I started a habit of posting covers and short notes about neglected books on Twitter and Instagram last year. One of the books I featured recently was Marian Spitzer’s tribute to a legendary vaudeville theatre, The Palace (1969). I read in one of the reviews of the book that Spitzer had been a publicist for the Palace in its heyday, which piqued my curiosity and led me to do a little more research. From her Wikipedia entry, I learned that she had written several books before The Palace as well as a number of short stories, and this led me to go looking for her fiction. It wasn’t a long search: her 1924 novel, Who Would be Free, which is available on the Internet Archive.
Spitzer was just 25 when the book was published, but she was already a veteran writer. She’d started as a publicist for the King-Bee Hive vaudeville agency when she was just 18, then switched to become a reporter for The New York Globe. By age 21, she was being invited to speak before journalism groups. One of the apparent benefits of her time as a publicity agent was developing a not-inconsiderable knack for self-promotion. She claimed she wrote the book only because publisher Horace Liveright asked her to. It was a promise she did her best to avoid. She later explained her approach to writing:
My method is this: When evening comes I may or may not have a date. Say, for sake of argument, I haven’t. I call up all the theaters where I think I make be able to graft a free ticket. Say, then, that I get turned down everywhere. Then I telephone all my friends and ask what they’re doing. They;re all doing something that they don’t want interrupted, say. Then I look around the place for a book that I haven’t read. If it’s just my luck that there isn’t, I take a last try at the theaters.
By then, if I fail again, I’ve exhausted all my resources for getting out of working. So I write.
Who Would be Free has, I suspect, substantially autobiographical elements. Like Spitzer herself, her heroine Eleanor Hoffman was born into a family of upper-middle-class German Jews living on the Upper West Side, the “Our Crowd” that Stephen Birmingham wrote about in his 1977 book. In the books’s opening chapter, she and her sister Muriel are being confirmed in a ceremony in a wealthy synagogue, alongside young men headed for Princeton and Yale. Comfortable in their place, her parents look down on Gentiles and recently-immigrated Jews from Eastern Europe. Eleanor’s mother, in particular, worries endlessly about protecting her family’s status by finding proper husbands for her daughters. Only when pushed to exasperation does she allow a word like meschugah slip into her conversation.
Who Would be Free stays true to its title: this is the story of an escape. After a classmate slips her a copy of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Eleanor loses faith not only in her religion but in her parents’ ability to consider her best interests. “In Jewish families, especially among the kind I come from,” she tells a Gentile friend, “you’re a prisoner to your parents, not only until you marry, but forever after, and the only satisfaction you can get is to have children of your own, and make prisoners of them.” She rejects marriage as an escape route: “That was marriage. She would belong to him. Then she wouldn’t belong to herself any more.”
After a blow-up with her mother, Eleanor storms out of the family apartment and moves in with a friend. Although she initially feels the pull of home, a few uncomfortable family dinners (“Frantic pleas, agonized wailings, extravagant promises. Threats of suicide, too.”) are enough to steel her resolve. It helps that she gets a lucky break and lands a job as a graphic designer with a theatrical producer. She quickly falls in love — with her work:
She was utterly happy. The life in and around the theater was exactly what she wanted, her idea of a dream come true. Just to be there, to listen to the plans for the new season, to chatter idly with the people who dawdled in and out of the Kalbfleisch office, to read the script of a new play and hear a discussion of who would be the best person to get for the star part, to be consulted occasionally by the art director on a point of scenic technicality or a matter of lights, that was heaven. She loved her job, she loved the strange, half-made people who were connected with her job, she loved her mode of living.
And then she falls in love with a man — a writer, a cynic … and a Gentile. The attraction is mutual. She admires his mind, he adores her spirit of independence. Best of all, they share the same tastes: “‘It’s pretty good to like the same things,’ he said blithely. ‘but when you find someone who hates the same things you do, it’s incomparable.'” But Eleanor has already learned one lesson in love: it can be survived. “[S]he had lost him, and she had wanted to die. But after a while she had recovered. She would always recover.” Having lived through the death of her fiancée, killed in combat in France, she decides (to steal a title from Marjorie Hillis), to live alone and like it: “She had to be footloose, spiritually as well as actually,” even if that comes at the price of loneliness.
I went to see Greta Gerwig’s film of Little Women just after finishing Who Would be Free and it was tempting to draw parallels between the two stories, even to try to sell Spitzer’s book as “Little Women in Manhattan”: sisters, a war, marriage as an economic proposition, the difficulty of a woman finding a place for herself outside of marriage. Unlike Jo March, however, Eleanor Hoffman sees both marriage and her family as prisons. Much as she feels a strong bond with her sister Muriel, just a year younger and alongside throughout school and synagogue, Eleanor sees her as victim, a prisoner happy to be locked in by husband and children for the rest of her life.
In an interview after the book was published, Spitzer said, “There are seven or eight reasons why I’m not married,” the first being “that no man has ever asked me to marry him.” In reality, she was already involved with another writer, Harlan Thompson. The two would marry less than a year later, have two sons, work together in New York and Hollywood, and from all accounts spend four happy decades together until Thompson’s death in 1966. Spitzer continued to write and publish fiction for another ten years — a novel (now extremely rare) called A Hungry Young Lady (1930) and short stories such as “Out Where the Blues Begin” (from The Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1933). In the late 1940s, she contracted tuberculosis and was bedridden for over a year, an experience she recounted in I Took It Lying Down (1951). Her final book, drawing heavily on her time as a publicity agent, was The Palace (1969). She died in 1983.