The Need To-day of a Strong Faith in God (1920, by Maurine Whipple when she was 16)

“The Need To-day of a Strong Faith in God” (Prize Essay), by Maurine Whipple.  Dixie Owl, January 1, 1920, p. 7-13. 

Maurine was a 16-year old sophomore at Dixie Normal College when she wrote this essay, which appeared in the school newspaper. 

Utah Wonderland: Navajo Blessing (c. 1945-1949)

Whipple tried several times to write an article titled “Utah Wonderlands” or “Through the Utah Wonderlands” in the 1945–1949 period. It centered around the people and places in some of the great natural wonders of Utah’s far south, including the Monument Valley, that she encountered through Stewart Campbell’s Utah Wonderland Tours company. This is a short piece from one of her drafts of the article, describing a Navajo blessing ritual.

In this sketch, Whipple, who often let her witty commentary dominate her travel nar- ratives, writes with a reserved voice, reporting the ceremony with little commentary but with telling details: the singer’s long nails, the fright of the young patient, the sounds of the chant. The healer that she refers to as “Old Fat” was probably Hosteen Tso, a well- known medicine man in Monument Valley.1 She was introduced to the medicine man by Harry Goulding, who with his wife Leone (usually called “Mike”), owned and oper- ated Goulding’s Trading Post in Monument Valley. The couple was known for their work convincing Hollywood directors to come to Monument Valley to film their Westerns. Whipple had described the Gouldings and Old Fat in This Is the Place: Utah, p. 95–113. The two photos attached here are from that book. 

The Time Will Come (1941)

Whipple’s sense of estrangement from her community is strongly portrayed in this story of a mother who reluctantly allows her only son to enlist. Elements of both feminism and pacifism are readily apparent, as is Whipple’s sensitivity for the Pueblo culture—an aspect which broadens the story’s theme and expands its setting from a 1940’s southwestern town to the red canyons of its distant past.

The character of the unnamed protagonist was based on Maurine’s neighbor, Elsie Hafen, whose son, Keith, had recently enlisted (and would later die) in the service of his country. Moved by Hafen’s voiceless heartache over her son’s departure, and the suffering of all Gold Star mothers, Whipple writes defiantly in the story about the “Elder Statesmen” of the town, “beating drums and flying flags” for the “young swashbuckling columns” in the village’s farewell parade, while, in contrast, the grieving mother sees the “waste” that lies ahead, as her boy goes off to war.

In Spring 1941 Whipple sent a draft of the story to her literary agent, Max Lieber. He replied that “the piece is out of step with the country’s [patriotic] mood.” She wrote four drafts of the story in the 1940s, experimenting with different narrators. In 1991, Veda Hale and Whipple collaborated on a revision of the story. The 1991 version is Whipple’s last piece of creative writing.

CANDLES OF THE LORD: AN ORIGINAL PAGEANT (1963-1975)

 CANDLES OF THE LORD: AN ORIGINAL PAGEANT (1963-1975)

     In the early 1960s Maurine Whipple's creative energies were at a low ebb. The "Grand Idea" of Mormonism's cooperative genius seemed to have dissipated itself, leaving her without the zeal to mobilize her energies. She had transferred them temporarily to Charley Shadel's cure for alcoholism; but after nine years of ferocious toil, the project had been shelved indefinitely. Her younger brother George, one of the failures of the Shadel "cure," was in the last stages of the alcoholism that would soon claim his life. Worried about him, plagued by frequent infections and arthritis in a hip and knee, Maurine was sufficiently curt and crusty with others that rumors circulated that she, too, had begun drinking.

     At this difficult period of her life, the "Grand Idea" revived in the form of a universal Easter pageant that would celebrate the resurrection as the crown of all human endeavor. With renewed energy, she filled her little home with stacks of books and articles on the final days of Jesus' life.  She reread Latter-day Saint scriptures, the Bible, and current biblical research.  She renewed her interest in the Indian myths of rejuvenation, and the land started to speak to her in new ways.  She roamed the countryside by car and on foot, looking for a suitable locale for staging the pageant taking shape in her mind.  One possibility was a natural amphitheater in an arch indentation in a red mountain between St. George and the exit off the main highway to Hurricane. But her favorite locale was in Snow Canyon, east of the present campground.  It offered ample staging area for dramatic effects, a breathtaking backdrop of orange and rust sandstone, footpaths leading "off-stage" into areas that could be screened for wings, and a slope so gentle leading up to the "stage" that seating for large audiences would not be a problem. Recalling those days of creative ferment, she said she found a new focus, that her whole life seemed shaped into a pattern of suffering and tempering that had prepared her to write this pageant.

Jane Thompson Bleak history, by Mabel Jarvis. A model for Clory McIntyre

Jane Thompson Bleak, Aged Pioneer Woman Recounts Past Events, by Mabel Jarvis 

Life history of Jane Thompson Bleak, wife of James G. Bleak. Written by Mabel Jarvis, a St. George journalist and author. Undated. It cuts off after 4 pages. Found in the Juanita Leone Leavitt Pulsipher Brooks Papers,  Utah Department of Heritage & Arts. 

Note the many similarities between these stories and those found about Clory in The Giant Joshua. Jane T. Bleak was still alive when Whipple started doing resear

ch for the book, and her name is listed in the book acknowledgements. 

John A. Widtsoe's February 1941 review of The Giant Joshua

[John A. Widtsoe], “On the Book Rack,” Improvement Era, 44 (February 1941), p. 93. 

Grandmother: Cornelia Agatha Lenzi McAllister

[Editor's Note: The relationship between Cornelia Agatha Lenzi McAllister (1844–1920), Maurine’s maternal grandmother, and Clorinda Agatha Lenzi MacIntyre, the petite and irrepressibly spritely heroine of The Giant Joshua, is clear. Maurine was seventeen when this grandmother died, and for years afterwards she fondly recalled her visits with Cornelia and their close friendship.

To the young Maurine, Grandmother McAllister was a romantic and enigmatic figure. Elegant in her black silk dress, and isolated in her deafness, she radiated dignity to her impressionable granddaughter, who wrote this sketch for a high school or college English assignment on ancestors between 1921 and 1926.

Cornelia’s husband, John D. T. McAllister, was a polygamist whose personality provided the fictional portrait of Abijah MacIntyre in The Giant Joshua. As his third plural wife, Cornelia bore McAllister six children, and like Abijah MacIntyre in the novel, McAllister became the second president of the St. George Temple in 1884. The fictional Abijah left Clory behind and took another, younger, plural wife north with him when he was called to preside over the Logan Temple. McAllister, likewise, in reality left Cornelia to become president of the Manti Temple in 1893, taking with him only his youngest plural wife and providing literary fodder for his granddaughter in the years to come.

But if Cornelia was indeed the model for Clorinda MacIntyre, Whipple spared “Clory” many of the trials which her grandmother endured. By having Clory die as a comparatively young woman, the fictional heroine missed the dependent old age of Grandmother Cornelia, and more dramatically, Clory was not deaf, as was Cornelia for all the years that Maurine knew her, the result of a childhood illness.

Still, the strong, enduring, female character is there. Grandma Cornelia was obviously well remembered and in her own way played a significant role in Whipple’s masterpiece.1]

Every life must have a purpose—some main idea or main motive by and for which it exists. For instance, one man might from his earliest conscious thought, dedicate his life to music and make human life richer by that contribution; another might choose business, another writing, and so on. The more I read biography, the more I am convinced that every really worthwhile life has a definite plan, whether the person is aware of it or not, and that when this supreme aim is accomplished, and the pattern has been completely traced, the life is finished, no matter how many more years the person might live.

The Giant Joshua, Chapter 1 alternate opening

Undated early draft of the opening of The Giant Joshua. Maurine Whipple Papers, Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Special Collections. Handwritten. MSS 1546, box 1.  

It is the last Sunday of October 1861. Sacrament meeting is being held in the Old Council House in Salt Lake City. President Brigham Young presides. Abijah McIntyre, a handsome, dark bearded man in his early forties, is seated with the other dignitaries upon the rostrum. (He is a member of the Seventies, an organization in charge of missionaries, and next to the apostles in importance). The congregation is seated upon wooden benches and Abijah’s family occupies the first bench directly beneath the rostrum. His wife, Bathsheba, a big-bosomed, imposing, stern-looking woman is seated beside her six sons, ranging from 16-year-old Freeborn, the eldest, down to the toddler, Isaiah. On her right is 17-year old Clorinda, brought up in the family as a daughter. Abijah had dandled her upon his knee in Philadelphia where he converted her father and brother converted to Mormonism. Clorinda’s father was a prosperous craftsman of fine jewelry, but when his wife refused to join the Church, he had left his business and assets to her and with his two children had walked across the plains in Abijah’s “Company of Ten.” But on this journey he had succumbed to the “green sickness”. And later, during the Starving Time, her brother had died from eating poisonous roots in Salt Lake City. Thus Abijah and Bathsheba were really the only parents Clorinda had really ever known. Clorinda is seated next to her best friend, Palmyra Wight and Pal’s husband David.

The congregation has just finished signing the opening hymn, Oh Zion, Dear Zion, and one (?) seated by the choir conductor with a rustle of standard Sunday-go-to-meeting finery. President Young suggests that Abijah McIntyre give the opening prayer, and Abijah does so at great length, spurred on by his own eloquence. Clorinda whispers to Pal that “Pa forgot to bless the corn on my big toe,” and both girls dissolve into a paroxysm of giggles. Both Freeborn and David have difficulty maintaining their own proper piety. Whereupon Abijah interrupts his prayer long enough to fix all four with a baleful eye. And Brother Brigham having repeatedly compared a windy prayer to a “braying jackass”, clears his throat significantly.  Abijah hurriedly ends his suggestions to the almighty, “Name of Jesus, amen,” and sits down.