The perfection of a woman’s intellect depends upon the perfection of its fusion with her personality. A woman amounts to most intellectually when she amounts to still more personally. She cannot move in pieces like a man, or like an earthworm. It needs the whole woman, acting harmoniously, to write. A man can retire into his brain and make a book, and a good one, leaving all the rest of his personality in confusion; but a woman must put her whole house in order before she can go off upstairs into her intellect and write. It follows that a woman’s artistic achievement is for her a harder job than a man’s achievement is for him, which would make the other fact—namely, that the woman’s book when written is never so great as the man’s—seem additionally cruel, if we could not discern that the best of women writers have, in attaining that best, reached not one result but two: impelled to clean all her spirit’s house before she can feel happy to write in it, a woman writer achieves both a home that people like to visit and a book that people like to read. Is it not true of all the greatest women authors that we think of them as women before we think of them as authors?
Of fiction-makers in our own tongue the greatest man is Shakespeare and the greatest woman is Jane Austen. In personal revelation both were signally reserved, the woman the more so, seeing that she did not even burst into the hieroglyphics of a sonnet sequence; but of the two our first thought of the woman is “dear Jane,” and of the man, “dear Rosalind”—or Beatrice or Mercutio. A man, possessing a separable intellect and an imagination so original that it can sometimes create what he personally is little capable of experiencing, may sometimes write one thing and be another; but not so a woman. On the other hand, has any woman ever attained such greatness that, at the mention of her name, we think of the books she wrote before we think of the woman she was?
It is true that professional women who direct their toil on the conviction that a woman’s brain is of the same quality as a man’s sometimes produce work that approximates a man’s in quantity. But sober observation of such women does not make me want to be one. I see them too often paying the penalty of being lopped and warped. Again I cannot see that, while such women attain their Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s and LL.D.’s, they ever attain the highest rank in literature. Imaginative writing seems to demand inexorably that a woman writer be inexorably a woman. On the other hand, I have reached as a brain-worker the conclusion that, while my head is different in substance from a man’s, I get most work out of it when I copy a man’s mental methods. My brain is a vague and volatile mass, shot through with fancies, whimseys, with flashes of intuitive and illuminative wisdom, and it is a task surpassingly difficult to hold all this volatility, this versatility, to the rigors of artistic expression, to the stern architectonics of fiction. To the degree that a woman shall succeed in imposing upon the matter of her intellect the method of a man’s intellect, to that degree shall her work show the sanity and serenity of universal, and sexless, art.
To impose upon a woman’s intellect a man’s discipline and detachment is excellent in theory; it is staggering in practice. Convention and his own will make a man’s time his own. A woman’s genius is for personality, or achievement within herself; a man’s is for work, or achievement outside of himself. Now it takes time to be a person, and it takes other people. A real woman’s life is meshed in other people’s from dawn to dark. These strands of other lives are to her so vital and precious that for no book’s sake will she ever break them, yet for any book’s sake she must disentangle them. A woman writer’s life is a constant compromise, due to the fact that if she does not live with her fellows, she will not have anything to write, and that if she does not withdraw from them, she will not have time to write anything. I do not know how other writing women manage their time. I know that to attain four hours a day at my desk means that I must be revoltingly stern with myself, my family, and my friends. One pays a price for retirement, but one need not pay too heavily. A solution lies in retaining those relations that mean real humanity, while cutting off those that mean only society: I do not play bridge, but I do play with children.
Of course, it always seems plausible to solve the problem of time to one’s self by running off to some strange place, but this never works very well. The reason is that such isolation is sure to prove evanescent, so that you have to keep packing your trunk and moving on to new exile, because human tendrils are so strong and stealthy that they push their way through the thickest walls you can build, and twine themselves, wherever you hide, about the fingers that want to write. In order to write a love-story of your own invention, you run away from some friend’s too insistent love-story at home, and the first thing you know you are deep in the love-affairs of your poor little chambermaid. You escape home worries only to have some stranger’s troubles batter down your hotel door. You might as well stay at home and put up with the truth, that if you care enough about people to wish to write of them, you will care enough for people to wish to live with them, abroad no less than at home. Besides, boarding is bleak and blighting. If I were a boarding woman, presently I should feel too chilly to wish to write; my fancies and my fingers would be too numb for expression. I need a home with its big warm peace and its little warm frictions before I can feel cozy enough to want to chat with a pen.
There is a somewhat different alternative to home existence; I have heard of communities duly arranged for the requirements of writers, where they enjoy a kind of clublike privacy and security from interruption. But are not such communities confined to the near-great? Are real writers any more than real persons attracted by such an abnormal existence? Writers who shun life and people are exactly the sort that life and people shun. Personally, I run away from an author whenever I hear one coming. Of the really great ones, I am desperately afraid, and of the not-so-great ones, far more so.
Writer communities imply too much of the placard. I wish I might never have to dangle my profession on a label. I am always embarrassed when I am forced blatantly to expose it—for example, to the frank questions of the doctor’s secretary, or of a customs official. “Profession?” they ask, and I cringe before the admission, “I am a writer.” I don’t feel ladylike when I say the words. On such occasions I would give my entire remuneration for an “Atlantic” essay to be able to say, “I am a laundress.”
Personally, I am only too glad to forget that I am a Grub-Streeter, if only other people would forget. No matter how obscurely one has ever appeared in print, one pays the penalty of the pinnacle ever after. Surely one is no more responsible for the tendency of one’s talents than for the color of one’s hair. I write because I have found it my best way of making a living,—and also because I can’t help it; therefore why cannot people accept me as simply as if I were a dressmaker? I should be embittered by the curious attitude of people toward the literary calling, if it were not as funny as it is puzzling. Once, at a tea, an imposing matron hurtled from the front door to my corner, crying out, “Can you talk as you write? If so, please do!” I was dumb with discomfort for the rest of the afternoon.
The subject of attitude toward the writer is worthy of digression and topical analysis, for there is a difference among friends, family, and general acquaintance. Now, it is not often that I wish to talk as I write, but the occasions when I do, while rare, are painful and urgent. It is precisely on these occasions that my friends fail me. Essays are a long while in being born, and while they are in process I would give much for some one with whom to talk them over. It is not after a thing is published that a writer needs appreciation: it is before, and especially before it is written. For twenty friends who will loyally enjoy anything I write, I cannot count three who will listen when I talk. Yet the ideas are exactly the same whether uttered by pen or tongue. No friend is so valuable as one ready to attend and sympathize during the incubation and parturition of an idea. And yet the majority, knowing too well the author’s temperamental uncertainties, are perhaps to be forgiven their preference to wait until the editorial christening. So much bigger to most minds is print than person. A writer’s best friends are prone to treat her with the affectionate inattention they would give to a Blind Tom. Yet I would rather my friends never listened to me, than that they always did; it is much cozier to be considered an idiot than an oracle.
If friends are prone to take the writing more seriously than they take the writer, her family, on the contrary, share her throes too intimately to take their poor sufferer lightly. Few authors experience the popular fallacy of a doting family audience. A shuddering apprehension of the potential effect upon editor and reader makes kinfolk intensely critical. The agonies to which any sympathetic household is subjected when one member of it is writing a book are such as to make them question whether any book is worth the price of its creation. A writer’s family also lives in the constant, but usually groundless, fear of being written up. There is both humor and pathos when dear Granny retires into a corner with some foible she knows you admired in infancy. Relatives are always a trifle uneasy in the presence of the chiel amang us takin’ notes. I doubt if any success quite compensates for the discomfort of being blood-kin to a writer. True, a family can sometimes be discovered passing the book or magazine around among the neighbors, but they don’t wish you to catch them with it in their own hands. Friends and family are alike in their complexity of attitude, being insistent that other people shall admire you, but afraid of making you conceited if they admire you themselves. The danger of conceit can be safely entrusted to editors and reviewers, not to mention the disillusion that sickens any author on comparing the finished book with the fancied one.