Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

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Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 25

by John E. Miller


  Apparently their writing activities led Laura and Rose to withdraw from most of their outside activities during the early 1930s. Whereas earlier the Mansfield Mirror had frequently recorded their presence at meetings of the Justamere Club, bridge parties, and various other social gatherings, now there was scarcely a reference. Laura's age as well as her need to work on her books would have figured prominently in her withdrawal from community activities. Not that the family became social recluses. They continued to entertain at home from time to time. The newspaper reported the visit of the family of Julian Bucher, who had spent summers with them when he was a boy, at “the beautiful country home” of the Wilders in September 1934. The J. W. Brentlingers spent a Sunday afternoon visiting the Wilders a month later. A former Mansfield boy, Ogden Riley of Peoria, Illinois, stayed with them while visiting old friends in and around town. And there certainly would have been other unreported visiting back and forth between the Wilders and their friends and neighbors. The Craigs continued to be valued friends, and Rose grew more and more attached to Corinne Murray, who shared many of her interests.31

  Mostly, though, Laura, Almanzo, and Rose kept each other company, often walking back and forth across the ridge to each other's houses to talk, share meals, or take tea. The diary that Rose kept regularly from 1931 to 1935 chronicles the frequency of these visits, which waxed and waned depending on the weather, work schedules, and other factors. Mostly it was Laura and Rose getting together; less often Almanzo was involved. Waffles or pancakes and sausage might make breakfast. Laura invited Rose over to make doughnuts. Fried spring chicken was sometimes on the menu, or fresh greens out of the garden, or tapioca cream and sponge cake. Sometimes they saw each other every day; at other times maybe only once a week or less (assuming that Rose was fairly thorough in noting these encounters in her diary). Most commonly they got together two or three times a week. In addition, there was always the phone, and sometimes even Almanzo used it to call Rose.32

  Laura and Almanzo owned a radio, and Rose came to listen to several of President Roosevelt's fireside chats, although the family was more interested in local gossip or things around the farm than politics. Sometimes they played chess or dominoes. They celebrated each other's birthdays, and at Christmastime they got together to trim a tree. Almanzo was known to shoot a game of pool, and now and then they drove or walked into town to take in a movie—maybe a Charlie Chan feature or Wallace Beery in Treasure Island or Pauline Lord in Mrs. Wiggs. They may have gone in to listen to Saturday-night band concerts on the square and probably attended some of the ceremonies and festivities around Memorial Day and Fourth of July.33

  Often they drove to nearby towns to visit friends, shop, eat, or take in entertainment. Sometimes Corinne Murray or a friend from out of town went with them, or a group got together to visit some place such as the Shrine Mosque in Springfield. Cedar Gap, Mountain Grove, Seymour, Ava, and Hartville were short distances away. Sometimes they ventured farther out, traveling to Branson, or Crystal Lake, or down into northern Arkansas.

  Rose's life changed dramatically when a fourteen-year-old orphan named John Turner showed up on her kitchen porch one cold, rainy afternoon in September 1933, offering to do some work in return for food. Rose responded to her mothering instinct and not only gave the boy a job weeding the flower bed but also took him into her home and nursed him and put him into the Mansfield high school. Later, upon discovering that John had an older brother named A1 who was still living on their uncle's farm near Ava, she took him in, too. Although the relationship between her and the boys was not always a smooth one, she discovered in them a new purpose for living. They helped restore in her a sense of fulfillment and nurturing, brightening her outlook on life. No longer expecting to find a loving relationship with a man, she invested her affectionate instincts in the boys, who partially reciprocated her feelings but who also could be a great frustration to her. At the end of the year she recorded in her journal, “John is a deep joy to me. There is endless interest, amusement, fascination, charm, in such a relationship with a child.”34

  Even so, the year ended dismally for Rose. Much of her malaise flowed from her ambivalent attitudes toward her mother. “I want to keep on going but do not quite see how,” she wrote, “and there is no alternative—rather than justify my mother's 25-year dread of my ‘coming back on her, sick’ I must kill myself. If she has to pay funeral costs, at least she will cut them to the bone and I will not have to endure her martyrdom and prolong it by living.”35

  It would be a wonderful thing if Laura had written and saved letters, diaries, and journals the way her daughter did. Had she done so, we could understand more about her thoughts and feelings as she wrote her novels. As it is, we can know in excruciating detail the innermost dreams and expectations, frustrations and suicidal wishes of Rose; about Laura's inner life we know relatively little. The most revealing evidence about her is to be found in her published writings—including her newspaper journalism—and in a few letters that have been preserved.

  Laura finished her “Indian juvenile” on February 1, 1934. Afterward, the family drove to Mountain Grove, where they ate some “awful food in [an] awful restaurant,” in Rose's words, and went to see a movie, The Invisible Man, which Rose described as “rotten.” But they all had “a gay, noisy time” driving home. Laura had worked on the manuscript during the second half of 1933. In this, her second autobiographical volume, she directly confronted the presence of Indians on the frontier. The story revolves around the family's moving to “Indian Territory” in Kansas and then being forced to leave when the federal government enforced the terms of a treaty with the Osage Indians by requiring white intruders who were squatting on the reserve to vacate. Although she had neglected to mention Indians in her first book about the allegedly “vast, empty forest” of northwestern Wisconsin, and while Indians were treated only marginally in her later narratives, Laura was not unaware of their presence on the frontier, and her thoughts about them were well-meaning, if often ambivalent.36

  What is notable about Laura's attitudes toward Indians is not so much that they contained a considerable degree of narrow-mindedness and prejudice but that they, to some degree at least, transcended generally accepted notions that were held about racial inferiority and the Indians’ alleged backwardness. Wright County had few blacks residing in it. Most of them were concentrated near Hartville, where their annual picnic was a big event in the area. Missouri had been a slave state and was the site of a number of Civil War battles, including the Battle of Hartville in 1863. Not surprisingly, Missouri's white population, deriving from a largely southern background, by and large accepted common racial stereotypes imputing black inferiority. Some towns enforced traditions that blacks would not be allowed to settle in them. Bigoted language was commonplace, and the idea that the races were equal would have been considered radical in the extreme by most people. Within this context, Laura could have been forgiven for harboring some of the prevalent prejudices directed against blacks, Indians, and other minorities. Her religious training and the precepts of fairness and benevolence that her parents imparted to her inclined her toward a more enlightened viewpoint.37

  Rose waited three and a half months before tackling her mother's “Indian story.” She was trying, with middling success, to churn out more of her own material, often running dry but managing to complete two short stories, “Hope Chest” and “Perfect House,” during the first part of 1934. It was only when she could not get started on another story that on May 20 she reluctantly turned to the task of working on her mother's novel. Laura stopped by after the first week to see how things were going, and Rose gave her a copy of what she had completed up to that time. The days were excruciatingly hot. Once Rose recorded the temperature at 125 degrees; the next day it was 135, breaking the thermometer. Laura was sick for a while, and once Rose walked the mile back and forth between the houses four times. Her eyes were giving her trouble, and she went to Springfield to have minor surgery on her eye
lids. Most days, however, she managed to stick to the task, and by June 10 she had finished her revisions on her mother's manuscript. After an early dinner, they all walked into town to watch Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama. After enjoying a day off from her labors, Rose took a little less than two weeks’ time to copy what they were calling “High Prairie” and to get it ready to mail to the publisher. The whole job took her five weeks; afterward there was nothing to do but wait for word from New York.38

  Despite the heat, which continued to hover around 100 degrees, Rose made another short stab at writing “The Hard Winter” before finishing a story called “Object Matrimony,” which quickly was bought by the Saturday Evening Post for nine hundred dollars. She also worked on a story called “Old Fashioned Christmas” before deciding to escape the July heat by going with John Turner on a five-week rail vacation to Florida, arriving back home on August 27. She wrote more short stories by the end of the year, but Rose again grew restless, more than ever eager to escape Rocky Ridge. Her mother was getting on with her writing now, and Rose had the additional responsibility of taking care of Al and John, who soon would be ready to head off to college. On February 26, 1935, she wrote in her diary, “I can not stand this house, this sunk-in-the-muck way of living, any more. I must get out.”39

  By the time that day finally arrived, Rose's departure from Mansfield had taken on a sense of inevitability, and the parting turned out to be not nearly so traumatic as she had imagined. In April she received an offer from the McBride Publishing Company to write a volume about Missouri for a series of state books that the company was in the process of publishing. At the time, Rose was just finishing a preface for a collection of short stories set in a fictionalized Mansfield that she had previously published. Longmans, Green, and Company was publishing the collection under the title Old Home Town. The McBride offer seemed especially enticing to Rose, since she had increasingly been turning her attention toward history. A state-oriented book would allow her to develop some of her ideas about how history should be written with regard to a single state about which she possessed some personal feeling and knowledge. The fifteen-hundred-dollar advance offered by the company also attracted her. Rose started researching the book in mid-May by reading books and taking notes about Missouri history at home, but she quickly concluded that to do a decent job she would need to use a good research library, like the one at the State Historical Society in Columbia. Thus, the decision was made to go live in the college town for an extended period of time while she did the necessary research. It was easier for her to move out under the circumstances, since neither she nor her parents realized that she would never return to live with them.40

  Laura decided to ride with Rose and Corinne Murray on July 20 for the 170-mile drive to Columbia, where Rose installed herself in a room downtown in the Tiger Hotel. From there, it was only a few minutes’ walk to the State Historical Society Library on the University of Missouri campus. Laura and Corinne drove home the next day. Life would be different for Laura and Almanzo without Rose, who had been living at Rocky Ridge for the previous seven and a half years. Only later would they all come to understand that she had left the place for good. Rose bought a secondhand Ford to travel around the state to gather material for her book, and Corinne Murray drove back to Columbia to accompany her on the trip. Unfortunately, the anecdotal, historical manuscript that Rose produced for the McBride Company did not meet their expectations. They had more of a contemporary travel book in mind, and her manuscript never was published. The better part of a year that she had spent working on it was wasted.41

  Laura's third book, whose title had gone from “High Prairie” to Little House on the Prairie, appeared toward the end of September 1935. Ida Louise Raymond at Harper and Brothers had sent it to a Midwestern librarian for evaluation before deciding whether to publish it. The librarian who read the manuscript liked it very much. As soon as copies were available, Laura gave one to the Mansfield Mirror, and they printed a story about it on the front page. Once again reviewers were quick with praise for the book and for the illustrations of Helen Sewell, which were described as “childlike and inviting” by one reviewer and “just right” by another. “Furiously interesting,” M. L. Becker called the book. Families should sit down and read it aloud, Books suggested. “Mrs. Wilder has caught the very essence of pioneer life, the satisfaction of hard work, the thrill of accomplishment, safety and comfort made possible through resourcefulness and exertion,” the New York Times reviewer wrote. “She draws, too, with humor and with understanding, the picture of a fine and courageous family, who are loyal and imaginative in their relationships to one another.”42

  During late 1935 and early 1936 Laura worked on a fourth volume, this one about the family's stays in Minnesota. She skipped over the interlude in Burr Oak, Iowa, perhaps because the memory of that period when her little brother, Freddie, died was too painful, perhaps because describing the move away from Walnut Grove and back again would complicate the story too much. Instead, she wrote it as if they had simply lived in Minnesota once. Writing in the middle of the Great Depression and during some of the worst drought and heat the country had ever experienced, Laura must have felt a sense of déjà vu in describing the difficulties of pioneer life in Minnesota during the 1870s. The challenges facing the family had included drought, grasshoppers, prairie fires, and crop failure, similar in many ways to the devastation wrought by the hard times of the 1930s, with its dust storms, insect invasions, and market collapse.

  Rose, in Columbia, had the manuscript in hand by the end of March 1936, but she put it aside for the time being. “Have to finish my mother's goddam juvenile, which has me stopped flat,” she noted in her diary on May 10. In June and July she finally tackled it. This was the first volume that Laura had written without Rose being nearby for consultation. Now the revision process would have to take place at a distance, with letters passing back and forth between them. Not surprisingly, Rose resented the demands on her time occasioned by her mother's book. Once again her own material was selling well, which was encouraging. She earned $9,717 (minus commissions of $946) for her efforts that year, her best performance since 1926.43

  The kinds of things that mother and daughter previously would have discussed over tea or breakfast now had to be taken care of in letters. Laura depended on Rose's judgment almost entirely to make the necessary modifications. To aid in the process of revision, Rose constructed a series of detailed questions about food, clothing, furniture, buildings, and a dozen other things that they both wanted to get right and to be understandable to their readers. The collaborative process that continued to develop between the two was not simply a one-way street, with Rose in the driver's seat; both were intimately involved in the process. Working together at such a distance was hard, but they managed. After several weeks at the task, Laura sent a list of suggested cuts and modifications, telling her daughter that it would be better if Rose made the changes on the version that she had in her possession. “I have no copy of the thing here that I can go over,” Laura explained. “If I should try to use the first scraps of scribbling, I would get us all confused for I changed it so much from them. That makes it hard for me to tell you where to cut.”44

  Laura made a map depicting Plum Creek and its relation to other landmarks, including their original dugout, the new house that her father had built for them, the stable, the swimming hole, the fish trap, the firebreak, the path to the Nelsons, and the road to town. “This was and is prairie country,” she reminded Rose, warning her not to confuse it with the hills and the gorge that they were so familiar with at Rocky Ridge. Aware that her memory was less than perfect on many details, she nevertheless was able to remember many particulars, even though she had been only seven years old when the family moved to Minnesota. Following the precedent set in the first book of elevating the girls’ ages, in this one Laura made them all a year older than they actually had been at the time.45

  Laura's or
iginal manuscript had failed to mention the railroad tracks on the edge of town that she and her sisters had to cross on their way to school, and Rose asked about the omission. Her query jogged Laura's memory. She drew another map to show where the railroad had been and how it was situated in relation to the half dozen or so buildings that she remembered being in the town at the time. Rose was full of questions. She asked about how potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables could have survived in the ground after rabbits had eaten their tops, and Laura explained that Minnesota's soil differed from Missouri's, making it better able to preserve things that remained in the ground. She asked about the big “crab” that her mother had seen in the creek, not believing that a fresh-water crab was likely to be found there, but they decided to leave it in the book anyway. She asked about vanity cakes, about the rooms at the back of a store where a party was held, about the recipe for vinegar pie, about when school terms were held, about the desks and books and blackboards, about sidewalks and song lyrics, and about many other things.46

  Laura dutifully answered all of Rose's questions as best she could, thanking her for making suggestions and for correcting her mistakes. “I know they are many,” she admitted. “I have written you the whys of the story as I wrote it. But you know your judgment is better than mine, so what you decide is the one that stands.” Many of the scenes were so vivid in her mind that she did not always consider that her readers might have a hard time visualizing what she was talking about without more elaborate description. Regarding the map of the town that she had drawn, she noted, “I see the pictures so plainly that I guess I failed to paint them as I should.” Not always, however, did Laura follow her daughter's advice. When Rose suggested that it would make more sense for Laura and Mary to have visited the town before walking there on their first day of school, her mother responded that she did not think they actually had seen the town before their first walk to school, so that was the way it stayed in the final draft.47

 

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