The final words to be said of any activity will always be, I suppose, was it worth what it cost? Well, the writing of fiction is worth, I imagine, exactly what digging a ditch or charting the heavens may be worth to the worker, and that is not a penny more or less than the release of mind which it brings. Although I may not speak as an authority, at least I can speak from long perseverance. I became a novelist before I was old enough to resist, and I remained a novelist because no other enterprise in life has afforded me the same interest or provided me with equal contentment. It is true that I have written only for the biased judgment within; but this inner critic has held up an unattainable standard, and has infused a certain zest of adventure into what may appear on the surface to be merely another humdrum way of earning a livelihood. Still, to a beginner who is young and cherishes an ambition to be celebrated, I should recommend the short cut (or royal road) through the radio and Hollywood; and certainly more than one creative writer, in search of swift economic security, would do well to buy a new broom and to set out for the next crossing. But, incredible as it may appear in this practical decade, there are novelists so wanting in a sense of the best proletarian values that they place artistic integrity above the voice on the air, the flash on the screen, and the dividends in the bank. There are others who possess an unreasoning faith in their own work; and there are yet others endowed with a comic spirit so robust, or so lively, that it can find diversion anywhere, even in our national exaltation of the inferior. To this happy company of neglected novelists, the ironic art of fiction will reveal its own special delights, and may even, as the years pass, yield its own sufficient, if imponderable, rewards.
In looking back through a long vista, I can see that what I have called the method of constant renewal may be reduced to three ruling principles. Obedience to this self-imposed discipline has enabled me to write novels for nearly forty years, and yet to feel that the substance from which I draw material and energy is as fresh to-day as it was in my first youthful failure. As time moves on, I still see life in beginnings, moods in conflict, and change as the only permanent law. But the value of these qualities (which may be self-deluding, and are derived, in fact, more from temperament than from technique) has been mellowed by long saturation with experience—by that essence of reality which one distils from life only after it has been lived.
Among the many strange superstitions of the age of science revels the cheerful belief that immaturity alone is enough. Pompous illiteracy, escaped from some Freudian cage, is in the saddle, and the voice of the amateur is the voice of authority. When we turn to the field of prose fiction, we find that it is filled with literary sky-rockets sputtering out in the fog. But the trouble with sky-rockets has always been that they do not stay up in the air. One has only to glance back over the post-war years to discover that the roads of the jazz age are matted thick with fireworks which went off too soon. To the poet, it is true, especially if he can arrange with destiny to die young, the glow of adolescence may impart an unfading magic. But the novel (which must be conceived with a subdued rapture, or with none at all, or even with the unpoetic virtues of industry and patience) requires more substantial ingredients than a little ignorance of life and a great yearning to tell everything one has never known. When I remember Defoe, the father of us all, I am persuaded that the novelist who has harvested well the years, and laid by a rich store of experience, will find his latter period the ripening time of his career.
Transposed into an impersonal method, the three rules of which I have spoken may be so arranged:
1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over.
2. Always preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries.
3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavour to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.
In my modest way, these rules have helped me, not only to pursue the one calling for which I was designed alike by character and inclination, but even to enjoy the prolonged study of a world that, as the sardonic insight of Henry Adams perceived, no "sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder."
Ellen Glasgow.
Richmond, Virginia,
December, 1934-1937
PART ONE
THE AGE OF MAKE-BELIEVE
CHAPTER 1
By the open French window of the dining-room Jenny Blair Archbald was reading Little Women for the assured reward of a penny a page. Now and then she would stop to shake her head, toss her smooth honey-coloured plaits over her shoulders, and screw her face into a caricature Aunt Etta's expression. "It isn't safe to skip," she thought. "Grandfather would be sure to find out. Well, even if Mamma did form her character on Meg and Jo, I think they're just poky old things." Poky old things, and yet spreading themselves over five hundred and thirty-two pages! "Mamma may call the Marches lots of fun," she added firmly, "but I'm different. I'm different."
The book dropped from her hands, while her startled gaze flew to the topmost branch of the old sycamore in the garden. Deep pulsations of light were flooding the world. Very thin and clear through the May afternoon, there was the chime of distant bells striking the hour. Somewhere, without or within, a miracle had occurred. At the age of nine years and seven months, she had encountered the second important event in human experience. She was discovering her hidden self as once before, in some long forgotten past, she had discovered her body. "I don't care. I'm different," she repeated exultantly.
From the warm mother-of-pearl vagueness within, a fragment of personality detached itself, wove a faint pattern of thought, and would gradually harden into a shell over her mind. But all she knew was, "I am this and not that." All she felt was the sudden glory, the singing rhythm of life. Softly, without knowing why, she began crooning, "I'm alive, alive, alive, and I'm Jenny Blair Archbald." Ages before, in the time far back beyond the vanishing rim of memory, she had composed this refrain, and she still chanted it to herself when happiness overflowed. For it was all her own. No one, not even her mother, not even her grandfather, knew how she loved it. Jealously, she kept it hidden away with her chief treasure, the gold locket in which somebody had wound a tiny circle of her father's hair after his tragic death in a fox-hunt. Though she was only five at the time, she had had this song even then. When she was alone and happy, she sang it aloud; when she was with her mother or her aunts, the words dissolved into a running tune. Nothing, except the white poodle she had lost and mourned, had ever given her such pure ecstasy. "I'm alive, alive, alive, and I'm Jenny Blair Archbald."