Although Alice Hoffman divided her autobiography into sections, the
content of those sections is sometimes repetitive. She writes as thoughts come
to her mind, jumping from period-to-period, subject-to-subject and place-to-place,
using very few dates. Her style is casual—as though she were writing to a close
friend known for years, someone who is familiar with all the people she knows and
the places she went. The syntax and vocabulary are products of her privileged
education in the late 1800s and are colored
with Victorian aristocratic embellishments.
From Alice Hoffman’s autobiography, we can gain a
small degree of insight into her thinking and sense of reality. However, we
must remember she was writing long after most of the people and events she chronicles
have passed. She tries to focus on the positive, the good times, but, occasionally, darker thoughts
emerge. She also sometimes provides various versions of events.
There are some striking
omissions. She says nothing about her marriage or her divorce. She admits never
having ready cash and does mention several of her law suits; however, she gives
little hint that from 1910 on her life was filled with an ongoing, overlapping
series of legal conflicts that spanned North Carolina, New York City and Paris, France. She also does
not discuss events leading to creation of the Roosevelt Trust in 1944.
In spite of the omissions, she does reveal, through self-observation, elements
of her personal worldview. For example, she mentions in several places that
personal liberty is highly important to her. In rejecting a suitor’s proposal,
she explains:
I
did not want to marry anyone.
I
told him I wanted to travel, study, be something, understand life, before
making any decisions.
I
have often wondered what I would have been like, had I not been financially
independent. It must make a tremendous difference in a girl’s point of view.
Photo from Dickinson University Theodore Roosevelt Center[ii]
She did, however, regard herself
as attractive to men, had many suitors before she married and mentions several
marriage proposals. She still feels she has these charms when she meets John
Royall. She claims that like most men he liked spending time with her:
…it
was being said that his wife was jealous… except that it seemed beyond the
possibilities that any one should conceive that I would wait until I had arrived at my already advanced age [55]
to come down to this remote wilderness to try to decoy another woman’s husband.
In explaining her passion for remodeling, she assesses her behavior:
I was never content without some purpose to
be achieved.
I see the vision and can give the working
plans which make it a reality, but someone else must attend to the details.
In looking back on her upbringing and family support, she says:
There was never the smallest atom of
“Expediency” either in my family or myself throughout my life.
Nor was the desirability of position,
alliance, acquaintance or wealth ever mentioned.
We were singularly free to look facts in the
face and judge them.
She speaks about her desire when younger to have children:
I was most anxious to have a family of
children to bring up, for I am convinced that I should have known how to
develop them to their best expression.
But, later says:
I am sincerely grateful that my faults and
virtues will die with me.
She then goes on to bemoan the “disagreeable” state of the world:
…the unbridled opportunity of Governments to
increase the difficulties of existence, by taxation, compulsory military
service, increased cost of living, I am glad that all those little souls that I
wanted to gather around me are still waiting for a chance to be born, where I
hope that they are still free and not slaves as we are.
Realizing that she seems to jump from residence to residence and has
lost so many of the places she has lived, she says:
It strikes me as rather pathetic that I
should have built so many nests, only to find that I must choose another tree.
Alice in jodhpur-like pants with cane, taken, it seems, around her Bogue Banks home. She often mentions walking in knee-high calfskin boots, which she also wore in Canada. Here, they provide good protection against snakes. [iii]
Her feelings about Bogue Banks are at best
mixed. At one point she says:
Nothing can ever describe the wonderful
feeling of the summer air when driving on the Beach. It is actually caressing,
and seems palpably to envelop one, and the wonder of the moonlight has
sometimes kept my eyes open through the whole night.
But, she finds the violent
electrical storms frightening. And, it’s not just the weather she finds
frightening. She keeps two pistols, one on each side of her bed, in fear of
intruders who might do her harm.
Her Uncle Henry is the only
family member who visits her in North Carolina on more than one occasion:
…he
was the only member of my family who ever appreciated or benefited from the
place….
Her friend Edna Ryle, from summers
Alice enjoyed in Canada, is one of the first friends to visit. She arrives when
Alice is still remodeling. The weather, initially beautiful, turns very cold. They
no longer have running water, the fireplaces are not well vented and the
construction noise is annoying.
This view of Alice’s Bogue
Banks house gives some idea of what it may have looked like when Edna visited. [iv]
When Alice’s cousin Nancy
comes to Bogue Banks, it’s mice that mar her visit. She describes her sister
Mary’s “first introduction to my forest” as being:
…not
what I could have wished. Mary got overheated walking the two miles which
separate the house from the Beach and ….a breeze on the verandah of the
Teahouse added to her cold. On the way back we ran across one of the wild boars
which roam at will on the island.
And, then, when Mary is
getting ready to leave:
The
weather had capriciously turned into a N.E. gale….
Alice’s niece, Eleanor, also makes
one disastrous trip and never returns. One successful outing with Eleanor
involves going to Shackleford Banks, where Eleanor took pictures. But, when
Eleanor tries sitting in Alice’s dining room to write letters to her children,
the mosquitoes are vicious.
Alice wanted to be reassured
by Eleanor’s comment that Bogue Banks would make a “wonderful place for Gracie
to spend her honeymoon,” but, alas, that does not happen. However, Alice makes
one of her strongest cases for living on Bogue Banks following her recollection
of this prospect:
It
was a wonderful place, …one of the last remaining retreats, isolated from all
the world & its fripperies. No telephone, electricity, radio, or noise….
But then, she follows with a
description of the severe weather she endured her first year as property owner
here:
…the hurricane in the summer of 1917, the
blizzard that year at Christmas, & the terrific thunderstorm the previous
year.
Before 1941, Alice spends a
good deal of time away from Bogue Banks. While she is away, her property is
damaged and mismanaged—rose gardens not maintained, strawberry patch trampled,
property taxes and utility bills not paid:
…many
repairs became increasingly necessary.
She blames irresponsible
people here for these troubles—
… their ignorance, lack of obedience, and care.
If she made friends in North
Carolina, she does not mention them. She does say that in her first year on the
island, she never went to the mainland. Most of the people she interacts with
are in her employ.
The happy times she discusses
include a summer stay with Ohio relatives when she was eight; days in
Farmington, CT, at Miss Porter’s School for Girls; summers at Southhampton, NY,
and Newport, RI; early European travels; horseracing days in Paris; summers in
Canada; her first visit to Bogue Banks and her trip to China; the companionship
of Polly, her parrot. Some of these will be subjects of future posts.
Also, based on the
autobiography, changes appear in previous posts such as “Why Alice Came to
Bogue Banks” and “The French Connection.”
[i] Alice Green Hoffman Papers (#127), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, USA.
[ii] The
Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson University: The Digital Library
Collection.
[iii]Barbara Milhaven, “Alice the Queen,” The Shoreline, 2009. Photo is from a PDF version of this article.
[iii]Barbara Milhaven, “Alice the Queen,” The Shoreline, 2009. Photo is from a PDF version of this article.
[iv] Ibid.