The Mansion of Happiness (41 page)

In a note KSW typed on October 25, 1972 (KSW Papers), she refers to the question of to whom the June 20, 1945, letter was addressed: “Of course Miss Moore intended it for him but she wrote to me because she knew me a little, as during my period of reviewing children’s books at
The New Yorker
I was invited to and attended the rather dreadful candlelight meetings in the fall of each year in which the children’s books were displayed
and discussed by Miss Moore to a rather reluctant collection of librarians, children’s book critics, and heads of children’s book departments in the publishing houses.” In an interview published in 1974 (Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher,
The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children’s Literature
[New York: Paddington Press, 1974], 128–29), EBW gave this account: “I can’t say what was in Anne Carroll
Moore’s mind when she tried to get me to withdraw the manuscript of ‘Stuart Little.’ I think she was dead set against an American family having a mouse-boy. I think, too, she found my story inconclusive (which it is), and it seems to me she said something about its having been written by a sick mind. I may be misquoting her, as I haven’t got the letter in my possession.”

In May 1974, LSB wrote to KSW about the
Stuart Little
fiasco: “You may remember you wrote me at length the horrid details at a time when I thought I could make public use of them. Thank God that is no longer on my conscience. But, my White file will preserve your version of the story for posterity. If only old A.C.M. were here to read it.” This may refer to correspondence from 1946 or to a letter from December 29,
1970—“Yours of Dec 29 gave me great pleasure,” LSB wrote to KSW on January 8, 1971 (KSW Papers, Bryn Mawr). Or it might refer to their correspondence in 1972, after Sayers’s biography was published.

59.
“Very difficult to place”: ACM to EBW, June 20, 1945, in Sayers,
Moore
, 243–44.

60.
EBW, “The Librarian.”

61.
EBW to Stanley Hart White, July 11–21, 1945,
Letters of EBW
, 253. KSW to ACM, undated, c. July 1945, in
Letters of EBW
, 252. See also KSW on
Stuart Little
in her “Children’s Shelf” column, titled “Children’s Books: Fairy Tales and the Postwar World,”
New Yorker
, December 8, 1945,
120–40.

62.
EBW, “Once More to the Lake,” in
One Man’s Meat
, 202–3.

63.
EBW,
Stuart Little
(New York: Harper & Row, 1945), 1–2.

64.
EBW, “The Librarian.”

65.
Malcolm Cowley, “Stuart Little, Or, New York Through the Eyes of a Mouse,” review of
Stuart Little, New York Times Book Review
, October 28, 1945, 7.

66.
Stuart Little
is also conspicuously absent from the NYPL’s Recommended Children’s Books for Christmas lists for 1945, 1946, and 1947 (I didn’t check any other years). These lists survive in the FCS Papers, Box 24, Folder 5, Special Collections, UCLA. The NYPL lists were apparently hugely influential, and librarians across the country really did use them to make decisions about buying books. Also, on the book not being adopted by libraries across the
country, see KSW note on LSB, undated typescript, but c. 1972, Box 1, KSW Papers.

67.
Leonard Lyons, “The Lyons Den,”
New York Post
, November 23, 1945. Lyons’s column
was apparently syndicated. It also appeared, for instance, in the
Washington Post
for November, 27, 1945; in that newspaper it was called “Gossip from Gotham.”

68.
EBW to FCS, November 24, 1945, in
Letters of EBW
, 255–56. The original, at Cornell, Box 62, is slightly longer but not much different. Sayers refers to this letter in her own letter to EBW, March 6, 1972, in the EBW Papers, Cornell, Box 157. It’s possible that the gossipy Louise Bechtel is the person who planted the
Post
squib, but no hint
of this appears in EBW to LSB, November 10, 1945, Box 43, Folder 657, LSB Papers, Vassar.

69.
EBW to Ursula Nordstrom, November 14, 1945,
Letters of EBW
, 255.

70.
EBW,
Stuart Little
, 2, 9.

71.
Davis,
Onward and Upward
, 3–7.

72.
KSW,
New Yorker
, December 7, 1946, 127. LSB wrote to KSW, approving of her column. KSW wrote back: “I know that what I said about library meetings will be misinterpreted but the whole thing has boiled up in me so long over the years about the modern attitude toward juveniles that I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I guess I won’t get invited to
the candlelit meetings again . . . I’m alarmed by the fact that I have only had letters liking my review and suspect there will be a concerted blast from the others eventually” (KSW to LSB, December 17, 1946, Box 43, Folder 658, LSB Papers, Vassar).

73.
EBW,
Stuart Little.

74.
Susan Alder’s ending for
Stuart Little
is included with a group of proposed alternate endings to the book sent to EBW by a class of fifth graders from Illinois. Susan DeBushe, secretary, class M, fifth grade, Central School, Glencoe, Illinois, to EBW, February 18, 1946, Box 215, EBW Papers.

75.
“A great book”: LSB to KSW, [1946], Box 1, KSW Papers. Bechtel discovering the book: KSW note on LSB, undated typescript, but c. 1972; and also KSW, note, October 25, 1972, Box 1, KSW Papers. The Whites did not know that Bechtel had intervened until she told them in 1972. “We were fascinated to hear that it was you who went to the Head Librarian at the
main New York Public Library and made Mrs. [
sic
] Moore and Mrs. Sayers pull ‘Stuart Little’ out of hiding’ ” (KSW to LSB, August 25, 1972, Box 43, Folder 661, LSB Papers, Vassar). Hopper’s response: Franklin F. Hopper to LSB, December 24, 1945, Papers of LSB, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. Stuart gnawing his way in: EBW, “The
Librarian.”

76.
The seventh grade of Clifton School, Cincinnati, Ohio, to EBW, March 11, 1946, Box 215, Folder 6, EBW Papers. KSW remembered, however, that libraries in Cleveland also helped break ACM’s stranglehold: “It was the Cleveland librarians who first turned against her and decided they weren’t going to follow the ban any more, and since then every public
library has had its copies of ‘Stuart Little’ ” (KSW to LSB, August 10, 1974, Box 43, Folder 661, LSB Papers, Vassar).

77.
LSB at the speech: “After my Bowker speech (which sold more reprints than any other since given) I recall so well the big lecture room [illeg] & ACM at the front
cutting me dead.
Later she either wrote or said how she disliked it. This was a blow indeed, yet there was a fundamental difference in our approaches to reading & especially
to its necessary relation to public education. In my private school teaching, in my teaching writing two seminars at Boulder, in my early ‘selling’ journeys across the continent, I had a far different experience of books & people than hers. No one could differ with her good taste & high standards, her fine feeling for nonsense, etc., and I did not! But I did have a different angle on
kinds
of reading for all
kinds
of people, & on necessity for more kinds of books [illeg] than she did” (LSB, notes ACM for FSC, Box 33, Folder 476, LSB Papers). LSB’s stories are many: ACM hollering at her beneath a streetlight at Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street about a book about which they disagreed; ACM in a black velvet dress hating LSB’s dog jumping in her lap; and so forth. Hoping for prizes: LSB,
Books in Search of Children
, ed. Virginia Haviland (New York:
Macmillan, 1940, 1955), 210. ACM sending LSB a blast: LSB to KSW, October [illeg.], 1946, Box 1, KSW Papers.

78.
The list of jurors was sent to me by the American Library Committee: Valerie Hawkins, e‑mail to the author, May 5, 2008. On how the jury and book selection works, and that the jury consists of children’s librarians, see Ruth Allen,
Children’s Book Prizes
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 21. What are now “Newbery Honor Books” used
to be called runners-up, but that change, when it was made, was retroactive. Grinding teeth: LSB to KSW, [Spring?] 1946, Box 1, KSW Papers. The letter is (implicitly) dated the morning after the announcement. The Newbery was announced in the June 20, 1946,
New York Times.
More on LSB’s backstage maneuvering with KSW for the Newbery: LSB to KSW, February 18, 1946, Box 93, EBW Papers, reporting on meeting a bookseller who “says ‘Stuart Little’
is my own choice for the Newberry [
sic
] in spite of much controversy.” LSB did genuinely love the book. She wrote a rather sweet fan letter to EBW, October 31, 1945, Box 93, EBW Papers: “Please excuse but—today ‘the sky is right,’ for I have met someone who is ‘headed in the right direction.’ ” EBW wrote back, EBW to LSB, November 10, 1945, Box 43, Folder 657, LSB Papers, Vassar (“Whether children will
like the book is a question which time will answer”). Thank you for grinding teeth: KSW to LSB, no date given but must be June or July 1946, Box 43, Folder 662, LSB Papers.

79.
Frederic Babcock, “Among the Authors,”
Chicago Daily Tribune
, October 7, 1945. On the price of the book, see the display ad in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, November 11, 1945. For an ad stating that the book is for children “from seven to seventy,” see
Washington Post
, October 28, 1945. Also: “I myself have
never known whether this book was a juvenile or a novel,” Katharine White confessed; but then, she didn’t really believe in juveniles. KSW to ACM, undated, c. July 1945, in
Letters of EBW
, 252. See also KSW on
Stuart Little
in her “Children’s Shelf,”
New Yorker
, December 8, 1945. On the celery-and-olive lunch: EBW to UN, December 17, 1946, and Editor’s Note,
Letters of EBW
, 261–62. Nordstrom,
“Stuart, Wilbur, Charlotte.”

80.
KSW, “How Dear to This Heart,”
New Yorker
, December 11, 1948. It had taken something out of Katharine White, who, in late 1946, told Louise Bechtel that she had decided to give up the “Children’s Shelf.” Bechtel convinced her not to, insisting, “This very year is a sort of crisis in children’s books.” LSB to
KSW, October [illeg.], 1946, KSW Papers.

81.
UN to EBW, October 23, 1952, in
Dear Genius
, 55–56. Eudora Welty’s review of
Charlotte’s Web
appeared in the
New York Times Book Review
, October 19, 1952.

82.
At noon that day, a reporter from the Associated Press called the Central Children’s Room, wanting to know the author of a limerick Kennedy had quoted in his inaugural address:

               
There was a young lady of Niger

               
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;

               
They returned from the ride

               
With the lady inside
,

               
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

Staff News
, NYPL, January 26, 1961. I found this clipped in Box 33, Folder 479, of the LSB Papers. The limerick was written by Cosmo Monkhouse.

83.
The letter is: KSW to LSB, September 12, 1961, Box 43, Folder 662, LSB Papers. “I really detest the woman,” KSW also wrote. See also KSW to Caroline Angell, Christmas 1976, KSW Papers, Box 29, Folder 1; the copy of the letter in KSW Papers, Box 1, Folder 11; and LSB to KSW, August 21, 1972, KSW Papers. KSW wanted LSB, not FCS, to write the biography of
ACM. LSB supplied FCS with much information for the biography, both in letters and over lunches. There is a sense of a conspiracy of silence about ACM’s horribleness. After one lunch with FCS, LSB wrote, “Naturally I feel that our talk left much ‘unresolved.’ I tried again to write out my divergence of basic opinion from ACM’s—& then
rewrote
it, & now sensibly am not sending it” (LSB to FCS, August 24, 1961,
Box 33, Folder 475, LSB Papers); LSB, on another occasion, warned FCS that “these hastily scribed pages are NOT for quotation!” (undated document, Box 33, Folder 475, LSB Papers, Vassar). LSB, like everyone else, has almost impossibly complicated feelings about ACM: she admired her, had been deeply hurt and humiliated by her, considered her a friend, and was still a little afraid of her reach, even from the grave. It took FSC more than ten years to write the
biography. See also, e.g., FCS to LSB, July 19, 1961, and August 23, 1961, Box 33, Folder 474, LSB Papers, as well as LSB’s notes, which she sent to FCS but which FCS returned after the biography was published, in 1972. LSB’s notes are in Box 33, Folder 475, LSB Papers. FCS makes clear to LSB that she is hugely daunted by the prospect of the biography (“what an assignment!”) because of how controversial a figure ACM was, but that she has decided to
write a tribute. FSC collected ACM’s letters from people (“You said you had too many, but here, forgive me, are more,” LSB wrote to FSC, August 24, 1961, Box 33, Folder 475, LSB Papers). When KSW read Sayers’s biography, she wrote LSB a long letter with her thoughts, which were about the same as they were when ACM died in 1961: “I really am surprised at what a silly woman Anne Carroll Moore turns out to be” (KSW to LSB, August 10, 1974,
Box 43, Folder 661, LSB Papers). Some of what KSW sent LSB left the latter a little worried: “I have carefully refrained from showing your letter to anybody,” Bechtel wrote in September 4, 1972. “If her [Sayers’s] mistake is to be corrected it should be done by you or E.B.” (Box 33, Folder 436, LSB Papers, Vassar). LSB, the very same day, complimented FCS on the biography (LSB to FCS, September 4, 1972, Box 43, Folder 664, LSB Papers). In her
biography of Moore, Sayers reported that, sometime near the end of her life, Moore told friends she had been to visit the Whites in North Brooklin. “They have a beautiful place,”
Moore said, “with such delphiniums and other flowers as I haven’t seen all summer” (Sayers,
Moore
, 217). Long ago, Katharine White had once or twice extended this invitation—stop by and see my little library—but she
hadn’t expected Moore to take it up. “Oh
what
a nerve, to come call on you two in Maine!” the ever-gossipy Bechtel exclaimed, on reading Sayers’s book. “How did she dare?” But she didn’t, White insisted; it was a lie: “I’ll bet she just sat in the car and looked at the delphiniums” (KSW to LSB, October 23, 1972, KSW Papers).