Betty Zane (1903) was an exercise of compensation by an unhappy dentist hoping to overcome his despondency by writing about ancestors whose lives were more eventful and more satisfying than his own. In the dim light over the kitchen table in his “dingy” office late at night, Grey imagined them to be “reckless bordermen [who] knew not the meaning of fear” and for whom “daring adventure was welcome” (vii). In his novel, Zane’s maternal great-grandfather, Col. Ebenezer Zane, along with Ebenezer’s sons, the Mc-Cullochs, and Wetzels, are portrayed as resourceful pioneers who battled Indians and cleared the way for settlement. Grey wanted his readers to be as impressed as he was by their heroic feats. Isaac Zane’s capture and daring escape from Indians, Col. Samuel McCulloch’s bold flight from them over a precipice, Lewis Wetzel’s cool victory in a shooting contest, and the climactic defense of Fort Henry were depicted as exciting and important. Grey believed that a significant amount of these men’s greatness came from simply doing what they had been raised to do. To prevent their imagined humility from being misunderstood or diminished, Grey used Betty’s suitor, Alfred Clarke, as a mouthpiece for his personal estimate:
Alfred honored courage in a man more than any other quality. He marveled at the simplicity of these bordermen who, he thought, took the most wonderful adventures and daring escapes as matter of course, a compulsory part of their daily lives. He had already, in one day, had more excitement than had ever befallen him; and was beginning to believe his thirst for a free life of stirring action would be quenched long before he learned to be become useful in his new sphere (48–49).
Given the manly achievements in this story, it is strange that Grey made his chief character a woman, but he did so not just to show Betty as equal to the men around her. His large cast of males challenged and occasionally overcame his ability to sustain a coherent narrative. As much as he admired his ancestors, he did not know enough about their actual lives to develop them into full, rounded characters. His descriptions of tracking drew heavily upon his own hunting experience and offered some of his best writing, but they also strained his limited knowledge and threatened to exhaust his reader’s interest.
He introduced Betty as a colorful variation. Unlike conventional women of her day or Grey’s own, Betty is bold, independent, and daring. She is an accomplished rider, likes to fish, and skillfully maneuvers her own canoe. Indians have inscribed her craft with the appropriate motto, “The race is to the swift and strong” (85). This affinity for male activities endows her with male traits. She is intent upon having her way and defies those who attempt to restrain her. Told repeatedly not go riding alone, she does so anyway and is nearly captured by Indians.
The reader learns that she hails from a Philadelphia background of “luxury, society, parties, balls, dances, [and] friends, all that the heart of a girl would desire” (69). She favors her life on the frontier because it allows her to be the person she wants to be. She is grateful that locals tolerate her assertiveness and openly proclaims her affection for their way of life. However, she is not blind to its limitations. She notices that men enjoy greater privilege, and she resents it. She complains at one point, “It is always a man that spoils everything” (35). Men are a nuisance because they take their superiority for granted. “I rather envy your being a man,” she confesses to Alfred. “You have a world to conquer. A woman—what can she do?” (69). Later she rephrases this question: “But what can women do in times of war? … Few women have the courage for self-destruction” (270). Later, when Fort Henry is surrounded by the British and their Indian allies and its defenders face looming defeat, she dashes for a new supply of gunpowder, affirming that she possesses as much courage as any man and discrediting conventional assumptions about women.
Nonetheless, Betty only appears equal to the bordermen around her. Grey made Betty his chief character in order to introduce a romance and enlarge the appeal of his adventure, especially to female readers. Love attracts men to her and becomes an alternative measure of worth. Within this small but diversified society, courage and resourcefulness separate the admirable from the ignoble, the hero from the villain, but so too respect for women—and tolerance for their presumed weakness. When courtship takes over the stage from coping with the woods and Indians, Betty is revealed to be considerably less confident and brave than she seems. Betty’s heritage is supposed to make her both a bold woman and a responsive lover: “Betty was a Zane and the Zanes came of a fighting race. Their blood had ever been hot and passionate; the blood of men quick to love and quick to hate” (141). Though “quick to love,” Betty is notably reluctant to assert herself when love arrives. Alfred’s display of interest flusters and unnerves her. When he encounters her in the woods after she has badly twisted her ankle, she is understandably wary and defensive, but her refusal of help and subsequent burst of tears perplexes him. Before a later encounter, she resolves not to dance with him, but then accepts his offer because she “lacked courage” to say no. Her tongue-tied inability to communicate her true emotions and expectations produces more erratic behavior and more confusion. Grey needs these miscues to complicate their relationship, but they also transform his strong-willed heroine into a genteel, submissive woman. Ironically, after her heroic dash saves Fort Henry, Betty agrees to marry Alfred and is described as “brave even in her surrender” (286).
Grey, of course, realized that romance was an alternative form of adventure that broadened his novel’s appeal, but one cannot help suspecting that his involvement with Dolly influenced his story as much as his ancestry. Because of the eleven-year difference in their ages, Dolly was initially an awed admirer, but she quickly became aggressive in her appeals for Zane’s attention. Silently, he registered her social pedigree and her familiarity with metropolitan life but was even more impressed by her open displays of love for him and the woods. Within a year of their meeting, she relished their outings in Lackawaxen and, like Betty, enjoyed canoeing and fishing. The dell with the large sycamore where Alfred and Betty frequently meet was probably based upon a special woodland spot of theirs. Though Dolly usually stayed at the Delaware House during her visits to Lackawaxen (and wrote many letters on its stationery), she also went camping with him and was not constrained by the era’s standards of propriety. A year before their marriage in 1905, on the occasion of their fourth anniversary as a courting couple, Dolly rejoiced that they were “not merely lovers, but companions, friends, mentally and physically if I might so state it.”78 Though close to her own family, she defied their status-conscious estimate of Zane as a suspect provider and unworthy suitor.
Dolly and Zane, camping near Lackawaxen, ca. 1904. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
Like Betty and Alfred, Dolly and Zane had misunderstandings, and they exposed gaps in Dolly’s boldness as well. By their second year together, conflicts arose and rapidly grew stormier and more contentious. Some were provoked by Zane’s turbulent emotions, which were worrisome and sometimes frightening. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but anything would be preferable to this,” he wrote to her in 1901. “If I spent another two such days & nights I would either go insane or kill myself.”79 Later, Dolly objected to the girlfriends that he refused to conceal and to relinquish. In 1903, she complained to him, “But seriously, Pearl, can’t you give up other days than Thursday to stray girls. I look forward to that all week and it’s a great disappointment. And it means that you’d rather see someone else. I’m not angry, but the green-eyed monster is rampaging a bit.”80 A year before, she had a dream in which she and Zane were in a hammock together, and another woman sat down alongside. Grey put his arm around the other woman and kissed her. When Dolly told the woman that Zane did not care for her, he said, “Shut up Dolly, don’t be a fool,” and Dolly awoke screaming.81
Zane urged her to “fight” her jealous spells and agreed to see “fewer” girls the upcoming winter. “As far as is possible I am yours,” he reassured her. “Whether I can ever be wholly yours is a question the future alone can answer.”8
2 He found it easier to apologize for his hurtful behavior than to change it. “Now there was no earthly sense in me talking to you as I did; that is, scolding and nagging you,” he wrote to her following a disagreement. “I am always ashamed of it; I am sorry for it now. I believe it is my own discontent; my haste and fire to do something immortal, and the realization of how futile that ambition may be, or rather how useless. I have to say something and you always get it. That’s because you are the only person who understands me.”83
Dolly was more outspoken than Betty about her feelings and even pressured Zane to reveal his. Her understanding and reassurance made him secure enough to do so, and he confessed to her:
Were my temperament and disposition such that I could be satisfied and content with work, and work all the time, without any real life, there might be a bright side to things.
But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots.
The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that.
That is all right and just what man ought to be.
But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good.
I want to be somebody. I want fame. I do not want much money, but I want enough to keep me from worrying to death all the time, as I have for years.84
Though Dolly often doubted her power over him, she argued that she could help him realize his potential if he would allow her to do so:
I felt as if I had things in me which if I could express, would make me great. I felt as if I could write a great book. Please do not laugh, it may sound ridiculous, to you, but I had the feeling. I know I could never do anything like that, as I have not the power to express. Whether I ever will have it, I do not know, and besides I do not care for myself. My ambition is for you, and I shall expend all my energy & all the power I possess to make you a great man.85
Over time, Zane accepted more and more of Dolly’s help. Her insistence upon dialogue mollified their misunderstandings, and made correspondence a crucial component of their relationship. “I like our talks now almost as much as I liked to be kissed,” she confided. “I almost think our intellectual intercourse is the sweetest part of our love. If that were not there, I don’t think I could care as much for you.”86 Despite her refusal to be diffident and tongue-tied like Betty, Dolly was conventional enough to believe that love should lead to marriage and told Zane so. “Oh, Pearl, I hope I’ll always be to you what the letter expressed,” she responded to one of his love letters. “But strange to say, rather than be your ideal, I’d be your wife, for an ideal cannot participate in all the every sweetness of such a relation.”87 To her dismay, Zane persisted in thinking of himself as different from those “ordinary men” who wanted only “a home, wife, children, and all that.”
In May 1904, Grey returned to Columbus and Zanesville for some public appearances on behalf of his new novel.88 He also wanted to confer with his father about his deepening wish to quit dentistry and to concentrate upon writing. Instead of his usual disagreement, Lewis urged that Zane stay with dentistry for income and write during his free time. Zane resisted this strategy. First, he had already experimented with this for two years, and the experience only intensified his longing for a complete break. Also, there was the negative example of Lewis himself, who had worked hard for many years but was currently too destitute to provide for Zane’s mother and unmarried sister. For months, Zane had been receiving emotional appeals from Ida for rent money.89 These circumstances may have been the chief reason for his visit.
When he returned to New York City, Zane informed R. C. that their mother and sister were in dire need of help. Lewis’s dark mood and foul temper were driving away the last of his patients and making his family miserable. This situation spurred Zane to “cross my Rubicon,” as he later characterized the momentous decision before him.90 Why continue with a profession that he detested when he could see that it had left his father impoverished and deranged? Would it not be better to do something he truly wanted to do? Concluding that he would leave dentistry and write, he decided to purchase a residence in Lackawaxen and to convert it into a family haven.
The one deterrent was money. Mary Hobart wanted $1,425 for her residence and three acres of land at the confluence of the Lackawaxen and Delaware rivers. Since he could not even afford the $500 for publication of Betty Zane, he could pay no more than a small portion of the asking price. His father’s financial situation left his mother and sister without anything to add. Nonetheless, Zane closed on the property on September 27, 1904.91 Reba undoubtedly contributed, since she and R. C. constructed a residence for themselves there a year later.92 Since distributions from Dolly’s inheritance began the spring before, she also contributed; shortly after closing, Zane wrote to her, “In regard to the investing of your money, I consider your place an excellent one.”93
A U.S. Park Service landscape treatment plan has characterized the site as “a family retreat from urban living.”94 Grey viewed his new home in just this way—as liberation from New York City, a return to unspoiled nature, and a refuge for his beleaguered family. In the same letter in which he acknowledged Dolly’s investment, he observed that “the air, the rivers, the pines and freedom make it most desirable for someone who wants these things.” Grateful that she had urged him to remain longer than he intended, he informed her that he had read “Mr. Wagner’s Simple Life,” and found the book “beautiful, instructive, and good,” but also “distress[ing]” in exposing “the shams and faults of my own life.”95 Charles Wagner was a French clergyman whose The Simple Life (1901/1904) attacked modern development and advocated a return to traditional values. When the book was translated into English in 1904, it was enormously popular in the United States. Like many Easterners, including Derek Bok, the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal who strongly recommended it to his readership, Wagner believed that the recent surge in wealth and urbanization was worrisome and that a more austere life was healthier and preferable.96 He proposed a Thoreauvian reassessment of “our complex life,” and argued that very little was required for a satisfying, fulfilling life. Focusing upon the centrality of money to modern existence, he proclaimed that it “complicates life, demoralizes man, [and] perverts the cause of society.”97 His argument dealt with the discontents that drove Grey away from dentistry and New York City, and furnished strong support for his Lackawaxen purchase.
Following the September closing, Zane worked hard on his new property; Shores of Lethe, his critique of contemporary thinking and behavior; and Peaceable Village, a much delayed sequel to Betty Zane. He then summoned Ida and his mother to leave Columbus and join him. By the end of the year, he had both a house and a family, but was still resistant to marriage and a wife. At thirty-two, he was no longer the promising bachelor Dolly had first met; his baseball days were behind him, and he had recently quit his only other source of status and income. His one novel had yet to recover its costs and his two unfinished manuscripts were long shots at best. His modest “new” home lacked winter insulation and was in the middle of nowhere, and his mother, sister, and brother were living there with him. Were Dolly to marry him, she would have to go against her family and her privileged New York existence and accept both his isolation and his family. Nonetheless, she was willing, but Zane was not.
During the spring of 1905, Dolly was tormented by more jealousy over Zane’s girlfriends. In a May letter she informed him of mysterious pains in her head, back, and stomach. Straining to appear upbeat, she praised the progress of his writing: “When I compared the difference in you now and two, three, even one year ago, it makes me very happy, and very confident that you will accomplish something in the literary field.”98 A week later, she revealed that her ailments were persisting, but again accentuated the positive. “I am in a very cheerful frame of mind. I haven’t been jealous or blue once,” she reassured him. In the lengthy discussion of writers that followed, she maintained that prose writers had “greater stability” than
poets, who were more inclined to pursue their imaginings. She then presumed upon this assessment to urge that Zane not act on his attraction to women. “I do not blame you & hope I never shall for what has happened or for what may happen,” she explained, “for I think I understand your nature and how you are handicapped.” To ensure that this appeal not be construed as faultfinding, she conceded her own jealousy and maintained that it too was “a primal instinct.” Hoping to be a positive example for him, she resolved that her jealousy “must be pulled out by the roots.”99
Dolly’s next letter announced that she “never for a moment doubted your word in saying you wanted to marry me,” but she now defended her jealousy as natural and justified: “I hated the thought of your being with other women and the reactions which in the nature of things would exist between you and them.” Charging that his need for women was an illness warranting treatment, she again stopped short of demanding that he change. Cryptically and prophetically she concluded, “I have realized some things in the last four months which will be of life long service to me and which I probably could not have gained any other way.”100 Despite the careful concessions in these circumspect appeals, Grey continued to see and correspond with Diosus. Her letters to Zane after May, however, betray a pained realization that he was withdrawing and she was losing out to Dolly.101
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