Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  She provided a quite different account of the events to Moyston, leaving out her fine wardrobe, the moonlit atmosphere, and all the prattle about her admirer. Instead, she acknowledged that she and Peggy, roused by gunfire in their room, “swore like troopers,” and admitted that the bey who proposed already had one wife.36

  Leaving Albania, she and Peggy Marquis traveled on and on, through Italy, Austria, and Hungary, then back to Albania for more photographs. There she met again with Rexh Meta, now studying at a vocational school through the generosity of Betsy Cleveland. At that point, Lane allowed a fateful fantasy to flourish in her mind: a plan to “adopt” him. On yet another mountain trip, she was gripped by a desire for further dependents, wanting to send a “gifted” mountain boy down to join Rexh at his school. In her diary, she talked herself out of it; but Rexh, whether he knew it or not, was slated for her attentions.

  That fall, she and Marquis were forced to stop in Constantinople to recuperate from malaria contracted in the Balkans, but Lane’s passion for the country brooked no deterrence. She declared that she would be back someday, this time to stay. “Even the malaria of Albania is superlative,” she wrote.37 She would long claim that Shala, her book about the region, was her favorite.

  Back in Paris, she became such a bore on the subject of Albania and its politics that she was caricatured in a novel by Dorothy Thompson’s new husband, a Hungarian expatriate named Josef Bard. In Shipwreck in Europe, Lane plays a cameo role as “Hazel Green,” a flirtatious friend of a character based on Thompson, who nurtures the protagonist while his lover is away. Bard substituted Montenegro for Albania:

  Hazel Green was near forty, but well-preserved. She was small and not thin, had a very average face, but beautiful expressive grey eyes. She wrote excellently but without much power of discrimination. She hated America for its industrial spirit, and fell in love with the Montenegrins in the far-off Balkans because they had no industrial spirit whatsoever. Of course they had almost no soap either. But Hazel preferred a well-built Montenegrin quite untouched by soap to an industrialized American full of soap. She saved money to build a house on the top of Mount Lovcen in the Bay of Cattaro, and intended to finish her life in the midst of her beloved Montenegrins. She wrote touching stories about their honesty, wisdom and general superiority in manly spirit, and illustrated them by long conversations with these brave mountaineers. How she spoke to her pets remained a riddle, because Hazel did not understand their language.

  Catty and mean-spirited, Bard’s portrait nonetheless captured the self-dramatizing nature of Lane’s fixation, something that would become even more marked before the decade was out.

  That fall, Lane began working for the publicity bureau of the Near East Relief Agency, reporting on food aid and refugee programs. Her health remained fragile, but even as she had her tonsils out (in Budapest) and suffered recurrent bouts of malaria (in Armenia), she pushed onward, spinning manically through countries and capitals: Greece, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad.

  The more misery, poverty, and displacement she saw, the more numb to the experience she became, no matter how shocking or horrific.38 Confronted with the Armenian genocide, she skirted piles of skeletons: “Skulls grinned among the bones … leg bones and rib cages were scattered farther away where hyenas or dogs had dragged them. There were little skulls and tiny backbones.” Recording her descent into depression—“Life goes by and nothing comes of it—nothing. No meaning”—she could summon neither perspective nor insight into her despair.39

  She began to develop a hostility to the very relief work she was supposed to be promoting, a cynical sense that it was all pointless, an exercise in lining the pockets of the exploiting classes. In letters to Fremont Older, who published her accounts in the San Francisco Call & Post, she went further, describing dining with Catholic bishops in an Armenian church, feasting on roast flesh while outside “the poor orphans obligingly die all round … making wonderful heart-appeals to take back home.” A cameraman had wandered by as a child died, and she parodied the delight her fellow relief workers took in his serendipitous capturing of the moment. He “actually got its death on the film!” she wrote.40

  The massacre of innocents recalled something closer to home. In one of her columns, she reported that a Turkish man had approvingly cited the old American saying, “‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian,’” adding that he felt the same way about Armenians. She contemplated it, remarking casually, “We did not kill the Indians because their religion differed from ours. We killed them for economic reasons, because they had the rich continent that we wanted.”41 Yet she criticized the Turk for learning nothing from civilization, comparing the “withering mess” overseas to her own superior country, “clean, happy, innocent and kind America.”42

  In years to come, such experiences would lead her to embrace an uncritical American exceptionalism while issuing blanket denunciations of human pity as a weakness, a “flaw in your defensive armor … surface emotion … dangerous in itself.” She had been made to feel that there was “something extremely unhinged in the universe.” Pity had been “dinned” into everyone’s heads for eons, she said, by schools, by churches, by the Red Cross and relief organizations. All it accomplished was to “open a door to suffering and suffering is a form of destruction … suffering carried far enough is death.”43 Her despairing outbursts of misanthropy, a visceral rejection of hope and charity, were the first expressions of an increasingly vehement and deliberately pitiless outlook. Even the usual pieties were not safe from her cynicism: “I think mother-love is a fiction, myself,” she wrote.44

  As the language in her diaries grew increasingly dark, she stumbled into moments of sheer existential vertigo. One occurred in a market in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, when she stopped to light a cigarette. With the flaring of the match in sunlight, she felt a paroxysm of ecstasy, a rapture at the sudden confluence of sun, flame, and heat. She later called it “the happiest moment of my life … the moment I lighted a match in the sunshine, in the Tartar market of Tiflis.”45

  Another day, she ventured out beyond Tiflis and across a grassy plateau, far beyond sight of houses, villages, civilization itself:

  It was a clear autumn afternoon. I’d gone out with a car … driving miles across those high, airy plateaus that seem quite deserted, rolling gently away to interminable distances on every side, covered with bronzed wild grass. They do not seem to be under the sky, they seem to be in the sky—lifted, somehow, into that thin blueness. And nothing moves upon them but flights of wild birds.… I walked away.… Every few minutes I looked back, to find the car, and the plateau rose between it and me like the slow swell of a wave. Then I looked back, and there was no car. Nothing but the thin air that seemed to be the sky, and the miles of blown grass, red and brown, that faintly rustled with a dry sound, and a bird that rose and cried and skimmed away in undulating flight. It was like being quite alone [on] the roof of the world. I felt that if I were to go to the edge and look over—holding carefully, not to fall—I would see below all that I had ever known; all the crowded cities and seas covered with ships, and the clamor of harbors and traffic of rivers, and farmlands being worked, and herds of cattle driven in clouds of dust across interminable plains.… But here there was only sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I felt a part of it, empty myself; there was a moment in which I was nothing at all—almost nothing at all. The only thing left in me was Albania. I said, I want to go back to Albania.46

  She did not appear to recognize it, but her description matched, detail for detail, another high plain under a vast sky, another prairie covered with brittle grass, far to the west. Once again, she had traveled thousands of miles, crossed oceans and continents, only to find herself back at the beginning.

  She could not stop. She kept on, crossing the desert sands of Syria, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad. By the fall of 1923, she was so exhausted she
could barely push a pen across a page. “Very blue,” she wrote.47 A few days later, “To think that I’m sitting here in this picturesque dam town on the Euphrates, when I want to be at home.”48 At a stopover in Paris, she decided that over the past three years she had lost everything: friends, finances, career. Whatever had been gained was “worthless … fading memories.” She soon declared the past year “a dead loss.”49

  In that frame of mind she set sail for the United States. She arrived at Rocky Ridge on December 20, 1923, just in time for Christmas. “Like a dream,” she wrote, “Mama Bess met me at Mansfield station.”50

  You Must Listen to Me

  What Laura Wilder made of the daughter who had returned from Europe is less than clear. We have no account of it in her voice, but she must have seen that something was wrong. The daughter whose pictures adorned the mantel had sailed off to France spirited, ambitious, and eager to see the world. The daughter who came back was devastated and subdued.

  Wilder, however, was struggling with her own problems. Continually pushing to do at fifty-seven everything she had demanded of herself as a younger woman, exhausted by housework and farm labor on top of her Farm Loan Association duties and other responsibilities, she was beginning to show the strain. Soon after coming home, Lane described her mother as “old and not very well” to Guy Moyston, then followed it by suggesting that her mother was completely broken down and “should be in a hospital.”51 Even allowing for Lane’s tendency to dramatize, it’s clear that Wilder was approaching her limits.

  The house at Rocky Ridge was comfortable, surrounded by gorgeous seasonal vistas, but the farm required a punishing amount of labor to maintain. Lane moved back into her old bedroom upstairs, making an office out of the sleeping porch and a novel out of her old Jack London articles. (The novelistic veneer would allow her to publish even though Charmian London still disapproved.) She had been homesick in the Middle East but soon found herself overwhelmed by the daily, grinding chores of farm life: hauling water, fetching firewood, peeling potatoes, frying meat, washing dishes, scrubbing floors, ironing, and “waiting on the pigs.”52

  To Moyston, she joked about the daily disruption of having to fetch the cows each afternoon, but it was clearly a genuine irritation. “My people can’t see why I shouldn’t settle down here for the rest of my life,” she complained.53 Her parents were too old to handle the work themselves, she said, but servants were impossible to find—even if her mother would have welcomed them, which she did not.

  No one else wanted to work so hard or live this way, Lane wearily concluded. There were fourteen empty farmhouses for sale in the area, reflecting the economic stagnation of agriculture, once again in a slump. After the tremendous wartime push to ramp up production of wheat, corn, and cotton, crops had once again flooded the market, causing prices to plummet and the farm economy to collapse. People were leaving for cities in droves, and Lane wanted to join them. The constant work and isolation explained why Wilder was so glad to have Rose back home; her mood and health improved dramatically, even if her daughter’s did not.

  Lane’s letters to Moyston recorded lively conversations between mother and daughter, including debates about politics and Prohibition. Nineteen twenty-four was a year of silent movies and bootleggers wielding Thompson submachine guns. Lenin died. J. Edgar Hoover ascended to the Olympian heights of the FBI. Leopold and Loeb attempted to commit their perfect crime. Fascists were on the rise, and a young hysteric named Adolf Hitler spent eight months of the year in jail for shooting off his mouth—and a gun—at the Beer Hall Putsch the previous winter.

  The Wilders and their daughter had a chance to chew over these developments with Moyston in person: he came for a three-month stay that spring. It must have made the close quarters of the small farmhouse even closer, and caused talk in town, which Lane acknowledged later, rolling her eyes in letters to her lover.54 Throughout that year, Moyston was becoming her indispensable foil and confidant. A former Tennessee farm boy, he settled into their routine with relish, going after the cows with Rose, snatching kisses, sitting on the porch in the gloaming and smoking cigarettes as birds settled in the trees and frogs croaked in the ravine.

  He was charming, and the Wilders loved him, seeing in him their daughter’s last chance for marital happiness and stability. When Wilder’s mother died, Moyston dispensed empathy and comfort: his own elderly mother was ailing too. Over the next few years, Wilder would inquire solicitously, through Lane, about his health, thanking him for little gifts of newspaper clippings and magazines. Almanzo, who often complained of sharing the house with multiple women (“there’s always a hen on,” he grumbled about the facilities), must have cherished having another man around the place.55 After Moyston left, he tenderly buffed and oiled an old pair of boots that he’d left behind, in case he returned. Lane, for her part, did not hesitate to pass along to the guest the guilt her mother had made her feel, telling him, “There was a large empty space in the house after you left, and my mother said, ‘Now can you imagine what it is like when you go, and there is nobody?’”56

  Politically, it was an unsettled time. Republican Calvin Coolidge had assumed office in 1923 when President Warren G. Harding died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Harding’s popularity had been undercut by posthumous disclosures about the Teapot Dome scandal, in which it emerged that the Secretary of the Interior had accepted gifts and no-interest loans from oil companies in exchange for favorable leases on public lands. The greatest political scandal prior to Watergate, Teapot Dome made cynics out of most Americans when it came to their elected officials. Along with the rest of her community, Wilder subscribed to the widespread assumption that everyone from the president on down was for sale. Lane, for her part, declared that she “never felt much real interest in American politics.”57

  Nonetheless, both of them hung on radio reports of the extraordinarily contentious Democratic National Convention held that summer in New York City. The “Klanbake,” as the convention became known, provided unparalleled theater, as Ku Klux Klan delegates attacked effigies of Al Smith, the Catholic governor of New York who was one of the front-runners. The convention would be the longest in American history, with politicians shouting their way through 103 ballots before finally settling on John Davis, a compromise candidate. Wilder had been impressed by Smith, and praised his graceful concession speech, admiring his courage in facing down Klan bullies. There was no hint, as yet, of any swing to the right in either woman’s position.58

  Yet on other topics, her daughter exhibited signs of becoming a reactionary. Lane seemed to approve of California’s compulsory sterilization of inmates at insane asylums, and supported Prohibition, declaring alcohol a poison.59 She also suggested to Moyston that despite Clarence Darrow’s celebrated defense, Leopold and Loeb should be “quietly chloroformed.”60 (Wilder, too, was outraged by the brazen murderers, her daughter wrote, sputtering in her chair while reading newspaper accounts of Darrow’s experts, “occasionally exploding, ‘Bunk!’”)61 A few years later, Lane would defend the state’s ultimate power at great length in a letter to Fremont Older, again counseling chloroform as the appropriate capital punishment.

  Writing long flirtatious letters to Moyston, Lane concealed from him the depth of her depression. Expressions of it had appeared throughout her European travels, feelings that she had bungled her life and career. As soon as she returned to Rocky Ridge, it swamped her. “I am dumb,” she wrote in her diary in 1924. “There is an insulation over everything. The unreality of long solitary days.… Life goes by, gets away from me, and soon I shall be dead, and everything insulated forever.”62 To Moyston, she merely complained of the monotony, irritably lashing out at him on occasion. Only to her diary did she confess her suicidal leanings, a sense of being buried alive in a stultifying routine, something that applied not only to endless farmhouse chores but to her writing as well.

  Her mood lifted a bit when she completed the manuscript for He Was a Man, her Jack London novel. Briefly fl
ush with cash, she paid off debts to friends and escaped to the East Coast for five months in the fall and winter of 1924, spending romantic weeks with Moyston in a rooming house in Croton, New York. Moyston wanted to make the relationship permanent, but Lane pulled away, hoping to preserve it as a long-distance affair. She had wanted the kind of love he offered all her life, she said, but she could not stand to be with anyone all the time. “I like loneliness,” she told him, not very convincingly. “I DON’T WANT TO BE CLUTCHED.”63 She could never marry him, she said, because “I’m not a wife.”64 She hated the very idea of marriage.65

  She proved it by returning to Rocky Ridge in 1925, not with Moyston but with her friend Helen Boylston, the Red Cross nurse who had first spoken to her of Albania. Thin, gawky, with a severe pageboy haircut, Boylston, known as “Troub”—a childhood nickname for “Trouble”—provided Rose with undemanding companionship that was laced with caustic humor. Lane, in turn, found Boylston a willing audience for her resentments, as well as an apt pupil; the former nurse was studying to be a writer. Boylston’s presence, along with a rotating roster of Lane’s other friends passing through Mansfield, contributed to a hothouse writers’ colony atmosphere at Rocky Ridge.

  Enjoying horseback riding in the bucolic Ozark hills, Boylston took to Almanzo immediately but detested Laura, later calling Rose “her mama’s slave.”66 When arguments broke out between Laura and her daughter, she recalled, Almanzo would often seek peace in the convenient haven of the cornfield. “Well, I knew when I married her she had a temper,” he said ruefully; “you just get used to those things.”67