Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt did not know she was precocious growing up. “I thought everyone was like me,” she says. She was born near Hanover, in 1906, but her parents shortly moved to Konigsberg to live with her grandparents. Her father died when she was seven. In school, in Konigsberg, she learned what it meant to be Jewish in Germany.

At first she went to the university at Marburg, and became involved with her professor, the charismatic and eloquent Heidegger.  “Being is hazardous,” said Heidegger. “The ground is trembling, but this lack of meaning is what makes life so vital and real.” She moved on to the University of Heidelberg, where she completed a dissertation on St. Augustine, under Karl Jaspers in 1929. Both of these teachers led Arendt to what she called “passionate thinking.” 

In 1929 she married Gunther Stern, like her headed toward an academic career. But by this time, it was almost impossible for them to find work. As more repression began, things became very difficult for Jews in Germany. Stern moved to Paris in 1931, but Arendt used their apartment in Berlin as a way-station for people trying to leave. She was arrested in 1933 for work documenting anti-Jewish propaganda. When she was freed after eight days, she walked out of Germany and into exile in Czechoslovakia.

Arendt looked for practical work in Paris. She had watched her university friends accommodate themselves to Hitler and she vowed not to get further involved with academia. She decided that if she was attacked as a Jew, she must fight as a Jew. She worked with Jewish organizations, including Youth Aliyah, doing fund-raising and helping young people move to Palestine. Arendt was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. Her mother had joined her in Paris, but her marriage was only a formality. She and Stern divorced.

Arendt met Heinrich Blucher, a working-class, self-taught philosopher, poet and activist, in Paris, “a political street fighter.” She found she could keep faith both with herself and with him. They married in 1940. “Where you are, there is my home,” she wrote to him.

Hannah was made to report for internment as France capitulated to Germany. She was sent to a camp in Gurs, in southern France with about 7,000 other women. The chaos was so great, however, that she managed to escape to Montauban, where she met her husband, and also her mother. With help from the American Varian Fry, they were able to get papers to get to Lisbon and then a ship to New York in 1941.

In New York, Arendt and Blucher participated in the vibrant life around them, gathering a tribe of fellow refugees and making many friends. Arendt excelled at loyalty, friendship and honesty. She said later that she wasn’t surprised by the persecution of Jews, but when they learned about Auschwitz in 1943, “that was the real shock. We could not believe it.”

Though she worked for Jewish organizations, Arendt was never a Zionist. She thought the creation of a state for Jews only would make hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. She had accepted being a “pariah” and found there was a certain warmth among her fellow Jews. But when the Israeli state was created, the warmth disappeared.

Arendt saw herself as a political theorist, not a philosopher. She began work on The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first major book, published in 1951. In it she says that the true existential crisis at the root of totalitarianism is loneliness. Loneliness had become the everyday experience of the masses, crushing them. In the modern world, labor and consumption alone throw us back on ourselves and make us lonely. Consumption takes the place of all truly relating activities.

Arendt was also teaching at many institutions, though she would not accept tenure-track positions, preferring to be independent. In her classes she said, “I don’t want you to empathize. I want you to understand.” We can’t change human suffering, but we can make it articulate. The table we sit around, she told her seminars, is the world. She was trying to remake the common world. She was not interested in people’s existential relationship to themselves as much as to each other. This was the true experience of freedom and true politics.

When Adolf Eichmann was brought to trial in Jerusalem, Arndt offered to cover the trial for The New Yorker. Reading his many pages of defense, Arendt laughed aloud. She thought he was a clown. Her ironic treatment of the trial was misunderstood by many and Arendt got a lot of backlash. The trial was a public event which brought the Holocaust to world-wide notice, and made Arendt well-known.

Traveling back to Germany to help reclaim treasures stolen by the Nazis, Arendt re-connected with Heidegger. She did not wish to return to Germany, but she did enjoy speaking German, and hearing it on the street. In 1950 she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. She continued to write and teach. Her husband Blucher died in 1970, and her own ill-health began in 1974. She died the following year, of a heart attack.

Lyndsey Stonebridge presents much of Arendt’s thought, as embodied in her life in We Are Free to Change the World [published 2024]. She points out Arendt’s stubborn insistence on reality, her fearlessness. The life of the mind doesn’t harden as it matures, but is responsive, always ready to look again. 

There are many biographies of Hannah Arendt, and I especially enjoyed an interview she gave in 1964, which you can watch here. Her thought seems to me to be particularly relevant today because of her insistence that we live in the world with others. She felt that violence is always a failure of politics. Freedom cannot be forced. It can only be experienced in the world and alongside others.

Anna Bont Frith

Geraldine Brooks

Anna Frith is 20 when plague comes to the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, England, in 1665. She is the main witness to what becomes of her village, as recounted in Geraldine Brooks’ historical novel Year of Wonders [published 2001]. Though many of the characters are based on research, this is a fictionalized account.

As a child Anna lost her mother early and her father treated her badly. She is married at 15 to Sam, a miner for lead, the chief work of the village. They are happy and have two sons. Anna is also in service to the Bradfords, the landed gentry, and to the new rector, Michael Mompellion. Mompellion’s wife Elinor teaches Anna to read, as Anna loves language, and also about the herbs in her garden.

When her husband is killed in a mining accident, Anna takes in a boarder, Mr. Viccars, a tailor. Viccars orders a bolt of cloth from London, opens it and soon is dead from plague. He tells Anna to burn his belongings, but villagers come to take some of the clothing he has made. Thus plague spreads throughout the village.

Horrified, the Bradfords leave, but Mompellion convinces his church flock to quarantine themselves. He sets up a system of exchange at a boundary stone, where local gentry will supply them, if they do not leave. Everyone agrees.

Anna’s two sons die, one after the other. She is lost, wondering why she is still alive. Spending time in the churchyard, she sees people torturing the local herbalist/midwife and her niece, whom they call “witches.” They have consorted with the devil and brought the plague. They hang the younger woman and her aunt dies of consumption and exposure. Mompellion tries to stop them. “Do we not have suffering enough here.”

Because there are no longer midwives in the village, Elinor asks Anna to assist at a birth. She is reluctant, but successfully helps a boy to be born. Death is all around, however. Anna goes to ask her father for help, but he belittles her. Why does God take good people and leave evil ones like her father, she wonders.

Anna and Elinor become nurses to villagers while Mompellion ministers to their spirits. They go to the physic garden kept by the “witches,” trying to learn what they can. Anna experiments with poppies, lulling herself with lovely dreams, but then realizes she must be awake to help people. Working with Elinor gives her serenity. Elinor tells Anna her own story, of becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Mompellion saved her.

With Elinor’s determination and Anna’s knowledge, the two of them manage to save the mine of nine-year-old Merry, the last of her family, by extracting enough lead to fill a “king’s dish.” The miners’ barmote court also sentences Anna’s father for stealing, however, and he is left to die. The villagers all succumb to fear. Some take to flagellating themselves. Anna’s step-mother Aphra sells charms as the ghost of one of the “witches.”

The villagers begin meeting for church outdoors at a distance from each other. Mompellion realizes they should burn their possessions, which they do in July 1666, about a year after the plague began. After a few weeks they realize no one else has died. Anna envies the love between Mompellion and Elinor and rues her own lonely state.

Aphra has gone mad, however, after a harsh punishment and losing her last child. She arrives for the service of thanksgiving wielding a knife. Mompellion and Elinor try to soothe her, but she fatally cuts Elinor’s neck. 

Mompellion is prostrate, all his strength gone. He throws down his Bible.  Anna tries to take care of him, but after many weeks gives up. She goes out to his spirited horse and takes it for a ride. When she returns, Mompellion kisses her. He apologizes for his excessive grief. They sleep together, but when Mompellion tells Anna that he had held himself away from Elinor because of her sin and the need for atonement, Anna is horrified by his coldness.

Anna goes to the church, where she finds Miss Bradford. She begs Anna to go to her mother who is having a difficult birth. Anna succeeds in midwifing a little girl. But the daughter tries to drown the baby, a bastard. Anna says she will take the baby away and never come back. The Bradfords give her jewels, and Mompellion lets her take his horse, as she will be in danger. Anna spurns protection and takes the first ship, which is bound for Venice. After a difficult voyage, they end up on the north coast of Africa, at Oran.

It seems to Anna that she should continue to learn healing. She has also had a daughter of her own, by Mompellion. She is taken into the household of a compassionate doctor and helps him in healing women as she raises her two daughters. It is difficult for her to get used to the sun and light, but she insists she will never go back to England.

Geraldine Brooks was a foreign correspondent in recent places of terrible conflict, Bosnia, the Middle East, Africa. She wanted to write about the question of who people become under the worst circumstances. In making Anna a witness to what happens in her village which, even today, plays up its status as a plague village, Brooks is able to explore many dark places. The book is not easy to read, but it does delve into the question.

Ruth McBride Jordan

James McBride and Ruth MacBride Jordan

Ruth Jordan was born in Poland in 1921. Two years after her birth, her father, a Jewish rabbi, moved the family to America, where they led an itinerant life until settling in Suffolk, Virginia, where they started a grocery and dry goods store.

Growing up, James McBride knew nothing of his mother’s story. She refused to speak of it. But slowly, he got her to tell it, writing it down for us in The Color of Water, published in 1995.

Ruth’s father made she and her brother do all the work of the store when they weren’t in school. As a Jew, Ruth felt isolated. The store was in a black neighborhood and customers were cheated. Ruth’s father had no respect for them, but Ruth found them peaceful and trusting. He also abused Ruth sexually. Her brother ran away at 15 and Ruth herself went to New York at 17 to live with relatives.

Ruth was fascinated by Harlem which was “magic” at the time. She found work as a manicurist up there, but Dennis McBride, whom she met at her aunt’s leather factory, knew how much trouble she could get into and was appalled. He began asking her out, but he didn’t want to marry. “In the South, I could be shot for marrying you,” he said. He took Ruth to the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Harlem where everyone loved Pastor Abner Brown. Dennis sang in the choir. Ruth converted to Christianity. “My world expanded in every way.” Ruth finally felt loved.

Living in a one room apartment, Dennis and Ruth had four children. “It was the happiest time in my life,” Ruth told her son. They applied for an apartment in the new Red Hook project in Brooklyn and got in. They had their own bathroom finally. The place was integrated, lovely, in Ruth’s eyes. She and Dennis started a prayer meeting in their living room (which was still going 40 years later). They had three more children, and one on the way in 1957, when Dennis died of lung cancer.

Ruth was shocked and scared. Many people helped them, but times were hard. She did not want to be on welfare. When Ruth asked her Jewish family for help, they told her, no. “We sat shiva for you. You are no longer part of our family.” When Ruth’s mother was dying, she was not allowed to see her.

Soon enough, however, another black man, Hunter Jordan, tall, capable and half Indian, wooed Ruth and her eight children. He took his life savings and bought the family a house in Queens. He couldn’t live in their chaos, however, and came on weekends to see Ruth and her kids, and help out. He and Ruth had four more kids, bringing the total to 12.

Ruth established a powerful framework for her family. She didn’t socialize, except in church. She had a distrust of authority and insisted on privacy. The kids were not to talk about themselves to others. Ruth had seen a lot of prejudice, but she never responded to it. The only things important to her were church and school. “What’s money if your mind is empty?” was her refrain.

Ruth went to every free museum and event she could find in New York, traveling on the subways with a gaggle of her black children in tow. She scanned the school programs, to get her kids into the best schools, usually Jewish, and sent them to camp in the summer. She insisted they all get good grades. She was a poor housekeeper and cook, but she didn’t care what the world thought of her. She refused to acknowledge her whiteness. “I’m light skinned,” she said.

When Ruth was 51, her second husband had a stroke. She was devastated. She went to work at the Chase Manhattan Bank as a secretary, still slim and pretty. At home, she designated the oldest kid the “king” or “queen,” the authority. The house was “organized chaos,” where the kids were always hungry, always debating. Civil rights and black power were the order of the day. The kids did not consider themselves poor or deprived. As they began to grow up they found the best college scholarships they could and often went on to become doctors and professors.

Ruth’s son James reports that all of his siblings had some color confusion. “Is God black or white?” “God is the color of water,” Ruth told the kids. She communicated her Jewishness through her respect for education. In 1974, the family moved to Delaware. James played in jazz bands, became a journalist.

James felt he needed to get to know his mother so as to know himself. He applied all his journalistic skills to her life, visiting Suffolk, Virginia and turning up her old friends. He published The Color of Water to great acclaim. It helped Ruth face her past. Ruth went on to get a degree in social work at Temple University in 1986 and settled in Ewing, Pennsylvania. At Christmas, all of James’ siblings collected at her house, anxious to recreate the madcap, color-blind, sophisticated atmosphere in which she had brought them up. Ruth died in 2010.

I loved this story of a young girl moving from the darkness of a family trying to survive without love, to the blazing light of its abundance. Ruth McBride Jordan built a life with two wonderful husbands and a dozen kids. They felt that “education, tempered by religion, was the way to pull yourself out of poverty.”  She was fearless in moving about New York and fierce when her children got in trouble. “Educate your mind,” she told her children. And they did.

Hattie Kong

Gish Jen

Hattie Kong is born in Shandong province, China, her father a distant descendant of the Confucius family. Her mother is a Christian missionary. When she is 16, the cultural revolution begins and Hattie is sent away, to family in Iowa. But Iowa is a monoculture at this time, and a family in Massachusetts is found for her to live with as an exchange student. She hears nothing from her parents.

Hattie grows up in the Hatch family, falling in love with Carter, the middle son, and investigating natural phenomena with him. It is Dr. Hatch who convinces Hattie to go into science. “You’re curious, interested in reality. Even the nature of our blindness interests you.” Dr. Hatch has a lab which Carter eventually runs. Hattie is hired, designing experiments to investigate Carter’s questions about the brain’s evolution. They have a brilliant partnership.

But science is competitive. Dr. Hatch thinks Hattie and Carter’s relationship is dangerous to the lab. Carter does not stand up for her. Hattie has to leave. She eventually finds her way to teaching, marrying Joe, a history teacher, and making a best friend of another teacher, Lee. Hattie and Joe have a son. 

When World and Town [2021], the novel by Gish Jen which tells Hattie’s story, opens, Hattie is 68. Her husband and best friend have died and she has moved to Riverlake, a small town in Vermont where the Hatches used to summer. She lives alone with her dogs and spends her time painting. She also has a group of friends who walk together and do yoga. It doesn’t feel like enough. She is as lonely as she has ever been.

In addition, Hattie’s Chinese relatives keep insisting that her parents, buried in Iowa, must be moved to the Kong family cemetery in China. The relatives are having misfortunes which they feel are due to this disrespect to family members.

A Cambodian family moves into a double-wide trailer, on a property just below Hattie’s windows. She makes friends with them, especially the young girl, Sophy, who speaks English well. And Carter appears in the town, having retired. He is building boats. The town is resisting a cell phone tower, and a big box discount store. Carter comes up with the best defense against the discount store at a town meeting. “The world has come to town.”

Sophy becomes the unwitting accomplice in a complicated family feud, fueled by a woman’s attempts to secure her family farm against her husband. The inability of the members of Sophy’s own family to find places in the town result in a horrendous beating. Hattie watches, helpless but open. When Sophy confesses to her, Hattie listens, tries to resolve the situation without bringing in the police, of whom the family is afraid. She enlists the help of her walking group, and Carter.

In the midst of this conflict, Carter admits he came to Riverlake to look for Hattie. She finds it hard to forgive him. He gave his life to science, not to her. He has also lost his wife. She tells him she left the lab because she needed a home. She was good with kids, teaching was satisfying. But Carter insists, “You can argue for the dignity of an ordinary life, but the higher precincts of science do make a person feel his dignity.” Hattie agrees that science, finding hard, repeatable results of experiments and sharing them, was wonderful.

When Carter turns up at the Cambodian family’s trailer with an excavator, to help with the drainage ditch the family is trying to build, the father quits his suicidal stance. The whole town is on hand, giddy with relief. They adopt the family into the town’s celebrations. Hattie watches the young people going to school at last. The woman who instigated the problems leaves town.

Hattie goes out to Iowa with a Chinese “bone picker” to retrieve her parents' urns. She sends them to Hong Kong to her relatives. They report that they are feeling a “big peace” once the ashes are interred in the Kong family cemetery. Carter moves in with Hattie. “They are the ones who lived.”

I loved Hattie, with her honesty, inability to believe in superstition and her tenacity. She makes moderate inroads into problems and doesn’t let go when times get tough. Though Carter has been in her thoughts her whole life, she had no expectation of seeing him again. Her late coming together with him is very moving.

Lucy Josephine Potter

Jamaica Kincaid

At 19, Lucy is sent by her mother to the United States from her native place, the island of Antigua in the Caribbean. She is to be an au pair, that is, to take care of four children and go to school at night. The four children belong to Lewis and Mariah, who are good to Lucy. She has her own room off the kitchen with its own bathroom. She is deeply homesick, which surprises her, as she had wanted to get away from home very badly.

In the spring Mariah shows Lucy a field of daffodils, wanting her to like them as much as she does. But, as a child, Lucy had been made to memorize Wordsworth’s poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” in which the poet celebrates the host of golden daffodils he sees. At the time Lucy had never seen a daffodil and she resents being made to study British culture. She wants to erase them. Spring snow was lovely, but Lucy weeps because she “could not bear to love one more thing in my life, one more thing that would make my heart break into a million pieces.”

The family takes the train to a cabin near a lake where Mariah spent her childhood summers. Mariah brings back fish she has caught for supper, telling Lucy, “I was looking forward to telling you I have Indian blood, which is why I am good at fishing. But now I am afraid you will take it the wrong way.” Lucy says only “All along I have wondered how you got to be the way you are.”

Things become sour in the household. Lewis has a garden, but rabbits are eating the vegetables. Mariah cries when Lewis kills them. Lucy knows that Lewis is having an affair with Mariah’s best friend, and sides with Mariah whom she loves. Lucy says to herself how surprising it is that having too much could make one unhappy. She has observed the opposite too long.

Meanwhile Lucy is not even opening her own mother’s letters. She longs for her, but she is mourning the death of a love affair with her mother. For her first nine years, she and her mother were inseparable, but then her mother had three sons and she turned away from Lucy, lavishing everything she had on the sons. Lucy is angry that her mother betrayed her own intelligence, and then Lucy’s as well. Lucy thought she could run away from her past, but finds her mother’s blood runs inside her.

Lucy makes friends with Peggy, who introduces her to the artist, Paul. The party at Paul’s house smells of myrrh and marijuana. His paintings are of strange figures in dark colors. Everything the people at the party said mattered. Lucy does not think she is an artist, but she wants to be around people who stand apart. She stays with Paul when everyone else goes home. She also stops going to nursing school at night.

Mariah and Lewis decide to divorce. They go through the motions at Christmas, but it felt like a funeral to Lucy. It was gloomy inside and out. Nevertheless Mariah begins to feel free. She gives Lucy a museum membership and Lucy also buys a camera, taking many photos. 

Though Lucy does not even open the letter from Antigua marked urgent, an acquaintance arrives to tell her her father has died. He left Lucy’s mother a pauper. Lucy gathers as much money as she can and sends it to her mother, but she includes a false address, telling her mother she is moving.

Lucy rents an apartment with Peggy. She has found a job answering the phones at the studio of a photographer. She has no secretarial skills, but she is allowed to use the darkroom at night. She remains a friend of Mariah, who gives her a large notebook full of empty pages, encouraging Lucy to begin her own life.

Jamaica Kincaid, who tells Lucy’s story in the novella Lucy [1990], leaves her here, as Lucy is turning 20. Lucy is not happy, but she has achieved her independence. Happiness seemed to be too much to ask.

And because Jamaica Kincaid says that her extraordinary stories both are and are not autobiographical, we can look at her later life and see what might have happened to Lucy. Kincaid herself has become an influential writer, has married and had two children, and teaches at Harvard. She is also a great gardener. At her home in Vermont, Kincaid began planting daffodils. She began with one thousand and continued until there are now perhaps 20,000 coming up in the spring, “redeeming Wordsworth”!

The experience of reading Kincaid’s writing is profound. Lucy says she is at her most “two-faced,” that is she cannot say many of the things she thinks out loud. But she treats us, her readers, to all of her thoughts, the powerful inner life which roils under her surface. Lucy appears angry to Mariah, but the reader feels enveloped in warmth. One reviewer says, “Kincaid holds you in her arms and rocks you!” You will also get this impression if you watch her speak, such as in this discussion of her career from 2014 at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Susan Burling Ward

Mary Hallock Foote

Born on a farm in upstate New York, Susan Burling Ward, the protagonist of Angle of Repose [1971] by Wallace Stegner, was sent to art school. She became an accomplished illustrator in her early 20’s and made a great friend of her colleague Augusta. Together with Thomas Hudson, the two made a productive, artistic trio. Augusta married Hudson and Susan met a young engineer, Oliver Ward.

Ward left for the West, determined to become an engineer. He stayed away for five years, while Susan wrote to him. When he came back, they made an agreement between them to marry. Oliver went to California for another year, but they were married in a quiet Quaker ceremony in 1876. Augusta told Susan she was throwing herself and her career away. Susan was already doing illustrations for well-known writers. 

But Susan took the train to California, to a mine near San Jose where Oliver had a job. He had spent everything he had building a house for them, with verandahs on three sides. Sage, bay and manzanita surrounded the house, which looked down on the hurly-burley of the mine. Susan took up her pencils, continuing to make sketches and wood-block illustrations. Their first child was born the next year.

Nevertheless, Susan felt isolated. She wanted to talk about books, art and music with someone. She dressed like a lady and was stand-offish, Oliver her only consolation. She wrote letters to Augusta and sent sketches of “local color” to magazines in New York. When Oliver quarreled with the mine manager over how he treated people, Susan stood behind him. “Don’t compromise your principles,” she told him.

Oliver quit the job and they spent a couple of months in Santa Cruz. Susan had grandiose plans for Oliver’s success with his invention of cement composition, but he didn't find backers. Instead he took a job in North Dakota and Susan took her baby home to her parents’ farm. She hoped to see Augusta, but she and her husband had gone to Europe.

After a year apart, Oliver sent for Susan to come to Leadville, Colorado, high in the mountains. There they lived in a log cabin, but Leadville was full of educated men. Civilization was roaring to life. Men from the newly created U.S. Geological Survey and others gathered at Susan’s house for conversation. She was secure and loved. She wrote, made drawings and did some traveling while Oliver ran the Adelaide mine. One spring she came back to find that the men were carrying guns, however. 

The Adelaide lost its backing and Oliver took Susan to Mexico with him to inspect a mine. Susan loved the stately gentility of the rancheros and hoped to settle in Michoacán. She found everything picturesque and sent illustrated articles back to New York. But Oliver reported honestly that the mine wasn’t worth much and he and Susan were again without a home. Susan went back to her New York farm and there had her second child. 

Rifts in Oliver and Susan’s communication began to show when Susan didn’t tell him about their coming child, and he didn’t tell her he was working on a speculative irrigation scheme. Nevertheless Susan once again left her friends, family and safety, and went out to Boise, a drab, new town without stimulus. The canyon was beautiful, however, with sage plains and a magic wind. The Wards, their children and Oliver’s assistants built a rock house with four fireplaces when winter was coming, using money from Susan’s publications, and Oliver’s concrete.

In 1887, Susan had her third baby. Life was uncertain and one of Oliver’s assistants, Frank, came to feel he was in love with Susan. She loved talking to him, but it was an honorable, Victorian, platonic relationship. “Oliver is the best man in the state,” Frank told Susan. Oliver was a brilliant engineer, but stubborn and taciturn. 

The irrigation project went badly and Susan took the children to Vancouver island. She was desperate to expose them to culture, conversation, theatre, not wanting them to grow up to be “savages.” She drove herself to work, while the children were educated by an English governess.

Two years later Susan returned to the demonstration ranch Oliver had built with renewed interest in the irrigation scheme. Susan was angry at the time it would take to make the place civilized. Oliver had planted trees, roses, a small lawn. He was terribly excited about how the “big ditch” would be able to irrigate 500 square miles. But dust was everywhere, Susan could not bring herself to go into Boise and she and Oliver existed in a “bruised and careful truce.” Little Ollie, 12 years old, was sent on the train to school in the East.

In 1890, part of the canal opened with festivities. But later that year the syndicate cut off funds, people went unpaid, and worst of all, a lawyer took the claim Oliver had set aside for Susan’s sister. “You haven’t had faith in me,” Oliver told Susan. “Not that I’ve deserved much faith.”

And here is where the story takes a turn. Stegner, as he often did, took his story from the real life of Mary Hallock Foote, a writer and illustrator, married to a mining engineer. Stegner had permission from the family to use her letters, but he may have used them too exactly. And then he changed her story.

In Stegner’s novel, Frank begs Susan to go away with him. Susan resists, but while talking to him one day, her little daughter Agnes, a five-year-old sprite, wanders away, slips into the canal and drowns. None of them recover from this tragedy. Frank commits suicide. Susan at first takes her children back east, but then returns to the ranch until Oliver sends for her. He has taken a job at the Zodiac mine in California near Grass Valley. Here they lived together for almost fifty years, treating each other “with grave, infallible kindness,” though Oliver never forgives Susan and their grandson never sees them kiss or touch each other.

In the real life story of Mary Hallock Foote, which the family documents here, the Footes lived in contentment and Arthur contributed many innovations to the Northstar mine near Grass Valley, California. Agnes, their youngest daughter, died at 17 after surgery for appendicitis. Mary did not get over the loss of her youngest daughter and was buried in Grass Valley beside her.

I do not have access to the memoir written by Mary Hallock Foote and published long after her death [A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West, 1972]. However, Stegner’s telling of her life, which he arguably twists to his own purpose, fleshes out the complex stresses of living between the civilized world of New York and that of the burgeoning West. Having staked my own claim on the West, I am susceptible to its beauties, which Stegner has done his part to describe, and also to conserve. The story as he tells it is well worth reading, but it also helps to have an awareness of its origins.

Note: Sands Hall gives a further opinion on Stegner’s use of Mary Hallock Foote’s life Here.

Sunny Rhodes

Marianne Wiggins

We meet Sunny, blonde hair flying, in a red cape, herding goats in the Owens Valley in California, 1941. She comes into the beautiful adobe house her father Rocky built, expecting to hear something of her twin brother who was in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was bombed. But Schiff, through whose eyes we see her, has come in a U.S. Army car on other business. She has wide eyes, cropped hair and no affectations.

Sunny and Stryker, her brother, grew up in this house, but Sunny has no memory of her mother, Lou, a French woman, a doctor, who dies of polio when Sunny is three. Her aunt Cass comes to live with the family at this time. When Sunny is five, she spends two summer months in the mountains with her father and brother, building a cabin and crafting a life in the wild.

At age ten, Sunny finds a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen and begins laboriously working through them, learning French to decipher her mother’s notes. It becomes a connection and Sunny finds she takes after her mother, with good instincts for cooking and gardening. Cass takes her to New York and Paris when Sunny is twelve. Sunny is amazed by the sheer number of people in New York, and surprised by Cass’ upper-class habits. Sunny is particularly interested in fish, since she has never lived near the ocean. When she looks back at her notes from Paris, they are full of fish meals!

By fifteen, Sunny has pledged herself to Jesus, the grandson of the orchard-keeper at Manzanar, who is the constant companion of Stryker and Sunny. Due to an unfortunate incident, however, Jesus must go back to Mexico and cannot be seen in the valley. Sunny sees him occasionally. She stays with her family, opening a restaurant in town which she names after her mother.

Rocky Rhodes has been fighting the water takeover of the valley by Los Angeles. The “water boys” constantly patrol the area. Then, in 1942, the U.S. Army moves in to build a camp for Japanese people caught in the conflict of World War II. Schiff, the camp overseer, falls in love with Sunny. He loves eating at her restaurant, even helps out when she needs him. He is Jewish, a lawyer. Both he and Sunny feel the camp is “all wrong.” 

Sunny tries to help by getting the women at the camp to cook. In the orphanage she finds a little boy with an “M” on his heel. The Rhodes family never hears exactly what happened to Stryker, but he was on the Arizona, and they know he had married a Japanese girl and had twin boys just before Pearl Harbor. What happened to them?

Sunny goes to meet Jesus, who is back in the U.S. as a bracero and a political activist. He has married someone else, as he feels he could never be a match for Sunny. This devastates her. She comes home unconscious and hypothermic, but she has tied herself to her horse. Slowly she recovers. Finding Schiff in the house enjoying her father and Cass’ hospitality, she yells at him. “Go away! You’re not family.” Schiff goes.

Months pass. The camp is up and running, the Japanese organizing themselves. Schiff decides to enlist, hoping to get a crack at Hitler. When Sunny hears this, she confronts him. “I don’t want you to die,” she says. “There are other things you can do.” Schiff takes her in his arms. When he asks her why she changed her mind about him, she tells him about a night she felt abandoned in a boat up near the cabin. Sunny and Schiff have ten days to spend together before Schiff will be sent away. Schiff wants to spend them camping.

Schiff is sent to Hawaii, where he learns that Stryker’s wife was on a plane to San Francisco on the morning of Pearl Harbor. The twin children were separated. Schiff spends the next four years working on a constitution which makes Japan a democracy, once it has surrendered. During that time, Rocky is killed, disappears without a trace. Sunny begs Schiff to return to her, but Schiff cannot. They do not communicate further.

When his work in Japan is complete, Schiff comes back to the U.S. He drives to the Owens Valley, but finds that the Rhodes’ ranch has been abandoned, bought by the Los Angeles water district. Nothing remains at the Manzanar camp except a gatehouse. He calls Cass to ask where Sunny is. She is pleased to hear from him and says Sunny is running a restaurant at Pt. Reyes Station.

Schiff drives to northern California and arrives at a locked Victorian house with three chairs on the porch, a reference to the Rhodes ranch. He first meets the boy from the camp at Manzanar whom Sunny has adopted. Sunny arrives with a wagon full of vegetables. She is noncommittal when she sees Schiff. But she is down a staff member for her evening meal, and he effortlessly fills in. 

After dinner they have a glass of wine. “You didn’t come when I needed you,” she says. “I missed you. I thought you would never come back.” In Japan, Schiff has seen a half-Caucasian, half-Japanese kid who is a dead ringer for Sunny’s adopted son. Sunny feels content. She has said what she needed to, to her father and brother. The most unfinished thing in her life is still her mother. She has begun an amalgamation of her mother’s recipes and her own.

Sunny is a character in Properties of Thirst [2022], a meandering, passionate novel by Marianne Wiggins. She faces the losses in her life with steady work, learning French, teaching herself to cook using her mother’s cookbooks and notes. Self-reliant and bold, she is also well aware of the pain of others and helps where she can. I loved the keen, intelligent story of Sunny and her family, which illuminates history at the time of World War II in Southern California.