A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  I was exasperated. “You can’t be serious, Mama Bess. Why would people associate you with what Catharine does? And why in the world would anyone object to a simple exchange of pleasantries on the sidewalk? Surely nobody thinks she’s going to run off with the fellow.”

  But I was fighting a losing battle. My mother’s compass swung to the poles of her friends’ opinions. And of all my New York visitors, Catharine was the sort of “new woman” who made the Mansfield matrons uncomfortable, armored as they were in their narrow morality. Her makeup and tight skirts had already attracted their scrutiny. Anything she said or did would serve as a subject for tittle-tattle until a new scandal came along to keep their tongues busy.

  “You mark my words, Rose.” My mother gave her head an ominous shake. “That girl is going to come to no good end.”

  “Yes, Mama,” I said dutifully.

  Catharine was clattering down the stairs. My mother stood. “I must be on my way.” She glanced at the stack of tablets and her face softened. “About Farmer Boy—I’m sorry I didn’t let you do the revisions you wanted to do before I sent it in the first time, Rose. That would have saved us both some extra work.”

  It was a remarkable moment.

  I had planned to start another story after I finished revising “Vengeance,” but I put the idea aside and went to work on Farmer Boy. My mother had taken out most of the digressive material, added a few descriptions, and revised some of the chapters. But there was still a great deal to be done, and I worked on it for the whole month of February. This time, I had the freedom to add the dialogue and detail that would make the story interesting to a young reader. And since I had visited the Wilder farm and had seen the places, I could describe the settings with authority.

  On March 2, I finished the manuscript and handed it over. I knew it was good, and Mama Bess must have agreed because she promptly sent it off to George Bye with the cover letter I composed for her. Two weeks later, Harper accepted it, but offered only a 5 percent royalty rate, half what Little House was earning.

  I wrote right away to George Bye, protesting that the reduction in my mother’s royalty was a dangerous precedent, especially since she felt she was obligated for a third book. Beating the drum for her, I wrote to Bye that she was already working on that book, an Indian story that promised to be even better than Little House. Bye carried my concern to Miss Raymond and reported her reply. The juvenile market, she said, was at a very low ebb. She was willing to make an adjustment—5 percent royalty up to three thousand copies, 10 percent after that—but it was the best that she could do. In the end, I had to tell my mother that she was probably lucky that Harper was willing to bring the book out, given the current economic catastrophe. She signed the contract. Farmer Boy would be published in the fall.

  And the economic situation really was a catastrophe, the terrible reports filling every newspaper and radio broadcast. The crash itself had been bad, and the weeks and months that followed had been worse. But the months between Roosevelt’s November election and his March 4 inauguration were horrible beyond description, with banks closing all across the country. Everyone was desperate for change, but what would the new president do? What could he do? Would anything make a difference?

  With the cooperation of Congress, FDR immediately nationalized gold, making it illegal for Americans to possess gold coins or bullion and forcing them to trade it to the government for paper money at the rate of $20.67 an ounce. Thinking about the situation, and remembering an episode that had happened when I was in Baku eleven years before, I sat down and wrote “A Little Flyer in Inflation,” retelling (and taking many liberties with the truth in so doing) an incident in which my friend Peggy Marquis and I had meddled with Azerbaijan’s exchange rate.

  In my story, Peggy and I are hauled before a panel of Russian judges to explain how and why we had managed to bid up the ruble, thereby destroying its value. One of the judges exclaims, “This is chaos, chaos! People cannot live without some fixed standard, a firm standard of value.” In the story, I wrote that “money is a matter of faith—as thirty-six inches are a yard only because multitudes agree to that measure of length and keep that agreement.” If the agreement was broken, “faith was gone, and any tangible thing to eat, to wear, to shelter one’s body from the weather was more valuable than any number of pieces of paper, which were only symbols of a lost faith.”

  “A Little Flyer in Inflation” was a parable, for me, of what was going to happen now that Roosevelt had effectively taken the country off the gold standard and given the government the right to create money. Harper’s Magazine bought the story immediately.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Year of Losses: 1933

  1933 was a long, dark year—a long, dark night of the soul, not just for me, but for most Americans. Many were sick in mind and spirit, many were sick in body, and almost all were adrift in seas of bleak misery. Failed hope is a knife that slashes all moorings.

  I was physically ill—fever, chills, achiness, fatigue—with what I now believe was a recurrence of the malaria I had contracted in 1922, when Peggy Marquis and I were traveling in the Balkans for the Near East Relief Agency. I’d spent a week in a private sanitarium in Budapest, and Peggy and I spent another week in the American hospital in Constantinople.

  “Albania’s malaria,” I wrote to Guy then, “is as fierce as the Russian bear.” My playful tone didn’t match the way I felt. Peggy and I were treated with the usual massive dose of quinine—sixty grains of the stuff twice a week—and spent the days between treatments recovering from the treatments. I’ve never been sure which was worse: the malaria or the side effects of the quinine. I was so ill that I lost the fear of death.

  Now, nine years later and for nearly three months, I was back in bed with what might have been a malarial relapse. I knew I needed to use the momentum from Hurricane to create more magazine opportunities for myself, so between bouts of illness—and operating on sheer will—I dragged myself to the typewriter and produced a new story and two rewrites, which I sent to George Bye in April, as well as a third story and another rewrite in May. Given how foggy-headed I felt during those weeks, I have no idea how I got any coherent narrative down on the page. But I must have, for all of the stories sold. Together, they brought in more than thirteen hundred dollars—a great relief, although it was half of what I’d been getting before everything had gone smash.

  But at least I could work, and I was deeply grateful. In 1933, thirteen million people, a third of the workforce, had no work. People who lost their jobs moved themselves and their families into makeshift housing and had little to eat and no way to stay warm and dry. Dispossessed farmers stuffed their belongings into dilapidated jalopies and headed for California in pursuit of a dream of plenty, only to find a cruel desert. Homeless men hopped freight trains and rode the rails—we saw them often as the trains came through Mansfield. They’d jump off in a town where they hoped they could exchange work for food, although it was more likely that a railroad detective or the local sheriff would collar them and toss them in jail for vagrancy. But I knew that it was the children who suffered the most. Malnutrition and a lack of medical and dental care would doom them to a lifetime of poor health and bad teeth. I felt their hurt most keenly, because of my own painful experience as the child of poverty-stricken parents.

  Am I trying to lighten the darkness of those lost months in my life by framing them in the context of a black, black time in the lives of all Americans? Perhaps I am, although I’d rather think I’m just trying to understand. Yes, of course, I suffered my own personal unhappiness, which spilled into my daily diary and the journal I kept intermittently. But I am more likely to write in my journal about my pain and grief than about any fleeting pleasures, so the journal is bleaker by far than my lived life. My days were filled with engrossing work and many trivial but real pleasures: the crewelwork pillow I was making for my mother; the bread-and-butter pickles I m
ade from the garden cucumbers I planted; games of chess and puzzles with Lucille, and the hooked rug we made together; letters to friends, from friends. And reading. In one two-week period, I devoured The Moon and Sixpence and The Casuarina Tree, by Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad’s Chance, Clarence Darrow’s The Story of My Life, This Country of Yours, by Morris Markey—and, of course, the magazines, especially for their short fiction: the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, the Atlantic. Reading had always been my purest pleasure, my greatest escape, and so it was now. And even on the darkest days, there was some light. I once wrote that I would be glad to die, and then, in the same entry, noted that I was ordering garden seeds—a startling and slightly irrational intersection of despair and hope, it seems to me now.

  Still, I saw clearly the relationship between my personal pain and the country’s pain: I was not just I, but a metaphor. Trapped as I was at Rocky Ridge, depressed, unable to see very far into the future—I was like many people, like all the others who were caught in situations over which they had no control. The sense of national helplessness created by the Depression was enough to blight the dreams of even the sunniest optimist. For me, this time was also the awakening of a stronger and more determined political consciousness.

  After the positive reception of Hurricane as a magazine serial, I was bitterly disappointed by what happened to the book early in 1933. It was published on February 21, to positive reviews. The Bookman called the book a “rich and moving experience” that was so “natural, direct, and simple” that it might have come from a pioneer journal. Both George Bye and Maxwell Aley assured me that in any normal year, Hurricane would have been a bestseller. But 1933 wasn’t normal and the book wasn’t a bestseller, not even when its price was lowered from $1.75 to $1.50. People simply weren’t buying books—and who could blame them?

  During January and February that year, the country was in a panic. Interest rates had gone up, businesses couldn’t borrow to pay bills, and the rate of bank failures, already high, spiked even higher. People rushed to their banks to pull out their money or trade their currency for gold, then hurried home to stuff it into mattresses and shoeboxes or bury it in their backyards. In January, President Hoover proposed a national bank holiday to gain control of the situation, but Roosevelt, awaiting his March inauguration, refused to cooperate, and the crisis continued to deepen. States were forced to declare their own bank holidays. In Cleveland, depositors thronging on sidewalks in front of banks were told that they could withdraw only 5 percent of what they had on deposit. In Mansfield, the banks stayed solvent but just barely. My mother was afraid that withdrawals there might be limited, so the two of us went to the bank, where she took out eight hundred dollars and used the money to pay off the mortgage on the farm. Both of us reasoned that the bank might fail and it would be better to use the money to retire the debt than to stick it in the mattress. Everywhere, factories closed, retail shops shut their doors, and nobody, nobody, bought books. All this could have been avoided if Roosevelt had cooperated with Hoover, it was said, but FDR was willing to let the whole banking situation go to smash so he could be credited with saving the banks and take advantage of the situation to expand his executive powers.

  Roosevelt’s inauguration took place at the end of the week following Hurricane’s publication. In his address, he declared (to cheers and applause) that we had nothing to fear but fear itself, but just in case, he would ask the Congress to give him war powers authority. Almost immediately, he declared a four-day bank holiday. Both of Mansfield’s banks were closed, and if you didn’t have enough money in your pocket to buy food or gasoline or pay the electric bill, you were out of luck. Across the country, hundreds of banks had already failed or didn’t reopen after the “holiday,” and there was talk that scrip would be issued either nationally or locally. But nobody knew how this would be done or who would do it or how it would work.

  Roosevelt gave his first radio talk the next Sunday night. Lucille and I went to the Rock House to listen with the parents, but their radio wasn’t working, so all four of us piled into Papa’s car and drove to Mrs. Moore’s house to hear it. The president’s talk seemed to quiet the panic, and people began taking their money back to the banks.

  Over the next few weeks and months, FDR cut quite a popular figure, especially because he was also moving to repeal Prohibition. “Beer by Easter!” the newspapers bannered. Roosevelt reminded some of Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, although a few speculated that it might take more than forty years to get the country out of the Depression. It seemed that the American people wanted their government to do something, anything, as long as it was done with a confident vigor. Will Rogers remarked, with his usual cynical humor, “The whole country is with FDR. even if what he does is wrong. If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, ‘Well, at least we got a fire started!’”

  I wasn’t cheering. I was reminded not of Moses but of Mussolini, whose growing power I had watched with alarm during and after my years in Albania. And my alarm only grew when the farm bill—the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the AAA—was introduced in a flurry of New Deal bills within days of the inauguration. It was supposed to balance supply and demand for farm crops so that farmers got a decent price for their produce. Under the act, they would be paid to stop growing corn, wheat, rice, and peanuts, among other crops, as well as stop producing milk and butter and raising pigs and lambs. The Supreme Court would declare the AAA unconstitutional a few years later, but in the meantime, the government would pay a million farmers to plow up ten million acres of cotton. Oats and wheat would be burned, even though this year’s winter wheat crop had failed. And millions of hogs and cattle would be bought from desperate farmers, then shot.

  Across Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma, across the Midwest and the South, farmers were incredulous. They and their families had worked long and hard to raise their crops and livestock, and it hurt like hell to see them plowed under or killed—especially when the meat simply went to waste. AAA payments might be the farmer’s only source of income, and the federal buyout of his crops and livestock might have saved him from bankruptcy or even starvation. But he hated the AAA and Roosevelt and himself and crept away in shame with the money in his hand.

  In farm communities everywhere there was open rebellion. In Mansfield, even people who had voted for FDR were heard to mutter darkly, “No government is gonna tell me what to grow.” Or “Taking money from the government to stop farming is just the same as going on the dole. I ain’t a-gonna do it!” My father was dead set against the idea, and for weeks that’s all he talked about, threatening to shoot any federal agent who tried to shoot his cows. George Olds, managing editor of the Springfield Leader, told me that a revolution was coming and advised me to stock up on food: “A thousand dollars in canned goods is better than a thousand in currency, Mrs. Lane—although you couldn’t scratch up a thousand dollars in currency anywhere. Not even ten dollars. Banks’ve been tee-totally cleaned out.”

  I didn’t fool myself, though, that an earlier solution to America’s banking crisis would have helped Hurricane. People who had money were holding on to every nickel, and people who stood in soup lines couldn’t afford to fork over $1.50 to read a book. It would enjoy a modest sale of more than ten thousand copies, even going into a fourth printing in midyear. But that was months away, and by that time, my hopes for a decent sale for my first serious piece of writing—writing that came from my heart—had withered and died. I felt the way a mother must feel when her child, in whom she has invested all her love and care, is rejected. I understood why, but understanding didn’t ease the sense of loss.

  But I was beginning to think of another project, for which Hurricane might be a kind of prologue. It would be a multivolume series of historical tales that together would make up one large novel, the connected dramas of American settlement, ranging across the continent from east to west. I wanted to make this a popular novel, a sales succe
ss, but also a serious novel, and I even indulged myself in drawing up the grand scheme with the same enthusiasm with which I once drew up schemes for Albanian houses.

  However, it wasn’t long before I saw with something like despair that I wasn’t brave enough to do this kind of epic work, to risk such a vast expenditure of time and effort. I simply didn’t have the courage. Realistically speaking, I didn’t have the time, either. A grand, beautiful novel of this scale would take years, and I didn’t have years to think and plan and write. I had to produce stuff that would sell. And I had to do my mother’s work, as well.

  At least, that’s what I told myself. Or perhaps it was that I was simply afraid of attempting big work, afraid of making a fool of myself, of appearing ridiculous. It’s a kind of cut-rate narcissism never to attempt big work, so that I never have to say I’ve failed.

  All this was going through my mind during the month I spent on Farmer Boy. I felt a sulky exasperation at having to do this—for a second time—instead of my own work. I told myself that the royalties would certainly ease my parents’ financial situation. And I was giving my mother a generous gift of my time—I ought to be able to take at least a little pleasure in that. But even that was difficult because having to accept my help was so difficult for her.

  Perhaps that’s why she tried to diminish some of my pleasure in the small success of Hurricane. I had given her my advance copy of the book, signed, of course, and I thought she might even read it, since some of the episodes were built on paragraphs from “Pioneer Girl,” and since we’d discussed my fictionalization. But when she came over for tea one day and happened on the trade advertisement for Hurricane, she pretended to be puzzled about the setting and the characters.

  “Caroline and Charles don’t belong in that place—in the Dakotas—at that time.” She was frowning at me over her reading glasses. “They were in Wisconsin when they married. And when they lived in the dugout, they weren’t newlyweds. They already had three children—Mary and Carrie and me.”