If only for her longevity, Olive Tilford Dargan is a significant figure in American letters. Born in 1869, she lived just one year short of a century and enjoyed a fifty-eight year publishing career. Her first book, Semiramis and Other Plays, was published by Scribners in 1904. Her final book, Innocent Bigamy and Other Stories, was issued by John F. Blair in 1962. Though not prolific she was versatile, claiming plays, poetry, short stories, and novels among her fifteen volumes. In mid-career she adopted a pseudonym, Fielding Burke, which she used for each of her three novels, all proletarian and polemical works. Perhaps both her longevity and versatility have mitigated against a deserved critical reputation. Today she is remembered primarily for one novel and one collection of short stories.
The addition of Kathy Ackerman’s thoroughly researched and gracefully written study is welcomed as the first full length book about this extraordinary literary figure. As her title indicates, she limits her attention to the Fielding Burke novels: Call Home the Heart (1932), A Stone Came Rolling (1935), and Sons of the Stranger (1947). Her ambitious thesis is that Dargan’s work should be considered in light of her “treatments of proletarianism, feminism, and race, with special attention to the ways these issues intersect in the southern Appalachian region.”
The question of why Ackerman did not simply use Fielding Burke as the title is answered by one of her primary tenets: that Dargan’s radical inclinations began long before she demonstrated them in the novels. For instance, in the biographical section that begins the work, Ackerman tells the anecdote of Dargan’s working in Boston as a stenographer to a rubber manufacturer. One day he dictated two letters, one ordering the abrupt closing of a factory, the other complaining about the upholstery of his yacht. Thus the inequalities of the capitalist industrial system were brought forcefully home to her. In 1904 Dargan met Rose Pastor Stokes, a founding member of the American Communist Party, who became one of her closest friends. Ackerman offers more than one suggestion as to why Dargan chose to use a non-gender specific pseudonym for her three novels, but the most salient one is that they were so radical that the author feared reprisal in that politically charged era.
Though Dargan’s college education included a year at Radcliffe and her early jobs were in Nova Scotia, Boston, and New York, it was her move to Appalachia that launched her writing career. In 1925 she published her most successful book, Highland Annals (later reissued as From My Highest Hill). That collection of short stories is based on her experiences in rural Appalachia and is generally a genial retelling of her relationship with the mountain folk she encountered. But when she moved from the country to the town, her writing became more radical. She was living in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1929, the year of cotton mill strikes in nearby Gastonia and Marion, the events that provided her with specific material to embody her political stances and move to a new genre, the novel.
One of the most impressive aspects of Ackerman’s book is her use of unpublished letters found in several collections throughout the country. Dargan’s correspondence with Rose Stokes reveals that she actually went to Gastonia and visited with the strikers, something she was able to do because of Rose’s influence. In April 1929, Dargan wrote Rose, “I’m stamped ‘middle-class’ all over. . . . But the strikers like me and make me feel like blood-kin—bless their weary bones!” Ackerman has found so much correspondence, in fact, that an edition of Dargan’s letters would be a useful tool to Appalachian scholars.
Call Home the Heart is the literal center of Ackerman’s study. She examines it, and to a lesser extent, the sequel, A Stone Came Rolling, in light of the proletarian movement in American letters, in comparison to other strike novels of the period and in the historical accounting of the events of the Gastonia strike. Ishma Waycaster, the protagonist of both novels, undergoes enormous changes as she moves from her isolated mountain home of Cloudy Knob to the densely populated and troubled Winbury. Ackerman devotes five of her nine chapters to the Gastonia novels, emphasizing Dargan’s treatment of feminism, race, political activism, and romance as they are demonstrated in the contrasting and conflicting issues of Ishma’s life. Because Ishma, presented generally sympathetically, shows her revulsion to a black woman in one gripping scene, race relations becomes a particularly difficult problem. Ackerman points out that Dargan felt that the labor organizers underestimated the depth of racism in the South. Feminist attitudes are also counter-poised against the prevailing patriarchal practices of the time and Dargan’s own celebration of the primacy of romantic love. It is to Ackerman’s credit that she undertakes such a plethora of complex issues in her study of the Gastonia novels.
The Heart of Revolution concludes with two other chapters, brief ones on Sons of a Stranger and on Dargan’s reactions to the critics. Though they seem a bit thin in comparison with the full treatment of the earlier chapters, they are nevertheless useful. Whatever organizational flaws the book might have, it is an important addition to scholarship on the proletarian novels of the thirties, the issues of feminism and racism in literature, and especially to our understanding of Olive Tilford Dargan, a refined Victorian lady writer who, having become a communist sympathizer, fought against social and economic oppression and championed the ideal of a classless society. She deserves the attention that Ackerman’s study will encourage.