Keep Going and Like It
In 1967, Marjorie Hillis Roulston published her final book, Keep Going and Like It, which promised to teach readers “How to be as glamorous in December as you were in May.” On the back of the hardcover, decorated with bright pink and yellow cartoon flowers, was a portrait of the white-haired author, resplendent in a satin blouse with huge fur cuffs and dark silk skirt, leaning toward the camera with one eyebrow arched conspiratorially. The photograph marked a departure from thirty years before, when her books were illustrated with line-drawn figures that were more symbols than individuals. Here, the reader is reckoning with Marjorie Hillis herself: her life story, which is woven through the book, her beliefs, and the lessons she’s learned. The advising “we” of the early books has disappeared; in her place is a confident, glamorous “I.”
This image of the author—a mature dowager in her elegant Upper East Side apartment—sits incongruously with the pop-art design of the front cover, suggesting a mismatch between her message and the youth-obsessed culture of the late 1960s. But what emerges from the book is a strong sense that being young is not the same thing as being modern: in many ways, Marjorie sounds more modern than Helen Gurley Brown, in her continued commitment to the simple idea that women are people and ought to be able to determine their lives as such. Published when Marjorie Hillis was almost eighty, Keep Going and Like It opened with the assertion that age was no dictator of personality, any more than gender ought to be: “This little book is written in the belief that you can have as interesting, useful, and even gay life in the sixties and seventies and often the eighties as at any other time in your life.”
Her final book combined the two modes of writing that Marjorie Hillis loved: the earnest advice for happiness, and the social satire that took nothing too seriously. The chapters, with titles like “Those Little Ailments” and “There Are Still a Few Odd Men,” approached the new challenges of sixty-plus life with sympathy and seriousness, but were capped off with witty poems that either amplified the message of the chapter, or made fun of it.
Much of the book was a reiteration of the familiar Live-Alone principles for those who might have forgotten them, with plenty of advice about clothes and beauty. But it was also a backward glance, and a meditation on what had changed. In her mother’s day, Marjorie recalled, women over sixty thought of themselves as “matrons and dowagers” and dressed accordingly. Today, however, “You see them on the tennis courts in shorts, in their gardens in slacks, and on the beach in bikinis” (though she considered this last trend, in most cases, a mistake, as “time has an unpleasant way of making some minor but unappetizing changes in most women’s appearance”). But in general, most women could adapt modern fashions for themselves, with a “hint of understatement.”94 And while the gradual disappearance in formal dressing—gowns and white tie for the opera, for instance—might have made life a little less elegant, it certainly made wardrobes cheaper.
The “setting for sixty plus” was not much different from the “setting for a solo act” Marjorie had described years ago. If the reader hadn’t taken her advice back then, by now it was high time to downsize from her cluttered and sprawling home to a more efficient place—no matter how painful the upheaval might be. “A good move means discarding every single thing that one isn’t going to need and enjoy, and then calling up the nearest thrift shop or the Salvation Army, and closing one’s mind to sentiment,” she urged briskly.95 Starting afresh with streamlined, modern furniture, “possibly Scan-dinavian,” was a great way to present an equally fresh impression to the world. And it wasn’t too late to start: “Creating a place in which one is comfortable, happy, and which expresses one’s own personality is one of the great satisfactions of life.”96 A retirement home was a last resort for those in very poor health—in general, Marjorie considered it a mistake to spend time only with those of one’s own age.
The attitude of the world to older women—and more importantly, the attitude of older women to the world—had also changed profoundly. She no longer wanted to be revered as a wise elder, if she ever had: “veneration is the last thing any modern American woman wants,” Marjorie insisted. “She wants to be alert and busy and popular.” This last part was important, and a direct rebuke to another lesson of her mother’s, imparted years before, that life was like a pebble thrown into a lake, with ripples that grew bigger and then inevitably, smaller. Now, she saw no need to stop being sociable and making new friends. “Nobody, but nobody, needs to be lonely.”97
However, Marjorie had a particular warning for retired career women. Having been used to being Somebody, now, without a job, such a woman might think she’s Nobody—“a depressing feeling that often results in a lessening of interest in clothes and grooming, and sometimes, unhappily, a tendency to take too much to drink.” The remedy was simple, however, as it always was, with a little effort: to volunteer, or more appealingly, have fun, by taking part in the cultural life of one’s city or town. “The answer if you feel lonely or neglected, is to get on the telephone, make the date, get the tickets, plan the bridge game, order the dinner, and involve yourself in the activities of the world.” The “Song of the Sixties” set the tone:
“We are the ladies whose age is unknown.
Whose hair may be false, but whose cash is our own.
We work hard to look like a ripe seventeen
But we play a big part in the smart current scene,
Through unceasing effort, we all get around
At an age when our grandmothers slept underground.” 98
In her later life Marjorie took great joy in being a grandmother to her stepchildren’s children, but characteristically, her approach to this relationship rejected the cloying sentiment that often clung to it. She cautioned grandmothers against making grandchildren the center of their world, as well as against giving them advice, or becoming an obligation. Her advice was to make your own life instead: “The woman who does it so well that her grandson says, ‘I have to call well in advance to get a date with my grandmother,’ makes one feel that here is a woman who not only has popularity but deserves it.”99
A few unmistakable signs of the changing times did creep into this Live-Alone swansong. Although Marjorie railed against the habit of sharing gory details about one’s own and other people’s ailments, she does advise readers to take advantage of the still-new Medicare provisions, enacted by President Johnson two years earlier, in 1965. And in the chapter “There Are Still a Few Odd Men,” she no longer needs to be coy about the real subject of the discussion, which is “what we might as well refer to frankly as sex, since it is so called everywhere from pulpit to paperback.”100 The word appeared too frequently for this to be a direct gibe at Sex and the Single Girl, but it’s hard to believe Marjorie would have missed the book’s appearance—whether or not she read it. The book’s final poem, “A Touch of Impropriety,” celebrates the gap that exists between the young single women who made up Helen Gurley Brown’s audience, and the Live-Alone survivors like herself. “There’s a difference we acknowledge, / Twixt your age and girls in college. / They are sharply watched by all society.” But she doesn’t envy the younger women, who are under the constant pressure of this social surveillance. As Gurley Brown also hints, there’s a freedom that derives from being old enough to escape the world’s scrutiny. If she’s careful with her money and her health, the older Live-Aloner may do in old age what she has done, if she’s smart, all along: exactly what she likes, how she likes, and with whom she likes—men, mothers, and moralizers be damned.
FOUR YEARS AFTER she published Keep Going and Like It, Marjorie Hillis Roulston passed away at the age of eighty-two, just missing the debut of Ms. magazine, the passage of Title IX, and the Roe v. Wade decision. A brief obituary in Time magazine sniffed that she “glorified spinsterhood,” while the New York Times praised her as a pillar of the community like her father, rather than as a feminist pioneer. But her smart and witty books—and the life on which they were based�
��lit a path through the middle of the twentieth century for women who didn’t think they could “have it all,” but understood that having anything at all depended on being able to make their own choices.
EPILOGUE
Six months after my father died and I first encountered Marjorie Hillis’s stern, funny, sensible voice, I met someone by chance, in New York, in a bar—thus breaking one of the few rules both Marjorie Hillis and Helen Gurley Brown shared. It was June, and by October we were living together. I’d jumped from living with roommates into my first ever real relationship, hastened as these things always are in the city by my lease coming up for renewal. I felt a pang of regret that I never got the chance to create my own Live-Alone oasis, to decorate exactly as I pleased, and to serve my friends elegant suppers in my very best formal pajamas in front of the fireplace (we may as well be optimistic).
Doing things faster than we really thought was wise became a theme of our relationship. Three years after I moved in, on another cold sunny day in October, we stood under the Hell Gate Bridge in Astoria Park, on the Queens side of Marjorie Hillis’s beloved East River, and stumbled through a short wedding ceremony that we had cobbled together. I didn’t write out my vows and can’t remember now exactly what I promised. I do remember at the last minute that we decided we wanted a reading, just one, and handed a piece of paper to our friend Adrian, an artist with a booming voice and the partner of my best friend, Ali, who gave me that first copy of Live Alone and Like It. The reading wasn’t about love or marriage but about the river behind us and the city beyond it. It was a passage from Marjorie Hillis’s hymn to New York, about the way its energy lights a reciprocal spark in your mind, and how what looks like anonymity and loneliness can, with a quarter-turn to the light, look instead like friendliness and welcome and home.
Our wedding, the one we wrote ourselves and celebrate as our anniversary, was real but it wasn’t official. We’d already undergone the legal procedure at City Hall back in May, at the end of the semester that meant the end of my visa. Over the summer we ran around trying to check everything off the elastic list of ways to prove that we were a real couple—opening a joint savings account, begging our friends to send us all the photographs they had of the two of us together, and choosing a handful of those with the most respectable jobs to sign affidavits swearing that we were in love. We got them notarized. I got screened for tuberculosis. Three days after our ceremony under the bridge, we went to the immigration office in Long Island City and tried to focus on a word-search game while around us, lawyers huddled with nervous couples. We were called in early, and the friendly agent with the Caribbean accent asked me apologetically, once again, if I was a prostitute or a terrorist, just in case I’d checked those boxes incorrectly on the form. I pushed more photos and more affidavits across his desk. We were in there just a couple of minutes before he told me he had approved my provisional green card, that I could expect it in the mail within a week. He said he knew we were a couple from the way we’d been sitting together in the waiting room.
When we got out past the metal detectors and security guards it was barely eleven and weakly sunny. The closest bar was a huge empty restaurant over a century old, all mahogany wood and stained glass lampshades, and we ordered gin martinis and sat at the bar. My hands were shaking too much not to spill my drink.
I tell this story because it is easy for many people, even me, to forget that marriage is always political, a rite of citizenship that is offered or withheld by the state. Because it’s easy to forget that exercising the right to live your life as you choose is still a political act, and a brave act—far braver for some people than for others, of course. Because there are still many, many powerful people who are afraid to allow women happiness, independence, pleasure, and the right to be alone—all the rights that Marjorie Hillis claimed for her Live-Aloner, without thinking of them as such. So while we can admire her devotion to a well-cut dress, well-ordered home, and perfectly mixed Manhattan, we should remember that it isn’t easy for any of us to create a life we really like, and harder still to do it in style.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book exists thanks to the curiosity, generosity, encouragement, and patience (so much patience!) of many people. Several world-class institutions in the United States supported me through years of research and writing. The New York Public Library gave me space to think and write, in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room and other research spaces, and access to its invaluable digital and human research resources. The Brooklyn Historical Society allowed me to piece together the life of the charismatic and controversial Newell Dwight Hillis, while the libraries of Columbia University, New York University, and the New-York Historical Society have offered me a quiet corner to work and daydream. Thanks to an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship from the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, I was able to dig through the Bobbs-Merrill archive and read Marjorie Hillis’s letters on her unfaded pale-blue personal stationery. The generous librarians and archivists at Condé Nast let me leaf through old issues of Vogue dating all the way back to when the magazine published poetry, as well as the correspondence of Edna Woolman Chase. In 2014 the beautiful Wildacres retreat in Little Switzerland, North Carolina, offered a residency to this city girl and taught her once and for all that she very much does not like living alone in a cabin in the woods.
At Columbia, I was lucky enough to find wonderful mentors and teachers in the English department, especially Sarah Cole, Marianne Hirsch, and David Damrosch, while at the New-York Historical Society, my current professional home, I have been privileged to work with the remarkable historians on the advisory board of the Center for Women’s History; thanks especially to Alice Kessler-Harris, Lara Vapnek, and Julia Golia for their generous welcome, teaching, and friendship. Laura Mogulescu, Jeanne Gutierrez, Lana Povitz, Sarah Litvin, Lindsay King, and especially Sarah Gordon have been inspirational colleagues and friends, and nothing we do would be possible without the mentorship of the inimitable Valerie Paley.
My unflappable agent, Kate Johnson, let me buttonhole her in the middle of Fifth Avenue to share my excitement about Marjorie Hillis, and guided me through several iterations of her story before it found its ideal home with Liveright. There, the astute and enthusiastic Katie Adams has been a dream editor, and I am grateful to her and the rest of the team, especially Bob Weil, Gina Iaquinta, and Cordelia Calvert, for guiding me through the new and often bewildering publishing process so cheerfully.
As a freelance writer I’ve depended on the support and collaboration of many wonderful editors. Thanks are due in particular to those who took a chance on small sections and early versions of Marjorie Hillis’s story: Sasha Weiss, Miriam Markowitz, Sara Polsky, and Lily Rothman. I’m grateful to the people who helped me discover a world of literary and intellectual fellowship outside academia: At Housing Works Bookstore, one of the most important communities in New York, Laura Tanenbaum, Rachel Fershleiser, and Sam Sacks, a brilliant editor who helped me hone my nonacademic voice. Thanks to David Haglund and everyone at PEN America, for letting me be an overgrown intern and build a new career, and for the much more important work you do daily on behalf of writers around the world. Serving as a board member of the National Book Critics Circle was an honor and a genuine pleasure thanks to the fellowship of smart and dedicated critics, especially Kate Tuttle, Walton Muyumba, Tom Beer, Ron Charles, and Laurie Muchnick. And to everyone who helps make the New York literary community what it is—thanks for letting me be a part of it.
THIS BOOK BEGAN with a gift, from the unfailingly generous and thoughtful Ali MacGilp, who could not have known where it would lead. She has been a incredible source of support and love, along with her sisters, Helena and Mazz, since we were tree climbing tomboys together, and with Adrian, Flora, Dave, and the UCL and Camberwell family. Lucy Ellis and her family have always been there for me, and I’m so grateful for the unofficial second home they gave me as a teenager. When I moved to New York in 2003 I was smart enough to bring som
e of England’s finest with me, for the long or short haul: Mark Dean and Grace Pickering, steadfast and hilarious allies; Mat Coakley; Esther Waters; and all too briefly, Max and Sophie Deveson. For them and everyone at King’s, especially Katie, Helena, Jenny, Helen, and Kirsten, thank you for teaching me that any kind of living alone and liking it is only possible with a loyal crew.
My PhD years were immeasurably improved by a cohort of brilliant women, at Columbia and NYU, among them Beth McArthur, Lauren Walsh, Lianne Habinek, Sharon Fulton, and Sara Landreth. Sarah Klock has been an inspiration and a dear friend since we met in Ann Douglas’s Cold War Culture class at Columbia. Jack, Arlo, and Juniper—this might be the first book with your names in it, but it won’t be the last. Susan Harlan, the exemplary Live-Aloner, has contributed more to this book than even she knows.
I met Tony Hightower six months after I “met” Marjorie Hillis, and right then I knew that I’d missed my shot at living stylishly alone. He makes everything else possible, and I’m grateful every day. Not least for bringing me to Astoria and to the Lady Pat, where Sam Meyer and Bari Dulberg have been better friends and upstairs neighbors than any sitcom could dream up, along with Scott Lydon and Kristy Tye (come back!), and the sharp, brilliant Michelle Dean (also come back!). Thanks our extended local family: Brittney, Dominique, and Vivien, Lexi and Connie at Astoria Bookshop, and Dennis and Liz at Astoria Coffee, where not-inconsiderable chunks of this book were written.
I owe more than I can say to my stylish, energetic, supportive, and brilliant mother, Andrea, to my ever-cheerful brother, Robert, my stepfather, Dave Jessup, and our funny, big-hearted, ever-expanding family. Much love to Bud, Eva, Jeanne, Andrew, and Rose for welcoming me so warmly into the family.
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