Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature

9. A Good Man and His Good Wife

68 9 A Good Man and His Good Wife Then, the man and the girl get married. They hold hands and they ride home —galoop galoop galoop galoop galoop galoop galoop galoop— together. —Ruth Krauss, Somebody Else’s Nut Tree and Other Tales from Children (1958) Dave’s working methods meant that he and Ruth kept very different hours. Ruth rose at seven in the morning, after which she would take their two dogs for a walk along the Five Mile River. While he slept, Ruth began working on story ideas in her upstairs studio. Dave rose at noon, and Ruth fixed his breakfast and her lunch shortly thereafter. Then he would read for about two hours before working in their Victory Garden or going sailing while she swam. At 5:30, they had dinner, prepared by Ruth. Dave would start work on Barnaby at 8:00 but found that he only really got under way after the 11:00 news. Despite living in different personal time zones, they were a very close couple—so close that, on 25 June 1943, they got married in New London, Connecticut.1 Harper gave Krauss a three-hundred-dollar advance and a contract for her first children’s book in October 1943. Influenced by her work on Ruth Benedict’s anthropological project on south Italian farming families, A Good Man and His Good Wife offers a novel twist on folktales that mock a husband’s failed attempts to copy his wife. In contrast, Krauss has mimicry supporting the husband’s efforts to teach a lesson to the wife. Nonetheless, as Krauss admitted four years later, A Good Man and His Good Wife “made some mistakes ” because “the characters are cast in the conventional roles.” The “good man” can never find anything because his good wife keeps moving things around, explaining, “My dear, I get so tired of the same things in the same place.”Frustrated, he puts his shoe on his head, his garters around his neck, his tie around his knee, his pants on his arms, his coat on his legs, his spectacles 69 A Good Man and His Good Wife on his elbow, and his socks on his ears. He then sits on the breakfast table, eating his napkin and wiping his face with a biscuit.When his wife exclaims,“My dear, this is ridiculous!,” he replies,“My dear, I get so tired of the same things in the same place.”The tactic cures“his good woman of a bad habit”: she stops moving things around.2 Ad Reinhardt received the same advance and worked up a rough dummy of the book while Krauss pondered her next project, an anti-ageist children’s book, I’m Tired of Being a Grandma. Ursula Nordstrom found parts of the beginning amusing but considered the manuscript “forced” and “not a really good follow-up to A Good Man and His Good Wife.”Krauss persisted, sending Nordstrom two new versions of the story because“our concepts of how people think, feel, and behave at certain ages, are socially conditioned,”and these concepts were“practically as bad as race-prejudice, prejudice against women, immigrants , etc.” Krauss pointed to “the Northwest Coast Indians of the United States and Canada” as holding “entirely different concepts about old people”: “Among these Indians, the high point of romantic sex is old-age, about seventy to ninety. You’re supposed to be romantic then; so, consequently, you Ad Reinhardt, two-page spread from Ruth Krauss, A Good Man and His Good Wife (New York: Harper, 1944). Reproduced courtesy of Anna Reinhardt. Copyright © Anna Reinhardt. 70 A Good Man and His Good Wife are romantic then.” Though sympathetic, Nordstrom did not think the idea worked as a story.3 Also in October 1943, Henry Holt published Barnaby, bringing the darling of the smart set to a wider audience. Rockwell Kent praised “Crockett Johnson’s profound understanding of the psychology of the child, of grownups and of fairy godfathers.” William Rose Benét, who won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for poetry,called Barnaby“a classic of humor”and declared Mr.O’Malley “a character to live with the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, Ferdinand, and all great creatures of fantasy.” Ruth McKenney, whose My Sister Eileen had been nominated for an Oscar earlier that year, took delight in“that evil intentioned , vain, pompous, wonderful little man with the wings.” She “suppose...