“Glad Refrains” began in January 2023 as a survey of music in Eleanor Porter’s fifteen novels — to see how her career as pianist and vocalist informed her fiction. Other novelists put music in their stories, but not so often, so fondly and so accurately. Eleanor wrote fifteen novels, including Pollyanna. Of those books, musicians have a role in seven, and a musician is the main protagonist in five.
“Sister Sue” is the fifteenth and final novel we will look at in this series.
Piano student Susan Gilmore is told by her teacher, Signor Bartoni, that she will be a great pianist. At this, Sue conjures a fantasy:
Once again before her eyes rose the vision of countless other audiences-to-be, with herself bowing her thanks to their clamorous demands of “Encore! Encore!” Once again through her whole self tingled the ecstasy of interpreting to a listening multitude the master thoughts of a master mind until the ivory keys under her fingers seemed living voices to speak her message as she willed. (p. 2)
Upon the failure of her father’s business and loss of his health, Sue’s career is hijacked by family responsibilities, including younger siblings. The Gilmores must leave Boston. Her beau disapproves. She dreads the consequences: moving to the country and giving up her grand piano.
If have not been for her piano, she thought she could not, indeed have endured it. But she could still find each day in her beloved keyboard, that means to vent her weariness, worry, and utter dejection. (p. 52)
Little-known Sister Sue came out in 1921, a year after Eleanor Hodgman Porter died. Almost all reference works omit this title. Gutenberg.org has not digitized the text. There no reprints of Sister Sue. (Used editions sell for $20 or less). Blame these omissions on the fact that the book was published months after obituaries and tributes had been accepted as a near-official record. I was chagrined at seeing the strange title for the first time last year in a letter that John Porter wrote in 1922. I found a second-hand copy of the book at a dealer and also found a free facsimile copy online, HERE, at the Hathi Trust Digital Library.
Sister Sue is the most autobiographical of Eleanor Porter’s works. Set in Vermont and Boston, it even has an episode that spoofs best-selling books. ( Pollyanna had inspired “Pollyanna” dolls, plays and games, and Trixie inspires “Trixie” cigars, stockings and pajamas,) There is also a dedicated, small-town piano teacher — Eleanor’s role for years. The heroine is childless and gives up hopes of a music career at age thirty. John and Eleanor did not have children, and she was thirty-two when she put music aside. Her dedication for Sister Sue is pointed and personal:
To the innumerable SISTER SUES
All over the world — who, patient and uncomplaining, have lived their “barren” lives with the “life worth while” ever beckoning them from afar, and especially to certain very dear “Sister Sues" personally known to me but whose modesty forbids my mentioning them here by name
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
Indigent and stranded in the Vermont town of Gilmoreville, Sue Gilmore keeps house and gives piano lessons. But Susan’s dreams of “Encore! Encore!” are expressed in those exact words at least sixteen times in next three hundred pages! A sampling:
Page 91— It did not help her to bake beans and stir up bread to be thinking all the time of that “Encore! Encore! Susanna Gilmore! Encore!” Page 95— But in her ears also was ringing, like an echo, away off in the distance, “Encore! Encore! Susanna Gilmore! Encore!” Page 200— And so vividly did she tell it that even the startled man across the room seemed to hear at least the echo of that call: "Encore! Encore! Susanna Gilmore! Encore! Encore!” —Page 287 ..In Donald Kendall's eyes was the vision of her as she had talked to him that December day, flushed, palpitating, and shining-eyed; and to his ears came again very distinctly the clamorous “Encore! Encore! Susanna Gilmore! Encore!” that her glowing words had evoked.
In the old house, Sue seeks comfort in a battered relic of the 19th century: a square piano. They were common until the late 1800s when iron frames replaced smaller wooden ones, and upright pianos became the affordable standard.
It's an old square one with octagon legs. It sounds a good deal like a tinkling cymbal, if you know what that is. I don't. But it sounds as if it sounded like that! Still, it'll be better than nothing, I suppose. (p. 61)
She could not find solace or relief even in the piano these days, for there was always a cut finger or a burned thumb to make playing a torture to her. For that matter, it had been more or less of a torture anyway, from the very first to play on that piano, so jangling on her sensitive nerves were the tingling notes that failed so miserably to respond to what she was longing to express. (p. 85)
In Sister Sue, Eleanor Porter tries to convey what music means. As in other books she uses musical terms as descriptives, but in Sister Sue, she wants the reader to see how performance can be a refuge from anguish — how it can bring people together — how to sense a composer’s intentions — how an accompanist should play to the principal — how a concert career can isolate an artist — how artistic success can undermine domesticity — and the awfulness of music’s absence.
Among her well-off neighbors is a childhood playmate, Donald Kendall, who is now a famous violinist. He visits Gilmoreville for Old Home Day, but his touring accompanist cannot stay. He reluctantly allows Sue to play for him and is dazzled. On stage before the public, Sue expertly accompanies Donald’s violin.
Those who knew and understood, however, realized that the quiet little woman at the piano was really depicting the very heights of her art by keeping her playing so nicely attuned to his that it was but a background against which his performance showed clear and distinct in all its wondrous brilliance and beauty. (p. 174)
Eleanor describes the effect of Donald’s performance at the Old Home Day concert:
And once again they went wild, those men and women and children who never before knew that “just a fiddle” could bring to their ears the winds from the mountains, the voices from the sea, the shouts and songs of triumphant multitudes, and the despairing wail of a woman who has lost her soul; or the tripping feet of fairies in the moonlight; or the tramp of a vast army is marching on to victory. (p. 174)
Donald leaves to go on tour, but he breaks his arm ( fated for most of EHP’s love-struck violinists) — and he comes home to Gilmoreville in a rage. Sue accompanies his furious rants with crashing chords from the the piano. The courtship begins.
The louder he talked the louder she played; the faster flew his tongue the faster flew her fingers, until they were both in gales of laughter — and with a rippling run and a crashing chord Sister Sue brought the performance to a triumphant end. (p. 253)
Sue had declined Donald’s invitation to go on tour with him due to her siblings, Gordon and May. A pool hall and fast companions are leading the teenagers astray. Sue’s response is to form a club with an “orchestra” to occupy the at-risk teens.
And we have sings and candy-pulls and dances downstairs. You should hear me play ragtime and dance music! I never thought I could, but I do. Oh, I make them hear good music, too, and they're getting to like it. We've started a little orchestra; Gordon plays the bass viol – he loves it. But if I went away all of this would stop… (p. 205)
The Gilmore kids grow up, marry and move away. When her father dies, Sue tries to renew her lessons with Signor Bartoni in Boston. She is thirty years old. Bartoni sees that her proficiency had faded but waits to tell her. While waiting for him, Sue meets her life-long idol:
Sister Sue found herself alone then with the GREAT ONE. In Sister Sue's mind she was just that — all capitals. Sister Sue had heard her play once — years ago. Since then the great pianist had been to Sister Sue the living embodiment of her own dreams.
The GREAT ONE* tells Sister Sue that despite musical triumphs, her glamorous life was unsatisfactory. She has not been “needed” by anyone. Sue has an epiphany and decides to resume her “needed” role of Sister Sue with her grown siblings. Donald happily intervenes, and Sue will be Donald’s wife. THE END
Sister Sue is the final novel in Glad Refrains. We took up Eleanor Porter’s novels chronologically, from 1907 to 1921, and the last one, Sister Sue is coincidentally the most personal and most musical. I question whether anyone but a musician could have written this novel.
Despite her celebrity as the creator of Pollyanna, which has no music, Eleanor’s enduring love was music. Pollyanna is unlike her other books — and, someday, we will speculate how a musician came to write it. Eleanor’s love of music germinated in the small town of Littleton, New Hampshire, and, by her late teens, she had enrolled in the New England Conservatory. During her fifteen years as a pianist and vocalist, great composers were all producing fresh work; EHP’s living contemporaries included Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Brahms, Sibelius, Bruckner, Debussy, Saint-Saëns and both Strausses — all were actively composing while she was performing.
Concerts and parlor music flourished in the cultural hothouse that was Greater Boston in Eleanor Porter’s day, scenes of which she recreated in her stories. She did not live to see the American public lured to modern distractions — movies, radio and modern phonographs. Eleanor offers a personal window on a vanished epoch of American music.
*[We are certain that THE GREAT ONE is a roman à clef for Amy Beach (1867-1944), who was born in Henniker, New Hampshire a year before Eleanor. An accomplished composer and famed concert pianist , Mrs. Beach was the sole woman member of the elite “Boston Six” composers who reigned in the late 1800s. Amy Beach’s striking compositions for violin and piano are still performed world-wide. One of these recital pieces is Romance for Violin and Piano. (Outstanding performance.) Her piano works are likewise established standards: Summer Dreams (Spritely piano. See the notes to follow this one.)
Sister Sue is in the Public Domain and available online in facsimile HERE, at the Hathi Trust Digital Library. Images are borrowed from public domain sources and the Hathi Trust.
Three thumbs up…. Thanks Jim
Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you, Jim.
Stuart-Sinclair