Dorothy Dodds Baker 1907-1968

My grandmother died before I was born, but her writing has let me know her

Dorothy Alice Dodds Baker, my grandmother, was born on this day in 1907.

She was gay at a time when that was an enormously difficult thing to be, and her own sense of family obligations formed an additional barrier — one of her own making — between the life she lived and the life she wanted.

That struggle shadowed all her years, rarely revealed except in letters donated, along with the manuscripts, galleys and what-not of a writer’s life, to UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Dorothy’s description of that correspondence is everything I love about her voice and the sensibility behind it:

These letters, all of them addressed to a lifelong friend, a woman named Mildred Stewart, unmarried, a schoolteacher, a writer, quiet, unobtrusive, loyal and endlessly devoted to me, do not, I feel need much explanation. They constitute a sort of running diary of my life between the ages of say twenty-five and fifty-eight. They could be an embarrassment to my family, revealing as they do my always latent and sometimes rampant deviation from the sexual norm, and with my striving to maintain sanity and integrity within the difficult set of circumstances I was saddled with and could not get free of, though I wanted to. These letters will, I trust, reveal me as I have been — making a conscientious attempt to be a dutiful daughter, a helpful and essentially loving and devoted wife, an adoring mother, and a serious writer — while being in my heart plagued with a feeling of being a driven outlaw, an imposter, a fraud and a pariah.

She was indeed a serious writer, winning immediate fame with her debut novel, 1938’s Young Man With a Horn, loosely based on the life of Bix Beiderbecke and tragically butchered as a movie starring Kirk Douglas and Doris Day. I first read Young Man when I was 15, and was struck by both the confident power of the writing and the wild joy of its invocation of music. (Not to mention that its portrayal of an interracial friendship was pretty bold for its time.)

But my grandmother struggled with what to do next. Her second book, 1943’s Trio, is sparse and evocative stylistically, but trapped within the societal guardrails of its day — the book’s lesbian relationship is not only coded but also portrayed as a flaw to be fixed, a common plot point of the era that writers fell back on to avoid obscenity charges. (It would be nearly a decade before Patricia Highsmith published the first lesbian novel with a happy ending, and that was under a pseudonym.) Not that adhering to conventions saved Trio. Dorothy and my grandfather, Howard Baker, reworked the story for Broadway, but the production was quickly shut down after New York City’s license commissioner — one of those right-wing guardians of decency that I suppose will always plague us — threatened to pull the theater’s license.

Family loyalty makes me want to blame Trio’s shortcomings on the strictures of the 1940s, but I can’t get there: It’s a constrained, constipated book that’s never convincing. And her third book, 1948’s Our Gifted Son, is just a hot mess: It starts out with no idea of what it wants to be and follows that roadmap about as well as you’d expect.

But then there’s her fourth and final book, 1962’s Cassandra at the Wedding. And oh is it ever marvelous — by turns brutal, funny, tart, knowing and wise, and utterly confident even as it switches voices and tones. It’s a book that makes my grandmother’s literary career look like the neat arc it never was, with Cassandra the studied, mature payoff of Young Man’s exuberant promise. I recommend Cassandra to anybody, though being a member of my family means viewing it through a uniquely odd and not always comfortable lens: its twin sisters are based on my mother and my aunt (not twins, for what it’s worth), and their boozy professor father isn’t too far from my grandfather Howard.

The twins’ mother is already dead in the book. Dorothy had pushed herself offstage, a foreshadowing of her own death from cancer a few years later that gives the book another dose of intrafamily strangeness: It feels like she’s narrating the aftermath of her own funeral.

I was born in 1969, so I never met my grandmother. And even if we had overlapped, she’d be long dead by now. But I feel like I knew her nonetheless. Part of that is from family stories: the little songs she made up to amuse herself, the outrageous things she’d say for the unsuspecting ears of visitors, and the quips that still make us smile or shake our heads. (A small one: Dorothy and Howard lived in the tiny town of Terra Bella, Calif., where they managed orange groves as a hedge against lean royalty checks. Dorothy’s description of the town? “A whole lot of terra and not a lot of bella.”)

But I also feel like I knew her because I’ve been able to read her books and stories and letters — and they’re revelatory even when she’s being guarded. That extraordinary voice is always there, and it tells you exactly who my grandmother was, even when she’s leaving a lot out.

And inevitably, my thoughts about her return to the principal irony: If Dorothy had been able to live the life she deserved, I wouldn’t exist. Neither would my son, my mother, my aunt, my cousins, or any of their children. That’s something so big and slippery that I’ve given up trying to get my arms around it, but something like it was on Dorothy’s mind too, as she prepared her letters for the Bancroft.

Not surprisingly, she nailed it:

I’m not sure what it all adds up to, but I do know that, at the point of death, I end up with love for all the principal characters in this farce — first of all my husband, whom I married fraudulently but have always loved, next our daughters who were allowed to us by some sort of miracle, and finally Mildred Stewart to whom these epistles were addressed — the allowed friend. I hope the letters will reveal (if anyone should ever read them) with some clarity the last clear thought I can muster — that my life is anybody’s life, and that anybody’s life is bound to have trouble in it, and that we are all of us bound by mortality, subject to grave disappointments, bitter blows, betrayals, and grave inadequacies — but there is also this, the saving grace: that in the middle of the muddle there is so much of the slapstick ludicrous so much that is warm and tender and clownish and good and dependable that even an acknowledged pariah cannot help recognizing it and considering it in the final accounting, with love and gratitude for the privilege of having had to go through it.