Books: Marital Etiquette

MARRIAGE Is A PRIVATE AFFAIR—Judith Kelly—Harper ($2.50).

This, the 1941 Harper Prize ($10,000) novel, is a problem book about marriage among U.S. upper-middle class, eastern-seaboard, Smith-or-Vassar bred, young housewives. It is written in their official dialect, by one of them. For the rest of them, it will probably be the novel of the season.

Theo and Tom West get off to a glowing start. Tom, an architect, is absorbed in a low-cost housing project. Theo bears two children rather sooner than she is spiritually adequate to the job. Their friends are solid-seeming, yet Theo finds infidelities among them, and at length, bored, crib-ridden, anesthetic towards her husband and afraid of losing her youth, she has an affair herself. When Tom, a simple, active man, finds out, it drives him half out of his wits, her into penitence, both into a cruel psychic deadlock whose detailing is the best thing in the book. Ultimately they stand ready for “the splendid, striving, accomplishing years of middle age,” beside which “the years of youth had become a thin, pathetic dream.”

Miss Kelly (in real life, Mrs. William D. English of Beverley, Mass.) lifts this story above the run of woman’s-magazine serials by her sincerity, her fondness for detail and her agile—if highly conditioned —intelligence. The husband’s work is described, for example, with enthusiasm and at length. (The author thought her novel was about housing, not marriage; but this time the publishers were right.) She handles many emotional atmospheres and tensions with at least charcoal accuracy. Much firsthand observation has evidently gone into the book.

But Miss Kelly’s lack of detachment and weakness for sermonizing turn what might have been a study of modern marriage into a sort of book of marital etiquette. Like any etiquette book, it will repel many readers who travel in a different set from the author’s, or who speak a different dialect.

The heroine says “mummy” and “tummy” and uses the maternal we. Other characters greet the reader with “We’re doing the Saturday Review puzzle.” All the men smoke pipes, which they rub against their cheeks or tap on their knees while they talk. Often they talk less like human beings than like editorials in a liberal weekly. Says Theo’s lover: “We sit here in America, and across the ocean we see death and denial enmeshing a great people. For there’s no use now imagining that Hitler is a temporary aberration. How long can it last?”