1931 Pulitzer Prize Review: Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes

Reading through these early Pulitzer-Prize winners has offered me a fascinating glimpse into a slice of novels that yesteryear’s critics once held in high regard as the peak of American literary excellence in their day. And Margaret Ayer Barnes’s Years of Grace is no exception. This is a delightful novel –it is surprisingly whimsical for a 600-page book– yet it is unfortunately wholly lacking in substance. Barnes spends a great deal of time describing the world of her protagonist, little Jane Ward –the books she reads, her friends, family, and dreams– but to what point and purpose? The novel takes place at the end of the 19th century, an age wherein midwestern towns were growing into prominent centers of commerce, and this transformation can be felt throughout book. There are four parts in Years of Grace, each covering a unique timeframe in the main character’s life. We begin with her childhood: Jane Ward is an innocent girl raised in a well-to-do Chicago family. As a young girl, she and a French boy named André fall in love. He proposes marriage but the Ward family prevents their engagement because Jane is still just a mere “child.” Jane is so distraught over the situation that her charming father secures Jane entry into Bryn Mawr as recompense –he pitches it as a wonderful school for girls where she will read French and Greek and, while away, she becomes briefly ensconced in the suffragette movement. Consider the following passage about Jane’s trip home for Christmas from college, espousing her newfangled academic ideas:

“At home, in the Christmas holidays, however, listening once more to her mother and Isabel, going out to parties where she tried not to be shy, missing André so dreadfully at every turn that nothing else seemed really to count at all, Jane had realized, of course, that she was all on Miss Thomas’s side. Life must be more important than this, she thought. There must be things for even a woman to o that would be interesting and significant. She had only to look at Flora and Muriel, comparing their dance programs in a dressing-room door, to feel just a little smug and condescending. But back at Bryn Mawr, among the people who had definite plans for concrete accomplishment, she felt again very trivial and purposeless. She didn’t really worry a bit as to whether or no[t] she ever voted and she didn’t want to work for her living really, she only cared about pleasing André and growing up into the kind of girl he’d like to be with and talk and love and marry. It was very confusing. At home she felt an infant Susan B. Anthony. She had aired her views on women’s rights with unaccustomed vigor, at the breakfast table, Isabel had derided her.
‘I hope you’re satisfied, John,’ her mother had said. ‘She’s a dreadful little blue-stocking already.’
But her father only laughed. 
‘The blue will come out in the wash,’ he had prophesied cheerfully. ‘I doubt if it’s a fast colour’” (99-100).

However, Jane’s infatuation with feminism is short-lived. When she returns home from Bryn Mawr, now a slightly older woman in her 20s, Jane finds renewed satisfaction with her family’s upper-middle class standards and traditions, and she quickly loses her desire to enter the labor market and ‘make something of herself’ (as Bryn Mawr had instructed her to do). Jane attends parties and cotillons (Note: a cotillon is a French word for a courtly dance. It refers to parties in which a young woman, in effect, presents herself to potential suitors for courtship and marriage). Gradually, Jane is courted by a handsome but slightly aloof man named Stephen Carver. At first she claims not to love him, but as time passes, and with no other serious prospects (as well as a surprising letter from André announcing his intent remain in France after all these years) Jane, somewhat reluctantly, decides to marry Stephen.

Next, we encounter Jane many years later with children, struggling to be graceful and honorable in the eyes of her mother-in-law. Amidst this unpleasant malaise, Jane reconnects with her old college friend, Agnes, who now lives in an apartment in New York alongside her excitable and romantic husband, Jimmy. Agnes is now a playwright and Jimmy is a musician. We see that Agnes and Jane lead very different lives, but Agnes is happy in her lower-class lifestyle and she has one young daughter. As time goes by, Jimmy, Agnes’s husband, falls in love with Jane. He travels frequently to visit her in Chicago, and the crescendo of the novel comes when Jimmy and Jane embrace in her garden under an apple tree. Jane finally professes her love and they make plans to travel the world together, but by morning Jane realizes she cannot be indecent to her husband, Stephen, nor to her good friend, Agnes. Jimmy tries several more times to persuade Jane, but she remains obstinate, so Jimmy runs away sending scant letters here and there. Months later, Jane receives a letter from Jimmy announcing that he has joined the ‘Prussian’ military forces in the war in Europe –a shock! The Prussian/German forces were the enemies of the Western alliance in World War I, the scars of which were only all-too recent at the time of this novel’s publication. Jimmy continues to profess his love for Jane in his letters, even from the war. Jane is dismayed and she breaks down in tears at one point when she receives another letter shortly thereafter: Agnes writes that Jimmy has run away to join the enemy German forces, and he has been killed at the Battle of the Marne (September 1914, the battle characterized by the advancing German army into France which left the French forces retreating back to Paris). Upon learning the news, an emotional Jane travels to New York City to comfort Agnes, who is also distraught, but she is wholly aloof to Jane’s brief affair with her late husband.

Time goes by and the war in Europe drags on. Agnes has found success with her theatrical plays in New York. Jane’s daughter announces an engagement, much like a youthful Jane once did many years prior with her first love, André. Jane’s family now lives in North Chicago in Lakewood, on the cusp of the Skokie Valley. Jane’s father sadly dies in his seventies, and then Stephen’s father dies leaving behind a large inheritance for the family, meanwhile Jane’s daughter becomes embroiled in a torrid affair causing scandal and divorce. She remarries in Paris where, in the end, Jane finally reconnects with her first love, André. He is now an artist and Jane visits his studio, but he seems to have grown into disillusioned man according to Jane. She quickly leaves and returns with Stephen to the United States. Perhaps the old patrician customs of her mother’s generation are, indeed, superior after all.

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While I enjoyed the simplicity and surprising pleasantness of Years of Grace, it cannot be denied that Barnes’s characters are wholly wooden and, in the end, nothing really happens in the novel. The one saving grace is Barnes’s carefully crafted prose. Years of Grace is simply a series of glimpses into the life of one woman as she follows the well-tread path from a young romantic, to a college feminist, and finally to a married woman: settled with an acceptable husband, though she strays when she dabbles in a brief but intense affair with her best friend’s husband, and lives to watch her children experience the changing tastes of a new generation. The novel is conservative in tone, albeit envious of the nomadic and adventurous life, yet it neither advocates nor dismisses the life of Jane. She is simply presented to the reader for consideration, or perhaps merely offered up for posterity. Jane exists like a fading glimmer of old Chicago, a time before the war and before the city’s notorious political corruption and crime-spree throughout much of the 20th century. Chock this novel up to more moralism from the early Pulitzer Prizes.

To conclude on a high note, it is remarkable to note the transformative changes in Chicago during Jane’s lifetime. For example, the Ward family lives on Pine Street, then a humble neighborhood that is gradually expanding and is eventually renamed “Michigan Avenue,” a soon-to-be mecca for skyscrapers, shopping malls, and fine-dining –today it is known as the “Magnificent Mile.” These changes remind me of Booth Tarkington’s descriptions of Indianapolis in The Magnificent Ambersons during the late 19th century with the advent of the automobile and the decline of the Gilded Age aristocracy.

Consider Jane’s darkly amusing forecast to her sister, Isabel, about how they will die together in remembrance of the glory days of old Chicago, and their livelihood on Pine Street (before it became Michigan Avenue):

“‘We’ll jump off the Michigan Boulevard bridge together.’ The thought had really caught Jane’s fancy. ‘Some early Spring afternoon, I think, Isabel, when the ice is just out of the river and the first sea-gulls have come and the water’s running very clear and green. We’ll climb upon the parapet together – which will be difficult as we’ll both be a little infirm – and take a last look down the boulevard, thinking of how it was once just Pine Street. We’ll shut our eyes and remember the old square houses and the wide green yards and the elm trees, meeting over the cedar-block pavement. We’ll remember the yellow ice wagons, Isabel, and the Furnesses’ four-in-hand, and the bicycles, and the hurdy-gurdies and our front steps on summer evenings. And then we’ll take hands and say ‘Out, brief candle!’ and jump!'” (458)

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On the 1931 Pulitzer Prize Decision

This was apparently the first year that the Pulitzer Board considered revising the language of the Pulitzer Prize again to simply reflect “the best novel published during the year by an American author.” In 1931, the jury selected three novels for finalists: Margaret Ayer Barnes’s Years of Grace, Elizabeth Madox Robert’s The Great Meadow, and Dorothy Canfield’s The Deepening Stream. The recommendation letter placed Barnes’s Years of Grace in “first place because of its vivid and interesting presentation of the change in character and mores throughout three generations of an American family.” Albert Paine also included a secondary personal choice in his report: Mothers Cry by Helen Grace Carlisle. The Pulitzer Advisory Board accepted their recommendations and awarded the prize to Years of Grace while also praising both finalists, as well.

The 1931 Novel Jury was composed of Jefferson B. Fletcher (Chair), Robert M. Lovett, and Albert B. Paine:

• Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
• Robert Morss Lovett (1870-1956) was a Bostonian who studied at Harvard. He taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, he was associate editor of The New Republic, served as governor secretary of the Virgin Islands, and was a political activist –he was accused of being a communist by the Dies Committee which forced him out of his secretary position. He was often on the frontlines of left-leaning picket lines, and helped launch the careers of several young writers, including John Dos Passos. In later years, his wife became a close friend and associate of Jane Addams and the couple lived at Hull House for a spell.
• Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) was born in Bedford, Massachusetts and grew up throughout the Midwest. He worked as a photographer and became a full-time writer living in New York and abroad in Europe. He became friends with Mark Twain and served as Twain’s biographer and also wrote travel books, novels, and children’s stories. In France, he wrote two books abut Joan of Arc which earned him the title of Chevalier from the Legion of Honour.

According to John Hohenberg, “the university’s Trustees adopted the Board’s recommendations without change, but there were not my critical cheers for the fiction choice.”

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Who Is Margaret Ayer Barnes?

Margaret Ayer Barnes (1886-1967) lived a life much like Jane Ward, the protagonist of Years of Grace. She attended Bryn Mawr College, married a prominent Chicago attorney named Cecil Barnes, and they had three sons together. She worked for several years as the director of alumnae at Bryn Mawr, organizing a college program focused on female workers in industry. Her writing career began after a traffic accident in 1925 or 1926 at the age of forty. She was vacationing in France when her limousine was involved in a head-on crash, breaking her skull, ribs, and back.

According to The New York Times obituary for Barnes: “Lying on her back in a cast, Mrs. Barnes placed a piece of paper on the plaster that covered her chest and started writing. Every short story she wrote at that time was accepted by a magazine.” During recovery she penned a dramatization of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (later made into a film in 1934) and this was followed by several plays including Jenny (1929) and Dishonored Lady (1930), which later became a motion picture that was sued out of existence by Barnes and her co-author, Edward Sheldon, as well as a short story collection. She then published Years of Grace, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and this was followed by Westward Passage (1931), which was also made into a 1932 motion picture, Within This Present (1933), Edna, His Wife (1935), and Wisdom’s Gate (1938). In 1936, Barnes was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, GA. She also received a master’s degree from Tufts (then called “Tufts College”). She was a member of the Authors’ League of America, but curiously stopped writing at some point in the late 1930s or early 1940s (I am unsure why she stopped writing). Barnes spent her later years in Cambridge, MA where she died in 1967.

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Film Adaptation:

• None.

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Literary Context in 1930-1931:

• Nobel Prize for Literature (1930): fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner, Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters.”
• According to Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1930 was Cimarron by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edna Ferber (later made into a Best Picture-winning film). Other notable books on the list included The Woman of Andros by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thornton Wilder, Pulitzer Prize-winner Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes, and Twenty-Four Hours by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield.
• Anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque was banned in Thuringian schools by Education Minister Wilhelm Frick.
• Agatha Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan in Edinburgh. Her first full-length Miss Marple novel The Murder at the Vicarage was published.
• Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle (1926) was first translated into English.
• East Wind: West Wind by Pearl S. Buck was published.
• The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos was published.
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner was published.
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett was published.
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil was published.

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Did The Right Book Win?

While Years of Grace is a fine enough novel, its Pulitzer Prize victory surely shows the early Pulitzer Prize prejudice for more simplistic, traditionalist, pseudo-Victorian novels rather than the more innovative works that were published that same year, such as As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner or The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos.

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Barnes, Margaret Ayer. Years of Grace. New York, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931.