ALICE DUER MILLER
If Alice Duer Miller would only express herself with a lofty obscurity
she would be a Distinguished Author and if she would only write about a
different kind of people she would be a really popular novelist. Not
that she isn’t popular, but that she might be ten times more so; and not
that her work lacks distinction, but it lacks the peculiar kind of
distinction which our high critical minds rave about.
She can go deeply--and deftly--into the minds of her people and bring
out with a beautiful lucidity and no little humor what she finds there.
But this satisfies neither camp. With those who are dissatisfied because
Mrs. Miller does not write “artistically” (that is, unintelligibly)
about the thoughts and emotions of her characters--with those we have no
patience. But the others, the readers who think this excellent writer
wasting her time on a worthless lot of subjects, for these we feel a
good deal of sympathy.
_Ladies Must Live_ is full of clever conversation; so is _The Happiest
Time of Their Lives_. Clever conversation never sold 10,000 copies of a
book nor had the slightest effect on a single life except the deplorable
effect of temporarily causing unequipped readers to simulate a
cleverness beyond their powers. Moreover, the young reader of such
books as these is pretty likely to think the people in them
half-admirable because they say adroit things--or say things adroitly.
This makes the young reader more difficult to deal with than ever. Mrs.
Miller, or some one for her, will be retorting that she cannot take
too-impressionable young minds into account in constructing a story. To
which only a single answer is possible and it is this: Everybody else in
the world has to take the young into account; why should not a writer do
so?
Mrs. Miller’s books, then, should be read by no one under thirty. And
this not because the reading of them will actually harm a younger
person, but because it may make him or her insufferable company for the
immediate future. It is quite impossible to think of Mrs. Miller’s
ingenious tales of persons in “society” as harming anybody; they are too
low voltage for that. And indeed in _The Happiest Time of Their Lives_
we meet pleasant and positive, or “plus” persons, such as Pete Wayne and
his mother, the contemplation of whom would be safe for the most
immature sixteen-year-old. But it would be very, very unsafe to set
before some young women the splendidly delineated Mrs. Vincent Farron of
that same book! Just because her husband knew perfectly how to deal with
her, how to break her, it does not follow that thousands of decent,
affectionate, kind (and rather muddle-headed) young men can fill
successfully the rôle of tigress tamers!
Yes, the great defect of Mrs. Miller’s stories is that we seldom care to
know the people in them, the Mrs. Farrons, the Nancy Almars, nor even
the Christine Fenimers and the innocent but tiresomely insipid Mathilde
Severances. We will occasionally consent to meet them and watch them
perform (better company being lacking at the moment) for one main reason
and only one: the skill with which they are brought before us and there
put through their tricks. And if our very figure of speech seems to have
in it something derogatory, to imply that these persons are not much
better than puppets, the implication is not without an honest
significance. Moving among artificialities, surrounded by polite and
transparent deceptions, it would be too much not to expect these
“society” folk to partake of their environment. They are wholly
mechanistic, to go to metaphysics for a suitable term; they are precious
puppets and nothing more; thanks to Mrs. Miller’s skill the strings
which control them are mostly invisible, but the jerky motion of them
gives the secret away.
Having been as honest about this as we know how to be, let us turn to
the first pages of _Ladies Must Live_ and cull a few samples of Mrs.
Miller’s writing, samples which will convey to those who have not read
her some idea of her gift of epigram and facile and beautiful
characterization:
“Mrs. Ussher ... turned toward hidden social availability very much as
the douser’s hazel wand turns toward the hidden spring.... She was
unaware of her own powers, and really supposed that her sudden and
usually ephemeral friendships were based on mutual attraction.... During
the short period of their existence, Mrs. Ussher gave to these
friendships the utmost loyalty and devotion. She agonized over the
financial, domestic and romantic troubles of her friends; she sat up
till the small hours, talking to them like a schoolgirl; during the
height of their careers she organized plots for their assistance; and
even when their stars were plainly on the decline, she would often ask
them to lunch, if she happened to be alone.
“Many people, we know, are prone to make friends with the rich and
great. Mrs. Ussher’s genius consisted in having made friends with them
before they were either.”
Nancy Almar’s husband says to her:
“‘I hope you’ll explain to them why I could not come.’
“‘You mean that I would not have gone if you had?’
“‘No,’ he said, ‘that I’m called South on business.’
“‘I shan’t tell them that, but I’ll tell them you say so, if you like.’”
She was as good as her word--she usually was.
“‘Would any one like to hear Roland’s explanation of why he is not with
us?’
“‘Had it anything to do with his not being asked?’ said a pale young
man; and as soon as he had spoken he glanced hastily round the circle to
ascertain how his remark had succeeded.
“So far as Mrs. Almar was concerned it had not succeeded at all, in
fact, though he did not know it, nothing he said would ever succeed with
her again, although a week before she had hung upon his every word. He
had been a new discovery, something unknown and Bohemian, but alas, a
day or two before, she had observed that underlying his socialistic
theories was an aching desire for social recognition. He liked to tell
his bejeweled hostesses about his friends the car-drivers; but, oh,
twenty times more, he would have liked to tell the car-drivers about his
friends the bejeweled hostesses. For this reason Mrs. Almar despised
him, and where she despised she made no secret of the fact.
“‘Not asked, Mr. Wickham!’ she said. ‘I assume my husband is asked
wherever I am,’ and then turning to Laura Ussher she added with a faint
smile: ‘One’s husband is always asked, isn’t he?’
“‘Certainly, as long as you never allow him to come,’ said another
speaker.”
Even from so slight an excerpt we think it will be plain that in the art
of characterization and in the business of writing dialogue Mrs. Miller
has nothing to learn. She is really one of the most hopeful prospects in
American literature to-day and the great hope for her and for readers
lies in the possibility--almost a probability--that she will abandon the
very restricted and unimportant milieu of her recent novels for better
fields. It is simple honesty to recognize that _The Happiest Time of
Their Lives_ holds out a great promise that she will do this. Such
persons as Pete Wayne and his mother, and even the rather pathetic
grandfather Mr. Lanley (of the New York Lanleys) are “real,” that is,
members of the human community and not sickening products of the social
hothouses. If Mrs. Miller will do a novel in which most of the men and
most of the women are “people”--regular people or irregular people,
great or small, does not matter; but they must be people--we in America
will be the first to acclaim her.
Of Mrs. Miller herself there are only a few brief facts to be stated.
This tall and charming woman was born in New York in 1874, the daughter
of James G. K. Duer and Elizabeth (Meads) Duer. She was graduated from
Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1899. She was married to Henry
Wise Miller of New York on October 5, 1899. Her New York home on the
upper East Side of the city, just below Central Park and just off Fifth
Avenue, is in the most fashionable residence section, is in the heart of
that region where most of her characters unquestionably live and where
most of the others aspire to.
BOOKS BY ALICE DUER MILLER
_The Modern Obstacle_, 1903.
_Calderon’s Prisoner_, 1904.
_Less Than Kin_, 1909.
_Blue Arch_, 1910.
_Are Women People?_ 1915.
_Come Out of the Kitchen_, 1916.
_Ladies Must Live_, 1917.
_The Happiest Time of Their Lives_, 1918.
_Wings in the Night_, 1918. Poems.
_The Charm School_, 1919. Harper & Brothers.
_The Beauty and the Bolshevist_, 1920. Harper & Brothers.
_Manslaughter_, 1921. Dodd, Mead & Company.
_With certain exceptions noted, books are published by the Century
Company, New York._