At eleven o’clock at night the tenement stairs are dark. Sandy linoleum stairs scraped by the feet of children. Up the stairs and down the stairs. Ma give me bread and butter. Ma look what Sammy done. Ma give me a penny. Ma Jakie kicked ne. Feet and screams and shouts up and down the stairs all day long.
Rose knocks at the door.
This is the door that leads to my bed and I am sleepy. On the other side of the door sleep already my father and my mother and my twelve brothers.
No one answers my knock. Beat heart beat gently heart. Beat against the door.
From its first lines, Helen Grace Carlisle’s first novel, See How They Run, announces itself as a work of modernist prose. Nowhere in the next 300 pages will we see comma or quotation mark. Not a line of dialogue is attributed to its speaker. Sentences are short — anything over 10-12 words long is an anomaly. Point of view switches from paragraph to paragraph and often from an impersonal observer to a character’s running thoughts.
It’s a striking choice on Carlisle’s part, given that she’s writing a novel that most assuredly will be marketed as a “woman’s book” alongside the like of Fannie Hurst’s Five and Ten and Susan Ertz’s The Galaxy and bought by readers accustomed to the predictable prose that had characterized most commercially successful (and hence, realist) fiction since all the bustles and corsets of Victorian prose had been dispensed with. But with a lean telegraphic style like Carlisle’s comes a narrative momentum that’s like an express train compared to the ambling pace of even best-selling authors like Hurst. I read See How They Run in two days and its successor, Mother’s Cry, in one. But more on that later.
The three blind mice in Carlisle’s novel are Rose, a tenement girl; Olivia, a friend of Rose’s with intellectual aspirations; and Mary Elizabeth, a girl from a middle-class suburban family. They run not after the farmer’s wife but away from the traps they see their families laying for them — or rather, the same trap: marriage. They run to New York City, as did 95% of young women in novels of the 1920s, and hope at first to make their way in show business (ditto). Competition and oversupply quickly drive them into less glamorous occupations.
As free modern women, all three are convinced that love is purely a matter of emotional attraction and personal choice, and so it seems at first. Olivia falls from a slick but lowlife operator named Jack who seduces her in a matter of days. Despite the cheap hotel room in which it takes place, the act sends Olivia into a rhapsodic fugue:
Now is my body ME.
My body was a wooden house. A wooden dwelling place wherein I wandered woodenly searching endlessly. A cold dark empty house. Now is the house warm and light and full with the whispers of men and women. With the joyous ecstatic whispers of men and women does my house rejoice. With exultation.
Because of what took place in a white iron bed. SSSSSSSSssssssssSSSSSSSSssssssssSSSSSSSssssssssSSSSSS
Rose’s reaction, however, reveals that her feelings for Olivia are more than friendship: “Tonight I fled from you as from a menace. What threat lies in your tawny chastity destroyed. What threat. I am frightened. Where are your arms tonight by beloved friend Olivia. The hot tears are tears of fear.”
Rose rebounds into the arms of a stereotypical Bohemian of the 1920s Greenwich Village ilk, a self-styled great artist who ekes out a living drawing magazine illustrations and drowning his frustrated ambitions in cheap booze and long-winded harangues. Olivia is — surprise — abandoned before her lover has to deal with finding her an abortionist. And Mary Elizabeth stumbles into a romance with a Frenchman who, after a certain cultural confusion, decides that he truly wants a wife and not a mistress. Carlisle manages to wrap things up with few of the awkward detours of a first-time novelist, leaving us with one apparently happy ending, one tragedy, and one step further down the path to self-actualization.
While not remotely autobiographical, See How They Run is woven from numerous threads drawn from Helen Grace Carlisle’s own life. Born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents emigrated from the Pale of Settlement, she had a scholarship to Hunter College that was briefly imperiled by her participation in demonstrations against America’s entry into World War One in 1917. Despite that, she volunteered to serve with the American Friends Service Committee and spent a year as a nurse’s aide at a hospital in France. Soon after returning to the States, she married Harry Carlisle and went to work as a secretary on Wall Street.
She had her first son in Europe, during a long break made possible by terrific exchange rates but the couple separated after seven years. Carlisle spent some months as an actress with a touring company while her parents cared for her sons. The Carlisles divorced not long before See How They Run was published and profiles appeared in newspapers throughout the U.S. touting her hard-knocks experiences. “Run away from home, girls!” she advised, adding — “But be sure you have a strong constitution — you’ll need it!”
Carlisle had begun another novel while she and her husband were living in Paris, but set it aside when the money ran out and she had to go back to work. Finding writing an escape from her marital troubles, she produced Mother’s Cry, which Harper & Brothers released within months of See How They Run.
If Carlisle’s good looks and bold statement garnered plenty of publicity for her first novel, Mothers Cry far surpassed its predecessor in sales. Not that there wasn’t as much or more sex, scandal, booze, and violence. But the difference is in the narrator and her story. “Mama wanted me to learn typewriting but it looked so hard and the machine frightened me a little. It made such a lot of noise.” Me is seventeen-year-old Mary. We will stay with Mary through the entire novel.
No more switching between points of view or characters. The year is 1898 and we will follow Mary through the next thirty years. Readers who dislike spoilers will not be happy with Carlisle: by the third page, we learn that her son Danny has gone to the electric chair. Although Carlisle introduces us to a sizable cast, including Mary’s four children, and there are enough dramatic events to fill a month’s worth of any soap opera, Mothers Cry boils down to the sad story of Mary Williams and her bad seed son, Danny.
Before Danny is out of short pants, he’s lied, stolen, abused, insulted, and vandalized everyone in his family, most of their neighbors, and a fair amount of their belongings. The D in Danny stands for delinquent, drop-out, drunk, druggie, double-crosser, deadbeat, and a few more things, and it’s not long before we start wondering why Mary doesn’t wear a red letter D on her dress. While his two sisters and brother are dutifully adding to their stock of virtue and good acts, Danny is not only looting the pantry but not even bothering to leave an I.O.U.
And unfortunately, Mary is too good and naive not to get used by Danny every time:
I tried to talk to Danny and I said don’t you know what stealing is and he said sure. I said don’t you know you’re stealing from me. And he said you oughter give me plenty of money and I wouldn’t have to take it. So I told him how I couldn’t afford it because I worked so hard for the money and lots of times I didn’t get enough work to do so I had to save every penny and I said if he kept on stealing when he grew up they’d put him in jail. Will they send me to jail now he said. No I said they don’t send children to jail. Oh then that’s all right Danny said and he walked away.
Carlisle’s commitment to Mary, her story, her perspective, her diction, even her often pedantic inclusion of trivial details, is remarkable. Where See How They Run is lean (several reviewers compared her prose to Gertrude Stein’s) and kaleidoscopic, Mothers Cry is almost relentless in its focus. Mary is going to end up with two children in the grave and she is going to make us take every step that took her to that ending.
The potential of both books to achieve some level of distinction, however, is undermined by Carlisle’s loyalty to the narrative tropes of the commercially successful women’s fiction. While her prose so refreshingly differs from that of Fannie Hurst et al., Carlisle may be a modernist in style, but her stories are old-fashioned melodramas. Her third novel, Together Again (1930), while told in symbolic language with abstract characters (“The Boy”; “The Girl”; “The Doctor”), ends with an ode to motherhood that’s downright embarrassing: “There was only The Womb, triumphant, magnificent, the eternal Mystery, the life everlasting, The World Without End.” (Note also that Carlisle has discovered the comma, although quotation marks were still in the future.)
The film rights to Mothers Cry were scooped up before the book appeared. Unlike See How They Run, which was a little too risqué even by Pre-Code standards, Mother’s Cry was Puritanical, if not Calvinist, at heart. Chester Morris was announced as the movie’s big star in the role of Danny, but the part went to Edward Woods, fresh from Broadway. Despite the fact that he seems to be wearing more lipstick than was necessary for the lighting and film of the time, Woods is such a convincing weasel that he was the first pick for the role of Tom Powers in The Public Enemy. Fortunately, director William Wellman decided to give the part to James Cagney and cast Woods as Powers’ sidekick Matt. It was the right choice: Cagney is never anything but an operator, while Edward Woods is never anything but a follower.
Helen Grace Carlisle wrote four more novels over almost thirty years after Together Again: We Begin (1932); The Wife (1934); Merry, Merry Maidens (which sounds a bit like a precursor to Mary McCarthy’s The Group) (1937); and The Tiger Sniff the Rose (1958) — by which time Carlisle had grown so unfamiliar that reviewers remarked that they “looked forward to more from this new author.” She died in 1968 of a heart attack at the age of 70.
See How They Run, by Helen Grace Carlisle
New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith (1929)
Mothers Cry, by Helen Grace Carlisle
New York and London: Harper & Brother (1929)