Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.1999.0004

1080-6563

George Bodmer,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Reviewed by: Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom George R. Bodmer (bio) Leonard S. Marcus, ed. Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. We are still able to bask in the great explosion of talent in illustration and book publishing that followed World War II in American children’s literature. We are now in the second or third generation from it, but today’s artists and pictures and stories exist in the freedom and opportunity opened by those books of a second Golden Age of children’s literature, written in English. In this volume of letters, we hear the voice not only of an eloquent witness of those days but also a prime mover. Ursula Nordstrom (1910–1988) was the director of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls for thirty-three years, beginning in 1940, and worked with Laura Ingalls Wilder, Garth Williams, Maurice Sendak, Marc Simont, Meindert DeJong, Else Holmelund Minarik, Ruth Krauss, E. B. White, Kay Thompson, John Steptoe, Crockett Johnson, and Edward Gorey, among others. In her letters printed here, a one-sided dialogue, alas, but one aided by Marcus’s helpful and knowledgeable footnotes, we see Nordstrom urging, cajoling, nursing, apologizing, buttering-up, prompting, and even scolding the fragile artistic temperaments of those who wrote and illustrated the children’s books of Harper’s great lists for the baby boomers. Dear Genius is, first of all, a book about a voice, Nordstrom’s witty, domineering, and dramatic letters that jump off the page with vitality and style. Secondly, it is a history of publishing and the time, and finally it is a text for the mechanics of book publishing. One would think that it is as [End Page 145] a piece of children’s literature history that we would chiefly be interested in this volume, but its real joy is Nordstrom’s personality, as she is able to type her passion onto the page to her correspondents. She wrote to Zena Sutherland in 1969: Such fun to talk to you the other evening. Among the many oh Lord how many! temptations I face and resist (usually) every single day of my life are: Sara Lee Brownies, imported beer, subscriptions to new magazines, riding instead of walking, martinis, and now direct long-distance dialing. (268) To Ruth Krauss in 1951, she begins, “Dear Ruthless: Damn it, why don’t you EVER stay home in the afternoon so a frantic rushed ch. bk. ed. can telephone you instead of having to write a letter!” (36). Though the reader is aware that these letters are Marcus’s selection, what develops is a novel of sorts of Nordstrom’s conversations with intimates as well as clients. She is concerned with their health, their writer’s blocks, as she is with politics (a staunch Adlai Stevenson supporter, for example), and the attempts at censorship from those who defined a children’s book too narrowly. Included here are several letters she has written to people who have bought or read her books and have questioned the wisdom of publishing them. It is customary when reviewing a volume of letters such as this to bemoan the end of letter-writing, in an age of telephone calls and poorly edited e-mail. Few have had Nordstrom’s ability to speak so vitally on the page, and one is often reminded of the difficulty of working on manual typewriters without benefit of computers. For example, she is constantly cajoling Meindert DeJong to make extra copies of his manuscripts and revisions, at one time unable to read a copy because it was so needed by others of her Harper staff in 1953: “HURRY WITH THAT CARBON. HOW COULD YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN A SECOND COPY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS!” (65). The word Xerox doesn’t appear in the book until page 260 (August 1968). It is to Leonard Marcus’s credit that he includes a number of letters that show the ways books are edited and published. There are numerous examples where Nordstrom negotiates for a change in plot or wording, underplaying the effect and (almost) always acceding to the artist’s own judgment. Clearly, she preferred to do...