I knew I was going to like Margaret Parton’s memoir, Journey Through a Lighted Room, on page two, when she writes of reflecting upon a Quaker meeting while “wandering aimlessly about the garden with a vodka and tonic in hand.”
This is the story of a woman who wasn’t ashamed by the fact that she liked a good drink, a good book, a good meal, a good piece of music, a good conversation, and a good fuck. She made her way in the working world, had an abortion she never regretted, married twice and divorced once, fell and stayed in love with a married man through two decades, raised a son and watched him die of leukemia, cared for a mother suffering from dementia, struggled with her weight, and generally held her own through lows and highs that I suspect any contemporary woman could relate to. Indeed, it’s a little surprising that Journey Through a Lighted Room isn’t better known and still in print, because the book is as fresh and frank as if Parton were telling it to us here and now.
Parton grew up in exceptional circumstances. Her mother, Mary Field Parton, was a successful writer and social activist who worked with Clarence Darrow and edited Mother Jones’ autobiography. Her father, Lemuel Parton, was a reported whose column, “Who’s News Today,” was syndicated in hundreds of newpapers across the US in the 1930s and 1940s. Her aunt, Sara Bard Field, campaigned for women’s suffrage and married Charles Erskine Scott Wood, whose resume included everything from graduating from West Point and fighting Indians in the West to defending Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman in court to painting and writing for socialist magazines. There was never a time when she wasn’t in the midst of talented, opinionated, and famous people. At the age of 14, she wrote in her journal,
Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson, a historian named Mr. Woodward [C. Vann Woodward] and his wfie, the reformed burglar Jack Black, and Mr. and Mrs. E. B. White were here. A very amusing evening, during which Sinclair Lewis rose from the table and carried his plate of roast beef over to the desk where I was eating alone because there wasn’t enough room for me at the big table; he sat down on the floor beside me and fed his roast beef to Tiggy and talked about cats.
Of the same evening, Margaret’s mother wrote in her diary, “Dinner party ruined by lovable but drunk Red Lewis.”
Mary and Lemuel Parton married when they both had established themselves in their careers, and though they were devoted to Margaret, their only child, they were utterly absorbed with each other. “It’s almost as hard for a child to grow up in the presence of an extremely happy marriage as it is to grow up in an unhappy home,” someone who knew her parents later observed to Margaret.
It was also hard from Margaret to establish her own identity when she was surrounded by such accomplished people. After graduating from Swarthmore, she bounced through a series of low-level jobs — writing news items for radio and spending a year as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. Feeling somewhat suffocated working in her parents’ world in New York City, she moved to San Francisco, where for two years she got to experience life as an independent adult. Though she wrote a humorous account of the time in Laughter on the Hill (1945), she admits in Journey that she left some of the more painful aspects out — particularly being abandoned by a man who got her pregnant and having, with almost no money to spare, to locate a doctor willing to give her an abortion.
When her father died in 1943, she returned to New York and worked as a newspaper reporter. Her time in San Francisco earned her an assignment to return there in 1945 to cover the conference leading to the formation of the United Nations. This, in turn, led to an assignment to Japan, the start of nearly seven years spent as a reporter in the Far East and India, where she covered events like the partition and the assassination of Gandhi. She also married Eric Britter, a British correspondent, and gave birth to their son, whom she named Lemuel, after her father.
The marriage was shaky from the start, however, and in September 1952, she took her son and returned to the U.S., moving in with her mother in Palisades, north of New York City. There, she “quickly discovered the facts of life for the single woman in the suburbs: almost total exclusion from the social life of the community.” Slowly, she won some writing jobs, and in 1954, was assigned to cover the first trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard for the murder of his wife. Parton’s coverage stood out and was soon being used by papers throughout the U.S..
This raised her visibility significantly and eventually led to an offer to work as an editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, at the time perhaps the most popular woman’s magazine in America. Having worked for years in the male-dominated field of newspaper reporting, she struggled to conform to the conservative, traditional conventions of the Journal:
From the Goulds came a constant pressure for IDEAS. From Beatrice: “I do hope your suggestions will be COMPELLING!” From Bruce: “We are always in need of good Big Ideas, such as ‘The Ten Richest Women,’ ‘The World’s Most Famous Jewels,’ and ‘The Ten Best-Dressed Women.'” That memo really amused me. Those were Big Ideas?
Though she was able to slip in occasional pieces of serious fiction and reporting, these were rare and hardly what the Journal’s readers wanted. “… [I]n the same issue we ran a superior story by Rebecca West and in the homemaking department an offer of a Bible quilt pattern; there were 3,200 requests for the pattern and one letter commenting on the Rebecca West story.”
In the late 1950s, she ran into an old acquaintance from Japan, former Navy Commander Alfred Hussey, a lawyer who’d served on General MacArthur’s staff and was one of the principal authors of the Japanese constitution, and they married in 1963 after his divorce from his first wife. His health began to fail soon afterward, however, and he died in 1964.
Around the same time, her mother began suffering from dementia, and though Margaret tried for months to care for her at home, she eventually had to put her into the first of a series of nursing homes. She then spent her days sorting through over fifty years of her parent’s papers and belongings, getting their house ready for sale, and visiting her mother: “the hours with her were agonizing and my heart broke with pity each time I saw her, particularly at the contrast with the self-assured, dynamic woman who emerged each day from the diary pages I was reading.” She also cared for her neighbor, Muriel Snow, widow of the writer Edgar Snow, in the terminal stage of cancer, holding Muriel’s hand as she screamed, “Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Help Me Die!”
The one bright spot in this time was her son, Lemuel, who emerged from a long period of adolescent isolation and depression and was building a circle of friends and a reputation as a tennis instructor. She was particularly vulnerable, therefore, when Lem suddenly fell ill. After he was hospitalized, a doctor came to tell her that Lem was suffering from an aggressive form of leukemia. “‘How long?’ I managed to ask. ‘Around four weeks,’ he said.”
Left alone after Lem’s death, she often considered suicide. “Some nights, alone and swept by storms of grief, I would stare at Lem’s .22, and twice I loaded it and held the muzzle in my mouth. Several times I poured sleeping pills into my hand and waited to find out what I would decide.” In the end, she simply carried on and found some sense of peace: “I no longer worry about being hopelessly out of step with current intellectual and literary movements, and simply accept myself as someone who is absorbed in unfashionable thoughts about love, truth, and the continuity of time.”
Margaret Parton continued to work after publishing Journey Through a Lighted Room, writing for Woman’s Day and other magazines, preparing a biography of her mother, and organizing the collection of papers now held by the University of Oregon Library. She helped establish the historical committee for her community of Palisades. She died in 1981.
Journey Through a Lighted Room is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.