Of all the muses you might expect a young woman novelist to be channeling in 1933, Henry Fielding is among the last. Yet the closest parallel one can find to Rose Caylor’s second novel, The Journey, is The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. In both books, a young innocent, a tabula rasa personality, travels to a great city where that blank slate is scribbled over by various forms of iniquity and sent home sadder and wiser.
But plot isn’t the primary point similarity between Tom Jones and The Journey. It’s the authorial voice. Tom Jones would be about a third as long and not one-tenth as enjoyable were its fairly thin story enriched by Fielding’s gentle, amused, and worldly-wise commentary. By the time Rose Caylor sat down to write The Journey, she’d been a newspaper reporter, PR agent for the American Medical Association, business report publisher, and actress in the Leo Dietrichstein’s traveling company, for which she had jumped into stage volcanoes, got shipwrecked on a desert island, and flounced around in crinoline and hoop skirts as “the Spirit of the Old South.” In his memoir Gaily, Gaily, Hecht compared Caylor to “a combination of Laurette Taylor, Sarah Bernhardt, and Geronimo.” Not quite the same as Fielding’s years as a magistrate and founder of the Bow Street Runners, but close in terms of street savvy, I suspect.
The actual story in The Journey could easily be squeezed onto about five pages without much abridgement. A Chicago reporter names Jimmy Dyrenforth sweet-talks Caryl Fancher, a typist in his father’s office and the two get married on a whim. Coming out of City Hall, Jimmy panics and rushes to a pay phone, where he talks the friendly editor of a New Orleans newspaper into giving him a job. Jimmy bolts for the first train to New Orleans, leaving the virginal Caryl to her own devices, hoping she will give up on the marriage before it’s even started.
Instead, she assembles a trousseau and heads off to New Orleans in pursuit. Though Jimmy meets her at the station, his welcome is mostly intended to persuade Caryl to leave as quickly as possible. Whether obstinate or just obtuse, she persists as he variously ignores and insults her, and eventually the two hop in bed and Caryl ends up pregnant. Though Caylor wrote her share of happy endings as a playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, there’s none to be found here. Caryl gives up eventually and heads to New York for an abortion after brow-beating Jimmy into borrowing $200 from his father.
So much for the narrative arc. What you can’t get from this synopsis, however, is any sense of why this book is 483 pages long. Perhaps an excerpt from Caylor’s introduction of the reader to Jimmy will help:
We take it that the reader will be glad at length to meet one of our characters who is not a fool. However, the reader may well turn and ask “What is her?” In attempting a valuation of our favourite masculine character, we must first state some of our concepts and premises, to which he must measure up. Thus:
To have convictions –! that is the true, the high, human importance. To feel that one’s beliefs matter, to attain them through moral force, to give them up with a struggle when one has become convinced they are false, that is living a worthy, possibly even noble, life. We truly believe that convictions, hard won and hard relinquished, are the only possessions that lend a passing importance to man, and dignity, etc., to his transitory estate. Our hero, however, hadn’t any hard-won convictions or any he wouldn’t give up at the drop of a hat. Opinions blew through his head like drafts. He no more bothered to knew where he got them than were he got a cold in the head, and he no more knew the reason why he gave them up than he could give the reason for a sneeze.
This is followed by nine pages of further reflection on Jimmy’s character, its development, and the nature of modern man, while Jimmy and Caryl wait side-by-side in a cab for the plot to move along. The Journey may take place in a time of trains, planes (well, a few), and automobiles, but its pace is solidly grounded in the 18th century. Thirty pages later, the couple is just sitting down to their first meal together. The consumation of their marriage is still at least three hundred pages off.
And this, in a nutshell, is the dilemma faced by a reader who decides to take Caylor’s journey. One reviewer called the book “irritating and entertaining,” and that’s precisely the mixed bag it offers. This is not a book you read for the story or even much for the characters, so if you don’t fall in love with Caylor as tour guide, I can’t imagine you’re likely to hang in past Chapter Two.
I think we have to accept that Caylor miscalculated how far she could stretch her story’s thin fabric over its complex scaffolding of commentary. I stuck with her to the very end because reading books like this is part of the price of my obsession. Given how rare this book is in the first place (perhaps a dozen copies in libraries worldwide and zero copies available for sale), I suspect few who even bother to read this far are likely to track down The Journey for themselves.
Yet, I must remind you that irritating was only one of the adjective used to describe this book. The other was entertaining. For, in the midst of many pages of reflections and discursions that often made me grumble, “Oh, just get on with it!”, there are also wonderful set-pieces. Like the literary discussion where a roomful of New Orleans belles dames debate whether Gulliver’s Travels is “fornographic” and gush over their latest reads, the titles and authors of which none of them can quite bring to mind. Or this description of the earnest authoress Rose Entwhistle and one of her attempts at research:
Today, Miss Entwhistle is very tired, and for a most perlexing reason. Having heard a salesgirl remark the other day, in answer to her own statement that a department store was very fascinating, that it was “a good place to learn human nature,” she had immediately (quite secretly of course and incognito) obtained a job in this same store and for that very purpose. Today, having worked a week there, having been rather disappointed in human nature, and having quit the day before, she suffered greatly in her feet, but especially there was a strange disquiet in her memory. Famous for her many stories dealing with department store life, she was beginning to wonder whether it was not she herself who was the author of that statement about department stores being “a good place to learn human nature,” and could it be that she had been taken in by a quotation from herself?
And, on occasion, Caylor can be refreshingly telegraphic in her approach. Take, for example, Chapter 32, which reads, in entirety, “We have no room in this book for the savageries of Caryl’s sister-in-law, Hazel.”
The Nation’s reviewer, Florence Codman, loved The Journey in all its digressive beauty, dismissing her own brief description of the book as “an offering of nickels where millions are to be enjoyed.” Well, perhaps not millions, but something in the mid-hundreds at least. Do these make The Journey worth the investment of a couple of weeks to read it? I guess that’s why I get paid the big bucks to help with these decisions.