The two new books came out together, this time through the McClure Publishing House. They did not want Human Work; I did not suppose they would, but The Home looked promising. We made an arrangement by which I was not to get any royalties from Human Work until after a certain number were sold, and as they, apparently, never sold that many, I got nothing from it. Neither did the other sell as I had really hoped, for the topic was not of universal appeal, and the stuff was funny, if not orthodox. But McClures’ brought out Wagner’s Simple Life that year, it struck a popular note, and they very naturally pushed that for all it was worth, perhaps for more.
It seemed to me that the two could have been profitably advertised together, as opposites, reaching different readers, but then I’m not a good business person. At any rate little came of these books, the plates were sold to Doubleday, Page and Company, and in after years I bought them in — plates of The Home, that is. I didn’t buy the plates of Human Work because I was always hoping to rewrite it, do it better.
Small and Maynard I had given up on account of repeated delays and mistakes, all of which they explained by blaming their book-keeper.
We lived in the first flat four years. Some pieces of furniture which were left in California I sent for. Some we bought, some were wedding presents. One kind offer among these was for a set of books or a sofa. I chose the sofa. Being invited to specify, I described a long, flat, smooth lounge covered with imitation leather. What arrived was a short, curved-up-at-the-end, deeply tufted couch, covered with real leather! To sleep on it a chair had to be added to the foot.
Katharine went to school for a while, a pleasant little one, kept by Miss Murphy and Miss Gaylord, rather near us. I kept on lecturing of course, our kind of housekeeping made it easy. On one long absence my dear Helen Campbell was mother for me. A reliable woman came once a week to clean; it was a peaceful and easy home for all of us.
Having met Mrs. Campbell and installed her with Katharine and Mr. Gilman, I started early in November, 1900, for a six weeks’ trip which is a good sample of my professional life. “Pack for six weeks in two bags,” says the diary. Never did I bother with a trunk on such journeys. I’ve gone to Europe with those two pieces of hand-baggage, and been thankful.
This tour began with some Federation meeting in Racine, and continued variously. I cannot cumber these pages with repeated description of such trips, which have continued all the rest of my life, but this seems an admirable sample.
Starting on Monday, November 5th, on Tuesday, between Detroit and Chicago I wrote an article for Success, 2500 words. Wednesday, lectured in Racine on “Our Brains.” Thursday, mailed first article and began another, 2000 words, mailed Saturday in Chicago. Monday, the twelfth: “re-write ‘Private Home and Public House’ — 2500 words.” Thirteenth: “rewrite ‘Celibacy in Domestic Service,’ 1700 words.” Fourteenth: “Write part of ‘Man as a Factor in Social Evolution.’ (This is a chapter in Human Work.) Fifteenth: “Finish ‘Man as a Factor,’ and begin ‘Persistence of Primitive Types in Domestic Relation.’ “ Seventeenth: “Write in cars ‘A Word for Tommy.’ “ Eighteenth: “A little more on Tommy.” Nineteenth: “Prepare and send off ‘Private Home and Public House’ to Bazaar, and ‘A Word for Tommy’ to Dial.” Twenty-second: “Finish ‘Persistence.’ “ Twenty-third: “Begin ‘As an Investment.’ “ Twenty-fifth: “Begin ‘The Social Service Bureau.’ “ Twenty-sixth: “Work more on ‘Social Service,’ recasting beginning.” Twenty-seventh: “More on S. S. — goes well.”
As to lectures, sermons, and talks, there were four up to December 2nd, the long wait in Chicago filled with writing, boarding the while; and then I rushed about, in Wisconsin and Minnesota, speaking in Monroe, Mankato, Minneapolis, Menominee, and another in Chicago, December 13th, eleven in all. As to returns, “Clear about 130 dollars on this trip. On debts $135.00.” Not much profit, was there! As there was considerable traveling involved, and a lot of “entertainment,” as well as seeing real friends, it was a busy time.
On my way home, encountering a blizzard, with confusion and delay, I sent from Buffalo a careful telegram to my husband as to arrival. I had always prided myself on my telegrams, concise but clear, businesslike and direct. So now I studied the time-table, consulted the conductor, and produced this masterpiece; “On train 13.” (I thought it particularly clever to give the number of the train, so that he could ask at the station, “Is No. 13 on time?”) My wire continued, “Hour late. Arrive about seven, Central Station.”
When that telegram reached him it read, “On train thirteen hours late,” and the rest, but as my “about seven” did not specify A.M. or P.M., it left much to be desired. I have put on no airs about telegrams since that one. “So glad to be home again!” on Saturday 15th, but there was another lecture in Chester, Pennsylvania, on the eighteenth, back same day, and it is not surprising to read on the nineteenth: “Collapse after supper. Very tired.”
We had a jolly Christmas that year. It appeared that Houghton had never had a Christmas tree himself, though “attending” many. I determined to remedy this lack forthwith and fully. On a huge piece of heavy pasteboard I drew a spiral from center to circumference in widening curves, and along it, at intervals, inserted bits of spruce, from a single twig in the center on in graduated numbers to the last, with as many twigs on it as he was years old at the time. Then gifts in number as the years were attached to the “trees,” from a great soft “parlor ball” on the first, up to twinkling multitudes of little things on the more numerous branches. It became increasingly difficult to find them, too, but steel pins, rubber bands, paper-clips and such, with clustering gum-drops and chocolates, filled out nobly. He expressed himself as entirely satisfied with retroactive Christmas trees!
We had a real one for Katharine of course; she had fifty-seven presents. I read her Dickens’s Christmas Carol, the Scrooge one. In later years she used to read it over every Christmas. By the thirty-first we all went to Norwich to see the aunts, for New Year’s.
The year closes! “I am happy and content Houghton — Katharine — Home.” With: “May I grow stronger and do good work in spite of my happiness!” Final cash account: “$5.20 left.”
In 1901 the first mark of note is “Sewing machine comes!” A Wilcox and Gibbs, a beauty, and a constant friend since. I had two to sew for now, and enjoyed it.
Among other efforts at earning I had a “Thinking Class” at my house, but it did not last long, I was not up to the kind of teaching I saw the need of. In April of that year: “Bad news about Mrs. Campbell — her mind is wandering — and so is she.” From then on was a growing grief and care for that dear “mother” who had been so kind to me.
My health showed no real improvement. Between bits of work there were long blank spaces, no entries in the diary, nothing done, the same old helpless gloom. I met at the house of a friend that remarkable woman, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, one of our first to study medicine. Charles Reade refers to her in his Woman Hater, I think — or was it in In Propria?
She was deeply interested in my case, the long continued misery and exhaustion. It must have come upon me pretty severely about this time, for the diary goes blank from April 17th to June 6th, when I lectured in Longwood, Pennsylvania; and again to July 3rd: “Went to Norwich,” and Sunday, 7th, “Returned to New York much rested and improved.” That is all to the first of August when we all three went to Summerbrook in the Adirondacks, to visit Prestonia Mann. That was a pleasure and a gain but after coming home I went down again, and dragged through an uneasy autumn. On the seventh of December Dr. Jacobi wrote, asking if she might try on me a system of treatment she had devised for such brain trouble as mine.
I was more than willing, and prepared for her better understanding of the case a long “fever-chart” sort of thing; with parallel lines showing normal, one super and several sub, down to melancholia; the years marked off with brief notes as to condition; and a wavering red line along the stretch of it, with a few peaks and many deep valleys, the average genera
lly below normal. She found this helpful, and began a course of treatment which lasted several months and did me much good.
The distinctive feature of her method was to set that inert brain to work under her direct suggestion and supervision, on small, irrelevant tasks; this to reestablish the capacity for action, without demanding any effort from me. We began with kindergarten blocks, just building things, for slowly increasing periods of application, but before she was through with me I was reading, still at her desk and under her direction, Wilson on The Cell.
All this intelligent care helped me much. I accomplished a little scattered work, and by the end of the year was glad to state that my legal debts were reduced to less than a thousand dollars, with a few other claims which I meant to meet when I could. Continuing to improve, I began to do something on Human Work once more, in January, 1902, and did some lecturing in near-by states. Indeed I grew strong enough physically — the trouble never seemed to affect my body much — to join a basketball team of women, playing in Barnard college gymnasium. Katharine belonged also, and I took great pride in a Mother-and-Daughter game in which forty-two and seventeen did equally well.
By February 7th I proudly set down: “Really work a little on book.” And I made once more a schedule for my day’s work, as I had done at intervals since my strong girlhood when I made and kept them: “Rise at seven. Dress, breakfast, etc., to 8:30. Housework to 9:30. Write to 11:15. Walk to Dr. — to 1:45. Lunch, rest, visit, sew, etc.”
But by February 13th: “Can’t read Cell book, brain won’t hold it. Very tired evening and can’t do anything.” Seventeenth: “Still low. Do nothing. Dr. sets me back to kindergarten blocks again.” But on the whole I gained, and had begun to feel quite steadily well, when, on February 26th, my dear daughter came down with pneumonia.
Almost recovered from pneumonia, she developed pleurisy. Before recovering from that there was a sudden turn for the worse, and by March 18th I have set down in red ink: “Scarlet fever!!! Oh dear!.—” That dear child who had always been so well — . It was May 12th before I joyfully write: “Katharine is moved into the other room! Hurrah!”
Having scarlet fever in a small flat is not easy. A disinfected sheet was hung at her door, all precautions were taken. There were trained nurses good and bad, till Miss Mendel arrived to bless us— “Tall, beautiful, cheerful, vigorous, calm, quiet, agreeable, capable — a treasure.”
Houghton, going to his business, had to be shielded from the faintest chance of contagion, and as for me, when I did have to go forth: “Take cleansing bath, bi-chloride bath — wash hair in bi-chloride and comb it with new comb, put on entirely different clothes even to garters and hairpins, disinfect watch, and walk across park to lecture.”
This misfortune also records the end of our easy boarding-house life. “Go and buy some kitchen things. Home and get lunch.” One can hardly hire servants with scarlet fever in the family. “Miss Mendel is an angel in the house. I settle down and do the work. Wash fifty pieces or so.” “I take to coffee and housekeeping very contentedly.” April 13th: “Get splendid dinner — roast chicken, etc.”
But there are few entries during that three months’ stretch of illness, anxiety and housework, and then none at all till the end of September. We spent most of that summer in Twilight Park, in the Catskills, Dr. Shelby still keeping an eye on Katharine, and by that time I was as weak as she. September 27th: “Katharine sails for Italy.” Her father and her other mother were in Rome, and she went to stay with them for a while.
October 2nd, more red ink— “Begin work!” and on the fifth: “Paint a bit — first time in many years, not a good picture, but a hopeful sign.” That work was in the line of articles and the Home book, but November 23rd again in red: “Begin Human Work again! write some eight pages, arrange and plan. Not tired.”
My good friend Mrs. Susa Young Gates cheered me much by telling me how well Women and Economics was going in Germany, and that they wanted me there for the next quinquennial, 1904. “More than any one else except Miss Anthony.” By December 31st: “Consider the book done — the first draft.”
These diaries are a nuisance. Page after page of those dismal “downs” with the cheerfully welcomed “ups.” Record of writing, record of lecturing, record of seeing people, record of housework. After 1903 I gave up the fat three-by-six kind, with two days to a page, and took to thinner ones, with seven days on a page, or rather on two, for they run right across, with the right hand page for cash account. These are big enough to set down engagements, train time, and such necessities.
Lecture trips long and short continued. There was a suffrage meeting in New Orleans, and another in Portland, Oregon, any and everywhere between. There are now but four states in the Union where I have not spoken, and those I have been through — South Dakota, Wyoming, Arizona and New Mexico. To have traversed one’s country from side to side, top to bottom and corner to corner, for thirty-six years, gives one a fair working knowledge of it. Being entertained by intelligent people in hundreds of cities, and meeting representative women from all parts of the country in these various conventions, is another open door for learning the needs and hopes of all sections.
Inheriting a far-focused mind and educating it in a general study of humanity which takes in all races and all times, this wandering life of mine has increased the natural breadth of vision and constantly added to its power. Never having had a settled home, but always feeling perfectly at home anywhere, in this country or others, I have been better able to judge dispassionately and to take a more long-range view of human affairs than is natural to more stationary people.
Also, the lack of happiness in personal relationships in all my early life, enabled me to judge those relationships more impartially than if they had been perfectly satisfactory. Deprivations bring a sort of freedom useful to the social student.
The new period of personal happiness, opening with the century, with the forced reversion to housework, brought its own joys. Work of any kind I always loved, and in this kind I was specially proficient. For intimate comfort there is nothing cozier than a well-appointed flat. There is no outside care or labor, inside everything is convenient, and one’s vertical neighbors are no worse than horizontal ones; that is if they are decent.
We stayed six years in that first apartment, the longest residence of my life so far. Then, with joyous courage, we took a house, 313 W. 82nd.
This was a charming house, big, well-built, comfortable. We could by no means furnish the great place, nor pay the rent alone, but a good friend, possessing furniture, took one floor and boarded with us, and several others had rooms and also shared our table. We had two servants, with accompanying vicissitudes, but the boarders seemed to like my menus; there was always a waiting list.
Katharine was with us part of our three years there, then returned again to Italy. Our delight in those great rooms, house-wide, and long in proportion, was intense, after the sense of compression which grows on one in narrow flats. Three years we lived there, and then moved to what was then the height of our desire — an apartment on Riverside Drive. It was the top floor, between 94th and 95th streets, near to a broad, lovely part of the Riverside Park. There was a huge boulder, quite near us, where people used to sit and watch the sun set, as if it were in the country; trees that we could lie under and look at the stars.
If that flat had had suitable closets, and if the other inhabitants had not encouraged New York’s little traveling pets, it would have been about perfect. As it was, the sheer beauty of the prospect so filled me that I began to write poetry about it, a descriptive set, called “River Windows.” I had hopes of these, but they were not shared by editors. Here’s one of them:
BLENDING
Sometimes that long, high-lying western wall
Grays up into a bank of evening cloud,
Blending and dim; vague river to vague sky;
Only pricked lights — too regular for stars —
To show the margin between earth and he
aven.
Again three years (the leases ran that way), and then, still moving northward, we took another flat on 136th Street, again top floor. This was a “walk up” one, about seventy steps in all. I used to walk to the “elevated” with Houghton, to the 135th Street station, and meet him there at night, which involved going up and down the steps of St. Nicholas Terrace, at that point numbering 131. So I had about four hundred stairs a day, quite good exercise for the heart.
These morning and evening walks of ours established our reputation in the vicinity as a model couple! — so we were told by a neighbor. As to neighbors in any sense of visiting acquaintance, we had none, save once or twice in the flat next us; and always excepting a few real friends who chanced to live near. For a while my dear Grace had an apartment similar to ours in the next building, and Katharine a small one on the same floor.
They had returned to this country together after Mr. Stetson’s death in Rome.
Katharine had long since chosen her profession, she was an artist like her father. Now she had her studio down-town and her little home, near both her mothers. While living on 136th Street she made a sudden step and began to work at modeling as well as painting, doing marvelously graceful little reliefs, as well as figures in the round. She married F. Tolles Chamberlin, a painter and sculptor, a man of fine talents and a record of achievements. They live in her old home, Pasadena, and with two small children and the housework, she manages to keep up somewhat in her art.
This third flat proved to be a long-abiding place. Ten years we lived there, degradingly comfortable. There is an insidious drugging effect in spending one’s time waiting on one’s own tastes and appetites, and those of dear ones. There is a picnic jollity in buying just what you want to eat, cooking it exactly to your taste, eating it with satisfaction — and washing the dishes in your own superior manner. It is comfortable, but not elevating. The insidious effects were somewhat mitigated by recurrent lecture trips, and during this New York period there were three more across the ocean.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 272
