by Ann Thwaite
Frances finished the book before leaving for London and the rehearsals of the English production of The Dawn of a Tomorrow. She was thrilled with the cast. Gertrude Elliot “has a depth and comprehension and strength. Miss Robson lacked”. Ellen Terry came to watch a rehearsal. “Never was there such an everlasting enchantress as that woman. She is such a real and vivid thing . . . She says I must write a play for her if I do it when she is ninety. It is to be full of lovely young things but the Ninety lady is to help them by pulling strings . . .”
Frances was feeling extraordinarily well for a change. An osteopath called Dr Horn had been helpful. “Has the motor gone to the re-makers?” she wrote to Vivian. “I shall be furious if it is not quite ready and beautiful when I return.” The gardens should be beautiful too. If they were not, the gardener, Mr Jaenicke, “is a double dyed villain”. The tone was light but with an overbearing note in it which was to become more and more common as she aged. “I expect everything to be radiant and, if I continue to be well, I expect to be radiant myself. I am surer and surer every day of the benefits of osteopathy.” She had celebrated her sixtieth birthday by feeling better than she had for years.
Once before, a Royal death—that of the young Duke of Clarence in 1892—had emptied the theatre for one of Frances’ plays. Now King Edward VII, his father, died a few days before the London opening of The Dawn of a Tomorrow. The success of the pre-London week at Liverpool had been tremendous. “Gertrude Elliot said ‘they eat it’ and Henry Ainley said, when the news of the King’s death came, ‘Well, nothing can spoil the play.’ ” Frances would not go to the first night at the Garrick on Friday, 13th May. She spent the following weekend at Lord Ronald Gower’s place, Hammerfield. “When I arrived here yesterday, Frank Hird met me with congratulations. He had read Walkley’s criticism and said he was, of course, very grudging but that he was obliged to admit that it was a big success . . . If audiences like the thing so much that they hush down applause because they cannot bear to lose a single word—the critics may say what they like.”
The papers were full of funeral procession routes, pictures of queens and princesses in crêpe, details of memorial services and the requirements of national mourning. Few were in play-going mood and the theatres were so empty there was not really much danger of those who were there missing a word. “The managers however are not disturbed because this was inevitable and they believe reaction will set in next week.”
Hammerfield was beautiful with primroses and cuckoo calls. Francis Shackleton, brother of the Polar explorer, then at the height of his fame, was there. He had a house in Park Lane and asked Frances to go there with Lord Ronald and Frank Hird and Josephine Browne to watch the funeral procession. “Lord Ronald is not very well,” Frances wrote, “and is, I am sure, depressed by the King’s death—not, I think, that he cared particularly for him but after all they were boys together . . . It recalls those days when he was very beautiful and young and surrounded by ducal and regal splendours—when his mother, the Duchess of Sutherland, was Mistress of the Robes and the Queen’s most intimate friend.”
The following Tuesday, Frances watched the procession which moved the King’s body to Westminster for the lying-in-state. She stood at one of the windows of the Sutherlands’ town place, Stafford House. She found it sad and impressive “watching the slow-moving kings and queens and nobles and troops and listening to the boom of the Dead March from a window of a house where the dead man had played as a child—and standing by a man who had been a child with him. King George walked behind the gun carriage on which the coffin lay covered with a gorgeous pall and with the Crown and other splendors on top. A little prince walked on either side of him.” At Lord Ronald’s side, Frances felt a participant, not an outsider.
On Friday they watched the funeral procession itself from the Shackleton house in Park Lane. Frances was delighted with herself. “I am a new creature. Thank God! Thank God!” She was up at five, waited and waited for the procession, watched it standing and yet felt strong enough after lunch to write long letters to Vivian and to Euphemia Macfarlane (her life-long friend from early days in Washington). “It is wonderful not to be tired and in pain every hour . . . It was all so magnificent and dramatic—the thousands of soldiers lining the route for miles—with reversed arms and bowed heads—the gun carriage with its stately solemn burden—the dead king’s splendid charger led behind him—the kings and queens and emperors following slowly—slowly—and the myriad silent people looking on.” The crowd was dressed entirely in black. “There has not been a touch of color to be seen in the streets since the day of the death. Every shop window is filled with black things and every shop has had to work night and day to provide mourning. Edith and I are in black from head to foot and shall be until we leave for America. Fortunately I had a black chiffon evening dress but we had to provide entire new outfits. We shall be obliged to wear them on the Continent as there are so many English people travelling that it would not be good taste to wear colors.”
Frances and Edith were leaving for the Continent on Monday to join Lord Ronald, Frank Hird and Josephine Browne at Lake Garda. Frances felt she “must have some Alps”. The first part of the holiday was delightful. They visited Cortina and drove “to Toblach through the Ampezzo Tal again—stopping midway to rest the horses while we lunched on the grass amongst flowers on a hillside”. They visited Innsbruck and Zirl, Zaufelt and Mittenwald. “We all feel we have seen all the beauty of the world . . . Tiny babies of two or three say ‘Grass Gött’ to you as you pass. Everybody says it.”
But then the weather changed and they were detained at Linderhof, near Oberammergau, by torrential rain which was said to have swept away part of the road, though there was a suspicion that the coachman who reported it was in the pay of the hotel owners. Frances rather enjoyed the rumours and reports and the comings and goings of half-drowned travellers. “Yesterday was really exciting,” she wrote to Vivian. She made him feel they might be cut off for weeks, marooned, running out of supplies. But the delays were minimal. She often exaggerated to make a good story.
In July, Frances was back at Plandome, working on a new book. This had been inspired by the success of the character G. Selden in The Shuttle—the irrepressible typewriter salesman from New York. Frances apparently had the details of that way of life from Archie Fahnestock, Edith’s son, who had tried to sell typewriters for a time. “Unsurpassed paper feed, practical ribbon mechanism, perfect and permanent alignment . . . A baby in a perambulator could learn to tick off orders for its bottle.” G. Selden’s sales talk comes over with great conviction. But it was the character, not his particular circumstances, that Frances decided to use for the hero of her next book, as long and leisurely a one as The Shuttle. She gave him a new name and a new job, whose details she again learned from the restless, unsuccessful Archie, now working as a society reporter at ten dollars a week.
T. Tembarom shares with G. Selden the cheerful slang and “picturesque national characteristics” of the young uneducated New Yorker, trying to exist on a paltry wage and optimistic that before long he will earn more. In The Shuttle, Selden endears himself to the rich and the aristocratic whom he happens to find himself among after a bicycle accident on the edge of Stornham Park. It occurred to Frances to write an adult version of Fauntleroy with a Selden-like character as her hero. Tembarom (a contraction of Temple Barholm), orphaned and penniless in New York at the age of ten, has raised himself by his own hard work and character from selling newspapers to the comparatively respectable heights of a reporter on the Sunday Earth with a “hall bedroom” in a third-rate boarding-house. This is his position when he hears the news that he has inherited an English estate with an income of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. The plot is full of preposterous coincidences but Tembarom’s character is very likeable and his behaviour in his temporary situation completely convincing. There is an excellent scene when his valet tries to do things for him which Tembarom has never heard of a man not do
ing for himself. Tembarom finds himself at a loss to know what to do in his vast country home. There’s a limit to the number of times you can read a joke in Punch. He asks his solicitor for suggestions.
“If you could ride or shoot, you could amuse yourself in the country.”
“I can ride in a streetcar when we’ve got five cents. That’s as far as I’ve gone in riding—and what in thunder could I shoot?”
“Game,” replied Mr Palford, with chill inward disgust. “Pheasants, partridges, woodcock, grouse—”
Tembarom thinks he would be more likely to shoot his own head off first. “He did not know that there were men who had gained distinction, popularity and fame by doing nothing in particular and hitting things animate and inanimate with magnificent precision of aim.” Tembarom knows very little indeed about the ways of the landed gentry and he has absolutely no respect for convention. The story, although far too long, is never dull. It had an excellent press. The Boston Transcript was typical: “It is an old-fashioned tale that is sometimes romantic, sometimes realistic, sometimes plausible, sometimes incredible but always enjoyable.”
Frances enjoyed writing it and was irritated by constant interruptions. This was one of the troubles about Plandome. It was far too near New York. She was plagued by reporters, not all of them as cheerful and charming as Tembarom. Often she refused interviews. When she did agree to give them, her views were likely to be distorted and “written up” in a way which made her irritated. Pictures were even worse, In T. Tembarom she writes feelingly of “baffled struggles to keep abominable woodcuts from being published in sensational journalistic sheets”. Frances found her views being requested on every imaginable subject. In 1908 she was even asked about “The Thaw case”—the case of the famous architect, Stanford White, murdered on the roof of one of his own buildings. “It seems unbelievable,” Frances wrote to Burlingame. “I saw that the young interviewer detested the impertinence but had been forced to come at the point of the sword.” It is interesting that on this occasion the girl reporter, a Miss Morgan, was able to interest Frances so much in a poem she had written that Frances sent it to Burlingame for possible publication.
She was asked for her views on marriage: “Women today are freer than ever before from the awful necessity of acquiring the first man in sight.” She was asked about women smoking. “Cigarettes are personal and every woman must decide if she wants to smoke,” she said mildly. She had begun herself many years before because she felt it helped her facial neuralgia. Her views on hell and the devil were more controversial. A syndicated article by Magda Frances West carried headlines all over the States: “THERE IS NO DEVIL” ASSERTS MRS FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT was carried by the Kansas City Post, for instance, in letters half an inch high. “I practise a doctrine of elimination on that which will not make me happy. I stopped believing in hell very early. I can remember the first time I ever said “There is no such place,’ still half-thinking that there might be. I said it to console someone else and I was rather terrified . . . Forget the devil and keep your pink lamps lighted. That’s a little by-word among my friends. A pink lamp always makes everything look lovely.” Years before, Sara Crewe had found “a bright lamp with a rosy shade” when her cold attic was transformed by Ram Dass. It had always been a symbol to Frances of warmth and comfort. But pink lamps, like rose-coloured spectacles, only give an illusion of warmth and beauty. There are some things they cannot transform. It is difficult to believe that someone who had written The Secret Garden so recently, who had looked at Mary Lennox in the cold winter light and helped her to blossom and flourish, could possibly have said the sort of things Frances is reported to have said. “I never read about ugly things that I cannot help. I never think about them,” she is supposed to have said to a New York Evening Herald reporter, as she sat in her rose and blue drawing-room at Plandome, with potted begonias drooping in the heat from the sizzling steam-pipes. “That is why I never read newspapers. They terrify me. Gory details, crimes, murders, I don’t believe it does anyone any good to read about them.” Fifty years before, the tales she was writing were “full of murders and fighting”. Now apparently she said the reading of such stories was dangerous to the mind. The New York Telegraph praised her views in a leader that November. Her assertion that “the personal devil is the only devil . . . is a believable doctrine and it would work for greater kindliness in the individual’s treatment of his fellow men”.
Frances never rejected her own early work. It would be interesting to know just what she thought of That Lass o’ Lowrie’s in these later years. Probably she saw herself as a social reformer, as one who had drawn attention to unacceptable conditions. For this, she was saying in 1910, was the one justification for the knowledge of evil. “Of course, if there were anything that my knowing about could help or avert, it would be my duty to know of it.”
But it would obviously be much better if she spent less time talking to reporters and fuming at the reports and more time writing. The New York winter was impossible and there was more building work to be done at Plandome. She must get away. In March 1911, she went to Bermuda with T. Tembarom in her luggage and stayed at the Princess Hotel. She liked the place a great deal. The climate was perfect for a winter refuge. She found a snow-white bungalow called Clifton Heights, with a garden sloping down to the waters of Bailey’s Bay, and rented it immediately. The atmosphere was congenial; Mark Twain had loved it and been there year after year. So had William Dean Howells.
Vivian wrote rare but encouraging letters about progress at Plandome. He had been planting seeds, reading all the directions on the packets very carefully. The bulbs were doing very well, “all about the place I saw little green points protruding”. Best of all, the contractors had agreed to have all the building work done before Frances’ return. “Don’t stay too long,” Vivian wrote, “we will have a greenhouse and cold frames in rows filled with mysteriously promising little green things for you when you get here. That ought to excite you.”
Frances returned to Plandome for the summer of 1911, full of excitement that she now had secured summer and winter homes, and, even more important, summer and winter gardens. But a happy summer was interrupted. Frank Jordan, Edith’s husband, was killed in a motor accident. Edith and Frank had been part of Frances’ household on and off for many years. She had been fond of Frank, worrying about him in 1900, even at the height of her own problems with Stephen. Frank had then been having business troubles. Someone called Balser had let him down. She thought him unspeakable “to play with an honest industrious man’s prospects in such a manner. Poor Frank, poor Frank!” she had written to Edith. “I cannot endure the thought of the thing.” She offered to lend Frank money “without interest, and if the money is to be lost, I would much rather lose it in trying to help Frank than in trying to help anyone else.”
Now, in 1911, poor Frank was dead. Frances took Edith off to Bermuda as soon as she could. Clifton Heights was ready for them. Frances had bought furniture from the previous tenant, a Captain Joyner, who had been ordered back to Dover and was going in tears of rage. Frances went into his drawing-room and said “Oh! how pretty. May I have all of this?” And into the dining-room and said, “I should like all this. It is so exactly what I want.” The sloping garden had a lily field with oleanders on one side and on the other a banana-field. There were palms and cedars and in the lower part of the garden—shielded by a white coral wall—Frances had planted six hundred and seventy-two roses. “They will bloom,” she wrote to Ella Hepworth Dixon, “when New York is seventy degrees below zero and London is black with fog or slopped with mud and rain. And on all this island there is not a motor or a train, or a smoking, rattling thing. And the Governor, Sir Walter Kitchener—Lord Kitchener’s brother—is a dear who takes you to see his princely chickens in palatial coops taken care of by the army when it is not busy playing soldiers.”
Back at Plandome the following summer, she had still not finished T. Tembarom, though it was due to begin serializatio
n in the Century in January 1913. She abandoned it temporarily for the less demanding task of dramatizing Racketty Packetty House. The story was one of four short books for small children Frances had written between 1906 and 1908, a series purporting to be told by Queen Crosspatch. The Spring Cleaning has already been mentioned. The Cozy Lion was another of this group, which still has some appeal, but, as Frances said, it is essential that “the grown-up person who reads this story aloud to children must know how to roar”. The lion wished to be good and go into society and the problem was to change his temper and his diet and persuade him to live on breakfast foods and things.
All these stories have some moments of nauseating whimsy to our more astringent modern taste, but, in the fight of the tone of the period, it is a wonder they are not more flawed. The advertisements that appeared alongside them in St Nicholas suggest contemporary attitudes to children and the language considered most suitable for them. “I just really might as well ’fess up,” says a child in a Pond’s advertisement. Necco wafers are described as “the kiddies’ Feast of Fairy Food”. “Have you a little ‘Fairy’ in your home?” parents are asked. “Your healthy, husky boy, or pretty playful girl will enjoy Fairy Soap.” “Healthy Kiddies” will also be “comfy” in Ford and Allen’s Tailored Washsuits and in Oblong Rubber Button Hose Supporters. Older children will enjoy “bully good sport” with an Ansco Folding Buster Brown Camera.
Racketty Packetty House is said to owe its inspiration to the de Kay family, whom Frances had come to know in the summers of 1902 and 1903 at East Hampton. Helena Gilder, Richard’s wife, had been a de Kay and all the de Kays and Gilders used to congregate at the resort in the summers before the First World War. Ormonde de Kay, the seventh of the eight children, was a particular favourite with Frances. On one occasion she knew he wanted a brightly painted cast-iron ferryboat he had seen in the window of Schwartz’s big toyshop on 23rd Street, New York. She bought it for him and hid it in a cupboard. When he next visited her, she waved her lorgnette around as if it were a wand, declared herself his Fairy Godmother and said she would conjure up his heart’s desire. The small boy duly named the ferryboat, and Frances, with more talk of her magic powers, waved her lorgnette and opened the cupboard. Ormonde was so convinced by the magic that he ignored the boat and claimed the lorgnette: “I want the thing that gets the things,” he said.