StoryDriven: Writing a Biography, Imagining a Life

On This Page:   • From a conversation with Sara Bard Field at 79.   • The Story of Sara Bard Field and C.E.S. Wood• Image: Sara Bard Field at about age 30 (1912).   • The Paper Trail • Image: A letter from Sara to Erskine (1911).   • Telling the Story of SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE.   • The Research Room: Author Queries.

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  • From a conversation with Sara Bard Field at 79:

    If we hadn't been introduced by Darrow I would probably never have—I won't say, never met him....

    I remember so well the whole meeting....[He had] a most beautiful complexion and the keenest and kindest eagle blue-gray eyes I think I have ever seen....And he had very curly gray hair....He was then in his late fifties, fifty-eight or fifty-nine, I think—and he was so handsome that everyone wherever he went turned round to look at him again....

    I asked him if he was reading Wells, who was then the most talked-of liberal writer of our time—H.G. Wells, and he had written a book called Ann Veronica....

    Well, I went home with a great turmoil in my heart, realizing that I'd been with a group I belonged with and that my life didn't otherwise fit into....And the sense of chasm gave me a feeling of more utter loneliness than I can explain.

                    — Sara Bard Field in a 1961 oral history interview. *

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    In 1910, the gifted, vibrant Sara Ehrgott, 28—a Christian Socialist, an aspiring poet, and the intensely unhappy wife of Rev. Albert Ehrgott, an orthodox Baptist minister—came to live in Portland, Oregon with her husband and their two small children. There, she was introduced by the famed labor lawyer Clarence Darrow to his dazzling colleague and fellow freethinker, Charles Erskine Scott Wood.

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    Fifty-eight-year-old C.E.S. Wood, known to his intimates as Erskine, was a mesmerizing and controversial figure in Portland. A wealthy, much-admired corporate attorney and a former army officer in the Indian wars, he was now a poet, painter, and patron of the arts, an outspoken atheist, a "philosophical anarchist," and a vocal social critic. He was also a man with a colossal and undiminished appetite for life, and he shared not only Sara's radical social views but also her ardent love of books and poetry.

    Like Sara, Erskine was unhappily married, to a leader of the city's stuffy upper crust. Despite the conspicuous differences in their ages and social positions, the two discovered that they were soulmates and began an ecstatic affair that scandalized Portland but ultimately inspired the strictly-raised Sara with the courage to seek a divorce and resettle on San Francisco's bohemian Russian Hill. There she laid claim to a new life as "Mrs. Sara Bard Field," a nationally famous suffrage orator and the first American of either sex to cross the United States by automobile for a political cause.

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     Erskine's wife refused to divorce him, but in 1919, after nearly a decade of emotional conflict, turbulent separations, and horrific personal tragedy, Sara and Erskine finally set up as "free lovers" on Russian Hill. A few years later they built a rural estate above the village of Los Gatos, where for twenty years they lived the life Sara had always dreamed of: writing books and publishing poetry, supporting the cause of social justice, and entertaining such friends and admirers as Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Bennett Cerf, and William Rose Benét.

     Eventually, after the death of Erskine's wife, Sara Bard Field and C.E.S. Wood decided to end their celebrated "free union" with a marriage ceremony (conducted by a rabbi): Sara at 58, her lover at 88. Erskine died in 1944 at the age of 91. Sara followed him three decades later, a respected California poet, a venerated former suffragist and icon of San Francisco's silver age, and a symbol of love's revolutionary power to triumph over the blind tyranny of convention.

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    Over the years, Sara occasionally toyed with the idea of writing her autobiography. Her friend Bennett Cerf, the editor-in-chief of Random House, implored her to do so: "I know that I need not tell you," he wrote in a March, 1938 letter, "that I stand ready to be of as much help as I possibly can.....It seems to me that tale of your whole relationship with Erskine is exactly the sort of thing that we need more and more of if we are to cling to anything decent while everything around us goes plunging on into absolute chaos." †

    Sara never wrote the memoir Cerf was hoping for. However, in 1958, having published three books of poetry and dozens of poems in Poetry magazine, The Nation, and The Saturday Review of Literature, she agreed to tape a series of interviews for the University of California at Berkeley about her crusade for women's rights and her evolution as a poet.

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    Gradually the tapings grew into a massive, 600-page oral history, "Sara Bard Field: Poet and Suffragist," and the work in which Sara finally bequeathed to posterity the story of her relationship with Erskine and her own testimony to the importance of intellectual and emotional freedom. In addition, she carefully preserved over 2,300 letters that she and Erskine wrote during their many separations, along with roughly 1,000 more to and from their friends, families, and former spouses. She gave most of these, as well as the couple's many poetry manuscripts and Erskine's rare books and paintings, to the Huntington Research Library in San Marino, California.

    I first saw this treasure-trove on a visit to the Huntington in the 1990s. Having read portions of her oral history, including those describing how she first met Erskine (see EXCERPT at the top of this page), I was captivated by her warmth, intelligence, and passionate spirit as well as by her dramatic life-story and the richness and poignancy of her memories.

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     And I was flabbergasted by the correspondence. Sara and Erskine's combined manuscripts, photographs, and other papers filled more than 300 boxes, and reading their letters to each other (31 boxes alone) was as electrifying as eavesdropping on a private dinner conversation of a hundred years ago—a living conversation between two people who, while tormented by the knowledge that they were tearing apart the lives of those who loved them, were nevertheless willing to risk great pain to themselves and others to be together and fully alive at last.

    To Sara, the stakes were especially high because she was touchingly certain that if she and Erskine were ever united, her lover would, through his writing (and with her assistance), lead Americans to a new and liberating sense of the supreme importance of love, individual freedom, and social justice.

    It is this conviction, to which Sara held unswervingly for the rest of her life, that make the letters a window on a special time and place in American history: that flawed, glittering, idealistic Age of Progress that ended with World War I, the age that historians long referred to as "the end of American innocence."

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    In SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE, I am tracing Sara and Erskine's long journey—the inner, psychological journey as well as the outward, public one—from unhappy marriages and lives stifled by religious orthodoxy and social convention to a life of freedom and personal happiness, but also of notoriety and social ostracism.

    Using their own words as well as the words of their friends and family members in letters, oral histories, diaries, unpublished autobiographical notes, published and unpublished poems, and other writings, SARA AND ERSKINE attempts to combine the careful research of traditional biography with the immediacy of historical journalism and the narrative drive of the nonfiction novel as it follows the arc of their epic romance and Sara's individual voyage from True Womanhood to New Womanhood.

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    By telling the story this way, I hope to make SARA AND ERSKINE, AN AMERICAN ROMANCE a different kind of biography—one that can reproduce for its readers the experience its author has had of listening in on a living conversation from the age of Ragtime and watching the gallant struggle of one remarkable yet essentially ordinary woman as she tries to liberate herself from the chains of the past and embrace, not always happily, the new and different morality of a modern era.

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    You can read about some of the detective work, literary problem-solving, and narrative highs of writing what I refer to as "story-driven biography" in articles published in the NEWSLETTER: IMAGINING A LIFE and THE CRAFT OF BIOGRAPHY. Go to the NEWLETTER ARCHIVE on this website.

    I welcome comments and hope that you'll E-MAIL ME.

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    In researching the life and times of SARA BARD FIELD, I'm always looking for undiscovered letters, photographs, or other material connected with her and people in her circles.

    If you have any information, please E-MAIL ME.

• I am trying to track down:

        •The present trustees of the estate of journalist Margaret Parton Hussey, of Sneden's Landing (Palisades), New York. Margaret Parton was the daughter of Sara's sister Mary Field Parton, who compiled and edited THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MOTHER JONES, and Lemuel F. Parton, a San Francisco newspaper editor who later became a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist.

        • The descendants of Sarah Wallace Foster Hanley (1874-1926) and Baptist minister Elijah Abraham Hanley (1871-1943). Sarah and Elijah Hanley had two daughters, Frances Foster Hanley, b. 1907, and Elizabeth Jane Hanley. I would love to find a photograph of Sarah Hanley, who wrote Sara Bard Field many long and interesting letters.

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        •Information about the life, correspondence, or photographs of Sara's lifelong friend, Oregon suffragist Emma Wold, later a Washington, DC immigration lawyer, and Julia Emory, her companion, a radical suffragist and the daughter of a Maryland state senator.

• Of ongoing interest: Correspondence between Sara Bard Field's friends and family or between friends and relatives of her first husband, ALBERT EHRGOTT. I'm particularly interested in finding letters from other people in which Sara is mentioned.

• Suffrage historians and Pacific Northwest history buffs: I'm still looking for the records of the Oregon College Equal Suffrage League, SARA BARD FIELD's 1912 suffrage campaign organization. If you've come across these, please E-MAIL ME—and thanks!

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Sources:

    • Sara Bard Field, "Sara Bard Field: Poet and Suffragist," pp. 190-203 passim. Typescript of an oral history conducted 1959-1963 by Amelia Fry, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1979. Courtesy The Bancroft Library. To read Sara Bard Field's oral history online, click here.

    • Bennett A. Cerf to Sara Bard Field, March 23, 1938. The Charles Erskine Scott Wood Collection, the Huntington Library, Addenda Box 10, Folder 58.
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Picture Credits:

    • Center column: Maurice Prendergast, "Park by the Sea", 1922 watercolor with graphite on paper: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast. • "Sara Bard Field around age 30 (1912)" and "A letter from Sara to Erskine (1911)": Used by courtesy of the Huntington Library. © It is unlawful to reproduce or copy these images in any form without written permission from the Huntington Library. • Suffrage Pageant, 1913: Library of Congress.

    • Sidebar: Sara Bard Field and C.E.S. Wood, and detail in main column, by W. E. Dassonville, reproduced by courtesy of the Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley. • Sara Bard Field, 1916: Library of Congress. • Photograph of C.E.S. Wood, about 1905 (photographer unknown), reproduced with the kind permission of Mrs. Beth Rondone.

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    • All material on this website Copyright © 2005-2010 by Dona Munker except where expressly stated or contributed by others. Copying, altering, or reproducing this material in any form without written permission is prohibited by law and may be prosecuted regardless of the venue or purpose of the copying.