these exquisite privations?” So Chase questioned himself, in Miss
Sackville-West’s story of _The Heir_. “What was that drudgery beside
this beauty, this pride, this Quixotism?” There is only one answer. If
you would be an artist you do not even bother with the answer. But your
heart leaps.
Books by V. Sackville-West
_Poems of West and East_ [in England]
1921 _Orchard and Vineyard_ [in England]
1918 _Heritage_
1920 _The Dragon in Shallow Waters_
1923 _Knole and the Sackvilles_
1923 _Challenge_ [withdrawn in England prior to publication, 1920]
1923 _Grey Wethers_
1924 _The Heir and Other Stories_
Sources on V. Sackville-West
_Knole and the Sackvilles_, generally, and also pages 11, 17, 68, 82,
83, 219 and 220
_Who’s Who_ [in England]
Private Information
7. _Harold Bell Wright_
i
From _Who’s Who in America_, 1922-1923 (Volume 12):
“WRIGHT, HAROLD BELL, author: born, Rome, Oneida County, New York, May
4, 1872; son, William A. Wright and Alma T. (Watson) Wright; student
two years, preparatory department, Hiram College, Ohio; married,
Frances E. Long, of Buffalo, New York, July 18, 1899; married, second,
Mrs. Winifred Mary Potter Duncan, of Los Angeles, California, August
5, 1920. Painter and decorator, 1887-92; landscape painter, 1892-7;
pastor, Christian (Disciples) Church, Pierce City, Missouri, 1897-8,
Pittsburg, Kansas, 1898-1903, Forest Avenue Church, Kansas City,
Missouri, 1903-5, Lebanon, Missouri, 1905-7, Redlands, California,
1907-8; retired from ministry, 1908. Author: _That Printer of Udell’s_,
1903; _The Shepherd of the Hills_, 1907; _The Calling of Dan Matthews_,
1909; _The Uncrowned King_, 1910; _The Winning of Barbara Worth_, 1911;
_Their Yesterdays_, 1912; _The Eyes of the World_, 1914; _When A Man’s
a Man_, 1916; _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_, 1919; _Helen of the Old
House_, 1921. Home: Tucson, Arizona.”
Such is the outline derived by the compilers of an invaluable work of
reference whose method is to ask of the individual certain standard
questions which he may answer in his discretion and which he may
supplement--in the editor’s discretion--by further information about
himself. The latitude allowed in such a work as _Who’s Who in America_,
is necessarily rather small; it would, however, have permitted Mr.
Wright to say that the sales of his fiction exceed those of any
other living American writer--perhaps those of any other living
writer anywhere. He did not say it. The impression given by the words
“landscape painter” may be misleading, for Mr. Wright at that time
made his living by sign painting and house painting; but also he made
sketches and water colors which he sold as he went along. Let this tiny
matter be as a warning that, on his own terms and in his own fashion of
speech, Harold Bell Wright is to be taken literally.
[Illustration: HAROLD BELL WRIGHT]
Always! Is there metaphor in his writing? Was there metaphor in
_Pilgrim’s Progress_? Are there parables in the Bible? Do sermons
contain allegories? We know that allegories embody sermons. Mr. Wright
has never concealed the purpose behind his novels, stories. It is to
say plainly some word that he believes will be of help, if uttered, to
men and women. In his strange personal history lies the seed of a novel
more absorbing, if less credible, than any he has written. The poor
boy, the boy left motherless at ten, the man out of work, the man with
an empty stomach and no means of filling it, the man who has been told
that “the rock pile was intended for fellows like you!”--and through
it all the sleazy thread of ill-health, down-right sickness, and the
bright scarlet stain of disease.... Two years at a little college,
cut short by illness; two years financed by hard work and ground down
in disappointment. Then the haphazard wandering, the tramping afoot
outdoors, the small painting jobs, the inability to find work at times,
the hardships of climate--and at last he finds himself in the Ozark
Mountains looking for ... what? For the chance to live, first of all.
It was there that he preached his first sermon, and there he found a
background and a setting for some of the stories he was eventually to
write. They were very far off, then, those stories, below the horizon,
out of sight as were so many other things that were to dawn on his life
when he should be thirty.
ii
In any consideration of Harold Bell Wright as an author, the usual
approaches are of no value, and not only of no value but so without
meaning as to be absurd. Almost he raises the fundamental question:
What is an author, anyway? Of course the word does apply to all whose
writing achieves publication, especially as a book or books; and
perhaps it may be used of a person who remains unpublished. But, as
always, there is here a meaning within a meaning; the word generally
carries with it some suggestion of literary skill or a pretension
thereto--as “doctor” implies a medical training, or “lawyer” admission
to practise at the bar. However, Mr. Wright neither possesses any
literary skill nor ever pretended to have any, comparatively speaking.
He has more than once uttered an emphatic disclaimer, but like other
very popular writers his sensitiveness to adverse criticism is keen.
He is a moralist, a fabulist, a preacher of sermons, a Sayer, and an
Utterer. There is in the impoverished English language no word for his
rôle. The English language, so full of words for things that do not
exist, has none for this type of man who has always existed among the
English-speaking peoples though rather sparsely among other peoples.
When forced to recognise his existence as a power for evil in politics,
we borrow the word demagogue; if his activity is rather indefinitely
“religious,” we affix the word evangelist. There is a common factor
in John Bunyan, Theodore Roosevelt, James Whitcomb Riley, Harold Bell
Wright easily recognised in whatever field it operates. In the case
of Mr. Wright, it has been said that he appeals “to the thousands
upon thousands who crave to see their humble doings, their paper
fantasies exalted and made memorable in the bright guise of a seeming
romance.” Unfortunately for the success of this diagnosis, it is not
the great masses of mankind who are sentimental, but the minority who
have accustomed themselves to the contemplation of mankind in great
masses. If Mr. Roosevelt had addressed himself to the “thousands
upon thousands” he would have been almost without influence; and Mr.
Riley’s verses are most noteworthy for their intimate personal appeal.
Such a Sayer as Walt Whitman, speaking to men _en masse_, receives
from men small attention. One can neither speak, write, paint, carve
or build for the thousands; one must do it for the individual every
time. In a short study of Roosevelt some years ago the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly, Ellery Sedgwick, admirably indicated Roosevelt’s real
achievement, which was--not that he moulded national policies but that
he made the homegoing day labourer, sitting in a trolley car, his empty
lunch pail beside him, trace with a stubby forefinger in the evening
newspaper the simple precept for that day, whether a command against
race suicide or a “Don’t flinch! Don’t foul! Hit the line hard!” He who
would speak to many men and women must always address each one; he must
not make the mistake of appealing to a lowest common intelligence and
he must perfectly understand that what is called “sentimentality” is
not a weakness but a sign of health--pink thoughts like pink cheeks.
iii
“She stood before him in all the beautiful strength of her young
womanhood.”
“He was really a fine looking young man with the appearance of being
exceptionally well-bred and well-kept. Indeed the most casual of
observers would not have hesitated to pronounce him a thoroughbred and
a good individual of the best type that the race has produced....”
These sentences, from Wright’s novel, _The Winning of Barbara Worth_,
have been quoted with the comment that Wright himself is that casual
observer and that, to the more thoughtful, Abraham Lincoln, who “was
anything but a thoroughbred, anything but well-kept” is the best type
of individual that the race has produced. Mr. Wright could crushingly
reply that Lincoln was not a type; but the failure in perception goes
much deeper. The critic of the passage quoted must know very well that
the respect of mankind for appearances is well-founded. Appearances
can be arrived at and kept up, being thus one of the few things
definitely within our powers of accomplishment and control; for what
lies under the appearance may be beyond our power to make or change.
It is not instinct, or even reason, but a solid regard for fact that
prizes appearance. Further, in the affair in question, two subjects
for a possible mating, the usual man or woman is as unromantic and
unsentimental as possible in his or her satisfaction at the good looks
of hero and heroine. Those good looks and good manners are something
to go upon. Each has an asset with the other and there is some chance
for the children, if any. Only a dangerous sentimentalist would wish
the man to be a mongrel. Mr. Wright knows all this; so do we all of us;
why, then, is he called a sentimentalist?
Because, I suppose, an inveterate tradition of the minority brands
the majority as sentimental. Were they so, they could not live. The
majority, not being victims of self-delusion, go through life, eating,
sleeping, working and feeling. The capacity to feel has not in them
been weakened. They may be robbed of their cheeks’ pinkness, but it is
more difficult to take away the pinkness of their thoughts (the mere
mental accompaniments of their feelings). Indeed, it has so far proved
impossible to enslave them by any intellectual system, as they have
been enslaved by this or that economic system. If it were possible to
persuade these men and women that physical mongrelism should take the
place of Mr. Wright’s hero’s thoroughbreeding, the world would have
become sentimental with a vengeance likely to recoil on the heads of
those who wrought the persuasion. The French Revolution would be as
nothing to the new era then dawning.
In other words, the young man used to advertise linen collars (and Mr.
Wright, at the young man’s age, might easily have served as the model)
is the people’s proper hero. He represents, to a considerable extent,
something within the average power to become. No more suggestive
antithesis can be imagined than between a novel like _The Shepherd of
the Hills_ and such a work of fiction as Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s _Main
Street_, crammed with the things beyond the average power to alter. It
is the interesting inevitability of the visitor to humble homes in out
of the way American places to encounter, on the parlour table or its
equivalent, a Bible, a “gift” edition of Longfellow’s Poems, _The Wreck
of the “Titanic”_ (with complete horrors, last words of all on board,
and full text of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” as played by the ship’s
band) and a copy of _The Shepherd of the Hills_, or, perhaps, _When a
Man’s a Man_. But _Main Street_? That, if it was ever in the house, has
gone the way of all wood pulp very quickly. For these people have none
of that difficulty experienced by the literary critic in distinguishing
books, and their applied canons are not matters of taste or sentiment
or intellectual theory, but principles of living as they are compelled
to practise them daily, personal and intimate, directed toward the
best appearance, unsentimental, unintellectual, individual, healthful,
sensibly ambitious, emotionally direct and ... free.
iv
Suppose, instead of audibly deploring Mr. Wright, and uttering in their
assaults upon him an unconscionable amount of twaddle, the literary
critics were to transform themselves into students of the popular
psychology. In such case they would see at once how the usual person
unsentimentally proceeds through life with the assistance of attainable
ideals. Of course, definitions of sentimentality may and do differ.
My idea here is simply that to espouse the shadowy ideal is to come
much more under the charge of being sentimental than to aspire to wear
the newest style of linen collar, or acquire good manners. I think at
once, too, of a writer whose best work meets the severe tests applied
by the critic of literature, Mr. Arnold Bennett. What is _The Old
Wives’ Tale_, what is _Clayhanger_, each a work of accepted art, but a
faithful transcription of the average person’s utter unsentimentality
and complete devotion to the attainable ideal? Mr. Bennett made
the same veracious observation as Mr. Wright makes; it is only the
presentation that is different--objective in the case of Bennett,
immersed in the case of Wright. For Bennett’s purpose literary art
is essential, for Wright’s, literary art is a handicap. Moreover, the
identification is unlike. The people Bennett writes about, with the
exception of Clayhanger, would not recognise themselves in his two
novels; the people of Mr. Wright, would. Why? Because Wright expresses
them in their own fractions--known to themselves. Bennett carries them
out to a decimal repetend--·142857142857142857 and so on, instead of
⅐, subscribed by Mr. Wright. Virtue, vice, greed, ambition, youth
and the like are the simple fractions in which Mr. Wright’s characters
are stated. Whatever realities these names represent, it had better
be realised that they are in themselves the simplest, most necessary
conventions. And as such, and as such only, has Wright used them.
His method of work was, I think, the innocent source of the general
misunderstanding surrounding him in the discussions of the minority. It
is well-known that before writing a novel he prepares a short argument,
as other writers prepare an outline or plot. “The system I use,” he
has explained, “may have been used for centuries, or it may be no
one else has ever used it. I have wondered whether it is old or new.
Whichever it may be, here it is: When I start to write a novel, the
first thing I do is to figure out why I am going to write it. Not what
is the story, but why? I mull this over a while, and when it is pretty
straight in my mind, I write out an argument. No suggestion of plot,
you see. No incidents, scenes, location, nothing done at first except
the argument, but it is the heart and soul of the novel. The novel
is merely this argument presented through the medium of characters,
plot, incidents, and the other properties of the story. Next come the
characters, each standing for some element or factor in the argument.
Up to the last copying of _The Eyes of the World_, not a character
had been named. They were called in the copy, Greed, Ambition, Youth,
or whatever they represented to me in the writing of the story.” This
simple explanation has been derided by asserting that “Mr. Wright seeks
to prove some abstract notion of his own concerning good and evil by
means of a picked assembly of human beings.” But how so? They are not
picked human beings at all, but like Bunyan’s characters, expressions
of the One. They prove nothing and are intended to prove nothing, being
merely expository, fabulous, moralistic, and the natural presentation
of no easy notion but some familiar fact--far from abstract! Take
_The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_, one of Wright’s least satisfactory
books to its author and to many readers and released by Wright with
great reluctance. An abstract notion is the last thing in the world
it touches upon; all is simple, vivid, commonplace, centred around
the actuality that, with another chance, many a man can set his life
straight.
If there is any shortcoming it arises from Wright’s personal
strength. The man who can do what he has done, persistently fighting
tuberculosis, risking public opinion in several matters and adhering
to his method in spite of a great change of personal attitude and a
personal revolution in ideas--that man is no weakling. It would be
interesting to survey the personal change in Mr. Wright but as it
nowhere extrudes in his work, there is no justification for an inquest.
But the very circumstance has its positive value in establishing him
for what he is not, namely, an artist. But there is another aspect of
Mr. Wright as phenomenon (not as person) and his success cannot be
understood without examining that aspect.
v
Wright’s boyhood, to the age of ten when he lost her, was focussed
about the personality of his mother. When she died he lost, if not
perhaps his only friend, his strongest. Before he could read she had
told him the Hiawatha legends, had read aloud to him the stories
of the Bible (the King James version), had retold Shakespeare for
him. Her death made him clutch to his heart these books, as well as
the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and the portions of Ruskin they had read
and re-read together in the home--which, by the way, was really at
Wrightstown, just outside Rome, New York, though Wright’s birthplace is
spoken of as “Rome.” A feeling that these books of his mother’s were
as sacred books was fixed in the boy’s mind. Wright has never ceased
to read them, nor to try to pour himself into those molds; and in
conversation he sometimes lets slip a phrase from one of them. Without
literary aptitude and with a very ragged species of formal education,
he speaks in his extraordinary fashion and the millions hearken. So
much so that his success from the outset may be said to have entirely
reconstructed--for the purpose of merchandising his books--the retail
machinery of book-selling.
The author of _That Printer of Udell’s_ had the means of reaching
the folks in little villages and on isolated farms, people who could
scarcely be reached by any of the books ordinarily being published.
The very inadequate machinery of retail distribution serving the book
trade was insufficient for his purpose. It is insufficient for most
purposes, but its insufficiency in the case of Harold Bell Wright was
painful and intolerable. With the most remarkable courage, effort
and persistence the publishers constructed a new and complete retail
mechanism to serve the special need. Those who have no knowledge of
the problems of merchandising will be unable to appreciate what they
did. A few details are in order. First, the larger book publishers
in the United States seldom sell directly to retailers in cities of
less than 50,000; smaller publishers seldom enter cities of less than
100,000. The needs of bookstores in little cities and towns, mixed and
important only in the aggregate, are taken care of by jobbers. There
are possibly 1,000 first-rate bookstores to serve a nation of well over
100,000,000 people--of whom, however, some 20,000,000 are incapable of
ever reading a book of any importance in an understanding way. There
are cities of 50,000 in which no first-rate bookstore exists. On the
other hand a magazine like Pictorial Review, solidly established on the
demand for dress patterns, or a magazine like Saturday Evening Post,
promulgating fiction patterns, penetrates into places where no new book
is ever seen. So, too, do certain denominational religious papers.
And in vast areas of the Middle and Far West, there is a seepage from
those reservoirs of modern merchandising, the mail order houses, the
Roosevelt Dams of commerce, constantly seeking, more and more achieving
the reclamation of the deserts of trade.
The “producers,” in stage parlance, of Harold Bell Wright determined
to utilise all these channels. It was a great risk of judgment and
money at the outset but it succeeded. This is no place to go into the
history of a unique performance in merchandising but the results have
a distinct place in any record of the author exploited. For one thing,
it may be asked if the success with Wright is of value in selling other
authors, and while there can be no dogmatic answer to the question it
is probable that in most cases it is not. And another phase of the
results throws a significant light on the nature of Wright’s work,
confirming what we have said about the terms of his appeal to his
readers. When a Wright novel is published the orders pile in from
stores and places with which a publisher has ordinarily no contact; and
the order from a hamlet in North Carolina is likely to exceed the order
from Brentano’s in New York.
This means two things. It means, naturally, that with the heavy
campaigns of advertising in all sorts of periodicals from Saturday
Evening Post to Zion’s Herald, the publishers reach the people who
buy a book a year or less often. But also it means that Wright is
the moralist, the fabulist and the Sayer we have termed him. On the
technical side, perhaps the most instructive detail of this selling
performance is the way in which it is initiated. Six months before a
new Wright story is to be published, thousands of tradespeople all
over the United States know that the story is to be published, and
when, and with what enormous advertising placed in forty specified
periodicals and several dozen newspapers it will be “pushed”; and then
begins the steady succession of personal letters and even telegrams,
circulars and placards and posters, honest-minded persons in remote
settlements discuss with enthusiasm and awe the prodigious sum of
money to be expended on “just this one book, a _book_,” librarians
grow anxious and advertising men eager, preachers prepare sermons,
in thousands upon thousands of homes the Christmas gift to Mother is
pre-determined,--until at last, in a wide-rolling wave of excitement,
a vast surge of the people of simple faith and worthy ideals, the day
comes when the book is born....
vi
It has been said that Wright is of magnetic personality, with fine,
clean, inspiring ideals, a man of tireless endeavour, a person who
“stirs in one emotions of which one is not ashamed.” Also that “he
radiates a Lincolnian type of rugged honesty” ... and much more of the
same sort. All such lingo is meaningless outside the atmosphere of
Wright’s books. The language of those novels is not one of literary
conventions but of certain inalterable thought-conventions; and
so, necessarily, is language addressed to those who read Wright.
“She stood before him in all the beautiful strength of her young
womanhood.”... “It is his almost clairvoyant power of reading the
human soul that has made Mr. Wright’s books among the most remarkable
of the present age.” These two statements are demonstrably true to
the many whose minds, struck by such sentences, give back the ring of
silver. They are not true in themselves; but then, we know no things
that are. To be “true” is simply to signify enough, at a given time, in
particular circumstances, to some individual or individuals.
That truth Mr. Wright has had enormously, and still has. His newest
novel, _The Mine With the Iron Door_, although in no way an elaboration
of the traditional tale of that mine--it was supposed to be a wonder
mine, where the old Spanish Fathers got the gold that enriched their
splendid altars--weaves the old legend through its texture of incident.
This gives to the novel a colour beyond the colour it has from its
Arizona setting; but the point with Mr. Wright is something like this:
Every life has its “mine with the iron door,” its dreams that can
never come true, its hopes that belong to a past that is forever dead.
Nevertheless, he will have you believe, though the lost mine may never
be found nor the iron door opened, some riches of happiness is still
possible. Were it not for this element, this presentation of something
that at a given time and in particular circumstances can signify truth
to many, many people, Mr. Wright’s new novel would be no more than a
picturesque and exciting adventure narrative of the Arizona desert.
vii