Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  It was not the love between Bertha Amory and Tredennis that interested her; it was the lack of love between Bertha and Richard Amory. Through One Administration has been called a political novel, and indeed it is partly that. Its picture of lobbying, of machinations and intrigues, is vivid and convincing. Frances’ portrait of Washington is confirmed by Henry Adams’ biographer: “The political tension never relaxed for a moment. A kind of breathlessness was always in the air. Each day during the Washington season some new disclosure, some overwhelming turn, seemed always to lie beyond the corner.” Adams reported that Henry James was revolted by the intrigues. Dubious dealings were then, as now, always coming to light. Secretary of State Blaine was reviled as “the continental liar from the State of Maine”, when he was found to have been involved in profitable but shady railroad deals. Through One Administration examines a “struggling, manoeuvring, over-reaching, ambitious world”. It also examines a failed marriage, the consequences of marrying the wrong person.

  Bertha Amory has made the mistake of “merely marrying the man who loves her”. The story is her tragedy written not solemnly, but lightly. “There is a fashion in emotions as in everything else,” said Bertha. “And sentiment is ‘out’. So is stateliness . . . Griefs are as much out of fashion as stateliness . . . Making light of things . . . is a kind of fashion nowadays.” But Bertha, like Frances, has a hunger in herself to be more serious. The sadness is that “we have obliged ourselves to be trivial for so long that we are incapable of seriousness”. For a time, it is possible to deceive oneself, to think that nothing matters, to amuse oneself continually, to enjoy excitement and diversion.

  Bertha admits, as Frances could never admit: “I am not very fond of anything or anyone. Not so fond even of Richard and the children, as I seem. I know that, though they do not. If they were not attractive and amiable, or if they interfered with my pleasures, my affection would not stand many shocks.” The men, though each one is distinct from the others, are shadowy compared with Bertha. The plot is complex and would be impossible to summarize, but as a portrait of a woman in her time, Through One Administration is a rich achievement.

  R. O. Beard in an article in the Dial for October 1882 worried about “A Certain Dangerous Tendency in Novels”. Through One Administration, like Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower, which had also just been published, was “stained by a covert but unmistakable depreciation of the most sacred vows”. Beard pleaded for “a purer type of fiction, which shall leave untouched by the faintest breath of dishonour the sanctity of wedded lives, and which can be placed in the hands of youth, with the assurance that an active sense of virtue and honor will be fostered by its influence”. This attack, ludicrous as it now seems to us, is surprising even in context, for there is no happy ending for Bertha. If one must find a moral, it is surely to have more respect for the marriage vows, to take much more thought before making them. What really angered critics like Beard was Bertha herself—this woman created by their own society, for Washington and Bertha are inextricable. They wanted women to be quiet, honest and innocent, concerned with fashion and not with power, affectionate and not passionate. It was not a woman’s job to throw out phrases, such as “All men are born free and some equal”, “I make a practice of recognizing my children when I meet them on the street”, or “The worst punishments in life are the punishments of ignorance”.

  But for every reader like Beard, there were twenty who relished the book. A contemporary critic in Literary News drew attention to the way the author had “lived and learned and suffered” in the ten years since That Lass o’ Lowrie’s. Another called it “a scathing attack on corruption in government”. It was one of Frances’ most successful books. A more recent critic wrote that Mrs Burnett showed how “a natural storyteller could use the complicated inter-relations of the social, financial and political life of Washington for their proper function of developing character . . . The tragic ending . . . gives Mrs Burnett a right to claim a place with the most logical of realists.”

  It was a fact that Frances found difficult to accept—that critics take writers more seriously if their books end unhappily. She preferred happy endings. “There ought to be a tremendous lot of natural splendid happiness in the life of every human being,” she once wrote to Vivian. “The acceptance of the belief that this is only a world of sorrows is hideous and ought to be exterminated.” She once said, “I do not think anyone has ever existed who so strenuously, passionately insisted that people should be happy as I do.” “Good God!” Tom says, almost in exasperation, in The De Willoughby Claim, “Why can’t people be happy—I want people to be happy.” In life, the problems involved in making people happy are often immense, things get out of hand, so much is out of our control. In art, Frances could have her own way; and all her other books end happily. Through One Administration was too near the bone for her to be able to deceive herself. There could be no easy romantic solution for Bertha Amory, nor indeed for Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was not possible for her to be happy in making others unhappy.

  We know, from his letter to Edith, that Swan Burnett was not happy in 1881 when Frances, having sent the boys down to old Mrs Burnett in New Market, went off to Long Island with most of Through One Administration in her luggage. It was due to begin serialization in the Century, the successor to Scribner’s under Gilder’s editorship, the following November. Also in her luggage was the draft dramatization of “Esmeralda”. “I hope it may be a success,” Swan wrote to Edith, as we have seen. “It has cost her enough in various ways to make it.” It had probably cost Swan more. Frances wrote to him jestingly to tell him he “might fill my place with another person of equal attractions” if he could find one. Was it a very good joke—when it really did seem she was happier away from Swan and Washington?

  Years later, Frances made Lady Maria say in The Making of a Marchioness: “If people will marry, they should choose the persons least likely to interfere with them.” Swan seems to have had this negative virtue. He never tried to stop her doing what she wanted to do. At Long Beach she and William Gillette were working on the “Esmeralda” play, which they had begun at Nook Farm the previous summer. At least, they were supposed to be working. She wrote to Julia Schayer:

  Mr Gillette comes out to me and we are convinced that we are working on the play—only the sea and the sand and the sky and things, don’t you know? This morning we simply played with sand and he said it rested him to look at my tennis suit, which he is amiable enough to think one of the prettiest things he ever saw. Yes, dearest, I know what you are saying in your little mind, but when I tell you in confidence that he is engaged to be married and things, and is supposed to be densely in love, you will know he is quite safe and accusations are quite needless.

  There were other attractions: “Yesterday . . . I was hopelessly enslaved by a member of the band, but today I find I was mistaken in my feelings, it is the leader who has enslaved me by the beautiful manner in which he gazed at me—or somebody else—while he led Schubert’s Serenade in the most impassioned style.” In another letter, Frances describes “A Greek God in bronze” who turns out to be the local swimming instructor. “He . . . is the most wonderful creature. His physique is perfection, simple and pure. I never noticed a man’s body before. I was always so actively employed searching for their brains—but his—Mon Dieu! Gott im Himmel! Santa Maria—and things! He wears a dark-blue woven, tight-fitting garment, reaching to the knee and leaving his superb arms and divine antique legs bare. He has a head like, oh, like Augustus Caesar etc., close, crisp hair and a Neapolitan fisherman’s close, dark-blue cap on it. And that is not the worst of it, either. The color of him, Julia, the color of him! He is sun-burned all over—the most exquisite pure bronze! I grow wild and have to erase!—and far be it from me to presume to ask him how much it is a lesson.”

  More important, of course, than one-sided flirtations with bandsmen and swimming instructors, was the two-sided flirtation with Richard Gilder, her “dear R.W.G.”.
She wrote, again to Julia Schayer:

  When we were at Milton one day, R.W. said to his wife, “See here, Helena, could I take this girl down to Long Beach and keep her all night? Would it be proper and all that sort of thing?” And Helena said, “Certainly it would. You couldn’t do it if she was not married, but under the circumstances it is perfectly proper.”

  A strange remark to make concerning a young woman with a novel in her luggage, which would show “a dangerous tendency” to undermine the institution of marriage.

  I regarded it rather as a joke and forgot about it, but “Lo en beholes!” as Uncle Remus says, when I met him at the train the creature inquired where my satchel was and to my utter amazement it turned out that we were really to stay all night—and we did—and of all the lovely times!

  We rambled about on the beach and grubbed in the sand and then went back to the hotel (only a few yards from the beach) and dined on the immense piazza, and then went back to the beach and sat in the sand again and bayed at the moon and talked and talked and talked, and I sang little songs, and things loomed up generally as they haven’t for a long time, and we sat there until midnight and then went and had lemonade on the porch, and he said he was afraid to leave me for fear I would say something interesting after he was gone and finally we retired, and as all our baggage consisted of one small pocket-comb, we had to perform our toilets with it by turns—he throwing it over my transom, and I returning it under his door.

  It is perhaps significant that this episode seems to mark the end of the close relationship between Gilder and Frances.

  Esmeralda was finally finished, in spite of the distractions of sand and tennis dresses. Daniel Frohman, then a young producer, agreed to put it on at the Madison Square Theater, New York. It was one of the newest and best equipped theatres in the country. The play opened in Newark, New Jersey, in September and had its first night in New York on 29th October 1881. The critics were not particularly enthusiastic. One apparently got extremely wet on the way to the theatre: “The cosy little house was quite full of the different kinds of our best people, in spite of the rain that made umbrellas or rubber coverings a necessity to all who scorn hacks.” It was “a charming enjoyable play” but the thing that pleased the critic most was the chance to see Kate Denin again. The delicate girl had once been a fixed favourite in the city but had gone to California twenty-seven years before. “The thousands upon thousands who applauded her . . . have been slowly but surely contributing to the wealth of such close corporations as that of Greenwood Cemetery. It is wholesome for New Yorkers to see Kate Denin again. It gives rise to such cheerful thoughts.”

  Whether it was because of Kate Denin’s presence, the performance of Annie Russell in the title role or Frances’ skill (Will Gillette admitted she had done most of the work), Esmeralda was a distinct success. It ran for three hundred and fifty nights and made a good deal of money. Two years later it was produced at the St James’ Theatre in London under the title Young Folks’ Ways. The Times gave it a great deal of space. “Freshness of scene, character and motive, combined with perfect healthiness of tone . . . [are] happily to be found in the new play . . . A simple and truthful picture of American life . . . as it is lived in the log cabins of North Carolina and amid the oppressive gaiety of Paris, this play with many faults possesses a distinct value as what M. Zola calls a document humain, and must be assigned in that respect a higher rank than any recent production of the English stage.”

  A “Casual Critic”, writing anonymously in the Pall Mall Gazette, lamented the state to which the theatre had come if this were indeed so: “It is not, we may say at once, a drama with a very sensible life of its own, and that it should be exactly what it is, and yet be, as we may say, where it is, suggests a good many reflections as to the sources at which the English stage, so robustly constituted in so many ways, and yet so sadly athirst, is at present compelled to drink.”

  We hardly need the confirmation of a letter Henry James wrote the next day—“I have written an article (anonymous—don’t mention it) for the Pall Mall Gazette . . .”; this serpentine sentence could have come from only one hand. But fortunately perhaps for their future friendship, Frances remained in ignorance of the authorship of this long review entitled so discouragingly, “A Poor Play Well Acted”. James showed some particular perspicacity as to where Frances’ future success might lie when he wrote: “It is composed of elements of a touching simplicity, put together with an ingeniousness which would be commendable in a moral tale for the young.”

  Fortunately again for Frances, the taste of the New York public was less mature and sophisticated than that of Henry James. She came to the end of 1881 with her play playing to full houses at the Madison Square Theater. Moreover her novel, serialized in the Century, was being devoured monthly by eager readers. She was tired and she could afford to sit back. It was time she saw more of the boys. They were sorry she spent so much time writing things they could not possibly understand. When she next wrote, it would be something for them.

  Chapter Four

  The Universal Favourite

  1882–1886

  Lionel was now seven and Vivian was five. Frances said, more than once, “The one perfect thing in my life was the childhood of my boys.” It is not a remark any of us would dare to make nowadays. And it seems, at a first glance, to fit in only too neatly with the popular idea that the Burnett boys, like little Lord Fauntleroy himself, must have been an unnatural pair of mollycoddled mother’s darlings. Certainly Frances made great demands on them—she had great plans for them. She saw them as temples she was building, clay she was moulding. In 1897 she wrote to Vivian, “I daresay it would surprise you if you knew how I have thought it out and planned it ever since you were born.” She had planned that he should be happy, that he should have every opportunity she had not had as a girl, that he should always enjoy the Party.

  “They must be happy,” she would say to herself. “Their lives must be as bright as I can make them; as far as lives can be perfect, I must make them so. Nothing must be lacking.” In his book, Vivian put it like this: “Her pattern was the Fairy Godmother and her guiding principle, love.” “Perhaps one’s children are like the talents in the parable,” she wrote to Vivian after Lionel’s death, “and when I show you two boys at the end—whatsoever the End is—someone will say “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ ”

  The dangers and difficulties inherent in her attitude were obviously enormous, and there was much heartache in store for Frances. But the extraordinary thing is that the boys’ childhood does seem to have been most attractively normal. They were not spoilt. Frances’ particular mixture of periods of absorption in their characters and activities, alternating with periods when she was completely involved in her own work and pleasures, seems to have worked surprisingly well.

  Lionel was the shy, sensitive one; Vivian the outgoing, talkative one. Both were affectionate, generous, courteous, acquisitive. They climbed up to Frances’ workroom, her Den at the top of the house in I Street, laden with treasures for the drawer in her desk—“bits of grass or pebble, gorgeous advertising cards, queerly shaped twigs or bits of wood, pictures out of papers” and five-cent toys from the Misses Stutz’ emporium on New York Avenue. “Please may I come in?” they said, “I’ve brought a treasure for you, Dearest.”

  They took part in the life of the household in a way that would have been unusual in England at that time. There were two servants in the house on I Street—a black couple, Carrie, the cook, and Dan, a man of all work. “They were his friends and they formed together a mutual admiration society,” Frances recorded in “How Fauntleroy Occurred”, an article written in the 1890s for a women’s magazine. We learn much about Vivian’s childhood from this piece. The way it is told jars on our tough mid-twentieth-century ears but there is nothing nauseating about Vivian himself. Some credit for this must certainly go to his father. Where Frances, as Fairy Godmother, lavished not only love but possessions on the boys, Swan
“believed more in the Spartan method and used often to say, when the boys were asking urgently for something: ‘Well, I would not give much for a boy who couldn’t make something out of a chunk of wood that would do as well.’ ”

  The stories about Vivian are legion and they are good stories. From the beginning, when he carried grubby handfuls of exhausted violets upstairs to his mother, he seemed determined to be charming. Even in an age which suspects charm, it is difficult not to be charmed. Told off for playing with the fire, he said, “Don’t you know I’m a Westal Wirgin?” He was interested in everything, the strata of the earth, the nature of a simoon, the interior arrangements of camels. The day before he was three, he was pinching his own arm and, finding it seemed to be built on something solid, he asked his mother about it. She gave him a few simple facts about his anatomy, the nature of bones.

  “If I could see under all the fat on your little body,” Frances said, “I should find a tiny skeleton.”

  “If you did,” said Vivian, delighted. “If you did, would you give it to me to play with?”

  One day, he asked a neighbour if she were “in society”. She replied by asking him what “in society” meant, hoping to hear his views. “It’s—well—there are a great many carriages, you know and a great many ladies come to see you. And they say, ‘How are you, Mrs Burnett? So glad to find you at home. Gabble, gabble, gabble, gabble. Good morning!’ And they go away. That’s it.” He was not criticizing. In fact, he enjoyed society. He liked handing things round on Tuesday afternoons. He was merely giving an impressionistic picture.

  The one thing the boys disliked about society was having to dress up, and Frances did have a weakness for picturesque clothing. The boys had blue jersey suits with red sashes and they also had best suits of black velvet with lace collars. These last may well have been partly inspired by Oscar Wilde’s clothes on his visit to them but they were by no means unusual wear for small boys at this period, a year or two before the Fauntleroy cult spread their appeal. In the Lady in 1885 (a few months before Little Lord Fauntleroy began to appear as a serial in St Nicholas) there are illustrations and descriptions of a style for a “little fellow of seven . . . tunic and knickerbockers of sapphire-blue velvet and sash of pale pink. Vandyke collar and cuffs, if not of old point lace, should be of Irish guipure.” Velvet had been a popular material for boys’ suits since the 1840s. Compared with this sapphire-blue and pink, the Burnett boys’ black and white seems positively plain. It also seems extremely tough and masculine when compared with the skirts and frills which eleven-year-old Inglis Synnott, E. M. Forster’s father’s cousin, was wearing in 1848. But the other point of comparison, of course, is with Tom Sawyer—with his bare feet, pants, shirt and straw hat.