MARY HEATON VORSE
There have been, and are, those who doubt whether anything good can come
out of Greenwich Village. It would possibly be unfair to cite Mary
Heaton Vorse as an answer to these doubters. In spite of the fact that
she once lived in Greenwich Village it is greatly to be doubted if the
woman who could write _The Prestons_ was ever of it. John Reed gives a
brief verbal picture of Mary Heaton Vorse entirely surrounded by
Greenwich Villagers and cigarette smoke, seated on the floor, doing
several things at once and, despite a deafening chatter from the girls
with the bobbed hair and the boys with the flowing ties, dictating a
short story with the utmost calm, speed and concentration. She dwelt
among highly trodden ways--and took her own track.
As a short story writer Mary Heaton Vorse is of the first importance in
any survey of contemporary American writers. As a novelist she shares
with Zona Gale the distinction of being put on the map by a single
superb book. As a personality she is alive and present to any one who
ever has met and talked with her. Corinne Lowe had a phrase likening her
to a Botticelli painting. Benjamin De Casseres describes her by her
voice, insists that it is the one thing making the striking first
impression and lingering in the memory like lovely music. I wish now
that I had set down the precise and extraordinary words in which Mr. De
Casseres extemporized his picture of the woman by the mere description
of her speech--its timbre and “tone color,” as musicians would say. No
paraphrase will serve; the reader will have to take on faith an
assertion--here made quite simply--that this woman of the memorable
voice, the isolation in the midst of the crowd and the face of sympathy
and comprehension is a woman of no common endowment.
But that, doubtless, would be evident to any one reading _The Prestons_.
Its author is, at the present writing, in Rome; in February, 1919, she
said in a letter to Boni & Liveright, publishers of _The Prestons_:
“I wish you wanted a book about Italy and industrial conditions here for
next fall instead of a sequel to _The Prestons_. You do not know how
happy it makes me to learn that over 10,000 copies of _The Prestons_
have been sold since you published it in December. I am frank to confess
that this is a larger sale than any other two of my books enjoyed in so
short a time.
“I love _The Prestons_--all of them, even Piker, the dog, and it warms
my heart in this cold Italian villa to learn that not only the American
public but the critics have spoken of my book as a really fine and true
interpretation of American family life. But I cannot promise the sequel
to _The Prestons_.”
A month later she was yielding. She would have a sequel ready for fall,
on conditions....
The truth about _The Prestons_ is this: Hardly a man or woman will be
able to read it and not close the book saying to himself, “Well, the
American family is a pretty good sort of an institution, after all!” No
finer tribute, we venture to believe, could be paid to a book--to _any_
book.
The book was welded together from a series of short stories. Note the
word, “welded.” Most novels made up of short stories are a poor
patchwork. Here there was an actual fusion. The result is a novel, and
nothing else.
So important is this book, so pleasant, so inspiringly hopeful in the
feeling with which it leaves you, that we may justifiably disregard Mary
Heaton Vorse’s other writings for the sake of concentrating on this one
narrative. I can only repeat, with a slight rearranging for the sake of
emphasis, what I wrote at the time of the book’s publication, which was:
Perhaps the nature of the book’s impression on the reader is due to its
very inclusiveness. It really doesn’t arrive anywhere except at the end
of 427 pages and of one or two years of normal American existences. No
great tragedy stains its pages; there is no love story. Nothing comes to
a decisive dénouement; we recall not a single “climax” except those
little social climaxes which occur in the best regulated families. The
only things that happen are Henry’s irritation with his twelve-year-old
son, Jimmie; Jimmie’s unconquerable attempts to be allowed to do
something that the grown-ups are sure to call getting into mischief;
seventeen-year-old Osborn’s adventures of the heart; the changing
absorptions of Edith, a high-school girl; the trials of Maria, Mrs.
Preston’s unmarried sister who lives with the family, and the
philosophical outgivings of Seraphy, for eighteen years the family
servant and shield and friend.
Not much of anything happens, you may think; well, perhaps not; but you
will not be able to leave the Prestons until the last page has been
turned. You will laugh unnumbered times as you turn the pages; you will
be touched more than once as you read. Quite unreasonably, no doubt, you
will fall in love with them as a family, from Aunt Maria to Piker, the
dog. They are so much--you.
It is quite impossible to do much more with a book like _The Prestons_
than to convey the nature of the story and the character of its telling.
It is related by Mrs. Preston and it starts with her exploration of the
house on a summer morning. She comes first upon the dog Piker. Piker is
lying on a silk wrap of Edith’s. “He is a long dog, modeled after the
graceful proportions of a barrel. At every corner nobby legs are put on,
dachshund fashion. His sparse yellow bristles are always coming out all
over everything.... His tail is long and thick and makes a noise like a
policeman’s club when he raps it on the floor.”
On the piazza were lemonade glasses, “some of them left on the floor
where they could quite easily be stepped upon.” Edith’s friends. The
mother takes them to the kitchen, bright and spotless, Seraphy’s domain.
In the library lying on the floor is Jimmie’s notebook containing his
observations, as a naturalist, on guinea pigs. They read:
“2 P. M.--Guinea pigs sleeping.
“2:30 P. M.--Still sleeping.
“3 P. M.--Running around cage (I poked them with a stick).
“3:15 P. M.--Eating.
“Note: Guinea pigs eat with persistence.
“Note: The habits of guinea pigs is monotonous.”
Whereupon “I saw,” records Jimmie’s mother, “by this notebook that
Jimmie had again been misled by one of those glittering books by
naturalists where all the high points of a year’s study are compressed
into one short article. He still touchingly believes the things he reads
in books.”
She passes on. “Now my eyes lit upon an ashtray. In it were the ashes of
a cigar and of three cigarettes. I had gone to bed leaving Osborn and
his father in the library. Osborn is my oldest son, who is going to
college next year. I stood and smiled over this telltale tray. Osborn
and his father were smoking together and Henry was apparently keeping
from my idealistic nature the sad fact that my son smoked.”
She wonders if her sister, Maria, knows that Osborn smokes. Maria
believes that “almost everything can be secured by two mysterious
processes. One is known as Nipping Things in the Bud and the other is
Taking Steps.” And having straightened up the house, the mother sits out
in the fresh morning air musing until various sounds denote the
beginning of the family’s day and the necessity of getting ready for
breakfast.
Of all the surprising affairs in which the youthful Jimmie had a hand we
think the affair of the fat little Baker boy the most amusing. “We was
in the swing,” Jimmie explained to his mother, “and I butted Ed in the
belly.”
“‘He hit him in the abdomen,’ corrected the Baker girl.
“‘I have always been very particular,’ Mrs. Baker announced, ‘Mrs.
Preston, about the language my children use, as you can see for
yourself. You heard how Jimmie referred to Edward’s abdomen. He has used
that word at least six times in the last five minutes; and that, Mrs.
Preston, I cannot stand. I will have my home kept refined and I say no
home can be refined where vulgar, common words are in daily use.’
“To this I found nothing to say but ‘Come home with me, Jimmie.’
“On the way, ‘Have I got to say “abdomen”?’ he asked. ‘Say, have I?’
“I took refuge in the cowardly woman’s evasion. ‘I don’t think that
there’s the slightest need of your using either of those terms ever,’ I
replied.
“Maria, who had heard the last words, said: ‘Yes, I should think one
could find pleasanter topics of conversation, Jimmie.’”
The trouble was that within a day or two four little boys, friends of
Jimmie’s, with their arms around each other’s necks, insisted on
marching up and down the street chanting in a derisive sing-song:
“Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,
Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,
Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen.”
They were audible even while Mrs. Baker, very flushed and angry, called
on Mrs. Preston, desiring her to Take Steps. The passage along the
street of the fat little Baker boy occasioned loud cries of “Here comes
Ab! Hello, Ab! There’s Ab Domen!” We will only say further of this
diverting and entirely truthful episode that it had an amazing sequel.
Jimmie, who cannot be convicted of having conspired to fasten upon young
Edward Baker a nickname at once refined and unusual, was more or less
responsible, we fear, for his aunt’s finding herself unable to open the
bathroom door after he had repaired and oiled all the locks in the
house. He was blameless of the thefts of what the family called “nether
undergarments” from the neighbors’ clotheslines. Here Maria played
detective, though the discovery of the culprit was mostly luck.
We may laugh over these things in a book and learn the better to laugh
over them in life, even when we are cast for the uncomfortable rôles in
their enaction. But we should not like to be the reader who may laugh at
such chapters as those which tell of young Osborn’s first attachment to
the ideal, as embodied in a certain Miss Fairweather, some years older
than he.
This is a book which takes its place with the best of Tarkington and
with the earlier Howells. For breadth of understanding, accuracy of
observation, fidelity of reporting it is not easy to think of an
American novel that transcends it.
Mrs. Vorse was born, in New York, Mary Marvin Heaton, daughter of Hiram
Heaton and Ellen Cordelia (Blackman) Heaton. She was educated abroad.
She was married on October 18, 1898, to Albert White Vorse, and,
secondly, in 1912, to Joseph O’Brien. She is correctly Mrs. Joseph
O’Brien.
BOOKS BY MARY HEATON VORSE
_The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman’s Wife_, 1908.
_The Very Little Person_, 1911.
_The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman_, 1911.
_The Heart’s Country_, 1913.
_The Ninth Man._
_The Prestons_, 1918.
_The Prestons is published by Boni & Liveright, New York._
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
born in 1859=>
born in 1857
{pg 49}
showed Miss Johnson=>
showed Miss Johnston
{pg 145}
demanding an implicity of obedience=>
demanding an implicitly of obedience
{pg 149}
Books ry Clara Louise Burnham=>
Books by Clara Louise Burnham
{pg 282}