This is a sad book: a daughter’s memoir of her mother’s prolonged and painful death from cancer over the span of four years. It’s an even sadder book when you know what came after it.
Betsey Barton was born in comfort and grew up in luxury. Her father, pioneering advertising man Bruce Barton, didn’t invent the concept of boosterism, but he certainly refined it. His 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, gave aspiring American capitalists a “Get Out of Purgatory” card by assuring them that Jesus — “the world’s greatest business executive” — wanted them to get rich. As a founder of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO), still one of the world’s leading ad agencies, he came up with brand names and slogans that are woven into our vernacular: General Motors; General Electric; and Betty Crocker, to mention a few. Barton went on to become a prominent Republican congressman representing Manhattan and advocating the Isolationist cause at the start of World War Two. During the run for his third term as President, FDR loved to mock Barton and fellow Isolationists Joe Martin and Hamilton Fish III with his phrase “Martin, Barton, and Fish” (to the rhythm of “Winken, Blinken, and Nod”), but his mockery had little effect on Barton’s wealth or social standing.
Barton’s only daughter Betsey was in the spotlight from the time she had her coming-out ball. Her picture appeared regularly in newspaper society sections and the pages of slick upscale magazines. In 1934, not long after being photographed for Town & Country, Betsey was severely injured in an automobile accident. Her back was broken and she was left paralyzed from the waist down. Three years later, while spending a winter holiday with her family outside Phoenix, the ambulance carrying her to a hospital for routine physical therapy went off the road, compounding her existing injuries and leaving her with severe nerve damage.
At first, Betsey and her parents hoped she would recovery her ability to walk, but after years of expensive and unsuccessful treatments, they came to accept that her condition was irreversible. As she experienced just how many challenges everyday life put in the path of a disabled person — even one with all the advantages of money and position — Betsey became an advocate with a cause. And when the first American servicemen began to return from combat with similar injuries, she became a writer as well. Her first book, And Now to Live Again (1944), was a call for these men not to lose hope.
Though she described herself as a nonprofessional, Betsey Barton wrote with the credibility of someone who’d been through the same experience. Her message was simple: in losing one life — a life free of injuries — these men had won a new one, a life “that in many delicate and tender ways is a far better one.” She recognized her readers would be skeptical. “Had I read this years ago when first I lost the use of my legs I would have thrown down the book in disgust,” she admitted. She offered herself as an example of both the potential for rehabilitation and its many opportunities for setbacks. “I have done all the wrong things and made all the mistakes it is possible to make and still survive.” But she also addressed the practical considerations of the handicapped: “Going into restaurants, going into subways, going out to dinner … become monstrous affairs demanding will power and planning and concentration.”
After the war, she continued to take an active role in the cause of the disabled and made frequent visits to military hospitals to talk with and support G.I.s undergoing rehabilitation. She turned these experiences into fictional form with her 1948 novel, The Long Walk. Set in an Army hospital, the story focuses on the “difficult” patients — the men who resist rehabilitation, sunk in their hopelessness and self-pity. Barton placed herself in the story in the person of Janet, a wheelchair-bound young woman whose presence is intended — but with mixed results — to boost the mens’ morale. While most reviews were complimentary, one British critic noted a weakness that runs through much of her writing: “The country which Miss Barton explores with so much sympathy and understanding is entirely that of the mind, and its physical setting is negligible.”
Around the time The Long Walk was published, Betsey’s mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. Having relied heavily on her mother’s support through years of therapy, the news hit Betsey with exceptional force. As Love is Deep is the diary of Esther Barton’s long and ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer and her daughter’s even longer struggle to come to terms with her mother’s death.
When she returned to New York City to be with her mother, Betsey wrote, “I was met by a stranger. A nervous, thin woman with what appeared to be suddenly whitened hair greeted me in the library.” The woman she had left “well and strong and full of life” was now shaking and hesitant. And worst of all for her daughter, she wanted to be left alone. “Mothers don’t ask to be left alone very often. They are the available members of the human race,” Betsey noted, frustrated at being unable to reciprocate the support she’d been given. Even when the two women sit together, Betsey finds herself “filled with a sense of desolation” at her mother’s silence.
This separation becomes a major theme in their relationship and a primary source of the feelings Betsey struggles with after her mother’s death: “So I stood outside her, as I was to do so often in months to come, filled with admiration at her ability to continue on with life as it had always been, terrified at the lack of communication.” Ironically, another accident ensured that Betsey could not be with her mother at the end. When Esther Barton died in November 1951, Betsey herself was laying in a hospital room, having slipped in her bathroom and fractured her left thigh. She was unable to attend the funeral.
The Arizona desert had by then become the Barton’s second home and the setting becomes Betsey’s spiritual refuge over the following years. It also became a practical refuge when the family’s home in Foxboro, Massachussetts — the home she grew up in, a small Colonial cottage expanded through numerous additions — was condemned and had to be demolished. Esther Barton had lavished years of collecting on the house’s furnishings and Betsey now watched “all the lovely things within it” being dispersed to scattered family and friends. “The house could be looked upon as a symbol of a time of life and through tears I could come finally to accept that what I missed was the fact that the time of life was over, must be over, for all of us.” In the desert, she found “a different kind of thinking” as she looks out on the long vistas towards the mountains: “Relationships, too, perhaps, are different because they exist within these lovely dimensions.”
As her mother was dying, Betsey channeled some of her energies into a second novel, The Shadow of the Bridge (1950), set in an exclusive New England girls’ boarding school. There is no mention of this in As Love is Deep, but it’s perhaps significant that one of the two main characters in the novel, Alida, is haunted by the memory of her mother, who died when the girl was still a child. While novelist Sterling North thought the book was “a beautifully organized, exquisitely told story, enriched by a real mastery of abnormal psychology,” most critics were much harsher. “This story of adolescent anguish is clearly written, with earnest intensity, but it casts little light upon ancient trials and the intensity itself is of such an unrelievedly banal order that it is something of an embarrassment,” Gertrude Buckman wrote in The New York Times. “There is freshness neither in the writing nor in the conception or drawing of characters or situation.”
Even though As Love is Deep is just 144 pages long, it took Betsey Barton seven years to write. Though she claims to reach some sense of what we casually refer to as “closure” — “the present was returned to me at last” — there is an underlying and unresolved conflict evident throughout. Early in the book, she writes,
I have given up the idea of working on myself, lost faith in it, since I have learned that will power, no matter how faithfuly applied, cannot restore my ability to walk. At one time I had thought that, despite all medical dictums, my force of will could cure me. Now I know differently. My interest in esoteric knowledge has not waned. It is only that I have suffered the disillusionment of not being able to bring about a miraculous healing of myself.
Both And Now to Live Again and As Love is Deep are filled with calls to find peace and perspective in love, beauty, and spiritual matters. “If we look at it right,” she argues, “even when we are doing what seems like nothing but the drudgery of physical exercise, we are working with divine tools, sacred tools, following the holy laws that will lead us out of disease into ease.” Yet one senses that Betsey Barton was herself never fully convinced. Her own physical challenges rarely allowed themselves to be ignored for long.
On the morning of Thursday, 13 December 1962, readers of The Los Angeles Times were greeted with a headline announcing Betsey Barton’s death. The morning before, Betsey’s live-in nurse found her floating face up in the pool outside her house in the hills above Bel-Air. Her wheelchair lay at the bottom of the dead end. Tracks in the lawn and deck indicated Betsey had wheeled herself up to and into the pool. The watch on her wrist read 4:40 AM. The police reported that acquaintances said that Betsey had been despondent over her increasing health problems. Though no note was found, the death was ruled a suicide. Her father funded a fellowship in his daughter’s name, administered by the World Rehabilitation Fund, to support the work of rehabilitation therapists and clinics in Third World countries and provide hope even though Betsey Barton ultimately lost hers.