I Have, I Fear, the Literary Temperament

 

May Day, 1923, as recorded in the diary of Dorothy Burr Thompson, Bryn Mawr College Class of 1923

February 28, 1920, gray, cold, dull

“I used to feel that having big thoughts and feeling deeply were a sign of greatness and that I was marked, so to speak.  Query: Can I write?  Is this an indication of the good taste of Bryn Mawr or my vile style?”

These words, inscribed in a composition notebook by Bryn Mawr freshman Dorothy Burr Thompson ’23 ninety years ago, remind me of my own overwrought musings, which served as source material for my novel, My Life As a Girl.  By the time I wrote the book, I was fifteen years removed from the angst of adjusting to college life.  Though I was teaching creative writing to Bryn Mawr undergraduates in the same building where I’d conferenced with my Freshman English professor, the psychological landscape of the campus had changed—as I had—in the intervening years.  In order to fictionalize the fear, uncertainty, and awe I’d felt on a campus that was by then my workplace, I had to undertake an archaeological excavation of my past.  I dug up my old insecurities (detailed in the journals I kept from 1980 – 1984) as well as my successes and grand plans (trumpeted in my letters home) to find again what I thought and felt at 17.  At that age, I entered Bryn Mawr’s class of 1984 with my brilliant, far-better-prepared classmates—and finally met the mythical Elizabeth Vermey ‘58, who’d opened the door with her signature on the letter of admission that is, along with my light-blue lantern, one of my most cherished college artifacts.

Middle-aged now, I tell my own true story differently to Bryn Mawr student Jen Rajchel ’11, who requested my biography when I signed up to participate in an archival project for Elliott Shore’s course in “Women’s Higher Education in the 19th &20th Centuries: The History of Bryn Mawr College”.  Like any life, mine is lived circuitously, but in retrospect I can plot my path as a series of points along a narrative timeline leading logically to the desk where I sit today, writing this essay.  As if becoming a writer is the inevitable conclusion to the story of a character who studied psychology, as I did at Bryn Mawr, and who planned to earn a Ph.D.

Dorothy Burr Thompson did the opposite; she entered Bryn Mawr a writer (she’d penned poems and stories and a novel draft, Marjorie, at Miss Hill’s School in Philadelphia) and exited as a scholar.  As I learned before I began reading her 1919 – 1923 diaries, she graduated summa cum laude, forged a brilliant career as a classical archaeologist specializing in ancient terra cotta art, and lived to be 101.  Knowing the end of her story diffuses its narrative tension somewhat by revealing what Dorothy accomplished in her long, productive, fruitful life.  But for me, this answer to the question of who she became only brings her own urgent query—Can I write?—into greater relief.

In fact, Dorothy published more than 50 scholarly papers and books on her excavation work in Athens.  Her life-spanning diaries in the Bryn Mawr College Archives (beyond the three volumes my research partner, history major Emily Kirchner ’12, and I studied) contain evidence that she wrote fiction and poetry into her forties, and yet no mention is made of this work in her New York Times obituary.

“There will be a box here for you one day,” Lee Wacker ’12 said cheerfully, as she and Michelle Smith ’12 sat across from me—Youth facing Middle Age—at a reading table in Canaday’s Coombe Suite one cold, rainy day in October.  How I will be remembered isn’t something I thought about much at Bryn Mawr, but it’s definitely something I think about now.  Perhaps it was this sudden realization—that a complex life with conflicting ambitions might be abstracted to fit a column of type or an archive box —that directed my attention to the subtext in Dorothy’s story.

And so, as Emily investigated Dorothy’s preparation for Bryn Mawr’s entrance exam and rigorous curriculum, I focused on her literary aspirations—and the role of Bryn Mawr College as setting and (at times) antagonist in altering the arc of her life.

Monday, September 22, 1919

“Four years of college should prove whether I have a right to write or should take up a manlier way of life.”

Bryn Mawr, at the point when Dorothy matriculated, was in some ways an unlikely setting for a young woman who declared herself a “literary type.”  Creative writing was not yet part of the curriculum.  Practically speaking, the long list of required courses in English, philosophy, math, science, Greek, Latin, and two modern languages left her even less time for outlining her new novel  (working title: Youth) than I would have six decades later, as I chose courses to fulfill slightly less onerous requirements.

More significant, perhaps, is the psychological setting for Dorothy’s endeavor, as depicted by Cornelia Meigs ’08 in What Makes a College?: A History of Bryn Mawr.  Our alma mater was founded by pragmatic Quakers and shaped by its formidable first dean, M.Carey Thomas, who articulated an agenda for “solid and scientific” instruction in her cheeky 1883 letter to James Rhoads, applying for the president’s job that would shortly become his.  Bryn Mawr in 1919—post-armistice, pre-suffrage—still had much to prove about what women and women’s colleges could do.  Though Dorothy’s fateful meeting with by-then-President Thomas wouldn’t occur until her sophomore year (Helen Taft took the reins in 1919 – 1920 while Thomas took a sabbatical), Bryn Mawr was Thomas’s brainchild, if not her stone embodiment in Collegiate Gothic style.  In literary terms, M. Carey Thomas is the antagonist in the conflict Dorothy establishes in her diary on the first day of classes in her freshman year.  Dramatically, Bryn Mawr is the perfect setting for the struggle that will intensify over four years and, finally, reveal her character.

August 8, 1920 clear, warm, soft

Oh, such a soft summer day, peaceful and dreary, ill-fit for recording turbulent and petty feelings!  Yet I must.  I have, I fear, the literary temperament—capable of being happy only in writing, however foolish may be my ideas.  Every day I have promised myself an orgy in the empty inviting blank book…”

By sophomore year, though Dorothy laments being “gradually weighed down by study to less artistic tasks,” she’s using her diary differently, as a true writer would:  to practice her craft and articulate her emerging literary aesthetic.   Her entries are transformed in content and style; self-analysis becomes literary criticism (she admires Jane Austen and Ivan Turgenev), ruminations on her friendships become thoughts about her characters.  “Malcolm is dead,” she writes on September 13, 1920—and I have to re-read the passage several times before I realize that Malcolm is not a family member, but her fictional creation.  “Perhaps it is wrong,” she adds, “or rather, inadvisable, to suffer so much for an imaginary pain…”  Her entries from this time reflect new awareness of herself as protagonist in her collegiate experiment of self-invention.  In one passage, she admits of her eponymous novel, “I always knew Marjorie was myself.”

Again and again in her diaries, Dorothy pits the “literary type” (such as her brilliant friend D.W., to whom she “confided all my schemes and hopes”) against the “scientific personality” (typified by her math professor, Anna Pell).  She pursues these women’s stories as a novelist would, seeking resolution to her own internal conflict.  By spring of sophomore year, D.W. makes the “upper ten” for the European Fellowship that Dorothy covets; by spring of junior year, she withdraws from Bryn Mawr after suffering a “nervous breakdown.” Dorothy’s professed fear of the literary temperament is informed by such dramatic outcomes, which seem to reinforce her own associations:  inspiration with depression, dullness with mental and physical health.  She expresses her dichotomous view of these mental states throughout her diaries, but never as succinctly as in her entry on February 28, 1920:  “I’d write tonight, but curiously, I feel vigorous, but uninspired, like a strong cow.”

Anna Pell is another story.  On Thursday, December 21, 1920, Dorothy presents (in dialogue with stage directions) a pointed conversation with the math professor at “Yarrow”.  As the two women speak, Mrs. Pell’s odd, “dog-like” husband Alexander shuffles in and out of the room, muttering that his wife is “crazy” and that he and she are “incompatible equations”.

D—Why am I more stupid as I go on?

Miss P—Misdirected energy, Miss Burr.

D—Must one give up everything, and health?

Miss P—Almost (pathetically but unsentimentally.) You must make a great many sacrifices; it is an isolated life. You can’t talk about your work to anyone.  But Mathematicians don’t consider—they go straight ahead.  (Bursting through reserve.) It’s the most wonderful thing in the world.

A month later, on Thursday, January 27, 1921, Dorothy depicts another, less amusing visit to “Miss P’” at Yarrow, to deliver a puzzle she’s promised to bring.  “Her eyes were red and swollen and her face white,” she notes, signaling an important scene with slower pacing and minute detail.  “I was embarrassed to meet her, so I chatted jauntily on about Miss Blake, engines, puzzles, etc. trying to set on myself as theatrical and romantic in imagining that she had been crying.”  Mrs. Pell takes the puzzle, though something in her manner is uncordial, and Dorothy feels unwanted.  “I got out quickly,” she reflects, as she builds to her point, “without knowing exactly why.”

Later, she’s shocked to learn from a professor of psychology, Miss Fernald, that Mr. Pell had died from a stroke just that morning.  “That that provincial, untrivial, earnest woman should have received me so undramatically, even tho’ she was in undoubted sorrow… a few hours after her husband’s death—is a triumph of the scientific personality,” she concludes.  “A literary woman could not have been so matter of fact.”  Dorothy presents the scene as more evidence of her own literary temperament, but her writing also reveals her instincts for character and story.  Her portrait of the strange Mr. Pell was prescient, as it turns out.  More than eighty years later, Richard Pipes would make the case in The Degaev Affair:  Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia that “Alexander Pell” was in fact notorious Russian terrorist Sergei Degaev, accomplice to the murder of Tsar Alexander II, leading a double life as the husband of Bryn Mawr’s math department chair.  Now that’s a story—one that Dorothy might have told.

Saturday, April 22, 1922 clear, cool, brilliant

“PT said to Uncle Earnest, “She is our best student”—I am elated, inspired—those murky misgivings and suicidal agonies retreat to deeper corners—though never do they entirely vanish.  This is my clear ambition—honor by those I respect.  More I demand still of course—honor from the world beyond academic doors—“

PT? The instant I understood the initials were President Thomas’s, I felt the intensity of Dorothy’s conflict and the certainty of her fate.  Though she had yet to choose her profession, she’d been chosen.  She’d been launched on a scholarly trajectory when her novelist mother, Anna Robeson (Brown) Burr, first suggested a career in archaeology; she’d gained momentum when she declared a double major (Bryn Mawr’s first) in classical archaeology and Greek.  Now, with high praise from Rhys Carpenter and Mary Swindler, she set her sights on winning Bryn Mawr’s European Fellowship, a prize that would cover a year of study in Greece, where she began the work that defined her life.

* * *

The students in the “Writing Short Fiction” class I teach at Bryn Mawr are smart, talented and well trained to critically examine themes in literature.  But I want them to learn to think as writers; that is, I want them to understand and apply literary technique to produce a desired effect in their stories.   This week, we talked about different kinds of story endings,  including resonant images like James Joyce’s “snow falling faintly through the universe” at the end of “The Dead”.   I was thinking of Dorothy as I told my students that stories don’t need to resolve neatly to be meaningful.   If the writer has done her work with scene and exposition and sensory detail, the reader will feel that what has happened mattered—that the events depicted have brought about a transformation that opens the story instead of tying it closed.

I shuffled through several possible endings to this narrative as my November 12, 5:00 pm, essay deadline for Professor Shore approached.   May Day?  Commencement?  The chance reunion with math professor Agnes Scott while out walking on April 8, 1923?  This last image is almost too perfect:  Miss Scott, one of Thomas’s first hires and true stars, contradicts Dorothy’s idea of the “scientific personality” as she warmly greets her former student “who deserted mathematics” and gives her a bouquet of pansies picked from her garden.  “Just so you do one thing thoroughly, that’s all that matters,” Miss Scott says. Dorothy, seemingly as surprised and touched as I am by her words, asks, “Was I wrong to leave the influence of such a spirit?”

Chronologically, this entry is nearer to the end of Dorothy’s college years than the ending I have in mind.  It also makes a point—perhaps too convincingly—that there can be no definite conclusion to Dorothy’s conflict or, one hopes, to her dreams. In this same passage—one week after winning the European Fellowship and being feted by professors and classmates and family—Dorothy is dismayed to hear that Rhys Carpenter has described her “heart’s desire” as archaeology.  She writes,  “I almost want to scream ‘No, no, no,’; to write and only to write and if not that—to create, be it but buttons!”

Finally, I decide that Dorothy’s character has been sufficiently illuminated by the story she’s told in her diaries; her “clear ambition—honor by those I respect” has been fulfilled.  And I end instead with an image of Dorothy from three weeks earlier, as she awaits word of her brilliant future from her room in Pembroke Hall:

Thursday, March 15, 1923 clear, cold, brilliant

“This week has been a worse strain than the war zone – and then I was watching for Death!  But the slow tightening of the web that draws me inescapably to the centre—ie: tonight when finally, undeniably, I shall know about the European Fellowship.  After 4 years of doubt, it comes as a high culmination, particularly by so much drama…”

Later

8:00 pm       The lights in Taylor make me uncommon nervous…

10:30             In an hour, it is about helpless!

10:50             All over! The letter, secured by adhesive tape, lies under the covers—and  here’s for a good sleep! …So quiet a night for all these years!  I rather hate to have it go!”

In life, endings are always beginnings; we just don’t know it at the time.

This archival project began with Jen Rajchel’s request for my biography, and so this seems an appropriate place to conclude:

I’m the author of the novel, My Life as a Girl (Random House), which is set in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, and at my alma mater, Bryn Mawr College. I graduated in 1984 with a major in psychology. I’m very grateful to the department and my senior conference professor, Rick McCauley, for allowing me to investigate such literary topics as prototype theory and metaphorical thinking before pursuing a writing career. Though I only took one creative writing class during my time at Bryn Mawr, my senior-year experience writing a bi-weekly opinion column for the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Bi-College News taught me to write with integrity and to be ready to defend my work…often face-to-face, over a meal in the dining hall with the smartest group of critics I’ve ever known.

One last image:  the day in my senior seminar class, “Cognitive Issues”, when Professor McCauley referenced my column in the Bi-College News. “Good work,” he said casually, kindly.  “You’re going to make a living writing one day.”  This essay, drafted 26 years later, is just one fragment of the encouragement I heard—still hear—in my psychology professor’s words.