Mister Dog by Margaret Wise Brown

I wonder how Margaret Wise Brown pitched this story to the Little Golden Book people?

“Well, Miss Brown, we liked The Color Kittens and The Seven Little Postmen. What have you got for us this time?”

“I’ve decided to take my next book in a slightly different direction. Picture this. A hairy, Republican nudist – no, it’s okay, stay with me – convinces a little homeless boy to come and sleep with him. It has a wonderful moral.”

Perhaps not. Nevertheless, that’s more or less what happens in Mister Dog, surely one of the most peculiar picture story books in existence. It begins with a depressed-looking mutt pouring milk on his cornflakes, dressing-gown gaping open at the front. Why go to the trouble of wearing a dressing-gown and slippers in the morning when you leave the house in the nude? And is that a bone in your pocket or are you just happy to see us? Oh. Oh, it literally is a bone in your pocket.

He certainly doesn’t look happy to see us. In fact, he looks like the weight of the world is on his shoulders. Either that or he’s had a massive night and needs hair of the dog rather than cereal and strawberries. Check out the front cover at the top of the page. Look at his eyes. Has Mister Dog has seen disturbing things that he cannot unsee? Or is that something stronger than tobacco in his corncob pipe.

The dog’s name is Crispin’s Crispian. We are told that “he was named Crispin’s Crispian because he belonged to himself”. Okay, so he answers to nobody. An admirable sentiment. But then, if his name is Crispin, why is he called Crispin’s Crispian? Why not Crispin’s Crispin? Where did the “a” come from? And if his name is Crispian, why is he not Crispian’s Crispian? He probably dreamed it up after a session on that pipe.

But the best part is when we are told that Mister Dog is "a conservative". That is a direct quote. And note the italics. It is a word that Margaret Wise Brown wishes to define. “He liked everything at the right time – dinner at dinner time, lunch at lunchtime, breakfast in time for breakfast, and sunrise at sunrise, and sunset at sunset. And at bedtime he liked everything in its own place – the cup in the saucer, the chair under the table, the stars in the heavens, the moon in the sky, and himself in his own little bed.”

Yeah, you gotta watch those damn liberals, they’ll move sunset to the morning just to keep the unions happy. It’ll be a two-hour working day. Only Eisenhower will keep the stars in the heavens and the moon in the sky. A vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for chaos.

Still, it’s a rather quaint 1952 view of conservatism. What might the 2016 version say?

“Crispin’s Crispian was a conservative. And not a pathetic thumb-sucking moderate. A proper Tea Party-loving, Trump-voting, gun-toting far right conservative. He liked everything at the right time, which was whenever he damn well wanted. He liked everything in its own place – the cup in the saucer, the chair under the table, and the Mexicans in Mexico, south of the wall.”

Margaret Wise Brown died the same year this was published, and I can’t decide if she was an eccentric genius or a nut-job. She is best known for Goodnight Moon, which was haunting and strange, but Mister Dog is at least a little warmer, thanks to Garth Williams’ fun illustrations. Williams was probably best known for illustrating the classic versions of Charlotte’s Web and the Little House on the Prairie series.

Yet for all the peculiarities (and there are a LOT of them), Mister Dog has a very valid message. Its subtitle is “The Dog Who Belonged to Himself”. He answers to no human family and asks nothing of the state. He is clearly a classic conservative lover of small government.

One day, Mister Dog meets a little boy who is fishing in a stream. “Who and what are you?” Mister Dog asks. The boy replies: “I am a boy, and I belong to myself”. Note that the boy does not introduce himself by name but as “a boy”. Yet another oddity. Mister Dog is glad, and invites the boy to come and live with him. The boy agrees, with an alarming lack of due diligence.

Then they went to a butcher shop – "to get his poor dog a bone," Crispian said. Now, since Crispin’s Crispian belonged to himself, he gave himself the bone and trotted home with it.

Note the direct quote. Why would Mister Dog say he wanted “to get his poor dog a bone”? He should say “to get my poor dog a bone”. Who edited this stuff? Anyway, then the little boy prances off happily with Crispin/Crispian, blissfully unaware that soon he will be tidying a dog’s living room. They make dinner at Mister Dog’s house and each of them, in Brown’s words “chewed it up and swallowed it into his little fat stomach”. Then boy and dog sleep in side-by-side beds.

The moral of this story is clear: your life is your own, and don’t let anyone else rule it. Mister Dog belongs to himself. The boy belongs to himself. They both act on free will. If the boy can be easily convinced to come and do chores then, hey, that’s just Mister Dog’s good fortune.

For all of Margaret Wise Brown’s oddities, I think she knew how to tap into the brain of a child. The word “belong” resonated with me. As a child, I heard it often. I “belonged” to my parents and my friends “belonged” to theirs. “Who does such-and-such belong to?” adults would ask each other. This never sat well with me, for I felt that nobody owned me. This is the child-like mindset Brown exploits (and which Mister Dog then exploits with the little boy).

But Brown also implies that you’ll be happier if you let people into your life. Look how despondent Mister Dog appeared when preparing his breakfast cereal, back before he had met the boy. And look at how happy he was afterwards. You can be yourself and belong to yourself without having to keep to yourself.

Mister Dog is strange, confusing, disturbing, and utterly unique. And I love it. If I was American and Crispin’s Crispian was on the presidential ticket this year, I’d vote conservative. He wouldn’t build a wall to keep the Mexicans out. Although there is a fence around his house and a sign that says “NO CATS”, so I guess you never know.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

Next year, Goodnight Moon turns 70 years old. It has sold more than 14 million copies since it was first published in 1947 and is one of the most beloved bedtime stories of all. And yet, until recently I had never read it. I’m not even sure I had heard of it until I saw it on Heidi’s shelf, a baby-shower gift that I hadn’t noticed before.

So we read it. And I thought: “What the hell was that all about?”

There was something vaguely unsettling in the pages, haunting even. The stark red and green colour scheme, the vast room, the single red balloon hovering in the corner, the “quiet old lady” who is actually a rabbit and who is sometimes there and sometimes not. It was all a bit ... eerie.

In the great green room, a little rabbit lies in bed saying goodnight to everything he can see. And some things he can’t. Goodnight comb. Goodnight chairs. Goodnight mush. Goodnight nobody. Goodnight air. Goodnight air? That’s a kid desperately trying to drag out his bedtime.

All I could think of was Steve Carell as Brick the weatherman in Anchorman. I love ... carpet. I love ... desk. Brick, are you just looking at things in the office and saying that you love them? I love lamp. Do you really love the lamp or are you just saying it because you saw it? I love lamp. I love lamp.

I later read that George W. Bush nominated Goodnight Moon as one of his favourite books. And again I thought of Brick.

Anyway, back to the book. I wasn’t the only one who found it creepy. Zoe felt there was something Twin Peaks-ish about it. “What is the bowl full of mush?" she asked. “Is it porridge? Is it soup? Is it laced with LSD?”

I thought that a single reading nearly 70 years after publication was perhaps not the fairest way to assess Goodnight Moon, so I did some research. The author, Margaret Wise Brown, was interviewed by LIFE magazine the year before Goodnight Moon was published:

The first draft of a Brown book is usually written in wild, enthusiastic haste, in lost unintelligible soft pencil on whatever scraps of paper are available; the backs of grocery bills, shopping lists, old envelopes. “I finish the rough draft in 20 minutes,” Miss Brown says, “and then I spend two years polishing." She is currently polishing 23 books more or less simultaneously.

Brown only wrote, she did not illustrate, so the artwork fell to her friend and collaborator Clement Hurd. And there are some curious aspects to the illustrations, not the least of which is that the characters are rabbits. Apparently this was simply because Hurd was better at drawing bunnies than people.

Brown might have polished her words but you know what they say, you can’t polish a Hurd.

There are peculiar details if you look closely. On the bunny’s bedside table is a book with a green cover. Turn the page upside down and you’ll see it is a copy of Goodnight Moon. It is no surprise to find such a touch of absurdity.

One of the strangest pictorial elements is in the framed illustration over the fireplace in the little bunny’s room. It depicts a cow jumping over the moon, but the cow’s udder is hard to make out. In the words of Brown’s biographer, on the publisher’s instructions the udder “was reduced to an anatomical blur, so as not to disarrange the fragile sensibilities of some librarians”.

I can just imagine the library detective Mr Bookman, perhaps my all-time favourite Seinfeld guest character, enforcing that himself. “This is about that kid’s right to read a book without getting his mind warped. Or maybe that turns you on, Seinfeld, maybe that’s how you get your kicks.”

The mysterious blurred udder didn’t help. When it was first published, the New York Public Library refused to stock even a single copy of Goodnight Moon. It considered the book “unbearably sentimental” and did not acquire its first copy until 26 years later.

Children’s books, the library believed, should be fairytales or folklore, classics rather than the absurd modernity of Goodnight Moon. But Brown was ahead of her time. She had studied at an education college whose founder wanted to create a new style of picture story books, called “Here and Now”. At its core would be the everyday experiences of a regular toddler.

And that’s what kids respond to with Goodnight Moon. The bedroom is a place they know. The objects are familiar, although less so 70 years later. None would now recognise the old style telephone on the bedside table. Then again, why does a toddler need a phone by the bed anyway?

The concept of saying goodnight to random stuff, baffling as I found it on first reading, is actually quite sweet. Heidi is forever waving at anyone and anything, animate or inanimate. Even the blank “goodnight nobody” page seems true to life. Kids do say the darnedest things. The author gets inside the mind of a tiny child and uses soothing rhyme and rhythm to great effect.

To adults, the room seems abnormally vast. But Goodnight Moon wasn't written for adults. To a toddler, any room seems enormous. Their world is so small, their perspective so different from their parents. On a second and third reading, I realised that everything I found strange made much more sense from the little bunny's viewpoint.

As the pages progress and the bunny gets more tired, the illustrations become just a touch hazier. The final line – “goodnight noises everywhere” – acknowledges that bedtime for the little ones is early, while the rest of the house remains active.

Margaret Brown was perhaps more Wise than I first gave her credit for.

Then again, she died aged 42 when, after emergency surgery for appendicitis while on a publicity tour in France, she kicked up her legs, cancan style, to show how fit she felt. That dislodged a blood clot in her leg, which quickly travelled to her brain and killed her instantly.

Not so Wise after all.