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| Claire McCardell - evening gown, early 1940s. Metropolitan Museum of Art It doesn't seem that this dress is an evening gown! |
People Are NOT Talking About Nancy Hale, although they should.
Vogue: " . . . Dear Beast, the Nancy Hale novel, intelligent, gay, and mannered, centering (sic) about a Northern girl married into an old Virginia family, a new woman in a town where even new silver is "a delicious, risky vision, not even to be contemplated unless one's pedigree were so watertight that it would be obvious that one possessed ancestral silver"; its action turning on a silly device, a visit from an un-Life-like Life photographer. Miss Hale sees the South's characteristics, through her alien, Northern eyes, as idiosyncrasies, and plays them for laughs."
I disagree. Vogue makes the book sound more like The Egg and I.
I got the book from the inter-library loan and read it shortly after seeing The Help. We are very much in the same white world; Dear Beast doesn't venture over the tracks. Abby, a Northerner, has haphazardly married a Southerner and moved with him to Virginia. Abby, thinking that "when you made a friend in New York, she was likely to be all you would ever know of the complex of her life; you might never meet her sister or best beau, let alone her mother or her father," attends a luncheon, very much like those in The Help.
"She looked up and down the long, oval table, with its centerpiece of white July roses, surrounded by women who had been brought up that it was bad manners ever to allow a silence. Not one of them but was imbedded in layer after layer of relationships -- relationships with connections of their husbands, with friends, with friends of friends, with servants, with the families of servants, with their own families stretching back generation after generation. The life they led consisted of people; people in all colors and degrees, people loved, hated, dealt with, people on terms of familiarity, people held at arm's length. Tradespeople, servants, children, cousins, spouses, friends by the dozens depended from each of these women, as from the myriad udders of an Oriental animal goddess. They moved and breathed within relationships; they never stirred unaccompanied; even their thoughts were group thoughts, family thoughts; they were region thoughts, race thoughts."
And at the same party, a southern woman has gone north, "married General Foods" and attended a charity event. She reports back:
"This particular benefit is for International Orphans Incorporated -- a charity that brings children over from Europe." . . .
"Charity begins at home, I say," Relia Fenn put in. She rang the tiny silver bell, at her right hand, and the two Negro maids in gray uniforms with organdy aprons, reappeared and began to clear away the dessert plates. "I truly do. You can spend your millions of dollars all over the globe on your stark heathen and your coal-black, and it won't do one particle of good if there isn't charity in your heart." Her words were swallowed up by the torrent of generally voiced agreement.
"Abby's eyes followed the colored maids as they passed in and out through the swinging door to the pantry. Her eyes returned to the tableful of ladies. By some association of ideas, she visualized her diary, lying in its drawer beside the bed, at home. Then she allowed herself to swept on again by the avalanche of opinion around her," endlessly debating, who is the better friend of" the niggra?" The hypocritical Northerner or the soft hearted Southerner. . .
The forgettable Life photographer comes to town, consternation ensues, a book is written, Abby goes North.
The New York scenes are the weakest in the book; remarkably, it gains strength and keeps on gaining when Abby returns South to her quintessentially college-sports-mad husband, who, against all odds, becomes a fully-realized human being.
Nancy Hale was another Vogue alumna, like Marya Mannes, writing under a pseudonym in the 1930s. She was also a grand-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe - a fun fact that might be mentioned in a novel about the South!
Then, as now, Vogue uses writers and columnists as a roving cast of characters: not sure what the top photo was about, but in the bottom, Nancy Hale models a halter top made from a dime-store handkerchief, something we were still doing when I wore halter tops. Here is a photo from 1932:
In the Berkeley Public Library, you can still find her books on Mary Cassatt and the intellectual heritage of New England. In 1959, her best-known book would have been her 1942 novel, 700 pages, The Prodigal Women. Dear Beast is mentioned neither in her NYT obituary, or a biographical sketch introducing her papers at Smith College. I'm not sure why this sank out of sight. It didn't deserve to.
Tomorrow: Art Carney and a new album.
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