Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Lane and Helen Boylston spent 1925 at Rocky Ridge. They hoped by the following year to accumulate enough savings to imagine living out Lane’s most fervent dream: returning to Albania. In February 1926, Lane received a disappointing settlement from her lawsuit against Frederick O’Brien: seeking royalties for her work on his bestselling White Shadows in the South Seas, she got little more than nine hundred dollars. But with earnings from the previous year, she was able to pay off debts and think about investing.

  Lane and Boylston had grown tremendously excited about the stock market. Boylston had jumped in earlier, investing the money she had earned from her nursing career with a former employer, George Q. Palmer. His Wall Street firm, Palmer & Co., was bringing her steady returns. Lane soon joined in, asking Moyston whether she could borrow a couple of hundred dollars; she wanted to assemble a thousand-dollar investment, telling him, “I feel like taking the gamble.”106 The rest she planned to borrow from N. J. Craig.107 In her enthusiasm, she pulled her parents into the market along with her. “Stocks are leaping around like corn in a popper,” Rose wrote to them. “Fortunately, we can’t lose.”108

  In her embrace of bull market optimism, Lane had plenty of company. After a severe recession in 1920–1921, the economy had come booming back. Americans began to borrow heavily; hundreds of thousands purchased consumer goods such as automobiles and radios “on time.” Brokers began lending to small investors, advancing up to two-thirds of their stocks’ value, urging ordinary Americans to play the market.

  Like most people, Lane saw no potential peril. In 1926, as her annual payment to her parents, Lane transferred five hundred dollars from her Palmer account to their new account with the firm, and the Wilders invested an additional five hundred of their own. Lane assured them that they could anticipate earning 8 percent annually, and she was giddy with the expectation that she could build both accounts to the point where all three could retire and live off the earnings, her parents in Rocky Ridge and she in Albania. “The only proper use for money, for you two now,” she told her parents, “is spending.” Whatever you want, she told them, “you can have it.”109

  The Wilders, of course, paid no attention to her exuberance, continuing to live a frugal existence among their pigs and hens, entertained by a self-renewing circle of farm cats and their preternaturally gifted Airedale terrier, Nero, who would sit politely at the dinner table like a member of the family, eating off his own plate.110 They had contemplated driving to the Grand Canyon that summer but could find no one to take care of the livestock.111 Their daughter, on the other hand, embarked on a spending spree that would not be curbed until the economy crashed.

  In March 1926, Lane and Helen Boylston sailed to France, and immediately plunged into language study at the Berlitz School in Paris, devoting themselves to French, Italian, German, and Russian, with plans (unrealized) to branch out into Greek, Serbian, and Albanian. In a note to Moyston, Wilder joked about her daughter’s private Babel: “Wouldn’t it be funny if Rose and Troub should get their languages mixed? What a confusion of tongues it would be.”112

  Lane paid their Russian tutor, a former architect, to design for her a new home on the Adriatic, in the “pure Arab style.” The sketch showed a lavish colonnaded affair with a walled garden, swimming pool, terraces, defensive gun emplacements, open courtyards, and a servants’ court.113 She wrote ecstatically to Moyston, calling it “heaven.”

  But beneath the ebullience triggered by her escape from the stultifying Missouri farm were other, darker feelings. Two articles she wrote about herself and her parents suggested that her depression ran deep, back to her earliest days in Dakota Territory. Both published in Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan (forerunner of the Cosmopolitan magazine edited by Helen Gurley Brown), they aimed to shock and to wound.

  The first, “If I Could Live My Life Over Again: I Am Successful, Happy and Divorced, But I Wish I Were an Old-Fashioned Wife and Mother,” revisited her teenage fears of being an “old maid” and her unhappy marriage. She divorced, she wrote, “as I might have committed suicide,” believing she would never be happy again.114 Painting her single life as selfish, she wrote that if she were twenty again, she would “marry and stay married.”115 It was a bald falsification of her true feelings, since she never regretted leaving Gillette Lane, only having married him in the first place. She also did not acknowledge the fact that she was at that very moment being pursued by an ardent suitor whose strongest desire was to marry her, a desire she continued to discourage.

  In Mansfield, the article inspired intense interest. Friends showered copies of it on her parents, she told Moyston. Her mother said not a word about it. “I think she hates it,” Lane wrote, and she was probably right.116

  But it was the second article that provided a blueprint to the emotional breakdown that she was suffering, and would continue to suffer, for the rest of her life. It appeared under a sensational title: “I, Rose Wilder Lane, Am the Only Truly HAPPY Person I Know and I Discovered the Secret of Happiness on the Day I Tried to Kill Myself.”117 Her description of her childhood was no less hyperbolic. “All unsuspected,” she wrote, “I lived through a childhood that was a nightmare.” Although her parents “did their best,” she had suffered fear, anxiety, isolation, malnutrition, torment by peers, and, most startling of all, the guilt of knowing she had ruined her parents’ lives by burning down their house:

  I was an only child; and I was three years old when the last of seven successive years of crop failure on the Dakota prairies ruined my prosperous farmer-father, complications of work, worry and diphtheria left him an invalid, and our house burned. My mother was barely twenty-one. I stood beside her at the window, my eyes just above the sill, on the July harvest day when she watched a hail-storm drive into the ground the hundreds of acres of ripe wheat that would have paid the mortgages.

  I was taken away from home, and told nothing—kind adults answering my questions with “Hush!” until I asked no more—during those weeks when my father and mother were expected to die of diphtheria, and I knew it. And later it was I, alone in the kitchen and helpfully trying to put more wood in the stove, who set fire to the house. My mother was still ill in bed. She saved herself and me, but nothing else. I quite well remember watching the house burn, with everything we owned in the world, and knowing that I had done it.

  I was always very quiet. No one knew what went on in my mind. Because I loved my parents I would not let them suspect that I was suffering. I concealed from them how much I felt their poverty, their struggles and disappointments. These filled my life, magnified like horrors in a dream. My father and mother were courageous, even gaily so. They did everything possible to make me happy, and I gallantly responded with an effort to persuade them they were succeeding.… I have since seen something of human barbarities, in the Near East and elsewhere, but they were no surprise to me.118

  The article captured the self-dramatizing tendency of her adult years. One morning, she said, at a difficult moment in her marriage, she attempted suicide by soaking a rag with chloroform and burying her face in it.119 She woke later with nothing more than a bad headache. This brush with death, she said, inspired lasting happiness, the joy of being alive. “It is now fifteen years since I began to enjoy living,” she claimed, “and I enjoy it more every day.” (That assertion of optimism was no more reliable than the rest of her reporting; her diary around this time recorded such reflections as “the leprosy of death, which attacks everyone at about 40.”)120

  Perhaps it is no wonder that Lane had left for Europe before the article appeared. Like so many of her exaggerations, it must have been profoundly disturbing and embarrassing to her parents. According to Wilder’s account, her daughter had had nothing to do with the fire. And even if she had tried to add fuel to the stove, Rose was not yet three when the house on the tree claim burned, and no child of that age can be held responsible for such an accident. What made her fabricate that responsibility? Was it something her mother said? Or was Lane,
as an adult, acting out a need to assume the central role, casting herself as a tiny angel of destruction?

  Whatever the explanation, the articles marked a turning point. From here on out, Lane would repeatedly cause ruination to herself, bringing her life down around her ears. Every time she grasped some semblance of stability, she would burn through it, alienating the people who might have helped her, spending lavishly and frantically until her money was gone.

  * * *

  ROSE Wilder Lane’s Albanian dream began with a comical road trip in a Model T Ford from Paris to Tirana in August 1926, and ended in an ignominious retreat back to Rocky Ridge seventeen months later. The accounts that Lane produced for friends and family—letters to Moyston, Dorothy Thompson, the humorist Clarence Day, her broker George Palmer, and others, and a travel diary that she and Helen Boylston kept for the Wilders, later published as Travels with Zenobia—were self-consciously perky and full of fun, an early Hollywood travel yarn starring two spunky American gals abroad. The commentary she wrote for herself, however, was grim.

  In journal entries labeled “My Albanian Garden,” she cast back over her life, deploring her youthful “struggling with sex” at seventeen; her naive belief in Gillette Lane; the long recovery after the stillbirth and operation; and lost opportunities in Europe, where she felt she had been “exploited,” financially and emotionally, by her travel companions. She seemed to be trying to find a sense of control over her life. But self-analysis only fed her insecurity, and a fixation that began emerging from her time in Albania would become an overwhelming obsession: houses. They would consume her: designing them, building them, renovating them, pouring money into them.

  Even before reaching Tirana, she was spending heavily. The new Model T, bought in a Paris showroom, was decidedly not the cheapest means of travel, especially given the various taxes, duties, and fees. Driving to Albania, Lane and Boylston took along with them their French cook, Yvonne. In Tirana, they rented a house, hoping eventually to buy land, but byzantine regulations restricted sales to foreigners.121 A host of servants was hired: a butler, two gardeners, a houseboy, and an additional cook.

  Servants in Albania were affordable enough, but the most extraordinary expenditures came with the rented house. The building and grounds, adorned with courtyards and terraces, fruit trees and flower gardens, were ample for two persons, but within a few months Lane embarked on extensive renovations: taking up floors and cutting archways, installing a full bath (the house had a water closet), and building balconies over the gardens (to be screened in summer, glassed in winter). She also arranged for the construction of no fewer than eight fireplaces.122

  Over the next few months, with five thousand dollars in her Palmer account, she spent around two thousand on renovations to property she did not own. It recalled her grandfather’s fateful decision to build on Kansas land that did not belong to him, and like that decision, it would not end well. At one point, she telegraphed Clarence Day, frantically trying to borrow five hundred dollars: she had run out of money to pay the workers.123

  Dimly, she recognized that she was creating a financially precarious situation for herself. “I am not a stupid person,” she told him, “yet there are … times when my grasp on reality goes all to smash, and then I run into such troubles … I am forty years old, and should have more sense.”124 She was good for it, she assured him, and if something happened to her, he could expect her mother to cover the debt.

  Lane never made the obvious psychological connection between her claim that she had burned down her parents’ house and her own incessant house-building, which somehow failed to provide her with a permanent place to live. In a fit of construction fever, she wrote to Dorothy Thompson:

  Days of great excitement, tense and emotional. For the carpenters and the masons have arrived; floors are coming up, foundations are going down … studding and rafters mysteriously erect themselves in air. Houses are the abiding joys; they are the most emotion-stirring of all things … houses are real, deep, emotional things.… Albanians are right in knowing that far worse than to kill the criminal or the enemy is to burn his house.125

  If she had burned a house, she would now rebuild it, over and over again.

  * * *

  AT the same time as she was renovating the rented house, Lane was sitting at her desk agonizing over her work, trying to churn out Ozark serials to pay the rent. In 1926, she published Hill-Billy, a novel cobbled together from pieces she had written for Country Gentleman during her year at Rocky Ridge. Its protagonist was transparently modeled on her parents’ close friend, the lawyer and banker Noah Jefferson Craig. The book was dedicated to him: “the love and understanding you have for your own hill-folk, who are only by adoption mine, have made a book which never would have been written without you.”126 And Lane named her hero Abimelech Noah Baird, continuing her practice of scarcely concealing the sources of her fictional material. Just like N. J. Craig, A. N. Baird comes down out of a holler to become a lawyer, outwitting the townsfolk who take him for a dumb hillbilly.

  Drawing on the legend of Walter Raleigh’s lost colony, whose survivors were rumored to have traipsed over to Tennessee and thence to the Ozarks, Lane populated the backwoods with families named Rippee, Garner, and Miller, the names of actual families who lived in Wright County for generations and still do today. Her characters speak in a broad vernacular that strongly recalls denizens of Al Capp’s Dogpatch, using expressions such as “woods’ colt” for a baby born out of wedlock, and delivering themselves of such remarks as “That thar ornery yallow-livered son of a mangy houn’ dawg laid tail betwixt legs an’ scringed belly upwards.”127

  Lane dismissed the book in her letters, but nonetheless immediately embarked on another such serial for Country Gentleman. It was based on the real-life Ozark blood feud between the Alsups and the Fleetwoods, a local version of the Hatfields and McCoys. Lane made it into a Romeo and Juliet story: Cindy, of the red-gold hair, loves the boy she grew up with, Jefferson Boon, but the star-crossed lovers must survive the animosity between their clans. It was melodramatic hackwork again, to the point where Lane was mortified when Harper’s insisted on publishing it as a novel, suffering agonies of embarrassment over the gushing, pulpy ad copy.128

  Not all her writing was quite so mercenary. “The Blue Bead,” published in Harper’s in 1925 and featuring a familiar American woman who travels in the Albanian mountains, hinted at a richer talent, and received an honorable mention in a story contest. “Yarbwoman,” published in Harper’s in 1927, was also a cut above her more commercial efforts. For that story, she borrowed a fable from her grandfather: a tale Charles Ingalls had told Almanzo about Lake Pepin’s Maiden Rock, infested with rattlesnakes, and a man mysteriously poisoned by a venom-dripping snake fang piercing a leather boot.129 It too was a regional tale but quieter and more atmospheric, capturing the grim realities of mountain lives.

  Lane admitted to correspondents and her diary that she wanted to write something “worth while,” but her cycle of profligate spending kept her tied to commercial production. She linked the “squirrel cage” she was caught in to her early poverty: “I let the money go, as always, in satisfying momentary desires.… It seems that I come back, always, to that simple material viewpoint of my childhood.”130

  From here on, she would begin expressing contempt not only for her own work, which she termed “cheap popular success,” but for her public, whom she often referred to collectively and sardonically as “Gentle Reader.” She demeaned her own constant reading as “little more than a drug habit.”131 She found little to admire in other writers, dismissing the moderns as having nothing to say.132

  What’s more, she told her diary, she was done with men, having realized that her attitude toward them was “essentially exploiting … I wanted what they had, not what they were.” She had despised all of the men “who said they loved me.”133 Gray-haired and worn-looking at forty, she was through with love affairs. “No affection, poverty, inferiority,” s
he wrote in her diary.134

  The lower she slipped in her own self-esteem, the more she began playing the grande dame, giving free rein to her imperious impulses. To Dorothy Thompson and others, she wrote condescending descriptions of her servants and neighbors, remarking on their quaint ways: “Their lives go by like the days, without effort or struggle; just naturally passing.”135 One unsatisfactory servant she compared to a “homeless dog,” saying, “It must be very difficult to live among human beings, without any kind of human brain.”136 Josef Bard, whose Hazel Green character had viewed Balkans as her pets, had been right.

  No dashing Albanian beys were vying for her hand now, but she enjoyed fancying herself as “specially created … for the Moslem woman’s life,” punctuating her letters with “Inshallah!” and “Oh Allah!”137 At Rocky Ridge, she had been slopping pigs and fetching firewood; in Tirana, she and Troub would have fires built for them. Servants brought them tea and cakes as their gardens were planted and tended, their clothes cleaned and ironed, their meals prepared, and mud cleaned off their shoes. “There is nothing wrong with America but the servant problem,” she informed Fremont Older, as if she were to the manor born.138 To furnish the house, she and Troub planned to adopt a purebred Great Dane puppy from England that cost a lavish fifty pounds.

  In keeping with her newfound sense of superiority, she began to express anti-Semitic and racist views, writing to Day to demand why he was outraged by housing restrictions limiting Jews to certain neighborhoods. “We don’t like pogroms,” she wrote, “so we say that Jews are not only as good as, but the same as, any other people. But we know they aren’t.”139 She expounded on the issue for him, in a dogmatic tone she was adopting more and more: “Jewry isn’t an abstraction, it’s a characteristic something in individuals.… If you don’t like it, why should you have it in your house?” She recommended that he read Jud Süss, a 1925 historical novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, as a “true picture of the Jew.”140 She deplored Americans’ sentimentality about “the oppressed negro” and the attitude that interracial marriage might be “admirable.”141