[Author's note: Julia Davis died January 30, 1993, in Ranson, WV, approximately a year after the following work was published.]
Many writers with more than a score of books to their credit would be satisfied to rest on their laurels, particularly if they had just celebrated their ninety-second birthday. But Julia Davis isn't one of them.
For her, writing is like breathing, and she has been writing for a long, long time. Born and nurtured in West Virginia, she has traveled widely, rubbed elbows with princes and presidents, and spent much of her working life away from her native state. But wherever she has gone, Julia Davis has looked at the world through eyes sharpened by her West Virginia childhood. And whenever she has returned home for research or respite, she has looked at us with the fresh perspective of the traveller.
During her eighty-year career, Julia Davis has published just about every type of literature you can imagine. In the process, she has developed a reputation as a careful craftsman, a writer who can look at the past and the present with clarity and balance. Her subject matter has been equally diverse, ranging from the streets of Calcutta to the hills and farmlands of West Virginia.
Born July 23, 1900, to John W. Davis, a Clarksburg lawyer, and Julia Leavell McDonald, from Media Farm, Jefferson County, she was first named Anna Kennedy Davis in honor of her maternal grandmother. Had her mother lived, the girl named Anna might have trod a different path into the future. But her mother died three weeks after giving her life, and the baby girl was renamed Julia McDonald Davis.
The path taken by Julia Davis has been a long one with many twists and turns. From time to time it crossed that of her father, Ambassador to Great Britain, presidential candidate, renowned lawyer. For brief periods, father and daughter traveled together, but most of her journey has been spent in the company of three husbands (she married one of them twice), seven children, and a few close friends. With her help, I have retraced this journey. Here is her story.
Julia's father John W. Davis was not only a brilliant lawyer but also a painfully shy man (Figure 1). His courtship of Julia McDonald lasted almost five years. During that time and the brief marriage that followed, he shared with her much that he had never shared with anyone else. With the death of his wife, John W. Davis lost a part of him that he would never recover. Seeking refuge from the pain, he threw himself completely into his work and his work became his life.
He was to have many friends, many triumphs, a few defeats, and a new wife who saw to his comfort and career. But the loss of his first wife Julia never left him, and the face and name of his daughter were constant reminders of both his greatest love and his greatest loss. Recalling her childhood and her father's growing separation from her, Julia Davis notes, "He was always kindly, often abstracted, but I knew then, and I know still, that looking at me hurt his heart."
Figure 1. John W. Davis
Unable to keep his daughter with him, John Davis placed her in the capable hands of her grandparents, relegating himself to the role of infrequent visitor, bringer of gifts, and absentee parent. Julia thrived under the attention of two sets of very different grandparents.
Educated at home in Clarksburg by her grandmother Davis until age nine, spending her summers at Media, the McDonald farm, Julia Davis characterizes her childhood as alternating between a group of "unrepentant individualists" and a family that quite properly called itself a "clan." Looking back over those early years, she reflects, "Certainly I was not unhappy with the Davises, where I received so much love and learned to love deeply in return. Certainly I do not quarrel with having been taught to use my mind. But I was solitary in that silent house."
She goes on to say, "For the child I was, Media meant joy and freedom, freedom from anxious supervision, from precocity, from loneliness, from all that in one way or another oppressed my spirit. Children were a commonplace on that farm. No one hung over me, no one seemed to care what I did. I expanded, running wild."
As Julia Davis undertook the journey from adolescence into adulthood, this dual existence continued. From the Davises and her life in Clarksburg, she learned how to write. And from her sojourns with the McDonalds of Jefferson County, she learned what to write about.
Julia Davis admits that her early education by Anna Kennedy Davis (Figure 2) covered only the basics, but the influence of this remarkable woman should not be minimized. This was the grandmother who knew Greek and Latin, who debated politics and philosophy with her lawyer husband, and who fought off the pleas of her doctor and the preliminary pains of childbirth until she had finished reading a chapter from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Figure 2. Anna Kennedy Davis, Julia's maternal grandmother, ca. 1910.
From the tutelage of her grandmother, Julia Davis moved on to the private school taught by her cousin Virginia Kennedy in Clarksburg. It was while she was at this school that her first published work appeared, a poem printed in St. Nicholas Magazine thatearned the eleven-year-old writer a silver medal. By age fourteen, she had completed the course of study for graduation, but her grandparents decided to give her a couple of years at the Shipley School in Philadelphia before she went to college. And before she set off for college, Julia had spent more than sixteen summers at Media.
Summers spent with scores of kids and farm animals, with uncles like John Yates
McDonald, a dirt farmer with four college degrees. Summers with her raspy-voiced
grandfather, Major Edward A. H. McDonald, an officer in Stuart's cavalry who took a
bullet in the throat shortly before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. He had kept himself from bleeding to death by sticking his finger in the wound and then
endured six weeks of frequent hemorrhages and a fractured jaw before the bullet could
be removed. This was a man who ran his farm with the discipline and precision he had
shown in the service, except for his treatment of granddaughter Julia. He was incapable
of punishing her. Rarely speaking of his military experiences, the Major summed up
the years of sacrifice by noting that he did not regret fighting for the South and Virginia
but also reminding Julia that "You must be glad we did not win." While Julia's life
alternated between Clarksburg and Media, her father's political career had caught fire,
first as representative from the 1st West Virginia district and then as Solicitor General
for the United States. (See Figures 3 and 4.) He had moved to Washington, D.C., and
when Julia was eleven, he married Nell Bassell from Clarksburg. Nell made sure that
John W. Davis wore the right clothes, met the right people, and kept his appointments.
She freed him from the responsibilities of daily life so that he could do what he did best,
practice law and diplomacy. And in the process, Nell built a wall around her husband
that daughter Julia could rarely penetrate.
Figure 3. The Davis house in Clarksburg, WV
Figure 4. Media, the McDonald farm in Jefferson County, WV
Deprived of her mother's company by death, Julia was also denied frequent access to her father by Nell. Julia Davis notes that, wherever her father and stepmother lived, "My stepmother was happier when I was not around. In spite of her determined kindness I could see this, and it came as a shock to one who had been `Raised a pet.'" She observed that Nell "readily subscribed to the theory that I should not be uprooted, but should stay with my two sets of grandparents as usual, and visit Washington only for short vacations."
If you ask Julia Davis about the effect this thirty-two-year separation had on her, she will shrug and tell you there was no lack of love in her life, in childhood or after. I believe her. But if you carefully examine the milestones on her journey through adulthood you will see that Julia Davis learned much from that separation from her natural parents.
As far back as she could remember, Julia Davis wanted to be a mother. When she found that she was unable to bear children of her own, she nurtured seven of them, and she shared her life with three husbands. She also wanted to be a writer, and when she took on the responsibility of raising children, she frequently struggled to balance the demands of her craft against those of the youngsters in her care. Her writing also reflects her separation from her natural parents, for the characters in her novels are frequently orphans, children separated from one or both parents by death or duty, and women who carry on alone while the menfolks are off to war or on other adventures.
Julia Davis began her freshman year at Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1917, before her father was appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James. Finishing her second year at college, she and her friend Katy Watson joined J.W. Davis and Nell in England in the fall of 1920. Julia Davis has recounted the adventures of these two American girls in her memoir, Legacy of Love (1961). Julia's memories of this period, based on her letters to her aunts and Katy's letters to her father and mother, are to be published in 1992 by the University of West Virginia Press under the title The Embassy Girls. During her stay in England, she met Lieutenant William M. Adams, an American pilot and air force attache at the American embassy. She was later to marry him.
Returning to the United States, Julia resumed her classes at Wellesley in the fall of 1921. But the school now seemed smaller, "like a pair of shoes that had grown too tight." She finished out the year and transferred to Barnard, where she received her bachelor's degree in 1922. At the time, she wanted to be a playwright, and the play she wrote during her senior year was selected for production at the college. Unnamed and now lost, the play dealt with the struggles of West Virginia mountain folk as they were thrust into the twentieth century by World War I. Drawn from people the Davis family knew in Clarksburg, the main characters, a mother and her son Selby, had lived in the mountains all their lives and knew little of the world beyond. Upset to learn that Selby must leave home to fight, the mother naively asks, "Why don't we line up on this side of the river and shoot the Germans as they come out of the water?" Her son, excited by the prospect of becoming a soldier but ignorant of the dangers ahead, leans out of the train window as it departs and yells to his mother and friends, "I'm a-gonna get 'em!" "Who?" they ask. "The fellow they're sendin' me after!"
The themes from the lost play reverberate through much of Julia Davis' later work, including her short stories "Two for One" and "White Justice," which depict American Indians forced to live in the white man's world and the problems of Indian mothers separated from their children.
In 1923, Julia Davis married William Adams and the couple moved to Copenhagen, where he managed the Scandinavian branch of the American Rubber Company. Julia and her husband spent two and one half years in Scandinavia, and it was there that she collected the materials that would become her first two books. That first one got its start when the couple visited one of Bill's friends, who had recently completed a series of watercolors illustrating the work of Saxo Grammaticus, the compiler of the first history of the Danes. She was looking for someone to translate the original work and create a narrative to accompany the illustrations. "Julia can do it," said Bill. "She loves to write." And she did.
During her years in Copenhagen, Julia Davis translated the original work into English from Old Danish and retold the stories. When the Adamses returned to the United States to live in 1926, she set out to find a publisher for her book. Looking for a more immediate source of income, she also landed a job as a reporter for the Associated Press. Both experiences helped her hone the tools of her craft.
Recalling that first attempt to get her book published, she says, "I brought it back and went around with this portfolio of big pictures. I didn't know that wasn't how you sold a book. Well, I went around with these pictures from door to door of the publishers. And sometimes I'd have to walk twice around the block before I could kick myself in to say `Here I am and here's this possibility.'" She continues, "Eventually I saw the head of Dutton's junior department. And she thought it could be made into stories for young adults, that is teenagers."
Julia Davis signed a contract, but the book needed a lot of work before it could be published. She figured that she could finish it while she worked at some other job that would pay the bills. She became a reporter for the Associated Press in New York City.
Recalling those first days as an Associated Press reporter, Julia Davis said, "I was the second woman they'd ever hired. I was doing special features, and they paid me a quarter of a cent a word, which they told me quite frankly was the lowest they'd ever offered anybody. But I was glad to get the job and I thoroughly enjoyed it." Remembering the Special Features editor she worked for, she noted, "He was very nice to work with. And he told me in the beginning, `You're writing for a newspaper. Take the first chapter of Genesis as your model. Put the whole story in the first sentence. Then develop the story.'" Illustrating her point, Julia Davis went on, "`In the beginning the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is.' That's the story. Then you go ahead and fill in the details."
Writing special features was supposed to be tamer than covering fires or some of the other local news, but it had its own dangers. Returning to the office one day to type up her story, she was knocked down and nearly run over by a cab. The driver pulled her away from the vehicle's front wheels, which had come so close to crushing her that they left tread marks on her coat. Brushing the dirt from her clothes, Julia Davis crossed the street to the Associated Press offices, reached her desk, and sat down at her typewriter. When her hands stopped shaking, she typed her story, filed it, and met deadline. Major McDonald would have been proud of her.
Despite her love of reporting and the raise she received for her efforts, meeting deadlines at the newspaper didn't help her meet the publishing deadline for her book. She quit her job in the summer of 1927 and returned to the Davis home in Clarksburg for a few weeks. Melville Davisson Post, a friend of the Davises, lived nearby, and this West Virginia master of the detective story gave Julia a crash course in novel writing.
Remembering that summer, Julia Davis said, "He taught me more in six weeks than I had learned in all the English courses that I had taken at all the colleges. He really knew what he was doing. He would tell me, `You need a little more dialogue here. You've got to build this up. You've got to build that up.'" She continued, "Your dialogue was always either to advance the story or to enlighten people about the characters. It must always have a purpose. It must always move the story. I really learned how much cloth it takes to make a pair of pants with him in those six weeks."
Figure 5. Julia Davis and husband William Adams in wedding dress, at Mattapan, J.W. Davis' house on Long Island, ca. 1923
During that period, Swords of the Vikings began to take shape. Published in 1928, the book was one of the five nominated that year for the Newberry Medal. It stayed in print for forty years. And so Julia Davis, with one book under her belt, set out on her lifelong career as a novelist.
The challenges facing Julia Davis in 1928 were the same ones confronting many women her age who had recently entered the workforce. Heir to the victories won by their mothers and grandmothers for women's suffrage, her generation was the first in which women had real choices to make among marriage, career, and children. Could women compete with men in the workplace? Would women, like many men, sacrifice time with their children or spouse to provide their family with the necessities (or luxuries) of life? More than sixty years later, Julia Davis would have her own answers to these questions.
Her writing career took off in an unexpected direction when the contract for that first book led her down a path that she didn't want to follow. Remembering her first contract, she said, "I was so thrilled that somebody was going to publish a book that I had written that I would have signed anything. I realized afterwards that I had signed a contract to write children's books. I had to write six of them before I could get out of it."
What's wrong with writing children's books? Well, people just didn't take writers of juvenile fiction very seriously in those days. Smiling at her predicament, Julia Davis said, "I realized that I had to get out of children's books because I would go to writers' parties, and they would say `What do you write?' As soon as I'd say `I write books for young adults,' they'd spot someone across the room they just had to talk to and move off."
Five more children's novels followed Swords of the Vikings in quick succession. Vaino, a Boy of New Finland (1928), interweaves sagas about Vaino, a hero of early Finland, with the adventures of a modern boy of the same name who fights on the side of the White forces in Finland's 1918 revolution. Mountains are Free, which appeared the following year, recounts the exploits of William Tell in Switzerland's fight for independence.
Her assignment to write Stonewall (1931) sent her off in a new direction. Recalling the assignment, Julia Davis said, "that got me back to America, and I realized that my real interest was American history, particularly in the history of this area. Jackson, of course, was from Clarksburg and went through the Shenandoah Valley and Jefferson County a good many times. I became very interested in that."
She continued the Civil War theme in Remember and Forget (1931). Using the McDonald family home outside of Winchester, Virginia, as the setting and family letters and memoirs as a source, Julia Davis created a story of a family divided by conflicting allegiances to their state and their country. Peter Hale (1932), which ended her obligation to Dutton, recounts the adventures of an orphan during the colonial period.
If you read Julia Davis' first six "children's" novels, you will probably be surprised at the quality of the effort. Each is well written and aimed at a reading level that today would be classified as adult. Only today's vulgarity and explicit sex are missing. She didn't write her books "down" to children, and while these works often deal with fairly complex issues, they do so in a straightforward way. She summarizes the causes of the Civil War in Stonewall, for example, without glorifying the struggle or romanticizing the combatants on either side.
The effort to complete six books under contract allowed Julia Davis to focus on American history and to select the genre that she would favor in the future. Although she would devour hundreds of academic histories and primary sources during her career, she chose not to write scholarly works because she wished to write for the general reader. On the other hand, historical romance was too far removed from reality to satisfy her own desire to write about real people and real events. She selected the historical novel as her niche, and her creations have combined careful historical research into source materials with a narrative style that eliminates the seams and wrinkles found in the fabric of more scholarly history.
During the four years in which Julia Davis wrote five novels, writing served as a source of renewal as well as income. She was an invalid during much of that time, first due to complications from a miscarriage and then from a fractured vertebra incurred in a fall from a horse (Figure 6). Finally, she was out of her contract. But four years of sickness, plus disagreements with her husband, had taken their toll. The couple was divorced in 1932.
Julia Davis' stay in Reno, Nevada, while she waited for her divorce yielded material for the short stories "White Justice" (1933) and "Two for One" (1939), both published in Atlantic Monthly. Set in Nevada and based on actual court cases, the stories explore the different concepts of white and Indian justice. Written in a colorful, straightforward expository style, the stories are reminiscent of the works of O. Henry and Melville Davisson Post.
Back in New York City, Julia Davis' life took a new direction. She met and married Paul West, an assistant to Henry Luce at Time and Life, and she took a job as an adoption agent at the State Charities Aid Association. Like her job at Associated Press, Julia Davis West's new job was low paying and difficult. She was given the children hardest to place, and she made a success of it. Her short story "Return" (1940), deals with the struggle of an immigrant mother to keep and care for her son. It is based on Julia Davis' own experiences with adopted children and their natural and adoptive parents. By the time she left the job five years later, she had a case load of one hundred children. A boy and girl from the agency remained hers for life.
Figure 6. Julia Davis in riding attire, ca. 1935
Figure 7. Julia Davis and her second husband, Paul West
Julia Davis' next book did not come as quickly as her last six. The demands of her job, her children, and her marriage pulled her in many different directions. Three years in the making, No Other White Men (1938) is the story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Like her other historical works, the narrative makes extensive use of first hand accounts and shows an attention to setting and detail. The book was in print for more than fifty years and is as readable today as when it was first printed.
Thus far, Julia Davis had drawn upon her personal and family experiences to add realism and depth to the stories she had created, but she had never based a whole novel upon an incident taken from her own life. Unexpected events during the next two years gave her the material for a new novel and forged bonds of love and friendship that have lasted a lifetime.
The Spanish Civil War had just ended, and a correspondent who had covered the war told her that two refugee children needed a temporary home. Their mother had been shot by Franco's sympathasizers and their father, a promising Spanish novelist and supporter of the losing communist cause, needed someone to look after the children for just six weeks while he got settled in Mexico. Julia Davis recalls, "I took them in for six weeks and they stayed forever." The story of how Julia Davis came to be their "mother" and how they began their journey back from the horrors of war is movingly told in The Sun Climbs Slow (1940), a quietly powerful novel that is probably her greatest work.
Asked by Stephen Vincent Benet to write The Shenandoah (1944) for The
Rivers of American Series, Julia Davis set to work on what has been her
longest research project. More than five years in the making, The
Shenandoah was written amidst great personal turmoil,including the death of
her stepmother Nell and her aunt Emma, who had been like a mother to her
since the death of grandmother Davis. The Wests were forced to sell their
New York home when Paul entered the service, and the burden for earning a
living and supporting their three children fell mainly on Julia. Moving back
to the Davis house in Clarksburg, she used it as her base of operations as she
wrote and traveled throughout the Shenandoah Valley gathering material for
her book. The most popular of Julia Davis' works, The Shenandoah is still in
print. A Valley and a Song (1963) provided younger readers with their own
view of the valley.
Her marriage was one of the casualties of the war, and the Wests were divorced in 1949. The end of her marriage and the end of the war sent Julia Davis off in new directions. The death of her stepmother in 1943 had removed the barrier that had stood between father and daughter for more than thirty years. Moving back to New York, Julia Davis grew closer to her father. Now they were two grownups with their own professions who shared the same past, not a little girl and a far away father.
By the time Julia Davis' journey had taken her midway through the century, her
reputation as a writer of popular histories was rising. The tales of adventure and
heroism spun in No Other White Men and The Shenandoah had overshadowed
the quieter, more complex themes found in her short stories and the novel about
her Spanish wards. In the novels she would write during the next decade, she
would attempt to combine the adventures of men intent on exploration or
conquest with the struggles of women to nurture and protect their families.
Her interest in local history continued in Cloud on the Land (1950), where she
used Media Farm in Jefferson County West Virginia as background for an
historical novel about Western settlement and slavery. Set early in the 19th
century, the book begins the saga of the McLeod family of Virginia, including
Angus McLeod, a plantation owner forced to confront the economic problems of
slavery and manumission, and his wife Lucy, who loves her husband but finds
slavery abhorrent. Anecdotes from the McDonald family's past and present are
woven into the narrative and give the work interest and realism.
The world presented in Cloud on the Land is one in which both men and women
shape the world around them. Taking up residence at a remote trading post,
Angus and Lucy struggle to make a living in a land where the law is only as
strong as the character of the people who enforce it. While her husband is away
for months trading with the Indians, Lucy is left to run the business, maintain
order among rough frontiersmen and Indians, bear her children, and care for her
family.
Julia Davis's story outgrew this book, and it was continued in Bridle the Wind (1951), which is set in Jefferson County, Virginia in the 1830's. Unlike the
frontier society of Cloud on the Land, the Southern culture depicted in the second novel has firmly established roles for its members. Within this atmosphere, Lucy settles into more traditional roles as wife and mother and confronts slavery first hand. The slavery depicted here is so closely intertwined with Southern society and economy that it envelopes blacks and whites alike. Like barbed wire that fuses with a growing tree, it cannot be eliminated without destroying the living fabric that surrounds it. Unable to eradicate slavery even on her own plantation, Lucy flees north with a fugitive slave, leaving her family behind. She eventually returns home alone to face prosecution. Her love for Angus and the children is even stronger than her abhorrence of slavery.
Eagle on the Sun (1956) continues the family saga during the Mexican War. The novel focuses on the adventures of Angus and his son during Doniphan's expedition to Mexico, an event that she would explore again in her history Ride with the Eagle (1962). The Lucy depicted here is a minor character, a wife and a mother in the South of the 1840's who runs the plantation and raises the younger children while the men are off to war.
During the same period that Julia Davis tackled the slavery issue in the McLeod trilogy, John W. Davis was addressing the issue of integration in the U.S. Supreme Court (1954). (See Figure 8.) Although his daughter and friends advised J.W. Davis against arguing South Carolina's case opposing the integration of public schools, he took the case anyway. South Carolina's governor was a close friend, and Davis believed he had the law and precedent on his side. Looking back on that period, Julia Davis noted that her father, as usual, decided to take the case on his own and didn't share his ideas with her. Likewise, Julia developed her exploration of slavery independently of her father, discussing this and other works with him only after publication.
While she was working on Cloud on the Land, Julia Davis' life and career both took new directions. In 1951, she married Charles P. Healy, a lawyer at Columbia University, and the couple's children from their previous marriages came to live with them. Her writing took a detour into the realm of mysteries under the pseudonym of F. Draco. Accompanying her father to England when he received an honorary doctorate in 1950, she saw a "church" that had been built early in the nineteenth century for devil worship. She used the building and its history when she wrote The Devil's Church (1951). Another mystery, Cruise with Death (1952), was published under that same name, and several short stories followed.
If you ask Julia Davis for details about F. Draco, you will quickly find that he is not just a pseudonym but also a character in his own right. Julia Davis notes, "He was mostly rushing around adventuring, and he just wrote occasionally. All three of my husbands were in the OSS, so F. Draco participated a little bit in those experiences. F. Draco would write things that Julia Davis wouldn't write. And she didn't want to be mixed up with him, because she was a much more serious writer."
F. Draco's novels and short stories received a fair amount of attention during the 1950's and 1960's. Some of the shorter pieces were published in popular magazines such as Redbook and Cosmopolitan. The mystery "man" F. Draco was selected as one of the short story writers to be featured in a publication project undertaken by the National Endowment for the Arts. He was asked to join an association of mystery writers and received numerous offers to submit his work for publication. Offers never made to his creator, Julia Davis. F. Draco's notoriety both angered and amused Julia Davis. Recalling the membership in the mystery writers' association that was offered to F. Draco, she said, "I was furious because Julia Davis had been writing for a long time and she'd never been chosen. And here came F. Draco and immediately was nominated. That made me really angry because he didn't know one thing that I hadn't taught him. Not one thing. I'm not a feminist, but you can understand that I was angry."
F. Draco represents an interesting excursion on Julia Davis' journey as a writer. Initially bound by contract to write children's fiction, she eventually distanced herself from a genre that was then populated largely by women writers. Establishing herself in the field of popular histories and historical novels, Julia Davis achieved recognition for her tales of adventure, exploration, and war, rather than for her stories of mothers and children. She had successfully competed with male authors, although her works dealing with men fared better than those that focused on women. By developing the persona of F. Draco, Julia Davis created a male author who wrote successfully for a primarily female audience.
Is Julia Davis' creation of F. Draco an attempt to compete with male authors by trying to be like them? She notes, "I've never thought I was the least bit like a man, never wanted to be like them. I never wanted to compete with men. I wanted to manage men, and I did. You never have to compete with somebody you can manage." Some time during the 1950's, F. Draco went off on a new adventure and never returned.
The death of Julia Davis' father in 1955 and husband in 1956 marked a hiatus in her career, and the loss of several members of the McDonald clan placed an additional burden on her to settle family affairs. During this period, she reflected that "Sometimes there comes a pause in life when the familiar forward motion no longer serves, when new direction must be sought." She was now the custodian of large amounts of materials documenting the history of the Davis and McDonald families.
Figure 8. J.W. Davis
Reading through this wealth of information, she recalls, brought her back to her roots. "The older generations came again to life, this time in the round, not merely as seen by the young. Reading, I recalled my family in every sense of that good word, and found my signposts for the future." Much of her subsequent writing has focused on making the history of both families available to the public.
Julia Davis donated many of her father's papers to Yale University in 1961, and she placed other materials written by her father in the keeping of West Virginia University. (The diaries kept by J.W. Davis as Ambassador to England are scheduled to be published by West Virginia University some time in 1992.) She captured the essence of the relatives who raised her in Legacy of Love (1961), a series of anecdotes that focus on her life in Clarksburg, Media, and London. Mount Up (1967), based on the diary of her grandfather Edward A. McDonald, recounts his exploits during the Civil War. Never Say Die (1980) tells the story of Angus McDonald's flight to America after the Battle of Culloden and the growth of his branch of the McDonald clan on this continent. Much of this material deals with early life in Virginia, Ohio, and the area that would later become West Virginia.
While keeping her commitment to record the achievements of her family,
Julia Davis has continued to deal with broader issues in American
history. Her play The Anvil (1961), written for the Civil War centennial
in Charles Town, West Virginia, was produced off Broadway in 1962.
Dealing with the trial of John Brown after the abolitionist's raid on
Harpers Ferry, the play looks at Brown as a catalyst for the violent events
that followed. Brown, as the play's title suggests, is an anvil on which
God beats out His purposes. He is also a mirror, reflecting the prejudices
the audience brings to the play. Savior? Terrorist? Religious fanatic?
In her attempt to portray Brown accurately, Julia Davis refuses to give us
easy answers. Her refusal to bend her facts to fit the plot has drawn
criticism from some reviewers, while others have praised her efforts to
capture the complexity of her subject.
Two other plays were created some time during this period. One of them, portraying three women at three periods in their lives, was optioned but never produced. It has been lost. Explaining why it was not produced at the time, Julia Davis remarked, "They asked me `Who would want to see a play about middle-aged women talking about their lives?"
The other play, Possession, is published here [in Harvest] for the first time. It deals with a mother's efforts to protect and educate her sons despite an alcoholic first husband, a rich manipulative second husband, and a politically savvy third husband. Based on real people and events, Possession explores the prices people pay to obtain wealth, power, security, or the love of others. Using the format found in her novel of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Julia Davis wrote Ride with the Eagle (1962), which draws upon the diaries of six soldiers to recreate the adventures of Colonel William Doniphan's First Missouri volunteers in the war with Mexico.
The role of women in politics and law was another topic that caught her attention. Her articles published in the Smithsonian Magazine (October 1977 and March 1981) contrast the careers of the first two woman candidates for president of the United States. Victoria Woodhull is portrayed as using men and her feminine charms to get what she wanted, while Belva Lockwood is seen as struggling to advance her legal and political career by her intellect and pure grit.
Her short story "I AM" was written for Jimmy Carter's daughter Amy, who had to cope with her new role as the daughter of the President. The story of a little girl who tries to lock out the rest of the world so that she can spend time with her busy father is written with the insight of someone who had lived through the experience herself.
In 1974, Julia Davis remarried William Adams, and the couple lived at his home in Cannan, New York until his death in 1986. Her short story "Full Circle" recounts the reunion of Jean Moffat, the main character in The Sun Climbs Slow, with her first husband. Summing up the reunion of both Jean Moffat and Julia Davis with their first husbands, the author concludes the story by saying
The issues that once had divided them so fiercely now appeared like toys that children drop and forget to put away. There would be details to work out, adjustments to make, but nothing that reasonable adults could not adapt to. The broken vows could be repeated, never to be broken again, for this time they would be conscious promises such as the young cannot make, for they do not know what lies ahead.
When her husband died, she decided to make her return to West Virginia permanent. Settled in Charles Town since 1986, she has continued to write and lead an active life despite the toll that ninety two years of living has taken. Last year, she wrote the narrative for the Jefferson County Historical Society's book on historic homes, Between the Shenandoah and the Potomac.
Although Julia Davis has written poetry since she was a teenager, little has been published. Most of the verse that has survived has been written since 1970 and is included in this volume [Harvest]. The Julia Davis revealed in these occasional pieces is mainly a wife, mother, and friend rather than the more familiar novelist or historian. The "Song of an Oversusceptible Young Man" and "His Mother's Reply" represent a dialogue between Julia Davis' Spanish son Ramon and herself. "To My Husband At Christmas" captures the feeling of closeness to departed loved ones during the holidays. These and similar works compliment her other creations that focus on relationships among husbands, wives, and their children. Poems such as "Elegy for Three" and "Old Age is Not For Sissies" deal with the loss of the loved ones whom she has survived. Others such as "Lament" and "To My Doctor" are lighthearted accounts of the struggles of her active mind and spirit to survive in a fragile, aging body.
Looking back over her life, Julia Davis reflects, "I always wanted to write novels and raise children, and I've done both." She acknowledges that she is a minor writer when compared with contemporaries such as Edna Ferber, Willa Cather, and Eudora Welty. She chalks up her fate to lack of talent, but the careful craftsmanship of her work argues against that explanation. After tracing her journey as a writer, daughter, wife, mother, and friend, I think there is a more complex reason.
Recalling her struggles to balance the demands of her career, children, and husbands, Julia Davis notes that her father once told her, "You have a good mind, but your heart is mush." Then she adds, "I wish he were alive today, because I would say `Father, the heart paid off better than the head.'" Applying this philosophy to her own writing, she continues, "The head might have paid better.... Maybe I could have written better if I had no other interests, but I could not have lived better. I couldn't have been happier."
Two major themes run through the works of Julia Davis ¾ the history, heroism, and adventure found in such works as No Other White Men or The Shenandoah; and the subtler tales of domestic relationships found in her short stories, The Sun Climbs Slow, Legacy of Love, Possession, and her poems. Thus far her reputation as a writer has been based primarily on the former theme, on works that show Julia Davis writing with her head. Yet the power of her other creations, the ones she wrote with her heart, should no longer be ignored. Perhaps the works collected in the present volume [Harvest] will help future writers, critics, and historians to arrive at a more balanced assessment of her career.
A few artists, like Shakespeare and Mozart, possessed genius so powerful that they could create master works under almost any circumstances. But most of us, like Julia Davis, have had to weigh the sacrifices demanded by our art against the needs of our spouses, children, and friends. Throughout her work, Julia Davis' female characters have had to choose between the head and the heart, and most have selected the latter. On her own journey through life she has generally made the same choice, although there have been many excursions along the way. The path she has trod may not be the one we would choose, but we must acknowledge that her life and her writing have been true to each other.
It is now the summer of 1992 and another novel is in the works. After that, who knows? If I had my way, I'd finish this story of Julia Davis' career with the phrase "... and she wrote happily ever after." But you, and I, and Julia Davis know that such endings are reserved for fairy tales, not biographies. Perhaps one of her recently completed poems best sums up what she sees ahead:
91 Is no fun.
92 What to do?
93 Wait and see.
94 Shut the door.
95 Don't stay alive.
For the young, or even the middle aged, her poem may seem like a grim way to end this tale. But then most of us have a long journey ahead of us before we can see life from her perspective. Meanwhile, I hope that she will let me walk along with her for a few more miles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is the most complete listing of the works of Julia Davis published to date. She has written frequently for newspapers and magazines, and at the age of 92, does not remember every work that has been printed. (Who would?)
Articles written by Julia Davis [Adams] as a reporter for the Associated Press in New York between 1926 and 1927 were published without a byline, but they generally appeared as feature articles in the New York papers' Sunday sections. She has been interviewed or written about by numerous reporters over the years, and has written several brief historical essays for the press. Most of these sources remain uncollected and unidentified. Short stories, published under the pseudonym F. Draco, are said to have been published in Story, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan magazines, although efforts to locate them have thus far been unsuccessful.
A poem beginning with the line "Midnight in May ..." is said to have been published by Julia Davis in St. Nicholas Magazine sometime between 1911 and 1914. Efforts to locate it have not been successful. A few other poems were probably published in magazines during the 1940's and 1950's.
The works of Julia Davis' father, John W. Davis, are numerous and have not been collected in their entirety. Harbaugh's Lawyer's Lawyer is the most extensive biography of J.W. Davis. Ramon Sender's Death in Zamorra is written by Julia Davis' Spanish "son" and provides more details on the background used in her novel The Sun Climbs Slow. Previous biographical sketches on Julia Davis are incomplete and generally unreliable in some of their details.
Novels and Histories
Swords of the Vikings. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1928.
Vaino: A Boy of New Finland. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1929.
Mountains are Free. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1930.
Stonewall Jackson. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1931.
Remember and Forget. New York: E.P. Dutton, & Co., 1932.
No Other White Men. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1937.
Peter Hale. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1939.
The Sun Climbs Slow. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1942.
The Shenandoah. New York: Reinhart, 1945.
Cloud on the Land. New York: Reinhart & Co., 1951.
[Draco, F.] The Devil's Church. New York: Reinhart & Co., 1951.
[Draco, F.] Cruise with Death. New York: Reinhart & Co., 1952.
Bridle the Wind. New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1953.
Eagle on the Sun. New York: Reinhart & Co., 1956.
Legacy of Love. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.
Ride with the Eagle. New York: Harcourt, 1962.
A Valley and a Song: the Story of the Shenandoah Valley. Holt, 1963.
Never Say Die: the Glengary McDonalds of Virginia. Norwoods Printing Co.: Stafford, Va., 1980.
Mount Up: A True Story Based on the Reminiscences of Major E.A.H. McDonald of the Confederate Cavalry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
Jefferson County Historical Society. Between the Shenandoah and the Potomac. Jefferson County Historical Society 1991. (Narrative by Julia Davis Adams.)
The Embassy Girls. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. West Virginia University Press, 1992.
Harvest: Collected Works of Julia Davis. William D. Theriault, ed. Charles Town, WV: Arts & Humanities Alliance of Jefferson County, 1992.
Plays
West Virginia Mountaineers. (Unpublished, now lost. Written and produced at Barnard College, 1923).
Three Women, Three Ages. (Unpublished, now lost. Written in the 1950's.)
Possession. (Written ca. 1960, published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis)
The Anvil. Elmsford, New York: Harper & Row, Inc., 1963. (Orig. copyrighted in 1962 by author.)
Poetry
All available poetry was published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis.
"Age" (1992)
"Apostrophe" (1977)
"Autumn"
"Commentary" (1977)
"Elegy For Three"
"Epilogue" (1977)
"Lament" (1992)
"Lost Love"
"A Madrigal" (1977)
"Metamorphosis" (1977)
"Memory"
"Modern Romance" (1977)
"Obverse"
"Old Age Is Not For Sissies"
"Reflections" (1992)
"Seasonal"
"Song of an Oversusceptible Young Man" and "His Mother's Reply"
"To An Octogenarian"
"To Cyrus Vance" (1992)
"To My Doctor"
"To My Husband At Christmas"
"To My Family"
Essays
"To Featherfoot" (undated, published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis)
"Feisty Schoolmarm Made the Lawyers Sit Up and Take Notice." Smithsonian 11:133-134 (March 1981). (Written about Belva Lockwood)
"The Language of Flowers" (undated, published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis)
"The Memory Bank," (undated, published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis)
"A Pigeon Father in New York," (undated, published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis)
"Separation in Age," (1986, reprinted in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis)
"Teach Your Husband to Cook Cookbook," (1978, reprinted in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis)
"A Valley Hidden from the World," Valleys of History 6(No. 4):6-13. The Potomac Edison Company: Hagerstown, Maryland, 1970.
"Victorians Thought She Was a Downright Scandal: As She Was." Smithsonian 8:131-136 (October 1977). (Written about Victoria Woodhull.)
Short Stories
[Draco, F.] "The Ancient Goddess," (Published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis).
"Full Circle," (1983, published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis).
"The Ghosts of the Gods." Unfinished short story by F. Draco. (undated, published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis)
"I AM," (Written during Jimmy Carter's Presidency, published in Harvest: The Collected Works of Julia Davis.)
"Uffe the Silent," St. Nicholas 55:376 (March 1928). (This story appeared in Swords of the Vikings.)
"White Justice," Atlantic 151:689-695 (June 1933). "Two for One," Atlantic 163:733-738 (June 1939).
"Return," Women's Home Companion 67:18-19 (June 1940). Reprinted in Babies Keep Coming, Becky Reyher. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947, pp. 335-349.
Other Sources
Davis, John W. Papers. Yale University, Sterling Library.
Davis, John W. Papers of John W. Davis. West Virginia University Press (in press).
Harbaugh, William H. Interviews with Julia Davis Healy, March 1959 to September 1972, Yale University.
Harbaugh, William H. Lawyer's Lawyer: The Life of John W. Davis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Huntley, Theodore A. The Life of John W. Davis. New York: Duffield and Company, 1924.
Sender, Ramon. Death in Zamorra. University of New Mexico Press, 1991.
Tedford, Barbara Wilkie, "Confronting `The Other' in the fiction of Julia Davis," Bulletin of the West Virginia Association of College Teachers 11 (Fall 1989): 93-100.