Master of Ceremonies

Katharine Brush’s last published novel, The Boy From Maine, debuted in 1942. Phil Stong, writing in The Saturday Review, called the novel “a heroic effort to take the gay, brittle, and slightly desperate survivors of the last war [World War I] and bring them up to date.” Beatrice Sherman of The New York Times thought the book contained “quick and realistic sketches of the social upheavals of the last twenty-five years, all laid on by a competent brush” (Did you catch that last pun?)

I just re-read the book, and I think it’s Kay’s best. It has more of the depth that the critics found lacking in Don’t Ever Leave Me, a sentiment that Miss Sherman shared. It’s a pity that Kay didn’t live longer to write more.

Above: The first edition dust jacket in dire need of some good art direction. Disembodied heads; and no music note ever looked like that. The result of War-time economies?

The Boy is one Hobey Hadley, a bumpkin born Hobart Higgins, on an Island off the coast of Maine at the turn of the last century. After fleeing the poverty and utter bleakness of the island, and surviving a requisite patriotic stint in the US Navy (he lies about his age to get in), Hobey lands in New York, and decides to stay, at the urging of benefactress (“Fairy Godmother” is really more like it) Ruby, who runs a smart cabaret, and whom Hobey meets right off the boat, even before the salt spray on his uniform has had a chance to evaporate. Our Boy eventually works his way up the ladder of show business, first as MC and erstwhile crooner at Ruby’s, then as a radio announcer, and, finally, at the ripe old age of 40, Hobey leaves the spotlight and becomes a successful radio executive.

Broadway Gave The Boy From Maine Everything But the Girl He Loved

1945 reprint

And all the while he yearns for his childhood love, Rosalie, whose family used to summer on Hobey’s Island. While Rosalie is genuinely fond of Hobey, both know there can never be anything between them. Or, rather, Hobey knows it; it would never occur to Rosalie that such an idea could even exist. Rosalie is rich and glamorous (she’s a Katharine Brush heroine, afterall), and Hobey is a hick.  A lovable hick, but a hick nonetheless.

But Fate, if it won’t let them be together, will at least not allow them to be kept entirely apart. Rosalie and her second husband (was the fatal wound that killed Rosalie’s first really a gun-cleaning accident?), the faded (though still extravagantly handsome) football star Bailey Harker, move in and out of New York over the years, and neo-sophisticate extraordinaire Hobey, at the center of her circle of intimates, basks in the warm glow of his radiant Rosalie.

And They Lived Happily Ever After

Of course there’s never a doubt that Our Boy is going to get his girl. The only question is how long it will take, the only suspense what obstacle will need to be overcome next.

At Last: after 7+ years work, 
a rather bemused looking
Kay (from the jacket)

And that brings me to an observation about The Boy From Maine’s structure. Though Kay began the book around the time Don’t Ever Leave Me was finished (1935), work on the novel stopped sometime before 1940, when Kay suffered some serious writer’s block. Kay apparently became unstuck in 1941, when You Go Your Way was completed. Kay often said that Boy stalled at page 220, and, interestingly enough, a perceivable change in the tone and the pacing of the novel occurs right about that spot, when Hobey returns to the island to visit his estranged family. Once Hobey leaves the island for the second time and returns to New York, Kay wraps everything up with a swift neatness that is not in keeping with the first part of the novel, and which all seems just a little too convenient. Frank Stockton could have been writing about The Boy From Maine when he complained that the ending of Young Man of Manhattan “reminds one of the hasty cutting of knots with which some of Dickens's plots are brought to a close.”

I don’t know if I would have noticed this shift had I not known anything about the novel’s compositional history, but it’s unmistakably there.

Anyway, the book is pure soap opera, sentimental, sometimes silly, sometimes melodramatic; so I naturally ate it up.

Itchbay

“I haven't met Dorothy Parker, and I wouldn’t dare say a word if I had. I guess I know when to make wisecracks and when not to.” 

That’s what Kay said in 1940. I wonder if she changed her mind a year later, when Parker’s review of You Go Your Way appeared in the July 6, 1941 issue of PM...She must have had plenty to say. At least in private.

They Went That-a-Way!

You Go Your Way was Kay’s sixth novel to be published, but it was not  the one that had stalled at page 220, the one that led Kay to write This is on Me. (That novel would have to wait yet another year before finally finding its way into hard covers.) Kirkus Reviews called You Go Your Way “Airy amorantics by a crack hand,” and Beatrice Sherman, writing in The New York Times found the novel “light and amusing, short on ballast, but long on smartly frivolous conversation,” and “generously diverting.”

Young and vivacious (and stunningly beautiful—that goes without saying) Connie Crowell, though madly in love with husband Bill, decides (before their honeymoon is even over) that she married Bill too hastily. Connie’s unorthodox philosophy (“I wish bigamy wasn't illegal”) is that she should have been married once or twice before—unhappily—so that she and Bill would be assured of unending marital bliss. And so, what follows is a completely preposterous string of separations, rivalries, and courtships, through which Connie bounces merrily while Bill fumes and tries to keep up. You know exactly how it will all turn out in the end, but the ride is a lot of fun. I won’t give anything away, but you can probably figure out the ending from my simple synopsis without much effort.

“Then Bill fell in love with a purple china
dachshund with cacti planted in its open back.”
The rivals prepare to go wooing--simultaneously.

Though the plot is light as air, Connie’s “amorantics” and the book’s dialogue are genuinely funny. You Go Your Way is Kay’s only truly comedic novel, and the only one that actually makes me laugh out loud; it has all the elements of classic Hollywood screwball comedy. Doesn't that look like Cary Grant holding the red roses?   

In fact, The New York Times announced in late 1940 that Paramount had bought the screen rights to You Go Your Way as a probable vehicle for Claudette Colbert. That’s funny, because a few days ago The Palm Beach Story (which starred Claudette Colbert, of course) was on the television, and I was struck by how alike Preston Sturges’s picture and Kay’s novel are. Both date from the same time, and the main characters are young, glamorous New Yorkers. Both start off with the wife deciding the couple shouldn't be married any longer.

Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert in
Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story

Both marriages are “threatened” by the presence of romantic rivals on each side. And in each the wife goes—by train—to Palm Beach for a divorce (Florida divorces are quicker than Reno divorces, according to Connie Crowell.) The plot of The Palm Beach Story is, not surprisingly when one considers Sturges's oeuvre, even more ridiculous than Kay's story.

But I think Palm Beach gives a little hint of what the movie version of Your Way might have looked like. It’s a pity the picture didn’t get made, and we’ll most certainly never know why.

One odd coincidence: Connie and Bill (in You Go Your Way) don yachting caps and go “yachting” on a chartered tug called the Ella F. McGlew. In The Palm Beach Story Gerry Jeffers (Colbert) introduces husband Tom (Joel McCrea) as her brother, Captain McGlew! Mere coincidence? Or was Preston Sturges perhaps familiar with Kay’s book?

You Go Your Way was originally  serialized in The American, starting with the April, 1941 issue. Illustration by Alfred Parker

Should've Left Well Enough Alone

First appearing in Cosmopolitan magazine, Kay’s 1935 novel Don’t Ever Leave Me did not, despite mostly favorable reviews (The New York Times was quite generous in its praise), enjoy success similar to that of its predecessors. Kay would later lay the blame on her own constant tinkering, her incessant re-writing. In fact, she told The Times in 1942 that the novel wasn't written at all—it was “carved.” Kay was, however, she further explained, ultimately pleased with the result. Along with a few other writers, bless their hearts.

Sidney Cunningham dances with Don Lamont at the Labor Day dance.
Was the one wandering white strand inlaid in her otherwise black hair
grown or manufactured?  And what was the story of the little black cat
tattooed on her back? Magazine illustration by McClelland Barclay.

Reading the reviews today, I am reminded of that assessment by the Times in 1944: “the interesting thing about Katharine Brush's work has always been not so much what she says as how she says it.”

Regarding the how of Leave Me, one finds little in a negative vein:

“The large audiences that were captured by Young Man of Manhattan and Red-Headed Woman will not be disappointed…” (Leane Zugsmith, NYT)

“[Brush is] very readable for the moment…devilishly adept…” (John Chamberlain, NYT; “Books of the Times”)

“[Brush] has achieved a slick-as-cream smoothness which lesser popular writers must envy desperately…On certain contemporary matters her work is definitive.” (Edith H. Walton, The Youngstown Daily Vindicator)

The what, on the other hand, left the same critics unsatisfied.

Here’s Chamberlain:

Superficially, Miss Brush is a novelist of Scott Fitzgerald’s order. But only superficially. Both of them have very retentive memories for the ephemeral that gives each year its special tone. But…Fitzgerald is interested in character, in people making moral decisions. Miss Brush tries to be. But the typical and the topical are always diverting her…[T]he world of character, of moral decision, is neglected…

And although Walton thought the novel warmer than Red-Headed Woman, and found in it “faint, undeveloped traces of social consciousness,” she predicted that the book would be “unbearably nostalgic” ten years into the future. She twists the knife a bit by concluding that Don’t Ever Leave Me “will disappoint only those naïve optimists who once supposed, on the basis of her short stories, that Katharine Brush might develop into a writer of consequence.”

Ouch.

Left: the rather drab dust jacket of the first edition; Kay's name is now larger than the title. Right: Inscription inside Swanie's copy of Leave Me

Glitter and be Gay

Kay's first two novels began life as serials in College Humor magazine. Glitter was published in book form in 1926, and Little Sins followed a year later. 

There’s really little point in giving detailed synopses of the plots. Suffice it to say that the books are full of glamorous young people doing the things that glamorous young people did back then. They go to dances and drive fast sexy cars. They drink too much and smoke endless cigarettes. They stay out until the wee hours and never rise before noon. They fall in and out of love, often with each others’ spouses, and sometimes with disastrous results. They…well, you get the idea.

Of course the books are dated, frequently in funny ways that the author certainly never intended. They do not, it must be readily admitted, have the timelessness of that greatest of their comtemporaries, The Great Gatsby. But they are a lot of fun. And to be fair, 85-year-old popular novels should really be judged not by how true to life they seem to us but by how true to life they were in their own day. They measure up pretty well in that regard.

Both novels are rare 
in their dust jackets

The only review in print of Glitter that I have been able to find appeared in the April 1926 issue of the campus publication The Ohio State Engineer. 
The Engineer’s reviewer found that the novel’s characters “in every way seem to be the people that we meet every day,” and went on to predict that “this book will soon be the best seller in college circles.” I cannot confirm whether or not that prediction ever came true, but according to Kay's "autobiography" This is on Me,  the book sold about 8,000 copies, apparently quite respectable for a first novel of the time.

Little Sins seems to have attracted a little more attention. In what is the earliest review of a Brush work by a major publication that I have seen, Time magazine had this to say:

The Significance. Nowadays it takes a mental eye of high velocity detail, the myriad activities of knowing young Manhattanites. There are so many things to do and everything is done so quickly. To cover the assignment with the thoroughness and mimetic accuracy (but not the rancor) of a Sinclair Lewis, and at the same time to create four central characters of breathless reality, and a Dickensian hurly-burly of minor characters, and to keep them moving through their swift social traffic under their own power and in their right positions, requires a highly developed social instinct and something akin to literary genius. Socially and book-technically, Little Sins is a stunning performance. And to its fundamental perfections are superadded real whimsy, real pathos, an unobtrusive cleverness at small talk.

Did you catch that?  "Mimetic accuracy of a Sinclair Lewis".  "Breathless reality".  "Literary genius".  "Stunning performance".

Though Glitter is cited as source, Kay gets
no credit on this lobby card for The Drop Kick 

Glitter’s story was filmed--twice, apparently--as silents. (A third, talking picture was planned but never came about.) The Drop Kick from 1927 starred Richard Barthelmess, and is mostly known today for an early appearance of a 20-year-old John Wayne.  (Keen-eyed admirers of the Duke can spot him in a crowd scene.) The second, according to This is on Me, was titled Football Coach, though there is no such film listed at imdb.com. As with so many other silent movies, we must assume this one lost. And although Time thought Little Sins “looks like another sure-fire [film] scenario,” that book never did make it to the screen.

Perhaps Time was right when it called the novel “one of those rare books with more electricity in its pages than can ever be added to it in a projection room.”

Pifflingly Unimportant: Kay covered the 1925 Atlantic City Beauty Pageant for the Brush-Moore Newspaper chain of Ohio (her father-in-law was an owner). The experience provided material for Little Sins.

Distinguished Company

It may seem difficult, some 70 or 80 years after its publication, to categorize the fiction of Katharine Brush. I’ve seen her books described as "romance novels," which absolutely makes me cringe: the term is just plain wrong. But, more importantly, it conveys a thoroughly inaccurate impression of the quality of the work.

Faith Baldwin (a contemporary of Brush’s) wrote romance novels. A LOT of them. In her obituary (she died in 1978) The New York Times said Baldwin wrote “with never a pretense at literary significance.” Time magazine accused her of shaky grammar and poor punctuation, and said she “fizzed fiction like an inexhaustible literary pop bottle.”

Little Girl Pal: Kay sporting
an uncharacteristically slick hairdo

By contrast, one New York Times reviewer opined (in 1944 with what would be all of Brush’s full-length novels behind her) that “the interesting thing about Katharine Brush's work has always been not so much what she says as how she says it.” In 1931, when Time reported on the relatively young publishing house of Farrar & Rinehart, Brush’s name appeared first in a list of F&R authors that included Upton Sinclair and DuBose Heyward, among other luminaries. Seventeen years later, in a list of "post-World War I stars" that had written for The New York Post, Time placed Brush in the company of the greatest of these, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

Even more telling is Brush’s inclusion in what is probably the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the work of women writers, Margaret Lawrence’s The School of Femininity, published in Canada in 1936 and reprinted as recently as 1977. 

Dust jacket of the first
American edition, 1936

Grouping Brush with Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, and Daphne du Maurier in a section called "Little Girl Pals," Lawrence describes Brush as "extraordinarily able," her artistry "striking."

“[Brush] ranks high,” Lawrence declares from the start, “not only among the younger women writers, but also among all the women writers. The high ranking is justified by the technical control and the depth of her fidelity to her subjects.”

All the women writers. The table of contents 
of School is a Who’s Who of women writers: 
Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, 
Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, Pearl Buck...  

Romance novels, my foot!