A Literary Letter from America

The advantage of the sandwich over set dishes is that it is easier for the cook to prepare and easier for the eater to take — especially if he is in a hurry, or has grown tired of rich foods and wants a change of taste and a bite on the run. So I have not hesitated to squeeze this literary sandwich in among the assorted dishes my dear reader is accustomed to enjoying at the table of "The Woman's Voice"; and if this flavor should trouble my reader, I would remind her that if she returns after it to the other dishes in the magazine, she will "relish" their flavor more than she has been used to relishing it — and I shall thereby have served her, and served my fellow cooks in our great restaurant.

This piece, then, is not a criticism of the books that will appear in it, but a presentation of them and an introduction of the reader to them, built upon what the commentators have said of those books and what the literary circles are saying about them. In my choice of them I have confined myself to some of what has appeared during the month by way of works by women writers, or by personalities who have shone in one facet of life or another.

*

The first book is entitled "Tallulah," in which the actress Tallulah Bankhead has recounted her life. Tallulah is a singular phenomenon in modern American society: a woman whose name has overshadowed the names of many of the country's men and women — not because she is a politician, or a philanthropist, or an inventor, or a woman of letters, or a woman of business, but because she has a most endearing personality. She appears on the stage and captivates all the spectators, even when she acts in failed plays; she stands out in society, and its shining figures hasten to gather round her; she talks in her loud voice, and every sentence is a well-turned joke that the newspaper columns snatch up and that finds its way, after a while, into books. It is not so very hard for a person to attain fame during his lifetime; but it is very hard indeed for anyone to become a legend while still alive. Yet Tallulah Bankhead is today, and has long been, a legend: the people of the country pass her name from mouth to mouth, tell stories about her, true or fabricated, and almost know more about her than she knows about herself. She could drop the last part of her name and roam the Western world wherever she pleased, and no bank would hesitate to cash her drafts! And she herself has helped to create the legend: those troublesome lion cubs she keeps as other women keep dogs or a cat; that immortal voice in which she whispers so that the neighbors hear; that boldness joined to unconcern which marks her, and which moves her to call the one-eyed man one-eyed and an adversary — let us say "adversary," and not use the word she uses; and those love affairs that rival the loves of history's great lovers — all these have made of Tallulah a legend whose name, if it appears in an article, guarantees its writer readers. What, then, when the legend speaks of herself — and in a large, comprehensive book?

The subject of the book, this being so, is known to a great multitude of readers. Part of it is known to them by hearsay, because no one would ever dare put it in writing for fear of prosecution on a charge of libel and slander. But the important thing is that the heroine herself should recount the events, in her own particular style and with that vitality of hers which none can match — and this is what she has done in the book. Often it seems to the reader that the paragraphs before him, throbbing with life and brimming with warmth, are a seismograph on which great tremors have been registered, set off by this time bomb, or this tremendous hurricane.

The question, then: how much will the author disclose, and how much will she divulge? She recounts her life from her childhood — her mother's early death, and her staying at home with her father, who was Speaker of the American House of Representatives, and with her pious women relations — and she tells of her love, from her earliest years, for mirrors and for every other sort of approbation, which fitted her, while still in first bloom, for the stage. When one of the cinema magazines announced a great contest, Tallulah hastened to send in her photograph and won the prize, and at sixteen she set out for New York — and for the legend that had begun to be woven. Soon she appeared on the stage and began to receive the critics' slaps; she still remembers a comment in one of the papers on the first play she appeared in, which said: "There are three or four girls in the company whom we could wish still under their mothers' care!" In her nineteenth year she went to London to play the heroine of "Rain," but the author of the story, Somerset Maugham, would not accept her, and dismissed her. She lost her head and rushed to her room, put on the clothes of the story's heroine, played the records on which the part had been recorded, took twenty aspirin tablets, and went to sleep contentedly awaiting the inevitable end! To her dismay she rose in the morning in the best of health, and this vexation was cut short by Noël Coward, who telephoned her, begging her to act in another play. Thus began the London period, which

lasted eight years and which Tallulah counts the best years of her life: in it she conquered the city and won the friendship of its great ones, above all the heir to the throne. The author recounts all this in detail, and speaks of the various plays she acted in; of the quips she let fall on this occasion and that, which have lived on and will live on after her; of what she loves in life and what she hates; of her opinions of this great man of the country and of that one; of her view of the Democratic Party, which she loves; and of the current rumor that she takes drugs (she declares the rumor a fabrication: all there is to it is that she took opium once, heroin another time, cocaine a third, and hashish a few times). And she recalls the tales of her loves, alluding to "the king of lovers," John Barrymore, who lost his round with her — a thing that rarely happened to him with anyone else; and she confesses that she loved twice in her life: she loved Napier, that is, Lord Alington, and she loved another person whom she left unnamed because he is still living — thereby opening the field to conjecture, and there is no doubt that the coming months will see an abundant number of articles in which the writers try to lift the curtain from the unknown beloved.

So Tallulah discloses a great deal, but she does not disclose everything. And she herself feels that the reader expected her to hide nothing from him, and that he anticipated confessions beside which Rousseau's confessions would be nothing; and so she apologizes to him for having disappointed him, but says: "In deference to what good taste requires, I have not set down all my faults!" And she adds: "And what did you expect to read? Forever Amber?!" Yes — Tallulah has drawn the curtain over her bedroom, but she has stripped it from all her other rooms, without first troubling to tidy them.

Tallulah is a legend, and she is also a symbol — a symbol of the woman who defied environment and society, and did everything she wished to do, and succeeded in it, whether in the field of love or of art or of life. Not long ago a woman went to a psychoanalyst and began recounting to him her dreams and the symptoms of her nerves, and when she reached the words, "And yesterday I dreamed of Tallulah Bankhead," the analyst stopped her and said: "I understand. Yes, yes!"

★

The second book is entitled "Giant," by the novelist Edna Ferber. And if our first author has shone in the field of art and society, this author has shone, to a great degree also, in the field of the novel. In the past she published a number of novels that critics and readers alike received with much approval; then she fell silent for long years, from which she has emerged in these last days with the book I am leafing through in this hasty survey.

The new book has raised an uproar in the state of Texas: for the giant to which the title points is meant to be Texas, in which the events of the novel take place, and some commentators hold that the characters of the novel are drawn from its well-known sons — despite what stands at the front of the book (as things customarily stand at the front of books): that all the characters are creations of the imagination, and any resemblance is mere coincidence! Among the signs of this uproar are seven successive essays published by a writer from Texas, in which he attacked the author and assailed her for having seen in the state nothing but a place where the inhabitants are base, the food is bad, civilization has been effaced, and money flourishes; and in his articles he laid on the bitter epithets in generous measure, describing the book as cheap, mendacious, spiteful, mean, wrong in its facts, tendentious, and so on through the like epithets. Another writer commented: Let the author rejoice and let the publisher rejoice, for the book will meet with great success in forty-seven of our states! And another said: Edna Ferber has declared that she does not love the Texas she writes about — let her be assured the feeling is mutual!

And in truth the book is entirely about Texas. It is a tourists' guide to that fabulous state — a guide the inhabitants of the state may themselves have need of, for it portrays their country as they have never known it. It is about Texas, where the dwarf stands six feet tall, and where the people are of two kinds: the rich millionaire and the poor millionaire. The author has deliberately set out to criticize what the state stands for, and to insist that wealth in itself is nothing; she makes one of the characters of the novel say: "Here in Texas we have the towering buildings raised on the vast prairies, but our thought is scanty and our civilization shallow." And she stresses that breadth of area does not mean greatness, adding: "Are sunflowers superior to violets because they are bigger?!"

In Texas there is an uproar, which may die down and may swell. But this side of the book is secondary, for all its importance, and it would be an error for the reader to view the book in its light alone. As a story the book is highly successful, and among the most outstanding novels of the year; and as literature it is a rich piece, with power in it, and life, and a message. Edna Ferber may not be able to visit Texas without the law pursuing her; but the book that brought this about finds its way into the state as it finds it everywhere else, and the borders will remain open to it even after the uproar around it, and around its aging author, has died away.

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When I set about writing this piece, I did not imagine it would run on with me to such length; so I must put off to another occasion the discussion of two other books: "The Lovers" by Kathleen Winsor, author of "Forever Amber," and "Love Is a Pie" by Maude Hutchins, the most feminine of America's women writers — and I shall be happy to tell my readers about her, someday, as I knew her.

But I will say a little about a third book, "The Girls from Esquire." This is a book about woman; I take it up here because I remember that "The Woman's Voice" is read by men as it is read by women! The book is a large collection of articles, stories, drawings, comments, and studies drawn from the famous magazine "Esquire," all of them marked by wit, freshness, and gaiety, written by a number of this country's men of letters after they had looked at woman with a searching, appreciative look — the look of the expert. And though the chapters of the book differ in subject and in author, a thread binds them one to another; for who among us does not see the magic thread that gathers together such chapters as these: "The Double Bed," "The Divorced Woman," "The Secrets of Love," "The Wretched Husband," "That Terrible Beast Within Us," "The Seven Moments of Love," and so on? Much has been written on these subjects before; but the chapters of the book in my hands are chapters of literature, the fruit of men of letters, and its value is of a high literary order.

The book has been printed in a deluxe edition, and its pages, which run to more than three hundred, contain thirty full-page comic drawings. It is divided into six main sections: Woman Is a Necessary Evil; Everything for Love's Sake; Woman Says What She Pleases; Famous Women; Sugar and Spice; and Science and Sex.

And perhaps the best that can be said of the book is what appeared in an advertisement for it: the most exciting of books, by the most famous of writers, on the most delightful of subjects!

T. S.