Hildegarde Hawthorne

Mrs. John Oskison (Hildegarde Hawthorne) is a daughter of Julian, a granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She is a brisk woman, with a deep throaty quick laugh and snapping eyes. She knows personally most of the successful writers of America and regards them with friendly if somewhat seeing eyes. She seems to be a woman without poses and with few prejudices. She has been a book reviewer for many years, and she has published volumes of travel and occasional essays. She is conservative in her estimates of books; but she has long watched the psychology of the reading public and she understands it about as well as any human being can. Her clever analysis of Harold Bell Wright’s place among American writers is proof of this. She carries on the New England tradition without wearing it hung from her bosom by a chain. A woman worth knowing, she is, whose judgment on what’s good to read is not to be neglected.

THE WRIGHT AMERICAN

In the canteen I ran in France there was a bookshelf containing some twenty or thirty volumes, a haphazard collection made up of the leavings of units passing through, of a small boxful obtained with difficulty from Y headquarters, and of occasional wandering volumes arriving from across the seas. The boys patronized the shelf eagerly enough, and most of the time it was almost empty, volumes of religious advice being the sole survivors of the demands made upon it. But though practically everything in the nature of a novel or story went well, I soon came to know that ten out of a dozen of the boys who asked for a book would say first:

“Got anything by Harold Bell Wright?”

If I had, they took it. If I had not, they took anything else. It was Harold Bell Wright against the field, with Wright winning every time. There were only four of his books in my library, and they were on the go unceasingly.

Now, I had never read one of them. Neither had anyone I knew—knew, at least, in that old life which seemed so far away and long ago during the war. Practically everyone in that literary past had told me how bad they were, how fearful was the English in which they were written, how false, vapid, and sentimental were their contents. And I wondered at the passionate longing for the things displayed by the American doughboy in his thousands. And not only the doughboy—the officers, when they dropped in to see if there was something to read, usually made the same request.

“They may be darned good fighters”, was my thought, “but they certainly have a mighty poor taste in literature.”

There, of course, was where I made my mistake. They had no taste at all for literature. Literature was not what they were after. They were not even seeking a just estimate of human nature or of life. Probably none of them had so much as a streak of the artist in him, and to appreciate literature there must be a trace of that creature in your makeup. As to their fellow men and life as they met it, they doubtless sized up both in a manner satisfactory to themselves. What they wanted when they read—well, was what they found in Harold Bell Wright.

What did they find, what are they finding, in his work?

One morning I asked one of the boys, a lad from a small town in Pennsylvania who had brought back the last of the four, having read the rest one after the other, why he liked Harold Bell Wright so much. He was not used to expressing his critical convictions, but finally he came out with:

“I don’t know as it’s the story so much, but you see, he kind of gets at what I’ve tried to think about, and writes it so’s I can get hold of it. And he sure does know a lot of nice American girls!”

At the time I thought no more of the problem of Harold Bell Wright and his vast public. There were other matters to be attended to.

Yet there is something interesting here. Something it seems worth while to pursue. The war is long over, the doughboys scattered. But all over America Wright’s latest book is being read by hundreds of thousands of copies. Remembering my experience as a librarian in a Y hut in France, I feel sure that a large proportion of this public is young men—young men who don’t care very much about reading any other books.

Wondering on the subject, I read this latest book myself. It was the first one of Wright’s books that I had read, and judgment on an author should not be passed on the authority of a single volume. But I am not seeking to pass judgment; what I want to do is to get an explanation. I think this one book will suffice for that. The book is not a book for me. It doesn’t hold what I seek in a book. But it is not addressed to me. It is, however, addressed to America; and America takes it to her heart with enthusiasm.

In reading the story I found that the criticisms passed on Wright by people who had never read him were inaccurate. The English he uses is good English. Good, clear, strong English, with no taint of fine writing. Nor was the book false or vapid, though it did not escape sentimentality. But the sentimentality had nothing of the gross or maudlin. It reminded me of the sentimentality I have met in small town people who have had no wide contacts with life, and who accept face values as realities—a mother is to them something inherently noble and selfless, for instance, and even the fact that they have personally known bad and selfish mothers will not modify this preconceived stand. Such persons are shrewd and alert enough in the affairs of daily life, but they have a certain number of rubber stamps passing as beliefs, and become beliefs for them. There is a great deal of this sort of sentimentality in America, and possibly elsewhere.

It is not this that makes Mr. Wright so popular in his country, however. There are plenty of books written that are ten times as sentimental as his, and which have no vogue at all; books that tell more thrilling stories than he tells, too. For it is not the story they tell that makes them to be demanded. These matters help, but are not it. No. As I read, I remembered what the Pennsylvania boy had said. He had found thoughts which he had tried to put into words himself, tried to get clear in his mind, doubtless, expressed by his author, expressed so that they became his own, expressed as he would like to have expressed them himself.

The average American is not a thinker. He does not reflect upon life. Books that are written for those who do think, who do reflect, plays that are produced for such, do not interest him. They are not in his field. Now, Wright is not a literary man. He does not wish to be one. But he does reflect upon life, upon the obvious life with which the public comes into contact. It is not individual experience he seeks to express, it is not the growth of character in conflict with life as it is found in this or that man or woman. Mr. Wright is a preacher. What he wants to do, and does do, is to expound basic problems of right and wrong in a manner that will reach the greatest possible number of persons. He works toward this with the utmost sincerity and in the clutch of an immense conviction. He has a theme to teach. And he believes to a passionate degree in America and the American, believes that if only certain things can be set right, then our ship of state, our nation, will make the port of the millennium or something almost as good. There is a moving quality in a belief like this, a beauty; it is certainly one of the causes of Mr. Wright’s tremendous popularity.

Let there be no mistake as to Mr. Wright’s quality as a workman. There is nothing ill considered or sloppy in his methods. When he has finished a book he has put into it the best work of which he is capable, and taken an infinite amount of pains. He gets his basic theme first, as clear as possible in his mind, and hangs on to this until it begins to call for exploitation. Thereupon he sets to work at his foundations, making a pattern of his idea, with its darks and lights, its good and bad, its conflict and outcome. He chooses a symbol that shall express the main thought of the book. In “Helen of the Old House”, for instance, he wished to make clear that coöperation between the men who work and the men who think is necessary in this world. So he has for his leading character a man who is a helpless cripple but who is wise, full of love and justice. Associated with this man is his friend and servant, a creature strong physically, but mentally weak and undeveloped. Between them they work out a satisfactory existence, and influence the entire book. In this way Mr. Wright plans out his sermon, presents his lesson. His characters are chosen to exploit his theme and he selects them, not for their human value, but for their value in putting into story form the theme in his mind. Last, he proceeds to write his book in a manner that will appeal to the largest possible public. He wants the shopgirl and the clerk, the factory hand and the traction man, the cowboy and the village postmistress to read it, and he writes it in the way he believes they will like best—he writes it to meet the popular taste.

You may say that this is not the way of an artist. To this Mr. Wright retorts that a man who succeeds in his aim, who puts his idea into a form that will appeal to the public for whom he writes, even though that public is numbered by the millions, is still an artist. He is attacking problems that beset his readers, putting them into words that they have not for themselves, thinking for them the thoughts they want to but do not know how to think. He is a preacher of democracy speaking to a public obsessed by bread and butter problems because it has to be, and trying to show the best road to the solution of the difficulties of these problems; he is speaking to a public that prefers types to individuals, and that wants in a book the kind of story that it wishes for itself. If this writer is criticized by another public for not proceeding in a manner which would alienate this special, this large audience, the criticism is based on a misconception of the entire affair.

Wright’s solutions are sane, sound, and kindly. The guidance he offers is safe. He has horse sense and his appeal is to horse sense, perhaps slightly sublimated. If the young American is reading him, he is reading what will help to clarify and steady himself. Also, it is to be remembered that many of those who read him are not readers at all, in the broad sense. If he did not write they would read nothing. But reading him, they begin to form the habit of reading, and in time they will take another book than his when one of his is not to be had. In fact, he is training readers in a nation which, in spite of our multiplicity of papers and magazines, is emphatically not a nation of readers.

He is making thinkers too. Don’t be too ready to laugh at that. He may not make you think, but you are a mere fraction of America. If you want to know America in the bulk read one of Wright’s books, and try to get back of it to the men and women who ask for him in their millions, who want him because he expresses what they need to have expressed. Wright understands them, and he may help you to understand them. They have nothing to do with literature and its standards, but they have a whole lot to do with America and her standards. Wright’s creative energy is directed toward them, and the book he writes is a mere instrument to his end, shaped to fit it to its use. That is why he is so popular: not because he cannot give a literary public what it cries for, but because he can give his own public what it really needs.