ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Coburn: Mrs. Fordyce
Coburn) is the most fanciful writer in America to-day. Fanciful,
inventive--not imaginative in the large and proper sense of the word
imagination. Her method in writing is utterly different from that of any
other popular author. She is in this respect as unique as Harold Bell
Wright--to whom she bears no resemblance whatever. Wright starts a
novel--we hope the reader will pardon this digression--by making an
elaborate outline, synopsis, scenario, _not_ of the story but of certain
moral and ethical ideas, concepts and principles which he wishes to
impress upon his readers. Sometimes up to the very last typewritten
draft of one of his books the characters are known only by words
denoting the things they stand for. Then, at the eleventh hour, Wright
strikes out “Greed” and inserts “Obadiah Jackson” and “Manliness” and
inserts “David Fanning”--and the copy goes to the printer.
Mrs. Coburn, or Miss Abbott as we may permit ourselves to call her
because of her pen name’s connotations--Miss Abbott finds a title and
then constructs her story. “Her stories are made to revolve around the
title, rather than an outgrowth of any plot,” says a writer in the
Boston _Globe_, upon whose article we rely mainly for the facts of this
chapter. It is an article with rather too much fluff but it presents the
really interesting facts about the author of _Molly Make-Believe_ and
presents them with point. The writer of it says: “Once a satisfactory
title occurs to Miss Abbott, she follows it in exactly the same manner
as the detective who is pursuing a clue.”
This is perfectly intelligible. _Molly Make-Believe_ as a title teems
with ideas; so does _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_; so does _The White-Linen
Nurse_.
“My characters are always wholly imaginary. I have never yet put a real
person in a story. I doubt if I ever shall, for once I begin to weave a
tale, imagination has too vivid a hold on me.”
Upon this the Boston _Globe_ writer remarks, with a great deal of
truthfulness:
“She may choose a commonplace subject--a girl, a woman, a road, a
husband.... Mrs. Coburn immediately succeeds in placing hers in the
uncommon category. It is the qualifying adjective that plays a prominent
part in making her subjects peculiarly original. She specifies that her
heroine is a sick-a-bed lady, her girl is very tired, her thoroughfare
is a runaway road, and even the husband in her sanitarium story is a
Sunday spouse.
“It is not her nomenclature alone that is unique and attractive. Added
to marked creative ability, she has a quality of verbal fitness, and her
phrases are charged with amazing intensity and force, so that there is
an exhilaration in her pages. Indeed, as one of her friends said, after
reading _The Kink in the Air_, one about decides that it is the ‘kink’
in this author’s style that is its chiefest charm.”
Many scoff; Franklin P. Adams used to divert himself with Eleanor
Hallowell Abbottisms; scratching the surface of the ground like an
industrious hen you may uncover many choice morsels of wriggling
English. But if you think these are all the Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
books contain you are as deluded as the hen that thinks she has
uncovered earth’s deepest secrets. Below, far below, but not buried at
such a depth as to be uncoverable by ordinary minds, are veins of pure
humor, tenderness; the rich gold of sympathy and friendly fancifulness.
They are paying streaks. Pick up a reprinted copy of _Molly
Make-Believe_ and look at the page in the front which records _over
twenty_ editions in five years!
We follow the lead of the Boston _Globe_ article:
Miss Abbott works slowly and carefully. Her chief concern while writing
is with her own feeling about the tale she is at work upon. Unless she
comes to like it pretty well she does not send it to a publisher. It
must interest her first as some sort of warranty that it will interest
others. “Painter, musician, writer--whether anybody else likes your work
or not,” she says, “doesn’t specially matter if you can only bring that
work to the point where you like it yourself.”
She writes entirely upon the typewriter. Even the first draft is
composed on a machine. Frequently she spends the entire day at her
machine. In writing _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_ she devoted twelve hours each
day for nine days to the task and this, with one exception, is the
quickest story-making she has ever accomplished. It is, by any standard,
a tremendous bit of work. Three, four, rarely six hours a day is the
ordinary day’s work of a busy writer. Twelve hours on a stretch can be
and is managed once in a great while when circumstances make the work
imperative; but it is not managed for more than a day or two and is
usually followed by a complete rest, sometimes in bed and with medical
attendance! Twelve hours a day for nine days--it will make the hardiest
shudder. Many of the best American writers are entirely satisfied if
they do 500 or 1,000 words a day--and not every day at that. But as a
rule Miss Abbott takes from a month to a year to write in such time as
she can dedicate to it a short story, or a long short story, or a short
novel. In eight years she wrote some twenty stories. For two years in
succession she won a $1,000 prize in _Collier’s Weekly_ short story
contests with _The Very Tired Girl_ and _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_.
Before her marriage to Dr. Fordyce Coburn Miss Abbott was secretary and
English assistant in the State Normal School at Lowell, Massachusetts.
This job kept her at her desk all day and it was in hours when she might
have been expected to be asleep or resting or playing that she hunted
titles and let her fancy do what it would with them. She used a pen name
at first. Her first serious attempts at writing were in verse. Two long
poems published in _Harper’s Magazine_ attracted much attention.
How curiously things go in this world! Miss Abbott had furnished the
text and scheme for an advertising circular sent out by a Boston firm.
The circular was so strikingly good that business houses began to come
to its originator with offers of advertising contracts. Miss Abbott was
for some time in a state of indecision as to whether she should develop
her gift for writing advertisements or try to succeed with stories.
Finally she sent two tales to two magazines with the mental resolution:
“If these are rejected, I believe I’ll take up commercial writing.”
But both stories were accepted. Miss Abbott says that she owes her
success as a fictioneer, therefore, to _Lippincott’s Magazine_ and the
_Smart Set_ quite as much as to anything else.
As readers will have suspected, Miss Abbott is a member of the family
which has attained distinction in letters and theology both. She is a
daughter of the Rev. Edward Abbott, sometime editor of the _Literary
World_ of Boston; a niece of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the _Outlook_
and Henry Ward Beecher’s successor at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn; and a
granddaughter of the Jacob Abbott who wrote the Rollo books for boys.
Miss Abbott’s father was born in Farmington, Maine, and was graduated
from New York University in 1860, seven years after his brother, Lyman
Abbott, matriculated at the same institution. Edward Abbott studied
theology at the Andover Theological Seminary and served as pastor of the
Pilgrim Congregational Church at Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1869 to
1878 he was editor of the _Congregationalist_; afterward he became
editor of the _Literary World_. He was ordained a minister of the
Episcopal church in 1879 and served as rector of St. James’s Church,
Cambridge, until 1896. Like his father, Jacob Abbott, Edward Abbott
wrote some juvenile books as well as several histories and biographies.
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott was born in Cambridge in 1872. Largely educated
by private tutors, she was for a short time a student in the public
schools and afterward a special student at Radcliffe. She was a child
exceedingly fond of outdoor life. Although she remembers kind and
patient teachers she can recall no day when the walls of a schoolroom
did not fret and torment her with the sense of physical confinement.
“The one or two things I understood at all I learned so quickly that it
drove me almost crazy waiting for the fifty or more classmates to catch
up--and the great many things I didn’t understand I was too frightened
to learn in such a crowd. I can’t look upon little, playful,
day-dreaming, high-strung children shut up in an ironbound schoolroom
without experiencing a very large lump in my throat.”
At the Harvard grammar school in Cambridge her teachers first discovered
the Abbott talent in her surprising fondness for English composition, a
subject not customarily dear to the hearts of schoolchildren, and in her
rapturous delight in reading aloud Washington Irving’s _Sketch Book_.
“Certainly,” says Miss Abbott, “I never showed any other special signs
of intelligence, being always, I remember, at the extreme foot of my
class in every subject except English. Surely nothing but my father’s
unfailing sympathy and understanding sustained either me or my teachers,
through the dreadful period of fractions and other mathematical horrors.
And it was here at this school that I formed the first intellectual
friendship of my life with a little, fair-haired, blue-eyed,
earnest-minded boy who is now Professor Thomas Whittemore, of Tufts
College. While the other children giggled over ink-dipped pigtails,
wrote facetious notes about their teachers, and traded postage stamps,
we two were whispering about authors and exchanging autographs and
timidly confiding literary ambitions to each other. Funny little people
we must have been--astonishingly solemn, inordinately dignified and most
deliciously important With all the grave, childish self-consciousness of
having already fixed our minds on higher things.
“I recall one day when we were swapping a Longfellow check-stub for a
Whittier post-card, or something of that sort. We got caught at it and
were kept ignominiously after school, to the infinite delight of our
more frivolous-minded companions.”
Miss Abbott’s husband, Dr. Fordyce Coburn, is the “silent partner” in
her work to whom _Molly Make-Believe_ is dedicated. He aids and abets
her in her stories, in taking a course in playwriting at Harvard under
Professor George Baker, in anything she wants to do. Dr. Coburn is
medical adviser of the Lowell high school and an all-round athlete and
sportsman whenever a city practice will release him sufficiently. He and
Mrs. Coburn spend their spare time salmon fishing in Maine, playing
tennis at Lowell, coon and wild turkey hunting on the edge of the
Florida everglades--doing anything, in fact, that two persons, husband
and wife, great comrades and possessing similar tastes, can always find
to do happily together.
BOOKS BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT
_Molly Make-Believe_, 1910.
_The Sick-a-Bed Lady_, 1911.
_The White-Linen Nurse_, 1913.
_The Indiscreet Letter_, 1915.
_Little Eve Edgarton_, 1915.
_The Stingy Receiver_, 1917.
_Published by the Century Company, New York_.
_The Ne’er-Do-Much_, 1918.
_Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York_.
_Old-Dad_, 1919.
_Published by E. P. Dutton & Company. New York_.