Book Review: Many a Voyage

Title: Many a Voyage

Author: Loula Grace Erdman

Date: 1960

Publisher: Dodd Mead & Co.

ISBN: none

Length: 311 pages

Quote: “I was able to find only three recorded facts about Fannie Lathrop Ross, my heroine. These were the date of her birth, the date of her marriage, and the date of her death...There is no doubt in my mind, however, that she must have been an extraordinary woman. She would have needed to be to have lived with...Edmund Gibson Ross, past their golden wedding anniversary. Through him, in one way or another, her life was touched by almost every great national event during those tumultuous years, 1848-1889...”

I've observed more than once, in recent years, that his refusal to take sides in the American Civil War makes John Ross, of Oklahoma, one of my heroes. Enough things in east Tennessee have been named after him to show that others share this feeling. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century another man was making the name of Ross even more famous.

Edmund Ross, of Kansas, was Horace Greeley's ideal young man. Rather than waiting for a job on Greeley's newspaper he bought his own little printing press and “went west to grow up with the country.” Abolitionist, frontiersman, “Indian fighter,” he was twice appointed territorial governor and even elected U.S. Senator. As a Senator he acted out the ambivalence many Americans felt about the Civil War at the time. Although he'd started fighting for the Northern side, in Kansas, long before the actual war started, and showed no particular admiration for Andrew Johnson's frantic efforts to show disloyalty to Tennessee, Ross didn't blame Johnson for President Lincoln's death or think Johnson needed to be removed from office. Thanks to the rules of procedure in use at the time, some blamed or credited Ross for President Johnson's opportunity to finish his term. Later, President Kennedy would list Edmund Ross among his Profiles in Courage.

Should any of the “Indian fighters” be regarded as heroes? Can that question be taken up some other day? In their own minds, by the standards of their own culture, the men who slaughtered the buffalo and the Plains people were brave. Certainly they were tough. Arguably their culture was wicked and they, individually, were its fools—the late Vine Deloria used to argue that position—but Erdman completely ignores arguments about the morality of North American immigrants' unofficial war on their host ethnic groups (and, in some cases, their cousins in those groups) in the nineteenth century. Her focus, like Kennedy's, is on Senator Ross's voting for conscience over constituents.

Loula Grace Erdman was an historical novelist popular with school librarians and book clubs in the pre-feminist mid-twentieth century. The story of Senator Edmund Ross moved her to invent a fictional character for his obscure wife. Although the fictional Fannie whose mock-biography this novel is cannot be positively identified with the real Mrs. Ross, as Erdman admitted in the endnote quoted above, history made it easy for Erdman to spin a story in which fictional Fannie comes through as a plausible, likable character. The endnote explains which of fictional Fannie's adventures seem likely and unlikely to have been similar to the real Mrs. Ross's.

But the writer can never not communicate...even when a writer like Gertrude Stein or Kim Kardashian publishes a book that communicates mainly “I'm so rich and famous that I don't have to write anything coherent to get people to buy my book.” What Erdman put into her fictional Fannie Lathrop Ross was an ideal of sanely submissive wifehood...that worked, because there are sanely submissive, passionately monogamous wives, and they behave like fictional Fannie.

Fictional Fannie is hardly docile, although she always wishes people could calm down and live in peace and harmony. She stands up to slave catchers, Civil War guerrillas, plagues, famines, and riots; after a battle she charges out to help the wounded, soothe the dying, and dispose of the dead. She's “in love” with her husband even into their old age, thanks to a generous supply of hormones (the real Mrs. Ross aged rather slowly, by nineteenth century standards, and died fairly old) and the romantic tension created by his constantly going off on adventures of his own. When tempted to disagree with her husband she's not afraid to do that, but she seems to ask herself “Do I want my own way, or do I want to be with him?” and decide she wants to be with him.

In the 1950s many wanted to believe that that was the way all women were, or ought to have been, or needed to be in order to be really happy in life...and we don't even know that it's the way the real Fannie Lathrop Ross was. The real Mrs. Ross may have been a teacher—Senator Ross went on record supporting women's rights to be fairly paid and recognized as teachers—but fictional Fannie is never employed in that profession. (The old French Socialist ideal of never-employed women being “innocent” of money was still kicking in 1960.) The real Mrs. Ross may have enjoyed travel and “frontier” living as much as Senator Ross did, but fictional Fannie is a homebody who has lost her home. As explained in the endnote, Erdman didn't even really know whether the real Mrs. Ross originally had brown hair, or whether she'd always been short; only one old, bad photo of her in her sixties survived. (In her sixties the real Mrs. Ross was short; in the nineteenth century brown hair was considered as suitable for romantic heroines as blonde, red, or black hair, and in the twentieth century many women wished that were still the case.)

So bah, humbug, I remember thinking when I read Erdman's little propaganda studies of “femi-ninny-ty” in high school. Fannie was admittedly fictional. Girls who wanted to be like fictional Fannie married early, generally got divorced early, and grew up miserable. Girls who wanted to be happy in life went to college, got jobs, and didn't let ourselves need men, even if we did eventually yield to a really choice admirer's really determined pursuit—and never allowed ourselves even to consider marriage with anyone whose life goals were different from ours. I wanted to live in my home town and not have babies; into my thirties I expected that to mean I'd never be married at all. And yet...in my early thirties, when I was finding it possible and even pleasant to live on two of the three corners of Virginia at one time, I started asking myself “Do I want to do my own thing, or do I want to be with him?” and deciding I wanted to be with my husband...in Maryland. Rereading Many a Voyage, I now find fictional Fannie believable. If not based on the real Mrs. Ross, fictional Fannie is based on some real women.

Lots of school libraries stocked Erdman's books in the mid-twentieth century. Lots of libraries have discarded them since; the copy of Many a Voyage I just reread is a discarded library book. But it may be time to reconsider whether Erdman's heroines deserve to be considered heroines after all. Maybe the real Fannie Lathrop Ross never met Jesse James, but then again the fictional encounter between those characters may have something to say to modern readers. Read or reread this book and tell me what you think.

To buy it here will cost $5 per book, $5 per package (four books of this size would fit into one package), plus $1 per online payment. The story is too long, the print too small, to appeal to most children who play with dolls, but adult doll collectors may commission a doll dressed like Fannie for an additional $10.