A few dozen pages into the novel Ex-Wife, the narrator’s husband throws her through a glass door. The brutality of the episode is intensified by the understated precision of her narration. “I lay on the breakfast room floor,” she tells us, “and thought vaguely that things like this did not happen.”[1]
The book’s mix of raw confession and urbanity resonated with readers, and it spent a month on the bestseller list when it was first published, anonymously, in 1929.[2] The many subsequent printings included the name of the author, Ursula Parrott. Her first book, Ex-Wife sold one hundred thousand copies and launched a lucrative career, and the following year was adapted for film as The Divorcee with Norma Shearer.
Parrott would go on to write over twenty books, dozens of stories, and four Hollywood scripts. Despite its succès de scandale, however, Ex-Wife, like its author, has been forgotten, and so I will offer a sketch of the book’s plot and the author’s life.
Ex-Wife is about a young urbanite, Patricia, and the collapse of her marriage. Patricia writes ad copy and is making her way up in the world of fashion magazine publishing in New York City. At 19, she met Peter, a career-focused newspaper reporter, and they married. Peter does not want children—he worries that this might ruin his wife’s good looks—and he is not happy when Patricia gets pregnant. When she delivers a son, she is overjoyed, but the baby dies at three months. Patricia is devastated but Peter is relieved.
The couple move to Greenwich Village, struggle for a bit to make ends meet before becoming financially secure. Their lives are much taken up with parties and the alcohol-fueled sexual freedom of the time. Yet the supposed sophistication and egalitarianism of their generation break down when met with reality. Peter sleeps with another woman and tells Patricia. “He and I were very definitely committed to the honesty policy,” she tells us. “I made no scene about it—and I never felt about Peter, after, quite as I had before.”
A few months later she returns the favor with a close friend of Peter, then finds that she is “afraid to tell him—that to confront a theoretically modern young husband with the actual fact of his wife’s infidelity was just beyond me.” She discovers that “all the theories about the right to experiment and the desirability of varied experience—theories that had seemed so adequate in discussing the sexual adventures of acquaintances—were no help at all when the decision concerned Peter and me.”[3]
To avoid naming the friend, Patricia compounds the problem disastrously by instead telling Peter that she has slept around casually with different men. While at first Peter pretends to a modern equanimity about it, and they agree to try a bit more monogamy and sobriety, he is soon berating her, calling her a “slut,” and physically abusing her. She is pregnant again, at which news he throws her through the glass. The doctor who stitches her arm also helps her find an abortionist. Peter is indifferent to both procedures. He wants a divorce, moves out, but continues to abuse Patricia verbally and physically when he sees her. Yet she still loves him and thinks their marriage is salvageable. The abuse continues until she finally agrees to the divorce.
While separated and coming to terms with her new identity as an “ex-wife,” Patricia floats through a world of easy hook-ups, the basis for much of the book’s chronicle. Now a jaded 25 year old, she works, attends cocktail parties, sleeps with men. Eventually, she meets Noel, another newspaper man. They fall in love and are happy together, but Noel is still married to Beatrice, an embittered woman who refuses to give Noel a divorce. Noel feels responsible for Beatrice. He was driving when they were in a car accident; the right side of Beatrice’s face is still beautiful, the left disfigured from the crash.
Yet so in love are Noel and Patricia that he wants to accept a job assignment in Asia and take Patricia with him, leaving his marriage behind if not legally terminated. Beatrice, however, visits Patricia and tells her she is pregnant with Noel’s child. Beatrice, nineteen when she married Noel, is meant to be seen as a counterpart to Patricia, who was nineteen when she met Peter. Each man has left his wife disfigured, Beatrice physically and Patricia emotionally.
Patricia steps aside, sacrificing her own happiness for Beatrice, and for a baby that died in her case but can live in Beatrice’s. She not only convinces Beatrice to accompany Noel to Asia, but supervises her rival’s hair and clothes, and arranges for an artist friend to make beautiful half-masks that hide her scars. Patricia is heartbroken, but has helped the shattered Beatrice achieve a resurrection of self-confidence and the possibility of matrimonial peace. Beatrice promises Patricia that she will be good to Noel, and that if the baby is a girl she will name it after her.
At the end of the novel, Patricia’s former lover Nathaniel proposes marriage to her and she accepts. With his recently inherited wealth, they set off on a cruise around the world. The ending is one of bittersweet acceptance. Before setting off, Patricia looks at her own image in a mirror: “She did not look happy or unhappy. She looked a little tired and a little amused. I wondered what she was like.” Patricia is committed to the kind Nathaniel, who tells her “I mean to be very good to you.” She responds, “I mean to make you a perfect wife.” She means it, even as she also thinks to herself: “Yet I shall hope, through all my youth, through all my life, that in some far city I shall find my love again.” This marriage is not the abusive one of her first or the joyful one she might have had and still aches for with Noel. It is, as she puts it, “what shelter offers,” and she is “a little tired and a little amused,” and grateful.[4]
Unjustly forgotten, Ex-Wife is a novel that, for all its occasional sentimentality, is shot through with wit, social critique, sexual anthropology, and passages of deft lyricism. It is a Jazz Age social document, with 1920s Village bohemia, speakeasies, references to Freud, and the sounds of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Fitzgerald and Hemingway are indexed, not unironically, as markers of advanced taste. It is a Lost Generation novel; Patricia’s first love was a cousin killed in battle in the First World War. The modernity of the novel is produced by the shatterings, moral and technological, of the twentieth century. “I wished that Heaven were real to me,” Patricia reflects, “and wondered why it was not, to me or any contemporaries I knew. The Victorians had been able to leave things to God,” she muses, but her generation only knows “the sound of guns and the knowledge of the immediacy of death.”[5]
Despite its period markers, Ex-Wife often feels dizzyingly contemporary, more even than canonical works of its time such as The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises, as the writer Francine Prose observed in her introduction to a 1989 reissue of the novel. Patricia is a freelancer at various New York fashion magazines, and divides her time between work, cocktail parties, “one-night-stands”—that is the phrase used in the book—and the gym, where she keeps in shape by running laps on the rooftop track. Parrott’s novel at times finds kinship with Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, a similarly popular New York novel of substance abuse, marital dissolution, and magazine work. Yet Ex-Wife feels in some ways less dated today than McInerney’s 1984 debut.
The novel’s most contemporary notes are sounded when Patricia and her best friend Lucia are, as Prose writes, “addressing questions of personal and sexual self-determination that, sixty years later [and now ninety—MW], women are still asking.”[6]
Lucia in particular voices a series of indictments of the promises of feminism. “[T]his freedom for women,” Lucia says, “turned out to be God's greatest gift to men.”[7] The emancipation from the supposed shackles, moral, economic, and sexual, of Victorian social arrangements has not solved the problems of meaning, work, family, and love. “The principal thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity did,” says Lucia, “was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in return for love, fidelity and so on. Women used to have status, a relative security. Now they have the status of any prostitute, success while their looks hold out.”[8] Disparaging the advantages of economic and sexual freedom, she continues:
The choices for women used to be: marriage, the convent, or the street. They’re just the same now. Marriage has the same name. Or you can have a career, letting it absorb all emotional energy (just like the convent). Or you can have an imitation masculine attitude toward sex, and a succession of meaningless affairs, promiscuity, (the street that is) taking your pay in orchids and dinner-dates instead of money left on the dresser.[9]
Lucia claims that under the old dispensation the majority of women were content. “The abnormal ones, I suppose, had a rotten time of it,” she muses, “and so they yelled and pushed and tipped over the apple-cart for the rest of us in the end.” Facetious or not, she maintains that: “If the next generation of women have any sense, they’ll dynamite the statue of Susan B. Anthony, and start a crusade for the revival of chivalry.”[10]
Prose found such passages shockingly current: “we feel we could be in an eighties fern bar,” she says in her introduction, “eavesdropping on the intimate chat of two young women at the next table.”[11]
Three decades after Prose’s consideration, this sense of familiarity may be even greater, as intentional polyamory has come once more into fashion, even as the psychotherapist Esther Perel finds that supposedly open marriages run the same risks of relationship-destroying infidelity as monogamous ones.[12] In Lucia’s broadsides against feminism, meanwhile, we can hear a brief for the twenty-first century tradwife.
Of course, Ex-Wife also responds to its historical moment. The technology, availability, and growing acceptance of contraception took major leaps forward in the teens and twenties of the last century, to an extent that, if not quite as earthshaking as the advent of the pill two generations later, still constituted a seismic shift. Lucia again: “I think chastity, really, went out when birth control came in. If there is no ‘consequence’—it just isn’t important.”[13]
Certainly, effective contraception and, while medically risky, access to abortion, are the prerequisites for Patricia’s one-night-stands. Some of these hook-ups are pleasant—for instance, when she sleeps with the doctor who gives her stitches after the glass door incident, and who gives her honest and compassionate advice as a newly separated woman. Others are less kind. All are distracting yet fundamentally empty. “Hoping sometime to wake and find I had slept beside a lover and a friend,” Patricia tells us, “I slept to wake beside a stranger exigent, triumphant, or exasperated, or perhaps as bored and as polite as I.”[14]
Divorce itself was a timely concern. Again, while it had not the ubiquity it would from the 1960s on, the frequency of divorce in United States doubled in the period between World War One and the stock market crash of 1929. Patricia, when putting her things into storage, murmurs embarrassedly to the clerk when he itemizes her wedding ring. The clerk responds, unfazed: “Why, ma’am, we must have two’-three hundred of them in the vaults right now.”[15]
Ex-Wife is also a New York novel. One of its more interesting aspects in this regard is its treatment of Jews, who made up more than a quarter of the city’s population in the 1920s, and are referenced in three of the book’s episodes. The first is when Lucia inducts Patricia into her bewildering new life as an “ex-wife.” One of the men they socialize with is a wealthy Jew named Max, presumably of immigrant background. “We did not know many Jews,” Patricia explains.
He was one of the nicest. He was old; looked like a Rembrandt portrait; had made about a million dollars in the junk business; and been taken up by people who wanted him to give money to their philanthropies. He had a huge wife whom he adored. One day he told us proudly that she was learning to write. We thought for an instant it was to write books; but he meant a-b-c’s.[16]
The second Jew we meet is Doctor Cohen, the abortionist who terminates Patricia’s second pregnancy. He is portrayed sympathetically, a young doctor attempting to help women in need. The entire episode is told with wrenchingly dark humor as Patricia wonders if she will survive the operation or end as “a paragraph in various newspapers among the day’s casual deaths,” yet still makes sure to dress well, including her “black lizard sports’ shoes.”[17] At the clinic Patricia meets a teenaged girl who is getting an abortion because her Jewish boyfriend’s mother is “orthodox Jewish and she’d die if he married a girl who wasn’t kosher.”[18]
Finally, there is the sociopathic Stepan, who rapes Patricia after she refuses his advances and then gloats about it. He is described as a “Russian Jew, perhaps,” and tells a bizarre story of how in Russia he hid from a pogrom in a forest and drank the blood of a wolf his mother shot.[19]
In each case the Jewish character is connected with the dislocation, vulnerability, and loss Patricia experiences after the collapse of her marriage. As she remarks of Max: “He was not one of our set. But it was not a set; just unmatched pieces.”[20]
Yet the largely unjudgmental and even, in two out of three cases, sympathetic treatments of these characters, constitute a difference from New York novels that use Jews as markers of social upheaval, such as Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth with its strangely sympathetic parvenu Simon Rosedale, or the crude Jewish stereotype in McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, one of that novel’s anxious laments over the passing away of the WASP establishment.
(For those who don’t recall McInerney’s 1980s touchstone, at one point the coke-addled narrator finds himself in “a limo with a guy named Bernie” as well as a pair of escorts, Maria and Crystal. A resentful Jew, Bernie berates the narrator: “You got Ivy League written all over you. But I could buy you and your old man and his country club. I use guys like you in your button-down shirts to fetch my coffee.” A drug-dealer, Bernie is especially nervous about competition from what he calls “my brother Jews—the Hasidim. . . . They’re all set up for something like this. Liquid capital, worldwide organization, secrecy and trust. How can they lose? I’m telling you, most of the blow in the country already has a Yiddish accent.”)[21]
The Jews in Ex-Wife, by contrast, are neither crude stereotypes nor a cultural index, even if they owe their presence in the book to the narrator’s personal chaos. Although the figure of the wealthy Jewish patron/lover/sugar daddy was a feature of 1920s novels (e.g. the “Button King” in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Alfred Israel in Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth) the matter-of-fact portrayal of Jews by Parrott suggests that, like much in Parrott’s novel, they are based on the author’s actual experiences.
Parrott was born Katherine Ursula Towle in 1899 to middle-class Boston parents. She attended Catholic school and then Radcliffe College.[22] Her son Marc would later wonder “if her showoff traits, some charming, some very dangerous, derived from the snubbing she took in Cambridge as a pushy lace-curtain Irish girl from Dorchester.”[23]
From college she moved to Greenwich Village, working in fashion magazines, and in 1922 married Lindesay Marc Parrott, a young reporter for the New York Times. The Parrotts were part of a fast-living set of young bohemians with a preponderance of newspaper reporters, both men and women, and who would also produce a considerable amount of prose fiction along the way. They were witty, tough, drank fantastically (Ursula had pride of place among the women in this regard), slept with each others’ spouses, broke up each other marriages, and distracted themselves with sardonic humor from the heartaches they caused.
We are fortunate to have a non-fictionalized portrait of this circle in a late reconstruction by the Harvard scholar Robert Darnton. In an essay he published in 2011 Darnton talks about a series of interviews he conducted with the surviving women of the group in the late 1980s when they were mostly living in nursing homes.
Darnton’s father was a member of this circle. He had been a reporter and then war correspondent for the New York Times, killed in the Pacific in 1942. He had been friends in the 1920s with the Parrotts, though around the time Ex-Wife was published the friendship was strained when he stole Lindesay’s then-girlfriend (post-Ursula) and married her. A few years later the elder Darnton would commence an affair with his wife’s best friend, resulting in a pregnancy, a double divorce, and the birth of the future Harvard professor.
Such stories were not uncommon in this circle. As one of the women, then an 89 year old former crime reporter for the New York Evening Journal told Darnton matter-of-factly, “You know, we had no morals at all.” Or as a then 86 year old former advertising writer put it: “We were amoral. All that switching of partners hurt, but we wanted to have a good time, as much fun as possible, and to hell with the stuffed shirts.”[24]
Two years after the Parrotts married, Ursula gave birth to a son, Marc, a fact she managed to conceal from her husband for two years. (She had returned from London, where the couple were living, to her native Boston on realizing she was pregnant.) When the existence of his son was revealed to Lindesay, the couple divorced, and it continued to be Ursula who would provide for him.[25]
“My mother worked like a galley slave,” Marc recalled. “I well recall the chaos and tension of making those eternal deadlines for Cosmopolitan, or Women’s Home Companion.”[26] Parrott was one of a number of once-popular women writers of the interwar period who specialized in women’s magazine fiction and romance, and who found additional success through film options and screenplays. Faith Baldwin, Anita Loos, Vina Delmar, and Kathleen Norris were some of her equally famous and now mostly neglected contemporaries who were similar in this regard. Parrot’s son estimates that she must have earned around $700,000 in pre-WWII dollars.[27]
Earned and also lost. Parrott, says her son, “was at all times very generous, as long as she had anything to give.”[28] She spent every cent she earned, married three more times after her first husband, and found herself in trouble with the law, once for helping sneak a lover and former member of the Benny Goodman orchestra out of an army prison where he was already being punished for being away without leave, and once for stealing silverware from the home of friends.[29] She died of cancer in 1957 in a New York City charity ward.
Despite the storms of celebrity and trouble she both created and weathered, a line spoken by Patricia in Ex-Wife feels like it was meant for Parrott’s tombstone. “I never swam the Channel or had twins or wrote a play or murdered a rival,” she says. “I have just lived quietly, year after year, on Scotch and kisses.”[30]
Next: The Divorcee.
Sources:
[Anonymous]. Ex-Husband. New York: The Macaulay Company, 1929.
Darnton, Robert. “The Old-Girl Network.” Raritan 31, 1 (Summer 2011): 156-78.
Justice, Keith L. Bestseller Index: All Books, by Author, on the Lists of Publishers Weekly and the New York Times Through 1990. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Compani, Inc., 1998.
McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
Parrott, Marc. Afterword to Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott. Markham, Ontario: New American Library, 1989.
Parrott, Ursula. Ex-Wife. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1929. Initially published anonymously by Jonathan Cape, this edition is the 1930 ninth printing.
Perel, Esther. The State of Affairs. E-book, HarperCollins, 2017.
Prose, Francine. Introduction to Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott. Markham, Ontario: New American Library, 1989.
Raub, Patricia. Yesterday’s Stories: Popular Women’s Novels of the Twenties and Thirties. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Westall, Susan. “The Development of a Bio-bibliography for Ursula Parrott with Indexing and Navigation Tools in Printed and Web-based Versions.” Master’s thesis, Kent State University, 1999.
[1] Parrott 1930, 37.
[2] Justice 1998, 239.
[3] Parrott 1930, 17, 19, 20.
[4] Parrott 1930, 271, 272, 268.
[5] Parrott 1930, 140-41.
[6] Prose 1989, viii.
[7] Parrott 1930, 6.
[8] Parrott 1930, 88.
[9] Parrott 1930, 88-89, emphasis in original.
[10] Parrott 1930, 89, 88.
[11] Prose 1989, vii.
[12] Perel 2017, see chapter 14, e.g., “But it never ceases to intrigue me that even when we have the freedom to direct our gaze toward other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden. Monogamy may or may not be natural to human beings, but transgression surely is. Every relationship, from the most stringent to the most lenient, has boundaries, and boundaries invite trespassers.”
[13] Parrott 1930, 90.
[14] Parrott 1930, 98.
[15] Parrott 1930, 60.
[16] Parrott 1930, 8.
[17] Parrott 1930, 41.
[18] Parrott 1930, 45.
[19] Parrott 1930, 126.
[20] Parrott 1930, 8.
[21] McInerney 1984, 116-18.
[22] Biographical information for Parrott is taken from Westall 1999 and Parrott, Marc 1989, complemented by Darnton 2011.
[23] Parrott, Marc 1989, 221.
[24] Darnton 2011, 157, 170.
[25] Ex-Wife was quickly followed by the publication of a satirical novel titled Ex-Husband. Some have speculated that the author of this anonymous novel was Parrott’s husband Lindesay, who wrote it as literary revenge. This is almost certainly not the case. Rather than revenge, Ex-Husband is an opportunistic take-off of Parrott’s novel along the lines of a Mad magazine or National Lampoon spoof, and is often very funny. It scrambles the gender roles of the original novel, deflates its more portentous lyricism, and takes the Jazz Age references to absurd extremes as every party the protagonist attends is crowded with all the famous names of the period. At one point, the name-dropping devolves into just a long list of famous 1920s figures without even punctuation or capitalization of the proper nouns. The wag or wags who wrote this anticipate the jokes in Woody Allen’s “A Twenties Memory” by over four decades, and capture the intense American self-consciousness of the 1920s, perhaps unequaled by any generation since.
[26] Parrott, Marc 1989, 220.
[27] See Raub 1994, chapter 1 for a discussion of Ex-Wife in the context of other popular women’s novels of the 1920s and 30s.
[28] Parrott, Marc 1989, 220.
[29] “Novelist Seen Making Love in Army Stockade,” The Pittsburgh Press, February 26, 1943, page 14.
[30] Parrott 1930, 205.