The Joys of Being a Woman, and Other Papers

by Winifred Margaretta Kirkland

But if a writer is comfortably without honor among her intimates, she is more than honored by the attention accorded by chance acquaintance. The attitude of the average person toward print as print is enigmatic. Not all people place the pen on a pedestal, but all regard the penman as somehow different. I once essayed retirement at a little village hotel. I was promptly established in a room made sacred by the previous occupancy of another lady author. Her name I had never before heard, although I heard it daily during my sojourn. Her sole producible work was a railroad advertisement of some remote garden-spot in California, but it had been enough to confer a halo, as well as to win more substantial reward, for I afterwards found out that, solely for the literary aroma she diffused, the lady had been allowed to remain two years without paying a cent of board. Unfortunately I did not discover the fact until I had paid my own board for two months. The incident disproves the charge that the United States has no popular respect for the fine arts.

Print is prone to induce curious revelations from strangers. You write, perhaps, a story that tries to be true to simple human emotions, and the next thing you know, somebody in Idaho is writing you all about his wife or baby. It is touching, but quaint. I have come to be a little suspicious of letters from strangers that purport to be simple letters of appreciation. I used to be very much flattered by them until my brief notes of thanks drew forth such unexpected replies. It appeared that the writers of the letters were writers of other works as well; they were sending these to me forthwith; would I kindly read and comment? My experience is, I gather, not unique. A writer-friend, whose published poetry is marked by peculiar sanity, has received from more than one unknown source effusions so bizarre that they can emanate from nothing but a madhouse.

It is easy to silence by silence these unseen acquaintance, but others nearer by demand tact. Among these are people who tell me stories they want me to tell. They never can understand why I don’t use the material. As a matter of fact, raw romance striking enough to impress the lay mind is much too striking for a writer’s employment. Truth that is stranger than fiction is what every story-teller must avoid if he is to write stories true enough to be read.

What I more and more discover is that nine tenths of the people one meets want to write, that seven tenths of them have at some time tried, and that not more than one tenth of them perceive why they have failed. Since they think the impulse to write more distinctive than its accomplishment, and since they feel that they have the impulse in all its glory, they regard with a half-contemptuous envy the person who actually does write. They regard creation as purely inspirational, and look askance at a worker who goes to her desk every morning like a machine. For all I know, they are right. A good many people think that the only reason they are not writers is that they never tried to be. Others think they would have written if they had only been taught how, if they had had the opportunity of certain courses in college. Still others think there must be some charmed approach to an editor’s attention. Who introduced me, they frankly ask. When people talk like this it requires some self-control to repress my conviction that any person who could have written would have written, and my knowledge that the only introduction I ever had to any editor was made by my own manuscripts.

Friends, family, and general acquaintance have, I find, one impulse in common, the desire always to hound down the autobiographic. They read, beam brightly, look up at me, and say, “Oh, here is Aunt Sarah’s chicken-pen!” Actually it is an old well I once saw in Brittany. “Oh, here is the story of old Mr. Gresham at his grandnephew’s funeral. Don’t you remember I showed you Elsie’s letter about it?” I never saw the letter, never heard of old Mr. Gresham, and the chapter in question describes the antics of a four-year-old at his father’s wedding.

“Here is Saidie Lippincott to the life!”

I gasp, “Who is Saidie Lippincott?”

“Don’t you remember you met her at Rose Earle’s tea when you visited me four years ago?”

There is no possession people are so unwilling to let one have as an imagination. In private, friends will tear a book to shreds to discover some portrait they can recognize; and in the case of authors famous enough to be dead, critics rake the ground wherever they have trod in an effort to prove that the folk of their fancy were drawn from the earth rather than the air. There seems no means of convincing a reader that in a writer’s head are constantly a thousand faces he has never seen or heard of, all subtle with story, all begging for a book, and all so real that they often make his daily waking seem a dream.

There is no denying that there is autobiography in all fiction, but the relation of the two is not so superficial as the mere introduction of facts and of characters from one’s daily life. The actual relation of experience and its expression is deep and intricate, and, especially for the woman writer, pervasive. As one must adjust one’s work to a feminine body, to a feminine brain, and to distinctly feminine social relations, so one must take into account as still more determinative a woman’s spiritual characteristics. However potent the impulse to write, the impulse to live is deeper. I have dwelt on the negative side of this problem, the uselessness of fleeing to strange places to escape other people’s burdens; but it is impossible to over-emphasize the positive side, the difficulties of staying at home with the burdens that Providence has provided. However intense the joys and sorrows of the people the woman creates, the joys and sorrows of the people she loves will be still more intense. It needs both poise and vitality to be equal to the demands both of fancy and of fact. The mere external tangle of hours and seasons that any human relations necessitate is nothing compared with the spiritual tangle of one’s sympathies. The instinct to soothe and succor and the instinct to think and write meet in a daily, an hourly, variance. Heart and head are equally insistent in their demands, and equally vengeful if unsatisfied. Books cry to be written, and people cry to be loved, and to whichever one I turn a deaf ear, I am presently paying the penalty of a great unrest and discontent. To preserve the balance of attention between the needs of her head and the needs of her heart is the biggest problem any woman writer faces. I have discovered no ultimate solution; it is rather a matter of small daily solutions, in which at one time we sacrifice the friend to the book, and at another the book to the friend.