Elizabeth Madox Roberts was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. She is noted especially for her vivid, impressionistic depiction of her protagonists’ inner life and for her accurate portrayal of life in Kentucky.
Career
Elizabeth Madox Roberts enjoyed enormous success as a novelist, and to a lesser extent as a short story writer and poet, during the decade from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. Thereafter her books stopped selling, and her name virtually ceased to be discussed in literary circles. Only in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in conjunction with the 1981 centenary of her birth, did critics rediscover the haunting novels of Roberts. Most notable among these are The Time of Man (1926); in this and other books, including My Heart and My Flesh (1927), Jingling in the Wind (1928), and The Great Meadow (1930), Roberts created a series of compelling narratives set in her native Kentucky.
In 1910, a visit with relatives in the mountains of Colorado inspired Roberts to write seven poems, which were published with photographs of mountain flowers in the book In the Great Steep's Garden (1915).
Even as late as 1935 Roberts was recognized by British author and critic Ford Madox Ford as a writer who had changed the shape of literature: “With Miss Roberts,” Ford wrote, “the whole complexion of your [American] literature changed; the local became the universal.” In the year Roberts issued The Time of Man, Sherwood Anderson had said of that book, “No one in America is doing such writing”; more than fifty years later, at a 1981 symposium gathered to honor the Roberts centenary, Robert Penn Warren called the book “a masterpiece.”
The Time of Man is the story of Ellen Chesser, who in the words of Alison D. Goeller in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “takes on the proportions of Odysseus as she struggles against nature and fate in her attempts to discover herself.” Along the way, she loves one man, Jonas Prather, and he jilts her; she falls in love with another, Jasper Kent, and in the course of their marriage endures his infidelity and the death of a child. Her neighbor and close friend, Cassie MacMurtrie, commits suicide, but by the end of the story, Ellen is more determined than ever to prevail.
The Time of Man was, in the words of V. F. Calverton in Survey, “one of the best works of fiction in recent American literature.” Dorothy Graffe of the Nation called it “a book that is somehow realistic, although written in poetic language, that is beautiful though it deals with dirt and poverty and ugliness. A saga of the heroic woman, living near the earth.” E. C. Beckwith in Literary Review proffered even higher praise: “Among the recent noteworthy first novels, we have read none graced by a richer maturity and distinction than Miss Roberts’s admirably written story of Southern farm life.” A reviewer in Atlantic’s Bookshelf warned readers, “Some of the episodes are sordid, many readers will feel, even gross,” but a critic in the Boston Transcript held that “Roberts has written a novel that will stand out clearly from the long line of feud drama tales of the Kentucky mountains.” H. L. Stuart of the New York Times, like several other critics, recommended the book as a realistic portrayal of the “peasant temperament,” a phrase that says as much about the era as it does about Roberts’s book. T. S. Stribling of New York Herald Tribune Bookshad started out unimpressed, and thought the book’s first half “tedious but when Ellen’s love interest became full blown and vital, went straight on through the book and drew up at the end sorry that my journey had ended.”
Roberts called her next book, My Heart and My Flesh (1927), “the story of a woman who went to hell and returned to walk among you.” Theodosia Bell is part black, but is considered white - and an aristocrat at that. This in itself must have constituted a daring premise for a Southern writer of the 1920s: theretofore perhaps only Mark Twain, in The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, had dealt with the idea of a mulatto character who “grows up white.” When Theodosia loses everything, she seeks out her half-siblings, who are considered black, but in so doing she hurts them and fails to help herself. “In the end,” Goeller wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “having wreaked disaster upon her half-siblings, she returns to the Singleton farm where she grew up, hoping to discover strength within her; now, however, the once-prosperous farm is decayed and overrun with stray dogs, symbolizing her own spiritual decay and disorder. Just as she is about to commit suicide, she experiences a renewal of spirit almost magically and is able, eventually, to regain nearly everything she has lost.”
Some critics compared My Heart and My Flesh disparagingly with its predecessor. “In The Time of Man,” wrote D. G. Van Doren in the Nation, “Roberts wrote in her own particular way a magnificent symphony. Her second symphony is confused. The harmonies are sound and lovely; the theme itself is blurred.” M. E. Chase in Atlantic’s Bookshelf wrote that “the epic quality of The Time of Man, which lent to that story the exciting illusion that the book marched on in spite of its author, is entirely lacking in this new novel, which is episodic in the extreme.” A New York Times reviewer sounded a more positive tone, but noted that “The Time of Man, in its total effect, appears to be made of more enduring stuff than My Heart and My Flesh." But, the reviewer continued a few sentences later, “it is only in this comparative sense that My Heart and My Flesh can be described as disappointing. Perhaps one hoped for too much.” A critic in the Springfield Republican called the book “a failure, [but] a failure of a first-rate writer. The failure is no doubt partly due to the rapidity with which the book was written - one suspects that Miss Roberts’s mind, if not her pen, had been busy for many years with The Time of Man.” L. S. Morris of the New Republic also suggested that the book was a grand failure, and “it is because of the plane on which she fails and the abilities she displays in failing, that her book is entitled to consideration at length.”
Reviewers were just as apt, however, to compare My Heart and My Flesh favorably with Roberts’s first novel - and to compare its author favorably with distinguished figures of the literary world. “No other writer whom I know,” wrote Mary Ross in New York Herald Tribune Books, “has pierced so straightly through the rich texture of this visible world to the flow of the subterranean streams which water its beauty. There are no tricks in Miss Roberts’s story; it moves with the rhythmic beat of a great symphony, swelling to the breaking point of anguish, then resolving itself majestically into quietude.” The Time of Man, pointed out Allan Nevins in the Saturday Review of Literature, had served merely to prepare readers for the greater psychological adventure of the present volume: “In the pages which relate how Theodosia, after all, that she has undergone, flees to a lonely farmhouse to recover, and lies writhing there until she finds strength of mind and body to put the past behind her, Miss Roberts reaches the height of her powers. These pages are a convincing study of a brain diseased. To do this effectively, and yet not overdo it, was a problem which would have baffled weaker writers, but Miss Roberts’s pen does not falter.”
C. R. Walker of the Independent observed that My Heart and My Flesh was, “like many novels of our time preoccupied with mentality, with ‘states of the soul,’ but in fashion, unlike any I have ever read. Though concerned with many of the most elemental and brutal facts of life, it is beautiful and rich in poetry.” Roberts deserved comparison to Sherwood Anderson, wrote Harry Hansen of the New York World, only “she is free from his crudities.” A reviewer in Outlook placed her in even higher company: “Miss Roberts’s style seems to inherit from Walt Whitman, James Joyce, and, in her rhythms and sonorities, from the King James Bible (literature makes strange bedfellows), but she is no imitator. She dares to show her fine talent as it is - all her own.”
Jingling in the Wind (1928) was a more lighthearted tale than either of her first two books, borrowing a conceit from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales - the idea of travelers exchanging fabulous stories with one another - and giving it a Kentucky flavor. The hero in her short story “On the Mountainside,” published in August, 1927, American Mercury, dreams of travelling to the flatlands, in his mind a fantastic place; likewise, the protagonist of Jingling fulfills the ambition of leaving his mountain home to visit a fabled city of the plains. Jeremy is his county’s official rainmaker - which is literally what it sounds like, someone with the power to call up rain from the sky - and he journeys to the city for a rainmakers’ convention. But along the way, the bus breaks down, and while the mechanics work on it, he and the others begin to tell each other stories. Jeremy even meets a female rainmaker, Miss Tulip Tree McAfee, and falls in love.
A reviewer in Nation commented that the best one could do was to “chuckle appreciatively” over certain of the novel’s passages, “and nod heavily over the remainder of the book.” A critic in the New York Times wrote that, were it not for the reputation Roberts had established with The Time of Man, “one would be tempted to toss this book to the floor with an unkind exclamation.” Laura Benet observed in the New York Evening Post “no mental child of this author’s could be entirely devoid of charm,” nonetheless compared the novel to a firecracker whose “fuse sizzles and the sparks do not fly high, for the book is too much made-to-order and too hurriedly done.” On the other hand, a critic in the New Republic called Jingling in the Wind a “satirical fantasy [which] jingles delightfully in the wind.” Ross of Books was effusive: “Miss Roberts has tossed the typewriter over the new moon and set out on a novelist’s holiday, as gay as a cricket, as sprightly as a green grasshopper. Jingling in the Wind is a poet’s novel, dancing through cadences of prose that lift into song, as joyously fantastic in sound and rhythm as in image.” Nevins of the Saturday Review of Literature warned readers “that this is a gay fantasia, a bit of harlequinade, a fabric of mockery.” Yet “it is a tale to be read, not too seriously, but deliberately, to savor its unusual qualities.” A Springfield Republican commentator wrote that “the reviewer finds. Jingling in the Wind delicate, poetic, diverting, at times, but does not pretend to know what the book is about” - a fault in itself, the review suggested. And Ben Wasson of Outlook pointed out the high standard Roberts had set for herself. The present book was “delightful” and “charming,” he said, “and [keeps] company with similar adjectives”; but why, “when one can be the mate to descriptives such as inspired and wonderful, should one turn and spend time with the lesser gentlemen?”
The Great Meadow (1930), which was released as a movie the following year, was the last of Roberts’s significant novels. Set in the years between 1774 and 1781, it is the story of Diony Hall, who migrates to Kentucky (the “great meadow”) from the Virginia coast. Her husband, Berk Jarvis, goes away to find the Indians who scalped his mother, and when he does not return for many years, Diony remarries. “At once an archetype of the American pioneer who longs for adventure and yet needs beauty and order in her life,” Goeller wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Diony sees herself constantly on the edge of civilization, embodying the tension between her mother’s mountain spirit and her father’s aristocratic sensibility.”
The sheer volume of reviews the book attracted suggests an author at the top of her game, as Roberts was in 1930. Notices ranged from the positive words of Ross in Books - “Here again is the Elizabeth Madox Roberts of The Time of Man, drawing in epic strokes the people of her native Kentucky” - to B. E. Canby’s dismissive review in the Spectator: “I feel there is something lacking in the book as a whole.” Despite trying to appreciate the book, the reviewer wrote, “Diony remains a woman who lives an extremely exciting life in a dull way.” But far more of the reviews were upbeat or at least offered qualified praise. John Chamberlain of the New Republic compared Roberts to J. M. Synge; and Ross (again) in Survey, as well as a Times Literary Supplement critic, noted the lyrical quality of the writing. The words of a reviewer in the New York Times would later seem ironic: “Working in material that is native to the core, master of a style perfect for the uses to which it is put, Elizabeth Madox Roberts is giving to her work a universal value. For no writer of prose fiction in America does the future seem to hold less of uncertainty.”
As it turned out, the very fact that Roberts was at the peak of her career suggested that it would all be downhill from there. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer had observed that her book was “another sign that the poetry of America’s past is beginning to inspire her best writers more than her garish present.” That review came out on August 21, 1930, when it was perhaps not yet clear that the “garish present” to which the critic referred had ended with the Wall Street crash of the preceding October. “In the years that followed the success of The Great Meadow,” Goeller wrote, “Roberts’s literary reputation and popularity began to decline rapidly.” In 1930 she reissued a book of poetry, Under the Tree, which received positive reviews. It had first been published in 1922, four years before The Time of Man; and in fact, her very first book had been a volume of poems, In the Great Steep’s Garden (1915), published while she was living in Colorado with a sister. She would later publish a third collection of verse, Song in the Meadow (1940). “Although she is remembered today more for her fiction than her poetry,” wrote a contributor to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “she published during her lifetime a small but generally excellent body of poetry.”
Roberts in 1931 issued the novel A Buried Treasure, followed in 1932 by The Haunted Mirror, a book of short stories. In all, she had published thirteen stories, which together make up that volume and Not by Strange Gods (1941), her last book. Her novel He Sent forth a Raven (1935) is the tale of the aristocratic misanthrope Stoner Drake, embittered by the loss of his wife. In her last novel, Black Is My Truelove’s Hair (1938), Roberts tells the story of Dena Jones, who has been wounded in love by Will Langtry and finds solace with Nat Journeyman, who Goeller described in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as “a farmer and Dionysian figure, the embodiment of both growth and decay, love and hate, good and evil.”
It is not easy to discern, from the reviews of the time, that Roberts’s reputation was on a decline. Certainly, there were sour notes, as when one reviewer complained that Roberts’s characters were “argument racks” - that is, simple mouthpieces for her thoughts about life. Elizabeth Bowen of the New Statesman & Nation wrote of He Sent forth a Raven that “[Roberts’s] style booms so loudly that it is impossible to make out what is going on in the book, or why, or what it is going to lead to.” Many more of the reviews, however, were mixed, along the lines of observations made by Nevins in the Saturday Review of Literature: “The story is not told as directly, vigorously, and racily as in Miss Roberts’s first book, and is far from being as rich and full. But it is of all her later works the one that comes closest to The Time of Man. ” There were even unabashedly positive commentaries, including one from Ross in Books: “He Sent forth a Raven has the intensity and the mysticism of one of [William] Blake’s lyrics.”
Roberts’ later years were filled with illness. She had been sickly from her childhood in Kentucky, and had become ill a number of times in subsequent years. Suffering from Hodgkin’s disease, she sought refuge in Orlando, Florida where she died in 1941. She never married, and in her later years spent her time increasingly alone.
The fact that Roberts had enjoyed so few years of success was particularly poignant in light of her beginnings. Raised poor in rural Kentucky, she had wanted to attend college, but did not manage to do so until she was more than thirty years old, at which time she put herself through the University of Chicago by giving music lessons. The experience, which brought her into contact with a number of literary figures of the day, had been pivotal to her creative development, and it was soon after she graduated in 1921 that she began to write full-time.
Views
The plot was not the primary attraction in Roberts’s fiction; rather, it was the mood she set, and the intense psychological tension pervading her stories, that kept readers coming back. From her college days - in Roberts’s case, during her thirties - she had been fascinated by the idealism of the eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley. Berkeley has usually been categorized with John Locke and David Hume as an empiricist, but his conception of reality - that it is, crudely speaking, a creation of the mind - differs sharply from the pragmatic approach of his contemporaries. Berkeley’s skepticism regarding objective reality suited Roberts well.
Quotations:
“Somewhere there is a connection between the world of the mind, and the outer order - it is the secret of the contact that we are after, the point, the moment of union. We faintly sense the one and we know as faintly the other, but there is a point where they come together, and we can never know the whole of reality until we have these two completely.”
Personality
Roberts had many gifts. If she does not indisputably achieve major status, it is because her novels are few (though she wrote much during the few years spanned by her writing career) and their scope is somewhat restricted. Among the first-class novelists of twentieth-century America, Roberts is original, evocative, and accomplished. Her universe is one we explore with continuing satisfaction. Intelligence, sensitivity, depth of perception, poetic vision, stylistic immediacy and strength, luminous sensibility, insight into the complex relationships between the individual and his traditions - these are her distinctive qualities as a craftsman in fiction.
Physical Characteristics:
Elizabeth Roberts' correspondence is punctuated with reports of her ill health, a fact always present in her adult life - tuberculosis, anemia, migraine headaches, low blood pressure. A tonsil infection was a major illness; in 1934 she had a complete nervous collapse after those skin problems eventually diagnosed as Hodgkins' disease, skin cancer, or both - unlike her other health problems in being fatal. Two late letters describe, all too vividly, the ravages of the skin disorder and experimental remedies. A 1922 letter to Monroe Wheeler is probably representative of her social life in Springfield: "I live a curiously lonely existence - you would not endure it a week, thinking all my thoughts to myself."
Quotes from others about the person
"Roberts seems to owe little to any of the schools of fiction which have hitherto busied themselves with the treatment of American provincial life. Her mood is original, powerful, and without ever verging on sentimentality, tender.” - J. W. Krutch, Saturday Review of Literature