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In his novel Giants in the Earth, O.E. Rolvaag celebrated the Norwegian pioneers of the previous generation who settled in the Great Plains. Martha Ostenso, a rough contemporary and fellow Norwegian, was more interested in her own time—the farmsteads and small towns that had sprung up where the covered wagons stopped. The change was dramatic:
In the tiny park beside the depot where the rectangular bed of nasturtiums, four o'clocks, mignonette and baby's breath, inlaid with white-washed stones, spelled out the name of the town, a spiral sprinkler was throwing a toy rainbow over the grass.
(The Young May Moon)
Born in 1900 near Bergen, Ostenso’s family immigrated to Canada when she was a small child. Martha spent part of her childhood near Winnipeg, and was for a short period a teacher in the Interlake region of rural Manitoba, not too far from the Minnesota border (the family had moved around Minnesota and South Dakota earlier in her childhood). The experience was to give her the backdrop for her celebrated first novel, Wild Geese (1925). In the meantime she attended the University of Manitoba, where she met English prof Douglas Durkin. In a scandal worthy of one of Ostenso’s novels, Durkin, in his mid-thirties, abruptly left his wife and five children to take a teaching job at Columbia. Ostenso followed him to New York and got a job as social worker. Because he could not obtain a divorce, the two lived together as lovers until Drukin’s wife died in the ‘40s, when they finally married.
They also wrote together. Even Wild Geese has touches of Durkin’s sexually tense, D.H. Lawrence-inspired prose, and later novels may be equally his work, though only Ostenso’s name appeared on the cover. This may have initially been so Wild Geese could be considered for a best North American Novel contest run by the publishers Dodd, Mead and Company (only manuscripts by unpublished novelists qualified for the contest). Written in six weeks, Ostenso’s debut novel follows a young teacher, Lind Archer, who boards with the Gare family, a farm family ruled by their tyrannical and avaricious father, Caleb. Like much of Ostenso’s later work, the novel is psychological and quietly romantic, memorable now for its depictions of rural life—a style of writing that has become known as “prairie realism” in Canada, and in the United States bears similarity to the writing of Willa Cather and Hamlin Garland.
The floor of the loft was composed of pine boards scrubbed white and smooth. You could look down through a knothole and see the stove glowing red in the darkness of the room below. Above, the rough, cobweb-hung rafters leaned down upon you; and on a wild night a jet of wind would ripple over your cheek if you lay with your face to the wall. In a winter dawn even tiny siftings of snow might be found in the crease of your pillow.
Wild Geese won the contest, awarding Ostenso $13,500 and establishing her career as a best-selling novelist. She and Durkin wrote more than a dozen subsequent novels, including The Mad Carews (1927), about a family of aristocratic farmers, and O River, Remember! (1943) which follows three generations of settlers near Fargo. Perhaps her most highly regarded novel is The Young May Moon (1929). As with Wild Geese, the protagonist, Marcia Gunther, is an independent woman making it on her own in the harsh landscape and patriarchal society of the rural Midwest. After her young husband commits suicide in the aftermath of a lover’s quarrel, Marcia defiantly stays on in the town of Bethune to raise her son. She learns to live with the scandal and small town mentality, eventually moving away from her controlling, religiously fundamentalist mother-in-law to inhabit a crumbling cottage on an isolated hill left behind by the pioneers.
At one point, Marcia tries to explain to Paul Brule, the town doctor and her late husband’s best friend, why she doesn’t just leave Bethune:
“What you don't seem to understand is that all this doesn't matter to me. What does matter—” she drew a deep, hard breath, “—is that I've got to live out something—something in myself. I would have to do that if there was no world at all. Up here—isolated in this way—I can live it out—if I'm left alone."
The stoic sentiment is admirable, but Ostenso’s heroine has to face practicalities too. Marcia teaches music and tends a garden to squeak by with her son Rolf:
She had always had food for him in plenty, though she herself had sometimes gone without. For she had sworn to herself that on the day when the child should suffer want, she would admit defeat and take whatever course was open to her to provide for him.
Martha Ostenso’s Bethune invites comparison to Gopher Prairie, Sinclair Lewis’s fictional town in Main Street. (Lewis knew and reputedly was in love with Ostenso, coming to blows with Durkin on one occasion.) Both are small-minded, hayseed Midwestern towns. While Lewis was a brilliant satirist, focusing his lens on the different facets of small town life, Ostenso is mainly concerned with the inner weather of her characters in the tradition of Emily Brontë and Louisa May Alcott. And while Marcia Gunther is a more full-bodied character than Carol Kennicott, it’s easy to see why Lewis’s more humorous treatment is also better known today. The Young May Moon is, like its setting, probably too bleak a novel to gain a lasting readership.
But while their books sold, Ostenso and Durkin made the most of it. From New York they moved back to the Midwest, living for a time in St. Louis Park and Brainerd. Like Hamlin Garland and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ostenso’s road eventually led to Hollywood. Wild Geese had been made into a movie in 1927, and during the ‘30s the couple made good money writing screenplays. Ostenso also co-authored And They Shall Walk (1943) with Sister Elizabeth Kenny, an autobiography of the nurse’s life and her revolutionary treatment for polio.
By the early 1960s Ostenso’s own health was in serious decline, due to heavy drinking. Partying with the likes of John Barrymore, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks apparently took its toll. Shortly after moving to Seattle in 1963, she died of cirrhosis of the liver. It was a long way from the one-room schoolhouse in Manitoba, and even further from Bergen. Perhaps, like her character Marcia Gunther, she’d had to live out something in herself. 