Eleanor Porter, a former musician, wrote fifteen novels including the classic Pollyanna. “Glad Refrains” looks at music in her work.
Dawn, Eleanor Porter’s thirteenth novel, is the adult story of Keith Burton who goes blind. He overcomes his sorrows by helping blind war veterans and finding the love of a woman. It was published in England as Keith’s Dark Tower. Dawn, makes no mention of music at all — no musical people who play instruments or sing songs and zero music metaphors or similes that evoke music.
The absence of music in Dawn was puzzling at first, because I know that music is very important to sight-impaired people. Only recently, it “dawned” on me that music was largely unavailable to the blind until it could be replayed from a recording. Eleanor set Dawn at a time when reproduction equipment was very primitive and before speakers were amplified. Until vinyl arrived in the late 1940s, records were mostly made of shellac and lacquer resins which offered limited fidelity. Magnetic tape came a decade later than that. That is why the blind characters in Dawn do not enjoy any music.
There is, however, much to appreciate in Dawn. Set in 1914, it references the war in Europe and laments the human cost. It promotes vocational rehabilitation for the blind — a new cause at the time. It offers Pollyanna-ish advice from Susan Betts, the earthy, poetizing housemaid. And, a contemporary critic in The New York Sun praised Dawn’s sober portrayal of suicidal despair.
The Sun review declares that Eleanor’s writing teaches a lesson for “writers who would pass shudderingly by” books like Dawn. It scolds critics who are “blind” to the book’s virtues. Eleanor earned the reviewer’s respect by her not curing the boy’s blindness with a forced happy ending. The Sun was especially taken by the chilling scene when Susan confronts suicidal Keith Burton — so taken was The Sun that it reprinted the entire encounter. So, in the absence of anything musical in this book, we present, in consolation, the 1,350-word review as it appeared in The Sun on March 30, 1919. The Sun review begins very condescendingly, then becomes very appreciative:
[From The New York Sun]
The Story of a Blind Boy and Some Reflection
Intended for Those Who would Let It Go Unread
We can see no reasonable objection to, and we can imagine good reasons for, sitting down at the very beginning of a piece about Eleanor H Porter's, new novel, Dawn, the things to be said against the book.
Well, then –
This story about a blind boy is utterly devoid of any literary distinction. We have never been able to define literary distinction, and do not believe it exists outside the mind of readers; but whatever it is, whatsoever shapes it may assume, we are certain that Dawn has it not.
There's no plot worth mentioning, and the “action” can be forecast about a hundred pages ahead as you proceed. The invaluable aid of coincidence is not rejected, and Mrs. Porter isn't above enriching her people with money left, on page 256, by a barely mentioned aunt. But this is by the way; there are 339 pages.
Though, the story is essentially a story of the human mind and heart. The author concerns herself no whit with dignity of narration. She does not use dignified words for dignified things, often; and where she does, she frequently is trite. She tells us of an “indefinable something”; the usual way in which her characters show renewed resolution, or assert courage, or betray their personal pride is by a lifted chin; but the worst thing is the shallowness of so many of these people, and the exaggerations with which they are put on paper. . . . To which must be added, the less serious, but more annoying fault of a humorous character whose humor is low grade. People who use the wrong word are frequently, funny, but they are seldom funny through a whole book.
Yet, Dawn has qualities which make it, if not a great novel, at any rate, a really moving story and a story certain to be widely read and quite honestly “loved.” It contains perhaps a “message” for a good many people, and readers of Mrs. Porter's books will turn to it with expectation, and the expectation will be completely satisfied. But to ourselves the best thing about it is the message it contains for those who will not read it and the lesson it holds for writers who will pass shudderingly by.
When you say that Dawn is about a blind boy, who was saved from despair by finding that he could help blinded soldiers, you need hardly say more, though you cannot very well say less. Keith Burton went blind at fourteen. His mother was dead. He lived with his father, a painter who was a failure, and Susan. Susan was a managing, mothering housekeeper, who made rhymes, continually and talked like Mrs. Malaprop. One of the wonders is how Susan, who never use the right word in conversation, always contrived to handle words pretty correctly in versifying. Susan is a trial to more than Mr. Burton, but even the most impatient reader will detect, besides her good heartedness, rare moments in which she unquestionably says Something — as when she remarks that there are times when it's an impertinence to tell people not to worry; and again, when she asserts that to choose the sunny side of the road is more meritorious than to deny the shady side's existence.
Now, please note this: Mrs. Porter, although she depicts Susan as offering her doggerel to magazines for publication, does not ask you to believe that any magazine ever bought it. So, in a more important matter, having recited the history of Keith Burton's blindness, she does not at the very, very last minute tell you that, by some magical, hocus-pocus or other, he is to recover his sight. Carp away, if you will, but concede that these things [are] in her story’s favor. Now, let us see if there is anything else in its favor, or rather – Since we have said there is – what Dawn will mean to those who like it.
The theme is extremely simple, fine, and in itself, so infinitely pathetic that no amount of dross in the telling could utterly spoil it. There may be more important events in the world than the gradual coming of blindness to a fourteen-year-old year old boy, but there is nothing that stirs the heart more deeply unless it be a tragedy affecting one's own father or mother – or son. Our lives can all be scanned (even the wildest of them make some sort of free verse!) and they may be said to consist essentially of upstrokes and downstrokes or anastrophes and catastrophes as the Greeks would have called them. The great upstroke in all our lives, the flash of the sword that sweeps through the Gordian knot of loneliness and self-despair is love. And all the downstrokes are made by the selfsame sword. It is our human love for some other like ourselves that makes us suffer when that other suffers. The sword is turned in our hearts.
Now there are people whose hearts are dead, and there are other people whose hearts have never beat; but it is difficult, outside these two classes of the Dead People, to imagine anyone who could read the opening chapters of Dawn, and not be profoundly moved. It is puzzling to try to think of a live and living person who could read quite coldly the chapter in which Susan bets comes upon Keith Burton in the attic. Here is the scene, a little over a page in the book:
Over at the desk by the window there was a swift movement--but not so swift that Susan did not see the revolver pushed under some loose papers.
"Is that you, Susan?" asked Keith sharply.
"Yes, honey. I jest came up to get somethin'."Susan's face was white like paper, and her hands were cold and shaking, but her voice, except for a certain breathlessness, was cheerfully steady. With more or less noise and with a running fire of inconsequent comment, she rummaged among the trunks and boxes, gradually working her way to, ward the desk where Keith still sat.
At the desk, with a sudden swift movement, she thrust the papers to one side and dropped her hand on the revolver. At the same moment Keith's arm shot out and his hand fell, covering hers.
She saw his young face flush and harden and his mouth set into stern lines.
"Susan, you'll be good enough, please, to take your hand off that," he said then sharply.
There was a moment's tense silence. Susan's eyes, agonized and pleading, were on his face. But Keith could not see that. He could only hear her words a moment later--light words, with a hidden laugh in them, yet spoken with that same curious breathlessness.
"Faith, honey, an' how can I, with your own hand holdin' mine so tight?"
Keith removed his hand instantly. His set face darkened.
"This is not a joke, Susan, and I shall have to depend on your honor to let that revolver stay where it is. Unfortunately I am unable to SEE whether I am obeyed or not."
It was Susan's turn to flush. She drew back at once, leaving the weapon uncovered on the desk between them.
"I'm not takin' the pistol, Keith." The laugh was all gone from Susan's voice now. So, too, was the breathlessness. The voice was steady, grave, but very gentle. "We take matches an' pizen an' knives away from CHILDREN--not from grown men, Keith. The pistol is right where you can reach it--if you want it."
. . . . When we started this piece, we thought: “We will point out some of the things that will make thousands of readers like Dawn, and they are the things that many far more pretentious writers than Mrs. Porter had better copy – if they can. We will point that out, too.” However, we have changed our mind.
There are none so blind as ––––––
And contemplating a certain common kind of Literary Critic and Author bang! our philosophy and our patience, both leave us, and we feel like ejaculating with Susan on page 78: “Fool! Fool! Fool! Don't you know anything!”
DAWN by Eleanor H. Porter. Boston Houghton Mifflin Company $1.50
The New York Sun March 30, 1919
Laura Bridgman
When Eleanor Porter was a little girl in Littleton New Hampshire, a blind and deaf woman from nearby Hanover was famous for being rehabilitated to a then-surprising degree. Laura Bridgman (1829-1889) had suffered scarlet fever at age two. It left her permanently deaf and blind. A farmer’s daughter, Laura was described by Slate magazine recently as: “… the most famous woman in the world other than Queen Victoria. She was a Helen Keller before Helen Keller…” (Indeed, she was Helen Keller’s inspiration.) Laura Bridgman’s rehabilitation by Samuel Gridley Howe, first director of the Perkins School, was nationally celebrated and would have been known to Littleton residents.
Eleanor Porter returns with a juvenile narrator for Mary Marie (1920) wherein a child of divorce plays the piano — in the next “Glad Refrains.”
Dawn is in the Public Domain and available free HERE at Gutenburg.org. Images are borrowed from Wikipedia and the Hathi Trust.