MARY AUSTIN
[Spellings and punctuation, even though inadvertent, have been
faithfully transcribed for the sake of preserving something intensely
human in the personal sketch below.]
[Typewritten] Independence, Cal.
Nov. 25th, 1902.
Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.;
Gentlemen,
Enclosed you will find the biographical sketch of my life and some
account of my work, in reply to your request for the same. I have
no doubt that you can get some expression of opinion from Mr. Muir
in regard to my book “A Land of Little Rain”. but I will take pains
to make sure of the matter and write you again in regard to it.
Chas. F. Lummis, editor of Out West, and George Hamlin Fitch,
literary editor of The San Fransisco Chronicle, and also the
reviewer of the Argonaut can be counted on to give me some friendly
notice, especially Lummis as he is my first and warmest friend in
the west.... I have written the biographical sketch in the third
person to avoid the use of so many “I’s,” which always makes me
miserable, you can cut out all that is not to the point.
Sincerely yours
MARY AUSTIN.
[Written]
P. S. I am afraid you will be disappointed with the notes but it is
the best I can do.
[Enclosure. Typewritten]
Mary Hunter Austin was born in Carlinville, Illinois, descended on her
mother’s side from the family of the celebrated French chemist,
Daguerre. Being born fortunately before the flood of so-called
children’s books, she began to be familiar with the English classics as
soon as she could read, and the study of these and an intimate
acquaintance with nature occupied most of the years until the end of her
university work. At that time very serious ill health drove her to
California, and a friendly destiny provided that she should settle in
the new and untamed lands about the Sierra Nevadas and the desert edges.
Although not yet twenty, she had already made some preparation for
following the profession of teaching, and in the unconventional life of
mining towns, and in the wickiups of the Indians found exceptional
opportunities for pushing her investigations in child-study.
Mrs. Austin’s work in this direction met with instant recognition in her
state, and before long many excellent positions were open to her, but by
this time she discovered that she did not want them. Like most desert
dwellers, Mrs. Austin had come under the spell of its mystery, and after
teaching a short time in the Los Angeles Normal School, was glad to
return to the life of the hills, and soon after began to devote herself
seriously to writing.
Very early her work attracted the attention of The Atlantic Monthly, St.
Nicholas, and the Youth’s Companion. Most of the monthly magazines have
published work of hers.
All of Mary Austin’s work is like her life, out of doors, nights under
the pines, long days’ watchings by water holes to see the wild things
drink, breaking trail up new slopes, heat, cloud bursts, snow, wild
beast and mountain bloom, all equally delightful because understood.
* * * * *
[At this point the typewriting stops; the “biographical notes” continue
in pen and ink, Mrs. Austin writing on both sides of the sheets of
paper.]
* * * * *
N. B. I can’t do it, when I wrote the letter that accompanies this I
thought it would be easy to do, but it isn’t. There is really nothing to
tell. I have just _looked_, nothing more, when I was too sick to do
anything else I could lie out under the sage brush and look, and when I
was able to get about I went to look at other things, and by and by I
got to know when and where looking was most worth while. Then I got so
full of looking that I had to write to get rid of some of it to make
room for more. I was only two months writing “A Land of Little Rain” but
I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it. After a while I
will write a book about my brother the coyote which will make you “sit
up,” I mean that is the way I feel about it.
I have considered a long while, to see if I have any interesting
eccentricities such as make people want to buy the books of the people
who have them, but I think not. You are to figure to yourself a small,
plain, brown woman with too much hair, always a little sick, and always
busy about the fields and the mesas in a manner, so they say in the
village, as if I should like to see anybody try to stop me.
Years ago I was a good shot, but as I grew more acquainted with the ways
of wild folks I found it lie heavy on my conscience and so latterly have
given it up. I have a house by the rill of Pine creek, looking toward
Kearsarge, and the sage brush grows up to the door. As for the villagers
they have accepted me on the same basis as the weather, an institution
which there is no use trying to account for. Two years ago I delivered
the Fourth of July oration here, and if, when there is no minister of
any sort here, as frequently happens, I go and ring the church bell,
they will come in to hear me in the most natural manner.
When I go out of this valley (Owens) to attend or to talk to large
educational gatherings I ride 130 miles in the stage across the desert
to Mojave, and the driver lets me hold the lines. Once when he said the
water of Mojave made him sick, I put him inside and took the stage in
from Red Rock to Coyote Holes. The other passengers who were a barber
with a wooden leg, and a Londoner, head of a mining syndicate, took care
of my baby. You see I was the only one who knew how to drive four
horses.
For a long time before I came to Independence, I lived in Lone Pine
where the population is two-thirds Mexican and there gained the
knowledge of their character which informs many of my stories. I should
say that my husband who is Register of the U. S. Land office, is also a
botanist and much of my outdoor life is by way of assisting his field
work.
Now for my work--the best is “A Land of Little Rain,” and the child
verse in the St. Nicholas. I think the best and worst of it is that I am
a little too near to my material. Where I seem to skimp a little, I can
understand now that the book is cold, it was only that I presupposed a
greater knowledge in the reader. During the last six months I have
discovered that the same thing is happening to me that I complained of
in Jimville.--the desert has “struck in.” But I shall do better work,
and still better. I am pleased to learn through some of my editor
friends that my verse is rather better paid for and more widely copied
than the average product of verse makers, and I conceive it possible
that this might be traced to the influence of Piute and Shoshone
medicine men and Dancers who are the only poets I personally know. For
consider how I get nearer to the root of the poetic impulse among these
single-hearted savages than any other where. But if I write at length
upon this point you will say with my friend Kern River Jim, “This all
blame foolishness.” And this brings me to my work among the Indians in
which I am somewhat generally misrepresented. If I deny what is commonly
reported, that the Indians regard me worshipfully for the good I do,
then is the denial taken for modesty which it is not, but merely truth.
They tell me things because I am really interested and a little for the
sake of small favors but mostly because I give them no rest until they
do. Says my friend Kern River Jim, “What for you learn them Injun songs?
You can’t sing um, You go learn songs in a book, that’s good enough for
you.” Nevertheless I have been able to do them nearly as much good as
they have done me.
This is the best I can do for you in this way,--but whatever you are
minded to say of my work say this--that I have been writing only four or
five years and have not yet come to my full power, nor will yet for some
years more.
* * * * *
So wrote Mary Austin in late fall, 1902. Very nearly a year later
Houghton Mifflin Company published _The Land of Little Rain_, a
collection of fourteen sketches that were read with admiration and joy,
that are rediscovered every year, that established incontestably Mary
Austin’s qualifications as a writer.
“East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and
south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.
“Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far
into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets
the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s
is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that
supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that
purpose is not proven.”
The reader draws in his breath sharply. This is a _writer!_ And she has
style. Yes, but so have dozens of others. And they never do anything
with it. They write charming little essays, fanciful, forgotten. What
else has she?
She has keen eyes, a keen mind, a heart to understand and a silence and
time to come to the understanding. This much you make sure of as you go
deeper into the book, reading the accounts of _The Pocket Hunter_ and
_Jimville: A Bret Harte Town_. When you have finished you know Mrs.
Austin’s promise but unless you have read her later books you do not
know her performance.
It began right after the appearance of _The Land of Little Rain_ with
her next work, the novel _Isidro_, a romance dealing with the California
of the padres, and it reached its high and sustained level with _A Woman
of Genius_.
She did not remain on the edge of the desert. To do so would have been
fatal. She moved about and with benefit to herself and her work. Now she
lives in a house facing on Gramercy Park, New York, where she has a
studio. She has exchanged the Mojave desert for the desert of Manhattan,
but she is sheltered in an oasis touched with the lingering loveliness
of the New York H. C. Bunner knew. Ask her about the advantages of her
new environment and she will tell you a story:
“A young Californian who came East to try his fortune gravitated
naturally to Washington Square where Genius is supposed to germinate. He
was personally conducted to the Liberal Club where a young woman in
bobbed hair and a futurist dress asked him if he didn’t think the
Liberal Club the most remarkable thing in America.
“‘Well,’ said the Westerner, ‘there’s the Grand Canyon, you know.’
“There you have it,” concludes Mrs. Austin. “If you haven’t seen the
Grand Canyon you had better keep away from the Liberal Club; but once
you have caught the lift and bigness of America outside New York, then
New York is the most inspiring place in the world in which to work.”
Ask her about her fine novel _The Ford_, a story of present day
California which takes its title from a river shallow where the boy
Kenneth Brent rescues a lamb from drowning:
“The book records incidents in my own life in the struggle for the
waters of Owens River which the city of Los Angeles stole from us,” Mrs.
Austin explains. “That was a very wicked episode, and I did not begin to
do justice to the chicanery of Los Angeles. I am saving some of these
things for the sequel to _The Ford_! It was I who discovered and made
public the attempt of the city to secure the surplus rights of the river
in just such fashion as I have described Anne and Kenneth Brent doing in
the book.”
We have had Mary Austin’s portrait of herself in 1902; let us have a
portrait of her by a visitor who met her about that time. Elia W.
Peattie, writing in the Boston _Transcript_, supplies just those
externals that we need to round out our picture:
“I met another desert woman, too [she had been describing a visit to Ida
Meacham Strobridge]--Mary Austin, who has within the last eighteen
months appeared twice in the _Atlantic_ in sketches which could have
been written only by one who knows the solitude and understands it. _A
Shepherd of the Sierras_ and _The Little Coyote_ were the titles of
these stories. She has also written much verse and of a peculiar order.
It is for children, and has a wild and curious quality. This has
appeared chiefly in the _Youth’s Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_.
“Mary Austin lives down in Independence, where her husband is Government
land agent. She is fairly on the edge of Death Valley, and her
companions are principally Paiute Indians.... Mrs. Austin has an
Indian-like solemnity about her. She has a pervading shyness and likes
the philosophy of the Indians and their poetry. Instinctively she is
artistic in all she does, and her writing has undeniable style as well
as remarkable individuality. Her paper on _The Indian Arts_ read at one
of the art sessions of the biennial meeting of the General Federation of
Women’s Clubs was the most purely literary paper of the entire
convention. It was written too well, if anything. It was so smooth that
it failed to arrest the attention of the more casual listeners....
“All that Mrs. Austin says has a certain value. She speaks seldom. Her
utterance is rather slow, her voice very soft, and her remarks are
usually grave.... The desert has cloistered her; she is a religieuse,
serving her kind, wearing no habit, subscribing to no creed.”
A bit of a purple patch, that last! The truth is that the desert molded
Mary Austin without stunting her. She is like one of those desert plants
of which she tells us, whose maturity may be attained at ten feet or
four inches, according to moisture and the region in which they grow.
Herself, she is a desert species--but transplanted in time! She made her
final escape before the desert “struck in” too deeply; had she not done
so dwarfing would have been inescapable; instead of the ten-foot
maturity she would have given us her best--her all, her completion--at
four inches.
She has been lucky, yes, but not beyond her deserving. The _Atlantic_
which printed her first offerings was, you will remember, the same
_Atlantic_ which gave Jack London his first chance. The Boston magazine
seldom prints serials, how seldom may be gathered from the fact that
five years elapsed after the appearance of Mary S. Watts’s _Van Cleve_
before the “continued” line footed one of its pages. Yet the _Atlantic_
serialized _Isidro_. The _North American Review_, no less severely
selective than the _Atlantic_,--the _North American_, which had printed
serially novels by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, elected to print Mary
Austin’s _The Man Jesus_ month by month. _The Man Jesus_ is a biography
such as none but an American steeped in the wilderness, steeped in fine
literature, with a deeply developed reflective habit could have written.
It might almost have been predicted from a woman who remarked in 1904,
who threw out in the course of a casual lecture the arresting words:
“Most of the great religions have originated in desert countries.”
If we say that _The Man Jesus_ called for unusual knowledge and an
unusual faculty, what shall we say of _A Woman of Genius_? Some readers
were doubtless shocked by this novel on its first appearance; the number
must be smaller to-day. It is as honest as George Meredith and as
finely wrought as anything by Henry James. Genius, in the experience of
Olivia Lattimore, a superb actress of tragic rôles, is a gift, a
possession in the sense in which we say that a man or a woman “is
possessed of”--or by--a devil. Living in Chicago on 85 cents a week was
not only not in any way important to her artistic development, it was
actually “a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of
serving you anew with entertainment.” In other words, the people who
think that poverty and heartbreak are inevitable in the case of a person
of genius, are even desirable or requisite for the growth and flowering
of that genius, are a pack of silly souls. Worse than that, they are
guilty souls; for their attitude allows misery and wretchedness to
befall the gifted mortal to such an extent that the wonder is the world
has any geniuses at all, or any who survive to reveal what is in them.
And so Mrs. Austin makes her Olivia Lattimore bare her life for us
pretty completely. It is an austere and serious revelation.
“About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of
the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was
when the light failed.... On the impulse I spoke.
“‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I want to know ...?’
“It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right.
Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended
shock come over my mother’s reminiscent softness....
“‘Olivia! Olivia!’ She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the
ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private
terror of its own. ‘Olivia, I’ll not hear of such things! You are not to
speak of them, do you understand! I’ll have nothing to do with them!’
“‘I wanted to know,’ I said. ‘I thought you could tell me....’”
“I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing--it
was the first week in November--beginning to collect on the edges of the
walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a
background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my
mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale,
scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking
the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced
them together there in the cold twilight.”
“‘I’m sorry, daughter’--she hesitated--‘I can’t help you. I don’t
know.... I never knew myself.’”
We follow the girl through marriage, the birth of a son and his death in
infancy, the almost accidental disclosure of her gift for the stage, her
struggle with her husband, the gradual breach between them and his
defection involving the village dressmaker, the long and harrowing
period in Chicago after his death when Olivia was without work, without
money and often without hope. Success came, of course; it takes death
itself to extinguish genius such as she possessed, “of which I was for
the moment the vase, the cup.” The finest thing in this remarkable story
is the portrayal of that last struggle between Olivia and Helmeth
Garrett in which the woman’s gift (or possession) bests even love. But
the chapters on Olivia’s childhood are wonderfully penetrating glimpses
into the mind of a young girl and the depiction of other characters is
of a high order; one of the best being the sketch of Olivia’s brother,
Forester, “Forrie,” who made a vocation, a life work, of the business of
being a dutiful son. _A Woman of Genius_ is the work of a woman of
genius.
“Whatever you are minded to say of my work say this--that I ... have not
yet come to my full power.” You knew, Mrs. Austin. And now we all know.
BOOKS BY MARY AUSTIN
_Love and the Soul-Maker_, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
_The Green Bough._ Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
_The Land of the Sun_, Houghton Mifflin.
_The Land of Little Rain_, 1903. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Basket Woman_, 1904. Houghton Mifflin.
_Isidro_, 1905. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Flock_, 1906. Houghton Mifflin.
_Santa Lucia_, 1908. Harper & Brothers, New York.
_Lost Borders_, 1909. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Arrow Maker_, 1911. Doubleday, Page.
_Christ in Italy_, 1911. Doubleday, Page.
_A Woman of Genius_, 1912. Doubleday, Page.
_The Lovely Lady_, 1913. Doubleday, Page.
_The Man Jesus_, 1915. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Ford_, 1917. Houghton Mifflin.
_The Young Woman Citizen_, 1918. The Woman’s Press, New York.
_The Trail Book_, 1918. Houghton Mifflin.
_26 Jayne Street_, 1920. Houghton Mifflin.