Eleanor Porter, a former musician, wrote fifteen novels including the classic Pollyanna. In “Glad Refrains” we look for music in her work.
Mary Marie is the perky child protagonist of this book. She accompanies her anxious parents through divorce and reconciliation and learns adult lessons. She also plays the piano. It is the only novel that Eleanor wrote in the first person and she allows MM to tell the story, initially in her diary:
“PREFACE” — Which Explains Things”
Father calls me Mary. Mother calls me Marie. Everybody else calls me Mary Marie. The rest of my name is Anderson.
Eleanor gives Mary Marie the amusing verbal fluency of Pollyanna, but MM is not a missionary orphan who avoids music lessons. Rather, MM loves the piano and lives in a Boston townhouse with her chic mother, Madge, — or on Andersonville College campus with her professor father, a famous astronomer.
I'm thirteen years old, and I'm a cross-current and a contradiction. That is, Sarah says I'm that. (Sarah is my old nurse.) She says she read it once—that the children of unlikes were always a cross-current and a contradiction. And my father and mother are unlikes, and I'm the children. That is, I'm the child. I'm all there is.
Despite sounding like Pollyanna, Mary Marie does not specifically play the Glad Game. In the face of disappointments she strains for optimism in an ingenuous, childlike way. The word “glad” occurs fully seventy five times in Mary Marie, but “gladness” is not the book’s message.
And now I'm going to be a bigger cross-current and contradiction than ever, for I'm going to live half the time with Mother and the other half with Father. Mother will go to Boston to live, and Father will stay here—a divorce, you know.
Her parents reconciled, Mary Marie finishes her story in the extended, final chapter. Set twelve years later, it comprises a full quarter of the book. Now Mary Marie is a twenty-eight year-old mother who is leaving her husband, Jerry, a noted artist, and taking their daughter, Eunice a five-year-old. While packing, she finds her old diary. It revives sad memories and inspires a soul-searching conversation with her mother. In their dialogue, Eleanor airs her thoughts about marital disharmony as she had in the story of the separated couple in The Road to Understanding (1917).
This book is more adult than Understanding. MM is affected when the Andersons actually divorce, and, when Mary Marie grows up and has marital problems, she is disposed to divorce also. Her mother reminds MM of how hurtful it was to her as a child, and MM concludes that she will work to save the union for the child’s sake.
Music is Mary Marie’s outlet for the anxiety caused by the separation. At her father’s big house Mary Marie seeks the piano in the parlor. It is a desolate place since her mother left for Boston, especially the chilling decor:
Before I got the light on, the chairs and sofas loomed up like ghosts in their linen covers. And when the light did come on, I saw that all the old shiver places were there. Not one was missing. Great-Grandfather Anderson's coffin plate on black velvet, the wax cross and flowers that had been used at three Anderson funerals, the hair wreath made of all the hair of seventeen dead Andersons and five live ones—no, no, I don't mean all the hair, but hair from all seventeen and five. Nurse Sarah used to tell me about it.
Well, as I said, all the shiver places were there, and I shivered again as I looked at them; then I crossed over to Mother's old piano, opened it, and touched the keys. I love to play. There wasn't any music there, but I don't need music for lots of my pieces. I know them by heart—only they're all gay and lively, and twinkly-toe dancy. Marie music. I don't know a one that would be proper for Mary to play.
But I was just tingling to play something, and I remembered that Father was in the observatory, and Aunt Jane upstairs in the other part of the house where she couldn't possibly hear. So I began to play. I played the very slowest piece I had, and I played softly at first; but I know I forgot, and I know I hadn't played two pieces before I was having the best time ever, and making all the noise I wanted to.
Music is also a topic when a concert violinist woos newly divorced Madge Anderson. She accompanies him on the piano. He is revealed as a cad and expelled but first ignites jealousy in MM’s father. The reader is not told anything about the compositions they perform nor is their performance celebrated.
We note that astronomy was the profession of MM’s father. While living in Springfield, Vermont where telescopes were manufactured, the Porters were close friends with Governor James Hartness (1861-1934), an amateur inventor and astronomer. The Hartness estate is now an inn with a display of his telescopes. Eleanor dedicated her tenth book, Just David (1916), to his wife, Lena Hartness.
Mary Marie was the next-to-last published novel by Eleanor Porter. It came out in 1920, the year that she died. The next year, John Lyman Porter would oversee the publication of Sister Sue, the story of a woman whose promising musical career is thwarted by family responsibilities. It is a fully-realized adult novel. (It also has Victorian hair wreaths and coffin plates.)
The main character of Sister Sue certainly resonated with Eleanor who gave up a career in music but wrote so affectingly about it. We know that, besides houseplants and her mother’s paintings, Eleanor’s third-floor parlor at 40 Inman Street was yet home to her beloved piano.
Mary Marie is in the Public Domain and available free HERE at Gutenburg.org. Images are borrowed from Wikipedia, Etsy and the Hathi Trust.