SOURCE: Malone, Michael. “… And Ladies of the G.O.P.” Nation 129 (21-28 July 1984): 52-4.

[In the following essay, Malone takes a jaundiced view of “… And Ladies of the Club,” asserting that it is graceless and of dubious literary quality.]

Properly publicized, nothing succeeds like failure, particularly when its hucksters belong to the industry that inflicted the initial wound. Hollywood, for example, adores films excoriating its powerful heartlessness and takes sentimental satisfaction in rewarding its own victims: Ingrid Bergman wins an Oscar for having been ostracized by those who give Oscars. Publishing is no different: it fervently gloats over how many times it turned down William Kennedy's Ironweed before wreathing the book in loot and laurel. An even noisier lemming rush chased John Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Eleven years after its young author, depressed by innumerable rejections of his novel, committed suicide, his mother persuaded Walker Percy to persuade Louisiana State University Press to publish the book. It became a best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

As Reagan would say, here we go again. In 1982, Ohio State University Press printed a few hundred copies of a 1,176-page novel called “… And Ladies of the Club,” by Helen Hooven Santmyer, an octogenarian resident of a nursing home in a small southwestern Ohio town. The book received a few regional reviews and sold modestly. Now, in The New York Times Book Review of June 24, a full-page ad announces that G. P. Putnam's Sons has 200,000 copies of this same novel in print; the book is praised in a long review by Vance Bourjaily and listed (before publication) as number two on the Times best-seller list. Book-of-the-Month Club has paid ＄110,000 to make “… And Ladies of the Club” its main selection; Berkeley Books has paid ＄400,000 for the paperback rights; and Family Circle is serializing Miss Santmyer's encyclopedic tome of middle-American social, theological and political mores from 1868 to 1932 as “an unforgettable love story.” A mini-series is apparently in the works. This book, in industry lingo, has legs.

It has legs without the sex or shootouts or glitz that usually accompany such limbs. It has legs without the grace of style or joy of creativity that occasionally accompany such limbs. Its legs have nothing to do with its enormous body (it's longer than War and Peace), nor its circumscribed soul. Ladies [“… And Ladies of the Club,”] is an earnest, intelligent, stolidly written, leaden-crafted, Sears, Roebuck catalogue of the lives of a great many earnest, stolid, well-off, white Protestant Republican citizens who reside in a small southwestern Ohio town and think its values the center and circumference of the moral universe. The book is village Victorian; the legs are modern Manhattan. Having legs means a novel will walk briskly off the shelf to the cash register, like any other successfully promoted product. Just as literature need not be bad (or good) to fail—Thackeray's Vanity Fair was rejected eighteen times—so it need not be bad (or good) to succeed with a helping leg up. Byron's Childe Harold sold like The Michael Jackson Story because society was agog with scandalous rumors about its author. Many writers who have made their way into the canon were boosted there, in fact, by one leg or another. If not “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” they were flamboyantly self-destructive, or hermits, or died young, or fought bulls, or were censored. We're only human; we like a star.

Helen Hooven Santmyer is now a star, a celebrity product, famous for writing a very long book over a very long time at a very advanced age, and for having her book left forlorn by the hearth at first and then whisked off to the ball to marry the Prince of Fortune. As a journalist from The Washington Post put it, apparently in all seriousness,

The bare account of how she produced the work over the years, in her spare time, in sickness and in health, in itself provides an astonishing testament. She wrote it all out in longhand, on a ledger. … Let us pause to praise … a really good example of the lone and worthy human triumphing in the end. Amid the hog wallow of phonies, hucksters, hustlers, and other assorted Great I Ams … rises the name of Helen Hooven Santmyer. She stands apart for fulfilling the American—the universal—dream of achieving a life's ambition. Her hard work has paid off at age 88.

The fact that all this sounds like the sort of speech that would start Reagan weeping into the flag has a lot to do with why “… And Ladies of the Club” is the right best seller for our neo-Gilded Age. But first, how?

THE MAKING OF A BEST SELLER

Again, we have a mother to thank. One Grace Sindell, overhearing a woman tell her Shaker Heights librarian that Ladies was the best book she'd ever read, passed the novel along to her son Gerald (a Hollywood “writer/producer/director”) who passed it along to one Stanley Corwin (a producer, once highly placed in New York publishing) who passed it along to an old college pal, one Owen Laster (of the William Morris Agency). He was “overwhelmed by its quality” and passed it along to Phyllis Grann, president and publisher of G. P. Putnam's. She was “mesmerized” by its quality and, having purchased the novel “solely on the basis of its literary merit,” planned a 50,000-copy first printing. Perhaps Laster mentioned that Sindell and Corwin (who had, of course, already flown to Ohio and bought up the trade rights from a startled O.S.U. Press) were planning a miniseries. Touting Ladies as a new Forsyte Saga, Putnam's sold the work to Book-of-the-Month Club, where president Al Silverman, “captured” by its quality, crowned it “The Great Middle American Novel,” and chairman Edward Fitzgerald added, “There is no way we won't sell more than 100,000 copies of that book.”

We are now up to January, 1984. Who knows how many (or how few) people have, at this point, actually read, word by word, this discursive, repetitious and often exhaustingly dull four and a half pounds of paper. “… And Ladies of the Club” is not the longest novel in the world (that honor goes, I believe, to Jules Romains's Men of Good Will), but as Putnam's publicist points out, it's twice as long as Gone With the Wind. I am not a particularly slow reader, and it took me months to trudge my way dutifully through its wrist-wrenching bulk. Moreover, I love long novels with lots of characters, like War and Peace, I love Victorian town novels, like Middlemarch, I love Great Middle American Novels, like My Antonia, I love fat pedestrian family sagas, like The Forsyte Saga. I love Gone With the Wind. Had Ladies been anywhere near as good as the least of these, I would have loved it. But it wasn't and I didn't.

Why I was assigned to read it, why CBS and NBC and ABC and Time and Newsweek and Life rushed to Xenia to tree Santmyer in her nursing home, has little to do with the “Dickensian richness” that Mr. Kefauver of O.S.U. Press saw in those eleven boxes of manuscript she sent him and a great deal to do with the leader-of-the-pack status of The New York Times.

On January 12, an article titled “Happy End for Novelist's 50-Year Effort,” accompanied by a photo of Santmyer, appeared on the front page of The Times. By next day the blitz was on, and out in Xenia, Ohio, at Hospitality Home East, stunned administrators were fielding phone calls as if they were Swifty Lazar. Those dusty copies Mr. Kefauver hadn't been able to sell vanished, except for one he hid in a vault. “Just extraordinary,” said he, and sold Santmyer's nonfiction Ohio Town (1963) to Harper & Row for ＄25,000. Harper also optioned her first two novels, Herbs and Apples (1925) and The Fierce Dispute (1929), though both were already in the public domain. They also bought, sight unseen, her unpublished Farewell to Summer. If she has any short stories up in the attic, she should pack them off to Manhattan at once.

The early media flurry sketched a Grandma Moses portrait of Santmyer warbling her woodnotes wild for a half-century to defend small-town virtues against the (surely by now somewhat faded) sneers of Sinclair Lewis. The author, who appears to be a sharp-minded and impressively unflappable woman, made it clear that she is no literary naif. She studied at Oxford, she published books, she worked for Scribner's, she taught English, she was a reference librarian and a college dean. While she took notes for Ladies for decades (I suspect Ohio Town is one such notebook), major work did not begin until she was seventy, and while she intensely disliked Main Street, she has not devoted her life to wreaking revenge on Lewis. Abandoning the Grandma Moses approach, Family Circle described Santmyer as “a forerunner of the modern single career-woman.” (Unlike most of the women in her book, she has never married.)

THE MESSAGE OF A BEST SELLER

Whether as ur-feminist or “champion of the small town and of late bloomers everywhere,” as Life has it, Santmyer is first and foremost old. And old is in, from Madison Avenue (“Where's the beef?”) to Publishers' Row (note the fuss over 77-year-old Harriet Doerr's first novel, Stones for Ibarra). More than old, Santmyer is a defender, like the President, of “Old America”—that mythical Eden where happy, decent, solvent, paternalistic, family-faithful, Good Christian People of the Middle Class live protected by white picket fences from the soot of the fallen world. “Such is our comfortable tradition and sure faith,” as Lewis says in the preface to Main Street. It is interesting to see journalists contrasting Santmyer's Waynesboro with Lewis's “embittered” Gopher Prairie, Anderson's “twisted” Winesburg and Masters's “morbid” Spoon River—as if we'd slid back a half century and “revolt from the village” literature was freshly shocking. Of course, we have slid back, and the conservative character of Santmyer's book is a key to its success. Raised a Calvinist Republican, the author gives every indication of sharing the political views of her protagonists. Asked why she ended the novel in 1932, she snapped, “What I thought of the New Deal wasn't fit to print.” Her heroine, Ann (symbol of devoted loving-kindness), regrets dying and leaving the country in the hands of “that bland patronizing demagogue,” F.D.R. “Where did all those votes come from? Poor white trash must have crawled out like worms from under stones.”

The novel is loosely centered around sweet brunet Ann and saucy blond Sally, and their Civil War veteran husbands, John (a good but gloomy doctor) and Ludwig (a benevolent industrialist). The politics of all four, from age 17 to 70, are as right as Reagan. John: “I didn't fight to set the nigger free.” Ludwig: “Our labor force probably doesn't know the meaning of the word [union], and we could replace them easily enough anyway.” Sally (after her son gets “an Irish washerwoman's child” pregnant): “What is the use of money if we can't use it to get out of mistakes like this?” Woodrow Wilson is a “pusillanimous pedagogue”; Eugene Debs, a “jailbird”; Populism, “incredible folly”; and, according to these victors of the Civil War, “Negroes would rather fish than work anyday.”

The women pass their days paying calls, retiring to have babies, planning theatrical Christmas parties and subscription libraries, writing literary papers for their Women's Club and talking politics, on which subject they are quite au courant. There is far more discussion of the need for protective tariffs and the resumption of the gold standard than of their “unforgettable love story.” In comparison, Carol Kennicott, with her yearning for romance and her interior-decorating notions of revolution against Main Street, seems astonishingly innocent. An inordinate amount of Ladies is given over to secondhand nitty-gritty convention politicking, for Ludwig, Mark Hanna's pal, is a bigwig among delegates. We need to remember that, during the postwar years, various gangs of Ohio Republicans were running the country: Grant, the eighteenth President; Hayes, the nineteenth; Garfield, the twentieth; Harrison, the twenty-third; McKinley, the twenty-fifth; Taft, the twenty-seventh; and Harding, the twenty-ninth. The election of each is a major subject of gossip in this novel. That the Ohioans (from the Whiskey Ring to the Teapot Dome) were as inept and/or corrupt a bunch of mediocrities as ever sat in the Oval Office now occupied by Harding's true heir is a view vigorously pooh-poohed by Santmyer's Waynesboroeans. What's good for the G.O.P. is “for the good of the country.” Bad times (the Panic of 1873, the Depression) are ultimately troublesome only because they temporarily threaten Ludwig's cordage factory. Of Ohioan Coxey's March to Washington with thousands of unemployed, we hear nothing. Presumably, those sorts would rather fish than work. For the rest, prosperity always triumphs in the end.

But it is as a writer and not as an apologist for reactionary nostalgia that Santmyer must be judged. Indeed, she has wisely judged herself in the person of a novel-writing young woman who appears toward the book's end, her heart set “on being famous,” ready to “do a long book about the 60s, 70s, and 80s, covering several generations of life in a small midwestern town.” “She laughed at herself ruefully. She was no Galsworthy, much less … a Proust.”

Exactly so. And while this novel is a prodigious feat of endurance and, in a way, an act of bravery, the result is work and not art. Much has been made of its “thick-textured tapestry of life,” but I found the attention to setting curiously sporadic and diffuse—like blurred and spotted rotogravures. Naturally in so long and minutely paced a domestic saga, historical particulars do add up. Slowly, sewing machines, public schools and horseless carriages appear. If not an artist's selective eye for the revelatory detail, Santmyer has a research librarian's eye for the accurate detail, the “iron-gray faille, whose skirt had a deep box-plaited flounce, an overskirt of lilacs foulard.” This parenthetical facsimile of life (how a class of people dressed, wed, celebrated, died, worshipped) has in itself the interest (if not the liveliness) of the Lisle Letters or Mary Chestnut's diary. But as Santmyer devotes far more descriptive space to Ludwig's rope factory (her father ran one) than to anything else, we learn rather more about hemp delivery and cable-lay than most readers will find riveting.

More troublesome, she lacks a writer's ear and consequently, her characters lack voices. The middle class speak the writerly prose of the narrator, rather formal even among intimates: “You agree with me that Julia is a completely frigid woman.” “It is in your power to make him as happy as it is possible for a man like John to be, who is by temperament moody and unstable, and who is still suffering the nervous traumatism consequent to the war.” The faithful blacks speak Uncle Remus: “Res' yo'se'f on yonde' chair.” Conversations are repeated again and again as if the author as well as the characters had forgotten they'd already said all this. Talk swings from the mundane—John: “Has the paper come?” Ann: “How could the paper get through this snow?” John: “That was stupid of me. We'll probably not get a paper”—to the philosophical—John to Ann: “It is in the small ways in which love expresses itself that make in the end for happiness, not the overwhelming passion”—to the sociological—Ann to her grandchildren: “Once people get the notion the government has an obligation to support its citizens, there'll be no end to what they'll demand. America will be on a long tobaggan slide downhill to Socialism.” Dialogue is used in awkward ways to refresh the reader's memory. Why should Sally need to tell Ann, whom she has seen almost daily for fifty years, that her son “seems to be doing very well as a customer's man in the brokerage firm where his father-in-law's a partner”?

Santmyer has listed among her own favorite writers Dickens, Twain, Balzac and “the Russians.” Those are good choices. I wish she could have learned from them extravagance and passion and proportion. In her Comédie Humaine, life is kept in ledgers, summer to fall, winter to spring, year by changeless year. It's not that nothing happens; there are immense events—fires, floods, polio epidemics—and domestic calamities—infidelity, divorce, drug addiction, runaways, a probable lesbian's suicide—social scandals and endless deaths, both sudden and lingering. But there are so many of them and most are so patly foreshadowed and so matter-of-factly fulfilled that our response is blunted. Santmyer's detached, summarizing approach works most effectively, and movingly, on her portraits of the cramped, dwindled valiant lives and solitary deaths of three spinsters. There are secondary characters (an elderly suffragette and temperance activist, a bright socialist lawyer, a wry newspaper owner) who struck me as far more interesting than the central figures but who get short shrift. Santmyer also has a talent for the caustic riposte which I wish she had allowed herself to indulge, especially as so much of the book is gossip of a not especially good-hearted kind, among folk with the “universal desire to be the first with the news, particularly bad news.”

Fellow members of the real Xenia Women's Club have described Helen Hooven Santmyer as “reticent and austere.” Something of that quality stiffens her pen in “… And Ladies of the Club.” She said she worried people wouldn't think the book dramatic because there wasn't enough violence in it, “nothing hysterical.” In fact, it isn't dramatic because there isn't enough drama in it; the author seems to shy away from scenes, not squeamish about their subject matter so much as their fictive nature, as if fiction-making itself were a bit silly. “These things don't happen except in cliché-filled banal novels.” “A novelist couldn't have worked things out better,” is the embarrassed response to a coincidence. But the great novelists were no more afraid of life's continual clichés and coincidences than they were tempted to use fact to justify fiction.

Asked what she thought of Ladies, Santmyer replied, “I think there's something there, but I don't think I can put it into words.” She said of her earlier novels, “They never sold enough to make me rich.” Well, Ladies has made her both rich and famous. The Xenia Chamber of Commerce is preparing a brochure to lead tourists through the fictional sites in the town. Similar steps were taken by the good folk of Sauk Centre, Minnesota (“The Original Main Street”), and of Clyde, Ohio (Winesburg), and of Red Cloud, Nebraska (“Willa Cather Country”). I suggest that anyone who wants to read a “Great Middle American Novel” should go find a copy of My Antonia, or Winesburg, Ohio, or Main Street and Babbitt, or Main-Travelled Roads, or Tom Sawyer. All of those put together are still not as long as “… And Ladies of the Club.”