What a fine day for
an act and a show
a cold and a snow
—RUTH KRAUSS, What a Fine Day For … (1967)
Now back in touch with Ad Reinhardt, Crockett Johnson was taking an interest in his old friend’s career. In April 1963, noting that Reinhardt’s paintings were on display “around the world,” Johnson asked, “Have you thought of Rowayton?” Kidding Reinhardt, who was then being canonized as a major American painter, Johnson added, “We have a nice little Art Association here and I think if I played my cards right I could wangle you into a group show. Oils priced over thirty dollars don’t sell very well of course, and it will cost you fifteen dollars to join, but the prestige is enormous.” Reinhardt should come up to take a look: “Pack a pile of your representative (I mean representative of your work; don’t go and paint a lot of representational pictures through any misunderstanding) canvases and your family in the car and take off.”1
If Reinhardt could not make it up to Rowayton, Johnson said he would visit on 1 May, when he and Ruth would be in Brooklyn Heights for a party hosted by Willard Maas and Marie Menken. Their parties were a who’s who of the culturally influential. Andy Warhol called Maas and Menken “the last of the great Bohemians. They wrote and filmed and drank (their friends called them ‘scholarly drunks’) and were involved with all the modern poets.”2
In 1963, Ruth Krauss published one of her most important poems, “This Breast,” in the Wagner Literary Magazine. Begun in Kenneth Koch’s class the previous year, the poem’s inspiration may be Koch’s “Thank You” (1962), which gives thanks for a series of items unlikely to generate feelings of gratitude: “Thank you for the chance to run a small hotel / In an elephant stopover in Zambezi, / But I do not know how to take care of guests, certainly they would all leave soon.” Generating her own absurdist repetitions, Krauss’s recurring “This breast” takes the place of Koch’s recurring “Thank you.” Krauss’s sense of epic repetition likely also derived from her readings of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg.3
The most striking difference between Krauss’s poem and Koch’s is tone. Where Koch sustains irony throughout, Krauss goes directly for surrealist pastiche. One stanza begins,
This breast as the Irish Statesman so shrewdly remarked most unabashed explorer of the crypts of the soul
This breast—but we have nothing but the word of Mr. Snooks
This breast a dove
This breast the flower of Gum Swamp
This breast a little confused by this possibility
Juxtaposing this breast with a wide array of unrelated items creates a series of associations, ranging from comic to serious, banal to baffling. Koch’s poem renders thank you ironic, but Krauss’s poem completely changes the meaning of this breast. Alignment with such disparate phrases as Mexican poetry and Chinese history and I seen it in the papers empties out the word’s meaning, transforming breast into a universal signifier. It can be an Irish Statesman, “composed entirely of scraps of historic fact,” or a “Dostoevskian masterpiece.”
Krauss’s collection of avant-garde poems for children, which did not include “This Breast,” was now making the rounds, represented by Marilyn Marlow. Like Ursula Nordstrom at Harper, Atheneum editor Jean Karl wondered about audience. Though the work “could only be done as a picture book,” it seemed not “really suitable for the picture book age.” Atheneum had published Krauss’s Lorca book the previous year, and it had received poor reviews, adding to Karl’s skepticism. Nevertheless, Karl “would certainly be glad to read anything” Krauss sent. This was best-selling children’s writer Ruth Krauss, author of A Hole Is to Dig and A Very Special House. Perhaps she would yet produce another hit?4
Writing would become his most famous book, Maurice Sendak got stuck and came to visit Krauss and Johnson. After his Nutshell Library (1962) sold one hundred thousand copies in its first year, Nordstrom, seeing the makings of a successful series, asked him to create more Nutshell books. Having illustrated fifty books in the preceding decade, Sendak did not want to repeat himself. He wanted to do something new. When she suggested that someone else create sequels instead, he was upset. The Nutshell Library was his idea. Nordstrom backed off, and Sendak returned to Where the Wild Horses Are, a book he had begun in 1955, during his apprenticeship with Krauss and Johnson but had set aside in favor of other projects. In the first months of 1963, Sendak carried around a spiral notebook, rewriting the story every few days. By May, Sendak had finished drafting the text and had changed the book’s title to Where the Wild Things Are. But he remained unsatisfied and began making trips to Rowayton in search of guidance. As Sendak struggled with what to call the series of three wordless two-page spreads where the main character, Max, and the Wild Things cavort in the forest, Johnson proposed the word rumpus. So right before this visual sequence, Max says, “Let the wild rumpus start!” Sendak later reflected, “Max was born in Rowayton and … was the love child of me, Ruth, and Dave.” Krauss and Johnson had taught Sendak the need to have a “fierce honesty” in children’s books. Though Max is a version of Sendak, he also “has his roots in Ruth Krauss”—specifically, in her belief that children “were allowed to be as cruel and maniacal as she knew they were.”5
The love child of the New York School and the Bank Street School, the first of Krauss’s poem plays made it to the stage on 10 June 1963 as part of The Pocket Follies at New York’s Pocket Theater. In its entirety, A Beautiful Day has a girl walk on stage, announce, “What a beautiful day!” and then “the Sun falls down onto the stage.” Remy Charlip staged four very different versions, which were interspersed throughout the production as a running gag.6
The play was warmly received, but Krauss probably did not see it. During the first week of June 1963, Phyllis Rowand began having severe headaches. Ruth drove her to the hospital, where doctors discovered a brain aneurysm. Ten days later, she was dead at the age of forty-seven. The loss of such a close friend caused Dave to face his own mortality but not the health risks of his smoking. Though it was three years before the surgeon general’s warning would appear on cigarette packets, the opening scene in “Doctor’s Orders,” from Ellen’s Lion, suggests that Dave knew the hazards. Pretending to be a doctor, Ellen says, “You’re a mighty sick little lion…. You’ll have to stop smoking.” Dave did not stop smoking, but he did draw up a will. (Ruth postponed facing anything that reminded her of her mortality.) His will offers a clear sense of who was most important to him. He left Ruth everything. If she were to predecease him, half of his estate would go to his sister’s children; a quarter would go to Linda and Nancy Hahn, the children of Ruth’s cousin, Richard Hahn; one-eighth would go to close friends Abe and Frume Levine; and one-eighth would go to Nina Rowand Wallace, who began art school that fall.7 In her absence, Dave and Ruth became closer to the Frasconis. Antonio, Leona, and their sons Pablo (age eleven) and Miguel (age six) began a tradition of having Spaghetti Night at 74 Rowayton Avenue each Wednesday. After dinner, the adults sat at the kitchen table, drinking wine, and talking about art. Observing the creative lives of their parents and their parents’ friends, the boys started to create art of their own. Pablo wrote poetry in Ruth’s style, “experimenting with absurd and surreal imagery.” He showed his poems to Ruth, and she encouraged him to keep at it.8
Maurice Sendak at Lake Mohonk, New York, October 1968. At photographer Nancy Crampton’s suggestion, Maurice posed on this waterbike, which is right alongside the dock and firmly tethered to it. Copyright © Nancy Crampton.
In the fall of 1963, Krauss’s writing for children was not receiving much encouragement or even notice. The only review of Bouquet of Littles, in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, declared the catalogs of rhymes “appealing but repetitive.” In contrast, The Lion’s Own Story and Harold’s ABC attracted plenty of attention, most of it positive. The Los Angeles Times thought the sequel to Ellen’s Lion “dull,” but the Chicago Tribune loved the “delightfully droll conversations” and considered it “a marvelous book for any child who has owned a stuffed animal, any adult who has had either, for all readers of the preceding Ellen’s Lion, and for all fans of Crockett Johnson.” In the New York Times Book Review, Ellen Lewis Buell wrote, “Those agile-witted readers and listeners who liked Ellen’s Lion will be glad to know the unpredictable little girl is in fine form again.” The reviews of Harold’s ABC were also strong, though not all noted the ingenious way Johnson wove each letter into a narrative. When he turned in the manuscript, Johnson had fretted that readers would overlook the complexity of what he had accomplished. The book “looks easy but it is difficult to find a word for each letter in order and fit the letter into the visualization (however absurdly), meanwhile keeping up a narrative (however nutty).” Only the Horn Book’s Ethel Heins understood that this was “a unique kind of ABC book” with “each letter actually generating a picture from which the word becomes part of an uninterrupted story,” though the New York Times did note that “some of the transitions are wonderfully logical,” such as when Harold “cuts a large wedge out of” a cake, making “a perfect C!”9
Johnson and Krauss were irritated by what they saw as Harper’s indifference toward reprinting Is This You?, originally published by Scott and now out of print. After more than six months of correspondence without a definite publication date, the authors learned that the contract would receive no advance. Johnson then told Nordstrom that he and Krauss had decided to withdraw the book and seek another home for it. That December, Nordstrom sent a letter of apology. But it was an unpleasant end to a year that had more darkness than usual—Rowand’s death in June and President Kennedy’s assassination in November. As Nordstrom noted on December 20, “the assassination happened 4 weeks ago today, almost to the minute. It gets more unbearable all the time, doesn’t it.”10
January 1964 started out on an upbeat note. Johnson was contemplating some new children’s books, and Krauss was looking forward to the production of some of her plays in the spring. She enjoyed defying people’s expectations, both regarding what she could do as a children’s writer and regarding generic conventions for picture books, poetry, or theater. One three-line poem play being produced starred a narrator, a spy, and lots of pineapples. The entirety of the play reads,
NARRATOR: in a poem you make your point with pineapples
PINEAPPLES: fly onto the stage from all directions
SPY: and it would be nice to have a spy going in and out
Describing its upcoming performance, Krauss told Nordstrom, “Everybody throws pineapples all over the theatre. (I just thought you’d like to know.)” Krauss relished the mischief of her work.11
However, neither she nor Johnson relished Captain Kangaroo broadcasting readings of their books without payment. Despite the free publicity that would have ensued, they, Maurice Sendak, and Marc Simont declined to let the popular children’s television show read The Carrot Seed, The Birthday Party, or the new edition of A Good Man and His Good Wife on the air. In these authors’ view, “The television rights to literary properties … ought to be paid for in the United States, as they are in Britain, Canada, Australia, and other countries.” It was a laudable moral position but a poor business decision.12
Business likes a formula. When A Hole Is to Dig is a hit, it wants more books like that; when Harold and the Purple Crayon is a hit, it wants more Harold books. The creative mind, however, does not necessarily find inspiration in the formulaic and market-tested. Johnson’s imagination increasingly wandered in more philosophical, less commercially successful directions. In early 1964, he sent Nordstrom The Emperor’s Gifts, a parable he modestly described as a “small morality play or something.” It introduces a young emperor, sitting on his throne, awaiting the rulers of his six kingdoms. Knowing that each king would “come bearing wondrous gifts,” the boy emperor “pondered what to give them in return.” King Drowse the Lazy arrives bearing a bottle of Contentment and lies down to sleep in a far corner of the throne room. Next, King Wot the Learned brings a “tall crystal phial” of Wisdom. The emperor sees that learning has saddened King Wot and gives him the bottle of Contentment. King Rash the Foolhardy enters with a beaker of Bravery in one hand and his head in the other. Seeing that he needs wisdom, the Emperor gives King Rash the previous visitor’s gift. And so the story goes. An astute judge of each visitor’s strengths and weaknesses, this Harold-sized emperor deftly matches each gift with the king who needs it most.13
The story is about maintaining an equilibrium among personal characteristics that are admirable in moderation but dangerous in excess. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince (1943), The Emperor’s Gifts is a quietly profound book about human nature, a children’s book with great resonance for adult readers. The editors at Harper were underwhelmed. Susan Carr thought it “totally adult,” a book that “you’d have to keep explaining to anyone under 10—even the kings’ names.” Nordstrom confessed to being “slightly baffled as to what age child it would really interest—as the type of format would appeal to a younger child than could possibly enjoy the ideas.” They returned the manuscript to Johnson, encouraging him to send along a book “that we can accept and send you a big blue contract and a big fat check.”14
Though Johnson’s work no longer found editorial favor there, Harper’s books were winning awards. In 1964, Harper won its first Newbery and its first Caldecott, with the latter going to Sendak for Where the Wild Things Are. In his acceptance speech, Sendak spoke of his “delight in choreographing dances for picture-book characters,” his “favorite” being “a bouncy ballet some Ruth Krauss children danced to a Haydn serenade.” Before the ceremony, Nordstrom wrote to Krauss, asking for a few words. To help magazines prepare articles on him, she was collecting comments from those whose work he had illustrated: Meindert DeJong, Charlotte Zolotow, Else Holmelund Minarik. But “it would hardly be an article without something from Ruth the Krauss.” Krauss promised to send a “genuine appreciation” just “as soon as possible.” It is unlikely that she managed to write it.15
Crockett Johnson, illustration from The Emperor’s Gifts (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
In the first half of March 1964, Ruth began having intense headaches. Only nine months earlier, what began as headaches killed her friend Phyllis Rowand. Dave took Ruth to Norwalk Hospital, where doctors initially diagnosed her with a severe allergic headache. Whew. Their initial relief gave way to concern when the headaches grew so severe that she had to check in to the hospital on 22 March. Dave visited daily, bringing mail and news and pressing the hospital staff to run the tests that, he thought, they should have run in the first place. Coping with “inadequate medical facilities and shortages of nurses and other personnel,” Dave grew “convinced it is sheer madness for anybody except millionaires to get sick without first moving to England or some other civilized country.” In early April, doctors ran the tests and identified her problem as viral encephalitis, a rare but potentially lethal inflammation of the brain. She eventually began to improve and was allowed to come home but soon suffered a relapse. This time, doctors suggested that her illness was spinal meningitis and ordered a spinal tap. Throughout April and into May, Ruth lay in the hospital, some days feeling better and other days feeling worse. To cheer her up, Frank O’Hara sent some collages he created with Joe Brainard. Her friend Norma Simon also visited daily, knitting Ruth a sweater. By late May, she was able to sit up for short periods and returned to work on the proofs for Eyes Nose Fingers Toes. She did not like them. The layout did not match what Krauss had seen at the dummy stage, and she insisted on seeing “a paste-up of the precise way the book is going to press.”16
While she was ill, Krauss missed the debut of her four new plays as part of an evening of theater directed by Peter Levin at the Hardware Poets Playhouse. The one-acts were a hit. The Village Voice’s Sydney Schubert Walter wrote, “The richest experiences of the evening came in four very short plays (or poems for the stage) by Ruth Krauss. These amusing little pieces are pure gold, mined from an extraordinary imagination.”17
By early August, Krauss had recovered fully and gotten back to her poetry. Ted Berrigan had published some of her plays in C, so she sent him more work for his consideration. She also corresponded with poet Michael Benedikt, who had published her work in Locus Solus. He admired her poems, telling her, “You are possibly the only writer I can think of for whom the idea of creating a new form, or something close to it, is a necessary premise for going ahead and writing.” Her forms are “so perfect within the structure of [her] experimenting that they look classical even next to what people who use old forms are doing. It’s funny. Stravinsky I think accomplishes this also.” Ruth also had admirers at Caffe Cino, a pioneering Off-Off Broadway coffeehouse founded in 1959 that had staged work by J. D. Salinger, Lanford Wilson, and Harold Pinter. In August 1964, Krauss’s 38 Haikus made its debut there.18
That year also saw Krauss’s debut as children’s-book illustrator with an adaptation of her story, “The Little Queen,” which had first appeared in Somebody Else’s Nut Tree six years earlier. The Little King, the Little Queen, the Little Monster, and Other Stories You Can Make Up Yourself, published as a Scholastic paperback in 1964, reprints the original story verbatim, adding similar tales about a little king and a little monster. Hoping to inspire children, Krauss ends the book with suggestions for other “stories you can make up yourself”: “The Little Elephant,” “The Little Egg,” and “The Little ? ? ?” The book received no reviews until its 1968 republication by Whitman, at which time Library Journal called it “disappointing at best.”19
Not deterred by Harper’s rejections, Johnson sought a different publisher for The Emperor’s Gifts and Magic Beach. Though his inner perfectionist might cause him to doubt about his work, Johnson had a sanguine disposition. As Harold did, he always kept his wits and his purple crayon—a helpful approach for many things, especially boats.
Having enjoyed sailing with Dave, Gil Rose bought a sailboat of his own but was a bit apprehensive about using it. Suppose the mast came down or the boat filled with water? He would try out the boat with Dave, an experienced sailor. On a pleasant afternoon, the two men the new boat out into Long Island Sound. Suddenly, just as Rose had feared, the mast came crashing down. He and Dave quickly gathered it and the sail together. They started the motor and headed back to shore. At the dock, they discovered that the mast was on a hinge, held upright by a cable. One of the screws holding the cable in place had been loose, come unscrewed, and caused the mast’s sudden descent. They fixed the problem and, just to prove to themselves that they could do it, set out again for a sail. This time, the boat functioned perfectly. When they returned to 74 Rowayton, Dave invited Rose in for martini. When Ruth asked how things had gone, Dave replied, with complete sincerity, “Fine.” Rose was astounded: “What do you mean, ‘Fine’? The mast fell down. It could have hurt us or toppled the boat. So much went wrong!” Perplexed, Dave calmly responded, “We went out, we had a problem, we solved it. That’s a good day.”20
The optimism of his daily life did not extend to national politics. There, Johnson was sharply critical of the increasingly conservative Cold War America. In July 1964, when Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination, Johnson wrote to Frank Boyle, a Runyonesque leftist who ran a newsstand next to the main branch of the New York Public Library before retiring to Florida (his home at the time of this correspondence): “I see our man Buggsy Goldwater made it last night. It makes you proud of America. Where else could a little old immigrant Jewish peddlar spawn a beloved ideological leader of the white Protestant fascist set?” Change the tone slightly, and one might imagine O’Malley explaining the Republican National Convention to a bewildered Barnaby. Johnson went on to compare Goldwater to the exNazi scientist played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, released the preceding January, and said that Goldwater’s choice of a running mate was important because he will become “president of the United States when Buggsy blows himself up experimenting with small atomic bombs in the cellar of the White House.” Although he found most politicians disappointing, Johnson found hope in the new generation of activists.21
One evening in the fall of 1964, he phoned Antonio Frasconi and excitedly said, “Come over and see something on TV.” The Frasconis found Dave watching television, transfixed by the Free Speech protests at the University of California at Berkeley. In September, chancellor Edward Strong closed a free speech area of campus, where students had been advocating on behalf of various causes, including the civil rights movement. Berkeley’s administration then threatened activist students with suspension. Led by Mario Savo, thousands of students organized rallies and occupied university buildings, and more than eight hundred served jail time. By the end of the fall term, the university’s board of regents replaced the chancellor, and the students won back their right to free speech. Dave was thrilled.22
Krauss’s poetry also resonated with a much younger generation of writers and artists, appearing alongside works by Charles Olson and Diane Wakoski in the September and October issues of the poetry journal Wild Dog (1963–66), coedited by Black Mountain poet Edward Dorn. The premiere issue of Nadada (1964–65) placed Krauss in more avant-garde company. With a frontispiece by Andy Warhol, the journal’s inaugural “Contemporary American Poets Issue” opened with Allen Ginsberg’s “May 22 Calcutta,” followed by Krauss’s “Poem” and “Song” and poems by Bill Berkson, Frank O’Hara, Willard Maas, Ted Berrigan, Gerard Malanga, and Charles Bukowski.23
Where Krauss’s work was becoming increasingly experimental, Johnson’s writings were moving toward the existential. In September, he sent Harper Gordy and the Pirate and the Circus Ringmaster and the Knight and the Major League Manager and the Western Marshal and the Astronaut and a Remarkable Achievement, a new book of what he described as “slightly sophisticated humor for eight- or ten-year-olds.” Young Gordy is on his way home from school when he meets and helps Dead Eye Eddie find buried treasure. However, because he “promised to come straight home from school today,” he cannot help dig up the loot. A series of nonadventures follows: Gordy meets someone interesting, has an opportunity for excitement, but remembers his promise and continues home. Carr confessed that though she wanted to like it, she did not: “After a while you know (and I think even 7–8–9 year olds would know) exactly what is going to happen.” Further, instead of being “fun or funny,” the story was “sort of defeating” and “almost unfair.” She suggested that Johnson write one such adventure about Gordy in a book of other Gordy stories, something more along the lines of the Ellen books.24
Instead, Johnson began looking for another publisher for Gordy, as he had done for We Wonder What Will Walter Be? When He Grows Up, published late that fall by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Also focused on choices, the book strongly echoes a cartoon the fourteen-year-old Johnson had drawn in which a boy dreams of possible future careers. In the new book, “Walter wished somebody could decide for him. He was trying to think what to be when he grew up.” Clad in gray trousers and a black T-shirt, Walter resembles a young existentialist learning to accept the burdens of his freedom. His dark attire aside, Walter is not somber but thoughtful, marked by that inquisitive spirit that characterizes nearly all of Johnson’s protagonists. The “best thinkers in the kingdom”—Antelope, Mole, Flamingo, Giraffe, Elephant, and Turtle— convene to ponder Walter’s dilemma. Each one advises Walter to be more like him. In the end, Lion offers Walter the wisest advice: “Whatever you decide, be sure to make your decision bravely, without fear. Think boldly!”
As Dave moved toward his brave decision, Ruth made a bold decision of her own. Though she and Nordstrom had been corresponding for five years about the book of experimental poetry for children, at the end of December, Ruth signed a contract with Pantheon to release the volume. She did not tell Nordstrom.25
