Nava Atlas's Blog, page 35

Margaret Landon, author of Anna and the King of Siam

Famed for Anna and the King of Siam (1944), which inspired a variety of adaptations, including the musical “The King and I,” American writer Margaret Landon (September 7, 1903 – December 4, 1993) spent more than a decade studying Siam (now Thailand) and a lifetime writing about it.

Anna and the King of Siam was Margaret Landon’s crowning achievement. It sold over one million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Based on the true story of Anna Leonowens, who served as governess to the King Mongkut, in the 19th century, it introduced Western readers to a world of Asian culture.

 

Family and Childhood

Margaret Dorothea Mortenson was born in Somers, Wisconsin. Her father, Annenus Duabus Mortenson, was born in Racine, Wisconsin to a Norwegian mother and a Danish father. As a young man, he worked as an office manager in advertising for Curtis Publishing Company in Chicago and, later, in the business department of the Saturday Evening Post.

Her mother, Adelle Johanne Estberg, was born in Franksville, Wisconsin to Danish parents. She didn’t work outside the home until after her husband died in 1925. She then began working as a secretary at a college.

Annenus and Adelle married in 1902 and, after Margaret, had two more daughters: Evangeline, two years younger than Margaret, and Elizabeth, seven years younger.

 

The Gift of Words

Margaret attended Evanston Township High School in Illinois. Her English teacher there once told her: “You have the gift of words. Do something with it!”

She was also interested in sports, and later served as captain of the women’s baseball, basketball, and tennis teams at Wheaton College, a Christian school in Wheaton, Illinois.

After graduating in 1925, she taught English and Latin in Bear Lake, Wisconsin, an experience she described as “an agonizing year” having “soon discovered that I disliked teaching.”

In1926, she married Kenneth Perry Landon, whom she’d met at college. He was a seminary student, a graduate of Wheaton College and subsequently, Princeton Theological Seminary. The following year he went to Siam, to work as a Presbyterian missionary accompanied  by Margaret.

 

In Siam

After spending most of 1927 and 1928 in Bangkok, where they learned Siamese, the Landons were stationed at Nakhon Si Thammarat and, afterwards, Trang.

Kenneth earned his master’s degree at the University of Chicago in the 1931-1932 academic year but, otherwise, from 1927 to 1937, their missionary work in Siam was all-consuming. Often the Landons were the only non-Siamese people in their environs.

Margaret served as principal of Trang Christian school for girls at her husband’s mission for five years, according to her Washington Post obituary.

While living in Siam, the couple had three children: Margaret Dorothea, William Bradley II, and Carol Elizabeth. These children learned Siamese before they learned English and were issued passports there. After the couple returned to America, they had one more son, Kenneth Perry, Jr.

It’s understandable that Margaret found little time to write anything beyond the mission newsletter and correspondence but, while in Siam, in 1930, she discovered the story which inspired the novel she would write after the family returned to America.

A family friend, Dr. Edwin Bruce McDaniel, had copies of two books written by Anna Leonowens, a widowed woman who describes traveling from Wales to Siam in 1862—both to teach English to King Mongkut’s many children and his favored concubines and to present Western political ideologies.

Both these volumes—The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem (1872)—were viewed by the Siamese government as disrespectful to the regent and thus banned. Even after the King’s son, Prince Chulalongkorn, became King and abolished the custom of prostration before superiors in the court and freed his slaves (both acts evidence of Leonowens’ influence, she asserted), Anna’s books remained forbidden. But Margaret found her story fascinating.

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Kenneth and Margaret Landon and their children
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Return to America, and writing

Back in America, Margaret finally found her own copies of Leonowens’ books, when she visited second-hand bookstores in Chicago. One of her assignments in the night school classes she attended in 1937–38, at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, reflected her ongoing interest in the widow’s life story.

Her first published work was a magazine article titled “Hollywood Invades Siam,” inspired by Leonowens’ writing, for which Margaret was paid fifteen dollars.

She began writing Anna and the King of Siam in 1939 in Richmond, Indiana, where her family lived until 1942, when Kenneth began working for the State Department as a southeast Asia specialist in Washington D.C. Kenneth would publish three books himself, all on southeast Asia, as well as numerous articles. In addition, he lectured nationally.

Margaret’s close friend from college, Muriel Fuller, who worked in the publishing industry, encouraged Margaret to combine and rewrite the stories in Leonowens’ books, to reduce the lengthy descriptions and refine the timeline. In July 1943, just a few hours before Kenneth Jr.’s birth, Margaret finished her book.

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Anna and the King of Siam on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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The Road from Siam to Publication

Margaret rewrote some sections of her book as many as twenty times, and her research was meticulous, assisted by her husband’s connections in the State department. Nonetheless, while exploring the story, she didn’t have access to overseas archives and was primarily dependent upon Anna’s published versions of events.

Although two publishers rejected Margaret’s finished manuscript, John Day Company was encouraged by Kenneth Landon’s conversations with key figures there to accept it for publication. John Day had been founded in 1926 by Edwin Walsh, who was married to the novelist Pearl S. Buck. Her writing, including the best-selling The Good Earth (1931), had demonstrated the marketability of western writers’ narratives about Eastern lives.

As biographer Alfred Habegger observes, however, the editor of the publishing house’s monthly magazine (Asia and the Americas) was concerned about the work’s tone. Editor Elsie Weil worked with Margaret to prepare select chapters for publication in the firm’s magazine.

Weil felt it smacked “a little too much of juvenile Sunday school literature.” In fact, Margaret had relied on Anna’s published children’s stories for particular scenes; she also remained committed to Anna’s “deep religious feelings” and believed they were essential to the story.

Walsh instructed Margaret: “Stick as closely as possible to recorded facts. But no doubt you have to invent or reconstruct in many places.” What Weil called the “fictionizing” of the piece was a way to engage readers but, ultimately, the work was published as a biography.

As time passed and more complex Eastern stories were made available to Western readers, Margaret’s imaginative flair would come to overshadow her scholarly intentions. Margaret dedicated the book to her younger sister Evangeline, who had been killed in a car crash in 1941. The book became a best-seller and was also distributed to WWII troops in an Armed Services Edition.

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Cover of the original UK edition
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Later work

Margaret struggled to continue writing. In 1946, a serious bout with rheumatic fever interfered with her work for two years. She published Never Dies the Dream in 1949, a novel, also with substantial detail about Siamese life. The story told of a missionary running a school in Bangkok in the 1930s, whom Habegger describes as an “honest, idealistic, white American woman”—but it wasn’t as successful as The King and I.

Staying with her perceived expertise, Margaret shifted to non-fiction and began compiling a textbook for high school students on Southeast Asian history.

According to her Washington Post obituary, Margaret’s poor health and family responsibilities are cited as reasons for her slowed writing output. She is described as having “entertained foreign dignitaries” and being a member of  “such groups as the Literary Society.” Her textbook, Pageant of Malayan History, remained unfinished.

 

Death and Legacy

Landon died after a stroke on December 4, 1993 in Alexandria, Virginia, in the Hermitage Retirement Home. Her husband had died there earlier that year, and the couple are now buried together in Wheaton Cemetery in Illinois.

The original manuscript of Anna and the King of Siam and related material is housed in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. The rest of the Landons’ papers are in the Special Collections Department of Wheaton College. Personal papers, correspondence, other manuscripts, and dozens of CDs of oral history interviews with Margaret and Kenneth fill 348 boxes there.

Anna and the King of Siam sold over one million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Through Landon’s work, many Westerners who lacked experience with Eastern culture and society gained some understanding.

It seems unlikely that Leonowens’ memoirs would have remained available without Landon’s interest in her life and work. Biographer Susan Morgan notes that Margaret’s novel “introduced Thailand, which is to say, Margaret and Ken’s vision of Thailand, to the American people.” And it further inspired retellings on film, stage, radio and television.

The best-known adaptation was the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I, which opened on Broadway on March 29, 1951. It starred Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner, The show had a budget of $250,000, which was the largest Rodgers and Hammerstein production at the time. It continues to charm audiences and is regularly and enthusiastically revived on stages around the world. As recently as 2015, a Broadway revival won a Tony Award.

The 1956 film based on the musical, with Deborah Kerr playing Anna, with Yul Brynner reprising his stage role as the King, was tremendously popular and critically acclaimed. Also titled The King and I, it was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five. Songs like “Getting to Know You” and “Shall We Dance” wound their way into repertoire albums for decades to come.

There were several other film and television adaptations both before and after the stage and screen versions, none as successful or iconic.

Just as Anna Leonowens transformed her personal history and reinvented herself through the narratives she published during her lifetime, Margaret Landon reimagined Anna’s life on the page. Others reimagined those stories on the stage and screen. Multiple interpretations of  compelling stories remind us of the power of narrative to open us, as readers, to new worlds of experience.

Contributed by Marcie McCauley, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and the Humber College Creative Writing Program. She writes and reads (mostly women writers!) in Toronto, Canada. And she chats about it on Buried In Print and @buriedinprint. 

More about Margaret Landon

Major works

Anna and the King of Siam (1944)Never Dies the Dream (1949)

Stage and film adaptations

Anna and the King of Siam   (1946 film) The King and I   (1951 stage musical)The King and I  (1956 film musical)Anna and the King  (1972 TV series)The King and I  (1999 animated film musical) Anna and the King   (1999 film)

More information

Margaret and Kenneth P. Landon Papers at Wheaton College Reader discussion on Goodreads New York Times Obituary

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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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An Analysis of The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin (1974)

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most influential science fiction and fantasy writers of the twentieth century. Her 1974 novel, The Dispossessed, was written as a political tale, with themes that include freedom and the corruption of capitalist societies. It won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards in 1975.

Le Guin uses her novel as a moral principle of anarchism based on political theories and ideas of collective societies to challenge modes of radical thinking. Discussing these philosophies will determine if she was successful in delivering a convincing narrative that overcomes conflicting notions of a perfect society

 A concept of opposites

Le Guin uses a concept of opposites with the use of two planets to write of a society governed by principles free from state rule on the planet Anarres. She compares that with a capitalist regime on the planet Urras. Le Guin created the planet Anarres intending to promote what she deemed to be new ideas, where water and heat would be rationed and where nothing goes to waste.

Everything was to be recycled and they would use the wind to generate energy. All this may sound rather familiar, as some of the ideas that Le Guin posits were already in existence when she wrote her story. The oil shortages of the 1970s changed the energy environment for the world. It was because of this, those alternative ways of using energy sources were developed such as wind energy which had been around for thousands of years beforehand.

The same is true of recycling, which was also in existence since the early nineteenth century. Le Guin wasn’t exploring anything that wasn’t already being utilized in this world, let alone another world. However, the following quote from her book could be a possible foreshadowing of recent events that have occurred in our world where she describes the whole planet as “a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.” (3)

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Ursula K. Le Guin
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The planet Anarres, and stylistic considerations

Unfortunately, Le Guin’s ideas were not fresh or new at the time of her writing the novel and her imagined planet of Anarres isn’t without some serious issues. Not least of all that she describes it as “a barren sixty-acre field . . . a place where nothing grows.” (4)

However, without any grass there would be no herbivores, without herbivores, there are no carnivores, nor insect or plant life. Thus far, Anarres isn’t promoting the congeniality intended, which is to foster sharing and equality.

In an ideal world where everyone is on the same level; a life without hierarchy may seem an attractive option. Unfortunately, these ideas tend to develop a lack of focus and leadership. Everyone “has” and nobody “owns;” there are no profiteers. Consequently, there is nothing to gain or work towards and without incentives, the ambition to succeed is rendered non-existent.

Le Guin’s novel is littered with stylistic prose. Written in a non-linear style, she plays with shifts of time, a technique used as a vehicle to drive her narrative forward. She transports her readers back into the past life of her protagonist Shevek by alternating chapters with his present life; a literary approach that may not appeal to everyone.

The opening chapter uses a clichéd plot device describing a symbolic wall between two planets which is central to the novel. This is aptly illustrated with the line “what was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” (4) The wall is being used as a symbol of global inequality that demonstrates the idiom “the haves and the have-nots.”

Le Guin is endeavoring to reveal how people will always demonstrate dissatisfaction with their lives and consider the other side of the wall to be more desirable. Her use of symbolism is intended to proposition the reader to consider their ideals. Questioning the reasoning behind hope for a perfect society explores whether the perfection of a collective civilization is ever realistic.

 

Contrasting Anarres with Urras

She contrasts the planet of Anarres with a parallel universe of capitalism on the planet Urras. This is an attempt at harmony and if it can be achieved through anarchistic principles. Her novel offers the possibility of freedom in a perfect civilization and she makes vain attempts to represent Anarres as an ideal society that exhibits deficiencies of capitalism.

Unfortunately, this interpretation is arguably flawed. Her narrative meanders somewhat, resulting in a portrayal of both societies exhibiting deficiencies. Neither planet displays an ideal civilization and it becomes unclear as to what the author is attempting to demonstrate.

Le Guin depicts Anarres as an ideal collective society with anarchistic principles but describes it as “grimy and mournful.” Her choice of the word “mournful” is significant as it contradicts any ideas of being ideal; instead, it suggests an unattractive place beset with misery.

In contrast, the planet Urras offers a capitalist regime which she portrays as an appealing land of “innumerable patches of green.” It is given further credibility through Shevek when he arrives on the planet Urras. Captivated by its beauty he reflects upon “how the world is supposed to look.” (5)

However, irrespective of the appeal of the lustrous landscape on Urras, there is a sense of overindulgence suggesting feigned enthusiasm. Problematically, Le Guin’s figurative language may be masking less attractive traits beneath its pleasing exterior which threatens to send out an unclear message.

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The Dispossessed on Bookshop.org* & Amazon*
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Critical considerations & conclusion

Critic Tom Moylan writes in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction that Le Guin’s novel falls into the trap of endorsing a system of capitalism that it aims to condemn. (1) The result is a contradictory narrative that leaves Le Guin’s imagery unconvincing. It implies that confidence in the realization of a perfect society hasn’t been achieved on either planet. To realize confidence that inspires hope of a flawless society requires the narrative to overcome contradictions, which so far it fails to do.

Unfortunately, Le Guin’s attempts to offer greater confidence in making hopes and dreams of a better society appear conceivable, remain unpersuasive. The question of who has the authority to create, implement and control the rules in a free society remains under scrutiny “freedom is never very safe.”(6) Without effective leadership, the freedom of a collective society will crumble within a fractured civilization.

This further questions, if anyone would like to live in a society where its population was free of responsibility but their liberty was denied. Le Guin writes “would you really want to go and live in prison,” illustrating the lack of autonomy in a utopian society where people are unable to think independently of one another. (7) Le Guin’s narrative illustrates how free thought is something that is being denied suggesting that freedom and utopia cannot co-exist.

Utopias and their ideologies for a flawless existence date to the Renaissance period in 1516 with Thomas More’s Utopia written as a tale of social criticism. More says in his book that there were many things within the commonwealth of utopia he wished the country would imitate but lamented by saying, “though I don’t really expect it will.” (2)

More’s remark further supports the existence of historical aspirations that question hopes of a perfect society and the dreams for a better future. Writer Victor Urbanowicz claims in his science fiction article “Personal and political in The Dispossessed” that Le Guin had said that anarchism is “the most idealistic … the most interesting, of all political theories.”

He went on to say that Le Guin had also claimed the purpose of writing The Dispossessed was so she could embody it [anarchism] in a novel, that “had not been done before.” The claims of an anarchist utopian novel not being previously written are misguided. William Morris had written his novel titled News from Nowhere almost a century before Le Guin, in 1890. Both novels are remarkably similar, based on past revolutions that abandon capitalism and profit-orientated organizations. Both authors aim to provide an alternative to a capitalist command whilst attempting to fulfill the hopes of an ideal society.

Considering both novels with More’s highlights the significance of persistent efforts being made by authors writing comparable texts. This would suggest that aspirations to strive for a utopian society have been the hope of many throughout history. It poses the question of why the freedom that is envisaged through a utopian ideal still eludes society.

A utopian anarchist society raises optimism but it cannot be endured. It questions if anyone would desire a life of restriction. By presenting a contrasting environment to allow for an exploration of new ideas highlights social failings that are still prevalent today. Le Guin emphasized the cultural downfall of seeking a utopia that everyone would be happy with which confirmed the failure of the coexistence of freedom within a utopia.

Fantasy creates worlds that can originally explore social challenges and conventions but they need to offer a realistic possibility of achievement. Le Guin fails to offer this assurance in her narrative. As each generation evolves, they would only know the lackluster existence of a place such as Anarres.

Without experiencing the discourse and unrest that ‘can’ occur in a world like Urras, there is nothing to compare it with, and the potential for anarchy is likely to occur once again. To offer the dream or hope of a better future narratives need to be supported with strong characters who are living through real experiences.

If the possibility of realization isn’t attainable it will foster an ever-turning circle of disappointment. The result of Le Guin’s novel leaves a population with no ambition and little to motivate beyond a daily existence. Maybe Le Guin was telling us that it’s time to dispense with this idea of utopia.

Notes

1. Andrew Milner, “Tom Moylan” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ed by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight (London: Gollancz, updated 12 August 2018)  [Accessed 29 August 2021].
2. Thomas More, ‘UTOPIA’, in Utopia (New Haven: Yale University Press 2017)  pp. 1–2.
3. Ursula. K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (London: Gollancz. SF Masterworks 2017) p 13.
4. Le Guin,p.11.
5. Le Guin, p.68.
6. Le Guin, p.354.
7. Le Guin, p.50.
8. Le Guin, p.12.
9. Victor Urbanowicz, ‘Personal and Political in “The Dispossessed”’, Science-fiction studies, 5(2), (1978) pp. 110–117.

Bibliography

Le Guin Ursula. K, The Dispossessed (London: Gollancz. SF Masterworks 2017)Milner Andrew, ‘Tom Moylan’ The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction ed by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight (London: Gollancz, updated 12 August 2018) http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/moylan_tom  [Accessed 29 August 2021]More, Thomas, ‘UTOPIA’, in Utopia (New Haven: Yale University Press 2017)Morris William, Asa Briggs, and Graeme Shankland, News From Nowhere (London: Penguin Books, 1987)Urbanowicz, Victor ‘Personal and Political in “The Dispossessed”’, Science-fiction studies, 5(2), (1978)

Contributed by Suzanne Bajor: Suzanne is a working-class writer in her third year of an English Literature and Creative Writing degree. Originally from Liverpool, she now lives in Greater Manchester. Writing has always been a hobby, but it wasn’t until she took early retirement in 2017 that Suzanne felt that she could develop her interest. She embarked upon a degree with the Open University and has just completed her level two with distinction (2021).

Since retiring, Suzanne has been actively submitting her work and has been shortlisted and published online with several of her short fictional pieces. When she is not writing and studying, Suzanne relaxes through her love of art and says drawing and painting allow her to switch off from outside distractions. This also helps her focus and develop ideas for her writing.

Developing techniques and learning how to write a substantial piece of work through her degree, has allowed Suzanne to gain confidence in sharing her work with others. Connect with Suzanne Bajor on Twitter.

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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (1934)

Agatha Christie (1890—1976) was the most widely published and best-selling author of all time. She authored sixty-six crime novels and short story collections, fourteen plays, and six other romance novels. Murder on the Orient Express, an intricate crime fiction novel, is one of Christie’s greatest mystery novels featuring the illustrious Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

Murder on the Orient Express was first published in the United Kingdom in 1934, and soon after in the United States, retitled Murder on the Calais Coach. Christie drew inspiration for the plot from recent headlines.

Around the time when Murder on the Orient Express was published, the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s son had yet to be solved. This real-life mystery, coupled with Christie’s first journey on the Orient Express in 1928, inspired the iconic detective story.

Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in her room at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, near the southern end of the Orient Express railway. As a memorial to the famed author, the hotel has continued to maintain Christie’s room.

 A brief introduction

Here’s a brief introduction to the book from the 1960 Dodd, Mead edition, by which time it was retitled Murder on the Orient Express to match the classic U.K. edition. Link here to a complete plot summary.

Thundering along on its three-day journey across Europe, the famous Orient Express suddenly came to a stop in the night. Snowdrifts blocked the line. Surrounded by the silent Balkan hills, the passengers slept unheeding.

But Hercule Poirot had not slept well. He awoke in the small hours, wondering at the silence and immobility of the train. He was startled by a loud groan which seemed to come from the next compartment. Footsteps sounded in the corridor, and there was a tap on a door.

Then someone said, It was nothing, a mistake. Poirot heard no more, and after a while dozed off uneasily. But in the morning the man in the next compartment lay dead — stabbed, viciously and frenziedly, over and over again. And since the snow outside was unbroken, the murderer was still on the train.

Thus begins one of the incomparable Christie’s most memorable suspense masterpieces — a mystery baffler considered by many connoisseurs to be her finest. Mistress of the surprise ending, the Queen of Crime” has never offered a more astonishing (and as always, completely logical) solution to a murder puzzle.

The basis of a record-breaking, all-star motion picture, Murder on the Orient Express continues to thrill audiences everywhere who agree that an intriguing mystery is the ultimate in entertainment.

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You might also enjoy:
Celebrating the Centenary of The Mysterious Affair at Styles
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Original 1933–1934 reviews

Considering that Murder on the Orient Express, as it came to be known, is one of Christie’s best-known Poirot novels, it received modest attention, and reviews, on both sides of the Atlantic. Here are two reviews from American newspapers from 1933, the year it was first published in the U.S.

Agatha Christie’s Latest Thriller

From The Baltimore Sun, November 2, 1933: “Agatha Christie’s latest thriller, The Murder in the Calais Coach, deals with the murder of a kidnapper on the Orient Express, the murder being done by twelve persons variously associated with the family of the child who had been kidnapped and murdered.

That Miss Christie and her famous French detective seem to accept this murder as an approximation of justice, and its provocation as reason enough for the detective to advance a fake solution to the authorities, makes it plain that this English authoress thinks that it would be bad form in a story for American readers to apprehend the avengers of a kidnapping.

And the participation of twelve murderers, being a sort of lethal approximation of the jury system, salves the conscience of an English writer opposed to lynch law.”

Agatha Christie Writes Another Poirot Thriller

From The Sacramento Bee, February 24, 1934: M. Hercule Pierot, the famous Belgian detective, finds himself confronted with the most puzzling crime of his long career when the body of an American is found stabbed to death in the sleeping coach of the Stamboul-Paris express. As the train has been stalled in a snowbank in the mountains of Yugoslavia, it has been impossible for the killer or killers to have escaped from the train.

Moreover, the murder is given a greater significance when it is discovered that the victim is a notorious kidnapper, head of a gang which has committed a crime as brutal as the Lindbergh baby case.

Thus does the curtain go up on the Murder in the Calais Coach. It becomes even more mystifying as the investigation proceeds. For everyone in the coach appears to have an air-tight alibi, and yet one or more of them must’ve done the killing.”

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Film adaptations of Murder on the Orient Express

1974 Film Adaptation: The first adaptation of Christie’s novel, directed by Sidney Lumet, was released in 1974. A critical and audience hit, it starred Albert Finney as Poirot and Ingrid Bergman as Greta Ohlsson. Sean Connery and Lauren Bacall were featured as well. The film won nine Academy Awards, including Ingrid Bergman’s for Best Supporting. The film was financially successful as well, earning a total of $35 million at the box office.

The film earned an approval rating of 90% based on 39 reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, receiving an average rating of 7/10. The website’s critics consensus says that the “production of Murder on the Orient Express is one of the best Agatha Christie film adaptations to see the silver screen”.

Murder on the Orient Express was remade into a slightly altered version for TV in 2001, with Alfred Molina starring as Poirot. Agatha Christie, who died fourteen months after the 1974 film was released, said that this film was one of the only movie adaptations of her books that she liked.

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2017 Film Adaptation: The 20th Century Fox 2017 feature film version of Murder on the Orient Express was the fourth screen adaptation of Christie’s novel. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, he also starred as Poirot, with supporting cast members Penelope Cruz, Tom Bateman, and Johnny Depp.

The film was nominated for eighteen movie awards including several Critic’s Choice Awards and Teen Choice Awards and did quite well at the box office, earning a worldwide gross of $350 million. The film earned an approval rating of 60% based on 295 reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, receiving an average rating of 6/10. 

You can stream the 1974 film*and the 2017 film on Amazon*.

A film adaptation of Death on the Nile, another Poirot mystery, is being positioned as a sequel to the 2017 film adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, though it has a different (and diverse) all-star cast. The filming of Death on the Nile underwent several delays in production but is to be released on February 11, 2022. The new film is expected to spur an interest in Christie’s novel as well as other previous film adaptations. 

 Quotes from Murder on the Orient Express

“The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”

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“The body—the cage—is everything of the most respectable—but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.”

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“I like to see an angry Englishman,” said Poirot. “They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.”

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“Because, you see, if the man were an invention—a fabrication—how much easier to make him disappear!”

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“What’s wrong with my proposition?” Poirot rose. “If you will forgive me for being personal—I do not like your face.”

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“I have learned to save myself useless emotion.”

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“I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty—to one’s friends and one’s family and one’s caste.”

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“The happiness of one man and one woman is the greatest thing in all the world.”

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Agatha Christie books on Bookshop.org*
Agatha Christie page on Amazon*
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More about Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Murder on the Orient Express: All the Versions and Their Differences The Home of Agatha Christie: Murder on the Orient Express

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Gone With the Wind’s Melanie Wilkes, and the Woman Who Portrayed Her

It’s a talented fiction writer who can make you believe that she has written your story. And what if you’ve been named for a fictional heroine because your father loved her character traits? Then, it’s almost an umbilical cordlike connection that stays with you throughout your life. This is how I came to be named Melanie, after the character of Melanie Wilkes from Gone With the Wind.

My father had read the book in engineering college, when I was nowhere in the picture. He tucked the name away in his head for future use. After my birth, as is wont in families, many suggestions for names came up from family members. The name Melanie encountered a bit of resistance, being a Christian name in an Indian home, but my father stood his ground.

He had loved what Melanie from Gone with the Wind stood for and hoped that the daughter named after her would in some way reflect her “qualities of charm and devotion.” He even wrote a letter to the British Council in the city that I was born in to check on the genus of the name, after verification with the Oxford Book of English Names.  The British Council replied promptly enough, congratulating him and saying that since they didn’t have that book  in their library, they were ordering a copy. 

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Olivia de Havilland as Melanie in the film adaptation of
Gone With the Wind, 1939
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Melanie: Compassion personified

In Margaret Mitchell’s award-winning novel, Melanie is the quintessential good girl, compared to the feisty and spirited Scarlett O’Hara. They make a perfect foil for one another and become best friends, with Melanie rising to Scarlett’s defense when people spoke ill of her.

Melanie is full of admiration for Scarlett and tells her, “I’ve always admired you so. I wish I could be more like you.” Ironically, Melanie’s husband, Ashley realizes his wife’s true worth only when she is dying and says to Scarlett, “I can’t live without her. I can’t. Everything I ever had is going with her … She’s the only dream I ever had that didn’t die in the face of reality.” 

In essence, that sums up what Melanie’s character stands for. She is compassion personified and steadfast in her convictions about what’s right. Despite being demure, she is able to display courage when the going gets tough, so much so that at various points in the novel, each of the characters turns to her in times of need, and she winds up playing a pivotal role in the story.

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Olivia de Havilland
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Here is how the difference between the characters of Melanie and Scarlett is summed up in the pages of Gone With the Wind:

“What Melanie did was no more than all Southern girls were taught to do: to make those about them feel at ease and pleased with themselves. It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land in which men were contented, uncontradicted, and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live.

So from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world, except credit for having intelligence.

Scarlett exercised the same charms as Melanie but with a studied artistry and consummate skill. The difference between the two girls lay in the fact that Melanie spoke kind and flattering words from a desire to make people happy, if only temporarily, and Scarlett never did it except to further her own aims.”

 

Olivia de Havilland embodies Melanie

One cannot speak of Melanie without mentioning , who plays the role in the faithful 1939 film adaptation of Gone with the Wind. The role got so under her skin that she wrote a piece titled “To Parents, Who Name Their Daughter Melanie.”

When Selznick approached Olivia to play a part in Gone with the Wind, Warner Bros., with whom she had then been under contract, wouldn’t release her. She wangled it by inviting Warner’s wife to tea. Mrs. Warner was able to persuade her husband to loan her for the film. 

Much to everyone’s surprise, Olivia insisted that she wanted to play Melanie in the movie, when every actress was vying to win the role of Scarlett O’Hara. She felt that she knew what it was to be a Scarlett but “Melanie had very deeply feminine qualities, which I felt were very endangered at that time and from generation to generation, and that somehow they should be kept alive. And one way I could contribute to that, was to play Melanie.” 

By feminine qualities, de Havilland wasn’t referring just to physical attributes. She clarified by saying, “Melanie was other-people oriented. She was always thinking of the other person.” 

For me, the most important observation that Olivia de Havilland made is: “The interesting thing to me is that Melanie was happy. Scarlett wasn’t a happy woman, all self-generated and preoccupied. But there’s Melanie, loving, compassionate. She had this marvelous capacity to relate to people with whom she would normally have no relationship.” 

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Variety (March 15, 1944)
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Courage in real life — the De Havilland Law

In addition to being remembered as Melanie all of her acting life, Olivia needs to be acknowledged and thanked for the De Havilland Law, which was a victory for all the creative people of Hollywood.

When Olivia entered the film business, the studios enjoyed all the power, and signed actors up to work on long-term contracts involving six-day work weeks and long hours. If they refused to be loaned out to another studio or to play a particular role, they were liable for suspension without pay, with the length of the suspension extending the period of contract. 

Under contract to Warner Bros., Olivia grew dissatisfied with the roles assigned to her and wished to break free. She longed to play a role like that of Melanie (for which she ultimately won an Oscar nomination) and knew she had an audience who would want to see her movies. “I had a responsibility to them,” she said in an interview. 

In 1943, when her contract with Warner Bros. ended, the studio refused to release her, saying that she had to serve them for another six months to factor in a period of suspension. When Olivia decided to legally take on Warner Bros., she put a budding career on the line to fight an unjust system.

The courts ruled finally in favor of Olivia in a landmark judgement, which came to be known as the De Havilland Law, with one newspaper Variety boldly splashing the headline “de Havilland Free Agent.”

Olivia lived on till the age of 104 but fought this case at a young age.  It’s hard to know where this courage came from and whether playing the role of Melanie had anything to do with it.  Certainly, if I could have one wish as a way to live up to my name, it would be to do something as bold and brave as Olivia de Havilland, who epitomized the character of Melanie Wilkes.

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You might also enjoy:
Gone With the Wind — Echoing Through the Ages
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Melanie P. Kumar is a  Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.

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Glimpses into the Secret Diaries of Anne Lister (“Gentleman Jack”)

The fascinating and highly transgressive Englishwoman Anne Lister (1791 – 1840) of Shibden Hall in Yorkshire wasn’t a writer of published books, but was a committed diarist with a lot to write about. This introduction to the secret diaries of Anne Lister is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early Transgressive British Woman Writers by Francis Booth ©2021, reprinted by permission.

Known in her local environs as “Gentleman Jack,” Lister’s enormous journals, only recently published, run to twenty six volumes and four million words – which possibly makes her in terms of word count one of the most prolific of woman writers in this book – but were never meant to be read by anyone.

These diaries, written primarily between 1817 and the mid-1820s, are partly in code to hide Lister’s lesbian sexuality. Once decoded, they are perfectly unambiguous, at least today.

I am resolved not to let my life pass without some private memorial that I may hereafter read, perhaps with a smile, when Time has frozen up the channel of those sentiments which flow so freely now. (19th February 1819)

I owe a good deal to this journal. By unburdening my mind on paper I feel, as it were, to get rid of it; it seems made over to a friend that hears it patiently, keeps it faithfully, and by never forgetting anything, is always ready to compare the past & present & thus to cheer & edify the future. (22nd June 1821)

Lister was born at an extraordinary time in history: her father served on the British side in the American War of Independence and was wounded at Lexington, returning unwilling to run the family business. But, as well as being the time of the American Revolution, this was the white heat of the British Industrial Revolution, which was led by the mills of Yorkshire.

She ran and expanded the family business like a true entrepreneur, taking advantage of the times, moving it from land owning and agriculture into the coal mining business, doing deals and signing contracts, employing and firing male workers just like any male boss.

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Killing the Angel   on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel   on Amazon UK*
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She always dressed in black in a masculine way – though she did not actually dress as a man – and was known locally as “Gentleman Jack,” for reasons unspoken in public but understood by all. This is an early entry, dated 1816:

Ann & I lay awake last night till 4 in the morning. I let her into my penchant for the ladies. Expatiated on the nature of my feelings towards her & hers towards me. Told her that she ought not deceive herself as to the nature of my sentiments & the strictness of my intentions towards her.

I could feel the same in at least two more instances & named her sister, Eliza, as one, saying that I did not dislike her in my heart but rather admired her as a pretty girl. I asked Ann if she liked me the less for my candour, etc., etc. She said no, kissed me & proved by her manner she did not.

Although she wrote in code, and no one saw her diaries, Lister did not take any care to hide her long-term lesbian relationship with fellow landowning Yorkshire woman Ann Walker; quite the opposite. They were the first women to have a same-sex wedding ceremony, in York in 1834, even though it was not legally recognized.

Lister seems to have had quite a number of female lovers before settling down with Walker; she talked quite openly about her preferences with women who did not necessarily share them but were fascinated to understand. Anne seems to have believed completely that her activities were no sin – and that her tastes were shared by many women in her circle – but that those of homosexual men were.

She asked if I thought the thing was wrong – if it was forbidden in the bible & said she felt queer when she heard Sir Thomas Horton mentioned. I dexterously parried all these points – said Sir T. H.’s case was quite a different thing. That was positively forbidden & signally punished in the bible – that the other was certainly not named.

Besides, Sir T. H. was proved to be a perfect man by his having a child & it was infamous to be connected with both sexes – but that [there] were beings who were so unfortunate as to be not quite so perfect &, supposing they kept to one side [of] the question, was there no excuse for them.

It would be hard to deny them a gratification of this kind. I urged in my own defence the strength of natural feeling & instinct, for so I might call it, as I had always had the same turn from infancy. That it had been known to me, as it were, by inclination.

That I had never varied & no effort on my part had been able to counteract it. That the girls liked me & had always liked me. That I had never been refused by anyone & that, without attempting to account for the thing, I hoped it might, under such circumstances be excused.

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A page from Anne Lister’s coded diary
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Although Lister’s diaries are mostly read today for their lesbian interest, they also give a fascinating account of day-to-day life in Yorkshire at that time.

You descend to Buxton down a very steep narrow road with an ill-fenced off precipice (the case in many other parts of the road) on your right. The appearance of the town is very singular – surrounded by rude, bleak, barren lime-stone mountains covered with lime-kilns.

The Crescent is situated so low & so hid from view, you hardly see the chimneys till you drive round the back & come into the area in front. We went to the Great hotel – had a sitting-room downstairs. C – preferred it on account of seeing the people as they walked along the Piazza.

Ordered dinner immediately and devoured a brace of Moor-game which were excellent but dear (6s) in consequence of the moors being so strictly preserved . . . Anne and Watson  have a double-bedded room – I a tolerably good single one opposite – 10s per week – up I know not how many flights of stairs.

All rather tired & went to bed early. Anne sat by my bedside & lay by me upon the bed till 3 in the morning – I teasing & behaving rather amorously to her. She would gladly have got into bed or done anything of the loving kind I asked her.

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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Watercolor portrait of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall

Image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, with this historic commentary:

Likely painted by a Mrs. Taylor on Wednesday 20 and Thursday November 1822, as described in Lister’s diary:

Wednesday 20 November [Halifax] At 12:40, too George in the gig & drove to Mrs Taylor’s. Sat for my likeness perhaps 1 1/4 hour. Very well satisfied with the sketch. There is something so very characteristic in the figure. Paid for it, 2 guineas … Neither Mrs Rawson nor Catherine thought it a good likeness. Found great fault with the mouth &, at first, with almost every part of the whole thing.

Thursday 21 November [Halifax] …Went to Mrs Taylor… sat nearly an hour during which she closed the mouth, improved the picture exceedingly & made it an admirable likeness… Got home at 2.25. The likeness struck me as so strong I could not help laughing. My aunt came up & laughed too, agreeing that the likeness was capital. Ditto my uncle. We are all satisfied, let others say what they may.”

Anne Lister reveals her true feelings nine months later: 30 August 1823 “Mrs Taylor’s sketch of me, like a person afraid of speaking. Too foolish looking. Could not bear it. Not at all characteristic.”

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Gentleman Jack — 2109 series and companion book

Gentleman Jack (the series) is available for streaming on Amazon*

Gentleman Jack, an 8-episode historical drama series, premiered in the U.S. in April, 2019, and in May 2019 in the U.K. Created and directed by Sally Wainright, the series was co-produced by BBC One and HBO. Suranne Jones stars as the landowner, industrialist, and prolific diarist Anne Lister.

The story is distilled from Lister’s multi-volume diaries that document her life of lesbian relationships in secret code. Nominated for multiple awards, this series was well received by critics and audiences alike. A second season, also based on Lister’s diaries, is in production.

Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister is available on bookshop.org and Amazon*

Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister is the companion book to the series by Anne Choma and Sally Wainright. From the publisher:

Anne Lister was remarkable. Fearless, charismatic and determined to explore her lesbian sexuality, she forged her own path in a society that had no language to define her. She was a landowner, an industrialist and a prolific diarist, whose output has secured her legacy as one of the most fascinating figures of the 19th century.

Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister follows Anne from her crumbling ancestral home in Yorkshire to the glittering courts of Denmark as she resolves to put past heartbreak behind her and find herself a wife. This book introduces the real Gentleman Jack, featuring unpublished journal extracts decrypted for the first time by series creator Sally Wainwright and writer Anne Choma.

Learn more about Anne Lister and the decoding of the secret diaries on the official website.

Portrait at very top of Lister from Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation.

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Maxine Kumin, Prolific American Poet

Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925 – February 6, 2014) is known primarily as a poet, but she was also a prolific writer of children’s books, fiction, and essays.

She was born Maxine Winokur in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Reform Jewish parents. Her father was the largest pawnbroker in the city of Philadelphia; her mother was a socially ambitious woman who loved dressing for nights at the symphony or the theater and discouraged any mannerisms that might, in her view, make her children appear to be immigrants.

Maxine was directed to list her father’s occupation as “broker,” rather than “pawnbroker,” whenever a form required that information.

Germantown was a largely Protestant neighborhood, and Maxine and her family faced many forms of anti-Semitism from both children and adults. “On bad days,” she says in her memoir The Pawnbroker’s Daughter (2015), “older kids chased us downhill from school yelling Christ-killer!”

 

College years

An avid swimmer, Maxine hoped to attend Wellesley College, which had an excellent swimming pool and an underwater observation room for analyzing strokes. But in 1942, nearly all elite colleges and universities accepted only a limited number of Jews and other minorities.

She ended up instead at Radcliffe, which did not have a regulation-size swimming pool. But her disappointment over the poor swimming facilities at Radcliffe didn’t last. She quickly made friends “of varying beliefs and hues” and eventually became captain of the swim team.

In 1943, Maxine joined other Radcliffe students in supporting striking workers at a local shipyard, leafletting workers as the shifts changed, and writing and producing the union’s weekly newspaper. This activity brought her to the attention of the FBI, who contacted her parents. Her father threatened to take her out of school if she continued her involvement in the union drive. She responded that she would support herself through school if necessary and continued her activism.

 

The long marriage

In April of 1945, while a junior at Radcliffe, she went on a blind date with Victor Kumin, a 1943 Harvard grad serving as a sergeant in the U.S. Army in Cambridge on furlough. The remaining five days of Victor Kumin’s furlough were filled with long walks, visits to the zoo and the ballet, and intimate talks over drinks in a hotel bar. In short, they fell in love.

Over the coming months, they continued their long-distance love affair in 575 letters exchanged between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Maxine had no idea until after the war that Victor, a young chemist, was part of the team of thousands of people working to develop the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the bombings, Victor refused to continue his work and eventually received an honorable discharge.

Maxine and Victor were married on June 29, 1946, just a little more than three weeks after she graduated from Radcliffe. In 2002, she celebrated their relationship (which lasted until her death in 2014) in The Long Marriage (2002). The title poem begins:

The sweet jazz
of their college days
spools over them
where they lie
on the dark lake
of night growing
old unevenly …

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Photo by George Litwak
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Children and light verse 

By 1953, Maxine was pregnant with her third child and she and Victor were living in Newton, a suburb of Boston. She had completed an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Radcliffe a few years earlier. Restless for an outlet for her love of poetry, she began writing light verse.

She was thrilled when her first effort was published in The Christian Science Monitor. Subsequent poems appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post. So deep was the prejudice against women’s intellectual capabilities in 1955 that the Post required a letter from Maxine’s husband’s employer to certify that she had actually written the poem herself.

But her poetic aspirations weren’t limited to light verse. She admired Edna St. Vincent Millay and W. H. Auden and longed to produce work inspired by Millay’s sonnets and Auden’s “deft tetrameter.”

In 1957, Maxine enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. The workshop was taught by John Holmes, an English professor at Tufts, who became her mentor—in Maxine’s words, her “Christian academic daddy.” It was in the context of this workshop that she wrote her first “true” poems, as she called them, which would ultimately appear in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. In 1961, her first book of poetry, Halfway, was published. She details her transformation as a poet in “Metamorphosis: From Light Verse to the Poetry of Witness.”

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Maxine Kumin in the 1950s; photo by Carl Chiarenza
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Anne Sexton and the Radcliffe Institute

In addition to Holmes, Maxine met Anne Sexton in that poetry workshop. Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin had an intense literary friendship that lasted for seventeen years, until Sexton’s suicide. In daily phone calls, they read each other’s work aloud and offered feedback. They also collaborated on four children’s books.

Both women were thrilled when they were selected as part of the first group of women artists and scholars to join the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1961. The recognition, Maxine said, “authenticated us… said we were real and what we did was valuable.” For years after Sexton’s death, Maxine explored her grief through her poetry. Here’s more about The Literary Friendship of Anne Sexton & Maxine Kumin.

How It Is

Shall I say how it is in your clothes?
A month after your death I wear your blue jacket.
The dog at the center of my life recognizes
you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic.

 

“PoBiz” and the Pulitzer Prize

In 1961, Victor and Maxine each inherited $5000. Frustrated with life in suburbia, Maxine felt she needed a retreat to become a serious poet. The reigning poets of her time were T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, as well as  Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. She noted that the latter two weren’t mothers.

The Kumins took their $10,000 windfall and headed to New Hampshire, near the area where they spent their honeymoon, to look for property. After more than a year of searching, they found an old white farmhouse at the end of a nameless dirt road.

Vacant for six years, the house was missing shingles from its roof. It was surrounded by a dense thicket of blackberry brambles. The interior was littered with dead birds and dead mice. They recognized it immediately as the home they sought.

The house became not just a retreat, but an inspiration. An elderly neighbor, Henry Manley, knew the history of the house and the land and became a character in many of Maxine’s poems. She rediscovered her love of riding and horses when their daughter, Judith, took riding lessons.

Maxine Kumin’s fourth book of poetry, Up Country: Poems of New England, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Suddenly, she found herself enmeshed in the poetry business, or what she called PoBiz. Interviews, TV appearances, invitations to give readings and teach made her fear she would never write again. She fled to the farm, where she “took Candide’s advice to cultivate my garden … Once I had dirt packed under my fingernails I recovered my equilibrium. The poems inched back in their own time.”

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Nature and social concerns

Maxine Kumin’s attention to the details of life in rural New England and her use of traditional verse forms has led some to refer to her as “Roberta Frost.” But she also wrote about social and environmental problems. Her daughter, Judith Kumin, worked with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for more than three decades, confronting the problems of Vietnamese boat people and the displaced and disenfranchised in Belgrade and Bangkok.

Maxine’s poems on these subjects were not as highly regarded as her poems about rural life, but she insisted that these were poems she needed to “write for sanity’s sake and because it is important to bear witness,” combining throughout her life the need to write poetry with the need to act. In “During the Assassinations” she recalls her life as a mother in the 1960s:

During the assassinations
I marched with other soccer moms.
I carried lemons in case of tear gas.

 

Demanding representation

In 1981–1982, Maxine Kumin was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now known as Poet Laureate of the United States. In this capacity, she was able to select several women poets to read in a monthly series, most notably Adrienne Rich, who had rejected similar invitations from male laureates. Maxine was especially proud of starting a series of brown-bag lunches that allowed fans and admirers to meet informally with well-known poets.

In 1995, she and poet Carolyn Kizer were appointed chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. They lobbied for the appointment of African American poet Lucille Clifton to a vacant post on two occasions, but both opportunities went to white men. In November of 1998, she and Kizer resigned in protest. Their action led to changes in the structure of the Academy that resulted in greater representation of women and minorities. “We were praised by many and damned by a Procrustean few,” she said.

 

Inside the halo

In July of 1998, Maxine suffered an accident while preparing her beloved horse Deuter for an exhibition. Her injuries were so extensive that her surgeon told her that ninety-five percent of people with her spinal injuries did not survive, and of those who did, ninety-five percent ended up as quadriplegics. She underwent months of painful rehabilitation, initially in a contraption called a halo meant to prevent patients with spinal injuries from moving.

Eventually, through her determination and the support of her family as well as countless medical professionals, she regained her ability to speak, read, write, and walk again. She documented her triumphant return to horseback nine months after the injury in her book Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (2000).

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Maxine Kumin page on Amazon*
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A Jewish Calvinist

Until her death in 2014 on her New Hampshire farm, Maxine Kumin continued to write, publishing children’s books, a novel, essays, and poetry.

“The garden has to be tended every day,” she said in a video interview near the end of her life, “just as the horses have to be tended to, not just every day, but morning, noon, and night. The writing exerts the same kind of discipline. A day without sitting down at my desk seriously is a day full of guilt. I think of myself as a Jewish Calvinist. Salvation through grace, grace through good works. Working is good. It’s just that simple. I wouldn’t trade this life for any other.”

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Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.

More about Maxine Kumin

On this site

The Literary Friendship of Anne Sexton & Maxine Kumin

Selected poetry collections

The Privilege (1965)The Nightmare Factory  (1970)The Abduction  (1971)Up Country  (1972)House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate  (1975)The Retrieval System (1978)Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, New and Selected Poems (1982)The Long Approach (1986)Nurture  (1989)Looking for Luck  (1992)Connecting the Dots  (1996)The Long Marriage: Poems  (2002)Bringing Together: Uncollected Early Poems 1958–1988 (2003)Jack and Other New Poems, (2005)Still to Mow  (2009)Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010 (2010)And Short the Season (2014)

Biographies

Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (2000)Braham, Jean The Light Within the Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur,
Maxine Kumin, & Stanley Kunitz (2007)The Pawnbroker’s Daughter: A Memoir by Maxine Kumin (2015)

Children’s books

Maxine Kumin was also the author of 25 books for children. See the complete listing on her website.

More information

Maxine Kumin website Video interview  Poetry Foundation A selection of Kumin’s poems on Poetry Foundation Jewish Women’s Archive Washington Post obituary Atomic Heritage Foundation profile of Victor Kumin 

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Orphans and Boarding Schools: On rereading Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster

The summer I was twelve, I pulled a well-read and worn book from the shelves of the public library and discovered a story that seemed to be told directly to me. Behind the deceptively dull cover of Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster (1912) were letters and drawings that pulled me hard and fast into Judy Abbott’s life—an orphan at boarding school.

So many of my favorite things were combined in this book: orphans and lonely childhoods, girls succeeding against the odds with their studious natures, boarding school and class events, and perhaps most of all, the burgeoning writer’s sensibility that I also enjoyed in Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964).

I borrowed and devoured Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs  that very afternoon; I’ve revisited it many times.

 

Orphan girls

Judy’s orphan status reminded me of other favorite characters, from classics like Emily of New Moon (1923) by L.M. Montgomery, Ballet Shoes (1936) by Noel Streatfeild, and A Little Princess (1905) by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

And later-twentieth-century orphans, too, like Mandy the eponymous heroine of Julie Andrews Edwards’ 1971 novel and Christina in K.M. Peyton’s Flambards (1967).

As a kid with recently divorced parents, relocated a couple of hundred miles from familiar territory, I related to these characters’ dislocation. Pseudo-orphans, girls temporarily separated from family—in Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking (1945) and Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962)—also appealed.

Even girls unexpectedly living in single-family households like the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1880) — Rose Campbell, in Eight Cousins (1874), was a proper orphan but I hadn’t met her yet.

And Judy wasn’t only an orphan, but an orphan keen on rewarding her anonymous benefactor’s investment — not simply surviving, but thriving. The biography of my copy of Daddy-Long-Legs described its author as an orphan, but Jean Webster lived with both parents until she was fifteen years old.

Nonetheless, as Alice Sanford’s article in the Vassar Miscellany (June 1915) explains, the success of Daddy-Long-Legs created many opportunities for actual orphans:

“One hundred orphan children have since been placed in families by the Society of the National Sons and Daughters of the Golden West. Miss Webster has been consulted repeatedly by prominent social workers to suggest improvements in children’s institutional homes, besides being invited to become a Director in many of them.”

Whether true or not, the author having been described as an orphan would have made Judy’s story about life at the John Grier Home and Fergussen College more credible. And decades after the author’s death, Vassar praised Daddy-Long-Legs as “a moving revelation of child-life in an orphanage, timeless in its humor, justice, and lovable make-believe.”

The book’s social welfare message “that under-privileged children, if given a chance, are capable of succeeding in life and of enjoying its beauty” is simple but powerful. (September 1936, Vassar Miscellany)

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Learn more about Jean Webster
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Girls-in-progress: Selfhood

I also related to the work-in-progress nature of young Jerusha, who changed her name to “Judy” when she went to Fergussen Hall (the author herself changed from “Alice” to “Jean” when she went to college), echoing Anne imagining herself into becoming “Cordelia” in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908).

I was waiting for someone to see the real me, like Judy’s benefactor saw her: “He believes that you have originality, and he is planning to educate you to become a writer.”

In the story, “Jerusha” was said to be a name from a tombstone and a telephone book. In real life, Jean Webster’s friend Ethelyn McKinney had a grandmother named Jerusha, and Jean’s connection to the McKinney family intensified when she married Ethelyn’s brother in 1915 (though nobody claimed the grandmother’s name was an inspiration).

Eventually, Judy’s story would succeed not only on the printed page but on the Broadway stage and multiple Hollywood films. Webster herself adapted the work for theatre and Alice Sanford shares this evidence of the author’s commitment to its success:

“It is a fact that on the opening night of the play in February at Atlantic City, Mr. [Henry] Miller was very nervous and dubious, and said to Miss Webster that he would sell out the house for twenty dollars. She, however, was confident, and predicted a success.”

 

Boarding schools

I preferred Enid Blyton-style school stories to literary alternatives; Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre bored me after Jane left Lowood and only finished reading it decades later. When Sara Crewe was in classes with Miss Minchin in A Little Princess, life was fine, but her fortunes soon took a turn.

Judy’s life at Fergussen Hall was more bookish than the Naughtiest Girl, St. Clare’s, and Malory Towers stories. Although lacking the privileges of her well-to-do classmates, Judy must catch up scholastically and socially:

“The trouble with college is that you are expected to know such a lot of things you’ve never learned. It’s very embarrassing at times.”

I preferred the stories where children connected with teachers who recognized their talents, and even though I was less fond of books about boys (unless they were one of the Three Investigators or the love interest in a Beverly Cleary romance), a story like Irene Hunt’s The Lottery Rose squeaked past my anti-boy bias because of the boarding-school setting.

Judy includes specifics about her classes and her independent work, which held its own appeal. Jean Webster’s homage to her beloved Vassar College is most immediately recognizable in When Patty Went to College (1903) and Just Patty (1911). But a 1912 review in the Vassar Miscellany by Gabrielle Elliot situates Daddy-Long-Legs there too:

“Perhaps the earmarks are not quite so plain, but when we find the heroine trying to make a tower room livable, taking the ‘entertaining’ Benvenuto Cellini’s life in chunks and writing ‘humorous’ songs for a Glee Club concert our suspicions are more or less confirmed.”

From the perspective of a fellow Vassar graduate, the school setting was one of the novel’s most appealing elements:

“The description of how ‘Judy’ nightly fortified herself behind an engaged sign and acquired in gulps the knowledge which everyone is assumed to have is extremely amusing. Perhaps the most genuine part of the book comes in one or two perceptive touches of the everyday life at college.”

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Daddy-Long-Legs on Bookshop.org* and on Amazon*
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Works-in-progress: Writing

Although I warmed to the details of Judy’s coursework—which wars she was studying and which verbs she was conjugating — her growing identity as a writer thrilled me more. In concert with the sense that I — and only I — was the reader of this story, other than the bookish girl who made it.

“I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an ‘engaged’ on the door and get into my nice red bathrobe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch, and light the brass student lamp at my elbow, and read and read and read. One book isn’t enough. I have four going at once. Just now, they’re Tennyson’s poems and Vanity Fair and Kipling’s Plain Tales and – don’t laugh – Little Women. I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn’t brought up on Little Women. I haven’t told anybody though (that would stamp me as queer).”

Judy’s letters read more like a diary because her benefactor never writes back. Throughout the book, she is reading, mostly for school but sometimes for pleasure: “Excuse me for filling my letters so full of [Robert Louis] Stevenson; my mind is very much engaged with him at present.”

And, eventually, she is writing as much as she is reading, particularly during the summer holidays: “College opens in two weeks and I shall be glad to begin work again. I have worked quite a lot this summer though—six short stories and seven poems. Those I sent to the magazines all came back with the most courteous promptitude. But I don’t mind.”

From the start, it felt like she was writing both to me and about me. Books like Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik (1979) and Norma Fox Mazer’s I, Trissy (1971) had revealed the power of intimacy in handwritten pages. Judy’s story unfolded decades earlier, but her hand-drawn, near-stick figures were as disproportioned as my own doodles, and her bookishness was recognizable and her friendships were enviable.

 

Spiders and titles

Judy addresses her letters to Daddy-Long-Legs because of a silhouette she has glimpsed, that of a very tall man (her benefactor), but the title had another genesis, which Alice Sanford describes:

“Five or six summers ago Miss Webster was visiting at the home of her publisher, and as they all were sitting on the porch, a daddy-long-legs dropped into her lap. ‘Oh, a daddy-long-legs,’ she exclaimed — ‘what a capital title for a book!’ and the publisher said upon her leaving, ‘Don’t forget to write the book.’”

Jean Webster didn’t take it seriously, but her publisher did:

“After receiving a mock-up ‘with the picture of a daddy-long-legs emblazoned upon it’ Jean Webster got to work. Over the next couple of years, she noodled the idea and conceived of a ‘little orphan asylum girl, Judy, who finally goes to college through the munificence of the aristocratic Jervis Pendleton, self-styled misogynist.’”

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The first film version, 1919
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Enduring, rereading

Jervis is a shadowy figure in the novel, but in later adaptations, the relationship between him and Judy is more prominent. More than a decade after I first read the book, I finally saw a film that I recognized as being adapted from it.

In between, I had seen Shirley Temple’s Curly Top (1935) but I didn’t recognize it as the same story. The first film, made by Mary Pickford in 1919, wasn’t available (likely for the best, as the orphanage scenes probably would have given me nightmares), although Canadian students studied Mary Pickford in school as dutifully as Judy studied algebra and physiology.

Rewatching the 1955 film Daddy-Long-Legs recently, I was struck by how much of it was about Jervis Pendleton, which is perhaps best explained by the fact that Fred Astaire was cast in the role, opposite Leslie Caron.

Rumor has it that he was surprised to be cast opposite a ballerina, quickly announcing: “Kid, you’re going to have to do what I do, because I sure don’t do what you do.” As Judy in the film, Leslie Caron does what Fred Astaire as Jervis does: dancing makes for better showmanship than reading or writing.

Bolstering Daddy-Long-Legs’ popularity has been a series of stage and screen productions: films in 1990 in Japan, and in 2005 in Korea; on-stage as Love from Judy in 1952 in England, as a two-person musical in California in 2009, and stage production in New York City in 2015.

But it’s the novel that holds the most appeal for me. Other readers of classic girls’ stories often count it among their favorites too, both in North America and in England (where many of Jean Webster’s novels were published, often a year or two after their American debut).

In 2005, Amanda Craig, nominated more than once for the International Women’s Fiction Prize, included it in a list of her favorite teen romances in the London Times, describing it like this: “Sweet novel made up of an adopted girl’s letters to her daddy.”

She’s not adopted and he’s not her daddy, yet this statement is no more inaccurate than the biographical note at the back of the novel that identifies Jean Webster as an orphan. The point is that Judy doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere and her Daddy-Long-Legs helps her believe that she does. It’s a human yearning to connect: it’s what we look for in a story and it’s why I return to Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs.

Contributed by Marcie McCauley, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and the Humber College Creative Writing Program. She writes and reads (mostly women writers!) in Toronto, Canada. And she chats about it on Buried In Print and @buriedinprint. 

 

More about Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster Read full text on Project Gutenberg Listen on Librivox Reader discussion on Goodreads Jean Webster on the Vassar Encyclopedia

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The post Orphans and Boarding Schools: On rereading Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Flint and Steel: The Tumultuous Marriage of Martha Gellhorn & Ernest Hemingway

The esteemed war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, famously said, “Why should I be a footnote to somebody else’s life?” She dreaded being remembered mainly for her doomed marriage to the iconic American author. Hemingway and Gellhorn encouraged each other, supported each other, and once they separated, refused to speak of each other.

It all began when one evening, close to Christmas 1936, the young journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn went to a bar on Key West for a drink. She was with her mother, Edna, and younger brother Alfred, taking a break in the winter sun. The bar was Sloppy Joe’s, and there Martha noticed “a large, dirty man in untidy somewhat soiled white shorts and shirt,” sitting in a corner, drinking and reading his mail.

The man was Ernest Hemingway, and this fairly inauspicious meeting was the start of a relationship that lasted almost ten years. Culminating in a disastrous four-year marriage, their partnership is (in)famous for its volatility, hard drinking, and occasional violence.

But there were also times of love, happiness, and hard work in writing. The tempestuous dynamic between these two enormous literary talents continues to fascinate to this day.

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Photo of Gellhorn and Hemingway by Corbis
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An “odd bird”

When he first met Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway was living on Key West with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, and three sons: John (known as Bumby), age thirteen; Patrick (nicknamed “Mexican Mouse”), age eight; and Gregory, or Gigi, who was five. Hemingway spent a lot of time fishing in the clear waters off the island and drinking in Sloppy Joe’s, but by the end of 1936 was also planning a trip to Spain to cover the civil war.

His enthusiastic support of the Republican cause had attracted the attention of the North American Newspaper Alliance, who asked him to cover the conflict for them, and he was raising money to buy ambulances as well as planning a documentary film with the Dutch director Joris Ivens.

Gellhorn, though not as well established as Hemingway, had her own accomplishments and ambitions. Her recent book, The Trouble I’ve Seen, based on her experiences of reporting the Great Depression, had received rave reviews, and she’d been hailed as the literary discovery of the decade. She was also very well traveled and aware of the worsening situation in Europe.

After their first drinks in Sloppy Joe’s, Hemingway offered to show the family around the island and, believing Martha and Alfred to be a couple rather than brother and sister, resolved to “get her away from the young punk” as soon as he could. 

When Edna and Alfred went home to St Louis a week later, Gellhorn decided to stay to work on her new novel. However, instead of writing, she spent hours talking to Hemingway — about politics, about his love of Cuba, his books, and his new manuscript, which he gave her to read. She did so, “weak with envy and wonder,” but determined not to imitate the style she admired so much. She had found, she wrote to her close friend Eleanor Roosevelt, “an odd bird, very lovable and full of fire and a marvelous storyteller.”

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Learn more about Martha Gellhorn
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The Spanish Civil War and the start of a relationship

When Martha Gellhorn finally left for St. Louis in the middle of January 1937, Hemingway headed to New York to finalize his preparations for Spain. His regular letters and phone calls gave her encouragement through the long winter days, during which she forced herself to work on her novel for ten pages a day, determined to get it done as quickly as possible so that she could go to Europe herself and “get all the facts tidy.”

But by the time she arrived in New York, Hemingway was almost ready to leave for Spain. His passage was booked and, with obligations to both his documentary film and to the NANA, he had to depart without her. It took several weeks for Gellhorn to procure the required paperwork, eventually persuading a friend at Collier’s magazine to give her special correspondent status.

She sailed in March 1937, writing to a family friend, “Me, I am going to Spain with the boys. I don’t know who the boys are, but I am going with them.”

Too impatient to find a traveling companion among the several hundred men and women going to Spain as part of the International Brigades, Gellhorn set out alone from Paris with only fifty dollars and a backpack full of tinned food. By late March she was in Barcelona, crowded with soldiers and militia of all kinds, and from there made her way to Madrid.

Hemingway, already installed in two rooms in the Hotel Florida, greeted her: “I knew you’d get here, daughter, because I fixed it so you could.” Gellhorn accepted the self-congratulatory twisting of the truth with tolerance but was less understanding the next morning after she found herself locked her in her room during a bombing raid. When Hemingway finally came to let her out he explained that he had done it for her own safety, but she was furious. Later, she wrote, “I should have known at that moment what doom was.”

It didn’t, however, stop her from starting an affair. She didn’t love Hemingway, she claimed, and she wasn’t physically attracted to him, but she admired him and was grateful for his companionship and leadership amid a horrific war. Hemingway regarded himself — and was mostly regarded by others — as the foremost foreign journalist in Spain, and was able to procure supplies, including petrol, where no one else could.

He knew his way around the various fronts and was expert with a gun. As “just about the only blonde in the country,” Gellhorn felt vulnerable, although she would never have shown it. It was, she felt, better to be seen as belonging to someone.

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Photo: JFK Presidential Library and Museum
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“A gigantic jam”

It was the first of four trips to Spain over the next two years, interspersed with periods back in America. Hemingway’s film was a success, while Gellhorn’s articles about the human cost of war, the ordinary people, and their lives on the streets were taken enthusiastically by Collier’s and The New Yorker.

Their second trip, in August 1937, was less successful. Gellhorn and Hemingway were attempting to be discreet about their relationship, mostly for Pauline’s sake, and they again traveled from New York on separate ships. By the time they arrived, two-thirds of the country lay in nationalist hands.

Madrid was becoming increasingly cold and uncomfortable, with little food to be had, and in the tough conditions, the differences between the two of them began to slide into violent arguments. Known for being a bully at times, Hemingway was capable of subjecting Gellhorn to torrents of abuse: she described one evening as “a really excellent show but the kind of show usually reserved for enemies.”

By November 8th, Gellhorn’s 29th birthday, she had heard from America that gossip was circulating about her and Hemingway, and swore never again to “get into such a thing … I am in it up to the neck.” She dreaded returning to New York.

Meanwhile,  with nothing much happening at the front, Hemingway had started work on a play called The Fifth Column, based largely on his experiences in Spain and including a not-entirely flattering portrait of Martha as Dorothy Bridges, the heroine, whose main feature was her legs and who had “men, affairs, abortions, ambitions.”

Christmas 1937 was spent in America, after a nasty incident in Paris when Pauline, having traveled to confront Hemingway about Gellhorn, threatened to jump off their hotel balcony. Hemingway, with characteristic understatement, confided in Max Perkins that he was in a “gigantic jam” yet returned once more to Spain with Gellhorn in April 1938, leaving an increasingly desperate Pauline in America.

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Martha Gellhorn: Quotes from a Courageous Woman
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Finca Vigía and life in Cuba

By the end of 1938, Hemingway was back in Key West, trying to adapt back into family life with Pauline, but it was evident to visitors that he was unhappy. His brother Leicester noted that he was drinking an average of fifteen Scotch and sodas each day. He eventually retreated to one of his favorite islands, Cuba, to write, and Gellhorn joined him in the early spring of 1939.

She found him split between two hotel rooms in Havana, one for sleeping and one for writing, disheveled as usual, stockpiling food and surrounded by deep-sea fishing tackle (the waters of the Gulf were only half an hour away by boat). Having tolerated his squalid way of hotel living during the war in Spain, Gellhorn found that she couldn’t bear it in Cuba, and determined to find them somewhere more permanent to live.

She found a house in the village of San Francisco de Paula, not far from Havana. A one-story colonial Spanish building called Finca Vigía, it was set in fifteen acres of grounds that had overgrown to jungle density in the tropical heat.

The house hadn’t been lived in for years and needed significant cleaning and renovation, but Gellhorn saw its potential. Their move to the Finca effectively marked the end of Hemingway’s marriage to Pauline.

At first, the two were happy in their new home, writing constantly and leading a disciplined life. Hemingway, who had started work on For Whom The Bell Tolls, rose early and started writing before dawn, using their sunny bedroom as a study.

Gellhorn admired the way he fiercely protected his writing time despite everything there was to do around the house: “He has,” she wrote to a friend, “been about as much use as a stuffed squirrel, but he is turning out a beautiful story. And nothing on earth besides matters to him …”

She was having trouble, per usual, with her book (it would later be published as The Stricken Field), worried that her writing was flat and uninspiring. Reading Hemingway’s work made things worse: she saw her own as “without magic” while his flowed “like the music of a flute.” But she was happy in the Finca, surrounded by the exotic plants she loved, and the view of the sea.

With a break in Wyoming and Idaho over the fall, they continued this routine into the new year, writing in the mornings (Hemingway now tucked up in bed because of the exceptionally cold weather), playing tennis in the afternoons, and, about once a week, driving into Havana for a long night of hard drinking at the Floridita, Hemingway’s favorite bar.

Hemingway’s sons came for a successful visit in March 1940. They liked Gellhorn, calling her “The Marty,” and she relished becoming an instant mother to three good-looking, intelligent, yet very different boys.

Gradually, the differences between them began escalating once again into arguments, just as they had done in Spain. Hemingway found the bad news from Europe intrusive, and eventually banned their radio from the house altogether. Gellhorn found his disinterest annoying and his commitment to his work overbearing.

One letter from Hemingway at this time is a profuse tract of apology, begging her forgiveness for having been “thoughtless, egotistic, mean-spirited and unhelpful.” It was one of the few times he admitted to, and apologized for, any wrongdoing.

 

A marriage of flint and steel

In September 1940, For Whom The Bell Tolls was published. It sold — as Hemingway put it — “like frozen Daiquiris in hell.” After a stint alone in New York for the initial round of publication events, Hemingway took Gellhorn back to Sun Valley with his sons. They spent happy weeks hunting, riding, fishing, and playing tennis, and became engaged after Hemingway’s divorce from Pauline was finalized.

Gellhorn wore a diamond and sapphire ring she described as “snappy as hell.” Although she had some doubts about marriage (upsetting Hemingway, who wrote that she had given him a “good sound busted heart”) photos from this time show them both happy, windswept, and smiling.

On November 21, 1940 they were married in the dining room of the Union Pacific Railroad in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Several newspapers covered the wedding, with one reporter describing it as a union “of flint and steel,” though which one of them was which was never made clear.

 

“Honeymoon” in China

Many years later, when Gellhorn was nearly seventy, she wrote a book of the “horror journeys” of her life, Travels With Myself and Another. The book is full of darkly comic stories of terrible discomfort, embarrassing situations, and all the gory details of traveling in strange places with few modern comforts.

She included their “honeymoon trip to China, entitled “Mr. Ma’s Tigers,” one of the funniest in the collection and notable for its tone of affection and self-mockery. Collier’s had asked her to travel to the Far East to cover the war there, and Hemingway, despite grave misgivings, agreed to join her for part of the trip and write some articles for PM magazine. The trip was to start on the Burma Road, not long after their wedding, and Hemingway insisted on calling it their honeymoon.

It started badly, with rolling Pacific waves which made them seasick all the way to Hawaii. Although things started to improve in Hong Kong, where Hemingway found new friends to drink with and delighted in setting off firecrackers in their hotel room, there was the ever-present danger of Japanese bombing, and health concerns, including a prevalence of cholera.

When the couple got permission to travel to the front line, they made the journey in an ancient truck, a derelict boat that let in water, and ponies so small that Hemingway pointed out he could walk and ride at the same time. It was also, as Gellhorn noted, the “mosquito center of the world.”

One night, lying on a board in wet clothes, besieged by flies and mosquitoes, she said, “I want to die.” Hemingway replied, “Too late. Who wanted to come to China?” But when she and Hemingway parted in Rangoon, he wrote, “I am lost without you … with you I have so much fun even on such a lousy trip.”

 

The Crook Shop, and a Caribbean “journey from hell”

Back in Cuba, Martha settled down to edit the proofs of a collection of stories, The Heart of Another, while Hemingway spent more and more time fishing in the Gulf on his boat, the Pilar. Martha enjoyed joining him when she wasn’t working, and Hemingway told Max Perkins that he was happy with her, that she was just what he needed, and that she had told him she was now going to stop traveling and stay at home.

But the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entrance of America into the war made them both restless. Still unwilling to travel to Europe, Hemingway started to gather stories for a war anthology, while both he and Gellhorn were intrigued by the idea of setting up a kind of counter-intelligence group in Cuba, similar to the ‘Fifth Column’ of Madrid in the Spanish Civil War.

Hemingway proposed to recruit informants from among his friends in the Havana bars, and, somewhat bizarrely, to equip the Pilar with grenades and machine guns in order to hunt and destroy enemy submarines that might be cruising the Gulf (his idea was to lure them into raising their conning towers, before lobbing grenades down the opening).

In a turn of events that seems ludicrous today, he succeeded in recruiting an eight-man crew and persuaded the FBI to contribute $500 a month for running costs. “Friendless” was the official name of the operation, but it was more often known as the Crook Shop.

As the Crook Shop took over the Finca, and the parties and drinking sessions began to last well into the morning hours, Gellhorn grew more and more impatient. She and Hemingway began to quarrel regularly, even about writing, so when Collier’s suggested that she do some traveling around the Caribbean and write about preparations for war, she was delighted.

But the assignment became another of her journeys from hell. It started in Puerto Rico, which had been turned into a huge naval base, and continued from St. Thomas to Antigua. Gellhorn was held up by hurricanes and heavy rain; she became violently seasick; and one night, while she slept out the bad weather on Saba, she awoke to find that the boat crew had slipped away in the night, leaving her marooned on an island with very few facilities.

She finally made her way off with a derelict motor launch, paying $60 to persuade the elderly captain to take her to Antigua. At her next destination, Surinam, she fractured a wrist and caught dengue fever.

Throughout her trip, Hemingway sent her several letters, most of them loving and intimate, full of life at the Finca and the domestic squabbles of the cats that had taken up residence in the gardens. Responding to a complaint from Gellhorn about life in Cuba, he wrote, “Boy can you hit. Can you hit and do you know where the heart of another lives…”

It was clear on her return that Hemingway had missed her, and Gellhorn spoke of becoming a “good little wife” and giving up reporting so as not to have to leave him again. For a short time, over the summer, they were genuinely happy.

 

War at home and in Europe

As time went on, Gellhorn grew increasingly tired of Hemingway’s spying activities and heavy drinking. He had quarreled with most of his writer friends and was spending more and more time at sea; on the few occasions he was at the Finca he was moody, depressed, and occasionally violent.

She was finding his slovenly way of living almost unbearable, while he told her that she was obsessed with cleanliness. One night, after a fight about his drunken driving on their way back from a night in Havana, Gellhorn took the wheel of his beloved Lincoln Continental and drove it slowly straight into a tree. She got out and walked back to the Finca, leaving Hemingway with the wrecked car.

Finally, despite the lack of military accreditation for women journalists, and despite all the dangers, Gellhorn decided to go to Europe. She tried to persuade Hemingway to go with her — even after all their arguments, there were still moments of tenderness — but he was reluctant to leave the Finca and the Pilar. From New York, she wrote, “You belong to me … We have a good wide life ahead of us. And I will try to be beautiful when I am old, and if I can’t do that I will try to be good. I love you very much.”

Gellhorn arrived in London in fall 1943. During the weeks that followed, she wrote several long and loving letters to Hemingway, full of the war in London and the people she was meeting, and still encouraging him to join her. Hemingway, though, was drinking heavily alone at the Finca, and wrote less and less often.

To Gellhorn’s mother, with whom he got on well, he wrote that he felt he was dying a little every day. Jealous of Gellhorn but unwilling to join her, he wrote to Max Perkins that he hadn’t “done a damned thing I wanted to do now for well over two years….but then I guess no one else has either except Martha who does exactly what she wants to do as willfully as any spoiled child…”

After six months, despite being desperate not to miss the French landings, Gellhorn decided to return, set on the idea of “blast[ing] him loose from Cuba” and bringing him back to Europe.

 

“I am wondering now if it ever really worked …”

This time, her return was not so happy. They fought over everything — over the house, over writing, over money -—and Hemingway went so far as to write to Gellhorn’s mother saying that he felt she had become unbalanced during her time in Europe.

“Nothing outside of herself interests her very much … she seems mentally unbalanced, maybe just borderline …” Then, out of the blue, Hemingway announced that he had decided to go to Europe after all, and would be writing articles for Collier’s — a move that effectively jeopardized Gellhorn’s position at the magazine, since officially it was allowed to have only one accredited journalist at the front.

Even more galling for Gellhorn was the fact that, after agreeing to write an article on RAF pilots, Hemingway was given a coveted seat on a plane heading for London, and told her that no women were allowed on board. Later, it turned out that the actress Gertrude Lawrence was also a passenger.

Angry but undeterred, Gellhorn eventually found a place on a Norwegian freighter. On the twenty-day Atlantic crossing, she had plenty of time for reflection, and in letters to friends made clear that she felt the marriage was over:

“He is a good man … He is however bad for me, sadly enough, or maybe wrong for me is the word; and I am wrong for him … I am wondering now if it ever really worked …We quarreled too much I suppose … It is all sickening and I am sad to death …”

When Gellhorn met up with Hemingway in London, she found him once again installed in a hotel, surrounded by hangers-on and drinking heavily. Instead of welcoming her, he seemed to delight in goading her, reducing her to tears and embarrassing those they were with, and one evening stood her up for dinner in favor of Mary Welsh, a young American journalist for the Daily Express. From that night, Gellhorn considered their marriage over.

 

Divorce and aftermath

It was not an amicable separation. Hemingway was not accustomed to being left by women, and even his sons were not spared his furious attempts to portray himself as the one who had wanted to end it. He wrote to Patrick that he had “torn up my tickets on her and would be glad never to see her again.”

Hemingway and Gellhorn met only twice more: once by accident in Paris in 1944, and later in London to finalize details of their divorce, which came through at the end of 1945.

It was a sad end to a troubled relationship. Later, Hemingway’s youngest son Gregory would say that Gellhorn had been driven away by his father’s bullish behavior and egotism. Gellhorn wrote to her mother that, “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.”

After that, she refused to talk about Hemingway at all. Even in Travels With Myself and Another he was referred to only as UC, and on hearing of his suicide in 1961, her only comment was that she understood why he had done it.

Hemingway, initially outspoken and blustering about their separation, also fell silent on the subject. It’s ironic, then, that speculation, gossip, and fascination with their unconventional love story continued long after they had separated, and survives today in books, biographies, and the sensationalized 2012 film, Hemingway and Gellhorn, 2012.

Further reading

Travels With Myself And Another by Martha Gellhorn (1978)The Hemingway Women by Bernice Kert (1983)Selected Letters 1917-1961 by Ernest Hemingway, edited by Carlos Baker (2003)Martha Gellhorn: A Life by Caroline Moorehead (2004)Ernest Hemingway: A Biography by Mary Dearborn (2018)

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is an author, poet, and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States, and the Bahamas.

When not traveling or working on her current projects — a chapbook of poetry, “The Cabinet of Lost Things,” and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes — she can be found with her nose in a book, daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Visit her on the web at Elodie Rose Barnes.

The post Flint and Steel: The Tumultuous Marriage of Martha Gellhorn & Ernest Hemingway appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Time Out of Mind by Rachel Field (1935)

Time Out of Mind by Rachel Field (1894 – 1942) was this American author’s first novel for adults, published in 1935. The following year, it won the National Book Award.

Field had been writing prose and poetry for children and young adults, as well as plays, since 1924. Her major breakthrough, up until Time Out of Mind was released, was the children’s book Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (1929), which won the Newbery Medal.

The story in Time Out of Mind is narrated in the first person by Kate Fernald. Kate, described as a hardy, “square-rigged” girl, comes to the Maine coast home of the Fortune family at the age of ten. She accompanies her mother, who serves as the housekeeper, and grows up with brother and sister Nat and Clarissa Fortune, forging a bond that would last a lifetime. The book begins:

“I was never one to begrudge people their memories. From a child I would listen when they spoke of the past. Mother often remarked upon it as strange in one so young. But I think I must have guessed, even then, at what is now clear to me, though I have not skill enough with words to make it plain. For I know that nothing can be so sweet as remembered joy, and nothing so bitter as despair that no longer has the power to hurt us. And to me the past seems like nothing so much as one of those shells that used to be on every mantelpiece of sea-faring families years ago along the coast of Maine.”

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Learn more about Rachel Field
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This award-winning novel earned universal praise at the time of its publication; though it’s no longer well known, contemporary readers seem to enjoy it as well. Here are two 1935 reviews of a story worthy of rediscovery:

Maine is Scene of Rachel Field’s Nostalgic Saga

From the original review in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 27, 1935: The cycle of the seasons, spring and summer, autumn and winter, along the blue Penobscot Bay, forms the radiant background for Rachel Fields’s nostalgic saga of Maine folks and tall-masted sailing ships.

The pungent odor of the majestic pines and the harbors about which the fortune of a great shipping family eddies, permeates each page of Time Out of Mind, a shining example of the renaissance of the traditional romantic novel.

From these pages there arises another stalwart “square-rigged” figure, Kate Fernald, who belongs alongside Mary Peters and others of her caliber in the Maine hall of fictional fame.

Kate, daughter of the housekeeper, came to Fortune’s Folly, the great white-columned home of the Fortune family when she was ten years old. As an old woman, she draws upon her storehouse of  poignant memories to relate the story of the disintegration of the Fortunes, ship-builders for three generations.

Major Fortune, heir to the tradition that “there’s no port too far for Fortune pines to cast their shadows,” was too blindly willful to read the doom of canvas in the encroachment of steam. His failure to read this handwriting on the wall spelled disaster for his fortune and his family.

Rissa (short for Clarissa), the arrogant and lovely daughter, and Nat, his son, whose physical unfitness to step into the Major’s shoes and love of music rankled his father.

There is a sense of foreboding at the torchlight launching of the Rainbow, the last of the Fortune ships to sail the seas, and well there might have been for the sailing of the Rainbow marked the beginning of the Fortune’s decline.

Trembling, white-faced twelve-year-old Nat is forced by his father to make a hand on the maiden voyage, to return a year later permanently broken in spirit and health. Rissa and Kate Fernald, equally loving Nat, scheme to protect him from the Major. This jealous struggle to draw him within the circle of love continues through the story.

Rissa and Nat escape from the stern shadow of the Folly to Paris. The Major, never recovered from the fate of the Rainbow, is laid to rest in the Little Prospect Cemetery, but Kate Fernald stays on, happy in the daily chores, scouring the Maine countryside for ripe red berries and russet apples, suffering an occasional twinge from the failure of her plan for marriage.

Kate still harbors a notion that Rissa, Nat, and she will be together again in the big house, the grandeur of which is slowly fading in the shadow of the pert modern homes of the summer visitors that are slowly and surely crowding the acres of the Fortune shoreline.

In the tragic climax of Nat and Rissa’s return, Kate’s strength in the face of failure is a memorable characterization and the resultant lump in the throat, the product of Miss Field’s word artistry, might be termed senile sentimentality by the foes of romanticism, but we prefer to call it just a natural involuntary reaction to the author’s force and skill.

In the end, Kate Fernald hears the strike of the quaint French clock, symbolic of the flow of time through the years and all that remains to her of the Fortune’s possessions, and she finds herself left alone “to fill the last pages of the Major’s old logbooks.”

Strong in color with a quiet rhythm all its own, Time Out of Mind is a sturdy tale, as fresh and clean as the tang of a New England breeze.

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Time Out of Mind by Rachel Field on Amazon*
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Kate Fernald is a Character You Will Not Forget

From The Daily Times (Davenport, Iowa), April 6, 1935: In the words of Major Fortune, last of the ship-building Fortunes whose vessels for generations had been known the world around, Kate Fernald, who tells the story in Time Out of Mind, was “a  square-rigged girl” and “a four-square girl.”

When Kate was only ten years old, her father died and her mother gave up the farm where they had lived. The two came to “Fortune’s Folly,” the great house of Major Fortune, where Kate’s mother took the position of housekeeper. From that time on, there grew in this simple, warmhearted country girl a conflict between two widely divergent ways of life — the reckless and lordly manner that came to a Fortune, and the sweet and lowly, the good and honest path that so many of the world’s toilers take.

Yet Kate had no pretense about her, and the conflict wasn’t due to any importance she stressed upon the highborn — rather, it was a conflict in loyalties. She was faithful to her own kind, but she was faithful to these Fortunes too, even to the Major who had been so cruel and unjust to his son, Nat, simply because the boy had a taste for music instead of ships.

Kate was only a child when she came to Fortune’s Folly and she wasn’t regarded as a servant, or even as the daughter of a servant, yet there was a kind of barrier between Kate and Nat and Rissa, the daughter of the Major, just the same. They played together, they confided in each other, they formed a secret society to outwit the Major so that Nat could practice his beloved music.

But Kate as well as the Fortune children know that they belonged to different worlds. Nat was less conscious of this than Rissa, indeed. Nat was so absorbed in his music that he was scarcely aware of being a Fortune, certainly, he was not the conventional son of a line of strong men. No, he was weak and puny and had a bad heart. He was marked for glory, as a fortune-teller predicted, but he was also marked for death.

The big-souled Kate, the narrator of this story, looked backward as old people do, remembering feeling, sensing every detail of the scene, which is the Maine coast, recalling words, inflections, gestures of persons she had known in her girlhood and young womanhood.

As she relates this tale, she has had a job in the post office of Little Prospect, and for thirty years has led an obscure and blameless life with a modest role in the community.

Once in a while, someone who knows the strange story of Nat’s death, and about his having come home to stay at Fortune’s Folly when Kate was there alone; a broken-down Nat it was who had found fame but not happiness.

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The Field House by Robin Clifford Wood —
Rediscovering Rachel Field
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Once in a while, a garbled old piece of gossip will be repeated. But those who hear the talk do not pay much heed; it is difficult to get excited about the irregular romance of a person who is very old. It all happened so long ago, one will say; perhaps it never happened.

It was a happy thought by Rachel Field to have Kate herself tell the story, because by this means the author achieved a character of great significance. Kate unconsciously reveals her sterling qualities — her bravery, goodness, independence, and capacities for loving, giving, and serving.

Kate herself told Nat once that “it’s better to feel something too much, even if it spills over.” She thought it was “better than drying up slow from the inside.” And it is a remembered abundance of love and a remembered desire to spend herself, even recklessly, that kept Kate from being a tragic spinster and letting those free-flowing founts of her being dry up.

This is a book that anyone can enjoy and it’s recommended unreservedly to all who appreciate the land and the trees and the movements of the tides and for characters who are consistent with their heritage and upbringing. It is a book filled with the mellowness, the bright sun, and the wild rain that natives of the Maine coast know.

It is filled with a repetition of nature’s warmth and growth and storm, nature’s occasional flashes of cruelty. Rachel Field depicts these places and their people so surely and so truly.

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The Dilettante by Edith Wharton (1903 short story-full text)

The Dilettante by Edith Wharton is a short story that was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1903, and then was part of The Descent of Man and Other Stories in 1904. Close on the heels of this short story collection, Wharton’s very successful first novel, The House of Mirth, was published in 1905, establishing her as a major figure in American literature.

The story centers around the relationship of Mrs. Vervain and Thursdale. Mrs. Vervain is in love with him, though he considers her just a friend (this possibly echoes some of Wharton’s own relationships with men). Arrogantly, Thursdale (the dilettante of the story’s title) even considers Mrs. Vervain something of his own creation. He describes her as “the finest material to work on,” almost as if she is merely clay in his hands.

The dictionary defines a dilettante as “a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.” 

It’s worth considering being a dilettante applies to Thursdale and the women in his life. He looks back on attempts at commitment as mistakes, comparing them to “long walks back from a picnic when one has to carry all the crockery  one has finished using.” 

The Dilettante, which is in the public domain, is reprinted here in full. Some of the long paragraphs have been broken up for easier readability. Edith Wharton’s The Descent of Man is not to be confused, of course, with Charles Darwin’s book of the same title.

 

The Dilettante by Edith Wharton

It was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned as usual into Mrs. Vervain’s street.

The “as usual” was his own qualification of the act; a convenient way of bridging the interval—in days and other sequences—that lay between this visit and the last. It was characteristic of him that he instinctively excluded his call two days earlier, with Ruth Gaynor, from the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain: the special conditions attending it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs. Vervain than an engraved dinner invitation is like a personal letter.

Yet it was to talk over his call with Miss Gaynor that he was now returning to the scene of that episode; and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted to handle the talking over as skillfully as the interview itself that, at her corner, he had felt the dilettante’s irresistible craving to take a last look at a work of art that was passing out of his possession.

On the whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected than Mrs. Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking things for granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she owed her excellence to his training.

Early in his career Thursdale had made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady, of telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in return. The latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back from a picnic, when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished using: it was the last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be encumbered with the debris of a feast.

He thus incidentally learned that the privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming woman can accord; and in seeking to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment he had developed a science of evasion in which the woman of the moment became a mere implement of the game.

He owed a great deal of delicate enjoyment to the cultivation of this art. The perils from which it had been his refuge became naively harmless: was it possible that he who now took his easy way along the levels had once preferred to gasp on the raw heights of emotion?

Youth is a high-colored season; but he had the satisfaction of feeling that he had entered earlier than most into that chiar’oscuro of sensation where every half-tone has its value.

As a promoter of this pleasure no one he had known was comparable to Mrs. Vervain. He had taught a good many women not to betray their feelings, but he had never before had such fine material to work in.

She had been surprisingly crude when he first knew her; capable of making the most awkward inferences, of plunging through thin ice, of recklessly undressing her emotions; but she had acquired, under the discipline of his reticences and evasions, a skill almost equal to his own, and perhaps more remarkable in that it involved keeping time with any tune he played and reading at sight some uncommonly difficult passages.

It had taken Thursdale seven years to form this fine talent; but the result justified the effort. At the crucial moment she had been perfect: her way of greeting Miss Gaynor had made him regret that he had announced his engagement by letter.

It was an evasion that confessed a difficulty; a deviation implying an obstacle, where, by common consent, it was agreed to see none; it betrayed, in short, a lack of confidence in the completeness of his method. It had been his pride never to put himself in a position which had to be quitted, as it were, by the back door; but here, as he perceived, the main portals would have opened for him of their own accord.

All this, and much more, he read in the finished naturalness with which Mrs. Vervain had met Miss Gaynor. He had never seen a better piece of work: there was no over-eagerness, no suspicious warmth, above all (and this gave her art the grace of a natural quality) there were none of those damnable implications whereby a woman, in welcoming her friend’s betrothed, may keep him on pins and needles while she laps the lady in complacency.

So masterly a performance, indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss Gaynor’s door-step words—”To be so kind to me, how she must have liked you!”—though he caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness to transmit them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew who was unfailingly certain to enjoy a good thing.

It was perhaps the one drawback to his new situation that it might develop good things which it would be impossible to hand on to Margaret Vervain.

The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friend’s powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning down her street instead of going on to the club. He would show her that he knew how to value her; he would ask her to achieve with him a feat infinitely rarer and more delicate than the one he had appeared to avoid.

Incidentally, he would also dispose of the interval of time before dinner: ever since he had seen Miss Gaynor off, an hour earlier, on her return journey to Buffalo, he had been wondering how he should put in the rest of the afternoon. It was absurd, how he missed the girl….Yes, that was it; the desire to talk about her was, after all, at the bottom of his impulse to call on Mrs. Vervain!

It was absurd, if you like—but it was delightfully rejuvenating. He could recall the time when he had been afraid of being obvious: now he felt that this return to the primitive emotions might be as restorative as a holiday in the Canadian woods. And it was precisely by the girl’s candor, her directness, her lack of complications, that he was taken.

The sense that she might say something rash at any moment was positively exhilarating: if she had thrown her arms about him at the station he would not have given a thought to his crumpled dignity. It surprised Thursdale to find what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure; and though his sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to any conscious purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that his sentimental economies had left him such a large surplus to draw upon.

Mrs. Vervain was at home—as usual. When one visits the cemetery one expects to find the angel on the tombstone, and it struck Thursdale as another proof of his friend’s good taste that she had been in no undue haste to change her habits.

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The Descent of Man and Other Stories on Amazon*
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The whole house appeared to count on his coming; the footman took his hat and overcoat as naturally as though there had been no lapse in his visits; and the drawing-room at once enveloped him in that atmosphere of tacit intelligence which Mrs. Vervain imparted to her very furniture.

It was a surprise that, in this general harmony of circumstances, Mrs. Vervain should herself sound the first false note.

“You?” she exclaimed; and the book she held slipped from her hand.

It was crude, certainly; unless it were a touch of the finest art. The difficulty of classifying it disturbed Thursdale’s balance.

“Why not?” he said, restoring the book. “Isn’t it my hour?” And as she made no answer, he added gently, “Unless it’s some one else’s?”

She laid the book aside and sank back into her chair. “Mine, merely,” she said.

“I hope that doesn’t mean that you’re unwilling to share it?”

“With you? By no means. You’re welcome to my last crust.”

He looked at her reproachfully. “Do you call this the last?”

She smiled as he dropped into the seat across the hearth. “It’s a way of giving it more flavor!”

He returned the smile. “A visit to you doesn’t need such condiments.”

She took this with just the right measure of retrospective amusement.

“Ah, but I want to put into this one a very special taste,” she confessed.

Her smile was so confident, so reassuring, that it lulled him into the imprudence of saying, “Why should you want it to be different from what was always so perfectly right?”

She hesitated. “Doesn’t the fact that it’s the last constitute a difference?”

“The last—my last visit to you?”

“Oh, metaphorically, I mean—there’s a break in the continuity.”

Decidedly, she was pressing too hard: unlearning his arts already!

“I don’t recognize it,” he said. “Unless you make me—” he added, with a note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid attention.

She turned to him with grave eyes. “You recognize no difference whatever?”

“None—except an added link in the chain.”

“An added link?”

“In having one more thing to like you for—your letting Miss Gaynor see why I had already so many.” He flattered himself that this turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase.

Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose. “Was it that you came for?” she asked, almost gaily.

“If it is necessary to have a reason—that was one.”

“To talk to me about Miss Gaynor?”

“To tell you how she talks about you.”

“That will be very interesting—especially if you have seen her since her second visit to me.”

“Her second visit?” Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start and moved to another. “She came to see you again?”

“This morning, yes—by appointment.”

He continued to look at her blankly. “You sent for her?”

“I didn’t have to—she wrote and asked me last night. But no doubt you have seen her since.”

Thursdale sat silent. He was trying to separate his words from his thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably. “I saw her off just now at the station.”

“And she didn’t tell you that she had been here again?”

“There was hardly time, I suppose—there were people about—” he floundered.

“Ah, she’ll write, then.”

He regained his composure. “Of course she’ll write: very often, I hope. You know I’m absurdly in love,” he cried audaciously.

She tilted her head back, looking up at him as he leaned against the chimney-piece. He had leaned there so often that the attitude touched a pulse which set up a throbbing in her throat. “Oh, my poor Thursdale!” she murmured.

“I suppose it’s rather ridiculous,” he owned; and as she remained silent, he added, with a sudden break—”Or have you another reason for pitying me?”

Her answer was another question. “Have you been back to your rooms since you left her?”

“Since I left her at the station? I came straight here.”

“Ah, yes—you could: there was no reason—” Her words passed into a silent musing.

Thursdale moved nervously nearer. “You said you had something to tell me?”

“Perhaps I had better let her do so. There may be a letter at your rooms.”

“A letter? What do you mean? A letter from her? What has happened?”

His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of reassurance. “Nothing has happened—perhaps that is just the worst of it. You always hated, you know,” she added incoherently, “to have things happen: you never would let them.”

“And now—?”

“Well, that was what she came here for: I supposed you had guessed. To know if anything had happened.”

“Had happened?” He gazed at her slowly. “Between you and me?” he said with a rush of light.

The words were so much cruder than any that had ever passed between them that the color rose to her face; but she held his startled gaze.

“You know girls are not quite as unsophisticated as they used to be. Are you surprised that such an idea should occur to her?”

His own color answered hers: it was the only reply that came to him.

Mrs. Vervain went on, smoothly: “I supposed it might have struck you that there were times when we presented that appearance.”

He made an impatient gesture. “A man’s past is his own!”

“Perhaps—it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared it. But one learns such truths only by experience; and Miss Gaynor is naturally inexperienced.”

“Of course—but—supposing her act a natural one—” he floundered lamentably among his innuendoes—”I still don’t see—how there was anything—”

“Anything to take hold of? There wasn’t—”

“Well, then—?” escaped him, in crude satisfaction; but as she did not complete the sentence he went on with a faltering laugh: “She can hardly object to the existence of a mere friendship between us!”

“But she does,” said Mrs. Vervain.

Thursdale stood perplexed. He had seen, on the previous day, no trace of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still hear the candid ring of the girl’s praise of Mrs. Vervain. If she were such an abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness, she must at least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival for solution.

The situation seemed one through which one could no longer move in a penumbra, and he let in a burst of light with the direct query: “Won’t you explain what you mean?”

Mrs. Vervain sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted, that she seemed unable to produce one on the spot.

At last she said slowly: “She came to find out if you were really free.”

Thursdale colored again. “Free?” he stammered, with a sense of physical disgust at contact with such crassness.

“Yes—if I had quite done with you.” She smiled in recovered security. “It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for definitions.”

“Yes—well?” he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.

“Well—and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she wanted me to define my status—to know exactly where I had stood all along.”

Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the clue. “And even when you had told her that—”

“Even when I had told her that I had had no status—that I had never stood anywhere, in any sense she meant,” said Mrs. Vervain, slowly—”even then she wasn’t satisfied, it seems.”

He uttered an uneasy exclamation. “She didn’t believe you, you mean?”

“I mean that she did believe me: too thoroughly.”

“Well, then—in God’s name, what did she want?”

“Something more—those were the words she used.”

“Something more? Between—between you and me? Is it a conundrum?” He laughed awkwardly.

“Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer forbidden to contemplate the relation of the sexes.”

“So it seems!” he commented. “But since, in this case, there wasn’t any—” he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.

“That’s just it. The unpardonable offence has been—in our not offending.”

He flung himself down despairingly. “I give it up!—What did you tell her?” he burst out with sudden crudeness.

“The exact truth. If I had only known,” she broke off with a beseeching tenderness, “won’t you believe that I would still have lied for you?”

“Lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either of us?”

“To save you—to hide you from her to the last! As I’ve hidden you from myself all these years!” She stood up with a sudden tragic import in her movement. “You believe me capable of that, don’t you? If I had only guessed—but I have never known a girl like her; she had the truth out of me with a spring.”

“The truth that you and I had never—”

“Had never—never in all these years! Oh, she knew why—she measured us both in a flash. She didn’t suspect me of having haggled with you—her words pelted me like hail. ‘He just took what he wanted—sifted and sorted you to suit his taste. Burnt out the gold and left a heap of cinders. And you let him—you let yourself be cut in bits’—she mixed her metaphors a little—’be cut in bits, and used or discarded, while all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to him! But he’s Shylock—and you have bled to death of the pound of flesh he has cut out of you.’ But she despises me the most, you know—far the most—” Mrs. Vervain ended.

The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room.

Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess. Half the room was between them, but they seemed to stare close at each other now that the veils of reticence and ambiguity had fallen.

His first words were characteristic. “She does despise me, then?” he exclaimed.

“She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the heart.”

He was excessively pale. “Please tell me exactly what she said of me.”

“She did not speak much of you: she is proud. But I gather that while she understands love or indifference, her eyes have never been opened to the many intermediate shades of feeling. At any rate, she expressed an unwillingness to be taken with reservations—she thinks you would have loved her better if you had loved some one else first. The point of view is original—she insists on a man with a past!”

“Oh, a past—if she’s serious—I could rake up a past!” he said with a laugh.

“So I suggested: but she has her eyes on his particular portion of it. She insists on making it a test case. She wanted to know what you had done to me; and before I could guess her drift I blundered into telling her.”

Thursdale drew a difficult breath. “I never supposed—your revenge is complete,” he said slowly.

He heard a little gasp in her throat. “My revenge? When I sent for you to warn you—to save you from being surprised as I was surprised?”

“You’re very good—but it’s rather late to talk of saving me.” He held out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.

“How you must care!—for I never saw you so dull,” was her answer. “Don’t you see that it’s not too late for me to help you?” And as he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: “Take the rest—in imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I lied to her—she’s too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a sense, I sha’n’t have been wasted.”

His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls.

It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went up to his friend and took her hand.

“You would do it—you would do it!”

She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.

“Good-by,” he said, kissing it.

“Good-by? You are going—?”

“To get my letter.”

“Your letter? The letter won’t matter, if you will only do what I ask.”

He returned her gaze. “I might, I suppose, without being out of character. Only, don’t you see that if your plan helped me it could only harm her?”

“Harm her?“

“To sacrifice you wouldn’t make me different. I shall go on being what I have always been—sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want my punishment to fall on her?“

She looked at him long and deeply. “Ah, if I had to choose between you—!”

“You would let her take her chance? But I can’t, you see. I must take my punishment alone.”

She drew her hand away, sighing. “Oh, there will be no punishment for either of you.”

“For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me.”

She shook her head with a slight laugh. “There will be no letter.”

Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look. “No letter? You don’t mean—”

“I mean that she’s been with you since I saw her—she’s seen you and heard your voice. If there is a letter, she has recalled it—from the first station, by telegraph.”

He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. “But in the mean while I shall have read it,” he said.

The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful emptiness of the room.

. . . . . . . .

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