Out of a Clear Sky

[from Harrisburg Telegraph, Fri, May 11, 1917] A young Belgian noblewoman and heiress comes to the United States in order to escape the man her uncle wishes her to marry. Learning that they have followed her and are close on her heels, she jumps off a slow-going train as it passes through the Tennessee mountains. The owner of an old farm, a gentleman farmer, is luckily there and his chivalry is roused at her loneliness and inexperience, and his heart is won by her charm and quaint English. He takes her to a neighbor's, where for the first time in her formal existence she comes close to the actual things of life. The uncle and prince have tracked her, and in spite of the hero's efforts to lead them astray, appear on the scene. Miss Daviess brings her international romance to a sympathetic conclusion.

Since this is the first Maria Thompson Daviess book I'm entering, I'll start with a bit of an introduction to the author. She has an interesting biography. Born into a prominent Kentucky landowning family, she was bright and artistic from childhood, and, after her father's death (probable suicide), her uncle in Tennessee housed the family and saw to her education, writing "You have shown decided symptoms of intellect, and I want you here by me so I can see it develop...You are all the girl I have got and I want to make you into as great a woman as if you were a boy." Remarkably open-minded for 1880. Under this encouragement, and with the role model of her strong, independent grandmother, Daviess developed into an artist, teacher, writer, and suffragette. More than one of her books was made into a movie, including "Out of a Clear Sky" (1918, starring Marguerite Clark, well-reviewed, now lost). She never married and had no children. Mary Grace McGeehan, in her 2018 "My Life 100 Years Ago" blog post "The surprisingly ubiquitous lesbians of 1918: A Pride Month Salute", writes that Daviess is "not famous enough today to have sparked much speculation about her sexuality", but it's pretty clear that she formed romantic attachments to both men and women. Perplexingly, her memoirs show that her liberalism in other areas didn't extend to "race mixing": an ABE listing for "Seven Times Seven" quotes her as saying she could never "sit down and eat with any human being with a brown skin". Which is to her shame and loss.

But Out of a Clear Sky. Like many of her novels, it's set in Harpeth Valley, Tennessee, "where nature and man are both generous and lovable". (NYT May 20 1917) And like many of them, it's folksy and sentimental, though not as overtly religious as some of her other titles. You'll want to take her in the same small doses you do Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, of whom she reminds me, but as long as you do -- and have a sweet tooth -- Thompson's awfully charming. Out of a Clear Sky isn't as good as The Melting of Molly, but it's still pretty irresistible. It shouldn't be -- the protagonist is so silly as to approach shooting distance of "too stupid to live", she spends an inordinate amount of time in tears ("I am alive, but I weep" (34)), and her French-to-English "Meester Bob Lawrence", gets more than a little old. And yet, and yet. It's actually somewhat exciting, and, in parts, moving. Celeste de Berseck and Krymn is 18, the daughter of a Belgian nobleman and an English mother. Her father and brother, having been "shot at Louvain" during the German invasion of 1914, she becomes the ward of an evil uncle, who's promised riches by the Emperor if he'll marry her to a German prince (Louis Augustus), making her a German and their "many children...a tie to make Belgium one with Germany." (36) When her mom dies in England, she and her American governess flee to the US, hoping to find shelter with her classmate in Chicago. Thence, the pursuit, the leap from the train, the encounter with Meester Bob, and the attempts to outrun, and outwit, the uncle and his entourage. Celeste is good-hearted and affectionate, if inexplicably naive, Bob Lawrence is everything honorable, and the side characters, "small Bill" (very much like her Melting of Molly kiddo) and Granny White (clearly modeled on her own grandmother) are lovingly portrayed. I can't deny I enjoyed almost every minute. A contemporary review in The Courier Journal (Mon Jul 30 1917) sums it up perfectly and I quote at length: "One must be able, if one is to find the charm, to shut out real life from the horizon as artists look at a section of landscape through rounded hands. The adventures of a Belgian countess who descended 'out of a clear sky' into a Tennessee forest and the care of 'Meester Bob' are readable and even engrossing, if accepted on these terms. The language of Celeste of Krymn, Countess de Berseck, is as fascinating nonsense as that of Lola in "Seventeen," and not to be taken much more seriously. There seems no sound reason -- no pun intended -- why a Belgian countess should call a dog's bark a 'terrifying animal noise,' nor why she should speak of a squirrel as 'a little animal that is much like those in the park in Kensington' that 'made a curl in his tail' Miss Daviess confuses language difficulties with matters of ordinary apprehension. By the same token her heroines (in this case the girl is only 18) preserve an abnormal juvenility in everyday matters, while behaving with truly heroic courage and idealism in weighty affairs. To criticise their behavior is to break the butterfly on the wheel. To those who like 'cute' heroines and the sort of optimism that is described by publishers as 'wholesome' Miss Daviess' story is unreservedly recommended." So, close your eyes to Celeste's cluelessness and Bob's "You child, you little, little child!" (75) and just float on...

Flaggish: Bob talks about the race instinct and race approval but it's in reference to procreation and it could be that he's referring to the human race? Granny White has three black male field laborers who tend her land but nothing slighting is said about them.