Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  “The white man has dominated by his colour so far in the history of the world, but it is written in the Books that when the men of colour acquire our culture and combine it with their own methods of living and rate of production, they are going to bring forth greater numbers, better equipped for the battle of life, than we are. When they have got our last secret, constructive or scientific, they will take it, and living in a way that we would not, reproducing in numbers we don’t, they will beat us at any game we start, if we don’t take warning while we are in the ascendancy, and keep there.”

  And this:

  “There’s an undercurrent of something deep and subtle going on in this country right now . . . If California does not wake up very shortly and very thoroughly she is going to pay an awful price for the luxury she is experiencing while she pampers herself with the service of the Japanese, just as the South has pampered herself for generations with the service of the negroes. When the negroes learn what there is to know, then the day of retribution will be at hand.”

  The plot of Her Father’s Daughter revolves around a Japanese A student in a Los Angeles high school, named Oka Sayye, who is actually a thirty-year-old man planted there by the Japanese government for God knows what reason, but who is clearly such a threat to the white world that in the end he has to be remorselessly pushed off a cliff by the heroine’s Irish housekeeper. I’m not kidding.

  Suspecting that Oka Sayye is not what he pretends to be, and in any case incensed by the very thought of a nonwhite leading the class, Linda reproaches another A student named (yes) Donald Whiting for his supine acceptance of second place. She taunts him with the idea

  “that a boy as big as you and as strong as you and with as good brain and your opportunities has allowed a little brown Jap to cross the Pacific Ocean and in a totally strange country to learn a language foreign to him, and, with the same books and the same chances, to beat you at your own game.”

  Donald meekly asks, “Linda, tell me how I can beat that little cocoanut-headed Jap.”

  In this atrocious book (I said that The Harvester was Stratton-Porter’s worst book, because this one is really in a different league), Stratton-Porter puts her talent for describing desirable consumer objects to the task of describing undesirable racial traits: “I have never seen anything so mask-like as the stolid little square head on that Jap,” Linda says to Donald. “I have never seen anything I dislike more than the oily, stiff, black hair standing up on it like menacing bristles.” Consumerism is not absent from the book—parallel to the yellow-peril plot is another Cinderella story, this one featuring a wicked stepsister, Eileen, who deprives Linda of the pretty clothes and dainty furnishings that are her due.

  Like Elnora, Linda finds a way of extracting money from nature: she collects desert plants and writes a lucrative magazine column about the delectable dishes she makes from them. But here even the Cinderella plot has a racist twist. Stratton-Porter improves on the original Cinderella story by severing the blood connection between the heroine and her nasty sibling: Linda finds a document in a secret compartment in her late father’s study, from which she learns that Eileen was not his biological daughter. Blood tells all.

  Judith Reick Long notes in her biography that Her Father’s Daughter “caused no ripples in Gene Stratton-Porter’s readership” and in general “met with few complaints.” (The Literary Review went so far as to praise its “wholesome charm,” she writes.) In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives us a nice sense of where white supremacy was situated in the thinking of 1920s America. In drawing the portrait of his deeply unpleasant character Tom Buchanan, he has him extravagantly praise a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by a writer named Goddard: “ ‘The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved . . . This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’ ”

  Fitzgerald used Goddard’s book as a novelist writing today might use a New Age book to establish a character’s intellectual nullity. He based Goddard on a real writer named Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920) sometimes reads as if Stratton-Porter had written it—“clean, virile, genius-bearing blood, streaming down the ages through the unerring action of heredity”—and surely had been read by her. She had probably also read The Passing of the Great Race (1916) by the equally fervent racist Madison Grant—a book Adolf Hitler is said to have called “my bible.”*

  When, during the 1980s and 1990s, Indiana University Press reissued eight of Stratton-Porter’s novels (as literature for “young adults”), it wisely didn’t go near Her Father’s Daughter, though it did include The Keeper of the Bees (1925), a work about a World War I veteran with an incurable shrapnel wound, whose weirdness almost surpasses that of The Harvester. But while other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sentimental novels have fallen by the wayside, as dull as they are ridiculous, even the most risible of Stratton-Porter’s works remain oddly readable. One mocks them but goes on turning their pages. Stratton-Porter had the crucial ability of the popular novelist to make the reader want to know what happens next to people in whose existence he does not for one minute believe. But she had something else as well.

  In a perceptive study called “Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles,” Lawrence Jay Dessner, dwelling on some of the book’s more conspicuous excesses, notes:

  This relentless insistence, this lack of moderation, this sensationalism in [Freckles’s] language is so customary, so seemingly habitual, that one feels the presence of presumably unconscious expressive needs. It is as if the novel’s intellectual and ideological muddle is merely a superficial layer of flotsam bobbing on a boiling sea of emotion.

  Dessner adds, with nice dryness, “Freckles is not a work to support a faith in the political progressiveness of popular fiction.” But Dessner’s image of a boiling sea of emotion as the element in which Stratton-Porter’s fiction is suspended offers a clue to its power. She often uses the phrase “she panted” instead of “she said,” and the novels themselves have the atmosphere of someone breathlessly running around inside them, ordering their cuckoo plots and scattering their pernicious notions in a kind of passion of uncontrolled and uncontrollable feeling. Her peaceable kingdom—where birds and moths and small mammals lie down with oil tycoons and lumber barons, and elegant bathroom fixtures and lovely things to eat and lawn dresses and eugenics and God and fringed gentians are all mixed up together—is the product of an imagination of almost life-threatening febrility.

  If a sense of “unconscious expressive needs” wafts out of all imaginative literature, it is rare to find it so floridly present in bestselling sentimental fiction. In an article called “The Why of the Best Seller,” published in 1921 in The Bookman, the critic William Lyon Phelps valiantly struggled to define the character of Gene Stratton-Porter’s achievement. He was reduced to saying, “She is a public institution, like Yellowstone Park,” and “If she is not a literary artist, she is anyhow a wonderful woman.” (This after deploring Her Father’s Daughter.)

  In a memoir called The Lady of the Limberlost (1928), Stratton-Porter’s daughter, Jeannette Porter Meehan, defended her mother’s apparent mawkishness:

  Mother knew both sides of life, but she chose to write only about one side. She knew the stern realities, the immorality, and the seamy, disgusting sidelights of life. But why write about them? Every one has his own trouble and heartache, so why not give the world something happy to read, and make them see visions of idealised life? Surely this does more good than sordid tales of sex filth that only lead to morbid and diseased thinking.

  But in fact, read a certain way, the novels have much to offer dirty minds. For example, the way Dessner, under the sway of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, reads the queer stuff going on
between Freckles and McLean (“the perfervid, the ecstatic—may one say the erotic?—relationship between Freckles and McLean”) and sees the stump of Freckles’s missing hand as a “shame-provoking, phallic-shaped member.” Stratton-Porter generally kept her interest in sex filth below the level of consciousness, but in The Harvester she allowed it to surface with almost embarrassing explicitness. The Girl predictably succumbs to the charms of her benefactor-decorator (Stratton-Porter liked to portray him asleep, looking like a Rockwell Kent Aryan hero, “his lithe figure stretched the length of the bed,” “the strong, manly features, the fine brow and chin” etched by the light of the moon)—but she is sexless. After one of her sad attempts at a kiss, he witheringly tells her, “That was the loving caress of a ten-year-old girl to a big brother she admired. That’s all!” and stalks off to talk to his dog Belshazzar about his sex starvation. Presently, he decides on a bold step: “Excuse me if I give you a demonstration of the real thing, just to furnish you an idea of how it should be.” After the demonstration,

  she lifted her handkerchief and pressed it against her lips, as she whispered in an awed voice, “My gracious Heaven, is that the kind of a kiss he is expecting me to give him? Why, I couldn’t—not to save my life.”

  In the end, the Harvester accepts the counsel of a lewd old lady named Granny Moreland:

  “If you’re going to bar a woman from being a wife ’til she knows what you mean by love, you’ll stop about nine tenths of the weddings in the world, and t’other tenth will be women that no decent-minded man would jine with.”

  Granny checks her facts with a doctor:

  “I told him you’d tell him that no clean, sweet-minded girl ever had known nor ever would know what love means to a man ’til he marries her and teaches her. Ain’t it so, Doc?”

  “It certainly is.”

  (Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach takes a mordant look at the conduct of this pedagogy in mid-twentieth-century England.)

  In A Girl of the Limberlost, there is a scene of voyeurism so vividly rendered that I have retained a picture of it in my mind over the years, assuming that I was recalling one of the book’s art nouveau illustrations by Wladyslaw T. Benda. In fact, no such illustration exists—the image derives from my mind’s eye. What I see is a man in a tree on a dark night, looking through a window into a lighted room where a girl in a nightgown is reading at a table. In Stratton-Porter’s description:

  He could see the throb of her breast under its thin covering and smell the fragrance of the tossing hair. He could see the narrow bed with its pieced calico cover, the whitewashed walls with gay lithographs, and every crevice stuck full of twigs with dangling cocoons . . . But nothing was worth a glance save the perfect face and form within reach by one spring through the rotten mosquito bar. He gripped the limb above that on which he stood, licked his lips, and breathed through his throat to be sure he was making no sound.

  It is a measure of what children pick up without knowing exactly what they are taking in that my uninformed ten-year-old self grasped and was excited by the scene’s obvious sense of sexual threat. Though not spelled out, the implications of “throb of her breast,” “within reach by one spring,” “licked his lips” were not lost on me. Of course, the rape is averted: Elnora starts talking to herself, as Stratton-Porter’s characters are given to doing when she needs them to, and her innocent babble converts the would-be predator into a blubbering, sentimental fool who restores the money he has stolen from Elnora’s hiding place in the Limberlost and leaves her a note of warning against his fellow lowlifes.

  A Girl of the Limberlost is Stratton-Porter’s best book. Alone among the novels, it escapes the wild veerings of her mind into strange, crankish byways. Its single touch of racism—and it is recognizable as racism only in the light of Her Father’s Daughter and The Harvester—is the drastic skin peel the reformed mother gives herself to remove the brown complexion she acquired while working outdoors without a sunbonnet; a white skin is part of her program of looking nice in front of Elnora’s classmates. And Elnora is Stratton-Porter’s best heroine. Her strict morality and goodness are accompanied by a straightforwardness, almost a brusqueness of manner that sets her off from the saccharine heroines of conventional sentimental fiction. She has a lot to put up with, and she puts up with it with endearing good-enough grace.

  Edith Carr, A Girl of the Limberlost’s bad girl, is another unusual creation. She is beautiful, rich, and spoiled, but has a dimension of neuroticism that sets her off from her conventional counterparts. There is an atmosphere around her—and her peculiar faithful follower Hart Henderson—that evokes the beautiful damned characters Fitzgerald created twenty years later. Philip Ammon (né Mammon?) is about as wooden as a character can get—but then Prince Charming is no Pierre Bezukhov, either. A Girl of the Limberlost’s strong mythic understructure, the Aladdin’s cave glitter it imparts to the modest material rewards of Elnora’s enterprise and hard work secures it a special place in Stratton-Porter’s oeuvre—and in American popular art.

  In 1922 Stratton-Porter wrote a long poem called The Fire Bird, about an Indian maiden who brings divine retribution on herself, in which she believed she had achieved the high art that eluded her in her novels. Her one fear, as she wrote to a friend, was that “it is one of those things so very high class, so for the few understanding ones, that I have the very gravest doubts as to whether I could market it if I wanted to.” The poem did get published, but has long been out of print. It isn’t as bad as you might think; it’s merely boring.

  Stratton-Porter gave a party for herself in Los Angeles to celebrate The Fire Bird’s publication. She invited 115 people and wore “a new evening dress of orchid chiffon velvet, looking, my friends were kind enough to say, the best they ever had seen me.” (This is from a letter that Jeannette Porter Meehan quotes in The Lady of the Limberlost.) The house was decorated with red and white flowers and large branches on which stuffed cardinals, “insured at one hundred dollars each and loaned me from one of the museums of the city,” were perched. There was music (“ ‘The Pastoral Symphony’ with the bird notes done on a flute”), an hour-long reading from The Fire Bird, and a buffet supper of roasted turkey and spiced ham and salad and cake and ice cream. “A number of people who were present told me that it was the most unique and the most beautiful party ever given in Los Angeles.” (Freckles had clearly seen nothing when he rhapsodized about the Bird Woman’s party in Indiana.)

  Two years later, Stratton-Porter was dead, at sixty-one; she was killed when a Los Angeles streetcar rammed into her chauffeur-driven limousine, one of two she owned. She had just finished The Keeper of the Bees at her new fourteen-room redwood vacation house on Catalina Island, to which she had retreated with a cook, a driver, two secretaries, and “a little Yaqui Indian” while awaiting the completion of an eleven-thousand-square-foot, twenty-two-room Tudor-style mansion in Bel Air.

  The book was dictated from a hammock slung between two oaks on a hillside and sometimes reads as if the author’s attention were elsewhere. At the start of the novel, its hero, Jamie MacFarlane, flees a veterans’ hospital at a California hot spring, where he has been unsuccessfully treated for his shrapnel wound (and from which he is about to be transferred to the dread Camp Kearney, where everyone is or will become tubercular), and makes his way to the seaside house and garden of a moribund beekeeper, who asks him to look after the bees when he collapses and is hospitalized. MacFarlane learns beekeeping from an annoying child called the Little Scout and gets mixed up with a woman called the Storm Girl, whom he meets on a rock jutting out of the Pacific Ocean during a storm and obligingly weds the next day to give her unborn child (the Shame Baby) a name.

  None of this is believable, and much of it is tedious. Only when she is dealing with the minute and sometimes disgusting particulars of MacFarlane’s medical condition does Stratton-Porter fully draw us (and perhaps herself) into her story. As she scrutinizes her hero’s bloody bandages and traces his chronic infection to th
e germs bred by the “hot, chemically saturated boiling spring water” piped through the veterans’ hospital, she returns to the boiling sea of emotion that is the breeding ground for her inspiration. She invests the story of MacFarlane’s cure by bathing in cold Pacific water and never eating starches and meats in the same meal with a thrilling significance. Putting her characteristic feverish intensity in the service of the medical fads of her day, she once again strikes the note to which her contemporaries vibrated, and to which we ourselves may helplessly, if somewhat more mutedly, respond. Imagine a Jane Brody column written by Charlotte Brontë and you will have a sense of Stratton-Porter’s singular feat.

  * A Girl of the Limberlost, Freckles, The Harvester, Her Father’s Daughter, and The Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton-Porter; Gene Stratton-Porter: Novelist and Naturalist by Judith Reick Long; and The Lady of the Limberlost: The Life and Letters of Gene Stratton-Porter by Jeannette Porter Meehan

  * See Trevor Butterworth’s review of Timothy Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (Knopf, 2008), Bookforum, December/January 2009.

  THE GENIUS OF THE GLASS HOUSE

  1999

  In a short essay in the voluminous catalog that accompanies the exhibition Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women, Phyllis Rose notes that “Cameron’s women do not smile. Their poses embody sorrow, resignation, composure, solemnity, and love, determined love, love which will have a hard time of it.” Rose goes on to write of the illness, disaster, and defeat that perpetually hovered over the lives of Victorian women. But there were causes closer to hand for the tragic address of Cameron’s women. Cameron used a photographic apparatus—fifteen- by twelve-inch glass plates and a lens of thirty-inch focal length—that required exposures of between three and ten minutes. Here is an account of a sitting by one of the unsmiling women, quoted by Helmut Gernsheim in his book Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (1948 and 1974):