By 1941, Margaret’s creative focus was far from children’s books, although stories and poems for that younger audience continued to pour out onto paper when she sat down to write. She was working on an essay about the life and death of Virginia Woolf and on a play about two lovers torn apart by the war, entitled I Dare Not Die. Now that she was no longer on staff at Scott, she didn’t have to worry about offending Bill Scott, so she wrote to Gertrude Stein. She explained that when she had heard Stein’s speech in Brooklyn years before, she realized Stein’s writing was perfect for a children’s book. Margaret said that she had many stories about how well children responded to the book, which she would share with Stein when she came back to America in the spring. Corresponding with her literary idol as a colleague was a personal triumph, and Gertrude’s kind but short response was carefully added to Margaret’s scrapbook. Their correspondence ended there.
Margaret had become good friends with Bruce Bliven and his roommate, E.J. (Ely) Kahn Jr., who wrote for The New Yorker. Margaret convinced them to join her and Dot on a beagling excursion, and the jaunt was detailed by Kahn in the magazine. Both Margaret and Dot came away with scratched knees, but Dot declared the wounds added only a healthy glow to her appearance. On that day, the hares were uncooperative, and more than once the hounds bounded off in the opposite direction of their prey. Margaret assured the men this was not the way the hunt usually transpired, but the day’s events and Ely’s humor made for delightful company. The fourteen-mile run over hills and through trees and brambles wore the two men out. On the ride home, Margaret told Bruce he had never looked better; Bruce said he had never felt worse.
While Margaret admitted to still being in love with Bill Gaston, their relationship was not exclusive. She dated another writer at The New Yorker for a brief time and rarely had trouble finding male companionship in the city for dinners or plays. One dinner date turned into a long weekend when her date insisted that Margaret and Monty Hare see the ski slope he recently designed. They drove late into the night to reach Greylock Mountain in Massachusetts.
The next day, Margaret trudged up the slope behind the two men. She wasn’t out of shape, but Monty was long-legged, and her date was an Olympic skier. She simply couldn’t keep up. They were headed to the top of Thunderbolt Run, considered one of the best wooded ski slopes ever designed. Skiing was just becoming popular in America, and unlike the slopes in Canada and Switzerland, conditions in the United States were primitive. There was no welcoming lodge with a roaring fire at the bottom of this slope, just a little shack that sold admission tickets. A tiny woodstove offered the only bit of warmth.
Margaret hoped to impress Monty with her skiing. He was a member of the Birdbrain Club, known for his impeccable grammar and biting sarcasm. He was one of the funniest people she knew; he was exceedingly charming and reliably cheerful. The same couldn’t be said about her date that evening. By the time they arrived at the ski slope, she had already grown tired of him. He was quite handsome but had little to talk about except all the work he had done on this mountain and the races he had won or was going to win.
Marching up this mountain was too much work. They were going to need a chairlift there if this resort was going to attract anyone but daring young men. Most skiers, like Margaret, preferred a comfortable ride up the hill, bundled in furs and blankets of possum, raccoon, and fox layered on by lift attendants. When she vacationed at other resorts, she loved watching the piles of discarded furs riding past her down the hill on the lift as she rode up. Another set of attendants would remove the pelts and hang them along the fence to be retrieved after the run so skiers were never exposed to the extreme cold for very long.
Halfway up, Margaret had had enough, and besides, she wanted to write down a story that had come to her before she forgot it. She decided to turn back and told the men she would wait for them in the little lodge down the hill.
Margaret had heard a haunting French ballad with a word pattern that she knew would make a good children’s story. In the song, a woman attempts to leave her lover by changing into different animals. With each metamorphosis she dreams up, he threatens to transform into something that will keep her close to him. The lyrics were adult and dark, but that “if you, then I” dynamic was something she was certain she could use. She knew that children loved a catchy word pattern simply because they loved language. She once read a story in French to a group of three-year-olds who didn’t understand the story but enjoyed it nonetheless simply because of the rhythm of the words.
This idea had been forming in the back of her mind for a while. Four months earlier, she had offered the word pattern to Lucy Mitchell to use in the textbook series but warned her that if it wasn’t put to good use, she was going to turn it into one of her own picture books. Lucy was busy with textbooks for older children, so Margaret decided to make a go of it. She knew from her psychology classes at Hollins that at around the age of two, children began seeing themselves as separate human beings, rather than as part of their parents. That push and pull of wanting to be independent but the fear of leaving the nest is a fraught but necessary stage of development for children. Margaret was convinced it could become the perfect substitute for the obsessive love song in the ballad.