Diverging Roads
This month I’m looking at books on resilience and since we have five Sundays I am starting with a fiction book. And it was weirdly fortuitous, cause I googled fiction books resilience and it kicked back this weeks book, which I already had! And it’s an old book, initially published in 1919, Diverging Roads by Rose Wilder Lane. So let’s do this.
I would like to throw in here, that there are two summaries provided online for this book. The one from Project Gutenberg is correct.
Project Gutenberg synopsis
The one from Good Reads is not the same book. I genuinely have no idea what book this is a synopsis for, it is not Diverging Roads by Rose Wilder Lane.
Good Reads synopsis
Diverging Roads is semi-autobiographical, in that Lane became a telegrapher, moved to San Francisco where she eventually married, followed her husband on various sales schemes, becomes a better salesman than her husband, and is eventually abandoned by her husband, before becoming an author. All of which is in Diverging Roads, although not necessarily in that order.
The protagonist in Diverging Roads is Helen Davies, who grows up in a small town, Masonville, CA, on her family’s farm. She knows being a farmer is hard, and her parents must renew the mortgage annually to keep ahead of the bills, especially in bad harvest. Shortly after completing high school, Davies is being courted by her high school sweetheart Paul and Paul has been offered a job as a telegrapher. And they talk about possible marriage, but Paul, being a responsible man in like 1906-ish, wants to be established before marrying Helen. He wants to make sure he can support a wife, and his mother who he is responsible for assisting, as his father is dead and his mother scraped together the money to get him trained as a telegrapher.
Well, Helen is pro-active in her own fate, she doesn’t want to just sit around at home being a financial burden for her parents, and she doesn’t want to be a burden on Paul either, so she does some research and finds a telegrapher course in Sacramento. She talks to her parents, and they borrow an extra $100 against their mortgage to pay for the school and her room and board while she’s learning.
And she’s off to Sacramento, where she learns the absolute bare basics of telegraphy before discovering, just as she’s running out of money, that the teacher who owns and operates the school is a drunk, and she hasn’t learned as much as she wants to. And just as she’s piecing this together, a friend of a family friend, Mrs. Campbell, finds her and advises her the boarding house she’s been staying at…well the owner supplements her income with prostitution. Not illegal in 1906, but highly scandalous for a respectable young lady to be boarding there. So, Mrs. Campbell plucks Helen from the boarding house and takes her to her own house.
This sounds like a kind thing to do, only the lady did it with the expectation that Helen would contact her parents for a train ticket home. Which Helen wouldn’t do, because her parents don’t have spare money, and they still have to care for Helen’s younger siblings. And Helen owes them $100 which she needs to pay back.
So, here’s her first crossroad in making her own destiny. She can accept the advice of Mrs. Campbell and go home. Or she can do what she did. She went to the local telegraph office and begged for a job as a clerk, and the opportunity to practice her telegraph skills after hours. And she got the job, making a paltry sum of like $5 per week, about $162 per week in 2025 currency.
Mrs. Campbell doesn’t approve but now she feels responsible, so she accepts Helen’s offer of $5 per month for a room. Eventually, Paul comes to visit and through a series of events, they end up staying out all night. Nothing happens, they’re good kids, but Mrs. Campbell gets supremely judgy, and her boss at the telegrapher’s office decides she was playing the innocent, and she really must be a bad girl, given that she stayed out all night with this Paul guy and she WAS a boarder at the bawdy house. So, he makes a pass at Helen. Who freaks the fuck out. Her reaction manages to convince him that she was everything she said, and possibly in guilt for having made the pass, he gets her a job as a telegrapher at a hotel in San Francisco.
There she works her ass off, two jobs, eventually getting to the point where she’s earning $90 per month, nearly $3000 in 2025 currency. She’s repaid her parents and started saving. She makes friends and has started seeing what the nightlife is like in San Francisco, which is where she encounters Lemon Sours, hence this week’s cocktail. Paul comes to visit in San Francisco, and they have a falling out over his disapproval or her friends, and her hurt that when he was in a station where they both could have worked, him the day shift her the night shift, he didn’t send for her and marry her right then. She wanted to build a life with him. He wanted to be all set, so she never had to work.
And she really doesn’t want to work anymore but is mad at Paul that he didn’t give her the option to work with him to build a life together, meanwhile he still doesn’t think he’s able to support a spouse. But I got her position too. She doesn’t WANT to work, but it’s better to work with someone to build something than to work alone, waiting for a future on someone else’s timeline.
Anyway, they have a falling out and she ends up marrying Gilbert H Kennedy, aka Bert, who she met with her roommate while they were out on the town, and she’s excited by him because he knows how to flirt, versus Paul who’s just very strait forward, and he’s a challenge to her, and also is ostensibly is quite wealthy and she’ll never have to work again. But for a heavy piece of foreshadowing, when she thinks “Beneath their gaiety a ceaseless game was being played, man against woman, and every word and glance was a move in that game, the basis of which was enmity.” Tell me that’s not a recipe for a toxic relationship? A game of enmity…in perpetuity…against your spouse.
Oh, and….well….HE’s not wealthy. His father is. And his father ends up cutting him off over his playboy ways and multiple business failures and profligate spending. Which doesn’t come out until Helen has been married to him for a few years. And she tries to be a good wife to him, despite many glaring red flags. Red flags like…they had to sneak out of the hotel when their honeymoon ended because he didn’t have the money to pay the bills. And they kind of lived on this knife’s edge of catastrophe until he gets a job offer selling land in like mid-California, where the oil fields are.
And Bert sends for Helen, telling her this is the chance for a fresh start, the sales are rolling in, and everything is going so well in Coalinga. So, she packs her suitcase and spends their last $10 buying a train ticket to Coalinga. And for the first week or so, it seems Bert was correct, as he handed her a handful of gold dollars totaling $100. So, while he’s out selling land, she’s staying in the hotel room, reading the literature on the land for sale. And then one day, the hotel manager advises her she can’t charge meals to the room anymore, it must be cash at meal time. And after paying for her meal, she goes to the hotel lobby and is reading a paper and spots a small byline that reads “Bert Kennedy Sought on Bad Check Charge.” And she realizes her husband has abandoned her. With a rather large hotel bill. And as last man standing, she’s on the hook for the bill, or face jail time.
Man….if you thought the theme was resilience when she realized she’d been swindled by the telegraph school, hold on to your hats. Because while she’s only the wife, in early 20th century parlance, she’s well aware that a crime has been committed, and since her name is now Kennedy by virtue of marriage, her own name has also been dragged through the mud by her runaway husband.
So, she heads out to the oil fields and starts rustling up prospects for land purchase. And becomes THE premier landman in Central California. After she makes her first sale, she goes to the realtor who had initially contracted with her husband to make the sales and makes a bargain with him. She’ll take over the territory and make the sales, and they can keep a percentage of her commission against the money her husband owes the company, which includes the cost of a company car he stole, total to the tune of $5,000….or $162,017 in modern currency.
The business manager/owner, Mr. Clark, is no dummy. He’s well aware he’s coming out ahead in this deal because payment from Mrs. Kennedy is better than no payment at all with Mr. Kennedy in prison. So, he accepts her offer and she hits the streets.
While in Coalinga, she reconnects with Paul, just as friends because she is married and this isn’t Reddit, so there’s no hanky panky. Helps that he is still supporting his mother, so there’s a built-in chaperone to maintain Helen’s good name, which she very much needs to maintain to keep up her status as a saleswoman.
And this being the early 20th century, eventually Mr. Clark determines she needs a mans help making sales and sends two guys down to take over the field, which she pushes back against by giving them a leads list she knows damn well is not interested in purchasing. And she proves herself to be very astute at spotting trends as she realizes the area is drying up, and the roughnecks who have been their primary customers are moving on to the next oil fields, which are NOT in Coalinga. So, she meets with the sales guy who bugged her least and recommends they start their own branch office, and rather than going door to door looking for sales, run advertisements to bring in people who are interested in buying.
All through this she is still reconnecting with Paul and three years have passed with no word from Bert. She and Paul talk and decide if she gets a divorce, they will marry. So, she starts seeing a lawyer and around the time she pays off the rest of the money owed, Bert conveniently shows up, a changed man, ready to do right by her, he just wants his wife…in Australia.
She, wisely, turns his dumb ass down, and proceeds with the divorce. And with the advent of what would become WWI, sees the sales will dry up as farmers are loath to purchase more land when market conditions are shaky, like when there’s a war, and sells her share of the business to her partner, deciding to retire.
This lasts scarcely three months when she gets bored and approaches a magazine with an idea for a series of articles, which is initially semi-rejected by the editor who sarcastically tells her if she can tell a story he’ll consider it. Until she delivers a story, much to his surprise, and it’s quite good, so he hires Helen as a correspondent and she finds herself back in San Francisco, and making friends with other women who have also been forced to make their own way in the world.
And just as this circle of friends is breaking up, one to DC to write there, one as a war correspondent in France, Helen is offered a position as a correspondent to Japan, China, and Russia. She considers, and meets with Paul, and realizes she and Paul have clung to this idea of who they were as children, but she’s not that person anymore, who just wants to be a wife and care for the home. She’s become jaded of trusting men because of her experiences with Bert and being left destitute, and while there’s no doubt Paul would never do that, because he is a seriously good guy, he doesn’t really appreciate the changes in her that have made her loath to be dependent on him for all her financially support. And there’s that earlier foreshadowing again…rather than a partner, it’s a game of enmity, with Paul wanting her to be someone she no longer is, and her wanting to be who she has already become through her life’s experiences.
And she admittedly takes the cowards way out, sending him a letter from the dock as she boards a ship for Russia. And that’s where it ends, where she is looking with hope at the adventures that await her overseas, leaving Paul crushed again….the first time being when she married Bert. But she is divorced now, and so is a totally free agent. The entire book takes place over about 8 years so she’s 26 when she heads West across the Pacific, older, wiser, a lot more cautious, appreciative of what Paul had to offer, but aware it was no longer the life she wanted to lead.
This book was surprisingly engaging and weirdly relevant to today, as there is an ongoing culture war between the trad wife lifestyle and career women who don’t necessarily want the husband and kids and picket fences. And as shocking as being a career woman may have been back in 1914, being looked down on as spinsters, the modern day equivalent is the crazy cat lady. And hell, at least Helen reached her decisions organically, based on her own life experiences.
A big part of what makes my heart ache for some of today’s kids is they’ve been told by screeching feminists that wanting a husband and to be a stay at home mom is anti-feminist, bypassing that Lane’s generation, i.e. first wave feminists, fought for the right to choose which path was better for you. Modern feminists think if you want kids, you’re contributing to your own repression and internalized misogyny. Which leaves women who want kids feeling like they’ve failed at life if they go for career first and then find they CAN’T have kids when they’re in a financial position to afford them. It started as a joke on Idiocracy, and now it’s reality.
Anyway, I quite enjoyed this one. It was a little predictable, or maybe it’s my own jadedness bleeding through as I watched her flirting with Bert and knew he was no damn good and this wasn’t going to end well. At least he didn’t leave her pregnant. Lane herself had a still birth and an operation shortly after that left her unable to have children. And I have a feeling this book was her way of embracing that single and childless lifestyle that choice and circumstance had thrust upon her.
Helen’s determination to pull herself out of whatever situation she found herself in speaks to a resilience and determination that is absolutely lacking in kids these days…damn, I feel old now. But seriously! I’m trying to imagine any of my nieces getting off their asses to improve their own lives when life slaps at them and…well, they haven’t so far.
