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WORK TITLE: North of Crazy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Kings, Neltje Doubleday
BIRTHDATE: 1934
WEBSITE: http://www.neltje.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October, 1934, in New York, NY; daughter of Nelson (a publishing executive) and Ellen (a socialite) Doubleday; married John Sargent, Sr. (divorced); married (divorced); children: Ellen, John Jr.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Artist and writer. Former owner and operator of the Sheridan Inn, Sheridan, WY.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Neltje is an artist and writer based in rural Wyoming. Born Neltje Doubleday, she is the daughter of the publishing magnate Nelson Doubleday, the cofounder of Doubleday & McClure Company, which eventually became Doubleday Publishing.
Neltje shares stories from her unconventional life in her 2016 book North of Crazy: A Memoir. Born in New York City in 1934, Neltje grew up on Long Island and on a plantation in South Carolina called Bonny Hall. Her family was wealthy, but her relationship with her parents was dysfunctional. Her father was focused on his work and rarely present, and her mother, Ellen, was concerned primarily with her own social agenda. In these circumstances, Neltje bonded with many of the hired help at Bonny Hall, most of whom were African American. In her memoir, she remembers the feeling of being close to the body of her nanny, Mattie. Neltje also describes her father’s car, the boat she and her friends took fishing, the emotions she felt when she heard the servants sing, and the clothing worn by her half sisters. On Long Island, the family home was called Barberries. There, a group of hired nannies, tutors, and maids cared for Neltje and her siblings. She recalls the cruelty of a governess who worked for her family.
As for her family itself, Netlje discusses her close relationship with Nelson Jr., her brother. It was assumed that Nelson Jr. would take over the leadership of Doubleday Publishing, which he ultimately did. Neltje remembers the influx of English families to Long Island during World War II. New York became a target for bombings during the conflict, so Neltje’s parents sent her and Nelson to Bonny Hall for a few months. During that time, she was sexually assaulted by a family friend. When her parents found out, they sent her to see a psychiatrist. A few years later, Nelson Sr. became ill. Neltje suggests that the time she spent with him while he was sick marked the first time she felt his love for her. In time, she was sent away to Switzerland for boarding school. While in Europe, Neltje visited Windsor Castle with Daphne du Maurier and was struck by how the royal family lived. After her father died, Neltje’s mother slipped into alcoholism. Neltje became engaged to an older man, John Sargent, at the age of seventeen. They had two children together, but the marriage was unhappy. After they divorced, Neltje battled with Sargent and her brother for money from the family business. Ultimately, she settled in Wyoming, remodeled and ran a boutique inn, married again and divorced again, and embarked on a career as a painter.
Reviews of North of Crazy were mixed. “Neltje, an artist, philanthropist and member of the Doubleday publishing family … remembers a full life, if not a well-examined one,” suggested a Publishers Weekly reviewer. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews stated: “It is difficult to discern the audience for this self-absorbed, often inartful memoir of an artist whose renown has not spread widely beyond the American West.” However, Carol Haggas, critic in Booklist, described the book as “a fascinating life journey.” Writing for the Washington Times, Martin Rubin commented of Neltje: “It is easy to dismiss her as just another ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ telling her tale of existential woe in a world of material privilege. But to some extent anyway, it is necessary to take a life, the person who led it, and her account of doing so on their own terms and judge it accordingly.” Rubin added: “On the whole North of Crazy has a good deal to commend it. Most striking of all is its author’s use of tense.” Sandra Dorr, reviewer for the Denver Post, called the book “a cathartic memoir that often reads like an extended artist’s statement.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Neltje, North of Crazy: A Memoir, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2016, Carol Haggas, review of North of Crazy, p. 28.
Publishers Weekly, July 11, 2016, review of North of Crazy, p. 52.
ONLINE
Denver Post Online, http://www.denverpost.com/ (October 23, 2016), Sandra Dorr, review of North of Crazy.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (June 21, 2016), review of North of Crazy.
Neltje Home Page, http://www.neltje.com (March 28, 2017).
North of Crazy Web site, http://www.northofcrazybyneltje.com/ (March 28, 2017), author profile.
Washington Times Online, http://www.washingtontimes.com/ (November 6, 2016), Martin Rubin, review of North of Crazy.
I trust in the unconscious. I strive to make the sensed visible, to balance the interior reality of passion with the external condition of form.
New York City was my birthplace in October of 1934. My early years were spent on Long Island at a time when it was rural and in South Carolina on a plantation where hidden and mysterious goings on took place amongst the trees shrouded with Spanish moss. In the narrow canals of rice fields I fished from flat bottom boats with lures of wild colors and vicious tripod hooks. I climbed trees, rode horseback, wandered canal banks of dark pooled swamps and fell in love with a world that was unknowable - other. People didn't interest me.
On Long Island the woods and the treetops were my home. From the safe caverns among leaves and branches I listened to the adults' conversation, watched squirrels and chipmunks scramble, ate sun sweetened cherries, and upon descent fought with my brother who was a year older. Lifestyle and furnishings in the house were formal and so too was the family behavior. I hated it.
In the third grade I failed art because I would not paint or crayon within the lines. I felt life to be chaotic; myself to be a leaf blown by winds of force without attachment. A precursor of my art making now. In high school I had an extraordinary History of Art teacher, Sarah B. McClennan. She taught me to see.
At age eighteen I married. I had two children by age twenty three and was divorced at age twenty eight. I did no artwork until age thirty when I picked up a piece of charcoal to sketch my children while they were playing jacks on the floor or just lying about. They were faceless. The weight and position of the body, the angle of a hand, tilt of a head, bend in a knee told the story of emotion: theirs and my feelings about them.
In June 1966 I moved with my children to a ranch in Wyoming from an apartment on Park Avenue in New York City. For one month I shoveled sheep manure three feet deep out of an old beaten up sheep shed. We made our home in a trailer while the ranch house was being remodeled and spent most of the summer making order out of a trash heap. Skies were crystalline. Shade was hard to come by, but there was a creek and a reservoir to swim in, thistles to spray, box elder bugs to annoy, and space. Incredible open space. Rolling scoria topped hills. A lush valley that meanders to the Big Horn Mountains. These mountains are sometimes blue sometimes purple or grey, but they are never the same. I had found home. I sculpted in wax, cast in bronze. I made collages. I painted. My second husband who was a painter made my making art impossible with interruptions and demands. I did something else. For eighteen years I owned and operated the Sheridan Inn, a National Historic Site that I renovated. In the years I owned the Sheridan Inn, I learned to cook for five hundred people, fix the dishwasher, cocktail waitress, janitor, but never do the books or run a cash register. Incompetent. I opened a gallery for contemporary art in the upstairs portion of the Inn, and there was a gift shop to run as well as the restaurant and saloon. Those years gave me a crash course in life. You have to be crazy to be in the food business. I thought the same of marriage; it ended after six years.
Whether I return from a voyage to the Antarctic or Alaska, or even a simple drive to Billings, Montana, two hours away, I feel a thrill of excitement and belonging when I come back to the Big Horn Mountains and these surrounding hills. The thunderous yet quiet sense of being that those mountains give me cannot be parlayed into easy identity. The size and variety of shape, the constancy that changes in the shifting light, the eons of history that lie in geological layers, the human and animal history that passes through the crevasses and open pasturelands, all tumble together to manifest a sense of majesty, a life giving force.
Since 1985 my life is my artwork. I create because I am driven to define moments, emotional responses to the natural world, and the chaos that seems to be life's breath. My senses live on red alert. All of them. I am sustained by, obsessed with, my soul filled to brimming virtually daily by the grand, the infinitesimal, the lightest and the darkest of images and insights. My passions fierce and demanding enforce me to forge a whole of reverie and reality. I paint.
Neltje
BIO
She was born Neltje Doubleday, yet for years she has used no last name and goes solely by Neltje. Her grandfather started Doubleday & McClure Company, which over the years became Doubleday Publishing. Her father Nelson, Doubleday, expanded the company and hoped his son Nelson would follow his father’s passion. At eighteen Neltje married John Sargent, Sr. who would go on to become the President and Chief Executive of Doubleday. Years later her brother Nelson Doubleday took the company helm. The life she recounts in her memoir NORTH OF CRAZY (St. Martin’s Press, October 4, 2016, $25.99) is one of great passion, sadness, determination, and courage.
Neltje was brought up in a moneyed world of cultural prestige with the expectation that she would become a socially-gifted wife and mother. Her childhood was marred by her parent's abandonment and alcoholism; their focus was only on her brother. At age nine the family friend who took her riding sexually abused her. This secret was to haunt Neltje. Marriage to Sargent seemed to offer an escape, and for a while it did. Their life together was filled with travel, parties and martini-fueled evenings entertaining the literati. Theodore Roethke slept in their bathtub and once, during a manic bender, held a knife to Neltje's throat. W. Somerset Maugham offered advice on sex in marriage. Other writers, artists and friends included Daphne du Maurier (who made a pass at Neltje's mother), Raoul Fleishman (co-founder of the New Yorker), Gertrude Lawrence, Oskar Kokoschka (a painter who was a contemporary of Picasso) Bertrand Russell, Georges Simenon, and Bennett Cerf. When her children were aged five and seven, the marriage fell apart. John Sargent’s philandering and her family's power struggles over money had taken their toll.
After two years of soul searching Neltje obtained a divorce, put her life together, met a writer /painter from London whom she eventually married and moved her family to Wyoming where her children went to a two room school house. Years later, Neltje led a long battle to have Doubleday Publishing go public. Her mother, brother and Sargent fought back and won partially, but so did Neltje. The tale of how she established herself with two small children in the middle of nowhere includes a second marriage to a man who eventually swindled her out of money and almost wrested away a beloved Picasso. Her story also showcases her extraordinary attachment to the natural world, “My cabin here at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming fronts on the rising sun yet allows me to watch light fall behind the granite peaks each evening from my living room chair.” Neltje is an abstract expressionist painter having exhibited throughout the Rockies to the sands of Florida. Her latest interest has been in painting huge canvases, ten foot high by thirty feet long evoking her emotional response to the natural world. She's now 82 and plans to go on 108.
Neltje lives on Piney Creek and writes in her cabin on the Little North Fork of Crazy Woman Creek in Wyoming. NORTH OF CRAZY is a memoir as unconventional and courageous as its author.
QUOTED: "a fascinating life journey."
North of Crazy
Carol Haggas
Booklist. 113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p28.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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North of Crazy. By Neltje. Oct. 2016. 288p. St. Martin's, $25.99 (9781250088147); e-book, $12.99 (9781250088161). 759.13.
In writing her memoir, Neltje, the daughter of publishing titan Nelson Doubleday, notably discards her birth surname and that of the two husbands she has had in her long, unconventional life. This is far from being a sin of omission. Although she was born into a world of privilege and prominence, Neltje's childhood was almost Dickensian in its lack of parental love and in her subjugation to her brother, Nelson, Jr., who, from birth, was groomed to assume the presidency of the company. Her first marriage, to an older man, ended in divorce once his career with Doubleday was firmly established. Her second marriage, to a serial philanderer, ended when he absconded with the wealth she had established on her own as an artist, cattle rancher, and entrepreneur. Though late to embrace the second wave of feminism, Neltje is a keen and passionate advocate for its tenets about a woman's need to forge her own identity and survive in spite of betrayals that may beset her through the most basic and intimate of relationships. A fascinating life journey.--Carol Haggas
QUOTED: "Neltje, an artist, philanthropist and member of the Doubleday publishing family ... remembers a full life, if not a well-examined one."
North of Crazy: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly. 263.28 (July 11, 2016): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
North of Crazy: A Memoir
Neltje. St. Martin's, $25.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-250-08814-7
Neltje, an artist, philanthropist and member of the Doubleday publishing family (her full name is Neltje Doubleday Kings), remembers a full life, if not a well-examined one. Neltje and her brother, Nelson, were born into a patriarchal family of alcoholics and raised by a succession of caretakers; She makes her escape by marrying young, only to find herself in an unhappy, emotionally distant marriage. After 12 years, she leaves for Wyoming with her married lover and her two children (whom she had with her husband, John Turner Sargent, president and CEO of Doubleday, 1963-1978) to take advantage of the state's divorce laws, and she ends up staying, trading the life of an Eastern socialite for that of a Western artist. Like Sallie Bingham, Neltje develops feminist consciousness in parallel with her attempts to wrest control over a trust that treated her as a second-class citizen; when she describes these struggles, her emotions are raw. She glosses lightly over other events (such as being molested by a family acquaintance at age nine), spending more time describing her clothing for the march in Selma in 1965 than on the legacy of her family's racism. She follows her whims and her lovers, but her often repeated fears over imitating her mother's self-absorbed parenting are superficial. "My doubts," she says, "resurfaced and vanished." She was once told-that her abstract paintings made people uncomfortable; "they scared me, too," she writes, "they were so in-your-face painful." Unfortunately, she's less successful at describing that pain with words. (Oct.)
QUOTED: "it is easy to dismiss her as just another “Poor Little Rich Girl” telling her tale of existential woe in a world of material privilege. But to some extent anyway, it is necessary to take a life, the person who led it, and her account of doing so on their own terms and judge it accordingly."
"On the whole North of Crazy has a good deal to commend it. Most striking of all is its author’s use of tense."
BOOK REVIEW: ‘North of Crazy: a Memoir’
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By Martin Rubin - - Sunday, November 6, 2016
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
NORTH OF CRAZY: A MEMOIR
By Neltje
St. Martin’s Press, $25.99, 275 pages
When Steve Forbes was running for president in another, less fraught season, he came in for a goodly dose of ribbing for mentioning the sadness he felt going to boarding school when asked about travails in his life. Since so few of the electorate to whom he was appealing shared that particular experience, it wasn’t the smartest political gambit, but those of us who did, indeed felt his pain.
I was reminded of Mr. Forbes while reading this memoir by Neltje Doubleday Sargent Kings, who as artist and author goes just by her distinctive first name, for it is easy to dismiss her as just another “Poor Little Rich Girl” telling her tale of existential woe in a world of material privilege. But to some extent anyway, it is necessary to take a life, the person who led it, and her account of doing so on their own terms and judge it accordingly. My qualifier is because I balk at someone who can feel LSD could make her better understand her life and a few other such solecisms, but on the whole “North of Crazy” has a good deal to commend it.
Most striking of all is its author’s use of tense: when Neltje is describing her horrendous childhood with indifferent, alcoholic parents, detached siblings, alternating governesses loving and unkind, a family friend who molests her, she uses the present tense. Most of the rest of the book reverts to the past, but sometimes lapses back into the present, a sure indicator of just how fraught she finds these particular “remembrances of things past.” It is an unusual and very effective way of underlining her feelings to the reader.
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If Neltje spares us little of the miseries she endured, she also shares a lot of fun times. Like getting to know Gertrude Lawrence and Daphne Du Maurier and, through the latter, the British royal family, observing Princess Elizabeth visibly pregnant with Prince Charles and literally bumping heads — twice —with her mother Queen Elizabeth as they try to retrieve a spilled deviled egg. (Prince Philip neatly accomplishes the task without collision.) Those who have read in various biographies of Du Maurier of her sudden unrequited love for Neltje’s mother Ellen will relish Mrs. Doubleday’s bewildered reaction, as in her cups she wonders if she must be a lesbian to engender such passion.
Somerset Maugham is a somewhat forbidding houseguest on the Doubleday estate in South Carolina where he lived in exile during World War II and an even more astringent host when back home on the French Riviera. There are lots of fascinating encounters with other writers from Bertrand Russell to Theodore Roethke, for after all the family business is publishing.
But business and family are very much intertwined and there is a lot here about struggles over inheritances and stock options and control of Doubleday: “The intricacies of family were a Galsworthian tale,” writes Neltje with ample justification. Her tale is no “Forsyte Saga,” but she leaves us in no doubt as to how caustic and damaging all this was to her familial relationships, especially with her mother and brother Nelson.
Fascinatingly, despite the fact that both Neltje’s parents failed her, her reactions to them are wildly different. Although she nurses her elderly mother as she dies a lingering, terrible death from cancer, her emotions are complicated:
“I loved her, and all my life I wanted her to love me. She couldn’t, not wouldn’t. But I did not like her. And I ended up feeling the same way about Nelson.”
But even now she still cries out to her father in the final words of “North of Crazy”:
“When my father died, I was so young, only fourteen. I had to withhold my grief then, and the gut-wrenching rage that filled me. NowI weep — great racking sobs for the father who vanished just as he became a fatherHow unfair. I love you, I need you, I miss you. Come back, be with me. You might even like me now.”
So many of the phrases (apart from the title, obviously) in Noel Coward’s song “Poor Little Rich Girl” apply to Neltje that it’s uncanny. He may have been one of the few literary celebrities whom she didn’t get to know, but when he was writing “The life you lead leaves your nerves all a-jangle,/Your love affairs are in a hopeless tangle,/Though you’re a child, dear/Your life’s a wild typhoon./Poor little rich girl,/you’re a bewitched girl./Don’t drop a stitch too soon, he might have been describing her. Neltje’s triumph as she looks back from her serene 80s at the wild ride of her earlier life is that, despite all those dropped stitches, as an artist, businesswoman and conservationist, she has finally managed to weave her life into a colorful, satisfying fabric.
• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.
QUOTED: "It is difficult to discern the audience for this self-absorbed, often inartful memoir of an artist whose renown has not spread widely beyond the American West."
NORTH OF CRAZY
A Memoir
by Neltje
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A memoir from publishing tycoon Nelson Doubleday’s daughter, an abstract expressionist painter.
Shuttled between a Long Island mansion and a South Carolina plantation, Neltje (she prefers to be recognized by her first name only) could seemingly never satisfy her father, and her biological mother comes across as a phantom of sorts, incapable of loving her daughter. Neltje's older brother, Nelson Jr., felt like a link to sanity for a while, but he eventually distanced himself from his sister. Daily life worsened considerably when Neltje was 9 and suffered repeated sexual abuse at the hands of a grown man trusted by her parents. Sent to school in Switzerland, she thrived briefly but ultimately suffered disappointment. In a memoir shot through with self-pity, Neltje chronicles the deaths of her sometimes-cruel, alcoholic father in 1949 and her mother 30 years later. The author sought refuge in marriage at age 18 and bore two children while in her early 20s, but none of that seemed to lift the despondency for long. Later in life, Neltje lost much of her inherited wealth to a dishonest second husband. Due to her elevated status, famous people flew in and out of her life; cameo appearances include W. Somerset Maugham, Theodore Roethke, and Irving Stone. The memoir takes a turn for the positive when Neltje moves west, finding geographical beauty and personal repose in Wyoming, which she has called home for nearly 50 years. Upon arriving in the West, the author decided to become a visual artist, and she also began to understand economic self-sufficiency and the theory and importance of practicing and preaching feminism.
It is difficult to discern the audience for this self-absorbed, often inartful memoir of an artist whose renown has not spread widely beyond the American West.
Pub Date: Oct. 4th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08814-7
Page count: 288pp
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 21st, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1st, 2016
QUOTED: "a cathartic memoir that often reads like an extended artist’s statement."
Book review: A Doubleday daughter belongs, at last
By SPECIAL TO THE DENVER POSTOctober 23, 2016 at 12:29 am
By Sandra Dorr, Special to The Denver Post
crazyHalfway through “North of Crazy” is a rabidly honest sentence, one of many in a cathartic memoir that often reads like an extended artist’s statement. Delighting in her children sneaking cookies, unable to scold them, Neltje writes, “Discipline did not come easy to me because I thought like a child, and I often still do.”
Neltje, who goes by a solo name, acknowledges herself here as the daughter of publishing magnate Nelson Doubleday; sister to his heir, Nelson; child of a less-than-tender socialite mother, Ellen; and ex-wife of John Sargent, who became Doubleday’s president in a family and business built on power and fear.
The memoir covers 78 years of her life — almost, akin to Neltje’s current 10×30 paintings, more than can be taken in. In these pages, we learn how a woman shakes off the first 30 years of an opulent, literary yet suffocating life to discover her own true nature, that echo of childhood that leads her to a fantastic, frontier landscape in Wyoming, where a bitter past can melt like mountain water in an arroyo.
Early on, Neltje vividly describes the warm moments of her childhood in Bonny Hall, the family plantation in Yemassee, S.C., where black friends and servants, Jimmy, Haskell and Little John, take her fishing in rice fields, and loving Mattie tells her stories in the nursery: “I lay against her breast, listening to her heartbeat, her voice; felt the soft warmth of her flesh beneath her uniform. And her laugh made her whole body jiggle.”
Here and throughout she acutely remembers colors and shapes: the green bottomed boat, her father’s gray Buick, the pique collared dress tried on by her two older half-sisters, Puck and Madeline, children of her mother’s first marriage, whom she occasionally sees. She craves the nights when her father asks the servants, whom he terms “the darkies,” to sing for their guests: “I want to cry … their voices, rolling out like waves lapping on the beach, soothe and envelop us … the throb of music in their voices speaks of a belonging I have never known.”
These memories are interludes in years of being presented to parents in Barberries, a more formal home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, and being raised by a host of nannies, maids, tutors, and a cold governess who once forced Neltje to eat her own vomit off the floor. She shares an uneasy kinship with her brother Nelson, who’s treated as a young king, the future of Doubleday, while her future is to be molded as an heiress and society wife. Her father frightens her to the degree that she stammers when she speaks to him, desperately wanting him to listen.
In 1942, she spends an idyllic summer playing with English children of publishing friends who come to Oyster Bay to escape air raids. All the children deeply envy the one boy who lives with his mother. When New York is threatened by potential air raids, Neltje and Nelson are sent to Bonny Hall for the winter without their parents. There, a friend of the family takes her riding and molests her. For the next 70 years, she will remember his threats of what he will do if she tells.
Puck, however, learns of this and comes to her rescue at Bonny Hall. Her parents remove the man and hire a psychiatrist for Neltje, yet do not discuss the matter with her; she feels like “an animal in a cage of glass.”
In 1946, her father’s lungs collapse, and for the first time she spends weekends at Barberries keeping her father company, watching baseball and musicals on an early-model TV, especially “Annie Get Your Gun,” together, laughing. He sends her Cymbidium orchids, “small, velvety flowers in a wide range of colors, so delicate. I feel his love, new for me to know. And I love him and tell him so.”
Her mother has the flowers stopped, and sends her to an all-girls boarding school over the next year, in Switzerland. Though her mother rarely writes, she receives letters from her father every week, and from Nelson almost daily. She gains strength, and finally some weight, learning multiple languages and befriending other lonely girls. When author Daphne du Maurier takes her to Windsor Castle, she witnesses a way of life, easy and full of pleasure, between Daphne and her partner, Tommy, something even more exciting than meeting the royal family, or viewing the Mona Lisa in Paris.
Jump ahead another seven years, past her father’s death of lung cancer, her mother’s collapse into nightly drinking, to Neltje’s “coming out,” which she considers both a pleasure and a meat market, and a ride home in a cab with family friend John Sargent, who coaxes her into an engagement before she turns 18. Over the objections of her mother and siblings, she marries him, and begins a lonely New York life much like her mother’s, learning to keep house by day, entertaining authors in streams of publishing parties by night.
Raoul Fleishman, co-founder of the New Yorker, is witty and kind; W. Somerset Maugham, whom she knows from her childhood, advises her on sex in marriage; and she staves off a drunken, manic Theodore Roethke, who holds a knife to her throat in her kitchen. More important, she attends an art show opening for an old friend, Jon Schueler’s, whose abstract expressionist paintings she cannot forget.
The marriage slides even as she gives birth to two beloved children, Ellen and John, and argues with her husband over trying to eat dinner with the family instead of the constant cocktail parties and evenings with authors she is to help snag for the business. Both have affairs. She gradually realizes that her husband is unable to feel emotional attachment toward women, men or children.
Being “Dutch stubborn and Irish difficult,” she renovates old houses for the family upstate, and spends time playing with her children, much of it outdoors, always wondering, “Was I going to be a selfish mother? Like mine?”
Breadcrumbs appear in the forest of the 12 years with John, and their publishing trips to Europe. In the large studio of a Swiss abstract painter, Oscar Kokoschka, a contemporary of Picasso, she senses a kindred spirit, and the possibility of a life of art. Another friend, Geoffrey Hellman, advises her on marriage: “Get out before ten years, or you won’t.”
She battles with her brother over her share of stock, and his unwillingness to allow Doubleday Publishing to go public, and also with her husband over allowing shares of stock to go to the children, rather than him. Ultimately, she wins the stock back for her children, obtains a divorce in Mexico, and then wins a partial battle after taking Nelson, appointed as her trustee, to court.
“I grew up during this court battle in ways that triggered change in my future,” she writes. “The disregard of my mother and brother hurt, yet it set me free … .I no longer felt I had a family save for my half sisters.”
She puts her life back together “out of the scraps of myself” with a writer/painter from London, and moves her family, with him, to Banner, Wyo., buying an 1898 ranch with a stone house and sheep sheds on a lush creek with a view of the Bighorn Mountains. Her children ride horses and start school in a one-room schoolhouse, which horrifies her mother.
With the impulsiveness of a Frida Kahlo (or a Jo March), Neltje buys a historic inn hours before it’s due to be crushed by a wrecking ball, and spends several years restoring it as a talisman of Western pioneers, and a center in downtown Sheridan. Neighbors and new friends pull her jeep out of the creek in mid-winter, loan her equipment, help her buy cattle, hold potlucks with great home cooking and pies, and play poker together around kitchen tables. At last she finds community and trust that have nothing to do with her wealth or surname, which she drops entirely.
Though her second marriage also ends, Neltje begins painting in earnest, first learning how to make the mark of sumi-e painting on rice paper, then creating monotypes, then abstract canvases. On a visit to her sister Puck, she acknowledges her own addiction to alcohol. Puck takes Neltje to an AA meeting that night, the beginning of 30 years of sobriety. “How fragile are moments like this,” she remembers, “how serendipitous.”
She becomes active in the local women’s center, founds a local gallery for artists up and down the Rockies, and in 1987, is invited to exhibit solo at the Yellowstone Art Center. On the little North Fork of Crazy Woman Creek, she buys a “piece of paradise” at the base of the Bighorn Mountains, converting the property into homes for her children, and eventually grandchildren, as wilderness retreats.
With love and forgiveness, Neltje helps her mother die, and reconnects with her brother before he dies in 2015.
Ultimately, she founds an artists’ residency program, Jentel, on another section of the ranch. With Jentel’s director, M.J. Edwards, she travels the world from Antartica to Uzbekistan, to Mongolia and Morocco, which inspires her first suite of four 10×30 paintings, exhibited at the University of Wyoming.
“I paint from the unconscious,” she writes, “moving color and brush mark in a rhythmic dance, a pulse beat. The seed is sown; the layers grow.”
Her own house grows “like a wandering sculpture,” with her own large metal sculptures on the grounds, and wings added for her grandchildren, “who have encouraged me, to my great happiness, to remain a child at heart.”
North of Crazy: A Memoir
by Neltje
St. Martin’s Press
Poet and fiction writer Sandra Dorr (sandydorr@bresnan.net) teaches Women’s Wilderness Writing retreats in Colorado and Utah.