Laddie by Gene Stratton-Porter ~ 1913. This edition: Grosset & Dunlap, 1913. Illustrated by Herman Pfeifer. Hardcover. 541 pages.
I had a really long post written, but I’ve just deleted it. My troubled relationship with Gene Stratton-Porter seemed to be getting in the way – I enjoy large parts of her stories (except for the appallingly racist Her Father’s Daughter ) but there’s always something utterly improbable to jib at, and Laddie is no exception.
Here’s the (only slightly) condensed rewrite.
First, the good.
This tale is based on Gene Stratton-Porter’s own childhood as the “afterthought” child in a well-off Indiana farm family of mother, father, and twelve siblings. It takes place not too many years after the end of the Civil War, which is frequently referenced. The family was most fervently on the Union side, and there is a major incident concerning a hideaway built to shelter stoppers-by on the pre-war Underground Railway.
The memoir passages taken from GS-P’s personal experience are, for the most part, absolutely charming. Depictions of family dynamics, sibling squabbles, beloved pets, and of course nature rambles, all ring wonderfully true, and kept my interest during the “fairytale” scenes, which were much more of a chore to get through straight-faced.
The hero of this story is the family’s middle brother, “Laddie”, based on GS-P’s own beloved brother, who died in a drowning accident when she was nine years old. The Laddie of the novel is the embodiment af all the masculine virtues; he never (and I mean never) sets his foot wrong, or does a mean act to anyone. The girl he (ultimately successfully) courts throughout this tale is virtually his matched twin in physical perfection, athleticism, intelligence,Ā and kindliness.
The only star missing from the Princess’s (for that is her nickname) crown of virtues is that of fervent religiosity, and she attains that by the end through Laddie’s efforts (he has enough religion for two), so all will presumably be well going forward with them, graced as they are by a kind fate which has also endowed upon them abundant financial resources and aristocratic English heritages, those last two always a Very Big Deal in Stratton-Porter’s fictions.
Oops, I’ve strayed into the bad.
Snobbery.
Gene Stratton-Porter’s most unappealing trait. She’s a snob, and that sticks out in great big bumps in every single one of her novels.
Sure, mere common-place characters are allowed to toddle about with her mild approval, but she was a fervent advocate of the “good birth will tell” school of thought, and so it’s no great surprise when it is revealed that Laddie and his family have true blue blood a-sloshing away in their veins, having ancestors back in the old country (England) who were Crusaders. In the family treasure chest is the old family crest; there’s an Earldom (or something similar) in their background, and once the equally snobbish (and newly arrived from England) father of Laddie’s heart-throb learns this, all objection to his aristocratic daughter mating with a commonplace (though well-off, well spoken, morally pure, physically perfect etc etc) farm lad magically disappears.
I think I’ll stop right here. If anybody really needs a plot description, it’s basically a gentle family saga, children being children, the young narrator (she’s eight years old or thereabouts) running free and then adjusting to the imprisonment of school, and Laddie, on the cusp of adulthood, courting his future partner for 500 pages or so before the inevitable happens (everyone says yes) and things are tidied up. There is another blighted romance which gets fixed up, a mystery or two, an adventure involving stolen money, lots of riding around on Arab-Kentucky thoroughbred horses, and tons of charming nature-related anecdotes.
And God.
Lots and lots of God. GS-P’s own father was a lay preacher of sorts, and so is the father in the book, so Biblical references sprout up on every page.
The happy ending relies heavily on the hand of coincidence; it is by far the weakest part of what isn’t really as rotten a book as my niggling criticism might make you suspect.
I actually quite liked Laddie, despite the frequent annoying bits and the “God-given superiority of the British upper classes” strand. It’s long, it’s glacially slow-moving, it’s full of off-tangent excursions and rabbit trails of thought, but there’s a core of sweetness, too and an appealingly obvious love of the author for her family and her childhood home.
My rating: (deep breath) 7.5/10
Okey-doke. Bonus. If you’re still with me, here are the author’s own words, recorded in Gene Stratton-Porter: A Little Story of The Life and Work and Ideals of “The Bird Woman”. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926.
In August of 1913 the author’s novel “Laddie” was published in New York, London, Sydney and Toronto simultaneously. This book contains the same mixture of romance and nature interest as the others, and was modelled on the same plan of introducing nature objects peculiar to the location, and characters, many of whom are from life, typical of the locality at a given period. The first thing many critics said of it was that “no such people ever existed, and no such life was ever lived.” In reply to this the author said: “Of a truth, the home I described in this book I knew to the last grain of wood in the doors, and I painted it with absolute accuracy; and many of the people I described I knew more intimately than I ever have known any others. Taken as a whole it represents a perfectly faithful picture of home life, in a family who were reared and educated exactly as this book indicates. There was such a man as Laddie, and he was as much bigger and better than my description of him as a real thing is always better than its presentment. The only difference, barring the nature work, between my books and those of many other writers, is that I prefer to describe and to perpetuate the best I have known in life; whereas many authors seem to feel that they have no hope of achieving a high literary standing unless they delve in and reproduce the worst.
“To deny that wrong and pitiful things exist in life is folly, but to believe that these things are made better by promiscuous discussion at the hands of writers who fail to prove by their books that their viewpoint is either right, clean, or helpful, is close to insanity. If there is to be any error on either side in a book, then God knows it is far better that it should be upon the side of pure sentiment and high ideals than upon that of a too loose discussion of subjects which often open to a large part of the world their first knowledge of such forms of sin, profligate expenditure, and waste of life’s best opportunities. There is one great beauty in idealized romance: reading it can make no one worse than he is, while it may help thousands to a cleaner life and higher inspiration than they ever before have known.”
Take that, nay sayers! Clean lives and high inspirations for all!
(Now I’m hitting the publish button, before I take it all down again. Cheers!)
Leaves & Pages 
I have always had a squeamish response to Gene Stratton-Porter. Yes, Her Father’s Daughter is repellent, and at the end of The Keeper of the Bees there is a nasty hint of facism, and the snobbery is there in every book, but as a teenager I loved the romances in them and continue to like her descriptions of nature. And she had some interesting women (again, I refer to The Keeper of the Bees).I actually have her non-fiction book on moths. It is her excessive passion, her willingness to write of people who pant and throb and cry ringingly and all that, which fascinates me. As you say, her homely details ring truthfully: those family descriptions you mention, and the humiliations endure by a teenage girl in A Girl of the Limberlost. I think her books are actually unhealthy, but they can draw you in.
Yes, unhealthy is the word, I think. Only to be read with eyes wide open to the troublesome bits. I feel very uneasy about the many readers who apparently embrace these indiscriminately. I glanced over the Goodreads reviews for Laddie and was taken aback by the number of reviewers who viewed it as a depiction of an ideal family life. They obviously never caught the rather blatant overtones of money worship and Stratton-Porter’s fawning attitude towards “aristocratic” bloodlines! We hear over and over in this book how marvelous it is to be well-off, even while lip service is given to the idea that even poor people might have some admirable qualities, though by working hard “like WE do” they might be able to drag themselves up the ladder a bit more. There are some uneasy-making parallels to certain schools of current-day political thought here that make me cringe.
But the stories do draw you in, and here are decidedly good bits. Just…well…yeah…where does one draw the line? If they keep us thinking and if we recognize and don’t swallow the unsavory bits I think there can be something to be said for reading these. Because if we only stick to things that follow our personal ideals 100% then we would sure be limiting the field, wouldn’t we?! š š
If we decided not to read books that held unpleasant or even deeply repugnant elements, we’d be left with very little. If you get intelligent women from some writers, you’ll get anti-Semitism, and if you get a great thriller, you get real women-hating, and everywhere you’ll get eye-watering racism. Even L. M. Montgomery depicts French-Canadians in ways that are…unfortunate. There is no flawless literature, so I guess it comes down to what you can stomach and how much of it.
Yes, again. The current tendency to quite happily jettison an artist’s work because of some perceived flaw, in particular with older works containing now-forbidden attitudes, language or terminology common in the time of its writing, is very disturbing. Some authors/artists are absolutely untouchable in the realm of public opinion – L.M.Montgomery! – while their work contains some rather atrocious viewpoints. Actually I can’t think of any book I’ve read that doesn’t contain something conceivably offensive to somebody. And why would we want there to be such a thing? Think of how bland our literary chopices would be, how empty out art gallery walls and theatres! We need to have this literature accessible (I believe) and recognize by our occasional repugnance how we have socially evolved. And often just nod to its time of writing and move on. Or if we can’t get around it, discard that book/writer/artist from our personal library. But NOT forbid it to others. When we as discussers of literature point out these sorts of things, it’s usually a reflection of our own responses, or perhaps a heads-up to other readers that they might bump into something unsavory. I think it would be an immense disservice to ourselves and fellow readers to never go out of our comfort zones and to try to supress disturbing older attitudes. Navigate around these as best you can – each person has different tolerances, as you say – but let the work stand to be assessed by others in their turn. And point them out where they seem notable, in particular where we are talking about our own responses personally. Yes? Maybe?
Interesting conundrum. Reading books that you enjoy, while knowing there are ingrained problems. One of those, for me, is Dear Enemy, by Jean Webster. Sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs. Highly enjoyable, and many progressive aspects to the book (1915, I think) but then I trip over some pretty grim attitudes too. Do I cherry pick? Dunno.
She wrote in a style that was acceptable for that time period. It is difficult to remove our 21st century hats when reading older works.
Oh, yes. I agree. Sometimes one has to pull on the (imaginary) rubber boots when wading through the muddy bits, but we would be much poorer as readers if we insist on extending our current day social rules to older works. But sometimes a writer’s attitudes are so jarring that we can’t just dismiss them as era-expected. I do admit to allowing myself to sometimes judge a writer by their emphasis beyond the norm on certain things. Gene Stratton-Porter and her fixation on the wonders of aristocratic lineage, for example. She goes beyond the norm (in my opinion) even for her own time.