Books: Columnists’ Sensation

TO BEG I AM ASHAMED—Sheila Cousins—Vanguard ($2).

When the English publishers of To beg I am ashamed sent advance copies to columnists of the London Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, they got an unpleasant surprise: before the book was released both papers appeared with quaint English headlines, such as “A Vile Book,” “A Disgraceful Book,” with vague stories about its sensationalism, forced its withdrawal.

Last week U. S. readers had a chance to see what sort of material offends London journalists when To beg I am ashamed was brought out with no pre-publication onslaughts. Their main reaction was likely to be one of surprise that so conventional a story could cause so much fuss. The work of a 26-year-old prostitute who writes under a pseudonym, it is a record of a drab and distressing life, makes prostitution attractive to nobody. Its author seems intelligent, unsentimental but strangely apathetic, gives the impression that she could have escaped her environment but stayed in it because she suspected that possible alternatives would be equally bad. Her mother was a screaming, hard-drinking nervous case, her father a whining incompetent.

Giving herself credit for no very high motives, the author admits that after she was seduced she was wildly promiscuous until she bore an illegitimate son, became a streetwalker after he died. Most interesting but cloudiest part of To beg I am ashamed tells of her brief marriage, which took her to Malaya, where her husband worked for a rubber company. Since he knew of her past, she thought the marriage was hopeless from the start, nevertheless made a desperate effort to become respectable, was frustrated by her former clients, her mother’s malicious disclosures, her husband’s sullenness and doubt, her own inertia.