Author and novelist Jessamyn West (1902-1984), was raised and shaped by a long line of Quakers. Rooted in Indiana, they wound up evangelical and Holiness-centered, as well as cousins to Richard Nixon, in southern California.

West is best remembered for her classic The Friendly Persuasion (book and movie). Her family left their southern Indiana Quaker homeland in 1908, when Jessamyn was six.

West left the family’s Quakerism as a young woman. As her church moved in ever-more conservative directions, she wound up a writer, not an activist, but at least a loyal ACLU liberal. And  her Quaker past never really left her.

This evolution shaped much of West’s 1966 semi-autobiographical novel, A Matter of Time. In it Holiness Quakerism is called the Pilgrim Church, Indiana becomes Kentucky, and she is renamed Tasmania Murphy. Thus refracted, her skepticism extended even to holidays.

Tasmania/Jessamyn describes how she resisted her growing heretical thoughts, and stalled her departure, by trying to get saved.

It begins with Jessamyn musing about how the Indiana-Kentucky homeland she knew almost entirely through her mother’s stories often seemed more real than her everyday California . . .

I

From A Matter ofTime:

And even stranger than this real, though distant in time and space, world of Kentucky was the world of the Pilgrim Church. Stranger because even though we all inhabited it, and were its citizens by birth, we did not seem truly to dwell there. What did we do to show our citizenship?

There were numerous things we didn’t do. In addition to the usual things not done by Christians, like murdering, stealing, committing adultery, taking the name of the Lord in vain, and so forth, as Pilgrims we didn’t drink, smoke, dance, or play cards.

But was that all it took? What did we do? We went to church two or three times a month, but, insofar as I could see, were uninfluenced by what happened there. (Usually nothing happened.) We made some contributions to the collection plate; Mother thought we should tithe, usually when family funds were the lowest, in the hope that the Lord, noticing the bread cast upon the water by the Murphys, would return it as cake. Mother read her Bible, or had Father, who liked to read aloud, read it to her . . .

We remembered the Sabbath enough, if not to keep it absolutely holy, at least enough to keep the garage closed, and to shut down the towing service. (Except in emergencies and for price and a half.)

But was this enough? Was this all it took? I didn’t know what was expected of Christians, of the Pilgrim, or of myself. Or what I wanted. Something ennobling? Enrapturing? Self-obliterating? Transfigured by love? Did I want to preach to birds? Lick the sores of the leprous? To be absolutely loving?

Even at twenty four, no child, no virgin, with my own kind of hardness, I was not past longing. Not past feeling a loss. This was the eve of the birth of our Saviour. What did He save us from? (In the Murphy household this was never discussed.)

Sin? We all sinned. Death? We would all die. Would anyone pray? Or read Matthew, Chapters 25 to 32?

No one. Would anyone, like Marmee and her Little Women, pack baskets for the poor? No one. Were there any poor? We hadn’t looked into it. “Give all and follow me”? Oh, no! The clothesbasket would reveal a fair and calculated exchange; the oven discharge a succulence in excess of need; the table speak of a prideful past, attested to by possessions.

At twenty-four I was already past (I judged) redemption; anyway, it hadn’t happened yet. But at seven and again at seventeen I had made my try. Believing, even then, that a Pilgrim ought to do something, I got saved. . . .

II

It wasn’t necessary. I was born saved, my parents being Pilgrims at my birth. But I wanted a hand in it myself. I didn’t want it secondhand. I wanted my own vision, my own burning bush and cleft rock.

I went to the altar because I was afraid to go, and I was afraid to be afraid. I went because I was ashamed to go, and I was ashamed to be ashamed. I went because I pitied the preacher. I went because I pitied Jesus on His cross, to whom, because He had suffered (for me, it was said), I owed a little debt of suffering of my own.

Above all, I went (as I remember it) because I hoped by that act, by that prayer, by that declaration, to satisfy a longing so painful I felt it as physical ache, to transcend Tasmania Murphy and become one (in love) with all mankind: never again envy Le Cid or be impatient with Marmion.

I loved myself when loving; I knew the transporting bliss of complete self-forgetfulness achieved when I worked with hot cloths to cure Mother’s headaches, or divested myself of my clothing for Blix, or went without lunches to buy Blackie a treat. I experienced the unnamable when I ran, at the close of day, up into the brown hills through a froth of sound (stirred up by disturbing the cicadas) to watch the sun go down behind the oil derricks.

I wanted by one act to nail it all down, guarantee it forever. One act was supposed to do it.

After the second birth, the reborn supposedly became incapable of sin. I never lost my capability. For a short time at seventeen I really believed I had. First of all I experienced a euphoria of the same kind one has after having gone to the dentist, the euphoria that comes as the aftermath of the complete concentration courage requires.

I mistook it for salvation. Evidently no one else did. No one, in my family or out, offered to watch and pray with me, to labor with me to keep the old Adam dead. And the rebirth of which I had on those evenings in the hills and in my acts of self-forgetfulness dreamed was never achieved.

Never forgotten, either. It was now seven years since my last try, at seventeen, to attain a perpetual state of grace. I had given up hope for it. It wasn’t for me.

Still, I had flashes of glory which kept me discontented with any other state. On Christmas Eve that thirst, undefinable, never properly slaked, made me, though relishing high jinks and joining in them, anticipating tamale pie and the surprises of the laundry basket, dissatisfied. This evening was as high and holy a time as our year could produce.

III

We were all brought up in the practice of “returning thanks” before eating. Nothing was said. We bowed our heads and there was a minute or two of silence. Blix told me she always counted to ten, then looked up. I actually said thanks; it was a moment of floating, of nonbeing, or of being everything; I’m not sure which, but I enjoyed it.

I continued the practice of “returning thanks” after Everett and I were married. Or tried to. I would bow my head, close my eyes, become everything or nothing, rejoicing in creamed carrots (and glad I was finished with scraping and cooking the damned things), floating, beginning to float, far away from all earthly trivia; then, just as I made it, Everett’s hand would come under the tablecloth, caressing and pinching up and down the length of my thigh.

I think he thought of it as a contest between him and God for my attention; as he thought of home-coming to Baranca as a contest between himself and my family. In Baranca he lost. But at the supper table he won. This proves nothing about God or Everett, but does, I think, make some comment about me.

When Everett’s pinching and tickling recalled me from prayer, I felt as some people do when awakened from a sleep. [My brother] Blackie was like that with sleep. If he dozed off on the sofa, and you poked him so that he could undress and go to bed properly, he woke up fighting mad, and struck out at you or anyone else within flailing distance.

It’s one thing to come out of sleep fighting mad, and another to emerge from prayer mad. But that’s what Everett’s fingers nibbling along my thigh mad me: mad, and wanting to hit.

And that proved his point, I guess. He was stronger than God; and my praying, if that was the word for it, was pretty shallow. For quite a long time, I continued to bow my head, to keep my eyes shut, and to give no sign that I wasn’t in the timeless realm.

But I wasn’t. I was in the present, hearing a voice – my own – saying, “Stop that, Everett, stop it, or I’ll hit you.”

So I gave up returning thanks before meals. I couldn’t endure sitting there, a whited sepulcher, posture saying one thing, thoughts another. I had spoken to Everett about it, I had asked him to stop, but he had laughed and said, “If a little tickling takes your mind off God, I guess you aren’t very close to Him anyway.”

Maybe I wasn’t. Anyway, I gave up “returning thanks,” though I missed it. For a long time, even though I picked up my knife and fork as briskly as Everett at the beginning of a meal, I had, for a second or two, a hollow unsatisfied feeling.

Everett, so far as I know, never realized that I had given up “returning thanks.”

“What we call structured was for [my mother] destroyed. ‘They will organize it,’ said the Devil of Christianity, and stopped worrying. Christmas was organized, and Mama ignored it. Mother’s Day was organized and she despised it. Thanksgiving was organized, but cooking up feasts seemed too natural a pleasure for her to be hurt by a set date. Besides, the dates used to vary, which took off some of the structural curse. Perhaps she was a Quaker to the bone: each day and moment too sacramental for labels. Birthdays? Yes, for the old. She pitied old people, because she knew where she was headed. But for the young? Forget it.

As the project of filming her book The Friendly Persuasion moved closer to “action,” author Jessamyn West was called in by the director, William Wyler. She later published another memoir/journal, of her experience working on the film as a script writer and “technical” Quaker consultant, called To See The Dream:

I had a long talk with Mr. Wyler yesterday. . . . He spoke to me of his hopes for “The Friendly Persuasion.” Financial success, of course; without that, picture making stops. A picture that people want to see is a financial success. But why do people want to see a picture?
Mr. Wyler said, “I know it isn’t fashionable to speak of pictures with a message. I don’t suppose you care to be thought of as a writer with a message. But I believe that every good picture and every great book has a message; that when people call a movie good they do so because it has said something memorable. I have seen a lot of suffering and injustice in the world. I took part in the last war. I am a Jew. In my own religion there are practices that seem stupid to me. The separation of men and women in church, for in­stance. That’s one of the reasons why, although you tell me it was customary, I don’t like the idea of showing the men and the women in the Quaker meetinghouse separated.

The Quakers, it seems to me, have been able to hit upon more that is honest and reasonable in their lives than most people. I want to show that. This movie can’t be a sermon. No one will want to see it if it says in so many words, ‘Honesty, love, and simplicity are best.’ But I don’t think it will be a success either unless, after seeing it, people say to themselves, ‘Those Quakers had something worthwhile that maybe we have lost–or never had.’
They quote Sam Goldwyn a lot for his mistakes in English, but Sam has made a lot of truths memor­able by putting them in a form that people quote because they’re funny. Sam said about one of his pictures,’l don’t care whether this picture makes a nickel or not. I just want millions of people to see it.’
That’s the way I feel about this. I’m not a pacifist, as you know. So that’s not why I’m inter­ested in this picture. I’m interested in it in spite of that. And I admit I wouldn’t be interested in it at all no matter what its message if I didn’t think it told a good story.  . . .
But the Quakers honored other people’s ways of thinking and doing. Jess [Birdwell, Gary Cooper’s character], who thinks fighting’s wrong, lets his son go to war. Eliza [Birdwell, Dorothy McGuire], who thinks music is wrong, lets Jess have his organ. This picture says that salvation isn’t a mass product. It says that you save or lose your soul as an individual. When people go out of the theaters after seeing this . . . if we succeed . . . they aren’t going to say ‘so what.’ They’re going to say, ‘That guy had guts. He did what he thought was right.'”
When I didn’t answer, he asked me, “That’s what Quakers do believe, isn’t it?”
“That’s what they believe,” I told him.
I don’t remember all he said. It was a very long talk. But that was the gist of it. I met [Wyler’s assistant] Stu in Portia’s office afterward. He asked me where I’d been all afternoon.
“Talking to Mr. Wyler.”
Stu is still young enough, privy as he is to almost all the ins and outs of this picture-and many of which I know nothing—to be agog when some unexpected interview takes place.
“What’s up? “
“Wyler’s going to make a Quaker of me before this picture’s over,” I told him.
It’s true. I am always being told by people on the outside looking in, what Quakerism means to them.
Actually, I com­pletely forget that I’m writing about Quakers or that these people are different from others. As a matter of fact I don’t believe they are. But I was moved by Wyler’s talk and told Stu so.

From, “To See The Dream,” 1956