Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens

By Miriam Kalman Friedman

Growing up in a conservative, middle-class family in Texas, Claire Myers Owens sought adventure and freedom at an early age. At twenty years old, she left home and quickly found a community of like-minded free spirits and intellectuals in New York’s Greenwich Village. There Owens wrote novels and short stories, including the controversial novel The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman’s Independence, which was banned by the New York Public Library for its "risqué" content. Drawn to ideals of selfactualization and creative freedom, Owens became a key figure in the Human Potential Movement along with founder Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley, and became an ardent follower of Carl Jung. In her later years, Owens devoted her life to the practice of Zen Buddhism, moving to Rochester, NY, where she joined the Zen Center and studied under Roshi Philip Kapleau. She published her final book, Zen and the Lady, at the age of eighty-three.

Friedman’s rediscovery of Owens brings well-deserved attention to her little known yet extraordinary life and passionate spirit. Drawing upon autobiographies, letters, journals, and novels, Friedman chronicles Owens’s robust intellect and her tumultuous private life and, along the way, shows readers what makes her story significant. With very few role models in the early twentieth century, Owens blazed her own path of independence and enlightenment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780815654797

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Claire Myers Owens portrait by Minnie Smith, New Haven, CT, c. 1940s. From Blagg-Huey Library, Woman’s Collection, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas. Published with permission.

Copyright © 2019 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2019

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∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-3633-5 (hardcover)   978-0-8156-1107-3 (paperback)   978-0-8156-5479-7 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Friedman, Miriam Kalman, author.

Title: Rivers of light : the life of Claire Myers Owens / Miriam Kalman Friedman.

Description: First edition. | Syracuse : Syracuse University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018061078 (print) | LCCN 2019008894 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815654797 (E-book) | ISBN 9780815636335 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815611073 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Owens, Claire Myers. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

Classification: LCC PS3529.W436 (ebook) | LCC PS3529.W436 Z58 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.52 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061078

Manufactured in the United States of America

To those women coming of age in the twenty-first century: the rights of freedom, opportunity, and autonomy you now enjoy were bravely obtained by feminists and activists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Guard these rights as if your identity and self-determination depend on them—because they do. I dedicate this book to the Tellectinas of today, tomorrow, and forever.

And to

Carolyn A. Carney, Tellectina Exemplar

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Wind

1. Smug Harbor: 1896–1912

2. A Bundle of Contradictions: 1909–1913

3. Rote Hill: 1913–1916

4. Be Wise: 1916–1917

5. Nithking: 1917–1919

6. New Chimera: 1919–1920

7. Rivers of Light: 1921–1931

8. If It’s Predictable . . .: 1928–1935

9. Parallel Letters/Parallel Lives: 1930–1935

10. The Wolfe at the Door: 1935–1937

11. Expiedway Ten: 1937–1949

12. Awakening—Discovery of the Self: 1949–1963

13. The Lady and Her Court: 1963–1969

14. The End Is the Beginning: 1970–1976

15. Grande Amoureuse: 1976–1983

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Claire Myers Owens portrait

1. The West Wind, 1915, by Anne Brigman

2. Coren Douglas and Clairene Myers

3. Susan Allen Myers and Coren Lee Myers

4. Clairene’s senior picture

5. Clairene, College Press Club

6. Clairene at the locust tree

7. Clairene and Alden on the Myers’s porch

8. Mystery man

9. Clairene in hat

10. Dauber and Pine bookstore

11. Claire Myers Wanders

12. Claire Myers Owens with AAUW members

13. Claire and Thurston Owens in London

14. Claire signing Discovery of the Self

15. Dwain Wilder

16. Dr. Kenneth Ring

17. John White

18. Raul daSilva

19. Claire, Susan Stone, and Audrey Fernandez

20. Zen garden

Acknowledgments

TWO YEARS AGO, my friend and colleague Carolyn Carney called to say: I need a project. Let’s bring Claire back to life. I was astonished. The manuscript had sat for over ten years in disarray after an earlier attempt to publish. Carolyn assured me she would rescue the endnotes, and together we decided to go back to the earliest draft of the manuscript. She helped me forget the painful experience of the past and celebrate the joy of creation. Because of her encouragement, you are now reading this book. So first and foremost, I thank Carolyn for her eagle eye, her enduring patience, her expertise in research and American history, and her loyal friendship.

The late Ruthe Winegarten introduced me to Elizabeth Snapp, about whom you will read in the introduction, and who has been part of this project since its inception. Dale Spender’s Women Studies Institute in London, which I attended through a grant from Sally Bingham, helped me launch this project in the right direction. Truly a life work, this biography owes to the cooperation and endorsement of Elizabeth Snapp, then director of the Blagg-Huey Library at Texas Woman’s University (TWU). She made my discovery of Claire Myers Owens feasible and each project fun. As director, she ran the library, archive, and Woman’s Collection with professionalism and dignity, as a place of honor and a tribute to scholarship, as did her staff, especially Dawn Letson and Glenda Kallman. I also thank Kimberly Johnson, current director of libraries at TWU, along with members of her excellent staff, especially Shelia M. Bickel and Kristin Clark for their expertise and cooperation. Shelia’s extraordinary efforts offered immeasurable support.

Every biographer joyfully thanks the friends and colleagues of their subjects. All Claire people welcomed me into their homes and inner circles with generous hospitality, sharing their personal memories; they have celebrated each phase of this rebirth of the amazing Claire. Because they are numerous, I thank them as a group: Dr. Kenneth Ring, John White, Audrey Fernandez, Dwain Wilder, Raul daSilva, Margaret Lee Braun, Geoffrey Lister, Larry McSpadden, and Dr. Jean Houston, as well as Linda and Ed Stewart.

I have enjoyed enthusiastic support over the years from colleagues, friends, and professors, especially Drs. Janet Freedman, Joan Weimer, Peggy Brown, Paula Joyce, and Larry Campbell, and my BFF, ever-loyal Linda Comess. Special thanks to Dr. Lynette Carpenter for the card graced by the photograph, The West Wind, 1915, by Anne Brigman and to Lauren Lean at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York.

Professor Tim Redman and I have stayed in touch since he chaired my doctoral committee at University of Texas at Dallas. I salute him as scholar, mentor, and friend and honor him as a biographer who loves the process.

Among my cherished colleagues at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, I thank Drs. Ruth McAdams and Pauline Griffith as well as Maureen Hockenberger and Carolyn Carney.

I thank Carol Hoffman, an expert reader and lifelong friend; Denise and Steve Estrin, Terry and Dr. Vikram Jayanty, and Harriet and Gary Hoffman for their continued interest and support. Dawon Washington told me Claire would see print in my lifetime; he was right!

My Mussar group—Marcia and Michael Nichols, Babs Rosenfeld, Heather Westendarp and Naomi Wittlin—provides enthusiastic support, as do my lifelong friends Dottie Unger, Judy Osborn, Ann Plantowsky, and Paula Pozmantier (among too many others to name.) Thanks to Jenna Blum for our discussion of independent women, like Claire and Blum’s June Bouquet, who struggle against the man trap to balance their autonomy with their connections to the men in their lives.

My husband, Dr. Robert H. Friedman—my truly beloved Bobby—reentered my life in 2003. He has believed in this project and sustained and encouraged my efforts through all its ups and downs. His pride in my work reflects the bonds of our love.

My daughter, Pepi Harris Wucher, and son, Earl Kalman Harris, likely consider Claire a second mother; with no children of her own, she must have been their Godsent Godmother, for her values and spirit influenced my insights as a mom, and now, as a grandmother. My wonderful family members include Pepi, James, Miles, and Eli Wucher; Earl, Debbie, Lindi, and Cooper Harris; Karen, Walt, and Eliana Friedman-Elliston; Lori and Zeke Perales; Kara, Levi, and Sam Newman; and my bonus son, Ben Friedman, who found my reprint of Claire’s novel, The Unpredictable Adventure, in Northwestern University’s library, an amazing moment for me. To the entire Kalman/Rose, Harris/Rice/Polishuk, and Friedman/Borger/Grosman/Davis families: I celebrate us.

Working with Syracuse University Press has been an honor and delight. Alison Maura Shay, acquisitions editor, offered kind guidance and brilliant insights. Kelly L. Balenske has added pleasure to the energy of this process. Thanks as well to Suzanne Guiod, editor-in-chief, Lynn Wilcox, Mona Hamlin, Brendan Missett, and Kay Steinmetz. I also extend my gratitude to Alene Ross Levy and Karen Friedman for their assistance with proofreading and to Cathy Goddard for indexing.

And now, joyfully: Claire, the story she wrote with her life.

Introduction

The Wind

It was the first of those strange beautiful frightening experiences which were to change my whole life eventually.

—Claire Myers Owens, Awakening to the Good

I HOLD IN MY HAND a photograph of a woman dancing nude on a beach. Sunlight caresses the water with the same playfulness that her feet caress the sand. She is tall and slender, one foot poised as if ready to leap. The wind dances through the light veil she holds above her head, as if it will lift her, carry her out over the ocean, over the dark cliffs, into a shimmering heaven. The photograph, titled The West Wind, 1915, by Anne Brigman, graces a greeting card that sits on a shelf in my study.¹ Perhaps what attracts me to this picture is the way it echoes a particularly passionate moment in the life of Claire Myers Owens, a moment on a Long Island beach in 1930 with her second husband, George Wanders:

Quickly I dropped my clothes to the ground, with every layer discarding layers of artificial civilization. It was the first time in my life I had gone swimming without a suit. . . .

I ran along the firm edge of the sand laughing and dancing, my wet hair streaming out behind me. The sun pressed its fertile kiss emphatically on top of my head . . . as I danced, I sang at the top of my lungs. . . . Swinging my arms high, improvising the steps as I went, I danced faster and faster. . . . The brief occasional touch of my feet to the earth only accented the beat of the music. Surely I was dancing in rhythm with the moving waves, the recurrent sun, the seasonal earth, and the unknown universe—in harmony with all natural things.

Then suddenly everything changed.

For abruptly all sense of bodily motion ceased, all physical sensation, all conscious contact with the sand, for the earth itself no longer existed. Nor did the sky, or sun or sea nor love nor giving in marriage nor even husbands.

I was alone in the universe with the universe.²

Themes and images in this passage resonate in Claire’s writings and repeat throughout her life: the dance of ecstasy, the drive toward freedom, the fusion with nature, the mystical sense of universal oneness. But there was another Claire, exemplified in her portrait rendered in rich pastel colors—a woman in her early forties wearing a tailored gray suit, a pink silk blouse, and a hat of pink roses, caught in a dignified pose holding a book, seated beside a table stacked with two more, her chin thrust at a confident angle, her eyes intelligent, her smile enigmatic.³

Claire Myers Owens: writer, lecturer, adventurer, seeker of enlightenment, mystic, clairvoyant, and grande amoureuse. Her story lies between these two images—the nymph dancing on the beach and the lady—encompassing each, transcending both. Further ironies associated with the Brigman photograph, The West Wind, 1915, both in its title and in its date, expand our understanding of the complexity of and distance between the nymph and the lady.

In 1915, Clairene Myers was a nineteen year old attending the College of Industrial Arts (CIA), now Texas Woman’s University (TWU), in Denton. There, the perfume exuded by the honey locust tree prompted the same realization of oneness with the natural world sparked by the sun and wind on the beach. A series of passages illuminating these events comprise her 1958 memoir, Awakening to the Good—Psychological or Religious? The chapter Wind captures the enormous power of her first remembered experience at age ten in her family garden, when a strong wind erupted out of a clear blue sky:

Suddenly a bubbling spring of mysterious joy welled up inside me. I commenced to run, to race with the wind, against the wind, over the green grass, over the flowerbeds, between the madly swaying bushes. I flung my arms up. . . .

Faster and faster I danced. For once I was free. Free to be my natural animal self. Free from my mother’s daily don’ts. From the satin-lined prison of lady-like decorum. . . . Free from the admonishing voices of teachers. . . . And from the sin I never felt.

Stung into a delicious frenzy, I flung myself with renewed vigor into this orgy. Never had I felt so ecstatically happy in my life! Why? I did not know. I did not care.

Mind you a norther is not a storm. It is a freak of nature. A cold streak of wind. It does not rain. It blows. It cuts through a warm sunny day like a sharp knife through a ripe melon. It is incredibly sudden, brief and exciting. It is gone almost before it arrives. You never forget it—if you were ever ten in Texas [emphasis mine].⁴

Dancing herself into a frenzy, this modern young Sufi becomes one with the wind. But wind does not bring oneness; Claire herself does that. Each of her ecstasies allows her to discard layers of artificial civilization to break free of the satin-lined prison of lady-like decorum . . . and from the sin [she] never felt. And here we witness a glaring paradox: the nymph is free, the lady, restricted. Yet in the world of Claire’s birth, the world of the Bible Belt South at the turn of the century, sexuality and intellectuality are both forbidden to women; they are not seen as polarities. The only role open to a woman is that of lady in a culture where lady means belle and where female means feminine—the opposite of both the intellectual achievement the portrait implies and the freedom to dance naked on a windswept beach.

The image of the wind in these passages becomes a metaphor for the way Claire Myers Owens used the turbulence in her life as both stimulus and obstacle in her psychological journey toward self-discovery and wholeness. For Claire, wholeness became a matter of balancing the sensual with the intellectual, the nymph with the lady to discover the woman. These moments, the events she called small ecstasies, are harbingers of a life filled with mystical insights that would climax in her spontaneous Great Awakening in 1949, an event that significantly altered her life course along with the focus and genre of her writing. Whereas she began her career writing short stories, novels, book reviews, and magazine columns about her life as a woman, she ended it writing memoirs and scholarly explorations of her ecstatic experiences and her life as a sentient being in search of what she called the good. In retrospect, everything she wrote was autobiographical, in tandem with her effort to provide a scientific explanation for mystical phenomena, to articulate the ineffable. In her work, as in her life, she sought resolution through mediating within the tension of opposites.

Her description of the norther in the passage above is distinctive of her southern roots—a Texan by birth, a northeasterner by choice—that informed her worldview and that functioned as both stimulus and obstacle to the adventure that makes Claire Myers Owens’s life unique. To understand Owens and to appreciate her as the protagonist of her life, who transformed ordinary circumstances into an extraordinary adventure, one must understand the significance of the underlying dichotomies that shape the nature of her struggle. The struggle is built on a paradox, rooted in the Texas soil of her southern heritage.⁵

In the years after the Civil War, the lives and roles of white, middle-class, privileged women changed in significant ways. The paradoxical image of woman as submissive, beautiful, charming, modest, and innocent, while remaining a strong, dependable, wife, mother, and domestic manager, haunted the women of Owens’s generation as much as it did that of her mother’s and grandmother’s.

Consistent with so-called pedestal values, this culturally defined image of a white lady, particularly in the South, coalesced to create a creature who, lacking the capacity for rational thought, developed a highly efficient intuition, which allowed her to be a competent homemaker—wife and mother. Part of [the southern lady’s] charm lay in her innocence. The less a woman knew of life, Ellen Glasgow once remarked bitterly, the better she was supposed to be able to deal with it.⁶ A lady was expected to inhabit the private domain and leave important matters in the public domain to the men. Naturally, we cannot assume that being a southern woman meant the same thing to all or even most women.⁷ Specifically, Claire’s maternal influences and paternal values clearly placed the roots of her childhood in the deep southern mores that accepted ladylike decorum as an ideal, and white as the default race. All other races, which in Texas at the turn of the century would have mainly included black and Hispanic people, were defined as other. Whiteness and privilege were invisible norms to families in young Clairene’s middle-class social circles. As a white female, living in the segregated state of Texas, Claire enjoyed privilege, though she would not have realized it. Claire would have seen herself as the norm, conditioned to see herself as white and therefore separate from the other. Claire would have unconsciously believed, as Debby Irving puts it, white was the raceless race—just plain, normal, the one against which all others were measured.⁸

Nevertheless, privilege imposed social and familial expectations Claire experienced as limitations. As Roxane Gay points out, accusations of privilege imply we have it easy.⁹ But Claire’s intellectual curiosity to explore the world outside her small Texas town set her apart from her peers and created friction between her and her family—friction that informs her life, her loves, and the impetus for her adventures, both spiritual and emotional.

Biography and the Biographer

When Penelope Niven, biographer of Carl Sandburg, James Earl Jones, and Edward Steichen, speaks of coming to biography she refers to a process common to the field. Most biographers report an initial moment of discovering their subject as one that defies logic and thrusts them into an unfamiliar and sacred realm. Niven quotes Sandburg’s comment to Amy Lowell regarding his biography of Lincoln and hers of Keats: Ain’t it hell the way a book walks up . . . and makes you write it?—Don’t you feel almost predestinarian?¹⁰

My own predestinarian story begins in 1988, with a portrait—the painting described above that hung in Elizabeth Snapp’s office at Texas Woman’s University. Snapp, who as director of the Blagg-Huey Library helped develop their extensive Woman’s Collection and archival holdings, agreed to assist me in my search for a lost woman writer I could rediscover. My model was Elaine R. Hedges’s famous reprint of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Snapp began pointing out some of the interesting women whose papers are held in the archives. But my eyes kept focusing on the wall above her head.

The presence of the woman in the portrait, painted by Minnie Smith in the 1940s, cast a spell over me the moment I walked into the room. Claire Myers Owens, Snapp volunteered, noticing my distraction. She graduated from here in 1916 with a degree in domestic science and left Texas to do social work. She worked at a coalmine in Alabama for a short stint, then started a cooperative community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Ultimately she settled in the Northeast—New York City, New Haven, Rochester—where she wrote books and reviews, studied transpersonal psychology, and took up Zen Buddhism at age seventy-three.

Books? What kind of books? I asked, my eyes locked with Claire’s.

Oh, three or four autobiographies and a fantasy novel banned by the New York Public Library.

Banned? My heart skipped a beat. Banned books are written by bad women. Feminist researchers love bad women. Without even searching, I had found my subject! Could I see her work—read her books?

Elizabeth Snapp’s answer discouraged me. The Owens papers were closed because only eleven boxes had been catalogued. The bulk of the papers, photos, manuscripts, audio and visual cassettes, and other memorabilia still sat in the huge packing boxes in which they had arrived four years earlier. Snapp, who had been the driving force behind the collection of Owens’s papers, tried to interest me in other collections, but I listened with only half an ear. I was mesmerized by that painting, which followed me home that day and haunted my dreams that night. What seduced me? The skill of the artist—the soft, lovely mauves, greens, and purples? The power of the subject—her dignity tempered by stunning beauty? Who was this woman? What secrets lay behind that enigmatic smile, that insolent tilt of the chin?

The next morning, as if not of my own volition, I called Elizabeth Snapp to ask again if I might just browse through the available documents and read that banned book. This time she said yes. Years later, Snapp, who had communicated with Claire at the end of her life and had collected the papers from her Rochester apartment after her death, told me she believes Claire influenced her change of heart. Today we both accept that Claire Myers Owens chose me to write her life the moment I walked into Snapp’s office.¹¹

That moment marks the call to adventure, which transformed my life as a southern woman, my heritage as a Jew, my roles as mother, wife, daughter, sibling, and friend, and my consciousness of my unconscious. Equally important to writer and scholar, that moment informs my methodology—a system that merges intellectual pursuit with intuition. The experience of bonding with my subject, measured against research into the complex themes of her writing and the cultural and historical milieu from which they arise, comprises the thin line I learned to walk between objectivity and subjectivity. This bond exemplifies Ray Monk’s argument that biography as a project comprises moments of understanding that consist of seeing connections both within the subject’s life and between the subject and the biographer.¹² Ultimately, my journey parallels my subject’s journey; the themes of our lives intersect.

Biography is a personal art. Objectivity and subjectivity wrestle for front-row seats at its performance. In the last thirty years, feminist scholars have deemed valid their personal attachment to subjects, often present from the beginning and intensifying as their projects proceed, challenging the illusion of objectivity.¹³ This merging of souls and mirroring of quests creates what Liz Stanley calls a living relationship that starts out complex and becomes more . . . complex over time. The feminist approach, proscribed by traditional scholars, suggests that writing a woman’s life requires an active, not a neutral, voice from the biographer.¹⁴

Ultimately, as Carol Kolmerten puts it, we all want to hear about the lives of ‘real’ people, their obstacles and how they overcame them.¹⁵ Some of these real people, like Claire Myers Owens, were not famous in their own time, but their lives provide patterns of development that reveal the paradox of heroic moments in ordinary life choices. Feminists do not assume Owens, or other biographical subjects, must meet arbitrary definitions of appropriate behavior or measure up to standards outside their milieu to be considered among the women worthies.¹⁶

My philosophical approach to Owens’s life embraces that expressed by Linda Wagner-Martin: One of the most difficult problems facing the biographer of women is to make what may be only moderate achievement as important to the reader as it was to the subject.¹⁷ Periodically, I would ask myself, what is moderate achievement for women? How do we define a female heroic? How do we designate women worthiness, or might we stretch and redefine the boundaries of exceptional achievement?¹⁸ How do we consider these values in the context of my subject’s life span? This biography explores and illuminates these questions.

During the first several years after my discovery and ensuing investigation of Owens’s papers, I published journal articles, a chapter in an anthology, an entry in The New Texas Handbook, and presented numerous conference papers, with a goal to republish Owens’s 1935 novel, The Unpredictable Adventure,¹⁹ a utopian fiction, which Carol Farley Kessler considers the most significant of the nine utopias published by US women during the 1930s.²⁰ When Syracuse University Press republished the book in 1993, with my preface, afterword, and glossary translating her ingenious anagrams, I thought I was done with Claire Myers Owens. I was wrong, for she was not done with me, and through a series of twists and turns of fate—synchronicities—I decided to write her full biography.

Thus, discovering Claire became my own unpredictable adventure. I have come to appreciate Liz Stanley’s metaphor of biography as a process of reverse archeology: The accumulation of layers of knowledge and complexity rather than the stripping away of debris to reveal the real person beneath.²¹ The deeper I dug, the more complicated Owens seemed and the more baffling our relationship became. Rather than unveiling her life, she continually fluttered beyond my grasp by, paradoxically, expanding my horizons. Validated by acceptance of the feminist conundrum of the inter-twining of biographer and subject, I allowed her life to expand my own.²²

Together still, we glide, spiraling toward richer and broader interpretations of what some might call reality but which Owens called the cosmos, or Ultimate Reality, or Universal Mind. However, this aspect of my journey became complicated by my own biases; I was highly skeptical about my belief in a higher power or God and frequently embarrassed by her passionate search for spiritual meaning. Her association with the weird branches of psychology and her final embrace of Zen Buddhism terrified me—what was I taking on? How would I be perceived as a scholar? Who would take me seriously? In the end, I laid my doubts aside and simply studied the material, allowing my discovery of Claire to put me in touch with my own spirituality.

The Project of Claire Myers Owens

The question remains: why Claire Myers Owens? What makes her ordinary life extraordinary? How do I justify recovering her work, retelling her stories, writing her life? From the beginning, what struck me about the young Clairene Myers was her courage to leave Texas in search of her self, though she repeatedly claimed she had no idea what that meant. Groomed to become a privileged southern belle by her mother and grandmother—fundamentalist Baptists who defined themselves by their connections to the antebellum South and a fabled aristocracy—at age twenty she sought freedom, certitude, and self-definition in a wider, less restricted world. I wanted to understand how she knew what she knew and place her in the historical context of her generation, both within the southern culture from whence she came and in the northeastern culture she joined. As it turned out, my goals were part of the feminist impulse to celebrate that rare woman who, to paraphrase Carolyn Heilbrun, recognizes in herself a special gift without definition and writes herself a life beyond convention, thus avoiding a blunted female destiny. In most cases, such women’s choices are motivated by their dissatisfaction . . . with appropriate gender assignments. Claire’s struggles with gender roles and patriarchal codes comprise the predominant theme of her fiction and life choices during the first half of her life, a struggle Heilbrun defines as the pattern of the unwomanly woman who lives the quest plot men are expected to live.²³ For Clairene, there were no established patterns of female autonomy, no women on whom to model her drive toward independence. She had to catapult herself into a wider world she knew only from books and write herself into a new identity.

As our living relationship continues, my notion of Claire has evolved to embrace not only her significant contributions as a feminist writer, which attracted me from the beginning, but also her calling as a mystic and spiritual guide, which I found so disconcerting at first. In telling a life, we extend our lives into our subjects’ lives as they extend their lives into ours.

Other biographers experience similar connections. All of her life, historian Emily Bingham heard her great aunt Henrietta Bingham (1891–1968) described by family alternately as a magical physical presence with a muse-like influence, and as a mess and embarrassment, a ‘three-dollar bill,’ . . . fascinating but dangerous. When Emily found a trunk full of Henrietta’s papers and memorabilia forgotten in the attic of her familial home, her curiosity evolved into a need to redefine her aunt as a real woman, rather than an enigmatic subject of family lore. Emily describes the biography she wrote as emphatically a work of non-fiction, which readers may finish with a sense having glimpsed a life from the end of the street while being unable to completely overtake it. True history, she explains, true life is often that way. And yet, as with my relationship to Claire Myers Owens, pinning down a life, discovering its truth, may be as illusive as a dream but as valuable as a crown of rare jewels. Enigmatic women may defy concrete definitions, but their presence in our lives is surely transformative.²⁴

During the first half of her life, Claire was a woman of many names and in her New York years, she used all of them. She was born Clairene Lenore Allen Myers, and her given name, Clairene, stuck until she was well into her thirties, when she began to call herself Claire, the name she used on publications. Each time she married, she incorporated her husband’s name when she published. Furthermore, early in the 1930s when she started submitting novels, she adopted the name Claire Myers Spotswood, exploiting her connections to the eighteenth-century governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood—whose roots connect her to Martha Washington—even though her books rebelled against exploiting such lineage. In several documents of that period, her name appears in multiple variations. She even adopted the male pseudonym, Clarence Myers.

As a feminist, I cringe at the thought of referring to her as Owens in discussions directed at periods or accomplishments that occurred before her marriage to H. Thurston Owens in 1937. Indeed, it was not until 1958, with the publication of her first memoir at age sixty-two that she became professionally and permanently identified as Claire Myers Owens. Therefore, I call her Clairene during her early years, Claire during her middle years, and Owens only when describing periods when that was her name or when referring to the Claire Myers Owens Collection in the Texas Woman’s University archive. I refer to her both as Claire and as Owens during this period, designating Owens as her professional persona and Claire as her authentic personal self.

Organization and Method

This biography addresses Claire Myers Owens’s life, beginning with her southern ancestors and parents and her childhood in Temple, Texas. Her departure from Texas in 1916 marks her defining moment as a New Woman and adventurer, capturing the early struggles of a young woman educated enough to have had a choice and brave enough to have made one.²⁵ Although Owens never identified as a feminist, The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman’s Independence—modeled after James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen series but with a feminist heroine—along with several unpublished novels and an assortment of short stories, reveals her struggle to define herself as a thinking woman without sacrificing her feminine charms or sexuality.

Her Great Awakening at age fifty-four initiated a dramatic shift in Owens’s lifestyle, goals, and interests and spawned two autobiographies illuminating her search for the good inherent in the human spirit: Awakening to the Good (1958) and Discovery of the Self (1963). Her life as a spiritual journey shifted at age seventy-three, when Owens, recently widowed, took up Zen Buddhism with a group of Yale University graduates, members of the 1970s counterculture, and moved from New Haven to Rochester. Zen and the Lady (1979) captures her connection to Zen. Friends and colleagues claim she developed extraordinary capacities of clairvoyance and extrasensory perception as a result of her meditative practice.

Owens’s life story provides a model of a self-defined woman whose spirit of adventure remained as courageous and passionate in old age as it had been in her youth. Because Owens’s fiction and nonfiction are predominantly autobiographical, I struggle to separate fiction from fact in both genres. Sometimes the characters and events presented in real life seem fictional, and the fictional ones seem real, and indeed, are real—thinly disguised men and women, places and events, which shaped her life and stimulated her observations. Owens wrote to piece her own life together, to create understanding. Her autobiographies and fictions are autographic to use Jeanne Perreault’s term.²⁶ As Owens writes, she creates a new self; she connects to the past in order to understand her present and to transform it into ballast for future adventures. Her writing is transformative in the true sense of the word: she becomes the person in her stories, and the person she creates becomes the real Claire Myers Owens.

Throughout this biography, I refer to a 1979 interview Claire Myers Owens did with Professor Kenneth Ring, a leader in the transpersonal psychology movement during the 1970s and 1980s, and into the present. The interview informs my insights and understandings of Claire’s journey into the vast arena that has become the modern human-potential movement, now often conflated with what has come to be known as New Age.

Dr. Ring’s interview, along with his subsequent willingness to teach and guide my insights, helped me weave the loose threads of Claire’s journey into a chronological tapestry, to bring Owens’s perceptions to my interpretation of her early years, and to verify Owens’s technique of infusing her fictions with real life events. To paraphrase Anais Nin, her life is indeed her art, and her art her life.

1. The West Wind, 1915, by Anne Brigman. Digital positive from the original gelatin silver negative in the George Eastman Museum’s collection. Courtesy of George Eastman Museum.

Thus, I confront a final conundrum: all biographers and autobiographers create fictions through which, according to Carol Kolmerten, we search for facts, insights, illuminated moments that will suddenly reveal to readers the ‘truth.’²⁷ Our own, individual truths, that is. Ultimately, I write in hopes that this new narrative will find its way into the hearts and minds of those in search of stories to live by, stories that invite new patterns of living, that inform creative choices, and contribute, in Claire Myers Owens’s honor, to a discovery of the good within the human spirit.

1

Smug Harbor

1896–1912

Smug Harbor, a large and prosperous seaport on the south coast of Err [where] the fog rolled in from the Dead Sea in such thick white clouds that it was impossible to see anything clearly.

—Claire Myers Spotswood, The Unpredictable Adventure

I WAS BORN IN THE DEEP SOUTH, in the heart of Texas. Most people think of Texas as a western state full of cowboys and large ranches. But that’s the western part of the state. I never saw a live cowboy in my life. Claire Myers Owens’s voice bounces with youthful vibrancy as she speaks during a 1979 taped interview with Professor Kenneth Ring in her home after the release of her last published book, Zen and the Lady. Central Texas at the turn of the twentieth century was known as the Black Belt, in reference to its rich soil good for growing cotton. Half our town was black, she adds, acknowledging the double meaning of the word, especially in that part of the country. But our whole town was submerged in old southern traditions.¹

Born in Rockdale, Texas, on February 11, 1896, Clairene Lenore Allen Myers grew up in nearby Temple. Neither place was much of a town. Cotton farms prevailed; streets were unpaved, muddy, and residents were imbued with a provincial southern mentality. Claire’s maternal grandmother, Laura Elizabeth Smith Allen, considered herself an exile of Virginia, though she was born in Tennessee and reared in Harris County, Texas. Claire’s mother, Susan Allen Myers, shared her own mother’s goal: to ensure that Clairene would grow up to be a proper southern belle—a lady. Together they tried to inculcate in her not just the ways of a southern aristocracy—but southern values in the days before emancipation, the days of the antebellum South.²

The family Bible records the date of Susan Allen’s marriage to Coren Lee Myers as June 30, 1893, in Fort Worth, Texas. Coren was twenty-nine, and Susie was twenty-four, typical ages for marriage at the turn of the twentieth century. Susie taught first grade before her marriage. Professor C. L. Myers, as he was called, taught in a one-room structure from 1881 until 1885, when he became principal of Troy High School, a position he held until 1890.³ Their first child, Coren Douglas, his mother’s favorite, was born in 1894, a year after the Myerses’ marriage, and two years later, Clairene Lenore was born. There were no other children and no other pregnancies recorded, though years later Susan would write her daughter that she knew nothing scientifically about birth control.⁴

Clairene’s father, the dominant force in the family, influenced her spirit of ambition and adventure. So fierce was his intellect, so stanch his strong but gentle attitude, her father held the family in his iron hand with a velvet glove. A born teacher, Myers eventually left education and went into business to provide a more affluent lifestyle for his family. He would say honor, honesty, and justice were the most important things in the world.⁵ For southerners like Mr. Myers, honor defines the link between society and the individual.⁶

Inherent in the concept of honor lies a sense of noblesse oblige, which separates gentlemen from those considered members of an inferior class.⁷ Generous by nature, Myers learned to count on his wife’s keen ability to judge people’s character. When he loaned money he trusted everybody, sometimes to his sorrow. Often, he would bring the borrower home to let his more skeptical wife pass judgment: She could see through people like a pane of dirty glass.⁸

Susan was also involved in civic work, and a group of men once offered to nominate her for governor. My father wouldn’t have that at all, Claire would say. Susan demurred in respect to her husband’s wishes for she was exceedingly conventional.⁹

For southern women, such self-suppression was part of the norm. Though placed on a pedestal, women were expected to bow to the decisions the men in their lives made on their behalf. Men considered endearing women’s ability to suffer in silence. As Bertram Wyatt-Brown put it, Men were not would-be patriarchs. They were the real thing.¹⁰

Throughout her life, Claire loved telling stories of her mother’s ingenuity. One story reveals the underlying paradox that sustains contradictory southern values. My mother liked to cook and was an expert. But at that time, in that culture, it was considered demeaning for a lady to do her own work. Ladies left the cooking to their black servants. But Susan Myers was enterprising: She formed a gourmet club and [the members] cooked all sorts of Cordon Bleu dishes.¹¹

On March 6, 1914, Susan Myers organized the Housekeepers Club, inviting 24 Temple women to come to her home at 3 p.m. The club’s mission, the social enjoyment and mutual improvement of its members, apparently included creating unusual menus and serving monthly dinners. Susan was elected the first president, serving in that capacity for eleven years. In 1915, they sponsored a similar club for younger women, the Domestic Science Club.¹²

Through her civic leadership, Susan Myers influenced Temple. As president of the Women’s Civil League, in 1915, she issued an unfavorable report following a sanitary survey of the city, which stated that unless remedial measures are adopted, there is a danger of much unnecessary illness and probably deaths this winter.¹³

Thus, although a democratic, civic-minded woman, Susan adhered to the old southern traditions. Friendly toward those who shared her belief system, she was intolerant of those with different values. Once a ball was given by a banker, the richest man in town—the only one with a ballroom in his house. Clairene wanted to attend, but her mother would not allow it: Susan "saw his wife picking cotton in a field barefooted"—a disgrace according to the rigid social standards of their times with its class distinctions and codes for proper female behavior.¹⁴

An immaculate housekeeper, Susan Myers rarely lifted a finger to do any of the actual work, employing black servants whom she managed with aloof kindness and proficiency. If her attitude seems inconsistent with her identity as an ethical person, it should be noted that her values, rooted in both southern and Baptist traditions, fully supported the prevailing racist views of southern whites. As Rufus Spain points out, "The Baptist view of race was the Southern view.¹⁵ Susan Myers was a strong influence on Claire’s life; she wanted her to be a lady above everything else.

As an adult, Claire had to discard many contradictory ideas by recognizing their limitations and defining a place for herself in the modern world. Yet, ironically, the title Zen and the Lady, which she published in her eighties, reflects the way old southern values haunted her throughout her life.

Indeed, the influence of both parents on Claire is inestimable. As a businessman with real estate holdings, her father, known for his fairness, had a steady stream of tenants coming to the house for advice on their own legal and business matters. Claire’s pride in Myers’s ethical standards and outrage at southern injustice shines through in memoirs and interviews during her later years: If a black man had a case against a white man, Claire would paraphrase her father, it was lost before it began, merely because he was black. Holding such values in the early 1900s distinguished Myers from his milieu, leading Claire to see him as advanced for his time.¹⁶ In the turn-of-the-twentieth-century South, for Myers to stand for equal rights and protection under the law for all citizens was not liberal or conservative, but ‘radical.’¹⁷

Bertram Wyatt-Brown explains the South’s paradoxical embrace of slavery and of a code of honor by pointing out that honor came first; slavery was instituted to perpetuate the South and its values. Slavery became interconnected with power and prestige, with ownership of slaves as proof of a man’s worth.¹⁸

In this post–civil rights era, people tend to think that segregation was maintained by virulent racists. . . . Therein lies the danger. . . . Human goodness can coexist alongside great evil.¹⁹ In truth, the Myerses would not have seen segregation as evil or even inhumane, though Claire struggled to make sense of it far into her adult years.

In her autobiographical, unpublished novel Amanda Mann, written in the 1970s and 1980s, Amanda, a surrogate for young Clairene, asks her grandmother if she had approved of slavery. The grandmother answers: Certainly not. No good Southerner did, but we were caught up in the system.²⁰

Susan Myers was the product of Old South values, romanticized through the memories of her mother, Laura Elizabeth Smith Allen. Born June 16, 1845, in the Milam District of Texas, Laura moved at age seven with her family and their slaves to a farm in Harris County, Texas. Laura was proud of her lineage and her Virginia roots. Her mother, Charlotte Mary Payne, Claire’s great-grandmother, claimed to be a descendant of Martha Washington and of Alexander Spotswood, who became the first governor of Virginia in 1710.

As an adult, Claire spent many hours collecting genealogical information documenting her roots. Complex and convoluted, her findings are difficult to follow, but are corroborated for the most part by Claire’s cousin Mary Roper. Great-grandmother Charlotte Payne was sister to Mary Roper’s mother, Claire wrote in a journal. "My great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather [are] Catherine Dandridge and Dr. Nathan Payne. We are related to Martha Washington . . . a daughter of John Dandridge. Catherine Dandridge was either a niece or cousin of John D. My great-grandmother, Charlotte Mary Payne [Laura’s mother] had a sister named Dorothia (ea) [sic] Spotswood Dandridge Payne. Thus great-great-grandmother Catherine Dandridge is second cousin to Martha Washington."²¹

Fact or legend, the story informed the family’s self-definition as aristocracy, with connections to English nobility and to Martha Washington.

On June 4, 1866, Laura Smith married B. F. Allen, a man whose lineage seemed to measure up to Laura’s expectations. In 1874, they moved to Rockdale. They had three children, Robert, Laura Lee, and Susan, born November 13, 1869. In Amanda Mann, the grandmother, modeled on Laura, wore long dresses and nineteenth-century style throughout her life.²²

In 1880, when Susie was eleven, Laura became a Baptist when she converted at a tent revival amid the usual frenzy of devotion marked by shouted vows and bursts of song. Perhaps Laura’s attraction to religion reflected her yearning for excitement and her nostalgia for the glory of Old Southern traditions missing from rural Texas. Perhaps her firm connections to her Virginia heritage and her commitment to the church arose out of the need to fill a social gap. In many ways, Claire’s passionate approach to life and her hunger for excitement linked her to Grandmother Allen. Unfortunately, the passions that bound