Talk:The Beloved Pawn (Everybody's Magazine 1922-23)
| Information about this edition | |
|---|---|
| Edition: | Extracted from the serial in Everybody's magazine, November 1922 to February 1923, pp. 05-31 (Nov 1922), etc. |
| Source: | https://archive.org/details/sim_everybodys-magazine_1922-11_47_5 ; https://archive.org/details/sim_everybodys-magazine_1922-12_47_6 ; https://archive.org/details/sim_everybodys-magazine_1923-01_48_1 ; https://archive.org/sim_everybodys-magazine_1923-02_48_2 |
| Contributor(s): | icame isaw |
| Notes: | Accompanying illustrations will probably be omitted, since they are extracted from microfilms. |
| Proofreaders: | icankered |
Some tidbits from the author[edit]
(From "Everybody's Chimney Corner" (Where Reader, Author and Editor Gather to Talk Things Over) of Everybody's Magazine, November 1922.)
STORY-INTEREST is always the dominant element in the work of Harold Titus (“The Beloved Pawn,” page 4), but underneath there is also a serious purpose. In “Foraker's Folly” he told of the criminal waste of timber; in “The Beloved Pawn” he makes us acquainted with the romance of the Great Lakes.
I suppose [he writes] it could be only America that would take a great connected series of bodies of fresh water and put them to work so strenuously and then say nothing about them. Just go away and let them work, like a horse or a windlass. Teach a smattering about them in schools, refer ptatronizingly to them now and then as lovely places, build cities beside them and largely dependent upon them, use products daily that are either made possible or easier of access because of the lakes, be thankful for them in hot weather—and otherwise have little to say about them. Yet they are so big, so important, so beautiful!
OF THEIR importance Mr. Titus goes on to say:
Statistics can never make people understand them. That it is three hundred miles down Lake Michigan from Chicago to Manistique means little; that six hundred feet of water b not an unusual depth; that the tonnage which goes through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie makes the annual tonnage of the Suez Canal seem insignificant—these things mean little in themselves. Try another: No equal area of water that rolls floats as much shipping in a year as does the Detroit River. That fall flat, too. The beauty of the Great Lakes cannot be compared to that of any other water in the world and carry meaning. They are things apart, an influence, a background for important cultural factors that are beyond statistics. There is no locality more American in America than the Great Lakes. The romance of exploration is largely forgotten by America as a whole; the island communities, once so picturesque, are thinning out; railroads have driven the trading booker off this fresh water; fishing, for the most part, is to-day as efficient and commonplace as most IS of business; the great fleets of freighters go up and down, up and down, hardly noticed, rarely thought about except by those directly interested in shipping. And yet the Great Lakes have their place in our civilization and, in time, that place will be recognized and talked about and respected and the lakes themselves will be studied and appreciated and understood.
SOME of the flavor of these inland seas found its way into “The Beloved Pawn.”
The location is real. The Beaver Islands are to-day much as they were a generation ago. Anything could have happened on the Beavers. That's what the gentle priest at St. James said when I put it to him: “Anything might have happened here, my son.” MacKinnon, the trader, was one of many who once sailed their small, busy crafts about the lakes. They're mostly gone now, to be sure, but not so long ago they were common and important to the people up there. There have been Eldreds—and worse; there have been crowds of men worse than his collection of scum; the Jen Bordens were scattered about fresh water a few years ago, and some still persist; the Eve Eldreds—honestly, I hope that people who read the yarn will think that there never could have been a maiden so lovely. There are so many novels of the Great Lakes to be written. I could go on for the remainder of my writing career and, should it be ever so long, I never could cover the lakes, never could exhaust their possibilities.