Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  In the end, Lane could not sustain the intricate fantasy she had been constructing for herself. She felt cut off from magazine editors and the American market. After renovating the rented house, she began fantasizing about a new one to be built at Rocky Ridge. In July 1927, Country Gentleman paid her the spectacular sum of ten thousand dollars for her “Cindy” serial, and she and Troub embarked on a victory tour of Europe in their Model T, planning to fetch the Great Dane. When that deal fell through, they adjusted expectations, buying instead a Maltese terrier called Bunting von Sevilla.142 She told Guy Moyston that she was returning to Rocky Ridge with newfound confidence as a chatelaine, planning “to get servants and boss them.”143 It was either that or buy a house in Albania.

  Her mother apparently decided the issue. In January 1928, Wilder sent her daughter a telegram, since lost. It may have asked her to return. Almanzo Wilder was diagnosed with “a beginning cancer”—skin cancer—around that time.144

  Lane and Boylston sublet their rented house, sold the Ford, and booked passage to New York. She did not bother to report what happened to the servants. In the end, the most remarkable aspect of her Albanian sojourn—the closest emotional attachment she had maintained for years—was the haste with which it was abandoned.

  But as she prepared to embark, she had one more grand gesture to make. Rexh Meta, now eighteen and a graduate of the Tirana Vocational School, had caught the eye of someone at the British embassy, who proposed that he attend Cambridge University in England.145 He was not often mentioned in Lane’s letters or diaries of the period, but the week before she left she gave him five hundred dollars, promising more. In time, he would become her first “adopted” child, another project on which she would lavish time, anguish, and money. Like her houses, however, he would prove a curiously replaceable proposition. After Lane sailed away from Albania on January 27, 1928, she never saw him again.

  She was ending a number of things. Back in New York that spring, she broke off her seven-year relationship with Moyston. She fondly recalled their time in Croton and Rocky Ridge, and the night that cows stood around staring “wonderingly” at them. She apologized for hurting him, and quoted Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”146

  On the passage home, she had recorded in her diary that she had around twenty thousand in her Palmer account and intended to spend “no more considerable sums” until she had fifty thousand.147

  Six months later, she began building a house for her parents.

  Chapter 9

  Pioneer Girl

  Rock House

  Laura Ingalls had been born when wheat sold high, and in the late nineteen-twenties the cycle was coming around again. On her 1925 road trip to California and back, she had run her hands through the buffalo grass of Kansas, one of the native grasses of the prairies she had loved. She may have been among the last to do so: all that buffalo grass was soon to go the way of the buffalo.

  To the west of Mansfield, the southern Great Plains were about to be stripped bare of topsoil in one of the last land booms in American history. By 1926, buffalo grass was being plowed up by the acre, great swaths of it removed in Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and New Mexico. Within a few years, that ecological rapine would wreak havoc across the prairie.

  Wheat had always been an American game of chance, and now the land itself had become a casino. Had anyone been thinking about it, the boom on the southern plains resembled nothing so much as the Dakota Boom of the 1880s. But no one was thinking. Everyone was buying. So-called suitcase farmers—big-city speculators and small-town white-collar workers alike—were arriving by train by the score, buying up a square mile or two or ten and leasing out the land to tenant farmers. Some simply threw seed in the ground and hoped for a big payday.1

  Charles Ingalls could only have dreamed about such conditions. Wheat prices and exports had reached all-time highs during World War I, when Congress mandated prices at over two dollars a bushel. After the war, prices stayed there for a time, as the United States exported grain to starving countries in Europe: political turmoil in the Soviet Union, once the world leader in wheat exports, allowed America to take the top spot. Gas-powered Ford tractors had eased the backbreaking work of sod-busting, pulling disc plows sharp as knives through virgin turf, grinding the soil to a fine dust. Combines—machines combining a harvester and a thresher—made large teams of men wielding sickles and flails, the laborers Laura Wilder had once dreaded having to feed, obsolete.

  Huge factory farms were making unheard-of profits. A woman in Haskell County, Kansas, was christened the “wheat queen” in 1926 after her two thousand acres brought a profit of $75,000.2 Burgeoning populations nearly burst the seams of sleepy hamlets: in Kansas, Stanton County grew by 137 percent from 1920 to 1930, and Grant County by 184 percent.3 Dodge City, once a modest village, would become a teeming anthill of ten thousand by 1930, and a building boom taxed contractors and carpenters. There were unforeseen housing shortages in places like Ashland, Kansas, a village of fewer than five hundred at the turn of the century.4 Inflating along with the wheat boom, a speculative real estate bubble began to expand all across the country. National housing prices rose by around 20 percent, with residential markets heating up from Florida to Chicago.5

  In a sign of trouble to come, nonfarm foreclosures began rising steeply in 1926, the same year that housing starts peaked. Houses had become almost as easy to buy on credit as cars; they too were now being mass-produced. Alongside Lane’s 1925 Cosmopolitan article ran an advertisement for a “Five-Room Aladdin,” an all-inclusive kit for a wood-frame house, shingles to doorknobs, shipped to the nearest railroad station.6 Sears, Roebuck—the fantastically successful mail-order firm run by Almanzo’s childhood friend from Spring Valley—was the largest manufacturer of such houses. The firm had been selling kits since 1908, but their popularity exploded in the 1920s. By 1930, almost 50,000 of their kits would be sold across the country.

  Supplied with pre-milled, precut lumber, the kits represented a miraculous advance in convenience. Ads touted their ease and speed of construction, though Hollywood parodied the misadventures experienced by neophytes. Buster Keaton found inventive ways to hit himself in the face building a kit house in the silent comedy One Week. And in The Cocoanuts, Groucho Marx, playing a crooked real estate developer, mocked the Florida land boom. “You can have any kind of home you want to, even stucco,” he exclaimed, brandishing his cigar. “Oh how you can get stuck-oh! Now is the time to buy while the new boom is on. Remember that old saying, ‘A new boom sweeps clean.’”7

  Lane too was riding the boom, engaging in a clean sweep of her own at Rocky Ridge. Upon her return to the farmhouse in the spring of 1928, finding her father increasingly unable to handle the chores, she urged her parents to retire from farming altogether. As a stopgap measure, Almanzo Wilder brought in a tenant farmer, Bruce Prock, to handle plowing, maintenance, and livestock.

  Laura Wilder retired as well from her role as secretary-treasurer for the Mansfield Farm Loan Association, resigning at the age of sixty-one. Her contribution to the community had been substantial. In massive leather-bound volumes recording deeds of trust in the Hartville Courthouse, Wilder had filed document after document throughout the 1920s, painstakingly typing out legal land descriptions, occasionally pasting in revised or corrected wording. Her signature appeared on more than forty such deeds in the volume covering 1922–1926. On occasion, Almanzo filled in for her, signing paperwork as well.8 Between 1917 and 1928, she had assisted in preparing and closing nearly a million dollars in loans and had earned perhaps several thousand dollars in the process.9 Notes from her last meeting recorded a “hearty vote of thanks” to her as outgoing secretary.10

  In what may have been a retirement party, Lane hosted a lavish outing for the Justamere Club, treating ladies to the theater and a luncheon held at the Colonial Hotel in Springfield. The newspapers breathlessly recorded the activities of the “Famous Writer Back to Live in Ozarks.”11 To her mother’s chagrin, Lane was al
ready a controversial and much-debated local celebrity.

  Ensconced in the crowded farmhouse with Helen Boylston, Lane dedicated the rest of the year to upending her parents’ lives. Soon, her fantasies about moving them to England, or even Albania, gave way to a storm of rearrangement, as she began the process of constructing two new houses on the property, one for the tenant farmer and his family and the other for her parents.

  No hard evidence survives of the Wilders’ reaction to this plan. They had labored for decades to complete the farmhouse to their satisfaction, and by all accounts were comfortable where they were. In retrospect, their ambivalence is clear. On the one hand, they accepted their daughter’s gift, just as they accepted her money. On the other, Wilder made it known to her daughter that she wanted nothing to do with the construction, declining even to look at it while it was under way. Lane blithely assured a friend that her mother “wanted a new house, but didn’t want to bother with it in the building stages.”12

  Having importuned her daughter to return, Wilder may have felt that relinquishing her house was the price she had to pay to keep Rose down on the farm. But it could not have been easy being relegated to what was, literally, the back forty.13 The Rock House, as the new dwelling would be called, was to be built nearly a mile away from the original farmhouse, out of its sight. The design was based on a Sears, Roebuck model, “The Mitchell,” with two gables and an arched front door with strap hinges, lit by a “quaint English lamp.”14

  Parsimonious to a fault, the Wilders could only have blanched at the excessive spending that ensued. After years of struggling to rise out of extreme poverty, they still lived frugally, wary of expenditures that might revive the specter of the 1890s. Lane had other ideas.

  The complete Sears kit was listed for $1,493 to $2,143, depending on finishes. But Lane purchased the design, not the kit, and hired a Springfield architect and a contractor to rework the plans, adding expensive doors, windows, and cabinetry. The architect’s final tally climbed to $5,500. And once construction began, Lane showed up daily to supervise it down to the tiniest detail. At one point, she ordered workers to tear out a just-installed ceiling and replace it with a lower one. She had newly installed floors refinished to her specifications, and altered the architect’s design for the bathroom on the fly. The substitutions and changes sent the price ever higher.15 She wrote wearily that the extra expenditures amounted to “another life wasting mistake that I shall make,” but made no effort to stick to a budget.16 By the time construction was finished, she ended up spending more than $11,000 on the design, construction, and furnishing of Rock House, more than five times the original Sears kit price. She accepted a loan of around $2,500 from her mother to complete the project, signing a note and agreeing to pay interest.17

  Lane was consumed by the process, writing to an editor at Harper and Brothers, which was publishing her “Cindy” serial as a book that fall, to say that she had not thought about her own work for months. As her spending spun out of control, she found herself increasingly unable to focus. She admitted to the editor, a relative stranger, that her house obsession was an addiction that she could not restrain:

  I am building a house for my father and mother; a really charming little English-type cottage, of field-stone and brick, Johns-Manville asbestos shingles, Truscon steel casements, Rol-screens, made-to-order doors and hardware, and every electrical thing the genius of America has devised.… Houses are my vice; I simply can’t take ’em or leave ’em alone. But for houses, I know it well, I’d be much more profitable to everyone, including me. This is my 18th habitation, made or re-made including some apartments. But I can’t seem to help it.18

  As her parents’ new house was being built, Lane, like a cuckoo bird, began remaking their old nest, undertaking ambitious renovations by installing electricity and redoing plumbing. At the same time, she was overseeing the completion of the third house on the property, for the Procks. The renovation of the farmhouse seemed to be one final spasmodic effort to assert her adulthood, ascendancy, and authority, and to compensate for earlier losses that she claimed were her fault. But again, she would not truly make her parents’ original house her own, choosing to rent it from them once their new house was completed. As in Albania, she had devised a situation that involved spending thousands of dollars on housing that would, inevitably, leave her still without a place of her own.

  She could not have chosen a more self-destructive trajectory, a situation perfectly poised to plunge her back into the unhappiness of her previous stay at Rocky Ridge. Flush after the sale of Cindy, she could easily have continued to provide income for her parents while locating a New York City apartment or a home for herself in the East, closer to editors, agents, and friends. But she seemed as oblivious to her own needs as to those of others.

  Nervous Breakdown

  That summer, Lane descended into the most severe depressive period of her life. It was heralded by her destruction of several long and important friendships. Her alienation of friends and colleagues would follow a pattern of aggressive betrayal, one she would inevitably reenact with her mother as well.

  That spring, she typed out a three-page, single-spaced letter, most of it a single unbroken paragraph, to Sherwood Anderson, whom she had met casually in Paris years earlier.19 She had apparently just learned that Anderson had parodied her, as “Rose Frank,” in his 1925 novel Dark Laughter, capturing the reckless, brassy tone Lane adopted with her friends and in her salacious, gossipy letters.20

  In the novel’s pivotal scene, before an audience that includes an Irish-American journalist clearly based on Guy Moyston, Rose Frank, “a plump strong-looking little American woman of perhaps thirty … sending smart Parisian gossip to American newspapers,” describes her reaction to playing the voyeur in Paris at a students’ ball, watching an orgy take place, “twenty-nine ways of love-making—all done in the life—naked people.”21 In 1921, Lane had indeed witnessed such a scene, graphically recounting it at a garden party Anderson attended. Now she found herself reflected in his prose as a frustrated, sexually repressed bystander who had yearned but feared to join the debauch, her neurotic “dark laughter” supplying the novel’s title.

  She was furious. “I haven’t liked anything else you’ve written,” she told Anderson, “it has all seemed useless and stupid to me.” She called Winesburg, Ohio “sickening” and “disgusting,” lecturing him about his “sex-obsession.”22 She recalled that he had once been to her apartment and she hadn’t liked him then. He was, she said, a “poseur” and a “fool.”23

  Lane never sent Anderson the letter. Nonetheless, the fact of writing it underscored her lack of self-awareness, as well as the rages she was prey to. Never once, excoriating Anderson, did she acknowledge that she had written many books caricaturing others, in fiction and fact.

  One of those books soon caused a tempest in a teapot. Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928, and Lane’s embroidered 1920 biography of him received renewed attention. An article in the Saturday Evening Post claimed that Hoover had asked an aide to buy the plates used to print an embarrassingly adulatory book by a woman journalist from California, planning to destroy them.24 Recognizing herself, Lane sought to refute what she felt to be the implication—that she had been bribed to suppress the work—but could not reach Hoover. Years later he would suggest, unconvincingly, that it was a matter of mistaken identity: he had been dismayed by another hagiographical work, by another woman in California.25 But at the time the incident agitated Lane, who was convinced that her reputation had been sullied.

  That summer, Lane wrote another unhinged letter that she did not send, this time to Dorothy Thompson. Thompson had divorced Josef Bard the previous year, and Lane had tried—and failed—to talk her friend out of a second marriage, to Sinclair Lewis. She recalled the ex-husband’s treachery (Josef Bard having also caricatured her in a novel), comparing him to a “barnyard fowl” and his work to “European slime.”26 She went so far as to say that Thompson’s marriage
had been “debasing,” that the “slime” had rubbed off. And she accused Thompson of becoming unreachable by marrying Lewis. “You are gone,” she wrote. “Where does the light of the candle go when it is blown out?… I know that I won’t be able to speak to you.”27

  The letter that Lane did send Thompson, two days later, was less bombastic but scarcely better, suggesting that Thompson was “terribly mistaken” in her decision to remarry and was standing “blindfolded on the chasm’s edge.”28 From her honeymoon, Thompson replied with baffled affection.

  This loathing of marriage would be at the center of the most remarkable expression of Lane’s increasing instability, her break with Clarence Day. He had been one of her closest friends. The relationship was never romantic, but for years she had written him long, confiding letters, discussing every facet of her career and personality. In response, he had offered detailed editorial advice and counsel, and had loaned her money. They had even discussed the idea of publishing a selection of their letters.

  But in July 1928, when he wrote with the news that he had just married, Lane was horrified. In yet another letter she did not send, she wrote of receiving his news as Boylston was drawing a bucket of water from the well. She commanded Troub to put the water down, she said, having had a vision of her dropping the bucket “and cold waves lapping my ankles.”29

  The letter she did send to Day was uncharacteristically brief and syntactically tortured: