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The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Discussion
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Tom Averill , writer-in-residence and professor of English at Washburn University of Topeka, teaches courses in creative writing and Kansas literature, folklore, and film. His publications include two novels Secrets of the Tsil Café (Penguin Putnam, 2001) and The Slow Air of Ewan MacPherson (BlueHen/Berkley, 2003), as well as short story collections Passes at the Moon (Woodley Press, 1985) and Seeing Mona Naked (Watermark Press, 1989). He is the editor of What Kansas Means to Me: Twentieth-century Writers on the Sunflower State (University Press of Kansas, 1990) and author of To Kansas: How You Know When You Are Here (Eagle Books, 1996), a collection of radio commentaries. |
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Listen to the discussion of The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.
Tom Averill: When The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton first appeared as a novel, I was excited because I teach Kansas literature at Washburn University and for many years have been starved for materials from the Territorial period that were true literature in the sense of being imaginative: poetry, or fiction, or plays. I was pleased when Lidie Newton came out and I read the reviews of it eagerly. The initial reviews were somewhat negative. I remember the New York Times saying that it was an extremely well-researched book, an extremely accurate book, and that unfortunately, the author had become so enamored of her research and her accuracies that she felt compelled to include all the research. In this case, the devil wasn't in the details. Some critics were not appreciative of the texture of the book. To my way of thinking, they misread the book in many ways. Smiley's research and her careful attention to detail all the way through is very intentional and very deliberate because of the nature of this book.
I must admit that upon first reading Lidie Newton myself, I was somewhat influenced by those reviews. My first reading of it was not as pleasurable as I had hoped. I felt like a critic of one of William Allen White's really long novels who wrote in The Nation, "It's such a big book. One wishes it were actually great." You have to invest a lot of time and energy. But I decided to teach it to my students at Washburn, and I reread it when it came out in paperback. I assume some of you have read the interview with Jane Smiley at the end of the book and understand the context in which she puts the book in her own creative life. She was interested in responding to the Oklahoma City bombing and the confluence of violence and radicalism and ideology in American politics. Understanding that and coming to the book again knowing I was going to teach it, I reread Lidie Newton with great pleasure. I always tell my students, "If you don't like it, all you have to do is reread it." It truly rewards rereading. I don't know if all of you have gotten all the way through it yet and whether you're tempted to just start again. But I find that each time I've read it the book comes alive on more and more different levels. I think it's a rich, interesting and complicated book.
I had the opportunity to sit next to Jane Smiley at a dinner in Lincoln, Nebraska, a couple of years ago, and I told her, "I'm teaching your book in my Kansas literature."
She said, "Oh, the Lidie Newton."
"Yes," I said, "the Lidie Newton". I really like it because it allows me to talk about things from the Territorial period that no other book allows."
She said, "I imagine that would go well in a college classroom." She was happy it was being taught. She said that she had become a real student of the period and had an affection for the period and for what was going on in Kansas and for the kinds of things that were being written about that time.
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| Sarah Tappan Doolittle (Lawrence) Robinson, came with her husband, Charles Robinson, from Boston to Lawrence, Kansas Territory, in 1854. She is the author of Kansas, Its Interior and Exterior Life. |
One of the strengths of the book is that it's a nineteenth-century book written in the twentieth century. It definitely is a kind of "false document." Even the title itself is the kind of title that would have been written by a real woman named Lidie Newton, who would have lived through this experience and then given lectures about it, something like Kansas: Its Exterior and Interior Life by Sarahh Robinson. These books had long titles. And the writing of them was part of women's literature during this time. Women found themselves the wives of missionaries or politicians or travelers. They would write the all-true account of what it was like to be in India or Kansas or to be among the natives somewhere on the globe.
The New York Times didn't address the fact that this was a book written to be a book that would be like a book you'd find, dusty, on a library shelf, a book that would contain all of those details that people would be starved for because they couldn't get them on the radio or the television. So that's how I read the book, as a "false document" from that time. It's also rich in many other kinds of stories, and so that's another way I teach it.
What are some of your responses to reading the book?
Participant: I like the way every chapter is introduced.
Tom Averill: Exactly. These quotes from Catherine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy set the context for the time and they do double duty. They give us the language of the time, helping to put us in that time period. They also remind us that one of Lidie Newton's strengths is not housekeeping or doing the other things for which this particular guidebook would find a space on her shelf—she might well need such a treatise on domestic economy for the use of young ladies at home. There is another irony in the domestic economy part of the title, because Lidie is basically homeless the entire book: she is a homeless person. Think about Kansas as a place: "Home on the Range," "Oh, give me a home." Everybody wanted a home. Lidie wanted a home. Her father dies, so she is kicked out of that home. She takes up with Thomas Newton; they have that home. But there's the Kansas controversy hanging over all the homesteads in 1856, with bullets flying, Lawrence being ransacked, and so on. When Thomas is killed, Lidie is homeless again. She walks away, almost mad in her grief. Almost literally mad. She's sick, she's tired, she's hungry, and she collapses and is taken in again. But she still doesn't find a home. She leaves the Missouri house of Richard Day. So, anyway, this idea of domestic economy for the use of young ladies at home does have an ironic tinge to it.
Participant: To me, she put history in perspective, not only the homesteading experience, but the starkest thing was the Pottawatomie Massacre. I've struggled and we've struggled in this group to understand whether John Brown was really involved, what it was all about. But what this showed me more than anything else what it set off, that her husband could be killed indirectly as a result of that violence. For me, this put it all into a starkly real perspective.
Tom Averill: A human perspective.
Participant: Historical too. We haven't known what went on.
Participant: I think she puts the Missouri contingent in a more balanced perspective than some of the other books. We argued in the Gladstone book discussion that it wasn't really so violent. Here, you see the other side, the Missouri life on the plantation. That was nicely done.
Participant: This takes me to the name of the book: The All-True Travels and Adventures. What is true? Truth certainly changes for Lidie based on where she lives and the experiences she is having on the frontier. It changes for all the people in the book.
Tom Averill: I think that is a very good point. Think about why she comes to Kansas. Why do all these people want to come to Kansas? It's those lies they're told on the handbills that they're looking at in the stores in Illinois, in Quincy. So, what's the truth? The truth is kind of appalling, isn't it? David B. Graves, who is our host all the way through, immediately introduces us to the fact that the truth is a slippery thing in K.T.
Participant: She also refers over and over to the two truths to every situation. It depends on one's perception. I think she reinforces perception.
Participant: One out of every five rumors is true.
Tom Averill: Yes. And also the danger of truth. I remember a passage in Lidie Newton about the truth, which leads you to nothing but ill, to violence, to confrontation. I think she uses the word "principles." "Principles are a dangerous thing because once you have principles, then, like as not in K.T., you're going to die for your principles." That's a hard truth to learn.
Participant: Thomas determined his course of action through principles. And Lidie responded more from the gut: "I hope you're going to attack me, I'm going to attack back." Thomas would say, "Let's talk it out." I thought that was an important dichotomy in the book between Thomas and Lidie.
Participant: The end of one of these chapters describes what Thomas wants. What Thomas really wants is time to sit down and think things through.
Participant: They have nice little hints at the top of every page.
Tom Averill: It's a handy way to review the book.
Participant: She went to a lot of trouble to create those.
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Tom Averill: In addition to this distinction you're making between thought versus action, intellect versus passion is one of the dichotomies throughout the book. This dichotomy describes the stereotypes about Missourians versus Kansans or Northeasterners, the Massachusetts people. You are all from Lawrence, right? You go up and down Massachusetts Street, so you must identify with the Thomas Newtons of the world who are "gentle," "literate," "logical," "courageous," "moral," "sober," "industrious," and "men of conscience." All those words are used at one time or another to describe the abolitionists, the New England Emigrant Aid Company people. I made a list of the Sheriff Jones types: "rude," "illiterate," "rash," "emotional," bullies," "cowards," "immoral," "drunkards," "lazy," not "men of conscience," but "men of honor." Honor is a very dangerous thing.
Honor and principles have a lot in common. I think this is a good distinction to make in the world of the book. One of the interesting things that emerges in the book is a new kind of person who is called the Westerner. David B. Graves is a Westerner. Frank, Lidie's nephew, is a Westerner. They are "entrepreneurial."
Participant: People from Illinois were considered Westerners. The people from Boston weren't, but the people from Illinois were Westerners.
Participant: Their behavior was what distinguished them as Westerners. Louisa was a Westerner too. She was the woman whose husband died. She quickly married another husband. She was right there on the frontier, making it work for her as a woman in a lot of different ways.
Tom Averill: Absolutely. That sort of entrepreneurial spirit, and not taking sides, but just finding a place, becomes important to those characters.
Participant: Getting back to your list of characteristics, I think one of the reasons that so many people have trouble with John Brown is because he was extremely emotional, extremely passionate, and had a lot of characteristics that Sheriff Jones had. We're uncomfortable with that.
Tom Averill: We like him all the way up to the time when he actually murdered somebody. He didn't have the logical side that Thomas Newton had, the contemplative side, the one that wants to think it out. He's already got it all thought out.
Participant: But every time I go to the capital building I have this thought about every day the governor goes out of her office and immediately sees the Curry portrait of this madman. You wonder sometimes why state politics are the way they are. I think you can blame it on that portrait.
Participant: The story about John Brown changes in the book in terms of how really brutal he was. Did he shoot or hack people to death? Louisa says, "Well, it doesn't really matter. He was a bad guy and whatever he did, he did." The book says that what happened with John Brown is unclear and there are a lot of different stories about it. That is also what we read in the Gladstone book.
Tom Averill: Did you have something to say about John Brown?
Participant: I was fed the horror of Quantrill with Gerber rice cereal. I think all Lawrencians were. I thought David B. Graves was a genius. He was an entrepreneur. He could juggle the time, the person, how he was going to make a few coins. Frank started out as an entrepreneur, but he moved into red-leg status. When you read the books from the other side of the coin, I think you get the same sentiments. The Missourians believed that Kansans were wicked, evil, and red legs. Jennison's Jayhawkers burned Osceola, Missouri, in 1861. But we don't always hear about that.
Tom Averill : I agree with you, too. If you go back to the Curry mural, you do have a stereotype. It's based on the bible-rifle dichotomy at the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church. Just the fact that John Brown would have a Bible and a rifle; not the weapon of choice near as I can tell. It's a stereotype with the prairie fire and the tornado and the blacks cowering in the background behind him and the dead union soldier and the dead confederate soldier precursing the Civil War. It's a part of our history that Lidie Newton drops in on to give us that human, confused side.
This is a young woman. She's not as young as most characters who are part of a coming-of-age novel, but if you look at her life experiences, many of them fit the typical coming-of-age story. She is someone who experiences a lot in the novel, and it shapes who she then becomes. When she goes to the Missouri side, Richard Day elaborates on what's wrong with the mechanized, industrialized North and argues that the South is actually closer to the roots of America. He describes a Jeffersonian, agricultural dream of a democratic self-sustaining place. The only thing that's wrong with it is that it's built on slavery. His utter contempt for industrialism is not so ill-justified if you look at the abuses and the enslavement that went on in the industrialized Northeast, where women and children worked in much worse conditions than Day's slaves did. But as Lorna says, "It doesn't matter how you're treated. The one thing about it always is that you're a slave." That's the big difference. This controversy in American history is pinpointed in Kansas and in the Civil War, and it has some interesting sides.
Participant: Lidie never really mentioned that Jeremiah was stolen. There was an allusion to this effect. Missouri was settled primarily by Kentuckians, who bred fine racing horses, so there were all kinds of elusive factors. Her revenge is built on the fact that her husband was murdered. But why was he murdered? He booted the claim jumpers, and the person who shot Jeremiah recognized that it was one of their horses or one of their associate's horses.
Tom Averill: I don't want to say the death of the horse was worse than Thomas' death, but Lidie makes it clear that the shooting of the horse to her is even more heartless because it doesn't have to do with politics. It doesn't have to do with principles or ideology; it has to do with pure meanness in ending the life of something beautiful.
Participant: The name of the horse initially was Lazarus, and later it was Jeremiah when Lidie owned it. Jeremiah fought the battle of Jericho, and Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. I thought her choice of names for the horse under its different ownerships was quite telling.
Tom Averill: Interesting. I hadn't put those details together.
Participant: I haven't cried reading a book for a long time, but after Jeremiah's death and Thomas's death, I just let go. I found that just heartbreaking, just too much.
Participant: Did you think there wasn't very much foreshadowing?
Participant: No.
Participant: It was so sudden.
Participant: They knew she was pregnant.
Tom Averill: Did you know that?
Participant: There were little clues.
Tom Averill: I have to take my students through those. This is a nineteenth-century book. They're not going to talk about the act, but there is a little moment where you can tell that he is bedding her as a husband.
Participant: I'm not sure when we were supposed to know she was pregnant, though.
Participant: There was a little clue or two.
Participant: What were they?
Participant: She projects that she will someday be pregnant. She's anticipating.
Participant: She wants to be, but I didn't see any clues that she was.
Tom Averill: But you know the way writers work. Once you write that she "wants to be," then it's a foreshadowing, isn't it? You said the death was not foreshadowed.
Participant: I didn't see that as foreshadowing, I saw that as sad, because then she had not even one piece of him left. If it were foreshadowed, it would have been more logical.
Participant: I felt it when they set out alone on this journey. There was something that came down on me.
Participant: When who set out alone?
Participant: When Lidie and Thomas set out alone for their claim. There was something about them being alone, there was something about the way she described the beginning of their journey out there that said for me, "Uh oh. Trouble's coming."
Participant: But you didn't sense her pregnancy from that?
Participant: No, I didn't. But I did get the feeling that this was when there would be a problem—that they would encounter the Southerners or someone like that.
Participant: It's like a movie.
Tom Averill: The music would've changed. I think atmospherically Smiley sets the stage.
Participant: She did, atmospherically. The weather was very important throughout the book.
Tom Averill: That's good in a Kansas book.
Participant: She wrote a beautiful bit of foreshadowing at the bottom of page 138 and top of 139, not specifically about Thomas' death, but about all the troubles to come. It lets you know that everything's going to go bad. "At any rate, we visited and gossiped among ourselves as if we would be friends for the rest of our lives. That was K.T. all over. You had to be acting every day as if your life would on from that moment, full tilt, because if you held back, you would settle on nothing—make no claim, dig no well, have no friends. All the same, you could embrace something with all your might and have it turn to empty air only so many times. But I wasn't thinking about that then."
Tom Averill: There's another similar passage that takes a look at them as a group and what they've done. It's very negative about what's happened to them. They came out to Kansas Territory with all kinds of promises, and here they are.
Participant: Before Book Two, the book kind of dragged, because we went over and over how hard this life was and yet nothing really happened. Book Two went much faster.
Participant: I was struck by the fact that so many things did not happen by intent in Lidie's life. When she swam the Mississippi River, she knew she was going to do it. But she hadn't really decided to marry Thomas. We don't hear her really make the decision or him propose, or the wedding happen. Suddenly they're married.
Participant: There wasn't much time with regard to all that.
Participant: The same is true with what is happening with them in Lawrence. A lot of things don't happen by intent; they're just in a swirl of activity and violence that they respond to. That seems to be a theme in the book.
Tom Averill: It's very much a theme, I think. Some of the critics who didn't like the book felt that Lidie is never an actor but is always acted upon. I don't tend to agree with that all the way through. The book picks up in the second part, because Lidie then becomes an actor, bent on a particular kind of story, which is revenge. She's not following anymore.
By the way, the passage I was thinking of is on page 269, about K.T. as a school for mourning. "In the manner that you do, I began noticing all the other bereft souls, as I hadn't noticed them before my own bereavement. There was Mr. James, of course, who, it was said, had taken greatly to drink. . ." He was an angry man. There was a Mrs. Harrison, whose children "gone down with fever and died." Here was Mrs. McChesney "whose husband had been hit by a falling tree and died with a corncake in his mouth." This is a bizarre series of events. "Mrs. Dalton hadn't left her bed." Add to that what you know about the rest of the characters in the book—for example, the young mother who dies—and there's a lot of sadness and grieving. This tree falling when you have a corncake in your mouth is a perfect example of unintended actions or consequences.
There are stories in the book that I think are interesting, all-true, but especially the revenge and gender stuff in the second part. Even in the first part there's a little hint. That's why she needs that book for young ladies because she isn't one. Lidie needs a book to tell her how to be one. Look at her tomboyishness, her ability to swim the river, her love of horses, her ability to hunt, her mannishness in general.
Participant: She wasn't described as big or an unattractive person at all.
Tom Averill: Quite the opposite.
Participant: But have you ever seen pictures?
Participant: Time Life has a book—I forget which one it is, it might be in the cowboys volume—on a lady from Dodge City named Squirrel Liz. She is the god-awfulest looking person you ever did see, but she's the best prostitute in town. She has a little pet squirrel, and that's where she got her name. Remember pictures of Belle Star. There were lots of unattractive women on the frontier.
Participant: But we have a lot more help these days.
Participant: It was a hard life. I wouldn't have made it through it, I'm sure.
Participant: On the other hand, if Lidie had been pretty, she would've been married by the time Thomas got there. She would not have been available.
Participant: She would have had other options.
Participant: She had some options for marriage, and she did not want to marry a man whose wife had died, who had six kids that she had to take care of. She not only turned them down, she turned them down rather curtly.
Participant: But if she had been an attractive woman, she would've had more choices in life. And she probably wouldn't have been quite so adventurous.
Participant: Thomas seemed to be quite taken with her though.
Participant: Everything about her was what he needed, what a woman needed to get by in the West.
Participant: He thought she could survive.
Participant: And I think he really loved her too, though.
Participant: She had the qualities he needed for a partner.
Participant: Some he lacked himself.
Tom Averill: Absolutely.
Participant: She saw early that the suitor wasn't the same as the husband.
Tom Averill: Remember that Lidie is only twenty. For that time, she feels relatively old as a person. But she's also a very inexperienced person in many ways. She's a young person. When I teach the book, I tell my students, "She's your age."
Participant: Wouldn't she have been almost middle aged for that time?
Tom Averill: I think that's accurate.
Participant: Women were dying from having all these children, and they died of old age between 40 and 50.
Tom Averill: Did you read the book, in part, as a love story? It's a very short romance, a very short courtship. Their time together through their whole marriage is very short. They come to Kansas Territory in August 1855; Thomas is dead by July 1856. So they're married less than a year. She feels like she's just getting to know him because she doesn't know him when she marries. They read together. There are those few moments that she really treasures. I thought some of the saddest moments were not when he died but those little moments they finally had that were tender moments between them. She was insecure about her looks. She said at one point, "Only an abolitionist would marry me."
Participant: But you have the feeling that they were falling in love.
Tom Averill: I think you do. There were some really poignant moments where he says something right to her or is slightly affectionate, and it means so much. And she treasures his watch after his death. She has to have some little part of him. She wants him to be "watch"ing her get revenge. I think the revenge is part of the unrequited love. Then she loses the baby. She loses a husband, she loses a baby, she loses a homestead, she loses her horse. It's a school of mourning. You can count up all the losses in almost everything she tries to do. She even loses her last quest, to rescue Lorna at the end of the book.
Participant: I thought that she began to define herself as an independent person in her relationship with Thomas, particularly on the Sunday that Frank ran the horse. She let him run the horse again. She identified with how that horse was being all that it could be. She loved it. Thomas did not. I couldn't figure out whether that was because they ran the horse on Sunday, which might have been inconsistent with his beliefs, or if it was because he didn't believe in running horses at all.
Participant: He was waiting for the horse to do the mail run, I think. It delayed the mail.
Participant: But that was the point at which Lidie did not just go along with everything that Thomas wanted.
Participant: When she bought the horse, that was an independent action.
Participant: She had a closer relationship, with her nephew than she did with her husband, it seemed to me.
Tom Averill: And with her horse.
Participant: She gave more thought and more emotion to buying a horse and bonding with the horse than she did to her decision to marry her husband.
Participant: She's had more experiences with horses.
Tom Averill: Perhaps her comfort level is higher with horses than with men.
Participant: For her, it was easier to communicate with a horse than with her husband.
Participant: She got married because she didn't have many other options at the time.
Participant: I think she wanted to have the freedom to get away.
Tom Averill: She's an adventurer. That's where the All-True Travels and Adventures comes in. She's not just going to travel somewhere, she's going to have adventures.
Participant: I remembered when I graduated from high school, if my husband hadn't come along, I would've gone. I wanted out of that little area where I lived so much, I would've left.
Participant: People didn't marry in that same timeframe as we do. They took care of each other. They were health mates, primarily.
Participant: Or business partners.
Participant: When Louisa married her second husband, it wasn't a great love story, and neither was her marriage to the first husband.
Participant: I think the majority grew to love each other. Even though Mrs. James loved her husband, he had his own problems.
Tom Averill: But with Lidie, there's a bit of a conventional love story. She says after Thomas dies that that's when her beauty left her because he was the only man who had ever found her beautiful. This is very poignant. She makes up a story at the very end when she's with Lorna, saying that she was cruelly abandoned by her husband. Another time with Frank she makes up the story that she's deaf. She hears all these terrible, negative things about how ugly she is, and she can't respond to them because she's pretending to be deaf.
Participant: That was Frank's story.
Tom Averill: Right. She uses it later with Lorna. She says that Lorna's deaf, and that's why Lorna needs to be with her in the hotel room. She's lost the one man who thought she was beautiful. At least that's how she feels. That loss is doubled, I think, by having a miscarriage in Missouri. But her independence comes through in Missouri, too, because she is not going to marry this Day fellow. Not just because of the ideology of it, but because she doesn't want to marry at that point. When she leaves with Lorna, that is an active step. She's not just passive.
Participant: Would you argue that Lorna makes her do it?
Participant: She was still grieving.
Participant: I thought the whole book was a story of loss. Handling necessary losses sometimes, but hard losses.
Participant: She makes human decisions, has human indecisions, she gets pushed into things, and she takes the lead. I found her character to be very human. In a lot of books she would have found the killers and gunned them down.
Tom Averill: And the baby would've survived and grown up to be a senator or something like that. But not in this book, with it's qualities of gritty, human reality.
Participant: As you're reading, you keep thinking you're going down one path, and then it actually goes down a path that we can relate to. She helps the slave, but it's not really her idea. It's something that any one of us in that situation might have done regardless of the consequences.
Participant: One of the best parts of the story was when we discovered that Lorna was the one that she left the four dollars for.
Tom Averill: Yes. It goes way back to the woman in the cave. But even there you can say on Lidie's behalf that she does have someone clamoring to get her to stay and marry him and another person saying, "No, you're going to take me because you owe it to me." She chooses Lorna, which is the choice I wanted her to make.
Participant: I didn't really get interested in the book until her husband is shot, and she can't make up her mind—does she stay or does she go? Does she go for help? Does she stay with him? It's such a human situation.
Tom Averill: Then who shows up? David B. Graves. He's a pernicious fellow. Maybe "pernicious" is not the right word, but it seems like David B. Graves shows up at the beginning or end of each crisis. He's always there. He is an ubiquitous presence. He's there when she goes after the gun powder and they make that trade. He's there after Thomas' death. He's there at the ship, and he helps catch her at the end. Whose side is he on?
Participant: He does tell us exactly whose side he's on.
Tom Averill: He's "sound on the goose."
Participant: And he says, "I will abide by the law." But which law? He said, "I don't care if we have slavery or we don't have slavery. I will uphold the law." Isn't that what he says?
Participant: And he also said at one point that he could see both sides of the issue.
Participant: I think he can empathize with both sides.
Participant: He's the fence sitter, I thought.
Participant: He's taking advantage of both sides too.
Participant: Is Jane Smiley an Eastern lady?
Tom Averill: Jane Smiley has roots in a lot of places. She lived for a long time in Iowa, and she got her MFA degree at the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa, but she grew up in St. Louis. Where is she living now? In California? She did her horse book because she's very interested in horses as well. She did her Iowa book, the Thousand Acres, and she did Moo, her Iowa State Agricultural College satire on academic life. She's had the freedom to move about and pursue her interests.
Participant: She really delved into these Territorial days.
Tom Averill: Yes. Her books are well-researched. And she comes to know a place. You can tell after your reading that she knows what she's talking about. She's not doing a superficial job here. She's doing a historian's kind of job.
Participant: Did she spend much time in Lawrence? She knew the streets.
Tom Averill: I don't think so. Not a whole lot.
Participant: She read Sarah Robinson.
Tom Averill: She read her Robinson, but she also thanks people at the research library.
Participant: She also knew the topography. She knew about the ravine that people hid in. The ravine is now Tennessee Street.
Participant: She never mentioned a church, though, did she?
Participant: Reverend Lum was the first minister at the Plymouth (Congregational) Church.
Participant: She mentions Unitarians and Congregationalists.
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| Reverend Richard Cordley, D.D., long-time Congregational minister of Lawrence, historian, and educator, was active, along with his wife, in the Underground Railroad. |
Tom Averill: Smiley's St. Louis upbringing would make her a Midwesterner. But she's the daughter or the granddaughter of the Lilly fortune, the pharmaceutical company. She's always had the ability to do what she wants to do. She has written about all kinds of different places.
Participant: Has she written other historical novels?
Participant: She's written a book called Greenlanders.
Tom Averill: I haven't read that. I read Age of Grief and A Thousand Acres. For that she had to research farming practices in Iowa to understand tiling and drainage.
Participant: Are they all books of loss?
Tom Averill: Moo is a satire, but A Thousand Acres is a King Lear plot brought to Iowa. King Lear is all about loss.
Participant: I have been told that the majority of her material is sad.
Tom Averill: Let's talk about that. At the end, Lidie seems to still be a welter of impulses and emotions. When she is shipped home after her failed attempt to rescue Lorna from slavery, what does she do?
Participant: Doesn't she visit Thomas's family?
Tom Averill: Yes. She does this courtship backwards. Usually you meet the family before the marriage, but she meets the family after his death. She gives a lecture in Boston. What a great place to give a lecture—in the center of abolitionism, and also feminism was strong there. Does she like giving that lecture?
Participant: She doubted herself again. She was surprised when it was well-received. I believe that Louisa told her, "You don't want to go to Boston. You don't want to live in that square box." Mrs. Bush had encouraged her to go, telling her how wonderful Boston was, that all women had tea parties and how nice they were, how good life was there. She goes to Boston and what Louisa said turned out to be more true for her. She felt too constrained in that environment. She couldn't be herself there is how I read it.
Participant: One time she took on Louisa's name. She called herself Louisa Bisket.
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| Eli Thayer was an educator, originator of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, and congressman. He supplied John Brown with arms to defend the free-state settlers of Kansas. |
Tom Averill: When she goes back to Boston, it strikes me that it's almost like those posters at the beginning of the book that don't tell the truth about Kansas. When she's talking about "The title of my lecture,"—it's at the end of page 450—"given it by Mr. Thayer's friend, was 'Latest News from the War in Kansas, with a FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT of a foiled SLAVE ESCAPE in Missouri.'" It was a big headline. When she tries to tell about this at the end, she says, "No one could describe what was true in Kansas and Missouri. Hardly any Kansan or any Missourian, I thought, could describe what was true there to another Kansan or Missourian, even one supposedly on his or her side." You can't condense this very human experience into the clichés of the "garden land" of Kansas or the "FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT" of a runaway slave, or any of the clichés of the Western experience or the Kansas experience or the pre-Civil War experience. Only at the very end did they speak of K.T. "It was only then that we ever spoke of K.T., and then it was only to agree that whatever anyone else thought, after K.T., nothing, not Bull Run or Gettysburg certainly not the raid at Harpers ferry that some thought started it all, not the Emancipation or the burning of Atlanta, not the killing of the President, nothing ever surprised either of us again."
Participant: This is off the subject, but in their cooking was it true "you didn't need any leavening in your biscuits because of the limestone in the water." Did you ever try that?
Tom Averill: No, I haven't.
Participant: I can't imagine that would be true. It had to be the well water.
Participant: I noticed it too.
Participant: I read it, and then she came back to it again.
Tom Averill: I do know Native Americans used ashes for leavening because they had some of the same properties, like potash, that leaven—they used it with cornmeal, and things like that.
Participant: I know that there are yeast spores and there are people who build their own yeast, but to say that it could be made with water was surprising.
Participant: Of course, we do have limestone around here.
Participant: Well water would be the hard water. Rain water was the soft water.
Tom Averill: This takes us into a whole range of manners and mores. Jane Smiley is interested in taking you on that steamboat with the men's cabin and the women's cabin and the meal that's served; and all the food that's described—none of it is very pleasant-sounding food. It's eaten with ferocity, as fast as it can be eaten. There seems to be no pleasure in food or in eating.
Participant: There's a great deal of competition.
Participant: Maybe there's a scarcity.
Tom Averill: Yes, and the men don't seem to care whether the women get anything to eat.
Participant: Contrast that with the amount of time that Lewis and Clark spend describing what they eat and how they eat it and how good it is. I noticed when she describes the fact that they only got her sister into a funeral dress by corseting her as tight as a sausage. I knew that there was going to be a lot of food references in this book. You cook a sausage that has a casing, and you puncture the casing so that it won't explode. I had a visualization of this sister exploding at some point out of her dress.
Participant: The eating habits sound like the Middle Ages.
Tom Averill: And the amount of spitting.
Participant: And the coarsness.
Participant: No wonder there weren't very many women out there.
Participant: Dying might have been a better choice.
Participant: One cup and one spoon, wasn't it, when she went with Lorna? Plus a few basics, cornbread and other things to eat. I thought it was interesting that she chose one cup and one spoon.
Participant: The pioneers didn't have silver for each person. When they had guests, the silver, whatever they had, was in a bowl, and each person took a utensil and used it for their meal. If you got there after the utensils were gone, you ate with your hands.
Participant: There was an early reference to someone visiting for coffee or tea and bringing their own spoon to her cabin.
Participant: She mentioned that many cups were broken on the way, and she didn't have enough cups to go around. These were very real issues.
Tom Averill: Smiley is very aware of someone coming into a new territory. This book is a kind of travel log that describes the habits and customs of the natives, the peoples as they exist there. Lidie is someone who doesn't stay. I described her as homeless, which may be extreme, but there is this sense in which Lidie doesn't find a place. Even when she goes into Missouri and might find a place, she's not really looking for a place, she's looking to revenge Thomas's death. Lorna helps her do that when she says, "This is something you're going to do for him." When that fails, what else can she do to grieve the loss of her husband and that baby? What else can she do that has any vestige of her marriage? Nothing she can do is going to bring him back. Then she's left, sadly, where she started with the inability to talk about it because it is so complicated.
Getting back to your comment, that's the beauty of the book. It's not the story of someone who is heroic. It's not the story of somebody who spawns a great future generation. We don't follow her past her twenty-first year, but if you think about this year in her life, all these All-True Travels and Adventures, there is a sadness to it, but there's also a kind of humanity to it that you don't often get in a novel. I think maybe that's what bums some readers out. We want some fantasy.
Participant: She returns home a changed person because of all the experiences she has had on the frontier. When she's on the boat coming home, she doesn't have her knitting and tatting. She doesn't do any of the things that the other women on the boat are doing. She says, "I was a different animal now. A horse among cows. A duck among geese." And that's how she returns home. And then her sister says, "I am displeased with you. You are nothing but trouble in two states and one territory." "And then she threw her arms around me and burst into tears."
Participant: Was she better off at the beginning of the book or the end?
Participant: Or is she the same? She didn't fit in but her situation was the same. She didn't fit then. She was a square peg from start to end.
Tom Averill: The "horse among cows" implies the sleekness, speed, and breeding of a horse and the fine sensibility of a horse versus a cow. What about the duck versus the goose?
Participant: Geese fly but ducks waddle.
Tom Averill: If she's a duck among geese, then she's the ugly, awkward one among them. But she's also the horse, so she's both. In her own metaphor she's better and worse off than when she started. I think that's the nature of the book.
Participant: Cattle and geese have one thing in common: they travel together. Horses and ducks can travel together, but they're also individuals.
Participant: I believe that Lidie has grown tremendously within herself as a result of her experience on the frontier. It goes with what you said. She is more independent, more able to make decisions based on her experiences.
Participant: This could be a lot of people's stories. It wasn't unique to Lidie. So many women on the frontier at that time had these same experiences.
Tom Averill: If we go back to the gender issue, one of the things that strikes me is that Lidie becomes a new kind of woman as well. Just as we talked about Northerners and Southerners, now we've got this new Westerner. We've also got this new kind of woman that Louisa tries to teach her to be. Louisa Bisket is not a rabid feminist, but she's very independent and doesn't fit conventions. In some ways, Lidie's ahead of her time in that sense. But she's a prototype of a new kind of woman, too. In some ways this book is about the way in which Kansas and the western territories allowed people to be free in certain ways and defeated in other ways. Jane Smiley knew that America evolved with the Louisiana Purchase and with the addition of the Western states and away from the old conflicts of North and South, which is what Lidie grew up with.
Within thirty years of this book's time period, all the conflicts are between East and West, in terms of economic system, industrialization, agriculture versus finance, Populists versus the Republicans. Everything's different in America within thirty to forty years. We see the beginnings of that in this book. Jane Smiley would have been interested in these developments in her research as she's doing the book. Also, a new kind of person emerges, who doesn't take sides. We realize that the world is more complicated than rhetoric and headlines. We need to look beneath. There's a modernness to it, even though it's set in place so specifically in its detail. There's a modernness to the book that I like about it.
Participant: What was the origin of the "goose" question? It's the first time I've seen that in this literature. I presume it's accurate historically.
Tom Averill: It is. I've run across it in different places. But I'm not sure what it means to be " sound on the goose ." I'm not sure what the "goose" meant. I haven't done the research. Does anybody know?
Participant: I've never seen it before.
Participant: The way it was explained in here, I thought it was just a euphemism. They were using the word "goose" as a substitute for slavery.
Participant: The ending mentioned the goose again, and I thought, "How does this tie in?" I couldn't find it.
Participant: There's a place where Lidie's dressed as a man and she points out that there are dangers to women on the frontier, but for men, there were also dangers. She could go and come as she wished as a male, but males were free to kill males because of gender and insults. She was showing both sides there. Feminists often show how bad it is for women on the frontier, but it wasn't all that perfect for men either.
Participant: She said in one place that women were safe. "Women everywhere were honored." It wasn't a question of their safety, hitching a ride along the road, for example. Now the opposite is true.
Tom Averill: The gender issues continue all the way through the book. She first dresses up as a man in Kansas Territory when she's going to look at the dispute over the claim. Frank encourages her to do that. Frank is her true soul mate.
Participant: She should've ended up with Frank. That's what I looked for at the end of the book.
Tom Averill: Who is she talking to at the end of the book? It's Frank. People who survive something stick together. I remember it so vividly after the Vietnam War. If you were a veteran of Vietnam, you may have felt the way that Lidie felt. You came back and nobody could understand what you had been through, except for another person who went through it, too. I don't want to bring contemporary politics into it, but I think it's very similar in the sense that you go into a territory that nobody understands and everybody thinks they understand, and it's very difficult. You see a lot of things that you don't understand and you experience a lot of loss, which everybody did. Then who do you talk to afterward? In that sense, Frank and Lidie are the survivors. Of course, the other side of it is that she's not on the lecture circuit, but she writes a book. The book is her attempt to tell you everything that happened.
There's the gender issue, there's the revenge story, there's the love story that to me is the poignant part of it, there's the coming-of-age story where the person who is not the actor in her own life learns how to act, making decisions even if they aren't good ones by the end of the book. She is the horse instead of the cow. All of these stories are woven together so well. It's an admirable book. That's why I said it's an admirable book to reread. Once you know the whole plot and you're aware of all these different issues and stories, the book resonates and deepens. It's a fine piece of work. If we met in a year, all having reread the book then, we would have a different discussion.
Participant: This book ought to make about six movies.
Tom Averill: Has anyone turned it into a movie?
Participant: They wouldn't do it justice if they did.
Tom Averill: I think it would be so hard to do.
Participant: Do you think if we had not read the other three books that we would've been able to understand it?
Participant: I just love how they all overlap.
Participant: Smiley did so much research that the first time I tried to read this book when it first came out, I didn't know enough history to get it. Maybe that's why it didn't have the popular appeal.
Participant: I didn't like this book for the first third because it was too flat.
Tom Averill: Where's the story? Where's the drama?
Participant: Where is the story? Where is the emotion? Where are we going with this? I began to really get into the book when we got to the prairie and we got to the history more than in the first third of the book.
Tom Averill: I thought David B. Graves was the first person who's like a "character." "Now we're in a novel." Because the rest of it was so realistic, David B. Graves just takes off the page, doesn't he? He's an interesting guy all the way through. We want to see him again rather than some of the other characters who aren't.
Participant: I thought it was interesting when she said that she didn't get into it until they got into the prairie.
Participant: I just found the "goose" question. It's on page 64.
Tom Averill: Does it explain why it's the "goose?"
Participant: "'The goose question is slavery, ma'am. If you are a proslavery man, then out here we say that you are sound on the goose.'"
Tom Averill: But the question is, Why do they say that he's "sound on the goose?"
Participant: I found a book in the library called Understanding Jane Smiley, and there's a chapter on each of her books up to and including Lidie Newton . The article discusses something that we really haven't touched upon: the fact that Jane Smiley greatly admires Uncle Tom's Cabin much more than Huckleberry Finn. And there's a really interesting article by Smiley in the January 1996 Harpers. He points out many things where she seems to be making references to Huckleberry Finn that went completely over my head. There's so much in this book that one can discuss, her swimming in the Mississippi, all those river trips in the steamboats. He says Frank is really Huck, but in a way Lidie is Huck too. Huck at the end of his book set out for the territory, but Lidie also takes a page from Harriet Beecher Stowe in that Smiley talks about the family lives of these people and the household arrangements.
Tom Averill: In the Harper's article that Smiley wrote about the importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin as opposed to Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn is a new kind of American character too, which makes him interesting again. He is human rather than a political or principal figure; he's batted around from place to place in the same way that Lidie is. This is a tie. Then he goes out for the Territory and becomes Frank.
Has anyone read the novel by Greg Matthews called The Further Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? I haven't read it, but he takes characters bound to a particular time and place and tries to see them as part of the future. That's what I was trying to do with Lidie; to say that Jane Smiley's creating a prototype of what will become possible for women. Huck Finn creates that, too. I would think that Jane Smiley's very interested in that.
Participant: I think she's a little too hard on Twain's book.
Tom Averill: You all read Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Smiley in her article, as you know, says it should be read. It's a fine piece of American literature. Do you agree?
Participant: I had a hard time reading it.
Tom Averill: That's okay. We don't have to genuflect before everything.
Participant: We were pleasantly surprised. We hadn't realized what a good book it was.
Participant: It was wonderful.
Participant: I loved it.
Participant: I hadn't read it before.
Participant: I think part of what makes it hard is the nineteenth-century syntax.
Participant: By the time I got through the slave dialogue, all I wanted to do was take aspirin and bang my head against the wall.
Tom Averill: That's true in Huckleberry Finn when you first encounter it.
Participant: To me, the difference between Uncle Tom's Cabin and Lidie Newton is that the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin is an abolitionist through and through and there is a strong religious motivation behind the book that is displayed in some of the characters in the book. Lidie Newton is not a religious person as she describes herself in the book.
Tom Averill: That's right. The Western character is secular.
Participant: Except that character now seems to have become more religious.
Participant: I would like to pass around one other thing just to show how recent all this really is. I found a book at Watson Library, it's Sarah Robinson's book Kansas: It's Interior and Exterior Life. And to my amazement, it has Sarah Robinson's handwriting in it. It was published in 1856.
Participant: Could I ask a question? Franklin is constantly being referred to in the book. Where was Franklin?
Participant: The proslavery community Franklin used to be southeast of Lawrence, at the intersection of the present K-10 and Franklin Road. It was on the California Trail.
Tom Averill: Thank you all for your insights.
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton : Story Lines
A story of someone growing up, from a "useless" young woman to someone who defines herself—what is her character? At the end of the book, Lidie says, "I saw that I had done it again, that is, taken a stranger for a companion and set out on a journey whose destination I had no notion of.
Lidie accepts herself and her fate on pp. 442-443—Thomas is dead, she has no child, Frank is probably dead, too, everything was different from the handbills.
She also learns where principles take you: p. 444, "Didn't matter what side you were on or what your principles were; if you talked about them long enough, well, you had to act on them. Now that I was in jail, I didn't know what I thought about principles anymore. It seemed as though the main result of having any was dislocation, injury, pain, and death. But of course that left out Lorna."
By the end of the books, Lidie is different:
She learns that it's hard to know the truth: p. 451, "No one could describe what was true in Kansas and Missouri. Hardly any Kansan or any Missourian, I thought, could describe what was true there to another Kansan or Missourian, even one supposedly on his or her side.
"... after K.T., nothing ... ever surprised either of us ever again." (P. 452)
A travelogue, a false document, by a woman of the times. Her lecture at the end is typical, and a woman might have become a lecturer, even if only because she was the eyewitness. The text is typical of the kinds of books Smiley would have read in order to gain insights into the period: ex., Sarah Robinson's Kansas: Its Exterior and Interior Life .
A book of historical insight
--on contrasts between Missouri and Kansas, South and North, Missourians v Kansans, and especially on slavery, p. 378
—more on slavery—Helen's view: p. 392
—slavery, Lorna's bottom-line view, p. 419, "Slaves live all different. But dey all slaves. Dey all got to do what dey is tol' to do."
A love story
—Thomas as a mystery, p. 268, yet to be discovered, even in death.
—remains a huge presence, long after his death, p. 338.
—she continually grips his watch. Is he (pun) "watch"ing her?
—she sells Thomas' watch on p. 413.
—she feels only an abolitionist could love her, p. 343
—the baby, and that loss, the last of her connection with Thomas except for her revenge plot, p. 350, and she says she's lost everything (p. 351). Earlier, she's said that holding Louisa and
—she says of her hair, and its beauty: "When my husband was killed, that did away with my beauty, because he was the only man who ever found me beautiful." (p. 354)
—still "quizzing Thomas," (p. 375-76)
—another marriage proposal, Richard Day, p. 396
—Lidie makes up a story, while travelling with Lorna, of being shamefully abandoned (p. 427) and that's probably how she feels by the end.
A discussion of gender, because Lidie dresses in men's clothing during her transition from Kansas to Missouri, where we pick her up again.
—begins when Frank convinces her to dress in Thomas' clothes during the Jenkins claim fight
—master Philip incident, p. 342, "I could only put my cowardice down to my femininity."
—p. 418, Lidie says: "I saw that walking to Kansas City was going to be considerably harder in a skirt and light shoes than it had been in trousers and boots, ..."
A revenge story
—p. 331, "Everything swirled around Thomas' killing and the justice to be exacted."
—p. 338, the revenge might be a way to hang on to Thomas, and thus to grieve
—first confrontation with Samson and Chaney and the boy, pp. 388-389
—admitted failure, p. 390
—Lorna's escape becomes part of the plan to do something for Thomas. Lorna says: "Den dis is somethin you gone do fo' him."
And Lidie says (p. 404), "Aiding in her escape was the thing I had to do for Thomas that would somehow restore him to me."
Credits
Eli Thayer and Richard Cordley photos; illustration of Lawrence, Kansas Territory, 1854-55, used with permission of the Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries
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