I

These new friendships, and many others, added much to my enjoyment of Paris; but the core of my life was under my own roof, among my books and my intimate friends. Above all it was in my work, which was growing and spreading, and absorbing more and more of my time and my imagination.

I had continued steadily at my story–telling, from which nothing could ever distract me for long, and during the busy happy Parisian years, and especially after the appearance of "The House of Mirth," a growing sense of mastery made the work more and more absorbing. In 1908 I published "The Hermit and the Wild Woman," a volume of short stories, in 1910 another, called "Tales of Men and Ghosts," and between the two the record of some of our motor journeys in France.

But the book to the making of which I brought the greatest joy and the fullest ease was "Ethan Frome." For years I had wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life even in my own time, and a thousandfold more a generation earlier, utterly unlike that seen through the rose–coloured spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett. In those days the snow–bound villages of Western Massachusetts were still grim places, morally and physically: insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden house–fronts of the long village street, or in the isolated farm–houses on the neighbouring hills; and Emily Bronte would have found as savage tragedies in our remoter valleys as on her Yorkshire moors. In this connection, I may mention that every detail about the colony of drunken mountain outlaws described in "Summer" was given to me by the rector of the church at Lenox (near which we lived), and that the lonely peak I have called "the Mountain" was in reality Bear Mountain, an isolated summit not more than twelve miles from our own home. The rector had been fetched there by one of the mountain outlaws to read the Burial Service over a woman of evil reputation; and when he arrived every one in the house of mourning was drunk, and the service was performed as I have related it. The rector's predecessor in the fashionable parish of Lenox had, I believe, once been called for on a similar errand, but had prudently refused to go; my friend, however, thought it his duty to do so, and drove off alone with the outlaw—coming back with his eyes full of horror and his heart of anguish and pity. Needless to say, when "Summer" appeared, this chapter was received with indignant denial by many reviewers and readers; and not the least vociferous were the New Englanders who had for years sought the reflection of local life in the rose–and–lavender pages of their favourite authoresses—and had forgotten to look into Hawthorne's.

"Ethan Frome" shocked my readers less than "Summer"; but it was frequently criticized as "painful," and at first had much less success than my previous books. I have a clearer recollection of its beginnings than of those of my other tales, through the singular accident that its first pages were written—in French! I had determined, when we came to live in Paris, to polish and enlarge my French vocabulary; for though I had spoken the language since the age of four I had never had much occasion to talk it, for any length of time, with cultivated people, having usually, since my marriage, wandered through France as a tourist. The result was that I had kept up the language chiefly through reading, and the favourite French authors of my early youth being Bossuet, Racine, Corneille and Labruyere, most of my polite locutions dated from the seventeenth century, and Bourget used to laugh at me for speaking "the purest Louis Quatorze." To bring my idioms up to date I asked Charles Du Bos to find, among his friends, a young professor who would come and talk with me two or three times a week. An amiable young man was found; but, being too amiable ever to correct my spoken mistakes, he finally hit on the expedient of asking me to prepare an "exercise" before each visit. The easiest thing for me was to write a story; and thus the French version of "Ethan Frome" was begun, and carried on for a few weeks. Then the lessons were given up, and the copy–book containing my "exercise" vanished forever. But a few years later, during one of our summer sojourns at the Mount, a distant glimpse of Bear Mountain brought Ethan back to my memory, and the following winter in Paris I wrote the tale as it now stands, reading my morning's work aloud each evening to Walter Berry, who was as familiar as I was with the lives led in those half–deserted villages before the coming of motor and telephone. We talked the tale over page by page, so that its accuracy of "atmosphere" is doubly assured—and I mention this because not long since, in an article by an American literary critic, I saw "Ethan Frome" cited as an interesting example of a successful New England story written by some one who knew nothing of New England! "Ethan Frome" was written after I had spent ten years in the hill–region where the scene is laid, during which years I had come to know well the aspect, dialect, and mental and moral attitude of the hill–people. The fact that "Summer" deals with the same class and type as those portrayed in "Ethan Frome," and has the same setting, might have sufficed to disprove the legend—but once such a legend is started it echoes on as long as its subject survives.