100. Nora May French with Catherine Prendergast

AMY HELMES: Hi, everybody. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner and good friend, Kim Askew. 

KIM ASKEW: Hey everyone. The writer we're going to be discussing today was a talented American poet who tragically took her own life at a young age only to have her writing commandeered after her death by a not particularly great guy, also a writer, who was once her lover. Sounds like shades of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

AMY: Yeah, no kidding, but this poet, Nora May French, preceded Plath by about 50 years. She's not a name I'd ever heard of until today's guest resurrected her story in a wonderful biography that came out last fall. You guys, I can't rave enough about this book. It's an engrossing saga, and some big names from the West Coast's early 20th century literary bohemian society factor into it, including one of our previous lost ladies on this podcast. It's a story where literary history meets sex scandal meets true crime. Uh, all my favorite things, so basically my life came to a standstill while I was reading this book, and I knew we had to spread the word about it. It's a biography about two women, actually, and while it's terrifically juicy and full of all kinds of twists and turns, it also says so much, I think, about the way in which women get diminished by time, history, and well, let's face it, men.

KIM: I'm already on the edge of my seat for this episode. So let's read the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today is Catherine Prendergast, author of The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America. As Kirkus Reviews described it, the book "reads like a dramatic novel fueled by sex, alcohol and the quest for fame and fortune." The Los Angeles Times says "it takes on the cast of a great detective novel." Boy does it. Yeah.

AMY: Yeah, I hate to be so over-the-top about this one, but honestly, it's one of these books that I can't stop raving about. I've told so many people, anybody that I know, especially, that has a knowledge of Carmel-by-the-Sea, I'm like, "You have to read this, it's so good, you guys!"

KIM: Is it an audio book too? Cause I feel like it would be a great audiobook. 

AMY: Yeah, and that's how I read it.

KIM: Oh, you read it as an audio book?

AMY: Yes. And I will say, I would take my dog out on walks and I'd be gone for like three hours, like, "No, I can't go home." Catherine, we should add, is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And she's been both a Fulbright Scholar as well as the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. Catherine, welcome to the show. We're so happy to have you.

CATHERINE: Thank you! Thanks for asking me.

AMY: Now, Kim and I hadn't heard of this poet, Nora May French, and reading your book actually reminded me of how much I love to read biographies of people I'm unfamiliar with because it's all so new and exciting, right? Like, so Abraham Lincoln, I know what happens, but for this one, it was all a mystery as we were going along, and I loved that. So how did you discover Nora and what made you want to write her story?

CATHERINE: One of the things I like to say is, she wasn't unknown at her time. Far from it. And, you know, while people were like, "Well, why are you writing about these unknown women?" I'm looking at, you know, front page newspapers that have their writing or stories of their events or, you know, their deaths or whatever. So we're talking about people who have been removed from history rather than just, you know, they never were appreciated. And I spend a lot of time taking the reader with me through the archives to see that process of removal, those ripped pages, the crossouts, the missing sheets. So I wasn't looking for, you know, a lost woman poet at all. I was after a sort of broader story about Carmel, but when I found this letter from Nora May French in her inimicable voice --and you really have to read it to understand how her voices drags you in, she was writing her boyfriend a letter about her self-administered abortion. This is 1907. So she brought pills. As she was administering the abortion and I was like, "what kind of woman does this? This is amazing." Because you really don't find first person accounts that many of abortion back then. And then, uh, I noticed a page was missing. Like it ended in mid-sentence, and this was a page that was in archives under her boyfriend's name, Harry Lafler, who really was, you know, kind of a mediocre poet in his day. She far out stripped him in terms of acclaim, but somehow it had made it to the Bancroft at Berkeley. I never got to see Harry's reply. I never got to see what that last page was. And this turned out to be a theme in the women's lives. And particularly Nora, wherever she came up, there was some over the top efforts to obscure this story. So of course that only made me want to look more.

KIM: So in the prologue you described this letter that she's writing. She's taken pills to induce an abortion. Why did you choose to start the book with that particular anecdote?

CATHERINE: Okay. I didn't initially, but as the legislation started rolling through, as I was writing all of this that's rolled up to the present. We're now actually having this conversation post-Roe of, you know, its fall, but it was clearly telegraphed, you know, so for years I knew it was coming. So anyway, I then moved it up to the front of the book. I started there because it is a pivotal point in her life. And one of the things about the book is that reproductive moments for women turn out to be very pivotal points involving life and death and changes of relationships and paths forking where they can't go back. So that sets her on a course. Um, but also because the voice in it grabbed me. And finally, because I just wanted to give a heads up. This is a book about unapologetic abortion -- abortion that actually improved this woman's life and allowed her to continue writing. And I knew there would be people who would pick it up and put it down, you know, just based on that. Um, the first line is "she was two weeks late," so you find out she's deciding to have an abortion on the first paragraph. Um, but I was like too bad.

KIM: Mm-hmm

CATHERINE: I guess those aren't my readers, so... 

AMY: I wanted to say, um, as soon as I started reading your book, I think you even said, but it made me realize that it's almost always going to be more difficult to write a biography about a woman than a man. you actually say in your prologue, I'll quote this: "Archives can resemble graveyards with marked tombs for men that also contain the scattered bones of various women. You have to do a lot of searching to reconstruct women's lives." So can you talk about this a little more? How hard was it for you to piece together this story once you got started?

CATHERINE: Hard. I almost gave up. Um, I didn't think there was enough about the women initially. And so I was writing about the men, but I mean, they're quite, atrocious. So, you know, that's eventually not very sustaining. So I decided to redouble my efforts and oddly enough, a source of this West Coast tale was an hour and a half down the road for me in Abraham Lincoln's, second mention, presidential library because her grandfather was a governor of Illinois. Her great uncle was Henry Wells who started American Express and Wells Fargo. Now you can well imagine then that neither of these people were mentioned in the many obituaries, salacious coverage of her death, because they didn't want to sully those two huge families. And that I found interesting right off the bat, but yeah, I was still concentrated on the Wells side and I went to Wells College and I researched the companies and all those histories and their correspondence. I forgot completely about the governor's side and his family papers being at the Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois. And that's where I was able to reconstruct her youth, and a lot of the first few chapters came through that. That said, there's never as much as there is about the men. And sexual lives about women, they're not something to brag about, they're something to be hidden, right? So a lot of those letters just get, you know, burnt, weeded out. Um, and so you have to really draw the dots in women's lives. And I felt bad about this initially, you know, being such a rigorous scholar, like, how am I gonna, you know, conjecture what happened here? And I had a coffee with a historian, 18th century historian, Dana Rabin , a friend of mine, who said, "You know, you have to, otherwise you write about men over and over again."

KIM: Yeah, yeah. So Amy and I were fascinated by the story of Nora May French's girlhood. Part of it was spent not far from where we live in Los Angeles. So that definitely piqued our interest. She was writing poems already from a very early age, but she was also getting recognized early on for some of that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

CATHERINE: Oh, my gosh, even from age 11, she won this statewide contest for kids, writing an essay about school. I mean, she was a prodigy, immediately, and Charles Loomis , a central figure in the LA literary community, took her under his wing and started publishing her poem when she was a teenager in Out West, or The Land of Sunshine ...it changed titles. And so she was hooked right into the life's blood of the California scene, but quickly exceeded that and started publishing nationally.

AMY: And I think we should point out too, because I think a lot of modern day readers kind of forget this, but poetry was a much bigger genre during her time period, right? You could be like a celebrity poet. People were reading poetry all the time.

CATHERINE: Yeah. I mean, the entertainment at the home would be reading aloud. You know, we are obviously pre-TV. Films are just coming in, you know, and eventually that's going to start replacing literature in people's recreational lives, but at this point, you know, in the newspapers, in the journals, you know, writers are getting paid sums that are larger than what they're paid today to do their work. Any freelance writer today would look at the sums that they were paid then and they would cry, because it would be equivalent, if not more, than what you get paid today.

KIM: Wow. 

AMY: Um, so at one point then, getting back to her personal life, Nora was engaged to a young man, and the whole family was thrilled about this, because they thought, "Okay, he's pretty well off. This is gonna make her financially secure." The problem is she could not go through with the wedding. He was not keen on her continuing to write, so that was a dealbreaker.

CATHERINE: No. He wanted her yeah, to, to be a lady. And, uh, being a lady at that point meant you devoted yourself to her husband. Now denying this comfortable life throws her back into penury, throws her family, you know, which is barely hanging on, into a state in which she can't help them either. It's a huge choice. And she's marching ever forward into her twenties where, you know, spinsterhood awaits, so this is not a casual breaking off.

KIM: That was a big choice for her. Um, can you talk a little bit about some of the poems she was writing around this time and maybe talk about some of the hallmarks of a Nora May French poem?

CATHERINE: So initially the hallmarks she takes from Charles Loomis's inspiration, the old Spanish legacy of Los Angeles. So that's a feature that is woven through her poems. So she's quite aware that white people are supplanting this. And yeah, there's a little bit of glorification of what that is, but nonetheless, it is through there that she sets sort of a scene and then takes her personal life and kind of imbues it. So at the point where she meets the next guy, who's turned out to be married, that she has an affair with, uh, she writes a poem called "The Spanish Girl" and it charts the rise, and inevitable fall of that, um, relationship. And always there is a lyrical quality of nature that is through it. Many of the poets at the time are writing very Victorian, ornate kind of like thees and thous and, you know, freighted with obscure illusions. And she is never doing that. She's not doing that from the start. And the next boyfriend, who's an editor, tries to edit her poetry to make it more Victorian, and she rebels and. 

AMY: Yes, we gotta talk about this because that was my laugh out loud moment in the book.

CATHERINE: So her next boyfriend is the editor of a Western journal in San Francisco. And this is gonna be her bridge to San Francisco, and they're falling in love through the mail. But he's also editing her work. So interspersed with this love letter is one where she's saying Uh-uh. He tried to turn the word wind to wynd. And she's like, "absolutely not." "We will disagree violently on the subject of wind or wynd. I know wynd is the approved version, but I don't know it personally, it isn't wynd I love, but wind — wind. A wynd is something that crawls around moated granges and sends chills up Mariana's spine, a wind whips through the sagebrush and sings in the pines and tries to take you with it, right off the top of the hill." She liked her expression to be uncluttered as raw and forceful as her own life had been. And in case he was considering exercising his editorial prerogative, she informed him, "I will have wind with a short ‘I’."

AMY: Love it.

CATHERINE: And my, my agent made me a coaster with wynd. She was making, you know, when the pandemic started, coasters for her clients with curse words. I was like, I want W Y N D! 

KIM: Love it.

AMY: I just love, "we will disagree violently..." 

KIM: Yeah. 

CATHERINE: Not having it. So, yeah, so she was actually more in step with the times. Walt Whitman is coming in. Jack London with his very stripped down tails of nature. So she's sort of following her own sense of you know, hiking, camping out, being, you know, just a true, the only actual true Bohemian in this book of Bohemians.

AMY: Okay. So we have Nora who has called off her wedding. She's now flitting from sort of lover to lover. Then on the flip side, your book simultaneously tells the story of another woman named Carrie Sterling. And this is the woman who would factor into the cyanide love triangle of your subtitle. So Carrie Sterling opts for the more traditional wifely role that Nora is eschewing. But she does not have happy results necessarily. So tell us a little bit about Carrie and George Sterling. Who were they?

CATHERINE: Okay. So George Sterling was kind of a Yankee blue blood whose parents had founded Shelter Island and Sag Harbor. And, you know, he's just a Mayflower kid all the way back, but a ne'er-do-well who flunks out of college, and his mom packs him off to work with his stockbroker uncle in San Francisco. And there they get into the real estate game that builds the East Bay. Carrie, however, is the daughter of a police captain who dies too young, leaving her and her four siblings and her mom to take in boarders, a common way for widows and single women to make ends meet when there wasn't much other way to make money. So she grows up in this environment closer to the Oakland docks, like around where Jack London was hanging out, um, takes the first chance she gets, though, to work in an office, and it happens to be George Sterling's office. So she decides very early with the experience of poverty, um, that she's marrying up. And George Sterling is, you know, he's good looking. If you've got that sort of addiction to potential where you look for the sad sack boyfriend that your love can make pure, that's sort of what happens. But it doesn't work out for her because George is a philandering drunk. 

KIM: He's awful. I mean, the men in general are pretty terrible.

CATHERINE: Yeah. Somehow I haven't been invited by the Jack London Society to give a talk either. 

KIM: I wonder why! I was disgusted with him after reading this.

CATHERINE: Yeah. Yeah. It's another side you find when you go at it through the women's lives, because they're trying to navigate this world that the men are making. And so if you're writing about the women, you're relieved of the burden of trying to make these men more presentable than they were.

KIM: Oh, I love that. Yep.

AMY: Okay. So George Sterling, he's a poet writing in all the flowery Victorian ways that you described that are kind of outmoded, but he doesn't kind of realize that he's on the tail end of all that.

CATHERINE: No cause he has Ambrose Bierce telling him he's a genius, and Ambrose Bierce is a huge deal. You know, Bierce, Twain, Brett Harte, they sort of built the West in terms of, you know, its literary foundations in San Francisco in the same way Loomis did down there. So he's got this guy telling him he's the shit. So he's thinking, "All I need to do is to quit this realty job and write poetry full time and Carrie, if you loved me, you would support me."

AMY: And she tried

CATHERINE: She did. 

AMY: Um, so he has earned the nickname King of Bohemia, or maybe it's self appointed nickname. I don't know. 

CATHERINE: No, he earned it. 

AMY: Okay. Okay. But that also brings us then to this Bohemian community Carmel by the Sea, which, tell us a little bit more about when, you know, they decide they're going to set up, partly for his realty schemes, um, partly because he fancies himself a Bohemian. They're going to set up and create this new community. 

CATHERINE: So you've got to understand California at this point is going through a land craze. You know, the Gold Rush is gone, right? The train is hooked up, though. And Oakland is the terminus of the Transcontinental Railway. So suddenly any strip of California real estate is hot. Now, the Pacific Improvement Company, which is the big four railroad, their land development arm of, the big railroad barons, they put a hotel in Monterey Peninsula, and they had a train going right to it and baths and a racetrack and, you know, sumptuous gardens and everything like that. Now going down the Monterey Peninsula there's Carmel, sitting at the bottom. This beautiful strip of beach, but with really nothing on it. And successive people had tried to make a go of it, but finally, this one lawyer in The Bohemian Club who knows Sterling buys it up. His idea is to make basically Monterey, you know, make a sumptuous wealthy resort that the train will go right too, because right then it sounds like the train's gonna go all the way to Carmel and then boom, this cheap, nowhere real estate that's hard to get to, people will just come right down. So he buys it, but people aren't coming. It's only in desperation that he settles on the Bohemians as a scheme to pull people down, because the flashy, you know, ads he's buying aren't working. This is what brings George Sterling and Carrie Sterling to Carmel. They're paid. They're paid to recruit. 

KIM: Yeah, it's a crazy story. I will never think of Carmel the same way again after reading about this.

CATHERINE: Well, it was interesting to write about it when you're in Carmel and you know, Carmel, as it is now, is a very wealthy resort area, but it's also one that pays homage to its Bohemian founders. But quite frankly, the Bohemians were just a short term, repeat, short term plan to get that, draw in the wealthy buyer.

KIM: Yeah. So can you talk about the people that George Sterling sort of began bringing down there?

and 

CATHERINE: Right. So as King of Bohemia, so to speak, he was the center of this group of writers at Coppa's in San Francisco, a restaurant where they all gathered. And he'd pick up the check, because he was the one with money because of his real estate gig. Um, so he worked through that crowd, sometimes a really hard sell, just like he would selling Piedmont real estate: "It's a thousand bucks, but it'll go fast. Write me right away if you wanna buy this, da, da, da," together with descriptions of what it's doing for his life. "Poetry, just rolling out of him! Salubrious breezes! His marriage restored!" You know, he's trying everything to get people to come down and buy. Meanwhile, he's actually renting.

KIM: And then the earthquake happened, right?

CATHERINE: Yeah. So while George was struggling, starting in 1905, to get his friends to buy, in 1906, the earthquake demolishes most of San Francisco, bringing a bunch of people then, and suddenly Carrie's running a version of her boarding house again, you know, to people. A refugee camp in Carmel, um, and some wind up staying, some go elsewhere. The Carmel community really sort of kicks off. The legacy of it starts from then.

KIM: Yeah. And, um, basically Carrie is like working super hard, doing all the things she didn't really want to do while George is running around... 

CATHERINE: Sleeping with whoever...

KIM: Sleeping with whoever, you know, just presenting this whole Bohemian lifestyle, but she's actually keeping all of it going in the background. And then, um, Charmian Kittredge London actually shows up, which our listeners will probably remember we did an episode on her last year, so she starts factoring into the story as well. And we should point out that Carrie Sterling wasn't too keen on Charmian, right?

CATHERINE: Well, so it was a huge scandal when London left his first wife and then married again. And Carrie knew a lot, because Jack London and George Sterling were best friends. So you know, Carrie was also friends with Jack's first wife, so she watched, you know, all of this unfold and she knew that it wasn't as innocent as they portrayed, that these relationships overlapped. And uh, she wanted George to denounce Jack, and he wouldn't, and she blamed Jack in his dissolute ways for, you know, George's increasing alcoholism and philandering. So her bid to go to Carmel was all about trying to save her marriage, but in the end, she does not wind up getting away from this crowd. Um, it sort of drags with him. That said, Jack London never buys in Carmel. He buys his own ranch, as we all know, in Sonoma, and the friction between his wife and George's wife is a lot of why.

AMY: I think it's funny though, that George basically used the Londons as like an optics PR scheme. So they had the Londons come down for a weekend to Carmel and took a bunch of photographs as if they were gonna be buying there, um, and the Londons just sort of went along with it, knowing like, "Yep, no, we're not staying here, but whatever." 

CATHERINE: They are getting something out of it too, though, because Jack really couldn't come up with his own plots. He took them from life. So whole books are with the thinly veiled Bohemian crowd, you know, as their subject, George is in three of them. So he's getting something out of it too. But yeah, no, definitely. If you Google photographs of old Carmel, the one of these four writers with Jack central on the beach comes up like that, but he was just down there on a weekend, just for that shoot. 

AMY: Yeah. "And if he's hanging out here, don't you want to be here too?" Sort of thing. 

CATHERINE: Precisely. Meanwhile, other photographs show Carrie in the background, feeding them, being ignored. Um, Charmian's diaries in the Huntington, you know, describe the trip. She always wrote "lolly" in her diary as code for having sex, right? So I'm thinking about like, you know, Carrie has to clean these sheets, you know? She didn't have a laundry, you know, and she hates her, you know? So like it's the worst thing. She made George promise she'd never have to entertain this woman, and like all of George's other promises, that one is broken.

AMY: Well, we do have a soft spot in our heart for Charmian, too, having done an episode on her, but I will say it's, you know, it's hard to even find fault with anything Charmian and you know, their little tension, given the antics of all the men in the group. Uh, and I love that you just sort of break into the narrative at times to acknowledge like, "Okay, can we all just say for a second what assholes they all are?"

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Like, needs to say it and you did!

CATHERINE: All these women are put on collision courses, Charmian and. Nora and Carrie, by their limited choices that are exactly, you know, bolstered by the men who have paid no consequences for the general sexual liberation of the time. Meanwhile, Charmian goes through a terrible birth, loses her daughter, a later miscarriage. Another friend of theirs, you know, dies in childbirth. There is the cost of this written all the way throughout, but over and over the women pay it. The women pay it socially, physically, career-wise, in every single way. 

KIM: Yeah. They're all working in this system that they didn't create.

CATHERINE: It's patriarchy. 

KIM: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 

CATHERINE: They don't have the choices women have today. And even when they take it, you know, you see uh, the consequences of the rash choices they take to get out of this system bring them down.

KIM: Yeah. And we've kind of said that if there's one true villain from this book, it's got to be George Sterling. 

CATHERINE: Unquestionably. 

KIM: I mean, how did Nora May French end up coming into his orbit, and how did she fall into this romantic liaison with him?

CATHERINE: So Harry Lafler, the editor that she met in San Francisco, was also George Sterling's good friend. Particularly, you know, Jack London was not in the picture early on. Harry Lafler was there first. They worked together at the realty syndicate. They wrote poetry together and at Coppa's restaurant they went trolling for, you know, lays together. I , I don't know any other way to put it! So they would like stand next to a woman's table and read sonnets they contemporaneously composed about their beauty. But you know, they're like running through women like tissue and they're both married, right? So when Nora goes to San Francisco to be with Harry Lafler, he's still actually married. Um, so eventually, uh, circumstances I don't wanna reveal wind up with their breaking up. And at this point, Nora is working for the phone company, another factory job. Her poetry is getting published more broadly and she wins a huge contest, et cetera, et cetera, but she is poor. And the 1907 crash is making employment scarce. There's strikes. The trains aren't working on time. Remember this is post earthquake. So there is just destitution everywhere. There's even Bubonic Plague, you know, making a march. So she is penniless and has no place to go. Meanwhile, Carrie and George, who know them, are like, "Okay, we need to kick our tenants out in our cabin out back who are just being like annoying. So this is a good excuse. Come down and stay with us for a while before you go off to your next plan." And she has a next plan at that time, but then circumstances don't pan out. And, uh, it's very clear, um, that from George's correspondence and from the events that she and George had become involved, and no surprise, they are two of the most sexually incontinent people in the book. So.

AMY: Um, okay, taking a little segue for a moment from the story. I want to pause to talk about your process of writing the biography, because you sort of tell us as you go along about your research. And there's a moment where you take us inside the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, where you're looking up records. Kim and I are big fans of the Huntington, obviously. Yeah, it's gorgeous, but we've never actually gotten to go inside where you were doing your research. So that was wonderful to read about. Um, but I wanna talk about that sort of oh my god moment with the ripped letters that...

CATHERINE: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, so the Huntington is a relic of robber baron money. CP Huntington's widow, um, it was her money that started it, the gardens, the restaurant, the museum, and then the part that most people don't go into, which is the research collections of American, largely Western, literature. So they have 66,000 items from Jack London. George Sterling, a lot of his letters were there, and I found in them, a poem that Nora had written on ledger paper, which was odd because this is unlike any other paper she ever wrote on. And I was trying to establish, you know, the smoking gun between her affair with George, who was at that point still working at the realty syndicate though their offices moved to Oakland, and I find a poem of his written on ledger paper. And then I line it up. Both of them are ripped halves, and I line it up and realize the same sheet of paper.

KIM: Whoa! Dun dun dun! 

CATHERINE: You know, and, and so was likely composed in his office... what was she doing there, et cetera, et cetera? So that sent me on the hunt for all the different coordinations of seeming coincidences. She of course was involved with yet another married man. He, of course, was head over heels in love with her. And you find out so much more after she dies about how much and why. And then she moves in, and this is apparently not the last time he's going to try to move a love interest into Carmel, as you'll find out later.

KIM: So jumping ahead to Nora's shocking suicide. She allegedly drank cyanide at around midnight one night in 1907. She was just 26 years old. Carrie Sterling was the only one home when it happened. Catherine, as you write in your book about Carrie's testimony of what happened that night, it is basically "a bananas account." Do you want to walk us through it? What happened?

CATHERINE: Okay. Right. So, George is out of town. He was frequently out of town because he was still working at the realty syndicate while ostensibly living full time as a Bohemian poet in Carmel. And it's, it's important to realize all these people were living these double lives. So they had a journal, a diary, that they kept, and it was kind of a public document because people who stayed there when they were out of town would fill in the weather, you know? So I knew like when it was rainy, when it was not, you know, it was great, like, day- by- day, who visited, what they ate, attempts to go hunting and mussel capturing. So, so much of the color of the book is out of that very detailed journal. But, um, the weeks he's gone, Carrie's hand takes over and she's describing how much fun she and Nora are having together, going out dancing and this, that, and the other. And then there's an entry, "Nora and I had toast on the porch, another beautiful day, 10:00 AM." And then George's hand finishes out the entry, "Phyllis, which was Nora's nickname, drank potassium cyanide at midnight and died." You know, basically like this shocking juxtaposition. So I'm like, "What the hell happened?" So I then go to the newspapers, which are very yellow tabloids, and find that her account, you know, a detailed account that she tells a friend is accurate and find that, yes, she's the only person home, um, that she heard Nora get up, go to the bathroom, come back. She said, "Are you okay?" And then heard something that sounded like hysterics and then goes over and sees her basically having, you know, almost seizure and flushing the cheeks, and like, foam and stuff. She tries to warm her up for an hour after she's already dead. And then she realizes, after an hour, that she's dead and then she goes running for help. And I'm like, This doesn't make none of it. I mean, that's just a tip of the iceberg on what doesn't make sense to me. And I invite the reader to try to pull it together themselves. My dream is for book clubs to have knock-down drag-outs about what actually happened that night. 

KIM: Yeah. 

CATHERINE: Beyond the newspapers, there's a lot of cleanup and letters afterwards where they're explaining things to their friends and they're hiding where the actual funeral is. And it's just crazy.

AMY: Yeah, something doesn't add up. And a, a note to listeners, Nora's death occurs about midway through The Gilded Edge, so there are still a lot more twists and turns remaining in the story. Um, we're gonna leave that all up to you when you read it, but what we can say, and, it's mentioned in the first couple pages of the book, so it's not a huge spoiler, Carrie and George both go on separately to kill themselves in later years by cyanide poisoning.

CATHERINE: And also what's said early on in the book is that Nora's death is so sensationalized it kicks off copycat suicides in New York where people are found dead with her poem in their pocket. So, um, it is this weird Goethe-esque, you know, phenomenon. Uh, and so as much as Carrie and George are trying to walk away from this mess, it keeps coming back. And so Nora, although she dies midway, haunts the rest of this tale and revelations keep coming out.

AMY: And the, the copycat suicides among random strangers points to the fact of just how much of a celebrity poet she was and how well known she was, as you said.

CATHERINE: Yes. And her poetry really called to the young and the aspirational and the romantic and her beauty, she was gorgeous, you know, was splashed all over the newspapers as well. So you're seeing really kind of a, a femme fatale treatment of her. And one thing I point out is that the manner of her death begins to eclipse her life. And that's part of what buries her as well.

AMY: Um, and then we see that the men start to recognize the blame that they've had to an extent, you know. This was a woman that they had been falling all over themselves to sleep with. Um, many of them were trying to sleep with her, some, some succeeded, some didn't. Um, so the writer James Hopper, who was one of those men who tried, he wrote to his pal, George Sterling saying, "She certainly did us, George, the swift-souled one. She was playing toy with us tangle-footed blunderers, and suddenly with a dodge and dart eluded us forever." Somehow they're the victims, you know, in this letter. 

CATHERINE: Yeah, absolutely. Everybody just sees Nora as a game. But over the next year, Hopper has something of revelation and realizes not only, um, a portion of the blame, but also that Carrie and George haven't told him everything.

AMY: And yeah, so he says in a later letter to George, he writes, "We thought we had the lifeboat out, but we were only hitting her on the head with our oars." So as you said, he kind of has a realization like, "Wait, she was the victim. Oh my God." 

CATHERINE: Yes. And I was one of the people with the oars. 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. Although in a sense, I mean, we saw that he was hopeful that maybe he could have a relationship with her, although he was married too, but, um, 

CATHERINE: Separated, but yes.

AMY: You kind of were like, maybe he would've been the good guy. I don't know because yes, he did come across as better than the other gents in the book.

CATHERINE: James Hopper is like, if you're gonna like one guy, he's the guy to like, because he does eventually come around. And so he, I think, did make good over his life, which George didn't bother to do.

KIM: Nora's ex, Harry Lafler, ended up putting together a book of her poems for publication after her death. And you say this ended up creating a distorted portrait of Nora. It must have been galling for you to see how the men in her life ended up overshadowing her, especially since you argue that her poetry was better than theirs. 

CATHERINE: Okay. You're not supposed to read the reviews, but there's one, two star Amazon review of a guy who's just like, "You have not credited enough what these men did for her poetic career." Putting her in the context of a neophyte, you know, to these men and so the whole that, you know, this Bohemian male, pioneer spirit has, has this modern day antecedent, and if you run afoul of them, they come at you. It's really funny that they still want to, in order to elevate the men they still admire and their poetry that they find spirit with, they have to, you know, keep this going, the very kind of selective comprehension of where the women were in this. Keep it going.

KIM: Right, right. And I'm sure that having spent so much time getting to know both Carrie Sterling and Nora May French, you probably hold a special place in your heart for each of them.

CATHERINE: Initially not Carrie, I want to be clear. 

KIM: Okay. 

CATHERINE: Nora, instantly. Carrie, not so much. It was only in researching her childhood where I began to understand it. And my uncle read a very early draft and he liked her more than anyone. And I that's, when I realized, she's my grandmother, who grew up in industrial working house in Ireland and then moved to her mom's boarding house sort of situation and, was never going to be be poor again, you know, and had no patience for pretense and, uh, glamorizing that. So, you know, all these parties with Bohemians dressing up as hobos and drinking, you know, beer out of tomato cans on the beach when they're having champagne in San Francisco Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, um, she would've not liked that. And Carrie's letter shows her increasing frustration. So eventually, yes, I do like her. Plus anyone who's had to, you know, survive being in an alcoholic home recognizes a story of really trying everything to get this man back on track.

KIM: Yeah. She really did. She really did. 

AMY: I understand that, um, kind of dichotomy of admiring her kind of stoicism and at the same time being so frustrated with her, for sticking around and being like, "You're putting up with it. You're basically permitting his behavior." So yeah, there's two sides of it where you're like, you're angry with her, and then also you, you have to be like, all right, she was really trying to make this marriage work and do whatever she could and be a supportive wife. 

CATHERINE: And it never got better. Just a word to you out there. It 

AMY: no.

CATHERINE: Those of you who were still, you know, afflicted by the addiction to potential, you know, get over it.

KIM: Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. So I was wondering if there was a particular poem or two of Nora's, maybe you'd want to share with us if you have any particular favorites or pieces that kind of give us a picture of who she was as a person.

CATHERINE: Uh, yeah, I'm gonna read the one called “Ave Atque Vale” which means "hello, goodbye." And she had submitted it supposedly the week before she died, but, um, she had composed it many years earlier. There is a poem “Ave Atque Vale” from Swinburne that is clearly, when you read it, has some influences in it. So I'll read part of it and you can see how her sort of sense of nature and trying to find a piece through nature that isn't through the sort of human interactions in her world, is part of it. Also the sadness that's sometimes, um, mixed with joy. Uh, there's a lot of bitter sweetness: 

Now nothing is the same, old visions move me,

I wander silent through the waning land,

And find, for youth and little leaves to love me,

The old, old liken crumbling in my hand. 

What shifting films of distance fold you, blind you, 

This windy eve of dreams. I cannot tell; 

I know through some strange mist they grope to find you–

These hands that give you Greeting and Farewell.

 And that's very much, um, her style. There's a sort of lyrical quality, a direct quality, uh, always taking inspiration from birds, flowers, uh, leaves, and always struggling with some interpersonal relationship on top of that. And there's also a perceptiveness that's always tied to the land that the Carmel River is dwindling. It's being overdrawn through development. And she sees this, you know, she sees the waning of California taking place in front of her eyes as so many of us do who wind up living.... you know, I grew up in New Jersey in the seventies and every woods became a new development, and that's her experience of moving through the land. And so she's kind of capturing that side too, which I don't think you pick up on unless you know the history there.

AMY: You also talk in your book about Nora being, you know, the quintessential "new woman," but then also pointing out that all of these new women at this time period who were seeking autonomy and freedom, there weren't any corresponding "new men" to help them along. And I had never really thought about that, but that makes perfect sense because what kind of strides can women make as they're evolving if the men are not evolving alongside them? And we are still seeing that today. We talked about Roe at the top of the show, but it's these male elected officials overwhelmingly who are still making the decisions, and not in our favor.

CATHERINE: A hundred percent. I hope, you know, people learn from this book that, um, it's always a step forward, you know, sometimes two, three steps back. All the women in this book are new women: Mary Austin, Carrie Sterling, Nora, they all would fall under that category, Carrie, for working in an office. Charmian for riding horses. Um, Nora for not getting married. But as I was reading all this new women literature, I was like, "Where's the new man?" There's no entity that's ever called the new man and that I think is, is the progressive curse. People think progress is inevitable and, uh, it's not. We absorb a lot of books that celebrate women's history and their accomplishments and rightfully bring them to the fore and give them acknowledgement in the day, but if we're not mourning what is lost, what creativity is lost through this, we are doing a service to history, that there's a lot to mourn, as well.

KIM: Mm-hmm. absolutely. Listeners do yourself a favor and go pick up a copy of The Gilded Edge. It's so intriguing, and we barely scratch the surface of the story in this brief time. So you'll love reading Catherine's more thorough account. It's actually coming out in paperback in October. And Catherine, we are delighted you could join us for an episode to share your knowledge of Nora May French. Thank you. 

CATHERINE: Thanks for all the great questions!

KIM: So that's all for today's podcast. By the way, this marks our 100th episode if you can believe it. We've put a lot of effort into putting out weekly content over the last two years. And if you're a fan, tell us so, by leaving us a glowing five-star review over at Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.

AMY: Yeah, your enthusiasm and feedback, you guys, is what really keeps us going. And we're excited to catch up with you again next week. Bye, everybody. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.