PAPASHVILY, Helen Waite

Born 19 December 1906, Stockton, California; died 19 May 1996

Also wrote under: Helen Papashvily

Daughter of Herbert and Isabella Lochhead Waite; married George Papashvily, 1933

Helen Waite Papashvily was educated in public schools and at the University of California at Berkeley. She graduated in 1929, and then opened a bookstore. The next year she met her husband, an immigrant from Kobiankari in Soviet Georgia who had come to the U.S. in 1923; about the same time Papashvily began her writing career with a variety of short pieces.

In 1933 the Papashvilys moved to New York City, where Papashvily collected books for private libraries and wrote short stories, works for children, and articles. In 1935 they bought the Ertoba Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Papashvily lived until her death.

It was Papashvily's idea to set down her husband's accounts of his involved and colorful 20-year Americanization. Anything Can Happen (1945) quickly sold 600,000 copies, was translated into 15 languages, and was made into a film in 1952.

Anything Can Happen looks back to a period early in this century, just before the National Origins Act (1924) cut off the large wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The book, told from a personal perspective, constitutes what the Saturday Review called a "psychological case-study in the adjustment of the alien." Papashvily approaches the immigrant's quest for food, shelter, and matrimony with wit, enthusiasm, honesty, and gracious old-world manners. His story presents a version of the old theme of innocence encountering experience—with not all the innocence on the immigrant's side.

Part of the book's popularity originally stemmed from its optimistic portrayal of life in America, its tone being one of philosophic acceptance rather than rebellion against injustices. Consequently, the book lends credence to the vision of America as a melting pot. Its appeal, however, is also attributable to its vivid, charming, and often poetic use of language. This can be credited in part to Papashvily, who set out to capture the rhythm and flavor of her husband's English rather than his exact speech.

The Papashvilys' five joint works constitute total and perfect collaboration. George supplied the material; his wife, seeing its potential, transformed it from verbal anecdotes into written words. (George, coming from a rural, oral tradition, and involved in tactile rather than verbal pursuits, eventually learned to read English, but never to write it.) Moreover, as an American married to an immigrant, Papashvily sensed how best to present her husband's material to an American audience. Perhaps because the collaboration was so successful, the extent of George's contribution to it is often glossed over.

Of the Papashvilys' other works the most important is Yes and No Stories (1946), one of the few books to render the folklore of Georgia, a country inaccessible both geographically and linguistically, into a language other than Russian. Because Georgian history involves recurrent invasions that resulted in the grafting of diverse ethnic cultures upon native materials, the tales, according to a New York Times Book Review, "though circumscribed in their locale, merge with the main stream of Indo-European folk matter."

Papashvily's most important independent effort, All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who Wrote It, the Women Who Read It, in the Nineteenth Century (1956, reprinted 1972), was the first book to study in detail the enormous quantities of popular 19th-century American fiction written by, for, and about women; to discuss its authors individually; and to assess the relationship of their work to feminism. Treating domestic fiction as a social and psychological phenomenon, Papashvily concluded that while the suffragists of the period waged outright rebellion, the novelists engaged in surreptitious warfare "to destroy their common enemy, man." As Nancy Cott notes, Papashvily thus found "the roots of feminism, in a shrewdly adapted form, in domesticity itself."

Other Works:

Thanks to Noah (with G. Papashvily, 1951). Dogs and People (with G. Papashvily, 1954). Louisa May Alcott (1965). Russian Cooking (with G. Papashvily and the editors of Time-Life Books, 1969). Home, and Home Again (with G. Papashvily,1973). George Papashvily: Sculptor, A Retrospective Catalogue (1979).

Bibliography:

Cott, N., Bonds of Womanhood (1977).

Other references:

CSM (22 Oct. 1956, 4 Nov. 1965, 17 Oct. 1973). NR (15 Jan. 1945). NYHTB (5 April 1951, 21 Oct. 1956). NYT (21 Nov. 1954). NYTBR (31 Dec. 1944, 1 Dec. 1946, 21 Oct. 1956). San Francisco Chronicle (8 Nov. 1946). SR (9 Nov. 1946, 10 Nov. 1956). Saturday Review (13 Jan. 1945).

—JANET SHARISTANIAN