How do marketing departments decide when to tout a reissued novel as a “forgotten classic”? Does it have to have been received with acclaim the first time around before it disappears from view, or is it OK to define it as such even if it attracted little attention when it first appeared, lying restlessly in used bookstores, waiting for an excited young agent to hold it up to the light and discover that it has the weight and atmosphere of a classic?
Kay Dicks She (‘the radical dystopian classic that has been lost for forty years’) falls into the latter category. Initially critics were dismissive or indifferent, sales were poor, and the novel disappeared almost before anyone had noticed it was there. Caroline Blackwood’s The fate of Mary Rose, soon republished by Virago, falls into the first category. It received wide and positive reviews and was published in several languages before it went out of print. Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-wife (“A forgotten classic… darkly comic”) is a more complicated case—less a once-acclaimed book seeking a new generation of readers than a daring bestseller seeking a home in fiction.
The novel, an account of a very young woman’s life in New York after her divorce, was initially published anonymously to draw attention to the offensive nature of its content. This was a common marketing tactic at the time, but the content was truly scandalous. The protagonist, Patricia, has an abortion in the opening chapters, has sex with dozens of men, considers whether to sleep with a particularly wild specimen in order to get hold of a dresser she admires, and is incredibly drunk at least half the time. The first printing of the book sold out immediately, and after Parrott’s identity was revealed in the tabloids, the marketing team made efforts to conflate her identity with Patricia’s, suggesting that Ex-wife be considered a confession rather than fiction.
The book was made into a film. The Divorceestarring Norma Shearer, who won an Oscar for the title role. Over the next decade, Parrott became very famous and very rich. She wrote for filmmakers and magazines, published dozens of novels and short stories, and became a fixture in the tabloid press, a beautifully dressed woman with an angelic face and a poodle named Ex-Wife. Eventually, the press turned on her, writing about her abortions and alcoholism, her increasingly unsuitable husbands (she married four times), and her numerous arrests for things like “impairing the loyalty and discipline of the American armed forces.” Although she made a lot of money, she had to go through more (in the afterword to the 1989 edition of Ex-wife, her semi-estranged son wrote that she spent it on “houses, cars, servants, travel, and the better products of Bergdorf Goodman and Bonwit’s”), and by the end of her not-so-long life she was spending far more time drinking than writing. In 1957, aged 58, she died of cancer in a charity ward, deeply in debt and with a warrant still out for her arrest (she had stolen a thousand dollars’ worth of silverware from a friend’s house during a weekend stay). No obituaries were written for her, and for a long time no one thought to remember her. Ex-wife or the woman who wrote it.
There are many reasons why books are forgotten. Ex-wifeIn the case of , I can think of a few obvious reasons, most of them having to do with our old companion, misogyny. One could also cite the problems of overexposure, American Puritan values (similar to misogyny), and Parrott’s ridiculous personal life, which makes it quite difficult to read her work with a straight face (same). There might be another reason, however, which I could never have guessed from looking at the way the reissue was marketed—Parrott as a kind of jazz precursor to Jacqueline Susann or Nora Ephron—or from reading the foreword, which emphasizes how “alarmingly relatable” Ex-wife Is.
It may be that Parrott’s novel has been forgotten for so long because it is so shockingly mean, so dark and brutal in its worldview. In its almost unrelenting bleakness and its repeated message that women’s quest for equality has only made their lives harder, more frightening and more shameful, it reminded me of Richard Yates’ The Easter Parade and his chilling first sentence: “None of the Grimes sisters had happy lives, and looking back, it always seemed as if the problems had started with their parents’ divorce.”
Apart from some meticulously detailed descriptions of the outfits and a few interludes in which Patricia and her best friend Lucia talk about men while going out, Ex-wife is essentially a long series of scenes designed to show that there is nothing worse or more dangerous than being single, that it is better to be married to absolutely any man, even one who beats you and worries that you won’t be pretty anymore when you’re pregnant, than to be alone. Between rape, strangulation, harassment and humiliation, Patricia congratulates herself on being so pretty and so thin, looks at herself in the mirror and reminds herself and us that her face is all a woman has in the end.
Her strongest emotions seem to be reserved for clothing, which she sees as armor and, perhaps most importantly, a weapon, one of the few she owns. When she encounters a romantic rival, she is “relieved that I was wearing the beautiful headscarf, for I could not have borne to meet her in anything but the most beautiful clothes I owned.” Clothing is real to her, as almost nothing else is, even when she is thrown through a glass door when she tells her whoring, malicious husband that she is pregnant: “I lay on the breakfast room floor, thinking vaguely that such things do not happen.”
Here Patricia and Lucia, another ex-wife and the novel’s ostensible voice of reason, discuss being single: “Women used to have status, relative security. Now they have prostitute status, success as long as they look good. If the next generation of women have any sense, they’ll blow up the statue of Susan B. Anthony and start a crusade to revive chivalry.” I must confess that I don’t find this particularly relatable, although I do find it disturbing. Ex-wife is a fascinating, creepy doc, and I couldn’t put it down. But for anyone looking for a jazz-age romp about single girls making it in the big city, this isn’t it at all.
