"Their kiss tasted like sadness”

The General’s Women: a novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

"She would forever remember that moment as the point at which her old life ended and a new life began. If I survive, she thought, I will be different. I will know, always, that I am a part of something larger than myself."

The story is astonishing. The General’s Women tells the story of the love affair between General Dwight Eisenhower and a former model and now driver, Kay Summersby during the Second World War. At this point he had been married to Mamie for twenty-five years – years in which they had had two children, and lost one of their young sons to illness. Kay is married but separated, and engaged to be married to another man when she comes to work for Ike when he is stationed in London, directing military operations. Wittig Albert’s astoundingly readable novel imagines that affair – from London to North Africa and back to England.

Told mostly from Kay’s point of view, there are still sections devoted to the thoughts and lives of both Ike, and Mamie.

Mamie is in in Washington for the duration of the war, isolated, away from her husband and the frontline. And it’s Mamie who comes off badly – her portrayal, while sympathetically painted – means she comes across as a cossetted, spoiled army wife, more interested in unpacking her china than in understanding the politics of the war raging across the ocean. The world of jealous army wives is fascinatingly portrayed – wives jealous of the rankings of their friends’ husbands, and wives who revel in gossip and in repeating such gossip under the guise of being sympathetic. And Mamie hears the gossip, is sickened by it and can do no more than smile through it. You feel somewhat sorry for her. 

But set against the strong, brave Kay, driving in war-darkened London, through the infamous pea soup fogs and then in the frontline in North Africa – Mamie comes off badly. No wonder, you think, Ike would have preferred the resilient Kay to his delicate, neurotic wife. And when she reveals how far she may have gone to save her marriage, the dislike is compounded.

Author Susan Wittig Albert

Ike, the historical figure, is humanised here. A man confident when plotting war tactics, less so when declaring his feelings for another, or even admitting those feelings to himself. Kay and Ike’s romance is portrayed against the violence of war, snatched, secret moments are all they have; their time is limited, in more ways than one. Nevertheless the affair is rendered beautifully – as two people fall in love against the odds, against perceived wisdom, despite his marriage and growing fame, and despite their age gaps. Kay was in her thirties when the affair began, Ike his early fifties.

Wittig Albert writes of their togetherness: “Still, as she drifted off to sleep with Ike fitted closely against her— the two of them breathing together, their hearts, she thought, beating together— she knew that a line had somehow been crossed. Her last thought as sleep came was her mother’s word: dangerous. Yes, it was, she thought, yes.”

The story is compellingly told – and as always, Wittig’s historical fiction is gripping, fascinating, enjoyably so. The novel wears its research lightly and convincingly. Her research is based Kay’s memoirs, Ike’s letters, fellow officers’ wartime diaries, and newspaper archives. Wittig evokes deprived war-time London with an authenticity that is remarkable, and contrasts it against the harshly lit North African scenes and the claustrophobic Washington apartment scenes.

Of course this is fiction – but as you read on, astonished, you can’t help wondering where the truth lies. To this end Wittig includes an author note at the end, explaining some of her sources and reasoning, and is as fascinating to read as the novel.

There’s no spoiler in saying that of course Ike left Kay – we all know he went on to win the Presidential election in 1952 and had his wife Mamie at his side, not another woman. This novel forces us to ask who are the winners, who are the losers, and at what price does power come? If Ike had divorced Mamie in the conservative 1940s the scandal of his affair and other political machinations would surely have put paid to his political ambitions.

It also forces us to look at the real sadness that results when people put ambition, duty, fear of the consequences or the lust for power above and beyond their own feelings. Was Ike being inauthentic to his true self? Did he stay with Mamie because he knew he’d be ruined professionally if he didn’t?

In the end Kay comes across as both a warm, loving woman unwittingly falling in love with a man so charismatic and powerful that she couldn’t help herself, despite her own engagement to another, and we’re reminded through her story that love happens. Despite ourselves, love happens, even when it seems foolish and stupid to let it. But Kay’s story is ultimately a sad one – by loving all and risking everything, she also lost so much too. And the poignancy of that pervades the end of this novel.

You’re left with the questions: did Ike really want to divorce Mamie and marry Kay? You be the judge in the excellent, highly recommended The General’s Women.  

A Wilder Rose by Susan Wittig Albert

A Wilder Rose is the story of the
Little House books and the possible literary
deception behind them

This extremely readable novel tells the story of Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of The Little House books (Little House on the Prairie and others in the series). Or was Laura really the sole and accomplished author of the books?

Lane was already a successful popular writer when she returned to her parents’ Ozark farm in Rocky Ridge in 1928. Divorced from a husband, she had also lived abroad and had rich experiences behind her. She had a plump portfolio of investments behind her. There she imagined she would both add to her portfolio as well as build her parents a modern farmhouse wired with electricity and indoor plumbing. She was making money with her writing – and her income was going through the stock market roof. Life was good. She was accompanied by her friend Troub, with whom she had a relationship – although this is somewhat opaquely referred to in this novel.

Writer Albert re-imagines the events of these years. With a foreboding known to us through history only we read as Lane and her companion experience the horrors of the stock market crash of 1929. Lane finds herself stuck through circumstance and desperation on the farm; finds her relationship with Troub withering away bewilderingly: “We had prided ourselves on enjoying each other, without obligation. And now that we reached the end, neither of us gave way to tears – not then, anyway.” Troub would later go on to write children’s novels penning the Sue Barton and Carol Page series.

And into this chasm her mother, a pioneer girl, comes to her with a scrap of a story of her early years. It’s poorly written, hardly publishable, hardly even a book, but Lane sets out to fix the writing, and it’s eventually published with more books promised. The literary deception, begun so innocuously and innocently, is in full force. Her mother will be known as the author of the children’s books – even though the truth is, it’s more of a collaboration between mother and daughter. Or is it? 

This is a novel of that collaboration, although there is still some doubt as to the veracity of that claim, as well as of the complicated knot of the mother/daughter relationship between Laura and her only child, a tie that Lane sometimes felt like a stranglehold, and of how Lane shaped her mother’s story into publishable books.

The world of 1930s small-town America is also intricately recreated in this book – a time when modern conveniences such as electricity and plumbing were still luxuries in rural areas; and pioneer women could still remember the wagons and wildness that permeated their youth.  But it’s a bleak time in history with the country decimated by the disaster and the great dust storms. When Lane travels the country, writing a book on it, the harshness edges through: “Dust, dirt, wind. ‘We know where the dust comes from by its colours,’ one farmer’s wife told me, holding her apron across her face.”

But it is also a story of Lane herself – little known now beyond the history books – and it’s a fascinating story. A woman who lived by her own rules in a time when most women married and subsumed themselves in that bond; a woman who took up her pen and wrote her way to fortune and kept on writing even when that pile disappeared. A woman who had been born in poverty, who managed to move beyond her life’s circumstances.  Lane is an spirited woman and one of the treasures of this novel is how enormously likeable she is; with Wittig creating an empathy that leads you through the book.  Lane’s life is at times unrelentingly hard in those years: trapped, failing dental health, growing older, her life moving away from her. But I found myself compulsively reading to the end, drawn on, entranced by this woman’s strength and vigour.