Nava Atlas's Blog, page 29

Natalia Ginzburg, Italian Novelist, Essayist, and Playwright

Natalia Ginzburg (July 14, 1916 – October 7, 1991) is considered among the best Italian writers of the post-World War II generation. Her vast literary legacy of novels, essays, plays, and nonfiction captures the devastation endured by war survivors.

In her works, the reader is struck by the imagery and near lyricism as she describes the mundane details and personal catastrophes that define life under political oppression. It has been said of Ginzburg that she “wrote like a man,” given that she was unsentimental in portraying the historic, violent traumas she witnessed.

 

Early life

Born Natalia Levi in Palermo, Sicily, she grew up under the iron heel of Mussolini’s fascism in the 1930s. She was the youngest of five children of Giuseppe Levi and Lidia Tanzi. For several generations on both sides of the Levi and Tanzi family branches, the family had an inordinately high number of brilliant minds and renowned achievers in the arts and sciences.

When Natalia was three years old, the family relocated to Turin, Italy. Giuseppe, a renowned neuroanatomy professor. Took a position at the University of Turin. In the 1930s and 940s, Turin was the center of anti-fascist activity in Italy — and every member of the Levi family was an active member of the Italian underground Resistance.

Following the Levi family tradition of brilliant minds and high achievements, Natalia started writing and publishing in adolescence. Her first book, a novella titled Il Bambini was published in a distinguished Florentine magazine when she was eighteen. It was released under a pseudonym to hide her Jewish identity.

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A family of anti-fascist activists

Being Jewish and outspoken against the Italian fascists, the Levi family was brutally retaliated against by the local fascist authorities. Giuseppe Levi lost his job and each of Natalia’s brothers was intermittently arrested for seditious acts. Yet despite the risk, the Levi family continued their anti-fascist work.

In 1934, Natalia’s brother Mario, a journalist, became an unwitting hero when he and an associate were caught at the Swiss border attempting to bring anti-fascist literature into Italy. As his colleague was being arrested, Mario jumped into the Tresa river and swam to safety on the Swiss shore while wearing his overcoat.

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Marriage to Leone Ginzburg

The most renowned and effective Resistance fighter in Turin was Leone Ginzburg, a native of Odessa, Ukraine. Ginzburg was a professor of Russian literature at the University of Turin and a close friend of the Levi family.

Despite the coming World War, Leone and Natalia were married in 1938 — a testament to the hope of a peaceful future, and the great power of love and family. The couple had three children, the oldest of whom, Carlo Ginzburg, is currently an eminent historian at the University of California Los Angeles.

Two years after they were married, Leone was sent into confino, (internal exile). He and Natalia were sent to the isolated and very poor countryside of Abruzzi. The fascists were convinced that by removing Ginzburg from the political activity in Italian cities, he would cease to be effective.

But despite his confino, the fascist authorities continued to fear Ginzburg’s organizing power and popularity with the Italian people. Ginzburg was a resistance leader who did not abandon his work despite the risk to his and his family’s life.

After Mussolini was deposed in 1943, Leone and Natalia returned to Rome to work on an underground press. Five months later, Leone disappeared. Natalia later found out he had died in prison of “cardiac arrest,” the medical term given when a prisoner dies of torture. She recalled:

“Arriving in Rome, I breathed a sigh of relief believing that a happy period was about to begin for us. I didn’t have any reason to believe this, but I did. We had a place to stay near the Piazza Bologna. Leone was the editor of a clandestine paper and was never home. They arrested him twenty days after our arrival and I never saw him again.”

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Natalia Ginzburg page on Amazon*
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Career as an editor and author

After Leone’s death, Natalia stayed in Rome and worked for Einaudi Publishers as an editor. She was the first Italian translator of Proust’s Swann’s Way and found great satisfaction working and befriending other renowned Italian writers, including Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, and Italo Calvino.

The 1950s and 1960s were the most prolific years in Natalia Ginzburg’s writing career. Her best work was written in this period, including Valentino (1957), The Little Virtues, (1962), Voices in the Evening (1961), and Family Lexicon, (1963). She married Gabriele Baldini, with whom she was together from 1950 to 1969.

Family Lexicon was the recipient of Italy’s 1963 Straga Prize (the Italian version of the American Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award). Family Lexicon was published as a novel, and, despite the resemblance to the Turin household of her youth in the 1930s and 1940s, Natalia was adamant that it was a work of fiction.

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Legacy

Through all of her copious writings and life as a public intellectual in Italian culture, Natalia also remained an activist. In the last decade of her life she became politically active and was elected as an independent left-wing deputy in 1983. She was reelected in 1987. She was motivated by a profound sense of justice, and championed causes that affected impoverished Italian populations the most, such as food prices and legal representation for crime victims.

Finding herself uncomfortable with the limitations of party politics, Natalia retired from this pursuit. She spent the last three years of her life in Rome, where she died peacefully at the age of seventy-five in 1991.

Natalia Ginzburg and her fellow Italian writers from the post-World War II generation have been experiencing a renaissance for the past decade. There have been reissues of their work with new translations and new introductions. These include a reissue of Valentino and Sagittarius by the New York Review of Books in 2020 in a single volume. At a lecture to launch this publication, Cynthia Zarin and Jhumpa Lahiri paid homage to the life and works of Natalia Ginzburg.

With so many of her works available in English translation, Natalia Ginzburg is an esteemed author worth discovering.

Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.

More about Natalia Ginzburg

For a more detailed listing of Natalia Ginzburg’s works, including essays, plays, and names of translators, follow this link.

Selected novels and short stories

La strada che va in città (1942); English translation: The Road to the City (1949)È stato così (1947); English translation The Dry Heart (1949)Tutti i nostri ieri (1952); English translation: A Light for Fools / All Our Yesterdays (1985)Valentino (1957); English translation: Valentino (1987)Sagittario (1957); English translation: Sagittarius (1987)Le voci della sera (1961); English translation: Voices in the Evening (1963)Lessico famigliare (1963); English translation: Family Lexicon (2017)Famiglia (1977); English translation: Family (1988)La famiglia Manzoni (1983); English translation: The Manzoni Family (1987)La città e la casa (1984); English translation; The City and the House (1986)

More information and sources

Rediscovering Natalia Ginzburg (The New Yorker) Jewish Women’s Archives Natalia Ginzburg’s Radical Clarity (The New Republic) If Ferrante is a Friend, Ginzburg is a Mentor (The Guardian) Wikipedia Reader discussion of Natalia Ginzburg’s works on Goodreads

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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Natalia Ginzburg, Italian Novelist, Essayist, and Playwright appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Pregnancy in Classic Novels by Women Authors: A Transgressive Theme

After reading a memoir of high-risk pregnancy by a friend (more about that ahead), I got to thinking about the prevalence of pregnancy in classic novels by women authors as a central theme. 

Of course, many there are many instances of female characters in novels (both by male and female authors) bearing a child or miscarrying, but pregnancy itself is rarely more than quickly touched upon.

Reliable birth control was nonexistent not so long ago; yet fictional pregnancies, other than the  seduction and abandonment trope, aren’t all that common. Her First Time: Seduction and Loss of Innocence in 1920s Women’s Novels presents several classic titles in which the heroine becomes pregnant (usually outside of marriage), with various outcomes.

In a Guardian article titled “Why does literature ignore pregnancy?” Jessie Greengrass observed that while exploring pregnancy as a theme is more prevalent than it once was, it still seems transgressive:

“Women’s bodies can be many things. They can be mirrors, weights, rewards; but so often they are seen from outside. Experiences that are unique to them remain anomalous, smoothly impenetrable, like bubbles of water to which significance refuses to adhere. What could we possibly learn about being human from that which only happens to half of us?”

Even so, more contemporary novels than ever have presented the theme of pregnancy, though often in apocalyptic ways. For more upbeat stories of pregnancy in fiction, one has to turn to romance novels. But I suppose there’s no drama in an uneventful pregnancy, is there?

 

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Knocked Down is available on Bookshop.org*, Amazon*
and wherever books are sold
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That brings me back to the memoir by my friend and colleague, Aileen Weintraub. Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir, as the title implies, is about a high-risk pregnancy, but it’s much more than that. As I wrote in the blurb I provided for the book:

“Knocked Down poignantly and often hilariously reminds us that no one is exempt from life’s unexpected curveballs. Aileen Weintraub weaves her wry wisdom into this chronicle of how the choices we make can collide with circumstances beyond our control. This fast-paced memoir of a woman who is forced to slow down is proof positive that precarious situations can be overcome with family, faith, and especially love.”

In turns touching and funny, Knocked Down brought back memories of leaving NYC for the Hudson Valley, deciding to have babies after insisting that I didn’t want children, dealing with my Jewish Mother (and becoming one). It’s so much about what it means to be female — what we give up, what we gain.

It may not be a work of fiction, but Knocked Down was what sparked this train of thought about pregnancy as a theme in classic novels, a rabbit hole that was fascinating to go down. And now, on to the novels …

 

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Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson (1790)

Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson (1762 – 1824) was the best-known work by this American-British author. It was also America’s first best-selling novel. With its themes of seduction, abandonment and remorse, it sparked a great deal of controversy in its time. Yet it remained the most widely read novel of the first half of the nineteenth century.

The story is about the betrayal of Charlotte, just fifteen years old, and a student in an English boarding school. She meets secretly with two British officers who are about to set sail for America to take part in the Revolutionary War.

The night before she is to return to her family home to celebrate her birthday, she is persuaded to go with the officer with whom she has fallen in love. He promises to marry her when they get to America. This promise, of course, is broken.

Laden with heavy moralizing, Charlotte is made to suffer and pay over and over for her unhappy adventure. In the end, she gives birth to a baby girl and dies of malnutrition. What’s worse about this melodramatic plot is that Rowson claimed it was based on the true story of someone she knew.

 

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Summer by Edith Wharton (1917)

Summer by Edith Wharton, a novella, was one of her personal favorites. She called it the “hot Ethan,” referring to her 1911 novella, Ethan Frome. It’s unclear if she was speaking of the book’s setting in the summer season, Charity’s sexual awakening, or both.

Charity, who was adopted by a small-town lawyer named Royall and his wife as a baby, continues to live with him after his wife passes away. He begins to look at Charity in a new light once she becomes a young woman, which deeply disgusts her. While working at the local library, she meets a young architect passing through. He seduces and abandons her, leaving her pregnant. 

“Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, all of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.”

Lawyer Royall, initially furious at the mess Charity finds herself in, becomes a comforting ally.

“Mr. Royall seldom spoke, but his silent presence gave her, for the first time, a sense of peace and security. She knew that where he was there would be warmth rest, silence; and for the moment they were all she wanted.”

 

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Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

Pregnancy and childbirth play minor, yet pivotal roles in Margaret Mitchell‘s Gone With the Wind. The widowed Scarlett was left with a son by her first husband; after marrying Rhett Butler, she gives birth to the adored Bonnie Blue. Then, she wants nothing more to do with pregnancy, lest it spoils her seventeen-inch waist.

Following an angry encounter, Rhett forces himself upon Scarlett. Controversially, this incident of marital rape seems to turns Scarlett’s pretty head; in the morning, she’s practically purring. He nonetheless decides to leave Scarlett, and in the interim, Scarlett discovers that she’s pregnant (her third pregnancy in the book; her second in the film). 

When Rhett returns after three months, he’s still in a foul mood, souring Scarlett’s as well. When she informs him of the pregnancy, he says, “Cheer up, maybe you will have a miscarriage.” Enraged, Scarlett takes a swing at him. When Rhett steps out of the way, Scarlett loses her footing and tumbles down the long staircase. She does miscarry and nearly dies. 

Melanie, the angelic wife of Ashley Wilkes (the man with whom Scarlett professes to be in love) becomes pregnant with their second child, though her doctor warns her against it. Sure enough, she grows weak after a miscarriage. Summoned to Melanie’s bedside in her final moments, Scarlett is made to realize what’s at stake in making deathbed promises to one she had until then considered a rival.

 

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The Door of Life by Enid Bagnold (1938)

It’s surprising to discover that Enid Bagnold, the author best known for the classic horse story National Velvet, wrote what is considered one of the first novels centered on pregnancy and childbirth. Oddly titled The Squire when first published in England, it was recast asThe Door of Life for its American publication.

This semi-autobiographical novel is described as an almost meditative reading experience from the perspective of the expectant mother, who is soon to give birth to her fifth child. A 1938 review observed:

“Those to whom the act of giving birth to a new human is fraught with terror and dread will see here that it is possible for it to be a wonderful and moving experience. We have never before read of the birth of a baby where all anguish was removed and a deep, fundamental joy was put in its place.”

Even by today’s standards, that sounds so refreshingly positive!

 

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The Tenth Month by Laura Z. Hobson (1970)

We’ll let the publisher of this 1970 novel about single motherhood describe it, since they did it so ably:

In her first great best seller, Gentleman’s Agreement, Laura Z. Hobson dealt memorably with the prejudice of antisemitism. In The Tenth Month, Hobson deals with another kind of prejudice — one far more subtle, emotional, and pervasive — the prejudice that society is guilty of when it forces a single  rigid code of morality on all human beings.

The Tenth Month is the story of Theodora Gray, a woman who has been told she can never have children, but now —after ten years of divorce and at the amiable end of one of her infrequent affairs —suddenly discovers that she is pregnant.

Dori Gray is not bothered by feelings of shame or self-reproach. She is delighted, and determined to have her baby. But another kind of dilemma poses itself: even before she is certain that she is pregnant, Dori falls in love with Matthew Poole, a lawyer who is married and a devoted father of two children.

Should she tell him she is pregnant by another man? If she tells him, how will he take it? Will Dori become another “problem case,” or will Matthew’s strength and humanity prevail and let him respect the rightness of her decision to have her child?

 

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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Pregnancy in Classic Novels by Women Authors: A Transgressive Theme appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Vera Caspary’s Ladies and Gents, and Women’s Flapper Novels of the 1920s

Women’s flapper novels of the 1920s captured the essence of a fleeting era known as the Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties. This look at a largely forgotten genre of fiction, many written by women, is excerpted from the forthcoming A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.

The 1920s was the age of the flapper — the free, single, modern woman unencumbered by long skirts or long hair who could go anywhere, do anything; she did not have to settle for what her mother had to settle for.

She could change her life and entire social and economic situation, if only through marriage, and even change her physical appearance. The Flapper magazine, with its slogan “not for old fogeys,” was based in Vera Caspary’s hometown of Chicago and started in 1922. The opening issue made its stance clear.

“Greetings, flappers! All ye who have faith in this world and its people, who do not think we are going to the eternal bowwows, who love life and joy and laughter and pretty clothes and good times, and who are not afraid of reformers, conformers, or chloroformers — greetings! … Thanks to the flappers the world is going round instead of crooked, and life is still bearable. Long may the tribe wave!”

Gertrude Atherton’s novel Black Oxen, the bestselling novel of 1923, features the flapper Janet Oglethorpe, portraayed in the film of the same year by Clara Bow, with whom Caspary’s character Rosina in Ladies and Gents identifies. Oglethorpe herself gives a good definition of the fashionable woman of her age.

Being a rank materialist myself, I know ‘em like a book. The emancipated flapper is just plain female under her paint and outside her cocktails. More so for she’s more stimulated. Where girls used to be merely romantic, she’s romantic—callow romance of youth, perhaps, but still romantic—plus sex-instinct rampant. At least that’s the way I size ‘em up, and its logic. There’s no virginity of mind left, mauled as they must be and half-stewed all the time, and they’re wild to get rid of the other. But they’re too young yet to be promiscuous, at least those of Janet’s sort, and they want to fall in love and get him quick.

In Atherton’s next novel, The Crystal Cup, 1925, the young Gita from the aloof old Carteret family dresses and behaves like a boy but denies to her disapproving grandmother that she is a flapper.

     “You do all you can to distort and destroy the Carteret beauty in your attempt to look like a boy. The Carteret women were all dashing brunettes, but feminine. Otherwise they never would have had men crawling at their feet, generation after generation.”
     “If men crawled at my feet—which they don’t do these days, anyhow—I’d kick them out of the way. And if I were a man myself—and I wish to God I were—I’d see women to the devil before I’d make a fool of myself——”
     “I don’t like your language. I don’t like your voice. I don’t like your bobbed hair——”
     “My hair is not bobbed.” …
     “Are you a specimen of the flappers all these magazines and novels are full of?”
     “I am not. Silly little females. Besides, I’m twenty-two.”
     “I can’t make out whether you seem to hate men or women more, and you won’t give any reason.”
     “I don’t hate women. I only resent being one.”

The Flapper Wife: The Story Of A Jazz Bride by Beatrice Burton (1925) made into the silent film His Jazz Bride (1926) and its sequel Footloose (1926), feature the hedonistic young May Seymour who is looking to marry a millionaire but settles for a lawyer instead. For a while, anyway. Then May gets bored with married life and starts to have affairs with other men, refusing to settle down.

Nalbro Bartley’s The Fox Woman (1928) also concerns the predatory 1920s female. “Everyone knows the fox woman. She is at every club – in every set – at every resort. You see men gathered around her – you see groups of women talking about her. She is a type in the modern world of Society. Her desire is always to dominate, possess. Always exacting love, never returning it – plunging men into despair, into jealousy, finally into hatred.”

Like Ladies and Gents, Janet Flanner’s The Cubical City (1926) is about a woman succeeding in this world of show business, though as a costume designer rather than as a dancer. The owner of the New York theatre for which Delia Poole designs the showgirls’ costumes tells her that everything had changed after prohibition: the market had become more sophisticated, more discerning.

“What we got in our line is mostly girls. In the old days if they was pretty it used to be enough. Now we gotta put ‘em across,” he had added with regret. “We gotta have expensive lights. We gotta have good music. Beautiful sets. Ideas. They need everything nowadays since life ain’t so simple. Since prohibition everybody’s got wine and we furnish the women and song.”

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In Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep, among the top ten bestselling novels of 1927, is set in Jazz Age New York. The three heroines, including a mother and daughter, go as far as trying to change their bodies to look like the flapper ideal.

“The modern girl was always free, was expected to know how to use her freedom. Nona’s independence had been as scrupulously respected as Jim’s; she had had her full share of the perpetual modern agitations. Yet Nona was firm as a rock: a man’s heart could build on her. If a woman was naturally straight, jazz and night-clubs couldn’t make her crooked.”

Laura Lou Brookman wrote several books about this kind of strong, independent, even predatory modern woman, including The Heart Bandit (1928). “The thrilling and romantic adventures of a beautiful young ‘man hunter.’” The full-page newspaper ad for it featured a drawing of a short-haired, big-eyed woman in a heart shape and the words:

Ask yourself these questions.
     Does every pretty Flapper coolly look over the men about her, select one or several victims – and begin a ruthless, subtle campaign, using all her feminine lure and wiles to attach his heart – and purse?
     Can the Flapper tactics really win a man’s heart?
     Do bare knees and a vanity case win a wedding ring?
     Is the motto of the girl of today “Get Your Man”?
     Is the modern maid a man hunter?

Similarly, the dust jacket of Ethel Hueston’s Birds Fly South (1930) says of its heroine:

P.T. is a flapper. She lives in a New York hotel for the sake of a Good Address. She wears slinky clothes with a swishy little flare of red silk at the right knee. She lies in a tepid salt bath for one hour daily to preserve youth, beauty, suppleness. She makes it a point of business to pick up strange men who pay for her luncheon. She is ready to marry a stranger on a bottle of champagne. But – if you think you are going to find her a Horrible Warning, a Terrible Example of Flaming Youth, read further. P.T. is really the most charming among Ethel Hueston’s many charming heroines.

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Perhaps the most famous novel featuring the thoroughly modern 1920s flapper was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, the second-bestselling novel of 1926. Loos’ narrator, Lorelei Lee, is somewhat similar to Caspary’s third person Rosina in that her parents want her to be serious but she prefers frivolity and freedom, traveling the world in search of excitement. However, Lorelei does decide to write a book in the form of a diary, given to us unedited, spelling mistakes and all.

A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time. I mean it is my favorite recreation and sometimes I sit for hours and do not seem to do anything else but think.

So this gentleman said a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think . . . And so when my maid brought it to me, I said to her, “Well, Lulu, here is another book and we have not read half the ones we have got yet.” But when I opened it and saw that it was all a blank. I remembered what my gentleman acquaintance said, and so then I realized that it was a diary. So here I am writing a book instead of reading one.

Like Rosina in Ladies and Gents, and like most young women at the time, Lorelei’s dream is to be in the moving pictures – as Vera Caspary’s dream was to write for them and in which she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. “Gentlemen always seem to remember blondes. I mean the only career I would like to be besides an authoress is a cinema star and I was doing quite well in the cinema when Mr. Eisman made me give it all up,” says Lorelei.

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Vera Caspary
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Ladies and Gents by Vera Caspary (1929)

Soon after Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was released, and well before Caspary’s Ladies and Gents was published, the death of the flapper was being widely announced. An article in the New York Times of February 16, 1928, was titled “No More Flappers.”

In thirty-five cities the flapper has been surveyed and found wanting. Investigation reveals, not that she is lacking in certain desirable qualities, but that she has actually disappeared. Surely you have missed her. Who has seen in recent days this creature, described by the league as the typical post-war flapper? Her hair was furiously frizzled. Her smoking was overenthusiastic. Her chewing gum was too loud and too large. Her vocabulary was imported direct from the trenches. She was startlingly picturesque – and now she is no more.

In her place is a delicately made up young woman of great poise and dignity. She has selected a few attributes of the flapper for preservation – the latch-key, the lipstick and the liquor. But she makes such discreet use of them that she is no longer an offense to the world at large. Instead of flaunting her freedom, she makes it more valuable by using it quietly.

Still, the world of Broadway theatres, shows and revues, the world that Rosina moves in through Ladies and Gents moves up and moves through was highly successful throughout the prohibition-era 1920s. Caspary describes this world of New York Jazz Age theatre beautifully in her autobiography.

Broadway glittered with theatres. It was a time of richness when the plays, the playwrights and the players offered exuberant and intelligent entertainment. The show music was by Gershwin, Kerns, Youmans, Berlin and Richard Rogers. Jazz was fresh, good bands played in cabarets or small, elegant nightclubs where tall fellows in tails waltzed and tangoed with sylphs in memorable chiffons. Revues were of two kinds – big, vulgar and funny in the Ziegfeld or Schubert manner, or small, witty satires disrespectful of politicians, artists and heroics.

Unlike Lorelei Lee, unlike Janet Oglethorpe, unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald’s flapper heroines Isabelle Borgé and Daisy Buchanan and indeed unlike Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, whom he named “the first American flapper,” Rosina in Ladies and Gents does not come from money or from high society. (The little-known short story collection Flappers and Philosophers, (1920) was Fitzgerald’s first published book.)

And unlike Helen Taylor in Thyra Samter Winslow’s Show Business (1926) – also a novel about a young woman climbing to the top of the New York musical theatre scene – she does not come from a narrow, conservative small town society. Indeed, Rosina Scaduto Monticelli’s circus family are situated outside society altogether, being Italian acrobats, itinerant and literally surrounded by circus freaks.

In this, Rosina is somewhat similar to Magnolia from Edna Ferber’s Show Boat (1926), who “learned to strut and shuffle the buck-and-wing from the Negroes whose black faces dotted the boards of the southern wharves,” and her daughter Kim, who becomes a famous actress in New York City.

Rosina is also to some extent a successor to Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), who like Rosina, progresses from ingénue to queen of the stage but unlike her ends up alone.

“Here was Carrie, in the beginning poor, unsophisticated, emotional; responding with desire to everything most lovely in life, yet finding herself turned as by a wall. . . Amid the tinsel and shine of her state walked Carrie, unhappy.”

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Vera Caspary’s Ladies and Gents, and Women’s Flapper Novels of the 1920s appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Alice Guy-Blaché, Pioneer of Early Cinema

Alice Guy-Blaché (July 1, 1873 – March 24, 1968) was a pioneering filmmaker of the early days of cinema, and the first woman to direct a film. One of the first filmmakers to make a narrative film, she was the only known female filmmaker in the world from 1896 to 1906.

Guy-Blaché directed, produced, or supervised about a thousand films, many of them short. When she died in 1968, many of her accomplishments had been erased from male-dominated film history books, but recent years have seen a revival of interest in her life and work.

 

Early years

Alice Ida Antoinette Guy was born in Paris to a Chilean father, Emile Guy, and a French mother, Marie Clotilde Franceline Aubert. The Guy family made their home in Santiago, Chile, where Alice’s four siblings were born and where Emile ran a bookshop and publishing company.

A smallpox epidemic in 1872 compelled the family to emigrate to France, where Alice was born the following year. When her parents returned to Chile soon after her birth, Alice was left in the care of her grandmother in Switzerland.

At the age of three, Alice returned to Chile. She spent the next two years with her family in Santiago before returning to France. She attended school at Veyrier, and later, went to a convent school at Ferney with her sister Louise.

In 1891, when Alice was nearly eighteen, her father died of unknown causes. Her mother struggled to get a job, and Alice trained as a typist and stenographer to help support her family. Her first job was at a varnish factory, and in 1894 she began working as a secretary at the Comptoir Général de la Photographie, owned first by Felix-Max Richard and then by Léon Gaumont.

The company manufactured cameras, and after Gaumont took over in 1895 (and changed the company name to L. Gaumont et Cie) it became one of the leading names in the relatively new motion-picture industry in France. It was the start of what would become, for Alice, a lifelong passion and successful career.

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A new vision for film making

During her first months at the company, Alice became familiar with clients, marketing strategies, and the stock of cameras the company sold. She became acquainted with the short films that were made to demonstrate the cameras to clients and met other pioneers in the film business such as Auguste and Louis Lumière.

Together with Gaumont, she attended the “surprise” Lumière event in March 1895, in which the Lumière brothers demonstrated the first use of film projection. The film was simple — a shaky scene of workmen leaving the Lumière factory — but Alice was struck by the possibilities that projection offered and the opportunities it presented for incorporating narrative storytelling into film.

With characteristic bravado, she asked Gaumont for permission to make her own film. He considered it something of a “girlish thing” to do, but he allowed her the use of a company studio and camera on the condition that her secretarial work didn’t suffer.

Alice continued to effectively run the office while producing and directing the world’s first narrative film, only a few minutes long, and a July newspaper of that year describes the result as a “chaste fiction of children born under the cabbages in a wonderfully framed chromo landscape.” The film is unfortunately now lost, although later films made by Alice with the same title, La Fée aux Choux, did survive, and managed to confuse film historians for some time.

In 1912, recalling this first instance of narrative fiction in film, Alice said that, “Before very long, every moving picture house in the country was turning out stories instead of spectacles and plots instead of panoramas.”

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A woman in a man’s world

From 1896 to 1906, Alice worked as Gaumont’s head of production. In those ten years she produced hundreds of films and created an effective studio system years before Hollywood did so. She systematically developed narrative filmmaking and pioneered several techniques. These included the use of audio recordings in conjunction with film, using double exposure, masking techniques, hand coloring of film, and running a film backwards.

But while other pioneers like the Lumière brothers and George Méliès received huge accolades for technical advances during this period, Alice received little attention.

She was quite aware of the challenges faced by women in film, writing that: “My youth, my inexperience, my sex all conspired against me.” Later, in a 1914 edition of The Moving Picture World journal, she openly criticized the systemic eradication of women’s achievements, particularly in the field of filmmaking:

“There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason she cannot master every technicality of the art … In the arts of acting, painting, music, and literature women have long held their place among the most successful workers, and when it is considered how vitally these arts enter into the production of motion pictures one wonders why the names of scores of women are not found among the most successful creators of photodrama offerings.”

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The formation of Solax

In 1907, Alice married Herbert Blaché, a British-born filmmaker and screenwriter who was appointed as production manager for Gaumont in the U.S. The move across the Atlantic was initially not a happy one for Alice, who described the arrival in New York:

“The view of Liberty lighting the world, the sight of skyscrapers in the fog could not chase my sadness. I saw all that through tears which I tried in vain to stop. All around me I heard exclamations of enthusiasm in a language of which I understood not one word.”

Despite the upheaval, the couple had a daughter, Simone, in 1908, and a son, Reginald, in 1912.

Alice and Herbert left Gaumont and set up on their own studio in 1910. The Solax Company had its first base in Flushing, New York, and in 1912 moved to Fort Lee, New Jersey, then a center of American filmmaking. The studio in Fort Lee was state of the art, with prop rooms, dressing rooms, carpentry workshops, five stage sets, darkrooms, labs, and projection rooms.

Herbert worked as production manager and cinematographer, while Alice was the artistic director. She also directed many of Solax’s releases. She scouted for locations (by car or on horseback), supervised other directors, and managed a company of adult and child actors along with several animals — including lions, rats, and a six hundred-pound tiger named Princess. On the wall of the studio, she hung a sign that said, “Be Natural.”

Within two years, Solax had become the largest pre-Hollywood studio in America. One of their most famous films, A Fool and His Money (1912), was the first to use an all-Black cast. There were many other films that could now be considered activist and feminist in subtle ways, though Alice herself didn’t consider them as such.

She was more focused on the psychology of character and, when money allowed, successfully made the transition to longer, more complex narrative films in which these could be explored in more depth. The studio continued to turn out films of all kinds, from romances to action films to Western-style shorts.

As time went on, though, competition from Hollywood increased and financial difficulties mounted. Technology was changing rapidly, and costs were rising. Often, the money needed to keep up to date simply wasn’t enough; the outbreak of the World War in 1914 also took its toll.

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The end of a dream

Eventually Alice and Herbert divorced. Their professional partnership didn’t survive either. The rapid emergence of Hollywood after the war forced Solax out of business, and Herbert left to work in California. After surviving a severe bout of what was called the Spanish flu in 1918, Alice directed her last film in 1919.

In 1921, she was forced to auction her film studio in bankruptcy. Alice returned to France in 1922, where she had no luck in finding film work and turned to writing articles and children’s stories instead.

In the late 1940s Alice wrote her autobiography, concerned that she was being erased from much of the film history she had helped to create. It was first published in French (1976) and translated into English a decade later. She also made exhaustive lists of her films — many of them unavailable and presumed lost — hoping to be able to reclaim credit for the pioneering work that went into them.

Some of her efforts paid off when in 1958 she was awarded the French Légion d’Honneur, but she remained ambivalent. She wrote of her life: “Is it a failure; is it a success? I don’t know.”

Alice never remarried and returned to the US in 1964 to live with her daughter Simone in New Jersey. She died at the age of 94 on March 24, 1968, in a nursing home. She is buried at Maryrest Cemetery, Wayne, New Jersey. In 2012 the Fort Lee Film Commission installed a new gravestone, replacing the old one that simply stated her name and dates of birth and death with one that also proclaimed her as the “first woman motion picture director.” It also carries the Solax company logo, an image of the rising sun.

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Legacy

Alice Guy-Blaché has been the subject of something of a revival after a 2018 documentary film, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, directed by Pamela B. Green and narrated by Jodie Foster. Many of her surviving films have since been restored and preserved, and Pamela B. Green is developing a feature biopic about her life.

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is an author, poet, and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States, and the Bahamas.

When not traveling or working on her current projects — a chapbook of poetry, “The Cabinet of Lost Things,” and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes — she can be found with her nose in a book, daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Visit her on the web at Elodie Rose Barnes.

Further reading

Alice Guy-Blaché: Cinema Pioneer (Whitney Museum of American Art Series) by Joan Simon (2009)Alice Guy-Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema by Alison McMahon (2003)

More information

Overlooked No More (NY Times Obituary Series) Women Film Pioneers Project Be Natural: the Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché – film by Pamela Green, narrated by Jodie Foster (trailer, 2019) A Fool and His Money : 1912 film by Alice Guy-Blaché available to watch on YouTube The Detective’s Dog : 1912 film by Alice Guy-Blaché available to watch on YouTube

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Vera Caspary, prolific novelist and screenwriter

Vera Caspary (1899-1987) was an American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Over the course of her long and prolific career, she became known as a writer of crime fiction, though she created works in other genres. 

She had more than twenty novels published (plus others left unpublished), the best known of which remains Laura (1943). She also wrote long short stories and novellas, not to mention numerous screenplays for Hollywood films, some based on her own works.

Many of her works featured young, forward-thinking women (then called “career girls”) who fought for female autonomy and equality, and refused male protection. 

According to her autobiography, Vera considered herself lucky to have lived during the “century of the woman,” and to have been part of the struggle that led to greater equality. Her work paved the way for the strong female characters we celebrate in contemporary fiction, and her own life story serves as inspiration for women who strive for equality today.

Francis Booth, the author of No Girl Named Vera Can Ever Tell a Lie (the first work to examine all of Caspary’s novels) observed: 

“Although she worked in Hollywood and many of her novels were published as pulp paperbacks with lurid covers and sensationalist blurbs, Caspary herself was a connoisseur of classic British literature. One Caspary woman calls herself Haworth after the Brontë Parsonage, Stranger Than Truth pays homage to Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Bedelia to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.”

 

Education and the start of a writing career

Vera Caspary was born into a middle-class family Jewish family in Chicago, the youngest of four children. Enjoying a happy childhood, she attended public schools in Chicago and graduated from high school in 1917. 

After completing a six-month course in business, she worked in a variety of office jobs. She was a stenographer, a copywriter, and served as director of a correspondence school that offered ballet lessons.

Vera began working on her first novel in 1922. After the death of her father in 1924, she moved to New York to work as the editor of Dance Magazine, a position she held from 1925 through 1927. 

 

First novels

In 1929, Vera released her second novel, The White Girl. It tells the story of a young mixed-race woman who “passes” as white. Vera’s next novels, published later the same year, were Ladies & Gents and Music in the Street. The latter was inspired by the time she spent living in a home for working girls.

In 1931, Vera moved back to Chicago. Together with playwright Winifred Lenihan, she wrote a play called Blind Mice. The play was the inspiration for Working Girls, a film that was released in December 1931. The following year, Vera published a novel of the same name. Her family members were characters in the story, and they appeared with invented names. 

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A sojourn in Hollywood

Vera had been supporting her mother with the money she earned from writing, so at this point in her life, she was almost penniless. After a chance meeting with an editor at Paramount, she wrote “Suburb,” a 40-page story that earned her two thousand dollars. The money was enough to enable her to move to Hollywood, where she wrote plays with Samuel Ornitz. 

After winning a six-month writing contract with Hollywood studios, Vera had a falling out with Harry Cohn, the founder of Columbia Pictures. Though she still had five months left on her contract, she no longer received assignments, and instead spent her days at the beach. Eventually, she was able to get her contract canceled, and returned to New York.

 

Introduction to Communism

In the 1930s, many writers were interested in socialism, and Samuel Ornitz gave Vera copies of The Communist Manifesto and The Daily Worker. Eventually, Vera joined the Communist Party. “Lucy Sheridan” was her alias, and she hosted fundraisers and Party meetings at her home. However, she later stated that she was not fully committed to communism.

In 1939, she went to Russia to see communism in action. Upon her return to New York, she tried to resign from the Communist Party and was given a leave of absence. In January of 1940, she moved back to Hollywood.

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The sensationalized pulp cover of Laura
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Breaking through with Laura

In October 1941, Vera completed Laura, the breakthrough work that would become her most famous novel. A very different kind of detective novel, it centers on the presumed murder of the title character and the hunt for her killer. Told in the first person by different characters, it’s particularly noteworthy for its surprising twist. Like the title character, Vera was a strong, independent woman who had worked in the male-dominated world of New York advertising.

Laura debuted in serial installments in Collier’s magazine from November through December 1942. Vera wrote a dramatization of it that same year. Published in book form by Houghton Mifflin in 1943, Laura was released as a film in 1944. Directed by Otto Preminger, it is considered a film noir classic.

 

Meeting Isadore “Igee” Goldsmith

In addition to her professional breakthroughs, Vera’s personal life underwent significant change in the 1940s. She met her future husband, Isadore Goldsmith (“Igee”), in 1942. Igee worked as a film producer. After she returned home from a business trip to New York, he was waiting for her with red roses.

Sadly, their time together was cut short. As a British citizen, Igee was drafted for service in World War II and was compelled to return to England. He and Vera wouldn’t see one other again for thirteen months.

While Igee was away, Vera began working on her next novel, Bedelia. As a way to reunite with Igee, Vera cabled him in late 1944 to offer him the film rights for a British screenplay of Bedelia, on the condition that she could come over to England to write it. She arrived in England in January 1945 and spent several months there with Igee before returning to the U.S.

In 1946, Stranger Than Truth, a novel, and The Murder in the Stork Club, a novella, were published. She and Igee were reunited in May 1946, and they married on October 5, 1949. Vera was just shy of fifty years old, and it almost goes without saying that the couple didn’t have children.

The late 1940s saw the release of A Letter to Three Wives, a film considered a classic.

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Vera in 1950; author photo for the novel Three Husbands
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The 1950s and Later Life

In 1951, Vera was questioned by MGM about her communist ties. Fearing that she’d be blacklisted, she fled to Europe with Igee, where they lived happily in a fairytale castle in Austria; Vera wrote contentedly in a tower room, including a draft of Wedding in Paris, her only musical comedy for the stage.

1953 saw the release of the film Blue Gardenia, directed by Fritz Lang, based on Vera’s story, “The Gardenia.” It has stood the test of time as a classic of the era.

Vera was placed on the “gray list” (which was somewhat less dire than the dreaded blacklist), and she and Igee did not return to Hollywood permanently until 1956.

In 1957, Vera wrote the screenplay for Les Girls. The film starred Gene Kelly, and Vera remembered the production as one of her most enjoyable experiences. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she published several novels, including The Husband, Evvie, and Bachelor in Paradise.

Sadly, Igee was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early 1960s. Between surgeries and other treatments, he and Vera traveled to Greece, Las Vegas, and many of the places they’d meant to visit. Igee passed away in Vermont in 1964. After his death, Vera returned to live in New York. 

From 1964 through 1979, Vera published eight books. The Secrets of Grown-Ups, her memoir, was published in 1979. After suffering a stroke, Vera passed away in New York in June 1987.

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Vera Caspary page on Amazon*
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The legacy  of Vera Caspary

As Vera wrote in her memoir, “In another generation, perhaps the next, equality will be taken for granted. Those who come after us may find it easier to assert independence, but will miss the grand adventure of having been born a woman in this century of change.”

In recent times, Caspary’s works have been republished, albeit a fraction of her output, by the Feminist Press and the Murder Room. Francis Booth writes, “In her thrillers and murder mysteries, Caspary tackled sexism, racism, fascism and anti-Semitism head-on, from her first novel in 1929 to her last in 1975.”

Through her unconventional life and the independence of her characters, Vera Caspary redefined “the grand adventure” of living as a modern woman. She inspired women to live life on their terms, and she continues to inspire women to make bold choices to this day.

 

A few quotes

“This has been the century of the woman, and I know myself to have been a part of the revolution.” (from The Secrets of Grown-Ups)

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“She is carved from Adam’s rib, indestructible as legend, and no man will ever aim his malice with sufficient accuracy to destroy her.” (from Laura)

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“All my tales, whether gaily caparisoned with wealth or morbid in poverty, whether celebrating health or pain (for there are sanatoria and cemeteries as well as ballrooms), tell of man’s reliance upon woman, his need, blindness, and final recognition. In its many beginnings, mutations, and styles of narration, my story always concerns man’s search for the sympathy and satisfaction that only the heroine can bestow.” (from Evvie)

More about Vera Caspary

Novels and short stories

Follow this link for Vera Caspary’s full bibliography.

1929 The White Girl 1929 Ladies and Gents 1929 Music in the Street 1930 Anyone Can Wear Pink1932 Thicker Than Water1942 Laura1943 Sugar and Spice1943 Stranger in the House1945 Bedelia 1945 Murder at the Stork Club/The Lady in Mink1946 Stranger Than Truth1947 Out of the Blue1948 Marriage ‘481950 The Weeping and the Laughter/Death Wish1952 Thelma1952 The Gardenia1954 False Face1957 The Husband1960 Evvie1961 Bachelor in Paradise1964 A Chosen Sparrow1966 The Man Who Loved His Wife1967 The Rosecrest Cell1968 Ruth1971 Final Portrait1975 The Dreamers1978 Elizabeth X/The Secret of Elizabeth

Memoir

The Secrets of Grown-Ups (1979)

Filmography

1931  Working Girls (from the play Blind Mice)1932  The Night of June 13 (from the unpublished story “Suburb”)1934  Private Scandal (from the unpublished story “In Conference”)1934  Such Women Are Dangerous (from the unpublished story “Odd Thursday”)1935  I’ll Love You Always (screenplay)1937  Easy Living (based on her story)1938  Scandal Street (from the unpublished story “Suburb”)1938  Service de Luxe (based on her story)1940  Sing, Dance, Plenty Hot (based on her story)1941  Lady from Louisiana (screenplay)1943  Lady Bodyguard (based on her story)1944  Laura (from her novel)1946  Claudia and David (adaptation)1946  Bedelia (screenplay from her novel)1947  Out of the Blue (screenplay from her novel)1949  A Letter to Three Wives (adaptation)1950  Three Husbands (screenplay from her story)1951  I Can Get It for You Wholesale (adaptation)1953  The Blue Gardenia (from her story “The Gardenia”)1953  Give a Girl a Break (from her story)1955  A Portrait of Murder (20th Century-Fox Hour TV hour episode from her novel Laura)1957  Les Girls (from her story)1961  Bachelor in Paradise (from her novel)1962  Laura (TV Movie from her novel)1968  Laura (TV Movie from her novel)1985  A Letter to Three Wives (TV Movie adaptation)

More information and sources

The Secrets of Vera Caspary, the Woman Who Wrote Laura Jewish Women’s Archive Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads Dolls and Dames — Laura by Vera Caspary The Broadcast 41

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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Vera Caspary’s Bachelor in Paradise (1961): Sex and Bias in the ‘Burbs

The newly built Los Angeles suburb of Paradise in Vera Caspary’s 1961 novel Bachelor in Paradise is rather like the aspirational estate of Northridge in Caspary’s earlier story “Stranger in the House” (1943). Excerpted from the forthcoming A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth.

“It is one of those suburbs distinguished in real-estate advertisements by the word exclusive. The residents spend large sums to separate themselves from neighbors whom they meet as often as possible at the Country Club . . . Pedestrians are seldom seen.”

It is also somewhat similar to the setting of Grace Metalious’s 1956 novel Peyton Place (1956), with its simmering suburban sexual tensions among the “simple, well-constructed, one-family dwellings, most of them modeled on Cape Cod lines and painted white with green trim” and to Pepper Street in Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall (1948), also set in a California suburb.

 

Trouble in Paradise

The descriptions of the lives of the women in the suburban, middle-class houses in Caspary’s Paradise anticipate Betty Friedan’s explorations of The Feminine Mystique  (1963) into the sexual underworld of the women who live in these perfect, fully equipped homes designed to give the modern housewife everything she needs except intellectual and sexual satisfaction.

Paradise Estates, Adam discovered, offered the ultimate in Gracious Living; fully equipped built-in kitchens . . . two ovens to every stove . . . Picture windows, thermostatic all-year temperature control, architecture to suit a variety of purses and every taste.

Eight floor plans were shown in the two-three- and four-bedroom models; all of these could be adapted to any style or period. There were Paradise Regency, Paradise Provincial, Paradise Rancho and Paradise Contempo. In spite of the labels under the pictures the houses looked all the same to Adam. Perhaps, he had the humility to tell himself, his eye had not been trained to subtleties. He could not allow himself too much prejudice.

“Welcome to Paradise, Mr. Niles.”

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, American men were very proud of the modern domestic gadgetry that they had worked so hard to buy to make their wives’ lives easier. In July 1959, even President Richard Nixon, in the famous “Kitchen Debate” with Russian President Nikita Khrushchev had been bragging about how the latest technology in Californian kitchens made the American housewife the envy of the world.

Aspirational magazines like Good Housekeeping, in which Caspary first published several of her pieces, and Today’s Woman, for Today’s Homemaker, later subtitled for Young Wives, where Caspary’s Out of the Blue first appeared in 1947, prominently featured full page color ads for these latest, labor-saving domestic gadgets showing suburban housewives beaming with happiness and content. But many of them were not at all not content with their gadgets, their lives and especially with their husbands.

 

Desperate housewives

In the same year Betty Friedan was also to show in The Feminine Mystique exactly how bored, unsatisfied and unfulfilled was the suburban housewife, descendant of Emma Bovary living a life of quiet desperation behind the picture windows. 

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even herself the silent question – ‘is this all?’”

Ten years earlier, in 1953, Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal The Second Sex had been first translated into English and had posed some of the questions Friedan was answering.

“How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome?”

 

Communities of “the best sort”

Apart from the undercurrent of sexual dissatisfaction, another unspoken problem in these white, aspirational enclaves was the prevalence of racism and antisemitism, both of which Caspary tackled seriously throughout her life and writing career.

Here she treats things rather more lightly, despite the February 1960 incident in which four Black college students in North Carolina refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter without being served and the March 1960 bomb and gun attack on Temple Beth-Israel in Alabama. Both of these incidents may have happened while she was writing Bachelor.

The first purpose-built conurbations in America were constructed after the Second World War and aimed to provide affordable housing for returning veterans to buy rather than rent. They were called Levittowns after their founder William J. Levitt, who refused to sell the homes to people of color; the Federal Housing Association which loaned the money for their construction included racial covenants in the contracts ensuring that the communities would be segregated.

The realtor for Paradise Estates in Bachelor tells Adam that it is “a community of the best sort.”

These communities were built as white middle class bastions, sheltered from the racial and economic diversity of big cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago – Caspary’s three main homes throughout her life and the settings of most of her novels.

The boosterism in the realtor’s paean to Paradise recalls Sinclair Lewis’s much earlier eponymous realtor in Babbitt (1922), set in Zenith, where “American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary.” And race.

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Vera Caspary
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A lone bachelor

Adam’s stay in Paradise, where he works from home, breaks the one cardinal rule: there are no men in Paradise during the weekday unless they are sick or retired.

“The male exodus which started at 7 a.m. on Mondays and continued through Friday gave Paradise Estates the atmosphere of a convent whose nuns were allowed habits of varied style and color.”

When the men return at the weekend, they plunge into domestic chores.

“Saturday mornings brought out the usual spate of do-it-yourself husbands in blue jeans, faded khaki and floral shirts. They began like busy bees to repaint, repair, lay bricks, plant perennials.”

To make things worse for himself, Adam is not used to having picture windows and never closes his curtains, so everyone makes it their business to know exactly what he is doing at all times. This has an alarming effect on the wives at home.

“Had Adam been half the man he was these women would have been kindled. Had he been fat or bald or growing his first beard, or partly disabled by a wife, at some distant place, he would have added excitement to their lives; but he was healthy, debonair, violently male and unattached. Local fashions changed. Wide skirts and frilly blouses took the place of blue jeans and old shirts. Curlers were not seen in public.”

To the home-alone women of Paradise, “the season of the bachelor was no less than the advent of an archangel.” They want him not just for sexual purposes but for the domestic do-it-yourself skills all men are assumed to have. “Aggressively domestic” is the way he describes them.

 “Since no gadget ever invented for woman’s comfort has displaced man, the female community found many uses for its stay-at-home bachelor.” Adam can never settle down to work for any length of time before the doorbell rings and a neighbor asks for his help, whenever “tires went flat, when motors stalled, bathtubs overflowed, when they needed help with plugs and wires and the common screwdriver.”

With Caspary’s Laura, Bedelia, Evvie and Elizabeth X we had women at the center of a mystery pursued by multiple men, here we have a man who is himself a mystery pursued by multiple women: Dolores, Linda, Rosemary and her siren teenage daughter Patty. Divorces ensue, jealousy and envy are everywhere. One night, in his own house, Adam is assaulted by three separate jealous men.

Then Adam chooses Rosemary and she chooses him back. Both are too cynical to want to get married, so they start an affair.

“Neither believed the affair sinful. It is not adultery when no one is married.”

But it is a shock to the community.

“Had these lovers lived in Greenwich Village, in Paris, London, even in Hollywood or the center of St Louis, one of them could have moved into the other’s house and to hell with the neighbors. But they lived in Paradise and Paradise does not have a climate friendly to the frankly passionate.”

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You may also enjoy: Bedelia by Vera Caspary
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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Vera Caspary’s Bachelor in Paradise (1961): Sex and Bias in the ‘Burbs appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored by Marita O. Bonner (1925)

Marita Odette Bonner (1899 – 1971) was a short story writer, playwright, and essayist. Between 1925 and 1927 she produced a great number of short stories featuring characters from varied cultures navigating urban life. She became noted for two prize-winning essays — “On Being Young—A Woman—and Colored” (1925), presented here, and “Drab Rambles” (1927). 

One of the earliest Black students at Radcliffe College, she was academically talented as well as a gifted pianist and composer. Upon her 1922, graduation, when she was named “Radcliffe’s Beethoven,” Bonner continued to blossom, becoming a noted figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement.

In the late 1920s, Bonner wrote three plays, the best known of which was The Purple Flower (1928). Her writings often dealt with the challenges of being Black in a racist society, a theme exemplified in the essay that follows.

“On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” was a first prize winner in an annual contest sponsored by The Crisis (the journal of the NAACP, which had a decided literary bent). Originally published in their December 1925 issue, it is now in the public domain.

At the time of this essay’s publication, the prolific Marita Bonner was working as an English teacher at the Armstrong High School in Washington, D. C. She continued to write short fiction until 1941, after which she focused on raising her three children as well as teaching high school in Chicago.

 

On Being Young — a Woman — and Colored by Marita O. Bonner

You start out after you have gone from kindergarten to sheepskin covered with sundry Latin phrases. 

At least you know what you want life to give you. A career as fixed and as calmly brilliant as the North Star. The one real thing that money buys. Time. Time to do things. A house that can be as delectably out of order and as easily put in order as the doll-house of  “playing-house” days. And of course, a husband you can look up to without looking down on yourself. 

Somehow you feel like a kitten in a sunny catnip field that sees sleek, plump brown field mice and yellow baby chicks sitting coyly, side by side, under each leaf. A desire to dash three or four ways seizes you. 

That’s Youth. But you know that things learned need testing—acid testing—to see if they are really after all, an interwoven part of you. All your life you have heard of the debt you owe “Your People” because you have managed to have the things they have not largely had. 

So you find a spot where there are hordes of them—of course below the Line—to be your catnip field while you close your eyes to mice and chickens alike. 

If you have never lived among your own, you feel prodigal. Some warm untouched current flows through them—through you— and drags you out into the deep waters of a new sea of human foibles and mannerisms; of a peculiar psychology and prejudices. And one day you find yourself entangled—enmeshed—pinioned in the sea- weed of a Black Ghetto. 

Not a Ghetto, placid like the Strasse that flows, outwardly unperturbed and calm in a stream of religious belief, but a peculiar group. Cut off, flung together, shoved aside in a bundle because of color and with no more in common. 

Unless color is, after all, the real bond. Milling around like live fish in a basket. Those at the bottom crushed into a sort of stupid apathy by the weight of those on top. Those on top leaping, leaping; leaping to scale the sides; to get out. There are two “colored” movies, innumerable parties—and cards. Cards played so intensely that it fascinates and repulses at once. 

Movies. Movies worthy and worthless—but not even a low-caste spoken stage. Parties, plentiful. Music and dancing and much that is wit and color and gaiety.

But they are like the richest chocolate; stuffed costly chocolates that make the taste go stale if you have too many of them. That make plain whole bread taste like ashes. 

There are all the earmarks of a group within a group. Cut off all around from ingress from or egress to other groups. A sameness of type. The smug self-satisfaction of an inner measurement; a measurement by standards known within a limited group and not those of an unlimited, seeing, world … Like the blind, blind mice. Mice whose eyes have been blinded. 

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RELATED CONTENT

Renaissance Women: 13 Female Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
7 Black Women Playwrights of the Early 20th Century
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Strange longing seizes hold of you. You wish yourself back where you can lay your dollar down and sit in a dollar seat to hear voices, strings, reeds that have lifted the World out, up, beyond things that have bodies and walls. Where you can marvel at new. marbles and bronzes and flat colors that will make men forget that things exist in a flesh more often than in spirit. Where you can sink your body in a cushioned seat and sink your soul at the same time into a section of life set before you on the boards for a few hours. 

You hear that up at New York this is to be seen; that, to be heard. You decide the next train will take you there. You decide the next second that that train will not take you, nor the next— nor the next for some time to come. 

For you know that—being a woman— you cannot twice a month or twice a year, for that matter, break away to see or hear anything in a city that is supposed to see and hear too much. 

That’s being a woman. A woman of any color. You decide that something is wrong with a world that stifles and chokes; that cuts off and stunts; hedging in, pressing down on eyes, ears and throat. Somehow all wrong. 

You wonder how it happens there that — say five hundred miles from the Bay State — Anglo Saxon intelligence is so warped and stunted. 

How judgment and discernment are bred out of the race. And what has become of discrimination? Discrimination of the right sort. Discrimination that the best minds have told you weighs shadows and nuances and spiritual differences before it catalogues. The kind they have taught you all of your life was best: that looks clearly past generalization and past appearance to dissect, to dig down to the real heart of matters. That casts aside rapid summary conclusions, drawn from primary inference, as Daniel did the spiced meats. 

Why can’t they then perceive that there is a difference in the glance from a pair of eyes that look, mildly docile, at “white ladies” and those that, impersonally and perceptively — aware of distinctions — see only women who happen to be white? 

Why do they see a colored woman only as a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and the Quasimodos with avid indiscrimination? Why unless you talk in staccato squawks — brittle as sea-shells — unless you “champ” gum — unless you cover two yards square when you laugh —unless your taste runs to violent colors — impossible perfumes and more impossible clothes —are you a feminine Caliban craving to pass for Ariel? 

An empty imitation of an empty invitation. A mime; a sham; a copy-cat. A hollow re-echo. A froth, a foam. A fleck of the ashes of superficiality? 

Everything you touch or taste now is like the flesh of an unripe persimmon … Do you need to be told what that is being …? Old ideas, old fundamentals seem worm-eaten, out-grown, worthless, bitter; fit for the scrap-heap of Wisdom. 

What you had thought tangible and practical has turned out to be a collection of “blue-flower” theories. If they have not discovered how to use their accumulation of facts, they are use- less to you in Their world. Every part of you becomes bitter. 

But — “In Heaven’s name, do not grow bitter. Be bigger than they are” — exhort white friends who have never had to draw breath in a Jim-Crow train. Who have never had petty putrid insult dragged over them — drawing blood —l ike pebbled sand on your body where the skin is tenderest. On your body where the skin is thinnest and tenderest. 

You long to explode and hurt everything white; friendly; unfriendly. But you know that you cannot live with a chip on your shoulder even if you can manage a smile around your eyes—without getting steely and brittle and losing the softness that makes you a woman. 

For chips make you bend your body to balance them. And once you bend, you lose your poise, your balance, and the chip gets into you. The real you. You get hard … And many things in you can ossify … And you know, being a woman, you have to go about it gently and quietly, to find out and to discover just what is wrong. Just what can be done. 

You see clearly that they have acquired things. Money; money. Money to build with, money to destroy. Money to swim in. Money to drown in. Money. 

An ascendancy of wisdom. An incalculable hoard of wisdom in all fields, in all things collected from all quarters of humanity. A stupendous mass of things. Things. 

So, too, the Greeks … Things. And the Romans … And you wonder and wonder why they have not discovered how to handle deftly and skillfully, Wisdom, stored up for them — like the honey for the Gods on Olympus — since time unknown. 

You wonder and you wonder until you wander out into Infinity, where — if it is to be found anywhere —Truth really exists. The Greeks had possessions, culture. They were lost because they did not understand. The Romans owned more than anyone else.Trampled under the heel of Vandals and Civilization, because they would not understand. Greeks. Did not understand. 

Romans. Would not understand. “They.” Will not understand. 

So you find, they have shut Wisdom up and have forgotten to find the key that will let her out They have trapped, trammeled, lashed her to themselves with thews and thongs and theories. They have ran- sacked sea and earth and air to bring every treasure to her. But she sulks and will not work for a world with a whitish hue because it has snubbed her twin sister, Understanding. 

You see clearly — off there is Infinity — Understanding. Standing alone, waiting for someone to really want her. But she is so far out there is no way to snatch at her and drag her in. 

So — being a woman — you can wait. You must sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden — and weighted as if your feet were cast in the iron of your soul. Not wasting strength in enervating gestures as if two hundred years of bonds and whips had really tricked you into nervous uncertainty. 

But quiet; quiet. Like Buddha — who brown like I am — sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years before the white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands. 

Motionless on the outside. But inside? Silent. Still … “Perhaps Buddha is a woman.” 

So you too. Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, at the eyes so that Life will flow into and not by you. And you can gather, as it passes, the essences, the overtones, the tints, the shadows; draw understanding to your self. And then you can, when Time is ripe, swoop to your feet — at your full height — at a single gesture. Ready to go where? Why … Wherever God motions.

The post On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored by Marita O. Bonner (1925) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

7 Black Women Playwrights of the Early 20th Century

In the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s, and the years just before and after, a notable number of Black women made a name for themselves as writers, playwrights, poets, editors, and journalists. 

Women writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance era were often multifaceted, working as educators, librarians, musicians, and more while at the same time developing their talents in the written and theatrical arts. 

Here we’ll take a look at seven Black women playwrights of the early twentieth century whose works written for the stage are ripe for  rediscovery. For further in-depth overviews of Black women playwrights of the early twentieth century, consult these sources:

Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950 (Kathy A. Perkins, editor). Indiana University Press, 1990.“Angelina Weld Grimké, Mary T. Burrill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Marita O. Bonner: An Analysis of Their Plays” by Doris E. Abramson in Sage, 1985 (This article is excellent, though it requires access to academic libraries via ProQuest)A brief overview of women playwrights whose work rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance era can be found in chapter 1 of Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Prager, 1988. 

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Marita O. Bonner

Marita Odette Bonner (1899 – 1971) was a short story writer, playwright, and essayist. Between 1925 and 1927 she produced a great number of short stories featuring characters from varied cultures navigating urban life.

Bonner was academically talented as well as a gifted pianist and composer. She was one of the earliest Black students at Radcliffe College. Jim Crow wasn’t just limited to the South, Bonner was forced to commute for all of her college years, as Black students weren’t allowed to live on campus. Upon her 1922, graduation, when she was named “Radcliffe’s Beethoven,” Bonner continued to bloom.

She became known for two prize-winning essays — “On Being Young—A Woman— and Colored” (1925) and “Drab Rambles” (1927). In the late 1920s, Bonner wrote three plays, the best known of which was The Purple Flower (1928). Her writing often dealt with the challenges facing Black communities in a racist society.

Marita Bonner continued to write short fiction until 1941, after which she focused on raising her three children as well as teaching high school in Chicago. Find Bonner’s plays in printed form:

The Pot-Maker (A Play to be Read): (Opportunity 5, Feb. 1927: pp. 43-46)
The Purple Flower.(The Crisis 35, Jan. 1928: pp. 202-07)
Exit — An Illusion.(Crisis 36, Oct. 1929: pp. 335-336; 352)

 

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Mary P. Burrill

Mary P. Burrill (1881 – 1946) was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance era; her two plays, considered of cultural significance, were published in 1919. They That Sit in Darkness was published in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, and Aftermath, published in The Liberator, a socialist publication. Aftermath was staged in New York City in 1928 by the Krigwa Players.

Burrill’s theatrical writings were classified as protest plays, as they aimed to advance views on social issues, notably race and gender. Burrill remained a central figure in the Washington, D.C. wing of the Harlem Renaissance movement, where she hosted a literary salon to encourage writers and other creative artists of the movement. She also enjoyed a long career at Dunbar High School, where she taught English and drama and directed plays and musicals.

Burrill’s partner was Lucy Diggs Slowe, who was appointed Dean of Women at Howard University (one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in 1922. They were ahead of their time, living as a couple for twenty-five years, and even bought a house together. Burrill was heartbroken when Slowe died in 1937.

It’s not easy to find the full text of They That Sit in Darkness;  the full text of Aftermath can be read here.

 

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Angelina Weld Grimké

Angelina Weld Grimké (1880 – 1958) was an American essayist, playwright, and poet whose work was frequently featured in The Crisis, the influential journal of the NAACP, and anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance era. She’s best remembered for her poetry and short stories. Themes of race and bias played a prominent role in her poetry and plays.

Rachel (which you can read in full by linking through) was the only play she wrote that was staged, but it was of great historic significance as one of the first public productions of a work by a woman of color. It had its debut in Washington D.C. in 1916 and was formally published in 1920. The program read:

“This is the first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relative to the lamentable condition of the millions of Colored citizens in this free republic.”

Grimké wrote just one other play, Mara, which, like Rachel, dealt with the theme of lynching. It remains unpublished. Rachel was staged in a virtual performance by the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2021.

 

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Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960)  had a dual career as a writer (producing novels, short stories, plays, and essays) and anthropologist. 

Though Zora is better known today for her novels (particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), short stories, and essays, she was a surprisingly prolific playwright. Zora’s plays are far less known than her fiction and nonfiction works, mainly because most remain unpublished and unproduced. Still, they reveal another aspect of her talent and ambition. Most of the following plays can be accessed at the Collection of Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress.

The first play, Meet the Mamma, is dated 1925; the last, Polk County, is from 1944. The rest are dated from 1930 to 1935:

Meet the Mamma: A Musical Play in Three Acts; Cold Keener, a Revue; De Turkey and de Law: A Comedy in Three Acts; Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts (co-written with Langston Hughes); Forty Yards; Lawing and Jawing; Poker!; Woofing; Spunk; Color Struck; Polk County: A Comedy of Negro Life on a Sawmill Camp with Authentic Negro Music in Three Acts.

 

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Georgia Douglas Johnson

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was best known as a poet active during the Harlem Renaissance era, though she also was an avid musician, teacher, and anti-lynching activist. She was one of the first African-American female playwrights and produced four books of poetry. 

It’s estimated that she wrote nearly thirty plays, some of which have been lost along with other portions of her work. Of those, there are some twelve surviving plays. Although none of Georgia’s plays were published in her lifetime, several were staged at community venues such as churches, schools, YMCAs, and such. By the time she delved into writing plays, she had already earned a solid reputation as a published poet with Heart of a Woman and Other Poems (1918) and Bronze (1922).

A comprehensive collection of her surviving plays was published in 2006 — The Plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson: From the New Negro Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. this is the best resource in which to read her plays in full. It contains: Blue Blood; Plumes; Frederick Douglass; Paupaulekejo; Starting Point; A Sunday Morning in the South (white church version); A Sunday Morning in the South (Black church version); Safe; Blue-Eyed Black Boy; And Yet They Paused.

 

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May Miller

May Miller (1899 – 1995) was one of the most widely published female playwrights and poets of the Harlem Renaissance era. Though poetry was her first love, her accomplishments branched out widely. She was the first African-American student to attend Johns Hopkins University and became one of the pioneers in the field of sociology. 

Miller augmented her work as a writer with a distinguished career as a teacher and lecturer in several prestigious institutions. Her major plays addressed colorism within the Black community, Black servicemen, lynching, and other issues of race and class.

Her major works include: The Bog Guide (1925); Scratches (1929); Stragglers in the Dust (1930); Nails and Thorns (1933). These were all republished by Alexander Street Press from 2001 to 2003.  In addition, Miller also wrote many historical plays, four of which (including Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth) were included in the anthology Negro History in Thirteen Plays (1935).

 

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Eulalie Spence

Eulalie Spence (1894 – 1981) was so popular and prolific in her heyday that it’s hard to fathom her decline into obscurity. Like many of her contemporaries who bloomed during the Harlem Renaissance, she was multitalented—a writer and playwright as well as an actress and teacher. She authored some fourteen plays, of which five were published. 

Spence, an immigrant from the British West Indies, believed that plays were meant to be fun and entertaining. Though this went against the prevailing notion that the purpose of all art was to agitate for social justice, she was a highly visible member of the Black theater community of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of its most popular.

Later, Spence became an important mentor to renowned theatrical producer Joseph Papp, who founded The Public Theater and the Shakespeare in the park theater festival in New York City. They encountered one another when she was the only Black teacher in his predominantly white high school; he described her as “the most influential force” in his life. 

Spence’s plays included in this list are from 1923 – 1929, except for The Whipping, which is dated 1934: The Starter; On Being Forty; Foreign Mail; Fool’s Errand; Her; Hot Stuff; The Hunch; Undertow; Episode; La Divina Pastora; The Whipping.

 

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RELATED CONTENT

Renaissance Women: 13 Female Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance to Rediscover and Read

 

The post 7 Black Women Playwrights of the Early 20th Century appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Pure and the Impure by Colette (1932)

The Pure and the Impure by Colette, a strange work first published in 1932, feels less like a novel and more like a series of loosely stitched together character sketches. Indeed it is just that, of the gay and lesbian demimondaine societies in the Paris of Colette’s time. This deep dive into The Pure and the Impure is excerpted from Text Acts: Eroticism in 20th-Century Literature, volume 2* by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.

All but one of the characters are unnamed but are presumably real people that Colette knew. Janet Flanner, who was Paris correspondent for The New Yorker from 1925 onwards, and published plenty of her own sketches of Paris society, said of The Pure and the Impure:

“She used her customary semi-fictional formula to report on the behavior, the mores, reflexes, instincts of women, especially as sentient, desiring creatures drawn to similarities and even to substitutes. Colette, as author, confronts the reader at the same time in a somewhat fierce intimacy, with her personal remembrances, observations, and exact images, all dealing basically with the phenomenon of eroticism.

Colette’s understanding of the male sex amounted to an amazing identification with man per se, to which was added her own uterine comprehension of women, more objective than feminine. One can think of no other female writer endowed with this double comprehension whereby she understood and accepted the naturalness of sex wherever found or however fragmented and re-apportioned. She seemed to have a hermaphroditic duality in her understanding and twofold loyalties.”

Colette is indeed equally at home in the society of adulterous older women, gay men, and transgender women in this book, as no doubt she was in real life. Given that it was published only four years after Radclyffe Hall’s banned and despised The Well of Loneliness, which does not contain any references to sex or sexuality – the furthest it goes is a one-sentence description of a kiss between two women – it seems amazing that Colette’s book was ever published, though it was written in French and published in Paris.

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More about Colette
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Pushing male censors to the limit

It almost seems as if Colette is trying to push every button that would make male censors apoplectic. Close to the beginning, there is a scene of female orgasm: the male censors, even if they admitted that there was such a thing, would hate to see it in print, especially as it takes place in an opium den; drugs and female sex in one scene — horrors!

“The narrow staircase of polished wood creaked under some footsteps, which then sounded on the balcony above me, where could be heard the rustling of silk, the light impact of pillows thrown upon the echoing floorboards, and silence closed in again. But from the depths of this very silence a sound imperceptibly began in a woman’s throat, at first husky, then clear, asserting its firmness and amplitude as it was repeated, becoming clear and full like the notes the nightingale repeats and accumulates until they pour out in a flood of arpeggios …

Up there on the balcony a woman was trying hard to delay her pleasure and in doing so was hurrying it towards its climax and destruction, in a rhythm at first so calm and harmonious, so marked that I involuntarily beat time with my head, for its cadence was as perfect as its melody.”

But wait — there’s worse. We then discover that the woman in question, Charlotte, was not only ‘rather plump and resembled the favourite models of Renoir,’ but that she was ‘probably forty-five years old.’ What? says the censor, going red in the face: even plump, middle-aged women have orgasms?

Apparently, they do, but that is not even the worst of it: it turns out the man involved in the orgasm was a fair-haired boy, much younger than her. And then, just when the censor is about to pass out from apoplexy, the narrator reveals the shocking truth: the woman faked the orgasm to please the boy.

“I recalled the romantic reward she had granted the young lover, the almost public display of pleasure she had made in that nightingale lament, those full notes reiterated again and again, precipitated until their trembling equilibrium broke in a climax of torrential sobbing … I considered the young lover’s happiness was great when measured by the perfect dupery of the woman who thus subtly contrived to give a weak and sensitive boy the very highest concept of himself that a man can have.”

Which is the more outrageous for the male, patriarchal, misogynistic censor: showing a woman having an orgasm with a boy, or showing a woman faking that orgasm? ‘Am I, then,’ she says later, ‘going to find myself, in the first pages of a book, declaring that men are of less use to women than women are to men? We shall see.’ We do and they are.

 

Writing freely about female sexuality

Having now made sure that the censor is dead of a heart attack, Colette feels free to talk freely and in great depth about female sexuality, lesbianism and homosexuality. She even feels free to use the ‘c’ word (le con in French; just to remind you that con is a masculine noun, as are le vagin, le clitoris and l’orgasme).

She is talking here with the British-born, French-speaking Sapphic poet Renée Vivien, the only character in the book who is referred to by her real name, as she was already long dead. They are talking about a male poet. Vivian says, ‘I don’t want to hear any more about him or his verses tonight. He has no talent …’

One of the few straight men Colette knows, whom she calls Damien, is a womanizer, a Don Juan; like all men of this type, he is never satisfied by a woman, never feels any form of partnership or equality with them; he has ‘the same concept of a lover that used to be a characteristic of young girls, who could not imagine a warrior except with his weapon drawn or a lover except one ready at any moment to prove his love.’

He tells her that, ‘on that score the women I’ve known have never had any reason to complain. I educated them well. But as for what they ever gave me in exchange…’ The narrator wonders:

“… what would he have said had he ever met the woman who, out of sheer generosity, fools the man by simulating ecstasy? But I need not worry on that score: most surely he encountered Charlotte, and perhaps more than once. She produced for him her little broken cries, while she turned her head aside, and while her hair veiled her forehead, her cheek, her half-shut eyes, lucid and attentive to her master’s pleasure… The Charlottes of this world nearly always have long hair.”

Having begun the narrative in an opium den, the narrator tells us that, for her, sex is no more dangerous a habit than smoking tobacco, either for men or for women: ‘The habit of obtaining sexual satisfaction is less tyrannical than the tobacco habit, but it gains on one. O voluptuous pleasure, O lascivious ram, cracking your skull against all obstacles, time and again!’

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The Pure and the Impure by Colette
on Bookshop.org*  and Amazon*
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Cross-dressing women

Many of Colette’s circle were women who dressed and acted in the most masculine way possible; after World War I they were very few young men in society and, perhaps subliminally, many cultured and educated lesbians in a certain, closed, secluded part of Paris society, and also of British society, as chronicled by Radclyffe Hall.They filled the void as best they could, though that was not always enough. In the breaking down of class barriers that followed the War, these secluded societies found it far more difficult to hide themselves.

“How timid I was, at that period when I was trying to look like a boy, and how feminine I was beneath my disguise of cropped hair. ‘Who would take us to be women? Why, women.’ They alone were not fooled. With such distinguishing marks as pleated shirt front, hard collar, sometimes a waistcoat, and always a silk pocket-handkerchief, I frequented a society perishing on the margin of all societies.

Although morals, good and bad, have not changed during the past twenty-five or thirty years, class consciousness, in destroying itself, has gradually undermined and debilitated the clique I am referring to, which tried, trembling with fear, to live without hypocrisy, the breathable air of society… The adherents of this clique of women exacted secrecy for their parties, where they appeared dressed in long trousers and dinner jackets and behaved with unsurpassed propriety.”

Many of these cross-dressing women had their girlfriend, their protégée, their petite amie, ‘rather rude young creatures, insinuating and grasping. Not surprising, this, for these ladies in male attire had, by birth and from infancy, a taste for below stairs accomplices.’

But not all of Colette’s acquaintances are comfortable with these cross-dressing women. One says to her, ‘you see, when a woman remains a woman, she is a complete human being. She lacks nothing, even insofar as her amie is concerned. But if ever she gets it into her head to try to be a man, then she’s grotesque.’ For Colette, the only thing of which she disproves is ‘Sapphic libertinage;’ for her, fidelity rather than sexual gratification is the most important thing.

“Two women very much in love do not shun the ecstasy of the senses, nor do they shun a sensuality less concentrated than the orgasm, and more warming. It is this unresolved and demanding sensuality that finds happiness in an exchange of glances, an arm laid on a shoulder, and is thrilled by the odour of sun-warmed wheat caught in a head of hair. These are the delights of a constant companionship and shed habits that engender and excuse fidelity.”

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Text Acts, Vols. 1, 2, &3 on Amazon U.S.*
and Amazon U.K.*
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Colette on Proust

Colette knew Marcel Proust slightly and read all of his works. She doesn’t disapprove of his emphasis on homosexuality, but strongly objects to his portrayal of women. She feels, and indeed demonstrates later in the book, that she has an intimate understanding of the homosexual man, but that he does not have the same understanding of women.

“Ever since Proust shed light on Sodom, we have had a feeling of respect for what he wrote, and would never dare, after him, to touch the subject of these hounded creatures, who are careful to blur their tracks and to propagate at every step their personal cloud, like the cuttlefish.

But – was he misled, or was he ignorant? – when he assembles a Gomorrah of inscrutable and depraved young girls, when he denounces an entente, a collective tea, a frenzy of bad angels, we are only diverted, indulgent, and a little bored, having lost the support of the dazzling light of truth that guides us through Sodom.

This is because, with all due deference to the imagination or the error of Marcel Proust, there is no such thing as Gomorrah. Puberty, boarding school, solitude, prisons, aberrations, snobbishness – they are all seedbeds, but too shallow to engender and sustain a vice that could attract a great number or become an established thing that would gain the indispensable solidarity of its votaries. Intact, enormous, eternal, Sodom looks down from its heights upon its puny counterfeit.”

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Short and Sweet Quotes by Colette
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The language of passion

Colette seems to have been welcomed into the gay male society of Paris, though mainly as an observer. If anything, she considers them more well-adjusted than lesbian society, especially the transgender lesbians who are obsessed with masculinity: gay men are not obsessed with women.

“They allowed me to share with them their sudden outbursts of gaiety, so shrill and revealing. They appreciated my silence, for I was faithful to their concept of me as a nice piece of furniture and I listened to them as if I were an expert. They got used to me, without ever allowing me access to a real affection. No one excluded me – no one loved me. I owe a great deal to their cold friendship, to their fierce critical sense.

They taught me not only that a man can be amorously satisfied with a man but that one sex can suppress, by forgetting it, the other sex. This I had not learned from the ladies in men’s clothes, who were preoccupied with men, who were always, with suspect bitterness, finding fault with men. My strange homosexual friends did not talk about women, except distantly and condescendingly… Absent yet present, a translucent witness, I enjoyed an indefinable piece, accompanied by a kind of conspiratorial pride.

I heard on their lips the language of passion, of betrayal and jealousy, and sometimes of despair – languages with which I was all too familiar, I had heard them elsewhere and spoke them fluently to myself.”

Colette certainly spoke and wrote the languages of passion, one of the first and still one of the best women to do so.

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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The Group by Mary McCarthy (1963)

The Group (1963), is arguably American author Mary McCarthy’s best-known work. Known for trenchant works of fiction and nonfiction, McCarthy likely would not have chosen this juicy, gossipy novel, with elements of autobiography, to be a great part of her lasting legacy, as we’ll see later.

The Group hit the New York Times Bestseller List several weeks after its publication and stayed there for nearly two years. Considered rather scandalous for its time, it touched on issues of contraception, abortion, mental illness, male chauvinism, and lesbian relationships, as experienced by young women in the 1930s.

The book was banned in several countries, but that didn’t deter it from being a huge international hit. The film version of The Group premiered in 1966, featuring a stellar cast (including a breakthrough role for Candice Bergen) and direction by Sidney Lumet.

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Learn more about Mary McCarthy
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A brief synopsis

The book follows the lives of a group of friends from Vassar College (which McCarthy attended), from the time of their graduation in 1933. The young women — Kay, Dottie, Mary, Press, Libby, Elinor (Lakey), Helena, and Polly, are beginning to experience the trials of young adulthood just as America is gripped by the Great Depression. Life unfolds with its joys and triumphs, as well as its sorrows and challenges.

Here’s a succinct description from the 1991 Mariner Books edition:

“Written with a trenchant, sardonic edge, The Group is a dazzlingly outspoken novel and a captivating look at the social history of America between two world wars. Juicy, shocking, witty, and almost continually brilliant.

Mary McCarthy’s most celebrated novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates, known simply to their classmates as ‘the group.’ An eclectic mix of personalities and upbringings, they meet a week after graduation to watch Kay Strong get married. 

After the ceremony, the women begin their adult lives — traveling to Europe, tackling the worlds of nursing and publishing, and finding love and heartbreak in the streets of New York City. 

Through the years, some of the friends grow apart and some become entangled in each other’s affairs, but all vow not to become like their mothers and fathers. It is only when one of them passes away that they all come back together again to mourn the loss of a friend, a confidante, and most importantly, a member of the group.”

 Initial critical reception

The Group was widely reviewed, often with breathless attention to its more controversial details. Male critics were occasionally harsh. Norman Mailer, known for being a chauvinistic jerk, wrote in the New York Review of Books: “Her book fails as a novel by being good but not nearly good enough … she is simply not a good enough woman to write a major novel.”

A 2017 Guardian article reporting on that year’s reissue of The Group, reflected on the book’s impact on McCarthy’s life and reputation:

“For years afterwards, McCarthy received letters from irate readers accusing her of a ‘perverted outlook on life.’ She was shunned by her former university contemporaries, many of whom felt they had been mercilessly pilloried in the book. Despite the fact that The Group went on to top the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years, the experience was still raw enough for McCarthy to admit in a 1989 newspaper interview shortly before her death that she thought The Group had ‘ruined my life.’”

Other critics were kinder, considering the novel for its intrinsic value rather than what the reviewer personally thought of Mary McCarthy. Critic David Boroff wrote: “Miss McCarthy has come through brilliantly. It is sheer exhilaration to watch her nimble intelligence at work, great joy to read her rich and supple prose. The Group clearly is one of the best novels of the decade.” 

Some of the real-life women who were fictionalized — McCarthy’s Vassar classmates — recognized themselves in the novel and were none too happy.

 

A contemporary reconsideration

The long view has been kind to The Group. With the benefit of hindsight, critic Julia Armfield named The Group the best book of 1963 in a 2019 piece in Granta.

A 2019 essay in LitHub by Mikaella Clements directs the contemporary reader to Please Take this Summer to Become Obsessed with the Group — with the tagline, Mary McCarthy’s 1960s novel about the 1930s feels like 2019. She writes that reading The Group is:

“… an obsessive experience, and one that, despite McCarthy’s and the novel’s fame, still feels like discovering a thrilling secret. Its prose shows a master stylist at work, its aesthetics are striking—all ivory-tipped cigarettes, hand-pureed pâté, Vassar socialists in dungarees—and it has a surprise queer romance that twists the whole narrative into new shape. It’s my new standard for a summer read: lavish, hilarious, smart, and mean, like a glamorous friend you’re torn between fearing and crushing on.”

 In Vassar Unzipped, a 2013 Vanity Fair piece celebrating the 50th anniversary of the novel, Laura Jacobs “explores why the book still dazzles as a generational portrait, falters as fiction, and blighted McCarthy’s life.”

Fascinating fact! The Group served as an inspiration for Candace Bushnell for her 1996 novel, Sex and the City, which was the basis, of course, for the massively successful TV series and subsequent films. Bushnell wrote the foreword to a 2009 reissue of The Group.

Other contemporary reconsiderations call The Group “timeless.” Perhaps McCarthy was ahead of her time, but it’s also depressing to think that today’s women continue to struggle with the same issues as those of the 1930s.

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Though it has always received mixed reviews, the 1966 film adaptation
has gained favor as a cultural touchstone.
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A 1963 review of The Group by Mary McCarthy

From the original review in The Kansas City Star, August 25, 1963: Vassar May Confuse Them, But It Can’t Defeat Them: The Group by Mary McCarthy, reviewed by Richard Rhodes:

Ten years in the lives of eight girls, Vassar Class of ’33 — that is The Group, an excellent successor to Mary McCarthy’s earlier novels, witty, gossipy, crammed with artifacts of the 1930s, occasionally cruel, outstandingly realistic.

Besides “The Group” there are also fathers and husbands, babies under rigid feeding schedules, casseroles made with Campbell’s Soup, the new efficiency apartments, and the just-completed Museum of Modern Art. 

That so much paraphernalia can be closet in one book is a triumph of the author’s style, which combines the lilting patois of an Irish washerwoman with the factual journal of a literate anthropologist. The Group’s dated slang, for example, she remembers perfectly.

“Kay and Harald had just about fainted when they heard what Dottie had been up to, behind their backs.” What Dottie has been up to, early in the novel, was a one-night stand with a man she had met only the same afternoon, at Kay’s wedding. Dottie, so innocent that her greatest worry was that Dick didn’t kiss her before they bedded.

This confusion between what Dottie’s Vassar education convinced her is “enlightened,” and what her family life and social values prepared her for, is typical of most of the members of the Group. They are sprung from a college staffed by scientific suffragettes, but they have only half-learned or half-believed, their lessons. 

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The Group on bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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With commendable courage and amusing silliness, they usually muddle through. They often fire their heaviest artillery at small targets, so that the question of whether to get dinner from a can or from mother’s recipe book invariably involves them in the question of whether to be a “new” woman, or, horrors, and old fogy.

When their education fails them they revert to type and valiantly stick together. If Kay has the enlightened daring to be married in a brown dress without the benefit of mother, father, or virginity, they will loyally attend, clucking and a little wide-eyed. 

If everyone insists Polly’s father is a potentially dangerous manic-depressive, Polly will nevertheless take him into her apartment and support as best she can his extravagant eccentricities. 

If Press Hartshorn Crockett is too timid to give in to her natural desires to play with her baby (her pediatrician husband insists it is to be picked up only for feedings), she will still envy and secretly admire Norine, who sunbathes her son naked in Central Park, and feeds him table scraps at three months: “… already he had shown a taste for Italian spaghetti.”

Press and Norine’s conversation in the park, late in the novel, might very well sum up the conflict which enlivens the book:

     “You really think our education was a mistake?” Press asked anxiously. Sloan had often expressed the same view, but that was because it had given her ideas he had disagreed with.

     “Oh, completely,” said Norine. “I’ve been crippled for life.” She stretched.

Norine could stretch in boredom at Priss’s question. Norine, a non-Group girl, survived Vassar almost untouched, reverting to type soon after graduation — she is slovenly, sensual, relaxed, and often immoral. She doesn’t have the conflicts that Press and The Group have.

But how much even they are “crippled for life” remains, Mary McCarthy makes clear, to be seen. Sooner or later most of them learn to manage the plain business of life —marriage, family problems, money problems babies, keeping house. Probably all survived to become good citizens and settled members of their appropriate social class, with babies and suburban homes and second cars and nostalgic memories of their years at Vassar.

Since society and their education were mutually exclusive, most of the Group undoubtedly found it easier to jettison the latter.

All except Mary McCarthy, Vassar class of ’33, who now can claim among her many charms and curios the honor of having elevated the inflections of girlish gossip to the level of an effective, ambient prose style. 

An Irish orphan girl from Seattle with a good ear and a forthright pen, she now lives with her husband in Paris. And after all these years she has finally got “The Group” together again.

More about The Group A Critical Reading of The Group Mary McCarthy’s The Group: Three Queer Readings Reader discussion on Goodreads

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