Quiet Drinking doesn’t openly admit to a fear of drunkenness, but in its emphasis on educating one’s palate, serving drinks attractively, and always offering food to guests, the book makes clear that a sophisticated soirée no longer involved bathtub gin and swinging from the chandeliers. The line between tipsy and blotto was a fine one, which women, especially single ones, needed to walk vigilantly. In Live Alone and Like It, Marjorie waxed unusually poetic about the pleasure of alcoholic wooziness, that delicate state “when you arrive at the dinner-table, heaven knows how, and are aware that everything beyond the table is vague, like a semilighted stage-set, while the shirt-fronts of the men and the white shoulders and jewels of the women are more acutely accented than ever before.” Things snap into focus, however, when the line is crossed: excesses like “shrill voices, familiarities, vulgar stories” are condemned as “frankly, disgusting.”40 Prohibition’s anything-goes attitude was firmly in the past.
Virginia Elliott’s contemporary Alma Whitaker—a Los Angeles Times columnist who in the early 1920s was an evangelist for the pleasures and health benefits of smoking—spent much more time on the risks of domestic drinking in her 1933 book Bacchus Behave! Her first chapter was one “In Which We Discuss Nectar and Manners,” followed by “Simple Rules for Righteous Behavior.” If readers forgot the central message (as they might, after the intervening chapters on cocktails, whisky, gin, brandy, liqueurs, wines, rum, champagne, and beer), they were brought back to the behavioral point, with the chapters “On Being a Good Guest,” and “Customs to Frown Upon.” The freedom to drink, according to Whitaker, was a fragile privilege, and a serious responsibility. “The success of the Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment can be materially aided by your own scrupulous personal conduct,” she wrote.41 Post-Prohibition, liquor was no longer a scarce treat to obsess and fight over, like children with cheap candy. It was time for Americans to grow up, and consign the “appalling mixtures” and “reckless indiscretion” of the previous decade to the embarrassing past. All the sneaky trappings of the Volstead era, like the surreptitious hip flask, were suddenly “déclassé,” decreed Whitaker, and hosts who had turned a corner of their home into an illicit bar were urged to “wall it up as you would an ancient crypt, for future historians to discover—and shudder over.”42
The Depression-era turn to the domestic sphere benefited single women by allowing them to claim control over their worlds and close the door on what they didn’t want to be or do. Yet for the successful Live-Aloner, the solitary ménage was by no means a hermitage. On the contrary, it could be a site of creativity and reinvention, a welcoming social space, and so much fun that she never even thought to miss the husband and children who weren’t underfoot. But she needed to be on her guard, so that the guests she’d invited—especially the men—didn’t overindulge and misbehave. It was a balancing act that, writ large, dominated the day-to-day existence of the Live-Aloner as she worked to guard her independence. To enjoy her freedom, but not too much. In the years to come, she would learn that her presence in the culture, and especially in the workforce, would always be ripe for backlash.
5
WORK ENDS AT NIGHTFALL
Careers for Seven Women
In April 1938, Marjorie Hillis first shared with her publishers her cherished idea of a book of verse, which she originally called If Women Must Work. It was constructed as a long narrative poem, Careers for Seven Women, broken up with a series of sonnets. It would tell the story of seven friends with different jobs and attitudes toward work, and attempt to dramatize the challenges and compromises that met working women at every stage of their careers.
Inside the publishing company, the new project met with a distinctly tepid response. One of the first readers admitted that she didn’t have a strong grasp of the mechanics of poetry, but nevertheless thought the lines didn’t scan properly, and seemed “labored and uninspired,” although she was at a loss to know how it could be fixed. The rhymes and language were simple, and for the most part lacked the “sparkle” that this kind of light verse needed—although there were plenty of “epigrammatic and quotable lines.”
A second internal report deemed the sonnet series “exceedingly uneven,” and Marjorie would eventually drop them after her brother, Dick, read the manuscript and concurred. The narrative poem, on the other hand, was “distinguished by the sort of knowledge and understanding of feminine character, biting yet sympathetic, that one has come to expect of the French.” Marjorie Hillis was no Dorothy Parker, this reader noted, nor even “a Margaret Fishback,” the copywriter-poetess whose career was then at its height. But her poems were “human,” her characters “recognizable,” and the result appealing, if “neither deep nor important.”1
Despite these reservations, the publishers thought the book could be a modest success with Marjorie’s eager fans, more for its subject matter and the author’s name than the brilliance of its poetry. The press release emphasized that the author was an authority on the “hopes and heartaches, ambitions and disappointments” of working women, and that her characters represented types that would be reflected in real women across the country. Through “the unusual medium of verse,” the release added rather nervously, the author was able to dramatize a different side of their lives—those “spiritual and psychological needs” that were not being met by economic independence alone.
Work Ends at Nightfall was published on August 31. Three days later, Marjorie sent an anxious cable to her publisher about the lack of press attention in New York, and proposed either sending the in-house publicist out to meet personally with reviewers, or engaging an external publicity person, at a shared cost, to try to push her own ideas for promotions and news stories—she was ready with the names of two such “go getters.” She had already supplied a list of previously supportive reviewers who might be called upon to say something in praise of the book. But nothing much could move it. By November, after the British publisher of her earlier books had politely declined this volume, hopes for its success were fading. It had sold about five thousand copies by this point—“not bad for a book of verse,” her publisher acknowledged—but it wasn’t going to get close to any bestseller lists. There was some small comfort for Marjorie when an acquaintance asked to set the poem’s “lullaby” verses to music—but one small song was no match for the chorus of praise she’d previously enjoyed.
Laurance Chambers defended the company against Marjorie’s disappointment. “Every one in our organization was keyed up over it, and we worked like sin,” he insisted in January, laying out how much they’d overspent on advertising that hadn’t resulted in sales. It was always a gamble, he reminded her. “Selling poetry is a tough job except where the critics recognize the author as a poetic genius (and by no means always then).” In the final reckoning, the fault wasn’t in the publisher’s lack of effort, but in the lack of enthusiastic readers. “So please don’t kick us. Kick the dear public.”
Nevertheless, there were no tie-in department store displays for Work Ends at Nightfall, nor did Marjorie set off on a nationwide promotional tour. (One display ad for Macy’s did do its best to capitalize on the lucrative potential of a new Live-Alone book, declaring: “Read Marjorie Hillis’s new book ‘Work Ends at Nightfall,’ and you’ll rush right out and buy yourself a new housecoat. Sketched is a colorfully embroidered slipper rayon satin in black, wine, royal and blue. 7.98.”) The subdued publication was not exactly surprising, as the new book was a departure in tone as well as form. For the first time, the Live Alone queen seemed to be casting serious doubt on whether independence really was a route to happiness.
Poetry was not a new pursuit for Marjorie, who had written verses for Vogue and for various newspapers when she was younger—and it also wasn’t as strange or noteworthy then as it would be today for a journalist to produce, essentially, a novella in verse. Poetry, of an accessible, conventional sort, was still widely read, and it was a truism that there were certain kinds of intimacy and ambiguity and emotio
n that a writer couldn’t attain any other way. The publisher’s advertisement relied on this idea, touting the book’s use of “the universal language of poetry” to reveal the “unspoken thoughts” of working women “with beauty, frankness and understanding.” The reviewer for the Los Angeles Times likewise saw no particular obstacle in the form: “Marjorie Hillis has gone poetic on her readers, and they’ll like it.” Even “those who shy away from poetry,” he (or she) reassured his readers, “need not shy away from her.”2
Two weeks after the book appeared, Marjorie celebrated at a joint party thrown for her and the novelist Dawn Powell, who had just published a new novel, The Happy Island. Powell shared a publisher with Marjorie’s rival Dorothea Brande, and although Marjorie’s satire was gentler, both writers were frequently likened to Dorothy Parker. Their books cast a sidelong, skeptical glance at New York society and women’s place in it; the New York Herald Tribune’s book columnist explained of Powell’s novel: “Happy Island means Manhattan, and the title is writ sarkastic [sic] . . . It illuminates the desperate situation of people who hate New York and can’t stand living anywhere else—besides which, nowhere else could stand them either . . .”3 Marjorie’s characters in Work Ends at Nightfall were not as glamorous as Powell’s cast of café-society denizens, but both authors were concerned with questioning New York’s reputation as the natural and most congenial habitat of the independent woman, especially, in Marjorie’s case, one who was no longer quite young, and who felt herself lacking the energy to continue making the compromises the city so relentlessly demanded.
The seven friends in Work Ends at Nightfall meet after work “in one of those dim restaurants / Where chiefly women gather,” a claustrophobic and unglamorous place full of “milling femininity” and “minor dramas.” First to arrive are Eileen and Nancy, an advertising executive and a photographer, who order a daiquiri and a Scotch and soda and await the others. Next is Kate, “plain, dun-colored” and eager to please, a columnist who is married to a man she doesn’t love—and is torn between triumph that she has a man at all, and misery that he is so unpleasant. Claudia, a stylist, is a quintessential Live-Aloner, “slim and composed” and the happiest, or most self-satisfied, of the group, while Irene, “a dainty, fluttering woman,” is a stenographer whose hopes for a romantic future are fading. Last to arrive are Martha and Mary, bearing biblically appropriate names: a selfless, religious social worker and a besotted mother. The balance of jobs the seven share is somewhat unrealistic—five are professional, and only two (Irene, the stenographer, and Mary, who works in a gift shop) do the kind of routine, low-paid jobs that actually occupied most working women in the 1930s. The Depression benefited women workers in several ways, but it took its toll on those who had managed to fight their way into prestigious fields like law, medicine, and higher education. The decline in opportunity was small as a percentage of those fields, because they were still so male dominated, but it represented a larger decline in possibility. As one historian sums it up, “by 1940, only one woman job holder in ten could be classified as a professional; the remaining nine were clustered in clerical, sales, manufacturing, and domestic service.”4 Five out of seven is clearly no one in ten—though perhaps Marjorie might protest that among such a small and sinking band, it would hardly be surprising for professional women to cling together once they had found one another.
All the women in the poem are interested in discussing their working lives, but their rivalry is obvious in the private reflections they make when another speaks. When Irene, the stenographer, complains that “Such work as ours is hard,” the others immediately think, “Your work and mine are surely not the same.”5 Irene is desperate for solidarity from the other women, but her job places her below them in prestige, and they don’t want to equate her labor with their careers. Despite popular culture’s promise of office romances, Irene has discovered that it isn’t there, beside a desk, that “A man chose a woman to take in his care.”6 When her workday ends, there is nothing for her but to go home, alone.
The poem suggests that there is a particular pleasure and privilege to work that doesn’t end at nightfall, represented by stylist Claudia eyeing the new fashions on the restaurant-goers and journalist Kate keeping her eye out for stories. Marjorie herself described this thrill in her own work as a writer and lecturer, of not knowing where business ended and social life began, “as everything I did opened up some new channel and it was all exciting.”7 Kate admits that they are guilty of letting their work “engross” and “absorb” them to the exclusion of other pleasures, and Claudia agrees:
“Women don’t know when
Their work should end, their private lives begin;
Or sometimes it’s the private lives that win.
We need more balance.”8
For Eileen, the wealthy advertising executive, the problem is that work is still new enough for women that they haven’t yet learned to take it for granted, or fit it easily into their lives, as men do.
In an interview with the women’s page of the Baltimore Sun after the book’s release, Marjorie referred to her characters as though they were case studies to explain her belief that taking pride in her appearance had the power to shape a woman’s happiness. “Take, for instance, Claudia and Eileen in my last book, Work Ends at Nightfall,” she said. “They were successful because they were meticulous—or I might say, because they lived meticulously. Kate and Irene didn’t bother, and just let themselves go, so as a consequence they got the second best from life instead of the best, which they desired.”9 Claudia, the stylist, is the happiest of the seven in her small apartment in a remote, shabby neighborhood. Her happiness gave Marjorie a way to prove her point that domestic surroundings had a powerful effect on happiness, and the author equates Claudia’s pride in her three rooms to Mary’s in her sleeping child. Claudia has chosen and knows every object in the apartment, so that “Every little charming part / Of her rooms, made up a chart / Of the travels of her heart.”10 Eileen, by contrast, is successful enough to afford a high-floor apartment reflecting the height of her ambition, but its beauty has been purchased, rather than curated. Her expensive “deep, pale rugs” and “calla lilies in a crystal vase” give Eileen less happiness than Claudia’s quirky statues and paintings.11
Kate, despite finding her job as a journalist rewarding, finds her personal life miserable. Although she has long enjoyed “the pride plain women feel / At winning any man,” her “morose and critical” husband makes her home life miserable. Single Nancy, meanwhile, believes that “If you’re lonely, there is laziness behind it,”12 and has almost too much male attention. She devotes herself to romance so determinedly that she neglects her home, which is a “workmanlike and bare” studio.13 One of the manuscript readers picked up on a contradiction—or perhaps hypocrisy—undermining the character. “It seems as though the author wasn’t quite sure what Nancy proved. She tries to make Nancy’s promiscuity a natural thing, and then turns around and condemns her freedom as license.”14 But Nancy’s problem isn’t too much sex, but too little care of herself.
Along with Claudia, Mary, the mother, is the most fulfilled of the seven, although her satisfaction is chillingly expressed as relief that she can now sink her ambitions into her child, rather than try to fulfill them herself: “All your broken wishes will / Mend themselves and live in her,” she thinks, as she watches her baby sleep.15 Her husband, “stirred / By her sweet frailty,” treats her like a child, and she has mastered “the useful gift / Of helplessness”—hardly a victory to celebrate.16 Martha, the social worker, feels empathy for the others but wants to find a definite answer to which way of life, work or marriage, is better for women. She finds herself, on her way home, in an ornate chapel, where a glimpse of the nuns comforts her with the reminder that there is no one way of life that will make every woman happy, and that each of them must find her own way to make her life count.
We Need More Balance
Work Ends at Nightfall gave Marjorie an oppor
tunity to dramatize the challenges for working women that weren’t simply a question of money and budgets, as she’d discussed in Orchids and elsewhere. Her ambivalence about what it meant—and what it cost—to be a “career woman” reflected the culture at large, which was still not prepared to truly embrace women’s professional ambitions, nor to make the allowances that would enable them to combine work with family life.
Marjorie didn’t see her own job at Vogue, much less as a full-time writer, as simply a way to support herself. After her parents died and her family obligations faded, she began to derive a stronger sense of identity from her status as a career woman. “I had never taken it very seriously,” she recalled later, while her pious and bookish family “had never taken it seriously at all.” But she valued Vogue more as her status there rose, after she’d become accustomed to the “free and easy” attitudes of the younger women and “very, very fancy young men,” with whom she worked.17 Even at the deepest moments of family crisis, she did not leave the magazine until her books were truly successful, launching her on a new and higher-profile career.
The Extra Woman Page 14