THE PATH OF GLORY
Starting Point and First Processes. “It so happens in the case of ‘The Path of Glory’ that I can give you exactly the germinal idea from which the story sprang. Three months before I wrote it a friend put into my hand two letters. The first was written by Piatt Andrew of The American Ambulance at Paris and gave the full details of a wonderful funeral accorded a young American volunteer driver who was killed on an early trip; the second was the last personal letter of the young man to his family—the letter of a young man of education and breeding and in no way similar to the Nat letter of my story save as they both expressed a fundamental human longing. Copies were being made and I was offered some. I carried mine home and laid them by. But they haunted me. ‘There’s a story there,’ I thought. However, I didn’t seem to get a story—at once. Nevertheless my mind played with the letters. That funeral! The story of course lay there, but how to set it off, enhance it properly. One day thinking it over idly—I have a vagabond mind and never attack a problem in any logical fashion—the solution dawned quite suddenly. It would be best set off by contrast, of course, with some unthinkably shabby funeral, and would receive its greatest force by being reconstructed through the minds of a people to whom a funeral is a precious event.”—Mary Brecht Pulver.
After a statement to the effect that she knows “people to whom the trappings and ceremonials of death take on a sense of privilege,” Mrs. Pulver continues:
“Just here I got some paper and a pencil and wrote the story. Or rather it wrote itself—as my stories usually do. When I began describing the lonely farm in which my people lived I had not the least idea who the people were—how many, what sex, age, race, or previous condition of servitude. There was a family in that house. A family preferably in hard luck. Then at the foot of the hill I saw a lame boy driving a cow. I walked along with him—and recognizing him as Luke, and acquainting myself with his ideas and frame of mind, I knew of course who his people were, how many, their habits, their names—‘all’s to it,’ as Luke would have said.
“And so I told their story—and about how one of them went to France and got killed. And how indirectly he helped them out of their hard luck. That is all there was to ‘The Path of Glory.’”
Plot. Note, first, that since the presentation is consistently from Luke’s angle, the plot events are given in chronological order for him; but that from the point of view of actual occurrence they are presented with some inversion. (For example, the experience of Mrs. Haynes in the town precedes her summary to Luke.) In this respect, the author—perhaps unconsciously—shows ability to mass plot material to best advantage through artistic adherence to one angle of narration. Many short-story writers appear to understand this principle, yet fail to master it.
Initial Impulse: The story impulse lies, dormant, in the business of Nat’s funeral. Where does it become active?
Main Steps in Action: Nat’s visit home. A direct forecast of the climax lies in the reason for his going to Europe. Another important stage is the death and burial of Father Haynes, “Paw.”
Dramatic Climax: The combination of “Paw’s” home-made burial and Nat’s death. The two come near together and constitute the lowest turn of the Haynes wheel of fortune. In Nat’s death lies the possibility for change. (In the presentation of the plot, this climax is reported through the letter, the reception of which is, in itself, a step toward the climax of action.)
Steps toward the Climax of Action: The letter telling of Nat’s death. Mrs. Haynes’s stony grief. The second letter; Nat’s funeral and the croix de guerre. “Maw” awakes; she is “going downtown.” She shows the letter, and soon understands that Nat has given glory to Stony Brook. The letter is to be published. It is to be read aloud at the schoolhouse and Nat’s story retold. There will be a memorial service at the churches. There will be a big public service in the Town Hall. (Other details make the change of fortune explicit and complete.)
Climax of Action: “Maw” returns home, rehabilitated, and rehearses the day’s experience to Luke. He recognizes that Nat has done “somethin’ big for us all.”
Characters. If one test of the “short-story” is that no character should enter who does not assist in the action, will this story stand it? What, for example, is Tom’s part? Would you give him up? Is it permissible to introduce characters to enrich the action? There is no question about the value from a literary consideration.
The part of each main character is well-defined. Luke, self-conscious, lame and sensitive, offers the medium through whom the story is told. “Maw” suffers; it is she to whom the turns of fortune mean most; she is the chief character. “Paw” is the cause of the Haynes status in the community. Nat, the prodigal, is the one through whom rehabilitation comes.
The personalities that enrich the action are: 1. Clem, his wife, and S’norta. They do so (a) by intensifying “Maw’s” sense of poverty, (b) by furnishing contrast in worldly goods and in character; 2. Tom. His misfortune enhances the wretchedness of the main actors, and the probability of his being made sound in mind emphasizes their changed fortunes. 3. Background characters. All, practically, whom Mrs. Haynes meets on her famous day in the town.
Apply to these primary and secondary characters the tests suggested in previous exercises. Do they live?
Setting. What does “Stony Brook, New York” suggest by way of physical and spiritual conditions? How is the locality an integral part of the atmosphere?
Details. The “human appeal” in this narrative will make it hard for any reader, however crusty, to refrain from tears or an awakened sense of pity. By what measures has the author brought about this desired result? The list should be long. After you have made it, see how far you can generalize from it as to provocation of emotional reaction.
“What I like in reading a story,” Mrs. Pulver says, “is a simple gracious English, a shade whimsical perhaps, that concerns itself with a situation and people who palpitate, in whose fate you become sincerely interested, as humans, not merely a clever bit of literary bridge. And the whole must be laced for me with a dash of humor, that tender fun-poking that will save the written human appeal from being heart-throb stuff or the handiwork of a sob-sister.”
Some examples of contrast have already been offered. Point out others, even stronger.
In Division II (pages 421-425) the focus is on Nat, the action seemingly held up, meanwhile. Did you, in reading, feel this long delay to be irksome, or were you compensated by the matter itself and the vision of its promise?
In Division IV, what intensifying value has the rain?
In Division V, what intensifying value has the first sentence?—“It was dusk when Maw came back; dusk of a clear day, with a rosy sunset off behind the hills.”
General. Mary Brecht Pulver declares she is afraid she is that “hooted-at and disbelieved-in thing,” an inspirational writer. “Given a major premise, an argument, some slight flash of idea, for a chart and I am ready to sail over the smooth white main. My crew will come to me ready named, ready behavioured, and will navigate my bark for me.... All of my stories are pictures. They unroll like a cinema in colors just off my left shoulder. They move so fast my wrist aches to keep up with them. I never rewrite anything unless an editor requests it. My first draft is the only one. As you see, this is not intellectual but emotional work. I can do only a thousand words at a sitting because of the emotional strain. This seems deplorable, considering the product but it seems necessary. Like the Jap in the legend, I must mix a little blood with my clay to get any kind of pottery.”
At first, this passage would seem to say, “There’s no use trying to learn to write.” And it may be urged here that the young fiction aspirant who feels impelled to create, and according to his own bent, should give his genius a full chance. Any student may glean this, however, from the words of Mrs. Pulver: Without emotion of one’s own, success is impossible.