WT: Your book on William Tell, Mountains Are Free, was that a subject that was given to you by your publisher?
JD: Yes.
WT: So he basically said "Write this," and you wrote it. And your source materials for that were whatever was generally available?
JD: Yes. I can't claim any inside information on that one. [laughs]
WT: The name of the book, how did that come about? Mountains Are Free?
JD: Well, they are. And so are the Swiss mountains. And it's the motto of West Virginia.
WT: So that was deliberate.
JD: Sure. It worked well for me in Russia and Georgia, too. I told my guide down there, who of course was a communist guide (but
the Georgians never liked the Russians. They didn't like communist Russia.) I said "Your state reminds me very much of my state.
The motto of my state is `Mountaineers are always free.'" Well, his eyes lit up, and from then on he took us everywhere. He took us
over country roads where you had to ford streams hoping they weren't too deep. I mean there wasn't any other way to get across.
And I saw how backward the countryside really was. Because in those days, they had improved the cities, and then you were never to
go out of the cities. You just saw the cities and said "Isn't the country thriving!" And this was '57. So he became out great friend just
on that basis.
WT: I read the play "Possession." The address you have on it is Princeton, New Jersey. Was your husband Charles alive?
JD: Chip was dead and Bill hadn't come back into the picture yet.
WT: So it was between 1956 and 1976. Can you tell me how you got started on that play?
JD: Well, it actually happened in West Virginia. That woman existed. Well, she actually did ... her sisters-in-law said she poisoned
her first husband. I left that doubtful. He drank the poison she put in a whiskey jug and he was a drinker, but she hadn't left the
whiskey out for him. She'd ... He got it out. I don't know if there was any intention. She was very much in love with him when she
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married him. She ran away to marry him, and they had these two children, two boys. And he was a drunk, a real alcoholic. It wasn't
understood in those days as something you could get help for. It was just "Why do you do that?" you know.
WT: Was this a local incident?
JD: Yes. The man she did, or did not poison, was my grandfather's cousin. And then she did marry the rich old senator who had
wanted to marry her in the beginning. And then he died of natural causes, and she nursed him very faithfully but she did make him
reconstruct his will and leave everything to her and not to his daughter. And then she married, when she was about to be brought to
trial because his other children, or maybe grandchildren, objected to the will. And then she married the governor who had her pardon
in his pocket in case the trial went against her. And whoever was charging her withdrew from the trial. It never came to trial. She
was going to be tried for forging his will, or got him to sign something when he was on his deathbed and didn't know what he was
signing. Anyway she did make changes in his will. And later, she lived quite a long time after that, and her son took care of her. I
used to visit him. And at the end they had to have nurses for her. And as soon as the nurses got to know anybody in town, they'd
bring them in from Pittsburgh and then change for another nurse so that too much talk wouldn't get around town. I think that she
began to talk rather freely in her last years. And this is all true. That part's not in the play. And she was also heard to say later that
she had married once for love, once for money, and once for position, and give her money every time.
WT: Can you give me any names?
JD: The first one she married was a Davis. So I knew her as Myra Davis. I knew her as Myra Horner. Of course I didn't know her
by that name because I was very much younger. I think I saw her once or twice but just as a very very old lady. I knew her
grandchildren well. The one that her sisters-in-law said she poisoned, but that was never brought to trial because there wasn't any
evidence, was a first cousin of my grandfather's. A Davis also. I always had it in the back of my mind, but her grandson, who was a
great friend of mine (and that's his picture up there) was always like a brother to me, said if I published it while he lived he would
never speak to me again. So I never really tried to sell that play or have it produced.
WT: I noticed when I read through it that there were two first acts, one starting before they were married ...
JD: I decided that wasn't necessary in the very first scene, and of course they don't like very many changes of scenery. I never made
any real effort to get that one on. She was quite a woman, obviously. And she brought her sons up well. That's when she was
married to the senator. She had plenty of money to send them to the best colleges and gave them all the education they should have.
One was very successful and the other contracted syphilis and with the mental trouble that came on with that (they didn't know how
to treat that in those days).
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WT: This is a West Virginia Senator?
JD: Yes.
WT: And what was his name?
JD: Davis.
WT: It was senator Davis.
JD: No, not that family. That family are not related to us at all. You can't claim all the Davises any more than you can claim all the
Smiths. Now if your name is Theriault you can say it. If that's the name, it's probably a relation. Not if your name is Davis.
WT: One of the pieces in the package was about five or six pages from a story called "Ghosts of the Gods."
JD: I don't know what's happened to the rest of it. I thought it started out rather promising.
WT: Yes. Was that ever published?
JD: No. I have more of that stuff up in the attic and if we're going to make that attic trip, I'd like to make it some time in the
daytime....
WT: I think you mentioned last time that you had several short stories published under the name F. Draco.
JD: Yes, F. Draco, I've forgotten what it was called. I remember the last sentence but ... The last sentence was "The beach was
empty except for the dead and rotting body of a steer." He was killing a steer to give a party for natives on some remote island and I
think the natives killed him instead. And the story ... I've forgotten. But it was published in, I don't think it was in Story Magazine, it
was in Adventure Magazine. And then I had some stories in Story but I've forgotten them too. You know, life is so long and memory
is not so good.
WT: I was wondering if any of them had appeared in an anthology.
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JD: There was one. It was an anthology about children and it was when I was working in the adoption agency, so that must have been
about '34 or '35. And I've forgotten what it was called, but I know the real mother claimed the child and took it back and it was so
homesick for the adoptive family that she finally took it back to the adoptive family. The child being three years old, or something
like that.
WT: Your novel Bridle the Wind, the second in the trilogy, to me is one of the most interesting ones.
JD: Yes, that's the one of that trilogy that did the worst too. I liked it myself, but it was unpopular. Too much feminism in it, I think,
for the time in which it was published.
WT: I think published today it would be much more popular. I was very interested in your characterization of the hunchback lawyer.
Can you tell me how you developed that? Was that based on a real person?
JD: It was sort of combination of people. There was a hunchback lawyer here, but he was not the one who's in the book. I put a lot of
characteristics of other people into him.
WT: The courtroom scene and the method by which he got Lucy off. Which basically seems to be a technicality.
JD: It was.
WT: How did you arrive at that?
JD: Well, I just studied the laws of the day.
WT: In a way I felt a little bit let down there because I had followed her through the whole story and I was expecting a lot more to
happen in the courtroom. Maybe it was more realistic the way you did it, but I guess I was used to courtroom drama.
JD: Well I'm sure I had legal... like any lawyer you look up and see what cases are like that. You say, well if it happened once it
could happen again, and so you build your defense on that. I'm sure I found that case. I'm sure I did look up the lawyers of the time.
I found it just the other day in my papers, some faxes of the Virginia laws about slaves in that time. They were perfectly awful.
Thank God its over. I did tell you about my grandfather. The one who had fought right through the war from First Manassas to
Appomattox. Except when he was a prisoner of war and then he escaped and went back to fight again. He told me when I was about
eleven, he said "I would have to fight as I did because I couldn't fight against my own people." Which meant he couldn't fight against
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Virginia. Because they were much more Virginians than they were United States. He said "I couldn't fight against my own people,
but you must always be very glad we didn't win." That took it right off the back of my mind. I mean I never had to fight the Civil
War at school or any of that nonsense, which many Southern girls did.
WT: I would have been very interested in your writing a fourth volume, or perhaps a fifth, dealing with the family after the Civil War
during Reconstruction.
JD: Well I meant to, but by the time I did three books about the family, the second one as I say didn't go well. The other two did go
well, but the second one didn't, and then I just got interested in doing something else.
WT: To me the second one dealt with not only feminism but also a lot of other issues that perhaps people didn't want to deal with.
JD: It didn't do well at all. In fact, it was amazing that they took the third one. It was about the Mexican War. That did well. The
first one did the best. The first one was taken by a book club in this country and then, a historical book club, and then it was
published in England and went very well over there. But there are fashions in reading just as there are in writing.
WT: One of my favorite parts in your book Legacy of Love, when you were very young was when you told about The Great Lie.
JD: Oh yes. I've never had such a conviction of guilt in my life. I was overwhelmed by my guilt.
WT: But wasn't that also you exercising the same kind of imagination ...
JD: Oh sure. It was surely imaginative. The dear Italian coal miners going up to the coal mine, all they'd done was wave a hand at
me. They loved children. And I constructed a whole scene out of my head and went in and told the cook. She told grandmother and
grandmother told aunt Emma. They both told my father and my grandfather. And I wasn't allowed to play on that side of the yard
again that summer for fear they'd see me again. Poor dears. We'd had a lot of "black hand" around at that time. I don't suppose these
men were involved in it in the least, because all they gave me was the most friendly grin and waved their hands.
WT: What I think you said in contrasting Clarksburg with Media was one of the things you did at Clarksburg a lot while you were
growing up was dream.
JD: Yes. I didn't have many playmates. I was very much the only child in a big house of adults who were mostly devoted to
intellectual activity. So the silence was just overwhelming.
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WT: When you were a child, writing ...
JD: As soon as I could write I was writing stories.
WT: What kind of things were your writing?
JD: Well, princesses and princes. Very derivative stories. Then I wrote a Just So story about how the pig got his tail, which wasn't
nearly as good as Kipling's but [laughs] I wrote it anyway. I think I was about eleven by that time. These other ones were really ... I
have a notebook with some of them in it. I can show it to you.
WT: Was your grandmother reading that or your aunts?
JD: Well, I was reading to myself by the time I was four.
WT: Were you getting any kind of response from your family to your writing? Did they approve of you doing this?
JD: Well, they approved of me trying to write. Grandmother approved of anything that was trying to work with my mind. She didn't
approve of much else. She did want me to develop what was here. I remember much later I was reading The Saturday Evening Post.
I must have been eleven or twelve. And she said "Reading that trash again?" And she said "I hope that you'll marry a poor man
because you'll never amount to anything if you don't." I satisfied her. I married three poor men. [laughs]
WT: You've said one of the things you wanted to do for a long time was write books. How did that fit into your family's feeling about
...
JD: Grandmother thought that was just right. Then she said "What do you want to be?" and I said "I want to be a good wife and
mother." And she said "Is that all?" Well, that's what she'd been and my other grandmother had been. What else was I to imitate?
But I did want to write books. There was no doubt about that. As soon as I could form the letters I began writing. And then I used to
dramatize the books I read. I would have to play ... was particularly fond of the Jungle Books. I would be Mogli, of course. And my
poor aunt would have to be whatever character I assigned her. [laughs] And then I'd tell her what to do, so that I could be what I was
going to be. And I did a great deal of that. Always dramatizing my stories.
WT: Did you do any of that while your were at Media? Did that carry over?
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JD: I was too busy. Too busy running round the farm and watching everything. Getting uncle Will to saddle a horse for me and
racing with my colleagues who were happy to be out there. My grandfather would say "I told you not to run those horses in the front
field." I couldn't go out on the road yet. I was too young, without an adult with me, on a horse. "I look at you riding around the front
field like Comanches." And we were. They weren't very fast horses anyway, but we were getting the very last ounce of speed out of
them.
WT: As you were growing up and even later when you were writing as a professional, what kind of writers were you reading, that you
were interested in?
JD: Well in my early teens I went through practically all of Scott and I couldn't read Dickens. Now I can't read Scott and I love
Dickens.
WT: How about into the '30's and '40's?
JD: By then I was reading just about everything and I still am trying, although I get defeated by many of the modern writers.
WT: What I don't see in your writing as they go into the 1930's and '40's, is definite influences from some of the writers like
Hemingway, Faulkner. It seemed like your style had been pretty well formed.
JD: Well, I think Hemingway did introduce a new style. And I had read a lot of books before that which were, according to the new
style, very wordy. And I followed Hemingway trying to make my style not very wordy. And I think you'll agree it isn't. I try to say
the most in the fewest words.
WT: Your short stories, I think, are even more noticeably economical in words.
JD: You read those ones that were in the Atlantic Monthly.
WT: I know you're still working on one novel.
JD: Well, I've just gone back to it. And of course I'm finding that what I did back last winter before I got sick was absolutely
unacceptable, so I'm doing it over from the beginning, and I haven't gotten very far. And I have a problem because I'm always trying
to find a place, a hole, where I can dig in and write and be undisturbed. I don't have that here. The telephone rings, or whoever is
working for me in the morning has to be instructed about something or I have to make sure there's enough food, or something. And
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really, in all my years of writing I was able to leave home, like a man going to his office at nine o'clock after the children went to
school, by the time they got to school age of course. And before that I'd have somebody come in and take care of them in the
mornings, and go somewhere. It doesn't matter where. All I want ... I want a sofa because I write lying down a good deal of the time.
And then I had a typewriter, but I can't type any more because of this hand. And so all I need now is a pad and a pencil and a sofa and
a place I know I'm not going to be disturbed. I can close up about half past twelve and go home for lunch. And I don't know where I
can find that. They said I could work in the room at the library, but I'd have to sit up there and look as if I was busy. And a lot of the
time I might be just staring at the wall and not look as if I was busy.
WT: Very few people go in there.
JD: Well, even one person is deadly at that time. You're putting yourself into an entirely different world. You come out and it takes a
good half hour to get back in. So an interruption is not just a few minutes. Or at least for me it isn't. My creative mind shuts up about
five o'clock and then I want to have a drink and I want to talk to somebody or do something like that. People are always saying idiot
things like "I've always wanted to write a book but I don't know where you find the time." Well you know you don't get the time to
write a book. Your make the time to write a book. No one is going to hand you the time to write a book. I feel as I'm doing better. I
feel as I write that I'm beginning to get it right. I'm glad I didn't make any effort to publish it or even send it to my agent. I have two
or three, which I've lost. I had four chapters done. But they're no good anyway. But they would give me a body to go on with. And I
know what's going to happen and all that.
WT: If you had as much time and energy as you needed, what would you do after that?
JD: Oh I just think I'll finish that book. I don't know what I will do after that. If I can finish that book I'll be doing well.
WT: Most of the books that you've written and didn't require a lot of external research take about a year. Is that right?
JD: Well, it took me a good deal more than a year to do the research on The Shenandoah. I read about 400 books and manuscripts and
letters, and reminiscences.
WT: The one you're working on now is based on material you already have.
JD: I've already researched this one so I don't have to do any. I don't think I would ever have the physical energy to go ... for instance
I used to go to the public library in New York or the Library of Congress with a hard boiled egg in my pocket and stay six and seven
hours going through all kinds of stuff.
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WT: Your trip to Russia in 1957, was that a pleasure trip?
JD: We went as representatives of the American Authors' Guild to the Russian Authors' Guild. But there was really no ... The party
they gave to us, only two Russian authors dared to turn up. But it was a very interesting, instructive trip.
WT: Russia wasn't that friendly a place in 1957, was it?
JD: Oh no. And we had a little code that we wrote back saying if we said this it means "They've swept us away. See if you can get
us. Tell the American embassy." [laughs]
WT: Were you American authors going over there with your books?
JD: No. It was another American author and myself, Grace Stone, and we were asked to go as representatives of the American
Authors' League to the Russian Authors' League. But as I said, at the party they gave for us only two Russian authors turned up.
Because they didn't want to be misassociated. And our guides were very strange, and the guide in Petrograd, no it was Leningrad, said
"Do you like modern painting?" [whisper] "Yes I do." She took me up to the top floor of the Hermitage, the art museum. And there
were the Picassos and the Monets and the Manets and the whole lot. Stacked on the floor so that you had to look at them this way
[flat]. And then about ten years later, of course, the Russians realized that these were much valued. Stalin had said "Put them up
there. They're terrible. They're disintegrating the people." They realized that they were much valued all over the world. And now
they're very proud to show them off. They'd stolen most of them from old members of the aristocracy or the richocracy. Most of them
really from a very rich Jewish gentleman who had made a point of collecting them. There they were just stacked like those records
over there. And I wrote to all my guides after I got home because I'd made friends with all of them. Never had a word back.
WT: How long were you there?
JD: Six weeks, which makes me a Russian expert. It seemed long enough. And I went to Georgia. The Georgian guide made great ...
Did I tell you about Montani Semper Liberatis? Oh he glowed at that. Old Georgia was the last standout, now that its free. Its always
wanted to be free. He took us everywhere. He took us down to the basement and showed us what had been stolen from the
aristocratic Georgian families. And he took us out in the country. Mostly you couldn't go out in the country because the roads weren't
done. He took us over roads where there was no roads, where you forded the brook. And I said "Just like West Virginia," and my
travelling companion Grace said to me "I didn't come all this way to be somewhere that's like West Virginia." [laughs] And I said
"But you have. And it is." I had a good time with all my guides. I made real friends with all of them but never heard a word.
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WT: Was that an experience that might be worth writing about someday? [Note: She did write of her trip to Russia, but it was never
published. The typescript is located at the Charles Town Museum, in Charles Town, WV.]
JD: Yes. I just found a nice picture of me in Russia today.
WT: Did you travel the route of Lewis and Clark when you wrote No Other White Men?
JD: To some extent. I had gone out and met the tribe Sackagawea belonged to. I had gone out to Wyoming and met them. And I did
know that country. I didn't go specifically for the book. I did go enough to see what the country was like.
WT: What got you started on that book?
JD: How could I remember everything I've done?
WT: Well, it was either something you had to write or something you wanted to write, I guess.
JD: I think it was something I wanted to write. I know when I first wrote Swords of the Vikings. I had the worst possible contract and
I got that book out and I got out Vaino, Boy of Finland, into which I wove the thing Longfellow took Hiawatha from and then my
editor suggested I write about William Tell. So I did. It was an interesting story. But how I got into the ... I don't think he suggested
it. I think I suggested it.
WT: Were you interested in the Clarks?
JD: No. Clarksburg, who was named for his older brother. I really cannot tell you at this point. I don't think he suggested. I know it
was one I took a great deal of joy in writing and loved doing it. And read their original diaries. And Clark couldn't spell, but he was a
great extrovert and loved everybody and got on with everybody and took care of the little boy of Sakagewea, who was sick and the
Indian guide. He saved their instruments from the canoe upset. And Lewis was just the opposite. He was much of a scholar. Wrote
beautiful English. Liked being alone. Never happier than when he was alone and met a grizzly bear. A complete introvert. And yet
they were very great friends. And I don't know how I got started on that. It was one of the books that I took a great deal of joy in
writing. And I went up to the top floor in the New York Library. They have a history floor, where they have their original
manuscripts. Not the manuscript but printed directly from their original manuscripts. And also those of Pat Gass and of the young
boy George who was with them. He wrote to his family saying he was going off with them and "Your loving and obedient son."
Giving them no chance to say yes or no. I think it's one of my best books. It stayed in print for forty years. That means something.
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And it was translated into German. And it was also translated into arabic but I never got the arabic translation because about that time
in Egypt they were burning all Western books.
WT: Your book Ride with the Eagle, the Mexican War book, seems to use similar sources.
JD: They weren't similar sources.
WT: I mean diaries.
JD: They were my grandfather's diaries. You're asking me to remember a lot more than I can remember.
WT: What I was trying to compare that with the effort for No Other White Men, since it was dealing with diary sources...
JD: I wrote No Other White Men long before I did the other. My feeling has always been to go to the source if you can get it. Of
course the source of the William Tell story is not available. I did have a source for the Swords of the Vikings. I had the first written
Danish history. I mean written in Danish. And my friend, who got me into the project said, because of her pictures she wanted the
stories written up, said "You won't be able to read it because its gammeldansk, which means Old Danish." Well, it was much easier
for me than New Danish because it was much more like English. They had an immense influence on our language, as you know.
WT: For Ride with the Eagle, were you able to go over any of the route or was it something you did mainly from written materials?
JD: Are you talking about Ride with the Eagle or Eagle on the Sun?
WT: Ride with the Eagle.
JD: My grandfather, I had his original diary. [She still seems to be confusing Ride with the Eagle, the tale of the Doniphan
Expedition using diaries, with her novel about the expedition, Eagle on the Sun.]
WT: You didn't do any travelling for that, did you?
JD: Oh yes. I went up and down the valley as he did. [Still doesn't seem right.]
WT: Part of it went out to Missouri, didn't it. Doniphan's expedition to Mexico?
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JD: Well, I did have an ancestor who went out to Missouri. And he would have been a Sam Houston. Because he just decided that
he and his friends would go and liberate Mexico, I mean Texas. But then he came back home to say goodby to his grandmother.
He'd been to West Point and then he went out to Missouri and was a fur trader for a while. He really was a fur trader, and wrote
letters back saying "Bring me some tobacco when you come. I'm out." And that kind of thing. He got on very well with the Indians
and so forth and then came back to St. Louis and was going with his friends to liberate Texas but came home first to say goodby to
his grandmother and met Miss Lucy Naylor and fell in love and married her and studied law in his father-in-law's law office, became
a lawyer and sired nine children by her and nine children by his next wife. She died of it, but the next wife went on and on and wrote
a very good memoir. She was apparently a very strong woman.
WT: Now that I've read "The Return" can you tell me how you came about writing that?
JD: I worked for five years in a child adoption agency. That was one of the cases I really knew about. And I made it into a story.
WT: Was that one you were personally involved in?
JD: Not that I was involved in the sense of making them do anything, but I was involved in the sense that I could see what they were
doing.
WT: How did you get to write Cruise with Death?
JD: It is no good. My sister-in-law had written it. She had the story and she was sick and I said "Well I'll help you get it printed."
And I rewrote it. But it was a bad story and it wasn't a great success as a book either. There's very little of me in it. I was trying to
help her out, and I didn't help either her or myself.
WT: Your unpublished play "Possession." I was trying to get people straight there. Was the senator in there Henry G. Davis?
JD: No, it was the other one.
WT: You said her name was Myra Davis ...
JD: It was Senator Camden.
WT: So when she was married to the doctor, his name was Davis?
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JD: Yes. He was a cousin of my grandfather's. And his sisters always thought that he she had poisoned him and killed him but it's a
mute point. Sure the lye was in the whiskey bottle, but she was using the whiskey bottle to make soap.
WT: And her maiden name was Horner?
JD: Myra Horner.
WT: Do you have any other plays that you remember...
JD: Yes, I had another play that I wrote a long time back. I wrote it when I was taking a course in play writing at Barnard, and it was
chosen as the play to be done at the end of the year. It was a play about West Virginia Mountaineers and it was done by New York
Jewesses. And you never saw anything funnier in your life. I sat in the back seat and just roared with laughter. But I've lost it,
unless it's up in the attic. And then I wrote another play about this woman you were talking about. And I always wanted to be a
playwright. In fact that one that you saw was optioned by Brecht Pemberton, but then he died and it never came out.
WT: You're talking about the one from Barnard?
JD: No, I'm talking about "Possession." I don't know which one I'm talking about, to tell you the truth. The one from Barnard was
about three sisters. One was very intellectual. One was pretty and sweet. And one was very motherly. In the first act they were in
their '20's, next act in their '40's, and last act in their '60's. And everybody said "Who wants to read about a lot of old women in their
'60's?"
WT: Today they would.
JD: [laughs] Yes, today they would. It was tracing their developments.... I think it was this play about the three women that he had
the option on. And I've forgotten what it was called. And my play about West Virginia mountaineers was very different and was
chosen to be put on at the end of the play writing session, done by New York jewesses. You just could have died laughing.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
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