Nathalie Sedgwick Colby was hardly a typical first-time novelist when Green Forest appeared in the spring of 1927. Not only was she making her debut at the age of 52, but she was the wife of a former Secretary of State. Her husband, Bainbridge Colby, had the awkward task of serving as Woodrow Wilson’s senior diplomat during Wilson’s final year in office, when his health had failed and his political capital had gone up in flames with the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles.
Though their marriage had been a mostly happy one, they had grown apart after Bainbridge Colby’s time as Secretary. He found the stiff cloak of a public man suited him, while his wife preferred to pursue private interests — in particular, to try her hand at writing, something her friends had been urging her to do. Green Forest proved not only Nathalie’s first creative endeavor but the provocation that led him to apply for divorce in a French court a few months after its publication.
His application was both vehement and vague. It accused Nathalie of numerous “wounding and injurious acts and expressions” as well as “annoyances of every sort,” which is a charge that could apply to just about any marriage between two strong personalities. The real problem, not addressed in the application, was that Bainbridge felt that his wife had mocked him in Green Forest.
Green Forest takes place over the span of about eight days — the time it takes a group of mostly wealthy New Yorkers to cross the Atlantic and land in Cherbourg. The story focuses on Shirley Challoner, 45, the widow of a stiff-necked banker, who is accompanying her daughter, Suzette, in pursuit of the fiancé who’s abandoned her, but among the supporting cast is Mr. Punderson, a former governor rumored to have an inside chance at becoming the next President.
Punderson holds himself aloof from the rest of the passengers and says little that is not platitudes, but at one point the ship’s doctor sees behind that mask:
In anything could be worse than a ship, the doctor thought, it was politics. A politician’s life was performance. This man’s technique not so different from a matinée hero, really…. For a next President couldn’t allow himself to be seen — had to have a mystery about him. The bosses had worked out the impressionistic idea. Unseen, he became every man — rich man, poor man, beggar man; could be visualized as “one of us” in every house; but he must never be glimpsed as a man smoking, drinking, and swearing… These speeches he made finally got the man himself, put a touch of rhetoric in him. “I doubt if he could say, ‘I want a glass of water,'” Dr. Watkins thought. “Don’t believe he could for a minute.”
Bainbridge Colby must have harbored some Presidential aspirations, for he was convinced that Mr. Punderson was his caricature. If was bad enough that his wife had the nerve to become something as unbecoming as a novelist: that she would portray him as a bland tool of machine politicians — a Warren G. Harding-like figure, for God’s sake — was unforgiveable.
France was as popular as Mexico as a source of quickie divorces for Americans in the 1920s, but France was a bit tougher on its residency requirements, particularly by the time that Bainbridge Colby submitted his application to the court in Versailles. Concerns about Paris’s growing divorce industry led the French government to adopt strict limits on who was eligible to apply for divorce under their laws, and despite the fact that he was represented by Alexandre Millerand. who’d served as President of France from 1920 to 1924, the court dismissed his case, ruling that it had no jurisdiction over a civil matter between two American citizens.
Convinced that Bainbridge could not tolerate having a novelist as a wife, Nathalie crossed the Atlantic and headed for the next respectable option: Reno. Nevada also had a residency requirement, but by the late 1920s, Reno had built up its own divorce industry, including an assortment of dude ranches and overpriced bungalows where wealthy women could wait out the requisite two months and then submit their application. By early October 1929, the divorce was final. Asked to comment by reporters on the steps of the courthouse, Nathalie replied tersely, “Mr. Colby is great in history as a great Secretary of State. There is nothing left for me to say” — deftly skewering Mr. Punderson’s pretensions.
But What About the Book?
I apologize for getting sidetracked with the Colby’s divorce. What matters here is the book, of course.
Shirley Challoner seems at first to be merely the trailing mother following in the wake of her head-strong daughter, Suzette, and the principal players shallow rich people not worth the bother. But within a chapter or two, Nathalie Colby allows us to see that Shirley’s still, almost passive surface manner masks deep currents. While Suzette is nothing but surface manner and interested only in getting to the top of the social ladder, Shirley is a quiet, artistic soul who’s endured a marriage she was forced into for similar reasons of status.
While she went through the motions of playing the gracious hostess supporting Franklin, her prominent husband, she harbored a vision of a refuge where she would express herself, surround herself with beauty and peace — a place she thinks of as “the green forest.” And with her husband’s death, she has realized that she has an ideal companion to share the green forest with: Dr. David Findlay, the self-effacing physician with whom she’s played duets through countless musical at-homes. Findlay appreciates, rejoices in art and music and beauty, and working in a charity hospital on the Lower East Side, he and Shirley understand how much goes on beneath the surface of the life that Suzette adores:
At her home on Fifth Avenue, things were so concealed by the sacred home idea, so rolled up in it, that one could eat a chop there (she could see Franklin eating one, Suzette too), ignoring all the time the chain dangling from its frilled bone, of a kitchen-maid, cook, butler, housemaid, and lots more — and a roof to cover them all.
Green Forest isn’t long. Yes, 310 pages, but this is with the generous leading, wide margins, and squat 7.5″x5″ page size of a typical 1920s hardback, so probably around 50,000 words. But there are more layers within Colby’s story that you would suspect at first. There is the social comedy of Suzette, as she first insinuates herself with the snobbish but deeply insecure mother of her fugitive fiancé — and then ruthless abandons her to take up with a polished (but even more superficial) Argentinian diplomat. There is the plight of Miss Joy, fleeing to England in hopes of finding a way to make a living and support the infant she tells everyone is her nephew (her child, of course, and the reason she is ostracized by everyone but Shirley and the ship’s doctor). There are Mr. and Mrs. Piggott — he a hard-working businessman hoping to enjoy his slowly-accumulated fortune but suffering in silence while his wife cuckolds him with the owner of the ship’s line. And there is Shirley, reaching her decision to abandon everything, including her fortune, to run back to America and marry David Findlay — Shirley, whom we come to love and for whom Colby reserves a heart-breaking ending.
Much was made of the fact that Colby incorporated the “new” stream of consciousness technique to portray Shirley’s thoughts, but I doubt that today’s readers would find anything exceptional in that. What impressed me was that Colby’s design was so complex and yet so effortless. This does not read like the work of a first-time novelist.
And as a woman of great experience and cultural sensitiveness, she notes so much with such little effort. As the ship docks in Cherbourg, Shirley hands her daughter a wad of cash to tip the steward. She notes that the Argentinian’s eyes follow it: “Arambaru saw the wad; a waiter couldn’t have seen it quicker; only, in a waiter one could understand.” She knows that Arambaru is nothing but a gold-digger with some polish and an accent.
One of the book’s early reviewers, John Craig of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, was so impressed by Colby’s accomplishment that he spun out a nearly 200-word sentence that leaves a reader begging for a period to arrive:
It would be of the former [good enough to merit success] were the only requirements unflagging inspiration (meaning that Mrs. Colby obviously loved writing every word of it); a light, deft hand and a technical competence that many an experienced novelist might envy (she moves, always smoothly and clearly, between present time and retrospect, and from one to another of the viewpoints of quite a company of characters, the while so managing three important and incidental narratives that you never have the slightest trouble keep track of them); a continuous sparkle of ingenuity and fancy on the surface of a flow of feeling (which feeling, although intensely feminine in a mode that, like some of Mrs. Colby’s effects and devices, has rather passed out of high favor, is so notable that an anonymous reviewer of Green Forest has positively reared himself a monument by reproaching her for writing from the head and not the heart!); and the triumphant carrying through of the whole design and undertaking.
A more temperate reviewer, Ernest Boyd, covering the book for The New Yorker under his pen-name of Alceste, put Green Forest at the top of his round-up of nearly a dozen recent novels, concluding: “Mrs. Colby’s first novel is a work of brilliant intellectual imagination, as harsh as life in_ its scorn of sentimentality, and showing the finest gifts of sardonic humor.”
Nathalie Sedgwick Colby published two more novels, both receiving good reviews, soon after Green Forest: Black Stream (1928), which follows two wealthy New York families through one eventful day, and A Man Can Build a House (1929), about a family settling into a new development in suburban New Jersey. Her work was considered significant enough that Grant Overton included her in the 1928 edition of his The Women Who Make Our Novels. Her last novel, For Life, published in 1936 and about a small New England town, received less notice, and having skimmed it, I would say her 1938 memoir, Remembering, is forgettable. She died in 1942 at the age of 67.
Faye Hammill makes brief mention of Green Forest in her recent study, Ocean Liners and Modern Literature, but otherwise, as far as I can see, the book has gone unnoticed.
Great find. Also it’s remarkable that this work hasn’t been digitized by archive.org or by Google or a university. I think it’s easy to assume that the digitization efforts locate all the books published from a time period like the 1920s. In fact, university libraries must miss a lot of titles from that time period. (I have one 1920s novel — also from a major publisher — which I am in the middle of digitizing).
Yes, I am using ILL and buying old books because no one — the Internet Archive, Google, Hathi Trust — has scanned them yet.