Books by Zona Gale
Romance Island, 1906.
The Loves of Pelleas and Ettarre, 1907.
Friendship Village, 1908.
Friendship Village Love Stories, 1909.
Mothers to Men, 1911.
Christmas, 1912.
When I Was a Little Girl, 1913.
Neighborhood Stories, 1914.
Heart’s Kindred, 1915.
A Daughter of Tomorrow, 1917.
Birth, 1918.
Peace in Friendship Village, 1919.
Miss Lulu Bett, 1920.
Neighbors (play), 1920.
Miss Lulu Bett (play), 1921.
First two books published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis; Neighbors first published by B. W. Huebsch, New York; Miss Lulu Bett, novel and play, published by D. Appleton & Company, New York. Other books published by the Macmillan Company, New York.
CHAPTER XXXV
MARY HEATON VORSE
THERE have been, and are, those who doubt whether anything good can come out of Greenwich Village. It would possibly be unfair to cite Mary Heaton Vorse as an answer to these doubters. In spite of the fact that she once lived in Greenwich Village it is greatly to be doubted if the woman who could write The Prestons was ever of it. John Reed gives a brief verbal picture of Mary Heaton Vorse entirely surrounded by Greenwich Villagers and cigarette smoke, seated on the floor, doing several things at once and, despite a deafening chatter from the girls with the bobbed hair and the boys with the flowing ties, dictating a short story with the utmost calm, speed and concentration. She dwelt among highly trodden ways—and took her own track.
As a short story writer Mary Heaton Vorse is of the first importance in any survey of contemporary American writers. As a novelist she shares with Zona Gale the distinction of being put on the map by a single superb book. As a personality she is alive and present to any one who ever has met and talked with her. Corinne Lowe had a phrase likening her to a Botticelli painting. Benjamin De Casseres describes her by her voice, insists that it is the one thing making the striking first impression and lingering in the memory like lovely music. I wish now that I had set down the precise and extraordinary words in which Mr. De Casseres extemporized his picture of the woman by the mere description of her speech—its timbre and “tone color,” as musicians would say. No paraphrase will serve; the reader will have to take on faith an assertion—here made quite simply—that this woman of the memorable voice, the isolation in the midst of the crowd and the face of sympathy and comprehension is a woman of no common endowment.
But that, doubtless, would be evident to any one reading The Prestons. Its author is, at the present writing, in Rome; in February, 1919, she said in a letter to Boni & Liveright, publishers of The Prestons:
“I wish you wanted a book about Italy and industrial conditions here for next fall instead of a sequel to The Prestons. You do not know how happy it makes me to learn that over 10,000 copies of The Prestons have been sold since you published it in December. I am frank to confess that this is a larger sale than any other two of my books enjoyed in so short a time.
“I love The Prestons—all of them, even Piker, the dog, and it warms my heart in this cold Italian villa to learn that not only the American public but the critics have spoken of my book as a really fine and true interpretation of American family life. But I cannot promise the sequel to The Prestons.”
A month later she was yielding. She would have a sequel ready for fall, on conditions....
The truth about The Prestons is this: Hardly a man or woman will be able to read it and not close the book saying to himself, “Well, the American family is a pretty good sort of an institution, after all!” No finer tribute, we venture to believe, could be paid to a book—to any book.
The book was welded together from a series of short stories. Note the word, “welded.” Most novels made up of short stories are a poor patchwork. Here there was an actual fusion. The result is a novel, and nothing else.
So important is this book, so pleasant, so inspiringly hopeful in the feeling with which it leaves you, that we may justifiably disregard Mary Heaton Vorse’s other writings for the sake of concentrating on this one narrative. I can only repeat, with a slight rearranging for the sake of emphasis, what I wrote at the time of the book’s publication, which was:
Perhaps the nature of the book’s impression on the reader is due to its very inclusiveness. It really doesn’t arrive anywhere except at the end of 427 pages and of one or two years of normal American existences. No great tragedy stains its pages; there is no love story. Nothing comes to a decisive dénouement; we recall not a single “climax” except those little social climaxes which occur in the best regulated families. The only things that happen are Henry’s irritation with his twelve-year-old son, Jimmie; Jimmie’s unconquerable attempts to be allowed to do something that the grown-ups are sure to call getting into mischief; seventeen-year-old Osborn’s adventures of the heart; the changing absorptions of Edith, a high-school girl; the trials of Maria, Mrs. Preston’s unmarried sister who lives with the family, and the philosophical outgivings of Seraphy, for eighteen years the family servant and shield and friend.
Not much of anything happens, you may think; well, perhaps not; but you will not be able to leave the Prestons until the last page has been turned. You will laugh unnumbered times as you turn the pages; you will be touched more than once as you read. Quite unreasonably, no doubt, you will fall in love with them as a family, from Aunt Maria to Piker, the dog. They are so much—you.
It is quite impossible to do much more with a book like The Prestons than to convey the nature of the story and the character of its telling. It is related by Mrs. Preston and it starts with her exploration of the house on a summer morning. She comes first upon the dog Piker. Piker is lying on a silk wrap of Edith’s. “He is a long dog, modeled after the graceful proportions of a barrel. At every corner nobby legs are put on, dachshund fashion. His sparse yellow bristles are always coming out all over everything.... His tail is long and thick and makes a noise like a policeman’s club when he raps it on the floor.”
On the piazza were lemonade glasses, “some of them left on the floor where they could quite easily be stepped upon.” Edith’s friends. The mother takes them to the kitchen, bright and spotless, Seraphy’s domain. In the library lying on the floor is Jimmie’s notebook containing his observations, as a naturalist, on guinea pigs. They read:
“2 P. M.—Guinea pigs sleeping.
“3 P. M.—Running around cage (I poked them with a stick).
“3:15 P. M.—Eating.
“Note: Guinea pigs eat with persistence.
“Note: The habits of guinea pigs is monotonous.”
Whereupon “I saw,” records Jimmie’s mother, “by this notebook that Jimmie had again been misled by one of those glittering books by naturalists where all the high points of a year’s study are compressed into one short article. He still touchingly believes the things he reads in books.”
She passes on. “Now my eyes lit upon an ashtray. In it were the ashes of a cigar and of three cigarettes. I had gone to bed leaving Osborn and his father in the library. Osborn is my oldest son, who is going to college next year. I stood and smiled over this telltale tray. Osborn and his father were smoking together and Henry was apparently keeping from my idealistic nature the sad fact that my son smoked.”
She wonders if her sister, Maria, knows that Osborn smokes. Maria believes that “almost everything can be secured by two mysterious processes. One is known as Nipping Things in the Bud and the other is Taking Steps.” And having straightened up the house, the mother sits out in the fresh morning air musing until various sounds denote the beginning of the family’s day and the necessity of getting ready for breakfast.
Of all the surprising affairs in which the youthful Jimmie had a hand we think the affair of the fat little Baker boy the most amusing. “We was in the swing,” Jimmie explained to his mother, “and I butted Ed in the belly.”
“‘He hit him in the abdomen,’ corrected the Baker girl.
“‘I have always been very particular,’ Mrs. Baker announced, ‘Mrs. Preston, about the language my children use, as you can see for yourself. You heard how Jimmie referred to Edward’s abdomen. He has used that word at least six times in the last five minutes; and that, Mrs. Preston, I cannot stand. I will have my home kept refined and I say no home can be refined where vulgar, common words are in daily use.’
“To this I found nothing to say but ‘Come home with me, Jimmie.’
“On the way, ‘Have I got to say “abdomen”?’ he asked. ‘Say, have I?’
“I took refuge in the cowardly woman’s evasion. ‘I don’t think that there’s the slightest need of your using either of those terms ever,’ I replied.
“Maria, who had heard the last words, said: ‘Yes, I should think one could find pleasanter topics of conversation, Jimmie.’”
The trouble was that within a day or two four little boys, friends of Jimmie’s, with their arms around each other’s necks, insisted on marching up and down the street chanting in a derisive sing-song:
“Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,
Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,
Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen.”
They were audible even while Mrs. Baker, very flushed and angry, called on Mrs. Preston, desiring her to Take Steps. The passage along the street of the fat little Baker boy occasioned loud cries of “Here comes Ab! Hello, Ab! There’s Ab Domen!” We will only say further of this diverting and entirely truthful episode that it had an amazing sequel.
Jimmie, who cannot be convicted of having conspired to fasten upon young Edward Baker a nickname at once refined and unusual, was more or less responsible, we fear, for his aunt’s finding herself unable to open the bathroom door after he had repaired and oiled all the locks in the house. He was blameless of the thefts of what the family called “nether undergarments” from the neighbors’ clotheslines. Here Maria played detective, though the discovery of the culprit was mostly luck.
We may laugh over these things in a book and learn the better to laugh over them in life, even when we are cast for the uncomfortable rôles in their enaction. But we should not like to be the reader who may laugh at such chapters as those which tell of young Osborn’s first attachment to the ideal, as embodied in a certain Miss Fairweather, some years older than he.
This is a book which takes its place with the best of Tarkington and with the earlier Howells. For breadth of understanding, accuracy of observation, fidelity of reporting it is not easy to think of an American novel that transcends it.
Mrs. Vorse was born, in New York, Mary Marvin Heaton, daughter of Hiram Heaton and Ellen Cordelia (Blackman) Heaton. She was educated abroad. She was married on October 18, 1898, to Albert White Vorse, and, secondly, in 1912, to Joseph O’Brien. She is correctly Mrs. Joseph O’Brien.