The Mansion of Happiness (11 page)

A century later, when
Anne Carroll Moore was a little Goody Two-Shoes herself, the amusing and precious and Lilliputian world of children had become a mainstay of Victorian middle-class culture: there were children’s books, children’s clothes, children’s toys, and children’s furniture. Annie Moore was sixteen, in 1887, when
Milton Bradley published
The Paradise of Childhood.
In the age of
progress, with all its
machines, the world of adults was thought to be ruthless: cold, industrial, and grinding. Reformers wanted childhood, a world of little women and little men, to be a place apart, a paradise: the last mansion of happiness.

Most of what Moore did in the Children’s Room at the New York Public Library had never been done before. She hired storytellers and, in her first year alone, organized two hundred story hours—and ten times as many two years later. She compiled a list of twenty-five hundred standard titles in children’s literature. She fought for, and won, the right to grant borrowing privileges to children. (By 1913, children’s books accounted for one-third
of all the volumes borrowed from New York’s public libraries.) She invited authors to come and talk about their work. Much against the prevailing
sentiment of her day, she was convinced that her job was to give “to the child of foreign parentage a feeling of pride in the beautiful things of the country his parents have left in place of the sense of shame with which he too often regards it.”
⁶
She celebrated the holidays of immigrants (reading Irish poetry aloud, for instance, on St. Patrick’s Day) and stocked the shelves with books in French, German, Russian, and Swedish. In 1924, she hired the African-American writer
Nella Larsen to head the Children’s Room in Harlem, at the 135th Street branch (in her first year, Larsen bought over six
hundred new books). In every one of the library’s branches, Moore abolished age restrictions. Down came the silence signs; up went framed prints of the work of children’s book illustrators. “Do not expect or demand perfect quiet,” she instructed her staff. “The education of children begins at the open shelves” was her watchword. In place of locked cabinets, she provided every library with a big black ledger; if you could sign your name in it,
you could borrow a book. Moore considered signing the ledger something between an act of citizenship and a sacrament, to be undertaken only after reading a pledge, as solemn as an oath: “When I write my name in this book I promise to take good care of the books I use in the Library and at home, and to obey the rules of the Library.” (Philip Roth once said that taking that pledge—at a public library in Newark in the 1940s—“had as much to do with
civilizing me as any idea I was ever to come upon in the books themselves.”) During both the First and the Second World Wars, soldiers on leave in the city climbed the steps, past Patience and Fortitude, the massive stone lions guarding the entrance, walked into the Children’s Room, and asked to see the black books from years past.
⁷
They wanted to look up their
names, to trace the record of a childhood lost, an inky, smudged, and quavering once-upon-a-time.

“Anne Carroll Moore is an occurrence,”
Carl Sandburg wrote admiringly.
⁸
In the first half of the twentieth century, no one wielded more power in the world of children’s literature than Moore, a librarian in a city of publishers. The authors were more fretful, the editors smarter, the publishers cannier. But for
gumption, for glove-fisted gumption, Moore smacked them all, right in the snoot. “Admit to no discouragement!” she liked to say. She never lacked for an opinion. “Dull in a new way,” she labeled books she despised. When
William R. Scott brought her copies of his press’s new books, tricked out with pop-ups and bells and buttons, Moore snapped, “Truck! Mr. Scott. They are truck!” Her verdict, not any editor’s,
not any
bookseller’s, sealed a book’s fate. She kept a rubber stamp at her desk and used it liberally while paging through publishers’ catalogs: “Not recommended for purchase by expert.”
⁹
The End.

The end of Moore’s own influence came, years later, when she tried to block the publication of a book by
E. B. White about a woman who gives birth to a mouse, a book that disturbed much that Anne Carroll Moore believed about life and death and everything she believed about childhood and adulthood. Watching Moore stand in the way of that book, White’s editor,
Ursula Nordstrom, remembered, was like watching a
terrible accident: you tried not to look, but you couldn’t help yourself. Or, no, Nordstrom thought, it was worse: it was like watching a horse fall down, its spindly legs crumpling beneath its great weight.
¹⁰

E. B. White, born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899, was a generation Moore’s junior. As a boy, he had a pet mouse; he thought he looked a little mousy himself. The common house mouse comes from Europe, and traveled the world during the age of discovery. Mice were bred in captivity as early as the seventeenth century. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, “fancy mice,” bred in Japan, were brought to Britain. By the end of the nineteenth
century, a trade in fancy mice was thriving in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Mus musculus
was bred to white; children took to keeping mice as pets. Anatomists began using them in laboratories, to uncover the
secrets of generation and, especially, to study heredity, which is what
C. C. Little was studying at Harvard when E. B. White was a boy.
¹¹

In 1909, when White was nine, he won a prize from
Woman’s Home Companion
, for a poem about a mouse. He wanted to be a writer, and it always bugged him that there were books in his town library he wasn’t allowed to look at.
¹²
The New York Public Library opened the year he turned twelve, the year he won a silver badge for “A Winter
Walk,” an essay published in the children’s magazine
St. Nicholas
, which Anne Carroll Moore stocked on the shelves of her Children’s Room.
¹³
In 1917, White went to Cornell, where he became the editor of his college paper, the
Cornell Daily Sun.
In 1918, Moore wrote her first book review, in the
Bookman.
That review marks the birth of serious criticism of children’s literature. (The next year saw still more firsts: the first Children’s Book Week, organized by Moore, and the appointment of Louise Seaman, soon-to-be Bechtel, to head the first
children’s department at a major publishing house, Macmillan.) Moore’s column ran in
Bookman
until 1926, the year after
Harold Ross, an upstart from Aspen, launched a
magazine called the
New Yorker.
¹⁴
Right away, Ross hired White as a writer and snapped up a crackerjack thirty-two-year-old freelancer named Katharine Angell as a reader of manuscripts. Not long after, Angell became the magazine’s fiction editor.
¹⁵

Along about this time, E. B. White fell asleep on a train and “dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.” White had eighteen nieces and nephews who were forever begging him to tell them a story, but he hated trying to make one up off the top of his head. He set to writing and stocked a desk drawer with tales about “his mouse-child … the only fictional figure ever
to have honored and disturbed my sleep.” (He was therefore not, he felt, at liberty “to change him into a grasshopper or a wallaby.”) He named him Stuart.
¹⁶

Anne Carroll Moore had an imaginary friend, too. “I have brought someone with me,” she would say, singsongy, as she fished out of her handbag a wooden doll dressed as a Dutch boy. She named him Nicholas Knickerbocker. Moore also had letterhead engraved for her doll, and wrote and signed letters—to adults—as “Nicholas.” (“I’m the sorriest little Dutch boy you ever knew over your accident,” she once wrote to
Louise Seaman Bechtel.) When Moore forgot Nicholas in a taxi, never to be found again, her colleagues, fair to say, did not grieve his loss.
¹⁷

In 1924, Moore published her own children’s book,
Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story.
It begins with Nicholas’s Christmas Eve arrival in a New York Public Library Children’s Room filled with fairy creatures: “The Troll gave a leap from the Christmas Tree and landed right beside the Brownie in a corner of the window seat. Just then the Fifth Avenue window swung wide open and in walked a strange boy about eight inches
high.”
¹⁸
It has not aged well.

From 1924 to 1930, Anne Carroll Moore reviewed children’s books for the
New York Herald Tribune;
beginning in 1936, her reviews also appeared in the
Horn Book.
She could be a tough critic, especially of books that violated her rules: “Books about girls should be as interesting as girls are” and “Avoid those histories that gain dramatic interest by appeal to prejudice. Especially true of American histories.”
¹⁹
But merely in bothering to criticize children’s books, Moore was ahead of everyone. Only in 1927 did the
Saturday Review
begin running a twice-monthly column called “The Children’s
Bookshop.” The
New York Times Book Review
didn’t regularly review children’s books until
1930. It was a first, in 1928, when the
New Yorker
’s
Dorothy Parker, in her “Constant Reader” column, reviewed
A. A. Milne’s
The House at Pooh Corner.
(Moore called another Milne book “a nonsense story in the best tradition of the nursery.”) Pooh’s wasn’t just a Good Hum and a Hopeful Hum. It was a hummy hum. “And it is that word
‘hummy,’ my darlings,” Parker wrote, “that marks the first place in ‘The House at Pooh Corner’ at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”
²⁰

In 1929, E. B. White married Katharine Angell. They soon had a son. In 1933, when the Whites’ son, Joel, was three, Katharine, who also had two children from her first marriage, began writing the
New Yorker
’s “Children’s Shelf,” an annual and sometimes semiannual roundup of children’s books. Katharine White’s taste in children’s literature, if it fell short of Tonstant Weader’s fwowing up, was more
than spitting distance from Moore’s indulgence in the adventures of Troll, Brownie, and Nicholas Knickerbocker. An A. A. Milne introduction to
Jean de Brunhoff’s
Travels of Babar
, White found “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.” White favored sturdy characters and spare prose. But there was something else at
stake, too. White’s “Children’s Shelf,” even in its title, called into question the very idea of a children’s library. Maybe all they needed was a shelf?

Some of the very best prose and poetry, not to mention the best art, is to be found in books written for children—disciplined, inspired, even elevated by the constraints of the form. Katharine White loved very many books for children; above all, she admired the beauty and lyricism of picture books and readers for the under-twelve set. But about what was happening to children’s literature, especially for older kids, she had her doubts:

And who decides what’s suitable, anyway? Parents? Librarians? Editors? White had her own ideas about who should draw the line—if a line had to be drawn—between what was good for children and what was childish or just plain rotten. About Anne Carroll Moore she once fumed, “Critic, my eye!”
²²

Sometimes books labeled juvenile are, instead, antique. Children’s literature, at least in the West, is utterly bound up in the medieval, as the literary scholar
Seth Lerer has argued.
²³
Lots of books for kids are about the
Middle Ages (everything from
The Hobbit
to
Robin Hood
and
Redwall
); and the conventions of the genre (allegory, moral fable, romance, and heavy-handed symbolism) are also themselves distinctly premodern. It’s not only that many books shelved as “children’s literature”—the Grimms’ fairy tales or
Gulliver’s Travels
or
Huck Finn
—were born as biting political satire, for adults; it’s also that books written for children in the centuries after the
discovery of childhood tend to be distinctly, willfully, and often delightfully anti-modern.
The Phantom Tollbooth
has more in common with
Pilgrim’s Progress
than it does with
On the Road.
Lurking in the stacks of every “children’s library” are dozens of literary impostors: satires, from ages past, hiding their fangs; and shiny new books, dressed up in some very old clothes.

It would be convenient if Katharine White and Anne Carroll Moore stood on either side of a divide between anti-modernist and modernist writing. But their taste doesn’t really sort out that way. A better way of thinking about it might be to say that Anne Carroll Moore did not like fangs. She loved what was precious, innocent, and sentimental. White found the same stuff mawkish, prudish, and daffy. “There are too many coy books full of talking animals,
whimsical children, and condescending adults,” White complained in the “Children’s Shelf” in 1935. Katharine White also hated the word “juvenile,” and sorely regretted, in the 1930s, that “it still adequately describes the calibre of the great majority of these books.”
²⁴
But what about her husband’s teensy
talking mouse-child? Whether he was juvenile remained to be seen because, for now, he was still stuck in that desk drawer.