Constance Lindsay Skinner: Writing on the Frontier 9781442673274

Citation preview

CONSTANCE LINDSAY S K I N N E R : W R I T I N G ON THE F R O N T I E R

This page intentionally left blank

Constance Lindsay Skinner Writing on the Frontier

JEAN BARMAN

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2002 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3678-3 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Barman, Jean, 1939Constance Lindsay Skinner : writing on the frontier / Jean Barman. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3678-3 1. Skinner, Constance Lindsay, 1877-1939. 2. Authors, Canadian 20th century - Biography. 3. Book editors - United States - Biography. 4. Journalists - United States - Biography. 5. Pioneers - British Columbia - Biography. I. Title. ' PS8537.K56Z54 2002 PR9199.3.S54Z54 2002

C818'.5209

C2002-901533-2

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

vii

Acknowledgments 1 2

Writing on the Frontier 3

A British Columbian Inheritance 13 3 4

Border Crossing Beyond Journalism 5

6 8 9

33

Storytelling

58

84

Engaging the Frontier

104

7 Private Woman 123 Old and New Directions 150

Return to the British Columbia Frontier 10 No More Private Woman 200 11 Almost Famous 218 12 Reflections 247

174

Appendix: Chronology of the Life of Constance Lindsay Skinner Notes

267

Bibliography

321

Illustration Credits Index

343

345

Illustrations follow page 152

263

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

My greatest debt is to the New York Public Library. The care and attention given to Constance Lindsay Skinner's papers, deposited there on her death in 1939, are exceptional. Staff in the Manuscripts and Archives Division have been exemplary in responding to my queries, whether in person or at a distance, and in arranging for permission to quote from the papers and to reproduce photographs and illustrations. Carole Gerson first alerted me to the papers' existence, for which I am very appreciative. Constance Lindsay Skinner was sufficiently close to fame that, when she wrote to persons well enough known for their papers to survive in public repositories, her letters were considered sufficiently important to be kept. Through the assistance of many dedicated archivists and librarians, I located items in the British Columbia Archives, City of Vancouver Archives, Hudson's Bay Archives, Huntington Library, Minnesota Historical Society, National Archives, National Archives of Canada, New York Public Library, Newberry Library, Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and at the libraries or archives of Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Indiana University, Princeton University, Rollins College, Syracuse University, University of British Columbia, University of California at Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Toronto, University of Virginia, and Yale University. Constance Lindsay Skinner's most extensive and revealing letters were exchanged with fellow Canadian Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Divided between the National Archives in Washington, DC, and Dartmouth College, they are used here with the generous permission of his widow, Evelyn Nef. Many persons have given support along the way. Donald Akenson, Alison Prentice, and Beverly Boutilier spurred my interest by encouraging me to publish articles on Constance Lindsay Skinner,1 and Joan Harcourt, to

viii Acknowledgments

consider writing a book. Mary Commager kindly discussed her husband's links with Constance Lindsay Skinner, and Jonathan Cohen shared his expertise on Muna Lee. Also helpful have been the Women's National Book Association and the Bienes Center for the Literary Arts in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Donald B. Smith alerted me to important archival sources, and the Interlibrary Loan Service at the University of British Columbia patiently tracked down publications. Emily Barman and Arthur Kendy gave research assistance in the United States. Roderick J. Barman thoughtfully critiqued the manuscript, and James Hoffman, the sections on theatre. Two anonymous reviewers were very astute, as have been editors Siobhan McMenemy and Jill McConkey at University of Toronto Press. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has generously supported my research over the years, and the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, the publication of this book. I thank you all.

CONSTANCE LINDSAY S K I N N E R : W R I T I N G ON THE F R O N T I E R

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER ONE

Writing on the Frontier

On Constance Lindsay Skinner's death in New York City in 1939, Time magazine described her as a 'novelist, historian, journalist' who 'wrote mostly of frontier life.'1 The assessment was apt and caught the essence of the woman. Hers was a writing life. She lived to write, and she wrote to live. In doing so, she drew repeatedly on the British Columbia frontier of her childhood, and even more so on the frontiers of the imagination. All her life, Constance Lindsay Skinner engaged the frontier. She made a living as a writer at a time when few men, even fewer women, managed the feat. Her capacity to do so during the first four decades of the twentieth century, mostly in New York City, was based on a certain talent, but it also grew out of a fierce determination that never quailed. In her view, it was to write 'wherefore came I into this world/ She embodied a self-confidence that viewed rejection as only a temporary setback. During a mid-life crisis, she reiterated the outlook that sustained her. 'If I can keep on living long enough I'll win.' Years later, she was no less committed. 'Writing, to me, is not something one does, but experience, a way of living/ 2 Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing life had three bases. The first was the aura of authenticity she possessed by virtue of her origins on the British Columbia frontier or, as Time magazine put it, in 'the Canadian wilds/ Born into one of the first newcomer families in British Columbia, she spent her childhood in the remote Cariboo region of the central interior. Writing to an Ontario contemporary, Constance stressed how 'I am a western Canadian by birth & upbringing, ... that my parents & grandparents were BC pioneers/3 Because she left the province as a young woman, before its population mushroomed and its character changed dramatically, she retained a view of the frontier that was increasingly removed from, and unburdened by, a changing reality. Therein lay much of the appeal. Whatever the setting

4 Constance Lindsay Skinner of her writing - it might be Tennessee or New England, the better to appeal to American readers - she drew on her British Columbian origins. Her frontier inheritance was safely contained within her, buttressed by its relics decorating the walls of her New York apartment. During a period when most women writers lacked the scholarly qualifications paraded by their male counterparts, Constance possessed credentials drawn from experience that she exploited, time and again, to good effect. The second basis for Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing life was a facility at writing, not just well enough to get published but rapidly enough in enough different genres to survive financially. A friend from her twenties described 'the words running down your pen-handle tumbling in ecstasy on your writing-pad, joying in liberty, new from your brain.' About two and a half million of her words reached publication. Constance began as a journalist, became a playwright, poet, short-story writer, and novelist, was a historian for a time, wrote young people's adventures, and eventually was something of everything, including editor of a monograph series. She possessed the capacity to respond to market forces. Early on, Constance found a writing formula that worked for her, whatever the genre, one that she recommended to others. The way to learn to write is to write. Start something and finish it; then put it away for a day or so, till the thrill of achievement has gone off; and then read it slowly and critically, silently, and aloud, and be harsh with yourself, and never satisfied.'4 Constance wielded a ready pen. The third, and very important, basis to Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing life was a willingness to subordinate the private woman to the writer. 'I dwell alone and free' ended one of her poems. Constance wanted love and affection as much as we all do by virtue of being human, but not at the cost of surrendering her determination to have a writing life. 'I walk my own track in life & no mere male can bump me off it,' she told her mother on turning thirty. Constance's engagement with the frontier gave the principal motif to her life as a woman, just as it did to her career as a writer. In searching for intimacy, she sought heroes who awoke in her the same qualities that she brought to life with her pen, lamenting just after her fiftieth birthday how the 'he-man' of the frontier had become extinct. Constance never flinched from the bargain that she had made in order to have a writing life. To be able to revere manhood in a concrete form is the essential thing to me. With that image in my mind I can live alone more than content.' She traded away intimacy when the choice had to be made and took pride in 'the good name I've guarded so carefully through all these years of work and struggle.'5

Writing on the Frontier 5

Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing life got her to the edge of fame, but no closer. She was repeatedly reminded what success felt and tasted like. The young Constance knew popular writer Jack London and was mentored by celebrated stage actress Helena Modjeska. Constance beat out Ezra Pound's protege T.S. Eliot and his first published poem, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' for a prestigious prize awarded by Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine. Constance's inclusion in an anthology of Aboriginal poetry gave her pride of place over poets and ethnographers Alice Corbin Henderson, Mary Austin, Natalie Curtis, and Alice Fletcher. Constance shaped frontier historian Herbert Eugene Bolton's best-known work, The Spanish Borderlands, and she corresponded with Frederick Jackson Turner, who is said to have shared more of his frontier childhood with her than with anyone else. She dallied with Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, but, as with others of her acquaintance, it was he, and fellow writers like Cornelia Meigs and Margaret Mitchell, who reached the heights as she looked on from the foothills. Constance Lindsay Skinner was to some extent caught in an impossible dilemma. 'It is necessary to have backing for an art career & / wish to Heaven I had even a little such help,' she reflected in a rare moment of candour. Unlike numerous other women and men who sought a writing life, Constance did not have a fallback position. There was no family money, no spouse, no patron to smooth over the rough patches. Nor did she have the higher education that permitted various of her contemporaries, increasingly female as well as male, to teach on a full- or part-time basis as a complement to their writing. Having to support herself by herself, Constance always had to direct her energies to the marketplace. As recalled by her longtime editor at Macmillan, 'earning her living by her pen alone, [Constance] was always writing against time, always being pressed to keep a date-line, often worried about money.'6 The very facility that made it possible for Constance to have a writing life, at a time when few others were able to do so, worked against her ever producing a carefully honed, widely acclaimed masterpiece or achieving broad recognition in a single genre. Whether or not she possessed the ability to do so, she did not have the leisure to maximize the possibility of reaching that goal. Constance never experienced any single moment of greatness. From a Canadian perspective, Constance Lindsay Skinner was also disadvantaged in the search for fame by her border crossing. Her four decades of residence in the United States were, in her view, compelled. Literary historians agree that 'only the barest handful of Canadian writers made a good living from their work.'7 Women, in particular, wrote 'with little hope for

6

Constance Lindsay Skinner

financial reward/ according to literary critic Carole Gerson, 'in many cases, paying the cost themselves' of publication. Markets in the United States were far more lucrative than in Canada. Constance once explained, 'Alas! Canada has, as yet, failed to provide a market for her writers; and writers must live - at least we think we must!' The strategy paid off. A year before Constance's death, a British Columbia cousin who spent her married life in England mused, 'I remember a photo mother had of you which was very beautiful taken I think just before you went to California - you have stayed in the United States ever since & had a very much more interesting & full life than Vancouver or Victoria could supply.'9 Constance did not consider she had abandoned the province and country of her birth. She never lost sight of whence she came and, during the early twentieth century, likely brought British Columbia to the attention of more Americans than any other single person of her generation. Everyone who knew her, or knew about her, also got to know about British Columbia. Helena Modjeska was so entranced that, when she performed in Vancouver, she drove about the city in order to 'imagine I see you walking in some of the streets.' Having received a 'kind and stimulating letter' from Constance, American historian John Truslow Adams quipped in reply, 'British Columbia sounds delightful but is it not - considering the population in general rather an unusual colony?' The biographical note in a 'new poetry' anthology edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson emphasized that 'much of her childhood and youth was passed in close contact with the British Columbian Indian tribes.' Short months before her death, Constance described to her literary agent how 'I got my blessed birth in the British Columbian wilderness, and a heritage of beauty and largeness which no turn of fortune can take from me.'10 Constance's identification with British Columbia and Canada did not translate into recognition as a Canadian writer. Part of the silence has to do with her place of birth. Every nation acquires a canon, a set of writings and authors promoted by critics, academics, and anthologists as 'great literature.' The process of inclusion, and exclusion, is not neutral. Gender, class, race, and sexual orientation all play a role, as do taste, affinity, and personal acquaintance. Critic Dermot McCarthy contends that 'Canadian literary history, from the first anthologies, has been obsessed with the "single central subject or theme" of national identity, ... endlessly repeating the same story to itself, moving the same or similar canonic units like chess pieces in an irresolvable stalemate.'11 As Robert Lecker puts it, 'every time literary critics address Canadian literature, they also imagine the country.'12 British Columbia, during Constance's lifetime, was a very long way away from

Writing on the Frontier 7 central Canada, whose much larger, longer-settled population determined it would have charge of the literary game. Constance refused to pander to Canada's canon brokers, either as a young woman still in British Columbia or later in life. In 1924 she so deeply offended the literary editor of Toronto's Saturday Night magazine, by reviewing critically in a New York newspaper three of his favoured Canadian writers, that he vowed revenge. When 'her "Canadian" book [comes out,] I have a fancy that I shall be very mean and dirty and low in my review.'1 Whether or not such influences were at work, her books with a Canadian setting, as well as her other publications, were virtually ignored in the country of her birth. Later critics have followed suit; hence, her exclusion from anthologies and histories of Canadian writing, including the 1,200-page Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, now in its second edition.14 Another part of the silence has to do with gender. Even when women of Constance's generation persisted in getting themselves published, theirs was what Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMullen, and Elizabeth Waterston have termed a 'literary half-life.' Until very recently in Canada, the canon has reflected male assumptions about what merits inclusion. 'The academy itself in the early twentieth century - teachers, editors, and reviewers - was an all-male group, unable to see or appreciate the language, concerns, and structures of women's writing.'15 Fellow poet Florence Livesay lamented to Constance how T wish Canadians knew your poetry better than they do.' Writing from Toronto, Livesay was furious how, in a recent Canadian literary publication, 'there are only five women included!'16 Four years later, American publisher H.W. Wilson came out with a biographical guide entitled Living Authors, whereupon the self-styled guardian of literary Canada, Canadian Bookman, waxed indignant. 'Canadian readers will be shocked to learn that the only ones included to represent Canada are Mazo de la Roche, Morley Callaghan, Constance Lindsay Skinner and Isabel Paterson.' Three of the four were women; by comparison, all but two of the seventeen 'wellknown authors' whom Canadian Bookman wanted included were men.17 To the extent Constance Lindsay Skinner edged toward fame, it was in the United States. Americans have in general been less concerned with border crossing. They have simply co-opted those who speak their language. When Constance's short story 'The Dew on the Fleece' was selected for inclusion in O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories, 'written by Americans and published in American magazines/ no one queried her eligibility for the prestigious honour.18 It was simply assumed that she qualified by virtue of her living in New York and setting her winning story in smalltown Indiana.

8

Constance Lindsay Skinner

Few British Columbian and Canadian writers have endured so well in the United States as has Constance Lindsay Skinner. The scholarly biographical dictionary Notable American Women, 1607-1950 contains some 1,300 women who achieved 'distinction in their own right of more than local significance/ and includes her alongside 25 'Historians' and 67 other 'Authors' of the years 1900-50.19 She turns up in American National Biography, published in 1999 as the successor to the Dictionary of American Biography.20 Its two dozen volumes contain some 17,000 men and women deemed the most 'significant' by virtue of their achievement, fame, or influence on the course of the history of the United States over the past four centuries. Only 30 other women were born in Canada, as were about 180 men. Constance merits inclusion thrice, as fiction writer, poet, and historian. In the first category, she joins fewer than 700 others, about 240 of them women. She is one of 475 poets, of whom about 130 are women. Some 300 historians are included, less than 40 of them women.21 Constance Lindsay Skinner remains part of the American literary canon. Given the silence in Canada, it is not surprising that Constance Lindsay Skinner entered my life through a side door. I did not search her out, nor would I have reason for doing so, not being a literary scholar. Her Red Willows sat on a shelf in the University of British Columbia Library next to a book I came to find. Intrigued by the title, I had a look. A puzzle formed in my mind as I scanned the pages. How was it that a novel could have been published in New York at the end of the roaring twenties, with a British Columbian setting and, moreover, considerable understanding of its subject matter, and yet someone like myself who read widely on British Columbia had never heard of the author? Neither had colleagues to whom I proffered her name. I could not find her in any of the Canadian biographical dictionaries or literary histories that I checked over the next several months. It was only on idly chatting at a summer garden party with Carole Gerson of Simon Fraser University, expert on the history of Canadian literature with emphasis on women writers, that I got my first clue. Carole said she had heard of some papers in the New York Public Library. My curiosity awakened, a year later I read through them. The Constance Lindsay Skinner I encountered in the Manuscript and Archives Division of the New York Public Library gave me pause. There she is a name to be reckoned with, assumed to be worth the care that has been lavished on her. I came away convinced that her writing life merited attention, even more so as, over the next several years, I tracked down her publications and located additional correspondence in archives across the United

Writing on the Frontier 9 States and Canada. 22 No complete list of her publications exists, so far as I am aware, and those included in the Bibliography of the present volume must be considered only part, if a major part, of the whole.23 The private woman who was Constance Lindsay Skinner survives in snatches. She lived for herself and her talent at a time when it was extremely difficult for any woman to do so, and she was as concerned to sculpt her legacy as she was to control her life. 'My feet never leave the ground, but my head is where it was meant to be - as high in free air as I can lift it.' She liked to claim she had 'no personal life/ A woman invited to her Manhattan apartment was awed 'by your own lonely and beautiful efforts - for every artist must go a solitary way - even though in a crowded mart/ At her death, American historian Henry Steele Commager, who knew her well, wrote that 'all of her life she was something of a lone wolf, independent and even remote/ Decades later, Constance's last publisher still remembered how, 'seemingly outgoing with all of us, she nevertheless kept herself strictly under wraps.... Constance Lindsay Skinner was almost impossible to get to know, and now after all these years she remains just that/ She culled her personal papers when she moved addresses. With her mother's death in 1925, Constance acquired family materials which, left in a basement storeroom, 'suffered from the seeping of furnace dust or ashes & oil smear/ Sometime later, Constance experienced 'the roof breaking & leaking all over my papers/ She increasingly relied on the telephone. 'Your letter reached me here, and I've had a telephone talk with publisher/ Another time, Til try to get you by phone on Thursday/ 24 Much of Constance Lindsay Skinner's personal life, such as it was, remains in the shadows. On the other hand, Constance did not intend that her surviving papers should end up in the New York Public Library. This alone gives them a certain honesty. Her publisher took the initiative, on her sudden and unexpected death in 1939, to ensure that 'all of Miss Skinner's papers, including manuscripts, bank statements and a great deal of her correspondence, was placed by the Public Administrator in the custody of the New York Public Library for sorting and safekeeping/ It is entirely appropriate that they should have gone there, for the library was integral to Constance's writing life. 'I have to be at the 42nd Library today & Thursday so can't be home here in the afternoon to let you in.'25 I am not a literary critic. I do not possess the capacity, or the inclination, to appraise the literary merits of Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing. She may or may not have been a great writer. That is not my concern. My interest is, rather, with Constance Lindsay Skinner's life as a writer and with

10

Constance Lindsay Skinner

how her life and her writing intersected, intertwined, and, over time, became one. For that reason, I have used her first name in the text, preferred her own words where she has something to tell us, and, so far as I am able, written about her whole life. My argument is a simple one. The life of the imagination cannot be separated from the life of everyday. We think, we dream, we write, based on who we are and which experiences have come our way. As literary critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar remind us in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, our task is to 'reimagine the author as a gendered human being whose text reflects key cultural conditions.'26 Hilary Fraser and R.S. White make a similar point. 'No matter how we may attempt to escape the confines of our personal, historical locations, we shall always, despite ourselves perhaps, reveal the preoccupations, anxieties and confidences of our debates and disputes from the time we live in/ 27 It is from this perspective that Clarence Karr describes how five wellknown Canadian writers of the same time period as Constance each 'brought the experience of their life to their fiction.'28 Constance's preoccupation with the frontier was both individual and emblematic of her generation. It was, as Susan Cummins Miller has pointed out, a favoured theme of many women writers of the time.29 They each depicted the frontier, as did Constance, on the basis of their own experiences, aspirations, and ambitions, but also out of a common context. For a good two centuries, by the time of Constance's birth, Europeans had been determined to occupy as much as possible of the world with the supposed goal of 'civilizing' indigenous peoples into Christianity, while at the same time exploiting them for economic advantage. They did so firmly convinced in their own superiority, a conviction based on religious dogma and also on their paler skin colour, which they increasingly equated with racial superiority. To the extent local peoples did not take kindly to being colonized, contact zones or borderlands came into being. There the winners and the losers had not yet quite been determined, however inevitable the outcome might have appeared to the colonizers. Firmly grounded in her own formative experiences, Constance's frontiers changed their location without altering their essence as sites of encounter where persons willing to take a chance on the unknown had a greater possibility to achieve their goals than they did in settled locations where a single set of understandings were firmly in place. In writing on the frontier, Constance repeatedly reflected on the borders that could and could not be crossed, and about the potential in the new hybrid, or mixed-race, forms of identity that frontiers made possible. Gender assumptions ensured that most colonizers were male. These men some-

Writing on the Frontier 11 times engaged in sexual dalliances or longer-term unions with local women, whose darker skin tones ensured that offspring would occupy a middling or liminal position. Historically on the frontier, persons of mixed race were so denigrated that the word Constance and most of her contemporaries used to describe them, 'halfbreed/ continues to have a strong pejorative connotation. The French alternative of 'metis' assumes Canadian Prairie, if not also paternal French-Canadian, origins. An alternative term is 'hybrid/ whose narrow meaning has to do with the biology of crossing plant or animal species, and its broader, more recent use, as described by Robert Young and others, with cultural interaction.30 While similarly implicated by past usage, the language of hybridity has advantages, even over such blander alternatives as mixed race, in combining the historical stigma of racial impurity with the potential in a hardier variety. The word captures Constance's own sense of ambivalence. The context in which Constance wrote was informed by gender as well as by race. As Fraser and White sum up about women writers of her time, and also subsequently, 'the literary genres available to them are typically gendered male/31 'Gender helps to form all aspects of the literary experience and system/ Penny Boumelha explains. 'Being, or becoming, an author is a process in which gender differences and conventions, operate at many levels ... Such matters as male pseudonyms, the issues of professionalism and access to publication, and the different opportunities for education are all traversed by (though not only by) gender/32 Gender also played out in the personal lives of women writers of Constance's generation. Elizabeth Ammons describes in her study of Constance's American contemporaries how they 'floated between a past they wished to leave (sometimes ambivalently, sometimes defiantly) and a future that they had not yet gained/ As did Constance, they sought to break with their parents' outlook, for the most part not believing 'that it was either possible or desirable to combine the traditional middle-class role of wife and mother with the role of artist/ The choices women writers made were not easy, nor did they necessarily result in the fulfilment of their ambition. They might well end up, 'in deep, subtle ways, emotionally stranded between worlds' that continued to be shaped by male assumptions about the canon and most everything else.33 In its multiple dimensions, Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing life speaks to generations of others with similar aspirations. Apart from a handful who catch the popular imagination or are lionized by the literary establishment, most persons determined on a writing life through their own resources have followed much the same trajectory as did Constance. Some of the genres in which they and she perforce write - newspaper features,

12

Constance Lindsay Skinner

magazine short stories, and juvenile fiction - rarely leave a legacy. Their very readability makes them suspect, less literary according to the canon than are poetry and 'serious' fiction. We acknowledge these generations of writing lives in reflecting on that of Constance Lindsay Skinner. In middle age, Constance Lindsay Skinner mused how 'the things in my mind, where my real life is lived, are more actual to me by far than any experience of the senses/34 Reality and the imagination intertwined for her, just as they do for all of us. While very few of us have the facility to make our stories end quite so satisfactorily as Constance did, at least on paper, we possess a similar imagination and, like her, want our stories to have happy endings. By understanding how she cobbled together a living based on a ready pen, dogged determination, and hope, we gain a window into ourselves. Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing life is much more than the story of a single person. It speaks to all women, and men, who have through time dared to follow their dreams.

CHAPTER TWO

A British Columbian Inheritance

Constance Lindsay Skinner was born on 9 December 1877 in the Cariboo region of central British Columbia. Hers was a double inheritance. It was not just the location of her birth and childhood but her family background that gave Connie, as she was called when young, deep roots in British Columbia. Her paternal grandfather was one of three farm bailiffs brought out from England in 1852 to the British colony of Vancouver Island. Her maternal grandfather, a Scots businessman, arrived in Victoria at the height of the gold rush that began in 1858. Both families were upper middle class by aspiration and migrated out of economic necessity rather than any desire for a new life. Connie inherited the morality tale that was her family saga and all her life took care not to be publicly associated with their debacles: 'I use my frontier childhood ... because it ties in with the background of my books; but my family history has no place in my work.'1 She understood how difficult it was to take a chance on the unknown, yet how essential it was to do so if newcomer families like the Skinners and the Lindsays were to call British Columbia their home. Constance's paternal grandfather, Thomas James Skinner, failed not once but repeatedly. From a landed Essex family, he had a brief stint with the East India Company before giving it up to marry, perhaps above himself, and to farm. His wife Mary's expectations soon turned sour, Connie once wrote, perhaps with more than a touch of exaggeration: 'She was ... not quite eighteen when she married the heir to vast estates and a large fortune, and twenty-four when she came, a lady without a penny, the wife of a ruined man ... to pioneer the forest land of Vancouver Island.'3 Various family members had already tried the colonies. Now it was Thomas Skinner's turn to retrieve himself and his family, including seven-year-old Robert James, who would become Connie's father.

14 Constance Lindsay Skinner In August 1852, Thomas Skinner signed a fifteen-year agreement with a subsidiary of the London-based Hudson's Bay Company, the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, to become bailiff of one of three farms they were establishing near Fort Victoria.4 The fur trade post was less than a decade old and about as far away as it was possible to get from Britain itself. Vancouver Island had been a British colony for three years, but the status had little meaning. The northwest coast of North America remained remote and forbidding some seventy-five years after the sea voyage of celebrated English captain James Cook brought it to the attention of Britain and the colonizing world. A trade in furs had grown up with local Aboriginal people, first by ship for sea otter skins and then through the establishment of posts, where a variety of pelts were traded for newcomer goods. Posts contained a dozen or so men, most of them cohabiting with local Aboriginal women. While the trader in charge was generally Scots or English, employees came from Quebec, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland. Skinner's decision gave every appearance of being an act of desperation, and likely it was. Hudson's Bay physician John Sebastian Helmcken, who arrived on Vancouver Island two years earlier, described the three farms' bailiffs as 'all gentlemen and ladies, people who had seen better days.' A Skinner daughter recalled in old age how her father 'never told us much about his background or his family, except they were great for wasting money.'5 The Skinner family motto of 'Dum Spero Speiro' (While I breathe I hope) was apt. A daughter recounted how, together with 'a number of family servants and farm laborers, brought from the old home to help in creating a new abode in the Far West,' the Skinners arrived with five children in January 1853. Having survived a six-month voyage, they found themselves relegated to a shack at the edge of Fort Victoria. Blankets divided the family's living quarters from their servants, and it was there that Mary Skinner gave birth a month later to a daughter named Constance after a British naval vessel anchored in the harbour. Connie took pride in how 'I was named for her.'6 The Skinners and the two other bailiff families were meant to turn this remote British enclave into a proper colony by developing agricultural establishments that would sustain newcomer settlement. So as to set a 'civilizing' tone, the three families quickly hived themselves off from the rest of Vancouver Island's several hundred newcomers, their mostly Aboriginal or part-Aboriginal wives, and hybrid offspring. The bailiffs' goal was to create the familiar on the frontier and so turn it toward settlement. All three Puget Sound farms became known for their generous hospitality and lively

A British Columbian Inheritance 15 social life, which included balls, concerts, riding parties, and invitations to dances on the Royal Navy ships that periodically docked nearby. Daughter Mary recalled how 'my mother used to get all her clothes from England [and we] would all be excited over the contents [of] "our box/" A large crinoline was the height of fashion, and her grandmother in England 'sent with it instructions that under no conditions was it to be shortened, but if it were too long, bigger hoops were to be worn under it!' Skinner, who 'liked the smell of the fox and to follow the hounds/ got himself elected representative to the First House of Assembly on Vancouver Island. The Skinner children were, so far as possible, educated privately.7 The family's genteel lifestyle was not much affected by the gold rush that, in 1858, transformed Victoria into a boomtown. It was six years later that Skinner suffered another failure. Hudson's Bay records indicate he went bankrupt and was turfed off the farm. A week before a bankruptcy notice was published in December 1863, Skinner preempted land on the east side of Quamichan Lake in the Cowichan Valley. Located not that far north of Victoria by boat, it was one of the areas on Vancouver Island favoured by genteel British newcomers wanting to farm. The next spring, so Victoria's establishment Colonist newspaper lamented, the Skinners were 'obliged to ... begin life anew in a remote settlement' on 'the outskirts of civilization/ Their furniture was left on the shore covered with carpets until it could be transported piece by piece three miles through the woods to two tents and a log cabin erected in work bees. As a talisman of perseverance, Mary Skinner planted near the crude cabin poppies whose original seeds she had brought from England and propagated at Victoria.8 The social divisions put in place there continued at 'Farleigh,' as the Skinners grandly named their new home. Mary Skinner kept up pretensions, slowly marrying off three of her five daughters to a British naval officer, an English doctor's son who would become provincial premier in 1887, and another Englishman soon elected to the British Columbia legislature. The remaining two daughters, Mary and Emily, remained single, as did one of the three sons.9 Connie took away from her father, Robert, the Skinners' third son, important lessons about social aspirations gone awry. He considered that his ambition had been thwarted by familial obligation. 'My father began as a mere boy to make life for himself; but, through his sense of duty to his parents, allowed their unwisdom to defeat his plans for self-advancement... When he did leave home he thought it too late to prepare for the career he had wished for - the Law.' Young Robert was forced to accept whatever employment would help maintain his parents' lifestyle. 'He did one thing

16 Constance Lindsay Skinner after another that would enable him to send money home. He was not the favorite son, he was only the son who was counted on to defray the extravagances of people who could not harmonize their tastes with their income/ Robert Skinner recounted how he went to work in 1858, at age fourteen, as 'a general utility boy in a wholesale commission store in Victoria/ Nine years later, he joined the Hudson's Bay Company and in 1870 the Fort Kamloops journal noted: 'Mr Robert J Skinner appointed ... in charge of T.R. [Thompson River] District at 1100.00 p annum/ Now a man of some status, Skinner was elected to the 1871 Legislative Council and recalled proudly how 'he voted for confederation' at the time British Columbia was deciding whether or not to join Canada. The official record indicates he was rarely present and, when there, took no active role in the discussion. The absence may be partially explained by Skinner having been dispatched to the Cariboo, where, still a clerk, he took over the trading post at Quesnel, or Quesnelle as it was sometimes spelled.10 Four years earlier, the Hudson's Bay Company had closed their long-standing post of Fort Alexandria in favour of Quesnel. The northern terminus of the new Cariboo Wagon Road linking the coast to the goldfields, Quesnel was a distribution centre for miners and settlers.11 Bob Skinner, as he was known to his friends, met Annie Lindsay in 1876 through a mutual acquaintance. He was thirty-two and ready to settle down. Aged twenty-five, she was just as eager to give up the single state. Her family motto, 'Dure Forte' or 'Endure bravely/ had proven to be just as apt in British Columbia as was that of the Skinner family. Connie once described the Lindsays as 'aristocratic Scotch,' and another time, her mother as the 'daughter of a titled English family/12 The family's actual circumstances were not quite so grand, if nonetheless genteel. Annie Lindsay's mother died when she was three. Her father, Daniel, remarried. A Scots businessman, he 'left his children with his sister in Stirling and opened an import business in Chile/ Connie's papers in the New York Public Library include a letterpress of 675 pages containing his correspondence during 1859-60 for his Bazaar Ingles e Europeau in Santiago. Unfortunately, the first quarter of the book was pasted over by a young Connie, who retitled it 'Vancouver BC Nov. 1898,' and the last three-quarters are virtually illegible because of water damage. According to Connie, 'an earthquake wiped out grandfather's Chilean business and he went to Victoria/ The decision was not entirely the result of chance, so Lindsay later claimed. The ship carrying Anglican missionary William Duncan from England to Vancouver Island in 1857 stopped in Chile, where the young

A British Columbian Inheritance 17 zealot shared with the local businessman a vision of the Pacific Northwest that enticed him there a few years later.13 By the time Daniel Lindsay arrived in 1862, the gold rush had transformed Victoria into a bustling entrepot. Caught up in the euphoria, Lindsay opened the Victoria Crockery and Glass Depot on Fort Street. To his 'well assorted stock of Staffordshire and Glassware, suited for Family and Hotel use/ which he imported from England, Lindsay soon added coal oil, coal oil lamps, and Bibles in ten languages. He quickly established himself among fellow Victorians as 'a gentleman of intelligence and experience/ but laudatory words could not prevent his being undone in the economic downturn that set upon Victoria as the gold rush moderated in 1864. Lindsay tried a partnership with a tradesman experienced with Tainting, Glazing, Paper Hanging, Bell Hanging, Upholstery, etc., etc./ but by the spring of 1865 he was forced out of business altogether. In an ironic twist, Lindsay got himself appointed official assignee in bankruptcy operations, which position he supplemented by offering his services as an accountant.14 Annie Lindsay and her two brothers had passed an unhappy decade in Scotland being 'educated in all the rigors of old-time Presbyterianism' before their father, settled in Victoria with a second family, sent for them. During the long sea voyage, Annie's great comfort was a little hardwood trunk. As Connie later evoked, it 'held all of my mother's earthly possessions when it crossed the seas with her from Scotland - a little girl of twelve - she and her brass nailed trunk in care of the captain of a sailing ship bound for the town of Victoria in British Columbia.'15 The three children did not fare much better on Vancouver Island than in Scotland, for 'the Lindsays were painfully poor.' Lindsay's assignee position, 'a principal means of support for my large family/ paid only a percentage of bankrupt estates. He lobbied for a salaried government job to maintain his 'family of seven children/ but to no avail. So in 1868 Lindsay abandoned Victoria for a land pre-emption also in the Cowichan Valley. The family 'lived in a little holding in the forest, miles from any living soul/ and Connie later wrote how 'my mother would tell the other children fairy and bible stories to give them courage and to restore her own.' There was even, from Annie's perspective, the proverbial stepmother, who 'had an unfortunate habit of nagging everybody within reach.' That may not have been all. A man who as a child knew Daniel Lindsay recalled: T fancy he was "dour." Anyway I was always rather afraid of him.'16 Just as had Bob Skinner, Annie and her two brothers were expected to sustain their family's social aspirations. To avoid doing so, one brother, 'before he was twelve ... ran away to sea/ His siblings also looked for escape

18 Constance Lindsay Skinner and read the newspapers 'filled with tales of life and adventure in the rich Cariboo goldfields far to the north/ Annie 'clipped the exciting tales from the newspaper and stored them in her trunk/ As later explained by Connie, based on what her mother told her: 'Already worn out with work and privations and the home atmosphere, at age eighteen she took charge of the district school [at Metchosin] near Victoria, and for two years supported her parents and the four step-brothers and sisters and herself on her salary of $50 per month/ Annie was freed when, in 1875, her father landed a job as a customs officer and the Lindsays returned to Victoria. Annie followed her dream. Gathering together her possessions in the trunk that had come with her around the Horn, she joined her brother, now postmaster and telegraph operator at the gold rush boomtown of Stanley, not far from Quesnel, where Bob Skinner was posted. At first she taught school, then learned telegraphy from her brother, and for a time served as the local operator under his supervision.17 Annie's departure from the classroom did not signal a retreat from intellectual pursuits. A man who met Annie when he was a child recalled for Connie how from the time her mother went to the Cariboo she listened to what others had to say. 'I was immensely impressed with your mother's custom of copying into manuscript books what took her fancy ... She met old pioneers who told her stories of the early days. She wrote these stories in little note books with shiny covers and stored them in the trunk of the hundred brass nails/ As Annie got to know Bob Skinner, she added his stories to her trove. 'He told her episodes of his life as a wild horse hunter, as an explorer, as a fur trader - and also many bits of Indian lore - and she wrote these tales in her note books & stored them in the brass-nailed trunk/ 18 The couple's courtship set the tone for their marriage. In every way they were opposites. Connie described her father as 'a tall, well-built man of distinguished appearance and exquisite courtesy of manner; and as broad mentally as the plains he has traversed/ Annie was 'a small woman' and Bob's emotional opposite. 'Very delicate in health and very sensitive, her nerves were pretty thoroughly wrenched before she grew up/ Not only that, according to a man who knew her family well, Annie was 'a lame woman, short leg/ Annie presented herself to her husband within a traditional framework of female fragility and dependence. The lifelong relationship that developed between them was already visible in the correspondence from their courtship. Within a week of his proposal on 23 November 1876, Bob was assuring her, in a letter awash with romantic sentiment, not to worry about finding a job in the interim before their marriage. 'Dearest I cant bear the idea of your going seeking employment at that work of slavery

A British Columbian Inheritance 19

- brave, independent little soul that you be ... if you need it will you not look to me for a little [financial support] now? you know I am sure that you would only be conferring an additional happiness on me by so doing - but please put all thoughts of going away out of your dear little head - will you not dearest/19 It was Bob Skinner who made a home on the frontier for his future wife, not she for him. His elaborate preparations included papering their bedroom and acquiring 'door mats, mirrors and so forth/ Annie must have offered to assist as evidenced by his next letter, for the most part filled with romantic longing. 'No darling I certainly shall not want you to do any sewing or anything else but loving for at the least a month after you call this your home/ As reiterated in another letter a week later, he could hardly wait until 'I can get my arms round you. All that I think about doing and all I have done [is] in the hope of making you a trifle comfortable in your new home/ At the letter's end, 'Oh! for a kiss/20 Robert James Skinner and Annie Lindsay were married at Stanley on 1 February 1877. Their first and only child, named Constance Annie after her maternal aunt and mother, was born on 9 December of the same year at Stanley. As to the location, according to a resident of the day, 'there were no doctors at Quesnelle & there were 3 upp [sic] here/ Referring to the popular American writer, Connie once described Stanley as 'a little Bret Harte town in the gold fields/ 21 Baby Connie came home to a log cabin whose furniture 'had been made on the spot/ She recalled: 'Between them, my parents designed it; my father did the carpentering and my mother upholstered it. Mattresses, pillows, and cushions were stuffed with wild goose and duck feathers. Cretonnes, bright calicoes, and flannels made the coverings. The staves of heavy casks were used for rockers. The log walls, with mud plastered between the round logs, were more or less covered by hangings such as bear, lynx or wolverine skins, caribou heads, pieces of Indian work, and baskets; and screens stood about here and there, made of heavy crimson muslin and ornamented with Christmas cards and the colored pictures from the Christmas issues of various English magazines/ There were 'crimson-baize curtains, the red flowered home manufactured carpet, the many colored book bindings lining the log walls to the ceiling/ Connie described how, during the winter, 'wood fires blaze[d] in Franklin stoves/22 Quesnel, which in Connie's memory 'lay between a stage road, and a wild river/ had economic importance far beyond its size. As a provincial directory dating from her first years explained, 'here furs are collected from

20 Constance Lindsay Skinner a vast surrounding district by the Hudson's Bay Company; this being a central depot.' From its site at the forks of the Fraser and Quesnel Rivers, flat bottom boats moved furs, trade goods, and passengers at least as far north and west as Fort George and Stuart Lake, over three hundred kilometres away. The Skinners' home was at the centre of the action, 'separated from the [Company] 'store' by a fair-sized garden,' so Connie remembered. 'Except for the front of the store, which is bare to the bank and the river, the post buildings and grounds are enclosed in a very tall, strong, picket fence. The cabins of a tiny settlement are scattered about it.' The provincial directory put about one hundred persons in Quesnel. The community contained six other stores, half of them run by Chinese, two hotels and two saloons, two butcher and two blacksmith shops, and '1 Chinese baker's shop.' As evoked by Connie, 'a few whites, chiefly French Canadians, and an equal number of Chinese, comprised the village.'23 Bob Skinner accepted both furs and cash in exchange for a wide variety of goods ranging from guns and ammunition, clothing and household goods, to basic foodstuffs and liquor. Annie later wrote what she called 'a true story' drawn from her notebooks. 'Most of the provisions and also the goods used for trading purposes at the different posts up the river were first shipped to Quesnelle [where] they are stored in large warehouses until the time for starting arrives. They are then taken up the river in boats built especially for the purpose which are towed by a crew of Indians and half castes ... Each man has a broad canvas band, which is worn round one shoulder, across the breast and under the arm on the other side ... The crew of these boats have to walk along narrow trails ... pulling these heavy boats.' The paddlers would, Connie once recalled, sing 'Cree or Carrier melodies; or they may be missionary hymn tunes measured to the paddle strokes,' but most likely 'the songs of old Quebec which the roving voyageur has carried along all Canada's waters.' Another time she evoked how, 'in the camp on the river bank my father sang it ['blow Yee Winds, Heigho!'] lustily, or played it on his flute, to the accompaniment of frenzied fiddles and feet!'24 Some of the furs arrived on pack trains managed by muleteers, many of whom had come north during the gold rush from Mexico or elsewhere in Spanish America. Connie described, in the third person, her childhood response to their arrival. 'The bells of the pack train cut through the hot summer day like a silver knife. Seventy mules with their packs head into the corral and the muleteers begin unloading. She goes in search of Spanish Don, who seems to have no other name ... By and by Spanish Don will dance the jota for her. He will sing Spanish songs, accompanying himself on

A British Columbian Inheritance 21

the fiddle/ Connie recalled 'packs of pungent-smelling furs being carried into the store; scores of Indians in bright blankets stalking about; a tent town rising on the bank; the smell of cook fires; Indian women giving me little presents of beaded moccasins, or a swan's foot made into a pouch, with bead trimmings/ 25 The little frontier world that Bob Skinner oversaw extended from the fur trade into the private sphere. He quickly took charge, not just of his marriage but of Annie as a person. She became 'my own darling little Girlie/ to be cosseted and held dear. Annie and Connie were, he reminded his wife, 'my possessions and do I feel rich that I own you/ He took pride that Annie was 'a more loving and obedient wife' than his brother had. He explained in a letter to Annie: 'A cold hearted unloving woman is something utterly abhorrent and unnatural - after all it is merely selfish egotism the outcome of a weak ill regulated mind strangely lacking in common sense craving after an unenviable notoriety/ 26 Robert James Skinner had no doubt as to woman's nature and woman's role. For all that Annie Skinner acquiesced to her husband's depiction of her, she took no pleasure in Quesnel or in the frontier. Having adopted her husband's more socially prestigious denomination, she played her expected role in the Anglican church by teaching Sunday school, playing the organ, and leading the choir, but that was about it. She wrote down in her little notebooks what she observed, but increasingly sought escape, on the grounds of health. Connie later wrote how 'my mother has been a terrible sufferer of ill health all her life/ Annie's means of getting away was the stagecoach, which ran weekly 'except sometimes in the thick of winter/ By the time Connie was eight, the 'down stage' connected with the Canadian Pacific Railway, which had just been constructed across Canada. 27 Trips to the outside were a regular feature of Connie's early years. In late summer of 1879, when she was about twenty months, Annie took her daughter to visit relatives and acquaintances in Stanley and Barkerville in the hope it would, in her husband's words, do her 'some good/ The next year Annie went off, with Connie in tow, to consult Victoria physician Dr Helmcken for an undisclosed illness and then to see her Skinner in-laws in the Cowichan Valley. Virtually every late summer, Annie took Connie somewhere or other. Connie recalled vividly how Quesnel 'was five days' journey by stage or horseback from the nearest railway station on the way "down country" to civilization/ 28 Bob Skinner's letters written to Annie during her absences were highly conflicted. On the one hand, he fretted whether he would be able, before

22 Constance Lindsay Skinner her return, to hang new wallpaper, caulk the inside of the house between the logs, 'put in new carpet etc/ On the other, he made no pretense of diminished sexual desire. She might embody fragility, but that did not mean he could not strut his stuff. Referring to a female acquaintance whose partner was off to Victoria: 'She will have to postpone her illnesses - it is no use her getting sick when there is no one at hand to rub her - I would offer to only I am afraid you would spoil the sport by wanting to be present and with instructions how it should be done &c &c/ He wrote during one of her many sojourns: 'Annie dear you say you would give all you possess tonight for one loving hug - only to put your head on my shoulders and kiss me again and again - would kisses satisfy you? - they would be to me - as sweet as they undoubtedly are - but the prelude to something sweeter still.' Over time his innuendoes grew bolder. 'I have not commenced flirting with Miss B or any one else yet but as you so kindly recommended that cause for my loneliness me thinks I'll try it - perhaps I may find some remains of the old habit still existing if I search diligently therefore/ When Annie wrote to attempt to persuade her husband to have a maid, Bob agreed, 'provided she was good looking and neither too young nor too old - she might save you doing many things that in your delicate health you are not fit to do carrying the baby & so forth/ 29 Given that the Skinners had no more children, this comment encourages speculation that the list of things that her 'delicate health' precluded extended to sexual relations. Connie's status as a cherished only child may have been the principal link that held her parents together. Her place of honour is caught in her description, written in the third person, of the New Year's Day just after she turned four. For Connie, who got a new coat of 'sky-blue flannel, deep trimmed in ermine/ it was a 'time of reunion and jollification' when people 'come from everywhere now, crossing the thick ice of the rivers in sleds drawn by horses or dogs/ The long-standing tradition in the Hudson's Bay Company was that labourers and all others associated with the trade were invited to celebrate as equals once a year on New Year's Day. 'Everyone from miles around will come to greet the Factor/ Annie Skinner wore 'her best dress of stiff autumn-brown silk that can "stand alone," with antique lace at the neck and wrists, and a small brooch of Scotch pebbles/ She played her expected role well. 'She has already inspected the trays of glasses and cups, the platters of cookies and doughnuts, and the enormous fourtiered fruit cakes frosted as white as the winter world/ 30 Little Connie was very much part of the proceedings. 'Among her iced and gleaming snowmen, snow bears and snow doll's house in the white garden, the small girl tracks about on her incredibly gorgeous snowshoes. Their

A British Columbian Inheritance 23

wooden frames are black and thickly tufted with scarlet, blue, white and yellow wool... there are ermine tails on her leggings and moccasins.' Connie too waited for the guests, 'particularly for Mr. Wing Wee, who is a great man in the Chinese village a bit up the river.' Wing Wee arrived, bearing the anticipated gifts. 'He wears a plum satin coat lined throughout with prime marten skins bought from her father. Now he comes on the run down the road and in at the gate in his sled drawn by two of his servants. He takes her aboard and rides her round the garden! She goes in with him and he gives her firecrackers and ginger and Chinese pictures on crinkily paper.' This was no ordinary guest, in Connie's recollection. 'Mr. Wing Wee is a very rich merchant; and he is overlord, with tribute, of all the Chinese in the Cariboo.' Connie had other favourites from among the men come to pay homage to her parents. The old Frenchman, whom her father calls "Monsieur Le Marquis" ... calls her Mademoiselle. The voyageurs and the Canuck halfbreeds of the fur brigades call her P'tite Ma'm'selle.' Connie never forgot them. Tt is her almost dearest friend, the old canoeman who made her incredibly gorgeous snowshoes ... A son walks on each side of him, a step behind. The Indian wife of the elder son walks behind her husband, with their daughter. "Bo'jour! Bon an, p'tite Mamselle!" ... The Indian woman bears gifts in a basket. She smiles, beckons, discloses thin strips of sun-jellied saskatoons and thicker strips of smoked red salmon. She gives the little girl a small bit of the jelly.' Another time Connie wrote about how, in their annual summer encampment, 'M. Le Marquis ... reads aloud to the voyageurs from the book which he has been writing since long before her birth, about an ogre named Robespierre and a beautiful fairy queen named Marie Antoinette [and] in turn they will repeat the story in Cree to the Indians [and] then an Indian hunter will tell a story about the last bear he killed. Marie Antoinette and the Bear-Killer.' Connie once summed up the world of her childhood as 'a placid frontier.' In recalling the various players, she also revealed the power dynamic. 'A few Whites, a few Indians, a few Chinese - all of them gentle and wellmeaning and dependable (if one did not expect too much) so long as they were not annoyed. They understood one another well enough not to start any trouble/ 31 In her imagination, Connie was 'home-taught and self-educated.' The weekly stage 'brought mails and the London papers, to which my father subscribed.' There were, of course, limitations. 'To be sure, the papers were months old when they reached us: governments had arisen and fallen, wars been fought and the inevitable peace treaties signed, when we received our

24

Constance Lindsay Skinner

first news of them. But what of that? They made reading material for us that year, and next year, for visiting traders from other posts more northerly, where no stage passed; and we were saved from the error of taking the commotions of the "civilized" world too seriously!'32 From the time Connie began to talk at twenty-one months, her parents put her interests first. Bob Skinner made arrangements to get her some first readers. 'At the age of half-past three Life and Books begin in the garden round the log living house ... Mother sits on a blanket on the grass. The little girl sits in her swing suspended from a bough of a Balm of Gilead tree ... Mother reads her favorite stories aloud: Joseph and his Brethren from the Bible, the Baby's Opera and Grimm's Fairy Tales.' Another time Connie wrote: 'I learned my "Three R's" from my mother and a little Latin, music, and French from my father.' Connie recalled writing her first story, a fairy tale, not long after. When she could not spell longer words, she simply put in dashes. 'At seven I wrote my first story, which was merely an imitation of Grimm's fairy tales.' Once begun, Connie did not stop. 'Almost every day she wrote something ... Because she did not like her own rhymes she dropped poetry and began composing dance rhythms and tunes.' A family friend commented to Connie shortly after her mother's death, 'It was in Cariboo, if I mistake not, that your mother certainly, and you too, I think, drank in that inspiration that finds expression in a facile pen.'33 A half century after leaving the Cariboo, Connie gave, in a private letter, one of the most evocative portraits ever of learning on the frontier. 'I can recall a small child scraping the thick frost off the window pane in a far northern log fur trading post, to see the sleds, the huge Hudson-Bay dogs with bells on, swinging in with the mail. Among the packets would be her St Nicholas - sometimes several copies together, in the 5 1/2 months of winter, when mails were delayed. She would still have to wait, until the trader, her father, in his big wolf skin coat - such a big man & such a big coat! - came across the enclosure from the store to the house - & it would take a lot of breathing & scratching on the pane to keep a peephole open so that she could see him coming with her magazine, addressed to her, in his hand. Then the dash to the door, but standing well away from the blast of 40-60° below let in as the door opened & the big Wolfman entered, saying with a delight equal to hers, "Here it is!"'34 The woman who became Constance Lindsay Skinner rarely talked about her formal schooling. An exception was an interview she gave decades later to a boys' magazine. 'My mother taught me to read and write - it was only later that a government school was opened ... In order to have a public school it was necessary to enroll eighteen pupils. They were collected in due course

A British Columbian Inheritance 25

and a young woman of twenty-four arrived to teach them. I was the only pure white child of school years; and there were only a few children of my age or thereabouts of mixed blood. The rest of the pupils were adults - white men who never had a chance to learn the three R's, Chinese, Indians, and half-breeds/ 35 Bob Skinner was among the group of Quesnel residents who attempted, without success, to secure a teacher in the fall of 1882 when Connie was almost five. The school-marm has turned out a bilk - she will not come her "pa" objecting to her trusting herself in a savage land so far from home, so we will have to make another trial trusting that success will crown our efforts.' Success came two years later, when Connie was almost seven. Quesnel's first teacher, Alice Northcott, arrived sitting beside the driver of the BX stage on 4 August 1884. According to Northcott, her first class the next day included, alongside 'Connie Skinner (daughter of the H.B. manager)/ principally the offspring of Company servants. As in Connie's recollection, many of the students were hybrids, having Aboriginal or mixedrace mothers. Alice Northcott's schoolhouse was 'an abandoned store/ The room was sparse. There was a map of Canada and of the world without a single name on either. There were no books to start with/ Children sat at long desks 'facing one another, writing their lessons on slates/36 The only other story to survive from Connie's school days is of a recess fight, when she was seven, between two much older classmates. 'In dashing after a ball, an Indian thrust me out of his way so roughly that I fell. I got up in time to see a Malay [Chinese] boy of about fifteen - his blouse and sandals flapping, pigtail flying, his face black with rage - pull a big knife out of his sleeve and charge after the Indian, who ran in circles rQund the playground on the river bank trying to dodge until he could get to the road. I raced after Ah Sing and grabbed his arm, and reduced him to state of stupefaction by forbidding him to kill the Indian. Then I marched him into the store so that my father could talk to him. After he had learned that knives must not be worn in school, he received a present for his chivalrous intentions toward me/37 No question exists about the power this small child knew she possessed by virtue of being the factor's daughter, and she had no qualms in exercising it. Connie's greatest pleasure was not the one-room school but her father's 'library of some two thousand books which lined the living room of our big log house/ Bob Skinner may not have become the lawyer of his dreams, but, perhaps to compensate, he took great pride in maintaining a rich literary tradition on the frontier. Constance once wrote nostalgically, again in the third person, about taking books to read 'in her blanket tent' under the

26 Constance Lindsay Skinner Balm of Gilead tree where she had swung a few years earlier while listening to her mother. 'She reads the [Ancient] Mariner aloud to her dolls, under the glistening tree/ Bob Skinner regularly added to his collection from listings in publishers' catalogues. Children's books such as Alice through the Looking-Glass and Perrault's Fairy Tales arrived 'on the mule pack train driven by Spanish Don.' A later interview evoked the library's role in Connie's somewhat solitary upbringing: 'The huge log house of the trading post was stacked with books of all sorts, chiefly works of travel, the classics and the poets. The only white child at the post, Miss Skinner had few companions but her parents and library. At seven years of age she was a voracious reader, her taste being chiefly for Milton and Shakespeare and the fairy tales of good Mr. Grimm.'38 Connie claimed her favourite author until the age of twelve was Sir Walter Scott, with William Shakespeare, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Dickens competing for second place. Her surviving correspondence indicates that she read widely among British authors of her father's generation. Much of Connie's education took place outside of the classroom or the library. If she escaped the frontier with her mother, she learned to love it with her father. 'My father liked me to be venturesome.' One day she retreated slowly, and successfully, from a black bear in the raspberry patch, while another time a lynx came within six metres of her and her father. In her memory 'nature was vast, ruggedly beautiful, and calmly powerful about us.' Spring break-up, when the ice cracked in the river, was a special treat. Connie absorbed the lore around the trading post, in the process acquiring attributes that would stand her in good stead for the rest of her life. 'When I was still almost a baby my father began to teach me observation ... My father would take me for long walks and encourage me to think about what we saw en route and to express my little opinions ... We played this game until I became very proficient. I have never stopped playing it. It is almost impossible for me to look at anyone I meet for the first time and not see everything external ... I think, too, that I see below the surface of feature and tint. I see thoughts.' Other times, father and daughter canoed together or visited the voyageurs' annual 'encampment - scores of tents along the river bank.' She once wrote about her father that 'he was my chief, almost my sole, companion during my most impressionable years, for my mother was an invalid much of that time.'39 Connie picked up Chinook from listening to her father at work. It was Bob Skinner she had in mind when, much later in life, she began a novel, never completed, from the perspective of a six-year-old child of the frontier. 'Tyee was her father and, in Chinook which everybody talked on the river,

A British Columbian Inheritance

27

his name meant Chief ... He began to speak rapidly to the other man in the patois of the north woods, the mixture of old French, Indian and English which is called Chinook/ Virtually everyone in British Columbia during these years understood the trade jargon of Chinook, and father and daughter continued to use such words as 'skookum' for 'strength' in their correspondence long after she left British Columbia.40 Connie got to know about 'Siwashes/ the Chinook word for Aboriginal people or Indians. She told the story of how 'an anxious father discovers me about sunset sitting in a red-skinned family circle eating flat bread just baked on the stones.' Another time she wrote about 'very, very old Chief Tsel'is'tah/ who adopted her father when he first came into the Cariboo. To the extent Bob Skinner influenced his daughter's attitudes, he was not complimentary. Writing to his future wife, he described 'a tribe of noble red men attended by several dusky - and I might add dirty - maids of the forest having paid me a visit and monopolized my store for two days to the great offense of my olfactory organs/ His perception of Aboriginal women as objects for newcomer desire is suggested by his aside how 'one rather good looking "girl" with black hair a yard long particularly struck somebody's fancy/41 As Skinner's offhand comments indicate, skin colour gave an easy justification for the activity in which he was engaged. His parents before him had also been agents of the colonizing enterprise in which darker skin tones were equated with an innate inferiority that then justified discriminatory treatment. Despite everyday acquaintance, Aboriginal people had to be treated with disdain for persons like Skinner to explain their presence among them. Robert James Skinner's status rose over time as he was promoted from clerk to junior chief trader in 1879 and to chief trader in 1884. The added responsibility rebounded to his disadvantage when, as newcomer settlement grew, the Hudson's Bay Company's traditional monopoly met increased competition from independent traders. The value of furs traded under Skinner's oversight halved from $21,438 in 1884 to $10,207 two years later. Forced to defend himself, he claimed, in July 1887, that the decline would have been 'far worse under the management of any person, no matter who than my individual self, for without boasting I have no hesitation in saying that it was my personal popularity - with the Indians alone which has retained for the Hudsons Bay Co the greater part of the fur trade done at Quesnelle in the years 85 & 86 - in face of the tremendous odds there have been against me in prices paid & inducements offered by opposition traders/ 42 However much he might protest, Skinner was caught in a difficult situation without much promise for the future.

28

Constance Lindsay Skinner

In the late summer of 1887, when Constance was not quite ten, her family left Quesnel for the provincial capital of Victoria. Bob Skinner may have sought escape from the Hudson's Bay Company's deteriorating economic circumstances in the North; alternatively, he was forced out. Rumours long circulated in the Cariboo that he was 'lazy, never opened the Quesnel store until 10 a.m. - had name of being the 2nd laziest man in Cariboo.' According to Hudson's Bay records, he was dismissed on 24 November 1887 for falsification of accounts, some three months after the family moved to Victoria. He rebounded as a result of family connections, so rumour had it. 'Skinner's sister married Alex Davie Premier hence his pull for timber job in Vancouver.' Skinner's brother-in-law, A.E.B. Davie, had become premier in March 1887, and, whether or not he played a role, the next year Skinner got himself appointed provincial forestry inspector at a salary of $125 a month.43 The Skinner family moved across Georgia Strait from Victoria to the boomtown of Vancouver, terminus of the newly completed Canadian Pacific Railway. Robert Skinner's position gave him a step up in Vancouver's nascent social hierarchy. Joining the Vancouver Cricket Club, he played alongside some of the city's leading professionals and real estate entrepreneurs. Annie discovered social reform, one of the few avenues open to women outside of the home, and quickly became a stalwart of the Girls' Friendly Society and the Young Women's Mutual Improvement Home.44 The family's prepossessing three-storey home at 1227 Robson Street was conveniently located for Connie, about to turn twelve, to attend one of several private schools scattered about the West End, where socially aspiring families lived. At the beginning of 1890 a resourceful Scotswoman who brought her piano with her to Vancouver opened Dunthwaite School, and Connie was among the twenty daughters of prominent families enrolled there. A contemporary who founded a nearby girls' school recalled how Dunthwaite's early students 'sat on apple boxes and coal oil cans.' They learned enough French that Connie could write and speak it passably four decades later. She also, one account claims, became 'a talented and accomplished musician.'45 Three of Constance's exercise books survive from the first half of the 1890s.46 One of them contains more sophisticated versions of the fairy tales that engaged her from her earliest years. A typical beginning ran: 'How long ago I cannot say but indeed it is very long ago that there happened these matters which I am about to relate to you. You must know then that at this time as I have said, so very long ago, it was well known that Heaven was a lady and not a place as recent societies aver.' The other two exercise books are given over to assignments, the practice being for Connie to write a 'com-

A British Columbian Inheritance

29

position' on a designated topic that was then edited or otherwise commented on, sometimes with instructions for it to be rewritten. Many topics were fairly pedestrian, as with 'Christopher Columbus,' 'Henry Wadsworth Longfellow/ and 'Alfred Lord Tennyson' or 'The Eye' and 'The Beaver.' She wrote an essay on 'Feminine Employments' given over to weaving, which drew the comment 'You have not mentioned tatting.' To her cursory treatment of the geography of 'India': 'It would be desirable to read the history of this great Dependency of Great Britain.' Connie used 'Amusements/ in May 1891, to divert from a perfunctory discussion of lacrosse to such 'quiet amusements' as reading. 'Some of our best authors are George Elliot, Miss Mullock, Elizabeth Wetherell, R.D. Blackmore, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott/ which she followed up with a very competent critique of each of their recent works. The next October, Connie acknowledged in an essay on 'Reading Matter' that it now 'consisted more of "Harper's Monthly magazine" & a few novels than of sober minded improving literature.' She reflected: 'I am afraid I am hard to please. I like everybody to be happy & no one to die except the wicked people ... Surely there is enough misery & sin in the world to make people unhappy without putting more of it between two paper or board covers. I like people in books to be a little lively & to keep things going in a gay breezy style.' Whenever she could, Connie evoked a sense of place that was distinctly her own. The Fraser River/ which she was asked to read aloud in class, may have been her earliest description of the fur trade of her childhood. 'The H.B.C. boats ascend it by means of the cordeille, or towing-line, bound over the shoulders of a strong crew. The men, usually half-casts & Indians, have to climb over rocks & cliffs, sometimes clinging to the face of the high banks; & sometimes wading the stream, with the waters to their waists, for hours & even days at a time. The life of the Canadian voyageur is not by any means an easy one; though one would think so to hear him singing & yelling no matter how hard the work.' For an essay on 'Tea' she described a particular species grown 'in the Cowichan district' where her grandparents lived. An assignment on her summer holiday there in 1894 probed her paternal inheritance. 'A great many of the farms are owned by English people who understand their genealogical trees better than they do their orchards or their fields.' In semi-fictional form, Connie pondered why three Cowichan daughters, much like her Skinner aunts, remained unwed. 'They know no gentlemen well; they are not allowed to speak to those they meet at friends' houses. Much less are they permitted to bow to those they encounter in the streets ... Their mother has doomed them to single blessedness, why it would be difficult to tell. Perhaps, as some say, to save the

30

Constance Lindsay Skinner

expense of servants & the trouble of working herself/ Connie described the family's servant Matthew Allard, descended, as indeed he was in real life, from '"one of the best Hudson Bay families," he would tell you/ and from 'an Indian Princess, she was/ Sympathy vied with a ridicule grounded in the racism of the day as in her attribution of his 'peculiarities ... to his Indian extraction/ She described Allard as 'slow, honest, plodding & faithful ... deliberate in mind and body, little thought for today, none for tomorrow, absolutely without ambition to better his circumstances [as] is the Indian/ Allard's hybridity, or mixed race, only made matters worse, for 'very few children of the Indian & white parents are any better than Indians in these particulars/ Whether or not Constance actually took the provincial examination certifying high school completion, the kinds of questions that were asked reflected her years of essay writing: Name three of the chief Anglo-Saxon writers and their works. Name four works of Charles Dickens. Who were the authors of the following: (a) Thanatopsis (b) Pleasures of Hope (c) The Lady of the Lake (d) Hudibras (e) Hiawatha (f) The Deserted Village

Only one out of sixty-some questions on the literature component of the examinations for the years 1891-4 had to do with Canadian literature, and that was: 'Give the name of a Canadian poet/47 High school completion was as far as Constance could go without leaving the province. No opportunity existed in British Columbia for post-secondary education, not even a teachers' training college until the turn of the century. The Skinner family's move to Vancouver did not mean that Connie left the frontier altogether. Both literally and through her writing, parts of it soon followed her to Vancouver. The closest she came to a sibling relationship was with Margaret Alexander, a year or two her senior. Maggie came to live with the Skinners in the fall of 1890 so that she could acquire the social graces denied her in the North. Like Robert Skinner, Maggie's father was a Hudson's Bay officer who had gone on to other things, in his case ranching on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the northern coast of British Columbia. Their remoteness, combined with his wife's death in 1887, made

A British Columbian Inheritance 31 him concerned that his daughter mix 'with educated and refined people.' James Lindsay Alexander had come out from Scotland as a raw eighteenyear-old and had a long series of fur trade adventures that he retailed to his children from time to time. His stepdaughter recalled his telling her that, while at the remote Hudson Bay post of York Factory in the early 1860s, 'it was not unusual to pass under a row of Indians' scalps strung across the trails between high poles/ making it 'unsafe for the inmates of the Fort to venture abroad unless armed.'48 Alexander was transferred to northern British Columbia, and it was there he found himself a wife in Sarah Ogden, whose father headed the post where he was stationed. Maggie's mother, a member of the Pacific Northwest fur trade clan spawned by the legendary Peter Skene Ogden from Anglo-Quebec, was half Aboriginal by descent, making her daughter a 'quarter breed,' in the parlance of the time. Perceptions varied, however, of Maggie's deceased mother. In the 1881 manuscript census, Alexander described her as a 'halfbreed,' but a daughter of Alexander's second wife considered her to have been 'an Indian,' making Maggie the quintessential 'halfbreed' or hybrid.49 The product of a time and place in which the separation of the races was not nearly so fixed as it would become once the frontier gave way to newcomer settlement, Maggie Alexander embodied a biological duality. As with any hybrid, human or organic, she possessed a mixed heritage with the potential to be hardier than either progenitor. Her inheritance was, at the same time, one that many contemporaries found threatening, fearful that Aboriginal descent would win out. Maggie Alexander was described by her father as 'undemonstrative but her love and affection for those she really cares for is very deep and strong.' The two teenage girls grew close, as attested by a family friend's comment to Annie Skinner in the fall of 1891 that 'Connie would never get on without her' and his aside: 'Are Connie & Maggie still as long a time at meals as they used to be?' Not only did they live as sisters, the two attended Dunthwaite together, and, in a school photo, Maggie stood, quite literally, in Connie's shadow. A fellow student explained Maggie's presence among offspring of leading Vancouver families by her being the Skinners' 'adopted daughter.'50 It was from Maggie Alexander that Connie learned about another aspect of the British Columbia frontier. Not far from the Queen Charlottes, where Maggie's father and second family lived, was Anglican missionary William Duncan, whom Connie's grandfather had met in Chile. Duncan first established himself at the fur trade post of Fort Simpson, later moving his flock of Tsimshian converts to the nearby island of Metlakatla. Connie also heard

32

Constance Lindsay Skinner

from Maggie about Duncan's counterpart, Methodist minister Thomas Crosby, who from his base at Fort Simpson just as vigorously pursued Tsimshian souls and, from time to time, made conversion expeditions to the Queen Charlottes. In about 1892, Maggie's father returned to his family home of Tinkerburn' near Edinburgh for a visit. He likely stopped in Vancouver on the way, and Maggie received comparable gifts to the 'small gunmetal pin on watches, all kinds of nice clothing and Scottish heather wool stockings' he brought back to his second family on the north coast.51 The stories that Maggie had to tell must have occupied many an evening together. To what extent the two whispered over Maggie's hybridity, it is impossible to know. Maggie's younger sister later became very ambivalent about their maternal ancestry. Her son recalled how she 'would never admit that we were darkies.' The very possibility of Aboriginal descent acted as a stigma, as in his speculation about Maggie's stepmother that 'I wouldn't be surprised if she's got feathers too.' As to the reasons for this attitude, he speculated that 'the Indians were so far below us, so uncivilized,' that the family did not want to identify with them. Certainly Connie was aware of Maggie's heritage. Much later, she reflected how 'the only sister I ever had, the daughter of dear friends of my parents, who adopted her and brought her up with me, had Indian blood.' Maggie Alexander married a Vancouver accountant in late 1895 while still part of the Skinner household.52 Although she and Connie would remain in touch through the First World War, if not longer, when Maggie's son Theo proudly sent her a large portrait of himself in uniform, in effect Connie once again became an only child. Constance Lindsay Skinner entered adulthood with a diverse British Columbian inheritance. Her grandparentage gave her deep roots in genteel British Columbia going back to the first years of newcomer settlement. Her childhood put her at the cusp between Aboriginal life, the fur trade, and the gold rush. Her time with Maggie Alexander personalized the hybrid experience, the most human of the frontier's manifestations across the colonized world.

CHAPTER THREE

Border Crossing

Connie Skinner had written for as long as she could remember. With Maggie Alexander's departure from the Skinner household, writing became more and more the centre of her life. She later claimed, at a time when she was fudging her age by a couple of years, as women were wont to do in those days: 'I wrote my first story when I was five, and my first novel when I was eleven. At fourteen I wrote the words and music of a three-act operetta for children, which was performed. At sixteen I had published two short stories, written a lot of music (none of it worth anything), and was doing dramatic criticism for one paper, fashion and social gossip for another, and political stuff for a third.'1 The process by which a scribbling Connie became a published Constance with her own byline gives the principal motif to her late adolescence and young adulthood. Border crossing was essential to doing so. One of the earliest finished pieces of writing among Constance Lindsay Skinner's papers in the New York Public Library is the three-act operetta 'In Gelderland.' Described as 'a musical sketch for children,' it was completed when Connie was in her mid-teens to be 'performed by children just a little younger than herself for a charity.' The audience, as reported in a local Vancouver newspaper, included the Canadian governor general, Lord Aberdeen, with his wife and two children. The dialogue is bright and witty, and the music, which was also composed by Miss Skinner, is catchy and very tuneful.' She kept all her life a handful of photographs of 'In Gelderland/ visually a pageant play of the seventeenth century with its dozen parts taken by young girls. She later claimed the operetta was accepted by an English music firm specializing in works for children, which failed before 'In Gelderland' went to press.2

34

Constance Lindsay Skinner

Performance was well and good, but Connie wanted to be published. At first she did not much care who got the credit so long as she made it into print, and she used various pen-names for different reasons. One was not to offend her parents. 'When she was in her teens ... Miss Skinner began submitting her stories under a pen-name to local papers [and] began to get small checks for her contributions, sometimes as much as five dollars.' She often told the story of how her 'first work of fiction' was printed in the Sunday issue of a Vancouver newspaper under a pseudonym. Its impetus likely lay in confidences shared with Maggie. 'Considered risque in those days,' the article was about 'the "worser" whites mingling with the natives along the coast.' 'With heart athrill she listened to a guarded discussion of it by her parents' and asked to see the paper. "No," said her mother kindly ... "It is not the sort of thing I want you to read. You are far too young."'3 A second reason for resorting to a pen-name had to do, not with age, but with gender. Like other women with similar ambitions, Connie was well aware that writing by men got an easier reception. Connie told of sending an editor in Seattle, at about the same point in time, articles signed 'Lindsay Skinner.' The editor, thinking his contributor a man, invited 'him' to go on a hunting trip through the Rockies. She reflected how 'it must have given the editor something of a nervous shock to find the writer of these masculine articles with skirts to her boot tops, hair down her back, and in fact a school girl.'4 She tried out various names - Constance Lindsay, Constant Lindsay, Constant Lindisi, C. Lindsay Skinner, C. Zaylin, a play on Lindsay - before settling on Constance Skinner or, increasingly, Constance Lindsay Skinner. Constance's father fed her ambitions. Conscious of how his career had been stifled, Bob Skinner worked hard to expand his only child's horizons. Whether or not she went with her father, Constance later evoked her 'memory' of an elderly chief on 'the British Columbia Coast.' It was probably Chief Capilano, whom she described as 'the aged chief' on the north shore of Burrard Inlet across from Vancouver. He was 'an old chief, his hair grayed and his broad brown face deeplined by a hundred and ten years, his sightless eyes - almost hidden under sagging crinkled lids.' As Constance recalled him: 'He sat in his doorway - a low oval entrance in the trunk of his totem pole, which towered, with its grotesque carvings of finny and winged beasts, thirty feet into the fine misty rain, that dropped, silent and opaque, on the earthen cliff.'5 In August 1893, as Constance was approaching sixteen, she and her father spent a month travelling through the interior Okanagan Valley, still largely given over to ranching, and to Kootenay towns spawned by hard-

Border Crossing 35 rock mining. The trip, which her father later described as 'so absolutely without care - we had nothing to do - and we did nothing with perfect satisfaction/ was turned to practical use. The summer 1895 issue of what Constance termed 'the leading monthly magazine in Canada' contained a travel article of some 5,500 words written in the first person by 'Constance Lindsay/ 'Through Okanagan and Kootenay' in the Canadian Magazine, published in Toronto, was illustrated with her line drawings.6 Among the Skinner papers are fragile handwritten notes for 'Articles written in British Columbia on the Klondike and other subjects of local interest, 1898.' There is a book of snapshots of a trip to Skagway and the Klondike at the height of the gold rush, when it was drawing men from all over the world. It was an adventure that three decades later brought back a poignant memory of how 'I stood beside the trail one morning and watched them pouring through the gap in the mountains - some on horses, most of them on foot, carrying their blankets and their picks and shovels on their backs.' Her manuscript entitled The Golden Klondike and How to Reach It' advised 'British subjects ... to make use of the All-Canadian Route via the Stikine river' so as to avoid having 'to pay toll to any alien gate-keeper/ in other words, to the United States. The piece was submitted to at least one English magazine, with no indication of whether or not it reached publication. Constance published two feature articles under the pseudonym of C. Zaylin. 'Catching and Packing Salmon' told of a visit with some friends to a cannery near Vancouver. The other, in the Vancouver World newspaper in August 1898 at the height of Klondike fever, was entitled 'Among the Outfitters/ Its content is indicated by its subtitle, 'What Was Seen and Heard by an Observant Lady - Everyday Incidents on the Streets of Vancouver.' The next year, Constance was researching an article on the 'Timber Industries/7 The sole means for an energetic and ambitious young woman such as Constance Skinner to make a living in Vancouver by writing was as a journalist.8 Most newspaper articles have no byline, making it impossible to trace her trajectory. She claimed to have done 'dramatic criticisms' for the World from about 1894, and a letter of reference indicates that 'for several years' she wrote for it on 'social matters/ A third of a century later, an acquaintance reminisced how 'your writings in the World were a delight/ Her entry into the newspaper's pages may have been assisted by the owner's daughter, Geraldine McLagan, being a classmate at Dunthwaite School.9 It was not only the World for which Constance wrote. She later claimed she was 'contributing regularly to three British Columbia papers and a monthly published in Seattle, Wash/ Constance also acted as correspondent

36 Constance Lindsay Skinner 'for weekly journals in other parts of British Columbia' and Washington State. In July 1899 she applied to the editor of Nelson's Economist newspaper, about to become a daily as a result of the Kootenays mining boom, to be its 'Coast correspondent.' She claimed considerable experience. 'I feel pretty capable to undertake something of the kind ...You might try me as a political writer - I can get the news - the inside news - from my old source as before.' In November of the same year, using the byline of 'C. Lindsay Skinner/ she became 'Editor for B.C. of the State Magazine, published in Tacoma Wash.' She explained to a potential contributor that 'it is a new magazine & our wish is to make it the exponent of thought & culture in the West.' Constance spent considerable time in Victoria soliciting articles for a projected 'Special B.C. Number - all articles, stories, verse etc to be on B.C. subjects and by B.C. writers/ She was successful with a number of British Columbians prominent in government circles, only to have the editor renege on the promised special issue.10 Constance wanted more than a writing life cobbled together at an editor's whim. Encountering aspiring Toronto publisher Robert Glasgow in Vancouver in the autumn of 1899, she gave him, for his assessment, four short stories she had written. Two of them, with 'all rights reserved by the author C. Zalin/ survive in the New York Public Library.11 'The Other Mrs. Stimson' mirrors the short stories Constance read in Harper's Monthly and other magazines, but 'Under the Shadow of the Pines (Tales of the West Coast of British Columbia)' was quite a different matter. In it a young 'halfbreed' named less Penniman takes pleasure at having got herself 'a "white" husband,' but soon grows discontented. Whereas 'his love was so great, so conscious of itself, that it made no provision for doubt in her/ she exists at a much more elemental level, as signalled by Constance's description of her dress. 'A frayed dark skirt scarcely reached her feet, which, bare and brown, twinkled through the new grass, and her gaudy cotton blouse left bare her throat and a part of her breast.' Her husband Seth's promise that, when he returns from fishing, he will bring her a new dress from Vancouver, is enough to satisfy her, but only for the moment. They reached their cottage and Jess moved as blithely as her hereditary dawdle permitted about the kitchen getting Seth his dinner, singing; for had she not a "white" husband? and had he not promised her a whole dress of "red an' yaller caliker"?' Left alone at the cannery where they live, Jess is pursued by its owner from Montreal, who considers her 'a fascinating little savage/ 'fine-looking - if she is a siwash.' At first Jess resists his sexual advances, but when he is injured she gives in to his wiles, 'for in such as she, under the stress of emotion forgetting all that Christianity and civilization have taught, the Indian

Border Crossing

37

blood does assert itself and claim its due.' Discovering the situation on his return, Seth is about to kill the cannery owner when Jess steps between the two men. Realizing he is partly to blame for assuming a level of commitment she cannot attain by virtue of her racial inheritance, Seth reconciles with Jess. The response from the male reviewer to which Glasgow sent Constance's four stories gives a sense of the literary scene in Canada. The borders of sensibility Constance crossed in her writing did not appeal. The reviewer granted that the stories were entertaining with a facility to keep characters distinct and make 'living people of them.' The difficulty lay in her not writing as he considered a proper young Canadian woman should. 'Her point of view is rather cynical and blase, as though the whole gamut of life had been run through ... The Author seems to think it necessary to make unfaithfulness in love a piece de resistance in every story.' So far as the reviewer was concerned, Constance's principal defect was, 'put into a nut-shell, insincerity and lack of morals.' He put the blame on British Columbia exceptionalism. This may be the natural style of things at the coast. If so, so much the worse for the Pacific. She should come to Ontario for a time where she will find ideal girls and faithful lovers.' To be told that only by molding herself on Ontarian values could she be published in Canada was not what Constance wanted to hear. Her determination did not falter. Glasgow later reminded her how, when they first met, T did not know much - only enough to see that you had the divine fire.'12 Constance was likely not wholly without experience of the themes she explored in her stories. She was an engaging young woman who knew what she wanted and was willing to tackle the world head-on in order to get it. In her writing, she made teasing references to flirtation and to young men going about smoking cigarettes. She mocked the social ethic of her mother's generation, as in describing a woman being courted by 'a noble young man ... very much interested in my charitable scheme to provide the aged and infirm women of Zanzibar with flannel petticoats.' Her zest comes through in a letter she received much later in life, beginning 'Kla-how-ya Tillicum to Constance Skinner - Connie! for thus you were.' Someone else nostalgically recalled 'the gay late 'nineties, and later, when she lightly tossed aside the hearts and hands of scores of British Columbia's best young men.' Glasgow invited her to visit Toronto, since his wife 'is quite a matchmaker/ although any man 'would need to be a pretty stout fellow (I don't mean corpulent) & a man in every part to keep pace with you/13 One of the men Constance encountered was 'my friend Captain Wainewright' - so she described him in asking an acquaintance to give him a news-

38 Constance Lindsay Skinner paper job, for 'he's pretty hard up/ 'I want you to take care of him for ... he has a brilliant brain/ He may have been the Charles Wainewright who about this time worked at the World newspaper alongside Constance. She confided in her aunt Mary Skinner, who responded on a cautionary note: 'I am very interested in your Capt. & while I like blue eyes to look at more than any others I don't trust them the least little tiny wee bit. So I hope they will turn to grey. Yes dear I do like a man to the manor born & none will compare with Englishmen/ Whatever happened between the two, a decade later Constance reflected bitterly how, 'since one man named Wainewright betrayed my trust and broke my heart I have never been fooled by a man/14 Writing much later, referring perhaps to her dashed hopes for intimacy, Constance described at some length how she came to feel herself trapped in Vancouver. 'Love of truth was so strong in me that I was unable to subscribe to tradition and opinion. The petty social tyrannies of a petty society in a small town were too irksome to be borne. I could not be bound by them/ She suffered the inevitable consequences. 'So I was "talked about" dreadful sin - and caused my mother no end of perturbation and anxiety. I was sure of my right intention. I had a clear conscience. I was not afraid of "what people might say" ... So I persisted in saying and doing what I considered right and let people like or lump it/ If Annie Skinner fretted, her husband saw matters differently. 'My father aided and abetted me in my strife for individuality. He had been cramped in his boyhood and had seen the error of suppression. He would not have me suppressed. He cautioned me often and pointed out possible consequences but did not use authority. My mother, motherlike, was more fearful for me/ As for why Constance acted thus, 'the demand for Freedom is, has always been, the most insistent cry of my being/15 Fate intervened. Late in 1899, Constance became ill while scurrying after contributions to the thwarted British Columbia issue of the Tacoma-based magazine. Her mother described how 'she worked so hard over the matter when in Victoria, going out in all weather that she caught a cold which clung persistently to her after her return home and ended in pneumonia/ In this age before penicillin or sulpha drugs, there was little to do but wait and hope for recovery. Constance described a year later how 'I had to be quiet so much - as still as death - almost in an unconscious state for hours/ She had an epiphany. 'It was then that something came to me - something that had eluded me before/ She came to believe that 'the true things do come to us, silently, making no sign - working from the soul out to the light, and not, from outside/ She realized she had to depend on her own

Border Crossing

39

resources. 'I have ceased to read and study the records of other seekers. What they have attained is theirs — what I shall attain must be mine, individual and personal to me.' Constance later recalled how, thereafter, 'I've had no other protector than my Reason & no discipline but my own.'16 To ensure Constance's recovery, her doctor in Vancouver ordered her 'to California as soon as she was able to go.' The state's milder climate gave far greater possibility for a full return to health than did damp and rainy Vancouver. Sent early in 1900 to her mother's half-sister living in Los Angeles, Constance never looked back.17 Four times Vancouver's size, 100,000 persons lived there.18 Opportunities were far greater for a determined young woman self-confident in her ability to write than they had been so far, or seemed likely to become, in Vancouver. Canadian writers had long been aware that it was necessary, as one of them put it a year earlier, to 'get over the border as soon as you can' and 'shake the dust of Canada from your feet.'19 Aged twenty-two, Constance was ready to strike out on her own. In April 1900 she sought and received an enthusiastic letter of recommendation from the president of the World 'to certify that Miss Skinner is thoroughly competent to undertake any style of correspondence or general newspaper work.' J.C. McLagan had only good to say about his young reporter. 'Miss Skinner is particularly well able to represent any journal in social matters, as she belongs to one of the oldest and most prominent families in this province. Her literary style is good, terse and to the point. Her descriptive work is strong and vivid, and I have every confidence in recommending her for any branch of literary or newspaper work.'20 Armed with her letter of reference, Constance Skinner went job hunting. According to the story she later told: 'She wrote to the Los Angeles Times, making application for a job — and got it. When she appeared, the city editor wanted to send her home. "Because," he said, "the Times does not employ children."' She persuaded the editor to give her a trial and, by the end of the year, had become music and dramatic critic. She would attend a performance, then immediately write the story so as to get it filed in time to make the next day's edition. By the middle of 1901, her reviews appeared in the Times every week or ten days, and she was being reprinted in newspapers across the United States.21 In December 1903 Constance took another chance and hopped over to the growing Hearst chain of newspapers. As she wrote in her letter of resignation to the Times, T have been made a most advantageous offer by the Los Angeles Examiner to become the Dramatic Critic.' She gambled, joining the staff when the newspaper, according to her, 'had been in existence only a

40

Constance Lindsay Skinner

week/22 The Examiner had an earlier form; what changed was its purchase by ambitious newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst in December 1903 as his seventh acquisition.23 Constance gave great credit to Los Angeles Examiner editor Arthur L. Clarke for 'her real start in a literary career/ Under his guidance, she covered theatrical and musical events, wrote poems and short fiction as fillers, and did interviews and feature articles. 'He taught me the fundamentals of good reporting and good writing; the fine points of criticism and the functions of an editor ... Clarke made sure that my work was not standardized. Each news story required a new approach and fresh treatment/ Her reviews appeared as often as every second day during the height of the theatre and music season from November to February and again in May. Constance had her own byline almost as large as the headline, and her own telephone or, as she put it, 'the voice of electricity/ Her critiques could wax enthusiastic '"Divine Sarah" [Bernhardt] Gives Two Wonderful Portrayals of Woman's Great Love' - but she could also find 'nothing to recommend' in a production. Her passion for playwright Henrik Ibsen was matched only by her intense dislike of his contemporary Victorien Sardou. 'The Frenchman's theatric booklets are so shallow that they are nothing but surface - and mud. His language - pseudo-wit and vanity - is a meet vehicle for the vulgarity of his mind. He cares nothing about the actor's art. His object is selfadvertisement/24 Constance's papers contain her press card as an Examiner reporter, suggesting that she valued the experience. A fellow journalist who knew Constance in later life described her as 'one of Hearst's first sob sisters,' the women journalists of early century who initiated the concept of human-interest stories calculated to appeal to the emotions. Journalism was changing, with women being seen by Hearst and other newspaper owners as particularly able to win others' confidence and so get a good story. Constance no longer only reported the news, she also made it, musing later in life how T used to be rather a good interviewer of celebrated persons/ A typical article, headed 'Vibrant, Vital This Soprano,' was accompanied by a photograph captioned 'Mrs. Emma D. Partridge, Soprano Soloist with Innes Band, Talking with Miss Constance Skinner/25 A staff artist went with her on a number of interviews and drew cartoons, sometimes of her interviewees, other times of Constance. Constance's stories often had a cheeky edge. Her subjects, be they visiting performers or their local Los Angeles counterparts, were selected with some care. 'On Thursday afternoon I opened my desk and ranged before mine eyes the portraits of twenty local "performers" ... and cogitated thusly: "Shall I interview No. 1 on 'How It Feels to be the Worst Actress in

Border Crossing

41

Los Angeles?' or No. 5 on 'How I Did Not Become an Actor' or No. 13 on 'How Pitch Has Become Obsolete in Vocal Music'?"' Constance's method of getting a good story was straightforward. 'A face never seen before will flash life's panorama before one in less than fifteen minutes, provided always that one has the opera glasses of sympathy up through which to view it.'26 She put her subjects at ease, perhaps falsely so, by not taking notes, but rather relying on her memory to get the details right. The result could be devastating: 'When Mrs. Scholl learned through a telephone receiver that she was about to be stormed by the intrepid interviewer, she went into a flutter of alarm.' Writing about a plump aging stage actress reduced to character roles: 'I descended upon Miss Andrews one evening last week with the cool determination to ascertain the nature and extent of her secret sorrow and, furthermore, to reveal it to the sentimental public. I found Miss Andrews in despair and dishabille ... I gloated inwardly; for if there is one thing I love more than another it is human woe. A noble and dignified melancholy is an uplifting spectacle - and it makes beautiful "copy/" Even the legendary Sarah Bernhardt did not entirely escape, as with Constance's description of the end of a somewhat strained interview: 'Is it permitted to kiss Madame's hand/ I asked. 'No, no/ said the gracious Sarah, and presented her cheek.

The reprimand grated. Having been admonished by Bernhardt that she did 'not play Ibsen' but favoured Sardou, who had written plays specifically for her, Constance could not resist adding the next day in reviewing her performance: 'There is something sad in this Bernhardt season — the realization that such art and gifts as Sarah's have been so largely devoted to the cheap and contemptible themes of Sardou drama.' 27 A quarter of a century later, Constance explained, in a short story for young people about a Los Angeles cub reporter not unlike herself, that 'what's needed in the newspaper game is a quick wit, plenty of nerve, and a brow of brass.' These characteristics are evident in one of the few anecdotes about these years that Constance told in later life. Spring floods held up celebrated English actress Lily Langtry's train on the way to Los Angeles, and Constance's editor sent her to get an interview even though she was refusing reporters' requests. Constance arrived in early morning at the remote siding where Lily Langtry's private car sat and gave her press card to a reluctant maid. As Constance described two decades later, 'great was her surprise when she was immediately invited within the mysterious precincts

42

Constance Lindsay Skinner

of the car to be met by the lovely Lily in negligee - and, it must be told, curl papers.' The reason lay with Constance's card, which on its reverse gave permission from the mayor of Los Angeles to carry a revolver if necessary. The actress wanted to have sight of a woman comfortable in wielding a gun. In the story she wrote at the time, Constance ensured that readers knew she had got up close and personal. She described how 'the texture of her skin is wonderfully delicate and velvety' and impertinently asked Langtry so that readers did not think she was overawed at having secured access, Ts it very terrible for you when the lines come [to your face] ?'28 The whole point of the exercise was to sell newspapers. Hearst's growing chain was premised on using 'the power of the media to set the national political agenda,' to quote his biographer David Nasaw. 'He personally proclaimed that while other newspapers merely reported the news, his newspapers "made" it.'29 One very small part of this agenda, Constance got a taste of what it meant to be a celebrity, so she later recalled for a fellow journalist. The Los Angeles Examiner, on which she worked for several years, advertised her far and wide. Ash cans were embellished with her words, billboards carried her image; even the gila monsters in the Mojave Desert were urged from the mile posts to "read Constance Skinner in the Examiner." The forests of derricks in the oil belt blazoned her pose, and each new cargo of Japanese and Armenian pickers dumped off in the fruit valleys was greeted by her tattered and smiling lithograph.'30 Border crossing had a personal as well as a public dimension. The young enthusiast, happy to publish under whatever name so long as her writing appeared in print, had become a recognized writer confident in her identity. It was during these same years that the much-favoured daughter became an independent woman. Success was not without personal anguish, whose contours reveal Constance's unswerving determination to have a writing life at a time when young women of her background were meant to be content to await marriage. She left Vancouver very aware of how both 'my parents have lived chiefly for me,' even though tugging her in two different directions.31 For a young unmarried woman to head off on her own, much less an only child, was likely more than almost any turn-of-the-century mother could have borne. So it was with Annie Skinner. As she had done throughout her married life, she lived a contradiction. Outwardly she was becoming a prominent social activist, while inwardly she still wanted others to cosset her. Annie Skinner was now well established in the Vancouver social reform movement, her husband quipping how she was busy with 'YWCA, GFS,

Border Crossing 43

UBA,' and other matters. The Klondike gold rush combined with Vancouver's growth to bring many unattached young women to the city. Annie was at the forefront in finding temporary homes for them and then, in 1897, forming a branch of the Young Women's Christian Association out of the earlier Young Women's Improvement Association. Annie became founding president, being later lauded as 'largely responsible for the foundation of YWCA work in Vancouver.' Her volunteer activity rested on strong moral views. Bob Skinner, ever the tease, was amused by her reaction to his getting tickets to the theatre. Mindful of public opinion, Annie could not countenance the image of, in her words as quoted by him in a letter to Constance, '"the president of the YWCA"' going to the theatre to see girls in '"tights."' In good part through Annie's efforts, the YWCA became closely allied with the British Women's Immigration Society and the Travellers' Aid Society. The first, headquartered in London, had as its goal the 'sending of women and girls to the Colonies of our vast Empire/ while the second met them as they arrived, so that they would not be 'exposed to the greatest peril/ In 1905 the Vancouver YWCA took credit for having 'supplied 250 young women with positions, [and} at the same time our President has found homes for about 50 others/ Annie wrote upwards to a thousand letters a year to young women and their families from around the empire. As well, so her obituary ran, 'for years [she] personally met every boat and train coming to the city, giving aid and guidance to the many girls who came to the Coast, lone and friendless/32 Even as Annie Skinner assisted young women who were away from home, she strove to return her daughter there. Much later in life, Constance mused how 'my mother educated me in fear, she was afraid of everything for me/ Annie endlessly worried, crying at night if a letter did not arrive. As Bob Skinner confided to his daughter, 'I know that if she could have her way you would be here by her side always/ Constance must remember that her mother 'hardly exists outside of sentiment - it colors more or less most women's view of things - with her it is the view/ Constance should not mind what her mother said, her father continued, because she did not intend harm. Write her nice letters and do not touch on troubled subjects. 'I am proud of you my darling and I don't misunderstand your wanting to be independent. I think if you'll remember I always encouraged you to exercise independence of thought/ Following a visit home in 1905, Constance's father urged, virtually begged, her to write as often as possible, if only a postcard, since her mother sees 'all gloom' and needs some brightness. Constance was not repentant, reflecting many years later: 'I suppose it is always hard for mothers to reconcile themselves to their children's different mode

44 Constance Lindsay Skinner of thought [but] I believe, judging from my own life, that young people may think and act as they please/33 If Annie wanted Constance back in Vancouver, Bob Skinner just as energetically encouraged his daughter to stay in California for the sake of her writing life. He was convinced she could not pursue her aspirations in Vancouver. Writing in early spring 1902, by which time Constance had been away for two years, he advised on job possibilities. As for returning home to please her mother: 'I do not think it would be good for you to do so unless there was some definite career for you here - and in your chosen vocation there certainly is not/ Vancouver was still a small town, at least insofar as opportunities existed for ambitious women. 'The girls who have places in newspaper offices - and there are only 2 - and they both in the Province office - are simply cheap clerks. They don't have any writing that needs brain work or literary ability to perform & the outside work as you know is awfully poor - & poorly paid - half a page on Saturday or Sunday @ $2.50 a week. Gossip about society, all paltry vulgar stuff of that sort/ He concluded: 'No dear I do not want you to leave what you have to come home to such as that is - nothing -1 want you - you know I do - but not so - what I do want is that you should make the very most of your chances there/ Constance had, from time to time, been sending stories back to newspapers in Vancouver, for the most part not getting paid for doing so. Her father seconded her decision to cut her links unless they were willing to buy her stories. 'I think you are quite right not to send anything to papers here that they won't pay for - they have no money to pay for anything and they don't need to - they "prig" [English slang for steal] everything they want if they happen to see it - & filch from one another - the World steals all its political news from the [Victoria] Colonist and garbles it to suit its owners' views/34 Bob Skinner won out, because his view agreed with Constance's own strong will, but also because the relationship between father and daughter was stronger than that between mother and daughter. Again and again, he offered tactical advice on how to respond to Annie in ways that would not sacrifice Constance's future, perhaps more accurately the future he envisaged for her. Constance later wrote that it was because her paternal grandparents had so disastrously tried to manage her father's life as a young man that 'he would not allow me to be "managed," but insisted that, at any sacrifice to him and my mother, I must have my own life/ More and more, Bob Skinner saw his daughter as an emanation of himself. Her success became his success. He had never attained the status he sought for himself and continued to fret over his circumstances. His position as provincial forestry inspector embodied an element of patronage that made him vulnerable to

Border Crossing 45 political rumblings. Writing to Constance in 1902, Skinner regretted that he could not visit her in California for lack of money but also out of fear. In his absence, he might 'find a government in power which wants my position for one of their own followers - and then - unless I had a few dollars to fall back upon - things would go mighty hard with us.' Writing to 'My dear kid/ as he called Constance in his letters, Skinner repeatedly gave her the advice he would like to have received at a similar point in his life. 'IndustryEconomy-Integrity - are the way - and there is none other that is not full of pitfalls and miseries - life is like business - and life is a business.'35 Bob Skinner provided not just practical advice but the little financial extras intended to keep his daughter happy in her new life. In January 1902 he admonished 'My dear kid' to use the money he was sending to get her teeth looked after. A few months later, he enclosed a U.S. $5 note to pay for another month's piano rental or to buy something special for herself. In October 1905, when Constance decided to stay in San Francisco for a short while on her return to Los Angeles from her visit home to Vancouver, he sent her $10 to tide her over. A year later, he worried aloud that she was not having the financial success she deserved. His money was sent at some personal sacrifice, for Annie's health continued to draw on his resources. He shared with his daughter how she 'needs some more doctor's care - and I don't suppose that that can be obtained without taking every last cent I have now laid away.'36 Bob Skinner also gave his daughter a continuing link to her frontier inheritance. His obituary recalled his 'remarkably vivid memory,' and characterized him as 'a mine of accurate information and romantic anecdote,' 'a store of invaluable information on the early days of the Far West.' Constance repeatedly sought confirmation of her remembered childhood in her letters to him. After she inquired about what she remembered as a 'California poppy,' he explained: 'The original seed was brought from England by my mother in 1852, planted at Esquimalt and Cowichan - & the flowers we had at Quesnelle were from seed raised at Cowichan.' Another time she asked for the names of Indian tribes and where they lived in British Columbia.37 As time passed and Constance created her own life in Los Angeles, she became less dependent on her father and more willing to trust her inclinations. Annie Skinner visited her daughter in December 1906, and they may have drawn closer. Certainly, there was more to talk about. Annie was so involved in encouraging British girls to immigrate to British Columbia that during her visit her husband had to send on the letters addressed to her from people wanting servants. By this time, if not earlier, Annie Skinner was writing creatively, which created a bond between mother and daughter.

46 Constance Lindsay Skinner Constance had one of her mother's stories typed and tried to find a publisher for it. Another time, she arranged copyright in the United States for a piece of writing, suggesting it was about to be published. Annie Skinner's obituary would assert that her daughter 'inherited many of the gifts of her talented mother.'38 However much Constance's parents might disagree over their only child, they were joined in their anxiety over her sexuality. Annie agonized that her daughter might fall in love with one of the actors at the theatrical performances she regularly attended as a reviewer. Despite his best intentions not to do so, Bob Skinner also fretted. She should have fun and pleasure, but 'don't get hurt.' She must take care of herself since nobody else would. 'You are a wise young woman of discretion - therefore be discreet, be wise - take care of yourself - because if you don't no one else will - men are selfish animals at the best - and pain to them is a little thing compared to the pain that is sometimes wrought by them - some without wishing it - to others - keep those two French words in your mind - "Guardez vous."' After Constance assured him that she was 'not going to fall in love with any of those most agreeable and fascinating impossibles,' he queried, with rare honesty, 'are you one of those who see no heroism except in those who fall.' She should not monopolize anyone but also not let them monopolize her. A lot of men do 'not have in themselves the "skookum" i.e. the strength' needed to persevere. Reflecting notions of masculinity that had earlier found their way into his letters to his wife, Robert Skinner went on to describe an ideal couple. It was an image that would find its way, time and again, into his daughter's writing. 'A man to be really good needs an admixture of the Strong Devil in him - if he has only that of the weak devil he is no good but in neither case should the Devil part be predominant - a woman shouldn't be all angel either, five per cent Satan is just about right and makes everybody happy around her.' Toward the end of her life, Constance wrote of her father that, 'physically, mentally, morally, he remains my standard of a man.'39 Constance's surviving papers provide few, but nonetheless tantalizing, clues to her personal life in California. She was in her twenties, attractive, and ambitious. Many years later, she reflected: 'Then I found myself alone in California, in the least restricted branch of work - the newspaper -1 indulged my desire for freedom to the full. The only ties I had were the rules to report at the office every day at one o'clock and to attend the theater and turn in my copy by 12.30 at night. The rest of my time was generally my own. I was not regarded as a "young lady" with social proprieties demanded of me. I was a worker and my work was the only demand made of me. I did what I chose,

Border Crossing

47

knew whom I chose, went where I chose and with whom I chose/ She smoked, her manuscript poem 'Adieu, Cigarette!' lamenting: A long farewell to all my pleasures White bodied, curved, all luminous and sweet; Adieu, Adieu, ye shall not move me! To shake my resolution do not seek! Well, one more p u f f - j u s t one to prove How sweet! One more! But I will quit - next week!

Constance understood the world of drug addiction, one of her articles describing how 'his halting uncertain step, the grayish color of his skin; his face, which, while it is acutely nervous, remains muscularly still, as though deadened, and above all his blank eyes - all spell morphine.'40 Constance had become a 'new woman' determined to live on her own terms. Over the past decade, the term had become equated with many women's greater desire for independence and access to the public sphere, much as Constance achieved in Los Angeles. Constance gave one of her later short stories a decidedly autobiographical heroine, whose outlook adds to the slim trace that survives of these years. There were some men of another type - not many. In fact, I knew most about them from the work that I did as a reporter. They were the men in other women's life stories, not in mine. And there were women who were mad about them. Almost every day the paper had some such story - a story of people who had thrown away everything for passion. I wrote many of them, because the editor found out that I could get people to tell me things they wouldn't tell other reporters.'41 Among Constance's papers is an album of photographs from her California years of very handsome young men whose names are obliterated apart from a few heroic poses of the young Jack London, who in 1903 became famous as author of The Call of the Wild. A year his junior, Constance interviewed him as a reporter, reviewed his books, and sympathetically covered his public lectures lauding socialism. She may have endeared herself by her refusal to be intimidated by him during their first encounter: Jack London lit a cigarette and looked laughter at me over the end of it... 'I see that you rely entirely upon your imagination. You don't take notes,' said Jack London. 'You might have said memory/ I expostulated.

48

Constance Lindsay Skinner

Jack London smiled the cheerful smile of the man who has scored. 'I shall read you very critically tomorrow morning/ he said, 'and if I find any errors I shall report you.' 'Very well/ I said, 'In that case I shall put in this interview my criticism of your play.' 'Oh, come, come, that would hardly be fair. You know this is only the first rough draft' ... 'It will be the first - and only - draft of this interview that will be published. Remember that and don't criticize a first draft.' Jack London lit a cigarette. 'Suppose we cry pax/ he said.

Throughout her life, Constance valued her friendship with Jack London, whose marriage in 1905 to Charmian Kittredge she closely followed. Not only did she save the postcards that 'Wolf/ as he signed himself, sent her from his Pacific adventures in 1906 and 1907 and subsequently from the home the Londons set up at Glen Ellen south of San Francisco, all her life she kept his photo on the wall of her apartment. 42 The tie between Constance and the Londons was strengthened by her living during 1906 and 1907 in the household of Los Angeles sculptor Jeanie Spring Peet. Her son, reporter and writer Cloudsley Johns, was a friend of London's. There Constance also got to know Johns's younger half-brother, Herbert Heron Peet, who in 1905 had eloped with the daughter of the woman Johns wed the next year.43 For her Christmas present in 1908, Herbert Heron Peet set down in verse for Constance 'the vision of your den ... with the tables piled with pens, and golden manuscripts, and pens, and folded paper, and tobacco jars/ Constance not only smoked, she sometimes rolled her own cigarettes. See, I imagine you Smugly established There, by your work-table, Writing so rapidly! Almost I see the words Running down your pen-handle Tumbling in ecstasy On your writing-pad. Joying in liberty, New from your brain.

Constance's facility at writing rapidly with intensity was already legend.

Border Crossing

49

Of course you will recall that vivid week Of summer (not a seven-day, but just A workman's week), when your unceasing pen Drove down the long sheets of gray paper - got In subtle ways. I will not chide you now. Theft has excuses. Why, who would not steal, If cold gray paper could impress a brain With inspiration of a work like that You wrote in six brief days - or was it five ?

Sunday evenings were given over to conversation, when a group of four or five engaged in 'drifting talk' on topics ranging from 'sacred history' to Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. Constance reflected a few years later how Los Angeles was 'a hot house for brains, and feelings blaze and flourish like its poppyfields/44 Constance and Peet shared a love of the stage: On plays again. I always talk of plays, As well you know. You talk of them yourself. (Are those imported? Thanks, I'd rather not, But smoke yourself, I'll watch you.)

A collaboration between the two was initiated when 'I told you ... the theme I had in mind, which you could write, to please me.' Building on Constance's experience as a dramatic critic and his interest in acting, she and Herbert Heron Peet wrote plays together, with such titles as 'The Vagabond/ The Love Liars/ 'Over the Border/ and The Lady of Gray Gables/ the last two described as four-act romantic comedies.45 Both Jack London and Cloudsley Johns also became role models for Constance by virtue of their publishing, so she wrote about Johns, 'short stories in leading magazines.'46 Their activity may have precipitated her publication of a short story of about 1,600 words, The Home-coming of Marie-Pierre/ under the name of 'C. Lindsay Skinner' in a Los Angeles magazine, Out West, early in 1903. Simpler in plot line than 'Under the Shadow of the Pines/ which she shared with Robert Glasgow while still in Vancouver, the story also centres on a young female hybrid. The daughter of 'a tall blond Frenchman and his little soft-eyed Indian wife/ Marie-Pierre Lepage returns home to the British Columbia north coast after eight years in a convent school to discover that her mother died five years earlier and her father has become a drunkard. As the story ends, she is all alone, being watched by

50 Constance Lindsay Skinner a leering White fisherman, 'silent as a waiting panther.'47 Constance also got one of her early fairy tales, 'Legend of the Moon Baby,' into one of the newspapers for which she wrote, as well as other short pieces of writing.48 Constance also wrote plays on her own. As well as a pressed flower in an envelope received from Jack London, she saved a letter in which he admired an allegorical play of hers about the dangers of sailing around the world. 'In some ways I think "Sea Horror" is the finest thing of yours I have ever read. There is a simple & noble exaltation to it, from the first word to the last.' The letter closed: 'Constance, you're a brick - a fine noble woman. About the noblest I've met in this vale of the world. Wolf.' Constance conceived a biblical play 'David' while living in the Peet household. 'The big roaming studio ... is set round with palms and the sweep and life and shadow of them in the burnished rooms and vast white moons of that allrevealing yet mythic southland had much to do with the writing of David, and with the magic in it.'49 The two most original of Constance's plays returned to the British Columbia frontier of her childhood. 'Ait-zum-ka' used Aboriginal names throughout and called for a completely Aboriginal cast. According to Constance, '"Ait-zum-ka," the lyric drama, was completed & copyrighted in 1903, & its Los Angeles production arranged for.' Where, or if, it appeared is unclear. In any case, Constance soon revised 'Ait-zum-ka' into 'Songs of the Coast-Dwellers/ which she described as 'a poetic drama in one act.'50 'The Birthright,' a four-act play copyrighted in 1906, was a wholly different proposition. Characterized by Constance as 'a British Columbia tragedy' set in the present day, the play wrestled with Aboriginal hybridity much as did her short stories 'Under the Shadow of the Pines' and 'The Home-coming of Marie-Pierre.'51 Like them, 'The Birthright' was almost certainly inspired by confidences shared with Maggie Alexander about her own life and about missionaries like William Duncan and Thomas Crosby whom Maggie knew from her childhood. The play's setting of the Naas River on the British Columbia north coast is not dissimilar from whence Maggie came. Its female protagonist, Precious Conroy, is a missionary couple's adopted daughter just returned from California, where she was educated in the hope of subduing the danger inherent in her hybridity, much as Maggie was sent to live with the Skinners in Vancouver. In 'The Birthright,' Constance stacked the deck to appeal to contemporary fears about Aboriginal people and hybrids.52 In the play's directions, Constance instructed the actress portraying Precious to adopt 'a rapidly noiseless, swinging walk like a panther's.' Early on, a newcomer woman inquires: 'Now, this girl, Precious Conroy - does she show any Indian blood

Border Crossing

51

in her appearance - or in her instincts?' Thereupon, Precious runs into the room dishevelled from being chased by a bear, and this fundamental question seems to have been answered: '"Well, it hasn't taken you long to return to the ways of your ancestors/" Even Precious's adopted mother is forced to acknowledge how 'simply dreadful' it is that 'no matter what one does, the wild blood will show itself The message is clear. Despite Precious being kept ignorant of her hybridity, she is doomed by descent, for 'Indian blood is Indian blood.' Precious is tainted by her 'Birthright,' and hence the play's title. Precious's character and actions serve to absolve those around her from any guilt over their racist attitudes. The action begins when the missionary couple's birth son Dick becomes infatuated with Precious. His father is strongly opposed, for 'to marry a native wife - or a wife in whose veins was the least taint - would be in many cases to make him throw away a brilliant career and his standing in the community.' Dick's mother agrees. Tt sticks out all over her. Haven't we seen it, your father and I - since she came back? It shows in everything she does, everything she says. Her way of sitting, moving, her walk, her very thoughts are Indian.' Learning the truth about her heredity, Precious remonstrates, only to have her adopted mother retort, 'It's in your blood! You're Indian all through.' Dick weakens and Precious accepts her destiny, but not before stabbing Dick to death, thus confirming the dominant society's fear of the imagined hybrid and, as well, the duplicity inherent in the missionary enterprise. Writing and reviewing plays gave Constance access to the notables of the acting world, including the celebrated Polish Shakespearean actress Helena Modjeska. 'It was on Christmas eve of 1903 that I met Madame Modjeska for the first time.'53 A few months earlier, Modjeska, in her early sixties, moved near Los Angeles, possibly more to satisfy her husband's desires than her own.54 Tn the later summer of 1903 we crossed the ocean for the last time, probably, and settled down quietly in our mountain home in California.'55 The meeting with Modjeska grew out of Constance's mandate from the newly established Examiner to find interesting features. Spotting Modjeska dining in a Los Angeles restaurant, she sent in a note and waited in the lobby for her to leave. Later, Modjeska said that Constance looked so disappointed she could not simply pass her by. The two were attracted to each other. Modjeska was a formidable woman still able to mesmerize young and old. Nine years earlier, aspiring writer Willa Cather, then a university student in Nebraska, was similarly caught up, lauding in the local newspaper 'the gentleness and sweetness which make Modjeska universally beloved.' For young Cather, Modjeska was at

52

Constance Lindsay Skinner

one and the same time 'that sweet womanly woman' and 'that great and delicate artist who had done more to raise the standard of the American stage ... than any other actress who ever lived/ Seeing her act in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Gather was rhapsodic. 'One can never forget the sweet womanly delight that steals over Modjeska's Rosalind when she reads those poems hung about in the forest, and that great fainting of hers at the sight of Orlando's blood.' Gather was tantalized by how 'Modjeska, the woman/ retained a privacy making her all the more captivating. 'She is fit for the lofty and heroic impulses which belonged to the days when women were saints and queens.' Four years later, Willa Gather again watched Modjeska perform and, this time, inveigled lunch with her. Now the same age as Constance when she first encountered the actress and a dramatic critic in Pittsburgh much as Constance was in Los Angeles, Gather again swooned. 'When I see her play I can understand how Dante loved Beatrice for a lifetime ... how knights of old died to kiss their mistress' hand ... To step ... into this woman's presence is to enter another world, a world in which the imagination soars ... Ah! The pity of it that this woman must grow old!'56 Whereas Willa Gather never got beyond the public Modjeska, Constance did so. 'I told you once I was not demonstrative but love takes deep roots and I love you,' Modjeska wrote three years after their first encounter. Madame Modjeska, as she was known, took a kind of responsibility for Constance, who in turn wrote laudatory articles and assisted in the preparation of the actress's memoir, published in 1910 shortly after her death. Constance was repeatedly cajoled to visit, and the two women spent considerable time together at Modjeska's self-described 'retreat far from the turmoil of the world,' in effect, a country estate way beyond what Constance would have otherwise been able to experience. 'Arden' was located about twenty-five miles, or forty kilometres, from the nearest town of Santa Ana, and the last half of that distance could be travelled only by horse, but the actress 'did not suffer from lack of society' for she had many 'great many dear friends,' some of whom Constance met while staying there.57 As well as promoting the young Constance Skinner in a setting where connections counted, Helena Modjeska fed her literary ambitions. 'Many thanks for your letter and for the sad beautiful poems.' Another time: 'You are clever and I do so admire and love you/ Modjeska played on the younger woman's aspirations. 'When-oh!-when will you come to the hills of Arden? ... Do not think of my memoirs think only of your own work. You are bound to write a book or a play and make a name for yourself/

Border Crossing

53

Travelling in her private Pullman car to perform in Vancouver, Helena Modjeska promised Constance that she would 'take a drive there and imagine I see you walking in some of the streets - composing your play ... How I wish I could read your play/ She and her husband felt themselves close enough to Constance to meet her parents while there. Another time: 'Your poem is superb ... It is all you and I cried over it. ... I feel every line of it. It speaks to me of you and you only - It is so sad! so sad - sweet dear soul! ...You must be assured that I will work hard to get the poems and the plays to print and on the stage/58 While the older woman did her best to assist her protege to publication, her efforts were unsuccessful. Constance later recalled how 'in 1905 Mme Modjeska went to N.Y & took some of the poems [from the play "Ait-zumka," later "Songs of the Coast-Dwellers"] & the play trying to interest N.Y. eds & managers/ 59 Nothing happened, then or the next year, and Modjeska apologized. 'You have no idea how mortified I feel not to be able to do anything for you/ The play was likely 'The Birthright/ which, according to Constance, the New York producers to whom Modjeska showed it considered 'a little too modern and also too daring in the handling of its original theme/ 60 Over time, a certain coolness grew up in the relationship. Perhaps Modjeska lost her utility, or Constance began to see in her fawning attention the same need for control that her mother possessed in spades. The frequently travelling actress became more admonishing in her letters. 'You said once that you don't like to write short stories, and you also said that you never will write another poem, but perhaps you will change your mind. You would not be the artist you are, if you had no moods ... Fame will come and money too, but I must admit that the road is hard and steep/61 Modjeska's pleas for Constance to visit Arden were increasingly sidestepped. It was Madame Modjeska who gave Constance her later inclination to claim Spanish ancestry, addressing her always as Carmen, possibly because of her dark hair. Interviewed a quarter of a century later, Constance was still reflecting on how 'Modjeska called her Carmen/ Constance saw her as a role model, headlining one of her articles about her, 'Growing old gracefully, each ensuing year adds another jewel in Modjeska's crown of perfect womanhood/ In this press clipping, which she kept to her death, Constance underlined the sentence reading, 'Very feminine this dark little woman with all her greatness/ 'Madame/ as Constance labelled her Modjeska file, was a formative influence. Throughout Constance's life, her portrait complemented that of London on the wall of her apartment. 62

54

Constance Lindsay Skinner

For all intents and purposes, Constance was settled in Los Angeles. Her status in the newspaper world was as high as any woman of the time could expect to attain, certainly far better than had she stayed in Vancouver. She had a coterie of friends and acquaintances. For a 'new woman' on her own, she gave every appearance of doing extremely well. Yet Constance was dissatisfied, expressing to her father in December 1906 her desire to be more appreciated and to have greater financial success.63 At some point, Constance bought property in Los Angeles, but even that did not hold her.64 So when the opportunity came for a better job, Constance took it. In early 1908, she followed her editor, Arthur J. Clarke, to Chicago. Constance became dramatic critic for the Evening American, founded by Hearst at the turn of the century.65 Almost two million in population, Chicago was big and brawling compared with the more modest and sedate Los Angeles. A major shipping and meat-packing centre, it was noted for its stockyards and large numbers of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The postcards Constance sent home underlined her curiosity about Chicago, even though it was, she reported, very expensive to live there. Her everyday life was, for the most part, an extension of her job. 'One day is so like another in this business of mine. I go to the office, doing work, come back to the Hotel Morrison, eat, go to the theater, then the office again - then "home" to bed/ Later, she recalled how, 'first in Los Angeles, then in Chicago - I wrote about a column a day and several columns for the Sunday paper.'66 Most hotels were concentrated in the central business district, nicknamed the Loop for the streetcar turnaround predating the elevated train that now circles the downtown. Constance moved from the Hotel Morrison to the Bismark and then the Plaza before getting herself an apartment at 458 Fullerton Parkway, located in a fashionable residential area to the north.67 The only hint of a social life comes from a short story written a dozen years later in which the female protagonist, nicknamed Clarence, is a Chicago newspaper reporter, like Constance, 'twenty-nine years' old with 'lots of hair; dark, foreign-looking' but of 'first-class' English descent. She prefers 'afternoon coffee and muffins,' even though 'it ought, racially, to have been tea, but Clarence had sojourned in southern California where a distinguished European element gives coffee the lead.' A fellow reporter who is smitten with her - 'I wanted all there was of her' - recalls how, 'when they raised her pay, she bought a spirit lamp and a percolator, and we used to have it in her rooms in the Ritz Hotel' in late afternoon or early evening. Constance depicts Clarence as a good reporter: 'She was quick, observant,

Border Crossing 55 could write good English and write it fast, and she had the news sense that seized on the meat of a story, and she was a glutton for work and harmonious to have around/ The reason for the austere lifestyle is that, despite her talents, Clarence is forced to work doubly hard at the job, for it is her boss's 'opinion women had no right in a newspaper office/ At one point in the story, he orders her 'to find that temptress and get an interview with her and turn it in in time for the three o'clock edition or kiss her job good-by/68 Bob Skinner's reaction to his daughter's move to Chicago underlines the distance that had grown up over time between father and daughter. Almost pathetically grateful for a letter that reached him on his sixty-fourth birthday in March 1908, he was more critical than he had ever been in the past toward his only child. Her Chicago newspaper was not as good as its Los Angeles predecessor. Now she was even writing about minstrel shows! 'I noticed as mother did that your pieces are not always such literary gems as they used to be in Los Angeles but I can quite understand that you have first to write for a different class of people generally & that when you have compelled them to "discover" you - as I am sure you will - you will lead them to [new] heights/ All the same, he continued to support his daughter, sending her $25 on top of another $25 dispatched very recently.69 Constance's rapprochement with her mother is indicated by two long intimate letters written after moving to Chicago. In them Constance reflected at length on her personal life and the difficulties of being a woman on her own. The philosophy that sustained her, and would do so throughout her life, was apparent in her assurance to her mother. T can still say my oldtime brief prayer before I go to sleep each night. "My conscience is clear - I have done no wrong to man or woman or to myself this day." As long as I can say that I can look myself in the face. That is the important thing, isn't it? - to live rightly & openly by one's own conscience. We stand or fall to ourselves and to God only/70 Constance took care to reassure her mother that the struggle to make a living had brought the rewards she sought. T wish you could see my life & know how good it has all been for me. It has broadened my outlook and made a real woman of me. It has been the best life possible for me. It has made me know & understand - and that was always what I wanted/ In the second letter, Constance made the same point a bit differently. T would not give up the past ten years & what they have taught me - not for a kingdom/71 Now turned thirty, Constance had not fulfilled the usual expectation for a daughter of her day, even one who made a living on her own, that she would eventually retreat into marriage. She acknowledged to her mother the existence of such a goal, but put it into perspective. T wish you could see

56 Constance Lindsay Skinner that you have no cause to worry about me; and that I am not weaned away from you just because my life has not been what you wish. It is the life God chose for me and it has been good for me. I can say that honestly though it has had none of the great happiness that every true woman longs for. It has given what I needed more than happiness - knowledge & work.'72 Constance added one of the rare tantalizing hints that survive concerning her sexuality during her newspaper years. 'Because I amuse myself with a man or with men don't be alarmed about me. Had I been going to shipwreck myself I'd have done it long ago. I had chances enough/ She knew how to protect herself. 'Don't be alarmed about my getting into divorce suits. I never flirt with married men, even though they are the only safe men to flirt with - they can't afford to talk! I have no illusions about men. I've known too many of them.' Her parents simply had to trust her: 'Dad knows & he can tell you that underneath all my temperament there is a bedrock of granite. I walk my own track in life & no mere male can bump me off it. I know too much to put myself into a hole that hasn't another exit.' Constance added, as if to emphasize the point: There is a profane saying out west which I rather like, "Live so each day that you can look every d- man in the face & tell them to go to Hell."'73 Constance emphasized, as she had done before and would do again in other contexts, how much the model of her father governed her responses to other men. 'I've proved a few decent honourable loyal fellows and I know two men who come up in all points to my standard of a man. One of those is my Dad. I don't put him in that class because he is my Dad but because he belongs there.' As for her mother, Constance pointed out the difference between their generations. Also once independent, Annie expected, from the time of her courtship, to be cosseted and protected by a man, whereas Constance was still fending for herself. Expectations were changing in the larger society, making it more possible for women like her to have their life on their own terms, if at a cost. In the one letter, Constance reminded her mother gently how 'you & I can't think alike on all points because we are two persons and our experiences have been different.' In the other, Constance went on the offensive. 'You, dearest wee Mother, don't know one half so much about the wicked world as I know. You have not had my opportunities and you have not wanted to know. I've had opportunities and I've wanted to know. So I know, and it hasn't soured me a bit. And it is the knowledge that is Power.'74 For all that Constance saw her father as an almost stereotypical frontier hero, their lives had gone separate ways. Not only did she age, so did he. Robert Skinner's letter to 'My dear dear Kiddie' in August 1909 would be

Border Crossing

57

his last. She had written enthusiastically about the upcoming production in Buffalo of her play 'Good Morning, Rosamond!' a comedy in three acts about a young widow awaiting her prince. As well as hinting in the name of its main character to Modjeska's celebrated portrayal of Shakespeare's Rosalind, the play drew heavily on Constance's paternal and maternal inheritances, in particular the stories picked up during her childhood about her grandparents' aspirations for gentility. Bob Skinner expressed his hope that the play would be successful and make it onto the London stage, but he also made clear how very ill he was. Constance attended the mid-August opening in Buffalo, finding herself on the other side of the journalistic divide as the celebrity being interviewed. She knew how to play the game, being described as having 'a cordial smile, the "real goods" manner, and your heart warms toward her.' Taken up, Constance sent back postcards with 'love from the kid/ giving visual glimpses of her life but little news. In October 1909, Robert James Skinner died.75 No longer was he there for her. From now on, Constance had to engage the frontier on her own. The transformation from Connie to Constance was complete. Important borders had been crossed. Vancouver had been exchanged for Los Angeles and then Chicago. The much-favoured daughter had become an independent person. The young enthusiast keen to publish under whatever name just so long as she appeared in print had become, at age thirty, a recognized writer with her own byline and reputation.

CHAPTER FOUR

Beyond Journalism

Constance Skinner wanted more. She had written for newspapers for a good decade. She estimated she had done 'over 300 interviews with the great & the near great of every profession.'1 The job was growing stale. Her success as a journalist paled beside the varied forms of writing in which she had also engaged since her earliest years. She sought the creative freedom that diverse genres gave. The patronage of actress Helena Modjeska encouraged her to believe that she could write as she wished. So did proximity to successful author Jack London and the others whom she interviewed and got to know in California. Her father's death in the fall of 1909 sundered the need to behave responsibly in order to ensure his continued respect. The engagement with the frontier that long marked her came to the fore. Entering her thirties, Constance moved beyond journalism. Increasingly, she identified herself as a writer and sought so to make a living. The step was extremely dangerous. As literary historian James West points out, it was 'risky financially' to be a writer, for recognition might well come, if at all, only late in life. For most there was a trade-off. 'Many authors have proved themselves ingenious and adaptable, surviving and producing despite these disadvantages, and walking the line between art and commerce with great skill and success.'2 Constance's survival came to depend on writing as she must, whatever the genre, in order also to be able to write as she would. She had already demonstrated she could do both. Much of Constance's move beyond journalism remains in the shadows. She was not yet well enough known for her letters to survive in the archives of others, nor did she easily share her inner self. As for her personal papers, she 'destroyed a suit case full' when she moved in 1921.3 The most tantalizing hints about the transformation come through her writing. The year 1910 in Chicago became a critical marker for Constance. No

Beyond Journalism 59

longer only a journalist, she began to acquire a measure of recognition and, much more importantly, some income from other genres. Each of the three strands with which she engaged from her earliest years - playwriting, poetry, fiction - brought its rewards. Playwriting had long engrossed Constance. Her years as a critic buoyed her confidence. As she observed to an acquaintance shortly after moving to Chicago, not only had she reviewed endless plays, she had read them in abundance. 'In my eight years as a dramatic critic, I have had plays brought to me to "please read" - well-more times than I like to remember.'4 Constance's ambition to be a playwright had been fed in ample measure by Helena Modjeska and given practical impetus by her writing association with Herbert Heron Peet. It is unclear how many plays Constance wrote, on her own or with Peet, or what happened to all of them. Many of the numerous drafts and outlines among her papers went nowhere, probably for good reason. An undated romantic play in one act, 'For Faith of the Ready Sword/ had an English setting with 'mistresses' and 'sirs.' 'The Lady or the Law/ a dramatic play in one act, relied heavily on opera capes. Other plays among her papers in the New York Public Library, as with 'The Anointed/ a 'Drama in 4 Acts' with biblical characters, copyrighted 1910, also had an uncertain fate. It was not for lack of trying that many of Constance's plays stayed on the shelf. Some months after moving to Chicago in 1908, she wrote to McClurg's Publishing Company about 'the mss of my blank verse drama "The Right to Live."' She described the play as about 'the development of a human soul in the conditions which a warfare for the freedom of men brings about.' Its socialist leanings echoed the speeches of Jack London that Constance had so enthusiastically covered in Los Angeles. Constance believed it merited consideration 'both as verse & as drama.' She was willing to be flexible and mused to McClurg's, T have been thinking of late that the lines in it about socialism may possibly militate against its publication & production on the stage.' If necessary, 'they can be omitted.'5 The concession did not, however, bring publication. Much later in life, Constance claimed to have had 'seven dramatic productions.' 'Good Morning, Rosamond!' was performed not just in Buffalo but in stock theatres in several other cities, including Cleveland. In 1910 she gave the rights to The Birthright/ in exchange for 5 per cent of gross receipts, to theatrical mogul J.J. Shubert, for production in the Garrick Theater in Chicago. Tt will make a sensation because of its gripping drama and its novelty/ Shubert is claimed to have enthused. The next March, she and Peet negotiated with the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles for production of The Birthright/ but it was, according to Constance, still too daring to be staged.6

60 Constance Lindsay Skinner At about the same time, in January 1911, Constance's biblical play 'David' inaugurated the Forest Theater in Carmel, California, not far from Jack London's home at Glen Ellen south of San Francisco. Herbert Heron Peet effected the coup. He moved to Carmel about the same time Constance left for Chicago in 1908. There he devoted his energies to dramatizing plays, whether written by himself, Jack London, Constance, or others. Convinced that 'the interest in drama is very great all over America now/ Peet got the idea of building an outdoor amphitheatre to consolidate Carmel's burgeoning status as a centre for the arts. Determined to act as well as write, Peet took the title role in 'David.' Playing to an audience from all over northern California that Constance optimistically estimated at 2,000 (more likely, 1,000), the production received large illustrated reviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. 'David' was also performed at Carmel during 'Historical Pageant Week' in July 1912, and perhaps at other times.7 Constance's poetry, whose origins went back to her British Columbia childhood and her years as Helena Modjeska's protege, acquired recognition at about the same time. Initially criticized for 'the irregularity of her verse forms,' she finally achieved a breakthrough. Her first poem to make it into a magazine may have been 'A Dream,' which appeared in Harper's Weekly in June 1910. Long established, Harper's attracted a broad readership for its wide-ranging content and generous use of illustrations. The magazine had been a favourite of hers as a schoolgirl escaping more serious literature, which may explain why she submitted the poem there. Whether or not intentionally, the poem gave every appearance of being autobiographical. Constance mused in the first line, 'I dreamed you came to me'; by the poem's end, she realized that 'o'er Life's barren moor I walk alone.'8 Even as 'A Dream' was published, Constance had a lengthy short story, a 'novelette' in the language of the day, accepted by Ainslee's Magazine. She had long been ambivalent about writing fiction, perhaps because of the rebuff she had received at the turn of the century from her central Canadian critic. Only a few years earlier, she had confided to Modjeska how she did not 'like to write short stories.' The money to be got by doing so likely caused her change of heart. The acceptance of 'A Man and His Mate' significantly upped Constance's finances. 'We will send you a check for $300.00 for it next week,' the editor informed her in May 1910.9 Given that the story was about 20,000 words in length, the going rate being paid by this New York-based magazine was roughly \Vi cents a word. 'A Man and His Mate' appeared in Ainslee's in March 1911, being followed in quick succession by two more stories, 'Divorced' and 'The Law.'10 Constance's three breakthroughs, as playwright, poet, and short-story

Beyond Journalism 61

writer, gave the impetus for her to give up her steady employment as a journalist. While, as historian Marjorie Lang explains, 'it was not surprising that young women with poetic yearnings and a passion for scribbling should want to enter journalism' at the turn of the century, when it first became possible for them to do so, 'the gloss soon wore off.' However profitable might be 'the personalities they created for the newspaper, be it the spirited "new woman,"' or some other, females were not taken seriously.11 In November 1910, Constance explained, she 'resigned her position as dramatic critic on the Chicago American to pursue more freely her chosen vocation of playwright and novelist.' She did so with an open invitation to return to the newspaper, should she choose. 'Let us hear from you as often as it shall please you/ Constance was likely not thinking about doing so if the characterization of journalism offered in her Ainslee's short story 'The Law,' set in Chicago and written at about this time, is at all indicative. As her 'parting shot/ the heroine ridicules her errant husband: '"Why not try your luck as contributor to the Children's Page of a daily paper? You should succeed at that. Your views of life are so rosy and so simple — so unhampered by facts."' As historian Henry Steele Commager wrote in Constance's obituary, 'she was never entirely happy in journalism.' 12 She eagerly took to the possibility of making a writing life on her own terms. Constance's decision encouraged another move. By now in her early thirties, Constance lived everywhere and nowhere. She wrote in Chicago, but in her imagination she resided on the frontier. When 'Vancouver's First Playwright,' as the Vancouver Province newspaper headlined, was interviewed by 'mail' in January 1911, she asserted firmly that 'I am only American by adoption.' So far as she was concerned, 'I am a far-far Westerner, born in a gulch in a gold rush in the Cariboo district, raised in a tiny village on the high bluffs of the Eraser ... daughter of a pathfinder and grand-daughter of a pioneer and all that means in every drop of my blood.'13 The more Constance determined to write as she would, the more Chicago lost its purpose. Once she gave up her job, no reason remained to stay. Chicago was developing an artistic culture of sorts,14 but the Mecca of the writing world was New York City. Book and magazine publishers were concentrated there. A quarter of a century earlier, fellow Canadian Sara Jeannette Duncan explained how 'the market for Canadian literary wares is New York, where the intellectual life of the continent is rapidly centralizing.'15 It was the same with the theatre. When Helena Modjeska promoted Constance's plays, no question existed for her but that they had to 'be produced in New York, first - then your career as a playwright is opened.'16

62

Constance Lindsay Skinner

New York City was, Sandra Asdickes argues in a history of women there before the First World War, a very exciting and optimistic place filled with possibilities for the determined and the ambitious among them.17 So to New York Constance went. New York City was unlike any other urban agglomeration. Ten years younger than Constance, English aristocrat Violet Asquith described her first impressions at about the same point in time. 'I simply don't know where to begin to give you any idea of this extraordinary place - stupendous size, lightning speed, deafening noise, miraculous mechanical ingenuity ... above all an extraordinary atmosphere of hope - which (however illusory) seems to communicate itself on landing to everyone, down to the most pinched & threadbare/ Rows of tenements crammed with recent immigrants lured by hopes for a better life vied with the elegant brownstones of sophisticates intent to set the tone of American literary and artistic life. 'I have never imagined anything at all like New York - the houses rise on each side of one like huge cliffs - honeycombed with windows - the streets seem like cracks between them - & one crawls along like an insect in the depths of the crack.'18 New York's heart was the island of Manhattan, whose population peaked at two and a third million in 1910. Speaking to all of their aspirations, the next year the New York Public Library opened magnificent new facilities on 42nd Street. It was likely in the early summer of 1912 that Constance made the leap to New York, just as her play 'The Birthright' was reaching the stage in Chicago. Hers was the big gamble. She had supported herself since leaving British Columbia, with intermittent assistance from her father. Now he was dead, and she had only her own devices by which to make a living. Yet Constance possessed proven talent and had her wits about her. She later claimed that, upon leaving Chicago, she had just $25.90 in her pocketbook 'with no one to appeal to in case the worse happened.'19 Constance may also have had a commitment from Ainslee's, with which she had published several short stories in the past year, to take over as its dramatic critic. Constance became the anonymous 'First Nighter' who, during the 1912-13 theatre season, penned the magazine's feature 'Plays and Players.'20 Allotted 2,000 words, the monthly Ainslee's column called forth all of Constance's accumulated expertise as she tantalizingly evoked 'the dramatic excitements of the month' for a general audience spread across North America without, at the same time, neglecting more sophisticated readers or alienating the producers to whom she was peddling her own plays. She had no qualms about pronouncing mightily on the state of the art, be it form 'staging of this sort is not even a lost art in America; it has never been dis-

Beyond Journalism 63 covered' - or substance - 'here in America we have been going through rather a rough siege ... of realism/ but are now in a 'romance-play revival, recently prophesied on these pages.' A theatre's rumoured sale to a 'business' man caused her pen to take flight. The dramatic art can no more be permanently syndicated, commercialized, subjected to an utterly business control for material ends, than the passion of a Beethoven sonata can be syndicated, or the immortal progress in the wind-filled wings of the sculpture "Victory"; the speech of light in Rembrandt's picture, or the infinite revelations intangibly made in the art of great actors; the sweep of epic verse or the sweep of wind on the Colorado ranges; the pure passion of Earth; opening her thousand portals to the spring; or the melody of heaven when "the morning stars sang together."'21 The seriousness Constance accorded her new task, which at Ainslee's Magazine's usual rate brought in about $60 an issue, is attested by her taking up residence in the Flanders, a twelve-storey brick hotel on West 47th Street in the heart of the threatre district.22 It soon became imperative that Constance find a more permanent place to live, not just for herself but also for her mother. About the time she headed to New York in 1912, the independence that she had chosen over marriage and family met the reality of being an only child. From her earliest years, her father had pushed her on, whereas her mother projected her own fears and anxieties on her daughter. Constance had resisted daughterhood's obligations as long as she could, but now they caught up with her. With Bob Skinner's death in the fall of 1909, Constance inherited responsibility for her mother. At first she sought to maintain the established relationship, reiterating in great detail in her letters how different their lives had become. Nonetheless, Annie Skinner grew ever more dependent on her. Constance was forced to assist financially as well as struggle to support herself: 'I am so glad my money has helped you with the taxes too. How I wish I could make it more.' The only solution seemed to be to bring her mother to live with her in New York. 'We shall have a nice happy time together with ease of mind and enough to live on without distress or the old scrimp.'23 Annie agreed. In 1911 she resigned the presidency of the Vancouver YWCA, which she had held since its foundation, and the next February from its board of governors, preparatory to leaving the city. Some time after Constance got herself settled in a four-storey walk-up apartment building at 438 E. 116th Street, her mother joined her there. One of the common interests that mother and daughter had come to share was writing. Constance's successes encouraged her mother on. Several of Annie Skinner's manuscripts survive in the New York Public Library. 'In the Heart of the Mountains: A True Story' recreated the life of

64 Constance Lindsay Skinner the fur trade servants she had known 'many years ago' at Quesnel. Its most powerful images are 'French Canadian trappers by name Dupres De Loissac, Duval, and Dausereau' who 'had come from the lower country and were on their way to the North to trap furs/24 In 'Angels in the Mist/ Annie paralleled, perhaps presaged, her daughter's preoccupation with hybridity. Its simplistic plot centres on a small girl whose mother is Aboriginal and father a former Hudson's Bay servant. When her mother dies, she is sent to be taught by nuns, who tell her about angels. Eventually she herself dies and so comes to be with them. What is revealing about the story is that, even though mother and child are 'good/ unlike Constance's depiction of Precious Conroy in 'The Birthright/ they must still both disappear through death for the story to reach its conclusion. Neither the Aboriginal mother nor the hybrid daughter is permitted to survive as a character. It is unclear if any of Annie Skinner's stories reached publication. A shared interest in writing could not overcome the two's long-standing differences. It soon became clear, at least to Constance, that the bonds linking them were far more fragile than the outlooks and attitudes that had long divided them. Constance was stifled. 'I was in a prison of "duty" to the will of another person - the iron will of a narrow little person, as pathetic as cruel in her hatred of my work, my religion, my views of life and, in short, of all that gave life any meaning to me.' Annie Skinner's religiosity, originating in her Scots Presbyterian schooling, was more than Constance could bear. Every exchange annoyed, as when 'my mother said she would have grieved far less over my death than over seeing me leave the Episcopalian [Anglican] church - & this regardless of the fact that I had left the Epis. Church, as far as any faith in anything taught there, when I was 16.'25 Constance still had to earn a living for both of them, so she later confided to a younger writer then in a similar situation. 'I was on my own, in a hard job, desperately lonely, in a city where I had no friends (and no time to make friends) - and with an ailing dependent - my mother ... Many times, I did not know how I would manage the rent and, sometimes, where even our next meal was coming from. My family were nearly all dead, dispersed, or busy with their own troubles. I had no one to help me or to give me advice/ As another account summed up, 'with an invalid mother to care for during the day, her chance to write was not great. Yet way into the wee sma' hours she wielded her pen - she cannot use a typewriter/ Over time the gulf so widened between mother and daughter that Annie Skinner returned to Vancouver after an absence of 'several years/ She likely left in 1917, shifting Constance's responsibility from putting up with her to supporting her. The two kept in contact, Constance ensuring that Annie remained aware of the dynamic that both bound and separated them: 'Now beloved small

Beyond Journalism 65

mother I haven't time to chatter indefinitely this morning! I am a busy Person or Personagem. So there.'26 Constance's obligation to her mother only strengthened her determination to have a writing life. In striving toward that goal, no genre more engaged her during her first half dozen years in New York than did poetry. She was determined to make her reputation as a poet and used every possible means to do so. In turning to poetry, Constance was, so literary historian William Drake tells us, part of a larger movement 'beginning around World War I and cresting in the mid-1920s' in which 'publishers rushed to the opportunity to discover and issue women's poetry.'27 Constance was not central to this shift, but nonetheless benefited from it by getting her poems published more readily than a half dozen years earlier when Helena Modjeska was advocating on her behalf. The most common means of publication was as filler in popular magazines, which used poems to fill the empty spaces at the bottom of articles. The acceptance by Ainslee's of her short stories may have been responsible for their willingness also to print her poetry. 'Song Primitive,' lauding nature, and 'Song of Harvest,' using sexualized language to evoke grain's reaping, appeared in the magazine in 1912.28 In a burst of self-confidence on moving to New York, or perhaps in anticipation of doing so, Constance expanded her horizons from Ainslee's to its heady competitor, The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness, also headquartered in the city. A monthly with considerable snob appeal and the magazine on which Ainslee's consciously patterned itself, Smart Set had literary critic Henry L. Mencken as a regular contributor, which added to its 'cleverness/ It was generally accepted that American writers of distinction appeared in Smart Set, and Constance was determined to be among their number. Constance had a poem, an essay, and a story published in Smart Set in 1912. The poem, 'Life,' was standard fare, while the essay, 'Chicago, a City with Instincts/ described cultural amenities.29 Smart Set's going rate for poetry was twenty-five cents a line, which meant that 'Life' garnered a whole $3, the essay a few dollars more. Four more poems were published in 1913 in Munsey's Magazine, one of the most popular and highly circulated monthlies in the United States. The autobiographical echo in one of these, 'Song of the Super-Woman,' gives a particular power to its lines: I enter in and bar the door; No hand comes tapping there No lover's footstep on my floor,

66

Constance Lindsay Skinner

No child to claim my care; Though poor and mean this house of mine, I live alone and free ... And yet - the pictures that I paint, All bear the heart's impress, As though my soul meets with complaint Unfettered loneliness.

Another of the poems in Munsey's, The Lover's Philosophy/ was equally reflective of Constance's situation in its slap at the religiosity she had long ago rejected: ... Oh, tell me not that heavenly bliss Shall crown me when I'm dead; (When life and love are fled!) For what care I for heaven's bliss The while I feel thy kiss?... 30

The other two of Constance's poems to appear in Munsey's in 1913 were from her lyric drama 'Ait-zum-ka/ written while she was in California and revised as 'Songs of the Coast-Dwellers.' She later explained how 'ever since 1903 the poems [from it] have been offered off & on.' In each of them, Constance wrote as the protagonist. In 'Indian Spring/ she is 'the life-bringer' in all of its manifestations. 'I Sing of the Desired' has as its author Kan-il-lak the Singer, who rejoices that 'with the nets of song I have snared the Woman-Spirit!'31 In composing poetry from an Aboriginal perspective, Constance put herself at the forefront of a larger movement concerned, to use the expression coined by critic Helen Carr, with 'reading the savage mind.'32 The enthusiasm among anthropologists like Franz Boas on the British Columbia north coast to retrieve ways of life existing prior to contact was mirrored by writers wanting to get inside Aboriginal people's mental worlds. Writers not only sought broader audiences than did anthropologists, but they also were less constrained by the line between representation and interpretation. A handful of Aboriginal persons published autobiographies, tribal stories, or other kinds of writing, but the overwhelming proportion of works were by persons like Constance who claimed a personal connection with the way of life they were attempting to evoke. Some wrote stories or plays, as with Constance's 'Ait zum-ka/ but many turned to poetry intended to echo Aboriginal songs and chants. The general conviction that Aboriginal peoples were doomed to give way before a superior mode of life gave an urgency to recovering as much as

Beyond Journalism 67

possible of a 'disappearing race.' This priority encouraged a romanticism in approach that contributed to the popularity of the writing that resulted. It was within this context that, in August 1913, Constance achieved her first triumph as a poet. The Bookman, a London review of new literature, regularly offered a variety of prizes, usually from half a guinea to five guineas, for everything from best ballad to best epigram of a recently published work. Learning of a six-month 'twenty-one guineas prize poem competition/ Constance inquired of the editor if irregular verse forms would be considered, to be told, to her pleasure, that form 'must be dictated by the spirit of the composition.' The competition attracted several thousand entries from around the world, including Constance's 'Song of CradleMaking/ which divided the first prize. Not only that, her 'Song Primitive/ published in Ainslee's, garnered an honourable mention. Bookman's editor described 'Song of Cradle-Making' as an 'excellent lyric - certain lines of it are very beautifully imagined and finely touched with emotion/ The poem, which included a note explaining that 'the language is that of a British Columbian coast tribe (Kwa'kiutl)/ was written in the voice of a pregnant Aboriginal woman hoping to bear a son: That hast stirred! When I lifted thy little cradle, The little cradle I am making for thee, I felt thee! ... Oh, I know not if thou be son Strong Chief, Great Fisher, Law of Woman, As thy father is; Or only Sorrow Woman, Patient Serving Hands, Like thy mother.33

'Song of Cradle-Making' became the first of Constance's poems to be reprinted, not just published for the first time. The prestigious British Review requested permission to do so and included it together with five other of her poems 'after the manner of American Indian songs/ to quote Constance. A year later, in 1914, 'Song of Cradle-Making' turned up with evocative illustrations in Sunset: The Pacific Monthly, a magazine out of San Francisco whose content was intended to laud California. Much later, Constance reflected: 'Cradlemaking is generally considered my best poem. It was the first to win notice for my work, sharing "First" prize in the London Bookman's 21 guinea lyric contest in 1913.'34 The Bookman prize boosted Constance's identification with poetry. So did

68

Constance Lindsay Skinner

the growth of venues in which to publish. Poetry moved out of the closet, so to speak. Possibilities expanded from popular magazines, which continued to accept poems to fill in at the end of articles, to journals given over wholly, or for the most part, to poetry. Some magazines proved to be exceedingly peripheral and of short duration, meaning that any of Constance's poems published there have disappeared from view. Others fundamentally transformed the genre amidst growing acceptance 'that form and rhythm do not depend on regular measures/ to quote Constance.35 Two major new journals intending to give direction to the burgeoning interest in verse were The Poetry Review, which began in London in January 1912, and Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, started in Chicago in October of the same year. Each was the inspiration of a single individual, whose commitment was remarkable. The Poetry Review, which combined new verse with articles and reviews, was edited by English poet Harold Monro in association with the Poetry Society, an English group intent on fostering interest in the genre.36 Poetry, almost wholly given over to verse, was the creature of Chicago journalist cum poet Harriet Monroe, whose own attempts to get her verse into print made her realize 'what a desperate fight for recognition poets had to make, and make mostly in vain, through the score of years before 1912.' As well as giving 'poetry her own place, her own voice,' Poetry showed respect for its authors through annual prizes and a payment of 50 cents a line or $10 a small page. Monroe's family connections secured the financial backing needed to set up the magazine; but it was her ability and commitment that sustained it.37 Under her astute editorship, Poetry, like its British counterpart, quickly attracted a wide following and became a literary success story. Within a year of garnering the Bookman prize, Constance made it into both of the new poetry journals. In 'Song of Basket-Weaving,' published in Poetry Review in August 1914, she evoked herself as the daughter of 'kulsagh/ which she translated as cedar tree, who reflects on the deeper meaning of weaving a basket.38 More important in acknowledging Constance's stature as a poet was her essay 'Poetry - The Living Speech,' which followed in Poetry Review at the end of 1914. There she commended the move, on both sides of the Atlantic, 'to re-establish Poetry as a popular art.' The essay's subtitle, 'Why the Invention of New Forms Fails,' put frontand-centre her position that 'the champions of the new styles of vers libre are guilty of the sin with which they charge the devotees of the sonnet and rhymed Ode: they are making a stumbling-block of Form, so that to write something which shall break all established canons of Form becomes the chief object of view, rather than to express veraciously and harmoniously

Beyond Journalism 69

an idea which is worthy of expression/ In Constance's view, 'true poetry ... is living speech when there is conceived in the individual, the group, or the nation, an idea which is noble enough, vital enough, to be worthy to be given to mankind/ 39 She continued to believe, all her life, in feeling over form. Constance had a parallel triumph at about this same time. In October 1914 a cycle of her Aboriginal poems was published in Poetry under the title of her earlier play, 'Songs of the Coast-Dwellers/ As with Constance's entry into Poetry Review, it is impossible to know the basis for acceptance. It may have been aided by personal acquaintance, as Monroe had reviewed plays for Chicago newspapers about the same time as Constance. Perhaps for that reason, Constance had no qualms about seeking to retain copyright, even when it meant less income, so she later reminded Monroe. 'You said Poetry paid 10.— per page and the price would be nearly half for only American rights whereupon I offered the 20 pages for 100.— & we clinched or cinched at that/ 40 Among the fifty-some poets appearing in the same volume of Poetry featuring Constance on the first seventeen pages were Rupert Brooke, D.H. Lawrence, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg. She had joined an impressive coterie. In the 'Songs of the Coast-Dwellers' cycle of nine poems, Constance again wrote in the first person. She adopted, among other identities, that of a Kwakiutl chief at prayer after the salmon catch, a tall, proud Haida describing himself as a 'conqueror of women/ an unborn child awaiting its birth, and an elderly man about to die. Writing to Monroe, Constance described the best aspect of her poetry as 'its universality & versatility of feeling & of method (i.e. use of free rhythms)/ According to Constance, the set of poems in Poetry 'were reviewed extensively in the U.S. press. The N.Y. Eve. Sun gave a 2 col. head & 1/3 col. space; the Boston American (Sunday ed.) 2 columns of review & quotes. Montreal Star (Canada) 1 column & Vancouver BC News-Advertiser 2 1/2 columns with quotes. Shorter reviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Louisville, Winnipeg, Minneapolis/41 Constance was thrilled. Poetry such as Constance wrote did not sit well with young avant-garde American poet Ezra Pound. From his London base, the brash Pound had first tried to pressure Harold Monro and the Poetry Review toward his individualistic and doctrinaire views.42 Unable to get his way, Pound turned his attention to Harriet Monroe, becoming a principal influence on Poetry from its foundation in 1912. By encouraging his wide range of acquaintances to contribute, Pound hastened the shift in the United States away from, in Monroe's words, 'Victorian-American mildness' and 'the same old thing in

70

Constance Lindsay Skinner

the same old academic way/43 The direction Pound sought was, however, very different from that which Constance proffered. Poetry gave two annual prizes for the best poems it published, and Pound was determined that one of them for 1914 should go to his young protege T.S. Eliot for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock/ which marked his first appearance as a poet. Rejected by Monro for the Poetry Review as 'absolutely insane, or words to that effect/ Eliot's poem had made it, through Pound's intervention, into Poetry even though Monroe considered it lacked the new American spirit in poetry she was encouraging. Pound was adamant. 'I see no other possible award of the prize,' he informed her. 'No, if your committee doesn't make the award to Eliot, God only knows what slough of ignominy they will fall into - reaction, death, silliness!!!!!!' Among the four or five poets Pound was determined should not receive an award were Constance and Monroe's protege, Vachel Lindsay.44 As her autobiography reveals, Harriet Monroe was getting tired of Pound's verbal excesses. If 'the best critic living' with a welcome 'acid touch on weak spots,' he was also, in her view, prone to 'temperamental exaggerations.' Monroe's jury awarded Vachel Lindsay first prize and Constance the $100 second prize for 'Songs of the Coast-Dwellers,' a decision Pound condemned as 'peculiarly filthy and disgusting.'45 Constance gloried over the prize. To the extent she was aware, then or subsequently, of what Pound and his circle thought, the award may have had a certain bittersweet quality. Rather than drawing her toward fame, the prize gave an opportunity for Pound and others of similar persuasion to expound their reasons as to why she should not be recognized. If Ezra Pound was disaffected by Constance's Aboriginal verse, others were not. The well-known author of The Forsythe Saga, John Galsworthy, liked what her poems portended. 'After reading them, one feels that sophistication is the ruin of poetry; one almost feels that "civilization" as we practice it is the death of beauty.'46 Fellow poet N.C. Wyeth, who was working with Constance on illustrating her poems, was a bit ambivalent. 'If I am a friend, as you have deemed me so many times, I cannot restrain a suggestion. It will either strike you well or otherwise impertinent or foolish. Me thinks I am beginning to detect the reason why of a lack of complete workmanship to even your best poems. Their impulse is always strong, but lack unity, precisely for their want of more sustaining power.'47 Wyeth may have got to the heart of Constance's talent. She had a facility to write rapidly, encouraged by the need to survive financially on her own, but it was also compelled by her constant need to move on, be it to another genre or some other goal not yet achieved. Wyeth understood her character.

Beyond Journalism

71

'You jump at conclusions too rapidly and too sweepingly ... they are the final blossoming but what trowelling, fertilizing and watering must go on in the first phase!'48 The letter's impact, if not its influence on her writing, is attested by Constance's keeping it in its original envelope, despite her throwing away almost all of her other correspondence from these years and virtually every other envelope, whatever the time period. The critiques by Pound, Wyeth, and perhaps others in no way stemmed the flow of Aboriginal verse. 'Song of the Little Son' was published in 1914 in the literary digest Current Opinion. Constance's Aboriginal verse offered, at first glance, an easy solution to the literary implications of her frontier inheritance. By romanticizing the everyday life of Aboriginal people, they were safely secured within their own setting. Such an interpretation is partial. Her poems are imbued with sexuality and eroticism, which make her subjects far more living persons than had they merely been tucked into some mythic past. Conversely, the use of Aboriginal persons, generally viewed as members of 'a disappearing race/ made it more acceptable to evoke such themes than had she used more familiar subjects. 'Song of Whip-Plaiting/ one of the poems published originally in the British Review, and also in the 'Songs of the Coast-Dwellers' cycle that so incensed Ezra Pound, has a maiden plaiting a whip out of shredded cedar boughs. These 'little strands of pain' are a 'love-gift' to her future husband. The poem ends with a plea: ... (Ah - sometimes - thou will be gentle? Little roots of pain are deep, deep in me Since I saw thee standing in my doorway.) ... I have plaited thy whip. I am thy Woman! 49

'Song of the Young Mother' extends the motif into mating, procreation, and birth: ... Strange, that pain came with love; I knew it not until thy father sought me. Yet - what woman would cast love out? Gladly in the dusk I waited him None told me, not my mother even, of the pang. ... Darkness and his, his utterly, in that dark None had told me Nor that his strength would leap, rejoicing at my cry.

72

Constance Lindsay Skinner

At dawn — it is our custom — I went forth alone .... My tears fell, shining among the earth's bright drops; For, now I knew Why the maiden plaits a whip of cedar-fiber, To give to her husband's hand on her marriage-day. Once I asked my father - it seemed so strange A maid should weave and weave a rod for her own sorrow. He laughed and said: 'It is our custom; ay, an old custom - ... My mother sat near. Ah, I have remembered that she spoke not; But, silently, in the shadow of his body, drooped her head. Ay, 'tis old, the custom, Old as earth is old; Ancient as passion, Pitiless as passion Ay, pitiless, pitiless, the earth-way for women! ... Into the headless hand of passion We yield our power-of-pain. It is the law of the earth-way. So it is with birth-giving. Aii-he! The mightier pang, The mightier loving! ...

'No Answer Is Given/ also in the 'Songs of the Coast-Dwellers' cycle, has 'Ah-woa-te, the Hunter' meeting 'a maiden' who beseeches him, 'Hunter, will you come to my little fire and tell me what Love is?' After warning her that he will soon be gone hunting, he does so. Afterwards: She said, 'Hunter, you have told me of Love!' 'It may be so,' I answered. I wished to sleep. She said, 'Already it is ashes.' ... I was angry; I said, 'Better you had slept.' She said, 'Yes - but I lie bleeding on the moss.' ...50

Constance's successes convinced her she could make her mark as a poet. Much as had happened in Los Angeles with Helena Modjeska, she was encouraged in her aspirations at a critical juncture. The intermediary this time was tremendously popular novelist and nature writer Gene StrattonPorter, fifteen years her senior, who lived 'in the woods' in Indiana.51 Stratton-Porter later recalled: 'One evening I picked up the latest issue of "Poetry," read a few pages, and called to my family: "Good People, listen!"

Beyond Journalism

73

Then I read aloud a collection of poems, read parts over and over, and the entire offering again. These were new songs by a singer unknown to me.' Stratton-Porter was enthralled. 'Nowhere in the literature of any nation is there work like them, nor have I found anything that I think surpasses them/ Stratton-Porter recognized Constance, who she deemed 'one of our most native and original artists/ was not writing about Aboriginal lives in a literal sense, but rather using 'fragments of the past' to describe universal human emotions. 'Miss Skinner, with fluid drawn from the hearts of the Coast Dwellers, writes the old story of this human heart everywhere ... Indian life was only the gossamer veil through which the poet sought to glimpse humanity divested of convention and restriction and one of its sources, Nature ... We humans are all Coast-Dwellers on the narrow earthstrip of the senses and their sorrow-mingled joys, with the sonorous walls of our racial past rising sky-high behind us, while before us stretches the expansive and shining vision of life as we would have it.' The two struck up a correspondence. Aware that 'a writer could starve to death from the amount of recognition to be had through publication' in a magazine like Poetry, Gene Stratton-Porter sought to use her extensive connections to further Constance's ambitions. 'What you need this minute is publicity.' Stratton-Porter wrote to the editor of Delineator, whose monthly circulation topped a million, in the 'hope she could use some of your things where a large number of people would see them.' The editor, who was 'planning a big Thanksgiving issue,' wanted 'something written especially for the Delineator/ which, Stratton-Porter reminded Constance, 'is a woman's publication for women.' She should not be offended by being asked to 'sing a few to order/ for 'this is not commercialism; it is common sense.' Stratton-Porter admonished her to 'do as you are bid until you get an audience, then do as you please.' 'Autumn Dawn: A Poem of the Indian Harvest/ lushly illustrated by Wyeth, appeared in Delineator in October 1915. Not only that, Stratton-Porter integrated one of Constance's poems into her next novel. Tt will put the poem before millions and give you as big an introduction as any one thing could.' In her million-copy bestseller Michael O'Halloran, published in 1915, the hero explains how 'a few days ago, while I was still a searcher myself I read a poem called "Song of the Search" that was the biggest thing of its kind that I have yet found in our language.' He lauds Constance's poem to his romantic interest. 'It was so great that I reread it until I am sure I can do it justice. Listen my "Bearer of the Morning" my "Bringer of Song."' Thereupon, 'from his heart he quoted Constance Skinner's wonderful poem' in its entirety. Written in the voice of a

74 Constance Lindsay Skinner hunter returned from the forest in search of a mate, the critical lines of 'Song of the Search' run: I descend from the forest alone. Rose-flushed are the willows, stark and a-quiver, In the warm sudden grasp of Spring; Like a woman when her lover has suddenly, swiftly taken her. ... Where art thou, Spring-daughter? I tremble with love as the reeds by the river, I burn as the dusk in the red-tented west, ... I desire thee as eagles the storm; I yearn to thy breast as night to the sea, I claim thee as the silence claims the stars, O Earth, Earth, great Earth, Say where she is, the Bearer of Morning, My Bringer of Song? Love in me waits to be born, Where is She, the woman? At the end of the page of verse, Stratton-Porter's hero declares, 'Where is she, the Woman! The answer is "Here." "Bearer of Morning," "Bringer of Song." I adore you/ His intended sighs, 'My Man/ and the action continues.52 Gene Stratton-Porter's patronage strengthened Constance's determination to be recognized as a poet. Two means existed. The first was to have poems collected into a separate volume; while the second was to get into anthologies. The two collided to Constance's disadvantage. Stratton-Porter was sympathetic to Constance's desire for her own book of verse. T know all about the awful hunger to see your naked brain children between covers and on a shelf/ Stratton-Porter later claimed to have 'arranged for their publication with Hodder and Stoughton, the owners of the London Bookman, and with an American firm/ but 'before we could really begin the work, the war broke out/ Constance herself went after publisher Henry Holt. 'My "Songs of the Coast-Dwellers" are regarded as a new and rather striking departure in American literature/ She could provide not only poems, but their elaboration. 'Mr Wyeth is so eager to illustrate a book of the poems that he has offered to go into it "on speculation" to do as many color illustrations or as few as a publisher desires/ Constance did her best to cajole a positive response. 'My own public reputation & personal following would help also toward the sale of such a book ... The poems have proved already to have an appeal for the "Common People" as well as

Beyond Journalism 75

for critics & prize-givers, & art & nature lovers. ... A book of the sort we desire would be unique in American Art.' Constance got caught when, about the same time, she was invited to submit a group of her poems to a prestigious new anthology being organized by Poetry's editor Harriet Monroe to be published by Macmillan. The New Poetry anthology was intended by Monroe, and her co-editor, poet Alice Corbin Henderson, to bring together the best of Poery's verse with other poetry published since 1900. The anthology's title reflected the growing recognition that poetry was changing both its forms and substance, becoming much more 'a concrete and immediate realization of life.' As Monroe explained in the volume's introduction, 'it is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period,' increasingly aspiring to 'modern speech, simplicity of form, and authentic vitality of theme.' For that reason, whereas 85 poets, just over a third of them women, made it into The New Poetry, others, including Constance's fellow Canadian Bliss Carman, were explicitly excluded on the grounds that their poetry, even if recently written, 'belongs, by its affinities, to the earlier period.' The two editors could not afford to pay contributors and relied on their goodwill and the project's importance to obtain authors' permissions.54 On receiving the invitation, Constance telephoned her prospective publisher of her verse, whose identity is unclear in the correspondence. The publisher, she reported back to Monroe, 'vetoes your selection hard, as using up about a quarter of my book in advance.' Monroe sought, among other poems, Constance's very powerful, sexually charged trio written from a female perspective: 'Song of Whip-Plaiting,' 'Song of the Young Mother/ and 'No Answer Is Given.' Competition played a role in the publisher's response, so Constance explained. 'He doesn't see why 1/5 or 1/4 of the book he is taking chances on & putting his $ into should be "given gratis to the MacMillan Co."' To do so 'will give neither him nor me any advantage/ Constance hedged. She considered her publisher's position 'painfully rational & clear & indisputable!' but, also, she was not entirely happy with Monroe's choices. Constance had retained rights to three poems, including the fairly benign 'Chief's Prayer after the Salmon Catch.' This Constance considered 'would give a fairer view of my work than your selection mentioned in y[ou]r letter, i.e. show its universality & versatility of feeling & of method (i.e. use of free rhythms) better than your choice which would lay undue emphasis on "unhappy-hearted woman/" It was the very strength Harriet Monroe perceptively saw in Constance's poetry, its erotic sensuality, that she sought to withhold from the anthology. Constance added she

76

Constance Lindsay Skinner

was still writing Aboriginal poems, and another possibility for inclusion was 'Summer Dawn/ part of 'an unfinished series of "dawns."' Constance's heart lay with having her own book of poetry. 'I hope this will fit your needs. If not & you don't want to use any of my own selections, you can leave me out & I won't feel hurt but will understand.' Constance was remarkably honest in positioning her poetry at the edge, rather than the core, of the shifting terrain that Poetry exemplified. In a postscript to Monroe, she mentioned her Poetry Review essay, and added: 'By the way so you think I belong in a "New Poetry" series? I am so out of sympathy with most of it! I stand in my own little corner only with my own very decided method & views.' Harriet Monroe made a second attempt to persuade Constance, who again prevaricated. 'Naturally I understand & sympathize with your desire to use something from one of y[ou]r prize group and don't want to put any pebbles in the way of the anthology & as far as my personal likes go I'd like to be in it. That all isn't the point in this here mix up! I have to be docile & obedient to a publisher who is arranging to spend lots of money on a beautifully made book.' Constance wanted Monroe to share in her good fortune of having her own book of verse, rather than begrudge it to her. 'I have insisted on full recognition of you & Poetry in this, my first, chance really to "hand you something."' Constance proposed a compromise. The ultimate I can do seems to be "Whip-plaiting" & "No Answer" (& "Chief's Prayer," if you like to add this).' Monroe had no choice but to accept the offer, which did achieve part of her aims. In the event, Constance's book of verse did not appear, possibly because of the autbreak of the First World War, whereas The New Poetry was a resounding success. It became 'a "best seller in the poetry field,"' according to Monroe, and was twice revised over the next decade and a half.55 Even the anthology's principal contributor, the irascible Ezra Pound, was pleased, telling Alice Corbin Henderson, 'On the whole a good job for which you are to be congratulated.'56 Whether or not Constance's lesser contribution diminished her long-term reputation as a poet it is impossible to say, but certainly she was not as prominent within the anthology's pages as she might have been. As to her overriding ambition for her own book of poetry, not just publishers but her greatest supporter, Gene Stratton-Porter, expressed some quite legitimate reservations. 'I think that as a writer you would do yourself irreparable damage to publish a book at this time if it were in your power. You are too new. Your work is not sufficiently known.' Poetry publishing was a gamble under any circumstances, and, StrattonPorter continued, 'you have not enough of an audience to take even the few

Beyond Journalism 77 hundred books that would be required to pay the cost of publication; and to bring out a book which is a financial failure would do nothing but make you a risk which no other publisher would care to undertake ... The best volume of poetry by well-known authors seldom brings a living income/ As for the new poem 'Summer Dawn' that Constance mentioned in her correspondence with Monroe, it turned up in Poetry in January 1916 together with 'Kan-il-lak the Singer/ 'Spring to the Earth-Witch' and 'Chief Capilano Greets His Namesake at Dawn' followed just over a year later.57 They were part of a special 'Aboriginal poetry' issue of Poetry acknowledging the force of this new direction in writing in which Constance had been engaged for a decade and a half. Although the issue was given over to interpretations rather than translations, Monroe emphasized in an 'editorial comment' how science and art were both necessary 'to preserve the fast disappearing folk-lore of the tribes/ including 'their beautiful primitive poetry/ Perhaps for this reason, for the first time Constance sited one of her Aboriginal poems by defining 'Capilano' as 'the highest white-capped mountain on Vancouver's harbor, B.C.' as well as the 'name of the aged chief of the tribe inhabiting the village at its foot/ The poem used the Chinook word 'cla'h'ya,' translated by Constance as 'a phrase of greeting/58 Through her identification with the person, whom she had once met, and with the jargon, she claimed a basis of authority for writing Aboriginal verse much more explicitly than ever before. Constance's poems also continued to appear elsewhere. 'Song of BasketWeaving' was reprinted in the September 1916 issue of Others: A Magazine of New Verse, a poetry magazine begun the year before. 'Indian Lover's Hymn' had its debut in Sunset a month later. Two months later, The Wild Woman's Lullaby/ illustrated by Wyeth, appeared in Scribner's.59 A third of a century old, Scribner's was a general magazine giving a literary flavour to a variety of popular topics - travel, society and the economy, stories and poetry. Constance well understood the boost that Wyeth's 'beautiful illustration' gave her Aboriginal verse, reflecting several years later how 'he made the beginning of a new art... not Indian but primal/60 Constance was wiser by the time a second opportunity arose to appear in a poetry anthology, this time 'of the songs and chants from the Indians of North America/ Published in 1918, The Path on the Rainbow used seven of her Aboriginal poems originally published in Poetry and four others that had appeared elsewhere. She readily gave permission to editor George W. Cronyn, perhaps because her own book of poems had by now fallen through. The poems' inclusion placed her at the heart of the larger movement wherein non-Aboriginals, mostly women, were giving voice to

78

Constance Lindsay Skinner

Aboriginal peoples across North America. The logic behind their doing so rested, Harriet Monroe once explained, on their 'sympathetic knowledge' based on close acquaintance.61 The Path on the Rainbow's four other major participants were similar to Constance in their reliance on a combination of experience and proximity. Alice Corbin Henderson, who co-edited Poetry and The New Poetry until tuberculosis forced her to move to the Southwest, associated herself with Navajo and Pueblo peoples of the Santa Fe area.62 Mary Austin, who also identified with the Southwest, was passionate for nature and had a strong sense of community with Native American cultures.63 Natalie Curtis Burlin devoted herself to transcribing and preserving on phonograph cylinders Native American music in danger of 'vanishing forever/64 The much older Alice Fletcher, who combined interests in ethnography and social activism, similarly claimed a mission by virtue of 'living with my Indian friends' in her case, the Omaha of Oklahoma. 'I learned to hear the echoes of a time when every living thing even the sky had a voice. That voice devoutly heard by the ancient people of America I desired to make audible to others.'65 Constance was key to The Path on the Rainbow, appearing in both the translation and interpretation sections and contributing an essay entitled 'The Indian As Poet,' which was juxtaposed with Fletcher's description of a Pawnee ceremony. The translations, a quarter of them by Natalie Curtis Burlin, were divided among geographical areas of North America. The Northwest Coast section comprised ethnographer Franz Boas's translation of three Tsimshian prayers and Kwakiutl and Chinook songs, his counterpart John R. Swanton's translation of three Haida and Tlingit songs, and Constance's four songs, described as Haida. As to style, it is difficult to distinguish Constance from the two ethnographers. 'Love Song,' 'The Bear's Song,' 'Song for Fine Weather,' and 'Bear Song' may well have been actual translations, for they were far more straightforward than was her usual style, and she never subsequently published them under her own name.66 The separate section of the anthology entitled 'Interpretations' contained verse which Constance described as 'inspired by the Native poems'; they resulted from having 'sought to enter into the Indian consciousness and to sing of it from within, interpretatively.' The section included eleven of her poems and lesser numbers by four other authors, including Austin, Henderson, and Constance's fellow Canadian poet Pauline Johnson. All but one of Constance's interpretations, The Song of the Hills,' was previously published. 'The Indian As Poet,' the volume's concluding essay by Constance, firmly and assertively placed Aboriginal people's poetic impulse in nature.

Beyond Journalism 79

'Nature, the Tremendous, is the primitive bard's habitat/67 The essay also justified the volume's interpretive poets, including, of course, herself. Prominent literary critic Louis Untermeyer did not agree. Writing in the monthly review The Dial, he was dubious about the utility of The Path on the Rainbow. Constance sidestepped his wrath. The graceful essay by way of epilogue is the work of Constance Lindsay Skinner.' The volume's concept did not. Translation was such a 'hazardous matter' it was better not attempted. Not only that, many of the poems were 'odd-shaped pieces of sentimentality' without sufficient indication, in the form of footnotes, of their authenticity or value. Cronyn was the culprit. 'A good Indian, according to his students, is not so much a dead Indian as a singing one. ... But we have been offered singularly little by the protagonists or the red man that is either thorough or convincing ... One suspects the editor, George W. Cronyn, of fathering more than a few hybrid if not actually dubious offspring.' Untermeyer singled out 'jingles like Pauline Johnson's "The Song My Paddle Sings," which is neither original nor aboriginal, and rhymed sweetmeats as "It is Dark on the Lost Lagoon"' with its 'sentimental jingling.'68 Ontarian hybrid Pauline Johnson wrote, as Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson have persuasively elaborated, out of her combined Mohawk and newcomer inheritances.69 Both Mary Austin and its editor, George Cronyn, came to the defence of The Path on the Rainbow in subsequent issues of Dial, but not of Johnson's verse. Austin opined: Tt ... ought not to seem surprising, as Mr. Untermeyer suspects, that Indian poets are like other poets, occasionally banal and commonplace.' Cronyn disowned Johnson. Tt must be confessed that it was against the judgment of the editor and only in deference to the wishes of the publisher, who argued the popularity of the poet's works in Canada and elsewhere that inclusion was made. The poems in question show how far the Indian poet strays from her own primitive tribal songs, when attempting the White Man's mode. But then one must concede something to one's publishers!'70 In other words, the inclusion of the two Canadian poets, Constance and Pauline Johnson, was in no way linked. Constance's papers and correspondence give no indication that the two were ever in contact or that Constance was aware of, or influenced by, her compatriot. Despite such 'thoroughly New Yorkish' grumbles, to borrow Austin's dismissal of Untermeyer, The Path on the Rainbow was a popular success. It would be reprinted throughout the century, sometimes under the title American Indian Poetry, and it continues to lodge in countless libraries and is extensively used in Native Studies courses.71 In January 1919 Constance bragged to a friend about a 'collection of Indian songs (original NA Indian

80

Constance Lindsay Skinner

poems)' and was particularly pleased that there were 'poems by Palefaces including me in the volume.' In an unusual burst of modesty, she added: 'Mine have no scientific value and are not properly "Indian" poems, but simply primitive stuff using Indian atmosphere etc because it pleases me to do so.'72 The public Constance was far more strategic. Not satisfied with appearing extensively in the anthology, she wrote a long paean of praise of it in the weekly Reedy's Mirror, published out of St Louis. The first importance of this volume, it seems to me, is that it takes the work of our native bards out of the domain of ethnological research and places it where it belongs, in literature.' Describing rhythm as 'a direct impartation of Nature to her human children,' Constance considered the book 'reveals that a sense of rhythm is in all primitive peoples,' because 'there are no barriers - actual barriers of concrete nor figurative ones of education - between the savage and the Earth.' She claimed that, although a number of the songs and chants were more recent, 'none exhibit the slight traces of European influence; they are genuine American Classics.'73 Constance was not only writing poetry, she was validating it as critic. The reams of poems that flowed from Constance's pen during the 1910s complemented, rather than supplanted, her aspirations as a playwright. She remained as concerned to get her work on the stage as in print, and from time to time had some success. The romantic comedy 'The Lady of Gray Gables,' which she wrote with Herbert Heron, was a commencement production in two Indiana high schools in 1911. The next July, Constance dispatched it to producer David Belasco in New York. His response both dashed expectations and gave hope. 'I read the play carefully and was much interested and I would have considered it for production were it not for the fact that my plans were made for the next two seasons and the plays already in preparation. Of course had it suited any of the stars who are under engagement to me, it would be different, as I am always looking for plays for them. But your play requires a special cast. Some time, during the season, I should like to see you and perhaps we can talk about something for the future.' In related fashion, in a feature article appearing in New York Dramatic Mirror in January 1913, Constance built on her 'nine years of close association with the theater in the capacity of dramatic critic' to muse on recent productions in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York.74 The Shubert brothers were the theatrical moguls of the day, and Constance had no qualms about repeatedly acquainting them with her plays. It is unclear if her Aboriginal lyric drama, 'Ait-zum-ka' cum 'Songs of the

Beyond Journalism

81

Coast-Dwellers/ was ever produced, although not for trying. Constance told Helen Monroe at the beginning of 1916 that 'the Shuberts now have an entirely remodeled version of the play including fewer of the songs & more prose/75 No play was closer to Constance's heart, or more contentious, than The Birthright/ It had played in Chicago and Boston, and, according to Constance writing as 'First Nighter' in Ainslee's, it was among 'the Shubert announcements for the [New York] season' in 1912-13. For whatever reason, it did not open, and she kept chiding }.}. Shubert, who in March 1916 finally saw 'an opportunity to produce the play/ He engaged a cast for a fall opening at the Shubert Theatre on West 44th Street, but there was a catch. 'It would have to be revised somewhat' to suit the female star, Charlotte Walker, and Shubert proposed that her husband, Eugene Walter, have 'a free hand in making the adaption' and, by virtue of doing so, garner half of Constance's royalties. Constance objected, even though the man in question had some years earlier written a hit play for Shubert. Shubert played hardball. 'Evidently you do not care whether the play is produced or not ... Sometimes it is well to pocket a little pride and get a little money/ Constance held firm, convinced that her reputation would suffer from the plot's alteration. Shubert's parting shot made clear every woman's difficulties in attempting to enter what was still a man's world. 'I think your arguments are all against you, but as you are of the feminine gender it is hardly necessary for me to try and convince you/ Shubert added, for good measure: 'I think it is mere obstinacy on your part not to allow us to go ahead/ At least from Constance's perspective, far more was involved. She later reflected how 'in 1916 Shubert offered me 250.00 & immediate production of a play of mine if I would put a certain decadent tint through the whole fabric of it; &, tho' I was up against the wall hard, I turned it down without a regret. 'Birthright' seems to have had no further performances. Constance's association with the Shuberts did not end, however. Her play 'Good Morning, Rosamond!' which had played in Buffalo and perhaps elsewhere, opened in their 48th Street theatre in December 1917. The editor of Ainslee's, for one, was enchanted. 'I've been to the theater rather too much in my life & am consequently difficult to please. Therefore I think it is a special tribute to Rosamond that she delighted me as no other play has in many years. The sparkling crisp comedy of it and the rare beauty of the underlying poetry combine to make it a real gem of a play/ He also pointed to what may well have been the play's undoing. Constance was trying too hard to be clever. 'Whether or not there are enough white people with intelligence in New York to make it the success it ought to be, I do not know/77

82

Constance Lindsay Skinner

The play 'Good Morning, Rosamond!' gave the impetus to another breakthrough in Constance's writing life. It was not without purpose that she kept a strict watch over copyright, giving away only one genre at a time. She turned the play into a novel, published under the same title in 1917. Gene Stratton-Porter had opened the doors with her publisher, Frank Nelson Doubleday, who, if unwilling to invest in Constance's poems, was not totally uninterested in her writing. Constance later recalled how 'I wrote the novel "Good-Morning, Rosamond," published by Doubleday Page & Co., in five weeks but half of it was already in plot and dialogue because that half was the play of the same name.' The book was a popular success, reviews or short notices appearing in several dozen newspapers across the United States, as well as the expected locations such as Publishers Weekly. The Dallas News compared it to 'the works of Jane Austen'; the Buffalo Times to 'Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford."' Doubleday distributed to bookstores promotional postcards for ordering copies. According to Constance, the novel sold out its edition of 3,000 copies.78 There was also an edition with McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart of Toronto, who likely bought the Canadian rights. Not unexpectedly, the substantial novel of about 80,000 words echoed the play, being organized as a series of scenes or vignettes around its rich young Canadian heroine Rosamond. It is four years since her much older husband died, after just sixteen months of marriage, leaving her with a household of servants keen to keep his memory alive as an aristocrat superior to her origins as a poor farmer's daughter. When an emergency calls the servants away after breakfast, Rosamond is free to be herself for the day, 'a willing little daughter of the earth, with the earth's promise in her.' Facing her husband's portrait, she acknowledges she married for the glamour. As for him: 'You didn't marry me for love of me - you took me as if I were a - a - bunch of wild flowers, to give just the right contrasting touch of rustic simplicity to your fine house.' Tired of mourning, Rosamond is going to 'be young again' and search out a 'true mate,' 'a fairy prince' who will truly mean it when he says each day, 'Good-morning, Rosamond!' Conveniently, 'a very disorderly, lawless person' who was as a child rescued by gypsies after his well-born mother and poor artist father died is about to return home from adventuring in the Balkans. Imagining the said Jack to be 'bald and whiskered,' Rosamond does not give him a second thought. The newly adventurous Rosamond wards off several suitors over the course of her unexpected day of freedom before being entranced by a night-time 'vagabond' who, of course, turns out to be Jack cum her 'fairy prince.'79 Constance's transformation during the decade of her thirties is indicated by

Beyond Journalism 83 an essay on wartime cookery written in 1918 for the Delineator. It marked a milestone, for her basis of authority was as a celebrity with name recognition in a magazine with a million circulation. 'Next to writing, cooking is my favorite amusement/ Constance once reflected, and here she explained how 'the same intelligence that properly regulates other work can systematize cooking/ taking away the stigma which deems it a form of slavery.80 Constance argued for economy in the face of wartime shortages, giving as examples recipes for lamb curry, fish spread, and so on. Constance also learned during these years about the cut-throat nature of the writing world. It was not only poets such as Ezra Pound who worked behind the scenes. In 1915 Constance published a short piece entitled 'I Hear Song Walking' in the Los Angeles Graphic. Sometime thereafter she sent a woman working for the paper 'an article of mine in NY Times on the study of Nature rhythms from brooks & so on/ According to Constance, the woman appropriated the idea, publishing an article and a preface to a book of verse without acknowledging where the concept came from. Constance felt comfortable enough with her newfound self to wax philosophical. 'No matter - if she has really trained her ear to hear the rhythms which the Indian poets listen to and repeat I wish more verse-makers would listen to the rhythms of primeval truth/81 Constance had successfully moved beyond journalism. Since settling in New York, she had established a certain reputation. Her poetry was both winning awards and being reprinted, her plays had made it onto the New York stage, her first novel sold out its run. She stood at the edge of fame, or so it seemed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Storytelling

The passion that Constance Skinner brought to poetry and plays paid few bills. Her desire to leave journalism was feasible only so long as she acquired other means of income. No genre paid more than did short stories. Their widespread popularity made them almost inherently less literary. They were, quite simply too broadly appealing to make a reputation. In telling stories to sustain a writing life during her mid- and late thirties, Constance drew on an enduring strand of her life experience. She claimed to have written her first story at age five, and she had read short stories from the time she was a schoolgirl. While still in Vancouver, she had a short story published under a pseudonym in a local newspaper, while four others were rejected by an Ontario critic as too raunchy. Perhaps inspired by Jack London's success in the genre, she marketed 'The Home-coming of MariePierre,' even though she did not, she claimed, 'like to write short stories.'1 A desire to move beyond reporting the thoughts of others undoubtedly encouraged Constance's change of heart. Telling stories was not difficult. As she once put it, 'fiction ... wrote itself.' Only 'a very few times' had she 'plotted a story before writing it.'2 She dashed them off because she had to and also because it was so very easy for her to do so. Thus Constance survived as a writer. Storytelling served another purpose in Constance's life. She lived vicariously through her stories. They expressed desires and hopes put on hold in order to have a writing life. Time and again, she probed the frontiers of the imagination in them. Constance's short stories gave her a venue to make and remake herself at will. Constance was able to live through stories, not just because of her facility at telling them but also because of the market for them. Short stories were a

Storytelling 85 staple in the popular magazines that flourished across the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century. At the time of Constance's birth in 1877 there was a limited number of respectable journals, among them Century, Harper's, North American Review, and Scribner's, each of which targeted a select readership. Important structural shifts transformed popular reading over the next several decades. Rising literacy levels, industrialization, urbanization, and the growth of brand names in consumer goods, and hence advertising, encouraged low-priced mass-circulation magazines to take hold.3 New printing technology made it possible to produce more copies faster at a cheaper price, and road, rail, postal, and retail expansion facilitated national and international distribution. Numerous publications were refashioned to attract larger audiences. Woman's Home Companion got its modern beginnings in 1886, Munsey's in 1889, Delineator in 1894, Saturday Evening Post in 1897. Newcomers gave competition, as with McClure's in 1893, Ainslee's in 1898, and Smart Set in 1900. Circulation soared, both of established and upstart magazines, so that a hundred thousand or even a half a million or more people might read a single issue. Magazines were read because persons felt they ought to, as with articles on self-improvement and right behaviour, but they were also read for pleasure, and hence the demand for short stories designed to entertain. Short stories, and their longer variant of novelettes broken into chapters, became a staple of popular magazines, sometimes also appearing as chapters in the Sunday editions of urban newspapers. Literary critic Heather McClave catches the essence of the short story. 'As a genre, the short story requires a careful selection of material to convey meaning within strict limits on time and space. Each word must count. The attitude and approach must be clear. Instead of the epic overviews and slow accretion of details, common to novels, short stories present the close and immediate scrutiny of a few subjects.'4 So constructed, stories drew consumers seeking relaxation and entertainment. They were little adventures. As Constance once explained, 'a good story serves a useful purpose, if it makes one forget the cares of his daily life. If you dissect anything, for that matter, it loses its charm.'5 Short stories were, of course, just as prescriptive as were articles and advice columns, but more subtly, and thereby effectively, so. Their protagonists modelled both expected behaviour and the extent to which it was possible to diverge and still recover. The usual happy ending might well come at a cost. In telling stories, Constance worked within the accepted guidelines. Each magazine had a good idea of what its readers wanted. The great number of short story submissions made it possible for magazines to pick and choose to achieve their preferred mix. Constance's papers contain fifty or so stories,

86 Constance Lindsay Skinner some of them submitted unsuccessfully to several magazines. 'Submitted at your usual rates stamps enclosed/ ran the usual note accompanying Constance's address on the title page. If to some extent writing to formula, Constance remained her own person. She soon discovered it was possible to use the genre to open up possibilities for readers and, vicariously, for herself. Doing so was as important to telling stories as it was to crafting poetry. Next to journalism, short stories were the most feasible way for women of Constance's generation to have a writing life. They were assisted in doing so by an international copyright agreement of the late nineteenth century that took away any economic advantage for American magazines to fill their pages with borrowed material, a common practice up to that time. Popular magazines' demand for new material became so great that writers did not have to conform to the essentially male literary canon to get published. Some writers had name recognition, as with Jack London, but many others did not. As magazine historian Theodore Peterson puts it: 'Publishers were discovering that the story itself was more important than the literary skill with which it was told. Who told it was important ... and some magazines sought showcase bylines; but, at bottom, the tale itself was the thing.'6 Magazines' pages were filled by innumerable Constances willing to cater to popular tastes in exchange for being paid so much a word. Fellow Canadian writers Sara Jeanette Duncan, Mazo de la Roche, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Pauline Johnson were among a host of women, and men, writing for the American market. 7 It was Ainslee's Magazine's enthusiasm over her three short stories written while in Chicago, 'A Man and His Mate/ 'Divorced/ and The Law/ that had encouraged Constance to leave a paid position as a journalist and to make the leap to New York. Ainslee's was not just any publication, but one of the most successful mass-market magazines in the United States. Selling for 15