So Big

by Edna Ferber

  21

  They had had tea in the farm sitting room and Dallas had made a little moaning over the beauty of the Dutch lustre set. Selina had entertained them with the shining air of one who is robed in silk and fine linen. She and General Goguet had got on famously from the start, meeting on the common ground of asparagus culture.

  “But how thick?” he had demanded, for he, too, had his pet asparagus beds on the farm in Brittany. “How thick at the base?”

  Selina made a circle with thumb and forefinger. The General groaned with envy and despair. He was very comfortable, the General. He partook largely of tea and cakes. He flattered Selina with his eyes. She actually dimpled, flushed, laughed like a girl. But it was to Roelf she turned; it was on Roelf that her eyes dwelt and rested. It was with him she walked when she was silent and the others talked. It was as though he were her one son, and had come home. Her face was radiant, beautiful.

  Seated next to Dirk, Dallas said, in a low voice: “There, that’s what I mean. That’s what I mean when I say I want to do portraits. Not portraits of ladies with a string of pearls and one lily hand half hidden in the folds of a satin skirt. I mean character portraits of men and women who are really distinguished looking—distinguishedly American, for example—like your mother.”

  Dirk looked up at her quickly, half smiling, as though expecting to find her smiling, too. But she was not smiling. “My mother!”

  “Yes, if she’d let me. With that fine splendid face all lit up with the light that comes from inside; and the jaw-line like that of the women who came over in the Mayflower; or crossed the continent in a covered wagon; and her eyes! And that battered funny gorgeous bum old hat and the white shirtwaist—and her hands! She’s beautiful. She’d make me famous at one leap. You’d see!”

  Dirk stared at her. It was as though he could not comprehend. Then he turned in his chair to stare at his mother. Selina was talking to Roelf.

  “And you’ve done all the famous men of Europe, haven’t you, Roelf! To think of it! You’ve seen the world, and you’ve got it in your hand. Little Roelf Pool. And you did it all alone. In spite of everything.”

  Roelf leaned toward her. He put his hand over her rough one. “Cabbages are beautiful,” he said. Then they both laughed as at some exquisite joke. Then, seriously: “What a fine life you’ve had, too, Selina. A full life, and a rich one and successful.”

  “I!” exclaimed Selina. “Why, Roelf, I’ve been here all these years, just where you left me when you were a boy. I think the very hat and dress I’m wearing might be the same I wore then. I’ve been nowhere, done nothing, seen nothing. When I think of all the places I was going to see! All the things I was going to do!”

  “You’ve been everywhere in the world,” said Roelf. “You’ve seen all the places of great beauty and light. You remember you told me that your father had once said, when you were a little girl, that there were only two kinds of people who really mattered in the world. One kind was wheat and the other kind emeralds. You’re wheat, Selina.”

  “And you’re emerald,” said Selina, quickly.

  The General was interested but uncomprehending. He glanced now at the watch on his wrist and gave a little exclamation. “But the dinner! Our hostess, Madame Storm! It is very fine to run away but one must come back. Our so beautiful hostess.” He had sprung to his feet.

  “She is beautiful, isn’t she?” said Selina.

  “No,” Roelf replied, abruptly. “The mouth is smaller than the eyes. With Mrs. Storm from here to here”—he illustrated by turning to Dallas, touching her lips, her eyes, lightly with his slender powerful brown fingers—“is smaller than from here to here. When the mouth is smaller than the eyes there is no real beauty. Now Dallas here——”

  “Yes, me,” scoffed Dallas, all agrin. “There’s a grand mouth for you. If a large mouth is your notion of beauty then I must look like Helen of Troy to you, Roelf.”

  “You do,” said Roelf, simply.

  Inside Dirk something was saying, over and over, “You’re nothing but a rubber stamp, Dirk DeJong. You’re nothing but a rubber stamp.” Over and over.

  “These dinners!” exclaimed the General. “I do not wish to seem ungracious, but these dinners! Much rather would I remain here on this quiet and beautiful farm.”

  At the porch steps he turned, brought his heels together with a sharp smack, bent from the waist, picked up Selina’s rough work-worn hand and kissed it. And then, as she smiled a little, uncertainly, her left hand at her breast, her cheeks pink, Roelf, too, kissed her hand tenderly.

  “Why,” said Selina, and laughed a soft tremulous little laugh, “Why, I’ve never had my hand kissed before.”

  She stood on the porch steps and waved at them as they were whirled swiftly away, the four of them. A slight straight little figure in the plain white blouse and the skirt spattered with the soil of the farm.

  “You’ll come out again?” she had said to Dallas. And Dallas had said yes, but that she was leaving soon for Paris, to study and work.

  “When I come back you’ll let me do your portrait?”

  “My portrait!” Selina had exclaimed, wonderingly.

  Now as the four were whirled back to Chicago over the asphalted Halsted road they were relaxed, a little tired. They yielded to the narcotic of spring that was in the air.

  Roelf Pool took off his hat. In the cruel spring sunshine you saw that the black hair was sprinkled with gray. “On days like this I refuse to believe that I’m forty-five. Dallas, tell me I’m not forty-five.”

  “You’re not forty-five,” said Dallas in her leisurely caressing voice.

  Roelf’s lean brown hand reached over frankly and clasped her strong white one. “When you say it like that, Dallas, it sounds true.” “It is true,” said Dallas.

  They dropped Dallas first at the shabby old Ontario Street studio, then Dirk at his smart little apartment, and went on.

  Dirk turned his key in the lock. Saki, the Japanese houseman, slid silently into the hall making little hissing noises of greeting. On the correct little console in the hall there was a correct little pile of letters and invitations. He went through the Italian living room and into his bedroom. The Jap followed him. Dirk’s correct evening clothes (made by Peel the English tailor on Michigan Boulevard) were laid correctly on his bed—trousers, vest, shirt, coat; fine, immaculate.

  “Messages, Saki?”

  “Missy Stlom telephone.”

  “Oh. Leave any message?”

  “No. Say s’e call ‘gain.”

  “All right, Saki.” He waved him away and out of the room. The man went and closed the door softly behind him as a correct Jap servant should. Dirk took off his coat, his vest, threw them on a chair near the bed. He stood at the bedside looking down at his Peel evening clothes, at the glossy shirtfront that never bulged. A bath, he thought, dully, automatically. Then, quite suddenly, he flung himself on the fine silk-covered bed, face down, and lay there, his head in his arms, very still. He was lying there half an hour later when he heard the telephone’s shrill insistence and Saki’s gentle deferential rap at the bedroom door.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  * * *

  Edna Ferber

  Ferber at the Algonquin Round Table

  Me and “Ferb”

  About the book

  * * *

  1924

  Ferber and Her Pulitzer Prize

  Read on

  * * *

  Have You Read? More by Edna Ferber

  About the author

  Edna Ferber

  “I DIDN’T WANT TO BE A WRITER,” Edna Ferber admitted in her 1939 autobiography A Peculiar Treasure. “I never had wanted to be a writer. I couldn’t even use a typewriter, never having tried. The stage was my one love. . . .I go to the theater because I love it; I write plays for the theater because I love it. I am still wrapped in my childish dream [of being an actress, but]. . . . At seventeen my writing career
accidentally began.”

  That accidental career, of course, was an astounding success. Beginning as a “Girl Reporter” for the Appleton, Wisconsin, Crescent at age seventeen, Ferber parlayed a short stint as a journalist into a long career as a writer of short stories, novels, and plays—a career that lasted more than sixty years and brought her great fame and wealth.

  Ferber was born on August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Jacob and Julia Ferber, a Hungarian-born Jewish merchant and his American-born wife. During Edna’s childhood, the family moved several times throughout the Midwest before settling in Appleton, where the Ferbers ran a general store. When Jacob began losing his sight to a degenerative eye disease, Julia took control of the family fortunes, running the store with indefatigable shrewdness. A formidable woman, Julia would later appear, fictionalized, in many of her daughter’s novels.

  For financial reasons, Ferber set aside her plans to study for a career on the stage and took a job right after high school on the Crescent. After a year and a half covering every imaginable type of story, she was fired by a new editor who disdained her “feminine” writing style, but she was hired immediately by the Milwaukee Journal. Young and enthusiastic, she took her job seriously, neglecting her personal well-being. When she collapsed from exhaustion, she returned to Appleton for what was supposed to be a temporary leave. Except for some freelance assignments during political conventions, however, Ferber never returned to newspaper work.

  While she was recuperating she wrote her first short story, “The Homely Heroine.” It was published in Everybody’s Magazine, and Edna Ferber’s career as a writer of fiction took off.

  More stories followed, and a novel, Dawn O’Hara, was published in 1911. In a short story called “Representing T. A. Buck,” Ferber introduced the unusual character of Mrs. Emma McChesney, a divorced traveling saleswoman with a young son, who worked for the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. American Magazine published the story and asked for a second installment. Without having planned it, Ferber embarked on a string of Emma McChesney stories that appeared in American Magazine and Cosmopolitan; were collected into three volumes; and had a huge following (Theodore Roosevelt was a fan). When a reviewer of the third volume, Emma McChesney & Co. (1915), accused Ferber of beating a dead horse, Ferber realized, “I had been sliding to oblivion on a path greased by Emma McChesney.” She immediately stopped writing the stories, despite an offer from Cosmopolitan to name her own price. Nonetheless, Ferber did dramatize the stories for the stage, working in collaboration with George V. Hobart. The play, Our Mrs. McChesney, was produced in 1915 and starred Ethel Barrymore.

  Ferber’s second novel, Fanny Herself, was published in 1917; her third, The Girls, in 1921. It was Ferber’s next novel, So Big (1924), that established her as a major writer. It won the Pulitzer Prize and became the first of many best sellers she would produce.

  While she worked on novels, Ferber continued to publish short stories in magazines and books. One story, “Old Man Minick,” caught the attention of playwright George S. Kaufman, who asked her to collaborate with him on adapting it for the stage. The play, Minick, was the first in an impressive list of collaborations between the two writers. After Minick, Ferber topped the success of So Big with the novel Show Boat (1926), which served as the basis for the now-classic 1927 Broadway musical and three film versions. In what surely would be a coup for any writer, Show Boat opened on Broadway December 27, 1927, and another Ferber hit, The Royal Family, written with Kaufman, opened the next day.

  By this time, Ferber was living full time in New York and hanging around with the legendary wits of the Algonquin Round Table, including Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Marc Connelly, Robert Sherwood, Heywood Broun, and Dorothy Parker. But her rigorous work schedule precluded social lunches, and she admitted that she graced the table less frequently than was reported.

  After Show Boat, many of Ferber’s novels were large-scale social histories that dealt with regional America. Cimarron (1930) recreates the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, American Beauty (1931) is based on a wave of immigration of industrious Polish farmers to New England in the late nineteenth century, Come and Get It (1935) exposes the rape of Wisconsin and Michigan forests by the Robber Barons. Other novels include Saratoga Trunk (1941) and Great Son (1945); her other plays with Kaufman include Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (1936).

  Ferber’s 1952 novel Giant, a sprawling contemporary satire of the newly wealthy in Texas, caused quite an uproar in the Lone Star State, but was a huge commercial success. The 1956 film version of the book, famous for being the last film of screen legend James Dean, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for its director, George Stevens. Ice Palace (1958), her last novel, was set in Alaska. She published two volumes of her memoirs, A Peculiar Treasure (1939) and A Kind of Magic (1963). Ferber, who never married, died of cancer on April 16, 1968.

  Hugely successful in her day, Ferber’s novels later fell out of favor somewhat, perhaps because commercial success often breeds contempt among the intelligentsia. Ferber was a quintessentially American writer, choosing American settings—often huge panoramas—and themes for her work. “Each one of them had been written with a definite underlying theme in mind, and this had, for some baffling reason, been almost entirely overlooked by the average reader,” Ferber once complained. “I found myself regarded as a go-getting best seller and a deft writer of romantic and colorful American novels.”

  In her obituary, The New York Times said, “Her books were not profound, but they were vivid and had a sound sociological basis. She was among the best-read novelists in the nation, and critics of the 1920s and ’30s did not hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her day.”

  Ferber herself once wrote, “Those critics or well-wishers who think that I could have written better than I have are flattering me. Always I have written at the top of my bent at that particular time. It may be that this or that, written five years later or one year earlier, or under different circumstances, might have been the better for it. But one writes as the opportunity and the material and the inclination shape themselves. This is certain: I never have written a line except to please myself. I never have written with an eye to what is called the public or the market or the trend or the editor or the reviewer. Good or bad, popular or unpopular, lasting or ephemeral, the words I have put down on paper were the best words I could summon at the time to express the thing I wanted more than anything else to say.”

  Ferber at the Algonquin Round Table

  “YOU NEW JERSEY NERO! You mistake your pinafore for a toga!” was Ferber’s lacerating retort to some poison dart or other sent by the critic and smug pundit Alexander Wollcott. Tossing barbs was not unfamiliar to either of them, as both were charter members of the fabled Algonquin Round Table—also known as the “charmed circle”—where wit was as iced as the martinis.

  In the early thirties, the favorite place to cat and dog was at the literally round table of the Algonquin Hotel, on West 44th Street in New York. Much has been written about the cactus children of this secret club, where someone was always willing to play verbal patty-cake. The playwright Marc Connelly, an entrenched member, recalls, “There was no sentiment among that crowd.” One had to be up to the potent snuff that wafted around the table.

  “They were actually merciless if they disapproved,” Ferber assessed. “I have never encountered a more hard-bitten crew.” The renowned regulars constituting the “crew” being: George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Neysa McMein, Alexander Woollcott, and Franklin P. Adams. “However,” Ferber continued, “if they liked what you had done, they did say so, publicly and wholeheartedly. Their standards were high, their vocabulary fresh, fluid, astringent, and very, very tough. Theirs was a tonic influence, one on the other, and all on the world of American letters . . . They were ruthless toward charlatans, toward the pompous, and the mentally and artistically dishonest. Casual, incisive,
they had a certain terrible integrity about their work and a boundless ambition.”

  There were various reports about who were the chosen few at the Round Table and who did the choosing. It is without dispute that Woollcott was a founding member—never to be deposed because he outlasted everyone, in terms of food consumption and bon mots. As for the others, it varies with sources. There were the illustrious visitors such as Katharine Cornell, Harpo Marx, Charles MacArthur, and Ben Hecht; there were the sitters, Margalo Gilmore, Louis Bromfield, Peggy Leech Pulitzer, Kathleen and Charlie Norris; and there were the active members. Ferber belonged to the latter. She lunched and sparred when she chose—never needing an invitation. She couldn’t have gone every day or her body of work would have been “So Small.” Marc Connelly recalls the regimen of the Round Tablers. The group would break up shortly past noon, and after putting in a few creative hours, would meet again around 5 PM at someone’s apartment—often for an evening of revelry. It doesn’t seem as though Ferber could ingest this sort of diet, yet her diary entries of the late twenties and early thirties list the Algonquin as one of her top social priorities.

  “It was all fun,” recounts Katharine Hepburn. “There were individuals in those days. Nobody suffered outwardly. It wasn’t cricket.”

  More tennis than cricket, they volleyed for service and then smacked their opponent with a cry of “love.” Ferber did very well at this, remaining poised, alert, and ready to move in for the kill.