Books by Demetra Vaka
The First Secretary, 1907.
Haremlik, 1909.
The Duke’s Price, 1910.
Finella in Fairyland, 1910.
In the Shadow of Islam, 1911.
A Child of the Orient, 1914.
The Grasp of the Sultan, 1916.
The Heart of the Balkans, 1917.
In the Heart of German Intrigue, 1918.
Demetra Vaka’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
CHAPTER XXIV
EDNA FERBER
THE most interesting thing about Edna Ferber is that she was born in Kalamazoo. No, the most interesting thing is that she threw her first novel in the wastebasket whence, like Kipling’s Recessional, it was retrieved by another. No, no! the most interesting thing about Edna Ferber is that she’s a superb short story writer, one of the best in America, one of the dozen best.
You are all wrong. The supremely interesting fact about Edna Ferber is this: She invented the Tired Business Woman.
When writing about Miss Ferber why be dull? Why go in for the higher criticism? As for the lower criticism, we hope we are above it. Certainly she is.
To get back to name, dates, etc.: Chicago, Des Moines and Appleton, Wisconsin, all have a stake in Miss Ferber’s success. Kalamazoo doesn’t vociferate. It doesn’t have to, for she was born there and though seven cities claimed Homer dead it will be no use for seven or eight or six places to claim Edna Ferber living. Kalamazoo will see to that; Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she made her debut—the only debut that’s really worth making—on August 15, 1887. That is why we shall speak of her very respectfully. She is a month older than we are and a month is everything.
The daughter of Jacob Charles Ferber and Julia (Neuman) Ferber. Educated in the public and high schools of—alas for Kalamazoo!—Appleton, Wisconsin. At seventeen she became a reporter on the Appleton Daily Crescent—“the youngest real reporter in the world.” She has it on us. We were almost nineteen when—but never mind. Appleton, we hear, soon became too small for Miss Ferber. Appletons have a way of doing that, or isn’t it rather that the Edna Ferbers have a way of growing too big for the Appletons? Anyway, Miss Ferber went to Milwaukee and then to a big Chicago daily, the Tribune, to be exact. In Milwaukee she worked on the Journal. Dawn O’Hara, her first book, was written in the time she could spare from newspaper work. After it was completed she did not like it. It was her mother who rescued the manuscript from the wastebasket and sent it to a publisher, the same person mentioned in the dedication of the novel: “To my dear mother who frequently interrupts and to my sister Fannie who says ‘Sh-sh-sh!’ outside my door.”
The best piece of work Mrs. Ferber ever did! The book took publisher and public by storm. It came out in 1911 and in the same year the new American author attained the dignity of twenty-four years. Our copy of Dawn O’Hara is marked “eighth edition,” but as it is a reprinted copy that may understate, or rather under-indicate, the book’s success. A few thousands one way or another hardly matters among so many thousands of copies sold!
Without pressing the autobiographical idea too hard it is perfectly evident that much of the background of Dawn O’Hara is from Miss Ferber’s own experience, notably the settings in Milwaukee. How she could ever have been so dissatisfied with her story as to discard it utterly any present-day reader will be puzzled to imagine. It is extremely well told. It is full of the perfect human—humorously human—quality which lifts so many of Miss Ferber’s short stories into high place. Take this passage:
“The Whalens live just around the corner. The Whalens are omniscient. They have a system of news gathering which would make the efforts of a New York daily appear antiquated. They know that Jenny Laffin feeds the family on soup meat and oatmeal when Mr. Laffin is on the road; they know that Mrs. Pearson only shakes out her rugs once in four weeks; they can tell you the number of times a week that Sam Dempster comes home drunk; they know that the Merkles never have cream with their coffee because little Lizzie Merkle goes to the creamery every day with just one pail and three cents; they gloat over the knowledge that Professor Grimes, who is a married man, is sweet on Gertie Ashe, who teaches second reader in his school; they can tell you where Mrs. Black got her seal coat, and her husband only earning two thousand a year; they know who is going to run for mayor, and how long poor Angela Sims has to live, and what Guy Donnelly said to Min when he asked her to marry him.
“The three Whalens—mother and daughters—hunt in a group. They send meaning glances to one another across the room, and at parties they get together and exchange bulletins in a corner. On passing the Whalen house one is uncomfortably aware of shadowy forms lurking in the windows, and of parlor curtains that are agitated for no apparent cause.”
Beautiful! Gardiner of Harvard could have turned it inside out for you and have shown you just where Miss Ferber impinged on your sensations and how and to what end.... But the thing shows the facility of her best work. Are the Whalens important to the story of Dawn O’Hara? They are not. They are merely figures on the canvas, amusing but unimportant people, no more than “brushed in” but brushed in with a firmness of touch, a fidelity of detail, a humorous artist eye that is, as we say, “taking” or “fetching” and wholly delightful.
Since 1911 with short stories and a book a year there is nothing to chronicle but a progressive and uninterrupted success. Nothing except the Tired Business Woman. Make no mistake; this creation of Miss Ferber’s is not a feminine counterpart of the Tired Business Man. The T. B. W. does not go to musical shows and sit in the front rows. She does not telephone home to the husband that she is sorry but important business will detain her downtown this evening. She does not bring home old friends unexpectedly to dinner, or worse, not bring them home to dinner. She is man-less but not because she need be. She is unmarried or a widow. She has a boy, like Jock McChesney, and finds the task of making a man of him, in outside hours not devoted to earning their living, a woman-sized job! Give Edna Ferber credit for this, that she has done as much as the cleverest feminist to make the world see the self-reliant woman as she is, and not as the world deduces she may be. A woman, yes, and a mother, yes! But a regular person above everything else. Read, or re-read, Emma McChesney & Co. with this in a corner of your mind and you will be thankful to Miss Ferber when you have finished. Some thanks, too, may go to Ethel Barrymore, whose impersonation of the Tired But Admired (and admirable) Business Woman of Miss Ferber’s fiction reënforced the lesson of the book with the ocular demonstration of the play.
Miss Ferber is going forward. The evidence of it will be found in the stories contained in her latest book, Cheerful—By Request (1918) and perhaps particularly in the story in that volume called The Gay Old Dog. At thirty-one she has her best years—as literary records go—before her. No painstaking appraisal of her work would be wise at this time. In the next two or three years she may overshadow everything she has done so far. We hope so. Because then, bearing in mind that month’s initial difference, we shall have high hopes ourselves!