Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels - Grant M. Overton - Страница 16

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“MRS. NORRIS,” explains William Dean Howells, “puts the problem, or the fact, or the trait before you by quick, vivid touches of portraiture or action. If she lacks the final touch of Frank Norris’s power, she has the compensating gift of a more controlled and concentrated observation. She has the secret of closely adding detail to detail in a triumph of what another California author has called Littleism, but what seems to be nature’s way of achieving Largeism.”

Of course, this is the method of Kathleen Norris, the method in her madness, to use the word madness in its old sense of being possessed by something. What is Mrs. Norris possessed by? Why, the irresistible impulse to put things before you and make you consider whether they should be so. H’m, a preacher might do that. Well, had most preachers the presentative skill of Kathleen Norris there would be ticket speculators on the sidewalks in front of their tabernacles!

If you want to make people think write a novel—but be sure you know how! Mrs. Norris does. Why, is easily answered. She was not a newspaper reporter for nothing. Newspaper training does inculcate “a taste exact for faultless fact” that “amounts to a disease,” quite as the lilting lines in The Mikado have it. The fiction of Kathleen Norris is distinguished by several unusual qualities, all due, in the present writer’s opinion, to newspaper training operating upon a gifted and observant mind:

As in a good piece of reporting, a single important idea or fact or problem is at the bottom of each of her novels.

Each story is first of all a story, the crisp, penetrative account of certain persons and events.

Mrs. Norris never appears to have taken her fact or idea or problem and said, “I will build a tale about this.” She seems always to be describing actual people and actual occurrences. This seeming may be deceptive. It may be that she goes about it the other way, proceeding from her idea to her people and incidents. If she does, the trail is covered perfectly. For the reader gets the sensation first of persons and “doings” and then, later, of problems arising from their relations to each other; which is the precise and invariable effect life itself always gives us. We do not think of the problem of divorce first and of our neighbors, John Doe and Cora Doe, afterward; we see Cora Doe going past the house and recall when John Doe was last in town and then, and not until then, do we think of the tragedy of their lives and the dreadful question mark coiled in the center of it.

In other words, life assimilates all its great facts and problems and the novelist who would set them forth effectively must first have assimilated them too, so that they will not have to be “brought in” the story he is telling, but will be in it from the beginning, disclosing themselves as the action develops. The reader must feel that he has discovered the fact or the problem for himself, that he, all by himself, has abstracted it out of the scenes put before him. He must see Cora Doe go by and hear of John Doe’s last appearance and look upon the wreck of their lives—but all the rest must be left to him to grasp unaided! The real reason why no story can have a moral is that every reader must find his own moral, even if each finds the same one!

Mrs. Norris understands this and practices it. She does not ask you to consider whether a girl, bred in sordid surroundings and having access in youth only to tawdry ideals, can lift herself to gentleness and dignity and become, at any cost, the captain of her soul. No! She makes you acquainted with Julia Page. She refrains from questioning the efficacy of divorce and writes The Heart of Rachael, which makes every reader ask himself the question. If her readers unite in an identical answer and that answer is the one Mrs. Norris herself would return, does that convict her of stepping outside the novelist’s province? Bless you, no; the novelist’s province is as large as life is, and its boundaries in the case of any given writer as far as he can carry and maintain them. Mrs. Norris’ s frontiers are wide.

The woman first. An interesting article in the Book News Monthly several years ago posited that “Kathleen Norris upsets all our accepted ideas of how a novelist is made.... With the exception of five months spent in taking a literary course at the University of California, Mrs. Norris never had any schooling, and, until five years ago (1908), she never had been outside her native State.... No thrilling adventures, no prairie life, or mountaineering, no experiences of travel, or residence in Paris or Berlin, have been hers.” The impression of wonder which this may create will be somewhat modified by the sketch of her life which follows, and for which we are chiefly indebted to the same article.

Kathleen Norris was the daughter of James A. Thompson, of San Francisco. The father was a San Franciscan of long residence and twice served as president of the famous Bohemian Club. At the time of his death he was manager of the Donohoe-Kelly Bank. Kathleen was the second child in a family of six—three boys and three girls. Mr. Thompson would not send his children to school and they were taught at home, with an occasional governess for language study. In 1899 the family moved to Mill Valley across San Francisco Bay, and “Treehaven,” a bungalow in the beautiful valley at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, became the home. A quieter life can hardly be imagined. There weren’t many neighbors, the children did not go to school, most of the visitors were grown people, there were no children’s parties. Kathleen Norris never saw the inside of a theater until she was sixteen, which will astonish readers of The Story of Julia Page. There was, however, a large library, there were plenty of magazines, there were miles of forest as a playground, there were horses, cows, dogs, cats, a garden. Mountains were there to be climbed and creeks to be waded. “The boys as well as the girls of the family all became practical cooks.”

Kathleen was the oldest girl. At nineteen she was to “come out” in San Francisco. A house had been taken in the city for the winter. Gowns had been ordered and “the cotillions joined” when Mrs. Thompson was stricken with pneumonia and died. Her husband died, broken-hearted, in less than a month afterward. Misfortunes culminating just after the father’s death left the six children “destitute, with the exception of the family home in Mill Valley, too large and too far from the city to be a negotiable asset.”

The children had never known what it was to want money. They behaved bravely. The oldest boy already had a small job. Kathleen got work at once with a hardware house at $30 a month. Her 15-year-old sister took three pupils “whose fees barely paid for her commutation ticket and carfares. The total of the little family’s income was about $80 a month. Their one terror—never realized—was of debt.”

Kathleen and her sister came home from the day’s work to get the dinner, make beds, wash dishes and scrub the kitchen floor at midnight. Kathleen, who had been a favorite story-teller all her life, began to wonder if she could not make money by writing. Her tales as a child had generally been illustrated with little pen drawings of girls with pigtails, girls in checkered aprons, girls in fancy dress, “and occasionally with more tragic pictures, such as widows and bereaved mothers mourning beside their departed.... There is a scrapbook in the family in which are pasted more than 1,000 of these sketches.” Now she was not thinking of illustrating stories, her own or others’, but of making needed money. In the fall of 1903 she had attempted to take a year’s course in the English department of the University of California and had had to give it up because the family needed her. In 1904, at the age of twenty-three, she made her first successful effort. The San Francisco Argonaut paid her $15.50 for a story called The Colonel and the Lady. Mrs. Norris was then librarian in the Mechanics’ Library and had more time to try writing. Such success as she had was not very encouraging. She left the library to go into settlement work, and for several months strove “to reanimate an already defunct settlement house.” She got her feet on the right path at last by becoming society editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. A few months later she became a reporter for the San Francisco Call, where she worked for two years.

“Mrs. Norris doesn’t know whether the newspaper experience helped or hindered her in her literary work.” There need be no uncertainty, we should think, when, as we are told in the next breath, “during these years she saw many phases of life that must have enlarged her vision and made her more catholic in her views.” She learned to write with speed. “During the visit of the Atlantic fleet to Pacific waters, in 1908, there was one day in which 8,000 words were Mrs. Norris’s contribution to the paper.” This may explain why she is one of the most prolific of American novelists. Long before Josselyn’s Wife could be brought out in the fall of 1918, Sisters had begun to be published serially.

In April, 1909, Kathleen Thompson was married to Charles Gilman Norris, younger brother of Frank Norris, the author of McTeague and The Pit. Charles Norris, now Capt. Charles Norris, U. S. A., is himself a novelist, the author of The Amateur and Salt: The Education of Griffith Adams. Captain and Mrs. Norris, whose home is at Port Washington, Long Island, New York, have a son named after his distinguished uncle, Frank Norris.

Marriage, a home in New York City, and the first leisure since her father’s death; a literary atmosphere (her husband was in magazine editorial work), and the happiness of being in the city she had for years longed to know-these are the circumstances which reawakened Mrs. Norris’s ambition to write. She essayed again without encouragement from editors except the editor at the breakfast table. Her newspaper training now seemed to handicap her, “her fiction lacked the simplicity and the appeal that have since endeared it to so many readers.” For months she got nothing but rejections. Finally this note popped out of the mail: