Popular success came immediately with the publication of her first book. Following the praise showered on the manuscript by Marion Fiery at Knopf and Virginia Kirkus at Harper and Brothers and designation of the book by the Junior Literary Guild as its April 1932 selection, Little House in the Big Woods received strong recommendations from reviewers. Praising the story's “refreshingly genuine and lifelike quality,” the New York Times observed that its characters were “very much alive” and that the portrait of Pa, especially, was drawn “with loving care and reality.” Atlantic Bookshelf called the story “delightful and absorbing.” Books urged that it be read by all Middle Border children and by many others. “Too few, nowadays, can tell as real and treasurable a story,” the publication noted. “Moreover, this story is delightfully told.”1
Laura must have been pleased with all of the favorable attention. Not only was she now a published author, but the response was overwhelmingly positive. Although no notice of the book's appearance ran in the Mansfield Mirror, news of it must have spread rapidly around town. Laura now began to reap the prestige she wanted, and financial returns began to trickle in also, slowly at first, but accumulating to considerable proportions over time.
Rose, too, was pleased with her mother's success. When Marion Fiery had informed her in September about Knopf's decision to publish the book, she had written in her diary, “Am feeling grand.” Two months later, when Harper and Brothers took over the manuscript, the following entry appeared: “I am thankful.” Positive comments declined in frequency during the months preceding publication of Little House in the Big Woods; mostly the diary's pages recorded cries of pain and despair. In June, Rose raged, “I must leave here.” Two months later: “The whole situation is getting too much on my nerves and I don't sleep well.” In September: “Feeling dull & sunk” and “Feel stupid.” Then in November: “Accomplished nothing. Am bothered & worried by teeth.” Her final assessment of 1931 consisted simply of “Last year was catastrophic.”2
Rose's despondency flowed partly from health problems. Her teeth, especially, were plaguing her. Several times she went to St. Louis to have them worked on. At other times pains in her shoulders and legs left her feeling sick and tired. The final cutoff in late November of income from the Palmer account devastated her and dashed all hope that she would be able to depend on it without having to continue to grind out the kinds of stories she increasingly disliked. Within days, Helen Boylston packed up and headed back East, where it would be easier for her to support herself financially. Rose owed Troub about twenty-eight hundred dollars. Laura, upon hearing the news of the Palmer Company's failure, “took it very well, considering,” Rose noted in her diary. But money worries left Rose “sick with fear.” She did not know how she would pay her bills. Then a “begging letter” arrived from Laura's sister Grace in Manchester, South Dakota. She and her husband, Nate Dow, were growing desperate and did not know where to turn. Rose discussed the situation with her parents over dinner at her place. “Couldn't sleep til after midnight,” she recorded in her diary.” Six days later: “Had another panic all night.” And a couple of weeks after that: “Sick panic and was unable to do anything at all.”3
Even during this period of intense financial difficulty, however, considerable cash flowed through Rose's bank account. She had a great deal more to work with than did most Americans. In October a $1,200 check (minus 10 percent for her agent) arrived for the sale of “Immoral Woman” to Ladies’ Home Journal, and radio announcer Lowell Thomas sent her $500 in partial payment for ghostwriting a book for him. Next month, another $1,200 followed upon acceptance of “The Dog Wolf,” by Good Housekeeping. It all went toward reducing debts that she had accumulated. She continued to subsidize the Cambridge education of Rexh Meta, the young Albanian she had met in Albania, and to support her parents with annual income supplements. It seemed that no matter how much money Rose earned, there was never enough, and in 1932 her financial situation deteriorated even further as her magazine markets evaporated. Even when her stories sold, they brought in less money: between $500 and $750, rather than the $900 to $1,200 she had become accustomed to.4
Departing from her usual Ozark themes, Rose began working in October 1931 on a serial set on the Dakota prairies during the 1880s. Calling it “Courage,” she wanted to write it to exalt the resourcefulness and bravery of the frontier homesteaders, as typified by her grandparents, Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Stories that she had heard over and over again from her parents formed the basis for her short novel. Progress came slowly, however; she set the project aside several times before finally finishing it. Even before the appearance of Little House in the Big Woods in April, Laura brought Rose the draft of a new novel that she had written about Almanzo's childhood. Rose spent a week working on it in March, then continued to revise it during May and June, completing her work and typing it sometime between August 12 and 16. Her and her mother's writing careers were becoming increasingly intertwined. The editing job Rose did on the first novel had been desultory, but she either felt it necessary or simply decided that she wanted to spend more time working on the second one, Farmer Boy. After this, Rose would play a much larger role in editing and restructuring her mother's manuscripts. Meanwhile, her own writing began to depend much more heavily upon material given to her by her parents.5
For some time Rose had been growing increasingly frustrated at her inability to come up with new and compelling subjects for her writing. She possessed style and technique in abundance; subject matter was something else again. She never claimed that writing was particularly enjoyable; it was simply a job for her, she told people. But she could turn out an amazing number of pages when she was on track. The problem was that increasingly everything that she did left her feeling unfulfilled and empty. She judged her work to be merely clever—focused upon surfaces and inauthentic. Despite her many exciting adventures and travels that took her halfway around the world, Rose lacked the kinds of experiences that she believed would have served her well for fictionalizing. Her frustrating search for a compelling subject to write about derived from, and in turn contributed to, her deep-seated lack of personal identity. Although she remained unwilling to commit herself romantically to any single person after her divorce from Gillette, Rose retained a wide array of friends and corresponded regularly with many others. But she lacked the capacity to give unlimited love to anyone. After traveling to many exotic places and living on both coasts and in foreign countries, Rose did not have anyplace to call home. No place had earned her full commitment, nor any person. She seemed destined always to be dreaming of someplace else.
What drove Rose to write now about the Dakota frontier, after indicating earlier that the homesteading experience had never excited any interest in her, is hard to say. Possibly her parents’ trip back to De Smet for the annual Old Settlers’ Day celebration there on June 10, 1931, made her think about it. They had talked about going the previous year, when the town had its big fiftieth-anniversary celebration, but things had not worked out. Laura had found time, however, to write a poem for the occasion and had mailed it to editor Aubrey Sherwood, who published it in the De Smet News. It was titled “Dakota Prairies,” and, while somewhat more pretentious in language than that of many similar home-town versifiers, it did little to bring distinction upon its author:
Ever I see them in my mental vision
As first my eyes beheld them years agone,
Clad all in brown with russet shades and golden
Stretching away into the far unknown;
Never a break to mar their sweep of grandeur
From North to South, from East to West the same,
Save that the East was full of purple shadows,
The West with setting sun was all aflame;
Never a sign of human habitation
To show that man's domain was begun;
The only marks the footpaths of the bison
Made by the herds before their day was done.
The sky dow
n-turned a brazen bowl to me,
And clanging with the calls of wild gray geese
Winging their way unto the distant Southland
To ’scape the coming storms and rest in peace.
Ever the winds went whispering o'er the prairies,
Ever the grasses whispered back again,
And then the sun dipped down below the skyline
And stars at just the outline of the plain.6
She signed the poem “Laura Ingalls Wilder,” no doubt to assist local folks who had known her and her family in identifying her. Seven years later, when she started writing about her Dakota-prairie experiences, she sounded many of the same themes and called up similar images: prairie vistas, flamboyant sunrises and sunsets, open spaces, wild geese, waving grass, and whispering winds. Unlike her poem, which asserted that “man's domain” on the prairie commenced with the arrival of white settlers, Laura's books did pay some attention to the original settlers of the prairies and plains, the Native Americans. Nevertheless, both early and late, she thought of the westward movement not as a conquering army, displacing an already well-established Indian presence on the land, but as a benign and progressive transformation that introduced the blessings of civilization to the region.
When Laura and Almanzo finally departed for South Dakota on June 6, 1931, Rose noted in her diary that she was “astounded to see them actually start on the trip.” Laura's manuscript had just been sent to the publisher a week and a half earlier, and all they could do at that point was wait for a response. Laura and Almanzo would be able to reacquaint themselves with old places and talk to old friends whom they had lost contact with for almost four decades. They traveled a route similar to the one that they had taken down to Missouri in 1894. What had required a month and a half to negotiate now took only several days, as Nero, their Airedale dog, rode with them on the car's running board.7
De Smet had, of course, undergone considerable change. Though many of the places they visited remained familiar to them, much was different. No buildings remained standing on their old tree claim north of town, and just a few of the trees they had planted had managed to survive. Grain was growing on the hill on the homestead where Rose had been born. They drove around to look at Spirit Lake and at the old family homestead. Grace helped Laura go through Caroline's and Mary's belongings, which were being stored in a room of the house on Third Street while it was being rented. (Mary had died in 1928.) Later Laura and Almanzo drove west to Keystone in the Black Hills, where they visited Carrie and went sightseeing.8
Back in Mansfield three weeks after starting their journey, both were happy to be home, telling Rose, “East, west, home's best.” She could respond only by thinking of how utterly complacent and dated her parents’ viewpoint seemed to her. Laura had kept a diary during at least part of the trip, but if returning to some of her old haunts had made her think more about her childhood, it did not lead her immediately to concentrate her writing energies on her adolescent years in De Smet. After Farmer Boy, Laura would write about her childhood chronologically, elaborating upon the episodes that she had written about in “Pioneer Girl.” Her third book would be set in Indian Territory in Kansas; not for another six years would she start writing about her Dakota experiences.9
Interestingly enough, Rose turned her attention to life in Dakota before her mother did, even interrupting her work on editing “Farmer Boy.” Toward the end of June 1932, she rode a bus to St. Louis to have some dental work performed. Upon returning to Mansfield, she set her mother's manuscript aside temporarily and put in five weeks of intense work on “Courage,” which she now was calling “Let the Hurricane Roar.” The new title derived from an old song that her mother remembered singing. Laura wrote Carrie to find out if she knew the words of the song. Day after day, while they suffered from the intense heat of July and early August in the Ozarks, Rose cranked out a story about a blizzard on the Dakota prairie. Some days, as she recorded it in her diary, the heat was merely “terrific”; at other times it was “devastating.” Mostly, there was no rain. Worse, Rose worried that there was no further income in sight for her. As her bank balance dwindled, she noted in her diary, “I am truly frightened.” A day later she escalated the adjective to “terrified.”10
No doubt much of the power in Rose's story about fortitude and courage on the frontier derived from her own fears and timidity in the face of financial disaster and other calamities. The years 1930 and 1931 had been difficult for her; 1932 and 1933 turned out to be even worse. She slid into despondency, worried about her finances, her writing career, her personal relationships, her teeth, her general health, her deteriorating looks, her advancing age, and the seeming shackles that tied her down to her parents. Living in the midst of many people, she was desperately lonely. She began to realize that there probably would be no more great loves in her life, and she was prepared to write off the opposite sex. Few of her acquaintances appeared very interesting to her; most of them seemed dull and “stupid” (the latter a term she applied frequently to herself). Having recently turned forty-five and depressed by her lack of accomplishment, she grew increasingly aware of her own mortality. Morbid thoughts about death and even suicide frequently overwhelmed her.
Rose was especially exasperated by the large amount of time she had to (or chose to) spend on her mother's second manuscript. She always resented things that seemed to reduce her personal freedom; this seemed to be just one more example of her mother's literally “tying her down.” Midway through revising “Farmer Boy,” Rose became acutely depressed. On May 29 she wrote in her journal, “I am old. I am alone, a failure, forgotten, here in this dull alien place, I am losing my teeth.” More to the point: “I am not leading my own life, because any life must coalesce around a central purpose, and I have none.” Two days later she wailed, “I am really a stupid person…. I am too childlike and simple. Other people doubtless understand each other's meaning & purposes well enough, but I continually keep pulling at mama's sleeve and yammering, ‘Mama, mama! answer me, please!’” Her resentment toward others “tying her down” was genuine, but she also realized that, having failed to locate any central purpose in her life, she often flailed about. On June 8 she arrived at an important realization: “My whole trouble was that I am not master of my material in writing my mother's second juvenile. It was a little job that seemed inconsequential—and is—and therefore it was able to do all this to me without my knowing it—The truth is that for better or worse, no matter how hopelessly a failure, I am a writer. I am a writer. Nothing else in the world is so important to me—to my own inner self—as writing is.” Because she had to spend so much time on her mother's material, she was unable to work on her own, a situation made all the worse by her assumption that her mother's work was essentially trivial. Laura, for her part, may not have been interested enough in what Rose was writing to actually sit down and read it. At least, Rose did not think so. In one of her cynical moods, she had written Guy Moyston, “Oh, it isn't hard to keep Mama Bess from reading my books. She never reads ‘em. She just likes to have ‘em around.”11
Very likely it was while working on her mother's manuscripts and talking to her parents about their traveling to De Smet that Rose began to think about writing a story located in Dakota. Now stories that they had related to her over the years could serve as background material, especially the incredible tales about the hard winter of 1880–1881, when De Smet and the other towns along the Chicago and North Western Railroad tracks were snowed in for months. The events of that winter had become almost legendary among those who had lived through it. These stories, passed on by her parents and filtered through Rose's lively imagination, inspired Let the Hurricane Roar. It, along with Free Land, published in 1938 and also based upon stories her parents had told her, became Rose's two most outstanding pieces of fiction. Thus, the collaboration that occurred between mother and daughter worked in mutually beneficial fashion: Laura lent Rose factual material to draw upon for her writing, while Rose lent
her professional expertise to polish and edit Laura's writing.
Laura sometimes may have resented Rose's appropriation of stories that she and Almanzo had told her for use in her own fiction. After getting started on writing novels, Laura at least hoped that Rose would avoid using stories that she might want to make use of later. Once, upon glimpsing a newspaper advertisement for the book edition of Let the Hurricane Roar that identified the names of the leading characters as Charles and Caroline, Laura immediately assumed that Rose had used her parents as models in writing the book, and she appeared to be resentful of it. Generally, however, Laura was quite willing to help her daughter in any way that she could. A few years later, Almanzo helped Rose with her research in preparation for writing Free Land by filling out a long questionnaire that she had prepared for him, asking about specific details of farming and frontier life as he had known it back in the 1880s.12
A month after Rose sent the manuscript of “Hurricane” to George Bye, the Saturday Evening Post bought it for three thousand dollars, publishing it as a two-part serial in October 1932. Rose indicated that her purpose in writing the frontier romance transcended its ostensible subject matter; her real subject was the depression that the country was experiencing at the time. The story, Rose said in Better Homes and Gardens in December 1933, was intended as a reply to pessimists in the United States. “It was written,” she said, “from my feeling that living is never easy, that all human history is a record of achievement in disaster (so that disaster is no cause for despair), and that our great asset is the valor of the American spirit—the undefeated spirit of millions of obscure men and women who are as valiant today as the pioneers were in the past.”13
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 23
