Showing posts with label Kathrene Pinkerton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kathrene Pinkerton. Show all posts

17. Tension in the Bush

The Problem of Being Alone Together

 

Division of labour in the wilderness: Kathrene Pinkerton prepares a meal while her husband Robert writes at their desk. Source: Kathrene Pinkerton, A Home in the Wilds (formerly Wilderness Wife). New York: Tanlinger Publishing Co., [1939], 1967.

The problem, simply, is that of being alone together. ... Isolation is a special pitfall to the couples in the wilderness. Key to the domestic economy, as crucial as loading firewood, are measures the couple take to avoid crowding each other, rubbing up against each other to the point of irritation."  - Randall Roorda [Source: "Wilderness Wives: Domestic Economy and Women's Participation in Nature," in This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment. Melody Hessing, Rebecca Raglon, and Catriona Sandilands, eds. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005, p. 46.]

Kathrene Pinkerton and her husband Robert, who, like Nan and Richard Morenus, had moved from New York City to live in a one-room cabin in northern Ontario, recognized that they each needed their own space. Pinkerton wrote the following in her 1939 book Wilderness Wife which Nan had read:

Our winter days fell naturally into a schedule. Robert wrote every morning ... while I inspected the trap line. In the afternoon he was busy out-of-doors cutting wood or doing odd jobs and I had the cabin. This arrangement was not the result of a treaty. It had worked out naturally and was an unconscious recognition of the fact that two people cannot always be together. They must escape from each other occasionally if only to be demagnetized. And everyone must have his own domain. Without separate outlets into the world around us, a one-room cabin life would have permitted no individual privacies. The divergence in our interests gave us supper-time conversation.

Rugged Interdependence

The Morenus' first year at their cabin on the island near Sioux Lookout was spent in what Roorda calls a state of "rugged interdependence" - repairing the cabin, clearing windfall and brush, patching mattresses and bedding, fixing up canoes, and generally putting their camp into shape. There was little time for squabbles. “Less important than what wife or husband can do is what the couple does together," Roorda writes.

In addition, Nan and Richard had a shared interest in writing. "After the first year the typewriter was unlimbered, a certain number of hours each day had to be put in on the keyboard," Richard writes in his Maclean's article "From Broadway to Bush" (September 1, 1946). "Long experience of writing in the States had made our radio contacts not too difficult to maintain, and after convincing our markets that our mail service could meet their deadlines we turned our thoughts script-wise once again." 

Nan and Richard Morenus in northern Ontario. Source
 

Friction

“There’s an odd chemicalization that takes place in the wilderness,” Richard wrote in Crazy White Man (1952). He had noticed while acting as a guide for American sportsmen that, “however good friends two men may be, put them together for any period of time beyond the normal processes of society, and their nerves begin to react. It is almost as though the tempo of living in a city for fifty weeks out of the year acted as a drug, the removal of which caused a drastic mental reaction. By the fifth or sixth day they [start] to argue between themselves. About little things. Their laughter, at first so spontaneous, becomes strained and forced at each other’s attempts at humour.” Had this same “chemicalization” occurred between Richard and Nan?

Richard acknowledges in his Maclean's article that there had been some tough times during their five years on the island. "We have suffered discouragement and ofttimes heartbreaking disappointments," he writes. "There will always be these so long as we live in the bush." He also refers to Nan's independent nature. "Nan will get her own deer, and skin it herself," he says. "Her canoe needs a patch before being stored for the winter. This she’ll want to see to herself."

As the years went by, Nan had found many activities to occupy her time while Richard wrote. She learned how to set snares, how to bake bannock and bread, how to drive a dog team, how to fish through the ice, and how to hunt and butcher venison. She also took her turns at the typewriter.

Was there competition between Nan and Richard as they navigated wilderness living? Was Nan's striving toward self-reliance and expertise in the outdoors a source of irritation for Richard? Did he resent Nan's growing proficiency at tasks one would expect a man to perform - tasks like looking after their dog team? As her strength and skills developed, did Nan chafe against her husband's expectations of domesticity and dependency?

Whatever the causes of the Morenus' tension in the wilds of northern Ontario, their marriage did not survive the strain.

 

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©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.

 



16. Nan the Writer - Part 1: "Jim Chief"

Snatching Minutes to Write in the Bush

 

I have not found any photos of Nan writing so this one will have to do. Jean Arthur in the movie The More the Merrier, 1943. Source     
 
Two letters written to Nan were discovered tucked inside the pages a book by a woman in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. As I attempt to piece together Nan's fractured history, these shards of her memory are like gems to me. The first of the two letters is featured in a previous post.. The second is shown below. 
 
She is a marvelous cook, and when not reading over new recipes she is plowing through biography, for she considers reading of biographies of the utmost help to a writer. Aha! that gives it away. Yes, she spends much of her spare time writing stories, which some day, she says, are going to be sent to magazines. (She’s still a little timid about sending them in.) 
- "Versatile Nan Dorland Cooks, Swims, and Acts," in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 18, 1931.

As this 1931 newspaper article points out, Nan had an ambition to be a writer. While she did collaborate with her husband Richard Morenus in the writing of radio scripts during the late 1930s, and while the 1940 US Census records her occupation as copy writer for an advertising agency, to my knowledge it would be another decade before any of her work was published. 

Writing in the Bush

In 1941, when Nan and Richard gave up city life and moved to an island complete with a log cabin in Ontario bush country, a typewriter accompanied them. For the next six years both Nan and Richard wrote articles and radio scripts to finance their new wilderness life.

Several months before moving to the wilds of northern Ontario, Nan read Kathrene Pinkerton's fine book, Wilderness Wife (1939). She began corresponding with Pinkerton, seeking advice not only about bush life, but also about writing. 


Kathrene Pinkerton's letter to Nan, Sept. 6 [1942], postmarked March 17, 1943.. Source: Darlene Studer, La Ronge, Saskatchewan.

"Why don't you try writing juveniles," Pinkerton suggests in a letter to Nan dated September 6 [1942]. "You're living the material they want." Juvenile books could be lucrative. "I call the ones I'm piling up my old age insurance," Pinkerton continues. "The other evening Alfred Harcourt [of Harcourt Brace, a publishing company] said that he’d figured that six juveniles, especially if they were a series about one set of characters, gave as good a yield as the investment of eighty thousand dollars."

(I am grateful to Darlene Studor for sharing this and one other letter with me. I contacted the University of Oregon Archives where Pinkerton's papers are housed, but, to my great dismay, there were no letters from Nan to Kathrene in that collection.)

If Nan wrote any manuscripts or published any works for younger readers, I have not yet discovered them. She did, however, publish two articles in the Canadian magazine  Maclean's during the latter half of the 1940s. Here is the first one.

"Jim Chief"

On October 15, 1946, Nan's first-ever magazine article "Jim Chief" was published in Maclean's. The editor wrote that it was "one of the best articles we have ever published by a beginner." She had finished writing this article sometime in January 1946. (See below.)

First page of Nan's article in Maclean's, October 15, 1946.

Nan wrote her article in "no set writing hours, due to the exigencies of bush life," she told the editor of Maclean's. (She would also have been competing for time on the typewriter with Richard, unless they had a second one.)

The piece, written last winter, took about four months of snatching minutes out of her routine of baking bread, snaring rabbits, driving a dog team to help haul wood, butchering venison, knitting socks and mitts, fishing through ice, washing fleece-lined underwear, and cooking four meals a day to keep her husband and herself fortified against those biting northern temperatures – as cold as 50 below zero. She says writing this article about Old Jim was always a joy, because he was her favorite bush character. - Source

Like other portrayals of Indigenous peoples during the 1940s, however, Nan’s story of Jim Chief – while sympathetic – contains racist, condescending, and patronizing language. This is clear from the opening paragraph. “Early November freeze-up was threatening when Jim Chief and his squaw paddled up to our island on their first official visit. Jim was our nearest neighbor on our northern lake—a tattered, aged Ojibway we were soon to know as a reprobate and a rascal, and so charming that it was impossible not to like him.”

Nan and her husband Richard became friends with Jim Chief, who “came by the Island regularly, exhibiting a wistful, almost pitiful need to chat,” Nan writes. “He would sit in a corner of the cabin an hour or more until, having talked himself out, he would rise abruptly and shuffle out the door with a vague backward gesture of farewell.”

Nan knew how to tell a story. For example, once, when Richard was away in New York on business connected to their fiction and radio writing, Jim Chief helped Nan get out of a rather sticky situation. Three intoxicated white men showed up at the island. “There was an ugliness to their drunkenness that made me uneasy,” Nan writes. Fortunately, Jim Chief, who paddled by the island every day to check on Nan, chose that moment to show up. Nan signaled to him. She describes what happened next:

I glanced behind me. All three men were sprawled on the cabin steps and demanding that I join them. [Jim Chief] sat motionless in the [canoe] in an attitude of watchful waiting. His jaws clamped hard shut in that stolid, implacable manner of a primitive. With his wide-brimmed, battered old hat jammed low on his brow, the droop of that left eyelid somehow managed a sinister look. And better still, the barrel of his venerable rifle protruded over the bow of the canoe. … Innocently slung there, it now presented unexpected menace by pointing directly at my three unwelcome guests. Minutes went by, and then the scene sank in. Gradually the drinking party on my cabin steps dissolved. The men filed by me, keeping a weather eye on the ominous character in the canoe gazing so steadily at them from behind the well-armed bow. In a remarkably short time the loaded skiff was offshore, the faulty motor resumed its half-hearted, intermittent putt-putting up the river, and the men were out of sight.

Eventually Jim Chief grew ill and his visits to the Morenuses stopped. “To our surprise we missed him greatly,” Nan writes. “Life in the bush without Jim Chief appearing with his gossip, his schemes, his primordial guile left a hole in our existence as gaping as the loss of one of the seasons.” 

The editor's note at the end of Nan's article states that just as the story was going to press Maclean's received a hurried note from Nan. "Old Jim," she wrote, "was found dead in his wigwam some six weeks following my completion of his story. And now the lakes and bush are empty indeed."

Winnipeg Tribune, March 13, 1946

 
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©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.