F 521 148 VOL7 N02 - - - - INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Dianne J. Carunel, Seymour William E. Ervin, Hartford City Ralph D. Gray, Indianapolis Charles A. Johnson, Carmel H. Roll McLaughlin, Carmel Thomas M. Miller, Carmel Janet C. Moran, Hammond Ronald V. Morris, Lafayette Kathleen Stiso Mullins, South Bend Alan T. Nolan, Indianapolis, Chair Larry K. Pitts, Indianapolis William G. Prime, Madison Robert L. Reid, Evansville Evaline 1-1. Rhodehamel, Indianapolis, Vice President Frances Petty Sargent, Muncie Richard S. Simons, Marion John Martin Smith, Auburn, President Theodore L. Steele, Indianapolis P. R. Sweeney, Vincennes SLanley Warren, Indianapolis, Treasurer Michael L. Westfall, Fremonl

ADMIN ISTRATION Peter T. Harstad, Executive Director Raymond L. Shoemaker, Administrative Director Annabelle J.Jackson, Controller Susan P. Brown, Human Resources Director Carolyn S. Smith, Membership Secretary

DIVISI ON DIRECTORS

Bruce L. Johnson, Library Thomas K. Krasean, Community Relations Thomas A. Mason, Publications Robert M. laylorJr., Education

TRACES OF INDIANA AND MIDWESTERN HISTORl' Thomas A. Mason, Executive Editor J. Kent Calder, Managing Editor Megan L. McKee, Editor Kathleen M. Breen, Editorial Assistant George R. Hanlin, Editorial Assistant

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Ray E. Boomhower Douglas E. Clanin Paula J. Corpuz Ruth Dorrel

PHOTOGRAPHY Kim Charles Ferrill, Photographer Susan L. S. Sutton, Coordinator

EDITORIAL BOARD RichardJ. M. Blackett, Indiana University, Bloomington Edward E. Breen, Marion Chronicle-Tribune James T. Callaghan, Indianapolis Andrew R. L. Cayton, Miami University David E. Dawson, Indianapolis Robert L. Gildea, lndianapolis Ralph D. Gray, Indiana University, Indianapolis James J-1. Madison, Indiana University, Bloomington Richard S. Simons, Marion

DESIG N Lloyd Brooks & Company R. Lloyd Brooks, An Director

TYPOGRAPHY Weimer Graphics, Inc.

PRINTING

Shepard Poorman Communications Corp. Editors' Page 3 APR :i 0 1995

"I'll Have to Ask Indianapolis" INDIANA HISTORICAL WILLIAM STYRON SOCIETY LIBRARY 1lf Ordeal and Renewal: David Laurance Chambers, Hiram Haydn, and Lie Down in Darkness ) KENT CALDE R 2lf "Alwaxs the Other S�ringi": The L{je and Nature Writing of Edwin Way Te ale CATHERINE E FORREST WEBER 3 6 Des tination Indiana: The Joh n Hay Home RAY BOOMHOWER 3 8 The Cou n tr y Con tributor: Rockville's Juliet V Stra us.s RAY BOOMHOWER lf 8 Focus: The Theodore Dreiser Papers ) KENT CALDER

FRON T COVER: IN 1967 WILLIAM ST YRON VISITED THE CAPRON, VIRGINIA, FARM HOUSE WHERE NAT TURNER'S DEADLY UP RISING BE GAN IN 1831.

STYRON WON THE 1968 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION FOR THE (ONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER. TED POLUMBAUM, LIFE MAGAZ INE, © TIME INC. IN SIDE FRONT COVER: SUBJUGATION, THE MEM ORIAL STATUE TO )ULlET V. STRAUSS AT TURKEY RUN STATE PA RK. INDIANA STATE LIBRARY.

ABOVE: PH O TOGRAPH OF A WINTER SCENE BY EDWIN WAY TEALE. COURTESY, EDWIN WAY TEALE PAPERS,

UNIVERSITY OF CONNEC TICUT LIBRARIES, STORRS. © UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT.

BACK COVER: COURTESY, EDWIN WAY TEALE PAPERS, UNIVERSITY OF CON ECTICUT LIBRARIES, STORRS. © UN IVERSI TY OF CONNECT ICU T 2 TRACES Swall ow ing the Canar· y

PRINC AS I SAT IN THE make concessions. He did not make them easily, however. My essay on AUDIENCE AT NORT H CENTRAL HIGH SC HOOL IN INDIANAPOLIS IN Chambers and Styron's editor Hiram Haydn is presented as a complement ANTICIPAT ION OF LISTENING TO A� TA LK BY WiLLIAM STYRON, I to Styron's memoir. This entire issue is devoted to lit­ CLUTC HED A COPY OF HIS FIRST NOVEL, LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS, WHICH erary topics. Indiana, of course, has a long and distinguished literary his­ WA S PUBLISHED BY THE IN DIANAPOLIS FIRM OF BOBBS-MERRILL IN 1951. tory that is well known or at least Styron had come to town under the Styron's fate was actually Chambers. familiar to most Hoosiers. Many, auspices of the Indianapolis-Marion Later that evening, I asked the however, may find something new in County Public Library Foundation author if he had any plans for pub­ Catherine Weber's story about the to deliver its annual Marian McFad­ lishing the lecture, which deals not career of Edwin Way Te ale, who den Lecture, and I, like hundreds of only with the publication of his first grew up at the edge of the Indiana others in attendance, was hoping to novel but also with the value of dunes and became the first nature acquire the author's autograph. My libraries and the dangers of censor­ writer to win a Pulitzer Prize. Ray chances were particularly good, ship. He said that he had no such Boomhower provides a profile of however, because Cathy Gibson, the plans, so I asked all assembled to Indiana's Country Contributor,

library staff member in charge of consider Tr aces as an outlet. When Juliet V. Strauss, whose columns arranging the lecture, had asked me the librarians expressed enthusiasm advocating traditional roles for and my wife to meet a group of peo­ for the idea, Styron reached into women reached a national audience ple, including then library director the inside pocket of his jacket, in the pages of the Ladies ' Home jour­ Ray Gnat and Styron, for dinner pulled out the handwritten text, nal between 1893 and 1918. Writing

afterward. Here, I thought, I would and handed it to me. I nearly at a time when Indiana authors dom­ be able to query the author about fainted. Tr ying not to look too inated the national literary scene the circumstances surrounding the much like the cat who swallowed with poems and romantic tales that publication of Lie Down in Darkness. the canary, I steered the conversa­ espoused wholesome midwestern

I had recently received a small tion to another topic before Styron values, Strauss fit in well with the grant to research David Laurance had a chance to change his mind. other Golden Age authors. Chambers, who served Bobbs-Merrill He did not change his mind, and Indiana's Golden Age of literature in various capacities for fifty-five his essay presented in this issue is an exerted its gravitational pull on years, ending his career as chairman eloquent testament to the impor­ Chambers and even Styron, and it of the board in 1958 with the sale of tance of maintaining freedom of continues to influence the state's the firm. As president in 1950 expression in society through the writers and editors, whether they Chambers maintaine.d tight control publication and distribution of are inspired by sympathy with the of the firm's trade department, and books. Styron's tale about the efforts tradition or by resistance to it. The I knew Styron could not have pub­ of Bobbs-Merrill's home office to most interesting writing and pub­ lished this novel without dealing soften his language reflects the chal­ lishing about Indiana, however, is with him. As Styron's talk unfolded lenges faced by the midwestern pub­ comprised of mixtures of these two that night, I realized that the bulk lisher in its efforts to accommodate responses. That's what we hope of it dealt with the very question a rapidly changing literary climate. you'll find here. that I intended to ask. I also real­ Even such a staunch advocate of the ). KENT CALDER ized that the "Indianapolis" deciding genteel tradition as Chambers had to Managing Edito r

Spriug i995 3 4 TRACES I'll Have to Ask IndianapOlis •

WIL LIAM ST YRON DE LIVE RED THE

INDIA NA POLIS-MARION COUNT Y PU BLIC LIBR ARY

FOUNDATION' S SE VENT EENTH ANNUA L MA RIAN

McFA DDEN MEMORIA L LECTUR E ON

14 APRIL 1994.

Jm very happy to be in Indianapolis especially under the auspices of this very fine

library. This is my first trip to your city, whose iden­

tity in the past has been most real to me as the

hometown of my good friend Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt

has often spoken to me with affection of Indianapo­

lis, and I hope that this evening I won't commit any

major gaffes or mishaps or otherwise disgrace him.

I William Styronl

© 1994 WILLIAM STYRON

Spri11g 1995 5 WILLIAM STYRON !though this is my first visit to Indianapolis,

there was a time in my · e when Indianapolis figured very large as an influ­ ence on me, and I'd like to explain the connection. About two hundred years ago-it was 1951, to be exact-I finished my first novel, Lie Down in Darkness. In those post-World War II years there was a reverent, I should say almost wor­ shipful, aura that surrounded the writing and publishing of novels. This is not to say that even today the novel as a literary form has lost cachet or distinction (though there are critics who would argue that position) but in those days to be a young novelist was a little like being a rock star in our time. The grand figures of the previous generation-Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell-were still very much alive, and we young hopefuls were determined to emulate these heroes and stake our claim to literary glory. The first among the newcomers to make his mark was Tr uman Capote, whose brilliant tales and lovely novel Other Voices, Other Rooms filled me, his I WROTE THE exact contemporary, with inordinate envy. Then soon after this came The Na ked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, a writer of such obvious and prodigious FIRST PA GES OF gifts that it took the breath away. Following on Mailer's triumph was James Jones's monumental From He re to Eternity, which was quickly succeeded by that LTE DOWN IN DARKNESS classic which forever crystallized the soul of the American adolescent, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. I don't think it was vainglory on my part, as WHILE I WA S LIVING I was writing my own novel and was watching these fine books appear one after another, to consider myself an authentic member of the same generation IN NEW YORK CIT Y and to want to make Lie Down in Darkness a worthy companion to those works. I wrote the first pages of Lie Down in Darkness while I was living in New IN THE BA SEMENT York City in the basement of a brownstone on upper Lexington Avenue. It was the winter of 1947. I was twenty-three years old and had just been fired OF A BROWNST ONE from my job as junior editor with the McGraw Hill Book Company-a fiasco I described much later in another book of mine, Sophie's Choice. There was a ON UPPE R blizzard raging outside-it's still memorialized in weather annals as the greatest New York blizzard of the century-and those opening pages were LEXINGTON AVENUE . pages written in passion and in the incomparable assurance of youth, and were never later touched or revised. After the blizzard subsided I had a stack IT WA S THE WINT ER of manuscript pages and a burning desire to see them amplified with a full­ fledged novel. But I sensed that I needed guidance and, even more than OF 1947. guidance, encouragement. I had heard of a lively and interesting class in fic­ tion writing at the New School for Social Research, and I enrolled in this class, conducted by an engaging, scholarly teacher named Hiram Haydn. Haydn was the ideal preceptor for a writing course, strict and no-nonsense regarding the substance of one's text, quick to detect softness or sloppiness or sentimentality, yet eager to find and nurture those radiant beams of true tal­ ent that occasionally appear in such a class. I was enormously pleased when I realized that he liked my work and, beyond that, thrilled that through him I was able to establish a publishing connection. For, as it turned out, Haydn had just been bired as New York editor of the Indianapolis-based house of Bobbs-Merrill. It also turned out that he had been given the authority to sign up for book contracts those among his students whom he felt had literary promise. I sensed in Hiram an enormous zeal and idealism, a man deter­ mined to transform Bobbs-Merrill from a rather commercial enterprise, whose chief previous glory had been the perennially huge best-seller The Joy of Cooking, into a publishing house that would honor and nurture good writ­ ing. And so I was flabbergasted and filled with joy when he offered me an 6 TRACES option on my first novel and a check for an amount that was somewhat mod­ est, in those days even by Indiana standards-one hundred dollars. For the next three years I struggled to complete the book, moving all over the map, to North Carolina, to Brooklyn, to a small town up the Hudson River, to a cramped apartment that I shared with a young sculptor, who was as poor as I was, on the upper West Side of Manhattan. Money was a major problem for me-l had next to none except for a tiny stipend from my generous father-and the income I could expect derived entirely from what Hiram could shake from the coffers of Bobbs-Merrill. This is where the word Indianapolis began to loom large in my destiny. Whenever, literally down to my last single dollar, resorting to pawning the Elgin wristwatch I had received on my fifteenth birthday, on going to a grocery and trying to redeem, for a box of frozen Birdseye peas, the coupon my sculptor friend had received upon complaining about a worm he had found in another box of peas-when, in these straits, I approached Haydn THE NAME for an advance on my royalties, the reply would come, "''ll have to ask Indi­ anapolis. " Mercifully, the response from this city was almost always favorable, INDIA NAPOLIS ACQUIRED assuring my humble survival, but in any case the name In dianapolis acquired the quality of an incantation, rather portentous and ominous at the same time, like THE QUALIT Y OF AN Hanoi during the time of Vietnam or Moscow throughout the Cold War. The talismanic nature of Indianapolis became even more apparent some­ INCA NTATION, RATHER what later when, exhaustedly, I finished the last chapter of the book and went off as a Marine lieutenant to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where I PORTENT OUS began training for combat in the Korean War. This was a dark time, indeed. Firmly believing that in September, when the book was scheduled to be AND OMINOUS published, I would be fighting the Chinese in Korea, I spent the spring and summer despairingly in the Carolina swamps, at least part of the time cor­ AT THE SA ME TIME, recting the galleys of Lie Down in Darkness. Where Indianapolis came in once again was through the views of Bobbs-Merrill's management over mat­ LIKE HA NOI ters of literary taste and propriety. That time-the late 40s and early 50s-was a watershed period in our liter­ DUR ING THE TIME ature. Although some years earlier Ulysses had been approved by the federal courts for adult consumption, Joyce's masterpiece was virtually unique in OF VIET NAM being exempt from the scrutiny of the censors and the puritans. But in the years following World War II there began a profound if gradual change oR Mos cow toward permitting writers to express themselves more freely, particularly in the use of the vulgar vernacular, and in matters of sex. I emphasize the gradu­ THROUGH OUT THE alness of the transition. For example in The Na ked and the Dead, published in 1948, Norman Mailer was forced to use, for the common vulgarism describing CO LD WA R. sexual intercourse, not the four-letter word but a foreshortened three letter epithet ''fug," spelled f-u-g. Among other results this prompted the raunchy old actress Ta llulah Bankhead, upon meeting young Mailer for the first time, to say, "Oh you're the writer who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck.' " But the times were changing. The first book in American literature to employ this and other Anglo-Saxon expletives with absolute freedom was James Jones's From He re to Eternity and even The Catcher in the Rye, published in that same year of 1951, used the word once, although in a way that was intended to demon­ strate its offensiveness. It's interesting, by the way, that even today The Catcher in the Ry e is among the books most frequently yanked off the library shelves of public schools, usually at the behest of angry parents who, ironically and cer­ tainly stupidly, seem to be unaware that in this one case the word is seen by the young hero, Holden Caulfield, as being objectionable.

Spring 1995 7 *

A st01y that delves �eep into heart and mind to reveal the innermost secrets of a woman's soul I

A NOVEL BY WILLIAM STYRON . .. \ ...... In this classic tragedy of Peyton Loftis, her. corrupt and loving father, her unforgiving mother.' and ner pathetic sister, Maudie, a n� writer of extraordinary talent has achieved a,cleansing and ennobling drama. As you read, you recognize familiar emotions ... feelings you thought peculiar to yourself alone ... boldly expressed on� printed page. With rapt iQtensity you share the desperate quest, and, in the end, are uplifted by tbe 'final word, invoking tha� faith and love which must · endure if man is to endure. • "I've read LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS with admira- tion and amazement. Styron is obviously that most unusual of phenomena, a 'born writer'-and, more imporundy, a writer of exceptional, extraordinary talent •• , As an elderly and jaded critic, I make William 'W::ii!=:..' Styron the deepest and most reverent of bows!" .:... LLOYD MORRIS Al111l bookstores � $3.50

�------�* 5� 8 TR ACES ut what about Lie Down in Darkness, also pub­ WILLIAM STYRON lished in that turning-point year of 1951? As it developed, while I was with the Marines in North Carolina Hiram Haydn was having trouble with Indi­ anapolis. The powers that be at Bobbs-Merrill were getting upset over a few of the situations and dialogue in my about-to-be-published manuscript. Unlike Mailer and Jones, I was writing of a domestic fictional milieu in which the common four-letter words were not employed frequently, at least at that time, but I had retained a few of the more or less milder dirty words, as they were called then, and several erotic situations which by present-day standards would seem amusingly tame. Nonetheless, Hiram Haydn, representing the New York office, found himself in conflict with the higher ups in the Midwest office, and down in the Carolina boondocks I was caught in the crossfire. I remember some of Hiram's messages which in those days, particularly because of my frequent inaccessibility, reached me by telegram. Once again the name of the capital city of Indiana took on the quality of an incantation. "INDIANAPOLIS WI L L "Indianapolis," the wire would read, "suggests page 221 drop the word ass. Would you consider bottom?" Or, "Indianapolis concerned phrase page 140 felt ACCEPT BJG BOOB S her up too suggestive. Would you think of alternative?" And once I got a mes­ sage that read, "Indianapolis will accept big boobs but will you still revise bit BUT WIL L YOU ST ILL about the open fly." Fortunately, these strictures and reservations did no permanent damage REVISE BIT to my text nor did I feel that my work suffered any major violation. I mostly managed to knuckle under for Indianapolis without complaint. But what ABOUT THE I've said does show you how, at mid-century, there still existed in certain " quarters in America a point of view about free expression that was severely OPEN FLY. circumscribed, still profoundly in thrall to nineteenth-century standards and to a prudery that now seems so quaint as to be almost touching. It could be said, of course, that we have gone over the edge; indeed, there have been some books published in recent years that I've found so scabrous and loathsome that I've yearned, at least for a moment, for a return to Vic­ torian decorum and restraint. Yet my yearning is almost always short-lived. People, after all, are not forced to read garbage, which even if it overwhelms us-or seems to at times-is preferable to censorship. And this brings me to a consideration of what my chronicle of Lie Down in Darkness and its problems has been leading up to-and that is, in fact, freedom of expression in our time, and the importance of libraries to our culture, and the danger that exists to the written word, whether those words be dirty or clean, simple or sublime. For it goes without saying that the written word is in peril, and its enemies are not just the yahoos and the censors, but those who dwell in the academic camp. Let me relate what recently happened to me. If you write long enough you will inevitably suffer the misfortune of having your words subjected to scholarly scrutiny. This is much worse than getting bad reviews. Not long ago I received in the mail a 200-page thesis from a graduate student at a California university, which bore the following title-! quote verbatim: Sophie 's Choice: A jungian Per­ spective. Beneath this was the description: "Prepared for Karl Kracklauer, Ph.D. for Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Course 'Therapeutic Process.' " I will now read to you from the introduction on the first page: "As Styron's Sophie is a complicated character, and because her relationships are multifaceted and equally complex, I focus primarily on a single event in Sophie's life in order to gain entry into her psyche. In analyzing Sophie I rely on

SpriHg 1995 9 WILLIAM STYRON Greek mythology, Greek artwork and Jungian psychology. " The important line: "In this paper I analyze the character Sophie from the movie 'Sophie's Choice.' " There was a footnote to this statement that read: "W here the movie was vague I referred to the book, Sophie's Choice, for clarification. " This, it seems to me, is the ultimate antiliterary story. It follows logically that I should want to say a few words about the most proliterary of institu­ tions, the library. After all, we're gathered here in behalf of a library. I'd like to describe how in my early life the library evolved from a forbidding place, ruled by frightening Minotaurs and guardian demons, into a refuge, the center of my soul's rescue, the friendliest place on earth. T {) Then I was fourteen John Steinbeck's epic novel The Grapes of Wra th was VVpublished, to mixed reviews. While generally praised as a literary achievement, there were dissenters who were profoundly offended by some of the coarsely realistic language. It should be noted that this language was totally AT MID-CENT URY, innocuous by present-day standards, containing none of the wicked four-letter vocables that have even plopped onto the pages of the new Ne w Yorker. Still, the THERE ST IL L EXISTED book had created enormous protest in some quarters; like many works of the period it had been threatened by a ban in-where else?-Boston. My school­ IN CERTAIN QUA RTERS mate, Knocky Floyd, had somehow brief ly gotten hold of a copy of The Grapes of Wrath and he told me that if I, too, could obtain the book I would find on IN AMERICA page 232 the word "condom. " Or perhaps it was in the plural-"condoms." It was a word that was nowhere, even in the dictionaries of those pre-World War A POINT OF VIEW II years, nor was another Steinbeckian sizzler, that is, "whore"; the idea of see­ ing these words in print made me nearly sick with desire though in fairness to ABOUT FREE EXPR ESSION myself I also wanted to read the story of the suffering Joad family. The elderly Miss Evans, God rest her soul, was the librarian who presided over the public THAT NOW SEEMS library in my hometown in Tidewater Virginia, and it was she whom I con­ fronted when, on a lucky day, I managed at last to find on its shelf one of five SO QUA INT or six already smudged and dog-eared copies of this incredibly popular book. As she finished stamping the back page she handed me the book with an AS TO BE ALMOST intense scowl and asked me my age; when I replied fourteen, she gave a kind of squeal and began to snatch the volume away. "Unfit! Unfit!" Miss Evans TOUCHING. cried. "Unfit for your age!" There was a tugging match which both embar­ rassed and horrified me-she kept repeating "Unfit!" like a malediction-and I finally let her grab the book back in triumph. The next episode in my depraved quest for sensation took place a year later, when I was fifteen, in New York City. It was my first trip to the metropo­ lis, a vacation at Christmastime from my Virginia prep school. I had a single goal. More than the Statue of Liberty, more than Times Square, my mind was set on one thing. On my second day I trudged through the snow past the icicle-clad lions of the New York Public Library and into the catalog room, where I thumbed through the cards in search of a volume that had been spo­ ken of at school as one of the most erotically arousing works ever printed. I don't exaggerate when I recall my heart being in a near-critical seizure when I located the card and the name of the author, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), and the title, almost brutal in its terrifying promise, Psy­ chopathia Sexualis. Every schoolboy of that time wanted to read this Germanic compendium of sexual horrors. With the scrawled Dewey Decimal number and the title in hand I made my way to the circulation desk. Miss Evans would have approved of her much younger male counterpart: his face wore a look of lordly contempt. He was tall, in those days I was short. He looked down at me 10 TRACES as, in my changing voice, I croaked out my request; he s.aid scathingly, "This book is for specialists. Are you a specialist in the field?" "W hat field?" I replied feebly. "Abnormal psychology. Are you a specialist?" His tone and manner had so smothered me with humiliation that I was speechless; after a silent beat or two he said: "This book is not for young boys seeking a thrill. " The effect was catastrophic, nearly fatal; I slunk out of the New York Pub­ lic Library, resolved never to enter a library again. These countless years later I've been able to regard those incidents in the way one regards so many experiences that seem tragic at the time they hap­ pen; they were both educating and valuable. Recently, when I've pondered the issue of censorship and pornography I've remembered these moments of awful rejection and have seen that they comprise an object lesson. Of HI RAM HA YDN,

REPRESENT ING THE

NEW YORK OFFICE,

FOUND HIMSELF

IN CONF LICT

WITH THE HIGHE R UPS

IN THE MIDWEST

OFFICE, AND DOWN

IN THE CA ROLINA

BOONDOCKS [ WA S c H IRAM HAYDN (FOURTH FROM THE RIGHT) PRESIDES OVER AN EDITORIAL BOA RD MEETING OF THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR IN 1952.

CA UGHT IN course, my own youth was a factor in having been denied, and neither of those books were pornography. Still, there's a point to be made. It was not THE CROSSFIRE. prurience, not lust that impelled me to seek out these works but a far sim­ pler instinct: curiosity. In a puritanical society-and America is, par excel­ lence, a puritanical society-it is the veil of forbiddenness, as much as what lies behind the veil, that provokes the desire for penetration, if I may use the word. Had Miss Evans permitted me to read the word "condom," or had I been able to while away a winter afternoon immersed in Krafft-Ebing, whose juiciest passages, I later learned, were obscured in a smoke screen of Latin, I might have fulfilled at least some of my curiosity and then returned to normal adolescent concerns. As it was, I remained heavy-spirited and restless with need. The present-day foes of sexually explicit writing and other depictions of sex, whether art or pornography, and those who would censor such works, don't understand this underlying psychological reality and thus undermine their own cause. There is, it is true, a group, probably not very large, of super-enthusiasts for whom pornography is an obsession and a necessity. Joyce Carol Oates has likened these people to religious

Spri119 f995 II votaries, with whom one might morally disagree even as one scorns so much seemingly displaced heat, but whose requirements should be demo­ cratically tolerated and finally even respected. At the same time, the nearly universal availability of erotica has allowed most other people to take it or leave it; many find it somehow fulfilling, and there is nothing wrong with that. I suspect that the great mass of people, whose curiosity has been bless­ edly satisfied, have discovered in the aftermath an excruciating monotony and have signed off for good. The censors who would re-establish the tyranny of my youth should quit at this point, accepting the fact that it's the sordid absolutism of denial-not that which is made accessible-that turns people into cranks and makes them violent and mad. After I experienced rejection, acceptance, and total immersion in read­ ing, the United States Marine Corps introduced me to the glories of the library. During World War II, at the age of seventeen, I joined the Marines IT GOES WITHOUT but was deemed too young to be sent right away into the Pacific combat. I was delivered for a time, instead, to the V- 12 program at Duke University, SAYING THAT THE which then as now possessed one of the great college libraries of America. I'm sure it was at least partially the Zeitgeist that led me into a virtual ram­ WRIT TEN WORD IS IN page through those library shelves. When one has intimations of a too early demise it powerfully focuses the mind. The war in the Pacific was at a boil­ PE RIL, AND ITS ENEMIES ing fury, and there were few of us young Marines who didn't have a previ­ sion of himself as being among the fallen martyrs. I was taking a splendid ARE NOT JUST THE course in seventeenth-century English prose and I'd hoarded an incanta­ tory line from Sir Thomas Browne: The long habit of living indisposeth us for YA HOOS AND THE dy ing. This of course is British understatement. I wanted desperately to live, and the books in the Duke University Library were the rocks and boulders CENSO RS, BUT THOSE to which I clung against my onrushing sense of doom and mortality. I read everything I could lay my hands on. Even today I can recall the slightly WHO DWEL L IN THE blind and bloodshot perception I had of the vaulted Gothic reading room, overheated, the smell of glue and sweat and stale documents, winter ACA DEMIC CAMP. coughs, whispers, the clock ticking toward midnight as I raised my eyes over the edge of Crime and Punishment. The library became my hangout, my private club, my sanctuary, the place of my salvation; during the many months I was at Duke, I felt that when I was reading in the library I was sheltered from the world and from the evil winds of the future; no harm could come to me there. It was doubtless escape of sorts but it also brought me immeasurable enrichment. God bless libraries. It's hard for me to realize th�t this was exactly fifty years ago, perhaps to this very night. Tr uly still, the long habit of living indisposeth us for dy ing. I for­ got to mention that among the books at the Duke library I desperately wanted to read in those days, but was unable to obtain, were Lady Chatter­ ley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence and Tr opic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I did, however, see them incarcerated, immobilized like two child molesters, behind heavy wire grillwork in the Rare Book Room. I've learned that they were finally set free some years ago with an unconditional pardon.

William Sty-ron is author of such powerful and poetic novels as The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a Pulitzer Prize winner; Sophie's Choice ( 1979), winner of the National Book Award; and Lie Down in Darkness ( 1951), awarded the Prix de Rome. His recent writings include Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) and Tidewater Morn­ ing: Three Ta les from Yo uth (1993). A graduate of Duke University, Sty-ron lives in Rox­ bury, Connecticut. 12 TRACES hey met at an offi- virtue but a •habit, who stood W 1 L L 1 A M ST Y RO N rs' dance on the island. IL. ------' shyly in one corner of the offi- · er name was Helen Peyton. Her father was a cers' club at the reception, the ends of his once-proud West Pointer, from an old Virginia family. Wasn't mustache twitching sadly, and told him in an apolo­ it a coincidence, she asked Milton as they danced, that getic, mournful tone that Charley Quinn had been her grandfather should have gone to the University, too? killed overseas, it was bad, too bad. That night they walked along the seawall in a drizzling So the anger mounted silently in the younger man as rain and when he bent over, unsteady, very drunk, to he expressed a faint regret for the death of a boy he had kiss her, the city lights drifted like embers across the lost track of long ago, barely concealing the resentment darkness. Then she fled, the raindrops on her cape leav- he felt at having been told such a thing on his wedding ing a trail of trembling sparks. day-as if his father, in atonement for his ill-advised Perhaps they were both too young to know better, but a move in getting his son's commission in the first place, few months later they were engaged to be married. They had passed the remark as a reminder that war was not were both handsome people, and they were wildly in love. all champagne and flowers and the tinkly laughter of They liked parties, dancing; on Saturdays they rode officers' wives. And he had hardly restrained himself horseback in Central Park. Yet she was straitlaced in from saying something very bitter, archly insulting to many ways, rather severe: No, Milton. We'll have to wait his father as the old man stood there, the damp, feeble till afterwards. And drinking. She loved a good time, but blinking of his eyes reflecting the weakness for which a sober good time. Loftis had felt all his "Now, Little Miss life a quiet contempt. Muffet," he'd say, smil- He wanted to get ing, "don't be scared, him out of there and a little one .. . " on his way back to "Oh, Milton, please, you've had enough. No. No. I Richmond. He despised his father. The old man had won't!" And running off, unaccountably, weeping a little. given him too much. My son (he was living in a board- Now wouldn't you know? There's an Army brat for inghouse then; the old house had been torn down, a you. Crazy as hell, the unstable life caused it. Moving cigarette factory erected on the site, the steel and con- around always. But he loved her, God he loved her. For crete walls impermeable to the lingering ghosts of a a long time he drank nothing. For her. quiet and departed tradition or even to the memory of They talked bravely, brightly of the future. His father a dozen ancient cedars which had cast down a tender, had a little money; he'd set Milton up in practice in trembling light upon that vanished ground) my son, your Port Warwick, "a growing town," as the saying goes. mother was a joy and indeed a deliverance to me and I hope They could have a good time there. It wasn't much and pray if only out of honor to the blessed memory of her who money his father was giving them, but it would do for a brought you into life that you will as the Preacher said live joy- while. They'd manage. fu lly with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of Then she told him. When her mother died she was thy vanity which he hath given thee under the sun all the days due to inherit a hundred thousand dollars. "Oh, baby," of thy vanity fo r that is thy portion in this life and in thy he said, mildly protesting but elated, and so they were laborwhich thou takest under the sun. My son ... married with the bright hollow panoply attending such A sudden, quick ache of pity and sadness came over military affairs, the ceremony that disturbed him him, he fumbled stupidly for a word to say, but Helen's because of the untroubled thrill it gave him. The sweet face floated near, upturned, offering him a kiss, and excitement that came from the flags and the music, of she led him away to meet someone. His father stood which he was faintly ashamed, was not mere patriotism. awkwardly in the corner then, groping in conversation It was rather the· pride he had in his rank, which he with a bored young lieutenant while he, the new cap- had attained only through his bride and he knew it, tain, listened to the rhythmic wedding small talk of a but which nonetheless sent through him a fierce ado- general's wife, nodded, smiled, and thought of the pale lescent upsurge of exciting arrogance-the twin silver boy with the blemish like a flower, the brother he had bars and the starched dress uniform, impeccably white. never had, and of his father whom he had never Nor was the feeling of sham and fakery canceled by the known. "Really, Helen," the general's wife was saying, "I news brought by his father, now a diffidently mild, still think you have the pick of the Army. Such a peach!" doting old man in whom patience was no longer a And her laughter shattered the air like falling glass.

Spri11g 1995 13 Orde al and Re ne wal

- THE NEW EDITOR IN CHA RGE OF THE NEW YORK OFFICE OF THE VENERABLE

INDIANAPOLIS PUBLISHING FIRM BOBBS- MERRILL CAME TO TOW N FOR THE FIRST

OF HIS SCHEDULED BIMONTHLY VISITS IN SEPTEMBER 1950. A CLEVELAND

NATIVE, THE FORTY-TWO-YEA R-OLD HIRA M HAYDN WAS NO STRANGER TO THE

MIDW EST, BUT AS HE STEPPED FROM UNION STATION INTO THE MUGGY HEAT

DAVID LAURANCE CHAMBERS, HIRAM HAYDN, AND

� illaMUv � illad�

HE WAS HIT BY A WAVE OF REVULSION. "MIDDLE AMERICA ," HE RECALLED IN HIS

MEMOIR WORDS AND fACES, WAS "THAT FLATLAND OF BIGOTRY AND NA SAL INFE-

LICITY FROM WHICH I HA D FLED IN 1941, HOPING FOR PERMA NENT EXILE."

HE WAS BACK NOW, HOW EVER, IN THE HEA RT OF THE HEARTLAND, AND HE

FA CED HIS MEETING WITH COMPANY PRESIDENT DAVID LAURANCE CHAMBERS

"wiTH soMETHING LEss THAN EXHILARATio N." ). Kent Calder-

14 TRACES Spri"g 1995 15 0 R D E A L A N D R E N E w A L

he fo reboding that Haydn experienced upon leaving weakly interjected. Ignoring him, Chambers brought his the train station stayed with him as he entered oration to an impressive conclusion. Placing his hand on theT offices on North Meridian Street. The building, with Haydn's, Chambers envisioned their joint program bring­ its classical facade, had originally served as a showroom ing Bobbs-Merrill back to the "front rank of publishers." fo r electric automobiles, and acid stains from the batteries Haydn was stunned. "My childhood had undermined any were still visible on the floor. Haydn remembered the capacity fo r resolution in the face of such masterful dialec­ "horrid rows" of desks and offices and the corridors tic, such disarming flattery," he recalled. Nevertheless, he "swarming with clerks and secretaries." At the top of a fo rced himself to resist, explaining to the president that broad staircase, he met Chambers's secretary, Lois Stew­ he had only accepted the job because Ross Baker, the sales art, who showed him into the president's office. Cham­ manager in the New Yo rk office, had given him assurances bers did not look up when Haydn entered. When he did, that as editor he would have unlimited freedom in acquir­ Haydn immediately noticed his blue eyes: "Pale Alexan­ ing manuscripts fo r the fi rm. drian eyes," he explained; "Yet I knew, even then, capable Chambers immediately became enraged. "The trans­ of incandescence." fo rmation," wrote Haydn, "(which was to prove only the The first hour of the meeti ng went well. Chambers at first of hundreds) was devastating." Eyes protruding and age seventy-one was a cultivated man who had been a Phi hands shaking, Chambers raised his voice to a level that Beta Kappa and a Charles Scribner fe llow in English at "must have made the whole building tremble," calling Princeton, and he exhibited Haydn "an ingrate, and considerable charm in recit­ upstart, arrogant and fatu­ ing fo r the new editor the ous." Haydn res ponded that illustrious history of Bobbs­ he was only asking to abide Merrill. Eyes gleaming by the original agreement. behind his pince-nez, he Chambers then shifted to a spoke of Samuel Merrill, the pleading note. "He had fo under, and William Conrad been Bobbs-Merrill," wrote Bobbs, the fo rmer president, Haydn, "had guided it whom Chambers had come to through all the treacherous work for in 1903 and suc­ shoals and channels through ceeded as president in 1935. decades." Why couldn't the He spoke of how the firm, two work together now that primarily a publisher of law Chambers was at the end of books, had established itself "'T HE PARROTT BUILDING AT 724 MERIDIAN STREET BECAME his career? Haydn insisted THE HOME OF ROBBS-MERRILL IN THE SUMMER OF 1926 WHEN as a trade publisher through PLANS FOR THE WORLD WAR MEMORIAL PLAZA FORCED THE on autonomy in acquiring its association with James FIRM TO MOVE FROM ITS BU ILDING ON THE NORTH SIDE OF authors, and the meeting UNIVERSITY SQUARE. Whitcomb Riley and other ended sourly with Chambers Hoosier authors, including Charles Major, Meredith saying coldly, "We will talk of this another time." Nicholson, and Maurice Thompson. He reviewed the Thus began the cold war between the New Yo rk and golden years of the twenties, when he worked with such Indianapolis offices of Bobbs-Merrill that would continue, financially successful authors as Richard Hall iburton, according to Haydn, until Chambers was retired upstairs Bruce Barton, Julia Peterkin, and John Erskine after he to chairman of the board in 1953 and Lowe Berger became editor in 1925. He told Haydn how pleased he was became president. Haydn left the firm in 1954 to go to that Bobbs-Merrill was able to acquire an editoJ; of Random House. In his memoir, he referred to his years at Haydn's quality in a voice that became to Haydn "sooth­ Bobbs-Merrill as a "montage of dread , ordeal, and ing, hypnotic." He spoke finally of how much he looked renewal" in which Chambers tried unsuccessfully to fire fo rward to their collaQoration, when Haydn would find him three times. Nevertheless, the firm realized some suc­ interesting manuscripts and pass them on to Chambers cesses during his tenure, the most notable of which was the fo r review. publication of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness in "Duly mesmerized," the younger man realized that 1951. Despite its difficulties, the collaboration between something was suddenly amiss. "But Mr. Chambers-" he New Yo rk and Indianapolis, or Haydn and Chambers, was

16 TRACES 0 R D E A L A N D R E N E w A L

in this instance, at least, effective and therefore deserves a I knew next to nothing about book production; I fo und the more balanced depiction than the one offered by Haydn in "cost sheet," the careful inquiry into how and at what -point one

Wo rds and Faces. could "come out" with a given book, as obscure as the Eleusinian

Wo rds and Fa ces appeared in 1974, the year after mysteries. I had a fine disdain fo r the salesman's commercial Haydn died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-six. emphasis, and I resented any curb on the acquisition of good

Writing in an informal, almost conversational style, books, regardless of the limited sales they could command. Haydn, who was both an editor and a novelist, mixed sincerity, warmth, and criticism in his myriad tales of In addition, Haydn wrote, "I have always been a poor the authors, editors, and publishers he had known in administrator." his thirty-year publishing career. Though he fo und Haydn knew well that Chambers was a complex person many other occasions for criticism, he reserved per­ possessed of both considerable charm and a quick temper, haps his most scathing words for Chambers, who was and by his own admission he made little effort at accom­ portrayed, according to the book's jacket copy, as a modation. Add to the mix the snobbery that Haydn "Dickensian grotesque." In characterizing Haydn's por­ brought to his task as editor, his lack of respect fo r the trait of Chambers this way, the publisher of Wo rds and firm's previous accomplishments, and his earlier unhappy Fa ces, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, acknowledged the experience with the firm, and Haydn's searing portrait of probability of distortion. Chambers makes more sense. The trick, then, in telling That probability becomes a certainty upon closer exami­ this story is to take advantage of Haydn's sincerity while nation. Describing events that had taken place two and also accounting fo r his prejudices. three decades earlier and relying only on memory, the hambers left behind no such memoir as Wo rds and dying memoirist castigated Chambers on one page and Faces. A literary editor fo r almost thirty years, he pro­ provided information that made Chambers's actions seem ducedC an extraordinary number of letters and memm·an­ reasonable on another. In a few instances, the sound of dums that are now scattered throughout the project files grinding axes becomes almost audible. of the Bobbs-Merrill Collection at Indiana University's For example, Haydn harshly condemned Chambers's Lilly Library. Any sampling of his correspondence reveals frugality: "Never has human hand squeezed a dollar a rhetorical mastery that utilized diplomacy and tact at all tighter than Mr. Chambers's." This indictment had to do times and that mixed encouragement and praise with pre­ with what Haydn believed was the mishandling of his first cise amounts of admonition and firmness to get desired novel, By Na ture Free, which Bobbs-Merrill published in results. By many accounts, Chambers, or DLC as he was 1943. According to Haydn, the reviews fo r this book were known to those who worked with him, was an expert at "staggeringly good," with one prepublication reviewer manipulation, a particularly useful quality in an editor. calling it "the best novel about small-town life since Sin­ He reveals little about himself in these letters, however. clair Lewis's Main Street. " Chambers, however, refused to Occas ionally, something personal slipped through, as promote the book apart from its inclusion in list adver­ when he wrote in a memo to the New Yo rk office in 1926: tisements, and it died a "quiet death." The contract that "One of the trials of life is the necessity of constantly Haydn had signed fo r the first book provided the firm showing an accommodating spirit to authors." For the with an option on the author's next two books, as well as most part, though, business letters were not a place to with the same advance that he had been given fo r the ruminate or recall. first: $400. After some bristling letters with Chambers, The Lilly Library, however, has one surprising collection Haydn was finally released from his contract during an that consists almost entirely of personal letters written by angry phone call. Chambers in the years immediately fo llowing his retire­ Haydn, then, must have known what he was getting into ment as president of the firm and his designation as chair­ by taking the job at Bobbs-Merrill. Moreover, he admitted man of the board. The McCoy Collection contains more to practices that obviously would not have endeared him to than fifty handwritten, personal letters, all signed DLC, Chambers or any other publishing firm president. At one that Chambers wrote from 1954 to 1956 to his old friend point he acknowledged that in setting up his New Yo rk Samuel McCoy, whom he had known since his college days office he hired enthusiastic but inexperienced editors and at Princeton. In these letters Chambers exhibits traits of had very little interest in or knowledge of the financial vulnerability and candor that do not surface in his busi­ aspects of the business: ness letters, talking freely and with some humor about his

Spri11g 1995 17 0 R D E A L A N D R E N E w A L

memories, regrets, pains, doubts, and pleasures. Com­ arn doing," he continued, "is to jot down from day to day posed with no other motive than friendship, these letters anything that comes to the old noodle, from anywhere in provide real insight into the kind of man Chambers was at the past, without order or consequence. Sometime I might this period of his life, sometimes contradicting and some­ impose a fo rm upon these orts and shards. No harm done times corroborating the image put fo rth by Haydn. if I can't." These orts and shards, about twenty-five pages Though Chambers longed to write his memoirs and was worth, are now in the possession of Chambers's grand­ under some pressure to do so, he had to admit to McCoy daughter, and though there is much that is useful in them, that he didn't have the wherewithal fo r the task. "I really one wishes the publisher had written more. wish I might set down the pleasant things, the amusing, lov­ his little bit of evidence provides some focus and able eccentric, quaint things about old Indianapolis and perspective to what Haydn termed "the Chambers about publishing experience," he admitted in November AffTair." When Haydn met Chambers in Indianapolis on 1954; "I can reminisce, once started, by the hour, but I that warm September day, circumstances certainly con­ lack two things necessary for writing: an exactness of mem­ spired against a successful collaboration. Chambers was ory and the mental and physical energy required fo r any at the end of a distinguished career with a Midwestern extended composition." In December, when McCoy publishing firm that had achieved success by supplying encouraged Chambers to utilize a broad reading public with a tape recorder, Chambers what previous president W. C. responded, "Your tape-recording Bobbs had characterized as idea would be all very well for "good clean fiction and folks in their prime, but would corking good tales." Moreover, never in the world work with old DLC was only a few years away folks whose memory is full of from admitting to McCoy that holes and who interrupt each he was "subject to fits of black­ other every few minutes to ask, dog depression" and that he 'What was his name?' " But he was "done with publishing, then proceeded to write with petered out." obvious pleasure about Nick Chambers also refused to (Meredith Nicholson) and Ta rk abide by what were becoming (Booth Tarkington) and Jake standard practices of New Yo rk (Jacob Piatt Dunn) and Ruthie trade publishers: offering large (Ruth Pratt Bobbs, whose claim advances to authors and negoti­ <:&ACCORDING TO HIRAM H AYDN, BIMONTHLY to have "the prettiest ankles in SALES MEETINGS IN INDIANAPOLIS CONSISTED OF ating with agents. Though edi­ the state of Indiana" Chambers LONG DAYS . SALESMEN SPENT THEIR ALLOTTED tors in the firm's New Yo rk FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FREE TIME, BETWEEN THE vehemently denied). Six months END OF THE MORNING SESSION AND LUNCH AT office had access to the best later when the subject of mem­ THE INDIANAPOLIS AT HLETIC CLUB, DRINKING authors, they were at a disadvan­ IN A NEARBY HOTEL BA R THE ANTLERS H.OT EL oirs surfaced again, Chambers ON MERIDIAN WA S A LIKELY WATERING HOLE. tage in competing for them termed the idea "foolishness," because they had no authority to but he asked McCoy to help spur his memory anyway. "My make deals with agents, and they were not able to offer memory is like this sheet of paper, without depth or vari- the kind of advances that authors expected. Even ety. I am the least observant of men; I have no idea of the Chambers's old friend McCoy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning color of anyone's eyes." journalist with a dozen books to his credit, expressed ner­ As much a problem as it was fo r Chambers not to be able-• vousness about asking DLC for an advance in 1950. In the to remember what he wanted to, he was also plagued by an course of planning a biography of James Whitcomb Riley inability to fo rget: "Painful too is the fact that I do not . with Riley's nephew Edmund Eitel, McCoy asked Eitel if seem at all able to record only 'happy hours.' About people he was committed to Bobbs-Merrill. "Laurance looks coldly my unresisted pen mixes the evil with the good, often on advances," McCoy explained; "New Yo rk publishers more evil than good, with a subconscious cherishing of do not." resentments that should have been lost years ago ....This Despite his apparent unwillingness to change with the will never do." But he made an effort nevertheless. "What I times, Chambers was aware that the glory days of the 1920s

18 TRACES (� ,- � ...... ·I-Me.NC. @> THE BOBBS·MERRILL COMPA Y 1!u bliskrs Ill'. Mil' a• �a SubJect Ml! !!!!a !a P•rtm!!t

Thh ropor\ fro. Mr. Zi•ID_. lwbe b• beea n.U.t t.be UJIINript. wit.beut. 1.atornapt.1At tho prMfr.N) Mba MilO rec1411U11oclat1ona on UteraJ7 ,r.uc» wbicb illtit.o 7Hr triucllJ'eai c dllrat.l.oa.

To •• tbo report iadicatoa tbat .. ... proooaW wit.b a pabllabinl pnblM otbor thaD bow •• c GIIl• w OaA ooll-a probloa of po.. iblo lotal iaY al.ftMaq . Ill'. Uop .. wiab.. to llalte U clear t.bat. with t.bia upoct. bo clooao•t t.. l. at. all o•patmt. t.oO%pi'OH � aolt .

I• u 1 c..,.t.oat to rocbla wtut t.bl po.. i� ia­ nl:r... at. aipt. be. .L b.n �pt. ocU.r vacu track ot t.IM jad1c1al ••ciaana 1.a oo-c&l.l.ocl •obacoa1t7" ..... , --'Ut t.boir iaorouiat liboral1t.7. llbet.b• M1! 1!!1 ia D_.kp... w..U fall witM.n tee proooclu\a that �taft llooa oahWat.cl. J. clo a at 1m... Boo1cloa1 11D•riat ,noo4oot. 1a a tawrit.o trick of pn eoat. pncoclllro, Oftl'7 J•qo lllt1n1 to wr1t.e aow law aoc.-cliq to lab porooa al rlow.

At. A!QO rat.o abolll.d w aot •proaob thia J.tal probl• objoot.1Yti7 aad. ••• tho Mat w... od opiaioa, aot. ocU.r for t.ta llouo •a aako but. tor tta aat.bor•aT O.t ..Ud 701& t.biak, t.boa, of omaul.tiac Melrll.J. Cuo? He 1o hiaaalf a Ut.orar7 arUat. aadaot...... ,.... aiadod . lie bM d.oalt wit. b a•ob probl.•a tr .tiler pabliabora .

1t TOG approYO tbia naut.ioo •d h.n ao\ • oew of t.beaoript wit.b aU urroct.iANla 1a ..., lark, wire •• aad •• will hold up, aott.1D1 �po aad !lftd 7M tor tao parpooo tho oop1 wo•n booa workiat ea.

""CHAMBERS WROTE MEMORANDUMS ON PINK SLIPS FOR THE INDI ANAPOLIS OFFICE AND ON BLUE SLIPS FOR THE NEW YORK OFFICE. PINK SLIPS MIGHT CO TO SOMEONE SEATED CLOSE BY TWO BATCHES OF BLUE SLIPS LEFT INDIAN APOLIS EACH NIGHT, REMEMBERED AUTHOR GLENN TUCKER. FOR HAYDN, BLUE "WAS THE FATEFUL COLOR, THE WAR INC OF IMPENDING ERUPTION."

Sp ring 1995 19 0 R D E A L A N D R E N E w A L were over and that something had to be done if the firm ideas of the great writers of the previous generation to was to regain its position as a preeminent publisher of their own times, talents, and temperaments, they trade fiction. Hiring Haydn was Chambers's way of extended a tradition in American literature that started acknowledging that the firm was a good deal behind the with the likes of Stephen Crane , Frank Norris, and curve of popular literary taste and that someone with Theodore Dreiser and continued with Ernest Hemingway,

Haydn's judgment and connections was needed to help it F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Sin­ catch up. He simply was not ready to abdicate the author­ clair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson. This tradition, ity that he had spent almost fifty years building. which valued freedom of expression, experimentation in aydn, on the other hand, was only just beginning his fo rm and language, and frank depiction of the social and publishing career. An academic with a Ph.D. from psychological fo rces shaping American society, had fo und ColumH bia, he had been teaching in various capacities, no place among the catalogs of Bobbs-Merri ll. going to graduate school, and writing novels fo r seventeen A product of the genteel tradition of American fiction, years when in 1944 he became editor of the quarterly pub­ in which a touch of the hand could be a pledge of matri­ lication of Phi Beta Kappa, the American Scholar, a position mony, Chambers would have considered much of the new he would hold fo r the rest of his life. In 1945 he began a experimentation sordid and most of the frank language five-year stint with Crown Publishers, where, he obscene. In 1956 he would let McCoy know exactly where explained, he was somewhat of a loner because of his he stood on the subject of trends in contemporary litera­ scholarly background: "There was a conviction [at Crown] ture. In imitation of a bad tempered Riley he wrote: "An that I wasn't a regular, one of the guys-a conviction that I awful durned lot of that modern 'sophistication' you talk shared." Accepting the job at Bobbs-Merrill, Haydn looked about is repulsive and base and phony and pretentious fo rward to tapping the talent of the young writers he and inane. I hate the word." Still longing fo r the days taught in a novel workshop at the New School fo r Social when books like Barton's The Man No body Knows, Hallibur­ Research in New Yo rk, where his students included ton's The Royal Road to Romance, or Erskine's The Private William Styron, Thomas Gallagher, Mario Puzo, Daniel Life of He len of Tr oy (all published in 1925) could enter­ Stern, and many others who would later fulfill the poten­ tain, uplift, inspire, and make money, too, Chambers tial they then exhibited. He had no doubt that, if given would have fo und it difficult to see the full value of Lie free rein, he could revive the literary reputation of his Down in Darkness. new employer. Herman R. Ziegner, one of the young edi­ tilizing his editorial autonomy, Haydn signed Styron tors at Bobbs-Merrill, defined the audience Haydn sought to a contract with an advance of $100, a figure Sty­ as "intelligent readers of liberal attitudes who admit and ronU refers to in his accompanying essay as meager, "even defend realism in literature." Haydn and the young turks by Indiana standards." Ironically, this advance is $300 less had little concern fo r "corking good tales." than what Haydn had received seven years earlier, a sum According to Haydn, his first battle with Chambers he believed paltry enough to justify breaking his con­ arose over Lie Down in Darkness, which by any measure was tract. Though Styron mentions that the coffers of Bobbs­ one of the most important American novels published in Merrill were nqt easily opened, he also writes that "the the 1950s. In the course of bringing the book to market, response ...was almost always favorable, assuring my Haydn claimed that DLC tried to fire him on the basis of humble survival." Despite disagreements, Chambers at "sexual obsession." Though conflict was inevitable, evi­ least cooperated enough with Haydn to keep the young dence suggests that it may not have been as severe as author alive. Haydn remembered it. Under the circumstances Chambers's skepticism about n his essay, ''I'll Have to Ask Indianapolis," William Sty­ Lie Down in Darkness was not unfounded, given the youth of ron describes the literary atmosphere of the post-Worlcf the author, his lack of any previous publications, and the WarI II years and the reverence that existed fo r novels and high praise that the book was receiving from Haydn. In novelists. "In those days," he writes, "being a novelist was a· Wo rds and Fa ces Haydn described DLC's response to his little like being a rock star in our time." Ta lented young exhausting presentation on the merits of Styron's novel at writers like Styron, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Saul one of the Indianapolis sales meeti ngs: "Mr. Chambers Bellow, Nelson Algren, James Jones, James Baldwin, and ]. intoned in his powdery voice, 'If a quarter of what Mr. D. Salinger emerged in the fifties in the wake of the liter­ Haydn has said about this book is true, we are about to ary giants of the twenties. By adapting the themes and publish an extraordinary work. The crucial word is if.' "

20 TRACES DAVID'LAURANCE CHAMBERS 5272 North Meridian Street, Indianapolis 8, Indiana

No � ��� t:L� . � �� \MoL�. J'lAV

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""CHAMBERS REVEALED A VULNERABLE TONE IN LETTERS TO HIS FRIEND SAMUEL MCCOY THAT SELDOM, IF EVER, APPEARED IN HIS BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE.

Spri11g 1995 21 0 R D E A L A N D R E N E w A L

An unsigned, beautifully written fo urteen-page critical of Wo lfe's) yet ...are not imitative of either. " And he summary of Lie Down in Darkness fo und in the Bobbs­ prepared in teres ted parties fo r the questionable subject Merrill Collection reveals the passion for the book that matter, acknowledging that at the end of his story, Styron Chambers and the salesmen glimpsed at sales meetings. "chooses to be as explicit in his description of erotic and In a telephone conversation, William Styron identified phallic detail as was Joyce in the fa mous Molly Bloom

the author of this critique as Herman Ziegner, who at the soliloquy from Ulysses, a passage on which Mr. Styron's is time of composition was a thirty-three-year-old editor in closely modeled." Astutely, Ziegner then admitted that he the trade department in Indianapolis. His glowing report believed this "was a mistaken choice which fo r most read­ was so deft in its composition and so apt in its analysis ers will destroy the author's plan and block real under­ that Haydn gave a copy of it to Styron, and the author standing of his book," thereby setting the stage fo r the remembered it well more than fo rty years later. Haydn negotiations about the book's language that Styron refers obviously had allies in the flatland. to in his essay. In the first paragraph of his critique, Ziegner set the Haydn evidently handled these negotiations with great stage not only fo r a discussion tact and editorial skill because of the book's surprising bril- the book received an extremely liance but also fo r the criticism positive critical reception and the book would likely receive Little concerned with also sold well, establishing the from unenlightened readers: author overnight just as the the bottom line and editor had predicted. More- Few books published this year will extremely sensitive to over, Styron believes that the attract-or earn-more serious "strictures and reservations"

critical attention than Mr. Sty­ what he perceived as imposed by Indianapolis (read ron's work. I believe it is quite threats to artistic Chambers) did not perma­ possible, even probable, that this nently damage his text, though novel marks the beginning of an expression, Haydn was they revealed "how, at mid­ important career. I fo und it one century, there still existed in

of the most remarkable first nov­ destined to collide certain quarters in America a els I have ever read. It seemed to with Chambers. point of view about free expres­ me a powerful and tragic com­ sion that was severely circum-

mentary on the inner lives of men scribed, still profoundly in and women. Its best moments, I thrall to nineteenth-century

think, comprehend the tragic essence; the pity and terror they standards and to a prudery that now seems so quaint as to evoke effe ct true catharsis. I believe there will be few who will be almost touching. " dispute the stature of the novel. Most of the adverse criticism The restraint of a publisher like DLC now seems

(aside from notice of fau lts from which no novel is free) will touching bequse the pendulum has swung so far in the center in an area where literary standards are not the sole crite­ opposite direction. Taking advantage of the hard-won

ria of judgment. The reasons fo r this and its importance to the freedoms established by serious editors and artists, infe­

House must be developed in a fu ll discuss ion of the novel. rior talents now inundate their audiences with gratu­ itous obscenity and violence. Conveying the subtlety and Ziegner then went on to do this with no small amount nuance of passion in the simple touch of a hand is an of rhetorical mastery, narrating the saga of the dysfunc­ art that has gone the way of Chambers's pince-nez. This tional Loftis fa mily of Port Wa rwick, Virginia, split ap�rt particular result of postwar literary trends was just what by many things, but primarily by an unhealthy love Chambers fe ared when he so harshly denounced "sophis­ between father, Milton, and daughter, Peyton. Ziegner ticated" literature to his old friend McCoy. Still remem­ identified important themes: "the search by the lost for bering a time when the best authors in the country the place of home, by fugitive and disinherited fo r the seemed all to reside within a thirty-mile radius of his wise father, by the uncertain fo r the absolute principle, Indianapolis office, providing books to an audience in the saving truth." He explained the unusual style of sen­ the rest of the country eager to maintain the homespun tences that "have a quality like Fa ulkner's (with overtones values of a preindustrial society, Chambers recognized 22 TRACES 0 R 0 E A L A N 0 R E N E w A L

only a little too late that he no longer had the energy attained the stature of a Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's or to try to stem the turning literary tide. He retired a Saxe Commins at Random House.

completely in 1958, when his fi rm was sold to Howard An instant success, Lie Down in Darkness sold well and W. Sams, and he died on his eighty-fourth birthday, placed Bobbs-Merrill squarely in the midst of serious 12 January 1963. contemporary American literature. Though this out­ Haydn, on the other hand, an academic and educator come is attributable primarily to the efforts of Styron's as well as an editor, sought to publish books and writers New Yo rk editor, the contribution of the author's cagey that would maintain and extend the best qualities in and cranky old Indianapolis publisher has perhaps been American literature: honesty, originality, craftsmanship, underestimated. It is at least possible that Chambers's and courage. Little concerned with the bottom line and insistence on softening Styron's language helped to extremely sensitive to what he perceived as threats to make the book accessible to a larger reading public than artistic expression, he was destined to collide with Cham­ it might have been otherwise, thereby enhancing the bers. While the experience to Haydn was an "ordeal" and book's profitability and establishing the young author's a "painful melodrama," there is some reputation simultaneously. Chambers evidence that Chambers did not may have been out of touch with con­ remember it that way. temporary literary trends, but he In June 1955 the subject of Haydn knew something about best-sellers. Of came up in Chambers's correspon­ the hundreds of books he had a hand dence with McCoy when the latter in publishing over his long career, the sought advice about where to submit most important and enduring may some poems for publication. Chambers well have been borne of the strife that suggested Haydn at the American began on that muggy September day Scholar. "Though he may not pay more in 1950 when he met his new New Yo rk than carfare," explained Chambers, editor. Whether or not Haydn and "he has taste." Later that month, in Chambers got along, in this case their

response to a McCoy question about collaboration was a success. Lie Down

Haydn, Chambers offered this: "He was in Darkness is still in print. with us until last year, is now one of ® H IRAM HAYDN IN 1948 AT THE TIME OF THE PUBLICATION the senior Random editors, runs the N ]. Kent Calder would like to thank the OF HIS NOVEL THE TiME IS OON. fo llowing peojJle fo r their contributions to American Scholar with his left hand, is a early versions of this article: Robert M. great fiction editor." Chambers, therefore, a man who Ta ylor Jr. , ja mes P Fa dely, Thomas A. Mason, Robert Ho lder, acknowledged holding grudges, seems to have held no Diana Chambers Leslie, jeanette Va nausdall, Megan McKee, grudge here. In fac t, he genuinely had only good things and William Styron. He also wishes to acknowledge the help of Becky Cape, assistant curator of manuscripts at the Lilly to say about his fo rmer editor in a context especially Library. A Staff Grant from the Indiana Historical Society conducive to honesty and sincerity. While Chambers's provided research support. praise of Haydn might have meant little in an earlier business letter, it probably meant a good deal in FOR FURTHER READIN G this correspondence. Chambers would have had abso­ Casciato, Arthur D. "His Editor's Hand: Hiram Haydn's Changes in lutely no reason to encourage his close friend McCoy Styron's Lie Down in Darkness. " Studies in Bibliography 33 (1980): to submit poems to an enemy. This small incident 263-76. Clark, Thomas D. "David Laurance Chambers as I Knew Him." The serves as a powerful corrective to the version of events Indiana Un iversity Bookman 8 (1967) : 100-6. depicted in Haydn's memoir. Haydn, Hiram. Wo rds and Fa ces. New Yo rk: Harcourt 'BraceJovanovich, 1974. aydn left Bobbs-Merrill to work fo r another O'Bar, Jack Wayne. "A History of the Bobbs-Merrill Company, demanding boss in Bennett Cerf at Random House, 1850-1940: With a Postlude through the Early 1960s." Ph.D. diss., estaHblishing himself as one of America's preeminent Indiana University, 1975. Styron, William. In heritance of Night: Early Draft s of Lie Down in Dark­ trade editors. Though Chambers worked with many best­ ness. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

--- II, selling writers who appreciated his work and remained . Lie Down in Darkness. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merri 1951. Reprint 1992. loyal to him, none of them achieved a lasting place in Tu cker, Glenn. "Laurance Chambers: The Man Who Knew Books­ American literature. Chambers, therefore, never And Their Writers." Indianapolis Star Magazine, 20 April 1975, 26-3 1.

Spri"g 1995 23 IN THIS SELF-PORTRAIT, EDWIN WAY TEALE EXAMINES A BUMBLEBEE ON A SUNFLOW ER. TEALE'S NATURE PHOTOGRAPHS WERE EXHIBITED IN THE SALON OF THE ROYA L PHOT OGRAPHIC SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IN ONE-MAN SHOWS IN MUSEUMS AC ROSS AMERICA.

24 TRACES " "Always the Other Spring ! The Life and Nature Wr iting of Edwin Wa y Teale

"I'M WR ITING ABOUT

E T E R N A L T H I N C S... . p E 0 P L E

CH ANCE A LOT MORE THAN

MAYF L IES. "

ORN 2 )UNE 1899, "IN THE KIND OF NEIGHBORHOOD WHERE BOYS PUT ROCKS IN THEIR SNOWBALLS," EDWIN WA Yc;B TEALE MIGHT HAVE MISSED HIS CALLING. FORTUNATELY, AS A CHILD HE WENT FROM THE ROUCH CITY ENVIRONMENT OF )OLIET, ILLINOIS, TO SPEND HOLIDAYS AND THE LONG SUMMER

MON THS AT HIS GRANDPARENTS' FA RMHOUSE AT THE EDGE OF THE INDIANA DUNES. AT LONE OA K FA RM NEAR

Furnessville, young Te ale began his freedom spent exploring and discov­ and mysteries of the wide world that life journey from "Dune Boy" to ering unhindered the ninety-acre a lifetime is not too long to satisfy. " winner of the first Pulitzer Prize farm "inch by inch." The sky full of In The Lost Wo ods: Adventures of a ever given to a nature writer. birds, shape-changing clouds, and Na turalist ( 1945 ), Te ale recalled that Te ale nicknamed himself "Dune constellations; the marsh, swamp, this ride was "the starting point of Boy" when he came to write (ca. and sandy fields swarming with crea­ my absorption in the world of 1943) the story of those formative tures furry or slimy to the touch; the Nature." The boy did not undergo summers with Edwin and Jemima old granary with its smells of wheat metamorphic changes to reach man­ Way, his maternal grandparents. and rye, of Cramp's corncob pipe, hood, but instead followed stead­ "Gram was as remarkable as Cramp," and mice; the teeming population of fastly a path laid out for him at he said. Cramp's family had moved spotted, striped, or hard-backed bugs Lone Oak. This child was indeed from New York state to the Indiana and beetles-this was the rich world the father of the man who con­ dune country in 1854; Gram's, to Edwin Way Te ale entered as a child. cluded: "Anyone ... wl o loves any­ a nearby farm in 1867. Married in When he was six, a sleigh ride thing in nature simply and sincerely the fall of 1867, the Ways had four with his grandfather to the dark will find a measure of joy in life." children; Edwin was daughter forest to get firewood "aroused in Dune Boy is the story of a boy com­ Clara's son. [his] mind an interest in the ways ing of age on a farm in Indiana at the In Dune Boy the adult writer beginning of the twentieth concluded that he owed his century. At Lone Oak Farm, Catherine E Forre st We ber grandparents a childhood of I young Edwin helped with the 25 Spri11g 1995 E 0 w N w A y T E A L E

chores and was amply rewarded with became an avid reader of the maga­ Sears, Roebuck catalog. When the Gram's breakfast of hominy fried in zines in the attic and Gram's books. camera arrived, he photographed a bacon fat and her supper of corn­ About the Michigan City Public rabbit, "the first of many thousand meal mush topped with creamy milk. Library, he said, "I knew the inte­ nature pictures which have pro­ Gram nursed him too, trusting in the rior of this square graystone build­ vided interest and excitement dur­ popular cures of the day: poulticing ing almost as well as I did the fields ing succeeding years." his chest with hot fried onions for a of Lone Oak." In Dune Boy Te ale paid tribute to cold and salving a burn with succes­ Daydreaming that one day he, too, his extraordinary grandparents. "It sive layers of egg white, lard, and would be an author, he already knew was my great good-fortune to spend flour. For many years Gram was the what kind of books he would write. the summers of these early years in custodian of 140 volumes of world At Lone Oak, his "passionate love of the farmhouse where, more than classics in history and literature that the out-of-doors and ...interest in anywhere else in that part of north­ had been purchased by the township the world of books found a common ern Indiana, my attempts at writing trustees. Every evening she read meeting-ground. " Roving the farm, would be encouraged and appreci­ aloud to husband, grandson, and he wrote his impressions in a series ated," he wrote. whoever else happened to drop by; of notebooks. One notebook, labeled He was halfway through his teens, the readings, Te ale recalled, were "atmosphers," he reserved for "atmo­ studying hard, and bent on being a "one of the big events of the day. " spheric bits and descriptive pas­ writer, when the family got word randfather Way was a cheer­ sages"; one entry reads, "The smoke one January morning that Lone Oak ful companion at work and is an aerial serpan t. " In another, he farmhouse had gone up in flames. at play. "Keep yer eye peeled listed the wild creatures he saw: Gram and Cramp were safe at a ferG fun!" he often announced before "night-halk, red-headed woodpeccar. " neighbor's; Edwin took the train to a picnic or a trip to town. Once or He also observed himself: "This Furnessville and brought them back twice a summer, the family picnicked morning I scratched my head in bed. to Joliet. at Lake Michigan; it was "a gala event The hairs rubed together and made a Already well into their seventies, that required days of preparation. " squeek." The keeper of the note­ the grandparents decided to retire While Edwin sported an old wool books was not yet eight years old. to their daughter Elizabeth's home bathing suit, Cramp swam jauntily in "I plunged into writing, " he said in Richmond, Indiana. When Lake Michigan in his overalls. In later. He watched the cats of Lone Edwin entered Earlham College, he Michigan City, Cramp and Edwin vis­ Oak and wrote a story based on his was reunited with Gram and Cramp ited the Canditorium on Main Street study: "His mussels tightened and for another four years until his for wintergreen sodas topped with he sprang foreward and chalenged graduation (A.B., 1922). In Dune coral-pink foam. Used to hacking off the stranger to prove his worthy­ Boy, he wrote, "Each memory of pi tch from "The Chewing-Gum ship. " He continued to develop his them might well begin: 'Once upon Trees" (s pruces) on the farm, Edwin power of observation with "Tales of a wonderful time .. .' " spent his five cents on a more mal­ Lone Oak. " Te ale began the tales in In 1923 Te ale married fellow stu­ leable treat: wintergreen-flavored 1908 and completed the twenty­ dent Nellie Donovan of Indianapo­ Jumbo gum. ("My progress through fifth and final chapter in December lis, "a small, bright-eyed girl who the world, in later years, " Te ale 1909, when he was ten. could spot birds better than he and ref lected, "has been something of an Gram and Cramp made possible shared his passion for the outdoors." ,. Odyssey in search of wintergreen Edwin's hope of illustrating his arti- From the beginning of their mar­ sodas and Jumbo gum.") cles with photographs by giving him riage, taking up where Gram left Te ale claims he learned to read a job on the·farm. With a salary' of a off, Nellie read aloud to Edwin "by the Sears, Roebuck method-by cent and a half a quart, the boy every night. (In times of trouble trying to find all about the things I picked (at eighty berries a quart) they found it comforting to reread wanted most to own. " One week he 20,000 strawberries to buy a box Don Quixote. ) During their fifty­ listed "everything in the world I camera, film, developing kit, and seven years of marriage Nellie trav­ wanted": total cost, $392.80. He printing material-$3.75 in the eled with her husband on his nature 26 TRACES TEALE APTURED ON FILM A FIREFLY CLINGING TO A WET CRASS I-lEAD.

Spring 1995 27 E D w N w A y T E A L E

journeys, whether to the insect gar­ am not merely standing up for [the (Famed naturalist Roger To ry Peter­ den close to home or across Amer­ book] . I am standing on a chair and son said that his friend Te ale was ica. She was his "Partner Naturalist." shouting." Peattie went on to praise interested "in everything that grows, For two years Te ale worked as an Te ale's photographs by saying "there walks, swims, or flies.") How many instructor at Friends University, is nothing like them anywhere." seeds does a cattail have? Te ale Wichita, Kansas, where Nellie also In 1942 Te ale published Near Hori­ began counting, "gaily at first." Te n taught. Then, in 1924, he moved to zons: The Story of an Insect Garden. days later, he informed his long­ New York to fulfillhis boyhood dream Some years before, he had begun suffering family that a cattail (or at of becoming a writer. He entered the paying ten dollars a year for "insect least his cattail) had 147,265 seeds. English graduate program at Colum­ rights" to four acres of wasteland To heighten the drama of his bia University, and in nature photographs, 1925 he began selling Te ale had an innova­ "topics, quotations, gen­ tive idea. First, eral ideas, and partic­ he refrigerated the ular treatment" to Dr. insects to make them Frank Crane, a popular torpid. When he was syndicated columnist. ready to shoot, he took Popular Science hired an insect out of the him three years later as icebox and as it feature writer and pho­ warmed up, he tanta­ tographer, a job he lized it with "mate, held until 15 October opponent or pre�" 1941. For the rest of his With a one-inch focal life he celebrated the movie lens on a Zeiss date as his "own per­ Ideal B camera, he sonal Independence magnified the insect Day. " At the age of until it seemed to have

forty-two, with his son EDWIN WAY TEALE CALLED THE SUMMER HE AND NELLIE, HIS WIFE, SPENT been photographed in high school and his TRAV ELING AC ROSS AMERICA THE "GREAT SUMMER OF OUR LIVES." THIS MAP through a microscope. OF THEIR ROUTE APPEARED ON THE ENDPAPERS OF jOURNEY INTO SUMMER. invalid mother living Te ale's writing career with the family, he continued with the abandoned his steady salar y and near his Long Island home where he publication of Dune Boy in 1943; the launched himself "into the hazards of planted "a banquet-hall for the six­ Ne w iOrker characterized the book as a freelance life as a photographer of legged." Marveling, he observed the "Warm with the fresh and comfort­ and writer about the world of nature." insects who had charmed him since able savor of country life in the years thin a few weeks Te ale boyhood. A toppled June bug before the first World War. " That as earning more than his stopped its frantic kicking and rested same year Te ale was given the John mer regular salary. As quietly on its back when he gave it "a Burroughs Medal for distinguished Wwriter and photographer he had small object to hold." Amazed at the nature writing. When his next book, already made his mark outside his sight of butterflies fighting, he The Lost Wo ods, came out in 1945, it work for Popular Science; Dodd, Mead thought of the resemblance to "flow­ was to a readership nearly twice that had published five of his books. His ers locked in-combat." He watched of his previous books. book on American insects, Grassroot (for three hours) a praying mantis Then tragedy struck the Te ales. Jungles (1937), had been reviewed in making a nestz and noted that wh.en Their only son, David, had joined the the Ne w Yo rk Times Bpok Review's she had laid her eggs, "she moved army after his graduation from high place of honor, the front page. Natu­ away without a backward glance." school. He went to Germany with ralist Donald Cuirass Peattie wrote in His garden in all its aspects General George Patton's forces and the Ne w Thrk Herald Tr ibune review: "I catered to his passionate curiosity. became part of an assault team that

28 TRACES E D w N w A y T E A L E

specialized in planting dynamite. since he was a boy. Every evening in bound for the collt::ction in the Rare David was reported missing in action the motel of the day, for one to three Books Room in the Library of the for a year before his parents received hours, Te ale typed his field notes. University of Connecticut. His pub­ word that he had been killed by a ack home after their adven­ lisher and friend E. H. Dodd Jr. , in sniper's bullet two months before the ture, Te ale condensed and Of Na ture, Time, and Te ale, quoted end of the war in Europe. He was sorted his field notes into Te ale: "Writing for me is always hard only nineteen. large envelopes; each envelope con­ grinding work, and yet I am happiest David Te ale had shared his par­ tained the nucleus of a chapter. when I am writing a book." ents' love of the outdoors. To gether When he had collected other rele­ No rth with the Spring was a critical

the three of them had planned a vant material-maps, photos, the and popular success. William 0. series of journeys for Douglas headed his arti­ after the war to observe cle in the New York Times the American sea­ Book Review: "I Wish I sons. "Have you ever Had Written That." In dreamed," Te ale would 1960 when Orville ask, "of meeting spring Prescott of the Ne w York under far-southern Times selected fourteen skies, of following its books he expected triumphal pilgrimage would live for the up the map? " Now the next twenty-five years, grief-stricken parents he chose No rth with the knew that they must Spring and added Te ale's carry on. When No rth other nature books with the Spring was pub­ as well, "all of them lished in 1951, it was combinations of sound dedicated-as were scientific observation, each of the succeeding gracious writing and volumes in the tetra!- AT HIS WRITING CABIN AT TRAIL WOOD, TEALE WORKED ON A TWENTY· contagious enthusiasm." ogy-"To DAV ID Who FIVE·YEAR·OLD, FLAT·TOPPED DESK MADE FOR HIM IN A CARPENTER SHOP For their next "adven- IN CHESTERTON, INDIANA. Tr aveled with Us in ture with a season," the Our Hearts." Te ales chose autumn, In February 194 7 the "migrating bibliography, and the results of traveling from east to west "as the Te ales" (Nellie's term) headed out in library research-he filed the flow of American history crossed the their black Buick from the Florida planned contents of each chapter. continent." On a golden afternoon Everglades. "Spring advances up the When he was ready to write the in late August, they stood "on Cape United States, " Te ale would inform book, Te ale was at his typewriter by Cod's far-eastern tideline." Their his readers, "at the average rate of five in the morning (the hour he favorite author, Henry David Thoreau, about fifteen miles a day" and must have roused himself out of bed had said that a man might stand on "ascends mountainsides at the rate to help Gram and Gramp with the the Cape's outer beach and put all of about a hundred feet a day. " farm chores). He worked until six in America behind him. The Te ales Zigzagging for 17,000 miles through the evening, completing two chapters turned to face the setting sun, all twenty-three states, they remained a month. After supper Nellie read America and "the n: ost eventful right at the heart of spring's long, the manuscript aloud, and Edwin autumn of [their] lives" before them. slow exuberant progress northward. made his corrections. A reviewer During the 20,000-mile fall trip As they traveled, Te ale jotted down once commented: "Edwin never from coast to coast, Te ale typed his observations, such as "seasons begin missed anything, but if he did, Nellie daily field notes, which amounted to in the sky, " in the little Woolworth caught it." When he completed the half a million words. Autumn across notebooks he had been keeping book, he had the typescript pages America, published in 1956, surpassed

Spring 1995 29 E D w N w A y T E A L E

the popularity and critical acclaim of Nellie dropped one cent into the "W here California joins Mexico

No rth with the Sp ring. The Saturday machine that promised "Swami" and the I and meets the sea," on the Review called the birth of Edwin Way knows all. "W ill we make a trip this winter solstice, the Te ales took "one Te ale "one of the best things that ever summer? " Nellie asked, and Swami breath in autumn, the next in win­ happened to contemporary American answered, "Are you kidding?" ter. " The trip began with whale nature writing. " Na ture Magazine dwin Te ale was sixty-two years watching a mile out on the Pacific hailed the book as "a moving, varied, eold when he embarked on the Ocean. On board ship, Te ale mused satisfying, fact-fortified recollection trip through the fourth season. about his lifelong "insatiable desire in eloquent prose. " Te ale was receiv­ By the winter of 1961 he had pub­ to be inside other forms of life, to ing affirmation of the worthiness of lished more than twenty books and see the things that I see with their the project of his life: chronicling the received numerous honors, includ­ eyes and their minds-this is a natural history of the American sea­ ing a Litt. D. from Earlham College thread that has run through all our sons. He and Nellie began gearing up in 1957 and the 1960 Indiana seasonal wanderings. A thousand for the next year's trip into summer. Author's Day Award. Perhaps his reincarnations, each as a different As the sun rose in the White Moun­ greatest honor, however, would form of life, would be too few. " tains of New Hampshire on the vernal come with the completion of the From the Pacific to the Atlantic equinox, Te ale noted that "summer work he was about to begin. coast, the couple journeyed through was coming at its appointed time and we had come to meet it." The natural­ ist's pace should be a snail's pace, he said. What really counts, Te ale contin­ ued, is "how much he sees, ...how much he appreciates, how much he feels. " Three months and 19,000 miles (348 printed pages) later, he would rejoice in the completed jour­ ney, a "long and happy road through the second season of the year. " The Te ales enjoyed a leisurely trip in that summer of 1957. Advancing downstream from the source of the Kankakee River, near South Bend, Indiana, the Te ales were struck by the "moving, glittering magic show of the fireflies"-a show so great that they always remembered the stream as the "River of Fireflies. " They stopped over in Fenton, Michi­ gan, where Nellie had spent her girlhood summers, and visited Alle­ gan, where Potawatomi Chief Simon Pokagon died the year Edwin was born. They listened to "a sound older on this earth than the song of any bird, " the faint ras ing of drag­ p TEALE TOOK THIS SHOT OF A \'ii HITE·TA ILED FAWN PEEKING FROM THE CEDARS ON WISCON· onfly wings brushing against plant SIN'S DOOR PENINSULA. IN 1972, AS HE SELECTED IMAGES FOR A BOOK OF HIS NATURE PHOTOGRAPHS, TEALE REALIZED THAT MANY OF THE SCENES HE HAD RECORDED HAD SINCE leaves in North Dakota. Near Pike's BEEN ALTERED BY MAN. "IN THIS TIME OF SWIFT AND WIDESPREAD CHANCE," HE WROTE, "IT Peak, Colorado, at a small cafe, IS FORTUNATE THAT NEVER BEFORE HAVE SO MANY CAMERAS BEEN RECORDING SO MUCH." 30 TRACES E D w N w A y T E A L E

winter. Just a few weeks into their mont sugar bush "sweet with the Drawing from .their oytdoor trip east, in New Mexico, their snow perfume of the boiling sap." encounters and observations, they tires proved a curiosity to vacation­ In the last chapter of the "winter named the diverse sections of their ers at Death Valley; they kept pace book," Te ale summed it up that after 130 acres: Firefly Meadow, Wood­ with a dust devil that was traveling twenty years of seasonal traveling, cock Pasture, Starfield, Stepping at forty miles an hour; and they their favorite seasons were spring, Stone Brook, Tu rtle Rock, Far North snowshoed on the White Sands gyp­ summer, fall, and winter: "We want Woods. At Tr ail Wood, Te ale wrote, sum dunes. Ve nturing on, the Te ales the rounded year." Wa ndering through "Seven paths ...lead us-my wife, scratched for diamonds in a plowed Winter won the Pulitzer Prize for Nellie, and me-through the daily field in Arkansas and mired their general nonfiction in 1966. changes of the seasons." car in Missouri mud. They followed "I need contact with the earth as In his log cabin surrounded by the Wabash upstream to the Lim­ much as any herb or tree," Te ale aspens, Te ale continued writing. berlost Swamp, and while in Indiana once said. In the late fifties, in the Working, he was happy: "The printed raced through an ice storm that hills near Hampton, Connecticut, page ...is the river we can cross caught up with them at Liberty. he and Nellie had discovered and again." He was seventy-nine when he Near the end of their trip, Edwin bought the perfect place, Tr ail published one of his most compan­ and Nellie spent a night in a Ve r- Wood, their "sanctuary-farm." ionable books, A Wa lk through the Year, a chronicle of 365 Tr ail Wood days. The book is dedicated to the much-loved woman who walked beside him all his adult life:

To the sun and the moon and Nellie; To the pasture rose and the bluebird and Nellie; To the starlight and the rainbow and Nellie; To all that means the most to me at Tr ail Wood­ especially Nellie.

With a Te ale book in hand, the reader not only gains insights into the natural world but also grows fond of "EdwinandNellie" (naturalist and friend Ann Zwinger's descrip­ tion). Anecdotes and personal glimpses are endearing. Edwin meets a northern banded water snake: "It looked at m'e; I looked at it. It tired first." ellie dreams of a bright red warbler no one has seen before or of holding a purring chip­ munk to her ear, and Edwin writes, DURING HIS SUMMER TRAVELS, TEALE PHOTOGRAPHED PRAIRIE DOCS AT DEVILS TOWER "One of the missed opportunities of NATIONAL MONUMENT, WYOMING FOLLOWING THEODORE ROOSEVELT'S PRESIDENTIAL DECREE IN 1906, THE PRAIRIE DOC COLONY FLOURISHED AT THE PROTECTED SITE. my life, probably, has been a failure 31 Spr ing 1995 20,000 J A ' ADVE:r>.TUkOU JlilnMil l UK EY THROUCif TIU: er ORTU AME:RICAN WI

32 TRACES E D w N w A y T E A L E

to keep a complete record of the feeling ... never an end to the published posthumously by coau­ natural history of Nellie's dreams. " small adventures of seeing some­ thor Ann Zwinger. This, his thirti­ Since he was a boy on his grand­ thing new in what we have come to eth book, recorded the river parents' farm in the Indiana dunes, know so well. " After dark one fall journeys Zwinger shared with Te ale Edwin Way Te ale had known evening, the Te ales strolled up the during his last years. Tr aveling by how to live in enthusiastic har­ path to Starfield. Listening to the canoe, Te ale rejoiced: "W ith the mony with himself and with his small cries of the birds heading first paddle stroke I feel like a teth­ beloved world of nature. In A south, Edwin wrote : "Standing ered balloon whose rope has been Wa lk through the Ye ar, he affirms here motionless, wingless, earth- cut. I am floating free. " that "a sunny hour is Edwin Way Te ale died not an illusion. It is a at the age of eighty-one moment of reality as on 18 October 1980. much as the moment Mounted above his of strife. " desk in the log writing As carefree as a boy, cabin at Trail Wood Te ale peeled off his there remained the shirt and soaked up the inscription from an sunshine alongside a ancient gravestone, a flicker who was sun­ message to each of his bathing with outspread readers, and a witness wings. He gathered a to the success of Te ale's cupful of cattail pollen, own life: and Nellie made the "The wonder of the pancakes. To gether world, the beauty and they watched three fox the power, the shape of cubs playing. In the things, their colors, evening they listened lights and shades, these to the katydids and I saw. Look ye also while noticed that one was life lasts. " out of tune, for its call ended "in a kind of Catherine E Fo n·est We ber 'yip! yip!' " wrote about Jessamyn We st in Te ale called himself the summer 1994 issue o] Tr aces. "a lifelong hoarder of memories. " He rein­ TEALE REMEMBERED HIS GRANDMOTHER, JEMIMA WAY, "AS ONE FOR FURTHER READING forced his memories OF THE INDOMITABLE, GREAT WOMEN" THAT HE EVER MET. Dodd, Edward H., Jr., Of with significant objects Na ture, Time, and Te ale. New Yo rk: Dodd, from the past. He liked to hold bound, Nellie and I almost feel the Mead & Co., 1960. Cramp's gold watch in his cupped tug of migration ourselves. " He Te ale, Edwin Way. Dune Boy. 1943. Reprint. Bloomi ngton and Indianapolis: Indiana Uni­ hand, to feel the weight of it. concluded with the belief that "A versity Press, 1986. Beside the Tr ail Wood house under happy ending is no more false --. No rth with the Sp ring. New Yo rk: Dodd, Mead Co., 1951. the hickory trees, the Furnessville than an unhappy ending," and the & --. A Wa lk through the Ye ar. 1978. peony (transplanted from Lone joyful exclamation: "Always the Rep•·int. New Yo rk: The Edwin Way Te ale Oak to Long Island to Tr ail Wood) other spring!" Library of Nature Classics. Dodd, Mead & Co., 1987. bloomed deep red on each Memo­ Edwin Way Te ale's books were --. Wa ndering through Winter. New Yo rk: rial Day. translated into ten languages and Dodd, Mead & Co., 1965. Willard, Lawrence F. "Trail Wo od Tr ails with Te ale believed there was "never braille. A Conscious Stillness: Tw o Edwin Way Te ale." Audubon 54 (1962): an end to seeing, to hearing, to Na turalists on Thoreau's Rivers was 135-41. 33 Spring 19 95 EDWIN· AND NELLIE TEALE VISITED THE MEGALITHIC REMAINS AT AVEBURY, ENGLAND, WHILE RESEARCHING SPR INGTIME IN BRITAIN. FOR THE SERIES ON THE AMERICAN SEA· SONS, THE COUPLE TRAVELED MORE THAN I 00,000 MILES, SOME BY CAR, PLANE, AND FERRY, OTHERS BY FOOT, CANOE, AND SNOWSHOE.

34 TRAC ES awn came late If you look to the west as you E 0 W N WAY the next morn­ reach the top bf a rise some D ing. We watched the gray of its leaden miles south of Ve rsailles, your eye ascends a long light slowly increase beyond the window- slope to the summit of a higher hill. Scattered "trees

panes. Gone were the undimmed heavens of the night and patches of woodland vary with open stretches

before. All across the sky, as we started out, sullen up the length of this incline. On this day, all the

clouds pressed low. We were once more in a time of trunks of all the trees were gleaming; all the

winter rains. It was days before we saw the sun again. branches were crystalline. Even under the lowering

Under the low ceiling of the clouds, we turned sky, grass and bush and tree seemed bathed in a sil­

south down the eastern edge of Indiana. We trav­ ver glow, the cold radiance of light reflected from

eled, that day, almost the length of the state, from the ice ....

just below Fort Wayne to Madison, on the Ohio As the afternoon wore on, we seemed more and

River. And all the way we rode through a half twi­ more transported into a kind of Crystal Age. Every­

light. Somewhere below Winchester, near Lynn, I thing around us had become smooth and unmarred,

remember we looked down a wet side road that led clean and shining, hard and transparent. We moved

east a fe w miles to Greenfork To p. There, 1,240 fe et through a realm of cold and lifeless beauty. A breeze

above sea level, the crest of sprang up, but the dry

a little knoll in a cornfield music of the winter grasses

represents Indiana's high­ FROM WA NDERING was stilled. We heard when

est point of land. THROUGH W� we paused-and then only

Rain was fal ling when, a rarely-the small tinkling

little before noon, we sounds of ice striking ice.

slowed down at the edge of Richmond. For Nellie The beauty of a glaze storm is almost exclusively

and me, this was a nostalgic return to fam iliar sur­ visual beauty.

roundings. We drove about fo r some time, winding But that beauty has endless variety. Like specimens

through the Earlham College camp us, fo llowing preserved in colorless amber, each weed head was Clear Creek, visiting a long-remembered clump of displayed within its envelope of ice. A teasel became

blue spruces on a hillside. Beyond the ceaselessly a crystalline work of art and all the woven fe nces bor­

swinging arms of the windshield wipers, we saw dering pasture fields were converted into gleaming

scenes associated with the past. Every turn brought meshes of ice and wire. Under a line of locust trees,

recollections. For it was at Earlham College that we every branch shining with its glinting burden, an

first met. There our adventures together began. embankment fe ll away in a steep descent. From top

First in rain, then in soft, wet snow, then in sleet to bottom, it was clothed with wild honeysuckle 111 that bounded in streaming white pellets from the vines. All the intertwining stems and tendrils were i� windshield and hood of the car, we zigzagged south­ enveloped in ice. The picture presented suggested � ward through Liberty and Connersville and Rushville some tumbling waterfall, its airy grace stilled by cold � !a and Ve rsailles. The sky grew darker. Rain had changed in the midst of its descent. A little later, we passed a � � to snow when we came to Liberty. Snow had changed cornfield where all the stalks lay prostrate, each yel- �

to sleet by Connersville. And sleet had become fine low line visible through its coating of ice. . . . � � rain again when we reached Rushville. The roads were About an hour before dusk, on roads becoming � $ almost deserted. No one was in the fields. Both man slippery, we crept cautiously down the steep, wind- � w and beast were under cover. I switched on the radio. ing descent into the town of Madison, beside the � � Broadcasts were filled with warnings against freezing Ohio River. The freezing rain conti nued into the � . � rain. An ice storm was imminent. ... night. In the morning, our car was sheathed in tee. �

L______� o

Spri11g 1995 35 I DESTINATION INDIANA I The John Hay Hom e

UNE 1829 DR. CHARLES HAY, AFTER AN his infant years started its life in 1824 as the Salem Grammar School. ARDUOUS HORSE RIDE FROM HIS HOME IN LEXINGTON, KENTUC KY, When the school later moved to larger quarters, Dr. Hay bought the ARRIVED IN THE� SMALL INDIANA TOWN OF SALEM, WHICH AT THAT TIME schoolhouse and made it his home. During his years living in Salem, Dr. NUMBERED APPROX IMATELY EIGHT HUNDRED INHABITANTS. THE YOUNG Hay took an active part in the com­

DOCTOR OPENED HIS PRACTICE SHORTLY AFTER HIS ARRIVAL ON THE munity, becoming, along with Royal B. Childs, editor and publisher of Hoosier scene, but Hay, in the twelve kets remained open to burgeoning the Indiana Monitor newspaper, later years he resided in Salem, barely man­ American trade. Private secretary and known as the Salem Whig. Unable to aged to make enough money to sup­ military aide to President Abraham make ends meet for his large family port his family and eventually moved Lincoln, author of the acclaimed Pike through his Salem practice, the on to Warsaw, Illi­ County Ballads, edi­ Tr ansylvania College-trained physi­ nois. Although a fail­ torial writer for the cian moved to what he hoped were ure in Salem, Hay Ne w Yo rk Tr ibune, greener pastures in Illinois. did achieve his life's successful business- Although his father was by no ambition. "I have man, United States means a rich man, John Hay remem­ hoped," he wrote on § Minister to Great bered fondly childhood days passed his seventy-fifth � Britain, and Secre­ near the banks of the Mississippi birthday, "to leave � tary of State under River. "The boys of my day, " he ii behind me children, � two presidents recalled, "led an amphibious life in and children's chil­ � (William McKinley and near its waters in the summer dren-and the greater ! and Theodore Roo­ time, and in the winter its dazzling the number, the bet­ sevelt), Hay is best ice bridge, of incomparable beauty ---- - ter I would be .------";� known for helping and purity, was our favorite play­ Before e111barkii!g 011 a diplo111atic career, pleased-with whom Johu Hay served as a private secretary to strengthen ties ground." From an early age, Hay dis­ intelligence, honor, to Abraha 111 Lincoln, who111 he nickua111ed between America played an aptitude for learning and '' A c i t ·· " coo " '' e n_ ai_'__y____I1 _. ______J and thrift would be L______d T and Eng 1 and and writing and, with financial help matters of instinct and tradition." his Open Door notes regarding trade from relatives, journeyed east at age Born 8 October 1838 in Salem, in China. Although a Hoosier for seventeen to attend Brown Univer­ John Hay, the third of the six chi!- only a short time (his family moved sity in Providence, Rhode Island. dren raised by Dr. Charles and Helen to Illinois when he was three years The young man from the west took Leonard Hay, more than met his old), Hay and. his illustrious career some ribbing at first from his more father's wish for success. In a diplo- are memorialized at Salem's John Hay sophisticated classmates, but Hay matic and political career that Center, which includes the Hay won them over with his ready wit. At spanned the transforii_lation of the house, the Stevens Memorial Museuin, a fresh man dinner he was called United States from an agrarian and a pioneer village-all under the upon by the toastmaster to give a nation to a worldwide power, John auspices of the Washington County speech. When a voice cried out that Hay worked tirelessly to see that mar- Historical Society. the audience did not want anything The two-room, brick house that dry, the former Hoosier responded: Ray Boomhower was home to the young Hay during "Hay that is green can never be dry." 36 TRACES Graduating from Brown University as ambassador to England. He left Looking back over his life in a in 1858, Hay returned to Illinois and that post after a year to become diary entry for June 1905, Hay pondered what to do with his life. McKinley's secretary of state. Hay reflected: "I have had success. beyond Although he considered becoming a continued to serve as secretary of all the dreams of my boyhood. My minister, or returning to the east to state under Theodore Roosevelt, who name is printed in the journals of the try his hand as a writer, his family took over as president upon McKin­ world without descriptive qualifica­ urged him to study law instead. "They ley's assassination. As secretary of tions, which may, I suppose, be called would spoil a first-class preacher, " state, Hay was known for maintaining fame. By mere length of service I Hay wrote a friend, "to make a third­ friendly relations with Great Britain, shall occupy a modest place in the class lawyer of me. " Bending to his attempting to keep China open for history of my time." To help ensure family's wishes, Hay moved to Spring­ field, Illinois, to read law in his uncle's successful law office, which was adja­

cent to the law firm of Lincoln & Herndon.Becoming friends with John Nicolay, Lincoln's private secretary, Hay secured an appointment as the president's assistant private secretary (officially he was appointed to a clerk­ ship in the Department of the Inte­ rior and detailed to special service at the White House). From a seemingly innocuous posi­ tion as assistant private secretary, Hay, during the trying days of the Civil War, worked his way into Lin­ Tin birthplace of Hay had earlier housed the Salem Grammar School, which was opened in April 1825 11 nder the direction of John Morrison. Hay 's fa ther Charles bought tin brick coln's good graces, gradually han­ structure wlnn the school moved to larger quarters. dling more difficult assignments than just routine correspondence, American trade through the Open that Hay's life would not fade from such as dealing with office seekers, Door notes, and negotiating the the public's memory, the Washington investigating alleged secret societies treaties regarding America's involve­ County Historical Society in June plotting against the Union cause, ment with the Panama Canal. 1971 opened the John Hay Center. and traveling to Canada with Ne w Along with his diplomatic skills, The center includes the house where Yo rk Tr ibune editor Horace Greeley Hay possessed a talent for writing. Hay was born, restored to depict liv­ to meet with Confederate represen­ While working for the Ne w Yo rk ing conditions in the 1840s, and tatives on a possible peace proposal. Tribune in the 1870s, he won literary the three-story Stevens Memorial With Lincoln's blessing, Hay was fame with such dialect poems as "Lit­ Museum, which houses various commissioned on 12January 1864 as tle Breeches" and 'Jim Bludso." With exhibits and displays on the area's a major and assistant adjutant gen­ Nicolay, he coauthored the multivol­ history and the Society's genealogical eral of volunteers, eventually rising ume Abraham Lincoln: A History, and historical library. Also on the site to the rank of colonel of volunteers. which, combined with his relentless is a ten-building pioneer village. Following Lincoln's assassination, editorial assaults on the Democratic The John Hay Center is located Hay embarked, with help from Secre­ Party, won for Hay the distinction as three blocks east of the public square tary of State William Seward, on a the "Republican laureate. " A million­ at 307 E. Market St., Salem, Indi­

long diplomatic career, serving as aire through his marriage to Clara ana. The center's hours are 9 A.M. secretary of the American legation in Louise Stone, daughter of Cleveland to 5 P. M. daily with village tours

Paris, charge d'affaires at Vienna , railroad tycoon Amasa Stone (who conducted from 1 P. M. to 5 P. M. and secretary of the legation at committed suicide in 1883), Hay also Tuesday through Sunday. Admission Madrid. He later held posts as assis­ produced the novel The Bread-winners: is $2 for adults. For more informa­ tant secretary of state and, in 1897, A Social Study, which blasted labor tion, contact the center by calling was appointed by President McKinley unions and their leaders. (8 12) 883-6495.

Spring 1995 37 The Country Contri butor Rockville 's Juliet V Strauss

INDIANA STATE LIBRARY

OR EDWARD W BOK, EDITOR OF THE LADIES' HOME JOURNAL, AMERICA'S LEADING

WOMAN'S MAGAZINE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, THE SECRET TO HIS PERIODICAL'S

SUCCESS WA S SIMPLE: FIND WRITING TA LENT AND PUBLISH THE RESULT. IN DESCRIBING

HIS TECHNIQUE TO A NEW YORK ScJN REPORTER, BOK CAVE AS AN EXAMPLE A COLUMN

HE HAD FIRST NOTICED IN AN INDIANAPOLIS NEWSPAPER. "IT STRUCK ME AS WELL

DONE. I WATC HED IT FOR SOME TIME. THEN J TOOK PA INS TO FIND OUT WHO

WROTE IT," SAID BOK. HE DISCOVERED THAT THE WRITER WA S "A WOMAN IN A TINY

OUT- OF-THE-WAY TOWN IN INDIANA." AFTER A FAVORABLE REPORT FROM ONE OF

HIS STAFF, WHO TRAV ELED TO THE He:lOSIER STAT E TO VISI·T THE WOMAN, BOK

"MADE HER AN OFFER TO DO SOME WORK FOR US," WHICH LED TO THE COLUMN

"THE IDEAs oF A PLAIN couNTRY WoMAN." Ray Boomhower

38 TRACES J u L E T v. s T R A u s . s

The woman columnist Bok described to the New Yo rk ity. John H. Beadle, Rockville Tr ibune owner and later journalist was no stranger to the residents of her home­ roving correspondent for the American Press Associa­ town, Rockville, Indiana. From November 1905 until tion, heard one of Strauss's works and visited her her death in 1918, Juliet V Strauss, better known in her mother to inform her that her daughter had literary tal­ home state as "The Country Contributor" of Indianapo­ ent and should be encouraged to write. "Mother was lis Ne ws fame, produced for the journal a steady stream rather shocked at the idea of one of her girls doing any­ of common-sense observations for the magazine's thing of a public nature. But she was progressive for the female readers. "I have no hesitation in saying that her times and consented that I might write for the Tr ibune contributions have been more widely read and ... are and learn shorthand," Strauss noted. Her first contribu­ more popular than the writings of any single contribu­ tion for the newspaper was a satire on a masquerade tor to the magazine," Bok said of his discovery. Strauss's party attended by the town's elite. To avoid disclosing direct, down-to-earth writing style, which often empha­ her identity to the reading public, Beadle suggested she sized the importance of being a homemaker, was a hit use the nom de plume, "La Gi tani. " with Hoosier readers who regarded her "as friend and Isaac R. Strouse, who set the type for the story when counselor, " the Ne ws noted upon the author's death. no one else was in the office, also aided in keeping her Born on 7 January 1863 in Rockville, Juliet Virginia identity a secret. "The bond of secrecy thus established Humphreys was the second of four daughters raised by between the writer of that dainty and practically perfect William and Susan (King) Humphreys. As a young girl, manuscript was perhaps the most impelling of the she received from her father the nickname "Gypsy" mutual attractions which we found in each other, " (later shortened to Gyp) because of her constant wan­ Strouse said of the woman he would marry on 22 derings in Parke County's lush forests. Following their December 1881. The nuptials did not proceed without father's death in 1867, Juliet and her sisters were some disapproval, from the bride's family at least. brought up by their mother, a strong-willed woman who When she told one uncle that she intended to marry a played a key role in the future writer's education. A self­ man whose life's work was to be a newspaper editor, the described "dilatory pupil" while attending Rockville's uncle chewed on a piece of straw for a moment before public schools (she once told a gathering of newspaper telling his niece: 'Jule, don't you know that being an editors that she never studied a lesson in her life), editor is the orneriest business in the world?" Strauss said she had something more valuable than any Strouse, later a partner with Beadle in running the schoolhouse learning, and that was "the close compan­ Tribune, discovered that his new wife not only had writ­ ionship of a cultured mother who had a vocation fo r ing talent, but possessed an independent mind as well. teaching and who devoted her whole life to the care Many years before, Strouse's father had "Americanized" and education of her children. " his family's name from the German Strauss to Strouse. Although no scholar, she did excel in one area: writ­ Throughout her life, Juliet Strauss used the old German ing. Discovering her talent, fellow classmates, especially spelling of her husband's name, while Isaac Strouse boys, often used her skills to enliven their writing used the newer version. "She never would write our assignments. "Our teacher, " remembered Strauss, name as it was written by my father after he changed "knowing my style, soon discovered this, and it was not the spelling to compel the people of a typical Hoosier seldom that a paper came back to its author with the pioneer community to call him 'Strouse,' " the editor blue pencil run through certain paragraphs with the recalled for a series of articles about his wife written for word 'Gyp' in parenthesis beside them. " Her talents the Indianapolis Ne ws. might have made her popular with her fellow class­ As Strouse took on more and more responsibilities at mates, but Strauss's compositions did not always meet the Rockville newspaper, he found himself calling upon with complete approval. During literary exercises while his wife for writing assistance. One day while Beadle was in high school, she recalled that when she delivered her out of town and he was left in charge of the newspaper, work the "preachers always fidgeted around and the Strouse was stopped on his way to the office by a man nice ladies in their rustling black silk frocks coughed who had recently returned to town to attend a relative's apologetically behind their folded handkerchiefs, " funeral. The man handed the editor a ten dollar bill and uncomfortable, perhaps, with its satirical quality. said that he wanted an obituary of his relative in that One adult, however, recognized the youngster's abil- week's Tribune. Strouse told the man there was usually no

Spring 1995 39 J u L E T v. s T R A u s s charge for such notices, but added that it might be impos­ sible to get the sketch in the newspaper because, in order to get the edition out on time, he had to work the press himself. The man persisted, however, and Strouse took the money, had it converted into a five dollar gold piece, and ran home. Once there, he promised his wife that she could have the money if she wrote the sketch in time for that week's newspaper. She got the money. n 9 February 1893 Strauss began what became a 0 lifelong endeavor-a week ly column for the Tr ibune called "Squibs and Sayings." In describing how she began writing regularly for the newspaper, Strauss displayed her usual modesty. She noted that her hus­ band often would come home tired and careworn from his struggles with the newspaper's handpress and his interviews with subscribers "who wanted to pay in pithy turnips or green stovewood cut two inches too long for our little 'early breakfast' wood cook stove-and I hadn't the heart to refuse when he asked me if I couldn't write something to brighten up the paper." Strauss, busy at home with two daughters, did not travel in society circles much and fo und that "news was scarce and society items few and far between" fo r her column. Instead, she had to '"dig out' what I wrote from my head," Strauss noted. Those early columns included a hodgepodge of information for the Tr ibune's readers. Strauss com­ mented on everything from the plethora of advertise­ "I know what it is to be poor ments jammed into magazines to the appearance in and to be held down seemingly to a level Rockville of the first woman bicyclist. As it would in her future work, Strauss's home life also played a beneath my natural abilities. prominent role in her "Squibs and Sayings" column. I know what it means to be tired of the dishrag She even poked fun at her husband, the newspaper's editor, jokingly complaining one May that it was the and sick of the coal-scuttle, time of year "when the faithful spouse has to exercise I her Christian grace in listening to descriptions of the but have learned, big bass that got away, heard in intervals of scaling the and I think I have learned it well, scant 'catch' of sunfish and goggle eyes, and warding off the stealthy advances of the cat ...not to mention that there is a way of accepting these things which quieting sundry wails from the children, who insist lift them to the level of upon 'watching,' and becoming chief mourners over every fish which is beheaded." the brush and the pen and Writing for a small-town newspaper, however, pro­ duced its own set of troubles for the budding autho.r. the strings of the harp or the violin."

On one occasion, the .community's rival newspaper -JULIET STRAUSS published what Strauss called "a long, sarcastic, ven­ omous criticism of me and my work." Although hurt by the article, she took comfort from those people in town who expressed their delight in her writing. "You would 40 TRACES J u L E T v. s T R A u s s

be surprised to know, " A group enjoys the beat;tyof Sugar Creek, which runs through encourage and assist in the Tu rkey Rtn1, in August 1914. Ptiblic pressure from Pa rke Strauss said, "how well a development of a true and County reside11ts, including Strauss, helped lead to the preserva ­ kind or helpful word ...is tion of the area i11 its nattua l state. healthy American literature." remembered all a lifetime­ It was Cottman that Strauss and, too, how, though you may forgive them, the unkind wrote to in September 1896 asking for his opinion on a word or act remains-a hurt that never quite heals." story she had written called "The Professors Moving." "I Strauss also received early encouragement for her take criticism very well," she wrote Cottman, "so if you efforts from other Hoosier writers, including John Clark have anything on your mind you would like to say to me Ridpath and James Whitcomb Riley. Another author, I shall be glad to hear from you." Strauss got her wish. George S. Cottman, not only offered Strauss sound writ­ In a letter to her on 23 September 1896, Cottman ing advice, but also served as a confidant for her troubles. offered a lengthy critique of Strauss's work, telling her Born in Indianapolis on 10 May 1857, Cottman had been that he took such a detailed look because "of certain lit­ apprenticed as a printer to the Indianapolis Sentinel. Pos­ erary powers evinced ... which, if carefully directed, sessed with a love of history and a deftness with words, might, it seems to me, result in work of more than tran­ however, he soon turned to making his living through sient value." writing. Tr aveling throughout the state on his faithful The Indiana historian praised Strauss's ability to cap­ bicycle, he unearthed material on historical and natural ture the "picturesque character" of the stat�'s early pop­ subjects, which he turned into articles fo r area newspa­ ulation. "I have long thought that these phases of life, pers. Cottman, fo under in 1905 of the quarterly Indiana now buried in oblivion, would some time prove a mine

Magazine of History, also became a key and active member fo r some Indiana writer of fiction yet to come; and, so of the Western Association of Writers, a loosely organized far as I am aware, you are the first person on the ground authors group for med in 1886 that worked to "cultivate with any indication of a serious purpose," Cottman the highest and purest style of literary work, and to wrote her. He found, however, that Strauss needed to 41 Spri 11g 1995 42 TRACES J u L E T v. s T R A u s s work on two areas: her storytelling ability and develop- she possessed "talent-and not genius, " not being able ing her own style. He offered the fo llowing advice: to fully utilize her skills often frustrated Strauss. It made her sick, she wrote, "to see others who have

Art-or, to be more specific, the story-is realism-the objec­ scarcely a grain of talent printing their trash in tive fac ts plus the imagination of the artist, who, out of a sense respectable publications. " of harmony, proportions, fitness, beauty, combines those fac ts Despite her frustration at seeing others succeed while to serve his own purpose, and impressing into them meanings she struggled to find the time to write, Strauss did of his own. attract fa vorable attention. Indianapolis News editor Charles R. Williams was so impressed by an essay Strauss Responding to Cottman's letter, Strauss agreed with had written about the month of April that he signed her his observation that she possessed a great fascination fo r up to do a weekly column for his newspaper. Her first portraying old times-a fascination so intense "that I column, signed "The Country Contributor, " appeared in forget all about my plot and even have to scrape around the Ne ws 's 21 November 1903 edition. Strauss's work to get a semblance of a story upon appeared during what came to be which to hang the incidents." She known as the Golden Age of Indi­ also related to Cottman some of her ana literature-a time when frustration in trying to be both a Hoosier writers catered to readers housewife and a writer and admit­ who preferred writing that idealized ted that she had little spare time fo r traditional values or offered escape outside reading. Surprisingly, from an ever-changing world. Strauss expressed a strong aversion Strauss's work in both the Ne ws and for the writing work she had later in the Ladies ' Home jo urnal fit become best known for: newspa­ in well with this period, as she often pers. She wrote Cottman: "I have stressed to her readers the impor­ read only in a desultory way. Writ­ tance of life at home with a loving ten poetry because I couldn't help husband and children. She even cel­ it. Done newspaper work fo r fifteen ebrated the joys of cleaning house, years because I had to (I hate it) telling one reporter that "if I want and written in all eight stories five to be tip-top happy, I just light into of which I have sold. If you knew Looki11g back 011her youth in Rockuille, housekeeping with all my might. " me, you would see how useless it is Strauss, see11 here at age sixten1, said Used to living all her life in a to urge me to become methodical her a11d hersist ers' positio11 in society small town, Strauss also used her was "somewhat equivocal." Poor, pretty, and have a motif. There isn't any taleHted, atld fa therless girls, she added, column to editorialize on the supe­ you know. " offe red a "fine target for village gossips riority of life in the country over The demands of being a house­ and fo r the slings and arrows of outra­ that in the city. She strongly dis­ geous fortll!le as dealt out by more wife and mother often kept Strauss agreed with those who claimed that fo rtunate girls." from devoting as much time to her farm women had seen little of life. writing as she liked. In March 1897 "It is the woman who has walked she wrote to Cottman informing him that she could not across the fields on a wild winter night to help a sister be on the program for the WAW 's annual convention. "I woman in her hour of trial, the woman who has dressed have so very many cares and so much hard work to do the newborn baby and composed the limbs of the dead, that I can find little time fo r writing, " she informed learned the rude surgery of the farm, harnessed horses, Cottman. Due to some hard economic times, she had milked cows, carried young lambs into the kitchen to recently lost a small job writing fo r a Chicago newspa­ save them from perishing in the rough March weather­ per, which "threw me back into the kitchen again, and, it is she who has seen life, " Strauss wrote. though I have a great fo ndness for the kitchen and The Rockville native did not use her columns to urge think it is not half a bad place to be, I am unable to her readers to join in the struggle for women's rights, make much progress in literature, " wrote Strauss. such as suffrage. Strauss instead stressed that women Although the Rockville native related to Cottman that were "particularly fitted for the varied activities of plain 43 Sprillg 1995 44 TRACES J u L E T v. s T R A u s home life. " She also emphasized in her writings the columnist, Skelton recalled that Mondays and Tu esdays importance of individuality, lashing out at what she were set aside by Strauss to produce her columns for the termed the "smart" ideal of womanhood-the perfectly Ne ws and Jo urnal. ''Very seldom did she hesitate about sub­ groomed and well-mannered society lady. "I say she is ject matter, " Skelton noted. "The words seemed to flow tiresome," wrote Strauss, "that her 'taste' is question­ from the end of her pen. She often said to ambitious and able, that her influence on society is unwholesome. " inquiring readers, 'The only way to write is to write:' that Strauss advised women not to follow the crowd and was all she could tell them-that was her experience. " copy "every new wrinkle of fashion and custom," but Strauss used the middle of the week as a time for rather to be themselves, "to do as they wish to do, not dictating replies to letters she had received from her as some other woman sets the pace. " readers. Although deluged with mail, she made a point For the first few to answer every let­ years of her column, ter. In fact, Strauss the Country Con­ had handwritten tributor remained replies herself until relatively unknown the fall of 1912, to the general pub­ when she suffered a lic. Besieged by bout of neuritis. scores of letters "Sometimes her from women read­ hand would cramp ers wanting more until she could information about hardly hold the their favorite writer, pen," said Skelton. the News promi­ Strauss finally nently featured agreed to dictate Strauss in a 5 May George Cottma�1 (left) fo unded the Indiana Magazi�1eof History and, through letters, but Skelton 1906 article by his work with the We stern Associa tion of Wr iters, offe red a critical eye to said the writer William Herschell, budding writers like Strauss. A 1915 letter from the Country Contributor to refused to dictate Indiana governor Samuel Ralston (right) set the stage fo r the eventual preser­ one of the newspa­ vation of the Bloomingdale Glens area, now kuown as Tu rkey Run State Pa rk. her columns. "She per's top reporters. had formed her Herschell visited Strauss's home in Rockville, known to habit of thinking and could not change it," Skelton her readers as "Grouch Place," and described it and its said, adding that Strauss spent the latter part of the owner to an audience thirsting for more information week preparing her "Squibs and Sayings" column for about the mystery woman. Newspaper readers discovered her hometown newspaper. through Herschell's story that Strauss "is perfectly con­ One thing could and did disturb this routine­ tented when she is clad in her calico wrapper and sun­ Strauss's two daughters. "Her first and last thought was bonnet and is 'pottering' around the house. She would always for the children-they must have a good, whole­ rather make a garden in the rear of 'Grouch Place' than some time," Skelton recalled. Strauss's daughter, Marcia be presented as a lady at the court of St. James. " Strauss's F. S. Ott, later a columnist for the Rockville Republican, lack of pretense also shone through when she revealed noted that her mother's writing was such a part of the to Herschel! her doctrine for life: "Get happy and stay family's daily life that "it was merely an accepted thing that way. When trouble comes meet it, get along with it to us as children. " Calling her mother the "most pas­ as best you can, and then let loose of it." She also told sionate mother I have ever seen," Ott recalled that the reporter that she liked to attend parties now and Strauss "bruised her heart and hands alike ...to make then but was "not much of a club woman and only a fair the way smooth for her children. " Presbyterian. Otherwise, I'm all right." Strauss, whose jo urnal columns were published as The Despite the pressures of motherhood, family life, and Ideas of a Plain Country Wo man in 1906 by the Curtis newspaper deadlines, Strauss settled into a regular rou­ Publishing Company, found time for other pursuits tine over the years, according to her secretary Bessie Skel­ besides motherhood and writing. Perhaps her greatest ton. Reminiscing about her six years working for the contribution to her native state came in 1916, the year 45 Spring 1995 J u L E T v. s T R A u s s

Indiana celebrated its statehood centennial. Just a few her weekly column. Just a week before her death, which miles away from her Rockville home stood a vast area of occurred on 22 May 1918, Strauss's secretary called the virgin forest called Tu rkey Run (also known as Bloom­ newspaper to ask if one of the "emergency" columns, ingdale Glens), which one writer described as a "par­ written a few months earlier, could be returned to her adise of rocky gorges, glens, bathing beaches and boss for revision. Strauss managed to make the neces­ waterfalls. " Discovering that this area was in danger of sary changes and returned it to the Ne ws before her being bought by a timber company, Strauss wasted no death. The column, her last, which was titled "In time in trying to save the forest from destruction. Defense of Exaggeration," appeared in the newspaper In April 1915 she sent a letter to Indiana governor on 25 May 1918. In praising its former employee, the Samuel Ralston appealing for his help in saving Ne ws commended her works as offering "a very sound Tu rkey Run. Just a week after receiving her letter, Ral­ and helpful philosophy. One can read in them a love of ston appointed Strauss, Vida Newsom of Columbus, simplicity and genuineness, an earnest and honest faith, and William W. Woollen of Indianapolis to a Tu rkey a hatred of sham and pretense, and a belief in the home Run Commission and charged them with the difficult and family as the great educators. " task of preserving the forest. Strauss also expressed A more permanent memorial to Strauss came four her concerns to her friends at the Indianapolis Ne ws, years after her death with the unveiling of a memorial which included editor Richard Smith. Smith relayed to the author at Tu rkey Run State Park. Erected by the Strauss's appeal to Richard Lieber, one of the state's Woman's Press Club of Indiana, the sculpture, called noted conservationists. "Subjugation, " was crafted by Myra R. Richards. Accord­ In November 1915, Lieber met with Ralston to dis­ ing to the Press Club, the sculpture captured the spirit cuss with the governor his idea to establish a state parks of Strauss's writing-the subjugation of the material to system as a permanent memorial for the state's centen­ the spiritual. "We were all so grateful that Tu rkey Run nial celebration, which was being organized by the Indi­ had been saved from the timber interests and felt Mrs. ana Historical Commission. Ralston appointed Lieber Strauss should be memorialized for her leadership in to serve on the Tu rkey Run Commission, and, when the creating public sentiment for this state park to be IHC met in January 1916, it passed a motion approving saved," noted Susan McW hirter Ostrom, at that time the state park movement. Later, the commission cre­ Woman's Press Club recording secretary. ated a special parks committee with Lieber as its chair­ But perhaps the best way to remember Strauss is man (the Tu rkey Run Commission was merged into the through her own words. Reflecting on her life after her new committee). children had grown up and moved away from home, The first attempt to secure Tu rkey Run at a public auc­ she was proud that she had "never followed anybody's tion on 18 May 1916 failed. The Hoosier Veneer Com­ lead. I lived my own life. If I wished to ride a horse, or pany of Indianapolis secured the property with a $30,200 play a game of cards, or go wading in the creek with the bid. At the auction's conclusion, Herschell remembered children, I always did it. I never strained my eyesight or meeting a tearful Strauss along a path skirting Sugar racked my nerves to arrive at small perfections. I Creek. "I am sick of soul," she told the Ne ws reporter. avoided rivalries and emulations. In short, I live_9. " "Who would have dreamed that a few men's dollars could Contributing editor Ray Boomhower writes regularly fo r Traces. step in and destroy all this, the most beautiful spot in all He would be interested in hearing fr om anyone who might have more Indiana, one that all the money in the world could not information on the life and career of Rockville 's Ju liet V. Strauss. restore once it is gone? " Herschel! recognized, however, FOR FURTHER READING the woman's tears not as those of resignation, but as Frederick, Robert Allen. "Colonel Richard Lieber, Conservationist and "fighting tears. " He was right; the fight to save Ttirkey Park Builder: The Indiana Ye ars." Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1960. Hoy, Suellen. "Governor Samuel M. Ralston and Indiana's Centennial Run was far from over. Six months after the initial auc­ Celebration." Indiana Magazine of History 71 ( 1975): 245-66. tion, the parks committee reached a settlement with-the Shumaker, Arthur W. A History of indiana Literature. Indianapolis: timber firm, which accepted $40,200 for the site. Indiana Historical Bureau, 1962. Strauss, Juliet V The Ideas of a Plain Country Wo man. 1906. Reprint. Frequently ill later in life, Strauss still was able to New Yo rk: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1908. write columns for her eager readers. She even supplied The correspondence between Juliet V. Strauss and George S. Cottman is contained in the We stern Association of Writers and the Ne ws with a number of "emergency" articles in case George S. Cottman collections in the Indiana Division, Indiana she ever was unable, for whatever reason, to produce State Library. 46 TRACES hough our list of where the early corn is J U L 1 E T V . STRAUSS notable women is I. rustling, in the poultryyard 2ong one, the fact remains that the great when you hear the sleepy chirp of a little chick g uses of the worl d have been men. This under its mother's wing. If you have suddenly fe lt

should not be especially discouraging to women. yourself thus in touch with the Universal, know

The world doesn't need many geniuses. If that it is a revelation, but do not be in a hurry to you ever lived in the house with one you would be teii about it.

convinced that a little of him goes a long way, and The way to do things is to do them, and the way to

after he was gone, and the fam ily happily back into be somebody is just to be it.

the old rut of being nobody in particular There is never any glory in trying to do something

and having a good time, you would count which you cannot do, but there is always great hon­

your many blessings in a very tranquil state our and credit in doing anything well. Being a plain

of mind .... home woman is one of the greatest successes in life,

I am not much of a reformer, being doubtful of if to plainness you add kindness, tolerance, and

the real good of many things that we calJ progress, interest, real interest in simple things.

but I am not going to set myself in the path and get There is a text of Scripture that applies particu­

run over by them. One can keep out of their way and larly to women, ... "Though ye have lien among

besides, although the pots, yet shall

there is a lot of ye be as the wings

fuss over the chang­ FROM THE IDEAS OF A of a dove "-a nd I

ing conditions of PLAIN COUNTRY WOMAN smile when I

woman's lot and the see how intrinsic

new regime, when is that spirit of

the shouting and the tumult die it will be seen that womanliness that rises white and unsmirched

there is a respectable minority living close to the from life's scullery and its seeming degradations,

ground, holding to the old ideals, and, above all, and I wonder why it is that we are calJed upon to see

minding their own business-which is genius of the and know all the unspeakable side of life, to bear the

highest order.... burden of it-do the menial tasks, hustle out of sight

My mother was not a new woman, but I am quite the debris, the ghastly accumulations of daily living,

sure she had the proper theory of life. Yo u never and make the face of life sweet and attrac tive for

went into her kitchen but you fo und there a copy of man, fo r coarse, sinful, unsympathetic man, who is

some entertaining or instructive book. Yo u never big and strong, yet who cannot bear the sight of such

helped her wash the dishes without learning some­ things ! Then, after wondering a bit I come back to

thing widely removed from dishes. Hers was the the old doctrine that service is the crowning glory of

secret of a most successful way of living, and it is a life, and that through it alone do we lay hold upon

way that any thinking woman can adopt. She could the eternal. ...

not go out into the world, but she could bring the The inteiiigenl woman who has done real work­ world to her. and by real work I mean labour with her own hands

Wherever you are, wherever there is a point of year after year in her own house and kitchen-and

alert, interested consciousness, there is the centre who has meanwhile reared a creditable fam ily and

of the universe. To be interested is to be happy, still kept fo r her soul a pair of wings like a dove, is

and to be happy is simply to be in accord with your the perfect flower of civilisation, far superior to the wor [l]d. A sense of this truth may come to you woman of the world who knows the lingo of polite

anywhere-over the washtub, out in the garden society and little else .

47 Spri"g 1995 F o c u The Theodore Dreiser Pa pers

THE MANY HOOSIERS THROUGHOUT F lawsuits, and a book burning. An excerpt from one of the latter, written by newspa­ THE YEARS WHO HAVE SUCCUMBED TO THE TEMPTAT ION TO per editor Charles Yo st of Fayette, Ohio, provides an indication of Dreiser's PUT PEN TO PAPER IN AN IMAGINATIVE WAY, NONE IS AS stature in his home state at this time. In a letter of 2 May 1935 Yo st described IMPORTA NT TO AMERICAN LITERATURE AS THEODORE DREISER. his encounter with the Indiana Book Re view Club of Angola, Indiana:

It was guest night or day rather for this

club and the librarian of the Carnegie

-�, ....,, -··ll··) library there was invited to be present and -n:·r!.�t:_,...,_,_, C•t!f, expected to until she was told by Mrs. Emer­

son that I would probably have something to say about Mr. Dreiser ....

We ll, after I had concluded my remarks Mrs. Emerson told me the lady librarian said

she didn't have the nerve to meet me and

...... r-w. , • ...... , ,. , ••&, therefore had not put in her appearance .

She said that the library trustees had

ordered her to collect and burn every one of

Theodore Dreiser's books. I almost burned

up with a fe ver and wanted to know why she

(Mrs. Emerson) had not told me that before

I began to speak. Had I known that they

would have got a rap that would have made

them stagger fo r weeks ....Wh at sort of

Theodore Dreiser's address book. people are the trustees? Can't you imagine?

I did say, however, that teachers in our

schools were not fa miliar with the best con­ Never as popular in his lifetime as subsequent writing: the effect of money temporary authors; that libraries in many contemporaries Booth Ta rkington or or the lack of it on moral behavior. He places were somewhat leery of Dreiser, Meredith Nicholson, Dreiser and his fo unded his best works, Sister Carrie Nathan, Mencken, Darrow, Lewis, and We lls, works are now sources of an ever­ (1900), Je nnie Gerhardt (1911), and An and I imagine that went home, although I increasing amount of textual, critical, Arnerican Tragedy (1925), solidly on mem­ didn't know that you were on the expurgato­ and biographical scholarship. A small ories of his Indiana years. rious list and your books had been burned. I collection of Dreiser papers in the Indi­ Dreiser's genius was not immediately imagine they would likewise burn you at the ana Historical Society Library sheds a recognized by the American reading stake if they dared. faint but colorful light on the author's public. Sister Carrie sold only 450 copies life and reputation. in its first year and would not find its Dreiser's acceptance in Indiana was a Born in Te rre Haute in 1871 the sec­ true audience fo r another twenty years. long time in coming. Even by 1962, ond youngest in a large fa mily that By the mid-1920s, with the appearance when the Indiana Historical Society pub­ would number ten children, Dreiser of An Arnerican Tragedy , Dreiser was cele­ lished Arthur Shumaker's A History of grew up in various Indiana cities, includ­ brated as one of America's most engag­ Indiana Literatuu, Dreiser was not ing Sullivan, Vincennes, Evansville, and ing and original writers. Hoosiers, treated "because of insufficient resi­ Warsaw, the family looking always fo r a however, were•generally not a part of the dence and Indiana influence in [his] place that would supply them with some­ celebration. works." Though he left the state fo r thing more than mere subsistence. In A The Indiana Historical Society's collec­ good at the age of nineteen, he carried Ho osier Ho liday (1916) Dreiser referred tion of Dreiser· material contains miscel­ his experiences of poverty and social to these fo rmative years· as "one unbro­ lanea from 1935 to 1937, including the inferiority with him for the rest of his ken stretch of privation and misery." author's 102-page, typed address book, life, utilizing them repeatedly as subjects From his Indiana years Dreiser derived with handwritten revisions by Dreiser, fo r his enduring art. what would become a major theme of his and letters pertaining to investments, J. KENT CALDER TRACES 48 Otto Ping, Indians , and Indiana

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During the last days of the Potawatomi and Miami tribes in Indiana, before their forced removal west, a British-born artist, George Wi nter, was able to capture through his paintings, watercolors, and drawings the culture of these Native Americans. Published by the Society in cooperation with the Tippeca­ noe County Historical Association, this lavishly illustrated volume focuses on the career of Wi nter, one of the first professional artists to live and work in the Hoosier state. The book features essays by Christian F. Feest and R. David Edmunds.

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