Books: Golden Honeymoon

Golden Honeymoon (See front cover)

This week, with the publication of her fiftieth book,* Kathleen Norris celebrated the golden honeymoon of her marriage to her art, her craft, or whatever the turning out of three or four high-priced serials a year may be called. But just as one day in her native California is much like another, even when it comes to anniversary days, so her fiftieth book, Woman in Love, resembles all the other Kathleen Norris books. It has the usual Cinderella heroine, with nice looks, good impulses, a warm heart and high-minded scruples.

This time Cinderella is called Tamara Todhunter. Convent-bred (Mrs. Norris is a Catholic), Tamara goes forth into a wicked world with resolutions about life that do not stand up when a honey-tongued cinemactor comes a-wooing. Trouble arrives with the child of their illicit union, but virtue triumphs when Tamara gets herself an honest-to-goodness husband named George who is willing to be a father by proxy.

Mrs. Norris writes pattern stuff that always moves, however circuitously, to the happy end. "The reason why people like my books," she says, "is that I write of life as I want it to be." Since Mrs. Norris follows the dictates of her Church, the heroines in her stories can never get divorces, never practice birth control. As a result of this strict plot limitation, only the death of any who block her heroine's way can lead to a happy ending. And death stalks the pages of Mrs. Norris' novels as grimly and certainly as in a Greek tragedy. Two have to die in Woman in Love. First Tamara's seducer, Mayne Mallory, kills his wife. Then, after he has tried to blackmail Tamara's George, a lawyer, into taking his case through the courts, Mayne gets his own come-uppance when his victim's husband knocks him down, inadvertently killing him. Jail for manslaughter separates George and Tarn for a period, but California Justice appears more kind to Mrs. Norris' hero than to Tom Mooney.

Tamara is the type of all Norris heroines, who are so alike that not even their creator herself can recall all of them. Little ladies, they usually begin without money. Life treats them roughly, and more than one of them has had to cope with the burden of bearing an illegitimate child. But they are never defiled by pitch; they always sin through kindness or trustfulness; they ultimately marry. They improve their minds by studying French, Italian, music, cooking. Model girls, they are just what Mrs. Norris' large, enthusiastic audience of older women, young stenographers, people of circumscribed life and mothers of young girls want—and would like to be.

Author-Actress. Mrs. Norris says of her life, "It's just neutral." Yet she certainly fits no stereotyped category as a producer of literary lumber. A charming, friendly, incredibly busy woman, she is a concocter of treacly yarns, a romantic who laps up travel literature (Arctic exploration, mountain climbing), a sophisticated and often rampageous wit and practical joker, an amateur actress of talent, a deadly croquet player, a dynamo of energy that can leap from typewriter to cooking pot to evening dress and back again, a wife, a mother, a chatelaine, all in one highly individual bundle.