Immortal Wife
By
JESSIE BENTON FRÉMONT was the wife of John Charles Frémont, soldier, pathfinder, visionary, and political idealist in the America of a hundred years ago. Jessie Frémont believed that the true and greatest destiny for a woman is to stand “ shoulder to shoulder and brain to brain” beside her husband, as partner and comrade. She had opportunity to prove her principle. Fremont faced death in the Sierras and court-martial in Washington; amassed a fortune in California and lost it on the Hudson; rose to national fame, then slipped back into obscurity. Jessie shared his adventures — often in actuality, always in imagination and sympathy.
Her story, as Irving Stone tells it, is an absorbing one. The reader who follows it moves from mining village to Senate Chamber to battle-encampment. He meets the men of the day: Buchanan the compromiser, and the uncompromising Horace Greeley; young Bret Harte whose creative energy was so vigorous that he wrote his stories “not with pencil but with galley type”; Abraham Lincoln — a towering figure, “dark, brooding.” He becomes familiar as well with a thousand careful details — the parlors of the White House are lighted by wax tapers and decorated with camellias and laurustinus; Jessie does her hair “in the new Polish fashion with a braid of nine strands, a small bunch of flowers and leaves. . . .”
Supplementing Mr. Stone’s more reliable data are a great many “reimagined” conversations, reveries, and emotional exchanges by the main characters. One or two incidents are reconstructed where the author is convinced only of their “probability.” This fictionalizing will be acceptable to readers who can enjoy the book wholly on the author’s terms as a biographical novel. Yet Jessie Fremont lived within the recall of many of us, and the greater part of her life is documented. Readers who feel that the plain biographical facts are more fascinating than fiction, and most fascinating when set forth without twist or padding, will be disturbed by the question: How much of the material in this book belongs to Jessie Frémont’s own story, and how much to the imagination of Irving Stone?
Both as biographer and as novelist, Mr. Stone lays his emphasis on Jessie’s creation of her marriage into a third entity that could bind and yet transcend the individual identities of husband and wife. His treatment of the theme is impressive, and most impressive when least rhetorical. It is in his account of the decline of the Fremont fortunes during the last years of Jessie’s married life, when, having much ground to cover, he tells his story succinctly and with little embellishment, that his narrative and his heroine seem most fully to merit the title he has chosen for them. Doubleday, Doran, $3.00.
ELEANOR RUGGLES