Among the Hoosiers

Almost all of Jessamyn West’s writing ignores the street crime, drugs, poverty, and artificiality of today’s urban life and ensconces itself amid the small town or rural America of generations past, roughly in the period from the early nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Her personal love for solitude as a homemaker among her chores; her predilection for the writings of Thoreau; her childhood spent on ranches without (it seems) any important regrets; her dislike of, or at least uneasiness with, highway commercialism; her fascination with her mother’s tales of life back in the “good old days” – all of these found expression in such books as The Friendly Persuasion, Except for Me and Thee, A Mirror for the Sky, The Witch Diggers, Leafy Rivers, The Massacre at Fall Creek, and the first half of The Life I Really Lived (covered in chapter 3). Early West discovered that, by choosing her literary materials from an era already securely established in the past, she could avoid the pain of dealing with her own valetudinarian condition, a subject soon exhausted, in any event, as well as the disadvantage of having led a sheltered life. To a woman who had spent many years confined to bed and couch, whose youth had burned up in tubercular fever, the family past meant release, romance, and freedom for the imagination. If it had worked for the bedridden Marcel Proust and Robert Louis Stevenson, it might work for her. Of course, the accessibility of bits of story material related to her by her mother made it irresistible to use the old days in the Midwest for several of her books. And this she did.

The reader of West’s Hoosier fiction notices that she uses an abundance of authentic detail covering not merely the flora and fauna of her ancestral region but its folkways and language, the latter being rich in colloquialisms, dialect, archaisms, and figurative expressions.¹ It is a land of corn and timothy and tobacco. Indiana Page 33  |  Top of Articleforests are not just trees in the aggregate but oaks and willows, gums and sycamores, catalpas and redbuds, shagbark hickories and dogwoods. And the sassafras too, from whose roots Eliza in Friendly Persuasion makes her cups of aromatic tea. In May the locust blossoms shower the wood paths like summer snow. Twining about the branches of these trees and bushes grow the luscious fox grapes that adorn Venese’s bower (see Witch Diggers). Overhead fly occasional buzzards and wild turkeys. Native flowers are plentiful too, including phlox and lilacs, goldenrod and snowball bushes, Johnny-jump-ups and spice pinks, while later in the year the fields are purple with ironweed and farewell summer. The intense fragrance of lilies-of-the-valley perfumes Jess Birdwell’s house in Friendly Persuasion when he returns home from a trip.

Jess’s nursery is a cornucopia of luscious fruits: He grows and sells many varieties of old-fashioned apples that include Rambo, Grimes Golden (his favorite), Maiden Blush, Summer Sweeting, Rome Beauty, Early Harvest, and Northern Spy. And crab apples for making preserves. And May Duke cherries. And gooseberries. And Lucretia dewberries. One of his peaches is the white-fleshed Stump of the World. Jess even grows the Flemish Beauty – “A pear whose taste is summer in the mouth.” In the woods a visitor can sample the wild flavors of sarvice berries and pawpaws and persimmons.

Jess in one story feels bodacious because of the wen – or rising – at the base of his skull. If he chances to be impatient, he is said to fall into a swivet; if he acts sick, then he looks peaked. As an industrious and successful nurseryman peddling his stock about the country he is what a Hoosier of that day would call work-brickel, meaning good at labor and able to get a mort (quite a bit) of work done before nightfall. Some of his less productive neighbors are likely to spend too much time at the switchel jug (liquor jug) and fash themselves and, if they are not thrifty and foresighted, are likely to have a hardscrabble life of it. A kind and helpful person like Jess’s wife would be called clever, and when summer arrives this happy woman might go fluting and flying about the house as she does her chores. It is a land where the good old Puritan work ethic is alive and well. The undertaker in Witch Diggers advises Christie Fraser to have big plans but act humble (meechin) if he is to get on in the world.

Figurative language is abundant too. When the heroine of Leafy Rivers is riding behind her brother on a horse and holding onto him, Page 34  |  Top of Articleshe learns that “His thin waist, beneath her hands, tingled like a pump handle when the water begins to rise.” The admiring landlady Mrs. Culligan in The Massacre at Fall Creek believed that the handsome Charlie Fort “could charm a bird out of a tree”; he seemed to excrete “something like birdlime to catch the unwary.” And so Mrs. Culligan caters to his every need, in one scene feeding him a dish of cool “tender-grained clabber dusted with brown sugar,” and, in the privacy of her bedroom, treating him to hotter dishes. After Hannah peeks and finds Charlie naked with Mrs. Culligan, the distraught girl “crippled home like a string-haltered horse.” We are told that Hannah, fortunately, is not a “notionate flyaway girl”; nor is she a bit feisty (quarrelsome or aggressive), in spite of being red-haired.

The prose, so limpid and musical in many places, abounds in poetic touches. For instance, in Friendly Persuasion the “Apple trees bloomed into the dusk, the last of daylight seemingly sucked up into their white petals”; an early forenoon in May becomes “The morning of a piecemeal flicker-light day.”²

A reader new to the Friendly Persuasion stories perhaps imagines the author as a little lady of churchmouse meekness attired in gray bonnet and First Day shawl, and as loyal as a DAR matron to her ancestral township of North Vernon, Indiana, near which music-loving Jess Birdwell enacts his adventures. Such a genteel interpretation is, however, essentially untrue.

West did, though, revisit both Vernon and North Vernon at the time Friendly Persuasion was published and also while working on Witch Diggers. “I was tremulous about Southern Indiana for two reasons,” she confided to me about the first visit. “It was the fatherland. . . . And it was the place I really knew nothing about, yet had written about. It was like – going back there that first time [1945], having staked your existence on the truth of a dream” (22 May 1966 letter).

This return was apparently a pleasant one, for she was en route to New York to be honored at a reception by Harcourt, Brace publishers who were bringing out her first book. Later, while constructing Witch Diggers, she returned for a much longer sojourn to check on some nature descriptions she needed. At the railroad station she asked a porter whether she could take a taxi to the hotel. The porter replied, “Lady, if you take a taxi, you’re gonna plumb overshoot the town.”³ The porter did not exaggerate much, for Page 35  |  Top of ArticleNorth Vernon, although having been over many generations the railroad and highway center for Jennings County, had at the end of World War II fewer than 3,500 residents, while the older community of Vernon across the Muscatatuck River had less than a tenth of that number. Confronting the shocked author was a plain country hamlet with crudely dressed people and with manners to match; probably typical of Midwestern communities of this size, a latter day Gopher Prairie. So this was the town that Grace West had missed! But it was not so ugly that beautiful souls could not dwell there, at least in the daughter’s imagination.

Though Vernon too had fallen on neglected days, West could reflect that here once lay the headquarters of General Lew Wallace of Ben Hur fame during Morgan’s raid of 1863, the site of a station on the Underground Railroad (see West’s “Neighbors”), a courthouse where Henry Ward Beecher once spoke, the home of the now deceased author Phyllis Jackson (Victorian Cinderella), and the Rush Branch Church District near which Joshua Milhous had his nursery. Various buildings still standing here and across the river may have reminded her of the flour and woolen mills, the sawmills, the quarries, and the pork-packing companies that enjoyed no little prosperity in the 1800s. Probably she knew that flatboats had once docked at the forks of the river on the east side of Vernon.

She tried the hotel briefly – train smoke blew in through the window – and then shifted her quarters to Rosa Toole Gordon’s rooming house on 106 Jennings in North Vernon, where the Irish landlady fascinated her with her racy and verbally rich talk. Most of the time West holed up in her room upstairs, wrestling with the novel and living on oranges, crackers, cheese, and milk, except when she strolled out for dinner in some restaurant (West’s 7 May 1966 letter to me). She must have struck the other boarders as odd, a well-dressed out-of-towner arriving alone, keeping to herself, and not looking for a job. Just taking notes, notes, notes. This rooming house yielded materials for at least two of her works. One of the boarders furnished the model for the drunken ex-jockey in Witch Diggers, and the rooms themselves inspired the story “Breach of Promise” (West’s 22 May 1966 letter to me). It was not the hamlet of Vernon, however, but the rolling suburbs that provided West with settings for Friendly Persuasion and Witch Diggers, companion pieces that are markedly different in approach.

Friendly Persuasion

About 1939, when her first stories were being published in “little magazines” – she had not yet dared to try writing a novel – West began a series containing the idealistic nurseryman Jess Millhouse. It was lucky for her that John Woodburn, of Harcourt, Brace, saw the possibility of preparing a Quaker collection and talked her into the idea (West’s 27 January 1966 letter to me). Once convinced, she persisted in the plan. Not even a certain editor at Doubleday could dampen her hopes when he rejected her plan outright in 1941.⁴ And not even Thomas Wolfe’s editor, Edward Aswell of Harper & Brothers, could budge her two years later or thereabouts, when he suggested assimilating into a novel some of the stories he had seen, for a novel was far, far more salable for a new author than a collection would be. But West thought such a conversion quite beyond her powers (West’s 7 May 1966 letter to me). Besides, was she not already convinced that the stories had sufficient merit as they stood?

Protests arose against the book even before it reached the press. A cousin, Olive Marshburn, who took offense at the frank language in the magazine versions of the stories – pa, ain’t, duck dung – and who also thought the fictional Millhouse family seemed right out of the Milhous family album, indicated that the stories should be linguistically deodorized, scrubbed, and dressed in such proper attire as would befit a genteel family tradition. She even felt that Jess Birdwell degraded the Quaker faith in one of the stories by praying more loudly than necessary (Jess was actually trying to cover up the sounds of the “heathenish” organ in the loft). What is more, the cousin wrote to Grace West and to an English professor at Whittier urging them to use their influence in bowdlerizing the stories, as letters allegedly possessed by Jessamyn West testify. Outraged at the attempted censorship, more so since it occurred behind her back, West pointedly signified that the characters were ber fictions – and not family history, either – by changing Millhouse into the now Birdwell family. Too, she proudly clung to the offending words.

When the book Friendly Persuasion received a favorable acceptance, despite the retained “vulgarities,” the cousin Olive Marshburn then donned Quaker costume and gave readings from it. Marshburn now claimed that the Millhouses, newly become Birdwells, were actually Milhouses in disguise and therefore respectable members of Page 37  |  Top of Articlethe speaker’s own family. According to West, who was furious at the intrusion, Marshburn’s attitude stood for everything that had to be overcome in her life before it was possible to write honestly; in fact, she said, it accounted somewhat for the long delay in at last getting started.⁵ In brief, she would have to overcome the tendency to be agreeable or decent at the expense of being truthful, to be polite at the expense of being vivid, to be pretty at the expense of being honest. There was always the family to think of, or the Joneses next door – a sure route to a writer’s frustration.⁶

Following many migraine headaches and the ever threatening return of TB if she overexerted herself, West at last made the Bird-well collection a published fact – the first edition appearing in America shortly after the surrender of Japan, on November 8, 1945, and the book was issued in England the next year. West called it her “love poem to Indiana.” Almost without exception the reviews were favorable; in many instances they were cordial and glowing. Nathan L. Rothman in Saturday Review admired the style: “Miss West,” he said, “wields a prose of a most friendly persuasion. It is as soft and musical as the speech of her Quakers, as sensitive to every manifestation of nature as they.” Nor did he fail to mention the “sly wit” hiding hither and yon in the stories, and the “many passages of simple loftiness.”⁷ New Mexico Quarterly, in whose pages some of West’s early endeavors were first manifest, loyally championed its former contributor as a “finely original, sensitive talent.” “The flavor of Quaker speech, the Quaker humor [a characteristically gentle one] and balance and tolerance are in its every sentence,” the reviewer, Katherine Simons noted, “seldom does an author achieve such harmony of expression and subject matter.”⁸

The reception that had a special significance for West was that of the Quaker press, which was not quite so friendly. True, Richmond P. Miller in the Friends Intelligencer had nothing but praise for the new work,⁹ and the English journal Friend carried a pleasant if brief notice.¹⁰ But Friends Journal bore then and at the time of the motion picture some letters of adverse criticism. One 1956 letter accused the author of being “disrespectful” toward the Society of Friends by using the “commonest of words”¹¹ – amusingly ironic, coming from a member of a religious group that has always advocated plain and forthright language proper to a common folk. Of course, everyone knows that common folk never use ain’t and pa! It Page 38  |  Top of Articlejust so happens that West’s Quaker ancestors actually did employ such words, as she herself knew (West’s 25 January 1966 letter to me). Anyone refusing to admit such vocabulary into period fiction is being overly fastidious and unrealistic, especially today.

Perhaps West did not plan any larger pattern for the stories when she started out, yet one can discern in the book collection a slight pattern – familial, chronological, and thematic. The narratives are all told from the point of view of some Birdwell figure. The father, Jess, has seven stories; Eliza and her children Josh and Mattie have two each; and the granddaughter Elspeth, one. They follow a rough chronology: The first one shows Jess as a young Quaker husband operating the Maple Grove Nursery on the banks of the Muscatatuck before the Civil War (about 1852), and the last one ends with him at a brave 80, rich in children and happiness. In between the stories children are born, such as Stephen, Jane (first mentioned in “The Illumination”), and Little Jess (first mentioned in “The Buried Leaf”). At some unspecified time between the first and second stories the tiny daughter Sarah is born and dies after a pathetically brief youth.

“Music on the Muscatatuck,” the earliest of the items published, begins as sheer poetry. It is superbly fashioned to introduce the series.¹² Its rhythmic opening paragraph is also a model of condensed narration, giving the setting, a clapboard house along the river; the main figure in the series to follow, Jess; his ancestry, Irish; his religion, Quaker; his reading matter, the works of William Perm, John Woolman, and George Fox; the two dominant aesthetic tastes in this man, music (represented by the starling in the cage) and floral beauty; and even a hint at his occupation. We are surprised to learn that he has a good-looking Quaker minister for a wife, Eliza. Here, a dream removed from the ugliness and stark monotony of the Midwest as depicted in literature by E. W. Howe (Story of a Country Town) and Hamlin Garland (Main-Travelled Roads), is a quaint and generally happy land of horse racing, trout fishing, roses, and fruits; in this land poverty, drabness, and boredom are as scarce as Egyptians in an Israeli heaven.

Jess loyally lives up to the spirit of his religion, but he is too human to go along with all its austerities. The beauties of this world are too much with him. Still hungering for music during a train trip, he permits the organ salesman “Professor” Quigley to talk him into Page 39  |  Top of Articlebuying one. The conversation between Quigley and Jess is delightfully amusing, and, as usual, the author underplays the whole dialogue; she is wary of saying too much, of being sentimental about this Quaker with whom she obviously sympathizes. Nor does she pass judgment. Here is Quigley baiting his victim with lachrymal lures as he expounds on the virtues of the Payson and Clarke instrument:

The reader is satisfied by this stage that Quigley’s foxiness carries no harm and that what he is beguiling Jess into buying is wanted, even hungered for, by this music-starved Hoosier in the first place; hence the reader figuratively leans back in a Pullman seat and enjoys the folksy humor played out before him or her.

Later, back at the nursery, all smiles stop when Eliza refuses to permit the instrument in the house, believing it might seduce the family with its sensuous, ear-flattering charms. After all, there are the neighbors and the Grove Meeting to consider. (She embodies the Quaker’s historical prejudice against music.) To appease her and to make a concession to appearances, Jess hauls the organ into the attic, to which heaven he and his daughter Mattie learn to repair whenever the secular spirit of song moves them. In the climax of this story the ministry and oversight committee calls unexpectedly, and embarrassed Jess is desperate to drown out his daughter’s upstairs playing. He delivers for that purpose a long, extempore prayer before the assembled elders, his voice booming out at each fortissimo pause until Mattie has run through “The Old Musician and His Harp” five times. After the elders hobble out, impressed with this strange outburst of piety, there occurs a final touch of humor when Jess again hears the song resume from upstairs and unrepentantly taps out the beat with his foot.

“Shivaree before Breakfast” gains effectiveness by being told from the point of view of the Birdwell boys Joshua and Labe, ages 13 and 10, respectively. Like the other Quakers in the stories, they speak in the now quaint “thees” and “thous” that, together with Page 40  |  Top of Articleoccasional dialect words found in and out of the dialogue, lend to the book some of its realistic flavor. These boys set out on foot one morning to shivaree a neighbor, Old Alf, whom they suspect of having secretly married, for Labe had overheard the old man addressing endearments to a certain Molly in the house. But no wife trips to the window to see them, only the bachelor. Invited inside, they are surprised to learn that Old Alf has invented, out of sheer loneliness, an imaginary woman so that he can talk to someone.

Joshua, older and more conventional than his little brother, though less sympathetically responsive, feels that here is something dreadfully amiss in the adult sphere; therefore, when he assails Old Alf with “Thee’s crazy,” he unwittingly fights back the recognition that adulthood, which meant to him “not being worried or scared anymore,” can, like childhood, have its burden of sadness. Unwilling to admit the truth openly, he asserts that the old man is simply demented. Joshua has been used to interpreting life according to codes laid down by others, codes making for orderliness and regularity. Meanwhile Labe, with a more flexible and imaginative personality, is unaware of such behavior standards and enters sympathetically into Alf’s fantasy, even elaborating on it.¹³ Unlike his stiff-backed brother, Labe sees Alf not as odd but as companionable and fanciful, and he even promises to come back and visit him. The two brothers are finely differentiated characters.

No tragic lesson occurs in “The Pacing Goose,” in which Eliza, who has a weakness for geese, sets out eight goose eggs to hatch. Jess, wanting no troublesome fowl underfoot, privily tells the hired man to secretly pierce the shells with a darning needle. But Enoch bungles somehow and spares an egg; one goose named Samantha is born, and rapidly grows under Eliza’s feeding into a “full-rounded convexity” – “Emphasis on the vexity,” complains Jess.¹⁴ The pet gives short shrift to Jess’s pansies, and it even intimidates him by extending its reptilian neck and blowing icy hisses at him. Additional rustic humor occurs after Samantha gets mixed up with geese on a neighboring farm and Eliza has to go to court to recover her. After Eliza had won her case, Jess, alone with his hired man, informs him that the trial had taught him three things, two of which were woman’s dependability and her efficiency at mastering the law; and the third thing was: Never employ a hired man without first learning if he can count to eight (Persuasion, 45).

As with some of the other stories, the reading pleasure resides especially in the manner of telling. There is a smiling literary allu-siveness when Enoch, a reader of Emerson, thinks that some general information on women “might have a more than transcendental value.” Besides enjoying a sensuous description of backcountry cooking, we also appreciate Eliza’s sly wit when, after hearing her husband complain that no one in the house has written any poetry though spring is in the air, and then seeing him sniff the pies laid out for cooling, tells him that he is like all men in wanting to have their poetry and eat it too.

There is no more thistledown delicacy of treatment in all the book than “Lead Her like a Pigeon,” in which Mattie reaches the nubile state and experiences her first maidenly uneasiness at having to leave home someday. The theme of approaching marriage, announced cumulatively, begins with the girl’s spotting the pair of doves (symbolizing Venus) in the clearing near the empty house; her planning to care for the flowers growing untended in the yard (the flowers symbolic of children); Jud Bent’s references to her as Persephone and to Gard Bent, the new boyfriend and future husband, as Pluto, who in mythology takes the goddess into the underworld as his wife; the song beginning “Lead her like a pigeon,” which she very much wants the boy with the horn to complete; and the still more conventional emblem of the wedding ring: “They [her maidenly hands washing dishes] could not play the tune she envied, the tinkling bell-like sound of her mother’s wedding ring against the china. . . . [T]hat said, I’m a lady grown and mistress of dishes and cupboards” (Persuasion, 53-54). The author’s daughter told me that West found the idea for one of her stories, possibly this one, in the sound of Grace’s wedding ring tinkling on the dishes while they were being washed.

Since West once admitted that Mattie was drawn after what she thought her mother might have been like as a girl living in that time (West’s 18 August 1965 letter to me), it is natural to suspect that Gard Bent reflects Eldo West. As evidence of this source, we find that Gard has Indian blood and shares with Eldo West a farming background and an interest in schoolteaching.

In July 1863 the Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan led a force of about 2,460 soldiers from Kentucky to Vernon and, finding an armed militia lying in wait for him across the river, decided to Page 42  |  Top of Articlebypass the town. This is the historical background of “The Battle of Finney’s Ford,” against which are played some moral decisions among the Birdwells as to whether a Quaker should forego the creed of nonviolence when safety demands a call to arms. Josh, moved by the state governor’s appeal for militia, goes against his religious tradition and parental advice to join a local ragtag force. Although he never fires a shot against the enemy and although he ends up wounded from an inglorious fall off a cliff, he does have the satisfaction of overcoming fear and of proving himself a warrior. In putting aside the Quaker ideal, however, and rendering exclusively to Caesar, Josh foreshadows the increasing outer-directedness of the Friends that one finds culminating in the mixed-faith marriage at the end of Friendly Persuasion and in the spiritually impoverished community of A Matter of Time. Yet Josh is not the only physically brave member of his family: Labe actually loves to fight, and his bravery therefore takes the form of self-control. We are led to believe that the author’s heart is with Labe.

West, no exponent of heroics and physical violence, believed that courage can be shown just as easily without physical violence as with it. Unquestionably, a natural aversion to the games of war as well as a predictable Quaker quietism, to say nothing of hewing to a historical account in which no battle even occurred at Vernon, conspired to debar her from the subject of physical conflict. Another explanation is that she had early taken up a personal interest in stoicism as a philosophy to live by, such a belief making her lot as an invalid endurable. The philosophy carries over into the portrayal of her literary figures.¹⁵ The present Birdwell story is, consequently, not likely to satisfy the reader who demands some raw action in spicing up scenes of moral decision, especially as the author does build up to a battle scene and then defeats expectation.

In contrast, “The Buried Leaf” is a quiet interlude among the selections. At the outset Mattie is vexed at her father’s refusal to let her change her name to something she thinks is elegant. After sulking, she and Little Jess unearth in an abandoned cellar a box containing a leaf from the Bible that sets a new value on her name. From an anecdote told her by her father, she learns how heroic her ancestors had been in the wilderness.

“A Likely Exchange” and “First Day Finish” are companion pieces about horses, and they are so vividly wrought that some of the Page 43  |  Top of Articleauthor’s relatives believe – despite the almost totally fictional basis – that such happenings did occur. In the first piece Jess, alone on a business trip in rural Kentucky, skillfully trades his own slow carriage horse for an unsightly quadruped whose only good point is in refusing to be passed on the road. This neatly satisfies the injunction that his wife had given him on parting – that he get rid of their “racy-looking animal” – and at the same time gratifies his own lurking desire for a beast that can outrace the Black Prince, owned by the sleek Methodist preacher. It just so happens that the owner, a Mrs. Hudspeth, wants a slow pacer, one slow enough to be no obstacle in marrying off her four big, beefy, pipe-smoking daughters. As she phrases it, “Men ain’t got any heart for courting a girl they can’t pass – let alone catch up with” (Persuasion, 114). And so they make a trade.

In the second story the now successful horse trader drives his ungainly animal to victory the Sunday after he returns home; astonishes Eliza, who had not planned to rip off to church in a cloud of dust; and frustrates the smug Reverend Godley, who had expected to tear past them as usual on his way to harangue his congregation. Although none of the participants had intended it, the race becomes an interdenominational contest, and its outcome even satisfies the otherwise silent Quaker congregation.

There are various ways of creating the verisimilitude of a horse race, such as by using a series of long, sustained sentences that gallop along breathlessly, flinging the lather of rhetoric into the air. Twain shows early in Roughing It how it is done with the pony express rider, and later with the dog chasing a jackrabbit. West does not use this method; her effects stem largely from a suspense carefully built up, from subtlety of phrase rather than power of large units of rhetoric, and from a confident knowledge of horseflesh.

Like the two selections just examined, “‘Yes, We’ll Gather at the River’” contains a strain of frontier humor in the tradition of such early practitioners as George Washington Harris, Augustus B. Longstreet, and Johnson J. Hooper. As evidence of this similarity, one finds plenty of local color, including an interest in rural speech extending here to the Quakers’ “thees” and “thous”; a faint coarseness that is, however, appropriate to the life of rustics; a crude and decidedly comic figure; and, finally, a bit of roughhouse giving rise to hearty laughter.

The unclean hayseed Lafe Millspaugh, afraid for 30 years of touching bathwater, is hired to build Jess a bathhouse on the porch – the first chamber of its kind west of the Ohio. Conservative Eliza opposes the project for fear the neighbors will talk, for, after all, this was an age when all but the rich used sponge baths. First it was music, then horse racing, and now a tub for bathing (and for singing in too?) – a luxury too indulgent, too epicurean for the church! The carpenter Lafe disapproves too, and takes it upon himself to omit building a door to the otherwise completed “carnal room,” whereupon Jess gets revenge by dunking this presumptuous peckerwood in the tub. As usual with West’s technique, she does not report the physical struggle directly as it happens but through the senses of a nonparticipant, Eliza. Actually the tiff turns out to be quite funny this way. Such an auctorial withdrawal from anything approaching violence reminds us of the practice of another Midwestern writer, Willa Cather, as in Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Now past middle age, Jess in the following story is initially worried about an enormous wen on his neck. “The Meeting House” opens symbolically with him at the fireside extending his fingers as if to gather warmth in them. Although he had planned to take a sentimental trip to a distant meetinghouse where his parents had worshiped, he never gets there; instead, he has some encounters along the route that remind him of the threat of death that faces even the young. In the house of one of his customers tiny, seven-year-old Jasper Rice lies dying in a bed far too big for him. “A poor peaked little grain of Rice for such a big conveyance” is Jess’s metaphysical observation, this last being about as close to sentimentality as the story ever gets (Persuasion, 149). An equally pathetic case is Mrs. Rivers, a dying young woman deserted by her husband who, unable to bear the presence of sickness, finds consolation in a mistress. True here to the practice throughout Friendly Persuasion, West forebears to judge the morals or indiscretions of her people and presents everything objectively. The readers are left to judge for themselves.

The upshot of Jess’s trip is that when he gets home and compares his anxiety over the wen with the suffering he has found in other people, he thinks himself fortunate indeed; he signals his renewed delight in the simple and beautiful things of this world by sniffing the rich fragrance of some newly opened lilies-of-the-valley.

Kept indoors by rain one day, Jess in “The Vase” shows an idle interest in a vase that Eliza has left half-finished years before. Here in this intensely domestic story the viewpoint shifts easily and unobtrusively to that of Eliza, for whom the vase, made from a cracked lamp shade, holds sentimental associations. To her the object recalls the enthusiasm, the bouquet, of her early married days when before her gleamed, as it so often does in youth, an ideal future whose chance sorrows are mercifully veiled for the time being. The swan, accordingly, symbolizes that dream, the swan being painted on a shade whose crack is hidden with decoration. We are told in flashback that shortly after the infant Sarah died, Eliza had begun work upon the companion swan on the shade but was understandably interrupted by Jess one wintry day when he came in to lament the snowflakes that were then covering up Sarah’s grave. The second swan consequently remained “gray and shadowy . . . reminding her of so much, the dream before sunup” (Persuasion, 170), meaning the imperfectly fulfilled future as represented in the early vision. The theme here includes the life cycle with its attendant joys and sorrows.

Admittedly, the ostensible event in “The Illumination” is a gathering of neighbors in Jess’s house to celebrate the advent of his gas lighting, but the essential interest, as with so many of the narratives, lies in character revelation. A sharp moral contrast is implicit in Jess, a humanist more than pleased to spend his money for the sensuous satisfaction of gas light, and in the miser Whitcomb, who refuses to buy for himself any luxuries at all. Part of the success in sketching Whitcomb lies in making him no stock figure, no ordinary miser. The author probes far enough into his makeup to enable the reader to pity him as a human being. Both men are sadly aware of time’s winged chariot hovering near, the dust that waits for all; still, they strive in their markedly different ways to preserve something of value from the Heracleitan flux. Jess, at least, has a cheerful light to fend off the existential darkness, much as the old customer does in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.” Another, equally valid interpretation of the story is that Jess, a progressive, has to contend with the narrow-mindedness and backwardness of some of his midwestern neighbors.

West has injected into her hero some of the sensibility and responsiveness of one of her favorite literary figures, Henry David Thoreau. Though Jess’s sensitivity to natural beauty was mentioned Page 46  |  Top of Articleearlier, it is necessary to add that he, like many Friends in history, keeps a journal of spiritual observations (whimsically signing his sentences with names of famous men). Once he puts down a Thoreau-like “Eternity’s the depth you go” and consents at last to sign his own name. When Eliza tells him that he ought to prepare his soul for the hereafter, he replies, while looking admiringly at the sky, “This is preparing,” reminding us of Thoreau’s confident death-bed declaration “One world at a time.” Like the famous inspector of snowstorms, he too is a high-minded epicurean who believes in getting a good taste of this world’s pudding before turning to the next world’s ambrosia.

By the time we reach “Pictures from a Clapboard House,” Mattie and Gard have long married. The Quaker family has been changing, becoming more worldly: Not only do the Birdwells have gas lighting and a bathtub, but the once-banned organ now rests respectably in the sitting room. Stephen, like members of the author’s own family, has moved to California. Now he is back for a brief visit and, in defiance of the family, wed to a non-Quaker, the wild and none-too-faithful Lydia Cinnamond, who had been dating another man during the fiance’s absence. But Stephen is no stickler about damaged goods, for he likes a bit of wildness in a girl. Just as we experience the second story in the book from the viewpoint of a youngster participating in an abortive shivaree, we see the child Elspeth in this antepenultimate idyll witnessing a successful shivaree during Christmas at the Maple Grove Nursery. Here again much of the delicacy and effectiveness depend on the narrative point of view, which in this case is Elspeth’s. To the uncritical child the talk of infidelity in the household is innocently one with the glitter of snowfall, the Christmas tree shine, the untying of presents, and the shivaree; her child vision has the cinematic flow of pictures that shimmer in a radiance best known to one in the morning of life. The wondering and trusting innocence of Elspeth contrasts with the catlike softness and inconstancy of experienced Lydia. Thus the author uses the child as a lens through which we may discern all the more memorably the patterns of adult behavior.

Elspeth, representing the third generation of Birdwells in the book, is a link in the chain of eternity. Ever so sensitively West sketches at the outset the image of the child seated in the parlor stringing a popcorn harness for the Christmas tree: Elspeth thinks of Page 47  |  Top of Articleher absent mother (second generation) as the clock ticks slowly “Forever . . . forever”; under this spell she understandably feels lonely, with her mother gone and with the ticktock of everlastingness insinuating itself in her ear, and, feeling a need for human affection as a hedge against a chilling eternity, she asks her grandmother if she loves her. “Better than I did my own,” Eliza was used to replying to such a question, for “Then I was too young ... to know childhood wasn’t enduring” (Persuasion, 187). Though too much for the child to comprehend – and this immaturity is what makes the situation poignant – the granddaughter unreflectingly occupies her own place in the long procession of generations that move from the cradle to the casket. Even so, the story’s tone remains cheerful, partly because the serious parts of the story are balanced by happy ones, and all are filtered to us through the frosted glass of innocence.

The account of Homer Perkins in “Homer and the Lilies” is perhaps the most touching narrative in Friendly Persuasion. An adopted 12-year-old lad, he is as curious as the once-youthful Jess had been concerning all that is strange and beautiful in the world about him, but Homer’s misfortune is that the kindly old couple he lives with are dead to speech and to wonder. In Homer’s eyes the ordinary can undergo transfiguration into something rich and strange. He questions eagerly about natural phenomena – whether a mouse can run backward – and listens with breathless delight to the whispery fall of first snowflakes on the roof just above his attic bed. In this lovable boy, and lovable twice over because readers can see in him the best part of their own real or imagined youth, Jess recovers the boyhood he had once known. We accomplish this seeing without the slightest intrusion of the sentimental.

One day in the woods Homer makes friends with the nurseryman, who is a match for him in Wordsworthian sensitivity. In an unconscious farewell gesture to this world – managed with the author’s usual understatement – Homer one day pulls up and clutches to him an armful of Eliza’s lilies simply because they ravish him with their scent and loveliness. Jess’s reproof on that occasion is poignant when we look back on it, for not long afterward, during a winter storm, the boy passes away. By means of allusive wording, West succeeds in conveying the impression, ever so gently, that Jess himself has not many winters to go. In a symbolic sense he has died vicariously through Homer. On the literal level the sad imminence of Page 48  |  Top of Articlehis own demise is postponed yet awhile, enabling the group of stories to end on just the right bittersweet note. And the already wise Jess is wiser still.

It takes no great insight to learn that the plots in these stories are usually slight, for the focus is on some revealing incident or epiphany in the life of one or more of the principal characters. The book has three serious themes. The first concerns the adolescent confronted with the problems of adulthood. We can see this theme in “Shivaree” and in “The Battle of Finney’s Ford,” where the Quaker conscience is at odds with the demands of adulthood and patriotism. The second theme is about the eternal procession of humankind enacted by the various Birdwells and their acquaintances who either pass through the normal life cycle or, as with Jess and especially Elspeth, represent links in the long human chain. Several stories here are the more affecting for being bathed in the light of eternity. The second theme is closely related to the third one, that of illumination, as in “The Meeting House” and “Homer and the Lilies.” In the former story contact with the dying young acts reflexively to produce in Jess a heightened aesthetic sense; in the latter story Homer’s demise effects a spiritual change in the nurseryman, one more fitting now that Jess is presumably at the ripe age for wisdom and for meeting his Maker. As suggested earlier, the reader cannot help thinking that the constant threat of death in the author’s own life conditioned her to create literature in which human beings are, as Victor Hugo said, under a glorious reprieve from the sentence of death. A German proverb runs, “A heart that has never suffered is a heart that will never sing.”

As for the book’s sources, West accounts for them summarily in To See the Dream: “The Friendly Persuasion, insofar as it is anyone’s experience, is the experience of my great-grandparents as remembered by my mother from tales told her by her parents. . . . The facts are very few (Dream, 132-33). Among these facts are that Jess is modeled upon her great-grandfather Joshua Vickers Milhous, a nurseryman near Vernon.¹⁶ Joshua had such a passion for music that on one of his visits to Indianapolis he bought a $260 Mason and Hamlin organ, and, of course, his Quaker minister wife, Elizabeth, objected, as did the congregation. Even though the Quaker neighbors never became accustomed to the instrument, the Milhous children were delighted, as was their mother in time. Nevertheless, the Page 49  |  Top of Articlewhole affair of Quigley and the church elders in “Music on the Muscatatuck” is fiction.¹⁷

Like Jess, Joshua had a love for flowers and birds and was enthusiastic about stargazing. He was supposed to have enjoyed fast horses, but the races in the book are pure inventions. The same applies to the Kentucky trip. “‘Yes, We’ll Gather at the River’” derives partly from an experience Joshua had in building a bathroom; he had a tiff with the carpenter, who had refused to install a door because the specifications did not call for it. And “The Illumination” draws on Joshua’s successful installation of manufactured gas in his home. Left out of the story is the unpleasant fact that fumes began to rise into the house from a storage tank underneath and necessitated removing the equipment – much to Elizabeth’s relief.

The personality and appearance of Eliza are indebted to the Mary Frances McManaman mentioned earlier, a black-haired Irishwoman who made vases from lamp chimneys. The names Eliza, Mattie, Jess, and Josh are all derived from West’s ancestors. There was no shivaree at a bachelor’s house. West wrote to me that her mother had heard about an old man near the Maple Grove Nursery who used to talk to an imaginary spouse. As said before, Grace forms the basis, however slight, for Mattie’s characterization: For instance, West wrote me of her mother’s memories of “riding a white horse ... [and carrying] cookies in a reversed footstool to an ailing woman in the woods.” Grace also remembered a neighboring orphan boy of 16 or 17 named Homer who, in spite of good health, was found one morning dead in bed – with no evidence of foul play. Grace saw him in the coffin in his front yard with white tube roses in his hand. West said that “[t]he whole story came from the wonder in her voice at this sight.. .”(26 January 1966 letter to me).

“The Buried Leaf” owes its being to the author’s own childhood when she saw in the cellar of an abandoned house a Bible left to molder. “Pictures from a Clapboard House” has a similarly faint origin in the author’s experience, in this case from hearing over the telephone in the grandmother’s house the clock ticking in her own house. And “The Battle of Finney’s Ford” is all fiction except for Morgan’s raid (West’s 25 January 1966 letter to me).

One can see, then, that the facts are indeed skimpy. Far from being family history or even an attempt at it, Friendly Persuasion is almost totally a product of the imagination. To claim otherwise, as Page 50  |  Top of Articlesome of West’s relatives have wanted to do, is to grossly underestimate what is entailed in converting a “germ,” as Henry James calls it, into an artistically wrought story. Despite all of West’s efforts to downplay this book, for fear that she would be labeled a one-book author or a “sweet old Quaker lady,” Friendly Persuasion is as exquisitely wrought as anything else that she did.

Inasmuch as West left Indiana very early, apparently before she gained any unfortunate impressions of the region, she could well afford to look back with romantic nostalgia. Naturally, one wonders what kind of Birdwell collection would have resulted had West revisited North Vernon before the writing began. An earlier Quaker author, James Baldwin (1841-1945), spent his entire youth in central Indiana in the area around Westfield. His highly autobiographical narrative In My Youth was later reissued with the significant subtitle “An Intimate Personal Record of Life and Manners in the Middle Ages of the Middle West.”¹⁸ This novel furnishes quite a different view of pioneer life during the period that corresponds to the young manhood of Jess Birdwell. It is the viewpoint of an insider. Jess and his family, we will remember, seem to be somewhat isolated but not lonely, have a simple yet not drab environment, and soon come to know the beauty of music and the luxury of a bathtub and gas lighting. In My Youth, by contrast, shows a shy, sensitive boy starved for beauty and oppressed by the harsh realities of a pioneer Quaker settlement. Mercifully, he escapes into a world of fantasy where he has imaginary playmates to keep him company and somehow make life bearable. Still, the lad takes a cheerful view of Quaker life on the frontier, despite the numberless privations – yes, including that of music. Probably there is no more heart-wrenching, realistic contrast with West’s books to be found anywhere in the limited body of Hoosier-Quaker literature.

Widely translated abroad (Dutch, French, German, Spanish, and Italian editions appeared in 1945), Friendly Persuasion soon established Jessamyn West as the most accomplished Quaker writer of the age; moreover the reputation of this book overshadowed most if not all of her later work. And no doubt the successful 1956 motion picture starring the popular Gary Cooper in the role of Jess Birdwell, as well as the catchy theme song from it, “Thee I Love,” heard over the radio even a decade later, helped create this imbalance. The film, though not a faithful rendition of the story, contains enough resemblances Page 51  |  Top of Articleto remind the readers of their adventures with the text without constituting a repetition. A broad, folksy, sometimes sexy humor replaces wit for the most part. Unfortunately, the camera eye shows us little of the aesthetic and philosophical side of the remarkable nurseryman of the book.¹⁹

Further Persuasion

In the spring of 1969, almost a quarter century after the publication of Friendly Persuasion, West’s second and final installment of the Birdwell pieces appeared in the form of Except for Me and Thee.²⁰ More than half of these stories had never been printed before and were written expressly for the book – an unprecedented method for West, whose motive was clearly to fill in gaps in the previous collection. Sarah and Gard had had roles that were barely sketched; now these figures are enlarged. Perhaps owing to the scriptwriting influence, both Little Jess and the Civil War take on increased significance. In the first collection the reader was left curious about Jess’s bachelor days, but the new collection more than satisfies these needs. And for the first time a Jessamyn West book handles that infamous contradiction in the land of freedom and egalitarianism, black slavery.

By midsummer this new assemblage had the ephemeral distinction of being on several best-seller lists. Unquestionably West’s family relationship to the newly elected president of the United States, Richard Nixon, drove up the sales, especially after her appearance on the NBC’s televised “Today” show. Even more potent as advertising must have been the longtime popularity of Friendly Persuasion both as a book and as a film. Moreover, the new book fortunately came out at a time when the reading public was jaded with a superfluity of raw stories about sex, perversion, and brutality; consequently, it found a welcome, not only because it was a well-written book about a wholesome and quite believable family whose members clung to traditional moral values but also because it satisfied a desire for a more normal, peaceful, quaint, even charming mode of existence.

The character types, the main locale, the backcountry Quaker diction, the rustic drollery and high jinks, and even the situations are agreeably consistent with those of the 1945 collection. The book is Page 52  |  Top of Articlewarmhearted but unsentimental; kindly, folksy, comfortable; and, in those stories about slavery and war, compassionate toward the victims. It contains a dark seriousness only hinted at in the first edition. Thus the reader finds here and there a reaction against the idealized material of Friendly Persuasion, a reaction consisting of increased realism and a critical awareness that Quakers must somehow, short of violence, come to grips with and maybe alleviate the social evils of their age. There is less poetry now, and the style is not so light and graceful as in 1945. On the other hand, we find more wisdom and humaneness, together with what Matthew Arnold would have called the ability to see life whole.

“The Wooing,” the first of the new set, shows Jess as a restless swain who rebels, albeit briefly, against the Quaker tradition of marrying only within the sect; for “He intended to live, not to repeat a pattern” (Except, 8). His wildest fling consists of letting himself get intoxicated in the company of a husband-hungry girl, acceding to her proposal, and the next day getting betrothed to still another girl. Some light comedy develops when the two prospective brides, having learned of each other’s troth, walk sorrowfully up to the Birdwell dinner table together and require Jess to make a choice. He turns them both down, for by this time he has fallen in love with the preacher Eliza Cope. At the opening of the next story he and Eliza have been married for five years and are chafing at having to live in father-in-law Birdwell’s house. Jess now takes a long trip West to look for a suitable homesite, and he picks a fertile and beautiful spot in Indiana, which becomes the Maple Grove Nursery. “The New Home,” third in the group of stories about Jess’s early life and his settling near Vernon, is chiefly memorable for the figure of the lightning rod salesman Herman Leutweiler, who has all the glib cunning and racy speech of Professor Quigley, and then some. Naturally, Jess must safeguard his new house against not only chain and sheet but ball lightning as well.

“First Loss” deals with the death of their firstborn, Sarah, victim of scarlet fever at age five. The coffin symbolism here is eerily effective. Following this sad episode comes the relatively inconsequential “Mother of Three,” whose only excuse for being seems to be that it represents for the first and only time in the whole series the everyday trial of a young mother in rearing an obstreperous brood of children who sometimes get into mischief. The happenings are as commonplace Page 53  |  Top of Articleas buckwheat pancakes. But aside from the occasional “inner light,” Indian raids, wars and the founding of homesteads and communities, how much of the daily living on the nineteenth-century American frontier could not be considered commonplace? The marvel is that West could, at least in the other stories, make intriguing these sober, God-fearing, orderly, practical, and artistically starved Quakers whose actual counterparts in history (the Mil-houses) were mostly cut out of the same unexciting roll of provincial homespun. West put it even more starkly when she observed, “I don’t believe the true stories about the Milhous family could be written, except in the ironic vein of Flannery O’Connor” [italics hers] (25 January 1966 letter to me).

“Neighbors,” by far the longest episode in the book, ranks as one of the best. The setting is 1856. Despite the tone of calculated understatement and domesticity conveyed by the title, we find physical excitement and suspense as Eliza and her neighbors save a black slave couple from recapture. The turning point in the drama comes when Eliza is forced to admit, in the face of her conservatism and respect for legal authority, that there is a higher moral law to which the cruel Fugitive Slave Law must submit. The author makes her, rather than Jess, the focus of narration, perhaps because Eliza had not earlier committed herself to any serious social problems or experienced any danger. Except for Me and Thee might be subtitled “Eliza’s Coming Out.” A later adventure in which she again involves herself in the alleviation of human misery is “After the Battle,” the battle being Morgan’s raid, in which she binds the wound of a young Rebel trooper.

Jess in “Fast Horseflesh” gets his warmup for the race against Godley’s Black Prince, whose defeat was covered in Friendly Persuasion. A newspaper editor named Arkell wins over him, evidently because Eliza, who wanted to teach her husband a lesson, prayed for the opponent’s horse.

The weakness of using Jess exclusively as the focus of narration keeps “Growing Up” from being as funny or at least as satisfying as it might otherwise be. Some comic possibilities were lost in not permitting the reader to follow young Labe to his birthday party at Louella’s, where, for all we know, the amorous seamstress might have given Labe some awkward moments. It stands to reason too that the emotional impact of growing up, of a lad’s being pursued by Page 54  |  Top of Articlean older woman, is something that the participant ought to feel more keenly than the parents. West would have solved this problem admirably had she not decided to restrict the focus of narration throughout the book to either Jess or his wife. “Shivaree before Breakfast,” in the other collection, shows movingly how West can present the direct initiatory experience in the young without needing the consciousness of the Birdwell parents to provide interpretation. There, Josh and Labe are constantly before the reader; the main interest resides in their feelings, rather than the parents’ response to the adventure with Old Alf.

It might as well be observed at this juncture that one of the biggest differences between the volumes of 1945 and 1969 is just this striving after a consistent focus of narration by showing every adventure as it impinges on Jess or Eliza, or both. (As hinted earlier, this focus is sometimes gained at a loss in dramatic power.) Friendly Persuasion had deviated from this “ideal” at least four times. But Except for Me and Thee, which was devised after many years of teaching creative writing in the universities (where correct mode of narration is sanctified), of building novels, and of contriving coherent motion picture scripts, demonstrates a tighter method of unifying an episodic story line. That West wrote so many of the new stories expressly for a collection in itself promoted unity, whereas the separate parts of Friendly Persuasion, designed for scattered magazines over the years, ranged at large by focusing on three generations of Birdwells.

“A Family Argument” reveals Jess as a wise patriarch who holds his family together in time of dissension by virtue of his firm will and fairmindedness. Like the nation still smarting from the trials of the Civil War just ended, the Birdwells have their internal quarrels too. And the years have brought changes: Mattie has married, alas, a Methodist; her Gard is now a farmer; Little Jess has grown into a pert youngster who likes to interrupt discussions; and Josh attends school in Philadelphia. Compared with Jess, all the young people present to celebrate his birthday seem foolish; they are like puppies growling over a rag and tearing it apart. Still, he refuses to wax bitter and complain: “The world suits me to a T, Mattie. That’s my trouble. Why, sometimes I think the Lord made it especially for me. I like its colors. I don’t see how the flavor of spring water can be improved on. I’d hate to have to try to invent a better fruit than a Grimes Page 55  |  Top of ArticleGolden. Yellow lamplight on white snow. Thee ever seen anything prettier?” (Except, 283).

The moral of the final story serves to confirm Jess in his contentment. Two related plots operate, one inside the other, to treat the theme of family love. “Home for Christmas” finds Jess resisting Mattie’s desire to put up a Christmas tree (Methodist bauble) – Quaker tradition did not provide for this modernism. “The bigger the celebration in the world, Jess feared, the less chance the heart had for its celebration” (Except, 294). We can almost hear him say, if we use our imagination, “For heaven’s sake! If thee lets the tree in, thee will next have to drag in Christmas stockings and presents, other gimcracks having nothing to do with true Christmas spirit!” But the tree, Jess knew, would make Mattie and her little Elspeth happy. At this juncture the alcoholic Jasper Clark arrives to ask for a loan with which to buy his family some Christmas presents. He gets it: Jess thus makes his first hazardous step toward modernism. Not long afterward Clarence Clark, Jasper’s son, clatters up to ask Jess to help deal with Jasper who, drunk how, has been shooting wildly from his upstairs window. It looks like a sordid affair.

The true situation in the Clark family gradually unfolds for Jess after he reaches the scene. He learns that Jasper did not spend the borrowed money on liquor (someone gave him the jug), and that he had first remembered to buy presents for the whole family. Jasper had gotten drunk because he learned that his daughter Jenny was pregnant out of wedlock; he was shooting to drive off the seducer should he come. Despite these misfortunes, the Clarks love and care for one another. But no sentimentality intrudes to mar the perfect dignity and restraint of those passages in which Jess and Clara converse about familial matters.

Back home, warmed by this example of domestic love, Jess permits the Christmas tree to go up, although he does so against his better judgment. “People are getting more worldly every day,” he laments with the expected conservatism of a grandfather. “Except for me and thee, Jess” (Except, 309), Eliza puts in, evidently speaking for the author and herself, and incidentally providing the title for the book.

The only Birdwell story published earlier that was not included in the volume is “Little Jess and the Outrider.”²¹ Not only is it inferior to “After the Battle” in bringing home to the Birdwell clan Page 56  |  Top of Articlethe reality of war, but its inclusion would be repetitive, inasmuch as the theme of aiding a wounded trooper appears in both episodes. Besides, the focus in the omitted story is on Little Jess; Except for Me and Thee, as stated earlier, mistakenly limits the focus to Jess and Eliza.

As a best-seller, Except for Me and Thee obviously found some partisan reviewers. S. L. Steen wrote that the “characters are well portrayed, the prose poetic and charming with the Quaker idioms and touches of humor.”²² Zena Sutherland noted the “vibrant authenticity of the characters . . . [and the] practiced ease and resilience of style.”²³ Perhaps it was Carlos Baker who gave the most thoughtful and sympathetic coverage of the book: He opined that readers will learn more about the Birdwells but have “a certain mild regret that [this] is not the equal of its predecessor. . . . What if this sequel is a little paler than ‘The Friendly Persuasion’?... It will be a welcome accession to those (like myself) who are always eager to begin a new book by Jessamyn West.”²⁴

The two collections ought to be combined into one in order to keep the chronology straight. An examination of all the stories shows clearly that a suitable order can be followed in such a gathering if “Music on the Muscatatuck” is allowed to come first, as a beautifully seductive invitation to the series. The newcomer to the now-separate books might find the following sequence helpful:

The Buried Word

An early unpublished story called “Footprints beneath the Snow”²⁵ represents a first attempt to get at the materials of The Witcb Diggers (1951). In this 22-page manuscript nubile Lovetta Lewis, spending the Christmas holidays with her grandparents at the Jennings County poor farm, which the grandparents manage, so doubts that her lover Gardiner Bent will come to get her that she despairs. Actually he delays because he had heard a false report that she was spending Christmas with his rival. But when in the dead of night Gardiner at last arrives in his sleigh, she leaps out to him through the snow and they ride off to a joyous reconciliation. The juxtaposition of youth with age; warm and passionate love with midwinter iciness; the lover arriving unexpectedly on one of the few nights of the year commonly devoted to celebration and hope (Christmas Eve); the maiden’s sight of her future husband; the elopement from the bedroom; the old grandmother left behind to greet the chill of a winter morning – all these qualities are singularly evocative of Keats’s tale of medieval elopement in “The Eve of St. Agnes.” Regardless, The Witch Diggers will show far fewer resemblances to the poem and must be considered completely original.

We may observe in this abortive story the poor farm of greatgrandfather James McManaman’s day, but it is suitably fictionalized even in this period when West tended to be too transparently familial. There is a Jud Macmanaman as a carousing and bookish precursor to the serious and thoughtful Link Conboy of the novel. To their dissatisfied wives both men represent an image of failure for having chosen the wrong line of work. The love situation about the ineligible Page 58  |  Top of Articlesuitor perhaps echoes Grace Milhous and Eldo West, who did some of their courting at the farm.

“Footsteps beneath the Snow” contains some of the materials that eventually were used in “Lead Her like a Pigeon” and in “Pictures from a Clapboard House,” a fact showing that originally the substance of Friendly Persuasion and Witch Diggers was hardly separable in the artist’s mind. But creating Jess Birdwell and placing him at another ancestral location nearby no doubt cleared the way and left the poor farm with its figure of the waiting girl as a nucleus for a new, much longer story someday. The waiting girl became Cate Conboy.

A glimpse at the actual setting of Witch Diggers may prove a diverting introduction to the plot summary that follows.²⁶ Not more than five miles of rolling country south of Vernon on Highway 7 in the direction of Madison, the visitor today sees on the left the prominent landmark of the Freedom Church, while on his right, a few hundred feet farther, the entrance to a gravel road. If the visitor turns onto the road and winds with it awhile through meager farmland and around a bend, he or she presently arrives at a two-storey red-brick edifice, shaped like an L, that sprawls at the far end of the road. Alongside the front are some evergreen trees. These acres, known as the County Farm, contain the only red-brick building for miles around; the structure is old, dilapidated, mysterious, and lonely. In front, down a weedy declivity, Graham Creek winds its peaceful course through underbrush and among scraggly trees.

Walking to the back of the building, the visitor finds the place in sad disrepair, unless the current owner has succeeded in making his promised renovations. Farther back across the red clay fields lies a small plot of land that the plowman always cuts around. Here among the weeds and briars, as if to be neglected until Judgment Day, some dead have markers; others, lying under sunken ground covered with thorn and weed, have not a slab to identify them as the pauper inmates of the County Farm. These dead are not kin to the self-sustaining, admirable peasants of Thomas Gray’s famous churchyard; still, if they could tell their stories, the listener would doubtless hear the simple annals of the needy and forlorn, the crippled and blind, the feeble-minded and mad. These are the kinds of people Grace West had known or heard about when she visited the farm.

In the narrative of Witch Diggers, which opens in Indianapolis during the Christmas season of 1899, Christian (Christie) Fraser, a salesman at 22, boards a train headed south to visit Cate Conboy, his new girl, at the poor farm. She has invited him. While en route to the poor farm, Christie recalls in a flashback sequence his first meeting with Cate at a party in the home of his cousin Sylvy Cope (the surname reappears in two other books) at Stony Creek. Foreshad-owings of Christie’s death begin early: In his reflections, in his morbid talk with the cousin, and some months later in a coffin episode; moreover, the coffin reappears several times. Christie, an outsider bringing in his fresh point of view, is a good choice of a character to introduce for us the oddities of the poor farm.

Christie’s special weakness, as the bluff Uncle Wesley Cope once told him, is that he cannot resist saying yes. The young man fully illustrates this weakness soon enough, when he slips into bed with the Uncle’s daughter, who is eager to marry him. The purpose of the bedroom scene is to establish Christie, unlike his later rival Ferris Thompson, and unlike Cate herself, as a normal and passionate lover.

Cate, four years Christie’s junior, is second to her mother in being the best realized character in the novel. She is an egocentric, proud, boyish-looking (Conboy) girl with a superb figure, short curly hair, and dark flashing eyes. But given her mother’s indoctrination in backcountry fears about sex, Cate suffers from a common hangup in West’s books: A belief that sex leads invariably to pain and suffering. She cannot accept woman’s sexuality as a normal part of her makeup. Lib yells at her for bathing naked in the presence of her little sister; she orders Cate to cover herself with a towel, else she will be giving the sister bad thoughts. Lib says there is too much passion in the family as it is: Distrust those awful sexual impulses. And Cate, who wants dearly to please her mother, hearkens and obeys.

By contrast, Christie is an ardent lover. Arriving at the junction, he takes a macabre wagon ride out to the County Farm with the undertaker Korby, a vulgar social climber who is known for ostentatiously planting a kiss on the forehead of each and every corpse before closing the coffin. A chilling confrontation occurs when Christie is left holding a child’s casket at the door of the main building, Page 60  |  Top of ArticleKorby having raced off suddenly, and Dandie Conboy opens the door angrily to snatch the casket out of his hands.

We learn that Dandie, who insists on finding his own happiness without the aid of his altruistic father, has fallen in love with and will soon marry the softly feminine Nory Tate, a girl who has been raped and made pregnant by her uncle. Part of the story’s suspense is whether or not Dandie will succeed in wringing from her the ravager’s identity and what revenge he will then exact (in chapter 10 he castrates the old man).

Another rebel is Cate’s precocious little sister, Em, who pertly announces to Christie at their first meeting that she was probably adopted since she is so unlike the other Conboys. This amusing Em feels out of place at the house, for “she missed . . . those daily draughts of envy, admiration, and hate with which she was customarily refreshed at school. At school she was somebody, a person to be reckoned with.”²⁷ Her innocent exhibitionism – drawing pubic hairs on herself with burned matches in order to seem grown up and displaying herself naked to a Peeping Tom in an honest endeavor to cure him of his obsession – is, of course, sensational yet still consistent with what we might expect of a well-meaning little flaunter living in such surroundings and developing, unlike her sister Cate, an uninhibited interest in sex. As with some other figures in the story, Em stumbles about searching for happiness, and her search is made all the more difficult because of her bizarre methods and the shocked disapproval of the family. Soon enough learning that she gets people into trouble by telling secrets, she learns to keep the important ones to herself, including the news that insane Mary Abel plans to destroy the pigs belonging to the poor farm. No wonder that in the latter part of the novel she has lost her charming spontaneity.

Christie meets the parents as well. Lib, modeled after the West’s mother,²⁸ is a handsome woman who enjoys being the poor farm’s matron because of the social distinction. In the course of the narrative she develops from a benevolent shrew, quick to belittle her husband, to a wifely companion who shows him genuine respect, and from the unaffectionate mother of Cate she becomes a creature of sorrow who pities her daughter and even kisses her for the first time – for Lib needs to feel superior to and have pity for others before she can ever show them affection. There is simply not space enough here to do justice to this provocative woman, to her pride Page 61  |  Top of Articleand aloofness, her wrongheadedness, her vulgarity and slovenliness in keeping house, her capacity for insult, and her dexterity in putting presumptuous people in their place.

The problem with her husband, Link, is that he cannot get close to the souls of the inmates, though he tries and tries. He has waited all his life to meet someone to whom he can open his heart. But his children are largely uncommunicative with him, Lib is too proud and distant (when not merely condescending), and most of the poor house inmates are lame conversationalists. The only inmate with whom Link can communicate is John Manlief, an intelligent mute who miraculously regains his powers of speech from having bestowed love on a nursling pig – that’s right, a pig – that he has kept hidden in his room.

Among the grotesques cared for at the County Farm, Christie finds the cultists James and Mary Abel, brother and sister, who are obsessed that the Devil has long ago buried Truth somewhere in the earth and that it is now necessary to dig it up so that humankind can again be happy. For this digging they try to recruit the young salesman who, unfortunately for them, has settled for the lesser happiness of making love to Cate whenever he can get her alone; nevertheless, they do manage to enlist the adventurer Em for their mad diggings. The activities of the witch diggers provide a symbolic parallel to the misguided and sometimes frantic efforts of the so-called normal person, such as Cate, to reach happiness. After we read about foolish Cate getting married, the Abels no longer seem so demented.

The main plot pertains to the courting and betrothal of Christie and Cate; her sudden renunciation of Christie, who is for her “that old darkness” she feels she has to master and deny before she can enter safely, like a desexed nun, into the platonic bosom of the Thompson family; and her decision to marry the sensible, unexciting, and hypocritically delicate-minded Ferris Thompson, a man who does not even arouse her. She believes that if he is above such a dirty thing as sex, then she can master her own libidinous impulses and thus live a “mysteriously better life.”²⁹ Ferris, she thinks, represents the antithesis of the loose and terrible sexual behavior that she is alarmed to find around her and even in her own ardent lovemak-ing (she once let Christie play with her breasts). Being almost sexless, Ferris would, consequently, be “good.” In due course she Page 62  |  Top of Articlemarries him, despite intelligent advice to the contrary, and she goes to live in the prissily inane household of domineering Mother Thompson, “a small, bow-legged woman who looked ... a good deal like an anxious hen searching for a spot to drop an overdue egg” (Diggers, 136), and whose notion of housekeeping includes blowing dust from corners by means of a midget bellows.

Shocked at hearing of Cate’s nuptials, the salesman gets drunk, he is taken in by Sylvy, and the two are soon betrothed. Now that Cate has made a mess of her life she at last realizes that she hates her husband and wants Christie instead. And so she lures Christie to her with a letter. The plan almost works, except that he chances to visit Link at the poor farm first, where he loses his life trying to rescue livestock from the barn set afire by Mary Abel. His death leaves a guilt-stricken Cate, who somehow has to apportion the blame and perhaps learn from wise John Manlief the right way to love.

The story is clearly a tragedy about an admirable young woman who refuses to trust the honest dictates of her heart because of a mistaken notion about virtue – her “tragic flaw” is an error of judgment – and who consequently brings calamity on herself and her true love. As in Emily Bronte’s equally strange Wuthering Heights, a passionate girl learns too late that she has married the wrong man. Here in The Witch Diggers is perhaps the most tightly knitted and carefully worked-out tragedy that West gave us. From the death symbols at the beginning, all the way through to the conflagration, we feel a dark inevitability at work. The high point of mischief is the mistaken marriage, the death of love, aptly symbolized by the cooking of the goose named Eros. It is only a step further to the death of the lover himself. The witch diggers, who are on one level simply bizarre symbols of the mad quest for happiness in which Cate and Christie are to suffer, become in this intricately plotted novel agents of the catastrophe at the end.

The sources of The Witch Diggers are interesting mainly insofar as they demonstrate how little of actuality West chose to work with.³⁰ She made no interviews in or near North Vernon, she said, and she studied the administrations of none of the poor farm superintendents following MacManaman (she had never even heard of his immediate successors, O. M. Amick and Albert Ochs, until I told her about them). She admits having examined, during a visit at the poor farm, some nineteenth-century account books and having copied Page 63  |  Top of Articlefrom them a few things such as “prices, items bought . . . whiskey, horse collars, rag carpets, etc.,” along with some names of people associated with the asylum. On page 50 of the notebook used at the time, there is a list of the inmates’ names; comparison with the list on page 169 of the novel shows that West used three of them in altered form and three in unaltered form. Of these characters only one, Lily Bias, is engaged in any significant role. And where did the Conboy name come from? Although listed on the same page of the notebook as the other names – “Conboy for threshing 406 bu wheat 18.27” -the surname in the book derives from the author’s childhood when she heard her mother speak of going shopping at the “Conboy’s,” a country store in the Butlerville area.

Equally tenuous are other “facts” from the external world:

All else in the novel was imagined – but this means practically everything.

And what an imagination! It runs into a riot of low comedy at times, as at the funeral service in the cemetery when the venereal Hoxie Fifield, tricked by an inmate into daubing his loins with turpentine, races toward the group while doing awesome aerial stunts. Some may object to this mixture of the comic and the macabre. Shakespeare, however, found humor in a graveyard, and theater audiences have been praising the scene in Hamlet ever since. William Faulkner’s novels, praised by just about everybody these days, show several instances of grim humor. In general, West’s humor succeeds well when she handles low types (she never treats of upperclass life anyway), almost as if remembering the advice of Henry Fielding in Tom Jones, who says that “the highest life is much the dullest” and that “the various callings in lower spheres produce the great variety of humorous characters.”

Even though the story never flags in human interest, never descends into mere sentimentality, and has merits beyond what this brief study reports, it does not move the reader to the pitch of emotional involvement that the greatest literature does, as for instance Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Honoré de Balzac’s La Cousine Bette. But most of the superior novels we read in a lifetime also do not reach that level. Witch Diggers is a first novel, and it is a superbly structured one at that; the first novels of several authors far more famous than West do not even come close to her achievement here.

The search for happiness theme is about as universal as any found among the acknowledged classics. Granting that West stops short of offering neat answers, the reader never doubts that what she is describing is a moral universe in which there is some kind of intelligent answer to human problems, though the answer may be as difficult to find as if the Devil himself had buried it in the bowels of the earth. With Jessamyn West, love is the divining rod for finding such answers.

She wrote Witch Diggers, she claims, “in an effort to become an ‘honest woman,’” for she believed that Friendly Persuasion was not sufficiently realistic – not typical of the impoverished and backward region of southern Indiana. Hence the novel, a better book as far as she was concerned, would balance the account.³²

That great dame of American letters, Eudora Welty, in one of the warmest of the predominantly favorable reviews of Witch Diggers, Page 65  |  Top of Articleremarked that the fault of each character lies in his inarticulateness – “from whence stems his fate and his disaster.” This observation makes a good deal of sense if it is limited to the Conboy family. Welty also mentioned that West created characters that are “alive and vividly struggling, explained fully”; nonetheless, the touch of mystery remains that surrounds real-life persons.³³ W. E. Wilson thought that the author fell a little short of the high mark set by her previous book, and this statement is about as severe as any of the critics made.³⁴ As could be expected, the Quaker press, in fact Quakers in general, tended to ignore the novel; maybe they felt that, if they looked the other way long enough, West might reconsider this new direction her craft was taking and come out with another quaint, innocuous, clean, untroubled idyll about the Quaker past – and she did, almost two decades later. Meanwhile, some of her other work would become increasingly realistic.

Witch Diggers did not sell well, and the reason is not easy to find. Surely the reason is not simply that it “wasn’t dirty enough,” as West explained with facetious bitterness.³⁵ It could be that she had already created too indelibly the image of herself as the graceful, poetic Quaker who writes with a Constable-like lovingness only of the beautiful nineteenth-century past, of childhood, of racehorses, and of other pleasant things.

An Experiment in Operetta

Hardly had Friendly Persuasion begun to grace the bookstores in 1945 when Raoul Péne duBois read a few pages of it and decided that this Californian would be the very person to write the words and lyrics to a musical he had in mind about Jean Jacques (John James) Audubon. West accepted his commission to do the work, for the artist-naturalist in her felt a kinship with the Haitian ornithologist whose portraits of American birds are among the nonpareils of rustic art. Her interests in this figure and in Thoreau would merge in the study of nature and the love of freedom and life in the rough. DuBois arranged for the music to be written by Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Kubik.

By July of the following year West’s labor was mostly done.³⁶ DuBois, as an independent New York theatrical producer, doubtless had in mind the spatial resources of the large Broadway stage: “He Page 66  |  Top of Articletold me not to hold back,” West explained years later on the eve of the world premiere, “because he would handle anything sceni-cally.”³⁷ His expansive instruction probably harmed the work by ignoring that need, evident now, to compress certain huge scenes and instill unity, yet with orders to restrain herself, she might very well have refused the commission. The canvases turned out to be big – wagon train, river flatboat, forests – and the story embraced several ingredients of the Hollywood formula film. The operetta interested a film company enough for it to invest $100,000 in attempting its production, but the company finally abandoned the project because of formidable production problems.³⁸ The piece as brought out in 1948 by West’s usual publisher, Harcourt, Brace, contained illustrations by duBois himself and carried the title A Mirror for the Sky.³⁹ Although the subtitle carries the word opera, the work was delivered at its first performance under the label of “musical drama.” A purist, however, might insist that Mirror for the Sky is properly an “operetta” because it is an amusing if somewhat sentimental play stressing spectacle and a happy ending, delivered with spoken dialogue, loose plot, arias, choruses, and dances.

Mirror for the Sky conveys a romantic story in 15 scenes that depict the love life and artistic struggle of Audubon against a background of the American wilderness from 1808 to 1841. The work treats his courtship of Lucy Blakewell (historically, Bakewell), daughter of well-to-do parents, of which the father seems to like Audubon but cannot forgive him his poverty, whereas the mother treats him with unqualified disdain; the almost incredible faith and patience of Lucy following their marriage as she endures frontier hardships and defends her husband against charges of idleness and nonsupport; Audubon’s refusal to compromise and become a well-paid portrait painter in Philadelphia; and, last, his belated recognition and fame.

It should come as no surprise that book reviewers disagreed about the merits of this work, for being unable to listen to or read the music or see the stage spectacle poses special difficulties. A sensitive critic would surely enjoy reading some of the songs even though he or she did not know the tunes. A good example is the witty song in act 1, scene 5 sung by Wayland Platter.

The stage production came about practically by accident. Horace W. Robinson, the director of the University Theater at the University of Oregon, chanced on a copy of the play in a secondhand Page 67  |  Top of Articlebookstore and wrote to Gail Kubik to learn about the music. About six years later Robinson and his committee decided to present a mammoth public performance on 23 and 24 May 1958, in the large field house called McArthur Court on the university campus. This would be not only the biggest stage show in the history of Eugene, Oregon, but the first time the university had tried a work never before presented on the stage. McArthur Court could seat an audience of 5,000 and have room for the 250-voice University Chorus, the 62-member University-Eugene Symphony Orchestra, and a cast of 32 actors and 69 extras, not to mention dozens of production and business personnel along with a profusion of stage properties.

Chosen to play Audubon was a graduate student named Phil Green, a baritone who had experience in dozens of musical comedies and operettas and who had also sung with the Robert Shaw Chorale and the American Opera Society. An undergraduate with experience in summer theater work, Josephine Verri, would play Lucy.

Despite insufficient time for rehearsals, the operetta opened on the evening of 23 May as planned. The extensive publicity and promotion of this work in the local newspaper, on television and radio, and by fliers and letters brought in about 3,000 customers for the opening performance; also seated in the audience were Jessamyn West and Gail Kubik.

Perhaps it was just as well that no professional dramatic critic was present. After the intermission, vacant seats were “very obvious,” according to one customer who was shocked at how the Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard in its review the next day played down the shortcomings of the entertainment.⁴⁰ One person there, supposedly exceedingly knowledgeable about dramas, had this to say: “It was a bomb. It was ill-fated because of the place (McArthur Court . . . where it was staged). The extraordinary nature of the production tended to de-emphasize the story and emphasize the spectacle.”⁴¹

To Horace Robinson, one of the principal criticisms offered by patrons was the difficulty in following the story, in keeping the characters straight, and in understanding their relationships. He adds that the music was “magnificent,” but, being quite modern and sophisticated, it was not especially suited to the rustic quality of the libretto, which is surely a period piece. Moreover, in the production Page 68  |  Top of Articlethe music and libretto tried to “out do each other in terms of time and in terms of consequence.” Having watched the premiere, West allegedly confessed to Robinson that she, too, was dissatisfied with her piece and knew some ways to improve it.⁴² Insofar as is known to me, the operetta has never been repeated elsewhere, although the Roger Wagner Chorale has employed some of the songs in its programs.

One criticism of Robinson’s is particularly valid: The lack of continuity. Any reader of the book can see that Audubon and Lucy are quickly swallowed up by the spectacle of the great American wilderness, its colorful humor, its singing, its restless movement of flatboat and wagon train. Not all of the scenes are essential; and taken as a whole the scenes do not contribute toward any single dramatic action but instead relate to a whole lifetime of artistic perseverance and wifely fidelity. It is the kind of story best suited for a novel or motion picture.

Circe at Whitewater

West’s novel Leafy Rivers⁴³ is alluded to in the writing notebook as an entry written down some 15 or 20 years before. The entry reads simply: “A story in the past – the woman who drove the pigs.” Even before she had completed the manuscript, West was placing less value on it than on, say, A Matter of Time,⁴⁴ which is covered later in connection with the California items. In Leafy Rivers Indiana provides the main setting, but Ohio figures in the opening and closing scenes.

Using the omniscient point of view for her narrative, the author tells us that buxom young Leafy is about to give birth to her first child at her mother’s home in Blue Grass, Ohio, where she is visiting for a few weeks before returning home with her husband to their Indiana homestead. Only Leafy knows that the father of the child is not her husband.

While waiting and waiting for Leafy’s “wood colt” to get born -it will be a difficult birth – we slip back into 1816 and follow Leafy and her husband, Reno Rivers, into the Hoosier state where they run a pig farm for a year while endeavoring to make the place pay for itself. Their Whitewater landlord, the widower-sheriff Simon Yanders, falls in love with Leafy and dares to kiss her one day, and when a Page 69  |  Top of Articledebt becomes overdue and the sheriff tries to enforce payment by seizing their livestock, she locks him in the barn, steals his horse, and sets out alone to drive the pigs to Cincinnati, where she will sell them to pay off their debt.

Along the trail the herd roots out a nest of snakes, the old Edenic symbol of sin. Like the stolen kiss, the snakes represent an appropriate foreshadowing of fallen virtue. A storm soon makes Leafy take shelter in a fancy covered wagon, actually a boudoir on wheels, owned by a drover named Cashie Wade, whose mistress she soon becomes. As controller of pigs Leafy now takes on the role of Circe. Hanging just beneath the wagon is a wire-enclosed pen for carrying sick pigs: it is no accident in this thickly symbolic story that the bed of adultery lies just a squeal away from the bed of swine.⁴⁵

Through the sexual embraces of this backwoods Lothario, Leafy gets sexually awakened; we are supposed to believe that all this rutting along the pig traces satisfies her need for variety – especially after she gets pregnant for her efforts – and enables her to become more loving as a wife. Leafy learns from her mistakes, however, that the sexual act does not constitute love in the true sense and that, if Cashie can embrace her so readily, he can do so with almost any woman.

Having thus compromised her heroine, the author now begins to keep a balance sheet as if determined that Yanders, who had shoplifted a kiss from the girl, and Cashie, who had robbed the store, must each pay a penalty. The cuckolded Reno, back at Whitewater, at last shows his enterprise by galloping out to search for his wife despite his dangerously infected foot. The lame foot suggests the crippled god Vulcan, whose wife, Venus, betrayed him continually. Reno almost kills himself in the derring-do but is rescued by Sheriff Yanders, whom Leafy’s little brother Offie had freed from the barn, and then rides to Cincinnati stretched out in Cashie’s own wagon -ironically, even lying in the very same feathered bed his wife had warmed more than once in dalliance.

While we learn these adventures, the baby continues to show a Tristram Shandy-like reluctance in getting born. And Leafy’s brother Chancellor discovers that his life’s calling is to be a preacher (reminding us of Orpha’s brother in The Life I Really Lived).

Chancellor’s voluptuous girlfriend, Venese, is the most luridly drawn of all the characters; just as Cashie tempts Leafy into adultery, Page 70  |  Top of ArticleVenese tempts Chancellor into fornication. This young woman whets her appetite for meeting her lover by encouraging delayed absences, by putting up temporary barriers to their love, by deliberately arousing his jealousy. And Chancellor enjoys the “chanceyness” (the author’s word)⁴⁶ of these sylvan encounters – that is, until she takes what is for us the unbelievable step of arranging to be caught naked in the presence of another suitor just so that she can pique her boyfriend’s appetite. One gets the feeling that Venese’s function is mainly to spice up the Blue Grass phase of the story and make the erring Leafy seem by comparison the soul of abstinence.

Venese, who likes to woo secluded in a bower of fox grapes, with the fruit “hanging down for the taking .. . sweet and tangy once you got past their skins” (Leafy, 13), clearly suggests by name, by her rendezvous, and by her mode of pleasure the role of Venus. By every endowment she is well fitted to keep a love affair, or a marriage, from growing monotonous. Of all the West heroines she comes closest to deserving the tribute that Shakespeare’s Enobarbus pays to Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.” Still, Venese is no deceiving adventuress but a faithful backwoods belle. That she is attracted to a fellow about to don the sober garb of the ministry may make some readers skeptical. But ever since Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale of The Scarlet Letter, the reading public has been discovering that preachers are also human. Bernard De Voto in his Mark Twain’s America tells of the sexual freedom on the frontier and of the correlation between camp meetings and the rush of marriages that followed for the next three months. In the light of history Venese and Chancellor are not, then, unusual in their behavior.

West evidently wanted us not to compare Chancellor to Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry – the lad is too goodhearted and too serious for that – but instead to find him uninhibited and virile, in contrast with his colorless brother-in-law, Reno. Chancellor’s religious profession should come as no surprise to anyone, for the frontier church in early America offered one of the few opportunities a young man could have for the exercise of power and influence. We are led to believe that he and his girlfriend will soon abandon their little prayer meetings in the grape bower, for he tells her that she will have to get herself “saved” just as he did.

In one intriguingly symbolic scene Chancellor happens on Venese lying on the school ground one day in the midst of students; her dress is being used as a tablecloth; and she, playing out a game, allows the students to “set” her body with victuals from lunch baskets as if she were a table. Unconsciously aware of erotic significance here – her body, so to speak, a banquet spread out for the generality – Chancellor jerks her to her feet. After all, her last name is Lucey (loosey).

When the child is born, jealous Reno mistakenly believes that Yanders is the father. This is one of several ironies in the final chapters. Cashie is actually the father, no doubt about it. But because the truth about the paternity is not so explicitly set forth as some readers might desire (some reviewers surely misunderstood), the following bit of interior monologue from Leafy might help: “Everybody here tonight but Reno himself, who said the words that I [Leafy] had to hear, ready to claim the credit for what those October nights [with Cashie] along the trace produced” (Leafy, 302). Translated, this means that various people mistakenly believe that they helped the most in the safe delivery of the child, but Leafy knows that the major help came when Reno assured her that he would stay devoted despite her fall from grace.

Among the arresting features of the novel must be counted the double names and name changes. Cashie Wade is also known as Olin; he is dissatisfied with both names; by extension, he is dissatisfied with both of his selves; and he wants to get a new name. Leafy, who turns over a new leaf at the end of the story, is for once able to make up her mind and demands to be known as Mary Pratt. Offie matures enough to want to be called Howard. Prill, the mother, who also undergoes changes in the story, is sometimes called by her girlhood name, Aprilla. Even Dr. Daubenheyer, who delivers our heroine’s baby, has another name, June. Reno and Bass neither look for a change in themselves nor make one; their names, accordingly, are fixed. Chancellor, more so the master of himself than the other figures, has no desire to be called anything else.⁴⁷

West takes realism to greater lengths in Leafy Rivers than is usual for her. It is almost as if she were trying harder than ever to purge herself of the reputation of being the author of a sweet, charming, innocent Quakerism of the “theeing” and “thouing” variety. For instance, Leafy’s Quaker family, aptly named the Converses, are of Page 72  |  Top of Articlequite another variety than the Birdwells. They have no characteristic manner of speech or dress, voice no pacifist convictions, avoid no physical conflict, and undergo no persecutions as a religious group or even speak of them. Like the Baptists, they attend evangelist camp meetings of the Holy Roller vintage. Protestant groups on the early American frontier often became fundamentalist and revivalist, no matter what their original denomination; one reason for this similarity is owing to their common use of meeting facilities, which happens to be the case in Leafy Rivers.

West could hardly claim originality for the theme of a wife’s sexual awakening by proxy, especially since Kate Chopin used it earlier in her novel The Awakening, and pulp novels and films have exploited it for so long that by now it is a cliché. Even the sensational subject matter did not prevent the sales from being disappointing (Farmer, 31).

Regrettably, the writer did not endow Leafy with that richness of humanity making Lib Conboy and Cress Delahanty so alive in their books that one truly cares what happens to them. It is true that West did not have to admire her figures in order to portray them well; still, such admiration did seem to help, at least with the leading females.

John T. Flanagan, writing around 1971 before Massacre at Fall Creek came along, was correct in saying that Leafy Rivers is Jessamyn West’s “most successful book structurally [up to that time], but it. . . is complicated by the intentional alternations of place and time” (Flanagan, 305) that might cause the reader to lose patience. Flanagan here goes on to admit, however, that the author achieves “a magnificent sense of place” in the vividly selected details about the woods and farm life in Indiana (306). What one also notices in this novel is the technical skill: the clever symbols, the parallelisms, and the multiple and interlocking plots, all of which are smoothly resolved. The novel gives the effect of a tour de force, calculated and brilliant, cerebral rather than emotionally appealing.

The ending is so “professional,” as Joan Joffe Hall objects, that it suggests the influence of formula writing, though Hall does not go so far as to say that. “It’s ‘professional’ in a bad sense too,” she continues, “for she strains to tie up loose threads in a tidy ending.”⁴⁸ The ragged edges of life should have been left intact.

One is tempted to blame West’s stints in Hollywood for the clichés and slick writing that turn up in Leafy Rivers. Indeed, some Page 73  |  Top of Articleof the characteristics of the formula film are only too evident here: Each of the major characters has a problem that is resolved at the end; the setting is interestingly different; there is wilderness adventure; there is even some violence, which goes counter to West’s usual practice. Sex rears its head in two parallel love plots, one (Chancellor-Venese) to satisfy those looking for the storm-tossed adventures of fornication leading safely into the harbor of marriage, and the other (Cashie-Leafy) to satisfy those looking for the thrills of hell-raising adultery in which the deceived husband, mirabile dictu, forgives all at the end. Of course, the “villains” are finally made to pay or to reform a little, and the values of the unbroken marriage are reaffirmed at last.

Frontier Justice

In 1975 appeared The Massacre at Fall Creek, a narrative dealing with the currently popular subject of the white man’s treatment of the Indian on the American frontier.⁴⁹ No doubt West’s claim to having Indian blood made the topic appealing to her. The place in this, her only historical novel, is once again Indiana. Nearly two decades earlier West had found in Oliver Hampton Smith’s Early Indiana Trials and Sketches⁵⁰ a little-known reference to a backwoods massacre wherein five white men had murdered nine Indians who were camped along Fall Creek. Unfortunately for West the researcher (she never enjoyed doing research anyway), fire had long ago destroyed the scene of the trial, namely the Pendleton courthouse, together with its official records. As she reports in an epilogue to the novel, she was able to find only “some [few] scanty [eyewitness] accounts of the trials and executions,” some of these contradictory, published by public figures long after the main incident was over. Of the five historic figures referred to in the story, only three of them make an appearance, and briefly at that: James Brown Ray, the governor of Indiana; Colonel John Johnston, the Indian agent for the Northwest Territory; and James Noble, the prosecuting lawyer. All the principal figures in the story are imaginary.

What West learned was that in 1824 an amazing “first” happened in American law. Four white men were actually brought to trial on a charge of first-degree murder for the slaughter of nine Indians, most of them women and children. The Indians had posed no threat; nor Page 74  |  Top of Articlehad they committed any crime. The trial would not, however, have taken place had not Colonel Johnston insisted on it, pointing out that the surrounding Indian tribes threatened mass reprisals if justice were not done. One ticklish matter is that the accused whites were being tried for doing what had hitherto come naturally to them for generations as part of their Manifest Destiny – sweeping the Sénecas steadily westward, grabbing their lands, and killing them, much as one would kill rattlesnakes or wolves. Moreover, for these other killings the whites came to be admired in their circles as brave Indian fighters making the frontier safe for the settlers, heroic defenders of the Christian faith against the heathenish redskin. John Wood, one of the accused in the novel, exemplifies the problem: “From his cradle to now, the old man [Wood] had heard talk of moving west. Presidents had talked about it. Jefferson had sent Lewis and Clark to open the way. . . . Preachers spoke of the West as if it was the Promised Land. But there was no way to go west and live without killing Indians” (Massacre, 347). And this bloody practice would continue long after the Pendleton trial was over, until in 1890 the U.S. Cavalry outdid itself in brutality by murdering more than 200 unresisting men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.⁵¹

Although the main emphasis in The Massacre at Fall Creek is on the trial followed by the hanging of the guilty, the central character, 17-year-old Hannah Cape, provides us, as Kay Kinsella Rout observes, with an “excellent focus” for the moral issues. We see much of the action from her point of view, while “her youthfulness and her awkward indecisiveness about her sexuality serve as analogues for a new country’s attempts to reconcile its opposing values of Christianity and Indian hating.”⁵² Other parts of the story are told through the letters that Hannah’s lover, the lawyer Charlie Fort, sends back to his father for publication in the Cincinnati Western Spy, just as the historical Oliver Hampton Smith sent his account of the trial off to the Indianapolis Daily Journal.

Hannah, the tall, sturdy, redheaded daughter of a preacher, has a crush on a sensitive but psychotic neighbor boy called Johnny Wood, who, driven by his sneering stepmother to prove his manliness, joins his father and three other bigots in shooting Indians camped out on Fall Creek. Their object is to prevent further encroachment on the white settlements. As Johnny confesses later in court, the half-breed squaw Wide Eyes pleaded with him for her life Page 75  |  Top of Articleby ripping open her dress and showing him her breasts in order to prove that she was as white as he was, but the crazy boy thinks this melodramatic gesture is obscene and threatening and so shoots her once in each breast. As Rout tells us, Johnny’s “fervent religiosity is his shield against his vulnerability to women, as was [sic] his indifference to all reality outside the cover of a book” (8). Johnny’s confederates do equally atrocious things such as swinging a helpless child around and splintering his head against a tree. Clasby, the ringleader of these marauders, escapes capture until the end of the story.

Thanks to the instigation of the Indian agent, Colonel Johnston, all the murderers save Clasby are rounded up and jailed to await trial. The passionate young lawyer Charlie Fort is chosen to head the defense; his insensitive and social-climbing rival for the hand of Hannah, one O. A. Dilk, will aid in the prosecution. Meanwhile leaders from various Indian tribes in the region assemble at Pendleton to see whether the whites will punish the offenders. Their implied threat of retaliation looms like a red cloud over the remainder of the story and helps add suspense. West is careful to individualize these Indian leaders, not only by tribe, dress, and name but by attitude toward capital punishment. Her Indian hero Black Antler, for instance, opposes the death penalty under any circumstances; as a result, many Of the whites and most of the Indians shun him. Nevertheless, he remains one of the most admirable even if not well developed figures in the story.

The whites too are not of one mind about punishing their own but realize that unless they try the killers and mete out justice, they stand to forfeit their own lives in the thinly defended settlements. It is a measure of white justice in those days that had the massacre occurred in the settled and safe region of Indianapolis, the accused would never have been brought to trial, or at least never convicted.

This story contains no true heroes and heroines, because, as Farmer writes, “courage and cowardice, love and hate, guilt and innocence are too closely entwined in each of the characters, just as they are in life” (Farmer, 32). Nor are there any out-and-out villains. This is true not merely because the author found it difficult (as she says) to portray genuine evil but also because she went to some trouble to create a balanced point of view consistent with the way our pioneer forebears actually thought and behaved in the crude Page 76  |  Top of Articlenew society being built on the fringe of the wilderness. In so doing West creates humanized people who differ in their personalities, their religious beliefs, and, most of all, their conditioning by the habits and perils of the frontier. She tries to show us all sides of what we would now call criminal behavior, how justice can be ambiguous (more on this later), and how in this mixed-up world so full of cruelty we should at least practice mercy.

Among the accused now in jail, the fiery and blasphemous George Benson has killed Indians by habit rather than malice, sees absolutely no wrong in what he has done, and rages indignant that the cowering townspeople will not break him out of jail. John Wood, Sr., outwardly a hypocrite for taking refuge in the Bible after his bloody deeds, at least admits his guilt. His life story serves as an epitome of what must have happened to many a frontiersman in that day: At last he recognizes that he was heading toward the gallows all along, since he first bought New York State land swindled from the Indians; headed into the West for easy money and free land (nothing to do, everyone said, but clear it and kill Indians); and married his hate-filled wife, Reba, whom he could not handle and who finally corrupted him and his son, now in jail too.

The most sympathetically drawn villain is the former Indian fighter and now loving family man Luther Bemis, who could have avoided arrest after he had cut the throat of Red Cloud, but who follows his code of honor by turning himself in to the sheriff. Although he confesses his guilt and repents, the wonder is that his so-called Christian principles had allowed him to murder in the first place. Later on he escapes from jail to visit his newborn son, fully intending to return after he accomplishes this. Clasby, the least sympathetic figure, is the ringleader and moral coward of the group; he alone steals from his slain victims and takes off into the wilderness rather than face the consequences of his acts. We are told that the Indians finally catch up with Clasby and will wreak on him their own type of horrific revenge that is as natural to them as the white man’s hanging is peculiar: They will eat Clasby.

Rout remarks that the novel contains several moral ambiguities. Perhaps the greatest of these lies in what happens to young Johnny Wood, who was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to be hanged. It is easy to see justice in the hanging of the family men, Bemis, Benson, and the senior Wood, because they had the power to Page 77  |  Top of Articleact freely and then abused that power. But the case is quite otherwise with Johnny. His fellow prisoners had already been hanged and his turn is next. But at the last minute the Indiana governor rides in, as he did in history, and pardons Johnny. Obviously, the governor believes him to be mentally incompetent and therefore not responsible; even the Indians are satisfied with the atonement already exacted; and we, who read about this unfortunate lad, know he was the victim of his stepmother’s lust for land and power. As Rout reminds us, however, this was not an age of mental hospitals; consequently, the boy’s release marks a flaw in the code of justice based on compassion (Rout, 9). Johnny will now go out into the world unprovided for (unless his wicked stepmother takes him in, God forbid) and be free to commit another atrocity, if not on a harlot who invites him to bed, then on a coquette who displays too much of her leg or decolletage.

Incidentally, West agonized over writing the execution scene. Mary Ganz in her review of the novel quotes the author: “‘I thought I couldn’t write it,’ she said. ‘It would be all over, and they would have been hanged. Then I decided I had to.’ “⁵³

Another moral ambiguity turns up in Hannah’s relationship with Charlie Fort. After having sex with him she feels guilty and makes him promise to postpone any more such indulgence until after they are married; she concludes, paradoxically, that making love is not sinful but having a “woods colt” is. Charlie has violated the prohibitions of parents and society in debauching a 17-year-old girl, an act that the author does not ordinarily approve of even though many girls were supposed to have reached sexual maturity by that age, as witness the early marriages in those days. Apparently we are supposed to agree with Hannah that her fornication is forgivable because she and Charlie are going to be married. This is admittedly specious reasoning but it is not at all strange to the millions of young couples in America today who think nothing of engaging in premarital sex. In thus resolving the dilemma of what to do when the flesh will not wait, West manages to preserve the values of both premarital intercourse and a respectable social order following marriage (Rout, 6-7).

Certain improbabilities are likely to nag the reader. The main ones concern Luther Bemis, who, though suffering horribly from ruined knees and from gangrene brought on by freezing his feet, and doped up with draughts of opium, manages to have sex with his wife Page 78  |  Top of Articlein a crowded jail cell. Why sex now? He is actually bent on the pleasure of impregnating her with still another child, a little girl this time (he hopes), although they already have an infant boy whom this widow of a convicted murderer will have to support after he is dead. How she will manage financially or any other way after he is gone is a matter that neither one of them bothers to figure out. In this final reckless act of his, Bemis at least remains true to his essential wild-ness in not planning for the welfare of others.

Not only is the theme of the novel important, the characters vividly drawn for the most part, and the suspense admirably maintained from beginning to end, but we find here in abundance the flavor of rough and rugged frontier life. The author maintains a good balance between the two stories, Hannah’s love life versus the trial and hanging, neither one getting too much emphasis; moreover, she weaves the stories into a seamless whole by having Hannah and her lover take key roles in both of them. It is no wonder that Elisabeth Fisher, P. S. Prescott, and Joseph Marie Anderson all gave the novel highly favorable reviews.⁵⁴ Amid this chorus of praise the review in the New Yorker sounds imperceptive and perverse – there we read, oddly, that Massacre at Fall Creek is “heavy handed,” that the author should have written nonfiction instead, and that the heroine was “intended for the very young”⁵⁵ The book became a best-seller and was chosen as a Reader’s Digest Book Club selection and a Literary Guild main selection (Farmer 33).

West sold the film rights for $250,000 and the reprint rights for another $250,000 (Ganz, 28; my interview with Dr. McPherson).