“Scenes from A Girl’s Brief Life: Julia Newberry,” by Sarah White

Ballade of Julia Newberry

Where is the proud Old-Maid-to-Be of 1869?
Where’s Miss Pelet, who called her an enfant gatée?
Where is the studio with a secret stair?
Where are the dollies and bonbonnière,
the keepsakes, albums, and diaries?
Lost in Fever, Fire, and Fortune.

Where is her jaunty leghorn hat?
Where are the organdies, linens, crêpes de chines?
Where is the dark-haired girl who posed as Autumn?
Where is fair Mary, the Spring
and Ernestine, who fastened and unfastened
hundreds of hooks?
Lost in Fever, Fire, and Fortune.

Where is the long-handled parasol?
Where are the lap-robes and the excursions?
Where is le petit bleu with terrible news?
Where are a father’s plea and a daughter’s vow?
“Be someone, Julie.” “I will.”
Where is the widow, who heard, after Easter prayers,
“Mother, I’m cold. I want to go home,”
a whisper lost in Fever, Fire, and Fortune.

What does it matter? She would have died hereafter.
Where’s Uncle James, who sent the faire part?
Where’s cousin Minnie, who read it and wailed,
“She is gone. I have lost my soul.”?
Lost in Fever, Fire, and Fortune!

Opening the Diary

The Diary of Julia Newberry, written between June 1869 and October 1871 by an adolescent Chicago girl, was discovered in an upstate New York attic sixty years after her death, published in 1933 by W. W. Norton. It was followed by a sequel, Julia Newberry’s Sketchbook, or The Life of Two Future Old Maids.

The Diary was out of print when I picked it up in the Bryn Mawr Bookstore near Harvard Square in the spring of 1972 and opened it to the page dated October 13, my birthday— not, of course, in the year I was born, but in 1871. I was captivated by the voice I heard coming from Paris:

I am perfectly bewildered by the rush of events. I don’t know what to write or what to think. Half of Chicago is in ashes, it is too awful to believe, to [sic] dreadful to think about. And the suspense is fearful, and reports so vague & no one can get direct information.

News had traveled over the new transatlantic cable to a group of wealthy Chicagoans “(Mr. McCagg and seven or eight other Chicago men)” in Paris:

The fire began Sunday night, here it is Friday & we know nothing. I haven’t a doubt the stores on Kinzie street are gone, but I cant & wont imagine our house is burnt.

Academic history books I’d read completely lacked this immediacy—an account of events of which the writer herself doesn’t know the outcome, while I will know it the minute I turn to the next entry:

Teusday [sic] Oct 17, 1871:

[The Fire] swept the two magnificent avenues & every building on the South side from twelveth [sic]street to the river. The Court House, with the original copy of Father’s will & no one knows how many invaluable papers, legal documents, records, the beautiful Crosbie Opera house, a perfect bijou of a theatre, all the banks, insurance offices, railway depots, churches, & block after block of stores, unequalled any where.

It is clear that the worst thing that could have happened has happened:

And then oh misery, the fire, the red, angry, unrelenting fire leapt across the river, & burnt & burnt, till Mr. Mahlon Ogden’s house was the only one left standing up to Lincoln Park. [Mr. Ogden has managed to cover his entire house with drenched quilts and blankets]. Yes the whole North Side is in ashes, literally in ashes, &. every memory connected with my home is gone, every association, every link; never never to be again, irreparably and irrevocably gone.— No one ever loved their home more than I did mine…my studio, my beautiful studio, & the private staircase, & my room that I have looked forward to furnishing myself in pink & grey.

Julia is seventeen. Her first response to the devastating news is to cheer herself up by attending a friend’s evening party. But when she returns to the hotel and undresses, she collapses on a chaise with her diary and draws in it a detailed plan of the Newberrys’ ruined house, only recently remodeled, plus a list of every destroyed thing. She will remember the details of the completed, and now undone, remodeling. She will draw the floor plan in her diary and mourn all the objects of value.

I loved every angle in the house, every carpet, every table, every picture on the walls, every book in the library, the stairs, the basement, the garret.

Five decades ago, when I found the Diary, something about my own state of mind connected me to this heartbroken girl mourning the loss of her childhood, facing the shutdown of her hoped-for future. Julia’s eloquence aroused my respect for her grief. I was drawn to her impulse to recover her losses through naming and writing.

I was not by any means a connoisseur of diaries (I had not yet even read Anne Frank’s). Julia’s language spoke to me. I had a sense that she had read the same novels and narrative poems I had internalized as a girl in the old-style Albany Academy for Girls. Her penciled pages seemed to echo readings assigned to me—some by my mother, others by my excellent teachers at the Academy— Dickens, Scott, the Brontes, Longfellow, Tennyson, Stevenson, Browning, and Barrett (whom Julia disliked.)

The Diary, like these other works, rocks like a metrical cradle: “This is the forest primeval … Dactyls,”one long and two short syllables, “murmuring, Newberry, Julia.”

“Anapest.” itself a dactyl, a foot with two short and one long syllable, a dactyl reversed … “Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house … from ana-, paien, pais, to strike, as if a blow were required to reverse the dactyl. The mnemonic we learned was ‘With a leap and a bound the swift anapests throng.’”

Julia had not wanted to travel from home with its memories of Father (recently dead of tuberculosis, the principal Newberry illness) including “poor little Jamie,” her consumptive baby brother. It was Julia’s Mother and older sister Mary who most prized Worth gowns and endless teas with other traveling Chicagoans (though Julia herself did enjoy these, she had to admit).

In the Diary, anapests throng like dancers at the ball in Nice where she had danced with General Philip Sherman, revolving as if the prose were verse, as if Julia were recalling “Half-a-league, half-a-league, half-a-league onward, Into the Valley of Death….” Emphatic spondees like “North Side,” “Great Fire” may slow the phrase to a crawl: “My head feels as if it were filled with molten lead.” She read the news in far-off France soon after flames had traveled up the basement steps, crawled along parlor walls, onward, with a leap and a bound across the billiard room to the safe that held Mother’s silver, Father’s will …

… reversing and climbing, with primeval murmur, up the private stair to her studio where, on a sill surrounded by shards of window glass, stood the throng of “twenty-five dollies, poor wretches, all roasted in turn …” …terrible anapests.

Ballade of October 1871

Awful dots and dashes
cross the transatlantic Wires—
word of an insatiable Fire
borne on burning slips of paper
over the Chicago River
and filling travelers’ heads
with vertigo, and fever.

Gone, fortunes, gone, labors,
gone, North Side, gardens, silver.
in the safes lie molten spoons

and Mama’s bonbonniere,
gone, Father’s letters; gone,
father’s study; gone, her secret stair.

(The news, received in Paris,
fills her head, she says, with molten lead,
she holds her Diary on the hotel sofa
and draws the diagram of what’s lost and dead—

the plans, the formal and informal rooms,
the tool sheds, parterres, alcoves, corners, doors,
painted baby brothers—boys so soon consumed,
letters from the famous men her father knew:
Fenimore Cooper, James Buchanan,
not to mention her own albums
in the private studio, the pianoforte,
the secret stair, the room
she planned to decorate in pink and grey.
Her books of drawings. Where are they?
How well they burn—and look,
the twenty-five wretched, roasted dollies.
___________________________

Paris, where, the year before,
they burned the Gardens
of the Tuileries,
burned and ate the rats in alleys,
burned the birds in zoos,
roasted them on spits,
as hungry soldiers do.

“Weak as a Cat”

Taking stock on the morning of her seventeenth birthday (December 28, 1870), Julia, in Nice with her mother and sister, writes that her mother has given her an emerald ring and her sister a hundred dollars in gold. “I could not believe I was really seventeen years old … I have been twice to Florida, & three times to Europe. I have been to two boarding schools, & gained a great many friends in different ways. Have been run-away with twice [by horses, we suppose] & had my portrait painted. I have learned how to faint, & have inheireted [sic] a fortune.”

Has she become an heiress before learning to spell “inherit”? Fainting and fortune are in twin sentences. Are they closely related?

In a rollicking rhythm Julia describes her first faint—complete with a quotation from Hamlet.

September 20, 1869. Breevoort House, New York
Tuesday morning we went to Stewarts to try on dresses. I stood a long while and started to feel very queer and lo and behold I had a fainting fit, such an absurd thing. I felt all the blood leave my face, and Sister, dreadfully frightened, claimed I turned green and white as a corpse.

Green and white!

I felt most horrid as if I were going to “shuffle off this mortal coil.” I couldn’t have moved to save my life. They gave me water and some other stuff and fanned and fussed until I was better. I always wanted to faint once, to know how it felt. It is very nasty. Heroines faint, but authors never say it’s because they are bilious.

I have been weak as a cat ever since.

Perhaps I respond so strongly to Julia because I have been told that my grandmother was an expert in fainting. She used to faint when her daughter, my mother, was on her way out on a date with someone my grandmother disapproved of. Is there an art to fainting? Is fainting worth “learning” as a means of persuasion? At first, it doesn’t seem so. The unnamed illness that came on with Julia’s fainting spell at Stewart’s did nothing for her except to remove her from Miss Haines’ School “just as I was nicely, comfortably, happily settled … I had to leave … & I had only been there two weeks.”

Julia’s syncope adolescens deprives her of access to companions other than her mother and sister, including a possible good friend. Miss Prescott is a very nice girl. She said she should tell Miss H. she had found a kindred spirit “& indeed our tastes do agree most wonderfully. She actually likes to write compositions, history is her favorite study, her watch-chain is exactly like mine & came from Paris, & we are just the same height.”

It is decided that Julia is not strong enough, after her Christmas vacation, to return to Miss Haines’s school or her friend Miss Prescott. It is not fair to say that Julia’s mother and sister are happy about her chronic syncope. But inasmuch as the fainting cuts her off from people, it does contribute to one of their larger purposes. They need to put limits on her social life to shield her from those boys and girls who might be seeking her company only because of her wealth.

Instead of returning to school, she must go to a resort in Florida, where she will be courted by an odd boy named Jack Foster who likes her so much that he presents her with a pet baby alligator. They keep it in a small washtub in her room until it dies from eating too much rich ground beef from the hotel dining room and not enough mixed debris from the nearby river. In time, Jack will hang a gold alligator with ruby eyes on her charm bracelet.

Easter 1876.

By Easter 1876, Mrs. Newberry had lost her husband, her infant sons, and recently, Mary, one of her two attractive young daughters. We know her eldest daughter from the diary as the competent, fond, if bossy, older sister who keeps an eye on Julia’s health and moods. Until Mary, all too peacefully, succumbs to the tuberculosis that has felled all the others. We have no diary pages that record Julia’s distress at that loss.

It is her mother who records the cold Easter when she and Julia attend a Protestant service in Rome. Suddenly overtaken with fever and a sore throat, Julia begged to return to her hotel bed, where her mother and uncle watched in horror as diphtheria closed her throat and stopped her breath. She is buried in Rome’s Protestant cemetery, where two years later, Henry James would bury his quixotic Daisy Miller, and where John Keats lies with his “name writ on water.”

The Newberry fortune, having no heirs, built a world-famous library whose holdings in books, documents, maps, family and municipal archives, are available to readers and researchers from everywhere in a world where Julia herself would probably have preferred to spend her life drawing and continuing her memoir at the top of a secret stair. Julia had bravely faced the loss of “twenty-five dollies roasted in turn” on the windowsill of her study. Now she would bravely have returned to work on her art project—humorous drawings—The Life of Two Future Old Maids, a collaboration with her younger cousin Minnie Klapp. And she had never ceased work on her most productive project of all—the Diary, which offered abundant empty pages for chronicling the growth of a wise and witty daughter of Chicago. By now, she would have furnished the study in pink and gray.