Black Oxen (Unabridged). Gertrude Atherton

      XIV

       Table of Contents

      Gora Dwight, after the fashion of other successful authors, had recently bought a house. It was in East Thirty-fifth Street, not far from the one at present occupied by Madame Zattiany, but nearer Lexington Avenue. It was one of the old monotonous brownstone houses, but with a "southern exposure," and the former owner had removed the front steps and remodeled the lower floor.

      The dining-room, on the left of the entrance, was a long admirably proportioned room, and the large room above, which embraced the entire floor, Miss Dwight had converted into a library both sumptuous and stately. She had bought her furniture at auction that it might not look too new, and on the longer walls were bookcases seven feet high. She had collected a small library before the war; and for the many other books, some of them rare and all highly valued by their present possessor, she had haunted second-hand bookshops.

      The prevailing tone of the room was brown and gold, enlivened discreetly with red, and the chairs and lounges were deep and comfortable. A large davenport stood before the fireplace, which had been rebuilt for logs. There was a victrola in one corner, for Miss Dwight was amenable if her guests were seized with the desire to jazz, and a grand piano stood near the lower windows. The only evidence of sheer femininity was a tea table furnished with old pieces of silver she had picked up in France. The dining-room below was a trifle gayer in effect; the walls and curtains were a deep yellow and there were always flowers on the table.

New York knew so much about this new literary planet that it took for granted there was nothing further to be discovered. There are always San Franciscans in the great city, and when she became famous they were obliging with their biographical data. Life had been hard on her at first, for although she came of old Revolutionary stock she grew up in poverty and obscurity. Her father had been a failure, and after the death of her parents she had kept a lodging house for business women, taking courses at the University of California meanwhile; later she had studied nursing and made her mark with physicians and surgeons. Her brother, a good-looking chap with fine manners, but a sort of super-moron, had unexpectedly married into the old aristocracy of San Francisco, and Gora, through her sister-in-law, the lovely Alexina Groome,¹ had seen something of the lighter side of life. During this period she had written a number of short stories that had been published in the best magazines, and one novel of distinction that had made a "howling success" in San Francisco, owing to the unprecedented efforts of the fashionable people led by young Mrs. Mortimer Dwight; but had fallen flat in the East in spite of the reviews. Then had come a long intermission when fictionists were of small account in a world of awful facts. She was quite forgotten, for she made not even a casual contribution to the magazines; shortly after the war broke out she offered her services to England and for long and weary years was one of the most valued nurses in the British armies. At the close of the war she had returned to California, intending to write her new novel at Lake Tahoe, but finding the season in full swing she had gone to some small interior town and written it there. When it was finished she had brought it on to New York and had remained here ever since.

      So ended the brief biography, which was elaborated in many articles and interviews.

      As for the novel, it won her instant fame and a small fortune. It was gloomy, pessimistic, excoriating, merciless, drab, sordid, and hideously realistic. Its people hailed from that plebeian end of the vegetable garden devoted to turnips and cabbages. They possessed all the mean vices and weaknesses that detestable humanity has so far begotten. They were all failures and their pitiful aspirations were treated with biting irony. Futile, futile world!

      The scene was laid in a small town in California, a microcosm of the stupidities of civilization and of the United States of America in particular. The celebrated "atmosphere" of the state was ignored. The town and the types were "American"; it would seem that merely some unadmitted tenuous sentiment had set the scene in the state of the author's birth, but there the concession ended. Even the climate was treated with the scorn that all old clichés deserved. (Her biographers might have contributed the information that the climate of a California interior town in summer is simply infernal.)

      Naturally, the book created a furore. A few years before it would have expired at birth, even had a publisher been mad enough to offer it to a smug contented world. But the daily catalogue of the horrors and the obscenities of war, the violent dislocations that followed with their menaces of panic and revolution that affected the nerves and the pockets of the entire commonwealth, the irritable reaction against the war itself, knocked romance, optimism, aspiration, idealism, the sane and balanced judgment of life, to smithereens. More clichés. The world was rotten to the core and the human race so filthy the wonder was that any writer would handle it with tongs. But they plunged to their necks. The public, whose urges, inhibitions, complexes, were in a state of ferment, but inarticulate, found their release in these novels and stories and wallowed in them. The more insulting, the more ruthless, the more one-sided the disclosure of their irremediable faults and meannesses, the more voluptuous the pleasure. There had been reactions after the Civil War, but on a higher plane. The population had not been maculated by inferior races.

      The young editors, critics, special writers were enchanted. This was Life! At last! Moreover, it was Democracy. These young and able men, having renounced their earlier socialism, their sense of humor recognizing its disharmony with high salaries and pleasant living, were hot for Democracy. Nothing paid like Democracy in this heaving world. The Democratic wave rose and roared. Symbolic was this violent eruption of small-town fiction, as realistic as the kitchen, as pessimistic as Wall Street. All virtue, all hope, all idealism, had gone out of the world. Romance, for that matter, never had existed and it was high time the stupid world was forcibly purged of its immemorial illusion. Life was and ever had been sordid, commonplace, ignoble, vulgar, immedicable; refinement was a cowardly veneer that was beneath any seeker after Truth, and Truth was all that mattered. Love was to laugh. Happiness was hysteria, and content the delusion of morons (a word now hotly racing "authentic"). As for those verbal criminals, "loyalty" and "patriotism"—fecit vomitare.

      Their success was colossal.

      Gora Dwight caught the crest of the wave and sold three hundred thousand copies of "Fools." She immediately signed a contract with one of the "woman's magazines" for the serial rights of her next novel for thirty thousand dollars, and received a corresponding advance from her publisher. Her short stories sold for two thousand dollars apiece, and her first novel was exhumed and had a heavy sale.

      It was difficult to be pessimistic with a hundred thousand dollars in bonds and mortgages and the deed of a house in her strong box, but Gora Dwight was an artist and could always fall back on technique. But although her book was the intellectual expression of wildly distorted complexes, owing to the disillusionments of war, the humiliation of her ego in woman's most disastrous adventure, and the consequent repression of all her dearest urges, she deserved her success far more than any of her adolescent rivals. She had formed her style in the days of complete normalcy, and not only was that style distinguished, vigorous, and individual, but she was able to convey her extremest realism so subtly and yet so unambiguously that she could afford to disdain the latrinities of the "younger school." A marvellous feat. Most of them used the frank vocabulary of the humble home, as alone synonymous with Truth. Never before had such words invaded the sacrosanct pages of American letters. Little they recked, as Mr. Lee Clavering, who took the entire school as an obscene joke, pointed out, that they were but taking the shortest cut—advantage of the post-war license affecting all classes—to save themselves the exhausting effort of acquiring a vocabulary and forming a style.

      The spade as a symbol vanished from fiction.

      Miss Dwight had her own ideals, little as she permitted her unfortunate characters to have any, and not only was