Book Review: A Doubleday Daughter Belongs, At Last

By Sandra Dorr, Special to The Denver Post Halfway through “North of Crazy” is a rabidly honest sentence, one of many in a cathartic memoir that often reads like an extended artist’s statement. Delighting in her children sneaking cookies, unable to scold them, Neltje writes, “Discipline did not come easy to me because I thought like a child, and I often still do.” Neltje, who goes by a solo name, acknowledges herself here as the daughter of publishing magnate Nelson Doubleday; sister to his heir, Nelson; child of a less-than-tender socialite mother, Ellen; and ex-wife of John Sargent, who became Doubleday’s president in a family and business built on power and fear. The memoir covers 78 years of her life — almost, akin to Neltje’s current 10×30 paintings, more than can be taken in.   In these pages, we learn how a woman shakes off the first 30 years of an opulent, literary yet suffocating life to discover her own true nature, that echo of childhood that leads her to a fantastic, frontier landscape in Wyoming, where a bitter past can melt like mountain water in an arroyo. Early on, Neltje vividly describes the warm moments of her childhood in Bonny Hall, the family plantation in Yemassee, S.C., where black friends and servants, Jimmy, Haskell and Little John, take her fishing in rice fields, and loving Mattie tells her stories in the nursery:  “I lay against her breast, listening to her heartbeat, her voice; felt the soft warmth of her flesh beneath her uniform.  And her laugh made her whole body jiggle.” Here and throughout she acutely remembers colors and shapes:  the green bottomed boat, her father’s gray Buick, the pique collared dress tried on by her two older half-sisters, Puck and Madeline, children of her mother’s first marriage, whom she occasionally sees.  She craves the nights when her father asks the servants, whom he terms “the darkies,” to sing for their guests:  “I want to cry … their voices, rolling out like waves lapping on the beach, soothe and envelop us … the throb of music in their voices speaks of a belonging I have never known.” These memories are interludes in years of being presented to parents in Barberries, a more formal home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, and being raised by a host of nannies, maids, tutors, and a cold governess who once forced Neltje to eat her own vomit off the floor.  She shares an uneasy kinship with her brother Nelson, who’s treated as a young king, the future of Doubleday, while her future is to be molded as an heiress and society wife.  Her father frightens her to the degree that she stammers when she speaks to him, desperately wanting him to listen. In 1942, she spends an idyllic summer playing with English children of publishing friends who come to Oyster Bay to escape air raids.  All the children deeply envy the one boy who lives with his mother.