The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Sophie Kerr

Love at Large, 1916.
The Blue Envelope, 1917.
The Golden Block, 1918.
The See-Saw, 1919.
Painted Meadows, 1920.
One Thing Is Certain, 1922.

Love at Large was published by Harper & Brothers, New York. The Blue Envelope, The Golden Block and The See Saw were published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; the last two books were published by George H. Doran Company, New York.

CHAPTER XIX
MARJORIE BENTON COOKE

OF course Marjorie Benton Cooke is Bambi, or, if you prefer, Bambi is simply Marjorie Benton Cooke. The heroine of the most amusing novel by an American woman in many, many years couldn’t be solely the product of an imagination however fine. She couldn’t be anything but an imaginative introspection—by which we mean that Miss Cooke could only have created her by following the advice of O. Henry and others before him, to “look into your heart and write.”

No matter if not a single event of Bambi’s life is autobiographical; no matter if her Father Professor with his mathematical flowerbeds never lived; still less if Jarvis Jocelyn is a pure fantasy. The point is that to write Bambi Miss Cooke had to put her real self in the midst of imagined people and subject her real self to imagined events. This is completely different from the usual method of the skilled fictioneer. He builds his hero or heroine in the first place, but having made the character and infused into it the breath of life the character does the rest. The writer has little governance over his character’s actions; these are determined by the character himself and the writer does not much more than set them down. Incredible? Not in the least. Thackeray, Scott—we don’t know how many writers—testify to the obstinacy with which their people insist on being themselves. Why, an author is really no better off than a parent who brings a child into the world. The parent may transmit to the child certain traits and the author may endow his person with certain qualities; but as the child grows up he takes his own course rather oftener than not, and the fictional person does always! Or if he doesn’t we see the author jerking the strings and despise him for it, for the story rings false.

But the book Bambi is another matter and precisely what the difference consists in we have tried to show. Let us illustrate it anew. Bambi is imagined autobiography. Instead of creating Bambi and letting her go her way Miss Cooke conducted herself through the story. Or, if you want to put it in another way, you may say that she created Bambi and endowed her with certain of her own traits—gayety, courage, tenderness, wit, a love of drama—and then let her go her way. It is because of the intimate personal quality of her heroine that Miss Cooke dedicated her book “To Bambi, with thanks to her for being Herself! M. B. C.”

The book is a marvel—an absolute marvel. It sold heavily and promptly, that was to be expected; but the marvel consists not in the book’s popularity but in the extraordinary enthusiasm it stirred in its readers. Since no one who has read it seems to be able to avoid the use of superlatives in speaking of it—certainly this writer isn’t—it might be best to put aside any attempt at characterization. What follows shall be—analysis!

The first chapter takes the reader off his feet. Bambi, loving the dreamer Jarvis though perhaps not very consciously loving him, sends for a minister and has herself wedded to him, despite the absent-minded objections of her father, the professor of mathematics. Jarvis needs looking after. This perfectly implausible proceeding is made entirely plausible—you swallow it whole and with immense relish—by just two technical triumphs on Miss Cooke’s part.

1. Everything is in dialogue. You are not asked to believe that the Professor is one kind of a person, Bambi another, and Jarvis a third, and all three eminently unlikely; you see them do this and that and you hear them say so and so. Miss Cooke doesn’t ask you to believe her, she asks you to believe your senses!

2. The dialogue is witty—the wittiest—but there we go off on superlatives again. The dialogue is witty but natural in the completest sense of the word and the wit springs entirely from the situation. No other wit is so good, as any dramatist will tell you.

These two things are the key to the whole story and the key to the utter amazement which overcomes the reader when he applies the test of probability to it—after he has read it through. Of course the wonder of that first chapter could not be entirely sustained through 366 pages, but by the time Miss Cooke’s capital starting situation has lost its sharpest edge the plot has reared its head! Oh, yes, there’s a plot; all such a story as Bambi will stand; a plot with adequate suspense and a steady sweep toward a dénouement. For in a tale like Bambi you must not have too much plot; the chief interest is ever in the charming and lovable heroine.

But this sketch is all Bambi and none of it Marjorie Benton Cooke, of whom Bambi is only a projection, in dotted lines, as a draughtsman would say. Miss Cooke herself is the daughter of Joseph Henry Cooke and Jessie (Benton) Cooke. She was born in Richmond, Indiana. In 1899 she received the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. In the same year she began writing for the magazines. In fact her first printed “novel” exists as a yellowed clipping in her mother’s scrapbook. Underneath it is penned a memorandum: “Published the Sunday after Marjorie received her degree.” It was a whimsical episode, the story of a lost dime, divided into two “chapters,” and appeared in the Chicago Record-Herald. It contained no promise of Bambi.

“Marjorie and her doting parents,” as Mrs. Cooke once remarked, “thought fame and fortune were hers to command.” They weren’t. She traveled a long, hard road, writing scraps of humor and satire for newspapers and magazines, concocting little stories and selling them. She was fifteen years away from Bambi when she started. But she had the gift for dramatic recitation with which she later endowed that young woman. In 1902 she began touring the United States as a monologist. Dozens of her monologues have been published but will not be found listed at the end of this chapter. Miss Cooke would be the last to expect them to be. They are interesting only as the preparation necessary to write Bambi, particularly that first chapter. Miss Cooke has always been interested in social questions, as any one who remembers Jarvis Jocelyn’s experiences in New York will understand. She is a member of the Little Room Club in Chicago, the Heterodoxy Club and the Women’s University Club in New York.

Her books, as distinguished from her printed monologue booklets, began in 1903 with Modern Monologues, continued in 1905 with Dramatic Episodes and Plays for Children, marked time in 1907 with More Modern Monologues and budded with a novel, her first novel, in 1910—The Girl Who Lived in the Woods. Dr. David appeared in 1911; and there were To a Mother, The Twelfth Christian, a dramatic poem, and three one-act plays which were produced—all before Bambi.

And Miss Cooke will play a Chopin ballade for you and talk to you with the same lightness, deftness, and fun that Bambi displays. She has forgotten more about the art of talking than the authors of all the conversation books ever knew. She is not obtrusive. The manuscript of her happiest book came to the publishers quite unheralded—just a manuscript in a cardboard box with a note from Miss Cooke saying she would like to have Doubleday, Page & Company consider it. Eugene F. Saxton began it one Sunday afternoon about 5 o’clock, intending to read until six, then go for a walk and have dinner uptown somewhere. He read till seven, looked at the clock, and—went on reading. You can eat any day, you know....

Later a telegram went forth: “Bambi is ours. Love at first sight.”

Miss Cooke sat to Mary Green Blumenschein for the illustrations to her book; that’s why they are what they ought to be. And you are to picture her just as you would picture Bambi, say as sitting on a low couch, her feet tucked in, enthroned among billowy cushions, that is, of course, if you, the caller, are really acquainted. It will be sufficient to be acquainted with Bambi when you call.

What else? Bambi was followed by Cinderella Jane and that interesting tale of the studio cleaner who was married to the painter without love on either side—they made a success of it and were rewarded by becoming lovers—that tale was succeeded by The Threshold, in which Miss Cooke chose a theme which would give full and legitimate play to her interest in social problems. A rich bachelor, Gregory Farwell, employs Joan Babcock as housekeeper and companion for himself and his 17-year-old nephew. Farwell’s employees strike; the nephew, inspired by Joan, takes the workers’ side. The result is a thoroughly dramatic story in which the problems of capital and labor, social relations and the like arise fairly and squarely out of the action and are not foisted on the reader. Miss Cooke manages exceedingly difficult material well.

If you go to interview Miss Cooke about her own beliefs on serious subjects she will answer you out of the mouths of her people in The Threshold, and chiefly from the utterances of Joan Babcock—which does not mean that she makes her characters say what she wants to say to the world at large. No! It means merely that she herself has advanced no farther along the path to an answer to all these questions than Joan Babcock got. When Miss Cooke started to write The Threshold she knew, as a good novelist does, exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to find out how a certain type of ardent young American woman feels about the future and its social and industrial problems. You ask: why didn’t she go out and, finding a woman of that type, ask her? To do that was to run risks. You might not find the young woman. She might return evasive answers or answers either intentionally or unintentionally misleading—so few of us really know what we think about anything in the future! There was just one safe and certain way to set about it, and that was to create a young woman of the sort Miss Cooke had in mind, put her in the midst of events, and see what she would say and do, what she would come to believe about the things ahead.

Miss Cooke’s The Clutch of Circumstance, on the other hand, is just a good mystery yarn about secret service work and international plots—but based on fact. It has a serious defect in that the heroine, some of whose qualities are plainly exhibited for the reader’s admiration, is guilty of atrocious treachery, becoming, in fact, a German spy!

Miss Cooke? She is going ahead, thank you! She is going ahead in the wisest way in the world for a person of her special gifts. What was said in The Threshold about Joan is the best thing to say about her author: “The world is thrust forward by such dynamic personalities as yours, even by your mistakes. There is danger in action, but more in tranquil inaction, in feeble acquiescence in the face of injustice and wrong.”

I have left untouched this chapter, written in Miss Cooke’s lifetime, because, for the readers of her books, the picture of her as she lived is the picture to remember; and for the time they are under the spell of one of her stories, the fact is without significance that, in April, 1920, while in Japan at the commencement of a world tour, Marjorie Benton Cooke died.