With certain exceptions noted, books are published by the Century Company, New York.
CHAPTER XXIX
ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT
ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Coburn: Mrs. Fordyce Coburn) is the most fanciful writer in America to-day. Fanciful, inventive—not imaginative in the large and proper sense of the word imagination. Her method in writing is utterly different from that of any other popular author. She is in this respect as unique as Harold Bell Wright—to whom she bears no resemblance whatever. Wright starts a novel—we hope the reader will pardon this digression—by making an elaborate outline, synopsis, scenario, not of the story but of certain moral and ethical ideas, concepts and principles which he wishes to impress upon his readers. Sometimes up to the very last typewritten draft of one of his books the characters are known only by words denoting the things they stand for. Then, at the eleventh hour, Wright strikes out “Greed” and inserts “Obadiah Jackson” and “Manliness” and inserts “David Fanning”—and the copy goes to the printer.
Mrs. Coburn, or Miss Abbott as we may permit ourselves to call her because of her pen name’s connotations—Miss Abbott finds a title and then constructs her story. “Her stories are made to revolve around the title, rather than an outgrowth of any plot,” says a writer in the Boston Globe, upon whose article we rely mainly for the facts of this chapter. It is an article with rather too much fluff but it presents the really interesting facts about the author of Molly Make-Believe and presents them with point. The writer of it says: “Once a satisfactory title occurs to Miss Abbott, she follows it in exactly the same manner as the detective who is pursuing a clue.”
This is perfectly intelligible. Molly Make-Believe as a title teems with ideas; so does The Sick-a-Bed Lady; so does The White-Linen Nurse.
“My characters are always wholly imaginary. I have never yet put a real person in a story. I doubt if I ever shall, for once I begin to weave a tale, imagination has too vivid a hold on me.”
Upon this the Boston Globe writer remarks, with a great deal of truthfulness:
“She may choose a commonplace subject—a girl, a woman, a road, a husband.... Mrs. Coburn immediately succeeds in placing hers in the uncommon category. It is the qualifying adjective that plays a prominent part in making her subjects peculiarly original. She specifies that her heroine is a sick-a-bed lady, her girl is very tired, her thoroughfare is a runaway road, and even the husband in her sanitarium story is a Sunday spouse.
“It is not her nomenclature alone that is unique and attractive. Added to marked creative ability, she has a quality of verbal fitness, and her phrases are charged with amazing intensity and force, so that there is an exhilaration in her pages. Indeed, as one of her friends said, after reading The Kink in the Air, one about decides that it is the ‘kink’ in this author’s style that is its chiefest charm.”
Many scoff; Franklin P. Adams used to divert himself with Eleanor Hallowell Abbottisms; scratching the surface of the ground like an industrious hen you may uncover many choice morsels of wriggling English. But if you think these are all the Eleanor Hallowell Abbott books contain you are as deluded as the hen that thinks she has uncovered earth’s deepest secrets. Below, far below, but not buried at such a depth as to be uncoverable by ordinary minds, are veins of pure humor, tenderness; the rich gold of sympathy and friendly fancifulness. They are paying streaks. Pick up a reprinted copy of Molly Make-Believe and look at the page in the front which records over twenty editions in five years!