Americans All Part 30

Alarmed about this double interest I went on with the weaving back and forth of the elements of the plot which now involved the attempt to arouse in the reader's heart as in mine a sympathy for the bed-ridden old Mrs. Purdon and a comprehension of her sacrifice.

My daily routine continued as usual, gardening, telling stories, music, sewing, dusting, motoring, callers ... one of them, a self-consciously sophisticated Europeanized American, not having of course any idea of what was filling my inner life, rubbed me frightfully the wrong way by making a slighting condescending allusion to what he called the mean, emotional poverty of our inarticulate mountain people. I flew into a silent rage at him, though scorning to discuss with him a matter I felt him incapable of understanding, and the character of Cousin Horace went into the story. He was for the first day or two, a very poor cheap element, quite unreal, unrealized, a mere man of straw to be knocked over by the personages of the tale. Then I took myself to task, told myself that I was spoiling a story merely to revenge myself on a man I cared nothing about, and that I must either take Cousin Horace out or make him human. One day, working in the garden, I laughed out suddenly, delighted with the whimsical idea of making him, almost in spite of himself, the _deus ex machina_ of my little drama, quite soft and sympathetic under his sh.e.l.l of would-be worldly disillusion, as occasionally happens to elderly bachelors.

At this point the character of 'Niram's long-dead father came to life and tried to push his way into the story, a delightful, gentle, upright man, with charm and a sense of humor, such as none of the rest of my stark characters possessed. I felt that he was necessary to explain the fierceness of the sisters' rivalry for him. I planned one or two ways to get him in, in retrospect--and liked one of the scenes better than anything that finally was left in the story. Finally, very heavy-hearted, I put him out of the story, for the merely material reason that there was no room for him. As usual with my story-making, this plot was sprouting out in a dozen places, expanding, opening up, till I perceived that I had enough material for a novel. For a day or so I hung undecided. Would it perhaps be better to make it a novel and really tell about those characters all I knew and guessed? But again a consideration that has nothing to do with artistic form, settled the matter. I saw no earthly possibility of getting time enough to write a novel. So I left Mr. Purdon out, and began to think of ways to compress my material, to make one detail do double work so that s.p.a.ce might be saved.

One detail of the mechanism remained to be arranged, and this ended by deciding the whole form of the story, and the first-person character of the recital. This was the question of just how it would have been materially possible for the bed-ridden old woman to break down the life-long barrier between her and her sister, and how she could have reached her effectively and forced her hand. I could see no way to manage this except by somehow transporting her bodily to the sister's house, so that she could not be put out on the road without public scandal. This transportation must be managed by some character not in the main action, as none of the persons involved would have been willing to help her to this. It looked like putting in another character, just for that purpose, and of course he could not be put in without taking the time to make him plausible, human, understandable ... and I had just left out that charming widower for sheer lack of s.p.a.ce. Well, why not make it a first person story, and have the narrator be the one who takes Mrs. Purdon to her sister's? The narrator of the story never needs to be explained, always seems sufficiently living and real by virtue of the supremely human act of so often saying "I".

Now the materials were ready, the characters fully alive in my mind and entirely visualized, even to the smoothly braided hair of Ev'leen Ann, the patch-work quilt of the old woman out-of-doors, and the rustic wedding at the end, all details which had recently chanced to draw my attention; I heard everything through the song of the swollen brook, one of the main characters in the story, (although by this time in actual fact, June and lower water had come and the brook slid quiet and gleaming, between placid green banks) and I often found myself smiling foolishly in pleasure over the buggy going down the hill, freighted so richly with hearty human joy.

The story was now ready to write.

I drew a long breath of mingled antic.i.p.ation and apprehension, somewhat as you do when you stand, breathing quickly, balanced on your skis, at the top of a long white slope you are not sure you are clever enough to manage. Sitting down at my desk one morning, I "pushed off" and with a tingle of not altogether pleasurable excitement and alarm, felt myself "going." I "went" almost as precipitately as skis go down a long white slope, scribbling as rapidly as my pencil could go, indicating whole words with a dash and a jiggle, filling page after page with scrawls ...

it seemed to me that I had been at work perhaps half an hour, when someone was calling me impatiently to lunch. I had been writing four hours without stopping. My cheeks were flaming, my feet were cold, my lips parched. It was high time someone called me to lunch.

The next morning, back at the desk, I looked over what I had written, conquered the usual sick qualms of discouragement at finding it so infinitely flat and insipid compared to what I had wished to make it, and with a very clear idea of what remained to be done, plodded ahead doggedly, and finished the first draught before noon. It was almost twice too long.

After this came a period of steady desk work, every morning, of re-writing, compression, more compression, and the more or less mechanical work of technical revision, what a member of my family calls "cutting out the 'whiches'". The first thing to do each morning was to read a part of it over aloud, sentence by sentence, to try to catch clumsy, ungraceful phrases, overweights at one end or the other, "ringing" them as you ring a dubious coin, clipping off too-trailing relative clauses, "listening" hard. This work depends on what is known in music as "ear", and in my case it cannot be kept up long at a time, because I find my attention flagging. When I begin to suspect that my ear is dulling, I turn to other varieties of revision, of which there are plenty to keep anybody busy; for instance revision to explain facts; in this category is the sentence just after the narrator suspects Ev'leen Ann has gone down to the brook, "my ears ringing with all the frightening tales of the morbid vein of violence which runs through the characters of our reticent people." It seemed too on re-reading the story for the tenth or eleventh time, that for readers who do not know our valley people, the girl's attempt at suicide might seem improbable.

Some reference ought to be brought in, giving the facts that their sorrow and despair is terrible in proportion to the nervous strain of their tradition of repression, and that suicide is by no means unknown.

I tried bringing that fact in, as part of the conversation with Cousin Horace, but it never fused with the rest there, "stayed on top of the page" as bad sentences will do, never sank in, and always made the disagreeable impression on me that a false intonation in an actor's voice does. So it came out from there. I tried putting it in Ev'leen Ann's mouth, in a carefully arranged form, but it was so shockingly out of character there, that it was s.n.a.t.c.hed out at once. There I hung over the ma.n.u.script with that necessary fact in my hand and no place to lay it down. Finally I perceived a possible opening for it, where it now is in the story, and squeezing it in there discontentedly left it, for I still think it only inoffensively and not well placed.

Then there is the traditional, obvious revision for suggestiveness, such as the recurrent mention of the mountain brook at the beginning of each of the first scenes; revision for ordinary sense, in the first draught I had honeysuckle among the scents on the darkened porch, whereas honeysuckle does not bloom in Vermont till late June; revision for movement to get the narrator rapidly from her bed to the brook; for sound, sense proportion, even grammar ... and always interwoven with these mechanical revisions recurrent intense visualizations of the scenes. This is the mental trick which can be learned, I think, by practice and effort. Personally, although I never used as material any events in my own intimate life, I can write nothing if I cannot achieve these very definite, very complete visualizations of the scenes; which means that I can write nothing at all about places, people or phases of life which I do not intimately know, down to the last detail. If my life depended on it, it does not seem to me I could possibly write a story about Siberian hunters or East-side factory hands without having lived long among them. Now the story was what one calls "finished," and I made a clear copy, picking my way with difficulty among the alterations, the scratched-out pa.s.sages, and the cued-in paragraphs, the inserted pages, the re-arranged phrases. As I typed, the interest and pleasure in the story lasted just through that process. It still seemed pretty good to me, the wedding still touched me, the whimsical ending still amused me.

But on taking up the legible typed copy and beginning to glance rapidly over it, I felt fall over me the black shadow of that intolerable reaction which is enough to make any author abjure his calling for ever.

By the time I had reached the end, the full misery was there, the heart-sick, helpless consciousness of failure. What! I had had the presumption to try to translate into words, and make others feel a thrill of sacred living human feeling, that should not be touched save by worthy hands. And what had I produced? A trivial, paltry, complicated tale, with certain cheaply ingenious devices in it. I heard again the incommunicable note of profound emotion in the old man's voice, suffered again with his sufferings; and those little black marks on white paper lay dead, dead in my hands. What horrible people second-rate authors were! They ought to be prohibited by law from sending out their caricatures of life. I would never write again. All that effort, enough to have achieved a master-piece it seemed at the time ... and this, _this_, for result!

From the subconscious depths of long experience came up the cynical, slightly contemptuous consolation, "You know this never lasts. You always throw this same fit, and get over it."

So, suffering from really acute humiliation and unhappiness, I went out hastily to weed a flower-bed.

And sure enough, the next morning, after a long night's sleep, I felt quite rested, calm, and blessedly matter-of-fact. "Flint and Fire"

seemed already very far away and vague, and the question of whether it was good or bad, not very important or interesting, like the chart of your temperature in a fever now gone by.

DOROTHY CANFIELD

Dorothy Canfield grew up in an atmosphere of books and learning. Her father, James H. Canfield, was president of Kansas University, at Lawrence, and there Dorothy was born, Feb. 17, 1879. She attended the high school at Lawrence, and became friends with a young army officer who was teaching at the near-by Army post, and who taught her to ride horseback. In 1917 when the first American troops entered Paris, Dorothy Canfield, who had gone to Paris to help in war work, again met this army officer, General John J. Pers.h.i.+ng.

But this is getting ahead of the story. Dr. Canfield was called from Kansas to become president of Ohio State University, and later to be librarian at Columbia University, and so it happened that Dorothy took her college course at Ohio State and her graduate work at Columbia. She specialized in Romance languages, and took her degree as Doctor of Philosophy in 1904. In connection with Professor Carpenter of Columbia she wrote a text book on rhetoric. But books did not absorb quite all of her time, for the next item in her biography is her marriage to John R.

Fisher, who had been the captain of the Columbia football team. They made their home at Arlington, Vermont, with frequent visits to Europe.

In 1911-1912 they spent the winter in Rome. Here they came to know Madame Montessori, famous for developing a new system of training children. Dorothy Canfield spent many days at the "House of Childhood,"

studying the methods of this gifted teacher. The result of this was a book, _A Montessori Mother_, in which the system was adapted to the needs of American children.

_The Squirrel Cage_, published in 1912, was a study of an unhappy marriage. The book was favorably received by the critics, but found only a moderately wide public. A second novel, _The Bent Twig_, had college life as its setting; the chief character was the daughter of a professor in a Middle Western university. Meantime she had been publis.h.i.+ng in magazines a number of short stories dealing with various types of New England country people, and in 1916 these were gathered into a volume with the t.i.tle _Hillsboro People_. This book met with a wide acceptance, not only in this country but in France, where, like her other books, it was quickly translated and published. "Flint and Fire" is taken from this book. _The Real Motive_, another book of short stories, and _Understood Betsy_, a book for younger readers, were her next publications.

Meantime the Great War had come, and its summons was heard in their quiet mountain home. Mr. Fisher went to France with the Ambulance Corps; his wife as a war-relief worker. A letter from a friend thus described her work:

She 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, and establis.h.i.+ng a Red Cross hospital for them.

Out of the fullness of these experiences she wrote her next book, _Home Fires in France_, which at once took rank as one of the most notable pieces of literature inspired by the war. It is in the form of short stories, but only the form is fiction: it is a perfectly truthful portrayal of the French women and of some Americans who, far back of the trenches, kept up the life of a nation when all its people were gone. It reveals the soul of the French people. _The Day of Glory_, her latest book, is a series of further impressions of the war in France.

It is not often that an author takes us into his workshop and lets us see just how his stories are written. The preceding account of Dorothy Canfield's literary methods was written especially for this book.

DUSKY AMERICANS

_Most stories of Negro life fall into one of two groups. There is the story of the Civil War period, which pictures the "darky" on the old plantation, devoted to "young Ma.s.sa" or "old Miss,"--the Negro of slavery. Then there are stories of recent times in which the Negro is used purely for comic effect, a sort of minstrel-show character. Neither of these is the Negro of to-day. A truer picture is found in the stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar. The following story is from his FOLKS FROM DIXIE._

THE ORDEAL AT MT. HOPE

BY

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

"And this is Mt. Hope," said the Rev. Howard Dokesbury to himself as he descended, bag in hand, from the smoky, dingy coach, or part of a coach, which was a.s.signed to his people, and stepped upon the rotten planks of the station platform. The car he had just left was not a palace, nor had his reception by his fellow-pa.s.sengers or his intercourse with them been of such cordial nature as to endear them to him. But he watched the choky little engine with its three black cars wind out of sight with a look as regretful as if he were witnessing the departure of his dearest friend. Then he turned his attention again to his surroundings, and a sigh welled up from his heart. "And this is Mt. Hope," he repeated. A note in his voice indicated that he fully appreciated the spirit of keen irony in which the place had been named.

The color scheme of the picture that met his eyes was in dingy blacks and grays. The building that held the ticket, telegraph, and train despatchers' offices was a miserably old ramshackle affair, standing well in the foreground of this scene of gloom and desolation. Its windows were so coated with smoke and grime that they seemed to have been painted over in order to secure secrecy within. Here and there a lazy cur lay drowsily snapping at the flies, and at the end of the station, perched on boxes or leaning against the wall, making a living picture of equal laziness, stood a group of idle Negroes exchanging rude badinage with their white counterparts across the street.

After a while this bantering interchange would grow more keen and personal, a free-for-all friendly fight would follow, and the newspaper correspondent in that section would write it up as a "race war." But this had not happened yet that day.

"This is Mt. Hope," repeated the new-comer; "this is the field of my labors."

Rev. Howard Dokesbury, as may already have been inferred, was a Negro,--there could be no mistake about that. The deep dark brown of his skin, the rich over-fullness of his lips, and the close curl of his short black hair were evidences that admitted of no argument. He was a finely proportioned, stalwart-looking man, with a general air of self-possession and self-sufficiency in his manner. There was firmness in the set of his lips. A reader of character would have said of him, "Here is a man of solid judgement, careful in deliberation, prompt in execution, and decisive."

It was the perception in him of these very qualities which had prompted the authorities of the little college where he had taken his degree and received his theological training, to urge him to go among his people at the South, and there to exert his powers for good where the field was broad and the laborers few.

Born of Southern parents from whom he had learned many of the superst.i.tions and traditions of the South, Howard Dokesbury himself had never before been below Mason and Dixon's line. But with a confidence born of youth and a consciousness of personal power, he had started South with the idea that he knew the people with whom he had to deal, and was equipped with the proper weapons to cope with their shortcomings.

But as he looked around upon the scene which now met his eye, a doubt arose in his mind. He picked up his bag with a sigh, and approached a man who had been standing apart from the rest of the loungers and regarding him with indolent intentness.

"Could you direct me to the house of Stephen Gray?" asked the minister.

The interrogated took time to change his position from left foot to right and s.h.i.+ft his quid, before he drawled forth, "I reckon you's de new Mefdis preachah, huh?"

"Yes," replied Howard, in the most conciliatory tone he could command, "and I hope I find in you one of my flock."

"No, suh, I's a Babtist myse'f. I wa'n't raised up no place erroun' Mt.

Hope; I'm nach.e.l.ly f'om way up in Adams County. Dey jes' sont me down hyeah to fin' you an' tek you up to Steve's. Steve, he's workin' to-day an' couldn't come down."