by Ann Thwaite
I am a kind of pen-driving machine, warranted not to wear out, that is all. And if I show signs of doing so, it is certainly astonishing and uncalled for. I have somehow begun to feel myself held by a remorseless, silent Fate.
Write-write-write. Be sick, be tired, be weak and out of ideas, if you choose; but write! There are people who are saying that to me always, even when they don’t utter a word. I am ashamed to look them in the face, if I have not done my usual task. If they beat me with whips, they could not drive me more than they do by their thoughts and eagerness for my work, which communicate themselves to me without need for speech.
Does anyone ever think that I ought to be happy? . . . I should be ashamed to write down upon paper, even in secret, the thoughts that are forced upon me, in spite of my efforts to crush them back every day of my disappointed life . . . I wonder if I shall ever understand—after I die—if there is an “after”. But if there is not, and I am only a straw after all, and all this passion and misery is nothing but the wind that twists me! If I was sure of that, then the world should be mine as well.
I am so tired this morning that my arms and hands tremble as I write, and every nerve in my body seems unstrung. I can see my weariness in my face when I look in the glass; my eyes are bloodshot and heavy. I could see it in the face of a man or woman I had never met before, but no one sees it in me—and who would care, if they did? and if I were to die tonight—what would that matter?
It is a poor revenge—this dying. My dying would be a poorer revenge than any other. It would be a surprise, because I have nothing to die for, but I have even at last reached a stage of psychology which teaches me that it would be nothing more. People die every day and always have died. Who would remember me a week after the earth lay on me? Not one, I swear, of those who are nearest to me. Edith would care, and that would be all. And not one thought would rise with power enough to influence the future of the children I have almost given my soul for . . . God give me my life for my children’s sakes!
It was ironic that whereas most nineteenth-century husbands would have resented having a working wife—and there were times when Swan did—sometimes it seemed to Frances that he cared more about her books than he did about her. There were those moments when Frances felt Swan would not remember her “a week after the earth lay on me”, echoing the earlier poem: “E’en while my grave grass with Spring rain is wet, you will have found it easy to forget.” He might forget her but he would go on writing to her publishers.
It is an interesting reversal of the situation Henry James describes in “The Lesson of the Master”, where the writer is forced by his marriage into the market-place: “My wife makes all my bargains with my publishers for me, and she has done so for twenty years. She does it consummately well; that’s why I’m really pretty well off.” But the lesson is that “marriage interferes”. All through these years, while Frances wrote to Gilder about the stories themselves, it was Swan who wrote the business letters to Scribner’s. More than twenty years later, during her second marriage, Frances was to confide to Ella Hepworth Dixon how much she could have loved “an unbusiness-like husband”, one who did not urge her to finish Chapter Ten that morning. In January 1880, asking for the contract for Louisiana, Swan appended his first critical P.S. “Why is it that you abandoned the idea of advertising Haworth’s ‘extensively’ as you wrote us you intended doing?” Charles Scribner sent the contract and assured Swan that Haworth’s was advertised “more extensively than any of the autumn publications” and would be again in the spring. In April Louisiana was published in both countries and Frances went north to Canada again to be on British soil on British publication day. Swan liked the appearance of the book but had “serious doubts about the advisability of making it a $1.25 book”. He wishes they had adhered to their “first intention of making it a $1.00 book. I suppose, of course, the recent advance in paper has influenced you largely but I think the public would rather have a less expensive paper and pay less for the book.” Scribner replied very politely that he did not think they had made a mistake about the price. There must have been times when he wished Swan would confine his energies to ophthalmology.
For Swan was himself forging ahead in his profession. He had established a dispensary for treating the diseases of the eye, the first in Washington. After the slow start, patients were now coming in large numbers (between twenty and forty each day it was open) and providing him with ample opportunities for research. His writings contain diagnostic and therapeutic points concerning the eye of the Negro (physiologically, somewhat different from that of the Caucasian), which had not been previously recorded. In 1878 he had become a lecturer in ophthalmology and otology at the Medical School of Georgetown University and in 1883 he was to become a clinical professor. The British Museum has a copy of his translation of The Introduction of the Metrical System into Ophthalmology dated 1876, when they were in Paris. In 1879 he published another translation and in 1883 an original work Refraction in the Principal Meridians of a Traxial Ellipsoid. An 1882 lecture at the Smithsonian was published under the beguilingly simple title “How We See”.
It was not for want of other occupations that Swan bombarded Scribner’s with letters and finally decided to accept an offer from James R. Osgood and Company of Boston for Frances’ new book A Fair Barbarian, which had begun to appear in Scribner’s Monthly in January 1881. Swan was apparently unaware of Osgood’s reputation. Bret Harte and Harriet Beecher Stowe had complained loudly about his carelessness and flickering application. In fact, he had been heading for bankruptcy for ten years. But in 1881 he was campaigning strenuously to attract not only Frances but William Dean Howells and Mark Twain. Scribner’s brought out a new uniform edition of That Lass O’ Lowrie’s, Haworth’s and Louisiana in June. “It has been a matter of great regret to us that the publication of A Fair Barbarian was not confided to us. Without forcing ourselves upon your notice, or claiming any special attention, may we inquire whether we may expect to be the publishers of other writings of Mrs Burnett? We trust that an opportunity will be given to us of competing with other Publishers for that honor.”
Poor Scribner’s had behaved impeccably, but apparently there was no clause in their contracts about future books and the Burnetts felt no loyalty. Swan wrote coldly, “As regards Mrs Burnett’s future books . . . she is always open to any proposition which is likely to further her interests from a business point of view.” The following February he actually asked Scribner’s in a curt letter if they would dispose of the plates and stock on hand of all Mrs Burnett’s books—“and if so, at what price?” Scribner’s naturally refused. “We have spent a large amount of money in advertising them and bringing them to the attention of the public and we would prefer to keep any profit there may be from their sales.”
In March 1881, Emily Dickinson wrote to Mrs Holland: “The neighbourhood are much amused by A Fair Barbarian and Emily’s Scribner is perused by all the Boys and Girls—even the cynic Austin [her brother] confessed himself amused . . .” Frances had visited the Dickinsons in Amherst the previous May. “In the midst of luncheon,” Frances recalled, “there was brought to me a strange wonderful little poem lying on a bed of exquisite heartsease in a bow.” Unfortunately, we don’t know which poem Emily sent her.
In A Fair Barbarian Frances looked again at a confrontation which was, inevitably, to obsess her all her life. In Haworth’s the young American, Hilary Murdoch, returns to the industrial Lancashire his father had left thirty years before. In A Fair Barbarian the atmosphere is more that of Cranford than of Mary Barton, the setting a village in which “it is not our intention or desire to be exciting, my dear”. Octavia, Belinda Bassett’s American niece, is in every way calculated to upset the village. She is unaffected, good-natured, generous, but she is also careless of the conventions, decidedly “forward”, and she does not play the piano. It is a light undemanding book but the relationship between Octavia and Francis Barold is more complex than in the usual romantic novel and Oc
tavia is an extremely convincing character. It is tempting to see her adventures as a gloss on Frances’ own visit to England in 1872. But Eliza Hodgson had made sure that Frances knew the conventions. If she was at heart an Octavia, on that English visit anyway Frances had appeared convincingly enough as an English girl. Frances was to use the theme of the American in England in Little Lord Fauntleroy, of course, and in two of her major adult novels—The Shuttle and T. Tembarom. It was to earn her, from Marghanita Laski, the appellation “poor man’s James”.
Frances was already reading Henry James. She had bought The Europeans on its publication in 1878 and wrote to Gilder: “What a neat imagination that man has . . . He does not make me glad or sorry or triumphant. All the time I am admiring Henry James and thinking how beautifully he goes all round a thing and what excellent order he leaves it in—with no ends straggling—no gaps—no thin places. ‘How clever you are,’ I keep saying, ‘and how neat.’ ” But she did not seem to fear comparison with Daisy Miller, which had been published just the year before A Fair Barbarian. She did not meet James on his visit to Washington in 1882. But both Frances and James met Oscar Wilde.
Wilde was in the middle of his extraordinary lecture tour, weary of such questions as “Is it true you colour your bathwater with essence of verbena?” At Yale three hundred students had turned up at a lecture wearing red neckties and carrying sunflowers. At Rochester the manager had had to send for the police. Locks of Wilde’s hair were in great demand. He was paid $1,000 for an hour’s lecture. James spent the evening of 22nd January 1882 with the Lorings in Washington “and found there the repulsive and fatuous Oscar Wilde, whom, I am happy to say, no-one was looking at”. James’ friend Henry Adams refused an invitation to receive at a reception at the British Legation in honour of Wilde. But Frances was delighted with him.
He came to her house on I Street wearing “a black silk claw-hammer coat, fancily flowered dark waistcoat, knee breeches, silk stockings and patent leather pumps with broad buckles, an inconspicuous flower in his button-hole”. It is tempting to assume that the Burnett boys’ clothes, to be immortalized by Little Lord Fauntleroy, were influenced by this visit. The story goes that Frances, instead of introducing Wilde to her other guests, as a good hostess should, spent most of the afternoon talking to him in a corner. Chided for this later, she said, “What would you? I can see the rest of you at other times.”
Frances was not a member of Henry Adams’ circle. As James said, it “left out, on the whole, more people than it took in”, and Adams tended to want beauty in women. Frances was not beautiful. She had once paid a social call on Mrs Adams but it was never returned. Adams had been careful when his novel Democracy was published anonymously in 1880 to deny its authorship. “The secret had to be kept if the Adamses were to hold up their heads in Washington. Only a short time later,” wrote Adams’ biographer, “two women novelists satirized Washington society and paid the extreme penalty.” The first was Mrs Dahlgren, whose book was called A Washington Winter; the second was Frances Hodgson Burnett, the book Through One Administration.
Frances had begun another large novel in 1880. She had written to Gilder, “I have about three hundred pages of a book done and generally I don’t seem to care about it.” It was In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim and was not completed and published until 1899. She spent the summer of 1880 at Nook Farm, just west of Hartford, Connecticut, the community founded in 1851 by John Hooker and his wife, Isabella Beecher Hooker. Nook Farm’s inhabitants included Hooker’s brother-in-law, Francis Gillette, United States Senator, abolitionist and temperance reformer, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Frances’ admired Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Isabella’s sister, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain’s collaborator on The Gilded Ages and a whole network of writers and their relatives. Twain himself lived there but he was spending this summer of 1880 in Elmira while his Nook Farm house, turretted and extraordinary enough already, had thirty thousand dollars spent on its further embellishment. The next year Twain was to send Frances an inscribed copy of The Prince and the Pauper and it seems likely they had met by this time. Frances was at Nook Farm principally to work with William Gillette, Hooker’s nephew, who had been encouraged by Mark Twain to write for the theatre. Frances had met him on her visit to Boston. He had had a great success with his play The Professor and he had promised to help her dramatize her story “Esmeralda”.
Frances returned to Washington in time for the excitement of the Presidental election. General Garfield, the Republican Presidential candidate, was a neighbour and family friend. The Burnetts had moved to 1215 I Street in 1879. A plaque on the wall there now, put up in 1936 by David O. Selznick, commemorates the fact that ON THIS SITE FIFTY YEARS AGO THE DEATHLESS CLASSIC LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY WAS WRITTEN. The houses must have been renumbered for the plaque is a few doors below the present number 1215. The plaque includes a quotation from a letter written by Oliver Wendell Holmes (see page 150). The house belonged to General Grant, to whom it had been presented by some of his admirers. He had never lived there and the Burnetts rented it from him. The Garfields lived on the corner, opposite the dressmaker. They had three children—Abe, Irving and Molly—and the four boys played together a good deal. During the campaign, Vivian and Lionel became passionately involved. If they heard “Rah for Hancock!” in the street, they would fling open the windows, lean out precariously and shout, “Rah for Garfield!” There was in fact, at this period, very little to choose between the two parties: “In a sense, parties became ends in themselves, with Democrats existing to battle Republicans, Republican existing to oppose Democrats.” But “how could one disown the party of the martyred Lincoln?” Garfield’s background, apart from his propinquity, appealed enormously to Frances. His experiences had in some ways paralleled her own. His father had died when Garfield was two and the widowed mother had struggled to bring up her four children in a log-cabin in rural Ohio. The boys thrilled at the story of the hero of Chickamauga.
There was a pleasant letter from Mrs Garfield in reply to Frances’ congratulations on the General’s nomination:
Mentor, Ohio,
November 13 1880
My dear Mrs Burnett,
. . . Tell the small boys that the account of their patriotic exploits has been read at our table, and while the voters at the table all regard them as deserving great merit for their heroic efforts to endanger their lives, Mrs Garfield is compelled to admit that her admiration is nearly all lost in sympathy for their afflicted mother, watching with terrified eyes the third story windows.
Thanks for your congratulations. General Garfield joins me in kind regards to yourself and to Doctor Burnett, and the whole family join in a round-robin of kisses to the young Republicans.
Very truly yours,
Lucretia Randolph Garfield
Garfield got to the White House by an extremely narrow margin. But he was there. Frances wrote gaily to Gilder: “Would you like any little thing in foreign missions? Say—Court of St James? If so, mention per postal.” The Burnett boys, as Vivian remembered it, rode “their newly acquired bicycles in the porches and halls [of the White House], colliding with sluggish senators and cabinet officials.” This idyllic state of affairs did not last long. On 2nd July 1881, President Garfield stood on Washington Railroad Station with Secretary Blaine and was shot by a disappointed office-seeker called Guiteau. By a strange coincidence, only a few days before, Guiteau had threatened to kill E. L. Burlingame, the Scribner editor, for turning down a manuscript he had submitted. For Garfield, it was bullets not threats. Two lodged in his body. It took him more than two months to die. Henry Adams was curiously unmoved by his friend’s death. He thought of Thackeray and Balzac. They had “never invented anything as lurid as Garfield, Guiteau and Blaine”. But Frances thought of Garfield himself, and of the extraordinary fact that she, the girl from Islington Square, had known the assassinated President. She wrote a poem and read it at a memorial meeting held by the Washington Literary Society:
&
nbsp; . . . Watchman! How goes the night?
In tears, my friend, and praise
Of his high truth and generous trusting ways.
Of which warm love and buoyant hope and faith
Which passed life’s fires, free from all blight or scathe.
Strange! We forget the laurel wreath we gave,
And only love him—standing near his grave . . .
It was at this same society; a few years before when she had first come to Washington, that the president of the society had walked her round and patted her hand, saying, “Why, you little childish young thing. What do you mean by writing books like that?” Frances was no longer a young thing. She was nearly thirty-two—and Washington, for all its charms, was as much of a jungle as any mining town in Lancashire.
She had been exploring it all that summer in her new book Through One Administration, having finally put aside In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim, “the fiend” which had dragged at her for months. She wrote to Gilder in raptures. The new book interested her as she had never expected to be interested in anything again. “As it develops, it pays the subtle compliment to my intelligence of proving to me that I know ever so many things I scarcely thought I knew. I don’t think I ever wrote anything which seemed so to write itself . . . I hate and detest love stories,” she added, surprisingly perhaps for one who had written so many. “But it seems that you must have their grinning sentimental skeletons to hang your respectable humanity and drapery upon.” It was undoubtedly true that Frances put no special value in many of her books on the love between man and woman, the sexual relationship. Many of the most strongly loving relationships are between mother and son, father and daughter, between sisters, between friends. It was true of her, in the phrase James used of Stevenson, that “the idea of making believe appeals much more than the idea of making love”.