Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Chapter 12

  We Are All Here

  A True Picture

  Between 1937 and 1938, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter were immersed in the most editorially incestuous phase of their relationship. Swapping stories, borrowing from each other in ways that left no boundaries between their lives and their writing, they were eradicating any line between them. Economically, their parallel projects would be a success. But emotionally, their tensions, frustrations, and undigested disappointments would destroy much of the remaining bond between them.

  Lane’s leaving had temporarily eased the strain between the two women, at least on Wilder’s side. The mother began doing everything she could to help her daughter with her writing, just as Lane had been helping with hers. Throughout 1937, both Laura and Almanzo penned long letters to their daughter about Almanzo’s homesteading experience, recollections that would provide the factual scaffolding for Lane’s next and last major serial for the Saturday Evening Post, “Free Land.” Lane went so far as to ask her father to fill out an ad hoc questionnaire about those days, asking about everything from wind velocity to slang. His replies were terse. “My life has been mostly disappointments,” he wrote at one point. She translated this into a portrait of dauntless valor.1

  Given the rancor between mother and daughter over Let the Hurricane Roar, her parents’ enthusiastic endorsement of the new project was remarkable. In the same way that Hurricane had borrowed from Charles and Caroline Ingalls’s Plum Creek years, “Free Land” would reproduce Almanzo Wilder’s life and experience, making use of details, incidents, anecdotes, names, and turns of phrase that had occurred or would occur in her mother’s memoir and in her novels, those already published and those yet to be written. No letters explain Wilder’s change of heart after Hurricane, but her acquiescence may have been related to Lane’s severe depression after their rift. And having seen Old Home Town, she may have preferred that her daughter stick to stories of homesteading.

  Money was doubtless also a factor. In 1937, Lane was still “paralyzed” by debt. She was down to her last $104, with taxes coming due, when she heard that Ladies’ Home Journal had bought her story “Silk Dress” for $2,500.2 Derived from her parents’ lives, “Silk Dress” was a first stab at “Free Land,” tracing the lives of a frontier couple named John and Sally. It begins with the couple’s marriage in Burr Oak and follows their fortunes on the Great Plains as they settle near a town the spitting image of De Smet, living in a little house just like the one on Almanzo’s tree claim. The wind makes Sally “brown as an Indian”; they have a baby right before Christmas, and celebrate among wild prairie roses in June.3 They lose a wheat crop, nearly freeze in blizzards, dodge fireballs coming down the chimney, and go deeply into debt. After a July hailstorm destroys their next crop, John suggests making ice cream with the hailstones, just as Almanzo does in “The First Three Years.”4 Later, he suffers a crippling injury. It all works out in the end, with Sally singing ecstatically in church, declaring that her cup runneth over. A commercial rewrite of her mother’s manuscript, the story’s pathos and sentimentality demonstrate the limits of Lane’s talents when left to her own.

  “Free Land” was more of the same, a virtual Sears, Roebuck catalogue of her parents’ lives and her mother’s fiction. Borrowing liberally from Little House on the Prairie, Lane transferred into her serial the story of settlers driven out of Kansas by the government, describing a family near the Verdigris River building a little house on the high prairie only to be forced out by soldiers after “thousands of Indians were powwowing in the creek bottoms.”5 This family, too, suffered from “fever ’n’ ague.”6 They too had a daughter whose face was “as brown as an Indian’s.”7

  In “Free Land,” Lane again changed the names of the characters based on her parents—Almanzo and Laura Wilder, called John and Sally in “Silk Dress,” here became David and Mary Beaton—but otherwise followed her usual practice of using real names. Almanzo may have been bemused to find that David Beaton’s father was James; his sisters, Eliza and Alice; his brother, Perley; and that the family hailed from Malone, New York.

  The overlaps did not end there. The Minnesota Massacre is mentioned, and the frontier couple twists hay during a “hard winter.” The Bloody Benders stagger forth yet again, not very inventively disguised as the “Bordens.”8 Characters sing the same songs as in Wilder’s stories—“In the Starlight,” “Captain Jinks,” and “The Motto for Every Man,” the latter two from Silver Lake—and attend the same oyster suppers and minstrel shows that would appear in future Little House volumes. A local pastor is “Reverend Brown,” the real name of the preacher who married the Wilders. It was as if Margaret Mitchell had a daughter who was selling a magazine serial about Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara while her mother was writing Gone with the Wind.

  At the same time, “Free Land” was propaganda, something Wilder never aspired to. James Beaton objects to the government giving away “public land to the poor … he believed in every man’s paying his own way.”9 Including her father’s anecdote about lying on the homestead paperwork, Lane pronounces him satisfied, since “a man knew instinctively that Government was his natural enemy.”10 Her anti–New Deal designs on the reader are ever present. Characters denounce eastern trusts and the government’s “un-constitutional” tariffs, which, they say, are protecting the railroads and “grinding us down.”11

  Beyond writing detailed letters to Lane, Wilder also offered her daughter free rein to adapt “The First Three Years,” and Lane may have seen the manuscript. At some point, Wilder had told Ida Louise Raymond that she had “a grown-up book” in mind, and Raymond expressed delight at the news. On the back of Raymond’s letter, Wilder explained to Lane that she had raised her editor’s hopes with the idea: “It might wangle a little more advertising for the L.H. Books if I said I would write the grown up one. It was not a promise and if I didn’t it wouldn’t matter. So I wrote that I had material for one in my head.”12 In fact, of course, she had already written a draft.

  Wilder’s attempt to manipulate her publisher reveals a startlingly detached attitude toward her own work. She asked if Lane might be planning to “use the framework of The First Three Years,” and whether it might be worth it for Lane to write “the one grown-up story of Laura and Almanzo to sort of be the cap sheaf of the 7 volume children’s novel. I could write the rough work. You could polish it and put your name to it if that would be better than mine.”13 To some extent, Wilder saw writing as a cottage industry: books were the work of many hands, like quilts at a sewing bee. The notion explains a great deal about her practice of passing manuscripts and raw material back and forth with Lane. She did not always see how powerfully the writer’s perspective—an emotional connection to the subject—affects a book.

  Lane discouraged her mother from writing for adults, while simultaneously working on just such a manuscript herself. “As to your doing a novel,” she wrote, “there is no reason why you shouldn’t if you want to, but unless by wild chance you did a best-seller, there is much more money in juveniles. I’d do one myself if I could get time.”14 Harper would give an adult novel scant support, Lane argued, whereas “a juvenile keeps on selling for years as you know.” Her advice directly contradicted counsel she had given her mother years earlier, when she had assured her that there was no money in juveniles. She was warning Wilder off her territory and competing with her at the same time.

  While less histrionic than Hurricane, “Free Land” would be a similar Frankenstein’s monster, assembled from gobbets of her mother’s past but without the animating feeling that bound her mother’s books together. Given its derivative nature, the most striking aspect of the serial would lie in what it left out. Lane recounted her parents’ homesteading experience in virtually every particular: blizzards and hailstorms, debts and droughts. But there is no diphtheria, and no prairie fires. No baby dies.15 No house burns to the ground. No one loses everything and moves to Missouri. In a work written as propag
anda, Lane left out the most salient fact of her parents’ lives: their failures.

  Lane’s strategic omissions left the work rife with contradictions. Intent on proving that there was no such thing as “free land,” Lane larded the story with antigovernment statements while glossing over individuals’ responsibility for embarking on complex agricultural enterprises without the capital to pay for them or to absorb the risk when they failed. She never questioned the gullibility of those, like her parents, who believed the railroads’ huckster promotions during the Dakota Boom. Nor did she comprehend the ecological roots of the Great Plains catastrophe that destroyed their crops and livelihood. In the end, she had James Beaton bail out his son—just as James Wilder bailed out her parents in Mansfield by buying them a house—before the young couple loses everything.

  In life, loss was the engine that set Wilder’s fiction in motion. Exile propelled the powerful emotional undercurrent of the Little House books, an intensely felt nostalgia for people and places lost to her. That emotion was absent in “Free Land,” relegating it to homesteading soap opera. Its loosely linked anecdotes were joined not by familial love but by Lane’s, and the Post’s, ideology.

  * * *

  IN writing about Silver Lake, Wilder was eager to leave things out of her story, too. But her reasons were personal, not political. As in the 1920s, dealing with her mother’s death and the memories it brought up, she found herself beset by pangs, kept awake at night by the burden of recollection. Searching through her desk one day, she found a homemade, handwritten book of her mother’s. “When I put it there,” she wrote, “I couldn’t bear to read it, but I am having to live over those days with Pa and Ma anyway, so I did.”16 Caroline Ingalls had written her own poems in the book, and copied others she admired. In 1860, the year he married Caroline, Charles Ingalls had written in it the lyrics of two songs Laura would hear him sing throughout her childhood, “The Blue Juniata” and “Mary of the Wild Moor.”17

  Wilder never explicitly addressed why the memories pained her so, but the degree to which she resisted writing about what happened to Mary suggests how traumatic that experience remained. Her initial manuscripts about Silver Lake opened at the train depot, with Caroline Ingalls and her daughters leaving Minnesota to travel west. Wilder simply presented Mary as blind, as a result of illness, with little in the way of dramatization or explanation.

  Wilder wrote to Grace about small details, asking, for instance, which wildflowers grew on the prairie in springtime. At seventy-one, she was losing track of images that had seemed clear even a few years earlier, when she wrote her memoir. “That’s why the sooner I write my stuff the better,” she told Lane.18 But she refused to summon the will to probe the most wrenching moments. She did not ask either of her sisters, who cared for Mary in her final years, to recall the exact nature of her illness. Her efforts to describe her feelings about Mary’s disability sounded awkward, curt, even indifferent: “Laura was so glad to have Mary well and strong once more that she couldn’t feel so very sorrowful even about that.”19 A few pages later she gave it up, writing on a blank page of her tablet, “False Start.”20 Beginning again, she abandoned any attempt to describe her feelings.

  At first, Lane was less than helpful. Her advice on these matters took a didactic turn in the fall of 1937, when she counseled her mother, as an exercise, to take one of the previously published Little House books and copy the entire text out longhand, as a means of absorbing its “rhythm.”21 She planned to do something similar herself, she told Wilder, by typing out one of her own favorite novels, W. Somerset Maugham’s roman à clef Cakes and Ale. Lane went on to parse the “vowel patterns” in one of her mother’s sentences, examining it letter by letter. The mystifying discussion veered off into a denunciation of the “damn ignoramuses in publishing houses” who had seen fit to change Wilder’s American “plow” to the English “plough.”22 Lane could not bear to look at On the Banks of Plum Creek, she said, “without getting so mad I am sick.”23

  A couple of months later, Lane questioned whether, in fiction, Mary needed to be blind at all, then pressed her mother to add a crucial opening scene to provide a transition from the Plum Creek setting of the previous novel and address the circumstances that provoked the family’s move.24 Wilder resisted. Even in private, to her daughter, she fumbled reluctantly in trying to explain that Mary’s illness was “spinal meningitis,” crossing out the words and writing “some sort of spinal sickness.” She could not recall the exact terminology. The family had learned only years later, when Charles Ingalls took Mary to a specialist in Chicago, “that the nerves of her eyes were paralyzed and there was no hope.”25

  Explaining all this to the reader was another thing entirely, almost too woeful to contemplate. “It seems to me that beginning the story with hard times and sickness and Mary’s blindness would be making the story sad,” Wilder wrote, “while beginning it with the funny little R.R. journey and touching on the sad part as lightly as I have done makes pleasanter reading.”26 Yet she insisted that Mary must be blind, because otherwise she would have become the schoolteacher that Laura never wanted to be. A little wishfully, she suggested that Lane had been “too tired” when she read the manuscript to appreciate how Wilder had handled the problem.

  The debate continued well into 1938. Sensibly enough, Lane pointed out to her mother that “characters in fiction MUST have emotions, I do assure you,” only to be greeted by a cry of despair familiar to every editor since the dawn of revision.27 Buttering her up, Lane praised her mother’s fine descriptions, telling her that her writing was “really lovely” and getting “better and better.”28 But Wilder viewed any urging to delve deeper with dismay. “To make the changes you want,” she wailed, the manuscript would “have to be practically rewritten.”29 She repeatedly refused the notion of beginning with “a recital of discouragements and calamities such as Mary’s sickness & blindness. I don’t like it!” At one point, she sharply instructed Lane not to work on the manuscript any more, saying she was going over it carefully and would not be describing Mary’s illness or Jack’s death. “The reader must know all that but they should not be made to think about it,” she said. “I am afraid I am going to insist the story starts as I started it.”30

  Irritable and offended, Lane dared her to go out on her own. She said in a huff that her mother was “one of the few writers in the country who would turn down a collaboration with RWL.”31 Fine, she went on, “go ahead … if you don’t want this book touched, you’re absolutely right not to have it touched.” But if she went ahead like that, Lane warned, there would be consequences. She knew just how to frighten her mother, saying, “you’ll lose your audience for future books, and cut your income.” Delivering a stinging yet fairly accurate critique, she noted the manuscript’s “deadwood,” lapses in point of view, wooden dialogue, and poor paragraphing.

  In response, Wilder quelled her temper, thanked her daughter for giving her “courage,” and humbly acknowledged her heavy debt. “You see, I know the music but I can’t think of the words.… It is sweet of you to say the nice things you did about my writing and I will try to deserve them more.”32 Expressing a grudging professional respect for each other, trading compliments in a short-lived rapprochement, the two bent to the wheel again.

  They began grappling with the chronological complexity of their omissions. Introducing a multiyear gap between Plum Creek and the move to Dakota Territory meant they were eliding years of disaster and calamity: homelessness, the death of Freddy, the dismal and debt-laden months in Burr Oak and the family’s flight out of town, as well as the chaotic period in Walnut Grove, when Laura worked for the Masterses and her father tried one thing after another to keep them afloat only to see his eldest daughter fall desperately ill. “It is a story in itself,” Wilder acknowledged, “but does not belong in the picture I am making of the family.”33 She was driven to rescue her father from his less-than-flattering past, beginning one Silver Lake draft with the assertion that “Pa w
as a good farmer, on the banks of Plum Creek, for four years.”34 A bit later she wrote, “Pa paid all his debts.”35

  Again, they were debating what had become a familiar theme, truth versus fiction, this time with Lane waving her hands over the facts the way a magician passes them over a hat, diverting attention while absolving her mother of a reporter’s responsibility. “You must take into account the actual distinction between truth and fact,” she told her mother:

  It is beyond all human power to tell all the facts.… Facts are infinite in number. The truth is a meaning underlying them; you tell the truth by selecting the facts which illustrate it. All your travels to Burr Oak and back can be skipped because they do not mean anything except elapsed time.… It is not a fact, but it is perfectly true to take them west from the house on Plum Creek, where everything that has happened during this time might as truthfully have occurred as where it did occur.36

  As a statement of the novelist’s prerogative, this was reasonable, but Lane’s casual disposal of those years was startling. If anything, the period was among the most consequential in Wilder’s young life. Suppressing it would inevitably alter the trajectory of the tale she was telling, transforming the blind alleys and cul-de-sacs of random mischance, and the misfortunes of Charles Ingalls’s failed crops and unpaid debts, into an orderly westward progression to homestead and town. It would suppress, as well, any suggestion that Charles had been a less than reliable provider. The less chaotic, more burnished version was the “truth” that Wilder wanted, and her daughter guided her toward it.

  As she did, however, the two squabbled over sex, of all things. Silver Lake would be the first of the novels to describe Laura’s teenage years, and Wilder had introduced a scene where Laura picked up a knife to ward off a male cousin who tried to kiss her. Lane found it exaggerated, as if Laura were “a slum child” protecting her virginity.37 On the other hand, Lane argued for a scene in which Laura and Mary might watch the railroad crew at work; Wilder objected, saying that “nice girls” would have never exposed themselves in that fashion. Her daughter countered that workmen were not “degenerate savages.”38 (It turned out that Wilder was alluding to the fact that the workmen relieved themselves in the open air, a topic so indelicate she could barely bring herself to mention it. “The grass was so short it would not hide a thing,” she explained to Lane. “If a man wanted to do his jobs he dropped out and did them publicly.”)39 The tension behind the bickering was years in the making, a product of the teenage turmoil Lane had dramatized in Old Home Town as well as Wilder’s coldly disparaging response to a steamy scene in Lane’s Jack London novel: she had told Lane she would rather read about a bowel movement.40