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LEONARD MARCUS: Let's talk about some of the books you have published and about some of the authors with whom you've worked. For instance, how did you come to work with Paul and Ann Rand? MARGARET McELDERRY: Gerry Gross, who later became Vice-President in charge of Arts and Books at Boston University, was then in the production department at Harcourt, Brace & Co. He cared about book-making, art, music, and everything good. He knew Paul Rand and said the Rands, Ann and Paul, had just had a daughter and were interested in doing a children's book. So I called them, and we got started. Ann wrote the text and then Paul designed a dummy. I was timid about working with Paul, one of the great people in the advertising world, known internationally. Who was I to instruct him about his dummy? But I had some definite points to make. So I gathered my courage, made my points — and Paul was a pussy cat! He made all the requested changes, which were considerable. I realized then what it means to be a real professional. If professionals are asked to consider something by someone who is supposed to know what he or she is talking about, they won't go off in a huff. They'll consider it. Often when I note a problem and suggest a remedy, an author or illustrator will come up with a better solution, but at the very least they will think about what I have said. LM: How did The Two Reds (Harcourt) come about? MM: The Two Reds was my first attempt at publishing modern art. The author, Will Lipkind, was married to Maria Cimino of the New York Public Library's Central Children's Room. Will and Nicolas Mordvinoff, the wonderful, mad White Russian who was the book's illustrator, had become close friends. Nicolas was a painter. He had studied with Leger in Paris and had lived in Tahiti. These two men created The Two Reds based on their Greenwich Village neighborhood. When I saw that dummy, I thought it was a fascinating, new kind of book. I took a deep breath and decided that I was going to publish it, although I shuddered at the thought that no one might buy it. Once it came off press, remarkable things started. F.A.O. Schwarz was going to put in an entire window of The Two Reds. But the president of the store walked by as the display was being installed and said, "What do you think you are doing, putting a book called The Two Reds in our window?" This was the time of the Cold War. The book itself couldn't be less political — the two reds refer to a redhaired boy and a red-haired cat. But he forbade them to put the window in, and I've never yet had a window at Schwarz. Then there was a furor over the fact that Mordvinoff was a Russian name, even though Nicolas had been smuggled out of Russia as a small child and was no more Communist than I am. Nevertheless, there were wonderful reviews of the book. Louise Seaman Bechtel, who was reviewing for the New York Herald Tribune, wrote: "The publication of this book restores one's faith in the experimental daring of American publishers." That sentence is engraved on my heart. Ursula Nordstrom, children's book editor at Harper, called me on vacation in Nantucket to tell me about the review. The book was accepted by people whose opinion I valued. Then came Finders Keepers (Harcourt), Will and Nicolas's second book, which is about two dogs fighting over a bone. The endpapers of that book show the dogs and the bone. I had a long, tortured letter from a children's librarian saying that this was obviously a Communist book. Why? Because on the endpapers she had traced maps of Russia. It was the most extraordinary exercise in self-deluding imagination that I've ever encountered. But Finders Keepers won the Caldecott medal, and that same year Eleanor Estes won the Newbery for Ginger Pye (Harcourt). It was the first time that any publisher had won both awards together. It turned out to be a triumphant year that I could never have foreseen or planned; it just happened. LM: In the mid-1950s you also began publishing Antonio Frasconi. Had you known his prints from exhibitions you'd seen in New York? MM: Yes, and at that time the head of the Print Collection at the New York Public Library, Karl Kup, suggested that I think of Antonio for a children's book. So I wrote to him and asked him to consider the idea. He's a warm, compassionate person. He was born in Uruguay of Italian parents, and I wondered if perhaps his mother or father had told him folktales and stories, one of which might make a book. That wasn't so. They were always too busy, he said. Antonio was terribly conscious of language. He had taken only a crash course in English in Uruguay, and when he first came to the States he had had problems doing something so simple as ordering a sandwich. He and his wife, Leona Pearce Frasconi, had their first son, and Antonio wanted somehow to show children that there was more than one language in the world. So he created See and Say (Harcourt), which showed pictures of objects that would be familiar to a child, with the word for each object given in four languages. Each language was printed in a different color; it was quite a job to work out the layout. Gerry Gross and I spent a whole weekend taking things apart and putting them together again until we had it right. After Antonio published See and Say, he told me that all the time he had been doing advertising work and fine arts prints, nobody ever paid much attention. "Now that I've done this book, I'm getting all kinds of calls," he said. LM: Were other multilingual books being published then? MM: Sesyle Joslin published What Do You Say, Dear? (Harper), with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, in both Spanish and French translations. People kept saying we needed dual language books, so Sesyle published several with me, the first being There Is a Dragon in My Bed (Harcourt), illustrated by Irene Haas. But not enough people bought the books to justify the effort. At that time English was the only language taught in the public schools. Now we are in a resurgence of dual language, or multiple language, books. LM: You were talking earlier about finding illustrators in art galleries. I wondered about other ways you might seek out authors, and was interested in Mario Salvadori, the engineer. MM: He's a splendid man. There had been a fascinating article in the New York Times about his work with Harlem school children explaining the principles of engineering. So we got in touch with him. The book that resulted from this — Building: The Fight against Gravity (Atheneum) — was about the basic concepts of building: the different kinds of arches, for instance, and the responsibility of the engineers and the architects. Mario is immensely interested in everything and has a great concern for young people. LM: Would you tell me about Eleanor Estes? MM: What a woman! She was frail, never very strong. She had worked as a children's librarian, first in New Haven, then in the New York Public. By the time I came to the New York Public, she had already left, married, and had a child. She was then published by Harcourt, Brace. Elizabeth Hamilton was the children's book editor there, and she had taken on Eleanor's first book. Elizabeth Hamilton left to go to Morrow because they had an opening and wanted to build up their children's books. But Eleanor decided to stay with Harcourt, and we worked together on Ginger Pye. She had an enchanting sense of humor, which I think is evident in all her writing, and a lovely feeling for people. She was a very sensitive person, and she could be hurt if people weren't aware of that sensitivity. She was a joy to work with because you spent a great deal of time laughing. LM: Had she been a storyteller at the library? MM: Oh, I'm sure she told stories in the library because we all had to. But what she wrote came to her from her own childhood, which was poor insofar as material things went, but very rich in a superb mother and a warm family feeling. Eleanor was just a delight to be with — whimsical, challenging, questioning, sensible, and sometimes not so sensible. She was a very rare spirit. LM: Ginger Pye is almost stream of consciousness — it records a child's thought process. Did she do a lot of patching and revising to achieve that effect? MM: She took great care in her writing. By the time she sent something in it was basically finished, and she didn't need to consider major revisions. Always there were certain tucks to be taken, perhaps to shorten a little, but nothing major. I shall never forget the day in 1952 when the receptionist announced that Fred Melcher, publisher of Publishers Weekly and the man who established the Newbery and Caldecott awards, was waiting to see me. Fred used to go personally and tell publishers if they had won a Newbery or Caldecott award. I thought, "It can't be. It can't be," although I knew it was about the time when the awards would be announced. So of course I went out and brought him in. He said that we'd won the Newbery with Ginger Pye. I practically collapsed. Then he said, "And that's not all. " I thought, "What's happening?" When he told me we'd also won the Caldecott, I thought I'd lost my mind. He delighted in giving surprise and seeing someone's pleasure and excitement at receiving the award. Fred was much loved, as well he should have been. So there I was, swimming around in all of this. Nicolas Mordvinoff was another glorious, complicated character — handsome as the day is long, charming as only a certain kind of European can be. Nicolas loved the ladies. That was both his weakness and — I guess! — his strength, too. We planned a dinner for Eleanor and Nicolas the night before the actual Newbery-Caldecott banquet at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. First there was a huge cocktail party (a thousand people were invited), then a very small dinner in our suite afterwards. Of course, Nicolas got caught up with some lovely lady there, and he never showed up at the dinner. Eleanor thought it was because he didn't like her! It took me the whole evening to calm her down because she was a nervous wreck anyhow, having won the award and knowing she was going to make a speech the next night. I was furious at Nicolas, just furious at him! The next morning he called, and I was as cold as ice. Finally he said, "Margaret, I won the Caldecott." I said, "I don't care if you did." We were having a few people to drinks prior to going to the banquet. Nicolas arrived and said to me, "I have to speak to you alone. " The only place we could be alone was in the bathroom, and he got down on his knees. He gave me — I still have them — the first pair of cufflinks he'd been given as a small boy. They were a great treasure that he'd kept all the way from Russia to Tahiti to the U.S. Well, of course, I melted at that point. Eleanor had lovely, almost translucent, skin and dark hair. She was wearing a beautiful, topless — I said that once in introducing her! — a strapless dress of white tulle with a fitted bodice and then a very bouffant skirt. She really looked like a fairy tale princess. Will Lipkind, the author of Finders Keepers, was sitting next to Eleanor, and I was on the other side of the lectern. I saw Eleanor start to get up when it was the moment to make her speech — and then she fell right down to the floor. I thought she had probably fainted because she was in such a nervous state. I was about to faint, too. But suddenly, I saw she was laughing! What had happened was that Will, being a gentleman, had pushed back his chair when she was rising, and the leg of it had gotten caught on her skirt, so she got part way up and then went right down. She got up to the lectern, laughing her head oft and it was wonderful because it cracked the terrible tension in her. Then she said something like, "All my life since I was a child, and I knew I wanted to be a writer, I have dreamed of winning this award. And what do I do? I fall flat on the floor." The thousand people in the ballroom had exclaimed in dismay when she fell, but when she got up laughing, everyone laughed, too, and the occasion took on an even happier glow. LM: Would you say that as a writer she was less interested in plot than in other aspects of fiction writing? MM: Very much so. Her main interest was people and how they acted, interacted, and reacted. Plot structure was not what motivated her. She knew a story had to move, have a beginning and a middle and an end, but her writing was not dominated by that at all. LM: An English writer whose work is deeply rooted in one particular place, but has nonetheless found an audience here, is Lucy Boston. Would you like to talk about her? MM: Oh, I'd love to talk about Lucy Boston. Do you know the story of how she found her house, "Green Knowe "? In wartime England she was living in Cambridge, and she had been looking around wanting to find a place near Cambridge, but out in the countryside. She had seen this house from the river and thought, "Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful if . . . " Then she saw an ad in the paper for a house for sale, and she knew it was her house. So she went there at once and rang the doorbell, and the owner answered. She said that she understood the house was for sale, and he gave her a very strange look and said, "How do you know that?" She said, "Well, the ad in the paper." And he said, "But we haven't advertised. We've only decided this morning that we want to sell this house." So it wasn't the house that had been in the ad. But it was the house that Lucy had fallen in love with, and they had decided to sell it. Her life was shot through with magic like that. The house had been modernized, and she and her son Peter, who is an architect, decided they wanted to put it back as much as possible to its original late-eleventh-century form. So they began working on it. In the so-called Great Hall, which was upstairs, there was a sort of extra room hung down from the ceiling in one corner. You had to crawl to get into it. It seemed to have the most terrible feeling of evil, cold evil, coming out of it. All that Lucy and Peter could think of was that it had been a dreadfully unhappy little room — if you could even call it a room. One day Peter was at the house with the workmen; they were all out on the lawn eating their lunch. Peter went inside and up to that strange room and was just absolutely repelled by this sense of cold evil. When he came out, he must have looked terribly pale because they said to him, "Mr. Boston, are you all right?" So that room was torn out, and that was the end of any bad feeling in the house. Peter told a fascinating story at Lucy's memorial service, which I attended in England. One evening, after the house had been restored as much as was possible, Lucy had gone to a concert in Cambridge. He was sitting by the Elizabethan fireplace, totally absorbed in his reading. He was suddenly aware of something nearby. He looked up, and saw the room was full of people in the dress of bygone periods; they all seemed to be happy and celebrating. He watched for a little while, and then they disappeared. He felt sure that these were people who had been connected with the house in some way and who were rejoicing that it had been restored, to a degree anyhow, to the original form they knew. Peter let me know afterwards that he had had a certain hesitation about telling the story. "But you know, it happened, Margaret," he said. Very, very positively, and sternly, I said, "Yes, Peter, I believe you." LM: You got to know Lucy well over the years, didn't you? MM: Yes, but only after I published the first book, The Children of Green Knowe (Harcourt). I was going to England and was longing to meet her, but I was also intimidated because she was such a brilliant writer. I thought, "I am just a dumb, young — well not so young — children's book editor." I was to spend the night in her house because of train schedules. I got there in time for tea, and we were sitting in front of her huge fireplace. Lucy had large, dark, dark eyes and they were sparkling in the firelight. She began telling me about some of the ghosts of the house way back. I could feel the hackles rising on the back of my neck — for I was going to spend the night there. I thought, "Come on! You're an American. Pull yourself together! You can't be frightened by this!" Later we had a lovely dinner, and she took me up to my room. In those days she had hot water crocks, not rubber bottles; you could bruise a foot on them in bed if you kicked out inadvertently. I never had a better night's sleep in my life. We became very dear friends. I was married from her house, and she gave me away, which I didn't know a woman could do. But apparently it could be done — though she claimed that my husband and I were never legally married! A woman with a great sense of humor — and absolutely devastating if she didn't like someone, with deadly wit that could impale her victim like an insect. Outrageous but terribly funny; you would find yourself screaming with laughter, saying, "Lucy, stop it!" A very rare person. Her writing in her letters is just as brilliant — although it was informal and full of personal things as her writing in her books. She loved that house and treasured it and knew everything that could be known about it. It is filled with treasures — all kinds of old china and crystal — and then, of course, there are the gardens, which were her passion. She really spent most of her time gardening, with the help of a succession of wonderful gardeners, whom she loved dearly and who loved her. Old roses were her specialty, and some of them could be traced back to the time of the Crusaders. They have this incredible scent — there really is the scent of the ages in them somehow — and infinite sweetness. LM: You could be describing her writings, in which there is a similar interest in — and faith in the possibility of — reconnecting the past with the present. MM: Yes, that's the way she lived, with the past so much present both in the house and then in those wonderful roses. I never was there at the peak of rose time. In hindsight I should have just gotten on a plane and gone over for that moment. For many years Lucy annually would give a big garden party. Although I cannot imagine how it worked, guests were given a rose with white wine poured into it, and they sipped the white wine out of the rose. Imagine anything more sensual and beautiful than that! If you went around the garden with her as I did, she would tell you about each rose and its history. It was fascinating. Just a few years before she died, I remember she wrote: "Like an old foot I'm planting dozens more roses this year." It was harder to find the growers who had the old roses, but she believed in continuity. She loved the birds and the squirrels, too. She fed them all. Her dining room had French doors that opened out into the garden, onto a stone terrace, and the birds all came there. She fed the squirrels chocolates; I'm sure it ruined their teeth! In itself it was an amazing experience to watch the birds come to her, like Mrs. Oldknowe, of course, from The Children of Green Knowe, although they didn't quite flock around her head the way they did Mrs. Oldknowe's on occasion. Lucy was very much pleased, I think, in her later years, when the BBC broadcast her books and there were television interviews of her. She hated the upheaval of the crews coming in with their massive electrical equipment, but I suspect she enjoyed it at the same time. LM: How did she feel about the twentieth century — about the "modern" world? MM: Well she lived a very contemporary life in her own semicloistered way. She had granddaughters whom she loved watching grow up through all their antics. Music was the other great thing in her life. She would go to Cambridge for concerts until that finally got to be impractical- she herself didn't drive. During the war she and a friend gave recorded music concerts for soldiers, who would come, a few at a time, from nearby airbases, up in the Great Hall — which was splendid acoustically. Or she'd have live musicians — chamber music — there. But that's hardly being contemporary, is it? I mean, that's ageless, too. But it was very much a part of her life, and a number of these servicemen never forgot it. I suppose she was amused by the modern world. She could take it or leave it, which was a nice way of being. I could never get her to come over here. I so wanted her to. She didn't like to fly because it hurt her ears. She had this wild vision of me living a glamorous life with great dinner parties all the time — which is hardly the way I live! But she would write me these ridiculously funny letters imagining what she thought my life was like, and we had a glorious exchange back and forth. It was thanks to Lucy that I publish Warwick Hutton. I had been spending a weekend with her in Cambridge, and when I returned to London she called me and said, "I don't know why I didn't think of this while you were here, but there's a young friend, Warwick Hutton, who lives in Cambridge, and he's made a picture book, 'Noah's Ark', for his son. I should have asked him to come to tea and he could have shown it to you." I said, "Oh, Lucy, nobody wants another 'Noah's Ark'. They're a dime a dozen." But the next day was Good Friday, so I said, "If he can come tomorrow, I have a free morning." So he drove up and brought his "Noah" dummy in a glassine notebook — just the right size for a book — and I looked at it and I thought, "My God, I'm going to publish this — but I don't dare tell him." You don't just see and buy. So I said I was very much interested in it. Of course I did publish it as Noah and the Great Flood (Atheneum) and a number of distinguished books by Warwick Hutton since then. LM: Has he visited the United States? MM: Twice. His father was the master glass engraver who did the new angel windows in the Canterbury Cathedral, the originals of which had been bombed to bits during the war. And Warwick trained as a glass engraver, too; he helped his father on big commissions and then was himself asked to do some church windows in New Jersey, which is why he came over. He did stunning figures for that project. I was also lucky enough to publish Helen Oxenbury's We're Going on a Bear Hunt (McElderry), which Walker Books originated in England, and which I think is an almost perfect picture book — text and pictures. Helen had done board books for Sebastian Walker, which were exciting and new (I think they started the board book craze) and when she reached the saturation point Sebastian said, "Do whatever you want for a change — as big a book, as many colors as you'd like." And then Michael Rosen's text came along, which was a perfect match. So Helen decided she wanted the long, oblong format and half the illustrations to be black-and-white, which was wise because it's on those pages that the repetition or refrain comes in. The book is a joy to use with children — and Helen Oxenbury is a joy to know. How lucky I have been to have known and worked with so many remarkable people.
From the January/February 1994 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
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