Books: Belmar's Delmar

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KEPT WOMAN—Vina Delmar—Earcourt, Brace ($2.50).

The Bronx, New York City's northernmost borough, famed for bourgeois baby carriages, walkups and dingy streets, was fairly immune to litterateurs until Mrs. Vina Delmar began to leer in its direction. The result of her first leer she sold for about $60 to Snappy Stories, brisk woodpulp fiction monthly. Thereafter her Bronx first-novel Bad Girl, was wreathed by the Literary Guild, and, like later Delmar books, was read by millions.—

In Kept Woman Authoress Delmar again looks at Bronx domesticity, makes the colloquial-trivial often seem tragic. The story concerns one Lillian who preferred the sobriquet "kept woman" to the meaningless "wife." Her preference undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that her Keeper Hubert had a frigid, wealthy spouse who typified none of the connubial felicities. But Hubert feared that a divorce would cost him the lovely suburban retreat which Mrs. Hubert had financed, so he cherished Lillian in a Bronx apartment on $15,000 acquired by selling his pitiful business. A series of bibulous, wretched parties fast depleted the finances, as well as the joys of the liaison. Finally he was reduced to borrowing from the butcher and the wife who by that time closed her door on him. Lillian went back to work at the handkerchief counter, kept Hubert.

Authoress Delmar's manuscript is not illuminated with metaphor or stylistic arabesques. She writes her tawdry tale as simply as she might speak it. Daughter of show folks, onetime actress, usher, typist, she enjoys playing chess and ten nis badly, is 24, a mother. She has lived not only in The Bronx, but in Belmar, N. J., Scarsdale, N. Y. She returns from a European trip in November.