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Gems from the Internet Archives: Women’s Autobiographies

Not having access to a major library, I often indulge my love of browsing in the Internet Archive. I’ll admit that it often requires much sifting through extraneous material to locate the occasional gem, but even after ten years I’m surprised at what I manage to find. Here, for example, is a selection of some exceptional autobiographical works by women, mostly published between the 1920 and 1960.

modelingmylife

Modeling My Life, by Janet Scudder (1926)

Born and raised in Terre Haute, Indiana, Janet Scudder was one of the first American women to make a name and career for herself as a sculptor. Passionate about art from childhood, she studied drawing and sculpture and then moved to Chicago, where she worked carving decorative features on furniture before being hired by Lorado Taft as one of his White Rabbits, a remarkable team of women sculptors who created dozens of statues and decorative friezes for buildings in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. She then traveled to Paris, where she studied under Frederick MacMonnies. She writes of the experience, “I’m sure, if I had known it when I was studying in MacMonnies’ Paris studio, the only woman among a number of men who were working from nude models, I should have seen the ghosts of the whole congregation of missionaries rising up in their wrath to denounce me.” She found Paris liberating, but hardly the sinpot it was considered in America: “Zulh Taft ([Lorado’s sister] and I were there quite alone, unchaperoned; she was studying painting in a studio, while I worked away at sculpture; we ate about in restaurants, we were thrown with all sorts of people who were responsible only to themselves, we had no one watching us and no one to whom we were accountable, we went to life classes in the evening and tramped home from school late at night and we felt as protected and safe from harm as though we had been living in the heart of a family in the Middle West.” She went on to Florence, where she began to create the classically-inspired fountains that became her specialty. Returning to the U. S., she struggled, but eventually managed to establish a reputation and a steady stream of clients. Modeling My Life ends with an account her return to France as part of a YWCA mission that helped care for and entertain troops with the American Expeditionary Force.

The Stone Wall: An Autobiography, by Mary Casals (1930)

The Stone Wall is something of a landmark in American LGBT history, perhaps the first autobiography in which the author openly acknowledges her attraction to another woman and their long and happy partnership. Born and raised on a New England farm to family with deep Puritan roots, Casal recalls having to defend herself from sexual assault from hired hands and other men while still a teen. She began to realize her feelings towards women early on, and had her first physical contact (kisses and hugs) with another woman while in college. She felt great pressure to conform to conventions, and even married a man, an entirely unsatisfying experience that ended in divorce after she gave birth to a stillborn child and, in her grief, fled to New York City. There, she came to peace with her feelings for the first time: “My city contact had caused me to look at myself less and less as a sexual monstrosity.” She writes candidly of the practical difficulties of finding ways to spend time with another woman in public, given the rigid social customs of the time, let alone taking the risk to express her feelings. It was not until she was in her thirties that she met her long-term lover, Juno, and they set up house together in an apartment in Greenwich Village. Today’s reader will probably cringe at a few aspects that date the book (she refers to homosexuals as “inverts”), but it’s a window into how one gay woman managed to make a life for herself in a time of considerable intolerance.

Louise Baker, playing tennis (press photo from 1955)
Louise Baker, playing tennis (press photo from 1955)
Out on a Limb, by Louise Baker (1946)

Reviewing Out on a Limb in the Saturday Review, Grace Frank quipped that Louise Baker could have easily called her book “The Leg and I,” in imitation of Betty Macdonald’s best-seller of the same period. The two books certainly share the same comic outlook, with every character an eccentric and every episode retold with tongue in cheek. While still a girl, Louise Baker was struck down by a passing automobile and had to have her right leg amputated. “When I regained consciousness ten days later in a white hospital bed, with the blankets propped over me like a canopy, I had one foot in the grave.” Such are the sort of puns with which Baker fills her book. Baker’s parents insisted that she make every effort to get along with her bi-pedal friends, and she soon developed a spirit of independence that led her, in the course of time, to learn to ski, skate, and play tennis (she was encouraged to write the book to provide inspiration to the many disabled veterans just returned from World War Two). She preferred using crutches to wearing an artificial leg, and accumulated a considerable “crutch wardrobe”: “Crutches don’t come in gay colors but any good enamel works the enhancing transformation. I am now just as likely to complain, ‘I haven’t got a crutch I’d wear to a dog fight,’ as I am to say, ‘I haven’t got a decent dress to my name.'” Baker also wrote a comic novel, Party Line, about the 43-year career of switchboard operator Elmira Johnson in the small town of Mayfield, California, and a humorous account of her time working in a boy’s boarding school in Arizona, Snips and Snails, which was made into a gawdawful movie, Her Twelve Men (1954).

Journey Down a Blind Alley, by Mary Borden (1946)

Published the same year as Out on a Limb, Borden’s book is its polar opposite in tone. The book recounts Borden’s experiences in organizing and leading the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit throughout much of the Second World War, beginning in France in February 1940 and then, after evacuating to England and regrouping, in Syria and Egypt, and finally, in France again after D-Day. This was Borden’s second experience of battlefield nursing: she wrote of her time in field hospitals on the Western Front in The Forbidden Zone (1929). Borden, an American heiress and novelist (I featured her ambitious 1927 novel, Flamingo, here in 2009), was married to Brigadier General Edward Spears, who was Churchill’s military liaison with the French government up to its defeat and then with DeGaulle’s Free French forces. Much of Journey Down a Blind Alley is colored by a bitterness towards DeGaulle that stems in part from his at times petty treatment of Spears and in part from the many egos and attitudes among the French military with whom Borden had to deal, since the ambulance unit spent most of its time assigned to support Free French forces. She does admit that much of the difficulties had their roots in the complexity of interests among the French: “Looking back I realized now that the confusion and discord in the hospital reflected what was happening throughout France. Was not France herself in the winter of 1945 a medley of discordant elements with her F.F.I. and F.T.P., her heroic resistance and her bogus resistance, her Petainists and her milice and her armies from overseas who were straining their strength to the utmost limit of endurance so that France should not be said to have been liberated by strangers?” Journey Down a Blind Alley offers a sobering antidote to anyone still harboring an inclination to view the Second World War in simple good-and-bad terms.

lilliansmithjourney

The Journey, by Lillian Smith (1956)

“I went on this journey to find an image of the human being that I could feel proud of,” Lillian Smith writes at the start of The Journey. Smith, whose 1944 best-seller, Strange Fruit, was one of the first books to openly deal with segregation and racism in the South, finds herself reconsidering memories from her childhood and decides to travel along the coastal roads of South Carolina and George, “trying to recover the feel of the country where my family once
lived.” Along the way, she encounters people with varying views of life, race, and faith, including a motel owner whose ideas of progress, she realizes, come from a very different place than hers:

The manager of the motor court came to my door to offer a television set. He was of the swamp country, I saw now, as he stood there. He had the look that is left on a face when hookworm and malaria and malnutrition have done their destructive work early in life. And in his speech were the old accents which were natural to the wire grass and swamp people who found schooling as hard to come by in the old days as shelter and food. People who, in my childhood, were almost as remote from books and learning and science and art and comforts as are the peasants of China and India.

Now he operated a motor court, looked at television, drove a Buick, took a trip in a plane each fall (so he told me) to the World Series, and read a newspaper.

As I made use of the conveniences with which our scientific age has filled this motor court, set close to the swamp — old and mysterious and deep-rooted in time as our human past — I kept thinking of this man.

“Everything in the place is modrun,” he proudly told me, as he flung open the door to show me the mauve-colored lavatory and the mauve-colored toilet and mauve-colored toilet paper. And as I stared at the splendor I knew that his sanitary facilities as a child had been limited to a wash pan, a lean-to privy and the ancient corncob. No wonder he was proud of participating in these modern times.

As with many books, the best parts of The Journey are those that deal with the specific, the individual. As Orville Prescott wrote in his New York Times review, when Smith “writes about people she has known — quoting their conversation and telling their stories — she does so with sure skill and considerable emotional power.” However, “When she writes about abstract ideas she occasionally lapses into spasms of embarrassingly lush rhetoric and passages where her generous feeling is obvious, but where her precise meaning is lost….”

Dickey Chapell, 1959
Dickey Chapell, 1959
What’s a Woman Doing Here?, by Dickey Chapelle (1962)

Dickey Chapelle rarely followed a conventional path in her life. At age sixteen, she was studying aeronautical engineering on a scholarship to M. I. T.. Though she flunked out after two years, her love of airplanes and flying remained, and she earned her pilot’s license, paying for lessons with articles she sold to aviation magazines. When her husband was stationed to an Army unit in Panama after Pearl Harbor and she was told that wives could not accompany the men, she figured out that she could follow as an accredited journalist, and her career as a war correspondent began. Chapelle worked as both reporter and photographer. Her first combat assignment took her to Iwo Jima a week after the first landings. There she had a sudden wake-up call when encountering a wounded Marine whose “story probably is one of the reasons I’ve kept on being a chronicler of wars”:

After I took his picture, while the chaplain administered the last rites as the corpsman began transfusing him, he came back to consciousness for a moment. His eyes rested on me. He said, “Hey, who you spyin’ for?”

“The folks back home, Marine.”

“The folks-back home-huh? Well-fuck the folks back home,” he rasped. Then he closed his eyes. I didn’t see where his stretcher was carried.

After we had ceased loading for the day, his voice haunted me. What lay behind that raw reflex answer? What dear-John-I-know-you-understand letter? What other betrayal?

I remembered his wound. A piece of a giant mortar shell had sliced across his stomach. So I went down into the abdominal ward with my notebook in my hand. There were no names in it yet because I wasn’t willing to hold up moving stretchers while I spelled out names. But I had copied the dogtag numbers of each man as I made his picture. The nurses’ clipboard listed the serial numbers of the men being treated. The number I wanted wasn’t there. I thought perhaps I had been mistaken about the kind of wound he had, so I tried to find him in the other wards, the other decks, even those of the officers. I couldn’t find his number.

There was only one more set of papers aboard. This showed the dogtag numbers of the men who had died on deck. The number for which I was looking was near the top of the list.

So I think I was the last person to whom he was able to talk. And I had heard him die cursing what I thought he had died to defend.

It was my first and most terrible encounter with the barrier between men who fight, and those for whom the poets and the powers say they fight.

Chapelle went on to report on the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, on the U. S. Marine intervention in Lebanon, on Castro’s war against Batista in Cuba, and on the civil war in Algeria. She was captured by the Russians while accompanying a group of Hungarian resistance fighters along the border with Austria in 1956 and spent seven years in a Budapest jail. She had strong anti-Communist views and, with her husband Tony Chapelle, formed a relief organization, AVISO (American Voluntary Information Services Overseas), that provided food and information support on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the years following the Second World War. She was killed in Vietnam on November 4, 1965 while on patrol with a Marine platoon near Chu Lai. She was the first female American war correspondent killed in action. A selection of Chapelle’s photographs was published on the Washington Post website in December 2015 and over 500 of her pictures are available online at the Wisconsin Historical Society website.

Dinner Party at Sea, from Flamingo, by Mary Borden

oceanliner

The dinner party, thanks to the little pills that Mr. Parkinson always had by him, was a great success. Mr. Parkinson swallowed one, and made Mrs. Prime do the same, saying in his high, funny falsetto voice, “Here you are, Biddy,” and then the cocktail table shot across the floor and he went with it, landing on his head in a flowerpot. But he didn’t seem to mind. He picked himself up, ruefully feeling his head and smiling, and Mrs. Prime cried out, “Oh, darling Perky,” rather crossly, and pulled his clothes straight. They were evidently great friends.

That sort of thing kept happening during the evening. Still, Mr. Daw’s little dinner was very nice. It was like all pleasant expensive dinners, except that the ship turned over on its side every ten minutes, carrying with it down the sliding slope of a rushing monstrous mass of water the panelled restaurant with its gleaming white cloths and its pretty shaded lamps; except that the waiters clasping bottles of champagne fell on their knees and shot swiftly backward like crabs, and the peaches from California rolled round the floor, and the musicians went headlong with their fiddles and music racks on top of them, after the piano, crash, into a heap in the corner; except that Gussie’s slim little feet were covered with a soft warm mess of scrambled eggs that came scuttling and spilling under the table from somewhere, and that the iced soufflé went into Bridget’s lap. Otherwise, one would have thought one was at the Berkeley or Claridge’s or the Embassy Club.

from Flamingo, by Mary Borden
New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1927

Flamingo, by Mary Borden

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Flamingo'Flamingo is a spectacular failure. I kept thinking as I read of the time I saw a Titan III rocket blow up less than a thousand feet off the launchpad. No one would call that a success–but it sure was spectacular, awesome in its size and power, hitting us with a tremendous roar and shock wave seconds after we saw the explosion. Millions of dollars and the work of thousands was scattered in bits over the southern slopes of Vandenberg Air Force Base. A considerable effort lay behind that failure.

I’m not clear exactly what Mary Borden was aiming at, but it certainly was high. The two novels that come to mind when looking for something to compare Flamingo to are The Bonfire of the Vanities and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead–and no one could argue that either one of them lacked for ambition. Flamingo is about the Old World colliding with the New World, about politics and money and art and power, about love, lust, jealousy, and ambition, and about Jazz Age New York City, with all its frenzy, noise, music, low lifes and skyscrapers. It has the potential to be a candidate for the Great American Novel.

Borden’s ambition led her to draft London and New York as characters:

London and New York had been talking all that summer. They had been trying to understand each other, but with very moderate success. They saw things differently, or perhaps New York didn’t try very hard to understand that old woman across the Atlantic, that old fogey.

Take a god-like view of things when she feels like it:

But, of course, in the star swarm that was traveling the heavens, this spinning of the earth through day and night was too rapid to be visible. An eye watching the stars splutter, fizzle, and go cold could not count the rotations of that little top. As for the building activity in New York, that would be less noticeable than the appearance of a slight feverish roughness, a tiny wart, on the side of the earth’s face.

Speak as the voice of fashion:

The Radio Building, Brown, Johnson & Campbell, Associated Architects, was the very latest thing in skyscrapers a year ago. It isn’t now. While I write, other buildings are going up that will put it in the shade, and there is a rumor that a rival firm is going to build just behind it a building that will make it look quite insignificant.

And even make her bold enough to admit her weaknesses to the reader:

From now on this story becomes very confused. It is going to be very difficult to keep track of these people once the Aquitania is tied up to the Cunard pier in the North River. It is going to be like a game of hide and seek, a sort of treasure hunt on switchbacks, in a crowd, in the dark, that jangles and jiggles, in a great confusion of noises, and it will be impossible to keep my eye on the clock and tell a straight narrative of how one thing happened after another.

To Borden’s credit, I have to say that I think Flamingo would have been far more effective if it had been 300-400 pages longer that it is. For what is great about it is Borden’s courage to do what Dickens and Zola and Tom and Thomas Wolfe did–to grab her narrative in her teeth and plunge with it into the depths of her subject, to force us to take time to really get to know someone, some place or some thing.

Here, for example, is the start of her sketch of a supporting player in the story. Ikey Daw is a Jewish financier, a deal-maker who would probably beat up Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” for their lunch money:

To Ikey Daw, who was equally at home in all the numerous Ritz Hotels of the earth, crossing the Atlantic was so much a matter of habit that he scarcely noticed whether he was stepping on or off a ship. His activities were much the same wherever he was. When the telephone was switched off, the wireless got busy, and the many threads that he spun from his fingers held taut, spreading out from him in a beautiful elastic web that covered the earth. He didn’t appear to be aware of the sea sliding and heaving beyond the rail of the Aquitania. It didn’t affect his appetite, and he didn’t look at it. Natural phenomena like storms, heat and cold, a lot of water, or dry land, and the things described in the geography books, never attracted his attention. Nor did the antics and idiosyncrasies of human beings, except for so far as they came into his scheme, and for the most part they didn’t. He could afford to despise them, and so, wherever he was, he was always in the same place, and although he traveled pretty constantly, he never seemed to himself to be moving and yet never had the feeling of being put. If he had any feeling of being somewhere, it was of being suspended in the air, like a spider at the center of his web, and the web, since he had spun it out of himself, revolved round him, contracting, twisting, and adjusting itself to cover the globe with himself continually at the middle of it.

Borden spends over dozen pages introducing us to Daw, telling about his rise to wealth and power, revealing his passions and foibles, taking us along as he walks along the deck of the ship, smugly dismissing the importance and concerns of the other passengers, hoping to corner Sir Victor in a conversation. It’s wonderfully descriptive and detailed stuff, and as a reader I was happy to plunge in along with Borden and swim through it regardless of where we might eventually surface.

Manhattan, 1928'Not there isn’t any action in Flamingo. There’s a storm at sea, an attempt to manipulate the stock market, an unsuccessful coup on a board of directors, parties, a fox-hunt, even a shooting in a nightclub. Most of the time things move along at a reasonable clip, aside from the dreadful passages about Peter Campbell’s saintly mother and holy fool brother upstate in simple, wholesome Campbelltown.

Unfortunately, Borden’s grand design is undermined by the weakness of its basic story. Peter Campbell, the boy genius of American architecture, has been in love with an Englishwoman he first met when they played together as children on a beach in Cornwall. He’s only seen her three times since, and even then, just in glances–across an opera house in Vienna, entering a car outside the Ritz in Paris. As Peter is about to launch his boldest project ever–a multi-block complex combining train station, corporate headquarters, stores, radio transmitters, and even a church–the woman arrives in New York.

She is Lady Frederika Joyce, wife to Sir Victor Joyce, who is coming to America to tell the President that Great Britain will not repay its war debts. As the Joyces step off the gangplank of the Acquitania (243 pages into a 418-page book), Peter hops on a train to Chicago to pitch a skyscraper for that city. Numerous things happen to both parties, but the net result is that Peter and Frederika do not meet face to face until page 379. Thirty-nine pages later, the book’s over. And no, they don’t run off together to live happily ever after. There are several sub-plots and a cast of dozens, but that’s it as far as the core story goes. And as a protagonist, Peter Campbell leaves a lot to be desired. Even Frederika muses at the end of the book, “He was a great artist but a weak little man ….”

To use an architectural analogy–since Borden devotes a lot of the reader’s time to Peter Campbell’s unique, inspiring designs and constructions–the flaw that topples Borden’s own grand design is the weakness of her foundation. It’s as if she slaps down a layer of tarmac and then proceeds to build the Empire State Building on top of it. For Flamingo to work, it either needed to be equipped with a rock-solid substantial foundation or to have everything that wasn’t essential slashed away in a ruthless fit of editing.

Still, as failures go, this one is awe-inspiring and very much worthy of revival and reconsideration. Among her contemporaries, only John Dos Passos, in U. S. A. carried out a grander design. In neither case does the final product quite fulfill the promise of its initial chapters, but that in no way should suggest that either book is not interesting, as fascinating at times as a kaleidoscope.

Lady Edward Spears (Mary Borden), 1931It’s particularly noteworthy when one realizes who Mary Borden was and what she was up to at the time she wrote Flamingo. Borden was the daughter of a Chicago industrialist, who was married with two daughters and a third on the way and living in England when the First World War broke out. She used her money and influence to establish a field hospital and deployed with it to the Western Front, where she worked as a nurse throughout most of the war.

During the war, she fell in love with Edward Spears, who played a key, if sometimes controversial, role as a liaison officer between the British and French armies. She divorced her first husband and married Spears just before the end of the war. After the war, they set up house in London. Spears went into business and Parliament. They both wrote memoirs of their experiences in the war: Borden’s The Forbidden Zone in 1929; Spears’ Liaison 1914 in 1930.

Somewhere between the war, divorce, marriage, and keeping up an active social life, Borden also found time to write novels, publishing her first book, The Romantic Woman, in 1920. Flamingo, 1927, was her fifth novel and sixth book. Before the end of the decade, her critical reputation had earned her a place alongside Edith Wharton and Ellen Glasgow in at least one survey of American women writers.

Though most of her family fortune was lost in the 1929 stock market crash, Borden continued her hectic pace, publishing seven more books before the Second World War broke out. Once again, she and Spears went to the front. Spears, now a general, served as Churchill’s military liaison with the French government during the desperate weeks in June 1940 when the Germans invaded. Borden, with the help of Lady Frances Hadfield, formed the British-French ambulance unit and went with it to support the French troops in the Alsace. She arranged the evacuation of the unit from France and then led it to Syria and Egypt, where they provided aid to Free French forces. Borden and the ambulance unit returned to France after DDay and took part in the grand liberation parade in Paris. However, Charles DeGaulle soon after disbanded it, reportedly in a pique, having issued a ban on British units participating in the parade.

Woe on he who takes on an industrious woman with a gift for the pen. Less than a year after the war, Borden published Journey Down a Blind Alley, which recounted the many ways in which DeGaulle and others in the Anglophobic Free French leadership went out of their ways to make things difficult, even as French soldiers were lying in the unit’s beds. (I picked up a copy of Journey some months ago in hopes of writing about it, but I found it no better than the average war memoir aside from the uniqueness of Borden and the unit’s circumstances.)

Borden’s pace slowed only a bit after that. Her last book, The Hungry Leopard, was published in 1956 when she was 70. She died in 1968 and Spears passed six years later.


Locate a Copy


Flamingo, by Mary Borden
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1927