Charles Belmont was born in January 1866. It was nearly a year more before Rebecca got to her book. In a cooped-up winter and spring, the babies, then Clarke, were sick. She wrote about Holmes again, his disillusionment with Rapp’s Harmonist commune (an actual commune) in Pennsylvania. That was a lead piece in the Atlantic too (in May 1866), her last. The money managed Point Pleasant for a third vivifying summer, and in the fall, with the noises of new neighbors from the adjoining houses in her ears (Clarke had moved them to another row house without telling her) and her toddlers in healthy voice, Rebecca started her planned major novel.
Her intention was to “publish it in book form, after giving it care and time,” but as usual there were money problems. An offer from a new magazine, Galaxy, to serialize it was too tempting: she earned $3,600 for the serial rights alone.
From the beginning, the situation was nightmarish. Often there were only exhausted tag-ends of herself in tag-ends of time left over after the house, Clarke, the babies, for a book that demanded all her powers, all her concentration. Sometimes she had to send off great chunks, unread, unworked, to meet the inexorable monthly deadline.
Editorial problems developed. Galaxy was changing its format, wanted the installments cut. “It was only at your request that I gave it to Galaxy to publish serially,” Rebecca protested in a tone different from the shaken Rebecca to Fields six years before. “You must allow me the feeling which the humblest workman has for his work. . . . Whether it mutilates the story or not [seems] a secondary consideration to you.”
But primary to her. To no avail. Her situation as contracted-for employee was made clear. They cut, and sometimes she cut. Yet the pages poured on and on—868 printed pages.
Waiting for the Verdict, finished in 1868, was intended to pose what Rebecca considered the basic question of the time: how was the nation going to redress the wrong of slavery? Were the freed slaves to have work, education, respect, freedom?* The blacks, the nation, the future, were waiting for the verdict.
Her black characters would show the full human spectrum, the “as they might be”; her white characters would show the reasons for hope—and for hopelessness. The best and worst of the South would be juxtaposed with what was best and worst in the North.
The Civil War is still going on. Nathan (Nat), a slave, makes his hazardous escape to freedom, involving many black and white lives with his own, learning all the way, and instructing others by example and words.
He puts the horrors of insurrection into perspective:
De white people in de Souf, dey want der own guver’ment, an’ dey fights for it wid artillery an’ Parrott guns, an’ kills tousands, an’ dey calls it war; an’ Nat Turner, he want his freedom, an’ he fights wid knives an’ pikes, an’ sech wepons as he gets, an’ kills fifty odd, an dey calls it murder.
Unprepossessing outwardly and in his own esteem, with surface slave manners, Nat is a mover, deep observer, prophet, resourceful hero, whose dedication to freedom and opportunity for his people is unshakable.
A Randolph of Virginia falls in love with Rosslyn, a Northern girl, for qualities the Southern belles do not possess. She converts him to her Northern practices of “democracy and energy and practicality and opening fields of work . . . where help is needed.” He accepts her background: abolitionist, working class—”the class which you place on a par with your slaves”—accepts even the secret of her birth: she is illegitimate.
His cousin, Margaret, also a Randolph though raised in the North,* is wooed and won by a brooding, immensely cultured, eminent Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Broderip, who has cured her father. The doctor too has a birth secret—he is part black. Strongly affected by Nat—who turns out to be his half brother, not seen since early childhood—and through Nat by a new sense of the black situation, Dr. Broderip tells his fiancée his birth secret.
“The negro blood is abhorrent” to her. She lets the truth about him be known. He is excluded from his hospital, spurned by his patients, and ostracized by “polite society.” “The knowledge and skill acquired in all those patient years lay dead weight in his hands to-day.” Margaret’s Northern father, however, not only keeps his door open to the doctor, but organizes patients to fight for Broderip’s right to continue practicing.
Nat slowly and successfully convinces Broderip that his place is helping to organize and lead a regiment of freed slaves:
“. . . dey don’t know who to trust. Dey hears dat de Yankees ’ll sell dem down inter Cuba, an’ as fur dere ole marsters—well, dey knows dem. . . . Dey’d fight like debbils under a man ob dere own cullor. . . . Dey calls M’s Linkum Moses. Moses warn’t a white man, an’ a stranger,” deliberately. “He wur a chile ob de slave woman, an’ he went an’ stole all de learnin’ ob his masters, an’ den come back an’ took his people cross de riber inter freedom. His own people, suh.”
Broderip is killed in action. There are numerous other characters and situations: battle, escape, plantation, army, hospital, street scenes; life-going-on-as-usual social scenes; bigotry, apathy, humanity, degrees of hypocrisy; action, suspense, talk, talk, talk—intense debate, “warring creeds,” dissensions; confusion, contradictions, terror. There are surprising depths in the development of the main characters, most in Nat, Rosslyn, and the unprecedented, complex Dr. Broderip, torn between his whiteness and his blackness. There is also stereotype, slush, excess, caricature, melodrama, and occasional racism on Rebecca’s part.
Waiting for the Verdict never became a great book. More than anyone else, Rebecca knew that she had failed. She had conceived, intended to write, a great novel. She had failed to write it: had not given (had) the self and time (or the knowledge always) to write it. “A great hope fell, you heard no noise, the ruin was within.” She never attempted such an ambitious book again.
She also knew that Waiting for the Verdict was a book of far more substance and compass than any other fiction being written—and praised—at the time; and that it alone recorded, tried to make sense of, the seething currents of the Civil War period. Partly because of the unselected unwieldiness, the first-draft character of some of the pages, partly because of disturbing truths and portents in the book, understandings far ahead of the time, almost no one recognized this.*
“Sentimental propaganda for the negro dictates Waiting for the Verdict,” is how one reviewer dismissed it. The kindest remark The Nation made in a lengthy three-column review on November 21, 1867, was that,
As it stands, it preserves a certain American flavor. The author has evidently seen something corresponding to a portion of what she describes, and she has disengaged herself to a much greater degree than many of the female story-tellers of our native country from heterogeneous reminiscences of English novels.
Then it went on to say:
Mrs. Davis has written a number of short stories, chiefly of country life in Virginia and Pennsylvania, all distinguished by a certain severe and uncultured strength, but all disfigured by an injudicious straining after realistic effects which leave nature and reality at an infinite distance behind and beside them. The author has made herself the poet of poor people—laborers, farmers, mechanics, and factory hands. She has attempted to reproduce in dramatic form their manners and habits and woes and wants. The intention has always been good, but the execution has, to our mind, always been monstrous. . . . She drenches the whole field beforehand with a flood of lachrymose sentimentalism, and riots in the murky vapors which rise. . . . It is enough to make one forswear for ever all decent reflection and honest compassion, and take refuge in cynical jollity and elegant pococurantism.
Pococurantism. I looked it up. It means caring little, being indifferent, nonchalant.
. . . nothing is left but a crowd of ghastly, frowning, grinning automatons. The reader, exhausted by the constant strain upon his moral sensibilities, cries aloud for the good, graceful old nullities of the “fashionable novel.”*
It was about this time that Rebecca began her practice of ignoring reviews. Primarily
though, this was part of her rapid process of devaluing herself as a writer aspiring to art.
Never mind. She was at a time when she could say (indeed had to say, for it was true): “That is not all there is to life.” The almost total immersion that comes to a woman in a culture where full responsibility for home and growing new lives are hers, had engulfed Rebecca. The immediacy of Clarke, the house, two little ones at their most demanding, absorbing, alluring, “each day a new discovery in the unfolding miracle of human life,” left little over for other intensities. She began keeping a diary—a wife and mother diary, not a writer’s diary—wishing she
could put in words the happy sense of home and love that is under and over all, the thousand little ways in which my Darling shows how strong and tender is his love, Harding’s funny antics, the look of Charley’s earnest blue eyes.
She went on writing, of course, contracting for a serial (after having said she never would again) for Lippincott’s. No ambitious compass this time: this was going to be manageable, though still about something. The monthly deadlines once more proved “a tax on one’s endurance. And the horror of being sick, or the children being sick,” or of any of the other pulls and claims on her time.
The Nation reviewer, on October 22, 1868, approved of this book, Dallas Galbraith:
In the conception and arrangement of her story, . . . [the author] displays no inconsiderable energy and skill. She has evidently done her best to make it interesting, and to give her reader, in vulgar parlance, his money’s worth. . . .
Mrs. Davis, in her way, is an artist.
Mrs. Davis having intended to be, and for a while having practiced being, an artist, had no such illusions. Mrs. Davis, in her way, had become a professional workhorse in the field of letters for income, doing the best she could. Her writing had bought an end to the old economic terrors, and to drudgery; it had bought servant help and summers by the sea, and made keeping on writing possible. It had also bought the need to keep writing—for money. She was writing articles and comments on the times now, as well as fiction. She added children’s stories—highly moral—for Youth’s Companion. She joined the staff of the New York Tribune as contributing editor and began a long stream of articles and editorials. Clarke became an editor too—for the Philadelphia Inquirer—and forgot about a law practice.
Home almost always, Rebecca longed more and more for sky, vista, sea, another view than brick. She was “making fresh attacks on Papa to move out of town,” she wrote Annie, “but Papa reads his paper and won’t hear.”
With Rebecca’s earnings, Papa in 1870 bought their permanent home. In Philadelphia. Another row house flanked for blocks around by identical twins—but impressive three-story brick ones this time, with yards.
If Rebecca looked out her window anymore, for the rest of her life (except for the sea summers) it was to be to this sliver of sky and those brick houses endlessly repeating themselves. No river, no hills, no slow stream of human life moving by on its way to and from work in the mills. Her commonplace, her “Centre of the Universe,” was suburban domestic now. She records a typical day:
The boys’ bed is close by ours and at daylight they are awake. Charley generally asserting that he is “chivering cold” until he is taken into my arms. Then dear old Hardy puts his head up on the pillow and we whisper a while till the light in the transom shows that Annie [the maid] is ready to dress. Then I get up and we have breakfast. Clarke rises at 9 or 10. After he has his breakfast he reads the Inquirer, smokes his pipe, and goes [to work]. . . . When he comes home he has a supper of raw oysters with me and a cup of tea and then to bed.
Up two or three hours before Clarke was, and until 10 or 11 at night when he came home, Rebecca was running the house, seeing to the things that had to be done or doing them herself; mothering, teaching, when necessary nursing the boys; evading the neighbors (“Love thy neighbor? . . . The well to do, fat person across the way? I hate my kind when they come within meddling distance”)—and getting her writing done.
That first year in the new house, she revised some articles written in the high-tide time of “happy sense of home and love,” wrote a few more, and published Pro Aris et Focis (For Altar and Hearth), a small book all for domesticity, motherhood—and against women’s rights.*
What were these “voices . . . high, shrill and occasionally discordant” going on so about women’s rights? Yes, “shrill” was the recurrent adjective even then.
Equality? Women should no more feel inferior because they are not fit for men’s work than men feel inferior because they are not fit for women’s work.
Professions for women? “Some of that surplus female population who have no chance of rest** in a husband’s house and many of whom unhappily have no provision for the actual wants of life” should have public occupations open to them; but not potential wives and mothers. Was it more a woman’s work “to dissect babies rather than to suckle them”? And woman’s brain,
being like the rest of her frame, of more delicate organization, is not capable of such sustained and continuous mental exertion as man’s.†
Women vote? Most were properly far too occupied with home responsibilities even to consider taking that on; the rest, the idle, vain, rich, were interested only in fashion and amusement. Besides, husbands did not want their wives in the coarse political arena; and wives would not go against their husbands’ wishes. Nor should. The Bible was clear on the matter: wives must obey their husbands. “If you do not wish to obey, do not marry.”
Had Rebecca joined that succession of professional women (they are still with us today) who discourse—profitably—to other women on the ordained rightness, naturalness, and glories of keeping to woman’s sphere, while themselves exercising the privilege of wider realms and fuller use of self? No.
The glories, Rebecca believed; it was for her a time of genuine, deep family satisfactions. The ordain-edness, she also believed. It was a time of strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. That she wrote, worked at a “man’s” occupation, did not occur to her as contradiction. She carried it on privately, at home, in a woman’s way: that is, not as a man would, but fitted in, secondary to family; at the cost of none of her responsibilities to them. And she obeyed the Biblical injunctions: she kept to her place. It was Clarke’s natural right, as husband, to make the decisions, including where they should live. She accepted unquestioningly that, whatever their respective capacities, it was Clarke—as a man—who should be enabled to do his best work, while her ordained situation as woman was to help him toward that end: to be responsible for house, children, the proper atmosphere for his concentration and relaxation—and manage her writing when and as best as she could. Men could have love, home, children, and work, without cost to the work. Not women.
She did not say “Wrong, all wrong.” Violations of human potentiality which she refused to accept as natural, as ordained, in Life in the Iron Mills, she accepted as natural and ordained in the situation of women (including her own).
For all the insights throughout her writings on the narrowness, triviality, drudgery, hurts, restrictions in women’s lives—yes, and evidences of capacity within those restrictions—she could not envision women “as they might be.” Of their domestic, fourteen-hour-a-day, seven-day workweek, she did not ask Hetty’s question, so terribly punished in “The Wife’s Story”: “Was [it] for this reality that God made me?” Nor did she apply to her own sex Hugh Wolfe’s measure of “a true life,” one of “full development of faculties.”
When the high-tide time of family happiness out of which Pro Aris et Focis was written receded for Rebecca, she did not see its relationship to the situation of her sex. She knew only that something had gone terribly wrong with her life, her writing.
She was forty-one now. For eight years—often with exhilaration—she had been juggling cumulative responsibilities, selves, other beings. At last, the children old enough, she was beginning to have some space for time-self. Old aspirations began to rise. When
, once more, she discovered she was pregnant.
The third child (“but the child was a girl”), Nora, was born in 1872.
The following year, Rebecca wrote another revealing “Wife’s Story,” but this time there is neither terror nor temptation in it: the gift is used—without punishment—for family needs; the anguish is explicit only on the last page.
She called it Earthen Pitchers, a seven-part serial in Scribner’s Monthly (1873 and 1874) about the fate of two young women earning their living professionally at a time when professional women were an extreme rarity.
Jenny, “built for use but not for show,” is a no-nonsense journalist, with no pretensions to art.
Men who wanted to stand well with Jenny were wont to talk of the strength of her articles, quite as masculine as if they had been done by a man.
Audrey is a musician—violinist, singer, composer. She has been rigorously training herself since early childhood, eight to ten hours a day, for a life in music. Music “is all there is of me,” she says. One of the men in love with her answers:
“The best of you, I grant, but not all. . . . Half of your nature will be fallow. Besides, what do you know to teach by your art? What experience have you of life?”
On a night of auroral light and wild ocean storm, Audrey’s whole-selved concentration on music is momentarily breached by a rousing of desire, a hunger for human love. Later, unable to sleep, she goes out again into the storm:
. . . It seemed to her, she had grown to the age of sea and woods: they had received her into their company; she was one with them . . . she would have penetrated into the heart of this eternal world if she could; its mysteries, its vastness, its infinite, inaccessible repose. . . . The longing, the hope, which belong to those who are akin with Nature, for which no man has ever found words, oppressed and choked her. “And I,” she said, looking up and around her, as one who seeks a familiar face, “I too!”
Silences Page 15
