HELEN R. MARTIN
A chapter on Helen R. Martin can hardly be anything but a prolonged
interview, or a pieced interview, somewhat like a patchwork quilt,
constructed from talks of various persons with her at various times. And
always on the same subject--her subject--the Pennsylvania Dutch.
What there is to say about the writer and her work shall first be said.
She is the daughter of the Rev. Cornelius Reimensnyder, who came from
Germany to accept the pastorate of Lancaster county, so the daughter was
brought up among the Mennonites. She has written a novel every year or
so for the last fourteen years, writing in the time left over after
taking care of her home and her children, a boy and a girl; canvassing
for suffrage and campaigning for Socialism. Her home is in Harrisburg,
the capital of Pennsylvania. Her first novel was not of the people among
whom she had spent her life but “a romance of life as she would like it
to be.” Fortunately it did not sell, so she was led to look about her
for her future material. She did not begin to write until she met
Frederick R. Martin, to whom she was afterward married. He is an
instructor in music. And Mrs. Martin was herself a teacher. At one time
she taught children in a fashionable private school in New York City.
She knew the youngsters rather better than their parents.
Mrs. Martin, like Marjorie Benton Cooke and Harriet T. Comstock, is
interested in social questions. She has decided views on bringing up
children, wealth and poverty; she does not subscribe to Mrs. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s views of motherhood; she is not a feminist in any
general meaning of the word, because she believes that feminism in many
of its aspects is a passing phase. As a rule her preoccupation with
these problems is kept out of her work--the older generation of the
people she wrote about were blandly unaware that such questions reared
their heads--but her last two novels, _Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or
Christian?_ and _Maggie of Virginsburg_, introduce them extensively and
disastrously. Mrs. Martin’s failure with _Gertie Swartz_ arose entirely
from her inability to assimilate such matter _before_ writing her story.
As a result industrial conditions and employees’ welfare are
indigestible lumps in the novel. Some subjects cannot be introduced
bodily into a piece of fiction. They must arise as they arise in life
out of situations and character. They cannot be discussed in a story as
they are discussed from a platform. They can only act upon the people of
the tale or be acted upon by them; they can be discussed, if the
representation of life is to be fairly accurate, only to the extent that
the situations of the story call for. It is true that life contains many
futile and windy discussions, some academic, some not; but the only
things that count are those which involve action or precipitate action
or express or mold character. The novelist must exclude all else,
otherwise the novel will lack illusion and resemble nothing so much as
the minutes of the last meeting of the Society for the Suppression of
Sociological Sores.
_Gertie Swartz_ aside, the real controversy over Mrs. Martin’s work
arises from her studies of Pennsylvania Dutch life, and is of a sort to
give satisfaction to her as a writer. For the very nature of the
controversy carries with it the plain implication that she has got under
the skin of her people. It is alleged and deposed that she does not do
the Pennsylvania Dutch justice. The allegation was most completely made
in the New York _Evening Post_ for April 29, 1916, by Isaac R.
Pennypacker.
Briefly, Mr. Pennypacker declared that those who knew the Pennsylvania
Dutch “in a broader way” than Mrs. Martin’s stories reflect them “have
never taken her pictures of the life very seriously.” George Schock’s
_Hearts Contending_, a novel repeatedly praised by William Dean Howells,
“should be read as a corrective of Mrs. Martin’s tales.” Elsie
Singmaster also has had a better understanding of the Pennsylvania
Germans. The Moravians and the famous Bethlehem Bach Choir are proof of
Pennsylvania German culture. Read Whittier’s poem, _The Pennsylvania
Pilgrim_ (he thought it better than _Snowbound_ but said the public
would never find it out!). Pennsylvania German troops did bravely in the
Revolution and the Civil War. Mrs. Martin admits that the Pennsylvania
Dutch rise but it is ungracious of her to call attention to the
lingering accent, because Americans speak French and German badly.
Besides, she does not cite all the instances of their rise to high
station. She refers to their unpolished manners but great men, like Dr.
Johnson and Edwin M. Stanton, seldom have nice manners. “Mrs. Martin’s
curious comment on the fact that the Pennsylvania Dutchman’s barn is
larger than his house would be paralleled if she were to find it curious
that Mr. Wanamaker’s department store is larger than his residence.” Is
it? But how would Mr. Pennypacker account for the fact that Judge Gary’s
house on Fifth avenue is larger than his office at 71 Broadway? “A
punctilious regard for good manners by which she sets such store would
forever have prevented Mrs. Martin from publishing her books, because
the portraits of the people in them are caricatures.” Look out, Mrs.
Martin! Some one sees resemblances in your caricatures!
There is the case against Mrs. Martin and it is the highest compliment
her work could have. The next highest compliment is the fact that Minnie
Maddern Fiske made _Barnabetta_ into a play, _Erstwhile Susan_, and
appeared herself in the title-rôle. And the next highest compliment is
what Richard Watson Gilder of the _Century_ once said to Mrs. Martin:
“Your people do not converse on paper--they talk. When a community is
written up that community always resents it, even if it is described
flatteringly. You can’t praise any community enough to satisfy its own
conceit about itself.”
So much for compliments. If you call for proofs ask Mrs. Martin to show
you or read to you (she won’t allow them, as a rule, to be published)
some of the hundreds of letters she has received from Pennsylvania
Germans wanting to know if So-and-so was the original of this character,
asking why such and such a person was “put in your book,” complaining
that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch good traits,
complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch bad
traits, as stinginess and selfishness toward the womenfolk; praising her
delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life, condemning her for her
delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life. The truth is this, as Mrs.
Martin says:
“The Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like my stories. That is, the educated
descendants of the Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like them. The people of
whom I write generally are people who read nothing, not even newspapers,
except, as one woman told me, ‘sometimes meby the comic section.’ But
the Pennsylvania Dutch citizens of such places as Reading, Lancaster,
Lebanon, Bethlehem and other cities resent my commentaries upon the race
from which they have risen. Overlooking the finer and lovable characters
described in my books, they prefer to dwell upon the harsh people. I
wish more of them would take comfort from Tillie, Mrs. Dreary, and the
rest of my heroines.
“The only Pennsylvania Dutch who enjoy my stories seem to be those who
have moved West and to whom my books seem to come like a visit home.”
We think the reader of Mrs. Martin’s novels will thank us if we forego a
synoptic discussion of her tales and give instead what she has to say,
outside her books, about the people in them.
“It is a part of the common misconception that the Pennsylvania Dutch of
whom I write are all Mennonites. Now, Mennonites are a religious sect,
not a race or a nationality! I have written very little about
Mennonites. They are as inoffensive and mild as the Quakers, and it is
absurd to confound characters like Mrs. Dreary of the play _Erstwhile
Susan_ and her foster son Jake (who are, of course, Pennsylvania Dutch)
with the sect of Mennonites. Once a Pennsylvania Dutchman becomes a
Mennonite, he gives over his harshness and other grievous faults and
leads a mild, gentle and inoffensive life. Of course they are all very
frugal and ‘close’--they never outgrow that.
“The Amishmen are set apart from the world by their hooks and eyes. They
never wear buttons and buttonholes because buttons and buttonholes are
worldly. All of them wear the same sort of garb. The women fold
kerchiefs over their shoulders and across the breast that their too
seductive charms may not be revealed.
“I remember the suspicion with which Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and
their wives would invariably regard me when, applying for a few days’
board, I would confess to being a married woman, not even a widow. Why,
then, was I going about without my husband? This made it harder for me
to obtain board than if I had been an old maid. ‘Where’s her husband,
anyhow?’ the farmer and his wife would speculate. ‘Her out here alone
fur three days yet and him not showin’ his face! It’s somepin awful
funny!’ Then the wife would tell me how in twenty-five years of married
life she had never yet spent a night away from her spouse.
“One morning as I was sitting on the kitchen porch writing to my husband
the farmer’s wife bent over my shoulder to read what I was writing. ‘Now
that there writin’,’ she remarked, ‘I can’t read it so very good.’ I
quickly laid the blotter over the page. ‘I am writing to my husband,’ I
said hastily, ‘to let him know where I am.’ She stared at me. ‘He don’t
know where you’re at?’ she gasped. ‘Well, I guess anyhow, then!’ Which,
being interpreted, meant: ‘I should think it was about time!’”
The following further account of these people is taken from a talk
Joseph Gollomb had with Mrs. Martin while she was in New York to see the
opening of Mrs. Fiske in _Erstwhile Susan_. The interview, printed in
the New York _Evening Post_ of January 22, 1916, provoked Mr.
Pennypacker’s blanket indictment which we have already recapitulated:
“You can tell the Pennsylvania Dutchman by his speech, even after he
sheds his queer clothes and barbering and takes on the guise of the
average American,” explained Mrs. Martin. “A bellboy in Allentown once
disarmed my wrath with, ‘Was you bellin’ for me? I didn’t hear it make.’
I knew him then as coming from my people. His father probably would say,
cocking his weather eye, ‘It looks for rain. I’m sure it’s going to make
something down.’ Or his mother, pricing at market, would ask, ‘For what
do you sell your chickens at? I want to wonder. I feel for getting that
fat one.’ Your washerwoman, with all the deference in the world, will
refer to your husband and hers: ‘Does your Charlie like his shirt
ironed? My mister don’t.’
“Enter Cashtown, Virginsville, or Bird-In-The-Hand (these are actual
towns). You’ll see houses painted flagrant red or yellow or pink; flower
gardens gorgeous with color. And there all the display, or even trace of
love of physical beauty, stops. The homes are immaculate but ugly. The
parlor is furnished at marriage, then shut up for years.
“Most of the living is in the kitchen. The barn is bigger than the house
and is more modern than the kitchen. That is because the Pennsylvania
Dutchman is parsimonious with everything but the labor of his women.
He’ll buy modern plows, an automobile to take his products to market,
modern harness to save his horse. Up-to-dateness in the barn means more
money in his pocket. But he won’t spend a cent to save his wife or his
daughter a bit of work. That is what they are for--to work for the men
folks in the kitchen or near it.
“When a young man goes courting, his eyes are not blinded with Cupid’s
bandage. They are wide open to note how the prospective bride qualifies
as a frugal, hardworking housewife. I watched a young man studying three
girls, his object matrimony. They were sewing and he made a test of
their frugality by the way they tore off their threads. The girl who
tore off her thread closest to the stitch appealed to him most. Later he
watched them at pie making. With another test in mind he asked each of
them for the waste dough scraps. One of the girls, wanting to make a
hit, gave him generously. The girl who had won in the first test
scrimped a few crumbs for him--and won his hand and heart. Soon after,
his foot was seen on the rocker of her chair as they talked--which is
Pennsylvania Dutch for ‘I mean to marry this girl!’ ...
“What has given them the passion for pinching their souls I don’t know.
It may be a narrow and too literal interpretation of the Bible--for they
are intensely religious in the orthodox sense. The great majority of
them sooner or later join one of the several religious
sects--Mennonites, Dunkards, Amish, or some other. ‘I feel to be plain,’
they say, and join one of these sects.
“Their word is as good as gold--but they’ll quibble with their word. A
grower will get his wife to water the tobacco leaf, to make it weigh
more. ‘Did you water this tobacco?’ the intending buyer asks the farmer.
‘No,’ the farmer answers with literal truth. But once he gives his
literal word it is good to the last penny.”
These people are without the sense of citizenship. “They don’t think
about it at all,” said Mrs. Martin to an interviewer whose report of her
was printed in the _Evening Sun_, New York, April 7, 1915. “They have no
problems and therefore they are contented with their lot. They are wary
of education; they think it makes rogues. ‘Look at those grafters in
Harrisburg!’ they will say.”
Mrs. Martin once told a capital story of the Amish. This sect has a rule
that any one who breaks a law of the meeting shall be penalized by
living apart from his wife or, in the case of a woman, her husband;
denied even the solace of recrimination. The wife of a particularly
stingy member of the sect devised a cunning punishment for him by
herself breaking one of the laws of the meeting. “I don’t know what rule
she broke,” Mrs. Martin said. “It may have been sewing a button on her
dress instead of a hook and eye, or she may have advocated painting the
house. In any event her husband became an outcast, unable even to speak
to his wife.
“I used the instance, somewhat colored, in a story. The result was that
I got a letter from an Amish preacher informing me that if I would give
him the name of the man who was so stingy to his wife the church would
punish him properly. Of course I replied that the instance was purely
fictitious. To which the reply of the minister was that he could not
understand why I wrote such lies about the sect!”
Introducing Mrs. Martin, a bright, cheerful, little bit of a woman, at a
booksellers’ convention in New York, William Hard declared that she and
Margaret Deland were like two large railroad systems each operating
exclusively in its own territory by a tacit understanding. Mrs. Martin,
to accept the simile, freights great quantities of valuable stuff and
yields far better dividends than some of the big transcontinental lines!
BOOKS BY HELEN R. MARTIN
_Elusive Hildegarde._
_Her Husband’s Purse._
_His Courtship._
_Warren Hyde._
_Tillie, a Mennonite Maid_, 1904.
_Sabina, a Story of the Amish_, 1905.
_The Betrothal of Elypholate and Other Tales of
the Pennsylvania Dutch_, 1907.
_The Revolt of Anne Royle_, 1908.
_The Crossways_, 1910.
_When Half-Gods Go_, 1911.
_The Fighting Doctor_, 1912.
_The Parasite_, 1913.
_Barnabetta_, 1914.
_For a Mess of Pottage_, 1915.
_Martha of the Mennonite Country_, 1915.
_Those Fitzenbergers_, 1917.
_Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian?_ 1918.
_Maggie of Virginsburg_, 1918.
_The Schoolmaster of Hessville_, 1920.
_The Marriage of Susan_, 1921.
_Mrs. Martin’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New
York, and the Century Company, New York._