The Moment
Lakeheart Art Deco Guesthouse, June 2026. Late evening.
Perceiving and embracing the velveteen doesn't happen all at once. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. I am so old that most of the hairs on my head have been pulled out while crafting half-baked propositions.
I’m someone who was moved — as so many are — by the wisdom in the Velveteen Rabbit parable. Someone who naturally wants to watch him emerge from Margery Williams’ life. Well, that isn’t possible. We only know a few things. Beyond that, her life is not available to us, except through the spirit still living in her book.
We know that Margery’s father, a classical scholar and barrister, was a deeply loving influence who nurtured her imagination. However, he died when she was just seven years old, and this may be related to the melancholy found in many of her children’s books. In her 1925 essay, “Our Youngest Critics,” Bianco wrote: “It is the sadness which is inseparable from life, which has to do with growth and change and impermanence, and with the very essence of beauty.”
We know that the characters in the Boy’s nursery weren’t entirely fictional; they were the friends of her own past: “my almost forgotten Tubby who was the rabbit, and old Dobbin the Skin Horse (who belonged to my brother), and the toys my children had loved.”
We know that the Rabbit’s climax involves scarlet fever, and the doctor’s order to burn the Boy’s contaminated toys in a bonfire was a contemporary reality for her readers. Then too, Margery spent World War I years living in Turin, exposed to the tragedy of children whose entire lives and homes had been abruptly destroyed by the war.
From these one can draw inferences — never proofs.
Oh, would you look at that. Doesn’t that sound familiar? After being so moved by Leaves of Grass, I found Frederick B. Vaughan’s sublime letters revealed for the first time in Charley Shively’s potty-mouthed book, Calamus Lovers. It’s true that I’ve since turned up a few new biographical details, posted in my essays “Remember Fred Vaughan” and “Fred After Walt: the Rough Ashlar.” But mostly, the real Fred can only be found as the mysterious lover in Leaves of Grass.
Your wish to meet Margery is the same as my wish to meet Fred; same as the Boy’s wish: the longing for the beloved thing to be fully real, fully present. I know it well; I’ve known it for years. So let me be the one to tell you — having gone down this road before you — that there is a kind of return that isn’t the return you’re asking for.
The Real
I’ve been looking for Fred; you’ve been looking for Margery. Countless have been looking for Walt. So we must trust his advice: If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
Where are these footprints, then? Well, the latest refinements to the Bianco legend were recently reported among Andrea Long Chu’s Pulitzer Prize-winning essays for New York Magazine. Hers is a deeply researched, corrective report, but it won’t answer all your questions. Then, too, Margery's contemporaries wrote a tribute — A Book for Margery Bianco for Horn Book in 1951 — to keep her memory alive. But how alive is a memory if you have to request it from a few special collections?
Boot-soles, boot-soles. Words that itch in your ears till you understand them. The author has long since vanished from sight, only visible now to the spiritual eye. Our instinct was to reach for biography — the thing that we were taught was truly salient: the facts, the records, the archives. But that’s a lesser salience. And the great Salience turns out to be the thing that survives when the lesser salience is stripped away. Not Margery's fragmentary biography, but her wisdom. Not Walt’s safest letters but the letters kept sequestered until after Fred’s death. Not the archive but the wear pattern. The Skin Horse is literally a doctrine of Salience: what's Real is not what's shiny, new, mechanical, or well-documented — it’s what love has worn down to essence.
I find it spiritually challenging to grasp in the first place, and even more challenging to live up to. It’s yet another instance of that classic, recurrent spiritual demand: to give up something for something greater. And I don’t want to trivialize the pain of that.
It was never about the biography. It was the love that survives embodied in Logos. The seeker’s disappointment is not a failure of the search. It’s the search working — false salience falling away so the Real one can be seen.
The Testimony
All of the above brings us to breathtaking moment for so many of us in which the velveteen seeker asks his rōshi the meaning of The Real.
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it. “What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?” “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” “I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled. “The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”