ELEANOR H. PORTER
In the pleasant old town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a fourth
(top floor) apartment and above it a roof garden. Come up on the roof.
“Fresh, clean light canvas, framed in by borders of flowers, with a
hammock to dream in and a good stout table and a typewriter,” confront
us. At the table a little woman, blonde, youthful looking, her light and
fluffy hair neatly combed, her blue eyes--“laughing eyes”--changing
expression rapidly with her thoughts. She is writing with a lead pencil
and when she stops to talk to us she shows a ready wittedness, a
conversational gift, an aliveness that are charming--charming!
She tells us that she works here every morning when too boisterous winds
or a driving storm do not make it impossible; or too low a temperature.
She writes novels. It takes her a year to do one and when she has
finished she is good for nothing for several days. She writes each book
three times; first in lead pencil, the second draft on the typewriter
here, “and it is this copy that is polished over and rewritten and
tinkered with--and all fixed up.” The third draft has usually few
changes. It, or a stenographer’s copy of it, goes to the publisher, and
later there comes a message from Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston:
“Advance orders for your new novel _Just David_ are 100,000 copies.”
Isn’t that rewarding? _Just David_ will be out in a few days now....
The author of _Just David_--and _The Road to Understanding_ and _Oh,
Money! Money!_ and, why _of course_ of _Pollyanna_!--is not thinking of
the royalties that will be hers on 100,000 copies of her novel. No.
Eleanor H. Porter makes a moderate fortune with each of her books. But
what rewards her for the task of writing them--did you ever sit down and
write, just _write_, 80,000 words, let alone telling a story?--what
gives her the satisfaction that’s of the heart is the invincible proof
that a hundred thousand are buying her book on faith. They believe in
_her_, in her work; she has pleased them, made them happier or better
somehow, somewhere, somewhen; they look to her for help, for cheer, for
entertainment, for a kind of enlightenment that they haven’t found
elsewhere and that will be supremely worth their while.
Stand aside, you who are sophisticated, cynical, world worn and merely
flippant! If you could see assembled before you in one vast throng this
hundred thousand and tens of thousands more, if you could see them
gathered about you with upturned interested, expectant and eager faces,
what would you say? What _could_ you say? Do you think your
sophistication would be proof against the expression on these faces? Do
you think that _you_ could give them what they need? Would your
subtleties help them? Would they listen to you and go away a little
braver, a little more comforted, a little readier to face life?
Up in the White Mountains there’s a cabin called after the girl
Pollyanna. Out in Colorado there’s a Pollyanna teahouse. A little maid
in Texas bears the name. The builder of an apartment house in an Indiana
city has his fancy struck. There’s a Pollyanna brand of milk, and
Pollyanna clubs are formed whose members sport an enameled button
showing a young girl’s sweet face. Surely the woman who can so touch the
hearts, the imagination, or even merely the fancy of men and women and
children everywhere--surely she and her work call for respectful
consideration. There must be something here, something admirable, if we
can only put our fingers on it! There is.
And first let us hear about Mrs. Porter herself. We have met her at
work. Was there anything to suggest direct descent from Governor William
Bradford of the Mayflower and the “stern and rockbound coast”? There was
not. There was, however, a suggestion of a childhood spent in an oldtime
white frame New England house, with green blinds and big pillars in
front. There was certainly more than a suggestion of a child brought up
to play indoors and out. With a little imagination we could have seen
her studying music, always music, loving to improvise. “I liked to play
out all my moods and everything I saw and heard. I could get rid of my
tempers, too, by sometimes just playing them out. And I liked to play
the beautiful things I saw--sunsets, woods and lakes.... In that way,
perhaps, _David_ is autobiographical.... The many years’ training in
voice as well as instrumental music has never failed to help me in
expressing just the mood I want to express.”
She was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, a place of some few thousands
in the White Mountains, the daughter of Francis H. Hodgman and Llewella
Woolson Hodgman. She had a brother to play with. She “knew the woods
from early childhood.” Little verses and stories by her commemorated
birthdays and other occasions of moment. In high school ill health
arrested her studies. For a while books had to be put entirely aside and
she lived a good deal outdoors. Spruce, fir, cedar and tamarack,
mountain flowers and plants, became personalities to be distinguished
one from another and to be delighted in for their peculiarities. When
she wrote _Just David_ she had only to recall her youth, after all.
Health regained, she went to Boston for more musical study under private
teachers and at the New England Conservatory. She sang in concerts and
in church choirs. In 1892 she was married to John Lyman Porter. She
lived a year in Chattanooga and a few years in New York and Springfield,
Vermont; Boston (Cambridge) has been her home with these exceptions. Mr.
and Mrs. Porter have lived in Cambridge for the last sixteen years. Mrs.
Porter’s mother, Mrs. Hodgman, an invalid, has lived with them.
We have said that Mrs. Porter works every morning. Yes, the morning
hours are set apart for her work and it is not readily interrupted. Her
first book, published in 1907, was _Cross Currents_, a study of child
labor, struck out from her by what she had seen in New York of
youngsters made to toil at the fashioning of artificial flowers. Indeed,
her first impulse to write came to her in New York, on an afternoon
several years after her marriage, as she stood in Trinity churchyard. It
was a flash, a dramatic impression such as comes to many a visitor. When
these dead awaken! _If_ these dead were to awaken, were to come back to
us here and now! How would they think and feel about what they would
see? What would they say and do?
Well--
“So that was how I got my start.” True enough, for the real start comes
in the impulse, doesn’t it? After that has been felt intervals hardly
matter....
_Cross Currents_ was successful and Mrs. Porter was persuaded to write a
sequel, _The Turn of the Tide_. She had developed a habit, now fixed, of
clipping from newspapers and magazines bits of news, comments, whatnot,
that were significant to her. These she filed, filed and card indexed.
One day she saw in some magazine four lines expressing wonder as to what
would happen, if feminine influence came into the home life of three
bachelors.
From those four lines, or rather, from the idea in them, came _Miss
Billy_; and from _Miss Billy_ came _Miss Billy’s Decision_ and _Miss
Billy--Married_. Not immediately; Mrs. Porter filed the clipping. She
thought vaguely that perhaps, maybe, some day, she would write a short
story--only a short story--based on the idea in this sentence or so....
_Pollyanna_--
So many think of Mrs. Porter only as the author of _Pollyanna_--they are
not her real readers who know better!--that it is much fairer to her and
ourselves to consider her other books. After the Pollyanna stories came
_Just David_, easily accounted for. Mrs. Porter says that her thoughts
had often played around the idea of a child brought up to know only what
is good. You shudder, or laugh. Good heavens, don’t you wish that _you_
could have been spared some of the things you were brought up to know?
At the bottom of your acquired attitude is there no faint wistfulness,
no trace of longing for something once loved and lost--not awhile but
forever?
David is the only son of a violinist. After his mother’s death the
father carries the boy to a cabin in the mountains. Six years afterward
he is brought to a quiet country town--a lad in love with music, with
birds and flowers.
“Mr. and Mrs. Holly, more than ever now, were learning to look at the
world through David’s eyes. One day--one wonderful day--they went to
walk in the woods with the boy; and whenever before had Simon Holly left
his work for so frivolous a thing as to walk in the woods!
“It was not accomplished without a struggle, as David could have told.
All the morning David urged and begged. If for once, just once, they
would leave everything and come, they would not regret it, he was sure.
But they shook their heads and said, ‘No, no, impossible.’ In the
afternoon the pies were done and the potatoes dug and David urged and
pleaded again. And to please the boy they went.
“It was a curious walk. Ellen Holly trod softly with timid feet. She
threw hurried, frightened glances from side to side. It was plain that
Ellen Holly did not know how to play. Simon Holly stalked at her elbow,
stern, silent and preoccupied. It was plain that Simon Holly not only
did not know how to play, but did not care to find out.
“The boy tripped along ahead and talked. He had the air of a monarch
displaying his kingdom. Here was a flower that was like a story for
interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth telling. Even
Simon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly
picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, and pine, and larch;
and then, in answer to Mrs. Holly’s murmured, ‘But, David, where is the
difference? They look so much alike,’ had said:
“‘Oh, but they are not. Just see how much more pointed at the top this
fir is than that spruce back there; and the branches grow straight out,
too, like arms, and they are all smooth and tapering at the end like a
pussy-cat’s tail. But the spruce back there--its branches turned down
and out--didn’t you notice?--and they are all bushy at the end like a
squirrel’s tail. Oh, they’re lots different.
“‘That’s a larch way ahead--that one with the branches all scraggly and
close down to the ground. I could start to climb that easy, but I
couldn’t that pine over there. See, it’s way up before there is a place
for your feet! But I love pines. Up there on the mountain, where I
lived, the pines were so tall that it seemed as if God used them
sometimes to hold up the sky.’
“And Simon Holly heard, and said nothing, and that he did say
nothing--especially nothing in answer to David’s confident assertions
concerning celestial and terrestrial architecture--only goes to show how
well, indeed, the man was learning to look at the world through David’s
eyes....”
“If the characters are true, the story tells itself,” says Mrs. Porter.
“The plot comes very easily after I get some leading idea which I wish
to work out. It is sometimes months after I have something in mind
before I have carried the idea along far enough to begin writing. The
ideas for novels come from careful observation and wide reading.
“No, I would not say that novels are written by inspiration. I call it
enthusiasm. And unless the writer has enthusiasm while writing a novel I
think the indifference is bound to show in the story.”
Her own enthusiasm holds her to the task, carries her through the year
she devotes to a book, enables her sometimes to write steadily for eight
or nine hours and then spend an evening with her heavy correspondence.
Her enthusiasm, a steady flame, burns to the end; and then her
exhaustion does not matter. The task is done.
Without an idea--a crisp, definite, interesting idea is always there,
whether you like her novels or no--without an idea Mrs. Porter won’t
write. But when she begins to write she has much more than the idea.
She has a synopsis written out. She couldn’t work without one, she says.
And to that synopsis she sticks pretty closely. “For I must see my aim,”
she explains, “I must have every part of the story bear definitely
toward the object. The synopsis of _Pollyanna_ differs very little from
the completed story. However, the glad game was not in the synopsis.
That did invent itself--in the second chapter. And of course various
characters always have a way of sort of writing themselves in, and new
scenes and incidents suggest themselves as the book grows.”
Does Mrs. Porter preach? Not by intention. She abhors the notion of
trying to. She does believe that “the idea of happiness should be held
up to people. But I do not attempt to preach happiness,” she adds
hastily. “I make my characters as simple and natural as possible. If the
characters are sufficiently vivid, if they are true, they can say a lot
of things that no author could say directly without being charged with
sermonizing.”
Oho! remarks the critic, Mrs. Porter thinks that if she puts her
preaching into the mouths of her persons she can escape the charge of
sermonizing. Wrong. Mrs. Porter does not say that. She does declare that
_if the characters are true_ they can say things that, from the author,
would be mere preaching. Truth in your people comes first, must always
be first; if they are true they can, and probably will, not only say but
do many things with a moral in them. Why, aren’t we always reading a
moral out of--or into--every other thing we hear our neighbors say or
see them do?
The critic has another quarrel with Eleanor Porter. He accuses her of
“evasive idealism” and “sham optimism” in her stories. Let her answer
him:
“Just why the ‘realities of life’ should always mean the filth and
brambles, sticks and stones and stumbling blocks of our daily pathway I
have never understood,” she cries. “But such seems to be the case. To
most critics there are evidently no pleasantly agreeable, decent
qualities of life. But I believe that there are, and these realities may
lend themselves to just as sincere and direct an interpretation of life
as may the other kind.
“There is a blue sky, there is a warm sun, and there are birds that sing
in the treetops. Then why should their presence be unnoticed--sometimes?
That is certainly not a sugary philosophy utterly without a basis in
logic or human experience. I realize that this sort of thing can be
overdone, but still contend that always to look at the hole instead of
the doughnut is not only very foolish--but very detrimental to one’s
digestion.”
Bravo! A simple, straightforward and unstudied rejoinder, that! And if
the critic says that he is only asking for “both realities” let us
demand of him why he praised the “artistry” of those dark Russian novels
of muck and insanity--and nothing else. He must condemn them for their
worse one-sidedness ere we listen to another word from him. Moreover, we
have, we must confess, whatever our personal tastes in fiction, always
enough and too many of the specialists in gloom; never quite enough of
the purveyors of cheerfulness.
You may feel a possibly irrational prejudice against the child that
cheers, as Pollyanna or David, but if you do not find absorbing the
situation in a “grown-up” novel like _The Road to Understanding_ it is
your fault, not Eleanor Porter’s. Here is the son of a very rich man who
has always had his way and so takes it headlong in the matter of
marrying his aunt’s nursegirl. She is not fitted to make him happy. They
are separated--never mind how. The husband thinks of it as a “vacation”
for his wife and the baby girl and has no idea that the breach may be
semi-permanent. The wife makes it so. She goes to a friend of her
husband and begs him to enable her to become in education, in tastes, in
deportment fit to be Burke Denby’s wife. And she persuades him to it.
Her whereabouts, the whereabouts of herself and Burke Denby’s little
daughter, is so simply and effectually concealed, that the husband never
gets trace of them. What Helen Denby has set out to do is rather
impossible as regards herself, she acknowledges that; but with the
passage of years and constant association with well-bred people she does
very largely acquire the things she lacked. Yes, years! It is an idea
and it is certainly a situation. This is no place to give away a
denouement but--they are brought together again.
An idea just as ingenious is the foundation of Mrs. Porter’s amusing
_Oh, Money! Money!_ It is the attempt of Mr. Stanley G. Fulton,
possessor of twenty millions of dollars, to find out how some of his
heirs will spend money after he is dead. They are three distant cousins
and each of them receives a trustee’s check for $100,000. Then plain
John Smith appears among them and watches results. He also learns a
thing or two and finds a wife in a woman of middle age (or more) whose
humorous wisdom is aptly summed up by her remark that “if you don’t know
how to get happiness out of five dollars, you won’t know how to get it
out of five thousand. For it isn’t the money that does things; it’s the
man behind the money.”
Sell? Of course books like this sell! You don’t have to be a
psychologist to grasp and subscribe to the six reasons for a big sale,
advanced by the publishers just before the publication of _Oh, Money!
Money!_--six reasons whose validity has been sufficiently proved as
these lines are being written, with proofs piling up hour by hour. Here
they are:
1. It deals with the most interesting subject in the world--the getting
and spending of money.
2. The story of three families--cousins--who unexpectedly receive
$100,000 each from an unknown relative, will strike a responsive chord,
in every reader’s heart and set every reader thinking how _he_ would
spend the money.
3. It has the same quality that has made Cinderella the most popular of
all fairy tales, the joy of watching a girl who has never been fairly
treated come out on top in spite of all odds.
4. The scene is laid in a little village and the whole book is a gem of
country life and shrewd Yankee philosophy.
5. There is a charming love theme with a happy ending.
6. And, above all, the story teaches an unobtrusive lesson that will
appeal to every one of Mrs. Porter’s readers; the lesson that happiness
must come from within, and that money cannot buy it.
* * * * *
Eleanor Hodgman Porter died on May 21, 1920.
BOOKS BY ELEANOR H. PORTER
_Cross Currents_, 1907.
_The Turn of the Tide_, 1908.
_The Story of Marco_, 1911.
_Miss Billy_, 1911.
_Miss Billy’s Decision_, 1912.
_Pollyanna_, 1913.
_Miss Billy--Married_, 1914.
_Pollyanna Grows Up_, 1915.
_Just David_, 1916.
_The Road to Understanding_, 1917.
_Oh, Money! Money!_ 1918.
_Dawn_, 1919.
_Mary-Marie_, 1919.
_Sister Sue_, 1921.
_The first two books were published by W. A. Wilde, Boston; the books
about Miss Billy and Pollyanna by the Page Company, Boston; the last six
books by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._