Julia Davis: a Literary Biography
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Julia Davis: A Literary Biography William D. Theriault Copyright 1992, William D. Theriault Individual copies of this work may be reproduced without charge as long as this source is clearly acknowledged. It may not be reproduced for resale without written permission of the author. Questions, comments, or corrections should be addressed to William D. Theriault, email: [email protected] Cover: Julia Davis, age 19, in dress she wore when she was presented at the Court of St. James ii Preface This work first appeared in Harvest: Collected Works of Julia Davis. (Ed. William D. Theriault. Charles Town, WV: Arts & Humanities Alliance of Jefferson County, 1992.) I have modified it to include photographs supplied by Julia Davis and interviews conducted in the preparation of the original work. This is the only authorized biography of Julia Davis, who read and corrected it before its initial printing. William D. Theriault, Hagerstown, MD, 2009 iii iv Contents Preface................................................................iii Julia Davis Biography ........................................................1 Appendix A. Additional Photographs ...............................................23 Appendix B. Interviews Conducted with Julia Davis .......................................35 Index ...............................................................131 v vi Julia Davis [Author's note: Julia Davis died January 30, 1993, in Ranson, WV, approximately a year after the following work was published.] Many writers with more than a score of books to their credit would be satisfied to rest on their laurels, particularly if they had just celebrated their ninety-second birthday. But Julia Davis isn't one of them. For her, writing is like breathing, and she has been writing for a long, long time. Born and nurtured in West Virginia, she has traveled widely, rubbed elbows with princes and presidents, and spent much of her working life away from her native state. But wherever she has gone, Julia Davis has looked at the world through eyes sharpened by her West Virginia childhood. And whenever she has returned home for research or respite, she has looked at us with the fresh perspective of the traveller. During her eighty-year career, Julia Davis has published just about every type of literature you can imagine. In the process, she has developed a reputation as a careful craftsman, a writer who can look at the past and the present with clarity and balance. Her subject matter has been equally diverse, ranging from the streets of Calcutta to the hills and farmlands of West Virginia. Born July 23, 1900, to John W. Davis, a Clarksburg lawyer, and Julia Leavell McDonald, from Media Farm, Jefferson County, she was first named Anna Kennedy Davis in honor of her maternal grandmother. Had her mother lived, the girl named Anna might have trod a different path into the future. But her mother died three weeks after giving her life, and the baby girl was renamed Julia McDonald Davis. The path taken by Julia Davis has been a long one with many twists and turns. From time to time it crossed that of her father, Ambassador to Great Britain, presidential candidate, renowned lawyer. For brief periods, father and daughter traveled together, but most of her journey has been spent in the company of three husbands (she married one of them twice), seven children, and a few close friends. With her help, I have retraced this journey. Here is her story. Julia's father John W. Davis was not only a brilliant lawyer but also a painfully shy man (Figure 1). His courtship of Julia McDonald lasted almost five years. During that time and the brief marriage that followed, he shared with her much that he had never shared with anyone else. With the death of his wife, John W. Davis lost a part of him that he would never recover. Seeking refuge from the pain, he threw himself completely into his work and his work became his life. 1 He was to have many friends, many triumphs, a few defeats, and a new wife who saw to his comfort and career. But the loss of his first wife Julia never left him, and the face and name of his daughter were constant reminders of both his greatest love and his greatest loss. Recalling her childhood and her father's growing separation from her, Julia Davis notes, "He was always kindly, often abstracted, but I knew then, and I know still, that looking at me hurt his heart." Unable to keep his daughter with him, John Davis placed her in the capable hands of her grandparents, relegating himself to the role of infrequent visitor, bringer of gifts, and absentee parent. Julia thrived under the attention of two sets of very different grandparents. Educated at home in Clarksburg by her grandmother Davis until age nine, spending her summers at Media, the McDonald farm, Julia Davis characterizes her childhood as alternating between a group of "unrepentant individualists" and a family that quite properly called itself a "clan." Looking back over those early years, she reflects, "Certainly I was not unhappy with the Davises, where I received so much love and learned to love deeply in return. Certainly I do not quarrel with having been taught to use my mind. But I was solitary in that silent house." She goes on to say, "For the child I was, Media meant joy and freedom, freedom from anxious supervision, from precocity, from loneliness, from all that in one way or another oppressed my spirit. Children were a commonplace on that farm. No one hung over me, no one seemed to Figure 1. John W. Davis care what I did. I expanded, running wild." As Julia Davis undertook the journey from adolescence into adulthood, this dual existence continued. From the Davises and her life in Clarksburg, she learned how to write. And from her sojourns with the McDonalds of Jefferson County, she learned what to write about. Julia Davis admits that her early education by Anna Kennedy Davis (Figure 2) covered only the basics, but the influence of this remarkable woman should not be minimized. This was the grandmother who knew Greek and Latin, who debated politics and philosophy with her lawyer husband, and who fought off the pleas of her doctor and the preliminary pains of childbirth until she had finished reading a chapter from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From the tutelage of her grandmother, Julia Davis moved on to the private school taught by her cousin Virginia Kennedy in Clarksburg. It was while she was at this school that her first published work appeared, a poem printed in St. Nicholas Magazine that 2 earned the eleven-year-old writer a silver medal. By age fourteen, she had completed the course of study for graduation, but her grandparents decided to give her a couple of years at the Shipley School in Philadelphia before she went to college. And before she set off for college, Julia had spent more than sixteen summers at Media. Summers spent with scores of kids and farm animals, with uncles like John Yates McDonald, a dirt farmer with four college degrees. Summers with her raspy-voiced grandfather, Major Edward A. H. McDonald, an officer in Stuart's cavalry who took a bullet in the throat shortly before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. He had kept himself from bleeding to death by sticking his finger in the wound and then endured six weeks of frequent hemorrhages and a fractured jaw before the bullet could be removed. This was a man who ran his farm with the discipline and precision he had shown in the service, except for his treatment of granddaughter Julia. He was incapable of punishing her. Rarely speaking of his military experiences, the Major summed up the years of sacrifice by noting that he did not regret fighting for the South and Virginia but also reminding Julia that "You must be glad we did not win." While Julia's life alternated between Clarksburg and Media, her father's political career had caught fire, first as representative from the 1st West Virginia district and then as Solicitor General for the United States. (See Figures 3 and 4.) He had moved to Washington, D.C., and when Julia was eleven, he married Nell Bassell from Clarksburg. Nell made sure that John W. Davis wore the right clothes, met the right people, and kept his appointments. She freed him from the responsibilities of daily life so that he could do what he did best, practice law and diplomacy. And in the process, Nell built a wall around her husband Figure 2. Anna Kennedy Davis, Julia's maternal that daughter Julia could rarely penetrate. grandmother, ca. 1910. Deprived of her mother's company by death, Julia was also denied frequent access to her father by Nell. Julia Davis notes that, wherever her father and stepmother lived, "My stepmother was happier when I was not around. In spite of her determined kindness I could see this, and it came as a shock to one who had been `Raised a pet.'" She observed that Nell "readily subscribed to the theory that I should not be uprooted, but should stay with my two sets of grandparents as usual, and visit Washington only for short vacations." 3 If you ask Julia Davis about the effect this thirty-two-year separation had on her, she will shrug and tell you there was no lack of love in her life, in childhood or after. I believe her. But if you carefully examine the milestones on her journey through adulthood you will see that Julia Davis learned much from that separation from her natural parents. As far back as she could remember, Julia Davis wanted to be a mother.