“Anybody’s Gold Mine”, by Maurine Whipple

One in a series of introductions of pieces from A Craving For Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (BCC Press, 2020).

Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 1, 1949.

One of a series of Whipple magazine articles about interesting places and people on the edges of the Great Basin. In 1914, a man named Freddie Crystal arrived in Johnson Canyon north of Kanab, Utah with a newspaper clipping about Mexican petroglyphs. A legend held that Montezuma had sent much of his gold north to save it from the marauding Spaniards, and Crystal thought the petroglyphs indicated that it had been hidden nearby. Many Kanab citizens spent weeks living in tents in Johnson Canyon digging for the hidden treasure; but after two years, there was still no sign of it.

In spring 1949 Whipple was working as a caretaker on the isolated Von Hake ranch in Johnson Canyon. She interviewed Kanab citizens about the craze, and explored the area herself. She sold the story to The Saturday Evening Post, the leading general-interest magazines of the day, for $750. They sent photographer to take pictures of the dig site.

“The Timpanogos Hike”, by Maurine Whipple

One in a series of introductions of pieces from A Craving For Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (BCC Press, 2020).

This unpublished essay is based on Whipple’s participation in a 1943 midsummer moonlight hike of Mount Timpanogos at the head of Utah Valley. The annual hike, led from 1929 to 1961 by Charles (Chic) James Hart Sr., a PE teacher at Brigham Young University, drew hundreds of participants. She presents her own simple patriotism and sentimental response to nature as juxtaposed to a male companion she calls "the Cynic", who refuses to be impressed by any ceremonial, geologic, or natural wonders until the sublime moment of reaching the peak at sunrise.

The Giant Joshua reading guide

Here are a series of posts with background information and commentary about Maurine Whipple's The Giant Joshua, by Andrew Hall, Lynne Larson, and Sarah Reed, published at By Common Consent in 2020. 

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/08/10/bcc-late-summer-book-club-the-giant-joshua/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/08/17/the-giant-joshua-chapters-one-and-two/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/08/24/the-giant-joshua-chapters-three-and-four/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/08/31/the-giant-joshua-chapters-five-and-six-community-unity-and-native-americans/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/09/07/maurine-whipple-and-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-a-complicated-relationship-chapters-7-and-8/

 https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/09/14/the-giant-joshua-chapters-nine-and-ten/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/09/21/the-giant-joshua-chapters-11-12-polygamy-and-postmemory/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/10/06/the-giant-joshua-chapters-15-and-16-polygamy-raids-life-on-the-underground-and-the-real-life-stories-behind-the-novel/

https://bycommonconsent.com/2020/10/10/the-giant-joshua-chapter-17-the-great-smile-and-the-sequel/

Also, be sure to get A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple, edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson (By Common Consent Press, 2020), for Cleave the Wood, the sequel to The Giant Joshua, and other great stories, articles, and essays by Whipple.

Here is the first post:

Welcome to the BCC Late Summer Book Club!

For the next eight weeks we will be reading Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua, which is widely considered to be Mormonism’s greatest novel. Maurine Whipple is an enigmatic figure—in 1938 at age 35 she was broke, divorced and depressed, a failed grade school teacher who wrote obsessively but who had never published a substantial work. In that year, however, she was awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for new writers, and the coveted prize allowed her to take pen in hand, let her genius flower, and create her masterpiece. Over the next two years she worked feverishly on The Giant Joshua, the epic story of the 1861 settlers of St. George. 

The Giant Joshua celebrates a vision of disparate people coming together to form a community of mutual love and service, while also portraying the hardships of pioneer life. Terryl L. Givens has stated, “No one has succeeded better than Whipple at capturing the recurrent Mormon paradox: the independence and loneliness of an exiled people . . . making it perhaps the fullest cultural expression of the Mormon experience.”[1] Most of all, Maurine was exceptional in her ability to depict the complicated choices and emotions of women living in polygamous marriages and in a patriarchal society. 

When The Giant Joshua was published in 1941, it received a flood of positive reviews nationwide. The literary critic Bernard DeVoto wrote in the Saturday Review of Literature, “The Giant Joshua is excellent reading and it catches a previously neglected side of the Mormon story—the tenderness and sympathy which existed among a people dogged by persecution and hardships, forced to battle an inclement nature for every morsel of food they ate and to struggle for every moment of genuine happiness.”[2] The Book-of-the-Month Club review said the heroine was “one of the most appealing women in modern fiction.” 

In Maurine’s own community, however, the novel was less enthusiastically received. Many in St. George were offended by her depiction of polygamy, and her own father called the novel vulgar. When the apostle John A. Widtsoe accused her of “straining for the lurid” in a review in The Improvement Era[3], he shamed Maurine and probably squelched sales throughout Mormon country. She had expected Joshua to be welcomed by her LDS neighbors and even by the ecclesiastical authorities, for she saw her characters as heroic in their accomplishments in spite of their human weaknesses, and not “vulgar” because of them. She was badly shaken by the negative response. Still, although her attachment to the institution vacillated over the years, she never left the Church and remained fiercely loyal to “her people.” She managed to publish a Utah travel book and a few notable magazine articles over the next two decades, but was never able to complete another novel—one of the great tragedies of Mormon cultural history.

However, there is now hope. BCC Press will soon publish A Craving for Beauty: The Lost Works of Maurine Whipple, edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson. The volume contains over 450 pages of literary work by Maurine in her prime, most of which has never been published, including over 200 pages from Cleave the Wood, her planned sequel to The Giant Joshua. The volume is full of excellent material, including stories that take on issues of faith and superstition, community and isolation, oppression and tolerance. Maurine was ahead of her time in her calls for gender and racial equality, a heritage with which we should become more familiar. Participating in the Giant Joshua book club will offer everyone a chance to prepare for this momentous occasion in Mormon literary history.

A post on two chapters of The Giant Joshua will appear on the blog every seven days over the next eight weeks. The authors will provide commentary on the content, the story of Maurine’s efforts at composing each chapter in 1938-1940, details on the real historical figures on whom she based her characters, and links to selections of her unpublished works. 

So please prepare yourselves by reading the dramatic opening two chapters and get ready to share your own comments on the blog or on Twitter (#GiantJoshua). These chapters introduce Clorinda (Clory) MacIntyre, who begins as an orphaned Mormon girl compelled to become the third wife of a man who has been like an adoptive father to her. Clory, her new husband, and two sister wives are part of an 1861 emigrant wagon train traveling from Salt Lake City to the arid lands of the Dixie Mission. It will introduce the real historical figures of Erastus Snow and John D.Lee[4], and culminate in the blessing of an ox, and a baby’s birth, while the party desperately scrambles to pull its wagons over a cliff. A triumphant entry into what will become St. George awaits them. 

Michael Austin has said that the creation of The Giant Joshua is “nothing less than a miracle”. It is a miracle you won’t want to miss.

---

[1] Terryl R. Givens. People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 289

[2] Bernard DeVoto, Saturday Review of Literature, Jan. 4, 1941.

[3] [John A. Widtsoe], “On the Book Rack,” Improvement Era, 44 (February 1941), p. 93. The story of Maurine’s relationship with Church leaders, including previously unknown documents which tell of a 1935 encounter between Maurine and Widtsoe which may have colored Widtsoe’s view of Maurine, will be told in an upcoming book club post.

[4] Maurine’s portrayal of John D. Lee and the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre was based on information she had received from her St. George friend and former teacher Juanita Brooks. Maurine and Juanita had a long and troubled relationship, they were two very different personalities drawn together by the desire to write and explore the past of their communities, traits which set them off as odd to the rest of the community. Maurine had little compunction about “borrowing” stories she read in journals and other materials gathered by Juanita, and although Juanita helped to edit the entire novel, she resented Maurine publishing some of the stories before she was able to complete the scholarship which would result in her masterpiece, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950). The fact that our greatest novelist and our greatest historian were close collaborators for many years is remarkable. The story of their partnership and fallings out will be told in an upcoming book club post.

“A Grain of Mustard Seed” Maurine Whipple and the Spanish Flu

One in a series of introductions of pieces from A Craving For Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple (BCC Press, 2020).

"A Grain of Mustard Seed"

Whipple set this short story in Salt Lake City in Winter 1918, during the Spanish Influenza pandemic. It tells of a dying young woman and her husband’s priesthood blessing which brings her back to health. The story, written in 1943, is perhaps Whipple’s most positive towards LDS faith, featuring the young man’s thoughts upon returning from a 3-year mission, a fairly detailed but reverent description of their marriage in the SLC Temple (despite Whipple not having been endowed at that point), his fear of losing her, and the blessing, performed by the husband and his former missionary companions, stretching their arms through the window of the hospital they were not allowed to enter.

(Photos of a BYU lecture hall, Utah newspapers, and the Millennial Star during the 1918-1919 pandemic)

A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple

A Craving for Beauty: The Collected Writings of Maurine Whipple, edited by Veda Hale, Andrew Hall, and Lynne Larson, has been published in October 2020 by By Common Consent Press.

Maurine Whipple (1903-1992) was the author of the great Mormon novel The Giant Joshua (1941). She wrote many other remarkable short fiction pieces and magazine articles over the years, only a few of which have been published. This volume collects her published stories and her best previously unpublished work, including magazine stories about some fascinating people and places in extreme corners of the intermountain west, reporting from within Short Creek during the 1953 polygamy raid, a war-era lecture questioning war, racism, and patriarchy, several excellent short stories, and five chapters of Cleave the Wood, the unfinished sequel to The Giant Joshua.

Meet the Mormons (Look Magazine, March 10, 1942)

 Maurine Whipple, "Meet the Mormons". Look Magazine, March 10, 1942. Photographs by Earl Thiesen

Confessions of a She-Devil (Unpublished autobiographical essay, 1937)

 

"Confessions of a She-Devil" is an autobiography which Maurine apparently wrote for use at the Rocky Mountain Writer's Conference at Boulder, Colorado, 1937. Veda Hale went over and confirmed much of the material with Maurine late in her life. There are fictionalized elements, however. There are two copies, a 34 page holograph and a 18 page typeset (included here). The originals are in the BYU Harold B. Lee Special Collections and copies in the Dixie State University Library Special Collections. The holograph and the typeset are virtually identical, except in one paragraph in the holograph describing a disagreement with Grant Redford in Cedar City, Utah.