6th February, 1933, Los Angeles Biltmore
Beloved Papa,
I was frightfully glad to get your letter written after you got back from Paris because I’d just written you a long and detailed one in answer to your what you called sententious one, and you’ll have got it by now. I am absolutely delighted that you’re not worritted any more, and that you do feel I’m quite sane and responsible, because, as they say over here – I sure am. My only comment is about what you say about it being the duty of the clergy to spread religion and that the layman doesn’t really need to. My feeling is that we’ve been putting it on to the clergy and expecting them to be supermen to call in and consult about our religious difficulties for too long, and that we love to abuse the Church and say it’s dead, while in point of fact, the Church is, or are, the people in it, clergy and all. This isn’t religion in the accepted sense of the word, except in so far as it’s a quality of life, which religion should really be, as you said in your letter. Religion is one of the things that one has to use and give away or else it goes dead. Imagine if you’d had the giveable away kind, so that we’d all lived on a basis of reciprocal honesty with each other, when we were all smaller. I shouldn’t have felt that you were so far away and high up as I’ve often felt it, and it would have meant a family fellowship instead of a focal point for our various religious beliefs – or disbeliefs. Personally, I don’t think anyone had such divine parents as we have. I’m just sorry we haven’t known how to make more of you, and having now learnt that parents and children needn’t live on different planes I don’t see why we should waste any more time. Talk of a united spirit and a feeling of confidence (?) throughout the world, while although we are one of the most united families I know, we really all live in our own little worlds and don’t know each other. As for there being nothing in guidance, humanly I don’t think it would have occurred to me that going several thousand miles from home would bring me closer to you. And, what’s more Papa, I’m jolly well determined that it’s not going to stop short at letters. I can write all this to you, and then slip back in to the same old father and daughter relationship with you as before, when I see you, simply from habit. But I’m convinced that God can get us over habits, just as much as anything else. By the way, have you ever brought yourself to read ‘For Sinners Only’? There’s a lot of sound stuff in it, in spite of its journalistic style, which I may say I now don’t notice because I know how wonderfully helpful it’s been to so many people. I’m afraid I gave my copy to Kitty Trevelyan, but you can get it anywhere.
My only comment seems to have been a long one.
Feb 10th
I seem to have stopped rather abruptly too, but we’ve had absolutely no time these last four days. Los Angeles being anyway the home of fancy religions, people come flocking simply to try and start a new –ism, and we are kept busy showing that this isn’t one.
I think I’d better tell you about the Rodeo last Saturday which was on our day off between the end of the Phoenix campaign and the beginning of this one (the telephone has already rung 3 times since I started writing this morning. So my style may be a trifle disjointed if it goes on at that rate).
Frank had in his inimitable way discovered that there was a Rodeo and had decided that we ought to see it, so we all went off in cars to a place called Wickenburg which was about 50 miles from Phoenix, and got there just as it was starting, and it was simply marvellous. The place was seething with cowboys in red and yellow shirts and enormous hats, and Indians with long black hair – it was gloriously hot and sunny, and they started off. First they had bronco busting, and out of 15 or 20 riders only 2 came off. They’re only allowed to hold on with one hand, and if the other so much as touches the horse the rider is disqualified. The broncos were taken into pens just big enough for them to fit in, and then saddled from outside; I mean the saddles were lowered on to them from the top and then done up through holes in the fence, after which the rider was lowered into position, the gate was opened and the horse shot out sideways in a series of the most extraordinary convolutions (?) which the cowboy had to sit through for 15 seconds, at the end of which time a gun went off and his friends galloped up and yanked him off his horse on to theirs like a movie rescue, and the bronco went bucking off down the field by itself.
Then they had calf roping. An unfortunate little calf was let out of a pen about 3 seconds ahead of a horseman armed with a lariat who had to pursue it, rope it round its neck, and having thrown it, tie three of its legs together with a bit of rope which he carried in his mouth. The record time for this operation was 16 seconds! which included whirling the lassoo round his head before he threw it, and getting off his horse to tie the animal’s legs together.
There was then some bareback bronco riding, followed by steer roping which was the same thing but done by two people working together on a large ox with enormous horns. I mean they worked together to rope it, not that they both rode on it. One lassoed the beast round its horns so that it kicked its heels up and the other man neatly slipped a rope round its hind legs; then their two horses ran in different directions so that the steer was laid out, and one of the men came up and tied its legs together. That took slightly longer, but not much.
The next thing was bull dogging which meant that a steer was let out of its pen between two horsemen, one of whom had to throw himself from his gallopping horse in to the bull’s head which had, as I said, vast horns, and stop it and knock it over. Very often they were carried half way down the field clinging round the bull’s neck, and then when it stopped and tried to shake them off they clung on to its horns and gradually twisted its head round till it went over. The record for that was 4 seconds and there was tremendous excitement.
Last came a wild horse race, and bronco bull riding, by which time we’d ceased being surprised at anything, but a bucking bull is a very funny sight.
We went back to Wickenburg and had supper in a comic little shack where two cowboys played, and sang to the banjo, and Frank presented them with a copy of For Sinners Only as a reward. He always has spare copies lurking in the offing. There was a very rustic and wild and woolly fair going on, consisting of two sideshows, and two roundabouts of different kinds, all of which we patronised, and after supper they staged an old fashioned stage coach hold up in the village street. The people who were being held up made no effort to appear frightened or put out in any way, and apart from screaming in an absent minded way at irregular intervals took no further interest in the proceedings. As our train didn’t leave till 9.30 we wandered about in little bunches looking at the toughs, and my goodness they were tough, and went to the drug store where we sent off postcards and drank milk shakes till it was time to go. I took several photographs but they haven’t been developed yet.
We got here the next morning at about half past 8, and spent the morning preaching in various churches and have been on the hop ever since.
We’ve been in Hollywood itself several times, but have seen none but the respectable inhabitants. One of the respectable film actors has been changed though and we’re going to lunch in the Fox Studios next week. So I hope we shall see something. This afternoon we’re all going for a cruise round the harbour in a yacht, which will be my first view of the sea, and tomorrow some of us are going to a neighbouring township called Santa Barbara for 4 days, after which there’s going to be a short houseparty at another place called Riverside, and then we shall go to San Francisco. After that I’m not sure.
There I really must stop. This is to Mother too of course. By the way do make some reference to my letters when you answer them, just so that I know where I wrote them from and what I was doing.
Luff,
Maria
English