|
Article Excerpt
It was around 1988, while I was in the used book and antiquarian book trade, when a copy of a biography written by William Arnold titled Shadowland crossed my desk. It was about an actress, and her name was Frances Farmer.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
I probably would have just thumbed through the pages, looked up the price, and placed it with a pile of other books waiting their turn to be shelved. But something caught my eye. There were references to labor strikes and political radicalism in the thirties. There were also provocative and disturbing photographs. One showed a young high school student, Frances Farmer. The caption noted that she won national attention for penning an essay entitled "God Dies." In another shot of Farmer, taken just a few years later, she stands on the deck of a ship leaving on a trip to the Soviet Union. There were pictures of her performing on stage and screen; of her with her parents; some showed her being arrested, defiant, fighting the police. Several were of a gruesome medical procedure, a prefrontal lobotomy. A woman was secured on a gurney, people clustered around watching as a lone practitioner seems to wield a small hammer, ready to shove an instrument of some kind into the woman's skull.
What was going on?
I began reading Shadlowland, and stayed up most of that night to finish it, and in the morning called the American Atheist Center in Texas and talked to Madalyn O'Hair and Robin Murray-O'Hair. Did they know anything about a woman named Frances Farmer, and a half-century old essay contest that stunned Seattle and much of the nation? If anyone had information about this, it would likely be the O'Hairs. They had spent years collecting and writing about the history of Atheism and Freethought. Yes, the name was somewhat familiar, but incredibly even they did not know much. "Frances Farmer--wasn't she some actress?" This would be the beginning of a pattern that would emerge over the following years as I tried to delve into the life of this enigmatic woman. So many of the people I would end up talking to, people who might know something about Farmer, had only hints, rumors, slivers of what could be the truth.
"Didn't she go crazy?"
Or, "Wasn't she the one given a lobotomy? Just terrible ..."
And there was a quote from a newspaper columnist, "What happened to Frances Farmer shouldn't happen to anyone ..."
I was later to learn that some of the claims presented in William Arnold's book were inaccurate, others supported by only a gossamer web of circumstantial evidence. Shadowland did not have an index, it lacked footnotes, and it provided readers with little to document much of the story Arnold was trying to convey. There were also nagging problems with whole parts of this book, like the claim that Frances Farmer was the victim of a terrible miscarriage of legal justice and medical ethics, that this rebellious, strong-willed, out-spoken and independent-minded woman had been lobotomized to silence her. And there was so much omitted, or glossed over. I wanted to know more about Farmer as an Atheist heretic who as a young girl devoured philosophy, especially the works of Frederick Nietzsche. I wanted to know more about Farmer the feminist; about Farmer the political rebel of the Popular Front era in American History.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Frances Farmer was born on September 19, 1913 in Seattle, Washington, the third child of Lillian Van Ornum and Ernest Melvin Farmer. If there was any hint of this baby's future, it might have been the Van Ornum legacy. Her grandfather was Zacheus Van Ornum, born in 1828, and later part of a wave of immigrants moving west in the early nineteenth century. He became a trail scout and translator for hire. He was also an ardent heretic and freethinker, maybe an out-and-out Atheist, and a vocal defender of the ideas of Charles Darwin. By one family account, Van Ornum would silently lead his family brood into a church, listen quietly to the ranting of the preacher--and when he had heard enough (sometimes, it is hinted, with firearm in hand), seize the podium and lecture the credulous congregation on the enlightened findings of science and the insights of Darwinism.
Frances' father was an attorney who apparently engaged in numerous failed business enterprises. Her mother Lillian has been described as a strong-willed, eccentric, and dominating woman, often a mass of contradictions,. There was conflict between her parents and eventual separation; but one idea the young and head-strong Frances Farmer learned at an early age was this: stand by your convictions, stand up for your ideas, and she did just that.
She was a precocious child. She was also a voracious reader throughout her life. In her teenage years Farmer was studying a good deal of weighty philosophy, particularly the works of Frederick Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche, that most misunderstood of thinkers, who proclaimed the death of god, the consequent emancipation of humanity, and the embrace of creative vitality. For Nietzsche, it was we--humanity--who impose a rational order, meaning, and values on the universe, not the gods be they Christian, Greek, or any others. Years later, as she was becoming one of the reigning queens of the Hollywood scene, studio photographs would show an elegant Frances Farmer pensively reading at home, a full bookcase of classic works in the background.
Frances took this message of Atheism to heart. In 1931 she was attending West Seattle High School and was a student in a creative writing class taught by a woman named Belle McKenzie. She was already "breaking the mold" in so many aspects, including gender. The 1930 yearbook from West Seattle High shows her as one of the few leading female figures in the Debate Club. There she is, the last figure in the front row, staring at the camera, brooding, serious. A portent of things to come?
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
As part of a class competition, Farmer wrote an essay titled "God Dies." It recounted how she had lost a new hat and prayed to God in order to find it, which she did. This exuberant, initial faith in a benevolent and helpful household deity is shattered when she learns about the deaths of a classmate's parents. She naturally becomes outraged at the injustice and unfairness of it all. She wrote that prior to this tragedy, God had become a "Super father" responding to her prayer.
"That satisfied me," she revealed, "until I began to figure out that if God loved me and all His children equally, why did he bother about my hat and let other children lose their fathers and mothers for always?"
"God was gone," a young and questioning Frances Farmer concluded.
Years later, a writer for Christianity Today in reviewing the 1982 film Frances praised Frances Farmer for her commitment to social justice, but described her essay as "adolescent." The subtext here is that Farmer's questioning and enlightenment regarding the existence of God was nothing more than ideational puberty so to speak, something to be dismissed, the mere Angst of a young girl, and nothing more substantive.
It was anything but. For those who have made this sort of philosophical hegira, this journey, Nietzsche, other writers, even Framer's essay speaks evocatively to us. Farmer was talking about theodicy, the problem of evil in a world supposedly conjured and presided over by an all-benevolent, powerful God. Theodicy remains a significant and nagging obstacle to any thinking person arguing for the existence of any omniscient, altruistic deity.
Even at the age of 16, Frances Farmer had it right. And so did a lot of other people. Lively letters being exchanged in...
|
