Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (review)

Reviews Leonard S. Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.352 pp. $25.00. Margaret Wise Brown wrote some of the best loved and most imitated of modern children 's picture books. Goodnight Moon, Runaway Bunny, The Little Island, and the various "noisy books" are among the more than one hundred enduring fictions she brought forth during her brief life. Readers of this review who might be inclined to dismiss the children's picture book genre as mere fluff for undeveloped minds would be well advised to take a look at some of the better books in the field—for example the works of Maurice Sendak, Arnold Lobel, and Chris Van Allsburg. Especially worthy of a look are Margaret Wise Brown's collaborations with Clement Hurd, Leonard Weisgard, Jean Chariot, Garth Williams, Barbara Coony, Remy Charlip, and many others. The best children's picture books achieve a kind of eloquence for which simplicity of statement is a precondition; that this kind of eloquence requires pictures to realize its full expression is a special feature of that eloquence rather than a limitation. It could be argued that the children's picture book is, in certain respects, one of our society 's most valuable forms of art. It is a form of art both literary and graphic that parents can hold in their hands to share with their youngest and, therefore, most fragile children. The intimate transaction between parent, child, and picture book is one that Margaret Wise Brown understood well. She found ways to make that core interconnectedness the primary subject of her art and the art of the collaborators she brought into her projects. The example of her best works demonstrated that the most primary of subjects for picture books, the parent-child bond, could be addressed directly if one had the wit and wisdom to attain genuine simplicity. Margaret Wise Brown's phenomenal success as an author of books for children was not due to an ability to speak to children; it was rather primarily because the cast of her mind allowed her to speak as a child that she came to deserve the title "laureate of the nursery," bestowed upon her by Louise Bechtel. Brown's sensibility was an amaz- reviews 277 ing amalgam—sophisticated, ironical modernism intermingled with an uncanny capacity for the fresh and direct (and therefore childlike) observation. Her picture poems were Gertrude Stein and nursery rhyme rolled into one. It was, in fact, at the urging of Margaret Wise Brown that Gertrude Stein was commissioned to write the children's book The World is Round. Born in 1910 and rising to prominence in the thirties and forties, Brown was an important innovator in her rapidly evolving field. One of the pleasures of reading Awakened by the Moon is the access it gives us to the formative years of the modern children's book industry. Margaret Wise Brown was at the heart of that action as author, editor, and all-around instigator. In the "Fairy Tale Wars" between Ann Carroll Moore (the New York Public Library-based advocate for pixie-dust fantasy) and Lucy Sprague Mitchell (the advocate for here-and-now pragmatism) Brown was clearly on the side of Mitchell's Bank Street School approach. In fact, it was under Mitchell's tutelage that Brown first started working with children and children's books in the heady Progressive atmosphere of Bank Street. Yet, as Margaret's genius for the picture book evolved beyond her early successes with the influential here-andnow -oriented "noisy books," she gradually gave free rein to her natural love for the fantastic. As Marcus points out, books such as Runaway Bunny demonstrated that "even a here-and-now story can be a dream." Brown had a knack for collaboration. One of her most frequent collaborators, Leonard Weisgard, points out that many of the artists who illustrated Brown's books did their best work with her. Her successes as a collaborator were in no small measure supported by her capacity for friendship. Leonard Marcus' biography gets quite a bit of help from Brown's friends, many of whom are still alive and active. Their anecdotes about...