Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  There were no parties in 1892. She sat in her writing room in the large house she had bought three years before and in which she had spent so little time, and remembered her early days. She wrote long letters to Burlingame. She told him she had become so carried away by her own childhood that she was working harder than was wise: “three days ago, have written steadily from nine o’clock in the morning until six at night with only about fifteen minutes for lunch, I rather went to pieces . . . I must go to the sea.”

  It was not only hard work that was getting her down. She had spent a great deal of time and emotional energy on the case of Frances Courtenay Baylor. It is worth going into this story in some detail, for it is typical of a number of such incidents throughout Frances’ life. She meant so well. She wanted to be so kind; but she was a hopeless judge of people and she was not a very good judge of other people’s work. In this case, she had not even read Miss Baylor’s novel Claudia—but Miss Baylor was an old friend who had written other books Frances had liked. When she heard that Lippincott had offered only a paltry sum for the new novel, Frances was indignant. She knew Miss Baylor badly needed money. “It is such a burning shame,” she wrote to Burlingame, “that she should be the prey of people like the Lippincotts.”

  Poor Miss Baylor, so gentle, so timid, so sad, had, it seemed to Frances, fallen among thieves. Frances suggested Miss Baylor should send her manuscript to Scribner’s, to “a firm of gentlemen”. So Miss Baylor refused Lippincott’s offer, which was as surprising to them “as if a bowl of milk had drawn a sword”, as Frances put it to Burlingame, rather spoiling the effect by adding, “which I consider rather a neat figure of speech”. Frances was sure that if Lippincott “get her again she will always be in bondage and the one thing left to me in life is to try to free people from bondage”. Miss Baylor sent Claudia to Scribner’s. But Scribner’s did not like it. They could not publish it.

  Frances was distraught. “I was so sure—so sure I was going to be able to help her, I was positively thanking God in advance for letting me have the chance to do it. But I don’t know about God—who does? It seems to me sometimes as if He—or She—or It—or They—whatever it is—were only made furious at me for these poor little struggles to help those who need helping so much. It is not only that it always comes back upon me in the form of trouble or anxious responsibilities—but it seems to hurt the ones I am trying to care for. It would have been so much better for this sad little lady if I had never tried to help her . . . Shall I ever learn? No, never-never-never. Tomorrow I shall do something quite new and brilliant in its inspirational idiocy.” She asked Burlingame to write a letter to her which she could show to Miss Baylor, which would soften the blow—saying that “Miss Baylor has not been at her best when she wrote the book, because you know her best is very good indeed and this work does not do justice. . . . And please be so kind, kind, kind as your heart can be—and please try to encourage her for the future . . . If you could just give [her] the feeling that this failure is only pour le moment. . . I believe it is just encouragement—a little good luck—that she wants . . .”

  Burlingame wrote the required letter and Frances sent Miss Baylor the cheque she had been counting on. If the way to hell is paved with good intentions, Francis said she had decorated streets “in the most intricate patterns”. She never learned from her mistakes; over and over again some well-meant interference led to trouble, worst of all twenty-five years later when she found herself sued for fifty thousand dollars.

  In 1892 there were other irritations. The English reviews of Children I Have Known, a collection of short pieces, were pleasant enough on the whole, but the Athenaeum urged Frances to pay more attention to her style. “The warmest admirers of That Lass o’ Lowrie’s cannot but earnestly hope that Mrs Burnett will be on her guard against tendencies dangerously akin to gush and verbal redundancy, which have been too observable in all the most recent successors of that fine work. Over-great fertility is always demoralizing. How little first-rate work is done by even first-rate novelists.” Frances was surely reminded of the strictures of the Literary News in February 1889. Another three years had gone by and still she had written nothing worthy to stand with That Lass o’ Lowrie’s and Through One Administration.

  Frances was plagued by reporters, curious about what she was up to, about her unconventional marriage, about the possibility of another Fauntleroy. Mostly she was not communicative, but occasionally she was charmed into talking and regretted it afterwards. “I am ever so stupid sometimes when I am talking to a person who seems nice-minded and honourable . . . But I have such a horror of the American Newspaper creature that I am afraid of him after he has gone, howsoever respectable, he has appeared.” If journalists were anathema, publishers were a different matter. This was the happiest period of Frances’ relations with Scribner’s, even though to her surprise she suddenly realized that they were only paying her a royalty of 12½%, whereas Warne in London paid fifteen. She decided she was not businesslike, but it seemed extraordinary that such a thing could have escaped her attention. “I admit being perfectly ridiculous in such matters and only saved from ruin by the fact that I record everything in black and white and keep it in a dispatch box.” She hoped they would alter her terms for The One I Knew the Best of All—but at least they were gentlemen. Some day she would write a beautiful article about publishing, and parents would say of their sons: “If he is Clever enough and Noble enough—and sufficiently akin to Seraphs I will make him a Publisher.”

  “I have had publishers in various countries”, Frances wrote—American, English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Polish—but the publisher whose publications she was most interested in was the one who presented the story of the Drury Lane Boys’ Club, seventy-eight small pages in pale blue covers with hardly a lead or a misprint in the whole book. The printing was done in the basement of the Massachusetts Avenue house on the press of the Moon, the weekly paper. The publisher was of course Vivian. Frances had written the account for him to use. When Scribner’s Magazine used it with Vivian’s permission, they printed a notice to the effect that it could be obtained in the form of a small book. They bought from Vivian eight hundred copies of his publication at eighteen cents a copy. Frances was thrilled about the whole thing. He talked of “galley proofs” like a professional, she said.

  In an article written at about this time, with Stephen’s experiences uppermost in her mind, Frances encouraged parents to let their children follow their own inclinations. If her son wants to be a butcher, Frances wrote, “I shall endeavor to help him secure a butcher’s shop in the best possible business situation and to try to invest his legs of mutton with an air of picturesque distinction.” But it would be much nicer if he were to become a publisher, or a musician.

  Washington was becoming unbearably hot. It was time they got to the sea. They found Marshall Cottage at Swampscott, Massachusetts, not far from Lynn, where they had spent earlier summers. Vivian, aged sixteen, wrote to his father in Washington as Frances finished off The One I Knew the Best of All.

  Swampscott Mass.

  July 9th ’92

  Dear Daddy:—

  Since you absolutely refuse to write to me after I have written to you once I suppose I must needs write again. No more news than there was at first hardly. I have been doing absolutely nothing. I take pictures, walk on the sands and come back and take pictures again. At present that is all there is to do. I don’t know intimately one girl or boy of my age in the place, yet somehow or other I am not having such a miserable time. I have taken some quite good pictures, for me, and I would enclose some of them but I have no paper to print them on. We have resurrected a guitar of Mama’s and Kitty, who is here now, is teaching me how to play. An old banjo has also been brought to light which, counting my banjo, makes three string instruments in the house. Kitty plays the Guitar and I the banjo and Kitty sings and it is real pretty. We did it last night on the veranda and the effect was quite nice. I tried singing a little too and Ki
tty says she thinks I am going to have a nice voice . . . I am having a little row boat built for “me and the rest”. It is going to be very pretty and we are going to call it “Cherie”. I will probably bring it down to Washington to use on the river. My stock of information has about run dry so, dear old Daddy, I will close this letter by hoping you are not too lonely.

  Lovingly,

  Vivian

  With her autobiography on its way to Burlingame, Frances started turning over various ideas. She felt “in a working mood” but was not quite sure what to do next. In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim was still waiting to be finished but she wanted to do something new. “I wonder if the Regency—or one of the earlier Georges would be attractive. Do you think so?” she asked Burlingame. “Or is the past out of fashion?” She was being businesslike. “If I did these things would the Magazine want them and what would it pay me by the thousand words . . . I cannot afford to waste time.” She was fascinated by the fact that the Regent who wore stays and curled his hair had once been a beautiful ardent boy. “If the people will not live for me as really as if they walked down Piccadilly today I shall throw them aside,” she ended the letter reassuringly, though she would hardly have done so if the past was in fashion and Scribner’s offered a vast sum per thousand words. Frances’ interest in this period eventually went into a play, The First Gentleman of Europe.

  Giovanni and the Other, the collection of short stories about children which had already appeared in England, was published in America that winter. The Dial was harsh: “To us it seems an unworthy successor of the book which made her famous. The titular story is far too melancholy to be healthful for the young. The grief in it—that of a mother for the death of her son—is so far from being restrained that it is sentimental and morbid in the extreme.” But fifteen thousand copies” had been ordered before publication. It sold briskly. All her books were selling briskly. Dolly had recently been re-issued in England. F. C. Burnand wrote a lyrical letter about it: “It is the most perfect book—most charming, most natural—but I have no words at hand to convey my admiration of it. You will read what I shall say in Punch.” He hoped it would sell a hundred thousand in various languages all over the world. “Pardon my enthusiasm—it masters me and breaks out once ‘in a blue moon’.”

  Early in 1893 Frances was reunited with her sister Edith, the audience and solace of her childhood. They had not seen each other for many years. Edith’s first husband, Pleasant Fahnestock, the Knoxville carpenter, had died of smallpox many years before, soon after they had gone to California on the trail, it seems, of gold. It was probably from Edith’s letters that Frances had got the detail for Octavia’s background in A Fair Barbarian. Edith had been left a widow with two very small sons, Archer and Ernest, the younger boy scarred for life by the smallpox which had killed his father. Years later Edith had married again, to a man called Frank Jordan, and the child of this marriage, a small girl, had recently died at the age of six. Edith had had more than her share of unhappiness. Frances urged her to come East for a holiday and then proposed that they should travel to England together. Frances would show Edith the country she had not seen since leaving Liverpool twenty-eight years before.

  Just before sailing Frances wrote to Scribner, asking him to send some of her books, which had been requested for exhibition in the Women’s Department of the World’s Fair in Chicago. “I have grown so tired of Woman with a capital W, though I suppose it is rankest heresy to say so. I don’t want to be a Woman at all—I have begun to feel that I want to be something like this—‘woman’. Nevertheless if everybody is sending books, I must send mine.”

  Frances must, at the same point, have gone to the Chicago Fair herself, for her Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress could surely not have been written otherwise. The Fair was an extraordinary phenomenon, with streets thronged with characters straight out of the Arabian Nights, ‘hootchy kootchy’ dancers, a cyclorama of the Swiss Alps; a full-size knight in armour on a full-size horse, both made out of dried Californian prunes, a Ferris Wheel, a Lapland village, a collection of nasty-tempered ostriches and a Chinese theatre. There was something for everyone—a City Beautiful with Rose Gardens and minarets and fountains. Julia Ward Howe thought the Cairo Dancers indecent, but thirty years later Theodore Dreiser was still breathless, remembering “this vast and harmonious collection of perfectly constructed and snowy buildings . . . this fairy land”. Frances had been commissioned to write the story, originally as part of a World’s Fair Book, and although Eugene Field, the instigator of the scheme, had written “you could not be dull or unfelicitous, even though you tried to be”, this was by far the weakest of her full-length children’s books, a fairy-story without real savour, a box of chocolates with no hard centres.

  Edith and Frances sailed in May 1893. Soon after their departure, Swan wrote to Charles Scribner for their address: “Did Mrs Burnett leave her London Banker’s address with you? She left it with us but it has been misplaced.”

  Frances was glad to get away from America again. The old restlessness, the old feeling that the Party was going on somewhere else, was strong in her. She could never stay in one place for long. This was her thirteenth Atlantic crossing. In the next twenty years, she crossed it twenty more times. This may seem unremarkable nowadays with businessmen flying back and forth constantly, with television personalities commuting, with the journey time counted in hours. When Frances travelled, it was still an event. Messengers hurried up the gangways “leaving baskets and boxes of fruit and flowers with cards and notes attached”, farewell offerings to be placed in staterooms. Passengers lay for days on deck in steamer chairs, looking at the dark water, listening to the throb of engines, drinking beef tea and reading novels. Others walked “their customary quota of carefully-measured miles the day”. The voyage made a decent interval, a pause for thought, between the two ways of life. “One seems to need them both,” Frances said. Now she wanted a home in England. It was not enough to have a banker’s address. She needed to belong.

  The house she eventually chose—after summer months reading Pepys at The Glade, Long Ditton Hill, just across the river from Hampton Court—was 63 Portland Place, London W.1. Frances rented it from the autumn of 1893 until 1898, when she found Maytham Hall in Kent, which was to be the English house which meant most to her. The Portland Place house, though it combined the utmost respectability with an interesting atmosphere, was a continual worry. It was large and demanding. It was a giant with an open maw “whose only diet is coin of the realm”. “I always need so much money in spite of the most muscular effort,” Frances wrote in May 1894, relieved to receive from Scribner’s a royalty cheque for $2,181.30. At the end of August there was another $2,394.30, royalties on The One I Knew the Best of All. But it was a considerable task to run a house like 63 Portland Place, not on inherited money, not on income from investments, or the toil of other hands, but on the earnings of one pen. The fuel bills alone were enormous. “I have fires everywhere, of course,” she wrote in February 1895, “but the ceilings are so lofty and passages so endless that to go from the library to the drawing-room or a bedroom is like going on a voyage to the open Polar Sea. I always rather expect to encounter icebergs with bears on them in my blue bathroom.” There were servants to be paid, and carriages to be kept up—a landau and a new Victoria (“delightfully cushioned and springy”). There were horses. There was entertaining. And there was Stephen, who made himself more and more indispensable throughout these years.

  The Portland Place house was the inspiration for Frances’ next major novel, which was intended to show the world she had not become just a scribbler of charming stories for children. Another volume of these was published in 1894. In England it was called The Captain’s Youngest—a good title, as Warne said, because the English “are so fond of soldiers”. In America it was called Piccino and Other Child Stories. The Dial, though conceding that “Mrs Burnett’s graceful style makes everything from her pen agreeable reading”, took her to task
for the picture of domestic misery in the story “The Captain’s Youngest”, “which no child should be able to understand; its termination is entirely too tragic”. The Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress, on the other hand, was criticized, justly, for exactly the opposite reason. The two small pilgrims “meet no difficulties whatever. They have no fear. They never get lost or confused, and find only courtesy and kindness.” We don’t know Frances’ reactions to these reviews. She never comments on them in her letters; she said she never read her critics. Scribner kept telling her the books were “going splendidly” in spite of the Dial. But it was nearly ten years before she wrote another book for children.

  The new book was to be a new departure. Underneath the high-ceilinged rooms, the fine Adam interior of 63 Portland Place, there is a large basement area with long underground passages leading out to the Mews behind. A Lady of Quality apparently had its beginning “in a dark back chamber, revealed at the end of one of the corridors by the chance scratching of a match”. “What a place to hide the body of a man you had accidentally killed,” Frances remarked to the group of guests that she had taken on the excursion as part of the evening’s entertainment.

  The body was that of Sir John Oxon, killed with a riding whip by the heroine, Clorinda Wildairs, the Lady of Quality herself. The time was the early eighteenth century, and Frances thought she was telling the story “exactly in the style of Richard Steele”. “I find I can imitate it so easily and the story is so exciting.” Frances was thrilled with her creation. Clorinda “is a magnificent creature who rides over laws as she leaps fences. Perhaps Scribner’s would turn pale at the sight of her—but to her last word she will be read and fought over and discussed.” “A brilliant London critic tells me it is the book of my life and the opening of a new career,” she wrote to Charles Scribner in New York.