Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  His sister Marion remembered Frances reading The Secret Garden aloud to them in 1909. She read extremely well, with a Yorkshire accent in the right parts which was entirely convincing to these young Americans. Her own books never failed to move her. Edith would smile and say if you saw Fluffy laughing or crying over a book, it would most probably be one of her own. Marion said Frances was the first woman she ever saw smoking a cigarette and Ormonde remembered being sent out to buy cream peppermints, which she was still nibbling between puffs at her Turkish cigarettes. They were supposed to clear the windpipe. Another sister, Phyllis, remembered Frances “as a very odd and fascinating creature . . . When I was growing up before 1914 she was so kind to me . . . I remember at East Hampton . . . she lent me What Maisie Knew and one of Gissing’s most dreary books—Also Delina Delaney and Irene Iddesleigh.” The last two are by Amanda Ros, once called “the world’s worst novelist”. It is an odd list of books and gives more evidence perhaps than we otherwise have of Frances’ uncertain literary taste.

  The relationship between the de Kays and the dolls in Racketty Packetty House is presumably that they both “got fun out of everything. You never saw a family have such fun. They could make up stories and pretend things and invent games out of nothing . . . They were so fond of each other and so good-natured and always in such spirits that everyone who knew them was fond of them.” The dolls were also shabby and poor and contented with their lot. The Castle dolls, on the other hand, in their smart Tidy Castle, are grand and haughty and scornful. Lord Hubert reads the newspaper with a high-bred air and Lord Rupert glances aristocratically at his love-letters from ladies of title. Eventually the dolls from Racketty Packetty House nurse the dolls of Tidy Castle through scarlet fever, and their characters improve and they promise never to scorn anyone again. The New York World called it “a convincing argument against snobbery”. The magazine Theatre said it was “a very good lesson for the limousine children who scorn those of pedestrian parents”.

  It was obviously just the thing to open the new Children’s Theater on the top of the Century Theater on Monday afternoon, 23rd December 1912. The Children’s Theater could seat eight hundred children; the chairs were small, the usherettes were dressed as Little Red Riding Hoods and the booking office was like a gate-keeper’s lodge. Each of the boxes came from a different fairy story. At the first performance, Frances was in Jack the Giant Killer’s box with Vivian, who had written the music for the play, Edith, her son Ernest, and Mrs Underwood Johnson. The programme was unbearably whimsical: “Madame Sarasco Brignole taught the little Green Workers their dancey steps. C. Alexander Ramsey made the cute little costumes.” But the play was far more robust; indeed one of the critics had cause to complain of Peter Piper’s vulgarity. He was not quite the sort of boy one would want one’s own son to be. He boasted too much; he was too pleased with himself. The critic preferred “well-mannered respectful children as the heroes and heroines of our children’s books for they, after all, are the most influential examples in our lives”. The children anyway loved Peter and the play. After the first performance, Frances gave a party for the actors, GOOD FAIRY CALLS ON CHILD PLAYERS: MRS BURNETT IS SANTA CLAUS said the newspapers, providing excellent publicity for the play. There were presents and ice cream for everybody.

  In February, Frances was in Bermuda again, sending urgent instructions to Vivian about the Plandome garden. “I want Watts to border all the herbaceous beds with white Phlox Drummondii and to sow that entire curve by the rhododendron and azalea bed with nasturtium seed. Nasturtiums thrive on poor soil . . . Get me some seedlings of Arititos Grandis for the empty spaces—also lobelia, ageratum and white candytuft for bordering the fountain. Be sure to have that fringed and starred annual phlox sown thick round the beds of the Sunk Garden. Now I want these things done. I don’t want to come back and find they were forgotten . . . The new roses I got for my Secret Garden here are doing beautifully . . .”

  She had been ill and T. Tembarom was still not finished, though the early chapters were already appearing in the Century, and Hodder and Stoughton had bought the English book rights. Vivian spent two weeks with Frances and Edith in Bermuda in March. In April Frances returned to Plandome. She hardly had time to notice if the candytuft was in the right position before she was planning a European holiday with two of the Hall sisters. The book was finished. She was feeling very tired and at Plandome everything seemed to press on her. Scribner wrote proposing a new uniform edition of the early novels (“Unfortunately we have not had the pleasure of publishing for you your most recent books”), but Frances was not very interested. “I have left everything behind. Other people must settle things,” she wrote from Austria. She was enjoying for the first time the delights of motoring through Europe. “If I were strong enough, I should motor from morning until night.” She had had ptomaine poisoning on the steamer to Trieste and it took her a good while to recover fully. But nothing could for long diminish her pleasure in being in Europe. One of her happiest afternoons was spent in “a defense tower” on the walls of Rothenburg. She had asked about the delightful small house and, hearing it belonged to a Mancunian artist called Arthur Wasse, she determined “to see the pictures of a man who had the sense to make a house of that place and live in it”. What she thought of the pictures is not recorded but she loved the house and the view and the “cosy, homely Manchester dear” they belonged to.

  Frances stayed for nine months on the Continent, until the end of April 1914, perhaps aware that she was seeing Europe for the last time and that, in any case, it would never be the same again. “To live in the best suite of rooms in the best hotels in any part of Europe is strict economy in comparison to living at Plandome Park, Long Island,” she wrote to Ella Hepworth Dixon. “And as one can spend an occasional morning at home and lightly earn one’s living as one goes—with the aid of a pen and ink and a few cheap sheets of paper—one need not accuse oneself of extravagance.”

  It was marvellous to be free, to go where one pleased, not to be running a household, instructing servants, deriding on meals, not to be bombarded with requests of one sort and another. During recent years many of the requests had been for permission to film her books. The “Vitagraph” organization was one of the first but “Mr Edwards of Samuel French’s agency, which deals with the business of the play ‘on the road’ advises against my selling the rights. I already know that the motion pictures are said to greatly influence the theatres and, as Fauntleroy is continually played still, I feel sure Mr Edwards is right.” This was in 1911. The following year, she was less sure, and beginning to be persuaded by the Kinemacolor firm, “which is rich and respectable and whose process is by far the most interesting”. There was no doubt that “the Moving Picture rights are becoming an important consideration and are likely to represent definite income in the future”.

  Her final conversion to the cinema is said to have come during these months on the Continent. “One day in Berechtsgarten, she strayed into what in that part of the world is called a ‘Kino’, where peasant girls and men in their picturesque costumes were chinking beer at little tables set on a sanded floor, while moving pictures were being shown. In a land so far away, in both distance and manners and customs, she saw stories of American life appreciated and applauded by people who could not have understood a word of English. Mrs Burnett was so struck by the universality of the appeal of the moving picture that, from that time forward, she became an ardent student of the cinema, keenly interested in both the entertainment and the audience.” In October 1913, Kinemacolor cabled: GUARANTEE 8,000 MINIMUM FOR FIRST TWO YEARS. The first two films were to be The Dawn of a Tomorrow and Esmeralda. By the time she returned to America, negotiations were concluded for four more films (Fauntleroy, A Lady of Quality, A Little Princess and The Pretty Sister of José) and Frances was considering tackling “an original story for the cinematograph”.

  But her immediate concern was a new book. The Lost Prince is said to have had its origin in a brief talk wi
th Eleanor Calhoun, the actress who had played Clorinda in England. She was now the Princess Hreblianovich Lazarovich and some remarks she made about the history of Serbia had given Frances ideas. An incident in Vienna in October 1913 meant a great deal to her and related itself both to The Lost Prince and to The White People, which she wrote the following year. Kitty and Gigi Hall had gone to one of the Viennese art galleries alone. Frances had rested in the hotel. “I am not yet strong enough to stand on my feet twenty-four hours of the day, so I cannot go with them always,” she wrote to Ella Hepworth Dixon. When they returned, one of them brought a photograph over to Frances and laid it on the desk in her hotel room.

  “When I looked at it,” Frances wrote to Edith, “I cried out in spite of myself”. It was a photograph of a portrait by Van Dyck—the portrait of a boy about fifteen—a young Prince Ruprecht von der Pfaltz of Bavaria and he was so like Lionel that it brought one’s heart into one’s mouth. The head, the eyebrows, the shape of the face, the eyes were Lionel’s very own. It gave me strange things to think of when I found myself looking at my own boy’s face in a picture painted three hundred years ago! What did Prince Ruprecht do? I must find out. Did he come back? And what for?”

  It was not just a lack of strength which had kept Frances away from the art gallery that afternoon. More and more, she did not like cities. “Vienna is beautiful and splendid, with majestic spaces, and the galleries are full of wonders—but I don’t love cities—I don’t love them—I want my mountains every hour . . . I have been wild with the unspeakable beauty of this world—and cities seem—not enough.” She dutifully went to the Hofburg and the Imperial Palace. She saw the Crown Jewels and the Relics (“a tooth of John the Baptist, a bone of St Anne, a piece of the Manger”). “The jewels of Marie Antoinette and of her mother Maria Teresa were more magnificent than any I have ever seen”; but her letters to Edith described not them but her own new clothes.

  One from Paris had described a pile of new purchases in the Boulevard des Capucines, including the lacy, chiffony things she had always favoured. In Vienna she went to an excellent tailor. “I know how interested a frivolous and fashionable Edith will be . . . I must not buy Viennese clothes and not describe them to my sister.” She had had two “perfect costumes” made. One was “of a sort of brownish mole trimmed with sable”. With it she wore “a huge muff of gathered cloth and sable bands, and a velvet toque of the same shade”, and a long coat of the same cloth, lined with black musquash. As an alternative to the sable muff and velvet hat, there was “a large musquash muff and a soft musquash hat, which you jam down on your head and turn up as you please. The other suit is of the most exquisite black broadcloth which is like soft satin. With it I wear a black velvet hat with an insane feather sticking upright and the big black baby lamb muff and stole . . . I was also obliged—as I am by way of going to operas every few nights—to buy a warm evening cloak. It is such a beautiful thing—soft black velvet lined with white satin and with collar and cuffs of ermine and covered with the most unique embroidery of softly shaded silver beads . . .” Edith might think her extravagant but at least they were “very much less expensive than they would have been in New York”. Knowing her weakness, she was perpetually defending herself against the charge of extravagance.

  All of Edith’s family were closely involved in Frances’ affairs. In this same letter, she wrote, “Ask Archie to send my English bank book to be made up.” Archie was now married. Frances had given him and his bride Annie an extremely large cheque to help them buy a house, on the understanding, she thought, that there would always be a room in it for Edith—when Frances was away, and after her death. From Bermuda in February 1913, she had written to Vivian: “As to Archie and Annie, I can hear their screams of rapture traversing the Gulf Stream every hour.”

  Screams of rapture were perhaps not appropriate to a house shared with a mother-in-law. There were quarrels and problems. Edith took refuge at Plandome. Frances was furious. “But for you—absolutely but for you,” she wrote to Edith, “the house never would have been there.” She wrote to Edith from Munich telling her to go to Bermuda and she would join her there. The affair, which should have remained a private family quarrel, eventually became a public scandal and distressed and humiliated Frances.

  On 17th May 1914, Stephen Townesend died. Among his more likeable characteristics had been his intense love for animals. His obituary in The Animals’ Guardian spoke of two of his last acts: “The one was the tremendous philippic . . . last November against the sermon of the Archbishop of York in unveiling a stained glass window to the memory of a fox-hunting gentleman, in which His Grace extolled hunting as a diversion. The other incident was a fox-hunt in the neighbourhood of his country retreat at Colney Heath, St Albans. A much-harried fox took refuge in the grounds surrounding his house, and he at once, although he had been in bed some weeks, crept down into the garden in his dressing-gown and told the men and women mere assembled on horse-back what he thought of them.” This was the actor’s finest hour, but his “desperate step” may well have hastened his death. His death certificate, certified by their old friend, Owen Lankester, shows Stephen died, at fifty-four, of pneumonia and exhaustion. There is no record of Frances’ reaction to the news.

  And fortunately, in May 1914, there were more pleasant family matters to distract her. LORD FAUNTLEROY GREETS MOTHER recorded the New York Telegraph when Frances reached New York aboard the Minnewaska from London. It had been her final, her thirty-third Atlantic crossing. How different her life would have been if she had suffered from sea-sickness. As it was, by the end, she had divided her time almost exactly between her two countries. And at last it looked as if Lord Fauntleroy, aged thirty-eight, was to have a new rôle. By July, when Frances and Edith returned from Bermuda, Vivian was engaged to Constance Buel, aged twenty-one. “Now about Constance,” Frances wrote to Kitty and Gigi Hall, “she is one of the two daughters of the first wife of Mr Buel, who has just retired from the Century magazine . . . She is a pet . . . a little slim wisp of a child . . . quiet and calm and with a sweetly concealed backbone of much strength . . . She plainly enjoys herself every minute. She has years and years less than Vivian, but he always was twenty-one and now he is more so than ever. He does so love her. And he is so happy.” Constance was beautiful and musical, swam like a fish, ran a motor and danced like a fairy. She shared Vivian’s love of sailing too. “All Saturday afternoon she and Vivian worked together on Delight, preparing the sails etc. and all Sunday morning they sailed on the sound and came back sunburned to the bone.”

  Frances was genuinely delighted at Vivian’s good fortune. “I was wondering what I could do to keep him from growing tired and sad!” Vivian had found his own solution, his own happiness. Frances was determined to be an ideal mother-in-law, but of course she could not help wanting to organize their lives for them. She had so much money and they had so little. They were married in November and the following January she sent them off, in the very first boat to go through the Panama Canal, “on a long and joyous journey to San Francisco, Honolulu, Japan, China and various enchanted islands”. Vivian had been contemplating asking his firm for a month’s holiday. Frances insisted he should be away for four months. “I sent him away to play with the map and choose the places he has always most wanted to go to.” No one could resist that sort of generosity but it obviously carried with it return obligations and responsibilities.

  Frances was meanwhile coming to the end of The Lost Prince. She had written about it regularly to Fayal Clarke, editor of St Nicholas, an extremely emotional man, who was inclined to address Frances as “Friend of our Very Souls”, to rhapsodize about her inspiration and hail her as “so wonderful a manifestation of the divine soul-of-things”. He encouraged in her the tendency she always had, more at some times than others, to think she was a mere channel rather than a creator, that it was not she who was writing but some power outside herself. At this time Edith and Frances used to have periods of silence in which they tried to
find guidance from something—they would not call it God—beyond themselves. During these silences (Frances wrote to Fayal Clarke) splendid thoughts would come from the outside.

  Frances read The Lost Prince aloud to Edith as she wrote it. “When I read the last chapter to Edith this morning [the last chapter she had written, that is, not the final one of the book] she said it lifted her out of the world and made her blood race through her veins . . . I am glad, because when she begins to utter little cries when I am reading to her, all is well. It has always been so, since she was a child.” Edith was the perfect audience, as enthralled and grateful as any writer could wish Frances’ only fear about the new book was that it might be too long and would be impossible to cut. “How could one cut pages out of the story of a boy—a boy who is a Prince but does not know he is one, though he has always the noble image of a Prince before him, making his way through Europe in the guise of a stalwart little tramp, but secretly carrying a sign and a message to stray men in crowded streets, at palace gates, in forests and on mountainsides, he himself ignorant of all but that he must obey and pass on in silence.” The story is too patriotic (“the sword in my hand—for Samaria”) for contemporary taste, and there are ideas of inborn nobility and gentlemanly behaviour which have dated, but once again Frances showed her power as a storyteller. The reader is compelled to turn the page as a delicate hand tightens its grasp on Marco’s shoulder in the crowded foyer at the Opera in Munich.