A Lady of Good Family (26 page)

Q. Women have always struggled with the age-old question of how to find fulfillment in both their personal and professional lives. Some readers might conclude from Beatrix’s example that achieving such a balance requires great wealth and a lack of children. Do you agree?

A. No, I don’t agree, or at least I don’t think that is how it should be. Let’s be honest, though. Enough money and freedom from
duty to do as you please to build a career can’t hurt! Women and girls today might find it difficult to understand what married life was often like before birth control was readily available. Some women experienced one pregnancy after another, in fact, spent their entire premenopausal life in some stage of pregnancy and child rearing. It was their work, and it consumed their time and quite often killed them. The wealthy had nannies, nurses, and governesses to take care of child rearing, and I suspect they knew a little more about birth control than we give them credit for.

Today, women have more freedom and more choices. But achieving a balance, as you say, is a struggle. Fulfillment comes from doing what you love and being surrounded by people who respect your choices. It’s a day-to-day struggle, doing your work and also being available to family and friends. My one rule is this: never, never, ever call me in the morning when I’m working. I’ll hang up on you, if I answer the phone at all. I can’t write in bed like Edith did, though. I envy her that.

Q. Mrs. Haskett is a truly disagreeable woman, cruel and acquisitive. She seems to embody the negative aspects of the nouveau riche. Did you have a particular model in mind when you created her?

A. Thankfully no, if you’re referring to living people I know. I thought of Mrs. Haskett almost as a metaphor for the greed of
the times, that “I have the money and I can buy whatever I want, whether you want to sell or not” attitude.

I love art museums second only to good libraries, and it pains me that so many collections were built on war, looting, and the rich buying from the newly poor. There is no way around this problem, however. How else can art be moved from private collections to public viewings? Henry James covered some of this territory in his novels, the rich Americans buying art off the impoverished Europeans.

As to Mrs. Haskett’s social ambitions for herself and her daughters, firm placement in the respectable upper classes, in her generation, was as important as money in the bank, as poor Lily Bart discovers. If you were rich enough, you could buy a title, an ancestral home, and all the toys and benefits that came with them. There’s a reason why it is called the Gilded Age and not the golden age. Gilding is a superficial layer that wears off in time. And it’s why, in the title, I refer to Beatrix as a lady. Breeding and a generosity of spirit, empathy, are deeper than gilding: they don’t wear off.

Q. Beatrix’s mother, Minnie, seems open-minded in her love for her daughter and willing to defy strict social convention to find meaningful work for herself. Can you tell us more about her? Was she warm and accessible with people outside her class? Were she and Beatrix able to remain close even as Beatrix’s career flourished, and following her marriage to Max Farrand?

A. Minnie (Mary) Jones was known for her warmth, wit, and intelligence. Henry James was a great admirer of her and a lifelong friend, so she must have been a wonderful conversationalist and a perceptive reader. She’s one of the people I’d love to invite to dinner and ask what she thinks of my own favorite books, and which of Edith’s books she most admires.

Aside from her intelligence and energy, Minnie was also a woman of great social conscience. She didn’t just give loose change to charity; she worked for the poor and for the working class. I suspect that her dedication to helping the less fortunate might have been one of the things that damaged her marriage: Freddie Jones was a son much loved and spoiled by his mother, and he expected a wife to be dedicated to his comfort, not to the well-being of others.

Beatrix and Minnie’s close and loving relationship wasn’t changed by Beatrix’s marriage, though the time they spent together was necessarily reduced. When the Great Depression arrived, Minnie was short of cash, and Beatrix did all she could to help her; Minnie often spent summers with Beatrix and Max in Bar Harbor.

One of the great sorrows of Beatrix’s life was that she wasn’t with Minnie when she died, at age eighty-four. Minnie had traveled again to Europe to see Edith, but caught a cold, and the cold turned into pneumonia. She died before Beatrix could get there.

At the memorial for her mother in New York, Beatrix
chose this beautiful passage from Proverbs to read: “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and gold.”

Q. Can you tell us more about the projects Beatrix worked on after 1920, when the novel ends?

A. Dumbarton Oaks is the jewel in Beatrix’s crown, and visitors can still admire her work there, especially how she designed the gardens to suit the rocky, sloping grounds, letting the original shapes of the land guide her choices.

Beatrix was already fifty years old when she began her work at Dumbarton Oaks, a good age for remembering earlier days, and these gardens do reflect Beatrix’s earlier trips in Italy. There are references to Renaissance gardens and also to the American Arts and Crafts movement. The terraces function as outdoor rooms and courts leading into other outdoor rooms; there are fountains, pools, rose beds, sculptures, walks lined with flowering trees. There are places to be meditatively alone, places for talking with friends. The Dumbarton Oaks Gardens are absolutely magnificent.

Before, during, and after her years of work and maintenance at Dumbarton Oaks, Beatrix worked on some two hundred different projects: college campuses, private gardens, town gardens, village greens, memorials and memorial stones, including one for President Theodore Roosevelt in the Oyster
Bay cemetery of Long Island, a rose garden for the New York Botanical Garden . . . the list is extensive and varied, showing Beatrix’s determination to bring green and growing beauty to as many settings and people as she could.

Beatrix’s other famous garden didn’t share as happy a fate as Dumbarton Oaks, however. After Beatrix and Max married, the couple spent a large part of every year in Bar Harbor and together created Reef Point Gardens: home, horticultural library, and botanic garden all at once, a place where Beatrix could showcase native American plants and provide educational resources for horticulturalists and gardeners. But after Max died in 1945, funding for Reef Point fell short of what was needed to maintain the extensive garden and library. Rather than let the house and garden dwindle into mediocrity, Beatrix had her childhood home torn down and the gardens dismantled.

I think that grim and mournful action testifies to the depth of her feeling both for her husband and for her mother: without them, the house no longer made sense. A friend bought the property to rebuild on; another friend purchased many of the plants and created two new gardens with them: the Asticou Azalea Garden and the Thuya Garden. There is a kind of eternity to gardens: they are rarely completely destroyed; they continue either in individual plants moved elsewhere or in suggestions of paths and walls, outlines.

Beatrix transferred her library and papers to the University of California at Berkeley and moved to a smaller cottage in Bar Harbor. She died there in 1959.

The Beatrix Farrand Society (www.beatrixfarrandsociety.org) lists thirteen gardens where her work can still be admired, including the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Maine; the Beatrix Farrand Garden at Bellefield in Hyde Park, New York; the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden in the New York Botanical Garden; and her most famous work, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.

Q. Your novel
The Beautiful American
, published in the spring of 2014, received glowing reviews from print publications and from readers who posted comments online. Does anything about your experience in publishing that novel stand out?

A. Some wonderful comments: a male reader said it made him cry! Someone else said that when she finished it, she started it all over again. The response, in general, was really wonderful and very encouraging. The novel received the CNY Award in Fiction for 2014, and I was delighted about that. I’m a storyteller and I’m over the moon when people like the story and the way it is told. Some friends, though, thought that my portrayal of Picasso was much too kind. I had to explain that I was writing Picasso the way Nora, the narrator, would have perceived him, and Nora rather liked
Picasso. He was kind to her, which is not the same as saying he was kind to all women. He wasn’t. He was, we all know, a bit of a rascal.

Q. Since you liked this question last time, I’ll ask it again. Where do you keep the pile of books you’re reading and what’s in it these days?

A. Ah. I have a new system. I placed a bookcase on top of my desk, not beside it, so all I have to do is look up from my typing and there they are, all the titles I need for reference and inspiration. I just hope the legs of my desk are really, really strong.

I also have a nightstand with very strong legs and lots of books on it. The desktop books are mostly research for the novel, along with the novels of Edith and Henry, and several histories of gardening. The nightstand books are my distraction reading: I believe in the Zen theory that sometimes to hit the target you have to look away from it, so during my research and writing I also read lots of books that had nothing to do with Beatrix and gardens. A few that stand out:
Shakespeare’s Pub
, by Pete Brown, a really fine history of the George Inn in London. Sounds starchy, but believe me, it isn’t.
Wild
, by Cheryl Strayed, was a great read and thoroughly convinced me I’m not the extreme-hiker type. Marina Warner’s
Once Upon a Time
is a fascinating new look at fairy tales, and my reading
group devoured the
Old Filth
trilogy by Jane Gardam. I reread
The Pursuit of Love
by Jessica Mitford for perhaps the thirty-second time.

Q. Do you find new electronic devices changing the way you read? Do research?

A. Not the way I read. I still prefer the old-fashioned paper-between-boards kind of reading experience. I remember one day when my computer had gone all squirrelly and my husband’s had as well. I was weeping and wailing and he picked up a book and said, “Look! This is perfect technology! Portable, no power source needed, and no software.” That’s how I still feel about books. I admit, though, that being able to carry around an entire library in your handbag is beginning to sound appealing.

Research is a trickier question. I will use online databases for quick facts and fact-checking, but I still prefer volumes, actual books, for deeper research. For instance, for an earlier novel, I read some twelve hundred pages of text (library books) to write a five-page scene about falconry. Mostly I still roam my various libraries, fingering actual books on actual shelves. If I ever come back as a ghost, I plan to haunt a particular library at Cornell, where I’ve done most of my research. It is a wonderful, fantastic place, as good as a garden, and I think I’ll make a decent ghost for it.

Q. Do you have a book that you’ve always wanted to write and haven’t written yet?

A. Yes. It’s . . . I can’t tell you. I’m superstitious about this. If I talk about a book before I begin it, the book doesn’t get finished. So, stay tuned!

1. Did you enjoy the novel? What was your overall response to it?

2. Although the novel is primarily about historical figure Beatrix Farrand, fictional Daisy Winters tells the story. Did you find Daisy an effective narrator? What are the advantages and disadvantages of hearing the story from her point of view?

3. Discuss what life was like for Beatrix as an upper-class woman coming of age before 1900. What restrictions did she face early on that began to fall away as the new century progressed?

4. Beatrix and Amerigo first meet by chance several times, which seems to suggest that fate is conspiring to draw them together. Have you ever had a similar experience of a romance that seems “meant to be”?

5. Discuss the references to novels by Henry James and Edith Wharton. Are you familiar with
Daisy Miller
,
The Turn of the Screw
, and
The House of Mirth
? Are you inspired to seek them out and read them?

6. The author suggests that falling in love was an important part of Beatrix’s growth both as a woman and as a professional landscape gardener. How does the experience enrich her? Do you agree that an experience of passionate, romantic love is essential for a woman’s fulfillment?

7. Why does Beatrix hesitate when Amerigo suggests they elope? Have you ever had to make a split-second decision with far-reaching consequences for your life? What did you choose?

8. There are happy and unhappy marriages in the novel. Discuss the ingredients that go into making each marriage successful or disastrous. How much freedom to choose do the couples really have, and how much is driven by social convention? What role does luck play? And how do the marriages in the novel compare to marriages you know now?

9. Discuss the various ghosts in the novel. Why do you think the author includes them? Does the epigraph, taken from Beatrix Farrand’s writing, provide a clue?

10. Discuss the many cruelties Mrs. Haskett inflicts and the
possessions she accumulates in an effort to gain entrée into New York society’s highest echelons. Does she remind you of anyone from history, literature, or today’s pop culture?

11. Why do you think the author includes the three descriptions of gardens—for first meetings, second chances, and “where no one can weep”?

12. Does the novel make you want to create a garden, visit a garden, or read about gardens?

13. Before reading the novel, had you ever heard of Beatrix Farrand? Consider making a list of accomplished women of the last one hundred and fifty years that most people have never heard of.

14. Did you find the end of the novel satisfying? Why or why not?