Laura Ingalls Wilder's Orange Notebooks and the Art of the Little House Books

"The road pushes against the grassy land and breaks off short. And that's the end of it," said Laura.

"It can't be," Mary objected. "The road goes all the way to Silver Lake."

"I know it does," Laura answered.

"Well, then I don't think you ought to say things like that," Mary told her gently. "We should always be careful to say exactly what we mean."

"I was saying what I meant," Laura protested. But she could not explain. There were so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of saying them.¹

The easy flow of her language and the enormous recall of details of her life deceive the reader into imagining that Laura Ingalls Wilder must have found writing her autobiographical novels for children a matter of no more than sitting down to record exactly what she meant, in order from the earliest memories until her marriage. That she worked "over her material painstakingly, revising and polishing it and verifying dates," Elizabeth Rider Montgomery tells us.² But how hard she worked to choose between the "many ways of seeing things and . . . many ways of saying them" becomes clearer when one examines the evidence of her work itself.

The possibilities of what the well-known orange notebooks from the Springfield Grocer Company might tell us did not seem urgent until the posthumous publication of three of them in 1971, under the title The First Four Years. Roger Lea MacBride, in his "Introduction," warns the reader that because Mrs. Wilder "lost interest in revising and completing it for publication" after Almanzo's death, "there is a difference from the earlier books in the way the story is told."³ Any child notices the difference, and may accept it, through his great faith in Mrs. Wilder. But the adult is struck by its relative flatness, the lack-lustre quality of its language, the very different character of Laura from the one he has learned to know and love, the disheartening series of misfortunes. One is also struck by many episodes' being told again, less well it seems than the first time. The impulse to discover the character of the dissimilarities leads one to compare familiar portions of The First Four Years with the same events as they are related in These Happy Golden Years,⁴ published during her lifetime. The latter novel is drawn in part from events also related in The First Four Years, and revised by Mrs. Wilder in a manner that presumably satisfied her exacting standards of language, form, and mood. Some key to Mrs. Wilder's approach to her art may surface from a systematic examination of these differences.

The "Prologue" of The First Four Years corresponds to the middle portion of Chapter 23, "Barnum Walks," in These Happy Golden Years. In two brief pages, the "Prologue" describes a horse-drawn buggy out under the stars, bearing "the driver and the white-clothed form in the seat beside him." At length "a sweet contralto voice rose softly on the air" and sang "in the starlight," "for it was June . . . and lovers were abroad in the still, sweet evenings." In These Happy Golden Years, the same scene occurs directly after the closing session of Mr. Clewett's singing school. But the event is transformed. The distance established by anonymous characters and the mere outlines of human forms in the "Prologue" is broken down when the driver and his companion become Almanzo and Laura, and when the close observation of detail and the injection of dialogue fill in the picture so the the reader shares the experience. "Barnum no longer reared and plunged. He started quickly, with a little jump, into a smooth trot. The air was chilled with the breath of coming winter. . . . There was no sound but the soft clip-clop of Barnum's feet as he walked along the grassy prairie road."⁵ Almanzo asks Laura to sing the starlight song, which she does, and then, where "lovers were abroad," we have dramatized for us the scene in which...