NONFICTION
Tamsen Donner’s tragic fate inspires Burton’s new book
For some writers, a serendipitous discovery or passing remark can set an entire career in motion or drive it just as arbitrarily off the tracks.
For Gabrielle Burton, the former Buffalo-based feminist author who now lives in Venice, Calif., an offhanded comment by a venerable writing teacher at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in 1972 turned into a near decade-long detour in her life and work. In “Searching for Tamsen Donner,” her extraordinary new nonfiction addition to the University of Nebraska Press’s American Lives Series, she recounts how former Middlebury College professor William Lederer once told her he dreamed that she would one day write a book about people “surviving without eating each other.”
Thirty-seven years later, this turns out to be that book. Burton, who returns to Buffalo for a reading and book signing at 3 p. m. today at WNY Book Arts Collaborative on 468 Mohawk St., initially had no idea where this unsolicited portent would lead her. She was writing a novel about a young woman from a conservative, Midwestern background on a cross-country motorcycle trip in the late 1960s, but the fantasy element of the project was all too apparent to her as the wife of a University at Buffalo professor and the mother of five young daughters. Still, there was “road novel” in her and she was determined to pursue it.
Through a series of entirely coincidental observations and discoveries, she noted a remarkable parallelism between her own life and that of Tamsen Donner, matriarch of the ill-fated Donner Party, whose attempted passage across the snowbound Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846-1847 led to the American westward migration’s most notorious episode of starvation and cannibalism.
Burton’s first attempt to write about two women living parallel lives 130 years apart led to years of research, often with her family in tow, including in 1977 when the entire Burton clan — Gabrielle, her husband Roger, and their five daughters ages 5 to 13 — essentially re-enacted the journey of the Donner Party from their home in Eggertsville (the Donner family set off from Springfield, Ill.) via the “jumping off” point of Independence, Mo., to California in their late-model Chevy Impala station wagon.
As often happens with such quixotic projects, the novel that resulted (“Nearly Time”) was idiosyncratic in ways that did not comport with editors’ expectations of feminist authors of that era, and it did not find a publisher.
Eventually Burton moved onto another project—a darkly comedic feminist/surrealist novel called “Heartbreak Hotel” — that won her the Maxwell Perkins Prize in 1986. She developed an interest in screenwriting, and wrote the screenplay and with her grown daughters produced “Manna from Heaven,” an independent film shot in Buffalo that premiered in these parts to much fanfare in 2001.
Despite these successes, her fascination with the life of Tamsen Donner did not fade. Writing a conventional biography seemed too academic an exercise, and besides it had already
been done. What Burton sought was a narrative that read Tamsen Donner’s heroic 19th century pre-feminist life through the lens of 20th century feminist experience — including her own experience as a mother and working artist — right through the backtracking and occasional setbacks of post-feminist thinking in the 21st century.
The form she adopts in this book is neither straightforward biography nor personal memoir, but a skillful interpolation of the two that permits her to explore what her earlier novel did not — the intensely personal connection she feels to Donner and the paradoxical set of impulses she must have felt as a educated woman, a pioneer who believed in Manifest Destiny, and also the mother of five.
The portions of the book that recount the Burton family trek across the Rockies and High Sierras are written with a deft comic touch and the plucky, feminist bravado that made “Heartbreak Hotel” such a crossover hit. What may surprise readers is the author’s intuitive gifts as a researcher and narrative historian. She succeeds where other historians and biographers have failed in uncovering and publishing here all 17 of Donner’s known letters from the journey.
Burton’s curiosity to speculate and piece together clues as to circumstances surrounding Tamsen’s fate — she is thought to be the last of the 41 victims of the Donner Party to perish in March 1847 — drives the narrative forward as if Burton’s own perceived vulnerabilities somehow implicate her in the tragedy. It’s the book’s final uncoupling of these two parallel lives that is Tamsen Donner’s legacy to pioneering woman and Burton’s literary triumph.
R. D. Pohl is the News’ literary blogger and poetry editor.
Searching for Tamsen Donner By Gabrielle Burton University of Nebraska Press 328 pages, $26.95
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