There comes a time when Amy Lee changes direction: she stops producing tales of heroism and adventure and joins the school of domestic realism.
The reasons given for this drastic transformation are rather contrived and not altogether convincing. I suspect that this element was introduced mainly for the sake of the plot and to make some points; Stella Gibbons could also have used it to clear up some unfinished business of her own .
From danger and death to domesticity
As a child Amy Lee scribbles non-stop, producing exciting adventure stories such as Pharaoh’s Curse: A Tale of Ancient Egypt and The Wolf of Leningrad: A Thrilling Story of The Russian Revolution purely for her own enjoyment. The books she reads fire her imagination and provide the ideas for her stories.
As a young woman, she writes exciting adventure stories for publication. She may not have any first-hand knowledge, any personal experience, of the sort of people and action that she writes about, but her readers love her work. She becomes a best-seller; her books are made into films and this gains her world-wide popularity.
After moving to America, Amy Lee changes track and writes a very different kind of story for a whole new constituency of readers:
“Her stories of family life communicated (because she herself felt it) to the passing of an examination or the breaking of a betrothal the excitement she had once given to escapes from death and last-minute rescues, and she charmed her readers by showing them the variety and interest of every day.”
So what happened here? Why did Amy abandon her heroic avatars? Why the farewell to adventure in favour of embracing mundane subject matters? One of the reasons given is that Amy's adventure stories lack moral values; they are in some ways unethical, unedifying and unwholesome, something that she is unaware of until she visits America and comes in for some direct criticism. She also cools off after experiencing danger, death amd great fear at first hand.
Criticism of Amy's stories
Amy Lee's earliest stories may not be very realistic, but they sound harmless enough, even the one about Buck Finch among the cannibals!
After she has been writing for publication for a while, there are enough changes in her content and approach to elicit some criticism. We are told that she panders to her readers' cravings for danger, excitement and fear-based thrills, that some of her new heroes are outlaws and that she casts a glamour over violence and horror, but we are not given enough information to decide whether or not the criticisms of the stories are completely justified.
Amy Lee first visits America to go on a lecture tour. Someone she meets at a reception criticises her books to her face because they have a bad influence on people, especially the young:
“No, my dear, I don’t like your books. You write about people on the wrong side of the law, and we’ve still got quite enough of that right here in New Leicester without the children reading about it in books...
Still plenty of rats about, and we don’t want ’em glorified in our books...The business of literature is to elevate and improve, not to make bad men and bad ways fascinating to our boys and girls...”
“You’re one of the forces, Miss Lee, that’s helping to break up civilization,” concluded Miss Cordell firmly. “Anyway, your books are, and it comes to the same thing. You think it over. Try and write something sweet and homey that the women’ll like. Good-day to you.”
When Amy encounters Bob, the American boy she first met at Kenwood many years earlier, she asks him what he thinks of her books. He says that he doesn't like them:
“Well, you see, fighting and death aren’t like that and criminals aren’t. You don’t tell the truth about them.”
“It isn’t meant to be true, it’s a story!” she cried.
“I know. But it’s a story glorifying criminals. Perhaps people who don’t know what criminals are like might like it. But it just seemed silly to me.”
Bob does know what criminals are like; he has been involved with them in the past.
Amy Lee becomes unable to write
Stella Gibbons says in My American, “A natural writer stops writing only when dead.”
Amy Lee is a natural writer, but she stops writing during her stay in America. She becomes half dead with anxiety and terror when Bob goes missing. He is saved from the criminals who kidnapped him, but Amy takes a long time to recover from the stress. She finds that a key element has gone from her life for ever:
“And when her health returned, restored by happiness, she found her secret world had vanished. Not even its ruins were left. She opened the unfinished manuscript of Tower of The Wicked, staring at the last words she had written before her illness and could not remember writing them, nor believe that she had written them. She knew, as she stared at the words, that never again would she be able to make stories out of danger and fear.”
Not only has she lost the inclination and ability to write thrilling adventure stories, she also gets a severe case of writer's block.
Amy Lee resumes her writing
Amy gets going again as a writer after a suggestion by Bob, who is now her husband:
“For weeks after her marriage she had put off trying to write, and when at last she did try, urged by Mr. Humfriss and her publishers, this blankness and despair was all that she could feel. Her power to tell stories seemed dead. Bob had come in and found her sitting there, white and silent. He gathered from her confused explanation what had happened and gave her the first piece of advice that came into his head, for he was late for a lecture and in a hurry.
“Well, darling, maybe you could write something more homey,” he said...”
This encouragement enables Amy to resume her writing, but in a very different genre. Her way of writing changes too; she can't manage the total immersion of the past:
“She was no longer able to give whole days to her writing, for looking after Bob and managing the house took up most of her time. But fortunately she no longer needed to retreat into a long trance of concentration and excitement in order to create; her books were now the kind that can be written in time snatched from domestic affairs. She had almost forgotten the frightening morning some years ago, when she had sat for an hour, in silence, staring at a blank page on which she was unable to write a word.”
It takes a while, but Amy's 'sweet and homey' second wave stories become almost as popular as her thrillers were - although they appeal more to women than they do to men.
Behind the transition
There is something not quite right about the way that Stella Gibbons makes Amy Lee stop writing the stories that Stella wanted to write and start writing the stories that Stella had to settle for writing after she got Cold Comfort Farm out of her system. Perhaps there is a mixture of motives behind it. Could sour grapes be involved?
Perhaps Stella was giving the message that in order to grow up, people must stop living with imaginary people in a fantasy world in favour of engaging with real people in the real world; they must also take on adult viewpoints and responsibilities.
Perhaps she is saying that writers should think about the effect that their words and ideas have on others: it is better to produce wholesome food for the mind rather than be a purveyor of dangerous drugs for the imagination.
Perhaps Stella Gibbons was just trying to tie up loose ends and perform her typical white magic by creating a happy ending for Amy Lee, one in which she gets the best of both worlds.
This may wrap up Amy's story, but there is still more to come about My American, which, like all of Stella Gibbons's lesser-known works, is overshadowed by Cold Comfort Farm (1932), her first published novel and one that is neither an exciting adventure story nor about the ordinary people of north London.
Stella Gibbons in 1932, seven years before My American was published:
