A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Garet, always pessimistic, was even gloomier now. “People want manna and milk out of the rock,” he wrote to me. “I wanted people to stay hard and fit and self-sufficient, so that they could go on under their own power. Now, they’ll get their manna and milk, and it will render them powerless.”

  Still, 1936 wasn’t all bad. I earned nine thousand dollars—my best year since 1926. My short fiction was bringing in as much as twenty-five hundred dollars now, and the magazine markets were improving. I sold all the short pieces I wrote, and I was making a start on my novel Free Land, the project that—eventually—would make me financially independent.

  And by the following fall, the fall of 1937, my family life was entirely changed. John and Al had graduated high school and were spending the year in Europe, studying, traveling, learning about the great, wide world beyond the Ozark Mountains. Rexh wrote to say that he was to be married to the childhood sweetheart whom he had courted in the traditional Moslem way, by arranging their marriage through her father. I sent them my love and congratulations and two hundred dollars for a honeymoon trip to Budapest. And while I had rejected George Bye’s suggestion that I write an article about my sons, I wrote a short story about Rexh, his courage and perseverance in his love for his bride. It was called “The Song Without Words.” It was published in Ladies’ Home Journal.

  My parents had moved back to the old farmhouse, modernized now with electricity, plumbing, hot water, and a furnace so it was easier for them to manage. Having abandoned her efforts to persuade me to live in the Rock House, Mama Bess rented it out. With the rents from the Rock House and the tenant house and the royalties from the Little House books increasing by nearly a thousand dollars every year, my parents would have enough reliable income to support them, I hoped, for the rest of their lives.

  Ironically, then, things had worked out the way I planned, more or less. The crash had radically altered the plans and dreams and hopes of everyone in the country, and I was no exception. But if the crash hadn’t happened, would my mother have gotten serious about writing “Pioneer Girl,” from which we drew all the other books? If the crash hadn’t seriously reduced the magazine markets, leaving me stranded at Rocky Ridge, would I have had the time to make her drafts publishable? I seriously doubt it. The money she was earning freed my mother, at last and for the rest of her life, from her financial dependence on me. If the price of that freedom was her dependence on my revisions of her work—there were four books to come—she could deal with that, and I could, too. It had been a struggle, but we were both free now to care for one another in a less fettered way. One night, in bed, she even wrote to thank me for the things I’d given her: the rent money she was collecting on the Rock House, the royalties she was earning on the books. But her last sentence was quintessentially Mama Bess, undercutting her thanks by taking credit for all that I had done: “And so I have to remind myself what a wise woman I am to have a daughter like you.”

  Sweet are the uses of adversity. Yes—and I felt good when I thought about my parents’ situation.

  And about my own. Among the magazines, I was once again in demand. George Bye wrote to let me know that 20th Century Fox was interested in seeing the manuscript of my Missouri book, and he offered an idea for an around-the-globe travel series called “Before I Die.” The Post liked it, but preferred me to write about little-known spots in the United States, so I declined. The Country Gentleman offered eight thousand dollars for a three-part serial, yet to be written. Mrs. Roosevelt read Hurricane and wrote about it in her “My Day” column. In all this hurly-burly, I sold four more stories.

  By September 1937, I was back in New York—and free.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  King Street: April 1939

  “New York. That’s where Russell and I tracked you down in the fall of 1937,” Norma Lee said. Finished shaping the meat loaf, she went to the sink and washed her hands. “When you were living at the Grosvenor and tearing your hair out over Free Land.” She laughed. “And then the Post bought it for twenty-five thousand dollars and it went on to become a bestselling book and earn you pots more money.”

  Norma Lee was too easily enthusiastic, Rose thought, but then, she was young. She would learn that money wasn’t the truest measure of the worth of a piece of writing. Rose laid out another piece of green-print cotton fabric and began to chalk an outline around a diamond-shaped cardboard template.

  “I’m always in despair when I’m partway through a long project,” she said. “I remember telling Adelaide Neall that I was heartsick about the damn thing. I didn’t dare look at it critically because then I would know it was no good at all and I’d have to abandon it.”

  It was true. From the day she’d begun professional writing—almost thirty years now—she had always felt that way. Whatever she was writing—it just wasn’t good enough. It didn’t meet her expectation of what it should have, could have been. And she always felt, once she’d finished a very good piece of writing, that it was the last one she’d be able to write, that there would never be another. That had never been true, though, until this time. This time, maybe she was right. Maybe Free Land really was the last. The effort to produce it—the eighteen-hour days, the seven-day weeks, month after month—had exhausted her.

  And there was worry, too, because Free Land—which she had written out of passion—was very good. Editors would expect that level of work from her, whether the piece was long or short. But she had no ideas, no energy for beginning something new. What has become of my ability to write a story when I had to? she asked herself plaintively and heard no answer.

  But perhaps the truth lay in the competitive demands of real life, which—now that she owned her own little house, at last—were simply too interesting, too compelling. Fiction, and especially the kind of make-believe, happy-ending fiction demanded by the magazines, didn’t seem worth her time, although she had to complete her obligation to her mother. Three more books. Three more books!

  And, of course, there was the other writing, the political writing, what Garet called “writing your passion.” She was doing plenty of that, articles arguing against any U.S. entry into the European conflict and pieces on the importance of personal self-reliance. There would be a dozen out this year. Though they didn’t bring in much money, she didn’t need much. She no longer had to support her mother. Al and Rexh were self-sufficient, and John, who was still trying to find himself, had declared that he would no longer accept her support—a bitter rejection that had wounded her deeply but that, in the end, she had schooled herself to accept.

  Norma Lee got two cups out of the cupboard and began making tea. “Of course, I had never known any serious writers before I met you. But when I saw you at the Grosvenor, I remember being frightfully impressed with your writing schedule. You were working even harder than you did in Columbia. You were spending all day and half the night at the typewriter.”

  “I needed the money,” Rose said ruefully. “I was nearly broke when I got to New York. I had seven dollars in my pocket after I paid a week’s rent for a furnished flat. I unpacked my typewriter, settled down to work, and wrote ‘Home Over Saturday.’ It was a Dakota pioneer story based on an episode in my mother’s ‘Pioneer Girl’ that was so frightening it couldn’t be included in a book for children.” She shook her head. “It’s a true story that involves a woman with a butcher knife who seems bent on slashing her husband to death. I gave it one of those O. Henry plot-twist endings that the Post likes so much. They snapped it up and I had money again.”

  “And then you moved to the Grosvenor Hotel?” Norma Lee brought two cups of tea and her cigarettes to the table. She sat down, frowning. “I seem to remember that somebody else lived there—another writer, I mean. Who was it?”

  “Willa Cather and her friend Edith,” Rose said. “For five years.” She rotated the template on the fabric and marked again. “You know, it’s funny. Back in Columbia, I had a ninth-floor sui
te with the morning sun and a thirty-mile view of the Missouri hills. At the Grosvenor, I had a swank address—the corner of Fifth Avenue and West Tenth—and a three-dollar-a-night, handkerchief-sized room that looked out on an air shaft. For a dollar-fifty more, I could have had one with a window on Fifth Avenue. But I needed to write, and the air shaft provided fewer distractions.”

  She picked up her scissors and began to cut diamonds out of the fabric. “Except, of course, for the pigeons that perched on the windowsill, so tame they would eat out of my hand. I’ve always loved pigeons. And the young woman on the floor above, who was also on the air shaft. She was a tap dancer. She would shove the furniture back and tap for hours. She had a Victrola but just one record. ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.’”

  “Oh, that’s from Shall We Dance,” Norma Lee put in eagerly. “Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. They danced on roller skates.”

  Rose chuckled. “I think my neighbor danced on roller skates, too. On my ceiling, hour after hour. I thought of complaining to the hotel manager, but she was a nice girl. The poor thing had to practice somewhere.” She put down her scissors and reached for her cigarettes. “Anyway, she didn’t last long. She ran out of money and moved into a flat with two girls she’d met in a coffee shop.” She lit a match to her cigarette. “I’d gotten rather fond of her, but I was glad she was gone. I was afraid that the lyrics of ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’ were going to turn up somewhere in Free Land. David Beaton might start humming it.” David was the protagonist, a Dakota homesteader who intended to stake his claim, as Rose’s father had, to 320 acres of “free land”—land that was being given away under the Homestead Act.

  “But he didn’t call it off,” Norma Lee said. “David Beaton is like that dancer. She kept tapping. He just puts his head down and keeps on plugging. Blizzards, droughts, storms, bad luck, Indians, horse thieves—he doesn’t give up his dream, no matter what.”

  “That’s the point I wanted to make,” Rose said, pulling on her cigarette. “Anybody who really wants to do something can do it, if they put enough effort into it. David isn’t a hero or a superman. He’s an ordinary person with an ordinary person’s weaknesses and frailties. He married the wrong woman. He makes bad business decisions. The ‘free land’ he’s aiming to claim isn’t ‘free’ at all—it’s paid for in his sweat and his wife’s tears and their blood. But he loves the land. And he endures.” She smiled crookedly. “He doesn’t succeed, he doesn’t triumph—unless success and triumph are measured in simple endurance, as they should be. He just remains . . . invincible.” She thought of Mary Margaret McBride, who had outlasted the Depression and now had her own hugely popular radio show.

  Norma Lee put down her teacup. “Invincible,” she repeated thoughtfully. “Yes, I think that describes him, in the end.”

  Rose frowned. “The New York Times reviewer took issue with that ending. He said it was false. ‘It leads one to believe that David conquered. Some did and do conquer. But the odds!’ That’s what the reviewer said.”

  “I didn’t think the ending was false,” Norma Lee ventured. “But perhaps just a . . . bit optimistic?”

  “It’s not optimistic at all,” Rose replied, remembering the gaunt Kansas wheat farmer who had sent his wife and children back East in search of clean air. “There’s no guarantee for David, and he knows it. He understands that he’s free to leave, to go someplace safer, but he chooses to stay. He knows the odds. He could lose his crops and his health—my father did. He could lose his wife—many women died in childbirth. He could lose a child: my grandmother did, my mother did, I did. David knows all this, and as Thomas Paine said, it has never been discovered how to make a man unknow his knowledge. Knowing what he has to pay for land that the government thinks it’s giving him. Knowing the price and choosing to pay it and keep on paying it, over and over again—that’s what makes him invincible.”

  She turned to look out the window, at the forsythia beginning to bloom in bright yellow-gold arcs against the pale greens and browns of the woods. She thought back over the years, her writing, her travels, her effort to build a home in Albania, her retreat to Rocky Ridge, the crash and the terrible Depression, the emptiness left in her by all her losses.

  Had she succeeded in any of it, in anything she had ever wanted to do?

  No, not in what she had planned or in the way she had planned. But there was the forsythia, as golden as the sun, outside her own window, and over her head, the roof of her own little house, and on the bookshelf, her own books and those she had written for her mother.

  Slowly, slowly, and little by little.

  Glory to your lips: it is so.

  It is so.

  EPILOGUE

  The Rest of the Story: “Our Wild Rose at Her Wildest”

  Rose’s career as a fiction writer was not over, although Free Land is the last novel that bears her name. After she finished rewriting By the Shores of Silver Lake, she coauthored three more books with her mother: The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years. In the last three books, Rose seems to be working more independently than ever, and there are no surviving letters attempting to solicit information or coach her coauthor to improve her writing. According to her biographer, William Holtz, Rose rewrote her mother’s tablet pages, “expanding, condensing, and shifting material, sharpening drama and dialogue, and composing new episodes out of whole cloth.” The Little House series was at last complete.

  At some point, probably in the last few years of the collaboration, Laura produced the manuscript of The First Four Years, the story of her early marriage to Almanzo. In late 1937, she had suggested the project to Rose. “I could write the rough work. You could polish it and put your name to it if that would be better than mine.” But Rose was hard at work on Free Land at the time and didn’t offer to help. When the book was finally published, after both Laura’s and Rose’s deaths, readers were more puzzled than enthusiastic. The stumbling prose and the clumsily developed story were not what they had come to expect from Laura Ingalls Wilder. For some, the book made them consider the possibility that Rose had been more involved with the writing of the series than anyone knew.

  Rose dedicated the rest of her days to her passion: the active practice and advocacy—through publications, letters, and teaching—of the libertarian philosophy that she had begun to develop in the early days of the New Deal. After Free Land (and in some ways a continuation of it), her next project was The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority, published in early 1943. In that book, she saw America as an exceptional nation, a “totally new world,” unaffected by Old World races, classes, or creeds and separated from the European past by a radical new conception of individual autonomy. At its best, she argued, America offers the utopian potential for human growth and human liberty, both of which thrive under laissez-faire and are stifled by governmental and economic controls. “An eccentric and spirited statement of a certain strain of the modern libertarian character . . . historically visionary,” one critic has called the book.

  The Discovery of Freedom was written “at white heat,” Rose said, and published during wartime. It ends on a fervent wartime declaration that for many would echo long after the war was over:

  Win this war? Of course Americans will win this war. This is only a war; there is more than that. Five generations of Americans have led the Revolution, and the time is coming when Americans will set this whole world free.

  Although Herbert Hoover praised the book, reviewers largely ignored it, and because it was wartime, people’s energies and attention were elsewhere. Discovery went out of print at Rose’s wish: true to form, she saw it as topical and flawed and planned to revise it. She never did.

  Instead, beginning in 1943, she worked as a newspaper columnist, writing regular “Rose Lane Says” columns for the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American weekly newspaper that, at its peak, had a national circul
ation of about two hundred thousand. Always written with passion and great energy, her columns ranged from political history to laissez-faire economics, from radical individualism to civil rights.

  Rose paid taxes on her income, but as her distrust of the government deepened, she found ways to reduce her income to the point where she would not have to pay income tax or the new Social Security tax. In 1943, she planned to create a trust into which her royalties and writing income would be paid; she would receive just enough to live on (frugally) and the rest would be donated to charity. (The scheme never came to fruition.) She was deeply opposed to the Social Security program and refused to get a Social Security number: “I will have nothing to do with that Ponzi fraud,” she wrote with characteristic fervor, and she never did. Her passionate crusade against government programs did not always sit well with her friends and editors. As the war ground on, the conservative Saturday Evening Post became (in Rose’s view) far too liberal. One of her intemperate letters prompted fiction editor Adelaide Neall to write across the page: “Our wild Rose at her wildest.”

  The war, which Rose had resisted in print until Pearl Harbor, moved her to invest more time and energy in her garden. She refused to get a ration card, for she believed that rationing “causes more shortages than it relieves” and requires people to submit to “bureaucratic regimentation.” She enlarged her garden and went shares with her neighbors on chickens, pigs, and a cow. “I raised a pig,” she was quoted as saying in a New York newspaper article, “butchered it last fall, 600 pounds of beautiful pork. I get around the butter and sugar rationing by making my own butter and using honey as a substitute for sugar.” By war’s end, she had become known for her cellar full of home-canned meats, fruits, and vegetables. “Aladdin’s cave,” she wrote, “glittering with jewels—all those colors in glass, with the gold-colored metal rings on the tops of the jars.” She was known, too, for her frugality: she was living, she said, on just fifty dollars a month, six hundred dollars a year. At bottom, her independence, self-reliance, and frugality were political statements.