Tag Archives: historical research

The Year of Jane Grant: On Marcia Davenport and Archival Absences

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Way back in the spring of this year I traveled to Washington, D.C. It was a multi-purpose trip. I wanted to attend the annual conference of the Biographers International Organization (BIO). I have been a member for several years and have met, mostly online, many wonderful and talented writers. This would be a chance to see some of them in person and to learn new things about writing biography.

And while in D.C., I could do some research at the Library of Congress in two collections that I thought might have some useful information about Jane Grant: the papers of author Marcia Davenport and the records of the Writers’ War Board (WWB).

The third reason was just as important: sightseeing. Charles and I hadn’t been to D.C. in a very long time and it’s one of our favorite cities. I hesitated a bit because of the presence of the current administration but then worried that because of the current administration, the things we enjoy seeing might not be accessible for much longer. (I was right to be concerned. The recent government shutdown caused the Smithsonian to close its doors.) So off we went.

It was a marvelous trip. We visited many of the Smithsonian museums and various monuments, we ate at very good restaurants—our favorite was probably Immigrant Food at the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. The BIO conference was illuminating, and I enjoyed meeting other biographers. I hope to attend another soon, especially when it’s back in its usual New York City location, because then I can add some more Jane Grant research to my itinerary.

(Immigrant Food at the White House, 1701 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, via Tripadvisor)

About the second reason for the D.C. trip: archival research. I ended up not needing all the time for it that I blocked off. On the one hand—yay! More time for museums. On the other—rats! Nothing new about Jane. I knew it was a gamble going in, but a historian always hopes to get her eyes on something stunning. Or at least interesting. Mostly, though, the visit to the Library of Congress served as a sharp reminder of archival absences, what gets saved and preserved and what gets, for one reason or another, tossed.

(Library of Congress, Main Entrance of the Thomas Jefferson building, Billy Wilson, Flickr, 2022, NPS.gov)

During World War II, Jane served as the editor of the WWB’s newsletter. The board was a volunteer organization that helped the government produce well-written propaganda in support of the war effort by matching writers with issues the government and military wanted to highlight. The WWB’s records provided a lot of information on how this worked, but nothing about Jane’s role that I didn’t already know from the documents she saved and are with her papers at the University of Oregon.

I knew from the collection description of Marcia Davenport’s papers that they focused on her writing career—that there would be a lot about her public life and maybe nothing about her private life. The second part proved true. Since she and Jane were friends for many years, I’d hoped that some of their personal correspondence might have sneaked in. But Jane is as absent in the collection as she is in Marcia’s 1967 memoir Too Strong for Fantasy. (To be fair, Marcia does not appear in Jane’s memoir, either. But Marcia’s book covers the time period during which their friendship was the most active, and Jane’s does not.)

Jane first knew Marcia Davenport as Marcia Clarke. Before that, she was Abigail Marcia Glick, born in New York City in 1903 to Reba Feinsohn Glick and Bernard Glick, who worked in insurance. The Romanian-born Reba, twelve years younger than her husband, began formal singing lessons as an adult, taking her young daughter with her to Europe for her summer studies. Within a few years Reba was performing at the Metropolitan Opera under her stage name, Alma Gluck. Marcia’s parents divorced in 1911, and she started using the name Gluck instead of Glick, so throughout her life she was known, at different times, as Glick, Gluck, Clarke, and finally Davenport. Three years after the divorce, Alma Gluck married Ephrem Zimbalist, a concert violinist. (Alma then gave birth to Marcia’s half-brother, Ephrem Zimbalist, Jr., who went on to become an actor, probably most known as the lead in the 1960s television show The F.B.I., and the father of Stephanie Zimbalist, who in the 1980s co-starred in the marvelous Remington Steele with Pierce Brosnan.)

(Alma Gluck and daughter Marcia, c. 1915, Library of Congress)

Growing up, Marcia was surrounded by classical music and classical musicians. She had also become, by her own admission, a “spoilt brat.” Her mother sent her to live with the Earl Barnes family, friends of friends, in Philadelphia where she attended a Quaker day school. From there, Marcia enrolled at Wellesley College in 1921 but failed to graduate. During the summer of 1922, while taking some courses at the University of Grenoble in France, she met Frank Delmas Clarke, who was from New Orleans and a student at Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School in New Haven, Connecticut.

They fell in love. Both returned to their respective colleges in the fall but hated being apart. Marcia, who had not done well during her freshman year, knew she was in danger of flunking out. Clarke was not happy with his program, so they decided to get engaged. Clarke dropped out of school, and a relative secured a position for him in the coal business in Pittsburgh. Marcia and Clarke married on April 22, 1923, in Port Chester, New York, before moving to the Steel City.

The next year, Marcia gave birth to a daughter. Clarke relocated the family to Philadelphia, where he had taken a new job, then walked out on them after a few weeks. Suddenly a single mother, Marcia scrambled to land a job as a copywriter for a local retail store. She enjoyed the work and thrived on it, appreciating the independence it afforded her. In 1927, she returned to New York City to pursue a job as a writer.

Vanity Fair editor and friend of the family Frank Crowninshield arranged an introduction to John Hanrahan, business manager at The New Yorker. Since Marcia lacked any real journalism experience, Crowninshield thought Hanrahan would be more likely to see the potential in her advertising copy portfolio. It would at least get her a foot in the door at the magazine.

The strategy worked. Hanrahan put in a word for Marcia with Harold Ross, and she was asked to write an article, on speculation, about a new apartment house that was going up. “The assignment was like handing a porterhouse steak to a hungry hound,” Marcia recalled in her memoir. “I was hired immediately as a general staff writer. My basic work was as a reporter for ‘The Talk of the Town.’ My job was leg-work, gathering at its sources the material which the rewrite geniuses turned into the front-of-the-book.”

Soon, in addition to her “Talk of the Town” work, Marcia was writing five columns under different pseudonyms. She later remembered that this frenetic activity was not unique to her. “We all worked as hard. We thought nothing of working from early morning until nine or ten at night, with a sandwich for lunch at our desks. Then after a dinner break the proofs would start coming in. They had to be corrected and rewritten in whole or in part after Ross got his hooks into them, so it was the rule rather than the exception to work from eleven or twelve at night until dawn.”

It’s not clear exactly when Jane Grant met Marcia, but it was likely not long after she started at The New Yorker. If the two women didn’t run into each other during one of Jane’s rare visits to the magazine’s office, Ross might have made a point of mentioning Marcia to his wife. The women had a lot in common: music, opera, journalism. It is likely that Jane invited Marcia to the brownstone for dinner at least once, maybe more often.

In 1929, the year Jane and Ross divorced, Marcia remarried. Russell Davenport was a Yale graduate and an aspiring novelist and poet from an influential Philadelphia family. Marcia Davenport left The New Yorker about a year later to focus on writing a biography of Mozart, which was published in 1932 by Charles Scribner’s Sons and remained in print for decades.

During the 1930s, when Jane traveled extensively through Europe, she and Marcia joined up for at least part of her journey. They got along so well that once, after they parted from their travels in the summer of 1937, Marcia wrote to Jane, “I can tell you with the utmost truth that the best part of the summer for me was our trip, even with the trials of Albania, and that Athens remains the high point of my experiences for a long time past.”

Their friendship may have continued beyond the late 1930s, after Jane stopped taking European vacations. Fascism had been on the rise and World War II was about to break out. William Harris, the man Jane was seeing in the 1930s and would later marry, took a job at Fortune in 1937, the same year Russell Davenport became the magazine’s managing editor, so the two women had that connection as well.

Marcia Davenport’s writing career took off in the 1930s. She worked for a few years as the music critic for Stage magazine, which had a financial connection to The New Yorker. She penned two best-selling novels in the 1940s: The Valley of Decision, a multi-generational family drama, and East Side, West Side, a story of the unraveling of the marriage of a New York City couple. Both became big-budget MGM movies; the first starred Greer Garson and Gregory Peck, the second James Mason and Barbara Stanwick.

(Marcia Davenport at NBC radio, 1936)

So far, I have found no evidence that Jane read either of the novels or saw the movie versions. But I will be making another research trip to the University of Oregon for another look through Jane’s papers. I did not have enough time to turn over every page during my first trip, but one of the things I want to keep an eye out for on my next visit is additional information about the Jane/Marcia friendship. It may exist. It may not. That’s all part of the research life—finding the conversations and confronting the silences.

Now that December is here, it’s time to draw to a close The Year of Jane Grant. My work on the Jane Grant book will continue into 2026, so stay tuned for updates on its progress. The first posts of 2026 will likely be my annual roundup of my favorite books from the past year, something I love to share.

Until then, happy holidays!

A 2912 Tale of Photographs, Memories, and Momories, Part II: Irene senior and Irene junior

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I’ve been trying to write this second part of the 2912 Tale since last November. Every time I get to a certain section of it, my brain refuses to move forward. I keep thinking, nope, this is too much. Even though I’ve been writing and publishing for close to thirty years, for this part of the Tale, words fail me. Repeatedly.

Anyway, a quick reminder of the preceding post: Back in October, as I sorted through family pictures with my sister Kathi, I was hit with both memories and momories—my term for the stories our mom (aka Irene junior) told. I know that what I’ve been calling momories are really a form of oral history, the process of verbally passing along information and stories to the next generation. But for me, calling them momories makes their provenance clear and keeps our mom centered in my memories.

As Kathi and I went through those snapshots, we ran across a few of our mom that I didn’t remember seeing before. They had our mom’s careful all-capitals printing on the backs, where she jotted a few identifiers. These jarred a couple of more momories that made me further ponder the relationship between Irene junior and her paternal grandmother, Irene senior.

The first photo is of Irene junior at about a year old, with her father George, Irene senior’s firstborn son, who is holding her hands to help her walk. They are in the yard of the tiny summer home (always called the cottage) owned by Irene senior and her husband Edward (who died before we were born) near a small lake in northern Illinois.*

The second, which I found as startling as the one of Irene senior sitting on a donkey in Capri, shows our mom, probably no more than twenty years old, wearing a strapless swimsuit, smiling at the camera. This picture was probably taken in that same yard at the cottage. Despite the smile, Irene junior did not like warm weather and direct sunshine.

I have a momory about an incident that took place at the cottage probably sometime between the 1940s and early 1950s. Irene junior would have been old enough to be in the room when it happened—the only bedroom in the house, where a small group of female relatives, including her mother and grandmother, changed into their bathing suits before heading down to the lake—but I don’t remember her saying how old.

A younger married woman first raised Irene senior’s hackles by not modestly turning away from the others as she removed her clothing. Flashing portions of her naked body, this woman complained about her husband, said she wasn’t happy in her marriage, and wanted to leave him and get a divorce. Irene scolded the woman—I don’t remember if our mom said it was a niece, perhaps, or a younger cousin—telling her to stop talking foolishly, to behave herself, and go on home with her husband. Our mom related that the young woman felt properly chastised and indeed continued in her marriage, never again mentioning leaving her husband. Nana, our mom said in a tone ladened with finality, didn’t approve of divorce, so there was no divorce in our family.

Lately I’ve been considering that momory alongside another one that should be prefaced by this piece of information. At some point early in our parents’ marriage (or maybe just after they’d become engaged—my memory of the momory is faulty here), Nana bought our dad Mike a pair of sturdy leather work boots. Even if this had been a birthday or Christmas present, it was a generous gift and not inexpensive.

I have wondered if the boots might have been Nana’s way of apologizing for a remark she made, not in Mike’s presence, but one all the members of the Berwyn bungalow household probably chuckled about as they gleefully relayed it to him. Our mom still laughed about it decades later whenever she brought it up; our dad did something like an eyeroll when she did.

The story went like this: While our mom waited for our dad to pick her up for one of their first dates, Irene senior watched as he got out of his car and headed up the concrete front steps of the bungalow. She noted his appearance—loose-fit khaki pants, a Hawaiian-style shirt, dark sunglasses, probably a cigarette in his hand—and announced, “A hoodlum’s come to pick up our Irene.”

(Mike, about 10 years before he met Irene junior, cultivating that “hoodlum” appearance.)

Nana must have changed her mind soon after having an actual conversation with our dad. The two of them ended up liking each other. The work boots she bought for him were a thoughtful gift. Mike learned land surveying in the army, a trade he continued in civilian life, and quality footwear made a huge difference to his on-the-job comfort.

(Mike, somewhere in Korea sometime in 1951, wearing boots similar to the ones Irene senior later gave him.)

Our dad kept those boots for the rest of his life, carefully cleaning and polishing the leather, getting the soles and heels replaced when they wore down.** They probably reminded him of Nana and of that early kindness. He cried when she died, our mom told us. We understood the weight of that sentence. We never saw our dad cry so Nana must have been really special to him.

I sometimes think about the momory of that event at the cottage—our mom’s pronouncement that Nana would not tolerate divorce—and the momory of Nana’s first glimpse of our dad that prompted the hoodlum comment which may have led her to buy the boots. Then I imagine the connections among all these, and the subsequent strong bond between our dad and Nana that prompted his tears at her death.

But to explain how I’ve imagined those connections, I’d have to delve into two family secrets of 2912. That’s what brings me to a dead stop every time I reach this point. I’ve tried to write about them, and I still can’t. While the cat has long been out of the bag about both secrets (at least within the family), they are entangled in many other issues that seem too daunting to unravel. So every time, I just stop writing.

Why bring this up now? Well, sorting through those photographs made me think about it. Plus I’m at the beginning-ish stage of a new book project, which involves a lot of research, some of which ends in frustration because of what’s missing. Or what I believe is missing.

Researching and writing biography requires tracking down a variety of sources, including pictures, letters, and memoirs. I rely on not only what other people decided to save in terms of physical artifacts, but also what they chose to write about, whether as notations on the backs of photos, information passed along in correspondence, and/or remembrances included in memoirs and/or autobiographies.  

Decisions and choices like these produce silences in the archives leaving researchers to constantly ask how materials have been selected and saved, but also, very specifically, what’s missing and why it might be missing.

I’ve imposed some silences in my family’s archives by saving some photos and pitching others and by sharing some specifically collected and very consciously edited memories and momories.

After Kathi and I finished looking through all those pictures back in October, I headed off for my first major research trip for a book about Jane Grant, co-founder of The New Yorker magazine and lifelong women’s rights advocate. And there, in the vast collection of her papers, I faced silences. More on that in the next post.***  

(Jane Grant, c. early 1940s, Jane Grant Photograph Collection, PH141, University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections.)

Some asides:

*Decades later, when our parents Irene and Mike took us to the cottage in the summer, the first thing my dad had to do when we arrived was clean up the outhouse, especially to get rid of the spider webs. None of us siblings would go in there if we saw spider webs. Even in the 1960s, the cottage lacked an indoor toilet. Our mom disliked being at the cottage, probably because, with four children, she had more work to do during what was supposed to be a vacation. But, because of the four of us, our parents could only afford cheap vacations. The cottage was free to use, within a couple of hours’ drive, and was right near a lake that kept us busy during the long summer daylight.

**After Mike died, Charles, my husband, took the boots. They were still in relatively good shape, but after many decades they only fit one pair of feet so had finally outlived their usefulness.

***It’s Women’s History Month, so I hope to post one or two pieces about Jane Grant and what’s been happening with my research. This year, the National Women’s History Alliance has chosen the theme of “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” which is a good match for my Jane Grant project.

Welcome 2024! (What I’ve got coming up.)

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I look forward to the beginning of each new year so I can round up and reflect on the reading I’ve done over the preceding year. Pulling together my own “favorites” lists of fiction and nonfiction will take me a bit longer than usual because I’ve got a big thing happening starting next week.

I’ll be in New York City (for the first time ever) to complete a Short-Term Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library. For two weeks I get to comb through the records of The New Yorker magazine, which was co-founded in 1925 by Jane Grant, the subject of my next biography. I’m thrilled and honored to receive this support from the NYPL.

(Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Nothing remotely like what I’ll be doing in New York.)

(Library of Congress photo. Where I’ll actually spend most of my time.)

This will be the second major research trip for my new book project, which is tentatively titled The Jazz-Age Feminism of Jane Grant. Back in October, I traveled to the University of Oregon to research Grant’s papers, housed in the archives of the Knight Library.

I started to write a blog post about that experience, which turned into quite a different piece that’s still unfinished but not abandoned. So, after I post my 2023 reading lists in late January, I’ll polish the unfinished piece and get that up, then, in time for Women’s History Month, there will be a couple of articles about these research trips and an update on the status of my book project.

Until then, here’s a link to a post I wrote for Shepherd, a reading recommendation site, about my three favorite novels that I read before October 2023. It’ll give you a sneak peek at what will be in my full list.

https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/theresa-kaminski

And here’s the link to the list of the 2023-2024 recipients of the Short-Term Research Fellowships at the New York Public Library:

https://www.nypl.org/help/about-nypl/fellowships-institutes/short-term-fellowship-recipients

I hope everyone finds joy in 2024!