heard of communities duly arranged for the requirements of writers,
where they enjoy a kind of clublike privacy and security from
interruption. But are not such communities confined to the near-great?
Are real writers any more than real persons attracted by such an
abnormal existence? Writers who shun life and people are exactly the
sort that life and people shun. Personally, I run away from an author
whenever I hear one coming. Of the really great ones, I am desperately
afraid, and of the not-so-great ones, far more so.
* * * * *
Writer communities imply too much of the placard. I wish I might never
have to dangle my profession on a label. I am always embarrassed when
I am forced blatantly to expose it--for example, to the frank questions
of the doctor’s secretary, or of a customs official. “Profession?”
they ask, and I cringe before the admission, “I am a writer.” I don’t
feel ladylike when I say the words. On such occasions I would give my
entire remuneration for an “Atlantic” essay to be able to say, “I am a
laundress.”
Personally, I am only too glad to forget that I am a Grub-Streeter, if
only other people would forget. No matter how obscurely one has ever
appeared in print, one pays the penalty of the pinnacle ever after.
Surely one is no more responsible for the tendency of one’s talents than
for the color of one’s hair. I write because I have found it my best way
of making a living,--and also because I can’t help it; therefore why
cannot people accept me as simply as if I were a dressmaker? I should
be embittered by the curious attitude of people toward the literary
calling, if it were not as funny as it is puzzling. Once, at a tea,
an imposing matron hurtled from the front door to my corner, crying
out, “Can you talk as you write? If so, please do!” I was dumb with
discomfort for the rest of the afternoon.
The subject of attitude toward the writer is worthy of digression and
topical analysis, for there is a difference among friends, family, and
general acquaintance. Now, it is not often that I wish to talk as I
write, but the occasions when I do, while rare, are painful and urgent.
It is precisely on these occasions that my friends fail me. Essays
are a long while in being born, and while they are in process I would
give much for some one with whom to talk them over. It is not after a
thing is published that a writer needs appreciation: it is before, and
especially before it is written. For twenty friends who will loyally
enjoy anything I write, I cannot count three who will listen when I
talk. Yet the ideas are exactly the same whether uttered by pen or
tongue. No friend is so valuable as one ready to attend and sympathize
during the incubation and parturition of an idea. And yet the majority,
knowing too well the author’s temperamental uncertainties, are perhaps
to be forgiven their preference to wait until the editorial christening.
So much bigger to most minds is print than person. A writer’s best
friends are prone to treat her with the affectionate inattention they
would give to a Blind Tom. Yet I would rather my friends never listened
to me, than that they always did; it is much cozier to be considered an
idiot than an oracle.
If friends are prone to take the writing more seriously than they take
the writer, her family, on the contrary, share her throes too intimately
to take their poor sufferer lightly. Few authors experience the popular
fallacy of a doting family audience. A shuddering apprehension of
the potential effect upon editor and reader makes kinfolk intensely
critical. The agonies to which any sympathetic household is subjected
when one member of it is writing a book are such as to make them
question whether any book is worth the price of its creation. A writer’s
family also lives in the constant, but usually groundless, fear of being
written up. There is both humor and pathos when dear Granny retires into
a corner with some foible she knows you admired in infancy. Relatives
are always a trifle uneasy in the presence of the chiel amang us takin’
notes. I doubt if any success quite compensates for the discomfort of
being blood-kin to a writer. True, a family can sometimes be discovered
passing the book or magazine around among the neighbors, but they don’t
wish you to catch them with it in their own hands. Friends and family
are alike in their complexity of attitude, being insistent that other
people shall admire you, but afraid of making you conceited if they
admire you themselves. The danger of conceit can be safely entrusted to
editors and reviewers, not to mention the disillusion that sickens any
author on comparing the finished book with the fancied one.
But if a writer is comfortably without honor among her intimates, she
is more than honored by the attention accorded by chance acquaintance.
The attitude of the average person toward print as print is enigmatic.
Not all people place the pen on a pedestal, but all regard the penman
as somehow different. I once essayed retirement at a little village
hotel. I was promptly established in a room made sacred by the previous
occupancy of another lady author. Her name I had never before heard,
although I heard it daily during my sojourn. Her sole producible work
was a railroad advertisement of some remote garden-spot in California,
but it had been enough to confer a halo, as well as to win more
substantial reward, for I afterwards found out that, solely for the
literary aroma she diffused, the lady had been allowed to remain two
years without paying a cent of board. Unfortunately I did not discover
the fact until I had paid my own board for two months. The incident
disproves the charge that the United States has no popular respect for
the fine arts.
Print is prone to induce curious revelations from strangers. You write,
perhaps, a story that tries to be true to simple human emotions, and
the next thing you know, somebody in Idaho is writing you all about his
wife or baby. It is touching, but quaint. I have come to be a little
suspicious of letters from strangers that purport to be simple letters
of appreciation. I used to be very much flattered by them until my brief
notes of thanks drew forth such unexpected replies. It appeared that
the writers of the letters were writers of other works as well; they
were sending these to me forthwith; would I kindly read and comment? My
experience is, I gather, not unique. A writer-friend, whose published
poetry is marked by peculiar sanity, has received from more than one
unknown source effusions so bizarre that they can emanate from nothing
but a madhouse.
It is easy to silence by silence these unseen acquaintance, but others
nearer by demand tact. Among these are people who tell me stories they
want me to tell. They never can understand why I don’t use the material.
As a matter of fact, raw romance striking enough to impress the lay
mind is much too striking for a writer’s employment. Truth that is
stranger than fiction is what every story-teller must avoid if he is to
write stories true enough to be read.
What I more and more discover is that nine tenths of the people one
meets want to write, that seven tenths of them have at some time
tried, and that not more than one tenth of them perceive why they have
failed. Since they think the impulse to write more distinctive than
its accomplishment, and since they feel that they have the impulse in
all its glory, they regard with a half-contemptuous envy the person
who actually does write. They regard creation as purely inspirational,
and look askance at a worker who goes to her desk every morning like
a machine. For all I know, they are right. A good many people think
that the only reason they are not writers is that they never tried to
be. Others think they would have written if they had only been taught
how, if they had had the opportunity of certain courses in college.
Still others think there must be some charmed approach to an editor’s
attention. Who introduced me, they frankly ask. When people talk like
this it requires some self-control to repress my conviction that any
person who could have written would have written, and my knowledge
that the only introduction I ever had to any editor was made by my own
manuscripts.
Friends, family, and general acquaintance have, I find, one impulse
in common, the desire always to hound down the autobiographic. They
read, beam brightly, look up at me, and say, “Oh, here is Aunt Sarah’s
chicken-pen!” Actually it is an old well I once saw in Brittany. “Oh,
here is the story of old Mr. Gresham at his grandnephew’s funeral.
Don’t you remember I showed you Elsie’s letter about it?” I never saw
the letter, never heard of old Mr. Gresham, and the chapter in question
describes the antics of a four-year-old at his father’s wedding.
“Here is Saidie Lippincott to the life!”
I gasp, “Who is Saidie Lippincott?”
“Don’t you remember you met her at Rose Earle’s tea when you visited me
four years ago?”
There is no possession people are so unwilling to let one have as an
imagination. In private, friends will tear a book to shreds to discover
some portrait they can recognize; and in the case of authors famous
enough to be dead, critics rake the ground wherever they have trod in an
effort to prove that the folk of their fancy were drawn from the earth
rather than the air. There seems no means of convincing a reader that
in a writer’s head are constantly a thousand faces he has never seen or
heard of, all subtle with story, all begging for a book, and all so real
that they often make his daily waking seem a dream.
* * * * *
There is no denying that there is autobiography in all fiction, but the
relation of the two is not so superficial as the mere introduction of
facts and of characters from one’s daily life. The actual relation of
experience and its expression is deep and intricate, and, especially
for the woman writer, pervasive. As one must adjust one’s work to a
feminine body, to a feminine brain, and to distinctly feminine social
relations, so one must take into account as still more determinative a
woman’s spiritual characteristics. However potent the impulse to write,
the impulse to live is deeper. I have dwelt on the negative side of
this problem, the uselessness of fleeing to strange places to escape
other people’s burdens; but it is impossible to over-emphasize the
positive side, the difficulties of staying at home with the burdens
that Providence has provided. However intense the joys and sorrows of
the people the woman creates, the joys and sorrows of the people she
loves will be still more intense. It needs both poise and vitality to be
equal to the demands both of fancy and of fact. The mere external tangle
of hours and seasons that any human relations necessitate is nothing
compared with the spiritual tangle of one’s sympathies. The instinct to
soothe and succor and the instinct to think and write meet in a daily,
an hourly, variance. Heart and head are equally insistent in their
demands, and equally vengeful if unsatisfied. Books cry to be written,
and people cry to be loved, and to whichever one I turn a deaf ear, I
am presently paying the penalty of a great unrest and discontent. To
preserve the balance of attention between the needs of her head and the
needs of her heart is the biggest problem any woman writer faces. I have
discovered no ultimate solution; it is rather a matter of small daily
solutions, in which at one time we sacrifice the friend to the book, and
at another the book to the friend.
Yet in any crucial choice a real woman chooses living rather than
literature. My brain itself approves this yielding of intellect to
emotions for the very simple reason that, if I don’t thus yield, the
emotions denied will avenge themselves on the brain, and the book I
write will be unnatural because I myself am unnatural.
Once I thought it impossible to write when people about me were in
distress: I proposed to myself to wait until things should settle down.
I perceived that things never do settle down; that for women who have
human affections, there will always be somebody somewhere to worry
about. It is rather inspiring to be a woman, because it is so difficult.
With the winds blowing from every direction at once, one must somehow
steer a course that will reveal alike to the reader who knows one’s book
and to the friend who knows one’s heart, a halcyon serenity.
A relative detachment from her own living is as necessary for a woman
writer as an absolute detachment is stultifying. Since for a woman
expression is fused with experience, clean hands and a pure heart are
for her the fundamental demands of art, and this fact means that she
must be constantly scouring off her sense of humor with spiritual
sapolio before she can effectively handle a pen. Be sure her philosophy
will find her out in her book far more clearly than in a man’s.
The natural fusion of a woman’s brain with her emotions, resisted, leads
to intellectual weakness; accepted, leads to intellectual strength. In
the history of literature George Sand is the great example of a woman
who won success by the masculine solution of detachment from experience,
and Jane Austen, the great example of a woman who won success by the
feminine solution of identification with her own dailyness.
I am inclined to think the latter by far the greater artist, just as I
am inclined to think that in literature rather than in any other form
of mental activity will always be found woman’s highest intellectual
achievement, for the simple reason that woman’s genius consists in
personality, and for the expression of personality words are the only
adequate medium. Jane Austen’s example is the great encouragement for
the woman who wishes to write without ceasing to be a simple everyday
woman. Jane Austen was capable of a detachment that enabled her to
write books that give no hint of the thunder of the Napoleonic wars
even when she had two brothers on fighting ships. She was capable of an
identification with her surroundings that enabled her to write novels
of universal humanity and eternal artistry and to keep right on being
everybody’s aunt at the same time. She was sane and humorous in her
novels because she was sane and humorous out of them. She achieved fame
because she had first achieved personality. Still, her fame is only a
thin frail fire set beside the effulgence of a dozen men of her time.
Yet I would rather have been Jane Austen than Shelley or Wordsworth
or Keats. It is perfectly just that men’s books should be greater
than women’s, because men are willing to pay the price. Not to write
“Macbeth” would I willingly give up an afternoon’s romp with a baby. As
a woman I reckon my spirit’s capital, not in terms of accomplishment,
but in terms of my own joy, and a baby brings me more joy than a book.
Men ought to write better than women because they care more; in a
way women who write have the more impersonal outside-of-themselves
impulsion, because inside of themselves they don’t care. I acknowledge
the urge of writing and I am willing up to a certain point to pay by
means of a vigorous mental discipline and a certain self-saving from
useless self-spending, but I don’t pretend that writing satisfies me.
Something descends upon me and says, “Write,” and shakes me like a
helpless kitten until I do write; but it’s a relief when the shaking is
over, and I am left to the merrier business of merely being myself. In
other words, I am a writer because I can’t help it, but I am a woman
because I choose to be.
XIV
_Picnic Pictures_
Her white house is the same, with a difference. It was always a house
fitted to the person like a garment, a friendly house with peace in
the corners, a house warm with sun or firelight; yet I think we always
used the house merely as a starting-place for picnics, for running away
into the out-of-doors with a well-stocked basket. We are at best only
reformed dryads, my friend and I, and I am not even reformed. I think
perhaps that it was in like manner that we used our two selves, merely
as a starting-point for picnics, for the leap into the infinite, the
challenging of space and time, the tossing of stars like play-balls
from one to the other, always with the joy of the word shaping on the
tongue to the gleam in a friend’s eye. We are lovers of words, I and
she. True we also had talk in the library, dusked with books, dead
men’s spirits packed shoulder to shoulder on the shelves. There was
brave firelight in the library, and quiet candles, and there was also
Xerxes. The great gray Persian curled on one corner of the big desk.
Even asleep he dominated the home in his sole masculinity. Yet to me he
was sexless and sphinxlike except when he forsook his Oriental calm for
strange gambols in the white moonlight, a bounding gray shape of a tiger
grace. Sometimes Xerxes rose and stretched as if our conversation bored
him, sometimes his great purring drowned out the Occidental flippancy
of our chat. He was more king than cat, and he always made me a little
uncomfortable, that Xerxes. To-day he is not dead but deposed. His place
on the desk is usurped by a sturdy box of cigars.
However happily we might talk in the library we always knew we were
better without a roof, for in the blood of the born picnicker there is
something that must always be running, dancing, flying. Out-of-doors,
there were the little brooks to chuckle at us if talk delved too
deep, and the pine-tops to fill all pauses with quiet music. We were
the better picnickers because we lived for the most part in life’s
schoolroom. We counted our picnic days and sorted them into due order of
excellence, some better, some not quite so merry, yet all very good. But
lately I had begun to wonder about the picnics, for the difference in
the white, hill-girdled house is a husband. When our friends marry we
always wonder about the picnics, for sorrow is always a third comrade to
hold two friends’ hands the tighter, and to keep their feet more closely
in step; it is happiness that may sever and un-self people.
This, our first married picnic, dawned as brisk and bright as any. The
master is not with us. He departs each morning for a mysterious place
called “The Works.” That is something I have always noticed in husbands,
that tendency to go forth to “The Works.” Somehow no matter how hard
women may toil for their daily bread, they never seem to belong to “The
Works” of the world. The white house bustles with picnic preparations.
It has to bustle when Jennie is in it. Jennie? Well, Jennie might be
called the steam-engine at the middle of the merry-go-round. Some day I
think the world will grow wise enough to stop talking about the servant
question, and begin to study the philosophy that is still often to be
found going about wrapped in a maid’s cap and apron. Jennie, a little
person quick of foot, bounces up and down like a merry ball, and cries
to the blue May morning while she butters sandwiches, “Picnic time has
come again! Picnic time has come again!” Yet I never heard of Jennie’s
going on a picnic; do people ever know, I wonder, how much of other
people’s unselfishness must go to the making of anybody’s Eden?
The hall rocks to the bouncings and barkings of Mac, for he, too, feels
picnic in the air. Mac is a newcomer, so is Peggy, the mare, ready tied
beneath a tree to carry us over the hills and far away. When Adam came
to this Eden, he brought his animals with him, a method much better than
the Scriptural one, for it must have been a strain on any honeymoon,
that influx of indiscriminate elephant and dinosaur, cormorant and
anteater, and what not. The animals here were carefully chosen, Mac, the
shaggy, clumsy, warm-hearted Airedale, and Peggy, high-bred as a lady of
the old South, having all such a lady’s charm and grace and fundamental
loyalty touched with just the dash of deviltry considered meet to spice
the masculine palate. It is with the clatter of Mac’s ecstatic barking
as he plunges before Peggy’s light hoofs that we go driving forth toward
the blue, hill-swept horizon.
There is a tentative venturesomeness about my friend’s driving, for
horsemanship with her is a recent accomplishment, and a proud one,
to the zest of which Peggy contributes with a pricking of ears and a
graceful dip to the side of the road before every motor-car. Mac trots
briskly in front or behind, or to the side. His path through life is one
of friendly detours. He will never accomplish any great deeds in dogdom.
He is one of the simple souls unconscious of their magnetism. There
is not an animal by the roadside that doesn’t come ambling up to his
genial little nose. Even a herd of Jersey cows lopes clumsily across the
pasture to chat with him at the bars, and no dog, big or little, fails
to wish Mac good-morning.
It is the kind of morning for good wishes both for dogs and men. Knotted
old farmers, seeing our picnic faces and picnic basket, grin and
twinkle, sharing the May sunshine. The hills are a dim blue against a
sky still softer. Boulder-strewn pastures, more brown than green, are
starred with bluets. Far off there, below a shaggy stretch of pines,
is a field so golden with dandelions that it quivers as if held by
midsummer heat.
We don’t know where we are going; that is always the charm of our
picnics, to follow the will of the road. It carries us past a sawmill
in the wood. Its stridency and the tang of fresh sawdust strike sharp
across the air fragrant with fern. Then the road is off again across the
open, cleaving farms with their broad greening fields. The meadowlarks
ring out their calls to us. The bobolinks dart and dive and sing. I
turn to my companion in sudden question: “Now that you are married to a
woodsman, do you know anything more about birds?”
“Oh, no,” she answers easily, “we know only the nice birds”; thus
reassuring me that in her company I need fear, no more than of old, to
meet any but the best bird society, robins and blackbirds and orioles
and the other long-established families, and reassuring me also as to my
fear that the one left behind at “The Works” might prove to be one of
these bugaboo birdmen, of all beings the most subtly superior. In fact,
it is very difficult to extract good conversation from any kind of human
encyclopedia, ornithological or other.
Everywhere the cherry trees and pear are snowed over with white, but
the apple blossoms are unopened, turning to a deep rose amid the
pale-green leaves. The orchards are nearly human in their individuality,
whether they form a little battalion of old men, sturdy and gnarled and
steadfast, or a band of little budding baby trees toddling up a hill.
There are no great waters in this countryside, but many little glinting
brooks, pattering downhill beside our wheels, then meandering through
meadows beneath their bushy willows. We are minded to follow a brook and
let it lead us to perfect picnic. It leads us, of course, up a hill and
up, away from all farms, all valleys, into a deep woods road, hushed
and strange, and at last beckons us aside from the road itself, with a
twinkle of white birch stems, and the swirl of wild water, white and
amber.
It takes a long time to tie and blanket Peggy while I sit dreaming
in the dappled shade beside the musical rush of water, haunted by my
friend’s own song that once set all this woodland madness to elfin
rhythms. But my mood is interrupted by the thumping down of the stout
picnic basket. She is smilingly tolerant of my dryad whimseys, but for
herself, nowadays, she wishes to unpack that basket and get settled. It
is for me also, perhaps, to be smilingly tolerant of the other dryad
turned domestic; for me, brook water still has power to turn me dizzy
and to make my heart stop beating.