The Neglected Books Page

[画像:Cover of Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, by Brad Bigelow]

I have a book coming out in January. It’s a biography of Virginia Faulkner, a writer even many followers of this site have never heard of. So, a book about a woman nobody’s ever heard of by a writer who’s never published a book before is pretty much a guarantee that I will end up featuring it here someday.

How did I come to spend much of the last five years writing about Virginia Faulkner? Well, it all started here, actually.

Long ago (How Long? Over 17 years), I mentioned a book called My Hey-Day, or The Crack-up of the International Set, which purported to be the memoirs of one Princess Tulip Murphy as related by Virginia Faulkner in a short post catching up on recent neglected reading. As I often do, I did a little research to find out about the author. From her entry in Contemporary Authors (New Revision Series) Volume 11, I learned that she was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1913; attended Radcliffe for one year; worked for the Washington Post, Town and Country magazine in New York, and MGM in Hollywood; wrote several novels and a Broadway play in addition to My Hey-Day; then worked as an editor at the University of Nebraska Press from 1956 until her death in 1980. That last bit stuck in my head. It seemed an odd trajectory: Washington, New York City, Hollywood … and then the University of Nebraska Press?

In early 2020, I was taking Ian Thomson’s seminar in the MA Biography/Creative Nonfiction program at the University of East Anglia, I decided to take a closer look into Virginia Faulkner’s life for an assignment requiring us to incorporate media in our essays. The paper I turned in, “Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Clippings,” was a sprint through her first twenty-some years as told through headlines and quotes from various Lincoln, Nebraska newspapers culled from Newspapers.com. From the photo in an article on her midnight marriage and its later annulment, I leaped to the conclusion that she was gay. The similar between her haircut and clothes and those of the then-famous English lesbian Radclyffe Hall, whose novel The Well of Loneliness had been ruled not obscene by a US court in 1929, seemed an obvious indication of her sexuality.

I didn’t have the word count allowance to cover Faulkner’s whole life using this approach, and I would probably have left her story unfinished had the pandemic and the U.K. lockdown not intervened. But when I considered what was required to research and complete a dissertation (or thesis, as it’s called in the U.S.) in the course of the next six months, I realized that my Plan A, to write a biography of G. E. (Gertrude) Trevelyan, was no longer viable, and I looked for subjects I could address purely through virtual research. That odd trajectory — Washington, New York City, Hollywood, Lincoln, Nebraska — kept coming back as a mystery begging to be solved, so I began to survey what would be involved in collecting evidence.

At that point, I stumbled through an extraordinarily lucky series of coincidences. Finding a photo of Faulkner with the composer Dana Suesse and the once-notorious New York City madam, Polly Adler, in the collection of the Kansas City Library that I might use, I asked for permissions and was referred to Suesse’s executor, Peter Mintun, whose name I remembered as a singer and pianist from the time we lived in the San Francisco area. Peter not only generously agreed, but as we discussed my research, passed along several contacts he thought might help.

One was a woman named Samantha Shada who’d done some research into Faulkner herself. When I contacted Samantha, she not only added to my growing list of contacts but emailed me two batches of Faulkner’s personal letters that she’d had scanned by the Special Collections staff at the University of Nebraska Lincoln library. The letters dated from 1930, when Virginia left her home in Lincoln for the first time, to attend an exclusive girls’ finishing school in Rome, and stopped in late 1935, not long after Virginia had arrived in Hollywood to work for MGM. Some of the letters were typed, others were handwritten, but all shone with intelligence and bubbled with wisecracks and self-deprecating remarks. A few were in a different hand and almost indecipherable. These I skipped, but after reading the rest, I knew I had to share this remarkable sensibility with others.

Virginia — and I now felt comfortable referring to her on a first-name basis — was one of history’s great letter writers. In 1930, while still settling in at Miss Moxley’s school in Rome, she wrote her brother, Eddie: “You know how I used to be finicky about my food? If I thought a human hair was involved in a viand I was consuming, I would very nearly be sick at the table. Now, however, if I found a partially decomposed horse in the vermicelli, I would only make a slight moué of distaste and eat around it.” If this was a sample of Virginia writing on a familiar basis, I dreamt of what other riches from 1936 and beyond that awaiting in the archives in Lincoln. I began to picture a collection of her letters that would put even her novels and magazine stories to shame.

Another contact Peter Mintun shared was Debby Applegate, who was working on a biography of Polly Adler, the other woman with Virginia and Dana Suesse in that photo from the Kansas City library. I recognized Debby’s name, as she was something of a legend for winning the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography with her first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. Debby replied to my email with enthusiasm. She’d looked into Virginia’s life because in the early 1950s, Virginia spent the better part of a year turning a massive manuscript of Polly’s autobiography, a manuscript that had been repeatedly rejected by publishers, into a book that became a global bestseller: A House is Not a Home. Debby not only shared her research notes on Virginia but directed me to a Lincoln collector who owned the one remaining notebook from Virginia’s work on the book.

Among the people Samantha Shada referred me to was the person who proved most instrumental to the whole project. At the time I first called Ron Hull, he was a few weeks away from turning 90. I reached him at his office. Having come to Lincoln in 1955 — the same year Virginia returned to her hometown — he had by then spent almost 65 years developing and running educational television, first in Nebraska, then in Washington, D.C., Vietnam, and China, and then again in Nebraska, and he was still coming to work five days a week. Having been a close friend and colleague of Virginia throughout the second half of her life, he was full of stories about her and over the moon to know that someone was working on her biography, even as just a thesis. We talked several times for at least an hour in April and May 2020, and he was bubbling with enthusiasm. More than that, he talked to Donna Shear, then director of the University of Nebraska Press, and soon after, I was invited to submit a book proposal. Unknown first-time writers who haven’t even finished a thesis don’t often get such invitations, and that, more than anything else, is why Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts is now about to be published.

The information I was able to collect virtually, including the invaluable collection of letters Samantha Shada provided, was enough for me to complete my thesis, which focused on Virginia’s time in Rome, at Radcliffe, and in Washington, D.C. between 1930 and 1934, but as soon as my wife and I returned to the U.S. and archives began opening up, the in-person research had to get underway. I spent three weeks in Lincoln, going through Virginia’s papers item by item, as well as the personal papers of her brother, Ed, and her partner, Bernice Slote, and those of others she worked with, including Robert Knoll, Mari Sandoz, and the novelist Wright Morris. It soon became apparent that Virginia’s letters from 1936 on were lost forever. They weren’t in her papers or in Ed’s. In fact, Ed’s papers contained no personal items from 1936 until the mid-1950s, and he had been meticulous in his record-keeping.

What I learned from Rich Faulkner, Virginia’s one surviving first cousin, was that Ed began storing papers for Virginia and Bernice — including records from Prairie Schooner — in his basement sometime in the 1970s, and at some point after that, his water heater leaked and dozens of boxes were damaged and thrown away. This made the challenge of piecing together Virginia’s life between 1936 and 1955 all the more difficult. Fortunately, her papers included some of the notes she assembled during the three years she spent as a “girl hermit” in Pacific Grove, California, becoming fascinated with the work of Willa Cather and divining, through close reading and psychological analysis rather than through access to any primary evidence, that Cather was a lesbian. This work followed a year Virginia spent in therapy and in a sanatorium in Michigan where she likely received multiple rounds of electro-convulsive treatments, and her notes revealed an obsessive level of interest in hidden messages and overloaded symbolism that would not have withstood scrutiny by any competent scholar.

The visit to Lincoln also allowed me to contact the collector who had the one surviving notebook and other papers from Virginia’s work on A House is Not a Home, and I spent a day reading and scanning the material. The shorthand explanation of what Virginia did for Polly is that she ghost-wrote the memoirs, but what the notebook shows is that it would be more accurate to say she ghost-edited them. What she did wasn’t that different from what Maxwell Perkins did for Thomas Wolfe with the manuscript of You Can’t Go Home Again: she cut and structured the material into a coherent narrative, adding historical context and — crucial to potential publishers — making sure that the book was libel-proof. It was a dry run of what Virginia would do time and again when she became an editor with the University of Nebraska Press.

Most of Virginia’s papers in the UN-Lincoln library Special Collections related to her work for the press: correspondence with authors as she guided them along the path from proposal to publishable manuscript. There were two classes of authors for Virginia, based on the tone she adopted in her letters. The majority were academics who might be experts in their field but had not the slightest idea of how to put a half-decent book together. At times, especially in the case of William Curtin, whose collection of Willa Cather’s early journalism, The World and the Parish, took almost a decade to complete, her temper was tested to the breaking point. Her frustration and near-contempt is palpable in the letters from the last months before publication and likely drove Curtin into a long period of depression.

In a few cases, however, when Virginia was satisfied that an author had both the intellectual rigor and the writing skills required of her benchmarks for the press, her tone was warm, informal, and peppered with her characteristic wisecracks. She and Wright Morris, whose books the press began reissuing in the late 1960s in its Bison Books paperback series, hit it off from the beginning. It helped that his books were already written, but Virginia came to think of Morris as Nebraska’s best writer (after Cather, of course) and the two shared a love of cocktails and unveiled sarcasm.

Her most intimate tone could be heard in her correspondence with Hazel Barnes, a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert on Sartre and the existentialists. Barnes was a lesbian in a long-term partnership with another member of the faculty and it was clear that Virginia respected not only her scholarship but her ability to navigate institutional waters at a time when there was little tolerance of anything but the most conventional heterosexual relationships. Barnes made a point to stop in Lincoln on her trips to and from the east and she and her partner Doris Schwalbe became close friends of Virginia and Bernice Slote.

The sympathy between the two women was such that I decided to stop in Boulder on my way back from Nebraska and take a look through Hazel Barnes’s papers. It was a hunch that paid off. In the dozen or so boxes containing everything from manuscripts to a pair of Barnes’s baby shoes, I found a letter from August 1963, typed by Virginia at home and when she was several drinks into her evening, in which she contemplates seducing a faculty wife and second-guessing her decision to stay in Lincoln, effectively putting her career as a writer behind her:

I see now that it was a major mistake for me to stop being a writer and try to be a people. I can’t think why I would have anyway, except from despair. So now since 1956 I have tried to be a people and screw that. It is a waste of energy. People are slobs, and they don’t care, they never make anything, they are dandruff and snot.

Virginia closes by acknowledging her unique trust in Barnes: "I am responsible for myself; telling you what I feel is a prized luxury. Let me have it."

Virginia’s first partnership was with Dana Suesse, and I had to wait almost a year before Suesse’s papers became available at the Library of Congress. "I am on my way now to have tea with Virginia Faulkner," Dana Suesse wrote her mother on the morning of February 1, 1941. "She is one of the most brilliant girls I have met in a long while. I adore her books." That was the start of a relationship that lasted for much of the 1940s, and given the loss of Virginia’s letters from this time, any clues to their partnership and Virginia’s life during this period would have to come from Suesse’s papers. Luckily, Suesse provided two priceless aids to the researcher. First, for much of her life, she kept small pocket agendas with her daily activities and appointments. From these, I learned, for example, that Dana moved into Virginia’s Manhattan apartment on October 11, 1941. In addition, Dana wrote to her mother at least once a week, except when they lived a short drive apart in Connecticut, and often passed along news of Virginia — even after Dana moved to Paris to study with the legendary composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.

It was from the Paris letters that I learned that Virginia admitted herself to the Haven, an exclusive sanatorium in Rochester, Michigan, sometime in the late summer of 1949. Virginia was, by all accounts, a heavy drinker if not a functional alcoholic, but she also suffered from periods of crippling depressions and self-doubt. The first record of these could be found in those cryptic letters included in the PDFs passed along by Samantha Shada. Once I took the time to decipher and transcribe them, I saw that they were written to Ed Faulkner by Evelyn Merriman, a former teacher at the Moxley School in Rome. Merriam had come to New York from the private girls’ school in Connecticut where she was now teaching to visit Virginia, who had recently arrived to launch her career. She found Virginia in a panic, worried that she would not be able to make a living or even be taken seriously as a writer, and she reached out to Ed for help. Within a few days, Merriman felt that the crisis had passed and wrote Ed that she was returning to Connecticut, but there were clues to other episodes of depression over the following years.

Dana Suesse’s letters to her mother provided some insight into Virginia’s mental health problems and her time at the Haven, but these were supplemented by several dozen letters that avoided the deluge in Ed Faulkner’s basement. These were to Ann Watkins, Polly Adler’s literary agent, and are found in the Special Collections at Columbia University. Dana Suesse, newly returned from Paris, brought Virginia together with Adler after her release from the Haven in the summer of 1950. Knowing of Polly’s struggles to find a publisher, as well as of the problems with Polly’s manuscript, Dana thought Virginia might work with Polly to put the book into publishable shape. Virginia agreed to take on the job, but she was wary of Polly’s force-of-nature personality and insisted on working without a contract or a fee.

It would take almost two years to finish what started as a few weeks’ task, and over the course of that time, Virginia left New York and spent time in intensive outpatient treatment with psychiatrists in Detroit and Milwaukee, as well as what was likely another round of ECT at the state asylum in Hastings, Nebraska, before finding refuge in Pacific Grove. Although incidental to her work on A House is Not a Home, Virginia’s updates about her status in the letters to Watkins are the sole surviving records from that year of wandering.

After finishing work on A House is Not a Home, Virginia turned her energies into her Cather project, working for over two years on numerous notebooks full of quotations from Cather, Jung, and the few books about Cather published since her death in 1947 — of which only the one notebook in the UN Lincoln Special Collections still survives. She shared her findings in a few letters brimming with excitement that she sent to Bill Koshland, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf she knew from her days in New York. Koshland’s replies were encouraging but cautious. Cather was one of the authors Alfred Knopf held closest to his heart and Koshland knew that Knopf and Cather’s executor and partner, Edith Lewis, would cut off cooperation with Virginia completely if they got wind of her project.

As it was, Virginia’s Cather project came to an end when she left Pacific Grove and returned to Lincoln. Although it wasn’t clear at first what Virginia’s next step would be. Rumors in Lincoln were that her brother Ed had brought her back because she was going broke or going on benders or going in some direction that he worried would lead to ruin. But an accidental meeting with Emily Schossberger, director of the University of Nebraska Press, led to a job of assembling a Nebraska anthology, eventually called Roundup, and the work on Roundup led to a full-time position as editor and, after 1961, editor in chief.

Skeptical at first about Lincoln — she used to joke that people there complained that her novels “didn’t have enough pictures” — Virginia found the work at the press more fulfilling than the work of churning out witty magazine fiction had been prior to her time at the Haven. And she soon realized that her position enabled her to return to her Cather project from a different angle. Instead of trying to psychoanalyze Cather, she began a long-term campaign to provide Cather with the kind of foundation that supports an author’s place in the canon: authoritative, annotated texts and serious critical studies of her work. With Bernice Slote, a UN Lincoln professor of English who became her partner and chief collaborator in the early 1960s, Virginia collected much of Cather’s earliest work in a series of books published by the UN Press, and by the early 1970s, the two were considered leading Cather experts. Their efforts culminated in the first international conference on Cather’s work, held in Lincoln and Red Cloud, Nebraska, marking Cather’s centenary in 1973.

Virginia and Bernice’s commitment to the cause of advancing Cather as a great writer, however, led them to resist — first dismissively and then doggedly — efforts by a new generation of scholars to acknowledge and celebrate Cather’s sexuality. From having “uncovered” Cather as a lesbian in her motel room in Pacific Grove in the early 1950s, Virginia had become a leader among the Cather reactionaries. In part, this was to protect the trust of the Cather family members who took over the writer’s estate after the death of Edith Lewis. In March of 1980, Virginia wrote Cather’s niece Helen Cather Southwick, who had become increasingly concerned over work making prominent mention of Cather as a lesbian. She assured Southwick that she and Bernice would closely scrutinize any book or article that highlighted Cather’s sexuality, and if they felt its scholarship wasn’t up to snuff, to “blow it out of the water.” Virginia then tried to argue that the “lesbian label” was often applied as a way to diminish a great woman’s work.

Virginia’s time in academic publishing had convinced her that she lacked the education and discipline to undertake a serious study of Cather’s life and work, but she was convinced that Bernice Slote could and would. And so did many in the community of Cather scholars. Among Bernice’s papers are letters from people looking forward to her “authoritative biography,” and she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her research. But when Virginia died suddenly in September 1980, Bernice — who had already suffered a major stroke — found it difficult to muster the energy to take the project forward. Though she resumed teaching for a while, Bernice never again published as an academic, and after a second stroke in late 1982, she was confined to a nursing home, where she died in February 1983.

In the course of researching Virginia Faulkner’s life, I realized that my task was not, as I thought originally, to write a literary biography. A literary biography — such as the one Bernice Slote might have written — tries to illuminate a writer’s work through the context of their life. In Virginia’s case, however, her novels and short stories, however funny and well-crafted, were simply not of the caliber to merit close critical study. Though she was often referred to as “the next Dorothy Parker” in the 1930s, the fact is that Dorothy Parker was not just a woman with a quick wit and sharp tongue but a writer who produced short stories (in particular) of lasting value, while many of Virginia’s stories are throwaway accounts of the bickering of idle rich married couples.

The reason for writing Virginia’s story was simpler than to illuminate her work: it was to tell her story, the story of a woman of ferocious wit and intelligence who struggled with alcoholism and depression and had the courage to start again at the age of 42, setting aside her own career as a writer and devoting her energy to advancing the work of Willa Cather and the numerous writers she guided as an editor of genius. It was, as that letter to Hazel Barnes shows, a decision she doubted at times, but one she persevered with, to her credit and that of the press and the writers she believed in. I hope that readers will agree that it’s a story well worth telling.

Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts is available for pre-orders now from the University of Nebraska Press: Link.

There were some great books published in 1925. This is not one of them.

It is, however, great fun. By his own admission, Mon coeur au ralenti (1924), the French original of Wings of Desire, Dekobra’s tenth, was the novel in which he finally hit his stride. It sold over 100,000 copies in its first year and encouraged Dekobra to write a sequel, La Madone des sleepings (The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars) (1925), which became a worldwide bestseller, remaining in print in French ever since and getting reissued in English every few decades. From that point on, Dekobra would churn out his extravagant tales at the rate of one every nine to ten months, culminating in his last (aptly, La Madone des Boeing) in 1972, the year before he died at the age of 88.

If any decision helped Dekobra achieve such productivity (and respectable sales, if not quite of the scale of the first Madonna), it was probably the casting aside of any concern for plausibility. Within the first few chapters of Wings of Desire, for example, a penniless Frenchman, Gerard Dextrier, fresh off the boat in New York and spending his last few coins in a Bowery saloon, is swept up by an Italian schemer named Count Alfierini, transformed into one Prince Seliman, the son of a Circassian beauty and an Austrian prince, and transported to a gala party held on the rooftop of the Park Avenue mansion of Mrs. Griselda Turner, the richest widow in the world. A few pages later, he’s rescuing Mrs. Turner’s daughter from an opium den in Chinatown.

Just a chapter further, and he’s being propositioned by a cartel of shady investors who’ve come together to finance an assault on Mrs. Turner’s affections. Their first candidate for the job having been shot down in flames, the group want Dextrier/Seliman to woo the widow, with the aim of taking control of her capital and reimbursing their expenses (clothes, apartment, chauffeur, flowers, jewelry) at the rate of roughly 100 to 1. Unfortunately, this was also Count Alfierini’s plan, and Dextrier operates on a first-come, first-served basis.

Dekobra’s plot lines resemble one of those roads on an Alpine leg of the Tour de France, with a switchback every chapter as the story ascends to a height of dizzying absurdity. Dextrier is taken to Vienna, where he meets the real Prince Seliman, a penniless septuagenarian Austro-Hungarian nobleman who adopts him for a few hundred schillings. Dextrier/Seliman and Mrs. Turner marry in Paris, where the first Mrs. Turner, now a nightclub dancer, begs him to save her daughter (Evelyn, it turns out, is actually the stepdaughter of the second Mrs. Turner (now Princess Seliman)). Back in New York, Dextrier realizes it’s Evelyn he loves, despite the sunken eyes and pallid skin of an opium addict. There’s a detour down to a luxurious hotel in Palm Beach for … well, some complicated imbroglio … then a return to New York for a showdown: to whose heart will this Frenchman be true?

Most readers of quickly-written popular novels read for plot, and that may be true of Dekobra’s fans as well. For me, however, his chief attraction is his tone, well conveyed by Neal Wainwright, Dekobra’s translator for his first dozen or so English publications. There is something so ornately bombastic in Dekobra’s prose that I cannot help but chuckle while also admiring its nonchalance. Sipping a whiskey he tells us is composed of “a distillation of wheat, beets, old rags, wood shavings, and dead cats,” Dextrier calmly reflects that his future “did not appear to concern me any more than the variations of the parallax of Aldebaran.” (You can depend upon Dekobra to add a fair amount of relatively useless trivia to your knowledge in the course of his narratives.)

In Vienna, the old, true Prince Seliman tells Dextrier of his life in humble seclusion, accompanied only by his cat, “a silent witness which, unmoved, assists at the evaginations [Yeah, I had to look that one up] of my mind, that is a living symbol … the invading Demagogy which contemplates with a secret joy the downfall of the old régimes, the decease of hierarchies and the abjection of Nietzschean dreams, advancing like the Huns of Attila under the lead of brainless rhetoricians.” Don’t try to make sense of it, though: there’s more actual meaning in any line from Finnegans Wake than there is a Dekobra pronouncement.

Dekobra liked to style himself a philosopher of sex. “The Man Who Understands Women” proclaimed a profile that appeared in American newspapers in the early 1930s. So, he shares with us such meditations as:

I have frequently wondered just exactly what composes the yes or no of a woman. Is it the hygrometrical state of the air? Or the book she finished the night before? Or the eccentricities which she inherits from her great grand mother? Or a happy suggestion? Or a fear upon which she has failed to reflect? Or is it simply the amount of pepper she has consumed with her last meal?

Any bets on the pepper? Less confident writers would feel obliged to ensure some coherence among these possibilities, but our Maurice is a Jackson Pollock of prose, happy to scatter words on a page and leave it to the foolish reader to make sense of them.

Dekobra might have understood women, but he fails to pass that knowledge along to his protagonists. Had Dekobra been an American or English writer, say someone like Richard Harding Davis, Dextrier would settle down happily ever after with one of the two Turners. But Balzac would have no happy endings and neither will Dekobra, and so we leave Dextrier broke again, his bridges burned with both women, ready to head back to France, where he will soon launch into another adventure in Les Madone des sleepings.

Once in a while when reading a novel from the past, I like to pretend that it’s something that’s just been published. If you do this with a book by Maurice Dekobra, you soon find yourself thinking, “C’mon, buddy … dial it back a bit.” If someone were to publish an imitation today, it would probably come off more like a ridiculous pastiche than a faithful reproduction. These are not books to be taken seriously. They belong on a shelf beside the work of P. G. Wodehouse — even if, in Maurice Dekobra’s case, most of the humor is unintentional.

Wings of Desire is available on the Internet Archive: Link.

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Wings of Desire, by Maurice Dekobra, translated by Neal Wainwright
New York: The Macaulay Company, 1925

This was my contribution to Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s 1925 Club.

[画像:Five books about writing creative nonfiction]

A few days ago, I posted a note on BlueSky: “Dear writers of creative nonfiction: Creative nonfiction is more than just writing about how you’re writing what you’re writing.” It’s an observation that’s neither new nor original. Back in 1997, James Wolcott published an article in Vanity Fair titled, “Me, Myself, and I” in which he called writers such as Philip Lopate, Anne Roiphe, and Laurie Stone as “navel gazers” and complained that “Never have so many shared so much of so little.”

Though almost three decades have passed since Wolcott’s piece, the tendency of some authors to inject themselves into a nonfiction narrative has not only continued unabated but been embraced as the defining characteristic of what makes it “creative.” In his 2024 biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Glad to the Brink of Fear, for example, James Marcus opens his fourth chapter with a little personal essay about a winter walk: “I am writing these lines on a December afternoon, surrounded by tall, gray, columnar trees that have lost their lower limbs and resemble the masts of ships,” and notes that “Thanks to man-made global warming, still contested by one in three Americans, there is no snow.” The winter scene leads to a memory of his father’s funeral and eventually returns to Emerson through the subject of grief. There are only a few such intrusions in Marcus’s book, which to me begs the question of whether they were really necessary, but they didn’t dissuade the Times Literary Supplement and others from naming it as one of the outstanding books of the year.

The idea that creative nonfiction depends on the active presence of the author was not foremost in the minds of those who championed the label when it first became widely recognized in the early 1990s. Lee Gutkind, often referred to as the father of creative nonfiction for his numerous books on the subject and his founding of Creative Nonfiction magazine in 1991, described it as simply, “Capturing and describing a subject so that the most resistant reader will be interested in learning more about it” in The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality, published the same year as Wolcott’s essay. Well before Gutkind stepped forward, others were using the term without any implication that the hand of the author needed to be an overt aspect. In their 1969 college anthology, Modern American Prose (Perspectives in Literature), Patricia J. Costello and Charles A. Conefrey refer to John Updike’s 1960 essay about Ted Williams’s last game with the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” as “‘creative nonfiction’; it is prose based soundly on fact but with the added dimension of a creative touch.”

Still, the overt presence of the author, whether as the “I” of a first-person narrator or as a persona (the “Mailer” that Norman Mailer was fond of using as ironic (iconic?) alternative), remains a dominant feature in much creative nonfiction. This tendency, in my view, discourages writers from employing other approaches that have as much or more potential to illuminate their subjects. So, as a counterpoint to the egocentric school of creative nonfiction, I want to offer a few examples, mostly neglected and mostly published before the term came into use.

• Pull Devil, Pull Baker , by Stella Benson and Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine (1933)

In April 1931, the English novelist Stella Benson, living in Hong Kong as the wife of a diplomat, encountered an elderly Russian man in a charity hospital who introduced himself as a count, a member of "one of the most distinguiched aristocratic famelys of Europe." He had written a memoir that he pressed upon Benson, hoping she would get it published and pass along the resulting royalties.

She did get it published, but not after grappling not merely with the Count’s highly idiosyncratic prose but with the fundamental questions of fact his narrative raised. First, she had to abandon the invisibility of the traditional editor of a memoir:

The dislocation between author and editor is usually more discreetly glossed over than it is in our book. At any rate, in our book, the Count says what he means, and I say what I mean, and, although our meanings are often mutually contradictory, at least I do not interpret him, as some editors have been known to interpret authors who are no longer sufficiently alive to insist on interpreting themselves.

For the essence of the Count, she comes to realize, is fiction. He has created a persona for himself, and his memoirs are the story of the life of that persona, which may or may not resemble fact, but which do remain faithful to the truth required to maintain his persona. After accepting the fictionality of the Count, she writes:

I could edit an armadillo now, if I had to. I have seen and talked to the Count; I have not seen or talked to the Jew Taylor [a Jewish tailor in Warsaw the Count accuses of blackmail] or the armadillo, but to describe Count, Jew or armadillo I have no recourse but to invent. I know nothing about the Count de Savine, either, except what he looks like and what he says and what he writes.

And, indeed, she proceeds then to retell the Count’s tale of the dastardly Jew Taylor in the person of the tailor himself. Knocked unconscious by the Count, the tailor comes to and thinks, for a moment, that he has died and gone into an afterlife of nothingness. He is frightened, then comforted by the sense that all his worldly cares and burdens are now gone. When he finally realizes he is still in Warsaw, still a tailor, still a small-time moneylender, and still a Jew, he — or rather, Benson as the tailor — understands, bitterly, "For a minute I was free ... now I am the slave of a slave."

In the end, Benson concludes, “There is, perhaps, no thing called Truth in any book — or at any rate that can be arrived at by appraisal from a standpoint outside the book itself.”

And if that ain’t creative nonfiction, I’ll eat my hat. Pull Devil, Pull Baker is, in my mind, a landmark work that has yet to receive its due. [Pull Devil, Pull Baker was reissued in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press in 2022.]

• As I Remember Him: The Biography of R. S. , by Hans Zinsser (1940)

As I Remember Him is one of the more unusual experiments in autobiography. The book is written in two voices: one of the unnamed author, the other of R. S. — the initials standing for “Romantic Soul.” The author sets R. S.’s material in context or comments — not always positively — upon it. After trying and failing in several professions, including painter and soldier, Zinsser entered medical school, graduating in 1903, and soon became one of the leading experts in the new field of bacteriology. Adding R.S. as a character allows Zinsser to reveal some uncomfortable truths about himself, such as the fact that he often disappeared on benders with the poet Hart Crane in the cantinas of Mexico City when he was supposed to be helping stem an outbreak of typhus.

Zinsser began writing As I Remember Him after being diagnosed with leukemia, then incurable, in 1938, and he survived long enough to see the book published. Even with the creation of a fictional self, however, Zinsser struggles to overcome the constitutional diffidence of a scientist and introvert and too often relies on purely factual passages, usually mini-histories of diseases such as syphilis, instead of delving into personal matters, so his experiment is not, I think, a complete success. Zinsser gives in to the pull of the tradition of autobiographies as seamless chronological narratives instead of building his story more as a collage of fragments, as is better accepted now, and it would be an interesting editorial exercise to attempt to redo As I Remember Him as more of a deliberate cut-and-paste job (more on cut-and-paste jobs below).

• Earth Could Be Fair, by Pierre van Paassen (1946)

Earth Could Be Fair is the story of one Dutch town’s experience in World War Two, told through six prisms: five of van Paassen’s classmates and himself as orchestrator. It’s a patiently assembled mosaic that starts in 1907, when a tremendous rainstorm destroys dozens of buildings and threatens to flood van Paassen’s hometown of Gorcum, and leads up through over 300 pages to the German invasion in May 1940. Then, he follows his classmates through the next five years of occupation and eventual liberation. Two turn collaborators, Toon Mussert one of the leaders of the Dutch Nazi movement. One, a woman, helps organize and run a supply network for the resistance. A classmate who becomes a Catholic priest dies nailed to a cross by the Japanese in Indonesia. And one, a doctor, is rounded up with the other 130 Jews in the town, housed for weeks within the local synagogue, and eventually transported to extermination camps in Poland. He survives until his camp is liberated by the Russians, but later dies when he and a few Polish partisans blow up their hideout to kill themselves along with a squad of Wehrmacht troops coming in from the street.

The New Yorker’s reviewer had little appetite for van Paassen’s approach. While conceding that the book “has merit in its mood, atmosphere, and evocation of the past,” he attacked the author’s “suspiciously complete recall of conversations and trivial events that took place thirty-odd years ago” and “a slipshod attitude toward facts,” calling him “probably the most creative nonfiction writer at work today.” The recollection of detailed conversations from the past is easily the single most common way in which biographers and autobiographers have long engaged in creative nonfiction. Even the great Boswell reconstructed rather than recorded the talks of Samuel Johnson that fill his biography. Several reviewers described van Paassen’s work in Earth Could Be Fair as novelistic, but none argued that it was a work of fiction. I suspect one could easily, if not quickly, go page by page through the book and flag passages as either taken from factual documentation, reconstructed — assembled from old fragmentary evidence and new cement — or clearly invented anew based on impressions and assumptions.

The same could be done for almost all works of nonfiction that are not strictly academic in purpose. And that brings to mind one of the first uses of the term “creative nonfiction. In 1937, while serving as Governor General of Canada, novelist John Buchan — then Lord Tweedsmuir — established an annual award for the best works of Canadian literature. A few years later, the categories were revised, and nonfiction was divided into two: academic nonfiction and creative nonfiction. Academic nonfiction conformed to broadly accepted conventions such as citing sources in notes and bibliographies and use of an objective third person narrative voice. Creative nonfiction, on the other hand, included histories, personal memoirs, philosophy, and travel. The key characteristic was that the works nominated had to be accessible by a broad audience of readers. Nothing in Pierre van Paassen’s Earth Could Be Fair — aside from its non-Canadianness (is this a word?) — would have disqualified it as creative nonfiction.

• The Experience of War: The United States in World War II, by Kenneth S. Davis (1965)The Experience of War: The United States in World War II

The Experience of War is one of the most exciting works of history I’ve ever written. Davis structures his account as a sequence of set-pieces such as General Jonathan Wainwright waiting for the end in a tunnel on Corregidor and Navy pilots spotting and attacking the Japanese carrier Kaga just as they reach the very limit of their range, opening the battle of Midway. Davis caveats at the start of his book that “It is not designed to be a formal academic history, though every effort has been made to assure its factual accuracy. Rather, its essential purpose is literary in that it attempts to rescue from the erosions and abstractions of Time something of what Webster’s Dictionary, in the definition of ‘experience,’ calls the "actual living through an event or events; actual enjoyment or suffering.”

To this end, Davis adds at least one fictional character to his narrative. In chapter 10, we follow George, a Marine recruit, through his basic training, his transport to Hawaii, his passage to an island in the Southwest Pacific, and through his part in the island’s assault and bitter conquest. This led to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fisher to remark, several decades later, that the book "promiscuously mixes fiction and fact" and was not serious history. When I looked at Davis’s work, including his long and ultimately unfinished biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, back in 2008, however, I concluded that his greatest shortcoming was not his use of fictional characters but his weakness for bursts of prose of 19th century floridity.

And it was the fiction that brought out the worst of it. Here, for example, is just a bit of George’s thoughts as he looks out on Guadalcanal from the deck of his ship:

Certainly beauty was there for the seeing — in the jagged, lofty, blue-green mountains of the interior; in the dark green jungles opened here and there by wide, pale sweeps of grassland, shoulder-high grasses flowing there in the wind like sea waves; in the tall, swaying cocoanut palms spread in mile after mile of groves along the northern shore; in the dazzlingly white beaches or coral sand with surf breaking gently upon them, rhythmic as a porch swing’s stroke across summer night in a now lost and ancient past.

Edmund Morris introduces fictional characters on an even grander scale in Dutch, his book on Ronald Reagan, discussed below, but succeeds where Davis fails because his skill as a writer works on a structural level not only at the top level — the content and sequence of his chapters — but also at the level of well-crafted sentences and paragraphs — unlike that sodden mass above.

(As an aside, the problems with Kenneth S. Davis’s prose at the sentence/paragraph level supports a theory I have that in the past, many books were just as sloppily edited as seems to be today’s average. For every Robert Gottlieb-Robert Caro collaboration in which great pains are taken to every aspect of a book, there are plenty of examples, past and present, that suggest that a fair number of books were slapped together without the kind of ruthless blue-penciling that could have turned a good book into a great book. The Experience of War seems like a book that could have been significantly improved through some hard-nosed developmental editing.)

• Apalache , by Paul Metcalf (1976)

Apalache is an epic tragedy of the loss of the Eden that North America represented when Europeans began to explore and colonize. Metcalf weaves together hundreds of excerpts from numerous sources ranging from Native American myths to the journals of early European explorers to scientific texts and newspaper articles, ranging over a period of nearly 400 years. Allan Kornblum wrote that Metcalf had "a scope of historical vision and a depth of compassion that I found breathtaking." I find that last phrase key to appreciating Metcalf’s work. Yes, it is densely historical, and as he said himself, full of "the incontrovertible force of facts."

When I wrote about Apalache in 2021, I referred to it as, “in its unique way, the Great American Novel — if you accept that the Great American story is that of the destruction of Eden and its inhabitants and their replacement by a spirit of exploitation enforced through violence.” But is it a novel? There is really nothing fictional in it. I took the time to track down several dozen of the texts that Metcalf drew from — and cites — and I could find no evidence that he had altered or invented anything. His creation is the collage that is Apalache: the selection and trimming and fitting of fragments to form an overall work, not the invention of those fragments. So, perhaps novel isn’t the right way to describe it. Apalache is a creative work built out of facts and factual sources: in other words, creative nonfiction. So, why isn’t Paul Metcalf celebrated in the same way that, say, W. G. Sebald is?

• Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan — A Mosaic , by Ruth Limmer (1980)

Louise Bogan didn’t write her autobiography. Or rather, she didn’t write this book. Always an intensely private person, she rarely risked putting details about her life in print, preferring to confide in her own diaries and journals and, occasionally, in letters to a few friends. "The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself," she once wrote. "Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there."

Journey Around My Room was assembled some years after Bogan’s death in 1970 by her literary executor, Ruth Limmer, a professor of English at Goucher College, after the idea was suggested by Amanda Vaill, then an editor at Viking. Limmer framed the work in rough chronological order, using text from a story Bogan published in The New Yorker in 1933 titled "Journey Around My Room" as introduction, close, and chapter prefaces. She also used the lines from one of Bogan’s poems, "Train Tune" ("Back through clouds/Back through clearing/Back through distance/Back through silence...") as chapter titles. Finally, she pulled from the mass of papers Bogan left: extracts from journals, notebooks, poems, letters, short stories, scraps of paper, essays, even recorded conversations hundreds of fragments — the tesserae from which she assembled this mosaic.

I think it’s one of the great American autobiographies. It’s moving and beautiful and nuanced and brilliantly structured. I would love to see it reissued as recognized as the classic it is. Unfortunately, in the view of Bogan’s executor, Journey Around My Room is merely “an unauthorized butchering” of her work, and so the book is unlikely ever to be republished. Which doesn’t diminish its merit but does guarantee its continued obscurity, unless a samizadat network of underground champions like me develops.

• Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, by Edmund Morris (1999)

I am among the small number of readers who not only bought a copy of Dutch but kept reading after realizing that Morris had invented a character, a fictious lifelong friend of Ronald Reagan who narrated the book as personal recollections rather than traditional, factual biography. It may have been a tactic Morris adopted as the only way to get through a book he’d promised Reagan to write, and among those who like their presidential biographies more like … well, like Morris’s biographies of Theodore Roosevelt.

The backlash against Morris when the book first came out has overshadowed the man’s sheer experimental audacity in trying something considered almost a mortal sin in a formal presidential biography. But folks, remember what Morris called the book? Dutch was Reagan’s nickname among friends from his youth, which Morris’s fictional character was. So, to that extent, it was a case of truth in packaging. Had he called the book Ronald Reagan: A Presidential Life or something like that, then the anger and disappointment would have been more understandable. For me, I consider Dutch a bold, if perhaps not entirely successful, work of creative nonfiction, and one that makes sense if we understand it as an attempt to tell Reagan’s story using the same tools of superficial appearances and masks the man himself employed as actor, corporate spokesman, and politician.

[画像:Cover of first US edition of Bad Girl by Vina Delmar]

In March 1928, just weeks before Viña Delmar’s first novel, Bad Girl, was published, Boston’s self-appointed censors, the Watch and Ward Society, announced that it disapproved of the novel and threatened to prosecute any Massachusetts shop that sold it. Aside from noting that “The book has one pretty strong chapter in it,” the society provided no justification for the decision, simply stating, “We care neither to push out such books, nor to furnish our contemporaries over in New York with just so much free advertising.”

[画像:Article on Watch and Ward Society ban of Bad Girl]

The story was then rippled through newspapers around the country, providing Delmar and her publisher, Harcourt, Brace and Company with “just so much free advertising,” and Bad Girl the book — and Bad Girl, the 1931 based on it — gained a reputation as a scandalous it hardly deserves. In reality, Bad Girl is no more shocking than Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy: what both books are is unadorned realism. But I’m saying this from today’s perspective. An American Tragedy was also blacklisted by the Watch and Ward Society, and the contemporary sense of what was and wasn’t acceptable among “good people” is of crucial importance to both the title and dramatic pivot of Delmar’s novel.

Dot Healey and Eddie Collins meet one Sunday on a Hudson River cruise, an excursion boat full of working-class couples and singles enjoying an afternoon out of the city. She is a typist; he repairs radios at a store. At first resistant to her flirting, Eddie ends up walking Dot home at the end of the day. But When they arrive back at the apartment building where Dot lives with her widower father and brother, she panics.

"I can’t go upstairs. It’s half past twelve and my brother will kill me." The last few words were accompanied by an agonized sob.
"Don’t be crazy," said Eddie, his face suddenly hardening. "Your brother won’t kill you. Tell him you were at a friend’s house. Don’t he know Maude? He won’t holler."
"Oh, he will, he will, Eddie. He hit me once something awful just because I went to Coney Island and didn’t get home till twelve."

Dot’s brother is another self-appointed censor, but one filled with righteous violence. Dot continues to see Eddie, until one night she agrees to sleep with him, knowing this will earn her brother’s scarlet letter.

She said what was on her mind. "I’d be a bad girl."
"No, you wouldn’t. A bad girl is something different. You’d never let anybody else touch you, would you?"
"I don’t know," she said after a minute’s hesitancy. "I never thought I would let you go the whole way with me."

This time, when the two return to Dot’s building, she feels that she bears the mark of her sin like a stigmata. Eddie suggests they get married the next day, but Dot knows this will not assuage his fury. "Oh, Eddie, Eddie, I can’t bear it. He’ll see it on me. He’ll know what I’ve done and he’ll kill me." Dot’s brother doesn’t kill her, but he does banish her, at first even threatening to withhold all her clothes and other belongings: “You touch nothing that’s in that room, hear me? I paid for every damn rag you own,” he declares, adding that, “If you haven’t any money you can probably get some before morning." Dot spends the night with a friend and in the morning, she and Eddie marry.

From this point on, Bad Girl becomes not a tale of drinking, wild parties, and late-night debauchery but something more like Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park: a story of two fairly ordinary young people in their first year or so of marriage. Eddie refuses to let Dot continue working; she grows frustrated with trying to fill her days while he’s at work; she wishes for more space, nicer furniture, more clothes; he struggles to empathize with her feelings; they both worry about money.

Some critics complained that Bad Girl is too full of mundane details of Dot and Eddie’s life. Delmar argued that she wrote about what she knew:

I have been asked if Dot and Eddie, my leading characters, are actual people. The answer is "Yes and no." Dot and Eddie are the backbone of up-town New York. They are the representative middle-class couple as I see them. These two people are not literally numbered among my acquaintances but Dot and Eddie are the composite picture of a score of my acquaintances. I love them for their naiveté and simplicity and I wrote about them because I want other people to know them.

Delmar’s own life, at least up to the time she started getting her stories published, wasn’t that different from Dot’s. She was born in Brooklyn in 1903, followed her parents, vaudeville performers, around the US, then settled with her father in Harlem after her mother died in 1916. She attended New York City public schools, dropped out of high school to work as a typist, married at the age of 18.

Dot becomes pregnant and the second half of the novel focuses on her experience of pregnancy. She worries about the financial burden of delivery and raising the child, wonders whether Eddie will only see it as a burden, too. I recently read Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group, which follows a number of Vassar graduates through the 1930s, and Bad Girl parallels the gynecological and obstetrical experiences that earned McCarthy’s book its own scandalous reputation (and bestseller status) thirty years later, though recounted — again, with Dreiserian realism — through Dot’s naive and inarticulate perspective.

A friend refers Dot to an abortionist, but the squalor of his office puts her on edge: “The rug needed sweeping, Dot noted after a time. Another few minutes passed before she observed the huddled wisps of dust clinging together beneath the divan. Then she saw other things. Dirty windows, a smeared mirror. She shuddered. There was a damp chilliness about the room.” His unctuous manner further unsettles her. “I like to help little girls out," he says, and he examines her with “adventurous and heavy” hands.

Like McCarthy’s Priss, Dot is treated with condescension when it comes time to deliver, her child brought in and taken away when the nurses choose, with few explanations or attempts to calm her anxiety when the baby fails to thrive at first. Delmar wrote from experience, having given birth to her son Gray at a Harlem maternity clinic three years before. Given prevailing attitudes towards detailed discussions of pregnancy and childbirth — the word “pregnant” was forbidden in Hollywood scripts and no expectant mother was allowed to show the slightest hint of a bulge — it may well have been Delmar’s frank and detailed account of delivery and postnatal care that set off the Watch and Ward Society.

Ironically, one of the most enthusiastic reviews of Bad Girl appeared in Hospital Management magazine, which praised Delmar for:

Her picture of a devoted and skillful obstetrician, his associate, the sinister other kind which blots the profession, the attitudes of her friends, and her own physiological and psychological reactions in pregnancy, these are of certain value. The careful hoarding for hospital expense and doctor, the impressions of admission and reactions of nurses in attendance, the agony of suspense over the feeding of the child are realism in hospital affairs that should be of immediate interest to physicians, superintendents and nurses.

And though the book became one of the top five bestselling novels of 1928, a book, in the words of one critic, “that the good housewives smuggle into their homes, and discuss furtively over their back fences,” it was consistently acclaimed for its unadorned realism. “It is one of the most matter-of-fact, simple, straightforward, accurate pieces of writing I have ever seen in print,” wrote Joseph M. March in the New York Evening Post, “and it lives from beginning to end.”

[画像:Advertisement for Bad Girl featuring a photo of author Vina Delmar]

The success of Bad Girl boosted Viña Delmar into the ranks of America’s most popular writers. The year after it came out, the first film adaptation of her work, Dance Hall, based on her short story of the same name, was released by RKO, and Playing Around, based on “Sheba,” followed in 1930. The same year, Delmar and Brian Marlowe wrote a play based on Bad Girl that toured the country, although its Broadway run was brief. The novel wasn’t filmed until 1931, but the movie benefited significantly from a convergence of talents, particularly director Frank Borzage, who was becoming an expert in stories of the working-class, and actors Sally Eilers and James Dunn, paired in the first of six films they would make together.

Dunn, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Delmar, hit the screen in a starring role with his first feature and his unfiltered Noo Yawk accent provided a refreshing alternative to the mid-Atlantic accent that had become the studio’s preference. The Los Angeles Times wrote that “no performance has lately equaled the impression made by this rather plain young man, who, aside from having a likable personality, scores a major hit by his ability as an actor.” Few reviewers found anything scandalous in the film, and William A. Johnston of the Hollywood Herald gushed that, “The Fox people have glorified a theme that hits at the heart of the youth of America: pulsing, human, wholesome, in the finale, uplifting…laid against the background of modern big city life, brutal in its realism, yet wholly unobjectionable in detail.” “Let the censors and their scissors go hang!” Johnston declared.

Still, when it came time to market the film, the emphasis was on scandal over substance. “There’s one in every town,” declared a two-page ad published in several industry journals, showing a much more alluring Dot than appears in either the novel or the movie. Another ad featured Delmar’s novel, calling it an “emotional exposé.” The title Bad Girl is almost deliberately misleading, but perhaps that’s what Delmar had in mind all along.

[画像:Advertisement for Bad Girl highlighting Vina Delmar's original novel]

Critics and industry insiders, however, recognized the merits of Bad Girl. It was named to several lists of the ten best films of the year and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, for director Frank Borzage and screenwriter Edwin J. Burke. A dozen of Delmar’s magazine stories were made into films and she herself wrote the screenplays for two of the best American movies of the 1930s, Make Way for Tomorrow and The Awful Truth.

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Bad Girl. by Viña Delmar
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928

[画像:Dust jacket of The Great Day by Georgette Carneal]

Inside the Callahan Building, thirteen magazines are being put together. They hold “tales of love and desire and hate, fresh each month –as life, moving over cities small and large, leaves a fresh supply of pain and pleasure.” Their circulation runs into millions. Overseeing this enterprise is Jonathan Callahan, an evangelist of physical fitness who descends from his executive suite twice a day to lead the collective staff in an exercise routine. Though in his fifties, Callahan loves to compete with younger men in feats of strength.

As The Great Day opens, Callahan is launching a new venture: a newspaper, The Evening Truth. He has a grand vision of it reaching “a public that no other daily paper in America reaches,” of it being “a great campaigning newspaper.” To run it, he has assigned Stephen Murdock, the young ace of Tales of the Truth, Callahan’s most popular magazine, as managing editor. He’s pumped Murdock and other members of the Truth’s staff full of his vision of bringing truth to power, or whatever the 1920s equivalent crusading phrase was.

Unfortunately, Callahan intends to pursue the truth the same way as he has in Tales of the Truth: through the back door. Instead of civic reform, his real agenda is simple. He wants to sell papers. To do it, he charges Murdock to splash every front page with shocking headlines and even more shocking images. And he equips Murdock with a secret weapon to shake readers out of their comfort zones: the composograph. The composograph, as described by Carneal, is “a photograph, apparently taken from life, in which the true photographed faces of people in the news had been used, but the bodies, the postures, and the event described, were arranged and photographed in the offices of the tabloid.”

Students of American journalism will recognize that composograph provides the key that unlocks the door to the real-life counterparts to most of the characters and constructs of The Great Day. Composographs were introduced in the New York Evening Graphic, the notorious tabloid founded by fitness guru and publisher Bernarr Macfadden in 1924. Some examples, such as this, illustrating the bedroom games of real estate developer Edward “Daddy” Browning and his 15-year-old wife, “Peaches,” described during the trial for her separation application, seem a bit ridiculous today, but at a time when newspaper readership was at its peak, the composographs helped boost daily circulation to nearly one million. Only the New York Daily News and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Daily Mirror, both tabloids, had more readers.

[画像:Georgette Carneal, 1932]

Georgette Carneal was, indirectly, a veteran of The Evening Graphic. Born in Baltimore, she began working as a reporter in the early 1920s, when still in her teens, and moved to New York City in 1923. She quickly earned a reputation for pursuing her stories with fierce tenacity, a reputation due in part to a perhaps apocryphal tale that she won a job with the New York World by convincing Geroge Baker, president of the New York First National Bank, to give her his first and only interview. From 1924 to 1925, she was married (her first, his third) to Louis Weitzenkorn, a veteran reporter who took over as Graphic editor after Macfadden fired the paper’s first editor, Emile Gauvreau.

Weitzenkorn likely served as the inspiration for Stephen Murdock. Weitzenkorn was considered one of the best reporters in a city with some of the best in the country, and he liked to put his hand at other types of writing — magazine essays and plays — when he had a chance. Initially, at least, he bought Macfadden’s line that the Graphic was going to be a crusading paper. It was later said that Gauvreau tried to make the Graphic sensational, and Weitzenkorn tried to make it “semi-respectable.” After Macfadden fired Gauvreau and made Weitzenkorn editor in 1929, he soon learned that his readers preferred scandals to crusades, and he found himself being pressured to put sales ahead of scruples. As Shanon Fitzpatrick puts it in her 2022 book, True Story: How a Pulp Empire Remade Mass Media, about the spectacular rise and slow decline of Bernarr Macfadden’s publishing empire, to compete with the Daily News and Daily Mirror, “the Graphic constantly pushed the envelope, attracting a string of costly libel suits along the way.

The Great Day is a bit of a loose, baggy monster, with dozens of characters and at least a half-dozen subplots, but Murdock’s story is the centerpiece. From the very beginning, he struggles to reconcile the daily choices of running the Truth with his self-image as a man of character and values. His principal weapon in this struggle, though, is nothing more than ferocious rationalization:

I’m still young . . . still young. Only thirty — that’s very young. Besides, none of this touches me. I’m here for a purpose. I’m young enough to squeeze this dirty thing dry; eke out some heavy coin from it — and make my get-away.

Five years later, the age has changed but not the refrain:

"Hell, I’m only thirty-five," he said to himself, "and I’m making twenty thousand a year. What difference does it make what I’m doing? That’s, a lot of money — and that’s young."

[画像:The Evening Graphic Building, from <em>New York: The Wonder City</em>, by W. Parker Chase, 1932.]

As Weitzenkorn is said to have, Murdock believes himself above the sordid business of tabloid journalism. He recognizes the scent of the muck he’s busy raking, but refuses to accept that any will cling to him:

His eyes leapt, eager, restless, laughing, across the space of office that was the tenth floor of the Callahan Building, and his nostrils dilated as he breathed the breath of Callahan’s again.

It was an odor that contained many elements; there was dry wind and dust, and clothes made to live and breathe with the flesh beneath…. You couldn’t cook a smell like that, he thought; couldn’t brew it, either; but here human beings in a building, stewing all together, some of their worry going into it, and the dust from the floor, and the invisible dust from the buildings: it smelled like fear. He looked at them. Day by day they came into this place, sweated, worked, laughed, lived; the same dumb insistence in their faces, the same futile endeavor. Then they went, and a silence came into the place.

Carneal’s vision of America has had all its idealism wrung out. If the Truth sacrifices journalistic integrity for sensationalism, it is merely a mirror of everything that surrounds it. A world where immigrants live in fear — not of deportation but of exploitation, poverty, illness, and accident. Murdock recalls seeing a German-American man weeping over the body of his dead wife in Bellevue Hospital and the indignity brought upon him by the tabloid photographers hoping to catch a dramatic picture of his grief. The only thing separating them was a matter of degree, “of nearness to or distance from — poverty.” Poverty that results chiefly from the immigrant’s failure to jump on the American merry-go-round, driven not by capitalism but graft:

The very graft and crookedness that made people rich, that was the life-blood of great cities. This man or that man had gotten a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million, dependent upon the circumstances, upon the time and place. It was — opportunity…. That was how fortunes were made. Even the men who wrote the stories for the papers, they did it, too.

Murdock thinks he’s found a way to get off the merry-go-round when he meets and falls in love with Julia O’Day, a sad-faced beauty he spots one night in a nightclub. She has a penthouse in Manhattan, an estate in Westchester, wears the most sophisticatedly simple gowns, speaks with tenderness and delicacy. The two of them can pool their takings and run away to a better life, somewhere far from the sewers of Manhattan.

But Julia has been corrupted, too, and by the same force: money. “I was very broke,” she confesses, “and thinking a great deal about money. I was thinking, you need money, you must have money, real money, wealth, to live at all.” When she meets Craig, a man of wealth, power, and dubious associates, she agrees to become his mistress. Craig is the one paying for the penthouse, the gowns, the evenings in clubs. “You make up your mind to let things go — dignity, decency, that kind of thing.”

The night before Julia and Murdock plan to marry, Craig summons her to the estate. Knowing Julia’s desire to get away from him, he offers to give her 100,000ドル — in return for seducing his wife while he watches. The next morning, Julia is found dead in the garage, a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. Callahan’s right-hand man, George Oval (a fictional counterpart of Liberty magazine editor Fulton Oursler) recognizes a lurid story when he sees one and quickly overrides any concerns to protect Murdock’s feelings — especially when investigators come across Julia’s candid and detail-filled diary. He makes sure, of course, to clothe his actions in a crusader’s tunic:

Our paper can wage, through that diary, the greatest fight ever waged against loose living. Every man and every woman will want to know what Julia O’Day gave for the money she got. Every man and every woman…

Carneal even includes samples of the Evening Truth’s coverage of Julia’s death.

[画像:"Found Dead": the simulated front cover of The Evening Truth announcing Julia O'Day's death.]

Carneal portrays Murdock as a victim of self-delusion. She saves her sharpest instruments, however, for her portrait of George Oval and his second wife, June (the fictional counterpart of Grace Perkins, the author of No More Orchids, featured here recently. Where Murdock has misgivings about drinking the Kool-Aid of filthy lucre, Oval and his wife have the fervor — indeed, the joy — of true believers. Oval is not only the editor over all of Callahan’s editors but the author of six novels, each more acclaimed than its predecessors. No longer does he sense people whispering as he walks down the aisle in a Broadway theater, “There goes George Oval. He runs those magazines for ‘people whose lips move when they read.'” Now, he is — in the words of a review he reads three times to savor each superlative — "one of the outstanding literary figures of America and of the world." He lives surrounded by “the signs and symbols of his success,” even as he continues to approve — hell, to orchestrate — the Truth’s most flagrant assaults on individual dignity.

The Great Day is certainly one of the most savage satires of American mass media and the American success myth ever published. And with its subplot involving pedophilia, it’s natural to find parallels between Carneal’s novel and what’s going on in the White House today. There are, around President Trump, counterparts to George Oval, men like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought who truly believe themselves to be crusaders of only the purest motives as they undertake the most craven actions. But the larger population comprises people like Murdock, who perhaps think they can escape the moral consequences of their work or kid themselves that its corruption can be papered over with an impressive job title, or a step upwards to more lucrative jobs. The message of Georgette Carneal’s The Great Day is that one can no more be a little bit compromised than a woman can be a little bit pregnant. The world is full of Faustian bargains.

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The Great Day, by Georgette Carneal
New York: Liveright, Inc., Publishers, 1932

[画像:The Pitfalls of Love by Adele Garrison from the White Plains NY Daily Reporter, November 8, 1940]

Thirteen million words. Over forty years’ work. Millions of readers. It’s been called the longest novel ever written. And you’ve never heard of it or its author.

That’s because Adele Garrison’s Revelations of a Wife has never been reissued, aside from its first volume, Revelations of a Wife: The Story of a Honeymoon, which was published in book form in 1915 and is now in the public domain (Project Gutenberg, Librivox). Revelations of a Wife was a newspaper serial, a form that’s barely recognized, let alone written about, today.

According to King News, the 1941 autobiography of King Features Syndicate founder Moses Koenigsberg, Revelations of a Wife was designed, not inspired. “Few undertakings with literary flavor ever set out along more methodical lines than marked this feature. First, the plane of reading interest was plotted. It touched at every angle the housewife in modest financial circumstances.” “A sea of psychology” was explored, he claimed, to characterize the situation and mindsight of the diarist. “Household events dominated her life. Their importance to her ranked in order of their nearness. Only second to her own her the domestic affairs of those close at hand. She would be held in rapt attention by the daily diary of the woman next door.” Above all, her middle class “must be jealously preserved.”

Only then did Koenigsberg start looking for a writer. It had to be a woman, of course, and preferably one who combined a lively imagination with the diligence and speed of an experienced reporter. After months of considering candidates, he found exactly who he was looking for: Nana Springer White.

Born Nana Belle Springer in Clinton Junction, Wisconsin in 1873, she had been home-schooled up to high school by her mother, who forbade her daughter reading fiction. “As a result,” she later wrote, “I read everything omnivorously, including seed catalogues.” After a stint as a schoolteacher, she went to work as a women’s feature writer for the Milwaukee Sentinel, then moved to Chicago. Then editor of the Chicago American, Koenigsberg took Springer on in the same role but on the understanding that he would let her take on straight reporting jobs normally assigned to men. To avoid upsetting family and friends back in Wisconsin, they agreed these stories would be credited to “Evelyn Campbell.”

Evelyn Campbell was a daring reporter. She went undercover to collect the facts on the arrangements that several Chicago factories had to avoid paying their female employees. The women were given checks and instructed they could only be cashed in a local saloon, where they would then be pressured into buying beer, getting drunk, and being swindled out of what was left of their pay. She attended murder trials and hangings and once had an actor arrested when he got rough with her during an interview with his actress girlfriend.

While working for Koenigsberg, though, she met and married Martin White, a fellow reporter who soon took a job with the Associated Press in New York. The couple moved to a house in the suburbs. Martin commuted to Manhattan and Nana began raising the first of their four children.

Never ready to set aside her work as a writer, she had been selling short stories to various syndicates for publication in newspapers around the country. At a time when per-capita readership in America was at its height, newspapers were starved for material and syndicates like King Features, which Koenigsberg founded in 1913, were thriving. Beyond the straight news that Associated Press, Reuters, and others had been providing for decades, these new services were offering a variety of “soft” features like cooking, homemaking, fashion, humor, comics, general interest stories, and fiction.

Koenigsberg’s idea was to tap into the huge market for fiction among women with a novel that would appeal to a demographic it would mirror: middle class homemakers, women with enough money to hire a little domestic help, not so rich as to afford servants. In early 1915, Koenigsberg wrote Nana Springer White with his proposal. She could work from home; it would be a steady income; and she could keep her privacy: a pseudonym had already been chosen. Adele Garrison was invented, he said, “to hit as close as possible to the median line in the American social fabric.”

[画像:Advertisement for the first installment of Revelations of a Wife, July 1915.]

The first installment of Revelations of a Wife appeared on July 19, 1915. “Today we were married.”

“We” are Dicky, a commercial artist, and Margaret — Madge — a former schoolteacher. Dicky was free spirited and still a bit of a philanderer, or at least a flirt, while Madge is — and continues to be for the next 40 years — described as “beautiful, sensitive and severe in her codes.” Madge is no Victorian wife, subservient, accommodating, deferential to her husband. She is neither ingenue nor spinster but a woman with education, life experiences, and a will of her own. Enough of a will, in fact, that she expresses some wonder at this new identity she has taken on:

I cannot believe that I, Margaret Spencer, 27 years old, I who laughed and sneered at marriage, justifying myself by the tragedies and unhappiness of scores of my friends, I who have made for myself a place in the world’s work with an assured comfortable income, have suddenly thrown all my theories to the winds and given myself in marriage in as impetuous, unreasoning fashion as any foolish schoolgirl.

From the very first, Revelations of a Wife was written to incorporate lessons from a century’s worth of magazine serials: compact size (the daily chapter under 1,000 words); steady narrative drive; each chapter ending on the cusp of a development only revealed in the next. Though she would write over 10,000 chapters in Revelations, White/Garrison managed to keep her primary cast down to 25 characters: Madge and Dicky, their children (and grandchildren), their neighbors, a few relatives and friends.

Koenigsberg had lucked into the perfect creator to turn his concept into reality. As Ishbel Ross wrote in her 1936 book, Ladies of the Press:

Miss Garrison’s ingenuity is boundless. She weaves a plot, unravels it and gets a fresh start now and again. She can turn out her copy in intervals between entertaining friends, seeing that her household is running smoothly, and carrying on her club work. She goes for days on end with little sleep, sits up half the night with guests, and when the last one has started for home, continues her revelations, due in the office next morning.

She once told a reporter that her formula involved juggling three balls: melodrama, romance, and domesticity. “I try hard not to throw one higher than the others for too long a time.” She also said that she was often infuriated with her narrator. “If I’d been Madge’s husband, I’d have killed her,” she remarked.

Revelations of a Wife quickly gained an enthusiastic following, some of whom would remain faithful to the very end. Its first 52 chapters — “The Story of a Honeymoon” — were packaged up and published the same year by the Universal Press. This would be the one and only physical book produced from the serial.

It was not without competition. In fact, nearly simultaneously with its appearance, the Newspaper Enterprise Association, a competing distribution service, began publishing Confessions of a Wife, written by Idah McGlone Gibson. NEA attempted to squelch Garrison’s serial, sending Koenigsberg a letter accusing King Features of plagiarism. He replied with a short list of admissions that concluded with a refusal to admit guilt:

It is true that each serial is in the form of a diary.
It is true that in each case the diary purports to have been written because of a sacred promise to a dying mother.
It is true that in each case the diarist is red-haired.
It is true that each diarist was a schoolteacher before her marriage.
It is true that in both cases the diarist’s first name is Margaret.
It is true that the first name of the husband of each diarist is Richard.
It is true that each husband has been an artist.
But beyond these analogies there is no substantial similarity between the stories. The two narratives are essentially different. There is no likeness either in action or development.

In addition, Koenigsberg brought to the attention of his competitors that the Chicago American had published a serial called Confessions of a Wife, written by Elizabeth Miller Yorke, while he’d been its editor.

Published four times a week at the start, demand was so great that White started writing Monday through Friday. Several papers were inundated with angry letters when they stopped or even interrupted the series. A steady slate of at least 75 newspapers around the country adopted Revelations of a Wife as a feature as predictable as the weather forecast.

[画像:Advertisement for "My Marriage Problem," an installment of Revelations of a Wife, from 1921]

And White carried on. Every couple of years, she would launch a new installment. “My Soldier Husband” had Dicky deployed to France to fight in World War One. Major developments — an affair? No, not really, just the suspicions of one; growing children; aging parents; economic gains and losses — were organized: “Heart of a Wife,” “My Heart and My Husband,” “Given in Marriage,” “Love’s Embers,” “Marriage Meddlers,” “Married Comrades,” “Fair Horizon,” “Love’s Pitfalls.” By the mid-1930s, it was said that over 5,000 chapters had appeared, amounting to over 4 million words. “And there has never been a dull or uninteresting chapter that did not leave the reader eager to know what was coming next,” claimed one of the infomercial articles that appeared just before the start of a new installment.

When Time magazine published a feature on the series — which it described as a “3,000,000-word novel, longest in the world” — in 1928, it said Revelations “appeals not to shopgirls who what a seduction in every chapter but to housewives and clubwomen who read more fiction than any other group of U.S. inhabitants.” The popularity of White’s serial was not reflected in her income, however. In 1941, Koenigsberg estimated that she’d earned roughly 250,000ドル over the course of 26 years with his service, or under 10,000ドル a year: not bad by the standards of the time, but hardly a fortune.

As the years passed, the pressure to maintain readers’ interest led White to travel down some fairly absurd narrative back alleys. As a 1948 profile in Editor and Publisher put it, White’s cast had by then “been threatened by a Nazi submarine off Long Island, rescued a queen in a mythical European kingdom, captured spies, escaped through secret passages, recovered sacred Chinese gems…” “Heart of a Wife” involves a conspiracy to obtain a mysterious box containing the inheritance left to a young woman by the ex-husband of one of Madge’s closest friends, a kidnapping, and a dramatic rescue of its victim. Often, White was no more than a step or two of her readers. When one editor asked White what was in the mysterious box, she replied, “Well, Gene, when I find out myself, I’ll tell you.” “And two years later,” she reported proudly, “I did.”

[画像:Adele Garrison/Nana Springer White's obituary in Editor and Publisher magazine, December 8, 1956.]

White’s dedication to the work was legendary. She continued writing and living in their large Connecticut farmhouse after Martin White died in 1948. In 1955, when a fire broke out in her home, she called the fire department, then took her typewriter to another room well away from the fire and continued to write. She was then 81 and had been writing her serial for 40 years. Nana Springer White died in her sister’s home in Sag Harbor, New York in December 1956, just a few months after the last chapter of the last installment of Revelations, “Love Triumphant,” appeared. By conservative estimate, the serial had run to 13 million words in total.

Is it fair to call Revelations of a Wife the longest novel? Not if by novel you mean a work of fiction conceived as a single entity and certainly not if you expect a novel to take the form of a physical book or even set of books, as with Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage or Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Given the length of time and the format in which Revelations was published, it’s fairer to consider it sui generis, as a serial.

Serials were, throughout the lifespan of Revelations of a Wife, one of — if not the — most popular form of fiction in America. Plenty of best-selling books were packaged and published in serial form, but there were others, like much of Revelations, that never transitioned to book form. Here, for example, are a dozen-plus serials listed in a 1936 issue of Editor and Publisher — and there are at least four times more listed in a two-column spread too big to show here.

The fact that newspaper serials are so little studied today is in part attributable to the lack of evidence that they exerted any upward influence on the craft of fiction. Unlike Victorian serials, many of which easily transitioned to book form and form part of the literary canon, these serials are perhaps no more relevant to today’s readers than an episode of a radio or television soap opera from the same period. Yet as a firm believer in “there must be a pony in there” principle, I can’t help but wonder if we’re not leaving an important element of our literary history unexamined.

Recently, a new press joined the growing field of reissue publishers. Quite Literally Books, a New York-based firm, debuted in April 2025 with three novels: Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset (1929); The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1924); and The Pink House by Nelia Gardner White (1950). Quite Literally’s masthead lists a staff of seventeen, a team that dwarfs the skeletal crews that keep most of the reissue publishers I know afloat and that clearly has devoted a considerable effort to establishing itself from the start with a high-quality design and branding approach.

In one of the thought pieces on their site, press founders Bremond Berry MacDougall and Lisa Endo Cooper tackle the question, “Why have so many books by women been lost to history?”. “The simple answer, at least in part,” they argue, “seems to be that male critics and scholars were the arbiters of the American literary canon in the early 20th century, and they just didn’t seriously consider works by American women authors as ‘literature,’ either because of the subject matter—the home, relationships, the interior lives of women—or because it was women who were writing them.” In republishing “ought-to-be-in-print books by American women authors — and occasionally others — who’ve been shelved for far too long,” MacDougall and Cooper aim “to be a part of ongoing conversations about essential questions of belonging and the American literary canon –Who is included and why? And who gets to decide?”

If anything is clear about the American literary canon, it’s that it’s never been a static entity. Moby Dick, which today is consistently ranked among the greatest of all American novels, was essentially forgotten for decades after its initial publication. Melville’s name doesn’t even appear in Stanford professor Alphonso Newcomer’s American Literature (1902) or in the nearly 700 pages of Roy Bennett Page’s American Literature of 1915. Even Mark Twain, whose novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Ernest Hemingway declared as the source of “all modern American literature,” is missing from Page’s survey and in Newcomer’s book receives less attention than his contemporary Bret Harte, now considered a minor figure compared to Twain. Newcomer gives Emily Dickinson one paragraph, though he acknowledges that her poems “bear witness in every word to their high inspiration.”

Rediscovery publishing plays a significant role in the evolution of the canon, as I argued here last year. The work of Zora Neale Hurston, particularly her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, did not disappear when she died, poor and forgotten, in 1960, but few scholars sought it out and wrote about it. When University of Wyoming professor Robert Hemenway put an author’s query in the New York Times Book Review in 1971, it was the first mention of Hurston’s name in a major publication since her death. After Alice Walker’s article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” appeared in Ms. magazine in 1975, the University of Illinois Press reissued Their Eyes Were Watching God and the book began to appear on reading lists and in academic journal articles. The exceptional success of the reissue (for a university press) prompted Harper Collins to pick up the permissions for a trade edition and went on to sell over 250,000 copies by the end of the 1990s.

Jessie Redmon Fauset’s work, along with that of others in the Harlem Renaissance generation, fell out of print and into critical neglect in the 1940s and 1950s, aside from mentions in surveys that automatically diminished their relative important with the label “Negro literature.” By the 1980s, however, Plum Bun had been reissued and it has since appeared in several other editions, including the two-volume Harlem Renaissance Novels set from the Library of America. JSTOR lists six journal articles focusing on Plum Bun since 2000 — hardly comparable to the output associated with Shakespeare or Faulkner, but still greater than that devoted to most of the works that came out at the same time as Fauset’s novel.

In the March 3, 1929 issue of The New York Times in which Plum Bun was reviewed, five other works of fiction were covered:

• The Grand Manner by Louis Kronenberger
• Young Entry by M. J. Farrell
• PeeVee by Fred Jacob
• Sartoris by William Faulkner
• The Greatest Adventure by John Taine

Aside from Sartoris, the rest of these works quickly fell out of print. MIT Press reissued The Greatest Adventure, sort of a Conan Doyle Lost World novel set in Antarctica, as a lost science fiction classic just recently, but the other three titles are long forgotten and unlikely to be rediscovered.

While men long dominated the worlds of American publishing and literary studies, it’s overly simplistic to say that “male critics and scholars were the arbiters of the American literary canon in the early 20th century” and that the work of women writers was neglected as a result. When it came to book reviews, for example, at the time that Plum Bun was published, two of the most influential newspaper book editors were women: Isabel Paterson at the New York Herald Tribune and Fanny Butcher of the Chicago Tribune. Paterson held her post for 25 years, Butcher for 40. Of the contemporary reviews of Plum Bun, most were unsigned, according to the practice of the day, but several in the biggest American papers and magazines were by women: Eleanore Reiley in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Bernice Kenyon in The New Republic. Women held prominent positions in the magazine world as well. Edna Woolman Chase edited Vogue, which back then regularly published fiction, for almost 40 years. Eunice Chapin, whose 1931 novel, Pick-Up, was featured here recently, was the managing editor of McCall’s, one of America’s top two women’s magazines when Plum Bun came out.

Indeed, it’s illuminating to compare the fate of Isabel Paterson’s own novels of the time, four of which have been reviewed on this site, to the three rediscoveries of Quite Literally. Paterson’s The Golden Vanity was reissued by the academic publisher Routledge in 2017 as part of an abbreviated series of “Lost Urban Classics” priced exclusively for the library market. This edition has an introduction by Paterson’s biographer, Stephen Cox, who has worked strenuously to position Paterson as a pioneer of Libertarian and luddite thought. I would argue that Cox has succeeded too well in his mission, given that there appears to be no appetite among scholars of American or feminist literature now to look at Paterson’s fiction on its own merits (which are considerable). Had it not been for Cox’s efforts, however, I doubt that even The Golden Vanity would be in print now.

For the default fate of all novels is to go out of print and become forgotten. Alfred A. Knopf once said that “Most novels fail on the day they’re published” — even when the publisher is as enthusiastic as Knopf was for Peter de Polnay’s The Angry Man’s Tale (1939). Patriarchy and prejudice do play a role, but the most important role, I believe, is overproduction — which is even simpler and stupider. Six novels were reviewed on the same day as Plum Bun; perhaps twenty or more that same week; easily several hundred in the course of 1929. And even then, there were at least as many that the Times couldn’t afford the space to cover. No one, not even the great polymaths and canon gatekeepers Edmund Wilson and Harold Bloom, could keep up with the hundreds (and now thousands) of novels published every year, let alone provide a reliable or authoritative judgment on what does and doesn’t deserve to survive based on its artistic or historical merits. Even these critics are essentially lone blind men trying to grasp an elephant. They not only miss much; they inevitably misjudge much, too.

Which is why what I and my fellow archaeologists like Scott Thompson, Lucy Scholes, Simon Thomas, Brian Busby, Becky Brown, Michael Walmer, and others do is important. And now Bremond Berry MacDougall and Lisa Endo Cooper at Quite Literally. We are all carrying out the task set by poet Denise Riley:

… looking for lost people – look unrelentingly.
“They died” is not an utterance in the syntax of life
where they belonged, no belong – reanimate them
not minding if the still living turn away, casually.
…
The souls of the dead are the spirit of language:
you hear them alight inside that spoken thought.

At a time when writers could make small fortunes by selling the film rights to their novels, plays, and magazine stories to studios hungry for scripts for talkies, the biggest fortune by far was that made by Fulton Oursler and his wife Grace. Neither of those names are likely to be familiar to many people today, but they represented a power couple that could take a place beside legendary studio executive Irving Thalberg and his Oscar-winning actress wife, Norma Shearer. In 1932 alone, they sold eight properties to Fox and Columbia — five for Fulton and three for Grace — while continuing to produce a steady flow of best-selling novels and magazine short stories. And, in Grace’s case, giving birth to her second child.

It may help to explain that Fulton Oursler was more than a writer. Back in 1921, Oursler had been hired by Bernarr Macfadden, the physical fitness guru who had stumbled into a gold mine by founding True Story magazine and tapping into two burgeoning trends: America’s fascination with gossip and its consumption of magazines. Although True Story purported to be filled with authentic if lurid tales submitted by general public, Macfadden soon found that while the public might have some great stories, they needed the help of experienced writers to tell them. He hired Oursler, a former newspaper reporter who could produce thousands of publishable words in just a few hours at the typewriter.

Macfadden learned that Oursler had an even greater gift as an editor than as a writer and he turned over most of the day-to-day responsibilities for True Story to Oursler. True Story quickly grew into one of the most popular magazines in America and with Oursler’s help, Macfadden established over a dozen magazines in the next few years, capitalizing on everything from the growth of radio (Radio Stories), the beauty industry (Beautiful Womanhood), and even the brief wave of artistic dance enthusiasm inspired by Isadora Duncan (Dance Magazine). To feed his media machine, Macfadden tasked Oursler to hire what in today’s world we’d call content creators: prolific writers like Oursler. Into the Macfadden Building at 1926 Broadway filed an ensemble that included Vera Caspary (future author of Laura), Nat Pendleton (Olympic wrestler and future Hollywood character actor), and a tenacious young reporter and occasional Broadway actress named Grace Perkins.

Perkins became Oursler’s girl Friday, taking on every job from chasing down gangsters’ molls to posing for the cheesecake photos that were a staple of Macfadden periodicals. And not long after, she became Oursler’s mistress. By 1925, Oursler had decided to end his first marriage, and he and Perkins sailed for France, when Oursler obtained a French divorce and the two married. Oursler continued to run Macfadden’s magazines remotely while in France and managed to finish his third novel, Sandalwood.

Oursler encouraged Perkins to try her hand at creative writing and she began selling stories, starting with “Borrowed Clothes,” which appeared in McClure’s in 1926. Two years later, her first novel, Angel Child, appeared within weeks of Oursler’s fourth, Poor Little Fool. As if life wasn’t busy enough at the Oursler/Perkins apartment (referred to as Sandalwood), publisher and bookstore owner Lowell Brentano, who’d co-authored a thriller play, The Spider, approached Grace about writing a book to capitalize on the success of Ursula Parrott’s scandalous best-selling novel, Ex-Wife. Brentano’s idea was to publish anonymously — as Ex-Wife had been at first — a novel claiming to be the confessions of a long-time “kept woman”: Ex-Mistress.

Although uncomfortable with the subject matter — as her stepson Will Oursler relates in his memoir, Family Story, Perkins’s private morals were considerably more Puritanical than her professional career and affair with Oursler would suggest — she agreed on the condition that Brentano assure her anonymity. Considering that Perkins had spent the last six years working for a tell-all magazine and lived in a city with a gossip columnist on every corner, she should have known that Brentano’s commitment would be short-lived. Although Ex-Mistress first appeared anonymously, subsequent printings were credited to Dora Macy, the book’s narrator, and within a month or two later, Variety and other papers were telling the world that the credit properly belonged to Mrs. Fulton Oursler/Grace Perkins.

Perkins suffered from multiple health problems, and not long after Ex-Mistress was published, she was hospitalized and spent several months in recouperation. Her talks with the nurses who cared for her inspired her to follow the formula of Ex-Mistress — a first-person of a woman who struggles against a series of injustices and obstacles. This time, however, she added a more compelling action. Lora, the nurse, is assigned by her nursing service to care for two young sisters who are, as the medical profession put it at the time, failing to thrive. In reality, they’re being starved to death in a complicated conspiracy involving their wealthy but dissolute mother, her chauffeur, and a corrupt doctor. The obstacles she faces in trying to rescue reveal something of the power structures of the time in that Lora, despite the medical facts on her side, is disparaged by virtually everyone, including her nursing service supervisor and a reputable doctor she seeks out. The doctor, for example, resists becoming involved purely out of collegial discretion.

The film rights to Ex-Wife and Night Nurse were quickly picked up by Warner Brothers, each selling for over 10,000,ドル and Perkins’s next novel, Personal Maid, was sold to Paramount before it was even published. Hungry for strong stories on shocking subjects, the studios found Perkins’s work ideal — and her prominent connection with Macfadden’s magazine empire, which now included Liberty, provided an easy way to broaden the reach of their publicity. Of the three film versions, Night Nurse is, by far, the most faithful to Perkins’s original. My Past, on the other hand, jettisoned almost everything except the heroine’s name — and even that was mutated to Doree Macy.

By the summer of 1932, the lure of movie money had become too strong to resist, and the Ourslers moved to Hollywood, renting a large house from actor Jack Holt. Oursler continued to manage the editorial affairs of Macfadden Publications and work on Thatcher Colt mystery novels he published as Anthony Abbott, several of which were made into movies, as was The Spider. Ironically, living in America’s capital of illusions sparked Perkins’s interest in writing a story that dealt more directly with the nation’s economic problems: the Wall Street crash of October 1929 and the resulting depression.

No More Orchids opens in November 1929, just a few weeks after the crash. Anne Holt, daughter of a banker and granddaughter of one of the richest men in America, arrives in Cherbourg by seaplane to catch the steamship that’s delayed its departure while she partied in Paris. She offers no apology to the captain, knowing his concern for schedule takes a back seat to his fear of provoking the grandfather’s wrath, and immediately dives into a bridge game with a band of friends. “Card playing was the hardest work any of us did,” Ann reflects. Short on hard cash when she loses, she pays her debt by handing over a 10,000ドル diamond bracelet. Money means as little to Ann as air.

Her attitude especially repels one of the ship’s passengers. Tony Gage, the manager of a coffee plantation in Brazil (owned, it turns out, by Ann’s grandfather), finds her carelessness about money abhorrent. Unfortunately, the two of them also feel a powerful physical attraction, and by the time they land in New York, a fierce love-hate relationship is underway, with love steadily gaining the upper hand.

Anne’s holiday comes to an abrupt end. Her sister, in an unhappy marriage, has had an affair, followed by an abortion, and has taken to smoking cocaine-laced cigarettes. Anne’s grandfather is holding her inheritance hostage to her agreeing to marry a European nobleman. And his leverage has increased thanks to the impending failure of her father Bill’s bank. “The whole world will hear of it — for there isn’t a chance, not a chance, that he could pull out clean,” he informs her, delighting in the prospect of seeing the son-in-law he despises ruined. Marry the prince, however, and the grandfather will not just release Anne’s inheritance but bail out her father. Thus, Anne’s dilemma is set: will she choose love or money and her father’s rescue?

[画像:Opening pages of "No More Orchids" in Liberty magazine, July 2, 1932]

We reach this cliffhanging moment roughly one-third of the way into the book. Between here and the eventual happy ending, Perkins seeds a half-dozen more plot twists and quandaries, betraying a factor that influenced the book every bit as much as artistic intention: its serialization. No More Orchids appeared in ten installments in Liberty magazine between mid-June and mid-August 1932. In keeping with the traditions of magazine serials, it was incumbent upon Perkins to close each installment with enough dramatic tension to bring the readers back the next week. At the end of the ninth installment, in the August 13, 1932 issue, for example, readers were informed, “In next week’s concluding installment you’ll witness the great climax that decides whether life is to hold frustration or happiness for Anne.” In this way, the narrative arc of a serialized novel more closely resembles the trajectory of an artillery shell than Aristotle’s three-act story structure. Nine-tenths of the way into the novel, we still don’t know “whether life is to hold frustration or happiness for Anne.” Everything will come together in the final installment.

[画像:Photoplay edition of No More Orchids]

The film rights to No More Orchids were sold to Columbia in early June 1932, before the serial even began running in Liberty, and the book edition of the novel was released by Covici-Friede in late July, when seven out of ten installments had appeared. The film version, starring Carole Lombard, was released in late November, concurrent with a second book edition, this time with photos from the film, in the “Photoplay” movie tie-in series that Grosset and Dunlap had been publishing since Harold MacGrath’s The Adventures of Kathlyn in 1913.

No More Orchids offers an illuminating example of how each medium — book, magazine, and movie — adapted the same underlying story to its purposes. From a plot standpoint, there is little difference between the book and magazine serial versions, but Perkins had to trim her structure and prose for Liberty. The book’s sixteen chapters are condensed into ten installments, with color being the chief victim of the cut. Here, for example, Anne, recuperating from an emergency appendectomy (another cliffhanger), observes her Maine farm-wife grandmother:

And as I got better I’d pretend that I was asleep, and then fall to studying her with endless inspection…. She wasn’t ugly! [Anne’s mother had called her mother-in-law ugly.] Nobody could call her a beauty, but she certainly wasn’t as repulsively decayed as my memory pictured her. There were moments when she was almost lovely. I searched her for signs of resemblance to Bill, and often there were phrases she used, and tonalities, that brought him back to me so sharply that I could feel my lips forming his name.

The Liberty version drops that last sentence, and similar elisions can be found in almost every paragraph of more than three or four sentences. It’s much the same editorial approach one finds in Reader’s Digest condensed books: triage. Keep the plot, patch up the dialogue, sacrifice the long descriptions. The extent of the damage this triage does to a text is perhaps evidence of its artistic integrity: one shudders to think how it would ruin Remembrance of Things Past; No More Orchids, on the other hand, might actually have benefited from it. Grace Perkins mostly writes in terse, telegraphic sentences, her dialogue ping-pongs among her characters. I’m not sure Gran’s “tonalities” are worth preserving.

[画像:Lobby card for film version of No More Orchids]

If the magazine version of No More Orchids required Perkins to trim her prose a bit, the film version called for some serious machete work. Keene Thompson was first assigned as screenwriter, but in September, with the serial complete and the book version published, Columbia called in Gertrude Purcell to tailor the story to the strengths of its three leads: Carole Lombard (Anne), Lyle Talbot (Tony), and Walter Connolly (Bill). Between them, Thompson and Purcell jettisoned at least 70% of Perkins’s material.

Much of the second half of the novel takes place in the aftermath of Bill’s suicide. Anne having refused her grandfather’s deal, Bill heads to Washington, D.C. in hopes of raising money to keep his bank afloat. Failing, he shoots himself, and Anne finds herself destitute, struggling to find work and survive. Her romance with Tony runs into its share of obstacles. She flees to the safety of her grandmother’s farm, only to see it consumed in a forest fire. In the last chapter, a letter from Bill materializes with evidence that will send her evil grandfather to jail for fraud, restoring Bill’s posthumous reputation, and Anne and Tony reunite, marry, and head off to South America to live happily ever after.

All of this gets ditched in the film. Anne never has to go hungry or fight a forest fire or have an emergency appendectomy in a Maine train station because the scriptwriters manufacture a deus ex machina that allows all that dramatic clutter to be bypassed. Bill takes out an enormous life insurance policy and then flies his plane into a mountain, thereby resolving the bank crisis and enabling the lovers to reunite, etc..

Many studies have been written about the art or craft of adapting fiction to film. Most take books that most of us would consider classic, or at least respectably solid — say, the novels of Jane Austen — and note the various ways in which the complexities, nuances, and riches are lost in translation to the screen. But one could just as easily take a lesser book — and No More Orchids is certainly far inferior to Pride and Prejudice — and ask, what’s gained?

Just comparing the book and film versions of No More Orchids and their near-contemporaries in Big Business Girl, which I wrote about recently, I would argue that little that’s lost between page and screen in No More Orchids is worth mourning. There is a lot of narrative thrashing, particularly in the second half, that is intricate choreography but not fundamentally revealing of character or context. With the film version of Big Business Girl, on the other hand, the entire subplot of dry-cleaning rackets, hijacking, murders, and bombings is lost, and the story is reduced to a familiar formula: will Priscilla marry Miles Standish or John Alden? Either way, Priscilla’s going to have to quit her job and become a happy homemaker.

Grace Perkins and Fulton Oursler stayed in Hollywood for a year or so after No More Orchids, both contributing dialogue and picking up a few more film rights sales. Perkins’s story “Mike,” which appeared in Liberty in May 1933, came out as Torch Singer, starring Claudette Colbert, a few months later. They returned to New York and carried on their successful magazine careers, Oursler moving from Liberty to Reader’s Digest in the early 1940s. Oursler and Perkins both embraced religion around the same time and Oursler had an enormous bestseller in The Greatest Story Ever Told, which took a serial magazine story approach to the life of Jesus Christ (and which was filmed in 1965). Perkins wrote three more novels after No More Orchids, but none were picked up by the studios. Oursler died in 1952; Perkins died three years later after sustaining injuries in a fall.

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No More Orchids, by Grace Perkins
New York: Covici-Friede, 1932

[画像:Cover of first US edition of Big Business Girl]

When Farrar and Rinehart published Big Business Girl in 1930, they credited the book to the anonymous “One of Them” — meaning one of the women in big business. “She knows whereof she writes. She remains anonymous because she has revelations to make and emotional secrets to tell.”

They were being disingenuous. They knew perfectly well that the author was Patricia Reilly, then managing editor of College Humor. For one thing, the novel had just been serialized in the magazine and when Warner Brothers bought the movie rights, Reilly had been named in Variety and other industry journals. For another, they’d known Reilly for years: when she was a journalism graduate fresh out of Columbia, Stanley Rinehart had hired her as a staff writer when he and John Farrar were both working for The Bookman magazine.

Though College Humor was hardly in the same league as America’s biggest weeklies, Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, and Colliers, all with readerships in millions and famous for paying extraordinary rates for fiction by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, its editorial reputation belied its name. Many of the same names that appeared in the big magazines competed to publish in College Humor, even though its circulation was just 150,000 in 1930, half of what it had been before the Wall Street crash of the year before. Zelda Fitzgerald, for example, published “The Original Follies Girl” (credited to “F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald”) in the July 1929 issue, just a few months before Big Business Girl began running. Patricia Reilly would take over as editor of the magazine in 1932, moving on to run Motion Picture magazine in 1934.

When she was named College Humor editor, Reilly recalled that she felt she had to give up her own chances of being a writer when she started working at the magazine. “I wanted to write myself but I very quickly realized, and with few pangs of disillusionment, that I would never write the Great American Novel.” But sometime in 1928, she began developing an idea for a book that would blend her observations from her time in the working world with events that were shaking up Chicago, where College Humor was based. She approached Margaret Culkin Banning, already a prolific novelist and a regular contributor to College Humor, but Banning declined, saying she knew little about the situation in Chicago. She then asked H. N. Swanson, the magazine’s editor, for suggestions, and he advised Reilly to set aside doubts about her own abilities and write it herself.

Big Business Girl is the story of Claire MacIntyre:

A girl who has just graduated from a great state university, with a diploma , which is almost standard equipment for the young darling of today; a girl who faces the cold fact that nine out of ten of her number are doomed to failure, yet surveys the business world with level eyes and decides she can succeed as fast as any college trained man of her age.

Reilly’s was not the first generation of working women, but it was the first for whom going to college and continuing on to work in business was a reality for tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of women. There had been plenty of books written about the experience of young men leaving college and going into the world, she wrote in her foreword, but “almost never
are the problems of the girl graduate dignified between the covers of a book.”

The book opens as Claire — Mac to her friends — is celebrating her impending graduation with her boyfriend, Johnny. Johnny is a star of the campus, a singer with his own jazz band, in demand at all the local dances. He was proud of Claire for her “brains and personality” — but not her ambition. He plans to try his luck in show business and wants her to trail along as the dutiful spouse. She has other ideas. She wants to make her own money, in part because she’s racked up a debt of 5,000ドル getting through college.

And so, she bids farewell to Johnny and heads to Chicago, where her only relative, a comfortable but crotchety bachelor, lives. Her uncle thinks little of her plans for a career: “I think you are a crazy young kid. You have no business in business,” he tells her. After several rejections, she applies to an industrial dry-cleaning company looking to fill a new position: adjuster. The job involves settling claims from angry customers whose clothes have been damaged in the cleaning process. Today’s reader will wonder how such a job could qualify as “Big Business.” But here’s where the other half of Reilly’s concept for the book comes in.

Long forgotten in the legends of Chicago mobsters like Al Capone is the dry-cleaning racket. While best remembered for bootlegging and rum-running to supply the public with illegal booze during Prohibition, Capone and his ilk had a dozen or more other shady ways of making money. Among them was the dry-cleaning racket, which was a complicated web of collusion between mobsters and unions to shake down dry-cleaning shops and companies for protection money.

The scheme was explained a decade later in a report to the U.S. Senate:

Terrorism has been among the devices employed in the enforcement of a succession of market-sharing and price-fixing plans adopted by members of the cleaning and dyeing trade in Chicago at various times during the past 30 years. Beatings have been inflicted, trucks damaged, plants bombed, windows smashed, and clothing ruined; at least two persons connected with the trade have been murdered and the talents of such notorious gangsters as Al Capone and George (“Bugs”) Moran have been brought into play. The Chicago Master Cleaners and Dyers Association controlled the trade from 1910 to 1930, its power derived-largely from the economic strength of three friendly unions — the Laundry and Dye House Drivers and Chauffeurs Union, Local 712 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters known as the truck drivers’ union; the Cleaners, Dyers, and Pressers Union, Federal Local No. 17742 of the A. F. of L., known as the inside workers’ union; and the Retail Cleaners and Dyers Union, Federal Local No. 17792 of the A. F. of L., known as the tailors’ union.

When he learns where Mac will be working, her uncle tells her she’s landed in the worst place in Chicago for corruption: “There are even racketeers who prey on other racketeers.”

Hired on a trial basis, Mac quickly impresses her company’s owner by running an appeal that brings in hundreds of women customers. She proves a wizard at everything from calming irate customers to convincing them to accept low claim settlements — and with the racket in full swing, fire-bombing stores and hijacking delivery trucks, there are plenty of claims to settle. The owner begins grooming her for advancement. “You don’t handle your work like a girl, somehow,” he observes. “You seem more like a man.” “That is the sweetest thing you ever could have said,” she replies. And in true chauvinist fashion, he also takes a special interest in cultivating a social relationship — purely in a fatherly way, mind, and only because his wife dislikes going out. Their home is up in Evanston, after all, and it’s so much easier for him to keep a spare tuxedo at the office.

Mac’s career is rolling along smoothly — despite having to parry her boss’s advances — when Johnny arrives on the scene. Soon, the two suitors are butting heads like a couple of buck deer in heat. And suddenly Reilly betrays her inexperience in plotting by throwing in a completely implausible twist. Johnny is upset because he and Mac are husband and wife. They were married in college. But “student marriages weren’t popular at State,” so they decided to let anyone know. Including themselves, given the way Mac and Johnny talk of parting ways at the beginning of the book.

Many of the novels about modern women and modern marriage written around this time, like Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife and Sarah Salt’s Sense and Sensuality, struggled to reconcile traditional notions about a wife’s role and the desire to earn money and pursue a career. The choice is often presented in either/or terms, and neither option particularly appealing.

Big Business Girl rejects the either/or choice. For Mac, abandoning her career for a domestic life is out of the question. “She wondered how women just stayed at home and shopped and played bridge in the afternoon and had tea together, with nothing to talk about except their parties and husbands and menus and clothes. She couldn’t picture herself in such a role — ever.” Johnny eventually comes to acceptance, if unmistakably grudging. Long before the acronym was invented, he sees the economic benefits of being in a DINK marriage.

In part, this was due to Reilly’s own experience. Around the time that Big Business Girl was being serialized, she married Robert Foster, a stockbroker she’d known while working for The Bookman in New York. As she told an interviewer in 1932, “My husband is all for my working. He thinks I’d simply die on the vine if I didn’t have something to keep me busy constantly.”

Warner Brothers bought the movie rights to Big Business Girl soon after its run in College Humor, and the movie version starring Loretta Young as Mac and Frank Albertson as Johnny was released in mid-1931. The adaptation was written by Robert Lord, then Warners’ most prolific screenwriter. Lord recognized that Warners could make a love story or a gangster story but not both, so Chicago was swapped in favor of New York City and dry-cleaning in favor of advertising. Young carries off her role — stunningly beautiful and full of entrepreneurial gumption. Frank Albertson is a convincing college boy and an utterly unconvincing romantic lead who makes the often-slimy Ricardo Cortez as the lecherous boss look like a good prospect. Lord takes advantage of the divorce the couple consider to write a terrific scene in which Albertson and Joan Blondell play cards in a hotel room while waiting for a private detective to catch them in flagrante.

As in the novel, the couple reunite — but with the understanding that Mac gives up business for the hope of living happily ever after with Johnny. In this way, as seems to be the case with many of the books behind supposedly outrageous Pre-Code movies, Big Business Girl is more complex, realistic, and sophisticated than its better-known film version. Even before the enforcement of the Motion Picture Association’s Production Code, Hollywood was forced, through a combination of the constraints of short running times, set limitations, and the need to appeal to a much broader audience than that of a magazine like College Humor, to eliminate much of what makes the book interesting.

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Big Business Girl, by “One of Them” (Patricia Reilly)
New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1930

[画像:Cover of Which Grain Will Grow by H. H. Lynde]

Looking about for a good book to offer as my contribution to the 1952 Club, I was a bit daunted by the gulf between the extremely un-neglected candidates (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood) and the many neglected but unexceptional ones (e.g., Carl Jonas’s Jefferson Selleck, an attempt to update Babbitt for the 1950s without ruffling any feathers). Skimming through reviews in the New York Times, I was intrigued to see that Orville Prescott, the Times’s book editor, singled out a book I’d never heard of in his end-of-year round-up. Which Grain Will Grow by H. H. Lynde, he wrote, “has not received the attention it deserves, which is a pity because it is a wise and expertly written novel about that rare thing, a cross section of American life which includes neither plutocrats nor sharecroppers.”

My interest increased in reading a few synopses in various newspaper reviews. Which Grain Will Grow follows a collection of about a half-dozen major characters and several dozen others, all of them residents of Columbia City — from Lynde’s descriptions a fictional stand-in for Pasco, Washington — over a period of roughly twenty-five years, from the mid-1920s to the early 1950s. This is an era I find particularly fascinating, given the number of social upheavals that took place: Prohibition, the Wall Street crash, the Great Depression and New Deal, World War Two and the reintegration of millions of veterans, the start of the Cold War and blacklisting. In addition, south-central Washington state is an area unnoticed, to my knowledge, by any fictional observer.

Yet in Prescott’s review earlier in the year, when Which Grain Will Grow first came out, there were signs for caution, had I been paying attention:

Miss Lynde has chosen to write of normal people and to avoid extremes of tragedy and degradation. She is intensely interested in the varieties of individual character and in the strange ways of destiny. She has no pat answers to life’s eternal questions, but she asks them again with fresh insistence and brood about them in a thoughtful fashion which stimulates further thought.

He may have been attempting to contrast Lynde’s novel with those (e.g., Wise Blood) peopled with grotesques or (e.g., Invisible Man) simmering with anger, but in hindsight, his words seem as much to be placating potential readers. “No extremes here,” he signaled: this is a book about “normal people,” and 1952 was a time when being “normal” (i.e., white, middle-class, patriarchal, and socially conservative) was a matter of near-paranoiac levels of concern.

Which Grains Will Grow takes its title from Macbeth:

If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grains will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me…

The epigraph alerts us to the prospect that some characters we are about to meet will achieve success and others failure. This, and the span of time the story encompasses, would lead you to think that this will prove a saga of social, economic, and political forces at work, a tale of winners and losers.

The book opens as Chris Barlow, a World War One veteran and Princeton drop-out, is crossing the great blank space of wheat farms and nothingness between Ritzville, an hour west of Spokane, and the cluster of towns around the bend where the Columbia River turns west for its long run to the Pacific. Thinking only to stop for the night before continuing on to Seattle, he decides instead to play an old trick and talk his way into the home of a wealthy family based on an asserted acquaintance with their son, a Princeton alum conveniently settled far away on the East coast. There, he meets two young women — Ann Saxon and Phyllis Hollister — to whom he finds himself strongly attracted.

This first section of Which Grain Will Grow is titled “A Long Introduction.” It consumes 265 of the book’s 433 pages, and that fact offers the first clue to what’s wrong with the book. This very long introduction takes us through roughly six or seven months, culminating in a scene in which Chris, encountering Ann on the veranda of the home where she lives with her sister and her brother-in-law, Columbia City’s most powerful banker, realizes in a flash that he loves Ann and not Phyllis. In those many pages, Lynde patiently draws her cast on stage, giving each a chance to share with us — through her omniscient narrator — their thoughts, emotions, aspirations, and dreads. Each is given plenty of time to speak their piece. No one is rushed off.

Here, for example, we follow Pete Malleck, an honest if unexceptional young man whose family lives in one of the cheap frame houses in the Flats down by the river. He’s just learned that his brother-in-law has left town with the hard-saved cash Pete had given his sister to pay off a medical debt. I quote at length to offer a taste of H. H. Lynde’s voice:

Pete walked the three blocks over the High Street steadily and stolidly; not fast, because he was sweating with the heat — though it might just as well have been deep snow he was plodding through, picking up one foot and putting it down ahead of the other. But he wasn’t walking blindly either, or unseeingly, as the saying goes. It was, in fact, more as if he’d been in an accident, hit by a truck, maybe, and got up and walked away from it, knowing just where he was going — which was home to supper and he’d be late and Mom would be waiting if he didn’t get a move on and at the same time congratulating himself in a dim way because his legs and arms worked all right. So apparently he hadn’t been killed or maimed in the crash. But the pain was there, just the same, and he was full of it.

It takes another three paragraphs and about five hundred words to get poor Pete through those three blocks to High Street. Lynde is in no rush, regardless of whether Pete’s mom has supper waiting. When she takes us inside a character’s head, we’re going to be there for a good five to ten pages.

Lynde’s approach is nothing if not earnest. If Pete is going to work through his feelings about being ripped off or about his sister — not particularly bright or ambition — slipping further into poverty and hopelessness, Lynde is going to stick with him every step of the way. This scene reminded me of a mindfulness teacher who related how she once tried to run mindfully, focusing on the movement of each foot as it set down and pushed off, and came close to breaking an ankle in the process.

Combined with what one reviewer called Lynde’s “honest, thoughtful, unspectacular, malleable prose,” the result is convincing, almost unsettlingly realistic. We know that Pete is a good man because along with Lynde, we watch him consider the different ways in which he could lash out — at his deadbeat brother-in-law, at his shiftless sister, at his poor-paying, unrespected job as a hardware store clerk — and sets each aside as brutish and unproductive. Whether that understanding was worth slogging through page after page of undistinguished prose is another matter.

William Esty, writing about a year later in Commonweal, had no patience with Lynde’s style, which he called “insufferable serious-woman’s-magazine prose, so considerately clear about everything small, so comfortably vague about everything large, withal so suffocatingly cozy.” Her work — as indeed Carl Jonas’s Jefferson Selleck — was, he argued, an example of “the forsaking of politics and, indeed, life, for an intellectual bomb shelter.”

It’s a fair criticism. If politics affect life in Columbia City, it escapes Lynde’s notice. If the Depression causes anyone to lose a job or experience hardships, it amounts to more than a vague awareness. A son is lost in World War Two and Chris Barlow somehow becomes a wealthy and influential businessman as a result of his part in America’s war machine, but we’re never clear just how. And if you give up on Which Grains Will Grow as little as ten pages before the end, you will never know how the dramatic situation Lynde painstakingly develops over four hundred pages reaches its climax. Fittingly, which it finally comes, it’s related in flashback.

Which Grain Will Grow was no bestseller, but it did rate selection as an alternate title by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Even given the Club’s inclination to highlight only the best attributes of a book, however, its catalog writer acknowledged that “Had the economy required of the playwright been forced upon her, I suspect we’d have here even a more engrossing book.”

This is not to suggest that Which Grain Will Grow is not worth reading. Lynde, born the daughter of one of the richest men in Spokane, Washington (the H. H. stood for Helen Huntington, the Lynde coming from her paternal grandmother), came late to fiction. She was 47 when her first novel, Remember Matt Boyer (1944), about an isolationist politician, was published. She married at the age of 51, two years after her parents died and perhaps because she felt freed by their deaths. She wrote four novels in all, her last, The Adversary, appearing in 1957. I have to wonder if Lynde had read Esty’s article, as The Adversary portrays two contrasting groups in a fictional Orange County town: a group of society fixtures gathering at a cocktail party and an extremist cult busy burning their belongings and preparing their ritual costumes for what they believe is the end of the world, just hours away.

Which Grains Will Grow is, in its way, an archetypal novel of the American 1950s. It could sit alongside James Gould Cozzens’s 1957 novel, By Love Possessed, an even bigger commercial success and critical failure, both books suffering from an excess of care paid to subjects not worth the effort. Cozzens was guilty of overestimating his talent, which led him to write prose of torturous complexity. H. H. Lynde was guilty of underestimating her ability to stage manage her characters. She treats every character’s every thought with an excess of respect, subordinating her control of plot to yet another paragraph of reflections. It makes for a cast filled with convincing and nuanced personalities. What it doesn’t make for is powerful fiction. It’s a novel now of historical rather than literary interest.

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Which Grain Will Grow, by H. H. Lynde (pseudonym of Helen Huntington Morgan)
New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1952

In late 1931, the budding literary journal Prairie Schooner informed its readers that “Miss Eunice Chapin, formerly of Lincoln” (and formerly of the University of Nebraska, where Prairie Schooner was based) had published her first novel, Pick Up. “It is trash, and not worth the hour it takes to read it.” It was, according to the reviewer, “the worst first-novel we have ever read,” the sort of thing only of interest to “servant girls and overworked stenographers.” Having done a fair amount of research into the history and society of Lincoln, Nebraska around this time for my biography of Virginia Faulkner (due from the University of Nebraska Press in January 2026), the bitterness of this review intrigued me. Was there more than just literary criticism at work here?

Lincoln and its major university should have been proud of its native daughter. Having done graduate work at Bryn Mawr, Eunice Chapin rose steadily through the literary world of New York City, first as a freelancer, then as an assistant editor at Forum, then managing editor of McCall’s , one of the most popular women’s magazines in America, in 1928, and finally acquisition editor with G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1930. She wrote Pick Up after George Putnam himself challenged her to put her apparently encyclopedic knowledge of the city, or at least Manhattan, on paper.

Chapin’s father was a banker, director of First National, one of the largest banks in the city and on the boards of several companies and charities in Lincoln, so there was an understandable tendency among the local newspapers to make a big deal of Pick Up. The Star gave the book a half-page spread in its Sunday magazine section, announcing that it “Reveals Real Quality in Modern Youth.” Chapin herself tried to downplay the hype, saying that “her conservative friends are going to be surprised” and that her family “will wish I’d produced a Hamlet” instead of something “frisky.”

“Frisky” was putting it mildly for most Lincoln readers. In the book’s opening chapter, Cherry Towne, a secretary, meets a handsome young man on an uptown bus. Losing her hat in a gust of wind, she catches a chill and he generously invites her up to his luxurious apartment to warm up, introducing himself as Niels Atherton. After chit-chat about his stint with a circus in Barcelona, a tiger hunt in Malaya, and an expedition up the Amazon, he drops that he happens to own the Humming Bird motor company in Detroit.

Though Cherry demurs that she has little experience with alcohol, he plies her with multiple cocktails and then suggests she take a bath to relax. Unable to steer a straight course into the bathroom, she allows him to disrobe and set her into the tub, where he proceeds to soap her all over. This is as intimate as the evening gets, but allowing a strange man she’s known for just a few hours to assist with her ablutions was already a prairie mile past the point where any good Midwest girl should have drawn the line.

Not content with publicizing the book, the Star decided to publish Pick Up as a serial. Unfortunately, so many complaints were received when the first two installments were published that the paper put its censors to work and excised all the potentially scandalous bits from the remaining text. The Omaha World-Herald called the resulting work “pretty much emaciated,” with “little reason for publishing it.” Several other papers around the country ran the book as a serial as well, but Pick Up failed to gain traction either critically or commercially. (Perhaps this is why George Putnam, who encouraged Chapin to write the book, passed on publishing it — and even Brewer & Warren, who accepted it, chose not to take Chapin’s second novel, City Girl, a year later.)

If there was an agenda behind the Prairie Schooner review, the journal wasn’t alone in its judgment. The New York Time dismissed the book as “a flimsy bit of fluff.” Saturday Review called it a “slightly idiotic, pseudo-sophisticated tale,” and “a novel peopled exclusively by imbeciles, morons, pinheads, and worse….” The Brooklyn Daily Times compared Chapin’s subject and style to that of Viña Delmar’s best-seller Bad Girl: “reportorial, with great attention to detail.” Its rival, the Brooklyn Eagle, on the other hand, thought Chapin capable of much better work: “talent devoted to such a girl as Cherry is too much like squirrel hunting with a bear trap.”

Most reviewers found it implausible that Cherry would manage to cross paths with so many celebrities. Strolling into the restaurant of the Algonquin Hotel, Ricky, another of her suitors, remarks, “There’s Fannie Hurst — back from Florence. And [Lucius] Beebe, home from Bermuda. And Admiral [Richard] Byrd…” Among the glitterati he spots is Niels, lunching with June, a Broadway star known as one of his main squeezes. There’s plenty of jealousy, mixed motives, and white lies to propel Chapin’s story along for its three hundred-some pages, but what there isn’t is substance, either behind its characters’ masks or underneath Chapin’s descriptions of New York. Chapin told one Lincoln reporter that she hoped “those at home who know me will see that fragile, sensitive story of the girl beneath the noisy, wisecracking surface of New York, and they’ll understand, and like it.” I hoped so, too. But I’m afraid the reviewers were right.

RKO bought the film rights to Pick Up and announced its version would star Helen Twelvetrees, but the project died in development, as did “Coast to Coast,” an original story Chapin sold to Fox. Still, the studios were gathering in writers like firewood ahead of a rough winter and Chapin ended 1931 on the staff at Columbia. Within a year of that, she married John Larkin, a playwright and former New York acquaintance. She published three more novels — City Girl (1932), Love Without Breakfast (1934), and Million-Dollar Story (1938) — all of which quickly disappeared without much critical notice. If she contributed to any films, her credits have been lost, likely all in early stages of development. Eunice Chapin died in Los Angeles in 1978.

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Pick Up, by Eunice Chapin
New York: Brewer & Warren, Inc., 1931

[画像:Lobby card for The Divorcee, the 1930 film adaptation of Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife]

As part of my current project of digging into the source texts of Hollywood Pre-Code movies of the early 1930s, I spent much of February exploring the rabbit-hole of the brief-lived phenomenon of books inspired by (or simply exploiting) the success and notoriety of Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel, Ex-Wife. Recently reissued by Faber (UK) and McNally (US) and featured in the title of Marsha Gordon’s biography of Parrott, Becoming the Ex-Wife, Ex-Wife is no longer a neglected book. But what most readers don’t know — even Gordon mentions it only in passing — is the extent to which Ex-Wife led to a whole series of Ex-titled books, most of them drawing upon or taking off from Parrott’s book.

To set this overview in context, I have to take say a little bit about Parrott and her bestseller.

[画像:Cover of the first US edition of Ex-Wife.]

• Ex-Wife, by Ursula Parrott
New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1929

When Ex-Wife first appeared, it was considered such a volatile mixture of sex, drink, and changing morals that its publishers kept its author’s name off the first five printings and initially marketed it as nonfiction. Even after Ursula Parrott, then a prolific writer of magazine short stories, was credited on the dust jacket, it was claimed to be her autobiography. By then, it had been declared unfit for circulation by the venerable Watch and Ward Society of Parrott’s hometown of Boston — which only speeded up the rate at which copies flew out of bookstores.

“My husband left me four years ago,” declares Pat, the narrator. “Why — I don’t precisely understand, and never did. Nor, I suspect, does he.” Though divorce was still considered something of a social embarrassment (I had a distant cousin who never told her husband of 60 years that her parents had divorced in 1915), what was most shocking to readers was this blasé attitude of the two parties involved. Decades before the term “open marriage” was coined, the practice of flexible fidelity had become so prevalent, or perceived to be, that publishers and Hollywood studios felt obliged to both cover and condemn it. (See Party Husband (book and movie) or Illicit (movie).)

Ex-Wife shows that flexible fidelity required a far more flexibility than many Americans were capable of. Pat and Peter marry, spend time in Europe, maintain busy work and social lives, and everything seems grand for a time. Well, aside from Pat’s pregnancy: “No baby, at least no baby for years and years,” Peter cautions her. “You are too young and nice-looking, and I don’t want you to be hurt.” Meaning he doesn’t want to have a wife who’s less than ideal arm candy. Or the financial and emotional responsibility for two other lives. When Peter has a casual affair, he expects Pats to take it, well, casually. When Pat responds in kind, though, Peter recoils: “I always thought you were the cleanest person in the world.” Open marriage quickly turns into open conflict. “I’ll teach you to go through my pockets for money or anything, you bitch,” says Peter, and strikes Pat across the mouth. Yet neither admits to feelings of jealousy because jealousy “was too outrageously old-fashioned.”

Although not strictly autobiographical, Ex-Wife has numerous parallels with Ursula Parrott’s own story and her first marriage to reporter Lindesay Parrott. Both Parrott and Pat cheated and were cheated on, lubricated their lives with too much Prohibition alcohol, enjoyed the financial independence of working, and resented the uneven distribution of practical and emotional responsibilities between wife and man. Pat echoes a sentiment frequently voiced by Parrott: “Freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men.”

Though Pat soon adapts to life after marriage (her diary fills with entries like, “Dinner — Richard”; “C. L. C. — the Ritz — 7:15”; “Dominic — to dine at the Cecelia”), she never quite settles into the role of the gay divorcée. Indeed, Ex-Wife is as much an artifact of 17th century Boston Puritanism as of the Roaring Twenties. Adultery was then still the most common basis for divorce and though Pat doesn’t have to wear a red “A”, she still carries around a label of ostracism: “You’re an ex-wife,” her friend Lucia tells her, “because it is the most important thing to know about you … explains everything else, that you once were married to a man who left you.”

As Parrott portrays it, life as an ex-wife is less carefree than nihilistic. “While I was married,” Pat writes, “I saved money and made plans for the next fifty years and so on. Afterward, I did not make plans for the month after next. It seemed such a waste of time.” After years of socializing, brief affairs, and a cast of a thousand escorts, Pat surrenders her freedom for the security of marriage to Nathaniel, a dullish but reliable man who celebrates her “obvious wholesomeness.” It’s not a case so much of living happily ever after as living comfortably ever after. Pat has had her flings and Nathaniel is clearly too unimaginative to even contemplate one.

It’s hard to imagine anyone getting much of an illicit thrill from reading Ex-Wife, but it was, if briefly, considered the hottest book one could buy over the counter. Ex-Wife was scooped up by MGM and filmed with MGM executive Irving Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, in the lead. Though it won Shearer a Best Actress Oscar, The Divorcee resembles Ex-Wife only in the sense that the shards on the floor resemble a vase before it was knocked off a table. We’re 57 minutes into an 84-minute film before Jerry (Pat) tells Ted (Peter) about her infidelity. And unlike Ex-Wife, the two remarry and live happily ever after.

The success of book and film led to a predictable response from publishers: “Can we have another one like it?” Parrott herself quickly spun off Strangers May Kiss (1930), another story about years of a sophisticated and loose relationship that culminates in traditional marriage. It, too, was instantly transformed into a vehicle for Norma Shearer (under the same title and with slightly more fidelity to the original). But in New York, the call for “More!” rang out and was soon answered.

[画像:Cover of Ex-Husband]

• Ex-Husband, by Anonymous
New York: The Macaulay Company, 1929

The first to follow was Ex-Husband, published anonymously but attributed in rumors to various authors, including Parrott’s real ex-husband and the poet and critic Joseph Auslander. Of all the Ex-titled books, it was not only the most clearly imitative of Parrott’s book but also by far the best. Although certainly written in haste, it operates at a level of originality far above that of mere parody.

“My wife left me four years ago, maybe five,” relates the narrator, Wilfred Mallard. Time is not the only thing Wilfred is a little vague on. Indeed, Wilfred often reminded me of another great comic autobiographer, Augustus Carp. Like Carp, he thinks so highly of himself that everyone else in his world is merely a passing shadow. Wilfred feels he has made not only the supreme but also the most logical sacrifice in allowing his able wife Roberta, to go out and work while he remains at home. He’s happy to be the weaker sex in their relationship:

I wanted to subordinate my life to hers, to devote myself utterly to her service, to be the one who would cry, “Upidee, Upida,” as she struggled up the hilly path, and “Excelsior!” as she reached the top.

Not that this means he takes on any domestic duties, unless these include showering frequently. Wilfred takes a lot of showers in this book, each followed by long sessions of admiring his “smooth bronzed skin, like a Greek god, long eyelashes, supple shapely calves, and silky hair” in front of a mirror. So consumed with himself is Wilfred that he struggles to comprehend when Roberta stands at the door, suitcases packed, ready to leave for the last time:

“Good-by and good luck!”
She could not possibly mean it. She must be joking.
“Don’t joke about that, Roberta dear,” I said. “It hurts me too much even to think about it. Will you be home early?”

Like Parrott’s Pat, Wilfred finds refuge with a sympathetic friend. Ivan, however, wants to extend him more than just sympathy. Ivan comes in while Wilfred is bathing: “O, but I haven’t scrubbed your back yet.” Wilfred declines his offer (“I hate having my body touched unless by a woman, who touches it in holy passion,” he confides to the reader). Ivan is crushed. “He looked hurt, as though I had struck him with a whip.”

Having a narcissist as narrator gives the author of Ex-Husband the opportunity to play on some of Parrott’s worst tendencies. Pat in Ex-Wife is constantly giving the reader a fashion show:

The dress slipped on. Black marocain with a deep white collar and exaggerated cuffs, cut petalwise. Black satin opera pumps… I did not like satin shoes much, but these made my feet look so narrow. An almost brimless black milan hat, with a gold arrow embroidered athwart the front. Pearls — no, the flat gold necklace.

Wilfred is a peacock of the highest order:

I had dressed with especial care that morning. Suede shoes were topped with soft velvety mouse-colored spats covering pin striped silk socks in black and white like the shimmer of cobwebs against a dark sky. At the last minute I had decided against my soft, light gray suit vest, and had worn a silk brocade instead. Soft gray shirt, tie to match. Gray Borsolino hat. Gray gloves. I love grays. I looked in the long cheval glass and decided that I was not offensive, not offensive at all.

Like Parrott, Ex-Husband’s author plays “artfully” with music. Parrott has a chapter in which Pat’s thoughts are interwoven with lines from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Wilfred and a friend debate the meaning of life while listening to the strains of “Andante Strenuosa” by that Viennese master, Meiselmenig. Where Parrott very occasionally drops a name, Wilfred spews them out:

We mingled with them informally. William Seabrook, red-faced and thumb-ringed; Theodore Dreiser, the American tragedy; George Jean Nathan, a choir boy at a prize fight; Joseph Auslander, Adolphe Menjou talking with Edgar Allan Poe on Fifth Avenue; … Rebecca West, looking Spanish, spoiled, and spent; Horace Liveright, a cut-steel shoe buckle; Edna Millay, looking as though she had lost a buck in the snow ; Ursula Parrott, the little girl reporter of the dementia Peacox case¹…

¹ Parrott reported on the June 1929 murder trial of Earl Peacox for the New York Evening Journal.

This goes on for another page and a half, and it’s just one of several name-dropping orgies.

As entertainment, Ex-Husband edges out Ex-Wife in my book. While Parrott’s book is undoubtedly an accurate representation of the quandary of women trying to balance the pulls of career, marriage, societal expectations, and (let’s face it) enjoying themselves, Pat (and Parrott herself) always seems haunted by the specter of Puritanical judgments. Wilfred, on the other hand, is too blissfully oblivious to worry about anything but finding another woman to take care of him. Which he does, in Harriet, who has the decided advantage over Roberta of being independently wealth and hence capable of supporting him without the distraction of a career. It certainly seems a happier match than that of Pat and Nathaniel, which Parrott never quite portrays as anything more than a compromise.

• Ex-Mistress, by Anonymous (Dora Macy)
New York: Brentano’s, 1930

With Ex-Mistress, the direct influence of Parrott’s book begins quickly to fade. The shadow of The Scarlet Letter, on the other hand, falls starkly across this novel’s opening chapter. “I am not a bad woman. I am not a prostitute,” she announces at the start. Dora Macy (one of the mysteries of this book is the author’s decision to name her narrator after one of her pseudonyms) is a virginal sixteen-year-old in a small Southern town seduced by the handsome son of the town’s banker. Things go too far on a Sunday picnic. Dora finds herself with child; the banker’s son and her family reject her, so she hops a train to New York.

Dora proves a proficient survivor. She gets a job, finds a trustworthy friend and guide to the ways of the big city, and even manages to gain admission to a benign home for unwed mothers when her time comes. Giving up the child for adoption, she emerges with a single overriding goal: security. Security, that is, within the constraint that her history makes her unfit for marriage in the eyes of “decent people.” So she has to rely on the one commodity of value on the market: “My body belonged to myself…. It was mine — the only thing I had. The only thing in the world that belonged to me.”

Dora pursues two paths to security. While slowly ascending the career ladder through retail jobs from shopgirl to manager to shop owner and eventually, a chain of cosmetics salons, she acquires a sequence of sugar daddies. Restaurant dinners, clothes, and occasional items of jewelry at first, then an apartment, and finally, a penthouse complete with grand piano and gym. A Chinese businessman is followed by an author, a doctor, and a banker. Abortion as birth control is dealt with casually. Dora’s friend Marion, a Broadway star, has one done after a show on Saturday night and is back and dancing in the spotlight on Monday.

As an author, Dora Macy is more craftswoman than artist. Her prose carries the story along in coach class and most of her characters are equally functional. Occasionally, though, an observation slips out that suggests far closer study of people. A sister who counsels her after she gives up her child has a mind “like a room that never had the windows opened.” A landlady is “The kind of a woman who put on her glasses to answer the phone.”

And she understands well the skills required to attract and keep a man interested in maintaining a long-term mistress. On a first evening out, Dora wears:

White satin (which is always good for a first impression), and a huge white ostrich fan. But not a single piece of jewelry. Never wear jewelry when you first consider a new love; it leaves him nothing to adorn. Later, of course, you wear his jewelry, and nothing else but.

A mistress has to manage a delicate and ever-evolving balance between tantalizing and satisfying the man keeping her. He has no legal constraint preventing him from abandoning his mistress and at most the risk of of blackmail if he does. Men, Dora decides, need three women: a mother, a wife, and a mistress, and the successful mistress must juggle all three roles over the course of a relationship. When her sugariest daddy, a banker, dies and she considers her situation at the age of 37, however, Dora opts for marriage to Earl, a middle-aged bachelor with deep pockets and a shallow mind: “He took an enormously long time to say anything, and when it was said it really didn’t amount to much.”

Dora Macy was the pen name of Grace Perkins, a one-time Broadway actress who married the writer and editor Fulton Oursler in 1925 and became a successful writer herself. Ex-Mistress was her second novel, and like Parrott’s, it was picked up by by Hollywood (Warner Brothers) and made into My Past (1931), starring Bebe Daniels. Both the novel and the movie were followed in short order: Macy’s Night Nurse, which drew upon dozens of interviews with registered nurses in New York, was also filmed by Warner Brothers, retaining the book’s title. Night Nurse is considered a classic Pre-Code film, with a stellar performance by Barbara Stanwyck and unveiled references to adultery, child abuse, bootlegging, kidnapping, and drug addiction.

• Ex-“It”, by Anonymous (Edward Dean Sullivan)
New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1930

One assumes that Grosset and Dunlap approached Edward Dean Sullivan (or vice-versa) about whipping out a quick parody of Ex-Wife. Instead of going the route of Ex-Husband, though, he reached way back to 1927 and another then-hot commodity, It, which made both author Elinor Glyn and star of the film adaptation, “It” (with quotation marks), Clara Bow, household names.

Ex-“It” is the somewhat amusing autobiography of Fanny Hill, a girl who “works” (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) her way up to wealth and fame. At the time Ex-“It” was published, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was very much considered obscene and unsaleable over the counter any place in America, so it’s doubtful that many readers saw the parallels between Cleland’s character and Sullivan’s.

Somewhat amusing in part because, like most published jokes, it goes on too long, but mostly because of the howling sexism: “At four years of age I could say ‘Pees dimmy dat,’ which is all any gal with good teeth and a shape need say up to thirty.” On the other hand, there are a few apt observations. I’m sure we’ve all encountered a little dog that’s “just a nervous breakdown with a leg at each corner.” Overall, though, file this one under “Forgettable.”

• Ex-Judge, by Anonymous
New York: Brentano’s, 1930

Ex-Judge has no relationship with Ex-Wife aside from its title. Unlike the rest of Ex-Wife’s ilk, it’s a third-person narrative and clearly a novel submitted to Brentano’s with a different title. In the context of the Seabury investigations of New York City police and judicial corruption, Ex-Judge is an overlooked artifact, a fictionalized account (Tammany Hall becomes Tammanela) of a mediocre political machine functionary elevated to the bench with the task of acquitting friends and convicting enemies. It does give an convincing insider’s view of how the gears of Tammany’s machine fit together, but as a novel, it’s a bit too much like a building that’s never had its scaffolding removed.

• Ex-Racketeer, by Anonymous
New York: Rudolph Field, 1930

Ex-Racketeer is a gangster’s soliloquy of just 83 pages, an express journey through American organized crime from 1918 to 1930. Eugene Caxton is a mob soldier hiding out from Turk, a boss he’s ripped off. While counting time, he picks up the pen and courtesy paper in his hotel room’s desk and begins to write a memoir.

Like James Cagney’s character, Tom Powers, in The Public Enemy, Eugene gets started doing petty jobs as a teenager and works his way up through the ranks. With the start of Prohibition, his mob adds bootlegging to its existing menu of “Narcotics, White Slavery, Robbery, and Strike-Breaking,” and Eugene offers his opinion of the risks and benefits of each. He regrets, though, that Hollywood has “spoiled” most mobsters: “Made them too self-conscious… They all try to live like the subject of a Ben Hecht scenario.” And he offers a prediction we sadly can see being realized in America today: “What this nation needs is not a good five cent cigar, but a definite, exclusive, authoritative, and formally acknowledged aristocracy … we’ll come to it yet.”

Not to spoil the plot, such as it is, but it should be no surprise that things do not end well for Eugene.

• Ex-Baby, by Anonymous (Aben Kandel)
New York: Covici-Friede, 1930

Anyone who paid good money for a copy of Ex-Baby (as I did) got robbed. Just 55 pages long with 18-plus point type, it’s an average humor column packaged like a novella. And the joke is paper-thin. This is the narrative of a four-year-old boy (an ex-baby, get it?) with the voice and sensibility of a twenty-something wiseguy: “On a good night, I’d have pa, ma, grandma, Uncle Timiny, the neighbor, the maid, and maybe a cousin or two all doing little tricks to get me to eat my spinach. Gee, it was great.” Ha-ha, hee-hee.

• Ex-Book, by William Henry Hanemann
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930

Ex-Book is the slightest of the lot, just 14 pages, really just a brochure included with copies of Hanemann’s The Facts of Life, a collection of comic pieces also published by Farrar & Rinehart. On the other hand, its one joke is carried off far better than Ex-Baby’s. “I am lying, face down, in a strange wire basket,” the narrator relates. It’s a manuscript, dropped off with an editor by its author. “I’m sick and tired of you,” declares the author. “I know every comma, every paragraph, every turn and twist and clever phase … and God, Cookie, how you bore me.” An amusing slalom though the publication process.

Though Ursula Parrott cranked out 18 more books before her life and career crashed and burned in the mid-1940s, none of them inspired a wave of imitators like Ex-Wife’s. I highly recommend anyone interested in Parrott’s rackety life read Marsha Gordon’s biography.

[画像:Cover of first edition of The Goldfish Bowl by Mary C. McCall]

Mary C. McCall, Jr. (given the Junior by her mother, Mary C. McCall, as a flex against the patriarchy (her father specifically)) was a busy and well-paid writer of magazine fiction when she decided to take on a longer piece, a novel. Looking around for material, she thought of her girlhood friend, Elisabeth Morrow, whose sister Anne had recently married the most famous man in America: Charles Lindbergh. Like any newspaper reader or radio listener of the day, McCall knew that Lindbergh and his wife were subject to relentless scrutiny, but unlike most of them, she also heard from Elisabeth what it was like to be the objects of this attention.

It was, she said, like living in a goldfish bowl, exposed on all side — an analogy that got credited to Irvin S. Cobb but originally came from a story by Saki. McCall thought a good story could be built around the situation as told from the goldfishes’ perspective. To avoid simply fictionalizing Lindbergh’s tale, she took her inspiration from the loss of the US Navy submarine SS-4 in 1927. Struck accidentally by a US Coast Guard ship, the SS-4 sank off Provincetown, Massachusetts. Forty men were trapped aboard and though divers were able to locate and communicate with crewmen through tapping on the hull, all hands died before the sub could be raised.

McCall turned this tragedy into a story of heroism. After his sub is struck and sunk by a yacht, Lieutenant Scotty McClenahan comes up with the idea of ejecting the crewmen through the torpedo tubes, allowing them to make it to the surface. The catch, though, is that the last man aboard would be unable to trigger the firing of the tube. Scotty volunteers to be the one to stay behind and accepts his certain death, only to be rescued at the last moment by Navy divers.

All of this happens before the book opens. We meet Scotty as he comes to aboard the Navy destroyer after the rescue. Still groggy from oxygen deprivation and time in the bariatric chamber, he’s startled to learn that he’s become an overnight hero:

“They want romance: that’s you. Football hero, laying down his life for his brothers. Two days, trapped in a watery tomb. Raised from the dead. You’re Lazarus and Buddy Rogers all in one. You’re every mother’s dearm-kiddie. Every school teacher has fallen asleep thinking of running her fingers through your hair.”

He’s promoted to Commander, which is particularly disconcerting because Scotty had resigned his commission and was due to leave the Navy in a few weeks. His fleet’s admiral is waiting to present him with a medal. As the destroyer pulls into New York harbor, dozens of reporters and a newsreel camera crew come aboard to get his story. Tugboats shoot up waterworks. Landing at the Battery, he’s hustled into a limousine for a ticker tape parade along Broadway. The mayor presents the key to the city. He’s bundled into a tuxedo and feted as guest of honor at a banquet that night. Telegrams stream in with offers — the movies, magazines, vaudeville — but a wily publisher named Chapin talks him into signing an exclusive contract while Scotty’s head is still spinning.

Little of this would have been unfamiliar to McCall’s readers, and to be honest, little of it is told with particular originality. Where the book improves significantly is when McCall takes Scotty home to Connecticut and his longtime girlfriend, Janet. Or, to be more accurate, his longtime girl friend. For, as ardent as Scotty’s feelings may have been even before his brush with death, Janet is a young woman not ready to abandon her independence for a wedding ring. When Scotty leaves Janet’s home in the wee hours of the morning after a long and inconclusive talk, however, a reporter accosts him and asks if the two are now engaged. Still untrained at handling the press, Scotty stutters “Yes” and hurries away.

In the morning, the news is on the front page of every paper. Returning to Janet’s home to apologize for the surprise, Scotty is confronted by a woman with a stronger backbone than his:

“Can’t you see what’s the matter?… You honestly can’t see what you’ve done to me?”

“No,” said Scotty. “Here it was so late — and your mother and father –”

“Well, all I have to say to you is this,” said Janet, “if you’re afraid of anything a filthy little tabloid can say, I’m not. The newspapers own you. You’re afair of them. Well, thank God, I’m not.”

“But, Janet, you can’t — ”

“I can telephone them and tell them the truth. Tell them what you should have told that man last night, — that we’re not engaged. Let them say what they please. Let them print whatever dirty story they like. Suppose it was three o’clock when you left here. Or six o’clock. Do you suppose I care? We know what happened. You went to sleep.”

Janet sees far better than Scotty the that price of fame is a loss of control, and she is far less willing than he to surrender it: “I’m crazy about you,” she acknowledges. “But being crazy isn’t a very enviable state. My reason’s got to play some part in my marriage. I won’t be yanked around by my body.”

When Scotty returns to New York City to meet with Chapin about his plans, he finds himself attracting a fans from the moment he arrives at Grand Central Station. The moment he stops to look at the display of the book “by Commander Scott McClenahan” his ghostwriters have slapped together overnight, the press of the people begins to feel more suffocating than the oxygen-deprived atmosphere in the submarine:

They were all staring at him. Passers-by stopped. The crowd multiplied itself, as figures multiply in a dream. Scotty made for the doorway to the offices, but they were there before him. Hands on his coat — people pawing him. Some one was tearing at a button on his sleeve. He lowered his head and butted his way through. He didn’t know whether his shoving shoulders or his doubled fists hurt them. He had to get away. He dragged a few of them into the hallway.
He made a last flailing movement with his arms and heard some one fall on the marble floor. “Good!” He was grunting out the words as he ran to the elevator. “I hope he broke his God damn neck!”

Scotty does not wear the mantle of fame well. And the wealth and comforts that come from his display-case job with a gyroscope company don’t compensate for the constraints of being under the constant scrutiny and pressure to play the hero. But it’s Janet — they eventually marry — who draws the line. She wants to be able to work: “I don’t think I want to be taken care of. I don’t like asking you for clothes money and taxis — things like that. I’d like to have something of my own.” And she fears that they could never have children: “I couldn’t stand the prying and peering…. ‘Yes my dear, I saw here on the street the other day and she’s enormous. She must be seven months along.'”

McCall manufacturers an escape for Scotty and Janet that one has to say operates a little too much like the torpedo tubes on the sub: they flee in the night for a place where their names are unknown and they can start afresh as nobodies. Canada.

The artificiality of the book’s ending didn’t prevent McCall’s agent from selling the book to Little, Brown & Co. (5,000ドル), the serial rights to Pictorial Review (7,500ドル), and the film rights to Warner Brothers (8,750ドル), or slightly under 500,000ドル in today’s dollars. It was a different time indeed.

[画像:Lobby card for It's Tough to be Famous, showing Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. pulling up up crewman played by David Landau.]

McCall had Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in mind when she created Scotty, and Darryl Zanuck at Warner Brothers agreed he was right for the part. The script was finished in late 1931 and the production was filmed in January 1932. McCall wanted to work on the script, but Zanuck told her that the studio “never employed writers on their own work.” He also rejected the title as “too arty” and said the film would be called (spoiler alert!) It’s Tough to be Famous . The script was written by a studio veteran, Robert Lord (who, coincidentally, also wrote the screenplay of Five Star Final, featured here last year. McCall soon afterward joined Warner Brothers as a screenwriter, though, and would eventually become a three-time head of the Screenwriter’s Guild and one of the most powerful women in Hollywood until her career was derailed by the blacklist.

McCall and Fairbanks clicked when they met and had a brief affair after she arrived in Hollywood ahead of her husband. They remained good friends until McCall’s death in 1986. Sadly for all involved, It’s Tough to be Famous was released a month after Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped; a few weeks later, his body was found and the manhunt for the killer launched with a magnitude of publicity vastly exceeding anything McCall had imagined. An above-average if not great film by the standards of its day, with a winning performance by Fairbanks, It’s Tough to Be Famous was quickly forgotten.

You can read more about Mary C. McCall, Jr. in J. E. Smyth’s recent biography, Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Screenwriter, published by Columbia University Press.

---

The Goldfish Bowl, by Mary C. McCall, Jr.
Boston: Little, Brown, and Company (1932)

[画像:Liberty magazine ad for its serial of The Woman Accused (and the associated Paramount movie)]

I should start with an apology — two of them, actually. First, I apologize for not posting here for the last two months. I recently submitted the manuscript of my book, Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, to the University of Nebraska Press, and that left me little time and energy for Neglected Books. And second, I’ll apology in advance for the fact that there will be a fair number of posts about books from the early 1930s that will probably, on average, deserve their neglect if not for their function as sources for movies from what’s known as the Pre-Code era, which has become something of a fascination for me.

I wrote about Louis Weitzenkorn’s play Five-Star Final back in September and have since accumulated several shelves full of novels and plays from this period. A fair number of source texts have become quite rare, so I’ve taken liberal advantage of Inter Library Loan to obtain others — including this monstrosity.

There may be no better evidence of the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and the literary world of the early 1930s than The Woman Accused. The genesis of the project is lost in the files of Paramount Studios, but apparently Polan Banks, one of Paramount’s screenwriters with a few novels to his credit, concocted the idea of having a team of popular novelists of the time collaborating on a novel that would both be serialized in Liberty magazine and filmed by Paramount. Tag-team novel writing wasn’t new: no lesser worthies than Henry James and William Dean Howells had banded with ten scribes in 1907 to produce The Whole Family, whose excellence is demonstrated by the fact that this may be the first and only time you’ll ever hear about it.

The novelty of Banks’s proposal was not the collaboration of the authors but the collaboration of studio, magazine, and book publisher in the synergistic marketing of the story. Liberty would publish the individual chapters concurrent with the appearance of Paramount’s movie in cinemas around the country, and Ray Long & Richard R. Smith would collect the chapters in a book that would hit shops at the same time. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Consumer would have to make concerted efforts not to stumble into one or another of its packages.

[画像:Poster for The Woman Accused starring Nancy Carroll and Cary Grant (1933)]

As the most popular magazine of the time, it was easy for Liberty to round up nine willing writers (Polan Banks graciously offered his services). Most of them were regular contributors already, and the few who weren’t would be happy to join the Liberty team. At the time, a single feature story in Liberty could earn a writer more than the average American made in a year. By late 1932, the recruitment process was over and the writing well underway. The cast of contributors is testimony to the fickleness of literary success:

• Rupert Hughes . Hughes was a prolific novelist, playwright, and author of magazine fiction whose strongest tie to Hollywood was through his nephew, the millionaire and budding film producer Howard Hughes. Hughes was also then in the midst of writing a well-regarded multi-volume biography of George Washington.
• Vicki Baum . The Austrian-born Baum was riding a wave of success from her novel, Menschen im Hotel, which became a best-seller in the U.S. as Grand Hotel and, in turn, the 1932 movie of the same name that won the Oscar for best picture of the year.
• Zane Grey . Grey had, by this time, spent decades as America’s best-selling author of Westerns (and even today his novel Riders of the Purple Sage has never been out of print).
• Viña Delmar . Delmar was then at the height of her success, her hit novel Bad Girl having been both a popular success and the basis of a 1931 movie of the same name, which earned three Oscar nominations, including for best picture, and with several other films made from her magazine stories.
• Irvin S. Cobb . Unless you frequent musty old bookstores, you’ve probably never seen his name before, but Cobb was then producing humorous and folksy books with titles like Speaking of Operations and Old Judge Priest (which John Ford would film the following year with Will Rogers in the title role).
• Gertrude Atherton . California’s answer to Edith Wharton, Atherton was perhaps too prolific to help her critical reputation, but her social and historical novels had been steady sellers since the turn of the century.
• J. P. McEvoy . McEvoy was then best-known for his Dixie Dugan novels, lightly satirical looks at show business as seen by a chorus girl and would-be starlet (modeled on Louise Brooks). (Long out of print and exceptionally rare, the Dixie Dugan trilogy was reissued earlier this year by Tough Poets Press.)
• Ursula Parrott . Ursula Parrott already had two movie adaptations under her belt, with her 1929 best-seller, Ex-Wife, made into The Divorcee and Strangers May Kiss filmed under the same name in 1931, both starring Norma Shearer.
• Polan Banks. Banks’s first novel, Black Ivory, was a turgid potboiler set in 18th century Louisiana, but it sold well enough to earn an invitation to come to Hollywood, where his next book, Street of Women, became a starring vehicle for Kay Francis under the same name in 1932.
• Sophie Kerr . Although, as her Wikipedia page puts it, Kerr “is largely unknown to contemporary readers and her books are long out of print,” she had ten novels to her name by the time she was enlisted to work on this project and was a frequent contributor of magazine fiction.

In theory, The Woman Accused would have taken months to write, with each author receiving the previous chapters and adding their own, in a version of the game Consequences. In practice, it appears that Banks and Hughes came up with the outline of the story and the transition points for each chapter to ensure continuity, and all the writers churned out their chapters in a few weeks. The exercise was not much of a stretch from that of writing a typical magazine short story, which all of them were doing as many as a dozen times each year.

Churned is the operative word here. As the New York Times’s reviewer put it when the book version came out, “If a machine existed for the production of novels without the hindrance of an artist’s imagination, its work would resemble this collaboration of ten successful writers …” It’s a bit like a gourmet meal run through a blender for consumption through a straw.

Much magazine fiction of the time relied on a formula perfected decades before by the likes of O. Henry: characters recognizably based on stereotypes, a dramatic quandary, and a twist. And The Woman Accused is simply a concatenation of ten different versions of this stereotype hung upon a skeletal plot. Glenda Cromwell is a bright, beautiful, popular young woman who’s madly in love with bright, handsome, successful lawyer Jeffrey Baxter. Happiness awaits them. Unfortunately, there’s an obstacle: Glenda is a kept woman, the mistress of a powerful tycoon named Leo Young.

She decides to take the course of radical honesty and tells Jeffrey all, expecting his rejection. But Jeffrey demonstrates exception tolerance — or a uniformly low opinion of women:

She told him everything, put the worst interpretation on all her misdeeds, made crimes of her mistakes, tried to make him loathe her old self, as she herself did. This proved to him only that she was honest. He believed all women capable of sin, and most of them eager to yield to temptation.

And so, he proposes and she accepts and this book could easily have been ended by page 9. But Rupert Hughes, author of the first chapter, injects a couple of doses of plot complications and twists to keep his fiction machine cranking. They should go on a “six-day cruise to nowhere,” during which the captain — an old client — will marry them in secret (Because? O, reader, toss away your crutches of plausibility and walk!).

But then, the night before departure, Leo Young returns. He refuses to let Glenda go. Threatens to spread horrible rumors. She was once arrested (For? This is left to our imagination, or rather, to Chapter 10) and he can arrange for her records, including fingerprints, to be destroyed. He twirls the end of his moustache around his finger in malevolent glee. (Sorry, that’s Simon Legree. Hard to keep these stereotype bad guys straight.) There’s an argument, a struggle, and a shot.

Somehow, Glenda and Jeffrey make their way to the ship before the police discover the body. But wait! There’s a radiogram: Glenda is wanted for murder. Those fingerprints match the ones on the gun! The captain is told to hold Glenda until the return to port. But then someone comes up with the idea of holding a mock trial, with Glenda as defendant and Jeffery as her attorney. Several more plot twists follow, each accompanied by much creaking of machinery. Finally, a completely implausible explanation for Leo’s death is produced and Glenda and Jeffrey live happily ever after.

The ten authors should be credited with managing to achieve a consistent level of mediocrity across all ten chapters. These were writers known for their ability to produce fast-moving plots, not finely-honed prose styles or memorable characters. Viña Delmar shows slightly more flair for dialogue, Zane Grey slightly less clunkiness in his narrative. Sophie Kerr has the misfortune to be left with the chore of explaining those fingerprints, which she does in ten pages of near shaggy-dog tale telling by Glenda that serve more to achieve her word count goal than to facilitate a neat happy ending to the book.

In sum, The Woman Accused is neither a good novel or a good novelty. Nor was it entirely satisfactory as film material. Paramount gave the stories to playwright Bayard Veiller, then on contract, and he cut out a few twists and introduced some of his own. Now, the mock trial is instigated by a crony of the late Leo Young who commandeers a police boat that races out to intercept the cruise ship at sea. Which was, of course, just another day’s work for the men of the New York City Police Department Navy. Veiller tacks on a talky examination in a judge’s office on land — with Baxter once again as defense attorney — and invents a fairly shocking scene in which Baxter, played by Cary Grant, horsewhips a low-life crook, played by Jack LaRue, into confessing…well, something useful to exonerate Glenda.

The book’s primary interest is as an artifact of the intimate links between Hollywood and the literary world of its time. Liberty proclaimed that 5,000,000 of its readers would want to see Paramount’s movie version. Paramount opened its movie not with cast or production credit but with portraits of the “Ten of the World’s Greatest Authors.” Ads for the Long & Smith book touted both film and magazine serial.

Opening credits of the Paramount film, The Woman Accused (1933).

For the authors involved, The Woman Accused, once the royalty checks were deposited, the book was probably forgotten. All continued to write. Atherton, the oldest, published eleven books before her death in 1948. Grey, the first to die, in 1939, managed to publish sixteen more as well as an equal number posthumously. Viña Delmar had the the longest career, publishing her 16th novel, McKeever, in 1976 and passing at the age of 86 in 1990. Of the several hundred books (and even more magazine stories) produced by this tentet, Zane Grey’s books have survived the best, although Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife has had a recent revival thanks to reissues from Faber (UK) and McNally Editions (US) and a 2023 biography by Marsha Gordon.

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The Woman Accused, by Rupert Hughes, Vicki Baum, Zane Grey, Viña Delmar, Irvin S. Cobb, Gertrude Atherton, J. P. McEvoy, Ursula Parrott, Polan Banks, and Sophie Kerr
New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, Inc., 1933.

This is a guest post by David Quantick.

"My parents are both married and 1⁄2 of them are very good looking."

This is the story of two very different writers, one an American comic writer of genius, playwright and sportswriter, the other a young English girl with terrible spelling.

The American was Ring Lardner. Lardner began his career as a sports journalist with a particular interest in baseball, widened his remit to humorous columns, and became one of the best-known comic writers of his time. His novel You Know Me Al, written in the form of letters from a baseball player to a friend, is still extremely funny, while his theatrical parodies display a sardonic surrealism (a line from one of those short plays is still quoted in anthologies: "The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week").

Lardner was the epitome of the hard-drinking, sports-loving American writer, admired by Hemingway, used as the basis for a character by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and immensely popular with the public; and he had a journalist’s scepticism. In 1919, the world was delighted by a very short novel apparently written by a nine-year-old girl called Daisy Ashford. The book – which had apparently been discovered by the British writer Frank Swinnerton, who passed it on to Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie – was called The Young Visiters. It recounted the story of Ethel, a young Victorian woman, and her social-climbing older friend, Mr Salteena, written in a breathless pastiche of the romances of the day. The Young Visiters was, and still is, unintentionally hilarious, and at the end of the First World War became an international best seller. Ashford, now in her early 20s, was a celebrity.

I shall put some red ruge on my face said Ethel because I am very pale owing to the drains in this house.
Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters (1919)

Most of the world took Ashford at her word and The Young Visiters at face value, but there were those who were less convinced, and indeed, there is something about the book that suggests another hand was at work (lines like "he sat down and eat the egg which Ethel had so kindly laid for him" always seem a bit knowingly comic to me). One person who thought the book was a fraud was Winston Churchill; another was Ring Lardner. "I didn’t, and I don’t, believe Daisy Ashford in spite of Swinnerton’s testimony and that of other ‘witnesses.’" he once wrote.

But Lardner did more than express his doubts about The Young Visiters, he rewrote it. Or rather, he wrote a parody of it, called The Young Immigrunts.

First serialised in The Saturday Evening Post in 1920, The Young Immigrunts abandons the plot of Ashford’s book and its musings on social advancement and the aristocracy and replaces them with something completely American: the story of the Lardner family’s move from Goshen, Indiana, to their new home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The comedy is now about the awfulness of their road trip (and the father’s vile temper and reactions to said trip), but as the story is told by Lardner’s young son Bill, the book is able to retain the same youthful, naïve tone of its original.

We see the world through Bill’s eyes but, where Ashford’s prose is (apparently) unwittingly funny and unobservant, Lardner’s is very knowing, and directed at an adult readership. The Father and Mother are constantly sniping at one another, the journey is a nightmare, and the various cops, kids, and landladies that the family run into are a gallery of grotesques.

Will you call us at 1⁄2 past 5 my mother reqested to our lanlady as we entered our Hudson barracks.

I will if I am awake, she replid useing her handkerchief to some extent.

It’s clear from reading The Young Immigrunts that whatever his views on the original, Lardner must have enjoyed reading it. His use of language, the turns of phrase he adopts, the mixture of literary styles and pure illiteracy, take Ashford’s text as a template and a jumping-off point for Lardner’s own viewpoint. Sport, particularly baseball, features heavily (there’s even (possibly) a reference to the famous "Black Sox" baseball scandal.

The result is a book that’s a note-perfect parody of The Young Visiters – "We will half to change our close replid my mother steping into a mud peddle in front of the hotel with an informal look" – but also takes the text into a new, Lardnerian direction. It’s a masterpiece that works perfectly whether you’ve read the original or not.

And it contains what many people – or rather, all sane people – consider to be the funniest line in the history of literature (a line so memorable that at least two books about Lardner have been named after it).

I can’t really follow it so I’ll just say goodbye and leave you with the line. Here it is:

Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.

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[画像:David Quantick]David Quantick is a writer with seven novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Ricky’s Hand, was published in August 2022. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.

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The Young Immigrunts, by Ring Lardner
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1920

[画像:Cover of Argument with the East Wind by Joan O'Donovan]

“Your time’s your own, and don’t you forget it, my girl: for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can do what you bloody well choose,” Eva Wotton reminds herself at the start of Argument with the East Wind (1986), the last of Joan O’Donovan’s three novels about older single women trying to find the place in the world that fits them. “So what was she going to do with today? It was hers and empty; and they could so easily slip through her fingers, those minutes, those hours, leaving nothing but a deposit of waste and regret.”

Sixty, just retired from a dreary office job, she wakes up unsettled from a dream and unsure how to approach this first day of the rest of her life. Back from a Mediterranean holiday with friends, she scans her surroundings, taking inventory of her situation: a postcard from her married lover Alec, its tone reminding her of his affectionate lack of commitment; a notice to pick up her first OAP (Old Age Pension) check; the roar of an airplane overhead reminding her that this house is both her property and no one’s idea of Nirvana; the scratched sofa reminding her of Pussy, the cat she still talks to, though dead and gone for years. And then a clatter outside reminds her she’s forgotten to ask the milkman to resume delivery.

Bob, the milkman, is a good-natured, loquacious sort who’s happy to supply a pint nonetheless. But he has a new young helper, Harry, and as Bob natters on, Eva sees Harry reach down and rip out two tulips from her next-door neighbor’s (a West Indian couple) garden — and worse, hears him mutter, “N——s,” as he spits and tosses the flowers away. Enraged, she switches into attack mode, only to end up a moment later flat on her back, her robe caught up in a briar bush, the pint shattered and spilled on the sidewalk.

This is just the first in a series of unexpected events that, over the course of a week, both throw Eva’s world into disarray and provide her with the means and motivation to set it right and to her satisfaction for perhaps the first time. She goes to visit Nora, her oldest friend, in a care home, only to be informed by the matron, a model bureaucrat, that Nora had died the week before:

“As you know,” Matron was saying, “our rules don’t normally allow…. But as we were unable to contact you and at that point didn’t know there was a…. So it happened in one way as she would have wished, and I’m sure that will be a comfort to you in time to come. That she died here, in her own little room, I mean. And very peacefully at the end, very peacefully indeed. She knew nothing,” Matron assured Eva earnestly, “ab-so-lutely nothing, my dear.”

The shock of this news, like Eva’s rush to the defense of her neighbors against a mean little racist and the end of her mean little affair with Alec, comes as an unexpected shock. Harry the young milkman turns out to be the nephew of the local councilman Eva argued with a year or two before when he came canvassing “to put a stop to this insidious invasion of our shores by foreigners.” She soon finds “N—— LOVER GO!” spray-painted across the front of her house. But these shocks also spur Eva to action, and in the end — without revealing any of several major plot twists — leave her a much different woman and in a much better place than she was at the start of this first week of retirement. And Joan O’Donovan helps carry us through the many bumps and swerves along the way by creating an astute and funny, if at times excessively self-critical, narrator in Eva.

[画像:Cover of She Alas! by Joan O'Donovan]

Argument with the East Wind was preceded by two novels whose spinster protagonists ended up in less happy places. In She Alas! (1965), Jane Franckis is a Canadian woman living in a small town south of London who’s never moved on from being left by her dashing RAF pilot lover. She gave up the child from their affair and gave up trying to fit into her town’s insular culture. If anything, she goes out of her way to irritate the locals, exaggerating her Canadian accent and idioms, taking a superior tone, shutting herself up in her house with a bottle as company. Her slow rot is interrupted by the arrival of Ivy Gravy (yes, that really is the name O’Donovan chose), her NCO aide from her time serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

She Alas! seems a bit like a dry-run for Argument. The two books have similar ingredients, but the resulting dish in the case of the first is less satisfying. While Jane, like Eva, is both narrator and protagonist, she lacks Eva’s resilience and tenacity. Where Eva’s humor is grounded in a belief in man’s fundamental goodness (despite the presence of a few bad apples), Jane’s is laced with wormwood. And where the comic figures in Argument are mostly recognizable characters from everyday life, the supporting cast in She Alas! was described by several reviewers as Dickensian — and not in a complimentary way. As one Australian critic wrote, “The pathos is not finely shaded enough to stand up strongly in the company of the book’s bludgeoning comedy.”

[画像:Cover of The Visited by ! by Joan O'Donovan]

Joan O’Donovan’s exploration of spinsterhood began in 1959 with her first novel, The Visited. If there is any comic strain here, it’s black indeed. This time, the spinster is Edith Crannick, in her mid-thirties and “miserable as hell.” Hoping to be diverted by a holiday in Dublin, she’s only been reminded once again that in the eyes of society, she is undesirable, worthless, or invisible. And then Leopold Darkin, also English and also traveling solo, introduces himself in the lounge of their hotel.

It turns out they are neighbors — of a sort, a few blocks apart. Leopold is a bit coarse, separated (or divorced? It’s not clear, he mentions a daughter). But he’s company and amusing enough, nice enough, and, well, randy enough to put an effort into courting Edith. They spend some happy days together in Dublin, then head their separate ways home. Leopold promises to keep in touch. Edith promises herself to make sure he does.

And the rest of The Visited is the story of how Edith keeps that promise. What she hasn’t shared with Leopold is that she is not only sensing all hope of marriage, if not love, rapidly slipping away, but also still living with a mother who’s suspicious, controlling … and failing in health. Leopold is her Plan A. She has no Plan B. And so with an intensity that keeps ratcheting up the narrative tension, she sets to carrying out her plan. Woe be to anyone who gets in her way.

While hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, mid-century English fiction hadn’t seen many scorned women lately when The Visited hit the scene. A few reviewers found the whole subject distasteful. J. B. Priestley, on the other hand, wrote that O’Donovan “stands out, among so many messers-about and muddlers in story-telling as Pancho Gonzales would in a suburban tennis club,” and Penelope Mortimer reported that the book “frightened and moved me and I honestly couldn’t put it down.” I confess that my enthusiasm for The Visited was dampened a bit by the terrible quality of my Ace paperback edition (the few remaining copies of the Gollancz hardback sell for 75ドル and up). This is a story that deserves a printing equal to its quality.

[画像:Joan O'Donovan, 1986.]

Joan O’Donovan’s life had a few parallels of its own with that of her spinsters. She had a long affair with the Irish writer Frank O’Connor (while he was still married to his first wife) and bore him a son, Oliver, now a distinguished Anglican scholar. She took his real last name when she published her first book, the story collection Dangerous Worlds in 1958, though the two had parted ways well before that. She published several story collections, along with the three novels, and settled in France sometime in the 1970s. There, she became acquainted with the writer David Garnett and eventually became his caregiver until he died in 1981. I haven’t been able to determine when or where Joan O’Donovan (Joan Knape) died.

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The Visited
London: Victor Gollancz, 1959

She Alas!
London: Victor Gollancz, 1965

Argument with the East Wind
London: Macmillan, 1986

[画像:Cover of Miss Abby Fitch-Martin by Kataryn Loughlin]

History is written by the winners, George Orwell said, and this goes for family history, too. After finishing Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, you sigh in relief that the adage is true in this case. If Kataryn Loughlin and her little sister Esther survived to adulthood, it was despite the best efforts of their Aunt Abby.

“Aunt Abby” sounds far too familiar for this forbidding woman. She was, Loughlin writes, the “final synthesis of eight generations of Puritan ancestors, the last member of an intermarrying tribe who had persistently adhered to a family code of Pedigree, Prudence, Pride, and Purse.” Intermarrying is putting it lightly: not only did the Fitches and Martins and Fitch-Martins have a tradition of marriage between first and second cousins, but they also recycled first names, particularly Abby and Pliny, making Loughlin’s first chapter, “Family History,” a bewildering read.

But you can skip that, for soon the cast is pared down to the essential few. Kataryn and Esther are the survivors of the four daughters of Katherine Fitch-Martin, Abby’s half-sister, and the Marine of French-Canadian origin she married. When Katherine dies in a fire, the girls are left to their closest relatives: their grandfather, his daughter Abby, and his son James (from his second marriage and therefore, despised by Abby). When the girls arrive at the family home in Whitesboro, New York, Abby makes their situation clear: “You are the unwanted, unfortunate products of my half-sister’s ill-advised marriage and are only here temporarily, to humor my father.”

She then shuttles the girls to an empty, unheated bedroom and locks the door behind her. Kataryn is five. Esther is four. This is just the first of many nights they will spend cold and hunger in a household with more than ample means to provide for them generously. But Miss Abby Fitch-Martin is a pathologically mean and cold woman who proceeds to spend nearly twenty years denying them any form of material or emotional comfort.

Hers was a Puritanism distilled to its extreme. Meat was eaten once a week, and then it was a one-pound piece of steak divided into five portions with Abby always reserving the largest for herself. Kataryn and Esther were given one set of clothes, one pair of boots, one cotton coat for the bitter upstate New York winters. If their clothes were torn or became threadbare, Miss Abby gave needle and thread and instructed the girls to mend the garment themselves. If a classmate invited them in for a snack after school, Miss Abby forbade the girls from entering anyone else’s house and sent them to bed without supper. If a sympathetic parent gave them some trinket — a marble, a playing card — she confiscated and destroyed it, calling the girls thieves.

One summer when Kataryn was just eight years old, she so angered Miss Abby with some trivial infraction that her aunt threw her first belongings in a bag, took her to the train station, and put her aboard a train to Montreal, where the girl’s long-missing father was known to have some family. Miss Abby gave Kataryn a nickel and instructed her to “Find a relative in the phonebook and call them.” Miraculously, Kataryn made it to Montreal, given food along the way by fellow passengers, and with help from a kindly station agent, was able to locate a great-uncle with whom she was able to stay for a few months. But even that meager reprieve ended and the girl was returned to the “care” of Miss Abby.

Even a small school prize — a five-dollar gold piece — would be confiscated and disappear into what James called, “Aunt Abby’s insatiable maw.” She kept accounts meticulously and made a point to charge everything possible against Kataryn and Esther’s eventual inheritance: “A good quarter of her long life was spent at her desk, estimating and recording the minutiae of daily life.” In 1914, for example, she noted the fares for six hundred tram rides to Utica and back, all of them debits against the girls, as were the wages for the cook, half the food expenses, and all of the coal, water, and electricity used in the house.

If there was any relief from Miss Abby’s relentless neglect, it was thanks to their uncle James. A brilliant if eccentric man (he worked on a number of Esperanto dictionaries) and alcoholic, he convinced Abby on several occasions to allow Kataryn to “chaperone” him on a trip to a sanitarium in Colorado for “the cure.” On one of these trips, Kataryn grew so bored that she talked a couple from Arizona into taking her along when they returned home and she spent two months in the warm, relaxed atmosphere Flagstaff. Among other things, this book is testament to Kataryn’s incredible ability to avoid disaster.

Even when Kataryn managed an escape, earning a scholarship to college and covering her living expenses through a variety of jobs, Miss Abby’s thirst for retribution could not be satisfied. Just before the girl’s first year of study ended, Miss Abby traveled to campus and presented herself to the school’s dean, informing him that the only way Kataryn could have made her money was by “thieving and whoring.”

Kataryn and Esther married and freed themselves of Miss Abby’s control, but she then directed her still-generous supply of venom at poor Uncle James. After falling and breaking a hip at age 81, she insisted on being treated as an invalid, with James her only full-time carer, despite reports from neighbors that she could occasionally be glimpsed moving around the house on her own feet. When he finally collapsed and died of a combination of exhaustion and hunger, Miss Abby left alone — and triumphant:

She had regained her pinnacle. That her whole life had slipped by in the waiting was utterly unimportant. At long last, it was all hers again: the money, the property, and most of all, the sacred name. She, who had valued it the most, was the last ever to possess it.

[画像:Kataryn Loughlin, author of Miss Abby Fitch-Martin]

One might ask, “Why would anyone read a book about such a nasty, petty person?” Well, for me, the answer is two-fold. For one, Miss Abby’s meanness is of such a magnitude and intensity that it fascinates in the depth of its blackness. She could easily take a place besides the worst of Dickens’s villains and leave them quaking. And for the other, Kataryn Loughlin is a fine writer who keeps her resentment simmering without ever letting it boil over. A good Christian woman, she married a sexton and the two of them cared for the Methodist church and cemetery in Vernon, New York, for over thirty years. Though she wrote hundreds of articles on local history during that time, Miss Abby Fitch-Martin was the only book she published. Kataryn Loughlin died in 1965 at the age of 57.

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Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, by Kataryn Loughlin
New York: Coward-McCann, 1952

[画像:Suggested ad layouts from the pressbook for Five Star Final.]

For the last couple of years, I’ve closed most nights by watching one of the hundreds (thousands?) of early sound movies made in the period commonly referred to as Pre-Code, from the introduction of sound in the late 1920s to the adoption of the Motion Picture Production Code (often called the Hays Code) in 1934. Technical limitations aside — and these have as much to do with the quality of film stock and the blasé attitudes of studios towards preservation as with the shortcomings of the recording equipment of the period — these films manage to squeeze a lot of story into 60- to 75-minute packages.

But recently, I’ve begun to explore the literary roots of Pre-Code, gathering some of the stories, novels, and plays that provided the source material for many of these movies. Although studios did use original stories devised by member of their writing staffs, the majority of Hollywood A-list movies (and a healthy share of the B-movies) were adapted from existing literary properties. Often, the adaptations wandered far afield from the original works. A notorious example is the 1934 film based on Willa Cather’s novel A Lost Lady, which transplanted Marian and Captain Forrester from 1890s Nebraska to 1930s Chicago, jettisoning almost everything except character names and a skeleton of the plot along the way. Cather was so disgusted with the result that she forbade further use of her work by Hollywood for the rest of her lifetime.

Louis Weitzenkorn’s play Five Star Final, which debuted in New York in December 1930 and was transformed into a film starring Edward G. Robinson that was released by Warner Brothers nine months later, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Cather’s A Lost Lady. Both play and movie are scathing attacks upon “yellow journalism” — the unscrupulous practices of tabloid newspapers that, sadly, continue to be seen today. A veteran of New York City newspapers, Weitzenkorn came up through the ranks until he became editor of one of yellow journalism’s worst offenders, the New York Evening Graphic, which was known by its critics as the “Porno-Graphic.” He only lasted a few months in the job, though, finding it too hard to stomach the necessary ethical compromises. One of his colleagues on the Graphic, Frank Mallen, later wrote that, “He never liked anything about it. As a matter of fact, he didn’t know why in hell he ever got tangled up in it.” After tendering his resignation, Weitzenkorn boarded a ship for France and decided to work out his feelings about the Evening Graphic and its ilk in dramatic form.

Five Star Final debuted in December 1930 and was a critical and popular success. Over a year after the Wall Street crash, theater-goers in New York still had an appetite for social criticism, and Five Star Final delivered it fast and unfiltered. As John W. Perry wrote in Editor and Publisher, the play is “a venomous, sullen, and bitter castigation of that sensational fringe of American newspaper making which has only one god — circulation — and which, for the sake of this god, will sacrifice honor, decency, and self-respect without the quiver of an eyelash.” Arthur Pollock, a widely-syndicated critic, said the play “froths at the mouth considerably” and would have been more effective with a little toning-down. The Daily Worker’s reviewer took a strict Marxist view: “Since it is bourgeois criticism and not workers’ criticism, it mixed in a lot of snobbish disgust at the workers,” characterizing the Gazaette’s readers as “soda jerkers and fat chambermaids.”

In Five Star Final, Weitzenkorn portrays the transgression and redemption of Randall, his fictional counterpart, editor of the Evening Gazette. Prodded by a circulation-hungry owner, he agrees to run a serial about a scandal from 20 years past, in which a distraught young woman named Nancy Voorhees murdered the employer who had seduced and impregnated her and then refused to take responsibility for his act. Found innocent by a sympathetic jury, she slipped from the public spotlight and seemingly disappeared. Randall soon manages to track her down though, and his publicity tears down the facade of a normal life Nancy and her husband have created. The relentless sensationalism of the Gazette’s coverage ultimately leads the couple to commit suicide.

[画像:Ad for the original New York production of Five Star Final.]

Five Star Final ran for 175 performances on Broadway and several touring companies took the play around the country in the following months. Warner Brothers bought the film rights for 25,000ドル and began lining it up as a feature for Edward G. Robinson, the studio’s hottest star from the success of his protrayal of the Al Capone-like Rico in Little Caesar. Warners’ most productive director, Mervyn Le Roy (six feature films in 1931 alone), was assigned to direct. There was a slight delay in the film’s release, however, because Weitzenkorn’s contract prohibited Warner Brothers from going out to theaters until the last touring run of the play ended.

As scripted by Byron Morgan and Robert Lord, the film may represent the closest thing to a faithful adaptation short of an actual filmed stage production. After reading the play — one of the relatively rare examples of a Pre-Code source play that was published — I watched the film again, following along from the book, and was struck by how extensively Morgan and Lord reused Weitzenkorn’s text. Indeed, more than just dialogue, whole pages of which are essentially reproduced word-for-word, but also the act/scene structure and even staging directions.

[画像:Use of split screen in Five Star Final]

Although Weitzenkorn had no film experience when writing the play, his staging made the film easy to translate into a shooting script. While there are just seven locations used in the play’s 19 scenes and Weitzenkorn called for the use of a revolving stage floor that would allow several scenes to be performed in two or three locations simultaneously. This was innovative for theaters but Le Roy could easily reproduce the effect using the split-screen technique perfected early in the sound era. Le Roy also eliminated several brief scenes from the play that had less to do with advancing the plot than with creating the atmosphere of the Gazette’s typical readers.

Dropping one in particular — set in “Trixie’s flat” — avoided running afoul of state censors with its unsubtle suggestion that Trixie and her flatmate are prostitutes. Another, in “the apartment of a colored couple,” makes the film a bit less offensive to current sensibilities than the play. Its omission, on the other hand, probably leaves today’s viewers wondering what the references to “Clearing House numbers” was all about. (See this item from the Harvard University Press blog for an explanation of how numbers rackets in Harlem used the daily transaction totals from the New York Clearing House as the basis for the daily betting.)

[画像:Edward G. Robinson's character washing his hands in Five Star Final]

One aspect of the film that draws the attention of viewers now, on the other hand, is absent from the play. Several times in the film, Robinson is shown diligently washing his hands. Robinson and Le Roy came up with the idea, and it works well on several levels. Although the term obsessive compulsive disorder hadn’t come into widespread use at the time, the behavior not only shows the stress Robinson’s character feels in continually being forced to engage in duplicitous and exploitive practices but symbolizes his desperate attempts to cleanse his guilty conscience. Its last instance also provides the set-up for one of film’s best lines when Aline MacMahon, playing Robinson’s secretary, castigates him, saying that “You can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.

Five Star Final (the play) has not shared its film version’s longevity. One watches the film now for its brisk direction (despite running nearly 90 minutes), sharp dialogue (much from the play), and ensemble acting. Frances Starr and H. B. Warner, Warner’s stock players are particularly effective as Nancy Voorhees and her husband, one of more believable examples of marital love onscreen from the time. Tabloid journalism is every bit as awful now as then, but at least we’re saved from the onslaught of papers attempting to produce three, four, five, or more editions in a single day. And so while the film still works as entertainment, Weitzenkorn’s play is only of interest as a historical artifact today.

Five Star Final the film was even more successful than the play, making a profit of 500,000ドル over its costs and earning a nomination for Best Picture at the 5th Academy Awards (it lost to Grand Hotel). Warners recycled the story in 1936 in Two Against the World, with Humphrey Bogart in the lead and the setting changed somewhat awkwardly (the age of 24-hour news broadcasting was still almost 40 years away) to a radio station. Louis Weitzenkorn moved to Hollywood for a few years, contributing to screen plays for 24 Hours (1931) and Men of Chance (1932), before returning to New York and the newspaper business. In the early 1940s, he moved back to his home town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and tried writing another play, but he died in 1943 when his clothes caught fire as he was fixing a pot of coffee in his apartment.

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Five Star Final: A Melodrama in Three Acts, by Louis Weitzenkorn
New York: Samuel French, 1931

[画像:Cover of the UK edition of La Douleur by Marguerite Duras.]

Marguerite Duras is hardly a neglected writer, having at least a dozen books currently in print in English and having kept a number close to that in print since first hitting her stride with English readers in the 1960s. Her 1984 autobiographical novel L’Amant (The Lover), which won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into over 40 languages, is considered a 20th century classic. And several parts of La Douleur (The Pain), which was published in the U.S. as The War: A Memoir, were incorporated into Emmanuel Finkiel’s 2017 film, Memoir of War. Yet despite Duras’s fame, the film, and the book’s profound power, the American edition of La Douleur (New Press) dates back to 2008 and the British edition (Flamingo) to 1987.

La Douleur collects six texts, two straight memoir, two autobiographical fiction, two wholly fictional, so the book’s American title is somewhat misleading. In addition, the texts are presented not in chronological order, but — in my opinion, at least — in order of merit, and the first three are far better than the last.

The book takes its title from Duras’s first piece, La Douleur, drawn from the diary she kept over the weeks when she waited for news of her husband, Robert Antelme. A writer and member of the Resistance, Antelme had been arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944, just six weeks ahead of the liberation of Paris by Allied forces, and like thousands of Resistance members before him, sent from Fresnes prison to a concentration camp in Germany.

Duras’s and Antelme’s marriage had already been strained by the death of their child in 1942, and by 1944, Duras was involved with the editor Dionys Mascolo, referred to as D. in the book, and intent upon divorcing Antelme. This fact hovers over her narrative, contributing to her anxiety and sense of survivor’s guilt.

In April 1945, as the Allies advance into Germany and begin liberating prisoner of war camps, French prisoners start arriving in Paris and Duras’s hopes lift. But at the same time, so do images of Buchenwald, the first concentration camp reached by American and British troops: the piles of corpses, the ghost-like skeletons of the surviving inmates. She associates one photo in particular with Antelme: “In a ditch, face down, legs drawn up, arms outstretched, he’s dying. Dead.” A few of Antelme’s associates, mere shadows of their former selves, return from Buchenwald and speak of seeing him but losing him in the chaos of the camp’s last days.

Then, in May, François Mitterrand, referred to in the book by his Resistance name, Morland, calls from Germany. Assigned by General De Gaulle as a liaison to the American forces liberating camps in Kaufering and Dachau, Mitterrand was passing through one of the blocks at Dachau when he heard his name spoken, so faintly he barely processes it. He recognizes Antelme — and recognizes that the man is perhaps hours from death. He enlists the help of Mascolo and another friend, and quickly arranges paperwork and uniforms so the two men can drive to Germany and help smuggle Antelme out of the camp. Mitterrand understands that the man is too weak to survive the Americans’s usual regime for reviving inmates.

The whole passage of Antelme’s discovery, rescue, and return to Paris in the back of Mitterrand’s car takes perhaps five pages, but they’re among the most suspenseful and emotional I’ve read in many years. Just blocks from Duras’s apartment, Mascolo stops to telephone: “I’m ringing to warn you that it’s more terrible than anything we’ve imagined.” When she sees Antelme’s body being carried up the stairs of her building,

I can’t remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn’t want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry.

Then begins the slow, painstaking process of bringing Antelme back to life without killing him. In the first days, he cannot even eat, merely taking in sips of pale broth. “His legs look like crutches…. When the sun shines you can see through his hands.” For days, his survival is in doubt and Duras thinks, “My identity has gone. I’m just she who is afraid when she wakes.”

But survive he does, and as Antelme regains his strength, Duras must test it by breaking the news: “I told him we had to get a divorce, that I wanted a child by D.” By August, they are able to travel to the Savoy for a holiday and Antelme is able to read a newspaper: “Hiroshima is perhaps the first thing outside his own life that he see.”

Antelme and Duras did divorce and Mascolo became the second of three husbands. Antelme wrote a memoir of his time in the concentration camps, L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race) in 1947, after which, Duras writes, “he never spoke of the German concentration camps again. Never uttered the words again.”

The texts that follow “La Douleur” jump back in time. “Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier” relates the cat-and-mouse game that the Gestapo agent who arrested Antelme plays with her in the weeks before the liberation. Rabier appears to be a French collaborator but Duras believes him to be German. He entices her with promises to ensure Antelme will be treated well but she suspects his real aim is to get her to betray other members of the Resistance — Mitterrand in particular.

It’s a potentially lethal game they play. “Every time I’m going to see Rabier — and this is to go on right to the end — I act as if I were going to be killed. As if he knew all about my activities. Every time, every day.” As days pass and the Allies near Paris, however, Rabier’s own situation grows more complicated. She looks at him and thinks, “I suddenly see him as an extra in a farcical tragedy…already stricken by a death that is itself devalued, not genuine, deflated.” Mascolo tells her the Resistance plans to kill Rabier, but in the end, he is arrested and Duras testifies at his trial. And then he goes “completely out of my head…. He must have been shot during the winter of 1944-1945. I don’t know where.”

In “Albert of the Capitals,” the last of the three strongest texts, Duras relates an episode in the first days after the liberation, when the Resistance exercised summary judgment on some collaborators. She and another Resistance member hold a waiter, a man known as Albert of “The Capitals” (a café), as a hostage, expecting him to be executed. It’s almost the mirror image of the Rabier piece: Duras recognizes she holds the power of life and death over the man and the dubious ethics involved in the situation. She watches as Albert is savagely beaten in an attempt to get him to disclose how he communicated with the Gestapo.

The story is written in the third person. Duras is Thérèse, she tells us in an opening note, and the approach may have been necessary to enable her to deal frankly with her own responsibility for Albert’s torture. Set in the context of the two preceding pieces, it completes a portrait of the moral and ethical intricacies involved in the Occupation of France and the retribution against collaborators in the first weeks after liberation.

If it were up to me, I would reissue these three pieces separately and encourage them to be read widely, particularly by Americans. One thing I observed in twenty years of life in Europe is the resistance of many Europeans to view the world in black-and-white terms, and I suspect this stems at least in part from the experience of living under various occupations — German, Soviet, Allied. As Duras shows in La Douleur, simple distinctions of good and bad, right and wrong, are luxuries that people have to abandon to survive under an occupation. Even if it’s as petty as doing a little bartering in the black market, trade-offs between ideals and practical needs are constantly being negotiated. Duras tries to understand her choices in La Douleur, but she does not forgive them completely, and this seems the best that anyone who looks back to such times can expect.

I watched Memoir of War after finishing La Douleur, and it seemed like a case study in the problems of adapting books too faithfully to the screen. For one thing, it’s hard for me to believe in the realism of a film shot in color with the polish of today’s commercial productions when this is a time I know best from grainy black-and-white newsreel footage. For another, it’s almost impossible for today’s actors to convey the sheer frailty of people who’d lived under rationing for years, even less under the severe deprivations of concentration camps — or their costumes the decrepitude of clothes that have been lived in for years, mended and threadbare, shiny from wear. And finally, in holding to the framework of Duras’s first-person diary and memoir texts, Finkiel has to rely heavily on voiceover by his star Mélanie Thierry when voiceover is a technique best used infrequently and sparingly. One doesn’t go to a movie to listen to someone read from a book — something Irving Thalberg or Sam Goldwyn probably said more than once.

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La Douleur, by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray
London: Collins, 1985
Published in the U.S. by Pantheon as The War: A Memoir

[画像:Cover of the U. of Nebraska Press edition of Marie Luise Kaschnitz's The House of Childhood]

“Where is the House of Childhood?” A stranger stops the narrator of Marie Luise Kaschnitz’s short novel in the street to ask this question. “What is it? A museum? A school?” The stranger isn’t sure. The narrator herself has never heard of it. Yet, as she walks on, puzzling over the encounter, there she sees it.

It’s not a particularly distinctive building: big, gray, “without any special adornment except for a kind of Jugendstil embellishment placed above the portal and below which the name was written in golden letters.” She moves on. She’s not particularly interested. “The mere word childhood makes me kind of nervous. It’s amazing how little I remember from my childhood and how much I dislike being reminded of that time by others.”

But then it turns out that the House of Childhood is actually located quite close to her apartment. But she finds the entrance, a tiny foyer leading to a security window, probably under constant surveillance by a security camera, off-putting: “Things of that sort remind me of the Gestapo.” Anyway, the past is dead: “The only thing that’s important is the present.”

Still, it nags at her. Might as well have a quick look, she thinks. She walks in. Now the entrance leads to a courtyard, sort of a garden, scattered with exhibits: “Disorderly, even chaotic, but not at all sinister.” Intrigued, she returns again and again. The rooms seem to be under constant reorganization. Displays appear, disappear. Exhibits target specific senses: smells, tastes, sounds. Some are quite disturbing:

Yesterday, for example, I heard in a dark room one single scream that went right through me, and today I blindly ran into a veil of iron, hurting my lips, while smelling powder and the fragrance of violets…. The urgency of impressions like that is almost painful, maybe even more so because you don’t just pass from one to the next but are forced to experience, I might almost say practice, each one several times. Five or six times in succession, the scream without any additional sounds reverberating in the air, just as many times the quiet scratching of the veil on my lips; behind that, dead cold, as from fog-shrouded skin.

With repeated visits, some things in the House of Childhood begin to seem familiar to this woman who’s so intently put the past behind her. “Again and again I hear my mother singing.” Not songs, but little phrases: “Have you not seen your father?” — even though her father is in Russia.

As she grows more obsessed with the House, parts of her current life seem to slip away. Things in her apartment are moved. She takes a seat in a cafe and the waiters all ignore her. She rushes to the House and finds it closed — not just closed but giving the impression of having been shuttered permanently.

[画像:Marie Luise Kaschnitz in the late 1950s.]

Kaschnitz wrote The House of Childhood while she and her husband were living in Rome in the mid-1950s and some German critics have suggested the book was a symbolic attempt to explore the childhoods that were lost to younger Germans during the Third Reich. (Renate Rasp would take a much darker satiric look at the same subject years later in her novel A Family Failure, reviewed here in 2019.) In a monograph on Kaschnitz, Elsbeth Pulver speculated that the novel is a metaphor for the process of undergoing psychoanalysis, and the random-yet-progressive nature of the narrator’s experiences in the House, the movement from general to specific and intimate memories (or, perhaps more correctly, sensations) certainly resembles what numerous patients who’ve gone through extended psychoanalytic treatments report.

Kafka’s The Trial is an obvious influence, but I think Kaschnitz moves well beyond imitation. Kaschnitz is best known among English-language readers for her short story, “The Fat Girl,” and a fascination with the pathologies of childhood is a theme in several of her other stories. Like Kafka, Kaschnitz knows that the absurd only works when the bizarre illogical of any situation is anchored in the specific and realistic, and throughout The House of Childhood one finds images and sensations that trigger one’s own memories. I think it’s a brilliant work that much deserves more attention and study.

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Das Haus der Kindheit, by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1956), translated into English as The House of Childhood by Anni Whissen
Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990