MARY AUSTIN'S COUNTRY

MARY AUSTIN'S COUNTRY BY PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANSEL ADAMS with quotations from the writings of MARY AUSTIN

A WHO WAS MARY AUSTIN? A strange woman, who had the courage to walk alone. A writer, a searcher, a fighter, who at moments of her life stood revealed as great as the woman in America of her time, even as one of the great people of all time and then was hidden again for a while in obscurity. At first glance, from a distance, she was just a little woman whose legs were too short and whose mass of hair was too heavy. Seen close, her face, with its wide mouth, was brooding and resolute, and the heavy-lidded eyes were those of a seer. With her first word, she became a center of force, alternately drawing people toward her and repulsing them, by turns harsh and generous, mystic and practical. Her country was the West. Even today, long after she is dead, her impress lies across the whole Southwest. Whoever travels there will find her moving before him will see a hill move suddenly into the shape of words she gave it, enter with her, through the flicker of saguaros, into the uncanny spell of the desert, hear with her ears the click and patter of aspen leaves, and the higher note of a creek rising, swollen with snow water, in the afternoons. And whoever pauses where she once paused, or lived a while, will find the spirit of the place as she evoked it, still hovering there, invisible and potent.

How did she come to write? In 1902 she answered shyly. "There is really nothing to tell. I have just looked, nothing more . . . and by and by I got to know where looking was most worthwhile. Then I got so full of looking that I had to write to get rid of some of it and make room for more." Actually there was more, much more to tell, and when she was old and near death, she wrote some of it down.

Of a lonely child, unwanted, who felt her mother turn away from her. Whose most appalling early memory was being left behind while her family vanished down a boardwalk into the hot distances. A child for whom the world changed, one summer morning, when she found God under a walnut tree. A child who crept in her nightie to her parents door at night and huddled on bare boards to listen at the crack while her mother read her ailing father to sleep. A child who soaked herself in the memories of her elders until, though she was not born until 1868, she felt she had herself known the sights and sounds of the Civil War. And in earlier memories, too: what her father as a young man saw on the Mississippi - the rafts, the canoes laden with buffalo meat, the birds in the canebreaks, and the slaves passed from house to house north to freedom. And earlier still: what her grandmother saw, crossing the prairies with a spinning wheel and a johnnycake pan. A child even then sensing the pulse of America as it beat through the Midwest. A child who soon learned to turn from the ache of being unwanted to making images in her own head and finding books that had in them "room to walk around in."

Of a lonely, gawky girl with an intelligence too big and rough for small-town boys, an intelligence only whetted by intermittent years at college. A sick girl - all her life she was more or less sick-who at twenty journeyed with her widowed mother to California, where her brother had started a homesteading project near Bakersfield. And of the first years, years of drought when dying cattle had to be driven from the settlers water barrels and buzzards darkened the hills.

A homely and peculiar girl, thought her new neighbors, who snubbed and disliked her. A girl, who, having made the taffy for a candy pull, would leave the party to wander with her hair down, out over the desert in the night. "... There was seldom an hour when I could not turn from all my poor affairs to the living shape and pulse of the land...." She sat so still that wild things whirred or padded or scurried past her; she shared a shack with an antelope during a storm. She ate wild green grapes and began to get well and to look around her. At the gay grace with which Spain had fitted into the hills and hollows of California. At the stubborn ignorance with which her own kind were trying to make the country conform to their ideas and their memories of older landscapes. At the brutal wars in which cattlemen, sheepmen, ranchers and railroaders fought each other for possession of the land and its scanty water. She began to study "history for the sake of the land."

Daughter and sister of shiftless, dreaming men, she married another, misled by what she thought was sympathy and understanding. And followed Wallace Austin into the huge, mountain-haunted Owens Valley, where he drifted from failure to failure. As a wife, Mary was lonelier than before, and discovered in her own courage her sole staff and shelter. "I have never known what it was to be cared for." Pregnant, and suddenly evicted from her hotel without warning, she sat long hours on her trunk beside the road, waiting in vain for her husband to return. At last she rose and found a boarding house where she could cook and earn a living for both of them.

A valiant woman, who battled an eagle to save her baby. A woman who could, when the stage driver fell ill, take up the reins of the four horses and bring them over the rough desert road to the next stop. One night in Red Rock Canyon, while the stage labored through sand, a figure, looming up out of the dark, brought guns to the hip. The stranger wanted to know was there anybody on board who could pray out loud? "I could pray," said Mary and, climbing down over the wheel, followed the swinging lantern down the dark canyon to where a man lay dying.

A mother who watched with horror her one beautiful little daughter grow into a mindlessness punctuated by meaningless rages. Her own mother wrote her: "I don't know what you have done, daughter, to have such a judgment upon you!" Years later Mary could write, "That nerve ached out at last."

More and more Mary turned to the land. For her, the knotted thrust of mountains and the fall of hills were music; to her, the dynamics of storm, rock, water and life were what the tangling passions and ideals of mankind are to most writers. She looked at the death and the life around her and wanted to see it and hear it whole, from the immensities of sky to the delicate trace of wild claws and what passed through the minds of men. She listened to the Mexicans, to the Chinese, to the Basque sheepherders among their dogs and flocks. She listened to the Paiutes, and tried to get into her own body their subtle skill and sympathy with twig and bark. In their songs and chants she heard a beat and cadence she was later to call THE AMERICAN RHYTHM. And in their tales of visions and voices she recognized not only the Presence she had felt under the walnut tree but other experiences familiar to her.One night a wire came, telling her to hurry to her mother, who was ill in Los Angeles. Distraught, trying to pack and make connections, Mary sat for a moment on the stoop, and was not surprised to behold, through the quiet of the evening, her mother appear, young and smiling, with a rose in herhair, telling her not to come, that everything was all right. Consoled, Mary fell asleep, only to waken crying, knowing before the next wire came that her mother was dead.

Daytimes, to earn some sort of living, Mary taught school; she had a remarkable gift for delighting and inspiring children. Nights and holidays she wrote. Neighbor women would come in to find her pacing the floor with her hair down, searching for word or phrase, while her own child, Ruth, strapped to a chair, screamed uncontrollably. Though in their mercy, the neighbors cared for Ruth when Mary was out, they did it in protest against what seemed her neglect. Only a few at that time could see through her strange stoniness.

Already a few stories and sketches of hers had been published. Distinguished people, coming to explore and climb the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada, were seeking Mary Austin in "the brown house under the willow tree" at Independence; Then, in 1903, came THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN. It was an instant success; a new writer had taken material that came past her fresh as the morning and set it down with at once a huge eye-reach and a microscopic delicacy. Mary had found not only her escape but her way to face reality. And she had found her function.

Out of the same background, she wrote THE BASKETWOMAN. For THE FLOCK, to renew her feeling for the talk of sheepherders and the sounds and rhythms of their flocks, she went back to Bakersfield, where they found her queerer than ever. For her first novel, ISIDRO, she needed to study a mission of the Spanish colonial period, and chose Carmel, where Mission San Carlos Borromeo commanded what was then a wild hillside overlooking the Pacific.

After ISIDRO, she went back to Independence and suddenly realized that the whole Owens Valley was doomed. Quietly over the years, under the aegis of the new Bureau of Reclamation, agents for Los Angeles had been buying up water rights. Now Los Angeles could pipe out of the valley nearly all its mountain waters. Mary roused her neighbors; she fought with Los Angeles herself. A committee went all the way to Washington to plead with President Theodore Roosevelt. But he saw water for a booming city as more important than water for a few small towns, mines and ranches. And so one of the most magnificent valleys in America, running for hundreds of miles between the huge granite wave of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada and the brilliant desert range of the Inyos, was condemned to desert.

Mary could not stand the coming horror and desolation. She took Ruth and fled to Carmel, begging Wallace to come with her. But he refused, preferring to drift hopefully where there was no hope. Years later, when Mary finally ended the tenous relation between them in divorce, she was grieved to find how grieved he was. Meanwhile, shocked, uprooted and seriously ill, she could not care for Ruth and had to place her in an institution where, mercifully young, Ruth finally died. Mary's own suffering the doctors diagnosed as cancer of the breast and gave her less than a year to live. She decided to go to Rome; it might, she thought, be a good place to die in.

Instead, she recovered. Perhaps the diagnosis was incor-rect. Anyway, in Rome Mary learned from a nun how to escape pain through prayer, went on to discover in the writings of the Christian mystics much that the Paiute medicine men had told her and found, in sensing a new land and a new culture " how much like prayer is the attempt to get inside art and understand it; how healing is the power of beauty . . ."

She went on to London to join her friends Herbert and Lou Hoover and to meet Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, and others, whom she found at that time rather remote and cold. In New York, she paused to see about the production of her play, THE ARROW MAKER, then returned to Carmel. Here and there among its pines and cypresses, and along its rocky points and beaches, a number of artists and writers were building their homes. Jack London, Lincoln Steffens, Maynard Dixon and, later, Robinson Jeffers, William Rose Benet, Sinclair Lewis - these were men capable of appreciating Mary. Feeling them respond to her, but awkward after the long years of grief and loneliness, Mary made attempts silly as a schoolgirl's to be glamorous and hold the center of the stage. Seeing her approach with her hair down, when she cherished the notion she was irresistible, men who regarded her with genuine affection and admiration took refuge in derision and even flight. But ridicule and gossip hadnever yet stopped Mary; she persevered until finally her friends threw up their hands and accepted as comic this inconsistency in a woman with the force and insight of a sibyl, whose stature as a writer seemed growing day by day.

In her work, Mary was tackling form after form, problem after problem. Play, novel, poem, essay, short story she tried them all. Nor did she flinch from writing about problems that interested her, whether contemporary, such as the fight for women's rights, or eternal, such as religion. Always her finest work was done when she wrote out of her own intense looking and listening, and let her materials take whatever form was inherent in it. In the best of her writing, the earth itself is her theme. Her people move upon the land, formed by it as are dove and mouse, pine and willow; however, acutely observed, they become transparent. Behind them, beyond them, the land is visible. They move with the quality of myth and folklore under vast skies; their horizons are also those of consciousness. In the subconscious, Mary believed, the whole experience of the race, psychic and physical alike, is stored. From the subconscious, with its instinctive understanding of the universe and man's destiny within it, come the healing and ennobling powers of all great religions. And genius, Mary was convinced, occurred when an individual is born, through whom as through a well or spring, these depths rise into the light.

In there is a cactus garden that I can never pass without crossing my fingers against its spell ...So that if I should disappear some day unaccountably from my accustomed places, leaving no trace, you might find me there in some such state as you read of in monkish tales, when one walked in the woods for an hour and found that centuries had passed.

Again and again she returned to certain themes as they unfolded before her. To the quality of folk, the American folk, of whatever race or background. To genius EVERYMAN'S GENIUS, A WOMAN OF GENIUS, Christ as genius in THE MAN JESUS. To religion-CHRIST IN ITALY, CAN PRAYER BE ANSWERED? And to the character of regions LANDS OF THE SUN, THE LAND OF JOURNEY'S ENDING. Yet, despite the years in California, Mary never felt she knew it as a whole. In LANDS OF THE SUN, she lamented, "I overlooked much of detail... those missed items of delight shimmer on the mind's horizon with a beckoning sense of loss. As if more were lost than can ever be touched again." Around her, the land had changed. The lovely Southern California of the 1880's had been obliterated; the Owens Valley was fanged with the blackened chimneys of burned houses and ghostly with dying trees. Even Carmel was losing its Greek beauty.

When America entered World War I, Mary found herself in New York. She tried to stay there. She quartered the city for walking and discovering. She dived down into it, represented herself as typist or newspaperwoman, worked at odd trades such as making wigs or artificial flowers, and listened. But never from the bastions of metropolis, never from the idioms of talk that swirled above the pavements, did there come the power and understanding she felt when the naked earth was under her feet and space encompassed her. Moreover " The thing I suffered from worst in New York was boredom." She met many interesting and gifted people, but to her, with the West behind her, they seemed as involved in fads, feuds, and trivialities as if New York were a vortex that had swallowed them. She tried to rescue some of the young writers; she hectored and scolded until one group of them dubbed her "God's mother-in-law." But Louis Adamic Eagles mewing about the perilous footholds, great trees rooting where once the slender ladders clung!... suddenly, high and inaccessible in the canyon wall, the sun picks out the little windows in the walls amid the smoke-blue shadows, and you brush your eyes once or twice to make sure you do not see half-naked men, deerand antelope-laden, climbing up the banded cliffs...

The saguaro...giving back the light like spears... make a continuous vertical flicker in the landscape. Marching together... they have a stately look, like the pillars of ruined temples.

had reason to call her “a strange, grand woman,” after her badgerings of both him and his publishers resulted in his early success here. And Sinclair Lewis spoke for a great many people when, after an evening of meekly taking a tongue-lashing for his literary shortcomings, he grabbed her, kissed her and shouted, “God damn you, Mary, I love you!” Inevitably Mary came back to the West, and more and more she came to the austere and magical Southwest. For her, as for thousands before and after her, it became more than the land of her birth. Here was the land of her heart, her hope, her home, her LAND OF JOURNEY’S ENDING. She built her house of adobe, in Santa Fe, on the Camino del Sol, where she could look across the town at the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo. “It is a mountain country, immensely, dramatically beautiful; it is contiguous to the desert with its appeal of mystery and naked space, and it supplies the elements of Aboriginal society which I have learned to recognize as my proper medium. I have a genius for beginnings...” Sitting under Inscription Rock, she heard it murmur like a shell of time. Walking across a slight mound, she would feel about her the presence of ancient, simple people; excavation would prove the mound a prehistoric house site. Archaeologists and historians could and did find her mistaken here and there, and then find themselves unearthing evidence that documented some intuitive guess of hers.

At wavelike intervals recognition came to her, and her pleasure in it was sometimes a little wry. “Every seven years New York discovers me.” When Carl Van Doren called her books “wells driven into America to bring up water for her countrymen,” and hailed her as a prophetess, she remarked he should have mentioned what a good cook she was. In 1922, she went to England to lecture before the Fabian Society, and

received, from the same literary giants she had found cold before, the most resounding accolade of her life. But to the oft-quoted remark by a Cambridge don that she was “the most intellectual women in America,” her dry rejoinder was that, so far as she knew, he based his estimate on the one thing of hers he ever read praise of his own book. And her perceptions of H. G. Wells as a human being were not mollified by his praise: “What other woman can touch her? Her work will live when many of the more portentous reputations of today have served their purpose in the world...” We wish to thank the publishers, HOUGHTON MIFLIN COMPANY, for granting us permission to reproduce the charming sketches by Mr. E. Boyd Smith as they appeared in Mrs. Austin's LAND OF LITTLE RAIN, published in October 1903.

Once it is seen, there is no way afterwards of not seeing it. Anytime now, - and sometimes whether I will or no ...I see it there... the noiseless dance of island towers, advancing, retreating...

Santa Fe, full of poets and painters, could perceive the greatness of Mary Austin even while it laughed at her foibles. Close friends learned that in the mornings, when she was working, she might pass them unseeing and be rude if they interrupted her, yet in the afternoons she might bring a batch of pies still hot from her oven. And they might smile when she lectured and received them wearing a high Spanish comb and mantilla and looking quite regal until she stood up. But when they wanted a doughty fighter to lead a crusade, they came to Mary. She had long fought for the Indians Amerindians, she called them; now she fought to protect them against “too great enthusiasm.” She fought to save Santa Fe from the “improvements” that had ruined Los Angeles and Carmel. She fought to save from destruction and oblivion the folk arts and architecture of the Spanish Americans; when the Santuario, poignantly beautiful little chapel at Chimayo, was in danger of being sold and its santos scattered, it was Mary who inspired the gift that saved it.

In 1930 the magnificent TAOS PUEBLO appeared; Mary in text and a young pianist, Ansel Adams, in a dozen massive and sculptural photographs, gave that phase of Indian culture an almost classic splendor. The success of what, for him, was a first book, helped persuade Adams to change his profession from music to photography. Both responsive to the character of a place, its moods, its magic, both endowed with the reach and the skill to convey immensity as well as delicacy, they made good collaborators, as Adams was to prove twenty years later, when he interpreted the grandeur and beauty of the Owens Valley for a new edition of THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN. Together, they planned another spectacular book on the Spanish Americans. With Frank Applegate, painter and ardent collector of santos and bultos, who knew everybody in every hut in the hills, Adams went photographing. But, suddenly, Applegate died, and Mary, shocked by his death and gravely ill herself, faltered over her manuscript, and finally left it unfinished, a mass of notes not yet lifted from the pedestrian.

Now she found herself face to face with the ultimate problems of human existence: What is death? And what is the meaning of life? the last thing I expected of death," she wrote, "was to be afraid of it." Examining her fear, she found it to be a dread of being senseless blind, deaf, dumb. "The thought that I should never again see the plum blossoms storm the flanks of Pena Blanca, never again hear the drums of the Keres calling up the He-rain with its winghollows filled with evening blueness, smote me with an insupportable pang I should like a little space to love the world before I leave it." For Mary, no supernatural heaven or hell existed. More and more she had become a mystic, exploring religions, connecting them with myths or folklore, but never adopting any formal creed for herself. She made retreats among Catholic nuns, to restore her soul; she owned a rosary, but used it to tell her subconscious what she wanted to write, and how, and when, so that at the allotted time, she said, "the stories wrote themselves." She had powers others considered mediumistic. "I could get messages for you I could get comforting and convincing things. But I would not know that they did not come to me by the same way that a Feverish, dying, propped up in bed, often with a drain still in the wound of an operation, Mary was still writing, still valiant, still pouring forth her force. In the autumn of 1934, she appeared at a celebration called a Poets' Roundup, and read before a crowd, suddenly hushed and awed, a few of the poems later published in WHEN I AM DEAD. In those last moments in the sun, Mary Austin reached a terrifying majesty. Five days later she was dead. A friend on horseback scattered her ashes in the hills.

A new character comes for my novel when I need it..." Now, in the light of all she had read, heard, and known along the rims of consciousness, she wrote EXPERIENCES FACING DEATH. And emerged with faith triumphant. "I have experienced the Presence of God... but nowhere have I found or felt the dark." In the same spirit, she examined her own life, seeing, through the character of Mary Hunter Austin, vast panoramas in time and place, seeing the roots of her grief and loneliness with compassion. She could write, "I have been true to the pattern and it has been true to me." And called her autobiography EARTH HORIZON.

Mary Austin's country begins where the Sierra Nevada rises from the level desert into the highest peaks in America; it ends where the Sangre de Cristos, under winter snow, burn after dawn and after sunset like the Blood of Christ. In between lies a huge country whose heights, depths and horizons call to the American mind. Across that country, for any traveler or sojourner, Mary Austin's words move like light. For anyone who has loved it, Ansel Adams has held the moments when it most profoundly reveals itself. Sky-high and rootdeep, words and photographs here appear together.