Literature in the Making, by Some of Its Makers

by Unknown

"Why is it," asked Mrs. Norris, "that a girl like that cannot see the value of such an incident as that? That shoe-drawer is a picturesque and interesting thing, unknown to most people. And this girl, who knows all about it, and wants to write, cannot see its literary value! And yet what more interesting subject is there for her to write about than that shoe-drawer? I do not see why writers will not appreciate the importance of writing about the things that are around them."

Mrs. Norris gave a somewhat embarrassed laugh. "I really shouldn't attempt to lay down the law in this way," she said. "I can speak only for myself—I must write of the people and things that I know best, but I ought not to attempt to prescribe what other people shall write about."

Mrs. Norris's chief literary enthusiasm seems to be Charles Dickens. "When we were all infants out in the backwoods of California," she said, "we battened on Dickens. Dickens and a writer whom I don't suppose anybody reads nowadays—Henry Kingsley. The boys read Sir Walter Scott's novels, and left Dickens to me. I read Dickens with delight, and I still read him with delight. I have found passages in Dickens of which I honestly believe there are no equal in all English literature except in Shakespeare. I do not think that there is ever a year in which I do not read some of Dickens's novels over again. Of course, any one can find Dickens's faults—but I do not see how any one can fail to find his excellences."

"What is it in Dickens that especially attracts you?" I asked.

Mrs. Norris was silent for a moment. Then she said: "I think I like him chiefly because he saw so clearly the joys of the poor. He did not give his poor people nothing but disease and oppression and despair. He gave them roast goose and plum pudding for their Christmas dinner—he gave them faith and hope and love. He knew that often the rich suffer and the poor are happy.

"Many of the modern realists seem ignorant of the fact that the poor may be happy. They think that the cotter's Saturday night must always be squalid and sordid and dismal, and that the millionaire's Saturday night must be splendid and joyful. As a matter of fact, the poor family may be, and often is, healthier and happier in every way than the rich family. But these extreme realists are not like Dickens, they have not his intimate knowledge of the life of the poor. They have the outsider's viewpoint.

"Too many writers are telling us about the sorrows of the poor. We need writers who will tell us about the joys of the poor. We need writers who will be aware of the pleasures to be derived from a good dinner of corned beef and cabbage and a visit to a moving-picture theater. Often when I pass a row of mean houses, as they would be called, I think gratefully of the good times that I have had in just such places."

The thought of that little Celtic Californian reading Dickens among the redwood-trees appealed to me. So I asked Mrs. Norris to tell more about her childhood.

"Well," she said, "we hear a great deal about the misery, the bleak and barren lives of the children who live in the tenements of New York's lower East Side. But I think that an East Side tenement child would die of ennui if it should be brought up as we were brought up. We had none of the amusing and exciting experiences of the East Side child—we had no white stockings, no ice-cream cones, no Coney Island, nothing of the sort.

"We never even went to school. We would study French for a while with some French neighbor who had sufficient leisure to teach us, and then we'd study Spanish for a while with some Spaniard. That was the extent of our schooling.