In the spring of 1939, Lane instigated an ugly break with Thompson over a perceived slight to Isaac Don Levine, the anti-Communist Hearst columnist and her neighbor in Connecticut. In a talk at the International PEN Congress at the New York World’s Fair, Thompson had warned journalists against becoming propaganda tools in the ongoing “ideological warfare,” citing the fact-checking difficulties and ethical dilemmas facing reporters who found themselves relaying accusations that could not be independently verified.114 As an example, she used the case of Walter Krivitsky, a former intelligence agent and defector from the Soviet Union with ties to Trotsky. Levine and Lane had arranged editorial introductions between Krivitsky and the Post, which then published a series of memoirs about his role as an agent in Stalin’s secret service. Thompson criticized this, pointing out that the former agent’s assertions were “neither provable nor unprovable.”115
After a phone conversation in which Lane defended Levine’s honor while Thompson dismissed him as having an agenda, Lane wrote an excoriating riposte, echoing previous complaints in which she accused her friend of becoming “not the Dorothy I thought I knew”:
Once you were a fine person, sensitive, intelligent, witty, poetic, ardent for truth and justice, sure in judgments based on moral and humane values. Now you are coarse and stupid. You surround yourself with sycophants and exploiters who would betray you and vanish at a rumor that the by-line was fading.… I see rotten trick after trick, half-truth and propaganda-slant, in your copy.… When have I, in the slightest degree, exploited you? Traded on my knowing you? Did I ask you for help in saving my Albanian son and his family, or my Albanian property? In nineteen years, when have I come to you with an axe to grind? Do you no longer know a genuine thing when you see it, or do you no longer value it?116
It was an epistolary tantrum, reminiscent of the one Lane had enacted with Clarence Day years earlier. With forbearance, Thompson defended her position and sought to save the friendship, but it would never be the same. Although Thompson had visited her in Missouri, Lane would consistently refuse her friend’s repeated invitations to visit her country home in Vermont.
The Levine-Krivitsky affair signaled another major depressive episode for Lane, this one typified by self-pity, professional jealousy, and increasingly unstable rhetoric. It highlighted Lane’s lifelong inability to recognize the existence or value of journalistic ethics, something that had hampered her early career as a biographer and would continue to cast a haze of confusion over the “truth” or fiction of the Little House books. As Lane tipped into yet another volatile period, it threatened to destroy the delicate balance in her mother’s work, introducing to it an element of propaganda.
* * *
WITH delays due to Wilder and Lane’s extended debate over its opening, the manuscript for On the Shores of Silver Lake was not ready to be turned in to the publisher until May 1939. Earlier that year, abashed by her tardiness, Wilder told Lane she was ignoring Ida Louise Raymond’s puzzled queries: “She can think I have gone to Timbuctoo or am sick or mad or just [too] lazy to write.”117 A bout of flu delayed her even further, and she worried that three years might pass between books and “my stories will be forgotten.”118
She was also worried about her daughter. “I am uneasy about you,” she told her in early 1939. If Lane were “short of money,” Wilder assured her, she had a couple of hundred dollars she could send.119
While continuing to economize by writing on the backs of old letters and burning wood rather than running the furnace, Wilder was finally achieving a sense of security. She told her daughter that she had escaped from the nightmare that once troubled her: “I haven’t gone alone down that long, dark road I used to dream of, for a long time,” she wrote. “The last time I saw it stretching ahead of me, I said in my dream ‘But I don’t have to go through those dark woods, I don’t have to go that way.’ And I turned away from it. We are living inside our income and I don’t have to worry about the bills.”120
At the same time, she acknowledged that Lane must be relieved to be free of her dependents, saying that “it must seem strange to you not to have anyones expenses to pay, except your own, to have everybody, including us, off your hands.” She apologized that she still needed Lane’s assistance with her books, a “trouble” that would soon, in any case, be over.
When Wilder wrote to George Bye at the end of that month to tell him the manuscript was at the typist, she asked him to get her a good contract, saying that Plum Creek had been so successful that Harper should “treat me well.”121 She referred further questions to Lane, since she and her husband were “going wandering.” Only a year after their previous visit, they were returning to De Smet for Old Settlers’ Day, an annual summer celebration in the town.122 It would be the last time.
Wilder herself recognized the finality of it. She was nervous about the trip, planning to send Lane the “Hard Winter” manuscript in case anything happened to them.123 She had been taking stock of her life and reached out to her daughter once again to thank her for the many ways in which she had made their lives easier. She counted over the creature comforts and luxuries their child had thoughtfully provided: dining table and chairs, rose-colored drapes, comfortable mattresses and down quilts, and gifts of jewelry. She thanked her for their financial security, the rent money now coming in from the Rock House and especially the income from the Little House books. “Without your help, I would not have the royalties from my books in the bank to draw on,” she acknowledged. It was a genuine outpouring of affection and appreciation that stands out against the women’s often querulous exchanges. Signing it, “Very much love, Mama Bess,” she wrote as a postscript, “Oh Rose my dear, we do thank you so much for being so good to us.”124
No reply has survived. Wilder was growing older and may have simply wanted to express the feelings while she had the chance. By withdrawing, her daughter may have triggered the kind of gratitude she had always yearned for, but if so, there is no indication that the words were a balm.
If Wilder noticed her daughter remaining withdrawn, she did not show it, chattering about new curtains, local gossip, and politics. She shook her head over the fact that Mansfield was planning to build a new sewage system with $65,000 in WPA money and a $17,000 bond. “The town is already bonded for more than it is worth,” she said. “God help the poor taxpayers!”125
The Roosevelts continued to merit caustic remarks. In town, tickets for a celebration of FDR’s birthday party, to be held in the Masonic Hall, were twenty-five cents a piece, “and ‘they’ couldn’t sell them.”126 Wilder gloated over the fact that only fifty people showed up, and refreshments took all the ticket money. She wished that “Mrs. Roosevelt would have to scrub her own floors and do her own work,” but shrugged her shoulders over foreign news. “We probably are thinking alike about things,” she said, adding, “Hitlers word is about as good as Roosevelt’s, isn’t it.” She was sure FDR had already made a secret agreement, and “Elinor knows it.”127
But unlike her daughter’s all-consuming invective, Wilder’s politics were more casual, of a piece with rural, conservative, small-town life. She was concerned about communism and dictators, but found the new “Capri blue” curtains she was sewing for the living room a more compelling topic, hoping they would look like “a filmy, misty, blue cloud against the windows.”128 She invested more space and time in relating town gossip and describing how recent rain had filled ditches and made the creek “roar.”129 She kept a distracted eye on the national scene, but her focus was local.
The Wilders left for De Smet on June 6, the mother writing to her daughter with reassurance: “We will be very careful, drive slowly and stop when we please.”130 They pledged not to drive on Sundays, when “every crazy boy is drunk and on the road.” As promised, she had sent Lane the “Hard Winter” draft by registered mail. It was the only existing manuscript; she had been unable to finish a fair copy for herself because she had injured her hand. “I expect you will find lots of fault in it
, but we can argue it out later,” she said.
Despite that anticipation, Wilder’s comments suggested that she was making provisions in case she and Almanzo did not come back. Her letter to Lane amounted to a kind of last will and testament, telling her where to find the key to the safety deposit box, the Postal Savings certificates, and the “little, old writing desk” that had traveled with the Wilders in 1894. Notes for the next book could be found in an envelope marked “Pioneer Girl,” and Wilder suggested that Lane could “finish the series if you had to do so.”131 Her postscript, too, was a nod toward the end, begging her daughter never to allow the slovenly Murrays in their farmhouse again. “Do whatever else you please with it but not that,” she wrote.
But the trip was uneventful. Although they encountered heat and dust returning through Kansas, for the most part the weather offered “lovely, warm, going-somewhere-days.”132 Wilder wrote a brief account for the children’s section of the Christian Science Monitor, chronicling familiar associations brought on by hearing the Dakota meadowlarks singing again and feeling the spring wind blowing in her face: “Almost I seemed to hear Ma say, ‘Laura, put your sunbonnet on! You’ll look like an Indian.’ So I tilted my wide hat brim to shield my face from sun and wind.”133
Mostly, she noted how everything was different. “The little town we used to know was gone,” she said, replaced by sprawling development that reached to what had once been the Big Slough, where she had walked home from school with Carrie. The schoolhouse was gone, as were the rickety wooden stores on the main street with their false fronts. Happily, so was the drought: it rained during their visit, and after so many dead, dry years, everyone found it refreshing and “nobody cared.”134
They were feted as distinguished guests. The publisher and editor of the De Smet News, Aubrey Sherwood—grandson of Sam Masters, Wilder’s old schoolteacher in Walnut Grove—had early on recognized the importance to De Smet of the historical legacy represented by both “Free Land” and the Little House books, becoming an ardent promoter and collector of memorabilia. Sherwood organized the Old Settlers’ Day celebrations, and in coming years he would cover the Ingallses’ story so relentlessly that townsfolk would tire of it. On the Wilders’ visit in 1939, he photographed them seated in his office beneath a wall of historical images, including the portrait of the Ingalls family taken just before Laura and Almanzo had left town the first time. With “hard winter” commemorative ribbons pinned to their lapels, they show in their determined expressions something of the stoicism that got them through it.135
The Wilders drove out to see Charles Ingalls’s old homestead, the vanished dream of self-sufficiency, sold soon after he proved up. Wilder’s description only hints at what it meant to her, the melancholy of seeing the place for the last time, those who had settled it gone with the prairie wind. “There is a nice farm house in place of the little claim shanty,” she wrote wistfully, “but the Cotton Wood trees we set that long ago day when Grace was lost among the violets are still growing—big trees now.”136
Her memories were already safely preserved, in one of the final chapters of Silver Lake, in the scene where Laura finds her baby sister sitting in a shallow concavity full of violets, an old buffalo wallow filled with fragrance and color:
The whole great plain of the earth was shadow. There was hardly a wind, but the air moved and whispered to itself in the grasses. Laura almost knew what it said. Lonely and wild and eternal were land and water and sky and the air blowing.137
Perhaps more than anything that she could say or do in 1939, that was her farewell to the place.
By the Shores of Silver Lake was published in October of that year, earning another Newbery Honor Book nomination and excellent reviews.138 Kirkus called it a “splendidly written contribution to factual frontier material,” but conveyed a note of uncertainty about its proper classification.139 “One always hesitates as to whether these stories of Laura Wilder’s childhood belong with fiction or non-fiction,” the reviewer said, advising booksellers to “place this where you have found the others sell best.”
* * *
EVEN after Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, triggering declarations of war by Britain and France, the United States continued to cling to isolation. Roosevelt remained hampered by the 1930s Neutrality Acts. As a way around them, he developed the Lend-Lease policy of providing limited aid in food, fuel, and weapons.
With deep reluctance and foreboding, Americans began to realize the inevitability of war. By July 1940, more than 70 percent supported “compulsory military training for all young men.”140 Asked by Life magazine whether, on entering the war, the country should continue to fight “at all costs” as Norway, Finland, and Belgium had, more than half of those polled said yes.141
But Lane railed against compulsory government programs of any kind, in ways that became increasingly disturbing to those around her, straining relationships. All her life, she had defied authority. Now, during the run-up to the war and throughout that long conflict, she behaved as if government interference in her life was both a personal affront and a threat to her very existence.
In 1939 she had broken with Dorothy Thompson, and in short order would quarrel with the friends she had fought over with Thompson: Don Levine and his wife, Ruth. On May 10, 1940, a year to the day after her appearance before the Senate subcommittee pleading for isolationism, Lane was at the Levines’ home, listening to radio news of the German invasion of Holland and Belgium. The Levines, who were Jewish, were appalled, believing that the United States should declare war immediately, and Don said he would pick up a rifle and fight before ever submitting to Hitler.
Although she had recently published a letter denouncing anti-Semitism, Lane took their reaction personally, writing in her diary “they both … turned against me,” and recording a lengthy anti-Semitic diatribe:
I do not know what “the Jew” is. Facts are that he is not a race, a nationality, nor, as an individual, often, the adherent of a religious faith. I do not know what the reality is. I have been unable to see that any [such] reality, The Jew, actually exists.… yesterday [Ruth] coldly repulsed my efforts to save what has been a genuine and deep emotional attachment and did this by saying that Hitler’s actions probably do not mean to anyone else what they mean to “those of our faith.” What does she mean by “our faith”?142
Ruth Levine later recalled their discussion differently, and Lane’s reaction may well have been tied to instability. Once again, she was suicidal, writing in her journal that month: “Truly I would prefer to die. No argument against suicide has any reality now.”143 In her diary, she described herself as “manic depressive.”144 She had been forced to borrow money from her mother yet again, a circumstance that may have contributed to her worsening mood.145 Her houseguest, Norma Lee Browning, recalled her ongoing irritation over the continuing demands of editing her mother’s work.146
A month later, during an argument about politics in the Danbury house, Lane broke with John Turner. To friends who had known them both, their dispute was unclear, and Lane explained little beyond saying that John had “walked out of this house in a towering rage.”147 He took a train to New York City and joined the Coast Guard, later telling Lane that he despised himself for freeloading and wanted to “stand entirely on my own feet.”148 Decades later, Turner said he did not mean to break away entirely but was aware that Lane would be infuriated by his enlistment, telling her biographer, “I knew how she felt about government and that she would feel that I had gone over to the enemy.”149 At the time, Lane said, with finality, “I truly have no interest at all in John Turner.”150 Beyond a brief encounter or two the following year, she would never see him or his brother again. She had been John’s “mother” for six years.
Lane also broke with editors at the Saturday Evening Post. During the summer of 1939, she had driven across the country gathering material for another Post serial, this one attacking the National Recovery Administration. A New Deal agency that regul
ated working hours and set minimum wages and prices, it was reviled by conservatives for raising the cost of doing business. The fictional protagonist of Lane’s piece was a small-scale coal miner in Laramie, Wyoming, who felt oppressed by the government, making bald statements such as “I can’t stand no more regulations.”151
She titled it “Forgotten Man,” in an ironic reference to Roosevelt’s famous radio address in 1932 recognizing “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”152 But the magazine’s new editor, beginning to shy away from isolationism after the death of George Horace Lorimer, rejected the manuscript as veiled propaganda, saying Lane’s “indignation smothers it.”153 Lane declared herself “stunned.”154 She would never publish another piece of fiction.
Love’s Old Sweet Song
While her daughter involved herself in ever more intense arguments, Wilder was wearying of politics. In Danbury, Lane was glued to the radio, feverishly recording European developments in her journal. In Mansfield, Wilder was reveling in her busy teenage self.
Just as her book on the Hard Winter was about to published, a last-minute contretemps over the title broke out, Harper fearing that children would be deterred by anything “hard.” Both Wilder and her daughter were annoyed, Lane griping that “there is altogether too much coddling of the mythical tender child.”155 Still, Wilder readily compromised, accepting The Long Winter as a substitute. She must have been elated by its reception. Published in June of 1940, it earned high praise, a starred review in Kirkus, a Newbery Honor mention, and the New York Times Book Review’s imprimatur: “The book is beautifully written, and we could ill spare this picture of a fine pioneer family.”156
Prairie Fires Page 49
