CHAPTER XXXIII

MARY E. WALLER

There are two actresses who are never interviewed--Alla Nazimova and Maude Adams. At least that was true some years ago; perhaps it is no longer true of Nazimova. But did you ever see an interview with Maude Adams? And yet, the interview is one of the most useful means of securing that publicity an actress must have. Exceptions establish the rule.

An author is not in precisely the same case with an actor, but personal publicity, of an entirely honorable and legitimate sort, has served most authors well. The truth is, the public has a certain right in the personality of any one undertaking to serve or entertain the public; in the words of statutes, a writer, like an actor, is, to a degree, “charged with a public interest” and the day may come when writers, like traction officials, will be subject to public inquiry. Perhaps Public Service Commissions will regulate them....

Until that day we may never know anything about the personality of Mary E. Waller, about the woman behind _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_. For, in the words of her publishers, “Miss Waller is singularly averse to publicity. She has never permitted her portrait to be published.” As for biographical data, meager is the word. Let us see just how scanty it is.

We know that she was born in Boston and that she traveled and studied abroad, taught in a private school in New York and later established and maintained for five years a school for girls in Chicago. We know that her family, for four generations, has been identified with the history of Vermont, and that for many years, until she moved to her present home on the island of Nantucket, Miss Waller spent the greater part of her time with her mother in the Vermont hills.

That is all any one has so far been authorized to say of the period before Miss Waller’s success as an author.

In 1902 there was published in Boston a book called _Little Citizens_, a story of New York street gamins. The following year saw the publication of a story of family life in the Green Mountains. Of this second book by Miss Waller, Margaret E. Sangster said, five years later (June 19, 1907) in the _Christian Herald_:

“I read the other day the most suggestive book that has appeared since Miss Alcott published _Little Women_. The title of the book, _A Daughter of the Rich_, by M. E. Waller, fails to convey an idea of the striking qualities of a most fascinating story. The scenes and background of the story are in a mountain fastness of New Hampshire, in a home where parents of culture and piety, encumbered by poverty, are successfully bringing up a household of delightful boys and girls. A city physician persuades the father of an only daughter to send his delicate darling out of the enervating atmosphere of a millionaire’s home that is motherless, into the sweetness and mother-brooding environment of the home on the mountainside. The little girl is introduced to strangers, who at once become her friends, and in the novel situation, without a single luxury, but in much homely comfort, she gains the health and strength that wealth could not give her.

“I have it in my heart to wish that this book might have the vogue that _Little Women_ had. The simple, beautiful story is worth a thousand sermons and treatises on the best way of rearing and training a family.”

The _Christian Herald_ enters many homes and Margaret E. Sangster was read by many thousands. There is no way of measuring the direct and indirect influence of such praise as she uttered. It is very great. But this was in 1907. The year following the appearance of _A daughter of the Rich_, Miss Waller’s third book, _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_, came along.

Books have curious fates. Gene Stratton-Porter’s _Freckles_ took three years to find its audience. A fine novel by St. John G. Ervine, _Changing Winds_, was published, had the expected sale and died; remained dead for about a year and then suddenly began selling again! In the case of a textbook such a phenomenon can always be traced to some simple explanation. For example, W. J. Henderson wrote a condensed treatise called _Elements of Navigation_ which sold desultorily for years, the sales slowly declining. Came the Great War. The United States undertook to create a merchant marine. Thousands of men had to be trained to navigate merchant ships. Mr. Henderson’s book sold like hot cakes, was reprinted; was revised and pretty well rewritten; sold faster than fiction!

In the case of a novel a “resurrection” is seldom quite explicable. It is matter for conjecture what “brought back” _Changing Winds_. Now _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_ was not a book that rose from the dead, but a book that almost never lived; that is to say, it was six months before it achieved popular success. Once “alive” it has ever since remained so. Seven years after publication the _twenty-eighth_ edition was published. It is unnecessary to say more.

The catalogue of the American Library Association, a conscientious publication if ever there was one, describes this book concisely: “Scene in the Green Mountains. An ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood finds interests in the outside world through a chance acquaintance and becomes a wood-carver of renown.” There you are; see what conscientiousness can accomplish! All the charm, all the wistfulness, all the magic of hope and aspiration, and the triumph of achievement, which make this novel the beloved tale it is--stripped away! “An ambitious farmer crippled in early manhood....” The librarians are not to blame, either. It is their business to outline concisely.... Whereas fiction is no matter of outlines but, like life, a thing of coloring, perspective, the glint of an eye, the shadowed corner of a smiling mouth. Fiction cannot be done in black and white; those who, under the label of “realism,” essay the task, invariably fail.

But we were to enumerate what is known of Miss Waller. Well, in 1913, after she had been besieged for nine years for her picture, a visitor to Nantucket, whither the author had gone to live, did succeed in seeing her and talking with her. He did not get a photograph of her (in the fall of 1912 a photographer went expressly to Nantucket and lay long in wait for a snapshot, coming away without a single exposure). But at least the visitor did see and converse with Miss Waller. How came this miracle about?

There had never been a hospital on Nantucket, in spite of the shipwrecks and succorings of two centuries. Certain residents decided it was time one was built. A board of trustees was formed and a house purchased. Money for maintenance was needed. So they built an enormous thermometer on the main street, under overarching elms. When the visitor came to trail Miss Waller he found the temperature about $6,800, which included royalties from one of Miss Waller’s books.

The hospital cottage was not new--but very solid. The visitor reflected that amid all this white paneling of the eighteenth century and mission oak of the nineteenth, other visitors would doubtless soon be drinking tea and paying the cost of absorbent cotton and iron bedsteads. Meanwhile he was sufficiently grateful to be allowed to visit another house and find himself seated opposite Miss Waller. She occupied a chintz-covered chair halfway between a flashing grate fire and a row of windows. Mahogany and the implements of authorship were all about. The mahogany was exceptionally fine. Through the windows, marine views and glimpses of moorland--or what they’d call moorland in an English novel. Talk. About the hospital. Nothing about Miss Waller. Nothing about her work. Nothing about her plans. Yes, she lived on Nantucket the year round. Illness in the family kept her closely at home.... Beyond question, there _is_ a Mary E. Waller. She is not mythical. Though she may some day be a cause of controversy. Let it therefore be set down that Shakespeare, not Bacon, wrote _Hamlet_; Mary E. Waller, not Clara Louise Burnham, wrote _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_.

And that is all. No more exists. We may say a word or two about Miss Waller’s books since her big success. It will have to be inadequate and sketchy. _A Daughter of the Rich_ is technically described as “for girls of 10 and upward.” _Sanna of the Island Town_ is a series of pen pictures of incidents in the ordinary life of an island village--Nantucket is the original. _Through the Gates of the Netherlands_ is the “pleasant narrative of the six months’ experience in Holland of an American architect and his wife who saw the country, its art and its people intimately and intelligently.” We quote again from the American Library Association’s catalogue. In epitomizing this sort of volume (travel-educational-gift book) see how excellent the outline method is!

Edwin Markham liked _Our Benny_, saying: “It is fluent and simple and full of a homely pathos and humor, and it takes a place next below _Snowbound_ and _Myles Standish_.” Caution! _Our Benny_ is a narrative poem; there are those who can’t endure verse. They may pass on to _Flamsted Quarries_. This opens in New York City. A fatherly priest sees a child on the vaudeville stage and takes her to an asylum for homeless children. Later we find them in a small Maine village, a quarry town. There is an embezzler in the story and the theme is the power of a simple environment, good, hard work and honest love to make men and women whole.

_My Ragpicker_ is about Nanette, an appealing little child of poverty in Paris. _A Cry in the Wilderness_ has American and Canadian characters and its scenes are laid mainly in New York and in a seigneury on the St. Lawrence--Miss Waller’s first invasion of Canada. _Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart_ was published by Miss Waller herself, in 1913; doubtless it was an enterprise in behalf of that hospital which she thrust between herself and her visitor. _From an Island Outpost_ is a meditative book--thoughts that came to Miss Waller as she wrote from her own island outpost on Nantucket. _Out of the Silences_ is a return to Canada and a novel of the Great War. The setting is just over the border from Dakota. The central character, Bob Collamore, an American boy, is left as a youngster of nine in charge of William Plunket, a saddle-maker, quaintly philosophical, broad-minded, sympathetic, with a considerable knowledge of the human heart. The boy Bob grows up with Plunket’s stepson, McGillie, and the children of the Cree Indian tribe. He gets a good deal of the red man’s knowledge. As he matures the white man’s ambition to get out in the world and match his wits against his fellows seizes him. He goes forth confidently, to find that his youthful years have fixed indelibly his ideals, his philosophy and his outlook on life. Love, romance and success come to him--and death. For the war calls to his manhood and takes him to France.

An intermediate book may be briefly mentioned. _A Year Out of Life_ is only partly a work of fiction; in part it records Miss Waller’s impressions of German life--long before the war, of course, for it was published in 1909.

BOOKS BY MARY E. WALLER

_Little Citizens_, 1902. _A Daughter of the Rich_, 1903. _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_, 1904. _Sanna of the Island Town_, 1905. _Through the Gates of the Netherlands_, 1906. _A Year Out of Life_, 1909. _Our Benny_, 1909. _Flamsted Quarries_, 1910. _My Ragpicker_, 1911. _A Cry in the Wilderness_, 1912. _Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart_, 1913. _From an Island Outpost_, 1914. _Out of the Silences_, 1918.

_Little Citizens was published by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, Boston; Aunt Dorcas’s Change of Heart was published by Miss Waller; all Miss Waller’s other books are published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston._