The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Kathleen Norris

Mother, 1911.
The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne, 1912.
Poor Dear Margaret Kirby, 1913.
Saturday’s Child, 1914.
The Treasure, 1915.
The Story of Julia Page, 1915.
The Heart of Rachael, 1916.
Undertow, 1917.
Martie, the Unconquered, 1917.
Josselyn’s Wife, 1918.
Sisters, 1919.
Harriet and the Piper, 1920.
The Beloved Woman, 1921.
Lucretia Lombard, 1922.
Certain People of Importance, 1922.

These novels by Mrs. Norris are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.

CHAPTER VII
MARGARET DELAND

EDITH WHARTON, at 56, does a work of mercy in France; Margaret Deland is similarly engaged at 61. That speaks so much more loudly than their books. And their books are not silent.

If the band of a kiltie regiment plays The Campbells Are Coming, one of them may be Margaretta Wade (Campbell) Deland. Mrs. Deland was born in Alleghany, Pennsylvania, February 23, 1857. Her parents died while she was very young, and she was reared in the family of an uncle, Benjamin Campbell, who lived in Manchester, then a suburb of Alleghany, and the original Old Chester of Mrs. Deland’s famous and loved stories.

“Our home,” Mrs. Deland once wrote, “was a great, old-fashioned country house, built by English people among the hills of western Pennsylvania more than a century ago. There was a stiff, prim garden, with box hedges and closely clipped evergreens. In front of the garden were terraces, and then meadows stretching down to the Ohio River, which bent like a shining arm about the circle of the western hills.”

“Which bent like a shining arm about the circle of the western hills!” Beautiful simile!

In this old garden the little girl played the greater part of her waking hours. She loved the outdoors. She was highly impressionable and imaginative. She had the curious and dear convictions of childhood. She was sure that the whole of Asia was a yellow land, because the map of Asia in her old dog-eared geography was colored yellow.

Her first taste in reading was formed upon Ivanhoe and The Talisman and Tales of a Grandfather, Hawthorne’s stories, and the works of Washington Irving. Her first and indeed her final experience of life was that summed up in Stevenson’s saying: “And the greatest adventures are not those we go to seek.” Mrs. Deland expressed it this way: “Not the prominent events; nor the catastrophes, nor the very great pleasures; not the journeys nor the deprivations, but the commonplaces of everyday life determine what a child shall do, and still more positively determine what he shall be.”

In one word: character. And it is with character almost solely that Mrs. Deland as a writer has been preoccupied. Dr. Lavendar is a study in character, so is Helena Richie, so is the Iron Woman; and the young people that surround her are character studies of a completeness unexcelled in American fiction.

There is more than one way of dealing with character in fiction. But first we must settle what we mean by character. We mean, concisely, inherited traits as affected by environment. Environment includes people as well as things.

It is impossible to make a character study convincing without taking heredity into account, and this irrespective of whether heredity or environment plays the greater rôle in a mortal’s life. The eternal controversy as to which of these two influences is preponderant is largely futile because the preponderance differs with various persons, differs with the traits inherited, differs with a thousand differing pressures of circumstance. One thing is certain: whether anything is known about an individual’s inherited endowment or not we always and inescapably assume that he has one. The best handy illustration of this is Jennie Cushing in Mary S. Watts’s book, The Rise of Jennie Cushing. Nothing whatever is known by us regarding Jennie Cushing’s inheritance; we don’t know her parentage any more than she does. Her environment we know with awful exactitude and we are perfectly conscious that it fails utterly to explain her except, of course, her marvelous and painfully acquired gift of reticence. We are forced, therefore, to presuppose in her case an inheritance of extraordinary will-power and extraordinary sensitiveness to beauty in any of its forms. And we do presuppose it! It makes her wholly credible; more credible, probably, than any careful account of her forebears could have made her.

Now in The Iron Woman, indisputably Mrs. Deland’s finest story, we get both heredity and environment exactly known and precisely compounded. Indeed, if Mrs. Deland’s great novel has a fault it is the fault of giving us more knowledge than should be ours. Her people are so complete that there is no unknown quantity in the equation they make. It is just a trifle too good to be true, too life-like to be convincing. Knowing to the last inch what they are (as we know our neighbors of long standing) we know to the last degree what they will do, under what circumstances they will do it, how they will do it and what the result upon them and upon others, just as minutely known, will be. To see Sarah Maitland and the boy Blair is like watching a terrible and inevitable and perfectly anticipated tragedy approaching in the house next door. Listen:

“But after a breathless six months of partnership—in business, if in nothing else—Herbert Maitland, leaving behind him his little two-year-old Nannie, and an unborn boy of whose approaching advent he was ignorant, got out of the world as expeditiously as consumption could take him. Indeed, his wife had so jostled him and deafened him and dazed him that there was nothing for him to do but die—so that there might be room for her expanding energy. Yet she loved him; nobody who saw her in those first silent, agonized months could doubt that she loved him. Her pain expressed itself, not in moans or tears or physical prostration, but in work. Work, which had been an interest, became a refuge. Under like circumstances some people take to religion and some to drink; as Mrs. Maitland’s religion had never been more than church-going and contributions to foreign missions, it was, of course, no help under the strain of grief; and as her temperament did not dictate the other means of consolation, she turned to work. She worked herself numb; very likely she had hours when she did not feel her loss. But she did not feel anything else. Not even her baby’s little clinging hands, or his milky lips at her breast. She did her duty by him; she hired a reliable woman to take charge of him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to nurse him. She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the naïve conviction of her day that church-going and religion were synonymous, she began, when he was four years old, to take him to church. In her shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever since it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited trousseau, she sat in a front pew, between the two children, and felt that she was doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty without maternal instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as maternal instinct without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and in the first few years of her bereavement, the big, suffering woman seemed to have nothing but duty to offer to her child. Nannie’s puzzles began then. ‘Why don’t Mamma hug my baby brother?’ she used to ask the nurse, who had no explanation to offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie, and his eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his service while he was still in petticoats.

“Blair was three years old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland’s maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by the boy’s shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the hideous candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of his first expressions of opinion had been contained in the single word ‘uggy,’ accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother. Whenever she sneezed—and she was one of those people who cannot, or do not, moderate a sneeze—Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He would jump at the unexpected sound, then burst into furious tears. When she tried to draw his head down upon her scratchy black alpaca breast, he would say violently, ‘No, no! No, no!’ at which she would push him roughly from her knee and fall into hurt silence.... She took Blair’s little chin in her hand—a big, beautiful, powerful hand, with broken and blackened nails—and turning his wincing face up, rubbed her cheek roughly against his. ‘Get over your airs!’ she said.”

It is, we repeat, exactly like living next door to the family and, with the procession of the years, collecting innumerable little incidents and observed facts all piecing accurately together. It is not fiction at all, it is biography, the best and brightest and most instructive kind of biography. What is the difference between fiction and biography? Principally it consists only in this, that in the case of the life of an actual man the biographer is under no necessity of explaining or reconciling his apparent contradictions. We know the man lived and that he was capable of those contradictions. If the biographer can reconcile or explain them, offering an acceptable and plausible theory to account for them, very well; we are grateful. But it is not imperative that he should do so; what is imperative is that he should set down a faithful record of the contradictions themselves; for we can then, having the evidence before us, frame our own theories to account for them.

In writing fiction or fictional biography the author’s main struggle is for plausibility. If his character does perplexing and contradictory things the author feels that he must make them entirely understandable or we will not accept the character—and in this he is generally right. Human nature is human nature; what we take at the hands of life we are forced to take and make the best of; but we won’t take the same things from a novel because we aren’t compelled to. We insist that the novelist make everything clear and under this great compulsion the novelist is always working. The result is not always happy. Compulsions, however desirable in general, remain laws of force. Compulsory education—compulsory fiction; there are cases where both work badly, where both do serious ill.

Considered as fiction, The Iron Woman is vitiated ever so slightly by the painful consciousness that we have required every person in it to be explained to us too fully, a requirement to which Mrs. Deland has obediently conformed. No mystery, no magic of the unknown, invests the story. We have only to watch these people take their appointed courses to an appointed end. We read eagerly and with a sense of uncertainty not as to what the outcome will be, but as to whether Mrs. Deland will dare, will dare, to break the law of the fictioneer. She does not, and thereby throws her book over into the field of biography. What, you say, did these people actually live? Of course they lived. If you mean, were there originals for all of them? we cannot say. Probably there were. But you must remember that the novelist who works from an original, a living person, hardly ever takes that person as he is. Usually some addition and subtraction goes on. Without doubt this was the case here. When we speak of The Iron Woman as biography, the best and brightest of biography, we mean simply this: The studies of the people in it are too minute for fiction and the people themselves are over-plausible. The writer’s effort to make them plausible has gone so far and been so successful as to defeat her end. The wealth of detail with which she enriches her splendid story makes it a biography, or a cluster of biographies; and considered as biographies, these people are a vivid success, and all that extreme plausibility we have noted, all that conscientious dove-tailing of traits and circumstance, falls lightly and easily and beautifully into place as the brilliant and convincing effort of a biographer to explain her people, reconcile their self-contradictions, put them in the right light before the world, in the light in which they saw themselves and in which they saw each other.

We are not trying to be ingenious nor to find in Mrs. Deland’s work something which is not there. We have no patience with artificiality in dealing with these matters. We are simply trying to account for the feeling that sweeps over us as we re-read The Iron Woman, a feeling which we believe most of those who re-read the book will share. And we venture to think that in this attempt to solve our feeling about Mrs. Deland’s biggest novel we have solved the peculiarity of all her exquisite work. She is the ideal biographer. As supporting evidence to the case we have made (we hope it is a decent case) we call attention to her Old Chester books and stories. In The Awakening of Helena Richie, in Old Chester Tales, in Dr. Lavendar’s People—in them all, in all her work—we believe that the reader who takes the biographical standpoint will find the fullest satisfaction. It will be a full satisfaction indeed. Mrs. Deland is one of the ablest writers America has produced so far. We will allow her to be a genius if genius is, after all, merely the capacity for taking infinite pains and exhibiting an infinite comprehension of and sympathy with simple and memorable lives.