A Woman of Genius Part 1

A Woman of Genius.

by Mary Austin.

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

It is strange that I can never think of writing any account of my life without thinking of Pauline Mills and wondering what she will say of it.

Pauline is rather given to reading the autobiographies of distinguished people--unless she has left off since I disappointed her--and finding in them new persuasions of the fundamental lightness of her scheme of things. I recall very well, how, when I was having the bad time of my life there in Chicago, she would abound in consoling instances from one then appearing in the monthly magazines; skidding over the obvious derivation of the biographist's son from the Lord Knows Who, except that it wasn't from the man to whom she was legally married, to fix on the foolish detail of the child's tempers and woolly lambs as the advertis.e.m.e.nt of that true womanliness which Pauline loves to pluck from every feminine bush.

There was also a great deal in that story about a certain other celebrity, for her relations to whom the writer was blackballed in a club of which I afterward became a member, and I think it was the things Pauline said about one of the rewards of genius being the privilege of a.s.sociation with such transcendent personalities on a footing which permitted one to call them by their first names in one's reminiscences, that gave me the notion of writing this book. It has struck me as humorous to a degree, that, in this sort of writing, the really important things are usually left out.

I thought then of writing the life of an accomplished woman, not so much of the accomplishment as of the woman; and I have never been able to make a start at it without thinking of Pauline Mills and that curious social warp which obligates us most to impeach the validity of a woman's opinion at the points where it is most supported by experience. From the earliest I have been rendered highly suspicious of the social estimate of women, by the general social conspiracy against her telling the truth about herself. But, in fact, I do not think Mrs. Mills will read my book. Henry will read it first at his office and tell her that he'd rather she shouldn't, for Henry has been so successfully Paulined that it is quite sufficient for any statement of life to lie outside his wife's accepted bias, to stamp it with insidious impropriety. There is at times something almost heroic in the resolution with which women like Pauline Mills defend themselves from whatever might shift the centres of their complacency.

But even without Pauline, it interests me greatly to undertake this book, of which I have said in the t.i.tle as much as a phrase may of the scope of the undertaking, for if I know anything of genius it is wholly extraneous, derived, impersonal, flowing through and by. I cannot tell you what it is, but I hope to show you a little of how I was seized of it, shaped; what resistances opposed to it; what surrenders. I mean to put as plainly as possible how I felt it fumbling at my earlier life like the sea at the foot of a tidal wall, and by what rifts in the structure of living, its inundation rose upon me; by what practices and pa.s.sions I was enlarged to it, and by what well meaning of my friends I was cramped and hardened. But of its ultimate operation once it had worked up through my stiff clay, of triumphs, profits, all the intricacies of technique, gossip of rehearsals, you shall hear next to nothing. This is the story of the struggle between a Genius for Tragic Acting and the daughter of a County Clerk, with the social ideal of Taylorville, Ohianna, for the villain. It is a drama in which none of the characters played the parts they were cast for, and invariably spoke from the wrong cues, which nevertheless proceeded to a successful denouement. But if you are looking for anything ordinarily called plot, you will be disappointed. Plot is distinctly the province of fiction, though I've a notion there is a sort of order in my story, if one could look at it from the vantage of the G.o.ds, but I have never rightly made it out. What I mean to go about is the exploitation of the personal phases of genius, of which when it refers to myself you must not understand me to speak as of a peculiar merit, like the faculty for presiding at a woman's club or baking sixteen pies of a morning, which distinguished one Taylorvillian from another; rather as a seizure, a possession which overtook me unaware, like one of those insidious Oriental disorders which you may never die of, but can never be cured.

You shall hear how I did successfully stave it off in my youth for the sake of a Working Taylor and Men's Outfitter, and was nearly intimidated out of it by the wife of a Chicago attorney who had something to do with stocks; how I was often very tired of it, and many times, especially in the earlier periods when I was trying to effect a compromise between it and the afore-mentioned Taylorvillian predilections, I should have been happiest to have been quit of it altogether.

I shall try to have you understand that I have not undertaken to restate those phases of autobiography which are commonly suppressed, because of an exception to what the public has finally and at large concurred in, that it does not particularly matter what happens to the vessel of personality, so long as the essential fluid gets through; but from having gone so much farther to discover that it matters not a little to Genius to be so scamped and r.e.t.a.r.ded. I have arrived at seeing the uncritical acceptance of poverty and heartbreak as essential accompaniments of Gift, very much of a piece with the p.r.o.neness of Christians to regard the early martyrdoms as concomitants of faith, when every thinking person knows they arose in the cruelty and stupidity of the bystanders. Hardly any one seems to have recalled in this connection, that the initial Christian experience is a baptism of Joy, and it was only in the business of communicating it that it became b.l.o.o.d.y and tormenting. If you will go a little farther with me, you shall be made to see the miseries of genius, perhaps also the bulk of wretchedness everywhere, not so much the rod of inexplicable chastis.e.m.e.nt, as the reaction of a purblind social complacency.

I shall take you at the sincerest in admitting the function of Art to be its re-kneading of the bread of life until it nourishes us toward greater achievement, as a basis for proving that much that you may be thinking about its processes is wrong, and most that you may have done for its support is beside the mark. If I have had any compunction about writing this book, it has been the fear that in the relation of incidents difficult and sordid, you might still miss the point of your being largely to blame for them. And even if you escape the ba.n.a.lity of believing that my having lived for a week in Chicago on 85 cents was in any way important to my artistic development, and go so far as to apprehend it as it actually was, a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of serving you anew with entertainment, you must go a little farther honestly to accept it, even when it came--this revitalizing fluid of which I was for the moment the vase, the cup--in circ.u.mstances which in the rule you live by, appear, when not actually reprehensible, at least ridiculous.

Looking back over a series of struggles that have left me in a frame when no man under forty interests me very much, still within the possibility of personal romance, and at an age when most women have the affectional value of a keepsake only, the arbiter and leader of my world, I seem to see my life not much else but a breach in the social fabric, sedulously bricked up from within and battered from without, through which at last pours light and the fluid soul of Life. Something of all this I shall try to make plain to you, and incidentally how in the process I have perceived dimly this huge coil of social adjustment as a struggle _against_ the invasive forces of blessedness, the smother of sheep in the lanes stupidly to escape the fair pastures toward which a large Friendliness herds them. If you go as far as this with me, you shall avoid, who knows, what indirection, and that not altogether without entertainment.

CHAPTER II

Of Taylorville, where I grew up and was married, the most distinguishing thing was that there was nothing to distinguish it from a hundred towns in Ohianna. To begin with, it was laid out about a square, and had two streets at right angles known as Main and Broad. Broad Street, I remember, ran east and west between the high school and the railway station, and Main Street had the Catholic cemetery on the south, and the tool and hoe works on the north to mark--there was no other visible distinction--the points at which it became country road. There were numerous cross streets, east and west, called after the Governors, or perhaps it was the Presidents, and north and south, set forth on official maps as avenues, taking their names from the trees with which they were falsely declared to be planted, though I do not recall that they were ever spoken of by these names except by the leading county paper which had its office in one corner of the square over the Cooperative store, was Republican in politics, and stood for Progress.

The square was planted with maples; a hitching rack ran quite around it and was, in the number and character of the vehicles attached to it, a sort of public calendar for the days of the week and the seasons. On court days and elections, I remember, they quite filled the rack and overflowed to the tie-posts in front of the courthouse, which stood on its own ground a little off from the square, balanced on the opposite side by the Methodist Church. It was a perfect index to the country neighbourhoods that spread east and north to the flat, black corn lands, west to the marl and clay of the river district, and south to the tall-weeded, oozy Bottoms. Teams from the Bottoms, I believe, always had c.o.c.kleburs in their tails; and spanking dapple grays drove in with shining top-buggies from the stock farms whose flacking windmills on the straight horizons of the north, struck on my childish fancy as some sort of mechanical scarecrow to frighten away the homey charms of the wooded hills. I recall this sort of detail as the only thing in my native town that affected my imagination. When I saw the flakes of black loam dropping from the tires, or the yellow clay of the river district caked solidly about the racked hubs, I was stirred by the allurement of travel and adventure, the movement of human enterprise on the fourwent ways of the world.

From my always seeming to see them so bemired with their recent pa.s.sages, I gather that my observations must have been made chiefly in winter on my way to school. From other memories of Taylorville arched in by the full-leaved elms and maples, smelling of dust and syringas, and never quite separable from a suspicion of boredom, I judge my summer acquaintance with its streets to have been chiefly by way of going to church, for, until the winter I was eleven years old, Taylorville, the world in fact, meant Hadley's pasture.

It lay back of that part of the town where our house was, contiguous to a common of abandoned orchard and cow lot, and if it lacked anything of adventurous occasion and delight, we, Forrie and Effie and I, the McGee children, and the little Allinghams, did not know it. There was a sort of convention of childhood that we should never go straight to it by the proper path, but it must always be taken by a.s.sault or stealth: over the woodhouse and then along the top of the orchard fence as far as you could manage without falling off, and then tagging the orchard trees; I remember there were times when we felt obliged to climb up every tree in our way and down on the other side, and so to the stump lot where the earliest violets were to be found--how blue it would be with them in April about the fairy ring of some decaying trunk!--and beyond the stump lot, the alder brook and the Stone-pit pond where we caught a pike once, come up from the river to sp.a.w.n. Up from the brook ranged a wood over the shallow hills, farther and darker than we dared, and along its banks was every variety of pleasantness. There was always something to be done there, springs to be scooped out, rills to be dammed; always something to eat, sa.s.safras root, minnows taken by hand and half cooked on surrept.i.tious fires, red haws and hazelnuts; always some place to be visited with freshness and discovery, dark umbrageous corners to provide that dreaded and delighted panic of the wild.

But perhaps the best service the pasture did us was as a theatre for the dramatization of the bourgeoning social instinct. We played at church and school in it, at scalping and Robinson Crusoe and the Three Bears.

We went farther and played at High Priests and Oracles and Sacrifice--and what were we at Taylorville to know of such things?

If this were to be as full an account of my Art as it is of myself, I should have to stop here and try to have you understand how at this time I was all awash in the fluid stuff of it, buoyed and possessed by unknowledgable splendours, heroisms, tendernesses, a shifty glittering flood. I am always checked in my attempt to render this submerged childhood of mine by the recollection of my mother in the midst of the annoyance which any reference to it always caused her, trying judicially to account for it on the basis of my having read too much, with the lurking conviction at the bottom of all comment that a few more spankings might have effectually counteracted it. But though I read more than the other children, there was never very much to read in Taylorville at any time, and no amount of reading could have put into my mind what I found there--the sustaining fairy wonder of the world.

I was not, I think, different in kind from the other children, except as being more consistently immersed in it and never quite dispossessed. I have lost and rediscovered the way to it some several times; have indeed, had to defend its approaches with violence and skill: this whole business of the biography has no other point, in fact, than to show you how far my human behaviour has been timed to keep what I believe most people part with no more distressfully than with their milk teeth.

Effie, I know, has no recollection of this period other than that there was a time when the earth was hung with vestiges of splendour, and if my brother has kept anything of his original inheritance, he would sooner admit to a left over appet.i.te for jujubes and liquorice; for Forester is fully of the common opinion that the fevers, flights and drops of temperament are the mere infirmity of Gift. There was a time, before I left off talking to Forester at all about my work, when he visibly permitted his pity to a.s.suage his disgust at the persistence of so patent a silliness in me, and still earlier, before I owned three motor cars, an estate in Florida and a house on the Hudson, there were not wanting intimations of its voluntary a.s.sumption as a pose; pose in Forester's vocabulary standing for any frame of behaviour to which he is not naturally addicted. But there it was, the flux of experience rising to the surface of our plays, the reservoir from which later, without having personally contemplated such an act, I drew the authority for how Lady Macbeth must have felt, about to do a murder, from which if I had had a taste for it, I might have drawn with like a.s.surance the necessity of the square of the hypotenuse to equal the squares of the other two sides.

It is curious that, though I cannot remember how my father looked nor who taught me long division, I recall perfectly how the reddening blackberry leaves lay under the h.o.a.r frost in Hadley's pasture, and the dew between the pale gold wires of the gra.s.s on summer mornings, and the very words and rites by which we paid observance to Snockerty. I am not sure whether Ellen McGee or I invented him, but first and last he got us into as much trouble as though we had not always distinctly recognized him for an invention. The McGees lived quite around the corner of the pasture from us, and, as far as my memory serves, the whole seven of them had nothing to do but lie in wait for any appearance of ours in the stump lot; though in respect to their father being a section boss, and the family Catholic, we were not supposed, when we put on our good clothes and went out of the front gate, to meet them socially. I think there must have been also some parental restriction on our intercourse of play, for they never came to our house nor we to theirs; the little Allinghams, in fact, never would play with them. They came to play with us and only included the McGees on the implication of their being our guests. If at any time we three Lattimores were called away, Pauline, who was the eldest, would forthwith marshal her young tribe in exactly the same manner in which she afterward held Henry Mills in the paths of rect.i.tude, and march them straight out of the big gate to their home. I remember how I used perfectly to hate the expression of the little Allinghams on these occasions and sympathize with the not always successfully repressed jeers of the McGees. Mrs. Allingham was the sort of woman who makes a point of having the full confidence of her children--detestable practice--and I have always suspected, in spite of the friendliness of the families, that the little Allinghams used to make a sort of moral instance of us whenever they fell into discredit with their parents. At any rate the report of our doings in Hadley's pasture as they worked around through her to our mother, would lead to episodes of marked coolness, in which we held ourselves each loftily aloof from the other, until incontinently the spirit of play swirled us together again in a joyous democracy.

At the time when the Snockerty obsession overtook us, Ellen McGee was the only real rival I had for the leadership of the pasture; if she had not had, along with all her Irish quickness, a touch of Irish sycophancy, I should have lost all my ascendency after the advent of Snockerty. I feel sure now that Ellen must have invented him; she was most enviably furnished in all the signs of lucky and unlucky and what it meant if you put your stocking on wrong side out in the morning, with charms to say for warts, and sc.r.a.ps of Old World song that had all the force of incantations. Her fairy tales too had a more convincing sound, for she got them from her father, who had always known somebody who knew the human partic.i.p.ators. It was commonly insisted by Mrs. Allingham that the McGee children would never come to anything, and I believe, in fact, they never did, but they supplied an element of healthful vulgarity in our lives that, remembering Alfred Allingham's adolescent priggishness, I am inclined to think was very good for us.

If I have said nothing of my parents until now, it is because the part they played in our lives for the first ten years was, from our point of view, negligible. Parents were a sort of natural appendage of children, against whose solidarity our performance had room and opportunity. They kept the house together; they staved off fear--no one, for instance, would think of sleeping in a place where there were no parents--they bulked large between us and the unknown. There was a general notion of our elders toward rubbing it into us that we ought to be excessively grateful to them for not having turned us adrift, _sans_ food and housing, but I do not think we took it seriously.

Parents existed for the purpose of rendering the world livable for children, and on the whole their disposition was friendly, except in cases like Mrs. Allingham, who contrived always to give you a guilty sense of having forgot to wipe your feet or tramped on the flower borders. I do not think we had a more active belief in our parents'

profession of absorption in our interests than in my father's pretence to be desperately wounded by Forester's popgun, or scared out of his wits when Effie jumped at him from behind the syringa bush. It was admittedly nice of them and it kept the game going, but there were also times when they did not manage it so successfully as we could have wished. I think that we never questioned their right to punish us for disobedience, perhaps because there is, after all, something intrinsically sound about the right of might, though we sometimes questioned the occasion, as when we had been told we might play in the pasture for an hour, of the pa.s.sage of which we knew as much as wild pigeons. There was always, to me at least, an inexplicableness about such reprisals that mitigated against their moral issue. There was one point, however, upon which we all three opposed an unalterable front; we would not kiss and make up after our private squabbles. We fought, or combined against neighbouring tribes, or divided our benefits with an even handedness that obtains nowhere as among children, but we would not be tricked into a status which it might be inconvenient to maintain.

I am sure, though, that Mrs. Allingham used rather to put it over my mother for her inability to make little prigs of us.

"Mothers," she would say on the rare occasions when she came to call in the beaded dolman and black kid gloves which other Taylorvillians wore only on Sunday, "MOTHERS," with the effect of making it all capitals, "have an inestimable privilege in shaping their children's characters."

This was when we had had our faces surrept.i.tiously washed and been brought in for ceremonial inspection; and a little later she would add, with the air of having tactfully conveyed advice under the guise of information, "I always insist"--here Forester would kick me furtively--"_insist_ on having the full confidence of mine," at which point my mother would make excuses to get me out of the room before I, who never could learn that people are not always of the mind they think they are, made embarra.s.sing disclosures.

Up to this time my mother figures chiefly as a woman who tied up our hurts and overruled my father when he tried to beg us off from going to church. I suppose it was the baby always in arms or expected that kept us from romping all over her as we did with my father; and much of her profession of interest in us, which came usually at the end of admonitory occasions, had the cold futility of the family prayers that my mother tried to make appear part of the habitual order when Cousin Judd came to stay with us.

I do not know whether he suspected the hollowness of our morning worship, but I am sure I was never in the least imposed upon by the high moral att.i.tude from which my mother attempted to deal with my misbehaviours. She used to conduct these interviews on the prescription of certain books by the reading of which I was afterward corrupted, on a basis of shocked solemnity that, as she was not without a sense of humour, often broke down under my raw disbelief. Forester, always amenable to suggestion, was sometimes reduced to writhing contrition by these inquisitorial attempts, but I came away from them oftenest not a little embarra.s.sed by her inability to bring anything to pa.s.s by them.

I do not think our detachment was greater than is common with young children in families where they are pushed out of their privilege of cuddling as fast as they were in ours. There was thirteen months between Forester and me, another brother, early dead, before Effie, and two that came after. The children who died were always sickly; I think it probable in the country phrase, so appalling in its easy acceptance, my mother had "never seen a well day"; and what was meant to be the joy of loving was utterly swamped for her in its accompanying dread. I seem to have been born into the knowledge that the breast, the lap, and the brooding tenderness were the sole prerogative of babies; it was imperative to your larger estate not to exhibit the weakness of wanting them. There comes back to me in this connection an evening with us three, Forester, Effie and I, squeezed on to the lowest step of the stairs for company, my mother in the dusk, rocking and singing one of those wildly sweet and tragic melodies that the men brought back out of the South as seeds are carried in a sheep's coat. To this day I cannot hear it without a certain swelling to let in the smell of the summer dusk and the flitter of the bats outside and the quaver of my mother's voice. I could see the baby's white gown hanging over her arm--it was the next one after Effie, and already she must have been expecting the next--and the soft screech of the rocker on the deal floor, and all at once I knew, with what certainty it hurts me still to remember, how it felt to be held so close ... _close_ ... and safe ... and the swell of the breast under the song, and the swing of the rocker ... knew it as if I had been but that moment dispossessed ... and the need ... as I know now I have always needed to be so enfolded.

I do not remember just what happened; I seem to have come to from a fit of pa.s.sionate crying, climbed up out of it by a hand that gripped me by the shoulder and shook me occasionally by way of hastening my composure. I was struggling desperately to get away from it ... away from the mother, who held me so to the mother I had just remembered ...

and there was Jule, the maid, holding up the lamp, ordering me to bed in the dark for having spoiled our quiet evening. Then after what seemed a long time, Effie snuggled up to me under the covers, terrified by my sudden accession of sobs but too loyal to call down the household upon us.

It came back ... the need of mothering. There was a time when I had lain abed some days with the measles or whatever. I was small enough, I remember, to lie in the crib bed that was kept downstairs for the prevalent baby ... and my mouth was dry with fever. I recall my mother standing over me and my being taken dreadfully with the need of that sustaining bosom, and her stooping to my stretched arms divinely ... and then ... I asked her to put me down again. I have had drops and sinkings, but nothing to compare with this, for there was nothing there you understand ... the release, the comforting ... it wasn't there ...

_it was never there at all_!

CHAPTER III

But I began to tell you how Ellen McGee and I invented Snockerty and arrived at our first contact with organized society, at least Forrie and Effie and I did, for it led to our being interdicted the society of the McGee children for so long that we forgot to inquire what inconvenience, if any, they suffered on account of it.

You will see for yourself that Ellen must have invented him--where, indeed, should a saint-abhorring, Sunday-schooled Taylorville child get the stuff for it? G.o.d we knew, and were greatly bored by His inordinate partiality for the Jews as against all ancient peoples, and by the inquisitorial eye and ear forever at the keyhole of our lives, as Cousin Judd never spared to remind us; and personally I was convinced of a large friendliness brooding over Hadley's pasture, to the sense of which I woke every morning afresh, was called by it, and to it; walking apart from the others, I vaguely prayed. But Snockerty was of the stripe of trolls, leprechauns, pucks, and hobgoblins.

We began, I remember, by thinking of him as resident in an old hollow apple tree, down which, if small trifles were dropped, they fell out of reach and sound. There was the inviting hole, arm high in the apple trunk, into which you popped bright pebbles, bits of gla.s.s--and I suppose He might have sprung very naturally from the need of justifying your having parted with something you valued and couldn't get back again, at the prompting of an impulse you did not understand. Very presently the practice grew into the acknowledgment of a personality amenable to our desires.

We took to dropping small belongings in the tree for an omen of the day: whether the spring was full or not, or if we should find any pawpaws in the wood, and drew the augury from anything that happened immediately afterward: say, if the wind ruffled the leaves or if a rabbit ran out of the gra.s.s.

It was Ellen who showed the most wit in interpreting the signs and afterward reconciling their inconsistencies, but it was I conceived the notion of propitiating Snockerty, who by this time had come to exercise a marked influence on all our plays, by a species of dramatic entertainment made up of sc.r.a.ps of school exercises, Sunday hymns, recitations, and particularly of improvisations in which Ellen and I vied. There were times when, even in the midst of these ritualistic observances, we would go off at a tangent of normal play, quite oblivious of Snockerty; other times we were so worked upon by our own performance as to make sacrifices of really valuable possessions and variously to afflict ourselves.

It was I, I remember, who scared one of the little Allinghams almost into fits by my rendering in the name of Snockerty of an anathema which I had picked up somewhere, but it was Ellen who contrived to extend His influence over the whole of our territory by finding in every decaying stump and hollow trunk, a means of communication, and deriving therefrom authority for any wild prank that happened to come into her head. It is curious that in all the escapades which were imposed on us in the name of our deity, for which we were duly punished, not one word of the real cause of our outbreaks ever leaked through to our parents. It was the only thing, I believe, the little Allinghams never told their mother, not even when the second youngest in a perfect frenzy of propitiation, made a sacrifice of a handful of his careful curls which I personally hacked off for him with Forester's pocket knife. He lied like a little gentleman and said he had cut them off himself because he was tired of looking like a girl baby.

I think it must have been about the end of Snockerty's second summer that Ellen's wild humour got us all into serious trouble which resulted in my first real contact with authority.

Along the west side of Hadley's pasture, between it and the county road, lay the tilled fields of the Ross property, corn and pumpkins and turnips, against which a solemn trespa.s.s board advised us. It was that board, no doubt, which led to our always referring to the owner of it as old man Ross, for except as he was a tall, stooping, white-bearded, childless man, I do not know how he had deserved our disrespect. I have suspected since that the trespa.s.s sign did not originate wholly in the alleged cantankerousness of farmer Ross, and that the McGees knew more of the taste of his young turnips and roasting ears than they admitted at the time when Snockerty announced to Ellen through the hollow of a dark, gnarly oak at the foot of Hadley's hill, that he would be acceptably served by a feast of green corn and turnips out of Ross's field. This was the first time the idea of such a depredation had occurred to us, I believe, for we were really good children in the main, but I do not think we had any notion of disobeying. Personally I rather delighted in the idea of being compelled to desperate enterprises. I recall the wild freebooting dash, the scramble over the fence, the rustle of the corn full of delicious intimations of ambush and surprise, the real fear of coming suddenly on old man Ross among the rows, where I suspect we did a great deal of damage in the search for ears suitable to roast, and the derisive epithets which we did not spare to fling over our shoulders as we escaped into the brush with our booty. There was a perfect little carnival of wickedness in the safe hollow where we stripped the ears for roasting--fires too were forbidden us--where we dared old man Ross to come on, gave dramatic rehearsals of what we should do to him in that event, and revelled in forbidden manners and interdicted words. I remember the delightful shock of hearing Alfred Allingham declare that he meant to get his belly full of green corn anyway, for belly was a word that no well brought up Taylorville child was expected to use on any occasion; and finally how we all took hands in a wild dance around the fire and over it, crying,

"Snockerty, Snockerty, Snockerty!"

in a sort of savage singsong.