Books: The Purple-Prose Heart

ANATOMY OF ME (367 pp.)—Fannie Hurst—Doubleday ($5).

Theodore Dreiser, that shaggy old lion of American letters, sat in a library reference room reading St. Thomas Aquinas. Next to Dreiser sat Miss Fannie Hurst, author. They started to talk, and so fascinated was Dreiser by her remarks on Aquinas that he insisted on continuing the conversation even though she had to catch a plane to St. Louis. Dreiser, as Author Hurst now tells it, flew right along with her, but not before asking her husband if he had any objections. He did not. which leads Author Hurst to remark: “This throws a revealing light on my wonderful kind of marriage.” Up in the airplane, Dreiser talked all the time. “Damn it,” he growled, “up to a year ago I lived all of my life without God, and I might have had Him always. . .”

Comments Miss Hurst: “There I sat . . . with no words to console the massive Dreiser, who had almost missed God. He died a few months later.”

This 1945 episode is typical not only of the style of her autobiography, but of Fannie Hurst’s literary career: her word power has somehow never quite kept pace with her lofty ambitions. Not that Autobiographer Hurst is short of words. She has plenty of words,

rich words,

round words

the kind of words that demand to be set off in short, separate paragraphs.

And Miss Hurst is not one to resist such a demand.

Not she.

Glaze of Words. Thus, as if she were herself the heroine of a Fannie Hurst novel, she traces her progress from the conventional, middle-class home of her St. Louis childhood to her present, medievally furnished, stained-glass-windowed, triplex apartment in Manhattan.

In the home of Shoe Manufacturer Samuel Hurst, “a spade was a spade was a spade.” Young Fannie was troubled by being fat, by being Jewish, above all by Mama, who was (as Author Hurst shows her in a striking portrait) vulgar, loud, socially ambitious, a woman young Fannie had to love and also had to get away from at any cost.

At St. Louis’ coed Washington University, Fannie did not participate in “the ‘spooning’ that I had reason to suspect went on between students.” Instead she wrote blank verse. Visiting Manhattan with her father, Fannie looked down from a hotel window and saw her future. People, she remembers, were “flowing like slow molasses, yet full of heartbeat and fear and hope and power and—infinity. Those people down there were composed of persons.” She would have to live in New York, find the persons among the people, glaze them with her words.

Autobiographer Hurst still seems convinced that no one ever had a more difficult time pulling loose from parents. But eventually, on the end of a great rubber band that would occasionally snap her back to St. Louis, she returned to Manhattan alone. She worked as a salesgirl at Macy’s, a waitress at Childs, wrote constantly. After several years, the Saturday Evening Post accepted the 36th manuscript she had sent them—and she was a hit.

Dew on the Rose. From this point on. Author Hurst’s Anatomy fans out into a swiftly sketched, vaguely chronological record of her experiences as a successful “women’s writer.” Her secret marriage to the late Russian-born Pianist Jacques Danielson became celebrated when a reporter uncovered it, learned that the couple kept separate apartments. “You mean, you never meet for breakfast?” said the A.P. man. “Oh, two or three times a week.” said Fannie. “Our way of keeping the dew on the rose.”

There were fleeting acquaintances with Sinclair Lewis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Scott Fitzgerald. But despite Fannie’s reputation as a literary salon-keeper, she says that literary personalities made her nervous. To Fannie, the famed Algonquin Hotel Round Table was mostly “a group of pundits, wits, wags, versifiers.” Wrote Mama from St. Louis: “How is it you never mention being at that hotel with the Indian name?” The answer is that the Indian wags of the Round Table would have scalped her.

And yet her fans may well ask: How many of the Algonquin crowd have endured as long as Fannie Hurst? The Satevepost’s George Horace Lorimer, she recalls, once wrote her: “Less red meat in your stories, please. Let us have some delicate white cuts.” Red meat, which was rarely on the menu at the Algonquin, is Author Hurst’s undisputed specialty. And that, compared to some other fare available today, at least makes for a square meal—even if her fancy sauces are always indigestible.