Interpretation
 

The question for a biographer becomes at this juncture: What can we now recover of the charmed life and achievements of the three Setons, and how? We start with simply the facts. The Setons were well-recognized personalities, particularly as writers, during their lifetimes, earning handsome incomes, awards, and attention from the media and adulatory readers. When they "came to town" on speaking engagements or book tours, they made headlines.When they filed for divorce, they made headlines as well. They were not only unusually good-looking and stylish people, but also connected empathetically with others, demonstrating a natural curiosity and magnetic warmth that brought them many admirers. Although Grace was the only member of the family with a college degree, all three exuded intelligence and could show off a wealth of knowledge on many subjects. They were the "beautiful" people of their day, and like many of the citizens of the Greenwich, Connecticut community that was their home as a family, they traveled in the best circles, widely and quite justly admired for their accomplishments.

A biographer finds no dearth of documents for these accomplishments, and indeed, the sheer volume of print is the problem. As a very public family, the Setons can be traced through their media coverage - newspaper articles by and about them, reviews of their books, and two full-length biographies of Ernest Thompson Seton. They also left a wide trail through carefully preserved letters. Their roamings away from one another produced the benefit of a voluminous correspondence, and the letters are a rich source of information. Somewhat curiously, however, the letters seldom reveal personal feelings or deep emotions. They are witty, often richly descriptive, but oddly impersonal in tone, for the most part. ETS and Anya Seton were also obsessive journal keepers throughout their lives, but no two people's personal jottings could be more different. From his teens until his death, ETS kept careful, almost daily note of many activities, yet his are primarily the journals of a man who saw himself as a scientist, and then a public figure. There are hundreds of drawings of skunk tails, for instance, as ETS the naturalist experimented with breeding to produce particular patterns in the tail fur of his charges. Details of travels, observations of flora and fauna, meetings with people who were important to his career abound, but only once in a while a private utterance about family or other personal situations. Ann, on the other hand, as a teenager began to keep a journal of her inner life that for her meant primarily her "love" life, and this chronicling of social affairs, flirtations or sexual escapades, and physical attractiveness constitutes her primary concern. As she came into her own as an author, however, she became both more self-analytical and more interested in recording the progress of her writing career. Her many health problems - real or imagined - also became a major preoccupation. Even in her sixties, her "love life" still dominated most of the pages. Her journals present the passionate emotions her father's lack, but they are also a valuable record of her maturing sense of herself as a writer.

As subjects of a biography, then, the Setons are wonderfully well documented through their own writing. Yet they are also hard to frame through their books or journals or letters primarily because their writing lives went in so many different directions simultaneously. For this reason alone the houses they lived in become a helpful grounding point as well as a frame. To follow the Seton paper trail is to be overcome by a mountain of words -- eloquent, intriguing, entertaining, poignant, yet also deceptive. Their actual travels also lack any organizing consistency. Tracing the journeys which in one sense constituted their "lives" results in a map full of tangled, crisscrossing lines. In words and in their travel itineraries, and in their emotional involvements too, the Setons were disorderly people. "Order, order, order," Anya once wrote in her journal as a New Year's resolution, commenting that both her own and her father's untidiness were the result of minds too full, too responsive to the richness of the world around them. For the Setons, as we shall see, their houses were a way of ordering life, as they become now a way of ordering the Seton lives for their biographer.
Considering the coeval traveling and writing lives of the Setons, what remains surprising is how much more than a launching pad their homes represented, and indeed how much the concept of home-building, both literally and figuratively, meant to them. The Greenwich houses of the Setons were very consciously designed and constructed representations of a kind of life very different from the ones they wanted to write about. Perhaps one would not expect ETS to turn his artist-naturalist eye to the recording of early twentieth century, middle class, upwardly mobile life in sound-side Greenwich. But neither his supposedly very socially conscious wife nor his daughter, brought up to be a social butterfly and little else, ever considered, any more than "The Chief" himself, writing about the genteel suburban world that their homes personified. The Greenwich homes were carefully constructed and cultivated to be icons of status, social acceptance, family harmony - i.e. civilization at its most gracious and zestful. From 1900 until 1930, the Setons were prominent Greenwich citizens who paid an enormous amount of attention to the fashions and club life of Greenwich's finest - if only between trips. But more importantly, their homes also occupied their minds while they were taking trips. ETS, for instance, made notebooks full of drawings for DeWinton and Little Peequo, sketching them while on long train trips away from home. Grace wrote probably the longest and most impassioned letter of her life - on a train - in the Orient - in 1923, begging her husband not to sell DeWinton, but to live with her there and take up his rightful place as a prominent man of society. Anya, on her honeymoon in France and England, collected postcards of architecturally interesting country houses to share with her father.

Within Seton Castle, ETS's only western home, can be read his last and most romantic American dream of self-realization. In a book that collects many ETS stories and lore, Julia Buttree included a poem that he had written, she admits, "For one of his houses in the East." But she adds, "I have, with his wholehearted approval, changed that poem to comply with our conditions. It is now the, shall I say, theme song of Seton Village." The poem begins: "We've clad our thought in stone and steel/We've built of native pine/We've made a home that through the years/Can all our love enshrine." The poem fits both the Greenwich and the Santa Fe homes, and it does so because all of the Seton homes -- as ETS, Grace, and Anya seem to have understood -- were a reflection of the mind, the "thought," that is distilled in them and of the ideal of family that both propelled and eluded the builders.

Anya, who kept a home base as a resident of Greenwich all of her life, wrote articles for women's magazines on homemaking and ruminated frequently in her journals about owning her own home. Her move from Greenwich to Old Greenwich to accomplish this lifelong dream is unquestionably a measure of how she wanted to see herself and be seen, not as one of what she once disdainfully called the "commuter" class of Greenwich, but as one of the old ones, steeped in the history of a revered pre-colonial time and place that preceded the upstart refugees from New York (perhaps including her own father). Yet Anya both insisted upon and transgressed against Old Greenwich manners and mores in order to assert her identity, much as her father would have. Perhaps the most prominent example of her conflicted vision of Old Greenwich, the plans she and her husband chose for Sea Rune, also reflects her father's way of making statements about himself. It is a low, entirely unpretentious, fifties-style ranch-house, but it sits at the end of one of Old Greenwich's most prestigious streets, Binney Lane. The house has been only ambivalently tolerated by the neighbors. As one Binney family descendant recently, and with ironic graciousness, put it, "All I can say is that anyone who builds a house with a flat roof is asking for trouble." Importantly, while Sea Rune emphatically does not fit the street's ambiance architecturally, it does fit its lot, rising naturally and shaped unobtrusively along the rocky shore overlooking the Sound. Like her father, Anya chose to relate home to natural environment with a rather boldly independent result. Yet in her choice of Binney Lane, it is very likely that Anya was following a much more conventional motivation related to class and social standing, and one with a clear parental precedent. When Grace pressed ETS to make the move from exotic, outlying Wyndygoul to elegant De Winton, with its coveted Lake Avenue address, she undoubtedly had in mind the message of respectability and economic assurance that such a move would convey. While none of the Setons wanted to be defined by social labels, they nonetheless wanted to prove that they could master and manipulate them.

The Seton family's journey, traced from Ernest and Grace's purchase of Wyndygoul in 1900 to the sale of Sea Rune and the proposed sale of Seton Castle in 2001, reveals an extraordinary American success story. Writing in a tiny room in London, a near-penniless art student, Seton had predicted when he was barely twenty-one (in 1881) that "By 1905 I shall by God's help, have made a comfortable fortune by my pen and pencil, also in part by judicious speculation." He not only met this prediction, he beat it, primarily through the 1898 publication of Wild Animals I Have Known. Scribner's ran out of the first two thousand copies in three weeks. Grace too met with important recognition very early. With hardly any training in the book-writing craft, except what might be called a very valuable apprenticeship to her husband, she produced her own first book, the popular A Woman Tenderfoot, in 1900. Her mother Clemencie wrote to her exultantly, "Darling, do you remember writing me from Paris that you would give yourself ten years to come before the public? Instead of ten it is only three."

Like her parents, Ann Seton too dreamed very early of making a name for herself, and at age seventeen expressed total confidence in having a writing career - IF she wanted it. To her diary she confided, "I could write, I know, but the trouble is that I want to live vivid exciting things not write them for imaginary creatures." By 1928, at the age of twenty-four, she was married with two children, restless, and more determined than ever to have a "full life." Again to her diary she wrote, "Also I do want to really accomplish something. When the day comes that I get money for some writing, I shall be beside myself with joy. Writing is my gift, even though mediocre still, can I not perfect myself?" (July 29). Twelve years later, the housewife Ann Seton Chase, who had only a high school education augmented with one short course in fiction writing, found her first novel, My Theodosia, bringing in both money and fame. By 1946 she was receiving a $5000.00 advance for her fourth novel and could gleefully crow, "Six years ago a $250.00 advance sounded good!" Her 1946 earnings from writing, she recorded in her journal, amounted to $94,000.00, enough to afford the Moon Rocks tract of land which would one day provide her with a first "home of my own."

That the three Setons could mark out their futures so clearly and then proceed on a seemingly straight and fast track to make their dreams come true indeed sets them apart from most mortals. But Americans of all sorts and conditions, from the beginning of the new century until Black Tuesday, 1929, felt drunk with just such a possibility for themselves. If the Setons "made it" more decisively and dramatically than others, they seemed not anomalies but rather models and confirmations - models of determination, talent in the service of will, a faith, as young Ann put it, that the dream of perfecting oneself was not an outrageous joke. The manor on the hill, the invitation to dine with the president, the rise of a first novel to the bestseller lists, belonged to a game that anyone could sit down to play, according the expansive rhetoric of the new century. If luck seemed a part of how this family came to epitomize American success, neither the culture nor the Setons themselves had to acknowledge it. Their houses and their books came from a vision that would seem unimpeded by outside obstacles, the vision of the twentieth century itself at its start. Inside the houses, however, if not the books, the Setons look more familiar to readers at the beginning of a much more sober-looking twenty-first century, for one of the sadder dimensions of the Seton story is the way in which this father, mother, and daughter seemed to lose the capacity to function in family roles as they climbed the ladder of success defined in the American way. Their romantic books, not their human relationships and certainly not the family's tense interactions within the walls of their homes, came to define them in their own as well as in the public's eyes. 
Wyndygoul, De Winton, Little Peequo, the homes of ETS, Grace, and Anya; Seton Castle, the home of ETS, Julia, and Beulah; Sea Rune, the home of Anya Seton and Chan Chase - these five homes house the story of both an unusual and a representative twentieth century American family. ETS, Grace, and Anya Seton together wrote enough books to fill a library. As a literary family, the Setons present to us now an astonishing case of talent, energy, and sheer will to achieve, attributes in important ways both nurtured and threatened by their relationships as father, mother, and daughter. The study that follows will explore their accomplishments, the American success story that their lives seem to epitomize, and - as an inevitable consequence - the enormous personal costs that they paid, as a family, for their success. The biography focuses first on the compelling emotional ties that bound the Setons to one another and also drove them apart in their quest for achievement, defined according to uniquely American standards. How did the reality of being Setons - by 1920 a family well-known AS a family -- influence their lives as writers, celebrities, and members of a very elite portion of American society? Many kinds of public success came easily to all three Setons, yet success in the intimate roles of husband or wife, parent or child, was their most difficult, and largely unsatisfied, longing. This, then, is the story of an American family who both reflected and contradicted the ideal of what such a family should look like in the twentieth century. And the narrative energy of the story ironically gathers its force from the tenuous base in family life that the Seton homes provided.

Why choose to tell the Seton story through their houses? Often, tracing the actions of the Setons gives the impression that escaping from home, from the very threat of being defined by home, was a major motivating force behind the way that ETS, Grace, and Anya arranged their lives. However, one can also see that Wyndygoul, and later DeWinton, Little Peequo, and finally Sea Rune - the four Seton Greenwich estates, and certainly Seton Castle in New Mexico, were each a different kind of book that the father, mother, and daughter wrote, for each other as well as for themselves and the public. Obviously, each house in its physical and aesthetic plan was designed to make certain statements in the language of property that was so well understood in the decades of prosperity that they and other upwardly mobile, thoroughly modern WASP Americans enjoyed. While none of the houses was directly used as settings in the Setons' writing, all of them were nonetheless means of self-presentation very clearly chosen. Moreover, the Seton residences are the best, perhaps the only, settings that give us a visual and emotive location for the Setons' interactions with each other.

The two most tangible keys to the Setons' interwoven social, artistic, and family identities are the home settings that they carefully designed but only ambivalently maintained and the imaginative worlds of the books they created out of their travels away from home. In the long run, it seems that the books, far more than the homes, would have offered each of the Setons an authoritative and pleasurable means to present their vision of themselves. Yet houses, domestic architecture, and interior design fascinated all three of them, and they were as keenly interested in building and preserving their homes as they were in writing their books. To see the Setons at home is to watch a father, mother, and daughter in some ways play, very self-consciously, into the social norms of their time and class. To see them at home is also to see them writing the books for which they were best known. The subjects of those books might be wild animals, or a lady sahib's explorations of the Sahara, or the romance between Katherine Swynford and the great John of Gaunt. However, the authorial minds behind those fictions were using not only far away worlds but psychological, emotional, and social strains very close to home to weave stories that were inevitably as much about the writers as about the escapist fantasies they enshrined on the page. In many of ETS's more anthropomorphic animal tales, for instance, the animals' sense of home and family is central to his establishing of their intent. In many of Grace's travel books, she supplies elaborate detail on the homes and homemaking skills of the women whose countries she is visiting. Anya Seton creates a series of homebuilders as characters in her novels, and for her readers, homes become a way of judging both status and personal worth, as we see in the castle John of Gaunt builds for Duchess Blanche in Katherine; in Joseph Alston's carelessly constructed plantation homes in My Theodosia; and in the elegant but intimidating design of Dragonwyck, the Hudson River mansion that dominates the psychological terrain of the novel of the same name.

A careful reading of all of the Setons' narrative books together uncovers a strong autobiographical presence in almost all of them; to explore that presence in connection with the context of the Seton homes is to find three authors learning from one another, confronting one another, and opening themselves to the public with motivations that are imaginatively hidden in the exotic settings and plots of their narratives. What we can observe finally, through their homes and their books, is a family of writers who were people of prodigious talent, prodigious passion, enormous charm, and fierce egotism. This combination was responsible for their public acceptance, their private failures, and the engrossing nature of their common story. The only place to find them all together is at home, where all their journeys, and most particularly their creative, artistic journeys, began.