American nights entertainment
perhaps his only friend, his strongest. Before he could read she had
told him the Hiawatha legends, had read aloud to him the stories
of the Bible (the King James version), had retold Shakespeare for
him. Her death made him clutch to his heart these books, as well as
the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ and the portions of Ruskin they had read
and re-read together in the home--which, by the way, was really at
Wrightstown, just outside Rome, New York, though Wright’s birthplace is
spoken of as “Rome.” A feeling that these books of his mother’s were
as sacred books was fixed in the boy’s mind. Wright has never ceased
to read them, nor to try to pour himself into those molds; and in
conversation he sometimes lets slip a phrase from one of them. Without
literary aptitude and with a very ragged species of formal education,
he speaks in his extraordinary fashion and the millions hearken. So
much so that his success from the outset may be said to have entirely
reconstructed--for the purpose of merchandising his books--the retail
machinery of book-selling.
The author of _That Printer of Udell’s_ had the means of reaching
the folks in little villages and on isolated farms, people who could
scarcely be reached by any of the books ordinarily being published.
The very inadequate machinery of retail distribution serving the book
trade was insufficient for his purpose. It is insufficient for most
purposes, but its insufficiency in the case of Harold Bell Wright was
painful and intolerable. With the most remarkable courage, effort
and persistence the publishers constructed a new and complete retail
mechanism to serve the special need. Those who have no knowledge of
the problems of merchandising will be unable to appreciate what they
did. A few details are in order. First, the larger book publishers
in the United States seldom sell directly to retailers in cities of
less than 50,000; smaller publishers seldom enter cities of less than
100,000. The needs of bookstores in little cities and towns, mixed and
important only in the aggregate, are taken care of by jobbers. There
are possibly 1,000 first-rate bookstores to serve a nation of well over
100,000,000 people--of whom, however, some 20,000,000 are incapable of
ever reading a book of any importance in an understanding way. There
are cities of 50,000 in which no first-rate bookstore exists. On the
other hand a magazine like Pictorial Review, solidly established on the
demand for dress patterns, or a magazine like Saturday Evening Post,
promulgating fiction patterns, penetrates into places where no new book
is ever seen. So, too, do certain denominational religious papers.
And in vast areas of the Middle and Far West, there is a seepage from
those reservoirs of modern merchandising, the mail order houses, the
Roosevelt Dams of commerce, constantly seeking, more and more achieving
the reclamation of the deserts of trade.
The “producers,” in stage parlance, of Harold Bell Wright determined
to utilise all these channels. It was a great risk of judgment and
money at the outset but it succeeded. This is no place to go into the
history of a unique performance in merchandising but the results have
a distinct place in any record of the author exploited. For one thing,
it may be asked if the success with Wright is of value in selling other
authors, and while there can be no dogmatic answer to the question it
is probable that in most cases it is not. And another phase of the
results throws a significant light on the nature of Wright’s work,
confirming what we have said about the terms of his appeal to his
readers. When a Wright novel is published the orders pile in from
stores and places with which a publisher has ordinarily no contact; and
the order from a hamlet in North Carolina is likely to exceed the order
from Brentano’s in New York.
This means two things. It means, naturally, that with the heavy
campaigns of advertising in all sorts of periodicals from Saturday
Evening Post to Zion’s Herald, the publishers reach the people who
buy a book a year or less often. But also it means that Wright is
the moralist, the fabulist and the Sayer we have termed him. On the
technical side, perhaps the most instructive detail of this selling
performance is the way in which it is initiated. Six months before a
new Wright story is to be published, thousands of tradespeople all
over the United States know that the story is to be published, and
when, and with what enormous advertising placed in forty specified
periodicals and several dozen newspapers it will be “pushed”; and then
begins the steady succession of personal letters and even telegrams,
circulars and placards and posters, honest-minded persons in remote
settlements discuss with enthusiasm and awe the prodigious sum of
money to be expended on “just this one book, a _book_,” librarians
grow anxious and advertising men eager, preachers prepare sermons,
in thousands upon thousands of homes the Christmas gift to Mother is
pre-determined,--until at last, in a wide-rolling wave of excitement,
a vast surge of the people of simple faith and worthy ideals, the day
comes when the book is born....
vi
It has been said that Wright is of magnetic personality, with fine,
clean, inspiring ideals, a man of tireless endeavour, a person who
“stirs in one emotions of which one is not ashamed.” Also that “he
radiates a Lincolnian type of rugged honesty” ... and much more of the
same sort. All such lingo is meaningless outside the atmosphere of
Wright’s books. The language of those novels is not one of literary
conventions but of certain inalterable thought-conventions; and
so, necessarily, is language addressed to those who read Wright.
“She stood before him in all the beautiful strength of her young
womanhood.”... “It is his almost clairvoyant power of reading the
human soul that has made Mr. Wright’s books among the most remarkable
of the present age.” These two statements are demonstrably true to
the many whose minds, struck by such sentences, give back the ring of
silver. They are not true in themselves; but then, we know no things
that are. To be “true” is simply to signify enough, at a given time, in
particular circumstances, to some individual or individuals.
That truth Mr. Wright has had enormously, and still has. His newest
novel, _The Mine With the Iron Door_, although in no way an elaboration
of the traditional tale of that mine--it was supposed to be a wonder
mine, where the old Spanish Fathers got the gold that enriched their
splendid altars--weaves the old legend through its texture of incident.
This gives to the novel a colour beyond the colour it has from its
Arizona setting; but the point with Mr. Wright is something like this:
Every life has its “mine with the iron door,” its dreams that can
never come true, its hopes that belong to a past that is forever dead.
Nevertheless, he will have you believe, though the lost mine may never
be found nor the iron door opened, some riches of happiness is still
possible. Were it not for this element, this presentation of something
that at a given time and in particular circumstances can signify truth
to many, many people, Mr. Wright’s new novel would be no more than a
picturesque and exciting adventure narrative of the Arizona desert.
vii
Mr. Wright went to Tucson, Arizona, some ten years ago on a business
errand. Three days after reaching the city he had bought a cottage.
Now he owns eighty acres outside Tucson and has built a new home,
a comfortable but by no means pretentious house with a garden
transplanted from the neighbouring desert. The scale of living is
modest. Wright and his wife take care of the grounds and house, to
a large extent; and there is usually not more than one servant. Mr.
Wright has a motor car that he has driven for six years and will
continue to drive for some years yet. He is fond of horseback riding
and spends as much time camping as at home. Two or three tents, the
car, some tinned stuff and staples and plenty of ammunition are all Mr.
and Mrs. Wright need, for both are good marksmen. They shoot for food,
but Wright will not kill a deer.
The stories are frequently written, or largely written, on these
expeditions into the desert. Because he is not an artist, Wright has
a sadly difficult time. He will submit a story like _The Winning of
Barbara Worth_ to five engineers in order that they may check up
his account of the irrigation of the desert. A long time was spent
in worrisome “looking over the ground,” visiting factory towns,
interviewing employers and workmen, before _Helen of the Old House_
took even preliminary shape. As a rule, the incidents Wright uses are
transcribed from life, producing the effect of extreme incredibility
of which his readers sometimes complain. Being his readers, they are
silenced when he tells them of the actual occurrence.
Hildegarde Hawthorne has pointed out the very great and incontestable
service of Wright: He creates book readers. It requires very little
examination of the facts to discover that thousands whose reading has
been nothing but newspapers and magazines have been led by Wright’s
stories into the habit of reading a book occasionally. That is an
accomplishment of an importance hard to overrate.
As for the man, there is one story I like better than any he has
written. Some years ago, riding horseback on a narrow trail, Wright was
struck by an automobile that came suddenly around a corner of rock.
Horse and rider were pitched into a gully; the horse was killed and
Wright’s particularly bad lung so suffered by the fall that everyone
assured him there was nothing left but to die. He said: “I won’t die.”
Because he couldn’t be moved, a tent had to be erected over him there
in the gully, so that he might die in the shade. Lying there under the
tent, he fulfilled his purpose by getting well. He also, under the same
tent and in the same place, wrote _When a Man’s a Man_.... And now he
is again in good physical shape, riding his horses after the day’s work
is over through the desert or up into the foothills of the Catalina
Mountains.
The preacher he began, the preacher he must probably remain. There may,
perhaps, be something pitiful in the spectacle of a man struggling
with the palette of words, as there is something bizarre in the voice
proceeding from the wilderness with a perfectly mundane message: That
every valley had better be filled, every mountain and hill nicely
graded; the crooked carefully straightened, the rough ways ... paved
with asphalt.
Books by Harold Bell Wright
1903 _That Printer of Udell’s_
1907 _The Shepherd of the Hills_
1909 _The Calling of Dan Matthews_
1910 _The Uncrowned King_
1911 _The Winning of Barbara Worth_
1912 _Their Yesterdays_
1914 _The Eyes of the World_
1916 _When a Man’s a Man_
1919 _The Re-Creation of Brian Kent_
1921 _Helen of the Old House_
1923 _The Mine With the Iron Door_
Sources on Harold Bell Wright
_Harold Bell Wright._ Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company
_Harold Bell Wright, the Man Behind the Novels_, by HILDEGARDE
HAWTHORNE. Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company
Private Information
_8. “Ah, Did You Once See Shelley Plain?”_
i
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
BROWNING: _Memorabilia_
The four lines, and, indeed, the twelve remaining lines of this
one of Robert Browning’s shorter poems illustrate very well the
man’s superlative faculty of drama. With a little of our Edwin
Arlington Robinson, he mixed a little of our Eugene O’Neill; and,
on occasion, expressed himself with point and passion. Such was his
simplicity that he appeared (it is now laughable to remember) rather