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Title: The Women Who Make Our Novels
Author: Overton, Grant M. (Martin)
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Women Who Make Our Novels" ***
MODERN AMERICAN WRITERS
THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS
The Women Who Make
Our Novels
BY
GRANT M. OVERTON
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
_First printing December 12, 1918_
_Second printing April 25, 1919_
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
_Edith Wharton_ 1
CHAPTER II
_Alice Brown_ 11
CHAPTER III
_Ellen Glasgow_ 20
CHAPTER IV
_Gertrude Atherton_ 41
CHAPTER V
_Mary Roberts Rinehart_ 54
CHAPTER VI
_Kathleen Norris_ 68
CHAPTER VII
_Margaret Deland_ 78
CHAPTER VIII
_Gene Stratton-Porter_ 88
CHAPTER IX
_Eleanor H. Porter_ 108
CHAPTER X
_Kate Douglas Wiggin_ 121
CHAPTER XI
_Mary Johnston_ 132
CHAPTER XII
_Corra Harris_ 153
CHAPTER XIII
_Mary Austin_ 164
CHAPTER XIV
_Mary S. Watts_ 177
CHAPTER XV
_Mary E. Wilkins Freeman_ 198
CHAPTER XVI
_Anna Katharine Green_ 204
CHAPTER XVII
_Helen R. Martin_ 215
CHAPTER XVIII
_Sophie Kerr_ 226
CHAPTER XIX
_Marjorie Benton Cooke_ 238
CHAPTER XX
_Grace S. Richmond_ 246
CHAPTER XXI
_Willa Sibert Cather_ 254
CHAPTER XXII
_Clara Louise Burnham_ 267
CHAPTER XXIII
_Demetra Vaka_ 284
CHAPTER XXIV
_Edna Ferber_ 292
CHAPTER XXV
_Dorothy Canfield Fisher_ 298
CHAPTER XXVI
_Amelia E. Barr_ 304
CHAPTER XXVII
_Alice Hegan Rice_ 313
CHAPTER XXVIII
_Alice Duer Miller_ 320
CHAPTER XXIX
_Eleanor Hallowell Abbott_ 326
CHAPTER XXX
_Harriet T. Comstock_ 334
CHAPTER XXXI
_Honoré Willsie_ 342
CHAPTER XXXII
_Frances Hodgson Burnett_ 357
CHAPTER XXXIII
_Mary E. Waller_ 369
CHAPTER XXXIV
_Zona Gale_ 377
CHAPTER XXXV
_Mary Heaton Vorse_ 386
INTRODUCTION
This book, the rather unpremeditated production of several months’ work,
is by a man who is not a novelist and who is therefore entirely unfitted
to write about women who are novelists. Several excuses may be urged;
the author is, by general agreement, young. He has to do with many
novels, being, indeed, a sort of new and strange creature, a literary
reporter self-styled, a person connected with a newspaper and charged
with the task of describing new books for the readers thereof. As he
could make no critical pretensions he had to fall back upon a process
peculiar to newspaper work, the attempt at a simple putting before the
public of facts, of things lately said and done--in short, of news. He
had to regard a new book as a piece of news to be communicated as
honestly and as entertainingly as any other occurrence. And so, here. He
has tried to be a good reporter of the personalities, performances and
methods of work of some of the best known American women novelists.
An effort has been made to include in this book all the living American
women novelists whose writing, by the customary standards, is
artistically fine. An equal effort has been made to include all the
living American women novelists whose writing has attained a wide
popularity. The author does not contend, nor will he so much as allow,
that the production of writing artistically fine is a greater
achievement than the satisfaction of many thousands of readers. It may
be more lasting; it is not more meritorious; and to attempt to institute
comparisons between the two things is absurd. The critic may be
justified in treating of Edith Wharton and ignoring Gene
Stratton-Porter. The literary reporter who should do such a thing
doesn’t know his job.
It is, therefore, to be feared that this is no book for highbrows. But a
lower forehead and a broader outlook have their advantages. In the
striking popularity of a particular storyteller a thoughtful observer
may see important and significant evidences of the tendencies of his
time. And that may be much more worth his while than the most careful
speculation as to who will be read fifty years from now.
The order in which authors are taken up in the book is accidental and
therefore meaningless. The reader is recommended to follow his own
inclination in perusing the chapters. They are entirely detached from
each other, as are the subjects considered except for an occasional
reference, in discussing one, to another’s work. These references, and
in fact all the discussions of various books, are to be taken as
expository and not critical. If a thing is stated to be good, bad or
indifferent the statement is made as a statement of fact and not of
personal opinion.
The justification of this book is the need of it. It is ridiculous that
there should be nothing easily accessible about such writers as Edith
Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Mary Johnston, Mary S. Watts,
Anna Katharine Green, Clara Louise Burnham, Amelia E. Barr and Edna
Ferber. The condensations of _Who’s Who in America_ are dry bones; books
on living American writers are all “studies” or compilations of a highly
selective sort; their authors want to be revered by posterity as persons
of wonderful critical perception and judgment. The authors themselves
have not the time to satisfy their readers’ curiosity and their
publishers hesitate lest they may not remain their publishers!
And so the literary reporter steps in. Some of the chapters in this
book, generally condensed in content, have appeared in the columns of
_Books and the Book World_, the literary magazine of _The Sun_, New
York, of which he is the editor. In their preparation he has been
wonderfully helped by the authors themselves and by other individuals
and publishing houses, for which he makes acknowledgment and returns his
thanks in a note elsewhere in the book.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
My indebtedness to various persons and sources is repeatedly made
manifest in the text. Only the co-operation of publishers has made
possible the preparation of these sketches in a short time. I wish
particularly to thank the following for important help:
Houghton Mifflin Company and Mr. Roger L. Scaife and Mrs. Helen
Bishop-Dennis for material on Mary Roberts Rinehart, Eleanor H. Porter,
Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mary Johnston, Mary Austin, Willa Sibert Cather,
Clara Louise Burnham and Demetra Vaka.
Doubleday, Page & Company and Mr. Harry E. Maule for material on Ellen
Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Gene Stratton-Porter, Corra Harris, Helen R.
Martin, Sophie Kerr, Marjorie Benton Cooke, Grace S. Richmond and
Harriet T. Comstock.
The Macmillan Company and Mr. Harold S. Latham for material on Alice
Brown and Mary S. Watts and Zona Gale.
Harper & Brothers and Miss Hesper Le Gallienne for material on Gertrude
Atherton, Margaret Deland and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
The Century Company for material on Alice Hegan Rice, Alice Duer Miller
and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott.
Frederick A. Stokes Company and Mr. William Morrow for material on
Gertrude Atherton, Edna Ferber, Honoré Willsie and Frances Hodgson
Burnett.
Dodd, Mead & Company for material on Anna Katharine Green, Gertrude
Atherton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Eleanor Hallowell Abbott.
Henry Holt & Company and Miss Ellen Knowles Eayrs for material on
Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Charles Scribner’s Sons for material on Edith Wharton.
Little, Brown & Company for material on Mary E. Waller.
THE WOMEN WHO MAKE OUR NOVELS
CHAPTER I
EDITH WHARTON
The order of authors in this book is accidental and the circumstance
that the first chapter of the book is upon Edith Wharton is also
accidental, also and therefore; which is to say that it is not
accidental at all. For if there is any lesson which life teaches us it
is the existence of an order, a plan, in unsuspected places. To say,
therefore, that a thing is accidental is to pay it the most glorious
compliment. It is to say that it is ordered or ordained, decreed,
immutably fixed upon from the Beginning--not of a book but of a
Universe. There is about anything accidental something absolutely
divine. To dart off at a tangent (for a mere moment) there was this much
in the divine right of kings--an accident at the beginning of it. Had
the kings contented themselves with this accidental character, had they
preserved the spontaneity that surrounded the first of their crowd,
there would be more of them left! But such reflections and the working
out of them, a pleasurable kind of intellectual counterpoint, may be
left to Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
We are concerned wholly with the women who make our novels and, by the
accident of title if you like, more with the women than with their
novels. The two are no more perfectly separable than milk and cream and
very often the best thing to do is not to try to separate them, but
rather to stir them up together. As the only excuses for a book--other
than a work of fiction--are either that it presents facts or suggests
ideas, we shall try to talk rather simply (much more simply than in our
first paragraph of this chapter) about American women novelists and
their books--simply and honestly. If we say little about “literature” it
is because what is usually described as literature is nothing better
than a pale reflection of life.
Edith Wharton comes first in this book that she may the better stand
alone. She has always stood alone. The distinguishing thing about her is
the distinguishing thing about her work--aloneness, which is not the
same thing as aloofness. She is not aloof. At 56 she is working in
France, doing that which her hand finds to do. Her aloneness arises from
the facts of her life. Never were so many favoring stars clustered
together as for her when she was born. She had everything.
She was born in New York (item 1) in 1862, Edith Newbold Jones, the
daughter of Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones (item
2). She was educated at home (item 3) and was married to Edward Wharton
of Boston in 1885 (item 4--no! countless items of luck had already
intervened!). In other words, Mrs. Wharton, granddaughter of General
Ebenezer Stevens of Revolutionary fame, came of distinguished family,
was the child of extremely well-to-do parents, had every advantage that
careful instruction, generous travel and cultivated surroundings could
confer upon her. Much of her life has been spent in Italy; a perfect
acquaintance with great painting and architecture, everywhere so
discernible in her work, has always with her been the customary thing.
Private tutors in America and abroad spared her the leveling processes
of forty lines of Virgil a day and ten mathematical sums each night.
They touched her as a sculptor touches his clay, firmly and caressingly
and only to bring out her peculiar excellences, only to help her native
genius to expression. Think of it--Italy and all the other rich
backgrounds, means, social position, fine traditions, the right
surroundings, the right mentors, the right tastes and a considerable
gift to begin with! What a mold! It is exquisite, perhaps unmatched in
the instance of any other novelist. It is what we dream of for genius
and it is what genius would smash to fragments! The very fact that Mrs.
Wharton _had_ a mold is the best evidence that she is not a genius in
the most discriminating sense of a most indiscriminately used word.
She is not a genius but she moves and always has moved in a world of
geniuses. From childhood she had, of course, an easy familiarity with
French, German and Italian. The ordinary bounds upon reading--the only
way of keeping the company of the supremely great of earth--were thus
swept a measureless distance away. French, German and Italian as well
as English literature were accessible to her--and the French includes
the Russian, of course. She read widely and we are told that “when she
came upon Goethe she was more prepared than the average to take to heart
his counsels of perfection and reach after a high and effective
culture!” Reach? Not upward, surely; there was nothing above her.
Outward, perhaps. At any rate, here was Mrs. Wharton in the actual
presence and company of a genius if ever there lived one. It is
agonizing to think what Goethe would have said were he alive these days.
He would have said the supremely scathing thing, the thing that would
have withered forever the moral cancer of his countrymen, and we cannot
articulate it. A magical mind and a magical tongue and a magical
pen--Goethe. He was always saying sesame. We, who have not his genius,
have to batter down the barred door.
It is to Goethe above all other literary influence that Mrs. Wharton
feels indebted. Strike out the word “literary.” The influence of Goethe
is not a literary influence, but an influence proceeding directly from
the heart of life itself. What sort of an influence is it? High, pure,
clean and yet human. Intangible, too; about all you really can say of it
is that it is like the company of some people who bring out all the best
that is in you. They do not put into you anything new. They draw you
out, or rather, they draw something out of you. At the risk of shocking
the fastidious reader and to the joy of the literally-minded we may say
that they are the spiritual equivalent of the mustard plaster. They
have an equal drawing power and efficacy, but they do not draw out the
ache but the great glow and spirit which are the incontestable proof of
the existence in the human soul of something immortal.
Mrs. Wharton read widely, as we say, and she read in the main “standard”
fiction. Her taste is for George Eliot and the ethical teachings of that
earlier woman novelist. Her taste is equally for Gustave Flaubert, the
“craftsman’s master,” the writer who teaches writers how to write. You
learn the innermost secrets of your writing craft from Flaubert and then
you put aside everything you have learned from the master and learn from
life. Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens and Meredith have been Mrs. Wharton’s
steady diet; she has re-read them so often as repeatedly and contentedly
to fall into arrears with respect to current fiction. She has had always
a great interest in biology and in whatever touches upon the history of
human thought. This, in brief, is the substance of Edith Wharton the
woman and the background of Edith Wharton the novelist.
We shall not discuss Mrs. Wharton’s books in detail in this chapter and
book for the best of reasons--they leave no room for two opinions of her
work. Of almost no other novelist whom we shall consider would it be
possible to say this; indeed of some American women novelists there are
nearer twenty-two than two opinions. Some writers, like Gertrude
Atherton, are subjects of perpetual controversy; others are the cause of
wide but sharply defined cleavages of opinion--Gene Stratton-Porter, for
example. The work of still others is more properly matter for
speculation as to what they may do than estimate of what they have done.
But Mrs. Wharton falls in none of these classifications. There is only
one opinion about her work: it is excellent but lifeless; it is Greek
marble with no Pygmalion near. From this sweeping verdict three--and
only three--of her books are to be excepted. They are _Ethan Frome_ and
_The House of Mirth_ and _Summer_. In these three books you can feel the
pulse beat. In _Ethan Frome_ the pulse is the feeble quiver of the
crushed and dying human heart; in _The House of Mirth_ there is the slow
throb of human suffering and anguish, mental no less than spiritual; in
_Summer_ there is the excited and accelerated vibration of human
passion.
It will be taken as a very dogmatic piece of business on our part when
we say that her work leaves no room for two opinions. Was there ever a
bit of writing, some will ask, which could not give birth in the minds
of readers to more than one opinion? Often, indeed, twin opinions are
born to the same reader!
We must answer that here and hereafter we are dealing with easily
ascertainable facts and not indulging in criticism. Mrs. Wharton’s work
leaves room for only one opinion simply because those who might form
another opinion do not read her. And those who do not read her take
their opinions from those who do and then, following the instinct of our
natures, declare (quite honestly) the borrowed opinion as their own. Our
real audacity consists in the assertion, implied in what we have said,
that of all the thousands who read Mrs. Wharton not one believes in his
heart for one solitary instant that the mass of her fiction is alive.
They look upon her work as they look upon the Winged Victory; it is
ravishingly beautiful, it has perfection of form, it has every attribute
of beauty possible of attainment by the consummate artist, but it has
also the severe limitations of any form of art.
We must pause here a moment to be emphatic. Art is not life and never
can be. Life is not art and never can be. This is just as true of
writing as of painting or sculpture. All art is necessarily dead. All
art is necessarily a _representation_ of life or some aspect of it. The
moment a person begins to paint or to model or to write and allow
himself to think of any kind of _art_ in what he is doing, he goes into
a fourth dimension--and life exists in only three dimensions. This is
not to say that art is undesirable; it is highly desirable, is, in fact,
almost as necessary to our souls as a fourth dimension is to the
mathematician. The fourth dimension is a spiritual necessity to the
mathematician; it is the future life in the terms of his trade.
And so, if a writer would keep life in what he writes, he must not think
of art at all. He must not have any of the artist’s special
preoccupations. He must go at his writing just as he would go at living.
If he could keep self-consciousness of what he is doing or trying to do
entirely out of his work he would succeed completely. And succeed
completely he never does. How nearly he can come to complete success we
know from some of Kipling, O. Henry, most of Conrad, one book of Thomas
Hardy’s--we name a few modern writers just for the sake of specific
illustration and illustration instantly familiar to any reader of this
book.
Mrs. Wharton is sometimes spoken of as a pupil of Henry James, and the
resemblance is strong in some of her work to that of James, but she is
not his pupil. It is simply a case of the similar products of largely
similar inheritances and environment. Both these writers were from birth
well-to-do, both had exceptional education and lived and moved in
cultivated surroundings. Their endowments were not unlike though more
disparate than their circumstances. James had a greater gift and ruined
it more completely. _The Portrait of a Lady_ is the everlasting witness
of what he might have done by the fact of what, in that superb novel, he
did do. _Ethan Frome_, _The House of Mirth_ and _Summer_ are all
inferior to _The Portrait of a Lady_ and all superior to James’s later
work.
If any one tells you otherwise it is because he is thinking in terms of
art and not in terms of life. And some will tell you otherwise, for the
world never has lacked those to whom art was more than life just as the
world has never lacked those to whom a future life was more than the
life of this earth. With these we have no quarrel; we can but respect
them; God made them so. It takes all kinds of people, we agree, to make
a world; if that is so, manifestly it takes all kinds of views to get
the true view. In any triangle the sum of all three angles is equal to
two right angles. If, therefore, one of the angles of the triangle is a
right angle, the sum of the other two will equal a right angle. The
angle of outlook which sees only the artistry in a piece of literary
work added to the angle of outlook which sees only the livingness in the
same work may make the right angle which we all aspire to look from.
BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON
_The Greater Inclination_, 1899.
_The Touchstone_, 1900.
_Crucial Instances_, 1901.
_The Valley of Decision_, 1902.
_Sanctuary_, 1903.
_The Descent of Man, and Other Stories_, 1904.
_Italian Villas and Their Gardens_, 1904.
_Italian Backgrounds_, 1905.
_The House of Mirth_, 1905.
_Madame de Treymes_, 1907.
_The Fruit of the Tree_, 1907.
_The Hermit and the Wild Woman_, 1908.
_A Motor-Flight Through France_, 1908.
_Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse_, 1909.
_Tales of Men and Ghosts_, 1910.
_The Reef_, 1912.
_The Custom of the Country_, 1913.
_The Book of the Homeless_, 1915.
_Fighting France_, 1915.
_Ethan Frome._
_The Decoration of Houses._
_The Joy of Living._
_Xingu and Other Stories._
_Summer_, 1917.
_The Marne_, 1918.
_French Ways and Their Meaning_, 1919.
_The Age of Innocence_, 1920.
_The Glimpses of the Moon_, 1922.
_The Reef, Summer, The Marne, French Ways and Their Meaning, The Age of
Innocence, and The Glimpses of the Moon were published by D. Appleton &
Company, New York; Mrs. Wharton’s other books were published by Charles
Scribner’s Sons, New York._
CHAPTER II
ALICE BROWN
From New Hampshire Alice Brown responded, July 29, 1918, to a request
for something from herself about herself with a letter as follows:
“I have been too busy in legitimate ways--gardening, cooking, cursing
the Hun--to write you a human document. But these are some of the dark
facts. I was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, about six miles
inland from the sea, near enough to get a tang of salt and a ‘sea turn’
of walking--[a word that looks like ‘mist’ or ‘twist’.] The country
there is slightly rolling, with hills enough to give nice little dips
and climbs in the winding roads, and the farms are fertile. My people
were farmers. We lived, not at Hampton Falls village, but in a little
‘neighborhood’ on the road to Exeter, and at Exeter all the shopping was
done. It was one postoffice, and any neighbor who drove over brought
back the mail for the rest.
“I went to the little district school until I was perhaps fourteen and
then went to the ‘Robinson Female Seminary,’ Exeter, walking back and
forth every day except in the winter months, and there I was
graduated--after which I taught several years, in the country and in
Boston, hating it more and more every minute, and then threw over my
certainty to write.
“I did a little work on the _Christian Register_ and then went to the
_Youth’s Companion_, where, for years, I ground out stuff from the
latest books and magazines.
“And that’s really all! I own a farm here at Hill, which I don’t carry
on--sell the grass standing and the apples on the trees. I love gardens
and houses. I wish I could go round planning the resurrection of old
houses and pass them over to somebody else and plan more.
“And _that’s_ all! Now I ask you if any newspaper gent, even with a
genius for embroidery, could make anything of that? ‘Story? God bless
you, sir, I’ve none to tell!’
“Gloomily yours,
“ALICE BROWN.”
[In pencil]
“I thought I should write about five thousand words, but this is how it
pans out!”
And it pans out extremely well, if a newspaper gent with no genius for
embroidery, incapable, indeed, of knitting a single sock for a soldier,
may express his satisfaction. For a woman of sixty who has no story of
her own to tell has certainly a lot of stories to tell of other people.
Miss Brown has told them all. A very respectable list of writings will
be found at the close of this chapter.
New England stories (_Meadow-Grass_), English travels (_By Oak and
Thorn_), poems (_The Road to Castaly_), a study of Stevenson written in
collaboration, stories for girls (as _The Secret of the Clan_), a play
that, among nearly 1,700 submitted, won a $10,000 prize (_Children of
Earth_) and a number of novels of which _The Prisoner_ is the most
notable, are a main outline of her contribution to American literature.
She is without any question one of the half dozen best short story
writers America possesses at this time. Her short stories have achieved
a wider fame for her than anything else, and quite rightly. As a poet
she does pleasant and sometimes interesting work, but it is impossible
to say more. As a dramatist she wrote one play--the play that captured
Winthrop Ames’s prize--which was splendidly imaginative and even rather
poetic, but as undramatic as a “book play” can be. It never had a chance
of popular success. Does some one say that is nothing against it? It is
everything against it. The play or the book that does not appeal to a
wide audience has a fatal lack and no amount of “literary” merit can
make up for that lack.
As a novelist Miss Brown can be absolutely unreadable. If you don’t
believe that try to go through _My Love and I_, first published under
the pen name “Martin Redfield.” It is Stevenson with the Scotch left
out. Again, she can write a book like _The Prisoner_, which is as fine
in its way as anything John Galsworthy ever did. In its way? Nothing
derogatory, we assure you! The way is American, not English; that’s all
(as Miss Brown would say).
It is perhaps unfortunate that in a book dealing with American women
novelists it should be necessary to confine the consideration of Alice
Brown to her novels; but this disadvantage to her is no greater than
the disadvantage to Edna Ferber or one or two others whose best work is
not in the novel form. Since the restriction does Miss Brown, on the
whole, a considerable injustice, let us restrict a little further and
consider only her best novel. We shall then be doing as much as we can
to redress the balance in her favor and perhaps more than we ought to
do. But chivalry is not dead.
_The Prisoner_ is the story of a relatively young man who has just come
out of prison and whose readjustment to the world he is reëntering is a
keenly interesting subject. The very first thing to be noted is the
absolute originality and freshness of Miss Brown’s conception of her
story. This, perhaps innocently, we believe to be without a literary
parallel.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred novelists, in these days probably 999 out
of 1,000, and of women novelists 9,999 out of 10,000, would see the
released man in a single aspect. The victim of society, of course;
prison reform, sociology, Thomas Mott Osborneism, uplift, the cruelty of
the world in letting a man out after having once put him in (for it is
much more of a punishment to release a man from jail than to incarcerate
him), cruelty, wrong, cruelty, injustice, cruelty, the way of the world,
cruelty----.
Now the basis of this general attitude is an incurable sentimentality,
and Miss Brown is not sentimental but sanative, made so by a gift of
humor and laughter. She is, it is true, rather deeply interested in
ideas as ideas, and in _The Prisoner_ she has packed a few more than can
be found in any American novel of the last dozen years. The root idea
is that expressed by the prisoner--or ex-prisoner--himself. As Jeff
says, with a flash of insight (prisoners learn to look within), the real
difficulty is not that a man is in prison, but that he’s outside the
law. And on the last page of the book the same idea is paraphrased, put
even more perfectly, by Miss Brown, who says of Lydia that she knew by
her talk with Jeff and reading what he had imperfectly written “that he
meant to be eternally free through fulfilling the incomprehensible
paradox of binding himself to the law.”
This will not appeal to persons who have not been taught by Gilbert K.
Chesterton the art of lucid thinking. The fact that a man is in prison
is unimportant; it is a mere symptom or consequence of the terrible
thing which is the matter with him. For his presence there is simply
evidence that he put himself, or got himself, outside the law. In
pursuit of money, or a woman, or what not sort of game he has cut
himself off from the community of mankind and it will be a miracle if he
can get back into it. The mere fact that he has committed a crime is
very little one way or the other, almost meaningless in itself. If he is
“outside” and so cut off in mind and spirit and imagination from all his
fellows, what is to them a crime will bear to him no immoral aspect
whatever. For what is a crime? Something that we agree must not go
unpunished. Something that “we” agree. But the man “outside” is not one
of us any longer if he ever was.
At the risk of seeming to digress we must endeavor to make this very
clear, for otherwise _The Prisoner_ will be, in its real import, lost on
the reader. Human nature being what it is there is no way to prevent a
man getting “outside” if the bent takes him. There are many ways in
which we try to keep every one in the fellowship--for society is
essentially a spiritual alliance and with a creed so broad that we make
laws simply to state what is _not_ in that creed, the whole creed itself
being entirely beyond our powers of expression. But there is no sure way
to keep men from getting “outside” the fellowship. And once they have
got outside the real problem is to get them back in. They can get back
in only voluntarily and of their own free will, and only by binding
themselves to the law. Law, not laws. What they must accept is the
inexpressible creed of fellowship and their acceptance of that carries
with it an acceptance of the things barred by it, the things we make
laws about.
And the only hope of getting a man who has got “outside” to accept the
creed and reënter the fellowship is to convince him that only by so
doing can he achieve freedom, that only by binding himself to the
unwritten law can he become “eternally free.” If you can make him see
that, you have salvaged him for society. As the surest way to make a man
see a thing is to let him discover it for himself we have invented
prisons. Do not be deceived by the stupid notion that prisons are to
punish men or even to protect society from their evil depredations.
Prisons are the result of a deep, very sensible, entirely unshakeable
piece of knowledge which we collectively possess, namely, that the man
who has put himself beyond the pale must himself bring himself within
it again. To that end we enclose him in four symbolic brick walls. We
give him no physical or bodily escape. And so, after a time, he makes a
mental escape and finds himself still essentially free, though
physically in jail! So at last he comes to understand and accept the
paradox that he can be free in no other way--ever.
The idea deserves expanding, but the reader will probably consider that
we have intruded unpardonably with it in this chapter anyway. However,
we can see no other means of making clear the philosophic basis of Miss
Brown’s fine novel. Of its other features we shall not even bother to
speak. It is well written, of course; it offers persons and situations
that are both metaphysical and melodramatic and therefore, in this
indissolubility of thought and feeling, life-like, amazing, comical,
thought-provoking--why heap up adjectives? The character drawing is
simply superb and a better executed figure than Madame Beattie cannot be
found in the whole range of American fiction. Miss Amabel is hardly
inferior. Weedon Moore, Alston Choate, the rigid and motionless but
perfectly well grandmother in bed, Rhoda Knox--there is no gainsaying
the fidelity of these people to observed facts and existences. If Henry
James had had Madame Beattie’s necklace in place of his golden bowls and
sacred founts his art would have been expended on really worthy
material, but he could not, nor could any one, have done more with it
than Alice Brown has done.
On the strength of this one story Miss Brown must be placed very high on
the roll of American novelists at least as high as we place, among the
men, Owen Wister, by reason solely of that incomparable novel of the
West, _The Virginian_.
BOOKS BY ALICE BROWN
_Fools of Nature._
_Meadow-Grass._
_By Oak and Thorn._
_Life of Mercy Otis Warren._
_The Road to Castaly._
_The Day of His Youth._
_Robert Louis Stevenson--A Study (with Louise Imogen Guiney)._
_Tiverton Tales._
_King’s End_, 1901.
_Margaret Warrener_, 1901.
_The Mannerings._
_High Noon._
_Paradise._
_The County Road_, 1906.
_The Court of Love_, 1906.
_Rose McLeod_, 1908.
_The Story of Thyrza_, 1909.
_Country Neighbors_, 1910.
_John Winterbourne’s Family_, 1910.
_The One-Footed Fairy_, 1911.
_The Secret of the Clan_, 1912.
_My Love and I_, 1912.
_Vanishing Points_, 1913.
_Robin Hood’s Barn_, 1913.
_Children of Earth_, 1915.
_Bromley Neighborhood._
_The Prisoner_, 1916.
_The Flying Teuton_, 1918.
_Homespun and Gold_, 1920.
_The Wind Between the Worlds_, 1920.
_Published by The Macmillan Company, New York. Some of the earlier books
by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._
CHAPTER III
ELLEN GLASGOW
Ellen Glasgow’s first two books were produced before she was twenty. She
is a Virginian, like Mary Johnston, but a realist--better, a disciple of
naturalism--and concerned with social and personal problems of the last
thirty years. A dozen books stand to her credit, all novels except a
book of verse, nearly all concerned with the social reconstruction in
the South. Banish the connotations of the word “Reconstruction” as used
respecting the South. The period immediately following the end of the
civil war is almost the sole property of Thomas Dixon. Miss Glasgow’s
province for a number of years and a number of books has been the more
gradual and more fateful making over of the South into something
reasonably homogeneous with the rest of the United States than the
leisured feudalism of the ’50s and the hopeless wreck of the ’60s.
She is a novelist of manners, but of changing manners; of cycles and
transformations, whether in the lives of individuals or the life of a
region. Unlike Miss Johnston, she cannot revive the past for its own
sake, but only for the sake of the present and the future. She is an
evolutionist who has not read Darwin and Herbert Spencer in vain. Her
writing is filled with a serious purpose, the purpose to put life
before you not merely as it is but as she thinks you should see it. She
does not preach or moralize, being far too fine an artist for such
crudities. It is enough to have given you the facts in _her
interpretation_ of them. She is quietly confident that you will not be
able to get away from them, so presented. And you hardly ever are!
Miss Glasgow has had to drive so hard and so strongly and so much alone;
she has had to face such a vast inertia of tradition and such a tenacity
of feeling, that the struggle has narrowed her. She hates
sentimentality, and rightly. It has been the terrible obstacle she has
had to confront. Of her South she once said:
“I love it; I was brought up in it, but all my life I’ve had to struggle
against the South’s sentimentality, which I inherit. We shall sooner or
later have to tear asunder that veil of sentimentality. Our people will
have to realize that a statement made in criticism of the South is not
an act of disloyalty. Please say that in as kind a way as possible,”
Miss Glasgow added, probably with some compunction, for, as she said on
another occasion, when asked what the Southerners thought about her: “I
have no idea. They are very kind to me.” To finish her words about the
struggle with inherited sentimentality: “I say it as a Southerner,” she
explained. “We must cultivate within us truth instead of sentimentality,
which up to now has been our darling vice.” These words were uttered in
New York in the fall of 1912, a few months before the publication of her
novel _Virginia_, the title referring, however, not to her State, but
to the heroine of the book, Virginia Pendleton.
You can’t fight sentimentality with tolerance and it is Miss Glasgow’s
handicap that to write the great books she has written, to succeed as
she has succeeded under the most adverse conditions and in the most
adverse environment, she has had to contract her horizon, even to shut
her eyes and thrust with all her might ahead. Surrounded by
sentimentality and the tradition of a past whose glorious perfection it
were treason to question, she has not been able always to see things
clearly and to see them whole. In the early part of 1916 she declared
that contemporary English fiction was superior to American fiction, that
Americans were demanding from writers and politicians alike an “evasive
idealism” and a “sham optimism” and “a sugary philosophy, utterly
without any basis in logic or human experience.” There was some more to
the same effect, but let us not harrow the souls of ourselves who
rejoice in Ellen Glasgow’s work by recalling any more of it. She was
wrong, dead wrong; we think she would be the first to admit it now, but
whether she would or not she is pretty completely to be excused if never
to be defended. She was best answered at the time by Booth Tarkington,
the greatest living American writer of fiction, with the allowable
exception of William Dean Howells. Said Tarkington:
“It is human nature to desire optimism in anybody--in a doctor, or a
friend, or a farm hand, or a dog. Of course, the public desires optimism
in a book, and it wants not the ‘cheapest sort of sham optimism,’ but
the finest sort of genuine optimism that it can understand. Naturally,
the average understanding isn’t the highest understanding; nevertheless,
the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.”
Mr. Tarkington went on to say:
“Miss Glasgow is sorry that there are so many writers willing to supply
the demand for ‘sugary philosophy,’ but those writers are not only
willing to supply; they are inspired to supply. They aren’t superior
people turning the trick for money, as Miss Glasgow seems to think; they
are ‘giving the best that is in them.’ They take their art solemnly.”
The truest word on the subject ever uttered and most essential to be
reprinted here. It is not so much for the refutation of Miss Glasgow
that we give it. The full application of Mr. Tarkington’s remarks will
be seen in some of the later chapters of this book.
But to return to our Southern realist.
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, April 22,
1874, the daughter of Francis Thomas Glasgow and Anne Jane (Gholson)
Glasgow. Her father belonged to a family of professional men--lawyers,
judges, educators. The child was of delicate health. She never went to
school--an admission she makes with a blush. An aunt used to tell her
Scott’s stories at an age when Mother Goose is the customary
intellectual fare. At thirteen she read and enjoyed Robert Browning. He
is still her favorite poet, though Swinburne has a great place in her
affections. Quite unaccountably Miss Glasgow showed a taste for
scientific subjects. At eighteen she began “a systematic study of
political economy and socialism.” Her love for a story remained strong.
The home was a strict Southern home, the women in it were “sheltered.”
The young woman would shut herself up in her room every day and later
join the family for such diversions as they indulged in. Finally she
went to her father and said:
“Father, I have written a book.”
Isaac F. Marcosson says that Father was dumbfounded, and well he might
have been. The novel was published anonymously and was generally
supposed to be the work of a man of training and experience. It was _The
Descendant_, and it has been characterized as “a rather morbid
exposition of the development and life of an intellectual hybrid, the
offspring of a low woman and a highly intellectual man.”
The first book in which Miss Glasgow established her right to serious
consideration as an American novelist--as a novelist picturing American
life--was _The Voice of the People_, published in 1900. She has referred
in after years to _The Descendant_ as “a mere schoolgirl effort,”
although it was not received as such, not by a long shot! But she could
not so characterize _The Voice of the People_, nor could any one else.
It is a competent picture of the Virginia of the ’80s with its class
distinctions and its political maneuvering, framing a specific and
dramatic story. The novel exhibits a considerable knowledge of political
machinery and a characteristic tale relates how Miss Glasgow got some of
the necessary “atmosphere.” In 1897 she drove over twenty miles in the
hottest August weather in order to sit through two days of a Democratic
State convention. An old family friend, a delegate to the convention,
smuggled Miss Glasgow and her sister on to the stage of the opera house
in which the sessions were held. They were the only women in the
building and the ordeal of listening to two days of Southern oratory
must have been as severe as the ordeal of sitting, obscurely and
uncomfortably, in a sun-baked theater.
It is also said of Miss Glasgow that she remarked one day to a
friend--Mr. Marcosson, if we are not mistaken: “I am going to write a
novel of New York life.”
“But why New York life when you know Virginia and the South so well?”
“For the simple reason that art has no locality. It is universal. I do
not believe that any writer should be confined to any particular
locality.”
A reply which throws light on Miss Glasgow’s earnestness and seriousness
of purpose. But she was, while entirely right in what she said, not
answering the question. Art has no locality, but the artist has
necessarily only a few localities--those he knows tolerably well. Miss
Glasgow’s pictures of New York life never carry the conviction that her
Virginia settings do.
Her own Virginia setting is a very lovely one. Number One West Main
Street, Richmond, is a square old white house, “hemmed in by trees that
cast shade over the soldiers of the Confederacy.” Behind it is a garden
in which walks and composes a beautiful woman with red-gold hair, the
real Titian shade or simply red-brown, as you may decide. It is wavy and
has gold and copper gleams. “Once more you get the touch of Jane
Austen,” explains Mr. Marcosson. He tells us that Miss Glasgow writes
every morning and always behind a locked door; “a door that is not
locked has always given her a hint of possible intrusion. The only
animate thing that has ever shared the comradeship of her work is her
dog, Joy. She writes rapidly and in a large, masculine hand.”
Rapidly, perhaps, but not finally. Nearly every bit of _Virginia_ and
_Life and Gabriella_ was rewritten at least three times, some parts
more; and one chapter was rewritten thirteen times. It sounds
incredible, but Miss Glasgow says so herself. She used to write with a
pen, but now does her first draft in pencil and revises after it has
been typewritten.
And always novels. “I cannot write short stories,” Miss Glasgow
explains. “They bore me excruciatingly. The whole technique of the short
story and the novel is different. All the best of the short stories must
be painfully condensed with slight regard for the evolutionary causes
bringing about this or that effect. Everything that I see, I see in the
form of a novel--as a large canvas. I want to trace the process of cause
and effect; and that is why both _Virginia_ and _Gabriella_ were a joy
in the writing. Those books do not deal with problems. I do not ever let
a problem get into my novels--there is none, except, of course, as some
problem of an individual life may present itself to the character. I am
not concerned with any propaganda. A book should never serve any purpose
but the telling of life as it is--being faithfully realistic.”
“And realism is only the truth of life told, and is the writer’s true
business. Hawthorne was strongly realistic. He did not try to be
pleasing or pleasant. He wrote things as he saw them.
“I must live with a character a long time. Then the desire to write
comes and I begin after that to shape the background, and the details of
plot weave into their proper places. I never force myself to begin a
piece of work nor force myself to keep at it, when the something within
stops. And I never get an idea by looking for one. They just come,
always unexpectedly and always at the most inopportune times and
places--at a reception, on the train, on the street.”
When Miss Glasgow says that she does not let a problem get into her
novels, she means that she does not put it there, or consciously put it
there. She selects her people, who have _their_ individual problems as
she concedes, and brings them into relation with each other and from
that relation a problem may arise, probably does. But that is a natural
and artistic procedure, the perfect antithesis of the propagandist’s
methods. Once to Montrose J. Moses Miss Glasgow talked rather freely
about novel writing and her literary ideals.
“There are three things a novelist has to do to prove himself,” she
declared. “First, he must show an ability to create personalities;
second, he must exhibit a sincerity of style; and third, he must evince
the capacity for an intelligent criticism of life. Without these he is
not worth very much in a serious, big way. To contribute to the
knowledge and understanding of life--that should be his motive in
writing, not primarily to create a pleasant impression.
“There have been several stages in our growth since the special type of
fiction was evolved. There was the sentimentality of Richardson; then
came my favorite, Fielding, our first realist; and finally arrived the
critical period with its early representative in Jane Austen and more
recent upholder in Meredith. We had to pass through stages far from real
life before we reached the time of direct dealing with life, of real
criticism of life. Take such men as Wells and Galsworthy--and maybe
Arnold Bennett;--are they not trying to see life through and through? I
do not believe in the realism that merely depicts for the picture.
Realism of the kind I mean not only depicts, but interprets as well.”
“How about Fielding, your favorite?” asked Mr. Moses.
“Oh, he had his faults, but they were honest ones.” Mr. Moses remarked
Miss Glasgow’s enthusiasm as she talked. “He was the first to teach us
that life--and ordinary life, too--has poetry in it. There are some of
our writers with a social conscience who use narrative as a mere vehicle
for philosophy. It is always well to have a big central idea to hold the
building together, but realism--though some novelists would separate
it--cannot be practiced apart from vision. The novelist must have a
perspective in life.
“When I first began writing I steeped myself in economics, in
sociology--and later in German mysticism. But one learns only that he
may unlearn, if necessary. In doing _Virginia_ I was obliged to revisit
certain localities to refresh my memory of things. But I could not
write of them immediately; the impressions had to filter through my
imagination.
“A man who writes for his age seldom writes for any other. And that is
why I do not believe in being consciously local. Mr. Howells, as our
greatest realist, made us see the poetry of the life he knew best. While
I’ve never consciously been influenced by any school, I have felt what
he has done for the novel. At one time I knew my Balzac, my Flaubert, my
Guy de Maupassant, by heart. And of course I read the Russians, who, I
think, are the greatest of all novelists. But as far as I am aware, I
have worked my own method out for myself.”
Because she believes so much in the novel form, Miss Glasgow has never
written a play nor ever consented to the dramatization of any of her
books. “I like the flow of the novel,” she says. “It is the best
expression of the people and the times. The drama cannot comprehend all
of life as it is to-day. A larger canvas is needed to picture the
greater complexity. The greatest drama was written in times when life
was far more simple than it is now. The novel alone can take in its flow
all of this complexity.”
Add to Miss Glasgow’s literary tastes Maeterlinck, Spinoza, Ruskin and
the Bible. She was for years “tremendously interested” (Mr. Marcosson’s
words) in the literature of the Orient. There is a little brass Buddha
on her desk in the house in Richmond. The fatalistic touch, or more
accurately, the sense of the law of recompense and the payments life is
always exacting, pervades her stories. Certain ideas are for her garbed
in definite phrases. Take, for example, the titles of two of her books,
_The Wheel of Life_ (1906) and _The Ancient Law_ (1908). They merely
repeat the titles of the final chapter and the final book, respectively,
in her earlier novel, _The Deliverance_.
For some years Miss Glasgow has divided her time between her Richmond
home and a pleasant New York apartment overlooking Central Park, an
apartment which somehow, with its books, its portrait of Miss Glasgow
empaneled, its white pillars at the entrance to the reception room, its
books, books, books in mahogany cases, preserves a good deal of the
atmosphere of a Southern home. Miss Glasgow comes to New York “for the
change,” and also to get the life of New York which has alternated with
the life of Virginia in her later books.
_Virginia_, as her most popular book and the cause of a considerable
controversy on its appearance in 1913, must receive some attention in
this sketch. It is the first book of a trilogy--provided Miss Glasgow
writes the third! _Life and Gabriella_ was the second book of the
uncompleted trilogy. Let us see what Miss Glasgow has had to say about
these books. We assume that the reader knows her to have been an ardent
suffragist and advocate of economic independence for her sex.
“Success for a woman” (Miss Glasgow is speaking) “must be about the same
as for a man. Success for a woman means a harmonious adjustment to life.
Material success is not success if it does not also bring happiness.
“The great thing in life is the development of character to a point
where one may mold his destiny. One must use the circumstances of life
rather than be used by them. The greatest success for a woman is to be
the captain of her own soul.
“Women have always been in revolt.” (This in answer to a question as to
whether _Life and Gabriella_ was intended to express the modern revolt
of women.) “It is only now that the revolt is strong enough to break
through the crust. No matter what her condition or class, woman does not
now have to marry for support, because she is ashamed to be unmarried,
or because she is hounded to it by her relatives. She dare remain
single.
“I believe that marriage should be made more difficult and divorce
easier. I also believe that divorce laws should be made more uniform.
Laws made for traffic and commercial ends may need to be changed when a
certain arbitrary boundary is passed, but laws made for human nature
should be everywhere the same, for the man who lives in California and
the one in Maine are--just men.
“The mistake women, wives, have always made is that they have
concentrated too intensely on emotion. They have made emotion the only
thing in the world. Husband and wife must be mentally companionable if
their happiness is to last through the years.
“I find one of the most fascinating dramas in all the facets of life to
be the great epic of changing conditions and the adjustment of
individuals to the new order. Naturally the battle is always sharpest
and most dramatic in those places where the older system has been most
firmly intrenched. And that is why the coming of the new order in the
South has been attended by so many dramatic stories. When I began
_Virginia_ I had in mind three books dealing with the adjustment of
human lives to changing conditions.
“In _Virginia_ I wanted to do the biography of a woman, representative
of the old system of chivalry and showing her relation to that system
and the changing order. Virginia’s education, like that of every
well-bred Southern woman of her day, was designed to paralyze her
reasoning faculties and to eliminate all danger of mental unsettling.
Virginia was the passive and helpless victim of the ideal of feminine
self-sacrifice. The circumstances of her life first molded and then
dominated her.
“Gabriella was the product of the same school, but instead of being used
by circumstances, she used them to create her own destiny. The two books
are exact converses. Where Virginia is passive, Gabriella is active.
“Virginia desired happiness, but did not expect it, much less fight for
it, and consequently in a system where self-sacrifice was the ideal of
womanhood she became submerged by circumstances just as have been so
many other women of her type. Gabriella, on the other hand, desired
happiness and insisted on happiness. Gabriella had the courage of action
and through molding circumstances wrested from life her happiness and
success.”
“And the third book?” The reader must not think from the condensed and
coalesced extracts of what Miss Glasgow has said about her work that she
talks readily. She does not. You have, sometimes, rather to drag it out
of her--that is, what you want concerning her own work. On literature
generally she talks with freedom, wisdom and point.
“The third book may never be written,” Miss Glasgow answered. “If it
should be, it will deal with a woman who faces her world with the
weapons of indirect influence or subtlety.”
Gabriella’s philosophy was summed up in her words: “I want to be happy.
I have a right to be happy, and it depends on myself. No life is so hard
that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.” In the face of
disaster which would have broken the hearts of many women, she won her
success, her happiness, from the cruelties of life.
“I believe,” Miss Glasgow once said, “that a person gets out of life
just what he puts into it--or rather he puts in more than he gets out, I
suppose; for he is always working for something unattainable; always
groping vaguely with his spirit to find the hidden things. Gabriella, as
you may remember, was ‘obliged to believe in something or die.’”
We have heard Miss Glasgow tell how she lives with a character. She is,
or was, living with the character which will become the central figure
in the third novel of her probable trilogy. “The time is not ripe to
write,” she said, when last speaking about this possible book. “As soon
as I begin to speak of the character it all leaves me. For some years I
wrote one book every two years. Three years elapsed between _Virginia_
and _Life and Gabriella_. I have no idea when the next will be finished.
I cannot understand how any one can finish and publish two books a year
regularly. It seems that one ought to give more of one’s self to a book
than that. For my own part, I should like to write each novel and keep
it ten years before I publish it. But my friends tell me, ‘Of course,
that is impossible. You change so much in ten years--all would be
different. You would be obliged to write it all over again.’ I suppose
that is true.”
Very true. But the dissatisfaction with the ten-year-old novel would be
the dissatisfaction of the conscientious artist, Ellen Glasgow. It would
not be the dissatisfaction of the novel reader. At least, re-reading
_The Deliverance_ these fourteen years after its first publication, your
admiration for Miss Glasgow’s finished art, her sense of drama, her
penetration of the human heart, her portraitive skill, her fine sense of
the retributive conscience implanted in the human breast--all these
blended perceptions and satisfactions are as lively as they were when
the book first came out. Really the only difference is that now you look
confidently for them and are, though no less rejoiced and grateful, not
in the least surprised at the finding.
Miss Glasgow’s peculiar brilliance has never received a more honest or
better tribute than in what Gene Stratton-Porter had to say after
reading _Virginia_. It is worth quoting in full:
“The writings of Miss Ellen Glasgow have always possessed a unique and
special charm for me that has carried me from one book to another for
the pleasure derived from reading, with no special effort on my part to
learn just why I enjoyed them. Last summer a man quoted in my presence a
line of Miss Glasgow’s, something like this: ‘Not being able to give
her the finer gift of the spirit, he loaded her with jewels.’
“My dictionary defines an epigram, ‘A bright or witty thought tersely
and sharply expressed, often ending satirically.’ A saying like this
almost reaches that level. At any rate, it stuck in my mind, and when a
friend recently sent me a copy of Miss Glasgow’s latest book, I began
reading it with the thought in mind that I would watch and see if she
could say other things of like quality. My patience! She rolls them
unendingly. Before I had read twenty pages I realized just where lay the
charm that had always held me. It was not in plot, nor in character
drawing, not in construction; it was in the woman expressing her own
individuality with her pen. What a gift of expression she has! I know of
no other woman and very few men who can equal her on this one point.
“Chesterton does the same thing, with a champagne sparkle and bubble,
but I would hesitate to say that even he surpasses her, for while he is
bubbling and sparkling on the surface, charming, alluring, holding one,
she is down among the fibers of the heart, her bright brain and keen wit
cutting right and left with the precision of a skilled surgeon. Not so
witty, but fully as wise.
“You have only to read _Virginia_ to convince yourself.
“‘Having married, they immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent,
to make the worst of it.’
“‘Having lived through the brief illumination of romance, she had come
at last into that steady glow which encompasses the commonplace.’
“‘To demand that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility
of a human being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of
gallantry.’
“‘If the texture of his soul was not finely wrought, the proportions of
it were heroic.’
“‘From the day of his marriage he had never been able to deny her
anything she had set her heart upon--not even the privilege of working
herself to death for his sake when the opportunity offered.’
“‘You know how Abby is about men.’ ‘Yes, I know, and it’s just the way
men are about Abby.’
“‘How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if she didn’t have her
religious convictions?’
“‘Anybody who has mixed with beggars oughtn’t to turn up his nose at a
respectable bank.’ ‘But he says that it’s because the bank is so
respectable that he doesn’t think he could stand it.’
“‘She was as respectable as the early ’80s and the 21,000 inhabitants of
Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be.’
“These lines are offered as a taste of her quality, and they roll from
her pen in every paragraph.”
In accordance with the general method of this book we have thought it
best to put Ellen Glasgow, certainly a genius, certainly one of the
greatest living American novelists, perhaps one of the greatest since
there has been an American literature--we have thought it best to put
her, we say, before the reader chiefly in her own words and in her
aspect to others, just as she would herself let a character in one of
her books reveal himself by his speeches and his actions and stand
before you as the other characters sized him up. She would not tell you
what sort of man he was and require you to swallow her account of him;
she would set him before you, talking and going about; she would give
you the impression he made on those about him, and let you judge him for
yourself--the only right way. We have only one thing more which we want
to point out at the close, Miss Glasgow’s insight into the mind and
conscience of her people. It is best illustrated, and we give the close
of a chapter in _The Deliverance_--after all, is not this wonderful
story the finest of Miss Glasgow’s novels, we wonder? Christopher Blake,
the illiterate heir of a great name, the cherisher of an undying hate,
has succeeded in ruining or hastening the ruin of Will Fletcher,
grandson of the man who stole the Blake plantation. It is Blake’s
revenge. He can reach old Fletcher through the boy and he has done it.
He, a Blake, living in a wretched shack, while the erstwhile negro
overseer dwells at Blake Hall!
“Before him were his knotted and blistered hands, his long limbs
outstretched in their coarse clothes, but in the vision beyond the
little spring he walked proudly with his rightful heritage upon him--a
Blake by force of blood and circumstance. The world lay before
him--bright, alluring, a thing of enchanting promise, and it was as if
he looked for the first time upon the possibilities contained in this
life upon the earth. For an instant the glow lasted--the beauty dwelt
upon the vision, and he beheld, clear and radiant, the happiness which
might have been his own; then it grew dark again, and he faced the
brutal truth in all its nakedness: he knew himself for what he was--a
man debased by ignorance and passion to the level of the beasts. He had
sold his birthright for a requital, which had sickened him even in the
moment of fulfillment.
“To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment, he
felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat
himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw
him--that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was
not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon--it was rather the
excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard.
He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the
nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the
breach with Fletcher. That, at least, was his work, and his alone--the
bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart
and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand--he saw
that now in his first moment of awakening--a life that he had destroyed
as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step
by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose,
and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph.
“With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the
light.”
Powerful? Yes, the passage shows an unlimited mastery of the novelist’s
real material, the human soul. _The Deliverance_ is a story of revenge
with few equals and, that we can recall, no superiors; but it goes far
beyond that, because it shows also the retributive and regenerative
forces at work in Christopher Blake and their final effect upon him. The
hour in which he surrenders himself to justice as Fletcher’s murderer,
while the dead man’s grandchild flees, is the outward and visible sign
of an inward and spiritual reformation, a reformation to come but to be
preceded by an atonement. Wonderful among heroines is Maria Fletcher;
wonderful, infinitely pathetic, matchlessly moving, is the blind
grandmother sitting stiff and straight in her Elizabethan chair,
directing the hundreds of slaves who are slaves no longer, discoursing
upon the duties of the children who inherit a splendid name, recalling
with tenderness and spirit and racial pride the great people of her
youth, giving orders that are never executed, eating her bit of chicken
and sipping her port, blind--blind--successfully deceived, successfully
kept alive and contented and in a sort of way happy these twenty years
since the slave Phyllis “‘got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her
head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them.’”
A magnificent portrait, by an artist of whom America can never be
anything but proud.
BOOKS BY ELLEN GLASGOW
_The Descendant_, 1897.
_Phases of an Inferior Planet_, 1898.
_The Voice of the People_, 1900.
_The Freeman and Other Poems_, 1902.
_The Battleground_, 1902.
_The Deliverance_, 1904.
_The Wheel of Life_, 1906.
_The Ancient Law_, 1908.
_The Romance of a Plain Man_, 1909.
_The Miller of Old Church_, 1911.
_Virginia_, 1913.
_Life and Gabriella_, 1916.
_The Builders_, 1919.
_One Man in His Time_, 1922.
_Miss Glasgow’s first two books were brought out by Harper & Brothers,
New York; all the rest are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New
York._
CHAPTER IV
GERTRUDE ATHERTON
Gertrude Atherton has been the subject of more controversy than any
other living American novelist. It is one of the best evidences of her
importance. England, we are told, regards her as the greatest living
novelist of America. Many Americans so rate her. Abroad, the opinion of
her work approaches something like unanimity and it is very high. At
home unanimity is nowhere. Prophets are not the only ones who
occasionally suffer a lack of honor in their own countries.
A good deal of it comes out of Mrs. Atherton’s long-standing and
vigorous assault on the literary schools of William Dean Howells and
Henry James. Pick up her novel _Patience Sparhawk and Her Times_,
written over twenty years ago, and you will find a trace of that feeling
in her delineation of Patience’s schoolteacher, who read these literary
gods. But Mrs. Atherton seldom speaks her mind by indirection; all who
cared have known her opinions as fast as she reached them. She has no
use for commonplace people in life or fiction; and by commonplace people
we mean not everyday people, but people about whom there is no
distinction of thought or sensibility, who have no sharpness, no
individuality however simple, no gift however slight. Henry James Forman
says that Mrs. Atherton is the novelist of genius, but this is one of
those brilliantly epigrammatic characterizations which convey the truth
by bold exaggeration. She has not always written of geniuses, but always
she has written of men and women who had backbone, courage, distinct and
recognizable selves, ambition, wit, daring, not merely flash but fire.
She really writes about herself in dozens of reincarnations. Nothing
daunts her that is alive--vulgarity, wickedness, weakness and bold sin
she can understand and portray as accurately as the shining virtues. The
only thing she cannot endure is the dead-alive. Mr. Forman was in
essentials right when he said of her in the New York _Evening Post_ of
June 15, 1918:
“Genius has a particular fascination for her, and with a rare boldness
she would rather face difficulties of creating or re-creating genius in
her fiction than to waste time on mediocre protagonists. With the newer
school of English and American novelists, with the Frank Swinnertons,
the J. D. Beresfords, or the Mary Wattses, she has nothing in common,
unless it be their patience. But she will not expend that patience on
the drab or the colorless.
“An Alexander Hamilton or a Rezanov seems to be made to her hand, and if
she cannot find what she wants in history or in fact, she prefers to
dream of a woman genius, the young German countess, Gisela Niebuhr, a
Brunnhilde who leads her sisters to revolt against Prussianism and all
that makes Germany hideous to the world to-day.
“To understand genius, it has been said, is to approach it, and Mrs.
Atherton beyond any doubt understands genius. She understands its
trials, temptations, vagaries and accomplishments. She knows that the
fires which feed it are certain to break out in many ways aside from its
recognized work. Did Mrs. Atherton take the trouble to acknowledge the
existence of Mrs. Grundy, it would be only that she might destroy that
unpopular lady.
“‘Brains’ is Mrs. Atherton’s favorite word. Any printer who sets up a
novel of hers must add a special stock to his font of the six letters
that spell it. Neither in her life nor in her work has she any patience
with dullness. She could no more have written _Pollyanna_ than she could
have written the _Book of Job_. The blithe, all-conquering brain is her
field of research.”
Mrs. Atherton, he tells us, neither talks nor writes “like a book.” She
is “always buoyant and stimulating. Brains occupy as much space in her
talk as in her books. She is never dull.” And turning to _The
Conqueror_, he develops his idea:
“There were, we know, a few persons who resisted Alexander Hamilton. But
important though they were, they were as dust under Mrs. Atherton’s
feet. Hamilton led a charmed life. Hurricanes had spared him and the
storms of war, of party, of faction left him safe. He was a _genius_,
and cosmic forces enfolded him as in a protective shell. Surely no
character was ever more certainly created to the hand of a novelist than
was Hamilton for Mrs. Atherton. Not a merit or fault of his, but Mrs.
Atherton could caress it with a mother’s hand. How she hates Clinton
because he fought her idol, and how much she despises Jefferson! But
Washington--even the most austere of the virtues of Washington pass with
Mrs. Atherton, because he loved Hamilton as a father loves a son....
“Critics have sometimes charged Mrs. Atherton with the grave misdemeanor
of writing like herself, not like somebody else; of not being Mrs.
Wharton, of not being Henry James or Robert Louis Stevenson. The charge
is just. She is not any of those persons, nor in the least like them.
She does not write for a handful of other writers, nor does she waste
much time in polishing sentences. She writes for the public.... You
cannot read five pages of her fiction without feeling certain that their
author has lived life, not merely dreamed it.”
This is the most illuminating comment on Mrs. Atherton that has so far
seen the light of day, and we shall not attempt more than to supply a
footnote or two. Mr. Forman says that Mrs. Atherton writes for the
public and not for writers. True, but is it the public which reads Gene
Stratton-Porter or _Pollyanna_? Decidedly not. Her public--a very large
one--consists of those who do not ask or desire that fiction shall
interpret them to themselves or shape their lives for them, consciously
or otherwise. It is made up of the thousands who are capable of some
degree of purely æsthetic enjoyment in literature. For the pure æsthetes
Mrs. Wharton _et al._ For the unæsthetic and ethical the two Mrs.
Porters. For the great hosts who appreciate literary art and
story-telling skill but who won’t sacrifice everything for them, who
demand a real narrative, color, action, suspense and seek no moral end
in the tale to justify the tale’s existence--for them Mrs. Atherton. And
they--these people of her vast audience--are the great middle ground.
They represent in their attitude toward fiction the healthiest note of
all.
The “literary” or highbrow attitude toward Mrs. Atherton is perfectly
conveyed in an article upon her by Mr. H. W. Boynton, also published in
the New York _Evening Post_ but over two years earlier, on February 26,
1916. We extract a few illustrative sentences:
“I may say frankly that I write of Mrs. Atherton not out of a special
admiration for her work,” begins Mr. Boynton, in a highly
self-revelatory manner, “but because for any surveyor of modern American
fiction she is so evidently a figure in some measure ‘to be reckoned
with.’... Her publicity may be said to have been extraordinary in
proportion to her achievement.... The person who is examining her work
as literature can find nothing to the purpose here (_Mrs. Balfame_).”
How comfortable to feel like that! Mrs. Atherton, with an amused smile,
would probably say, at the intimation that there was no “literature” in
_Mrs. Balfame_, and perhaps other of her books: “But life is so much
more than literature!” When Mr. Boynton charges her with leaving life
out of her books Mrs. Atherton will be seriously exercised.
Gertrude Atherton is a great grandniece of Benjamin Franklin. She was
born in 1857 in San Francisco, the daughter of Thomas L. Horn. She was
educated at St. Mary’s Hall, Benicia, California, and at Sayre
Institute, Lexington, Kentucky. At an early age she was married to
George H. Bowen Atherton, a Californian who declined to travel and who
died when he finally was lured to Chile as a guest on a warship. Mrs.
Atherton describes her marriage as “one of the most important incidents
of my school life.”
She had always wanted to go round about the world and when she wasn’t
able to do so she amused herself by writing complete travel books,
taking her characters through all parts of Europe. She knew enough
geography to make her stories truthful.
“And I believe,” Mrs. Atherton told Alma Luise Olsen in an interview
appearing in _Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New York, on March
31, 1918, “that I apply some of those same ideas to my writing of
fiction to-day. Most lives are humdrum and commonplace, on the surface
at least. So I take characters that haven’t had half a chance in real
life and re-create their destinies for them and--well, my books are the
result. I got the idea from Taine when I was very young.”
This interview also threw interesting light on Mrs. Atherton’s novel,
_The Avalanche_, announced for publication in the spring of 1919 by
Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. _The Avalanche_ is a tale of
California society with a mystery plot, and deals with a young woman
whose devoted but shrewd New York husband will not rest until he has
solved the puzzle of appearances surrounding her. Mrs. Atherton,
submerged most of the time in her New York apartment on Riverside Drive
with war work--she returned from the European battlefronts to be the
American head of Le Bien-être du Blesse, “the welfare of the
wounded”--rose to the surface several days in the week at a quiet
country spot in New Jersey, and wrote. The story developing thirteen
chapters, she split the last in two.
“I wrote and copied 50,000 words in seven weeks--which shows what one
can do away from the telephone. Margaret Anglin told me the original
incident and attempted to persuade me to write it as a play for her. Now
that the book is finished she would never recognize any part of it but
an incident in the climax.
“That’s always the way with writing novels and stories. I never know how
they are going to come out when I begin, any more than I could take a
child right now and say just how I was going to shape its whole life.
“Most writers who deal with California in their books tell about nature
and the plain people and the proletariat and such things. No one but
myself has ever told anything about social life in San Francisco. It is
full of drama. It resembles New York in part, but it has a character all
its own.”
Mrs. Atherton works every morning from seven until noon, and does with
dry bread and tea for a working lunch. Her New York apartment has
balconied windows overlooking the Hudson. Before the door of the house
which contains it stands a Barnard College dormitory. Eleanor Gates,
writing in _Books and Authors_ for September, 1917, said:
“In the wintertime, on ‘first Sundays,’ the Atherton apartment gathers
in a very crush of notables--authors, painters, soldiers, diplomats,
publishers, journalists, people of fashion, scholars, travelers and not
a few who figure under the general title of ‘admirers of genius,’ and
who have maneuvered for a card. Mrs. Atherton has the Englishwoman’s
interest in world politics; her knowledge of things European is of the
rare first-hand kind; her horizon is international. The lucky old-time
friend of the author’s from ‘out West’ meets in her drawing-room a good
percentage of the most distinguished people of the metropolis, along
with men and women who are prominent abroad.”
It is undoubtedly true that Mrs. Atherton, had she lived in France prior
to 1789, would have been a woman of a salon. If there are modern de
Staëls she is among them!
The first book of Mrs. Atherton’s read by the present writer was
_Senator North_, and he still holds it to be one of her best. It was
written in Rouen and published in 1900. Mr. Boynton cites it as evidence
that she is “both consciously and unconsciously an American.” He thinks
that “her spread-eagling, her ‘barbaric yawp,’ audible if involuntary,”
was what won attention for her in England “before her own country had
begun to notice her.” And before Mr. Boynton had begun to notice her.
Mrs. Atherton has traveled very widely. Before she starts work on a new
novel she visits the contemplated scene of action. She studies the
characteristics of the people and exhausts all her sources of
information concerning the place and its history. As a result vividness
is never lacking in her books, “local color” is there in such measure as
she may determine desirable, character-drawing is reënforced by traits
observed as well as traits assumed. She is both quick and keen. She
notes and then generalizes with broad, sweeping conclusions. Faults of
taste are imputed to her, but this means merely that those who make the
criticism would exercise a different selective choice over the teemingly
abundant material she invariably accumulates. Faults of structure are
charged to her by those who do not like the way she and her characters
shape amorphous life to their own ends. “Lack of control of her
material” is the disapproving phrase. Mrs. Atherton has “style” only in
the larger sense of self-expression, “but in the sense of that special
and trained skill by which an artist expresses life with an almost
infallible fitness, it is difficult to connect the word with her at
all.” We should hope so. The “almost infallible fitness” makes for the
satisfaction of those who have their own infallible standards of what is
fit. Life hasn’t any. It lets anything happen. Life is vulgar, broad,
incongruous, surprising, touching.
“My style is all my own, and not the result of magazine training--which
stamps the work of every other writer of the first class in the
country.” There is something in that and those who quarrel with it do so
mainly because they won’t allow Mrs. Atherton a certain exaggeration of
statement to drive her point home.
Even Mr. Boynton allows that _Perch of the Devil_ contains some of Mrs.
Atherton’s finest work and is “a considerable book in its way.” The
character of Ida Compton is one which has excited and still excites so
much interest that it is worth while to quote Mrs. Atherton’s own
explanation of how she came to go to Butte, Montana, and evolve her. She
had been struck, as who has not, by the marvelous adaptability of
American women in the capitals of Europe; “four or five years of wealth,
study, travel, associations, and they are fitted to hold their own with
any of Europe’s ancient aristocracies.”
“I met so many of these women when I lived in Europe,” explains Mrs.
Atherton, “that it finally occurred to me to visit some of the Western
towns and study the type at its source. The result is Ida Compton. In
the various stages of her development, moreover--beginning when she was
the young daughter of a Butte miner and laundress--I found myself
meeting all American women in one. The West to-day--particularly the
Northwest--embodies what used to be known as merely ‘American.’ Any one
of practically all the Western women of nerve, ambition, and large
latent abilities, that I met in my travels through their section of the
country, might develop into a leader of New York society, a
Roman-American matron, or a member of Queen Mary’s court, frowning upon
too smart society. With their puritanical inheritance they might even
develop into good Bostonians, although they ‘gravitate’ naturally to the
more fluid societies. If they choose to retain their slang, they ‘put it
over’ with an innocent dash that is a part of their natural refinement.
They are virtuous by instinct, and atmospherically broadminded; full of
easy good nature, but quick to resent a personal liberty; they are both
sophisticated and direct, honest and subtle. With all their undiluted
Americanism there is no development beyond them, no rôle they cannot
play. For that reason these Ida Comptons are fundamentally all American
women. The crudest remind one constantly of hundreds of women one knows
in the higher American civilizations. And I found studying them at the
source and developing one of them from ‘the ground up,’ watching all her
qualities--good and bad--grow, diminish, fuse, but never quite change,
even more interesting than meeting the finished product in Europe and
amusing myself speculating upon her past.”
In the long list of Mrs. Atherton’s books with which this chapter
concludes it would be desirable, but it is hardly possible, to follow
the example of guidebooks and star and doublestar her more important
novels. It is impracticable because any such designations would have to
be those of a single taste or of a coterie of tastes. _Patience
Sparhawk_, the dramatized biography of Alexander Hamilton called _The
Conqueror_, and possibly her recent novel of a German revolution, or the
revolt of the German women under the leadership of Gisela Niebuhr, would
be marked with the double star; certainly _The Conqueror_ would. The
present writer would singlestar _Senator North_ and the novels of early
California--_The Doomswoman_, _Rezanov_, _The Splendid Idle Forties_ and
_The Californians_. Of _The Living Present_ we must speak to call
attention to the final paper in the book’s second part, a tribute to
four New York women, of whom one is Honoré Willsie, the subject of a
later chapter in this book. _The Living Present_ is not a novel. The
first half is concerned with French women in war time, the fruit of
Mrs. Atherton’s observations and experience in war work; the second half
has the general title _Feminism in Peace and War_. _Perch of the Devil_
must be doublestarred, so probably must _Ancestors_ and _Tower of
Ivory_. Such books as _Rulers of Kings_ and _The Travelling Thirds_ are
least important. _Mrs. Balfame_, as a capital mystery story, the result
doubtless of Mrs. Atherton’s attendance at a celebrated murder trial in
the interests of a New York newspaper, must be single starred in any
list. _The Valiant Runaways_, long out of print, has been republished
this fall (1918). It is a story for boys, of Spanish California, with an
encounter with a savage bear, a rescue from a dangerous river, capture
by Indians and an escape on wild mustangs capped by a revolutionary
battle! The performance may be considered a final reminder of Mrs.
Atherton’s versatility. No one has ever found fault with her for not
being versatile!
BOOKS BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON
_A Whirl Asunder_, 1895. Frederick A. Stokes Company,
New York. Now out of print.
_Patience Sparhawk and Her Times_, 1897. Stokes.
_His Fortunate Grace_, 1897. John Lane Company. New York. Now out of print.
_American Wives and English Husbands_, 1898. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.
_The Californians_, 1898. Stokes.
_A Daughter of the Vine_, 1899. Lane.
_The Valiant Runaways_, 1899. Dodd, Mead.
_Senator North_, 1900. Lane.
_The Aristocrats_, 1901. Lane.
_The Conqueror_, 1902. Stokes.
_The Splendid Idle Forties_, 1902. Stokes.
_A Few of Hamilton’s Letters_, 1903. Stokes.
_Rulers of Kings_, 1904. Harper & Brothers, New York.
_The Bell in the Fog_, 1905. Harper.
_The Travelling Thirds_, 1905. Harper.
_Ancestors_, 1907. Harper.
_The Gorgeous Isle_, 1908. Doubleday, Page & Company.
Not listed in their last catalogue.
_Tower of Ivory_, 1910. Stokes.
_Julia France and Her Times_, 1912. Stokes.
_Perch of the Devil_, 1914. Stokes.
_California--An Intimate History_, 1914. Harper.
_Before the Gringo Came_ (Combining _The Doomswoman_,
published in 1892, and _Rezanov_, published in 1906), 1915. Stokes.
_Mrs. Balfame_, 1916. Stokes.
_The Living Present_, 1917. Stokes.
_The White Morning_, 1918. Stokes.
_The Avalanche_, 1919. Stokes.
_The Sisters-in-Law_, 1921. Stokes.
_Sleeping Fires_, 1922. Stokes.
CHAPTER V
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
“I am being very frank,” exclaims Mary Roberts Rinehart. As if she ever
were otherwise! “I have never had any illusions about the work I do. I
am, frankly, a story-teller. Some day I may be a novelist.
“I want to write life. But life is not always clean and happy. It is
sometimes mean and sordid and cheap. These are the shadows that outline
the novelist’s picture. But I will never write anything which I cannot
place in my boys’ hands.”
Thus Mrs. Rinehart in the _American Magazine_ for October, 1917. It is
almost all you need to know to understand her work. Almost, but not
quite. Add this:
“I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career,
that I should say: ‘First pick your husband.’”
Mary Roberts (as she was) picked hers at nineteen and was married to him
nearly four months before she became twenty. That was in 1896; dates are
not one of her concealments. In fact, she has no concealments, only
reticences.
She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia
(Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh, and had been a pupil of the city’s
public and high schools, then of a training school for nurses where she
acquired that familiarity with hospital scenes which was necessary in
writing _The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_, the stories
collected under the title _Tish_ and the novel _K._ And then she became
the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician. And
then----
“Life was very good to me at the beginning,” says Mrs. Rinehart. “It
gave me a strong body, and it gave me my sons before it gave me my work.
I do not know what would have happened had the work come first. But I
should have had the children. I know that. I had always wanted them.
Even my hospital experience, which rent the veil of life for me and
showed it often terrible, could not change that fundamental thing we
call the maternal instinct.... I would forfeit every particle of success
that has come to me rather than lose any part, even the smallest, of my
family life. It is on the foundation of my home that I have builded.
“Yet, for a time, it seemed that my sons were to be all I was to have
out of life. From twenty to thirty I was an invalid.... This last summer
(1917), after forty days in the saddle through unknown mountains in
Montana and Washington, I was as unwearied as they were. But I paid ten
years for them.”
She thinks that is how she came to write. She had always wanted to. She
began in 1905--she was twenty-nine that year--and worked at a “tiny”
mahogany desk or upon a card table, “so low and so movable. It can sit
by the fire or in a sunny window.” She “learned to use a typewriter with
my two fore-fingers, with a baby on my knee!” She wrote when the
youngsters were out for a walk, asleep, playing. “It was frightfully
hard.... I found that when I wanted to write I could not, and then when
leisure came and I went to my desk, I had nothing to say.”
Her first work was mainly short stories and poems. Her very first work
was verse for children. Her first check was for $25, the reward of a
short article telling how she had systematized the work of the household
with two maids and a negro “buttons.” She sold one or two of the poems
for children and with a sense of guilt at the desertion of her family
made a trip to New York. She made the weary rounds in one day, “a
heart-breaking day, going from publisher to publisher.” In two places
she saw responsible persons and everywhere her verses were turned down.
“But one man was very kind to me, and to that publishing house I later
sent _The Circular Staircase_, my first novel. They published it and
some eight other books of mine.”
In her first year of sustained effort at writing, Mrs. Rinehart made
about $1,200. She was surrounded by “sane people who cried me down,” but
who were merry without being contemptuous. Her husband has been her
everlasting help. He “has stood squarely behind me, always. His belief
in me, his steadiness and his sanity and his humor have kept me going,
when, as has happened now and then, my little world of letters has
shaken under my feet.” To the three boys their mother’s work has been a
matter of course ever since they can remember. “I did not burst on them
gloriously. I am glad to say that they think I am a much better mother
than I am a writer, and that the family attitude in general has been
attentive but not supine. They regard it exactly as a banker’s family
regards his bank.”
Sometimes, Mrs. Rinehart, a banker’s family regards his bank as a
confounded nuisance! But that’s when the bank takes charge of the man
and demands an undue share of his time and energy. You have never let
your writing do that. With you it has been family first! Most of the
work of the twelve years from 1905 to 1917 which witnessed your signal
success was done in your home. But sometimes when you had a long piece
of work to do you felt, as you tell us, “the necessity of getting away
from everything for a little while.” So, beginning about 1915, you
rented a room in an office building in Pittsburgh once each year while
you had a novel in hand. It was barely furnished and the most
significant omission was a telephone. There you got through “a
surprising amount of work.” And then, in 1917, you became a commuter.
Your earnings had risen from the $1,200 of that first year to $50,000
and possibly more in a twelve-month. But let us have the story in your
own words:
“My business with its various ramifications had been growing; an
enormous correspondence, involving business details, foreign rights,
copyrights, moving picture rights, translation rights, second serial
rights, and dramatizations, had made from the small beginning of that
book of poems a large and complicated business.
“I had added political and editorial writing to my other work, and also
records of travel. I was quite likely to begin the day with an article
opposing capital punishment, spend the noon hours in the Rocky
Mountains, and finish off with a love story!
“I developed the mental agility of a mountain goat! Filing cases entered
into my life, card index systems. To glance into my study after working
hours was dismaying.
“And at last the very discerning head of the family made a stand. He
said that no business man would try to sleep in his office, and yet that
virtually was what I was doing.”
This from a doctor, forsooth! But perhaps Dr. Rinehart never bound up a
cut in the little room just off the front parlor.
Nevertheless he was right. “I am at home as soon as the small boy is, or
sooner,” Mrs. Rinehart proclaims. “And I am better for the change. It
takes me out of the house. The short ride in the train or the motor to
the city detaches me automatically from the grocery list and a frozen
pipe in the garage.
“In the city I have two bright and attractive rooms. My desk is ready;
my secretary is waiting. Sometimes I work all day; sometimes I look over
my mail and go out to luncheon and do not come back.
“Then automatically the train or car going home detaches me from
publishers and autograph hunters and pen and ink and paper. I am ready
to play.”
She lives in Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh. The home is known as
Glen Osborne. She is not an early riser. “I like to let the day break on
me gradually.” After breakfast there are household arrangements. She is
no slave to her typewriter. “I may say that I work every week-day
morning and perhaps three afternoons.” She goes riding, plays golf,
visits the dressmaker the other three. She is a member of the Equal
Franchise Association and of the Juvenile Court Association. There are
long vacations, but what she sees and experiences a-traveling is usually
rendered to her readers. “Thus in the summer we spend weeks in the
saddle in the mountains of the Far West, or fishing in Canada.... These
outdoor summers were planned at first because there were four men and
one woman in our party. Now, however, I love the open as men do.” She
writes about it better than many men do.
Mrs. Rinehart, in any account of herself, is certain to record the fact
that she has never done newspaper work, although in recent years she has
done “political and editorial writing.” She was never a newspaper
reporter. The “moral equivalent,” as William James would have styled it,
was, in her case, undoubtedly her hospital experience. Like any young
nurse, she saw “life in the raw,” to borrow the unoriginal but
completely expressive phrase used in her novel _K._ And then she had the
great fortune to marry happily and to become a mother. This is the
secret of her success, and all of it. Young and impressionable, she saw
what life is at its most agonizing, most horrible, most heroic moments.
Still young, but with her thoroughly normal and wholesome nature losing
its plasticity and taking on a definite mold, she found what life can be
in its permanent and most deeply satisfying beauty. Sympathy, genuine
affection and sanative humor were hers in fair measure; when they failed
her momentarily her husband replenished the healing store.
Her first novel, _The Circular Staircase_, was a mystery tale; so was
her second, _The Man in Lower Ten_. They appeared in 1908 and 1909
respectively. Her first play had been produced in New York in 1907. This
was _Double Life_, staged at the Bijou Theater. In conjunction with her
husband, she wrote _The Avenger_ (1908) and much later she collaborated
with Avery Hopwood in the highly successful farce _Seven Days_. This was
first played at the Astor Theater, New York. In 1913, at the Harris
Theater, New York, her farce _Cheer Up_ was put on. “Two plays were
successful,” in Mrs. Rinehart’s opinion.
She has written short stories for all the most popular American
magazines--the _Saturday Evening Post_ perhaps particularly;
_McClure’s_, _Everybody’s_, _Collier’s_, the _American_ and the
_Metropolitan_ are others she enumerates offhand. And her short stories
are among the most excellent produced by a living American writer. Some
of them, unified by possession of the same principal character or
characters, have been published in book form, as _Tish_ and _Bab, a
Sub-Deb_. The stories in _Tish_ relate various escapades of an unmarried
woman of advanced years, the heroine of Mrs. Rinehart’s earlier novel,
_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_. Letitia Carberry, “Tish,”
is a person without a literary parallel. Well-to-do, excitement-loving,
curious, with a passion for guiding the lives of two other maidens like
herself, Lizzie and Aggie; with a nephew, Charlie Sands, who throws up
hopeless hands before her unpredictable performances, Miss Carberry is
unique and funny beyond easy characterization. She pokes at the
carburetor with a hairpin, rides horseback in a divided skirt, puts
great faith in blackberry cordial, shoulders a shotgun and mends the
canoe with chewing gum. These things in the tales composing _Tish_; in
_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_ we have a story in which
the mystery of extraordinary and scandalous occurrences in a hospital
where Tish is a patient is finally solved by her efforts. Nothing
affords a better exhibition of Mrs. Rinehart’s skill as a story-teller
than this novel. Things that with less skillful handling would be both
ghoulish and shocking, are so related that they strike the reader merely
as bizarre or outrageously laughable, or as heightening the unguessable
puzzle of what is to come. The technical triumph is very great, as great
as that achieved in the last half of George M. Cohan’s play, _Seven Keys
to Baldpate_, where a corpse is lugged about without offending the
observer. _The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_ is a remarkable
evidence of the lengths to which farce can be carried and remain
inoffensive--and become the source of helpless mirth.
_Bab, a Sub-Deb_, with its account of the doings of a girl who has not
yet “come out,” a sub-débutante, is also unique and, to the extent of
the character’s capacity, just as diverting. Mrs. Rinehart does nothing
by halves, she exploits the possibilities of her people to the top of
their bents--and hers. She exploits--always legitimately--her own
affairs, as in _My Creed_, the autobiographical article in the _American
Magazine_ upon which we have drawn so heavily in this sketch, and _The
Altar of Freedom_, an account of her struggle to part with a son who
felt he must answer America’s call for men in 1917. With gusto she gives
us the account of a vacation trip--see _Through Glacier Park_ or
_Tenting To-Night_. With the heaviest possible charge of sentiment but
never an explosive cap of sentimentality, she puts before us a small
boy, the crown prince of a mythical but completely real kingdom, whose
pitifully circumscribed existence, whose scrapes and friendships and
admiration of Abraham Lincoln, have for their background court intrigues
and the uncovering of treason; read _Long Live the King!_ With complete
self-knowledge comes complete knowledge of others; Mrs. Rinehart can go
straight to the American heart and does it in _The Amazing Interlude_,
that story of Sara Lee Kennedy, who went from a Pennsylvania city to the
Belgian front to make soup for the soldiers. Here is romance so heady
and strong that most readers overlook, purposely and gladly, the
improbability of Henri’s return to Sara Lee and the little house of
mercy after daybreak discovered him, delirious and in a Belgian uniform,
dangling on the German wire. Artistically _The Amazing Interlude_ excels
by its portrait of Harvey, Sara Lee’s fiancé back home, Harvey who
resisted her “call” to service, who brought her back home, whose hard
selfishness as an American and whose lack of comprehension as a man make
him entirely typical of thousands in this country prior to April 6,
1917.
The novel _K._--or story _K._, if we accept Mrs. Rinehart’s disclaimer
as to novel writing--is possibly more representative of her work than
any other single book. It illustrates perfectly her ingenuity in
contriving and handling a plot; for the book ends on page 410 and the
most necessary revelation does not come until page 407. It exemplifies
her finished gift for telling a story; there are no wasted words and in
half a page she can transport you from laughter to tenderness. Half a
page? On page 70 you may see it done in seven lines. The girl Sidney
Page has slipped from a rock into the river, alighting on her feet and
standing neck deep. Rescued by K. Le Moyne, she remarks:
“‘There wasn’t any danger, really, unless--unless the river had
risen.... I dare say I shall have to be washed and ironed.’
“He drew her cautiously to her feet. Her wet skirts clung to her; her
shoes were sodden and heavy. She clung to him frantically, her eyes on
the river below. With the touch of her hands the man’s mirth died. He
held her very carefully, very tenderly, as one holds something
infinitely precious.”
_K._ shows its author’s power to portray character effectively in
sweeping outlines filled in, on occasion, with solid or mottled masses
of color. K. himself is the kind of a person that Mary S. Watts might
have put before us in some 600 closely printed pages. It is a difference
of method merely and while not every one would be able to appreciate the
thousand little touches with which Mrs. Watts drew her hero, Mrs.
Rinehart’s more vigorous delineation is effective at all distances, in
all lights, with almost all readers. She manages in this tale to present
a wide variety of persons and a great range of emotions and she manages
it less by atmospheric details and a single setting--the Street--than by
an astonishing number of relationships between a man and a woman; or, in
the case of Johnny, “the Rosenfeld boy,” and Joe Drummond, a youth and
a woman or girl. It will be worth the reader’s while to note that the
story contains no less than ten such relationships. First there are K.
and Sidney and Joe and Sidney. Then there are Max Wilson and Sidney, Max
Wilson and Carlotta Harrison, Tillie and Mr. Schwitter, Christine Lorenz
and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Palmer Howe, Grace Irving and Johnny
Rosenfeld, K. and Tillie and K. and Christine. This is very complicated
and unusual art--if it is not novelizing, then we do not know what
novelizing is. Consider the gamut run. K. and Sidney are the ripe
lovers. Joe’s unrequited love for Sidney is the desperate passion of
immaturity. Max Wilson’s feeling for Sidney is the infatuation of a
nature inherently fickle where women are concerned. Carlotta Harrison’s
love for Max Wilson is the dark passion. The relation between Tillie and
Schwitter goes to the bedrock of human instincts, is a thing Thomas
Hardy might have concerned himself with. It is pathetic; he would have
made it tragic as well; we are satisfied that in her disposition of it
Mrs. Rinehart is sufficiently faithful to the truth of life. Christine
Lorenz and Palmer Howe are the disillusioned married; but in this case,
as Christine said: “‘The only difference between me and other brides is
that I know what I’m getting. Most of them do not.’”
Grace Irving and Palmer Howe bring before us the man and the woman in
their worst relationship in the story, or in life either. Grace Irving
and Johnny Rosenfeld are a picture of thwarted motherhood and a blind
feeling for justice. K. and Tillie are proofs of the reach of friendship
and the efficacy of understanding. K. and Christine give us the woman
saved from herself.
The height--or the depth--to which Mrs. Rinehart attains in this story
is a thing to marvel at, and just as marvelous is the surety with which
she gets her distance. The tenth chapter of _K._ will not easily be
overmatched in American fiction or that of any other country. Here is
Mr. Schwitter, the nurseryman, middle-aged or older, not very
articulate, with a wife in an asylum playing with paper dolls; and here
is Tillie, punching meal tickets for Mrs. McKee, not becoming younger,
lonelier every day, suffering heartaches and disappointment without end.
Mr. Schwitter has proposed a certain thing.
“Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her,
embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He
meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the
look in her eyes and stared out of the front window.
“‘Them poplars out there ought to be taken away,’ he said heavily.
‘They’re hell on sewers.’”
* * * * *
“The total result ... after twelve years is that I have learned to sit
down at my desk and begin work simultaneously,” wrote Mrs. Rinehart in
1917. “One thing died, however, in those years of readjustment and
struggle. That was my belief in what is called ‘inspiration.’ I think I
had it now and then in those days, moments when I felt things I had
hardly words for, a breath of something much bigger than I was, a little
lift in the veil.
“It does not come any more.
“Other things bothered me in those first early days. I seemed to have so
many things to write about, and writing was so difficult. Ideas came,
but no words to clothe them. Now, when writing is easy, when the
technique of my work bothers me no more than the pen I write with, I
have less to say.
“I have words, but fewer ideas to clothe in them. And, coming more and
more often is the feeling that, before I have commenced to do real work,
I am written out; that I have for years wasted my substance in riotous
writing, and that now, when my chance is here, when I have lived and
adventured, when, if ever, I am to record honestly my little page of
these great times in which I live, now I shall fail.”
If her readers shared this feeling they must have murmured to themselves
as they turned the absorbing pages of _The Amazing Interlude_: “How
absurd!” It is doubtful if they recalled her spoken misgiving at all.
BOOKS BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
_The Circular Staircase_, 1908.
_The Man in Lower Ten_, 1909.
_When a Man Marries_, 1909.
_The Window at the White Cat_, 1910.
_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_, 1911.
_Where There’s a Will_, 1912.
_The Case of Jenny Brice_, 1913.
_The After House_, 1914.
_The Street of Seven Stars_, 1914.
_K._, 1915.
_Through Glacier Park._
_Tish_, 1916.
_The Altar of Freedom_, 1917.
_Long Live the King!_ 1917.
_Tenting To-Night_, 1918.
_Bab, a Sub-Deb._
_Kings, Queens and Pawns_, 1915.
_The Amazing Interlude_, 1918.
_Twenty-Three and a Half Hours’ Leave_, 1919.
_Dangerous Days_, 1919.
_Love Stories_, 1919.
_Affinities and Other Stories_, 1920.
_“Isn’t That Just Like a Man?”_ 1920.
_The Truce of God_, 1920.
_A Poor Wise Man_, 1920.
_More Tish_, 1921.
_Sight Unseen and The Confession_, 1921.
_The Breaking Point_, 1922.
_Published by George H. Doran Company, New York, except the following,
which are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston: The After
House, The Street of Seven Stars, K., Through Glacier Park, Tish, The
Altar of Freedom, Long Live the King! and Tenting To-Night._
CHAPTER VI
KATHLEEN NORRIS
“Mrs. Norris,” explains William Dean Howells, “puts the problem, or the
fact, or the trait before you by quick, vivid touches of portraiture or
action. If she lacks the final touch of Frank Norris’s power, she has
the compensating gift of a more controlled and concentrated observation.
She has the secret of closely adding detail to detail in a triumph of
what another California author has called Littleism, but what seems to
be nature’s way of achieving Largeism.”
Of course, this is the method of Kathleen Norris, the method in her
madness, to use the word madness in its old sense of being possessed by
something. What is Mrs. Norris possessed by? Why, the irresistible
impulse to put things before you and make you consider whether they
should be so. H’m, a preacher might do that. Well, had most preachers
the presentative skill of Kathleen Norris there would be ticket
speculators on the sidewalks in front of their tabernacles!
If you want to make people think write a novel--but be sure you know
how! Mrs. Norris does. Why, is easily answered. She was not a newspaper
reporter for nothing. Newspaper training does inculcate “a taste exact
for faultless fact” that “amounts to a disease,” quite as the lilting
lines in _The Mikado_ have it. The fiction of Kathleen Norris is
distinguished by several unusual qualities, all due, in the present
writer’s opinion, to newspaper training operating upon a gifted and
observant mind:
As in a good piece of reporting, a single important idea or fact or
problem is at the bottom of each of her novels.
Each story is first of all a story, the crisp, penetrative account of
certain persons and events.
Mrs. Norris never appears to have taken her fact or idea or problem and
said, “I will build a tale about this.” She seems always to be
describing actual people and actual occurrences. This seeming may be
deceptive. It may be that she goes about it the other way, proceeding
from her idea to her people and incidents. If she does, the trail is
covered perfectly. For the reader gets the sensation first of persons
and “doings” and then, later, of problems arising from their relations
to each other; which is the precise and invariable effect life itself
always gives us. We do not think of the problem of divorce first and of
our neighbors, John Doe and Cora Doe, afterward; we see Cora Doe going
past the house and recall when John Doe was last in town and then, and
not until then, do we think of the tragedy of their lives and the
dreadful question mark coiled in the center of it.
In other words, life assimilates all its great facts and problems and
the novelist who would set them forth effectively must first have
assimilated them too, so that they will not have to be “brought in” the
story he is telling, but will be in it from the beginning, disclosing
themselves as the action develops. The reader must feel that he has
_discovered_ the fact or the problem for himself, that he, all by
himself, has abstracted it out of the scenes put before him. He must see
Cora Doe go by and hear of John Doe’s last appearance and look upon the
wreck of their lives--but all the rest must be left to him to grasp
unaided! The real reason why no story can have a moral is that every
reader must find his own moral, even if each finds the same one!
Mrs. Norris understands this and practices it. She does not ask you to
consider whether a girl, bred in sordid surroundings and having access
in youth only to tawdry ideals, can lift herself to gentleness and
dignity and become, at any cost, the captain of her soul. No! She makes
you acquainted with Julia Page. She refrains from questioning the
efficacy of divorce and writes _The Heart of Rachael_, which makes every
reader ask himself the question. If her readers unite in an identical
answer and that answer is the one Mrs. Norris herself would return, does
that convict her of stepping outside the novelist’s province? Bless you,
no; the novelist’s province is as large as life is, and its boundaries
in the case of any given writer as far as he can carry and maintain
them. Mrs. Norris’ s frontiers are wide.
The woman first. An interesting article in the _Book News Monthly_
several years ago posited that “Kathleen Norris upsets all our accepted
ideas of how a novelist is made.... With the exception of five months
spent in taking a literary course at the University of California, Mrs.
Norris never had any schooling, and, until five years ago (1908), she
never had been outside her native State.... No thrilling adventures, no
prairie life, or mountaineering, no experiences of travel, or residence
in Paris or Berlin, have been hers.” The impression of wonder which this
may create will be somewhat modified by the sketch of her life which
follows, and for which we are chiefly indebted to the same article.
Kathleen Norris was the daughter of James A. Thompson, of San Francisco.
The father was a San Franciscan of long residence and twice served as
president of the famous Bohemian Club. At the time of his death he was
manager of the Donohoe-Kelly Bank. Kathleen was the second child in a
family of six--three boys and three girls. Mr. Thompson would not send
his children to school and they were taught at home, with an occasional
governess for language study. In 1899 the family moved to Mill Valley
across San Francisco Bay, and “Treehaven,” a bungalow in the beautiful
valley at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, became the home. A quieter life
can hardly be imagined. There weren’t many neighbors, the children did
not go to school, most of the visitors were grown people, there were no
children’s parties. Kathleen Norris never saw the inside of a theater
until she was sixteen, which will astonish readers of _The Story of
Julia Page_. There was, however, a large library, there were plenty of
magazines, there were miles of forest as a playground, there were
horses, cows, dogs, cats, a garden. Mountains were there to be climbed
and creeks to be waded. “The boys as well as the girls of the family all
became practical cooks.”
Kathleen was the oldest girl. At nineteen she was to “come out” in San
Francisco. A house had been taken in the city for the winter. Gowns had
been ordered and “the cotillions joined” when Mrs. Thompson was stricken
with pneumonia and died. Her husband died, broken-hearted, in less than
a month afterward. Misfortunes culminating just after the father’s death
left the six children “destitute, with the exception of the family home
in Mill Valley, too large and too far from the city to be a negotiable
asset.”
The children had never known what it was to want money. They behaved
bravely. The oldest boy already had a small job. Kathleen got work at
once with a hardware house at $30 a month. Her 15-year-old sister took
three pupils “whose fees barely paid for her commutation ticket and
carfares. The total of the little family’s income was about $80 a month.
Their one terror--never realized--was of debt.”
Kathleen and her sister came home from the day’s work to get the dinner,
make beds, wash dishes and scrub the kitchen floor at midnight.
Kathleen, who had been a favorite story-teller all her life, began to
wonder if she could not make money by writing. Her tales as a child had
generally been illustrated with little pen drawings of girls with
pigtails, girls in checkered aprons, girls in fancy dress, “and
occasionally with more tragic pictures, such as widows and bereaved
mothers mourning beside their departed.... There is a scrapbook in the
family in which are pasted more than 1,000 of these sketches.” Now she
was not thinking of illustrating stories, her own or others’, but of
making needed money. In the fall of 1903 she had attempted to take a
year’s course in the English department of the University of California
and had had to give it up because the family needed her. In 1904, at the
age of twenty-three, she made her first successful effort. The San
Francisco _Argonaut_ paid her $15.50 for a story called _The Colonel and
the Lady_. Mrs. Norris was then librarian in the Mechanics’ Library and
had more time to try writing. Such success as she had was not very
encouraging. She left the library to go into settlement work, and for
several months strove “to reanimate an already defunct settlement
house.” She got her feet on the right path at last by becoming society
editor of the San Francisco _Evening Bulletin_. A few months later she
became a reporter for the San Francisco _Call_, where she worked for two
years.
“Mrs. Norris doesn’t know whether the newspaper experience helped or
hindered her in her literary work.” There need be no uncertainty, we
should think, when, as we are told in the next breath, “during these
years she saw many phases of life that must have enlarged her vision and
made her more catholic in her views.” She learned to write with speed.
“During the visit of the Atlantic fleet to Pacific waters, in 1908,
there was one day in which 8,000 words were Mrs. Norris’s contribution
to the paper.” This may explain why she is one of the most prolific of
American novelists. Long before _Josselyn’s Wife_ could be brought out
in the fall of 1918, _Sisters_ had begun to be published serially.
In April, 1909, Kathleen Thompson was married to Charles Gilman Norris,
younger brother of Frank Norris, the author of _McTeague_ and _The
Pit_. Charles Norris, now Capt. Charles Norris, U. S. A., is himself a
novelist, the author of _The Amateur_ and _Salt: The Education of
Griffith Adams_. Captain and Mrs. Norris, whose home is at Port
Washington, Long Island, New York, have a son named after his
distinguished uncle, Frank Norris.
Marriage, a home in New York City, and the first leisure since her
father’s death; a literary atmosphere (her husband was in magazine
editorial work), and the happiness of being in the city she had for
years longed to know-these are the circumstances which reawakened Mrs.
Norris’s ambition to write. She essayed again without encouragement from
editors except the editor at the breakfast table. Her newspaper training
now seemed to handicap her, “her fiction lacked the simplicity and the
appeal that have since endeared it to so many readers.” For months she
got nothing but rejections. Finally this note popped out of the mail:
“Dear Mrs. Norris:
“The readers report that, delightful as this story is, it is ‘not
quite in our tone.’ The feeling of the _Atlantic_ is, that when a
tale is as intimately true to life as this is of yours, the tone is
surely a tone for the _Atlantic_ to adopt.
“It gives us much pleasure to accept so admirable a story.
“Very truly yours,
“THE EDITOR.”
The story that was “not quite in our tone” but that so impressed Ellery
Sedgwick, editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, was _What Happened to
Alanna_. On its publication S. S. McClure wrote to Mrs. Norris asking
for her next work. She replied, giving him the date on which _What
Happened to Alanna_ had been submitted to _McClure’s Magazine_ and the
date on which it had been returned to her.
Her next six stories appeared in _McClure’s_. After that it seemed to
the casual observer as if they were everywhere. In one month Mrs. Norris
was on five tables of contents.
And then the _Delineator_ offered a prize for a story of not more than
3,000 words. Mrs. Norris began one, and when she saw that it would run
to 10,000 words, she laid it aside and wrote another. So the
_Delineator_ lost and the _American Magazine_ gained _Mother_. On the
story’s appearance five publishers asked Mrs. Norris to enlarge it
sufficiently to make a book.
Enlarging short stories into novels is a ticklish business. Successes
are few. Mrs. Norris added 20,000 words to her short story. How well she
did it is evidenced by the dozens of editions through which the book has
run and more remarkably by the fact that Edward Bok, editor of the
_Ladies’ Home Journal_, paid a high price for the privilege of running
the novel as a serial _after_ its publication as a book. This is
apparently a unique instance.
_Mother_ was followed by _The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne_, the story of a
great-hearted woman who brought her fresh and honest ideals into the
heart of a narrow Western city. Those who read it may excusably gasp to
hear that it was written in six weeks on an order from the _Woman’s Home
Companion_. _Poor Dear Margaret Kirby_, collected short stories, was the
third book, appearing in the spring of 1913. _The Treasure_ had had
serial publication in the _Saturday Evening Post_. _Saturday’s Child_
preceded it. And then Mrs. Norris made her first great success with a
full length novel which many will consider the biggest book she has
done. It was _The Story of Julia Page_, the first of three novels which
have been called Mrs. Norris’s trilogy of American womanhood. The others
are _The Heart of Rachael_ and _Martie, the Unconquered_. Between these
last two appeared her short novel, _Undertow_, dealing with two young
married spendthrifts. _Josselyn’s Wife_, “the story of a woman’s faith,”
tells of a sweet, simple girl, Ellen Latimer, transported by a whirlwind
marriage to Gibbs Josselyn from the humdrum existence of a small country
town to the luxuries of the wealthy social life of New York. There is a
time when the young second wife of Gibbs Josselyn’s father threatens to
break up the happiness of the younger Josselyn and Ellen, for Gibbs
succumbs readily to her undeniable fascination. Then comes the crash.
Through the long agony of a murder trial it is the wife he has neglected
who alone upholds him. It is her faith that wins and that brings him at
last to an understanding of his egotistical folly.
Mrs. Norris is not yet at the height and fullness of her powers, as well
as can be judged contemporaneously. It is easy enough to look back on
the completed work of a writer’s lifetime and say, “Here he reached his
apex, here he began to decline, here he rose again for an hour.” But to
estimate the present and relate it tentatively to the future is very
much harder. _Mother_ was one “peak” in the graph of Mrs. Norris’s
progress, _The Story of Julia Page_ was another and a higher,
_Josselyn’s Wife_ is at least as high. There is every prospect that in
the active and happy years we may hope are ahead of her, Kathleen Norris
will excel the impressive novels she has already given us.
BOOKS BY KATHLEEN NORRIS
_Mother_, 1911.
_The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne_, 1912.
_Poor Dear Margaret Kirby_, 1913.
_Saturday’s Child_, 1914.
_The Treasure_, 1915.
_The Story of Julia Page_, 1915.
_The Heart of Rachael_, 1916.
_Undertow_, 1917.
_Martie, the Unconquered_, 1917.
_Josselyn’s Wife_, 1918.
_Sisters_, 1919.
_Harriet and the Piper_, 1920.
_The Beloved Woman_, 1921.
_Lucretia Lombard_, 1922.
_Certain People of Importance_, 1922.
_These novels by Mrs. Norris are published by Doubleday, Page & Company,
New York._
CHAPTER VII
MARGARET DELAND
Edith Wharton, at 56, does a work of mercy in France; Margaret Deland is
similarly engaged at 61. That speaks so much more loudly than their
books. And their books are not silent.
If the band of a kiltie regiment plays _The Campbells Are Coming_, one
of them may be Margaretta Wade (Campbell) Deland. Mrs. Deland was born
in Alleghany, Pennsylvania, February 23, 1857. Her parents died while
she was very young, and she was reared in the family of an uncle,
Benjamin Campbell, who lived in Manchester, then a suburb of Alleghany,
and the original Old Chester of Mrs. Deland’s famous and loved stories.
“Our home,” Mrs. Deland once wrote, “was a great, old-fashioned country
house, built by English people among the hills of western Pennsylvania
more than a century ago. There was a stiff, prim garden, with box hedges
and closely clipped evergreens. In front of the garden were terraces,
and then meadows stretching down to the Ohio River, which bent like a
shining arm about the circle of the western hills.”
“Which bent like a shining arm about the circle of the western hills!”
Beautiful simile!
In this old garden the little girl played the greater part of her waking
hours. She loved the outdoors. She was highly impressionable and
imaginative. She had the curious and dear convictions of childhood. She
was sure that the whole of Asia was a yellow land, because the map of
Asia in her old dog-eared geography was colored yellow.
Her first taste in reading was formed upon _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_
and _Tales of a Grandfather_, Hawthorne’s stories, and the works of
Washington Irving. Her first and indeed her final experience of life was
that summed up in Stevenson’s saying: “And the greatest adventures are
not those we go to seek.” Mrs. Deland expressed it this way: “Not the
prominent events; nor the catastrophes, nor the very great pleasures;
not the journeys nor the deprivations, but the commonplaces of everyday
life determine what a child shall do, and still more positively
determine what he shall be.”
In one word: character. And it is with character almost solely that Mrs.
Deland as a writer has been preoccupied. Dr. Lavendar is a study in
character, so is Helena Richie, so is the Iron Woman; and the young
people that surround her are character studies of a completeness
unexcelled in American fiction.
There is more than one way of dealing with character in fiction. But
first we must settle what we mean by character. We mean, concisely,
inherited traits as affected by environment. Environment includes people
as well as things.
It is impossible to make a character study convincing without taking
heredity into account, and this irrespective of whether heredity or
environment plays the greater rôle in a mortal’s life. The eternal
controversy as to which of these two influences is preponderant is
largely futile because the preponderance differs with various persons,
differs with the traits inherited, differs with a thousand differing
pressures of circumstance. One thing is certain: whether anything is
known about an individual’s inherited endowment or not we always and
inescapably assume that he has one. The best handy illustration of this
is Jennie Cushing in Mary S. Watts’s book, _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_.
Nothing whatever is known by us regarding Jennie Cushing’s inheritance;
we don’t know her parentage any more than she does. Her environment we
know with awful exactitude and we are perfectly conscious that it fails
utterly to explain her except, of course, her marvelous and painfully
acquired gift of reticence. We are forced, therefore, to presuppose in
her case an inheritance of extraordinary will-power and extraordinary
sensitiveness to beauty in any of its forms. And we do presuppose it! It
makes her wholly credible; more credible, probably, than any careful
account of her forebears could have made her.
Now in _The Iron Woman_, indisputably Mrs. Deland’s finest story, we get
both heredity and environment exactly known and precisely compounded.
Indeed, if Mrs. Deland’s great novel has a fault it is the fault of
giving us more knowledge than should be ours. Her people are so complete
that there is no unknown quantity in the equation they make. It is just
a trifle too good to be true, too life-like to be convincing. Knowing to
the last inch what they are (as we know our neighbors of long standing)
we know to the last degree what they will do, under what circumstances
they will do it, how they will do it and what the result upon them and
upon others, just as minutely known, will be. To see Sarah Maitland and
the boy Blair is like watching a terrible and inevitable and perfectly
anticipated tragedy approaching in the house next door. Listen:
“But after a breathless six months of partnership--in business, if in
nothing else--Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little
two-year-old Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he
was ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could
take him. Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and dazed
him that there was nothing for him to do but die--so that there might be
room for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; nobody who saw her in
those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she loved him. Her
pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical prostration,
but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under
like circumstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as
Mrs. Maitland’s religion had never been more than church-going and
contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help under the
strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate the other means
of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself numb; very likely
she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not feel
anything else. Not even her baby’s little clinging hands, or his milky
lips at her breast. She did her duty by him; she hired a reliable woman
to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to
nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the naïve
conviction of her day that church-going and religion were synonymous,
she began, when he was four years old, to take him to church. In her
shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever since
it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited trousseau, she
sat in a front pew, between the two children, and felt that she was
doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty without maternal
instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as maternal instinct
without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in the first few years
of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed to have nothing but
duty to offer to her child. Nannie’s puzzles began then. ‘Why don’t
Mamma hug my baby brother?’ she used to ask the nurse, who had no
explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie,
and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his
service while he was still in petticoats.
“Blair was three years old before, under the long atrophy of grief,
Sarah Maitland’s maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was
chilled by the boy’s shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was
chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous
candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first
expressions of opinion had been contained in the single word ‘uggy,’
accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed--and
she was one of those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a
sneeze--Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected
sound, then burst into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head
down upon her scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, ‘No,
no! No, no!’ at which she would push him roughly from her knee and fall
into hurt silence.... She took Blair’s little chin in her hand--a big,
beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails--and turning
his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. ‘Get over
your airs!’ she said.”
It is, we repeat, exactly like living next door to the family and, with
the procession of the years, collecting innumerable little incidents and
observed facts all piecing accurately together. It is not fiction at
all, it is biography, the best and brightest and most instructive kind
of biography. What is the difference between fiction and biography?
Principally it consists only in this, that in the case of the life of an
actual man the biographer is under no necessity of explaining or
reconciling his apparent contradictions. We know the man lived and that
he was capable of those contradictions. If the biographer can reconcile
or explain them, offering an acceptable and plausible theory to account
for them, very well; we are grateful. But it is not imperative that he
should do so; what is imperative is that he should set down a faithful
record of the contradictions themselves; for we can then, having the
evidence before us, frame our own theories to account for them.
In writing fiction or fictional biography the author’s main struggle is
for plausibility. If his character does perplexing and contradictory
things the author feels that he must make them entirely understandable
or we will not accept the character--and in this he is generally right.
Human nature is human nature; what we take at the hands of life we are
forced to take and make the best of; but we won’t take the same things
from a novel because we aren’t compelled to. We insist that the novelist
make everything clear and under this great compulsion the novelist is
always working. The result is not always happy. Compulsions, however
desirable in general, remain laws of force. Compulsory
education--compulsory fiction; there are cases where both work badly,
where both do serious ill.
Considered as fiction, _The Iron Woman_ is vitiated ever so slightly by
the painful consciousness that we have required every person in it to be
explained to us too fully, a requirement to which Mrs. Deland has
obediently conformed. No mystery, no magic of the unknown, invests the
story. We have only to watch these people take their appointed courses
to an appointed end. We read eagerly and with a sense of uncertainty
_not_ as to what the outcome will be, but as to whether Mrs. Deland will
dare, _will dare_, to break the law of the fictioneer. She does not, and
thereby throws her book over into the field of biography. What, you say,
did these people actually live? Of course they lived. If you mean, were
there originals for all of them? we cannot say. Probably there were. But
you must remember that the novelist who works from an original, a living
person, hardly ever takes that person as he is. Usually some addition
and subtraction goes on. Without doubt this was the case here. When we
speak of _The Iron Woman_ as biography, the best and brightest of
biography, we mean simply this: The studies of the people in it are too
minute for fiction and the people themselves are over-plausible. The
writer’s effort to make them plausible has gone so far and been so
successful as to defeat her end. The wealth of detail with which she
enriches her splendid story makes it a biography, or a cluster of
biographies; and considered as biographies, these people are a vivid
success, and all that extreme plausibility we have noted, all that
conscientious dove-tailing of traits and circumstance, falls lightly and
easily and beautifully into place as the brilliant and convincing effort
of a biographer to explain her people, reconcile their
self-contradictions, put them in the right light before the world, in
the light in which they saw themselves and in which they saw each other.
We are not trying to be ingenious nor to find in Mrs. Deland’s work
something which is not there. We have no patience with artificiality in
dealing with these matters. We are simply trying to account for the
feeling that sweeps over us as we re-read _The Iron Woman_, a feeling
which we believe most of those who re-read the book will share. And we
venture to think that in this attempt to solve our feeling about Mrs.
Deland’s biggest novel we have solved the peculiarity of all her
exquisite work. She is the ideal biographer. As supporting evidence to
the case we have made (we hope it is a decent case) we call attention to
her Old Chester books and stories. In _The Awakening of Helena Richie_,
in _Old Chester Tales_, in _Dr. Lavendar’s People_--in them all, in all
her work--we believe that the reader who takes the biographical
standpoint will find the fullest satisfaction. It will be a full
satisfaction indeed. Mrs. Deland is one of the ablest writers America
has produced so far. We will allow her to be a genius if genius is,
after all, merely the capacity for taking infinite pains and exhibiting
an infinite comprehension of and sympathy with simple and memorable
lives.
BOOKS BY MARGARET DELAND
_Good for the Soul._
_The Rising Tide._
_R. J.’s Mother._
_The Way to Peace._
_Where the Laborers Are Few._
_John Ward, Preacher._
_The Old Garden and Other Verses._
_Philip and His Wife._
_Florida Days._
_Sidney._
_The Story of a Child._
_The Wisdom of Fools._
_Mr. Tommy Dove and Other Stories._
_Old Chester Tales._
_Dr. Lavendar’s People._
_The Common Way_, 1904.
_The Awakening of Helena Richie_, 1906.
_An Encore_, 1907.
_The Iron Woman_, 1911.
_The Voice_, 1912.
_Partners_, 1913.
_The Hands of Esau_, 1914.
_Around Old Chester_, 1915.
_Small Things_, 1919.
_The Vehement Flame_, 1922.
_Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; Small Things is published by
D. Appleton & Company, New York._
CHAPTER VIII
GENE STRATTON-PORTER
Because Gene Stratton-Porter cares for the truth that is in her, she is
the most widely read and most widely loved author in America to-day,
with the probable exception of Harold Bell Wright. She is absolutely
sincere in all her work, she is in dead earnest, she does not care
primarily for money, but for certain ideas and ideals. Let no one
underestimate the tremendous power that is hers because of these things,
let no one underestimate her hold upon millions of readers; let none
undervalue the influence she has exerted and continues to exert, an
influence always for good, for clean living, for manly men, for womanly
women, for love of nature, for sane and reasonable human hopes and
aspirations, for honest affection, for wholesome laughter, for a healthy
emotionalism as the basis and justification of humble and invaluable
lives.
If Mrs. Porter has egoism it is the sort of egoism that the world needs.
It is nothing more or less than a firm and sustaining belief in one’s
self, in the worth of one’s work, and is bred of a passionate conviction
that you must always give the best of yourself without stint. Is it
egoistical to believe that? Is it self-centeredness to be proud of that?
Is it wrong, having set the world the best example of which you are
capable, to call it to the world’s attention? You will not get the
present reporter to say so! You will get from him nothing but an
expression of his own conviction that while literature, æsthetically
viewed, may not have been enriched by Mrs. Porter’s writings, thousands,
yes, tens of thousands of men and women have been made happier and
better by her stories. And that just about sweeps any other possible
accomplishment into limbo!
The secret of Mrs. Porter’s success is sincerity, complete sincerity;
doing one’s best work and doing it to the top of one’s bent. It is not a
question of art. There is no art about it. The finest literary artist in
the world could not duplicate her performance unless he were a duplicate
of _her_. It’s not a literary matter at all; the thing has its roots in
the personality, in the mind and heart and nervous organization of the
writer. If you could be a Gene Stratton-Porter you could write the
novels she writes and achieve just the success she achieves, a success
which is improperly measured by earnings of $500,000 to $750,000 from
her books, a success of which the true measure can never be taken
because it is a success in human lives and not in dollars.
The best evidence of this--for there will be doubters--is the story of
her life, very largely told in her own words, published in a booklet by
Doubleday, Page & Company in 1915. The booklet, for some time to be had
on request, is now out of print. In what follows it is drawn upon freely
and almost to the exclusion of anything else.
“Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his wife,
at the time of their marriage, as a ‘ninety-pound bit of pink porcelain,
pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge, having a big rope of bright
brown hair, never ill a day in her life, and bearing the loveliest name
ever given a woman--Mary.’ He further added that ‘God fashioned her
heart to be gracious, her body to be the mother of children, and as her
especial gift of Grace, he put Flower Magic into her fingers.’”
There were twelve children. Mrs. Stratton was “a wonderful mother.” She
kept an immaculate house, set a famous table, hospitably received all
who came to her door, made her children’s clothing. Her great gift was
making things grow. “She started dainty little vines and climbing plants
from tiny seeds she found in rice and coffee. Rooted things she soaked
in water, rolled in fine sand, planted according to habit, and they
almost never failed to justify her expectations. She even grew trees and
shrubs from slips and cuttings no one else would have thought of trying
to cultivate, her last resort being to cut a slip diagonally, insert the
lower end in a small potato, and plant as if rooted. And it nearly
always grew!”
She was of Dutch extraction and “worked her special magic with bulbs,
which she favored above other flowers. Tulips, daffodils, star flowers,
lilies, dahlias, little bright hyacinths, that she called ‘blue bells,’
she dearly loved. From these she distilled exquisite perfume by putting
clusters at time of perfect bloom in bowls lined with freshly made,
unsalted butter, covering them closely, and cutting the few drops of
extract thus obtained with alcohol. ‘She could do more different
things,’ says the author, ‘and finish them all in a greater degree of
perfection, than any other woman I have ever known. If I were limited to
one adjective in describing her, “capable” would be the word.’”
Mark Stratton was of English blood, a descendant of that first Mark
Stratton of New York, who married the beauty, Anne Hutchinson. He was of
the English family of which the Earl of Northbrooke is the present head.
He was tenacious, had clear-cut ideas, could not be influenced against
his better judgment. “He believed in God, in courtesy, in honor, and
cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used to say that he would
rather see a child of his the author of a book of which he could be
proud, than on the throne of England, which was the strongest way he
knew to express himself. His very first earnings he spent for a book;
when other men rested, he read; all his life he was a student of
extraordinarily tenacious memory. He especially loved history: Rollands,
Wilson’s _Outlines_, Hume, Macaulay, Gibbon, Prescott, and Bancroft, he
could quote from all of them paragraphs at a time, contrasting the views
of different writers on a given event, and remembering dates with
unfailing accuracy.” The Bible he knew by heart, except for the Old
Testament pedigrees. This is a literal statement of fact. He traveled
miles to deliver sermons, lectures, talks. He worshiped humanity and all
outdoors. Color was a prime delight. “‘He had a streak of genius in his
makeup, the genius of large appreciation,’” says Mrs. Porter. He
reveled in descriptions of personal bravery.
“To this mother at forty-six, and this father at fifty, each at
intellectual top-notch, every faculty having been stirred for years by
the dire stress of civil war, and the period immediately following, the
author was born,” on a farm in Wabash county, Indiana, in 1868. “From
childhood she recalls ‘thinking things which she felt should be saved,’
and frequently tugging at her mother’s skirts and begging her to ‘set
down’ what the child considered stories and poems. Most of these were
some big fact in nature that thrilled her, usually expressed in Biblical
terms.”
The farm was called “Hopewell,” after the home of some of Mark
Stratton’s ancestors. Mark Stratton and his wife had spent twenty-five
years beautifying it. The land was rolling, with springs and streams and
plenty of remaining forest. The roads were smooth, the house and barn
commodious; the family “rode abroad in a double carriage trimmed in
patent leather, drawn by a matched team of gray horses, and sometimes
the father ‘speeded a little’ for the delight of the children.”
The girl had an invalid mother, for about the time when Gene could first
remember things Mrs. Stratton contracted typhoid after nursing three of
her children through it. She never recovered her health. The youngest
child was therefore allowed to follow her father and brothers afield
“and when tired out slept on their coats in fence corners, often awaking
with shy creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she
pleased, amusing herself with birds, flowers, insects and plays she
invented. ‘By the day I trotted from one object which attracted me to
another, singing a little song of made-up phrases about everything I saw
while I waded catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or
following a bird with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the
inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an ear of
corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets.
“‘I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I knew what a
mother bird fed her young before I began dropping bugs, worms, crumbs,
and fruit into little red mouths that opened at my tap on the nest quite
as readily as at the touch of the feet of the mother bird.... I fed
butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside the screen of a
cellar window, doctored all the sick and wounded birds and animals the
men brought me from afield; made pets of the baby squirrels and rabbits
they carried in for my amusement; collected wild flowers; and as I grew
older, gathered arrow points and goose quills for sale in Fort Wayne. So
I had the first money I ever earned.’”
At school Mrs. Porter hated mathematics. Once when a mathematical topic
for an essay was forced upon her, she broke loose and read the class a
review of Saintine’s _Picciola_, the story of an imprisoned nobleman and
a tiny flower that blossomed within prison walls. She fascinated her
audience.
“‘The most that can be said of what education I have is that it is the
very best kind in the world for me; the only possible kind that would
not ruin a person of my inclinations. The others of my family had been
to college; I always have been too thankful for words that circumstances
intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove in
company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and
mentality.’” Her father encouraged her in writing, and when she wanted
to do something in color had an easel built for her. On it she afterward
painted the water colors for _Moths of the Limberlost_. If she wanted to
try music he paid for lessons for her. “‘It was he who demanded a
physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigors of
scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten books in
five years, five of which were on nature subjects, having my own
illustrations, and five novels, literally teeming with natural history,
true to nature.... It was he who daily lived before me the life of
exactly such a man as I portrayed in _The Harvester_, and who constantly
used every atom of brain and body power to help and to encourage all men
to do the same.’”
In 1886, at eighteen, Gene Stratton was married to Charles Darwin
Porter. A daughter was born to them, but the fever to write was merely
in abeyance for a while. “It dominated the life she lived, the cabin she
designed for their home, and the books she read. When her daughter was
old enough to go to school, Mrs. Porter’s time came.”
She explains: “‘I could not afford a maid, but I was very strong, vital
to the marrow, and I knew how to manage life to make it meet my needs,
thanks to even the small amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin
of fourteen rooms, and kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter’s
clothes, I kept a conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six
hundred bulbs every winter, tended a house of canaries and linnets, and
cooked and washed dishes besides three times a day. In my spare time
(mark the word, there was time to spare else the books never would have
been written and the pictures made) I mastered photography to such a
degree that the manufacturers of one of our finest brands of print paper
once sent the manager of their factory to me to learn how I handled it.
He frankly said that they could obtain no such results with it as I did.
He wanted to see my darkroom, examine my paraphernalia, and have me tell
him exactly how I worked. As I was using the family bathroom for a
darkroom and washing negatives and prints on turkey platters in the
kitchen sink, I was rather put to it when it came to giving an
exhibition.’ ...
“She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to
_Recreation_, and with the first installment was asked to take charge of
the department and furnish material each month, for which she was to be
paid at current prices in high-grade photographic material. We can form
some idea of the work she did under this arrangement from the fact that
she had over $1,000 worth of equipment at the end of the first year. The
second year she increased this by $500, and then accepted a place on the
natural history staff of _Outing_, working closely with Mr. Caspar
Whitney. After a year of this helpful experience, Mrs. Porter began to
turn her attention to what she calls ‘nature studies sugar-coated with
fiction.’ Mixing some childhood fact with a large degree of grown-up
fiction, she wrote a little story entitled _Laddie, the Princess, and
the Pie_.”
She dreaded failure, she who had been bred to believe that failure was
disgraceful. “‘I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from
ladders high in the air, and crossed water on improvised rafts without a
tremor, slipped with many misgivings into the postoffice and rented a
box for myself, so that if I met with failure my husband and the men in
the bank need not know what I had attempted.’”
That was in May; in September the storekeeper congratulated her on her
story in the _Metropolitan_. She had not seen it. She wrote to the
editor and got a quick reply. An office boy had lost or destroyed her
address and he had been waiting to hear from her. Would she do a
Christmas story?
She would, and did, and he asked for illustrations. She found that his
time limit gave her one day to do them in. She worked from 8 A. M. to 4
A. M. to make the necessary photographs, which required special settings
and costuming.
Not long after, Mrs. Porter wrote a short story of 10,000 words and sent
it to the _Century_. Richard Watson Gilder advised her to make a book of
it. This is the origin of _The Song of the Cardinal_. “Following Mr.
Gilder’s advice, she recast the tale and, starting with the mangled body
of a cardinal some marksman had left in the road she was traveling, in a
fervor of love for the birds and indignation at the hunter she told the
cardinal’s life history.” The book was published in 1903.
She illustrated the book herself after dangers and hardships of which
the reader seldom has any conception. Securing a mere tailpiece picture
once cost her three weeks in bed where she lay twisted in convulsions
and insensible most of the time.
_Freckles_ appeared in the fall of 1904. She had been spending every
other day for three months in the Limberlost swamp, making a series of
studies of the nest of a black vulture. She combined two men to make
McLean of the story, but Sarah Duncan was a real woman; Freckles was a
composite of certain ideals and her own field experiences, merged with
those of a friend. For the Angel she idealized her own daughter. The
book is dedicated to her husband, because he helped make it possible.
She had promised him not to work in the Limberlost. “‘There were most
excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was
impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just
invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and
quagmire filled with every plant, animal and human danger known in the
worst of such locations in the Central States.’” Nevertheless lumbermen
had brought word of the vulture’s nest. “‘I hastened to tell my husband
the wonderful story of the big black bird, the downy white baby, the
pale blue egg.’” So he said he would go with her.
It was awful.
“‘A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired to
the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we reached
the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces and the horse
stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter in kneeboots, I in
waist-high waders. The time was late June; we forced our way between
steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of gnats, flies, mosquitoes,
poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle
deep at every step and logs we thought solid broke under us. Our
progress was a steady succession of pulling and prying each other to the
surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed parts of our
bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the tree, cleared
the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed its unspeakable odors
for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess, and brought the baby and
egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat.
“‘We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant and
binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for almost
three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was able to take
wing.’”
The story itself--_Freckles_--originated in the fact that one day, while
leaving the swamp, a big feather with a shaft over twenty inches long
came spinning and swirling earthward and fell in the author’s path. It
was an eagle’s, but Mrs. Porter had been doing vultures, so a vulture’s
it became.
_Freckles_ took three years to find its audience. The marginal
illustrations made people think it purely a nature book. The news that
it was a novel of the kind you simply must read had to get about by word
of mouth. The copy that lies beside us as we write this sketch was
printed in 1914, ten years after the story’s first appearance. The
jacket says that by 1914 exactly 670,733 copies had been sold. And the
most important three of the ten years were largely wasted!
Publishers told Mrs. Porter then and afterward, repeatedly and
emphatically, that if she wanted to sell her best and make the most
money she must cut out the nature stuff. But, as she says, her real
reason in writing her novels was to bring natural history attractively
before the people who wouldn’t touch it in its pure state.
“‘I had had one year’s experience with _The Song of the Cardinal_,
frankly a nature book, and from the start I realized that I never could
reach the audience I wanted with a book on nature alone. To spend time
writing a book based wholly upon human passion and its outworking I
would not. So I compromised on a book into which I put all the nature
work that came naturally within its scope, and seasoned it with little
bits of imagination and straight copy from the lives of men and women I
had known intimately, folk who lived in a simple, common way with which
I was familiar. So I said to my publishers: “I will write the books
exactly as they take shape in my mind. You publish them. I know they
will sell enough that you will not lose. If I do not make over $600 on a
book I shall never utter a complaint. Make up my work as I think it
should be and leave it to the people as to what kind of book they will
take into their hearts and homes.” I altered _Freckles_ slightly, but
from that time on we worked on this agreement.
“‘My years of nature work have not been without considerable insight
into human nature, as well,’ continues Mrs. Porter. ‘I know its
failings, its inborn tendencies, its weaknesses, its failures, its depth
of crime; and the people who feel called upon to spend their time
analyzing, digging into, and uncovering these sources of depravity have
that privilege, more’s the pity! If I had my way about it, this is a
privilege no one could have in books intended for indiscriminate
circulation. I stand squarely for book censorship, and I firmly believe
that with a few more years of such books as half a dozen I could
mention, public opinion will demand this very thing. My life has been
fortunate in one glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked
in the woods. For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met,
lived with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of
thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish
high ideals, and it is _upon the lives of these that I base what I
write_. To contend that this does not produce a picture true to life is
idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal life; to the best
that good men and good women can do at level best.
“‘I care very little for the magazine or newspaper critics who proclaim
that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that my pictures of life
are sentimental and idealized. They are! And I glory in them! They are
straight, living pictures from the lives of men and women of morals,
honor, and loving kindness. They form “idealized pictures of life”
because they are copies from life where it touches religion, chastity,
love, home, and hope of Heaven ultimately. None of these roads leads to
publicity and the divorce court. They all end in the shelter and
seclusion of a home.
“‘Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to teach,
whether they really believe it or not, that no book is _true to life_
unless it is true to the _worst in life_, that the idea has infected
even the women.’”
_A Girl of the Limberlost_ “‘comes fairly close to my idea of a good
book. No possible harm can be done any one in reading it. The book can,
and does, present a hundred pictures that will draw any reader in closer
touch with nature and the Almighty, my primal object in each line I
write. The human side of the book is as close a character study as I am
capable of making. I regard the character of Mrs. Comstock as the best
thought-out and the cleanest-cut study of human nature I have so far
been able to do.’”
Prior to the appearance of _A Daughter of the Land_ this was Mrs.
Porter’s best book, unquestionably. All she says about it is perfectly
true, but she does not give herself proper credit in respect of one or
two of the book’s qualities. There is much humor in it and the
delineation of Kate Comstock, particularly in the first half of the
book, has the sharpness of line and the sureness of handling visible in
a fine etching. Consciously or subconsciously Mrs. Porter created at the
very outset of her story, in the second chapter, a situation which
appeals to the most thrilling and satisfying instinct in the human
breast. Elnora, pitifully dressed, has spent a humiliating first day at
high school in town. Since her mother will not provide them, Margaret
and Wesley Sinton go forth at nightfall to buy the clothes the girl
needs to wear and sit up half the night to get them ready quickly. It is
both humorous and genuinely moving. The reader shares their burst of
generosity. He shops with them and sits up with them and worries with
them and rejoices and partakes of their happiness in “doing for” the
girl; he is all the while quite conscious of the humor of the situation
without any abatement of the tenderness and delight that is his as well
as theirs. This is great work; it may not be great literature; whether
it is or not depends on what you require “literature” to give you. The
innumerable readers who require literature to give them what life gives
them (or even more, what life unjustly withholds from them)--emotion,
pure, deep, contenting and cleansing--these will ask no more than Mrs.
Porter gives them here.
The idea of _The Harvester_ was suggested to Mrs. Porter by an editor
who wanted a magazine article, with human interest in it, about ginseng
diggers. As she looked into the raising of the drug, the idea came to
her of a man growing drug plants professionally and of a sick girl
healed by them. “‘I wrote primarily to state that to my personal
knowledge, clean, loving men still exist in this world, and that no man
is forced to endure the grind of city life if he wills otherwise.... I
wrote the book as I thought it should be written, to prove my points and
establish my contentions. I think it did. Men the globe around promptly
wrote me that they had always observed the moral code; others that the
subject never in all their lives had been presented to them from my
point of view, but now that it had been, they would change and do what
they could to influence all men to do the same.’”
_Laddie_--“‘Of a truth, the home I described in this book I know to the
last grain of wood in the doors, and I painted it with absolute
accuracy; and many of the people I described I knew more intimately than
I ever have known any others.... There was such a man as Laddie, and he
was as much bigger and better than my description of him as a real thing
is always better than its presentment.’”
Mrs. Porter does not put money first, nor anywhere near first. “When the
public had discovered her and given generous approval to _A Girl of the
Limberlost_, when _The Harvester_ had established a new record, that
would have been the time for the author to prove her commercialism by
dropping nature work, and plunging headlong into books it would pay to
write, and for which many publishers were offering her alluring sums.
Mrs. Porter’s answer was the issuing of such books as _Music of the
Wild_ and _Moths of the Limberlost_. No argument is necessary.” No
argument is possible. Mrs. Porter has spent a great deal of the small
fortunes her novels have brought her on nature books which represent
years of fieldwork and a staggering expenditure for scientific
materials.
This is Mrs. Porter’s own description of the Limberlost swamp where she
has done so much work and which she has made yield such good stories.
“‘In the beginning of the end a great swamp region lay in northeastern
Indiana. Its head was in what is now Noble and DeKalb counties; its body
in Allen and Wells, and its feet in southern Adams and northern Jay.
The Limberlost lies at the foot and was, when I settled near it, exactly
as described in my books. The process of dismantling it was told in
_Freckles_ to start with, carried on in _A Girl of the Limberlost_, and
finished in _Moths of the Limberlost_. Now it has so completely fallen
prey to commercialism through the devastation of lumbermen, oilmen, and
farmers, that I have been forced to move my working territory and build
a new cabin about seventy miles north at the head of the swamp in Noble
county, where there are many lakes, miles of unbroken marsh, and a far
greater wealth of plant and animal life than existed during my time in
the southern part. At the north end every bird that frequents the
Central States is to be found. Here grow in profusion many orchids,
fringed gentians, cardinal flowers, turtle heads, starry campions,
purple gerardias, and grass of Parnassus. In one season I have located
here almost every flower named in the botanies as native to those
regions and several that I can find in no book in my library.
“‘But this change of territory involves the purchase of fifteen acres of
forest and orchard land, on a lake shore in a marsh country. It means
the building of a permanent, all-year-round home, which will provide the
comforts of life for my family and furnish a workshop consisting of a
library, a photographic darkroom and negative closet, and a printing
room for me. I could live in such a home as I could provide on the
income from my nature work alone; but when my working grounds were
cleared, drained and plowed up, literally wiped from the face of the
earth, I never could have moved to new country had it not been for the
earnings of my novels, which I now spend, and always have spent, in
great part, upon my nature work. Based on this plan of work and life I
have written ten books, and “please God I live so long,” I shall write
ten more. Possibly every one of them will be located in northern
Indiana. Each one will be filled with all the field and woods
legitimately falling to its location and peopled with the best men and
women I have known.’”
This promise Mrs. Porter has kept in her latest novel, _A Daughter of
the Land_, the story of Kate Bates, an American through and through, who
fought for her freedom against long odds, renouncing the easy path of
luxury that leads to loss of self-respect. It is Mrs. Porter’s finest
novel, this story of a woman’s life from her teens to well past forty,
from school days to her second marriage. It is a much more ambitious
attempt than any of her other stories and as successful as it is big.
Shamelessly we have built this chapter almost entirely upon Mrs.
Porter’s own account of herself--but could any one do better than to
present that? We are confident he could not. And aside from what she has
to say of her stories they call for no special survey one by one. The
one supremely significant thing to grasp is her sincerity and her giving
of the best that is in her. Now, the mass of people possess, in respect
of these qualities in a writer, a sort of sixth sense, a perfectly
infallible instinct that tells them when a writer is sincere, when he is
giving of his best. It is the faculty aptly described in the phrase: “I
don’t know much about literature, _but I know what I like_.” To be sure
you do! And that’s as near as ready characterization can come to the
secret! The person who has achieved a certain measure of sophistication
or who has cultivated his taste (which may mean improving it but always
means narrowing it) does _not_ know what he likes! He knows only what he
doesn’t like--or at least he is always finding it. He pays the price of
every refiner in the loss of broad and basic satisfaction. Cultivate a
tongue for caviar and you lose the honest and healthful enjoyment of
corned beef and cabbage. When you appreciate Bach you can no longer get
thrilling pleasure hearing a military band. It’s the same way everywhere
and with everybody.
If some people find no pleasure or benefit in Gene Stratton-Porter’s
stories, that is exclusively their own fault. They are looking for
certain æsthetic satisfactions in what they read and they require them
so absolutely that the writer’s best and the writer’s sincerity cannot
compensate for their absence. Is it good to have come to such a state?
Every one must make up his own mind about that, even as he must make his
own decision whether he will strive to attain it. Everything of this
sort is to be had for a price,--if you want to pay so much.
“‘To my way of thinking and working the greatest service a piece of
fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life
than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he
can be a gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier man, it is a wonder-working
book.’”
Thus Gene Stratton-Porter. There is incontestable evidence that her
books have done these very things. Literature, we have been told, is “a
criticism of life.” How about molding lives?
BOOKS BY GENE STRATTON-PORTER
_The Song of the Cardinal_, 1903.
_Freckles_, 1904.
_What I Have Done With Birds_ [_Friends in Feathers_], 1907.
_At the Foot of the Rainbow_, 1908.
_A Girl of the Limberlost_, 1909.
_Birds of the Bible_, 1909.
_Music of the Wild_, 1910.
_The Harvester_, 1911.
_Moths of the Limberlost_, 1912.
_Laddie_, 1913.
_Michael O’Halloran_, 1915.
_Morning Face._
_A Daughter of the Land_, 1918.
_Homing with the Birds_, 1920.
_Her Father’s Daughter_, 1921.
_The Fire Bird_, 1922.
_Mrs. Porter’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New
York._
CHAPTER IX
ELEANOR H. PORTER
In the pleasant old town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a fourth
(top floor) apartment and above it a roof garden. Come up on the roof.
“Fresh, clean light canvas, framed in by borders of flowers, with a
hammock to dream in and a good stout table and a typewriter,” confront
us. At the table a little woman, blonde, youthful looking, her light and
fluffy hair neatly combed, her blue eyes--“laughing eyes”--changing
expression rapidly with her thoughts. She is writing with a lead pencil
and when she stops to talk to us she shows a ready wittedness, a
conversational gift, an aliveness that are charming--charming!
She tells us that she works here every morning when too boisterous winds
or a driving storm do not make it impossible; or too low a temperature.
She writes novels. It takes her a year to do one and when she has
finished she is good for nothing for several days. She writes each book
three times; first in lead pencil, the second draft on the typewriter
here, “and it is this copy that is polished over and rewritten and
tinkered with--and all fixed up.” The third draft has usually few
changes. It, or a stenographer’s copy of it, goes to the publisher, and
later there comes a message from Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston:
“Advance orders for your new novel _Just David_ are 100,000 copies.”
Isn’t that rewarding? _Just David_ will be out in a few days now....
The author of _Just David_--and _The Road to Understanding_ and _Oh,
Money! Money!_ and, why _of course_ of _Pollyanna_!--is not thinking of
the royalties that will be hers on 100,000 copies of her novel. No.
Eleanor H. Porter makes a moderate fortune with each of her books. But
what rewards her for the task of writing them--did you ever sit down and
write, just _write_, 80,000 words, let alone telling a story?--what
gives her the satisfaction that’s of the heart is the invincible proof
that a hundred thousand are buying her book on faith. They believe in
_her_, in her work; she has pleased them, made them happier or better
somehow, somewhere, somewhen; they look to her for help, for cheer, for
entertainment, for a kind of enlightenment that they haven’t found
elsewhere and that will be supremely worth their while.
Stand aside, you who are sophisticated, cynical, world worn and merely
flippant! If you could see assembled before you in one vast throng this
hundred thousand and tens of thousands more, if you could see them
gathered about you with upturned interested, expectant and eager faces,
what would you say? What _could_ you say? Do you think your
sophistication would be proof against the expression on these faces? Do
you think that _you_ could give them what they need? Would your
subtleties help them? Would they listen to you and go away a little
braver, a little more comforted, a little readier to face life?
Up in the White Mountains there’s a cabin called after the girl
Pollyanna. Out in Colorado there’s a Pollyanna teahouse. A little maid
in Texas bears the name. The builder of an apartment house in an Indiana
city has his fancy struck. There’s a Pollyanna brand of milk, and
Pollyanna clubs are formed whose members sport an enameled button
showing a young girl’s sweet face. Surely the woman who can so touch the
hearts, the imagination, or even merely the fancy of men and women and
children everywhere--surely she and her work call for respectful
consideration. There must be something here, something admirable, if we
can only put our fingers on it! There is.
And first let us hear about Mrs. Porter herself. We have met her at
work. Was there anything to suggest direct descent from Governor William
Bradford of the Mayflower and the “stern and rockbound coast”? There was
not. There was, however, a suggestion of a childhood spent in an oldtime
white frame New England house, with green blinds and big pillars in
front. There was certainly more than a suggestion of a child brought up
to play indoors and out. With a little imagination we could have seen
her studying music, always music, loving to improvise. “I liked to play
out all my moods and everything I saw and heard. I could get rid of my
tempers, too, by sometimes just playing them out. And I liked to play
the beautiful things I saw--sunsets, woods and lakes.... In that way,
perhaps, _David_ is autobiographical.... The many years’ training in
voice as well as instrumental music has never failed to help me in
expressing just the mood I want to express.”
She was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, a place of some few thousands
in the White Mountains, the daughter of Francis H. Hodgman and Llewella
Woolson Hodgman. She had a brother to play with. She “knew the woods
from early childhood.” Little verses and stories by her commemorated
birthdays and other occasions of moment. In high school ill health
arrested her studies. For a while books had to be put entirely aside and
she lived a good deal outdoors. Spruce, fir, cedar and tamarack,
mountain flowers and plants, became personalities to be distinguished
one from another and to be delighted in for their peculiarities. When
she wrote _Just David_ she had only to recall her youth, after all.
Health regained, she went to Boston for more musical study under private
teachers and at the New England Conservatory. She sang in concerts and
in church choirs. In 1892 she was married to John Lyman Porter. She
lived a year in Chattanooga and a few years in New York and Springfield,
Vermont; Boston (Cambridge) has been her home with these exceptions. Mr.
and Mrs. Porter have lived in Cambridge for the last sixteen years. Mrs.
Porter’s mother, Mrs. Hodgman, an invalid, has lived with them.
We have said that Mrs. Porter works every morning. Yes, the morning
hours are set apart for her work and it is not readily interrupted. Her
first book, published in 1907, was _Cross Currents_, a study of child
labor, struck out from her by what she had seen in New York of
youngsters made to toil at the fashioning of artificial flowers. Indeed,
her first impulse to write came to her in New York, on an afternoon
several years after her marriage, as she stood in Trinity churchyard. It
was a flash, a dramatic impression such as comes to many a visitor. When
these dead awaken! _If_ these dead were to awaken, were to come back to
us here and now! How would they think and feel about what they would
see? What would they say and do?
Well--
“So that was how I got my start.” True enough, for the real start comes
in the impulse, doesn’t it? After that has been felt intervals hardly
matter....
_Cross Currents_ was successful and Mrs. Porter was persuaded to write a
sequel, _The Turn of the Tide_. She had developed a habit, now fixed, of
clipping from newspapers and magazines bits of news, comments, whatnot,
that were significant to her. These she filed, filed and card indexed.
One day she saw in some magazine four lines expressing wonder as to what
would happen, if feminine influence came into the home life of three
bachelors.
From those four lines, or rather, from the idea in them, came _Miss
Billy_; and from _Miss Billy_ came _Miss Billy’s Decision_ and _Miss
Billy--Married_. Not immediately; Mrs. Porter filed the clipping. She
thought vaguely that perhaps, maybe, some day, she would write a short
story--only a short story--based on the idea in this sentence or so....
_Pollyanna_--
So many think of Mrs. Porter only as the author of _Pollyanna_--they are
not her real readers who know better!--that it is much fairer to her and
ourselves to consider her other books. After the Pollyanna stories came
_Just David_, easily accounted for. Mrs. Porter says that her thoughts
had often played around the idea of a child brought up to know only what
is good. You shudder, or laugh. Good heavens, don’t you wish that _you_
could have been spared some of the things you were brought up to know?
At the bottom of your acquired attitude is there no faint wistfulness,
no trace of longing for something once loved and lost--not awhile but
forever?
David is the only son of a violinist. After his mother’s death the
father carries the boy to a cabin in the mountains. Six years afterward
he is brought to a quiet country town--a lad in love with music, with
birds and flowers.
“Mr. and Mrs. Holly, more than ever now, were learning to look at the
world through David’s eyes. One day--one wonderful day--they went to
walk in the woods with the boy; and whenever before had Simon Holly left
his work for so frivolous a thing as to walk in the woods!
“It was not accomplished without a struggle, as David could have told.
All the morning David urged and begged. If for once, just once, they
would leave everything and come, they would not regret it, he was sure.
But they shook their heads and said, ‘No, no, impossible.’ In the
afternoon the pies were done and the potatoes dug and David urged and
pleaded again. And to please the boy they went.
“It was a curious walk. Ellen Holly trod softly with timid feet. She
threw hurried, frightened glances from side to side. It was plain that
Ellen Holly did not know how to play. Simon Holly stalked at her elbow,
stern, silent and preoccupied. It was plain that Simon Holly not only
did not know how to play, but did not care to find out.
“The boy tripped along ahead and talked. He had the air of a monarch
displaying his kingdom. Here was a flower that was like a story for
interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth telling. Even
Simon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly
picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch;
and then, in answer to Mrs. Holly’s murmured, ‘But, David, where is the
difference? They look so much alike,’ had said:
“‘Oh, but they are not. Just see how much more pointed at the top this
fir is than that spruce back there; and the branches grow straight out,
too, like arms, and they are all smooth and tapering at the end like a
pussy-cat’s tail. But the spruce back there--its branches turned down
and out--didn’t you notice?--and they are all bushy at the end like a
squirrel’s tail. Oh, they’re lots different.
“‘That’s a larch way ahead--that one with the branches all scraggly and
close down to the ground. I could start to climb that easy, but I
couldn’t that pine over there. See, it’s way up before there is a place
for your feet! But I love pines. Up there on the mountain, where I
lived, the pines were so tall that it seemed as if God used them
sometimes to hold up the sky.’
“And Simon Holly heard, and said nothing, and that he did say
nothing--especially nothing in answer to David’s confident assertions
concerning celestial and terrestrial architecture--only goes to show how
well, indeed, the man was learning to look at the world through David’s
eyes....”
“If the characters are true, the story tells itself,” says Mrs. Porter.
“The plot comes very easily after I get some leading idea which I wish
to work out. It is sometimes months after I have something in mind
before I have carried the idea along far enough to begin writing. The
ideas for novels come from careful observation and wide reading.
“No, I would not say that novels are written by inspiration. I call it
enthusiasm. And unless the writer has enthusiasm while writing a novel I
think the indifference is bound to show in the story.”
Her own enthusiasm holds her to the task, carries her through the year
she devotes to a book, enables her sometimes to write steadily for eight
or nine hours and then spend an evening with her heavy correspondence.
Her enthusiasm, a steady flame, burns to the end; and then her
exhaustion does not matter. The task is done.
Without an idea--a crisp, definite, interesting idea is always there,
whether you like her novels or no--without an idea Mrs. Porter won’t
write. But when she begins to write she has much more than the idea.
She has a synopsis written out. She couldn’t work without one, she says.
And to that synopsis she sticks pretty closely. “For I must see my aim,”
she explains, “I must have every part of the story bear definitely
toward the object. The synopsis of _Pollyanna_ differs very little from
the completed story. However, the glad game was not in the synopsis.
That did invent itself--in the second chapter. And of course various
characters always have a way of sort of writing themselves in, and new
scenes and incidents suggest themselves as the book grows.”
Does Mrs. Porter preach? Not by intention. She abhors the notion of
trying to. She does believe that “the idea of happiness should be held
up to people. But I do not attempt to preach happiness,” she adds
hastily. “I make my characters as simple and natural as possible. If the
characters are sufficiently vivid, if they are true, they can say a lot
of things that no author could say directly without being charged with
sermonizing.”
Oho! remarks the critic, Mrs. Porter thinks that if she puts her
preaching into the mouths of her persons she can escape the charge of
sermonizing. Wrong. Mrs. Porter does not say that. She does declare that
_if the characters are true_ they can say things that, from the author,
would be mere preaching. Truth in your people comes first, must always
be first; if they are true they can, and probably will, not only say but
do many things with a moral in them. Why, aren’t we always reading a
moral out of--or into--every other thing we hear our neighbors say or
see them do?
The critic has another quarrel with Eleanor Porter. He accuses her of
“evasive idealism” and “sham optimism” in her stories. Let her answer
him:
“Just why the ‘realities of life’ should always mean the filth and
brambles, sticks and stones and stumbling blocks of our daily pathway I
have never understood,” she cries. “But such seems to be the case. To
most critics there are evidently no pleasantly agreeable, decent
qualities of life. But I believe that there are, and these realities may
lend themselves to just as sincere and direct an interpretation of life
as may the other kind.
“There is a blue sky, there is a warm sun, and there are birds that sing
in the treetops. Then why should their presence be unnoticed--sometimes?
That is certainly not a sugary philosophy utterly without a basis in
logic or human experience. I realize that this sort of thing can be
overdone, but still contend that always to look at the hole instead of
the doughnut is not only very foolish--but very detrimental to one’s
digestion.”
Bravo! A simple, straightforward and unstudied rejoinder, that! And if
the critic says that he is only asking for “both realities” let us
demand of him why he praised the “artistry” of those dark Russian novels
of muck and insanity--and nothing else. He must condemn them for their
worse one-sidedness ere we listen to another word from him. Moreover, we
have, we must confess, whatever our personal tastes in fiction, always
enough and too many of the specialists in gloom; never quite enough of
the purveyors of cheerfulness.
You may feel a possibly irrational prejudice against the child that
cheers, as Pollyanna or David, but if you do not find absorbing the
situation in a “grown-up” novel like _The Road to Understanding_ it is
your fault, not Eleanor Porter’s. Here is the son of a very rich man who
has always had his way and so takes it headlong in the matter of
marrying his aunt’s nursegirl. She is not fitted to make him happy. They
are separated--never mind how. The husband thinks of it as a “vacation”
for his wife and the baby girl and has no idea that the breach may be
semi-permanent. The wife makes it so. She goes to a friend of her
husband and begs him to enable her to become in education, in tastes, in
deportment fit to be Burke Denby’s wife. And she persuades him to it.
Her whereabouts, the whereabouts of herself and Burke Denby’s little
daughter, is so simply and effectually concealed, that the husband never
gets trace of them. What Helen Denby has set out to do is rather
impossible as regards herself, she acknowledges that; but with the
passage of years and constant association with well-bred people she does
very largely acquire the things she lacked. Yes, years! It is an idea
and it is certainly a situation. This is no place to give away a
denouement but--they are brought together again.
An idea just as ingenious is the foundation of Mrs. Porter’s amusing
_Oh, Money! Money!_ It is the attempt of Mr. Stanley G. Fulton,
possessor of twenty millions of dollars, to find out how some of his
heirs will spend money after he is dead. They are three distant cousins
and each of them receives a trustee’s check for $100,000. Then plain
John Smith appears among them and watches results. He also learns a
thing or two and finds a wife in a woman of middle age (or more) whose
humorous wisdom is aptly summed up by her remark that “if you don’t know
how to get happiness out of five dollars, you won’t know how to get it
out of five thousand. For it isn’t the money that does things; it’s the
man behind the money.”
Sell? Of course books like this sell! You don’t have to be a
psychologist to grasp and subscribe to the six reasons for a big sale,
advanced by the publishers just before the publication of _Oh, Money!
Money!_--six reasons whose validity has been sufficiently proved as
these lines are being written, with proofs piling up hour by hour. Here
they are:
1. It deals with the most interesting subject in the world--the getting
and spending of money.
2. The story of three families--cousins--who unexpectedly receive
$100,000 each from an unknown relative, will strike a responsive chord,
in every reader’s heart and set every reader thinking how _he_ would
spend the money.
3. It has the same quality that has made Cinderella the most popular of
all fairy tales, the joy of watching a girl who has never been fairly
treated come out on top in spite of all odds.
4. The scene is laid in a little village and the whole book is a gem of
country life and shrewd Yankee philosophy.
5. There is a charming love theme with a happy ending.
6. And, above all, the story teaches an unobtrusive lesson that will
appeal to every one of Mrs. Porter’s readers; the lesson that happiness
must come from within, and that money cannot buy it.
* * * * *
Eleanor Hodgman Porter died on May 21, 1920.
BOOKS BY ELEANOR H. PORTER
_Cross Currents_, 1907.
_The Turn of the Tide_, 1908.
_The Story of Marco_, 1911.
_Miss Billy_, 1911.
_Miss Billy’s Decision_, 1912.
_Pollyanna_, 1913.
_Miss Billy--Married_, 1914.
_Pollyanna Grows Up_, 1915.
_Just David_, 1916.
_The Road to Understanding_, 1917.
_Oh, Money! Money!_ 1918.
_Dawn_, 1919.
_Mary-Marie_, 1919.
_Sister Sue_, 1921.
_The first two books were published by W. A. Wilde, Boston; the books
about Miss Billy and Pollyanna by the Page Company, Boston; the last six
books by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._
CHAPTER X
KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
Once Kate Douglas Wiggin, at a fair held in the grounds of Lord Darnley,
in County Meath, Ireland, visited a crystal gazer “imported from Dublin
for the occasion.”
“You have many children,” said the seer.
“I have no children,” Mrs. Wiggin replied.
“But I see them; they are coming, still coming. O, so many little ones;
they are clinging to you; you are surrounded by them,” the woman
declared, her eyes on the ball. “They are children of a relative? No?...
I cannot understand. I _see them_.”
They left her puzzled and frowning. Perhaps she never will know how
wonderfully right was her vision.
“Little, lame Patsy and the angelic Carol; the mirth-provoking tribe of
the Ruggleses; brave Timothy and bewitching Lady Gay; pathetic Marm Lisa
and the incorrigible twins, Atlantic and Pacific Simonson; blithe Polly
Oliver, with her genius for story-telling; Winsome Rebecca and the
faithful Emma Jane,--all these figures crowd about us, and claim their
places as everybody’s children.”
It is impossible to read Kate Douglas Wiggin, think of her or write
about her without emotion, the kind of emotion that it is good to feel.
The world is a brighter world because she has lived in it, a better
world because she has written for it. Does this sound horribly trite?
Nothing is trite which is deeply felt and words, though they may
indicate the channel, can with difficulty measure the depth or gauge the
emotional flow. You who have lost your enthusiasm with your illusions,
you whose channels of feeling have trickled dry, you who live in a
desert whose aridity responds only to intellectual dry farming--keep off
this chapter! But all of you millions who love children, who like simple
and durable humor, who are not too far from laughter or tears, who are
not ashamed of tenderness, do you, one and all (there are countless
millions of you!) stay with us for a half hour!
Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith, came of New England stock that bred
teachers and preachers and law-givers and developed those humane traits
which make charitable effort and philanthropism a matter of course, like
prayer or the pie which Emerson preferred for breakfast. She happens to
have been born in Philadelphia, September 28, 1859, the daughter of
Robert N. Smith, and Helen E. (Dyer) Smith, but all her youth was spent
east of the New York line. A rural childhood; then the fine old school
for girls, called Abbott Academy, at Andover, Massachusetts. At eighteen
her step-father’s health made imperative a removal to California. After
her graduation at Andover Kate Smith joined the family in Santa Barbara.
She had been trained to teach children; she was a mere girl when she was
called to direct the famous Silver Street kindergartens of San
Francisco. Through her efforts it was that the first free kindergartens
for poor children were organized in California. She knew the methods of
Froebel and has done as much as any one in this country to secure their
spread and adoption. First as a kindergartner and then as a training
teacher her enthusiasm, her gift for leadership, her personal charm made
others, young and old, her devoted friends. For the babies of Tar Flat
and the Barbary Coast and for the young women of cultivation who sought
to become teachers she had the same fascination. She is irresistible; if
she were not she could not be liked and loved in New England as she is
at this day. Who else could gather the neighbors in Old Buxton
Meeting-House to hear, read aloud to them by the author from the
manuscript, stories of themselves and their apparently unremarkable
doings? With any one but Mrs. Wiggin the audience would be
self-conscious, detestably uncomfortable. But she is so soft-voiced, so
agreeable; she has so much sympathy and humor, is so pleasant to look
upon, is, in short, so “nice” and so neighborly that self-consciousness
is out of the question. Besides, you can be proud of her.... And you
are.
Old Buxton Meeting-House is in Maine, and it is in Maine, in the village
of Hollis, that the people of whom Mrs. Wiggin writes grow into being.
Her home is called Quillcote and from a cool green study where she works
she can hear the song of the Saco River and look through latticed
windows by her desk to where the shining weather-vane, a golden quill,
swings on the roof of the old barn. It is a quaint and ancient dwelling
of colonial date and colonial style set among arching elms. The village
is not a summer resort but a dreaming settlement on the banks of the
Saco. As it flows past the Quillcote elms the river widens into a lake.
A few rods below the house it has a fall. Below the fall for a mile or
so there is “foaming, curving, prancing white water.” It is the Saco,
placid and turbulent, which runs through _Timothy’s Quest_ and _Rebecca_
and _Rose o’ the River_.
Quillcote’s important structure, like the home of H. G. Wells’s Mr.
Britling, is the barn. We can believe that the builder would not
recognize it, aside from the weather-vane. It is what, in the jargon of
the day, is known as a “community center.” Years ago all the interior
was ripped out. A new floor was laid, casement windows were cut in and
the place took on the semblance of a rustic hall. Alone untampered with,
the great century-old rafters, hewn of stout-hearted oak and strong as
ever, remain in position. The barn walls were brushed down but left
their hue of tawny brown. Other old barns were stripped to supply
fish-hook hinges, suitably antique; ancient latches, decorative horns of
the moose. Solid settles were constructed of old boards weathered to a
silver gray. Old lanterns fitted with candles were hung from harness
pegs about the walls. The old grain-chest, piled high with cushions,
stands at one end of the big oblong room. “Wide doors open at the back
into a field of buttercups and daisies.” They still dance the square
dances on the threshing floor.
Biography is pointless if it does not build us a picture; and once we
have our picture who cares for dates and a chronicle of the years? In
the girl in New England, the young woman kindergartner in San Francisco,
the visitor to Ireland (and England and Scotland), the writer reading
from her manuscript in Old Buxton Meeting-House, the festival-bringer of
the Quillcote barn you have Kate Douglas Wiggin, born a Smith; you have
very completely and with a delightful authenticity the creator of all
those hosts of happy children, children sometimes sad, sometimes grieved
but always as certain of happiness as they are of sunshine;--you have
the Penelope who found the humors of foreign travel which more
pretentious humorists coming later could merely copy; you have the
perceptive and sympathetic heart which saw the Christmas romance of _The
Old Peabody Pew_. You ask no more. You ask only to be allowed to recall
with a changing but invariable pleasure the dozens of tales in which she
has shared with you her feelings about life.
Do you remember the Penelope books? Do you _remember_! Somehow,
_Penelope’s Progress_, wherein we accompany Salemina, Francesca and
Penelope through Scotland, has always seemed a bit the best. Page 2,
please:
“On arriving in New York, Francesca discovered that the young lawyer
whom for six months she had been advising to marry somebody ‘more worthy
than herself’ was at last about to do it. This was somewhat in the
nature of a shock, for Francesca has been in the habit, ever since she
was seventeen, of giving her lovers similar advice, and up to this time
no one of them has ever taken it. She therefore has had the not
unnatural hope, I think, of organizing at one time or another all those
disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood; and
perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband and
calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks were
filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to remember their
Creator with such assiduity that they might, in time, forget Her.”
Frank Stockton could be as funny as that. Mark Twain might have written
the close of the first chapter, where Francesca and Penelope, heads bent
over a genealogical table of the English kings, try to decide whether
“b. 1665” means born or beheaded. Irvin Cobb, shaking our sides with his
discussion of English pronunciation of proper names, and gravely
referring to a Norwegian fjord (“pronounced by the English, Ferguson”)
was anticipated by nearly twenty years when Mrs. Wiggin wrote:
“On the ground floor are the Misses Hepburn-Sciennes (pronounced
Hebburn-Sheens); on the floor above us are Miss Colquhoun (Cohoon) and
her cousin Miss Cockburn-Sinclair (Coburn-Sinkler). As soon as the
Hepburn-Sciennes depart, Mrs. M’Collop expects Mrs. Menzies of
Kilconquhar, of whom we shall speak as Mrs. Mingess of Kinyukkar.”
_Marm Lisa_ is graced with the presence of S. Cora Grubb, as well as the
youthful Atlantic and Pacific Simonson. Have we not yet with us such
places as Mrs. Grubb’s Unity Hall, the Meeting-Place of the Order of
Present Perfection? We have. On the wall was “an ingenious pictorial
representation of the fifty largest cities of the world, with the
successful establishment of various regenerating ideas indicated by
colored disks of paper neatly pasted on the surface.” Blue was for
Temperance, green for the Single Tax, orange, Cremation; red, Abolition
of War; purple, Vegetarianism; yellow, Hypnotism; black, Dress Reform;
blush rose, Social Purity; silver, Theosophy; magenta, Religious
Liberty; and, somewhat inappropriately, crushed strawberry denoted that
in this spot the Emancipation of Women had made a forward stride. It was
left for a small gold star to signify the progress of the Eldorado face
powder, S. Cora Grubb, sole agent.
The cat ’Zekiel in _The Old Peabody Pew_:
“’Zekiel had lost his tail in a mowing-machine; ’Zekiel had the asthma,
and the immersion of his nose in milk made him sneeze, so he was wont to
slip his paw in and out of the dish and lick it patiently for five
minutes together. Nancy often watched him pityingly, giving him kind and
gentle words to sustain his fainting spirit, but to-night she paid no
heed to him, although he sneezed violently to attract her attention.”
The sensation when, after the ringing of the last bell, Nancy Wentworth
walked up the aisle on Justin Peabody’s arm, is conveyed by some
parentheses of the comment later in the day. The two had taken their
seats side by side in the old family pew.
“(‘And consid’able close, too, though there was plenty o’ room!’)
“(‘And no one that I ever heard of so much as suspicioned that they had
ever kept company!’)
“(‘And do you s’pose she knew Justin was expected back when she scrubbed
his pew a-Friday?’)
“(‘And this explains the empty pulpit vases!’)
“(‘And I always said that Nancy would make a real handsome couple if she
ever got anybody to couple with!’)”
The boastful old man, Turrible Wiley, in _Rose o’ the River_:
“‘I remember once I was smokin’ my pipe when a jam broke under me. ’Twas
a small jam, or what we call a small jam on the Kennebec,--only about
three hundred thousand pine logs. The first thing I knowed, I was
shootin’ back an’ forth in the b’ilin’ foam, hangin’ on t’ the end of a
log like a spider. My hands was clasped round the log, and I never lost
control o’ my pipe. They said I smoked right along, jest as cool an’
placid as a pond-lily.’
“‘Why’d you quit drivin’?’ inquired Ivory.
“‘My strength wa’n’t ekal to it,’ Mr. Wiley responded sadly. ‘I was all
skin, bones, an’ nerve....
“‘I’ve tried all kinds o’ labor. Some of ’em don’t suit my liver, some
disagrees with my stomach, and the rest of ’em has vibrations.’”
In January, 1911, over 2,000,000 copies of Mrs. Wiggin’s books had been
sold; to-day the total is probably approaching 3,000,000. The most
popular of her books is _Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_, which has been
likened, in explanation of its popularity, to _Little Women_. But no
explanation is necessary. Rebecca is entirely, naturally human. Whether
she is perplexing her aunts or telling Miss Dearborn that she can’t
write about nature and slavery, having really nothing to say about
either; whether she is making her report on the missionaries’ children
“all born under Syrian skies,” or aweing Emma Jane with original ideas,
or helping the Simpsons, with the aid of Mr. Aladdin, to acquire a
wonderful lamp;--at all times, at every moment Rebecca Rowena Randall
reminds us of the youngsters we have known, and perhaps, a little, of
the youngsters we were once ourselves.
The triumph of naturalness, the perfect fidelity to the life of the
child; these explain _Rebecca_ and _Rebecca’s_ success, signalized less
in the selling of hundreds of thousands of copies, in the acting of the
play made from the book for months and months and months, than in the
joyous recognition with which Mrs. Wiggin’s heroine was greeted. Rebecca
inditing the couplet:
“When Joy and Duty clash
Let Duty go to smash”--
Rebecca playing on the tinkling old piano, “Wild roved an Indian girl,
bright Alfarata,” Rebecca doing this, thinking that, saying the thing
that needs to be said--generous, romantic, resourceful and brighter than
her surroundings--is a person it does us all good to know. Copies of the
book in libraries are read to shreds. The world, which can see through
any sham, loves this story. The world is right. To learn, in the words
of one of Conrad’s heroes, to live, to love and to put your trust in
life is all that matters. Mrs. Wiggin shows us how.
BOOKS BY KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
_The Birds’ Christmas Carol_, 1886.
_The Story of Patsy_, 1889.
_A Summer in a Canyon_, 1889.
_Timothy’s Quest_, 1890.
_The Story Hour_, 1890. (With Nora A. Smith, her sister.)
_Children’s Rights_, 1892. (With Nora A. Smith.)
_A Cathedral Courtship_ and _Penelope’s English Experiences_, 1893.
_Polly Oliver’s Problem_, 1893.
_The Village Watch-Tower_, 1895.
_Froebel’s Gifts_, 1895. (With Nora A. Smith.)
_Froebel’s Occupations_, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)
_Kindergarten Principles and Practice_, 1896. (With Nora A. Smith.)
_Marm Lisa_, 1896.
_Nine Love Songs, And A Carol_, 1896. (Music by Mrs.
Wiggin to words by Herrick, Sill, and others.)
_Penelope’s Progress_, 1898.
_Penelope’s Scottish Experiences_, 1900.
_Penelope’s Irish Experiences_, 1901.
_The Diary of a Goose Girl_, 1902.
_Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_, 1903.
_The Affair at the Inn_, 1904. (With Mary and Jane
Findlater and Allan McAulay.)
_Rose o’ the River_, 1905.
_New Chronicles of Rebecca_, 1907.
_Finding a Home_, 1907.
_The Flag Raising_, 1907.
_The Old Peabody Pew_, 1907.
_Susanna and Sue_, 1909.
_Robinetta_, 1911. (With Mary and Jane Findlater and Allan McAulay.)
_Mother Carey’s Chickens_, 1911.
_A Child’s Journey With Dickens_, 1912.
_The Story of Waitstill Baxter_, 1913.
_Penelope’s Postscripts_, 1915.
_The Romance of a Christmas Card_, 1916.
_Golden Numbers_, 1917.
_The Posy Ring_, 1917.
_Ladies in Waiting_, 1919.
_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._
CHAPTER XI
MARY JOHNSTON
“Didn’t you ever notice, Aunt Lucy,” asks Molly Cary on page 32 of Mary
Johnston’s novel, _The Long Roll_, “how everybody really belongs in a
book?”
It is the very question Mary Johnston herself has been asking these
twenty years, ever since _Prisoners of Hope_ announced to the world the
advent of a new American writer, a woman, to whom it would be necessary
to pay respectful attention, to whom it would be wise to give that
special admiration reserved for the artist regardless of sex or
nativity. Everybody really does belong in a book, especially Mary
Johnston in a book upon American women novelists! Prepare, then, for a
discursive chapter. Prepare to consider literary genius. Miss Johnston
has something, or several things, which no amount of analysis can
entirely label and no consideration of circumstances wholly account for.
She is the most dramatic of American women writers. Do you remember the
ending of the first chapter of _To Have and To Hold_? A shipload of
maidens, “fair and chaste, but meanly born,” has arrived at Jamestown,
Virginia, in the early days of that settlement. A friend traveling by
has told Ralph Percy about it and counseled him to go to town and get
him a wife. Percy rejects the idea, but his friend passing on he finds
himself alone and lonely in a cheerless house. He tries to read Master
Shakespeare’s plays and cannot. Idly he begins dicing. His mind goes
back to the English manorhouse that had been his home.
“To-morrow would be my thirty-sixth birthday. All the numbers that I
cast were high. ‘If I throw ambs-ace,’ I said, with a smile for my own
caprice, ‘curse me if I do not take Rolfe’s advice!’
“I shook the box and clapped it down upon the table, then lifted it, and
stared with a lengthening face at what it had hidden; which done, I
diced no more, but put out my lights and went soberly to bed.”
Still more dramatic because it makes a greater demand upon the reader’s
imagination, requiring him to picture for himself the ceaseless
self-torture of a murderer, is the ending of _Lewis Rand_. Rand has
killed Ludwell Cary and has not been found out. At length he walks into
the sheriff’s office. When the news gets abroad “the boy who minded the
sheriff’s door found himself a hero, and the words treasured that fell
from his tongue.” The last words of the book are as follows:
“‘Fairfax Cary [brother of the slain man] was in the court room
yesterday when he [Rand] was committed. He [Fairfax Cary] and Lewis Rand
spoke to each other, but no one heard what they said.’
“The boy came to the front again. ‘I didn’t hear much that morning
before Mr. Garrett [the sheriff] sent me away, but I heard why he [Rand]
gave himself up. I thought it wasn’t much of a reason----’
“The crowd pressed closer, ‘What was it, Michael, what was it?’
“‘It sounds foolish,’ answered the boy, ‘but I’ve got it right. He said
he must have sleep.’”
The funeral of Stonewall Jackson in the last pages of _The Long Roll_:
“Beneath arching trees, by houses of mellow red brick, houses of pale
gray stucco, by old porches and ironwork balconies, by wistaria and
climbing roses and magnolias with white chalices, the long procession
bore Stonewall Jackson. By St. Paul’s they bore him, by Washington and
the great bronze men in his company, by Jefferson and Marshall, by Henry
and Mason, by Lewis and Nelson. They bore him over the greensward to the
Capitol steps, and there the hearse stopped. Six generals lifted the
coffin, Longstreet going before. The bells tolled and the Dead March
rang, and all the people on the green slopes of the historic place
uncovered their heads and wept. The coffin, high-borne, passed upward
and between the great, white, Doric columns. It passed into the Capitol
and into the Hall of the Lower House. Here it rested before the
Speaker’s Chair.
“All day Stonewall Jackson lay in state. Twenty thousand people, from
the President of the Confederacy to the last poor wounded soldier who
could creep hither, passed before the bier, looked upon the calm face,
the flag-enshrouded form, lying among lilies before the Speaker’s Chair,
in the Virginia Hall of Delegates, in the Capitol of the Confederacy.
All day the bells tolled, all day the minute guns were fired.
“A man of the Stonewall Brigade, pausing his moment before the dead
leader, first bent, then lifted his head. He was a scout, a blonde
soldier, tall and strong, with a quiet, studious face and sea-blue eyes.
He looked now at the vaulted roof as though he saw instead the sky. He
spoke in a controlled, determined voice. ‘What Stonewall Jackson always
said was just this: “_Press forward!_”’ He passed on.
“Presently in line came a private soldier of A. P. Hill’s, a young man
like a beautiful athlete from a frieze, an athlete who was also a
philosopher. ‘Hail, great man of the past!’ he said. ‘If to-day you
consort with Cæsar, tell him we still make war.’ He, too, went on.
“Others passed, and then there came an artilleryman, a gunner of the
Horse Artillery. Gray-eyed, broad-browed, he stood his moment and gazed
upon the dead soldier among the lilies. ‘Hooker yet upon the
Rappahannock,’ he said. ‘We must have him across the Potomac, and we
must ourselves invade Pennsylvania.’”
So ends the book with a dramatic height which it is not in human power
to surpass because it ends nothing. We forget rather frequently that it
is of the essence of drama that _things go on_. A play or a book which
leaves us with the sense of utter completion, with the feeling that
nothing more happens or can happen, falls short of the highest dramatic
effect which is that of continuity of life and action, with various
events--bitter, happy, tragic and glorious--marking so many stages of an
unending record. The last words of _The Long Roll_ are worthy of the
greatest of Miss Johnston’s tales.
The sense of the dramatic cannot be acquired. It must be born in a
writer and if he have it he will apply it unfailingly to all possible
material that comes his way. Miss Johnston’s possession of this sense is
one element of her genius--perhaps the most important. The second
element is her creative imagination, equally innate. To have to use
terms of this sort is a pity, but let us see just what her “creative
imagination” is.
If you will turn to her book _The Wanderers_ you will find that it is a
series of nineteen chapters, each unrelated to the others except in the
underlying theme, the relationship of men and women. This relationship
is pictured at various times and places in the world’s history, from the
period when the human race knew not the uses of fire to the days of the
French Revolution. Now for the earlier chapters of this book there were
no historical records to which Miss Johnston could turn for an idea of
how men and women lived in those days; she is dealing with ages before
recorded history began. No doubt she got what she could out of the
scientists, the anthropologists and others who seek for the truth of the
human race’s beginnings. But scientific facts, head measurements, skull
conformations, ingenious theories based on the cave man’s drawings, are
one thing and a picture of life as it was lived tens of thousands of
years ago is quite another. How evoke the picture?
Well, we can’t tell you _how_ it is done, for if that could be told the
manner could be copied and we should many of us be able to write such
chapters as open _The Wanderers_. All we can be certain of is this, that
Miss Johnston was able to place herself in the surroundings of a
primitive woman of the treefolk--so much was the first imaginative step.
And having taken this first step she was able to create the moments and
hours of that creature’s existence, to imagine her thoughts and her
actions with respect to the things about her. That is what we mean by
creative imagination. There is a good deal less of it in story-telling
than is generally supposed. For the world has no idea of the extent to
which novels and tales of all kinds are merely autobiographical, or
reminiscent of scenes and persons, emotions and traits, once known. What
is recalled is not imagined nor even invented. A person may be lifelike,
wonderfully done, convincing, typical, true, and yet not be anything but
a patchwork from an actual past. He is neither imagined nor created and
a certain amount of re-creation involving only a small amount of
imagination, or even none at all, is the only actual contribution of his
author.
All this is very didactic but inescapable in the consideration of a
serious artist like Mary Johnston. She has the acutely dramatic sense,
she has imagination and a creative imagination at that; what else has
she? Nothing that may not be gained by the most patient striving. These
two qualities, these two never-to-be-acquired gifts, these two born
endowments are the sole attributes of literary genius. All the rest--an
almost boundless capacity for study, for digging up detail, for
documenting one’s self; a racy and enriched style; a faculty for reading
the essentials of character and putting them sharply on paper; a knack
at humor skillfully distilled throughout the pages; a mastery of
poignancy and the art of touching to tears--these are to be had for
taking pains, infinite and unresting pains. It may be said that they
will never be gained without the possession of a conscience scrupulous
to the nth degree and that such a conscience must be born in one. True,
but thousands have it. They become fine artists, we acknowledge them as
such; but confuse them with the geniuses we never do!
Well, but! exclaims the reader, granted Miss Johnston’s genius, let us
see the woman! At once, at once! with the preliminary caution that
interesting and instructive as the picture will be the inexplicable will
be always a part of it. Why, we think we have made clear. Abandoning
further transcendentalism let us turn our eyes to Virginia.
_The Long Roll_ starts with the reading of the Botetourt Resolutions and
it was in Buchanan, a village of Botetourt county, Virginia, that Mary
Johnston, the daughter of John William Johnston and Elizabeth Alexander
Johnston, was born on November 21, 1870. The Blue Ridge Mountains
shadowed the town, which had been partly burned some six years earlier,
the home of the Johnstons being one of many destroyed by the sweep of
civil war. Three miles away ran a railroad. A stage-coach and canal
boats joined Buchanan of the ’70s to the rest of the State and country.
The village is unrecognizable now. It had a boom. There are two
railroads. The old homes are in decay. The old families are spread afar.
The girl was frail and had to be educated at home. Her grandmother, a
Scotchwoman, first taught her and afterward an aunt took her in hand.
Major Johnston had a sizable library in which his daughter conducted
her own explorations. Histories fascinated her. As she grew older
governesses were employed. She did not go to school until she was
sixteen and then for less than three months. The family had just moved
to Birmingham, Alabama, at the behest of the father’s business and
professional interests. Miss Johnston had been packed off to a finishing
school in Atlanta. Her health could not stand it and she was brought
home where, a year later, her mother died.
Major Johnston, a lawyer and ex-member of the Virginia Legislature, was
interested in Southern railroads and had a hand in the beginnings of
some of the business enterprises which give Birmingham its present
industrial importance. The death of the mother left him with several
children of whom Mary Johnston was the eldest. Upon her fell the
direction of the household. It has been thought worthy of remark, in
view of Miss Johnston’s activities as a suffragist, that she _can_ keep
house. She has not done so in later years for the very good reason that
she has not had to. We come to that a little later, however.
Her writing was for some time done at no particular hour and in no
especial place, but a good deal of it in the open air. Her first novel,
_Prisoners of Hope_, published when she was twenty-eight, was begun
while she was living at the San Remo in New York; and she wrote a large
part of it in a quiet corner in Central Park. _To Have and To Hold_,
appearing two years later and constituting a great popular success, was
begun in Birmingham and completed mainly at a small Virginia mountain
resort. The first draft was written with a lead pencil and revised with
exceeding thoroughness, after which it was typewritten.
Major Johnston’s death sent his daughter to Richmond, where she made her
home at 110 East Franklin street with her sisters, Eloise and Elizabeth
Johnston, as the other members of the household. Miss Johnston’s father
indubitably did a great deal to make possible _The Long Roll_ and _Cease
Firing_, her epics of the Civil War. Leaving aside the question of
inherited traits and tastes we have to reflect that the father had
served in the Confederate army throughout the whole war, gaining
promotion to major in the artillery branch. He was wounded many times.
He had not been a fire-eater nor an extreme partisan and it was not easy
to get him to talk about the war. When he was launched on the subject
his excellent military knowledge and his gift for vivid description
enabled him to tell a wonderful story. He comprehended strategy and
tactics; knew the personal bravery of the leaders on both sides; had
seen nearly every aspect of the struggle. His daughter profited.
In Richmond, in the pleasant three-story “city” house with wisteria over
the white porch columns, with microphylla rose vines, crinkled pink
crape-myrtle and blossoming magnolias, Miss Johnston worked in a large,
airy room fronting southeast and on the second floor. It was full of
antique mahogany, books and pictures and not infrequently of friends
come in for tea and grouped about a tea table. These invasions were
possible in the afternoon. In the morning when the room was sunny Miss
Johnston was busy writing or reading proofs or dictating; she had begun
to dictate much of her work and afterward, at Warm Springs, Virginia,
where she went to work upon _The Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_, the
rattle of typewriters came to the ears of visitors to the resort like a
faint crackling of musketry, an echo of that conflict which they were
busied to portray.
Miss Johnston began early to travel. She has spent winters in Egypt,
springs in Italy, Southern France; summers in England and Scotland;
Sicily, Switzerland and Paris are part of her experience. These journeys
have been partly a matter of health. It must never be forgotten in
estimating Miss Johnston’s achievement that, as with Stevenson, it has
been a continual struggle with illness that she has had to go through.
Her will has driven her on. Perhaps, as where electricity encounters
high resistance, the result has been a brighter, more incandescent
flame.
With Richmond as a base the author made many excursions to Virginia
resorts, but chiefly to Warm Springs. The cottage that she occupied
there was at one time occupied by General Lee. _Lewis Rand_ was written
on its porch; later she worked there on her Civil War novels. Eventually
she built herself a home called Three Hills on a slope half a mile away
from Warm Springs and above the hollow in which the settlement lies. Off
to the south from Three Hills curves the road to Hot Springs. Do not
confuse Warm Springs and Hot Springs, known locally as “The Warm” and
“The Hot” and distinguishable because The Warm is hotter than The Hot!
Three Hills is a witness to a certain recovery of health for its owner,
making it possible for Miss Johnston at last to have a permanent home.
There are forty-odd acres, mostly left as nature has disposed them, with
here and there a few stone steps to help you up a slope. The house is
large, roomy, with enclosed porches and sleeping porches, with segments
and adjuncts which make it a large L. Miss Johnston’s study gives upon a
formal garden centered about a sundial and bird bath of carved stone.
Neat brick walks go between hedge plants sent by friends in Holland.
Flowers execute the processional of the seasons.
Steps and porches of red brick are set almost level with the grass. The
broad hall runs back to the garden and gives upon the study and the sun
parlor. Eloise Johnston is her sister’s house director. There are jam
closets, linen closets and a cedar room. Walled off from the garden are
the kitchen and servants’ dining-room. The servants, in the style of the
South, live in their own cottages. The hospitality of an older South is
maintained without abatement.
In a loose cloak, with a stout stick, Miss Johnston tramps the Virginia
hills. It is recreation, perhaps, but her mind is always at work. When
her body is at work also she sits at a mahogany desk in the study, a
cluttered desk, with an apple within reach of her free hand. Panes of
leaded glass about the room protect books of every description--history,
philosophy, science, most of the literature of suffrage and feminism--a
battalion, a regiment of volumes. In one corner two large globes, one
terrestrial, the other astronomical; elsewhere a microscope; on the
walls and mantel shelf copies of favorite pictures and photographs of
many friends. The beautiful old chest that used to house a grandmother’s
linen is full of old magazines and newspapers, ammunition for the
author.
Sooner or later someone will undertake the interesting task of going
through Virginia and identifying the sites of Miss Johnston’s stories. A
beginning was made by Alice M. Tyler, writing in the _Book News Monthly_
of March, 1911.
“_Prisoners of Hope_, _To Have and to Hold_ and _Audrey_ are full of
allusions to people, places and events that must cause the least
impressionable nature to thrill with patriotic and State pride. Visitors
to Jamestown have a newborn desire to pause beside the ruins of a
dwelling house where a young daughter of the Jacquelines greeted her
guests before going abroad to keep her birthday fête upon the greensward
in Audrey’s day. At Williamsburg is pointed out a crumbling edifice that
in its day represented the earliest theater in the United States, the
one in which Audrey played to the gentry who came from the surrounding
country with their wives and daughters, eager to witness the antics of
the player folk. In the same Old World capital is Bruton Church,
representing the scene of another episode in Audrey’s life.
“Higher up James River by some miles is Westover, the home of Audrey’s
fair rival, Evelyn Byrd, whose pink brocade ball gown, a treasured
heirloom, recalls to mind the governor’s palace in Williamsburg and the
official function at which Audrey beheld the radiant Evelyn in the full
flush of her loveliness.
“_Lewis Rand_ is of a later date. In its pages the country of the upper
James and Richmond come equally into play. The June moon still streams
into the ballroom at beautiful Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson,
as it did when Rand, the untutored, practiced his steps in it, and was
admitted to confidential companionship and wardship by its owner. The
grasses still wave in the yard of old Saint John’s Church, Richmond,
where Lewis Rand’s wife and her sister worshiped and saw grouped about
them the quality of the town in what was then its most aristocratic
quarter. The site of the coffee-house on Main Street, where politicians
of Rand’s party assembled to hear the news and discuss the issues of the
times, can still be readily identified. But the tide of prosperity has
for years flowed away from Leigh Street section, where the town home of
the Rands was said to have been situated, in the midst of neighborly
souls who sent in hot dishes for supper on the arrival of Mistress Rand
and her husband from their country residence near the State University,
in Charlottesville.”
There is something to be done also in the way of pedigrees. Miss Unity
Dandridge, niece of Col. Churchill in _Lewis Rand_, was the mother of
Fauquier Cary in _The Long Roll_. The Churchills, the Carys and others
should be charted for us; places, estates, such as Fontenoy, Three Oaks,
Greenwood, Silver Hill, should be put beyond peradventure. A decent
Baedeker of Virginia will concern itself with all these things.
It is unnecessary and might be tedious to consider at length each of
Miss Johnston’s books. Until the publication of _Hagar_ in 1913 all her
work had been historical and had consisted, with the exception of _The
Goddess of Reason_, of novels whose scenes lay wholly or mostly in
Virginia. Her treatment was in the main chronological, the only
departure from this being her first two books. _Prisoners of Hope_
(1898) was a story of colonial Virginia beginning about 1663; _To Have
and To Hold_ (1900) is a romance of the Jamestown settlement starting in
1621. Then came _Audrey_ (1902) dealing with Virginia in the time of
Col. William Byrd and _Lewis Rand_ (1908) which pictured the Virginia of
Jefferson. _The Long Roll_ (1911) and _Cease Firing_ (1912) gave us the
State during the Civil War. There was another romance, _Sir Mortimer_,
between _Audrey_ and _Lewis Rand_, and before _The Goddess of Reason_,
which was perhaps as near a failure as Miss Johnston could come. Very
likely, as suggested by Meredith Nicholson in an article in the _Book
News Monthly_ of March, 1911, Miss Johnston’s preoccupation with the
poetic drama of the French Revolution which was to become _The Goddess
of Reason_ was to blame. _The Goddess of Reason_ gave her dramatic
genius full play; Julia Marlowe’s acting showed it to be something
better than a closet drama. In its breadth and splendor this work showed
Miss Johnston at her full power, the power which was to give us _The
Long Roll_ and _Cease Firing_ within the next five years.
Although in _The Witch_, her next novel after _Hagar_, our writer went
back to Colonial times it was to interpret the present in the light of
the past and to show with some of the psychological keenness of _Lewis
Rand_ and the dramatic action of her earlier books a panorama of
prejudice and persecution “spiritually overcome by gallant faith and
joy of living.” _The Fortunes of Garin_ (1915) was pure romance and
adventure set in Southern France of the time of the Crusades and colored
as richly as a tapestry. Garin, of a poor but noble family, ready for a
fight or a frolic, fights gloriously in the Holy Land and comes back to
France to fight as gloriously in a civil war. In time he finds that the
princess in whose defense and behalf he has been battling is the girl
whom he rescued from peril years before. Of _The Wanderers_ (1917) we
have already spoken. _Foes_ (1918) is a story of boyhood friendship
transformed into lasting hate. The setting is Scotland, before and after
the Stuart rebellion crushed at Culloden. The unusual and picturesque
story is superbly told in most poetic prose.
How Miss Johnston gets her effects may be illustrated, in closing, by
two examples from _The Long Roll_. Illustrated, we say, not _shown_ in
the sense of enabling any one else to get them. Unless you have her
dramatic and imaginative genius you will never be able to take raw
material of your own and work a similar magic! Here is Steve Dagg, the
coward:
“Steve again saw from afar the approach of the nightmare. It stood large
on the opposite bank of Abraham’s Creek, and he must go to meet it. He
was wedged between comrades--Sergeant Coffin was looking straight at him
with his melancholy, bad-tempered eyes--he could not fall out, drop
behind! The backs of his hands began to grow cold and his unwashed
forehead was damp beneath matted, red-brown elf locks. From considerable
experience he knew that presently sick stomach would set in.... Seized
with panic he bit a cartridge and loaded. The air was rocking;
moreover, with the heavier waves came a sharp _zzzz-ip_! _zzzzzz-ip_!
Heaven and earth blurred together, blended by the giant brush of eddying
smoke. Steve tasted powder, smelled powder. On the other side of the
fence, from a battery lower down the slope to the guns beyond him two
men were running--running very swiftly, with bent heads. They ran like
people in a pelting rain and between them they carried a large bag or
bundle, slung in an oilcloth. They were tall and hardy men, and they
moved with a curious air of determination. ‘Carrying powder! Gawd!
before I’d be sech a fool----’ A shell came, and burst--burst between
the two men. There was an explosion, ear-splitting, heart-rending. A
part of the fence was wrecked; a small cedar tree torn into kindling.
Steve put down his musket, laid his forehead upon the rail before him,
and vomited.”
We meet Stonewall Jackson for the first time in the novel’s pages:
“First Brigade headquarters was a tree--an especially big tree-a little
removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden
table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for.
At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J.
Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen
chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before
him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of
each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An
awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions about his
health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace,
romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and
feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce
and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the
idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had
fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and
formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He
drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the
sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blanch. A
blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders--down came
reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness
quite like Nature’s. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but
little sense of humor, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water
and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had
caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a rawboned nag named Little
Sorrel, he carried his saber in the oddest fashion, and said ‘oblike’
instead of ‘oblique.’ He found his greatest pleasure in going to the
Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the
week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something,
but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what it
promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these
were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic,
tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exactitude,
monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy
of the sepulcher, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his
staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an
implicitly of obedience which might have been in order with some great
and glorious captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly
the due of the late professor of natural philosophy and artillery
tactics at the Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper’s
Ferry, where, as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until
Johnston’s arrival, he had begun to bring order out of chaos and to
weave from a high-spirited rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was
to acknowledge remarkable; true, too, that on the second of July, in the
small affair with Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the
critics in the ranks not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling
Waters Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some
mental reservations, began to call him ‘Old Jack.’ The epithet implied
approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said--in fact,
they did say--that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”
Now it is perfectly easy to take to pieces these descriptions and the
other passages we have cited from Mary Johnston’s work. With a little
study you may see several things which go far to explain the
effectiveness of her passages, some of them things of which she was not
directly conscious in writing, things that her experience had taught her
and that she attended to automatically, almost without thought.
For example:--
Every word tells. Turn back to the first part of this chapter and notice
again in the account of Stonewall Jackson’s funeral how the focus is
narrowed. They bore the dead man past the immortal great and into the
Capitol, then into one room of the Capitol, and rested him before a
single object in that room. Your eye, which has been ranging widely, is
directed to a single point.
Immediately, in the next short paragraph, the opposite effect is struck
home. Your eye is lifted from “the calm face, the flag-enshrouded form,
lying among lilies” to the Speaker’s Chair, symbol of a people’s freedom
and self-rule, to the room in which the chair stands, the Virginia Hall
of Delegates, the forum of an historic and noble State, and then to the
building of which this room is a part, the Capitol of the Confederacy, a
league of States banded for a cause men will die for. The eye ranges
abroad and the mind of the reader grasps the greatness of that cause as
he knows its tragic sorrow.
Glance again at the ending of _Lewis Rand_. It is quiet but in the
unresolved chord sounded by the boy Michael’s words there is the
greatest possible spur to the reader’s imaginative faculty. “‘He said he
must have sleep.’” It is placed squarely upon you to construct the
picture of the murderer who could not, night or day, close his eyes and
lose himself from the secret terror.
Steven Dagg did not have chills up and down his spine. No familiar
unpleasant thrill was his but a dreadful cessation within, so that the
backs of his hands became cold. He knew he would be sick. And when the
shell burst between the two powder carriers he was incapable of feeling
at all; purely reflex physical action was the most that was possible
for him. Fancy his utter numbness! It was too absolute for hysteria; he
may be said for the instant to have had no nerves, no mind, no
consciousness that could be recognized as such.
The passage in which Miss Johnston acquaints us with Stonewall Jackson
has its secret in the precise, scrupulous, neat cataloguing of the man.
Every word that could be inflected into an expression of personal
opinion is absent. We see just those things about Jackson that those in
contact with him noted; some are what we ordinarily consider essentials
of description, some are beautifully irrelevant in estimating character.
But we are not now after Jackson’s character; it is not known! A gleam
in his eye was observable, but one “hardly knew what it promised.” Of
course not! If Miss Johnston, in the light of the present, were to tell
us she would destroy the interest we feel in the man. After knowing of
him vaguely only as a fine soldier we are making his acquaintance as a
queer old codger who may or may not have stuff in him. Of course the
fact that we have some historical knowledge of him handicaps us; we
can’t view him quite as uncertainly and humanly as his men. But Miss
Johnston brings us almost to their viewpoint; almost she makes us forget
that we know what is coming from the inarticulate figure sitting stiffly
under the big tree, sucking lemons for dyspepsia, going stiffly to
church, missing the point of the best joke facing the North. The final
touch to make us share his men’s incertitude is the strict report of
their verdict on him--“every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!”
* * * * *
It is a long and discursive chapter, as we warned you. So much there is
to be said about genius, so many ways of saying the same thing! Miss
Johnston’s novels had sold over 1,000,000 copies _before_ the
publication of _The Long Roll_, when she had only some six books to her
credit and of these only four of a character to make a wide appeal.
BOOKS BY MARY JOHNSTON
_Prisoners of Hope_, 1898.
_To Have and to Hold_, 1900.
_Audrey_, 1902.
_Sir Mortimer_, 1904.
_The Goddess of Reason_, 1907.
_Lewis Rand_, 1908.
_The Long Roll_, 1911.
_Cease Firing_, 1912.
_Hagar_, 1913.
_The Witch_, 1914.
_The Fortunes of Garin_, 1915.
_The Wanderers_, 1917.
_Foes_, 1918.
_Michael Forth_, 1919.
_Sweet Rocket_, 1920.
_Silver Cross_, 1922.
_1492_, 1922.
_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; Sir Mortimer, Foes,
Michael Forth and Sweet Rocket by Harper & Brothers, New York; Silver
Cross and 1492 by Little, Brown & Company, Boston._
CHAPTER XII
CORRA HARRIS
They rise before dawn, gentle souls who find peace in the labor of their
hands and in their astonishing faith. They are the silent companions of
their husbands. People do not talk much in the valley because there is
not much to say. They know the weather, a few psalms, a few golden texts
and a few hymns by heart. They also know each other the same way, which
is a good deal more than husbands and wives can always claim in this
place.
“I do not know a single lazy woman in the valley nor one who is
unhappily married. They worry some over the bees when they swarm
inopportunely and over the chickens when they take the roup, and over
the children when they have a bad cold or do not learn their Sunday
school lessons, but they do not worry over their husbands. They are not
angry with mankind. As near as I can make out they want better schools
and they long for a closer walk with God. But I never knew one to want a
limousine or a servant to do her work or a nurse for her baby.
“And you could not put one of these fashionable split corkscrew skirts
upon any of them. Call it what you please, evil-mindedness or modesty,
but they are as far removed from the fashionable clothes one sees upon
women in New York as these women would appear to them removed from
decency and thrift.
“I do not know how long such a state of sweetness and homely goodness
will last there. The feet of youth take hold upon the ways of the world.
When I return this spring I may see some girl at the singing school on
Sunday afternoon wearing a tight skirt. But I am thankful I have seen
what I have of the simple, direct living of these men and women in the
valley, whose only problem is to perform the day’s work well, to love
one another and to believe in God and His mercies.”
Thus Corra Harris in the spring of 1914 in New York. It is almost
superfluous to say that. No other man or woman of the writers of this
country could have uttered the words, because no other American writer
has that homely vigor and Biblical phraseology, nor that peculiar
directness of uttered thought which can express in one breath the
longing for better schools and a closer walk with God, which can
contrast the things of the flesh and the things of the spirit in the
same sentence. From the day when the first installment of _A Circuit
Rider’s Wife_ appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_ it was manifest
that America had a new writer of distinction.
The distinction is not so much “literary” as national. Corra Harris’s
work could be nothing but American. It is racy of the soil, and crusted
with unusual and deep personal experience of life. The experience was
externally of a rare sort but spiritually of a wide and common and very
profound sort. It was an intensive cultivation of the soul that she
shared with us and we who had had a taste of that experience were able
to understand and rejoice in it. For the depths of life are spiritual
depths. They are not gained by travel be it ever so wide, nor by
exciting worldly adventures. They are plumbed at home, by the fireside,
at the supper table, in bed on sleepless nights, in the snatched
intervals of exhausting and ordinary toil, in the room where a father
lies dying, in the room where two young people are confessing love, in
the room where a child is being born.
Corra Harris was born on a typical Southern cotton plantation owned by
her father, Tinsley Tucker White, at Farm Hill, Elbert county, Georgia.
Her mother had been Mary Elizabeth Matthews. The girl spent her early
years on the plantation and was educated at home. Occasionally she made
trips to town behind two white mules. When she was 14 she was sent to a
local seminary. A few years there joined to the desultory teaching at
home gave her what was considered in the South of the late ’70s and
early ’80s (she was born March 17, 1869) a very respectable
education--for a girl.
At 17 she was married to Lundy Howard Harris, a young minister. It was
his first few years on a Methodist circuit which gave Mrs. Harris the
material from which she was able later to construct _A Circuit Rider’s
Wife_. After two or three years of preaching Mr. Harris became professor
of Greek in Emory College, Oxford, Georgia. Then for the first time his
wife began to write, using the pen name of Sidney Erskine. She met with
no success until she was 25. Then Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta
_Constitution_, published in the _Sunny South_ (owned by the
_Constitution_) a story of hers called _Darwinkle’s Dream_. It was a
gruesome story and Mr. Howell made Mrs. Harris rewrite some of it to
“give the poor fellow [the hero] a better chance.” Gruesome, yes;
nevertheless Mrs. Harris’s friend, Joel Chandler Harris, creator of
Uncle Remus, laughed over what he called the humor of it!
In 1899 Mrs. Harris had a series of articles on the South’s problems
accepted by the _Independent_ magazine. Steady progress, thereafter; she
became a contributor to the _Saturday Evening Post_ and with the
publication of _A Circuit Rider’s Wife_ reached her deserved place. Her
husband died on September 18, 1910. They had been married since 1887.
Mrs. Harris’s home is in the “valley” we have heard her describe, not so
far from Atlanta and near Pine Log, in Bartow county, Georgia. It is a
long, low log cabin with a forest of cathedral palms in front of it.
From the west you look down slopes to the crops Mrs. Harris grows, for
she is a farmer. The living room around which the house is built was an
Indian cabin over a hundred years old. The dining room is in back of the
living room and is decorated in yellow browns. Isma Dooley, writing an
article which appeared in a number of Southern newspapers, completes the
picture:
“The marigolds on the table are a harmonious touch and, as I write, the
whole cabin is gold-lighted by the afterglow of the wonderful sunset.
Mrs. Harris’s own room and sleeping porch are on the first floor. The
guest rooms are up a granite rustic stairway--cozy apartments done all
in blue. A rustic passageway leads to the kitchen and servants’
quarters, all of log construction. Mrs. Harris’s little study is another
adjunct of the cabin and is in the shade of stately pine trees. There
are no neighbors within a mile, but Mrs. Harris has a large acquaintance
in the county and is devoted to the people and their interests. She told
me many things about them as we took a long drive this afternoon behind
her stout mule team Blythe and Cobb and driven by Hicks, a colored
retainer. [The mules are apparently named in honor of fellow
contributors to the _Saturday Evening Post_.]
“‘Good evening, Mrs. Pliney,’ said Mrs. Harris, as she greeted an old
woman sitting out in front of a typical little country house.
“The woman smiled and responded. ‘When I passed here the other day,’
said Mrs. Harris, ‘and commented on the cosmos blossoms in her yard, she
remarked, “Neighbor, you should see them when the Wind blows the
blossoms; they look like butterflies.”
“‘The next morning I heard she had shot that day at one of her
neighbors! It shows that a poetic soul and desperation often go
together.’
“Here Hicks interrupted in apologetic tones: ‘But, Miss Corra, the man
she shot at was all the time a-teasin’ her dog.’”
At the time of Miss Dooley’s visit Mrs. Harris had been for some weeks
endeavoring to buy a saddle horse. The author had looked at about
twenty-five animals and was contemplating the purchase of a young and
beautiful creature having every virtue and grace a horse can have.
“But,” Mrs. Harris remarked, “when I asked the man the price of this
paragon he said $100!”
We could wish there were space in this book for the reproduction of some
of the letters Mrs. Harris has received since she began writing. They
are touching and amusing and altogether extraordinary. Her book _In
Search of a Husband_, for instance, brought her an epistle from a young
man of 27 who was in search of a wife. Though he had entered the
Presbyterian ministry at 15 and had worked his way through college and
the theological seminary he was “full of fun” and liked “good shows,
music and baseball. I suppose the worst habit I have is smoking.” He
explained naïvely: “I have visited every place of interest in North
America.... With all my experience, all my studies and all my theories I
ask myself again and again: Do I know what love is?”
Mrs. Harris endeavors to make some answer to all such letters but it
must have been a baffling task to frame a reply to a reader whose letter
began:
“Often I have noticed that in your metaphers you employ terms used in
techical grammer, for instance, in your Circuit Rider’s Widow:--‘He has
never risen above haveing his virtue conjugated in the subjunctive
mood.’ I naturally inferred that what he did or said was contrary to
fact, as that conveyed the substance of the definition of the
subjunctive mood. But, you follow up with may, can, must, etc., signs of
the Potential mood.”
This perplexed and perplexing inquirer went on to praise Mrs. Harris’s
character drawing.
It is not her character drawing, penetrative and uncanny as that is--a
man once growled: “This woman knows too much!”--that most distinguishes
Mrs. Harris but her irony, her corrosive sanity! Take her plain talk on
eugenics.
“During the last ten years that I have been coming to New York I have
heard one subject discussed more than any other, more than art,
literature, science, politics, society, religion, industry or commerce.
This is ‘sex,’ and the people whom I meet are not decadent. They all
harrow it, dissect it with an openness, a Tristram Shandy frankness that
would imply they have no personal sense of gender, male or female.
“One very distinguished man who is interested in the problem of sex, not
for, but I should say out of the working girls, said this to me:
“‘We want to give these girls the right start sexually.’ (It is what
nature always gives them, by the way!) ‘We are trying to inform them of
everything concerning sex. Of everything--destroy their curiosity, you
know.’
“‘How will you do it?’ I asked.
“‘Why with lectures upon it, with plays dramatizing its dangers, and
these moving pictures of the white slave traffic. These are some of the
means we are employing.’
“‘I suppose you never thought of marriage,’ I suggested. ‘That is
nature’s method.’
“‘Oh, marriage, but you see they can’t marry. Men won’t have them; not
enough men anyhow. Besides a great many of them ought not to marry the
kind of men they can and do marry. These very unions breed most of our
criminals.’
“There you have a sample of the intelligence of this place. It is so
wrong from beginning to end that no problem of living in it can be
solved right. Everybody must therefore beg the question. These girls are
not fit to become wives, these men are not fit to become husbands, so
they are to be saved by informing them of what they miss in marriage. I
doubt if it saves them.
“However, they have got as far as naming the problem ‘eugenics.’ They
hold conventions around about this place to decide how a thoroughbred
human animal can be produced. Laws are being passed, or framed for
passing, which require a physician’s certificate of health from the
contracting parties in marriage. It sounds right. It would be right if
such laws could be enforced. But they cannot be. You might as well pass
a law that smoke shall not rise, that stones shall not fall. When two
people love one another that way they will marry whatever their physical
rating may be.”
When _A Circuit Rider’s Widow_ was published it was interpreted in some
quarters as an attack on Methodism or upon the Methodist Church, South;
there were also allegations that Mrs. Harris had been blasphemous in
certain passages. The charge of blasphemy was foolish and the conclusion
respecting Mrs. Harris’s attitude toward Methodism must be modified upon
reading her very direct statement:
“I believe in the Methodist church, its doctrines, the liberty and
breadth of its original purpose. I believe in Felix Wade [the central
figure in _A Circuit Rider’s Widow_] as the preacher to come who will
deliver this church from what is almost a military system of
government, menacing to its spiritual power. In short, I believe in the
democracy of the religion of Jesus Christ. Such spirituality cannot be
properly interpreted by an autocracy nor by a commercialized
civilization which we are very rapidly developing in this country.”
The reader will be mindful, reading the last sentence, that it was
uttered in 1916, a year before America’s entrance into the war against
Germany.
Mrs. Harris’s books require reading, not critical discussion. And having
read them the criticism ensuing will not be literary criticism but a
criticism of life--which literature is sometimes held to be. In the
valley she lives with her daughter Faith, now Mrs. Harry Leech. It
should be noted that the acknowledged original of Susan Walton in her
book, _The Co-Citizens_, was Mrs. William H. Felton, Georgia’s pioneer
suffragist, a woman much honored for her public spirit and for public
services rendered as a private person, notably the production at the
right moments of a scrapbook in which were pasted all sorts of bits of
information about officeholders and candidates. Mrs. Felton collected
these items for years. She was over 80 when Mrs. Harris wrote her into
_The Co-Citizens_ and although she lived in Cartersville, near “the
valley,” the two women did not meet until after the publication of the
novel.
No better close for this chapter than its opening--Mrs. Harris’s own
words! She is picturing her life--and quite as vividly herself--to Isma
Dooley. It is after her visit to the European battlefronts. She revives
not what she saw of horror and struggle there, but what she has known of
pettiness and greatness in her peaceful home:
“I was so worried over the feuds between the brethren and the choir and
my own fault-finding spirit that I used to go round behind the church
sometimes and sit down among the graves to comfort myself.
“We have buried our people there for sixty years. Men who never could
get on with each other in the church are lying side by side, like
brothers in the same bed. I say it encourages me to know that the time
will come when we, too, will finish our day’s work and the strife with
which we test each other’s spirits, and lie down out there like the lion
and the lamb, together. But we shall be dead, which, in my opinion, is
the only safe way for lions and lambs to lie down together.
“I’d sit there and watch the fallen autumn leaves come whirling and
tipping over the tombs like little brown spirits of the dust, blown in
the wind. I thought of what a good man old Amos Tell was, though nobody
could get on with him in the church. But his contrariness didn’t count
now in my thoughts. I only remembered how he bore the burdens of the
church; how cross, but generous he was with the poor; how he made the
coffin for Molly Brown’s husband and didn’t charge for it. Then I’d bend
down and pull a few weeds from among the violets that grew round his
monument, as I’d have dusted his coat for him after a long journey. And
I would walk over and look at John Elrod’s fine tomb--John, who didn’t
know whether he was willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake and who
surpassed the wise in the simplicity of his faith.
“I’d look down at Abbie Carmichael’s grave as I passed--such a dingy
little grave, with such a meek little monument over it. We used to think
she was a great trial in the missionary society, always wanting to turn
it into a spiritual meeting instead of attending to the business and
collecting dues. She was hungry for the bread of life from morning till
night. Now she was satisfied, with her dust lying so close to the roots
of the great trees.
“I always feel as if I can bear with the living more patiently after
I’ve spent an hour in this churchyard and seen how far removed the dead
are from their transgressions.”
BOOKS BY CORRA HARRIS
_A Circuit Rider’s Wife_, 1910.
_Eve’s Second Husband_, 1911.
_The Recording Angel_, 1912.
_In Search of a Husband_, 1913.
_The Co-Citizens_, 1915.
_A Circuit Rider’s Widow_, 1916.
_Making Her His Wife_, 1918.
_From Sunup to Sundown_, 1919. (_With Faith Harris Leech, her daughter._)
_Happily Married_, 1920.
_My Son_, 1921.
_The Eyes of Love_, 1922.
_First two published by Henry Altemus, Philadelphia; next six by
Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; last three by George H. Doran
Company._
CHAPTER XIII
MARY AUSTIN
[Spellings and punctuation, even though inadvertent, have been
faithfully transcribed for the sake of preserving something intensely
human in the personal sketch below.]
[Typewritten] Independence, Cal.
Nov. 25th, 1902.
Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.;
Gentlemen,
Enclosed you will find the biographical sketch of my life and some
account of my work, in reply to your request for the same. I have
no doubt that you can get some expression of opinion from Mr. Muir
in regard to my book “A Land of Little Rain”. but I will take pains
to make sure of the matter and write you again in regard to it.
Chas. F. Lummis, editor of Out West, and George Hamlin Fitch,
literary editor of The San Fransisco Chronicle, and also the
reviewer of the Argonaut can be counted on to give me some friendly
notice, especially Lummis as he is my first and warmest friend in
the west.... I have written the biographical sketch in the third
person to avoid the use of so many “I’s,” which always makes me
miserable, you can cut out all that is not to the point.
Sincerely yours
MARY AUSTIN.
[Written]
P. S. I am afraid you will be disappointed with the notes but it is
the best I can do.
[Enclosure. Typewritten]
Mary Hunter Austin was born in Carlinville, Illinois, descended on her
mother’s side from the family of the celebrated French chemist,
Daguerre. Being born fortunately before the flood of so-called
children’s books, she began to be familiar with the English classics as
soon as she could read, and the study of these and an intimate
acquaintance with nature occupied most of the years until the end of her
university work. At that time very serious ill health drove her to
California, and a friendly destiny provided that she should settle in
the new and untamed lands about the Sierra Nevadas and the desert edges.
Although not yet twenty, she had already made some preparation for
following the profession of teaching, and in the unconventional life of
mining towns, and in the wickiups of the Indians found exceptional
opportunities for pushing her investigations in child-study.
Mrs. Austin’s work in this direction met with instant recognition in her
state, and before long many excellent positions were open to her, but by
this time she discovered that she did not want them. Like most desert
dwellers, Mrs. Austin had come under the spell of its mystery, and after
teaching a short time in the Los Angeles Normal School, was glad to
return to the life of the hills, and soon after began to devote herself
seriously to writing.
Very early her work attracted the attention of The Atlantic Monthly, St.
Nicholas, and the Youth’s Companion. Most of the monthly magazines have
published work of hers.
All of Mary Austin’s work is like her life, out of doors, nights under
the pines, long days’ watchings by water holes to see the wild things
drink, breaking trail up new slopes, heat, cloud bursts, snow, wild
beast and mountain bloom, all equally delightful because understood.
* * * * *
[At this point the typewriting stops; the “biographical notes” continue
in pen and ink, Mrs. Austin writing on both sides of the sheets of
paper.]
* * * * *
N. B. I can’t do it, when I wrote the letter that accompanies this I
thought it would be easy to do, but it isn’t. There is really nothing to
tell. I have just _looked_, nothing more, when I was too sick to do
anything else I could lie out under the sage brush and look, and when I
was able to get about I went to look at other things, and by and by I
got to know when and where looking was most worth while. Then I got so
full of looking that I had to write to get rid of some of it to make
room for more. I was only two months writing “A Land of Little Rain” but
I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it. After a while I
will write a book about my brother the coyote which will make you “sit
up,” I mean that is the way I feel about it.
I have considered a long while, to see if I have any interesting
eccentricities such as make people want to buy the books of the people
who have them, but I think not. You are to figure to yourself a small,
plain, brown woman with too much hair, always a little sick, and always
busy about the fields and the mesas in a manner, so they say in the
village, as if I should like to see anybody try to stop me.
Years ago I was a good shot, but as I grew more acquainted with the ways
of wild folks I found it lie heavy on my conscience and so latterly have
given it up. I have a house by the rill of Pine creek, looking toward
Kearsarge, and the sage brush grows up to the door. As for the villagers
they have accepted me on the same basis as the weather, an institution
which there is no use trying to account for. Two years ago I delivered
the Fourth of July oration here, and if, when there is no minister of
any sort here, as frequently happens, I go and ring the church bell,
they will come in to hear me in the most natural manner.
When I go out of this valley (Owens) to attend or to talk to large
educational gatherings I ride 130 miles in the stage across the desert
to Mojave, and the driver lets me hold the lines. Once when he said the
water of Mojave made him sick, I put him inside and took the stage in
from Red Rock to Coyote Holes. The other passengers who were a barber
with a wooden leg, and a Londoner, head of a mining syndicate, took care
of my baby. You see I was the only one who knew how to drive four
horses.
For a long time before I came to Independence, I lived in Lone Pine
where the population is two-thirds Mexican and there gained the
knowledge of their character which informs many of my stories. I should
say that my husband who is Register of the U. S. Land office, is also a
botanist and much of my outdoor life is by way of assisting his field
work.
Now for my work--the best is “A Land of Little Rain,” and the child
verse in the St. Nicholas. I think the best and worst of it is that I am
a little too near to my material. Where I seem to skimp a little, I can
understand now that the book is cold, it was only that I presupposed a
greater knowledge in the reader. During the last six months I have
discovered that the same thing is happening to me that I complained of
in Jimville.--the desert has “struck in.” But I shall do better work,
and still better. I am pleased to learn through some of my editor
friends that my verse is rather better paid for and more widely copied
than the average product of verse makers, and I conceive it possible
that this might be traced to the influence of Piute and Shoshone
medicine men and Dancers who are the only poets I personally know. For
consider how I get nearer to the root of the poetic impulse among these
single-hearted savages than any other where. But if I write at length
upon this point you will say with my friend Kern River Jim, “This all
blame foolishness.” And this brings me to my work among the Indians in
which I am somewhat generally misrepresented. If I deny what is commonly
reported, that the Indians regard me worshipfully for the good I do,
then is the denial taken for modesty which it is not, but merely truth.
They tell me things because I am really interested and a little for the
sake of small favors but mostly because I give them no rest until they
do. Says my friend Kern River Jim, “What for you learn them Injun songs?
You can’t sing um, You go learn songs in a book, that’s good enough for
you.” Nevertheless I have been able to do them nearly as much good as
they have done me.
This is the best I can do for you in this way,--but whatever you are
minded to say of my work say this--that I have been writing only four or
five years and have not yet come to my full power, nor will yet for some
years more.
* * * * *
So wrote Mary Austin in late fall, 1902. Very nearly a year later
Houghton Mifflin Company published _The Land of Little Rain_, a
collection of fourteen sketches that were read with admiration and joy,
that are rediscovered every year, that established incontestably Mary
Austin’s qualifications as a writer.
“East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and
south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.
“Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far
into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets
the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s
is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that
supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that
purpose is not proven.”
The reader draws in his breath sharply. This is a _writer!_ And she has
style. Yes, but so have dozens of others. And they never do anything
with it. They write charming little essays, fanciful, forgotten. What
else has she?
She has keen eyes, a keen mind, a heart to understand and a silence and
time to come to the understanding. This much you make sure of as you go
deeper into the book, reading the accounts of _The Pocket Hunter_ and
_Jimville: A Bret Harte Town_. When you have finished you know Mrs.
Austin’s promise but unless you have read her later books you do not
know her performance.
It began right after the appearance of _The Land of Little Rain_ with
her next work, the novel _Isidro_, a romance dealing with the California
of the padres, and it reached its high and sustained level with _A Woman
of Genius_.
She did not remain on the edge of the desert. To do so would have been
fatal. She moved about and with benefit to herself and her work. Now she
lives in a house facing on Gramercy Park, New York, where she has a
studio. She has exchanged the Mojave desert for the desert of Manhattan,
but she is sheltered in an oasis touched with the lingering loveliness
of the New York H. C. Bunner knew. Ask her about the advantages of her
new environment and she will tell you a story:
“A young Californian who came East to try his fortune gravitated
naturally to Washington Square where Genius is supposed to germinate. He
was personally conducted to the Liberal Club where a young woman in
bobbed hair and a futurist dress asked him if he didn’t think the
Liberal Club the most remarkable thing in America.
“‘Well,’ said the Westerner, ‘there’s the Grand Canyon, you know.’
“There you have it,” concludes Mrs. Austin. “If you haven’t seen the
Grand Canyon you had better keep away from the Liberal Club; but once
you have caught the lift and bigness of America outside New York, then
New York is the most inspiring place in the world in which to work.”
Ask her about her fine novel _The Ford_, a story of present day
California which takes its title from a river shallow where the boy
Kenneth Brent rescues a lamb from drowning:
“The book records incidents in my own life in the struggle for the
waters of Owens River which the city of Los Angeles stole from us,” Mrs.
Austin explains. “That was a very wicked episode, and I did not begin to
do justice to the chicanery of Los Angeles. I am saving some of these
things for the sequel to _The Ford_! It was I who discovered and made
public the attempt of the city to secure the surplus rights of the river
in just such fashion as I have described Anne and Kenneth Brent doing in
the book.”
We have had Mary Austin’s portrait of herself in 1902; let us have a
portrait of her by a visitor who met her about that time. Elia W.
Peattie, writing in the Boston _Transcript_, supplies just those
externals that we need to round out our picture:
“I met another desert woman, too [she had been describing a visit to Ida
Meacham Strobridge]--Mary Austin, who has within the last eighteen
months appeared twice in the _Atlantic_ in sketches which could have
been written only by one who knows the solitude and understands it. _A
Shepherd of the Sierras_ and _The Little Coyote_ were the titles of
these stories. She has also written much verse and of a peculiar order.
It is for children, and has a wild and curious quality. This has
appeared chiefly in the _Youth’s Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_.
“Mary Austin lives down in Independence, where her husband is Government
land agent. She is fairly on the edge of Death Valley, and her
companions are principally Paiute Indians.... Mrs. Austin has an
Indian-like solemnity about her. She has a pervading shyness and likes
the philosophy of the Indians and their poetry. Instinctively she is
artistic in all she does, and her writing has undeniable style as well
as remarkable individuality. Her paper on _The Indian Arts_ read at one
of the art sessions of the biennial meeting of the General Federation of
Women’s Clubs was the most purely literary paper of the entire
convention. It was written too well, if anything. It was so smooth that
it failed to arrest the attention of the more casual listeners....
“All that Mrs. Austin says has a certain value. She speaks seldom. Her
utterance is rather slow, her voice very soft, and her remarks are
usually grave.... The desert has cloistered her; she is a religieuse,
serving her kind, wearing no habit, subscribing to no creed.”
A bit of a purple patch, that last! The truth is that the desert molded
Mary Austin without stunting her. She is like one of those desert plants
of which she tells us, whose maturity may be attained at ten feet or
four inches, according to moisture and the region in which they grow.
Herself, she is a desert species--but transplanted in time! She made her
final escape before the desert “struck in” too deeply; had she not done
so dwarfing would have been inescapable; instead of the ten-foot
maturity she would have given us her best--her all, her completion--at
four inches.
She has been lucky, yes, but not beyond her deserving. The _Atlantic_
which printed her first offerings was, you will remember, the same
_Atlantic_ which gave Jack London his first chance. The Boston magazine
seldom prints serials, how seldom may be gathered from the fact that
five years elapsed after the appearance of Mary S. Watts’s _Van Cleve_
before the “continued” line footed one of its pages. Yet the _Atlantic_
serialized _Isidro_. The _North American Review_, no less severely
selective than the _Atlantic_,--the _North American_, which had printed
serially novels by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, elected to print Mary
Austin’s _The Man Jesus_ month by month. _The Man Jesus_ is a biography
such as none but an American steeped in the wilderness, steeped in fine
literature, with a deeply developed reflective habit could have written.
It might almost have been predicted from a woman who remarked in 1904,
who threw out in the course of a casual lecture the arresting words:
“Most of the great religions have originated in desert countries.”
If we say that _The Man Jesus_ called for unusual knowledge and an
unusual faculty, what shall we say of _A Woman of Genius_? Some readers
were doubtless shocked by this novel on its first appearance; the number
must be smaller to-day. It is as honest as George Meredith and as
finely wrought as anything by Henry James. Genius, in the experience of
Olivia Lattimore, a superb actress of tragic rôles, is a gift, a
possession in the sense in which we say that a man or a woman “is
possessed of”--or by--a devil. Living in Chicago on 85 cents a week was
not only not in any way important to her artistic development, it was
actually “a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of
serving you anew with entertainment.” In other words, the people who
think that poverty and heartbreak are inevitable in the case of a person
of genius, are even desirable or requisite for the growth and flowering
of that genius, are a pack of silly souls. Worse than that, they are
guilty souls; for their attitude allows misery and wretchedness to
befall the gifted mortal to such an extent that the wonder is the world
has any geniuses at all, or any who survive to reveal what is in them.
And so Mrs. Austin makes her Olivia Lattimore bare her life for us
pretty completely. It is an austere and serious revelation.
“About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of
the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was
when the light failed.... On the impulse I spoke.
“‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I want to know ...?’
“It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right.
Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended
shock come over my mother’s reminiscent softness....
“‘Olivia! Olivia!’ She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the
ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private
terror of its own. ‘Olivia, I’ll not hear of such things! You are not to
speak of them, do you understand! I’ll have nothing to do with them!’
“‘I wanted to know,’ I said. ‘I thought you could tell me....’”
“I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing--it
was the first week in November--beginning to collect on the edges of the
walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a
background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my
mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale,
scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking
the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced
them together there in the cold twilight.”
“‘I’m sorry, daughter’--she hesitated--‘I can’t help you. I don’t
know.... I never knew myself.’”
We follow the girl through marriage, the birth of a son and his death in
infancy, the almost accidental disclosure of her gift for the stage, her
struggle with her husband, the gradual breach between them and his
defection involving the village dressmaker, the long and harrowing
period in Chicago after his death when Olivia was without work, without
money and often without hope. Success came, of course; it takes death
itself to extinguish genius such as she possessed, “of which I was for
the moment the vase, the cup.” The finest thing in this remarkable story
is the portrayal of that last struggle between Olivia and Helmeth
Garrett in which the woman’s gift (or possession) bests even love. But
the chapters on Olivia’s childhood are wonderfully penetrating glimpses
into the mind of a young girl and the depiction of other characters is
of a high order; one of the best being the sketch of Olivia’s brother,
Forester, “Forrie,” who made a vocation, a life work, of the business of
being a dutiful son. _A Woman of Genius_ is the work of a woman of
genius.
“Whatever you are minded to say of my work say this--that I ... have not
yet come to my full power.” You knew, Mrs. Austin. And now we all know.
BOOKS BY MARY AUSTIN
_Love and the Soul-Maker_, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
_The Green Bough._ Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
_The Land of the Sun_, Houghton Mifflin.
_The Land of Little Rain_, 1903. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Basket Woman_, 1904. Houghton Mifflin.
_Isidro_, 1905. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Flock_, 1906. Houghton Mifflin.
_Santa Lucia_, 1908. Harper & Brothers, New York.
_Lost Borders_, 1909. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Arrow Maker_, 1911. Doubleday, Page.
_Christ in Italy_, 1911. Doubleday, Page.
_A Woman of Genius_, 1912. Doubleday, Page.
_The Lovely Lady_, 1913. Doubleday, Page.
_The Man Jesus_, 1915. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Ford_, 1917. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Young Woman Citizen_, 1918. The Woman’s Press, New York.
_The Trail Book_, 1918. Houghton Mifflin.
_26 Jayne Street_, 1920. Houghton Mifflin.
CHAPTER XIV
MARY S. WATTS
“2722 Cleinview Avenue, East Walnut Hills,
“Cincinnati, Ohio, June 19, 1918.
“My dear Mr. Overton:
“I have here a letter from Mr. Latham of Macmillans with a very
complimentary request from you for data regarding myself. There really
is not much to say about me as a person. The trade of writing has been
pursued--in times past, at least--by so many picturesque people in so
picturesque a fashion that the rest of the world has got into the habit
of thinking an author must of necessity be picturesque; but such is not
my case, rather to my regret whenever anybody displays this kind and
gratifying curiosity about me. One would dearly love to be a slap-dash,
swashbuckling sort of person like Borrow, say; or a sick, fiery,
indomitable R. L. S. Then there would be something to write about. As it
is, I am only an inconspicuous gentlewoman--I hope a gentlewoman
anyway!--with a more or less Victorian style of writing which has
frequently proved a profound puzzle to critics of a younger generation.
“The dates are to be got out of _Who’s Who_, but to spare trouble I will
give them here. Born, 1868; brought up on an old farm in central Ohio;
went to school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Cincinnati for
some two or three years; married 1891; lived in Cincinnati ever since.
Of all these events, the being brought up on that old farm is probably
the greatest asset for the literary career. The other things happen to
everybody, but the farm experience was _sui generis_, not exactly like
anything else, least of all like the farm-life you read about and
involuntarily picture. My people moved to this country home about the
middle of the last century, when it was only a few years removed from
the wilderness; I think the farm was the remnant of a comfortable
patrimony which in the well-tried old phrase had been ‘run through’; I
think it was a last resort, refuge, stronghold; but these were things
which were not talked about in the family. I can see now that the life I
was made to live as a child was very strange. Here we all were, educated
people with traditions and sophisticated ideas, set down amongst actual
backwoodsmen, whom the older members of the family looked upon, without
the least idea of being snobbish, as peasants. They really were a wild,
uncouth lot; there were grown men and women who could not read and
write. Of course that is all over now; education, the railroads, the
_Ladies’ Home Journal_ have changed everything. Don’t think I am not
serious in mentioning that final item: I sincerely believe that the
so-called women’s magazines have done more for these backward and
isolated communities than all the other preachers and teachers put
together. But the point of telling all this intimate history is to make
you understand the loneliness of my upbringing as a child; my sister and
I had no companions of our own age; we were not allowed to associate
with the country children. We must have been queer little fish. We had
to make up our own games, and we played stories out of books, taking all
the characters in turn.
“The Ohio countryside is not romantic as to landscape; nevertheless, it
has a kind of comfortable charm; I have described it pretty accurately
in _Nathan Burke_. In my day there were still passenger-pigeons by the
uncounted thousands, and of course quail, gray squirrels, and other
kinds of game in like abundance. There was an old man--at least I
thought him old then--named Ben Rhodes, who used to make his living
shooting and trapping, and who was, in fact, the last of the pioneers.
He wore a coon-skin cap with the bushy tail hanging down his back; and
butternut-dyed clothes. He could shoot a squirrel through the eye with a
rifle--a _rifle_, mind you!--at the utmost distance the weapon would
carry. ‘Yeh waste a power o’ powder ’n’ shot with them thar shot-guns,’
he would say. ‘Yeh taken twenty shot when _one_ orter do.’ I remember
him sitting on our back-porch, chewing tobacco, and skinning squirrels,
the last an operation of hideous dexterity. You rip the animal down the
front, and then after certain swift and mysterious performances with
Ben’s hunting-knife which was always horribly bright and keen, fit to
scalp people with, you take hold of the ears, you set your foot on the
tail, and with one infallible, quick jerk you somehow or other turn it
inside out and there in a trice is the furry pelt intact, and there the
dreadful skinless corpse of the squirrel with all its muscles showing,
red and slick and shining! I never see a squirrel without thinking of
Ben, who was a foot-loose creature and wandered off at last, and died
somewhere, much like the wild things he hunted. If I have been
particular to describe him here, it is because thirty years afterwards I
wrote about him and called him Jake Darnell; and in all the writings I
have done for which I have time and again been accused of having taken
living models, he is absolutely the only actual portrait. I could not
have imagined Ben; one must be born and brought up in the backwoods of
Ohio to know what manner of man he was. This answers, out of its order,
to be sure, one of your questions, that is: to what extent are my novels
autobiographical or reminiscent of real persons? Except as regards Ben,
they are not at all reminiscent of any one real person, and nothing I
have ever written has reflected my own life, consciously at least. An
author, I think, in picturing his own world, as seen through his own
eyes, may easily tell more about himself than he knows.
“This also, I perceive, answers another question: what is my method of
accumulating material? I find I have none. The material seems to present
itself or to be gathered up and packed away without conscious effort in
some store-house of memory. I can almost always go to this garret, turn
over the junk, and haul out what I want. It generally needs some making
over, piecing and patching, to be sure, but there is always something
there that will serve. I have never had to make a memorandum, as I
understand many authors do, of likely phrases, telling words, and so on,
never sketched out a scene or plot, never got up in the middle of the
night, or hopped off an omnibus to rush after a scrap of paper and
pencil in order to ‘jot down’ some immortal thought. The only thing I do
sometimes ‘jot down’ is the chronology of the narrative; John McGinnis
and Mary Dill are married at such-and-such a date; then, will their son,
Dill McGinnis, be fifteen at such-and-such a date? I never know, and
have to count up on my fingers, and generally revise the schedule
afterwards; and I have been caught up pretty sharply by the
unprofessional critics who volunteer criticism in letters to authors,
for being as much as twenty years out in my figures, or for making
contradictory statements. The sole excuse I have to offer is that I
can’t count, and never got any farther than six times eight, which I
believe makes forty-eight, in the multiplication-table. Invincible
ignorance, in other words, must be my salvation!
“As to my ‘first writings,’ I shared one quality with R. L. S. at any
rate; I knew they were trash. They were mostly short stories which went
and came between me and the magazine-editors with a pendulum-like
regularity; I used to work furiously over these things, and always sent
them off with the highest hopes, and yet received them back with no deep
disappointment. At the bottom of my heart, I say, I knew they were
trash. What I did not know was that, in very truth, I should never write
anything but trash, no matter how widely it got printed and published; I
was forever expecting some day to ‘do it’ and sit down satisfied; I am
still expecting that miracle and all the while I know it will not
happen. Some of those far-traveled short stories have since been
rewritten and published, and some incorporated in novels, and some are
still in the back of my mind waiting their hour of usefulness. When I
began, the influence of Stevenson was still very strong, and Mr. Weyman
and Mr. Hope-Hawkins, to say nothing of Rider Haggard and the
incomparable Sherlock Holmes, were in the middle of their popularity.
Where are the roses of yester-year? We will always read Stevenson, but
we realize now that he was a writer--just that. And he was a great
personality--just that. Everybody, including myself, used strenuously to
imitate him, and I think it didn’t do us any harm; he preached better
than he practiced, and after some toiling after him, we found that out,
but our toil was not thrown away. I will say, in self-glorification,
that after I got through imitating Stevenson, I did not start in and
imitate O. Henry, or Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and few are the writers who
can honestly make that boast! About that time, it became manifest to me
that the thing to do was not to muddle around with romance, ancient or
modern, but to write about people, and to ‘lie like the truth.’ I
remember reading Thackeray, and being struck with the profitable use of
the conversational style in ‘lying like the truth’; I don’t mean
‘chatty’ and I don’t mean colloquial, and I don’t mean that easy
slinging about of words which the new writers affect; I mean
_conversational_, as conversation is carried on between persons in what
I shall call for want of a better term good society. But what puzzled me
about Thackeray was that there were occasional passages, of considerable
extent, wherein he was not conversational at all; he was writing like
somebody else, but it still had the most amazing verisimilitude; it was
so plausible that you believed it just as you believe the morning paper.
It was in _Barry Lyndon_ that this first struck me, I believe. Who
showed him that trick? He is forever talking about Fielding, but upon
re-reading the latter I saw it was not Fielding he was imitating.
Thackeray, in breezy parlance, can give Fielding cards and spades. After
a while, in a moment of illumination, I found him out. The wily old
genius was not bothering his head about Fielding; the man he was
modeling upon was Daniel Defoe; that’s where he got that simplicity
which did not hesitate at times to be prosy, well aware that a plain
true narrative has always the defect of its quality, monotony,
repetition, a tedious dwelling on detail. There is nothing in fiction
better imagined or imagined with more veracity than the pitiful
importance which his efforts at braiding baskets, and making pottery
vessels, assume to the castaway Robinson in his solitude, and yet it is
not vividly interesting reading. There is nothing--also--better imagined
than George Warrington’s escape from Fort Duquesne, with the help of the
Indian squaw; but it is rather tiresome, on the whole; and the final
touch where the poor squaw, instead of turning out a lovely, romantic
Pocahontas, becomes a perfect nuisance when they reach the settlements,
getting drunk and creating scandal--that is a masterpiece of realism;
and we all hate to know about it! Re-reading Defoe, and reading
Thackeray more carefully, with side excursions, as it were, into reading
Swift and Mr. Thomas Hardy, it seemed to me that I might eventually
learn the trick. I take it that I have actually succeeded once or twice
by the fact that nobody will believe that I have ever invented a single
person or incident! People are eternally wanting to know who was the
original of this or that character, or what is worse, identifying
characters with somebodies whom, ten to one, I have never laid eyes on!
Others have insisted that they knew very well I was cutting the tale out
of whole cloth, but that I had no ‘vision,’ was ‘too photographic,’ etc.
It may well be so; my cup is very small, and I must drink out of it,
willy-nilly. The critics, as I have said, were rather put to it for
something to say, when I appeared; most of them adopted a cautious,
middle-of-the-road policy; you see I _might_ turn out to be a writer
after all, with my bewildering deliberation, my ‘careless fluency’--I
have seen this phrase used in description of my writing--my emphasis of
the commonplace. Of late years, I think they have got used to me; for
that matter, when all’s said and done, my contributions to literature
are not of such importance as to arrest a critic long.
“I see one of the questions relates to travels. Mine have been about as
those of the average citizen, except that one or two were undertaken in
search of material. For example, I went to Mexico when writing _Nathan
Burke_, as the hero is supposed to take part in the Mexican War. And
while at work on _Van Cleve_, a story in which the Spanish-American War
makes a kind of fugitive entrance and exit, I went to Cuba, and down to
Santiago. I might possibly have ‘faked up’ these stories without the
trouble of the journey; it would be as easy to do that as to imagine
society and the world fifty or a hundred years ago, which I have also
done--that is to say, not easy at all; nothing is easy--but I could have
done it. However, I prefer to make some attempt at getting the
atmosphere.
“The dates of publication are about as follows: _The Tenants_ (McClure),
1908; _Nathan Burke_ (Macmillan), 1910; _The Legacy_, 1911; _Van Cleve:
His Friends and His Family_, published serially in the _Atlantic
Monthly_, 1912, in book form by Macmillan, 1913; _The Rise of Jennie
Cushing_, 1915; _The Rudder_, 1916; _The Boardman Family_, 1918; also a
book called _Three Short Plays_, 1917.
“I cannot let this go without adding a word of protest--whether in your
judgment it is fit to make public or not--about the people who in
printed criticism, or in private letters and conversations, insist on
attributing to me the words I put into the mouths of my characters, and
the thoughts I put into their heads. I make a man designedly weak and
futile, or idle, or dull, or small-minded; I make him say or do
something which precisely exhibits his weakness, or futility, or
idleness, or dullness, or meanness; how else shall the reader know this
man than by his own mouth, by his own deeds? Is it not so that we know
one another? A character in a book must act and speak in his part; he
ought never to become even for one instant the mouthpiece of the author;
he is, in a sense, as much a stranger to the author, as much a different
and distinct personality, as he is to the reader. Then why, when I make
a man say: ‘There is no God,’ and moreover, go to work and express this
opinion in a dozen ways, by every act and thought of his career, why do
people accuse _me_ of being an atheist? At that rate, if I invented a
burglar, I’d first have to be a burglar myself! Nobody ever gives me
credit for the kind, intelligent, temperate, decent people I create;
it’s only the disagreeable ones, apparently, that I am accountable for.
What have I got to do with it? I merely imagine a character such as we
meet with every day of our lives, put him into a certain environment, or
submit him to certain circumstances, and then see what happens. ‘By
their fruits ye shall know them,’ and ‘Out of the fullness of the heart
the mouth speaketh’ give me the best of authorities for this method;
whole pages of description cannot illuminate the reader as much as one
unguarded sentence from the lips of a character. But why accuse _me_ of
his sentiments? I’m only turning a searchlight on him. The thing is
exasperating, not less so because it is a sort of left-handed tribute to
the verisimilitude I am always striving after. In the preface to one of
his books the late Mr. William de Morgan speaks his mind earnestly about
the same kind of injustice; and I am further reminded of a story about
Thackeray, who, on being reproached for ‘making So-and-So and Such-a-One
act that way,’ retorted: ‘Why, Good Lord, _I_ didn’t do it. They did it
themselves!’ So, if I err, at least I err in good company.
“This letter is already too long. With very many thanks, and best wishes
for the forthcoming book, I am
“Sincerely yours,
“MARY S. WATTS.”
* * * * *
Mrs. Watts’s candor should be attended by an equal candor on the part of
the compiler of this book. Of course, despite the reporter’s rôle to
which he endeavors pretty scrupulously to stick throughout these pages,
he has his personal preferences; his readers have a right to know
something about them if only that they may discount his statements at
their own intellectual rates of exchange. What we have to say about Mrs.
Watts may properly be prefaced, then, with the admission that, on the
whole, we (a strictly editorial we) have received more permanent
pleasure and satisfaction from her novels than from those of any other
American woman. Let us try to make clear the grounds for this
satisfaction and let us also try to place before the reader the solid
merits of her work.
Thackeray and Defoe, as she makes clear, have been most important of all
writers to her; and she admired in Thackeray the conversational style
with which he told his story; in Defoe she found the key to that
non-conversational, simple, rather prosy, repetitive, completely
realistic method of relation which is the best treatment in certain
passages and which affords the reader--and the writer--necessary relief.
But neither Thackeray nor Defoe, nor Swift, Hardy or any other had been
able to help Mrs. Watts had she not possessed certain gifts evidenced in
every one of her stories.
She can see a character through and through. By that we mean she can not
only conceive a person, but she can tell what he would do in any set of
circumstances soever. Just how wonderful this is you have only to stop a
moment and reflect to understand. Take any person whom you know
particularly well--do you know what he would do if he suddenly lost all
his money, or his job; if he suddenly became rich; if his wife left him;
if his father were murdered; if this; if that? You hesitate and well you
may; and yet you think you know _him_ rather well! The truth is, you
know only certain aspects of him; you have never read his mind or heart
and established the existence or absence of certain traits of character
which will infallibly determine his action in any event that may befall.
You’ve never done that--why should you? But you must do just that if you
are going to write a novel, and not with one person, but with half a
dozen; moreover, your person, when it comes to writing, isn’t somebody
you can study in flesh and blood, at least, not in Mrs. Watts’s case,
for Jake Darnell is her only actual portrait.
Mrs. Watts has in a high degree what has been called the “fine malice”
of feminine perception, a quality which makes _Pride and Prejudice_
immortal whether we like it or not; this is not malice in the sense of
hating or grudging or even disliking the people about you. It is merely
a faculty for noticing insignificant details which, when assembled,
constitute a merciless betrayal--the betrayal is merciless whether it is
favorable to the subject or not. Where Joseph Conrad, for example, makes
you envisage a man as a single dominant trait, Mrs. Watts makes you see
him as a bundle of contradictions. The difference in method is extreme,
but both methods are indispensable. Conrad supplies the key to an
otherwise unreadable soul; Mrs. Watts takes the soul that you read too
readily as that of a person upon a single thing intent and breaks it up
for you, splits it into a dozen shades of meaning and purpose as the
prism refracts white light into a whole spectrum of colors.
She has further the largeness of mind and tolerant humor to study all
and understand all and set everything down with unfailing gusto. Nothing
is too mean or too shabby, too pretentious or too lofty for her eyes and
her pen. She delineates insufferable young men like George Ducey in
_Nathan Burke_ and Everett Boardman in _The Boardman Family_ whom Gene
Stratton-Porter would not touch with a pitchfork and whom Edith Wharton
could never render adequately. But Lord! these young men must be of some
use in the world, we can fancy Mrs. Watts saying with a smile, else it’s
not likely they’d be here! The fact that they are here and have to be
reckoned with is enough. Let us see what is to be made of them. And she
proceeds to show us what _is_ made of them--not a pretty spectacle, to
be sure, not pointing a clear moral, maybe, but worth our while if only
to remind us of what we don’t know. We suspect that Mrs. Watts would
subscribe without reservation to Conrad’s notion that trying to find the
moral of our existences is in the main futile. Do you recall his words
in _A Personal Record_?
“The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel
and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope,
charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have
come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I
would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular: a spectacle
for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view--and in
this view alone--never for despair! Those visions, delicious or
poignant, are a moral end in themselves. The rest is our affair--the
laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high
tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle
mind--that’s our affair!”
It is, O master! Mrs. Watts has always made it very much her affair,
from _Nathan Burke_ to the present hour. In her is laughter, as when, in
_The Rudder_, Marshall Cook, the author, inspects the plant of Amzi
Loring, the “ice king.” Mr. Loring is a self-made man. Cook watches the
machinery spill blocks of ice weighing 300 pounds each.
“‘Beautifully clear! I was just thinking it was like a great glass box,’
said Cook. ‘It had no look of being solid.’
“‘Um-huh. Well, I _have_ seen things put inside it,’ said the other, sly
anticipation suddenly appearing on his features. He nodded significantly
to the puller; and presently with another clang, another wail of
escaping air, there boomed down upon the runway and fled past them
another three hundred pounds with a dark object embedded in the middle
of it, at sight of which Cook gave an exclamation.
“‘What!’ he shouted, rushing to peer after it.
“‘I told ’em to save out that cake and send it up to the house for you,’
said Amzi One, smiling, well-pleased. ‘You’ll see it again when you get
home.’”
A copy of Mr. Cook’s latest book had been frozen in the ice cake.
“‘Mr. Loring,’ said Cook solemnly. He paused, swallowing with a mighty
effort, even some slight contortion of the facial muscles.... ‘Mr.
Loring, my work has seldom had a--a token of appreciation that I--I
value m-more--ahem--ho, ha--_ahem, hem_--!’”
Tears! Yes, there are tears for those who can shed them in _Nathan
Burke_, where, indeed, the chapters describing Jim Sharpless’s critical
illness in the shabby little boarding house kept by the exasperating but
pitiful Mrs. Slaney read more like Dickens than Thackeray. Tenderness?
There is first and last a good deal of it, expended oftentimes upon
individuals with whom Mrs. Watts teaches us a wise patience. There is a
deserved tenderness in the close of the first part of _The Boardman
Family_, relieved instantly by one of those swift transitions which
occur in life. Sandra Boardman has decided to go to New York. She
intends to become a professional dancer.
“She went to bed early that night; and after a while Mrs. Alexander
Boardman, going quietly upstairs, stopped at her granddaughter’s door
and looked in. There was some disorder; Sandra’s trunk had already gone,
but her little valise stood open on a chair, waiting for the last odds
and ends; there were her gloves and hat and her nattily rolled umbrella
laid together. Mrs. Alexander went in a step; by the light from the hall
she could see Sandra sound asleep, with her long, thick, black hair
braided and tied up in a ribbon, lying across the pillow; she looked
very small and young. On the night-stand beside the bed, there was the
watch her father had given her on her nineteenth birthday, a girl’s
watch that never kept time, a foolish elegant trifle; and there was a
half-eaten apple which she had probably been too sleepy to finish.
Somehow these things, this inefficient watch, this apple with a bite or
two out of it, suddenly seemed to the old lady poignantly pathetic; a
hundred times she had seen Sandra thus in her crib, with a toy, a cooky
alongside; Richard, too, when he was a baby. Old Sarah Chase Boardman,
whose past, like everybody’s past, must have held some unpleasing
chapters, who went to church and subscribed to charities and practiced
an unswerving courtesy all for no better reason than because it appeared
to her the part of a lady, who believed nothing about God save that, if
He existed, He must surely be a gentleman--old Sarah Boardman got down
on her knees then and there and put up some lame petition for this young
girl.
“Mrs. Richard, passing by, saw her in the attitude with surprise and
alarm. ‘Good gracious, Mother, what is the matter?’ she wanted to know,
in a guarded voice.
“‘Nothing,’ said Mrs. Alexander, rising stiffly. ‘I dropped my little
gold pin. Never mind, Lucy, I found it, thank you!’”
A beautifully illustrative passage. It shows the Defoe method, the
enumerative narration, at its best. So many writers would have failed to
infect us with the feeling that Mrs. Watts conveys. It is not until you
have stepped inside Sandra’s room and seen, bit by bit, what old Sarah
Boardman saw, that you can share her feeling and understand how a very
fine (but also very worldly) old lady came to kneel and “put up some
lame petition for this girl.” The conclusion emphasizes what we said at
the start of this discussion. Would you, well as you might have known
Sarah Boardman, have known just how she would behave when her
daughter-in-law caught her upon her knees in Sandra’s bedroom? Mrs.
Watts knew, knew perfectly the rather pathetic deception the old lady’s
pride--reserve, worldliness, whatever you choose to call it--would
inspire; knew also the presence of mind which would enable her to effect
it.
In order of popularity Mrs. Watts’s books stand thus: _Nathan Burke_,
then _The Legacy_, her next book after _Nathan Burke_; then _The Rise of
Jennie Cushing_. The comparison is somewhat vitiated by the fact that
_Van Cleve_, coming between _The Legacy_ and _Jennie Cushing_, was
published serially in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and must have reached a
great many of Mrs. Watts’s readers that way before it appeared in
covers. _The Rudder_ was less successful than any of the others, though
it is too early to judge of the popularity of _The Boardman Family_,
published in the spring of 1918. For some reason which the present
writer is unable to fathom, _The Rudder_ was criticised with a most
unusual severity of opinion by those who “review” books and commonly
mistake their opinions for infallible fact. I have been unable to
perceive its inferiority to the bulk of Mrs. Watts’s work. It is a less
dramatic story, so far as external incident goes, than most of the
novels, but in its portraiture, its fidelity to personal
characteristics, its humor, its sharpness of observation and skillful
selection for recording, _The Rudder_ leaves nothing to be desired. I
should rate it with _The Legacy_ while freely conceding that the
developed story of the girl and woman, Letty Breen, chief figure in
_The Legacy_, more readily holds the average reader’s attention and
interest.
The close of _The Legacy_, where Letty Breen asks herself: “Am _I_ a
good woman--a bad woman?” and then answers “I do not know,” clearly
foreshadowed _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_, which, since its presentation
in motion pictures with Elsie Ferguson in the title rôle, will be in its
main outlines familiar to more people than any other story of Mrs.
Watts’s, not even excepting _Nathan Burke_. It is a pity that the film
representation twists the conclusion of the tale so as to affix the
conventional happy ending. Not the inevitable happy ending--none can
object to a happy ending where it is inevitable, nor desire another; it
is where an unhappy or neutral ending is inevitable that we resent
anything else being foisted upon us. And the true ending, the book
ending, of _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_ is neutral. It could not be
otherwise. There is in Jennie Cushing, built up by her solid will and
fortified by her experience, a force sufficiently great to neutralize
her love for Don and save her from herself.
_The Rise of Jennie Cushing_ is the most dramatic, the most artistic,
and will be the most enduring of Mrs. Watts’s books. It is without any
question a really great novel and both in its conception and its
execution it would reflect luster upon any name in American literature
and upon the literature of any land on earth. The popularity of _Nathan
Burke_, with its richness of detail, its warmth of feeling, its lively
narration and its distinctly good and distinctly bad characters, is
natural and to be expected. Any one who likes Dickens will revel in
_Nathan Burke_. The popularity of _The Legacy_ is partly attributable to
the fact that it followed _Nathan Burke_. But the popularity of _Jennie
Cushing_ represents the fresh and admiring discovery of Mrs. Watts by an
audience in large part different from that she had acquired with her
earlier books. It was a popularity wholly earned by _Jennie Cushing_ and
not a “carry-over” from a preceding book, as in the case of _The
Legacy_. That it was earned by the merit of the book itself is clear
enough from this fact: In the case of _Nathan Burke_ and _The Legacy_
the reprintings fell within three or four months; the books sold off
quickly. But _Jennie Cushing_ was published in October, reprinted in
November--and the next reprinting was the following June! This was not a
book of ephemeral success and made its way slowly by sheer power.
Power shows in every line of the story. Power of a silent but
incomparably wonderful sort is embodied in Jennie Cushing, the girl
whose infancy was spent in a brothel, who learned completely and finally
when to keep her lips shut, who was sent to a reformatory, who went to
work as a domestic on a farm, who gave herself to be the model and
mistress of an artist, who gave nothing that was not hers to give, whose
only mistake was in keeping silent once too often--or _was_ that a
mistake? At any rate, Jennie Cushing was stronger than any one about
her, more human, broader, capable of greater comprehensions, readier to
make necessary decisions and to act upon them, able to pay the hardest
price the world could exact from her--cool, courageous Jennie! And yet
she was feminine. Who can forget the little girl that was stricken with
the loveliness of the bronze statuette of two girls blithely dancing?
But her clear insight! She knew that it would be wrong for Don to marry
her and, in the very torture of her love for him, had courage to tell
him so and insist upon it. Her love she could not deny, or would not;
one hesitates to say that Jennie _could not_ deny herself anything.
_The Boardman Family_ suffers one serious defect. After writing with all
her usual skill and putting completely before us the girl Sandra
Boardman; her contemptible brother; Max Levison, the theatrical manager;
and various other absolutely life-like and interesting persons; after
getting our interest to a high pitch in the dilemma that confronts
Sandra respecting Levison as a lover Mrs. Watts quite incomprehensibly
has these three take passage on the Lusitania (they could as easily have
sailed on any other boat) and in the destruction of the steamship
Levison and Everett are drowned! The reader has himself the sense of
being submarined; his interest, torpedoed without warning, sinks without
a trace. If such a thing took place in a novel by a less able writer we
should know what to think of it; we should know that the author had
created a situation which was beyond him and from which he could not
extricate his people without a few fatalities! But no situation is
beyond Mrs. Watts; she has proved that time and again. It is a mystery
to be cleared up later.
_Van Cleve_ is an excellent and characteristic piece of work which, next
to _Nathan Burke_, may perhaps best be depended upon to engage the
interest of any one whose natural or acquired tastes fit him to enjoy
Mrs. Watts’s fine novels of the manners of our time. Of her _Three Short
Plays_, since they are not really within the scope of this book, we will
say merely that _An Ancient Dance_ is the most ingenious and
dramatically effective. _Civilization_ is splendid satire but
inconclusive in its termination. _The Wearin’ O’ The Green_ is a farce
that lacks the necessary madness and fantasticality. But all three plays
are most agreeable reading.
BOOKS BY MARY S. WATTS
_The Tenants_, 1908.
_Nathan Burke_, 1910.
_The Legacy_, 1911.
_Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family_, 1913.
_The Rise of Jennie Cushing_, 1914.
_The Rudder_, 1916.
_Three Short Plays_, 1917.
_The Boardman Family_, 1918.
_From Father to Son_, 1919.
_The Noon Mark_, 1920.
_The House of Rimmon_, 1922.
_Mrs. Watts’s books are published by the Macmillan Company, New York._
CHAPTER XV
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN
If this chapter on Mary Wilkins Freeman, one of the best known of
American writers, seems disappointingly short, the explanation is to be
found in three considerations:
Mrs. Freeman is primarily a short story writer and not a novelist. Her
successes have been with short stories, and they have been many.
Both as a short story writer and as a novelist her work is unimportant,
largely ephemeral and extremely overrated. Ephemerality in itself does
not matter; most things are ephemeral measured by any absolute
standards. Books come and go, opinions change as they ought to; the
fleeting quality of the mass of fiction is to be taken as a matter of
course; but when there is a persistent effort to maintain that such
writing as Mrs. Freeman’s has any permanent value as a contribution to
literature, it is necessary to deny strongly and without qualification
even at some risk of doing her really excellent work injustice. The
reader must not construe what we say about her work as an expression of
opinion, but as an assertion of fact. Dogma against dogma! Mr. Howells
and his school have so long instructed us to accept without question
their estimates of her work that it becomes imperative to cut the ground
from under them. They insist upon the literary value of such writing as
Mrs. Freeman’s. There is no such thing as literary value in writing.
There are no literary values, there are only values in life. And what is
Mrs. Freeman’s value in life? Slight, reminiscential, pleasing,
sometimes entertaining, occasionally revelatory of human nature, but
never for a moment revealing anything unexpected, never anything of
which we have not been perfectly aware--her stories are cordially
welcome and likeable (in general) without having the slightest relation
to the business of living. We read them and sustain a faint
consciousness that _once_ in some place among a few people they may have
had some bearing on life. We read them and observe that in the main they
are told skillfully. We are very glad to have them--and that is all.
The third reason for the brevity with which we deal with her is purely
historical. If this book were being written in 1898 instead of 1918, she
would occupy, and rightly, a considerable space in it. But as recently
as 1914 a book of her stories was put out with the short story, _The
Copy-Cat_, occupying first place in it and giving its title to the book!
The story deals with a little girl, Amelia, who was forever imitating
another little girl, Lily. Amelia was plain and Lily was pretty:
“Amelia, being very young and very tired, went to sleep. She did not
know that that night was to mark a sharp turn in her whole life.
Thereafter she went to school ‘dressed like the best,’ and her mother
petted her as nobody had ever known her mother could pet.
“It was not so very long afterward that Amelia, out of her own
improvement in appearance, developed a little stamp of individuality.
“One day Lily wore a white frock with blue ribbons, and Amelia wore one
with coral pink. It was a particular day in school; there was company,
and tea was served.
“‘I told you I was going to wear blue ribbons,’ Lily whispered to
Amelia. Amelia smiled lovingly back at her.
“‘Yes, I know, but I thought I would wear pink.’”
This in the year of our Lord 1914! This in the year when blood began to
flow as it has never flowed before; when free peoples everywhere awoke
to the presence of Black Evil on earth; when big, generous America with
all her faults was not exactly likely to be thrilled or touched or
enlightened by the recital of how a plain little girl finally got up
enough gumption to wear pink ribbons instead of blue. And yet we suppose
the people who set such store by “literary” values thought this a
“delightful little story”--“so true a picture of children”--“and wasn’t
that a charming conceit of sleeping in each other’s beds!” But it is
wretched stuff, really. At the end Mrs. Freeman simply tells you that
after “that night” Amelia’s mother’s whole nature changed and the
uninterestingly imitative little girl developed “a little stamp of
individuality” and will you please swallow all this quickly on Mrs.
Freeman’s mere say-so because she is tired of writing and the thing is
already the right magazine length anyway. Bah!
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is an extremely modest person. She is of New
England stock in both lines. Her ancestors were Puritan colonists. She
was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1862, and received her education
there and at Mount Holyoke Seminary. Ten years of her life were spent in
Brattleboro, Vermont, but after the death of her parents she returned to
Randolph where she made her home until her marriage on New Year’s Day,
1902, to Dr. Charles M. Freeman of Metuchen, New Jersey. Since then Mrs.
Freeman has lived in Metuchen.
Exactly when the intention to write first came to her, Mrs. Freeman does
not remember. She always felt that she must work at something, but did
not know what it was to be. Though she was fond of painting and
sculpture, her chief interest as a girl was reading. Socially, her
tastes were exceedingly catholic, and she was on the best of terms with
all her neighbors, many of whom she found herself studying as
characteristic New England types, thus unconsciously preparing herself
for the moment when she was to become a writer. She likes “people who
drop their g’s and use the double negative, as well as people who
don’t.”
Success as a writer came to her instantly. She suffered none of the
rebuffs and delays and discouragements usual to the young author. Her
earliest work was done for children and took the form of short stories
and poems in juvenile magazines. Her first grown-up story was _The Old
Lovers_, sent to _Harper’s Bazar_. Miss Mary L. Booth, then editor of
that periodical, upon receiving this contribution, written in a cramped
and unformed handwriting, evidently that of a child, determined upon a
hasty reading, but was so struck in the opening paragraphs with the
humor and the pathos of the story that she promptly sent Mrs. Freeman a
check. In the same mail with the _Bazar_ acceptance came a notification
that her story, _The Shadow Family_, had captured the prize in a
competition conducted by the Boston _Sunday Budget_. Both the checks
seemed very large to the new writer. “My delight and astonishment knew
no bounds.”
Mrs. Freeman is a rather small woman, singularly unaffected, cordial,
frank. A friend once described her thus: “A little, frail-looking
creature, with a splendid quantity of pale-brown hair, and dark-blue
eyes with a direct look and a clear, frank expression--eyes that readily
grow bright with fun.” Mrs. Freeman has plenty of humor, is quiet and
whimsical, is fond of country ways, but confesses to fear of cows,
caterpillars and all creeping things.
Her popularity has been sufficient to bring about the translation of a
number of her books into various European languages.
BOOKS BY MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN
_The Debtor._
_The Fair Lavini._
_A Humble Romance_, 1887.
_A New England Nun_, 1891.
_Young Lucretia_, 1892.
_Jane Field_, 1892.
_Giles Corey_, 1893.
_Pembroke_, 1894.
_Madelon_, 1896.
_Jerome--A Poor Man_, 1897.
_Silence_, 1898.
_Evelina’s Garden_, 1899.
_The Love of Parson Lord_, 1900.
_The Hearts of Highway_, 1900.
_The Portion of Labor_, 1901.
_Understudies_, 1901.
_Six Trees_, 1903.
_The Wind in the Rose Bush_, 1903.
_The Givers_, 1904.
_Doc Gordon_, 1906.
_By the Light of the Soul_, 1907.
_Shoulders of Atlas_, 1908.
_The Winning Lady_, 1909.
_The Green Door_, 1910.
_The Butterfly House_, 1912.
_Yates Pride_, 1912.
_The Copy-Cat and Other Stories_, 1914.
_The Jamesons._
_People of Our Neighborhood._
_Edgewater People_, 1918.
_Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; but The Butterfly House is
published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York._
CHAPTER XVI
ANNA KATHARINE GREEN
The real Anna Katharine Green is a terrible mystery. We do not mean Mrs.
Charles Rohlfs of 156 Park Street, Buffalo, whose husband is an expert
maker of fine furniture and who wrote _Initials Only_ and _The
Leavenworth Case_. We mean the Anna Katharine Green Mind, a Mind no
longer young counted by years, a Mind as subtle and powerful and clever
as ever, counted by achievement. Read _The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow_,
published at the close of 1917, if you doubt that Mind’s unabated
mastery. Anna Katharine Green--but hush! What awe-inspiring quality
invests the mere whisper of that name? Why do cold shivers run up and
down our backs? Why in our commonplace surroundings--porch, porch
chairs, typewriter, manuscript--why, why do we chill all over? Why do
the thrills in dots and dashes like a hurrying Morse code torture our
nerves?
We will tell you.
It is because last night we opened a book and read:
I
WHERE IS BELA?
“A high and narrow gate of carefully joined boards, standing ajar
in a fence of the same construction! What is there in this to rouse
a whole neighborhood and collect before it a group of eager,
anxious, hesitating people?
“I will tell you.
“This fence is no ordinary fence, and this gate no ordinary gate;
nor is the fact of the latter standing a trifle open, one to be
lightly regarded or taken an inconsiderate advantage of. For this
is Judge Ostrander’s place....”
We read. And we read. The others retired for the night. The pale moon
swam slowly through the heavens, regarding us with a calm, cold
indifference. The town clock boomed midnight, then one, then two.
Fatality hung in the air. Horror coursed in the veins and the blood
ceased to pulse through the arteries. Occasionally a ripened apple
dropped from the nearby tree to the ground. At the thud we jumped. But
we could not stop until, on page 381, the last of _Dark Hollow_, we had
read the solemn words: “Peace for him; and for Reuther and Oliver,
hope!” Then we crept off to bed. Utter exhaustion of all sensation
brought swift sleep....
It must have been about a third of the way through that the conviction
stole over us of Judge Ostrander’s guilt. Who murdered Algernon
Etheridge in Dark Hollow? Did John Scoville, executed for the crime?
Did--shuddering thought--young Oliver Ostrander slay that friend of his
father’s whom he hated so? Neither ... neither! Then who? Why, the
unlikeliest person in the book, of course, and trust Anna Katharine
Green to make it plausible!
Mrs. Green--it is difficult to know whether to call Mrs. Rohlfs “Miss
Green” or “Mrs. Green”--Mrs. Green cannot write “for a cent,” as slang
has it; but she can write and has written for a good many dollars! And
by that we don’t mean her motive is purely businesslike; we prefer to
believe that she writes for the exercise of her marvelous and peculiar
talent, and to afford excitement and entertainment to many thousands who
read her books. What is this talent? (It is impossible in writing about
her to avoid falling into the theatricism of her narrative style!)
Did you ever try to write a mystery story? If you have tried you will
understand much better than we can tell you. And if you haven’t it will
be necessary to take a single specimen of Mrs. Green’s work to
illustrate her powers.
_Dark Hollow_--and she never wrote a more excellent yarn--centers about
the murder of Algernon Etheridge twelve years before the narrative
begins. John Scoville, keeper of a tavern, was tried and executed for
the crime, swearing his innocence. Etheridge was the closest personal
friend Judge Archibald Ostrander had. Circumstances compelled Judge
Ostrander to preside at Scoville’s trial and the Judge was not merely
impartial, but manifestly favored, so far as was compatible with
fairness, the defense. The evidence against Scoville was purely
circumstantial but strong. He had been in Dark Hollow that night at the
time of the crime. Etheridge was killed with Scoville’s stick.
Scoville’s character was bad.
For twelve years since the crime Judge Ostrander has lived shut off from
the world, except for his appearances on the bench. His grounds are
walled off by a high board fence within a high board fence and he lives
alone with a huge negro servant. His son and he have parted irrevocably.
When the story opens this negro, Bela, has gone forth on morning
errands, unprecedentedly leaving the gate in the fence ajar! A woman in
purple, heavily veiled, has entered the grounds. The gaping neighborhood
ventures in after her but does not find her. The crowd comes upon the
Judge sitting erect and apparently lifeless in his house! It is an
attack of catalepsy. A little later the negro, mortally wounded by an
automobile, returns and dies trying to guard the iron door in the house
which preserves his master’s secret.
The woman in purple turns out to be Mrs. Scoville. She sees the Judge
and tells him that his son, Oliver, has fallen in love with her
daughter, Reuther. She also tells him of her conviction that her husband
did not slay Etheridge. It is a conviction arrived at since his
execution. Late as it is, she is determined to do what she can to
uncover new evidence.
Chapter by chapter, piling sensation on sensation, Mrs. Green writes of
Mrs. Scoville’s quest. There is the shadow of the man in the peaked cap
seen advancing into Dark Hollow at the hour of the crime. There is the
picture of Oliver Ostrander secreted in his father’s house with a band
of black painted across the eyes. There is the point of a knife blade in
the stick with which Etheridge was killed, and the blade from which it
was broken lies folded in Oliver’s desk. A peaked cap hangs in Oliver’s
closet! Just when every circumstance drives home the conviction of
Oliver’s guilt Judge Ostrander shows Mrs. Scoville a written statement
that establishes the fact of an earlier murder by her husband. She is
taken all aback and for the moment she believes again that the right man
was put to death for the murder of Etheridge. But the Judge allows her
to look at the document a moment too long. It has been tampered with at
the close; forgery has been done!
Oliver must be found, for an accusation against him has got abroad and
the police are looking for him. There is a race between the agents of
the district attorney and the messengers of the Judge. He is found in a
remote spot in the Adirondacks and flees, but whether to return home at
his father’s summons or to escape to Canada, who knows? By a desperate
drop over the side of a cliff he has landed in a tree top. The train is
not due for fifteen minutes. He’ll catch it.
“‘The train south?’
“‘Yes, and the train north. They pass here.’”
Is it a return or a flight to escape? Thus, in chapter after chapter,
Mrs. Green creates new suspense, introduces new thrills. As each lesser
uncertainty is resolved a fresh one takes its place and always the great
major questions hang unanswered over her story--till the very close.
Then the one closed avenue to a solution is unbarred, the stunning
surprise is sprung and the curtain falls swiftly on a stupefying
dénouement. Between the big revelation and the very end of the tale
there is just time enough and just explanation enough to convince the
reader of what he would least have believed before.
This faint outline of a capital story illustrates Mrs. Green’s talent.
Now for the explanation. The whole art of it consists in a truly
infinite capacity for taking pains. Before writing this story it was
necessary to write, or get clearly in mind, the biographies of half a
dozen people. Their lives had to be fully known to the author, even to
innumerable incidents which would not be used in her story. Particularly
was it necessary to know every aspect in the past of the relations of
these people to each other.
It was next necessary to reconstruct the crime. A period of twenty
minutes or half an hour at a given place was under consideration. Where
was this place and where did it stand with respect to every other place
in the story--Judge Ostrander’s house, the Claymore Inn, the ruin of
Spencer’s Folly? A map had to be made. It is an illustration in the
book. But much more than a map was necessary. The exact whereabouts of
every one of half a dozen persons for the whole twenty minutes or half
hour had to be settled. Etheridge, Scoville, Mrs. Scoville, Oliver and
Judge Ostrander were all in or near Dark Hollow. Just where was each at
every moment? Just what was each doing? Just what could, and did, each
say and do and hear and see? The author must know _all_ these things in
order to spare the reader what is irrelevant. She must have every inch
of the ground at her fingertips and every instant clear. You don’t
believe this? Try writing a story like _Dark Hollow_, improvising as you
go along, or working from a mere outline, and see what happens to you!
The only improvisation in such work as Mrs. Green’s is in respect of
what might be called chapter climaxes--the brief thrills, one or more to
a chapter, which arise, administer their shock to the reader’s nerves,
and are cleared up some pages later. Many of these are planned in
advance, a few suggest themselves as the writer goes along, others are
real inspirations which have suggested themselves during the writing and
are substituted for planned but less effective climaxes. Such is the
incident cited above where two trains, one bound south and the other
bound for Canada, meet and pass at the little mountain station.
It is frequently said that the whole art of a mystery story or detective
story of the kind Mrs. Green writes is to direct suspicion at every
person except the right one, until the end! This is clever and partly
true, but it takes no account of the vast amount of construction which
must go forward before a sentence of the story can be put on paper; it
ignores the fact that the criminal, to be convincing, must have figured
in the story from the start, for otherwise he will appear as a desperate
invention to help the author out of an otherwise insoluble situation.
Looking at _Dark Hollow_ in retrospect it is quite easy to see why
certain things had to be--so. Judge Ostrander had to be the murderer
because he was the person least likely to kill his dearest friend.
Oliver had to be under suspicion to make Judge Ostrander’s confession
plausible. The Judge had to be the murderer, furthermore, that Reuther
Scoville might not be an unfit person to become the wife of Oliver.
Oliver had to be cleared that he might be fit to mate with Reuther! Yes,
yes; but all this wisdom after the event gets nowhere. It does not
penetrate to the heart of the action and throws no light on the author’s
cunning. Do you suppose for a moment that she made her story out of such
nice little expediencies as these? You can’t build a story that way. It
won’t hold together for a moment.
No! The real starting point in _Dark Hollow_ was the conception on the
part of Mrs. Green of a man who should, in a moment’s fit of passion,
slay his closest friend and who should thereafter, for twelve years,
inflict on himself a peculiar punishment, imprisoning himself in a
convict’s cell _in his own home_! All the rest--the painting of a black
band across the eyes of his son’s portrait that they might not look on
his father, murderer and coward; the sending of that son away from home
for all time; the building of a double fence to guard against intrusion
by so much as an eye at a knothole--all these followed. Then on this
solid foundation of a single life, a single idea, a single stricken
conscience arose, course by course, the complicated and wonderful (but
solid and sound) structure of the book.
That is the talent of Anna Katharine Green, explained, analyzed and
illustrated. Things there are about it that cannot be explained or
analyzed. These we pass. We have said that she cannot write. It is true.
_The Leavenworth Case_, and _The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow_ and _Dark
Hollow_--every one of her many books is wretchedly written, full of
trite and cheap expressions, full of cliches, dotted with ludicrous
trifles of thought and expression, spotted with absurdities, as where
the negro Bela is struck and fatally injured by an automobile at the
outset of _Dark Hollow_. The car inflicted a terrible gash in his head
and we are informed that “it took a sixty horsepower racing machine
going at a high rate of speed to kill him”! And then it didn’t do it
instantaneously! If Mrs. Green could have had a collaborator with only
average literary skill she would carry everything irresistibly before
her. Her mind, joined to a pen capable of writing freshly, simply, with
dramatic effect but without theatricism, without sentimental
mawkishness, would have achieved books to be put on the shelf alongside
the stories of Poe, classical, perfect, immortal.
But if she is not immortal she will live a long, long time! Without ever
having created a character to compare with Sherlock Holmes she has
constructed tales more baffling than any of the crimes Sir Conan Doyle’s
detective solved. She has not had to resort to exotic coloring as Doyle
has sometimes had to do to conceal thinness of story. She has not had to
depend upon abstruse mathematical ciphers and codes as Poe did in _The
Goldbug_. She has not had to carry us through generations and
coincidences as Gaboriau did in _File No. 113_. She never employs the
fanciful inversions and mystical paradoxes by which Gilbert K.
Chesterton establishes, not so much the existence of crime and
criminals, as _The Innocence of Father Brown_. She can handle more
complex strands than Melville Davisson Post. But Mr. Post can write
rings around her! When we get the Anna Katharine Green Mind and the
Melville Davisson Post Art joined in a single person America will
produce the detective and mystery stories not of a decade nor of a
generation but of all time. Meanwhile let us give Mrs. Green her due. In
her way, and we have tried to show her way and to differentiate it from
the ways of others, she is the most accomplished story-teller in
American literary history. She is unique, and with anything unique it is
well to be satisfied!
BOOKS BY ANNA KATHARINE GREEN
_The Leavenworth Case._ A. L. Burt Company, New York.
_A Strange Disappearance._
_The Sword of Damocles._
_Hand and Ring._
_The Mill Mystery._
_Marked “Personal.”_
_Miss Hurd--An Enigma._
_Behind Closed Doors._
_Cynthia Wakeham’s Money._
_Dr. Izard._
_The Old Stone House and Other Stories._
_7 to 12._
_X. Y. Z._
_The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock._
_That Affair Next Door._
_Lost Man’s Lane._
_Agatha Webb._
_Risifi’s Daughter: A Drama._
_A Difficult Problem and Other Stories._
_The Circular Study._ Doubleday, Page & Company.
_One of My Sons._
_The Filigree Ball._ Bobbs-Merrill Company.
_The Defense of the Bride and Other Poems_, 1894.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
_The Millionaire Baby_, 1905. Burt.
_The House in the Mist_, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
_The Amethyst Box_, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
_The Chief Legatee_, 1906. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.
_The Mayor’s Wife_, 1907. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
_Three Thousand Dollars_, 1909.
_The House of the Whispering Pines_, 1910. Putnam’s. Burt.
_Initials Only_, 1911. Dodd, Mead. Burt. Reprinted in
the Army and Navy Library of Detective Fiction, 1918.
_Masterpieces of Mystery_, 1912. Dodd, Mead. Republished
in 1919 as _Room No. 3._ Dodd, Mead.
_Dark Hollow_, 1914. Dodd, Mead. Burt.
_The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange_, 1915.
_The Woman in the Alcove_, 1916. Burt.
_The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow_, 1917. Dodd, Mead.
_The Step on the Stair, or, You Are the Man_, 1922. Dodd, Mead.
CHAPTER XVII
HELEN R. MARTIN
A chapter on Helen R. Martin can hardly be anything but a prolonged
interview, or a pieced interview, somewhat like a patchwork quilt,
constructed from talks of various persons with her at various times. And
always on the same subject--her subject--the Pennsylvania Dutch.
What there is to say about the writer and her work shall first be said.
She is the daughter of the Rev. Cornelius Reimensnyder, who came from
Germany to accept the pastorate of Lancaster county, so the daughter was
brought up among the Mennonites. She has written a novel every year or
so for the last fourteen years, writing in the time left over after
taking care of her home and her children, a boy and a girl; canvassing
for suffrage and campaigning for Socialism. Her home is in Harrisburg,
the capital of Pennsylvania. Her first novel was not of the people among
whom she had spent her life but “a romance of life as she would like it
to be.” Fortunately it did not sell, so she was led to look about her
for her future material. She did not begin to write until she met
Frederick R. Martin, to whom she was afterward married. He is an
instructor in music. And Mrs. Martin was herself a teacher. At one time
she taught children in a fashionable private school in New York City.
She knew the youngsters rather better than their parents.
Mrs. Martin, like Marjorie Benton Cooke and Harriet T. Comstock, is
interested in social questions. She has decided views on bringing up
children, wealth and poverty; she does not subscribe to Mrs. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s views of motherhood; she is not a feminist in any
general meaning of the word, because she believes that feminism in many
of its aspects is a passing phase. As a rule her preoccupation with
these problems is kept out of her work--the older generation of the
people she wrote about were blandly unaware that such questions reared
their heads--but her last two novels, _Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or
Christian?_ and _Maggie of Virginsburg_, introduce them extensively and
disastrously. Mrs. Martin’s failure with _Gertie Swartz_ arose entirely
from her inability to assimilate such matter _before_ writing her story.
As a result industrial conditions and employees’ welfare are
indigestible lumps in the novel. Some subjects cannot be introduced
bodily into a piece of fiction. They must arise as they arise in life
out of situations and character. They cannot be discussed in a story as
they are discussed from a platform. They can only act upon the people of
the tale or be acted upon by them; they can be discussed, if the
representation of life is to be fairly accurate, only to the extent that
the situations of the story call for. It is true that life contains many
futile and windy discussions, some academic, some not; but the only
things that count are those which involve action or precipitate action
or express or mold character. The novelist must exclude all else,
otherwise the novel will lack illusion and resemble nothing so much as
the minutes of the last meeting of the Society for the Suppression of
Sociological Sores.
_Gertie Swartz_ aside, the real controversy over Mrs. Martin’s work
arises from her studies of Pennsylvania Dutch life, and is of a sort to
give satisfaction to her as a writer. For the very nature of the
controversy carries with it the plain implication that she has got under
the skin of her people. It is alleged and deposed that she does not do
the Pennsylvania Dutch justice. The allegation was most completely made
in the New York _Evening Post_ for April 29, 1916, by Isaac R.
Pennypacker.
Briefly, Mr. Pennypacker declared that those who knew the Pennsylvania
Dutch “in a broader way” than Mrs. Martin’s stories reflect them “have
never taken her pictures of the life very seriously.” George Schock’s
_Hearts Contending_, a novel repeatedly praised by William Dean Howells,
“should be read as a corrective of Mrs. Martin’s tales.” Elsie
Singmaster also has had a better understanding of the Pennsylvania
Germans. The Moravians and the famous Bethlehem Bach Choir are proof of
Pennsylvania German culture. Read Whittier’s poem, _The Pennsylvania
Pilgrim_ (he thought it better than _Snowbound_ but said the public
would never find it out!). Pennsylvania German troops did bravely in the
Revolution and the Civil War. Mrs. Martin admits that the Pennsylvania
Dutch rise but it is ungracious of her to call attention to the
lingering accent, because Americans speak French and German badly.
Besides, she does not cite all the instances of their rise to high
station. She refers to their unpolished manners but great men, like Dr.
Johnson and Edwin M. Stanton, seldom have nice manners. “Mrs. Martin’s
curious comment on the fact that the Pennsylvania Dutchman’s barn is
larger than his house would be paralleled if she were to find it curious
that Mr. Wanamaker’s department store is larger than his residence.” Is
it? But how would Mr. Pennypacker account for the fact that Judge Gary’s
house on Fifth avenue is larger than his office at 71 Broadway? “A
punctilious regard for good manners by which she sets such store would
forever have prevented Mrs. Martin from publishing her books, because
the portraits of the people in them are caricatures.” Look out, Mrs.
Martin! Some one sees resemblances in your caricatures!
There is the case against Mrs. Martin and it is the highest compliment
her work could have. The next highest compliment is the fact that Minnie
Maddern Fiske made _Barnabetta_ into a play, _Erstwhile Susan_, and
appeared herself in the title-rôle. And the next highest compliment is
what Richard Watson Gilder of the _Century_ once said to Mrs. Martin:
“Your people do not converse on paper--they talk. When a community is
written up that community always resents it, even if it is described
flatteringly. You can’t praise any community enough to satisfy its own
conceit about itself.”
So much for compliments. If you call for proofs ask Mrs. Martin to show
you or read to you (she won’t allow them, as a rule, to be published)
some of the hundreds of letters she has received from Pennsylvania
Germans wanting to know if So-and-so was the original of this character,
asking why such and such a person was “put in your book,” complaining
that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch good traits,
complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch bad
traits, as stinginess and selfishness toward the womenfolk; praising her
delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life, condemning her for her
delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life. The truth is this, as Mrs.
Martin says:
“The Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like my stories. That is, the educated
descendants of the Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like them. The people of
whom I write generally are people who read nothing, not even newspapers,
except, as one woman told me, ‘sometimes meby the comic section.’ But
the Pennsylvania Dutch citizens of such places as Reading, Lancaster,
Lebanon, Bethlehem and other cities resent my commentaries upon the race
from which they have risen. Overlooking the finer and lovable characters
described in my books, they prefer to dwell upon the harsh people. I
wish more of them would take comfort from Tillie, Mrs. Dreary, and the
rest of my heroines.
“The only Pennsylvania Dutch who enjoy my stories seem to be those who
have moved West and to whom my books seem to come like a visit home.”
We think the reader of Mrs. Martin’s novels will thank us if we forego a
synoptic discussion of her tales and give instead what she has to say,
outside her books, about the people in them.
“It is a part of the common misconception that the Pennsylvania Dutch of
whom I write are all Mennonites. Now, Mennonites are a religious sect,
not a race or a nationality! I have written very little about
Mennonites. They are as inoffensive and mild as the Quakers, and it is
absurd to confound characters like Mrs. Dreary of the play _Erstwhile
Susan_ and her foster son Jake (who are, of course, Pennsylvania Dutch)
with the sect of Mennonites. Once a Pennsylvania Dutchman becomes a
Mennonite, he gives over his harshness and other grievous faults and
leads a mild, gentle and inoffensive life. Of course they are all very
frugal and ‘close’--they never outgrow that.
“The Amishmen are set apart from the world by their hooks and eyes. They
never wear buttons and buttonholes because buttons and buttonholes are
worldly. All of them wear the same sort of garb. The women fold
kerchiefs over their shoulders and across the breast that their too
seductive charms may not be revealed.
“I remember the suspicion with which Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and
their wives would invariably regard me when, applying for a few days’
board, I would confess to being a married woman, not even a widow. Why,
then, was I going about without my husband? This made it harder for me
to obtain board than if I had been an old maid. ‘Where’s her husband,
anyhow?’ the farmer and his wife would speculate. ‘Her out here alone
fur three days yet and him not showin’ his face! It’s somepin awful
funny!’ Then the wife would tell me how in twenty-five years of married
life she had never yet spent a night away from her spouse.
“One morning as I was sitting on the kitchen porch writing to my husband
the farmer’s wife bent over my shoulder to read what I was writing. ‘Now
that there writin’,’ she remarked, ‘I can’t read it so very good.’ I
quickly laid the blotter over the page. ‘I am writing to my husband,’ I
said hastily, ‘to let him know where I am.’ She stared at me. ‘He don’t
know where you’re at?’ she gasped. ‘Well, I guess anyhow, then!’ Which,
being interpreted, meant: ‘I should think it was about time!’”
The following further account of these people is taken from a talk
Joseph Gollomb had with Mrs. Martin while she was in New York to see the
opening of Mrs. Fiske in _Erstwhile Susan_. The interview, printed in
the New York _Evening Post_ of January 22, 1916, provoked Mr.
Pennypacker’s blanket indictment which we have already recapitulated:
“You can tell the Pennsylvania Dutchman by his speech, even after he
sheds his queer clothes and barbering and takes on the guise of the
average American,” explained Mrs. Martin. “A bellboy in Allentown once
disarmed my wrath with, ‘Was you bellin’ for me? I didn’t hear it make.’
I knew him then as coming from my people. His father probably would say,
cocking his weather eye, ‘It looks for rain. I’m sure it’s going to make
something down.’ Or his mother, pricing at market, would ask, ‘For what
do you sell your chickens at? I want to wonder. I feel for getting that
fat one.’ Your washerwoman, with all the deference in the world, will
refer to your husband and hers: ‘Does your Charlie like his shirt
ironed? My mister don’t.’
“Enter Cashtown, Virginsville, or Bird-In-The-Hand (these are actual
towns). You’ll see houses painted flagrant red or yellow or pink; flower
gardens gorgeous with color. And there all the display, or even trace of
love of physical beauty, stops. The homes are immaculate but ugly. The
parlor is furnished at marriage, then shut up for years.
“Most of the living is in the kitchen. The barn is bigger than the house
and is more modern than the kitchen. That is because the Pennsylvania
Dutchman is parsimonious with everything but the labor of his women.
He’ll buy modern plows, an automobile to take his products to market,
modern harness to save his horse. Up-to-dateness in the barn means more
money in his pocket. But he won’t spend a cent to save his wife or his
daughter a bit of work. That is what they are for--to work for the men
folks in the kitchen or near it.
“When a young man goes courting, his eyes are not blinded with Cupid’s
bandage. They are wide open to note how the prospective bride qualifies
as a frugal, hardworking housewife. I watched a young man studying three
girls, his object matrimony. They were sewing and he made a test of
their frugality by the way they tore off their threads. The girl who
tore off her thread closest to the stitch appealed to him most. Later he
watched them at pie making. With another test in mind he asked each of
them for the waste dough scraps. One of the girls, wanting to make a
hit, gave him generously. The girl who had won in the first test
scrimped a few crumbs for him--and won his hand and heart. Soon after,
his foot was seen on the rocker of her chair as they talked--which is
Pennsylvania Dutch for ‘I mean to marry this girl!’ ...
“What has given them the passion for pinching their souls I don’t know.
It may be a narrow and too literal interpretation of the Bible--for they
are intensely religious in the orthodox sense. The great majority of
them sooner or later join one of the several religious
sects--Mennonites, Dunkards, Amish, or some other. ‘I feel to be plain,’
they say, and join one of these sects.
“Their word is as good as gold--but they’ll quibble with their word. A
grower will get his wife to water the tobacco leaf, to make it weigh
more. ‘Did you water this tobacco?’ the intending buyer asks the farmer.
‘No,’ the farmer answers with literal truth. But once he gives his
literal word it is good to the last penny.”
These people are without the sense of citizenship. “They don’t think
about it at all,” said Mrs. Martin to an interviewer whose report of her
was printed in the _Evening Sun_, New York, April 7, 1915. “They have no
problems and therefore they are contented with their lot. They are wary
of education; they think it makes rogues. ‘Look at those grafters in
Harrisburg!’ they will say.”
Mrs. Martin once told a capital story of the Amish. This sect has a rule
that any one who breaks a law of the meeting shall be penalized by
living apart from his wife or, in the case of a woman, her husband;
denied even the solace of recrimination. The wife of a particularly
stingy member of the sect devised a cunning punishment for him by
herself breaking one of the laws of the meeting. “I don’t know what rule
she broke,” Mrs. Martin said. “It may have been sewing a button on her
dress instead of a hook and eye, or she may have advocated painting the
house. In any event her husband became an outcast, unable even to speak
to his wife.
“I used the instance, somewhat colored, in a story. The result was that
I got a letter from an Amish preacher informing me that if I would give
him the name of the man who was so stingy to his wife the church would
punish him properly. Of course I replied that the instance was purely
fictitious. To which the reply of the minister was that he could not
understand why I wrote such lies about the sect!”
Introducing Mrs. Martin, a bright, cheerful, little bit of a woman, at a
booksellers’ convention in New York, William Hard declared that she and
Margaret Deland were like two large railroad systems each operating
exclusively in its own territory by a tacit understanding. Mrs. Martin,
to accept the simile, freights great quantities of valuable stuff and
yields far better dividends than some of the big transcontinental lines!
BOOKS BY HELEN R. MARTIN
_Elusive Hildegarde._
_Her Husband’s Purse._
_His Courtship._
_Warren Hyde._
_Tillie, a Mennonite Maid_, 1904.
_Sabina, a Story of the Amish_, 1905.
_The Betrothal of Elypholate and Other Tales of
the Pennsylvania Dutch_, 1907.
_The Revolt of Anne Royle_, 1908.
_The Crossways_, 1910.
_When Half-Gods Go_, 1911.
_The Fighting Doctor_, 1912.
_The Parasite_, 1913.
_Barnabetta_, 1914.
_For a Mess of Pottage_, 1915.
_Martha of the Mennonite Country_, 1915.
_Those Fitzenbergers_, 1917.
_Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian?_ 1918.
_Maggie of Virginsburg_, 1918.
_The Schoolmaster of Hessville_, 1920.
_The Marriage of Susan_, 1921.
_Mrs. Martin’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New
York, and the Century Company, New York._
CHAPTER XVIII
SOPHIE KERR
“July 19, 1918.
“My dear Mr. Overton:
“It has been almost impossible for me to write this. I have made a dozen
beginnings and invariably found myself drifting off into reminiscences
of my childhood and funny lies about what I think and feel. Good
heavens! what do I think and feel? I don’t know. I really don’t. I have
never had the time nor found myself of sufficient interest to sit down
and think about myself subjectively. I am afraid that this is a very
queer narrative and very dull, but at least I have tried to give only
facts....
“I was born near Denton, Maryland, a small town located in the ‘sandy
belt’ of the Eastern Shore. It is a narrow-minded, kind-hearted,
conventional, self-respecting community, not very enterprising--an
average little semi-Southern town. My father had a nursery and fruit
farm, and cared more, I think, for beautiful trees than he did for
people. We had lovely arborvitæ and red japonica hedges, magnolia trees,
an extraordinary collection of evergreens, and many unusual foreign
flowering shrubs.
“I went to school at Denton, the public school, and the embryo High
School of twenty to twenty-five years ago. And then I went to college.
“As a child I read everything that I could lay hands on and we always
had books and magazines at home. But my reading was not guided and it
was my great misfortune not to find among my teachers, either in school
or college, even one with any special mental quality or deep and sound
culture, or even any vital enthusiasm--with the exception of the
psychology teacher at college.
“I began to write at college, the sort of imitative stuff that most
college girls write--very highbrow essays on Maeterlinck, and that kind
of thing. Not much fiction or poetry, as I remember. But I had my ideas
of a writing career, for all that. When I was graduated from college I
was just eighteen and I came home and told my father that I was going to
be an author and he might as well buy me a typewriter--I was always of a
severely practical turn of mind. I got the typewriter and began to write
stories, first in longhand, then copying them single-spaced on the
machine; they made terrifying manuscripts. One got into the _Ladies’
World_, and one into the _Country Gentleman_, and one into _Truth_,
which was then a flourishing publication. And about that time, after I
had been home for a couple of years, at the suggestion of an old friend
of my father’s I went to the University of Vermont for a year of
graduate work. And I began to take a special course in history there
with Professor Samuel Emerson.
“I tell this with particularity, because it was the very best thing that
ever happened to me. As I worked with Professor Emerson, I gradually and
painfully became aware that I did not know how to use my mind, and that
my education was of the most shocking superficiality. I learned that I
didn’t know how to think. I will admit that I was surprised and oh, how
humiliated! If I’d only thrown myself on Professor Emerson’s mercy and
told him that I knew my shortcomings and asked him to help me! But I was
too youthfully proud for that, and I went on, dimly trying to get at the
thing myself and marking with a hopeless appreciation, which would have
doubtless amazed the Professor had he guessed it, the truly wonderful
way in which he used his own exceptional intellectuality.
“It is a fine thing to know what you do not know. It set me to work to
try to get what I did not have--a disciplined, well-ordered, logical
mind, a store of knowledge, a really broad culture. Alas, I never got
any of them, and I never shall. It takes different training and
environment from infancy to produce them, as well as greater
capabilities than mine. But I did at least get this--the habit of
thinking things out for myself, and a poor opinion, thought out by the
individual, is better than a lazy acceptance of some one else’s say-so.
“Naturally, my year with Professor Emerson gave me a very low opinion of
my chances to become a writer. I let writing alone for a while, and then
began doing little light things for the Pittsburgh _Gazette_, one of
whose staff I had met while on a visit to Pittsburgh. They were mostly
little essays--though that word is really too dignified for them--on the
foibles and fashions of the time. Sometimes a drop or two of sentiment
and little amusing incidents that I gathered when visiting in
Washington and Baltimore--we Southerners are great visitors, you
know--occasionally a scrap of very light verse.
“But this was not enough. I got restless and I wrote to the _Gazette_
people and asked for a job. I got it--I was to run the woman’s page of
their evening paper, and do Sunday specials. After I arrived the duties
of music critic were added, and later I had charge of a Sunday
supplement. The people on the _Gazette_ were very kind and patiently
tutored me through my greenhorn days. The training was excellent and I
worked there very happily for several years.
“But I had been trying some magazine work--more light, semi-humorous
stuff, and the _Woman’s Home Companion_ bought several of my pieces. I
went to New York to see them in the spring and in the fall I asked them
for a job. And got it,--assistant to Miss Gertrude B. Lane, who was then
the assistant editor, and is now the editor.
“I have stayed with the _Companion_ ever since, save for a year when I
went with the ill-starred _Circle_, and now I am managing editor. All
this covers a period of over ten years.
“After I got to New York the writing fever got me, and I tried some
stories and more short articles of sentiment and humor. Some of these
were published and some of them came back to me. More and more I tried
to do fiction, and more and more I did it: now I have three books
out--_Love at Large_, _The Blue Envelope_ and _The Golden Block_--and
another in the works, and I’ve written innumerable short stories, most
of which have been published. Of course the very best story I ever
wrote I cannot sell. I occasionally run across a copy of that story in
my rejected manuscript drawer and I say, ‘Never mind--some day I’ll wish
you on an editor, yet.’
“None of my stories are in the least autobiographical, and I
rarely--almost never--put real people or incidents in my stories, and
then only as a foundation on which the action of the story may go
forward. My stories are built up from my imagination, character after
character, plot, action and finale. I try to work out everything
logically, and after I have written a story I go over it and turn the
cold eye of criticism on its chronology and the convincingness of its
detail. Heaven forefend that I should intimate that I make no mistakes
in these,--but at least I try to get them right. That is where my long
editorial training is an asset.
“Furthermore, what my various characters say does not necessarily
reflect my own views or beliefs--I have no propaganda spirit--the
story’s the thing. Time and time again have indignant readers berated me
for beliefs expressed in the speeches of my characters--beliefs which
were at wide variance with my own, but perfectly in keeping with the
character who expressed them.
“(I seem to be wandering away from my theme, Mr. Overton, and truly, it
all seems very silly and flat to me. Here are some unrelated facts which
you may be able to use somehow--they sound like the answers to an _Alice
in Wonderland_ questionnaire.)
“I read heaps of biography and autobiography and fiction and poetry, and
I do not read any of these because of the possible effect they may have
on my work, but because I like to. I read all the magazines, too, but
because it is part of my job to see what they are doing. I would rather
be unhappy than uncomfortable. I am a good cook and like to do it;
indeed I can make better gingerbread and better spoon-bread and better
strawberry preserves than any one in the world--this is not arrogance,
but a beautiful exceptional truth, as Mr. Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis,
editor of _Munsey’s Magazine_] would say. I work very hard, all the
time, and I do not like parties and teas and such and never go to them,
when I can get out of it. I write whenever I have any time and I have
trained myself to use any time I can get and to go on with a story
without re-reading what I’ve already written, even after a lapse of
several days. I am an individualist without having the least conviction
that it’s the best thing to be. I do not take my own--or most other
people’s--writing very seriously. I believe that there was never a time
when so many people were writing and writing well, but saying nothing of
interest or value. On the other hand, I believe that there is a lot of
big work being done and that the mediocre stuff doesn’t really obscure
it. I’d rather be an editor than a writer, but I like to be both.
“(Now, really--this is getting ‘curiouser and curiouser,’ to revert
again to _Alice_. Will it do--or won’t it? And, if not, what have I left
unsaid that I ought to have said? I am gradually working myself up, I am
afraid, into a state of self-conscious muzziness. And I don’t want
_that_ to go into your book.)”
So writes Sophie Kerr (Mrs. Sophie Kerr Underwood) in response to an
appeal for some information about herself that might legitimately
gratify the natural curiosity of her readers. Her readers are a
multitude! She has had stories in “all the magazines,” so to speak; the
statement doesn’t exaggerate much. She hasn’t had a story, so far as we
know, in the _New Republic_ but when that Effort decides to take up the
publication of short stories doubtless she will!
Mrs. Underwood’s short stories need no introduction (to use the sacred
formula), and anyway we are here concerned with her as a novelist, and
primarily with her as the author of _The Blue Envelope_ and _The Golden
Block_.
Both these stories are concerned with women in business and there the
resemblance pretty nearly stops. _The Blue Envelope_ has for its heroine
a young girl (who tells the story) under twenty. Leslie Brennan is
pretty, a pretty butterfly, used to nothing but spending money and
having a joyous if innocent time. She lives with Mrs. Alexander, a woman
of family and breeding and wealth. Her guardian, Uncle Bob, pays her
bills. But when Mrs. Alexander is summoned to Maine by illness Leslie
goes to live with the Morrisons and meets Randall Heath. Heath makes
love to her and the shock when she finds out that he was only after her
money makes somewhat easier compliance with the unusual wish of her dead
father that she spend two years earning her living.
This adventure--earning your living is the greatest adventure in the
world and Sophie Kerr can prove it to you!--this enterprise takes Leslie
to New York. And there she meets Minnie Lacy who has long earned a
living and knows a lot about men’s neckties, being engaged in the
business of making them. And there, also, after getting a stenographer’s
training and some education in the work of a secretary, Leslie enters
the employ of Ewan Kennedy, inventor of explosives.
The “blue envelope” doesn’t make its appearance until along toward the
end of the story. It contains the formula for a powder which he is going
to give to the United States Government--sarnite. The formula must be
delivered to the Chief of Ordnance in Washington. Certain persons,
agents, presumably, of a foreign government, are bending heaven and
earth to get the sarnite formula. They will stop at nothing. And Leslie
Brennan has the task of delivering it to the Chief of Ordnance.
Does it sound like a good story? It does. And is it? It is. So good that
you feel much more like telling it than analyzing it. But to “give it
away” would be a very unfair piece of business. In analyzing it what
shall we say? _The Blue Envelope_ is simple, straightforward, absorbing
and thoroughly enjoyable because of the perfect naturalism of narration.
We don’t mean realism--abused word! We mean naturalism. And what is
naturalism? Why, simply the knack, art, faculty or gift of inventing
incidents, drawing characters, writing conversation, describing action
in such an unaffected manner that it all seems the most natural thing in
the world!
Now realism is never naturalism. A great realist may stick close to life
and use actual occurrences or real people in his books but we call him a
realist because he makes us see in what he sets before us things we
never have seen before. Without any desire to be paradoxical--we are
dead in earnest--it must be asserted flatly that the realist is as
unreal as the romanticist. Often more so. The realist is simply one
extreme, of which the romanticist is the other. The naturalist comes in
between. And Sophie Kerr is first of all a naturalist in this special
sense of the word. Whether her incidents are real or probable or unreal
and improbable she never fails in making them plausible, completely so.
It might be argued that to be perfectly and pleasantly and interestingly
plausible is better than to achieve the most surprising realism or the
most transcendental romance. We think that, in ninety-nine cases out of
a hundred, it is; we believe that unless a writer has that gift in the
nth degree commonly called genius, unless he is so matchless a
romanticist as Joseph Conrad or so unsurpassed a realist as Flaubert or
Thomas Hardy, he had better pray and struggle above everything for the
faculty of plausibility, interesting plausibility, worth while
naturalism! It is because we believe this that we hold Sophie Kerr to
have found and to be on the right track. It is because of this our
belief in her strong, fledged naturalism that we expect sound and
excellent work from her, work showing distinct growth both in intrinsic
value and in popular success. The first stage of that growth is
evidenced for everybody in the contrast between _The Blue Envelope_ and
its successor from her pen, _The Golden Block_.
_The Golden Block_ is part of the life story of a business woman,
Margaret Bailey, and the most important part. The novel finds her a
secretary of Henry Golden, manufacturer of paving blocks, and leaves her
his partner. It finds her practically a manager of his business at $40 a
week and leaves her a sharer in his business at possibly $40,000 a year.
The book begins on a note of success, of triumph; the Golden Company has
got a contract for street paving in New York which means the difference
between hundreds of thousands clear profit and bankruptcy. This has
happened mainly because Margaret Bailey is a business woman--a much
better business woman than Henry Golden is a business man. Now business
women are not too attractively drawn in most of our fiction. They are
new people, and the fictioneer is tempted to draw them in too harsh, too
straight lines; to caricature a little as Dickens used to caricature, in
order to bring out peculiarities and get the “effect.” Sophie Kerr
doesn’t do it with Margaret Bailey; the most praiseworthy and most
skillful thing in that admirable story _The Golden Block_ is the way in
which the author keeps Margaret Bailey human. She does it by naturalism.
Margaret is engrossed by the business of the Golden Company but she is
also engrossed in securing the education of her sister and brother, the
comfort and happiness of her father and mother, the welfare of the whole
family. Breath of her life though business is, you feel all the time
that she would sacrifice it completely if the happiness of Rose Bailey
or the other Baileys collectively required such an offering. But of
course the surest way to promote _their_ happiness is to succeed
herself.
Margaret Bailey is a character to be proud of and we hope Sophie Kerr is
proud of her. She is as clear-visioned as any heroine of fiction; she is
as clear-visioned as such women are in life! She is not afraid of being
called unwomanly, because she knows that this only means that she does
not conform to a handed-down ideal. She does not attempt to formulate a
philosophy of sex or love or life on the basis of her own feelings. She
speaks and thinks only for herself--not of herself except when asked to
explain. She finds no time to indulge in self-pity, but that does not
mean that she is hard. No! She is merely happy! She is doing what she
can do best and what she most wants to do. “You ought to have been a
man,” is the recurring refrain dinned in her ears, usually as a tribute
of admiration but frequently with an implication of disapproval, as if
the Creator had made a mistake somehow. “It’s my belief that there’s no
sex in brains,” Margaret falls into the habit of replying. She might
have added: “And there’s no brains in sex, either!”
If young writers must imitate, must go through a period of playing the
sedulous ape, as Stevenson called it, we hope that more of them will
cease to imitate the Great and Peculiar Few and imitate such exemplars
of intelligent and growing naturalism as Mrs. Underwood. It will make
the approach to a recognition of their own powers less painful. And for
Sophie Kerr we hope only that she may continue as she has begun and keep
growing.
BOOKS BY SOPHIE KERR
_Love at Large_, 1916.
_The Blue Envelope_, 1917.
_The Golden Block_, 1918.
_The See-Saw_, 1919.
_Painted Meadows_, 1920.
_One Thing Is Certain_, 1922.
_Love at Large was published by Harper & Brothers, New York. The Blue
Envelope, The Golden Block and The See Saw were published by Doubleday,
Page & Company, New York; the last two books were published by George H.
Doran Company, New York._
CHAPTER XIX
MARJORIE BENTON COOKE
Of course Marjorie Benton Cooke is Bambi, or, if you prefer, Bambi is
simply Marjorie Benton Cooke. The heroine of the most amusing novel by
an American woman in many, many years couldn’t be solely the product of
an imagination however fine. She couldn’t be anything but an imaginative
introspection--by which we mean that Miss Cooke could only have created
her by following the advice of O. Henry and others before him, to “look
into your heart and write.”
No matter if not a single event of Bambi’s life is autobiographical; no
matter if her Father Professor with his mathematical flowerbeds never
lived; still less if Jarvis Jocelyn is a pure fantasy. The point is that
to write Bambi Miss Cooke had to put her real self in the midst of
imagined people and subject her real self to imagined events. This is
completely different from the usual method of the skilled fictioneer. He
builds his hero or heroine in the first place, but having made the
character and infused into it the breath of life the character does the
rest. The writer has little governance over his character’s actions;
these are determined by the character himself and the writer does not
much more than set them down. Incredible? Not in the least. Thackeray,
Scott--we don’t know how many writers--testify to the obstinacy with
which their people insist on being themselves. Why, an author is really
no better off than a parent who brings a child into the world. The
parent may transmit to the child certain traits and the author may endow
his person with certain qualities; but as the child grows up he takes
his own course rather oftener than not, and the fictional person does
always! Or if he doesn’t we see the author jerking the strings and
despise him for it, for the story rings false.
But the book _Bambi_ is another matter and precisely what the difference
consists in we have tried to show. Let us illustrate it anew. _Bambi_ is
imagined autobiography. Instead of creating Bambi and letting her go her
way Miss Cooke conducted herself through the story. Or, if you want to
put it in another way, you may say that she created Bambi and endowed
her with certain of her own traits--gayety, courage, tenderness, wit, a
love of drama--and then let her go her way. It is because of the
intimate personal quality of her heroine that Miss Cooke dedicated her
book “To Bambi, with thanks to her for being Herself! M. B. C.”
The book is a marvel--an absolute marvel. It sold heavily and promptly,
that was to be expected; but the marvel consists not in the book’s
popularity but in the extraordinary enthusiasm it stirred in its
readers. Since no one who has read it seems to be able to avoid the use
of superlatives in speaking of it--certainly this writer isn’t--it might
be best to put aside any attempt at characterization. What follows shall
be--analysis!
The first chapter takes the reader off his feet. Bambi, loving the
dreamer Jarvis though perhaps not very consciously loving him, sends for
a minister and has herself wedded to him, despite the absent-minded
objections of her father, the professor of mathematics. Jarvis needs
looking after. This perfectly implausible proceeding is made entirely
plausible--you swallow it whole and with immense relish--by just two
technical triumphs on Miss Cooke’s part.
1. Everything is in dialogue. You are not asked to believe that the
Professor is one kind of a person, Bambi another, and Jarvis a third,
and all three eminently unlikely; you see them do this and that and you
hear them say so and so. Miss Cooke doesn’t ask you to believe _her_,
she asks you to believe your senses!
2. The dialogue is witty--the wittiest--but there we go off on
superlatives again. The dialogue is witty but natural in the completest
sense of the word and the wit springs entirely from the situation. No
other wit is so good, as any dramatist will tell you.
These two things are the key to the whole story and the key to the utter
amazement which overcomes the reader when he applies the test of
probability to it--after he has read it through. Of course the wonder of
that first chapter could not be entirely sustained through 366 pages,
but by the time Miss Cooke’s capital starting situation has lost its
sharpest edge the plot has reared its head! Oh, yes, there’s a plot; all
such a story as _Bambi_ will stand; a plot with adequate suspense and a
steady sweep toward a dénouement. For in a tale like _Bambi_ you must
not have too much plot; the chief interest is ever in the charming and
lovable heroine.
But this sketch is all Bambi and none of it Marjorie Benton Cooke, of
whom Bambi is only a projection, in dotted lines, as a draughtsman would
say. Miss Cooke herself is the daughter of Joseph Henry Cooke and Jessie
(Benton) Cooke. She was born in Richmond, Indiana. In 1899 she received
the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. In
the same year she began writing for the magazines. In fact her first
printed “novel” exists as a yellowed clipping in her mother’s scrapbook.
Underneath it is penned a memorandum: “Published the Sunday after
Marjorie received her degree.” It was a whimsical episode, the story of
a lost dime, divided into two “chapters,” and appeared in the Chicago
_Record-Herald_. It contained no promise of _Bambi_.
“Marjorie and her doting parents,” as Mrs. Cooke once remarked, “thought
fame and fortune were hers to command.” They weren’t. She traveled a
long, hard road, writing scraps of humor and satire for newspapers and
magazines, concocting little stories and selling them. She was fifteen
years away from _Bambi_ when she started. But she had the gift for
dramatic recitation with which she later endowed that young woman. In
1902 she began touring the United States as a monologist. Dozens of her
monologues have been published but will not be found listed at the end
of this chapter. Miss Cooke would be the last to expect them to be. They
are interesting only as the preparation necessary to write _Bambi_,
particularly that first chapter. Miss Cooke has always been interested
in social questions, as any one who remembers Jarvis Jocelyn’s
experiences in New York will understand. She is a member of the Little
Room Club in Chicago, the Heterodoxy Club and the Women’s University
Club in New York.
Her books, as distinguished from her printed monologue booklets, began
in 1903 with _Modern Monologues_, continued in 1905 with _Dramatic
Episodes_ and _Plays for Children_, marked time in 1907 with _More
Modern Monologues_ and budded with a novel, her first novel, in
1910--_The Girl Who Lived in the Woods_. _Dr. David_ appeared in 1911;
and there were _To a Mother_, _The Twelfth Christian_, a dramatic poem,
and three one-act plays which were produced--all before _Bambi_.
_And_ Miss Cooke will play a Chopin ballade for you and talk to you with
the same lightness, deftness, and fun that Bambi displays. She has
forgotten more about the art of talking than the authors of all the
conversation books ever knew. She is not obtrusive. The manuscript of
her happiest book came to the publishers quite unheralded--just a
manuscript in a cardboard box with a note from Miss Cooke saying she
would like to have Doubleday, Page & Company consider it. Eugene F.
Saxton began it one Sunday afternoon about 5 o’clock, intending to read
until six, then go for a walk and have dinner uptown somewhere. He read
till seven, looked at the clock, and--went on reading. You can eat any
day, you know....
Later a telegram went forth: “_Bambi_ is ours. Love at first sight.”
Miss Cooke sat to Mary Green Blumenschein for the illustrations to her
book; that’s why they are what they ought to be. And you are to picture
her just as you would picture Bambi, say as sitting on a low couch, her
feet tucked in, enthroned among billowy cushions, that is, of course, if
you, the caller, are really acquainted. It will be sufficient to be
acquainted with Bambi when you call.
What else? _Bambi_ was followed by _Cinderella Jane_ and that
interesting tale of the studio cleaner who was married to the painter
without love on either side--they made a success of it and were rewarded
by becoming lovers--that tale was succeeded by _The Threshold_, in which
Miss Cooke chose a theme which would give full and legitimate play to
her interest in social problems. A rich bachelor, Gregory Farwell,
employs Joan Babcock as housekeeper and companion for himself and his
17-year-old nephew. Farwell’s employees strike; the nephew, inspired by
Joan, takes the workers’ side. The result is a thoroughly dramatic story
in which the problems of capital and labor, social relations and the
like arise fairly and squarely out of the action and are not foisted on
the reader. Miss Cooke manages exceedingly difficult material well.
If you go to interview Miss Cooke about her own beliefs on serious
subjects she will answer you out of the mouths of her people in _The
Threshold_, and chiefly from the utterances of Joan Babcock--which does
not mean that she makes her characters say what she wants to say to the
world at large. No! It means merely that she herself has advanced no
farther along the path to an answer to all these questions than Joan
Babcock got. When Miss Cooke started to write _The Threshold_ she knew,
as a good novelist does, exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to
find out how a certain type of ardent young American woman feels about
the future and its social and industrial problems. You ask: why didn’t
she go out and, finding a woman of that type, ask her? To do that was to
run risks. You might not find the young woman. She might return evasive
answers or answers either intentionally or unintentionally
misleading--so few of us really know what we think about anything in the
future! There was just one safe and certain way to set about it, and
that was to create a young woman of the sort Miss Cooke had in mind, put
her in the midst of events, and see what she would say and do, what she
would come to believe about the things ahead.
Miss Cooke’s _The Clutch of Circumstance_, on the other hand, is just a
good mystery yarn about secret service work and international plots--but
based on fact. It has a serious defect in that the heroine, some of
whose qualities are plainly exhibited for the reader’s admiration, is
guilty of atrocious treachery, becoming, in fact, a German spy!
Miss Cooke? She is going ahead, thank you! She is going ahead in the
wisest way in the world for a person of her special gifts. What was said
in _The Threshold_ about Joan is the best thing to say about her author:
“The world is thrust forward by such dynamic personalities as yours,
even by your mistakes. There is danger in action, but more in tranquil
inaction, in feeble acquiescence in the face of injustice and wrong.”
I have left untouched this chapter, written in Miss Cooke’s lifetime,
because, for the readers of her books, the picture of her as she lived
is the picture to remember; and for the time they are under the spell of
one of her stories, the fact is without significance that, in April,
1920, while in Japan at the commencement of a world tour, Marjorie
Benton Cooke died.
BOOKS BY MARJORIE BENTON COOKE
_Modern Monologues_, 1903.
_Dramatic Episodes_, 1905.
_Plays for Children_, 1905.
_More Modern Monologues_, 1907.
_The Girl Who Lived in the Woods_, 1910.
_Dr. David_, 1911.
_Bambi_, 1914.
_The Dual Alliance_, 1915.
_Cinderella Jane_, 1917.
_The Threshold_, 1918.
_The Clutch of Circumstance_, 1918.
_The Cricket_, 1919.
_Married?_ 1921.
_The Girl Who Lived in the Woods and Dr. David are published by A. C.
McClurg & Company, Chicago; Miss Cooke’s later novels are published by
Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; but The Clutch of Circumstance is
published by George H. Doran Company, New York._
CHAPTER XX
GRACE S. RICHMOND
Why do some of Grace S. Richmond’s books sell faster than the books of
any other American woman writer? Because they do! And their popularity
has no relation whatever to their size. Some of the littlest--_On
Christmas Day in the Morning_, _On Christmas Day in the Evening_, and
_The Enlisting Wife_, for instances--sell most rapidly. Not the size;
perhaps it has something to do with the substance!
No perhaps about it! Mrs. Richmond has, more perfectly than most of her
contemporaries, the gift for disclosing the simplest and deepest
feelings of men and women everywhere in just those words which are at
the back of our heads and hardly ever on our lips. They are the words we
ache to utter but never quite bring ourselves to say. She says them for
us. She makes articulate and perfect the full feeling that is in us. She
is our emotional self--that part of self which is a common
possession--touched with pentecostal fire. When we read her we have the
delight of self-expression blended with a feeling of gratefulness to her
for affording it to us.
These are strong words. Gush, some will call them. Well, among the
people of repressed instincts there is one instinct seldom
repressed--the instinct to sneer at those who let themselves go. This is
an inconsistency which will trouble them (we point it out that they may
give themselves over to their favorite delight of self-torture) but
which bothers the rest of us not at all. We know--the rest of us--full
well that the emotionalism of which Mrs. Richmond is the most successful
exponent is a cleansing and refreshing exercise. We read her and come
away a little surer of ourselves and of the world about us. For the
essence of that world is the people in it and there is something in most
people that does not change.
Mrs. Richmond has written many books. The only exact fact to be stated
is that in 1914--and several of her most successful books have appeared
since--she had sold 400,000 copies. The total must be well on to the
million mark by now. Then there are the cheaper editions of her earlier
stories; there are the readers of her work in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_
and other publications; there are the libraries where copies of her are
always “out” and there are new circles of readers, each book being much
like a stone breaking the surface of a pond and making its own widening
ripples;--no matter. Millions read Mrs. Richmond. That is enough to
know. It is the achievement of a quiet, country-dwelling woman whose
publishers have a time to get her to be photographed!
She lives in Fredonia, New York, and the sketch of her life is a bare
outline. She was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the daughter of the
Rev. Charles Edwards Smith, D.D., and Catherine A. (Kimball) Smith. Her
father was a Baptist clergyman, the author of _The Baptism of Fire_ and
_The World Lighted_. Grace was an only child. While she was still a
young girl the family moved to Syracuse, New York. There the daughter
was educated in the Syracuse High School and under private tutors,
following college courses of study under their direction. She gave some
indications of the writer’s gift before her marriage, in 1887, to Dr.
Nelson Guernsey Richmond of Fredonia. But the wife of a young physician
with a growing practice has not a great deal of leisure. It was not
until 1891 that Mrs. Richmond, whose first work was short stories for
magazines, attracted special attention by a story which appeared in the
Thanksgiving number of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_.
It had come in as hundreds of other things come in, had been read by the
principal reader and had by him been handed directly to the editor, who
accepted it without delay. The story was called _The Flowing
Shoe-String_ and described the reformation, through love, of a
charmingly untidy little literary genius. Mrs. Richmond remembers it
very well! She found herself in rather notable company--Mrs. A. D. T.
Whitney, Frances E. Willard, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the Rev. T. De Witt
Talmage and Russell Sage were other contributors to that Thanksgiving
number.
Very, very modest, and very, very busy, Mrs. Richmond did not deluge the
editor with other work. In fact, seven whole years passed before she
made her second appearance in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_, in 1898, with
_A Silk-Lined Girl_. It was the Thanksgiving number again. The company
had changed but was still notable; Henry M. Stanley, Caroline Atwater
Mason and Mary E. Wilkins, now Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, were on the
table of contents.
This second bow was the real introduction to her audience. Since 1898
Mrs. Richmond has been among the magazine’s most steady and popular
contributors. For twelve years, from 1902 to 1913, not a year went by
when she was not represented in its pages. Her most successful work has
had its first appearance there. May and June of 1902 brought to the
_Journal’s_ readers the first of a series of tales about Juliet which
became, in 1905, a book, _The Indifference of Juliet_. Juliet’s
indifference was toward a young author in relation to the subject of
marriage. Naturally interest in her did not stop with _The Indifference
of Juliet_ and so, in 1907, her further experiences as communicated to
the _Journal’s_ readers were published between covers under the title
_With Juliet in England_.
Mrs. Richmond is a doctor’s wife. In 1910 she created the character for
whom she is most widely known and thanked--Redfield Pepper Burns, the
generous, red-haired young doctor of uncertain temper and humane
impulses of whom we haven’t heard the last yet. _Red Pepper Burns_ was
followed by _Mrs. Red Pepper_ and _Red Pepper’s Patients_. But hold
on--not so fast. In 1906, between the two Juliet books, Mrs. Richmond
had given us the story of _The Second Violin_. In 1908 came _Around the
Corner in Gay Street_, in 1909 _A Court of Inquiry_; there were also the
two Christmas booklets--_On Christmas Day in the Morning_ (1908) and _On
Christmas Day in the Evening_ (1910). Between _Red Pepper Burns_ and
_Mrs. Red Pepper_ appeared _Strawberry Acres_ and a year after _Mrs.
Red Pepper_ was published _The Twenty-fourth of June_.
But this is becoming a mere catalogue, and the place for a list of Mrs.
Richmond’s books is at the end of this chapter. What we want to do here
is to consider her writing, or a few fragments of it as representative
as may be, and try to see what she does and how she does it.
Let it be said at the outset that she makes slips which would be
inexcusable if we did not all make the same slips. In the second chapter
of _Red Pepper’s Patients_ Dr. Burns has sheltered a Hungarian violinist
who is now playing for the physician and his wife: “Warmed and fed, his
Latin nature leaping up from its deep depression to the exaltation of
the hour, the appeal he made to them was intensely pathetic.” The
Hungarians are not a Latin race, but we know what she means, so why be
bothered? “His attitude, as he stood before his hosts, had the
unconscious grace of the foreigner.” Of any foreigner--they are all
graceful! Hang it! We always think of them as unconsciously graceful.
Why quibble?
Mrs. Richmond can be humorous in the most natural way. From _The
Twenty-fourth of June_:
“‘Rufus,’ said his wife solemnly, following him into the white-tiled
bathroom, ‘I want you should look at those bath-towels. I never in my
life set eyes on anything like them. They must have cost--I don’t know
what they cost--I didn’t know there were such bath-towels made!’
“‘I don’t want to wrap myself in a blanket,’ asserted her husband. ‘I
want to know I’ve got a towel in my hand, that I can whisk round me and
slap myself with. Look here, let’s get to bed....
“‘Ruth,’ said he, with sudden solemnity, ‘I forgot to undress in my
dressing-room. Had I better put my clothes on and go take ’em off again
in there?’”
It is funny because it is so exactly what we do say in such situations.
It is naturalism of a very high order and the more humorous for being
entirely unforced.
In the creation of character Mrs. Richmond is at her best simply because
she differentiates her people ever so slightly from what, lacking a
better word, we generally call types. Her main triumph is evenly shared
in this field and that other, of which we spoke at the outset. _Red
Pepper Burns_ was a very great success as novels go and Redfield Pepper
Burns is a very distinct success as the persons of fiction go; but the
Christmas stories that Mrs. Richmond has written and such intimate
little heart messages as _The Enlisting Wife_ and _The Whistling Mother_
are just as successful. Take the opening of _The Enlisting Wife_:
“Judith Taine, who was married to Lieutenant Kirke Wendell, Junior, just
before he sailed for France, is keeping in a small blue book a little
record which he may see when he returns. It begins with the last
paragraph of a letter from her young husband.
“‘If you hadn’t enlisted with me, my Judith, I shouldn’t be half the man
I’m beginning to hope I am, over here in France. If manhood means
standing up straight and strong, facing the future without the old
boyish love of ease and snug corners--then--well--time will prove me,
anyhow. Darling, can you guess how you are with me, every waking
moment--and some of the sleeping ones too, when I’m lucky? My wife--even
though I could be with her only those few hours after Father married
us--how absolutely she is that! My enlisting wife, my fighting
comrade!--_O Judith!_’
“I don’t cry often--not I, Judith Taine Wendell. I can’t afford to cry,
there’s too much to be done. But that last paragraph did bring the
tears--happy ones--and I kissed the dear words again and again before I
tucked the letter away in the warm place where each one lives, day and
night, till the next one comes. O Kirke! Even you don’t know yet how
‘absolutely’ I am your wife!”
Such writing is insusceptible of analysis; it admits only of
characterization. We all know how hostile some of the characterization
is likely to be, but the fact remains that Mrs. Richmond has contrived
perfectly to set down _not_ the things the Judith Wendells and Kirke
Wendells actually say and write but the unspoken thought that gives body
and coloring to their actual words. It is what we wish we could say and
write that Mrs. Richmond gives us. She transliterates the true feeling.
Remember, it is not our feeling but the depth of it that we are
habitually ashamed to show. It is only necessary to make that reflection
to understand Mrs. Richmond’s success. She is as popular with our
emotional selves as would be a person who should write letters for the
unfortunate inhabitants of an illiterate community. Most of us are
emotional illiterates and are likely to remain so. We need Mrs. Richmond
and more like her.
BOOKS BY GRACE S. RICHMOND
_The Indifference of Juliet_, 1905.
_With Juliet in England_, 1907.
_Round the Corner in Gay Street_, 1908.
_Red Pepper Burns_, 1910.
_Strawberry Acres_, 1911.
_Mrs. Red Pepper_, 1913.
_The Second Violin_, 1906.
_A Court of Inquiry_, 1909.
_On Christmas Day in the Morning_, 1908.
_On Christmas Day in the Evening_, 1910.
_The Twenty-fourth of June_, 1914.
_Under the Country Sky._
_Under the Christmas Stars._
_The Brown Study._
_Red Pepper’s Patients_, 1917.
_The Whistling Mother_, 1917.
_The Enlisting Wife_, 1918.
_Brotherly House._
_Red and Black_, 1919.
_Foursquare_, 1922.
_The first six books are published by A. L. Burt Company, New York; the
rest by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._
CHAPTER XXI
WILLA SIBERT CATHER
Some novelists are at their best in their first novels; others do their
best work after a long apprenticeship in the public eye; a few show
steady growth and a very few show steady and rapid growth. Of these last
is Willa Sibert Cather.
She has written four novels. You pick up _Alexander’s Bridge_ and read
with discriminating pleasure. It is a fine piece of work. It
is--excellent is the word, yes, excellent and artistically fine all
through. The story is sound and gives a sort of æsthetic delight if you
are susceptible to purely æsthetic delights in literature. But there is
nothing about this very short tale of a great man who fissured and fell
to make a deep impression. However, some time later you come upon
another book by the same author and start to read.
Then what a shock; then what reverberations in your heart as well as
your head (for even an empty head will reverberate and perhaps rather
better than a filled one). _O Pioneers!_ is in its way an epic of the
Western plains; it is wholly epic in its emotional force and sweeping
panorama, though not in rich detail. The first chapter engages you and
the second chapter enthralls you. Thereafter you are a thorough
believer in the literary gift of Willa Sibert Cather. But though
intensely satisfied with _O Pioneers!_ you never for a moment expect
more of her--perhaps because it does not seem as if to expect more would
be in any way reasonable.
A year or so passes. You get hold of a new novel by her, as much thicker
than _O Pioneers!_ as _O Pioneers!_ was thicker than _Alexander’s
Bridge_. It is called _The Song of the Lark_. You eye it speculatively.
You start to read it confidently but not breathlessly. And ere you are
halfway through you know that she has excelled herself again.
_The Song of the Lark_ is a much bigger thing than her second novel in
every respect except one--it has not the same peculiar quality of
seeming to sum up in a single life the whole history of a part of
America in the period of that life. But wait--think a moment. Does not
this chronicle of Thea Kronberg, the singer, sum up in a single life the
whole emotional history of thousands of lives? Why, yes; you had not
thought of it but that is so! Thea Kronberg the girl, struggling ahead
toward some goal as yet unsuspected; Thea Kronberg the woman, fighting
with all her force to gain a goal perceived but hopelessly distant; Thea
Kronberg the great singer, fighting and triumphing for the sake of the
fight--what is this but the record of every superb artist who has ever
lived?
From the wonder of those second and third books, each so much bigger
than the one before, we turn somewhat bewilderedly to the probable
wonder of the woman who could--and did--write them. But here no wonder
lies. At least, you may read the external record of Willa Sibert
Cather’s life and find nothing that fully, or even adequately, explains
her growth as a novelist. If there were only a hint! But read through
this bit of autobiography and see if you can find any.
“Willa Sibert Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, the daughter of
Charles Fectigue Cather and Virginia Sibert Boak. Though the Siberts
were originally Alsatians, and the Cathers came from County Tyrone,
Ireland, both families had lived in Virginia for several generations.
When Willa Cather was 9 years old her father left Virginia and settled
on a ranch in Nebraska, in a very thinly populated part of the State
where the acreage of cultivated land was negligible beside the
tremendous stretch of raw prairie. There were very few American families
in that district; all the near neighbors were Scandinavians, and ten or
twelve miles away there was an entire township settled by Bohemians.
“For a child accustomed to the quiet and the established order behind
the Blue Ridge, this change was very stimulating. There was no school
near at hand, and Miss Cather lived out of doors, winter and summer. She
had a pony and rode about the Norwegian and Bohemian settlements,
talking to the old men and women and trying to understand them. The
first two years on the ranch were probably more important to her as a
writer than any that came afterward.
“After some preparation in the high school at Red Cloud, Nebraska, Miss
Cather entered the State University of Nebraska, graduated at 19, and
immediately went to Pittsburgh and got a position on the Pittsburgh
_Leader_. She was telegraph editor and dramatic critic on this paper for
several years and then gave it up to take the place of the head of the
English department in the Allegheny High School.
“While she was teaching in the Allegheny High School she published her
first book of verse, _April Twilights_, and her first book of short
stories, _The Troll Garden_. The latter book attracted a good deal of
attention, and six months after it was published, in the winter of 1906,
Miss Cather went to New York to accept a position on the staff of
_McClure’s Magazine_. From 1908 until the autumn of 1912 Miss Cather was
managing editor of _McClure’s Magazine_, and during these four years did
no writing at all. In the fall of 1912 she took a house in Cherry
Valley, New York, and wrote a short novel, _Alexander’s Bridge_, and a
novelette, _The Bohemian Girl_, both of which appeared serially in
_McClure’s Magazine_. In the spring of 1913 Miss Cather went for a long
stay in Arizona and New Mexico, penetrating to some of the many
hardly-accessible Cliff Dweller remains and the remote mesa cities of
the Pueblo Indians.
“Miss Cather has an apartment at 5 Bank street in New York, where she
lives in winter. In the summer she goes abroad or returns to the West.
This summer [1915] she refused a tempting offer to write a series of
articles on the war situation in Europe to explore the twenty-odd miles
of Cliff Dweller remains that are hidden away in the southwest corner of
Colorado, near Mancos and Durango.”
Very nice, but it tells you nothing that you need to know if you are to
frame a hypothesis to account for Miss Cather’s astonishingly rapid
progress as a novelist. The material for _O Pioneers!_ and _The Song of
the Lark_, or a good deal of it, was patently gathered in her
impressionable girlhood. The fine chapters of _The Song of the Lark_
which relate Thea Kronberg’s stay in the Cliff Dweller region with Fred
Ottenburg are outwardly explained by Miss Cather’s personal interest in
these ruins. What is not made in the least clear is the secret of her
own success. Let us look into some of the things she has said and see if
we can find a clew to it there.
“I have never found any intellectual excitement more intense than I used
to feel when I spent a morning with one of these pioneer women at her
baking or buttermaking. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable
state of excitement; I always felt as if they told me so much more than
they said--as if I had actually got inside another person’s skin. If one
begins that early it is the story of the man-eating tiger over again--no
other adventure ever carries one quite so far.”
Do you detect something? Do you perceive (1) a set of impressions
acquired at the most plastic age and with a sharpness of configuration
never to be lost and (2) an extraordinary blend of intellectual and
emotional feeling--of heart and mind--which carried the girl _beyond_
the spoken word; and also (3) an imaginative faculty which could go on
living a thing after merely hearing about it and living it through to
the unnarrated, possibly unexperienced, conclusion? Do you get a hint of
any or all of these things? Of course you do!
Going further we learn that when Miss Cather began to write she tried to
put the Swedish and Bohemian settlers she had known in her girlhood into
her short stories. “The results,” we are informed, “never satisfied
her.” She discussed this dissatisfaction afterward.
“It is always hard to write about the things that are near your heart,”
she argued. “From a kind of instinct of self-protection you distort and
disguise them. Those stories were so poor that they discouraged me. I
decided that I wouldn’t write any more about the country and the people
for whom I had a personal feeling.
“Then I had the good fortune to meet Sarah Orne Jewett, who had read all
of my early stories and had very clear and definite opinions about them
and about where my work fell short. She said: ‘Write it as it is, don’t
try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way;
you will have to make a way of your own. If the way happens to be new,
don’t let that frighten you. Don’t try to write the kind of short story
that this or that magazine wants; write the truth and let them take it
or leave it.’
“It is that kind of honesty, that earnest endeavor to tell truly the
thing that haunts the mind, that I love in Miss Jewett’s own work. I
dedicated _O Pioneers!_ to her because I had talked over some of the
characters with her, and in this book I tried to tell the story of the
people as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her by word
of mouth.”
Ah! This is downright enlightening. Miss Cather does not specifically
say that she had to depart from actual persons when she came to do her
good work, but that is the inference we draw. She does not entirely lay
bare the real reason; and for the benefit of those who may be puzzled
over it let us supplement what she says.
There is a pitch of emotion at which the artist cannot work; he can only
see, feel, learn, store up; the rendering of what he has felt and seen
comes afterward. Wordsworth said that poetry was emotion recollected in
tranquillity. He might just as well have extended the definition to
include all forms of art. When you or I come to sit down and put on
paper actual persons whom we knew and loved (or hated) we cannot do it
if the feeling is still very strong, any more than we can write about
them while loving or hating them. Our hands shake and our emotional and
mental disturbance is so great that we cannot collect our thoughts, or,
if we contrive to collect them partially, we cannot put them down on
paper. Tears blur the vision. We have to wait, then, until a little time
has passed and we are calmer; until we can _recall_ in a warm,
remembering glow, the feeling of that time, recall it just sufficiently
for our artist’s purpose. We sail through it then, but are not awash.
Very often this intensity of feeling about actual persons so persists as
to make it impracticable to write honestly about them at all. And so the
artist is thrown back on his imagination for the bodying forth of other
persons and characters, typical enough, real enough, true enough, but
not the flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. About these creations
of his own he can write and write well. And this, we are surmising, is
the experience that Miss Cather underwent as so many others have
undergone it before her.
In her case the difference was that she had an imagination to come to
her rescue. So few have! Or rather, so few have an adequate imaginative
faculty, one that will bear them forward, one that will sustain their
created people, that will meet every demand made upon its resources
early and late, that will not flag, that will not weary, that will not
die in the middle of the creative task.
We have built up our hypothesis. Now let us see if we can support it.
“According to Miss Cather, all the material for her writing had been
collected before she was 20 years old. ‘I have had nothing really new
since that time,’ she said. ‘Every story I have written since then has
been a recollection of some childhood experience, of something that
touched me while a youngster. You must know a subject as a child, before
you ever had any idea of writing, to instill into it, in a story, the
true feeling. After you grow up impressions don’t come so easily. And it
is for the purpose of recalling the old feelings I had in my youth that
I come West every summer. The West has for me that something which
excites me, and gives me what I want and need to write a story.’”
Surely this is all the confirmation we need. She goes West to get the
warm, remembering glow that is necessary for her artist’s purpose.
Let us consider her four books.
_Alexander’s Bridge_ might have been written by Edith Wharton. It has
only one fault, a certain cloudiness characteristic of finely-written
stories in which the mentality of one or two of the characters is of the
essence of the whole thing. It needs for its full appreciation Miss
Cather’s own explication of its purpose. She says:
“The bridge builder with whom this story is concerned began life a
pagan, a crude force, with little respect for anything but youth and
work and power. He married a woman of much more discriminating taste and
much more clearly defined standards. He admires and believes in the
social order of which she is really a part, though he has been only a
participant. Just so long as his ever-kindling energy exhibits itself
only in his work, everything goes well; but he runs the risk of
encountering new emotional as well as new intellectual stimuli [a pity
that in the effort to explain it should be necessary to resort to this
jargon!].
“The same qualities which made for his success involve him in a personal
relationship [with an actress, a youthful love] which poisons his peace
of mind and dissipates his working power. His behavior changes, but his
ideals do not.
“He was the kind of a man who had to think well of himself. His relation
to his wife was not a usual one; when he hurt her, he hurt his
self-respect and lost his sense of power. His bridge fell because he
himself had been torn in two ways and had lost his singleness of purpose
which makes a man effective. He had failed to give it the last ounce of
himself, the ounce that puts through every great undertaking.”
There! That last paragraph’s better! It makes quite clear the inner
action of the novel. And the only fault with the novel, we repeat, is
that this inner action should be clear right there! It should not be
necessary for any one of ordinary intelligence to have to read Miss
Cather’s explanation of what really takes place inside Bartley
Alexander.
_O Pioneers!_ is utterly different. Some one has said that reading a
novel by Miss Cather gives you no assurance at all as to what her next
novel will be like. That seems to be true. It is the stamp, we may add,
of a very original gift--talent--genius; the degree of her endowment is
not precisely determinable even yet. In _O Pioneers!_ it is a woman who
dominates the whole story, tall, strong, sensible, not so much
kind-hearted as human-hearted, which means a great comprehension with
sympathy to serve it. We see the girl Alexandra and her two brothers
left by a dying father with the charge to hold to the land, the untamed
soil of the prairie. The father has made his daughter the head of the
family because she has intelligence and her brothers have not. They work
well, but they do not use their heads in their work. The girl justifies
her father’s faith in her and by her intelligent anticipation makes her
brothers prosperous and herself rich. There is a third brother,
distinctly younger than the others, whom she has under her especial care
and upon whom she lavishes the maternal affection that is in her. The
terrible tragedy which involves him would have blasted irretrievably a
woman less strong, less intelligent than Alexandra. She survives it as
she would survive anything that life could do to her.
The quality of the story is dual. There is the fidelity to character
which marks the true novelist, the resolute putting through of what
these people, in contact with each other, will certainly bring about.
That calls for courage! How severe the temptation to shirk an inevitable
but bitter event! It is so easy to persuade yourself that this and that
will not mean disaster, that such and such chemicals when joined need
not explode, that oil and water will mix this once, that two and two may
for the moment make five! Why must there be a blighting catastrophe? Why
cannot a happy ending be a truthful ending? The answer is that sometimes
it can, but when it can’t you mustn’t make it so. Miss Cather’s _O
Pioneers!_ doesn’t try to.
The second aspect of this novel we have already named. It is cyclic,
that is, it sums up an era. Such a quality always gives a book a
historical value; where it is wedded to high fictional art, as here, the
satisfaction of the reader is complete.
_The Song of the Lark_ gains over _O Pioneers!_ in the first place by
its sheer bulk. _O Pioneers!_ was a series of scenes in a single but
changing setting; to cover so much ground, in point of time, the author
had to strip her action of all that was not indispensable. But as _The
Song of the Lark_ is entirely centered about the development of a single
person there is a chance to enrich the narrative with no end of detail;
more, it is necessary to do so. For here we are trying to come at the
innermost secret of Thea Kronberg, we are trying to find out
what--_what_--it was in her that made her great. To get at that we must
have exhaustively every item which can be made to contribute the least
mite of information. We must have everything about her from her
girlhood to her success on the New York stage, we must have all the
persons who came in contact with her and who had their effect on her, or
upon whom she had her effect, for it was generally that way about! We
must have her as she appeared to each and every one of the few really
privileged to know her. What they saw and said, the conclusions they
drew, are the material from which we have to dig out the secret. And
Miss Cather gives us all we need. She is replete with the facts and she
puts them in their entirety before us. The result is a biography, no
less; but a biography unencumbered with letters and irrelevant
conversations and unimportant views and the unendurable
conscientiousness of the faithfully recording friend.
_My Antonia_ is a book to be put alongside _O Pioneers!_ It is less
epical but of more historical value for its minute and colorful
depiction of life on the Nebraska prairies and in the Nebraska towns
about 1885. The book is really a chronicle of people and their
surroundings, a mosaic of character sketches and scenes and short
stories brought within a single ken. The material ranges from tragedy,
horror and repellent occurrences to pathos, humor and farce. It is
perfectly handled, however; the reader is never offended and is
variously touched and amused--and always the book is engrossing. Such a
book is worth a dozen formal historical records. And the figure of
Antonia Cuzak is a biographical triumph. Reminiscence here surpasses
fiction.
There is no more to be said and it may easily be that too much has been
said already. If this chapter has been too venturesome in its
inferences and too declamatory in its exposition, forgive that, O
reader! If you have read Miss Cather’s notable novels you may disagree
but you will understand and condone; if you have not read them you will
be more indulgent toward us after doing so; and actually if what we have
said shall lead you to read her books the whole of our striving will
have been fulfilled. She is a novelist whose work already adds
measurably to American literature; whether all of us put the same
estimate upon her accomplishment does not matter at all; it matters
supremely that as many of us as possible should be acquainted with it.
BOOKS BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER
_April Twilights_, 1903. R. G. Badger, Boston.
_The Troll Garden_, 1905. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York.
_Alexander’s Bridge_, 1912.
_O Pioneers!_ 1913.
_The Song of the Lark_, 1915.
_My Antonia_, 1918.
_Youth and the Bright Medusa_, 1920.
_One of Ours_, 1922.
_Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, but Youth and the Bright
Medusa and One of Ours are published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York._
CHAPTER XXII
CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM
To write twenty-six books is something, is it not? To have written
twenty-six books which have sold half a million copies (the publisher’s
offhand guess) is something else again and more. Clara Louise Burnham
has done that; and the cold arithmetical statement does not begin to
convey the real nature of her achievement. You must read her to know how
capable a novelist she is, how expert, how gifted with humor, insight,
fertility in those slight inventions which make up the reality of a
fictionist’s whole. Mrs. Burnham’s writings are associated in the minds
of many thousands who have not read her tales, or have read only a few
of them, with the doctrines of Christian Science. And it is true that
she is the author of several novels in which the principles of this
faith are of the essence of the stories. Equally true is it that she has
said of her book, _Jewel_:
“I like _Jewel_ best. I think she is my high water mark. It is a
Christian Science book and without the Christian Science terminology
that is used in the story it, well, it would be a kind of second _Little
Lord Fauntleroy_, and besides, it wouldn’t be _Jewel_.”
Which may be so but which does not hold true of _The Right Princess_.
There the identification of Frances Rogers’s beliefs with the faith of
which Mrs. Eddy was the founder is not indispensable to the narrative.
Miss Rogers need not have been a Scientist. We should still have an
unusual and effectively told story, a novel quite as entertaining and
worth the reader’s while as _The Opened Shutters_, from which the
terminology of the Scientists is entirely absent.
The point we would make, then, the point that ought, in sheer honesty,
to be made at the very outset of any consideration of Mrs. Burnham’s
work, is her genuine and incontestable achievement as a straight-way,
out-and-out, talented story-teller, a pure and simple fictioneer, an
experienced and popular American novelist. That some of her novels have
probably done more to put Christian Science precepts before the world in
what the Scientist believes to be the true light than anything ever
written other than the church’s texts--that this is so may be granted.
But it is not a fact we have to concern ourselves with here. We concede
it and pass on. We pass on in either direction, going back to the
fourteen books which preceded _The Right Princess_ or forward to the
eight novels which have appeared since _The Leaven of Love_. They are
the bulk of Mrs. Burnham’s work. And yet--it is to be feared we shall
have to bestow most of our attention upon the six books between! They
represent Mrs. Burnham’s widest popularity and what is possibly her best
work judged strictly in literary aspects. But enough of this for the
present; it is time enough to cross bridges when we come to them. Let us
first get a glimpse of Mrs. Burnham herself.
A tall woman, spare in build, with light hair, blue eyes and a merry
manner, a conversationalist with anecdotes, a manner of great
simplicity, serenity, calm pleasantness. She was the eldest daughter of
George F. Root, as popular a songwriter as this country has produced.
Born in Newton, Massachusetts, she has lived most of her life in
Chicago. She summers in Maine. Her education was in the public and in
private schools in Chicago, and at the New Church School, Waltham,
Massachusetts. Politically she is, or was, a Progressive; and at this
point we cannot do better than to quote her own words in the Chicago
_Record-Herald_ of November 24, 1912:
“People who see the large, sunshiny hotel room in which I work, whose
bay windows command a wide expanse of lake, say that they no longer
wonder at the good cheer of my stories. If I ever had the blues I should
believe in the water cure. I have always believed in the ounce of
prevention. Indeed, I try it all summer up in Maine.
“Bailey Island, my summer home, is only a small green hill in the superb
sweep of the Atlantic. My cottage stands eighty feet above the sea, and
there is nothing but water between me and Europe. It is great fun for a
woman who usually lives at a hotel to keep house three months of the
year.
“But Bailey Island is not an inspiring place. I never work in summer. My
father always told me to let the water in the reservoir fill up then.
Besides, a brick wall is all the view I want when I am at work. Even
this dear Lake Michigan is almost too distracting at times.
“Lake Michigan explains why I have not followed the tide of successful
writers to New York. I love Chicago, with all its soot and wind. I am
naturally optimistic, and therefore expect that within the next decade
the Illinois Central will be electrified. Then won’t this spot be a
winter paradise?
“Nevertheless, it is tempting to use my island as a background for my
stories. In _The Inner Flame_ I have gone back to it again. Besides, the
Villa Chantecler is a real place--a henhouse cleared and renovated by an
enthusiastic young artist and given that clever name. The Chantecler
studio was too picturesque an incident not to become material.
“However, very little of my material is taken from real life. It is
playing with fire to draw recognizable portraits of people; but I fancy
nearly all authors are quite aware that they are making composite
pictures of friends or acquaintances. For instance, the man who inspired
the character of Philip Sidney, the hero of _The Inner Flame_, is a
brother-in-law of John McCutcheon; while Edgar Fabian’s personality and
mannerisms are copied faithfully from another one of my friends whose
character is as different from Edgar’s as can be imagined. It is very
seldom that any individual appeals to me as material, but when he or she
does, I generally fall. Inasmuch as in all my books there is not one
villain, I should not think they would mind.
“I have been asked whether I have a ‘method’ in writing. I
have--necessarily. Genius has inspirations. It writes in the night, or
walking in the field, and burns cords of cigarettes. Mere talent must
be persistent and industrious, and can often forego cigarettes.
“When I was a very young girl I read something Miss Mulock said apropos
of writing which made a deep impression. It was this: ‘An author should
go to his desk as regularly as a carpenter to his bench, and with as
little thought of inspiration.’ I point to my twenty novels as a proof
that I have heeded that direction; for if any one doubts the manual
labor of book writing let him pick up any story and copy a chapter from
it in long hand. I have averaged one novel a year, yet my maximum period
of daily work is three morning hours.
“If a young person aspiring to print should ask me whether there is a
definite way to begin, I should tell him to start by catching a big
brother. Preferably his own, for any one else’s might be a hindrance.
Mine is Frederick W. Root, ex-president of the Literary Club, Cliff
Dweller, Little Roomer, and in many other respects an orthodox
Chicagoan. He has been my mascot ever since the day when he started on
the labor--and hard labor it was--of drawing a young sister away from
the music which was her chief interest and starting her at story
writing. You know I am one of the Roots. My father, George F. Root, was
known chiefly by his war songs, _Tramp, Tramp, Tramp_ and _The Battle
Cry of Freedom_ and so on, but every home in the land knows his simple,
melodious songs, and I should like to feel that the vitality in my
unpretentious stories is akin to the spontaneous harmony that flowed for
fifty happy years from his clear mind.
“I suppose the reason I did not wish to write was that music satisfied
me. My brother persisted against my indifference for a year. At last we
were both exasperated. He shut me into a room with him one day, and
opening a very business-like looking knife, declared with a fearful
scowl that I should not leave that room alive unless I promised to try
faithfully to write a story. I laughed a little and wept a little, and
at last promised to show him that I couldn’t do it.
“Some one asked him once in my presence why he was so certain that I
could write. He replied: ‘Oh, she has a picturesque way of telling
things and isn’t too much hampered by the truth.’ I forgive him even
such aspersions. He is an example of what ‘a heart at leisure from
itself’ can do for another. I owe him everything; above all the blessed
assurance which sometimes reaches me that my stories help others.
“It is wonderful that I met no obstacles in starting. With no conscious
preparation I was like a ship ready to be launched. Fred pushed me off
into deep water.
“I enjoy my work, but not quite in the carefree way I used to enjoy it.
With each new book now I am conscious of some anxiety not to disappoint
my large parish; not to go backward. Both in books and plays I believe
the destructive is doomed. In this world there exists only one rose
without a thorn. There are many larger, more alluring, more fragrant,
but there is only one thornless rose; it is work that you love.”
Mrs. Burnham rather minimizes the difficulties of getting started. Her
first stories were unfavorably passed upon but the verdicts did not
deter her. A poem sent to _Wide Awake_ was her first accepted work. _No
Gentlemen_ was her first novel. It should be stated that her mother also
was musically gifted. Though born in Newton, Massachusetts, the girl
lived for some years in North Reading, Massachusetts. She was nine when
the family went to Chicago to live. She was married young and it was
after her marriage that her brother induced her to write. She is a
member of the Little Room Club of Chicago and lives there at The Elms
Hotel. Her first play, or rather the first play made from one of her
books, was _The Right Princess_, and when, after the usual hitches, it
was staged smoothly at the Alcazar Theater in San Francisco late in
1912, Mrs. Burnham confessed to the dramatist’s deepest thrill. “I will
not act the doting parent except to say that after so many years of
seeing one’s characters in black and white on the printed page you can’t
imagine how fascinating it is to watch them move about in the flesh,
your own creations, speaking your own lines; and then my first--my very
first--villain lives in that little play.”
To get to Bailey Island, Mrs. Burnham’s summer home in Maine, you go
first to Portland, where the author is as “widely and favorably known”
as if she had lived there all her life. It is, in fact, almost a quarter
of a century since she began spending her summers in Maine. She has
failed to show up but rarely since 1894, although she did spend two
summers abroad and one visiting Yellowstone Park. “I only spared a
summer to go to Yellowstone because it was open only in summer,” she
explained afterward. Her Bailey Island house, a roomy shingled
structure, stands on a steep, shelving headland, not rocky but covered
with grass and with a pebbled beach at its foot. It is called The
Mooring. Beside it stands her brother’s house, of the same character but
a little larger. The view is over the Atlantic and Casco Bay and you may
see the White Mountains clearly. The story of how Mrs. Burnham came to
live there is related, with changes of names, in her novel _Dr.
Latimer_. The old tide mill, which figures so importantly in _The Opened
Shutters_, was a real mill which, two years after the novel’s appearance
in 1906, sank into the sea. Do you remember this passage in the last
chapter of _The Opened Shutters_?
“She paused, her lips apart, her eyes wide, for all at once she caught
sight of the Tide Mill. Every one of its shutters had turned back. The
sunlight was flooding in. She grew pale, sank down upon a rock near by,
and gazed.” And then a few pages later John Dunham’s words to Sylvia
Lacey:
“‘You said Love would open the shutters, and it has.’” The incident is
charged with a special significance in the story. It appears that when
the real mill disappeared a coincidence was noted, the sort of thing
that many persons prefer to think no coincidence at all. We quote from
the Portland _Evening Express_ of July 31, 1909:
“It seems that one day last summer Captain Morrill of the Harpswell
Steamboat Company, who is not too fond of story reading, picked up _The
Opened Shutters_ to read. His wife in telling about it to Mrs. Burnham
said that he read the story far into the night, not being willing to put
it down till he had read the last word. The next day when he was sailing
down the bay, his attention was suddenly directed to the old Tide Mill.
He looked at it long and steadily. Could it be? Were his eyes deceiving
him? Had he read so late and thought so deeply on the story that things
did not look quite natural to him? He looked at the old mill again. Yes,
it was sinking into the sea--and the shutters were wide open! The sun,
too, was shining through. For years these old shutters had not let in a
rift of light; but now they were aflood with it.”
Those who do not hug the supernatural are at liberty to suppose that the
strain of settling and sinking unbarred and flung open the shutters. Of
Captain Morrill it may be noted that his presence of mind and bravery
several years earlier had saved the lives of Mrs. Burnham and other
passengers in a collision between the steamboat Sebascodegan and a
revenue cutter. But for him _The Opened Shutters_ would never have been
written.
The beginning of this capital story was not with the Tide Mill, however,
but with the name Thinkright Johnson. Like certain persons whose
appearance before Mrs. Burnham’s mind’s eye has compelled her to write
about them, this New Englandish appellation gave birth to a book.
Thinkright Johnson--Thinkright Johnson; the name haunted Mrs. Burnham
for days and weeks, “till I knew that the only way I could have any
peace was to write something about him.”
It was the same way with Jewel. She kept coming before her author. “She
is the exact type of one of my little nieces, in character, looks, and
even to the things that she says. In some way I felt compelled to write
about her.”
On the other hand the story of _The Right Princess_ came to Mrs. Burnham
one evening when she was all dressed for the theater. “As I stood in my
room, all ready to go, it began to come to me. I drew off one of my
gloves and sat down to my desk just to jot down a few of the ideas; but
the whole thing grew so rapidly in my mind that I did not realize
anything in the world about me again, till I found myself removing one
of my shoes many hours later.
“The book was practically conceived and written in a single night. But,
ordinarily, I just live with my characters after they have come to me.
Of course it is usually the leading character of a story that occurs to
me first, and then I let him or her gather about them the characters
which they would naturally know or come in contact with. Then I just let
them say the things which they would naturally say to each other. Of
course I accept and reject what my characters shall say in print,
coördinating and assorting it into the plot; but they develop the plot.
“My hours are from 9 to 12 in the morning. Whatever I write comes to me
perfectly easily and naturally, and I rarely ever make any change in my
first copy. My mother used to say that I wrote just as other people
hemmed handkerchiefs. Writing has never meant any struggle whatever to
me.
“Stories are to entertain, and they cannot do this if they are unhappy,
and then, all my early stories I used to read to my father, and he
particularly disliked anything that was unhappy in them and urged me to
take it out.”
Among Mrs. Burnham’s close friends are the brothers George Barr
McCutcheon, the novelist, and John McCutcheon, the cartoonist; and
George Ade. Charles Klein, the playwright, was a personal friend also.
It is improper to use the word trilogy in speaking of Mrs. Burnham’s
Christian Science novels, since a trilogy, rightly speaking, is a group
of three novels in which one or more characters persist, or which have a
common setting. If we can speak of a trilogy based on an idea or set of
ideas then Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science trilogy consists of _The
Right Princess_ (1902), _Jewel_ (1903) and _The Leaven of Love_ (1908).
_The Opened Shutters_ (1906) is free from the special terminology of the
Scientists, though saturated with their principles and beliefs in the
character of Thinkright Johnson and later of Sylvia Lacey.
_Heart’s Haven_ (1918) is Mrs. Burnham’s account of May Ca’line, a
village beauty who, as between two lovers, kept faith with the one to
whom she had betrothed herself. Her son marries a girl of no breeding
and is saved from disaster by his mother’s rejected lover, whose story
he does not know. May Ca’line herself is later the means of restoring
her son’s fortunes. There is a double love story very pleasantly told
and very happily worked out.
Though with _The Leaven of Love_ Mrs. Burnham has given over writing
Christian Science novels the underlying ideas of her work, which were
there before she wrote _The Right Princess_, which were there when she
wrote _Dr. Latimer_, remain unaltered and always expressed. These ideas
are those of peaceful and happy existences, of the validity of mental
experiences, of the influence of intellectual environment. Thus as
lately as 1916, in _Instead of the Thorn_, she gives us the story of a
Chicago girl brought up in luxury, whose father is ruined in
circumstances that seem to her to involve his business associate. The
fact that this young man is in love with the girl sets up the
complication, or struggle, necessary to make a novel. The girl is
finally persuaded to go to New England for rest, and Mrs. Burnham
directs the reader’s attention less to the solution of certain external
problems than to the way in which simple, quiet village life restores
the heroine’s mental poise and happiness. As for the proof that Mrs.
Burnham’s faith was antecedent to the first of her Christian Science
novels what clearer evidence need be asked than Helen Ivison’s
characterization of Dr. Latimer in the story, _Dr. Latimer_?
“The secret of his influence over people is only that absolute trust in
God which he has learned somehow in life’s school. He puts self out of
the way more than any one we ever knew, and so a power shines through
him which is not of this world, and people, when they come near him,
feel all that is morally best in them being drawn forward, and are
conscious of crowding out of sight all that they would be ashamed to
have come to his notice.”
Nothing better illustrates the quality of Mrs. Burnham’s humor--a humor
that makes her stories palatable reading even where the reader disagrees
violently with the ideas set forth--than the chapters in _Jewel_ where
Jewel is suffering from what those about her agree to be fever and sore
throat. Dr. Ballard has prepared medicine in a glass of water. Jewel is
to take a couple of spoonfuls of the “water” to satisfy Mrs. Forbes.
Instead she drinks heavily from an unmedicated pitcherful. By evening
she is much better. Then does the doctor, who thinks he has tricked
Jewel by persuading her to trick the housekeeper, learn that he has been
fooled instead.
“‘Didn’t you drink any of the water?’ asked Dr. Ballard at last.
“‘Yes, out of the pitcher.’
“‘Why not out of the glass?’
“‘It didn’t look enough. I was so thirsty.’
“Mr. Evringham finally found voice.
“‘Jewel, why didn’t you obey the doctor?’ ...
“Jewel thought a minute.
“‘He said it wasn’t medicine, so what was the use?’ she asked.
“Mr. Evringham, seeming to find an answer to this difficult, bit the end
of his mustache.”
Equally amusing, equally good as humor, is Jewel’s behavior with respect
to the overshoes which she is ordered to wear. At first she wears them
regardless. Then she is told to wear them only when it rains. A rainy
day dawns. Grandfather Evringham comes downstairs in bad humor.
“‘Beastly weather.’” Jewel inquires:
“‘But the flowers and trees want a drink, don’t they?’
“‘’M. I suppose so.’
“‘And the brook will be prettier than ever.’
“‘’M. See that you keep out of it.’
“‘Yes, I will, grandpa; and I thought the first thing this morning, I’ll
wear my rubbers all day. I was so afraid I might forget I put them right
on to make sure.’”
Recovering shortly Mr. Evringham observes:
“‘The house doesn’t leak anywhere. I think it will be safe for you to
take them off until after breakfast.’”
Now this is excellent humorous writing and Mrs. Burnham’s novels are
filled with it, even her Christian Science novels, perhaps those
particularly; it is so good simply because she has most thoroughly
assimilated her material before starting to write. How many writers more
famous than she, more gifted, possibly, from a critical standpoint,
would have made a sorry failure of such books as _Jewel_ and _The Right
Princess_ we don’t care to think. But you may see the disaster any day
in the case of writers like Winston Churchill, engrossed by certain
political and ethical ideals, and Ernest Poole, whose fine novel _The
Harbor_ failed of the highest rank simply because he had not assimilated
the sociological ideas which he wished to present through his
characters. It is continually happening, this effort of the good artist
to handle material he has not mastered; and as surely as he essays the
task he leaves his place as a novelist to mount the pulpit of the
preacher, the rostrum of the reformer, the soapbox of the agitator--and
a fine story is spoiled beyond all salvaging.
But when Mrs. Burnham writes of Christian Science beliefs, ideas and
mental attitudes she is not writing primarily to lay those things before
the reader. She is writing to tell a story. These are the elements of
her story. From them she weaves her web of fancy but they are the colors
and not the pattern.
In the depiction of character, notably the strongly accentuated
characters of New England, Mrs. Burnham is unfailingly and admirably
successful. _The Opened Shutters_ lends itself from the start to the
happy illustration of this faculty. Who more accurately observed and
justly reported than Miss Lacey, Judge Trent and John Dunham? Miss Lacey
meets the judge’s housekeeper, old Hannah, and exclaims:
“‘I just met Judge Trent, Hannah. Dear me, can’t you brush that hat of
his a little? It looks for all the world like a black cat that has just
caught sight of a mastiff.’”
Martha Lacey’s attitude toward Judge Trent is summed up in the refrain
continually sounding at the back of her head:
“‘If I’d married him, he’”--would have done so and so or wouldn’t have
done something else. No two ways about that! The consciousness of this
stern and immutable fact is what makes Judge Trent’s life one long
sensation of relief at having been refused.
“The judge softly closed the door behind her. ‘There, but for the grace
of God,’ he murmured devoutly, ‘goes Mrs. Calvin Trent.’ Then he
returned to his desk, put on his hat, and sat down at his work.”
Plots? There are hundreds of writers who can build twenty-story plots
with express elevator service and private subway stations. There aren’t
so many who can see people clearly and see them whole and set them down
brightly on paper. Mrs. Burnham’s novels will be widely read and enjoyed
for so long as she writes them and afterward for many a day.
BOOKS BY CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM
_The Quest Flower._
_Flutterfly._
_The Golden Dog._
_No Gentlemen_, 1882.
_A Sane Lunatic_, 1883.
_Dearly Bought_, 1884.
_Next Door_, 1885.
_Young Maids and Old_, 1886.
_The Mistress of Beech Knoll_, 1887.
_Miss Bagg’s Secretary_, 1892.
_Dr. Latimer_, 1893.
_Miss Archer Archer_, 1894.
_Sweet Clover, a Romance of the White City_, 1894
_The Wise Woman_, 1895.
_A Great Love_, 1898.
_A West Point Wooing and Other Stories_, 1899.
_Miss Pritchard’s Wedding Trip_, 1901.
_The Right Princess_, 1902.
_Jewel: a Chapter in Her Life_, 1903.
_Jewel’s Story Book_, 1904.
_The Opened Shutters_, 1906.
_The Leaven of Love_, 1908.
_Clever Betsy_, 1910.
_The Inner Flame_, 1912.
_The Right Track_, 1914.
_Instead of the Thorn_, 1916.
_Heart’s Haven_, 1918.
_All of Mrs. Burnham’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston._
CHAPTER XXIII
DEMETRA VAKA
It is the commendable but not always fruitful practice of the publishing
house of Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, to send to all its authors a
folder calling for such particulars of their lives as may properly be
matter of interest to the general public. In 1914 or thereabouts one of
these fact requisitions went to the author Demetra Vaka, otherwise Mrs.
Kenneth Brown. In due time it came back to Boston bearing the following
data, inscribed in a feminine hand that no school-master could
conscientiously praise:
_Name in full_: Demetra Kenneth Brown.
_Chief occupation or profession_: Wife.
_Residence & address_: Green Lane Cottage, Mount Kisco, New York.
_Place of birth_: Island of Bouyouk Ada, Sea of Marmora.
_Date of birth_: 1877.
_Education, when and where received, in detail_: First privately. Then
at Athens Private School. Paris. Various convents. Courses at Sorbonne.
One year University of Athens. One year University of New York. Various
schools in Constantinople, too many to remember, using schools as
frivolous women use garments--throwing away when not becoming.
_Date of marriage_: 1904, April 21.
_Military, political and civic record_: No records whatever except of
bad temper.
_Director or trustee of the following educational or public
institutions_: Never offered any, except the self-assumed one of
bringing up my husband.
_Politics_: For the best man who is on the ticket.
_Religious denomination_: Orthodox Greek.
_Professional associations, learned and technical societies,
decorations, etc._: None.
_Member of the following philanthropic or charitable institutions (if
holder of any office, so state)_: Have not any money to spare.
_Social clubs_: Have not sufficient money except for golf and tennis
clubs of wherever I happen to be, which if all counted will require more
room than you allow me, as we roam all over the earth.
_Business or professional record_: On the editorial staff of Greek
newspaper _Atlantis_ for about six months in New York City. French
teacher at the Comstock School, N. Y. C., for several years up to 1903.
Writer since 1904.
_Office or position occupied by you_: Wife.
_Title of (first) book_: First Secretary.
_Year first published_: 1907.
_Publisher_: W. B. Dodge & Co. (extinct).
* * * * *
This amusing cross-examination needs to be supplemented at several
points and the reader will be somewhat more enlightened by what follows.
Demetra Vaka is a Greek whose ancestors lived in Constantinople for
more than 700 years. Many of them were Turkish government officials.
Mrs. Brown’s early life brought her constantly and intimately in touch,
therefore, with the Turks. She played with Turkish children and was able
to view the Turkish people without any religious prejudice whatever. But
she was born, she says, with an American soul. Certain conditions
revolted her, and not least among them the system of prearranged
marriages. It was to escape such a marriage that she ran away from home,
coming to the United States with the family of a relative. Once here,
however, she was soon left to shift for herself.
Alone, penniless, and not yet eighteen, she found it neither an easy nor
romantic affair to get work. When finally she got on the staff of
_Atlantis_ she found she liked newspaper work. But it came home to her
that going on this way she would never learn English, and at that time
she wanted English because she hoped to study medicine. So she became a
private school teacher of French, and within two years she had charge of
the French department of the school.
In 1901, six years after her arrival in America, she returned to Turkey.
Carefully guarded in her pocket was a ticket back to America. She had no
intention of staying in Constantinople. Once in that city invitations
from girlhood friends began to reach her. These were now married women,
and so, equipped with a new and American point of view, she entered
Turkish harems as a welcome visitor from whom there need be no secrets.
Eight years later ten studies of Turkish women, embodying what she saw
and heard in 1901-2, were published as a book, _Haremlik_, which means
“the place of the harem.” But to stick to the order of events:
Demetra Vaka returned to America and the teaching of French but not for
long. In 1904 she was married to Kenneth Brown, novelist, and had at
last the continuous encouragement and professional assistance necessary
if she was to become a writer in English. She had been frequently urged
to prepare for publication her picturesque experiences. One day after
her marriage she sent to a magazine editor an account of an experience
while on a visit to Russia. It was accepted. That settled it. She would
write.
_Haremlik_ was her second book. It made a wide and deep impression.
There have been French, Swedish, German, Italian, Danish and Dutch
translations. It is not fiction, and neither, essentially, is Mrs.
Brown’s later book, _A Child of the Orient_, which is the tale of the
author’s own childhood and early life in Constantinople, of a Greek girl
with Turkish friends and playmates. The flavor of the _Arabian Nights_
fills the pages of _Haremlik_ and _A Child of the Orient_. The final
chapters of the second book give Demetra Vaka’s first impressions of
America, the effect upon a girl in her teens of a land almost as
different from Paris as Paris had been from Constantinople and Athens.
Mrs. Brown’s latest book is a war book but of a quite exceptional
character. To understand its genesis you must remember that she is,
though by her marriage an American citizen, a Greek by race. Her love
for Greece, her hopes for its future, are pretty clearly disclosed in
the opening chapter of _Haremlik_. And so when the European War had
passed its first stages and the political situation in Greece had
developed into a struggle between King Constantine and Venizelos, a
struggle in which the King’s attitude threatened national dishonor,
Demetra Kenneth Brown resolved to go over to Greece, interview the
leaders of both factions, and save Greece for the Allies--at least
endeavor to see that Greece fulfilled her treaty obligations, such as
those entered upon with Serbia.
Looking at the enterprise now Mrs. Brown is the first to concede its
quixotism, its hopelessness, its ridiculousness from the start. And yet
it proved immensely worth while in unsuspected ways. Going to London,
the novelist succeeded in getting to Lloyd George; afterward she had
access to other high personages in the Allied countries. Besides French
she knows Italian. At Athens all doors were open to her. She interviewed
not once but many times King Constantine himself and his generals.
Afterward she went to Salonica and talked with Venizelos. When she had
done she was able to write, purely as a reporter, _In the Heart of
German Intrigue_, one of the notable exposés of the war. Out of the
mouths of Constantine and his aides she convicted them. Her series of
interlocking interviews built up a complete and fatal revelation of what
Germany, with the connivance of Constantine’s government, had planned to
do.
Mrs. Brown’s work as a reporter of royalties and others and even her
autobiographical books such as _A Child of the Orient_ and _Haremlik_
are, strictly considered, outside the scope of this sketch, which has
to do with her primarily as an American novelist and a woman. As a
novelist she has several books to her credit besides her initial
offering, _The First Secretary_. _The Duke’s Price_, written with her
husband; _Finella in Fairyland_, _In the Shadow of Islam_, and _The
Grasp of the Sultan_, which was first published anonymously (“by?”), are
all hers, as well as _The Heart of the Balkans_. Of all these _The Grasp
of the Sultan_, which received serial publication and sold well even
before the disclosure of the author’s identity, is the most interesting
and most deserving of detailed consideration in this place.
The novel was published in 1915 (as a book in June, 1916) and represents
Demetra Vaka’s skill after some ten years’ apprenticeship at writing in
English. A young Englishman, having wasted a fortune, drifts to
Constantinople, and is appointed, through the agency of a countryman who
has become a Turkish admiral, tutor to the imperial Ottoman princes. The
youngest in his charge is 4-year-old Prince Bayazet, whose mother is a
beautiful Greek girl of the harem. She has dared to defy the Sultan,
who, failing in entreaty, strives to break her will by taking her son
away from her. By a ruse of the head eunuch, she recovers the child and
obtains the Sultan’s pledge that they shall be unmolested for five
years.
This is the background for a romance. The young English tutor falls in
love with the Greek girl and plans to escape with her and the little
Prince Bayazet.
The story is told with expertness, without indirection, with a fine
control of suspense and with thrill after thrill. The finest thing
about it is the constant discovery to the reader of the author’s
thorough knowledge of her people and her setting. Assuming that it could
have been written by an American, it must have been preceded by weeks of
study supplemented by foreign travel; whether a person not born and bred
as Demetra Vaka was could have written it, even after extensive
“documentation,” seems doubtful. We should say the thing would be quite
impossible were we not mindful of the late F. Marion Crawford, of whose
ingenious and convincing tales Mrs. Brown’s inevitably remind us. He,
too, wrote one or more novels of Constantinople, with what historical
accuracy we can’t undertake to speculate. Possibly Mrs. Brown can pick a
hundred holes in them respecting matters of fact! However, they had, for
the American reader, an effect of perfect verisimilitude, and it is this
effect precisely that Mrs. Brown’s stories are enriched with. Only, in
her case, we know that the likeness to truth is felt because the truth
is there. She should do for us hereafter, if her restless spirit will
permit, what Crawford did. Give us romances, Demetra Vaka, give us the
East; stay with us, write for us novel after novel of the sort that used
to come, one or two a year, from that villa at Sorrento where lived so
long and wrought so faithfully the creator of Dr. Isaacs and the
chronicler of the braveries of Prince Saracinesca!
BOOKS BY DEMETRA VAKA
_The First Secretary_, 1907.
_Haremlik_, 1909.
_The Duke’s Price_, 1910.
_Finella in Fairyland_, 1910.
_In the Shadow of Islam_, 1911.
_A Child of the Orient_, 1914.
_The Grasp of the Sultan_, 1916.
_The Heart of the Balkans_, 1917.
_In the Heart of German Intrigue_, 1918.
_Demetra Vaka’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston._
CHAPTER XXIV
EDNA FERBER
The most interesting thing about Edna Ferber is that she was born in
Kalamazoo. No, the most interesting thing is that she threw her first
novel in the wastebasket whence, like Kipling’s _Recessional_, it was
retrieved by another. No, no! the most interesting thing about Edna
Ferber is that she’s a superb short story writer, one of the best in
America, one of the dozen best.
You are all wrong. The supremely interesting fact about Edna Ferber is
this: She invented the Tired Business Woman.
When writing about Miss Ferber why be dull? Why go in for the higher
criticism? As for the lower criticism, we hope we are above it.
Certainly _she_ is.
To get back to name, dates, etc.: Chicago, Des Moines and Appleton,
Wisconsin, all have a stake in Miss Ferber’s success. Kalamazoo doesn’t
vociferate. It doesn’t have to, for she was born there and though seven
cities claimed Homer dead it will be no use for seven or eight or six
places to claim Edna Ferber living. Kalamazoo will see to that;
Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she made her debut--the only debut that’s
really worth making--on August 15, 1887. That is why we shall speak of
her very respectfully. She is a month older than we are and a month is
everything.
The daughter of Jacob Charles Ferber and Julia (Neuman) Ferber. Educated
in the public and high schools of--alas for Kalamazoo!--Appleton,
Wisconsin. At seventeen she became a reporter on the Appleton _Daily
Crescent_--“the youngest real reporter in the world.” She has it on us.
We were almost nineteen when--but never mind. Appleton, we hear, soon
became too small for Miss Ferber. Appletons have a way of doing that, or
isn’t it rather that the Edna Ferbers have a way of growing too big for
the Appletons? Anyway, Miss Ferber went to Milwaukee and then to a big
Chicago daily, the _Tribune_, to be exact. In Milwaukee she worked on
the _Journal_. _Dawn O’Hara_, her first book, was written in the time
she could spare from newspaper work. After it was completed she did not
like it. It was her mother who rescued the manuscript from the
wastebasket and sent it to a publisher, the same person mentioned in the
dedication of the novel: “To my dear mother who frequently interrupts
and to my sister Fannie who says ‘Sh-sh-sh!’ outside my door.”
The best piece of work Mrs. Ferber ever did! The book took publisher and
public by storm. It came out in 1911 and in the same year the new
American author attained the dignity of twenty-four years. Our copy of
_Dawn O’Hara_ is marked “eighth edition,” but as it is a reprinted copy
that may understate, or rather under-indicate, the book’s success. A few
thousands one way or another hardly matters among so many thousands of
copies sold!
Without pressing the autobiographical idea too hard it is perfectly
evident that much of the background of _Dawn O’Hara_ is from Miss
Ferber’s own experience, notably the settings in Milwaukee. How she
could ever have been so dissatisfied with her story as to discard it
utterly any present-day reader will be puzzled to imagine. It is
extremely well told. It is full of the perfect human--humorously
human--quality which lifts so many of Miss Ferber’s short stories into
high place. Take this passage:
“The Whalens live just around the corner. The Whalens are omniscient.
They have a system of news gathering which would make the efforts of a
New York daily appear antiquated. They know that Jenny Laffin feeds the
family on soup meat and oatmeal when Mr. Laffin is on the road; they
know that Mrs. Pearson only shakes out her rugs once in four weeks; they
can tell you the number of times a week that Sam Dempster comes home
drunk; they know that the Merkles never have cream with their coffee
because little Lizzie Merkle goes to the creamery every day with just
one pail and three cents; they gloat over the knowledge that Professor
Grimes, who is a married man, is sweet on Gertie Ashe, who teaches
second reader in his school; they can tell you where Mrs. Black got her
seal coat, and her husband only earning two thousand a year; they know
who is going to run for mayor, and how long poor Angela Sims has to
live, and what Guy Donnelly said to Min when he asked her to marry him.
“The three Whalens--mother and daughters--hunt in a group. They send
meaning glances to one another across the room, and at parties they get
together and exchange bulletins in a corner. On passing the Whalen house
one is uncomfortably aware of shadowy forms lurking in the windows, and
of parlor curtains that are agitated for no apparent cause.”
Beautiful! Gardiner of Harvard could have turned it inside out for you
and have shown you just where Miss Ferber impinged on your sensations
and how and to what end.... But the thing shows the facility of her best
work. Are the Whalens important to the story of _Dawn O’Hara_? They are
not. They are merely figures on the canvas, amusing but unimportant
people, no more than “brushed in” but brushed in with a firmness of
touch, a fidelity of detail, a humorous artist eye that is, as we say,
“taking” or “fetching” and wholly delightful.
Since 1911 with short stories and a book a year there is nothing to
chronicle but a progressive and uninterrupted success. Nothing except
the Tired Business Woman. Make no mistake; this creation of Miss
Ferber’s is _not_ a feminine counterpart of the Tired Business Man. The
T. B. W. does not go to musical shows and sit in the front rows. She
does not telephone home to the husband that she is sorry but important
business will detain her downtown this evening. She does not bring home
old friends unexpectedly to dinner, or worse, _not_ bring them home to
dinner. She is man-less but not because she need be. She is unmarried or
a widow. She has a boy, like Jock McChesney, and finds the task of
making a man of him, in outside hours not devoted to earning their
living, a woman-sized job! Give Edna Ferber credit for this, that she
has done as much as the cleverest feminist to make the world see the
self-reliant woman as she is, and not as the world deduces she may be. A
woman, yes, and a mother, yes! But a regular person above everything
else. Read, or re-read, _Emma McChesney & Co._ with this in a corner of
your mind and you will be thankful to Miss Ferber when you have
finished. Some thanks, too, may go to Ethel Barrymore, whose
impersonation of the Tired But Admired (and admirable) Business Woman of
Miss Ferber’s fiction reënforced the lesson of the book with the ocular
demonstration of the play.
Miss Ferber is going forward. The evidence of it will be found in the
stories contained in her latest book, _Cheerful--By Request_ (1918) and
perhaps particularly in the story in that volume called _The Gay Old
Dog_. At thirty-one she has her best years--as literary records
go--before her. No painstaking appraisal of her work would be wise at
this time. In the next two or three years she may overshadow everything
she has done so far. We hope so. Because then, bearing in mind that
month’s initial difference, we shall have high hopes ourselves!
BOOKS BY EDNA FERBER
_Dawn O’Hara_, 1911.
_Buttered Side Down_, 1912.
_Roast Beef Medium_, 1913.
_Personality Plus_, 1914.
_Emma McChesney & Co._, 1915.
_Fanny Herself_, 1917.
_Cheerful--By Request_, 1918.
_Half Portions_, 1920.
_$1200 a Year_, 1920.
_The Girls_, 1921.
_Gigolo_, 1922.
_First six books published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York; the
others by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._
CHAPTER XXV
DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
Mrs. Fisher is, we think, the only novelist of whose work we shall say
nothing. Why? Because it “speaks for itself”? Certainly not. Every one’s
work does that. No, because it does not speak sufficiently for her.
You are asked here and now to think of her not as a novelist but as a
woman. For as a novelist we could say of her only the obvious fact, that
she is a top-notcher judged by any and every standard. The woman who
could write _The Squirrel-Cage_ does not need any critical tests applied
to determine the worth and genuineness of her work, nor the sincerity of
it. What she does need, or rather, what her readers and all readers
need, is a reminder of her rôle as teacher, helper, friend. She is one
of those fine people whose work makes the plain word “service” a shining
and symbolic thing. “Service” is no longer a word but a ritual and a
liturgy.
We shall give an outline of her life but as the friend who prepared it
for us says in a letter enclosing it: “It does not do justice to her
very useful war work.” This letter further says, with simple truth:
“She has been one who has not broken down under the strain but has gone
on doing a prodigious amount of work. First running, almost entirely
alone, the work for soldiers blinded in battle, editing a magazine for
them, running the presses, often with her own hands, getting books
written for them; all the time looking out for refugees and personal
cases that came under her attention; caring for children from the
evacuated portions of France, organizing work for them; then she dropped
all that and ran the camp on the edge of the war zone where her husband
was stationed to train the young ambulance workers; and while there she
started any number of important things--reading rooms, etc. Then she
went back to her work in Paris. Just now she is at the base of the
Pyrenees, organizing a Red Cross hospital for children from the
evacuated portions.
“All this is reflected, or I should say the result of her experiences is
reflected in her _Home Fires in France_, just published this fall. It is
just what the title says, and I don’t know anything that has been
written anything like it. There isn’t any bursting shrapnel in it, no
heroics or medals of honor; it is merely full of the French women and
some Americans who have done the steady, quiet work of holding life
together until the war should be over. Steadily they try to reconstruct
what the Germans have destroyed.... It is the best thing she has done.”
It and the deeds back of it. When you read _Home Fires in France_ you
will understand why one man who read proof on it exclaimed:
“If every one knew this book as I know it there would be no doubt of it
selling 100,000 copies at once.”
With _The Squirrel-Cage_, published in 1912, Mrs. Fisher became a
novelist. It was followed by two books on child training, _A Montessori
Mother_ (1913) and _Mothers and Children_ (1914), and then the teacher
resumed the rôle of storyteller with _The Bent Twig_. Before _The
Squirrel-Cage_ Mrs. Fisher was merely the author of a few textbooks.
After it she was an important figure in American fiction.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher is thirty-eight years old, a bachelor of
philosophy and a doctor of philosophy, mistress of six languages, author
of twelve books, mother of two children. She and her husband, John
Redwood Fisher, captain of a Columbia football team, himself a critic
and writer, divided their time before the war between a farm near a
little Vermont village and occasional excursions to New York, Rome or
some other metropolis. In 1915, Mr. Fisher joined the ambulance service
and went to France. Mrs. Fisher was at work on _Understood Betsy_, but
as soon as that was finished she followed her husband to Paris with her
children. Since then she has been absorbed in war relief work which has
ranged from running an establishment that prints books for soldiers
blinded in battle to managing five peasant women cooks and buying
supplies for a large training camp for ambulance drivers. Mr. Fisher is
now a first lieutenant in the United States Army in France.
Mrs. Fisher was born in Lawrence, Kansas, where her father was president
of the University of Kansas. As a high school girl in Lawrence she made
friends with an army officer on the staff of a nearby war college. He
taught her to ride horseback and introduced her to his hobby, higher
mathematics. This friendship has lately been resumed in France. The
young army officer is now General John J. Pershing.
Dorothea Frances Canfield, or Dorothy Canfield, became an undergraduate
in Ohio State University, of which her father (James Hulme Canfield) was
president at that time. Her degree of bachelor of philosophy came from
Ohio State University. When Mr. Canfield moved to New York to be
librarian at Columbia University his daughter took up postgraduate work
there, specializing in the Romance languages, and won her degree of
doctor of philosophy. For three years, from 1902 to 1905, she was
secretary of the Horace Mann School. Her associates all her life have
been cosmopolitan in the proper sense of that word. Her mother, Flavia
(Camp) Canfield, is an artist of some attainment and with her Dorothy
Canfield spent a good deal of her life abroad. The result--one
result--was friends of all nationalities living pretty much all over the
world. Mrs. Fisher is consequently a person of broad sympathies, but the
predominant quality in her seems to be a clear-headed, hearty New
England Americanism. At one time or another she has picked up a good
knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Danish. French she
acquired as a child tumbling about in the Paris studio of her mother.
Now her children are learning their French in Paris.
After their marriage in 1907, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher left New York and went
hunting for a working and living place far away from the city. On the
side of one of the Green Mountains, near the little village of
Arlington, Vermont, they found a fair approximation of what they were
after. The old house already on the farm they made over to suit their
needs and wishes. A spring branch on the mountain side was boxed up and
the water piped down to the house. An electric lighting plant was
installed. A study entirely separate from the house was built. Mr. and
Mrs. Fisher make no effort to have the farm cultivated. That is, they
didn’t in the good--or bad--old days before the war. They were on it to
live and work, but not to bury themselves in agricultural details. The
nearest approach to tilling the soil was the garden, the re-foresting of
the mountain side with baby pine trees, and the rejuvenation of an
ancient saw mill to work up the scrub timber.
Arlington is “in no sense a literary rural community.” The village has
only a few hundred people in it, is two miles away from the Fisher farm,
and its post-office has few manuscripts to handle either way. In
1911-12, for variety, Mr. and Mrs. Fisher went to Rome for the winter.
It was there that she made the acquaintance of Madame Montessori. An
American publisher was having trouble with the translation of Madame
Montessori’s book about her pedagogical system. Knowing that Mrs. Fisher
was an excellent Italian scholar and that she was already on the ground,
the publisher arranged for her assistance with the translation. Almost
every day of that winter Mrs. Fisher was at the Casa di Bambini
(Children’s House) looking after the translation and helping to
entertain and to explain the Montessori system to commissions sent from
England, France and other European countries. The direct result of that
winter was Mrs. Fisher’s _A Montessori Mother_, a simplification and
adaptation, in her delightfully easy and half-humorous style, of the
Italian system to the needs of American mothers. Besides being published
in the United States, Canada, England and India this book has been
translated into five foreign languages.
Mrs. Fisher is now one of five members of the State School Board for
Vermont, the first woman to be on the State Board of Education in
Vermont. This is in line with her ablest work, which has been in
training children and adolescents.
BOOKS BY DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER
_Corneille and Racine in England_, 1904.
_English Rhetoric and Composition (with Professor
G. R. Carpenter)_, 1906.
_What Shall We Do Now?_ 1906.
_Gunhild_, 1907.
_The Squirrel-Cage_, 1912.
_A Montessori Mother_, 1913.
_Mothers and Children_, 1914.
_The Bent Twig_, 1915.
_Hillsboro People_, 1916.
_The Real Motive_, 1917.
_Understood Betsy_, 1917.
_Home Fires in France_, 1918.
_The Day of Glory_, 1919.
_The Brimming Cup_, 1921.
_Rough-Hewn_, 1922.
_First thirteen published by Henry Holt & Company, New York; others by
Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York._
CHAPTER XXVI
AMELIA E. BARR
On March 17, 1918, the author of this book had the pleasure, as editor
of _Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New York, of printing what
is certainly the best account extant of Amelia E. Barr within a
reasonable length. Although the article was unsigned it was the work of
Mr. A. Elwood Corning, who had been a neighbor of Mrs. Barr at Richmond
Hill, Long Island, New York. It was based upon a personal visit and
interview. This chapter is really nothing more than a reprint of Mr.
Corning’s article with a few changes, particularly those necessitated by
Mrs. Barr’s death on March 10, 1919, at her Richmond Hill home. To Mr.
Corning, then, the credit of this chapter.
Amelia E. Barr struck the popular taste more than thirty years ago with
her _Bow of Orange Ribbon_. She was one of the most prolific of
present-day writers of fiction. Her last completed novel, _The Paper
Cap_, published in the fall of 1918, brought the number of her books up
to over seventy, and this does not include hundreds of short stories, a
poem a week for _fourteen years_, written for Bonner’s _Ledger_, or the
numerous newspaper articles, essays and verses of the first fourteen
years of her literary life.
On March 29, 1918, Mrs. Barr entered her eighty-eighth year. In the
preceding twelve months she had published three books, and shortly
before her eighty-seventh birthday (or the birthday which made her
eighty-seven years old!) she completed a fourth in manuscript! This was
_The Paper Cap_, the scenes of which are laid in Yorkshire, England,
where the novelist spent a part of her childhood. Mrs. Barr thought it
one of the best stories she had written. The paper cap of the title is
that of the workingman and the story centers around his fight for the
suffrage. It was really a contest between the hand loom and the power
loom.
It was about 4 in the afternoon when Mr. Corning reached Mrs. Barr’s
study on the visit which preceded the preparation of his article. Mrs.
Barr had been writing since 7 that morning, with only a brief
intermission for luncheon, and was not feeling, she declared, so well as
usual. “This is one of mamma’s blue Mondays,” said her daughter. But
after she had begun to discuss current events, some incidents of her
early life in Texas and above all the war Mrs. Barr became animated. She
was an interesting and enthusiastic talker with positive views, a power
of unusually apt expression and a mind keenly alert. Convinced of a
fact, she uttered it with passionate force.
On this particular afternoon the manuscript of _The Paper Cap_ was lying
on her writing table. “It will be done to-morrow,” she said with the
spirit of one who looks upon the completion of a work which has required
much thought and painstaking labor. She pushed the manuscript toward Mr.
Corning; it was as free of corrections and interpolations as if it had
been freshly copied from a former draft. Mrs. Barr seldom changed what
she first wrote and always used sheets of yellow paper, finding this
tint more restful to her eyes than white.
When weary of building stories she handed the manuscript over to a
stenographer to be typewritten. Mrs. Barr wrote with a lead pencil.
Going to a drawer she brought out a box full of old pencil stubs, some
of which dated back to the days when she was writing _The Bow of Orange
Ribbon_. A few years ago six or seven of these stubs were given to as
many friends, who had them tipped with gold and made into shawl pins.
In personal appearance and dress Mrs. Barr was typically English. She
had a large face and marvelous physique, was rapid of movement and lithe
of step. A flowing gown of some delicate shade was usually worn loosely
over a lace petticoat, and a beribboned cap of lace and rosebuds or
sometimes cowslips rested becomingly on her silvery hair.
But the most striking characteristic of this remarkable woman was the
retention of so much youthful vigor and optimism, which she attributed
to her English ancestry. Born at Ulverton, Lancashire, England, March
29, 1831, Amelia Barr was descended from a long line of Saxon forebears,
of whom the men for generations had been either seamen or preachers of
the Gospel. Her father, the Rev. Dr. William Henry Huddleston, was a
scholar and a preacher of eloquence. The child’s early education was
largely under his supervision. As he was a regular contributor to
English reviews, the little daughter was brought up in a literary
environment.
Before she was six she is said to have known intimately the tales of the
_Arabian Nights_, and nothing pleased her more in those days than to be
the recipient of a new book, a pleasure seldom afforded her. She would
often accompany her father on his preaching itineraries through the
fishing villages and thus became a lover of the sea, from which she
doubtless formed impressions which have disclosed themselves in her
fiction.
At eighteen she was sent to a Free Kirk seminary in Glasgow, where she
remained until her marriage to Robert Barr in July, 1850. For three
years the young couple lived in Scotland. Here Mrs. Barr made the
acquaintance of Henry Ward Beecher, who years later was able to help her
begin her career as a writer.
Failure in business compelled the Barrs to come to America. They first
came to New York, where the future novelist saw for the first time to
her great delight ready-made dresses and oranges, a fruit not easily
procurable in the north of England or Scotland.
The Barrs with their two little daughters soon went West, locating in
Chicago. After a time misfortune drove them South. They went first to
Austin, later to Galveston, Texas. The history of these eventful and
sorrowful years is told in Mrs. Barr’s autobiography, _The Red Leaves of
a Human Heart_.
In Austin success was sandwiched in with failure, disappointments and
heartaches. In those early days on the frontier there was a great
scarcity of many things which went to make up home life. When Mrs. Barr
came to America she had been told that she was going into a desolate and
savage country in which there were none of the comforts of life and
where none could be obtained. So she brought with her a great assortment
of useful articles, such as needles, tape, sewing cotton (linens, silks,
etc.). Finding that they had more than they wanted of such things, the
Barrs traded some of them for tea and other staple articles of food.
Despite vicissitudes Mrs. Barr never neglected her reading or the daily
instruction of her children. The noon hour was reserved for study and at
that time no one was permitted to disturb her. She could be seen daily
sitting with a young baby on her lap by the open door of her log house
partaking of the noonday meal and reading at the same time. In all, Mrs.
Barr had fifteen children. Three daughters are now living, one the wife
of Kirk Munro, the popular writer for boys.
In spite of her large family Mrs. Barr found time to accomplish things
outside household duties. During the Civil War, for example, articles of
amusement were few. One was put to great inconvenience in securing
games. So Mrs. Barr, an enthusiastic whist player, painted a pack of
cards, which were to those who remember them a most real counterpart of
an original set.
At the close of the war the Barrs moved to Galveston, and there, in
1867, Mrs. Barr experienced the overwhelming sorrow of her life. Yellow
fever entered her home. The whole family was stricken, and before Mrs.
Barr herself had fully recovered she suffered the loss of her husband
and three little sons.
After endeavoring to support herself and three daughters in the South
she came with them to New York in the fall of 1869.
One day she was asked if she could write stories and replied that she
had often written them for the amusement of her children but had
destroyed them after they had served their purpose. She promised to try
again and received $30 for the effort.
“What, $30 for that article?” she exclaimed. “Why, I can write three or
four of them a week.”
She eventually found work on the _Christian Union_, of which Beecher was
editor, and this opened a career which brought her both a reputation and
honor. At first she rented a few rooms at 27 Amity Street, Brooklyn, a
house once occupied by Edgar Allan Poe, although at the time she was
unconscious of the fact. When she moved into these quarters she found
that after paying the rent she had only $5 in her purse.
“Well, girls,” she told her daughters, “we will have a good beefsteak
dinner and let to-morrow take care of itself.” Even then she felt, as
she afterward said, that “God and Amelia Barr were a multitude.”
For fourteen years Mrs. Barr toiled, meeting with successes and rebuffs.
It was a hard struggle. After working all day in the Astor Library she
would often at night take her daughters to the theater, leaving
sometimes in her purse only enough money for carfare in the morning.
Returning from one of these outings she discovered that her house had
been broken into. Rushing at once to the family Bible, she found $40
between the pages where she had placed it for safety. Not having in
those days enough money to bank, she would often put bills behind
pictures, and they were never disturbed.
In 1884 _Jan Vedder’s Wife_ was published. The success of this book
almost immediately placed Mrs. Barr in the front rank of popular
American novelists. From that time her record was phenomenal. Over
fifty-three when her first book appeared, Mrs. Barr produced an average
of over two novels a year and at the close of her life she had not one
unsold manuscript. She had written only one article, she said, which she
was never able to dispose of. And so little did she care for her books
after they had been written that she had not a complete set of them in
her library, which numbered several thousand volumes.
She not infrequently took up one of her old novels and after reading it
said that it seemed like a new story. “All my characters,” she once
remarked, “are real to me. They begin to live and have a personality of
their own. I have started to write a villain and afterward fallen in
love with him and made him my hero.”
Mrs. Barr’s books were invariably sold outright. Years ago she made a
thorough study of the early history of Manhattan Island, which
ultimately formed a foundation on which she built eight historical
novels which stand out as among the best of her work. Chronologically
considered they should be read as follows:
_The House on Cherry Street._
_The Strawberry Handkerchief._
_The Bow of Orange Ribbon._
_A Maid of Old New York._
_A Song of a Single Note._
_The Maid of Maiden Lane._
_Trinity Bells._
_The Belle of Bowling Green._
So much Mr. Corning. The author of this book can add nothing to so
extraordinary a story. As fiction, Mrs. Barr’s own life and performance
would be called incredible. Her stories are first-rate stories; all of
them offer clean, imaginative and very real entertainment; many of them
offer a true and valuable picture of vanished or vanishing times,
manners and people. Her achievement was much bigger and more solid and
worth while than many, many efforts at literary “art.”
BOOKS BY AMELIA E. BARR
_Jan Vedder’s Wife._
_A Border Shepherdess._
_Feet of Clay._
_Bernicia._
_Remember the Alamo._
_She Loved a Sailor._
_The Lone House._
_A Sister of Esau._
_Prisoners of Conscience._
_The Tioni Whelp._
_The Black Shilling._
_The Bow of Orange Ribbon._
_A Maid of Old New York._
_A Song of a Single Note._
_The Maid of Maiden Lane._
_Trinity Bells._
_The Belle of Bowling Green._
_The Red Leaves of a Human Heart._
_The Strawberry Handkerchief_, 1908.
_The Hands of Compulsion_, 1909.
_The House on Cherry Street_, 1909.
_All the Days of My Life_, 1913.
_Playing With Fire_, 1914.
_The Winning of Lucia_, 1915.
_Three Score and Ten_, 1915.
_Measures of a Man_, 1915.
_Profit and Loss_, 1916.
_Joan_, 1917.
_Christine_, 1917.
_An Orkney Maid_, 1918.
_The Paper Cap_, 1918.
_Songs in the Common Chord_, 1920.
_(About 40 other books.)_
_Mrs. Barr’s novels are published by D. Appleton & Company, New York.
Some may be had in reprint, others are out of print._
CHAPTER XXVII
ALICE HEGAN RICE
The author of _Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ was born in 1870 in a
big old country house at Shelbyville, Kentucky, the home of her
grandfather, Judge Caldwell. Her name was, indeed, Alice Caldwell Hegan
as a girl. It was Alice Hegan when she wrote the very small book which
is quite as world famous as _Mr. Dooley_, Mrs. Wiggs’s pleasant
contemporary. It became Alice Hegan Rice on December 18, 1902, when the
daughter of Samuel W. Hegan and Sallie P. Hegan was married to the poet
Cale Young Rice. And they have lived happily ever after. They have
traveled the world over together. They rest, between whiles, at a big,
columned house in Louisville, Kentucky. There are photographs extant
showing them in pleasant idleness on the broad verandas. Mr. Rice writes
songs inspired by their travels together which make such books as
_Wraiths and Realities_ and songs inspired by their mere happy
proximity, making a book such as _Poems to A. H. R._, both published in
1918. Mrs. Rice no longer writes the fortunes of Mrs. Wiggs in disused
pages of an old business ledger (for that is how the first draft of
_Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ was made). But she writes as agreeably
as ever. Mostly shorter pieces. She is not really a novelist but a
short story writer. Even _Mrs. Wiggs_ was but a long short story.
Hegans have lived in Louisville pretty close to a century--ninety years
anyway. Alice Hegan’s girlhood was sheltered by a brick house on Fourth
Street. Summers she spent at Judge Caldwell’s house, her birthplace,
with a negro nurse and “Aunt Susan” to tell her folk tales, mostly about
personable animals, Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit and the rest of the common
acquaintance of Southern childhood. Dolls, church, Sunday School, day
school at “Miss Hampton’s” in a house once the home of George Keats,
brother of the poet; dancing school (“in ruffles and in gorgeous, wide,
blue sashes, pink being prohibited as highly unbecoming”); dances at
Galt House; “parties,” country dances in Shelbyville--these were the
tissue of those youthful days.
School days over, Alice Hegan wanted to go to Paris and study art. There
was reason to think that she had a talent, which would justify an
expenditure of time and money. She abandoned the idea because, as she
says, “I was an only daughter. My father and mother needed me. It
wouldn’t have been right for me to go.”
She had, meanwhile, been writing; she had always been writing a little.
When she was sixteen the Louisville _Courier-Journal_ had published _The
Reveries of a Spinster_, an anonymous companion-piece to _The Reveries
of a Bachelor_. The spinster’s reveries brought many letters to the
newspaper, letters read with due appreciation by Alice Hegan, author of
spinster and reveries both. She had also written a few short stories
and had been a contributor to humorous papers.
There was nothing surprising or wholly unpremeditated therefore in the
writing of _Mrs. Wiggs_. Alice Hegan and her mother kept a “give-away
bag” which went regularly to a “poor but merry and philosophic woman”
living in a neglected quarter of Louisville, out near the railroad
tracks, in the southern part of the city. This woman was the original of
Mrs. Wiggs. “The story was not a ‘just-so story,’” says Margaret Steele
Anderson in her over-effusive appreciation of Alice Hegan Rice, “nor was
it a photograph, exact from head to toe, but, in truth, a development of
the original. The merry woman served as a nucleus; the rest was all
Alice Hegan.” To quote further:
“The manuscript was read one rainy Saturday morning to a little group of
ardent young women which called itself, with a courage half gay and half
ironical, the Authors’ Club of Louisville. At that time it boasted no
‘real author,’ but the following was the roster of the club: Evelyn
Snead Barnett, Alice Hegan Rice, Ellen Churchill Semple, George Madden
Martin, Annie Fellows Johnston, Frances Caldwell Macaulay, Abbie Meguire
Roach, Eva A. Madden, Mary Finley Leonard, Venita Seibert White,
Margaret van der Cook and Margaret Anderson. This club meant nothing at
the time, but it means, now, such stories as _Mrs. Wiggs_ and _Mr. Opp_,
_Emmy Lou_, _The Lady of the Decoration_ and the _Little Colonel_ books.
It means also such work as Mrs. Roach’s studies of married life--which
rendered a year of _Harper’s_ very memorable--and such achievement in
anthropo-geography as has made Ellen Semple a name on two continents and
a lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. To this little club was read this
little story--and the club, as a body, became the very figure of
laughter, literally holding both its sides.
“The story was published by the Century Company in October, 1901, and
that next summer, as somebody put it, every tourist had it, ‘sticking up
out of his pocket.’”
There are thousands of stories to illustrate the world conquest of _Mrs.
Wiggs_. West Virginia coal miners whose little homes contain no Bible
have the book. In a village of Korea there is, or used to be, an old
woman, bent continually over her garden, known to the English officers
as “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.” In Sidmouth, on the coast of South
Devon, England, was another such person. Mr. and Mrs. Rice have had Mrs.
Wiggses pointed out to them everywhere--and they have been
everywhere--Sicily, China, India, Japan (the poet is a specialist in
Orientalism). “In India one Christmas day, after a morning on the
Ganges, after hours of Vedic hymns chanted by Brahmin priests and after
a terrible vision of the bodies on the burning ghats,” says Margaret
Anderson, “Mrs. Rice was suddenly jerked back into modern life by a
billboard near Benares. _Mrs. Wiggs_ would be played there that night by
an English company!”
Mrs. Rice is a good deal interested in philanthropic work at home. The
Rices’ house stands in St. James Court, a place of trees, bushes, wide
sweeps of lawn and a playing fountain. The author of _Mrs. Wiggs_
devotes time and personal effort to the Cabbage Patch Settlement and to
a woman’s club which is a feature of it. For many years Mrs. Rice was
chiefly active in work among boys. At sixteen she founded a club for
youngsters which held weekly meetings at her own home.
When writing she works generally in a snug room or den on the second
floor of her home, working through the quiet mornings. She contrives
somehow to deal with a heavy correspondence and replies with delightful
letters to the letters of all kinds--curious, friendly, grateful--that
she is constantly receiving.
“Though _Mrs. Wiggs_ has made its author famous,” says Margaret
Anderson, “_Mr. Opp_ is Mrs. Rice’s finest piece of work. In the hero of
this story, which is a story of Dickensian humor and robustness, we mark
a real and very big development--a development, moreover, which is not a
thing of violence but proceeds along the lines of the man’s peculiar
nature.
“Mrs. Wiggs is fixed, the same at the end of the book as at the opening;
but Mr. Opp grows, and the interest of the reader increases with his
growth. The story has not been read as _Mrs. Wiggs_ was read, but for
imagination, for spirituality, and even for humor, it remains the better
book.
“It is, indeed, her most distinct success, for _Lovey Mary_ followed
_Mrs. Wiggs_ in general character, while _Sandy_, though wholesome,
engaging, and charged to the full with Mrs. Rice’s humor, is not of an
equal inspiration. Her story of _Billy-Goat Hill_ shows some excellent
and delicate work, the figures of ‘Miss Lady’ and the Doctor recalling
those of Annie and her husband in _David Copperfield_, while Connie and
Noah Wicker are done with delightful vim and gayety.
“In _The Honorable Percival_ Mrs. Rice has aimed deliberately at the
light, the frothy, the effect of touch-and-go, yet here we note
especially an increase in her art. The thing is light and sure; it is
froth but froth well-made and inviting; it does touch and go, but it
touches with a spark and goes vividly.
“It is needless, however, to criticise her stories individually. What we
must note of her work is this: It meets the great human need of cheer,
it satisfies a great human desire with its wholesome milk of kindness.
To make many nations laugh and laugh innocently; to bring entertainment
to the sickbed and army trench and throne room and schoolroom; and to
the million common houses of a million common people--this is the
mission of her books and this their finest achievement.”
Wise and honest words, these, of Margaret Steele Anderson’s. What she
has said so well we shall not attempt to better. We shall agree
whole-heartedly with her that the best praise was given Alice Hegan Rice
“by a very wise old man, who spoke for a great host of readers when he
said:
“‘Madam, I salute you! You have done the world a service. You have
cheered us, you have made us laugh happily and with courage.’”
BOOKS BY ALICE HEGAN RICE
_Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_, 1901.
_Lovey Mary_, 1903.
_Sandy_, 1905.
_Captain June_, 1907.
_Mr. Opp_, 1909.
_A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill_, 1912.
_The Honorable Percival._
_Calvary Alley_, 1917.
_Miss Mink’s Soldier and Other Stories_, 1918.
_Quin_, 1921.
_Published by the Century Company, New York._
CHAPTER XXVIII
ALICE DUER MILLER
If Alice Duer Miller would only express herself with a lofty obscurity
she would be a Distinguished Author and if she would only write about a
different kind of people she would be a really popular novelist. Not
that she isn’t popular, but that she might be ten times more so; and not
that her work lacks distinction, but it lacks the peculiar kind of
distinction which our high critical minds rave about.
She can go deeply--and deftly--into the minds of her people and bring
out with a beautiful lucidity and no little humor what she finds there.
But this satisfies neither camp. With those who are dissatisfied because
Mrs. Miller does not write “artistically” (that is, unintelligibly)
about the thoughts and emotions of her characters--with those we have no
patience. But the others, the readers who think this excellent writer
wasting her time on a worthless lot of subjects, for these we feel a
good deal of sympathy.
_Ladies Must Live_ is full of clever conversation; so is _The Happiest
Time of Their Lives_. Clever conversation never sold 10,000 copies of a
book nor had the slightest effect on a single life except the deplorable
effect of temporarily causing unequipped readers to simulate a
cleverness beyond their powers. Moreover, the young reader of such
books as these is pretty likely to think the people in them
half-admirable because they say adroit things--or say things adroitly.
This makes the young reader more difficult to deal with than ever. Mrs.
Miller, or some one for her, will be retorting that she cannot take
too-impressionable young minds into account in constructing a story. To
which only a single answer is possible and it is this: Everybody else in
the world has to take the young into account; why should not a writer do
so?
Mrs. Miller’s books, then, should be read by no one under thirty. And
this not because the reading of them will actually harm a younger
person, but because it may make him or her insufferable company for the
immediate future. It is quite impossible to think of Mrs. Miller’s
ingenious tales of persons in “society” as harming anybody; they are too
low voltage for that. And indeed in _The Happiest Time of Their Lives_
we meet pleasant and positive, or “plus” persons, such as Pete Wayne and
his mother, the contemplation of whom would be safe for the most
immature sixteen-year-old. But it would be very, very unsafe to set
before some young women the splendidly delineated Mrs. Vincent Farron of
that same book! Just because her husband knew perfectly how to deal with
her, how to break her, it does not follow that thousands of decent,
affectionate, kind (and rather muddle-headed) young men can fill
successfully the rôle of tigress tamers!
Yes, the great defect of Mrs. Miller’s stories is that we seldom care to
know the people in them, the Mrs. Farrons, the Nancy Almars, nor even
the Christine Fenimers and the innocent but tiresomely insipid Mathilde
Severances. We will occasionally consent to meet them and watch them
perform (better company being lacking at the moment) for one main reason
and only one: the skill with which they are brought before us and there
put through their tricks. And if our very figure of speech seems to have
in it something derogatory, to imply that these persons are not much
better than puppets, the implication is not without an honest
significance. Moving among artificialities, surrounded by polite and
transparent deceptions, it would be too much not to expect these
“society” folk to partake of their environment. They are wholly
mechanistic, to go to metaphysics for a suitable term; they are precious
puppets and nothing more; thanks to Mrs. Miller’s skill the strings
which control them are mostly invisible, but the jerky motion of them
gives the secret away.
Having been as honest about this as we know how to be, let us turn to
the first pages of _Ladies Must Live_ and cull a few samples of Mrs.
Miller’s writing, samples which will convey to those who have not read
her some idea of her gift of epigram and facile and beautiful
characterization:
“Mrs. Ussher ... turned toward hidden social availability very much as
the douser’s hazel wand turns toward the hidden spring.... She was
unaware of her own powers, and really supposed that her sudden and
usually ephemeral friendships were based on mutual attraction.... During
the short period of their existence, Mrs. Ussher gave to these
friendships the utmost loyalty and devotion. She agonized over the
financial, domestic and romantic troubles of her friends; she sat up
till the small hours, talking to them like a schoolgirl; during the
height of their careers she organized plots for their assistance; and
even when their stars were plainly on the decline, she would often ask
them to lunch, if she happened to be alone.
“Many people, we know, are prone to make friends with the rich and
great. Mrs. Ussher’s genius consisted in having made friends with them
before they were either.”
Nancy Almar’s husband says to her:
“‘I hope you’ll explain to them why I could not come.’
“‘You mean that I would not have gone if you had?’
“‘No,’ he said, ‘that I’m called South on business.’
“‘I shan’t tell them that, but I’ll tell them you say so, if you like.’”
She was as good as her word--she usually was.
“‘Would any one like to hear Roland’s explanation of why he is not with
us?’
“‘Had it anything to do with his not being asked?’ said a pale young
man; and as soon as he had spoken he glanced hastily round the circle to
ascertain how his remark had succeeded.
“So far as Mrs. Almar was concerned it had not succeeded at all, in
fact, though he did not know it, nothing he said would ever succeed with
her again, although a week before she had hung upon his every word. He
had been a new discovery, something unknown and Bohemian, but alas, a
day or two before, she had observed that underlying his socialistic
theories was an aching desire for social recognition. He liked to tell
his bejeweled hostesses about his friends the car-drivers; but, oh,
twenty times more, he would have liked to tell the car-drivers about his
friends the bejeweled hostesses. For this reason Mrs. Almar despised
him, and where she despised she made no secret of the fact.
“‘Not asked, Mr. Wickham!’ she said. ‘I assume my husband is asked
wherever I am,’ and then turning to Laura Ussher she added with a faint
smile: ‘One’s husband is always asked, isn’t he?’
“‘Certainly, as long as you never allow him to come,’ said another
speaker.”
Even from so slight an excerpt we think it will be plain that in the art
of characterization and in the business of writing dialogue Mrs. Miller
has nothing to learn. She is really one of the most hopeful prospects in
American literature to-day and the great hope for her and for readers
lies in the possibility--almost a probability--that she will abandon the
very restricted and unimportant milieu of her recent novels for better
fields. It is simple honesty to recognize that _The Happiest Time of
Their Lives_ holds out a great promise that she will do this. Such
persons as Pete Wayne and his mother, and even the rather pathetic
grandfather Mr. Lanley (of the New York Lanleys) are “real,” that is,
members of the human community and not sickening products of the social
hothouses. If Mrs. Miller will do a novel in which most of the men and
most of the women are “people”--regular people or irregular people,
great or small, does not matter; but they must be people--we in America
will be the first to acclaim her.
Of Mrs. Miller herself there are only a few brief facts to be stated.
This tall and charming woman was born in New York in 1874, the daughter
of James G. K. Duer and Elizabeth (Meads) Duer. She was graduated from
Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1899. She was married to Henry
Wise Miller of New York on October 5, 1899. Her New York home on the
upper East Side of the city, just below Central Park and just off Fifth
Avenue, is in the most fashionable residence section, is in the heart of
that region where most of her characters unquestionably live and where
most of the others aspire to.
BOOKS BY ALICE DUER MILLER
_The Modern Obstacle_, 1903.
_Calderon’s Prisoner_, 1904.
_Less Than Kin_, 1909.
_Blue Arch_, 1910.
_Are Women People?_ 1915.
_Come Out of the Kitchen_, 1916.
_Ladies Must Live_, 1917.
_The Happiest Time of Their Lives_, 1918.
_Wings in the Night_, 1918. Poems.
_The Charm School_, 1919. Harper & Brothers.
_The Beauty and the Bolshevist_, 1920. Harper & Brothers.
_Manslaughter_, 1921. Dodd, Mead & Company.
_With certain exceptions noted, books are published by the Century
Company, New York._
CHAPTER XXIX
ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Coburn: Mrs. Fordyce
Coburn) is the most fanciful writer in America to-day. Fanciful,
inventive--not imaginative in the large and proper sense of the word
imagination. Her method in writing is utterly different from that of any
other popular author. She is in this respect as unique as Harold Bell
Wright--to whom she bears no resemblance whatever. Wright starts a
novel--we hope the reader will pardon this digression--by making an
elaborate outline, synopsis, scenario, _not_ of the story but of certain
moral and ethical ideas, concepts and principles which he wishes to
impress upon his readers. Sometimes up to the very last typewritten
draft of one of his books the characters are known only by words
denoting the things they stand for. Then, at the eleventh hour, Wright
strikes out “Greed” and inserts “Obadiah Jackson” and “Manliness” and
inserts “David Fanning”--and the copy goes to the printer.
Mrs. Coburn, or Miss Abbott as we may permit ourselves to call her
because of her pen name’s connotations--Miss Abbott finds a title and
then constructs her story. “Her stories are made to revolve around the
title, rather than an outgrowth of any plot,” says a writer in the
Boston _Globe_, upon whose article we rely mainly for the facts of this
chapter. It is an article with rather too much fluff but it presents the
really interesting facts about the author of _Molly Make-Believe_ and
presents them with point. The writer of it says: “Once a satisfactory
title occurs to Miss Abbott, she follows it in exactly the same manner
as the detective who is pursuing a clue.”
This is perfectly intelligible. _Molly Make-Believe_ as a title teems
with ideas; so does _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_; so does _The White-Linen
Nurse_.
“My characters are always wholly imaginary. I have never yet put a real
person in a story. I doubt if I ever shall, for once I begin to weave a
tale, imagination has too vivid a hold on me.”
Upon this the Boston _Globe_ writer remarks, with a great deal of
truthfulness:
“She may choose a commonplace subject--a girl, a woman, a road, a
husband.... Mrs. Coburn immediately succeeds in placing hers in the
uncommon category. It is the qualifying adjective that plays a prominent
part in making her subjects peculiarly original. She specifies that her
heroine is a sick-a-bed lady, her girl is very tired, her thoroughfare
is a runaway road, and even the husband in her sanitarium story is a
Sunday spouse.
“It is not her nomenclature alone that is unique and attractive. Added
to marked creative ability, she has a quality of verbal fitness, and her
phrases are charged with amazing intensity and force, so that there is
an exhilaration in her pages. Indeed, as one of her friends said, after
reading _The Kink in the Air_, one about decides that it is the ‘kink’
in this author’s style that is its chiefest charm.”
Many scoff; Franklin P. Adams used to divert himself with Eleanor
Hallowell Abbottisms; scratching the surface of the ground like an
industrious hen you may uncover many choice morsels of wriggling
English. But if you think these are all the Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
books contain you are as deluded as the hen that thinks she has
uncovered earth’s deepest secrets. Below, far below, but not buried at
such a depth as to be uncoverable by ordinary minds, are veins of pure
humor, tenderness; the rich gold of sympathy and friendly fancifulness.
They are paying streaks. Pick up a reprinted copy of _Molly
Make-Believe_ and look at the page in the front which records _over
twenty_ editions in five years!
We follow the lead of the Boston _Globe_ article:
Miss Abbott works slowly and carefully. Her chief concern while writing
is with her own feeling about the tale she is at work upon. Unless she
comes to like it pretty well she does not send it to a publisher. It
must interest her first as some sort of warranty that it will interest
others. “Painter, musician, writer--whether anybody else likes your work
or not,” she says, “doesn’t specially matter if you can only bring that
work to the point where you like it yourself.”
She writes entirely upon the typewriter. Even the first draft is
composed on a machine. Frequently she spends the entire day at her
machine. In writing _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_ she devoted twelve hours each
day for nine days to the task and this, with one exception, is the
quickest story-making she has ever accomplished. It is, by any standard,
a tremendous bit of work. Three, four, rarely six hours a day is the
ordinary day’s work of a busy writer. Twelve hours on a stretch can be
and is managed once in a great while when circumstances make the work
imperative; but it is not managed for more than a day or two and is
usually followed by a complete rest, sometimes in bed and with medical
attendance! Twelve hours a day for nine days--it will make the hardiest
shudder. Many of the best American writers are entirely satisfied if
they do 500 or 1,000 words a day--and not every day at that. But as a
rule Miss Abbott takes from a month to a year to write in such time as
she can dedicate to it a short story, or a long short story, or a short
novel. In eight years she wrote some twenty stories. For two years in
succession she won a $1,000 prize in _Collier’s Weekly_ short story
contests with _The Very Tired Girl_ and _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_.
Before her marriage to Dr. Fordyce Coburn Miss Abbott was secretary and
English assistant in the State Normal School at Lowell, Massachusetts.
This job kept her at her desk all day and it was in hours when she might
have been expected to be asleep or resting or playing that she hunted
titles and let her fancy do what it would with them. She used a pen name
at first. Her first serious attempts at writing were in verse. Two long
poems published in _Harper’s Magazine_ attracted much attention.
How curiously things go in this world! Miss Abbott had furnished the
text and scheme for an advertising circular sent out by a Boston firm.
The circular was so strikingly good that business houses began to come
to its originator with offers of advertising contracts. Miss Abbott was
for some time in a state of indecision as to whether she should develop
her gift for writing advertisements or try to succeed with stories.
Finally she sent two tales to two magazines with the mental resolution:
“If these are rejected, I believe I’ll take up commercial writing.”
But both stories were accepted. Miss Abbott says that she owes her
success as a fictioneer, therefore, to _Lippincott’s Magazine_ and the
_Smart Set_ quite as much as to anything else.
As readers will have suspected, Miss Abbott is a member of the family
which has attained distinction in letters and theology both. She is a
daughter of the Rev. Edward Abbott, sometime editor of the _Literary
World_ of Boston; a niece of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the _Outlook_
and Henry Ward Beecher’s successor at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn; and a
granddaughter of the Jacob Abbott who wrote the Rollo books for boys.
Miss Abbott’s father was born in Farmington, Maine, and was graduated
from New York University in 1860, seven years after his brother, Lyman
Abbott, matriculated at the same institution. Edward Abbott studied
theology at the Andover Theological Seminary and served as pastor of the
Pilgrim Congregational Church at Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1869 to
1878 he was editor of the _Congregationalist_; afterward he became
editor of the _Literary World_. He was ordained a minister of the
Episcopal church in 1879 and served as rector of St. James’s Church,
Cambridge, until 1896. Like his father, Jacob Abbott, Edward Abbott
wrote some juvenile books as well as several histories and biographies.
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott was born in Cambridge in 1872. Largely educated
by private tutors, she was for a short time a student in the public
schools and afterward a special student at Radcliffe. She was a child
exceedingly fond of outdoor life. Although she remembers kind and
patient teachers she can recall no day when the walls of a schoolroom
did not fret and torment her with the sense of physical confinement.
“The one or two things I understood at all I learned so quickly that it
drove me almost crazy waiting for the fifty or more classmates to catch
up--and the great many things I didn’t understand I was too frightened
to learn in such a crowd. I can’t look upon little, playful,
day-dreaming, high-strung children shut up in an ironbound schoolroom
without experiencing a very large lump in my throat.”
At the Harvard grammar school in Cambridge her teachers first discovered
the Abbott talent in her surprising fondness for English composition, a
subject not customarily dear to the hearts of schoolchildren, and in her
rapturous delight in reading aloud Washington Irving’s _Sketch Book_.
“Certainly,” says Miss Abbott, “I never showed any other special signs
of intelligence, being always, I remember, at the extreme foot of my
class in every subject except English. Surely nothing but my father’s
unfailing sympathy and understanding sustained either me or my teachers,
through the dreadful period of fractions and other mathematical horrors.
And it was here at this school that I formed the first intellectual
friendship of my life with a little, fair-haired, blue-eyed,
earnest-minded boy who is now Professor Thomas Whittemore, of Tufts
College. While the other children giggled over ink-dipped pigtails,
wrote facetious notes about their teachers, and traded postage stamps,
we two were whispering about authors and exchanging autographs and
timidly confiding literary ambitions to each other. Funny little people
we must have been--astonishingly solemn, inordinately dignified and most
deliciously important With all the grave, childish self-consciousness of
having already fixed our minds on higher things.
“I recall one day when we were swapping a Longfellow check-stub for a
Whittier post-card, or something of that sort. We got caught at it and
were kept ignominiously after school, to the infinite delight of our
more frivolous-minded companions.”
Miss Abbott’s husband, Dr. Fordyce Coburn, is the “silent partner” in
her work to whom _Molly Make-Believe_ is dedicated. He aids and abets
her in her stories, in taking a course in playwriting at Harvard under
Professor George Baker, in anything she wants to do. Dr. Coburn is
medical adviser of the Lowell high school and an all-round athlete and
sportsman whenever a city practice will release him sufficiently. He and
Mrs. Coburn spend their spare time salmon fishing in Maine, playing
tennis at Lowell, coon and wild turkey hunting on the edge of the
Florida everglades--doing anything, in fact, that two persons, husband
and wife, great comrades and possessing similar tastes, can always find
to do happily together.
BOOKS BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT
_Molly Make-Believe_, 1910.
_The Sick-a-Bed Lady_, 1911.
_The White-Linen Nurse_, 1913.
_The Indiscreet Letter_, 1915.
_Little Eve Edgarton_, 1915.
_The Stingy Receiver_, 1917.
_Published by the Century Company, New York_.
_The Ne’er-Do-Much_, 1918.
_Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York_.
_Old-Dad_, 1919.
_Published by E. P. Dutton & Company. New York_.
CHAPTER XXX
HARRIET T. COMSTOCK
The significant thing about Harriet T. Comstock has been her rôle in
reprint.
After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the
plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or
some other publishing house which issues popular books in inexpensive
form. The show has left Broadway to go on “the road.” And, you might not
think it, but sometimes the worth of a show is never known until it hits
“the road.”
The worth of Mrs. Comstock was never known until _Joyce of the North
Woods_ went into reprint.
The book, at over a dollar, had had a “good, average sale”--is 10,000
copies a good average sale? Reader, it is. Think not that all novels are
best sellers. That’s no more the case than that all the sellers are the
best novels.
_Joyce_ went into reprint and in three months sold 60,000 copies and
then it sold and sold and sold; and so, when they came to be reprinted,
did _Janet of the Dunes_ and _A Son of the Hills_. In a little more than
three years these three novels in reprint went to 250,000 copies. Since
then _The Place Beyond the Winds_ and later books have been put out by
the reprinters. Is there any question of Mrs. Comstock’s importance? We
think not.
But what’s the explanation? What, in the vernacular, is the answer? The
answer is just this: Mrs. Comstock is an earnest, sincere, enthusiastic
writer; she is an educated woman, a suffragist, with experience in
public speaking and a familiarity with public affairs; she is a
homemaker who has always made the keeping of a pleasant home in
Flatbush, Brooklyn, her chief business and who wrote at first just for
fun and as she had the chance; she has convictions and no more hesitates
to act upon them than to express them; she is personally modest--you
have to dig things out of her about herself. But--is this the answer? Is
there something else?
Yes, there is this else. Mrs. Comstock has worked with intensive culture
and a visible reward the peculiarly modern literary field known (it
really isn’t so known but it will be) as idealism.
What’s that? There are realists and romanticists although no two of us
agree as to what makes a literary realist, what a romanticist. Yet we
all recognize the distinction. It is a sure if shadowy boundary. But a
literary idealist?
The literary idealist is the product of everybody’s dissatisfaction with
what the other two give us. Vexed with the clash of the allopath and the
homeopath, some send for the osteopath. The figure of speech we employ
is no offhand metaphor. Literary idealists like Mrs. Comstock are a kind
of literary osteopaths. They go at us vigorously. They decline to dose
us with the nauseous compounds of realism and they shudder at the
thought of our taking sugar pellets of romance. What they want us to do
is to let them rub, thump, pound and flex us--mentally and emotionally,
of course. They say: “Now, see here! Your intellect and your emotions
may not be very wonderful but they are your own. Exercise them! Rely on
them! Keep well and happy by using them to the fullest extent! They are
what the Lord gave you. Don’t try to refine them till they become
flabby. Don’t use them brutally till they go to pieces. Recognize your
limitations and you’ll be all right!”
That’s Mrs. Comstock’s secret, whether she would put it that way herself
or not. She is not a “great” novelist in the usual acceptation of the
word; she is, in respect of literary distinction, not even a good
novelist. Aesthetically considered she is nowhere. Practically
considered she is in a hundred thousand homes, entertaining people,
instructing people, osteopathizing, making them use the brains and
feelings they have, preventing them from aping something they have not
and cannot acquire, killing snobbery at the roots, arresting the blight
of disillusionment and convincing young and old that certain simple,
fundamental instincts and certain simple, fundamental principles of
character are what count--with _them_. She is right, they do.
Conviction about the truth of life, conviction as to the best use of the
novel, namely, “to present the great truths of life in an attractive
manner, where they will reach the greatest number of people”--this sums
up Harriet T. Comstock. How did she come to write _The Place Beyond the
Winds_ which presents the question of eugenics and the ethics of
silence on certain matters affecting marriage? Mrs. Comstock’s face
saddens and she tells you:
“I had a most unpleasant experience once. I happened to learn that the
very attractive son of a dear friend of mine was totally unfit to marry
the girl to whom he was engaged. I approached the young man, but found
him obdurate; so, after a long mental and spiritual struggle, I revealed
the facts to the girl’s mother.
“It was the most trying experience of my life. Then the feeling came to
me that I must write about it--must do my small part toward banishing
the evil.”
Exactly! There you have the idealist in action as well as in literature.
It is perfectly plain what some people will think of Mrs. Comstock’s
course; it is equally plain that hundreds of thousands will approve it.
Do her the fine justice to acknowledge that whatever any one thought of
it, that even if every one else in the world condemned her, she would
have done as she did.
She has, in a showdown, absolute and unlimited courage. Then and then
only is her rooted modesty and her equally rooted humor put aside. As
for the humor that is hers, it comes out fully in the narrative of her
experiences campaigning for suffrage. As she once wrote:
“And then the anti who became converted and in a burst of gratitude sent
me a bottle of Benedictine!
“Maybe she felt as the young girl at a revival once felt who electrified
the congregation by shouting:
“‘Good Lord! My jewelry is dragging me down to hell--I am going to give
it to my sister!’”
Go out to Flatbush, as Alice Lawton did one sunshiny afternoon,
afterward relating her experience in the _Book News Monthly_; travel
along a “broad, tree-shaded street between rows of real homes with full
complement of flower gardens and babies and puppies; stop at a pretty,
wide-verandaed, white-pillared house and call upon Mrs. Comstock, wife,
mother, home-maker, novelist--a Jill of many trades and successful at
them all!”
She seats you in a “cozy, brown-walled drawing-room, beside a little
round table.” You eat “piping hot buttered toast and crisp jumbles, and
drink properly-brewed tea. Sonny comes strolling in, a large,
beautifully-marked Burne-Jonesy yellow cat,” a Persian. The creature is
polite but heads for a little mahogany desk and sniffs at the single
drawer. It contains his catnip.
The hostess is the sort of woman you make confidences to. Mrs. Comstock
is cheerful, “has smiling eyes, a loving-toned voice, curly gray hair,
wears pretty clothes and almost always flowers. One feels a hearty
welcome even when one telephones her. She never sounds annoyed, nor even
interrupted.”
Upstairs there’s a bright little room where she works. Couch in one
corner, built-in bookcase in another, big desk in the middle. The desk
is heaped with piles of closely-written paper and books. On the soft
buff paper of the walls are paintings, drawings, photographs--the
originals of illustrations to Mrs. Comstock’s books are noticeable. Here
she writes most of each novel, subjected to endless
interruptions--friends and neighbors of a novelist never take the
novelist’s work seriously. When the finishing chapters are to be done
Mrs. Comstock packs manuscript, pencils and paper and goes away. Her
publishers and her husband have the address--no one else. She is one of
the extremely few novelists who do not use a typewriter--she writes it
all out longhand and makes several copies before she gets through. She
began by writing stories for the school paper, she continued by writing
children’s stories, then books for older girls and boys. _Janet of the
Dunes_ was her first novel.
Thomas Hardy is her favorite author. “Whenever I feel that I am stranded
I read Hardy and regain my poise. He discusses so clearly and nobly the
problems with which we are struggling to-day. And I also like Barrie;
principally, I think, because he knows women so thoroughly, and I always
know he knows. Stevenson once said of George Eliot that when she wrote
of men they always put their hands up to feel if their hair is coming
down; but Barrie writes of women without their appearing with a cigar in
their hands.”
Of her method of work Mrs. Comstock says:
“The first thing I see is the place and the people--the background and
the actors. Then their story begins to unfold in my mind. When the time
comes that that story must be written before I can have any peace of
mind, I sit down to it--not before. Other writers, I understand, usually
see the story or the people first, and the background later. With me,
the background, the environment of my characters, is all-important.
Why, I even keep a set of pictures of the country I am writing of on my
desk beside me.”
Mrs. Comstock always goes to the scene of her stories. Her backgrounds
are always of actual places and her people are frequently real people.
Thus in _Joyce of the North Woods_ her St. Ange is a place in northern
New York and all the lesser characters are taken from life. In _The
Vindication_, Dr. Hill is straight out of actuality. On a suffrage tour
Mrs. Comstock met this young physician whose work had been so largely
among the Adirondack poor. He, too, had adopted a backward and neglected
child, just as Dr. Hill takes hold of the boy Chester in Mrs. Comstock’s
novel. _A Son of the Hills_ was the fruit of a visit in the Virginia
mountains. Not the immediate fruit; some time had to elapse before Mrs.
Comstock could “see” the story in the mountaineers. In _Mam’selle Jo_,
Mrs. Comstock has gone up North again, to the St. Lawrence country, and
she tells the moving story of a woman of 40 who has at last struggled
clear of debt and is at last able to gratify the instinct of mother-love
which is in her.
Popular she is, but she does not think of popularity. In truth a writer
cannot. For, as Mrs. Comstock says, the writer who thinks of the
possible popularity of her work when she should be thinking of her story
will impair her work. And her work is the thing with Mrs. Comstock.
Reject it if you like, accept it if you will; she will go unshakeably
on. She has something to do and is about doing it.
BOOKS BY HARRIET T. COMSTOCK
_Janet of the Dunes_, 1908.
_Joyce of the North Woods_, 1911.
_A Son of the Hills_, 1913.
_The Place Beyond the Winds_, 1914.
_The Vindication_, 1917.
_Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country_, 1918.
_Unbroken Lines_, 1919.
_The Shield of Silence_, 1921.
_At the Crossroads_, 1922.
_(Also many books for boys and girls.)_
_Mrs. Comstock’s earlier books are to be had in reprint. Janet of the
Dunes was published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston; the others are
published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._
CHAPTER XXXI
HONORÉ WILLSIE
Nothing is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but
in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It
will be enough to try faithfully to set them before her thousands of
readers and the thousands who ought to be her readers, to try to picture
Mrs. Willsie herself. That is all that can be done in a chapter of
reasonable length. To discuss intelligently Mrs. Willsie’s ideas would
require a book and an amount of exact knowledge on certain
subjects--immigration and Americanization, for example--that is no part
of our reporter’s equipment. A straightaway bit of exposition must do
instead.
The spring of 1919 will see the publication of a new novel by Mrs.
Willsie, _The Forbidden Trail_, an exciting story of the _Still Jim_
country, Arizona and the irrigable West. The novel deals with the clever
efforts of German spies and sympathizers to appropriate for Germany the
discoveries and improvements made by the sturdy Americans of our United
States Reclamation Service. This theme is not so completely derived from
the war as might appear at first glance. Readers of _Still Jim_ will
recall in the closing chapters the visit of Herr Gluck to the Cabillo
dam and his effort to get Jim Manning to enter the service of the
German Government--in a legitimate way, however. Of the illegitimate
ways in which Germany was then working among American engineers Mrs.
Willsie is now free to speak and may be trusted to speak out of an exact
knowledge. For her husband, Henry Elmer Willsie, of New York, was an
inventor and consulting engineer when she was married to him and with
him she spent two years in the deserts of Arizona.
Honoré Willsie was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, the daughter of William Dunbar
McCue and Lilly Bryant (Head) McCue and a descendant of old New
Englanders who went West, the people who form the important background
of _Still Jim_ and _Lydia of the Pines_. She is a Bachelor of Arts of
the University of Wisconsin and was married soon after her graduation.
The two years in the West followed and then the husband and wife came to
New York where Mrs. Willsie devoted herself to the task of winning
recognition as a writer. She says now:
“A plan, and always keeping your eye on what you want to be doing in
three years or in five years--that is what makes for success for a
writer.
“I came to New York with the intention of being a writer. I did not want
to work on a magazine or a newspaper. And I wanted to write what I
wanted to write.
“I had sold Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, editor of _Munsey’s Magazine_] a
little love story called _Beatrice and the Rose_. So after a few weeks
in New York I went to see him with a bundle of stories I wanted him to
buy. He looked them over and shook his head.
“‘Do me something else like _Beatrice and the Rose_ and I’ll take it,’
he said.
“‘I don’t want to go on writing stuff like that,’ I explained. ‘If
that’s the best I can do I’ll give up writing altogether.’
“‘But nobody wants to read about those deserts and glowing sunsets.
There is only one man in New York who will read about deserts--Theodore
Dreiser.’
“‘All right,’ I decided. ‘I will go to see Theodore Dreiser.’
“I sent my stuff to Mr. Dreiser in advance and next day I went down to
see what he thought of it. I was pretty well scared. I walked around the
Butterick Building--four times I walked around that bulky flatiron
before I screwed up enough courage to go in. When I finally got inside
and was ushered into Mr. Dreiser’s office [the novelist was then editor
of the _Delineator_, a job Mrs. Willsie now holds] I was tongue-tied
with nervousness. That nervousness might well have been prophetic. The
interview turned out to be a momentous one for me.
“‘My God!’ said Mr. Dreiser, looking me over. ‘Another infant come to
New York to reform it.’ But after a little talk he offered me a job,
editorial work at a good salary.
“‘I’ll have to think that over,’ I said, the temptation of a good
regular salary struggling against my plans for writing, and writing
only.
“‘No,’ Mr. Dreiser ordered. ‘You sit right there and decide now.’
“So I sat there and thought about it and finally I told him that I
wouldn’t take his job. I had stuck out this far and I guessed I could go
on.
“‘All right,’ Mr. Dreiser agreed without argument. ‘Stick it out at the
writing game if you want to. It won’t be easy, but you will make good.
You will have a hard time at first, and you will need pluck. But in five
years you will land and land big. As for these stories of yours, I will
buy them.’ And he named a sum staggering to my inexperience, though he
assured me he was taking advantage of me because I was unknown.
“Well, I kept on writing. I bought a second-hand typewriter and worked
it with two fingers and many times I thought of the salary I might have
had coming in every week. As Mr. Dreiser said, it wasn’t easy. I made
$500 that first year. Things came out my way because I stuck to my plan
and always kept my eye on the future--and had the courage to refuse that
job.”
Not long afterward Mrs. Willsie’s stories began to appear in the
magazines and were unusually popular. She took up the writing of special
articles for such periodicals as _Harper’s Weekly_ and _Collier’s_ on
important subjects--immigration, divorce, Indians, the United States
Reclamation Service. Norman Hapgood, who was then editor of _Harper’s
Weekly_, said of her work: “She has the ability to get at the essentials
of a big question, and put it in simple, human terms.”
Mrs. Willsie’s first published novel was _The Heart of the Desert_,
which came out in 1913. It won immediate recognition for her. Richard
Le Gallienne, writing an appreciation of Mrs. Willsie in the _Book News
Monthly_ of March, 1917, said:
“As a boy, of course, I adored the American Indian of Fenimore Cooper,
but, since then, words fail. If I have a bête noire in fiction,
nowadays, it is the American Indian. I mention this purely personal
peculiarity, merely to emphasize the delight which I took in Mrs.
Willsie’s hero in _The Heart of the Desert_--and his truly heroic wooing
and winning of a white girl, with Mrs. Willsie’s, and, I am sure, all
her readers’ concurrence. Never was such a masterful wooing, or one
brought to winning through such heart-beating suspense, such a grim
passionate race for love and life in so wild and star-lit and infinite a
setting.”
And he says that therefore “when I say that, in my opinion, _The Heart
of the Desert_ is one of the best ‘yarns,’ and, if I may say so, one of
the most virile love stories written in our time, it is not from any
prejudice in favor of its subject matter.”
Mr. Le Gallienne’s article is not long. We take the liberty to quote the
rest of it from a booklet on Mrs. Willsie prepared by the Frederick A.
Stokes Company, her publishers. This booklet also contains an
interesting article by Hildegarde Hawthorne on Mrs. Willsie and her
novels. Says Mr. Le Gallienne:
“My first acquaintance with Mrs. Honoré Willsie’s books came through a
photograph of her looks. The photograph, or photographs, to which I have
reference occurred in a copy of _Harper’s Weekly_, not so very long
before that honored periodical was gathered to its fathers. They were
taken by her husband, and represented Mrs. Willsie in the heart of the
Arizona Desert; dizzily seated at the edge of a canyon; in camp
democratically at dinner, with a stunning hat and a still more stunning
smile, and so on. Here, one said, was the veritable ‘Girl of the Golden
West,’ tall and fearless-eyed as Artemis; something like a symbolic
figure of that noble type of Western woman, which accounts so largely
for the proverbial chivalry--and homicides--of that portion of America
which is at once most romantic and most real. One of these,
particularly, haunted me, and with my subsequent acquaintance with Mrs.
Willsie’s writings in mind, I must be forgiven one more use of the word
‘symbolic’--Mrs. Willsie is seated in the foreground, a wilderness of
sagebrush all about her, and a lonely stretch of barren mountain in the
near background. Her head, of which you only see the massive coiled
hair, is bent in an attitude, as of sorrow, close over her knees, from
which her right hand hangs listlessly, almost touching the cowboy hat at
her feet. ‘The close of a long day,’ is the caption of the picture. In
the light of Mrs. Willsie’s books, that photograph has come to me to
represent the attitude of her soul, the soul of a young American woman,
to whom the idealism that made her country is a religion, in one of
those moods of dejection which occasionally overcome all of us who love
this great Republic, at what too frequently seems like an eclipse, or
even a decadence, of that idealism. As she sits there with bended head,
like some heroic weeper, in that austere wilderness, her attitude seems
to be saying what Lydia says so finally in her inspiring new book,
_Lydia of the Pines_:
“‘We’ve got too many lawyers in America. What I think America needs is
real love of America. And it seems to me the best way to get it is to
identify oneself with the actual soil of the community. What I want is
this: That you and I, upon the ground where poor John Levine did such
wrongs, will build us a home. I don’t mean a home as Americans usually
mean the word, I mean we’ll try to found a family there. We’ll send the
roots of our roof-tree so deep into the ground that for generations to
come our children’s children will be found there and our family name
will stand for old American ideals in the community. I don’t see how
else we Americans can make up to the world for the way we’ve exploited
America.’
“After looking at Mr. Willsie’s photographs, I chanced to be walking
along Fifth Avenue, and glancing into a bookseller’s windows, I beheld
one of those pyramidal displays of a new book which I have sometimes
thought must have exhausted the whole edition. The name of the book was
_Still Jim_. It was by the lady of Mr. Willsie’s beautiful
photographs--and it was a real best seller, said the bookseller, to whom
I disbursed the needed dollar and whatever it was. No young writer could
hope to live up to Mr. Willsie’s photographs, but I was happily
astonished to find how near Mrs. Willsie came to doing it. Apart from
the book as a story, its quality of atmosphere, its breath of vast
spaces, its sense of heroic action on a great stage, were remarkable.
There was, too, that background of ‘character’ to the writing in which
the life of a book mainly resides, and for lack of which so many clever
books come and go, perishing like the summer skies.
“_Lydia of the Pines_ [we have already quoted Mr. Le Gallienne’s words
on _The Heart of the Desert_] combines all Mrs. Willsie’s qualities and
characteristics in a maturing ratio. The book shows her as growing
nearer and nearer to that symbolic photograph of her. More and more she
is seen as the passionate dreamer of the true American ideal, a
practical dreamer, too, not afraid to arraign America to her face for
wrong done in the past, and wrongs still a-doing. The theme of _Lydia of
the Pines_ is one of the noblest she could have chosen--the infamy of
political corruption that is so subtly and cruelly doing the last wrong
to the Indian by the legalized theft of his pitiful ‘reservations.’
“‘Where the pine-forest is destroyed, the pines never come again,’--such
is the burden of this noble and very moving story of a high-souled but
most human girl, whose family and friends are implicated in ‘real
estate’ deals with Indians of a nearby reservation. It is a simple story
too, moving among simple lives, in a simple Western milieu which Mrs.
Willsie presents with great fidelity, with many touches of humor and
pathos.
“In _Lydia of the Pines_ one sees Mrs. Willsie growing in strength, more
surely becoming one of the authentic voices of the nobler Americanism,
and her book is sure of a huge welcome by those who have that at heart.”
With equal enthusiasm Hildegarde Hawthorne declares that _Lydia of the
Pines_ “is the best thing Mrs. Willsie has yet done.” The author of this
volume has endeavored generally to be reticent in the expression of
personal preferences. He will only say that he does not agree with Miss
Hawthorne about _Lydia_. He found it fearfully dull while fully
conceding the interest of the ideas which Mrs. Willsie never fails to
present for her readers’ contemplation. He admired the portrait of John
Levine but deplored what he felt to be its lack of solidity. The reader
sees Levine in two relations only--to Lydia and to the Indians, and
unfortunately his relations to the Indians are mostly a matter of
hearsay, what came to Lydia’s ears, no more. To this writer _Still Jim_
seems by far the better book.
But Miss Hawthorne is thoroughly right when she says:
“No one who reads Mrs. Willsie’s books can fail to be deeply interested
in seeing how the writer grasps and lays before her public certain big
problems confronting us, such as this of the downfall of the early
traditions, the influx of races that have not our conception of
government or of life, and now the Indian problem. In _Lydia of the
Pines_ the shameful story of our treatment of the red man is
illuminatingly told. It is told with measure and good sense, and is
concretely pictured, the facts concerning one Reservation supplying the
material. Those who wish to ascertain how closely Mrs. Willsie sticks to
facts need only hunt up the reports of the Board of Indian Commissioners
in regard to the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to find out. The
whole story is there, told over and over again with endless, pitiful
detail. In her novel Mrs. Willsie has drawn intelligently upon that mass
of testimony, handled it with a full realization of its drama, and also
with a peculiarly broad understanding of both sides.”
Gertrude Atherton says: “I think _Lydia of the Pines_ is an American
classic.” Margaret Deland wrote to Mrs. Willsie concerning _Still Jim_:
“All the book is American to the roots--but big Jim is the American
soul. It is too massive a book to write about in detail;--it’s the whole
effect that moves me: truth, beauty and democracy. A fine piece of
work--an honest heart behind it. I congratulate you.”
The element of mysticism in Mrs. Willsie finds its outlet in the two and
three line reveries which she puts at the head of her chapters. Thus in
_Still Jim_ a desert rock muses:
“Humans constantly shift sand and rock from place to place. They call
this work. I have seen time return their every work to the form in which
it was created.”
“Coyotes hunt weaker things. Humans hunt all things, even each other,
which the coyote will not do.”
In _Lydia of the Pines_ it is a pine tree which murmurs:
“The young pine knows the secrets of the ground. The old pine knows the
stars.”
“Nature is neither cruel nor sad. She is only purposeful, tending to an
end we cannot see.”
There should be mention of Mrs. Willsie’s most recent book, _Benefits
Forgot: A Study of Lincoln and Mother Love_. This is a brief but true
story of a young army surgeon for whose education his mother had made
great sacrifices. Mrs. Willsie tells how President Lincoln learned of
the young man’s neglect of his mother and brought him to realize his
ingratitude. It is a very fine and very touching little story.
Has the war changed Mrs. Willsie’s ideas and ideals? No, it has
sustained and strengthened them; it has supplied her with evidence in
their support and justification in their advancement. We quote an
interview with the novelist by Maxwell Aley:
“War time (Mrs. Willsie said) is woman’s time to show the stuff she is
made of. This war is going to take the ‘fluff’ out of feminism in
America just as it did in England. It’s”--hesitation and a twinkling
eye--“it’s going to blow the foam off the feminist beer!” [A good
figure, that, for feminism has certainly been something yeasty,
something brewing, and with a little hop in it!] “I hope the war is
going to make American women realize the importance of being women, and
the chance that it gives them to mold the coming generation.
“As I see it there are two things American women can do--one abstract
and one concrete. They can teach children in this time of national
stress what it means to be Americans, and in that way form the Americans
of the future; and they can mobilize their resources and offer them to
the government. Like all abstract things, the first is the more
difficult.
“Women have got to get down from pink teas to brass tacks! If the
average woman would only stop to realize just how important it is to be
a woman! Why, woman’s business is not only the bringing into the world
of the coming generation, but the molding of that generation’s ideals.
American men are too busy making a living to give much time to the
children--it’s the women who teach them at home and at school. And they
ought to be taught what it means to be Americans as well as being taught
religion and morals, or grammar and geography.
“But here’s the rub! To teach children that, a woman has got to realize
what it means herself. How many do?
“I hope more women realize it than men--that is, than the men I’ve
asked. Several years ago I started out asking all sorts of men ‘What is
an American?’ I asked ‘Bohunks’ and ‘Guineas’ at work on street
construction, I asked American men in every walk in life--and what do
you suppose I got as an average answer? That an American was a man who
knew how to get rich quick!
“This war has shown us that taking out naturalization papers, or even
being born here, doesn’t necessarily make an American. We’ve found out
that the melting pot doesn’t always melt. To be an American you must
have a certain philosophy of government, and only a thoughtful person
can have a philosophy at all. If you are going to be a true American,
you’ve got to think things out! You’ve got to come to an understanding
of the big ideals on which the men who founded this country built.
“Every American who does that develops a paradox. He finds first that he
has a sense of freedom and equality, and then he arrives at a feeling
of responsibility. That latter feeling has been very evident among
thinking Americans since the beginning of the European war, and it is
particularly evident now.
“It’s up to American women, then, to think out what it means to be
Americans before they attempt to teach their children--or some one
else’s children--what it means. I wish that we might have an American
litany--a national creed that mothers and teachers could give to our
children! I wish that every American child might be brought to
understand the state of mind of the men who wrote and signed our
Declaration of Independence--a state of mind compounded of utter
bravery, the spirit of self-sacrifice, and a devotion to cause and
country that made them literally offer up their ‘lives, their fortunes
and their sacred honor.’
“Now do you see why I said the abstract thing women have a chance to do
is the hard thing? But if it is the more difficult, I believe it is also
the more important.
“As for the concrete thing, that is already being done to a certain
extent. Women have begun offering their services to the government
through their various organizations, but they ought to do it more
completely. If we are to have universal service for men, we ought to
have a variety of universal service for women--at least a mobilization
of the resources of all the women in the country. I believe that women
here in America will get the vote out of this war as women are getting
it in England, but American women will have to show, as English women
have done, that they are worthy of the vote.
“And there is one thing American women must not forget--that the most
important thing they can mobilize is their sex. When the men of a
country give their bodies to the sword, the women must give theirs to
the future--to the generation to come. Now, more than in peace times,
women owe it to their country to bear children, and bear them
intelligently. And when they have borne them, it is their sacred duty to
bring them up Americans in a full understanding of the ideals on which
our fathers built the nation.”
Living in New York, writing in New York, working in New York as the
managing editor of the _Delineator_, Mrs. Willsie is still and
essentially the woman of Mr. Willsie’s photographs which made so
forcible an impression on Mr. Le Gallienne. With her is always a
splendid vision: “Exquisite violet mists rolled back toward the
mountains. The pungent odor of sagebrush floated through the tent.
Iridescent, bejeweled, flashing every rainbow tint from its moistened
breast, the desert smiled at us. Once more I yielded to its loveliness.”
To her and her vision many, many of her countrymen and countrywomen will
always yield gratefully and with pleasure.
BOOKS BY HONORÉ WILLSIE
_The Heart of the Desert_, 1913.
_Still Jim_, 1915.
_Lydia of the Pines_, 1917.
_Benefits Forgot_, 1917.
_The Forbidden Trail_, 1919.
_The Enchanted Canyon_, 1921.
_Judith of the Godless Valley_, 1922.
_Published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York._
CHAPTER XXXII
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
Half a dozen plays and half a hundred stories stand to the credit of
Frances Hodgson Burnett, born in Manchester, England, naturalized as an
American citizen in 1905 or thereabouts, the author of _Little Lord
Fauntleroy_, most famous of children’s stories by a living writer. Mrs.
Burnett is a novelist, as such books as _The Shuttle_ and _T. Tembaron_
attest. She is thought of half or more than half the time as a writer of
tales for youngsters, and rightly. Of these she has produced a great
number and their success is amazing. No beating of drums, no blasts on
trumpets, even toy trumpets: yet as the publishers assure you, in
respect of even her less known “juveniles,” they keep on selling, year
after year, with the most relentless endurance. They don’t have to be
advertised. In the famous sentiment of a famous advertisement, they are
advertised by their loving friends.
The best thing for the adult to do, after paying his tribute to
_Fauntleroy_, is to read _The Shuttle_, “a novel of international
marriage.” It represents Mrs. Burnett’s life. She alone of all the
writers of our day could have written such a book, declares a friend
whose desire to remain anonymous is here observed. He supplies a sketch
of Mrs. Burnett which had better be reproduced verbatim:
“She is English of the English by birth and temperament; born in
Manchester, as you know, where she lived until she was about thirteen.
Then, her father having failed in business, owing to the war in
America--his failure had something to do with the blockading of the
Southern ports, I believe--and he having died, the business went to
ruin, although Mrs. Burnett’s mother tried her gentle best to save it.
There was a large family of them, and Frances, who had already developed
the faculty of story-telling, was the life and spirit of the crowd.
“An older brother had gone to join an uncle in Tennessee, and when the
family’s fortunes were at lowest ebb he advised them to join him in
America, which they did, and lived in the greatest poverty on the
outskirts of Knoxville. They were so poor that when some one suggested
that Frances write out one of her stories and send it to _Godey’s Lady’s
Book_ the money for the stamps had to be earned by picking blackberries.
“The first story was accepted and all subsequent stories sent. Then Mrs.
Burnett graduated to _Peterson’s Magazine_. The Petersons were great
friends of Mrs. Burnett in her early days. They recommended that she
send some of her stories to the _Century_, which she did, but the
quality of them was so English that the _Century_ editors suspected they
were not original but copied by the little Tennessee girl from stories
in English magazines. When her second story was sent to them, they gave
expression to their doubt. The thing was explained to them, and the
publication of the stories--I believe the first was _Surly Tim’s
Troubles_--was made immediately.
“Mrs. Burnett has always kept in touch with England and English life. As
soon as she had made her success, in fact, just after the publication of
_That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_, she went back to England, and has spent some
part of nearly every year in England since then. She has lived in all
sections of England and has had houses in London; one at 63 Portland
Place, and another in Charles Street, Mayfair. She has had country homes
in Norfolk, Kent and Surrey. For nearly fifteen years she leased a very
interesting old house in Kent, Maytham Hall, really the manor house of a
very ancient estate. The house stands in the most wonderful of Kentish
gardens, which Mrs. Burnett, with her enthusiasm for gardening, made
even more beautiful than they were when she took them.
“Maytham Hall was the homestead of an ancient family of Moneypenneys. On
the corner of the Hall grounds stands an ancient Norman church--the
church of the Hundred of Rolvenden which is mentioned in the Domesday
Book. All the Moneypenneys are buried in this church, which, in its
simple way, is of remarkable beauty. Their tombstones surround the great
Hall pew, which is almost as big as a room, and has tables and chairs in
it. The Hall grounds stand between two very picturesque villages, both
appanages of the estate, one called Rolvenden Village and the other
Rolvenden Street. They are as picturesque as they can be, full of the
quaint old gaffers and gammers.
“As to the American side of Mrs. Burnett, she has lived over here in
touch with the most characteristically and the most broadly American
society in Washington and later in New York and its vicinity. As a young
girl she saw a good deal of New York life and it was during that time, I
imagine, that she got the impressions that produced the earlier part of
_The Shuttle_. Her saying that she was ‘English by birth and American by
the birth of her two sons’ I have always thought an amusing expression
of her case. In describing Bettina to me, once, she said that Bettina
was a woman’s version of the cleverness and sense of values that the
first Reuben Vandenpoel expressed. This seems to me to be the underlying
quality in Bettina. Her sense of the world of things backed by her
balance, her self-control and her typical American practicality.”
Mrs. Burnett loathes New York for its noise and dirt. Though she no
longer has Maytham Hall with its great terraced lawns and its rose
gardens she has a big country place near Manhasset, Long Island, New
York, called Plandome. It is within commuting distance of New York but
oh, how different!
A comfortable, rambling house is surrounded by gardens for which Mrs.
Burnett buys flowers as uncontrollably as a bibliophile buys books. The
house faces northwest and has “remarkable glimpses of sunsets.” Mrs.
Burnett naturally has many children as visitors. For them there is a
great doll house, the home of Lady Annabelle, who is larger than many of
the youngsters that call on her, and who has a wonderful wardrobe. The
big house is full of nests of children’s toys. It also contains much
age-darkened furniture brought over from Maytham Hall, principally oak
pieces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which Mrs. Burnett has
collected. Lady Annabelle’s residence, for example, was formerly a bread
and cheese cupboard which an antiquarian would tell you was probably
made by a skilled woodworker not later than the year 1500.
As if visitors were not enough, in such numbers as are hers, Mrs.
Burnett is always “neighborizing.” To children who live near by her she
read chapters of _The Secret Garden_ as they were finished. Now, she is
a most skillful reader. A very little girl of the lot sat listening for
hours on end. Impressions which flowered in _The Secret Garden_ came
from Maytham Hall where the rose gardens are surrounded by walls about
900 years old. Peasemarsh, Smallhive, Benenden are the names of towns
not far from Maytham Hall and all over the countryside you may
encounter, or could not many years back, children wearing red cloaks
given them by the Earl of Cranbrook. And what is the secret of _The
Secret Garden_? What does all this delightful picturesqueness enclose?
Why, an idea, namely, that if a healthful thought be planted in the mind
it pushes out unhealthful thoughts; and that if the body be unwell it
adjusts itself to the healthful thought and grows well. The secret
garden which, with its roses, surrounds the characters of the story,
plants in their minds all sorts of healthful thoughts. Mrs. Burnett is
not metaphysical, however. “Her roses, she declares, are always sincere
and endlessly instructive.”
She has suffered much from people who have interviewed her and have not
understood her, departing to write what they wanted her to say. She has
a philosophy but it is written in her books, definitely and decidedly.
It has no other existence and it cannot be separated from the tales
which are its embodiment. It is a peculiar characteristic of hers that
the moment an idea--a “concept” philosophically speaking--formulates
itself in her mind _it does so as some part of a story_. Her pleasant
persons and places have as definite ideas and theories and beliefs as
the most serious thesis but since they never presented themselves
abstractly to Mrs. Burnett they are not so conveyed by her. It is really
presumptuous, under the circumstances, to endeavor to express them
abstractly as we have just done in the case of _The Secret Garden_.
This will seem a hard saying to most of us, who are trained to try to
get at the kernel of everything. All modern education is designed to
teach men and women to think and express themselves abstractly with ease
and freedom and surety. Why? Because since the Greeks certain
abstractions and abstract thought and expression generally have been
prized as the best and safest and handiest medium of intellectual
exchanges. They are the intellectual coinage--a kind of verbal money
that obviates the clumsy old methods of barter. But while we are all
used to money and would not do without it we have to remember that the
majority of mankind still carries on a vast amount of intellectual
exchange by barter. You tell me an actual incident or a story you have
heard and I tell you what I have experienced or heard. We “swap”
experiences and knowledge and each benefits by what he gets from the
other without so much as drawing a single abstract conclusion or
generalization. The method has its disadvantages but lack of interest is
not one of them!
Understand this and you understand Mrs. Burnett. She is dealing with you
as you would deal with your neighbor. You would not go to your neighbor
and say: “It is possible to live too long.” You would go and tell him:
“John Smith’s mother isn’t treated decently. Yesterday,” etc., and you
would relate the actual occurrence. He would nod. And he would tell you
something in exchange. And neither of you would generalize about your
respective narrations, but each of you would take the lesson in them
well to heart. That is the way of the world and of neighbors. It is Mrs.
Burnett’s easily comprehended way too.
When she leaves Plandome Mrs. Burnett consents to spend a few days in
noisome New York--you can buy things there, after all, and editors and
publishers there do congregate--and then she flees to Bermuda. But not
until the last cosmos of autumn has perished and gone and every
flowerbed at Plandome has been “tucked in a blanket of fertilizer.” In
Bermuda she--gardens. She imports, in times more favorable than the
present, countless roses from England. Her Bermuda cottage is
unpretentious but charming.
To revert for a moment to _The Shuttle_, we may note something almost
prescient in what Mrs. Burnett said, in 1907, about England and America,
in a letter respecting this novel. She somewhat regretted the
characterization of the book as “a novel of international marriage.”
That, she argued, was hardly her theme. Of course not. She has no
abstract themes. She wrote:
“The subject (of international marriage) is an enormous one, and if I
had written all I have been observing for years and all I should have
liked to write I should have made a three-volume novel.
“When I say ‘the subject’ I do not mean merely the international
marriage question, but the whole international outlook upon a situation
between two great countries such as the history of the world--as far as
I know it--has not previously recorded. The wonderfulness of it lies in
the fact that two nations which were one, having parted with violence
and bitterness, are with a strange sureness being drawn nearer, nearer
to each other. That they are of the same blood--the mere fact that they
speak the same tongue--makes the thing inevitable in the end.
“I do not mean _The Shuttle_ to be merely a story of international
marriage, but to suggest a thousand other things. The international
marriage must, however, result in being a strong factor, and in the
hands of a writer of fiction it must play a prominent part--a leading
part, so to speak--because it is the love story, and without it we are
lost. For the matter of that, without it ‘the shouting and the tumult’
would die, ‘the captains and the kings depart.’
“Because I am English by birth and American by a sort of adoption, and
because I have vibrated between the two continents for years, I have
learned to be impersonal and unpartisan. I was neither American nor
English when I told the story. I was merely an intensely interested
person who had formed a habit of crossing the Atlantic twice a year.
“There have been disastrous international marriages and there have been
successful ones; there is no reason why there should not be
international marriages at once dignified and splendid--even
history-making. Still, I wish I had had room to add to _The Shuttle_
pictures of the thousand other things I find absorbing.”
It is not possible to do more than make suggestions as to what books of
Mrs. Burnett’s a reader should be sure to dip into. No two set of
suggestions would be identical, in all likelihood, but grownups can
acquire at least a respectable acquaintance with her work by reading
_That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_, _A Fair Barbarian_, _Little Lord Fauntleroy_,
_Sara Crewe_, _The Pretty Sister of José_, _In Connection With the De
Willoughby Claim_, _The Shuttle_, _The Dawn of a To-Morrow_, _The Secret
Garden_, _T. Tembaron_ and _Emily Fox-Seton_. No selective list for
children is worth making; give them any or all!
BOOKS BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
_That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_, 1877. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.
_Dolly, A Love Story_, 1877.
_Kathleen_, 1877. Hurst.
_Surly Tim and Other Stories_, 1877. Scribner.
_Haworth’s_, 1879. Scribner.
_Louisiana_, 1880. Scribner.
_A Fair Barbarian_, 1881. Scribner.
_Through One Administration_, 1883. Scribner.
_Little Lord Fauntleroy_, 1886. Scribner.
_Editha’s Burglar._ The Page Company, Boston.
_Sara Crewe_, 1888. Scribner.
_Little Saint Elizabeth_, 1889.
_Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress_, 1896. Scribner.
_The Pretty Sister of José_, 1896. Scribner.
_A Lady of Quality_, 1896. Scribner.
_His Grace of Ormonde_, 1897. Scribner.
_The Captain’s Youngest_, 1898.
_In Connection With the De Willoughby Claim_, 1899. Scribner.
_The Making of a Marchioness_, 1901. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.
_The Methods of Lady Walderhurst._ Stokes.
_In the Closed Room_, 1904. Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
_A Little Princess_, 1905. Scribner.
_Jarl’s Daughter_, 1906. Donohue. Given in the United States
Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Queen Silverbell_, 1906. The Century Company, New York. Given
in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Racketty-Packetty House_, 1906. Century. Given in the United
States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Earlier Stories_ (_Lindsay’s Luck_, etc.), 1907. Scribner.
Given in the United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Giovanni and the Other: Children Who Have Made
Stories_, 1907. Scribner. Given in the United States
Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Emily Fox-Seton_ (Combining _The Making of a Marchioness_
and _The Methods of Lady Walderhurst_). Stokes.
_Lindsay’s Luck._ Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue
of Books in Print (1912).
_Miss Crespigny._ Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue
of Books in Print (1912).
_Piccino and Other Child Stories._ Scribner. Given in the
United States Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Pretty Polly Pemberton._ Hurst. Given in the United States
Catalogue of Books in Print (1912).
_Quiet Life._ Donohue. Given in the United States Catalogue
of Books in Print (1912).
_Theo._ Hurst. Given in the United States Catalogue of Books
in Print (1912).
_Vagabondia._ Scribner. Given in the United States Catalogue
of Books in Print (1912).
_The Shuttle_, 1907. Stokes.
_The Cozy Lion_, 1907. Century.
_Good Wolf_, 1908. Moffat, Yard & Company, New York.
_Spring Cleaning_, 1908. Century.
_The Dawn of a To-Morrow_, 1909. Scribner.
_The Secret Garden_, 1909. Stokes.
_My Robin_, 1912. Stokes.
_T. Tembaron_, 1913. A. L. Burt Company, New York.
_Barty Crusoe and His Man Saturday_, 1914. Moffat, Yard.
_One I Knew The Best of All_, 1915. Scribner.
_The Lost Prince_, 1915. Burt.
_The Land of the Blue Flower_, 1916. Moffat, Yard.
_The Little Hunchback Zia_, 1916. Stokes.
_The Way to the House of Santa Claus_, 1916. Harper & Brothers, New York.
_White People_, 1917. Harper.
_The Head of the House of Coombe_, 1922. Stokes.
_Robin_, 1922. Stokes.
CHAPTER XXXIII
MARY E. WALLER
There are two actresses who are never interviewed--Alla Nazimova and
Maude Adams. At least that was true some years ago; perhaps it is no
longer true of Nazimova. But did you ever see an interview with Maude
Adams? And yet, the interview is one of the most useful means of
securing that publicity an actress must have. Exceptions establish the
rule.
An author is not in precisely the same case with an actor, but personal
publicity, of an entirely honorable and legitimate sort, has served most
authors well. The truth is, the public has a certain right in the
personality of any one undertaking to serve or entertain the public; in
the words of statutes, a writer, like an actor, is, to a degree,
“charged with a public interest” and the day may come when writers, like
traction officials, will be subject to public inquiry. Perhaps Public
Service Commissions will regulate them....
Until that day we may never know anything about the personality of Mary
E. Waller, about the woman behind _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_. For, in
the words of her publishers, “Miss Waller is singularly averse to
publicity. She has never permitted her portrait to be published.” As
for biographical data, meager is the word. Let us see just how scanty it
is.
We know that she was born in Boston and that she traveled and studied
abroad, taught in a private school in New York and later established and
maintained for five years a school for girls in Chicago. We know that
her family, for four generations, has been identified with the history
of Vermont, and that for many years, until she moved to her present home
on the island of Nantucket, Miss Waller spent the greater part of her
time with her mother in the Vermont hills.
That is all any one has so far been authorized to say of the period
before Miss Waller’s success as an author.
In 1902 there was published in Boston a book called _Little Citizens_, a
story of New York street gamins. The following year saw the publication
of a story of family life in the Green Mountains. Of this second book by
Miss Waller, Margaret E. Sangster said, five years later (June 19, 1907)
in the _Christian Herald_:
“I read the other day the most suggestive book that has appeared since
Miss Alcott published _Little Women_. The title of the book, _A Daughter
of the Rich_, by M. E. Waller, fails to convey an idea of the striking
qualities of a most fascinating story. The scenes and background of the
story are in a mountain fastness of New Hampshire, in a home where
parents of culture and piety, encumbered by poverty, are successfully
bringing up a household of delightful boys and girls. A city physician
persuades the father of an only daughter to send his delicate darling
out of the enervating atmosphere of a millionaire’s home that is
motherless, into the sweetness and mother-brooding environment of the
home on the mountainside. The little girl is introduced to strangers,
who at once become her friends, and in the novel situation, without a
single luxury, but in much homely comfort, she gains the health and
strength that wealth could not give her.
“I have it in my heart to wish that this book might have the vogue that
_Little Women_ had. The simple, beautiful story is worth a thousand
sermons and treatises on the best way of rearing and training a family.”
The _Christian Herald_ enters many homes and Margaret E. Sangster was
read by many thousands. There is no way of measuring the direct and
indirect influence of such praise as she uttered. It is very great. But
this was in 1907. The year following the appearance of _A daughter of
the Rich_, Miss Waller’s third book, _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_, came
along.
Books have curious fates. Gene Stratton-Porter’s _Freckles_ took three
years to find its audience. A fine novel by St. John G. Ervine,
_Changing Winds_, was published, had the expected sale and died;
remained dead for about a year and then suddenly began selling again! In
the case of a textbook such a phenomenon can always be traced to some
simple explanation. For example, W. J. Henderson wrote a condensed
treatise called _Elements of Navigation_ which sold desultorily for
years, the sales slowly declining. Came the Great War. The United States
undertook to create a merchant marine. Thousands of men had to be
trained to navigate merchant ships. Mr. Henderson’s book sold like hot
cakes, was reprinted; was revised and pretty well rewritten; sold faster
than fiction!
In the case of a novel a “resurrection” is seldom quite explicable. It
is matter for conjecture what “brought back” _Changing Winds_. Now _The
Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_ was not a book that rose from the dead, but a
book that almost never lived; that is to say, it was six months before
it achieved popular success. Once “alive” it has ever since remained so.
Seven years after publication the _twenty-eighth_ edition was published.
It is unnecessary to say more.
The catalogue of the American Library Association, a conscientious
publication if ever there was one, describes this book concisely: “Scene
in the Green Mountains. An ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood
finds interests in the outside world through a chance acquaintance and
becomes a wood-carver of renown.” There you are; see what
conscientiousness can accomplish! All the charm, all the wistfulness,
all the magic of hope and aspiration, and the triumph of achievement,
which make this novel the beloved tale it is--stripped away! “An
ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood....” The librarians are not
to blame, either. It is their business to outline concisely.... Whereas
fiction is no matter of outlines but, like life, a thing of coloring,
perspective, the glint of an eye, the shadowed corner of a smiling
mouth. Fiction cannot be done in black and white; those who, under the
label of “realism,” essay the task, invariably fail.
But we were to enumerate what is known of Miss Waller. Well, in 1913,
after she had been besieged for nine years for her picture, a visitor to
Nantucket, whither the author had gone to live, did succeed in seeing
her and talking with her. He did not get a photograph of her (in the
fall of 1912 a photographer went expressly to Nantucket and lay long in
wait for a snapshot, coming away without a single exposure). But at
least the visitor did see and converse with Miss Waller. How came this
miracle about?
There had never been a hospital on Nantucket, in spite of the shipwrecks
and succorings of two centuries. Certain residents decided it was time
one was built. A board of trustees was formed and a house purchased.
Money for maintenance was needed. So they built an enormous thermometer
on the main street, under overarching elms. When the visitor came to
trail Miss Waller he found the temperature about $6,800, which included
royalties from one of Miss Waller’s books.
The hospital cottage was not new--but very solid. The visitor reflected
that amid all this white paneling of the eighteenth century and mission
oak of the nineteenth, other visitors would doubtless soon be drinking
tea and paying the cost of absorbent cotton and iron bedsteads.
Meanwhile he was sufficiently grateful to be allowed to visit another
house and find himself seated opposite Miss Waller. She occupied a
chintz-covered chair halfway between a flashing grate fire and a row of
windows. Mahogany and the implements of authorship were all about. The
mahogany was exceptionally fine. Through the windows, marine views and
glimpses of moorland--or what they’d call moorland in an English novel.
Talk. About the hospital. Nothing about Miss Waller. Nothing about her
work. Nothing about her plans. Yes, she lived on Nantucket the year
round. Illness in the family kept her closely at home.... Beyond
question, there _is_ a Mary E. Waller. She is not mythical. Though she
may some day be a cause of controversy. Let it therefore be set down
that Shakespeare, not Bacon, wrote _Hamlet_; Mary E. Waller, not Clara
Louise Burnham, wrote _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_.
And that is all. No more exists. We may say a word or two about Miss
Waller’s books since her big success. It will have to be inadequate and
sketchy. _A Daughter of the Rich_ is technically described as “for girls
of 10 and upward.” _Sanna of the Island Town_ is a series of pen
pictures of incidents in the ordinary life of an island
village--Nantucket is the original. _Through the Gates of the
Netherlands_ is the “pleasant narrative of the six months’ experience in
Holland of an American architect and his wife who saw the country, its
art and its people intimately and intelligently.” We quote again from
the American Library Association’s catalogue. In epitomizing this sort
of volume (travel-educational-gift book) see how excellent the outline
method is!
Edwin Markham liked _Our Benny_, saying: “It is fluent and simple and
full of a homely pathos and humor, and it takes a place next below
_Snowbound_ and _Myles Standish_.” Caution! _Our Benny_ is a narrative
poem; there are those who can’t endure verse. They may pass on to
_Flamsted Quarries_. This opens in New York City. A fatherly priest sees
a child on the vaudeville stage and takes her to an asylum for homeless
children. Later we find them in a small Maine village, a quarry town.
There is an embezzler in the story and the theme is the power of a
simple environment, good, hard work and honest love to make men and
women whole.
_My Ragpicker_ is about Nanette, an appealing little child of poverty in
Paris. _A Cry in the Wilderness_ has American and Canadian characters
and its scenes are laid mainly in New York and in a seigneury on the St.
Lawrence--Miss Waller’s first invasion of Canada. _Aunt Dorcas’s Change
of Heart_ was published by Miss Waller herself, in 1913; doubtless it
was an enterprise in behalf of that hospital which she thrust between
herself and her visitor. _From an Island Outpost_ is a meditative
book--thoughts that came to Miss Waller as she wrote from her own island
outpost on Nantucket. _Out of the Silences_ is a return to Canada and a
novel of the Great War. The setting is just over the border from Dakota.
The central character, Bob Collamore, an American boy, is left as a
youngster of nine in charge of William Plunket, a saddle-maker, quaintly
philosophical, broad-minded, sympathetic, with a considerable knowledge
of the human heart. The boy Bob grows up with Plunket’s stepson,
McGillie, and the children of the Cree Indian tribe. He gets a good deal
of the red man’s knowledge. As he matures the white man’s ambition to
get out in the world and match his wits against his fellows seizes him.
He goes forth confidently, to find that his youthful years have fixed
indelibly his ideals, his philosophy and his outlook on life. Love,
romance and success come to him--and death. For the war calls to his
manhood and takes him to France.
An intermediate book may be briefly mentioned. _A Year Out of Life_ is
only partly a work of fiction; in part it records Miss Waller’s
impressions of German life--long before the war, of course, for it was
published in 1909.
BOOKS BY MARY E. WALLER
_Little Citizens_, 1902.
_A Daughter of the Rich_, 1903.
_The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_, 1904.
_Sanna of the Island Town_, 1905.
_Through the Gates of the Netherlands_, 1906.
_A Year Out of Life_, 1909.
_Our Benny_, 1909.
_Flamsted Quarries_, 1910.
_My Ragpicker_, 1911.
_A Cry in the Wilderness_, 1912.
_Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart_, 1913.
_From an Island Outpost_, 1914.
_Out of the Silences_, 1918.
_Little Citizens was published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company,
Boston; Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart was published by Miss Waller; all
Miss Waller’s other books are published by Little, Brown & Company,
Boston._
CHAPTER XXXIV
ZONA GALE
My dear Mr. Overton:--
“The first story which I ever wrote was printed. I printed it myself, in
pencil, for it was before I could write. And the story appeared in a
book. I made the book, of manilla paper, bound with ribbon. The story
began: ‘The sun was just sinking behind the western hills when three
travelers appeared. One was tall and one was short and one was
middle-sized.’ And when the heroine arrived and one of these travelers
asked her to marry him, I remember pressing my mother to tell me how to
spell ‘N--yes’, which constituted the maid’s reply.
“At about the same time I wrote a volume of verse in a blank book. One
selection was this:
When I am a lady, a lady
I will be a milliner if I can.
I’ll have pretty flowers and bonnets and hats
And in my store there shall be no mice and rats,
When I am a lady.
“When I was thirteen I wrote a novel, which almost simultaneously came
back to me from a publisher. It was called _A White Dove_, but I do not
know what it was about. A few years later I wrote another novel,
_Vedita_, of tremendous length--this is easy to remember because of the
cost of the type-writing. It was submitted to a Chicago newspaper which
was offering a prize for a serial. From that manuscript, which was
readily returned, I saved alive the character of Nichola, an old Italian
servant, whom I later used in _The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre_.
“A short story I first submitted at sixteen--it was called _Both_, was
three thousand words long, and I was paid Three Dollars for it by the
Milwaukee _Evening Wisconsin_. I had just entered the University at
Madison, forty miles from my home, but I traveled the forty miles and
came home to show the check, and went back in two hours. Excepting in
the Milwaukee and Madison and Wisconsin University newspapers, and one
or two evanescent magazines, I never had a story accepted until 1903,
though for ten years previous to that acceptance, by _Success Magazine_,
I had constantly submitted stories. In 1911 the _Delineator_ gave me a
first prize of $2,000 for a short story, _The Ancient Dawn_. In 1904 I
began writing stories about Pelleas and Ettarre, two old lovers, and
forty of these were published in a dozen magazines, and half were
collected in a volume published by the Macmillan Company. These were
followed by _Friendship Village_ stories. The first editor to whom these
stories were submitted declined them with the word that his acquaintance
with small towns was wide but that he had never seen any such people as
these. About sixty of these stories have been published serially, the
majority of them now collected in four volumes, but I am still not sure
that the first editor was not right.
“After graduating from Wisconsin University, about six years were spent
in newspaper work, in Milwaukee and New York, and in magazine work in
New York--and in that time a master’s degree was given by Wisconsin
University for work done in absentia, but neither degree, in itself, has
ever meant anything to me, though of course that part of the work which
I liked and wanted was invaluable.... I began newspaper work on the
Milwaukee _Evening Wisconsin_ which accepted that first story of mine,
and I secured a position by attrition. I presented myself every morning
at the desk of the city editor to ask for an assignment, but the chief
thing that I can recall about those mornings was the intense wish that
the elevator which was taking me up to the city room would turn out to
be the elevator taking me down again. At the end of two weeks the city
editor let me write about a flower show. I have never put such emotion
into anything else that I have written. I was another month in getting
on the staff. In New York the process was different. After being refused
by nearly every paper there, I went back to the New York _World_, and by
the office boy every morning I sent in a list of suggestions, made from
that day’s news, on which I thought I could write; and the city editor
checked those that I might try. After a good many weeks I went on the
staff of the _World_.
“And all of this was so largely sheer adventure and pioneering that none
of it now seems to me to have been either will or purpose, but pure
delight. But at the time I was under the illusion that I was very
determined.
“For the last few years I have lived here with my father and mother, in
the little town where I was born and where they have spent most of their
lives. My mother’s family, named Beers, is English; and my father’s
family, English, of Scotch-Irish descent, settled in Watertown,
Massachusetts, in 1640, nine generations ago. My
great-great-grandfather, Captain Henry Gale, led his company against the
courthouse at Worcester, where the supreme court was sitting, and
demanded the repeal of the imprisonment-for-debt law, just after the
Revolution; and for this he was condemned to death, and then reprieved,
and removed to Vermont.... Here in Portage, in my father’s house, a
little river runs close by the door, and there are lilacs on the bank
and hills to the south, and there are many wild birds, and squirrels
live in trees close to the windows. It is true that people love to try
to make their own surroundings sound romantic and unique, and hereby, to
my own taste, I do so. Here I have written ten books of fiction, two
published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company and all the rest by the Macmillan
Company; and a little play, _Neighbors_, published by Huebsch.
“I have had some years of that passion for reform. I was president of a
civic association here, then chairman of the State Federation’s civic
work, then of the national civic work of the General Federation of
Woman’s Clubs, and on the board of the American Civic association. I
have resigned from everything in favor of the new democracy.... My only
executive connection with any organization is with the board of the
American Union Against Militarism. I have been a believer in equal
suffrage since before it was respectable to believe. My paramount taste
is for poetry. At the moment my chief admiration is for Russia. My
deepest interest is to find those who feel something of the fundamental
truth underlying all religion. And my recreation is talk with those who
believe with passion in the new industrial and social and spiritual
To-morrow.
“ZONA GALE.”
“Portage, Wisconsin.
“February, 1919.”
Characteristically, Miss Gale says nothing, in her reply to a request
for information about herself, concerning her novel, _Birth_, the book
which has not only made absolutely necessary her inclusion in any record
of American women novelists, but has placed her in the front rank. For
however we may array the women writers of the United States, no one who
has read _Birth_ is likely to deny that it possesses some of the
attributes of greatness and literary permanence or that it has “its
share of the qualities which lift writing out of time.”
Pressed to say what is in her heart, Miss Gale will tell you that, “as a
matter of fact, _Birth_ is really my first novel. Since the most
fantastic book with which I began, I have never done anything of novel
length. All my other books have been short stories threaded together,
save three stories of 30,000 words published separately, in no sense
novels. After writing ten books, this book is really my first try at a
novel.... It is embarrassing to be caught looking in a mirror--or
saying one’s own name aloud over the telephone. But to try to do both,
in print, seems to underscore all one’s lacks.” A very modest person,
you see. The author of this book is aware of a certain injustice arising
from his inclusion of a number of letters. The risk is clear. He begs to
say, here and now, that he assumes that risk; and he had rather take the
chance that readers may suspect some of his subjects of
self-consciousness than encounter the certainty that they will think
these authors hardly human--names on title-pages merely.
When _Birth_ appeared some people were bewildered. One reviewer asked
pathetically what had become of the Zona Gale of _Friendship Village_.
But those whose saturation-point for sentimentality is decidedly, and,
as we believe, healthfully low, gave a great shout of satisfaction to
which added sounds of admiration formed a contrapuntal bass. For _Birth_
is a thing Thomas Hardy would not be ashamed to put his name to. Nor, we
suspect, George Meredith, either. We like to think that were George
Eliot living to-day, and mistress of the art of fiction (which, bless
her, she never was) she would have written such a book.
The fact that at this writing _Birth_ has not been “discovered” by the
large public which such a book ultimately commands is of little
importance. That will come. The failure of many book reviewers and book
reporters to detect and proclaim its distinction is an indictment of
book “reviewing” more specific and damning than any generality in which
we might indulge. The real elements of the book’s excellence may best be
recorded in the words of a daughter of Henry Mills Alden, Constance
Murray Greene, who said (_Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New
York, November 24, 1918):
“The charm consists in delightful and continuous humor, often sharp and
never overkind, which isn’t at all what people mean by ‘charming’ in the
new and popular sense. But here is the real substance of things more to
be desired than the fine gold of sunshine. Miss Gale is incurably funny
and we love her for it--witness the delivery horse, ‘hanging out its
tongue, not at all because of fast driving but from preference,’ and
Mis’ Henry Bates, whose stomach wouldn’t allow her to drink coffee. ‘She
always spoke’ (to quote directly) ‘as if her stomach stood back of her
chair.’ ... _Birth_ achieves the rare result of being both mystical and
colloquial.” How?
You may well ask. The setting is a tiny Wisconsin town, except for some
scenes in Chicago. The “hero” is a traveling salesman handling pickle
and fruit products; insignificant; with long, thin, freckled wrists and
a coat that gave the effect of blowing when there was no wind; with no
graces. You sicken over the little man’s humiliations in such social
life as Burage, Wisconsin, boasted. He marries a girl of the village, a
girl of some social gifts and quite ordinary and silly feminine
ambitions--and becomes a paperhanger, though knowing nothing of the
business. Barbara Pitt, Marshall Pitt’s wife, is dropped abruptly from
the story--daring technique but justified in the result--and the novel
develops as a narrative of the life-relation of father and son. This
little man, this Marshall Pitt, being human, had his immortal moments.
Zona Gale can put them on paper:
“It was in this manner that their child was born. There he was,
sentient. A rift in experience, the crossing of the street by Barbara at
one moment rather than the next; the opening of a gate by Pitt in the
afternoon instead of the morning. Then joy, ill, the depths, madness,
flowing about the two. These passed but there remained the
child--living, exquisite, sturdy, sensitive, a new microcosm,
experiencing within himself the act of God.”
Prose? Poetry! Deep and vibrant music. It has the austere beauty and the
imaginative content of Johann Sebastian Bach--say the _Chaconne_ in D
minor.
“Love is a creative force,” says Mrs. Greene in the article we have
already quoted, “and though Marshall Pitt had been unable through the
inarticulate material in which his soul was embodied to fashion himself
in any accordance with his blurred hopes, he could by virtue of his
great love for Barbara and their child offer to Jeffrey [his son] the
inspiration lacking which his life, even to his last heroic act, had
seemed a futile thing. In dying because he lacked cleverness to see the
means of escape, to save the only living thing that had loved him in
return, he made his last awkward gesture that of rescuing a dog!” We may
quote the passage, condensed slightly:
“They carried Pitt, and in his arms was a white Marseilles spread in
which he had swathed the little dog. The spread was burning, Pitt’s hair
was burning and the thin cotton of his shirt was all burned away about
his throat and breast and blazed upon his shoulders.
“They laid him on the ground and the people beat out the flames. As the
fire was quenched there was a terrific commotion in the white
Marseilles spread. Out leaped Jep, not a silken hair on him singed, and
he snapped indignantly at having been caused intolerable
inconvenience....
“‘Well, but of all the fool things. For a _dog_.’...”
BOOKS BY ZONA GALE
_Romance Island_, 1906.
_The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre_, 1907.
_Friendship Village_, 1908.
_Friendship Village Love Stories_, 1909.
_Mothers to Men_, 1911.
_Christmas_, 1912.
_When I Was a Little Girl_, 1913.
_Neighborhood Stories_, 1914.
_Heart’s Kindred_, 1915.
_A Daughter of Tomorrow_, 1917.
_Birth_, 1918.
_Peace in Friendship Village_, 1919.
_Miss Lulu Bett_, 1920.
_Neighbors_ (play), 1920.
_Miss Lulu Bett_ (play), 1921.
_First two books published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis;
Neighbors first published by B. W. Huebsch, New York; Miss Lulu Bett,
novel and play, published by D. Appleton & Company, New York. Other
books published by the Macmillan Company, New York._
CHAPTER XXXV
MARY HEATON VORSE
There have been, and are, those who doubt whether anything good can come
out of Greenwich Village. It would possibly be unfair to cite Mary
Heaton Vorse as an answer to these doubters. In spite of the fact that
she once lived in Greenwich Village it is greatly to be doubted if the
woman who could write _The Prestons_ was ever of it. John Reed gives a
brief verbal picture of Mary Heaton Vorse entirely surrounded by
Greenwich Villagers and cigarette smoke, seated on the floor, doing
several things at once and, despite a deafening chatter from the girls
with the bobbed hair and the boys with the flowing ties, dictating a
short story with the utmost calm, speed and concentration. She dwelt
among highly trodden ways--and took her own track.
As a short story writer Mary Heaton Vorse is of the first importance in
any survey of contemporary American writers. As a novelist she shares
with Zona Gale the distinction of being put on the map by a single
superb book. As a personality she is alive and present to any one who
ever has met and talked with her. Corinne Lowe had a phrase likening her
to a Botticelli painting. Benjamin De Casseres describes her by her
voice, insists that it is the one thing making the striking first
impression and lingering in the memory like lovely music. I wish now
that I had set down the precise and extraordinary words in which Mr. De
Casseres extemporized his picture of the woman by the mere description
of her speech--its timbre and “tone color,” as musicians would say. No
paraphrase will serve; the reader will have to take on faith an
assertion--here made quite simply--that this woman of the memorable
voice, the isolation in the midst of the crowd and the face of sympathy
and comprehension is a woman of no common endowment.
But that, doubtless, would be evident to any one reading _The Prestons_.
Its author is, at the present writing, in Rome; in February, 1919, she
said in a letter to Boni & Liveright, publishers of _The Prestons_:
“I wish you wanted a book about Italy and industrial conditions here for
next fall instead of a sequel to _The Prestons_. You do not know how
happy it makes me to learn that over 10,000 copies of _The Prestons_
have been sold since you published it in December. I am frank to confess
that this is a larger sale than any other two of my books enjoyed in so
short a time.
“I love _The Prestons_--all of them, even Piker, the dog, and it warms
my heart in this cold Italian villa to learn that not only the American
public but the critics have spoken of my book as a really fine and true
interpretation of American family life. But I cannot promise the sequel
to _The Prestons_.”
A month later she was yielding. She would have a sequel ready for fall,
on conditions....
The truth about _The Prestons_ is this: Hardly a man or woman will be
able to read it and not close the book saying to himself, “Well, the
American family is a pretty good sort of an institution, after all!” No
finer tribute, we venture to believe, could be paid to a book--to _any_
book.
The book was welded together from a series of short stories. Note the
word, “welded.” Most novels made up of short stories are a poor
patchwork. Here there was an actual fusion. The result is a novel, and
nothing else.
So important is this book, so pleasant, so inspiringly hopeful in the
feeling with which it leaves you, that we may justifiably disregard Mary
Heaton Vorse’s other writings for the sake of concentrating on this one
narrative. I can only repeat, with a slight rearranging for the sake of
emphasis, what I wrote at the time of the book’s publication, which was:
Perhaps the nature of the book’s impression on the reader is due to its
very inclusiveness. It really doesn’t arrive anywhere except at the end
of 427 pages and of one or two years of normal American existences. No
great tragedy stains its pages; there is no love story. Nothing comes to
a decisive dénouement; we recall not a single “climax” except those
little social climaxes which occur in the best regulated families. The
only things that happen are Henry’s irritation with his twelve-year-old
son, Jimmie; Jimmie’s unconquerable attempts to be allowed to do
something that the grown-ups are sure to call getting into mischief;
seventeen-year-old Osborn’s adventures of the heart; the changing
absorptions of Edith, a high-school girl; the trials of Maria, Mrs.
Preston’s unmarried sister who lives with the family, and the
philosophical outgivings of Seraphy, for eighteen years the family
servant and shield and friend.
Not much of anything happens, you may think; well, perhaps not; but you
will not be able to leave the Prestons until the last page has been
turned. You will laugh unnumbered times as you turn the pages; you will
be touched more than once as you read. Quite unreasonably, no doubt, you
will fall in love with them as a family, from Aunt Maria to Piker, the
dog. They are so much--you.
It is quite impossible to do much more with a book like _The Prestons_
than to convey the nature of the story and the character of its telling.
It is related by Mrs. Preston and it starts with her exploration of the
house on a summer morning. She comes first upon the dog Piker. Piker is
lying on a silk wrap of Edith’s. “He is a long dog, modeled after the
graceful proportions of a barrel. At every corner nobby legs are put on,
dachshund fashion. His sparse yellow bristles are always coming out all
over everything.... His tail is long and thick and makes a noise like a
policeman’s club when he raps it on the floor.”
On the piazza were lemonade glasses, “some of them left on the floor
where they could quite easily be stepped upon.” Edith’s friends. The
mother takes them to the kitchen, bright and spotless, Seraphy’s domain.
In the library lying on the floor is Jimmie’s notebook containing his
observations, as a naturalist, on guinea pigs. They read:
“2 P. M.--Guinea pigs sleeping.
“2:30 P. M.--Still sleeping.
“3 P. M.--Running around cage (I poked them with a stick).
“3:15 P. M.--Eating.
“Note: Guinea pigs eat with persistence.
“Note: The habits of guinea pigs is monotonous.”
Whereupon “I saw,” records Jimmie’s mother, “by this notebook that
Jimmie had again been misled by one of those glittering books by
naturalists where all the high points of a year’s study are compressed
into one short article. He still touchingly believes the things he reads
in books.”
She passes on. “Now my eyes lit upon an ashtray. In it were the ashes of
a cigar and of three cigarettes. I had gone to bed leaving Osborn and
his father in the library. Osborn is my oldest son, who is going to
college next year. I stood and smiled over this telltale tray. Osborn
and his father were smoking together and Henry was apparently keeping
from my idealistic nature the sad fact that my son smoked.”
She wonders if her sister, Maria, knows that Osborn smokes. Maria
believes that “almost everything can be secured by two mysterious
processes. One is known as Nipping Things in the Bud and the other is
Taking Steps.” And having straightened up the house, the mother sits out
in the fresh morning air musing until various sounds denote the
beginning of the family’s day and the necessity of getting ready for
breakfast.
Of all the surprising affairs in which the youthful Jimmie had a hand we
think the affair of the fat little Baker boy the most amusing. “We was
in the swing,” Jimmie explained to his mother, “and I butted Ed in the
belly.”
“‘He hit him in the abdomen,’ corrected the Baker girl.
“‘I have always been very particular,’ Mrs. Baker announced, ‘Mrs.
Preston, about the language my children use, as you can see for
yourself. You heard how Jimmie referred to Edward’s abdomen. He has used
that word at least six times in the last five minutes; and that, Mrs.
Preston, I cannot stand. I will have my home kept refined and I say no
home can be refined where vulgar, common words are in daily use.’
“To this I found nothing to say but ‘Come home with me, Jimmie.’
“On the way, ‘Have I got to say “abdomen”?’ he asked. ‘Say, have I?’
“I took refuge in the cowardly woman’s evasion. ‘I don’t think that
there’s the slightest need of your using either of those terms ever,’ I
replied.
“Maria, who had heard the last words, said: ‘Yes, I should think one
could find pleasanter topics of conversation, Jimmie.’”
The trouble was that within a day or two four little boys, friends of
Jimmie’s, with their arms around each other’s necks, insisted on
marching up and down the street chanting in a derisive sing-song:
“Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,
Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,
Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen.”
They were audible even while Mrs. Baker, very flushed and angry, called
on Mrs. Preston, desiring her to Take Steps. The passage along the
street of the fat little Baker boy occasioned loud cries of “Here comes
Ab! Hello, Ab! There’s Ab Domen!” We will only say further of this
diverting and entirely truthful episode that it had an amazing sequel.
Jimmie, who cannot be convicted of having conspired to fasten upon young
Edward Baker a nickname at once refined and unusual, was more or less
responsible, we fear, for his aunt’s finding herself unable to open the
bathroom door after he had repaired and oiled all the locks in the
house. He was blameless of the thefts of what the family called “nether
undergarments” from the neighbors’ clotheslines. Here Maria played
detective, though the discovery of the culprit was mostly luck.
We may laugh over these things in a book and learn the better to laugh
over them in life, even when we are cast for the uncomfortable rôles in
their enaction. But we should not like to be the reader who may laugh at
such chapters as those which tell of young Osborn’s first attachment to
the ideal, as embodied in a certain Miss Fairweather, some years older
than he.
This is a book which takes its place with the best of Tarkington and
with the earlier Howells. For breadth of understanding, accuracy of
observation, fidelity of reporting it is not easy to think of an
American novel that transcends it.
Mrs. Vorse was born, in New York, Mary Marvin Heaton, daughter of Hiram
Heaton and Ellen Cordelia (Blackman) Heaton. She was educated abroad.
She was married on October 18, 1898, to Albert White Vorse, and,
secondly, in 1912, to Joseph O’Brien. She is correctly Mrs. Joseph
O’Brien.
BOOKS BY MARY HEATON VORSE
_The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman’s Wife_, 1908.
_The Very Little Person_, 1911.
_The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman_, 1911.
_The Heart’s Country_, 1913.
_The Ninth Man._
_The Prestons_, 1918.
_The Prestons is published by Boni & Liveright, New York._
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
born in 1859=>
born in 1857
{pg 49}
showed Miss Johnson=>
showed Miss Johnston
{pg 145}
demanding an implicity of obedience=>
demanding an implicitly of obedience
{pg 149}
Books ry Clara Louise Burnham=>
Books by Clara Louise Burnham
{pg 282}
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Women Who Make Our Novels" ***
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