The Ox-Bow Man: A Biography Of Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Chapter Three: Marriage, Children, and Cazenovia Central School

« chapter three » marriage, children, and cazenovia central school W      at Nevada, Walter Clark met Barbara Frances Morse, the attractive and very bright daughter of a retired Presbyterian minister. Barbara, who suƒered from serious sinus problems, had come to Reno for her health after three years at Oberlin. A key to her somewhat eccentric personality might be seen in the fact that she was a music major at Oberlin although she was tone deaf. Their son Robert has reflected on the match between his father and mother: I suspect that it was her liveliness, her intelligence, and perhaps her relative worldliness that was the initial attraction—plus being attractive enough physically—she had the long, bent nose she called the Morse nose. [In] that early photo of her, when she was about the age she was when they met, she is looking something like a flapper, and she was close to three years older than dad.... I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t more or less vamp the relatively innocent Walter. › 43 ‹ 03-unv002.c3.4 6/29/04 4:23 PM Page 43 Relatively innocent? Such a description puts Clark in a somewhat diƒerent light. Nevertheless, this would seem to be an appraisal that Clark, in looking back, made of himself. One has to think of his fictional self-portrait, Tim Hazard, in The City of Trembling Leaves—a dreamy, sensitive, artistic, young man inspired by romantic legends. In October of 1933, while Walter was still in graduate school at the University of Vermont, the couple was married by Barbara’s father in his home in Elmira, New York. After a brief honeymoon at a borrowed cabin in the Adirondack Mountains, Barbara went back to Elmira while her husband returned to his rented room in a professor’s house in Burlington to finish his work at the university. Walter and Barbara were well matched. Both loved conversation and convivial companionship. They would stay together throughout their lives—he the breadwinner and sometime star of the family and she the supporter in everything he did. As their son has said, She certainly belongs with those wives who take over more of the burdens of everyday and family to help the husband with his art. Later in the marriage, however much the fun-loving, high spirited and more experienced one she might have been early, she saw herself as the practical one. And she was. She did all the bill-paying, did the taxes (and had frequent skirmishes with local  o~ces over deducting things related to the writing as business expenses.) ... She certainly was the housewife, and the main raiser of us children, and protecting Dad from us so he could write, although she said Dad would play with us as she didn’t, when he came home from teaching school. When Barbara and Walter met, she had an ambition to become a writer of mystery stories, and she continued to work at her writing throughout much of her life. Her imagined hero was a the ox-bow man › 44 ‹ 03-unv002.c3.4 6/29/04 4:23 PM Page 44 Anne Jenette (Barbara’s sister) and Barbara Frances Morse at Morse summer house in Essex, New York, ca. 1927. Courtesy of Robert M. Clark Walter and Barbara Clark, probably near Missoula, Montana, on automotive tour by Walter and a friend around the country, 1929. Barbara was taking summer school at the University of Montana. Courtesy of Robert M. Clark 03-unv002.c3.4 6/29/04 4:23 PM Page 45 Studio portrait, Barbara Frances Morse, summer 1929, when she was twenty-two years old, in Missoula, Montana. Courtesy of Robert M. Clark 03-unv002.c3.4 6/29/04 4:23 PM Page 46 Pennsylvania state trooper. At one point, with her husband’s help, shefinallysubmittedamanuscripttoapublisher.Therejectionletter became a family story, repeated by mother and father with some amusement. The letter said, as son Robert recalls, that “the writing was very good, as was the basic plot (which was hers), but the long descriptions of people and places slowed down the action too much.” So according her husband’s wishes and her agreement, Barbara, for the most part, settled on playing the conventional role of wife and mother as prescribed in the first part of the twentiethcentury .Nevertheless,shewasinmanywaysherownperson. She could be sharp, critical, and outspoken, although no one ever...