The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Anna Katharine Green

The Leavenworth Case. A. L. Burt Company, New York.
A Strange Disappearance.
The Sword of Damocles.
Hand and Ring.
The Mill Mystery.
Marked “Personal.”
Miss Hurd—An Enigma.
Behind Closed Doors.
Cynthia Wakeham’s Money.
Dr. Izard.
The Old Stone House and Other Stories.
7 to 12.
X. Y. Z.
The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock.
That Affair Next Door.
Lost Man’s Lane.
Agatha Webb.
Risifi’s Daughter: A Drama.
A Difficult Problem and Other Stories.
The Circular Study. Doubleday, Page & Company.
One of My Sons.
The Filigree Ball. Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The Defense of the Bride and Other Poems, 1894. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
The Millionaire Baby, 1905. Burt.
The House in the Mist, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
The Amethyst Box, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
The Chief Legatee, 1906. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.
The Mayor’s Wife, 1907. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
Three Thousand Dollars, 1909.
The House of the Whispering Pines, 1910. Putnam’s. Burt.
Initials Only, 1911. Dodd, Mead. Burt. Reprinted in the Army and Navy Library of Detective Fiction, 1918.
Masterpieces of Mystery, 1912. Dodd, Mead. Republished in 1919 as Room No. 3. Dodd, Mead.
Dark Hollow, 1914. Dodd, Mead. Burt.
The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, 1915.
The Woman in the Alcove, 1916. Burt.
The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow, 1917. Dodd, Mead.
The Step on the Stair, or, You Are the Man, 1922. Dodd, Mead.

CHAPTER XVII
HELEN R. MARTIN

A CHAPTER on Helen R. Martin can hardly be anything but a prolonged interview, or a pieced interview, somewhat like a patchwork quilt, constructed from talks of various persons with her at various times. And always on the same subject—her subject—the Pennsylvania Dutch.

What there is to say about the writer and her work shall first be said. She is the daughter of the Rev. Cornelius Reimensnyder, who came from Germany to accept the pastorate of Lancaster county, so the daughter was brought up among the Mennonites. She has written a novel every year or so for the last fourteen years, writing in the time left over after taking care of her home and her children, a boy and a girl; canvassing for suffrage and campaigning for Socialism. Her home is in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. Her first novel was not of the people among whom she had spent her life but “a romance of life as she would like it to be.” Fortunately it did not sell, so she was led to look about her for her future material. She did not begin to write until she met Frederick R. Martin, to whom she was afterward married. He is an instructor in music. And Mrs. Martin was herself a teacher. At one time she taught children in a fashionable private school in New York City. She knew the youngsters rather better than their parents.

Mrs. Martin, like Marjorie Benton Cooke and Harriet T. Comstock, is interested in social questions. She has decided views on bringing up children, wealth and poverty; she does not subscribe to Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s views of motherhood; she is not a feminist in any general meaning of the word, because she believes that feminism in many of its aspects is a passing phase. As a rule her preoccupation with these problems is kept out of her work—the older generation of the people she wrote about were blandly unaware that such questions reared their heads—but her last two novels, Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian? and Maggie of Virginsburg, introduce them extensively and disastrously. Mrs. Martin’s failure with Gertie Swartz arose entirely from her inability to assimilate such matter before writing her story. As a result industrial conditions and employees’ welfare are indigestible lumps in the novel. Some subjects cannot be introduced bodily into a piece of fiction. They must arise as they arise in life out of situations and character. They cannot be discussed in a story as they are discussed from a platform. They can only act upon the people of the tale or be acted upon by them; they can be discussed, if the representation of life is to be fairly accurate, only to the extent that the situations of the story call for. It is true that life contains many futile and windy discussions, some academic, some not; but the only things that count are those which involve action or precipitate action or express or mold character. The novelist must exclude all else, otherwise the novel will lack illusion and resemble nothing so much as the minutes of the last meeting of the Society for the Suppression of Sociological Sores.

Gertie Swartz aside, the real controversy over Mrs. Martin’s work arises from her studies of Pennsylvania Dutch life, and is of a sort to give satisfaction to her as a writer. For the very nature of the controversy carries with it the plain implication that she has got under the skin of her people. It is alleged and deposed that she does not do the Pennsylvania Dutch justice. The allegation was most completely made in the New York Evening Post for April 29, 1916, by Isaac R. Pennypacker.

Briefly, Mr. Pennypacker declared that those who knew the Pennsylvania Dutch “in a broader way” than Mrs. Martin’s stories reflect them “have never taken her pictures of the life very seriously.” George Schock’s Hearts Contending, a novel repeatedly praised by William Dean Howells, “should be read as a corrective of Mrs. Martin’s tales.” Elsie Singmaster also has had a better understanding of the Pennsylvania Germans. The Moravians and the famous Bethlehem Bach Choir are proof of Pennsylvania German culture. Read Whittier’s poem, The Pennsylvania Pilgrim (he thought it better than Snowbound but said the public would never find it out!). Pennsylvania German troops did bravely in the Revolution and the Civil War. Mrs. Martin admits that the Pennsylvania Dutch rise but it is ungracious of her to call attention to the lingering accent, because Americans speak French and German badly. Besides, she does not cite all the instances of their rise to high station. She refers to their unpolished manners but great men, like Dr. Johnson and Edwin M. Stanton, seldom have nice manners. “Mrs. Martin’s curious comment on the fact that the Pennsylvania Dutchman’s barn is larger than his house would be paralleled if she were to find it curious that Mr. Wanamaker’s department store is larger than his residence.” Is it? But how would Mr. Pennypacker account for the fact that Judge Gary’s house on Fifth avenue is larger than his office at 71 Broadway? “A punctilious regard for good manners by which she sets such store would forever have prevented Mrs. Martin from publishing her books, because the portraits of the people in them are caricatures.” Look out, Mrs. Martin! Some one sees resemblances in your caricatures!

There is the case against Mrs. Martin and it is the highest compliment her work could have. The next highest compliment is the fact that Minnie Maddern Fiske made Barnabetta into a play, Erstwhile Susan, and appeared herself in the title-rôle. And the next highest compliment is what Richard Watson Gilder of the Century once said to Mrs. Martin: “Your people do not converse on paper—they talk. When a community is written up that community always resents it, even if it is described flatteringly. You can’t praise any community enough to satisfy its own conceit about itself.”

So much for compliments. If you call for proofs ask Mrs. Martin to show you or read to you (she won’t allow them, as a rule, to be published) some of the hundreds of letters she has received from Pennsylvania Germans wanting to know if So-and-so was the original of this character, asking why such and such a person was “put in your book,” complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch good traits, complaining that she does not do justice to Pennsylvania Dutch bad traits, as stinginess and selfishness toward the womenfolk; praising her delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life, condemning her for her delineation of Pennsylvania Dutch life. The truth is this, as Mrs. Martin says:

“The Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like my stories. That is, the educated descendants of the Pennsylvania Dutch don’t like them. The people of whom I write generally are people who read nothing, not even newspapers, except, as one woman told me, ‘sometimes meby the comic section.’ But the Pennsylvania Dutch citizens of such places as Reading, Lancaster, Lebanon, Bethlehem and other cities resent my commentaries upon the race from which they have risen. Overlooking the finer and lovable characters described in my books, they prefer to dwell upon the harsh people. I wish more of them would take comfort from Tillie, Mrs. Dreary, and the rest of my heroines.

“The only Pennsylvania Dutch who enjoy my stories seem to be those who have moved West and to whom my books seem to come like a visit home.”

We think the reader of Mrs. Martin’s novels will thank us if we forego a synoptic discussion of her tales and give instead what she has to say, outside her books, about the people in them.

“It is a part of the common misconception that the Pennsylvania Dutch of whom I write are all Mennonites. Now, Mennonites are a religious sect, not a race or a nationality! I have written very little about Mennonites. They are as inoffensive and mild as the Quakers, and it is absurd to confound characters like Mrs. Dreary of the play Erstwhile Susan and her foster son Jake (who are, of course, Pennsylvania Dutch) with the sect of Mennonites. Once a Pennsylvania Dutchman becomes a Mennonite, he gives over his harshness and other grievous faults and leads a mild, gentle and inoffensive life. Of course they are all very frugal and ‘close’—they never outgrow that.

“The Amishmen are set apart from the world by their hooks and eyes. They never wear buttons and buttonholes because buttons and buttonholes are worldly. All of them wear the same sort of garb. The women fold kerchiefs over their shoulders and across the breast that their too seductive charms may not be revealed.

“I remember the suspicion with which Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and their wives would invariably regard me when, applying for a few days’ board, I would confess to being a married woman, not even a widow. Why, then, was I going about without my husband? This made it harder for me to obtain board than if I had been an old maid. ‘Where’s her husband, anyhow?’ the farmer and his wife would speculate. ‘Her out here alone fur three days yet and him not showin’ his face! It’s somepin awful funny!’ Then the wife would tell me how in twenty-five years of married life she had never yet spent a night away from her spouse.

“One morning as I was sitting on the kitchen porch writing to my husband the farmer’s wife bent over my shoulder to read what I was writing. ‘Now that there writin’,’ she remarked, ‘I can’t read it so very good.’ I quickly laid the blotter over the page. ‘I am writing to my husband,’ I said hastily, ‘to let him know where I am.’ She stared at me. ‘He don’t know where you’re at?’ she gasped. ‘Well, I guess anyhow, then!’ Which, being interpreted, meant: ‘I should think it was about time!’”

The following further account of these people is taken from a talk Joseph Gollomb had with Mrs. Martin while she was in New York to see the opening of Mrs. Fiske in Erstwhile Susan. The interview, printed in the New York Evening Post of January 22, 1916, provoked Mr. Pennypacker’s blanket indictment which we have already recapitulated:

“You can tell the Pennsylvania Dutchman by his speech, even after he sheds his queer clothes and barbering and takes on the guise of the average American,” explained Mrs. Martin. “A bellboy in Allentown once disarmed my wrath with, ‘Was you bellin’ for me? I didn’t hear it make.’ I knew him then as coming from my people. His father probably would say, cocking his weather eye, ‘It looks for rain. I’m sure it’s going to make something down.’ Or his mother, pricing at market, would ask, ‘For what do you sell your chickens at? I want to wonder. I feel for getting that fat one.’ Your washerwoman, with all the deference in the world, will refer to your husband and hers: ‘Does your Charlie like his shirt ironed? My mister don’t.’

“Enter Cashtown, Virginsville, or Bird-In-The-Hand (these are actual towns). You’ll see houses painted flagrant red or yellow or pink; flower gardens gorgeous with color. And there all the display, or even trace of love of physical beauty, stops. The homes are immaculate but ugly. The parlor is furnished at marriage, then shut up for years.

“Most of the living is in the kitchen. The barn is bigger than the house and is more modern than the kitchen. That is because the Pennsylvania Dutchman is parsimonious with everything but the labor of his women. He’ll buy modern plows, an automobile to take his products to market, modern harness to save his horse. Up-to-dateness in the barn means more money in his pocket. But he won’t spend a cent to save his wife or his daughter a bit of work. That is what they are for—to work for the men folks in the kitchen or near it.

“When a young man goes courting, his eyes are not blinded with Cupid’s bandage. They are wide open to note how the prospective bride qualifies as a frugal, hardworking housewife. I watched a young man studying three girls, his object matrimony. They were sewing and he made a test of their frugality by the way they tore off their threads. The girl who tore off her thread closest to the stitch appealed to him most. Later he watched them at pie making. With another test in mind he asked each of them for the waste dough scraps. One of the girls, wanting to make a hit, gave him generously. The girl who had won in the first test scrimped a few crumbs for him—and won his hand and heart. Soon after, his foot was seen on the rocker of her chair as they talked—which is Pennsylvania Dutch for ‘I mean to marry this girl!’ ...

“What has given them the passion for pinching their souls I don’t know. It may be a narrow and too literal interpretation of the Bible—for they are intensely religious in the orthodox sense. The great majority of them sooner or later join one of the several religious sects—Mennonites, Dunkards, Amish, or some other. ‘I feel to be plain,’ they say, and join one of these sects.

“Their word is as good as gold—but they’ll quibble with their word. A grower will get his wife to water the tobacco leaf, to make it weigh more. ‘Did you water this tobacco?’ the intending buyer asks the farmer. ‘No,’ the farmer answers with literal truth. But once he gives his literal word it is good to the last penny.”

These people are without the sense of citizenship. “They don’t think about it at all,” said Mrs. Martin to an interviewer whose report of her was printed in the Evening Sun, New York, April 7, 1915. “They have no problems and therefore they are contented with their lot. They are wary of education; they think it makes rogues. ‘Look at those grafters in Harrisburg!’ they will say.”

Mrs. Martin once told a capital story of the Amish. This sect has a rule that any one who breaks a law of the meeting shall be penalized by living apart from his wife or, in the case of a woman, her husband; denied even the solace of recrimination. The wife of a particularly stingy member of the sect devised a cunning punishment for him by herself breaking one of the laws of the meeting. “I don’t know what rule she broke,” Mrs. Martin said. “It may have been sewing a button on her dress instead of a hook and eye, or she may have advocated painting the house. In any event her husband became an outcast, unable even to speak to his wife.

“I used the instance, somewhat colored, in a story. The result was that I got a letter from an Amish preacher informing me that if I would give him the name of the man who was so stingy to his wife the church would punish him properly. Of course I replied that the instance was purely fictitious. To which the reply of the minister was that he could not understand why I wrote such lies about the sect!”

Introducing Mrs. Martin, a bright, cheerful, little bit of a woman, at a booksellers’ convention in New York, William Hard declared that she and Margaret Deland were like two large railroad systems each operating exclusively in its own territory by a tacit understanding. Mrs. Martin, to accept the simile, freights great quantities of valuable stuff and yields far better dividends than some of the big transcontinental lines!