Far off in her native Wheeling, little of this acclaim reached Rebecca. Forwarded letters began to arrive, but her first real indication of the impact her work was having came with a note from Hawthorne, Hawthorne himself, the author of those three anonymous tales she had memorized as a child. He was in Washington, would be going on to Harpers Ferry, and might he come on from there to meet her?
“Well, I suppose Esther felt a little in that way when the king’s scepter touched her,” Rebecca wrote.
Hawthorne never came. The Civil War had broken out; the railroad was cut.
Much else was severed. Virginia seceded. Wheeling became the center of pro-Union loyalties, soon the capital of self-proclaimed free New (later West) Virginia. Martial law was declared; the local theater turned into a jail; an island in the river, visible from Rebecca’s window, a prison camp. The house directly across the street from the Hardings’ was commandeered for General Rosecrans’s Union Army Western Department headquarters.
Rebecca’s brother Dick, along with several other young men of the Harding circle, made plans to join the Secessionists. They were talked out of it only at the last minute by the mayor: “It would ruin their families . . . he spoke particularly of Pa,” Rebecca wrote a cousin.
And in the midst of this, in mid-May, Fields sent back A Story of Today: “It assembles the gloom too depressingly.”
Rebecca’s letter reveals how shaken she was. She begged Fields to tell her “if that was the only objection, the one you assign?” She “thanked him for candor and kindness.” She asked: “If you do not think I could alter the story, shall I try again, or do you care to have me as a contributor?”
He wrote back at once, assuring her that the Atlantic wanted very much to keep her—and suggesting that she dispel some of the gloom, then resubmit the book. Fearful lest he lose his great discovery, he asked his young wife, Annie, to write also—a letter of such strong intelligent admiration, it was the start of Rebecca’s closest and most supporting literary friendship, though in this beginning, not necessarily in the right direction. “I will try to meet Mr. Fields’ wishes of being more cheerful,” Rebecca agreed, “though humor had need to be as high as God’s sunshine to glow cheerily on Virginia soil just now.”
What made her agree? Isolated, had she so little confidence in her own judgment? Was the terror of the oblivion from which she was just emerging so great, the need for the verification publication gives so compelling? Was she (a woman in that day) so afraid of jeopardizing the one way seemingly open to independence, occupation, public esteem, self-worth?
At just this time, one of Rebecca’s literary admirers, L. Clarke Davis, already a regular correspondent, wrote asking her to contribute to a new Philadelphia magazine, Peterson’s, for which he was a reader. It would be a different kind of writing—entertainment not literature.
Perhaps Life in the Iron Mills had been a fluke, “the novelty of the scene,” and not the achievement she had tried to make it, had believed it to be. Perhaps the merit of A Story of Today was self-delusion too, as was her being worthy of a place in the exalted Atlantic company. She promised to write for Peterson’s.
For six weeks Rebecca struggled with the revision of A Story of Today. Without the original manuscript, there is no way of knowing what the gloom was that she dispelled, and how much was marred and lost thereby; how much of the imperfect working out of character, the marks of haste and of patching, are in the original, how much the result of shaken judgment in a revision having to be made, furthermore, under “the shadow of death,” “from the border of the battlefield.”
In the beginning, she defends the very concerns of the book:
The shadow of death has fallen on us. . . . Do not call us traitors . . . who choose to be cool and silent through the fever of the hour,—who choose to search in common things for auguries . . . hint that there are yet other characters besides that of Patriot in which a man may appear creditably. . . .
I want you to go down into this common every-day drudgery . . . and consider if there might not be in it also a great warfare. . . . It has its slain. Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in your alleys.
Margret Howth has gone into a textile mill as a bookkeeper to “support a helpless father and mother. It was a common story.”* Holmes, the man she loves and who loves her, has broken off their secret engagement.
He had turned his back on love and kindly happiness and warmth, on all that was weak and useless in the world. . . . All men around him were doing the same,—thrusting and jostling and struggling up, up. It was the American motto, Go ahead; mothers taught it to their children; the whole system was a scale of glittering prizes. He at least saw the higher meaning of the truth.
He is “one of the new men who will mould the age.”
Knowles (not too successfully modeled after Doctor LeMoyne), Margret’s employer and the mill owner, is in the process of selling his mill. “His veins thick with the blood of a despised race”—he is part Indian—”a disciple of Garrison, you know,” he plans to use the money to organize in “the great city, with its stifling gambling hells, its negro-pens, its foul cellars,” and to make available a communal “new Arcadia.” It is for this work he seeks Margret’s help.
“You will fail, Knowles,” predicts Margret’s blind father (longtime adversary to Knowles, as Rebecca’s father was to LeMoyne):
“. . . any plan, Phalanstery or Community, call it what you please, founded on self-government, is based on . . . the tawdriest of shams. . . . There never was a thinner-crusted Devil’s egg in the world than democracy. . . .
“Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs. . . . Your own phantom, your Republic, your experiment to prove that all men are born free and equal—what is it to-day?”
“Don’t sneer at Knowles,” the author says:
Your own clear, tolerant brain, that reflects all men and creeds alike, like colorless water, drawing the truth from all, is very different, doubtless, from this narrow, solitary soul, who thought the world waited for him to fight down . . . evil. . . . An intolerant fanatic, of course. But the truth he did know was so terribly real to him. . . . And then, fanatics must make history for conservative men to learn from, I suppose.
From Knowles, and from the black peddler Lo with whom she feels the tie of identity, Margret glimpses and feels the “unhelped pain of life.” During an early morning walk with Lo, memorable for the descriptive immediacy of the changing mists, the transition from the countryside’s beauty into the city slums where Margret works, Lo, in the closeness of shared response, tells Margret of how her childhood in the mill deformed her:
It was a good while I was there: from seven year old till sixteen. ’T seemed longer t’ me ’n ’t was. ’T seemed as if I’d been there allus, —jes’ forever, yoh know . . . like as I was part o’ th’ engines, somehow. Th’ air used to be thick in my mouth, black wi’ smoke ’n’ wool ’n’ smells.
In them years I got dazed in my head, I think. ’T was th’ air ’n’ th’ work. . . . ’T got so that th’ noise o’ th’ looms went on in my head night ’n’ day,—allus thud, thud. ’N’ hot days, when th’ hands was chaffin’ ’n’ singin’, th’ black wheels ’n’ rollers was alive, starin’ down at me, ’n’ th’ shadders o’ th’ looms was like snakes creepin’,—creepin’ anear all th’ time.
As Margret and Knowles later walk the city, he looks
about him as into a seething caldron in which . . . the blood of uncounted races was fused . . . where creeds, philosophies, centuries old, grappled hand to hand in their death-struggle,—where innumerable aims and beliefs and powers of intellect, smothered rights and triumphant wrongs, warred together, struggling for victory.
Vulgar American life? He thought it a life more potent, more tragic in its history and prophecy, than any that has gone before.
They go to a hovel, a temporary one-room refuge he has established,
swarming with human life. Women,
idle trampers, whiskey-bloated, filthy, lay half-asleep, or smoking, on the floor. . . . Half-naked children crawled about in rags. . . . In the corner slept a heap of half-clothed blacks. Going on the underground railroad to Canada.
“Did I call it a bit of hell? [Knowles rages.] It’s only a glimpse of the under-life of America,—God help us!—where all men are born free and equal . . .
“And you,” he said, savagely, “you sit by the road-side, with help in your hands, and Christ in your heart, and call your life lost, quarrel with your God, because that mass of selfishness has left you. . . . Look at these women. What is their loss, do you think? Go back, will you, and drone out your life whimpering over your lost dream, and go to Shakespeare for tragedy when you want it? Tragedy! Come here,—let me hear what you call this.”
Lo, much mourned, dies from burns after a fire set in the mills by her father, who has been hounded as an ex-convict. Knowles, an old man now, has no money left to finance his dreams.
The tacked-on happy ending is grotesquely evident, a contrived reformation, out of it true love triumphing: the success-is-all Holmes converts to plainer, older virtues; Margret, obeying “the law of her woman’s nature” marries him and gives up working for social change. There is even an oil well opportunely gushing up in the back yard to keep them from poverty.
It is an awkward book, sometimes embarrassingly bad. Nevertheless, it is also a rewarding, fascinatingly native book of substance and power. It accomplishes much of what Rebecca set out to do in that first ardent fever of work after the Atlantic’s acceptance. Essential reading for any literary or social historian concerned with the period, Margret Howth: A Story of Today justifies re-evaluation, perhaps resurrection.
Fields had the revision back at the end of July and accepted it at once. Rebecca hastily concocted the promised mystery novel for Peterson’s. Then she stopped writing.
She could no longer “search in common things for auguries.” That “poor everyday warfare for bread” could not hold attention with the bloody, physical war all around. Wheeling was under threat of immediate attack from Lee’s surrounding armies and in “a state of panic not to be described.”
She had schooled herself to observe and read behaviors; now the behaviors were more than she could absorb. “Malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks. . . a slavery of intolerance; hands wet with a brother’s blood for Right”; fears, corruptions, political jobbery. The behavior of women—that she thought she understood:
They had taken the war into their whole strength, like their sisters, North and South: as women greedily do anything that promises to be an outlet for what power of brain, heart, or animal fervor they have, over what is needed for wifehood or maternity.
If there were, as there must also have been, evidences of true conviction, nobility, they were obscured for her by the other behaviors, and by her inability to come to a whole-selfed stand on the war.
Southern bred, nearly all her blood ties were Secessionist in sympathy, when not in action. Her other bonds and allegiances were Northern. She believed uncompromisingly that slavery, the greatest of wrongs, must be ended. But the federal government was making it clear that the war was not to end slavery, it was to end secession from the Union. Secession to her was a state’s right, “though I never would, never could, live in a slave confederacy.” Neither should slaves: the enslaved had an absolute right to their freedom. Yet how would they—who had never been permitted freedom—know how to use it? Deep in her was the Southern guilt-fear; freed slaves might take revenge, justified retribution. Then the innocent would suffer as well, wrong again come out of right. Round and round within her, the doubt and fear and contradiction, while all about her was destruction and bloodletting, with slavery seemingly no closer to being ended.
Margret Howth: A Story of Today began appearing serially, the lead piece in the October 1861 Atlantic. Whether it was this evidence of herself as a writer that helped, or not, Rebecca returned to writing—the most chilling and perfectly executed of her stories, “John Lamar.”
Set in the West Virginia hills in icy November, where Secesh Bushwhacker atrocities have been followed by Union Snakehunter reprisals, John Lamar, a Georgian slaveowner, is being held captive by Union forces under the command of his closest friend since childhood, Captain Dorr. Lamar is planning escape, an escape completely dependent on his barefoot body slave, Ben, to whom the North secretly means freedom. (“At two, Ben, remember. We will be free to-night, old boy.” It is typical of Lamar’s obliviousness that he says “we” without irony.) Ben listens to the two friend-enemies talk. Dorr begins:
“This slave question must be kept out of the war. It puts a false face on it.” . . .
“There is Ben. What, in God’s name, will you do with him? Keep him a slave, and chatter about self-government? Pah! The country is paying in blood for the lie, to-day. . . .”
. . . As for Ben, crouching there, if they talked of him like a clod, heedless [of his presence] . . . we all do the same, you know. . . .
“. . . Let the white Georgian come out of his sloth, and the black will rise with him. . . . When we have our Lowell, our New York . . . when we stand where New England does, Ben’s son will be ready for his freedom.”
Ben concludes that North or South, the “kind” intention is the same: to keep him (and his) always in slavery. An hour before the planned escape, half frozen, “crushing down and out the old parasite affection for his master . . . [his] muddy blood heating, firing with the same heroic dream that bade Tell and Garibaldi lift up their hands to God, and cry aloud that they were men and free,” Ben kills the sleeping Lamar, then turns south, not north—he has “a past of cruelty and oppression, . . . a lost life, to avenge.” The “canting abolitionist” Union soldier who had earlier called Ben “man and brother,” and at a camp prayer meeting, while Ben listened, had preached the Lord’s vengeance to the Babylon South—“As she hath done unto my people, be it done unto her”—is left to stand sentry over the dead man. “Humble, uncertain,” the words he has said earlier reiterate themselves: “The day of the Lord is nigh; it is at hand; and who can abide it?” And who can abide it?*
For months, invitations had been coming from the North, some from fabled names. The Fieldses, who had invited her from the beginning, stepped up the frequency of their urgings. Now Rebecca was desperate to go.
It was not only the need to get away from the war. The old sense of constriction, of longing for more than her life was, had roused up, intensified by the constant presence of death. She wanted to be, for a while, with people to whom literature was life; she wanted responding flesh and blood confirmation of her reality as a thinking, writing being. Nothing in Wheeling, outside of herself, confirmed it. No one regarded her as the nation’s most significant new writer. She was still just Harding’s spinster daughter, devoted, quiet, queer in her unshared interests. Within her family, life went on as before—her writing fitted in, their needs prior. Proud as they probably were of the recognition given her, her very subject matter may have precluded any discussion of it.
When her father became ill, a breakdown—“strain of the war”—it was taken for granted (most of all by herself) that she would put her writing aside, as if it were china painting, to devote herself to him. No one expected of her brothers that they should do the same.
Across the street, to take over the Western Department, came General Frémont, the “Pathfinder.” For a few hours now and then, when she could leave her father, she had occasional heady draughts, from Frémont, from his remarkable wife Jessie Benton, of what friends of range, culture, response, might mean to her. But the Frémonts were not to be in Wheeling long.
Famed as a wilderness explorer, the man who had won the popular, if not the electoral, vote for the presidency in 1856, Frémont was being maneuvered out of the command. “The incarnation of the chivalric and noble side of Abolitionism”; “simple, high-bred, courteous; always at a white heat of purpose” (Rebecca’s words) he was suspect.
The fall before (1861) when in command of the Missouri Territory, he had ordered the slaves therein freed, the first and only such order of emancipation. The action was annulled by Lincoln.
Months before she had promised Annie Fields a photograph of herself. Now she had one taken, and a copy sent to her Philadelphia correspondent, Clarke Davis, as well. (She was coming to count on his letters more and more in this drouth time.) The eyes look directly out of an ardent, compelling face, a strong intelligent face; the hair, carefully arranged, severely parted, falls in luxurious black curls onto plump beautiful shoulders that the dress is cut low enough to disclose. Was it at this time she copied out from Margaret Fuller:
With the intellect I always have, always shall overcome: but that is not the half of the work. The life, the life, O my God shall the life never be sweet? Nature vindicates her right, and I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust.*
Money was on her mind. For what? Family needs? The journey? The sweet freedom of being able—for the first time in her life, without dependence—to buy something without asking, or give money away or save it? She asked Fields for the advance of $100 refused earlier for the book publication of Margret Howth. He sent $200, and as the book was doing well (2,500 copies in three editions), another $200. She scribbled some stories for Peterson’s. That fitted in with her shredded time, as serious writing could not (and any one of them paid more than all of Margret Howth had brought her).
It was April, one year after publication of Life in the Iron Mills, before she could write Annie that yes, she would come North, “as soon as her father’s health permitted.” But still she could not go—the “minor trouble of an escort.” No unmarried lady, not even a well-known author with earnings of her own to finance a journey, was free to travel by herself. “O Annie,” she wrote her Boston friend, “how good it must be to be a man when you want to travel.”
Silences Page 12
