Sample text for Fannie : the talent for success of writer Fannie Hurst / by Brooke Kroeger.
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"What I lack is rhythm"
The first known published work of Fannie Hurst appeared in her high school newspaper at Christmastime 1904, the month before she graduated. "An Episode," a nine-paragraph story, sketches a few moments in the life of a wealthy, powerful, but godless man alone with his conscience in a cathedral. Overcome by the haunting majesty of his surroundings, he watched his misdeeds pass before him. Pain and remorse engulfed him. He sat crouched alone on a pew until the last echoes of "Ave Maria" died away.
Then he rose, and went out, and as he went he said, "I have knowledge, I have power--what I lack is rhythm."
Then he threw back his head and laughed, long and loud and bitterly, and went off into the dusk.
Fannie Hurst, the daughter of now quite comfortable, assimilated German Jews with deadening middle-class aspirations, wanted to be a writer. She liked to claim that the Saturday Evening Post mailed back her manuscripts as if by boomerang from the time she was fourteen. This did not deter her. Nor did her mother's dire prediction that she would end up "an old-maid schoolteacher like Tillie Strauss," the sad and lonely spinster daughter of one of her mother's friends. Fannie defied this well-meant but suffocating opposition and compromised only enough to go to college in St. Louis, her hometown. She entered Washington University in the fall of 1905, a month before she turned twenty.
Fannie and her classmates watched much ground break. The handsome new Gothic-style "Quad" had been a site for the most defining seven months of the century for St. Louis, the "Universal Exposition," more commonly known as the 1904 World's Fair. The trees that lined the campus drives were only saplings in those days, reminding Fannie of "the knees of newborn calves." By her sophomore year the first girls' dormitory opened, and every city girl who could afford to do so took a room in McMillan Hall to get a better feel for college life. This did not stop the trips back to Mama, however. The sight of coeds toting overnight bags out the door of the new red-brick building was so common that some of the professors took to calling the campus Suitcase U. Although McMillan had space for 125 girls, only 16 moved in that first year, and together they became a tight little band. Every evening they joined in a kind of family party. Fannie usually provided the entertainment, amusing the group with parodies, anecdotes, and character sketches. She could concoct a spooky mystery yarn with no more inspiration than the sight of the same car parked at the edge of campus day after day. Fannie laid claim to the most exotic suite of rooms, in a little tower at the dormitory's very top. She dubbed it "the test tube," a name that stuck. So did Fannie's penchant for snaring the best and most unusual living spaces.
Her vitality was legendary on campus; she never seemed to sleep. From the Quad, friends often saw the lights in the test-tube windows burn till daylight, the sole indication that she was making time to study. For Fannie, classwork always came a distant second to acting, writing, editing, sports, and, as McMillan's first president, even dorm life.
Nevertheless she took pains to project the air of a serious scholar and desperately wanted the approval of the university's intellectual elite. With pretentious displays of verbiage, she dazzled friends and classmates, but her academic average was no better than a straight B-minus. Her A's in subjects that mattered to her, like composition and literature, did not quite balance out the C's. "More conspicuous than distinguished" was the way she later described her academic performance. Thinking back on those days years later, a dormmate remembered Fannie not as brilliant but as robust and vigorous, someone who "enjoyed living in every fiber of her being." Fannie showed no inclination for social activism in those years; that came later. Nor did she engage in any experimentation with the opposite sex.
Nothing seems to have sated Fannie's need for attention--not her stage performances, not her student compositions, not the admiration of her friends or even a coveted nod from a professor who might occasionally acknowledge a flash of talent. She found herself "slashing around in all directions at once"--silently tormented, violently ambitious, jealous of the achievements of others.
This anguish, which she deftly concealed, seemed to center on her inability to get any of her writing published professionally. As yearnings go this one was not so far-fetched. Fannie was among a number of students in this St. Louis litter to show precocious promise. Among the young women in her age-group, a few already had distinguished themselves in the greater St. Louis community. Zoë Akins, poet and future playwright, spent a term on the Washington University campus in Fannie's sophomore year. By that time Akins's work was appearing regularly in the Mirror, a local magazine of national literary repute owned and edited by the legendary William Marion Reedy. Sara Teasdale, another poet about Fannie's age, had her first book of verse published in 1907, when Fannie was a junior. Reedy had been publishing Teasdale's poems in the Mirror for a year. Especially irksome to Fannie was the publication in book form of Completion of Coleridge's Christabel by her classmate Edna Wahlert. Years later Fannie oddly remembered this work as her own unpublished effort as a child of sixteen in one telling, and eleven in another. Yet of all this local achievement, Cornelia Catlin Coulter stirred the most envy. Brilliant, austere, and scholarly, Coulter had little time for Fannie in their days at Washington U. After graduation she went straight to Bryn Mawr and earned a doctorate on the strength of a dissertation titled "Retraction in the Ambrosian and Palatine Recensions of Plautus; a Study of the Persa, Poenulus, Pseudolus, Stichus, and Trinummus." Next to Coulter, Fannie always felt diminished, "transparent . . . a cheap and garish thing."
Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Hurst, Fannie, 1889-1968, Women and literature United States History 20th century, Authors, American 20th century Biography