The Mansion of Happiness (40 page)

39.
Dr. George Gallup, “Public Opposes Ban on Pictures Showing the Birth of a Baby,” press release, American Institute of Public Opinion News Service, April 22, 1938, “Birth of a Baby” file, Time Inc. Archives. “Publisher of Life Pushes Court Test,”
New York Times
, April 12, 1938. “Court Clears Life on Baby
Pictures,”
New York Times
, April 27, 1938. Mr. Prentice to Mr. Larsen, April 13, 1938, memo, “Birth of a Baby” file, Time Inc. Archives.

40.
EBW, “The Birth of an Adult,”
New Yorker
, April 23, 1938. “America Speaks,”
Atlanta Constitution
, April 22, 1938. By the end of April, Larsen could declare, “
Life
has definitely turned the corner.” The magazine’s circulation quadrupled; soon it passed two million. In the first half of 1939,
Life
recorded its first profit, of nearly $1 million. Brinkley,
The Publisher
, 224–25. Circulation cartoon reproduced in Kobler,
Luce.

41.
EBW to James Thurber, April 16, 1938,
Letters of EBW
, 164.

42.
EBW, “Children’s Books,” written in November 1938, as per
One Man’s Meat
(Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House, 1997), 19–24; appeared in
Harper’s
in January 1939. ACM, “Three Owls’ Notebook,”
Horn Book
(March 1939), 95, mentions it and tells every reader to read
it—“the best critical review of children’s books of 1938 I have seen.” She also read it aloud to more than one hundred children’s librarians (ACM to EBW, January 16–February 2, 1939, EBW Papers, Box 143, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell [the date span is because ACM hesitated for two weeks before sending the letter]).

43.
ACM to EBW, January 16–February 2, 1939, Box 143, EBW Papers. EBW to ACM, February 15, 1939, in
Letters of EBW
, 182.

44.
ACM to EBW, May [?], 1939, Box 143, EBW Papers. ACM to EBW, February 28, 1939, Box 143, EBW Papers. ACM to EBW, February 18, 1939, Box 143, EBW Papers. In 1939, ACM also wrote to EBW on January 16–February 2, February 28, March 24, and on an unspecified day in May.

45.
EBW to Eugene Saxton, March 1, 1939, in
Letters of EBW
, 182–83. EBW to Eugene Saxton, April 11, 1939, in
Letters of EBW
, 184; and EBW to ACM, April 25, 1939, in
Letters of EBW
, 185.

46.
Gertrude Stein,
The World Is Round
(London: B. T. Batsford, 1939). KSW, “The Children’s Harvest,”
New Yorker
, November 25, 1939.

47.
KSW quoted (undated) in Editor’s Note in
Letters of EBW
, 217.

48.
See the original of EBW to ACM, February 15, 1939, in Box 5, ACM Papers, which includes this paragraph: “Our house is a little more orderly, now; we gave away most of the review copies at Christmas, and can now make our way about the rooms. We gave quite a few to a small library in this village, where they were much appreciated, I think. Thanks again for your
letter. I will try to get to work on the book. Meantime, please save shelf space in your library, public though it may be, for a copy of ‘Quo Vadimus? Or The Case for the Bicycle.’ ”

49.
“What I wonder is whether there are Carnegie funds available for such a library if it were made a free one and to whom I should write to ask about this.” Miss Dollard, White carefully told Moore, was a “dear old lady,” but she hadn’t cataloged a book since 1912 and “won’t let people she doesn’t like come in the
place.” KSW to ACM, November 26, 1939, Box 5, ACM Papers. Moore, apparently, was unhelpful, telling White that Carnegie funds would not be forthcoming and that the library could never succeed without a professionally trained librarian. I have not been able to find ACM’s reply to KSW, presumably in late 1939 or early 1940. It is not in any of the archives I’ve checked. But KSW’s letter of February 7, 1942 (Box 5, ACM Papers), refers to Moore’s
response. I suspect the correspondence ceased entirely then, until ACM resumed it on February 1, 1941: “Mr. White and I are supposedly compiling an anthology of American humor and thought it would be fun to have a section in it on humor and children’s literature” (KSW to ACM, November 26, 1939, Box 5, ACM Papers).

50.
ACM to EBW, February 1, 1941, Box 143, EBW Papers. EBW to ACM, March 2, 1941, Box 5, ACM Papers. (This letter is not in the
Letters.
) ACM wrote to EBW on February 1 and March 6, 1941. KSW to ACM, February 7, 1942, Box 5, ACM Papers. See also KSW to ACM, January 13, 1943.

51.
KSW to ACM, February 7, 1942, Box 5, ACM Papers. See also KSW to ACM, January 13, 1943, Box 5, ACM Papers. On KSW’s continuing work with the library, in the next decades (the Whites moved back to Brooklin, year-round, in 1957), see, e.g., KSW to LSB, January 16 and February 11, 1953, and LSB to KSW, February 6, 1953, Box 1, KSW
Papers, Special Collections, Bryn Mawr.

52.
KSW to LSB, undated day in 1941, Box 43, Folder 658, LSB Papers, Vassar.

53.
Subtreasury:
Editors’ introduction to a section called “For (or Against) Children”: “Our first idea was to collect a section on humor from books written for children. We gave it up because, except for ‘The Peterkin Papers’ and ‘Uncle Remus,’ we did not find much humor in early juvenile literature, and the humor in modern books for children is for the most part picture-book humor. So this turned into a section quite
as much
about
children as
for
them. Incidentally, it also has a good deal to say about parents.” EBW and KSW, eds.,
A Subtreasury of American Humor
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1941), 303. Ross’s memo about EBW’s
Life
circulation parody: “We have oceans of evidence that our parody of the birth-of-a-baby feature in Life was generally, probably unanimously, appreciated in advertising agencies and that our Luce profile
was, too.” Box 964,
New Yorker
Records, NYPL. There followed much debate over whether this would annoy the
New Yorker
’s own advertisers. Ross insisted, “I don’t see who can get mad except Life (which is already mad).” Luce’s wife’s underwear: Ross to Eric Hodgins (at
Fortune
), March 27, 1940, Box 25. Covering the war: Ross to EBW [May 1941], in Harold Ross,
Letters from the Editor:
The New
Yorker
’s Harold Ross
, ed. Thomas Kunkel (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 154.

54.
KSW to ACM, May 31, 1944, Box 5, ACM Papers. Davis,
Onward and Upward
, 141–45. “I have no trap, no skill with traps, / No bait, no hope, no cheese, no bread.” Elledge,
E. B. White
, 250–52. On the manuscript evidence for the speed of the writing, see Peter F. Neumeyer, “
Stuart Little:
The Manuscripts,”
Horn Book
64 (1988): 593–600. Marcus, introduction to
Dear Genius
, xvii–xxii.

55.
Also: “she mounted such campaigns against people and against books. She was absolutely ruthless,” Frances Clarke Sayers (hereafter FCS), “Small Felicities of Life,” in FCS Oral History, October 19, 1974, transcript, Center for Oral History Research, UCLA, 135–39. Less candid but still bitter reminiscence can be found in FCS, “You
Elegant Fowl,”
Horn Book
65 (1989): 748–49.

56.
FCS,
Moore
, 242. ACM also refused to review
Stuart Little
for
Horn Book.
It may have been Louise Bechtel who had solicited this review; at the time, Bechtel was associate editor.

57.
Editor’s Note,
Letters of EBW
, 252. More useful: Ursula Nordstrom, “Stuart, Wilbur, Charlotte: A Tale of Tales,”
New York Times
, May 12, 1974. For KSW’s view that Nordstrom’s article didn’t go far enough in vindicating EBW, a vindication that KSW rather urgently wanted by this time, see KSW to LSB, June 24, 1974,
Box 43, Folder 662, LSB Papers, Vassar: “She was asked to write it and had a dreadful time with it as they made her do it over and over and in the end changed wordings and added stuff she did not want in there. But she did at least manage to tell a part of the A. C. Moore story. I guess she did not dare correct all the errors in the biography of Miss Moore by Frances Clarke Sayers. . . . Miss Moore had made altered copies of all the
anti-Stuart letters she wrote me.” But KSW applauds Nordstrom: “What amazed
me
in Ursula’s piece is that Miss Moore had the nerve to order
Ursula
not to publish the book. Ursula and Harper had a lot of courage to go ahead with it under these head-on attacks by the most famous children’s librarian, and supposedly the best critic of juvenile literature. Critic, my eye!”

58.
What happened to the letter is complicated. On June 20, 1945, ACM sent EBW a letter urging him not to publish
Stuart Little.
KSW later said that this letter consisted of fourteen pages (I believe it is her recollection that informs the Editor’s Note,
Letters of EBW
, 252); EBW later said this letter was sixteen pages (EBW to FCS, March 15, 1972, FCS
Papers, UCLA). Much suggests that the Whites threw this letter away. It is not among KSW’s papers, at Bryn Mawr. It is not among EBW’s papers, at Cornell. KSW later insisted that the Whites received not “a letter” but several, including at least two addressed to her and one addressed to EBW, all of which would have to have been dated between June and October of 1945. Everyone who refers to this letter or letters uses summaries that have crept into the
discussion over the years or KSW’s recollection of the correspondence.

In 2008, an indefatigable archivist at UCLA did find, in the FCS Papers, a six-page letter in ACM’s handwriting, marked as ACM’s copy of the letter she sent. (The letter had been misfiled, placed in a folder labeled “Resort.”) ACM did not know how to type and so did not make a carbon. The copy, therefore, can’t really be trusted too far. Sayers reproduced this letter in her 1972 biography of ACM (243–44). It does not
differ from the manuscript in Sayers’s papers, except that a page is missing from the manuscript. The manuscript original of the copy appears incomplete; it ends with a summary of what the rest of the letter might have contained, or just ACM’s notes on this corner of scrap paper, rather than with a closing or a signature. Both EBW and KSW insisted that what Sayers printed was not the letter (or letters) they received. (See EBW to FCS, March 15, 1972, FCS Papers,
UCLA.) KSW, who did not see the handwritten copy in Sayers’s possession but did see the galleys of Sayers’s book, and the book itself, came to think that ACM had destroyed the more complete copy of the letter: “I suspect that Miss Moore regretted her strong words and saw the tide was turning against her and destroyed her copy” (KSW to LSB, August 10, 1974, Box 43, Folder 661, LSB Papers, Vassar). To ACM’s June 20, 1945, letter, EBW did not
reply. KSW did reply. Her letter includes some internal evidence about to whom ACM’s letter was addressed: “Your letter made me quite sick and down-hearted. My husband came home an hour or two after I’d read it, looked at me, and said, ‘Well, what’s the matter with
you
?’ I then read him your letter and felt much better after I found it did not hurt him.” Whether the letter KSW opened was addressed to her or to her husband
or to both of them is unclear. She might have just opened his mail. She often did.

No further letters survive, although KSW later said that ACM answered her letter of June 26: “She replied to me again and said that was just the trouble, it was a novel for
adults
and attacked the book again. . . . After her second letter I asked her if she had any more to say to please write my husband direct, and she did write him, and this is the letter he referred to in his
Times
article which he was asked
by
The Times
to write
when ‘Stuart Little’ was being made into a television show.” KSW, note, October 25, 1972, KSW Papers. This, given the above, sounds very strange and even unlikely. It is possible that KSW is confused here and is remembering, instead, the exchange of letters in 1939, which did work this way, except backward: ACM wrote five pestering letters to EBW, after which KSW wrote, asking her to stop bothering her
husband, and taking control of the mettlesome correspondence herself. Passing the buck to her husband does not seem to have been her usual inclination. The
Times
essay KSW refers to is an essay EBW wrote in 1966 (
New York Times
, March 6), wherein he gave a slightly different account of what happened: “A letter arrived for me from Anne Carroll Moore, children’s librarian emeritus of the New York Public Library. Her letter was long, friendly, urgent,
and thoroughly surprising. She said she had read proofs of my forthcoming book called ‘Stuart Little’ and she strongly advised me to withdraw it. She said, as I recall the letter, that the book was non-affirmative, inconclusive, unfit for children, and would harm its author if published.”

When, in 1971, Sayers was preparing her biography of ACM for publication, she sent EBW the galley pages containing her version of ACM’s June 20, 1945, letter to him, allegedly from this longhand copy she had in her hands, there in the NYPL. EBW wrote back and said, in effect, that this was not the letter he had received. KSW wrote: “Neither of us recognized it as a letter from Miss Moore to him.” EBW was no more than mildly irritated:
“My conscience is clear about Anne Carroll Moore.” But KSW was troubled. EBW and KSW also searched their attic, to no avail. They asked the archivists at Cornell to search through EBW’s papers—again, to no avail. But their search was hampered by EBW’s hay fever. “There are cartons and cartons of these letters in the attic still to go to Cornell,” KSW wrote to LSB (August 24, 1972, Box 43, Folder 661, LSB Papers, Vassar). KSW
assumed that Elledge would clear the matter up in his biography: “Scott probably eventually would straighten it all out if he ever got this biography finished.” (Ibid.) He did not. EBW asked Sayers not to print her version of the letter until he could finish looking for the original, but she refused.

At just about this time, KSW was preparing to give her own papers to Bryn Mawr, and EBW was preparing a selection of his letters for publication. In 1972, KSW wrote, “There is nothing he can do now because apparently he put her final letter to him in the wastebasket as we both do with letters that disgust us. Miss Moore implied that the book would be bad for children although all right enough for adults and that she felt his letter was the letter of a
sick man.” About Sayers’s refusal to delay publication until the Whites had a chance to conduct a more thorough search for the June 20, 1945, letter, KSW wrote, “That’s what gripes us both but especially me” (KSW to LSB, Box 43, Folder 661, LSB Papers, Vassar, August 10, 1974). In a letter to LSB, October 23, 1972 (KSW Papers), KSW wrote, of the original ACM letter: “I am sure it was dumped in the wastebasket and burned up because Andy
often dumps things that displease him and so do I. I threw my two—or three?—away at once.” And of Sayers’s printed version of the letter: “I believe the original was longer than this and that in her copying it down for her own records she changed Mrs. to Mr. (of course she intended it to go to Mr., but wrote through me). I wrote back and had a
second letter. Because Andy cannot come up with the letter, probably neither he nor
I will write any correction unless he is directly libeled in some review.”