Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [161]
Her traveler’s prose is better than I expected–lively, perceptive, full of pictures. The wood engravings are really fine, as good as anything she ever did. Our scissors left holes in both text and pictures, but from what remains I get a strong impression of the excitement with which she did them.
I remember excitement in her face, too, or think I do, and in her leaning figure, and her fine old hands, when we resurrected those drawings forty years after she had drawn them. She chattered to me, explaining things. She excited herself just by talking, she remembered Spanish words forgotten for decades, she laughed the giggly laugh she usually reserved for safe old friends. Her agitation was too violent for her, it was close to hysteria and not far from pain. She got the giggles; she ended by bursting into tears.
Her Paris and her Rome, her best time, the lost opportunity that she may have regretted more than any of the other lost opportunities of her life. She would never have admitted it, she would have denied it with vehemence, she kept up all her life the pretense that Augusta was a superior Genius, but Grandmother was a much better artist than her friend, and she would have profited from, and certainly couldn’t help envying a little, Augusta’s opportunities for travel and study. Probably she nursed a secret conviction, which she would have suppressed as Unworthy, that in marrying Oliver Ward she had given up her chance to be anything more than the commercial illustrator she pretended she was. That sort of feeling would have grown as she felt her powers growing.
She came before the emancipation of women, and she herself was emancipated only partly. There were plenty of women who could have provided her the models for a literary career, but hardly a one, unless Mary Cassatt, whom she apparently never met, who could have shown her how to be a woman artist. The impulse and the talent were there, without either inspiring models or full opportunity. A sort of Isabel Archer existed half-acknowledged in Grandmother, a spirit fresh, independent, adventurous, not really prudish in spite of the gentility. There was an ambitious woman under the Quaker modesty and the genteel conventions. The light foot was for more than dancing, the bright eye for more than flirtations, the womanliness for more than mute submission to husband and hearth.
The conventions of her time and place never inhibited her, I think, because it never occurred to her to rebel against them. The penalties, the neurasthenia and breakdowns of the genteel female, she never experienced either. But the ambitions that gave her purpose and the talents that helped fill a life not otherwise satisfying, she never fully realized or developed. That she never got off the North American continent, and lived most of her life in the back corners of that, was a handicap she couldn’t help feeling. Once she turned down a commission to illustrate a novel of F. Marion Crawford’s because, as she said, she didn’t even know the kind of chairs they sat on in the great European houses and palazzi where the story took place. She could infuse with her own special emotion anything she could draw, but she could draw only what she had seen.
Mexico was indeed her Paris and her Rome, her Grand Tour, her only glimpse of the ancient and exotic civilizations that in her innocent nineteenth-century local-colorish way she craved to know. Now for once she traveled not away from civilization but toward it, and thanks to the Syndicate’s desire to present a confidently prosperous front she traveled first class. Among her baggage were twenty-four whited blocks hastily prepared at the Century office, and in her portmanteau was a cabled commission from Thomas in Geneva–a commission