A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Then give it away.” He sat up and reached for a cigarette, the match flaring into the dark. “Hell’s bells, Rose. You are a damn fine writer, and you’ve got to stop disparaging the work you do. So what if your fiction isn’t that high-culture crap? So what if it’s lowbrow, middlebrow, commercial? You get paid for it, don’t you? So write what sells and sell it for enough money to live on, and go off somewhere and write your passion—politics, history, government, freedom, all that optimistic stuff you’ve been preaching to me. Fiction, nonfiction, what the hell does it matter? Write it and give it away, if you have to, although you probably won’t. Write your passion and somebody will pay you for it.” He stuck his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, pulled me against him, and softly, fondly rapped my skull. “Dolt. Idiot. If we were in the kitchen, I’d throw a plate at your head.”

  I lay against him, breathing him in, loving the strength of him, the wisdom. Simple. So simple. I thought of the chaos that was my life—the boys, the farm, my mother, my work—and sighed. Sell my fiction, give my passion away. Was it really just that simple?

  And then our trip was over and he drove away, and I was suspended in a kind of unbelief, as lovers are, waiting for the blue envelopes that brought his letters, for the strong, almost illegible scrawl of his handwriting, for the cigarette smoke that scented the paper.

  “Rose, dear,” he wrote, “it is all more than I can comprehend. You shake me in the fixed principle of my life. I am angry and happy. I once wrote that a man would give everything he has in the world to find her—that woman, that one woman, that other part of himself. I thought to find her only in fragments, a glimpse here, a thought there, and never enough in any one place to be satisfied with. And now, we two! We ought to be in a rowboat somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. We ought to be on a distant island. I want to see you and yet I dread it.”

  I said earlier that after those two weeks with Garet, everything in my life was different. Everything. But not in the way that might be expected when two people are so suddenly and fiercely attracted as we were to each other. He might be shaken in the fixed principle of his life, but my own determination still held firm. A rowboat for two in the Pacific, yes. A distant island, visits when we could manage them, letters, and always a terrible longing, oh yes. But not marriage. Not marriage. Oh no, not marriage.

  And when I knew that—that I could not marry even such a man as Garet Garrett—I knew everything about myself and was resigned to my new freedom.

  I went back to Columbia, to my research in the archives and the library. Garet returned to the East Coast, to his small farm in Tuckahoe, New Jersey, and immediately wrote three articles for the Saturday Evening Post about what he’d learned on our trip. I devoured every word of them, hearing his raspy voice speaking to me as if he were in the same room, loving the sense of it, the rhythms, the density of the sentences, the clear, strong logic of each paragraph, each section, the whole. I didn’t agree with him on all points, and as the years went on, our disagreements would widen and deepen. But our differences never diminished my admiration for his intellect, his logic. Ah, that mind. That was what I loved of him then, and still love, and will love, wherever he is, wherever I am.

  And yes. It really was that simple. Garet had been gone just four days when I began writing. Earlier in the year, the Post had asked their lead writers for a thousand words for a “Who’s Who” profile. About myself, I had written: “I am now a fundamentalist American. Give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez-faire, and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best possibilities for the development of the human spirit.”

  “We’d like to see more along these same lines,” Post editor Adelaide Neall had written to me, just before I left with Garet. “Send us something else.”

  So I sat down at my typewriter and began to write, my understanding sharpened by two weeks of day-long, night-long talks with Garet. I called it “Credo.” I wrote that every American is governed only by the principle of personal responsibility and that his or her most important freedom is the absolute freedom to flourish or fail. The question each person must answer is whether that freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden, the price of individual self-reliance and insecurity. Yes, insecurity. Because if we are aiming to be genuinely self-reliant, we must learn to embrace uncertainty and anxiety. If we fail, there will be nothing to break our fall—nothing but whatever cushion we have managed to create for ourselves. I understood this in the context of my parents’ pioneer lives, built on the freedom to flourish or to fail. In the context of my own lifelong struggle for freedom and self-reliance—and my own deep uncertainties.

  Credo. I believe. And as I wrote, I realized that it was the first time in my life that I was writing exactly as I believed, without compromising my truth for an editor or for a reader or for cash cash cash. Two weeks and twelve thousand words later, I finished the piece and sent it to Adelaide Neall for her opinion. She sent it back. Too long, she said, too political, too polemical, too passionate. The Post had opposed the New Deal since Roosevelt’s election, but this was too outspoken even for them.

  I wasn’t surprised. But I wasn’t dejected, either. I hadn’t written it for Adelaide or for the Post, or for anybody. I had written it as my essential claim to my own deepest, truest freedoms, and that was enough. I sent it to Garet, of course, who wrote that it sounded like my voice—the voice he’d been hearing for the two weeks we were on the road—and that eventually Adelaide Neall and the Post would come around. If they didn’t, well, damn their bloody eyes. I should publish it myself.

  But they did come around. I sent the piece to George Bye, a longtime liberal Democrat, a Roosevelt supporter, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s very own literary agent. But none of those loyalties deterred him. He said the essay should have been read by the nonfiction editor, and resubmitted it to the Post. It was accepted immediately and published in early March 1936 to an enthusiastic reception. Herbert Hoover wrote to me, praising the piece and promising to see it widely distributed. Reader’s Digest reprinted it as an article, and Maxwell Aley at Longmans, Green reprinted it as a booklet, under the title Give Me Liberty. It was ironic, I thought, that the one thing I hadn’t written for money was bringing me money—but not much, for I insisted that the reprints be priced as affordably as possible.

  Cash cash cash would have to continue being my mantra, because I still had debts to pay and a family to support. But Garet had been right: I could write what sells and write what matters—what mattered to me, what I cared about most deeply. I had found my voice.

  Slowly, slowly, and little by little.

  Glory to your lips.

  It is so.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  On the Banks of Plum Creek: 1936–1937

  I was still in Columbia when “Credo” appeared in the Post in March 1936. Lucille and Eddie Murphy were living at the farm, running the household for me. The boys were still there too, completing the year at Mansfield High, and there were regular weekend visits back and forth. I had finished the Missouri book and turned it in: publication with McBride was out, but it looked like Longmans would publish it.

  “Well, good,” my mother said with satisfaction, when I told her that the Missouri project was concluded. “I hope this means you’ll be coming back to Rocky Ridge.” She gave me a long look. “I don’t think it’s good for you to stay away, Rose. Your father and I don’t trust the Murphys to take care of the place. And Jess says that Eddie is stealing water from the well. He fills up big cans and takes them into town for his laundry.”

  I turned away. Jess didn’t like either of the Murphys and was always complaining about them to my parents. But “stealing water”? It was a trivial thing, and I was sick of trivial complaints.

  I could no longer claim to be staying away because I was doing research work at the library. But now that I had escaped, I couldn’t bring myself to move ba
ck to the isolation of the farm, to the long, dull days filled with my mother’s phone calls and visits and my own temptations to domesticity. In Columbia, I wasn’t inclined to bake cookies or make soup or clean the living room or reupholster the sofa. I was there to write, and that was what I did. And because it was a university town, there was enough going on—lectures, concerts, films, and the like—to fill any empty hours. The people I had met were nice, too, educated, informed, interesting, and tolerant. I had once planned to keep the farmhouse as a writing retreat, a place to live between visits to New York and elsewhere. But the circumstances had changed. My mother was able to take care of herself and my father, and she had royalty money coming in, and when there was enough to replace the stipend I had given them for sixteen years, she told me to stop sending it. All I wanted was to bring the Rocky Ridge chapter of my life to a close.

  And I could do it, for the boys would soon be gone. They planned to spend the summer with me, studying with a tutor from the university in preparation for the coming school year. John had applied to a military school in New Mexico, and Al had decided to do his senior year at the University High School in Columbia. After that, I had promised them a summer of travel in Europe and then college. When they had embarked on their lives in the world, I would be free to live where I chose. And George Bye had been encouraging me to come back East, where I could be in closer touch with the magazines that purchased my work.

  My mother kept after me to stay. “Tell the Murphys to move out,” she instructed me. “You won’t need them after the boys are away at school. But you don’t have to come back and live in the farmhouse, you know. Your father and I think we should just trade houses.”

  “Actually, I don’t—”

  But she was going on, with enormous enthusiasm. “It would be just perfect, Rose. We know you love the Rock House—you put so much time and effort and money into building it and it’s such a pretty little place. It will be just the right size for you when John and Al are gone and you’re free of that burden.”

  “They’re not a burden,” I said defensively. “Let’s just leave things as they are for a little longer.”

  “And it will be so good to have you with us again,” she went on, as though I hadn’t spoken. “Whenever I need a little help with my writing, you’ll be handy. And you know, dear, your papa and I are lonely out there, all by ourselves.”

  Of course I would be “handy.” If I were at the Rock House, she could drop in or telephone any time she wanted. But I heard the wistfulness in her voice and remembered what she had once said to me, when Guy Moyston left Rocky Ridge and the house felt dismally empty: “This is how it feels when you leave and I don’t have anybody to talk to!” I heard both her plea and her demand, and I felt sorry for her. But it was time to take a stand.

  “I understand,” I said. “But I’ve already decided. Once the boys are gone, I’m going back to New York to live.”

  “New York!” My mother’s eyes widened and she flinched as if I had struck her. “Oh, no! Oh, please, let’s not hear anything about that!” She put her hand to her heart as if she were holding herself against a sudden pain. “Really, Rose—the Rock House would be just perfect for you.”

  Although she tried for the next couple of months to persuade me to change my mind, I didn’t back down, and once it was clear that I meant to stand by my decision, my mother accepted it, and the tensions in our relationship subsided. Little House on the Prairie had come out the previous November to a strong review in the New York Times. Now, in the spring, she came to Columbia with her manuscript of On the Banks of Plum Creek, the fourth of her books. Harper was publishing them every two years now to build a broader readership base. I would have plenty of time to work on this one.

  “Here it is, Rose, dear.” She put the now-familiar stack of orange-covered tablets on my desk. “I’ve done the best job I could, but it was harder than I thought.” She paused thoughtfully. “I left out Pa’s moving us to Walnut Grove, as you suggested, so the action would be less confusing. It all happens at Plum Creek. We didn’t have Jack, the bulldog, then, but I put him in anyway, because I think the children like him. Oh, and I left out the baby. Freddy.”

  We had talked about that several times. The baby’s birth and death had been included in “Pioneer Girl,” but she had written that version of her life for an adult audience. These books were for children. And since Freddy had died before his first birthday, she decided that he shouldn’t be mentioned at all. I had agreed, regretfully. Between us, there were three dead boys: her brother, her own nameless son, and mine. Three little boys, never forgotten, but never spoken of. Perhaps my three living sons were a kind of memorial. I hoped so.

  But one other thing was obvious. She had stopped insisting that her story was the literal truth. Confronted with the need to craft a story, she was beginning to think of her work as fiction, rather than autobiography.

  I picked up the first tablet and began leafing through it. “Any special instructions?”

  “Well, of course, I’m hoping that the way I’ve written it is good enough to stand as it is,” she said, taking off her gloves and her hat. She was staying to tea at the hotel, and then we were going shopping. “I’ve done such a lot of writing and rewriting, you know—you should see my pile of little scraps and scribblings! Naturally, I’m happy with the way I’ve done it. I hope you won’t have to spend a lot of time on it.” Her tone became conciliatory. “But your judgment is always better than mine where these things are concerned. Whatever you decide to do will be fine with me.” She smiled. “You’ll have the last word.”

  When I began to work on it, I found—as I had with the drafts of the earlier books—that the manuscript left open a great many questions that would have to be answered in the book. The central question was the theme, the idea that should hold the story together from beginning to end and motivate the actions of Pa and Ma. In my mother’s draft, that wasn’t clear, but when I asked her, she wrote to me with a ready answer.

  “It’s the wheat,” she said. “The fields of wheat spread out on both sides of Plum Creek. All that growing wheat gave everybody a false sense of security. They had no idea it could be destroyed. They thought it was going to make them rich.” When she made that clear, it gave the novel its structure: the wheat that the inexperienced settlers were so proud of was vulnerable to catastrophes that they couldn’t predict.

  That reminded me of what I had learned from the farmers in the Dust Bowl. It was decidedly helpful, and I kept it in mind as I did the rewrite. At the beginning of the book, Pa promises Ma that she would have to live in the dugout only until the first wheat crop. Then she would have a fine house, and he would have horses and a buggy. At the end of the book, Pa is still counting on the good wheat crop to come—although I knew from “Pioneer Girl” that the Plum Creek episode had ended in disaster. The grasshoppers came again, and Pa had had enough of farming. He was ready to move on again, even if that meant—again—leaving everything behind.

  I also needed more concrete details to flesh out the thin narrative, so I wrote Mama Bess a two-page letter with specific questions. She had the girls going to school during hay-cutting time. Did they have school in July? What schoolbooks did Laura and Mary have, and where did they get them? What did Pa wear when he dressed up? What were Laura’s school dresses like?

  She sent me the answers I needed. Their school dresses were sprigged calico made with tight waists, buttoned down the back. For Sundays, Pa had a black silk tie, a coat and vest, and Ma’s handmade calico shirts. School started in spring, so it probably wouldn’t be going on during haying time, so I should just leave that part out. She had no idea where they got the schoolbooks; Pa probably found them in town. (I thought they should be Ma’s books, since she had been a schoolteacher herself, so that’s what I wrote.) She gave me a full description of the schoolhouse and desks, which I was able to use.

  Concerned about length, I
sent her some pages and she returned them with a few cuts that worked. She proposed other cuts, though, that were far too drastic—the ox going through the roof, for instance, which was wonderfully dramatic—and I kept the material in. “Sorry it is such a mess,” she wrote at one point. “You must be awfully tired of this story.”

  Once I got started, I kept at it steadily. I reconstructed the action so that the narrative covered just a little more than a year; cut the episode of Ma’s illness since there were already so many wretched hardships; and cleared up the point-of-view problems. All told, I put in two months’ work on Plum Creek during that long, hot summer—so hot that I worked as I had one long-ago summer in Athens, wearing as little as possible and showering several times a day.

  I finished the revision and sent the full typescript to my mother in late September, with a draft of a cover letter she should send to George Bye, asking him to negotiate better terms for this book than he had for the last. There was a compelling justification for the request: she had just received an eight-hundred-dollar royalty check for the first six months of 1936. The books were selling well, and Harper could afford a better royalty. Miss Raymond accepted Plum Creek, with no requests for revisions.

  The boys were settled for their school year—Al with me in Columbia, John at his military school—and I was working, but my general spirits in the fall of 1936 were gloomy. It was an election year, the first opportunity for the country to vote on the New Deal. Garet and I had heard so many angry denunciations of the Roosevelt administration on our trip through the Farm Belt that we were both hoping that Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas and the Republican presidential candidate, might defeat Roosevelt in the November 1936 election.

  But Roosevelt won in the biggest landslide in history. He captured all but eight electoral votes, in Vermont and Maine. It was a hard blow, and Garet and I had the bleak sense that American public opinion was hostile to what we believed so strongly: the freedom of the independent, self-reliant individual who had the strength to withstand the power of the state. The Supreme Court had struck down eight of FDR’s New Deal programs, and immediately after his January inauguration, Roosevelt himself submitted a plan for “judicial reform” that would pack the nine-member court with seven new appointments. The plan failed. But the court caved in and began upholding several parts of the New Deal, including the minimum wage and the National Labor Relations Act.