I forget where I first stumbled across the name of Grace Flandrau and the notes that she was once a high-ranking member of Minnesota's literati, around the same time and with the same regard as F. Scott Fitzgerald. She published steadily through the 1920s and 30s, but sometime in the 1940s she stopped publishing and remained quiet, becoming obscure and dying in 1971.
A while back I found a copy of the Memoirs of Grace Flandrau on a clearance table at Common Good Books.
A slim volume, only 117 pages, but I thought it might be an interesting tale of Minnesota history in the early 1900s.
Well, yes and no. Flandrau lived in upper-crust society in St. Paul, but her position there was tenuous at best. Rumors of her illegitimacy dogged her all her life, and for once, with good reason: her mother was actually her father's mistress, not her father's wife. The family's fortunes rose and fell, with lavish dinner parties being held one day while fear of losing their home would surface the next. As a child, Flandrau was sent to Paris to attend school, not because it was the best school, but because it was actually cheaper to live and educate there at the time than in St. Paul. The bulk of this memoir talks about her schooling in Paris, and she's not particularly complimentary of the experience. That section of the book is interesting, but also, in today's memoir-obsessed culture, rather dry--there are some interesting anecdotes, including a headmistress's determination that all students would be converted to Catholicism, even the daughter of a Norwegian Lutheran minister. The same headmistress once cornered Flandrau and kissed her passionately, and then shunned her.
No abuse, other than the kiss and bad food, no excessive bullying, none of the kinds of things we've been schooled to expect in a memoir. That too may be a reflection of the times; in the introduction, editor Georgia Ray notes that Flandrau had exchanged letters with legendary editor Maxwell Perkins on the topic of publishing her memoirs, and his advice was to present them as fiction, because memoir simply wasn't as popular.
How times change.
For me, the best part of the book was the final short section. Flandrau met William Blair Flandrau, who was from St. Paul but owned a coffee plantation in Mexico. A very short courtship (consisting mostly of her reading his brother's book about Mexico and determining she wanted to go there) was followed by the newly married couple leaving for Mexico, against the advice of both sets of parents, who noted that she was perhaps not the best equipped for such a drastic cultural change.
One thing I know about Flandrau: she could write, especially in the last section. I had a devil of a time choosing just one passage to quote, so let's do two:
About one of the passengers on the ship to Mexico: "He was a man of several vocations, two of which were poetry and cooking. He read poetry and he wrote it. He was always sitting on deck with a small volume of poetry in hand unless he could get somebody to listen to him, and then he talked about cooking. He talked especially about a small club of gourmets of which he was a member, and it seemed to me strange that people would form a club for the sole purpose of cooking and eating and talking about food. It was an exclusive circle composed entirely of men as, he assured me, the high practitioners of the arts and other mysteries must be. And from the way he talked it seemed to me that the dishes they prepared must belong altogether outside the realm of what I had then considered food. Super dishes--the alter ego of nutriment."
About arriving in Havana and comparing it to other tropical coastal cities "They have an indescribably aspect in common--the liquid golden quality of the burning heat, the windy coconut palms leaning toward the sea, the chalky white and pale blue and pink sugar-frosting villas tarnished and blistered by the great winds that blow upon them, and the rains and the sun...The scent of the too-sweet flowers stealing from wet gardens behind high iron grilles, and there is always the slow roaring, the velvety, hushed crashing of the waves along the snow-white beach."
Sadly, the memoir in this volume ends with her arrival at the plantation. A note at the end says there are more pieces to the Mexican memoir in Flandrau's papers in Tucson. How I wish someone would publish them--I'd read them in a heartbeat. For now, I'll have to make do with requesting her out-of-print books from the library.
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