Free The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore Page A

considered signing the ledger something between an act of citizenship and a sacrament, to be undertaken only after reading a pledge, as solemn as an oath: “When I write my name in this book I promise to take good care of the books I use in the Library and at home, and to obey the rules of the Library.” (Philip Roth once said that taking that pledge—at a public library in Newark in the 1940s—“had as much to do with
     civilizing me as any idea I was ever to come upon in the books themselves.”) During both the First and the Second World Wars, soldiers on leave in the city climbed the steps, past Patience and Fortitude, the massive stone lions guarding the entrance, walked into the Children’s Room, and asked to see the black books from years past. 7 They wanted to look up their
     names, to trace the record of a childhood lost, an inky, smudged, and quavering once-upon-a-time.
    “Anne Carroll Moore is an occurrence,”Carl Sandburg wrote admiringly. 8 In the first half of the twentieth century, no one wielded more power in the world of children’s literature than Moore, a librarian in a city of publishers. The authors were more fretful, the editors smarter, the publishers cannier. But for
     gumption, for glove-fisted gumption, Moore smacked them all, right in the snoot. “Admit to no discouragement!” she liked to say. She never lacked for an opinion. “Dull in a new way,” she labeled books she despised. WhenWilliam R. Scott brought her copies of his press’s new books, tricked out with pop-ups and bells and buttons, Moore snapped, “Truck! Mr. Scott. They are truck!” Her verdict, not any editor’s,
     not anybookseller’s, sealed a book’s fate. She kept a rubber stamp at her desk and used it liberally while paging through publishers’ catalogs: “Not recommended for purchase by expert.” 9 The End.
    The end of Moore’s own influence came, years later, when she tried to block the publication of a book byE. B. White about a woman who gives birth to a mouse, a book that disturbed much that Anne Carroll Moore believed about life and death and everything she believed about childhood and adulthood. Watching Moore stand in the way of that book, White’s editor,Ursula Nordstrom, remembered, was like watching a
     terrible accident: you tried not to look, but you couldn’t help yourself. Or, no, Nordstrom thought, it was worse: it was like watching a horse fall down, its spindly legs crumpling beneath its great weight. 10
    E. B. White, born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899, was a generation Moore’s junior. As a boy, he had a pet mouse; he thought he looked a little mousy himself. The common house mouse comes from Europe, and traveled the world during the age of discovery. Mice were bred in captivity as early as the seventeenth century. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, “fancy mice,” bred in Japan, were brought to Britain. By the end of the nineteenth
     century, a trade in fancy mice was thriving in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Mus musculus
was bred to white; children took to keeping mice as pets. Anatomists began using them in laboratories, to uncover thesecrets of generation and, especially, to study heredity, which is whatC. C. Little was studying at Harvard when E. B. White was a boy. 11
    In 1909, when White was nine, he won a prize from
Woman’s Home Companion
, for a poem about a mouse. He wanted to be a writer, and it always bugged him that there were books in his town library he wasn’t allowed to look at. 12 The New York Public Library opened the year he turned twelve, the year he won a silver badge for “A Winter
     Walk,” an essay published in the children’s magazine
St. Nicholas
, which Anne Carroll Moore stocked on the shelves of her Children’s Room. 13 In 1917, White went to Cornell, where he became the editor of his college paper, the
Cornell Daily Sun.
In 1918, Moore wrote her first book review, in the
Bookman.
That review marks the birth of serious