Eleanor Saltzman, Novelist and Poet

In and among all the dispiriting and infuriating news we’ve been exposed to lately, several efforts to recognize the work of some women writers have provided some refreshing and inspiring relief. Last week, the Paris Review debuted a new monthly feature, Feminize Your Canon, written by Emma Garman, which will explore “the lives of underrated and underread female authors.” The Guardian added to its long-running “Top 10” feature a list of the “Top 10 Lost Women’s Classics.” And the ground-breaking Virago Press celebrated its 45th anniversary, having recently reissued Anna Segher’s 1942 novel, The Seventh Cross.

I quibble though, in seeing any of the books and writers discussed in the above items as truly lost. Underread, underappreciated, underrepresented in the canon? Yes, absolutely. But lost? If it takes just a click or two to order a new, in print copy of her books from Amazon or Waterstones or take your pick, then she’s certainly not lost.

Take, by contrast, the example of Eleanor Saltzman. She published two well-reviewed novels of life in rural Iowa–one of them earning a Kirkus Reviews starred review–as well as a dozen or so short stories and poems before she died suddenly at the age of 41 in 1946. A few paragraphs in Clarence Andrews’ 1972 A Literary History of Iowa appear to be the only record of her work since then. The only copy of her first novel, Ever Tomorrow (1936), sells for $188. I could find no copies of her second novel, Stuart’s Hill (1945), outside Worldcat.org. This is what lost looks like.

Born in Mount Ayr, Iowa in 1904, she was afflicted with infantile paralysis at the age of nine. Despite this, she attended Drake University, graduating with a bachelor’s in 1928, and went on to take a master’s from the University of Iowa a year later. She remained there as an editorial assistant of the school’s Classical Journal. Later, she worked on the staff of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, where she wrote a number of papers, as well as didactic short stories, on the subject of child rearing. Starting around 1930, she also began publishing short stories and poems in magazines such as Prairie Schooner, The Midland, The Cornhill Magazine, and American Prefaces.

Ever Tomorrow, published in 1936, was set in the area around Mount Ayr and told the story of Iowa farmer Joe Mueller, tracing his family’s decades of back-breaking work back to his parents and grandparents and forward into his hopes and expectations for his children and grandchildren. Its first section, “Genesis,” opens with Joe’s grandfather hauling the lumber for the farm house from a nearby sawmill, then, chapter by chapter, follows Joe through various ages from five to thirty-three. Though he dreams of leaving for Chicago like his brother Pete, Joe remains as the breadwinner and foundation of his family.

In the second section, “Exodus,” Joe moves his family into town as his children enter high school and talk about moving on. “I haven’t got anything against the farm,” Joe’s son Carl tells him. “Only I don’t want to get myself stuck off down here in the sticks and never get out. You don’t go anywhere on a farm. I want to go places and do something else besides plow corn.”Then, in “Return,” Joe moves back to the farm, seeing it less as a burden and more as the place where his roots originate. Finally, in “Tomorrow,” Saltzman hints at a tension between the solidity of the farm and the more sophisticated and perhaps less trustworthy worlds of the town and the big city.

As one reviewer put it, “There are no scenes of violent drama in Ever Tomorrow. There are no villains. The presentation of human desires, tragedies, and fulfillments, however, is poignant throughout.” Not everyone was quite so generous, though. Writing in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Roland White classed it as “softened realism”: “Softened realism is earnestly concerned with being faithful to reality, but it differs from common realism in not believing it necessary to go into all the physical details of life…. Softened realism prefers to deal chiefly with spiritual character, although always in relation to fairly commonplace reality. Its details are often disagreeable, but seldom nasty.” On the other hand, White assessed it “a work of honest craftmanship…. Its language is simple and clear, brightened by a gift for phrasing about characters.” Kirkus Reviews gave it a starred review, stating pointedly,

We are pulling this out of the run of the mill novels because we feel it should not be sidetracked as “another novel of the soil.” As a first novel, it deserves high praise; as a vigorous, simple poignant bit of Americana, it stands up against such novels as Time Out of Hind, As The Earth Turns, State Fair, etc. As Iowa background, with no sentimental trimmings for the back to the land cult, none the less the story unfolds as a saga of one man’s love of his land, a love not consciously inborn, but growing out of toil and pain and sacrifice.

In 1941, as her paralysis became more severe, Saltzman moved to Benton Harbor, Michigan where she stayed at the Saltzman Hotel, a therapeutic clinic run by her cousin, Dr. W. E. Saltzman, taking mineral bath treatments, managing the hotel’s accounts, and writing short pieces for the daily menus. She continued to write, however, and her second novel, Stuart’s Hill was serialized in Household magazine and later published by Bernard Ackerman, a small New York press.

Stuart’s Hill was certainly closer to White’s “softened realism.” Centered around the building of a chapel for a small farm community, it was something of a parable, in which sin (adultery) undermines the spiritual unity of the people and leads to the chapel being sold off for use as a barn. Reviewers saw in it similar qualities as Ever Tomorrow: “a simple story well told in a style of sustained beauty;” “a book of rare quality, a book that comes with a quiet grace in this day of tumult;” “written with almost biblical simplicity.” This is not to suggest, however, that Saltzman’s viewpoint was simplistic: the collapse of the community is due as much to the uncompromising scruples of the elders as to the actual act of sin. John T. Frederick called Stuart’s Hill a “fine example of a writer’s recognition and realization of a significant theme in Iowa rural life … of a country church and … its slow disuse, its decay, and its final destruction.”

Saltzman died unexpectedly in early January 1946 while staying at the hotel. An unpublished novel, Carpthorne, was found among her papers and is included in the collection of her papers at the University of Iowa library. Several months after her death, William Rose Benet wrote in The Saturday Review:

Have been grieved to hear that one of my contributors, who had been afflicted from childhood with infantile paralysis, died recently in a sanitarium in Benton Harbor, Michigan. This was Eleanor Saltzman, who still managed to get through high school and enter Duke University, where she was graduated with honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She obtained her M.A. at the University of Iowa, majoring in Greek. She worked in the Greek department and in child welfare for ten years. She also devoted much time to writing, and had two novels published, Ever Tomorrow (Coward-McCann, 1936) and Stuart’s Hill (Bernard Ackerman, 1945). In November I published in this department a poem of hers which I still regard highly, a poem about immortality.

In her memory I now print the following little poem, sent me by her sister. It was, I understand, written about eight years ago. Obviously, Eleanor Saltzman was one of the elect of this earth, a person acquainted with great pain but with clear, unfaltering courage. It is good to know of lives such as hers.

Requiem

It is not death
When we lie down and close our eyes
Because they see no more.
Serenity can touch us then,
And mold us into peace, and quietude.

Unity it is, of myriad atom dust
Released again to live again–
Tree and rain and
Stardust infinite.
Death found us earlier.
The stone we could not turn.
The grass sun-slain in June,
Our child who was not,
Our love, stillborn.

Saltzman’s last publication was the following poem, published posthumously in the Summer 1947 issue of Prairie Schooner. Knowing her thirty-plus year struggle with polio, its message is clearly as much one of physical as of romantic longing:

Release

And if I never move again,
I can lie still and think, and where my thoughts
Will go there is a quiet coral sky
Behind the leafing trees astir as stirs
My quickened breath, and I shall walk my road
As far as the farthest hill, and I shall wait
For you until the newborn moon is set.
You will come. My lips say you will come.

I shall rise as soon as dawn begins,
And I shall run, fleet as the lifting mist
And joyous in the strength our hearts have found,
Until I reach the deep blue morning lake,
Knowing you are with me, palm in palm.
Clothes abandoned on the naked sands,
Gasping I shall plunge in the water’s cold
And rising, plunge again, and I shall swim
Into the blue horizon, I shall swim
To the very end of time which has no end.
I can. I know I can. My arms are strong.
My body new alive, and you are near.

And if I never never move again,
I can lie still and think …

Perhaps someone will now find the time to track down Eleanor Saltzman’s books and help retrieve her from the realm of writers who are truly lost.

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