Francis Grierson: Beyond The Valley of Shadows to the halls of Villa Montezuma

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Sep/Oct 2004 by Simonson, Harold P

Francis Grierson

Burried in America's literary past are sonic remarkable writers who received only slight attention during their lifetimes or were forgotten soon alter their deaths. One of these writers, Francis Grierson, has caught the interest of literary historians in recent years. When the fifth edition of his Valley of Shadows (1909) appeared in 1948, Ednumd Wilson gave it a full-scale review in the New Yorker (September 18, 1948). Theodore Spencer said in his introduction to this edition that the book was a "minor classic," and Bernard DeVoto suggested that Grierson's unusually literary power justified the deletion of Spencer's adjective. Other scholars (Boy P. Basier, Carl Sandburg, and Van Wyek Brooks, to name hut three) have been struck by the strange career of Grierson, who, nschooled and unannounced, made his way from a log cabin in Sangamon County, Illinois, to the most elite courts and literary cireles of Europe.

Grierson's real name was Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard; he took his mother's family name when he published Modern Mysticism in 1899. He was born on September 18, 1848, in the town of Birkenhead, across the Mersey River lrom Liverpool, England. Distressed by the widespread economic depression (which by 1850 had sent nearly 19,000 English settler to Illinois alone), his parents emigrated in 1849 and settled the same year in Sangamon County. His father, Joseph Shepard, was much less a farmer than he appears in The Valley of Shadows. Unfamiliar wilh agriculture, unsuccessful in a horse-selling business, constantly troubled with sore eyes while in the country, and restless to obtain a governmental position in St. Louis, Shepard spent only ten years in Illinois before moving to that city. To Emily Grierson Shepard, his mother, the Illinois prairies were lonesome and monotonous, and it was not until the family moved to Chicago in 1865 that she enjoyed life in America. In several letters to her first cousin, General Benjamin H. Grierson of the Union Army, she complained about the American frontier and looked forward to returning to "civilized life" in Engand. "For my part," she wrote him from England in 1874, "I lost so many precious years of my life wandering in the wilderness."

For young Francis Grierson the sojourn in Illinois was by no means unhappy. In later years he remembered this period as a lime when he could "wander about amidst a sea of wild flowers." He wrote in The Valley of Shadows that his cosmopolitan life in the capitals of Europe did not suffice to "alienate the romance and memory of those wonderful times." The strain of mysticism throughout his writing can be traced back to his childhood on the prairies, where close at hand were strange night noises of prairie birds and animals, and not far away the Mississippi River flowing "in one fixed and endless direction."

Young Grierson and his sister, Letitia, attended no school until the family moved to St. Louis when he was ten. He was, however, aware of the political excitement also close at hand. When the family lived for a time in Macoupin County, near Palmyra, their log house served as a station on the Underground Railroad.

Grierson's father several times barely avoided serious trouble with his neighbors, who were strongly touched with Southern sympathies. Most memorable to the boy was the last Lincoln-Douglas debate at Alton. In language Sandburg found so compelling, Grierson wrote in The Valley of Shadows that on that October day in 1858 he remembered Lincoln as one standing "like some solitary pine on a lonely summit, very tall, very dark, very gaunt, and very rugged, his swarthy features stamped with a sad serenity."

After five years in St. Louis, where he served as a page on the staff of General John C. Frèmont, Grierson moved with his family first to Niagara Falls and then to Chicago. His important move came in 1869 when he set out alone for France, and as a skilllul piano improvisor gained the respect of composer Francois Auber and many royal families in whose court he played. During the next twenty years he traveled widely in both Europe and America, crossed the Atlantic several times, and once went to Australia. In 1887 he began writing for San Diego's Golden Era, a literary magazine to which Bret Harte and Mark Twain also contributed. Two volumes of Grieson's essays, Pensees et Essais and Essays and Pen-Pic lures, published two years later in Paris, were richly praised by Staphane Mallarmè and Paul Verlaine. During the next thirty years he published other volumes of essays that generally showed him as a belated romantic, hostile toward the new movements of literary realism, naturalism, and philosophical determinism.

Of all his published work the one receiving most notice was The Valley of Shadows, which consists of reminiscences about his early days in Illinois and Missouri. In it he pictured the ante-bellum days in the Midwest before industrialism and the Civil War had destroyed the old order. Grierson attempted to interpret the moods of the pioneers who saw the oncoming shadows of war and who puzzled over the symbolic meaning of the appearances of Donati's comet in 1858: an interpretation of the comet was that it prophesied that one from among the people would rise to lead them. Grierson's hook is also about Abraham Lincoln; Roy P. Basler asserted in The Lincoln Legend (1935) that of the many interpretations of Lincoln the mystic, Grierson's is "by far the most entrancing."