This interview also threw interesting light on Mrs. Atherton’s novel, The Avalanche, announced for publication in the spring of 1919 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. The Avalanche is a tale of California society with a mystery plot, and deals with a young woman whose devoted but shrewd New York husband will not rest until he has solved the puzzle of appearances surrounding her. Mrs. Atherton, submerged most of the time in her New York apartment on Riverside Drive with war work—she returned from the European battlefronts to be the American head of Le Bien-être du Blesse, “the welfare of the wounded”—rose to the surface several days in the week at a quiet country spot in New Jersey, and wrote. The story developing thirteen chapters, she split the last in two.
“I wrote and copied 50,000 words in seven weeks—which shows what one can do away from the telephone. Margaret Anglin told me the original incident and attempted to persuade me to write it as a play for her. Now that the book is finished she would never recognize any part of it but an incident in the climax.
“That’s always the way with writing novels and stories. I never know how they are going to come out when I begin, any more than I could take a child right now and say just how I was going to shape its whole life.
“Most writers who deal with California in their books tell about nature and the plain people and the proletariat and such things. No one but myself has ever told anything about social life in San Francisco. It is full of drama. It resembles New York in part, but it has a character all its own.”
Mrs. Atherton works every morning from seven until noon, and does with dry bread and tea for a working lunch. Her New York apartment has balconied windows overlooking the Hudson. Before the door of the house which contains it stands a Barnard College dormitory. Eleanor Gates, writing in Books and Authors for September, 1917, said:
“In the wintertime, on ‘first Sundays,’ the Atherton apartment gathers in a very crush of notables—authors, painters, soldiers, diplomats, publishers, journalists, people of fashion, scholars, travelers and not a few who figure under the general title of ‘admirers of genius,’ and who have maneuvered for a card. Mrs. Atherton has the Englishwoman’s interest in world politics; her knowledge of things European is of the rare first-hand kind; her horizon is international. The lucky old-time friend of the author’s from ‘out West’ meets in her drawing-room a good percentage of the most distinguished people of the metropolis, along with men and women who are prominent abroad.”
It is undoubtedly true that Mrs. Atherton, had she lived in France prior to 1789, would have been a woman of a salon. If there are modern de Staëls she is among them!
The first book of Mrs. Atherton’s read by the present writer was Senator North, and he still holds it to be one of her best. It was written in Rouen and published in 1900. Mr. Boynton cites it as evidence that she is “both consciously and unconsciously an American.” He thinks that “her spread-eagling, her ‘barbaric yawp,’ audible if involuntary,” was what won attention for her in England “before her own country had begun to notice her.” And before Mr. Boynton had begun to notice her.
Mrs. Atherton has traveled very widely. Before she starts work on a new novel she visits the contemplated scene of action. She studies the characteristics of the people and exhausts all her sources of information concerning the place and its history. As a result vividness is never lacking in her books, “local color” is there in such measure as she may determine desirable, character-drawing is reënforced by traits observed as well as traits assumed. She is both quick and keen. She notes and then generalizes with broad, sweeping conclusions. Faults of taste are imputed to her, but this means merely that those who make the criticism would exercise a different selective choice over the teemingly abundant material she invariably accumulates. Faults of structure are charged to her by those who do not like the way she and her characters shape amorphous life to their own ends. “Lack of control of her material” is the disapproving phrase. Mrs. Atherton has “style” only in the larger sense of self-expression, “but in the sense of that special and trained skill by which an artist expresses life with an almost infallible fitness, it is difficult to connect the word with her at all.” We should hope so. The “almost infallible fitness” makes for the satisfaction of those who have their own infallible standards of what is fit. Life hasn’t any. It lets anything happen. Life is vulgar, broad, incongruous, surprising, touching.
“My style is all my own, and not the result of magazine training—which stamps the work of every other writer of the first class in the country.” There is something in that and those who quarrel with it do so mainly because they won’t allow Mrs. Atherton a certain exaggeration of statement to drive her point home.