In President Woodrow Wilson, Laura thought she perceived the perfect embodiment of the kinds of high ideals for which the war was being fought. His high-minded rhetoric coincided perfectly with her own thinking about the need for people to embody elevated purposes and principles in their lives. She praised the “beautiful ideals” that he enunciated in his wartime messages. After the president's speech to the nation announcing the country's war aims in January 1918, Laura lauded its statement of American principles. “As a nation we stand for unselfishness, courage and self-sacrifice,” she wrote in a column titled “Victory May Depend on You.” Pursuing this theme, she noted, “It is indeed a ‘war in each man's heart,’ and as the battles go in these hearts of ours so will be the victory or defeat of the armies in the field, for a nation can be no greater than the sum of the greatness of its people. There never before has been a war where the action of each individual had such a direct bearing on the whole world.”39
After a false report that the Armistice had been signed, followed by a premature victory party, Mansfield's residents participated in a real celebration on November 11, 1918. People were awakened by wild shouting, blaring whistles, and clanging church bells. School was dismissed for the day, and folks bedecked their houses with flags, paraded around town, fired guns into the air, and hung the kaiser in effigy. Several people drove to Hartville to take part in the celebration at the county seat. Laura was on the refreshments committee for the homecoming bash staged the following May for returning soldiers. The war reinforced patriotism and nationalism in the United States, although during the next several years many people would lose their enthusiasm for foreign adventures. But the experience also expanded many people's horizons, making them more aware of and concerned about what was happening beyond their country's borders. A meeting to raise funds for Armenian and Syrian relief was held in the Methodist church, and several of Laura's friends were appointed to the local committee. Laura herself would soon be made more aware of places such as this by letters from Rose, who was traveling abroad.40
Laura turned fifty the year the United States entered the war. If aging was supposed to slow a person down, she did not appear to be following form. If anything, she seemed to be getting busier as time went by. In 1917, for example, Laura helped organize and then became secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield branch of the National Farm Loan Association, which received its funds from the federal government. In one of her articles for the Ruralist she noted how, from time to time, she would join Almanzo in the field when he needed her help. Just as a farmer needed to be master of many trades, she indicated, a wife, too, must be ready to tackle many challenges. Besides being available to assist her husband at a variety of tasks,
with brains, and muscle if necessary, the farmer's wife must know her own business, which includes the greatest variety of trades and occupations ever combined in one all-around person. Think of them! Cook, baker, seamstress, laundrywoman, nurse, chambermaid and nurse girl. She is a poultry keeper, an expert in dairy work, a specialist in canning, preserving and pickling and besides all else she must be the mother of the family and a smiling hostess.
In describing the typical farm woman, Laura was describing herself. Still, she wanted more.41
Clues to Laura's personality can be found in her Ruralist columns. In fact, they are one of the best sources we have, since she did not leave a large cache of letters, diaries, and journals into which she poured out her feelings like Rose did. She possessed a sense of humor, even about herself. In a column about the virtues of tactfulness, she recalled how once, having been less than tactful at a party, she had tried to make amends for it. Waiting for an opportunity to say something nice to the hostess before she left, all she could think of saying was, “Oh, wasn't that water good.” The episode left her feeling, she said, “like a little girl who had blundered at her first party.”42
She insisted so much on the virtues of laughter and cheerfulness that it leads one to suspect that eliciting them in herself was something of a task. In the company of other people, she generally kept her emotions under control and maintained a healthy social distance. Restraint, not exuberance, came naturally to her. Unpleasantness and harsh words repelled her, although she was capable of them herself. She could be highly judgmental of others and was quick to fault those who did not live up to her own high religious and moral standards. Thus, perhaps she felt it necessary to work at and give the appearance of “friendship and cheerfulness and hospitality” because they were not easily achieved. Every home, she informed her readers, possesses “a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings” of family members that is easily discernible to visitors. “If the members of a home are ill-tempered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house,” she observed. “If they are kindly, generous, good-tempered people, you will have a feeling of warmth and welcome that will make you wish to stay. Sometimes you feel that you must be very prim and dignified and at another place you feel a rollicking good humor and a readiness to laugh and be merry.” She set the second type of person forth as an ideal, but most of the time she probably conformed more to the image of primness and dignity than she did to laughter and merriment.43
Laura told people that she was not musically inclined, that the only musical instrument she was able to play was the phonograph, and that she sang only when she knew she would be drowned out by others. Yet, she possessed “a little music in her feet” and later would make her father's fiddle and family's singing a central theme in her fiction. “We do seem at times to have more than one personality,” she wrote in one of her columns, a truth that could have been derived from observing herself. If she had a tendency to be bossy with Almanzo at times, she realized her fault and fought against it. A neighbor told editor John Case, who was writing an article about Laura for the Missouri Ruralist, that Mrs. Wilder possessed a delightful personality. Always bright and cheery, she knew how to look at the sunny side of things, Case wrote. If Laura and Almanzo sometimes quarreled about how to manage the farm, it was a sign not only of disagreement but also of their mutual willingness to work together and make cooperative decisions. She and Almanzo were partners in every sense.44
Above all, Laura grasped hold of ambition and maintained a sense of destiny, not sure exactly wherein her achievement would ultimately lie. It was unusual for a rural-Ozarks resident to hope for such success, least of all a woman at a time when their options and opportunities remained heavily circumscribed. But somewhere inside herself, Laura retained a sense that she was different from other people, that there was something beyond the ordinary that she could accomplish. By the turn of the decade she could already discern in Rose's success a sign that ambition and determination could overcome mighty barriers. Frequently, her mind turned back to the fairies and the dreams and fantasies that they embodied. In a column in November 1922 she recounted an Irish fable in which the fairy king told a hesitant horseman as he contemplated a high barrier that needed to be crossed, “Throw your heart over the wall, then follow it!” Hesitancy and doubt must be banished, Laura counseled her readers. “If we would win success in anything,” she advised, “when we come to a wall that bars our way we must throw our hearts over and then follow confidently.”45
The wall that barred Laura's way, as she moved into her fifties, was less a barrier denying her access to opportunity than a failure on her part to understand just what it was that she hoped to achieve. During the war, she had been caught up in the frenzy and then had gone through the transition to peace, confronting all the problems others did in trying to return to normal conditions. There were many things to keep her busy: housework, chores on the farm, her women's clubs, church activities, writing for the Ruralist, and just being a neighbor. There remained the possibility of taking her writing beyond local farm-journal markets and breaking into new markets, something Rose could help her with if she could come up with some good subjects.
In June 1919, thanks to Rose, Laura's article “Whom W
ill You Marry?” was published in McCall's magazine. Rather than her usual “Mrs. A. J. Wilder,” she used the pen name “Laura Ingalls Wilder” to identify herself. The article was part of a series that Rose's editor friend Bessie Beatty was running in the magazine. Beatty had met Laura during her visit to San Francisco in 1915, and it was probably at Rose's suggestion that Beatty now invited Laura to write on the subject of marriage from a farm woman's point of view. The finished product became a tribute to the virtues of farm wives, describing the contributions they made to the success of the farm and the partnership they entered into with their husbands at the time of marriage. There was no reason to pity a farmer's wife, for she, of necessity, combined the desires of the “modern woman” with the traditional activities of housekeeping. “On the farm a woman may have both economic independence and a home life as perfect as she cares to make it,” the article asserted. “Farm women have always been wage-earners and partners in their husband's business. Such a creature as the woman parasite has never been known among us. Perhaps this is one reason why ‘feminism’ has never greatly aroused us.” This statement perfectly expressed the relationship of Laura and Almanzo.46
Laura must have voiced some surprise about or even chided Rose about the amount of rewriting that she had done on the piece from New York City, where she was now living, before sending it to Bessie Beatty. Rose wrote back in reply, “Don't be absurd about my doing the work on your article. I didn't re-write it a bit more than I rewrite Mary Heaton Vorse's articles, or Inez Haynes Irwin's stories. And not so much, for at least your copy was all the meat of the article.” She explained why she had deleted some material that her mother had written about large corporate trusts, and she noted that the payment for the article, while modest, was “really a fairly decent price for one article of a series considering that your name has as yet no commercial value.” Rose went on to encourage her mother to revise an article that she had already written at Rose's suggestion: the situation of modern girls in comparison with life when she was a girl. Laura expressed reservations about writing on the subject, prompting Rose to comment: “If you really don't want to do it, why let it go. There's no use making oneself miserable for the sake of an article more or less. I thought the subject would be an interesting one to you, that when you really began to think about it lots of new aspects of the question would occur to you, and that it would be fun to turn them around in your mind and work them out.”47
She returned the draft to her mother with detailed comments on how she thought it ought to be rewritten, with much more attention paid to description and detail. “If you want to do it over, this way,” Rose encouraged her, “I don't think there is the least chance that you will fail to sell it. Do it, and send it on again, and then if it has to be reshaped a bit, or cut to fit, I will do that for you and sell it to [Beatty]. You want to follow up your first article with another one very quickly, in order not to lose the advertising value of the first one, but to add to it.” Meanwhile, Rose indicated that she had not had time to go over some children's stories that Laura had also sent along to her. “I glanced through them, and think them good,” she indicated. “But they are not so important as the articles, for there is no opportunity to make a name with children's stories. I will get to them as soon as possible and see what can be done about marketing them, however.”48
What the nature of these “children's stories” was is impossible to say. Four years earlier, while working as a newspaperwoman, Rose had used several of her mother's poems, such as “Where Sunshine Fairies Go,” “The Faery Dew Drop,” and “Naughty Four O'Clocks,” in a feature for the San Francisco Bulletin titled “The Tuck ‘Em In Corner.” It would be a long time before Rose would realize how lucrative writing for children could be. Meanwhile, Laura, for one reason or another, did not succeed in responding to Rose's challenge to write more articles for national magazines, for it was not until 1925 that, once again with Rose's assistance, she managed to place two articles in Country Gentleman about living in a farm home.49
Meanwhile, life went on at Rocky Ridge, Laura continued to write columns for the Missouri Ruralist, dispense loans and do the bookkeeping for the National Farm Loan Association, and stay actively involved in her various church and club activities. It was with great joy and expectation that she and Almanzo heard from Rose that she was planning to return home to stay with them for a while. After living for a time in New York City's Greenwich Village, Rose had traveled to Europe in May 1920, visiting Paris, Vienna, Prague, London, and Berlin, as well as Budapest, Sarajevo, Constantinople, Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, and other points. She took an almost mystical liking to Albania, living for an extended period in its capital, Tirana, and befriending a teenage boy named Rexh Meta, who, she believed, in acting as her guide along dangerous mountain trails had been responsible for saving her life. Later she would pay the expenses for his education at Cambridge University in England.50
After almost four years of traveling, Rose sailed home to the United States in November 1923. After staying several weeks in New York, where she made connections with old friends and literary people, she boarded a train for St. Louis and then for Springfield, arriving in Mansfield just in time for Christmas. Laura met her at the depot, and, after taking a day to recuperate her energy, Rose had her father drive her into town to pick up her baggage at the depot and to say hello to some people whom she had not seen for years. With their daughter back home to stay with them, Laura and Almanzo were happy and content.51
6
Turning to Autobiography
1923–1932
Rose was exhausted when Laura met her at the Mansfield depot after an all-night train ride from St. Louis, with a changeover in Springfield. It had been four years since their daughter had been home, and Laura and Almanzo were delighted to see her again. But she was hardly a girl anymore. Gray was beginning to streak her hair, lines that they had not noticed earlier creased her face, and some of the spring had gone out of her step. At thirty-seven, their only child was approaching middle age, the realization of which left Rose periodically depressed during the next several years.1
The reason Rose had come home again, after several years of adventuring in foreign places, is not entirely clear. She had hoped to utilize her experiences in Europe and the Middle East as material for her writing, but little had come from those adventures. Her finances were precarious, she had lost contact with many of her friends, and she was physically exhausted. To her writer friend Guy Moyston she explained, “In Baghdad I got darn tired of picturesqueness, caravanserais [sic] and camels and Arabs—and though, between ourselves, that was not my whole reason for returning, I am now darn glad I left Samarkand without the sunshine of my presence, and beat it back through Paris and New York.” She also felt an obligation to her parents, who at fifty-seven and sixty-seven were unable to work as much around the farm as they previously had. Time was creeping up on them, and now she felt duty-bound to look after them. She searched for some arrangement that would minister to their needs and simultaneously secure her own freedom.2
To what extent this sense of responsibility was imposed upon her by her parents and to what degree it flowed from Rose's own dutifulness and personal needs is difficult to sort out. Certainly her parents were delighted to see her and to have her around again; her mother especially could be clingy and stubborn. After only a month at Rocky Ridge, Rose wrote to Guy Moyston, “I don't know whether I shall ever be able to get away from Mansfield again or not. My mother is old and not very well, and wants me to stay here.” If not for that, she said, she would have been in New York working to get back to Albania. But while Laura's health was not good in early 1924 and remained precarious for some time (she contracted ptomaine poisoning the following year) and while Almanzo, as always, needed to take things relatively easy, neither of them was exactly feeble. He had another twenty-five years to live, she thirty-three. Feeling obligated to supplement their income, Rose contributed five hundred dollars a year for their suppor
t. But her sense of physical entrapment on the farm is difficult to understand aside from her own personal needs and feelings. Perhaps it emerged out of guilt that she had left them at such a young age and stayed out of their lives for so long. Perhaps it was indecision about what to do with her own life. Or it may have resulted from a continuing sense of subordination to her mother, who kindled in her contradictory emotions of affection and resentment.3
Being an only child compounded the problem, intensifying the emotional bonds—as well as conflicts—between the generations. “I know, you have the same feeling about your mother that I have about mine,” Rose wrote Guy. “Only it isn't so bad for you, because you're one of three, and I'm the only one. And besides, you're a son, and I a daughter. Men aren't expected to stay at home.” Both parents were immensely proud of their daughter and reveled in her success. At the same time, they wished she would settle down, lead a conventional life, and raise a happy family. Meanwhile, she was the only one to whom they could look for financial support in their old age. Rose, for her part, was intensely aware that they were growing increasingly dependent upon her. “If we didn't have families, living would be a simple job,” she sighed. “Or perhaps if we had bigger families.” She concocted a variety of schemes in an effort to resolve her dilemma: move her parents to a city apartment, send her father to warmer climes for the winter, find a farm for them in California, or—impractically—have them move to England.4
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 18