Time of Her Life

After work on her sixth (which would eventually be published as her seventh) novel stalled, Kay found herself unable to write. Anything. 

So she started doing finger exercises on the typewriter. Then, at the prompting of her publishers (at 2am in the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel, if we take Kay at her word), she agreed to tell the story of her stories. What resulted was This Is On Me, a “hodge-podge autobiography, bubbly and easy to take throughout and really memorable in spots,” according to The American Mercury. 

The book owes its “hodge-podge” character to the fact that it is both autobiography and anthology, “interlarded” (to borrow Mercury's term) “with samples of pertinent literary work, including complete short stories.”

And though Time magazine felt the stories and sketches would not have been missed, their reviewer found This Is On Me “lively reading,” and “a welcome change from the usual preening of popular authors on How-I-Learned-To Write.” The critics, in fact, appear to have been quite unanimous in their praise; I have not found a single review that was less than glowing.

Parts of This Is On Me appeared first in Ladies’ Home Journal (beginning with the December 1939 issue) under the title Time of My Life. The Journal excerpts featured photographs that were not included when the book was published in the summer of 1940. This Is On Me was instead illustrated with simple line drawings by Susanne Suba. Suba was a successful and well-regarded artist and illustrator, but I think This Is On Me would be just that much more valuable as autobiography had the photos been retained.  

Left: This photographic timeline appeared in Ladies' Home Journal;

Above Right: Photo of a rather prim looking Kay from the book's dust jacket

Renwood Tonight

Other Women is ultra-rare with its
jacket: in my 5+ years of collecting,
this is the only one I have found.

In 1933 Farrar & Rinehart brought out Other Women, a collection of some of Kay's previously published short works. Half of the stories are set in Renwood, Ohio, already known to Kay’s readers as the home of Lillian Andrews. One story, in fact, centers around Louise Bartlett, the Renwood socialite who so ruthlessly and methodically cuts Lillian down to size during the course of a cocktail party in Lillian's own home. Published in 1930, the story very interestingly provides the first glimpse of Lillian, unnamed, mentioned only in passing. Here is Lillian in embryonic form, one which would later grow and develop fully into that notorious Red-Headed Woman. 

The fictional Renwood was based on the factual East Liverpool, Ohio, where Kay 
and her husband (and shortly thereafter their son Tommy) lived  from 1920 to 1926. Although Kay later maintained that she liked life in East Liverpool just fine, the pettiness, pretentions, and hypocrisies of Renwood’s ladies who lunch are archly chronicled by Kay, with little effort at concealing the contempt in which she must have held such narrow-minded provincialism. 

East Liverpool's country club is still there today; one of
Lillian Andrews's driving ambitions was to be afforded
entrée to the upper echelons of Renwood society, 
whose center was the country club.

Kay's handwriting was quite obviously 
the basis for the book jacket type.

The Little Opus

Though by 1927 Kay was already an established author with two novels under her belt, it was actually a short story that put her on the literary map. Night Club caused quite a sensation when it appeared in Harper's in September of that year. Yet there's actually such an absence of action in Night Club that Kay was later prompted to call it not even a story, merely a trick. 

Mrs. Brady is the ladies' lounge attendant at the Club Français, a tony New York night club. Throughout the course of the evening, young and not-so-young-anymore ladies wander in and out, lingering just long enough for the combing of hair, buffing of fingernails, powdering of noses. The reader, observing from the vantage point of the central character, is treated to snippets of the most intimate and revealing of conversations. At one a.m., when the club's dancing act go on, Mrs. Brady finally has some time to herself. She takes out the true stories-type magazine she purchased at the beginning of the story, and is immediately “absorbed, her eyes drinking up printed lines.” To Mrs. Brady the magazine stories are “live, vivid threads in the dull, drab pattern of her night.”  

Appearing 20 years after its
initial publication, this pulp
edition of Night Club hints at
titillations never delivered

The irony, of course, is that the "true" stories that Mrs. Brady finds so engrossing are actually playing out right under her nose, without her ever being aware of it. The story's ending is a literary punchline: that's Kay's "trick."

Night Club, which Kay later dubbed "The Little Opus," received an honorable mention from The O. Henry Awards, and was collected, along with 10 other of Kay's more successful stories up to that time, and published in a single volume in 1929. 


That same year, Kay's "Little Opus" was transferred to the big screen, albeit in a much altered (read "unrecognizable") form.


Incidentally, 1929 was also the year that one of Kay's stories actually won an 
O. Henry Award.

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!