CHAPTER XXIX

ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Coburn: Mrs. Fordyce Coburn) is the most fanciful writer in America to-day. Fanciful, inventive--not imaginative in the large and proper sense of the word imagination. Her method in writing is utterly different from that of any other popular author. She is in this respect as unique as Harold Bell Wright--to whom she bears no resemblance whatever. Wright starts a novel--we hope the reader will pardon this digression--by making an elaborate outline, synopsis, scenario, _not_ of the story but of certain moral and ethical ideas, concepts and principles which he wishes to impress upon his readers. Sometimes up to the very last typewritten draft of one of his books the characters are known only by words denoting the things they stand for. Then, at the eleventh hour, Wright strikes out “Greed” and inserts “Obadiah Jackson” and “Manliness” and inserts “David Fanning”--and the copy goes to the printer.

Mrs. Coburn, or Miss Abbott as we may permit ourselves to call her because of her pen name’s connotations--Miss Abbott finds a title and then constructs her story. “Her stories are made to revolve around the title, rather than an outgrowth of any plot,” says a writer in the Boston _Globe_, upon whose article we rely mainly for the facts of this chapter. It is an article with rather too much fluff but it presents the really interesting facts about the author of _Molly Make-Believe_ and presents them with point. The writer of it says: “Once a satisfactory title occurs to Miss Abbott, she follows it in exactly the same manner as the detective who is pursuing a clue.”

This is perfectly intelligible. _Molly Make-Believe_ as a title teems with ideas; so does _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_; so does _The White-Linen Nurse_.

“My characters are always wholly imaginary. I have never yet put a real person in a story. I doubt if I ever shall, for once I begin to weave a tale, imagination has too vivid a hold on me.”

Upon this the Boston _Globe_ writer remarks, with a great deal of truthfulness:

“She may choose a commonplace subject--a girl, a woman, a road, a husband.... Mrs. Coburn immediately succeeds in placing hers in the uncommon category. It is the qualifying adjective that plays a prominent part in making her subjects peculiarly original. She specifies that her heroine is a sick-a-bed lady, her girl is very tired, her thoroughfare is a runaway road, and even the husband in her sanitarium story is a Sunday spouse.

“It is not her nomenclature alone that is unique and attractive. Added to marked creative ability, she has a quality of verbal fitness, and her phrases are charged with amazing intensity and force, so that there is an exhilaration in her pages. Indeed, as one of her friends said, after reading _The Kink in the Air_, one about decides that it is the ‘kink’ in this author’s style that is its chiefest charm.”

Many scoff; Franklin P. Adams used to divert himself with Eleanor Hallowell Abbottisms; scratching the surface of the ground like an industrious hen you may uncover many choice morsels of wriggling English. But if you think these are all the Eleanor Hallowell Abbott books contain you are as deluded as the hen that thinks she has uncovered earth’s deepest secrets. Below, far below, but not buried at such a depth as to be uncoverable by ordinary minds, are veins of pure humor, tenderness; the rich gold of sympathy and friendly fancifulness. They are paying streaks. Pick up a reprinted copy of _Molly Make-Believe_ and look at the page in the front which records _over twenty_ editions in five years!

We follow the lead of the Boston _Globe_ article:

Miss Abbott works slowly and carefully. Her chief concern while writing is with her own feeling about the tale she is at work upon. Unless she comes to like it pretty well she does not send it to a publisher. It must interest her first as some sort of warranty that it will interest others. “Painter, musician, writer--whether anybody else likes your work or not,” she says, “doesn’t specially matter if you can only bring that work to the point where you like it yourself.”

She writes entirely upon the typewriter. Even the first draft is composed on a machine. Frequently she spends the entire day at her machine. In writing _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_ she devoted twelve hours each day for nine days to the task and this, with one exception, is the quickest story-making she has ever accomplished. It is, by any standard, a tremendous bit of work. Three, four, rarely six hours a day is the ordinary day’s work of a busy writer. Twelve hours on a stretch can be and is managed once in a great while when circumstances make the work imperative; but it is not managed for more than a day or two and is usually followed by a complete rest, sometimes in bed and with medical attendance! Twelve hours a day for nine days--it will make the hardiest shudder. Many of the best American writers are entirely satisfied if they do 500 or 1,000 words a day--and not every day at that. But as a rule Miss Abbott takes from a month to a year to write in such time as she can dedicate to it a short story, or a long short story, or a short novel. In eight years she wrote some twenty stories. For two years in succession she won a $1,000 prize in _Collier’s Weekly_ short story contests with _The Very Tired Girl_ and _The Sick-a-Bed Lady_.

Before her marriage to Dr. Fordyce Coburn Miss Abbott was secretary and English assistant in the State Normal School at Lowell, Massachusetts. This job kept her at her desk all day and it was in hours when she might have been expected to be asleep or resting or playing that she hunted titles and let her fancy do what it would with them. She used a pen name at first. Her first serious attempts at writing were in verse. Two long poems published in _Harper’s Magazine_ attracted much attention.

How curiously things go in this world! Miss Abbott had furnished the text and scheme for an advertising circular sent out by a Boston firm. The circular was so strikingly good that business houses began to come to its originator with offers of advertising contracts. Miss Abbott was for some time in a state of indecision as to whether she should develop her gift for writing advertisements or try to succeed with stories. Finally she sent two tales to two magazines with the mental resolution:

“If these are rejected, I believe I’ll take up commercial writing.”

But both stories were accepted. Miss Abbott says that she owes her success as a fictioneer, therefore, to _Lippincott’s Magazine_ and the _Smart Set_ quite as much as to anything else.

As readers will have suspected, Miss Abbott is a member of the family which has attained