“The prairie lay that afternoon as it had lain for centuries of September afternoons, vast as an ocean; motionless as an ocean coaxed into very little ripples by languid breezes; silent as an ocean where only very little waves slip back into their element.”
I finally finished the next Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on my list after dragging my feet for much of the summer. Admittedly, it has been an altogether difficult task descending from the beautiful rolling novels of the great American pioneer writer, Willa Cather, to the bleak landscapes of Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins (I took a detour after reading Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel One of Ours to read her other celebrated Great Plains works). At any rate, the problem with Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins is that it is an overtly preachy novel –it attempts to impart an explicit moral lesson of redemption and forgiveness on its readers, but this fable-esque moralism overwhelms any semblance of nuance or complexity in the novel. The selection of The Able McLaughlins for the Pulitzer Prize smacks of the early Pulitzer Board’s predilection for conservative, easily digestible, wholesome novels with a comforting lesson of religious piety, while often ignoring other truly great works of literature. The Able McLaughlins is a droning novel that concludes in a wildly anticlimactic ending, leaving the reader confused and unsatisfied –it is a novel that instructs strong people to take pity on those who are suffering.
The Able McLaughlins is about a family of Scottish Covenanters who settle on the Iowa prairie around the time of the Civil War (an event which bears little mark on the story –the Civil War merely serves as a vague backdrop to the novel). Their eldest son Wully McLaughlin returns home to his family farm after fighting in the war to spend one golden evening with his love interest, Chirstie McNair –a mostly unremarkable woman, who is reportedly very beautiful, but also described as emotional and erratic. Wully and Chirstie swear to commit to one another, before Wully is summoned back to the war. He returns again to Iowa a short time later, this time for good. He immediately visits Chirstie’s home only to find her a changed woman –she is now distant and aloof, spurning his advances. He eventually discovers that in his absence, she was raped and impregnated by a wayward cousin, Peter Keith. In a rage, Wully hunts down Peter Keith and threatens to kill him if he ever returns home again. Peter Keith then flees.
Years pass. Wully and Chirstie are married and Wully claims full responsibility for her child, while also bearing the public shame for the child’s early birth, sparing Chirstie a scandal within the community, but as time passes, many neighbors in this tight-knit Iowa farming community discover the truth about the child. Undeterred, Wully and Chirstie build a home and farm together. One day, Peter Keith returns and tries to grab Chirstie while she is alone inside her house. In the course of the scuffle, Peter Keith quickly flees when she loudly screams and shoots him in the foot. Wully and a group of men grab their guns and hunt for Peter Keith out on the prairie. This scene is set in a series of lengthy and tense passages in which the reader desperately longs for bloodlust –we yearn to see Peter Keith violently punished for his misdeeds. However, Peter Keith is never found.
One day, Wully and Chirstie travel into town to conduct business when Wully happens upon Peter Keith lying alone, unconscious, and suffering in a hay stable due to a hemorrhage. Wully decides to abandon Peter Keith, but Chirstie begs him to return and do the right thing. Thus they tie up Peter Keith and transport him back to his mother’s farm where he can die surrounded by family. In the end, Wully has a sudden and unexpected change of heart. He decides to help Peter Keith in his passing. Somehow, after years of hatred, Wully inexplicably finds an inner sense of tenderness and forgiveness for the man who once raped his wife. In the closing lines of the novel, Wully shockingly mentions that he may even find a pillow to comfort Peter Keith –this serves as an abrupt and confusing conclusion to an anticlimactic novel as Wully gingerly offers Peter Keith a peaceful death. Why? In all the preceding chapters, with the mere mention of Peter Keith’s name, Wully exploded into a frenzied, murderous rage. But in the end, he allows it all to dissipate out of a tender desire for forgiveness. The vengeance and requital that readers so desperately seek –and were so starkly promised throughout the novel– sadly never arrives.
However, despite being a mediocre novel, at least some praise for The Able McLaughlins is in order. This novel delivers what has been called an accurate portrayal of the fervent Presbyterianism of prairie immigrants. So, I suppose that is something worthy of historical consideration. The history of the Covenanters dates back to 16th and 17th century Scotland, during the reigns of James VI and Charles I, amidst conflicts with the English Crown over the Presbyterian Church of Scotland contra the Protestant Church of England, and at least The Able McLaughlins presents a fascinating depiction of these Scottish prairie immigrants in America.
Notable Quotations:
“The prairie lay that afternoon as it had lain for centuries of September afternoons, vast as an ocean; motionless as an ocean coaxed into very little ripples by languid breezes; silent as an ocean where only very little waves slip back into their element. One might have walked for hours without hearing anything louder than high white clouds casting shadows over the distances, or the tall slough grass bending lazily into waves” -opening lines.
“They were happy as the summer wore on, the three of them working from the first streak of dawn to the frog-croaking darkness. The stars in their courses and the clouds in their flights seemed to be working with them that season. Week after week, just as the ground grew ready for it, they watched the desired clouds roll up in great hills against the sky, and pour down long, slow, soaking rains. They watched the sun grow more and more stimulatingly warm, and then, just when their corn needed it, grow fiercely hot in its coaxing. They worked like slaves, of course. But then, they had always worked like slaves…Wheat and corn had surely never grown better than theirs did that year. To John, now, a field of wheat was a field of wheat, capable of being sold for so many dollars. To Wully, as to his father, there was first always, to be sure, the promise of money in growing grain, and he needed money. But besides that, there was more in it than perhaps anyone can say – certainly more than he ever said – all that keeps farm-minded men farming. It was the perfect symbol of rewarded, lavish labor, of requited love and care, of creating power, of wifely faithfulness, of the flower and fruit of life, its beauty, its ecstasy. Wully was too essentially a farmer to ever try to express his deep satisfaction in words. But when he saw his own wheat strong and green, swaying in the breezes, flushed with just the first signs of ripening, the sight made him begin whistling. And when, working to exhaustion, he saw row after row of corn, hoed by his own hands, standing forth unchoked by weeds, free to eat and grow like happy children, even though he was too tired to walk erectly, something within him – maybe his heart – danced with joy. Therefore he was then, as almost always, to be reckoned among the fortunate of the earth, one of those who know ungrudged contented exhaustion” (Chapter XIII, p. 170-172).
About The 1924 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1924 Novel Jury was composed of returning members: Jefferson B. Fletcher, Samuel Crothers, and Bliss Perry. According to future Pulitzer Prize administrator John Hohenberg, “there wasn’t much cheering” with this award. Apparently the initial recommendation from the novel jury was that no novel in 1923 was “outstanding enough to merit a prize this year.” They even considered nominating Willa Cather for the second time (and I wish they had), but eventually the jury simply noted that “if it is deemed that a prize should be awarded anyhow, the committee would name Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins.” A follow-up statement was issued with assurances that they would avoid the same type of scandal that occurred in 1921 wherein Sinclair Lewis was denied the Pulitzer Prize and subsequently spurred a nasty public battle in the press.
Today, The Able McLaughlins can be a difficult book to track down, having been out of print for many years. Luckily, having access to a strong inter-library loan program, I was able to get my hands on this one.
- Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
- Samuel M. Crothers (1857-1927) was a Unitarian minister. He resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts. According to W.J. Stuckey in his book entitled The Pulitzer Prize Novels, Crothers was an essayist “who believed that the English novel reached its highest development under Fielding and Richardson.”
- Bliss Perry (1860-1954) was born into a well-connected Massachusetts family (his brother was the headmaster at Phillips Exeter Academy) and he was educated at Williams College before teaching at Princeton and Harvard for many years. He taught at the University of Paris and served as editor of The Atlantic Monthly. He was a prominent literary critic and wrote extensively on American poetry, including a notable biography of Walt Whitman. He died in 1954 at the age of 93, he was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson, among other notable leaders.
Who Is Margaret Wilson?
Margaret Wilhelmina Wilson (1882-1973) –not to be confused with Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson– grew up on a farm in Traer, Iowa. She was the fourth child of West Wilson (a farmer and livestock trader) and Agnes (McCornack) Wilson. The family were initially farmers before moving to Ames, Iowa to become traders. They later uprooted to Chicago where Margaret attended Englewood High School. Wilson once described herself as “the most Middle Western of Middle Westerners.” She graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in Philosophy in 1904 before pursuing missionary work in India during the early 1900s (she had suddenly found herself immersed in the faith of her parents, Presbyterianism, much to the surprise of her friends). Wilson spent six years as a Presbyterian missionary in the Punjab region of northern India, assisting Dr. Maria White at the Sailkot Hospital and supervising the Gujranwala Girls’ School. However, missionary work took a toll on her health. She fell ill with typhoid and in 1910 was forced to return to the United States, later writing, “I left India when I did because if I had not I should have died quite futilely of compassion.”
When she returned to the United States, she attended Divinity School at the University of Chicago in 1912, while caring for her invalid father, and teaching at West Pullman High School. During that time she built a reputation for serializing short stories in The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. One of which was “Tales of a Polygamous City” (1917-1921). Wilson also published her stories under an amusing anonymous pseudonym called “An Elderly Spinster.” She published her debut novel in 1923, The Able McLaughlins, which was a spectacular success, earning her the inaugural Harper Prize (for best novel by an “unnoticed” writer) as well as the Pulitzer Prize, making her the first in a long line of future Pulitzer Prize-winning authors who would win the Pulitzer Prize for their debut novel (along with Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge; Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes; Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller, Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson; Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis; Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell; Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener; Advise and Consent by Allen Drury; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday; A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole; Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz; Tinkers by Paul Harding; and The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen).
Apparently, several central themes can be found throughout much of Margaret Wilson’s writing: redemption, forgiveness, and an examination of women as second class citizens –all of which feature heavily in The Able McLaughlins. Wilson later admitted that she wrote “consciously and unconsciously for women” as her target audience. In 1923, the same year she published her debut novel, Wilson married George Douglas Turner, a Scottish tutor at Oxford who later became the warden of Dartmoor Prison. He was a divorced father of three daughters (and he briefly served as a spy for the British government during World War I). They had initially met while Margaret was a missionary in India and then reconnected when Margaret sailed to Europe following her father’s death in 1923. They were married on December 24, 1923 in Paris before settling in England. In 1927, the couple moved to a house located along the prison wall. Throughout this period, she continued writing, publishing a total of eight adult novels, some of which focused on her experiences in India, along with a treatise on the injustice of the prison system entitled “The Crime of Punishment.” A year after the treatise was published, there was a riot at Dartmoor Prison in which Wilson’s husband was assaulted, but still she remained resolute in her views about the injustice of the modern prison system.
In 1925, Wilson’s follow-up novel to The Able McLaughlins was The Kenworthys, which was actually written prior to her first novel. It focused on two brothers, one of whom previously had been engaged to the woman the other marries. Wilson then published a sequel, The Painted Room (1926), about a betrayed woman who turns bitter toward the world until the novel abruptly concludes with an inexplicably happy ending, In 1928, she published her third novel Daughters of India, a partly autobiographical missionary novel that takes place in India, a colonial Raj novel. It was recently republished in 2007 by Oxford University Press and edited by Ralph Crane. This was followed by a fourth novel Trousers of Taffeta (1929) focused on the effects of polygamy on women in India and riddled with allusions to the Biblical story of Rachel and Leah. In 1936, she published a sequel to her debut Pulitzer-Prize winning book, entitled The Law and the McLaughlins, a moral examination of capital punishment as characters from The Able McLaughlins fail to bring the perpetrators of a double lynching to justice (Grahame Greene wrote a favorable review of the book). Her final book was a detective mystery story for children entitled The Devon Treasure Mystery (1939) which was written to cover the cost of needed home repairs.
Why did Margaret Wilson stop writing books after the late 1930s? What happened to her career? I have yet to find a sufficient answer to this question. According to an article on the Pulitzer Prize website, after the publication of her young adult detective novel in 1939, Margaret Wilson simply “abandoned” her literary career. With the start of World War II, Margaret and George’s crusade for prison reform was paused and their private home in England was taken over as a refuge for British soldiers. It became so chaotic, that at times the couple sometimes escaped to a nearby hotel for some peace and quiet. Despite facing ill health, George was often sent out on assignment for the British government which ultimately led to his death in 1946. Margaret Wilson remained in England and later died in 1973 at the age of 91 in Droitwich, Worcester, England. She had outlived her three stepdaughters.
Film Adaptation:
None.
Further Reading:
- The Law and the McLaughlins (1936)
- A sequel to The Able McLaughlins.
Literary Context in 1923-1924:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1923): William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”
- Per Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestselling novel in 1923 was Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton.
- The first issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales appeared in the U.S. It became a noted publication for its horror fiction and fantasy.
- Three Stories and Ten Poems by Ernest Hemingway was published.
- Cane by Gene Toomer was published.
- Flaming Youth by Samuel Hopkins Adams was published.
- The Girl from Hollywood by Edgar Rice Burroughs was published.
- The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams was published.
- A Lost Lady by Willa Cather was published.
- A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton was published.
- Through the Wheat by Thomas Boyd was published.
- The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
If not for the Pulitzer Prize’s reticence to embrace short story collections in its early years, I would have likely chosen Ernest Hemingway’s debut Three Stories and Ten Poems instead of Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins. Otherwise, had I found myself serving on the 1924 Pulitzer Prize jury, I would have taken a closer look at Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front, Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady (which had a substantial influence on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), or Sherwood Anderson’s Many Marriages. I have yet to read any of these three novels, but I hold The Able McLaughlins in fairly low regard so it’s likely any or all of them are superior in my eyes. The Able McLaughlins is a preachy, moralistic, mediocre novel in my view, one which all-too easily serviced the Pulitzer Prize’s openly traditionalist sympathies at the time, but it hardly stands out among the great works of enduring American literature.
Wilson, Margaret. The Able McLaughlins. Atlanta, Ga., Cherokee Pub. Co., 1951.