EDNA FERBER
BY ROGERS DICKINSON
Edna Ferber is an arresting personality. In speech, in appearance, and
in manner she stands out clear against the mass.
Anyone who really knows her realizes why her stories, both long and
short, reach the understanding and touch the hearts of the readers. One
is very likely to say, “Why, I know somebody like that,” or “I knew she
would do that.”
She knows folks, all sorts of people, but she is interested chiefly in
people who do things: not the men who run great corporations and control
the destinies of thousands of men and women, but the men and women who
have jobs, and under that classification come that vast number who run
modest households, who struggle to bring up children, who, in fact, form
the permanent solid stratum on which our society is built.
She has the large-minded sympathy that makes for understanding of the
under dog. She will take French lessons, not only because she wants to
study the language, but because a cultivated Frenchman needs money and
will not accept charity.
Edna Ferber enjoys a talk with a washwoman and the woman enjoys the talk
too. Her colored maid adores her—and imposes on her (as is the way with
colored maids).
She hates pretension and is very likely to speak her mind not only to
her intimates but straight to the face of the objectionable person.
Sometimes she speaks more strongly than she should, for she is impulsive
and quick-tempered, but no one is more generous than she in the
acknowledgment of mistakes.
Her letters are characteristic. They just begin. No salutation, no
sparring for an opening—they begin at the beginning and when she is
through she stops. She just adds her initials.
She stands on her own small feet. If you say to her, “The mantle of O.
Henry has fallen on your shoulders” (it has been said with complimentary
intent), you will get a flash from her black eyes that will scorch you
and a rush of words that will make you wish you were elsewhere. She does
not want anyone’s else mantle or footgear for that matter—she is
herself, Edna Ferber.
Her earlier picturesque, sometimes flippant style, the surprise
climaxes, and the short pithy sentences, come from her newspaper
experience and not from any influence of O. Henry. The newspaper
editor’s command is to “tell the story and make it snappy,” and it has
affected Edna Ferber’s style, as it has affected the work of many other
writers who grew out of newspaper offices.
Her style has changed as all thoughtful readers must have noticed. The
literary form of the Emma McChesney stories is quite different from that
of the stories in “Cheerful by Request” and “Gigolo.” Read a story in
“Roast Beef Medium” and then read “Old Man Minick.”
There is a depth and richness, a dignity and soundness, that the earlier
works lacked. Yet there is no loss of strength and vital freshness in
her later books.
There is a vitality about Edna Ferber that is recognizable the moment
she comes into a room. She enters almost with a rush, with a quick, firm
step; though she is short, scarcely more than five feet three, I should
think, she dominates most groups. Her rather large head with its thick
black hair, cropped so one may see the admirable shape of the skull, is
held erect. She greets one with a cordiality that is sometimes disarming
and she speaks with a curious drawl that seems quite out of character
with her forthright nature. What she says is worth listening to, for
even the most commonplace occasions bring forth unbromidic speech from
Edna Ferber.
As she talks in private conversation so she talks in public. She is a
good speech-maker, a good lecturer. Her spoken words have the pungent
vitality of her writing and the reading of her own stories makes the
characters come alive startlingly.
It may seem strange to those of us who do not make our own living by
creative writing that a woman who has made her mark as a reporter and
who still occasionally reports a national convention, finds it so hard
to write fiction. Edna Ferber has written for newspapers about all sorts
of things under every sort of difficult handicap of time and place, and
has produced good “copy.” Yet her short stories, novels and plays, are
slowly and laboriously produced. And when the job is done, so closely
has she held her nose to the grindstone, that she is unable to perceive
the work as a whole, and realize how good it is.
She once rented an apartment on the lake front in Chicago, her desk
facing the blue waters. She was in the midst of her novel, “The Girls.”
She complained that she could not get on with it, it was hard labor, so
hard that in spite of her best efforts she would look at the lake and
the trees and the children playing in the street below. Her anxious
publisher besought her to turn her typewriter table so she faced the
blank wall. She did; and the book was speedily born.
In an article in _The American Magazine_, under the characteristic title
of “The Joy of the Job,” she tells of her methods of work.
“At the risk of being hated I wanted to state that I’ve always felt
sorry for any woman who could play whenever she wanted to. She never
will know how sweet play can be. Chocolate is no treat for a girl in a
candy factory. Play is no treat for an idler. My work is such that
morning engagements and festive luncheoning are forbidden. On those rare
occasions, two or three times a year, perhaps, when I deliberately, and
for the good of my soul, break the rule and sneak off down-town for
luncheon, the affair takes on the proportions of an orgy. No college
girls’ midnight fudge spree could be more thrilling. To my unaccustomed
eyes the girls in their new hats all look pretty. The matrons appear
amazingly well dressed. The men, chatting over their after-luncheon
cigarettes, are captains of finance, discussing problems of national
import. I refuse to believe what my _vis-à-vis_ says about their being
cloak-and-suit salesmen whose conversation probably runs thus:
“‘I come into his place at ten this morning and he wouldn’t look at my
stuff till twelve, and finally I goes up to him, and I says to him, I
says, “Looka here, Marx.”’
“The very waiters interest me. The ’bus boys are deft, and I refuse to
be bothered by their finger nails. The chicken salad is a poem, the
coffee a dream, the French pastry a divine concoction.
“When you work three hundred and fifty mornings in the year, a game of
golf on the three hundred and fifty-first is a lark. That’s one reason
why I play so atrociously, I suppose. They who say that work hardens
one, or wearies, or dulls, have chosen the wrong occupation, or have
never really tasted the delights of it. It’s the finest freshener in the
world. It’s an appetizer. It’s a combination cocktail and _hors
d’œuvre_, to be taken before playing. It gives color to the most
commonplace of holidays. It makes a run through the park a treat.
There’s very little thrill in a brisk walk if you can brisk-walk from
morning until night. But after having sat before a typewriter, or desk,
or table, for hours together, to be able to stretch one’s legs for a
swing of two or three miles—that’s living.
“The entire output of my particular job depends upon me. By that I mean
that when I put the cover on my typewriter the works are closed. The
office equipment consists of one flat table, rather messy; one
typewriter, much abused, and one typewriter table; a chunk of yellow
copy paper, and one of white. All the wheels, belts, wires, bolts,
files, tools—the whole manufacturing scheme of things—has got to be
contained in the space between my chin and my topmost hairpin. And my
one horror, my nightmare of nightmares, is that some morning I’ll wake
up and find that space vacant, and the works closed down, with a mental
sign over the front door reading:
“‘For Rent. Fine, large empty head. Inquire within.’
“There was one year when there was a sign reading, ‘Closed for repairs.’
The horror of it is still with me.”
In another place she says: “No autobiographical sketch is complete
without a statement of ambitions. I have two. I want to be allowed to
sit in a rocking chair on the curb at the corner of State and Madison
streets and watch the folks go by. And I would fain live on a houseboat
in the Vale of Cashmere. I don’t know where the Vale of Cashmere is, nor
whether it boasts a water course or not.”
What a lot she would get out of her view of life from a rocking chair at
State and Madison streets!
She complained bitterly once that a certain writer, now opulent and
lazy, who knew Chicago from the stockyards to the North Shore, did not
use the stuff he had in his head. She felt not so much that he was
missing an opportunity, but that he had buried the talent of experience
that should have been passed on to others after he had gone.
Though Edna Ferber lives in New York—her apartment faces Central
Park—she is not of New York. She knows Chicago, she thinks Chicago,
just as Booth Tarkington thinks and knows Indianapolis and would not
live wholly away from it. The author of “The Girls,” that masterpiece of
Chicago, frequently visits the Windy City and sits, metaphorically, at
the corner of State and Madison and soaks in the spirit of the city,
that city so recently a pioneer town, so lately an effete city. No
wonder she finds it fascinating and inexhaustible.
Edna Ferber’s apartment is the place where she meets her friends,
breakfasts, lunches, dines, and sleeps. It is her rest house, her
relaxation. The furnishing of it was an adventure. The choosing of
draperies for the windows (there are many facing east), the tints for
the walls, and the fabrics for the upholstery, she found an exhilarating
venture into the unknown. She has been a hotel dweller, a renter of the
homes of other people. But here she is rioting in her own home with her
own furniture and hers is the sole responsibility for the color scheme,
the style, and the composition. And it is good. Her taste in furnishing
as in writing is to be relied upon. It is also most comfortable, too
comfortable. It would be hard enough to break away from this interesting
woman if one were standing talking in a windy street, but when
surrounded by all the comforts it is almost impossible not to overstay
one’s welcome.
But she works in a bare studio, close by, away from the telephone and
too friendly visitors. Every morning she sits down at the typewriter and
works—and most afternoons. No writer produces good work without
wearying effort, long hours of concentration, and at times great
discouragement.
What Miss Ferber wears while she works, whether dress, sweater, or
smock, I do not know, for she does not do her writing in public as a
prize fighter trains for a battle. Her battles are fought out alone.
One of her old and understanding friends, William Allen White, has
written a most illuminating account of her life, her struggles, and her
achievement. Mr. White being a Middle Westerner himself, quite
understands Edna Ferber’s point of view. The following extract is taken
from an introduction by the famous editor of the _Emporia Gazette_ for
an edition of “Cheerful by Request”:
“Edna Ferber’s pasture is long and narrow geographically; ranging from a
thin pennant running westward to the mountains, to a slim tatter as far
east as Vienna. But it is close clipped around Chicago, in Illinois,
Minnesota, and Wisconsin; and well cropped in and about New York. In its
social boundaries her field is more compact; chiefly lying in the middle
class, sometimes taking in those who are just climbing out of poverty,
and often considering those who are happily wiggling into our
plutocracy. But one thread will string every character she ever
conceived; all her people do something for a living. She is the goddess
of the worker. And from her typewriter keys spring hard-working bankers,
merchants, burglars, garage-helpers, stenographers, actors, traveling
salesmen, hotel clerks, porters and reporters, wholesalers, pushcart
men, wine touts, welfare workers, farmers, writers—always doers of
things: money makers, men and women who pull their weight in the boat.
And her stories chiefly tell what a fine time these hardworking
Americans have with their day’s work.
“In the Great American Short Story, which must tell of American life
rather than our Great American Novel, Edna Ferber’s section will be
among the workers. Mrs. Wharton and Henry Fuller and Sherwood Anderson
can have the loafers, in high life and low life. But Miss Ferber’s
people will come from the stores and offices and workshops. They will,
as the Gospel Hymn has it, come rejoicing, bringing home the bacon.
Their dramatic moments are oftenest in aprons, shirt-sleeves, overalls,
at desks, behind counters, in kitchens, behind stage curtains, in the
midst of the business of earning a living. Precious little is done in
the Ferber stories ‘in God’s great out of doors—in the wide open
spaces.’ When anything has to be open in Miss Ferber’s work it is a
lively and festive wide-open town.
“So let us consider who she is and how she happened to be a writing
woman. In the middle or late ’eighties of the nineteenth century she was
born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of Jewish parents. Her father was a
Hungarian. Her mother an American, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her
father was the owner of a general merchandise store, first in Iowa, then
in Appleton, Wisconsin. Miss Ferber at seventeen was graduated from the
Ryan High School in Appleton. For her graduating essay she wrote an
account of the life of the women workers in a local mill. The local
editor saw it: recognized that it was good reporting and gave her a job
as local reporter at $3.00 a week—a rather princely salary twenty years
ago for a new girl reporter in a country town. She wrote local items,
from the court house, the city hall, the fire department, the home of
the village Crœsus, and the police court. Then she was graduated from
the Appleton paper to Milwaukee. In Milwaukee also she was a reporter.
And while she was earning a living as a reporter she wrote ‘Dawn
O’Hara,’ her first novel. It sold well. While it was in the press and
selling during 1911 and ’12, the magazines began telling the story of
‘Emma McChesney.’ Here was something new; the traveling saleswoman—who
was rather more woman than merchant, but who was altogether human. The
character appealed to the public, and Edna Ferber had her knee in the
door of success. In 1913 the stories were collected under the title
‘Roast Beef Medium,’ and that book sold well. Two years later appeared
more McChesney stories under the title ‘Emma McChesney & Co.’ Then came
the play ‘Emma McChesney,’ and Edna Ferber was well in the ante-room of
the hall of fame, with her card going to posterity. In the meantime, a
book of short stories, ‘Buttered Side Down,’ had been written and sold
to the magazines and successfully published. In 1917 Miss Ferber’s
second novel appeared, ‘Fanny, Herself,’ and in 1918 came ‘Cheerful by
Request.’
“In 1922 all the promise of ten years of conscientious work was
fulfilled, when Miss Ferber wrote ‘The Girls,’ a novel of Chicago. The
humor of it, the strength of it, the art of it, must make posterity give
more than a glance at Edna Ferber’s card. She has something to tell
posterity about America.
“And so we must tell posterity something about her—about Edna Ferber,
herself. The best description of her family life ever written, she wrote
in the dedication of ‘Dawn O’Hara,’ to Julia Ferber, her ‘dear mother
who frequently interrupts, and to Sister Fannie who says Sh-Sh-Sh-
outside my door.’ Some shadowy hint of the life of the Ferbers after the
husband and father died, and before the family moved to Chicago, may be
found in the earlier chapters of ‘Fanny, Herself’—at least it is a good
picture of Julia Ferber, the mother, a strong, devoted, capable woman
who is a credit to her country.
“All around Edna Ferber is an atmosphere of work. She works hard and all
the time. Her friends work hard, and all the time. So when she takes her
typewriter in hand to tell of the world she knows, she describes a
working world. It is a world deeply American. For whatever else we
Americans are, we are workers. Here and there a man lives without work,
a white rich man’s son or a black washerwoman’s son. We have no leisure
classes. But the world of Edna Ferber’s people in its economic status is
the real world of America. And she, a working woman, is typical of the
modern American woman. If for any reason posterity is interested in this
American world of the first three decades of the twentieth century,
posterity will do well—indeed posterity probably can do no better than
to tell the butler to bring Edna Ferber for a few moments and let her
read ‘The Gay Old Dog,’ and ‘The Eldest.’”
Since Mr. White wrote the foregoing, Edna Ferber has made two big steps
forward. In the volume, “Gigolo,” is to be found that masterpiece, “Old
Man Minick,” to mention but one of a group of eight. The play from this
story, written by her in collaboration with George S. Kaufman, has
become an artistic and a financial success. The story, “Old Man Minick,”
together with the play, “Minick,” have been published in a separate
volume, so one can see how a short story can be turned into a successful
play. It is interesting to compare the fictional use of an idea with the
dramatic, especially when the work is done by the same hand.
Edna Ferber has always been interested in plays and play-writing. She
has written three that I know of, and two have been highly successful.
“$1,200 a Year,” written with Newman Levy, deserved a greater success
than it won. As a piece of literature it deserves more than one
rereading.
Of course “So Big” has done more to interest people in Edna Ferber than
anything else, yet the quality that has made such a success of that book
lies also in most of her earlier work. That she herself was not too sure
about it is made clear in an interview, titled “How it Feels to be a
Best Seller”:
“There are people who write Best Sellers as a matter of business. That
is, they are in the Best Seller business. They write them, I am told,
deliberately and mathematically, using a formula as a cook uses a
recipe. You hear a name and you say, in your ignorance, ‘Who? . . .
Who’s he?’ And the answer is, ‘He’s Whosis. You don’t mean to say you’ve
never read him! He writes Best Sellers.’
“I don’t know how they do it. I don’t want to know. I suppose they have
some peculiar thermometer or mechanism by which they gauge that fickle
phenomenon known as the public pulse. But occasionally some one comes
along who commits a Best Seller in all innocence, and with no such
intent. Of such am I.
“Not only did I not plan to write a Best Seller when I wrote ‘So Big’
but I thought, when I had finished it, that I had written the world’s
worst seller. Not that alone, I thought I had written a complete
Non-Seller. I didn’t think anyone would ever read it. And that’s the
literal truth.
“It was this way. I had worked on it, day after day, day after day, for
many months, starting at nine each morning and working until four in the
afternoon. I knew where I was going and why I wanted to get there, but
after a time I became like a patient plodder who must travel weary miles
along a lonely road before he arrives at the city of his destination.
Mile after mile I covered the distance, sometimes traveling fairly
swiftly, sometimes scarcely able to lift one tired foot after the other.
When it was finished I was so dulled by contact with it that I scarcely
could see it. The last stretch of the work, during June and July, had
been written in Chicago. That June and July in Chicago I recall as a
period during which the thermometer hovered gracefully between 90 and 96
in the shade.
“As the work of final correction began and progressed I began to dole
out sheaves of copy to the typist. She used to call for a chunk of the
story every day or two. She would appear at about four in the afternoon
when I had finished work for the day, and when I was at my limpest,
dampest and lowest. I remember her as a nice fresh-looking red-haired
girl in crisp cool orchid organdie. She would make four copies of each
fresh sheaf as she received it, return these, and call for more. No
other soul except myself had seen a line of that story.
“Each time she called I waited eagerly, hopefully, for her to make some
comment. I wanted her to say she liked Selina. I wanted her to say she
didn’t care for Dirk. I wanted her to say she thought the story should
have ended this way, or that. I wanted her to evince some interest in
the novel; to show some liking for it, or even to show dislike. She
never did.
“‘Well,’ said I to Miss E. Ferber, ‘that settles it. There you are,
Edna! I told you so! Who would be interested in a novel about a
middle-aged woman in a calico dress and with wispy hair and bad teeth,
grubbing on a little truck farm south of Chicago! Nobody. Who cares
about cabbages! Nobody. Who would read the thing if it came out as a
novel! A dull plodding book, written because I was interested; because I
wanted intensely to write it; because I had carried the thought of it
around in my head for five years or more.’
“The story was to be serialized in the _Woman’s Home Companion_ before
being published in novel form. Well, that was all right. It might go
well enough as a serial. But as a novel! Never.
“I wrote Mr. Russell Doubleday, of Doubleday, Page & Company, telling
him that I had finished the book but that it was not, in my opinion, a
book that would sell. No one, I wrote him, would read it. I thought it
would be better for his firm, as publishers, and for me, as author, if
we gave up the idea of publishing this story as a novel. It would be a
flat failure, receiving bad reviews, having no sale.
“Mr. Doubleday replied that I might be right, but that perhaps I should
let some one besides myself have a chance to judge its merits and
faults. Perhaps, he said, I had been too close to it. Would I let him
read it before deciding against it?
“He read it. He wrote me a letter. I keep that letter to read on rainy
days when I’m not feeling well.
“‘So Big’ has, for some reason I can’t explain, been a best seller since
it was published in February, selling on an average of a thousand a day.
I know how the ugly duckling felt who turned into a swan.”
And so, unlike Dirk de Jong, who thought he was so big and wasn’t, the
novel is so very big, when the author thought it of much less
importance.
It is safe to say that at least seven million people read “So Big” in
its serial and book form. All these people will be looking forward
hopefully to her next book. That there will be no disappointment can be
confidently predicted because Edna Ferber has built upon so sure a
foundation.
I believe that big work cannot come of small people. Edna Ferber is a
big person (not in stature nor avoirdupois) in mind, in heart, in soul,
and in vision. A study of her work shows her growth and she is still
growing, and will keep on growing as long as she lives. She will keep on
growing because she sees so much farther than she has been able to
reach. Her vision is so big.