History of a literary radical, and other essays

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

SOPHRONISBA

I should scarcely have understood Sophronisba unless I had imagined her against the background of that impeccable New England town from which she says she escaped. It is a setting of elm-shaded streets, with houses that can fairly be called mansions, and broad lawns stretching away from the green and beautiful white church. In this large princeliness of aspect the naïve stranger, like myself, would imagine nothing but what was grave and sweet and frank. Yet behind those pillared porticos Sophronisba tells me sit little and petrified people. This spacious beauty exists for people who are mostly afraid; afraid of each other, afraid of candor, afraid of sex, afraid of radicals. Underneath the large-hearted exterior she says they are stifled within. Women go queer from repression, spinsters multiply on families’ hands, while the young men drift away to Boston. Dark tales are heard of sexual insanity, and Sophronisba seems to think that the chastest wife never conceives without a secret haunting in her heart of guilt. I think there are other things in Sophronisba’s town, but these are the things she has seen, and these are the things she has fled from.

Sophronisba is perhaps forty, but she is probably much younger than she was at eleven. At that age the devilish conviction that she hated her mother strove incessantly with the heavenly conviction that it was her duty to love her. And there were unpleasing aunts and cousins who exhaustingly had to be loved when she wished only spitefully to slap them. Her conscience thus played her unhappy tricks through a submerged childhood, until college came as an emancipation from that deadly homesickness that is sickness not for your home but intolerance at it.

No more blessed relief comes to the conscience-burdened than the chance to exchange their duties for their tastes, when what you should unselfishly do to others is transformed into what books and pictures you ought to like. Your conscience gets its daily exercise, but without the moral pain. I imagine Sophronisba was not unhappy at college, where she could give up her weary efforts to get her emotions correct towards everybody in the world and the Three Persons in the heaven above it, in favor of acquiring a sound and authorized cultural taste. She seems to have very dutifully taken her master’s degree in English literature, and for her industrious conscience is recorded somewhere an unreadable but scholarly thesis, the very name of which she has probably forgotten herself.

For several years Sophronisba must have flowed along on that thin stream of the intellectual life which seems almost to have been invented for slender and thin-lipped New England maidens who desperately must make a living for themselves in order to keep out of the dull prison of their homes. There was for Sophronisba a little teaching, a little settlement work, a little writing, and a position with a publishing house. And always the firm clutch on New York and the dizzy living on a crust that might at any moment break and precipitate her on the intolerable ease of her dutifully loving family. It is the conventional opinion that this being a prisoner on parole can be terminated only by the safe custody of a man, or the thrilling freedom of complete personal success. Sophronisba’s career has been an indeterminate sentence of womanhood. She is at once a proof of how very hard the world still is on women, and how gaily they may play the game with the odds against them.

I did not meet Sophronisba until she was in the mellow of her years, and I cannot disentangle all her journalistic attempts, her dives into this magazine and that, the electrifying discovery of her by a great editor, the great careers that were always beginning, the great articles that were called off at the last moment, the delayed checks, the checks that never came, the magazines that went down with all on board. But there were always articles that did come off, and Sophronisba zigzagged her literary way through fat years of weekly series and Sunday supplements and lean years of desk work and book-reviewing. There are some of Sophronisba’s articles that I should like to have written myself. She piles her facts with great neatness, and there is a little ironic punch sometimes which is not enough to disturb the simple people who read it, but flatters you as of the more subtly discerning. Further, she has a genuine talent for the timely.

There has been strategy as well as art in her career. That feminine Yankeeness which speaks out of her quizzical features has not lived in vain. She tells with glee of editors captured in skilful sorties of wit, of connections laboriously pieced together. She confesses to plots to take the interesting and valuable in her net. There is continuous action along her battlefront. She makes the acceptance of an article an exciting event. As you drop in upon her for tea to follow her work from week to week, you seem to move in a maze of editorial conspiracy. Her zestfulness almost brings a thrill into the prosaic business of writing. Not beguilements, but candor and wit, are her ammunition. One would expect a person who looked like Sophronisba to be humorous. But her wit is good enough to be surprising, it is sharp but it leaves no sting. And it gets all the advantage of being carried along on a voice that retains the least suggestion of a racy Eastern twang. With the twang goes that lift and breathlessness that makes everything sound interesting. When you come upon Sophronisba in that charming dinner group that she frequents or as she trips out of the library, portfolio in hand, with a certain sedate primness which no amount of New York will ever strain out of her, you know that for a few moments the air is going to be bright.

How Sophronisba got rid of the virus of her New England conscience and morbidities I do not know. She must have exorcised more demons than most of us are even acquainted with. Yet she never seems to have lost the zest that comes from standing on the brink and watching the Gadarene swine plunge heavily down into the sea. She has expelled the terrors of religion and the perils of thwarted sex, but their nearness still thrills. She would not be herself, neither would her wit be as good, if it were not much made of gay little blasphemies and bold feminist irreverences. There is the unconscious play to the stiff New England gallery that makes what she says of more than local relevance. In her serious talk there lingers the slight, interested bitter tang of the old Puritan poison. But current issues mean much to Sophronisba. These things which foolish people speak of with grave-faced strainings after objectivity, with uncouth scientific jargon and sudden lapses into pruriency, Sophronisba presents as a genuine revelation. Her personal curiosity, combined with intellectual clarity, enable her to get it all assimilated. Her allegiance went, of course, quickly to Freud, and once, in a sudden summer flight to Jung in Zurich, she sat many hours absorbing the theories from a grave, ample, formidably abstract, and—for Sophronisba—too unhumorous Fraülein assistant. What Sophronisba got she has made into a philosophy of life, translated into New England dialect, and made quite revealingly her own. Before journalism claimed her for more startling researches, she would often give it for you in racy and eager fashion, turning up great layers of her own life and of those she knew about her. Many demons were thus sent flying.

Her exorcisms have been gained by a blazing candor and by a self-directed sense of humor which alone can support it. With the white light of this lantern she seems to have hunted down all the evil shadows in that background of hers. Her relentless exposure of her own motives, her eager publicity of soul and that fascinating life which is hers, her gossip without malice and her wise cynicism, make Sophronisba the greatest of reliefs from a world too full of decent reticences and self-respects. That heavy conscience has been trained down to an athletic trimness. I cannot find an interest or a realism or a self-interpretation at which she will cringe, though three centuries of Puritanism in her blood should tell her how unhallowed most of them are.

Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very tense, and if anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring, and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto. To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first.