It may seem strange to those of us who do not make our own living by creative writing that a woman who has made her mark as a reporter and who still occasionally reports a national convention, finds it so hard to write fiction. Edna Ferber has written for newspapers about all sorts of things under every sort of difficult handicap of time and place, and has produced good “copy.” Yet her short stories, novels and plays, are slowly and laboriously produced. And when the job is done, so closely has she held her nose to the grindstone, that she is unable to perceive the work as a whole, and realize how good it is.
She once rented an apartment on the lake front in Chicago, her desk facing the blue waters. She was in the midst of her novel, “The Girls.” She complained that she could not get on with it, it was hard labor, so hard that in spite of her best efforts she would look at the lake and the trees and the children playing in the street below. Her anxious publisher besought her to turn her typewriter table so she faced the blank wall. She did; and the book was speedily born.
In an article in The American Magazine, under the characteristic title of “The Joy of the Job,” she tells of her methods of work.
“At the risk of being hated I wanted to state that I’ve always felt sorry for any woman who could play whenever she wanted to. She never will know how sweet play can be. Chocolate is no treat for a girl in a candy factory. Play is no treat for an idler. My work is such that morning engagements and festive luncheoning are forbidden. On those rare occasions, two or three times a year, perhaps, when I deliberately, and for the good of my soul, break the rule and sneak off down-town for luncheon, the affair takes on the proportions of an orgy. No college girls’ midnight fudge spree could be more thrilling. To my unaccustomed eyes the girls in their new hats all look pretty. The matrons appear amazingly well dressed. The men, chatting over their after-luncheon cigarettes, are captains of finance, discussing problems of national import. I refuse to believe what my vis-à-vis says about their being cloak-and-suit salesmen whose conversation probably runs thus:
“ ‘I come into his place at ten this morning and he wouldn’t look at my stuff till twelve, and finally I goes up to him, and I says to him, I says, “Looka here, Marx.” ’
“The very waiters interest me. The ’bus boys are deft, and I refuse to be bothered by their finger nails. The chicken salad is a poem, the coffee a dream, the French pastry a divine concoction.
“When you work three hundred and fifty mornings in the year, a game of golf on the three hundred and fifty-first is a lark. That’s one reason why I play so atrociously, I suppose. They who say that work hardens one, or wearies, or dulls, have chosen the wrong occupation, or have never really tasted the delights of it. It’s the finest freshener in the world. It’s an appetizer. It’s a combination cocktail and hors d’œuvre, to be taken before playing. It gives color to the most commonplace of holidays. It makes a run through the park a treat. There’s very little thrill in a brisk walk if you can brisk-walk from morning until night. But after having sat before a typewriter, or desk, or table, for hours together, to be able to stretch one’s legs for a swing of two or three miles—that’s living.
“The entire output of my particular job depends upon me. By that I mean that when I put the cover on my typewriter the works are closed. The office equipment consists of one flat table, rather messy; one typewriter, much abused, and one typewriter table; a chunk of yellow copy paper, and one of white. All the wheels, belts, wires, bolts, files, tools—the whole manufacturing scheme of things—has got to be contained in the space between my chin and my topmost hairpin. And my one horror, my nightmare of nightmares, is that some morning I’ll wake up and find that space vacant, and the works closed down, with a mental sign over the front door reading:
“ ‘For Rent. Fine, large empty head. Inquire within.’
“There was one year when there was a sign reading, ‘Closed for repairs.’ The horror of it is still with me.”