Harold had to think of some other way to speed his trip. I is for Idea. He went to work on the next letter with his purple crayon.
—CROCKETT JOHNSON, Harold’s ABC (1963)
Ruth Krauss was so invested in her new career as a poet that at age fifty-nine, she decided to learn French. Having read Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Arthur Rimbaud in Kenneth Koch’s class, she felt that she should learn the language in which they had written. She and Dave planned a summer 1960 vacation “for a week or so only—maybe Quebec so I can practice reciting French poetry.”1
Before leaving for Canada, Crockett Johnson sent a dramatic adaptation of Barnaby to E. Y. Harburg. But Harburg was too busy to take on the project, and although he thought Barnaby “one of the classics of our day,” he did not have enough “time and energy” for the project. “I am both flattered and sad,” he wrote.2
The Hall Syndicate, however, was interested in a revival of the Barnaby comic strip. Enlisting Warren Sattler to do the artwork, Johnson updated the original plots for the 1960s—the Hot Coffee Ring became the Counterfeit Credit Card Ring, and the Victory Garden sequence became a story about Barnaby’s attempts to start a garden. He also added some new story lines that focused on contemporary topics such as marketing and questionnaires. Looking back at his old comic strips as he prepared them for the new series, Johnson was “amazed and stand in awe as I see how the characters solved their problems, seemingly without any aid from me.” Privately, however, he complained about breaking in a new assistant and because “the size of newspaper strips has shrunk so that I am having to rewrite and redraw everything.” Still, initial sales to newspapers were promising, and on 12 September 1960, the new Barnaby appeared in papers. Johnson created some inspired new episodes, but he was much less emotionally invested in the strip. Despite the year’s close-fought presidential election, the updated strip largely remained a passive observer of the political scene.3
His energies may have been too divided to give the strip the attention it needed. After the anticipated theatrical release of David Piel’s film version of Harold and the Purple Crayon, which still lacked a distributor, Johnson was planning to film five other Harold stories. He also had plans to adapt Barnaby strip material for a full-length feature film and for a series of 130 five-minute animated films to be shown on television. His collaborator on both projects would again be Lou Bunin. For a recent paper industry trade show, the two men had created an ad: Johnson drew the backgrounds, and Bunin used puppets to demonstrate why American Cyanamid’s new “wet strength” paper processes made stronger napkins and paper towels.4
The new Barnaby may also have lacked the earlier incarnation’s political focus because Johnson’s political views had become more complex. By the early 1960s, he was skeptical of those on the left as well as those on the right and believed that all politics was corrupt. Although he had supported Democratic candidates since the early 1950s and probably voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, at a party soon after the election, Johnson remarked, “Kennedy’s just a thug.” When the crowd of liberals reacted in surprise, he continued, “Oh, well, his father was a bootlegger.” Johnson’s impulse to puncture his liberal friends’ optimism may have stemmed from his political disillusionment or from his distrust of Joseph Kennedy Sr., who supported British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s and remained a friend of Senator Joseph McCarthy into the 1950s.5
Johnson rarely talked politics, and he had friends across the political spectrum because he was reluctant to impose his convictions on others. As Shelley Trubowitz put it, “You could be the most reactionary bastard and be at his house. It didn’t make any difference to him. Whatever you thought, go ahead and talk. He didn’t have anything against you unless you were a Hitlerite or something like that.” Though Johnson had long since grown suspicious of the Communist Party, he continued to believe that the best solution to the world’s problems would be to start over with international socialism. But he voiced that opinion only to his closest friends.6
Through the winter of 1960–61, Johnson oversaw the production of revised Barnaby strips, and Krauss worked on her poetry. Atypically, she did not involve herself in Marc Simont’s reillustration of A Good Man and His Good Wife. She was busy writing a group of poems inspired by Federico García Lorca. Harper’s Magazine editor Kay Gauss Jackson had turned down Krauss’s submissions to date but encouraged her to send more.7
Jacqueline Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, and Ruth Krauss’s I Can Fly, 1961. Image from Leonard Marcus, Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children’s Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon Along the Way (New York: Golden Books, 2007). Used by permission of the Estate of Jacques Lowe.
Krauss and Johnson spent Easter weekend visiting the coastal town of Cohasset, Massachusetts, where they picked up one of the Boston Sunday papers. In the Parade magazine insert, Ruth read a story about Caroline Kennedy, “the little girl in the White House.” In an accompanying photograph, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy smiles down at her three-year-old daughter, who holds a copy of I Can Fly, Krauss’s decade-old Little Golden Book. Despite her husband’s skepticism toward the Kennedys, seeing her I Can Fly in Caroline’s lap increased Krauss’s warm feelings toward the new first family.8
Determined to make an impression as a poet, Krauss was submitting poems to many journals, including the Evergreen Review and Locus Solus. The latter’s summer 1961 issue, edited by Kenneth Koch, would include works by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, William S. Burroughs, and Gregory Corso along with five of Krauss’s “news” prose poems and her “Uri Gagarin & William Shakespeare.” One of her more serious pieces, it alternates between Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and the words of the cosmonaut who in April 1961 became the first person in outer space. It begins,
compare thee
more lovely
and a single spin around the earth
winds do shake
withstanding well the state of weightlessness
too short
too hot
and often could see the earth my native.
Mingling the words of the Soviet pioneer with the Renaissance playwright aligns space flight with classic verse, figuring technological advance as an enduring art. Noting the sublime achievement of the man who beat the Americans into space, Krauss’s poem also takes a stand. Against those who reviled all communists, the verse suggests at least that scientific advances transcend national boundaries and at most that the Soviet space program is as powerful as one of the English language’s greatest poets. The poem is a political statement, too.9
Keeping his politics mostly to himself, Johnson was busy with other projects—the new Barnaby, advertising work, and children’s books. By December 1960, with Nordstrom clamoring for Johnson to do the seventh Harold book, he confessed that he would like to do one, but only if “had an idea or a subject.” He suggested that if Susan Carr, who had just been made managing editor, could “write a jacket blurb in a spare moment,” he was sure he would “be able to write the book for it.”10
In April 1961, Carr sent jacket flap copy for Harold’s Republic:
“Here is the flap copy,” said Harold, “and anyone knows that books have flap copy. Therefore, if there is flap copy, it stands to reason that there must be a book.”
Harold, inimitable hero of purple crayon fame, once again proves his versatility (and the versatility of his creator). Starting with only the flap, this Lilliputian Aristotle weaves himself into one adventure and out of another in a story that is as lovable and logical as Harold’s basic premise.
Crockett Johnson’s many fans, as well as students of philosophy, will recognize the truth of the following syllogism:
Books are good.
When Crockett Johnson writes one, they’re better.
This new book about Harold is Crockett Johnson’s best.
Carr’s blurb planted the seed for another Harold book, but Johnson would not find time to work on it for another year.11
Ladies’ Home Journal asked him to write a monthly story about Ellen and her lion. He submitted three new tales, and the editors sent him a handsome advance and promised to publish a new story each month for a year; the stories could then be collected into a book for Harper. However, an October editorial shake-up at the magazine derailed the project. Hoping to give new life to the stories, Johnson asked whether Harper would want another Ellen book. His last statement for Ellen’s Lion showed only eighty-nine copies sold at the regular trade price; however, the book “seems to have picked up a tiny hard core of unusually ardent fans and this is a kind of encouragement.” Two of those fans were Susan Carr and Ursula Nordstrom. Nevertheless, when Johnson submitted eight new Ellen stories in June 1962, the Harper editors were not enthusiastic. Carr found “a sameness about all these stories that never came up in the first book,” with “Ellen always goading the lion, and being sort of horrid.” She passed the manuscript on to Ann Jorgensen Tobias for a second opinion: Tobias believed that Ellen and the lion were “battling” too much and that the new stories lacked the “lightness of touch” in the originals. Nordstrom agreed, breaking the news to Johnson as gently as she could: The editors liked some of the stories a lot but were “terribly puzzled by the general tone of crabbiness.”12
While Johnson faced rejection, Krauss continued to mull over her book of experimental poetry for children. After asking again whether Nordstrom would be interested in the idea, Krauss expressed some ambivalence about her status as a writer of picture books, signing the letter “Wm. Shakespeare the 15th (anti-pictherbooks campaign in session here).” Nordstrom quickly expressed interest and advised Krauss not to worry. Krauss sent in more poems, but Nordstrom responded less than enthusiastically: Though “lots of things in them are marvelous,” she was “dubious about a lot of the poems’ appeal” for children. However, “do send anything that you may write or that you may find filed away in your refrigerator. We would dearly love another Ruth Krauss book, of course.”13
Krauss then sent Nordstrom “Yuri Gagarin & William Shakespeare” and a duet between Winnie the Pooh and Shakespeare. Using the cut-up technique pioneered by the surrealists (and later adopted by William S. Burroughs), the poem creates a dialogue between the “When daisies pied and violets blue” song from the final scene of Love Labour’s Lost (1598) and Pooh’s “Cloud Song” from the first chapter of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), bringing in the Latin translation of Pooh for added flavor. The short conversation begins,
WINNIE: How sweet to be a cloud
W.S.: when daisies pied and violets
WINNIE: floating in the blue
W.S.: and lady-smocks all silver-white
and cuckoo buds of yellow hue
WINNIE: Iniquum fatum fatu
W.S.: Cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo
Nordstrom was “delighted with” both poems, especially “Yuri Gagarin & William Shakespeare,” and would be happy “to keep reading whatever you send.” In October, Krauss received more poetic encouragement, as Harper’s published her “Variations on a Lorca Form,” marking both her first appearance as a poet in a mainstream magazine and the first time she had been paid for her poetry. Each of the poem’s seven short stanzas begins with the phrase “When I live again,” suggesting the possibility of reincarnation.14
After sending these back in July, Krauss had left for a ten-day writers’ conference at Wagner College on Staten Island, where she met editors from magazines (Mademoiselle, New World Writing) and publishers (Fawcett, Lippincott, Dial, Bantam, Scribner’s). She also met literary agents. Like many of their contemporaries, she and Johnson had dealt directly with publishers. However, because she was moving into a new field, she began to consider representation. At the conference, she also met and befriended poet and Wagner English professor Willard Maas and his wife, filmmaker Marie Menken, the couple who inspired the intense, fractious George and Martha of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play by Edward Albee (himself a participant in that year’s conference). If Krauss had not yet met O’Hara, then this conference introduced her to him, and he would soon become her teacher and poetic mentor.15
Krauss was also serving as mentor to younger writers. In 1961, Doris Orgel and her husband, Shelley, a psychiatrist, moved to Westport, Connecticut, and met Krauss and Johnson through Maurice Sendak. Doris Orgel was just getting into children’s books, and Sendak illustrated her first, a translation of Wilhelm Hauff’s Dwarf Long-Nose (1960). With Krauss presiding, Orgel, Mary Ann Hoberman, and another aspiring children’s author began meeting at a little bar on South Norwalk beach. Over Bloody Marys, they talked about writing and publishing books for children. Krauss advised them to do as she had done: participate in the Bank Street Writers group and observe children on playgrounds. Back at the Johnson-Krauss house, Johnson advised them not to fret and wait for publishers to reject their manuscripts. “Why do you put up with it?” he said. “I submit a manuscript of mine, and if I haven’t heard back in three weeks, I go there, and I pick it up and I leave. I’m not going to wait longer than that.”16
Ruth and Dave also became friends with the Orgels. When they went out to dinner, Doris Orgel was struck by Dave’s ability to hold his liquor: At nearly six feet tall and with an ex-football player’s build, drinks did not seem to affect him. As Gene Searchinger recalled, at restaurants, Dave would ask for two martinis. When waitresses would ask if one was for Ruth, he would respond, “No, two,” pointing to two places on the table in front of him—“Here, and here.” Next to those spots, he would neatly arrange his cigarettes and a stack of matches. Out with the Orgels, Dave might start with a boilermaker, followed by several other drinks. But Doris Orgel never saw him drunk. Rather, two martinis for Dave was equal to one martini for any other person.17
During the summer of 1961, Dave and Ruth took another vacation, driving up through New Hampshire and into Maine. Ruth suggested they drive up to Denmark, Maine, where she had spent two formative summers at Camp Walden forty years earlier. Within a mile of the camp, however, memories overwhelmed her, and she could not go on. Dave turned the car around and they headed back south.18
Not encouraged by the new Barnaby’s performance, Johnson decided to walk away from the strip. In January 1962, he told syndicate head Robert Hall that Barnaby had been written through March, at which point Johnson wanted either to bring the strip to and end or have someone else carry on the writing. He had, he thought, “turned out a respectable year and half of strips” and “a few even brilliant episodes.” However, sales were not strong, and readers did not seem to be paying attention: The new strips “haven’t provoked the slightest murmur of reaction from anybody (not even a harsh word).” Children’s books “and maybe old age” were slowing him down; a “young and energetic fellow” might be able to give the strip the “push it needs toward popular reception.” No one took the job. Sattler drew the strip through March, at which point Johnson took over, writing and drawing the final sequence, which recycled the ending he had created ten years earlier. The new Barnaby concluded on 14 April 1962.19
Johnson then returned to Magic Beach. After rewriting and shortening it, he decided it was “much better than the old one” and sent the manuscript back to Nordstrom in May. Harper reader Ann Jorgensen Tobias thought the story too “depressing” and complex for children, and Nordstrom admitted, “As an adult I love the mood of the story, and the tone of sadness. But we’re afraid that it just isn’t a children’s book.”20
That May brought similar criticism of Krauss’s latest book, Mama, I Wish I Was Snow—Child, You’d Be Very Cold, published not by Harper but by Atheneum. Instead of gathering ideas from children or inventing a story, Krauss adapted Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Cancion Tonta” (Silly Song), and Ellen Raskin provided illustrations. Kirkus called the book a “disappointment from the usually dependable Ruth Krauss,” and the New York Times Book Review’s George A. Woods predicted that the book would “leave children very cold indeed.” The Christian Science Monitor thought it unlikely even “to strike responsive chords in even the more imaginative child…. Sorry. Will await more butterflies.”21
Though Krauss was finding places to publish her poetry for adults, her verse yielded very little money. A couple of months before, New World Writing finally “‘bought’ some poetry” she had sent eight months earlier—for fourteen dollars. Still, she overlooked the reply’s tardiness and cashed the check. Hoping for a better return on her children’s books, Krauss sent a draft of her latest manuscript to literary agent Marilyn Marlow. Reminiscent of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (1947), the Goodnight Book followed a child saying goodnight to various items—eyes, nose, fingers, toes, windows, doors, even Bloomingdales. Wary of working through an agent, Nordstrom was glad when Krauss decided not to have Marlow represent this book, but the author-editor relationship was changing.22
In addition to finding a better title for the Goodnight Book, Krauss needed to find an illustrator. She admired Beni Montresor’s work but did not know him. Erik Blegvad lived nearby, but she was not sure he would be a good fit. Visiting old friends Nina and Herman Schneider in their Greenwich Village apartment, Krauss saw some artwork by their daughter, Elizabeth Susan Schneider, and asked if she would be interested in illustrating the book. Schneider welcomed the chance to prove herself to a publisher and won the job.23
At age nineteen, Schneider took the train up from New York up to Rowayton on her first professional assignment as an illustrator. Krauss picked her up at the station wearing “this little muumuu-ish kind of dress, which she always wore.” It was a very hot day, and Krauss began fluffing herself, saying, “I can’t stand having anything binding me. I just can’t stand clothing that sticks close to my body.” At 74 Rowayton Avenue, Schneider presented her ideas for the very spare text, Krauss liked what she saw, and they had no further inperson discussions about the book. This would not be another close working relationship, as Krauss had had with Sendak. These days, she was a poet first.24
She again went to the Wagner conference in July. That year, Willard Maas directed the conference, and the writers in residence included Kay Boyle and Kenneth Koch. Ruth’s poem “Duet” appeared in XbyX, “a one shot magazine put out by” Maas. Gerald Malanga published another Ruth Krauss poem in the Wagner Literary Magazine, which Allen Ginsberg called “the best college magazine in America.”25
Johnson returned to his most successful character, putting together Harold’s ABC. He had fun working in King Uranus, “the pre-Olympian god of the universe,” and Queen Urania, “the somewhat later muse of astronomy,” doubting whether “many seven-year-old classic scholars will write in complaining about the royal marriage as a barbarism.” Johnson was confident that Nordstrom and her editors would like his “nonsensical tour de force,” and they did. Ann Jorgensen Tobias and Carr made a few suggestions: When Harold reached the letter V, he lost interest in finishing the alphabet but only wanted to go home. Carr wrote, “It bothers me that Harold gives up. He never has before, and I don’t think he should…. The thing about Harold is that he is so invincible. I really think Dave should not let him get so depressed.” They also found had questions about “Z is for Zigzag. Dragging his crayon behind him, Harold sleepily staggered off to bed.” This seemed “anticlimactic.” He received a contract and a two-thousand-dollar advance for the book in January 1963, reworked the end of the book, and finished the manuscript in February.26
In Harold’s ABC, the seventh and last book to feature Harold, each letter forms a part of the object it names: A is the house’s attic, B a stack of two books, C a cake with one slice (called a “cut”) removed for Harold to eat. Most letters name more than one item: E stands for an “enormous edifice” made out of the letter as well as for “Etcetera” and for the elevators that Harold avoids because “they made his stomach feel funny.” Not the more common arbitrary collection of alphabet words, Harold’s ABC forms a narrative of the boy’s journey through the alphabet, with each letter leading to the next. As is true of the other Harold books, Harold’s ABC looks simple but is not.
During the fall of 1962, Krauss met regularly with Jane Flora, who was illustrating A Bouquet of Littles, a verse ode to smallness that strives for but does not quite arrive at the pithiness of A Hole Is to Dig and Open House for Butterflies, featuring such lines as “A little rug best fits a little floor, / A little storeman best fits a little store, / As my small sea best fits my little roar” and “a little storm best fits a little thunder / a little Alice best fits a little wonder.” Krauss was finding it “a ‘lulu’ to get a good picture-motif” going. A bit frustrated with the creative process, she joked to Nordstrom, “At this point, I’ve decided no more pic-books and no more poetry. Bibles, that’s what I’ll write.”27
Krauss was now studying poetry with O’Hara, whom she affectionately called “my teach,” which amused him because he was not then as accomplished as she was. A fall 1962 mimeographed collection, New School Poets, contains three Krauss poems: “My Dream with Its Solar-Pulse Gallop,” “Andy Auto Body,” and “Imitation,” a single-line riff on T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1922): “In the womb the womb men come and go.”28
At midnight on 23 November 1962, two hundred people filled New York’s Living Theatre for a “Reading of Poetry of Wagner Poets.” Maas moderated, and the fourteen featured poets included Jean Boudin, Malanga, David Shapiro, Frank Lima, and Krauss. Though she disliked giving public readings, she did so on this occasion because it was a benefit for the Wagner Literary Magazine, which had published her, and because she wanted to support the school where her friend Maas taught.29
When not receiving guests or accompanying Krauss to midnight poetry readings, Johnson returned to revising the new Ellen stories. He conceded that the charge of “a general tone of crabbiness” was “a well-taken criticism” and made changes, including a complete rewriting of one of the tales. He now thought that the stories were “really pretty good, good enough to publish somewhere,” though he acknowledged, “my opinion of the seemliness of my works can be a bit off; it still seems to me that far and away the best small thing I have done is that Magic Beach opus you sent rapidly back and which, since, half a dozen editors enthusiastically have turned down.” He asked Nordstrom to tell him whether these revised tales would make “a Harper Ellen’s Lion sequel” or to “give [him] a definite rejection.”30
In December 1962, Elizabeth Schneider brought her dummy for Krauss’s latest book, now called Eyes Nose Fingers Toes, to Nordstrom and Dorothy Hagen, the director of operations for Harper’s manufacturing department. The text for Eyes Nose Fingers Toes does not specify the protagonist’s gender, and Schneider had drawn a little girl. Hagen suggested changing the child to a boy because girl characters did not sell as well as boy characters. Krauss’s response was uncharacteristically practical: “People buy boy’s books for girls but not visa versa…. I hate so much work to go into a book, & then to have it not sell because it’s a girl.” In any case, she added, “I feel I’ve done my share & still do it of campaigning against male chauvinism.” Krauss’s willingness to see her book as simply a marketable product signals a changed relationship to children’s literature: It was where she made her living, but not where she was most emotionally invested. Schneider would have to redo the drawings.31
In May 1962, Harper and Brothers merged with a textbook publisher, Row, Peterson, and Company, and major changes soon followed. Nordstrom was optimistic that the merger would give her books an entry into the elementary school and high school markets, writing to Johnson, “We think their seventy (70) salesmen will be great helps in selling Harold to schools. We think all our children’s books will benefit, but Harold (especially the drawing one) is an example of a trade children’s book which can be used in schools by an imaginative teacher.” She joked,
I refer to the 70 salesmen as though I were an old Coney Island type producer—you know:
30 GIRLS 30!
But I say: 70 SALESMEN 70! Step up for the next show, price two bits.
Excuse me.
Though she took the changes with a sense of humor, as Leonard Marcus notes, the merger “prepared the ground for a historic change in the company’s management culture,” strengthening the publisher’s business side. After 1967, when the chairmanship of Harper’s executive committee passed from Harper’s Cass Canfield Sr. to Row, Peterson’s Gordon Jones, “the house was now in the hands of business-oriented people, while those who combined business with editorial creativity were out of control.”32
The new business emphasis would push Krauss and Johnson away from Harper, and both began to publish more frequently with other presses. In middle age, they were not content to repeat themselves. Though they could have relied on proven formulae for success, they instead kept inventing, Krauss in verse and Johnson in his increasingly philosophical tales. As Krauss had done, Johnson also wanted to pursue interests beyond the field of children’s books. His first successful career was as a cartoonist. His second, a picture book author. Maybe it was time to bring this second career to a close and to do something else. But what?