Chic Chicago

Chic Chicago

ONE CRYSTAL AND A MOTHER— Ellen du Pois Taylor—Harper ($2). It was that pudgy Machiavelli, Author Ben Hecht, who first made Chicago conscious of its exciting capacity for sophisticated wickedness. Mrs. Taylor, sprung from nowhere, will now revive the Hechtic excitement. Her wit and style are surpassingly original. Her treatment of esoteric erotics, from the viewpoint of a hard-boiled young Dakota virgin steeped in French novels, is a wide and pleasant departure from the lucubrations of Mr. Hecht’s rather sleazy males. But Mrs. Taylor’s actual material is like nothing so much as 17 more chapters in Mr. Hecht’s 1001 Afternoons. It consists chiefly of a mauve Fatima who may and may not have poisoned her preacher husband, and of Crystal Clemente, the mauve one’s daughter, who does penance for frequent flights of sex-honesty by outfitting an old ladies’ home with white lace shawls and caps, by giving Dunhill pipes to hoboes.

Lolling like a plush pansy on the cushioned floor of her boudoir in their suburban mansion, Mme. Clemente vents her jealousy and disapproval of Crystal’s wild-honeymoons, by telling all to the newspapers. That is where the narrator comes in, as an astute young literata fresh from the wheat belt, starved for silk lingerie and articulate courtship. An editor from whose gentle, sadistic lip cigarets droop two and three at a time; a svelte social secretary from Virginia who has come through three marriages with a rope scar around her neck and a bright-haired daughter, but without rings or crowsfeet; an aged German baron with a limp and many liaisons; a social-climbing physician whose heart is in interior decorating; a reportorial dandy; a gangster’s girl and their “oozy” baby—are other marionettes in this smart book for which so eminent a critic as Ford Madox Ford has risked an “admirable . . . absolutely astonishing!”

Specimen manipulations of the vernacular by Author Taylor:

“Madame Clemente was escorted from her aromatic lair on the blue arm of the law. Fragments of chiffon still clung to her and she was complacently resilient under the most grueling ordeals.”

“Crystal loosened my tight little moral cloak to an unshackling wind and pinned it back with something as hard and bright and impersonal as a star.”