Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506270021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY/STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
THERE it was, tucked into the stacks of fiction at Roanoke's main library: a first edition of Mary Johnston's first novel, ``Prisoners of Hope,'' signed by the author and dated 1899.
Vulnerable to theft, vandalism and the whims of any would-be bathtub reader, the book had been there for decades, untouched and unnoticed - so unheralded that it hadn't been removed to the guarded rare-book section of the library's Virginia Room.
So uncelebrated that it seemed to speak volumes about the author herself.
Mary Johnston, whose blockbuster second novel, ``To Have and To Hold,'' made her the first woman writer to top best-seller lists this century.
Mary Johnston, whose Civil War novels were studied by Gen. Eisenhower; praised and emulated by Margaret Mitchell before anyone had even heard of ``Gone With the Wind.''
Mary Johnston, born into a family that included representatives to the Virginia General Assembly, railroad and canal presidents, Confederate Army generals and donors of the land that became Hampden-Sydney, Longwood and Hollins colleges.
Mary Johnston, a native of tiny Buchanan - and a national figure in the women's suffrage movement.
She was a woman so ahead of her time that she drifted into obscurity nearly as quickly as she'd vaulted into fame.
And, for the most part, she's stayed there, like that signed first edition of ``Prisoners of Hope.''
Waiting for someone to come along and brush off the dust.
A stone's throw from the James River in Buchanan is the spot where Mary Johnston spent her first 15 years. Born into a lifelong struggle with fragile health, she was kept out of school and educated instead in the vast library of her homeplace by her aunt, grandmother and governesses.
A huge magnolia tree stood in her front yard, overlooking the James in its canal-boat era. Here in the shadow of Purgatory Mountain, Johnston's imagination grew. Her mind gobbled up historic accounts of Colonial Virginia and the Civil War, subjects that would become the settings for her most acclaimed and popular books.
Now, 60 years after her death, a gravel parking lot is all that remains of her Lowe Street birthplace. The sign in front says, ``SPEED LIMIT 25.''
Across the street in the Community House, the smell of homemade yeast rolls drifts among the musty antiques and town memorabilia. Ladies of the Town Improvement Society are fixing dinner for the local Rotary Club, so for the moment Buchanan's two public Mary Johnston mementos are available for inspection.
``If the Community House is closed, you can get a key from the girl at the town office,'' Annie Ransone explains.
She's an Improvement Society member emeritus, a retired clerk from her brother Willie's drug store and the unofficial town historian. ``'Cause I keep the scrapbooks, I guess,'' the 82-year-old says, one hand leaning on her cane and the other clutching an everpresent Pall Mall. ``Hardly a week goes by that somebody doesn't call and say, `Will you look up so and so?' ''
Those tasks fell to Miss Emma Martin before her death seven years ago. Miss Martin taught 12 of the 14 Ransone kids at the old Buchanan School, next door to Mary Johnston's homeplace. She also was the author's cousin - and the keeper of some of her books and old papers.
No one knows what happened to those items; rumor has it that a relative auctioned Johnston's books off along with Miss Emma's estate. What people have managed to squirrel away: an old photograph of Mary Johnston's house that Ransone keeps wedged in her yellowing scrapbook, and two treasures donated to the Community House in the '50s by Mary Johnston's youngest sister, Elizabeth.
Ransone shows off Johnston's ``petticoat dresser'' in the foyer - a mirrored stand she kept at the foot of her stairway to see if her slip was showing.
A small autographed portrait of the author sits on a table in the parlor, revealing a thoughtful, sad expression and dark, oval eyes. In 1900, a New York Times writer described Johnston as ``a wonderfully sweet-faced young woman, the graceful contours of her features recalling some famous miniatures on ivory by the old masters.''
``Momma said they honored her with a tea once, and the Town Improvement ladies invited her to speak,'' Ransone says. ``But they didn't honor her like they should. I don't know if they were jealous or what.''
``She should've been considered one of the country's great American authors,'' adds Annie's sister, Charlotte Roberts, who is visiting from New York City.
``It amazes me, history bores a lot of people, even the history of their own families. People don't seem to care anymore where they came from.''
A single commemorative plaque greets the visitor to Warm Springs' Three Hills Inn, the mansion Mary Johnston built in 1913 and where she died in 1936 at the age of 66.
It is said that Mary Johnston often visited the area baths as a young woman in search of health. It is also said that she built the knoll-top mansion with the proceeds from ``To Have and To Hold,'' thinking more commercial successes were to come.
They weren't.
Despite critical acclaim for the Civil War novels, despite the mixed reviews of her groundbreaking feminist novel ``Hagar,'' Johnston couldn't make a living from her writing.
``She had a lot of her rich society friends who'd come visit her here and mooch off her,'' says Charlene Fike, who now runs the Bath County Three Hills Inn with her husband, Doug, and another couple. ``So she began charging them. It was clear she wasn't going to be taken advantage of by freeloaders.''
Johnston didn't spare expense when she built the house, named for the view of three hills in the distance - with a backdrop of West Virginia mountains. Its foundation, made of the now-rare American chestnut, has not settled at all, nor has a single termite managed to worm its way in.
``In the house inspection, the guy told us, `If we have a nuclear attack, I'm coming to Three Hills.''' Fike recalls.
The Fikes had never heard of Mary Johnston when they came to view the place. But having grown up as the children of missionaries, they were immediately drawn to her philosophy: her declaration of pacifism during World War I, the way she made bridging different cultures a lifelong passion.
``That was just unheard of back then,'' Fike says. ``She was very endeared because she was good at mixing the different classes of society.''
A woman who had pressed Mary Johnston's sheets as a girl told of the weekend parties she threw: Saturday-night dinner for her literary-set guests and fellow feminists; Sunday-night hymn-sings that mixed both guests and hired help. At Christmas, she invited all the children of Warm Springs village up for a party, where she had gifts for them all.
Never married, Johnston ran the inn along with her two sisters, Elizabeth and Eloise. ``She was very satisfied with who she was,'' Fike says. ``And back then, the woman was the man.''
In 1923, Johnston wrote an impassioned essay for The Washington Herald promoting mixed marriages - of Jews and Gentiles, rich people and poor. A woman should marry for love, she wrote, or not at all.
``On the whole, it seems to me the young woman of today, cigarettes and so on to the contrary, is as wife and mother the superior of the young woman of yesterday,'' she wrote. But women still deserved equality, and Johnston argued that the key to it was economic independence.
The Three Hills of Johnston's day featured a massive English cottage-style boxwood garden. Johnston wrote in one of the cottages behind it, with a porch overlooking the boxwoods. She loved puttering in the garden, planting trees and tending her peonies.
She spent hours at a time in her private library, which was walled with books and contained two globes, one terrestrial, the other astronomical.
The library, unfortunately, was destroyed by a subsequent owner. But Johnston's beloved boxwoods remain. Last year the Fikes trimmed 20 inches of unwieldy sprigs off the hedges and plucked out piles of poison ivy. They're trying to bring Three Hills back to its Mary Johnston heyday.
Asked if she feels the author's presence on the grounds, Charlene Fike said, ``We do have steam heat that rattles, and I say to the guests, `Oh, that's Mary Johnston's ghost.'
``Because, well, not everyone likes the rattle of steam heat.''
In the early 1900s, a Hollins College professor proposed writing an article about Mary Johnston. In a letter of response written to her friend Matty Cocke, the daughter of Hollins founder Charles Lewis Cocke, Johnston said:
``If I may, I would ask Professor Pleasants to deal lightly with my life itself - I have somehow an ineradicable objection to seeing the actual myself in print. I never care what one says of my books!''
While a handful of scholars have written specific articles about Mary Johnston's feminism crusades and her literary works, few writers have undertaken the chronicling of her life, personal and professional.
Anita Firebaugh hopes that will change.
A graduate student at Hollins and a writer, Firebaugh has enough manila file folders full of Johnston trivia to author an entire series. She's gone through the 31 boxes of letters and papers - twice - at the University of Virginia's special-collections library. She's read the correspondences between Johnston and her good friend, fellow Virginia writer Ellen Glasgow.
``I'd written an article on her for the Fincastle Herald, and just found her fascinating,'' Firebaugh says. She started buying Johnston books at yard sales when she could find them. She began interviewing people like the Fikes and John Johnston, the author's great-nephew who lives in California.
``It was one of those things that grabs you, and you're stuck with it,'' she says. ``A couple of times I've put the thing away, but something always comes up and there it is again. And I keep thinking, `Geez, I'm meant to do this.' ''
Firebaugh describes her visit to Three Hills last year. ``It was a stormy, kinda windy, spooky day,'' she recalls. ``I felt like I had Mary Johnston there walking beside me.''
So at her knoll-top ranch house outside Fincastle, Anita Firebaugh reads all she can, and she writes. She's studied Johnston's first published article, a travelogue written for the Fincastle Herald in 1895, about seeing Queen Victoria while in Aix-les-Bains in Savoy, France.
She's read all about Johnston's alleged fragile health, and she's come to a conclusion of her own - that it's bunk. ``Between 1909 and 1913, she rode around the country in a Model-T, giving speeches every which way. She also wrote three books, `Hagar,' `The Long Roll' and `Cease Firing.'
``Clearly, she was not dying.''
The first woman to address the Virginia General Assembly, Johnston shocked people with her outspokenness on the suffrage issue. She also shocked them when she took to mysticism, the subject of most of her later books, including ``Silver Cross,'' ``Sweet Rocket'' and ``Michael Forth.''
Firebaugh admires the fact that Johnston dared entertain noted Hindu mystic and theosophist J. Krishnamurti at Three Hills in 1926. That Johnston was a pacifist, but perfectly ready to describe a battle up to the hilt. That the Baptist-raised aristocrat became an outspoken advocate of sex education.
And Firebaugh has pieced together some personal details never before written: that Johnston awoke early to write in the woods surrounding Three Hills; that she used No. 2 pencils and yellow legal pads for her first drafts; that Buchanan's Mary Johnston League was the country's only local suffrage group to adopt the name of a person.
Johnston's take on eugenics was that mankind would evolve into a superior being, not through eradication of certain classes or races, but through natural selection, Firebaugh notes.
An opponent of child labor who had Socialist leanings, Johnston believed the women's vote was crucial because women's input into politics would help create the society she desired: no war, greater intelligence, humane treatment of all people.
Had Johnston been alive in the 1960s, Firebaugh believes, she'd have marched on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr.
Were she alive today, ``she'd be really pissed about the apathy of people today, and I bet she wouldn't own a TV. I think a lot of the terrorism and horror would be personally devastating to her."
``She'd be pleased with some of the advancements made, but she'd be striving for more. She wouldn't be satisfied.
``I think she was always ahead of herself, which is why she has largely been overlooked,'' Firebaugh says. ``But you can read `Hagar,' and hell, that book's as relevant now as it was back then.''
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB