 |
| Dream of Laura |
Upon bounding up the steps to
the professor’s office, Kuehn found Triggs – yes, this really was the headline
– “in flagrante delictu.”
“He does not regard the
institution of marriage in any wise [sic] as a solemn or sacred institution or one
conducive to the best interest of morals or the progress of the human race,”
Kuehn told the court. It’s interesting that he sold out the professor on the
matter of marriage.
For later Kuehn became editor and publisher of a journal called Prospectus: Instead of a Magazine that proclaimed itself “calculated to jar the sensibilities and ruffle the temper of victims of ‘fixed’ opinions.”
For later Kuehn became editor and publisher of a journal called Prospectus: Instead of a Magazine that proclaimed itself “calculated to jar the sensibilities and ruffle the temper of victims of ‘fixed’ opinions.”
Dismissed from the University
of Chicago and disgraced by the trial, Triggs did have his defenders. Many insisted
that his freedom of speech had been violated.
“The worst that can be said
is that he is a little touched with the mild socialism of William Morris and
[German educator] Froebel,” the St. Louis
Mirror editorialized.
 |
| Professor Triggs in 1904; photo appeared in The Literary Digest |
In September 1905, Triggs traveled to New York City where he attended a meeting at Peck’s Restaurant on lower Fulton Street (a go-to place for big thinkers on small budgets).
With Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others, he established the League for Industrial Democracy and issued a call to study Socialism. The group stated:
The
recent remarkable increase in the Socialist vote of America should serve as an
indication to the educated men and women in the country that Socialism is a
thing concerning which it is no longer wise to be indifferent.
Then Triggs married a former
student, Ada Beall Cox. They moved to a ranch in Turlock, California, to raise
animals and grow fruits and vegetables. The plan was to continue to write and
publish.
Meanwhile in Paris, Laura had
married a physician and cared for her young son, Edmond. She became a member of
the Society of French Literary Critics and published articles under the
pseudonym Julia Gagey-McAdoo.
And she got to know Anatole France, an esteemed Parisian essayist, novelist, and historian who stood with Zola during the Dreyfus Affair and ultimately won a Nobel Prize.
And she got to know Anatole France, an esteemed Parisian essayist, novelist, and historian who stood with Zola during the Dreyfus Affair and ultimately won a Nobel Prize.
In the springtime of 1911, the
two began a love affair replete with ecstatically passionate correspondence.
Laura spoke and wrote French fluently. But the relationship did not last the
year. In December, “la belle Floridienne,” as he called her, wrote to her
lover:
I find myself sombering in a cruel
despair which is slowly destroying my normal capacity for hope and a sense of
inner harmony. You made me believe that I helped you live life and you would be
equally sad to lose me. You told me yesterday that the wife of your youth (of
which the memory is sacred) did not see you every day as I do. But similarly, I
see myself in a societal position that recognizes my rank and my talents, (and
I do not affect a false modesty there) in which you could at least visit, in
which I could have you as a guest and see you at dinner parties and the like. I
would adapt happily to this situation. What are words? You told me to not be
afraid of them. The essential is to feel complete with another person. Love of
this kind has no name or etiquette. It gives and receives all, it’s an endless
circle and this is how I love you…*
The next day Laura took an
overdose of barbital and died. She is buried in the ossuary at Pere Lachaise
Cemetery in Paris.
Young Edmond
returned to the United States to live with his aunt and uncle in New York City.
In California, Oscar and Ada Beall
Triggs became the parents of three children. They also won an award for their Shetland
pony at the Sonoma-Marin Agricultural Fair in 1914.
Further down the road, the
couple moved to the Tingley Colony in Point Loma, a Utopian community founded
by an autocratic Theosophist named Katherine Tingley. After World War I, they lived
in Seattle and then Manitoba, where Oscar died in 1930.
Ada lived for another 30
years and had all kinds of adventures. She may have been the happiest of the
lot.
*Translation by Mark Olmsted.
https://www.throughthehourglass/edmond-oscar-laura-2.html
See also March 2 + April 6 + June 15, 2016 posts.
Oscar Lovell Triggs was my grandfather. I am the daughter of his youngest son, Dudley. He died more than twenty years before I was born. What is written here, is a good summary of what I have learned over the years. The middle name Lovell is bestowed on all of the descendants of Oscar and Ada. My nephew just had a baby boy, who is now burdened with the naming tradition. My grandmother, Ada Beall Cox, wrote under the name Lovell Beall Triggs.
ReplyDelete