O My America!: Six Women and Their Second Acts in a New World - Softcover

Wheeler, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374534780 ISBN 13: 9780374534783

Publisher: North Point Press, 2014

Synopsis

In O My America!, the travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler embarks on a journey across the United States, guided by the adventures of six women who reinvented themselves as they chased the frontier west.

Wheeler's career has propelled her from pole to pole―camping in Arctic igloos, tracking Indian elephants, contemplating East African swamps so hot that toads explode―but as she stared down the uncharted territory of middle age, she found herself in need of a guide. "Fifty is a tough age," she writes. "Role models are scarce for women contemplating a second act." Scarce, that is, until she stumbled upon Fanny Trollope.

In 1827, Fanny, mother of Anthony, swapped England for Ohio with hopes of bolstering the family finances. There, failure and disappointment hounded the immigrant for three years before she returned home to write one of the most sensational travel accounts of the nineteenth century. Domestic Manners of the Americans made an instant splash on both sides of the Atlantic, where readers both relished and reviled Trollope's caustic take on the newly independent country. Her legacy became the stuff of legend: "Trollopize" emerged as a verb meaning "to abuse the American nation"; Mark Twain judged her the best foreign commentator on his country; the last king of France threw a ball in her honor. Fanny Trollope was forty-nine when she set out for America, and Wheeler, approaching fifty herself, was smitten. Fanny was living proof of life after fertility, and she led Wheeler to other trailblazers: the actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, the radical sociologist Harriet Martineau, the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, the traveler Isabella Bird, and the novelist Catherine Hubback―women born within half a century of one another who all reinvented themselves in a transforming America, the land of new beginnings.

In O My America!, Wheeler tracks her subjects from the Mississippi to the cinder cones of the Mayacamas at the tail end of the Cascades, armed with two sets of maps for each adventure: one current and one the women before her would have used. Bright, spirited, and tremendous tantrum-throwers, these ladies proved to be the best travel companion Wheeler could have asked for. "I had more fun writing this book than all my previous books put together," she writes―and it shows. Ambitious and full of life, O My America! is not only a great writer's reckoning with a young country, but also an exuberant tribute to fresh starts, second acts, and six unstoppable women.

About this title

About the Author:

Sara Wheeler is the author of many books of biography and travel, including Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990–2011 (NPP, 2013) and Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile. Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica was an international bestseller that The New York Times described as "gripping, emotional" and "compelling," and The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle (FSG, 2011) was chosen as Book of the Year by Michael Palin and Will Self, among others. Wheeler lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1
MERELY TELLING THE TRUTH
Fanny Trollope Goes to Ohio
 
 
Fanny Trollope was broke when she turned fifty, and on intimate terms with pig manure. She had made the three-month trek to Cincinnati, she said, “to hatch golden eggs for my son.” The frontier might have glittered, but not all of it was gold—Cincinnati turned out to be one big stinky pig factory (Easterners knew it as “Porkopolis,” if they knew it at all). After three years Fanny slunk home with a suitcase of smashed-up dreams and three children incubating tuberculosis. Then she wrote Domestic Manners of the Americans. The voice that sings from its pages speaks with the inflections of another age, but it is Fanny’s voice: stylish and pithy, elegant, sardonic and witty. The author refused to acknowledge any taboo, complaining about the way American museum curators covered up the penes of the statues. There is something true at the heart of Domestic Manners. It is a story of disillusion, of seeking and not finding, of the gap between expectation and reality.
The book appeared on both sides of the Atlantic on March 19, 1832, when Fanny was fifty-three. A British subaltern in New York reported, “The Tariff and Bank Bill were alike forgotten … At every corner of the street, at the door of every petty retailer of information for the people, a large placard met the eye with, ‘For sale here, with plates, Domestic Manners of the Americans, by Mrs. Trollope.’ At every table d’hôte, on board of every steamboat, in every stagecoach, and in all societies, the first question was ‘Have you read Mrs Trollope?’ The more it was abused the more rapidly did the printers issue new editions.” In Britain the book whizzed through multiple reprints within weeks, and when Fanny’s son Anthony produced his first novel, his roguish publisher placed adverts naming the author as MRS. Trollope. The family finances were at last secure, and Fanny’s harrowing American experience brought her freedom in the long run. No wonder she laughed at the personal attacks pouring from the United States. A lithograph was published depicting a fat grotesque (her), a mysterious young artist friend with a brush in his mouth, and her husband in front of a stag’s head sporting cuckold’s horns. A waxwork in New York represented Fanny as a goblin, and a traveling menagerie in Maine advertised “an exact likeness of the celebrated Mrs. Trollope” in which she appeared puffing on a pipe. “Trollopize” became a verb that meant “to abuse the American nation.” “No other author of the present day,” wrote a critic, “has been so much admired, and so much abused.” On and on it went, for years. The author “Nil Admirari” published a verse epic called The Trollopiad about a band of pompous gentlemen travelers observing the United States.
Later, Fanny picked up one fan in America: Mark Twain. In his own maudlin middle years he took a library of European commentators on a nostalgic Mississippi voyage, and on the last page of his copy of Domestic Manners noted, in his sprawling hand, “Of all these tourists, I like Dame Trollope best.” She was, said the master stretcher-teller, “merely telling the truth.” He recognized in her his own unquenchable gusto for life. Meanwhile, in Britain, invitations tumbled through the letterbox. Fanny rented a flat in a top London square and hurried between parties. “Lady Louisa Stewart,” she gushed to her son Tom, “told me that I had quite put English out of fashion, and that every one was talking Yankee talk.” The young Dickens praised her. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that there is no writer who has so well and so accurately (I need not add entertainingly) described America.” Tory papers loved Domestic Manners while Whigs and Radicals noted that the author’s background was not quite up to scratch. Britons can never escape their origins. In Anthony Trollope’s novel Is He Popenjoy?, the Dean of Brotherton’s father is a former groom. “The man looked like a gentleman,” the author says of the Dean, “but still there was the smell of the stable.” In Domestic Manners, Fanny insists that there should be a stable smell, so that one knew where one was—the alternative was a social free-for-all of the American kind. She needn’t have worried. When the book came out, the cultural elite showed that hierarchies were alive and well in Britain. They resented the author of Domestic Manners for entering their territory. The poet Robert Browning announced that Fanny was vulgar and pushy.
Over the next few years, following the appearance of Domestic Manners, Fanny nursed her tubercular offspring with one hand and dashed out novels with the other, “So that,” as Anthony put it, “there might be a decent roof for the children to die under.” When there was nobody left alive to nurse, Fanny swanned round the great capitals: Prince Metternich escorted her into dinner and the last king of France held a ball in her honor. It was one of the most dramatic reinventions of all time. She loved life, and never gave up on it. “Of all the people I have known,” Anthony wrote, “my mother was the most joyous, or at any rate, the most capable of joy.”
She was born Frances Milton in Bristol halfway through the long reign of George III, the Hanoverian known as The King Who Lost America. Like me, she was descended from generations of hardy West Country stock. Her father was a parson and her grandfather a distiller, and she grew up on a street that runs between Clifton Hill and York Place, close to the Hot Wells spa where the slavers’ wives took the waters. As a young woman Fanny moved to London to keep house for her brother in a dirty red-brick terrace sheathed in fog, and when she was thirty she married Thomas Trollope, a tow-headed barrister with a penchant for reckless schemes. Choleric (according to a colleague he was “industrious and disputatious in equal measure”) and an original Casaubon, Thomas was compiling an ecclesiastical dictionary and practicing law in what Anthony described as “dingy, almost suicidal chambers at No. 23 Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn.” At home at 16 Keppel Street the couple shared a ruinous sense of entitlement that led to the purchase of French marquetry desks, grand pianos and glazed wallpaper, and they maintained a minimum staff of half a dozen. During the first decade of their marriage they produced seven children and regularly leaped over the back wall to escape a creditor. “My father,” wrote Tom, their eldest, “was a poor man, and his establishment [the chambers] altogether on a modest footing. But it never would have occurred to him or to my mother that they could get on without a manservant in livery.” When Thomas senior’s law practice finally petered out, the family abandoned London for Harrow on the Hill, five miles outside the city, first renting a farmhouse, then leasing land to build a larger home with French windows, a lawn and a commodious parlour. Thomas was determined to set up as a gentleman farmer. The project, Anthony said, was to be the grave of all his father’s hopes, ambitions and prosperity. Calomel prescribed for sick headaches raised Thomas’ cantankerous outbursts to new heights (no wonder—it is mercurous chloride). “He is a good, honourable man,” Fanny confided to a friend, “but his temper is dreadful—every year increases his irritability—and also its lamentable effects upon the children.” Two of the seven children died: one a baby, the other, the beloved Arthur, at the age of twelve. Fanny, undiminished, held the family together. Thomas was, according to Tom, “a highly respected but not a popular or well-beloved man. Worst of all, alas! he was not popular in his own house … My mother’s disposition, on the other hand, was of the most genial, cheerful, happy, enjoué nature imaginable. All our happiest hours were spent with her; and to any one of us tête-à-tête with her was preferable to any other disposal of a holiday hour.” He said she “carried sunshine.” Fanny marched her brood through London’s smoking gaslights and yellow fogs to watch Hamlet or Doctor Faustus, and once queued for four hours to see Mrs. Siddons play Lady Macbeth. She enjoyed dancing, hiking and throwing parties, and above all was a passionate reader: unfinished books lay about the house like partly eaten sandwiches. Fanny considered herself a progressive radical, and knew many of the freethinkers floating round the capital in the 1820s. The Harrow farmhouse became a refuge for liberals seeking a temporary berth.
When the red-haired writer and social reformer Fanny Wright appeared dressed in Grecian robes, she dazzled Fanny, and introduced her to the idea of America. Tall and lithe with milky skin and a substantial inheritance, the Scots-born Wright had visited the States twice and was passionate about that country’s potential as a utopian democracy free from the conservative conventions of the Old World. She was close to the septuagenarian General Lafayette, the aristocrat who had served in the American War of Independence. (Washington said Lafayette was the only Frenchman he liked.) Wright had even accompanied the old soldier to America on his triumphal return tour in 1824; some said she had joined him in his bed. She stayed in America for two years, visiting Economy, a commune near Pittsburgh, and the Wabash River bottomland in Indiana where the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen had founded New Harmony, a communitarian experiment in which money was banned. Socialism, rationalism, women’s rights, free love—Wright was for it all. Convinced that she could prove the equality of the races, she had bought 200 acres on Tennessee’s Wolf River to establish a cooperative community where black and white would live in peace and harmony. When she met Fanny Trollope in Harrow, she had left her sister Camilla in charge at her commune, which she called Nashoba (Chickasaw for wolf), and had returned to Europe to recruit candidates willing to join her in the Tennessee co-op. Fanny was like a ripe plum, just right for picking. Thomas had just moved the family into a semi-derelict outbuilding and installed tenants in the main farmhouse. The accommodation, Anthony remembered, “always seemed to be in danger of falling into the neighbouring horse pond. As it crept downwards from house to stables, from stables to barns, from barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to dung heap, one could hardly tell where one began and the other ended.” No wonder Fanny became obsessed with Wright. She confided to a friend, “Fanny Wright is at once all that woman should be … I feel greatly inclined to say where her country is, there shall be my country. The more I see of her, the more I feel convinced that all her notions are right.” Tennessee was Fanny’s last best hope.
People did not expect menopausal women to reinvent themselves. “I can scarcely believe,” one acquaintance wrote to another, “that Mrs. T is actually on her way, and Trollope in his old age alone in London.” “Will wonders never cease?” wrote another. It was indeed a wonder, and I admired it. I didn’t know what home meant until I had children, and I can barely imagine the courage required to uproot as Fanny did. When I became a mother, I worried that I would never be truly free to take off again. I know it’s heretical to say it. At the time it felt heretical to feel it. I was forty-one when I had my second son, and I asked myself if, once he and his brother were gone, it would be too late.
As for Fanny’s children: twelve-year-old Anthony and seventeen-year-old Tom, boarders at Hampshire’s Winchester College, were to stay in England. Fanny took the other three with her—the feckless sixteen-year-old Henry, who was to teach Latin, fencing and dancing at Nashoba; Cecilia, who was eleven; and Emily, nine. Two servants agreed to take a chance with the party, and so did Auguste-Jean-Jacques Hervieu, a thirty-five-year-old French artist with a heroic moustache and republican views unappreciated by the authorities of his homeland. Hervieu was in search of a family: his father, a colonel in Napoleon’s army, had perished on the outskirts of Moscow. The Trollopes had unofficially adopted him, installing him as drawing master at the farmhouse, and as an artist they held him in high regard. Hervieu was, Fanny said, “among the many young Frenchmen who have been exiled for wishing for more freedom than the Bourbon fools and knaves allowed … if I have any knowledge of what is meant by the phrase, a man of genius, I conceive it to belong to him.”
*   *   *
The sailing ship Edward reached the mouth of the Mississippi in December 1827. “The first indication of our approach to land,” Fanny wrote, “was the appearance of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters.” Flights of pelicans thrilled her, and so did alligators, which she called crocodiles. Trunks of mighty trees uprooted by a hurricane span in the current “like the fragment of a world in ruins.” Bristolians are accustomed to narrow, placid rivers like the Avon, which subsides to a trickle twice a day, and Fanny’s description of the Mississippi as it decants into the Gulf of Mexico displays a touch of the Gothic. “Only one object rears itself above the eddying waters,” she wrote. “The mast of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross the [sand] bar, a dismal witness of the destruction that has been, and a boding prophet of that which is to come.” Above all she was amazed at the flatness of the shores and the ferocity of the river, “looking so mighty, and so unsubdued all the time, that I could not help fancying she would some day take the matter into her own hands again, and if so, farewell to New Orleans.”
The party found lodgings on Canal Street early in the evening, as the nabobs were talking on their second-floor verandas. Below, crowds drifted towards the Vieux Carré and its Franco-Spanish houses of yellow adobe or stuccoed brick, the hinges on the gates a yard long, and on past the white walls of the St. Charles Hotel, where planters danced in the Salle de Condé. New Orleans was the fifth-largest city in the nation and the unofficial capital of the South. West African freemen, Europeans and Creoles traded with Atakapa hunters bringing alligators they had speared through the eye, and with shaggy French-speaking Acadians who rode into town to barter sugar for tin pots. Twenty-four years after the Louisiana Purchase—the biggest land sale in history, and one that doubled the size of the U.S.—the city had already established its place in American geomythology: sexy, hot and slightly dangerous. When Fanny arrived the sugar elite had just appeared from the plantations for a three-month spree. Shopkeepers beckoned chatelaines who craved everything French, from yards of Parisian lace to cases of Sauternes, and the city imported so much Limoges china that an entrepreneurial Limousin had shipped in a team of potters and set up production near a clay pit. But the people of New Orleans didn’t want that. The dinner service had to be made in France. (The thing was to go full circle. When I was living in Paris in the 1970s, older people still said, “ Mais c’est l’Amérique!” to describe something luxuriously desirable.) Fanny liked it all, but when she entered a milliner’s shop, another customer introduced her to the milliner—a shopgirl—and the two enjoyed an “intellectual” conversation. It was “the first symptom of American equality that I perceived,” Fanny wrote. The incident was to reverberate throughout her American sojourn. In New Orleans she kept an open mind, noting the division between “two distinct sets of people”: the white Creole, and the mixed-race Quadroon. The latter she admired. ...

About this edition

• Publisher: North Point Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0374534780
• ISBN 13: 9780374534783
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304