Carnegie Mellon University keeps writer-educator Schmitt's memory alive

Her novels sold millions of copies and her short stories were published in magazines including Collier's, Harper's Bazaar and The Atlantic Monthly. At Carnegie Mellon University, she set a standard for teaching creative writing that is still employed today.

Gladys Schmitt, the author of novels including “David the King,” “The Godforgotten” and “Rembrandt,” was “the darling of Pittsburgh writers” at the time of her death in 1972, according to Gerald Costanzo, a professor of English at CMU.

If she is forgotten now — and Costanzo and his peers at CMU insist the university never forgot her — it is only because of the passing of time, not a reflection of her talent.

“I sense a seriousness about Gladys when I read her work,” says Cynthia Lamb, the co-editor, with Lois Joseph Fowler, of “The Collected Stories of Gladys Schmitt” (Carnegie Mellon). “I think she insisted on everything being superbly polished, and her craft was amazing.”

“She was of a different period,” Costanzo says. “I don't know if I could compare her (to another writer). I think the times were different. She had a very strong sense of herself as an artist, and I don't think most novelists see themselves that way.”

A Pittsburgh native, Schmitt was born in 1909 and attended the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh.

After graduating from Pitt, Schmitt took a job as an editor at Scholastic Magazine and moved to New York City with her husband, Simon Goldfield. She returned to Pittsburgh in 1942 to teach at CMU (then the Carnegie Institute of Technology).

Peggy Knapp, a professor of English at CMU, briefly worked with Schmitt. She remembers her former colleague being “always busy,” with hardly any time for idle conversation at school. But Schmitt and her husband did host dinner parties at their home in Squirrel Hill, where she would sit at one end of the table, doing needlepoint as conversations flowed.

“She was very warm,” Knapp says. “She was busy and productive. She had just written her last novel, ‘The Godforgotten,' (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) when I joined the faculty. ... I thought it was a magnificent novel. I think she was an intellectual novelist, one who was very much aware of academic currents.”

Schmitt started the university's creative-writing program at a time when there were only a handful of such curriculums in the country. The Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Center — known as “The Glad” on campus — remains the gathering point for CMU's creative-writing students and faculty. Costanzo — who launched the Carnegie Mellon Press in 1972 — says Schmitt designed “basically the same model we're using now” to teach creative writing.

“She was a marvelous teacher,” Costanzo says. “She taught me how to deal with students and how to be honest with them.”

The stories in the collection, published from 1929 to 1969, are often marked by details from bygone eras. In “The Furlough,” published in Mademoiselle in 1944, there are references to a telegram and an oilcloth table cover. A man travels in the luxury of a train's parlor car in “The Avenger” (Good Housekeeping, 1945).

Despite the period details, Lamb thinks the stories remain relevant to contemporary readers who will “recognize themselves, and people in general.”

“When she wrote, the story becomes unimportant,” Lamb says. “You forget about it. Details will remind you of other eras, but you don't concentrate on those. ... The stories transcend the era that she wrote them in, and I think they'll continue to do that because they are so evocative of how people react.”

“I can't think of anybody who was exactly like her writing at the same time,” Knapp says. “Although the venues she wrote for, The Atlantic and Collier's, would have had some similar voices. ... But she was more polished. It was more like New Yorker(-quality) work than most writers of her period.”

Schmitt's ability to capture slices of humanity might best be seen in “Consider the Giraffe,” from the 1944 short-story collection “It's a Woman's World” (McGraw Hill). About a young girl at a zoo with her distant, distracted parents, it's a tour de force of storytelling and imagination. When the young girl addresses the giraffe aloud — “Oh my darling, oh my beautiful” — Schmitt captures the moment as the creature approaches:

“He made his swaying, professional way all round the inner side of the barrier of wire. She pressed hard against the rail. The other children, the guard, the two sitting on the bench behind her, the park, the whole world fell away. Her arms went up in a gesture of utter gratefulness. The giraffe had stopped just in front of her, he was looking at her: she was drowned in his sweet, wet glance. A warm brown well of sorrow and gentleness closed over her, and she was forever safe, everlastingly loved.”

“It's so poignant, it makes you cry,” Lamb says. “For Gladys to write that so we understand this child at such a young age, her point of view, is remarkable. I really love every story, but that's one that I'll always remember.”

Rege Behe is a contributing writer for Trib Total Media.