Some Writers of Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts: Literary New England #13

Provincetown harbor, Cape Cod, formed the backcloth to a number of writers' lives.

Commercial Street looks out onto the harbor, and has been the home of a number of writers. This is number 466, the former home of Mary Heaton Vorse.

'MARY HEATON VORSE

1882–1966

AUTHOR

WAR CORRESPONDENT

LABOR JOURNALIST

LIVED HERE'

Vorse lived here from 1908–66, the year of her death. She was involved with the famous Provincetown Players. In this post, I frequently paraphrase from the brochure 'Provincetown Historic Walking Tour', published in 2010 by the Provincetown Historical Commission and funded by the Provincetown Tourism Fund.

I've already mentioned Vorse in this blog in relation to her novel Strike(1930) – concerning the 1929 Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina – although the brochure understandably only mentions her Time and the Town: A Provincetown Chronicle (1942), which states that she 'imbues her characters [...] with proletarian nobility'. Her house was owned by Captain Kibbe Cook.

The above photo of Vorse is in the public domain: a 1919 passport photo.

 564 Commercial Street, the former home of Susan Glaspell:

'SUSAN

GLASPELL

1882–1948

NOVELIST

PLAYWRIGHT

LIVED HERE'

571 Commercial Street, the former home of John Dos Passos.

 'JOHN

DOS PASSOS

1896–1960

NOVELIST

LIVED HERE'

577 Commercial Street, Francis' Flats.

 'EUGENE

O'NEILL

1888–1953

DRAMATIST

LIVED HERE'

Quite by chance, I stumbled across this plaque:

'IN HOMAGE TO

EUGENE GLADSTONE O'NEILL

FOR HIS CONTRIBUTION TO

AMERICAN DRAMA

WRITTEN AT THIS SITE IN

THE YEAR OF OUR LORD

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN

WERE THE PLAYS:

"ILE"

"THE MOON OF THE CARIBEES"

"THE LONG VOYAGE HOME"

"IN THE ZONE"'

The above plaque stands on an exterior wall by the entrance to Atlantic House.

627 is the final house of literary interest on Commercial Street.

Now the Norman Mailer Center, the writer lived here from 1990 to his death in 2007. The Norman Mailer Writers Colony aims to honor Mailer's contribution to literature, and encourage future writers.

Finally, and moving away from Commercial Street, 27a Bradford Street was a barn that editor and bookseller Frank Shay turned into the Barnstormers' Theater (now a private residence) to maintain the spirit here of the Provincetown Players after their removal to New York, and writers linked to it are O'Neill, Vorse, and Harry Kemp.

Unfortunately, we were unable to locate the graves of Mailer, Vorse, and Hutch Hapgood in Provincetown Cemetery, nor Susan Glaspell's in Snow Cemetery, Truro, but hadn't really the time to spend on seeking out omissions too much. Nevertheless, many thanks to Provincetown Tourism Office for helping Penny so much.

 

Below is a link to a post I made on Mary Heaton Vorse's Strike!:

 

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Mary Heaton Vorse: Strike!

Mary Heaton Vorse: Strike! (1930)

Mary Heaton Vorse (1874 -1966) was born in New York and brought up comfortably in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was a feminist, journalist, and novelist who published Strike, one of the six novels mentioned below (under Grace Lumpkin) which concerns the Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, which received national newspaper coverage. The textile mill strikes began in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and soon spread to the Carolinas. In the late 19th century, Northern industrialists had been drawn to the South by the promise of happy, contented workers who would work for considerably less money than workers in the North.

However, after World War I, demand for textiles declined as uniforms were no longer needed, and the fashion of the 1920s required less material. The mill owners were forced to makes cuts, and the work of management consultant F. W. Taylor in particular was given a great deal of attention. Families were working 55-hour weeks for less pay, and the workers became far less happy and contented and joined unions. The Gastonia strikes led to several deaths, and Strike is in part a re-creation of the workers' struggle, emphasizing the general animosity toward unions, Northern intelllectuals driven south in sympathy, and a hatred of communist ideas. Strikers (largely meaning unionists), of course, were demonized by mill owners and their supporters.

Unsurprisingly, although Vorse is tremendously sypathetic to the plight of the workers, unlike Lumpkin's To Make My Bread (1932), she was an outsider, and her novel - perhaps particularly from the point of view of the living conditons of the workers and their language - seems to lack the authenticity of Lumpkin's work, much of which is set in the mountains and descriptive of the subsistance farming before the workers were lured to the mills in the lower lands by the illusory temptation of greater wealth.