A Wilder Rose: A Novel (26 page)

Later, after the reviews of
Old Home Town
came out, I found it interesting that while each of them praised the book, not a single one mentioned the central, and deeply ironic, theme of escape. I think no one noticed. Perhaps they read the stories individually and failed to see the linking theme. Or perhaps they weren’t looking for irony in stories that were originally published as magazine fiction.

Hollister was less than two hours’ drive south of Mansfield. Lucille drove down several times during the three weeks I stayed at the hotel, once with my mother and, for the last weekend, with the boys, who went boating on the nearby Lake Taneycomo. Then we all drove back to Mansfield. Longmans’s contract for
Old Home Town
was waiting for me.

And so was another opportunity, one that would—in the end—take me away from Rocky Ridge and from Mansfield altogether, and for all time. Ernestine had escaped from her old hometown. And so, at last, would I.

“How did you come here?” the Albanians would inquire politely, ritually, of every traveler who reached their mountain village.

“Slowly, slowly,” the weary traveler would answer. “Slowly, slowly, and little by little.”

“Glory to your lips,” the villagers would reply, bowing low. “It is so.”

It is so.

It was late April when I returned to the farm, and I settled in to wrap up the manuscript of
Old Home Town
, retype the stories, and ship the thing off to Maxwell Aley at Longmans. The month of May was filled with the end-of-school-year activities: the class play (John had a role, Al worked on the set); graduation exercises (Al sang in the boys’ quartet); the boys’ class picnics (Lucille and I baked multiple jelly rolls); and a party for John’s June birthday.

And then an unexpected opportunity appeared in the mailbox. George Bye wrote to ask if I would be interested in writing a book on the state of Missouri for a series about the United States planned by Robert M. McBride. McBride had already published several popular travel books about Czechoslovakia and Germany—popular perhaps because most people couldn’t afford to travel, and reading was the next-best thing. To write the book, I would have to do quite a lot of research. But Columbia—the location of the University of Missouri Library and the state’s historical archives—was just a three-hour drive. I could spend the week there, while Lucille and Eddie kept an eye on the boys, and come home on weekends.
Quo vadis
, I thought. Escape, escape. I jumped at the chance.

Years earlier, I had thought that Missouri held a great deal of untouched story material. Now, the more I thought about writing a book about “my” state, the more enthusiastic I became. I wanted to do a book that wasn’t just a travel book but a story of the state, for I felt that Missouri had its own special character, its own unique personality. I knew the Ozarks and the Ozark people: I had written about them for years. I could learn about other parts of Missouri and reveal it in the way I would show a character in a story, with the actions, the events, the landscapes, and people, all interacting in a multithreaded plot. It was an ambitious idea, yes, but I saw very clearly how it could be done. All I needed was access to research materials and quiet time to do the writing.

Therein my escape. I found a comfortable ninth-floor suite in the Tiger Hotel on South Eighth Street in Columbia. I was able to rent the rooms very cheaply since there wasn’t much regular demand for that kind of accommodation. The hotel was only a few blocks from the University of Missouri campus and an enjoyable walk to the library and the state historical archives. I expected the research to take several months, and the writing—some of which could be done back at the farm—another few months, perhaps six altogether. I should have no trouble finishing the manuscript by January, when it was due.

But my move to Columbia produced something much better than a book: my escape from the farm. And in my escape, I discovered the seductive pleasures of living alone, truly
alone
, for the first time in my life.

I was actually astonished when I stopped to think about this. I had left home at seventeen, lived with roommates until my marriage to Gillette, then lived with other roommates after the marriage ended. After that, I traveled abroad with various women, lived with Troub, and moved to Rocky Ridge. Always, in all that time, there was at least one other person in my household, often three or four or five. I had lived a crowded life. I had never been genuinely
alone
. Now, most of the time, I found myself reveling in the solitude.

I still felt responsible for John and Al, of course, and I took it seriously. When I was planning my research, I had suggested that we rent a small house in Columbia so the boys could join me for the school year. We would have a good time together, with cultural events and movies and a chance for both boys to have a taste of life in the city. High school would be a bigger academic challenge, too—important, I thought, if they were to go to college.

But my descriptions of the enticements of city life persuaded neither John nor Al. They wanted to spend the school year with their friends at Mansfield High. Al had earned enough money to buy an old car, and now that the bunkhouse was finished, they had a comfortable living arrangement. Lucille and Eddie were willing to stay at the farm and supervise them—
in loco parentis
, as it were—so that’s how we worked it out. For me, the arrangement was sharply disappointing, for I had to acknowledge to myself that I felt closer to both boys, and especially to John, than either of them did to me.

But my mother wasn’t happy that I would be an “absentee landlord,” and she didn’t like what she thought was an unconventional situation at Rocky Ridge. “People are
talking
, Rose,” she kept saying worriedly. But she could see that I needed to use the libraries, and Columbia wasn't that far. So the family—the boys, my mother and father, Lucille—drove up frequently, and we stayed in touch with letters and telephone calls.

I turned in the manuscript of the Missouri book in January, but it quickly became clear that the publisher and I had very different books in mind. I had created a dramatic history of the state, while McBride wanted little more than a tourist guide with anecdotes about contemporary places and people.
I took a stab at revising the manuscript, then gave it up and told George Bye that I would return the advance when I had the money. I didn’t have to do that, as it turned out, because a few months later, Maxwell Aley, at Longmans, Green, bought the manuscript from McBride for the price of my advance. Despite Aley’s best intentions, though, Longmans couldn’t find a place for the book on their list. It was never published.

In another year, that would have been a bitter disappointment. But
Old Home Town
was selling well, and an idea for another book was stirring at the back of my mind. And something else had happened, something so important that it wasn’t until much later that I understood all the consequences.

It occurred in the summer of 1935, the summer I left the farm. It was another kind of escape, and perhaps the turning point in my life as a writer, and as a thinker and a political person. It was very simple thing, really. I spent two August weeks in a car with a man I barely knew, driving across the Midwest.

And after that, everything in my life was different.
Everything.

But not in the way you might think.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Credo”: 1935–1936

I met Garet Garrett in 1923, on board the
Leviathan
, bound from Le Havre to New York. The ship had been built in 1913 as the
SS Vaterland
. But she had the misfortune to be laid up at her dock in Hoboken when Wilson took the country to war against Germany and was seized by the U.S. government for troop transport. In 1923, refurbished and restored to her prewar Edwardian and Louis XVI splendor, and sailing to the music of her own ship’s orchestra, she was once again in service, the largest passenger liner in the world.

The luxury of the
Leviathan
seemed strange and almost sybaritic to me, and I found myself wandering the decks like a lost soul, unmoored and out of place. I was on my way home after a difficult three years traveling on behalf of the American Red Cross and Near East Relief. I had trekked across the postwar wreckage of Europe, through the Balkans, through Turkey, and into Armenia and Georgia and Azerbaijan. And not in luxury, either: it had been grueling travel in dangerous places where I didn’t speak the language, in unreliable vehicles, and with guides I couldn’t trust.

During those years, I had been writing magazine and newspaper pieces designed to encourage Americans to open their pocketbooks and support postwar relief. But nothing I wrote in any of those articles—and there were dozens of them—was exaggerated. Every word of it was true, all of the waste and desolation and cruelty and hunger and disease and cold—and the malevolent, willful ignorance that closed its eyes to the helpless. In Etchmiadzin, I was a guest of the archbishop of the Armenian church, where in the company of warm, plump, well-fed monks, I sat down to a magnificent feast. Outside, starving children cried on the cold steps. At the head of the table, the archbishop remarked in an offhand way, “They’re always dying out there.” He added (thinking that the story I was to write might bring in some foreign money), “Do you have a camera? Be sure and get a photo.”

The years traveling abroad changed me in many ways—especially in terms of my political perspective. When I was a child, my parents, along with most of the people I knew, were conservative Democrats of the William Jennings Bryan stripe, believing that the free coinage of silver would help raise farm prices and carry the country back to prosperity.

In high school in Louisiana, I read Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
and looked ahead to the perfectly socialist world that would be ours when Eugene V. Debs—whose presidential campaign literature I helped Aunt E.J. distribute—and his Socialist Party of America took the White House. My friends and I continued to bear the Socialist torch during my
Bulletin
days in
San Francisco, until the Bolshevik Revolution transformed us all into zealous admirers of the great Russian experiment and we decided that we were Communists at heart. This enthusiasm flared gloriously in New York after the war, where several of my idealistic friends were engaged in forming an American section of the Third International. I might have joined, since in any argument, I have a habit of taking the side of the underdog. But a particularly bad case of influenza kept me in bed and away from meetings for some time. When I recovered my health, I found myself in Europe, attempting to describe the real-world horrors of war’s aftermath so vividly that readers in capitalist America would feel the pain and open their purses.

And then, some four years after the Bolsheviks came to power, I traveled to Russian Georgia, where I stayed in the century-old home of a farmer, his wife, and their multitudinous children. The village was a prosperous one: the fields were beautifully maintained, the harvests were abundant, the dairy herds and flocks of chickens were flourishing, and everyone was well fed and warm (relatively speaking—I was wearing all the clothing I possessed and some I had borrowed). The farmers were communists in the truest, most traditional sense of the word, for the village lands and jointly owned resources were allotted to the farming families according to their needs. When needs changed (marriages, births, deaths), the villagers got together and worked out a new allotment. Once a year, the tsar’s tax collector rode across the plains at the head of a parade of oxcarts. The villagers loaded their tax payments of grain, chickens, piglets, and woven goods into the carts, and the tax collector rode away again. For generations, that, and the occasional conscription of sons for duty in the tsar’s army, was the villagers’ only contact with a central government.

But by 1923, things were different, and my host, a lifelong communist in a communist village, was not happy with Lenin’s new Communist (with a capital
C
) regime in Moscow. He complained that the big-city Communists were interfering in village affairs, coming in with rules and regulations for making the land more productive—“reforming” farming practices, it was called. The reforms didn’t make sense, he said.

“The government is too big and too far away,” he said. “Those men in Moscow, they are city men. They cannot know how we live and work, or how people live and work in the next village or on the other side of the mountains. Why doesn’t the government content itself with governing and let us alone? We don’t need their ‘reforms.
’”

That chance conversation with a communist in a communist village changed the way I saw Communism, and I found myself glad that the fates had earlier dealt me such a severe case of influenza that I was thereby restrained from naively pledging allegiance to the Party. It was neither socialism nor communism but good, old-fashioned American individualism I cherished—American freedom of thought and action, American democracy, and the spirit of American enterprise. I was damned sick of the Old World and glad to be going home to the New.

Those were the sorts of thoughts and feelings that were tumbling chaotically through my mind on board the luxurious
Leviathan
on that day in 1923 when I first encountered Garet Garrett. He was a small, jaunty man, powered by a coil spring of nervous energy and an incisively—and self-confidently—logical mind. He was dressed in tweeds, his bow ties matched the colors of his shirts, and his shoes were handmade and polished to a fare-thee-well. A writer on economic issues, he had been sent to Germany by the
Saturday Evening Post
to cover the German refusal to pay war reparations to the French, and he had a broad and deep understanding of postwar financial realities. We talked for hours about the war and its aftermath, the sights we had seen and the people we had met—about socialism, communism, democracy. About ourselves.

He was, I saw quickly, a passionate man, deeply informed, widely read, a writer and raconteur. His conversation was electric: its jolt left a lingering impression. There was a great deal to learn about him, and I confess to being fascinated—I, who pride myself on not being fascinated with anyone. He was born in rural Illinois and grew up working in the fields of his parents’ rented farm near Burlington, Iowa. He went to school only through the third grade and educated himself—as I had—by reading every book he could lay his hands on. He was in Chicago during the depression of 1893 and at eighteen was working in Cleveland as a reporter for the
Cleveland Press.
After that, Washington, D.C., and then New York, where he established his credentials as a financial reporter and served on the editorial council of the
New York Times
. The year before we met, he had become the
Saturday Evening Post
’s lead writer on economic issues. He was to go on to become one of the New Deal’s sharpest critics.

I got Garet’s letter the week before I moved to Columbia, the summer of 1935. He had been assigned by the
Post
to write a series of articles about the effects of the New Deal agriculture programs on farmers. He had read my
Post
article on wheat farming in the Great Plains and wondered if I would be free to go with him on the two-week research trip he planned to take through Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois.

“Yes,” I said and wired him that he could find me at the Tiger Hotel in Columbia.

“No!”
my mother cried, appalled. “Two weeks with a man in a car, going God knows where! Rose, you can’t! What will people think? What will they
say
?”

“Don’t tell them,” I said. “It’s none of their damned business.”

Garet and I left Columbia on a bright, hot morning and drove east into Illinois, then west across Missouri to the Great Plains, interviewing farmers about their responses to the New Deal. What we heard was similar to what I had heard on my trip two years before. But this time, there was a deeper anger and a broader disillusionment, for people had had two more years of experience with the dictatorial Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which had authority to manage soil erosion, reforestation, and flood-control projects and to loan money to farm tenants, croppers, and laborers to buy their own farmland. The AAA was paying farmers to take thirty million acres out of production in order to keep farm commodity prices high. But at the same time, it was bringing millions more acres into production through drainage and irrigation and pushing new farmers into accepting loans for land and equipment that they couldn’t afford.

“Don’t make no sense a-tall,” we heard from one glum farmer after another. “Just don’t make no damn sense, what them Washington folks are doing with the land and the crops.”

After my wheat-farming research trip two summers before, I was familiar with these problems. But although Garet had understood the situation in a theoretical way and from a distance, he was now confronted, as he put it, “with the facts and the faces.” As we traveled, we heard a great many stories that reinforced my fears about the farm crisis and gave to his fears a new and appalling reality. He became more pessimistic with every mile.

We were both dismayed by the freedoms the farmers were required to give up in return for the cash the government gave them. If you wanted to grow potatoes on your farm, for example, the Roosevelt administration would tell you how many bushels of potatoes you could grow and sell, tax free. Your tax-free potatoes, when they went to market, would go in a federal package, bearing a federal stamp, by permission of a federal bureau. If you wanted to grow and sell more potatoes than the law allowed, you had to pay a tax of forty-five cents a bushel. If you got caught bootlegging potatoes, you and your customer would be fined a thousand dollars. Get caught again and you went to jail—and your customer went as well.

It didn’t matter how many potatoes you could grow on your property, or how many hungry neighbors might want to buy your potatoes, or what price they might be willing and able to pay. “The Law of Potatoes,” Garet called it, was immutable. And what was true of potatoes, he wrote in one of his
Post
articles after he got back from our trip, was also true of wheat, cotton, and corn. This might still be a “free country”—for some people. But it wasn’t free for farmers, who even on good ground and with good weather and for a decent local market were no longer at liberty to choose the crops they would grow on their own land.

But what struck both of us most forcefully was the plight of farmers who were living on marginal land the government wanted to redevelop as grasslands or forests. In southern Illinois, for instance, in Pope County, the administration had decided to create the Shawnee National Forest from a quarter of a million acres of land that (the government said) was overcropped and eroded. It was true that some of the land badly needed reclamation—but not all. Yet
all
of the people who lived on those acres were being enticed to sell their farms and homes in return for cash and government loans so they could relocate to “better” areas or to villages being built by the Resettlement Administration. If the owner was unwilling to sell, the land would be condemned and the owner would be forced to leave with little or nothing to show for his or her time and work and cash investments. We met one Pope County woman of seventy who lived with her ailing husband in a neat frame house on thirty acres of good, well-managed soil with no erosion. The pair, by themselves, had cleared that land of timber, and it had supported them for a half-century. They didn’t want to sell out, but what choice did they have? They couldn’t continue farming. They had no children. Where could they go? How could they support themselves?

But at the same time, I saw many more people who, as individuals,
free
individuals, were finding their own way to survive the impositions of the bureaucracy, using the American wealth of resources and their own wealth of creativity. I saw farmers who refused to accept checks drawn on the public funds. I saw men and women quietly paying their debts and going about cheerfully in the daytime, finding God only knows what strength during the dark nights. I saw Americans still paying the price of individual liberty, which—like it or not—is individual responsibility
and
insecurity. I saw courage and endurance and strength.

After the first day or two, our trip wasn’t just business, and our relationship was not just an intellectual one. We were an unlikely pair of lovers, I suppose. I was nearing fifty, feeling—and looking, I feared—very much my age. Garet was seven years older, short, stout, and balding, missing several fingers and with a voice that was husky from a bullet he’d taken in the throat during a shooting in a restaurant five years before. He was irascible, a pessimist by nature, a thinker of cynical thoughts, and he rarely saw the funny side of anything. I was . . . I was my own greedy, disorderly self, wanting haphazardly and helter-skelter, wanting everything and all at once. And when I was with him, countering his pessimisms, I began to find my own optimism. In an odd sort of way, his darkness lightened mine.

Yes, unlikely lovers. But lovers we were, compelled by an undeniable physical need, attracted by an intellectual magnetism that was all-powerful, wholly irresistible. Lovers who lay awake, talking into the warm, sweet night, with the heavy richness of someone’s cigar drifting into the room on the breeze that stirred the curtains at the open window. Lovers who woke each other not with a kiss, but with a “Did you ever read . . . ?” or a “What do you think about . . . ?” Lovers who buried themselves in their newspapers at the breakfast table and in their books until bedtime. Lovers from that first night until the last morning when we said good-bye.