Young Mrs. Greeley
by . New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1929. 12mo. 205 pp. $2.00.
MR. TARKINGTON’S new novel will conceivably be appraised by too many readers as merely a light and entertaining story of feminine jealousy. Entertaining if is, but not light, if by light we mean negligible. In the characters of Aurelia Hedge and Stella Greeley he has drawn a type of modern woman who is so familiar that we should never suspect her of having overtones; yet he has made her overtones sound on every page. It is too much to hope that these two rather merciless portraits will be recognized by the kind of women who sat for them; or, if they are, the Stellas and Aurelias will be ready, doubtless, with a rationalizing defense.
To call it a story of jealousy seems not quite to reach the author’s real purpose. Rather, he has dramatized the mess that a silly wife can make when she sets out to ‘help’ her husband in his business. ‘The N. K. U. depends,’ says Mr. Cooper, Bill Greeley’s employer, ‘upon the wife of every man in its forces to second her hushand’s efforts’ —and Stella is forthwith pushed a little further on the campaign that her friend. Aurelia Hedge, has prompted. For, though the book takes its title from Stella, it is Aurelia who is the fons et origo mali. Both are shallow, idle, socially ambitious. They live in the Warwicke Armes, their apartments identical in Olde Englysshe Style, their husbands working for the National Kitchen Utensils. The story opens as Bill Greeley is made factory manager over Henry’s head. Henry’s wife submerges her resentment in infecting Stella with two notions — that Bill is likely to succumb to the charms of his new secretary, Miss Nelson, and that his promotion sprang from Mr. Cooper’s susceptibility to Stella’s beauty. Unsuspected by their husbands, the two launch a campaign that is to defeat Miss Nelson and push the interests of both men. Its tragi-comic collapse leaves Stella humiliated, and — for once — pretty clearly aware of her cheap futility.
For the most part Mr. Tarkington lets his people reveal themselves, but his three pages on Aurelia form a miniature classic in character description. Her limited, egocentric preoccupations, her indolence and vanity, her pretentiousness, are each important in their effect on Stella and Bill. That Aurelia has an inffnite capacity for making trouble never occurs to Stella, and she has few misgivings as she yields to Aurelia’s bear-leading. “She had a momentary impulse to set up some sort of defense for the offending William. He was her husband, not Aurelia’s; and she felt if he was to be defamed, the defamation was her own affair, not any other woman’s.’
But it is in his mass scenes that the author triumphs — the banquet at which the N. K. C. celebrates Bill’s promotion, and the Sunday high-tea at the Coopers’, which Stella anticipates as the stage for her captivation of Mr. Cooper, and which, instead, brings her downfall. For here, with irresistible humor not untinged with sympathy, Mr. Tarkington has set the overdressed and vapid Stella against the ‘society’ she hopes to enter —simple, natural, cultivated folk who discuss Bach and Brahms and Picasso, and to whose courteous efforts to include her she can only reply, with a coy giggle, ’Is n’t he the highbrow cut-up, though? I’ll tell the world!’
TERESA S. FITZPATRICK