Thursday, May 19, 2022

An Alabama Author & A Polar Explorer

On March 5 the shipwreck of the Endurance was located more than 100 years after Captain Ernest Shackleton and his crew abandoned the vessel during their 1915 expedition to the Antarctic. In January of that year the ship became frozen in ice; the crew remained with the Endurance until November when it sank. That event began even more incredible efforts by the crew. A recent account is Alfred Lansing and Nathaniel Philbrick's 2015 book Endurance. Incredibly, all members of the crew survived the ordeal. 

A photograph of Captain Shackleton's cabin on the ship reveals a few shelves of books he took on the expedition to help him pass the downtime. This article reprints the inventory of that personal library. The books include an encyclopedia, various dictionaries, collections of poetry, accounts of other polar expeditions, and wait--what's that? Why, it's a novel by an author with Alabama connections!

Let's investigate.

Over the course of her writing career, Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy published more than 20 novels between 1888 and 1930. One of those was World's-End, published in 1914. A copy of that book, probably with the cover and title page as shown below, ended up on a shelf in Shackleton's cabin. Also below is a contemporary review. You can read the novel online at the Internet Archive. So who was Amelie Louise Rives, later to become Princess Troubetzkoy?

Rives was born August 23, 1863, in Richmond, Virginia. Her parents were Alfred and Sarah; Alfred was an engineer. Amelie was the oldest of three daughters. At some point in the 1870's Alfred accepted a position as chief superintendent & general manager of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in Mobile. Amelie--and probably her sisters--continued the study of music and drawing under tutors and governesses. She also studied music under Miss Evy, who operated a private school in the city, and drawing at the Mobile Academy of Design.

The Rives family can be found in Mobile in the 1880 U.S. census. Patriarch Alfred L. Rives was fifty years old, a civil engineer and born in France around 1830. His wife Sarah was from Virginia. The children were Amelia, 16; Gertrude, 13; and Daisy, 5. Their home was 87 Government Street, near the current location of the Exploreum Science Center and a couple of blocks from Bienville Square.

Amelia's first publication, the romantic short story "A Brother to Dragons" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1886. Two years later her first novel The Quick or the Dead? created a scandal with its daring--immoral!--content as it quickly sold 300,000 copies. The book featured a new widow attracted to her late husband's cousin. Rives career was off to an impressive start; she published many novels, poems, and plays until 1930 and her final novel, Firedamp. Poetry publication continued into the 1940s. She died June 15, 1945. 

In June 1888 Rives married her first husband, a wealthy New Yorker named John Armstrong Chaloner, who led a fascinating life himself. The marriage was tumultuous and by 1895 the couple divorced. The following year she wed a Russian prince, Pierre Troubetzkoy, an established portrait painter. The two were introduced to each other in England by Oscar Wilde. That union lasted until his death in 1936. The couple lived in her ancestral home Castle Hill in Virginia. You can see the prince's 1904 photograph of his wife here

Despite her many publications and fame during her lifetime, Rives has fallen into obscurity since her death. Little has been written about her life or critical evaluation of her work. All of which is a shame. She mixed with some of the best known authors of the day, ranging from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ellen Glasgow and Mark Twain. Author James Branch Cabell was a cousin. She was an enthusiastic supporter of women's suffrage. Her work was parodied, surely a sign of her acclaim. Newspapers published anecdotes about her. 

Some reviews were positive, but many not. Her novels were long, stuffed with characters and events and included racial stereotypes of the day. Her heroines and heroes felt intensely, but spoke in the overheated dialog characteristic of so much literature at that time. Yet modern topics crept into them. In her 1915 novel Shadows of Flames a wife discovers the hiding place of her morphine-addicted husband--in his cigarettes. 

See Leila Christenbury's essay linked below for many more details of Rives' life and work. A search of the Library of Congress' Chronicling America newspaper database for 1880-1945 will turn up numerous articles about Rives published in her lifetime. 



Further Reading

Louis Auchincloss, A Writer's Capital Houghton Mifflin, 1979. [Includes a chapter on Rives]

Leila Christenbury, "Amélie Louise Rives Chanler Troubetzkoy 1863–1945," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 

Welford Dunaway Taylor.  Amelie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy Twayne, 1973 [info on Rives' time in Mobile is on p. 21]









Amelie Rives [1863-1945]

Source: The Bookman via Wikimedia Commons




This photo of Shackleton's cabin was taken in early March 1915 by Australian photographer Frank Hurley. 

Source: BBC.com










These two illustrations in World's End were reproduced from paintings by Alonzo Myron Kimball; one is seen on the cover of Collier's below.

Source: Wikipedia




Prior to book publication the novel was serialized in Collier's November 29, 1913-April 11, 1914





Findlay Weaver, editor of the Canadian publication Maclean's, discussed the book in the October 1, 1914, issue: 

To get back to the particular book to be considered this month, “World’s End” gets its name from the estate in Virginia where the greater part of the action of the story takes place. The novel can scarcely evade the charge of sentimentalism, yet it has an appealing quality which will endear it to the lovers of romance.

The principal characters of the tale are Phoebe Nelson, a heroine who blooms with all the charm of the South, her cousin Richard Bryce and his uncle Owen Randolph.

Richard is a fascinating young man, an abnormally clever artist with untold faith in himself as such and as a poet as well. But he has a twisted view of life, which, in the influence exerted on the girl with her rich and romantic nature, all but wrecks her prospects of true happiness and would have done so but for quiet strength in body, mind, and emotion of Richard’s uncle, Owen Randolph, who, stirred to the depth of his compassion and love for her, employs the force of his big character to reconstruct her life. Through deeply pathetic circumstances, by Owen’s assistance, she finally wins to triumphant happiness and the telling is lightened along the way by a charming humor and fine descriptive pasages making “World’s End” a most realistic place indeed, with warmly pictured characters, including funny and lovable negro servants.

Richard had peculiar views as to religion and marriage. He considered them “inartistic.” The universe was to him a vast studio. At twenty-six his enthusiasms gave him keener delight than they did to those about him. He did not restrict his attention to painting, for besides that he was, at the time of the opening of the story, engaged in writing a one-act opera in accordance with the Chinese laws of music which he maintained constituted the only real tonic-scale; and was also writing a volume of poems, the latest of his poems being “The Daughter of Ypocras.” Expounding this poem, he said: “Ypocras was a lovely girl who had been changed into a dragon and doomed to retain this fearful shape until some lover, knowing her plight, should be bold enough to kiss her on the mouth. The lover comes and, being often mirrored in the beautiful eyes which are all that remain to her of her woman’s form, is drawn gradually into doting on the rare sinuosities of her dragon-shape, and the play of the light along her scales of gold and violet. So that when at last his kiss transforms her again to woman, his artist heart breaks at the loss of his exquisite dragon, and he sinks dying at the feet of the sweetly normal maiden who has taken her place.” Richard further explained that he had endeavored in the poem to reveal some of the dark yet radiant magic lurking in the mysterious perversities of femininity, as opposed to the common-place attraction of what he called “the daylight charm of the uncomplex woman.”

Such twisted views were characteristic of Richard. For instance, when he came suddenly upon Phoebe in her garden, helpet crow “Jimmy Toots” was perched on her shoulder and as she caught sight of Richard she tried with both hands to tear “Jimmy Toots” from his perch but Richard, seeing “a picture of a young woman in an April garden with a bird of ill-omen on her shoulder,” urged her not to take it down.

“You with that crow are like a poem by Baudelaire” and forthwith “Jimmy Toots” became “M. Baudelaire” to Richard. How could one of his intensely artistic nature possibly employ such an inelegant term as “Jimmy Toots.”

Richard paints her picture in the garden with “M. Baudelaire,” calling the painting “Pandore et le Genie du Coffre.” In the painting he exaggerated a likeness he saw in her to a Botticelli, so that the head seemed a little small for the long nymphean limbs. “But the translation of Jimmy Crow into a bird of sombre presage was wholly a masterpiece.

Far more than any serpent he seemed fitted to whisper of honeyed sins in the ear of this virginal Eve-Pandore.

When Phoebe was permitted to see the painting her first words were, “Are my . . . am I quite as ... as long as that?” Her father, while admitting that the treatment was certainly original, considered that his living Phoebe was far prettier than Richard’s “Pandore.”

The reader can well imagine the effect of an attractive yet wholly self-centred young man in his influence upon the young woman who saw in him the ideal for whom she waited and will realize something of the possibilities which this situation opens to the author in working out the story and it is like getting into God’s clear sunshine when the influence of Owen Randolph eventually gains precedence.


The sinking of the Endurance 1 November 1915

Source: Wikipedia









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