With Women Writers from America — From the Heart of Life

"With Women Writers from America" — this is the title under which my series of articles is published. And holding that poetry is the most prominent and loftiest of literature's manifestations, the women of letters around whom the previous installments have turned, and around whom the coming ones will turn, have been poets. Nor is it difficult to write a number of articles about American women poets, for they are more plentiful than we might suppose, and the work of some of them reaches the summit.

In this article, however, I shall depart from the plan I laid out, and speak of two women who write prose, and who publish most of what they write in the Christian Science Monitor, which appears in Boston and is counted in the front rank of the country's newspapers. They do not, then, write literary prose — if we confine literary prose to novelistic, short-story, dramatic, and critical writing. And this is what led one of them, Mrs. Catherine Reynolds, to greet me at the outset by saying:

— But I am not a literary woman!

And what led the other, Mrs. Lydia L. Roberts, to say, with signs of apology on her face:

— Yes, I write — but about small, ordinary subjects!

I told her that I would devote this article to them precisely because they are not literary women, and because they write only about small, ordinary subjects!

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Catherine Reynolds is the wife of Horace Reynolds, the literary commentator whose critical articles appear in the New York Times every Sunday. She is a dignified lady who speaks with deliberation and poise; her conversation is marked by depth and breadth. She has lived with her husband in Cambridge for more than twenty years, where they occupy a lovely house in one of the quiet parts of the town, and she works part of the day in the office of the dean of the Harvard Divinity School.

Around 1935 she began writing short articles which she published from time to time in the Monitor, signing them with nothing more than the first letters of her name. These articles vary in length and appear as occasion allows, not on fixed days of the week; but what unites them all is a character named Prudence, around whom the articles — written in an engaging story form — revolve. As for the subjects these articles treat, they are simple ones; their selection rests on no unbridled imagination and no vast learning: she picks them from the home, from daily life, and from the atmosphere of the family. The material of her writing is her personal experience as a woman whose first task is the care of the members of her family and the management of the affairs of her house.

The essential point about this branch of literature is that it springs from the very heart of life, joining pleasure with profit. Prudence does not represent one girl only. She grows gradually from childhood into girlhood and then youth, and life's problems cross her path, as do its delights — at home, among her girlfriends, at school, with her acquaintances of the other sex, on the job, and in all the walks of life. Prudence, I say, does not represent one girl to whom things happen that happen to no one else; she is in fact every American girl and, to some degree, every girl anywhere. For this reason mothers read Catherine Reynolds's articles with eagerness and take in the thoughtful opinions and counsels with which the articles teem — implicitly, not explicitly; and for this reason girls read them with pleasure and find in them pictures of themselves, of the stumbling-blocks they must avoid and the paths they must follow.

For this reason, too, it was not strange that the character of Prudence should become one of the figures known and beloved to the paper's women readers, or that Catherine Reynolds should be prompted to publish more of its installments, which can be read in sequence. I have gathered that the number of letters that reach the paper's editor-in-chief from women readers in every part of America — indeed from outside the country, even from Australia — praising the Prudence series, commenting on it, and urging more of it, far exceeds what he receives about the writings of any other writer or commentator on a paper whose contributing editors and writers are counted by the abundant dozens. And this popularity rests, as I see it, on what I have mentioned: on Mrs. Reynolds's drawing of her subjects from the very heart of life and her striking of sensitive chords in the souls of her women readers,

and on her penetrating view of life and her consequent ability to offer useful guidance, and on her literary skill, which makes of her articles pieces that are read, as I have said, for delight as well as for profit — and which clothes the guidance in the garb of a story, so that the young readers are not put off!

And though the installments of this series have gone on appearing for upward of fifteen years, so that what has accumulated of them would fill a number of books, Catherine Reynolds remains unknown to all her women readers; the author of the series and the creator of Prudence is still a woman of whom they know nothing but the first letters of her name, C. C. R.!

It was cause for my astonishment on the one hand, and for my delight on the other, to find that Mrs. Reynolds is thoroughly informed about the Arab cause and the tragedy of Palestine, and indignant at her country's policy toward it. In her conversation I glimpsed her distaste for certain sides of life in this country, and her deep attachment to peace and tranquility; so it was no surprise to learn that she intends to travel to Europe and spend some time in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, the haunts of innocence in our world. Her first hope is that the dream of the one world may come true before its little worlds grapple with one another and turn it to nothing.

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As for Mrs. Lydia Roberts, she too publishes her writings in the Christian Science Monitor, but her articles and short verses appear as well in several other papers and magazines in Boston and elsewhere. Some time ago she published a book in three parts, containing little stories built on the facts of science and nature and on the lives of individuals; it is now studied in the schools by pupils between the ages of 9 and 11.

And though her writings include a number of stories, her articles turn for the most part on what she described as small, ordinary subjects. She said: I never go down to the city without coming back with ideas, opinions, and observations enough for three or four pieces; indeed I sit here at my desk and find myself, in the midst of my work and my duties, opening my little notebook to jot down headings, from which short articles later spring — and she added with a smile: and from which, after that, money orders spring!

And she said: No, I do not write great literature; I leave the writing on the big subjects to other men and women of letters. It is enough for me to write about what I feel I can discuss and be of use in: how to profit from leisure hours, for example; how to make reading beloved to the young; how to plant in children the virtues we wish them to be adorned with; how to make their bedtime an hour they await with longing rather than an ordeal they wish were over; and how, and how...

She too writes her articles in a graceful style that joins ease with pleasure and is free of verbal ornament and figurative images. She holds that literature drawn from life is bound to meet with a welcome from readers that artificial literature will never meet, however refined and embellished it may be.

Mrs. Roberts is a widow with three children and five grandchildren. She worked in Harvard's main library for twelve years, spending the last three of them as assistant to the well-known writer John Sweeney, professor of literature at Harvard, in supervising the Poetry Room; she retired this past June and intends to devote her time to writing.

This Poetry Room is a wing of Lamont Library, one of the university's libraries and the newest of them in building and arrangement; it has been named "the Woodberry Poetry Room" in memory of one of the professors of poetry at the end of the last century. It contains all the principal books that treat of poetry and of the writings of the world's poets generally, and of the poets of England and America in particular; it likewise contains all their collected works, and all the literary magazines from their beginnings down to their latest issues (1). Manuscripts of certain poets and drawings of them are on display there, and it holds one thousand two hundred records on which have been recorded readings by the various modern poets of selections they choose as the best of their poems, readings of certain classic poems by the older poets, folk songs, and various plays as performed on the stages of New York, London, and elsewhere. In the room are a number of listening machines that enable some 25 persons to use them at one time — without producing enough noise to keep those present from carrying on with their listening and their reading. This Poetry Room is distinguished as the most splendid of the library's halls: it is furnished with soft furnishings, laid out to the design of a European architect specially entrusted with that task, lit with lamps of highly artful form, and its contents arranged with wit and originality. It is the meeting place of all lovers of poetry and the spot in whose atmosphere they take their ease, hearing poetry and reading it — and writing it. It remains for me to say that this Poetry Room is a recent idea in the American universities, applied as yet only in a small number of the great universities and on a narrower scale; and that this room has one further "distinction": its use — indeed entry into it — is restricted to men and forbidden to any member of that other sex in whose name this magazine speaks!

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(1) John Sweeney has asked me to supply the Room with a copy of every issue of "The Woman's Voice" in which these articles of mine appear on the American women poets I know — whereby "The Woman's Voice" will be the first magazine, or book, in the Arabic language to hold a place in the Poetry Room at Harvard.

Neither Catherine Reynolds nor Lydia Roberts is an outstanding literary figure. I have written about them only to stress a point I think it well to stress in this magazine, which I know our women writers read: that the field of literature is wide and its subjects too many to be counted; that writing on the great traditional subjects has become common to the point of staleness; and that life holds an abundance of subjects requiring nothing but sharpness of observation — if the woman writer can treat them in a literary style and steep the articles in her personality and her culture, her product will be literature: small literature, but literature! Literature of this kind finds its way swiftly to readers, because it springs from the very heart of life.