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.
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’sRecessional, 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. Certainlysheis.
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 AppletonDaily 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, theTribune, to be exact. In Milwaukee she worked on theJournal.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 ofDawn O’Harais 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 ofDawn O’Harais 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 ofDawn 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 isnota 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,notbring 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 creditfor 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 calledThe 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!
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.
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 writeThe Squirrel-Cagedoes 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 amountof 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 herHome 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 readHome Fires in Franceyou 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.”
WithThe Squirrel-Cage, published in 1912, Mrs. Fisher became a novelist. It was followed by two books on child training,A Montessori Mother(1913) andMothers and Children(1914), and then the teacher resumed the rôle of storyteller withThe Bent Twig. BeforeThe Squirrel-CageMrs. 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 onUnderstood 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 introducedher 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 villageof 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 otherEuropean countries. The direct result of that winter was Mrs. Fisher’sA 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.
Corneille and Racine in England, 1904.English Rhetoric and Composition (with ProfessorG. 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.
ON March 17, 1918, the author of this book had the pleasure, as editor ofBooks and the Book WorldofThe 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 herBow 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 forfourteen years, written for Bonner’sLedger, 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 wasThe 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 ofThe Paper Capwas 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 wasas 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 writingThe 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 toEnglish 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 theArabian 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 theChristian 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 inthose days enough money to bank, she would often put bills behind pictures, and they were never disturbed.
In 1884Jan Vedder’s Wifewas 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.”
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.
THE author ofMrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patchwas 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 asMr. 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 asWraiths and Realitiesand songs inspired by their mere happy proximity, making a book such asPoems 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 ofMrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patchwas made). But she writes as agreeably as ever. Mostlyshorter pieces. She is not really a novelist but a short story writer. EvenMrs. Wiggswas 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 LouisvilleCourier-Journalhad publishedThe Reveries of a Spinster, an anonymous companion-piece toThe 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 ofMrs. 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 asMrs. WiggsandMr. Opp,Emmy Lou,The Lady of the Decorationand theLittle Colonelbooks. It means also such work as Mrs. Roach’s studies of married life—which rendered a year ofHarper’svery 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 ofMrs. 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. Wiggswould 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. JamesCourt, a place of trees, bushes, wide sweeps of lawn and a playing fountain. The author ofMrs. Wiggsdevotes 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.
“ThoughMrs. Wiggshas made its author famous,” says Margaret Anderson, “Mr. Oppis 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 asMrs. Wiggswas read, but for imagination, for spirituality, and even for humor, it remains the better book.
“It is, indeed, her most distinct success, forLovey MaryfollowedMrs. Wiggsin general character, whileSandy, though wholesome, engaging, and charged to the full with Mrs. Rice’s humor, is not of an equal inspiration. Her story ofBilly-Goat Hillshows someexcellent and delicate work, the figures of ‘Miss Lady’ and the Doctor recalling those of Annie and her husband inDavid Copperfield, while Connie and Noah Wicker are done with delightful vim and gayety.
“InThe Honorable PercivalMrs. 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.’”
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.
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 Liveis full of clever conversation; so isThe 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 inThe Happiest Time of Their Liveswe 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 ChristineFenimers 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 ofLadies Must Liveand 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. Sheagonized 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 thatThe Happiest Time of Their Livesholds 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 orsmall, 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.
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.
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,notof 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 revolvearound the title, rather than an outgrowth of any plot,” says a writer in the BostonGlobe, 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 ofMolly Make-Believeand 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-Believeas a title teems with ideas; so doesThe Sick-a-Bed Lady; so doesThe 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 BostonGlobewriter 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 herfriends said, after readingThe 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 ofMolly Make-Believeand look at the page in the front which recordsover twentyeditions in five years!
We follow the lead of the BostonGlobearticle:
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 writingThe Sick-a-Bed Ladyshe devoted twelve hours each dayfor 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 inCollier’s Weeklyshort story contests withThe Very Tired GirlandThe 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 inHarper’s Magazineattracted 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, toLippincott’s Magazineand theSmart Setquite 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 theLiterary Worldof Boston; a niece of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of theOutlookand 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 theCongregationalist; afterward he became editor of theLiteraryWorld. 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’sSketch 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 whomMolly Make-Believeis 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.
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.