“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):