The Bride of Texas (75 page)

“You can pay her the full amount,” I declared, sounding like a literary prima donna, “and send the bill for the corrections to me.”

“But that’s something neither I nor Miss Everett can —”

“If it weren’t for me,” I interrupted him, “she never would have taken up the pen. She wrote it out of jealousy.”

“All the more —”

I interrupted him again. “And you see, Mr. Little, I love her, do you understand?”

Mr. Little gave me a strange look and I hastened to add, “She’s my maiden aunt. The book’s appearance will be a gift for her sixty-fifth birthday.”

“For heaven’s sake,” my publisher said, “why didn’t you tell me straight out that this — this” — he faltered, trying to find a word to describe Humphrey’s horror — “thing was the work of your aunt?”

“I didn’t want you to see it as nepotism.”

Mr. Little grew thoughtful. “That explains a lot, of course,” he said. I preferred not to ask him what he meant.

Dawn on the Prairie
was Little and Brown’s greatest flop; they gave away more copies for review than they sold. Mr. Little asked me what magazine my aunt read and I told him it was Horton’s
Girls’ and Ladies’ Weekly Visitor
, an obscure publication from Chicago. He knew what the critics’ response to Lorraine Everett would be, and to make sure I’d stay with his firm he bought a superlative review in that journal. How he did it, I don’t know. It was shortly after a series of scandals around paid book reviews, and editors were reluctant to print unalloyed praise even when it was sincere, for fear of being accused
of taking bribes. Money can buy anything, though, if there is enough of it, and I think the review cost Mr. Little as much as Humphrey’s proofs had. I also think he charged me for at least part of it, concealed in the amount that went for “corrections”. What he didn’t know was that the bribed editor would want to protect himself. The next issue of Horton’s
Girls’ and Ladies’ Weekly Visitor
carried another review of
Dawn on the Prairie
, this time what is called a “devastating critique”, which tore to shreds not only Mr. Little’s paid advertisement, but also the novel itself.

Humphrey was shattered by the response. He was particularly upset by the unanimity of the reviewers, who concluded, with only varying degrees of contempt, that Lorraine Everett didn’t know the difference between a novel and natural lyricism, and between lyricism and watered-down transcendentalism. One of them even came up with some statistics: a full six hundred and eighteen pages of the book’s six hundred and seventy-eight pages consisted of descriptions of forests at various seasons of the year, and on four hundred and ninety-two of those six hundred and eighteen pages the lyrical evocations of nature were merely springboards for philosophizing on the principles of the universe. The story itself, according to the statistician, comprised a mere sixty pages, which was about right for the literary form the Germans call
die Novelle
, but certainly not what is implied in America by the term “novel”.

But even this novella — Humphrey’s clumsy attempt to tell a story of true love overcoming amusing obstacles — dealt with a serious question: the trapper’s daughter and the professor of entomology, captured by Indians, discover that the noble savages (one of them makes a speech in which he sounds like Rousseau) are hiding an escaped slave. The Indians have taken the lovers captive solely to prevent them from revealing their black friend’s whereabouts to the bounty-hunters. The professor
allays their fears with a speech summarizing the main ideas in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.

After that catastrophe, Humphrey stopped criticizing my lucrative literary activity and I in turn kept silent about
Dawn on the Prairie
, since I truly loved my philosopher husband. To make up to Mr. Little for his mental anguish and financial losses, I quickly wrote a novel called
The Pious Prevarication of Liza Thompson
. It broke all my previous sales records and financed the building of Mr. Little’s Provincetown mansion. Meanwhile, all memory of
Dawn on the Prairie
passed into merciful oblivion.

And yet how full of surprises life can be. If poor Humphrey had lived to my age, he might have started lecturing me about literature again. Today Laura A. Lee is forgotten, and not even professors of American literature know who she was. The last book she published was a quarter of a century ago, and that was an abbreviated edition of her first novel, reissued only because Mr. Griffith had turned it into a successful motion picture in which, of course, the story was shrunk to a ten-minute farce and the text reduced to a single heavily edited title. And as for Humphrey —

The other day I had a visit from my great-granddaughter — or was it my great-great-granddaughter? — who brought me a brand-new edition of
Dawn on the Prairie
, which is now required reading in a seminar on nineteenth-century American literature at her college. I could hardly believe my eyes. They had added seventy-five pages of notes and a thirty-seven-page introduction by a Harvard professor, which said, in essence, that if we set aside the predictable melodramatic plot and the cumbersome didactic passages the novel was an exceptionally fresh evocation of the virgin American wilderness, unlike anything left to us by any other American writer of the last century with the possible exception of James Fenimore Cooper, whose
influence on the book was in any case obvious. I don’t know if Humphrey was ever in the wilderness, but I doubt it. He was born in a brownstone house in Stuyvesant Park, New York, and spent his entire life, as unfortunately brief as it was, surrounded by books, even at our summer home in the Catskills. His “fresh evocation” was the result of a literary process similar to the one that produced my standard plots, those trips to the altar while overcoming amusing obstacles. My stories weren’t grounded in reality either but, rather than imitating another writer, I drew them out of thin air. The difference is evidently an essential one, which may be why my grandchildren are now reading — or perhaps merely studying — Humphrey’s sole excursion into literary prose. There is no cause for dismay, however. Fashions change, and perhaps some day someone will notice that all my heroines are “smart” while all my heroes are merely “handsome”, and will publish an annotated edition of
The Pious Prevarication of Liza Thompson
with an introduction showing that, like the unhappy Margaret Fuller, I too was an early proponent of women’s rights.

I hope he will not conclude that this tame dichotomy is all I had left of Margaret’s fighting spirit. But that will hardly happen. Literary criticism is, I sometimes feel, the art of seeing ghosts.

“I promise you the next novel I write will be true to life,” I told Maggie. I was thinking of the story of Jasmine and her distant love, Hasdrubal. We said goodbye on the front porch. The sky over Cincinnati looked like a coloured Christmas illustration.

“Don’t try it,” said Maggie. “You said yourself that you’re no Thackeray.”

“I know that, but I’d like to be better than I am.”

“You’ll only manage to be worse.” She tapped the pink spine of the book she held in her hand, my first author’s copy of
Who Got the Best of Whom?
, containing a long and impassioned
dedication I had penned into it for her. “Stick to what you do best.”

“A person should aspire to higher goals,” I said.

Maggie smiled wryly. “Perhaps. But in the final analysis it’s not what you want in life that counts, it’s what you accomplish.”

She kissed me and climbed into the cab I had ordered. The driver snapped the reins, the horses started off, and I never saw her again. In Liberty they told me she had come back for her mother’s funeral in the last year of the civil war, when she was a nurse in the field hospital with Meade’s corps of Grant’s army. After the war, they said, she moved to the South, but no one I knew had heard from her after that, so what she did with the rest of her life remains a mystery. But then, what she wanted in life remained a mystery too. Except for Ambrose. But that was just a wild, youthful infatuation — the kind that lasts a lifetime only in novels like Laura A. Lee’s.

Because Ambrose was loyal but insensitive to the personal motivations that often lay behind deeds that appeared to be for the common good, he was frequently clumsy in his handling of politics.

His final fall — which was actually fortunate, for it was what made him leave Chicago politics, which he had never understood, for the battlefields of Corinth and Knoxville — apparently began with the Carrington affair. He had hesitantly asked me about Carrington at the outset of his stay in Cincinnati, when he almost let slip what Halleck, Lincoln’s commander-in-chief at the time, thought of that thoroughly bureaucratic general.

He didn’t tell me what Halleck thought then, and I didn’t
find out until long after the war, in a dissertation written by my grandson Brendan. Brendan was possessed by an inexplicable interest in the Civil War in general, and in dear Ambrose in particular, although I had never told my own children, let alone my grandchildren, about that painful week in Liberty so long ago.

Halleck’s assessment of Carrington was a good one: he thought Carrington was only playing soldier, and that might be why he could hear grass grow a bit more than it actually did. But heaven knows — it isn’t clear from Brendan’s dissertation, or from my memories. “The extent and plans of treasonable societies are not realized,” Carrington wrote Ambrose. “Even men dare not speak loyalty for fear of fire and murder in some counties.” The correspondence lacked details about specific instances of arson and murder so motivated, and Ambrose was at a loss about what to do — whereupon Halleck wrote to him to express misgivings about Carrington’s judgement, and his conclusion was more than clear to the hesitant Ambrose. “General Carrington has never been tried in the field,” Halleck wrote. “Perhaps he may do better there.” Ambrose may not have even read the letter through to the end — if he didn’t, it was unfortunate — but he went straight to work. He removed Carrington as commander of the District of Indiana and replaced him with Milo Hascall. Although it soon became apparent that Halleck’s reservations about Carrington’s abilities applied equally to his replacement, in one respect Hascall differed profoundly from his predecessor: he virtually stank of gunpowder. He was a veteran of Shiloh and Stony River, where he had commanded an army corps. What Halleck had only feared that Carrington would do, Hascall made a reality. He didn’t worry about the probability of complicated conspiracies, but took preventive steps against them. Soon Halleck had occasion to resume his correspondence with Ambrose.

Unfortunately, the next letter was not as specific as the previous one. Halleck simply reflected on “the difficulty of finding district commanders with enough common sense to avoid conflicts with civilian authorities.” Hascall’s name was never mentioned in the letter. His actions can hardly have seemed those of a man lacking common sense, from Ambrose’s point of view, given his antipathy to anything remotely treasonous.

I said it was unfortunate if Ambrose didn’t read the first letter through to the end. The statement that General Carrington had never undergone trial by fire was followed by a subtle insinuation: “He owes his promotion entirely to political influence.”

Of course, he must have read the letter to the end, and he must have known that in this context “political influence” meant Governor Ollie Morton. Before Carrington’s appointment as district commander, he had been the governor’s choice to advise him on matters of sedition in Indiana. But Morton had once made a hat for Ambrose with his own two hands, whereas Carrington was a mere adviser. Ambrose’s call for resolute action against the Copperheads was in keeping with Morton’s opinions, of course, and so Ambrose knew that, Carrington notwithstanding, he was acting in the spirit of Morton’s intentions when he issued General Order Number thirty-eight, putting Vallandigham out of action.

Hascall also acted in the spirit of those intentions, but by then, unfortunately, Morton’s intentions had begun to change. Ollie Morton was a politician, and he weighed matters on the basis of how the voter would respond, not on consistency of principles. And his fingers were long enough to reach Washington.

He might have overlooked the fact that Ambrose hadn’t consulted him before removing Carrington, his protégé, but he soon discovered that Hascall was creating bedlam in his
election district by infuriating not only the Peace Democrats — Ollie couldn’t have cared less for them — but also those committed to the war. As a result, Ollie’s radical opinions quickly began to flag and he demanded that his main connection in Washington, Secretary of War Stanton, order Ambrose to replace Hascall. Stanton seemed in no hurry to comply.

Then, on May 28, Hascall arrested and detained the influential Senator Douglas. Ollie appealed again to Stanton, and sent a personal courier to Ambrose with a dispatch whose contents can only be deduced from the telegram Ambrose sent to Lincoln immediately afterwards, which Brendan quotes in full in his dissertation. It implies that, although several days earlier Lincoln had approved Ambrose’s actions, including General Order Number Thirty-eight, Ambrose had just learned from Ollie that not a single member of the president’s cabinet had agreed with Lincoln on that point. From Morton’s dispatch, Ambrose deduced that his action must have been an embarrassment to the president, and he reacted in his own way: “My views as to the proper policy to be pursued in this department are only changed,” he wired Lincoln, “in the belief that the present policy should be increased in rigor. You know my views upon the subject of command and you must not allow me to stand in the way of the carrying out of any general policy which you may choose to adopt.…” And then he offered his resignation.

That was no help to Lincoln in his dilemma. At a time of military defeats, gathering political storms, and the approaching presidential elections, he was besieged by worries from all sides. Besides, he was fond of Ambrose. What man who didn’t hold unyielding grudges wouldn’t have been fond of him? So Lincoln’s Pythian response to Ambrose’s telegram read, “When I shall wish to supersede you, I will let you know.” Lincoln went on to say that the entire cabinet regretted the necessity for
Vallandigham’s arrest but that, now that the affair was ended, “all are for seeing you through with it.”