Belle Cora: A Novel

Mrs. Frances Andersen had already been a New York City merchant’s daughter, a farm girl, a millworker, a prostitute, a madam, a killer, a missionary, a spirit medium, a respectable society matron, and a survivor of the Great San Francisco Earthquake when she began writing the book known to us as
Belle Cora
. She completed her final draft two days before her death in 1919, and the manuscript was discovered shortly thereafter in her Sacramento hotel suite, beneath a note that said, “Hear the will before you entertain any thoughts of destroying this.” As she had foreseen, the news of its existence came as an unpleasant shock to her heirs, who had had until then every reason to hope that their wealthy relative’s secrets would die with her.

It would be difficult to overstate the delight the tabloid press of the 1920s took in the ensuing court battle, as famous in its day as the Fatty Arbuckle rape trial or the “Peaches” Browning divorce. Before it was over, Mrs. Andersen’s sanity had been posthumously challenged, her servants had spoken on her behalf, the character of her loyal amanuensis Margaret Peabody had been attacked, members of San Francisco’s most notable families had been subpoenaed, and the manuscript itself had testified to its author’s mental competence much as
Oedipus at Colonus
is said to have done for the poet Sophocles. Since the purpose of this campaign was to keep
Belle Cora
a family affair, it was self-defeating from the start; Mrs. Andersen’s book—its plot already boiled down to its essentials in girls’ jump-rope rhymes and West Indian calypso songs, its title known to streetcar conductors and immigrant fruit peddlers—went into five printings when published in 1926 in highly abridged form by the Dial Press. The full text was harder to obtain. Scholars wishing to consult it were obliged either to visit the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, or else to make wary use of the pirated version published by the Obelisk Press in Paris in the 1930s and smuggled into the United States in the luggage of sophisticated travelers. At last, in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision regarding
Fanny Hill
(
Memoirs v. Massachusetts
,
383 U.S. 413) prepared the way for this accurate, complete, and unexpurgated edition.

In my role as a curator for the Bancroft collection and the author of separate monographs on the careers of David Broderick and Edward McGowan, both of whom walk briefly through the pages of Mrs. Andersen’s memoir, I have been fascinated by this remarkable document for years. When Sandpiper Senior Editor Morris Abramson asked me to edit the book and write the foreword, I jumped at the chance.

According to the current legal definition,
Belle Cora
is not obscene. There is no question about the redeeming social value of this work, a primary source for anyone researching antebellum New York, the “Miller heresy,” the California Gold Rush, or its author, a significant historical figure in her own right; and with Victorianism’s eclipse, it no longer offends contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters.

We are not all historians, however. It is fair to ask, now that the scandal surrounding its first publication is forgotten, and on drugstore bookracks the works of Genet and de Sade brazenly return our stare—now that we are permitted to read
Belle Cora
—why should we read it? For most of us the answer will be found in the spell its remarkable author, with her special brew of guile and honesty, is still able to cast upon us.

Like an old French postcard,
Belle Cora
has survived long enough to substitute other charms for its fading erotic appeal. Although Andersen, aka Arabella Godwin, Arabella Moody, Harriet Knowles, Arabella Talbot, Arabella Dickinson, Frances Dickinson, Arabella Ryan, and Belle Cora, was certainly a flawed human being, many readers have found her book as companionable as she herself was in her bloom (“Flaunting her beauty and wealth on the gayest thoroughfares, and on every gay occasion, with senator, judge, and citizen at her beck and call …”
^*
). She was not entirely a novice when she began
Belle Cora
, having previously ghost-written two books credited to her third husband, and having published, under her own name, the considerably less candid autobiography
My Life with James Victor Andersen
. It is safe to say that nothing in those works prepared
their readers for this one, with its pitiless scrutiny of matters concerning which her contemporaries maintained a systematic silence. Nostalgic without sentimentality, Mrs. Andersen has performed the feat of seeming modern to more than one generation. She speaks as clearly as ever across expanding gulfs of time, telling us what it was like to be in places long since obliterated, making the nearly impossible choices that most of us have been spared.

Prior to the publication of her memoir, the general outline of Belle Cora’s moment in history was known through several multi-volume works on the subject of Gold Rush–era California, reminiscences by members and opponents of the 1856 San Francisco Vigilance Committee, and a series of articles in the
San Francisco Bulletin
by the popular feature writer Pauline Jacobson. The more personal and private events of her childhood and adolescence in New York, as astonishing in their own way as those for which historians had remembered her, were unknown until these confessions appeared.

In fact, it is one of Mrs. Andersen’s unintended accomplishments to have helped correct, just as it was coming into existence, a false impression given by many books and films about the Far West—the myth of a Western type, with its own accent and code of honor, a romanticization of the old-timers and third-generation Westerners encountered by the writers and filmmakers of the 1920s. It is too easy to forget that when the West was really a frontier most of its inhabitants were new to it. They met as immigrants from many distant points of origin, as ill-assorted as the crates of shovels, cigars, pineapples, mosquito nets, and upright pianos that landed on San Francisco’s chaotic shores in 1849. And they were also immigrants from another time, from decades of naïve piety, climaxing five years earlier in the bitter fiasco of Millerism, when people had stood on hills and rooftops waiting for Jesus to appear in the sky. Mrs. Andersen, in her eagerness to justify her actions, to explain how she became an immoral woman, gives us this Eastern background of the West.

It is with pride that I present, complete in one volume, the confessions of the notorious widow of the gambler Charles Cora.

Arthur Adams Baylis, Ph.D.,
New York, 1967