LONELY PLACES
General. A technically well-wrought piece of realism, both in its adherence to the point of view, and in the rationalization of events. When it was first published, it bore the (editorial) sub-title, “A Story of Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.” “I assure you,” says Mr. Buzzell, “that woman’s inhumanity to woman never entered my mind in writing this story. If readers find a moral in any of my stories they can have it without question; I didn’t put it there and I’ll lay no claim to it.” What does this statement indicate with regard to Mr. Buzzell’s ideas of art?
Starting Point, and Development. “The beginning of a poem, I assume from my own experience, is a mood, a state of feeling, in the poet. He is stirred by something and sets to work to express it. Well, then, this is the way a story begins in me. As a result, the first tangible thing I have is the atmosphere.... I remembered that there were in Almont (Romeo) a number of ‘grand’ houses, standing far back from the road, and occupied by lonely women. I saw these houses buried in trees in summer, smelled the wild honeysuckle, watched the wrens flying in and out of the old teapots hung in the vines of the dining-room porch. In the winter I saw these houses buried in snow.”
Mr. Buzzell then wondered why these women had never married and concluded that all the young men of their generation had gone to the city to work.
“The next step was to select a definite setting. For this I took an old house which I knew thoroughly—my Grandfather’s house—the Orin Crisman house in ‘Addie Erb and her Girl Lottie.’ In this house I placed a woman not quite forty years old and I named her Abbie Snover. Then I gave her Old Chris as a companion. I had reason for placing Old Chris in the house with Abbie aside from an actual plot requirement. I placed him there because I wanted to impress my reader in the beginning with the loneliness of Abbie Snover’s environment rather than with her utter lack of companionship. The actual beginning of plot, I think, was when I decided to take Old Chris away from her at the end, so as to accentuate her loneliness. In searching for a cause that would remove the old man I decided to resort to gossip. The next question was how to start the gossip. It seemed most natural to have the children begin it. But how start the children? Abbie Snover and Old Chris had lived alone in that big house for fifteen years without any gossip; something would have to happen to start it. So I decided that Abbie would have to antagonize the children in some way. To be able to antagonize the children would necessarily require some kind of personal contact with them, so I had the children form a habit of going to her door after cookies. Then I invented the orange tree to give Abbie a reason for driving them out of the house.
“The rest was simple until I sent Abbie out of the big house on her journey to Mile Corners. It wasn’t until I reached this point that I decided to let the reader know that Old Chris was dead; that Abbie’s journey through the snow was to be a fruitless one; that fate had robbed her of her victory. If I had been concerned with writing just a short story I would have given my readers the desired surprise by withholding Old Chris’s death from them until Abbie found it out. What I wanted to do was to make them feel Abbie’s tragedy every step of the way along that country road.”
The difference between the realist’s and the romanticist’s methods may be seen by a consideration of what a romanticist would have done at any stage of the action. For example, Abbie’s kindness to the children would have been the cause, not of her undoing, but rather (under other circumstances) of her rehabilitation. The business of the orange tree, again, might have been used to turn the youngsters against her, as Mr. Buzzell has used it, but in this event then the sender of the orange tree would have arrived on the scene and by his masterfulness properly subdued the gossip.... Again, the romanticist would have saved the surprise, undoubtedly, for the reader as well as for Abbie. He would have desired to create the shock, and leave reflection to each reader.
Try telling the story from Mrs. Perry’s angle.
What is the struggle? Is it active or passive, or does it pass from one to the other condition? Are the stages of the plot well-marked, from initial impulse to climax of action?
What is the atmosphere? What details of setting, character, and action harmonize in the totality of effect? What notes of contrast but serve to intensify the prevailing mood?
Has the author attempted to enlist the reader’s sympathy for Abbie? Is his work finer and truer, as a result?