Books by Corra Harris
A Circuit Rider’s Wife, 1910.
Eve’s Second Husband, 1911.
The Recording Angel, 1912.
In Search of a Husband, 1913.
The Co-Citizens, 1915.
A Circuit Rider’s Widow, 1916.
Making Her His Wife, 1918.
From Sunup to Sundown, 1919. (With Faith Harris Leech, her daughter.)
Happily Married, 1920.
My Son, 1921.
The Eyes of Love, 1922.
First two published by Henry Altemus, Philadelphia; next six by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; last three by George H. Doran Company.
CHAPTER XIII
Mary Austin
[Spellings and punctuation, even though inadvertent, have been faithfully transcribed for the sake of preserving something intensely human in the personal sketch below.]
[Typewritten]
Independence, Cal.
Nov. 25th, 1902.
Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.;
Gentlemen,
Enclosed you will find the biographical sketch of my life and some account of my work, in reply to your request for the same. I have no doubt that you can get some expression of opinion from Mr. Muir in regard to my book “A Land of Little Rain”. but I will take pains to make sure of the matter and write you again in regard to it. Chas. F. Lummis, editor of Out West, and George Hamlin Fitch, literary editor of The San Fransisco Chronicle, and also the reviewer of the Argonaut can be counted on to give me some friendly notice, especially Lummis as he is my first and warmest friend in the west.... I have written the biographical sketch in the third person to avoid the use of so many “I’s,” which always makes me miserable, you can cut out all that is not to the point.
Sincerely yours
Mary Austin.
[Written]
P. S. I am afraid you will be disappointed with the notes but it is the best I can do.
[Enclosure. Typewritten]
Mary Hunter Austin was born in Carlinville, Illinois, descended on her mother’s side from the family of the celebrated French chemist, Daguerre. Being born fortunately before the flood of so-called children’s books, she began to be familiar with the English classics as soon as she could read, and the study of these and an intimate acquaintance with nature occupied most of the years until the end of her university work. At that time very serious ill health drove her to California, and a friendly destiny provided that she should settle in the new and untamed lands about the Sierra Nevadas and the desert edges. Although not yet twenty, she had already made some preparation for following the profession of teaching, and in the unconventional life of mining towns, and in the wickiups of the Indians found exceptional opportunities for pushing her investigations in child-study.
Mrs. Austin’s work in this direction met with instant recognition in her state, and before long many excellent positions were open to her, but by this time she discovered that she did not want them. Like most desert dwellers, Mrs. Austin had come under the spell of its mystery, and after teaching a short time in the Los Angeles Normal School, was glad to return to the life of the hills, and soon after began to devote herself seriously to writing.
Very early her work attracted the attention of The Atlantic Monthly, St. Nicholas, and the Youth’s Companion. Most of the monthly magazines have published work of hers.
All of Mary Austin’s work is like her life, out of doors, nights under the pines, long days’ watchings by water holes to see the wild things drink, breaking trail up new slopes, heat, cloud bursts, snow, wild beast and mountain bloom, all equally delightful because understood.
[At this point the typewriting stops; the “biographical notes” continue in pen and ink, Mrs. Austin writing on both sides of the sheets of paper.]
N. B. I can’t do it, when I wrote the letter that accompanies this I thought it would be easy to do, but it isn’t. There is really nothing to tell. I have just looked, nothing more, when I was too sick to do anything else I could lie out under the sage brush and look, and when I was able to get about I went to look at other things, and by and by I got to know when and where looking was most worth while. Then I got so full of looking that I had to write to get rid of some of it to make room for more. I was only two months writing “A Land of Little Rain” but I spent 12 years peeking and prying before I began it. After a while I will write a book about my brother the coyote which will make you “sit up,” I mean that is the way I feel about it.
I have considered a long while, to see if I have any interesting eccentricities such as make people want to buy the books of the people who have them, but I think not. You are to figure to yourself a small, plain, brown woman with too much hair, always a little sick, and always busy about the fields and the mesas in a manner, so they say in the village, as if I should like to see anybody try to stop me.
Years ago I was a good shot, but as I grew more acquainted with the ways of wild folks I found it lie heavy on my conscience and so latterly have given it up. I have a house by the rill of Pine creek, looking toward Kearsarge, and the sage brush grows up to the door. As for the villagers they have accepted me on the same basis as the weather, an institution which there is no use trying to account for. Two years ago I delivered the Fourth of July oration here, and if, when there is no minister of any sort here, as frequently happens, I go and ring the church bell, they will come in to hear me in the most natural manner.
When I go out of this valley (Owens) to attend or to talk to large educational gatherings I ride 130 miles in the stage across the desert to Mojave, and the driver lets me hold the lines. Once when he said the water of Mojave made him sick, I put him inside and took the stage in from Red Rock to Coyote Holes. The other passengers who were a barber with a wooden leg, and a Londoner, head of a mining syndicate, took care of my baby. You see I was the only one who knew how to drive four horses.
For a long time before I came to Independence, I lived in Lone Pine where the population is two-thirds Mexican and there gained the knowledge of their character which informs many of my stories. I should say that my husband who is Register of the U. S. Land office, is also a botanist and much of my outdoor life is by way of assisting his field work.
Now for my work—the best is “A Land of Little Rain,” and the child verse in the St. Nicholas. I think the best and worst of it is that I am a little too near to my material. Where I seem to skimp a little, I can understand now that the book is cold, it was only that I presupposed a greater knowledge in the reader. During the last six months I have discovered that the same thing is happening to me that I complained of in Jimville.—the desert has “struck in.” But I shall do better work, and still better. I am pleased to learn through some of my editor friends that my verse is rather better paid for and more widely copied than the average product of verse makers, and I conceive it possible that this might be traced to the influence of Piute and Shoshone medicine men and Dancers who are the only poets I personally know. For consider how I get nearer to the root of the poetic impulse among these single-hearted savages than any other where. But if I write at length upon this point you will say with my friend Kern River Jim, “This all blame foolishness.” And this brings me to my work among the Indians in which I am somewhat generally misrepresented. If I deny what is commonly reported, that the Indians regard me worshipfully for the good I do, then is the denial taken for modesty which it is not, but merely truth. They tell me things because I am really interested and a little for the sake of small favors but mostly because I give them no rest until they do. Says my friend Kern River Jim, “What for you learn them Injun songs? You can’t sing um, You go learn songs in a book, that’s good enough for you.” Nevertheless I have been able to do them nearly as much good as they have done me.
This is the best I can do for you in this way,—but whatever you are minded to say of my work say this—that I have been writing only four or five years and have not yet come to my full power, nor will yet for some years more.
. . . . . .
So wrote Mary Austin in late fall, 1902. Very nearly a year later Houghton Mifflin Company published The Land of Little Rain, a collection of fourteen sketches that were read with admiration and joy, that are rediscovered every year, that established incontestably Mary Austin’s qualifications as a writer.
“East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.
“Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven.”
The reader draws in his breath sharply. This is a writer! And she has style. Yes, but so have dozens of others. And they never do anything with it. They write charming little essays, fanciful, forgotten. What else has she?
She has keen eyes, a keen mind, a heart to understand and a silence and time to come to the understanding. This much you make sure of as you go deeper into the book, reading the accounts of The Pocket Hunter and Jimville: A Bret Harte Town. When you have finished you know Mrs. Austin’s promise but unless you have read her later books you do not know her performance.
It began right after the appearance of The Land of Little Rain with her next work, the novel Isidro, a romance dealing with the California of the padres, and it reached its high and sustained level with A Woman of Genius.
She did not remain on the edge of the desert. To do so would have been fatal. She moved about and with benefit to herself and her work. Now she lives in a house facing on Gramercy Park, New York, where she has a studio. She has exchanged the Mojave desert for the desert of Manhattan, but she is sheltered in an oasis touched with the lingering loveliness of the New York H. C. Bunner knew. Ask her about the advantages of her new environment and she will tell you a story:
“A young Californian who came East to try his fortune gravitated naturally to Washington Square where Genius is supposed to germinate. He was personally conducted to the Liberal Club where a young woman in bobbed hair and a futurist dress asked him if he didn’t think the Liberal Club the most remarkable thing in America.
“‘Well,’ said the Westerner, ‘there’s the Grand Canyon, you know.’
“There you have it,” concludes Mrs. Austin. “If you haven’t seen the Grand Canyon you had better keep away from the Liberal Club; but once you have caught the lift and bigness of America outside New York, then New York is the most inspiring place in the world in which to work.”
Ask her about her fine novel The Ford, a story of present day California which takes its title from a river shallow where the boy Kenneth Brent rescues a lamb from drowning:
“The book records incidents in my own life in the struggle for the waters of Owens River which the city of Los Angeles stole from us,” Mrs. Austin explains. “That was a very wicked episode, and I did not begin to do justice to the chicanery of Los Angeles. I am saving some of these things for the sequel to The Ford! It was I who discovered and made public the attempt of the city to secure the surplus rights of the river in just such fashion as I have described Anne and Kenneth Brent doing in the book.”
We have had Mary Austin’s portrait of herself in 1902; let us have a portrait of her by a visitor who met her about that time. Elia W. Peattie, writing in the Boston Transcript, supplies just those externals that we need to round out our picture:
“I met another desert woman, too [she had been describing a visit to Ida Meacham Strobridge]—Mary Austin, who has within the last eighteen months appeared twice in the Atlantic in sketches which could have been written only by one who knows the solitude and understands it. A Shepherd of the Sierras and The Little Coyote were the titles of these stories. She has also written much verse and of a peculiar order. It is for children, and has a wild and curious quality. This has appeared chiefly in the Youth’s Companion and St. Nicholas.
“Mary Austin lives down in Independence, where her husband is Government land agent. She is fairly on the edge of Death Valley, and her companions are principally Paiute Indians.... Mrs. Austin has an Indian-like solemnity about her. She has a pervading shyness and likes the philosophy of the Indians and their poetry. Instinctively she is artistic in all she does, and her writing has undeniable style as well as remarkable individuality. Her paper on The Indian Arts read at one of the art sessions of the biennial meeting of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was the most purely literary paper of the entire convention. It was written too well, if anything. It was so smooth that it failed to arrest the attention of the more casual listeners....
“All that Mrs. Austin says has a certain value. She speaks seldom. Her utterance is rather slow, her voice very soft, and her remarks are usually grave.... The desert has cloistered her; she is a religieuse, serving her kind, wearing no habit, subscribing to no creed.”
A bit of a purple patch, that last! The truth is that the desert molded Mary Austin without stunting her. She is like one of those desert plants of which she tells us, whose maturity may be attained at ten feet or four inches, according to moisture and the region in which they grow. Herself, she is a desert species—but transplanted in time! She made her final escape before the desert “struck in” too deeply; had she not done so dwarfing would have been inescapable; instead of the ten-foot maturity she would have given us her best—her all, her completion—at four inches.
She has been lucky, yes, but not beyond her deserving. The Atlantic which printed her first offerings was, you will remember, the same Atlantic which gave Jack London his first chance. The Boston magazine seldom prints serials, how seldom may be gathered from the fact that five years elapsed after the appearance of Mary S. Watts’s Van Cleve before the “continued” line footed one of its pages. Yet the Atlantic serialized Isidro. The North American Review, no less severely selective than the Atlantic,—the North American, which had printed serially novels by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, elected to print Mary Austin’s The Man Jesus month by month. The Man Jesus is a biography such as none but an American steeped in the wilderness, steeped in fine literature, with a deeply developed reflective habit could have written. It might almost have been predicted from a woman who remarked in 1904, who threw out in the course of a casual lecture the arresting words: “Most of the great religions have originated in desert countries.”
If we say that The Man Jesus called for unusual knowledge and an unusual faculty, what shall we say of A Woman of Genius? Some readers were doubtless shocked by this novel on its first appearance; the number must be smaller to-day. It is as honest as George Meredith and as finely wrought as anything by Henry James. Genius, in the experience of Olivia Lattimore, a superb actress of tragic rôles, is a gift, a possession in the sense in which we say that a man or a woman “is possessed of”—or by—a devil. Living in Chicago on 85 cents a week was not only not in any way important to her artistic development, it was actually “a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of serving you anew with entertainment.” In other words, the people who think that poverty and heartbreak are inevitable in the case of a person of genius, are even desirable or requisite for the growth and flowering of that genius, are a pack of silly souls. Worse than that, they are guilty souls; for their attitude allows misery and wretchedness to befall the gifted mortal to such an extent that the wonder is the world has any geniuses at all, or any who survive to reveal what is in them.
And so Mrs. Austin makes her Olivia Lattimore bare her life for us pretty completely. It is an austere and serious revelation.
“About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was when the light failed.... On the impulse I spoke.
“‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I want to know ...?’
“It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right. Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended shock come over my mother’s reminiscent softness....
“‘Olivia! Olivia!’ She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private terror of its own. ‘Olivia, I’ll not hear of such things! You are not to speak of them, do you understand! I’ll have nothing to do with them!’
“‘I wanted to know,’ I said. ‘I thought you could tell me....’”
“I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing—it was the first week in November—beginning to collect on the edges of the walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale, scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced them together there in the cold twilight.”
“‘I’m sorry, daughter’—she hesitated—‘I can’t help you. I don’t know.... I never knew myself.’”
We follow the girl through marriage, the birth of a son and his death in infancy, the almost accidental disclosure of her gift for the stage, her struggle with her husband, the gradual breach between them and his defection involving the village dressmaker, the long and harrowing period in Chicago after his death when Olivia was without work, without money and often without hope. Success came, of course; it takes death itself to extinguish genius such as she possessed, “of which I was for the moment the vase, the cup.” The finest thing in this remarkable story is the portrayal of that last struggle between Olivia and Helmeth Garrett in which the woman’s gift (or possession) bests even love. But the chapters on Olivia’s childhood are wonderfully penetrating glimpses into the mind of a young girl and the depiction of other characters is of a high order; one of the best being the sketch of Olivia’s brother, Forester, “Forrie,” who made a vocation, a life work, of the business of being a dutiful son. A Woman of Genius is the work of a woman of genius.
“Whatever you are minded to say of my work say this—that I ... have not yet come to my full power.” You knew, Mrs. Austin. And now we all know.