Books by Mary E. Waller
Little Citizens, 1902.
A Daughter of the Rich, 1903.
The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus, 1904.
Sanna of the Island Town, 1905.
Through the Gates of the Netherlands, 1906.
A Year Out of Life, 1909.
Our Benny, 1909.
Flamsted Quarries, 1910.
My Ragpicker, 1911.
A Cry in the Wilderness, 1912.
Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart, 1913.
From an Island Outpost, 1914.
Out of the Silences, 1918.
Little Citizens was published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, Boston; Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart was published by Miss Waller; all Miss Waller’s other books are published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston.
CHAPTER XXXIV
ZONA GALE
MY dear Mr. Overton:—
“The first story which I ever wrote was printed. I printed it myself, in pencil, for it was before I could write. And the story appeared in a book. I made the book, of manilla paper, bound with ribbon. The story began: ‘The sun was just sinking behind the western hills when three travelers appeared. One was tall and one was short and one was middle-sized.’ And when the heroine arrived and one of these travelers asked her to marry him, I remember pressing my mother to tell me how to spell ‘N—yes’, which constituted the maid’s reply.
“At about the same time I wrote a volume of verse in a blank book. One selection was this:
When I am a lady, a lady
I will be a milliner if I can.
I’ll have pretty flowers and bonnets and hats
And in my store there shall be no mice and rats,
When I am a lady.
“When I was thirteen I wrote a novel, which almost simultaneously came back to me from a publisher. It was called A White Dove, but I do not know what it was about. A few years later I wrote another novel, Vedita, of tremendous length—this is easy to remember because of the cost of the type-writing. It was submitted to a Chicago newspaper which was offering a prize for a serial. From that manuscript, which was readily returned, I saved alive the character of Nichola, an old Italian servant, whom I later used in The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre.
“A short story I first submitted at sixteen—it was called Both, was three thousand words long, and I was paid Three Dollars for it by the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin. I had just entered the University at Madison, forty miles from my home, but I traveled the forty miles and came home to show the check, and went back in two hours. Excepting in the Milwaukee and Madison and Wisconsin University newspapers, and one or two evanescent magazines, I never had a story accepted until 1903, though for ten years previous to that acceptance, by Success Magazine, I had constantly submitted stories. In 1911 the Delineator gave me a first prize of $2,000 for a short story, The Ancient Dawn. In 1904 I began writing stories about Pelleas and Ettarre, two old lovers, and forty of these were published in a dozen magazines, and half were collected in a volume published by the Macmillan Company. These were followed by Friendship Village stories. The first editor to whom these stories were submitted declined them with the word that his acquaintance with small towns was wide but that he had never seen any such people as these. About sixty of these stories have been published serially, the majority of them now collected in four volumes, but I am still not sure that the first editor was not right.
“After graduating from Wisconsin University, about six years were spent in newspaper work, in Milwaukee and New York, and in magazine work in New York—and in that time a master’s degree was given by Wisconsin University for work done in absentia, but neither degree, in itself, has ever meant anything to me, though of course that part of the work which I liked and wanted was invaluable.... I began newspaper work on the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin which accepted that first story of mine, and I secured a position by attrition. I presented myself every morning at the desk of the city editor to ask for an assignment, but the chief thing that I can recall about those mornings was the intense wish that the elevator which was taking me up to the city room would turn out to be the elevator taking me down again. At the end of two weeks the city editor let me write about a flower show. I have never put such emotion into anything else that I have written. I was another month in getting on the staff. In New York the process was different. After being refused by nearly every paper there, I went back to the New York World, and by the office boy every morning I sent in a list of suggestions, made from that day’s news, on which I thought I could write; and the city editor checked those that I might try. After a good many weeks I went on the staff of the World.
“And all of this was so largely sheer adventure and pioneering that none of it now seems to me to have been either will or purpose, but pure delight. But at the time I was under the illusion that I was very determined.
“For the last few years I have lived here with my father and mother, in the little town where I was born and where they have spent most of their lives. My mother’s family, named Beers, is English; and my father’s family, English, of Scotch-Irish descent, settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1640, nine generations ago. My great-great-grandfather, Captain Henry Gale, led his company against the courthouse at Worcester, where the supreme court was sitting, and demanded the repeal of the imprisonment-for-debt law, just after the Revolution; and for this he was condemned to death, and then reprieved, and removed to Vermont.... Here in Portage, in my father’s house, a little river runs close by the door, and there are lilacs on the bank and hills to the south, and there are many wild birds, and squirrels live in trees close to the windows. It is true that people love to try to make their own surroundings sound romantic and unique, and hereby, to my own taste, I do so. Here I have written ten books of fiction, two published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company and all the rest by the Macmillan Company; and a little play, Neighbors, published by Huebsch.
“I have had some years of that passion for reform. I was president of a civic association here, then chairman of the State Federation’s civic work, then of the national civic work of the General Federation of Woman’s Clubs, and on the board of the American Civic association. I have resigned from everything in favor of the new democracy.... My only executive connection with any organization is with the board of the American Union Against Militarism. I have been a believer in equal suffrage since before it was respectable to believe. My paramount taste is for poetry. At the moment my chief admiration is for Russia. My deepest interest is to find those who feel something of the fundamental truth underlying all religion. And my recreation is talk with those who believe with passion in the new industrial and social and spiritual To-morrow.
“Zona Gale.”
“Portage, Wisconsin.
“February, 1919.”
Characteristically, Miss Gale says nothing, in her reply to a request for information about herself, concerning her novel, Birth, the book which has not only made absolutely necessary her inclusion in any record of American women novelists, but has placed her in the front rank. For however we may array the women writers of the United States, no one who has read Birth is likely to deny that it possesses some of the attributes of greatness and literary permanence or that it has “its share of the qualities which lift writing out of time.”
Pressed to say what is in her heart, Miss Gale will tell you that, “as a matter of fact, Birth is really my first novel. Since the most fantastic book with which I began, I have never done anything of novel length. All my other books have been short stories threaded together, save three stories of 30,000 words published separately, in no sense novels. After writing ten books, this book is really my first try at a novel.... It is embarrassing to be caught looking in a mirror—or saying one’s own name aloud over the telephone. But to try to do both, in print, seems to underscore all one’s lacks.” A very modest person, you see. The author of this book is aware of a certain injustice arising from his inclusion of a number of letters. The risk is clear. He begs to say, here and now, that he assumes that risk; and he had rather take the chance that readers may suspect some of his subjects of self-consciousness than encounter the certainty that they will think these authors hardly human—names on title-pages merely.
When Birth appeared some people were bewildered. One reviewer asked pathetically what had become of the Zona Gale of Friendship Village. But those whose saturation-point for sentimentality is decidedly, and, as we believe, healthfully low, gave a great shout of satisfaction to which added sounds of admiration formed a contrapuntal bass. For Birth is a thing Thomas Hardy would not be ashamed to put his name to. Nor, we suspect, George Meredith, either. We like to think that were George Eliot living to-day, and mistress of the art of fiction (which, bless her, she never was) she would have written such a book.
The fact that at this writing Birth has not been “discovered” by the large public which such a book ultimately commands is of little importance. That will come. The failure of many book reviewers and book reporters to detect and proclaim its distinction is an indictment of book “reviewing” more specific and damning than any generality in which we might indulge. The real elements of the book’s excellence may best be recorded in the words of a daughter of Henry Mills Alden, Constance Murray Greene, who said (Books and the Book World of The Sun, New York, November 24, 1918):
“The charm consists in delightful and continuous humor, often sharp and never overkind, which isn’t at all what people mean by ‘charming’ in the new and popular sense. But here is the real substance of things more to be desired than the fine gold of sunshine. Miss Gale is incurably funny and we love her for it—witness the delivery horse, ‘hanging out its tongue, not at all because of fast driving but from preference,’ and Mis’ Henry Bates, whose stomach wouldn’t allow her to drink coffee. ‘She always spoke’ (to quote directly) ‘as if her stomach stood back of her chair.’ ... Birth achieves the rare result of being both mystical and colloquial.” How?
You may well ask. The setting is a tiny Wisconsin town, except for some scenes in Chicago. The “hero” is a traveling salesman handling pickle and fruit products; insignificant; with long, thin, freckled wrists and a coat that gave the effect of blowing when there was no wind; with no graces. You sicken over the little man’s humiliations in such social life as Burage, Wisconsin, boasted. He marries a girl of the village, a girl of some social gifts and quite ordinary and silly feminine ambitions—and becomes a paperhanger, though knowing nothing of the business. Barbara Pitt, Marshall Pitt’s wife, is dropped abruptly from the story—daring technique but justified in the result—and the novel develops as a narrative of the life-relation of father and son. This little man, this Marshall Pitt, being human, had his immortal moments. Zona Gale can put them on paper:
“It was in this manner that their child was born. There he was, sentient. A rift in experience, the crossing of the street by Barbara at one moment rather than the next; the opening of a gate by Pitt in the afternoon instead of the morning. Then joy, ill, the depths, madness, flowing about the two. These passed but there remained the child—living, exquisite, sturdy, sensitive, a new microcosm, experiencing within himself the act of God.”
Prose? Poetry! Deep and vibrant music. It has the austere beauty and the imaginative content of Johann Sebastian Bach—say the Chaconne in D minor.
“Love is a creative force,” says Mrs. Greene in the article we have already quoted, “and though Marshall Pitt had been unable through the inarticulate material in which his soul was embodied to fashion himself in any accordance with his blurred hopes, he could by virtue of his great love for Barbara and their child offer to Jeffrey [his son] the inspiration lacking which his life, even to his last heroic act, had seemed a futile thing. In dying because he lacked cleverness to see the means of escape, to save the only living thing that had loved him in return, he made his last awkward gesture that of rescuing a dog!” We may quote the passage, condensed slightly:
“They carried Pitt, and in his arms was a white Marseilles spread in which he had swathed the little dog. The spread was burning, Pitt’s hair was burning and the thin cotton of his shirt was all burned away about his throat and breast and blazed upon his shoulders.
“They laid him on the ground and the people beat out the flames. As the fire was quenched there was a terrific commotion in the white Marseilles spread. Out leaped Jep, not a silken hair on him singed, and he snapped indignantly at having been caused intolerable inconvenience....
“‘Well, but of all the fool things. For a dog.’...”