The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Margaret Deland

Good for the Soul.
The Rising Tide.
R. J.’s Mother.
The Way to Peace.
Where the Laborers Are Few.
John Ward, Preacher.
The Old Garden and Other Verses.
Philip and His Wife.
Florida Days.
Sidney.
The Story of a Child.
The Wisdom of Fools.
Mr. Tommy Dove and Other Stories.
Old Chester Tales.
Dr. Lavendar’s People.
The Common Way, 1904.
The Awakening of Helena Richie, 1906.
An Encore, 1907.
The Iron Woman, 1911.
The Voice, 1912.
Partners, 1913.
The Hands of Esau, 1914.
Around Old Chester, 1915.
Small Things, 1919.
The Vehement Flame, 1922.

Published by Harper & Brothers, New York; Small Things is published by D. Appleton & Company, New York.

CHAPTER VIII
GENE STRATTON-PORTER

BECAUSE Gene Stratton-Porter cares for the truth that is in her, she is the most widely read and most widely loved author in America to-day, with the probable exception of Harold Bell Wright. She is absolutely sincere in all her work, she is in dead earnest, she does not care primarily for money, but for certain ideas and ideals. Let no one underestimate the tremendous power that is hers because of these things, let no one underestimate her hold upon millions of readers; let none undervalue the influence she has exerted and continues to exert, an influence always for good, for clean living, for manly men, for womanly women, for love of nature, for sane and reasonable human hopes and aspirations, for honest affection, for wholesome laughter, for a healthy emotionalism as the basis and justification of humble and invaluable lives.

If Mrs. Porter has egoism it is the sort of egoism that the world needs. It is nothing more or less than a firm and sustaining belief in one’s self, in the worth of one’s work, and is bred of a passionate conviction that you must always give the best of yourself without stint. Is it egoistical to believe that? Is it self-centeredness to be proud of that? Is it wrong, having set the world the best example of which you are capable, to call it to the world’s attention? You will not get the present reporter to say so! You will get from him nothing but an expression of his own conviction that while literature, æsthetically viewed, may not have been enriched by Mrs. Porter’s writings, thousands, yes, tens of thousands of men and women have been made happier and better by her stories. And that just about sweeps any other possible accomplishment into limbo!

The secret of Mrs. Porter’s success is sincerity, complete sincerity; doing one’s best work and doing it to the top of one’s bent. It is not a question of art. There is no art about it. The finest literary artist in the world could not duplicate her performance unless he were a duplicate of her. It’s not a literary matter at all; the thing has its roots in the personality, in the mind and heart and nervous organization of the writer. If you could be a Gene Stratton-Porter you could write the novels she writes and achieve just the success she achieves, a success which is improperly measured by earnings of $500,000 to $750,000 from her books, a success of which the true measure can never be taken because it is a success in human lives and not in dollars.

The best evidence of this—for there will be doubters—is the story of her life, very largely told in her own words, published in a booklet by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1915. The booklet, for some time to be had on request, is now out of print. In what follows it is drawn upon freely and almost to the exclusion of anything else.

“Mark Stratton, the father of Gene Stratton-Porter, described his wife, at the time of their marriage, as a ‘ninety-pound bit of pink porcelain, pink as a wild rose, plump as a partridge, having a big rope of bright brown hair, never ill a day in her life, and bearing the loveliest name ever given a woman—Mary.’ He further added that ‘God fashioned her heart to be gracious, her body to be the mother of children, and as her especial gift of Grace, he put Flower Magic into her fingers.’”

There were twelve children. Mrs. Stratton was “a wonderful mother.” She kept an immaculate house, set a famous table, hospitably received all who came to her door, made her children’s clothing. Her great gift was making things grow. “She started dainty little vines and climbing plants from tiny seeds she found in rice and coffee. Rooted things she soaked in water, rolled in fine sand, planted according to habit, and they almost never failed to justify her expectations. She even grew trees and shrubs from slips and cuttings no one else would have thought of trying to cultivate, her last resort being to cut a slip diagonally, insert the lower end in a small potato, and plant as if rooted. And it nearly always grew!”

She was of Dutch extraction and “worked her special magic with bulbs, which she favored above other flowers. Tulips, daffodils, star flowers, lilies, dahlias, little bright hyacinths, that she called ‘blue bells,’ she dearly loved. From these she distilled exquisite perfume by putting clusters at time of perfect bloom in bowls lined with freshly made, unsalted butter, covering them closely, and cutting the few drops of extract thus obtained with alcohol. ‘She could do more different things,’ says the author, ‘and finish them all in a greater degree of perfection, than any other woman I have ever known. If I were limited to one adjective in describing her, “capable” would be the word.’”

Mark Stratton was of English blood, a descendant of that first Mark Stratton of New York, who married the beauty, Anne Hutchinson. He was of the English family of which the Earl of Northbrooke is the present head. He was tenacious, had clear-cut ideas, could not be influenced against his better judgment. “He believed in God, in courtesy, in honor, and cleanliness, in beauty, and in education. He used to say that he would rather see a child of his the author of a book of which he could be proud, than on the throne of England, which was the strongest way he knew to express himself. His very first earnings he spent for a book; when other men rested, he read; all his life he was a student of extraordinarily tenacious memory. He especially loved history: Rollands, Wilson’s Outlines, Hume, Macaulay, Gibbon, Prescott, and Bancroft, he could quote from all of them paragraphs at a time, contrasting the views of different writers on a given event, and remembering dates with unfailing accuracy.” The Bible he knew by heart, except for the Old Testament pedigrees. This is a literal statement of fact. He traveled miles to deliver sermons, lectures, talks. He worshiped humanity and all outdoors. Color was a prime delight. “‘He had a streak of genius in his makeup, the genius of large appreciation,’” says Mrs. Porter. He reveled in descriptions of personal bravery.

“To this mother at forty-six, and this father at fifty, each at intellectual top-notch, every faculty having been stirred for years by the dire stress of civil war, and the period immediately following, the author was born,” on a farm in Wabash county, Indiana, in 1868. “From childhood she recalls ‘thinking things which she felt should be saved,’ and frequently tugging at her mother’s skirts and begging her to ‘set down’ what the child considered stories and poems. Most of these were some big fact in nature that thrilled her, usually expressed in Biblical terms.”

The farm was called “Hopewell,” after the home of some of Mark Stratton’s ancestors. Mark Stratton and his wife had spent twenty-five years beautifying it. The land was rolling, with springs and streams and plenty of remaining forest. The roads were smooth, the house and barn commodious; the family “rode abroad in a double carriage trimmed in patent leather, drawn by a matched team of gray horses, and sometimes the father ‘speeded a little’ for the delight of the children.”

The girl had an invalid mother, for about the time when Gene could first remember things Mrs. Stratton contracted typhoid after nursing three of her children through it. She never recovered her health. The youngest child was therefore allowed to follow her father and brothers afield “and when tired out slept on their coats in fence corners, often awaking with shy creatures peering into her face. She wandered where she pleased, amusing herself with birds, flowers, insects and plays she invented. ‘By the day I trotted from one object which attracted me to another, singing a little song of made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird with a hair in its beak; much of the time I carried the inevitable baby for a woman-child, frequently improvised from an ear of corn in the silk, wrapped in catalpa leaf blankets.

“‘I stepped lightly, made no noise, and watched until I knew what a mother bird fed her young before I began dropping bugs, worms, crumbs, and fruit into little red mouths that opened at my tap on the nest quite as readily as at the touch of the feet of the mother bird.... I fed butterflies sweetened water and rose leaves inside the screen of a cellar window, doctored all the sick and wounded birds and animals the men brought me from afield; made pets of the baby squirrels and rabbits they carried in for my amusement; collected wild flowers; and as I grew older, gathered arrow points and goose quills for sale in Fort Wayne. So I had the first money I ever earned.’”

At school Mrs. Porter hated mathematics. Once when a mathematical topic for an essay was forced upon her, she broke loose and read the class a review of Saintine’s Picciola, the story of an imprisoned nobleman and a tiny flower that blossomed within prison walls. She fascinated her audience.

“‘The most that can be said of what education I have is that it is the very best kind in the world for me; the only possible kind that would not ruin a person of my inclinations. The others of my family had been to college; I always have been too thankful for words that circumstances intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove in company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and mentality.’” Her father encouraged her in writing, and when she wanted to do something in color had an easel built for her. On it she afterward painted the water colors for Moths of the Limberlost. If she wanted to try music he paid for lessons for her. “‘It was he who demanded a physical standard that developed strength to endure the rigors of scientific field and darkroom work, and the building of ten books in five years, five of which were on nature subjects, having my own illustrations, and five novels, literally teeming with natural history, true to nature.... It was he who daily lived before me the life of exactly such a man as I portrayed in The Harvester, and who constantly used every atom of brain and body power to help and to encourage all men to do the same.’”

In 1886, at eighteen, Gene Stratton was married to Charles Darwin Porter. A daughter was born to them, but the fever to write was merely in abeyance for a while. “It dominated the life she lived, the cabin she designed for their home, and the books she read. When her daughter was old enough to go to school, Mrs. Porter’s time came.”

She explains: “‘I could not afford a maid, but I was very strong, vital to the marrow, and I knew how to manage life to make it meet my needs, thanks to even the small amount I had seen of my mother. I kept a cabin of fourteen rooms, and kept it immaculate. I made most of my daughter’s clothes, I kept a conservatory in which there bloomed from three to six hundred bulbs every winter, tended a house of canaries and linnets, and cooked and washed dishes besides three times a day. In my spare time (mark the word, there was time to spare else the books never would have been written and the pictures made) I mastered photography to such a degree that the manufacturers of one of our finest brands of print paper once sent the manager of their factory to me to learn how I handled it. He frankly said that they could obtain no such results with it as I did. He wanted to see my darkroom, examine my paraphernalia, and have me tell him exactly how I worked. As I was using the family bathroom for a darkroom and washing negatives and prints on turkey platters in the kitchen sink, I was rather put to it when it came to giving an exhibition.’ ...

“She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to Recreation, and with the first installment was asked to take charge of the department and furnish material each month, for which she was to be paid at current prices in high-grade photographic material. We can form some idea of the work she did under this arrangement from the fact that she had over $1,000 worth of equipment at the end of the first year. The second year she increased this by $500, and then accepted a place on the natural history staff of Outing, working closely with Mr. Caspar Whitney. After a year of this helpful experience, Mrs. Porter began to turn her attention to what she calls ‘nature studies sugar-coated with fiction.’ Mixing some childhood fact with a large degree of grown-up fiction, she wrote a little story entitled Laddie, the Princess, and the Pie.”

She dreaded failure, she who had been bred to believe that failure was disgraceful. “‘I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders high in the air, and crossed water on improvised rafts without a tremor, slipped with many misgivings into the postoffice and rented a box for myself, so that if I met with failure my husband and the men in the bank need not know what I had attempted.’”

That was in May; in September the storekeeper congratulated her on her story in the Metropolitan. She had not seen it. She wrote to the editor and got a quick reply. An office boy had lost or destroyed her address and he had been waiting to hear from her. Would she do a Christmas story?

She would, and did, and he asked for illustrations. She found that his time limit gave her one day to do them in. She worked from 8 A. M. to 4 A. M. to make the necessary photographs, which required special settings and costuming.

Not long after, Mrs. Porter wrote a short story of 10,000 words and sent it to the Century. Richard Watson Gilder advised her to make a book of it. This is the origin of The Song of the Cardinal. “Following Mr. Gilder’s advice, she recast the tale and, starting with the mangled body of a cardinal some marksman had left in the road she was traveling, in a fervor of love for the birds and indignation at the hunter she told the cardinal’s life history.” The book was published in 1903.

She illustrated the book herself after dangers and hardships of which the reader seldom has any conception. Securing a mere tailpiece picture once cost her three weeks in bed where she lay twisted in convulsions and insensible most of the time.

Freckles appeared in the fall of 1904. She had been spending every other day for three months in the Limberlost swamp, making a series of studies of the nest of a black vulture. She combined two men to make McLean of the story, but Sarah Duncan was a real woman; Freckles was a composite of certain ideals and her own field experiences, merged with those of a friend. For the Angel she idealized her own daughter. The book is dedicated to her husband, because he helped make it possible. She had promised him not to work in the Limberlost. “‘There were most excellent reasons why I should not go there. Much of it was impenetrable. Only a few trees had been taken out; oilmen were just invading it. In its physical aspect it was a treacherous swamp and quagmire filled with every plant, animal and human danger known in the worst of such locations in the Central States.’” Nevertheless lumbermen had brought word of the vulture’s nest. “‘I hastened to tell my husband the wonderful story of the big black bird, the downy white baby, the pale blue egg.’” So he said he would go with her.

It was awful.

“‘A rod inside the swamp on a road leading to an oil well we mired to the carriage hubs. I shielded my camera in my arms and before we reached the well I thought the conveyance would be torn to pieces and the horse stalled. At the well we started on foot, Mr. Porter in kneeboots, I in waist-high waders. The time was late June; we forced our way between steaming, fetid pools, through swarms of gnats, flies, mosquitoes, poisonous insects, keeping a sharp watch for rattlesnakes. We sank ankle deep at every step and logs we thought solid broke under us. Our progress was a steady succession of pulling and prying each other to the surface. Our clothing was wringing wet, and the exposed parts of our bodies lumpy with bites and stings. My husband found the tree, cleared the opening to the great prostrate log, traversed its unspeakable odors for nearly forty feet to its farthest recess, and brought the baby and egg to the light in his leaf-lined hat.

“‘We could endure the location only by dipping napkins in deodorant and binding them over our mouths and nostrils. Every third day for almost three months we made this trip, until Little Chicken was able to take wing.’”

The story itself—Freckles—originated in the fact that one day, while leaving the swamp, a big feather with a shaft over twenty inches long came spinning and swirling earthward and fell in the author’s path. It was an eagle’s, but Mrs. Porter had been doing vultures, so a vulture’s it became.

Freckles took three years to find its audience. The marginal illustrations made people think it purely a nature book. The news that it was a novel of the kind you simply must read had to get about by word of mouth. The copy that lies beside us as we write this sketch was printed in 1914, ten years after the story’s first appearance. The jacket says that by 1914 exactly 670,733 copies had been sold. And the most important three of the ten years were largely wasted!

Publishers told Mrs. Porter then and afterward, repeatedly and emphatically, that if she wanted to sell her best and make the most money she must cut out the nature stuff. But, as she says, her real reason in writing her novels was to bring natural history attractively before the people who wouldn’t touch it in its pure state.

“‘I had had one year’s experience with The Song of the Cardinal, frankly a nature book, and from the start I realized that I never could reach the audience I wanted with a book on nature alone. To spend time writing a book based wholly upon human passion and its outworking I would not. So I compromised on a book into which I put all the nature work that came naturally within its scope, and seasoned it with little bits of imagination and straight copy from the lives of men and women I had known intimately, folk who lived in a simple, common way with which I was familiar. So I said to my publishers: “I will write the books exactly as they take shape in my mind. You publish them. I know they will sell enough that you will not lose. If I do not make over $600 on a book I shall never utter a complaint. Make up my work as I think it should be and leave it to the people as to what kind of book they will take into their hearts and homes.” I altered Freckles slightly, but from that time on we worked on this agreement.

“‘My years of nature work have not been without considerable insight into human nature, as well,’ continues Mrs. Porter. ‘I know its failings, its inborn tendencies, its weaknesses, its failures, its depth of crime; and the people who feel called upon to spend their time analyzing, digging into, and uncovering these sources of depravity have that privilege, more’s the pity! If I had my way about it, this is a privilege no one could have in books intended for indiscriminate circulation. I stand squarely for book censorship, and I firmly believe that with a few more years of such books as half a dozen I could mention, public opinion will demand this very thing. My life has been fortunate in one glad way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked in the woods. For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met, lived with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high ideals, and it is upon the lives of these that I base what I write. To contend that this does not produce a picture true to life is idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal life; to the best that good men and good women can do at level best.

“‘I care very little for the magazine or newspaper critics who proclaim that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that my pictures of life are sentimental and idealized. They are! And I glory in them! They are straight, living pictures from the lives of men and women of morals, honor, and loving kindness. They form “idealized pictures of life” because they are copies from life where it touches religion, chastity, love, home, and hope of Heaven ultimately. None of these roads leads to publicity and the divorce court. They all end in the shelter and seclusion of a home.

“‘Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life, that the idea has infected even the women.’”

A Girl of the Limberlost “‘comes fairly close to my idea of a good book. No possible harm can be done any one in reading it. The book can, and does, present a hundred pictures that will draw any reader in closer touch with nature and the Almighty, my primal object in each line I write. The human side of the book is as close a character study as I am capable of making. I regard the character of Mrs. Comstock as the best thought-out and the cleanest-cut study of human nature I have so far been able to do.’”

Prior to the appearance of A Daughter of the Land this was Mrs. Porter’s best book, unquestionably. All she says about it is perfectly true, but she does not give herself proper credit in respect of one or two of the book’s qualities. There is much humor in it and the delineation of Kate Comstock, particularly in the first half of the book, has the sharpness of line and the sureness of handling visible in a fine etching. Consciously or subconsciously Mrs. Porter created at the very outset of her story, in the second chapter, a situation which appeals to the most thrilling and satisfying instinct in the human breast. Elnora, pitifully dressed, has spent a humiliating first day at high school in town. Since her mother will not provide them, Margaret and Wesley Sinton go forth at nightfall to buy the clothes the girl needs to wear and sit up half the night to get them ready quickly. It is both humorous and genuinely moving. The reader shares their burst of generosity. He shops with them and sits up with them and worries with them and rejoices and partakes of their happiness in “doing for” the girl; he is all the while quite conscious of the humor of the situation without any abatement of the tenderness and delight that is his as well as theirs. This is great work; it may not be great literature; whether it is or not depends on what you require “literature” to give you. The innumerable readers who require literature to give them what life gives them (or even more, what life unjustly withholds from them)—emotion, pure, deep, contenting and cleansing—these will ask no more than Mrs. Porter gives them here.

The idea of The Harvester was suggested to Mrs. Porter by an editor who wanted a magazine article, with human interest in it, about ginseng diggers. As she looked into the raising of the drug, the idea came to her of a man growing drug plants professionally and of a sick girl healed by them. “‘I wrote primarily to state that to my personal knowledge, clean, loving men still exist in this world, and that no man is forced to endure the grind of city life if he wills otherwise.... I wrote the book as I thought it should be written, to prove my points and establish my contentions. I think it did. Men the globe around promptly wrote me that they had always observed the moral code; others that the subject never in all their lives had been presented to them from my point of view, but now that it had been, they would change and do what they could to influence all men to do the same.’”

Laddie—“‘Of a truth, the home I described in this book I know to the last grain of wood in the doors, and I painted it with absolute accuracy; and many of the people I described I knew more intimately than I ever have known any others.... There was such a man as Laddie, and he was as much bigger and better than my description of him as a real thing is always better than its presentment.’”

Mrs. Porter does not put money first, nor anywhere near first. “When the public had discovered her and given generous approval to A Girl of the Limberlost, when The Harvester had established a new record, that would have been the time for the author to prove her commercialism by dropping nature work, and plunging headlong into books it would pay to write, and for which many publishers were offering her alluring sums. Mrs. Porter’s answer was the issuing of such books as Music of the Wild and Moths of the Limberlost. No argument is necessary.” No argument is possible. Mrs. Porter has spent a great deal of the small fortunes her novels have brought her on nature books which represent years of fieldwork and a staggering expenditure for scientific materials.

This is Mrs. Porter’s own description of the Limberlost swamp where she has done so much work and which she has made yield such good stories.

“‘In the beginning of the end a great swamp region lay in northeastern Indiana. Its head was in what is now Noble and DeKalb counties; its body in Allen and Wells, and its feet in southern Adams and northern Jay. The Limberlost lies at the foot and was, when I settled near it, exactly as described in my books. The process of dismantling it was told in Freckles to start with, carried on in A Girl of the Limberlost, and finished in Moths of the Limberlost. Now it has so completely fallen prey to commercialism through the devastation of lumbermen, oilmen, and farmers, that I have been forced to move my working territory and build a new cabin about seventy miles north at the head of the swamp in Noble county, where there are many lakes, miles of unbroken marsh, and a far greater wealth of plant and animal life than existed during my time in the southern part. At the north end every bird that frequents the Central States is to be found. Here grow in profusion many orchids, fringed gentians, cardinal flowers, turtle heads, starry campions, purple gerardias, and grass of Parnassus. In one season I have located here almost every flower named in the botanies as native to those regions and several that I can find in no book in my library.

“‘But this change of territory involves the purchase of fifteen acres of forest and orchard land, on a lake shore in a marsh country. It means the building of a permanent, all-year-round home, which will provide the comforts of life for my family and furnish a workshop consisting of a library, a photographic darkroom and negative closet, and a printing room for me. I could live in such a home as I could provide on the income from my nature work alone; but when my working grounds were cleared, drained and plowed up, literally wiped from the face of the earth, I never could have moved to new country had it not been for the earnings of my novels, which I now spend, and always have spent, in great part, upon my nature work. Based on this plan of work and life I have written ten books, and “please God I live so long,” I shall write ten more. Possibly every one of them will be located in northern Indiana. Each one will be filled with all the field and woods legitimately falling to its location and peopled with the best men and women I have known.’”

This promise Mrs. Porter has kept in her latest novel, A Daughter of the Land, the story of Kate Bates, an American through and through, who fought for her freedom against long odds, renouncing the easy path of luxury that leads to loss of self-respect. It is Mrs. Porter’s finest novel, this story of a woman’s life from her teens to well past forty, from school days to her second marriage. It is a much more ambitious attempt than any of her other stories and as successful as it is big.

Shamelessly we have built this chapter almost entirely upon Mrs. Porter’s own account of herself—but could any one do better than to present that? We are confident he could not. And aside from what she has to say of her stories they call for no special survey one by one. The one supremely significant thing to grasp is her sincerity and her giving of the best that is in her. Now, the mass of people possess, in respect of these qualities in a writer, a sort of sixth sense, a perfectly infallible instinct that tells them when a writer is sincere, when he is giving of his best. It is the faculty aptly described in the phrase: “I don’t know much about literature, but I know what I like.” To be sure you do! And that’s as near as ready characterization can come to the secret! The person who has achieved a certain measure of sophistication or who has cultivated his taste (which may mean improving it but always means narrowing it) does not know what he likes! He knows only what he doesn’t like—or at least he is always finding it. He pays the price of every refiner in the loss of broad and basic satisfaction. Cultivate a tongue for caviar and you lose the honest and healthful enjoyment of corned beef and cabbage. When you appreciate Bach you can no longer get thrilling pleasure hearing a military band. It’s the same way everywhere and with everybody.

If some people find no pleasure or benefit in Gene Stratton-Porter’s stories, that is exclusively their own fault. They are looking for certain æsthetic satisfactions in what they read and they require them so absolutely that the writer’s best and the writer’s sincerity cannot compensate for their absence. Is it good to have come to such a state? Every one must make up his own mind about that, even as he must make his own decision whether he will strive to attain it. Everything of this sort is to be had for a price,—if you want to pay so much.

“‘To my way of thinking and working the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he can be a gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier man, it is a wonder-working book.’”

Thus Gene Stratton-Porter. There is incontestable evidence that her books have done these very things. Literature, we have been told, is “a criticism of life.” How about molding lives?