by Ron McCrea
Soon after their meeting Borthwick sailed for New York, where she paid a visit to the Putnam publishing house. George Putnam Jr. was abroad, so she met with a representative. Then she went to Canada, spent time with her children there, divorced Edwin Cheney, and moved into Taliesin in late July or early August.
When she arrived she discovered that Love and Ethics had not yet been published. “Mr. Seymour himself, though personally in sympathy with the work, was also afraid to publish it at first,” Borthwick wrote, “although Frank himself put up the money to cover the expenses. It is interesting to note that Mr. Seymour’s head proofreader came to him and said, ‘Mr. Seymour, I have been with you a good many years but I would rather give up my position than have anything to do with this. I cannot read any more of it!’ This he said of Liebe und Ethik.”
“All the publishers were afraid,” Borthwick said. “You cannot realize how provincial America is when it is a question of a thought in advance of its time.”85
Fig. 142. Margaret Anderson published Mamah Borthwick’s translation of Key’s “Romain Rolland” posthumously in The Little Review. Her magazine, founded in Chicago with $100 in help from Frank Lloyd Wright, later became famous in New York when it serialized James Joyce’s Ulysses. This 1930 portrait is by Man Ray.
In his 1945 memoir, Some Came This Way, Seymour paints himself as braver than he was. He writes that Wright “laid two [sic] manuscripts by Ellen Key on my table for publication on which he had the American rights. These I read with surprise. They appeared to be of a pattern similar in thought to Wright’s and dissimilar to the thinking of almost everybody else. They advocated a sensible attitude toward love. I published both of them and to my surprise found that thousands of people were eager to read them. Ellen Key’s writings marked a step ahead in the matter of sex morality and were accepted for a time as the last word in that field.”86
Seymour published The Morality of Women late in 1911. It got good reviews from Floyd Dell in the Chicago Evening Post Friday Literary Review and from Current Literature magazine.87 The book had sold 1,000 copies and gone into a second 1,000-copy printing by June 12, 1912. But Wright was still taking a net loss, according to a statement that Borthwick sent to Key. The other two books were money-losers. He had ordered 1,000 copies of Love and Ethics but only 28 had been sold, and he had ordered 1,000 copies of Torpedo Under the Ark but only 39 had been sold.
Key accused Borthwick and Wright of withholding money. Although Wright was in the red, Borthwick sent her a check of her own for $28, $25 for royalties plus the $3 postage due for the Hiroshige. (Borthwick’s separate checking account is an indicator of how she and Wright handled money.)
The small sales of the Ibsen book could be explained. The topic was specialized and it was little more than a pamphlet. “People didn’t feel they were getting their money’s worth, the booksellers tell me,” Borthwick said. But Love and Ethics was the book Wright and Borthwick had labored over together. It was to have been their debut in print, with Key’s thoughts on love and marriage doubling as their manifesto.
Seymour had delayed publication out of fear, and during that delay a rival translation had been published in New York, stealing both their thunder and their sales. The publisher was B.W. Huebsch, the translator Auralis K. Bogutslawsky. It came out in 1911 and went into a second edition in 1912. The London branch of Putnam’s also published the Huebsch translation in 1912.
Bogutslawsky seems to have had a scare himself. In a note prefacing the second edition, “A.K.B.” distances himself from the content, cautioning: “Ellen Key points the way to these higher values, without demanding that her revolutionary ideas of reform be translated into immediate action. Conditions are not ripe for the radical changes she suggests. A gradual transformation of moral values must lead the way to a better future, founded on a higher conception of love” (emphasis added).88
NO LOVE, NO ETHICS
The Huebsch publishing house, located in the West Village at 116 W. 13th Street, specialized in cutting-edge books. Huebsch published the first U.S. editions of work by James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence. He published Maxim Gorky’s The Spy, Karl Liebknecht’s Militarism, works by sociologist Thorstein Veblen, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.
“I know nothing of Mr. Huebsch,” Borthwick wrote Key after receiving the publisher’s announcement. “Liebe und Ethik was given to Ralph Fletcher Seymour of Chicago. … Mr. Wright has written Mr. Huebsch. Perhaps something can be done about his pirated publication.”
Noting that “Fletcher Seymour is publishing Love and Ethics as the ‘only authorized translation,’” Borthwick worried that their edition now would “probably not prove profitable owing to Huebsch’s piracy. Every effort will be made, however, to discountenance Huebsch in his undertakings.”
Borthwick was sure Symphony’s publication of The Morality of Women and its good reviews would break the ice for other publishers. “Now that one American publisher has dared to do it and the words have received such extremely favorable attention … they are evidently much chagrined,” she said. “You can feel assured now that, altho’ after the appearance of Love and Marriage publishers were still afraid here in America to publish Ellen Key’s work, there is no one now, after the appreciations The Morality of Women has received, who will be afraid to publish anything from her pen.
“You will be interested, I think, to know how our attempt to do what we believed right has succeeded. I can now say that we have, I believe, the entire respect of the community in which we live. I have never received a glance otherwise, and many kind and thoughtful things have been done for us by the people around here.”
—Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key, November 1912
“It must be difficult for you to realize how far behind Europe America is,” she told Key.
As to the fate of Love and Ethics, Borthwick said their publisher, Seymour, had assessed the Huebsch edition and “decided that ours was so much better it would repay publishing.”
“I cannot say so unqualifiedly as Mr. Seymour that ours is a better translation,” Borthwick said candidly. “Huebsch’s is clearer in many places and more concise, but because of its conciseness, perhaps partly, is quite lacking in the richness and poetry of the original, which qualities I think our translation reproduces better. His translation is that of a man—very evidently—who gives a very clear statement of the thought, but as Frank said, ‘It is a poetry crusher, while ours shows it is a translation made with love and appreciation.’ However, I must confess we had to say many times, ‘That passage is better than ours.’ But we quite agreed in saying more frequently, ‘There we are better than he is.’
Fig. 143. Ellen Key and her St. Bernard Vilda (Wild One) pose on the shore of Lake Vättern for the June 1913 cover of The Fra, a magazine produced by Elbert and Alice Hubbard at the Roycroft Arts & Craft colony in East Aurora, New York. Inside is an introduction to Key by Alice Hubbard and an essay by Key translated by someone other than Mamah Borthwick. The Fra’s design and typography are by Dard Hunter.
“I think your criticism of our translation may be just.”
Having been put on the defensive about their translation by Key but still having no answer from her about how a rival translation got into print, Wright and Borthwick traveled to Manhattan after New Year’s Day, 1913, looking for answers. (They likely went there after Wright met in Boston with the Spaulding brothers to arrange his Japanese print-buying trip.89) On January 5, on the eve of their departure for Japan, Borthwick told Key what they had discovered.
“We went out to New York to see Mr. Huebsch, to insist upon his withdrawing his edition from the market, saying that I had your authorization,” she said. “He told us that you had sold the rights to Love and Ethics to him, and showed us a check with your endorsement as proof.”
Huebsch’s jittery translator warned readers of Key’s Love and Ethics, “Conditions are not ripe for the radical changes she suggests.”
The couple must have been thunderstruck. Ke
y had cut a separate deal, authorized another translation, and accepted money.
Huebsch took pity on them and offered to buy Borthwick and Wright’s translation and use it in place of his own. “But his price was so small we felt that even with his in the market we would do better in time to keep it. We consider after a careful comparison of the two that our translation is best.“
She summed up: “Now dear lady, no word of yours has been published through me that you did not give me express permission to use and that was not in the hands of the publisher when I was with you in Sweden, months before you wrote me that you wished Putnam’s solely to publish your work.
“Forgive me for this long uninteresting letter. I promise not to again, but I had to get things straight,” Borthwick concluded. “I dare only add one word to hope that many years will bring blessings to you as you have brought blessings to us. I wish you all happiness in many New years. With veneration and love.”
There was no hint of rancor.
THE AMERICAN AND THE ATLANTIC
Wright and Borthwick made one more stop in new York, to meet with John S. Phillips, the editor and publisher of The American magazine. Key had been pestering Mamah to place her writings there since 1911, but everything Mamah had sent had been rejected.
The American of 1913 was not the muckraking American that Key might have had in mind, the one that had been created years earlier by Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln steffens, and Ida Tarbell, three famous investigative journalists who had left McClure’s to form their own publication. After Phillips bought The American in 1906, he changed it to a women’s magazine with soft features and fiction with mild feminist overtones. The issue of June 1913, for example, was dominated by a story of shipwrecked sailors on an island who encounter a tribe of winged women.
Borthwick in 1912 had tried to interest The American in condensing two of Key’s earlier books, Thought Pictures and Work and Humanity. “Mr. Phillips’ reply was that he found nothing suitable for a popular magazine,” she told Key. Before meeting with Phillips in New York she submitted a piece by Key called “A Whitsunday of Rodin—the First day of summer, Beltane,” supposedly more popular. Wright warned her that most readers of The American had never heard of Rodin. “You cannot realize how provincial we Americans are,” Mamah told Key.
They met with Phillips in Manhattan. “He said he wants something in which the masses as well as cultivated readers would be interested,” Borthwick said. “Most of his readers, for example, have never heard of Maeterlinck or Rodin. I think an article just a trifle spectacular is what Mr. Phillips wants; the masses are not captured otherwise.
“No, I did not give the Rodin article to any newspaper. You authorized me only to send it to the American. Of course any of the other magazines (except the strictly popular) would take any of the articles that the American returned, had I your instructions to send them elsewhere.”
Fig. 144. A portion of a letter sent from Taliesin in 1912 shows Mamah Borthwick’s handwriting style. It says, “A draughtsman of Frank’s whose wife is a Swedish woman brought us a copy of ‘Jul Kvällen’ with its photograph of Strand, Ellen Key’s article ‘Hemma’—and—an unusually lovely likeness of Ellen Key’s lovely self. With a heart full of love—Mamah Bouton Borthwick.”
Key was keeping Borthwick on a short leash. She would not give her permission to try other markets or repackage essays as books for anyone but Putnam. Seymour advised Wright and Borthwick that they could sell more of Torpedo Under the Ark if they added two or three of Key’s “Thought Pictures.” “But this permission I have told him repeatedly I feared I could not get from you since you feel bound to Putnam’s,” Mamah said.
Wright was willing to help. “Frank is much interested in certain combinations as to subjects in which he is especially interested and which treat so marvelously ideas absolutely misunderstood here—Freedom of the Personality, for instance,” she said.
Wright previously had sent Key copies of both The American and The Atlantic Monthly to nudge her toward The Atlantic. “The latter … is quite our best magazine, and is unquestionably where you belong,” Borthwick said. “You wrote me … that you were going to send me an article to translate for The Atlantic, and I have been continually hoping you would do it,” Borthwick wrote Key on November 10, 1912.
Less than a month later, Borthwick learned that an article by Key—translated by someone else—had appeared in The Atlantic. “I have not seen your article in the Atlantic. I will send for it,” Borthwick said. “As I wrote you last winter, the Atlantic is our best magazine and the one in which you would have the most intelligent audience.” The article, “Motherliness,” translated by “Mrs. A.E.B. Fries,” appeared in the October 1912 Atlantic. A two-part series translated by Fries, “Education for Motherhood,” appeared in the July and August issues of 1913.
Once again Key had double-crossed her. Once again, Borthwick maintained a stiff upper lip.
PROBLEMS AT PUTNAM’S
Mamah Borthwick seemed to be the object of what Washington Post etiquette columnist Judith Martin once termed the “Kafka Romance dissolver.” One person in a faltering relationship receives a bewildering series of hurts and rejections from the presumed beloved, without any explanation. Martin likens it to the baffling persecution of Joseph K. in The Trial.90
Lena Johannesson suggests there were two reasons for Key to pull away from Borthwick. One was that she didn’t grasp the implications of Mamah’s relationship with Wright until after she made commitments to her. “Ellen Key soon realized the nature of Mamah and Frank’s relationship and that her own gospel tended to legitimize that liaison,” Johannesson says. Key was shocked to find that two people were daring to live according to her precepts in a high-profile way.
“When she furthermore realized that the woman once called Mamah Cheney had abandoned her children out of love for a man, she seemed unwilling to reconcile such a brutal confrontation with her own theories. According to Ellen Key, the choice of free love can never be positive if it is combined with neglect of maternal love. This was her sad condemnation of Mamah and Frank.”91
The second reason she was pulling away was that she was hearing criticisms of Mamah as a translator. During 1912 Borthwick had taken on her first big job, the translation of Key’s book The Woman Movement (252 pp.) for Putnam’s in New York. Havelock Ellis, the sexologist and eugenicist who wrote the introduction, had a problem with Mamah. In communications with Key, he “draws attention to the fact that Mamah is not looked upon as a brilliant translator,” Johannesson says.92
“The place here is very lovely; all summer we had excursion parties come here to see the house and grounds, including Sunday-schools, Normal School classes, etc. I will try to send you some new photographs—you will scarcely recognize them from the others.”
—Mamah Borthwick to Ellen Key
Ellis complained directly to the publisher, as evidenced by Putnam’s letter to Key in January 1913:
“Mrs. Bouton Borthwick worked very hard to make her translation as good as possible, and we feel that it is now in fairly satisfactory form. Frankly, we do not consider, however, that she is really a first class translator,” the letter says. “Mr. Havelock Ellis feels particularly disappointed that the English translation could not have been more distinguished.”93
Putnam’s and Key may have tried to derail Borthwick. “Putnam’s have written me several times to the effect that they have letters from other translators who write also that they had your expressed desire that they do the translations into English and finally they asked me to prove my statement that you had asked me to write them concerning “Kvinnsrörelsen” [The Woman Movement] by sending them the ‘alleged’ letter,” Mamah wrote. “Their attitude has not been particularly pleasant about their other ‘alleged’ translators.”
Fig. 145. The Taliesin courtyard and hill garden are at full bloom in the late summer of 1912. The Tea Circle under the oak trees and statue of “The Flower in the Crannied Wall” are promine
nt in this Clarence Fuermann photograph taken from the roof.
Mamah was so cheerful, dauntless, and determined that in the end she was allowed to proceed. The Woman Movement was published by Putnam’s in 1912 with her name—and that of Havelock Ellis—on the title page. She heard nothing from Key for six months after sending the very direct letter in January 1913. In July, after she returned from Japan, she received a card from Key that made her “more delighted than I can say.” Putnam was going to let her translate a volume of essays by Key and an article on Romain Rolland, one of Europe’s leading pacifist and antifascist voices, whose 10-volume serialized novel, Jean-Christophe, would win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1915.
The essays never materialized, and Mamah was challenged by Mary Joanna Safford, a Washington-based translator, about her right to translate Key’s “Romain Rolland” from the French magazine La Revue, where Rolland’s own work appeared. Safford maintained that she had exclusive English translation rights to anything in La Revue. “There is no intimation that you were authorized to translate this special article,” Borthwick quotes Safford in writing to her, “Do you know whether Miss Key informed the editor that she wished the translation to be made by you?”
Borthwick did the translation, which was published by another of Wright’s Chicago friends, Margaret Anderson, in The Little Review, in 1915. By then Mamah was dead.
Ellen Key took the last letter from Mamah, written on July 20, 1914, and wrote at the top, with an underscore, “Nu Mördad”—“now murdered.” Below it she drew a cross.
ASSESSING KEY AND BORTHWICK
