Copyright 2002 by Diana Hensley
In 1960, my sister, Julia, and I shared a studio
apartment on Green
Street in San Francisco. We were a house or so away from the
corner of Steiner Street where St. Vincent de Paul's Roman
Catholic Church still stands. In order to get to our apartment,
we went down a narrow walkway and then up a few stairs. When we
looked out the east-facing windows of our studio we saw a
veritable jungle. Plants from an overgrown back yard at a lower
level had risen as high as our windows.
On a rainy, winter day the prospect was even gloomier.
Deep
green leaves of very old plants kept the water. At any time the
sun had to work its way in. To the front of the property was a
large, old house. According to local rumor, the author, Gertrude
Atherton, had once lived in that house.
My sister and I moved in 1961. I never went
back to Green
Street until my husband and I returned to the neighborhood
twenty-five years later to revisit St. Vincent de Paul's where we
had married.
My old apartment was still there, but the neighboring
house
and wild garden had disappeared. They'd been replaced with an
apartment building surrounded by concrete.
We hadn't taken the time to know much about Gertrude
Atherton, though we assumed she was somehow connected with the
town of Atherton, California. I'd never even been sure that the
rumor was true that she'd lived in the old house.
A few years ago, I stopped by a Mariposa Friends
of the
Library book sale. While going through an old box of books, I
came across a thick anthology of Marian poems, "I sing of a
Maiden. The Mary Book of Verse." The poems were so varied and
beautiful that I purchased the book. It had been written in 1947
was edited by Sister M. Therese of the Congregation of the
Sisters of the Divine Savior, and was published in New York by
Macmillan Company.
Upon perusal of the book, I discovered an inscription
in the
front of the book, from one of the authors, dedicated to Gertrude
Atherton and with reference to her home on Green Street. At the
time this poet, Joseph Joel Keith, was secretary-treasurer of the
Los Angeles Center of the P. E. N. club. He also was director of
publicity for the club and host to guest speakers at the
Ambassador Hotel meetings of the group. Mr. Keith's inscription
reads as follows:
"Friendly greetings
to Gertrude Atherton, with thanks
for inviting me to
Green Street when I came to her
favorite city, San
Francisco.
Joseph Joel Keith
Pages 337, 338
and 339
Also, the best of
all good wishes from the Los Angeles
P. E. N."
This book had come from the Mariposa, California
High School
Library. I have no idea when and how it got there but of course
I was delighted to discover that the neglected garden had truly
once belonged to Miss Atherton. I later learned that she had
stayed in Mairposa and that she died in 1948, a year after she
had received the gift book.
Now I was eager to learn more about Atherton,
the writer.
The Mariposa Library has one of her fiction works, "The Californians",
originally published in 1898 by Grosset and Dunlap and
republished in 1968 by the Gregg Press, Incorporated as part of
their Americans in Fiction series.
I read and enjoyed this title. The story
is set in the San
Francisco which preceded the great earthquake and fire of 1906
and also in the Peninsula town of Fair Oaks, which later became
present day Atherton. In the story, affluent San Franciscans
flee to Fair Oaks in the summer. Here, nature sparkles and the
descriptions of the hot, golden countryside set the mood for the
drama so vividly that one finds oneself wandering among the great
oaks with the characters of the story.
No less vibrant are the descriptions of the mansions
of the
rich, both in country and city. The business and social
activities of those who profited from the Gold Rush are
piercingly analyzed by Atherton. The families who gave San
Francisco streets their present names are part of the dramatis
personae. Names such as Polk, Montgomery and Geary are but a few
of those woven into the story.
The main character, Magdalena, is a young woman
divided
within herself by her mother's New England contribution to her
heritage and her proud Californian background acquired from her
father, Don Roberto.
The love story borders on the melodramatic, but
that too,
was part of its charm for this reader. More importantly, it
provides a leap back in time to a California with problems of its
own to be sure, but with no smog, traffic congestion or heavy
drug usage. Southern California air was so clear that people
with respiratory problems came there from all over the United
States to breathe more easily.
I learned that Gertrude Atherton herself
was born in San
Francisco in 1857. She had a private school education, the last
school as far away as Kentucky. Her first novel was "What Dreams
May Come". She moved to New York, then later was active in
French relief work during World War I. She earned the Legion of
Honor for this. Her storytelling abilities made her a popular
writer but according to Professor Clarence Gohdes of Duke
University in the 1968 edition of "The Californians"
" . . . her works
frequently attack the vital social
dilemmas that concerned
American society in the
nineteenth century
. . . "
According to Professor Gohdes, her principal works
began
with "The Doomswoman" in 1982, include "The Californians" in
1898, a novel about Washington politics, "Senator North" in 1900
and her very popular "The Conqueror" in 1902. Further works
include some non-fiction titles such as "California: An Intimate
History" in 1914, stories written in the twenties such as "The
Crystal Cup", those of the thirties like "The Sophisticates" in
1931 on through "The House of Lee", 1940.
Those stories listed as part of the Americans
in Fiction
reprints are: "Los Cerritos: A Romance of Modern Times",
"The
Californians", "Senator North", "Aristocrats", and "The Splendid
Idle Forties".
Again, you never know what literary trail adventure
a Library Book
Sale will spark.
MANY OF THESE TITLES ARE AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.COM
Please go from here directly to Amazon and put "Gertrude Atherton" in the
search box.