Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  In the same letter, Lane also ruefully admitted to Burr that she had gotten herself into a fiscal “tangle” in “building the new house for my mother,” comparing the sensation of her myriad obligations to “sticky flypaper.”46 It was a tangle indeed: throughout this period, Lane continued to borrow from her parents even as she helped to support them. A complete account of her financial dealings is difficult to reconstruct from the scattered diary entries and other available sources. But the economic peril engineered by her borrowing may have threatened to take her parents—even Rocky Ridge itself—down with it.

  Sometime in the late 1920s, Lane had arranged a loan of more than two thousand dollars from N. J. Craig, a substantial sum that must have been secured by collateral.47 Lane herself owned no property, not even the Rock House she had built for the Wilders. While she had earned handsomely in the past, she had no job and no salary. Her freelance income was sporadic, irregular, and unsecured; no bank could have accepted it as backing for a loan. Instead, just as she had once assured Clarence Day that her mother would be good for the money she borrowed from him, so her parents may have played a role in securing the loan from Craig. They may well have been co-signers, and as such stood to lose their property if Lane failed to pay.

  The stock market crash had wiped out not only Lane’s and Boylston’s Palmer accounts but her parents’ as well, but Lane waited weeks before letting them know. Her diary records her panic throughout the fall of 1931. In December, on the same day that Virginia Kirkus wrote accepting her mother’s manuscript for publication, Lane had her parents over for dinner (“spare-ribs and sweet potatoes”). She knew that her mother had not received her Palmer dividend, but was afraid to tell Wilder that the money was gone. Somehow, she had re-created the 1894 nightmare of the lost cash in the writing desk, and once again it was all her fault. The day after the dinner, she noted in her diary: “Too horribly upset about my mothers money to work.”48 Finally, the day after that, she relayed the news, noting that Wilder “took it very well, considering.”49

  The following month, Lane was awoken one January morning by her mother knocking at the door, holding a letter regarding the formation of a “creditors committee”—apparently anticipating the receivership of Palmer & Co., the assets and debts of which were being assumed by Irving Trust.50 “Couldn’t work, feeling ghastly,” Lane wrote after the encounter. Her diary increasingly captured feelings of rage she felt toward her mother as the family inched closer to ruin. Night after night, haunted by the “Palmer wreck,” she would suffer “a sick panic.”51 “Wish I were dead,” she wrote.52

  As for Wilder, she too was overwhelmed. In February 1932, just before her sixty-fifth birthday, Wilder received a pathetic letter from her sister Grace, pleading for help.53 Once again she was surrounded by need, with only her own resources to fall back on. When her father’s meager fortunes collapsed, when her husband’s health failed, she had been forced to lift the family on her own back, pushing through by dint of sheer determination and endless hard work. This time her own daughter—who had assured her that the stock market “could never lose” and told her that from now on money was for spending—had put her at risk.

  In April, a week after receiving her author’s copies of Little House in the Big Woods, Wilder collapsed. There had been a fire at the barns, apparently put out before it did much damage. The memories it must have stirred went unrecorded. A doctor came and diagnosed what Lane termed, unsympathetically, “overexertion & silly eating.”54 She added, “Poor dear will not take care of herself.” The exhaustion lingered. John Case, Wilder’s former editor at the Ruralist, heard of it, writing to Wilder in June to say he was sorry to learn she was unwell.55

  Lane chose that moment to pen in her journal a merciless dissection of her mother and Laura’s friends the Pooles, a neighboring farm couple with an adopted son. Her own self-loathing—the previous day she had dismissed her life as “meaningless”—always called forth a corresponding contempt for others.56 Mrs. Poole, Lane wrote, was a “cartoon figure of a corseted fat woman,” her blunt blond hair cut off at the neck, which was “rough and horribly wrinkled,” ornamented by a blue bead necklace from a St. Louis dime store that Wilder had given her as a gift.57 Lane despised the Pooles’ “higgledy-piggledy” flower beds and penchant for “old things,” which “they admire & treasure … not quite knowing why.” The only member of the household she liked was their adopted son, “a thin quick youth with a keen face.”

  In retrospect, the true source of Lane’s rancor was not Mrs. Poole. On the drive home from a visit to them, she grew furious with her mother when Wilder failed to sense her aversion to their lowbrow hosts:

  I remarked thoughtlessly that I had had a nice time. My mother brightened patheticly. “Did you really? You weren’t bored?” Before I could collect my idling mind she added, still brightly, “Seeing how the other half lives.” Suddenly I was profoundly, coldly angry. I could have killed. But my anger had no focus, no direction. It was not against her or anyone else. “What do you mean?” I said, icy. She looked at me. I could feel the murder in my eyes. Hers seemed expressionless. “Just common ordinary farmers,” she said, turning to the road ahead.58

  Determined to undermine her mother, Lane ignored a request from the Saturday Evening Post for a nonfiction article about her parents’ pioneer days and instead pressed on with her fiction. She finished “Courage” in July and sent it to George Bye as a three-part serial, retitling it, prophetically, “Let the Hurricane Roar.”59 Having unknowingly provided the material for the story, Wilder also unwittingly supplied that title, remarking during a conversation about the worsening economy: “Well, let the hurricane roar.” The phrase, she explained, was from an old hymn: “Then let the hurricane roar, / It will the sooner be o’er; / We will weather the blast, and will land at last, / On Canaan’s happy shore.”60 Lane wrote down the lyrics on an undated notebook page scrawled with potential titles.61

  Buffeted by her moods and sleepless nights, Lane also spent time that spring wrangling with her mother’s manuscript for “Farmer Boy,” which Wilder had brought to her. She was not happy with the task, bemoaning that she was not “master of my material in writing my mother’s second juvenile.”62 At another point, she described her work on the manuscript as “copying.” She finished her version of “Farmer Boy” at the same time that she finished “Let the Hurricane Roar.”

  On August 17, Lane sat writing in her journal, expressing little faith in either project and calling for the annihilation of Rocky Ridge—“If only a tornado would destroy the place and…”—when she received a wildly laudatory telegram from George Bye, congratulating her on “Hurricane.” He called it “better than money in the bank,” predicting that she would be hailed by “millions” of grateful readers.63 Lane was both thrilled and dismayed, fearful that he was overpraising the piece; he had greeted another story of hers, “Traveling Man,” in similar fashion, but it still languished unsold. “Am not really cheered,” she wrote, “cold and dull.”64

  Bye did quickly sell “Hurricane,” however. It went to the Saturday Evening Post, which had also bought the “Old Maid” story earlier that summer. Lane had yearned for years to break into the coveted Post; now she had succeeded twice in one year. “Hurricane” was slated to appear as a serial in October.65 But despite the success, Lane continued to be depressed. And she had still not told her mother about the story.

  With these sales, Lane had reversed their roles. Now she was succeeding while her mother failed. Her lack of faith in “Farmer Boy” had been well founded. In September, Harper & Brothers turned down the manuscript, saying that extensive revisions were necessary before it could be accepted.66 Like many publishers during the Depression, Harper was scaling back its children’s titles. Virginia Kirkus left the company that year. Her secretary, Ida Louise Raymond, was tasked with handling the remaining business; the children’s department drifted, temporarily in limbo.

  Lane had been so consumed with her own depression tha
t she barely seemed to register the greater global collapse, but 1932 was the beginning of the worst of all possible economic times. Every indicator was negative. In the United States, unemployment rose to 24.6 percent, while industrial stocks lost nearly 80 percent of their value. Ten thousand banks failed, and thirteen million people were thrown out of work. Missouri farms lost more than half their value in just a few years.67

  That fall, Lane had an opportunity to see how the Depression was unfolding firsthand. In October, she took money earned from “Hurricane” and set off on a car trip across the country with a friend from Mansfield, Corinne Murray. While Catherine Brody was up in her bedroom working on her writing, Murray was becoming a fixture in Lane’s life, coming over frequently to play bridge or chess. She and her husband, Jack Murray, ran a laundry in Mansfield but had a tempestuous relationship, and she would often seek solace at Rocky Ridge after marital spats. Eventually, Lane hired her as cook, housekeeper, and driver.

  Heading for New York to see Lane’s agent, publishers, and old friends, the pair took a circuitous route, first heading north to Ottawa, Canada. They wanted to visit Mahlon William Locke, a “toe-twisting” doctor recently written up in Cosmopolitan; he was famous for manipulating patients’ feet as a cure for fallen arches, a particular complaint of Lane’s. On the way they stopped in two of the family’s old haunts, Burr Oak, Iowa, and Spring Valley, Minnesota. Lane may have been anticipating that Burr Oak would appear in her mother’s novels. A few years later, she herself would set a story in that town, again based on her parents’ lives.68

  Driving south from Canada they also visited Almanzo’s hometown of Malone, New York, searching out the county fairgrounds, the church the Wilders had attended, and Franklin Academy, where the children had gone to school. Scouting back roads, Lane found the Wilders’ old farmhouse, the original barns, and the sheep pasture leading down to the Trout River—“perfectly lovely”—where her father had fished as a boy and jumped from the slippery banks into the swimming hole.69 Charming the owners, Lane talked her way into the house, later sending her parents a series of postcards in which she walked them through it room by room, reporting that the pantry was now a bedroom and the stove was missing.70 All else appeared to be much as it had been when James Wilder built the place. She sent a twig plucked from the balsam tree her father remembered and, by express, wintergreen plants, which she hoped to raise in Missouri for the berries Almanzo had cherished.

  Doubtless intended to fill out descriptions for “Farmer Boy,” the visit to Malone was also an act of love. Lane’s affection for her father shines through the cards she sent. The tender gesture may also have reflected frustration over the rejection of “Farmer Boy,” and perhaps guilt over the unpleasant surprises still awaiting Wilder in “Let the Hurricane Roar.”

  But no matter what Lane saw on her cross-country sojourn, she remained emotionally numb to the Depression, unable to accept the fact that it was real. She admired the fatalism expressed by a young filling station attendant who contended that the catastrophe was “good for us” despite the suffering it caused, saying “that’s all life is, anyway.”71 She even urged her mother to send a check for $260 to George Palmer, apparently still doing trades even after his company failed, to purchase more shares of National Industries, potentially throwing good money after bad.72 “The situation … may become disastrous,” she wrote, but “I do not really believe it will.”73

  That was not the prevailing view in 1932. Throughout the election year, Hoover had dutifully clung to Republican truisms, insisting that private relief organizations could minister to the millions of Americans thrown out of work and onto the streets. Although he launched a major public works project—the construction of a massive dam on the Colorado River—it was a drop in the ocean of unemployment, so negligible in its effects that his name was initially stricken from the finished product, known as Boulder Dam for more than a decade. He continued to disparage public works programs in general, which he termed as “demoralizing [as a] dole.”74 In desperate retaliation, people living in cardboard shacks named them “Hoovervilles.” Newspapers were “Hoover blankets,” and empty pockets, turned inside out, “Hoover flags.” A hungry nation turned implacably against the president when he told reporters, “No one is actually starving.”75

  Even Lane, Hoover’s onetime hagiographer, realized he was a failure. He was “alarming without being arousing,” she said, calling his efforts to explain the economic crisis to the public “psychologically bad.”76 His subtlety was his downfall, she told herself. At the moment, she thought that the country “desperately needs one of the good-old slogan-makers, a Roosevelt or a Bryan.”77

  Franklin Roosevelt piled onto his opponent, calling the portly Hoover a “fat, timid capon,” a castrated rooster fed for the pot. When FDR won in a landslide that November, carrying all but six states, Hoover, the upright businessman once lionized by Lane, had been reduced to a hated caricature. A rumor went around that he’d been apprehended fleeing the country on Andrew Mellon’s yacht, carrying gold looted from Fort Knox.78

  In an extraordinary reversal, Roosevelt won even conservative Mansfield, in Missouri’s predominantly Republican Wright County, 362 to 303. The Senate Democrats also prevailed there, as they would nationally.79 No one knows how the Wilders and their daughter voted. If they did help to elect FDR, it would be the only time.

  * * *

  WHATEVER their political concerns at that moment, the personal relationship between the two women was poised for upheaval. Lane would claim that her mother didn’t care about her writing, not bothering to read it. But Wilder’s sharp dismay on the occasion of learning about the progress of “Let the Hurricane Roar” revealed the gravity of the betrayal.

  In January 1933, Wilder found out what her daughter had been hiding, in the worst and most public way. Lane had received advance copies of advertisements for the story, scheduled for publication in book form by Longmans, Green and Company that February. She had deliberately hidden them from her mother. But Catherine Brody, unaware of the impact they would have, brought them out, in company, to show off the two full pages of publicity that would run in The Publishers’ Weekly.

  Lane dramatized the scene in her journal, describing her mother studying the ad with “an air of distaste.” Wilder interrupted Lane’s conversation with friends to question her sharply about it:

  “Why do they place it in the Dakotas?”

  I: “I don’t know.”

  She: “the names aren’t right.”

  I, alarmed: “What names?”

  She: “Caroline and Charles. They don’t belong in that place at that time. I don’t know—it’s all wrong. They’ve got it all wrong, somehow.” Effectively destroying the simple perfection of my pleasure.80

  Lane’s pleasure had been engineered at the cost of Wilder’s discomfiture and dismay, and the fact that she fixated on it recalled the worst of her self-serving behavior with Charlie Chaplin and Charmian London. The ad itself was a fanciful portrait of Wilder’s parents, a woodcut depicting the windswept couple from behind. Charles, a tall dashing figure with a shapely bottom worthy of that year’s screen idol, Clark Gable, clutched his wife’s elbow, staring indomitably into the future. The text read:

  A novel that makes you proud of being an American! A novel that moves you deeply, and ends with a “lift”—This is the story of Charles and Caroline, young pioneers in the rich wild Dakotas of the ’70s, of hot winds and cyclones, grasshoppers, blizzards, sod shanties; but most of all, of faith and magnificent courage. What these two young heroic pioneers went through dwarfs your present hardships and makes you ashamed to complain. Maybe it can lead America to sing with Charles, “LET THE HURRICANE ROAR!”81

  Lane could have adopted fictional names for her characters and disguised her borrowings with fresh invention and details. Yet she deliberately chose to trespass on her mother’s sacred ground, the reason why Wilder had begun writing in the first place. In that light, Lane’s theft appears all the
more transgressive, an expression of raw rivalry and jealousy. For both women, it was yet another outbreak of the consuming fires—abandonment, blame, and disappointment—that had been burning through their lives since their earliest days together.

  Hurricane sold remarkably well for any book during the Depression, ten thousand copies in four months, and Longmans arranged for a fourth printing only six weeks after it appeared in stores.82 Lane nonetheless despaired over lost opportunities. Had the book appeared during more auspicious times, it might have been her first major bestseller. As it was, sales quickly fell off, and a possible Hollywood sale that floated into view soon vanished.

  Bestseller or no, Let the Hurricane Roar was not Lane’s best work. She had once stated that “a story too many times told is a dish without salt,” and Hurricane carried the unconvincing air of something heard secondhand.83 Compared to her mother’s writing about the same experiences, the characters were flat and the language overwrought, the stuff of commercial magazine fare. Lane would call it her “classic,” touting it as comparable to Little Women “but with much stronger dramatic value and a terrific punch straight to the American heart.”84 It suffered, however, from the fictional equivalent of overacting, its characters ginning up drama by raging, shaking, screaming, and sobbing. Jaws were clenched, and fists pounded on tables. Scholars later dubbed it “stale and formulaic.”85

  Ironically, Lane was writing some of her best stories at the time, the ones that would fill Old Home Town, drawn from direct experience of small-town life and enlivened by her adolescent bird’s-eye view of Mansfield’s scandals. But for someone so gifted at editing the work of others, Lane was her own worst judge.