<div><span class='pageno' title='355' id='Page_355'></span><h1>XXI</h1></div>
<p class='pindent'>They had had tea in the farm sitting room and
Dallas had made a little moaning over the
beauty of the Dutch lustre set. Selina had
entertained them with the shining air of one who is
robed in silk and fine linen. She and General Goguet
had got on famously from the start, meeting on the
common ground of asparagus culture.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“But how thick?” he had demanded, for he, too,
had his pet asparagus beds on the farm in Brittany.
“How thick at the base?”</p>
<p class='pindent'>Selina made a circle with thumb and forefinger.
The General groaned with envy and despair. He was
very comfortable, the General. He partook largely
of tea and cakes. He flattered Selina with his eyes.
She actually dimpled, flushed, laughed like a girl. But
it was to Roelf she turned; it was on Roelf that her
eyes dwelt and rested. It was with him she walked
when she was silent and the others talked. It was as
though he were her one son, and had come home.
Her face was radiant, beautiful.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Seated next to Dirk, Dallas said, in a low voice:
“There, that’s what I mean. That’s what I mean
when I say I want to do portraits. Not portraits of
ladies with a string of pearls and one lily hand half
hidden in the folds of a satin skirt. I mean character
portraits of men and women who are really distinguished
looking—distinguishedly American, for example—like
your mother.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>Dirk looked up at her quickly, half smiling, as
though expecting to find her smiling, too. But she
was not smiling. “My mother!”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Yes, if she’d let me. With that fine splendid face
all lit up with the light that comes from inside; and
the jaw-line like that of the women who came over in
the <span class='it'>Mayflower</span>; or crossed the continent in a covered
wagon; and her eyes! And that battered funny gorgeous
bum old hat and the white shirtwaist—and her
hands! She’s beautiful. She’d make me famous at
one leap. You’d see!”</p>
<p class='pindent'>Dirk stared at her. It was as though he could not
comprehend. Then he turned in his chair to stare at
his mother. Selina was talking to Roelf.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“And you’ve done all the famous men of Europe,
haven’t you, Roelf! To think of it! You’ve seen the
world, and you’ve got it in your hand. Little Roelf
Pool. And you did it all alone. In spite of everything.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>Roelf leaned toward her. He put his hand over
her rough one. “Cabbages are beautiful,” he said.
Then they both laughed as at some exquisite joke.
Then, seriously: “What a fine life you’ve had, too,
Selina. A full life, and a rich one and successful.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“I!” exclaimed Selina. “Why, Roelf, I’ve been
here all these years, just where you left me when you
were a boy. I think the very hat and dress I’m wearing
might be the same I wore then. I’ve been nowhere,
done nothing, seen nothing. When I think of
all the places I was going to see! All the things I
was going to do!”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“You’ve been everywhere in the world,” said Roelf.
“You’ve seen all the places of great beauty and light.
You remember you told me that your father had once
said, when you were a little girl, that there were only
two kinds of people who really mattered in the world.
One kind was wheat and the other kind emeralds.
You’re wheat, Selina.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“And you’re emerald,” said Selina, quickly.</p>
<p class='pindent'>The General was interested but uncomprehending.
He glanced now at the watch on his wrist and gave a
little exclamation. “But the dinner! Our hostess,
Madame Storm! It is very fine to run away but one
must come back. Our so beautiful hostess.” He had
sprung to his feet.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“She is beautiful, isn’t she?” said Selina.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“No,” Roelf replied, abruptly. “The mouth is
smaller than the eyes. With Mrs. Storm from here
to here”—he illustrated by turning to Dallas,
touching her lips, her eyes, lightly with his slender
powerful brown fingers—“is smaller than from here
to here. When the mouth is smaller than the eyes
there is no real beauty. Now Dallas here——”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Yes, me,” scoffed Dallas, all agrin. “There’s a
grand mouth for you. If a large mouth is your notion
of beauty then I must look like Helen of Troy to
you, Roelf.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“You do,” said Roelf, simply.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Inside Dirk something was saying, over and over,
“You’re nothing but a rubber stamp, Dirk DeJong.
You’re nothing but a rubber stamp.” Over and over.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“These dinners!” exclaimed the General. “I do
not wish to seem ungracious, but these dinners! Much
rather would I remain here on this quiet and beautiful
farm.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>At the porch steps he turned, brought his heels together
with a sharp smack, bent from the waist, picked
up Selina’s rough work-worn hand and kissed it. And
then, as she smiled a little, uncertainly, her left hand
at her breast, her cheeks pink, Roelf, too, kissed her
hand tenderly.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Why,” said Selina, and laughed a soft tremulous
little laugh, “Why, I’ve never had my hand kissed before.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>She stood on the porch steps and waved at them
as they were whirled swiftly away, the four of them.
A slight straight little figure in the plain white blouse
and the skirt spattered with the soil of the farm.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“You’ll come out again?” she had said to Dallas.
And Dallas had said yes, but that she was leaving soon
for Paris, to study and work.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“When I come back you’ll let me do your portrait?”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“<span class='it'>My</span> portrait!” Selina had exclaimed, wonderingly.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Now as the four were whirled back to Chicago over
the asphalted Halsted road they were relaxed, a little
tired. They yielded to the narcotic of spring that
was in the air.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Roelf Pool took off his hat. In the cruel spring
sunshine you saw that the black hair was sprinkled with
gray. “On days like this I refuse to believe that I’m
forty-five. Dallas, tell me I’m not forty-five.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“You’re not forty-five,” said Dallas in her leisurely
caressing voice.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Roelf’s lean brown hand reached over frankly and
clasped her strong white one. “When you say it like
that, Dallas, it sounds true.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“It is true,” said Dallas.</p>
<p class='pindent'>They dropped Dallas first at the shabby old Ontario
Street studio, then Dirk at his smart little apartment,
and went on.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Dirk turned his key in the lock. Saki, the Japanese
houseman, slid silently into the hall making little hissing
noises of greeting. On the correct little console
in the hall there was a correct little pile of letters and
invitations. He went through the Italian living room
and into his bedroom. The Jap followed him. Dirk’s
correct evening clothes (made by Peel the English
tailor on Michigan Boulevard) were laid correctly on
his bed—trousers, vest, shirt, coat; fine, immaculate.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Messages, Saki?”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Missy Stlom telephone.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Oh. Leave any message?”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“No. Say s’e call ’gain.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>“All right, Saki.” He waved him away and out of
the room. The man went and closed the door softly
behind him as a correct Jap servant should. Dirk took
off his coat, his vest, threw them on a chair near the
bed. He stood at the bedside looking down at his
Peel evening clothes, at the glossy shirtfront that
never bulged. A bath, he thought, dully, automatically.
Then, quite suddenly, he flung himself on the
fine silk-covered bed, face down, and lay there, his
head in his arms, very still. He was lying there half
an hour later when he heard the telephone’s shrill insistence
and Saki’s gentle deferential rap at the bedroom
door.</p>
<div class='lgc' style='margin-top:3em;'> <!-- rend=';small;' -->
<p class='line' style='font-size:small;'>THE END</p>
</div> <!-- end rend -->
<div><span class='pageno' title='361' id='Page_361'></span><h1>EDNA FERBER<br/> <span class='sub-head'><span class='sc'>By Rogers Dickinson</span></span></h1></div>
<p class='pindent'>Edna Ferber is an arresting personality. In speech, in
appearance, and in manner she stands out clear against the
mass.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Anyone who really knows her realizes why her stories, both
long and short, reach the understanding and touch the hearts
of the readers. One is very likely to say, “Why, I know somebody
like that,” or “I knew she would do that.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>She knows folks, all sorts of people, but she is interested
chiefly in people who do things: not the men who run great
corporations and control the destinies of thousands of men and
women, but the men and women who have jobs, and under that
classification come that vast number who run modest households,
who struggle to bring up children, who, in fact, form the
permanent solid stratum on which our society is built.</p>
<p class='pindent'>She has the large-minded sympathy that makes for understanding
of the under dog. She will take French lessons, not
only because she wants to study the language, but because a
cultivated Frenchman needs money and will not accept charity.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Edna Ferber enjoys a talk with a washwoman and the
woman enjoys the talk too. Her colored maid adores her—and
imposes on her (as is the way with colored maids).</p>
<p class='pindent'>She hates pretension and is very likely to speak her mind not
only to her intimates but straight to the face of the objectionable
person. Sometimes she speaks more strongly than she
should, for she is impulsive and quick-tempered, but no one is
more generous than she in the acknowledgment of mistakes.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Her letters are characteristic. They just begin. No salutation,
no sparring for an opening—they begin at the beginning
and when she is through she stops. She just adds her initials.</p>
<p class='pindent'>She stands on her own small feet. If you say to her, “The
mantle of O. Henry has fallen on your shoulders” (it has been
said with complimentary intent), you will get a flash from her
black eyes that will scorch you and a rush of words that will
make you wish you were elsewhere. She does not want anyone’s
else mantle or footgear for that matter—she is herself,
Edna Ferber.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Her earlier picturesque, sometimes flippant style, the surprise
climaxes, and the short pithy sentences, come from her
newspaper experience and not from any influence of O. Henry.
The newspaper editor’s command is to “tell the story and
make it snappy,” and it has affected Edna Ferber’s style, as it
has affected the work of many other writers who grew out of
newspaper offices.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Her style has changed as all thoughtful readers must have
noticed. The literary form of the Emma McChesney stories
is quite different from that of the stories in “Cheerful by Request”
and “Gigolo.” Read a story in “Roast Beef Medium”
and then read “Old Man Minick.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>There is a depth and richness, a dignity and soundness, that
the earlier works lacked. Yet there is no loss of strength and
vital freshness in her later books.</p>
<p class='pindent'>There is a vitality about Edna Ferber that is recognizable
the moment she comes into a room. She enters almost with a
rush, with a quick, firm step; though she is short, scarcely more
than five feet three, I should think, she dominates most groups.
Her rather large head with its thick black hair, cropped so one
may see the admirable shape of the skull, is held erect. She
greets one with a cordiality that is sometimes disarming and she
speaks with a curious drawl that seems quite out of character
with her forthright nature. What she says is worth listening
to, for even the most commonplace occasions bring forth unbromidic
speech from Edna Ferber.</p>
<p class='pindent'>As she talks in private conversation so she talks in public.
She is a good speech-maker, a good lecturer. Her spoken
words have the pungent vitality of her writing and the reading
of her own stories makes the characters come alive startlingly.</p>
<p class='pindent'>It may seem strange to those of us who do not make our own
living by creative writing that a woman who has made her
mark as a reporter and who still occasionally reports a national
convention, finds it so hard to write fiction. Edna Ferber has
written for newspapers about all sorts of things under every
sort of difficult handicap of time and place, and has produced
good “copy.” Yet her short stories, novels and plays, are
slowly and laboriously produced. And when the job is done,
so closely has she held her nose to the grindstone, that she is
unable to perceive the work as a whole, and realize how good
it is.</p>
<p class='pindent'>She once rented an apartment on the lake front in Chicago,
her desk facing the blue waters. She was in the midst of her
novel, “The Girls.” She complained that she could not get on
with it, it was hard labor, so hard that in spite of her best
efforts she would look at the lake and the trees and the children
playing in the street below. Her anxious publisher besought
her to turn her typewriter table so she faced the blank wall.
She did; and the book was speedily born.</p>
<p class='pindent'>In an article in <span class='it'>The American Magazine</span>, under the characteristic
title of “The Joy of the Job,” she tells of her methods
of work.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“At the risk of being hated I wanted to state that I’ve always
felt sorry for any woman who could play whenever she wanted
to. She never will know how sweet play can be. Chocolate
is no treat for a girl in a candy factory. Play is no treat for
an idler. My work is such that morning engagements and
festive luncheoning are forbidden. On those rare occasions,
two or three times a year, perhaps, when I deliberately, and for
the good of my soul, break the rule and sneak off down-town
for luncheon, the affair takes on the proportions of an orgy.
No college girls’ midnight fudge spree could be more thrilling.
To my unaccustomed eyes the girls in their new hats all look
pretty. The matrons appear amazingly well dressed. The
men, chatting over their after-luncheon cigarettes, are captains
of finance, discussing problems of national import. I refuse
to believe what my <span class='it'>vis-à-vis</span> says about their being cloak-and-suit
salesmen whose conversation probably runs thus:</p>
<p class='pindent'>“ ‘I come into his place at ten this morning and he wouldn’t
look at my stuff till twelve, and finally I goes up to him, and I
says to him, I says, “Looka here, Marx.” ’</p>
<p class='pindent'>“The very waiters interest me. The ’bus boys are deft, and
I refuse to be bothered by their finger nails. The chicken
salad is a poem, the coffee a dream, the French pastry a divine
concoction.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“When you work three hundred and fifty mornings in the
year, a game of golf on the three hundred and fifty-first is a
lark. That’s one reason why I play so atrociously, I suppose.
They who say that work hardens one, or wearies, or dulls,
have chosen the wrong occupation, or have never really tasted
the delights of it. It’s the finest freshener in the world. It’s
an appetizer. It’s a combination cocktail and <span class='it'>hors d’œuvre</span>,
to be taken before playing. It gives color to the most commonplace
of holidays. It makes a run through the park a treat.
There’s very little thrill in a brisk walk if you can brisk-walk
from morning until night. But after having sat before a
typewriter, or desk, or table, for hours together, to be able
to stretch one’s legs for a swing of two or three miles—that’s
living.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“The entire output of my particular job depends upon me.
By that I mean that when I put the cover on my typewriter
the works are closed. The office equipment consists of one
flat table, rather messy; one typewriter, much abused, and one
typewriter table; a chunk of yellow copy paper, and one of
white. All the wheels, belts, wires, bolts, files, tools—the
whole manufacturing scheme of things—has got to be contained
in the space between my chin and my topmost hairpin. And
my one horror, my nightmare of nightmares, is that some morning
I’ll wake up and find that space vacant, and the works
closed down, with a mental sign over the front door reading:</p>
<p class='pindent'>“ ‘For Rent. Fine, large empty head. Inquire within.’</p>
<p class='pindent'>“There was one year when there was a sign reading, ‘Closed
for repairs.’ The horror of it is still with me.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>In another place she says: “No autobiographical sketch is
complete without a statement of ambitions. I have two. I
want to be allowed to sit in a rocking chair on the curb at the
corner of State and Madison streets and watch the folks go by.
And I would fain live on a houseboat in the Vale of Cashmere.
I don’t know where the Vale of Cashmere is, nor whether it
boasts a water course or not.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>What a lot she would get out of her view of life from a
rocking chair at State and Madison streets!</p>
<p class='pindent'>She complained bitterly once that a certain writer, now
opulent and lazy, who knew Chicago from the stockyards to
the North Shore, did not use the stuff he had in his head. She
felt not so much that he was missing an opportunity, but that
he had buried the talent of experience that should have been
passed on to others after he had gone.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Though Edna Ferber lives in New York—her apartment
faces Central Park—she is not of New York. She knows
Chicago, she thinks Chicago, just as Booth Tarkington thinks
and knows Indianapolis and would not live wholly away from
it. The author of “The Girls,” that masterpiece of Chicago,
frequently visits the Windy City and sits, metaphorically, at
the corner of State and Madison and soaks in the spirit of the
city, that city so recently a pioneer town, so lately an effete city.
No wonder she finds it fascinating and inexhaustible.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Edna Ferber’s apartment is the place where she meets her
friends, breakfasts, lunches, dines, and sleeps. It is her rest
house, her relaxation. The furnishing of it was an adventure.
The choosing of draperies for the windows (there are many
facing east), the tints for the walls, and the fabrics for the upholstery,
she found an exhilarating venture into the unknown.
She has been a hotel dweller, a renter of the homes of other
people. But here she is rioting in her own home with her own
furniture and hers is the sole responsibility for the color scheme,
the style, and the composition. And it is good. Her taste in
furnishing as in writing is to be relied upon. It is also most
comfortable, too comfortable. It would be hard enough to
break away from this interesting woman if one were standing
talking in a windy street, but when surrounded by all the comforts
it is almost impossible not to overstay one’s welcome.</p>
<p class='pindent'>But she works in a bare studio, close by, away from the telephone
and too friendly visitors. Every morning she sits down
at the typewriter and works—and most afternoons. No writer
produces good work without wearying effort, long hours of
concentration, and at times great discouragement.</p>
<p class='pindent'>What Miss Ferber wears while she works, whether dress,
sweater, or smock, I do not know, for she does not do her
writing in public as a prize fighter trains for a battle. Her
battles are fought out alone.</p>
<p class='pindent'>One of her old and understanding friends, William Allen
White, has written a most illuminating account of her life, her
struggles, and her achievement. Mr. White being a Middle
Westerner himself, quite understands Edna Ferber’s point of
view. The following extract is taken from an introduction
by the famous editor of the <span class='it'>Emporia Gazette</span> for an edition of
“Cheerful by Request”:</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Edna Ferber’s pasture is long and narrow geographically;
ranging from a thin pennant running westward to the mountains,
to a slim tatter as far east as Vienna. But it is close
clipped around Chicago, in Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin;
and well cropped in and about New York. In its social
boundaries her field is more compact; chiefly lying in the middle
class, sometimes taking in those who are just climbing out of
poverty, and often considering those who are happily wiggling
into our plutocracy. But one thread will string every character
she ever conceived; all her people do something for a
living. She is the goddess of the worker. And from her
typewriter keys spring hard-working bankers, merchants, burglars,
garage-helpers, stenographers, actors, traveling salesmen,
hotel clerks, porters and reporters, wholesalers, pushcart men,
wine touts, welfare workers, farmers, writers—always doers of
things: money makers, men and women who pull their weight
in the boat. And her stories chiefly tell what a fine time these
hardworking Americans have with their day’s work.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“In the Great American Short Story, which must tell of
American life rather than our Great American Novel, Edna
Ferber’s section will be among the workers. Mrs. Wharton
and Henry Fuller and Sherwood Anderson can have the loafers,
in high life and low life. But Miss Ferber’s people will
come from the stores and offices and workshops. They will,
as the Gospel Hymn has it, come rejoicing, bringing home the
bacon. Their dramatic moments are oftenest in aprons, shirt-sleeves,
overalls, at desks, behind counters, in kitchens, behind
stage curtains, in the midst of the business of earning a living.
Precious little is done in the Ferber stories ‘in God’s
great out of doors—in the wide open spaces.’ When anything
has to be open in Miss Ferber’s work it is a lively and festive
wide-open town.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“So let us consider who she is and how she happened to be
a writing woman. In the middle or late ’eighties of the nineteenth
century she was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of Jewish
parents. Her father was a Hungarian. Her mother an
American, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her father was
the owner of a general merchandise store, first in Iowa, then
in Appleton, Wisconsin. Miss Ferber at seventeen was graduated
from the Ryan High School in Appleton. For her
graduating essay she wrote an account of the life of the women
workers in a local mill. The local editor saw it: recognized
that it was good reporting and gave her a job as local reporter
at $3.00 a week—a rather princely salary twenty years ago for
a new girl reporter in a country town. She wrote local items,
from the court house, the city hall, the fire department, the
home of the village Crœsus, and the police court. Then she
was graduated from the Appleton paper to Milwaukee. In
Milwaukee also she was a reporter. And while she was earning
a living as a reporter she wrote ‘Dawn O’Hara,’ her first
novel. It sold well. While it was in the press and selling
during 1911 and ’12, the magazines began telling the story
of ‘Emma McChesney.’ Here was something new; the traveling
saleswoman—who was rather more woman than merchant,
but who was altogether human. The character appealed to the
public, and Edna Ferber had her knee in the door of success.
In 1913 the stories were collected under the title ‘Roast Beef
Medium,’ and that book sold well. Two years later appeared
more McChesney stories under the title ‘Emma McChesney
& Co.’ Then came the play ‘Emma McChesney,’ and Edna
Ferber was well in the ante-room of the hall of fame, with
her card going to posterity. In the meantime, a book of short
stories, ‘Buttered Side Down,’ had been written and sold to
the magazines and successfully published. In 1917 Miss Ferber’s
second novel appeared, ‘Fanny, Herself,’ and in 1918
came ‘Cheerful by Request.’</p>
<p class='pindent'>“In 1922 all the promise of ten years of conscientious work
was fulfilled, when Miss Ferber wrote ‘The Girls,’ a novel of
Chicago. The humor of it, the strength of it, the art of it,
must make posterity give more than a glance at Edna Ferber’s
card. She has something to tell posterity about America.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“And so we must tell posterity something about her—about
Edna Ferber, herself. The best description of her family life
ever written, she wrote in the dedication of ‘Dawn O’Hara,’
to Julia Ferber, her ‘dear mother who frequently interrupts,
and to Sister Fannie who says Sh-Sh-Sh- outside my door.’
Some shadowy hint of the life of the Ferbers after the husband
and father died, and before the family moved to Chicago, may
be found in the earlier chapters of ‘Fanny, Herself’—at least
it is a good picture of Julia Ferber, the mother, a strong, devoted,
capable woman who is a credit to her country.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“All around Edna Ferber is an atmosphere of work. She
works hard and all the time. Her friends work hard, and all
the time. So when she takes her typewriter in hand to tell of
the world she knows, she describes a working world. It is a
world deeply American. For whatever else we Americans
are, we are workers. Here and there a man lives without
work, a white rich man’s son or a black washerwoman’s son.
We have no leisure classes. But the world of Edna Ferber’s
people in its economic status is the real world of America. And
she, a working woman, is typical of the modern American
woman. If for any reason posterity is interested in this American
world of the first three decades of the twentieth century,
posterity will do well—indeed posterity probably can do no
better than to tell the butler to bring Edna Ferber for a few
moments and let her read ‘The Gay Old Dog,’ and ‘The
Eldest.’ ”</p>
<p class='pindent'>Since Mr. White wrote the foregoing, Edna Ferber has
made two big steps forward. In the volume, “Gigolo,” is to
be found that masterpiece, “Old Man Minick,” to mention
but one of a group of eight. The play from this story, written
by her in collaboration with George S. Kaufman, has become an
artistic and a financial success. The story, “Old Man Minick,”
together with the play, “Minick,” have been published in
a separate volume, so one can see how a short story can be
turned into a successful play. It is interesting to compare the
fictional use of an idea with the dramatic, especially when the
work is done by the same hand.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Edna Ferber has always been interested in plays and play-writing.
She has written three that I know of, and two have
been highly successful. “$1,200 a Year,” written with Newman
Levy, deserved a greater success than it won. As a piece
of literature it deserves more than one rereading.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Of course “So Big” has done more to interest people in
Edna Ferber than anything else, yet the quality that has made
such a success of that book lies also in most of her earlier work.
That she herself was not too sure about it is made clear in an
interview, titled “How it Feels to be a Best Seller”:</p>
<p class='pindent'>“There are people who write Best Sellers as a matter of
business. That is, they are in the Best Seller business. They
write them, I am told, deliberately and mathematically, using
a formula as a cook uses a recipe. You hear a name and you
say, in your ignorance, ‘Who? . . . Who’s he?’ And the
answer is, ‘He’s Whosis. You don’t mean to say you’ve never
read him! He writes Best Sellers.’</p>
<p class='pindent'>“I don’t know how they do it. I don’t want to know. I
suppose they have some peculiar thermometer or mechanism by
which they gauge that fickle phenomenon known as the public
pulse. But occasionally some one comes along who commits
a Best Seller in all innocence, and with no such intent. Of
such am I.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Not only did I not plan to write a Best Seller when I wrote
‘So Big’ but I thought, when I had finished it, that I had
written the world’s worst seller. Not that alone, I thought I
had written a complete Non-Seller. I didn’t think anyone
would ever read it. And that’s the literal truth.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“It was this way. I had worked on it, day after day, day
after day, for many months, starting at nine each morning and
working until four in the afternoon. I knew where I was
going and why I wanted to get there, but after a time I became
like a patient plodder who must travel weary miles along
a lonely road before he arrives at the city of his destination.
Mile after mile I covered the distance, sometimes traveling
fairly swiftly, sometimes scarcely able to lift one tired foot
after the other. When it was finished I was so dulled by contact
with it that I scarcely could see it. The last stretch of
the work, during June and July, had been written in Chicago.
That June and July in Chicago I recall as a period during
which the thermometer hovered gracefully between 90 and 96
in the shade.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“As the work of final correction began and progressed I
began to dole out sheaves of copy to the typist. She used to call
for a chunk of the story every day or two. She would appear
at about four in the afternoon when I had finished work for
the day, and when I was at my limpest, dampest and lowest.
I remember her as a nice fresh-looking red-haired girl in crisp
cool orchid organdie. She would make four copies of each
fresh sheaf as she received it, return these, and call for more.
No other soul except myself had seen a line of that story.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Each time she called I waited eagerly, hopefully, for her
to make some comment. I wanted her to say she liked Selina.
I wanted her to say she didn’t care for Dirk. I wanted her
to say she thought the story should have ended this way, or
that. I wanted her to evince some interest in the novel; to
show some liking for it, or even to show dislike. She never did.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“ ‘Well,’ said I to Miss E. Ferber, ‘that settles it. There you
are, Edna! I told you so! Who would be interested in a
novel about a middle-aged woman in a calico dress and with
wispy hair and bad teeth, grubbing on a little truck farm south
of Chicago! Nobody. Who cares about cabbages! Nobody.
Who would read the thing if it came out as a novel! A dull
plodding book, written because I was interested; because I
wanted intensely to write it; because I had carried the thought
of it around in my head for five years or more.’</p>
<p class='pindent'>“The story was to be serialized in the <span class='it'>Woman’s Home Companion</span>
before being published in novel form. Well, that was
all right. It might go well enough as a serial. But as a
novel! Never.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“I wrote Mr. Russell Doubleday, of Doubleday, Page &
Company, telling him that I had finished the book but that it
was not, in my opinion, a book that would sell. No one, I
wrote him, would read it. I thought it would be better for
his firm, as publishers, and for me, as author, if we gave up the
idea of publishing this story as a novel. It would be a flat
failure, receiving bad reviews, having no sale.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“Mr. Doubleday replied that I might be right, but that perhaps
I should let some one besides myself have a chance to
judge its merits and faults. Perhaps, he said, I had been too
close to it. Would I let him read it before deciding against it?</p>
<p class='pindent'>“He read it. He wrote me a letter. I keep that letter to
read on rainy days when I’m not feeling well.</p>
<p class='pindent'>“ ‘So Big’ has, for some reason I can’t explain, been a best
seller since it was published in February, selling on an average
of a thousand a day. I know how the ugly duckling felt who
turned into a swan.”</p>
<p class='pindent'>And so, unlike Dirk de Jong, who thought he was so big
and wasn’t, the novel is so very big, when the author thought
it of much less importance.</p>
<p class='pindent'>It is safe to say that at least seven million people read “So
Big” in its serial and book form. All these people will be
looking forward hopefully to her next book. That there will
be no disappointment can be confidently predicted because Edna
Ferber has built upon so sure a foundation.</p>
<p class='pindent'>I believe that big work cannot come of small people. Edna
Ferber is a big person (not in stature nor avoirdupois) in mind,
in heart, in soul, and in vision. A study of her work shows
her growth and she is still growing, and will keep on growing
as long as she lives. She will keep on growing because she
sees so much farther than she has been able to reach. Her
vision is so big.</p>
<div><h1>TRANSCRIBER NOTES</h1></div>
<p class='pindent'>Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.</p>
<p class='pindent'>Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.</p>
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