SITTING IN THE PUBLIC EYE

I could have been contented with intimate blessings. I do not remember ever to have craved a career. I do not now understand those who strive so brilliantly and senselessly for recognition, fame, and one sort of distinction or another.

For me the career of an author was purely accidental and resulted from a desperate emergency. I have written all this out more particularly in another book, but while we are on this subject of careers and recognition I may as well set down now what I have to say about that.

Anything you do, however well, which draws the world’s attention is a fearful thing, not to be lightly sought. And I do not refer in this connection to the competitive jealousies engendered by success, having had no experiences along this line. What I am trying to tell you is that with the rewards one earns in this business some right to live privately passes away. Your habitation may be divided from the crowded world by a thousand hills, but there are voluntary biographers in it who create the life they think you live back there. I could write much more entrancing legends about myself.

I have an ambition to sit gracefully in the public eye, one hand resting on my desk, neatly littered with manuscript, and the other curled like a white lily across my breast. When you are posing thus in your own mind it is disconcerting to learn that you are a country policeman, conscientious in the discharge of your duties. I respect policemen, but I should shrink from crowding into that profession.

If you have written much testifying to your Christian faith, even if you do admit a somewhat crank-sided human nature, it is depressing to learn that you are an atheist smoking with bad doctrines.

After that happened, I had no sooner retired behind that Scripture which says, ‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, for my sake ... for great is your reward in heaven’--and I am taking particular satisfaction in the dark intimation as to the probable nature of this reward--than I was startled by the report that I had become a Catholic. This is a compliment which I shall never deserve, even though I am totally lacking in Protestant animus against the Catholics. If you have been one of those certified widows so highly recommended in Paul’s epistle to Timothy it feels very queer to hear that you have been cutting a swath in the social life of Havana.

Not everything you hear about yourself can be considered good publicity. And if you have delicate sensibilities, the currycomb of public imagination frequently rubs your vanities the wrong way.

You can never choose your own duties or pastimes again. You must work at your thoughts. They hold you and compel you like voices calling to be heard.

Sometimes now I still feel the womanly instinct stirring in me to sew a fine seam. I want to lay a pattern on a piece of beautiful cloth, cut out something sweet and make it. I long to gather a ruffle with my fingers, pin one end of it down and scratch the gathers with my needle as I used to do long ago. But I never can do it. No time. No such cunning left now in my fingers. I have become a sewless woman.

When it is a fine, large, perfectly rounded day, with the sun shining and all the leaves talking in the wind and a faint perfume of woodland flowers floats in through the window like an invitation, I would give much to cast my pen far from me and follow it out and away to the deep green valleys where these blossoms bloom. But I cannot take the day off. I must stay here and write down the things my mind makes believe. No real blossoms, only the things I know--so little, compared with what the trees tell and the river sings, if you know how to listen.

Every author knows what I mean. We become the slaves of our thoughts that must be written before they fade into forgetfulness.

Invitations to speak upon public occasions are among my most grievous embarrassments. Why is it inferred that one is or can be a public speaker because she has written a book? Writing is a very private business. I do not know any other occupation which requires so much privacy unless it is a life of prayer or a life of crime.

During these many years with a bee in my bonnet and a pen in my hand I have practically lost my oral faculties. I cannot scintillate on a rostrum. The flare of so many faces would put out my light. I am accustomed to work in the presence of three open-eyed windows which look upon a wide green forest. Much motion and life out there, but complete and magnificent indifference to the mortal mind in here struggling with the adverb of an idea.

I am not apologizing, you understand, for not being able to live up to this side demand of a literary reputation. I am simply telling what happens to one not anxious to dine on her own fame in a public place. Many people will not believe an author shrinks from committing this act of sublimated cannibalism, because so many of them do it, especially the English writers imported by our women’s clubs. But I cannot be made to believe they enjoy the performance. One must have spent a while in England, realized how repressed their enthusiasms are, for Americans to understand how these speakers must suffer from our goggle-eyed reverence for their voice culture, their outrageous pronunciations and their perfectly exquisite intellectuality. Nothing, I believe, but a sense of financial duty to themselves brings them to us.

Meanwhile women are now the best public speakers in this country. They have something to say, and they are saying it with charm and courage. Heaven forbid that I should ever expose my old ruminating mind among them on the stage! What I mean is this: When you write you may take infinite time and patience to say what you want to say. You write in ten different ways. You reface it and begin again and again until the breathless, speechless idea you had lives and shines. This is how slow the pen-traveling mind may be; but try fumbling the ball of your thought like that before an audience and see what happens to you! The reporters would be justified in publishing the news that you had a stroke which rendered you practically inarticulate soon after you began your address.

As for preparing an address and delivering it with your eyes and spectacles fixed upon the page instead of the audience, I know this is intolerable, for I have been in many an audience on similar occasions and it has frequently occurred to me that the offending person might have chosen something much better from a book to read.

That which so many people strive to win must be a good thing, but I am simply telling you what fame costs. Once you grow accustomed to being famous, you do not realize it, but you are never quite your humble, honest self. No matter how tight you keep the lid on, there is some watered stock of vanity inside. You are always in danger of the thing’s coming off and of giving yourself an air or two. No man or woman was ever so distinguished that this exhibition did not make him ridiculous, especially to those of meaner minds.

But the final and most depressing part comes in the evening of your great day when you are no longer great. Your career has ended. Fame fades like a withered rose in your hair, and you are forgotten even if your works are not. Other writers, whom you naturally feel are not doing so well, are popping up in the public eye.

I am still sufficiently able-bodied in my mind and spirit not to notice the crowding forward of these youngsters; but I have a sort of presentiment that after a while, when I am no longer strong enough to practice nobility of mind, it is going to hurt some to do without the praise and admiration they get. I am dreading the time when I shall be so lonely, so much in need of a little recognition that I may be anxious to accept an invitation to sit on the stage behind the speaker of the evening.

I can feel myself like a pain sitting up there, very old and gray, maybe a little soft in my head, but so pleased to be present and face foremost to the audience! I am waiting for the speaker to conclude his oration and for the applause meant for him to die down. I am hoping like a poor old hungry child that a few people in the audience will recognize me as the author of ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife,’ or the woman who wrote ‘My Book and Heart’ many years ago. I am all in a flutter lest no one press forward through the crowd about the speaker and clasp me by my old palsied hand to say how glad he is to see me, and how well I am looking--not a day older! How do I manage to keep so young? And he will never forget when this or that circuit-rider story came out. And how he loves ‘My Book and Heart’! Maybe he has just read it all over again. I shall be hoping he will say something like that. Meanwhile I am glowing with childish pleasure at this spoofing, but trying to maintain the air of dignity I used to have when I really was myself.

Heavens, how I do despise those people, now in the strength of their years, who look with contempt or indifference upon the old children we become!

This is the lightning of fate already flashing in my sky. For I have observed the weather at the end of more than one distinguished career. It rarely ever is very warm and bright. You have outgrown the normal mediocre sense of yourself, and you are no longer able to keep up the intellectual expenses of your reputation as a famous person.