The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Helen R. Martin

Elusive Hildegarde.
Her Husband’s Purse.
His Courtship.
Warren Hyde.
Tillie, a Mennonite Maid, 1904.
Sabina, a Story of the Amish, 1905.
The Betrothal of Elypholate and Other Tales of the Pennsylvania Dutch, 1907.
The Revolt of Anne Royle, 1908.
The Crossways, 1910.
When Half-Gods Go, 1911.
The Fighting Doctor, 1912.
The Parasite, 1913.
Barnabetta, 1914.
For a Mess of Pottage, 1915.
Martha of the Mennonite Country, 1915.
Those Fitzenbergers, 1917.
Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian? 1918.
Maggie of Virginsburg, 1918.
The Schoolmaster of Hessville, 1920.
The Marriage of Susan, 1921.

Mrs. Martin’s books are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York, and the Century Company, New York.

CHAPTER XVIII
SOPHIE KERR

“July 19, 1918.

“My dear Mr. Overton:

“IT has been almost impossible for me to write this. I have made a dozen beginnings and invariably found myself drifting off into reminiscences of my childhood and funny lies about what I think and feel. Good heavens! what do I think and feel? I don’t know. I really don’t. I have never had the time nor found myself of sufficient interest to sit down and think about myself subjectively. I am afraid that this is a very queer narrative and very dull, but at least I have tried to give only facts....

“I was born near Denton, Maryland, a small town located in the ‘sandy belt’ of the Eastern Shore. It is a narrow-minded, kind-hearted, conventional, self-respecting community, not very enterprising—an average little semi-Southern town. My father had a nursery and fruit farm, and cared more, I think, for beautiful trees than he did for people. We had lovely arborvitæ and red japonica hedges, magnolia trees, an extraordinary collection of evergreens, and many unusual foreign flowering shrubs.

“I went to school at Denton, the public school, and the embryo High School of twenty to twenty-five years ago. And then I went to college.

“As a child I read everything that I could lay hands on and we always had books and magazines at home. But my reading was not guided and it was my great misfortune not to find among my teachers, either in school or college, even one with any special mental quality or deep and sound culture, or even any vital enthusiasm—with the exception of the psychology teacher at college.

“I began to write at college, the sort of imitative stuff that most college girls write—very highbrow essays on Maeterlinck, and that kind of thing. Not much fiction or poetry, as I remember. But I had my ideas of a writing career, for all that. When I was graduated from college I was just eighteen and I came home and told my father that I was going to be an author and he might as well buy me a typewriter—I was always of a severely practical turn of mind. I got the typewriter and began to write stories, first in longhand, then copying them single-spaced on the machine; they made terrifying manuscripts. One got into the Ladies’ World, and one into the Country Gentleman, and one into Truth, which was then a flourishing publication. And about that time, after I had been home for a couple of years, at the suggestion of an old friend of my father’s I went to the University of Vermont for a year of graduate work. And I began to take a special course in history there with Professor Samuel Emerson.

“I tell this with particularity, because it was the very best thing that ever happened to me. As I worked with Professor Emerson, I gradually and painfully became aware that I did not know how to use my mind, and that my education was of the most shocking superficiality. I learned that I didn’t know how to think. I will admit that I was surprised and oh, how humiliated! If I’d only thrown myself on Professor Emerson’s mercy and told him that I knew my shortcomings and asked him to help me! But I was too youthfully proud for that, and I went on, dimly trying to get at the thing myself and marking with a hopeless appreciation, which would have doubtless amazed the Professor had he guessed it, the truly wonderful way in which he used his own exceptional intellectuality.

“It is a fine thing to know what you do not know. It set me to work to try to get what I did not have—a disciplined, well-ordered, logical mind, a store of knowledge, a really broad culture. Alas, I never got any of them, and I never shall. It takes different training and environment from infancy to produce them, as well as greater capabilities than mine. But I did at least get this—the habit of thinking things out for myself, and a poor opinion, thought out by the individual, is better than a lazy acceptance of some one else’s say-so.

“Naturally, my year with Professor Emerson gave me a very low opinion of my chances to become a writer. I let writing alone for a while, and then began doing little light things for the Pittsburgh Gazette, one of whose staff I had met while on a visit to Pittsburgh. They were mostly little essays—though that word is really too dignified for them—on the foibles and fashions of the time. Sometimes a drop or two of sentiment and little amusing incidents that I gathered when visiting in Washington and Baltimore—we Southerners are great visitors, you know—occasionally a scrap of very light verse.

“But this was not enough. I got restless and I wrote to the Gazette people and asked for a job. I got it—I was to run the woman’s page of their evening paper, and do Sunday specials. After I arrived the duties of music critic were added, and later I had charge of a Sunday supplement. The people on the Gazette were very kind and patiently tutored me through my greenhorn days. The training was excellent and I worked there very happily for several years.

“But I had been trying some magazine work—more light, semi-humorous stuff, and the Woman’s Home Companion bought several of my pieces. I went to New York to see them in the spring and in the fall I asked them for a job. And got it,—assistant to Miss Gertrude B. Lane, who was then the assistant editor, and is now the editor.

“I have stayed with the Companion ever since, save for a year when I went with the ill-starred Circle, and now I am managing editor. All this covers a period of over ten years.

“After I got to New York the writing fever got me, and I tried some stories and more short articles of sentiment and humor. Some of these were published and some of them came back to me. More and more I tried to do fiction, and more and more I did it: now I have three books out—Love at Large, The Blue Envelope and The Golden Block—and another in the works, and I’ve written innumerable short stories, most of which have been published. Of course the very best story I ever wrote I cannot sell. I occasionally run across a copy of that story in my rejected manuscript drawer and I say, ‘Never mind—some day I’ll wish you on an editor, yet.’

“None of my stories are in the least autobiographical, and I rarely—almost never—put real people or incidents in my stories, and then only as a foundation on which the action of the story may go forward. My stories are built up from my imagination, character after character, plot, action and finale. I try to work out everything logically, and after I have written a story I go over it and turn the cold eye of criticism on its chronology and the convincingness of its detail. Heaven forefend that I should intimate that I make no mistakes in these,—but at least I try to get them right. That is where my long editorial training is an asset.

“Furthermore, what my various characters say does not necessarily reflect my own views or beliefs—I have no propaganda spirit—the story’s the thing. Time and time again have indignant readers berated me for beliefs expressed in the speeches of my characters—beliefs which were at wide variance with my own, but perfectly in keeping with the character who expressed them.

“(I seem to be wandering away from my theme, Mr. Overton, and truly, it all seems very silly and flat to me. Here are some unrelated facts which you may be able to use somehow—they sound like the answers to an Alice in Wonderland questionnaire.)

“I read heaps of biography and autobiography and fiction and poetry, and I do not read any of these because of the possible effect they may have on my work, but because I like to. I read all the magazines, too, but because it is part of my job to see what they are doing. I would rather be unhappy than uncomfortable. I am a good cook and like to do it; indeed I can make better gingerbread and better spoon-bread and better strawberry preserves than any one in the world—this is not arrogance, but a beautiful exceptional truth, as Mr. Bob Davis [Robert H. Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine] would say. I work very hard, all the time, and I do not like parties and teas and such and never go to them, when I can get out of it. I write whenever I have any time and I have trained myself to use any time I can get and to go on with a story without re-reading what I’ve already written, even after a lapse of several days. I am an individualist without having the least conviction that it’s the best thing to be. I do not take my own—or most other people’s—writing very seriously. I believe that there was never a time when so many people were writing and writing well, but saying nothing of interest or value. On the other hand, I believe that there is a lot of big work being done and that the mediocre stuff doesn’t really obscure it. I’d rather be an editor than a writer, but I like to be both.

“(Now, really—this is getting ‘curiouser and curiouser,’ to revert again to Alice. Will it do—or won’t it? And, if not, what have I left unsaid that I ought to have said? I am gradually working myself up, I am afraid, into a state of self-conscious muzziness. And I don’t want that to go into your book.)”

So writes Sophie Kerr (Mrs. Sophie Kerr Underwood) in response to an appeal for some information about herself that might legitimately gratify the natural curiosity of her readers. Her readers are a multitude! She has had stories in “all the magazines,” so to speak; the statement doesn’t exaggerate much. She hasn’t had a story, so far as we know, in the New Republic but when that Effort decides to take up the publication of short stories doubtless she will!

Mrs. Underwood’s short stories need no introduction (to use the sacred formula), and anyway we are here concerned with her as a novelist, and primarily with her as the author of The Blue Envelope and The Golden Block.

Both these stories are concerned with women in business and there the resemblance pretty nearly stops. The Blue Envelope has for its heroine a young girl (who tells the story) under twenty. Leslie Brennan is pretty, a pretty butterfly, used to nothing but spending money and having a joyous if innocent time. She lives with Mrs. Alexander, a woman of family and breeding and wealth. Her guardian, Uncle Bob, pays her bills. But when Mrs. Alexander is summoned to Maine by illness Leslie goes to live with the Morrisons and meets Randall Heath. Heath makes love to her and the shock when she finds out that he was only after her money makes somewhat easier compliance with the unusual wish of her dead father that she spend two years earning her living.

This adventure—earning your living is the greatest adventure in the world and Sophie Kerr can prove it to you!—this enterprise takes Leslie to New York. And there she meets Minnie Lacy who has long earned a living and knows a lot about men’s neckties, being engaged in the business of making them. And there, also, after getting a stenographer’s training and some education in the work of a secretary, Leslie enters the employ of Ewan Kennedy, inventor of explosives.

The “blue envelope” doesn’t make its appearance until along toward the end of the story. It contains the formula for a powder which he is going to give to the United States Government—sarnite. The formula must be delivered to the Chief of Ordnance in Washington. Certain persons, agents, presumably, of a foreign government, are bending heaven and earth to get the sarnite formula. They will stop at nothing. And Leslie Brennan has the task of delivering it to the Chief of Ordnance.

Does it sound like a good story? It does. And is it? It is. So good that you feel much more like telling it than analyzing it. But to “give it away” would be a very unfair piece of business. In analyzing it what shall we say? The Blue Envelope is simple, straightforward, absorbing and thoroughly enjoyable because of the perfect naturalism of narration. We don’t mean realism—abused word! We mean naturalism. And what is naturalism? Why, simply the knack, art, faculty or gift of inventing incidents, drawing characters, writing conversation, describing action in such an unaffected manner that it all seems the most natural thing in the world!

Now realism is never naturalism. A great realist may stick close to life and use actual occurrences or real people in his books but we call him a realist because he makes us see in what he sets before us things we never have seen before. Without any desire to be paradoxical—we are dead in earnest—it must be asserted flatly that the realist is as unreal as the romanticist. Often more so. The realist is simply one extreme, of which the romanticist is the other. The naturalist comes in between. And Sophie Kerr is first of all a naturalist in this special sense of the word. Whether her incidents are real or probable or unreal and improbable she never fails in making them plausible, completely so.

It might be argued that to be perfectly and pleasantly and interestingly plausible is better than to achieve the most surprising realism or the most transcendental romance. We think that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it is; we believe that unless a writer has that gift in the nth degree commonly called genius, unless he is so matchless a romanticist as Joseph Conrad or so unsurpassed a realist as Flaubert or Thomas Hardy, he had better pray and struggle above everything for the faculty of plausibility, interesting plausibility, worth while naturalism! It is because we believe this that we hold Sophie Kerr to have found and to be on the right track. It is because of this our belief in her strong, fledged naturalism that we expect sound and excellent work from her, work showing distinct growth both in intrinsic value and in popular success. The first stage of that growth is evidenced for everybody in the contrast between The Blue Envelope and its successor from her pen, The Golden Block.

The Golden Block is part of the life story of a business woman, Margaret Bailey, and the most important part. The novel finds her a secretary of Henry Golden, manufacturer of paving blocks, and leaves her his partner. It finds her practically a manager of his business at $40 a week and leaves her a sharer in his business at possibly $40,000 a year. The book begins on a note of success, of triumph; the Golden Company has got a contract for street paving in New York which means the difference between hundreds of thousands clear profit and bankruptcy. This has happened mainly because Margaret Bailey is a business woman—a much better business woman than Henry Golden is a business man. Now business women are not too attractively drawn in most of our fiction. They are new people, and the fictioneer is tempted to draw them in too harsh, too straight lines; to caricature a little as Dickens used to caricature, in order to bring out peculiarities and get the “effect.” Sophie Kerr doesn’t do it with Margaret Bailey; the most praiseworthy and most skillful thing in that admirable story The Golden Block is the way in which the author keeps Margaret Bailey human. She does it by naturalism. Margaret is engrossed by the business of the Golden Company but she is also engrossed in securing the education of her sister and brother, the comfort and happiness of her father and mother, the welfare of the whole family. Breath of her life though business is, you feel all the time that she would sacrifice it completely if the happiness of Rose Bailey or the other Baileys collectively required such an offering. But of course the surest way to promote their happiness is to succeed herself.

Margaret Bailey is a character to be proud of and we hope Sophie Kerr is proud of her. She is as clear-visioned as any heroine of fiction; she is as clear-visioned as such women are in life! She is not afraid of being called unwomanly, because she knows that this only means that she does not conform to a handed-down ideal. She does not attempt to formulate a philosophy of sex or love or life on the basis of her own feelings. She speaks and thinks only for herself—not of herself except when asked to explain. She finds no time to indulge in self-pity, but that does not mean that she is hard. No! She is merely happy! She is doing what she can do best and what she most wants to do. “You ought to have been a man,” is the recurring refrain dinned in her ears, usually as a tribute of admiration but frequently with an implication of disapproval, as if the Creator had made a mistake somehow. “It’s my belief that there’s no sex in brains,” Margaret falls into the habit of replying. She might have added: “And there’s no brains in sex, either!”

If young writers must imitate, must go through a period of playing the sedulous ape, as Stevenson called it, we hope that more of them will cease to imitate the Great and Peculiar Few and imitate such exemplars of intelligent and growing naturalism as Mrs. Underwood. It will make the approach to a recognition of their own powers less painful. And for Sophie Kerr we hope only that she may continue as she has begun and keep growing.