GERTRUDE ATHERTON
Gertrude Atherton has been the subject of more controversy than any
other living American novelist. It is one of the best evidences of her
importance. England, we are told, regards her as the greatest living
novelist of America. Many Americans so rate her. Abroad, the opinion of
her work approaches something like unanimity and it is very high. At
home unanimity is nowhere. Prophets are not the only ones who
occasionally suffer a lack of honor in their own countries.
A good deal of it comes out of Mrs. Atherton’s long-standing and
vigorous assault on the literary schools of William Dean Howells and
Henry James. Pick up her novel _Patience Sparhawk and Her Times_,
written over twenty years ago, and you will find a trace of that feeling
in her delineation of Patience’s schoolteacher, who read these literary
gods. But Mrs. Atherton seldom speaks her mind by indirection; all who
cared have known her opinions as fast as she reached them. She has no
use for commonplace people in life or fiction; and by commonplace people
we mean not everyday people, but people about whom there is no
distinction of thought or sensibility, who have no sharpness, no
individuality however simple, no gift however slight. Henry James Forman
says that Mrs. Atherton is the novelist of genius, but this is one of
those brilliantly epigrammatic characterizations which convey the truth
by bold exaggeration. She has not always written of geniuses, but always
she has written of men and women who had backbone, courage, distinct and
recognizable selves, ambition, wit, daring, not merely flash but fire.
She really writes about herself in dozens of reincarnations. Nothing
daunts her that is alive--vulgarity, wickedness, weakness and bold sin
she can understand and portray as accurately as the shining virtues. The
only thing she cannot endure is the dead-alive. Mr. Forman was in
essentials right when he said of her in the New York _Evening Post_ of
June 15, 1918:
“Genius has a particular fascination for her, and with a rare boldness
she would rather face difficulties of creating or re-creating genius in
her fiction than to waste time on mediocre protagonists. With the newer
school of English and American novelists, with the Frank Swinnertons,
the J. D. Beresfords, or the Mary Wattses, she has nothing in common,
unless it be their patience. But she will not expend that patience on
the drab or the colorless.
“An Alexander Hamilton or a Rezanov seems to be made to her hand, and if
she cannot find what she wants in history or in fact, she prefers to
dream of a woman genius, the young German countess, Gisela Niebuhr, a
Brunnhilde who leads her sisters to revolt against Prussianism and all
that makes Germany hideous to the world to-day.
“To understand genius, it has been said, is to approach it, and Mrs.
Atherton beyond any doubt understands genius. She understands its
trials, temptations, vagaries and accomplishments. She knows that the
fires which feed it are certain to break out in many ways aside from its
recognized work. Did Mrs. Atherton take the trouble to acknowledge the
existence of Mrs. Grundy, it would be only that she might destroy that
unpopular lady.
“‘Brains’ is Mrs. Atherton’s favorite word. Any printer who sets up a
novel of hers must add a special stock to his font of the six letters
that spell it. Neither in her life nor in her work has she any patience
with dullness. She could no more have written _Pollyanna_ than she could
have written the _Book of Job_. The blithe, all-conquering brain is her
field of research.”
Mrs. Atherton, he tells us, neither talks nor writes “like a book.” She
is “always buoyant and stimulating. Brains occupy as much space in her
talk as in her books. She is never dull.” And turning to _The
Conqueror_, he develops his idea:
“There were, we know, a few persons who resisted Alexander Hamilton. But
important though they were, they were as dust under Mrs. Atherton’s
feet. Hamilton led a charmed life. Hurricanes had spared him and the
storms of war, of party, of faction left him safe. He was a _genius_,
and cosmic forces enfolded him as in a protective shell. Surely no
character was ever more certainly created to the hand of a novelist than
was Hamilton for Mrs. Atherton. Not a merit or fault of his, but Mrs.
Atherton could caress it with a mother’s hand. How she hates Clinton
because he fought her idol, and how much she despises Jefferson! But
Washington--even the most austere of the virtues of Washington pass with
Mrs. Atherton, because he loved Hamilton as a father loves a son....
“Critics have sometimes charged Mrs. Atherton with the grave misdemeanor
of writing like herself, not like somebody else; of not being Mrs.
Wharton, of not being Henry James or Robert Louis Stevenson. The charge
is just. She is not any of those persons, nor in the least like them.
She does not write for a handful of other writers, nor does she waste
much time in polishing sentences. She writes for the public.... You
cannot read five pages of her fiction without feeling certain that their
author has lived life, not merely dreamed it.”
This is the most illuminating comment on Mrs. Atherton that has so far
seen the light of day, and we shall not attempt more than to supply a
footnote or two. Mr. Forman says that Mrs. Atherton writes for the
public and not for writers. True, but is it the public which reads Gene
Stratton-Porter or _Pollyanna_? Decidedly not. Her public--a very large
one--consists of those who do not ask or desire that fiction shall
interpret them to themselves or shape their lives for them, consciously
or otherwise. It is made up of the thousands who are capable of some
degree of purely æsthetic enjoyment in literature. For the pure æsthetes
Mrs. Wharton _et al._ For the unæsthetic and ethical the two Mrs.
Porters. For the great hosts who appreciate literary art and
story-telling skill but who won’t sacrifice everything for them, who
demand a real narrative, color, action, suspense and seek no moral end
in the tale to justify the tale’s existence--for them Mrs. Atherton. And
they--these people of her vast audience--are the great middle ground.
They represent in their attitude toward fiction the healthiest note of
all.
The “literary” or highbrow attitude toward Mrs. Atherton is perfectly
conveyed in an article upon her by Mr. H. W. Boynton, also published in
the New York _Evening Post_ but over two years earlier, on February 26,
1916. We extract a few illustrative sentences:
“I may say frankly that I write of Mrs. Atherton not out of a special
admiration for her work,” begins Mr. Boynton, in a highly
self-revelatory manner, “but because for any surveyor of modern American
fiction she is so evidently a figure in some measure ‘to be reckoned
with.’... Her publicity may be said to have been extraordinary in
proportion to her achievement.... The person who is examining her work
as literature can find nothing to the purpose here (_Mrs. Balfame_).”
How comfortable to feel like that! Mrs. Atherton, with an amused smile,
would probably say, at the intimation that there was no “literature” in
_Mrs. Balfame_, and perhaps other of her books: “But life is so much
more than literature!” When Mr. Boynton charges her with leaving life
out of her books Mrs. Atherton will be seriously exercised.
Gertrude Atherton is a great grandniece of Benjamin Franklin. She was
born in 1857 in San Francisco, the daughter of Thomas L. Horn. She was
educated at St. Mary’s Hall, Benicia, California, and at Sayre
Institute, Lexington, Kentucky. At an early age she was married to
George H. Bowen Atherton, a Californian who declined to travel and who
died when he finally was lured to Chile as a guest on a warship. Mrs.
Atherton describes her marriage as “one of the most important incidents
of my school life.”
She had always wanted to go round about the world and when she wasn’t
able to do so she amused herself by writing complete travel books,
taking her characters through all parts of Europe. She knew enough
geography to make her stories truthful.
“And I believe,” Mrs. Atherton told Alma Luise Olsen in an interview
appearing in _Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New York, on March
31, 1918, “that I apply some of those same ideas to my writing of
fiction to-day. Most lives are humdrum and commonplace, on the surface
at least. So I take characters that haven’t had half a chance in real
life and re-create their destinies for them and--well, my books are the
result. I got the idea from Taine when I was very young.”
This interview also threw interesting light on Mrs. Atherton’s novel,
_The Avalanche_, announced for publication in the spring of 1919 by
Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. _The Avalanche_ is a tale of
California society with a mystery plot, and deals with a young woman
whose devoted but shrewd New York husband will not rest until he has
solved the puzzle of appearances surrounding her. Mrs. Atherton,
submerged most of the time in her New York apartment on Riverside Drive
with war work--she returned from the European battlefronts to be the
American head of Le Bien-être du Blesse, “the welfare of the
wounded”--rose to the surface several days in the week at a quiet
country spot in New Jersey, and wrote. The story developing thirteen
chapters, she split the last in two.
“I wrote and copied 50,000 words in seven weeks--which shows what one
can do away from the telephone. Margaret Anglin told me the original
incident and attempted to persuade me to write it as a play for her. Now
that the book is finished she would never recognize any part of it but
an incident in the climax.
“That’s always the way with writing novels and stories. I never know how
they are going to come out when I begin, any more than I could take a
child right now and say just how I was going to shape its whole life.
“Most writers who deal with California in their books tell about nature
and the plain people and the proletariat and such things. No one but
myself has ever told anything about social life in San Francisco. It is
full of drama. It resembles New York in part, but it has a character all
its own.”
Mrs. Atherton works every morning from seven until noon, and does with
dry bread and tea for a working lunch. Her New York apartment has
balconied windows overlooking the Hudson. Before the door of the house
which contains it stands a Barnard College dormitory. Eleanor Gates,
writing in _Books and Authors_ for September, 1917, said:
“In the wintertime, on ‘first Sundays,’ the Atherton apartment gathers
in a very crush of notables--authors, painters, soldiers, diplomats,
publishers, journalists, people of fashion, scholars, travelers and not
a few who figure under the general title of ‘admirers of genius,’ and
who have maneuvered for a card. Mrs. Atherton has the Englishwoman’s
interest in world politics; her knowledge of things European is of the
rare first-hand kind; her horizon is international. The lucky old-time
friend of the author’s from ‘out West’ meets in her drawing-room a good
percentage of the most distinguished people of the metropolis, along
with men and women who are prominent abroad.”
It is undoubtedly true that Mrs. Atherton, had she lived in France prior
to 1789, would have been a woman of a salon. If there are modern de
Staëls she is among them!
The first book of Mrs. Atherton’s read by the present writer was
_Senator North_, and he still holds it to be one of her best. It was
written in Rouen and published in 1900. Mr. Boynton cites it as evidence
that she is “both consciously and unconsciously an American.” He thinks
that “her spread-eagling, her ‘barbaric yawp,’ audible if involuntary,”
was what won attention for her in England “before her own country had
begun to notice her.” And before Mr. Boynton had begun to notice her.
Mrs. Atherton has traveled very widely. Before she starts work on a new
novel she visits the contemplated scene of action. She studies the
characteristics of the people and exhausts all her sources of
information concerning the place and its history. As a result vividness
is never lacking in her books, “local color” is there in such measure as
she may determine desirable, character-drawing is reënforced by traits
observed as well as traits assumed. She is both quick and keen. She
notes and then generalizes with broad, sweeping conclusions. Faults of
taste are imputed to her, but this means merely that those who make the
criticism would exercise a different selective choice over the teemingly
abundant material she invariably accumulates. Faults of structure are
charged to her by those who do not like the way she and her characters
shape amorphous life to their own ends. “Lack of control of her
material” is the disapproving phrase. Mrs. Atherton has “style” only in
the larger sense of self-expression, “but in the sense of that special
and trained skill by which an artist expresses life with an almost
infallible fitness, it is difficult to connect the word with her at
all.” We should hope so. The “almost infallible fitness” makes for the
satisfaction of those who have their own infallible standards of what is
fit. Life hasn’t any. It lets anything happen. Life is vulgar, broad,
incongruous, surprising, touching.
“My style is all my own, and not the result of magazine training--which
stamps the work of every other writer of the first class in the
country.” There is something in that and those who quarrel with it do so
mainly because they won’t allow Mrs. Atherton a certain exaggeration of
statement to drive her point home.
Even Mr. Boynton allows that _Perch of the Devil_ contains some of Mrs.
Atherton’s finest work and is “a considerable book in its way.” The
character of Ida Compton is one which has excited and still excites so
much interest that it is worth while to quote Mrs. Atherton’s own
explanation of how she came to go to Butte, Montana, and evolve her. She
had been struck, as who has not, by the marvelous adaptability of
American women in the capitals of Europe; “four or five years of wealth,
study, travel, associations, and they are fitted to hold their own with
any of Europe’s ancient aristocracies.”
“I met so many of these women when I lived in Europe,” explains Mrs.
Atherton, “that it finally occurred to me to visit some of the Western
towns and study the type at its source. The result is Ida Compton. In
the various stages of her development, moreover--beginning when she was
the young daughter of a Butte miner and laundress--I found myself
meeting all American women in one. The West to-day--particularly the
Northwest--embodies what used to be known as merely ‘American.’ Any one
of practically all the Western women of nerve, ambition, and large
latent abilities, that I met in my travels through their section of the
country, might develop into a leader of New York society, a
Roman-American matron, or a member of Queen Mary’s court, frowning upon
too smart society. With their puritanical inheritance they might even
develop into good Bostonians, although they ‘gravitate’ naturally to the
more fluid societies. If they choose to retain their slang, they ‘put it
over’ with an innocent dash that is a part of their natural refinement.
They are virtuous by instinct, and atmospherically broadminded; full of
easy good nature, but quick to resent a personal liberty; they are both
sophisticated and direct, honest and subtle. With all their undiluted
Americanism there is no development beyond them, no rôle they cannot
play. For that reason these Ida Comptons are fundamentally all American
women. The crudest remind one constantly of hundreds of women one knows
in the higher American civilizations. And I found studying them at the
source and developing one of them from ‘the ground up,’ watching all her
qualities--good and bad--grow, diminish, fuse, but never quite change,
even more interesting than meeting the finished product in Europe and
amusing myself speculating upon her past.”
In the long list of Mrs. Atherton’s books with which this chapter
concludes it would be desirable, but it is hardly possible, to follow
the example of guidebooks and star and doublestar her more important
novels. It is impracticable because any such designations would have to
be those of a single taste or of a coterie of tastes. _Patience
Sparhawk_, the dramatized biography of Alexander Hamilton called _The
Conqueror_, and possibly her recent novel of a German revolution, or the
revolt of the German women under the leadership of Gisela Niebuhr, would
be marked with the double star; certainly _The Conqueror_ would. The
present writer would singlestar _Senator North_ and the novels of early
California--_The Doomswoman_, _Rezanov_, _The Splendid Idle Forties_ and
_The Californians_. Of _The Living Present_ we must speak to call
attention to the final paper in the book’s second part, a tribute to
four New York women, of whom one is Honoré Willsie, the subject of a
later chapter in this book. _The Living Present_ is not a novel. The
first half is concerned with French women in war time, the fruit of
Mrs. Atherton’s observations and experience in war work; the second half
has the general title _Feminism in Peace and War_. _Perch of the Devil_
must be doublestarred, so probably must _Ancestors_ and _Tower of
Ivory_. Such books as _Rulers of Kings_ and _The Travelling Thirds_ are
least important. _Mrs. Balfame_, as a capital mystery story, the result
doubtless of Mrs. Atherton’s attendance at a celebrated murder trial in
the interests of a New York newspaper, must be single starred in any
list. _The Valiant Runaways_, long out of print, has been republished
this fall (1918). It is a story for boys, of Spanish California, with an
encounter with a savage bear, a rescue from a dangerous river, capture
by Indians and an escape on wild mustangs capped by a revolutionary
battle! The performance may be considered a final reminder of Mrs.
Atherton’s versatility. No one has ever found fault with her for not
being versatile!
BOOKS BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON
_A Whirl Asunder_, 1895. Frederick A. Stokes Company,
New York. Now out of print.
_Patience Sparhawk and Her Times_, 1897. Stokes.
_His Fortunate Grace_, 1897. John Lane Company. New York. Now out of print.
_American Wives and English Husbands_, 1898. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.
_The Californians_, 1898. Stokes.
_A Daughter of the Vine_, 1899. Lane.
_The Valiant Runaways_, 1899. Dodd, Mead.
_Senator North_, 1900. Lane.
_The Aristocrats_, 1901. Lane.
_The Conqueror_, 1902. Stokes.
_The Splendid Idle Forties_, 1902. Stokes.
_A Few of Hamilton’s Letters_, 1903. Stokes.
_Rulers of Kings_, 1904. Harper & Brothers, New York.
_The Bell in the Fog_, 1905. Harper.
_The Travelling Thirds_, 1905. Harper.
_Ancestors_, 1907. Harper.
_The Gorgeous Isle_, 1908. Doubleday, Page & Company.
Not listed in their last catalogue.
_Tower of Ivory_, 1910. Stokes.
_Julia France and Her Times_, 1912. Stokes.
_Perch of the Devil_, 1914. Stokes.
_California--An Intimate History_, 1914. Harper.
_Before the Gringo Came_ (Combining _The Doomswoman_,
published in 1892, and _Rezanov_, published in 1906), 1915. Stokes.
_Mrs. Balfame_, 1916. Stokes.
_The Living Present_, 1917. Stokes.
_The White Morning_, 1918. Stokes.
_The Avalanche_, 1919. Stokes.
_The Sisters-in-Law_, 1921. Stokes.
_Sleeping Fires_, 1922. Stokes.