HARRIET T. COMSTOCK
The significant thing about Harriet T. Comstock has been her rôle in
reprint.
After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the
plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or
some other publishing house which issues popular books in inexpensive
form. The show has left Broadway to go on “the road.” And, you might not
think it, but sometimes the worth of a show is never known until it hits
“the road.”
The worth of Mrs. Comstock was never known until _Joyce of the North
Woods_ went into reprint.
The book, at over a dollar, had had a “good, average sale”--is 10,000
copies a good average sale? Reader, it is. Think not that all novels are
best sellers. That’s no more the case than that all the sellers are the
best novels.
_Joyce_ went into reprint and in three months sold 60,000 copies and
then it sold and sold and sold; and so, when they came to be reprinted,
did _Janet of the Dunes_ and _A Son of the Hills_. In a little more than
three years these three novels in reprint went to 250,000 copies. Since
then _The Place Beyond the Winds_ and later books have been put out by
the reprinters. Is there any question of Mrs. Comstock’s importance? We
think not.
But what’s the explanation? What, in the vernacular, is the answer? The
answer is just this: Mrs. Comstock is an earnest, sincere, enthusiastic
writer; she is an educated woman, a suffragist, with experience in
public speaking and a familiarity with public affairs; she is a
homemaker who has always made the keeping of a pleasant home in
Flatbush, Brooklyn, her chief business and who wrote at first just for
fun and as she had the chance; she has convictions and no more hesitates
to act upon them than to express them; she is personally modest--you
have to dig things out of her about herself. But--is this the answer? Is
there something else?
Yes, there is this else. Mrs. Comstock has worked with intensive culture
and a visible reward the peculiarly modern literary field known (it
really isn’t so known but it will be) as idealism.
What’s that? There are realists and romanticists although no two of us
agree as to what makes a literary realist, what a romanticist. Yet we
all recognize the distinction. It is a sure if shadowy boundary. But a
literary idealist?
The literary idealist is the product of everybody’s dissatisfaction with
what the other two give us. Vexed with the clash of the allopath and the
homeopath, some send for the osteopath. The figure of speech we employ
is no offhand metaphor. Literary idealists like Mrs. Comstock are a kind
of literary osteopaths. They go at us vigorously. They decline to dose
us with the nauseous compounds of realism and they shudder at the
thought of our taking sugar pellets of romance. What they want us to do
is to let them rub, thump, pound and flex us--mentally and emotionally,
of course. They say: “Now, see here! Your intellect and your emotions
may not be very wonderful but they are your own. Exercise them! Rely on
them! Keep well and happy by using them to the fullest extent! They are
what the Lord gave you. Don’t try to refine them till they become
flabby. Don’t use them brutally till they go to pieces. Recognize your
limitations and you’ll be all right!”
That’s Mrs. Comstock’s secret, whether she would put it that way herself
or not. She is not a “great” novelist in the usual acceptation of the
word; she is, in respect of literary distinction, not even a good
novelist. Aesthetically considered she is nowhere. Practically
considered she is in a hundred thousand homes, entertaining people,
instructing people, osteopathizing, making them use the brains and
feelings they have, preventing them from aping something they have not
and cannot acquire, killing snobbery at the roots, arresting the blight
of disillusionment and convincing young and old that certain simple,
fundamental instincts and certain simple, fundamental principles of
character are what count--with _them_. She is right, they do.
Conviction about the truth of life, conviction as to the best use of the
novel, namely, “to present the great truths of life in an attractive
manner, where they will reach the greatest number of people”--this sums
up Harriet T. Comstock. How did she come to write _The Place Beyond the
Winds_ which presents the question of eugenics and the ethics of
silence on certain matters affecting marriage? Mrs. Comstock’s face
saddens and she tells you:
“I had a most unpleasant experience once. I happened to learn that the
very attractive son of a dear friend of mine was totally unfit to marry
the girl to whom he was engaged. I approached the young man, but found
him obdurate; so, after a long mental and spiritual struggle, I revealed
the facts to the girl’s mother.
“It was the most trying experience of my life. Then the feeling came to
me that I must write about it--must do my small part toward banishing
the evil.”
Exactly! There you have the idealist in action as well as in literature.
It is perfectly plain what some people will think of Mrs. Comstock’s
course; it is equally plain that hundreds of thousands will approve it.
Do her the fine justice to acknowledge that whatever any one thought of
it, that even if every one else in the world condemned her, she would
have done as she did.
She has, in a showdown, absolute and unlimited courage. Then and then
only is her rooted modesty and her equally rooted humor put aside. As
for the humor that is hers, it comes out fully in the narrative of her
experiences campaigning for suffrage. As she once wrote:
“And then the anti who became converted and in a burst of gratitude sent
me a bottle of Benedictine!
“Maybe she felt as the young girl at a revival once felt who electrified
the congregation by shouting:
“‘Good Lord! My jewelry is dragging me down to hell--I am going to give
it to my sister!’”
Go out to Flatbush, as Alice Lawton did one sunshiny afternoon,
afterward relating her experience in the _Book News Monthly_; travel
along a “broad, tree-shaded street between rows of real homes with full
complement of flower gardens and babies and puppies; stop at a pretty,
wide-verandaed, white-pillared house and call upon Mrs. Comstock, wife,
mother, home-maker, novelist--a Jill of many trades and successful at
them all!”
She seats you in a “cozy, brown-walled drawing-room, beside a little
round table.” You eat “piping hot buttered toast and crisp jumbles, and
drink properly-brewed tea. Sonny comes strolling in, a large,
beautifully-marked Burne-Jonesy yellow cat,” a Persian. The creature is
polite but heads for a little mahogany desk and sniffs at the single
drawer. It contains his catnip.
The hostess is the sort of woman you make confidences to. Mrs. Comstock
is cheerful, “has smiling eyes, a loving-toned voice, curly gray hair,
wears pretty clothes and almost always flowers. One feels a hearty
welcome even when one telephones her. She never sounds annoyed, nor even
interrupted.”
Upstairs there’s a bright little room where she works. Couch in one
corner, built-in bookcase in another, big desk in the middle. The desk
is heaped with piles of closely-written paper and books. On the soft
buff paper of the walls are paintings, drawings, photographs--the
originals of illustrations to Mrs. Comstock’s books are noticeable. Here
she writes most of each novel, subjected to endless
interruptions--friends and neighbors of a novelist never take the
novelist’s work seriously. When the finishing chapters are to be done
Mrs. Comstock packs manuscript, pencils and paper and goes away. Her
publishers and her husband have the address--no one else. She is one of
the extremely few novelists who do not use a typewriter--she writes it
all out longhand and makes several copies before she gets through. She
began by writing stories for the school paper, she continued by writing
children’s stories, then books for older girls and boys. _Janet of the
Dunes_ was her first novel.
Thomas Hardy is her favorite author. “Whenever I feel that I am stranded
I read Hardy and regain my poise. He discusses so clearly and nobly the
problems with which we are struggling to-day. And I also like Barrie;
principally, I think, because he knows women so thoroughly, and I always
know he knows. Stevenson once said of George Eliot that when she wrote
of men they always put their hands up to feel if their hair is coming
down; but Barrie writes of women without their appearing with a cigar in
their hands.”
Of her method of work Mrs. Comstock says:
“The first thing I see is the place and the people--the background and
the actors. Then their story begins to unfold in my mind. When the time
comes that that story must be written before I can have any peace of
mind, I sit down to it--not before. Other writers, I understand, usually
see the story or the people first, and the background later. With me,
the background, the environment of my characters, is all-important.
Why, I even keep a set of pictures of the country I am writing of on my
desk beside me.”
Mrs. Comstock always goes to the scene of her stories. Her backgrounds
are always of actual places and her people are frequently real people.
Thus in _Joyce of the North Woods_ her St. Ange is a place in northern
New York and all the lesser characters are taken from life. In _The
Vindication_, Dr. Hill is straight out of actuality. On a suffrage tour
Mrs. Comstock met this young physician whose work had been so largely
among the Adirondack poor. He, too, had adopted a backward and neglected
child, just as Dr. Hill takes hold of the boy Chester in Mrs. Comstock’s
novel. _A Son of the Hills_ was the fruit of a visit in the Virginia
mountains. Not the immediate fruit; some time had to elapse before Mrs.
Comstock could “see” the story in the mountaineers. In _Mam’selle Jo_,
Mrs. Comstock has gone up North again, to the St. Lawrence country, and
she tells the moving story of a woman of 40 who has at last struggled
clear of debt and is at last able to gratify the instinct of mother-love
which is in her.
Popular she is, but she does not think of popularity. In truth a writer
cannot. For, as Mrs. Comstock says, the writer who thinks of the
possible popularity of her work when she should be thinking of her story
will impair her work. And her work is the thing with Mrs. Comstock.
Reject it if you like, accept it if you will; she will go unshakeably
on. She has something to do and is about doing it.
BOOKS BY HARRIET T. COMSTOCK
_Janet of the Dunes_, 1908.
_Joyce of the North Woods_, 1911.
_A Son of the Hills_, 1913.
_The Place Beyond the Winds_, 1914.
_The Vindication_, 1917.
_Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country_, 1918.
_Unbroken Lines_, 1919.
_The Shield of Silence_, 1921.
_At the Crossroads_, 1922.
_(Also many books for boys and girls.)_
_Mrs. Comstock’s earlier books are to be had in reprint. Janet of the
Dunes was published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston; the others are
published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._