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Confessions of a She-Devil (Unpublished autobiographical essay, 1937)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

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.