Forty-One False Starts (21 page)

In the end, the Harvester accepts the counsel of a lewd old lady named Granny Moreland:

“If you're going to bar a woman from being a wife 'til she knows what you mean by love, you'll stop about nine tenths of the weddings in the world, and t'other tenth will be women that no decent-minded man would jine with.”

Granny checks her facts with a doctor:

“I told him you'd tell him that no clean, sweet-minded girl ever had known nor ever would know what love means to a man 'til he marries her and teaches her. Ain't it so, Doc?”

“It certainly is.”

(Ian McEwan's
On Chesil Beach
takes a mordant look at the conduct of this pedagogy in mid-twentieth-century England.)

In
A Girl of the Limberlost
, there is a scene of voyeurism so vividly rendered that I have retained a picture of it in my mind over the years, assuming that I was recalling one of the book's art nouveau illustrations by Wladyslaw T. Benda. In fact, no such illustration exists—the image derives from my mind's eye. What I see is a man in a tree on a dark night, looking through a window into a lighted room where a girl in a nightgown is reading at a table. In Stratton-Porter's description:

He could see the throb of her breast under its thin covering and smell the fragrance of the tossing hair. He could see the narrow bed with its pieced calico cover, the whitewashed walls with gay lithographs, and every crevice stuck full of twigs with dangling cocoons . . . But nothing was worth a glance save the perfect face and form within reach by one spring through the rotten mosquito bar. He gripped the limb above that on which he stood, licked his lips, and breathed through his throat to be sure he was making no sound.

It is a measure of what children pick up without knowing exactly what they are taking in that my uninformed ten-year-old self grasped and was excited by the scene's obvious sense of sexual threat. Though not spelled out, the implications of “throb of her breast,” “within reach by one spring,” “licked his lips” were not lost on me. Of course, the rape is averted: Elnora starts talking to herself, as Stratton-Porter's characters are given to doing when she needs them to, and her innocent babble converts the would-be predator into a blubbering, sentimental fool who restores the money he has stolen from Elnora's hiding place in the Limberlost and leaves her a note of warning against his fellow lowlifes.

A Girl of the Limberlost
is Stratton-Porter's best book. Alone among the novels, it escapes the wild veerings of her mind into strange, crankish byways. Its single touch of racism—and it is recognizable as racism only in the light of
Her Father's Daughter
and
The Harvester
—is the drastic skin peel the reformed mother gives herself to remove the brown complexion she acquired while working outdoors without a sunbonnet; a white skin is part of her program of looking nice in front of Elnora's classmates. And Elnora is Stratton-Porter's best heroine. Her strict morality and goodness are accompanied by a straightforwardness, almost a brusqueness of manner that sets her off from the saccharine heroines of conventional sentimental fiction. She has a lot to put up with, and she puts up with it with endearing good-enough grace.

Edith Carr,
A Girl of the Limberlost
's bad girl, is another unusual creation. She is beautiful, rich, and spoiled, but has a dimension of neuroticism that sets her off from her conventional counterparts. There is an atmosphere around her—and her peculiar faithful follower Hart Henderson—that evokes the beautiful damned characters Fitzgerald created twenty years later. Philip Ammon (né Mammon?) is about as wooden as a character can get—but then Prince Charming is no Pierre Bezukhov, either.
A Girl of the Limberlost
's strong mythic understructure, the Aladdin's cave glitter it imparts to the modest material rewards of Elnora's enterprise and hard work secures it a special place in Stratton-Porter's oeuvre—and in American popular art.

In 1922 Stratton-Porter wrote a long poem called
The Fire Bird
, about an Indian maiden who brings divine retribution on herself, in which she believed she had achieved the high art that eluded her in her novels. Her one fear, as she wrote to a friend, was that “it is one of those things so very high class, so for the few understanding ones, that I have the very gravest doubts as to whether I could market it if I wanted to.” The poem did get published, but has long been out of print. It isn't as bad as you might think; it's merely boring.

Stratton-Porter gave a party for herself in Los Angeles to celebrate
The Fire Bird
's publication. She invited 115 people and wore “a new evening dress of orchid chiffon velvet, looking, my friends were kind enough to say, the best they ever had seen me.” (This is from a letter that Jeannette Porter Meehan quotes in
The Lady of the Limberlost
.) The house was decorated with red and white flowers and large branches on which stuffed cardinals, “insured at one hundred dollars each and loaned me from one of the museums of the city,” were perched. There was music (“ ‘The Pastoral Symphony' with the bird notes done on a flute”), an hour-long reading from
The Fire Bird
, and a buffet supper of roasted turkey and spiced ham and salad and cake and ice cream. “A number of people who were present told me that it was the most unique and the most beautiful party ever given in Los Angeles.” (Freckles had clearly seen nothing when he rhapsodized about the Bird Woman's party in Indiana.)

Two years later, Stratton-Porter was dead, at sixty-one; she was killed when a Los Angeles streetcar rammed into her chauffeur-driven limousine, one of two she owned. She had just finished
The Keeper of the Bees
at her new fourteen-room redwood vacation house on Catalina Island, to which she had retreated with a cook, a driver, two secretaries, and “a little Yaqui Indian” while awaiting the completion of an eleven-thousand-square-foot, twenty-two-room Tudor-style mansion in Bel Air.

The book was dictated from a hammock slung between two oaks on a hillside and sometimes reads as if the author's attention were elsewhere. At the start of the novel, its hero, Jamie MacFarlane, flees a veterans' hospital at a California hot spring, where he has been unsuccessfully treated for his shrapnel wound (and from which he is about to be transferred to the dread Camp Kearney, where everyone is or will become tubercular), and makes his way to the seaside house and garden of a moribund beekeeper, who asks him to look after the bees when he collapses and is hospitalized. MacFarlane learns beekeeping from an annoying child called the Little Scout and gets mixed up with a woman called the Storm Girl, whom he meets on a rock jutting out of the Pacific Ocean during a storm and obligingly weds the next day to give her unborn child (the Shame Baby) a name.

None of this is believable, and much of it is tedious. Only when she is dealing with the minute and sometimes disgusting particulars of MacFarlane's medical condition does Stratton-Porter fully draw us (and perhaps herself) into her story. As she scrutinizes her hero's bloody bandages and traces his chronic infection to the germs bred by the “hot, chemically saturated boiling spring water” piped through the veterans' hospital, she returns to the boiling sea of emotion that is the breeding ground for her inspiration. She invests the story of MacFarlane's cure by bathing in cold Pacific water and never eating starches and meats in the same meal with a thrilling significance. Putting her characteristic feverish intensity in the service of the medical fads of her day, she once again strikes the note to which her contemporaries vibrated, and to which we ourselves may helplessly, if somewhat more mutedly, respond. Imagine a Jane Brody column written by Charlotte Brontë and you will have a sense of Stratton-Porter's singular feat.

*
A Girl of the Limberlost
,
Freckles
,
The Harvester
,
Her Father's Daughter
, and
The Keeper of the Bees
by Gene Stratton-Porter;
Gene Stratton-Porter: Novelist and Naturalist
by Judith Reick Long; and
The Lady of the Limberlost: The Life and Letters of Gene Stratton-Porter
by Jeannette Porter Meehan

*
See Trevor Butterworth's review of Timothy Ryback's
Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life
(Knopf, 2008),
Bookforum
, December/January 2009.

THE GENIUS OF THE GLASS HOUSE

1999

In a short essay in the voluminous catalog that accompanies the exhibition
Julia Margaret Cameron's Women
, Phyllis Rose notes that “Cameron's women do not smile. Their poses embody sorrow, resignation, composure, solemnity, and love, determined love, love which will have a hard time of it.” Rose goes on to write of the illness, disaster, and defeat that perpetually hovered over the lives of Victorian women. But there were causes closer to hand for the tragic address of Cameron's women. Cameron used a photographic apparatus—fifteen- by twelve-inch glass plates and a lens of thirty-inch focal length—that required exposures of between
three and ten minutes
. Here is an account of a sitting by one of the unsmiling women, quoted by Helmut Gernsheim in his book
Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work
(1948 and 1974):

Mrs. Cameron put a crown on my head and posed me as the heroic queen. This was somewhat tedious, but not half so bad as the exposure . . . The exposure began. A minute went over and I felt as if I must scream; another minute, and the sensation was as if my eyes were coming out of my head; a third, and the back of my neck appeared to be afflicted with palsy; a fourth, and the crown, which was too large, began to slip down my forehead . . .

As it proved, the sitter's excruciations were for naught. The photograph was ruined during the fifth minute by Cameron's husband, Charles, a distinguished retired colonial official with a magnificent white beard, who would affably lend himself to his wife's enterprise to play a Merlin or Lear as the occasion required, but who was unfortunately given to “unconquerable fits of hilarity which always came in the wrong places.” When Charles “began to laugh audibly . . . this was too much for my self-possession, and I was obliged to join the dear old gentleman.”

We have been affectionately laughing at Julia Cameron for more than half a century; her reputation as a major photographer is inextricably entangled with the legend of her endearing ridiculousness. Virginia Woolf, who was Cameron's great-niece, set the legend in motion in 1926 in a biographical essay she wrote for the Hogarth Press monograph
Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women
by Julia Margaret Cameron. Three years earlier, Woolf had written a farce called
Freshwater
(a sort of
Patience
manqué, named for Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight, where Charles and Julia lived) in which she poked fun at the Victorian cult of beauty and rendered her great-aunt as one of its more exalted high priestesses. She described Cameron as “a brown-faced gypsylike-looking old woman, wearing a green shawl, fastened by an enormous cameo,” and gave her this speech:

All my sisters were beautiful, but I had genius. They were the brides of men, but I am the bride of Art. I have sought the beautiful in the most unlikely places. I have searched the police force at Freshwater, and not a man have I found with calves worthy of Sir Galahad. But, as I said to the Chief Constable, “Without beauty, constable, what is order? Without life, what is law?” Why should I continue to have my silver protected by a race of men whose legs are aesthetically abhorrent to me? If a burgler came and he were beautiful, I should say to him: Take my fish knives! Take my cruets, my bread baskets and my soup tureens. What you take is nothing to what you give, your calves, your beautiful calves.

Woolf's essay on her great-aunt, though less broadly Gilbertian than her farce, sustains the comic note. It begins with a wild story about Cameron's reprobate father, James Pattle, a colonial official stationed in Calcutta who died of drink in 1845 and whose corpse, according to the story, was sent back to England in a cask of rum that exploded on the sea journey and caused the death by horror of his widow—as well as the destruction of the ship, which itself exploded when the rum, running out of the cask, ignited. The tall tale of the father who couldn't be contained in his sepulchre of spirits is told to illustrate the “indomitable vitality” of the stock from which Cameron sprang. She was one of seven sisters celebrated for their energy, strong-mindedness, and, in all but one case, spectacular beauty. Julia Margaret was the exception. She “was without her sisters' beauty,” Woolf writes, and goes on to substantiate the charge with the testimony of another great-niece, who had known Cameron as a child and recalled her as “short and squat, with none of the Pattle grace and beauty about her . . . Dressed in dark clothes, stained with chemicals from her photography (and smelling of them too), with a plump eager face and a voice husky, and a little harsh, yet in some way compelling and even charming.”

Cameron's unattractiveness—her role as the woman who loved beauty but didn't herself possess it—is a pivot of the legend. When we look at Cameron's pictures of fair women (almost without exception her female sitters were young and pretty), we see, as a kind of afterimage, the gypsylike crone in the stained black dress who was their creator. Cameron's pictures also inescapably evoke the Victorian household over which she presided, with its fish knives and cruets and soup tureens, its maids and cooks and gardeners, its children and grandchildren and streams of visitors, among them the famous men (Tennyson, Carlyle, Browning, Darwin, Longfellow, among others) whom Cameron lured into the chicken house she had converted into a studio, and upon whose likenesses her artistic reputation for a long time largely rested.

We recall, further, that Cameron started photographing only at the age of forty-eight, with a camera her daughter and son-in-law supplied to divert her while the jocund Mr. Cameron was away looking after a failing coffee plantation and she was alone in the house at Freshwater Bay suffering from depression and anxiety. “It may amuse you, mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater,” were the words that accompanied the fateful gift. Hitherto, Cameron had lived the life of a well-to-do Victorian married woman who dabbled in poetry and fiction while raising her six children, and made a reputation for herself as a person of irrepressible, almost pathological generosity. Helmut Gernsheim, who elaborated what Woolf had adumbrated, tells wonderful anecdotes about the presents Cameron would force on the people she fell in love with, most notably the poet Henry Taylor (who had been a runner-up to Tennyson for poet laureate and now is only known to Victorian specialists) and his wife, Alice. Cameron's largesse took the form of rare rugs, shawls, jewelry, and decorative objects she and Charles brought from Calcutta when they returned to England in 1848, which Cameron proceeded to dispense as if they were throat lozenges. Gernsheim cites a man who “was sitting in a train with Henry Taylor at Waterloo Station when a disheveled lady rushed up at the last moment and flung a Persian rug in through the window as a present for Henry Taylor, who immediately—the train had started to move—heaved it out of the window onto the platform.”