Kitty Foyle
The Atlantic BOOKSHELF
by [Lippincott, $2.50]
Kitty Foyle is Christopher Morley’s best novel to date, and it is a work of utter directness which brings us an irresistibly living heroine and an amazing evocation of the most natural reality. From the point of view of craftsmanship it is interesting to note Mr. Morley’s success in turning abruptly from such involved fantasy as The Trojan Horse — that Chaucerian tale in modern idiom complete with loud-speaker — to take on the more disciplined task of simplicity. But readers of this new novel are not going to be thinking much about craftsmanship, or about Christopher Morley. They are going to be thinking about Kitty Foyle.
Some of them, perhaps, will be thinking of modern women generally in Kitty Foyle’s image, and testing her sharp, swift wisdom in terms of the life they know. Others will start thinking about the White-Collar Girl and her human problems in this exacting day of freedom and confusion. But for all of them the novel will be absorbingly alive in the completely convincing reality of an Irish-American girl who was born and brought up in Philadelphia, went to high school in a small town in Illinois, made good in her job with a cosmetic business in New York, and lived through a heartbreaking love affair in the years around twenty to face a new problem at twenty-eight. Kitty at twenty-eight looks back and tells her own story, not to an audience but to herself. No one stands between the reader and that quick-witted, questioning, gallant young modern that is Kitty Foyle.
The plot is one of the simplest and oldest of them all. Edith Wharton used it beautifully, with a Greek singleness, in Summer. Galsworthy gave it a Complex modern turn of haunting tragedy in The Apple Tree. Christopher Morley makes it a door through which Kitty Foyle enters our hearts as well as our consciousness. The daughter of a cricket coach turned factory foreman, self-reliant by character and necessity from babyhood, Kitty was completely valiant and generous in her love for the charming, sheltered son of Rittenhouse Square and the Main Line. ’When her happiness crashed she did all she could to save him pain. And of course she kept on working just the same; the beauty trade wasn’t much hurt by the depression.
Next to Kitty herself it is Pop and Philadelphia that are the novel’s most vivid characters. Every detail of her story is interesting because it is Kitty’s story. But if the scion of seven generations of the Main Line never takes on much substance for his own sake, that is perhaps right enough: we see Wvn only through Kitty’s love for him, as we see time and place in Kitty’s character and thought and experience.
This is a novel of shrewd observation and humor and compassion and truth, touched with Christopher Morley’s lively sense of place, and given reality through the artist s fine self-subordination. Only in one particular has whimsy conquered — when the author names his ‘old Philadelphians’ for suburban stations, on and off the Main Line.
KATHERINE WOODS