23: Searching for Margaret Wise Brown
on forgotten altars to lost lovers in secret woods behind mysterious houses
I did what they told you not to do: switch gears on your research the moment you walk through the door.
Prior to attending the graduate program in English at UC Berkeley I had been doing readings of texts from miscellaneous colonial conflict zones, both geographically and historically. I was interested in texts produced by colonized people—contemporary Palestinian poetry, early 19th centry Pequot historiographies, and the iso-lines of colonial conflict in some of Joyce’s early fiction. But I switched. I mean: I was and am still “interested” in those things. Part of me felt like I was expected to occupy this space of scholarship as a brown man. White/ academia can’t not project a host of carceral expectations on brown folk in that space, and I hated it before I knew or had the words to know I hated it.
One night I was reading Margaret Wise Brown’s famed “Goodnight Moon” to my youngest, and it dawned on me how brilliant, pristine and complex it was. I was reading it in the context of what I felt was the best of the modernist poets, and felt it was of that “caliber.” And I thought that that was my reason I switched gears in my research, from something at least ostensibly timely (in the academic register) to a sort of academic death wish.
The “real” reason was that pretty much the moment I began my time at Berkeley, my wife and I split up and she moved, with our children, down to LA. Shortly following, my third child was born. The uncertainty surrounding when and how often I spent time with my children, or was able to get all of them together; the guilt I felt at this redistribution of proximities and the subsequent fear of damaged intimacies; the complex multiple forms of the sense of loss that began to weave itself into my life and my future—all of this, I somehow way-after-the-fact realized, was “why” I chose to spend a ridiculous amount of time dwelling with the texts that shaped my own mythical world as a child and the worlds I occupied with my own children.
The summer after I quit academia, I was up late on my front porch, combing through some of my research. I can’t remember how, but I came across an article on Margaret Wise Brown in a publication of “The Island Institute,” an organization centered around communities along the New England coast, where Brown had lived in a mysterious and little-known house, now owned by the Rockefellers, as she had been engaged to one at the time of her death, the very same one who wrote the article I stumbled upon, which turned out to be an excerpt of a chapter of his memoir in which he talked about his relationship with Margaret, and his time spent at the house on the island.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the article was the author’s hilarious and blatant misrecognition of Margaret’s previous long-term romantic relationship with a woman: he recounts discovering what is very clearly an altar to the woman, who had since passed away, in the woods behind Margaret’s house, remarking how it was oddly too small to live in, and the central location of a picture of the woman before a specially made window that looked out over her favorite view, framed by candles. It reminded me of the archeologists who found “female” skeletons intertwined in a last moment of ecstasy in Pompeii and commented on their “friendship.”
What I was able to do with that article was something ol’ Jimmy Rockefeller didn’t necessarily want anyone to do: the house was (and is) pretty secluded, reachable mainly by boat or unmarked forest roads, without an address or fanfare. But: he dropped just enough information about the lay of the island— the location of certain bays, smaller islands, a quarry, coastal directions, etc.— that I was able to hop on google earth and find it. It wasn’t easy, and this was a few years ago so I’ll have to re-navigate a few things, including the dead link of that original article, but I found it. I “know” where it is.
The Only house, she called it. It was rumoured to have a door that opened to nowhere, and a wall of mirrors to multiply the islands and bays, sunsets and storms that she wrote about in texts like “The Little Island.”
That summer I rallied this and related researches to apply for a grant so that I could make a pilgrimage of sorts to the Only House (stopping at a number of archives along the way)— there is so much more to this story that I am so excited to share and write about— but as I sat on that porch, chain smoking and enraptured in what still feels like the most random of rearcher’s ecstasies, I realized, minutes before the midnight cut-off of the deadline, that said deadline was probably an east coast midnight, and that I was already three hours late. A little microcosm of how I’d felt the entire time I was at UC Berkeley.
I sighed and closed my computer at 11:59, and have only just now returned to those application documents, two summers later. I wasn’t sad then, just a little disappointed. Instead of saying “I was sad” I want to say “I was used to it,” but it’s hard to say “I was used to it” without that meaning, seeming, or actually being at least a little sad. Maybe it was sad, but I wasn’t sad. It still feels like my secret little archive of exciting and interesting things, like an old house in the woods that no one will ever really visit. But the feeling of the desire of still wanting to go visit is a wonderful feeling: a robustness, a presence, an abundance. Other than the little altar to Margaret’s lover in the woods that more than likely isn’t there anymore, I am unaware of a sense of loss in this weird terrain.