This is the third winter that the Independent has hosted young journalists in a fellowship named for Mary Heaton Vorse, who lived from 1907 until her death in 1966 in the house at 466 Commercial St. that has been restored by Ken Fulk and friends.
Last winter’s fellow, Amelia Roth-Dishy, delved into the Vorse archives at Wayne State University, and on Saturday she returned to Provincetown to preside over a satisfying gathering in the living room of that extraordinary house. Amelia had chosen a series of excerpts from Vorse’s writing — surprising in its “diversity and breadth,” she said, “from journalism to opinion to fiction” — which were read aloud by a group of illustrious local women.
Vorse is remembered here mostly for the 1942 memoir Time and the Town, her evocative portrait of Provincetown in the first decades of the 20th century. But she was an international correspondent of the first rank, writing vividly about women’s marginalization, racism, and the battles waged by organized labor around the world.
The witty and impassioned work we heard on Saturday brought Mary Heaton Vorse to life.
“It seemed as if I had been present at something at once deeply touching and deeply thrilling,” she wrote about a women’s suffrage conference in Budapest in 1913, “as though I had watched a young and hopeful army getting ready to march on to victories of peace such as no other army had dreamed of attempting; as though I had watched too, one of the most impressive things in the world — the loosing of long pent up and hitherto unused forces.”
Her description of the racist crowd at the rape trial of nine young Black men in Scottsboro, Ala. in 1933 is chilling. And her account of the Lawrence textile strike of 1912, written 23 years later, provides “crucial context for her worldview as a journalist and organizer, and also a wonderful bit of prose that renders the labor movement of this era in both grand and intimate terms,” Amelia told us in introducing it.
“Both Joe O’Brien and I had come a long road to get to Lawrence,” Vorse wrote of her time there with her second husband. “Together we experienced the realization of the human cost of our industrial life. Something transforming had happened to both of us. We knew now where we belonged — on the side of the workers and not with the comfortable people among whom we were born.
“Some synthesis had taken place between my life and that of the workers, some peculiar change which would never again permit me to look with indifference on the fact that riches for the few were made by the misery of the many.”
Some of our notably successful and influential neighbors more recently arrived on the Outer Cape like to say that they “come here to hide.” Vorse, who adored her Provincetown home and knew it intimately, offers a striking example of how one can be entirely of this place and yet also out in the world — and changing it profoundly.
