My mother had been writing, too, and the practice took her far beyond the little journal she had scribbled on the way to Missouri. Her writing grew out of talks she had given to farmers’ groups on improving the lives of farm women, as well as raising chickens and other farm topics. Between 1911 and 1915, she wrote eight pieces (including a poem and two articles she wrote under my father’s name) for Missouri Ruralist, a paper that had a circulation of about fifteen thousand and paid ten or fifteen dollars for each piece—good money for that kind of writing, at the time. But more importantly, Mama Bess was putting her writing to work. She was learning the craft. She was also anxious to break into the magazine market I was writing for, so I tried to include ideas and suggestions in every letter home.
I always told my mother that she could be a good writer if she would put the time into it—if she would let some of the chores slide, or pay a neighbor to pick the cowpeas, or take the clothes to the Mansfield laundry instead of doing the washing herself. From an editor’s point of view, it would have to be said that she was better at managing anecdotes and short, simple stories than longer narrative; grammar, punctuation, and spelling were not her strong suits. But she had an eye for nature, a knack for developing a moral lesson through a simple story, and a sense of the importance of everyday things. She couldn’t submit handwritten copy to the Ruralist, of course; I remember urging her to go to Springfield and buy an Underwood that she could pay for on the installment plan. Although she took my advice and taught herself to type, she preferred not to.
After I went to work for the Bulletin, I saw the chance to be of some significant help. I invited her to come out to San Francisco and stay with me for six weeks or so during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in the fall of 1915. I paid for her train ticket and gave her some money to make up for the extra work my father had to do while she was away. When she was with me, I helped her with a couple of pieces about the Exposition for the Ruralist and we blocked out several stories she could work on at home.
At the same time, I was writing a series of articles about Charlie Chaplin (I was hoping to syndicate them), so she got a glimpse of my life as a working writer. She didn’t like it at all, especially the amount of time it took. “I’d rather do farmwork than sit hunched over a typewriter for hours, the way you do,” she told me. “I’m hoping to make money as a writer, but I’d never want to work that hard!”
It was, I think, a moment of truth for her. Writing isn’t magic, it’s work; earning a living as a writer means showing up at the typewriter every day, whether you feel like it or not. I understood her dilemma: she had to choose between the farmwork and her writing, and that was hard.
Still, after she went back to Rocky Ridge, she did begin writing more regularly for the Ruralist, at the rate of two pieces a month, which—considering all the other jobs she had to do—must have required a great deal of effort. I found her stuff a little stilted and preachy, but she got looser as she went along, and I’m sure that her Ruralist readers appreciated her moral lessons. No, I know they did because they wrote to tell her so.
Aside from making time to write, my mother’s biggest problem was coming up with things to write about. I tried to get her to think of writing the way I thought of it—as a commodity to be sold and resold, whenever possible—and I sent her story ideas and things I’d written that I thought she might be able to rewrite and use. At the Bulletin, recycling pieces of writing was a common practice, and collaborations were the name of the game. The editorial staff constantly exchanged story ideas and copy and rewrote other writers’ stuff, often from beginning to end and sometimes without the approval of the original writer. Sole authorship was a rarity.
The pieces I sent did help her, I think. For instance, once I gave her a copy of a little piece I wrote called “Quarrels of the Proverbs” that was published in the Bulletin in early 1915. Three years later, when she was running short on ideas for her Ruralist column, she gave the piece a new title (“When Proverbs Get Together”) and recast it in a personal setting—her writing was always stronger when she wrote in first person. I urged her to include details of her life experience in everything she wrote, to make it richer, more concrete, more hers. When it came out, I thought her proverbs piece was better than mine. It encouraged me to think that she might be ready, with a little help, to aim at the magazine market.
In 1918, at the end of the war, Mr. Older left the Bulletin, and I did, too. I moved to New York and began writing for McCall’s, where Betty Beatty, from the Bulletin, was an editor. That’s where I came up with what I thought was a perfect writing opportunity for Mama Bess, exactly fitted to her experience as a farmer’s wife. At my suggestion, Betty offered my mother a chance to do an article on life as a farm housewife for a series called “Whom Will You Marry?” I told Mama Bess that she should sit down and read McCall’s carefully before she began writing, so she could imitate its breezy, colloquial style. But she didn’t follow my suggestion. The piece she sent was her usual Ruralist style: stiff, moralistic stuff. If I hadn’t gone over it pretty thoroughly, Betty would have turned it down. The article came out in the June 1919 issue, and the check arrived in my mother’s mailbox. But she was unhappy.
“It’s not the article I wrote,” she lamented.
“It’s your article, edited for style,” I told her, trying to smooth her ruffled feathers. But that wasn’t true. It was a substantial rewrite. I had moved paragraphs, cut a big section, and created a new introduction and conclusion. If I hadn’t done it, she would have lost the publication—and the payment.
The same thing happened a few years later when the Country Gentleman was publishing a series of my Ozark stories. The editor wanted a pair of companion pieces—one called “My Ozark Kitchen,” the other “My Ozark Dining Room”—both to carry my mother’s byline, each to earn $150. Mama Bess wrote the pieces, but they required a substantial rewrite, which upset her in exactly the same way.
It was another battle of wills: she defending her original writing, I defending my editorial work. My advice was based on a decade of experience in writing for the newspaper and magazine market, but she just wouldn’t listen. She had been raised in a long tradition of mother-knows-best that simply didn’t recognize a daughter’s separate expertise. She was qualified to give me instructions when it came to churning butter or taking care of the chickens. But if she was going to move into my world, she would have to accept my help, even if she didn’t want to.
After a few years, Mama Bess ran out of enthusiasm for farm topics and stopped writing for the Ruralist. She was still looking for things to write about, though, so I encouraged her to go back to what she once called the “story of my life thing”—an autobiography that she had been working on for some years. She possessed a store of recollections about her family’s covered-wagon travels, their log cabin in the Big Woods, their dugout in Minnesota, and the building of the town of De Smet. As a child, I had heard these stories over and over. They were a part of our family’s pioneer legacy.
And now, settled in her “retirement cottage” with no chickens to take care of or garden to weed and plenty of time on her hands, she had written her “story of my life thing.” That was what she brought to me in early May 1930, handwritten in the orange-covered Fifty-Fifty school tablets that she had bought at the grocery in Springfield.
She called it “Pioneer Girl.”
My mother and I had been discussing “Pioneer Girl” off and on ever since I returned to Rocky Ridge. I suggested that she write from her own viewpoint, describing the events and people just the way she had seen them as a child. It would be an easy, natural voice for her—she could simply write the way she spoke. I also suggested that she stay with the order of events as she remembered them, tell what happened without trying to make a “story” of it, and include everything she could recall. I thought her project might have a chance as a nonfiction serial in one of the women’s magazines, and I offered
to type it and send it to Carl Brandt for his opinion when she was finished.
But that was before. Before the crash. Things were different now. The magazines weren’t buying anything, and if they were, autobiography wasn’t it. But here it was, 326 handwritten pages, ready, she said, for me to type.
She sat down at the kitchen table, frowning at the stack of orange tablets. “I hope you can fit this in with your other projects, Rose. I don’t want my work to get in the way of something that earns money.”
I got out tea bags and the porcelain teacups and turned on the electric burner under the kettle. After Rocky Ridge was wired for electricity and before the money went away, I’d had an electric stove installed in the kitchen. It was a blessing in hot weather.
“I’m between projects,” I replied. “I mailed ‘State’s Evidence’ to Carl the day before yesterday. He’s sending it to Country Gentleman. But I don’t hold out a lot of hope. Things are slow just now.”
Mr. Bunting scratched at the screen door and I went to let him in. He’d gotten into the habit of running off, and his white coat was matted with grass burrs—heaven knows where he’d been.
“Oh, Country Gentleman,” my mother said with her cheerful little laugh. Her hair had turned almost completely white in the past year, and she wore it in crisp, careful waves. “Don’t worry, Rose. They’ll buy it. They love your work. They can’t get enough of it.”
I envied my mother’s cheery certainty. I had been writing for the Country Gentleman since 1925, and the editors had published sixteen of my stories. But they could love my work and still not have the money to buy it.
“It’s different these days.” I slid a meaningful glance toward the stack of tablets on the table. “The magazines aren’t buying much.”
“I’m not surprised,” she agreed with a sigh. “The Palmer reports are very gloomy.” She had opened an account with Mr. Palmer about the same time I’d opened mine and had sent him whatever she could save from my stipend. Her money had disappeared, just as Troub’s and mine had, although she had kept a stiff upper lip about it.
She brightened. “Just the same, I’m hoping that Mr. Brandt will like my story enough to feel that he can send it to the magazines. Who knows? It might earn a little something.” She looked away and added, delicately, “You’re carrying a bigger load, now that there are bills to pay for two houses. I want to help.”
Bills to pay for two houses. Perhaps she didn’t mean it as an indictment, but that’s how it sounded. If you hadn’t spent all that money building the Rock House, Rose, we wouldn’t be in this fix.
I bristled. But I only said, “I’ll get started on this tomorrow, but don’t get your hopes up, Mama Bess. Genevieve says that nothing is selling. The magazines don’t have any money.”
She squared her shoulders. “Well,” she said, predictably, “where there’s life, there’s hope, as Ma always said.” She smiled. “And where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
That was on Wednesday. On Thursday morning, I took the manuscript upstairs to my desk on the sleeping porch. Troub was there, drinking coffee, eating an apple, and marking up a story about Mr. Bunting that she was hoping to sell to the Atlantic Monthly. Her eyebrows shot up under her bangs when she saw the stack of pages.
“My golly, Rose. What’s that?”
“Mama Bess’s ‘Pioneer Girl,’” I said, sitting down at my typewriter. “The story of her life thing. She wants me to type it.”
Troub rolled her eyes. “That’s going to take a while, dear. And you won’t be just typing, you’ll be editing, too.” It wasn’t a question. She knew my penchant for editing everything that came within reach of my pen, and she had read Mama Bess’s writing. “Your mother can tell a good story,” she added, “but she can’t write for sour apples.”
“I’ll probably edit some,” I conceded. “I’m going to send a sample to Carl Brandt to see what he thinks about it.”
“She’ll fuss about the edits,” Troub predicted and went back to her work. “She’ll fuss a lot.”
I settled down to work, rough-editing as I typed. Troub was right, generally speaking. My mother is not a polished writer. But as I worked, I was captured by the narrative itself, by the physical hardships and dangers the Ingalls family had lived through. Crossing a flooded river in a flimsy wooden wagon pulled by swimming horses. Surrounded on all sides by a wild prairie fire, saved only by a narrow strip of plowed earth. Surviving a brutal winter in a starving town, no roads in or out, no railroad, no food, no fuel. And disease—scarlet fever, measles, influenza, consumption, the threat of infection—so mysterious and frightening, especially to a child.
Over the years, I had heard almost all of the stories, told by my mother in her soft, uninflected voice as we sat before a comfortable fire, where I could look up at her and know that she had survived, unharmed, to tell the tale. But I certainly hadn’t experienced them in a single, continuous narrative, one episode after another after another, as I did now. “Pioneer Girl” was not artful, by any measure. It was raw story, real story, the bedrock truth of what had happened, unmediated by any effort to make it pretty. Though I knew my mother’s story, I hadn’t fully comprehended the events that were part of her experience and, by direct inheritance, mine. In a peculiar, almost eerie way, it was as if I were meeting her for the first time, not as my mother, but as the girl she had been.
So I began to type her handwritten pages, smoothing out the awkwardness as I went, recasting sentences, reordering some of the material so that the times and places were coherent, altering the paragraphing, and expanding a few scenes. I also straightened out the insertions and deleted her private comments to me. At one point, she wrote that anybody else reading this would think she was making it up, but it was true.
At another point, she said that she and Mary caught a rash at school and had to be smeared with sulfur and lard. They weren’t allowed to touch the baby. The baby was her brother.
Her brother? Until that moment, I hadn’t known that my mother had a brother! Or that he had died: “Little Brother got worse instead of better and one awful day he straightened out his little body and was dead.” I stared at the words until they blurred, their despair clutching like a tiny fist at my breaking heart.
Was my mother remembering her brother as she wrote this? Or her own infant son, my brother, who died before they could give him a name? Or perhaps even my son, dead at birth? My grandmother’s child, my mother’s, my own—three little boys who would never be men; three dead boys, never spoken of but never forgotten. That afternoon, I put her story aside and went for a long walk along the edge of the ravine, where I could weep alone, not only for the sons but also for the mothers who had never known them.
On Friday, I sent Carl a few rough-edited pages as a sample. On Monday, I was surprised and cheered by his telegram saying that “State’s Evidence” had sold to the Country Gentleman for twelve hundred dollars—and that the sample pages I had sent him were fine.
I telephoned Mama Bess to tell her the good news and went back to work. By the next Saturday, I had turned my mother’s handwritten manuscript into 160 rough-edited, typed pages. I sent the package to Carl for his opinion, not for submission. I already knew what he would say. He would tell me that the story was fascinating, but that it needed a great deal more work before he could send it out. Both statements would be accurate. It was a fascinating story. And it needed a great deal more work before anybody else had a look at it. That’s what I wanted Mama Bess to hear: that, in a literary agent’s professional opinion, the project was worth doing, but it wasn’t ready—it wasn’t nearly ready. What I sent was for his eyes only.
I didn’t do any serious writing of my own for the next few weeks. Mama Bess’s teeth were causing her a great deal of pain, so we made several trips on the train to St. Louis, where one dentist pulled the rest of her teeth and another fitted a new set of dentures for her—expensive but n
ecessary, and she felt (and looked) much better when it was done. She could smile now, and she did, showing off her pretty teeth.
The weather that summer was horribly hot—the worst since 1901—with temperatures topping one hundred for day after debilitating day, with almost no breeze. I bought electric fans for both houses and set them up to blow over bowls of ice cubes (thank heaven for the electric refrigerator), and I sat at the typewriter with a damp towel over my head and shoulders.
But I was too exhausted by the heat, too stupefied, really, for serious work or even serious thought. During the long, languid days, I wrote letters and read and watered the rhododendrons and visited with Catharine, who came in July for a long stay. In the cooler evenings, Lucille drove out from town, and the four of us—Troub and I and Lucille and Catharine—had moonlight suppers on the garage roof, where we might hope to catch a breeze. We played bridge, and Troub and I told stories about our wild adventures with Zenobia, the Model T Ford we had bought in Paris in 1926 and driven through France and Italy to Albania. Albania. That life—our lovely villa, Ibraim’s fragrant garden, the minarets and medieval streets—seemed like a dream, another existence, another incarnation.
And as if in another dream, far away across the moonlit ridges, we could hear the hounds crying joyously on the trail of the elusive fox that, in Ozark foxhunting tradition, would be brought to bay but never killed. The dogs were always called off with a hunter’s horn, and the canny fox that fooled them was free to repeat his fleet performance another night. Briefly inspired by this wild night music, the vast night sky, and the clamoring dogs, I wrote a piece called “Reynard Runs,” which immediately sold to Elsie Jackson, editor of the North American Review.
A Wilder Rose: A Novel Page 9