Tackling the Problems of Her Century
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Tackling the Problems of Her Century Fanny Kemble's Journals Edited by Catherine Clinton Harvard. 210 pp. $39.95. Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars By Catherine Clinton Simon & Schuster. 304 pp....
...From childhood she had abhorred the idea of slavery...
...His fidelity to her lasted till her death—and beyond, in his writing...
...In 1850, to repair his reputation, he privately printed a furious 188-page defense that described Fanny's "peculiar" ideas: "She held that marriage should be companionship of partners on equal terms...
...26.00...
...A useful chronology and Clinton's 21 -page Introduction help fill the gaps left in the life story...
...James felt a deep need to be with Kemble...
...But by 1861 she began to weigh larger issues...
...Nevertheless, she and her father, with her mother's sister "Dali" de Camp as chaperone, faced that very fate...
...She gave Kemble another grandson as well as a granddaughter, and her Alverston Manor provided a perfect setting for perhaps the happiest days of Kemble's final years...
...Leger, with the drama that would always make her writing so seductive...
...Finally, when Lincoln's antislavery forces seemed in peril, Kemble released the Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation...
...Mostly, however, she stayed abroad, where Fan had followed her British husband after angry efforts to restore the family plantation's prosperity...
...I think I should be unhappy and the cause of unhappiness to others if I were to marry," she wrote...
...who would be the author of The Virginian...
...She found irresistible the period of bitter confrontation between two parts of a nation possessing drastically differing values, and the parallel personal struggle between a traditional husband and a rebellious wife who is locked in a form of bondage by 19th-century laws...
...It is from them that Catherine Clinton, the author also of the new biography, Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars, has taken the excerpts making up Fanny Kemble's Journals...
...Charles Kemble, who managed Covent Garden, having inherited a part interest and the accompanying overwhelming debt, was a better actor than businessman...
...Her journal entry goes on, "I believe I turned black myself, I was so indignant...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s" AT the age of 18 Fanny Kemble wrote a letter carefully comparing possible careers...
...As a small boy he had first seen her on a country road riding a horse—his vision of an Amazon...
...Her style ranges from passages of eloquent perception to careless journalistic prose, reflecting an assumption that trendy slang suffices anywhere...
...Pierce Butler had followed her on tour from one triumph to another, delighting in her vivacity, her audacious opinions on matters outside the female realm...
...The novelist Catharine Sedgwick started a long friendship with Kemble by introducing her to John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay...
...Inevitably, Fanny fell disastrously in love...
...Yet Pierce Butler was one of the kindlier owners...
...Clinton draws freely on Leon Edel's four-volume James biography, but it was Armstrong who used it to quote James in what may be the final word on Fanny Kemble: "Those who had not known her in Switzerland never knew what admirable nonsense she could talk, nor with what originality and gaiety she could invite the spirit of mirth...
...In one of their friendly intervals Butler let her visit his plantation, where she found the life of slaves more shocking than even she had imagined...
...For the sake of this "best and kindest father," Fanny plunged into intensive coaching by her mother, Maria Thérèse de Camp, a gifted actress who had given up the stage for her family...
...But marriage changed all that...
...They proved good writers, too, with strong opinions, representing yet another clash of loyalties—between North and South, mother and father...
...At age 19 Fanny made her debut in Romeo and Juliet...
...Fanny and her mother then played to sold-out houses all over Britain...
...Like Margaret Armstrong's Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian (1938), though, they tend to give a straightforwardly chronological account of the whole life...
...Around Boston, college lecture attendance "fell off so sharply on the afternoons of Kemble's matinees," Clinton reports, "that Harvard faculty threatened to cancel classes...
...The theater was crowded and she trembled with anxiety...
...This situation, foreshadowing conflict, lured earlier biographers...
...Dissolute and in deep debt thanks to poor investments, he won a divorce despite his scandalous infidelities...
...With the Union blockade keeping European textile traders out of Southern ports, Kemble suspected "that her beloved England might," as Clinton puts it, "cave in and recognize the Confederacy...
...This is meat and drink and sleep to me...
...For shortly she became an American by marriage— not just to any wealthy Philadelphia socialite, but one who owned the second largest plantation in Georgia and had a thousand slaves...
...Clinton valuably shows the tumultuous prelude and postlude to the Civil War...
...From their individual perspectives the daughters put us in the midst of truly wild scenes...
...Pierce Butler himself came under suspicion as a spy and was incarcerated...
...She deplored the lack of finger bowls in a New York hotel charging 16 guineas, yet appreciated kindnesses unknown abroad...
...my world, in which I live, and have my happiness...
...It wasn't only in her personal principles that Kemble was a century ahead of her husband...
...In her youthfully judicious style, she weighed what she had learned by being part of a "royal family" of the English theater (one aunt was Sarah Siddons) against her dream of becoming a writer...
...This period included the time she spent at "Perch" in Lenox, Massachusetts, where she could keep up with the growth of Sarah's son, Owen Wister Jr...
...In Philadelphia, where Negro property was burned, their sympathizers received death threats and abolitionists were afraid to speak...
...During the month-long voyage Fanny confided the poignant details of the departure to her constant correspondent and advisor, Harriet St...
...At page 49 the two-year stay in America is still in the offing...
...It describes a Christmas scene "in little Alice's immense nursery with its lofty arched roof of oak rafters...
...She had confronted the great problem of the century in America, and it would become her own...
...But she firmly resisted one future assumed for her...
...as her husband, Butler was embarrassed by her impulsive outcries, often against injustices in the South...
...Margaret Armstrong's biography quotes one of Fanny's last letters to Harriet...
...About Butler's involvement with a governess, Clinton says "he brazenly took the girls and Miss Hall to Newport (with whom he was having an affair...
...Unfortunately, that will also reveal the sorry contrast between our current standards of writing and the training of earlier times...
...Money poured in, but Charles Kemble was in dire legal trouble...
...When she stepped onstage she met a roar of welcome, a tribute, she thought, to her name alone...
...In the midst of her efforts to bring about some order and cleanliness (she gave a cent to each child whose face had been washed) she followed her habit of noting down the details in her daily journal...
...From shipboard she wrote of her impatience at being "cabined andconfined" through a stormy night: "Lay till daylight, the gale increasing, furiously, boxes, chairs, beds and their contents, wooden valuables and human invaluables rolling about and clinging to one another in glorious confusions...
...Fanny wrote bravely, "As long as God keeps us in health of body and mind, nothing need signify, provided we are not obliged to go off to that dreadful America...
...Because of Clinton's dependence on the journals, and Kemble's reticence in her later published writings, we are left with a rather sketchy impression of the last third of her life...
...Thousands of readers, some of them in high places both here and abroad, were deeply moved by Kemble's descriptions—for instance, of ignorant, zealous midwives in a filthy plantation infirmary trying desperately, and vainly, to save the lives of slave mothers and their babies...
...even at age 13, Walt Whitman felt her presence in a way that he later thought somehow led to Leaves of Grass...
...In favor of the stage she reckoned independence, "the great desideratum of life," but added, "my head and heart were engrossed with the idea of exercising and developing the literary talent which I think I possess...
...To make sure you don't miss any of the drama, you might go back and forth from the biography to Fanny Kemble's Journals...
...and, moreover, I hope, my means of fame...
...Young Fanny discussed Shakespeare with Daniel Webster, and from a privileged closeup she could record in her journal that Andrew Jackson was "very tall and thin, but erect and dignified in his carriage...
...By legal trickery, Butler, managed to keep them separated from their mother for much of their youth...
...in another Chief Justice John Marshall shed tears...
...But the balcony scene earned her applause of her own as a true Juliet...
...Kemble could laugh at her fantasies: "I might attain to the literary dignity of being the lioness of a season, asked to dinner parties 'because I am so clever...
...He warned her that the seat would have to be in the gallery, because "people of color are not allowed to go to the pit, or any other part of the house...
...Clinton's giving us a generous selection ofthat work may be her greatest service to literature and to Kemble, whose word pictures actually influenced history...
...Clinton's title suggests a more limited focus...
...She felt real outrage, however, when she wanted to give a theater ticket to a black man from the ship...
...Kemble's first sight of New York excited her, and on land the roughness of America was no worse than she had expected...
...joking, punning, botanizing, encouraging the lowly and abasing the proud (that was almost her mission in life) and startling infallibly all primness of propriety...
...No wonder the demands of her publishers would almost force her to produce, among other books, 11 volumes of journals...
...At Fanny's Washington debut Dolley Madison and John Quincy Adams were in one box...
...and in the center a fir tree on an oak table, where our dark bearded handsome American friend, Henry James the author, was busy decorating the branches with toys and bonbons...
...For years she kept this journal private, feeling that it held information she had no right to divulge...
...One questions her sensitivity to language when, with the reader aware of Kemble's past smallpox, Clinton reports that a gallant was disillusioned when he "spotted" her backstage...
...Then comes the voyage, and soon we learn how Fanny enchanted New York critics in The Taming of the Shrew and netted the equivalent of $100,000...
...Young men adored her...
...In this country the feeling grew more intense, and more complicated too...
...How prescient she was...
...Quite separately from a rather disjointed account of her subject back in Europe, earning a living by writing, acting and giving Shakespeare readings, Clinton concentrates on the already grown-up daughters, Sarah and Fan...
...Decades of discord followed, interspersed with periods of pleasure in Europe among distinguished friends, episodes of passion, and the welcome of two daughters...
...Inviting as Clinton's announced focus may be, the opening of her book ignores it...
...In the event she did not have the luxury of choosing a career...
...From his early 30s, long before fame...
Vol. 83 • November 2000 • No. 5
