viewed they all have exactly the same genesis, and I confess I cannot
conceive of any creative fiction written from any other beginning ...
that of a generally intensified emotional sensibility, such as every
human being experiences with more or less frequency. Everybody knows
such occasional hours or days of freshened emotional responses when
events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply,
when a sunset lifts you to exaltation, when a squeaking door throws you
into a fit of exasperation, when a clear look of trust in a child's eyes
moves you to tears, or an injustice reported in the newspapers to
flaming indignation, a good action to a sunny warm love of human nature,
a discovered meanness in yourself or another, to despair.
I have no idea whence this tide comes, or where it goes, but when it
begins to rise in my heart, I know that a story is hovering in the
offing. It does not always come safely to port. The daily routine of
ordinary life kills off many a vagrant emotion. Or if daily humdrum
occupation does not stifle it, perhaps this saturated solution of
feeling does not happen to crystallize about any concrete fact, episode,
word or phrase. In my own case, it is far more likely to seize on some
slight trifle, the shade of expression on somebody's face, or the tone
of somebody's voice, than to accept a more complete, ready-made episode.
Especially this emotion refuses to crystallize about, or to have
anything to do with those narrations of our actual life, offered by
friends who are sure that such-and-such a happening is so strange or
interesting that "it ought to go in a story."
The beginning of a story is then for me in more than usual sensitiveness
to emotion. If this encounters the right focus (and heaven only knows
why it is the "right" one) I get simultaneously a strong thrill of
intense feeling, and an intense desire to pass it on to other people.
This emotion may be any one of the infinitely varied ones which life
affords, laughter, sorrow, indignation, gayety, admiration, scorn,
pleasure. I recognize it for the "right" one when it brings with it an
irresistible impulse to try to make other people feel it. And I know
that when it comes, the story is begun. At this point, the story begins
to be more or less under my conscious control, and it is here that the
work of construction begins.
"Flint and Fire" thus hovered vaguely in a shimmer of general emotional
tensity, and thus abruptly crystallized itself about a chance phrase and
the cadence of the voice which pronounced it. For several days I had
been almost painfully alive to the beauty of an especially lovely
spring, always so lovely after the long winter in the mountains. One
evening, going on a very prosaic errand to a farm-house of our region, I
walked along a narrow path through dark pines, beside a brook swollen
with melting snow, and found the old man I came to see, sitting silent
and alone before his blackened small old house. I did my errand, and
then not to offend against our country standards of sociability, sat for
half an hour beside him.
The old man had been for some years desperately unhappy about a tragic
and permanent element in his life. I had known this, every one knew it.
But that evening, played upon as I had been by the stars, the darkness
of the pines and the shouting voice of the brook, I suddenly stopped
merely knowing it, and felt it. It seemed to me that his misery emanated
from him like a soundless wail of anguish. We talked very little, odds
and ends of neighborhood gossip, until the old man, shifting his
position, drew a long breath and said, "Seems to me I never heard the
brook sound so loud as it has this spring." There came instantly to my
mind the recollection that his grandfather had drowned himself in that
brook, and I sat silent, shaken by that thought and by the sound of his
voice. I have no words to attempt to reproduce his voice, or to try to
make you feel as I did, hot and cold with the awe of that glimpse into a
naked human heart. I felt my own heart contract dreadfully with helpless
sympathy ... and, I hope this is not as ugly as it sounds, I knew at the
same instant that I would try to get that pang of emotion into a story
and make other people feel it.
That is all. That particular phase of the construction of the story
came and went between two heart-beats.
I came home by the same path through the same pines along the same
brook, sinfully blind and deaf to the beauty that had so moved me an
hour ago. I was too busy now to notice anything outside the rapid
activity going on inside my head. My mind was working with a swiftness
and a coolness which I am somewhat ashamed to mention, and my emotions
were calmed, relaxed, let down from the tension of the last few days and
the last few moments. They had found their way out to an attempt at
self-expression and were at rest. I realize that this is not at all
estimable. The old man was just as unhappy as he had been when I had
felt my heart breaking with sympathy for him, but now he seemed very far
away.
I was snatching up one possibility after another, considering it for a
moment, casting it away and pouncing on another. First of all, the story
must be made as remote as possible from resembling the old man or his
trouble, lest he or any one in the world might think he was intended,
and be wounded.
What is the opposite pole from an old man's tragedy? A lover's tragedy,
of course. Yes, it must be separated lovers, young and passionate and
beautiful, because they would fit in with the back-ground of spring, and
swollen shouting starlit brooks, and the yearly resurrection which was
so closely connected with that ache of emotion that they were a part of
it.
Should the separation come from the weakness or faithlessness of one of
the lovers? No, ah no, I wanted it without ugliness, pure beautiful
sorrow, to fit that dark shadow of the pines ... the lovers must be
separated by outside forces.
What outside forces? Lack of money? Family opposition? Both, perhaps. I
knew plenty of cases of both in the life of our valley.
By this time I had come again to our own house and was swallowed in the
usual thousand home-activities. But underneath all that, quite steadily
my mind continued to work on the story as a wasp in a barn keeps on
silently plastering up the cells of his nest in the midst of the noisy
activities of farm-life. I said to one of the children, "Yes, dear,
wasn't it fun!" and to myself, "To be typical of our tradition-ridden
valley-people, the opposition ought to come from the dead hand of the
past." I asked a caller, "One lump or two?" and thought as I poured the
tea, "And if the character of that opposition could be made to indicate
a fierce capacity for passionate feeling in the older generation, that
would make it doubly useful in the story, not only as part of the
machinery of the plot, but as indicating an inheritance of passionate
feeling in the younger generation, with whom the story is concerned." I
dozed off at night, and woke to find myself saying, "It could come from
the jealousy of two sisters, now old women."
But that meant that under ordinary circumstances the lovers would have
been first cousins, and this might cause a subconscious wavering of
attention on the part of some readers ... just as well to get that stone
out of the path! I darned a sock and thought out the relationship in the
story, and was rewarded with a revelation of the character of the sick
old woman, 'Niram's step-mother.
Upon this, came one of those veering lists of the ballast aboard which
are so disconcerting to the author. The story got out of hand. The old
woman silent, indomitable, fed and deeply satisfied for all of her hard
and grinding life by her love for the husband whom she had taken from
her sister, she stepped to the front of my stage, and from that moment
on, dominated the action. I did not expect this, nor desire it, and I
was very much afraid that the result would be a perilously divided
interest which would spoil the unity of impression of the story. It now
occurs to me that this unexpected shifting of values may have been the
emergence of the element of tragic old age which had been the start of
the story and which I had conscientiously tried to smother out of sight.
At any rate, there she was, more touching, pathetic, striking, to my
eyes with her life-time proof of the reality of her passion, than my
untried young lovers who up to that time had seemed to me, in the full
fatuous flush of invention as I was, as ill-starred, innocent and
touching lovers as anybody had ever seen.
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 shell 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 space 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 space. 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 anticipation 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 snatched out at once. There I hung over
the manuscript 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 passages, 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. Pershing.
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 publishing 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 title _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 establishing 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 Massa" 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