Never assign a young man to review an old woman’s book. If only the book editor of the New York Times had heeded this advice when he assigned James Childs to review Isabel Bolton’s novel The Whirligig of Time. At the time the book was published, Bolton was 87, Childs at least 50 years younger. He had little patience for Bolton’s subtle and deliberate approach: “[T]here is so much treacle running throughout these pages”; “[W]hat should be a novel of some realism is transmogrified into a fantasy of life without logic or meaning, and held together only by a Victorian prissiness”; Bolton “creates characters who possess much sap and little dimension” and “resolves the plot in such a fashion as to lead the reader to suspect that the author herself was beginning to tire of the whole project.”
Childs’s review torpedoed the good ship Whirligig. The book received few other reviews and quickly disappeared. When Bolton died a few years later at the age of 92, none of her books were in print. In the late 1990s, the Steerforth Press (and Virago in the UK) reissued her first three novels — Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, and Many Mansions (which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1952) — as New York Mosaic, with an introduction by Doris Grumbach (who was herself 80 at the time). Grumbach opened with an adage that could serve as this site’s motto: “It is one of the accepted truths of the publishing world that many good books appear, are critically praised but attract few readers, fall between the cracks of their time, and are never heard of again.” Grumbach quoted Tobias Schneebaum, a friend in Bolton’s later years: she was “imperious, sharp-tongued, demanding, witty, often a delightful conversationalist, and always difficult.”
Bolton’s style is often compared to Henry James. Her sentences are often long and complex, probing their subjects from multiple angles. Though she was 40 years James’s junior, their worlds were not so far apart. They both lived among the wealthy and worldly, where appearances mattered and yet could be so deceptive to the untrained eye. Manners and words were the basic tools of its defense, and in experienced hands could also be used for surgically precise and deadly offense.
The Whirligig of Time is an artefact from this world. Its two primary characters, Blanche Willoughby and David Hare, were raised in it and now, meeting again in their eighties after decades of separation, are its survivors, adrift in the Atomic age. They met as children in another century and another New York, a New York where their parents and grandparents lived in elegant brownstones and maintained private parks to keep out the riffraff and the Irish.
It was in one of these parks that the principal cast of The Whirligig of Time comes together for the first time. Blanche and her sister Lily, orphans, meet David as he plays under the watch of his mother Laura. “Willoughby, Willoughby,” Laura muses when the two girls are introduced. “I think you’re David’s second or third or fourth cousin, several times removed perhaps.”
They also meet Olivia Wildering, a girl of precocious self-confidence who, in the course of that afternoon, faces down a bull. The bull, left to graze in a corner of the park by one of its subscribers (again, it was a different New York), gets a notion to charge the children at play, only to be stopped by the force of Olivia’s outrage at his sheer presumption. The children, and David most of all, leave the scene in awe of Olivia’s willpower.
But the brief rush of Mr. Pickering’s bull is the only action in this book. Everything else happens indirectly and on the margins. In fact, most of the book takes place in flashbacks over the course of the two days before David and Blanche finally meet again. David arrives at Blanche’s doorstep on page 187; the book ends four pages later.
But these are two people with a rich past in common:
The past engulfed them — vibrations of the nerves connecting memory with memory, instantaneous transport from childhood to youth to maturity; they seemed to be moving together from place to place, from scene to scene, from year to year. Places, rooms wherein momentous conversations had been exchanged, faces of the dead reanimated by thoughts of them, moments, the appearance and disappearance of familiar presences, sounds, fragrances.
Blanche and David may be survivors, but neither is unscarred. Blanche fell under the spell of David’s beautiful mother Laura and came to act as sort of an emotional nursemaid after she realizes — as, apparently, no one else in their circle does — that Laura has refused the great love of her life. Laura meets a passionate and handsome Frenchman when married, a mother, and bound tight by conventions. She tells the man their love must remain unrequited. David, in turn, becomes bound to Olivia, drawn like a magnet by the force of her personality. The two marry in a “wedding of the season” and head off to begin their marital bliss.
At which point David quickly realizes “the sad fact that he had married an incorrigible bore.” To Olivia, David is merely an appendage. A necessary appendage in the eyes of their society, but one of little intrinsic value. He annoyingly insists on taking her around Europe to look at works of art he loves and which she finds, without exception, in bad taste. As their honeymoon continues, David finds himself having “to endure her conversation as one might listen to the ceaseless buzzing of a fly on a faultless summer afternoon.” She, in turn, longs to return to New York so she can organize the affairs that will keep her at the center of society’s attention.
Their marriage falls into a uncomfortable sort of limbo. And then David finds himself in a situation much like that his mother: madly in love with someone not his spouse. In his case, however, he does the disrespectable thing:
To remember his madness was in a measure now to recover it again. Helen Brooks — his need to see her, to talk with her, had devoured him. He had been quite ready to shatter his domestic life, to forfeit all responsibility for his child, to deal his mother the severest sorrow of her life, to ruin his position in society, to throw all chances for a reputable career to the winds on the dubious chance of winning her love.
Bolton shared Henry James’s view that there are no happy endings in this life. The shared memories that bring Blanche and David together after decades are not fond. The world they had known as children was “so safe and so parochial.” Their early adult lives, however, were marked by disappointments and failures, and as they grew older, they saw themselves “in an age that we had made and were unprepared to meet.” And looking ahead, the sense that they were moving, with the rest of the world, “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.”
Bolton does not view the world of her youth nostalgically: both Blanche and David recall its pains, slights, and injustices. But neither does she shy away from the flaws of the New York of glass, steel, and Civil Defense shelters. As Tess Lewis wrote in Hudson Review, “She wrote novels of manners when the manners she had known had already disintegrated. Her characters, adrift in an uncertain world, know better than to glorify the past, but cannot help longing for the lost security of their often unhappy childhoods.” The Whirligig of Time is an elegaic novel of quiet, delicate, and deeply moving power. But it’s not a young man’s novel.
Bolton herself was a Blanche Willoughby with no David to share her sadness. Bolton was a pseudonym that Mary Britton Miller chose after her first novel In the Days of Thy Youth (1943) failed to sell or gain critical attention. Born an identical twin into the family of a prosperous New York lawyer, she and her four siblings were orphaned when both her parents died of pneumonia when she was four. Ten years later, she watched her twin sister Grace drown as they swam together in Long Island Sound. Her elder brother committed suicide in 1916. By the time Bolton achieved some success as a novelist with Do I Wake or Sleep, she was the only surviving member of her family. Having never married, she had lost all her friends from youth by the time she undertook to write The Whirligig of Time. By then, she had learned things about disappointment and endurance that were still in her New York Times reviewer’s future.