Marriage Is So Final

[from front dust jacket flap] As refreshing as a Tom Collins on a hot day is this witty and entertaining first novel by Winifred Halsted. No inhibitions of an unhappy childhood, no zest for social reform, mar the lighthearted gaiety with which it is written and yet, beneath the sophisticated dialogue, there lies a shrewd understanding of character and a real sympathy for the problems of present-day life.

There's Miranda Wick with her job in the Hamilton National Bank and her disconcerting reactions to the thought of marriage; Mr. Wick, her father, whose chronic pessimism as to the future of the country and the republican party results from his habit of reading both the Herald Tribune and the "Times*'s editorials; his more volatile wife who insisted on breakfasting in bed rather than face the hazards of early morning conversation with her hurried family. There's Miranda's friend Evelyn in her Greenwich Village apartment and Barton Piper, who had a remarkable gift for complicating everyone's life but his own, which contrasted unfavorably with the steady New England reasonableness of Adam Gates. These are people worth knowing: from the bank's first Get-Acquainted party to the unpropitious day of Miranda's wedding they will amuse you with their recognizable foibles.

There’s an extensive author’s bio on the back of Marriage’s dust jacket. I’ll include it below since it reads very much like it was written by Winifred and gives a good taste of her style. It indicates that many aspects of the story are taken from her real life and experiences and this is echoed by the really delightful “Oradell” column from The Record (Hackensack, New Jersey newspaper) of the time, which reads like a local social media feed, and in which her name appears over and over throughout the 20s and 30s. “Miss Winifred Halsted, who has had the grippe and been home for some days, has returned to High school” (Fri, Mar 17. 1922) — and, indeed, here is Miranda, in Marriage, 1932, home for some days with the grippe, too. It’s fun to follow Winifred’s adventures through high school and college — attendance at fraternity dances and returns home for holidays and school breaks are duly noted — “Miss Winifred Halsted came up from New Brunswick where she attends the State college, to spend the week-end at her home on Prospect street.” (Tue,Nov 6, 1923) — as are, later, luncheons she hosts and weddings she bridesmaids, and her move to New York. Marriage, her first novel, gets a full, page 3 feature (complete with author’s pic from the dust jacket): “This is the golden day of her life for Winifred Halsted, daughter of Mr. And Mrs. G. E. Halsted of 411 Prospect Avenue, Oradell. She may win a Pulitzer Prize, she may be elected President of the United States…” but never will an event match the thrill of being “ a self-conscious, happy girl, furtively scanning the new bookshelves all over town “ for her “bright pink and white and black wrapper” (Jan 7, 1939). She’ll go on to publish three more novels and many short stories and she continues popping up in Oradell news into the 1960s. The last media mention I can find, again from The Record, is in a 1964 obit for her aunt. It appears she never married.

The reviews for Marriage Is So Final must have made a happy girl even happier — they seem to have been uniformly positive. In a way, this surprised me — it’s not a book where much of anything happens and, as one reviewer admitted, it kind of “keeps on for several chapters after it is really finished.” (Knoxville News-Sentinel, Jan 8, 1939) But she does write well — “wields a facile pen” (Cincinnati Enquirer, Jan 7, 1939), and with a surprising confidence and ease for her age (”Wesley was the apotheosis of the big man on campus, a campus he had never seen, and twenty years to late” (40) —”), her youthful enthusiasm is contagious, and — the book is set in 1932 — she gives one of the best accounts I’ve seen in light fiction, of what it must have felt like as even a middle class family relatively insulated from the worst of it, to see the Great Depression wreaking havoc on so many settled lives and future plans (Miranda’s father, Mr. Wick, a staunch Republican, after Roosevelt’s election, “developed a habit of expressing his anticipation of disaster by opening the morning paper as though he were anxiously shaking out his shroud to see if it would fit.” (143). She does a great job of capturing the interior feeling of being in love — of the sudden sweep of “enveloping, totally irrelevant happiness” (150) and the question of whether Miranda will choose steady, “honest as an apple” (69) New Englander Adam or whimsical, unpredictable, irresponsible, idealistic Barton — the heart or the head — leaves you guessing, for a few chapters at least. The dialogue is very Golden Age romantic comedy — rapid-fire and jaunty, if occasionally a little forced, and main characters’ relationship feels fresh and modern in its gender expectations and life-goals (basically, work to live rather than live to work). There’s a nice close female friendship, and Miranda’s parents are also a lot of fun — the Knoxville News-Sentinel even aptly, I think, notes that “with all her youth and loveliness Miranda is not a match in attractiveness for her mother.”

Slight, but enjoyable.

[from dust jacket back] Winifred Halsted in private life is Winifred Halsted. Following a deeply ingrained family habit she was born and brought up in New Jersey and with added geographical consistency was graduated from New Jersey College for Women of Rutgers University. After that she relaxed a little and has since lived intermittently in New York City, depending upon the season and her finances.

The finances were provided by a series of brief, hardly recognizable impersonations of a person doing secretarial work for assorted employers including a college club, a portrait painter, and a psychiatrist. In addition to one glittering interlude as a receptionist complete with pearls and adamant manner but without the conventional blonde hair — a lifetime sorrow; the perceptive reader will be correct in inferring from her first attempt at a novel that she also spent time in an editorial job on the employee publication (house organ, to the trade) of a large bank.

Optimistic friends and a certain distaste for office hours let her into trying to write, an idea which had always attracted her but never before to the extend of doing anything about it. After selling several short stories the whole thing went to her head and she now devotes her whole time to the proposition, arranges her own (and longer) office hours, and finds life on this basis slightly more precarious but also far from dull.