False River, page 14
However—
Rocky Ridge
Southern Missouri, 1928. On a green ridge outside the sleepy town of Mansfield, an elderly farming couple lived in a white wooden house, its soaring stone chimney built entirely from the rocks on their farm.
Their prodigal only daughter returned from Europe to live with them after years away spent working as a writer. Adventurous and sophisticated, trained as a journalist, she’d been married and divorced. She’d learned four languages. She’d driven across the desert toward Baghdad and sailed the Aegean Sea.
She’d made her name and living as a writer of popular fiction, mainly stories and serials published in magazines and newspapers, and returned to America to write, stabilise her finances, and spend time with her ageing parents. She planned to return to Albania, one of her favourite places, and build a house there with courtyards and fountains, to live in splendid, exotic isolation, visited by intellectuals and politicians and writers from all over the world.
In Missouri she was joined by an old friend from her days working for the Red Cross, a wartime nurse who had travelled across Europe with her in a Model-T Ford. This friend set up camp on the lawn behind the house. She’d recently published her World War I diaries, and would go on to write a series of books based on her own experiences as a young nurse.
Every afternoon they sat outside in the garden drinking coffee served in an elaborate Albanian tea service. The rest of the day they wrote. The daughter pounded away on her typewriter up in her old attic bedroom, writing stories for The Saturday Evening Post and working on a novel inspired by family stories of pioneer life.
From the point of view of children’s literature, Mansfield in the late 1920s is an incredibly significant time and setting. This was Rocky Ridge Farm: the prodigal daughter was Rose Wilder Lane; her mother was Laura Ingalls Wilder; and work was about to begin on the classic children’s series known as the Little House books. Rose’s friend was Helen Dore Boylston — from 1936 the author of the Sue Barton series instrumental in creating the popular ‘career novel’ genre.
Almanzo Wilder, Laura’s husband and Rose’s father, wasn’t a writer. He was in his seventies, a man of few words, happiest working with horses. For forty years he’d walked with a limp, after a bout of diphtheria that led to a stroke. Both Laura and Rose had an uncomplicated, affectionate relationship with him. Laura called him ‘Manly’. He called her ‘Bessie’. Both Rose and her friend Helen called Laura ‘Mama Bess’. Everyone called Helen by her childhood nickname, ‘Troub’.
It sounds idyllic, but it wasn’t. Laura and Rose had a difficult relationship, made more difficult because of conflict over money and conflict over writing, and because Rose did not want to be back at Rocky Ridge. Rose thought that the solution to some of her problems, at least, would be a little house, built for her parents on another part of the farm.
She was wrong.
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little grey house made of logs.
I still remember the thrill of reading Little House in the Big Woods for the first time. It was 1972 and I was seven years old, living in a new house, in a new suburb, in New Zealand.
I read all Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, more or less in the order in which they were first published in the thirties and forties. Some were bought for me by my parents, but most I borrowed from the Te Atatu South public library, thick hardcovers with plastic wraps, stamped with the due date in red ink and returned, with a thud, on Friday evenings while my parents shopped at Foodtown and my sister took ballroom dancing classes at the Community Centre. Later I nagged to get the books in paperback, and I still have those worn and fingered copies.
Through the books I followed Laura and the Ingalls family from log cabins in Wisconsin (Little House in the Big Woods) and Indian Territory (Little House on the Prairie); to a river-side dugout near Walnut Grove, Minnesota (On the Banks of Plum Creek) and a surveyor’s house in eastern South Dakota (On the Shores of Silver Lake); and then to a claim shanty and store building in the new town of De Smet (The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years). In the first book Laura is a little girl, with a big sister named Mary and a baby sister named Carrie. Along the way another sister, Grace, is born. Their Pa is a jolly man with a beard who plays the fiddle; their Ma is soft-spoken and demure. The series ends when Laura turns eighteen and marries the handsome Almanzo Wilder. I read the other book in the series — Farmer Boy, about Almanzo’s boyhood in upstate New York — at some point as well, but I was much more interested in Laura.
The Little House books revealed a strange new world to me. I had never seen a prairie. I had never touched snow. I had never seen a wolf, fox or muskrat. Unsliced by driveways and footpaths, the prairie — and the past — seemed a wild, open place, where the imagination could run free and not fall off the edge of the Earth into the ocean. The books described an outlandish world of grasshopper plagues and prairie fires and hidden marshes; of trees that spewed syrup and lakes that froze over; of sleigh rides and wagon trails and train tracks that ran as far as the eye could see. This was a land as magical as Narnia, but better — because this was real.
And in the quiet camaraderie of the Ingalls family, I found a haven. Unlike our house, the little houses of the books were peaceful. Parents never raised their voices. They always knew right from wrong. They were cheerful in the face of terrible adversity, and made cosy homes for their children in lonely, dangerous places. We ventured out into the countryside with a chilly bin, flask and cheese-and-Marmite sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper; they ventured into the unknown with an axe, a gun and a covered wagon, ready to fell trees, light fires and fend off claim jumpers or hostile Indians. From this family, this safe haven, a heroine as smart and daring and spirited as Laura could emerge. I idolised her. I envied Laura her pluck, her place, her life.
When I moved to the United States in the early nineties I realised that — at long last — I would be able to experience the places described in the Little House books first-hand. I could travel to some of the sites of log cabins, schoolhouses and false-fronted store buildings, and see what places like Kansas and South Dakota really looked like. I could find out what happened to everyone in the Ingalls family when they grew up. The books would come to life in the dispersed hamlets and endless fields of America’s vast, secretive heartland. It would be a pilgrimage and an adventure.
It was, sort of. It got out of hand, as my obsessions often do, and turned into numerous odysseys over a two-year period, visiting every site related to the books and Laura’s life, and sitting through three Little House pageants — in Minnesota, South Dakota and Missouri — which is at least two pageants too many. I discovered that all the towns where Laura once lived are declining in population. I spent intense weeks at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, immersed in diaries, letters, manuscripts and other people’s personal business. I learned too much. I bored other people.
I stopped envying Laura. Sometimes I didn’t even like her that much. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a complex woman. A resourceful and determined adventurer, she could be snobbish, dogmatic and manipulative.
She wrote books celebrated for their simple integrity, yet in her personal life she was often disingenuous and sometimes spiteful. The Little House series is a paean to the self-sufficiency of her close, loving family, but as an adult she lived far from them and didn’t visit her mother or older sister at all during the last twenty years of their lives, even though she travelled to other places equally distant. Rose, her only daughter — as mercurial and determined as her mother — went through life feeling bitter towards Laura, and unloved. Laura in turn was a little scared of her daughter, and, even as she urged Rose to remain at home, found her almost impossible to live with.
So much that I’d believed about Laura and the stories of her life was wrong. Even the pioneering path of the Ingalls family — Wisconsin to Kansas to Minnesota to South Dakota — wasn’t exactly faithful to history. ‘I lived everything that happened in my books,’ she’d said, but this statement wasn’t the whole truth. The ‘true story’ was only true some of the time. And a lot of what isn’t true about the books was the work of Rose Wilder Lane.
Rose was born in 1886 in Dakota Territory, where the climate was at war with settlers. People like her grandparents, Caroline and Charles Ingalls, had moved west for two reasons. First was the Homestead Act of 1862, which meant a citizen could claim a quarter section — 160 acres — of surveyed but unclaimed land and own it outright after living and growing crops on it for five years. The second was because the new railroad opened up the Dakota Territory in the late 1870s and early 1880s. This is how the Ingalls family ended up in De Smet: Charles Ingalls had a bookkeeping job for a while with the railroad, and De Smet was one of the tiny towns that sprouted along the line.
Her parents, Laura and Almanzo, suffered disaster after disaster: their house burnt down, their baby son died, they both fell dangerously ill with diphtheria, and drought caused crop after crop to fail. The Great National Panic of 1893 morphed into a nationwide Depression, following Europe’s lead. Panic-selling in New York by British investors was one factor in tumbling stock prices and failing banks. The US economy declined, unemployment soared and cities witnessed violent strikes and protest marches. Crop prices fell and farmers in the middle of the country, in too much debt, lost their farms to the bank.
This happened to Laura and Almanzo. They retreated to Minnesota to live with his family, then to Florida with Laura’s uncle to try out homesteading there. They even considered moving to New Zealand. But, after returning to De Smet to see if anything could be salvaged there, they set off in 1894 for Mansfield in the Missouri Ozarks, based on reports of a good life in the Land of the Big Red Apple. The journey — of 650 miles — took them six weeks. ‘We joined long wagon trains moving south,’ Rose remembered years later, and ‘met hundreds of families going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold on the land.’
There they camped in the woods until, with their savings, they bought the land that formed Rocky Ridge Farm. For a decade they lived in a crude cabin. They were dirt poor. At first Almanzo made a living selling firewood. At the town school, Rose was the poor country cousin and she felt ashamed of her poverty: she had no shoes and her clothes were shabby. This was a sense she carried throughout her life, of the misery of a poor childhood, and some sort of inferiority that could not be overcome.
She wrote that as a child she concealed from her parents ‘how much I felt their poverty, their struggles and disappointments. These filled my life, magnified like horrors in a dream … I lived through a childhood that was a nightmare.’ In her diary of 1927, when she was still in Albania, she described her childhood as ‘no affection, poverty, humiliation’.
Rose was a sensitive, bookish child, a loner, someone who easily felt excluded — this didn’t change throughout her life. In her letters and diaries she often vented resentment towards friends with more middle-class backgrounds, particularly if they were from the metropolitan Northeast: in her lowest moments, she still felt patronised and dismissed, at a social and economic disadvantage.
In 1929, when she was back at Rocky Ridge Farm, Rose answered a questionnaire in The Little Review. In one answer she wrote: ‘I would change places with any young woman — about 20 — with intelligent, simple, harmonious parents, good health, good breeding and a cultured background.’ So she wanted to be young again, to start over — perhaps in this new era, where so much more seemed possible for women. And she wanted the thing she felt she most lacked, a ‘cultured background’. Laura was to glorify her own poor childhood in the Little House books, but Rose had no residual fondness for hers. She escaped Mansfield at seventeen, working as a telegrapher in Kansas City, and then moving to San Francisco, where her journalism career began (and a short-lived marriage, to Gillette Lane, began and ended).
She was to mix, and hold her own, in many cosmopolitan circles in Europe and New York, but she retained the self-image of the barefoot, under-educated child in the wagon train, her family one of the desperate thousands hoping to eke out a living somewhere else. She had to work much harder, she believed, than many of the other writers she met. ‘A person who starts out as a malnutrition [sic] child in an Ozark log cabin,’ she wrote to her lover, the playwright Guy Moyston, in 1925, ‘and gets as far as I’ve got, does it by raising hell about things.’
Her diaries are crammed with calculations about money, about how much she could earn and save, and her writing career was a series of compromises, in which she wrote things she despised — like corny Ozark tales for Country Gentlemen magazine, later compiled into a book called Hill-Billy — or acted as a ghostwriter for other people. Making money was always the most important thing. The financial insecurity of her childhood never left her, exacerbated by a life that relied on income from freelance writing.
She also felt financially responsible for her parents. They’d built the farmhouse at Rocky Ridge in 1911, but their life was still one of rural drudgery, particularly harsh in the winter. She wanted them to travel more and to enjoy modern comforts, like electricity and running water, or maybe to sell the farm altogether. The more magazine stories and popular novels and biographies Rose wrote, the more she earned, and the more she could give to her parents to buy them freedom from farming, beyond the five hundred dollars she paid them (or struggled to pay them, at times) each year during the twenties.
She wanted another kind of freedom as well, for herself — to be free from the obligation of being in Mansfield, helping to feed the pigs, mop the floors and haul in wood. One of the appeals of Albania for Rose: she could afford servants there. She didn’t want to live at Rocky Ridge being a servant herself.
Her parents, she told Moyston, still thought of her as an irresponsible child. To them she was this ‘unaccountable daughter who roams around the world, borrowing money here and being shot at there, learning strange languages and reading incomprehensible books’. They would have preferred a conventional daughter who married and lived locally.
When Rose returned in 1928 to Rocky Ridge, she was a middle-aged woman. A long-term relationship with Guy Moyston had ended. She was coming back to her childhood home, to stay with her parents on a long-term basis. No wonder she brought a friend with her. On the voyage back from her beloved Albania early that year, Rose wrote in her diary:
I will spend no more time, effort or money in realizing dreams, until I have a safe and solid $50,000 properly invested. I shall try to do this by the end of 1930. Six thousand a year contributed to the Palmer account should do this. Ten thousand a year earned. One serial and a few short stories. This seems to mean three years in the States, mostly in Rocky Ridge farmhouse, and it involves delicate personal adjustments with the family and Troub. If I can only make it a fresh, sunny, open-air life, without all this smothered smoldering — A busy life, active and energetic. At the same time, a learning life, studious. So that when I’m free to go again I shall be ready.
Her parents were happy to have their only child back, but the daily hubbub of farm life, and her mother’s desire for her company, intruded on Rose’s writing life. Troub had a small inheritance as well as her investments: she could write for fun. Rose needed to write — and her agent needed commercial work to sell — so she could become financially independent, with her ‘solid $50,000 properly invested’, and leave. The magazine market was booming, and financial freedom seemed just within reach. Like many adult children who skulk home in order to regroup, she wanted to save money and to be left alone.
Rose — temperamental, domineering and prone to depression, as well as flush with investment money — decided that her parents needed to move out. She’d use a few thousand of her savings to build them a little house just over the hill, with all mod-cons and no stairs, ideal for their doddering old age. She decided to remodel the farmhouse, install electricity and modern plumbing, and live in peace with Troub and any other visiting writer friends. In the long term, after she returned to Europe, the farmhouse could be rented out. In the short term, she paid her parents sixty dollars a month to rent the place herself.
The little house Rose built was from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue of 1928. It was called the Mitchell and, announced the catalogue, was ‘the latest idea in English architecture with a touch of the popular California studio type’. It had rock walls, gables, a shingled roof, a tall stone chimney and five rooms, plus a telephone nook in the hall and built-in bookcases in the living room. Rose bought all new furniture for the place. The Wilders dubbed it the Rock House, and moved in at the end of 1928.
The writer Flannery O’Connor also returned home as an adult to live in her mother’s house. She moved from her New York City life back to Milledgeville, Georgia, driven there by failing health, and never returned permanently to her sophisticated Yaddo circle or the independent life she was building for herself in the city. She had lupus, and only expected to live another five years, though she lasted fourteen. But in the restricted society of small-town life, O’Connor drew deep on the inner resources of her imaginative life and wrote her two novels and her greatest stories.
O’Connor took a wry view of life with Mother. They raised peacocks, and on election days they walked to the polls together, as she wrote, to cancel out each other’s vote. However O’Connor felt about the hand she’d been dealt, whatever rage or frustration or bitterness or sense of isolation, she found the strength to create profound and compelling works of fiction. She believed that the biggest threat to a writer’s gift was ‘self-inflation’, which she described as ‘the pride of the reformer or the theorist’. It’s unfortunate, but she could have been talking about Rose Wilder Lane.
