CHAPTER IX
ELEANOR H. PORTER
IN the pleasant old town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is a fourth (top floor) apartment and above it a roof garden. Come up on the roof. “Fresh, clean light canvas, framed in by borders of flowers, with a hammock to dream in and a good stout table and a typewriter,” confront us. At the table a little woman, blonde, youthful looking, her light and fluffy hair neatly combed, her blue eyes—“laughing eyes”—changing expression rapidly with her thoughts. She is writing with a lead pencil and when she stops to talk to us she shows a ready wittedness, a conversational gift, an aliveness that are charming—charming!
She tells us that she works here every morning when too boisterous winds or a driving storm do not make it impossible; or too low a temperature. She writes novels. It takes her a year to do one and when she has finished she is good for nothing for several days. She writes each book three times; first in lead pencil, the second draft on the typewriter here, “and it is this copy that is polished over and rewritten and tinkered with—and all fixed up.” The third draft has usually few changes. It, or a stenographer’s copy of it, goes to the publisher, and later there comes a message from Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston:
“Advance orders for your new novel Just David are 100,000 copies.”
Isn’t that rewarding? Just David will be out in a few days now....
The author of Just David—and The Road to Understanding and Oh, Money! Money! and, why of course of Pollyanna!—is not thinking of the royalties that will be hers on 100,000 copies of her novel. No. Eleanor H. Porter makes a moderate fortune with each of her books. But what rewards her for the task of writing them—did you ever sit down and write, just write, 80,000 words, let alone telling a story?—what gives her the satisfaction that’s of the heart is the invincible proof that a hundred thousand are buying her book on faith. They believe in her, in her work; she has pleased them, made them happier or better somehow, somewhere, somewhen; they look to her for help, for cheer, for entertainment, for a kind of enlightenment that they haven’t found elsewhere and that will be supremely worth their while.
Stand aside, you who are sophisticated, cynical, world worn and merely flippant! If you could see assembled before you in one vast throng this hundred thousand and tens of thousands more, if you could see them gathered about you with upturned interested, expectant and eager faces, what would you say? What could you say? Do you think your sophistication would be proof against the expression on these faces? Do you think that you could give them what they need? Would your subtleties help them? Would they listen to you and go away a little braver, a little more comforted, a little readier to face life?
Up in the White Mountains there’s a cabin called after the girl Pollyanna. Out in Colorado there’s a Pollyanna teahouse. A little maid in Texas bears the name. The builder of an apartment house in an Indiana city has his fancy struck. There’s a Pollyanna brand of milk, and Pollyanna clubs are formed whose members sport an enameled button showing a young girl’s sweet face. Surely the woman who can so touch the hearts, the imagination, or even merely the fancy of men and women and children everywhere—surely she and her work call for respectful consideration. There must be something here, something admirable, if we can only put our fingers on it! There is.
And first let us hear about Mrs. Porter herself. We have met her at work. Was there anything to suggest direct descent from Governor William Bradford of the Mayflower and the “stern and rockbound coast”? There was not. There was, however, a suggestion of a childhood spent in an oldtime white frame New England house, with green blinds and big pillars in front. There was certainly more than a suggestion of a child brought up to play indoors and out. With a little imagination we could have seen her studying music, always music, loving to improvise. “I liked to play out all my moods and everything I saw and heard. I could get rid of my tempers, too, by sometimes just playing them out. And I liked to play the beautiful things I saw—sunsets, woods and lakes.... In that way, perhaps, David is autobiographical.... The many years’ training in voice as well as instrumental music has never failed to help me in expressing just the mood I want to express.”
She was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, a place of some few thousands in the White Mountains, the daughter of Francis H. Hodgman and Llewella Woolson Hodgman. She had a brother to play with. She “knew the woods from early childhood.” Little verses and stories by her commemorated birthdays and other occasions of moment. In high school ill health arrested her studies. For a while books had to be put entirely aside and she lived a good deal outdoors. Spruce, fir, cedar and tamarack, mountain flowers and plants, became personalities to be distinguished one from another and to be delighted in for their peculiarities. When she wrote Just David she had only to recall her youth, after all.