Living With Books
HICKS, CRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Ellen Glasgow's Autobiography Reveals A Sensitive Woman Dogged by Tragedy I HAVE FOUND Ellen Glasgow's autobiography, The Woman Within (Harcourt, Brace,...
...At any rate, I now think that I know what Ellen Glasgow was like...
...she asked when Cary died...
...Any of the men with whom Miss Glasgow fell in love, after her rather diffident fashion, might be disconcerted by what she had to say about them...
...and they have decided that now, nine years after her death, is the time...
...Ellen," one of her best friends said, "I was crazy to read your book...
...During the closing decade of her life, while she was writing her last two novels and the prefaces that were collected in A Certain Measure, Miss Glasgow was working on her autobiography...
...A delicate child, she found solace in books...
...Never in robust health, afflicted early in life with deafness, she speaks constantly of misery and sorrow and exile and loneliness...
...but I never found anybody I could borrow it from...
...Then, in 1925, she published Barren Ground, which made a sharper impression on the critics than her earlier work had done...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Ellen Glasgow's Autobiography Reveals A Sensitive Woman Dogged by Tragedy I HAVE FOUND Ellen Glasgow's autobiography, The Woman Within (Harcourt, Brace, $5.00), more moving than any of her novels that I have read...
...and in the next twenty-five years she wrote a dozen others, all of them, so far as I know, concerned with life in Virginia...
...Most extraordinary of all, in that utterly unliterary society, she was deciding to become a writer...
...Moreover, she was already a rebel, and was reading Darwin and Henry George and other authors not approved of in the best Richmond society...
...Was my whole life to be smothered in tragedy...
...Her roots were in Richmond, and, no matter how much she traveled, it was in Richmond that she did her work...
...It also makes one regretfully aware of how very much better they might have been...
...But perhaps it was the effort by which discipline was achieved that made the earlier novels a little cold...
...Miss Glasgow rightly felt that romance was part of her story, but not the most important part...
...She left it to her literary executors to decide whether and when it should be published...
...She was born in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of an iron manufacturer, a stern, just, unaffectionate man whose virtues cast a shadow over her entire life...
...Thus, instead of exhibiting the decline of powers that is so common at the end of literary careers, Miss Glasgow's later work was her best...
...Now, indeed, we can marvel that a person so tortured was able to create so large a body of firmly disciplined work...
...She was sensitive to the sufferings of animals and, in general, of the defenseless and inarticulate, and always aware, as most of us are not, of the vast total of misery that any moment contains...
...It helps one to see why Miss Glasgow's novels are as good as they are...
...And in the larger world of letters recognition came slowly...
...Miss Glasgow thinks that her late flowering began when she fell out of love with the ineffable Harold S. Something, at any rate, relaxed some of her inhibitions, and she came closer to writing with her whole nature...
...But in Richmond there was nobody who was interested in what she wrote...
...but it was particularly, one suspects, the pompous Harold S., of whom she has left an unforgettable portrait, whose feelings had to be spared...
...In part, The Woman Within is conventional autobiography, with admirable descriptions of persons and places, and comments (not always very searching) on American life and letters, but it is most remarkable as a piece of self-analysis...
...Although we can see that her pessimism was shaped in the bosom of her family, it was intensified by the conditions under which her talents developed...
...Those I have read I remember as being carefully planned and meticulously written but rarely exciting...
...A life that seemed on the surface to be almost too placid is now revealed to us as having been filled with suffering and conflict...
...Lonely by nature and further isolated by her deafness, she was particularly lonely as a writer...
...Perhaps that is why I failed to respond warmly to them...
...and she followed it with a couple of skilfully ironic novels, The Romantic Comedians and They Stooped to Folly, that had considerable popular success...
...Her first novel, The Descendant, was published in 1397...
...Her mother died, then a beloved brother-in-law, a favorite brother, the first man she loved, the sister who was closest to her...
...Suffering plays a larger role in the book than love...
...It is easy to understand why she had doubts about publication, for this, as I have said, is an intimate revelation...
...As the title is intended to indicate, it is a personal story, and I realize now that the novels failed to give me any strong sense of the author's personality...
...and the habit of reading persisted even when, in her late teens, she was living the kind of social life that a Southern girl of good family was supposed to lead...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 46
