Treasures of the Texas Collection
Dorothy Scarborough
<woman’s voice reading the following>
“…the wind was the primal force… the sand blew in blinding fury across the
plains, or lay in mocking waves that never broke on any howsoever—distant
beach, or piled in mounds with fickle gusts removed almost as soon as they
were erected-when for endless miles there seemed nothing but wind and
sand and empty, far off sky.”
Hi, I’m Robert Darden, your host for Treasures of the Texas Collection.
And those words blow our way from the pages of The Wind, debut novel
of Dorothy Scarborough, native of Texas and Waco in particular, a
Baylor graduate and later faculty member who went on during the
early 1900s to become one of America’s most acclaimed female
novelists. Here to shine a light on some of her most interesting attributes
is Mark Andrew Olsen, author of Christian thrillers like The
Assignment and The Watchers and co-screenwriter of the MGM film,
Music Within.
Mark, thank you for talking with us today about the life and letters of
this most remarkable woman. Now, one of the first things one hears
about Dorothy Scarborough is that she came from a distinguished and
accomplished Waco family.
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I would call that a fair assessment of the Waco Scarboroughs. Dorothy was
the youngest of three children born to John and Mary Scarborough in 1873
in Mount Carmel. John Scarborough grew up on a large family plantation
with many slaves in Jackson Parish, Louisiana. He was a Civil War veteran,
twice wounded in the Red River campaign in 1864. The family moved early
on to Sweetwater because of Mrs. Scarborough’s need for a drier climate.
There Mr. Scarborough practiced law and soon became a Judge. During his
term of office he was credited with breaking up a band of outlaws who were
terrorizing that sparsely settled region.
I guess this was when Dorothy became acquainted with the dry and
windy climate of West Texas.
Actually, it is. Without jumping too far ahead of ourselves, Ms. Scarborough
did become rather infamous for a time, at least in West Texas, for her
depiction of the wind in her novel of the same name, which was turned into
one of the last great silent films of the same name, starring Lillian Gish. And
in one of her many defenses of the novel, Scarborough said, “I have been
accused of disliking West Texas, but that’s a mistake. It’s a great section,
and I love it. I used to live in West Texas, when I was about as big as a
ground-squirrel, and not of an age to be taking notes for novels. But I went
back for frequent visits in my early childhood and girlhood, and so I knew
northers and sandstorms and droughts. But ‘The Wind’ has its real origin in
the impressions I got from hearing my mother’s vivid accounts of her
struggles with the climate of the West. She loved the people out there, but
she did not care for the weather. My father had taken her there to that high,
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dry climate, because her lungs were weak. Well, she found the climate dry
enough!”
Eventually, though, the Scarborough family moved to Waco…
Yes; in fact, the old Scarborough home was at 717 Speight Avenue, and was
used for awhile by Baylor as a quote, “cooperative house for girls,” before
Memorial Hall was built on the property. They became members of First
Baptist Waco during the time when H.B. Carroll was pastor. John
Scarborough became a trustee of Baylor in 1888 and a member of the State
Board of the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 1887. He and his wife
are buried in Oakwood Cemetery, in Waco.
Did Dorothy Scarborough have siblings?
Actually, Dorothy was the youngest of three very interesting children. The
eldest child, Ellison Bledsoe, died in infancy in 1872. Martha Douglas
Scarborough wrote a non-fiction book titled Love Looks at Death, studied at
Baylor from 1887 to 94, receiving her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. She
later took a Bachelor’s from Vassar College and became a teacher of modern
language at Baylor. In 1898 she married a pastor, George W. McDaniel, who
became one of the leading Baptist ministers of the South, including
pastoring the First Baptist Church of Richmond, Virginia for 20 years and
being elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention.
George Scarborough, born in 1876, graduated from Baylor in 1896, but also
from University of Texas Law School. He was not interested in law,
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however, and in 1906 went to New York, where he did some unsuccessful
lecturing and later tried his hand at journalistic work. For a while he worked
at the Department of Justice, where he earned a reputation for fearlessness
and courage. Without any internal support, George cleaned up some of the
worst gambling rings in New York City and soon became a legend of terror
to gangsters. He was a dead shot, and was known for displaying great moral
and physical courage.
His real interest, however, lay in writing drama, and in 1912 his first play,
The Lure, was produced. It was a sensational success, and he followed it
with a number of successful plays on Broadway with such celebrated
producers as Harris, Schubert and Belasco. Over a dozen of his plays
reached Broadway between 1913 and 1920. He then became interested in
movies, and turned his attention to screenwriting, although no film credits
are attributed to him. Emily Dorothy Scarborough, the subject of this story,
was born January 27, 1878, the youngest of the three.
What’s known about her childhood?
Well, as a child she was very small, with gray-green eyes, and rather auburn
hair. Due to her small stature she was called “Dottie” by her friends and –
later -- “Miss Dottie” by her students. She had a stimulating personality and
a warm generous nature.
Dottie grew up literally on the Baylor campus. Students and faculty were
used to seeing her as a child sitting in the trees, reading a book. Sitting in a
perch reading a book seems to be a theme. There was a large old-fashioned
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barn at the Scarborough farm with a loft filled with hay and cotton-seed
hulls. Dorothy was apparently fond of going there and taking along a book.
One day her mother found a book there, and told a neighbor about it in terms
of distress, certain there had been a tramp up there. The house also had a
large tree into which she would often climb into to read.
As Baylor fans know, she eventually found her way to the school where
her father served as a trustee.
That’s right. Dorothy graduated from Baylor with a BA in 1896, and her MA
in 1899. As a Baylor co-ed, she focused her whole social and academic life
on her love of literature. She contributed poems, essays, sketches and short
stories to various student publications. As her writing matured, she began to
win literary prizes on campus. She was especially excited about her
participation in the Calliopean Literary Society, where one of her jobs was to
correspond with famous authors to request greetings and copies of their
works. After graduating, she taught in public school for several years in
nearby Marlin, Texas. In the fall of 1904, she returned to Baylor as an
instructor of English, a position she held until 1916, when she was made
assistant professor.
When was Scarborough first published?
While at Baylor, her first book, Fugitive Verses, a collection of her poetry,
was published. Its chapters included themes and place names familiar to
residents of Central Texas, like “Drought in Texas,” “In a Field of Buffalo
Clover,” “Spring in Cameron Park.” As a regular faculty member at Baylor
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from 1905 to 1915, she also taught general literature courses, composition,
creative writing, and journalism. She also taught a popular and influential
college-men's Sunday school class at the First Baptist Church in Waco.
When did Scarborough first display her passion for local folklore? It
was during her Baylor days, wasn’t it?
That’s right. Even though the study of folklore in Texas was in infancy when
Scarborough was teaching at Baylor, she soon became enamored with the
subject. There was an African-American church not far from the
Scarborough home, and on still summer evenings during her childhood Little
Dottie was known to sit and listen to the singing drift outside. Also on
summer Sundays, the “baptizin’s” were held in Waco Creek, and she was
known to frequent those as well.
Small wonder, then, that she became an early member of the Texas Folklore
Society, which was founded in 1910, and served as president of the society
in 1914–15. As reflected in her publications, her interests as a folklorist were
generally in folksongs, cowboys, and the lore of the Negro. In addition to
various essays and articles, she published two major folklore collections, On
the Trail of Negro Folksongs (1925) and A Song Catcher in the Southern
Mountains (1937, posthumous).
Let’s move on to her days following her departure from Baylor and
Waco.
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Unfortunately for the city, Miss Dorothy was not one to be kept in Waco
very long. Although she was immensely popular with her students, she soon
grew bored of the drudgery of correcting student compositions. She longed
for more time to devote to her own writing. During vacations from Baylor
she started doing graduate work at the University of Chicago. There she
turned to creative writing, notably short story courses, working towards
acquiring a Ph.D. In 1910, she and three other Baylor faculty women toured
Europe, and Scarborough stayed on with a year’s leave of absence to study
at Oxford University, in England. She learned when she arrived that the
university did not grant degrees to women, but the discovery did not stop
her. She continued her studies undeterred.
After her mother’s death in 1915, Dorothy leased the family home and
moved to New York City, where her brother was already a successful
playwright, in order to study literature at Columbia University. She never
lived in Texas again.
Expecting to be absent only a year, she soon learned the work would take
two years. While a student there, she was asked to become an instructor in
the short story. Calling it a subject she could teach “with one hand tied
behind her,” she promptly accepted, after having had such splendid success
at Baylor. Her progress at Columbia was marked by her promotion to
lecturer in 1919, to assistant professor in 1923, and to associate professor in
1931. Her teaching emphasis was creative writing, especially the techniques
of the short story and novel.
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Wasn’t it during this period that Scarborough established what most
consider her second major field of expertise? That, is ghost-stories and
the supernatural?
Yes, in fact, while receiving her PhD from Columbia, she wrote a
dissertation, "The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)" which
was so widely acclaimed by her peers that it was quickly published and it
has become a basic reference in the field. In it, Scarborough established the
Gothic romance and certain European writings as primary influences on the
use of the supernatural in modern literature. She organized the supernatural
by categories: modern ghosts, the devil, folktales, and supernatural science.
She even concluded that World War One was the cause for the
contemporary interest in the supernatural and that American writers were
primarily to credit for combining the supernatural with humor.
Despite this, shall we say, deviation into the spirit world, she did
continue her forays into folklore, didn’t she?
She certainly did. In 1920, Scarborough was living in Morningside Heights,
on the fringe of Harlem, when the first blues recording by an African
American singer, Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues," was released. It was a huge
commercial success, even though it was marketed exclusively in the African
American neighborhoods. Scarborough almost certainly knew of this
success, because as this song and other race records began to be a force to be
reckoned with on the cultural scene, she started a project to collect what she
described as "genuine Negro melodies." She took a few sabbaticals from
Columbia and traveled throughout the South to collect these songs. With the
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help of the famous folklorist George Kittredge of Harvard, she crafted these
into her first serious collection, which was published as On the Trail of
Negro Folk Songs in 1925 and immediately established her through the
academic world as an expert on the subject.
1925 was a bell-weather year for Scarborough, was it not?
Actually, many of her biographies describe that year as the highpoint of her
life. Her novel The Wind was published that year to great success, along with
a semi-autobiographical novel called The Unfair Sex.
Let’s talk about The Wind, one of her greatest successes, especially since
it was adapted into a famous silent film of the same name, starring the
great Lillian Gish.
The Wind was published anonymously, but not because she was trying to
avoid personal abuse brought on by the novel’s descriptions, but because her
publisher, Harper and Brothers, suggested bringing it out anonymously as a
publicity maneuver. A recent novel, West of the Water Tower, had been
brought over this way, and the discussion over who the author was had
greatly helped the author’s sales. However, Scarborough concluded that the
publicity for The Wind was inexcusably bungled, with the result that the
novel never met her expectations.
In the novel, the wind, the vastness of West Texas and the cruelty of some of
its inhabitants begin to immediately wear on the heroine, who has just
moved to Sweetwater. The wind keeps garden flowers from growing, the
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wind isolates people, the wind provokes haunting feelings of immortality.
Finally, the wind drives the heroine to insanity, sending her running across
the prairies, supposedly to collapse and a die a lunatic’s death.
Scarborough described Sweetwater as: “a struggling collection of small
houses of the rudest, simplest structure, some not even painted, some
without fences... Just little bare box houses, naked and unbeautiful, set down
in a waste of sand.”
Them’s fightin’ words!
Members of the West Texas Chamber of Commerce immediately accused
this unidentified Yankee writer of maligning Sweetwater and deliberately
exaggerating the dry climate of the region. In fact, angered locals even
gathered in front of the Nolan County Courthouse to burn copies of the
book. After her identity was revealed soon afterwards, Scarborough
explained that, although she was a loyal Texan, she was also a novelist, not
committed to be a booster for the climate of West Texas. As she summarized
once, she had been “convicted of realism in the first degree.” The Chamber
and its most vocal champion, Judge Crane, demanded that she satisfy their
version of historical accuracy in order to be a true novel of the West.
Enjoying a good fight, she responded,
“Has the West Texas wind got on your nerves, Mr. Crane, and the
sand blinded you to the difference between a novel and an historical
treatise? You complain that you can’t find any old timers near
Sweetwater that recall the plot of my recent novel, The Wind, and you
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haven’t dug up the murdered man’s body from any sand drift there.
Hence the book is fiction. Why, bless your historical heart, that’s all it
was ever meant to be! If storytellers weren’t allowed to invent
characters and situations, fiction would be even duller than it is. A
novelist writes impressionalistically, and fiction need conform only to
the essential truth of time and place.”
Was there lasting animosity between Scarborough and the champions of
West Texas?
No, it doesn’t seem that way. She later wrote about her exchanges with
Crane, “We Texans understand each other. What may seem like violence to
an ignorant Easterner, I recognize as only friendly enthusiasm.”
As a matter of fact, at the height of her book’s success, she was invited to
Sweetwater to speak. In a classic bit of irony, Scarborough arrived during
one of the most vicious sandstorms the region had experienced in years. And
when she accepted Crane’s invitation to tour the countryside, they were
caught in a blue norther so severe that they had trouble even making it back
to town. If Scarborough hadn’t already won her battle with the judge, she did
so when she presented him a signed copy of The Wind. Needless to say, the
visit was a triumph for her.
I take it this brings us to the last decade or so of Scarborough’s life.
Yes, and they were productive and satisfying years for her. Scarborough
continued to write even as she reveled in the life of an acclaimed author and
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folklorist. She was a sought-after speaker, book reviewer, and of course
continued her career at Columbia, where she influenced authors like Eric
Walrond and Carson McCullers. She divided her time between a farm in
rural Connecticut and an apartment in New York City. And it was there that
she died on November 7, 1935.
What kind of recognition did she receive?
One newspaper said, “…the impression which the late Dr. Dorothy
Scarborough, professor of English in Columbia University since 1917, left
upon Waco and Texas friends was demonstrated at her funeral in Waco Hall
Monday afternoon, when many scores of them journeyed through some of
the most disagreeable weather of the season to pay tribute to her memory.”
President Pat Neff presided. The Baylor flag was dipped in sorrow. Dr. J. M.
Dawson, pastor of the first Baptist Church, where Miss Scarborough had
taught while a Waco resident, declared that the author and teacher was
herself one of God’s noblest poems.
Dr. Lee Scarborough, a cousin who lived in the Scarborough home
while a student at Baylor, told of testimonies he had received from Baylor
men out over the state of the spiritual blessings they enjoyed through their
membership in the college men’s class she had taught in the First Baptist
Church Sunday School.
Can you leave us with one more memorable bit of Dorothy
Scarborough’s writing?
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Gladly. In Fugitive Verses, Dorothy Scarborough wrote a piece of verse that
sums up her view of endowing literature with something deeper than mere
eloquence.
“what if one be messageless?
What matters then
The facile pen,
The words
Like birds
That wing their easy flight
Into the vaporous nothingness of blue
If from that heavenward height
There fall not to the one whose eager view
Quick scans the sky
A faint, yet high, remote,
Yet rapturous note?
Rapturous note indeed, and a perfect one on which to end. Thank you,
Mark, for bringing this woman who would be remarkable in any era to
life for us.
I’m Robert Darden and thank you for joining us for another edition of
Treasures of the Texas Collection. Located on the Baylor University
campus, the Texas Collection has one of the country’s largest collections
of Texas-related documents, books, letters, photographs, memoirs, maps,
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and more. For more information, go to
http://www.baylor.edu/lib/texas/
Treasures of the Texas Collection was made possible by generous
grants from the Wardlaw Fellowship Fund for Texas Studies and
by the Guy B. Harrison, Jr. Endowment Fund.
This has been a production of KWBU, 103.3-FM, public radio
for Central Texas.
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