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While Eleanor and Jessie were busy planning their
weddings, Margaret continued her voice lessons. She had
beaus of her own, but somehow never found the right one.
One of them, Boyd Archer Fisher, was a graduate of
Harvard, a writer, social worker and efficiency expert
from New York. Margaret’s mother was impressed,
describing him as “quick to take not only an idea but a
point of view or an impression.” But Margaret was not in
love.
Boyd pursued the first daughter, trying to win her by
writing a one-act play, using it to describe his
jealousy over a singing career with which he couldn’t
compete. Aware of stories that suggested Margaret was
the least attractive of the sisters, Boyd’s protagonist
in the play told her character, “When I think about you,
you begin to radiate until I think you are the most
beautiful girl in the world.”
In one of his letters to her, Boyd described how he was
attempting to make something of himself so she didn’t
have to be ashamed of him, just in case “you do decide
to take me.” He was her date at a party in Greenwich
Village on February 14, 1914, after which Margaret was
portrayed in a New York Times article as being the
“chief factor in the evening’s success.” The article
said that Boyd Fisher claimed Margaret for the first
dance and “a share of the others,” but he was not able
to monopolize her evening. “Miss Wilson distributed her
time among the two hundred men and women, boys and girls
at the party so evenly that when it was over she had
exchanged a few words with every one of them.” Boyd and
Margaret remained only friends for the rest of their
lives.
When the First Lady died, Margaret Wilson, the only
remaining daughter at the White House, stepped in as
hostess, growing to hate the pressures as well as the
role. In a note to her sister Jessie, she apologized for
not writing sooner, saying she had to entertain
houseguests and callers “every minute.”
Margaret’s musical career had long been the great love
of her life. She had studied music at Goucher College,
with continual vocal training in New York. In 1915, with
her father happily in love with Edith Bolling Galt,
Margaret finally felt free to start her concert tours.
The newspapers were filled with surprised praise, saying
that her lyric soprano and personal charm would “command
recognition quite independent of her distinguished
parent.” A piece in the Baltimore Sun, captured in one
of her sister’s scrapbooks, proclaims that “there are
many voices that appear bigger, but hers is so clear, so
pure, that it carries…just as a Stradivarius does.” Her
“Ave Maria,” the newspaper said, was “an act of
worship.” After a sold-out concert for twelve thousand
in Denver, a free concert was held the following day for
the thirteen thousand who had been turned away the night
before. Always, all proceeds after concert expenses were
given to charities. During the First World War the Red
Cross was the benefactor. She toured around America
singing to raise funds for the Red Cross, and went to
sing at the frontiers of war-torn France as a way of
giving her support and making a contribution to the
cause.
From October 1915 to March 1918 Margaret and her
accompanist traveled to every training camp in the
country, giving concerts for the soldiers. Porter Oakes,
a young journalist for the National War Committee of the
YMCA, captured one such concert, held at twilight. He
described a “sea of bronzed faces,” ten thousand
soldiers, waiting for Margaret to sing. The men had just
received word that they were being shipped to the front.
Her songs, favorite old melodies, made “a chain of
musical memories to be carried away.” Oakes described
soldiers weeping, seeing through the music the love of a
mother or sweetheart or father. The tears “loosened up
and washed away that tight-around-the-heart feeling that
came with the knowledge that there would be no furloughs
home before the big movement began.”
Margaret’s tireless treks across the world for American
service men were a constant worry to her father. She
would travel twenty miles down artillery-blasted roads
to sing for two or three wounded soldiers, often after
much bigger performances. By the end of the war, her
outdoor concerts had strained her voice beyond repair,
and the sights and experiences of battlefield horror
prompted a nervous breakdown. Recuperating some months
after the war at Grove Oak Inn in North Carolina,
General John J. Pershing and his staff asked her to
sing. When she told them how she had lost her singing
voice, General Pershing rose and lifted his glass. “To
Miss Wilson,” he said, “just as much a victim of war
service as were the soldiers who filled this country’s
hospitals.”
Less than a year and a half after Margaret’s mother
died, her father married Edith Bolling Galt on December
18, 1915. There was, of course, scandal in Washington
because he married so soon. But Margaret and her sisters
knew that Woodrow Wilson had been devastated by the loss
of his wife, and was desperately lonely. They tried
their best to be understanding and to welcome the new
wife into the family.
After the war, with his post war treaty in shambles,
Wilson undertook a disastrous trip to urge ratification
of the Treaty of Versailles and to try to gain support
from the American public for the League of Nations. He
traveled eight thousand miles in twenty-two days. He
made thirty-two major speeches and eight minor ones. He
collapsed on the trip, his health irretrievably broken,
and was rushed back to the White House. He soon suffered
a major stroke. His new wife, Edith Wilson, protected
him. She was accused of being the Lady President, the
Regent, the Iron Queen, “the Petticoat government”--and
less complimentary terms. By this time Margaret was
living and working in New York, but she would come home
on weekends to be with her father.
Finally, on Sunday, February 3, 1924, at 11:55 a.m.,
nearly three years after he left the White House,
Woodrow Wilson died. His doctor stood on one side of his
bed, taking his pulse, with Margaret and Edith Wilson on
the other, as he breathed his last. At the time, Jessie
and Frank Sayre were living in Siam and could not come.
Eleanor and William McAdoo rushed home. Margaret moved
about in a daze, and would not respond to conversation.
The Wilson’s, who had always been so close, had lost the
lynchpin of the family. Their father left his modest
estate to Edith Wilson, with the exception of $2,500 to
be paid annually to Margaret as long as she remained
unmarried. She was to remain unmarried for the rest of
her life. Rent consumed half of her stipend, leaving her
little to live on.
Margaret returned to New York. Her life there remains
somewhat of a mystery. It is said that she worked with
the Biow Agency, an advertising firm, as a consultant
and to develop new clients for the firm. Later, she
attempted some speculation in oil stocks that went sour.
It is not known whether she actually sold the stock or
just introduced people to brokers. However, a letter
from Helen Bones, the cousin who had lived with the
Wilson’s in the White House, indicated that she had
received repayment from Margaret. Helen Bones said she
had entered the venture knowing it was a risk, and that
it was not Margaret’s fault. However, she kept the
money, knowing also that it meant much to Margaret’s
sense of pride and honor to pay back everyone of her
friends.
Despite privation, Margaret finally had the space and
“time for concentrated thought,” as her father had once
described it, reading philosophy and striving for a
higher principled life. In March 1926 Margaret appeared
in court where two teenagers were being arraigned for
burglarizing her apartment. She refused to press
charges. The magistrate said, “If they are not
prosecuted, now, they will not learn their lesson.”
Margaret smiled at the judge and said mildly, “The best
lesson for them is the lesson of kindness.” The
following day the Time wrote an editorial, stating that
Miss Wilson was perhaps more kind than wise.
Margaret became interested in the religious classics of
India and had begun reading about Indian mystics in the
early 1930’s. One day in the library she happened upon a
book by Sri Aurobindo and sat down in the main reading
room. She became lost in it, and an attendant had to
tell her that the library was closing. Every day she
returned to read until she finished the book.
Margaret went to live at Pondicherry, India, where
Aurobindo had his ashram, or spiritual community. There
she spent her days in prayer and meditation, working at
her assigned tasks in the flower garden, and helping to
type and edit Sri Aurobindo’s religious writings.
Her father’s stipend went further there, and Margaret
was able to contribute one hundred dollars a month to
the ashram and still have a little money for fresh
fruit, and for her favorite facial lotions sent by
Eleanor from home. There were two servants to prepare
her simple meals, although she reserved for herself what
she perceived as the privilege of washing Aurobindo’s
dishes. “I am not homesick,” she told a visiting
reporter. “In fact, I never felt more at home anywhere
any time in my life.”
Her obituary as printed in the New York Times, called
her a “recluse,” as though she were some sad hermit, but
such was not the case. Letters between Margaret and her
sister, Eleanor, show a fully alive, happy soul, at
peace with herself. “Do you remember those beautiful
words in the Bible?” she wrote her sister. “And I shall
keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed (or
fixed) on me? That is what we must do,” she said, “learn
to stay our minds on Him.” In the same letter Margaret
told Eleanor of her new name, given by Aurobindo. It was
“Nishtha,” she said, and it meant a “one-pointed fixed
and steady concentration, devotion and faith in the
single aim.” Her intense times of prayer and meditation
moved Margaret deeply. “Sometimes I feel as if the
Divine were whispering to my soul, and I, in order to
catch the faintest word, am listening as I have never
listened before,” she wrote to a friend in the States.
“Sometimes it is as if the Beloved and I were telling
each other secrets that none could share except in a
wordless communion with ‘Us.’”
At length Margaret’s body, which had suffered ill health
for much of her life, began to give way. In an ironic
twist of fate, she suffered periodic occurrences of
kidney problems that had eventually killed her mother,
but she would beg the Indian doctor not to send her back
to New York. For several days she hovered between life
and death. On April 24, 1944 Margaret Woodrow Wilson, or
Nishtha, died of uremia. She was buried in the
Protestant section of the cemetery at the ashram in
Pondicherry.
Risha Blackand, an Indian student at the ashram who had
been assigned the task of escorting Margaret back to her
apartment every evening after meditation, wrote of her
death. “So lived Nishtha in her spacious apartment
fanned by the fresh breeze from the sea and caressed by
the palmy breath of her garden blossoms. So she thought
and felt and dreamed: so she loved God and her fellow
men,” he said. “...Suddenly, like a flower, she drooped
and languished and faded away. But the unfading bloom
and aroma of her soul still hovered over the atmosphere
in which she aspired and prayed and adored her beloved
Lord.” |
Connection with
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
She was first introduced to eastern mysticism by her
friend Eliot, an English army officer and follower of
Sri Ramakrishna. In 1936 she discovered Sri Aurobindo's
'Essays on the Gita' at the New York City Public Library
and was so taken by it that the guards had to more or
less throw her out at closing time. She returned eagerly
the next day and continued to do so until she had read
through the book. To her great joy, she realised that at
long last she had found her path and her guru.
She took up correspondence with the Mother and Sri
Aurobindo and was anxious to be near them in order to
receive their help and guidance for her inner progress.
They advised her to "remain in America due to (her) ill
health but to establish an inner contact". Sri Aurobindo
also wrote to her that "The silent answer and help can
always go to you immediately - for there distance
doesn't count".
Arrival in
Pondicherry in 1938
Two years later, aged 52, Margaret was finally granted
permission by Sri Aurobindo and Mother to come to the
Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. She arrived in
Pondicherry in October 1938 against the advice of her
doctors, who warned her of the ill effects of the
tropical climate on her acute arthritic condition.
Soon after her arrival, she was renamed 'Nishtha' by Sri
Aurobindo, who wrote to her on 5.11.1938: "The word
means one-pointed, fixed and steady concentration,
devotion and faith in the single aim, the Divine and the
Divine Realisation."
Refusal to return
home
In 1940, after the United States joined the war,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent instructions to
evacuate all Americans from India on reports of Japan's
threatened invasion of India. But she resisted all
pressure from family, friends and the United States
government to return to America, and stayed on in the
Ashram to fulfill her dream.
The last six years of her life Nishtha spent in
Pondicherry, often ill, but content to be in such close
proximity to her beloved gurus.
"Their way is my
way…"
On 21.1.1943 she told The New York Times correspondent
Herbert L. Matthews - "I don't want to return to the
United State. I am not homesick. In fact I never felt
more at home anywhere any time in my life."
To her friend Lois, she wrote in 1939: "Since seeing Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother together, I have been surer
than ever that their way is my way - that my soul
brought me here where it belongs."
Inner experience
The Ashramites remember her as an imperious, fastidious
lady of remarkable mind and character. True to her new
name, she seems to have had only one intense aspiration,
that of realising the Divine.
In her letter to her dear friend Lois, it appears that
she was indeed progressing towards her goal, for she
writes: "I think I can say that some kind of
'experience' has begun for me, for I strike a quiet
nearly every day."
Extracts of
Margaret Woodrow Wilson’s letters to her friend Lois –
written from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry.
‘But Mother leaves us free to follow our own promptings.
She told me in the first interview that there were no
pledges of any kind here as they are “not true”. “Here
it is only the Divine”, she said.
That pregnant saying I am only gradually learning to
recognise, the significance of this place. I am
beginning to see that all the bondage here as elsewhere
and everywhere are our own making – that the Divine
imposes no bondage of any kind whatsoever.’
‘Sometimes I feel as if the Divine were whispering to my
soul and I, in order to catch the faintest word, am
listening as I have never listened before. Sometimes it
is as if the Beloved and I were telling each other
secrets that none can share except in a wordless
communion with “us”.’
‘But I will note, simply as one notes a ‘happening’,
that the closer I feel to Mother and Sri Aurobindo, the
closer I feel too as an immediate result sometimes, to
those other dear ones.’
‘.. I was transported into an inner plane of being which
I recognise as the same one I was in inwardly at certain
moments when my singing was more than ordinarily
subjective.’
‘But when I look at the Mother in the morning sunlight
on her terrace from which she sends each of us a shaft
of love more brilliant than any light that was ever seen
on snowy crests, or when in the evening I see her
standing in the meditation hall, still in the immutable
calm, the Unchanging One, I know that the vast stillness
of Mont Blanc is but a faint imitation of that other
Peace that She is.’
‘Oh Lois, one cannot talk about Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother – one can only suggest in some such words as
these that they are what we are seeking, that which we
will be in the outer man as now we are in the inner
Reality. They are consciously that.’
‘.. One day in a California garden, when the intensity
of my enjoyment provoked the rather humorous thought –
“I wonder if God enjoys this in exactly this way – if he
doesn’t, I’m sorry for him” – then came the idea as a
kind of realisation, “it is He that is enjoying this way
– perhaps that is the reason for me.’
‘..I think I can say that some kind of ‘experience’ has
began for me, for I strike a quiet nearly every day now
in meditation in which the consciousness is purer, more
whole than in the ordinary state. One of the disciples
says that I am beginning to touch the Purusha. The
consciousness that I touch, just barely touch (it
seems), is situated in the heart centre and Lois, it is
so sweet and so clear that now-a-days I feel that those
moments are my only conscious moments of the day. That
the rest of the time, which is of course most of the
time, I am in a sort of unconscious state! If I can have
this feeling when I have barely touched something, still
thru a veil, what must the unveiled Purusha
consciousness be! There is such a thing as getting near
the central psychic being and feeling its influence. And
the luminousness of mind that comes afterwards makes me
feel as if I have never lived or understood anything at
all before! I feel like a discoverer every day. The
other day in amusement at myself for my excitement over
my “petites decouvertes” I said to myself “Why, little
Christopher Columbus is discovering India at last!” It
is true that America must discover India’s secrets
before she can discover herself.
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