The Emilie Loring Collection

Swift Water is so different from Emilie Loring’s other novels. When Jean Randolph arrives home, Ezry Barker asks,

“Say, Jean, been gittin’ into trouble so soon? Seems though I see th’ old symptoms. Didn’t fetch the Turrible Twin along with ye, did ye?”

But that’s just what this book is about:  terrible twins.

Jean’s mother is an author, so absorbed in her writing career that her marriage has fallen apart, her husband loves another woman, and her daughter lives selfishly, without purpose. Jean enters the story in a dazzling, yellow roadster.

With a wicked, little smile of defiance the girl at the wheel kept on her impetuous course.

Emilie’s characters usually fly planes, ride horses, speak multiple languages, play piano, and sing. But not Jean.

“I have no talent, no parlor tricks. I play the organ creditably, that’s all.”

Secretly, she takes lessons on the church’s carillon, but she shuns church-going itself. She disdains the town girls who attend only to see the handsome minister, Christopher Wynne.

Jean’s father and Christopher Wynne are the book’s conscience–understanding, wise, and compassionate. But neither the father nor the minister is overbearing or dogmatic. That role is left to sanctimonious Luther Calvin.

Salvation stuck out all over him. Having acquired it himself—his brand—he’d bend his energies to converting the world.

Skirmishes for influence in Garston’s religious community dominate the story until a dam bursts, and the town is flooded—a huge flood that carries houses away and sweeps owners from their rooftops. Danger and death force everyone to commit to their beliefs and live—or die—by them, including Jean’s mother, who dies trying to get to her daughter to make amends.

“Jean misunderstood something. I swear that she misunderstood.”

Swift Water was written in 1929, and the timing is important. Emilie usually wrote from September to May and turned in her manuscript before she went to Blue Hill in July. But on May 6th, her brother Robert, her close companion and confidante since childhood, fell to his death from the twelfth floor of a New York hotel—nearly the same date as the death of their mother on May 8th, ten years before.

Did her brother fall to his death, or did he jump? Nearly blinded by illness and gasping for air, he called to the front desk for help, but by the time they got the door open, he lay on the pavement, deep scratches dug into the windowsill, as though he had clawed to remain inside.

Emilie was now the last of her family. Her father, mother, sister, and brother had gone before her. Swift water—unstoppable, inescapable, eternity at its end. She dug deeply for this one, but why? When did she write it? What undercurrents lay beneath the swift waters they navigated before Robert’s death?

Swift Water was published in early November of 1929, just days after Black Tuesday, and it hit a chord. So many were panicked, drowning in debt, disillusioned and desperate, seeking a firm foothold. Swift Water was right where they were. It went almost immediately into a second printing.

Emilie’s sunny personality is her defining characteristic, but in Swift Water, she lays her heart open, lost and questioning. She contemplates her terrible twin in Jean’s mother, who dies without absolution, and recalls the grief of her own mother’s death.

Heart-wringing business this, dismantling a home out of which the occupant had stepped, not knowing that she would never return. Day had followed unreal day–like dull beads on a string which Time relentlessly counted off one by one–as she had sorted and disposed of her mother’s intimate belongings.

Simply and elegantly, she takes on the struggle of souls for guidance and meaning.

Mysteriously restless, she seemed always to be longing for something—she didn’t know what. A purpose in life?

The last thing Emilie Loring would have wanted would have been to be called a “religious writer.” Every time I see her listed that way, I cringe on her behalf. She valued her faith, felt it deeply, and expressed it naturally, but she respected others’ journeys.

The greatest need of the country today is personal religion.

Some called it Destiny, others Force, still others Luck, some called it the Infinite, some called it–God.

Her purpose was, and remained, to entertain.

“My greatest ambition is to tell an absorbing story well. The sort of story which will cause the reader to close the book with a smile, to exclaim: ‘That’s a rattling good story.’”

I didn’t like Swift Water as much as her other books when I first read it. I liked to identify with the girls in the stories, and I kept disapproving of Jean. Why wasn’t she nicer?  Thank heaven for Christopher Wynne. He brought all of the romantic tension and fervor and completely showed up bland Harvey Brooke. I wonder at Emilie’s romantic life, that she wrote so compellingly of attraction.

Her pulses responded and set up a clamor. Curious the effect he had had upon her from the moment he had jumped to the running board of her roadster.

An amazing, outleaping force seemed sweeping her toward him. For the fraction of a second she fought a wild impulse to fling herself into his arms. Was she quite mad?

Love is triumphant in Swift Water, but otherwise, Emilie turns things all on their heads. There’s not even her usual reference to Alice in Wonderland, so I will provide one with which to close:

“Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night?” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Next up, one of my favorites:  Lighted Windows