Some time ago, the editors at The Feminist Press sent me a photocopy of Katharine Butler Hathaway’s memoir The Little Locksmith and asked whether I would write an afterword to the new edition they planned to publish. Because my own work deals extensively with illness, disability, and death, I get a good many requests to review and comment upon personal narratives dealing with these themes, a literary subgenre I’ve dubbed “the literature of personal disaster.” As Thomas Couser has written in Recovering Bodies, “although our selves and our lives are fundamentally somatic, the body has not until recently figured prominently in life writing” (5). As though to make up for their tardy appearance, works recounting the body’s vagaries and vicissitudes have crowded bookstore shelves in the past couple of decades. The range of conditions is broad: cancer (Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, Anatole Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness), polio (Leonard Kriegel, Falling Into Life), amputation (Andre Dubus, Meditations from a Movable Chair), paralysis (Reynolds Price, A Whole New Life), mental illness (William Styron, Darkness Visible, Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind), to name only a handful of the most prominent.
The quality is similarly varied, and not all of those I’m asked to read repay my time. Having read The Little Locksmith, however, I replied at once that I’d love to write about it. This was no ordinary addition to the genre. This was a work sui generis: not merely an account, however vivid and absorbing, of a cripple’s childhood and maturation but a nuanced inquiry into the social, psychosexual, and spiritual realities of disability, half a century before disability studies emerged as an academic pursuit. None of the scholars engaged in this field, myself included, appeared to know of The Little Locksmith’s existence. Much younger then, I still believed that books were published and kept in print on the basis of their merit rather than their marketability, and I couldn’t understand how this one could have been allowed to go out of print.
The Little Locksmith had been enthusiastically received when it was first published. Beginning in September 1942 the Atlantic Monthly serialized the work, bringing its author, in her last months, a welcome spate of admiration from friends and strangers alike; Coward-McCann published the book posthumously in 1943. Writing for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which chose it as a main selection, Christopher Morley predicted, “Kitty Butler’s story … will outlive a good many more pressingly fashionable novels or reports of literary heroism.” Similarly, in his review for the New York Times, Edward Wagenknecht predicted that The Little Locksmith “will be with us for some time.” Yet by the time it was sent to me, it was long out of print. Even though I had concentrated on women’s autobiography during my doctoral work, I had never come upon a single reference to it. It had, as most books are destined to do, vanished altogether.
Well, not quite. Someone at The Feminist Press knew about it. I heard nothing further from the editors, however, and after a while, I decided that the project had been abandoned. And, indeed, as I learned later, tracking down the heir who could give permission to reprint The Little Locksmith proved complicated enough that it very nearly had been. I held onto the photocopied pages, however, until a friend unearthed a copy for me in a used bookshop in, appropriately enough, Maine. Then the book itself—dustjacket tattered, pages brittle and browning, redolent of overheated attics in old Maine houses—took up a spot in my permanent library. Smug as I felt with possessing my own copy, I still regretted that a new edition wasn’t available for teaching and gift-giving. When, years later, I learned that the project had been revived, I felt as though a friend I had made long ago and far away was moving close enough to my home that I could throw her a big party and introduce her to everyone.
HERE SHE IS AT LAST!
Katharine Butler was born on October 2, 1890, in Baltimore, Maryland, and moved in 1895 to Salem, Massachusetts, where she spent a large part of her childhood. By accident of geography, I immediately felt connected to her. My own mother also grew up in Salem and also, after the loss of a father, was then raised in the relative backwater of Danvers. Growing up a couple of towns away, I shopped in the department store founded by Katharine Butler’s grandfather, James F. Almy, and knew well all the places she and her brother Warren passed by and through on their youthful evening drives and canoeing trips: Topsfield, Boxford, North Beverly, and the Ipswich River. I think this sense of contact, however tangential, often accounts for an initial uprush of affection for a book and its author, though critics seldom concede so personal a response. This felt connection also explains why, although I shall not call this author Kitty, the name used by her intimates, I also shall not use Hathaway, following critical convention, or even the socially prescribed Mrs. or Ms. Hathaway. Rather, I shall refer to her as Katharine, the same name by which she often refers to herself in The Little Locksmith.
At the age of five, Katharine contracted tuberculosis of the spine, also known as tuberculosis spondylitis or Pott’s disease. Since the strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis that possesses a particular affinity for bones and joints is carried by cows, she was likely infected by raw milk. Those of us born after milking herds began to be tuberculin-tested and milk to be pasteurized routinely may hardly recognize the disease, but it was once fairly common in children and, until the discovery of antibiotics, untreatable. The child was simply immobilized while the body overcame the infection, sometimes for years, in the hope of preventing the deformity kyphosis, otherwise known as curvature of the spine or, in less polite terms, hunchback. Thus, although the contraption Katharine describes sounds like an invention of medieval inquisitors, her doctor was, in fact, using the most advanced technology available to him and the results, horrifying as she found them on her first glance into the mirror, were far milder than they might have been.
Although she never grew taller than a “ten-year-old child,” the (unattributed) foreword to a posthumously compiled volume of Katharine’s work entitled The Journals and Letters of The Little Locksmith notes that “[h]er curvature was slight. Her head was handsome and low in relation to her shoulders. Her shoulders were wide, her hips narrow, and her legs and hands finely slim and beautiful, so that when she half-reclined she looked like a mermaid” (xi). A mermaid, no less, that seductive and fatal creature of seamen’s fantasies! As an adolescent and young woman, however, she clearly didn’t perceive herself in such a flattering light. Believing herself “deformed,” “hideous,” “grotesque,” she assumed that romantic and sexual love were forbidden her. While in her thirties, in a piece called “Things Japanese,” she reflected,
I had known for a long time that nobody could ever fall in love with me, because of my being like the little locksmith. I say I knew this, although I never had asked anybody if it were true, and nobody had ever told me that it was. Yet I believed that I ought to believe that it was true. It was their silence, not words, which made me believe that I was expected to believe this. No words ever were spoken, not a single word of enlightenment to help me solve and endure this inhuman predicament. (Journals, 72)
She believed, and grieved, and relinquished all hope for love.
Reading The Little Locksmith does little to contradict that impression, ending as it does with Katharine, the maiden aunt, still readying her house for writers, for her nieces, and for lovers presumably other than herself. Except for that one intriguing reference, in the epilogue, to “my husband, Dan Hathaway,” bustling in to restoke the fire (230). What’s this? Can there be more to Katharine’s story? Indeed, there is. Yet since Katharine didn’t live to write the companion book she had planned, and the volume collecting her letters and journals, published by Coward-McCann in 1946, is out of print, one can hardly read more. The journals and letters, however, do provide a portrait of Katharine’s life up until the eve of her death, and I have drawn liberally from them not only for reflections that coincide with the writing of The Little Locksmith but also for Katharine’s life beyond Castine—in Paris, in New York, and then in Maine again.
Once settled into the house in Castine, which she called Sellanraa after the place in Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, she made friends with the artist Philip von Saltza, who introduced her to the visiting Japanese artist Toshihiko. Fascinated since childhood by “all things Japanese,” she fell in love with Toshihiko, who brought her “a climax of health and freedom” and with whom she enjoyed “a degree of intimacy which makes ordinary occidental relationship seem superficial” (Journals, 74). The effects of the relationship weren’t entirely salutary. She wrote in a letter to Toshihiko,
My desire to write has gone out of me as completely as if it had been removed by an operation, through the potent action of love. I imagine it could not affect a man so, because art really belongs to a man as it doesn’t belong to a woman. I feel now that it is a great mistake, a great sin against nature for my sex to seek fame or even without the desire for fame to give a life’s devotion to any art except the art of living. (80)
Every woman artist has had to struggle against this patriarchal myth, designed to assure her lover both the smallest competitive field and the most ample domestic comfort. Art of living, indeed! Still, there’s something poignant about hearing these words in Katharine’s voice. She was not, after all, debarred from romantic love—in all its silliness as well as its splendor.
Toshihiko’s departure for Paris left her bereft, penning the melancholy request: “Tell me something. Because it doesn’t matter and you’re going, tell me one thing. Tell me (as if I were dead and you were talking to someone else with your hands on her breasts) what there was, once, about me” (81). In words that seem peculiarly Japanese in their balance and resignation, she assured him, in a letter written the next day, that the Thimble at Castine—the small creamhouse that Katharine restored as a place for her writing—awaited his return: “[Y]et the sense of waiting is so joined to the eternal waiting and eternal movement by Nature that it is all the same if the desired one returns or doesn’t return. Do you understand? Yes, joy and grief are one and the same” (83). She must have sensed that he had gone for good.
Unbearably lonely in Castine, she moved from the high white house to a tiny apartment at 4 Patchin Place in New York City. There, she began psychoanalysis with Dr. Izette de Forest, with whom she remained in touch for the rest of her life. There also, she met and fell in love with Toshihiko’s cousin Taro, himself an artist, who asked her to marry him and live in Japan. Returning to Japan to arrange the wedding, he was persuaded by his family to marry a Japanese woman instead. Although Katharine endeavored to endure this latest heartbreak with equanimity, “having lost that dream of going,” she wrote in a letter to Toshihiko, “I feel lost, and almost in exile in my own country” (104–05). Perhaps for this reason, she decided to go to Paris and pursue her own interest in drawing.
Toshihiko was there, of course, “older, thin and academic-looking,” though, as Katharine continued in a letter to her Radcliffe friend Catharine Huntington, he seemed to have lost much of his allure: “I couldn’t even understand why I had ever loved him so much” (116). He helped her to find a furnished studio in Montparnasse and raved about her drawings. A few of these are reproduced among her letters and journals; and although they possess considerable charm, especially one of the Castine waterfront, they scarcely seem rave-worthy. Katharine’s gifts seem to have been more verbal than visual. Nevertheless, she did work at her drawing, and even some painting, but, as she wrote in another letter to Catharine, only “halfheartedly,” allowing herself to be “what I always was with [Toshihiko]—a listener, a consoler, simply a woman; and this mood is utterly contrary to creative mood” (149).
Having withstood the gray Paris winter and Toshihiko’s often oppressive presence, she fled in the spring to the Haute Savoie to visit her friend Grace Thompson, who was being treated for tuberculosis in an Alpine sanatorium. Both the short narrative and the letters written during this interlude have a dreamy, hectic quality, as though Katharine’s life had gone both out of focus and out of control. When Grace ran out of money, she left the sanatorium and moved into Katharine’s hotel room. Grace was an “ex-Follies girl whose natural habitat is the speak-easy or night club” (219), and over Katharine’s ladylike protestations, they took to hanging out in the hotel bistro, where they teased and flirted with the “ouvriers” (workers) building a new sanatorium nearby. Fleeing the tubercular “malades” (patients) they took a house with a couple of the “ouvriers.” “All the past has fallen off me, and I feel nothing but this enclosed magic place,” Katharine wrote blissfully to Catherine (218). But in the fall, the ménage dissolved in a murky “tangle of deception” (225).
This chaotic period closed when, alarmed by word from Warren that their mother was ill, Katharine sailed for the United States. The following spring, at Catharine’s home in Boston, she met Daniel Rugg Hathaway of Marblehead. She wrote, in a letter to Dr. de Forest, that Dan was “younger than I am, though not too much” and “sweeter to me than anybody else I have ever dreamed of” (240). This was 1932, the depths of the Depression, and with neither money nor jobs, they couldn’t marry unless Katharine sold the house in Castine. As soon as she did so, they moved to Paris, where they could live more cheaply, and set up housekeeping as blissful newlyweds, “Mr. and Mrs. Muffet.” Although the honeymoon inevitably ended—and although during a particularly rough patch in 1938 Katharine burst out in a letter, “I want to get a divorce from Dan” (302)—the relationship endured.
Katharine and Dan had taken with them their “beautiful cat, our Toupsie, whose dark shadow and plumy tail sweep across the floor” (242). Toupsie became the subject of a children’s book, “Mr. Muffet’s Cat and Her Trip to Paris,” written and illustrated by Katharine, which Harper decided to publish with “childish and inexplicable enthusiasm” (265). Its acceptance, her first since she was a special student at Radcliffe, thrilled and heartened her. “I adore the feeling I have now,” she wrote, “of having a profession I can really claim. I have more and more plans in my head for continuing the Muffets, for drawings, etc.” (264).
These never came to fruition. Instead, a combination of homesickness and ill health sent her once again across the Atlantic. Dan remained in France for some months, but when medical opinion continued to forbid her return there, she sent for him. In Blue Hill, Maine, they bought the second house with which she fell in love during her lifetime: Sarn, an old brick place, “smaller and cozier” than the house in Castine but “unbelievably its equal in grandeur” (277). Since they hadn’t enough money for the extensive renovations the Castine house had received, Dan did most of the work himself, slowly and lovingly, as well as cooking, cleaning, and nursing Katharine through increasingly frequent and lengthy bouts with chronic myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart.
Meantime, whenever she was well enough, she secluded herself in her upstairs workroom, described with her characteristic passion for the details of interior space:
A square room with four windows, southwest corner. Old wallpaper, brown stripes—just brown, very odd, but quite studious-looking. A fireplace with quite nice mantelpiece, and a chest of drawers, daybed, wide oval table covered with all my pencils, erasers, pen knives, drawing pens, blotters, drawing ink, paint box, charcoal, etc., a low bench beside the couch where writing case and work in progress, as James Joyce calls it. Other side of couch is table holding victrola to call up past. There is a huge closet with shelves piled high with manuscript and notes and typewriter and typewriter paper. Also, portfolio of drawings, all of them. It really is wonderful. Windows look out into apple trees and across flowery fields to harbor. (294–95)
Here, she worked away at the project she called Obma—“the initial letters of the first line in the Song of Transformations, which is my theme song” (296)—which would become The Little Locksmith.
She lived to see the first but not the last of the installments published in the Atlantic Monthly. In April 1942, she explained her physical situation this way:
Years ago a famous specialist who took care of me told me I must never stop doing certain exercises which kept my abdominal muscles strong. He said I would always be all right if only I did them—because in my particular case things are so out of balance that without that reinforcement and underpinning, everything goes haywire with heart and lungs, as they begin to slump with the slumping of the underpinning. And I’ve neglected my exercises for about two years. (328)
She resumed these exercises, but despite her protestations of improved health, everything continued to go “haywire.” “At present,” she wrote from the Blue Hill Hospital in early December, “my only comfortable posture is on the knees with head bent down in front of me, like a snail or an unborn child. Only then can I breathe” (342). In this fetal curl, she traveled by ambulance to Salem, where she died on December 24, 1942.
“I am writing something now which I really do think is the best I can do,” Katharine wrote to her brother Warren in 1935. “It is my bread-and-butter letter to God, my thanks for a lovely visit on the earth” (280). A couple of years later, in a letter to Toshihiko, she commented: “A book about myself sounds terrible, but I don’t think it is terrible. I think it is good, somewhat good; not bad, at least” (313). Statements like these, in their measured modesty, do not reveal whether Katharine knew, as she worked on The Little Locksmith, just how remarkable the product would be. It had, as N. E. Monroe wrote in the Catholic World, “unusual charm and freshness and a perceptiveness not often found in contemporary writing.” Wagenknecht explained why he had opened his New York Times review with references to Walter de la Mare, Marie Bashkirtseff, Katherine Mansfield, William Blake, and John Keats: because The Little Locksmith, “the very opposite of a derivative book[,] … comes so fresh out of life, and falls so clear of established classifications, that the only way the reviewer can give the prospective reader a taste of its quality is thus to offer some suggestion of the company in which it must take its place.”
The reviewer’s task is to allow readers to taste a book’s quality, but space generally doesn’t permit an analysis of the complicated flavors that account for its particular piquancy. Thus, reviewers may point out that this is an absolutely original book without revealing just how it diverges from its predecessors. As critical readers, you and I have been given more latitude for pondering what makes The Little Locksmith more than an ordinary memoir, and for me its distinguishing—and rather startling—characteristic is that in it Katharine has written frankly about the body. This task does not, on the face of it, seem hard to do, and plenty of books have purported to carry it out, but I would argue that precious few have actually done so. Think of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, its vocabulary a veritable four-letter paean to bodily functions. But it’s really a book about ideas about the body, quite fantastical ideas, not about the plain old carcass and its way of being in the world. Unless they dress it up in veils of metaphor and view it from some distance, most writers, like most people in general, view the body with misgiving and even distaste.
Women have long had more difficulty in writing directly about the body than have men, as Virginia Woolf points out in a classic passage from “Professions for Women”: her writer’s creative dream is dashed when she thinks of “something, something about the body, about the passions which was unfitting for her as a woman to know,” her work brought to a standstill “by the extreme conventionality of the other sex” (61, 62). The accuracy of Woolf’s critique is borne out by Monroe’s report, in the Catholic World review, that the author of The Little Locksmith “has been condemned for her preoccupation with sex.” Nearly sixty years later, most of us would be tempted to hoot at what even Monroe called a “rather exaggerated judgment.” In The Little Locksmith, Katharine writes movingly but obliquely about the “great thing missing,” which was “much too great and too beautiful for the body in which I was doomed to live” (168, 55), but her youthful beliefs about sexual love, as reflected in her musings about the tortoise laying her eggs and the young lovers in the forest glade, seem mystical and overblown rather than lewd (170–71, 173–74). In adulthood, she was quite capable of ribaldry, as the following verse, “Miss Vague and Mr. Penny,” illustrates:
V. “I want a boarder, I haven’t any.
Someone like you going in and out
Would give me something to think about.”
P. “What are you, an old maid?” said he.
V. “Oh, no, no!” She laughed roguishly.
P. “Whereabouts do you live, is it far?”
V. “Just up the road and there you are
There’s a very high wall, so when you come
Just sing or whistle or even hum,
And I will hear you and know it is you
And then the next thing you have to do
Is ring the Sonnette beside the gate
And I’ll try not to make you wait.”
P. “I know what I’ll do, the best of all!”
Cried Mr. Penny, “I’ll scale the wall.”
V. “Don’t let the ivy catch your toes,
You’ve no idea how thick it grows!”
P. “Don’t you worry,” he said, “my sweet,
Your boarder can jump without catching his feet!”
V. “Oh!” Miss Vague gave a joyous squeal,
“I wonder how that will make me feel!”
They had a lovely time, I hear.
He stayed with her, off and on, for a year.
(Journals, 266–67)
It may not be very good poetry or pornography, but its easy good humor suggests that, with experience, Katharine had grown comfortable—though hardly “preoccupied”—with sex.
This very experience and consequent comfort may have fueled her critics. For she writes about not just any body, not even just any woman’s body, but a crippled woman’s body; and anything “unfitting for a woman to know” is, as people with disabilities have always learned and continue to learn even in our “sexually liberated” age, doubly “unfitting” for her. Nice gimps don’t do it—or even think about it. From her family’s silence, Katharine learned “that I was not to have what was apparently considered the most thrilling and important experience in grown-up life. … The reason was so obvious that no explanation was necessary. The reason was there in the mirror for me to see … [and] nobody ever attempted to console me” (Locksmith, 167–68). Since Katharine enjoyed both love affairs and a marriage as an adult, we may assume that the true defect lay not in her physical appearance and capacity for erotic activity but in the social attitudes that, ignoring the myriad ways in which she was a normal woman to focus solely on her physical deformity, set her apart. Not merely apart but “above,” as she well understood: “The locksmith is a symbol to people, they want it. … It is something precious to them—the virgin—the nonhuman person—the physically maimed is precious to them. Why? It seems to represent something to them purer, freer than they are—something extraordinary” (Journals, 348).
In the long run, the repression these attitudes caused may have done us a favor of incalculable value. For, like any good Freudian, Katharine reasons that “the natural craving to love and be loved turned itself into something else and found its miracle of satisfaction in my poetry” (Locksmith, 60). No one—especially not her mother—could bear the thought of a sexualized Katharine; everyone—especially her mother—admired artistic production. By sublimating her natural desires into her drawing and writing, Katharine both allayed her torment and attracted attention and affection from those who mattered most to her. Who can say whether the trade was fair? But her readers are the beneficiaries.
Even more crucially, repression of her ordinary desires transformed her into a person “susceptible to houses as some people are susceptible to other human beings” (Journals, 7). “Susceptible” is charged here romantically, even erotically. This is, after all, “A Person in Love with a House,” as she titles one of her manuscripts published in The Journals and Letters of The Little Locksmith—or more accurately, as that piece makes clear, with two houses, a large clapboard one in Castine and a smaller brick one in Blue Hill, Maine. Katharine writes that the first experience “caused as much of an awakening in me as another person’s first human love affair. I bought the house, and it changed the whole of my life. Marriage could not have done more” (Journals, 7). Indeed, in The Little Locksmith she speaks of the place in explicitly nuptial terms: “And so a kind of mystic marriage, an impregnation, took place between me and that piece of land and the buildings that stood on it” (133). Returning after her first winter away, as Katharine recounts in “A Person in Love with a House,” she “felt the same shyness and agitation and exquisite delight that two people feel when they meet each other again for the first time after they have become lovers” (22). After selling her house in Castine, she experienced “that rigid sort of silent, speechless pain that is so well known to anybody who has ever suffered in a love affair” (39). And a few years later, finding the brick house in Blue Hill, she reflected, “It seemed more than I could possibly deserve—to find a second love after having known a first that seemed matchless” (48).
In both The Little Locksmith and “A Person in Love with a House,” the house in Castine becomes a space of magical transformation, as well as a beloved other.
People who came there discovered that their hair grew more curly than usual, their jokes more sparkling, their personal attraction more irresistible, their love more surprising. … Conversations were crazier and more inspired than in other places and sometimes lasted all night. Breakfast went on forever. (Journals, 32)
Less facetiously and more powerfully, she recalls an image perceived in the mirror hanging over the front-hall table.
I did not see a woman. It looked more like a very intelligent gifted young boy. Nor did I see my deformity. It was not there; it had been canceled, wiped out, forgotten. There was an exultation in me so powerful that it canceled everything personal and limiting. What I saw in my reflection was the debonair, unsmiling look that you always see on the face of the artist when he is looking at himself and painting. … And behind that look something always burns and glows and triumphs; it is the artist’s joy at work and in its prime. (Journals, 27–28)
In this house, Katharine could transcend the constraining identity of “deformed” woman and see herself as an artist.
Later, in the house in Blue Hill, the transformation completed itself with the writing of The Little Locksmith. As a very young woman, she had written to Warren with rueful humor, “I am overcome by a crazy yearning desire for experience. I, of all people, am ill-fated by being made with that instinct plugged into me—I who can hardly walk up Conant Street pinned in hard by this dastardly brace, without puffing and smothering like a porpoise” (Journals, 54). Those who hang back in the face of adventure suffer deprivation, she was sure: “It is only by following your deepest instinct that you can live a rich life and if you let your fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct, then your life will be safe, expedient and thin” (Journals, 94). Openness to and celebration of experience remained strong: “I mean whatever happens I like it, even if it kills me. I will probably like dying when it comes,” she wrote in her thirties; and shortly after her marriage, “I really think I have lived about long enough, having so many marvelous things to remember” (105, 245). Settled into her final house with a husband who had “a remarkable talent for making fires burn, kettles boil, and ovens bake … for making transplanted trees and flowers flourish and grow and old furniture take on a luster” (51), she wrote, again to Warren, “I have always had a terrible craving for new experiences, but now at last my hunger and thirst have been satisfied. I have had enough. I am perfectly content, and now my one function is to sit in the chimney-corner and tell about my adventures” (278).
In another sense, her beloved houses represent not merely the magic crucible for self-transformation but the person of Katharine herself. Tellingly, both are dilapidated enough when she buys them to require extensive repair and maintenance, just as her own body has required work and care. More significantly, she starts out looking for a dwelling just like herself, “doll-like,” and does not buy one (Locksmith, 7). Instead, as we read in The Little Locksmith, she buys a house so large that it frightens her with its insistence that she grow into it, becoming the “responsive, gay, and brilliant woman” she knows herself to be, despite her visible disguise as “a little oddity, deformed and ashamed and shy” (68).
The most extraordinary quality of The Little Locksmith, I find, is the way in which, depending for its structure and progress on the most material elements—the body and its dwelling places—and employing very little religious rhetoric and no sanctimony, it achieves exceptional spiritual depth. Although Katharine intended it to be a book about Christianity, it hardly meets conventional expectations of such a project: that it be earnest, reverent, didactic, even dour. Instead, she could approach her professed subject with a light hand:
I am amazed by the sayings of Christ. They seem truer than anything I have ever read. And they certainly turn the world upside down. They are rather decidedly akin to psychoanalysis as I’ve experienced it with Dr. de Forest.
Probably I am just going crazy, like many other people who live in Maine all year round. (Journals, 291)
She was, however, deeply serious about her faith. Aware that “it is as embarrassing and difficult to use the word God in our generation as it was to use the word Sex in the previous one,” she wrote to Dan, somewhat hesitantly, that “I have come to believe in God, the God of the New Testament, and I wish to try to live according to the teachings of the New Testament,” and she begged him not to say “mocking things about the Christian religion” (316, 315–16).
In a letter to Dr. de Forest, she referred to “the abstract philosophical religious questions which are so much a part of me and my daily thoughts” (303). These, presented in raw form, might have made of The Little Locksmith a treatise rather than the luminous evocation of experience and feeling which it is. Revelatory rather than exegetical, Katharine’s writing illuminates the text of the world with a theological grace: she wrote in a letter to Dan, “Every page, every paragraph has been written when I had a clean sense of God’s guidance” (316). Throughout the book, she grasps as few writers do—but as the Jesus of the Gospels always does—the intertwining of the mundane with the holy, the body with the spirit. Even that most abstract of undertakings, writing, could be characterized in the earthiest of terms: The Little Locksmith emerged, she noted to her niece Libby, from “kind of a biological instinct; it is the turtle’s eggs dropped slowly into the earth” (Journals, 341)—the same grave, slow dropping that, years before, had stirred her to sexual awareness.
The fabric of creation is, for Katharine, all of a magnificent piece, to be discerned moment by epiphanic moment, to be received in humility and awe as a gift—whether it offers pain or delight. “What good is my book if I don’t know enough to be humble at all times, in all things?” she asked herself. “God is with me—controlling me, filling me just as much when I am suffering as when I am joyous” (Journals, 385). Few people ever achieve so spacious a vision. Fewer still can capture it in words. But we can and do respond to it. “When my book is published,” Katharine speculated, “perhaps people will read it out of curiosity, many people; but I am afraid that of those who read it, not more than five or six will catch their breath and say, ‘Oh, that is how I felt, too!’ Or ‘That is what I thought!’” (Journals, 373). I hope—and believe—that she had, with characteristic modesty, woefully underestimated our numbers!
Nancy Mairs
Tucson, Arizona
September 1999