ALICE BROWN
From New Hampshire Alice Brown responded, July 29, 1918, to a request
for something from herself about herself with a letter as follows:
“I have been too busy in legitimate ways--gardening, cooking, cursing
the Hun--to write you a human document. But these are some of the dark
facts. I was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, about six miles
inland from the sea, near enough to get a tang of salt and a ‘sea turn’
of walking--[a word that looks like ‘mist’ or ‘twist’.] The country
there is slightly rolling, with hills enough to give nice little dips
and climbs in the winding roads, and the farms are fertile. My people
were farmers. We lived, not at Hampton Falls village, but in a little
‘neighborhood’ on the road to Exeter, and at Exeter all the shopping was
done. It was one postoffice, and any neighbor who drove over brought
back the mail for the rest.
“I went to the little district school until I was perhaps fourteen and
then went to the ‘Robinson Female Seminary,’ Exeter, walking back and
forth every day except in the winter months, and there I was
graduated--after which I taught several years, in the country and in
Boston, hating it more and more every minute, and then threw over my
certainty to write.
“I did a little work on the _Christian Register_ and then went to the
_Youth’s Companion_, where, for years, I ground out stuff from the
latest books and magazines.
“And that’s really all! I own a farm here at Hill, which I don’t carry
on--sell the grass standing and the apples on the trees. I love gardens
and houses. I wish I could go round planning the resurrection of old
houses and pass them over to somebody else and plan more.
“And _that’s_ all! Now I ask you if any newspaper gent, even with a
genius for embroidery, could make anything of that? ‘Story? God bless
you, sir, I’ve none to tell!’
“Gloomily yours,
“ALICE BROWN.”
[In pencil]
“I thought I should write about five thousand words, but this is how it
pans out!”
And it pans out extremely well, if a newspaper gent with no genius for
embroidery, incapable, indeed, of knitting a single sock for a soldier,
may express his satisfaction. For a woman of sixty who has no story of
her own to tell has certainly a lot of stories to tell of other people.
Miss Brown has told them all. A very respectable list of writings will
be found at the close of this chapter.
New England stories (_Meadow-Grass_), English travels (_By Oak and
Thorn_), poems (_The Road to Castaly_), a study of Stevenson written in
collaboration, stories for girls (as _The Secret of the Clan_), a play
that, among nearly 1,700 submitted, won a $10,000 prize (_Children of
Earth_) and a number of novels of which _The Prisoner_ is the most
notable, are a main outline of her contribution to American literature.
She is without any question one of the half dozen best short story
writers America possesses at this time. Her short stories have achieved
a wider fame for her than anything else, and quite rightly. As a poet
she does pleasant and sometimes interesting work, but it is impossible
to say more. As a dramatist she wrote one play--the play that captured
Winthrop Ames’s prize--which was splendidly imaginative and even rather
poetic, but as undramatic as a “book play” can be. It never had a chance
of popular success. Does some one say that is nothing against it? It is
everything against it. The play or the book that does not appeal to a
wide audience has a fatal lack and no amount of “literary” merit can
make up for that lack.
As a novelist Miss Brown can be absolutely unreadable. If you don’t
believe that try to go through _My Love and I_, first published under
the pen name “Martin Redfield.” It is Stevenson with the Scotch left
out. Again, she can write a book like _The Prisoner_, which is as fine
in its way as anything John Galsworthy ever did. In its way? Nothing
derogatory, we assure you! The way is American, not English; that’s all
(as Miss Brown would say).
It is perhaps unfortunate that in a book dealing with American women
novelists it should be necessary to confine the consideration of Alice
Brown to her novels; but this disadvantage to her is no greater than
the disadvantage to Edna Ferber or one or two others whose best work is
not in the novel form. Since the restriction does Miss Brown, on the
whole, a considerable injustice, let us restrict a little further and
consider only her best novel. We shall then be doing as much as we can
to redress the balance in her favor and perhaps more than we ought to
do. But chivalry is not dead.
_The Prisoner_ is the story of a relatively young man who has just come
out of prison and whose readjustment to the world he is reëntering is a
keenly interesting subject. The very first thing to be noted is the
absolute originality and freshness of Miss Brown’s conception of her
story. This, perhaps innocently, we believe to be without a literary
parallel.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred novelists, in these days probably 999 out
of 1,000, and of women novelists 9,999 out of 10,000, would see the
released man in a single aspect. The victim of society, of course;
prison reform, sociology, Thomas Mott Osborneism, uplift, the cruelty of
the world in letting a man out after having once put him in (for it is
much more of a punishment to release a man from jail than to incarcerate
him), cruelty, wrong, cruelty, injustice, cruelty, the way of the world,
cruelty----.
Now the basis of this general attitude is an incurable sentimentality,
and Miss Brown is not sentimental but sanative, made so by a gift of
humor and laughter. She is, it is true, rather deeply interested in
ideas as ideas, and in _The Prisoner_ she has packed a few more than can
be found in any American novel of the last dozen years. The root idea
is that expressed by the prisoner--or ex-prisoner--himself. As Jeff
says, with a flash of insight (prisoners learn to look within), the real
difficulty is not that a man is in prison, but that he’s outside the
law. And on the last page of the book the same idea is paraphrased, put
even more perfectly, by Miss Brown, who says of Lydia that she knew by
her talk with Jeff and reading what he had imperfectly written “that he
meant to be eternally free through fulfilling the incomprehensible
paradox of binding himself to the law.”
This will not appeal to persons who have not been taught by Gilbert K.
Chesterton the art of lucid thinking. The fact that a man is in prison
is unimportant; it is a mere symptom or consequence of the terrible
thing which is the matter with him. For his presence there is simply
evidence that he put himself, or got himself, outside the law. In
pursuit of money, or a woman, or what not sort of game he has cut
himself off from the community of mankind and it will be a miracle if he
can get back into it. The mere fact that he has committed a crime is
very little one way or the other, almost meaningless in itself. If he is
“outside” and so cut off in mind and spirit and imagination from all his
fellows, what is to them a crime will bear to him no immoral aspect
whatever. For what is a crime? Something that we agree must not go
unpunished. Something that “we” agree. But the man “outside” is not one
of us any longer if he ever was.
At the risk of seeming to digress we must endeavor to make this very
clear, for otherwise _The Prisoner_ will be, in its real import, lost on
the reader. Human nature being what it is there is no way to prevent a
man getting “outside” if the bent takes him. There are many ways in
which we try to keep every one in the fellowship--for society is
essentially a spiritual alliance and with a creed so broad that we make
laws simply to state what is _not_ in that creed, the whole creed itself
being entirely beyond our powers of expression. But there is no sure way
to keep men from getting “outside” the fellowship. And once they have
got outside the real problem is to get them back in. They can get back
in only voluntarily and of their own free will, and only by binding
themselves to the law. Law, not laws. What they must accept is the
inexpressible creed of fellowship and their acceptance of that carries
with it an acceptance of the things barred by it, the things we make
laws about.
And the only hope of getting a man who has got “outside” to accept the
creed and reënter the fellowship is to convince him that only by so
doing can he achieve freedom, that only by binding himself to the
unwritten law can he become “eternally free.” If you can make him see
that, you have salvaged him for society. As the surest way to make a man
see a thing is to let him discover it for himself we have invented
prisons. Do not be deceived by the stupid notion that prisons are to
punish men or even to protect society from their evil depredations.
Prisons are the result of a deep, very sensible, entirely unshakeable
piece of knowledge which we collectively possess, namely, that the man
who has put himself beyond the pale must himself bring himself within
it again. To that end we enclose him in four symbolic brick walls. We
give him no physical or bodily escape. And so, after a time, he makes a
mental escape and finds himself still essentially free, though
physically in jail! So at last he comes to understand and accept the
paradox that he can be free in no other way--ever.
The idea deserves expanding, but the reader will probably consider that
we have intruded unpardonably with it in this chapter anyway. However,
we can see no other means of making clear the philosophic basis of Miss
Brown’s fine novel. Of its other features we shall not even bother to
speak. It is well written, of course; it offers persons and situations
that are both metaphysical and melodramatic and therefore, in this
indissolubility of thought and feeling, life-like, amazing, comical,
thought-provoking--why heap up adjectives? The character drawing is
simply superb and a better executed figure than Madame Beattie cannot be
found in the whole range of American fiction. Miss Amabel is hardly
inferior. Weedon Moore, Alston Choate, the rigid and motionless but
perfectly well grandmother in bed, Rhoda Knox--there is no gainsaying
the fidelity of these people to observed facts and existences. If Henry
James had had Madame Beattie’s necklace in place of his golden bowls and
sacred founts his art would have been expended on really worthy
material, but he could not, nor could any one, have done more with it
than Alice Brown has done.
On the strength of this one story Miss Brown must be placed very high on
the roll of American novelists at least as high as we place, among the
men, Owen Wister, by reason solely of that incomparable novel of the
West, _The Virginian_.
BOOKS BY ALICE BROWN
_Fools of Nature._
_Meadow-Grass._
_By Oak and Thorn._
_Life of Mercy Otis Warren._
_The Road to Castaly._
_The Day of His Youth._
_Robert Louis Stevenson--A Study (with Louise Imogen Guiney)._
_Tiverton Tales._
_King’s End_, 1901.
_Margaret Warrener_, 1901.
_The Mannerings._
_High Noon._
_Paradise._
_The County Road_, 1906.
_The Court of Love_, 1906.
_Rose McLeod_, 1908.
_The Story of Thyrza_, 1909.
_Country Neighbors_, 1910.
_John Winterbourne’s Family_, 1910.
_The One-Footed Fairy_, 1911.
_The Secret of the Clan_, 1912.
_My Love and I_, 1912.
_Vanishing Points_, 1913.
_Robin Hood’s Barn_, 1913.
_Children of Earth_, 1915.
_Bromley Neighborhood._
_The Prisoner_, 1916.
_The Flying Teuton_, 1918.
_Homespun and Gold_, 1920.
_The Wind Between the Worlds_, 1920.
_Published by The Macmillan Company, New York. Some of the earlier books
by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._