Books: Jimmy’s Jeebies

THE STORY OF MRS. MURPHY (445 pp.)—Natalie Anderson Scott—Dutton ($3).

The U.S. book trade’s midsummer, or muggier-than-usual, season has begun. Mrs. Murphy, the July choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, dutifully touted by B.-of-M.’s Bookpicker Clifton Fadiman as “compassionate” and “powerful,” is a clumsy, cliche-sodden version of The Lost Weekend. The problem of the alcoholic in society is as grave as ever, ‘but The Story of Mrs. Murphy swamps it with glycerine tears and marshmallow emotions.

“Better watch that temper of yours, son,” old Mom Murphy had said. The killer, shaken with remorse, sank to his knees on the kitchen floor. “Darling,” he sobbed, “I loved you. I always loved you.” He gathered the “limp little body” in his arms, caressed it, “covered it with kisses.” It was too late for kisses. Napoleon, the Murphy family parrot, was dead.

Jimmy Murphy, 25, had just knocked Napoleon across the kitchen with a baseball bat. Jimmy, a single-minded lush, had a frightful temper. Sometimes, according to Author Natalie Anderson Scott, he was capable of “smiling humorously,” but more often anger “twisted his handsome face” and corrupted his “sweet, childish mouth.” He swindled, stole, played fast & loose with girls—among them an artist named Kay, and Dolores, who wore sables and “went around adjusting herself” (Dolores could “adjust herself in a thrice”). Jimmy peddled dope, knifed his sister, beat up his mother, hocked the family goods. But his mother loved him dearly, and his brother Ed, a priest, thought he had “a finer than average” spiritual nature.

Apparently Author Scott thinks so too, for she has lavished 175,000 warning words on the clinical details of Jimmy’s decline & fall. The publishers urge readers not to assume that The Story of Mrs. Murphy is simply “another” novel about a drunk. They are quite right. Distinguished by nothing except low-grade prose and high-grade intentions, it is probably the worst novel of its kind since the days of T. S. (Ten Nights in a Barroom) Arthur.