“It’s a Wonderful World”:  Claudette Colbert As Poetess

 

Claudette Colbert

 ” You’ve got a super-degenerate’s face.” – Claudette Colbert in It’s a Wonderful World

Yes, well, I said I’d do it and I’m doing it. A lot of this work is simply writing in my diary, which is an act of rebellion, because it doesn’t follow any particular thread, nor does it take the form of a blog post.   I’m scribbling about pop culture, about how it’s changed in my lifetime, and about the snappy studio movies of the 1930s and ‘40s. I am dismayed to observe that Covid has vanquished smart comedies for adults. In fact, there are no movies for adults. The theater posters push superheroes, horror, and science fiction.  The best of the lot was the Star Wars marathon on May 4:  “May the Fourth Be With You!”

I miss going to theaters. Like many movie-goers, I frequented the “art” theaters that showed a mix of classic films and foreign films.  One night it would be Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, the next night Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard, and then Bergman’s long, very long drama, Scenes from a Marriage.   

In today’s tragic, beautiful world, I turn to screwball comedies. These comedies of the studio era, many made during the Depression, distracted audiences from bank failures, drought, and homeless hoboes. 

But comedies trump everything else, in my book.  Well, humor is buoyant:  it lifts our mood, it no doubt gets the endorphins doing whatever they do.  One of my favorite actresses is Claudette Colbert, who was droll and adorable but not exactly beautiful – not to be mistaken for a Barbie doll.  She was a smart actress with comic timing that makes every scene snap. 

Her most famous movie is It Happened One Night (1934), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. It is a charming, perfect film, directed by Frank Capra, an  “on the lam” movie in which Colbert plays a spoiled young heiress who runs away from her controlling father and finds herself on a bus with Clark Gable, a reporter, who wants an exclusive story on her. He rides with her and promises to protect her, as while the police and reporters frenetically pursue her.  As you might expect, this mismatched couple fall in love.  This trope works well in the movies and let us hope in life too.

And then there’s It’s a Wonderful World (1939), a movie no one remembers, in which Claudette Colbert  has one of her best roles, Edwina Corday, a witty poetess. She constantly uses the word “poetess,” which is funny in itself, and which confounds Jimmy Stewart, who plays Guy Johnson, a Private Investigator on the lam, because he is accused of a murder he is innocent of.  Never mind how she accidentally got involved with him, but Guy,  who is an uncultured chap, finds the poetry gig incomprehensible.  “That’s all?”   “Yes, that’s all I do.”  And throughout the film, she recites odd little whimsical poems at strange moments, a short ditty while peeping gamine-like out of a porthole on a boat at Jimmy Stewart.  It’s like looking at a very cute three-dimensional greeting card. 

Jimmy Stewart and Claudette Colbert in It’s a Wonderful World.

When Guy tries to get rid of her so she will be out of danger (and because she is in the way), she replies, “If anything happens, the publicity will help my poems enormously.” This isn’t so much a  wisecrack as modest vanity (an oxymoron, but apt).   Edwina loves being Guy’s fellow PI almost as much as she loves her poetry.

I had forgotten how charming young Jimmy Stewart is, so lanky and handsome. Colbert, in this film, manages to be slightly eccentric, absurd in the sunglasses she hides behind as a disguise, and in her trim but slightly schoolmarmish blouses with shoulder pads and a bowtie.

And there is a reference to Adam and Eve when, after spending the night outdoors, she points out an apple orchard and suggests they pick apples for breakfast. 

“They’re tame apples.  You don’t have to shoot them,” she says.

The great thing about a modern Adam and Eve is that they aren’t kicked out of the garden.  They make one for themselves.  The two are equal:  in the final scene (or one of the final scenes)  Guy is beating up the murderer and Edwina is pummeling the murderer’s female partner.

The two are equals, and though mismatched, we know that they will marry. The poetess and the P.I. How cute.

And happily ever after, we hope.

My Chic Pop Summer: Madonna, Myrna Loy, Mysteries & Musings

As a bibliomaniac, you love paper-related activities but shouldn’t you get out more?  Then you read a long review in The New York Review of Books of a biography of Madonna and realize that everything can change if The New York Review of Books devotes that much space to a celebrity biography.

Madonna with Regis and Kelly (the hat incident!)

And so you sit down to scribble in your journal.  But it seems vaguely moronic because you actually wrote the sentence:  Be more like Madonna!  Does Madonna keep a journal?  If so, good for her. You remember her book, Sex, which the librarian kept behind the counter. And on Kelly and Regis in 2003,  Regis asked Madonna if he could have her hat, and what could she do but give it to him? 

So how can you change your life?   You are not going to join the Catholic Workers, because their work is too arduous.  You could take up bowling. You could go birding, but what kind of word is “birding”? Still, you would keep a bird list, and if paper is involved, I’ll do it.

And you realize that you want to explore pop culture, with the help of paper.

So I’m going pop, but I will not go paper-free.

ACTIVITIES FOR MY POP CULTURE SUMMER

William Powell, Asta, and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man

Pop Activity 1.  Investigate the lives of Myrna Loy and William Powell, famous for their roles as Nick and Nora in the film version of The Thin Man and its sequels.  Surely somebody has written about them, but if not you must write an article for The New York Review of Books.  You pray that you won’t have to research in L.A. because you hear their transit system is deficient.

Pop Activity 2.  Take long hikes because you’re 10 or 20 percent sure you will hike the Appalachian Trail in the future.  Reread two hiking memoirs, Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and Cheryl Strayd’s Wild.  Bryson’s approach – hike, then give up, then walk a little more– suits my life-style, but Strayd is a heroine who walked the whole Pacific Crest trail.

Pop Activity 3.  Read the Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics series.  These reissued novels. written and set during World War II, vary in literary quality but are fascinating.  Fans of middlebrow novels and history will curl up and lose themselves in this series. 

Pop Activity 4.  Did I say birding?  Yes.  With my new birding notebook.

Pop Activity 5.  Do you read a mystery a day?  Please recommend!  I love Golden Age Detective novels but would like to read contemporary mysteries.  The only names that come to mind are Elly Griffiths, Janet Evanovich, and Mick Herron. 

The Culture of Women’s Love:  “Her Side of the Story,”  by Alba de Cespedes

 I have read quite a lot in translation lately. 

My new favorite novel is Her Side of the Story, by the Italian writer Alba de Cespedes, translated by Jill Foulston.  You may have read de Cespedes’s Forbidden Notebook, which was published last year.

Her Side of the Story is longer and deeper, a brilliant, half-mythic sketch of the culture of Italian girls and their mothers in the 1930s and ‘40s, and an exploration of the women’s universal disappointment in married love. 

Published in 1949, this elegant novel is narrated by Alessandra Torregiani. She is looking back at her past as a solitary young girl who adores her mother, a former concert pianist and an itinerant piano teacher.  In the first third of the book, Alessandra describes her impoverished girlhood in an apartment building where all the women are neglected by their husbands and most have lovers. It is a bit surreal:  all these women dreaming of love, waiting to experience what marriage promised and failed to deliver.  No one judges the adulteresses: even Alessandra and her friend, Fulvia, knew the lovers by sight, and  Fulvia’s mother has a lover, known as the Captain.  And later Alessandra’s beautiful mother, who is happiest when her husband is absent, falls in love with Hervey, the older brother of one of her students, who shares her passion for music.  This does not end well:  there is a shattering event that affects the rest of Alessandra’s life.  But certainly this pattern of true love, then marriage, then disappointment in married love, is repeated throughout the novel.

De Cespedes writes both dreamily and painfully about the cycle of women in love. Of course Alessandra forgets her observations about marriage when she falls in love with Francesco Minelli, a professor, in 1941.  Their love is an idyll, and she assumes it will continue so after marriage.  But he is never at home: they no longer take long walks on weekends or go to cafes.  He is a radical university professor, involved in the Resistance, and devotes all his time to going to secret meetings.  Alessandra has a secretarial job, and is also a literature student, but she is alone and lonely in the apartment.  There is no women’s community in this apartment house, as there was in her childhood home. She still loves Francesco obsessively, but can’t get his attention. Eventually, he loses his job. But as he becomes more and more involved in dangerous anti-fascist politics, she is increasingly disappointed and upset by their deteriorating relationship.

De Cepesdes’s lucid, pitch-perfect narration of depression and obsession will make you grieve for Alessandra’s disappointment in love, and for all the other women’s disappointment in love.

Here is an example of the insightful, beautifully-written prose.

I was no longer interested in a degree. I preferred to read with no order or plan, although only regular, methodical study drew Francesco’s attention. I wanted to stay at home with him, he with his books and I with mine, but he was always busy these days, nervous and easily irritated. I once heard him talking on the radio, and when I heard him say, in our rooms, things that had nothing to do with us or our affairs, he seemed to be truly lost. He was always seeing people and pursuing interests that were different from me. He was locked in his world, finding life and passion in it: everything that had been our world no longer interested him.

Jill Foulston’s translation is superb. I loved this book and strongly recommend it. And I hope more of de Cespedes’s books will be translated soon.

Betty and Veronica: A Competitive Female Friendship

Comic books used to be for guys. There were superhero comics, military comics, and spy comics, based on TV shows.  With the exception of R. Crumb and an omnibus edition of Cathy, the last comic book I read was The Six-Million-Dollar Man, based on a TV show about an invincible man rebuilt from robotic parts. I read it for a paper I was writing on the Prometheus myth in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and pop culture.

But my studies of pop culture lay in the future.  The pick of the comic books for girls was  Betty and Veronica. I would read almost anything:  (a) Nancy Drew, (b) Little Women, and (c), The World Book Encyclopedia.   But what doesn’t fit with the others? Betty and Veronica, a spin-off from the Archie comics, which made its debut in 1950.  

Betty and Veronica were among the few female protagonists of comic books. As role models, however, I am sure they were failures. I can imagine mothers banning Betty and Veronica, because they reinforce sexual stereotypes of boy-crazy girls, yadda, yadda, yadda.  And in the old comics, the girls’ friendship was twisted, but that made it exciting, because we were always on Betty’s side.   Veronica, a spoiled, rich, malevolent brunette competes with her “friend,” blond, ponytailed, nice Betty. for dates with Archie.  Here is Leslie Fiedler’s literary trope, “dark lady, light lady.” (The dark lady is bad, the light lady is good.) For some reason Betty’s hair is green on the internet, but that was not the case on the printed page!

I never got the thing about Archie.  He’s a nice, freckled, red-haired boy with the sex appeal of a flying squirrel.  But dating is what girls do in Archie’s world. And there’s not much to choose from in Riverdale. 

Jughead, Archie’s nerdy best friend, is funny, so he might be my pick; but Reggie is a devious male version of Veronica, with less personality; and Moose is big and dumb.  As for the girls, Veronica has advantages in terms of clothing and travel, but Betty is nice and normal, and very smart, at least in her latest incarnation. It’s pretty much a tie between them as far as Archie is concerned.

Betty and Veronica used to be funnier. I suspect that the humor has been watered down for reasons of political correctness.  Veronica is no longer the treacherous vamp, though she is still malicious, and Betty is brainier than I remembered, at the top of the honor roll. The episode I enjoyed the most in a 1989 comic book (see frame at top of post ) shows Betty struggling to open the locker for a weak boy named Dilton, and his unabridged dictionary falls on her head.  This gives Betty ESP! 

In another less inspired episode, Veronica is allowed to run her dad’s business empire for the day. Much to everyone’s surprise, Veronica wears a man’s business suit in order to be ironic, saucy, and fashionable.  But everybody mistakes her for a man. Some young boys call out, “Betty has a boyfriend!” In this strange episode, super-feminine Veronica for the first time is not deemed feminine. The next day she traipses down the stairs of her mansion in a negligee.

I cannot pretend these make good reading now, but once upon a time… and I suppose someone still reads them.

A Life-Changing Feminist Anthology:  “50 Years of ‘Ms.'”

I have been flicking through 50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution, an anthology of articles from the first mainstream American feminist magazine, founded in 1972.

Ms. meant a great deal to me when I was young.  My friends and I were rebels without a clue who defied society in summer by going braless and not shaving our legs.

Body hair is a trivial issue, but shaving legs was a real crisis for me.  On the first day of seventh grade, the male math teacher ranted  about the disgust he felt for girls who did not shave their legs.   I went home and cried. Was I the only one targeted? Were others also ashamed? And so I shaved my legs – but only sporadically.

Later I became aware of the Women’s Liberation movement, and learned some mechanisms for coping with sexism. The thoughtful high school principal, whose name, alas, I do not remember, kindly gave me a copy of Ms. magazine. Ms. was, if not life-changing, at least a confirmation of the double standard confronting women. This eclectic Ms. anthology abounds with brilliant articles from 1972-2022 about the politics of housework, the condescending nature of male etiquette toward women,  the plight of  women on welfare, the FBI’s investigation of feminist groups, and a woman’s father transitioning into a woman as the writer was undergoing puberty. 

Some of the founders of Ms.

There is even a very timely article about grammar, concerning the use of pronouns.   In the 1985 article, “Solving the Great Pronoun Debate,” Marie Shear writes about the problem of  sexist language.  She believes that the simplest solution to sexist pronouns is to use “they,” “their,” and “them” instead of the third person singular.  I disagree, but the “third-pronoun singular” war continues to be waged this century in the LGBTQ+ community.

I will end this post with a fascinating item from the monthly column, “Lost Women,” in 1972, by  Gerda Lerner, a historian who was a founder of the academic field of Women’s History. She poses the following challenge.

Name ten women who have made important contributions to American history and development.  (Please:  no presidents’ wives, writers, or opera singers – and no one living today. )  If this was difficult, try naming ten men. Easy?  Does that suggest something to you?  There is a good deal wrong with the history you were taught, the textbooks you read in high school and college, and the culture that has largely ignored what women have experienced and contributed to human development.  It is time to change the narrow, male-centered view of the past, to redefine history as the history of men and women…. Women have a right to their history too.”

I can glibly name some women politicians (Nancy Pelosi), a Supreme Court justice (Ruth Bader Ginsburg),  an astronaut (Sally Ride), and Emma Goldman (anarchist and birth control proponent), but three of the four women are celebrities, which may show that I do not have a good handle on women’s history.

And judging from my news feed online,  Taylor Swift is the most important  American woman of the 21st century. This is not, by the way, the goal of the brilliant, popular Ms. Swift, whom I admire, but celebrity spins out of control and people begin to confuse singers and actors with those other powerful women we have such difficulty naming.  (Please name them if you can!)

The first issue of Ms. was published in 1972, and I was surprised to learn it is still around.. Ms. did not incite a revolution, but it is still keeping women abreast of the issues.

Who Killed My Dad? 

“The greatest misfortune is not to have a true friend.” – Alexander Griboedov

Not my dad!

First, let it be said that I did not attend my dad’s funeral.  That sounds cold, and it wasn’t personal exactly, but our relationship was problematic.  He was an unreliable guy:  one minute he’d plan to visit me on my birthday, the next he’d call it off, deciding instead to attend a  production of Annie directed by his niece, a Wiccan schoolteacher.  One does tire of the Wiccan cousins on my dad’s side of the family but perhaps they charmed him with toads or magic herbs. 

I cannot pretend Dad was a delightful companion.  One Sunday afternoon when I was 15, I returned  from a 25-mile Hike for Hunger.   “Where have you been?” He did not believe in the Hike for Hunger. He insisted that I had been with a boyfriend.  

“Do you want to see my blisters?” 

That was being “mouthy.” so he threw me down on the floor and beat me up.  It was terrifying, and confusing, my face was on the floor and I could hardly breathe.  I never collected the Hike for Hunger pledge money from friends’ parents, because I was so sickened by what had happened that I felt ashamed to collect.

Then there was my college fund.  Who knew I had one?  I didn’t know.  I had a loan, a grant, and a job, but during that final crunch of senior year the job became too much. “Well, there’s the college fund,” he said. A college fund?  Best not to ask why he’d never told me; best to accept the $100 or so and never mention it again. 

Here is the kind of dad he was:  he could not identify me in a photograph.  Once he showed us a home movie, filmed by a distant relative, and said, “There you are!” of some random child who was not me.  In another scene, there I was,  a happy little girl beaming at a picnic table, wearing a nice dress and with my hair curled, the way Mom did to impress his “feckless” relatives.  My husband thought I looked adorable, but neither of us bothered to tell Dad because HE JUST WOULDN’T CARE.

Anyway, let’s cut to the chase. My dad had a lot of enemies.  That sounds paranoid, but is it?  He and his late wife’s children were suing and counter-suing over his late wife’s estate in the weeks before his death. Decades ago, a woman sued hm for sexual harassment. When I was a child, he was sued for knocking out a guy’s teeth in a fight over a woman. (My poor middle-class mother went through hell over this.) He probably pissed off a lot of  other people too because he was so inappropriate in his speech. I assumed he and his relatives were fighting over an estate consisting of just a few items, a  car, an RV, and something called a pole barn.  Much later, and much to my dismay, I learned that there were other assets.

It was the email about Dad’s death that turned me momentarily into Sara Paretsky’s detective, V. I. Warshawski.  My informant wrote, “There was some kind of accident.  We’ve decided against an autopsy because of his age and health issues.” 

AUTOPSY!  Why on earth would they consider an autopsy?  What kind of accident was this?  Is an autopsy standard form?  Had someone killed him?

We hope not.  We sincerely hope not.  I can imagine some of the feckless relatives circling like vultures over his car, RV, and pole barn.  Dad had, in fact, warned me against some of his relatives, particularly the compulsive liar in the family. “He/she says a lot of things, but none of them are true.”  I should have paid more attention to that warning, but I had only seen the liar eight times in my life. Nine max.

I now have to pray for Dad every night, though, because I’m anxious and sad about what might not have been a good end.  He once told me a person was lucky if he had one friend in the world.  He was talking about himself.   A poet friend who passed through his life fleetingly told me: “He’s the loneliest man I’ve ever met.”

Like most daughters, I yearned for my father’s love but I’m not sure that emotion was part of his psychology. I don’t think he understood other people’s feelings. He was intent on having fun. I know he enjoyed his life and travels for many, many years. And then suddenly he was old.

Perhaps he lived the best life he could.

The Grammar of Sleep

Some would say that there is no grammar of sleep.  I would have to disagree.  I often parse the grammar of sleep. These “dream” narratives are driven by moods of verbs:  the indicative mood of the verb (“I read”), the subjunctive mood (“I would read”), the infinitive mood (“to read); and the imperative mood (“Read!”)

Struggle 26 is one of my common sleep narratives.  The first time I opened this “book,” I tossed and turned.  Couldn’t I escape the struggle in the dream, before my whole life became a struggle?  Because when you struggle to sleep, when you’ve tried everything, when you’ve eaten turkey as a sleep aid, drunk warm milk, done yoga, and nothing works?  You would be surprised at how lack of sleep slows your responses. 

Struggle 26: I struggled over whether to stay in a college town I loved, completely resigned to underemployment, or move to a city to become an underpaid professional.  Which choice did I make?  Was it a good choice?  Was it the wrong choice?  Can “I struggle” become “I refuse to struggle”?  Should “I struggled” have become “Keep struggling!”? 

Struggle 26 was neither a dream nor a narrative. It was the imperative of a verb, a command:  “Struggle!”

 Mind you, these sleep narratives are not real books, and have a different meaning for every “reader.”  They are dream books.  They form a kind of narrative of sleep, if sleep had a narrative, which is improbable, nay, impossible, if your dreams ramble like mine.    Dreams do not tell what I call a coherent story.  They are more like broken myths.  They make half sense, have a half life.

A dream I have had over and over I call The House of Sleep. Perhaps it was the house of sleep because I seldom got there.  In my first dream I opened a book.  It was an old-fashioned album, filled with pictures of houses I’d never seen, captions I’d never read.  The first picture: I am sitting in front of a cottage on a beach, cackling over a book. Judging from the laughter, it is Cornelius Otis Skinner’s The Ape in Me.

But then  I turned a page and was panicked by a photo of myself, older, silver-haired, unrecognizable, in fact, except for my awareness that this was, or would be my future self. I was surrounded by lexicons and grammars, translating a cache of lovely new Latin poetry discovered by an archaeologist (were the poems real, or fake?) and given to me to read. But when that task was done, I would be given clay tablets written in a nonexistent, magical language. Why me? Why why why? Tolkien? Star Trek? What was I thinking?

Then I realized I could translate the nonsense if I MADE MY WAY TO A 24-HOUR GLASS RECTANGULAR EXTERIOR SMOKING LOUNGE at Indiana University Library, where I did some of my best work.

This lounge, however, no longer exists.

And then I remember my most important dream: Struggle 26.

Lynne Reid Banks, Author of “The L-Shaped Room,” Dead at 94

Lynne Reid Banks

Lynne Reid Banks, one of my favorite English writers, died April 4 at the age of 94.  She is best-known for her 1960 classic, The L-Shaped Room, about an unmarried woman who gets pregnant.  The single narrator, Jane Graham, a former actress who works in PR, moves into a rooming house after she is castigated by her father for getting pregnant. The rooming house is noisy and infested with bugs.  But the other roomers, some of them quite eccentric, are very kind and accept her pregnancy. 

To honor Lynne Reid Banks’s memory, I am re-posting my mini-essay about one of her later novels.

The Warning Bell, by Lynne Reid Banks

Lynne Reid Bank’s 1986 novel, The Warning Bell, is almost as brilliant as The L-Shaped Room, and treats similar issues.  Like Jane in The L-Shaped Room, Maggie, the heroine of The Warning Bell, Maggie, is besotted with theater, and like Jane, she gets pregnant.

The heroine, Maggie, feels guilty much of the time.  Raised in Scotland by a strict father and a gentle, fearful mother, Maggie feels split: at home she is Margaret Robertson, her parents’ dull daughter, and outside she is bright Maggie, who is entertaining and takes chances.  Encouraged by an impulsive English teacher, Maggie takes a big chance.  She accepts her father’s money, pretending to take a domestic science course in London for two years, while she is actually going to drama school.

Being an actress is not easy.  And Maggie frequently hears the voice of her alter-ego Margaret telling her to slow down and be sensible.  She gets some good roles in a repertory company, but cannot find work in London.  If not for her flamboyant friend, Tanya, a more talented actress, she feels she would have gone crazy. But the two argue and split up when pregnant Maggie decides to marry the man who date-raped her and emigrate to Africa.

Being a woman seems to be all about splitting selves. Reid writes about the split between career and motherhood, the split between living in Britain and Africa.  The section in Africa reminds me of Doris Lessing’s A Proper Marriage–what happens when you live in a provincial town and you fail as a mother, or feel that you fail?  After her husband leaves her, Maggie and her son Matt return to London, where Maggie makes some difficult decisions about careers and motherhood, some of which she regrets. 

As Maggie’s mother says to her, “You know, Maggie, the vainest and most futile mental exercise in the world is tracing back some accident or blunder to its origins, and letting one’s heart gnaw itself in regret that one didn’t know what was going to result….  One’s whole life can turn on some tiny thing.  It’s not fair.  there ought to be a bell, a warning bell, sounding at dangerous corners.  But there never, never is.”

Maggie’s mother is wise.  There ought to be a warning bell. Lynne Reid Banks empathized with her women characters as they break taboos and make very human mistakes.

Is The Personal Political?  Women’s Publishing 2024

“It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.” – “The Personal Is Political,” by Carol Hanisch, 1969

 I do not remember how I became familiar with the saying, “The Personal Is Political.” I must have picked it up from an anthology, or perhaps from my friend’s feminist mother, a Women’s Studies professor, because Doris Lessing, my favorite writer, never used this jargon; nor was it the kind of thing we said at our short-lived (two meetings!) consciousness raising group in high school. And yet the slogan was around, as was “Tell it like it is.”

I have always admired the alliterative quality of “The Personal Is the Political,” a radical saying coined in the 1960s .  The sound and meter are not to be underestimated.   I would not mind having it on a button (though it would be a crowded button).

Women were speaking out in the ‘60s and ‘70s, “telling it like it is,” lobbying for legal abortion, free day-care, and equal pay for equal work, only one of which demands was ever met, legalized abortion, but now that has been taken away, too.  So telling it like it is and The Personal Is Political were powerful ideas but do we dare talk about them nowadays? It’s a bit awkward in a red state.

Still, the feminists made strides in the twentieth century. One of the most important offshoots of the Second Wave was the founding of women’s  presses and publishing companies. In 1970 in New York  The Feminist Press was established. It began by reprinting neglected women’s classics like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,  Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills, Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy (SF), and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio. Nowadays The Feminist Press has expanded its list to publish Barbara Ehrenreich and other non-fiction, as well the entertaining Femmes Fatales series, which includes pulp classics like Laura, Stella Dallas, and Now, Voyager.    

The Feminist Press had a leftist political agenda, so it cannot quite be compared to the women’s presses that sprang up in the UK.  Still, something was simmering in England, too.  The writer  Carmen Calil founded Virago in 1970, and soon began to publish neglected women’s classics.  And much later, in 1999, a rival women’s press, Persephone, dedicated mostly to publishing interwar women’s books, was founded by Nicola Beauman.

I’ve never heard of “Winged Seeds” (this is aomeone else’s collectiion)

Virago has the more “intellectual” list of the two British women’s presses.  Several of the books in the Virago Modern Classics series are really, truly classics (Mrs. Oliphant’s absorbing Chronicles of Carlingford, Elizabeth Taylor’s beautifully-written novels and short stories), while others were published because of their historical significance (Storm Jameson’s intelligent novels. Vera Brittain’s political novels), still others capture the zeitgeist of the ’60s (Nell Nunn’s Poor Cow, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado).   On this impressive list, you will also find titles by  Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell), Barbara Comyns, Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West, Penelope Mortimer, Dorothy Baker, Kay Boyle, and Stevie Smith.  Over the years I have read but then prudently weeded several Viragos, not without regret.

And then there is Persephone, founded in 1999, not a direct descendant of Second Wave feminism, or not that I know of. I am less familiar with Persephone, but its charming interwar women’s novels strike me  as “cozier” than Viragos and Feminist Press titles.   

Nicola Beauman, the founder, is a literary scholar of interwar fiction, and her company in the early years seemed to have a brilliant marketing strategy: it appealed to women’s nostalgia by publishing adult books by the writers of children’s classic, two by Frances Hodgson Burnett, one by Noel Streatfeild, and one by Dorothy Canfield Fisher.  And then loyal customers bought her more literary novels. I was won over by two novels by Monica Dickens, one of my favorite writers, especially The Winds of Heaven, a classic about the fate of an older woman.  (A. S. Byatt wrote the introduction, or perhaps it was an afterword.) And it was a stroke of genius to reprint the once popular Dorothy Whipple, whose character-driven novels reflect deep insights into marriage, women’s wounded psyches, and the terrifying meaning of a dysfunctional family. 

Persephone’s publication of Dorothy Whipple represents the difference between Persephone and  Virago, or so Carmn Calil told  the Guardian.  She said that Virago never crossed “the Whipple line,”  implying that Whipple was an inferior writer. And much as I enjoyed my recent reading of a novel by Dorothy Whipple, I do understand the concept of “the line.”  Yet Virago and Persephone often overlap, both publishing books by Penelope Mortimer and Rachel Ferguson, for instance. And in recent years Virago has indeed crossed some kind of line by publishing Angela Thirkell’s light, humorous Barsetshire series.

It is a rich age for women’s publishing. I can lose myself in modern feminist theory or Stella Dallas from the Femmes Fatales series from the Feminist Press,  a Virago edition of a favorite novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. or an intelligent, entertaining novel by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone), whom, by the way, I read with enthusiasm.

Drink and Debauchery:  George Moore’s “A Mummer’s Wife”

Perhaps you are familiar with George Moore’s Esther Waters, a curiously modern Victorian novel that tells the story of a servant girl who, seduced and deserted by a fellow employee, struggles to survive as a single mother. 

The influence of Zola’s naturalism permeates his books, which sets them apart from most Victorian novels. I recently devoured A Mummer’s Wife, Moore’s complex novel about the theater life and alcoholism. This virtually forgotten novel is stunning, just short of being a masterpiece. 

Moore is a bold storyteller, unafraid of tackling dark subjects.  Indeed, A Mummer’s Wife shares common elements with Zola’s L’Assommoir, a novel about alcoholism and its destruction of a family. Moore’s tragic novel charts an ordinary woman’s descent into alcoholism. What begins as the story of a naive, weary seamstress at the beck and call of her asthmatic husband turns into a romantic elopement with an actor and her brief rise to stardom and rapid downfall.   

Moore’s understanding of the destructive power of alcohol drives the characters and plays havoc with lives. At the beginning there is is no alcohol at all in the home where lovely Kate Ede, a talented dressmaker, lives with her husband and mother-in-law.  She often feels like a drudge and a slave, as she stays up all night to nurse her asthmatic husband, Ralph.  It is as though she has two jobs, nursing and running a full-time business as a seamstress. His asthma attacks frighten both of them, but he is bad-tempered with Kate, blaming her for opening windows and doors, though he may himself have requested that she do so.

To make extra money for the household, the Edes have decided to rent out rooms to theater people.  Mrs. Ede, Kate’s mother-in-law, fears their tenants will be immoral, but Ralph snaps at her, saying they need the money and that is that.  All are surprised by the charm and considerateness of their tenant, Dick Lennox, the director of the theater company. He is the most charming person they have ever met. And soon Kate is desperately in love.

But the sleepless Kate must also worry about business: she agonizes over the knowledge that she can’t make the deadline for an important customer’s dress. Fortunately, her laid-back, chatty assistant, Miss Hender, distracts her from her problems.  Miss Hender is full of salacious gossip about the traveling theater company. Her boyfriend is an actor.

Kate likes Miss Hender, but is disturbed by her “coarseness.”  Kate would love to go to the theater herself, but can’t see how she can leave Ralph alone with his mother.  Miss Hender, who is comically direct, like a bawdy character in a Restoration comedy, speaks to Kate as if not fully realizing the bond of marriage.

“But what’s the use of his coming if you can’t get out?  A man always expects a girl to be able to go out with him.  The ‘hag’ is sure to be about, and even if you did manage to give her the slip, there’s your husband.  Lord!  I hadn’t thought of that before.  What frightful luck!  Don’t you wish he’d get ill again? Another fit of asthma would suit us down to the ground.”

Kate is shocked, and I, too, am scandalized by Miss Hender’s babbling.

Kate thought it very provoking that Miss Hender could never speak except in that coarse way.  She was a very nice girl in her way; very good-hearted, and it would be nice, convenient indeed, to be friendly with her but if she could not keep from making nasty remarks, there was no help for it but to treat her just as a workwoman at so much a day.

Ironically, Kate’s morals are soon more compromised than Miss Hender’s.  She runs away with Dick, though she is reluctant to leave her mother-in-law, Mrs. Ede, her best friend, and she feels guilty about leaving Ralph, who has recovered from his asthma and is his old affectionate self.

But she adores Dick, and finds the theater life so exciting that she forgets her former life. She takes piano and singing lessons and begins to act on the stage. She likes being a star, but during hard times the company disbands. And while Dick struggles to establish a new theater company in London, Kate stays alone in drab rooms in a grimy suburb and takes to drink

One forgets that women can be just as violent as men when they drink. Soon she is making drunken scenes in public – even at Dick’s theater – accusing him of having affairs with women. She is also violent, and attacks him even in the theater..

 This is a bold, very modern novel about the disintegration of a woman’s personality in the hell of drink. And Kate becomes a harridan. The sweet Kate Ede has disappeared, killed by alcohol All that is left is a hard carapace.

And one cannot help but think that the theater is part of the cause. She can’t cope with anonymity after the excitement of stardom. And certainly no one can cope with days and nights all alone, with no work, with no acquaintances, with no hope of change.

So who is the monster? Well, Kate… but it is the drink.

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