When Winter Comes to Main Street

by Grant M. Overton

Mrs. Banning has written a novel which will surprise those who remember her only by her first novel, This Marrying. The surprise will be less for those who read her second novel, Half Loaves, for they must have been struck by the real understanding she showed of the married relationship and the marked increase in her skill as a writer. Spellbinders is the sort of work one looks for after such a good novel as Half Loaves.

Mrs. Banning, who was married in 1914, lives in Duluth. A graduate of Vassar, her first novel was written in one of Margaret Mayo’s cottages at Harmon, New York. She is of purely Irish ancestry, related to the Plunkett family which bred both statesmen and revolutionaries for Ireland. On the other side there was a Colonel Culkin, who, Mrs. Banning says, “came over at the time of the Revolution but unfortunately fought on the wrong side, so we forget him and begin our Culkin lineage in this country with the Culkin who came over at the famous time of the ‘potato-rot.’” That would be the Irish famine of 1846, no doubt.

Sunny-San, Onoto Watanna’s first novel in six years, has been the signal for her re-entrance not only into the world of fiction, but the world of motion pictures and plays. Even before Sunny-San was ready as a book, the motion picture producers were on the author’s track. A large sum was paid cash down for the picture rights to the novel and then the prospect of a picture was laid aside while the possibilities of a play were estimated. These were seen to be exceptionally good. Here was a story of young American boys travelling in Japan and coming upon a still younger Japanese girl, threatened with cruelty and unhappiness. The young men endowed Sunny-San, so to speak, planking down enough money to secure her protection and education. Thereupon they continued blithely on their travels and forgot all about her.

Some years later a well-educated, dainty and exceedingly attractive Japanese girl presents herself on the doorstep of a house in New York where one of the young men resides. Situation! What shall the young man do with his charming and unexpected protégée! In view of the prolonged success of Fay Bainter in the play, East Is West, it was obviously the thing to make a play out of Sunny-San. And this, I believe, is being done as I write. In the meantime Onoto Watanna, who is really Mrs. Winnifred Reeve, and who lives on a ranch near Calgary, Canada, is very busy with her Canadian stories which have excited the enthusiasm of magazine editors. I am confident that she will do a Canadian novel; the more so because she tells me that, despite the success of Sunny-San and the enormous success of her earlier Japanese stories, like A Japanese Nightingale, her interest is really centred at present in Canada, its people and backgrounds.

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Pending Dorothy Speare’s second novel, let me suggest that those who have not done so read her first, Dancers in the Dark. That a young woman just out of Smith College should write this novel, that the novel should then begin immediately selling at a great rate, and that David Belasco should demand a play constructed from the novel is altogether a sequence to cause surprise. I have had letters from older people who said frankly that they could not express themselves about Dancers in the Dark, because it dealt with a life with which they were utterly unfamiliar—which, in some cases, they did not know existed. And yet it does exist! The demand for the book, the avidity with which it has been read and the intemperance with which it has been discussed testify that in Dancers in the Dark Miss Speare wrote a book with truth in it. I suppose it might be said of her first novel—though I should not agree in saying it—that, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, it had every conceivable fault except the fatal fault; it did not fail to live. The amount of publicity that this book received was astonishing. I have handled clippings from newspapers all over the country—and not mere “items” but “spreads” with pictures—in which the epigrammatic utterances of the characters in Dancers were reprinted and their truth or falsity debated hotly. Is the modern girl an “excitement eater”? Does she “live from man to man and never kill off a man”? There was altogether too much smoke and heat in the controversy for one to doubt the existence, underneath the surface of Miss Speare’s fiction, of glowing coals. And Miss Speare? Well, it is a fact that, like her heroine in Dancers, she has an exceptional voice; and I understand that she intends to cultivate the voice and to continue as a writer, both. That is a very difficult programme to lay out for one’s self, but I really believe her capable of succeeding in both halves of the programme.

Another distinctly popular novel, The Moon Out of Reach, by Margaret Pedler, is the fruit of a well-developed career as a novelist. The Hermit of Far End, The House of Dreams Come True, The Lamp of Fate, and The Splendid Folly were the forerunners of this immediate and distinct success. Mrs. Pedler is the wife of a sportsman well known in the West of England, the nearest living descendant of Sir Francis Drake. They have a lovely home in the country and Mrs. Pedler, besides the joys of her writing, is a collector of old furniture and china and a devotee of driving, tennis and swimming. It is interesting that as a girl she studied at the Royal Academy of Music with a view to being a professional singer. Marriage diverted her from that, but she still retains her interest in music; and it is characteristic of such novels as The Splendid Folly and The Moon Out of Reach that a lyric appearing in the book embodies the theme of the story. These lyrics of Mrs. Pedler’s have mostly been set to music.

What shall I say about Corra Harris’s The Eyes of Love except that it offers such a study of marriage as only Mrs. Harris puts on paper? Shrewd and homely wisdom, sympathetic and ironical humour, the insight and the fundamental experience,—above all, imagination in experience—which made their first deep and wide impression with the publication of A Circuit Rider’s Wife. I open The Eyes of Love at random and come upon such a passage as this, and then I don’t wonder that men as well as women read Corra Harris and continue to read her:

“Few women are ever related by marriage to the minds of their husbands. These minds are foreign countries where they discover themselves to be aliens, speaking another smaller language and practically incapable of mastering the manners and customs of that place. This is sometimes the man’s fault, because his mind is not a fit place for a nice person like his wife to dwell, but more frequently it is the wife’s fault, who is not willing to associate intimately with the hardships that inhabit the mind of a busy man, who has no time to ornament that area with ideas pertaining to the finer things. So it happens that both of them prefer this divorce, the man because the woman gets in the way with her scruples and emotions when he is about to do business without reference to either; the woman because it is easier to keep on the domestic periphery of her husband, where she thinks she knows him and is married to him because she knows what foods he likes, and the people he prefers to have asked to dine when she entertains, the chair that fits him, the large pillow or the small one he wants for his tired old head at night, the place where the light must be when he reads in the evening rather than talk to her, because there is nothing to talk about, since she is only the wife of his bosom and not of his head.”

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