XXIV The Dawning of Literary Life
“January 28th, 1854.
“My very dear Friend,—I wish you were here this morning! I long to talk with you. There are many things I cannot commit to paper, or of which I might be ashamed as soon as they were written. There are no short-hand and long-tongued reporters at our face-to-face confabulations.
“Of one thing I will give you a hint: Have you any recollection of a certain MS., portions of which were read in your hearing last spring? I should not be surprised if you were to hear something of it before long. Keep your eyes upon the papers for a few weeks, and if you see nothing that looks like a harbinger of the advent, just conclude that I have changed my mind at the last gasp and recalled it. For it has gone out of my hands! After the appearance of anything that looks that way, I unseal your mouth.
“Seriously, I have much pending upon this venture. The success of the book may be the opening of the path I cannot but feel that Providence has marked out for me.
“As it is a Virginia story, Southerners should buy it, if it has no other merit. My misgivings are grave and many; but my advisers urge me on, and notices of fugitive articles that have appeared in Northern and Southern papers have inoculated me with a little confidence in the wisdom of their counsel.
“I had not meant to say this, or, indeed, to mention the matter at all, but as the day of publication draws near, I am, to use an expressive Yankeeism—‘fidgety.’
“If anything I have said savors of undue solicitude for the bantling’s welfare, recollect that I am the mother. One thing more: I shall have nothing to do with advertisements. If they laud the work too highly, bear in mind that it is ‘all in the way of trade,’ and that booksellers will have their way.
“Our ‘Musical Molasses Stew’ came off last night. We had a grand ‘time!’ Violin, flute, guitar, piano—all played by masculine amateurs, and a chorus of men’s voices. It was ‘nae sae bad,’ as the Scotch critic said of Mrs. Siddons’s acting. The same might be said of the real frolic of pulling the treacle. My partner was a young Nova Scotian—‘Blackader’ by name—an intelligent, agreeable, and versatile youth who entered gloriously into the spirit of the occasion. He played upon the piano, sang treble, tenor, and bass by turns, and pulled and laughed with me until he had no strength left.”
I was but feebly convalescent from a brief illness when, chancing to pick up the latest number of Godey’s Magazine, and fluttering the leaves aimlessly, my eyes rested upon a paragraph in the “Editor’s Table.”
“Will the author of ‘Marrying Through Prudential Motives’ send her address to the editor?”
A queer story followed. The tale, sent so long ago to Mr. Godey that I had almost forgotten it, had fallen behind a drawer of his desk, and lain there for three years and more. When it finally turned up, curiosity, aroused by its disappearance and exhumation, led the editor to read it more carefully than if it had reached him through ordinary channels. He liked it, published it, and waited to hear from the author.
By some mischance that particular number of the “Lady’s Book” had escaped my notice. The story was copied into an English periodical; translated from this into French, and appeared on the other side of the channel. Another British monthly “took up the wondrous tale” by rendering the French version back into the vernacular. In this guise the much-handled bit of fiction was brought across the seas by The Albion, a New York periodical that published only English “stuff.” Mr. Godey arraigned The Albion for piracy, and the truth was revealed by degrees. Richmond papers copied the odd “happening” from Northern, and Mr. Morris made capital of it in advertising the forthcoming novel.
I have more than once spoken of the Richmond of that date as “provincial.” It was so backward in literary enterprise that the leading bookseller had not facilities at his command for publishing the book committed to him.
On March 9, 1854, I wrote to my Powhatan correspondent:
“Cousin Joe says he was charged by you to get ‘my book.’ I am sorry to say that it cannot be procured as yet. Unlooked for delays have impeded the work of publication. But, as the proofs arrive daily, now, I trust that the wheels are beginning to run more smoothly. It is printed in Philadelphia, although copyrighted in Richmond. Not a printer in this city could finish it before the 1st of May, so we were forced to send it to the North....
“You will read and like it, if only because I wrote it. Whether or not others may cavil at the religious tone, and ridicule the simplicity of the narrative, remains to be seen. Thus far I have had encouragement from all sides. My own fears are the drawback to sanguine expectation.”
The actual advent of Alone was a surprise, after all the waiting and wondering that left the heart sick with hope deferred.
I was setting out for a walk one balmy May morning, and standing on the front porch to draw on my gloves, when Doctor Haxall, who had long had in our family the sobriquet of “the beloved physician,” reined in his horses at the gate and called out that he was “just coming to ask me to drive with him.” He had often done the like good turn to me.
I was not robust, and he had watched my growth with more than professional solicitude. Had he been of my very own kindred, he could not have been kinder or displayed more active interest in all my affairs—great to me and small to him.
“Headache?” he queried, with a keen look at my pale face when I was seated at his side.
“Not exactly! I think the warm weather makes me languid.”
“More likely overexcited nerves. You must learn to take life more philosophically. But we won’t talk shop!”
We were bowling along at a fine rate. The doctor drove fast, blooded horses, and liked to handle the ribbons himself. The day was deliciously fresh, the air sweet with early roses and honeysuckle. I called his attention, in passing Conway Robinson’s grounds, to the perfume of violets rising in almost visible waves from a ravine where the grass was whitened by them as with a light fall of snow. I asked no questions as we turned down Capitol Street, and thence into Main Street. Sometimes I sat in the carriage while he paid a professional call. This might be his intention now. We brought up abruptly at Morris’s book-store, and the blesséd man leaped out and held his hand to me. He probably had an errand there. He handed me into the interior in his brisk way, and marched straight up to Mr. Morris, who advanced to meet us.
“Good-morning! I have come for a copy of this young lady’s book!”
If I had ever fainted, I should have swooned on the spot.
For there, in heaps and heaps upon the front counter—in bindings of dark-blue, and purple, and crimson, and leaf-brown—lay in lordly state, portly volumes, on the backs of which, in gleaming gold that shimmered and shook before my incredulous vision, was stamped:
“Alone.”
I saw, through the sudden dazzlement of the whole world about me, that a clerk had set a chair for me. I sat down gratefully.
Mr. Morris was talking:
“Opened this morning! I sent six copies up to you. I suppose you got them?”
“No!” I tried so hard to say it firmly that it sounded careless. I would have added, “I did not know it was out,” but dared not attempt a sentence.
Mr. Morris attended us to the door to point to placards a porter was tacking to boards put there for that express purpose:
JUST OUT!!
ALONE!
By Marion Harland
The doctor nodded satisfiedly and handed me into the carriage. In taking my seat, I thought, in a dull, sick way, of Bruce at the source of the Nile. I had had day-dreams of this day and hour a thousand times in the last ten years. Of how I should walk down-town some day, and see a placard at this very door bearing the title of a novel written and bound, and lettered in gilt, and PUBLISHED! bearing my pen-name! The vision was a reality; the dream was a triumphant fulfilment. And I was sitting, unchanged, and non-appreciative, by the dear old doctor, and his full, cordial tones were saying of the portly purple volume lying on the seat between us:
“Well, my dear child, I congratulate you, and I hope a second edition will be called for within six months!”
He did not ply me with questions. He may not have suspected that the shock had numbed my ideas and stiffened my tongue. If he had, he could not have borne himself more tactfully. He was a man who had seen the world and hobnobbed with really distinguished live authors. It would not have been possible for him to enter fully into what this day was to me. When I thought of Bruce and the Nile, it was because I did not comprehend that the very magnitude of the crisis was what deprived me of the power of appreciating what had happened.
No! I am not inclined to ridicule the unsophisticated girl whose emotions were too mighty for speech that May noon, and to minimize what excited them. Nothing that wealth or fame could ever offer me in years to come could stir the depths of heart and mind as they were upheaved in that supreme hour.
The parcel of books had been opened and the contents examined, by the time I got home. I stole past the open door of my mother’s chamber, where she and Aunt Rice, who was visiting us, and Mea were chatting vivaciously, and betook myself to my room.
When my sister looked me up at dinner-time I told her to excuse me from coming down. “The heat had made me giddy and headachy.”
She bade me “lie still. She would send me a cup of tea.”
“I’ll leave you this for company,” she cooed, laying the book tenderly on my pillow. “We think it beautiful.”
With that she went out softly, shutting me in with my “beautiful” first-born. Mea always had her wits within easy call. The sixth sense was born within her.
I saw of the travail of my soul and was satisfied; was repaid a thousandfold for months of toil and years of waiting, when my father read my book. He did not go down-town again that day, after coming home to dinner. My mother told me, with a happy break in her laugh, how he had hardly touched the food on his plate. Aunt Rice’s pleasant prattle saved the situation from awkwardness when he lapsed into a brown study and talked less than he ate. When dessert was brought in, he excused himself and disappeared from general view for the rest of the afternoon. The door of “the chamber” to which he withdrew was fast shut. Nobody disturbed him until it was too dark to read by daylight. My mother took in a lighted lamp and set it on the table by him.
“He didn’t see or hear me!” was her report. “He is a quarter through the book already, and he doesn’t skip a word.”
He spent just fifteen minutes at the supper-table. It was two o’clock in the morning before he reached the last page.
After prayers next morning he put his arm about me and held me fast for a moment. Then he kissed me very gravely.
“I was right about that book, daughter!”
That was all! but it was, to my speechless self, as if the morning stars had sung together for joy.
I record here and now what I did not know in the spring-tide of my happiness. I never had—I shall never have—another reader like him. As long as he lived, he “believed” in me and in my work with a sincerity and fervor as impossible for me to describe as it can be for any outsider to believe. He made the perusal of each volume (and they numbered a score before he died) as solemn a ceremony as he instituted for the first. His absolute absorption in it was the secret jest of the family, but they respected it at heart. When he talked with me of the characters that bore part in my stories, he treated them as real flesh-and-blood entities. He found fault with one, and sympathized with another, and argued with a third, as seeing them in propia personæ. It was strange—phenomenal—when one considers the light weight of the literature under advisement and the mental calibre of the man. To me it was at once inspiration and my exceeding great reward.
“June 5th, 1854.
“Dear Effie,—From a formidable pile of letters of good wishes and congratulation, I select (not happen upon!) your sweet, affectionate epistle, every word of which, if it did not come from your heart, went straight to mine.
“I shall never be a literary iceberg! That is clear. I have had a surfeit of compliments in public and in private, but a word of appreciation from a true, loving friend gives me more delicious pleasure than all else.
“I make no excuse for speaking freely to you of what you say is ‘near akin’ to you. I thank you heartily for owning the relationship. Two editions have been ’run off’ already, and another is now in press—unprecedented success in this part of the world—or so they tell me. Northern papers notice the book more at length and more handsomely than does the Richmond press.
“Of the sales in your county, I know nothing. Oh yes! C. W. told Mr. Rhodes that ‘Miss Virginia Hawes’s novel is having a tremendous run in Powhatan. Tre-men-dous, sir! Why, I had an order to buy a copy and send it up, myself, sir!’
“Isn’t that characteristic?”