Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  In the face of Chaplin’s wrath, Lane was neither abashed nor discouraged. Before the Bobbs-Merrill debacle played out, she had already latched on to Henry Ford, interviewing him during his Exposition appearance on a battleship. Her serial on his life appeared in the Bulletin in the last months of 1915, and was soon published in book form under an intriguing title: Henry Ford’s Own Story: How a Farmer Boy Rose to the Power That Goes with Many Millions Yet Never Lost Touch with Humanity.107 The phrase “Farmer Boy” would be repurposed in one of her mother’s titles, years later.

  The misadventure with Chaplin did teach her some kind of lesson, perhaps. The byline on the Henry Ford book read “As told to Rose Wilder Lane,” and the hagiographic text was cast in the third person. It was still fictionalized, as per her usual fashion. Years later, Lane’s own biographer acknowledged that Ford “repudiated the book for its inaccuracies.”108

  Next, she took on Jack London. The author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang had died suddenly, on November 22, 1916, at the age of forty. Less than six months later, Lane was writing to his widow, Charmian London, pleading for permission to write a biography of him. Sunset magazine had commissioned the project, which Lane breezily described to Mrs. London as “a semi-biography … a sort of free-hand sketch of his life.”109 Lane presented the project to her as a fait accompli, “my first chance to break into the magazines, and … they have given me an advance, and I have spent it!”110 The widow had already turned away several interested parties but pitied Lane after learning that she needed to “support her family.”111

  The serial, a “Life of Jack London,” began appearing in October 1917 and ran for eight monthly installments. Lane told Charmian London she had “verified” the facts, but said it was more important “to get, as nearly as I can, at the truth rather than at the facts.”112 The whole thing was fiction, as London could see from the outset. She and Jack London’s stepsister were dismayed right away by the portrayal of his “lonely poverty-cruel childhood” and by depictions of his father as a drunk.

  The series opened with an interior point of view of the five-year-old Jack, typical in tone:

  He was unhappy. Although he was so small, so unacquainted with the world outside the farmhouse yard that his imagination could not tell him what he wanted, he was unhappy. A sensation of hunger gnawed at him, but it was not hunger. It was like an ache, but he could not find it anywhere in his little body.

  There were many bizarre revelations to come. After wrangling with Sunset over an opportunity to examine proofs before the chapters appeared, London was shocked to read an account of how she had lost a child due to the “stresses” of sailing the South Seas. This was “flatly untrue,” she said.113 (Indeed it was.)114 She rushed corrections to the magazine, but the publication mostly tossed them aside, correcting the miscarriage story but little else. For her part, Lane tried to assuage her by saying that “my own two babies died,” a manipulative ploy to play on a bereaved woman’s sympathies.115

  Belatedly, Lane made it clear that she expected to publish the articles as a book. She repeatedly tried to wheedle permission, falsely claiming that she was someone who had never done newspaper work because she had more of a “conscience.”116 She told London, “Surely, you can appreciate that I tried not to be yellow.”117 But London, denouncing the Sunset pieces as “an erroneous interpretation” of her husband, was having none of it.118 “YOU FAILED TO DO WHAT YOU TRIED TO DO,” she replied, calling the liberties Lane had taken “NOT NECESSARY TO GOOD WORK.”119 Contemporary scholars concur, describing the serial as having “little value,” relying on “fictional devices of imagined conversations, impressionistic descriptions, and tailored atmosphere … based on skimpy evidence.”120

  The Lane who emerged during this period had no conscience, was heedless of others’ feelings, and possessed little regard for professional courtesy. Past the first flush of youth, without the excuses that can be made for the immature and inexperienced, she was proceeding with her writing career using the same lax standards of behavior she had absorbed from Claire Gillette Lane and the real estate business: make any promise, no matter how misleading; take every advantage in selling a commodity, whether a piece of property or a piece of writing. She appeared to have no qualms or moral compass, no sense of what was fair or appropriate. Her own biographer described her behavior with Jack London’s widow as a “subtle and continuing calculation” that skirted outright lies.121 Actually, it was worse. “Of course the whole thing is fictionized,” she wrote to London. “But I hope merely in the matter of color and handling.”122

  * * *

  MEANWHILE, at the Ruralist, her mother’s emphasis was on living a moral life. But just as she saw nothing wrong in Lane’s fictional reporting, Wilder, too, had little understanding of journalistic ethics. In 1918, in one memorable column, “When Proverbs Get Together,” she repurposed under her own name a humor feature Lane had written several years earlier for the Bulletin. She expanded it and altered some of the phrasing, yet the two columns—in structure and duplication of material—were much the same.123 The mother and daughter may have thought it harmless, sharing a humorous yarn the way Wilder’s father once swapped whoppers around the stove at the hardware store. But plagiarism had been recognized as unethical since at least the mid-1800s, and a nearby institution—the University of Missouri, which opened the world’s first journalism school in 1908—was devoted to promoting strict standards.124 Neither woman appeared to heed them.

  When America was drawn into the First World War, Wilder devoted herself to the war effort and women’s role in it. As soon as the U.S. declared war against Germany, her next column explained how country women could contribute, “however much we may regret the necessity.” She shared a conversation with a farm neighbor, a woman who had decided to wear overalls in the fields in conscious imitation of women working in the munitions factories. “Isn’t the raising of food to preserve life as important as the making of shells to take it?” Wilder quoted her saying. Her description of women’s work was patriotic and quietly assertive, assuring her readers that their skills had value:

  Our work is not spectacular and in doing it faithfully we shall win no war medals or decorations, but it is absolutely indispensable. We may feed the field hands, care for the poultry and work in the garden with the full assurance that we are doing as much for our country as any other person. Here in the Hills we have helped plant the potatoes and corn, we help with the milking and feed the calves and hogs and we will be found on the line just behind the trenches, “fighting for Uncle Sam,” as I heard one woman say, and every extra dozen eggs, pound of meat or bushel of vegetables we raise will help beat back the enemy, hunger.125

  She continued the drumbeat in many columns over the following months, urging women to volunteer for the Red Cross and buy Liberty Bonds. She also stepped up herself: buying her own bonds, donating fifteen “thoroughbred” Brown Leghorn eggs and a rooster to a Red Cross auction, and serving on the dinner committee to boot.126 But she did not engage in mere jingoism, thoughtfully debating America’s rush to war in previous conflicts. She criticized founders of a new local farmers’ club for failing to include women. She faulted the Women’s Trade Union League for working to improve labor conditions and reduce hours solely for urban women and children, while farm women were working fourteen to sixteen hours a day with no representation. She was becoming a rural rabble-rouser. She called out to her readers: “Write to me and tell me about it!”

  They did, and she was thrilled, saying she had feared “no one was listening to me.”127 To hear back from readers, she said, was “truly delightful.” She relished, as well, a letter of strong praise from her Ruralist editor, George Jordan. “It gives me such a warm, comfortable feeling around in my interior decorations,” she told her daughter.128

  She spread the joy, praising Wright County neighbors for keeping prices low to avoid war profiteering. Ladies in Mansfield churches were lauded for forswearing new hats in favor of Liber
ty Bond pins and Red Cross buttons. She called out for particular merit A. C. Barton and his “Show You Farm” in nearby Mountain Grove. A former Methodist preacher, Barton had restored his poor soil by practicing crop rotation, eschewing commercial fertilizers, hoeing corn by hand, and condemning the robbery of soil nutrients as “a sin.”129 She praised his “agricultural theology,” having long ago taken such advice as gospel: don’t go looking for a better place “but MAKE one.”130

  The culmination of this theme of self-reliance came in a column about dreams and their relationship to accomplishment. She joked about gardeners drowsing by the fire over winter seed catalogues, perfect spring produce springing up from the pages. She talked about her own Leghorns and the fantasies she had built on them, a dream punctured by reality. The flock might have made millions, she said, “if the hens had performed according to schedule; if the hawks had loved field mice better than spring chickens; if I had been so constituted that I never became weary.”131 No such excuses sufficed in real life, she knew, but nonetheless it was “necessary that we dream,” inspired by an ideal. Then, once the dreaming was over, she told her readers, “wake up and ‘get busy.’” That would be her gospel, in life and work.

  * * *

  WILDER’S regular columns were ever more valuable to the Ruralist, which elevated her to editor of the paper’s Home section in 1917. Lane would one day tell her that her articles stood out in the paper “like a skyscraper on a plain,” an apt comparison.132

  The year after Wilder’s promotion, the newspaper’s editor, John Case, published a warm profile of her, citing the fact that she had been connected with the Ruralist longer than anyone else on the editorial staff. She was characteristically modest, saying her education amounted to “what a girl would get on the frontier,” but Case was proud of his star farm columnist, saying she had won recognition “because of ability alone.” Wilder’s growing reputation was reflected in her work’s being given its own column title: it became “The Farm Home” in 1919 and then, in 1921, “As a Farm Woman Thinks.”

  Her self-assurance would not be undercut until her first article commissioned by a national magazine. That milestone came about through Lane’s connections and encouragement, which were indispensable. But her editing of her mother’s work also marked their first collaborative clash.

  In 1917, Bessie Beatty, Lane’s former boss at the Bulletin, had achieved national fame as one of the reporters who went to Russia to write about the October Revolution as it unfolded. The next year, she was offered the editorship of McCall’s Magazine. By that time, Lane had soured on Beatty, but she nonetheless prevailed on her former mentor to secure her mother a prestigious spot in the national publication. The resulting article, “Whom Will You Marry: The Farmer’s Wife,” was part of a series on the fates awaiting women who married into various professions.

  Drafts have not survived to reveal how extensive Lane’s changes were, but she wrote to her mother in April 1919 to smooth over Wilder’s dismay at the liberties she had taken. “Don’t be absurd about my doing the work on your article,” Lane wrote.133 “I didn’t rewrite it a bit more than I rewrite Mary Heaton Vorse’s articles or Inez Haynes Irwin’s stories.” (Vorse and Irwin were leftist suffragist writers.) Lane defended at length her decision, supported by the editors of McCall’s, to cut her mother’s discussion of farm economics, and congratulated her on “the size of the check … really a fairly decent price … considering that your name has as yet no commercial value.” She belittled her mother even as she buoyed her, a dynamic that would continue.

  For all her journalistic malfeasance, Lane was a talented and insightful line editor, as she would prove countless times over the years. Often without being asked, she reworked manuscripts not only by her mother but also by friends, acolytes, even mere acquaintances, dispensing reams of professional advice.

  In this instance, her advice was accompanied by page after page of suggestions about another project her mother was working on: an extensive memoir. That manuscript, now lost, was apparently also intended for McCall’s. Judging by Lane’s description, it was a tantalizing embryonic version of Wilder’s later work, a dry run for her future autobiography. It began by comparing “modern girls” to Wilder’s own experience growing up, and ran to at least forty pages.

  Going through it section by section, Lane patiently urged her mother to observe time-honored rules of good writing—show rather than tell, stick to a narrative voice, provide colorful details, and pay close attention to transitions:

  If I were you, I would jump directly, after the transition paragraph, into, “when I was a girl—” And draw the contrast clearly. Only one generation ago, Indians and forests and half a continent practically untouched by the white race. Free land, free fuel, food for the hunting it—“Go west, young man, and grow up with the land,” “And Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm.” That sort of thing. And do it all concretely—don’t say those things were so, show that they were so. Your log cabin in the Great Woods, that is now farming land—your trip through Kansas, across the sites of cities today—the building of the railroad through the Dakotas, now the wheat fields that feed the world during the war—Make it all real, because you saw it with your own eyes.134

  There, in 1919, was Wilder’s autobiography. She had already begun working on it. Even more illuminating: she was writing “children’s stories.” Lane said she liked them but that they were trivial compared to the memoir. She told her mother: “There is no opportunity to make a name with children’s stories.”135

  Diverging Roads

  As the nineteen-tens boiled over into the Roaring Twenties, strange manifestations of social ferment began appearing in literature as writers groped toward naturalistic depictions of the complexities of human behavior. In 1919, Sherwood Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of linked short stories in which small-town lives were warped by conformity into grotesque expressions of despair or deviance. Reviewers blanched at its shocking revelations and frank language, but it quickly became a cornerstone of the emerging Modernist movement. Over the next few years, Lane would herself become so emblematic of a small-town girl turned sophisticate that Anderson would parody her in a novel.136

  In 1920, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street laid bare what he called “the village virus” caught by priggish and prurient denizens of the American small town. The novel’s setting, the fictional Minnesota hamlet of Gopher Prairie, was based on the author’s own hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota. Lewis conceived of the book during a summer home from Yale while reading Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads, which had itself been inspired by Garland’s return to the stultifying torpor of a Midwest summer.

  After toiling for a time at commercial magazines—including serving as assistant editor of Adventure, a pulp title devoted to yarns about cowboys and pirates that was a favorite of the Wilders—Lewis earned world renown with Main Street. The book sold three hundred thousand copies in its first year, becoming an instant American classic. Its protagonist, Carol Milford Kennicott, hails from the big city of St. Paul, and when the novel opens, Lewis identifies her as the product of an America that had sped far beyond Wilder’s frontier times: “The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot.”137 He would be wrong about that, but Main Street proved a powerful influence on American fiction, including Lane’s.

  At the turn of the decade, Lane’s life was in turmoil. She had quit the Bulletin in the summer of 1918, when Fremont Older left after a dispute with the owner, and moved briefly to Sausalito as a freelance writer. After writing autobiographies of famous men she did not know, she now turned to her own life for material, writing a serial based on her adventures as working girl, telegrapher, and real estate seller. Sunset magazine, which had printed her articles on Jack London, published the work in nine parts, advertising it as “A Big, Modern Novel of a Girl’s Struggle for Business Success and Happiness.”138 Reminding read
ers of Lane’s “trenchant interpretation” of London, the magazine coyly invited them to speculate about whether the protagonist of this new tale was fictional: “how real a woman we can only guess.”139

  Titled “Diverging Roads: A Story of the Restless Sex,” the serial follows young Helen Davies, daughter of a “struggling farmer,” on her journey from innocence to experience. After a few months learning the art of telegraphy, Helen moves to San Francisco, where she takes a job sending telegrams in a big hotel. Lane made the parallels with her own life inescapable, naming her small town “Masonville” and her youthful beau “Paul Masters,” recalling her Mansfield suitor Paul Cooley.140 Likewise, Gillette Lane was scarcely concealed by “Gilbert Kennedy,” a cad Helen marries and quickly sheds.

  Nevertheless, Lane expressed dismay that the piece was read in Mansfield as a roman à clef, with a particularly hurtful portrayal of her mother. At the end of one installment, Helen’s mother piteously asks to borrow sixty dollars, saying that the cow died. It must have been aggravating to Lane’s actual mother, since money seemed to flow from Mansfield to San Francisco and not the other way around. Lane acknowledged having made things uncomfortable, in a rationalization that showed little self-awareness:

  Everyone will insist that it is my own experience.… As a matter of fact, not one iota … is my own experience. I simply used the background of parts of my own life, because it was easier than to labor over constructing a purely imaginary one.… All the characters, and all the experiences, were purely imaginary, and yet no one will believe it, because I put them in a telegraph office, and I was once a telegrapher, and because I put them in a real-estate office, and I was once a real-estate salesman.… I’m sorry you have been hurt by it.141