“Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead,
Your social order too!
Where tarries he, the Power who said:
See, I make things all new?”
In This Our Life is a drab and dreary novel that suffers from a burdensome lack of inspiration or motivation. As W.J. Stuckey notes, “In This Our Life is a minor performance by an otherwise significant novelist” (127). Mirroring the life of its depressive author Ellen Glasgow, In This Our Life is a bleak story about uprootedness, discontentment, and the fruitless efforts of one family to discover its own happiness. The novel is told in three parts (Part First: Family Feeling, Part Second: Years of Unreason, Part Third: All Things New) and it presents a cohort of “decaying aristocrats” living in Virginia just prior to the outbreak of World War II.
Our protagonist (and the only mildly appealing character in the book) is Asa Timberlake, a 60 year-old man whose once-prosperous Virginia family has fallen on hard times. He now works at a company that was formerly owned by his family, The Timberlake Tobacco Factory –it was once the finest tobacco company in Virginia before it was acquired by the Standard Tobacco Company. In the old days, Asa’s father personally knew all the faces and names of the employees in the factory, but now the business is being run by a corporate behemoth located in New York. As such, the company has devolved into a lackluster and impersonal place to work (the decline of Asa Timberlake’s once-great family echoes earlier themes found in earlier Pulitzer Prize-winners like The Magnificent Ambersons and Early Autumn). Sadly, when Asa’s father lost his good health along with the family fortune, he shot himself.
“Like all other successful men of his time and his place in the South, he had seen, as a child, the ruin of his family fortunes and the complete reversal of a social system” (114).
Now, Asa has inherited a broken family and his meager estate relies on the financial support of an unpleasant man named William Fitzroy. At the start of the novel, the Timberlake family’s elegant home is demolished, a reminder of the impermanence of things, and throughout the novel Asa’s loveless marriage sits in a state of complacency –his hypochondriac wife Lavinia remains bedridden and emotionally distant. Asa’s only escape is in visits to a neighbor’s farm where a lovely widow named Kate resides with her two dogs (Lavinia has forbidden Asa from having a dog). Much of the novel concerns Asa’s two daughters (both are given masculine names for inexplicable reasons): Roy and Stanley. Roy is the mature, level-headed elder sister, while Stanley is the petulant, narcissistic younger sister.
As the novel progresses, both Roy and Stanley become engaged –Roy marries a surgeon while Stanley is betrothed to a lawyer, but the ever-vain and indulgent child that she is, Stanley steals Roy’s husband and both sisters’ marriages completely fall apart. From here, the different characters experience a considerable level of depression, physical abuse, and suicide (Roy’s one-time husband shoots himself), and we are treated to constant reminders that truly nothing lasts forever. We are also offered the backstory of a young black driver named Parry, a boy with dreams of becoming a lawyer. He is wrongfully blamed for a reckless car accident that leaves a white woman injured and kills an innocent girl carrying pink flowers. In truth, it was actually Stanley who caused the accident while on an alcoholic binge. Naturally, Stanley faces no consequences for her actions and the novel ends without resolution or redemption. At the very least Asa makes a phone call which exonerates Parry and grants him the freedom to return home to his parents while avoiding any more time in a squalid “Negro jail cell.” Lastly, as a strange coda at the end of the novel, Roy briefly runs away from home with plans to head for New York but she stops for a night at a random strange man’s house before briefly returning home because she has forgotten her clothes. In This Our Life ends here, with Asa wondering if his morally bankrupt family can ever be salvaged. I am not quite sure how this novel won a Pulitzer Prize, I suppose Part III is the only mildly significant or engaging section of the book, but you need to read about 350 pages just to get there! To be fair, there are some sobering, reflective, existential passages peppered throughout the text, but all too often Ellen Glasgow masks any shred of profundity behind a darkened shroud of pure lugubriousness. We need not confuse despair with literary depth. At any rate, of all the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels I have read thus far, I would rank In This Our Life among the worst.
In a 1942 interview with The New York Times, Ms. Glasgow said the following: “My theme was in the question of what it is that a man has that lets him go on, and be a man, after he has failed, as it would seem, at everything. So many people missed the point that I want to make it again.” At the time, she was battling ill health and working on a sequel to In This Our Life, though it would never actually be published and In This Our Life wound up being her final novel.
The title In This Our Life was apparently borrowed from the sonnet collection “Modern Love” by 19th century Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith: “Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul/ When hot for certainties in this our life!” In 1941, Warner Bros. purchased the film rights to In This Our Life for $40,000 and released a movie starring Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland as sisters Roy and Stanley. It was directed by John Huston as well as Raoul Walsh (Walsh was uncredited in his temporary directorial role while John Huston was called away for war-time activities). Naturally, Hollywood downplayed some of the more dispiriting plot-points in the film and the ending was understandably wholly rewritten to fit more of the Hollywood mold. The film was actually John Huston’s second directorial assignment after The Maltese Falcon, and by all accounts In This Our Life was a bit more of a sophomoric effort on his part –or at least it was greatly overshadowed by his later more impressive directorial outings.
Notable Quotations:
“The street was darkened by a smoky sunset, and light had not yet come on in the lamps near the empty house. Under a troubled sky the old house looked deserted but charged with reality” (3 -opening lines).
“He was a bookish chap, and learning from books had always been easier than learning from life” (6).
“They will never again build like this, he thought. Dignity is an anachronism. Yes, the old house was going out with its age, with its world, with its manners, with its fashion in architecture” (8).
“Acceleration, not beauty, was the strange god of our modern worship” (63).
“‘Happiness. I want happiness… Oh, Father, I’m so wretched! I’m so terribly wretched…'” (343).
“It’s fear that does most of the harm in life: and he saw all the evils in the world, the whole sinister brood, spawned by fear” (409-410).
On the 1942 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1942 Pulitzer Jury was composed of returning veterans Jefferson Fletcher and Joseph Krutch, and they were joined by Gilbert Highet, a Scottish-American Classics professor at Columbia University (he replaced Dorothy Fisher on the jury from the previous year).
- Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and studied at the University of Tennessee and Columbia University. After serving in the army, he traveled throughout Europe with a friend, poet and critic Mark Van Doren. He taught composition at Brooklyn Polytechnic and became a theater critic at The Nation where he worked for many years. Something of a pantheist, mystic, and naturalist –he penned widely read biographies of Henry David Thoreau and Samuel Johnson.
- 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.
- Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) was a Scottish American classicist, academic writer, intellectual critic, and literary historian. He was married to Cold War novelist Helen MacInnes.
When it came time to present their recommendations to the Pulitzer Advisory Board at Columbia University, the Jury noted that “none of the novels brought to its attention seemed of really outstanding merit or equal to many at least of those which have received the prize in the past.” If not for the fact that the previous year had also issued no award (in which Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls was infamously snubbed) the Jury would have preferred not to issue an award again in 1942. Nevertheless, they presented four possible novels for consideration in no particular order: Windswept by Mary Ellen Chase, The Great Big Doorstep by E. P. O’Donnell, Storm by George Stewart, and Green Centuries by Caroline Gordon.
However, the Advisory Board rejected all four of these recommendations, and instead members of the Advisory Board sent various letters to Board Chair, Joseph Pulitzer –son of the award’s namesake– with the hope of securing his blessing for a different selection. Novelist W. E. Woodward praised Upton Sinclair’s Dragon’s Teeth, however the novel was actually published in 1942 (not 1941) and thus was ineligible for this year’s consideration (it would actually win the Pulitzer the following year). Another Board member Julian LeRose Harris of The Chattanooga Times suggested the latest novel by Ellen Glasgow, In This Our Life, as a top quality choice. He intended for the award to be in recognition of Glasgow’s full body of work, while praising her as one of the best and under-appreciated writers of his generation (Ms. Glasgow was nearly 70 years old at the time). This was enough to persuade the Board and so In This Our Life was selected as the winner, although today posterity has not exactly smiled upon Ms. Glasgow’s body of literary work. She remains a mostly forgotten American writer.
Dismayed but accepting of the Board’s decision, the three members of the Novel Jury quietly elected not to return the following year thus ending the incredible tenure of Jefferson B. Fletcher as a Pulitzer judge. During his decades serving on the Novel Jury he had overseen Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the likes of Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, Pearl S. Buck, Margaret Mitchell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and John Steinbeck to name a few. The future of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel now lay in question as a whole new Jury was to emerge in 1943 and lingering tensions still persisted over the true seat of authority between the opposing governing bodies: the Advisory Board versus the Novel Jury.
Per an article on the Pulitzer Prize website: “By the time she began work on In This Our Life, the liberties of literary modernism enabled Glasgow to take on an idealized vision of a South that had marinated in Lost Cause historiography and an idealized sentimentality, including upper-crust infidelity, insinuations of incest and the Jim Crow-era racial order. The novel takes a detour in its denouement when attorney and patriarch Asa Timberlake delineates the timeless consequences of his daughter Stanley’s hit-and-run defense strategy: “It won’t be more than a fine for you. […] But it will mean a long sentence for Parry,” the elder Timberlake’s falsely accused African American protege. Chosen at the Advisory Board’s discretion and far more realized than the subdued John Huston/Raoul Walsh film adaptation that coincided with the announcement of the Prize, the novel (currently in print through an authorized, inexpensive Kindle edition) remains a prescient work some 80 years after its release.”
Who is Ellen Glasgow?
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1873-1945) was a lifelong Virginian. She was the youngest of ten children, the daughter of Francis Thomas and Anne Jane (Gholson) Glasgow. Her father had been head of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, the main supplier of munitions for the Confederacy during the Civil War and thus her family was prominent and financially stable. She published some 20 novels during her lifetime, many of which focused on the plight of women during the tumultuous years of social change in the post-Reconstruction South, though none of her books today seem to have experienced much of a literary renaissance for modern audiences, save for those of us who happen upon In This Our Life as we trod our way through the Pulitzer Prize-winners. According to an article by the Pulitzer Prize website: “Ellen Glasgow was one of the preeminent American writers of her generation. Afflicted by a lifelong heart defect (indeed, the writing process of her Pulitzer-winning book was punctuated midway by a heart attack) and hereditary mental health issues that were dismissed by Victorian medical authorities as “nervous invalidism,” the Richmond, Va.-reared Glasgow parlayed her aristocratic pedigree and years of autodidactic study into a literary career that challenged the status quo through depictions of social ills that resonated in the Progressive Era, including the plight of factory workers and the extraordinary difficulties faced by women.”
Ms. Glasgow was raised in Richmond, Virginia at 1 West Main Street, a home which now stands as a National Historic Landmark. Interestingly enough, it has been listed for sale in recent years asking north of $2M. At any rate, Ms. Glasgow also spent her summers at the Jerdone Castle plantation which her father purchased in 1879, and between these two homes Ms. Glasgow wrote many of her celebrated novels. She wrote her first novel before the age of 20 but quickly destroyed it after her mother’s death in 1893, while her first published novel The Descendant was started when she was 18 and published anonymously in 1897. Dedicated to the late McCormack, the novel was about a young painter in New York named Rachel Gavin (writer Hamlin Garland gave it a favorable review). Her next two novels were also set in New York: her second book Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898) was also published anonymously, while her third book The Voice the People (1900) was to bear her name. The New York Times praised The Barren Ground as her most celebrated work. Initially, she had set about to write the social history of Virginia and many of her novels wrestled with the transition from ladies of genteel Victorian expectations, to contemporary independent women. In total, she published some twenty novels, two short story collections, poetry, and literary criticism, as well. Her final novel was In This Our Life (1941), the first of her works to treat African American characters as more than background props or caricatures.
Ms. Glasgow’s first short story was published in 1895, but shortly thereafter tragedy struck when her mother died and her beloved brother-in-law whom she considered a mentor, Walter McCormack, suddenly killed himself. To escape the gloom, Ms. Glasgow headed for New York where she attempted to secure a literary agent but the agent in question made aggressive sexual advances on her so Ms. Glasgow soon departed. During her lifetime, she never married but was engaged twice, once to a minister (Reverend Frank Paradise) and once to a lawyer (Henry W. Anderson). “Her tumultuous long-term engagement to perennial vice presidential and Supreme Court hopeful Henry W. Anderson inspired many of the vainglorious foils in [her] books.” Their engagement fell apart when he was called abroad during the First World War and he promptly fell in love with the Queen of Romania. She also had several prominent affairs during her lifetime, including with an anonymous married man she only ever referred to as “Gerald B.” They enjoyed short-lived trips together to New York and the Swiss Alps, but in the end he could not bring himself to divorce his wife so their affair remained brief and private. The true identity of “Gerald B.” remains a mystery.
In later years, Ms. Glasgow’s surviving brother killed himself and her sister died of cancer shortly thereafter. With so much grief and tragedy in her life (she once called her life a “long tragedy”), Ms. Glasgow also attempted suicide herself but she failed. Following years of ill health and heart disease, she died of a heart attack (her fourth heart attack) in her sleep at her Virginia Georgian home in 1945. At the time of Ms. Glasgow’s death, fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (author of The Yearling) drafted a biography of her late friend and fellow writer, a project which was never completed. A posthumous autobiography entitled The Woman Within was published in 1954 and it revealed further details of Ms. Glasgow’s life. Throughout her career, Ms. Glasgow won numerous awards aside from the Pulitzer, including the yearly award bestowed by the Saturday Review of Literature. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She also helped establish the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in 1909 and, as an animal lover, served as the longtime president of the Richmond SPCA (which received most of her estate upon her death). For much of her life, she lived with her secretary, Anne V. Bennett (10 years her junior) at her home at 1 West Main Street in Richmond. Today, Ellen Glasgow is generally regarded as a founding voice in the Southern Realism literary movement.
Film Adaptation:
- In This Our Life (1942)
- Director: John Huston (and Raoul Walsh in uncredited directorial role)
- Starring: Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, George Brent, Dennis Morgan, and Charles Coburn
Literary Context in 1941-1942:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1941): not awarded during World War II.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1941 was The Keys of the Kingdom by A. J. Cronin. Other novels that appeared on the list included For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (at #5), Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts who won a special Pulitzer Citation in 1957 (at #6), H. M. Pulham, Esquire by John P. Marquand who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley in 1938 (at #7), and Saratoga Trunk by Edna Ferber who won a Pulitzer Prize for So Big in 1925 (at #9).
- The Nazis issued a decree calling for the replacement of all blackletter typefaces by Antiqua in order to hearken back to15th and 16th German script (“The Bormann Decree” by Martin Bormann).
- Jean-Paul Sartre was released from a prisoner-of-war camp on health grounds.
- Eugene O’Neill completed Long Day’s Journey into Night (which would not be published and premiered until 1956).
- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Last Tycoon, unfinished upon his death in 1940, was edited by Edmund Wilson and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York City.
- Mildred Pierce by James M. Caine was published.
- The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller was published.
- Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers was published.
- Evil Under the Sun and N or M? by Agatha Christie were published.
Did The Right Book Win?
In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow is a depressing, forgettable winner of the Pulitzer Prize –I did not hold this book in any kid of high regard. As such, if I found myself in charge of selecting the Pulitzer Prize-winner for a book published in 1941, I likely would have considered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s posthumously published novel The Last Tycoon (it was, after all, a true scandal that Fitzgerald never won a Pulitzer Prize in my view).
Glasgow, Ellen. In This Our Life. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1941. First Edition.