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Josephine Herbst

The Animal Hotel, by Jean Garrigue (1966)

Cover of "The Animal Hotel"

“Once a bear kept a small inn for animals. Not many, just a mole or so, a chipmunk, a cat, several birds, a sheep and a deer. Wasps and bees, also inhabitants, didn’t count because they were innumerable.” Jean Garrigue’s 1966 novella, The Animal Hotel seems at first to be just a charming children’s story. The bear is a marvelous host, a diligent housekeeper who reminds the cat to keep its fish heads in a neat pile and the deer not to leave a trail of grass in the living room. She fixes wonderful meals of seeds and berries and each night they entertain each other with stories.

During the day, they wander through the fields and forest nearby, “traveling the way a brook does, by the path of least resistance”:

True enough, it took them like the brook longer to get wherever they wanted to go, but again, what of it? Every brook may feel that its destiny magically and magnetically draws it to some distant river but does the attraction of that looming end oblige it to get there by that shortest distance, a straight line? No. The sense of other destiny is there all the way, in every flat or round stone the brook trips over, under every bush, tree or moss-ledged wall the brook passes by, and so it was with these beasts when they went out on their rambles. Every moment of divaricating, very desultory direction they took was as significant to them, as bewitching and surprising as whatever it was they thought would be awaiting them.

But soon the simple tale of the happy life led by this rag-tag clan reveals a deeper layer underneath. There a loneliness in the bear unlike the other animals. The mole was blind, “didn’t care and had never known better.” But the bear “seemed to have renounced society.”

When hoof prints appear in the forest, the animals grow concerned. Too big, too nervous, too powerful to be trusted in their household. The bear goes out to look for him, so shoo him off. But then she stays away most of the day and then she disappears entirely. Each beast begins to feel “that the great days were over and their queen gone,” and to wonder if it is now time to move on.

Then, “after days and days, a very little packet of eternity,” she returns. Bedraggled, thin, with a thick leather collar around her neck and a chain dangling from the collar. The animals brew up a pot of tea and set to nursing her back to health.

When she recovers, she tells the animals not just of how she fell in love with the horse and went with him to the land of men but of the great career she had had many years before, performing in the greatest of circuses with another horse. And just as she had escaped from the circus to build a refuge deep in the forest, so she fled again this second time. Their special world restored to the animal hotel, they can look forward to the good times going on and on and on. “Would they not go on, and forever?”

At just under 100 pages and published by a small and then-new New York firm, the Eakins Press, The Animal Hotel went virtually unnoticed. In one of its very few reviews, Denis Donoghue wrote in The New York Review of Books that Garrigue’s writing had “a Book of Hours simplicity”:

Something of this quality is audible in The Animal Hotel. But the most important thing is that she knows her powers, she knows what she can do. If you want to write fabulous prose, the best bet is to compose a fable; to get the genre right before trying to get everything else right. Miss Garrigue has done this. So she is free to turn her pretty phrases, to speak of “the curl and curlycue of her voice,” giving the language its head: “Not me, I replied, for I saw what I knew and knew what I had to do and threw up the cards, every one, all the trumps of them and the trumpets, the trumpery too, and the triumphs.”

This is Miss Garrigue’s way of restoring the magic, by writing a book of charms, making the sentences charming.

In a short memoir of the early days of the Paris Review, George Plimpton claimed that The Animal Hotel was inspired by Garrigue’s experiences living at the Hotel Helvétia and its proprietors, Monsieur and Madame Jordan, who were generous and understanding hosts. Garrigue strung a clothesline across her room to allow a group of finches to reside with her. Not surprisingly, when Plimpton was offered to take the room over after she’d left, he found it “filled with sticks, stones, moss, seeds, wings, thistles, parts of dandelions, parts of pigeon’s eggs and snail whorls, etc.”

Josephine Herbst and Jean Garrigue clowning at Herbst's Erwinna, PA house, 1957
Josephine Herbst and Jean Garrigue clowning at Herbst’s Erwinna, PA house, 1957
But there should be no mystery about the inspiration behind The Animal Hotel. “For Josephine Herbst” reads the dedication. By the time the book was published, Herbst and Garrigue were no longer lovers, but they were still involved in others lives. And they had spent much of the 1950s in a relationship that centered around the busy circle of people that swirled around Herbst’s somewhat ramshackle country house near Erwinna, Pennsylvania.

Elinor Langer provides the explanation in her superb biography, Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell (1984):

When I think of Josie as she was in her later years — or rather, as she appeared — I see a vital woman surrounded by a circle of eager admirers, somewhat after the manner of the classic fairy tale in which a maternal figure has taken shelter deep in the heart of an enchanted forest surrounded by swarms of little people on whom she is really dependent but who are also under her spell. In the story the unorthodox household is occasionally menaced — someone is wounded or lost or word drifts in on the lips of animals about trouble in neighboring territories or from remnants of the past — but on the whole it is a safe and sufficient unit, mysteriously enveloped in a kind of protective charm. There actually was such a fable written about Erwinna, by Jean, a prose novella, The Animal Hotel, first published in the periodical New World Writing in 1956. The saga of a country lodging run by an amiable but elusive Bear whose “past was more complicated than anybody could guess” had its origin, more or less, in fact, for as the 1950s progressed, the house in Erwinna was becoming a stopping place for a group of young men and women just beginning to make their marks on the world, and Josie was very much the star…. Through their eyes the idea of Erwinna as a place of fellowship and creativity not just aloof from but superior to the world’s demands was magically reborn.

One of these young women, Jane Mayhall, later wrote that Herbst “made one feel that life was a kind of involved continuity”: “Reassurances and advisos toward attention to immediate events.” But like Garrigue’s bear, “she did suggest that there were realities beyond the moment.” As Langer shows, one of Herbst’s painful realities was Garrigue’s constant affairs and dalliances with other women and men, which by the time The Animal Hotel was published had left her lonely and forgotten.

Josephine Herbst died of cancer in early 1969; Jean Garrigue died of Hodgkin’s disease almost exactly three years later. In her last collection of poems, Studies for an Actress and Other Poems, Garrigue included a tribute to Herbst in a poem entitled, “In Memory”:

You did not doubt that you were beloved
And by good strangers, friends to you
Bearing the promised language.
Yet skeptic you could doubt
Out of a full heart
Who tried to beat the game

And did so, again, again,
And raised us leaves of hope by that
For something simple like a natural thing,
for something large, essential, driving hard
Against the stupors of too much gone wrong.
And by your intensity
Of flame against the dark
(You beat up flame,
You beat it up against the dark)

Gave us greater want
To change the heart to change the life
Changing our lives in the light that is changing
But which has no future, no yesterday.

Technically, The Animal Hotel has never been out of print and you can still order a new copy from the publisher, Eakins Press.

The Animal Hotel, by Jean Garrigue
New York: The Eakins Press, 1966

The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs, by Josephine Herbst (1991)

starchedblueskyofspainThough one of the most acclaimed of contemporary American novelists when she was writing in the 1930s, Josephine Herbst published just two books after 1941, and her last book, New Green World, a biography of early American naturalist John Bartram, in 1954, fifteen years before she died at the age of 76.

By the time she had turned 60, she was already struggling to survive. Her marriage to novelist John Herrmann ended in 1940 after he discovered that Herbst was in love with another woman. Her work during World War Two for the Office of the Coordinator of Information on a precursor to the Voice of America came to an end when the couple’s involvement with the Communist Party in the 1930s was investigated. (Herrmann was later shown to be not just a public Communist but a covert Soviet agent, but Herbst’s politics were never anything but open and stubbornly self-determined.) What little money she had went for essentials and she often relied on the kindness of friends to get by. And she turned to the bottle for relief more than did her good.

When Saul Bellow and his friends Jack Ludwig and Keith Botsford decided to launch their own literary magazine, The Noble Savage, Bellow reached out to Herbst and offered her some money for a piece recalling her experiences in Madrid and around the Republican front lines during the Spanish Civil War. The resulting essay, “The Starched Blue Sky of Spain,” was long — forty pages — and resolutely unromantic about a conflict that had long been romanticized, thanks to the work of Hemingway and others. Hemingway himself was shown in all his glory and selfishness: “he wanted to be the war writer of his age, and he knew it and went toward it,” but also took advantages of the services a master go-fer, Sid Franklin, who managed to keep his suite at the Hotel Florida stocked with eggs, butter, champagne, and even partridge. (For more on Hemingway’s residence at the hotel, see Amanda Vaill’s recent book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War.)

A second essay, “A Year of Disgrace,” appeared in The Noble Savage issue 2, and recalled how she met and fell in love with Herrmann in Paris in 1924, moved back to the U.S., where they lived for a while in an old farmhouse in Connecticut, then moved to Greenwich Village. In its own way, it was a skeptical look back at a time that had itself become romanticized (by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and others). She and Herrmann welcomed many friends to the sparse hospitality of their farmhouse, but Herbst was less than thrilled about the many nights the men spent tipping back jugs of applejack in the barn into the wee hours. At the same time, she still felt a rush of emotion when thinking of the lively talks and the celebrations of art that she was able to share with fellow writers and neighbors such as John Dos Passos, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon, poet Genevieve Taggard, and Catholic activist Dorothy Day:

But it was a mark of the time and the place that a first encounter might last all night, overflowing from the speakeasy to the street, from the street to someone’s room, to pitch you finally into a dawn exhilarated, oddly at peace, for wasn’t it of engagements like this, long talks and walks, that you had dreamed in the midwest town before the war when the sky had pressed above your head like a burnished brass bowl and the long secretive dark express trains zipped into the horizon? You had dreamed of it as surely as you had dreamed of love.

Herbst went another eight years before publishing another article. In 1968, “Yesterday’s Road,” a melancholy memoir of her investigation as a Communist sympathizer — and of her disillusionment with the Party based on her experiences in Spain and as a guest of the Soviet government at a writers’ congress in Moscow in 1930, appeared in the third issue of Theodore Solotaroff’s remarkable literary magazine in popular paperback form, the New American Review. Less than a year later, she was dead of lung cancer.

Over twenty years later, these three pieces, along with an unpublished essay on her memories of growing up in Iowa and of an unforgettable family expedition to the Oregon coast in 1901, “The Magicians and Their Apprentices,” was collected as The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs by HarperCollins, with an introduction by the novelist Diane Johnson. In Johnson’s words, “it was only in her sixties that in turning to this life as a subject, she found her real tone”:

Where most of us revise the past as we move forward through the present, Josephine Herbst retains something like total recall for the visual details of what her circle wore and ate and did….

… in her last essays, things had begun to come into perspective, and hers was a remarkable perspective, honed in remarkable times.

And, indeed, in commenting elsewhere on the then-contemporary fiction of the 1950s, Herbst would write, “What seems to be missing is a sense of the world. The world around us.”

Of the four essays, the first in order and chronology, “The Magicians and Their Apprentices,” is, in my opinion, by far the best of a very, very good lot — really, something of a masterpiece. I have a habit of dog-earing pages with passages I want to remember or quote, and there are so many in this piece that I could, without a little self-control, easy find myself reprinting nearly the entire piece. It has so many different facets: the simple pleasures of life in Sioux City, Iowa at the turn of the century and the disparate feelings of isolation and small-mindedness; the contrast between her father, the failed businessman, and her uncle, a highly successful pharmacist, businessman and Rotarian — and, at the same time, her uncle’s own sense of being haunted by the ghost of the father who died in the Civil War before his child was born; the excitement of discovering the world of books and writing and the mystifying experience of developing sexuality (“My body was speaking a language I was too ignorant to interpret”). As a work of lyrical yet honest autobiography, I think it ranks with one of my favorite books, James McConkey’s stunningly beautiful Court of Memory.

The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs is, sadly, itself long out of print since it was reissued by the Northeastern University Press in 1999. Herbst’s only work currently in print, according to Amazon, is Pity Is Not Enough (1933), the first of three novels (the others are The Executioner Waits (1934) and Rope of Gold (1939)) about the rise and decline of an Iowa family, the Trexlers. And you can find her very rare novella based on the life of Nathanael West, “Hunter of Doves,” in e-book formats in this recent piece on this site. I also recommend reading Hilton Kramer’s fine memoir, “Who was Josephin Herbst?” from the New Criterion (Link).

The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs, by Josephine Herbst
New York City: HarperCollins, 1991

Around the Campfire, from The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, by Josephine Herbst (1991)

Editor’s note: In 1898, Josephine Herbst journeyed from Sioux City, Iowa with her mother and three sisters to visit an uncle in Oregon. Together, the two families traveled by wagon to the coast, where they spent a few weeks camping in the woods alongside a beach, playing, swimming, fishing, and talking at night around the campfire. Nearly seventy years later, she recalled that trip in an essay about her childhood, parents, and family, titled “The Magicians and Their Apprentices.” Unpublished during her lifetime, it was collected along with three other autobiographical pieces in The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs, with an introduction by Diane Johnson–a book that, in my opinion, ranks as one of the finest works of autobiography written by an American during the 20th century.

familycamping

This was a summer for lore beyond books. Your hands and feet learned more than they had ever known they could do: how to catch mud cats and cut them up for bait; how to cast a line in a trout stream; how to dig your hands in oozy mud after the clam had squirted the signal of his little geyser. How to wait on the tide and how to find sea urchins and small frogs and ferns of sea moss in quiet pools. How to pry the rock oyster from his stony bed and how to cook him. How to catch a crab without getting pinched. How to walk barefoot on a slippery fallen log across the fiery sparkle of a tumbling mountain brook. How to stand still when you saw a deer. How to sit still around the campfire and listen to the gorgeous talk of grownups, who lived in their world, and you in yours, neither troubling to be pals with the other but only good friends.

It was a summer to remember not just for the new things your hands and feet discovered but for the glitter it offered of some distant beyond. There was someone’s beyond behind you, and a beyond to come to pass, and this interlude was the curious glowing union of past and present, promises and reality. The grownups were the magicians, the children their apprentices.

It was at night, in the light of the big campfire of driftwood, where the burning splinters fell in sparks the color of the rainbow or shot into tiny sulfurous spurts or foundered in pools of verdigris green, that the magicians and the apprentices played their true roles. For the circle was so gently relaxed, some sitting on rugs, some lying down and extending hands or feet toward the blaze, that a child of six could feel as detached as a bit of moss in a pool now covered by the tide. The very sound of the ocean and the sight of the sky, where the stars were bright buoys floating on their own watery deep, made you feel gently suspended in water, rocking in the vast hammock of the night. The voices of the grownups, slow, sometimes quietly breaking into laughter, communing over things dead and gone, remembering when my uncle and my mother were boy and girl together in a big family of other boys and girls, now scattered or dead, cast long lines backward in time and across a continent. There became here and then was now. The magicians might have been casting lines across an ocean covering buried towns and farms, so dreamlike was the world they called to life, so haunting the images, so watery the night, so true the history that branched its coral islands to you, because it had belonged to them.

Strange names of towns burst like sparks of dying wood. A dead aunt once more played the piano on Arch Street in Philadelphia, and the wild boy who went south to Georgia sent home a bunch of bananas to hang at the top of the stairs. The red bird sang in his gilded cage, and the mockingbird died. Once more the faithful dog Rebbie begged for bread spread with smearcase and apple butter. And against the glow of the fire, the flesh of your bare toes became rosy luminous; the delicate dark skeleton showed stiff as the charred twigs of a burning bush.

from The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs, by Josephine Herbst

Hunter of Doves, by Josephine Herbst (1954)

Nathanael West in Bucks County, PA

“For understanding what it was like to live to the full the turbulent American literary life of the 1920’s and 30’s as it moved from bohemianism to radicalism, there could be no more revealing figure than Josephine Herbst,” wrote Robert Gorham Davis in his review of Elinor Langer’s 1984 biography of Herbst, Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell. “She knew everyone and was in all the right places at the right historic moments – Greenwich Village, the Left Bank, Russia, Germany, Cuba and Spain.”

I won’t attempt to synopsize Herbst’s life and career here. Hilton Kramer did a far better job of that thirty years ago in his New Criterion article, “Who was Josephine Herbst?,” available online and well worth the read (link). What matters for this piece are two times in her life: the first, beginning in 1928, when she and her husband, the novelist John Herrmann, rented a small, rustic house in the Bucks County countryside near Erwinna, Pennsylvania; and the second, twenty-some years later, when she was living there alone, shunned by most of the literary establishment for her politics and struggling to write anything more than the marvelous, fulsome letters for which she was always held in awe by her correspondents and a few snippets of memoirs of her life in the 1920s and 1930s.

While living in Erwinna, Herbst and Herrmann made the acquaintance of Nathanael West, who was still working as the night manager of the Hotel Kenmore Hall in Manhattan and revising The Dream Life of Balso Snell, his absurdist novel set in the entrails of the Trojan Horse. They invited West out to Bucks County, and he immediately fell in love with the area. Throughout his life, West pretended to the style and manners of the rich and landed American gentry, and he loved to hike around the Pennsylvania woods with a shotgun slung in one arm, very much the gentleman hunter.

West quit the hotel job, having decided to make his name as a writer, and worked on finishing his second novel, the black comedy Miss Lonelyhearts. He bought a farm near Herbst and Herrmann and spent many hours with them. Herrmann and West often went out to hunt pheasant, quail, and West’s favorite, doves, although both were terrible shots. However, envious of the money that his friend and brother-in-law, S. J. Perelman (Perelman had married West’s sister Laura), was making writing for the Marx Brothers and others, he accepted a contract to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. While West’s experience in Hollywood wasn’t a financial success, it did contribute to his greatest artistic success, the novel The Day of the Locust. Only a few months after marrying the vivacious Eileen McKenney, the title character in her sister Ruth McKenney’s smash comedy play, “My Sister Eileen,” West and McKenney were killed in a car crash in California.

West’s novels, which had never been best-sellers, quickly fell out of print, but in the aftermath of World War Two, a new generation of critics, such Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, began to discover and appreciate the bleak and absurdist tone of his work. A number of academics and critics became interested in his life, and their researches led a number of them to Josephine Herbst’s doorstep.

She soon grew aggravated by their inclination to view West’s life and work through a postwar prism that exaggerated his foresight and ignored the good and bad points of his character. And so, sometime in 1953, she set aside the book she had been working on–a dual biography of the early American naturalists John and William Bartram (a book published in 1954 as New Green World), and wrote “Hunter of Doves,” a short novel based on her memories of West.

Although she gave her characters fictional names, “Hunter of Doves” deviates from fact in unimportant ways. Herbst’s own character, Mrs. Heath, is a painter rather than a writer. Timothy Comfort, the would-be biographer, is a stand-in for a handful of real-life researchers. And, as Elinor Langer revealed in her biography, the faint suggestion of a triangle involving West, Herbst, and Herrmann was actually taken from the passion Herbst had developed for the artist, Marion Greenwood.

What was true, however, was Herbst’s desire to have West seen truthfully. “Nothing is reliable except the work,” Mrs. Heath tells Comfort. “People either want to read or they don’t. You can find Noel Bartram, perhaps more than you like, right there, in his novels, if you take the trouble. Or have the sense. The intuitive sense.” Herbst was also true in depicting how the night manager job at the Hotel Kenmore Hall–a job that came his way through his family’s connections in real estate and took at his mother’s insistence–was both his prison and his inspiration:

Whether the mother intended the hotel as her son’s sole future, Mrs. Heath could not say, but it represented security, that shackling iron which simply meant one is freed from necessity to become enslaved….

But the truth was that the hotel and all its occupants surrounded him with the felt mat of a persistent presence. If he were alone in his privacy, the phone might ring, calling him below. One had no idea, he had pleaded, pleading for himself, the nature of the interruptions. He was the guardian of the hotel, its keeper, its jailor. A hotel like this was jam-packed with broken hearts, broken pocketbooks, too, and as the hotel was a genteel one, with a gilding upon it, one could imagine the pride of the victims who, finding themselves slowly drained of their substance, tried to keep up a front, sallied past the door, hummed, pretended light-hearted gaiety, delay of checks from rich uncles, alimony, or the imaginary sale of imaginary real estate that would put them on easy street.

“Hunter of Doves” was published in 1954 in Botteghe Oscure, an acclaimed international literary magazine published in Rome by Marguerite Caetani. It was quickly recognized as Herbst’s finest work since the 1930s, and did lead to a more nuanced view of West.

It did not, however, lead to either a rediscovery of Herbst’s work or a break-through of her own artistic roadblocks. Over the next fifteen years, she only managed to produce three autobiographical pieces–“The Starched Blue Sky of Spain” (The Noble Savage, Number 1, 1960); “A Year of Disgrace” (The Noble Savage, Number 3, 1961); and “Yesterday’s Road” (New American Review, Number 3, 1968). These, along with a fourth piece, “The Magicians and Their Apprentices,” about her girlhood in Sioux City, Iowa, were published posthumously in The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, and Other Memoirs

Given the fact that “Hunter of Doves” has never been reprinted and can be found only in the rare academic libraries holding back issues of Botteghe Oscure, I am taking here a unilateral and perhaps improper step of making the text freely available online.

A quick key to the characters in “Hunter of Doves”:

  • Noel Bartram = Nathanael West
  • Mrs. Heath = Josephine Herbst
  • Mr. Heath = John Herrmann
  • Joel Baker = S. J. Perelman
  • Nora Baker = Laura Weinstein Perelman
  • Parker Grainger = probably Quentin Reynolds