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 ladyI will be a milliner if I can.I’ll have pretty flowers and bonnets and hatsAnd in my store there shall be no mice and rats,When I am a lady.
When I am a lady, a ladyI will be a milliner if I can.I’ll have pretty flowers and bonnets and hatsAnd in my store there shall be no mice and rats,When I am a lady.
When I am a lady, a ladyI will be a milliner if I can.I’ll have pretty flowers and bonnets and hatsAnd 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 calledA 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 inThe Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre.
“A short story I first submitted at sixteen—it was calledBoth, was three thousand words long, and I was paid Three Dollars for it by the MilwaukeeEvening 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, bySuccess Magazine, I had constantly submitted stories. In 1911 theDelineatorgave 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 byFriendship Villagestories. 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 MilwaukeeEvening Wisconsinwhich 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 YorkWorld, 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 theWorld.
“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 beena 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 readBirthis 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,Birthis 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 amirror—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.
WhenBirthappeared some people were bewildered. One reviewer asked pathetically what had become of the Zona Gale ofFriendship 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. ForBirthis 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 writingBirthhas 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, whosaid (Books and the Book WorldofThe 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.’ ...Birthachieves 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 theChaconnein 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 aterrific 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 adog.’...”
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.
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 writeThe Prestonswas 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 describesher 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 readingThe Prestons. Its author is, at the present writing, in Rome; in February, 1919, she said in a letter to Boni & Liveright, publishers ofThe Prestons:
“I wish you wanted a book about Italy and industrial conditions here for next fall instead of a sequel toThe Prestons. You do not know how happy it makes me to learn that over 10,000 copies ofThe Prestonshave 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 loveThe 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 toThe Prestons.”
A month later she was yielding. She would have a sequel ready for fall, on conditions....
The truth aboutThe Prestonsis this: Hardly aman 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—toanybook.
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 wholives 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 likeThe Prestonsthan 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.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen.”
“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 “Herecomes 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.
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.
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}