Candid readers have on occasion told me that they are never quite sure what my essays are about. So I shall tell you right up-front about today’s effort, which has three disparate purposes. The first is simply to avoid any topic with an explicit political dimension. Within a few hours of posting, we shall (d. v.) have a new president and the chance of new beginnings—weighty subjects, indeed, though hardly in need of explication by me. I also want to relate a small example of “meaningful coincidence” or Jungian synchronicity, which are perhaps over-fancy terms for certain riddling experiences we all encounter in our lives. My third purpose is to honor the memory of two remarkable women journalists, Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968) and Louise Fleming (1917-2006).
Though my career determined our permanent residence on the East coast, I tried for many years to make regular trips to my family home in northern Arkansas. I continued to do so even after both my parents were dead in order to visit two beloved aunts, Edith Fleming Jarabek and Louise Fleming, who lived together to great ages and in increasingly delightful eccentricity in the old farmhouse. Especially with my Aunt Louise I grew ever closer in affection, admiration, confidence, and conspiracy during the last decades of her life. Our kinship was more than one of blood alone. She had not had the educational opportunities that were lavished on me, but she was a voracious and discriminating reader, and we were bound together by books. She was also a serious if at times acerb commentator on our national cultural and political life. This was before the rise of Branson as a “destination”, and the nearest airport of any size was Springfield, Missouri, where upon arrival I would rent a car and drive about an hour east to pick up State Route 5, which gave you a straight shot south to the Arkansas line. The junction point was a hamlet called Mansfield. This place had a certain unexploited literary connection to which I had been alerted by Aunt Louise. Mansfield was the last stop in the pioneering peregrination of the celebrated American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. There can be but few literate Americans, especially if they happen also to be parents, who are not familiar with the “Little House” books, first published between 1932 and 1943, which in semi-fictional form related the experiences of an American family moving from one hard-scrabble farm to another through the frigid plains and daunting backwoods of Middle America in the late nineteenth century. Laura Wilder’s house still stands in Mansfield, and she is buried in the town’s cemetery.
Aunt Louise died in 2006, the year I retired. I had already begun contemplating what turned out to be my first post-retirement project, The Anti-Communist Manifestoes, a study of four influential anti-Communist books of the 1940s and 50s. One of them, Out of the Night, though now seldom remembered, was the biggest American best-seller of 1941. Its author was a German ex-Communist, Richard Krebs, who wrote under the nom de plume of Jan Valtin. In addition to being a best-selling author, however, he was an illegal immigrant with a most unsavory and mysterious background. His book purports to be the autobiography of a Communist agitator and spy. In his legal and propaganda battles Krebs had powerful enemies, including the American Communist Party and its legion of literary votaries, who did their best to discredit the book and deport its author. But he also had very effective allies. One of these was his Connecticut neighbor, Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura and one of the more important dramatis personae in the Little House books. My task obligated me to conduct at least a modicum of research into her life. Among the facts I learned was that it was actually daughter Rose who had secured the Missouri property in which her parents spent their last years. Among the suspicions I developed was that Rose had so robustly helped revise her mother’s writings as to become, in effect, the unacknowledged co-author of some of them.
Rose Wilder Lane was a great original of a sort once produced in the land by the dozen but now increasingly rare. Her pioneer youth you will know from the Little House books. By the time she met and championed Valtin (Krebs) she had spent some years living essentially as a survivalist on a small plot of New England soil which provided her sole sustenance. She had chosen this “life style” in order to preclude having any monetary income at all, as she regarded both the Income Tax and Social Security as monstrous impositions on her freedom. A good deal had happened in her life since she left various little houses behind in the first years of the twentieth century.
There be mysteries in this world, and so far as I am concerned one of them is that so many extraordinary women marry very ordinary (or worse) men. The laws of demography as well as of thought would seem to require that there would be a roughly equal number of countervailing instances, but that has not been my observed experience. There was, briefly, a Mr. Lane, about whom I know nothing save that he was soon discarded, though Rose Wilder, apparently partial to monosyllables, kept his surname for legal purposes. Rose Wilder’s life was forever afterward what is usually called “fiercely independent”. She flouted a world which could view an unmarried female professional (let alone a divorcée) as scandalous, earning her bread as a telegrapher, a journalist, and a novelist. Her early appearances on the political scene are as a radical, a Communist friend of John Reed (possibly known to you as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World or as creatively trivialized for your amusement by Warren Beatty in the movie Reds). But unlike Reed, who died before he had time to be disillusioned, Rose soon jumped ship. She is now usually described as one of the founders of American Libertarianism.
Her dramatic political peregrinations were matched by those in the geographical sphere. Just as she did things ladies were not supposed to do, she sometimes chose exotic places in which to do them. She traveled, for instance, in pre-war Albania where his royal highness Zog, having promoted himself from President to King, proposed matrimony to her. Self-proclaimed Balkan royalty had little charm for a personal friend of Herbert Hoover. She’d had better offers in De Smet, ND. She politely declined. Her prolific journalistic work needs to be gathered together and studied, but two of her best books can be consulted in libraries. Let the Hurricane Roar (1933) is an excellent novel. Give Me Liberty (1936) delineates her bracing political credo.
My Aunt Louise died during the time I was “discovering” Rose Wilder, and I could not avoid thinking of the congruences between the two. Louise, too, was an American original, an eccentric unmarried lady who lived on a modest plot in the boondocks and earned an even more modest living as a journalist. For years she was a general dog’s-body at a paper called the Baxter Bulletin. At various times her duties included coffee-making, book keeping, repairing a linotype machine, writing ad copy, and diplomatically rescuing male superiors from exposing in print their most embarrassing solecisms. Eventually she began writing a weekly column, A Little Off Center—in my unbiased opinion easily the best thing in the paper. Her essays deal mainly with commonplace or quirky aspects of rural life. In one of her letters Jane Austen wrote of her subject matter as “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.” There is a similar sense of extravagant modesty in Louise’s prose. I just looked up her little posy of on-line memorials put together by the funeral home, one of which reads thus: “I have often wished that I could have known or at least met some person that I only read about or saw on tv. I think Louise Fleming was one of those persons. I only knew her from her columns in the newspaper. I will miss reading about her wonderful life and family. I wish I could have known her in person.”
I, who was lucky enough to do so, would apply to her the farewell that one of our language’s greatest writers, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), gave to one of our literature’s greatest heroines—the central character in Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Thank you.
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