Books: Tabloid Angel

GIVE Us OUR DREAM (298 pp.)—Arthémise Goertz—Whitflesey ($2.75).

Arthémise Goertz, who wrote this Literary Guild selection for July, is fortyish and kindly, and she has had her quota of happiness, excitement and tragedy. Her New Orleans childhood was in the “German tradition of discipline and duty.” She graduated from Tulane University magna cum laude, took with her a Phi Beta Kappa key and her Spanish professor as a husband. Later she lived in Mexico, wrote a book about it (South of the Border), then went to Japan on a scholarship. The day after Pearl Harbor the Japs made her a civilian war prisoner. She came back to the U.S. on the Gripsholm at the end of 1943, penniless and broken in health, to learn that her husband had been killed in action.

Not So Grand Hotel. Her first novel, Give Us Our Dream, is her well-intentioned but singularly sterile effort to excavate the humanity that pulsates under the drabness of Sunnyside, a railroad-side section of New York City where she lived after her return from Japan. Her characters all live in the same boxlike apartment house, and their humdrum lives shortly become caught up in a naive pattern which is spun without imagination. In this Grand Hotel without grandness, coincidence and sentiment are bigger than life.

The principal character is Mrs. Marsan, an idle widow on an annuity who in real life would be rated as an unbearable nuisance. She pries into her neighbors’ personal affairs, is happiest when unsuspecting lovers or brawlers are focused in her handy opera glasses. With the bumbling kindliness of her type, she is also a busybody good neighbor, always willing to help, and capable, even, of pawning her opera glasses to help a friend. Life for Mrs. Marsan is excitingly recorded by New York’s scare-headlined, tabloid Daily News: “She liked the love scrapes and the marriage tangles and the murders. . . . Best of all, she liked the pictures and the ads and the comics, and she read the Daily Horoscope the first thing, even before turning back into the building.”

Disingenuous Nosiness. Author Goertz sees her heroine as only a little lower than the angels. Her innocently disingenuous nosiness helps to bring about a marriage between two cripples, a therapeutic romance for a depressed war widow, a happy ending in a sordid triangle affair. Even her death from heart trouble helps: a friend, radical and fanatic, somehow learns a lesson in elementary humanity.

Readers whose view of life is adequately mirrored in city tabloids may find Miss Goertz’s pointless optimism momentarily heartwarming. Others will be irritated by the kind of tawdry romanticism whose bible is a horoscope and whose heaven is Times Square.