Books by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
Molly Make-Believe, 1910.
The Sick-a-Bed Lady, 1911.
The White-Linen Nurse, 1913.
The Indiscreet Letter, 1915.
Little Eve Edgarton, 1915.
The Stingy Receiver, 1917.
Published by the Century Company, New York.
The Ne’er-Do-Much, 1918.
Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.
Old-Dad, 1919.
Published by E. P. Dutton & Company. New York.
CHAPTER XXX
HARRIET T. COMSTOCK
THE significant thing about Harriet T. Comstock has been her rôle in reprint.
After a novel has met the demand for it in the regular edition the plates from which it is printed are turned over to Grosset & Dunlap or some other publishing house which issues popular books in inexpensive form. The show has left Broadway to go on “the road.” And, you might not think it, but sometimes the worth of a show is never known until it hits “the road.”
The worth of Mrs. Comstock was never known until Joyce of the North Woods went into reprint.
The book, at over a dollar, had had a “good, average sale”—is 10,000 copies a good average sale? Reader, it is. Think not that all novels are best sellers. That’s no more the case than that all the sellers are the best novels.
Joyce went into reprint and in three months sold 60,000 copies and then it sold and sold and sold; and so, when they came to be reprinted, did Janet of the Dunes and A Son of the Hills. In a little more than three years these three novels in reprint went to 250,000 copies. Since then The Place Beyond the Winds and later books have been put out by the reprinters. Is there any question of Mrs. Comstock’s importance? We think not.
But what’s the explanation? What, in the vernacular, is the answer? The answer is just this: Mrs. Comstock is an earnest, sincere, enthusiastic writer; she is an educated woman, a suffragist, with experience in public speaking and a familiarity with public affairs; she is a homemaker who has always made the keeping of a pleasant home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, her chief business and who wrote at first just for fun and as she had the chance; she has convictions and no more hesitates to act upon them than to express them; she is personally modest—you have to dig things out of her about herself. But—is this the answer? Is there something else?
Yes, there is this else. Mrs. Comstock has worked with intensive culture and a visible reward the peculiarly modern literary field known (it really isn’t so known but it will be) as idealism.
What’s that? There are realists and romanticists although no two of us agree as to what makes a literary realist, what a romanticist. Yet we all recognize the distinction. It is a sure if shadowy boundary. But a literary idealist?
The literary idealist is the product of everybody’s dissatisfaction with what the other two give us. Vexed with the clash of the allopath and the homeopath, some send for the osteopath. The figure of speech we employ is no offhand metaphor. Literary idealists like Mrs. Comstock are a kind of literary osteopaths. They go at us vigorously. They decline to dose us with the nauseous compounds of realism and they shudder at the thought of our taking sugar pellets of romance. What they want us to do is to let them rub, thump, pound and flex us—mentally and emotionally, of course. They say: “Now, see here! Your intellect and your emotions may not be very wonderful but they are your own. Exercise them! Rely on them! Keep well and happy by using them to the fullest extent! They are what the Lord gave you. Don’t try to refine them till they become flabby. Don’t use them brutally till they go to pieces. Recognize your limitations and you’ll be all right!”
That’s Mrs. Comstock’s secret, whether she would put it that way herself or not. She is not a “great” novelist in the usual acceptation of the word; she is, in respect of literary distinction, not even a good novelist. Aesthetically considered she is nowhere. Practically considered she is in a hundred thousand homes, entertaining people, instructing people, osteopathizing, making them use the brains and feelings they have, preventing them from aping something they have not and cannot acquire, killing snobbery at the roots, arresting the blight of disillusionment and convincing young and old that certain simple, fundamental instincts and certain simple, fundamental principles of character are what count—with them. She is right, they do.
Conviction about the truth of life, conviction as to the best use of the novel, namely, “to present the great truths of life in an attractive manner, where they will reach the greatest number of people”—this sums up Harriet T. Comstock. How did she come to write The Place Beyond the Winds which presents the question of eugenics and the ethics of silence on certain matters affecting marriage? Mrs. Comstock’s face saddens and she tells you:
“I had a most unpleasant experience once. I happened to learn that the very attractive son of a dear friend of mine was totally unfit to marry the girl to whom he was engaged. I approached the young man, but found him obdurate; so, after a long mental and spiritual struggle, I revealed the facts to the girl’s mother.
“It was the most trying experience of my life. Then the feeling came to me that I must write about it—must do my small part toward banishing the evil.”
Exactly! There you have the idealist in action as well as in literature. It is perfectly plain what some people will think of Mrs. Comstock’s course; it is equally plain that hundreds of thousands will approve it. Do her the fine justice to acknowledge that whatever any one thought of it, that even if every one else in the world condemned her, she would have done as she did.
She has, in a showdown, absolute and unlimited courage. Then and then only is her rooted modesty and her equally rooted humor put aside. As for the humor that is hers, it comes out fully in the narrative of her experiences campaigning for suffrage. As she once wrote:
“And then the anti who became converted and in a burst of gratitude sent me a bottle of Benedictine!
“Maybe she felt as the young girl at a revival once felt who electrified the congregation by shouting:
“‘Good Lord! My jewelry is dragging me down to hell—I am going to give it to my sister!’”
Go out to Flatbush, as Alice Lawton did one sunshiny afternoon, afterward relating her experience in the Book News Monthly; travel along a “broad, tree-shaded street between rows of real homes with full complement of flower gardens and babies and puppies; stop at a pretty, wide-verandaed, white-pillared house and call upon Mrs. Comstock, wife, mother, home-maker, novelist—a Jill of many trades and successful at them all!”
She seats you in a “cozy, brown-walled drawing-room, beside a little round table.” You eat “piping hot buttered toast and crisp jumbles, and drink properly-brewed tea. Sonny comes strolling in, a large, beautifully-marked Burne-Jonesy yellow cat,” a Persian. The creature is polite but heads for a little mahogany desk and sniffs at the single drawer. It contains his catnip.
The hostess is the sort of woman you make confidences to. Mrs. Comstock is cheerful, “has smiling eyes, a loving-toned voice, curly gray hair, wears pretty clothes and almost always flowers. One feels a hearty welcome even when one telephones her. She never sounds annoyed, nor even interrupted.”
Upstairs there’s a bright little room where she works. Couch in one corner, built-in bookcase in another, big desk in the middle. The desk is heaped with piles of closely-written paper and books. On the soft buff paper of the walls are paintings, drawings, photographs—the originals of illustrations to Mrs. Comstock’s books are noticeable. Here she writes most of each novel, subjected to endless interruptions—friends and neighbors of a novelist never take the novelist’s work seriously. When the finishing chapters are to be done Mrs. Comstock packs manuscript, pencils and paper and goes away. Her publishers and her husband have the address—no one else. She is one of the extremely few novelists who do not use a typewriter—she writes it all out longhand and makes several copies before she gets through. She began by writing stories for the school paper, she continued by writing children’s stories, then books for older girls and boys. Janet of the Dunes was her first novel.
Thomas Hardy is her favorite author. “Whenever I feel that I am stranded I read Hardy and regain my poise. He discusses so clearly and nobly the problems with which we are struggling to-day. And I also like Barrie; principally, I think, because he knows women so thoroughly, and I always know he knows. Stevenson once said of George Eliot that when she wrote of men they always put their hands up to feel if their hair is coming down; but Barrie writes of women without their appearing with a cigar in their hands.”
Of her method of work Mrs. Comstock says:
“The first thing I see is the place and the people—the background and the actors. Then their story begins to unfold in my mind. When the time comes that that story must be written before I can have any peace of mind, I sit down to it—not before. Other writers, I understand, usually see the story or the people first, and the background later. With me, the background, the environment of my characters, is all-important. Why, I even keep a set of pictures of the country I am writing of on my desk beside me.”
Mrs. Comstock always goes to the scene of her stories. Her backgrounds are always of actual places and her people are frequently real people. Thus in Joyce of the North Woods her St. Ange is a place in northern New York and all the lesser characters are taken from life. In The Vindication, Dr. Hill is straight out of actuality. On a suffrage tour Mrs. Comstock met this young physician whose work had been so largely among the Adirondack poor. He, too, had adopted a backward and neglected child, just as Dr. Hill takes hold of the boy Chester in Mrs. Comstock’s novel. A Son of the Hills was the fruit of a visit in the Virginia mountains. Not the immediate fruit; some time had to elapse before Mrs. Comstock could “see” the story in the mountaineers. In Mam’selle Jo, Mrs. Comstock has gone up North again, to the St. Lawrence country, and she tells the moving story of a woman of 40 who has at last struggled clear of debt and is at last able to gratify the instinct of mother-love which is in her.
Popular she is, but she does not think of popularity. In truth a writer cannot. For, as Mrs. Comstock says, the writer who thinks of the possible popularity of her work when she should be thinking of her story will impair her work. And her work is the thing with Mrs. Comstock. Reject it if you like, accept it if you will; she will go unshakeably on. She has something to do and is about doing it.