The Mansion of Happiness (12 page)

While Katharine White stood her ground against Anne Carroll Moore, Harold Ross battled
Henry Luce, who, with his Yale classmate
Briton Hadden, had started
Time
magazine in 1923. The battle between White and Moore turns out to have a great deal in common with the battle between Ross and Luce: in a way, they were part of the same war, a war about babying readers.

Ross meant the
New Yorker
to be everything
Time
wasn’t. (“But, Lester, is it
enough
just being against everything that ‘Time’ magazine is for?” read the caption beneath one
New Yorker
cartoon.)
²⁵
Time
sent out a flyer: “TIME has given such attention to the development of the best narrative English that hundreds of editors and journalists have declared it to be the greatest creative force in modern journalism.”
²⁶
The
New Yorker
published a parody: “Before a sentence may be used in THE NEW YORKER it must be cleaned and polished.
The work of brightening these sentences is accomplished by a trained editorial staff of 5,000 men named Mr. March.”
²⁷

Luce founded a business magazine in 1930. “Who reads
Fortune
?” Ross asked. “Dentists.”
²⁸
In 1936, Luce launched yet another magazine. “Life begins!” announced the first issue, alongside a photo of a doctor holding up a newborn baby. The week that issue hit newsstands, the
New
Yorker
published a profile of Luce called “Time … Fortune … Life … Luce,” a parody written by
New Yorker
editor
Wolcott Gibbs in
Time
’s trademark style. “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” Gibbs wrote. “Where it will all ends, knows God.” The next year,
Life
printed a photograph of Ross doodled on to make
him look like Joseph Stalin. Ross toyed with starting a magazine called
Death.
²⁹

In March 1937, the month after the publication of
John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
, Luce’s staff ran a cover story about
C. C. Little in
Time
and put an army of mice on the cover of
Life
, announcing, “Mice Replace Men on the Cancer Battlefield.” The feature went a long way to achieving Little’s goal of what he called “a New Deal for mice”: he wanted the
federal government to fund biomedical research and, especially, to pay for the use of mice in the fight against cancer. That goal was largely achieved, in June 1937, with the passage of the National Cancer Institute Act.
³⁰

Meanwhile,
Life
was struggling, $3 million in the red. “We have to get more and more remarkable pictures,” Luce ordered.
³¹
The first week of April 1938,
Life
’s editors warned subscribers of a forthcoming story “without precedent among general magazines”: “If your copy of LIFE is read by
children, this letter will give you time in which to make up your mind
whether they shall the see the story and under what conditions.”
³²
(Rejected was the idea of selling newsstand copies bound with a tape reading, “This issue of LIFE to be sold to adults only.”) Apparently, very few subscribers received the warning before the
magazine, since the letter was sent by third-class mail.
Life
also sent advance notices to nearly four thousand newspapermen; another four thousand to schoolteachers, mayors, and heads of women’s clubs; two thousand letters to Protestant clergymen; and more than three thousand to doctors and hospitals.
³³

The offending issue contained a removable centerfold—the pages were supposed to arrive uncut—called “The Birth of a Baby.” It consisted of thirty-five quite small black-and-white stills from a documentary film of the same title. For all the hoopla, the pictures were hardly prurient. The woman pictured was an actress named
Eleanor King, and not pregnant.
³⁴
The photographs contain no nudity (not even, really, the baby’s). The caption for frame 25 reads: “Dr. Wilson supports the head as the body emerges and slowly turns, but lets the mother actually expel the baby.” The baby emerges amid a sea of drapes.
³⁵

All the same, the stunt worked.
Eleanor Roosevelt said she found that issue of
Life
“completely engrossing.”
³⁶
The film was shown in fifteen states. One reporter made the not unreasonable claim that “almost overnight,
The Birth of a Baby
became the most discussed picture since
The Birth of a
Nation.
”
³⁷
Life
’s “Birth of a Baby” issue was banned all over the country. By April 15, municipal officials in fifty cities in New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and every New England state had prevented its distribution, seizing copies from newsstands and threatening and arresting newsdealers. (
Life
paid all of the newsdealers’ legal fees.) Pittsburgh safety
director
George E. A. Fairley ordered it off the city’s newsstands, declaring, “The magazine outrages all common decency.” When a Tucson police chief banned the sale of the magazine at newsstands, the
Arizona Daily Star
offered to sell it from its offices. In the Bronx, a Catholic district attorney named
Samuel J. Foley called the photographs “lewd, lascivious, obscene” and
“an outrageous affront.”
³⁸
Bronx police seized four thousand copies. After four Bronx newsdealers were arrested,
Roy Larsen,
Life
’s publisher, went to Foley’s office, sold a copy of the magazine to a policeman for a quarter, and was put in handcuffs. Larsen’s trial began on April 19. Two days later, George
Gallup issued the results of a nationwide poll. Asked, “In your opinion do these pictures violate the law against publication of ma-
terial which is obscene, filthy or indecent?,” 24 percent of respondents said yes; 76 percent, no. On April 26, a Bronx court ruled that the photographs were not indecent, and Larsen was released.
³⁹

This was just the kind of malarkey Harold Ross hated. The week after
Life
published “The Birth of a Baby,” the
New Yorker
published a lampoon called “The Birth of an Adult,” with text written by
E. B. White accompanied by stills of a fictitious film—drawings by
Rea Irvin, the artist who created Eustace Tilley—portraying “the waning phenomenon of
adulthood.” (Frame 1: “
The Birth of an Adult
is presented with no particular regard for good taste. The editors feel that adults are so rare, no question of taste is involved.”) “The decrease in the number of mature persons in the world is a shocking indictment of our civilization,” White wrote. That might have been satisfying but, in the meantime, seventeen million adults had seen that issue of
Life.
The
New Yorker
published a cartoon of two mailmen shouldering mail sacks stuffed with
Life;
one says, “If their circulation keeps going up, Joe, I swear I can’t go on.”
⁴⁰

At just that moment, E. B. White returned to his mouse. “I have written a fine parody of
Life
’s ‘The Birth of a Baby,’ ” he wrote to
James Thurber on April 16, 1938. “I also have a children’s book about half done.”
⁴¹
He had finally opened his desk drawer. White wrote
that letter from North Brooklin, Maine, population 800, where the Whites had just moved. North Brooklin was about sixty miles from
C. C. Little’s mouse
laboratory, in Bar Harbor. White gave his mouse a last name.

White next made a study of children’s literature. In a November 1938 essay for
Harper’s
, he complained that his house was chockablock with review copies of children’s books, two hundred of them, sent to his wife by publishers; they were spilling out of the cupboards, stuck under sofa cushions, tumbling out of the wood box. About the only one he liked was Dr. Seuss’s
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.
The rest were ruthlessly cloying, horribly written, and hopelessly naïve. (“One laughs in demoniac glee,” White wrote, “but this laugh has a hollow sound.”) What White found most depressing—and he was pretty discouraged in 1938, which he called “this year of infinite terror”—was the looming war that threatened to make the whole planet unsuitable for anyone, while, in the world of children’s literature,
“adults with blueprints of bombproof shelters sticking from their pants pockets solemnly caution their little ones against running downstairs with lollypops in their mouths.”
⁴²

In his
Harper’s
essay, White mused, as if he were merely mulling it over, that “it must be a lot of fun to write for children—reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work.” After Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) pointed White’s essay out to
Anne Carroll Moore, she wasted no time in sending White a letter. “I wish to goodness you would do a real children’s book
yourself,” she wrote, from a return address of “Behind the Lions.” “I feel sure you could, if you would, and I assure you the Library Lions would roar with all their might in its praise.” White replied that he had, in fact, started writing a children’s book but was finding it difficult. “I really only go at it when I am laid up in bed, sick, and lately I have been enjoying fine health. My fears about writing for children are
great—one can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness. I don’t trust myself in this treacherous field unless I am running a degree of fever.”
⁴³

Moore pursued the correspondence. In early 1939, she pressed upon White no fewer than five letters. She sent him copies of her reviews. She gave him writing tips: “Let it
flow
, without criticizing it
too
close
to its
creation.
” She inquired after his family, asking, more than once, for his child’s name. She was very, very keen to make the acquaintance of his wife: “I’d like to include
Mrs.
E.B. White in this letter for two reasons. The first that she is mother of the boy, or is it a girl? And second because she reviews children’s books for the New Yorker or some other magazine.” Most of all, she begged him to get
back to his children’s book. “Can’t you achieve a
temperature
, without getting sick and finish it off ?” She was attempting, as she often did, not only to cultivate this author but to claim him. “No one is more interested than I when your children’s book is ready,” Moore wrote on February 18. “Let me know if I can be of service at any stage.”
⁴⁴

In April 1939, White sent an unfinished manuscript to his editor at
Harper & Row,
Eugene Saxton. “It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it,” White offered, adding, “You will be shocked and grieved to discover that the principal character in the story has somewhat the attributes and appearance of a mouse.” Saxton was far from grieved. He wanted
Stuart
Little
, for a fall 1939 publication date. Anne Carroll Moore would have liked that, too; she was dying to take credit for the book. But that mouse would have to wait for a pack animal to budge. As White gently warned the pestering librarian, “I pull back like a mule at the slightest goading.”
⁴⁵

Two books that
were
published in 1939,
Gertrude Stein’s children’s book
The World Is Round
and John Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath
, reveal a bit more about what was turning into a baby battle of the books. Of Stein’s book, Anne Carroll Moore approved, with much enthusiasm. Katharine White found it numbingly insipid. (It begins, “Once upon a time the world was round and you
could go on it around and around. Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was.”) In her
New Yorker
column, White took aim at Moore: “A number of experts in children’s literature have pronounced ‘The World Is Round’ a good book, but that does not surprise me, since, with a few exceptions, the critics of children’s books
are remarkably lenient souls. They seem to regard books for children with the same tolerant tenderness with which nearly any adult regards a child. Most of us assume there is something good in every child; the critics go on from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory.”
⁴⁶

The Grapes of Wrath
met with the disapproval not of Anne Carroll Moore but of
Annie Dollard, the librarian of a private subscription library in Brooklin. “She was a tiny spinster with firm convictions about which books were fit to read,” Katharine wrote. “The library had acquired ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ but Annie took it off the shelf and placed it on her chair and sat on it. That solved that.”
⁴⁷
Of course, that didn’t solve that, and Katharine White decided to do something about it. Those two hundred review copies her husband had been tripping over before Christmas? She hauled them to the
Brooklin library.
⁴⁸

On November 26, 1939, the day after her “Children’s Shelf” column was printed in the
New Yorker
, Katharine White wrote to “Miss Moore” for the first time, delicately hinting that the librarian ought to stop bothering her husband about
Stuart Little
—“I’ve decided that the less we say the sooner it will be done”—and steering the correspondence in another direction by seeking advice
about how to apply for Carnegie funds for the Brooklin library. She also inquired, a little wickedly, after recommendations from the formidably humorless Moore for material for an anthology she and her husband were compiling,
A Subtreasury of American Humor.
⁴⁹

Anne Carroll Moore did not write to E. B. White again until February 1941, alerting him, in confidence, of her plan to retire from the New York Public Library. “I am telling you because I would love to make one of my very final recommendations a large order for E. B. White’s children’s book,” she wrote. White sent his congratulations, saying, “Mrs. White & I
were interested to learn of your forthcoming
retirement in the fall, & are impressed by your long and fruitful service to the children of the world. It is really one of the great and honorable careers—none finer.” Of Moore’s wanting to wheedle
Stuart Little
out of him as the capstone of her career, he did not utter a word. In her own letter, Katharine was sly. “Miss Moore,” she began, “Children’s literature cannot spare you.”
⁵⁰