The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-09-29
MRS. WOODROW PUT DESERT IN NOVEL No Arabian Waste But Our
 Own West SHE HAS LIVED THERE For Personification of the Wilderness She Chooses a Dancer-NO
 Actual Portraits in
 the Book
SHE HAS LIVED THERE
From the New York Sun.

From the New York Sun.
 Mrs Wilson Woodrow, the writer whose new novel the Appletons are publishing and whose husband was a cousin of the democratic nominee for President. is a fair haired, gentle voiced, demure hammered little woman, and gives no evidences of literary bo- hemianism. Her latest word, "rhe Black Pearl" is portrayal of the Ari- zona desert and life there and in the Rocky mountains. Seeing Mrs. Wood row it is hard to conceive that she not only produced the book but lived through scenes in the original which later, viewed In perspective. inspired her novel.
 T like writing on the desert best of a1l," she says. q went out there with my husband, who was a mining engi- neer and prospector, and fell under the spell of the scenery. No, the scenic descriptions in The Black Pearl are not exaggerated; they are inadequate, but when I got away from it and saw it in perspective I saw the dramatic features of 1t and wanted to try to portray it."
 Thus Mrs. Woodrow agrees with many other writers who insist that many forms of life that hold most of the dramatic in the telling, in the portrayed effect, seem most undramatic and hard even in the living. Also she agrees that she writer must get away from the scene of his action and get a perspective before he sets about telling his story.
 "As you know, I have written several ..1., ,,41 1.t, .f fI.O tF1 elaa said "As matter of fact, like writing short stories best of all-the necessity for concentrating action into one forceful effect. But ] have always had the idea of writing @ novel of the desert; where woman would typify the desert. The des- ert has always seemed to me like a wom- ana certain type of woman-with shift ing moods, various presentments, but al- ways at bottom an unexplained enigma And I like the Pearl better than any character l have ever done.'
 Mrs Woodrow smiled apologetically In her story of dancer heroine Is the per sonification of the desert. The author de- scribes a dance exhibition in a mining camp:
 ''As this troubling music of Hughies seemed to express the dominion of un- suspected but potent earth forces, primi- tive, savage and forever irreclaimable,
 
 tmbed Dimly he realized that should every desert on the globe finally be sub dued by the plough, the irrigating dltches and the pruning hook. they would still remain as realities in the mind of man. forever clouding his aspirations toward the mountain peaks and the stars. For the desert must ever remain an unsolved enigma, never to be reduced to formula, never to be explained by any human standards; now whispering to man of the mysteries of the soul and revealing to him moro of the infinite than his finite senses may grasp; and now mocking him with Illusions. her beautiful mrages wrought of airbeams and sunlight, and transforming him into a beast of greed with her haunting intimations of hidden and inexhaustible treasure.
 ''The Pearl was dancing to fIughs strange music she was dancing tho des- ert. this feat was not an intellec- tual one. She was not portra Ying the spirit of the desert as gleaned from study and observation and melted in the cruci- ble of her poetic imagination and moulded by her fancy until it was thing of form in her thought. The Black Pearl danced the desert because in her was the power to be one with it and live in it's life through every cell of her being. It was 8 matter of feeling with her, one phase of her affinity with the forces of the earth; but because she had the artists construc- tive imagination she could put it into form and dance Ii, and by projecting her own feelings into it convey it to others.
 ''It was the voice of the desert full of savage eXultaton in it's own loneliness and forsaken isolation, and through it ran cry of deep. disdainful triumph, as if it said; All puny races of men come to me; emlroider my vast surfaces with the green of your fields and gardens, build your houses upon my quiescent sands and dream that you have conquered and tanned me.
 And I abide. I abide, Silent, brood ing, unwilling of your noisy incursion. are absorbed in my dream under my own in- imtable skies. But soon or late, when the moment comes, I wake, l rouse see my inviolate desolations invaded. Then gather my strength, I drown you with my torrential rivers, I torture you with my burning sun, l obiterate you with my burning sand. So shall my cac- tus bloom once more, my jeWelled lizards crawl unmolested and the cry of the cay ote echo again through the vast, bound less spaces of my desolation
 "Then to my looms, to my looms and that Of emptiness and silence and space and light to weave all mysteries of color and all illusions of beauty.
 Lord cried Bob Flick to Seagrave, 'SheS plSN1nB the ueSert I've seen her look just like the music sounds. ''
 Mrs. Woodrow thinks that the desert is different fin its effect upon men and upon women, though she can give no ex- planation for the fact.
 ''The desert seems to bring out all that is finest best and strongest in the men, she said. But with the women 1t is diff ferent; they seem to dry up, to wither, to harden. No, there are no actual DOT traits of characters in the book. Some were suggested by originals, of course, but I have never been able to create a character satisfactorily without having free recourse to imagination-to project myself into it and follow it in its devel- opment
 "Some people have expressed wonder that I have managed to project myself into certain types of personality so diff ferent from my own--all the types of women that occur in these desert pie lures are so different from myself. AS to that l cannot reply definitely
 But have seen the desert lived in it, have seen what it does to it's own, and when I get away from it all can obtain picture of 1t all. with lights and shades in place. and can then understand in measure what it does can imagine my self in the places of those others"