there was work. When her mother died, she and her older sister, Alice, went to live with their Grandmother Griswold, who was fiercely independent and had a deep disdain for 19thcentury innovation. “Grandma” considered wood stoves needlessly modern and refused to use a sewing machine or an eggbeater, yet despite her frugality, she grew extensive flower gardens that aroused disbelief among her neighbors. She was also a reader and a revolutionary, quoting Thoreau and Rousseau and participating in local struggles for emancipation and women’s voting rights. Damon, in her application to Northfield in 1896, wrote that her object in life was “to be a somebody, variety not determined.” She wasted no time pursuing that goal. At Northfield, she became vice-president of her class and served two years on the board of The Hermonite. She delivered the class oration at Commencement and wrote “O Northfield Beautiful,” which became the school song. When her sister Alice graduated from Northfield a year after she did, the Commencement issue of The Hermonite stated that “she is known only as ‘Bertha Clark’s sister.’” Poor Alice! Damon went on to Pembroke College in Brown University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature and language, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and starred in several theater productions. She moved to Berkeley, California, with her first husband, who had secured a teaching post at the university; then watched the marriage dissolve when he had an affair with one of his students. Damon had begun cultivating her interests in gardening and
architecture, and she supported herself by building and remodeling homes in the Bay Area, despite never having had formal training. Possessing a “great wit” and “having a real talent for gathering people around her,” according to Benjamin Lehman, an English professor at Berkeley, Damon built friendships with local artists and writers; she took
At the age of 15, Bertha Clark Damon wrote in her application to Northfield that her object in life was “to be a somebody, variety not determined.”
a road trip with Ansel Adams through the Southwest in 1927. She married again, and she and her second husband became pioneers in bicoastal living, going back and forth between a 250acre estate in Alton, New Hampshire, and Berkeley. The grounds of her New Hampshire home provided an ideal laboratory for Damon’s experiments in gardening and landscape design. She also turned to writing, and what emerged in 1938 was Grandma Called It Carnal, the story of a childhood in which “carnal” meant “grasping for more and more things and missing more and more values.” Suddenly Damon was famous. So was Grandma, who died in 1925 at the age of 96. As The Saturday Review put it, “Grandma is more than amusing or odd or even striking; she is a figure of significance in the pattern of American life.” The book launched Damon on the lecture circuit, and in 1940 she became the first woman to be invited to speak at the Harvard Club of Boston. She insisted on entering through the front door, even though female guests were expected to use a separate entrance. Damon’s second best-seller, A Sense of Humus, appeared in 1943. It was a rumination on her gardening life in New Hampshire. “To consider humus,” she wrote, “is to get a hint of the oneness of the universe.” At the end of Grandma Called It Carnal, Damon describes how the doctor wrote on her grandmother’s death certificate: “Cause of death: Just stopped living.” The same might be said of Damon herself. As she grew older, she spent more time in Berkeley, her life setting somewhere in the west. She died in 1975. [NMH]
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