22 Mar 2018

Split Personality

by | posted in: Laura and Rose Wilder | 0

Rose Wilder Lane–journalist, short story writer, novelist, essayist–for all her output is a long-forgotten author. Only the Little House books, which she edited and ghostwrote, have stood the test of time–just not with her name attached. Ironically, her most ephemeral writing–letters and diary entries–may be the most worthy of preservation. At least those of her young adulthood and early middle-age. Something happened in her mid-forties that narrowed her vision, diminished the number of her correspondents and the diversity of her interests. Her journal lay fallow for long stretches after 1930. Political screed replaced philosophical musing as her primary literary mode. The doubt and vulnerability and curiosity that had made her ephemeral writings most compelling were replaced by conviction, combativeness, and intolerance. What prompted the radical change?

Reading journal entries selected by her biographer, one is struck by the self-awareness they reveal. In her early thirties, from Paris, she described her own “harum-scarum mind” in a letter to a male friend and incipient lover. As she explained, “I do not want things in an orderly manner, but helter-skelter, all at once & when that chaos is added to the chaos of living the result is messiness and frustration.” Honesty in her letters was matched by persistent self-criticism in her journal. At forty, in the middle of a third Albanian adventure, she admitted, “I don’t know anything about any part of life, because I’ve never lived any of it; I’ve only muddled about in dreams.” Even a frivolous 1920s magazine questionnaire became, in Rose’s hands, an occasion for rigorous self-evaluation. To the question, What are your strongest points?, Rose dutifully recorded for posterity: restlessness, tenacity, imagination, impulsiveness, generosity with money, desire to acquire, nervous irritability, morbid sympathy, vanity, recklessness, intelligence. It is easy to forget in the reading that she (apparently) saw all of these as strengths!

Her letters and journal entries were not all doubt and self-criticism. She could be expansive in them, as well. To her now-lover, she wrote, “If one neither seeks nor expects happiness anywhere else, it is there. Just to be alive, if nothing else matters to you, is to be happy.” A year later in Albania, she was no less buoyant: “It’s enough for me, just to be alive, just not to be dead yet. Just to see, and hear, and think about, this fascinating, interesting variable world.”

A certain restlessness in her personal writing mirrored the restlessness of her living. Like her grandparents–Charles and Caroline Ingalls–she seemed impelled across frontiers in search of a better elsewhere. Kansas City, San Francisco, Paris, Tirana, Baghdad, Tblisi: in the end, Albania came closest to fulfilling her dreams. Three times she visited the Balkan nation, the last time living and writing in a rented house for fifteen months. On the horizon, snow-capped mountains ringed her world. Across rooftops, the muezzin’s cry called the faithful to prayer five times each day. Below her window, beasts of burden plodded through winding streets, their bells clanking. Life in Albania had an air of timelessness for Rose. It could not last. Signs of modernity were sprouting up around her. She had been chasing “dream lands,” she realized, and documented the epiphany in her journal: “We continue to cling to the belief that when we see them they will be beautiful, but an implacable circle of reality moves with us wherever we go.”

For all her travels, Rose lived mostly within lines on a page, within pages in a book. Her life was dominated by thought–thought that sprang from the doubt at her core. In one journal entry, she questioned all that we think we know, finding, “Dizziness at the edge. Life is thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog.” In another, she invoked the fear and trembling of the mystics: “There is something very beautiful and terrible in the world–at the core of the world, of life–something neither beautiful nor terrible, but both, inseparably–if only we could get to it–could only know it somehow. But one gets only a glimpse, now and then, indescribable, ungraspable, only a feeling….” Mystery and wonder were her subjects.

Sometimes her doubt bled into debilitating self-doubt. “I have the blues,” she wrote a few years after Albania. “Why is that hell in all of us? A fundamental discord, it is: an agony of mal-adjustment to life, or to our conditions of life? Or is it because we can not accept the mystery, the unknowableness, the mists? We want solidities.” Through the years, she regularly chastised herself for falling short of her own ambitions. She wanted too many things, she said, but none of them passionately enough. It might also have been that her passions were too numerous, too diffuse, for her to pursue any one productively. As a result, self-doubt turned into the blues turned into depression. More than once. In 1932, as the country stumbled through hard times, Rose fell into her own Great Depression: “I am old, I am alone, a failure, forgotten…. All my trouble is still my old trouble of almost twenty years ago. I am not leading my own life because any life must coalesce around a central purpose, and I have none.” [Italics mine.]

Oh, but Rose did have a purpose waiting to emerge. It lay dormant in her soul, planted there by her parents, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. Like all children, everywhere, she had discounted her parents’ stories of the past as hopelessly old-fashioned and irrelevant to modern life. But, now, as she strove for a central purpose and the country struggled for its survival, the relevance of her family’s pioneer stories became unmistakable.

In 1932, Laura Ingalls Wilder, published the first of her now-famous children’s books. Her manuscript, which began as an autobiography, had been trimmed and reimagined into the book we know as Little House in the Big Woods. As editor, Rose had been steeped in her mother’s pioneer material, off and on, for two years. Now she adapted (plagiarized?) segments of it into an adult novel of her own, Let the Hurricane Roar. She set the story in the 1890s, the decade of her youth and another era of deep economic depression. Rose had spent a lifetime forgetting the grinding poverty of her early years, but now she allowed herself to remember. And the memory gave her authority in the current crisis. Rose had her heroine declaim, as if in counsel to Depression-era Americans, “We are having hard times now, but we should not dwell upon them but think of the future. It has never been easy to build up a country, but how much easier it is for us…than it was for our forefathers.” This was the consolation of an ice bath: Life is hard, but it could always be worse.

To her critics, Rose explained, “living is never easy,…all human history is a record of achievement in disaster.” Therefore, “disaster is no cause for despair.” She had taken the comforting maxim of her mother’s generation–“Sweet are the uses of adversity”–and given it a hard edge: “The only freedom is to be found within the slavery of self-discipline.” Even the young readers of her mother’s books were exposed to Rose’s crystallizing thought. “This is what it means to be free,” Laura muses in Little Town on the Prairie. “It means you have to be good.” Later, Ma instructs, “This earthly life is a battle. If it isn’t one thing to contend with it’s another. It always has been so and it always will be.”  These words could only have come from Rose Wilder Lane.

Gone was Rose’s self-doubt, gone her sense of mystery. She was sure of herself now, sure she understood the arc of history. It bent toward individual freedom, within a rigorous self-discipline. Stubbornly, she railed against any evidence to the contrary. The New Deal, she complained, was killing the American “pioneering spirit,” encouraging dependency. Americans were growing soft, accepting handouts from their government. Sometimes, she let her animus get the better of her. In 1937, she confided to the privacy (thankfully) of her journal that she hoped Roosevelt had been assassinated at his inauguration. Now, at the start of the president’s second term, Rose admitted she would “make a try at killing FDR” if she believed the country able to take advantage of it.

The woman of words had become an activist (of a sort). She lived out her ethic of self-reliance as a modern-day hermit, if not a westering pioneer. On a plot of land in southwestern Connecticut, sixty miles north of Manhattan, she raised her own fruits and vegetables, canning them by the hundreds for winter. She shared a milk cow with a neighbor, raised chickens and pigs. She churned her own butter, made her own cheese, cured her own ham. The foodstuffs she could not provide for herself–flour, salt and a minimum of sugar–she bartered for. She quit a longtime smoking habit rather than pay for cigarettes. This was Little House in Small Town Connecticut, Rose proving she could be as independent and self-reliant as her forebears.

To avoid the much despised income tax, Rose kept her earnings below a taxable threshold. She refused to register in Social Security, which she saw as a government-sponsored Ponzi scheme. War rationing in the forties became just another form of “political control” she could not abide. Rose lived by her principles and called on ordinary citizens, like herself, to resist the government’s overreach. She made the mistake (no doubt a “Freudian” one) of expressing subversive views on a postcard, which was intercepted by an overzealous postmaster and passed on to the FBI. These were wartimes and Rose’s words were potentially seditious. A local policeman–again, unduly officious–was sent to make inquiries. The resulting encounter yielded a sharply-worded riposte from Rose’s typewriter: “What Is This–The Gestapo?”

Rose’s notoriety grew. She was no longer simply a reporter on events. Her words and her actions sometimes made the news. “NOVELIST HAS GIVEN UP WRITING AND INCOME TO FIGHT NEW DEAL,” blared one headline. To some she was a courageous hero, taking on the “counter-revolutionary” New Deal. To others she was a crank.

Her friends were at a loss to account for the change. “Strange, erratic girl,” wrote one. “Floating between sanity and a bedlam of hates,” wrote another. Saddest was the price paid by longtime confidante, journalist Dorothy Thompson. Twenty years earlier, Rose had told Thompson she was the very rarest of friends. Now she allowed political differences to cripple their relationship. Rose chose ideological purity over loyalty. When Thompson published articles with pro-New Deal leanings, Rose attacked: “Once you were a fine person, sensitive, intelligent, witty, poetic, ardent for truth and justice. Now you are coarse and stupid.” With friends like that…, as they say.

Rose Wilder Lane felt increasingly out of step with her times and with her countrymen. History was passing her by, so she took the long view. The cause of freedom advanced in 1776 might take a “millennium or two,” she decided, to reach fruition. Until then, Rose could only keep the faith. To her most loyal supporter and the future author of the Rose of Rocky Ridge books, she wrote:

I wait for the natural to return; for newspapers to report the news with care for accuracy and grammar; for schools to teach and pupils to study; for faces to be sane and intelligent and even humorous; for American artists and writers and poets to be exuberant and optimistic and gay and VERY hardworking to create beauty and express truth; for poetry to be IMPORTANT again, and a new poem–beautiful or witty– to be a sensation from Maine to Baja California, a new painting to be intelligible as a matter of course, and discussed everywhere with intelligence, a new writer to be hailed with joy and hope; and work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, a good day’s work for a good dollar and devil take the hindmost., Hurrah!

Such nostalgia for a time that never existed! Such longing for a world outside the “implacable circle of reality”!

What happened to Rose in mid-life? What caused the shift, circa 1932, that made her harden so? A mid-life crisis? The election of FDR? One gropes for a more satisfying explanation. Tirelessly inquisitive, Rose might simply have tired of the quest. Fearlessly self-examining, she might, finally, have feared what she found lurking inside. Exquisitely sensitive to the “indescribable” and “ungraspable,” she might, in the end, have exchanged the fascination of mystery for the comfort of “solidities.” It might be that she–consciously or not–quashed her own “harum-scarum” mind, forced a unity on her too-varied passions. Perhaps. Even so, we are left with the question: Was the trade-off worth it?

In the end, the compulsive diarist lost her compulsion. In March 1959, at the age of seventy-two, Rose wrote these few words in her journal, marking the end of a writing life: “I am incapable of continuing the conversations with myself that fill this book so far. Don’t know why. Just don’t do them any more.”

Source:  Holtz, William. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

18 Mar 2018

Wise Choices

by | posted in: Laura and Rose Wilder | 0

It goes without saying that Laura Ingalls Wilder grew into a wise and loving mother.   Readers of the Little House series would expect nothing less from their heroine, the daughter of Charles and Caroline Ingalls. In fact, Laura and husband Almanzo raised but a single child, Rose, who grew up and honored them with these words in 1918:

“My mother loves courage and beauty and books; my father loves nature, birds and trees and curious stones, and both of them love the land, the stubborn, grudging, beautiful earth that wears out human lives year by year. They gave me something of all these loves, and whenever I do something that I really can’t help sitting down and admiring, I always come plump up against the fact that I never would have done it if I hadn’t been wise enough to pick out these particular parents.”

Higher praise would be hard to find. Especially coming from Rose. More often, she griped about her mother whom she thought manipulative, stingy with her affection, and not above playing the martyr.

From the perspective of middle age, Rose reflected on her mother, Mama Bess, as she always called her: “Something in her knows exactly how to put the screws on me. She made me so miserable when I was a child that I’ve never got over it.” Rose did her best to escape her mother’s clutches at an early age. Even before she turned eighteen, she was out of the house, a “bachelor girl,” supporting herself as a telegrapher. Still, every few years, homesickness drew her back to the family homestead in the Ozarks. The warm feeling of home never lasted long. Within a week, Rose would feel stifled and long to break free.

During one visit, in the mid-1920s, Rose complained to her journal: “She still thinks of me as a child. She even hesitates to let me have the responsibility of bringing up the butter from the spring, for fear I won’t quite do it right!” Her friend, Helen Boylston, made a similar observation, after spending two years living with the Wilders at Rocky Ridge: “Rose was very much her mama’s slave.”

The “slavery” was at least partly self-imposed. In 1919, as a freelance author and ghostwriter, Rose committed herself to supporting her parents in their retirement. Every year, regardless of financial ups and downs, she kept her promise of sending her parents five hundred dollars.  As her stock portfolio took off in the booming twenties, Rose doubled her contribution to one thousand dollars. Economic depression in the thirties forced her to cut back again.

Why the compulsion to support her mother?  She had never asked for the help.  Accepting the money may well have made her uncomfortable.  Rose’s unpredictable finances could only have given Laura worry.  Indeed, even as Rose sent her an annual stipend, she would often ask her mother for a loan.  “It was a tangle indeed,” wrote Laura’s biographer, Caroline Fraser.

In 1939, the seventy-two-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder had attained her dream of telling her family’s story to millions. She had become a nationally recognized author of five children’s books and the recipient of the distinguished Newbery Honor.  (Four more Honors would follow.)  She was earning about two thousand dollars a year in royalties.  She had earned the right to feel satisfied, yet one shortcoming still nagged: her role as mother.  “Somehow the bond with her daughter had proved the most difficult trial of all, despite Wilder’s storied closeness with her own parents.” (Fraser)

She sat down at her desk and wrote the words she thought might heal the wounds from three decades of what might be called “collaborative struggle.”  The words come as an eerie echo of Rose’s own from two decades earlier:

I thought again who we had to thank for all our good luck. But for you we would not have the rent money. You are responsible for my having dividend checks. Without your help I would not have the royalties from my books in the bank to draw on. It is always that way. When I go to count up our comfortableness and the luck of the world we have, it all leads back to you. And so, snuggled under my down quilt, I went to sleep thinking what a wise woman I am to have a daughter like you. …Oh Rose my dear, we do thank you so much for being so good to us.

 

Sources:

Fraser, Caroline.  Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2017.

Holtz, William. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

 

25 Feb 2018

Final Act

by | posted in: Good Reads: Nonfiction | 0

“I have been a fiction writer by choice and instinct for a long professional life. It has been a leap for me to tell the truth.” So begins the preface to Escape!, Sid Fleischman’s biography of Harry Houdini. Fleischman was delighted to find nonfiction “easier to write” than fiction, the plot and characters being “already served up.” At the same time, he was unnerved to discover a “harrowing downside”: “I was boxed in by the recorded past. I was unable to pluck Houdini’s conversations out of thin air. If he didn’t say something, neither could I….” Happily, the shackles of documented fact proved no more binding to Fleischman than handcuffs and ropes did to his subject. He “escaped” the trap of perfunctory prose and produced a biography that both informs and delights.

Fans of Fleischman’s work will understand his trepidation in approaching nonfiction. Many of his stories have historical settings that, despite well-researched details, don’t quite ring true. They are composites, unmoored from strict chronology. They feel mythical, fantastical–even when, as in The Whipping Boy, there is no actual magic.

Ah, magic. We learn in that two-page preface that Fleischman “did not trip over the Houdini story by accident.” During his “callow youth,” he trained to become a professional magician. He even made the acquaintance of Madame Houdini, the escape artist’s widow. At various times throughout the book, casually and without warning, Fleischman inserts himself into the text, using the personal pronoun, sometimes to provide his perspective as a magician, more often to propound his judgment as a biographer.

This device was disorienting in the first encounter. To explain the allure of sleight-of-hand magic in the young Houdini’s hands, Fleischman inserts, parenthetically, “As part of my magic persona in school, I used to read palms, which is pure bunk, but it gave me a chance to hold a girl’s hand.” Oh, really? Late in the book, in his discussion of Houdini’s attack on Spiritualism, Fleischman writes, “I have just consulted a magician’s supply catalogue…” Other biographers would have made the same point while staying in the third person. But Fleischman’s style works. It grows on you. It grew on me.

More often, Fleischman inserts himself in the text when making judgments. As he does, he makes clear that he is giving his personal opinion. He makes clear the evidence and reasoning his judgment is based on, yet acknowledges that its claim to truth is only provisional. He invites the reader to make his own decision whether or not to agree. On Houdini’s first alleged jailbreak, Fleischman says, “I would love to believe it. But is the myth a bit too neat?” and goes on to explain. On why the escape artist wrote a vitriolic book attacking the dead magician who was his spiritual mentor and from whom he took his name, Fleishman is even more direct: “I think this. Each field has its great icon. Einstein in science. Picasso in art. Edison in invention. There wasn’t room for two icons in magic. Robert-Houdin had to go.” Concluding the book, Fleischman shares his personal view on the entire project: “As a biographer, I found Houdini to be both a pleasure and a trial. To enter the world of the handcuff king was to find yourself in a house of mirrors. Conflicting information, rubber facts, and howling nonsense everywhere you look.”

“If [Houdini] didn’t say something, neither could I….” But Fleischman says plenty in colorful, muscular language. He is (appropriately) more restrained than in his fiction, yet his sentences still have the power to startle and enlighten. To wit:

  • On the allure of the magical enterprise for the outsider: “Ehrich was a perfect fit. He was an immigrant, he was poor, his religion was unpopular, and he was short.”
  • On the everydayness of prejudice in the early twentieth century: “The national pastime of gnashing one’s teeth at the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, and the Catholics was a social impulse even more tolerate than chewing plug tobacco.”
  • On an early escape trick: “Houdini stood with his wrists behind him in a spider web of ropes. A bag was pulled over his head like a sausage casing and the top tied off.”
  • On Houdini’s early, unrefined, stage persona: “He was a dees, dem, and dose magician.”
  • On his touchiness: “With his onion-thin skin, Houdini was profoundly wounded.”
  • On his arrogance: “Great and gifted men are, after all, human. They commonly harbor flaws and weaknesses of character. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, despised children. The German opera composer Richard Wagner was a sputtering anti-Semite. Napoleon had a habit of invading other countries. French poet Francois Villon was a thief. Houdini was cocky.”
  • And: “Houdini’s cocky pride and unblushing airs, laid end to end, would circle the earth, with vanities left over.”
  • On the Houdinis’ return to New York after their European tour: “Martin Beck had promised brass bands to greet them as they stepped ashore from their triumphs across the pond. Not a piccolo was to be heard.”
  • On Houdini’s aircraft during the period of his flying obsession: “The plane looked like a flying house with an outhouse tail following close behind.”
  • On his mean-spirited polemic against Robert-Houdin: “The book is dazzling with riches while at the same time it is petty, sanctimonious, insolent, sneering, and tormented. It is also astonishingly hypocritical.”
  • On the mystery of his disappearing elephant trick: “One thing is certain. The elephant didn’t go up Houdini’s sleeve.”

Fleischman died in 2010 at age 90, just four years after the publication of Escape! That still gave him enough time to produce two more biographies, The Trouble Begins at 8: A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West and Sir Charlie: Chaplin, the Funniest Man in the World. The “callow” young man who had started out as a professional magician in the late 1930s produced a four-act writing career (with occasional interludes writing magic books) that extended over seven decades.

Act I: Cub reporter.

Act II: Adult novelist.

Act III: Award-winning children’s fiction author.

Act IV: Young adult biographer.

Surely Act III was the climax of his career, but Act IV made for a meaningful, satisfying denouement. We, his readers, are the richer for it.

21 Feb 2018

“Will Rogers Says”: Divide the Country in Two

by | posted in: Will Rogers | 0

Divided. Polarized. Broken. Is the state of our politics at an all-time low? Is our grand experiment in republican government breaking apart? Our fears may overblown, yet they are hard to dismiss out of hand.

The nation faced its greatest challenge (other than the Civil War) during the economic depression of the 1930s. The crisis shook the nation to its core. Serious doubters looked for alternatives to capitalism. Millions of everyday Americans turned to…a cowboy philosopher named Will Rogers. His wit and wisdom, delivered in syndicated daily newspaper articles and weekly radio broadcasts, leavened the national dialogue and held out the possibility of hope. Rogers didn’t offer solutions so much as equal-opportunity wisecracks directed at leaders of both parties–and far-fetched schemes designed to produce laughs more than results. Such was his tongue-in-cheek suggestion, in a June 1935 radio broadcast, to divide the country in two.

It was six and a half years into the Depression. The Supreme Court had just nullified President Roosevelt’s far-reaching National Industrial Recovery Act. Millions of Americans expected Rogers to weigh in on the issue, to help them know what to think. The radio host dutifully obliged.

In his usual fashion, Rogers snuck up on the issue from the flank. The country had gotten too big, he mused. Perhaps it ought to be split up. “Let the Republicans have the East, you know–with Wall Street…. And then the Democrats take the West.” Roosevelt could follow them, he added for laughs, just as long as he didn’t bring any professors with him. Those who couldn’t decide, he suggested, could go to Huey-siana to be led by the populist former Louisiana governor, Huey Long. (Today we would give the Democrats both coasts and leave the broad middle to the Republicans, saving, perhaps, the Upper Midwest states for the undecided.)

With “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-fed,” as Roosevelt would later intone, Rogers maintained both parties wanted the same thing for the country: economic prosperity. They just disagreed on how to get there. The Cowboy Philosopher was either being disingenuous or unduly sanguine. ‘Prosperity’ is not so easily defined or agreed upon. People have their own ideas about how the world is and ought to be. A crisis only solidifies these ideas. And ideas have power.

Rogers, if pressed, might have conceded he was pushing his own big idea, if it can be called that: common sense. For more than fifteen years he had used comedy to expose political absurdities in an effort to promote clear thinking. Sometimes he dropped all pretense of humor, as he did in an earlier, 1931 broadcast: “The only problem that confronts this country today,” he said, “is at least 7,000,000 people are out of work. That’s our only problem.” Don’t get distracted by side issues, he seemed to admonish. Keep your eyes on the prize. A growing economy would satisfy everyone, regardless of how it was achieved. Four years later, in his split-the-country broadcast, he began with hyperbole, then fell back to realism: “It’s not a–it’s not a political thing. …Both sides, I think, are equally patriotic. Neither has a corner on patriotism, and neither has a corner on brains. It’s just–what should we do to recover?”

Rogers posed the question; he did not propose an answer. Even his idea to divide the country, he admitted, was doomed to failure. The parties would never accept it, for then “they wouldn’t have nobody to lay anything onto”: nobody to blame. Human nature, he seemed to say, abhors agreement; it thrives on contention. Will Rogers understood this truth better than anyone; he had built a career on finding the humor in it.

Rogers’s message for us today is not a simplistic “can’t-we-all-get-along?” bipartisanship. It implies that we can move ahead as a polity only if we, first, acknowledge our different visions of the world, and, second, respect those views as equally honest and firmly-held as our own. When considering the question “what should we do?” (about taxes, about health care, about infrastructure), we need to start from the understanding that disagreement will dominate the proceedings and that compromise will define the result.

A healthy amount of humor won’t hurt, either.