Personals by Eleanor DeLamater (1931)

I first came across Eleanor DeLamater’s novel Personals in a survey of recent (in 1932) novels that the critic considered “experimental” in form. Aside from the first two volumes of John Dos Passos’s landmark U. S. A. — The 42nd Parallel (1930) and Nineteen Nineteen (1932) — however, most have long been forgotten. But the description of DeLamater’s novel, which was structured around the personals in a small-town newspaper, stuck in my mind and when I finally came across a reasonably-priced copy, I scooped it up. The book was in immaculate condition, with its dust jacket intact and its binding still so tight that I doubt if anyone had even read it.

I was a little disappointed to discover that “personals” in 1931 referred not to personal ads but to what most papers in cities of any decent size called the society page. In the case of the Steepleton Weekly News, it amounts to a single half-column of local notes, such as, “Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Britton and daughter, Ellen, will spend this winter in their house on Riggs Island.”

In the book’s preface, the new owner of the Weekly News bemoans the lack of local news: “You can’t run a small-town paper without a snappy social sheet. The hicks want to see their names in print. How can I print ’em if they never do anything but eat and sleep? That ain’t news.”

Eleanor DeLamater is setting us up, of course. There’s plenty of news in each little local note, though not of the stock market crash or gangland murder level of spectacle. Instead, there are the quiet victories and even quieter tragedies of ordinary people. The Raymond Brittons, for example, are not spending the winter on Riggs Island — a peninsula, in fact, connected to the mainland by a causeway that disappears under the waves with high tides — by necessity, not choice. Old Nicholas Britton bought Riggs Island and most of the land around it in the 19th century and the family still holds much of the population of Steepleton in some form of indenture, but what little commerce kept Steepleton thriving — fishing, lumber — has declined, and with this decline has gone much of the Britton’s fortune. The Riggs Island mansion was a fine family seat for old Nicholas, but for Raymond, it was too drafty and too enmeshed in the past to be a desirable winter home. Unfortunately, after the Crash of 1929, year-round residence in New York City is unaffordable, especially as he lacks any of old Nicholas’s business skills or ambition.

The ambition in Steepleton now resides in humbler folk like Carrie Willow, whose drunkard fisherman father died and left her to fend for herself at the age of sixteen. Clerking in the general store, she has devoted her spare time and tiny savings to learning dressmaking, and is now at the point where she can support herself — taking in jobs like altering the one party dress owned by Miss Ada Whitehouse, a teacher in Steepleton’s school. Ada Whitehouse is a plain-looking, heavyset woman who feels herself teetering on the edge of spinsterhood and desperate to find a man, any man, who will pull her back from it.

Even before meeting Ada Whitehouse we know her fate: “Miss Ada Whitehouse, who died suddenly Wednesday morning, was well-known here, as she was for some time a teacher in our School.” There are no surprises awaiting the reader of Personals. DeLamater sets herself a technical challenge in that some of the quiet dramas behind the local notes on the first page of the story are recollected and others foretold, but she manages to stitch her different temporal pieces seamlessly. And she works in the fine tradition of Chekhov, so we quickly realize that the mention that “duck hunting is in full swing” means that somewhere before the book ends, a shotgun will be fired at something other than a duck.

Personals is no Winesburg, Ohio, though. None of DeLamater’s characters offer us the morbid fascination of Sherwood Anderson’s grotesques. The residents of Steepletown are still too close to their Puritanical roots to engage too enthusiastically in their sinning. Theirs may be lives of desperation, but they act out their tragedies discreetly. DeLamater does hint, if fastidiously, of incestuous attraction among the Britton, of homosexual longing of one young Steepleton man for another, but we know these desires will be kept under wraps. The passion of Steepletonians never rises above a simmer.

A number of its reviewers noted the spare construction of Personals. The Kansas City Star even stressed its lacks more than its assets: “Stripped of needless detail, simple but outstanding in its architecture…. No labyrinthine passages of subconsciousness, no dark psychological corners…. Not crowned by any crescendo peaks of drama; it has, however, grace and dignity.” Overall, the book is well-constructed but perhaps a little too restrained to rise to a first-rate work.

Personal was Eleanor Delamater’s only published novel. A Smith College graduate, she worked for several magazines in New York and published a few short stories throughout the 1930s. Somewhere in the mid-1930s, she moved to Hollywood, where she worked on the scripts of several of the Jones family comedies produced by 20th Century Fox to compete with MGM’s more successful Andy Hardy series, but by 1950, she had settled in Newtown, Connecticut, where she lived until 1980.

Personals, by Eleanor DeLamater
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931