Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (49 page)

Mitchell was born in Philadelphia, the son of a professor of medicine. He had a difficult relationship with his father, a surgeon, and in his youth suffered the chronic depression he later took it on himself to cure. A phobic aversion to blood made it impossible for him to follow his father’s line of medical work. None the less he had a brilliant academic career, finishing his studies in Paris – then the centre of neurological research. He returned in the mid-1850s, to take up partnership with his father. On his father’s death in 1858 he took over the family practice. In the same year he married. His wife died, four years (and two children) later, of diphtheria. Mitchell served, gallantly, as a surgeon in the Union Army in the Civil War.

During his war years, Mitchell was particularly concerned with the treatment of head wounds and what would later be called ‘shell shock’ – nervous trauma. He had always been fascinated by the brain and its disorders, and ‘paralysis’ – stillness (‘peace’, to draw an obvious analogy) – he believed, was curative for the organ’s disorders (he had an utter disdain for sexual explanations of psychic disorder). He considered (something that Charlotte Perkins Gilman fiercely refuted) that men’s and women’s brains were different. By the mid-1860s he had established himself as the country’s leading expert on nervous complaints. He remarried in 1874 and his second wife furnished him an entry to Philadelphia’s social elite. It was at this period that Mitchell devised his ‘rest cure’ as a therapy particularly appropriate for women. Women who underwent it, such as Gilman and Chopin, were less convinced of its efficacy.

Sigmund Freud admired him, but for his part, Mitchell did not admire Freud – on coming across a volume by the ‘sex-mad’ Viennese psychoanalyst, he threw the ‘filthy thing’ into the fire. Mitchell had, from youth onwards, tried his hand at poetry and short stories. His first full-length novel,
In War Time
, serialised in the
Atlantic Magazine
in 1884, drew on his own war experiences twenty years before. It was
well received, as were its successors. Fame, bestsellerdom and a doctorate of letters from Harvard, came with
Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker
in 1897. Reportedly, Mitchell spent seven years working on
Hugh Wynne
, which was then written in six weeks. Its publication was cannily timed to coincide with the centenary of 1796, whose main celebrations were held in Philadelphia. The war theme of the novel chimed with the recent American victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay and the surge of patriotism which accompanied it. Mitchell’s novel runs slightly against this grain by examining the tricky issues of pacifism and ‘cowardice’.

Mitchell had Quaker family connections. ‘Free Quakers’ were those dissidents who believed in the idea of a ‘just war’ and they were firmly disowned by the main body of the Society of Friends. In the novel
Hugh Wynne
, a born Quaker turned ‘free Quaker’ tells his story autobiographically. The narrative revolves around a lengthy description of the Revolution and its changing fortunes. Hugh, having escaped captivity and joined the Revolutionary army, rises to the rank of captain in the Pennsylvania Foot, and eventually to Colonel on the staff of the Commander in Chief, Washington. A subplot narrates the dastardly treachery of Benedict Arnold, in whose machinations Hugh is unwittingly and unwillingly caught up. Hugh sees Arnold years later in London, a wasted man: ‘There is a God who punishes the traitor,’ he complacently observes.

Is there any connection between the diabolic evangelist of the ‘rest cure’ and the bestselling novelist? There conceivably is. Mitchell’s therapy was, manifestly, an extension of the curative tranquillity of the Quaker service, the silence that puts one in connection with God. Anyone asked the question in 1900, ‘Who is the more important writer of fiction, S. Weir Mitchell or Charlotte Perkins Gilman?’ would probably have replied, ‘Who is she?’ He, in his heyday, was regarded as the ‘new Ben Franklin’. Now that they have both gone to their final rest cure it is he, not her, who is the forgotten author. Is that a peal of woman’s laughter one hears?

The Authoress.

On 26 September 2006, one of the smallest literary festivals ever organised was held in the John Hewitt pub, Belfast. Small attendance was in order. The festival’s mission was to celebrate ‘The World’s Worst Novelist’. Amanda Ros has always had a loyal band of what, in other circumstances, might be called ‘admirers’. Anna Margaret McKittrick was born in County Down. ‘By birth,’ she later proclaimed, ‘I am an Irishwoman, though a dash of German blood piebalds my veins.’ A clever girl, Miss McKittrick trained as a schoolteacher, and, aged seventeen, married Andrew Ross, stationmaster at Larne Harbour. For authorial purposes she later knocked an ‘s’ off her married name and borrowed ‘Amanda’ from the gothic fiction she loved.

Ros’s novels and verse were vanity-published; the first of them with a donation from her husband, on their tenth wedding anniversary. Her vanity, it must be said, was more than adequate to her talent. The Ros
oeuvre
comprises the novels
Irene Iddesleigh
(1897);
Delina Delaney
(1898);
Donald Dudley
(1900); and
Helen Huddleson
(unfinished at the time of her death, in 1936; as was the similarly promising
The Lusty Lawyer
). There were also two volumes of verse:
Poems of Puncture
(1912) and
Fumes of Formation
(1933). In later life, ensconced in a house she called ‘Iddesleigh’, she was widowed and well enough propertied from small inheritances to concentrate on her writing.

Though Amanda Ros was generally beneath reviewers’ notice, the humorist Barry Pain picked up
Irene Iddesleigh
and was humorous at the author’s expense. Amanda struck back by describing the London
literateur
as a ‘cancerous irritant wart’. She composed a celebratory poem on his death in 1928, rejoicing that there was one less pain in her life. The authoress, as she always termed herself, had the last laugh.

A club of men of letters, including such luminaries of the London literary world as Lord Beveridge, Desmond MacCarthy, and the
Punch
-man, F. Anstey, met regularly to compete with the most ludicrous passages from her work they could come up with. In Oxford, the ‘Inklings’ – donnish fellows in every sense, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams – would meet in their favourite pub, the ‘Bird and Baby’ in the dark days of the 1940s, for readings from the Ros
Gesamtwerk
. The victor ludorum was judged to be he who could read longest while keeping the straightest face. Aldous Huxley also ran a Ros-club, which met to savour the lady’s stylistic flights and felicities. The author of
Brave New World
was, the deluded lady declared, ‘the only critic who understands my writing.’ Too true, if she but knew it.

Her most devoted reader, she fondly believed, was King George V, who had, she claimed, no less than twenty-five copies of her work in his library. The reverse fandom has continued, cultishly, to the present day. A contemporary website dedicated to the search for the world’s worst writers (
www.nickpage.co.uk/worstweb
) confidently raises Ros’s writing arm, winner and still champion, well ahead of her only serious rival, the laureate of cheese, James McIntyre (1827–1906). McIntyre, a Canadian dairy farmer, unsurprisingly, was the author of such works as ‘Ode on the Mammoth Cheese’. It opens: ‘We have seen thee, queen of cheese, / Lying quietly at your ease,’ and gets cheesily worse. But not worse enough to rival Ros’s prose sublimities.

Nick Page, host to the above website, hazards that Ros’s
Delina Delaney
‘begins with possibly the most baffling opening sentence in any literature’:

Have you ever visited that portion of Erin’s plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?

The authoress made a late-life marriage in 1922 after the death of Andy Ross in 1917, and died Mrs Thomas Rodgers.

The great playground of young men.
Wister on the West

It is ironic that so many pioneer writers of Westerners were Easterners. Jack Schaefer, author of
Shane
, wrote what is considered by many to be the best example of the genre ever, without having gone any further west than Ohio. Owen Wister was born and bred in Pennsylvania, where his father was a wealthy physician. The Wisters were upper-class Philadelphians and well connected. Owen’s mother was a member of the Kemble acting dynasty. He was educated in the best schools in America and Europe before going on to Harvard where he formed the most important friendship
in his life, with Theodore Roosevelt. Like the future president, Wister had a mystical reverence for American wilderness.

After shining at university, Wister intended to devote himself to musical composition and studied in European conservatories. His ambitions were frustrated, however, partly by lack of parental support. He returned, disconsolately, to America where he worked for a while in the law. But his health was also failing. On the advice of S. Weir Mitchell (the physician-novelist later demonised by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), he went west. Mitchell’s advice worked better than for the author of ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’. Wyoming was both therapeutic and inspirational.

A physically revived Wister returned to Harvard and took a degree in law, setting up practice in Philadelphia in 1888. But the West called him, irresistibly. After several trips he began producing cowboy romances, which proved popular in magazine form and were collected in volumes with brand-name titles such as
Red Men and White
(1896). The work of Wister’s which had the longest lasting impact, and effectively reformed the dime-novel Western into something resembling a respectable genre was
The Virginian
(1902). The work sold powerfully and the play adapted from it, starring Dustin Farnum, ran for ten years.
The Virginian
was further popularised by the six movie versions, notably the 1929 version starring Gary Cooper.

It is a polite novel, which endorses
politesse
. The most famous words in novel, play and film – ‘when you call me that, SMILE’ – are rendered forever mysterious by the fact that in none of them is the verbal insult specified. In deference to his patron, Theodore Roosevelt, Wister further toned down a description of a horse sadistically having its eye gouged out. The episode appeared in the magazine version but not in the book version – which is dedicated to Roosevelt, with the note: ‘some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands new-written because you blamed it’. ‘Teddy’ represented Wister’s ideal politician. For both of them the West (‘this great playground of young men’) was a necessary testing ground for the American race, where those fittest to survive and carry American civilisation forward would ‘select’ themselves by struggle. The unfit would not survive. Indians (Native Americans) fell into the second category.

As is often noted, Wister’s conception of the cow-puncher is a reincarnation of the medieval ‘very parfit’ knight, with the attendant code of chivalry and honour. The cowboy was ‘the last romantic figure upon our soil’, Wister claimed. The setting is the plains of Wyoming and the foothills of the Tetons, in the period 1874–90. Even at the time Wister was writing, the pristine West was, as he lamented, ‘a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now … Time has flowed faster than my ink.’

The narrator (like the Virginian, unnamed, but evidently Wister himself) comes
from New York to Medicine Bow in Wyoming, by train; he is visiting the ranch of a friend, Judge Henry. He is met at the station by the laconic cow-puncher, the ‘Virginian’, who will conduct him to their destination. The men have various adventures in town before leaving, including the gambling scene, which features the legendary ‘smile’ instruction. The narrator is impressed by the physical grace and homespun eloquence of his guide, who later becomes his mentor during his ‘tenderfoot’ stage of apprenticeship into the ways of the Wild West. Insofar as the random episodes have a plot, they revolve around the Virginian’s growing love for the easterner schoolmarm, Molly Wood, whose heart he wins when he rescues her from drowning. She in turn educates him, giving him good books to read – Hawthorne, George Eliot (‘she talks too much’ is his not inapt comment) and above all, Walter Scott, who confirms the Virginian in his sense of what honour is.

That honour is tested in the last scene of the novel when he has to choose between Molly and duty. He has been called out by a bad man. It is the eve of his wedding and the peace-loving Molly tells him if he loves her, he will turn his back and not fight. But the Virginian has to do what he has to do. He goes out and shoots his man. ‘New England conscience’ – in the form of Molly’s anxiety – ‘capitulates to love’.