A Woman of Genius. Mary Hunter Austin
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to stamp it with insidious impropriety. There is at times something almost heroic in the resolution with which women like Pauline Mills defend themselves from whatever might shift the centres of their complacency.
But even without Pauline, it interests me greatly to undertake this book, of which I have said in the title as much as a phrase may of the scope of the undertaking, for if I know anything of genius it is wholly extraneous, derived, impersonal, flowing through and by. I cannot tell you what it is, but I hope to show you a little of how I was seized of it, shaped; what resistances opposed to it; what surrenders. I mean to put as plainly as possible how I felt it fumbling at my earlier life like the sea at the foot of a tidal wall, and by what rifts in the structure of living, its inundation rose upon me; by what practices and passions I was enlarged to it, and by what well meaning of my friends I was cramped and hardened. But of its ultimate operation once it had worked up through my stiff clay, of triumphs, profits, all the intricacies of technique, gossip of rehearsals, you shall hear next to nothing. This is the story of the struggle between a Genius for Tragic Acting and the daughter of a County Clerk, with the social ideal of Taylorville, Ohianna, for the villain. It is a drama in which none of the characters played the parts they were cast for, and invariably spoke from the wrong cues, which nevertheless proceeded to a successful dénouement. But if you are looking for anything ordinarily called plot, you will be disappointed. Plot is distinctly the province of fiction, though I've a notion there is a sort of order in my story, if one could look at it from the vantage of the gods, but I have never rightly made it out. What I mean to go about is the exploitation of the personal phases of genius, of which when it refers to myself you must not understand me to speak as of a peculiar merit, like the faculty for presiding at a woman's club or baking sixteen pies of a morning, which distinguished one Taylorvillian from another; rather as a seizure, a possession which overtook me unaware, like one of those insidious Oriental disorders which you may never die of, but can never be cured. You shall hear how I did successfully stave it off in my youth for the sake of a Working Taylor and Men's Outfitter, and was nearly intimidated out of it by the wife of a Chicago attorney who had something to do with stocks; how I was often very tired of it, and many times, especially in the earlier periods when I was trying to effect a compromise between it and the afore-mentioned Taylorvillian predilections, I should have been happiest to have been quit of it altogether.
I shall try to have you understand that I have not undertaken to restate those phases of autobiography which are commonly suppressed, because of an exception to what the public has finally and at large concurred in, that it does not particularly matter what happens to the vessel of personality, so long as the essential fluid gets through; but from having gone so much farther to discover that it matters not a little to Genius to be so scamped and retarded. I have arrived at seeing the uncritical acceptance of poverty and heartbreak as essential accompaniments of Gift, very much of a piece with the proneness of Christians to regard the early martyrdoms as concomitants of faith, when every thinking person knows they arose in the cruelty and stupidity of the bystanders. Hardly any one seems to have recalled in this connection, that the initial Christian experience is a baptism of Joy, and it was only in the business of communicating it that it became bloody and tormenting. If you will go a little farther with me, you shall be made to see the miseries of genius, perhaps also the bulk of wretchedness everywhere, not so much the rod of inexplicable chastisement, as the reaction of a purblind social complacency.
I shall take you at the sincerest in admitting the function of Art to be its re-kneading of the bread of life until it nourishes us toward greater achievement, as a basis for proving that much that you may be thinking about its processes is wrong, and most that you may have done for its support is beside the mark. If I have had any compunction about writing this book, it has been the fear that in the relation of incidents difficult and sordid, you might still miss the point of your being largely to blame for them. And even if you escape the banality of believing that my having lived for a week in Chicago on 85 cents was in any way important to my artistic development, and go so far as to apprehend it as it actually was, a foolish and unnecessary interference with my business of serving you anew with entertainment, you must go a little farther honestly to accept it, even when it came—this revitalizing fluid of which I was for the moment the vase, the cup—in circumstances which in the rule you live by, appear, when not actually reprehensible, at least ridiculous.
Looking back over a series of struggles that have left me in a frame when no man under forty interests me very much, still within the possibility of personal romance, and at an age when most women have the affectional value of a keepsake only, the arbiter and leader of my world, I seem to see my life not much else but a breach in the social fabric, sedulously bricked up from within and battered from without, through which at last pours light and the fluid soul of Life. Something of all this I shall try to make plain to you, and incidentally how in the process I have perceived dimly this huge coil of social adjustment as a struggle against the invasive forces of blessedness, the smother of sheep in the lanes stupidly to escape the fair pastures toward which a large Friendliness herds them. If you go as far as this with me, you shall avoid, who knows, what indirection, and that not altogether without entertainment.
CHAPTER II
Of Taylorville, where I grew up and was married, the most distinguishing thing was that there was nothing to distinguish it from a hundred towns in Ohianna. To begin with, it was laid out about a square, and had two streets at right angles known as Main and Broad. Broad Street, I remember, ran east and west between the high school and the railway station, and Main Street had the Catholic cemetery on the south, and the tool and hoe works on the north to mark—there was no other visible distinction—the points at which it became country road. There were numerous cross streets, east and west, called after the Governors, or perhaps it was the Presidents, and north and south, set forth on official maps as avenues, taking their names from the trees with which they were falsely declared to be planted, though I do not recall that they were ever spoken of by these names except by the leading county paper which had its office in one corner of the square over the Coöperative store, was Republican in politics, and stood for Progress.
The square was planted with maples; a hitching rack ran quite around it and was, in the number and character of the vehicles attached to it, a sort of public calendar for the days of the week and the seasons. On court days and elections, I remember, they quite filled the rack and overflowed to the tie-posts in front of the courthouse, which stood on its own ground a little off from the square, balanced on the opposite side by the Methodist Church. It was a perfect index to the country neighbourhoods that spread east and north to the flat, black corn lands, west to the marl and clay of the river district, and south to the tall-weeded, oozy Bottoms. Teams from the Bottoms, I believe, always had cockleburs in their tails; and spanking dapple grays drove in with shining top-buggies from the stock farms whose flacking windmills on the straight horizons of the north, struck on my childish fancy as some sort of mechanical scarecrow to frighten away the homey charms of the wooded hills. I recall this sort of detail as the only thing in my native town that affected my imagination. When I saw the flakes of black loam dropping from the tires, or the yellow clay of the river district caked solidly about the racked hubs, I was stirred by the allurement of travel and adventure, the movement of human enterprise on the fourwent ways of the world.
From my always seeming to see them so bemired with their recent passages, I gather that my observations must have been made chiefly in winter on my way to school. From other memories of Taylorville arched in by the full-leaved elms and maples, smelling of dust and syringas, and never quite separable from a suspicion of boredom, I judge my summer acquaintance with its streets to have been chiefly by way of going to church, for, until the winter I was eleven years old, Taylorville, the world in fact, meant Hadley's pasture.
It lay back of that part of the town where our house was, contiguous to a common of abandoned orchard and cow lot, and if it lacked anything of adventurous occasion and delight, we, Forrie and Effie and I, the McGee children, and the little Allinghams, did not know it. There was a sort of convention of childhood that we should never go straight to it by the proper path, but it must always be taken by assault or stealth: