“All the minds, sparkling and mysterious and more everlasting than souls”

I came to know Elizabeth Marion quite well during my research on the Carl Van Doren book. Elizabeth was a writer from a rural town in Washington State who met Van Doren at a writer’s conference in 1946. I’ve pored through boxes upon boxes of correspondence between the two writers, and have written on their literary relationship. Now I’d like to introduce Elizabeth Marion in her own right.

Before she was thirty, Elizabeth Marion of Spangle had authored three novels: The Day Will Come (1939), Ellen Spring (1941), and The Keys to the House (1944). She was born in Spokane in 1916 and was raised on the family farm near Spangle, and later Fairfield, with her parents and her younger siblings. How a young woman from a remote corner of the Northwest came to be a published novelist during the tail-end of the Great Depression is a great story, a tribute to unassailable determination: she researched her options and reached out to successful writers in New York who might be able to make an introduction on her behalf. The 22-year old introduced herself by letter to the writer, historian, and radio show host Hendrik Willem Van Loon, a name that has subsequently been lost to history but was widely known in its day. For his part, Van Loon was taken with Elizabeth Marion’s unique way with words and introduced the young writer to an editor at Thomas Crowell Company. This fortuitous connection lead to Crowell’s publication of Elizabeth Marion’s three novels. From The Keys to the House, she wrote:

It was the empty silence of the house, the immobile silence of the barnyard, that enhanced her imaginary fears. She herself seemed to move wraith-like about the house and yards, surrounded by an ominous oblivion she could not combat when he was gone. He was a very quiet person: he walked quietly, he talked calmly and without temper, he amused himself placidly with books and magazines and radio, even when he cursed over a stubborn total in his book-keeping his profanity was mild and without explosiveness…

The convenient commonplace of good pavement and service stations and legible road signs has almost erased, not the wonder of any country, but the human ability and desire to see the wonder. When a man travels fast toward a distant goal, he seldom sees the thing at hand. It hides behind a transparent haze of speed, and vanishes backward before he can look.

The descriptive quality we find in her fictional writing is the same verve Elizabeth Marion summoned in her personal correspondence to Van Loon and later, literary critic and historian Carl Van Doren. Elizabeth met Van Doren in 1946 at the Conference of Writers on the Northwest at Portland’s Reed College, where she immediately captured the attention of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Benjamin Franklin. Throughout the vast collection of her letters to Van Doren, Elizabeth wrote enthusiastically and at length. She wrote of the weather, usually snowing or raining or otherwise not for the faint-of-heart, in her rugged corner of the Northwest. She wrote of the books she was reading or would like to read but could not find at either the library or the local bookstore because the library and the bookstore did not possess the titles she was looking for (she especially liked volumes of letters). She wrote of the cats who shared her room, and the crowded and usually cold office nook she carved out of a small room behind the family’s kitchen, which could use a good cleaning. She wrote of using patterned stationery versus plain paper, and wondered if using patterned stationery made writers write better. She wrote of the new calf in the barn, the sounds of the local birds (chinooks), the precise shade of brown she saw in the turbulent river rushing through town after a rainy spell. Elizabeth Marion had a lot to say, and she was very happy to write all of it to Van Doren, who was enchanted by her energy and her wit and the sheer volume of her correspondence. 

Elizabeth shared with Van Doren the joy she found in the written word. Writing even ten sentences a day was a day well spent. She admitted that brevity was not her forte, and proudly described the fun she had putting pen to paper. She was, however, having less luck with her next novel. A meeting with her publisher’s representative in Seattle in 1948 proved hopeful, and Elizabeth was pleased to learn that Crowell was indeed interested in publishing her next book. The onus was on the author to produce a manuscript, the completion of which continued to elude her. Elizabeth was working on several writing projects, but nothing sounded quite right to her ear, nothing, to her mind, was “fit to print.” Frustrated, she accepted an editorial position at The Standard-Register in nearby Rockford. The reality, then as now, was there: writers do not get paid simply to write. Elizabeth admitted to Van Doren, “…being both lazy and optimistic and sure that the opus after the next will make my everlasting fortune, I’d rather not work, but oh me, how I do need some cash right now…a dismal subject.” But whether for publication or for pleasure, a writer must write, and Elizabeth continued her unique way with words in her near-daily correspondence to Van Doren:

…all the windows are open from the top to prevent Ouiji [cat] from taking a flying dive into the universe, and between roars in the traffic the running of the waters is plain to hear…I stopped to watch it, down at the little bridge on Main Street – just at the bridge the banks jut out a little and drop down a trifle, and the water rushes together in a V-shaped junction with two fringes of foam on either side the V…such a wondrous color it is – but not for water – the fine lush dark-brown of fields, the color of disaster and grief…

I’m not going to give away the rest of EM’s story; that would spoil the book. I will say that writing was a central component of her life. Her 7th Street apartment in Spokane was, as one would expect, full of books. Books lined the shelves and overflowed in stacks throughout her home. The magic that books held for Elizabeth Marion in her twenties, those cloth- and paper-bound jewels which shone so brightly “because they’re so distant….books do that for me, more than anything else…all the minds, sparkling and mysterious and more everlasting than souls, leaving their welcome testaments on the bookshelves” retained this charm for her throughout her life. Elizabeth Marion’s papers are archived at Washington State University, with a sizable collection of her letters to and from Carl Van Doren housed in the Carl Van Doren Papers at Princeton University Library.