SOPHIE KERR
“July 19, 1918.
“My dear Mr. Overton:
“It has been almost impossible for me to write this. I have made a dozen
beginnings and invariably found myself drifting off into reminiscences
of my childhood and funny lies about what I think and feel. Good
heavens! what do I think and feel? I don’t know. I really don’t. I have
never had the time nor found myself of sufficient interest to sit down
and think about myself subjectively. I am afraid that this is a very
queer narrative and very dull, but at least I have tried to give only
facts....
“I was born near Denton, Maryland, a small town located in the ‘sandy
belt’ of the Eastern Shore. It is a narrow-minded, kind-hearted,
conventional, self-respecting community, not very enterprising--an
average little semi-Southern town. My father had a nursery and fruit
farm, and cared more, I think, for beautiful trees than he did for
people. We had lovely arborvitæ and red japonica hedges, magnolia trees,
an extraordinary collection of evergreens, and many unusual foreign
flowering shrubs.
“I went to school at Denton, the public school, and the embryo High
School of twenty to twenty-five years ago. And then I went to college.
“As a child I read everything that I could lay hands on and we always
had books and magazines at home. But my reading was not guided and it
was my great misfortune not to find among my teachers, either in school
or college, even one with any special mental quality or deep and sound
culture, or even any vital enthusiasm--with the exception of the
psychology teacher at college.
“I began to write at college, the sort of imitative stuff that most
college girls write--very highbrow essays on Maeterlinck, and that kind
of thing. Not much fiction or poetry, as I remember. But I had my ideas
of a writing career, for all that. When I was graduated from college I
was just eighteen and I came home and told my father that I was going to
be an author and he might as well buy me a typewriter--I was always of a
severely practical turn of mind. I got the typewriter and began to write
stories, first in longhand, then copying them single-spaced on the
machine; they made terrifying manuscripts. One got into the _Ladies’
World_, and one into the _Country Gentleman_, and one into _Truth_,
which was then a flourishing publication. And about that time, after I
had been home for a couple of years, at the suggestion of an old friend
of my father’s I went to the University of Vermont for a year of
graduate work. And I began to take a special course in history there
with Professor Samuel Emerson.
“I tell this with particularity, because it was the very best thing that
ever happened to me. As I worked with Professor Emerson, I gradually and
painfully became aware that I did not know how to use my mind, and that
my education was of the most shocking superficiality. I learned that I
didn’t know how to think. I will admit that I was surprised and oh, how
humiliated! If I’d only thrown myself on Professor Emerson’s mercy and
told him that I knew my shortcomings and asked him to help me! But I was
too youthfully proud for that, and I went on, dimly trying to get at the
thing myself and marking with a hopeless appreciation, which would have
doubtless amazed the Professor had he guessed it, the truly wonderful
way in which he used his own exceptional intellectuality.
“It is a fine thing to know what you do not know. It set me to work to
try to get what I did not have--a disciplined, well-ordered, logical
mind, a store of knowledge, a really broad culture. Alas, I never got
any of them, and I never shall. It takes different training and
environment from infancy to produce them, as well as greater
capabilities than mine. But I did at least get this--the habit of
thinking things out for myself, and a poor opinion, thought out by the
individual, is better than a lazy acceptance of some one else’s say-so.
“Naturally, my year with Professor Emerson gave me a very low opinion of
my chances to become a writer. I let writing alone for a while, and then
began doing little light things for the Pittsburgh _Gazette_, one of
whose staff I had met while on a visit to Pittsburgh. They were mostly
little essays--though that word is really too dignified for them--on the
foibles and fashions of the time. Sometimes a drop or two of sentiment
and little amusing incidents that I gathered when visiting in
Washington and Baltimore--we Southerners are great visitors, you
know--occasionally a scrap of very light verse.
“But this was not enough. I got restless and I wrote to the _Gazette_
people and asked for a job. I got it--I was to run the woman’s page of
their evening paper, and do Sunday specials. After I arrived the duties
of music critic were added, and later I had charge of a Sunday
supplement. The people on the _Gazette_ were very kind and patiently
tutored me through my greenhorn days. The training was excellent and I
worked there very happily for several years.
“But I had been trying some magazine work--more light, semi-humorous
stuff, and the _Woman’s Home Companion_ bought several of my pieces. I
went to New York to see them in the spring and in the fall I asked them
for a job. And got it,--assistant to Miss Gertrude B. Lane, who was then
the assistant editor, and is now the editor.
“I have stayed with the _Companion_ ever since, save for a year when I
went with the ill-starred _Circle_, and now I am managing editor. All
this covers a period of over ten years.
“After I got to New York the writing fever got me, and I tried some
stories and more short articles of sentiment and humor. Some of these
were published and some of them came back to me. More and more I tried
to do fiction, and more and more I did it: now I have three books
out--_Love at Large_, _The Blue Envelope_ and _The Golden Block_--and
another in the works, and I’ve written innumerable short stories, most
of which have been published. Of course the very best story I ever
wrote I cannot sell. I occasionally run across a copy of that story in
my rejected manuscript drawer and I say, ‘Never mind--some day I’ll wish
you on an editor, yet.’
“None of my stories are in the least autobiographical, and I
rarely--almost never--put real people or incidents in my stories, and
then only as a foundation on which the action of the story may go
forward. My stories are built up from my imagination, character after
character, plot, action and finale. I try to work out everything
logically, and after I have written a story I go over it and turn the
cold eye of criticism on its chronology and the convincingness of its
detail. Heaven forefend that I should intimate that I make no mistakes
in these,--but at least I try to get them right. That is where my long
editorial training is an asset.
“Furthermore, what my various characters say does not necessarily
reflect my own views or beliefs--I have no propaganda spirit--the
story’s the thing. Time and time again have indignant readers berated me
for beliefs expressed in the speeches of my characters--beliefs which
were at wide variance with my own, but perfectly in keeping with the
character who expressed them.
“(I seem to be wandering away from my theme, Mr. Overton, and truly, it
all seems very silly and flat to me. Here are some unrelated facts which
you may be able to use somehow--they sound like the answers to an _Alice
in Wonderland_ questionnaire.)
“I read heaps of biography and autobiography and fiction and poetry, and
I do not read any of these because of the possible effect they may have
on my work, but because I like to. I read all the magazines, too, but
because it is part of my job to see what they are doing. I would rather
be unhappy than uncomfortable. I am a good cook and like to do it;
indeed I can make better gingerbread and better spoon-bread and better
strawberry preserves than any one in the world--this is not arrogance,
but a beautiful exceptional truth, as Mr. Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis,
editor of _Munsey’s Magazine_] would say. I work very hard, all the
time, and I do not like parties and teas and such and never go to them,
when I can get out of it. I write whenever I have any time and I have
trained myself to use any time I can get and to go on with a story
without re-reading what I’ve already written, even after a lapse of
several days. I am an individualist without having the least conviction
that it’s the best thing to be. I do not take my own--or most other
people’s--writing very seriously. I believe that there was never a time
when so many people were writing and writing well, but saying nothing of
interest or value. On the other hand, I believe that there is a lot of
big work being done and that the mediocre stuff doesn’t really obscure
it. I’d rather be an editor than a writer, but I like to be both.
“(Now, really--this is getting ‘curiouser and curiouser,’ to revert
again to _Alice_. Will it do--or won’t it? And, if not, what have I left
unsaid that I ought to have said? I am gradually working myself up, I am
afraid, into a state of self-conscious muzziness. And I don’t want
_that_ to go into your book.)”
So writes Sophie Kerr (Mrs. Sophie Kerr Underwood) in response to an
appeal for some information about herself that might legitimately
gratify the natural curiosity of her readers. Her readers are a
multitude! She has had stories in “all the magazines,” so to speak; the
statement doesn’t exaggerate much. She hasn’t had a story, so far as we
know, in the _New Republic_ but when that Effort decides to take up the
publication of short stories doubtless she will!
Mrs. Underwood’s short stories need no introduction (to use the sacred
formula), and anyway we are here concerned with her as a novelist, and
primarily with her as the author of _The Blue Envelope_ and _The Golden
Block_.
Both these stories are concerned with women in business and there the
resemblance pretty nearly stops. _The Blue Envelope_ has for its heroine
a young girl (who tells the story) under twenty. Leslie Brennan is
pretty, a pretty butterfly, used to nothing but spending money and
having a joyous if innocent time. She lives with Mrs. Alexander, a woman
of family and breeding and wealth. Her guardian, Uncle Bob, pays her
bills. But when Mrs. Alexander is summoned to Maine by illness Leslie
goes to live with the Morrisons and meets Randall Heath. Heath makes
love to her and the shock when she finds out that he was only after her
money makes somewhat easier compliance with the unusual wish of her dead
father that she spend two years earning her living.
This adventure--earning your living is the greatest adventure in the
world and Sophie Kerr can prove it to you!--this enterprise takes Leslie
to New York. And there she meets Minnie Lacy who has long earned a
living and knows a lot about men’s neckties, being engaged in the
business of making them. And there, also, after getting a stenographer’s
training and some education in the work of a secretary, Leslie enters
the employ of Ewan Kennedy, inventor of explosives.
The “blue envelope” doesn’t make its appearance until along toward the
end of the story. It contains the formula for a powder which he is going
to give to the United States Government--sarnite. The formula must be
delivered to the Chief of Ordnance in Washington. Certain persons,
agents, presumably, of a foreign government, are bending heaven and
earth to get the sarnite formula. They will stop at nothing. And Leslie
Brennan has the task of delivering it to the Chief of Ordnance.
Does it sound like a good story? It does. And is it? It is. So good that
you feel much more like telling it than analyzing it. But to “give it
away” would be a very unfair piece of business. In analyzing it what
shall we say? _The Blue Envelope_ is simple, straightforward, absorbing
and thoroughly enjoyable because of the perfect naturalism of narration.
We don’t mean realism--abused word! We mean naturalism. And what is
naturalism? Why, simply the knack, art, faculty or gift of inventing
incidents, drawing characters, writing conversation, describing action
in such an unaffected manner that it all seems the most natural thing in
the world!
Now realism is never naturalism. A great realist may stick close to life
and use actual occurrences or real people in his books but we call him a
realist because he makes us see in what he sets before us things we
never have seen before. Without any desire to be paradoxical--we are
dead in earnest--it must be asserted flatly that the realist is as
unreal as the romanticist. Often more so. The realist is simply one
extreme, of which the romanticist is the other. The naturalist comes in
between. And Sophie Kerr is first of all a naturalist in this special
sense of the word. Whether her incidents are real or probable or unreal
and improbable she never fails in making them plausible, completely so.
It might be argued that to be perfectly and pleasantly and interestingly
plausible is better than to achieve the most surprising realism or the
most transcendental romance. We think that, in ninety-nine cases out of
a hundred, it is; we believe that unless a writer has that gift in the
nth degree commonly called genius, unless he is so matchless a
romanticist as Joseph Conrad or so unsurpassed a realist as Flaubert or
Thomas Hardy, he had better pray and struggle above everything for the
faculty of plausibility, interesting plausibility, worth while
naturalism! It is because we believe this that we hold Sophie Kerr to
have found and to be on the right track. It is because of this our
belief in her strong, fledged naturalism that we expect sound and
excellent work from her, work showing distinct growth both in intrinsic
value and in popular success. The first stage of that growth is
evidenced for everybody in the contrast between _The Blue Envelope_ and
its successor from her pen, _The Golden Block_.
_The Golden Block_ is part of the life story of a business woman,
Margaret Bailey, and the most important part. The novel finds her a
secretary of Henry Golden, manufacturer of paving blocks, and leaves her
his partner. It finds her practically a manager of his business at $40 a
week and leaves her a sharer in his business at possibly $40,000 a year.
The book begins on a note of success, of triumph; the Golden Company has
got a contract for street paving in New York which means the difference
between hundreds of thousands clear profit and bankruptcy. This has
happened mainly because Margaret Bailey is a business woman--a much
better business woman than Henry Golden is a business man. Now business
women are not too attractively drawn in most of our fiction. They are
new people, and the fictioneer is tempted to draw them in too harsh, too
straight lines; to caricature a little as Dickens used to caricature, in
order to bring out peculiarities and get the “effect.” Sophie Kerr
doesn’t do it with Margaret Bailey; the most praiseworthy and most
skillful thing in that admirable story _The Golden Block_ is the way in
which the author keeps Margaret Bailey human. She does it by naturalism.
Margaret is engrossed by the business of the Golden Company but she is
also engrossed in securing the education of her sister and brother, the
comfort and happiness of her father and mother, the welfare of the whole
family. Breath of her life though business is, you feel all the time
that she would sacrifice it completely if the happiness of Rose Bailey
or the other Baileys collectively required such an offering. But of
course the surest way to promote _their_ happiness is to succeed
herself.
Margaret Bailey is a character to be proud of and we hope Sophie Kerr is
proud of her. She is as clear-visioned as any heroine of fiction; she is
as clear-visioned as such women are in life! She is not afraid of being
called unwomanly, because she knows that this only means that she does
not conform to a handed-down ideal. She does not attempt to formulate a
philosophy of sex or love or life on the basis of her own feelings. She
speaks and thinks only for herself--not of herself except when asked to
explain. She finds no time to indulge in self-pity, but that does not
mean that she is hard. No! She is merely happy! She is doing what she
can do best and what she most wants to do. “You ought to have been a
man,” is the recurring refrain dinned in her ears, usually as a tribute
of admiration but frequently with an implication of disapproval, as if
the Creator had made a mistake somehow. “It’s my belief that there’s no
sex in brains,” Margaret falls into the habit of replying. She might
have added: “And there’s no brains in sex, either!”
If young writers must imitate, must go through a period of playing the
sedulous ape, as Stevenson called it, we hope that more of them will
cease to imitate the Great and Peculiar Few and imitate such exemplars
of intelligent and growing naturalism as Mrs. Underwood. It will make
the approach to a recognition of their own powers less painful. And for
Sophie Kerr we hope only that she may continue as she has begun and keep
growing.
BOOKS BY SOPHIE KERR
_Love at Large_, 1916.
_The Blue Envelope_, 1917.
_The Golden Block_, 1918.
_The See-Saw_, 1919.
_Painted Meadows_, 1920.
_One Thing Is Certain_, 1922.
_Love at Large was published by Harper & Brothers, New York. The Blue
Envelope, The Golden Block and The See Saw were published by Doubleday,
Page & Company, New York; the last two books were published by George H.
Doran Company, New York._