Russell Patterson, “The place there’s smoke there’s fireplace.” Public area, by way of Wikimedia Commons.
I’d by no means heard of Ursula Parrott when McNally Editions introduced me to Ex-Spouse, the writer’s 1929 novel a couple of younger lady who all of a sudden finds herself suspended within the caliginous house between matrimony and divorce. The very first thing I receiveddered was the place it had been all my life. Ex-Spouse rattles with ghosts and loss and lonely New York flats, with males who change their minds and alter them once more, with folks and locations that assert their permanence by the actual fact that they’re gone and so they’re by no means coming again. Initially revealed anonymously, Ex-Spouse stirred speedy controversy for Parrott’s frank depiction of her heroine, Patricia, a girl whose attract doesn’t spare her from desertion after an open marriage proves to be an asymmetrical failure. Embarking on a marathon of alcoholic oblivion and a collection of principally joyless dips into the waters of sexual liberation, Patricia spends the guide ricocheting between her worry of an summary future and her fixation on a previous that has been polished, gleaming from reminiscence’s sleight of hand.
It’s been practically a century since Ex-Spouse had its flash of fame (the guide offered multiple hundred thousand copies in its first 12 months), and as progress has stripped divorce of its ethical opprobrium, it has additionally swelled the ranks of us ex-wives. Folded in with Patricia’s descriptions of one-night stands and prohibition-busting binges are the form of hole distractions relatable to any of us who’ve ever wished to overlook: she buys garments she will’t afford; she will get facials and has her hair achieved; she listens to songs on repeat whereas wearily questioning why heartache all the time appears to bookend love. My copy is riddled with exclamation marks and anecdotes that chart my very own parallel romantic catastrophes, its paragraphs vandalized with highlighted passages and bracketed phrases. There’s a sentence on the guide’s first web page that I outlined in black ink: “He grew bored with me;” it reads, “hunted about for causes to justify his weariness; and located them.” The field that I’ve drawn round these phrases is a body, I suppose; the sort that you simply discover round a mirror.
For all its painful familiarity, it’s simple to get caught within the lure of Ex-Spouse’s nostalgic attraction; there are phonographs and jazz golf equipment and attire from Vionnet; there are verboten cocktails and towering new buildings that attain towards a New York skyline so younger that it nonetheless reveals its stars. If critics as soon as took concern with the guide’s remedy of abortion, adultery, and informal intercourse, up to date analyses have too usually remarked that Patricia’s world can not assist however present us its age. “Scandalous or sensational?” wrote one critic when the guide was final reprinted, in 1989. “Occasions have modified.” Sure and no; launched within the decade between two world wars, and simply months earlier than Black Tuesday turned growth to bust, Ex-Spouse probes the violent uncertainty of a world locked in a perpetual state of turning into.
Lurching towards sexual revolution however nonetheless psychologically tethered to Victorian morality, ladies of Parrott’s technology discovered themselves caught within the free fall of collapsing convention. The seedy emotional texture of Ex-Spouse’s Jazz Age debauchery mirrored the panic felt by ladies throughout the nation who had glimpsed freedom however remained ill-equipped to navigate its penalties. Nearly instantly following the guide’s publication, the press started a guessing recreation that sought to establish who was being shielded below its mantle of anonymity; was Ex-Spouse a confession, a fantasy, or the indictment of a tradition shifting too quickly to acknowledge the inevitable casualties we go away within the wake of change? By August of 1929, conjecture had appropriately zeroed in on Katherine Ursula Parrott (née Towle), a journalist and trend author who appeared to bear an uncanny resemblance to her bobbed and brushed heroine.
Contemplating the guide within the context of what we now find out about her life, one can not put a lot inventory in Parrott’s suggestion that Patricia was a composite determine. As an alternative, Ex-Spouse appears to have been a spot to document accidents too private for her to say as her personal. Born in Boston to a doctor father and a housewife mom, Parrott decamped to New York’s Greenwich Village shortly following her commencement from Radcliffe School within the early twenties. Her first marriage, to the journalist Lindesay Parrott Sr., led to divorce in 1926, the 12 months he found that the childless marriage he had insisted upon was not so childless in any case. In 1924, Ursula had realized that she was pregnant and left the couple’s London dwelling for Boston, the place she gave start to her solely son earlier than depositing him within the custody of her father and older sister. It was a secret that she managed to maintain from Lindesay and their glamorous circle of mates for an astonishing two years. Marc Parrott, whose afterword concludes this guide, would by no means have a relationship together with his father. He was practically seven years outdated when his mom lastly acknowledged her maternity and assumed accountability for his care. It was 1931 by then, and Ursula had turn into considered one of a handful of girls who would discover her fortune writing escapist romance tales below the pall of the Nice Melancholy.
Marc Parrott’s recollections of his mom paint a vivid portrait of a spendthrift who usually labored for seventy-two-hour stretches as a way to meet the deadlines that may maintain her (and her lovers) in furs. Parrott swanned by the thirties publishing brief tales and serialized novels in ladies’s magazineazines, her identify usually talked about alongside the Hollywood stars who have been connected to her screenplays and cinematic advertaptations. Though I by no means as soon as discovered her son talked about within the many information gadgets dedicated to her work and her persona, Parrott was often discovered within the firm of a pet poodle improbably named Ex-Spouse; in additional methods than one, it might appear, her best scandal was additionally her most stalwart companion.
Although Ex-Spouse was initially framed as the author’s endorsement of a harmful new cultural mannequin, Parrott herself was painfully conscious of the double commonplace that continued to sentence “ladies who do.” Divorced for a second time in 1932 and for a 3rd 5 years after, the author overtly mused about her vulnerability in a world the place marriage not insulated growing old ladies from “man’s urge for selection.” Parrott referred to as divorced ladies like her “Leftover Women,” a time period that means each surplus and rejection. Her deserted lady is doomed to a battle that provides neither victory nor give up. I consider Patricia analyzing the phantom strains which have begun to etch themselves throughout her face. I consider her chilly lotions and her lipsticks, of her consciousness of a clock that by no means stops ticking. “The Leftover Girl isn’t free to get outdated,” Parrott wrote the winter after Ex-Spouse got here out, “for she has entered the competition, in her work and in her social life, with youthful ladies. And that competitors is cruel.”
By the early forties, as a serial divorcée who wrote tales with titles like “Love Comes however As soon as” and “Say Goodbye Once more,” Parrott discovered herself a goal of accelerating mockery within the press. Now not younger or glamorous sufficient to fee on the earth she knew, her identify would quickly be connected to a collection of scandals that would not be dismissed because the product of invention. In December of 1942, she was arrested and charged with serving to an imprisoned soldier to flee from the army stockade in Miami Seashore the place he was being held on suspicion of trafficking narcotics. Michael Neely Bryan was a twenty-six-year-old jazz guitarist who had discovered some notoriety taking part in in Benny Goodman’s band earlier than enlisting within the Military; the heady combination of medicine and intercourse led to a high-profile 1944 trial and introduced a swift conclusion to Parrott’s fourth and remaining marriage. Underneath headlines like “Novelist Seen Making Love in Military Stockade,” the author was described as a matronly lady who, following a lurid encounter, drove by a checkpoint along with her lover hidden within the again seat of her automotive. The 2 loved one night time of freedom at a lodge, the place they registered below the identify Artie Baker, then turned themselves in to the police, every making a tearful confession. “I checked out him and knew how badly he wished to go to dinner,” Parrott stated. “So I made a decision to take an opportunity for him.”
Although Parrott was in the end acquitted, the trial marked her. Now not welcome within the pages of magazines that catered to “respectable” middle-class ladies, Parrott revealed her final story, “Let’s Simply Marry,” in 1947, by which era she had completed twenty-two novels, fifty brief tales, and 4 authentic movie scripts, along with the eight novels that have been tailored for the display. She would floor in a recent scandal in 1950, when she was arrested in Delaware after skipping out on a $255.20 invoice following a six-month lodge keep. Mates stated that she’d gone to Delaware to assemble materials for a brand new guide, however would notice that she’d spent a lot of her time strolling her canine and little or no of it in entrance of her typewriter. Newspapers suggested that she’d been undone by an excessive amount of success, as if the story she’d advised 20 years prior had lastly confirmed to be a cautionary one. Parrott endured one remaining humiliation that definitively ended her profession and any phantasm she had of a return. In 1952, she was accused of stealing a thousand {dollars}’ value of silverware from a buddy who had allowed her to remain in his home below the premise that she wanted a spot to work on a brand new guide. A warrant was issued for her arrest, and she or he spent the remaining 5 years of her life in hiding. She died, on the age of fifty-seven, in a charity ward.
It appears simple from right here to know that Parrott’s profession as a author was usurped by the drama of her scandals. Like many ladies whose early lives and work are outlined by insurgentlion, Parrott’s indiscretions ceased to enchantment as soon as they have been not deemed youthful ones. Her legacy endured one final condemnation when her work was framed by historical past as “ladies’s literature,” a time period that was a tombstone within the days earlier than it was understood as an business. It grew to become a ghost, like its writer, neither married nor divorced, resigned to a perpetual now. Drifting round and not using a future, she drinks and retailers, goes on dates, and wonders what else can probably change in a world that not appears to have any guidelines. “Males used to purchase me violets,” Patricia remarks with brutal resignation. “However now they purchase me Scotch.”
Perhaps I really feel protecting of Patricia as a result of she feels so familiar to me—like proof that point doesn’t all the time change us within the ways in which we wish to consider. If the guide was as soon as too far forward of its day and later too far behind, it appears now someway good, as if we now have rounded the circle once more and finally discovered synchronicity. Wedged between Edith Wharton’s constrained society ladies and the squandered glamour of Jean Rhys’s doomed wanderers, Ex-Spouse was acquired by an interstitial America nonetheless negotiating who and what ladies have been allowed to be. As soon as caught in a cultural riptide, the guide now reads as a surprisingly anticipatory account of what it means to need and what it means to be left; we dwell in a world now the place most of us know the sensation of each. I consider the letter Patricia despatched to a lover who couldn’t love her again in the way in which that she wanted him to, of the loneliness she felt when day turned to nighttime and again once more. “I shall be lengthy useless,” it reads, “of waiting for a telegram saying you’re coming dwelling.”
Alissa Bennett’s essays and brief fiction have appeared in Vogue, Ursula, and the New York Occasions. With Lena Dunham, Bennett cohosts the podcast The C-Phrase, a present that examines and dismantles the mythologies tradition erects round public ladies. She is at present writing a movie in regards to the lifetime of Edith Wharton.
From the foreword to Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Spouse, to be reissued by McNally Editions in Could.
