HONORÉ WILLSIE
Nothing is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but
in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It
will be enough to try faithfully to set them before her thousands of
readers and the thousands who ought to be her readers, to try to picture
Mrs. Willsie herself. That is all that can be done in a chapter of
reasonable length. To discuss intelligently Mrs. Willsie’s ideas would
require a book and an amount of exact knowledge on certain
subjects--immigration and Americanization, for example--that is no part
of our reporter’s equipment. A straightaway bit of exposition must do
instead.
The spring of 1919 will see the publication of a new novel by Mrs.
Willsie, _The Forbidden Trail_, an exciting story of the _Still Jim_
country, Arizona and the irrigable West. The novel deals with the clever
efforts of German spies and sympathizers to appropriate for Germany the
discoveries and improvements made by the sturdy Americans of our United
States Reclamation Service. This theme is not so completely derived from
the war as might appear at first glance. Readers of _Still Jim_ will
recall in the closing chapters the visit of Herr Gluck to the Cabillo
dam and his effort to get Jim Manning to enter the service of the
German Government--in a legitimate way, however. Of the illegitimate
ways in which Germany was then working among American engineers Mrs.
Willsie is now free to speak and may be trusted to speak out of an exact
knowledge. For her husband, Henry Elmer Willsie, of New York, was an
inventor and consulting engineer when she was married to him and with
him she spent two years in the deserts of Arizona.
Honoré Willsie was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, the daughter of William Dunbar
McCue and Lilly Bryant (Head) McCue and a descendant of old New
Englanders who went West, the people who form the important background
of _Still Jim_ and _Lydia of the Pines_. She is a Bachelor of Arts of
the University of Wisconsin and was married soon after her graduation.
The two years in the West followed and then the husband and wife came to
New York where Mrs. Willsie devoted herself to the task of winning
recognition as a writer. She says now:
“A plan, and always keeping your eye on what you want to be doing in
three years or in five years--that is what makes for success for a
writer.
“I came to New York with the intention of being a writer. I did not want
to work on a magazine or a newspaper. And I wanted to write what I
wanted to write.
“I had sold Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, editor of _Munsey’s Magazine_] a
little love story called _Beatrice and the Rose_. So after a few weeks
in New York I went to see him with a bundle of stories I wanted him to
buy. He looked them over and shook his head.
“‘Do me something else like _Beatrice and the Rose_ and I’ll take it,’
he said.
“‘I don’t want to go on writing stuff like that,’ I explained. ‘If
that’s the best I can do I’ll give up writing altogether.’
“‘But nobody wants to read about those deserts and glowing sunsets.
There is only one man in New York who will read about deserts--Theodore
Dreiser.’
“‘All right,’ I decided. ‘I will go to see Theodore Dreiser.’
“I sent my stuff to Mr. Dreiser in advance and next day I went down to
see what he thought of it. I was pretty well scared. I walked around the
Butterick Building--four times I walked around that bulky flatiron
before I screwed up enough courage to go in. When I finally got inside
and was ushered into Mr. Dreiser’s office [the novelist was then editor
of the _Delineator_, a job Mrs. Willsie now holds] I was tongue-tied
with nervousness. That nervousness might well have been prophetic. The
interview turned out to be a momentous one for me.
“‘My God!’ said Mr. Dreiser, looking me over. ‘Another infant come to
New York to reform it.’ But after a little talk he offered me a job,
editorial work at a good salary.
“‘I’ll have to think that over,’ I said, the temptation of a good
regular salary struggling against my plans for writing, and writing
only.
“‘No,’ Mr. Dreiser ordered. ‘You sit right there and decide now.’
“So I sat there and thought about it and finally I told him that I
wouldn’t take his job. I had stuck out this far and I guessed I could go
on.
“‘All right,’ Mr. Dreiser agreed without argument. ‘Stick it out at the
writing game if you want to. It won’t be easy, but you will make good.
You will have a hard time at first, and you will need pluck. But in five
years you will land and land big. As for these stories of yours, I will
buy them.’ And he named a sum staggering to my inexperience, though he
assured me he was taking advantage of me because I was unknown.
“Well, I kept on writing. I bought a second-hand typewriter and worked
it with two fingers and many times I thought of the salary I might have
had coming in every week. As Mr. Dreiser said, it wasn’t easy. I made
$500 that first year. Things came out my way because I stuck to my plan
and always kept my eye on the future--and had the courage to refuse that
job.”
Not long afterward Mrs. Willsie’s stories began to appear in the
magazines and were unusually popular. She took up the writing of special
articles for such periodicals as _Harper’s Weekly_ and _Collier’s_ on
important subjects--immigration, divorce, Indians, the United States
Reclamation Service. Norman Hapgood, who was then editor of _Harper’s
Weekly_, said of her work: “She has the ability to get at the essentials
of a big question, and put it in simple, human terms.”
Mrs. Willsie’s first published novel was _The Heart of the Desert_,
which came out in 1913. It won immediate recognition for her. Richard
Le Gallienne, writing an appreciation of Mrs. Willsie in the _Book News
Monthly_ of March, 1917, said:
“As a boy, of course, I adored the American Indian of Fenimore Cooper,
but, since then, words fail. If I have a bête noire in fiction,
nowadays, it is the American Indian. I mention this purely personal
peculiarity, merely to emphasize the delight which I took in Mrs.
Willsie’s hero in _The Heart of the Desert_--and his truly heroic wooing
and winning of a white girl, with Mrs. Willsie’s, and, I am sure, all
her readers’ concurrence. Never was such a masterful wooing, or one
brought to winning through such heart-beating suspense, such a grim
passionate race for love and life in so wild and star-lit and infinite a
setting.”
And he says that therefore “when I say that, in my opinion, _The Heart
of the Desert_ is one of the best ‘yarns,’ and, if I may say so, one of
the most virile love stories written in our time, it is not from any
prejudice in favor of its subject matter.”
Mr. Le Gallienne’s article is not long. We take the liberty to quote the
rest of it from a booklet on Mrs. Willsie prepared by the Frederick A.
Stokes Company, her publishers. This booklet also contains an
interesting article by Hildegarde Hawthorne on Mrs. Willsie and her
novels. Says Mr. Le Gallienne:
“My first acquaintance with Mrs. Honoré Willsie’s books came through a
photograph of her looks. The photograph, or photographs, to which I have
reference occurred in a copy of _Harper’s Weekly_, not so very long
before that honored periodical was gathered to its fathers. They were
taken by her husband, and represented Mrs. Willsie in the heart of the
Arizona Desert; dizzily seated at the edge of a canyon; in camp
democratically at dinner, with a stunning hat and a still more stunning
smile, and so on. Here, one said, was the veritable ‘Girl of the Golden
West,’ tall and fearless-eyed as Artemis; something like a symbolic
figure of that noble type of Western woman, which accounts so largely
for the proverbial chivalry--and homicides--of that portion of America
which is at once most romantic and most real. One of these,
particularly, haunted me, and with my subsequent acquaintance with Mrs.
Willsie’s writings in mind, I must be forgiven one more use of the word
‘symbolic’--Mrs. Willsie is seated in the foreground, a wilderness of
sagebrush all about her, and a lonely stretch of barren mountain in the
near background. Her head, of which you only see the massive coiled
hair, is bent in an attitude, as of sorrow, close over her knees, from
which her right hand hangs listlessly, almost touching the cowboy hat at
her feet. ‘The close of a long day,’ is the caption of the picture. In
the light of Mrs. Willsie’s books, that photograph has come to me to
represent the attitude of her soul, the soul of a young American woman,
to whom the idealism that made her country is a religion, in one of
those moods of dejection which occasionally overcome all of us who love
this great Republic, at what too frequently seems like an eclipse, or
even a decadence, of that idealism. As she sits there with bended head,
like some heroic weeper, in that austere wilderness, her attitude seems
to be saying what Lydia says so finally in her inspiring new book,
_Lydia of the Pines_:
“‘We’ve got too many lawyers in America. What I think America needs is
real love of America. And it seems to me the best way to get it is to
identify oneself with the actual soil of the community. What I want is
this: That you and I, upon the ground where poor John Levine did such
wrongs, will build us a home. I don’t mean a home as Americans usually
mean the word, I mean we’ll try to found a family there. We’ll send the
roots of our roof-tree so deep into the ground that for generations to
come our children’s children will be found there and our family name
will stand for old American ideals in the community. I don’t see how
else we Americans can make up to the world for the way we’ve exploited
America.’
“After looking at Mr. Willsie’s photographs, I chanced to be walking
along Fifth Avenue, and glancing into a bookseller’s windows, I beheld
one of those pyramidal displays of a new book which I have sometimes
thought must have exhausted the whole edition. The name of the book was
_Still Jim_. It was by the lady of Mr. Willsie’s beautiful
photographs--and it was a real best seller, said the bookseller, to whom
I disbursed the needed dollar and whatever it was. No young writer could
hope to live up to Mr. Willsie’s photographs, but I was happily
astonished to find how near Mrs. Willsie came to doing it. Apart from
the book as a story, its quality of atmosphere, its breath of vast
spaces, its sense of heroic action on a great stage, were remarkable.
There was, too, that background of ‘character’ to the writing in which
the life of a book mainly resides, and for lack of which so many clever
books come and go, perishing like the summer skies.
“_Lydia of the Pines_ [we have already quoted Mr. Le Gallienne’s words
on _The Heart of the Desert_] combines all Mrs. Willsie’s qualities and
characteristics in a maturing ratio. The book shows her as growing
nearer and nearer to that symbolic photograph of her. More and more she
is seen as the passionate dreamer of the true American ideal, a
practical dreamer, too, not afraid to arraign America to her face for
wrong done in the past, and wrongs still a-doing. The theme of _Lydia of
the Pines_ is one of the noblest she could have chosen--the infamy of
political corruption that is so subtly and cruelly doing the last wrong
to the Indian by the legalized theft of his pitiful ‘reservations.’
“‘Where the pine-forest is destroyed, the pines never come again,’--such
is the burden of this noble and very moving story of a high-souled but
most human girl, whose family and friends are implicated in ‘real
estate’ deals with Indians of a nearby reservation. It is a simple story
too, moving among simple lives, in a simple Western milieu which Mrs.
Willsie presents with great fidelity, with many touches of humor and
pathos.
“In _Lydia of the Pines_ one sees Mrs. Willsie growing in strength, more
surely becoming one of the authentic voices of the nobler Americanism,
and her book is sure of a huge welcome by those who have that at heart.”
With equal enthusiasm Hildegarde Hawthorne declares that _Lydia of the
Pines_ “is the best thing Mrs. Willsie has yet done.” The author of this
volume has endeavored generally to be reticent in the expression of
personal preferences. He will only say that he does not agree with Miss
Hawthorne about _Lydia_. He found it fearfully dull while fully
conceding the interest of the ideas which Mrs. Willsie never fails to
present for her readers’ contemplation. He admired the portrait of John
Levine but deplored what he felt to be its lack of solidity. The reader
sees Levine in two relations only--to Lydia and to the Indians, and
unfortunately his relations to the Indians are mostly a matter of
hearsay, what came to Lydia’s ears, no more. To this writer _Still Jim_
seems by far the better book.
But Miss Hawthorne is thoroughly right when she says:
“No one who reads Mrs. Willsie’s books can fail to be deeply interested
in seeing how the writer grasps and lays before her public certain big
problems confronting us, such as this of the downfall of the early
traditions, the influx of races that have not our conception of
government or of life, and now the Indian problem. In _Lydia of the
Pines_ the shameful story of our treatment of the red man is
illuminatingly told. It is told with measure and good sense, and is
concretely pictured, the facts concerning one Reservation supplying the
material. Those who wish to ascertain how closely Mrs. Willsie sticks to
facts need only hunt up the reports of the Board of Indian Commissioners
in regard to the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to find out. The
whole story is there, told over and over again with endless, pitiful
detail. In her novel Mrs. Willsie has drawn intelligently upon that mass
of testimony, handled it with a full realization of its drama, and also
with a peculiarly broad understanding of both sides.”
Gertrude Atherton says: “I think _Lydia of the Pines_ is an American
classic.” Margaret Deland wrote to Mrs. Willsie concerning _Still Jim_:
“All the book is American to the roots--but big Jim is the American
soul. It is too massive a book to write about in detail;--it’s the whole
effect that moves me: truth, beauty and democracy. A fine piece of
work--an honest heart behind it. I congratulate you.”
The element of mysticism in Mrs. Willsie finds its outlet in the two and
three line reveries which she puts at the head of her chapters. Thus in
_Still Jim_ a desert rock muses:
“Humans constantly shift sand and rock from place to place. They call
this work. I have seen time return their every work to the form in which
it was created.”
“Coyotes hunt weaker things. Humans hunt all things, even each other,
which the coyote will not do.”
In _Lydia of the Pines_ it is a pine tree which murmurs:
“The young pine knows the secrets of the ground. The old pine knows the
stars.”
“Nature is neither cruel nor sad. She is only purposeful, tending to an
end we cannot see.”
There should be mention of Mrs. Willsie’s most recent book, _Benefits
Forgot: A Study of Lincoln and Mother Love_. This is a brief but true
story of a young army surgeon for whose education his mother had made
great sacrifices. Mrs. Willsie tells how President Lincoln learned of
the young man’s neglect of his mother and brought him to realize his
ingratitude. It is a very fine and very touching little story.
Has the war changed Mrs. Willsie’s ideas and ideals? No, it has
sustained and strengthened them; it has supplied her with evidence in
their support and justification in their advancement. We quote an
interview with the novelist by Maxwell Aley:
“War time (Mrs. Willsie said) is woman’s time to show the stuff she is
made of. This war is going to take the ‘fluff’ out of feminism in
America just as it did in England. It’s”--hesitation and a twinkling
eye--“it’s going to blow the foam off the feminist beer!” [A good
figure, that, for feminism has certainly been something yeasty,
something brewing, and with a little hop in it!] “I hope the war is
going to make American women realize the importance of being women, and
the chance that it gives them to mold the coming generation.
“As I see it there are two things American women can do--one abstract
and one concrete. They can teach children in this time of national
stress what it means to be Americans, and in that way form the Americans
of the future; and they can mobilize their resources and offer them to
the government. Like all abstract things, the first is the more
difficult.
“Women have got to get down from pink teas to brass tacks! If the
average woman would only stop to realize just how important it is to be
a woman! Why, woman’s business is not only the bringing into the world
of the coming generation, but the molding of that generation’s ideals.
American men are too busy making a living to give much time to the
children--it’s the women who teach them at home and at school. And they
ought to be taught what it means to be Americans as well as being taught
religion and morals, or grammar and geography.
“But here’s the rub! To teach children that, a woman has got to realize
what it means herself. How many do?
“I hope more women realize it than men--that is, than the men I’ve
asked. Several years ago I started out asking all sorts of men ‘What is
an American?’ I asked ‘Bohunks’ and ‘Guineas’ at work on street
construction, I asked American men in every walk in life--and what do
you suppose I got as an average answer? That an American was a man who
knew how to get rich quick!
“This war has shown us that taking out naturalization papers, or even
being born here, doesn’t necessarily make an American. We’ve found out
that the melting pot doesn’t always melt. To be an American you must
have a certain philosophy of government, and only a thoughtful person
can have a philosophy at all. If you are going to be a true American,
you’ve got to think things out! You’ve got to come to an understanding
of the big ideals on which the men who founded this country built.
“Every American who does that develops a paradox. He finds first that he
has a sense of freedom and equality, and then he arrives at a feeling
of responsibility. That latter feeling has been very evident among
thinking Americans since the beginning of the European war, and it is
particularly evident now.
“It’s up to American women, then, to think out what it means to be
Americans before they attempt to teach their children--or some one
else’s children--what it means. I wish that we might have an American
litany--a national creed that mothers and teachers could give to our
children! I wish that every American child might be brought to
understand the state of mind of the men who wrote and signed our
Declaration of Independence--a state of mind compounded of utter
bravery, the spirit of self-sacrifice, and a devotion to cause and
country that made them literally offer up their ‘lives, their fortunes
and their sacred honor.’
“Now do you see why I said the abstract thing women have a chance to do
is the hard thing? But if it is the more difficult, I believe it is also
the more important.
“As for the concrete thing, that is already being done to a certain
extent. Women have begun offering their services to the government
through their various organizations, but they ought to do it more
completely. If we are to have universal service for men, we ought to
have a variety of universal service for women--at least a mobilization
of the resources of all the women in the country. I believe that women
here in America will get the vote out of this war as women are getting
it in England, but American women will have to show, as English women
have done, that they are worthy of the vote.
“And there is one thing American women must not forget--that the most
important thing they can mobilize is their sex. When the men of a
country give their bodies to the sword, the women must give theirs to
the future--to the generation to come. Now, more than in peace times,
women owe it to their country to bear children, and bear them
intelligently. And when they have borne them, it is their sacred duty to
bring them up Americans in a full understanding of the ideals on which
our fathers built the nation.”
Living in New York, writing in New York, working in New York as the
managing editor of the _Delineator_, Mrs. Willsie is still and
essentially the woman of Mr. Willsie’s photographs which made so
forcible an impression on Mr. Le Gallienne. With her is always a
splendid vision: “Exquisite violet mists rolled back toward the
mountains. The pungent odor of sagebrush floated through the tent.
Iridescent, bejeweled, flashing every rainbow tint from its moistened
breast, the desert smiled at us. Once more I yielded to its loveliness.”
To her and her vision many, many of her countrymen and countrywomen will
always yield gratefully and with pleasure.
BOOKS BY HONORÉ WILLSIE
_The Heart of the Desert_, 1913.
_Still Jim_, 1915.
_Lydia of the Pines_, 1917.
_Benefits Forgot_, 1917.
_The Forbidden Trail_, 1919.
_The Enchanted Canyon_, 1921.
_Judith of the Godless Valley_, 1922.
_Published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York._