STEWART EDWARD WHITE AND ADVENTURE
=i=
"Stewart Edward White," says George Gordon in his book _The Men Who Make
Our Novels_, "writes out of a vast self-made experience, draws his
characters from a wide acquaintance with men, recalls situations and
incidents through years of forest tramping, hunting, exploring in Africa
and the less visited places of our continent, for the differing occasions
of his books. In his boyhood he spent a great part of each year in lumber
camps and on the river. He first found print with a series of articles on
birds, 'The Birds of Mackinac Island' (he was born in Grand Rapids, March
12, 1873), brought out in pamphlet form by the Ornithologists' Union and
since (perforce) referred to as his 'first book.' In the height of the
gold rush he set out for the Black Hills, to return East broke and to
write _The Claim Jumpers_ and _The Westerners_. He followed Roosevelt into
Africa, _The Land of Footprints_ and of _Simba_. He has, more recently,
seen service in France as a Major in the U. S. Field Artillery. Though
(certainly) no Ishmael, he has for years been a wanderer upon the face of
the earth, observant and curious of the arresting and strange--and his
novels and short stories mark a journey such as but few have gone upon, a
trailing of rainbows, a search for gold beyond the further hills and a
finding of those campfires (left behind when Mr. Kipling's _Explorer_
crossed the ranges beyond the edge of cultivation) round which the
resolute sit to swap lies while the tenderfoot makes a fair--and
forced--pretence at belief."
=ii=
Spring, 1922, having advanced to that stage where one could feel
confidence that summer would follow--a confidence one cannot always feel
in March--a short letter came from Mr. White. He enclosed two photographs.
One of them showed a trim-looking man with eyeglasses and moustache,
sitting shirt-sleeved in a frail-looking craft. The letter explained that
this was a collapsible canvas boat. My deduction was that the picture had
been taken before the boat collapsed.
There was also a picture of another and much sturdier boat. I think the
name Seattle was painted on her stern. She lay on a calm surface that
stretched off to a background of towering mountains--Lake Louise Inlet.
The much sturdier boat, I understood, was also the property of S. E.
White.
[Illustration: STEWART EDWARD WHITE]
The letter made all these things very clear. It said: "Fifteen tons, fifty
feet, sleeps five, thirty-seven horsepower, heavy duty engine, built
sea-going, speed nine knots. No phonograph! No wine cellar.
"We are going north, that is all the plans we have. We two are all there
are on board, though we are thinking of getting a cat. On second thought,
here is the crew in the canvas boat we carry to the inland lakes to fish
from. Her name is the _Wreckless_; be careful how you spell it."
As stated, the crew in the about-to-collapse boat was Stewart Edward
White. On his way north it was his intention to revise what will be, in
his judgment, the most important novel he has written. But I must not say
anything about that yet. Let me say something, rather, about his new book
which you who read this have a more immediate prospect of enjoying. _On
Tiptoe: A Romance of the Redwoods_ is Stewart Edward White in a somewhat
unusual but entirely taking rôle. Here we have Mr. White writing what is
essentially a comedy; and yet there is an element of fantasy in the story
which, in the light of a few opening and closing paragraphs, can be taken
seriously, too.
The story sounds, in an outline, almost baldly implausible. Here are
certain people, including a young woman, the daughter of a captain of
industry, stranded in the redwoods. Here is a young man out of nowhere,
who foretells the weather in a way that is uncannily verified soon
afterward. Here also is the astonishing engine which the young man has
brought with him out of nowhere,--an engine likely to revolutionise the
affairs of the world....
I suppose that the secret of such a story as _On Tiptoe_ lies entirely in
the telling. I know that when I heard it outlined, the thing seemed to me
to be preposterous. But then, while still under the conviction of this
preposterousness, the story itself came to my hand and I began to read.
Its preposterousness did not worry me any longer. It had, besides a
plausibility more than sufficient, a narrative charm and a whimsical
humour that would have justified any tale. The thing that links _On
Tiptoe_ with Stewart Edward White is the perfect picture of the
redwoods--the feeling of all outdoors you get while under the spell of the
story. I do not think there is any doubt that all lovers of White will
enjoy this venture into the field of light romance.
=iii=
Stewart Edward White was the son of T. Stewart White and Mary E. (Daniell)
White. He received the degree of bachelor of philosophy from the
University of Michigan in 1895 and the degree of master of arts from the
same institution in 1903 (_Who's Who in America: Volume 12_). He attended
Columbia Law School in 1896-97. He married on April 28, 1904, Elizabeth
Grant of Newport, Rhode Island. He was a major with the 144th Field
Artillery in 1917-18. He lives in California. But these skeletal details,
all right for _Who's Who in America_, serve our purpose poorly. I am going
to try to picture the man from two accounts of him written by friends. One
appeared as an appendix to White's novel _Gold_, published in 1913, and
was written by Eugene F. Saxton. The other is a short newspaper article by
John Palmer Gavit (long with the New York Evening Post) printed in the
Philadelphia Ledger for May 20, 1922.
Mr. Saxton had a talk with White a few days before White sailed from New
York for his second African exploring expedition. Saxton had asked the
novelist if he did not think it possible to lay hold of the hearts and
imaginations of a great public through a novel which had no love interest
in it; if "man pitted against nature was not, after all, the eternal
drama."
White thought for a moment and then said:
"In the main, that is correct. Only I should say that the one great drama
is that of the individual man's struggles toward perfect adjustment with
his environment. According as he comes into correspondence and harmony
with his environment, by that much does he succeed. That is what an
environment is for. It may be financial, natural, sexual, political, and
so on. The sex element is important, of course,--very important. But it is
not the only element by any means; nor is it necessarily an element that
exercises an instant influence on the great drama. Any one who so depicts
it is violating the truth. Other elements of the great drama are as
important--self-preservation, for example, is a very simple and even more
important instinct than that of the propagation of the race. Properly
presented, these other elements, being essentially vital, are of as much
interest to the great public as the relation of the sexes."
The first eight or nine years of Mr. White's life were spent in a small
mill town. Michigan was at that time the greatest of lumber states. White
was still a boy when the family moved to Grand Rapids, then a city of
about 30,000. Stewart Edward White did not go to school until he was
sixteen, but then he entered the third year high with boys of his own age
and was graduated at eighteen, president of his class. He won and, I
believe, still holds the five-mile running record of the school.
The explanation is that the eight or ten years which most boys spend in
grammar school were spent by Stewart Edward continually in the woods and
among the rivermen, in his own town and in the lumber camps to which his
father took him. Then there was a stretch of four years, from about the
age of twelve on, when he was in California, as he says "a very new sort
of a place." These days were spent largely in the saddle and he saw a good
deal of the old California ranch life.
"The Birds of Mackinac Island," already referred to, was only one of
thirty or forty papers on birds which White wrote in his youth for
scientific publications. Six or seven hundred skins that he acquired are
now preserved in the Kent Scientific Museum of Grand Rapids.
His summer vacations while he was in college were spent cruising the Great
Lakes in a 28-foot cutter sloop. After graduating he spent six months in a
packing-house at $6 a week. His adventure in the Black Hills gold rush
followed.
It was during his studies at Columbia that White wrote, as part of his
class work, a story called "A Man and His Dog" which Brander Matthews
urged him to try to sell. Short Stories brought it for $15 and subsequent
stories sold also. One brought as much as $35!
He tried working in MCClurg's bookstore in Chicago at $9 a week. Then he
set out for Hudson Bay. _The Claim Jumpers_, finished about this time, was
brought out as a book and was well received. The turn of the tide did not
come until Munsey paid $500 for the serial right in _The Westerners_.
White was paid in five dollar bills and he says that when he stuffed the
money in his pockets he left at once for fear someone would change his
mind and want all that money back.
_The Blazed Trail_ was written in a lumber camp in the depth of a northern
winter. The only hours White could spare for writing were in the early
morning, so he would begin at 4 A. M., and write until 8 A. M., then put
on his snowshoes and go out for a day's lumbering. The story finished, he
gave it to Jack Boyd, the foreman, to read. Boyd began it after supper one
evening and when White awoke the next morning at four o'clock he found the
foreman still at it. As Boyd never even read a newspaper, White regarded
this as a triumph. This is the book that an Englishwoman, entering a book
shop where White happened to be, asked for in these words: "Have you a
copy of _Blasé Tales_?"
White went out hastily in order not to overhear her cries of
disappointment.
=iv=
Mr. Saxton asked White why he went to Africa and White said:
"My answer to that is pretty general. I went because I wanted to. About
once in so often the wheels get rusty and I have to get up and do
something real or else blow up. Africa seemed to me a pretty real thing.
Before I went I read at least twenty books about it and yet I got no
mental image of what I was going to see. That fact accounts for these
books of mine. I have tried to tell in plain words what an ordinary person
would see there.
"Let me add," he went on, "that I did not go for material. I never go
anywhere for material; if I did I should not get it. That attitude of mind
would give me merely externals, which are not worth writing about. I go
places merely because, for one reason or another, they attract me. Then,
if it happens that I get close enough to the life, I may later find that I
have something to write about. A man rarely writes anything convincing
unless he has lived the life; not with his critical faculty alert; but
whole-heartedly and because, for the time being, it is his life."
=v=
John Palmer Gavit tells how once, when hunting, White broke his leg and
had to drag himself back long miles to camp alone:
"Adventure enough, you'd say. But along the way a partridge drummed and
nothing would do but he must digress a hundred yards from the shorter and
sufficiently painful way, brace himself for the shot and recoil, kill the
bird and have his dog retrieve it, and bring his game along with him. Just
to show himself that this impossible thing could be done.
"I am not imagining when I say that in this same spirit Stewart Edward
White faces the deeper problems and speculations of life. He wants to know
about things here and hereafter. With the same zest and simplicity of
motive he faces the secret doors of existence; not to prove or disprove,
but to see and find out. And when he comes to the Last Door he will go
through without fear, with eyes open to see in the next undiscovered
country what there is to be seen and to show that the heart of a brave and
unshrinking man, truthful and open-handed and friendly, is at home there,
as he may be anywhere under God's jurisdiction."
BOOKS BY STEWART EDWARD WHITE
THE WESTERNERS
THE CLAIM JUMPERS
THE BLAZED TRAIL
CONJUROR'S HOUSE
THE FOREST
THE MAGIC FOREST
THE SILENT PLACES
THE MOUNTAIN
BLAZED TRAIL STORIES
THE PASS
THE MYSTERY
ARIZONA NIGHTS
CAMP AND TRAIL
THE RIVERMAN
THE RULES OF THE GAME
THE CABIN
THE ADVENTURES OF BOBBY ORDE
THE LAND OF FOOTPRINTS
AFRICAN CAMP FIRES
GOLD
THE REDISCOVERED COUNTRY
THE GREY DAWN
THE LEOPARD WOMAN
SIMBA
THE FORTY-NINERS
THE ROSE DAWN
THE KILLER, AND OTHER STORIES
ON TIPTOE: A ROMANCE OF THE REDWOODS
SOURCES ON STEWART EDWARD WHITE
The Men Who Make our Novels, by George Gordon. MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY.
Who's Who in America.
Stewart Edward White: Appendix to GOLD (published in 1913) by Eugene F.
Saxton. DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY.
Stewart Edward White, by John Palmer Gavit. PHILADELPHIA PUBLIC LEDGER,
May 20, 1922.