‘Moon’ struck: The enduring joy of an enigmatic children’s classic

Episode transcript

Samantha Laine Perfas: 

In the great green room

There was a telephone

And a red balloon

And a picture of –

The cow jumping over the moon

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Laine Perfas: Welcome to Rethinking the News. I’m your host, Samantha Laine Perfas.

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Laine Perfas: So begins the classic children’s book “Goodnight Moon,” written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. The book is celebrating its 75th anniversary on Sept. 3. Set in the “great green room,” the narrator highlights a variety of items around the room – such as kittens and mittens and a bowl full of mush – and then proceeds to wish these items “goodnight” as the night progresses. 

Today I’m joined by Harry Bruinius to talk about the book’s legacy as an important piece of children’s literature. Here’s our conversation. 

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Laine Perfas: Harry, thanks so much for joining today. Do you mind just introducing yourself and sharing a little bit about what you do at the Monitor?

Harry Bruinius: I’m the staff writer in New York City. The biggest part of my job is covering religion and politics. But I do a lot of other things as well. I’ve covered sports. I’ve covered other kinds of cultural issues. Yeah. That’s my job here at the Monitor.

Laine Perfas: So for this story, you wrote about the 75th anniversary of “Goodnight Moon.” You never really read “Goodnight Moon” until you were assigned the story. What was your impression?

Bruinius: Well, I had heard of it. It’s one of those major titles that kind of runs through the cultural currents. But the experience of reading it for the first time, I was really surprised. I was surprised about how engaged I was going through the panels, and seeing the different quirks of this story that has made readers love it for so many decades. I was charmed by the nursery rhyme prose that yet is sort of modern and odd and elliptical. I was really impressed by how different it was. 

Laine Perfas: OK. Be honest. Did you think it was at all creepy?

Bruinius: You know, it wasn’t not creepy. And I was thinking about why I felt that way. The little bunny is alone. And then, you know, the quiet old lady comes in, but it’s not mother, it’s not grandmother. It’s a quiet old lady. So there’s sort of a mystery to who she is. The silence of the sky and the stars outside – there’s an immensity, which leads to kind of the traditional feeling of dread or awe.

Laine Perfas: Yeah, it’s so hard to put into words, but there is this oddness to the book. I didn’t read it growing up, but I have a 10-month-old now. And we always hold up two books at bedtime, and he often chooses “Goodnight Moon.” And at first that was baffling, because I was like, “This book is just kind of weird!” But now that I’ve read it so many times, I find myself reading it in this almost trancelike cadence, and it’s grown on me a little bit. In writing this story about the anniversary, what was it that people talked about that they loved about the book? Why has it lasted so long? 

Bruinius: One of the themes that immediately came out with everyone that I talked to was this intergenerational experience. One of the characters in the story talked about being at a birthday party. And there were family members and friends, anywhere from five to over 90. And they all had stories to tell about their experiences with the book. People have memories of reading it as a child. And then it becomes the storytelling that you do as a parent. So it was just interesting how generation by generation, people react to this book enthusiastically. 

Laine Perfas: And even now, when we talk about the book, it’s actually considered quite innovative and even radical. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Bruinius: It was really radical for its time. This approach to storytelling – it was kind of rooted in very simple details around a room. The parents and the child’s experience reading it is searching the pictures for socks and mittens and kittens and a bowlful of mush. And that becomes just a different kind of immediate experience, rather than a moral tale as nursery rhyme. And this was innovative for its time. I think that there was a kind of a conscious effort by Margaret Wise Brown and the illustrator Clement Hurd, to do something modern, and rooted in a sociological and psychological understanding of childhood development. 

Laine Perfas: Speaking of the author, she herself was actually a pretty incredible woman with an interesting story. Can you tell me a little bit about her?

Bruinius: Margaret Wise Brown, when she was younger, she attended the famous Bank Street Education School, who were kind of pioneers in the kinds of approaches to childhood development that I was talking about. And she was also sort of a woman who was ahead of her times. She lived with a woman, Blanche Oelrichs, [who] went by a male writer’s name, Michael Strange. And she would dress like a man. So she kind of had, you might call, a queer sexuality. And she’s also writing these interesting, different avant garde children’s stories, of which she had dozens, I think even hundreds to her name. This was her lasting legacy.

Laine Perfas: So I mentioned before, but this marks the 75th anniversary of this book. Do you think the book will continue to draw an audience?

Bruinius: Well, you might know better than me, since you’re reading it.

Laine Perfas: According to my son.

Bruinius: Yeah. One of the parents that I talked to, you know, said the exact same thing, that this was one of his five year old son’s favorite books. As a bedtime ritual, it seems to have found this sweet spot of both visual and auditory pleasure. It seems it isn’t going away anytime soon.

Laine Perfas: Well, thank you so much, Harry, for telling us a little bit more about everything you learned writing this story.

Bruinius: It was a pleasure. This was so fun. 

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Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. You can find a link to Harry’s story and a transcript for this episode at csmonitor.com/rethinkingthenews. This story was hosted by me, Samantha Laine Perfas, and co-produced with Jingnan Peng and Luke Cregan. Edited by Clay Collins. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Noel Flatt. Copyright by The Christian Science Monitor, 2022.