DEMETRA VAKA
It is the commendable but not always fruitful practice of the publishing
house of Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, to send to all its authors a
folder calling for such particulars of their lives as may properly be
matter of interest to the general public. In 1914 or thereabouts one of
these fact requisitions went to the author Demetra Vaka, otherwise Mrs.
Kenneth Brown. In due time it came back to Boston bearing the following
data, inscribed in a feminine hand that no school-master could
conscientiously praise:
_Name in full_: Demetra Kenneth Brown.
_Chief occupation or profession_: Wife.
_Residence & address_: Green Lane Cottage, Mount Kisco, New York.
_Place of birth_: Island of Bouyouk Ada, Sea of Marmora.
_Date of birth_: 1877.
_Education, when and where received, in detail_: First privately. Then
at Athens Private School. Paris. Various convents. Courses at Sorbonne.
One year University of Athens. One year University of New York. Various
schools in Constantinople, too many to remember, using schools as
frivolous women use garments--throwing away when not becoming.
_Date of marriage_: 1904, April 21.
_Military, political and civic record_: No records whatever except of
bad temper.
_Director or trustee of the following educational or public
institutions_: Never offered any, except the self-assumed one of
bringing up my husband.
_Politics_: For the best man who is on the ticket.
_Religious denomination_: Orthodox Greek.
_Professional associations, learned and technical societies,
decorations, etc._: None.
_Member of the following philanthropic or charitable institutions (if
holder of any office, so state)_: Have not any money to spare.
_Social clubs_: Have not sufficient money except for golf and tennis
clubs of wherever I happen to be, which if all counted will require more
room than you allow me, as we roam all over the earth.
_Business or professional record_: On the editorial staff of Greek
newspaper _Atlantis_ for about six months in New York City. French
teacher at the Comstock School, N. Y. C., for several years up to 1903.
Writer since 1904.
_Office or position occupied by you_: Wife.
_Title of (first) book_: First Secretary.
_Year first published_: 1907.
_Publisher_: W. B. Dodge & Co. (extinct).
* * * * *
This amusing cross-examination needs to be supplemented at several
points and the reader will be somewhat more enlightened by what follows.
Demetra Vaka is a Greek whose ancestors lived in Constantinople for
more than 700 years. Many of them were Turkish government officials.
Mrs. Brown’s early life brought her constantly and intimately in touch,
therefore, with the Turks. She played with Turkish children and was able
to view the Turkish people without any religious prejudice whatever. But
she was born, she says, with an American soul. Certain conditions
revolted her, and not least among them the system of prearranged
marriages. It was to escape such a marriage that she ran away from home,
coming to the United States with the family of a relative. Once here,
however, she was soon left to shift for herself.
Alone, penniless, and not yet eighteen, she found it neither an easy nor
romantic affair to get work. When finally she got on the staff of
_Atlantis_ she found she liked newspaper work. But it came home to her
that going on this way she would never learn English, and at that time
she wanted English because she hoped to study medicine. So she became a
private school teacher of French, and within two years she had charge of
the French department of the school.
In 1901, six years after her arrival in America, she returned to Turkey.
Carefully guarded in her pocket was a ticket back to America. She had no
intention of staying in Constantinople. Once in that city invitations
from girlhood friends began to reach her. These were now married women,
and so, equipped with a new and American point of view, she entered
Turkish harems as a welcome visitor from whom there need be no secrets.
Eight years later ten studies of Turkish women, embodying what she saw
and heard in 1901-2, were published as a book, _Haremlik_, which means
“the place of the harem.” But to stick to the order of events:
Demetra Vaka returned to America and the teaching of French but not for
long. In 1904 she was married to Kenneth Brown, novelist, and had at
last the continuous encouragement and professional assistance necessary
if she was to become a writer in English. She had been frequently urged
to prepare for publication her picturesque experiences. One day after
her marriage she sent to a magazine editor an account of an experience
while on a visit to Russia. It was accepted. That settled it. She would
write.
_Haremlik_ was her second book. It made a wide and deep impression.
There have been French, Swedish, German, Italian, Danish and Dutch
translations. It is not fiction, and neither, essentially, is Mrs.
Brown’s later book, _A Child of the Orient_, which is the tale of the
author’s own childhood and early life in Constantinople, of a Greek girl
with Turkish friends and playmates. The flavor of the _Arabian Nights_
fills the pages of _Haremlik_ and _A Child of the Orient_. The final
chapters of the second book give Demetra Vaka’s first impressions of
America, the effect upon a girl in her teens of a land almost as
different from Paris as Paris had been from Constantinople and Athens.
Mrs. Brown’s latest book is a war book but of a quite exceptional
character. To understand its genesis you must remember that she is,
though by her marriage an American citizen, a Greek by race. Her love
for Greece, her hopes for its future, are pretty clearly disclosed in
the opening chapter of _Haremlik_. And so when the European War had
passed its first stages and the political situation in Greece had
developed into a struggle between King Constantine and Venizelos, a
struggle in which the King’s attitude threatened national dishonor,
Demetra Kenneth Brown resolved to go over to Greece, interview the
leaders of both factions, and save Greece for the Allies--at least
endeavor to see that Greece fulfilled her treaty obligations, such as
those entered upon with Serbia.
Looking at the enterprise now Mrs. Brown is the first to concede its
quixotism, its hopelessness, its ridiculousness from the start. And yet
it proved immensely worth while in unsuspected ways. Going to London,
the novelist succeeded in getting to Lloyd George; afterward she had
access to other high personages in the Allied countries. Besides French
she knows Italian. At Athens all doors were open to her. She interviewed
not once but many times King Constantine himself and his generals.
Afterward she went to Salonica and talked with Venizelos. When she had
done she was able to write, purely as a reporter, _In the Heart of
German Intrigue_, one of the notable exposés of the war. Out of the
mouths of Constantine and his aides she convicted them. Her series of
interlocking interviews built up a complete and fatal revelation of what
Germany, with the connivance of Constantine’s government, had planned to
do.
Mrs. Brown’s work as a reporter of royalties and others and even her
autobiographical books such as _A Child of the Orient_ and _Haremlik_
are, strictly considered, outside the scope of this sketch, which has
to do with her primarily as an American novelist and a woman. As a
novelist she has several books to her credit besides her initial
offering, _The First Secretary_. _The Duke’s Price_, written with her
husband; _Finella in Fairyland_, _In the Shadow of Islam_, and _The
Grasp of the Sultan_, which was first published anonymously (“by?”), are
all hers, as well as _The Heart of the Balkans_. Of all these _The Grasp
of the Sultan_, which received serial publication and sold well even
before the disclosure of the author’s identity, is the most interesting
and most deserving of detailed consideration in this place.
The novel was published in 1915 (as a book in June, 1916) and represents
Demetra Vaka’s skill after some ten years’ apprenticeship at writing in
English. A young Englishman, having wasted a fortune, drifts to
Constantinople, and is appointed, through the agency of a countryman who
has become a Turkish admiral, tutor to the imperial Ottoman princes. The
youngest in his charge is 4-year-old Prince Bayazet, whose mother is a
beautiful Greek girl of the harem. She has dared to defy the Sultan,
who, failing in entreaty, strives to break her will by taking her son
away from her. By a ruse of the head eunuch, she recovers the child and
obtains the Sultan’s pledge that they shall be unmolested for five
years.
This is the background for a romance. The young English tutor falls in
love with the Greek girl and plans to escape with her and the little
Prince Bayazet.
The story is told with expertness, without indirection, with a fine
control of suspense and with thrill after thrill. The finest thing
about it is the constant discovery to the reader of the author’s
thorough knowledge of her people and her setting. Assuming that it could
have been written by an American, it must have been preceded by weeks of
study supplemented by foreign travel; whether a person not born and bred
as Demetra Vaka was could have written it, even after extensive
“documentation,” seems doubtful. We should say the thing would be quite
impossible were we not mindful of the late F. Marion Crawford, of whose
ingenious and convincing tales Mrs. Brown’s inevitably remind us. He,
too, wrote one or more novels of Constantinople, with what historical
accuracy we can’t undertake to speculate. Possibly Mrs. Brown can pick a
hundred holes in them respecting matters of fact! However, they had, for
the American reader, an effect of perfect verisimilitude, and it is this
effect precisely that Mrs. Brown’s stories are enriched with. Only, in
her case, we know that the likeness to truth is felt because the truth
is there. She should do for us hereafter, if her restless spirit will
permit, what Crawford did. Give us romances, Demetra Vaka, give us the
East; stay with us, write for us novel after novel of the sort that used
to come, one or two a year, from that villa at Sorrento where lived so
long and wrought so faithfully the creator of Dr. Isaacs and the
chronicler of the braveries of Prince Saracinesca!
BOOKS BY DEMETRA VAKA
_The First Secretary_, 1907.
_Haremlik_, 1909.
_The Duke’s Price_, 1910.
_Finella in Fairyland_, 1910.
_In the Shadow of Islam_, 1911.
_A Child of the Orient_, 1914.
_The Grasp of the Sultan_, 1916.
_The Heart of the Balkans_, 1917.
_In the Heart of German Intrigue_, 1918.
_Demetra Vaka’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston._