“The dates are to be got out of Who’s Who, but to spare trouble I will give them here. Born, 1868; brought up on an old farm in central Ohio; went to school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Cincinnati for some two or three years; married 1891; lived in Cincinnati ever since. Of all these events, the being brought up on that old farm is probably the greatest asset for the literary career. The other things happen to everybody, but the farm experience was sui generis, not exactly like anything else, least of all like the farm-life you read about and involuntarily picture. My people moved to this country home about the middle of the last century, when it was only a few years removed from the wilderness; I think the farm was the remnant of a comfortable patrimony which in the well-tried old phrase had been ‘run through’; I think it was a last resort, refuge, stronghold; but these were things which were not talked about in the family. I can see now that the life I was made to live as a child was very strange. Here we all were, educated people with traditions and sophisticated ideas, set down amongst actual backwoodsmen, whom the older members of the family looked upon, without the least idea of being snobbish, as peasants. They really were a wild, uncouth lot; there were grown men and women who could not read and write. Of course that is all over now; education, the railroads, the Ladies’ Home Journal have changed everything. Don’t think I am not serious in mentioning that final item: I sincerely believe that the so-called women’s magazines have done more for these backward and isolated communities than all the other preachers and teachers put together. But the point of telling all this intimate history is to make you understand the loneliness of my upbringing as a child; my sister and I had no companions of our own age; we were not allowed to associate with the country children. We must have been queer little fish. We had to make up our own games, and we played stories out of books, taking all the characters in turn.

“The Ohio countryside is not romantic as to landscape; nevertheless, it has a kind of comfortable charm; I have described it pretty accurately in Nathan Burke. In my day there were still passenger-pigeons by the uncounted thousands, and of course quail, gray squirrels, and other kinds of game in like abundance. There was an old man—at least I thought him old then—named Ben Rhodes, who used to make his living shooting and trapping, and who was, in fact, the last of the pioneers. He wore a coon-skin cap with the bushy tail hanging down his back; and butternut-dyed clothes. He could shoot a squirrel through the eye with a rifle—a rifle, mind you!—at the utmost distance the weapon would carry. ‘Yeh waste a power o’ powder ’n’ shot with them thar shot-guns,’ he would say. ‘Yeh taken twenty shot when one orter do.’ I remember him sitting on our back-porch, chewing tobacco, and skinning squirrels, the last an operation of hideous dexterity. You rip the animal down the front, and then after certain swift and mysterious performances with Ben’s hunting-knife which was always horribly bright and keen, fit to scalp people with, you take hold of the ears, you set your foot on the tail, and with one infallible, quick jerk you somehow or other turn it inside out and there in a trice is the furry pelt intact, and there the dreadful skinless corpse of the squirrel with all its muscles showing, red and slick and shining! I never see a squirrel without thinking of Ben, who was a foot-loose creature and wandered off at last, and died somewhere, much like the wild things he hunted. If I have been particular to describe him here, it is because thirty years afterwards I wrote about him and called him Jake Darnell; and in all the writings I have done for which I have time and again been accused of having taken living models, he is absolutely the only actual portrait. I could not have imagined Ben; one must be born and brought up in the backwoods of Ohio to know what manner of man he was. This answers, out of its order, to be sure, one of your questions, that is: to what extent are my novels autobiographical or reminiscent of real persons? Except as regards Ben, they are not at all reminiscent of any one real person, and nothing I have ever written has reflected my own life, consciously at least. An author, I think, in picturing his own world, as seen through his own eyes, may easily tell more about himself than he knows.

“This also, I perceive, answers another question: what is my method of accumulating material? I find I have none. The material seems to present itself or to be gathered up and packed away without conscious effort in some store-house of memory. I can almost always go to this garret, turn over the junk, and haul out what I want. It generally needs some making over, piecing and patching, to be sure, but there is always something there that will serve. I have never had to make a memorandum, as I understand many authors do, of likely phrases, telling words, and so on, never sketched out a scene or plot, never got up in the middle of the night, or hopped off an omnibus to rush after a scrap of paper and pencil in order to ‘jot down’ some immortal thought. The only thing I do sometimes ‘jot down’ is the chronology of the narrative; John McGinnis and Mary Dill are married at such-and-such a date; then, will their son, Dill McGinnis, be fifteen at such-and-such a date? I never know, and have to count up on my fingers, and generally revise the schedule afterwards; and I have been caught up pretty sharply by the unprofessional critics who volunteer criticism in letters to authors, for being as much as twenty years out in my figures, or for making contradictory statements. The sole excuse I have to offer is that I can’t count, and never got any farther than six times eight, which I believe makes forty-eight, in the multiplication-table. Invincible ignorance, in other words, must be my salvation!

“As to my ‘first writings,’ I shared one quality with R. L. S. at any rate; I knew they were trash. They were mostly short stories which went and came between me and the magazine-editors with a pendulum-like regularity; I used to work furiously over these things, and always sent them off with the highest hopes, and yet received them back with no deep disappointment. At the bottom of my heart, I say, I knew they were trash. What I did not know was that, in very truth, I should never write anything but trash, no matter how widely it got printed and published; I was forever expecting some day to ‘do it’ and sit down satisfied; I am still expecting that miracle and all the while I know it will not happen. Some of those far-traveled short stories have since been rewritten and published, and some incorporated in novels, and some are still in the back of my mind waiting their hour of usefulness. When I began, the influence of Stevenson was still very strong, and Mr. Weyman and Mr. Hope-Hawkins, to say nothing of Rider Haggard and the incomparable Sherlock Holmes, were in the middle of their popularity. Where are the roses of yester-year? We will always read Stevenson, but we realize now that he was a writer—just that. And he was a great personality—just that. Everybody, including myself, used strenuously to imitate him, and I think it didn’t do us any harm; he preached better than he practiced, and after some toiling after him, we found that out, but our toil was not thrown away. I will say, in self-glorification, that after I got through imitating Stevenson, I did not start in and imitate O. Henry, or Mr. Rudyard Kipling; and few are the writers who can honestly make that boast! About that time, it became manifest to me that the thing to do was not to muddle around with romance, ancient or modern, but to write about people, and to ‘lie like the truth.’ I remember reading Thackeray, and being struck with the profitable use of the conversational style in ‘lying like the truth’; I don’t mean ‘chatty’ and I don’t mean colloquial, and I don’t mean that easy slinging about of words which the new writers affect; I mean conversational, as conversation is carried on between persons in what I shall call for want of a better term good society. But what puzzled me about Thackeray was that there were occasional passages, of considerable extent, wherein he was not conversational at all; he was writing like somebody else, but it still had the most amazing verisimilitude; it was so plausible that you believed it just as you believe the morning paper. It was in Barry Lyndon that this first struck me, I believe. Who showed him that trick? He is forever talking about Fielding, but upon re-reading the latter I saw it was not Fielding he was imitating. Thackeray, in breezy parlance, can give Fielding cards and spades. After a while, in a moment of illumination, I found him out. The wily old genius was not bothering his head about Fielding; the man he was modeling upon was Daniel Defoe; that’s where he got that simplicity which did not hesitate at times to be prosy, well aware that a plain true narrative has always the defect of its quality, monotony, repetition, a tedious dwelling on detail. There is nothing in fiction better imagined or imagined with more veracity than the pitiful importance which his efforts at braiding baskets, and making pottery vessels, assume to the castaway Robinson in his solitude, and yet it is not vividly interesting reading. There is nothing—also—better imagined than George Warrington’s escape from Fort Duquesne, with the help of the Indian squaw; but it is rather tiresome, on the whole; and the final touch where the poor squaw, instead of turning out a lovely, romantic Pocahontas, becomes a perfect nuisance when they reach the settlements, getting drunk and creating scandal—that is a masterpiece of realism; and we all hate to know about it! Re-reading Defoe, and reading Thackeray more carefully, with side excursions, as it were, into reading Swift and Mr. Thomas Hardy, it seemed to me that I might eventually learn the trick. I take it that I have actually succeeded once or twice by the fact that nobody will believe that I have ever invented a single person or incident! People are eternally wanting to know who was the original of this or that character, or what is worse, identifying characters with somebodies whom, ten to one, I have never laid eyes on! Others have insisted that they knew very well I was cutting the tale out of whole cloth, but that I had no ‘vision,’ was ‘too photographic,’ etc. It may well be so; my cup is very small, and I must drink out of it, willy-nilly. The critics, as I have said, were rather put to it for something to say, when I appeared; most of them adopted a cautious, middle-of-the-road policy; you see I might turn out to be a writer after all, with my bewildering deliberation, my ‘careless fluency’—I have seen this phrase used in description of my writing—my emphasis of the commonplace. Of late years, I think they have got used to me; for that matter, when all’s said and done, my contributions to literature are not of such importance as to arrest a critic long.

“I see one of the questions relates to travels. Mine have been about as those of the average citizen, except that one or two were undertaken in search of material. For example, I went to Mexico when writing Nathan Burke, as the hero is supposed to take part in the Mexican War. And while at work on Van Cleve, a story in which the Spanish-American War makes a kind of fugitive entrance and exit, I went to Cuba, and down to Santiago. I might possibly have ‘faked up’ these stories without the trouble of the journey; it would be as easy to do that as to imagine society and the world fifty or a hundred years ago, which I have also done—that is to say, not easy at all; nothing is easy—but I could have done it. However, I prefer to make some attempt at getting the atmosphere.

“The dates of publication are about as follows: The Tenants (McClure), 1908; Nathan Burke (Macmillan), 1910; The Legacy, 1911; Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family, published serially in the Atlantic Monthly, 1912, in book form by Macmillan, 1913; The Rise of Jennie Cushing, 1915; The Rudder, 1916; The Boardman Family, 1918; also a book called Three Short Plays, 1917.

“I cannot let this go without adding a word of protest—whether in your judgment it is fit to make public or not—about the people who in printed criticism, or in private letters and conversations, insist on attributing to me the words I put into the mouths of my characters, and the thoughts I put into their heads. I make a man designedly weak and futile, or idle, or dull, or small-minded; I make him say or do something which precisely exhibits his weakness, or futility, or idleness, or dullness, or meanness; how else shall the reader know this man than by his own mouth, by his own deeds? Is it not so that we know one another? A character in a book must act and speak in his part; he ought never to become even for one instant the mouthpiece of the author; he is, in a sense, as much a stranger to the author, as much a different and distinct personality, as he is to the reader. Then why, when I make a man say: ‘There is no God,’ and moreover, go to work and express this opinion in a dozen ways, by every act and thought of his career, why do people accuse me of being an atheist? At that rate, if I invented a burglar, I’d first have to be a burglar myself! Nobody ever gives me credit for the kind, intelligent, temperate, decent people I create; it’s only the disagreeable ones, apparently, that I am accountable for. What have I got to do with it? I merely imagine a character such as we meet with every day of our lives, put him into a certain environment, or submit him to certain circumstances, and then see what happens. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ and ‘Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh’ give me the best of authorities for this method; whole pages of description cannot illuminate the reader as much as one unguarded sentence from the lips of a character. But why accuse me of his sentiments? I’m only turning a searchlight on him. The thing is exasperating, not less so because it is a sort of left-handed tribute to the verisimilitude I am always striving after. In the preface to one of his books the late Mr. William de Morgan speaks his mind earnestly about the same kind of injustice; and I am further reminded of a story about Thackeray, who, on being reproached for ‘making So-and-So and Such-a-One act that way,’ retorted: ‘Why, Good Lord, I didn’t do it. They did it themselves!’ So, if I err, at least I err in good company.

“This letter is already too long. With very many thanks, and best wishes for the forthcoming book, I am

“Sincerely yours,
“Mary S. Watts.”

Mrs. Watts’s candor should be attended by an equal candor on the part of the compiler of this book. Of course, despite the reporter’s rôle to which he endeavors pretty scrupulously to stick throughout these pages, he has his personal preferences; his readers have a right to know something about them if only that they may discount his statements at their own intellectual rates of exchange. What we have to say about Mrs. Watts may properly be prefaced, then, with the admission that, on the whole, we (a strictly editorial we) have received more permanent pleasure and satisfaction from her novels than from those of any other American woman. Let us try to make clear the grounds for this satisfaction and let us also try to place before the reader the solid merits of her work.