The Girls of Slender Talents
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS&WRITING The Girls of Slender Talents By Stanley Edgar Hyman If you want to write a novel, for whatever reason, and have no story to tell, do not despair. Two excellent concentrates...
...These lives are given an appearance of form by being framed between Kay's marriage in 1933 and her funeral in 1940...
...flatchested Priss nurses her baby and converts all the Vassar alumnae to nursing...
...Two examples should suffice: the run on cornflakes at the school "was comparable to the hordes of small Depression depositors retrieving their life savings from a failing bank...
...But most of the book is a wasteland of trivial detail, and the ending is beneath contempt...
...the financial problems of one of her classmates makes the narrator feel "a little like one of those medieval philosophers who were forever counting the grains of sand on the beach or trying to put the Atlantic Ocean into a pail and concluding that infinity was bigger than they were...
...Tanner certifies the authenticity of all this by a generous use of brand names...
...The villain, Harald, gets his comeuppance at the end, when Lakey persuades him (falsely) that she first seduced Kay...
...Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means is not about a group of girls in the same school class (she did that in her last book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie...
...If all this sounds a great deal like Miss Bannister's Girls, it is because it is very like Miss Bannister's Girls, with a pretence to seriousness...
...All the intimacies of her girls are described in relentless Kinseyan detail...
...Final affirmation: I do not believe that young women are as boring and awful as these books suggest...
...they do not laugh, they are heard "venturing a peal of same...
...The book is a story padded out to 30,000 words by endless repetition and the liberal quotation of poetry, then spread out to fill 176 pages by printing very few words on the page...
...Spark writes clumsily...
...Almost like corn on the cob...
...Squee and Nancy talk about cooking "with the authority of Irma Rombauer...
...These are a group of young women who in 1945 lived at the May of Teck Club, a London residence for "the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years...
...Polly finds happiness married to a wonderful psychiatrist with a sense of humor...
...Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer, for example, are "the Englishly rendered intentions of the sweet singer of Israel...
...The class villain, Wicky, who callously let her daughter drown and drove Cecily to suicide (by an affair with her husband), receives poetic justice: Her husband and her lover desert her and elope together...
...Helena remains a virgin...
...The style consists of labored picturesque comparisons...
...It consists of interlocking biographies of the 16 girls who graduated from Miss Bannister's School in 1940, as told by the class secretary...
...It is all so much realer than real life...
...Nancy, the daughter of a Midlands clergyman, is married to a Midlands clergyman...
...Twenty years later V R. is the new headmistress at Miss Bannister's, Jojo is a lesbian, Angie is married to a Roman Catholic teacher at the school and has 12 sons, Linda is married to a wonderful psychiatrist with a sense of humor, Prissy has had Caesarian twins, Maggie is a reformed alcoholic...
...thus her wild overpraise of Naked Lunch...
...Reading them in sequence is rather like spending a week in the girls' locker room...
...The Group had a first printing of 75,000, most of it sold out before publication, which suggests that the book-buying world divides into Vassar alumnae and those eager for inside dope about Vassar alumnae...
...Along with her padding and repetitiousness, Mrs...
...But more often it is vulgar ("Each sentence was wrung from her like a difficult stool") and adolescent (Felix Frankfurter becomes "Felix Hamburger," then "Felix Liverwurst...
...Kay's husband Harald betrays her with Norine, an odious member of the class who was not in the Group...
...Selina, the beauty who used to sleep out on the roof with Nicholas, is now famous and unapproachable, perhaps an actress...
...Again, two examples, which I take from adjacent pages, must suffice: "'Who would have thunk it?' irrepressibly remarked 'Pokey' (Mary) Prothero, a fat cheerful New York society girl with big red cheeks and yellow hair, who talked like a jolly beau of the McKinley period, in imitation of her yachtsman father...
...Some of the set pieces are funny: a lecture on the Mendelian inheritance of money guilt, a list of Helena's cultural accomplishments, Norine and Harald caught in bed by a party of detectives staging a divorce adultery...
...Delicious...
...There is one funny bit, a savage satire on the venality of British publishing, and nothing else of merit whatsoever...
...In The Girls' shred of plot, a girl named Joanna was killed in a bomb fire at the Club in 1945, and a young poet named Nicholas was consequently converted to the Christian faith...
...They are: Miss Bannister's Girls, by Louise Tanner (Farrar, Straus, 239 pp., $4.50), The Group, by Mary McCarthy (Harcourt, Brace and World, 378 pp., $5.95), and The Girls of Slender Means, by Muriel Spark (Knopf, 176 pp., $3.95...
...Names of people similarly become brands: Mimi and her husband "became a famous career couple in the tradition of Alexander Lieberman and Tatiana de Plexis...
...By one of those coincidences that punish publishers for their sins, three Company K novels have just appeared, each by a woman writer, each following a group of girls into Later Life...
...Miss McCarthy is in fact the Homer of Corn Niblets, always giving the telling superfluous detail: Helena learns to cut her own quills "from feathers," as though they might equally have been cut from cheddar...
...Miss Bannister's Girls, subtitled "An Acidulous Novel,' is in one respect the most reputable of the three, since it is a bit of fluff claiming to be no more than that...
...Now in the present a wire service reports that Nicholas has been martyred in Haiti, and a former May of Teck girl passes the word around on the telephone, giving us alternated looks at 1945 and the present...
...Fool,' spat out the Madonna from Lake Forest, between gritted pearly teeth...
...the instructions for inserting a diaphragm or toilet-training a child are as good as government manuals, and Miss McCarthy's pages on How to Deflower a Vassar Virgin are probably circulating in mimeographed form at Yale and Princeton right this moment...
...Irrepressibly remarked" and "spat out" are not really comparable, but I would match Miss McCarthy's "Sex, Dottie opined," against the best of Farrell any day...
...Libby becomes a literary agent...
...Mrs...
...There is nothing in this book for the Lillian-lugubriously-sighed sweepstakes (although there is a beauty in Mrs...
...as a photographer Mimi "had borrowed a trick or two from Richard Avedon...
...Pauline has found a new psychiatrist...
...It is an experience to blanch the strongest man, and I am not the strongest man...
...Some of the book is funny, principally the frustrated efforts of Buffy to bring off an adultery with her old Barnard professor, and the success of Angie, who is repeatedly kidnapped from school by one warring parent or the other, at getting her homework done en route, usually "through a blindfold in the back of a limousine...
...Pokey marries a poet and studies to be a veterinarian...
...In an article entitled "Lillian Lugubriously Sighed," Otis Ferguson once mocked James T. Farrell's efforts to find substitutes for "said...
...Lakey becomes a lesbian...
...Beneath this delicious krinkly texture of real life, the characters are lifeless cliches...
...In keeping with her material, Miss McCarthy's style has entirely deserted her, and the book is written in the prose of the Rover Boys...
...She has neither a fictive imagination nor any sense of novelistic form...
...Mary McCarthy is an intelligent and talented essayist who writes what I was once driven to call "pseudofictions": works of sociology or social history disguised as novels...
...Miss McCarthy gives the latter customers full value...
...Anne, who used to climb out a window naked and greased, is a housewife with children...
...I have read three other of Mrs...
...Her characters do not cry, they "burst into copious tears...
...Two excellent concentrates will make synthetic novels in a jiffy: the Grand Hotel package, which isolates a varied group of people and lets them interact...
...The Group tells of the later lives of eight friends in the Vassar class of 1933, Miss McCarthy's class...
...Here are the same brand names: Kay's Fish House Punch is made with One Dagger Rum, Pokey's family butler, off duty, wears his employer's discarded "royal-purple wadded dressing gown of Chinese embroidered silk with moiré lapels," Lakey appears in Patou models, Polly brushes her hair with an Ogilvie Sisters hairbrush, Kay lectures Dottie on the virtues of Corn Niblets ("It's the whole kernel corn...
...Dottie is seduced by an artist but marries a wealthy older man...
...When Norine and Priss discuss child care, we get a Punch and Judy battle between a caricature of Permissiveness and a caricature of Strictness...
...Spark's Memento Mori: "fluted the old newsvendor...
...Spark, is sometimes amusing...
...Spark's fictions— Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—and although I do not think highly of any of them, they have at least a cold cruelty that is sometimes amusing (as Miss Compton-Burnett, who has influenced Mrs...
...and the Company K package, which recounts the disparate later experiences of a group who were once together...
...The Girls of Slender Means abandons this cruelty in an ooze of compassion, and has nothing with which to replace it...
...Jane, who was a plump girl working in "the world of books," is now a gossip columnist...
...Miss Bannister's girls dress their children in Georg Jensen party clothes, have Axminster Orientals on the floor, drink Haig & Haig, wear Peck and Peck suits or Claire McCardells, freshen up with Aziza Bright Eye, and do not replace the old Sniffin and Myer plumbing when they remodel...
Vol. 46 • September 1963 • No. 19
