Book Review : Puttin’ On the Ritz in Ol’ New York

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (Plume: $7.95; 240 pages)

Published just as the Roaring ‘20s were subsiding into the sober ‘30s, “Ex-Wife” has been reissued as part of New American Library’s laudable effort to retrieve the forgotten works of American women writers. Told in a flip, brittle first-person mode that sometimes becomes downright didactic, “Ex-Wife” is the story of four hectic years in the life of a newly divorced New Yorker. Luckier, more capable and prettier than most, Patricia lands on her feet as a successful copywriter, remarried by the time she’s 28 to an adoring man, but not until she’s lost most of her girlish illusions.

As she’s sailing out of New York harbor on her round-the-world wedding trip, she examines herself in the stateroom window, seeing a slightly shopworn John Held girl. “She did not look happy or unhappy. She looked a little tired and a little amused,” a phrase that might describe the contemporary reader.

Though “Ex-Wife” was a scandalous success 60 years ago, by today’s relaxed standards Patricia’s behavior seems a model of restrained decorum. Relentlessly cheerful in her darkest hours, resilient when her lovers disappoint her, elegantly dressed even on her pittance of a salary, she inspires more envy than pity among her latter-day analogues. Time has shifted our sympathies from the heroine herself to the vanished world in which she lived.

A Vanished Era

Imagine a New York in which the autumn air is so clear “that the edges of tall buildings are etched against the sky”. . . an era when people topped off an evening of drinking, dining and theater with a trip uptown to a Harlem nightclub to dance or listen to jazz. Knowing we’re meant to identify with Patricia’s plight, we may find ourselves awash in nostalgia for that lost Atlantis.

Though Patricia and her friend, Lucia, are in the vanguard of Women’s Liberation--the first generation to be able to vote, to have a choice of profession beyond “the convent, the street, or marriage”--prevailing attitudes haven’t begun to catch up. When Patricia foolishly confesses her one extramarital escapade to her philandering first husband, he immediately abandons her for a woman whose unassailable virtue is her sole attraction. Even in mid-fling--gulping Rob Roys, dancing the Charleston and arranging her few assignations, Pat betrays a wistful longing for pre-liberation days, when “women used to have status, a relative security.”

She’d dynamite the statue of Susan B. Anthony if she could. Pat considers herself a victim of the new freedom, not a beneficiary. Lucia is even more cynical. “We are free to pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one husband.” In Lucia’s bleak view, the choices have changed in name only.

A Prophetic Analysis

A career is merely the equivalent of “the convent,” absorbing all of a woman’s emotional energy; “the street” has become a string of dead-end affairs, while marriage remains exactly the same in all essential particulars. This eloquent dialogue stretches into a remarkably prophetic analysis of the impossibility of “having it all,” even in an era when hardly any women had yet begun to enjoy a tiny share of personal autonomy.

While these tart observations are folded neatly into the text, the plot is designed to show the various perils lying in store for women of the future. Pat has a young assistant whose marriage disintegrates as soon as the bride’s salary exceeds the husband’s; Lucia settles with exhausted relief into the routines of a suburban matron, and Pat is trapped in a doomed affair with a married man, a Gothic situation that could have been invented by one of the Brontes.

The author was less fortunate than her heroine. In a touching afterword written by her son, he reports that after her one celebrated novel, Ursula Parrott supported both of them as a writer for women’s magazines, short periods of prosperity followed by spells of abject poverty. Unhappily married four times, in debt and in legal difficulties, she died at 57 under an assumed name in the charity ward of a Manhattan hospital, unable ever to find a satisfactory answer to the urgent question she asks early in “Ex-Wife”: “Here we are, with the sun of the New World shining on us; what are we going to do about it?”