I should scarcely have understood Sophronisba unless I had imagined
her against the background of that impeccable New England town from
which she says she escaped. It is a setting of elm-shaded streets, with
houses that can fairly be called mansions, and broad lawns stretching
away from the green and beautiful white church. In this large
princeliness of aspect the naïve stranger, like myself, would imagine
nothing but what was grave and sweet and frank. Yet behind those
pillared porticos Sophronisba tells me sit little and petrified people.
This spacious beauty exists for people who are mostly afraid; afraid
of each other, afraid of candor, afraid of sex, afraid of radicals.
Underneath the large-hearted exterior she says they are stifled within.
Women go queer from repression, spinsters multiply on families’ hands,
while the young men drift away to Boston. Dark tales are heard of
sexual insanity, and Sophronisba seems to think that the chastest wife
never conceives without a secret haunting in her heart of guilt. I
think there are other things in Sophronisba’s town, but these are the
things she has seen, and these are the things she has fled from.
Sophronisba is perhaps forty, but she is probably much younger than
she was at eleven. At that age the devilish conviction that she hated
her mother strove incessantly with the heavenly conviction that it was
her duty to love her. And there were unpleasing aunts and cousins who
exhaustingly had to be loved when she wished only spitefully to slap
them. Her conscience thus played her unhappy tricks through a submerged
childhood, until college came as an emancipation from that deadly
homesickness that is sickness not for your home but intolerance at it.
No more blessed relief comes to the conscience-burdened than the
chance to exchange their duties for their tastes, when what you should
unselfishly do to others is transformed into what books and pictures
you ought to like. Your conscience gets its daily exercise, but without
the moral pain. I imagine Sophronisba was not unhappy at college,
where she could give up her weary efforts to get her emotions correct
towards everybody in the world and the Three Persons in the heaven
above it, in favor of acquiring a sound and authorized cultural taste.
She seems to have very dutifully taken her master’s degree in English
literature, and for her industrious conscience is recorded somewhere
an unreadable but scholarly thesis, the very name of which she has
probably forgotten herself.
For several years Sophronisba must have flowed along on that thin
stream of the intellectual life which seems almost to have been
invented for slender and thin-lipped New England maidens who
desperately must make a living for themselves in order to keep out of
the dull prison of their homes. There was for Sophronisba a little
teaching, a little settlement work, a little writing, and a position
with a publishing house. And always the firm clutch on New York and the
dizzy living on a crust that might at any moment break and precipitate
her on the intolerable ease of her dutifully loving family. It is
the conventional opinion that this being a prisoner on parole can
be terminated only by the safe custody of a man, or the thrilling
freedom of complete personal success. Sophronisba’s career has been an
indeterminate sentence of womanhood. She is at once a proof of how very
hard the world still is on women, and how gaily they may play the game
with the odds against them.
I did not meet Sophronisba until she was in the mellow of her years,
and I cannot disentangle all her journalistic attempts, her dives
into this magazine and that, the electrifying discovery of her by
a great editor, the great careers that were always beginning, the
great articles that were called off at the last moment, the delayed
checks, the checks that never came, the magazines that went down
with all on board. But there were always articles that did come off,
and Sophronisba zigzagged her literary way through fat years of
weekly series and Sunday supplements and lean years of desk work and
book-reviewing. There are some of Sophronisba’s articles that I should
like to have written myself. She piles her facts with great neatness,
and there is a little ironic punch sometimes which is not enough to
disturb the simple people who read it, but flatters you as of the more
subtly discerning. Further, she has a genuine talent for the timely.
There has been strategy as well as art in her career. That feminine
Yankeeness which speaks out of her quizzical features has not lived in
vain. She tells with glee of editors captured in skilful sorties of
wit, of connections laboriously pieced together. She confesses to plots
to take the interesting and valuable in her net. There is continuous
action along her battlefront. She makes the acceptance of an article
an exciting event. As you drop in upon her for tea to follow her work
from week to week, you seem to move in a maze of editorial conspiracy.
Her zestfulness almost brings a thrill into the prosaic business of
writing. Not beguilements, but candor and wit, are her ammunition. One
would expect a person who looked like Sophronisba to be humorous. But
her wit is good enough to be surprising, it is sharp but it leaves no
sting. And it gets all the advantage of being carried along on a voice
that retains the least suggestion of a racy Eastern twang. With the
twang goes that lift and breathlessness that makes everything sound
interesting. When you come upon Sophronisba in that charming dinner
group that she frequents or as she trips out of the library, portfolio
in hand, with a certain sedate primness which no amount of New York
will ever strain out of her, you know that for a few moments the air is
going to be bright.
How Sophronisba got rid of the virus of her New England conscience
and morbidities I do not know. She must have exorcised more demons
than most of us are even acquainted with. Yet she never seems to have
lost the zest that comes from standing on the brink and watching the
Gadarene swine plunge heavily down into the sea. She has expelled the
terrors of religion and the perils of thwarted sex, but their nearness
still thrills. She would not be herself, neither would her wit be as
good, if it were not much made of gay little blasphemies and bold
feminist irreverences. There is the unconscious play to the stiff New
England gallery that makes what she says of more than local relevance.
In her serious talk there lingers the slight, interested bitter tang of
the old Puritan poison. But current issues mean much to Sophronisba.
These things which foolish people speak of with grave-faced strainings
after objectivity, with uncouth scientific jargon and sudden lapses
into pruriency, Sophronisba presents as a genuine revelation. Her
personal curiosity, combined with intellectual clarity, enable her
to get it all assimilated. Her allegiance went, of course, quickly
to Freud, and once, in a sudden summer flight to Jung in Zurich, she
sat many hours absorbing the theories from a grave, ample, formidably
abstract, and--for Sophronisba--too unhumorous Fraülein assistant. What
Sophronisba got she has made into a philosophy of life, translated
into New England dialect, and made quite revealingly her own. Before
journalism claimed her for more startling researches, she would often
give it for you in racy and eager fashion, turning up great layers of
her own life and of those she knew about her. Many demons were thus
sent flying.
Her exorcisms have been gained by a blazing candor and by a
self-directed sense of humor which alone can support it. With the
white light of this lantern she seems to have hunted down all the evil
shadows in that background of hers. Her relentless exposure of her
own motives, her eager publicity of soul and that fascinating life
which is hers, her gossip without malice and her wise cynicism, make
Sophronisba the greatest of reliefs from a world too full of decent
reticences and self-respects. That heavy conscience has been trained
down to an athletic trimness. I cannot find an interest or a realism or
a self-interpretation at which she will cringe, though three centuries
of Puritanism in her blood should tell her how unhallowed most of them
are.
Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the
subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very
tense, and if anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But
she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound
depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious
of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a
symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried
woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to
mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality
about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring,
and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto.
To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which
must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have
made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful
bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first.