Celebrating Dorothy Canfield Fisher with her short stories

Today, Jane's Birthday Book of Underappreciated Lady Authors celebrates one of my favorites, Dorothy Canfield Fisher. I don't think I am the only reader who met her through the Persephone edition of her 1924 novel The Home-Maker. I'm not sure whose review I read first, but it may have been Claire's at The Captive Reader. That was back in 2012, and I have been collecting her books ever since. I was lucky enough to find some on bookstore shelves, even in the original editions, and others on-line.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher published several books of short stories, and I have read all of them except Basque People (from 1931). I have found something to enjoy in each of them, many with familiar settings in Vermont or France (particularly in the Basque region). I can see connections to her novels, common themes that run through her fiction and non-fiction. Though I have read the books of short stories, I still wanted to read A Harvest of Stories, an anthology collected by DCF herself and published in 1956. I wanted to see which ones she chose, as the subtitle says, "From a Half Century of Writing." I hoped that she might have something to say about the stories or about the writing of them.

There are twenty-seven stories included, divided into three sections: "Vermont Memories," "Men, Women - and Children," and "War." DCF introduces them with a Prologue, "What My Mother Taught Me." In it, she explains the part her mother played in making her a teller of stories, one who has "to try with all one's might to understand that part of human life which does not lie visibly on the surface. And then to try to depict the people involved, and their actions, so that they may be recognizable men, women - and children." I love that in her stories, that she wants us to understand her people, to see not just what they do, but why - their motives, which they themselves don't always recognize or understand. And she has such compassion, such empathy for people. She sees them clearly, and she doesn't gloss over or whitewash, but she does understand, and she wants her readers to as well.

This collection includes some of my favorites. "Uncle Giles" is about a relative who considered himself a gentleman, someone who "should not be forced to the menial task of earning a living."

The tales of how Uncle Giles blandly outwitted [his able-bodied and energetic kinspeople's] stub-fingered attacks on his liberty and succeeded to the end of a very long life in living without work are part of our inheritance. For three generations now they have wrought the members of our family to wrath and laughter. He was incredible. You can't imagine anything like him. Unless you have had him in your family too.

"The Bedquilt," on the other hand, is the story of Aunt Mehetable, "of all the Elwell family...certainly the most unimportant," until she has an idea for a bold new quilt design. "A Family Alliance" is about the parents of a young engaged couple, meeting for the first time, trying to live up to the expectations that their children have created. It's very funny, and very sweet. And "As Ye Sow," the story of a busy mother whose young son and his friends are excluded from their class's Christmas entertainment, because (as she discovers) they are terrible singers. "Through Pity and Terror..." and "In the Eye of the Storm" describe life in France, under German occupation in the Great War. They are difficult to read even now.

I am so happy that Jane included Dorothy Canfield Fisher in her celebration. And if anyone would like a copy of The Home-Maker, I have one to share. I don't want to give it to the library sale, I want to give it to a fellow reader, to someone who I hope will enjoy her books as much as I do.

Seasoned Timber, by Dorothy Canfield

This was Dorothy Canfield Fisher's last novel, published in 1939. I started it two or three times before I really settled into reading it, but once I did, I could hardly put it down. It is such a powerful story, one that resonates with what is happening in this country today, but it is also a deeply personal story of one man's life.

Set in the small town of Clifford, Vermont, in 1934-1935, its central character is Timothy Coulton Hulme, the Principal of the town's Academy. I was well into the book before I realized that Clifford is the setting of another of Dorothy Canfield's novels, Bonfire. I was disappointed that Anna Craft and her neighbors don't appear in this book, because I so enjoyed meeting them in Bonfire.

In that book, Anna devises a way for young people in outlying farm communities to attend the Academy by working for their board in Clifford. The Academy is the only high school in the region. It scrapes by with funding from the town, voted on at the annual town meeting, as well as a tiny endowment and fees from students coming from outside the area. Timothy (T.C.) Hulme works long hours in teaching and administrative work, worrying constantly over maintenance and trying to stretch the limited funds. He also takes care of his elderly Aunt Lavinia, who spends her days (and sometimes nights) listening to classical music. We gradually learn more about Aunt Lavinia, and about their family history, which I found very moving.

Two major bombshells fall into T.C.'s busy but quiet middle-aged life. The first is meeting again a former Academy student, Susan Barney, now a teacher herself. He is immediately drawn to this young woman, and soon overwhelmed by the intensity of the feelings he develops for her. Widowed shortly after his first marriage, he had never remarried, or even thought of it. He is intoxicated by this new love, and with the possibilities it brings.

His happiness carries him through his days, and the daily struggles with the Academy. The second bombshell comes with the death of one of its three trustees, a self-made New York millionaire named George Wheaton. Wheaton would probably get along very well with Donald Trump. He has only the most tenuous connections with Clifford, but he has invented a family history with deep Vermont roots. He was elected a trustee in the hope that he would give money to the Academy. He does, but it comes a cost. He wants control, he wants the Academy to be a proper New England boarding school, and he wants it to be exclusive and Anglo. He harangues T.C. constantly about the few Jewish students enrolled, demanding that the school stop accepting them. T.C. steadfastly resists, agonizing over the rise of fascism and antisemitism in Europe, and fearing their spread in the United States. He is so clearly speaking for his creator here, and I wondered if she came as near despair as T.C. did.

Thwarted over his years as trustee, Wheaton makes a will that leaves the Academy a million dollars for an endowment and $200,000 for buildings. They are conditional gifts however, and that condition is the exclusion of Jewish students. The school's name must also be changed to "Wheaton Preparatory School." An additional sum of money is offered if the school will exclude girls as well. The decision of whether to accept the bequests will be made by the trustees. With Wheaton dead, another trustee must be elected to fill his spot, before they can vote on the bequest. The trustee will be elected by the town, and every single person living there has a vote, and a choice to make. This sets off a furious campaign, which I found fascinating. Many in the town want that million dollars. They want the jobs that will come with a bigger, wealthier school. They see hotels full of rich parents, and students with money to spend in the town. They aren't concerned with the handful of Jewish students already enrolled. T.C. and his allies throw themselves into the fight, which for him at least has implications far beyond their small school. They also marshal very practical arguments, pointing out that a "Preparatory School" will not welcome farm boys and girls, even if they are Gentiles. The locals are much more likely to end up working for the school than attending it.

I read a modern reprint of this novel, from the University Press of New England. It's part of a series with the evocative title "Hardscrabble Classics." The editor is Mark J. Madigan, who also edited the excellent book of DCF's letters, Keeping Fires Night and Day. In addition he has put together a collection of her short stories, The Bedquilt and Other Stories. The only reason I haven't bought a copy yet is that I have most of the stories in different collections. I did however find a copy of a biography that he cited in his notes, Ida H. Washington's Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography. Having read most of her fiction, as well as her letters, I'm curious to read more about her life, and to put her writing into its context. I did note that T.C., like DCF, attended Columbia University, and he shares his middle name with her father.

The Day of Glory, Dorothy Canfield

These days, I seem to lose the ability to write coherent sentences after about 7.30 in the evening. It is really cutting into my blogging time, particularly when my weekends get busy. Maybe the time change this weekend will help, with the longer light in the evenings.

I ordered my copy of this book back in January. I had pretty much given up hope of it, figuring it was lost in the mail, when it turned up in my mailbox on Friday. I was immediately intrigued, because it is a small book, only six chapters, less than 150 pages in my Henry Holt edition. I was also intrigued by the 1919 publication date, which suggested a connection to the Great War - as did the title of one of the pieces, "France's Fighting Woman Doctor." It turns out that the entire book is about France in the war years. It felt like a companion to DCF's 1918 book, Home Fires in France.

But this book felt different than most of the collections of her short stories that I have read.  Except for the first chapter, "On the Edge," these pieces read more like magazine articles than fiction. Most have authorial comments in the first person. The second chapter, "France's Fighting Woman Doctor," is a profile of a real person, Dr. Nicole Girard-Mangin, whom DCF seems to have known personally. According to DCF, the authorities who called her to military service didn't realize she was a woman until she arrived at the front (according to Wikipedia, she volunteered for service). I loved learning about her. And having read a bit about medical service from British and American nurses, it was so interesting to see it from the French side.

"Some Confused Impressions" describes a day spent "Near Château-Thierry, July, 1918," where the author meets French troops and civilians, as well as United States soldiers recently arrived in France. The last chapter, "The Day of Glory," is an account of the November 11th armistice in Paris. Only one chapter doesn't deal directly with the war, "Lourdes," focusing instead a day at the shrine among the pilgrims.

There are authors whose work I enjoy, whose books I buy, that I read and re-read. Then there are the authors whose work so resonates with me that I want to read - and own - everything that they have written. Dorothy Canfield is one of those authors, though I haven't really looked for her children's books yet (other than Understood Betsy). I think of them as the "complete" authors, and the list includes Jane Austen, Dorothy Dunnett, Kate O'Brien, Maura Laverty, E.O. Somerville & Martin Ross, even Laura Ingalls Wilder. It doesn't include Georgette Heyer (because I don't want to read her medieval historical novels), Dorothy L. Sayers (I feel no call to read her Dante translation), or even Anthony Trollope (ditto his book on Cicero or his biography of Thackeray). Do you have authors like that?

It's 7.24, and I feel my brain turning into a pumpkin!

The Real Motive, by Dorothy Canfield

The topic of "comfort reading" comes up often in book discussions. Ever since the presidential election in November, I have drawn comfort from the books of Dorothy Canfield Fisher. On election night itself, sick in body with what turned out to be a sinus infection, but also sick in heart and soul at the results, I had the strongest urge to read something of hers. I chose Hillsboro People, published in 1915. It is a collection of stories set around the town of the title, which perhaps stands for her own hometown of Arlington, Vermont. As Inauguration Day approached this week, I felt the same urge toward her books. This time I chose The Real Motive, another short story collection, published in 1916.

I've been trying to figure out what it is in her books that calls me so strongly right now. I think it is in part the balance, the humanity, the compassion that I find in her writing. Her characters are not all paragons. They can be weak and fragile, they can make bad choices and do harmful things. She shows us these things, but she wants us to understand the people who do them. And they can grow, learn, change their minds, sometimes. There is a basic human decency, a strength of character, an unshowy goodness in so many of them. Maybe it's also how clearly Canfield Fisher's stories express her values, her beliefs. She is not the most subtle of writers, and I know that some people find her overly didactic, too much the preacher. I don't. I feel like her fiction reflects the writer, the person that I came to know through reading an excellent collection of her letters a couple of years ago.

The stories in The Real Motive are an interesting mix, with some familiar elements. There are a couple set again in Hillsboro, but others in New York and Paris. Two of them take place around small colleges in the Midwest. DCF grew up in a small college town in Kansas, where her father taught at the state university. Perhaps that's where she developed her intolerance of the pretensions, the pettiness sometimes found in academic life. (I was a "faculty brat" myself, growing up in similar small college towns.) "From Across the Hall" is a sweet story of two parents watching their daughter fall in love, with very mixed feelings. "Vignettes from a Life of Two Months," about a new mother and her infant son, discusses breast-feeding with a frankness that I found surprising for 1916. Three of the stories involve immigrants, considering their motives in coming to America, their struggles here and the prejudices they face. I braced myself when one story introduced a "big, black-browed Semite, with the big diamond in his scarf and the big plaids on his protuberant waistcoat." But if his appearance had something of the stereotype, his character and the story didn't. I did cringe when the sole African American character to appear in the stories - a maid, traveling with her employer in France - spoke some of the worst "Gone with the Wind" style dialect ever written.

I realized only after finishing the book that while it was published in 1916, there is no hint of the Great War in it. At the time she was writing these stories, she and her husband John were planning to take their two children to France to work for the war effort.

I have collected and read most of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's novels. I still have her last, Seasoned Timber, on the TBR shelves. I also have A Harvest of Stories, chosen by DCF for this collection published shortly before her death in 1958. I even gave in to temptation and bought a copy of her Memories of Arlington, Vermont, because I wanted to know more about the real "Hillsboro." I think she is an author I will be re-reading for years to come.

Bonfire, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I learned about this 1933 novel from the letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher. One in particular made me anxious to get my hands on a copy:

Why, you've broken my heart! I don't know when I've had such a shock as you gave me by the casual phrase in your letter, "I felt that the hero should have done something more essential and important at the end than the leading of an athletic parade!" I could lay my head down on my desk and weep that you should think that poor broken Anson Craft was the hero of Bonfire, he whom I intended as the ne plus ultra of a failure, the blackness of his defeat the night against which the soaring triumph of the heroine of the book, his sister Anna, rises...Was I mistaken in thinking that I was strong enough to take on as "heroine" the kind of woman in real life goes almost invisible, quite unrecognized? (Letter, Sept. 5, 1938)

Her strong reaction intrigued me, and I wanted to know more about this heroine she had created.

The story is set in a small town, Clifford, among the mountains in Vermont. As it opens, we're introduced to the physical setting, which is also drawn on the book's endpapers. We meet some of the town's residents, including a white cat named Henrietta, as the sun rises on an April morning. Many of the human residents are wondering if Anna Craft is really coming back to Clifford. She has been in France for two years, working as a nurse, but she has accepted her old position of district nurse again. Her brother Anson, recently qualified as a doctor, is returning as well, to practice medicine there where their father and grandfather did. Anna has supported him through his training and his residency. Her two years in France were meant to be a break and a change, but now she has come home again.

There are several threads to the story that Dorothy Canfield weaves from this beginning. On one level, this is a story of a community, a rural New England town, with its old rooted families, connected by blood and history. News flies around - so does gossip. People are classified by their families, with personalities traced back the line just like physical features are. Anna's quick temper comes as much from her Craft blood as her red hair, but it's tempered by the melancholy strain of the Knapp blood in her mother's family. Her neighbor Mrs. Foote is a Nye by blood, practical and unimaginative, but in her mercurial teen-aged daughter Isabel the Foote strain predominates. (Anna has some Nye blood herself.)

As we follow "M'Sanna" through her rounds, we meet more of the people in the area, from the prosperous farmers of Churchman's Road to the Serles Shelf folks, who prefer hunting to actual work. But even the Serles Shelf people look down on the "degenerates" at Clifford Four Corners. I really enjoyed this part of the story, particularly Anna's work, which involves far more than nursing the sick. On her first day back, she commits herself to finding a way to help the children from the poorer farms attend the local academy, the only high school.

We also learn more of Anna's neighbors in Clifford, those who live along The Street. One of the most interesting to me was Miss Gussie Kemp, an elderly lady who lives with her sister Bessie. Miss Gussie is almost completely deaf, and people soon give up trying to talk to her. Besides, the lively Miss Bessie tends to dominate any conversation going. But if Miss Gussie can't hear, she can see - and more clearly than almost anyone in town. "The deaf woman sometimes wondered if the clatter of sound in normal ears did not distract the eyes from seeing." There is a wonderful moment at a working-party to decorate the church for Christmas:

When she sat back in her chair again, the whole group, heavily seated women and fluttering young people, had stopped what they were doing to to laugh over some joke. Miss Gussie saw the mirth - inaudible to her but not invisible as to other people - as bright waves, eddying around and around the room, dashing up their rainbow sprays against the grey cliffs of people's faces, usually so stony and dry, now glistening and streaming with gayety. . . [After someone shouts the joke to her] Miss Gussie laughed then herself, and enjoyed the joke. But not more than the sight of those human beings ransomed from themselves for an instant by laughter.

And when she sees instead people in trouble, she tries to help, offering words of comfort or careful advice - which often go unheard. She is a lovely character, and I could have happily spent more time with her.

A second major thread of the story involves Dr. Anson Craft's return to the Valley. He would rather be working in a research lab, but he needs to make enough money to pay Anna back the money she spent on his education. Resentful and bored, he meets a young woman from Serles Shelf that his sister has been trying to help. Their surprising marriage, which dominates the middle of the book, is not a happy one. I found this part less interesting, partly because I wasn't sure what DCF was trying to say. It's explained in the end, and here again Miss Gussie saw more than anyone else, and tried to help. I much preferred Anna's parallel story, of work and service, friendship and love. I will re-read this book, with great pleasure, for her and Miss Gussie, and the world of the Valley and The Street.

The passage of time is another theme running through this book, and I'll end with one passage that particularly struck me.

    On New Year's Day every calendar, large and small, has the same number of dates. But we soon learn that the years are of very different lengths. Nobody knows beforehand which ones will swing along at the steady pace of seasoned soldiers, which ones will caper past like children at play, and which will crawl by, dressed in black, headed for an open grave and bearing something precious that was once alive.
    Sometimes the Clifford years slid forward as evenly as a clock ticking, from the brilliance of January axes flashing in snowy woods, through sap-boiling time with steam clouds veiling leafless maples, into summer thunderstorms, and around again before you knew it through September school bells to Thanksgiving strawrides and then to trips to the woods for spruce and hemlock greens to decorate the church at Christmas. And nothing had happened, nothing whatever, except that all the children were an inch taller and the requisite number of pounds heavier (or M'Sanna Craft would have a thing or two to say to their parents) and all the old people had stepped one rung lower on the ladder that leads down into the burying ground. Yes, there were years like that, when nothing happened to anybody. And then there were others. . . 

N.B. This book fills another year in my Mid-Century of Books.

Her Son's Wife, by Dorothy Canfield

I think it will be a story which women will be interested in, (I hope which they will feel deeply) but I don't believe it can interest any man. They have for too many generations had the possibility and the habit, of putting on their hats and melting away out of the house, when family relations got too uncomfortably tense. I rather imagine they will put on their hats and melt from the book at about the third chapter. But I hope that women who have had, for generations, to stick it out with no escape, may have a certain horrified interest in the story. (Dorothy Canfield Fisher to Paul Reynolds, 3/28/1925)

Reading this book made me realize that I was starting to think of Dorothy Canfield as a "cozy" writer. Not that she didn't write about difficult themes, such as unhappy marriages and the damage that parents can inflict on their children. But the last three books of hers that I read have been about young people finding their way, growing into themselves, through the challenges of their families and backgrounds. They haven't been fairy stories, but the characters have struggled through to happy endings (which are themselves new beginnings). I knew before I started this book that it was about a family in conflict, as the title certainly suggests. I just wasn't prepared for the way that the story twists and turns - and my sympathies with it. I certainly read the last third or so with the "horrified interest" that the author hoped to invoke.

In the first chapter, we meet Mary Bascomb, holding court after school in her fifth-grade classroom. The mothers of her students wait their turns, to appeal, even to beg. She grants their requests - or doesn't - with a full appreciation of her power, and something of disdain for her subjects. We learn that she was widowed young, left with a son to support through teaching. Her son Ralph is about to graduate from college, and Mrs. Bascomb is ready to support him through law school. But she is tired, already looking forward to the day he will be established in his law office, independent. He has been in a nearby town, looking for summer work, and probably (his mother thinks) wasting time watching baseball games. Instead, a letter arrives, telling her that he has gotten married. "Just went before a justice of the peace with no fuss about it at all." In a scrawled postscript, Ralph adds, "Mother, Lottie's not your kind, but she's all right."

After a sleepless night, Mrs. Bascomb steels herself to walk out of the house and send a telegram: "Mother's home always yours. Bring Charlotte home and we will talk things over and make plans for the future..."  Then she steels herself to go to work, where people will have seen the announcement of the marriage in the paper. Ralph and Lottie arrive that afternoon, and from the first moment Mrs. Bascomb knows that her new daughter is most definitely "not your kind." But Ralph is completely under his wife's spell, physically in thrall to her. When Mrs. Bascomb can bring him down to earth enough to talk of practicalities, they agree that Ralph will return to college, finish his degree, and then look for work. Meanwhile, Lottie will live with Mrs. Bascomb.

Mrs. Bascomb now has two to support, and it soon becomes clear that another member will be added to the family. Lottie does no work, even to keep her own things in order. She and her mother-in-law are the proverbial oil and water, both quick to anger and to hard words. They try to wage their campaigns through Ralph, who when he cannot melt away out of the house tends to take his wife's side, to his mother's disgust. But everything changes for Mrs. Bascomb the night her granddaughter is born.

The baby girl was lying on her back, her face as calm as that of a Buddha, her eyes wide open, gazing up fixedly. As their gaze met, John Bascomb's widow woke from her long nightmare. The eyes were the eyes of John Bascomb, set under John Bascomb's brow.

From that moment, her grandmother's life begins to revolve around the baby, named (to her despair) Gladys and nicknamed Dids. Mrs. Bascomb wants desperately "to protect her darling, to work for her as she is doing now, to fight for her." She wants Dids to have opportunities and choices, more than her mother or even her grandmother did. Lottie resents her mother-in-law's "interference" with her child, asserting her place as Dids' mother as much as Ralph's wife.

Their struggle plays out over the years, as Dids grows up, and it is not a happy story. In the later years, Mrs. Bascomb figures out a strategy that made my jaw drop, and I read on in horrified fascination, to an unsettling ending. As I was reading, I was thinking that in different hands, Mary Bascomb would have been insufferable. In the beginning, she is a petty tyrant with a martyr complex, who would have fit right in with Margaret Oliphant's self-sacrificing mothers - though Mrs. Bascomb does not suffer in silence. We learn more about her in the course of the story, and we also see how her love for her granddaughter transforms her life, not in an instant, happily-ever-after fairy tale way. There is still conflict and anger and pain. But there is also satisfaction particularly in her work. Mrs. Bascomb is a good teacher, and inside her classroom she is the Teacher, free from the tension and anxiety of her life as Mother and Grandmother. And while I didn't like Lottie much more than Mrs. Bascomb does, she is not just a caricature or a monster either. Eventually we learn something of her life before Ralph, of what shaped her, and in the end I found her a genuinely sympathetic character, particularly in the turn her life takes. I would love to meet these characters again, say four or five years after the book's ending.

As different as this book felt, I did note some familiar Dorothy Canfield touches. For several years Mary Bascomb attends a summer teaching institute at Columbia University, which both Canfield and her husband John Fisher attended, as do many of her characters. The Great War plays no part in this book, though key events take place in 1914. But at one point Mrs. Bascomb is likened to "the driver of a war-ambulance over a shell-swept road." I think John Fisher's experiences as an ambulance driver in France must have gone into the description of "peering blindly ahead into a darkness which was lighted only by terrifying explosions; and from one alarming moment to the next [she] could only try to hold out yet a little longer..." Like many of Dorothy Canfield's characters, at least in the books I have read, Mary Bascomb realizes "How long it took her to understand anything." It seems to me that her central characters always have more to learn. Their lives and their characters are not static. However, none of those I have met so far has faced the bleak sentence of one in this book: "leisure and self-respect she was never to know again..."

The Deepening Stream, by Dorothy Canfield

Have you ever hugged a book?  I don't know that I have, but about halfway through this one I closed the covers and just held it for a minute.  I don't know if that was in lieu of hugging the author, or her character Matey Gilbert.  Maybe it was the joyful feeling that in Dorothy Canfield I have found an author whose books really speak to me, the kind that brings out the book evangelist in me.

We meet the central character of this story, Matey Gilbert, looking back over her earliest memory, from when she was four.  (I read the first chapters wondering if "Matey" was pronounced "Matty," only to learn later that it is "Mate-y," a family nickname never explained.)  We follow Matey through the next 30 years or so of her life.  We see her first as a child, learning to walk carefully around her parents' unhappy marriage.  The youngest of three children, she sees her sister Priscilla and brother Francis cope in their own ways with the constant strain of their home life. Matey finds a better way, led in part by a fox terrier who adopts her.  The second part of her life begins when she returns to the small New York village, Rustdorf, where her mother's extended family still lives.  There she meets a distant cousin Adrian and marries him, learning to build a partnership and a home, unlearning the lessons that she had carried from her parents' unhappiness.  The third part of her life opens with the Great War, when Matey and Adrian decide that they cannot sit passively at home while France and Belgium suffer.  They take their two young children to France, where Adrian joins an ambulance brigade and Matey works with refugees.  At the end of the book, they return home to Rustdorf, struggling with the traumas of their war-time experiences, to take up their lives, working in the family's mutual savings bank.  (At one point, I was starting to see visions of It's a Wonderful Life, with its building & loan society in a small New York town.)

The title of the book refers to Matey's "growth of personality," as DCF put it.  This is a familiar theme in her books that I have read so far: how a person grows and develops into herself, what shapes her, how she finds her own way.  DCF shows both positive and negative influences, the mistakes a person can make, the wrong paths she can take.  Her characters may have to struggle alone for a time - sometimes years.  Often, at least in the books that I have read, they find help as they find love, in friends but even more as they find their partner.  This is true for Matey, but marriage to Adrian doesn't solve all her problems.  She has to grow into her marriage, their partnership, and she is still finding her way on the last page of the book.  DCF referred to her as "my poor Matey" in her letters, but I found her an interesting and inspiring character, and her story a hopeful one.

A reader once asked DCF why she wrote so often about marriage.  DCF answered that "there has been a strangely marked 'literary fashion' to decry marriage, to decry and disbelieve in any form or growth towards strength and wholeness."  Her books were written to "correct an exaggeration..." but she did not mean to suggest that "happy marriage is the only solvent" (Letter, 2/7/1938).

Another reader, a professor of literature who championed American authors, wrote to her about the autobiographical elements he saw in this book.  She responded that "in the long run, most novels are a sort of autobiography I suppose."  She went on to write, "In a deep way you are right, of course, since it treats of the growth of personality in a normal woman under such and such circumstances, there must be, beneath the surface, perhaps more than I realize of autobiography" (Letter 11/24/1930).  I think it's having read her collected letters that made the autobiographical elements stand out for me.  Her own parents' marriage was strained by "a complete lack of harmony . . . [which seemed] a burden greater than I could bear during all the time when I was growing up" (Letter 6/22/1943). It is clearest in the last section of Matey's story, which is the longest.  Dorothy Canfield and her husband John Fisher took their two children to France in 1916.  John drove an ambulance, while Dorothy worked with refugees (though she took on many more and diverse work than Matey).  I found this section really interesting, as an account of life in Paris during the Great War.  I had read something of this in her book of short pieces, Home Fires in France, but I thought the story here was more compelling, in large part because we experience it with Matey.

Selected letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher

This volume is titled Keeping Fires Night and Day.  The phrase comes from a letter that Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote to her publisher in January 1920, from her home in Arlington, Vermont:

We have been having a real siege here, with John [her husband] in bed with a badly infected knee and a high temperature and us in quarantine with both children [daughter Sally and son Jimmy] whooping it up with chicken pox, and the thermometer at twenty below and me keeping fires night and day and tending to my sick-a-beds.  Pretty strenuous materially, but not at all wearing morally as there was no anxiety about them, which is the only thing that ever bothers me in the care of the sick. John is up today pretty pale and peaked, Sally is up, pretty spotted and speckled, and I am back in my study to attack delayed work.

It seems like a very appropriate title for this book, published by the University of Missouri Press in 1993.  The editor, Mark J. Madigan, has chosen letters that focus on Dorothy Canfield Fisher's enormous output of work, both her fiction and the constant stream of non-fiction articles and reviews that she wrote.  Once she became a member of the board of the Book of the Month Club, she wrote reviews every month for their newsletter (from which members chose their books).  But she also kept the fire of her commitment to social justice issues burning throughout her life.  There her focus was on challenging racism and anti-semitism in American society, stressing the need for education and life-long learning, and campaigning for greater opportunities for women.  I have enjoyed the books of hers that I have read, very much.  Reading her letters gave me a great admiration and liking for her, as a person - with of course the quirks that we all have.

I have to say that this is the most meticulously-edited volume of letters I have ever read.  Mark Madigan included a section at the beginning, "Editorial Practice," where he explained how he chose the letters to include (189 of more than 2500 in DCF's papers).  He also explained how he edited them (minimally, which was nice).  There is a chronology of her life, an introduction to her life and work, and a section on "Notable Recipients" (who include Willa Cather, W.E.B. Du Bois, Robert Frost, Pearl Buck, Isak Dinesen and her brother Thomas, Richard Wright, and Christopher Morley).  Eleanor Roosevelt was another correspondent, though she is represented here by only one letter.  According to the editor, she enjoyed reading DCF's work and considered her one of the most influential women in America.

The letters cover the years 1900 to 1958 (the last written two months before she died).  In selecting which to include, Dr. Madigan wrote, "[They] have been chosen according to their relevance to Fisher's career and development as a writer."  He defined relevance "to include both direct discussion of literary topics and reflections of the personality, interests, background, and spirit which inform the author's approach to literature."  Because he included the entire letters rather than excerpts (I wish all editors did), they contain personal and family information as well.  There are several letters written from France in the First World War, which report on the war work DCF and her husband were doing (John driving an ambulance).  Many of the letters discuss work that she had in progress, including most of her major novels.  (I am very much looking forward now to reading The Deepening Stream, Her Son's Wife, Seasoned Timber and Bonfire.)  DCF also wrote in detail about the Book of the Month Club, particularly about the process of selecting books.  She answered letters from readers complaining about the selections, telling one woman who was concerned about the "bad morals" of books chosen that perhaps she should cancel her subscription if she was worried about her children reading them.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher challenged racial discrimination in American society throughout her adult life.  In her own work, she pointed out the racism of Northern whites, and the denial of opportunities to blacks, working these themes into her New England stories.  Despite her progressive outlook, however, her letters show that she wasn't completely free of racist attitudes, including the tendency to assign group characteristics to African Americans.  In her mind all black Americans are musically talented, all are great story-tellers - or liars, as she remarked in one jarring letter.  I was particularly troubled by a short series of letters to Richard Wright, whose memoir Black Boy was under consideration by the BOMC.  He was apparently still editing it, because DCF suggested in two different letters that he include some allusion to white allies, working to uphold American ideals, who might have encouraged him in his struggles.  This would in turn encourage those allies.  She said more than once that he should only do so if he truly believed this, because otherwise "even a single word would be a dreadful travesty."  I felt so uncomfortable reading these letters, wondering how much pressure Richard Wright felt not just from an older, established white author, but someone on a committee that could make his book a best-seller (it was chosen for the BOMC in March 1945).  I should note though that DCF made frank, detailed suggestions about writing and editing to other authors in her letters, and received advice herself (without always agreeing).

I truly enjoyed learning more about DCF's life, both through the letters and the editorial framework.  She wrote that "in the long run, most novels are a sort of autobiography I suppose -" but "imaginary autobiography."  She drew elements from her own life, but she insisted that none of her characters were portraits of real people.  I did find in the letters some common threads in the books I have read so far.  Her parents' marriage was strained, with her artist mother traveling frequently to France, where she kept a studio in Paris.  DCF often joined her there.  Like many of her characters, she attended Columbia University, where she earned a Ph.D. in French literature. (She also received at least six honorary doctorates.)  Her husband John was an alum as well, and the captain of the football team.  I expect he provided a lot of the detail for the football-mad Neale's career (on the varsity team at Columbia) in Rough-Hewn.  According to the editor he also acted as his wife's secretary and editor while she supported their family, in a reversal of traditional roles that suggests The Home-Maker and the shared work of the parents in The Bent Twig.  And of course there is Vermont itself, the Eden from which her characters are sometimes exiled and to which they return in their happy endings.

I learned from the introduction that Willa Cather stipulated in her will that her letters may not be published nor quoted.  I'm happy Jane Austen didn't think of that - or Dorothy Canfield Fisher either!

(Cather was a college classmate of DCF's older brother Jim, and the two women became close friends.  But they did not speak to each other for 20 years, after Cather wrote a story about a mutual friend that DCF begged her not to publish, because the friend was sure to recognize herself in it.)

The Bent Twig, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Oh this book. Nothing of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's work that I have read so far has been light or frivolous.  But this 1915 novel is so full, of people and ideas and questions and dilemmas.  It is long and thoughtful and unhurried, yet it never dragged for me.  And as with Rough-Hewn, I was reluctant to let the characters go in the end, I wanted to follow them on in their lives.  (Unlike Rough-Hewn there doesn't seem to be a sequel or a prequel.  It would be lovely if like Barbara Pym, Canfield Fisher allowed her people to cross over between books.)

Like Rough-Hewn, this is a story of young people finding their way into their lives.  It centers on Sylvia Marshall, whom we meet on the first page as a child of seven.  DCF described the book in a letter to her publisher, Henry Holt:

       I mean, you see, how there isn't any "story" except my Sylvia, and that what I'm trying to do is to tell what sort of clay she was made of, and into what sort of vessel she was finally shaped by the moulding of circumstance.
      Of course in that sort of a book, the "plot" in the Victorian sense, isn't the important thing: and the thread of the story does not run through a sequence of events but connects one phase of inner development with another.

It seems to me that she comes from the best sort of clay, a strong and loving family - though a bit of an unconventional one.  (DCF did stack the deck by making both parents from Vermont.)  Sylvia lives with her parents in a small midwestern town where her father teaches economics at the state university.  Their family includes a younger sister Judith and a brother Lawrence.  Their life in a small house in the unfashionable part of town sets them apart from most of the faculty families, who disapprove of their simple way of life.  Mrs. Marshall works in the kitchen and the garden, and Professor Marshall shares in the cooking and housekeeping.  He is also a caring and involved father.  The children attend the local public school, where they mix democratically and happily with the town children - though not with the African American children, who are segregated in their own neighborhood and school.

From an early age, Sylvia knows that her family is different, and sometimes this bothers her, even as a young child.  The visits of her father's sister, her Aunt Victoria, bring this into sharp focus.  Victoria is a wealthy widow, having married money after the siblings lost their family fortune.  She calls their home life "idyllic," but there is a sting to her words.  Sylvia is fascinated by her glamorous aunt, always beautifully dressed, living in luxurious hotels on her travels.  She begins to grow dissatisfied with the things of home, as she moves into young adulthood.  College brings only more questions, including the biggest one: what is she to do with her life?  Where is her place?  Her aunt invites her on a long visit to her summer home in Vermont, where Sylvia falls into her life of ease, and a possible answer to those questions.

In this book, DCF tackled some big topics, including racial discrimination in American society, the limited opportunities open to educated women, and economic inequality.  Sylvia and her mother have a discussion of relations between the sexes that while never graphic feels very grounded and real - one that I found surprising in a book written in 1915.  One character struggles with chronic alcoholism.  Two characters make a disastrous marriage, which society approves because she is rich and he is a man of culture.  And this is the first of DCF's books that I've read to address faith and belief, if only briefly and late in the book.  Though I have seen her books described as didactic, and I can understand why, they don't feel that way to me.  Perhaps it's because she creates such strong, three-dimensional characters who carry the story.  They are never just puppets or straw-men for her ideas.

I can't quite decide on the meaning of the title.  Is Sylvia is the twig, growing away from her parents' strong roots, and warping a little in the process?   But for DCF, parents eventually have to stand back and let their children go, to find their own way and make their own mistakes.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I discovered that a book of DCF's letters has been published, and I am already deep into it.  This book and the letters have inspired me to look for more of her writing.  I think though that (also like Barbara Pym) she is not an author to rush through.

N.B. I read a "School Edition" of this novel, republished in 1939.  I've never seen an edition like this before. It includes an introduction (by a teacher) with a section "On the Development of the English Novel" and a brief biography of Dorothy Canfield Fisher.  It also includes "Notes and Suggestions" at the end, with topics for themes and selections for class reading.  One section instructs the student reader to "Look up what is meant by a strophic circle."  Another suggests, "Make the following words a part of your working vocabulary" (including askance, welted, and abysmal).  I wonder what I would have made of this story in high school.

Rough-Hewn, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

That proverb about not judging a book by its cover proved itself true once again with the beautiful, moving story inside these plain brown boards.

It's one of the best books I've read all year, and I kept putting it down to marvel at Dorothy Canfield Fisher's characters and their story.  I found my battered old copy on the shelves of Becker's Books, which almost overflows an old house on Houston's west side.  It's the kind of bookstore that rewards patient trolling through the shelves, particularly in the dimly-lit alcoves.  As I moved slowly along, it was of course Dorothy Canfield's name that caught my eye.  I knew nothing about this 1922 novel, not even the title, which naturally didn't stop me from buying it, since her books turn up so rarely.  I was very pleased later to find that this is a first edition.

With no dust-jacket and no cover copy, I truly had no idea what the story was about when I started it.  I was reminded again how rare that is. With new books, I usually know something about them - outlines of plot, details of character, whatever I glean from the covers.  Here I knew nothing, and I had the most delightful feeling of discovering a story, watching it unroll before me with no idea where it was taking me, or the characters.  And I haven't read enough of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's fiction to be certain how it would end.

For those who would like to discover this book for themselves, there will be spoilers below.  I don't think it counts as a spoiler though to say this is a wonderful book, and you should read it!

It opens in 1893, with a young boy, Neale Crittenden, just off to play shinny in the streets with his friends.  He lives in Union Hall, New Jersey, with his parents.  Neale attends a private school, but his whole life is taken up with sports and games.  Though he has loving and attentive parents, he lives very much in and by himself, in his own world.  I was just getting used to Neale and his world, when the next section of the book opened in France, where a young American girl named Marise Allen has arrived with her parents to live in Bayonne, near the Spanish border.  Her father is the sales representative of an American company selling farm machinery.  Really, however, they have come because Marise's mother wants to escape her provincial American life.  Having read a lot of novels and poetry, Mrs. Allen has come to Europe to find Culture and Life - and perhaps Love.  Too busy with these great things to care for her child, she leaves Marise to the Basque servants.  Old Jeanne in particular loves Marise like her own daughter, but she and the others despise Mrs. Allen.  Like her neighbors, they laugh at her behind her back for her laziness and for her too-obvious flirtations.  Marise, alone and vulnerable, picks up some very unfortunate ideas from them about men and relations between the sexes.  When her mother's imprudence leads to a great tragedy for the family, no one realizes how deeply it affects her young daughter, least of all Marise herself.

The story then moves back and forth between Neale and Marise.  In America, Neale moves through school and into college at Columbia, where he for a time finds his life's purpose in football.  His summers are spent in West Adams, Massachusetts, where his grandfather runs the family lumber mill.  Drawn to the work from childhood, Neale joins the lumber company where his father works after graduation.  He quickly becomes one of its rising stars, but suddenly he finds himself facing the question: what is he working for?  What is he meant to be doing with his life?  He gives up his job to travel, hoping to find an answer.  Meanwhile, Marise has sought refuge in music, studying the piano and hoping to make a career as a professional musician.  Eventually, her studies take her to Rome, where she meets Neale one fateful morning.

I loved so many things about this book.  At first I worried about Neale, whom I thought neglected by his parents.  Their close loving marriage seemed to leave little room for him.  It was only later in the book that I realized his parents, in best Dorothy Canfield Fisher fashion, were leaving Neale room to grow and develop, to find his own way.  The chapter where Neale discovers his parents' library and falls in love with books, starting with Great Expectations, was a complete delight.  Among his other attractions as a hero, he is a wonderful bookworm.  The senior Crittendens also give Neale the example of a happy, balanced partnership.  Once Neale is old enough, his father accepts a position in Central America, and his parents joyfully set off on their travels.  This is what they always wanted to do, they explain to their son, and now they can - leaving the conventional Yankee grandfather aghast, and blaming Neale's mother for this flightiness.

I thought Neale's story was much more interesting than Marise's, but then I realized that's because Marise's life is so narrow, hemmed in by her life in a small provincial French town, in a convent school.  I wondered how much Dorothy Canfield Fisher was drawing on her own experiences in writing Marise's.  Like Neale, Marise has to find her way into her own life (a phrase that DCF uses), but her first steps into that life come so much later than his.  I had a good idea where those steps were going to take them, when I learned that both Neale and Marise had roots in Vermont - the Paradise to which Dorothy Canfield Fisher returned again and again in her books.  In fact, Marise has an Aunt Hetty, clear kin to the Putneys in Understood Betsy.  As lovely as the ending of this book is, I do wish there was a sequel, set in Vermont.  I'd love to meet Neale and Marise again.

A writer's raw materials

Raw Material, Dorothy Canfield

I don't know who is responsible for this rather odd book, but I lay it to the earlier generations of my family . . .  

In the rather odd first chapter of this book, published in 1923, Dorothy Canfield suggests that many of us from our early years are story-tellers, creating vivid narratives woven together out of the messiness of our daily lives.  We synthesize, we organize, we create order out of chaos.  We may never write our stories down, or even share them with anyone else, yet they are a part of us.  But there are also those who see the world only through other people's stories, through the prism of books they have read, art they have seen or lectures they have heard.  In her view, that second-hand sight is really a type of blindness.

At least I think that's what she is saying.  Anyway, her book is for the story-tellers:

[T]his is not a written book in the usual sense.  It is a book where nearly everything is left for the reader to do.  I have only set down for my own use, a score of instances out of human life, which have long served me as pegs on which to hang the meditations of many different moods  . . .  In this unrelated, unorganized bundle of facts, I give you just the sort of thing from which a novelist makes principal or secondary characters, or episodes in a novel.  I offer them to you for the novels you are writing in your own heads  . . .  I have only tried to loan you a little more to add to the raw material which life has brought you, out of which you are constructing your own attempt to understand.

I found that first chapter a little difficult to follow (let alone summarize).  I also started to wonder uneasily if I am one of the second-hand crowd, too caught up in books.  I thought, "If the whole book is like this, I won't get too far with it."  But the chapters that followed were a delight.  They consist of vignettes, reminiscences of people and places, episodes in her life or in the lives of family and friends.  Some are set in her childhood, others in adulthood.  Many of them take place around her home in Vermont, in the small town where generations of her family had lived. Others are set in France, during her times there as a student, and then later during the Great War, when she was doing relief work.

There is an interesting variety in the chapters.  I  could see connections to other books of hers that I have read, particularly the sections on France in World War I, which fit right in with Home Fires in France.  One tells the story of her friend Octavie Moreau, who in the third year of the war was sent to a prison camp in Germany, with 39 other women from their town, as a reprisal for something that supposedly happened somewhere else.  I have never read anything about German concentration camps in the First World War, nor about civilian deported to them.  Another chapter, "Scylla and Charybdis," is about little Cousin Maria Pearl Manley, an orphan moving back and forth between two branches of her family, happy in neither.  I wish she could have spent some time with the Putney family from Understood Betsy.  In the last chapter, "Almera Hawley Canfield," Canfield builds up a picture of the great-grandmother whom she never met, from the reminiscences of family members and old friends, which also show us something of the community in which she lived.  It's really beautifully done.  The Vermont sections made me think of Sarah Orne Jewett and her evocative stories of Maine. 

I have so many of her books still to read, and I will be looking for these connections, to see if she used her raw materials in later works.

I found my slightly battered and foxed 1923 edition at Kaboom Books here in Houston, and it was $8.50 well spent.  A previous owner, Ralph M. Pons, left his bookplate inside the front cover. He can't ever have read it, though: at least a quarter of the pages were unopened.  So for the first time in my life, I found myself nervously separating the edges of pages.  It was more difficult than I expected, and I was a bit clumsy at times, so the book is a little more battered than when I bought it.  I don't mind, I'm just happy to have it on my shelves.

The home front in France in the Great War

Home Fires in France, Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Katrina's review of this over on Pining for the West caught my eye the other day.  I've been looking around for more of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's work, after falling in love with The Home-Maker and Understood Betsy last year.  A book of stories about France in the Great War sounded very intriguing.  From reading about Fisher, I knew that she and her husband spent three years doing relief work in France, so I expected that her stories, while fictional, would be based on her own experiences.  Ever since reading Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth a few years ago (before I started blogging), I've wanted to learn more about the First World War.  It was a bit of shock to realize from that book just how little I do know.  I can't remember studying it in any great detail, even as a history major in college.  Only a random assortment of names and dates comes to mind - August 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the invasion of Belgium, Ypres and the Somme.  Thinking this might fill in some of the blanks, I requested a copy through interlibrary loan and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it arrived.

Home Fires in France was published in America in 1918, presumably while the war was still going on.  According to the "Publisher's Note," Fisher wrote him that "What I write is about such very well-known conditions to us that it is hard to remember it may be fresh to you, but it is so far short of the actual conditions that it seems pretty pale, after all."  Her stories certainly aren't subtle.  They are clearly and strongly pro-French (one wouldn't know from them that the British are actually in the war). 

There are eleven stories in this book, and they are an interesting mix.  As the title suggests, they are not about the armies in the trenches but the home front.  They focus on both French soldiers and their families, and on Americans in France, many working for relief organizations.  Several of the stories are in the first person, with presumably Fisher herself narrating, others in the third person.  Some are set in Paris, flooded with refugees and invalided soldiers, others in the country-side, while two are harrowing accounts of events in northern France under German occupation. Fisher shows that while America was officially a neutral power, France was full of Americans like herself, collecting supplies and money from the U.S., organizing ambulances for the wounded, rehabilitation for the maimed and blind, food and clothing for the refugees.  Some of the Americans in her stories are there just to get their pictures in the paper, or to play at nursing handsome young men (as were some of the French involved in relief work as well). Others with a sincere desire to help are unprepared for the scope of the work and simply overwhelmed.  Several of the stories feature demobilized soldiers, maimed and blind, who must be provided for.  The narrator of one, "A Honeymoon . . . Vive l'Amérique," runs a Braille printing press producing books for veterans, which was one of Fisher's own projects.

The most affecting story, to me, was the one called "A Little Kansas Leaven," about a young woman named Ellen Boardman, twenty-seven, unmarried, an office manager, "plain, rather sallow, very serious."  Reading about the invasion of Belgium startles her into an awareness of world events, outside of her small Kansas town.  From the start, she cannot understand why America is standing by, unwilling to help France and Belgium (Britain apparently is on its own).  She ask questions of the fellow residents of her boarding house, and of her co-workers, many of whom see her as something of a crank, yet they find themselves reading the war news with more attention.  Eventually Ellen decides that she has to do something.  She takes leave from her job, over her boss's objections, takes out her life savings, and sails to France, to do what she can.  In Paris, she finds her way to a refugee bureau run by prominent Americans who desperately need her practical skills.  She spends four months there, organizing their work and their office.  In the evenings she goes to the Gare de l'Est, where soldiers returning to the front catch their trains.  There she timidly passes out chocolate and writing paper to those she finds alone, without family seeing them off.  When her savings run out, she sails back to America and her hometown, where she finds a hero's welcome.  I have to admit, this story brought tears to my eyes, a rare occurrence in reading.

I enjoyed these stories, though they weren't always comfortable reading.  However fictionalized, they opened up a new world to me, and they sparked my interest again in learning about the war itself.  I had no idea, for example, just what parts of France were occupied in the Great War.  Unlike Fisher and her readers in 1918, though, as I read I couldn't help thinking of the future, of what would happen in France just twenty years later.  It was especially poignant, reading the constant mention of fathers, husbands, sons lost, to know that her own son would die in the next war, in the Pacific.

Becoming Betsy

Understood Betsy, Dorothy Canfield Fisher

After I read Dorothy Canfield Fisher's The Home-Maker, I knew that I would be reading more of her work.  I just had no idea where to start.  Then, a few weeks ago, Jenny of Shelf Love wrote a lovely post about "children’s books that are about ordinary lives: no magic, no amulets, no spells, just children going about their everyday business."  And that reminded me of Understood Betsy.  I can remember as a child seeing this many times in the children's section of the library, but I don't think I ever even took it off the shelf.  As wonderful as it was to wander around the library making my own discoveries and choices, I do wish someone had pointed me toward this book years ago.

The Betsy of the title is introduced to us as Elizabeth Ann, nine years old and an orphan.  She lives with her Great-Aunt Harriet and Harriet's daughter, whom Elizabeth Ann calls Aunt Frances, somewhere in a city in middle America.  The aunts, who took her in as a baby, have devoted their lives to her, particularly the unmarried Aunt Frances.  She is determined to understand Elizabeth Ann by spending every minute with her and sharing every experience.  The aunts wrap her up in a loving, smothering cocoon that has left her a spindly pale peaked little girl, full of fears and anxieties, with no friends her own age (rather like Rose Campbell before Uncle Alec arrives). 

But when Great-Aunt Harriet develops a worrisome cough, and the doctor orders her away to a warm climate, suddenly all Aunt Frances's attention turns to her mother.  And they cannot take Elizabeth Ann with them.  When this book was published in 1917, perhaps its first readers would have understood Harriet's cough as tuberculosis; Elizabeth Ann has no idea and naturally feels completely abandoned.  Even worse, the cousins who were to take her in have their own medical crises, and instead they have to send her on to her Putney cousins in far-away Vermont.  There she is welcomed by Great-Uncle Henry, Great-Aunt Abigail, and their daughter Cousin Ann.

I had a confused idea that the title of this book was actually "Misunderstood Betsy," and that it was a Green Gables-esque adventure in which Betsy meets Vermont versions of Marilla Cuthbert and melts their cold hearts with her winning ways.  Maybe that's why I never got around to reading it.  What Elizabeth Ann finds instead is a warm loving home, one in which she is not coddled but encouraged to learn, to think for herself, to grow.  It is easy to see in both the Putney home and the small country school she attends the Montessori ideals that Dorothy Canfield Fisher supported so strongly, which also underlie Lester Knapp's loving careful parenting in The Home-Maker.

Elizabeth Ann is at first overwhelmed with grief, with a sense of abandonment and the loss of the only life she had known.  But from the moment Aunt Abigail puts a kitten in her arms, I knew she was going to be all right.

Elizabeth Ann bent her thin face over the warm furry, friendly little animal. She could not speak. She had always wanted a kitten, but Aunt Frances and Aunt Harriet and Grace had always been sure that cats brought diphtheria and tonsillitis and all sorts of dreadful diseases to delicate little girls.

Watching this unnaturally delicate little Elizabeth Ann grow and blossom into Betsy is a delight.  Like Maria in Penelope Lively's A Stitch in Time, though in a very different setting, she has to learn to be a child, to play, to make friends, but also to take her part in the family's life and work.  There are plenty of stumbles along the way, but joys and triumphs as well, and quite an adventurous 10th birthday at a local country fair.  I was reminded at times of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, in the small school house, the stories of frontier Vermont, and especially in the maple sugar candy Betsy makes in the snow (when I lived in western Massachusetts, I loved the sugaring season and quickly became addicted to the candy I'd read about for so many years).  I'll have to see if my nieces have read this wonderful book.  I hope they haven't outgrown its quiet magic; I certainly haven't.

A mother at work, a father at home

The Home-Maker, Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I've come across several reviews of this, but it was Claire's post over on The Captive Reader that put it on my TBR list. I knew nothing about the author, not even that she was an American. I've since learned about her impressive literary career, with 40 books published, both fiction and non-fiction. In addition to her own writing, she served for 25 years on the editorial board of the Book of the Month Club, which played a big part in how and what Americans read in the 20th century. I can't imagine that anything they chose was better than The Home-Maker.

The plot of the story, published in 1924, can be simply told. A father is injured, and a mother has to leave the home, to find work to support their family. But Fisher does something amazing with this story. Lester Knapp works in the business office of Willing's Emporium, a department store in their small town, where he is quietly miserable, constantly aware of his inadequacies as a provider. He left college after his junior year to find work so that he and Evangeline could marry. They are now raising three children on his small salary in a tiny house. Though she loves her children fiercely, Evangeline cannot help hating the work of caring for them and the house, and her unvoiced despair and anger are poisoning their home. When Lester suffers an accident that leaves him unable to walk, Evangeline in her turn finds work at the Emporium, and finds life opening out before her. Meanwhile, in the their home, Lester discovers his vocation in caring for the children, not just physically but also mentally and emotionally. He grows particularly close to Stephen, the youngest, whom the neighbors generally consider a budding juvenile delinquent. With this unconventional reversal of parental roles, each member of the family settles into place, into loving relationships and growth. But it is only the family's outwardly tragic circumstances that allow a man and a woman, a mother and a father, to switch roles. What will happen as Lester recovers from the accident? Will he and Evangeline have to return to their traditional roles, and their old way of living, filled as it was with such pain and despair?

In telling this story, Fisher moves from character to character, taking us into their minds and hearts, showing us events through their eyes. As the story shifted, I found myself empathizing with each one, even Evangeline in her struggles and her misery - except for Mrs. Anderson, a witchy old neighbor who torments Stephen, the one completely unsympathetic and unredeemed character. Yet while we see from the perspective of the different characters, we also see beyond, see what they don't or can't, which gives us an understanding that they sometimes lack.

Through this story Fisher explores some of the major questions facing American society in the 1920s. One is the roles of men and women, of husbands and wives, changing in the wake of the Great War and with the political gains of the woman's suffrage movement. A second major topic is the education and care of children. Lester comes to see that his role as a parent is watch and guide his children, to give them the space and freedom that allow "the slow unfolding from within of a child's nature." The theories of child-raising that he puts into practice with such success reminded me of the Montessori method, which I later learned Fisher was also very familiar with.

Another topic that Fisher addresses is the commercialization of America. The Emporium has just come under new management, as old Mr. Willing's nephew and his college-educated wife take over the business. They have a vision of building their business, but even more of raising the town's quality of life. "'My idea of good merchandise, Mrs. Knapp,' said Mr. Willing seriously, 'is that it shall be a liberal education in taste." Access to good merchandise will give people in small towns the confidence of city-dwellers, while buying will build the American economy. Evangeline shares that vision, it's part of what makes her such a valuable employee. This view of business grates on Lester:

"Jerome Willing's business ideal, as Lester saw it, was to seize on one of the lower human instincts, the desire for material possessions, to feed it, to inflame it, to stimulate it til it should take on the the monstrous proportions of a universal monomania. A city full of women whose daily occupation would be buying things, and things, and more things yet . . ."

Yet there is also a poignancy to the Willings' hopes and dreams. They see it as their life's work, its success not just for themselves but for their children. The store is in a small town, and to succeed they must draw in the country folk as well as the local people. They know they are competing against "the mail-order houses and the ten-cent stores" that "steal the business of country people away from where it belongs." What the Willings don't know is that first the highways, and then the mega-stores along the highways, and finally the internet, will all but erase family businesses like Willing's Emporium.

These topics seem so relevant to the world today, almost 90 years after this book was published. But Fisher's story isn't just about sociology or economics, it is first and foremost about people, about whom I came to care very much. I am still thinking about them, especially Stephen, finding with his father the love and security that he so desperately needed. I want to believe that the rather ambiguous ending Fisher gives them is a happy one, for everyone. I can't wait to see what else Dorothy Canfield Fisher has written, and I'd love to hear suggestions about what to read next.