Blood and Irony

IN THIS OUR LIFE -- Ellen Glasgow --Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

"When I consider her as a person," wrote Novelist James Branch Cabell of his friend, Ellen Glasgow, "she arouses in me a dark suspicion." Cabell's suspicion is that Ellen Glasgow "is a gentlewoman as well as a genius in an era unfavorable to either. . . ." Ellen Glasgow has aroused even darker suspicions among U.S. readers. They have suspected that she is dull or highbrow, and have translated their suspicions into a considerable lack of interest. Some who have read her Barren Ground, without reading They Stooped to Folly, consider her a too stern daughter of the voice of God. Others who have read The Romantic Comedians, but not Vein of Iron, consider her a light-minded iconoclast from whose irony nothing is safe.

In 1938 the American Academy of Arts and Letters elected Novelist Glasgow to membership. But the Pulitzer Prize committee still has not recognized her existence. She had the misfortune to publish Barren Ground the same year that Sinclair Lewis published Arrowsmith which won the prize. In the next nine years the Pulitzer committee passed over three of her best books in favor of Bromfield's Early Autumn, La Farge's Laughing Boy, Stribling's The Store. Novelist Glasgow went right on writing, revising, perfecting the series of novels which she had projected at the beginning of the Century -- "a social history of Virginia."

This week Ellen Glasgow, now 66, added In This Our Life to this impressive series. Not her greatest book, it is an interesting detail in the mural of her life work. She had been working on this detail since 1935, had revised it at least three times. It is not unusual for Novelist Glasgow to rewrite a single chapter 15 times.

Like most Glasgow novels, this one is laid in Queenborough, the imaginary Virginia town which she had made as much her literary province as Hardy made Wessex or Trollope Barsetshire. It is the story of the ineffectualness of a Southern aristocrat, Asa Timberlake, who has lost his money but not his manners. The Timberlake fortune had been invested in a cigaret factory. Now factory and fortune belonged to the Standard Tobacco Company. Asa still had a job with Standard, but he never knew for how long. His wife, plain-faced Lavinia, had stooped to marry him. Later she developed a heart ailment that enabled her to wield an invalid power that she had never known in healthier days. Asa's conscience is her slave. Sometimes he succeeds in sneaking off to spend Sunday with Kate Oliver on her river farm. His hope is that some day Uncle William will die and leave Lavinia a legacy. When that happened, Asa meant to leave and go to Kate. But when at last it did happen, it was already too late. Asa had begun to establish a protectorate over his daughter, Roy. "You will stand by me?" Roy asked. "I will, Roy, as long as you need me." "Looking up at the closed sky, once again [Asa] had a vision of Kate and the harvested fields and the broad river. Still ahead, and within sight, but just out of reach, and always a little farther away, fading, but not ever disappearing, was freedom."

Nearly all the characters in the book are defeated. The weak ones are crushed. But Asa's defeat is a victory, for it implies that under his apparent ineffectualness there is something stronger than his daughter's brittle bravery. Like the Greek dramatists, Novelist Glasgow believes that men's characters are men's fate, and that tragedy is never in defeat but in surrender. "An honorable end," she is fond of saying, "is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man."

The Author. Ellen Glasgow has probably thought more unconventional thoughts than any other gentlewoman in the South. But she has lived a thoroughly conventional spinster's life in the big, grey, brick, Georgian house at No. 1 West Main St., Richmond, Va. Since a heart attack last summer she has scarcely left it. No. 1 is a stately Southern mansion with an iron-fenced front yard, a brick-walled back yard. There are tall magnolias, myrtles, box, ivy, lots of flowers. Ellen's father, who was manager of the Confederacy's only heavy-calibre cannon foundry, bought No. 1 when his ten children (Ellen was the ninth) began to overflow their old home. It was then in the heart of fashionable Richmond.

Now there is a garage two doors away. Orthodox Greeks have taken over the Episcopal church across the street. In a nearby tourist lodging, a Philadelphia gangster murdered a woman with a brutality that diverted readers of Richmond newspapers for days. Rooming houses, chain stores, laundries, bakeries have crept in like the moral decay in a Glasgow novel. During Prohibition a humor-loving cop told Ellen Glasgow that her home was now in the heart of the bootlegging district. She said it was comforting to think that even a bootlegging district had a heart.

In No. 1 Ellen had passed her frail childhood, seldom going to school, reading in her grandfather's library practically everything she wanted. In No. 1 she wrote her first verse. (At the age of eight she had already secretly written her first story, A Lonely Daisy in a Garden of Roses.) There she has written most of her 19 novels, at a massive mahogany desk.

No. 1, like Hardy's Max Gate, has also housed a dynasty of dogs. Novelist Glasgow is an antivivisectionist and for some 20 years has been president of the Richmond S. P. C. A. Her favorite Sealyham, Jeremy, is buried in a little marked grave at one side of the back porch. At the other side lies the grave of a poodle. Two other Glasgow dogs are buried in the Richmond pet cemetery under marble stones. Novelist Glasgow likes dogs so much that she has a collection of some 75 porcelain and pottery dogs. James Branch Cabell also keeps a collector's zoo--lions, cows, horses, elephants, rhinoceroses in glass, bronze, amber, porcelain and terra cotta. One day Cabell admired one of Miss Glasgow's porcelain dogs so much that she gave it to him. Delighted, Author Cabell did not dare to put it down for fear that Miss Bennett, Novelist Glasgow's jealously vigilant secretary, would snatch it up and put it back in the collection. For guests like Novelist Cabell, Douglas Southall Freeman, Joseph Hergesheimer, Burton Rascoe, the Princess Troubetzkoy, hospitality at No. 1 is Southern and famous.

Ellen Glasgow is small and brown-eyed, with a heap of soft grey hair and a taste for big feather fans and red dresses. She is also a little deaf and uses an Acousticon which in conversation she holds toward the speaker. If she thinks she is going to hear something she will not like, she quickly pulls the instrument away again. Her conversation is as witty as her books and she has a reputation for talking the fattest contracts out of the thriftiest publishers. Though her previous book had sold only 11,000 copies, Novelist Glasgow in 1924 informed her publishers that she would like a $10,000 advance against the sales of her next book. And since this new idea of advertising had crept into the book world, she wanted $10,000 spent on advertising. She got it. Her next book was Barren Ground, a bestseller.

The Realist. She has always had a certain directness of mind. "It is incredible," one member of her family said, "that a well brought up Southern girl should even know what a bastard is." But at 22 Ellen was already treating this and other tabooed topics with authority. In The Descendant she had a good look at poor whites, wrote: "Socialism and individualism need to coalesce to give us the surest protection to the rights of man with the widest personal liberty. . . . Centralization and individualism need to be reconciled and can be." In The Battleground, she wrote a Civil War novel, which was recommended to British officers because of its military accuracy. The Voice of the People was "the first piece of genuine realism to come out of the South." In Virginia she tore to velvety tatters the myth of the Southern gentlewoman. In The Romantic Comedians, she wrote a satire on aging and romantic Southern gentlemen that makes even youthful Southerners wince at the name of Judge Honeywell. In Barren Ground she wrote an epic novel of the poor farmers in the Shenandoah. It was also an epic of a woman's struggle to restore her own life by restoring the soil. Ellen Glasgow had pounced on the mockingbird and magnolia school of Southern romanticism and left little but feathers and petals. She was a realist before Balzac had started Theodore Dreiser writing his American human comedy. "She was a realist," wrote the late Critic Stuart Sherman, "when some of our popular exponents of realism were in the cradle. . . . Realism crossed the Potomac twenty-five years ago, going North!"

"The South," said Ellen Glasgow, "needs blood and irony." And she proposed to give it both for she had come to understand "the misery of life," had won the "freedom of despair." Her novels are no more provincially Virginian than The Trojan Women is Trojan. Their major theme is human struggle, and Novelist Glasgow broods over her foredoomed characters with irony, pity and passion, but without sentimentality.

To many a worried Southerner Ellen Glasgow's realism makes her seem like a revolutionist. She is more of a belated Victorian with a full Victorian concern with moral problems. Last year she told Irita Van Doren: "I would lead the revolution myself if I were sure I'd get the right heads on my pike." The heads that Ellen Glasgow would hoist would please few revolutionists. No group is without them and no group has a monopoly of them. Ellen Glasgow has been thrusting at them since she started writing. They are called intolerance, injustice, inhumanity.

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