Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
ONE OF ANDY’S early essays for Harper’s concerned the shipments of children’s books that Katharine received every autumn for her annual review roundup in The New Yorker. Publishers’ nominees, forwarded to Maine from the magazine’s offices, flooded into the house, sometimes ten or twenty in a single package. Because the Whites’ shelves were already full, the new books teetered in stacks, stealing floor space and climbing onto the furniture like unruly pets, until eventually most wound up donated to the Brooklin area’s public schools.
Katharine briefly reviewed as many books as possible and listed others, thereby covering an average of fifty volumes per review, sometimes as many as eighty. She chose books she found well written or amusing or that particularly appealed to Joe, her in-house junior critic. She quoted him, for example, on the author of The Little Prince: “He seems to be writing about grownup things in a childish way.” Her own comments were similarly brisk but often salty. Of The Travels of Babar, the second installment in Jean de Brunhoff’s series about an orphaned elephant, Katharine wrote, “This year Babar is officially blessed by A. A. Milne in a prefatory paragraph, an unnecessary and misleading condescension, since de Brunhoff is witty without being Poohish, and Babar is an elephant who can stand on his own feet.”
Every year Andy began the season by resenting the influx of books, then soon found himself sprawled on the hearth and immersed in a tome about how to build a tree house. He read many of the books, from William Karl Harriman’s The Story of Tea to Lynnwood M. Chace and Evelyn M. Chadwick’s Little Orphan Willie-Mouse, which featured photographs of an actual wood mouse. Impressively detailed historical accounts stretched from Los Angeles to Tibet, from Williamsburg to Bali. Frances Cavanah’s Boyhood Adventures of Our Presidents featured on the front, stamped in red on the beige cloth, a Tom Sawyerish lad apparently running away from home; chapters were along the lines of “Tom Jefferson Climbs a Mountain.” The hero of the lushly colored Soomoon, Boy of Bali, who seemed to have the same idea as the boyhood presidents, was carrying his belongings on a pole, along with a white rooster in a cage. Bumblebuzz, by Rosalie K. Fry, drew Andy in with a painting on the cover of a bumblebee strolling along with a two-spotted ladybug.
Many of the more practical volumes struck him as unwittingly humorous—especially tirades about safety. “It is an odd place, this front yard of World Crisis,” he wrote, “where adults with blueprints of bombproof shelters sticking from their pants pockets solemnly caution their little ones against running downstairs with lollypops in their mouths.” A disappointing number of the books, he thought, lacked imagination and a sense of language. One that had plenty of both was an odd prose narrative entitled The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, by someone calling himself Dr. Seuss (which Andy misspelled in his essay).
“Close contact with the field of juvenile literature,” he wrote, “leads me to the conclusion that it must be a lot of fun to write for children—reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work. One side of it that must be exciting is finding a place, a period, or a thing that hasn’t already been written about.” He pointed out that “with science dominating life nowadays,” perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the authors of many children’s books at least nodded dutifully toward an animal’s actual behavior. “Even the cute animals of the nonsense school move against impeccable backgrounds of natural history,” he noted; “even a female ant who is sufficiently irregular to be able to talk English lays her eggs at the proper time and in the accepted manner.”
WHEN HE CAME to write a children’s book himself, only a few years after this essay, Andy casually mixed human and animal characters. Although Katharine and Andy purchased the Maine farm more than a decade before Stuart Little was published in 1945, the characters in it weren’t based upon the animals in their daily lives. Long before, Stuart had arrived in Andy’s mind in a direct shipment from his subconscious. In the spring of 1926 he had visited the lush Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. During his return train ride to New York, while he slept in an upper berth to the rhythm that he had loved since his first rail trip to Maine, he dreamed of a tiny, mouselike child—adventurous, polite but straightforward, dapper, and even supplied with hat and cane. The next morning, when Andy awoke, he remembered this odd character and scribbled a few notes about him.
Soon he made use of them. By then, between his various siblings, he had eighteen nieces and nephews, but no children of his own, so he often found himself called upon at family gatherings to amuse the youngsters with a story. Fond of children and popular with them, he was nonetheless embarrassed in the spotlight. He stammered and struggled, worrying that his poor performance was disappointing as he tried to invent a story on the spot. So he turned to the mouse-child in his mind and wrote up a few adventures for him, providing himself with narrative ammunition that he could pull from a desk drawer whenever a child begged for a story.
These typed manuscripts appealed to others besides children—including Katharine, not surprisingly. In 1935 she showed Clarence Day the Stuart adventures that had thus far accumulated. A regular New Yorker contributor best known for his humorous autobiographical stories culminating in Life with Father, Day was also a respected family friend. When he said, “Don’t let Andy neglect Stuart Little—it sounds like one of those real books that last,” the remark counted. But Andy still didn’t pursue the stories. Then in late 1938 he published his essay about rambling through Katharine’s flood of children’s books. At the New York Public Library, the prominent and influential children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore read Andy’s essay and wrote to him, encouraging him to tackle the need for great children’s literature himself, to create something that would “make the library lions roar.” He replied, “My fears about writing for children are great—one can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness.”
Meanwhile Katharine had spread the gospel of Stuart elsewhere, to Eugene Saxton, Andy’s editor at Harper (until his death in 1942), who asked to see whatever adventures already existed. Andy sent the pages, adding up to more than ten thousand words, in March 1939, with the note, “It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it.” He pointed out that, while Stuart was an imaginary mouse, he did not in any way resemble Mickey of dubious fame. He explained that because Stuart had appeared to him in a dream, as a gift rather than an invention, he didn’t feel free to metamorphose him from a mouse into a wallaby or a grasshopper.
Harper responded enthusiastically and Saxton encouraged Andy to complete the book as soon as possible. Naturally the aim of simply moving forward on a project made Andy nervous. (He had informed Anne Carroll Moore that he resisted goading like a mule.) He replied, “I can’t make any promises,” and explained that he was currently tending two hundred and fifty chicks. He hoped he might have the book finished by autumn.
It took him six years.
IN EARLY SPRING of 1943, Andy was as busy as ever on the farm. He sold cows and chopped lambs’ tails, built sheds and started a new set of chicks. With the war on and many shortages back home, he had to persuade the gas ration board to allow him to drive once a week to Blue Hill’s post office to mail in his New Yorker “News and Comment” pieces. Now and then he took time out to fish for smelt brought in by the tide. He could also be found gazing upward in the sunset to watch the woodcocks’ mating dance in the sky. Thirteen-year-old Joe had noticed that the lovesick male always flew back down to the place from which he took off, so the boy was able to walk a few steps closer during each flight, then stand perfectly still as the male came back to land. Eventually he crept to within ten feet of the plump, long-billed bird.
What Andy was not doing was writing. Despite ongoing depression, he was in a better mood—after a long, lingering winter and the dreary rains of spring—in part because he had yet again renounced a writing commitment. He had written to Frederick Lewis Allen, his editor at Harper’s, to confess that, although he had no complaints about how the magazine had treated him, he had always had great difficulty in writing his monthly “One Man’s Meat” column. He explained that a regular commitment didn’t come naturally to him, and he knew that sometimes he sent in subpar work because of a looming deadline. He used the kind of sentence he had employed in many situations when things seemed to everyone else to be going well: “So the only thing for me to do is quit.”
When Allen tried to talk him out of it, Andy replied that, yes, having such a commitment was good discipline, but discipline was not what he needed at the moment. “I want,” he said flatly, “to write when and if I feel like it.”
What he did not know was when the urge might strike him or what he might then want to write. During 1943 he wrote Comment as usual, but mostly he avoided his typewriter. It was a scary time. During this period he experienced what he described as a “nervous crack-up.” For many months he had had trouble sleeping. He had been experiencing dizziness, possibly related to his ongoing sinus troubles, for which he finally underwent an operation that seemed to have little effect. He consulted a psychiatrist, took tests, was told that perhaps even his dizziness and hyperventilation were psychosomatic. What helped him more than doctors, he thought, was tinkering at his workbench, taking lots of showers, drinking small amounts of dry sherry, and playing favorite old recordings over and over.
Many changes were taking place. Joe was now attending Exeter. In 1943 Andy and Katherine gave in to Harold Ross’s wartime pleas for help—and offers of higher salaries—and had decided to return to full-time New Yorker work, which meant wintering in the city rather than at the farm. The magazine provided a furnished apartment on East Thirty-fifth Street and life fell back into a semblance of its old routine—except that more than ever Andy was experiencing a sense of failure, of having never accomplished the significant writing of which he dreamed he might be capable. He complained that his head felt like an overcharged car battery. He told his brother Stan that he was going to consult a psychiatrist because his brain also felt like a tree with a kite tangled in its branches.
The next year, when he published a few clues to his mental state, a particular image recurred. In February The New Yorker published his poem “Home Song,” including the line “Ever at home are the mice in hiding.” In October the magazine published his brief poem “Vermin,” in which he confessed, “The mouse of Thought infests my head … He is too quick for me, / I see only his tail.” The next year, 1945, he told Stan that he suffered from “mice in the subconscious.” Mice had always been a recurring theme in his writing. He had identified with them even more than most children do, especially after the visits to his Summit Avenue bedroom by his secret mouse friend. His first published writing was about this creature, the childhood poem that won him an award from Woman’s Home Companion when he was nine, titled “To a Mouse.” And once, back in the fraternity house at Cornell, he found a mouse hiding in one of the cubbyholes of his rolltop desk, and both sat unmoving, staring at each other until one of Andy’s fraternity brothers walked in and broke up the tableau. In 1926 Andy’s first unsigned Comment paragraph for The New Yorker had been not about a mouse but about buying a mousetrap.
During the winter of 1944–45, convinced that he was going to die or at least go crazy, Andy sat looking across his desk at West Eleventh Street below, and he was able to complete Stuart Little within two months. Originally Stuart’s surname was Ade. While Andy was writing the book, however, he and Katharine were also editing an anthology, A Subtreasury of American Humor, in which they decided to include a story by George Ade. Maintaining his policy of steering away from resemblance to real people, Andy switched Stuart’s name to the more apt Little. Perhaps the oddest aspect of the novel, considering the animal that kept infesting Andy’s brain, was that he explicitly stated that Stuart was not a mouse, merely a boy who looks like a mouse, weighing so little at birth that “he could have been sent first class mail for three cents.” Like his creator, Stuart turned out to be handy, versatile, and plucky, and the opening chapters of the book found him in lighthearted adventures down a bathtub drain and inside a piano. Later, after Stuart’s Andy-like decision “to run away from home without telling anybody,” Andy’s text became more emotional and resonant. The carefree early adventures Andy had written while in his late twenties. The later material emerged from this difficult year in his forties.
Stuart even found himself paddling one of the souvenir birchbark canoes that Andy had seen at Bean’s store on the Maine lake in his childhood. Although he portrayed Stuart’s infatuation with the young teacher, Miss Harriet Ames, as a poignant romantic comedy in which Harriet is far wiser, it expressed much of the author’s own experience with romance—including a failed date after much anticipation. Following this interlude with another human, Andy kept Stuart’s vision of ideal love untainted by the complexities of human interaction, by having it take place not only between a bird and a human mouse, for whom sexuality could never complicate matters, but also mostly keeping his bird friend Margalo offstage and, presumably, unattainable. The book ends not with the culmination of the quest but with his committing to it.
FOR STUART LITTLE, Andy was working with a new division at Harper & Brothers—with Ursula Nordstrom, head of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls. In the late-nineteenth century, there had been a movement in the United States to create children’s reading rooms in public libraries; by the first decades of the twentieth century, these were commonplace nationwide. Gradually many publishers added departments devoted to children’s literature, focusing especially on meeting the needs of the growing library market. Although they had already been producing notable books for generations of children—the company was established in 1817—Harper & Brothers didn’t create an official children’s department until 1926. Originally it comprised only an editor, an assistant editor, and a secretary. The first directing editor was Virginia Kirkus, who in 1933 founded Kirkus Reviews, which quickly became an influential review publication, giving bookstores and publishers a heads-up about the thousands of upcoming titles each year.
A timid New Yorker named Ursula Nordstrom, barely out of her teens, joined Harper’s staff in 1931. When she walked in the door, her literary talents were not immediately apparent. She began not as an editor in Books for Boys and Girls but as a clerk in College Textbooks. Despite her intelligence and her interest in the arts, Nordstrom’s parents—both actors, her father the famous silent film star Henry E. Dixie—had declined to send her to college and had instead lobbied for secretarial school. Quickly learning the business and outgrowing her shyness, Nordstrom became known as a bright and ambitious young woman with a good sense of humor. After five years of relative boredom in a corner of the company that didn’t excite her imagination, Nordstrom was eager to take what she had learned about publishing and apply it in a more congenial environment. When Virginia Kirkus retired in 1936, her former assistant, Ida Louise Raymond, replaced her and took Nordstrom along as assistant editor. Soon, amid messy offices, she was dealing with such writers as Laura Ingalls Wilder.
In 1940 Nordstrom was promoted to director. During the four years since then she had critiqued, encouraged, and cajoled such writers as Margret and H. A. Rey, the married cocreators of a farcical romp entitled Curious George, and Margaret Wise Brown, author of a lyrical picture book called The Runaway Bunny. Nordstrom was no proponent of artificially sweetened pablum for tots. A witty and talkative workaholic, she believed passionately in the importance of good literature for children, but she did not idealize either children or the world of adulthood to which they were headed. She liked Stuart Little’s ambiguities and the unresolved quest at the end.
As Andy well knew from previous experience, the public reaction to a book was unpredictable. One of the stranger responses to Stuart Little came from Anne Carroll Moore, the New York librarian who had encouraged him to write the book in the first place. Before it was even published, she wrote again, saying that she had seen the proofs—Harper had sent a set, expecting applause—and she felt that the novel was inconclusive and not affirmative. She actually argued that it was unfit for children. In her surprising battle with Stuart, Moore launched two more salvos: she wrote a letter to Ursula Nordstrom, insisting that the book should not be published, and followed up with a fourteen-page missive to Katharine, advising that Andy cancel the planned publication, insisting that Stuart was unruly and that his story failed in every way to correspond to time-honored patterns for fantasy. Andy ignored her. Katharine replied with restrained politeness.
Nordstrom approached several artists to illustrate the book. Nominees included Aldren Watson, a muralist and illustrator, and Don Freeman, most of whose artwork concerned the world of theater in New York City. Nordstrom and Andy were both also interested in the possibility of getting Robert Lawson, who had gained recognition as illustrator of Munro Leaf’s 1936 book, The Story of Ferdinand—a tale of a timid bull that, in the prewar years, was denounced as pacifist propaganda. Both author and editor admired Lawson’s elegant draftsmanship and commitment to research, but he had long-running commitments to Harper’s rival publishers Viking and Little, Brown. (In 1945, the year that Stuart was published, Lawson won the Newbery Medal for Rabbit Hill, a dream of peaceful coexistence that he wrote and illustrated.)
Then Andy thought of drawings he had seen in The New Yorker off and on through the later war years by an ambitious young man named Garth Williams, who had not yet illustrated any books. Under a tight deadline from Harper, Williams submitted preliminary sketches, which included thoughtful attention to detail and respect for the story. Andy chose Williams. He mentioned to Nordstrom how Ernest Shepard had enlarged the proportions of Mole and Toad in The Wind in the Willows. Williams tried this approach but found that he couldn’t make it work because in the text Andy often referred to Stuart’s diminutive size.
When the novel was published in October, reviews were mostly very positive, including praise from critics who treated it as serious literature. Children and adults both read the book and sales were impressive. As far as Andy could tell, Stuart’s unnatural mousiness turned out to be a preoccupation only around the New Yorker offices. When he ran into critic Edmund Wilson in the hallway, Wilson said in his high-pitched voice, “I read that book of yours. I found the first part quite amusing—about the mouse, you know. But,” he confessed, “I was disappointed that you didn’t develop the theme more in the manner of Kafka.”
Earlier Harold Ross had dropped in to Andy’s office. Andy looked up to find him standing in the doorway. He looked jaunty with his briefcase hooked on a walking stick over his shoulder, but his expression was solemn.
“Saw your book, White.”
Andy looked at him.
Ross growled, “You made one serious mistake.”
“What was that?”
“Why, the mouse! You said he was born.” Always volatile and always sensitive to implications about sexuality or other behind-the-scenes intimacies, Ross was suddenly shouting. The logistical implications of a mouselike child born to a normal human mother were too much for him. “God damn it, White, you should have had him adopted!”
Meanwhile Stuart had come alive for other readers as he had for his creator. Before publication, Andy had written a letter to Nordstrom, offering his vast barn as a cemetery for unsold copies of Stuart Little. (His hero, Thoreau, had once bought up all the unsold copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, remarking in his journal, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”) But Nordstrom replied that she wasn’t worried because Harper was about to increase the first printing to more than fifty thousand.
Like every other book, Andy’s first children’s fantasy was out in the world without him, having its own adventures. In the autumn of 1945, for example, a man in New York named Stuart Little wrote to Nordstrom. Despite the name on his letterhead, she thought this claim was a joke and called his number and asked cautiously for Mr. Little. He was real. He wanted only a signed copy of the book. And while riding Manhattan buses in the first few months after publication, Garth Williams kept seeing commuters reading Stuart Little, sometimes three at once around him. He found these repeated glimpses of his carefully composed cover—Stuart paddling in his souvenir canoe down a rushing brook—so heartening he decided that, rather than pursue other kinds of artwork, he would concentrate on illustrating children’s books. Perhaps he could make a living at it.