Whiting--a Retrospect
I
AFTER some hesitation, I have decided that my being consistently a worst seller for forty years does not, after all, invalidate my opinions and experiences of writing as a profession. Until this moment I have been too absorbed to stop and look back.
The first thing I realize is that writing was nothing that either my family or I expected of me. From the moment my mother first held me in her arms, she wished mo to be an astronomer, like Maria Mitchell. She never quite got over her disappointment, although, when she went from us, there stood in a row on the top of her desk a dozen books, all mine. I look at them sometimes, at their backs one after another, and I think, ‘Did I ever in one lifetime cover all that paper with all that ink? And did good publishers really publish me, as their imprint affirms?’ Mother used to take down these volumes and read them, for hours. But I myself never open them. For how could anyone be anything but bored by the books one had written? It was only the books I had not yet written that ever excited me. They still do!
In my little-girl years, and in my teens and first twenties, I was too busy taking in to have any desire to give out. I do not know very much about how other writers have come to be dominated by their art. I often feel that it would be helpful if we did tell each other a little more about our own creative processes, irrespective of the fame or the obscurity of our achievement. I can only look back, actually for the first time, at the development of that one writer I know best.
As a little girl, then, — say from eight to twelve, — I recall myself as dwelling for hours at a stretch in a world apart, gladly under a spell, whispering over and over bits of ‘Hiawatha’ or Macaulay’s Lays, or letting my inner eye picture to the last detail the green water and white sea sands where dwelt Andersen’s Little Mermaid. Just as vividly I remember sitting motionless and remote, gazing at a blue mountain line against the sky. At the same time there was another side of me, very different and yet as enjoyable as my speed at tag. I loved nothing more than tearing sentences to pieces. I was twelve when that ancient and honorable textbook, Kellogg’s English Grammar, entered my life — page after page after page of delectable diagrams! It would have been hard to determine which I liked more, to find a far-off secret corner where I might declaim ‘The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire’ all by myself, or to take a page of newspaper prose and shred each sentence into bits and make a blacklined draft of its structure. Not until many years later did these two leading leanings of mine, toward poetry on the one side and toward analysis on the other, coalesce to form a single entity.
I am not sure that even now they have become altogether one, or ever will, for even while I am engaged in building an article, bit by bit, according to a rigid plan, it is my secret ambition to conceal that plan under a shimmer of phrases adroitly interwoven, and I still put myself to sleep by repeating verses from Walter de la Mare or Ralph Hodgson, yielding to them because their magic utterly eludes dissection.
My delight in structure came in handy when I found myself beginning Latin grammar, which appeared to me much easier and more logical than English. Having earlier routed the latter with Kellogg’s aid, I found nothing arduous about Latin, though I can now understand the exasperation of young classmates that any normal teen-age girl should go rooting around for alluring undiscovered rules in the footnotes. My predilection for analysis received fresh reënforcement about this time. I found myself abruptly placed in a large city school — a shy country child, feeling more uncouth, I hope, than I appeared. There were a thousand girls in that school and a hundred of them in the class where I was seated. English composition was imparted to us by an austere instructor, slim, vigorous, fifty. I was fourteen. I can still recall the painful start with which we all came to attention when for the first time in our lives we were addressed as ‘Ladies!’
As had happened with Kellogg’s English Grammar, I was to receive a definite influence for my future writing. The method for all of us was simple, but absolutely inescapable. On one Monday we laid upon our teacher’s desk an outline of our composition to come, all reduced to capital A’s and B’s, with little a’s and b’s beneath, and Roman and Arabic numerals intelligently sprinkled about. This sheet was in a few days returned, annotated and commented on. On the framework thus revised we then constructed the complete composition for the following Monday. It was a procedure that became built into my writing processes — outline first, then article, story, or book erected on that scaffolding. Hardly a dozen times have I deviated from this course, and when I have thrown my early training to the winds and jumped into my message without a chart I have always had reason to repent bitterly.
II
Not then, nor until four or five years later, did I have any idea of making writing a goal in itself. It would, of course, become a vehicle for the classical studies in which I had become utterly immersed in school and college. I was walking the Athenian streets with Socrates, I was looking over Juvenal’s shoulder at the wicked thoroughfares of Rome, too preoccupied with Latin and Greek to bring my dreams nearer home and actually envisage myself as giving my soul to the writing of English.
But those years with the Greeks have had their aftermath. The vision of clear columns rising against the sky, the impact upon my mind of thoughts rising clear against this world’s eternal chaos, have made me overcritical of certain modern forms and tendencies. For example, I am often completely floored by the prize poems of to-day. Because I was Greek for years in my youth, I now want to cry alike to editor and author of these literary exhibitions, ‘For Heaven’s sake, man, what’s the crime in being lucid? How am I to know whether it’s your fault or mine that I have n’t a notion what you’re driving at? ’ Because I was Greek for so long I want to say to the poet, ‘Why put yourself in such a pother to be unintelligible? If you have a thought, let her out ! The chances are that it’s not so big a thought; as to do any damage!’ Because of the Greek that long ago got under my schoolgirl skin and permanently into my bones and marrow, I can’t help feeling that there should be some connection between an artist and his public. If the poet shoots himself up into his own empyrean, regardless, he merely leaves his readers gaping after him, blinking at the spot where he disappeared. On the other hand, if he lets a poem hit us square between the eyes, it produces a much higher type of blinking.
I supposed I’d be a student of the classics and write a thesis and get a Ph. D., like all the rest. But I think my young Greek teacher, since then become well known, — Emily James Putnam, — must have discovered in me some tendencies of which I was myself hardly yet conscious, for I remember her giving me some advice that is worth passing on: ‘Read Greek for work, and French for recreation, and you will insensibly form a taste for style that will dominate your writing without further care on your part.’ As a matter of fact, I have not followed either of these suggestions, for as years went on the world of books, even the twin kingdoms of the ancient classics, grew less and less compelling. More and more insistently the real world all around me demanded my attention, until to-day all I want is to look and look, and then to write and write what I see. But it was some time, really, before I got that way.
Oddly enough, my first acute impulse toward writing came from teaching it. When I left college, the most obvious way to earn my living was to teach Latin, and out of that fact came a chain of experiences that was to bind me at last to writing as my profession. Along with Latin, I was also teaching English. The contrast in the response of my pupils was illuminating. No matter how conscientiously I prodded the corpse, Latin remained, for those growing girls, a dead language by which they refused
to be contaminated. Of course, the approach to the Roman tongue had been softened considerably in the decade since my own induction. In my halcyon adolescence we were first immersed in Latin grammar for three months, and then bayoneted at once into Cæsar, with no choice but to advance or perish. When I came to teach Latin, however, we stole on it softly, by means of a gentle little textbook so disarming as to be alarming, for how could you help being afraid of rules that had to be approached so surreptitiously? Latin both for my pupils and for me proved a bore, but those same pupils, the instant they entered their own home tongue, whether reading it or writing it, chirruped at once with joyous outpourings. We gamboled together, the girls and I. I forthwith resolved to teach English, and English only, and for six years I did, and loved it so well that almost I might be doing it still. Almost!
The sequence by which teaching English led to writing was quite natural. It was manifestly unfair to ask my pupils to do something I had not first done myself—like giving a cook a recipe for making bread instead of showing her with your own two hands. Presently I got so excited over my own recipes for writing before they were offered to my pupils that I began to question seriously which I really preferred, to teach other people to write or to write myself. I took a position that allowed me part time for my own writing, and so my indecision between the two courses got worse and worse year by year, until a watching friend rescued me. ‘When you are teaching,’ she asked, ‘are n’t you always wanting to stop and write?’
‘Yes.’
‘When you are writing, do you ever want to stop and teach?’
‘Never!’
Thus encouraged, I cut loose from the schoolroom and set out to be a free lance, but cannily, not until my earnings through writing had for three years equaled those through teaching. The road to a literary livelihood looked promising enough. But it was n’t. It never has been. In this, my first retrospect, I see that disappointment should be the key word for a trail forty years long. If, looking back, I made a chart of this path, it would show recurrent peaks of hope, followed by sinking spells. Somehow I would always bob up again, no matter what happened. ‘Next time!’ I would say to myself. ‘Next book! ’ And on I’d go.
III
Looking back, I perceive that the painful part of my course has not been failure, but half success. Almost invariably my books have gone to the first publisher to whom they were offered. Recurrent disappointment has been inevitable, because always I’ve expected the public to agree with the publisher. Sometimes I have flattered myself that the underlying cause is all that Greek that got into my system before I was twenty, and stayed there. If you’ve once been on fairly intimate terms with Sophocles, it’s mighty hard ever to brace yourself to write for the pulps. Or perhaps the reason is prenatal — my mother’s dream of a baby that should hitch its wagon to a star. Anyway I have never written a popular book, and as I attain the relentless insight of age I acknowledge at last that the real reason is that I did n’t know how! But none of this is said in sorrow. I am old enough now to realize not only what I have not had from my chosen profession but also what I have had. For forty years I have pursued the most alluring art ever permitted to the human spirit! Destitute I have been sometimes, though always shrewdly reserving the price of a ticket home, but in one luxury I have always indulged — I have always written the best I could. My best, obviously, has not been so very good, but I honestly think I’ve had my fun.
If disappointment has been the dominating emphasis of my career, I have to confess that at first it was certainly all my own fault. I failed because I had been born a bulldog, and I had to learn that to become a writer you have to be a great many other things in addition to being a bulldog. Perhaps the reaction from the necessary repressions of being a boardingschool teacher influenced my literary output at the start. At any rate, never before nor since has the more romantic side of my make-up asserted itself so violently. Little would anyone have dreamed that humor would ever become an element in my productions! I wrote story after story, allowing my fancy to race at will after tragedy wherever it could be found. I not only wrote such stories, but with bulldog persistence I sent them to editors for exactly two years by the clock. A manuscript paused in the village post office barely long enough to be stamped, then off I shipped it again. For exactly two years nobody accepted anything. My gentle ministerial father and my hobbledehoy brother, who brought the mail, were more sensitive than I. The envelopes were long and white and hard to conceal from the peering eyes of the parish.
Not because of family protests, however, did I suddenly desist, but because I met a wise lady who had herself once been a reader for the Atlantic. I wanted to write, did I? I did. Had it ever occurred to me to study a magazine before I bombarded it? I gazed at her in stupefaction, but she pressed her point. I’d study my market, would n’t I, before dumping a load of cabbages on the store steps of a hardware merchant? I went home and opened the first magazines handy, and examined them. Then I wrote again, and sent again. With my very first shots I brought down almost simultaneously the Atlantic and the Youth’s Companion. Afterwards, jumping from one to the other necessitated lightning changes in style that sometimes produced weird effects in my conversation, so that I have known my friends to call from room to room, ‘Come quick! Listen to her resting her English!’
Thus I became for some dozen or more years a writer of juvenile fiction and also a writer of essays, for the most part personal essays in which one is permitted to chuckle. The essays were more difficult to do than the stories, but more amusing for the author. I understood Rose Macaulay’s glee over essay writing as recently expressed in Personal Pleasures. Yet there was to come a time when for a dozen years I never even thought of writing a personal essay — nor a Youth’s Companion story, either, for that matter, but this for a different reason.
I wrote Youth’s Companion tales by the dozen. I don’t know what has become of them, for, as I said, it has always been very hard for me to look back at what I have written rather than forward to what I have not written. I might be producing juvenile stories still, but quite suddenly the Youth’s Companion up and died on me! With it there passed, I think, a whole era of American history. As one of the last contributors called in for consultation and assistance, I was actually present at the demise. A sprightly young novelist had been entrusted with resuscitation measures, but his brief editorship was drawing to an unavoidable close. He had spent months, he told me, traveling up and down rural districts, searching for surviving subscribers to the Youth’s Companion. Their names, he said, read like the list of inmates of an old ladies’ home. Youth, he had discovered, had long since ceased to associate with its Companion. Youth had changed its tastes considerably by the middle twenties of this century. At the first turn of its teens, youth now leaped at the many grown-up periodicals, which, in their turn, somewhat modified their contents to meet the need. (Have we ever heard that our average mentality is that of a thirteen-year-old?)
The decease of the Youth’s Companion left me with a heap of unavailable manuscripts on hand. The only places I could find to send them were the church-school magazines of the various denominations, and since I have found only one denomination able to pay as much as a cent a word for my juvenile stories, of necessity I have stopped writing them. As a matter of fact, I could live on a cent a word if only I could keep well and write fast enough — but I never can. The departure of our most worthy weekly left me not only with unused manuscripts, but with an unusable method of presentation. From my earliest contribution I had been cautioned to consider alike the small boy’s interest and his grandmother’s. I never wrote a story for the Companion without first envisaging a typical family circle grouped about the sturdy Rochester burner on the table, infant in arms, ten-year-olds, father, mother, grandparents, while someone read aloud my story, and every single one of them registered avid enjoyment!
Perhaps trying to hit so many bull’seyes at once is the reason I’ve never really taken to writing fiction; or perhaps it’s because I’ve observed so many people doing it and doing it so poorly. I continue to be one of the few people in the world who have never written a novel, but I’m beginning to weaken. In six decades I’ve watched so many souls that surely I could invent a few, and pull a little string inside me to set them jigging. Always that call to the next book! William De Morgan was older than I am — and Santayana.
For a few years I jogged along with the rest of the pleasant, unsuspecting world — mounting, witless step by step, the volcano. I wrote essays, mostly gay, and a few grown-up stories. One of them, I remember, landed in the Atlantic and another in Scribner’s, but I did little fiction. Somehow my stories were not sufficiently objective; they tended to get essayish in the middle. Then the volcano broke loose. At first we did n’t believe it, and for several years succeeded in living at least half our existence as if the war were n’t there. Then at last we did believe it, and entered it, but even then we thought it was a good war, the war to end war. Yes, even I. I have a book to prove it. Sometimes I read the first half of The New Death, for that part I still hold true, but never the second half, in which I pictured the beautiful new world to be built on the blood of young soldiers. The Atlantic printed the first half condensed into an article, but only the closing sentence of the second half.
The New Death was a direct result of Armageddon. It occurred to me that a most interesting study, of book length probably, could be made of the kind of autobiography the war was producing — the memoirs of young soldiers, their letters and comments from the front. For the most part, memoirs had always been written in the security of old age looking back. There was a pitiful wealth of this new type of autobiography being published just then. I studied the records left by the newly dead on every front, Italian, German, French, English, American. These belonged, of course, to the beginning of the conflict, when the young idealists were being slaughtered — poets and painters and musicians and inventors. I wanted to garner and preserve what they had to say, about everything. I found they all had one concern, and that was death. They all said the same things about death, almost in the same words sometimes. They all saw death as more beautiful than any of us had ever conceived, so when I came to write a book in which I should try to keep for us all some little of what the young men sacrificed were saying, I called the book The New Death.
IV
At that time I did not realize what had happened to my writing. Suddenly the real world had pushed in and possessed me. Little did I dream that never again was I to write a wholly light-hearted essay, or a romantic story. The contemporary had come crashing upon me with all its terrible questions: ‘Look at me! Think about me! What have you to say now?’ The immediate result was shell shock, although I never came nearer to the front than the mountains of North Carolina. There ensued a two-year breakdown of body, brain, and soul. The war did that to some of us who had lived half a lifetime believing war could never come again. Very slowly I came creeping back nearer to normal. Then like a bolt a book fell upon me, a book I must write, and at once. I had never before felt the writing impulse like that. I had chosen writing; writing had never before chosen me! From my first thought of it that book shook me as a mastiff might lift and shake a kitten. I have never felt so helpless, so choiceless! Why I, of all people — a book like that! While up to this time I had been more a believer than an agnostic, still I had not taken religion with overmuch intensity. Now I was possessed by a book of faith, which blazed and burned, shattering from head to footsole.
It had come upon me quite simply, too, at the start, before it changed into a thunderbolt. I was sitting by myself on a stone in a quiet pasture, ringed in the distance by blue mountains. A question pushed to the foreground: ‘What do you really think of all this thing called human life? What do you really believe about yourself, and other people, and God?’ There on that green and golden mountain morning I wrote the creed that was to become the last two pages of my first religious book, the very last type of book that I had ever expected to write. There is no better method, I believe, than to write the last paragraphs of a book first; but afterward it needed a whole year to present the slow-growing reasons that for me had led to the brief articles of my personal belief. Though the title has since been changed, I called the book Chaos and a Creed.
When at the start I went to my doctor for advice, he looked me over with all a surgeon’s keenness.
‘Will it hurt me to write this book?’ I asked.
‘It will hurt you very much more not to!’
Somehow I survived the year that followed, but when the book was finished I had n’t the courage to acknowledge its authorship, it was so different from anything any of my previous readers would have expected of me. Besides, that younger brother who had once begged me to give up those long white envelopes forever had developed into a clergyman, and now he besought me, ‘Don’t, oh, don’t ever write of religion, for no man will accept theology from a woman!’ Now I seriously question whether any woman has ever written of theology; but in writing about religion I protest that I’m following — with a long, long gap between us — Maude Royden, and E. Herman, and Evelyn Underhill. Still, I gave heed to my brother and decided to appear over a masculine pseudonym. Chaos and a Creed, by James Priceman, was entrusted to a friend as go-between and was promptly accepted by a leading New York publisher, without the author’s identity being known. Of course I had to tell the secret when I signed the contract. Also I kept up the deception only for a year or so.
The publishers at the beginning were enthusiastic. I believed them, too, and actually for a few ecstatic months felt that perhaps somehow I had been pitched into success. I wandered through mountain woods picturing the great changes that might come to my life with a real book being really read, and just a little good warm cash in my pocket. Of course none of it happened. It never does, but at that time I was n’t as inured to disappointment as I am now.
A pseudonym was a new experience, and had some unforeseen results. A critic gave Chaos and a Creed three columns in the Independent, and repeatedly called the author ‘virile’ and approved his ‘knight-errantry.’ Considering how hard I had fought for physical strength to write that book, it was rather nice to be called ‘virile.’ The book had been out only a few weeks when a letter in delicate handwriting trailed me all the way from New York to my mountain retreat. It read: —
DEAR MR. PRICEMAN,
Will you have luncheon with me next Sunday at one? I have read your book, Chaos and a Creed, and I should like to talk to you about it.
The letter was signed Robert Fulton Cutting. Just then I should not have been able to purchase shoes to put under a rich man’s table, much less the ticket to New York. Years later the invitation was repeated and I was near enough to accept. Looking back to my memories of that gentlest of gentlemen, I am still as much impressed as I was at first by his confidence in the craft to which I belong. Even if someone had written a poem sublime as Heaven, and I had been dizzy with admiration, still I’d never have invited any author to my home before I’d seen him!
V
For a few more misguided years I struggled on, trying to deal with a distant market. All my life I had been more afraid of living in New York than of any other form of existence. But there is always a thrill in rushing at the thing you are afraid of. The Southern mountains were too far from editors. I cut moorings, pulled up stakes, burned bridges, borrowed some money, and decided to live in New York as long as that money lasted. A new start at fifty-five I recommend as rejuvenating as long as you can hold the pace. Some of my old friends introduced me to new editors and publishers, and somehow I was able to hold on in the great city for some four years. I had to leave, though I had come to love it, not because I had exhausted New York, but because New York had exhausted me. However, I had remained long enough to reëstablish the United States mail as a dependable method of approach to my market.
There have come to be throughout the last twelve years four religious books over my signature, but something has happened to the last one that will prevent any more, I am afraid. The second of these I did when I first went to New York, and it had the immense advantages of being addressed to a magazine audience and of being criticized in advance by a magazine editor. Quite casually I had left some random notes with the editor of the Century. When I went back he gazed at me, kindled and kindling.
‘But don’t you realize what you have given me here?’
I did n’t.
‘This is a modern woman’s confession of faith, and I want it for my readers as fast as you can give it to me, in three articles of five thousand words each.’
Faced with necessity, I did the hardest job in concentrated expression that I’ve ever accomplished — all my faith made readable to the man in the street in fifteen thousand words! The three months’ serialization had the immense advantage that I could live on the proceeds of one chapter while I wrote the next. Also the three chapters, with one more added, had book publication speedily.
This second religious book was the occasion of an even greater disappointment than the first, but briefer, for peak of hope and depth of depression occurred within less than twenty hours. I freely acknowledge that nothing in all my writing life has ever made me so happy as when William Pierson Merrill chose my little book for one of his Sunday afternoon lectures. I sat flanked by two friends, and only their substantial presence prevented my floating right up to the vaulted rafters and on up through the roof. Dr. Merrill had had the whole service set to the spirit of my book — music, hymns, his own half-hour talk. The next morning I went flying to the publisher, still glowing from a night sleepless with joy. But there was no joy in my publisher. He looked at me in unrelieved despair; he said his agents were refusing even to offer the book any more.
‘But,’ I pleaded, ‘is there no way of letting the public know what Dr. Merrill has said of it?’
‘I do not know of any way,’ he said with finality.
With equal finality I walked out of that office, and never walked in again.
Then came my third book of religion. About this I have never stopped to ascertain whether or not I have been disappointed. The book was written — that is all that counts. For years I had wanted to write it, until in the end I was half crazed with the longing. One recognizes the symptoms of a book that demands inexorably to be born, and that tears you to pieces until you have secured the prospect of a year’s freedom to write it. I found at last a quiet spot, a room hung twenty-one stories above the East River. That room was a trifle larger than an English walnut, but it had a window big as all the world. In the light of that window I wrote at last the book which, longer suppressed, would have killed me. For years it had been pushing, all growing out of one sentence which had flashed upon me as embodying all I had come to think about the most mysteriously interesting man in human history. That sentence is, ‘For thirty years nobody dreamed that Jesus of Nazareth was divine.’ Looking back upon the road of forty years, I perceive that I have written only one book that satisfied me, and this because I did not seem to write it — it seemed to write itself.
Gazing back, I find myself tossed to one side or the other in my appraisal, just as I actually was in the climbing. Dollars and cents, do they matter? Yes, they do matter, grimly, for one must eat. But does n’t it matter equally, that hour last spring with Rufus Jones, or that other hour farther back, but still luminous, when Robert Norwood, whom I had never met, welcomed me to his study, that rich wainscoted haven in the heart of whirling New York? My astonished ears heard him saying, ’I have read everything you have ever written,’ and then, ‘I think that you and I behold the Galilean eye to eye.’
Since I have actually written the book I most wanted to write, I shall turn more gayly to new fields, from the field now closed to me. You see I really thought my fourth and last religious book might succeed, because, being frankly autobiographic, it could n’t escape being humorous in spots. I also hoped it stated clearly what has always been my sole motive in writing of that singularly unpopular subject, religion. I have never set out to convert, but only humbly to explain why I am what I am. But in writing of religion I have once again proved to myself my positive genius for unsuccess, for I manage to fall neatly between two stools. I feel precisely as some early Christians must have felt, those who did not spontaneously congregate in the catacombs, but had a large and delightful circle of friends among pagans. Suppose in that far-off ancient Rome somebody had found himself attracted by the Nazarene; he’d have wanted to explain to his amazed acquaintance. That’s the way I feel, but the rigid methods by which religious books are published relegate me instantly to certain prescribed book lists and book counters which no pagan ever looks at. Consequently I land with church people only, those who have always accepted the faith I am trying to explain and have never thought it needed any explaining.
I am gazing now at the close of my religious-book era. It came to an end when I received the first report of the sale of my last book. Now it took me ten months to write that book; there were seven months between its acceptance and its publication, and another ten months from publication to payment — making twenty-seven months in all before any returns. According to the statement received, these returns will be $178.80! In the face of these figures I must stop, for, though religious, I really am honest, and must endeavor to be self-supporting. So far I have had a most hospitable family, ready at any time to welcome home the aging prodigal who would persist in writing about religion. But I don’t think it quite square to push that hospitality further. I really think I could write a novel if I tried, and luckily there is a publisher who is asking that I try. Thus, after forty years, there is upon me once more the spell of the next book.