SOURCE: "Magazine Editors and the Stories of Thomas Nelson Page's Late Flowering," in Essays Mostly on Periodical Publishing in America, Duke University Press, 1973, pp. 148-61.

[Holman focuses on the non-Southern stories collected in Under the Crust, which found inhospitable magazine editors because they did not conform to Page's earlier local color stories of Southern chivalry. ]

Like his enemies, the stories a writer has trouble selling are one measure of the man; they also tell the reader of a later generation something of his time and place, and they make a useful gauge of his editors. The stories of Thomas Nelson Page's late flowering [published in Under the Crust (1908), included also in the collected Plantation Edition, and The Land of the Spirit (1913)] are a case in point. They consist of eleven atypical stories employing characters, settings, techniques, and themes significantly different from Page's earlier stories of planation life in antebellum piedmont Virginia. Consideration of these stories and the correspondence relating to them suggests that Page was more than a writer of local-color stories and that after his initial success his editors too often proved prescriptive rather than perceptive, wholly concerned with the preference of their readers, inhospitable to innovation, and consequently more aware of the day's marketplace than of either literary values or the future. A writer more greatly gifted than Page, or arrogant, or more aggressive in marketing what he wrote might have evaded their limitations without damage to himself, but that is speculation unrelated to consideration of these eleven non-Southern stories Page wrote to please himself.

The stories have been so generally ignored by critics and literary historians that some word on them is prerequisite for understanding what Page's editors found objectionable. All are social commentary verging upon protest, all attack man's inhumanity to man, and all imply criticism of whole castes, if not classes, in the American social structure. Though at first glance they appear mannered, dated, a little remote and genteel, they are close to the spirit of protesters like Veblen, young Garland, young Robert Herrick, and occasionally Frank Norris. They fall into three groups—five stories with New England settings, three strong stories which differ from each other and all his other fiction, and three stories with religious themes.

The New England stories are "Miss Godwin's Inheritance," published in Scribner's Magazine, 1904; "The New Lebanon Agent," originally called "The New Agent at Lebanon Station," Ladies' Home Journal, 1905; "Leander's Light," first called "Naboth's Vineyard," Century, 1907; "My Friend the Doctor," Scribner's Magazine, 1907; and "The Bigot," Scribner's Magazine, 1910. Page knew New England. Though Maine was his summer home for thirty years and local citizens counted him one of their own, he made no pretense to write from the inner consciousness of the villagers, as the local-color writers had done. By thus admitting the limitations of his own perceptions and experience, he avoided the condescension of summer-visitor writers like Edith Wharton, who had irritated Mary Wilkins Freeman and other native New Englanders. As usual, he was too honest an observer to risk faking what he did not know. The intent of the early Southern stories was to evoke time, place, and mood through the particulars of local color; in these New England stories the intent was quiet revelation of character, with setting only incidental. They appear in a volume significantly titled Under the Crust. For Page the shift involved innovations in technique as well as subject-matter and, less obviously, in center of interest. "The New Lebanon Agent," for example, is essentially objective. "Miss Godwin's Inheritance," which Charles Scribner considered "perfectly charming, and as a piece of art almost perfect" [correspondences cited in this essay are located in the Thomas Nelson Page collections at Duke University or the University of Virginia], differs from Page's earlier stories in having as both narrator and center of interest the simpatico summer visitor. In these New England stories Page makes his criticism explicit through the words of characters like Lishy Dow's widow in "My Friend the Doctor" when righteous indignation moved her to tell the self-gratifying Mrs. Durer exactly what she was.

By use of a different technique in three strong stories—"A Brother to Diogenes," Scribner's Magazine, 1906; "The Goth," Scribner's Magazine, 1907; and "The Outcast," in this country unpublished except in Page's The Land of the Spirit (1913)—Page leaves to the reader the responsibility for providing his own commentary. "A Brother to Diogenes" is essentially objective, that is, dramatic, with its central figure an unhappily materialistic man insensitive to the human values which Page believed sweeten life. The taut ending shows the story well made from the beginning. Page called it his California story because it evolved from a winter spent in Santa Barbara. "It contains some of my philosophy," he wrote his mother from Naples within sight of smoking volcano and unbelievably blue sea. That philosophy—the healing power of nature in mountain, field, and plain, coupled with the conviction that wealth limited to material things is ultimately poverty of spirit—is part of an agrarian revolt against the anonymity and increasing complexity of life that came with industrialization, thereby showing Page surprisingly akin to the Jack London of Martin Eden, the Booth Tarkington of the Growth trilogy, the Willa Cather of O, Pioneers!, the Ellen Glasgow of The Voice of the People, the Vanderbilt Fugitives, and the Maxwell Anderson of High Tor. By contrast, "The Goth" has its setting in Monte Carlo. This slice-of-life story of an international gambler given the cut direct by an acquaintance reads rather like a Richard Harding Davis story of fashionable society illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson; it happens to be a direct result of Page's reading a book on the psychology of compulsive gamblers at about the time he made two visits to Monte Carlo as an interested spectator in the winter of 1905-1906. Both this story and "The Outcast" demand that the reader produce his own commentary. "The Outcast" centers on a judge hearing the case of a prostitute accused of murder. In its dramatic presentation Page attempts to assess the basic responsibility for her situation, which by implication he attributes to her fatherless home. The situation clearly shows injustice, but Page did not demand what Brand Whitlock called instant reform. He was too good a lawyer, too knowledgeable in the ways of the world to expect that to work.

The final group of three stories is built around religious themes. "The Stranger's Pew," published in Scribner's Magazine in 1910, an effective retelling of the familiar story of a coldly formal church whose members could not recognize Christ in the flesh, reflects Page's continuing disavowal of worldliness within the church. "The Shepherd Who Watched by Night," Page's tribute to a brother who served as Episcopal rector in Virginia, Texas, and New York, is, he said [in the preface to The Land of the Spirit], "real enough to be a transcription of fact." Page never offered it to magazine editors, giving first rights instead to the Episcopal Church to use in raising funds for superannuated ministers. "The Stable of the Inn," which appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1912, is another affirmation of his religious commitment; derived from the Biblical account of the first Christmas, it is "to some extent based on the Golden Legend" [preface to The Land of the Spirit]. These religious stories are workmanlike examples of a kind rarely commanding the attention of scholars and critics. In subject-matter they bear some relation to the stories with which Henry Van Dyke had been instructing the multitudes, but they differ from his in being more restrained and comparatively sparse stylistically. Page claimed no literary excellence for them, but they had a certain appeal, as readers often reminded him.

However diversified the settings of these eleven stories, they have in common the subject of responsibility, which Page designated duty to God and man. As any reader who knows Page's earlier stories will recall, it was duty that sent Marse Chan to war, and duty that put iron into the soul of the old colonel who spiked his guns and sank them in the river before surrendering. The difference in emphasis, however, combined with new settings and experiments in technique, makes the later stories seem the work of another writer. The change, which was the basic cause of the editors' disaffection, challenges the reader to reassess for himself both the earlier stories and the later. After all the intervening years, of course, it is not likely that Page would find a wide audience of admirers again, but the reader who judges these stories of his late flowering by any objective standards will recognize in them evidence of a control of material, a knowledge of men and the world, and a more encompassing compassion than could have been predicted from the local-color stories on which Page's reputation still rests.

His apprenticeship to editors made him properly hesitant about going counter to their recommendations. Moreover, never a man to ignore an obligation, Page did not forget that without the active encouragement of the editors who came to Richmond to talk with him after publication of "Marse Chan" he would never have developed into a writer. William Dean Howells and Richard Watson Gilder made recommendations for cutting the long manuscript that fifteen years later became Red Rock (1898). Gilder urged him to record for the nation the recollections of a child growing up within sound of the battlefields; that account became Two Little Confederates, first published in 1888 and never out of print since. Robert Underwood Johnson suggested the theme of "Meh Lady." Editors taught him to shape and control his stories and to see all about him materials with fresh appeal to readers.

But those lessons had been learned in 1884-1886. Ten years later, the lyric impulse stilled by his wife's early death, Page was a different man with something else to say. By choice and conviction always a Virginian, he had in the intervening years lost the limitations of provincial horizons. Legal work for business interests he served had taken him into Colorado mining country and some even more inaccessible areas of the Appalachians. He carried letters of introduction from editors when he went to London to confer with financial backers. There his good breeding and charm continued to provide opportunities for intellectual and social life which included lunch with Edmund Gosse and W. M. Rossetti, Gosse's literary At-Homes, an afternoon with Kipling in his Embankment rooms, a Sunday with Thomas Hardy at the salon of Mrs. Francis Jeune, diplomatic receptions, days in the galleries of Parliament to study the oratory of Parnell, the theater with redoubtable old Countess Burdett-Coutts, friendship with Ada Rehan and the violinist Johannes Wolfe, beefsteak suppers in the Green Room of the Lyceum Theatre with Sir Henry Irving and the Beerbohm Trees, and a walking tour through Norway with the Irish editor of the London Sun. As a Southerner only a generation away from war and reconstruction, he found British attitudes toward life more congenial than those prevailing among Americans in the industrial and urban North, but when the financial panic of 1891 ended his English negotiations, he returned immediately home to Richmond. He was a cosmopolitan who kept his native roots.

The crucial year for Page, however, was 1892, when he "lectured"—that is, he read his own stories—from Boston to Denver and Palm Beach. Everywhere except in the impoverished South he saw the kind of wealth that, properly used, could found great libraries or free gifted individuals for work in the service of humanity and art, and what he saw aroused him to a sense of urgency: men of vision must take into the new industrial era the old aristocratic ideals of responsible leadership and service for the common good. A year later in Chicago his marriage to Mrs. Henry Field introduced him to the world of her Bryan and Lathrop relatives, unmistakably a moneyed aristocracy meeting its responsibilities in a mushrooming metropolis; her uncle was credited with bringing the Columbian Exposition to Chicago, her cousin served as secretary to liberal governor John Peter Altgeld, her brother gave sacrificially to support cultural activities, and Mrs. Page herself gave the nucleus of paintings for the Chicago Art Institute. Because her family was actively involved in the business of the city, they could give Page a depth of awareness that he might not have achieved without them. It has generally escaped the attention of critics that a full decade before the Muckrakers began spectacular disclosures about the new robber barons, Page was working into his stories satirical portraits of individuals who assumed money to be the one final measure of value. More significantly, he was writing stories of little people engulfed by urban blight and ill-planned industrialization, victims of what Kimball King called "an affluent society which has lost the traditional virtues of an aristocracy" ["Satirical Portraits by Thomas Nelson Page," Mississippi Quarterly, XVIII (Spring 1965)]. So long as these portraits were embedded in stories of plantation society, nobody seemed to pay much attention.

But increasingly when this new Page turned from accounts of a vanished past, the magazine editors did not like the change. They based their objections sometimes upon the story, sometimes upon Page's reputation, sometimes upon his "strong" language, and sometimes upon the expectation of their readers. Of the eleven short stories which I have been able to identify as part of this late burgeoning, Page managed to peddle nine essentially unchanged for magazine publication and gave to his church first-publication rights to a tenth one; of an additional group of manuscripts written in a new, sparse style from about 1897 to 1911 on subjects too powerful or controversial for editors to touch, however, Page seems to have saved intact only "The Outcast."

By this time Page had small need to turn out pot-boilers, because he was receiving a steady stream of book royalties from Scribner's. Though his wife's wealth paid most of their household bills, he remained scrupulously selfsupporting. His chief expense was subsidies for an astonishingly long list of unfortunates, many with no claim upon him except that they had nowhere else to turn. If financial pressures eventually caused Page to alter what he had written (as I can only surmise that in some cases they did) and if the pressures certainly caused him to publish poor material previously withheld, like "The Old Planters," it was essentially because he would not allow his wife or anyone else to meet responsibilities he had assumed for cousins in reduced circumstances, sick lawyers, a succession of widows and orphans, and former slaves who had never belonged to his family.

Letters to and from editors constitute the best evidence about the reaction to new developments in Page's writing. Page wrote Gilder in 1897 to suggest that he was experimenting deliberately with a way of writing which differed from his customary method. Ordinarily, except when he was writing an anecdote of the kind which gave him the reputation of raconteur par excellence, he began with a sketchlike impression of character or scene, in subsequent drafts revising form and action into it, often over a period of years. He seems to have suggested to Gilder in this letter that he was trying a direct story line to fit subject matter different from his plantation stories: "It's all right about the story," he wrote after Gilder had rejected an unspecified manuscript.

I am sorry it does not appeal to you; but that's the test in a way. . . . It is not homogeneous—not complete up close enough—and the episodes are episodes rather than segments of a well rounded and compact story. All this I know and shall remedy. But the succinct, colorless, direct narrative is what I am after here, and the style was deliberately adopted. I want to try it, and it must go so or not at all.

[Page to Gilder, December 3, 1897]

This was probably the "novelette or Long Story" which Edward Bok had wanted to see but returned because the Ladies' Home Journal required "the predominance of the feminine" [Bok to Page, January 28, 1898].

Careful attention to background was "the color" that editors not only expected, but demanded from Page. When he did not give it to them, they rejected his work. A case in point is the urban novel, The Untried Way, on which he had been working for several years in the directly simple style appropriate to the subject. In rejecting it, E. L. Burlingame of Scribner's Magazine explained:

I really do not think that the story would be successful, judged by your own standards and the standards of your previous work; and I cannot help thinking it likely that a re-reading after an interval may make you agree with me, at least with regard to the present form. It seems to me, frankly, bald and held down very close to the actions of the plot, without the color which you usually give (except perhaps in the first sketch of the hero in the opening chapter) and it affects me rather like the scenario of a story than like the story itself in your usual sense. If I did not know to the contrary, I should imagine it had been sketched out long ago with the intention of founding something upon it later; but I know that it is sometimes the effect when a warm colorist, in some sudden mood of reaction, keeps himself pretty rigidly in line. The experiment is always a hard one to try; and in this case I think the reader will not read as much into the result as you yourself had in mind in making the sketch.

[Burlingame to Page, July 29, 1898]

It is significant that Burlingame, acting here in dual editorial roles, with this same letter both rejected the manuscript for Scribner's Magazine and accepted it for book publication by Charles Scribner's Sons if Page insisted.

But in this instance Page's literary judgement must have yielded to his quick pride. I found no manuscript of The Untried Way in the vast Thomas Nelson Page collections, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library at the University of Virginia and in the William R. Perkins Library at Duke University. Apparently Page uncharacteristically destroyed it, or possibly he made subsequent use of it as foundation for John Marvel (1909) or, more probably, Gordon Keith (1903).

Magazine editors also gave Page trouble about all his other long manuscripts except Red Rock (1898). In these manuscripts he was writing of prostitution, mercenary marriages, the urban poor and conspicuous consumers of wealth, the staggering impact of alien migrations into the Anglo-Saxon culture of middle America, and of Southerners as corrupt politicians, money-grabbers, and the self-serving rievers and destroyers of a mountain mining town. No one, editors or reviewers, seems to have been bothered by his failure to grapple with the basics of economics and human relations, or by his offering as solution for all problems the domestic virtues of duty and compassionate brotherly love. What did bother the reviewers was exactly what his editors had objected to. "It is when the action of his stories changes to the North that we miss something of the charm of Mr. Page's earlier work," Herman Knickerbocker Vielé wrote in The Bookman [XVII (July 1903)], as if Virginia possessed inherent powers to cast charm upon unscrupulous business dealings and violent death. "There are many who can paint the railroad strikes of John Marvel or the speculation of Gordon Keith," Arthur Hobson Quinn later wrote regretfully; "no one but a Southern gentleman could have written Red Rock or 'Meh Lady'" ["Mr. Page in Fiction and Poetry," The Book News Monthly, XXVIII (November 1909)].

Moreover, John Marvel, innocuous as that work now seems, was kept out of sight in English circulating libraries except when a patron specifically requested it. "God bless the smug souls of the English Circulating Libraries!" Page exploded to Charles Scribner.

Are not they a choice lot? Think of [Elinor Glyn's] Three Weeks and George Moore and Man and Superman [Page after all belonged to the audiences that Shaw enjoyed shocking] and a few other choice morsels of pruriency and the way in which they turned them over their tongues, and smacked their greasy lips at their salacious taste, and then consider John Marvel doubtful!

I should not mind anything but doubtful, but if it does not go head on against their whole position of smuggy bourgeois hypocrisy, it is nothing. . . .

[Page to Scribner, March 12, 1910]

In effect, then, what his magazine editors and individual readers were demanding of Page was more Southern material of the kind he had been writing twenty years before. The notable exception was Scribner's Magazine, whose editors, though sometimes unenthusiastic about his finished product, made no effort to dictate what he wrote. Charles and Arthur Scribner had assembled an editorial staff including W. C. Brownell, E. L. Burlingame, and Robert Bridges, whose perceptive awareness of many kinds of excellence established the liberal milieu which Maxwell Perkins later inherited. Unlike some others, they did not reject good work in favor of inferior. Perhaps it was because they were also editors for the publishing house, with an obligation to keep a successful novelist happy. More probably, simply because they were editors for Charles Scribner's Sons they had a less restricted vision of what literature and the world are in reality, and thus a clearer understanding of the editor's relationship to the writer.

Among other editors, S. S. McClure asked for a series of articles on race relations in the South, subsequently collected as The Negro: The Southerner's Problem. He also asked Page for stories, but turned down two of the New England group as "what you might call a Northern story, a field in which we get plenty of stories [McClure to Page, Feb. 27, 1904]," and Page vowed to send him no more. Nor could Page place with his usual editors an article on the education of poor country girls in the South—of vital concern to Page and his father before him—and so he sold "A Neglected Class" to Good Housekeeping at about half his usual rates. Yet at the same time a Southern plantation story, like "Mam Lyddy's Recognition," bought by Charles Belmont Davis at Collier's, commanded top prices.

The editor who most frequently transgressed against Page's sense of values was Robert Underwood Johnson, who combined with an infinite capacity for detail a remarkable insensitivity to persons, managing to create one uproar after another without any awareness of storms about to break upon his head. Because Johnson was one of the editors cordial to him in the early years, Page swallowed without comment such judgments as "though it is not a 'Marse Chan,' and depends upon its interest rather than on its charm (a quality we hope to find in the Xmas story) we shall be glad to publish 'The New Lebanon Agent' . . ." [Johnson to Page, May 13, 1904]. But the condescending cajolery of another letter proved too much for Page. "At the earliest moment practicable," Johnson wrote,

we have read "My Friend Naboth," and Mr. Gilder desires me to say how we feel about it.

We find it not a story, in the sense of dramatic movement and interplay, but a sketch—to be sure, complete and rounded out with your wonted geniality—a typical though not very vivid sketch of our time. Now, what we are always hoping you will do for your old friends of The Century is to send them a first-rate breathless story which we can say is among your very best. As we have said, this is a sketch rather than a story. We want to have you in The Century's pages but we do not quite feel up to paying story prices for it. We do not like any more than you the bargaining side of literature, but unfortunately it is one that has to be fronted. . . .

We hope that you will put it within our reach.

[Johnson to Page, December 21, 1906]

Page fired off a reply by return mail:

As . . . you do not think it a story at all, but only a sketch, and not a very vivid sketch at that, I am going to get you to send it back to me, and see if I can't write "horse" plainly enough on it to have someone recognize the genus. . . .

This is the second piece of writing on paper that I have sent to The Century under the impression that it was a story, but which has been stamped sketch and returned to me. I do not in the least question the sincerity of your views about it, for I am conceited enough to believe that you would be reasonably glad to publish a "story" by me; and, of course, I know that what you call an acceptable story must be of more immediate value to you than what you call a sketch, and what I call a story, but I do not know just what constitutes the difference.

I would call "Rab and His Friends" [by Dr. John Brown] and "Posson Jone" [by George W. Cable] stories, as I did call "A Brother to Diogenes" a story, though none of these has in it what I understand by "dramatic movement and interplay," each of them being, in fact, but a story of one dog, or one man, in which is grouped or is attempting!?] to be grouped, a picture of a segment of life amid which the scene is placed.

Referring to some of the "authorities," I find that one Joseph Addison, himself a writer of sketches, defines a story as "the relation of an incident or minor event, a short narrative, a tale," while in a recently published authority of great weight I find that a story in the sense in which the term is used in literature is defined as "a narrative; a tale written in more or less imaginative style, especially a fictitious tale, shorter and less elaborate than a novel," while I find a sketch appears to have as an essential a brief, slight, or hasty delineation or composition. Now, I am afraid you read The Century Dictionary too much and Addison too little. I know that often a man is not a good judge of his own work, so I let pass the fact that I think "My Friend Naboth," a name for which I shall substitute "Leander's Light," a pretty good relation, I mean for me, of minor events in the life of an old Maine countryman and his sister. It was written with a view to showing that under their hard and repellant exterior there lies a deep vein of sentiment that makes them close kin to the rest of Anglo-Saxondom, to whom the love of home and family is the most vital and lasting of all principles.

[Page to Johnson, December 22, 1906]

Though neither Page nor his editors knew it then, Page had the future on his side, for the short story as written by Sherwood Anderson and all his literary descendants resembles more nearly Page's picture of a "segment of life" than Johnson's plotted "dramatic movement and interplay." In this matter, by insight or accident, the writer evidenced better judgment than his editors.

Johnson rejected "The Stranger's Pew" because it lacked "the novelty which the public would expect from you . . . admirable as it is in feeling and direction of purpose" [Johnson to Page, April 21, 1910]. Of course he and other editors meant novelty acceptable to them, not a shocker like "A Modern Brutus," later renamed "The Outcast." "Your story, 'A Modern Brutus,' is terribly impressive," wrote H. M. Alden from Harper's Magazine.

It does not read like a piece of fiction but like a strong narrative of fact. I do not think a story of this kind presented in this way will be kindly received by our readers. The sheer strength of the presentment seems to make it impossible. I am sorry that I must return it. . . .

[Alden to Page, January 12, 1910]

Similarly, Charles Belmont Davis returned it because

notwithstanding the power with which you have told this big story, we cannot believe it is the best kind of story for Collier's.. . . Certainly no charge of pruriency could be brought against this tale. . . . I can only hope you will send us something else that will come more within the scope of what we believe our readers want.

[Davis to Page, February 4, 1910]

No other magazine editor would publish it. In 1913, while clearing his desk before he went to serve as Ambassador to Rome, Page included it in The Land of the Spirit, a volume of short stories which was not republished as part of his collected edition. Three years later, to Page's distress, "The Outcast" was made into a movie with Mae Marsh in the lead; special preshowing to local clergymen to attest that it was a proper movie for a decent community were emphasized by screaming advertisements.

From about 1895 when he was writing The Untried Way, unpublished and now lost, editors again and again asked Page for stories, and what they bought again and again was material related in some fashion to the plantation stories that had brought him fame. Again and again, with such grace as was given to them, editors returned other materials to him with a variety of explanations: too stark, too bald, too lacking in warmth and color, too powerful, a sketch rather than a plotted story, or simply not what they wanted from him. Comparing what any one editor bought with what he rejected makes clear the fact that what they wanted of Page was Southern materials, Southern plantation material only. Johnson, who longed for another "Marse Chan" at bargain prices, bought "The Old Planters," a derivative and rambling piece that Page had pulled from his files and rewritten, but he returned "The New Lebanon Agent," which by any objective standards is better work, and S. S. McClure commissioned controversial articles on race relations in the South but turned down two quiet New England stories. The fact that few of these later stories of Page's have great appeal for the general reader of a later day is quite beside the point: The combined influence of the magazine editors was against change, experimentation, or innovation in form, content, or style.

This record of Page and his editors offers support for a theory by which Fred Lewis Pattee explained the plight of distinguished local colorists, like Mary Noailles Murfree, who in their later writing years were reduced to peddling stories from editor to editor. When Garland wrote Pattee that "the writer can't go on doing it over and over," Pattee philosophised, "And yet the reading public, or perhaps it is the publishers, brand their new writers with a herd mark and do not let them escape the ranch where they made their first appearance" [Penn State Yankee, 1953]. For Page, the record clearly shows, magazine editors with the notable exception of those at Scribner's did what they could to restrict him to plantation Virginia and the kind of stories he had been writing when first he came to their attention.