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.