The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Harriet T. Comstock

Janet of the Dunes, 1908.
Joyce of the North Woods, 1911.
A Son of the Hills, 1913.
The Place Beyond the Winds, 1914.
The Vindication, 1917.
Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country, 1918.
Unbroken Lines, 1919.
The Shield of Silence, 1921.
At the Crossroads, 1922.
(Also many books for boys and girls.)

Mrs. Comstock’s earlier books are to be had in reprint. Janet of the Dunes was published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston; the others are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.

CHAPTER XXXI
HONORÉ WILLSIE

NOTHING is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It will be enough to try faithfully to set them before her thousands of readers and the thousands who ought to be her readers, to try to picture Mrs. Willsie herself. That is all that can be done in a chapter of reasonable length. To discuss intelligently Mrs. Willsie’s ideas would require a book and an amount of exact knowledge on certain subjects—immigration and Americanization, for example—that is no part of our reporter’s equipment. A straightaway bit of exposition must do instead.

The spring of 1919 will see the publication of a new novel by Mrs. Willsie, The Forbidden Trail, an exciting story of the Still Jim country, Arizona and the irrigable West. The novel deals with the clever efforts of German spies and sympathizers to appropriate for Germany the discoveries and improvements made by the sturdy Americans of our United States Reclamation Service. This theme is not so completely derived from the war as might appear at first glance. Readers of Still Jim will recall in the closing chapters the visit of Herr Gluck to the Cabillo dam and his effort to get Jim Manning to enter the service of the German Government—in a legitimate way, however. Of the illegitimate ways in which Germany was then working among American engineers Mrs. Willsie is now free to speak and may be trusted to speak out of an exact knowledge. For her husband, Henry Elmer Willsie, of New York, was an inventor and consulting engineer when she was married to him and with him she spent two years in the deserts of Arizona.

Honoré Willsie was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, the daughter of William Dunbar McCue and Lilly Bryant (Head) McCue and a descendant of old New Englanders who went West, the people who form the important background of Still Jim and Lydia of the Pines. She is a Bachelor of Arts of the University of Wisconsin and was married soon after her graduation. The two years in the West followed and then the husband and wife came to New York where Mrs. Willsie devoted herself to the task of winning recognition as a writer. She says now:

“A plan, and always keeping your eye on what you want to be doing in three years or in five years—that is what makes for success for a writer.

“I came to New York with the intention of being a writer. I did not want to work on a magazine or a newspaper. And I wanted to write what I wanted to write.

“I had sold Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine] a little love story called Beatrice and the Rose. So after a few weeks in New York I went to see him with a bundle of stories I wanted him to buy. He looked them over and shook his head.

“‘Do me something else like Beatrice and the Rose and I’ll take it,’ he said.

“‘I don’t want to go on writing stuff like that,’ I explained. ‘If that’s the best I can do I’ll give up writing altogether.’

“‘But nobody wants to read about those deserts and glowing sunsets. There is only one man in New York who will read about deserts—Theodore Dreiser.’

“‘All right,’ I decided. ‘I will go to see Theodore Dreiser.’

“I sent my stuff to Mr. Dreiser in advance and next day I went down to see what he thought of it. I was pretty well scared. I walked around the Butterick Building—four times I walked around that bulky flatiron before I screwed up enough courage to go in. When I finally got inside and was ushered into Mr. Dreiser’s office [the novelist was then editor of the Delineator, a job Mrs. Willsie now holds] I was tongue-tied with nervousness. That nervousness might well have been prophetic. The interview turned out to be a momentous one for me.

“‘My God!’ said Mr. Dreiser, looking me over. ‘Another infant come to New York to reform it.’ But after a little talk he offered me a job, editorial work at a good salary.

“‘I’ll have to think that over,’ I said, the temptation of a good regular salary struggling against my plans for writing, and writing only.

“‘No,’ Mr. Dreiser ordered. ‘You sit right there and decide now.’

“So I sat there and thought about it and finally I told him that I wouldn’t take his job. I had stuck out this far and I guessed I could go on.

“‘All right,’ Mr. Dreiser agreed without argument. ‘Stick it out at the writing game if you want to. It won’t be easy, but you will make good. You will have a hard time at first, and you will need pluck. But in five years you will land and land big. As for these stories of yours, I will buy them.’ And he named a sum staggering to my inexperience, though he assured me he was taking advantage of me because I was unknown.

“Well, I kept on writing. I bought a second-hand typewriter and worked it with two fingers and many times I thought of the salary I might have had coming in every week. As Mr. Dreiser said, it wasn’t easy. I made $500 that first year. Things came out my way because I stuck to my plan and always kept my eye on the future—and had the courage to refuse that job.”

Not long afterward Mrs. Willsie’s stories began to appear in the magazines and were unusually popular. She took up the writing of special articles for such periodicals as Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s on important subjects—immigration, divorce, Indians, the United States Reclamation Service. Norman Hapgood, who was then editor of Harper’s Weekly, said of her work: “She has the ability to get at the essentials of a big question, and put it in simple, human terms.”

Mrs. Willsie’s first published novel was The Heart of the Desert, which came out in 1913. It won immediate recognition for her. Richard Le Gallienne, writing an appreciation of Mrs. Willsie in the Book News Monthly of March, 1917, said:

“As a boy, of course, I adored the American Indian of Fenimore Cooper, but, since then, words fail. If I have a bête noire in fiction, nowadays, it is the American Indian. I mention this purely personal peculiarity, merely to emphasize the delight which I took in Mrs. Willsie’s hero in The Heart of the Desert—and his truly heroic wooing and winning of a white girl, with Mrs. Willsie’s, and, I am sure, all her readers’ concurrence. Never was such a masterful wooing, or one brought to winning through such heart-beating suspense, such a grim passionate race for love and life in so wild and star-lit and infinite a setting.”

And he says that therefore “when I say that, in my opinion, The Heart of the Desert is one of the best ‘yarns,’ and, if I may say so, one of the most virile love stories written in our time, it is not from any prejudice in favor of its subject matter.”

Mr. Le Gallienne’s article is not long. We take the liberty to quote the rest of it from a booklet on Mrs. Willsie prepared by the Frederick A. Stokes Company, her publishers. This booklet also contains an interesting article by Hildegarde Hawthorne on Mrs. Willsie and her novels. Says Mr. Le Gallienne:

“My first acquaintance with Mrs. Honoré Willsie’s books came through a photograph of her looks. The photograph, or photographs, to which I have reference occurred in a copy of Harper’s Weekly, not so very long before that honored periodical was gathered to its fathers. They were taken by her husband, and represented Mrs. Willsie in the heart of the Arizona Desert; dizzily seated at the edge of a canyon; in camp democratically at dinner, with a stunning hat and a still more stunning smile, and so on. Here, one said, was the veritable ‘Girl of the Golden West,’ tall and fearless-eyed as Artemis; something like a symbolic figure of that noble type of Western woman, which accounts so largely for the proverbial chivalry—and homicides—of that portion of America which is at once most romantic and most real. One of these, particularly, haunted me, and with my subsequent acquaintance with Mrs. Willsie’s writings in mind, I must be forgiven one more use of the word ‘symbolic’—Mrs. Willsie is seated in the foreground, a wilderness of sagebrush all about her, and a lonely stretch of barren mountain in the near background. Her head, of which you only see the massive coiled hair, is bent in an attitude, as of sorrow, close over her knees, from which her right hand hangs listlessly, almost touching the cowboy hat at her feet. ‘The close of a long day,’ is the caption of the picture. In the light of Mrs. Willsie’s books, that photograph has come to me to represent the attitude of her soul, the soul of a young American woman, to whom the idealism that made her country is a religion, in one of those moods of dejection which occasionally overcome all of us who love this great Republic, at what too frequently seems like an eclipse, or even a decadence, of that idealism. As she sits there with bended head, like some heroic weeper, in that austere wilderness, her attitude seems to be saying what Lydia says so finally in her inspiring new book, Lydia of the Pines:

“‘We’ve got too many lawyers in America. What I think America needs is real love of America. And it seems to me the best way to get it is to identify oneself with the actual soil of the community. What I want is this: That you and I, upon the ground where poor John Levine did such wrongs, will build us a home. I don’t mean a home as Americans usually mean the word, I mean we’ll try to found a family there. We’ll send the roots of our roof-tree so deep into the ground that for generations to come our children’s children will be found there and our family name will stand for old American ideals in the community. I don’t see how else we Americans can make up to the world for the way we’ve exploited America.’

“After looking at Mr. Willsie’s photographs, I chanced to be walking along Fifth Avenue, and glancing into a bookseller’s windows, I beheld one of those pyramidal displays of a new book which I have sometimes thought must have exhausted the whole edition. The name of the book was Still Jim. It was by the lady of Mr. Willsie’s beautiful photographs—and it was a real best seller, said the bookseller, to whom I disbursed the needed dollar and whatever it was. No young writer could hope to live up to Mr. Willsie’s photographs, but I was happily astonished to find how near Mrs. Willsie came to doing it. Apart from the book as a story, its quality of atmosphere, its breath of vast spaces, its sense of heroic action on a great stage, were remarkable. There was, too, that background of ‘character’ to the writing in which the life of a book mainly resides, and for lack of which so many clever books come and go, perishing like the summer skies.

“Lydia of the Pines [we have already quoted Mr. Le Gallienne’s words on The Heart of the Desert] combines all Mrs. Willsie’s qualities and characteristics in a maturing ratio. The book shows her as growing nearer and nearer to that symbolic photograph of her. More and more she is seen as the passionate dreamer of the true American ideal, a practical dreamer, too, not afraid to arraign America to her face for wrong done in the past, and wrongs still a-doing. The theme of Lydia of the Pines is one of the noblest she could have chosen—the infamy of political corruption that is so subtly and cruelly doing the last wrong to the Indian by the legalized theft of his pitiful ‘reservations.’

“‘Where the pine-forest is destroyed, the pines never come again,’—such is the burden of this noble and very moving story of a high-souled but most human girl, whose family and friends are implicated in ‘real estate’ deals with Indians of a nearby reservation. It is a simple story too, moving among simple lives, in a simple Western milieu which Mrs. Willsie presents with great fidelity, with many touches of humor and pathos.

“In Lydia of the Pines one sees Mrs. Willsie growing in strength, more surely becoming one of the authentic voices of the nobler Americanism, and her book is sure of a huge welcome by those who have that at heart.”

With equal enthusiasm Hildegarde Hawthorne declares that Lydia of the Pines “is the best thing Mrs. Willsie has yet done.” The author of this volume has endeavored generally to be reticent in the expression of personal preferences. He will only say that he does not agree with Miss Hawthorne about Lydia. He found it fearfully dull while fully conceding the interest of the ideas which Mrs. Willsie never fails to present for her readers’ contemplation. He admired the portrait of John Levine but deplored what he felt to be its lack of solidity. The reader sees Levine in two relations only—to Lydia and to the Indians, and unfortunately his relations to the Indians are mostly a matter of hearsay, what came to Lydia’s ears, no more. To this writer Still Jim seems by far the better book.

But Miss Hawthorne is thoroughly right when she says:

“No one who reads Mrs. Willsie’s books can fail to be deeply interested in seeing how the writer grasps and lays before her public certain big problems confronting us, such as this of the downfall of the early traditions, the influx of races that have not our conception of government or of life, and now the Indian problem. In Lydia of the Pines the shameful story of our treatment of the red man is illuminatingly told. It is told with measure and good sense, and is concretely pictured, the facts concerning one Reservation supplying the material. Those who wish to ascertain how closely Mrs. Willsie sticks to facts need only hunt up the reports of the Board of Indian Commissioners in regard to the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota to find out. The whole story is there, told over and over again with endless, pitiful detail. In her novel Mrs. Willsie has drawn intelligently upon that mass of testimony, handled it with a full realization of its drama, and also with a peculiarly broad understanding of both sides.”

Gertrude Atherton says: “I think Lydia of the Pines is an American classic.” Margaret Deland wrote to Mrs. Willsie concerning Still Jim:

“All the book is American to the roots—but big Jim is the American soul. It is too massive a book to write about in detail;—it’s the whole effect that moves me: truth, beauty and democracy. A fine piece of work—an honest heart behind it. I congratulate you.”

The element of mysticism in Mrs. Willsie finds its outlet in the two and three line reveries which she puts at the head of her chapters. Thus in Still Jim a desert rock muses:

“Humans constantly shift sand and rock from place to place. They call this work. I have seen time return their every work to the form in which it was created.”

“Coyotes hunt weaker things. Humans hunt all things, even each other, which the coyote will not do.”

In Lydia of the Pines it is a pine tree which murmurs:

“The young pine knows the secrets of the ground. The old pine knows the stars.”

“Nature is neither cruel nor sad. She is only purposeful, tending to an end we cannot see.”

There should be mention of Mrs. Willsie’s most recent book, Benefits Forgot: A Study of Lincoln and Mother Love. This is a brief but true story of a young army surgeon for whose education his mother had made great sacrifices. Mrs. Willsie tells how President Lincoln learned of the young man’s neglect of his mother and brought him to realize his ingratitude. It is a very fine and very touching little story.

Has the war changed Mrs. Willsie’s ideas and ideals? No, it has sustained and strengthened them; it has supplied her with evidence in their support and justification in their advancement. We quote an interview with the novelist by Maxwell Aley:

“War time (Mrs. Willsie said) is woman’s time to show the stuff she is made of. This war is going to take the ‘fluff’ out of feminism in America just as it did in England. It’s”—hesitation and a twinkling eye—“it’s going to blow the foam off the feminist beer!” [A good figure, that, for feminism has certainly been something yeasty, something brewing, and with a little hop in it!] “I hope the war is going to make American women realize the importance of being women, and the chance that it gives them to mold the coming generation.

“As I see it there are two things American women can do—one abstract and one concrete. They can teach children in this time of national stress what it means to be Americans, and in that way form the Americans of the future; and they can mobilize their resources and offer them to the government. Like all abstract things, the first is the more difficult.

“Women have got to get down from pink teas to brass tacks! If the average woman would only stop to realize just how important it is to be a woman! Why, woman’s business is not only the bringing into the world of the coming generation, but the molding of that generation’s ideals. American men are too busy making a living to give much time to the children—it’s the women who teach them at home and at school. And they ought to be taught what it means to be Americans as well as being taught religion and morals, or grammar and geography.

“But here’s the rub! To teach children that, a woman has got to realize what it means herself. How many do?

“I hope more women realize it than men—that is, than the men I’ve asked. Several years ago I started out asking all sorts of men ‘What is an American?’ I asked ‘Bohunks’ and ‘Guineas’ at work on street construction, I asked American men in every walk in life—and what do you suppose I got as an average answer? That an American was a man who knew how to get rich quick!

“This war has shown us that taking out naturalization papers, or even being born here, doesn’t necessarily make an American. We’ve found out that the melting pot doesn’t always melt. To be an American you must have a certain philosophy of government, and only a thoughtful person can have a philosophy at all. If you are going to be a true American, you’ve got to think things out! You’ve got to come to an understanding of the big ideals on which the men who founded this country built.

“Every American who does that develops a paradox. He finds first that he has a sense of freedom and equality, and then he arrives at a feeling of responsibility. That latter feeling has been very evident among thinking Americans since the beginning of the European war, and it is particularly evident now.

“It’s up to American women, then, to think out what it means to be Americans before they attempt to teach their children—or some one else’s children—what it means. I wish that we might have an American litany—a national creed that mothers and teachers could give to our children! I wish that every American child might be brought to understand the state of mind of the men who wrote and signed our Declaration of Independence—a state of mind compounded of utter bravery, the spirit of self-sacrifice, and a devotion to cause and country that made them literally offer up their ‘lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.’

“Now do you see why I said the abstract thing women have a chance to do is the hard thing? But if it is the more difficult, I believe it is also the more important.

“As for the concrete thing, that is already being done to a certain extent. Women have begun offering their services to the government through their various organizations, but they ought to do it more completely. If we are to have universal service for men, we ought to have a variety of universal service for women—at least a mobilization of the resources of all the women in the country. I believe that women here in America will get the vote out of this war as women are getting it in England, but American women will have to show, as English women have done, that they are worthy of the vote.

“And there is one thing American women must not forget—that the most important thing they can mobilize is their sex. When the men of a country give their bodies to the sword, the women must give theirs to the future—to the generation to come. Now, more than in peace times, women owe it to their country to bear children, and bear them intelligently. And when they have borne them, it is their sacred duty to bring them up Americans in a full understanding of the ideals on which our fathers built the nation.”

Living in New York, writing in New York, working in New York as the managing editor of the Delineator, Mrs. Willsie is still and essentially the woman of Mr. Willsie’s photographs which made so forcible an impression on Mr. Le Gallienne. With her is always a splendid vision: “Exquisite violet mists rolled back toward the mountains. The pungent odor of sagebrush floated through the tent. Iridescent, bejeweled, flashing every rainbow tint from its moistened breast, the desert smiled at us. Once more I yielded to its loveliness.” To her and her vision many, many of her countrymen and countrywomen will always yield gratefully and with pleasure.