A Walk in the Dark

Title: A Walk in the Moonlight
Author: Eve Bennett
Publisher: Julian Messner, 1959
Setting: Bennett's trademark Denver
Provenance: ILL, currently the property of St. Francis University Library, Loretto, Pennsylvania
Fun: nosy neighbors; waitressing in a diner; quitting school
Quote: "The clothes, smelling clean and fresh, blew lazily in the breeze, and Mary was conscious of a job well done. Suddenly her eye caught a movement at the dining room window of the house next door. That meant that old Mrs. McDrey was peering from behind the lace curtain, looking for tattletale gray in Mary's wash, counting the towels and sheets, spying out every worn spot in every piece."

Sorry for the long gap. I got the bright idea of asking for some books through inter-library loan instead of pursuing them on Ebay and other sites. The first book I asked for came through quickly, but the next two didn't show at all, and when I asked at the library I was told my order had been cancelled, for no apparent reason. They put the request through again and this week I got A Walk In the Moonlight.

Eve Bennett also wrote Concerning Casey, I, Judy and April Wedding, all books set in Colorado (mainly Denver) and all about girls going through unexpected turmoil -- sometimes with a hint of sexual scandal -- and emerging stronger. A Walk in the Moonlight's starting point is a variation of the 19th century shibboleth in which a couple who stay out all night when their buggy breaks down have to get married because the woman's reputation is ruined. Mary Munday and faithful, if not very passionate, boyfriend Andy blow a carburetor on a mountain road and have to hike home. Nosy neighbor Mrs. McDrey sees Mary strolling in at six a.m. and tells another nosy neighbor and before you know it, Mary's friend, Tessie, is forbidden to associate with her. The girls at school talk, too, and soon Andy stops coming around.

This incident -- which is made believable, even for the 1950s -- is really just a small part of the story. Mary has a supportive family and plenty of friends and the reader can't help but think that the gossip doesn't amount to much. But Mary, like a lot of Bennett's heroines, is angry at the basic unfairness of life. She quits school and goes to work as a waitress in a grease-pit diner, and that's where the drama of the book unfolds.

The rest of A Walk in the Moonlight is Mary working through her emotions, with the help of her father and a new boyfriend, Mike Aldo. Here, the era in which is was written begins to tell. Mike has a tendency to grab Mary while subjecting her to "supportive" tirades which are supposed to bring her out of her self-pity. As a result of the speeches, Mary does indeed go back to school and makes plans for college. But in the final scene, after Mike tells Mary he's going to marry her someday, he suggests they stop seeing each other because in the meantime they might be...you know...tempted. (The words "clean" and "fine" are used a great deal in this scene.)

I can't help think this was a little old-fashioned, even for 1959, and it introduces a note of conflict to what is supposed to be an uplifting ending. I guess ten years later, when Mary gets a divorce from Mike (and she will), she'll have her waitressing experience to fall back on.

Now this sounds sort of bitter. It's always been my aim in this blog not to criticize books merely for demonstrating the values of their time. I don't believe the current era is inherently superior to the 50s; in some ways we're worse off. But I do object to a book like A Walk in the Moonlight, a book in which much care has been taken to create a realistic world with realistic conflicts, crushes itself down at the end into something "clean" and "fine."

So You've Ruined Your Life

Title: April Wedding
Author: Eve Bennett
Publisher: Julian Messner, 1959
Cover art: unknown
Provenance: formerly the property of the Grand Forks (ND) Public Library
Setting: Adolescent Denver
Fun: Teen Times radio show; selling insurance door to door, teenage motherhood
Quote: "Bill's somber eyes stared straight ahead. 'They might feel that their trust is betrayed if we go on like this. Jeannie, you know as well as I do what ails us. We either ought to give each other up, or we ought to get married.' "

You've probably seen this after-school special. High school seniors, deeply in love, decide to get married. A year later they're broke, living in a squalid apartment with a screaming baby. Boy begins to drift away, hanging out night after night with the guys. Girl turns into a nag with hair curlers and a rolling pin. Divorce, and a lesson for us all, are just around the corner.

It could be that Eve Bennett is just a little too independent-minded to accept this script. Or possibly she just doesn't want such bad things to happen to two nice characters like Jeannie and Bill. Certainly the major plot points are there, portrayed with Bennett's usual wit and realism. A courthouse wedding, a run-down apartment, Bill selling insurance door to door to pay the bills, followed by Bill quitting several jobs and being jealous of Jeannie working, topped off by Jeannie becoming pregnant and hating it. Bennett doesn't skimp on the reality of morning sickness, mood swings and the uncertainty of taking care of a first baby.

But Bennett is not trying to scare her audience straight. Sure, babies cry and pregnancy makes you feel unattractive, but there's always the possibility that your husband will come home on your birthday with a new dress ("smoke-gray pleated nylon skirt spangled with velvety black flowers and sparkle dust") and take you out to dinner. And that, after a year of ups and downs, your father-in-law, impressed by your commitment, will offer to pay for college for both of you. As Bennett comments on the back of the book, she is not "usually in favor of teen-age marriages...[but] I think most marriages could be worked out if both parties really tried, and the one thing on the side of young marriages is that youth is more resilient."

Is Bennett painting an over-optimistic picture? If the after-school-special version of the tale is grimmer than it needs to be, in order to sell the lesson of the story, is Bennett, working in the confines of popular fiction, bound to put a happy ending on things for the same reason? The answer is probably yes. But all any writer can do is try to describe the world as they know it, and that's something Bennett does very well.

There's Something about Casey

Title: Concerning Casey
Author: Eve Bennett

Cover Art: Georgeann Helms

Publisher: Julian Messner, 1958

Setting: Mountain View, a small mining town in Colorado

Provenance: formerly the property of the Grand Forks ND Public Library

Fun: a mayoral election; the state speech contest; a shotgun wedding

Quote: "What am I?" she asked, "I wish I knew. Maybe something has been left out of me. Maybe I'm not all there. Maybe I'm - sexless. Maybe I'm that horrid creature, an ambitious woman. But ambitious for what? What am I besides a girl with a beastly temper and a tongue she can't control very well?"

There's a lot of old-fashioned fun in Concerning Casey. Our heroine is the oldest of a large family. Her father is a crusading newspaper editor, who in the course of the book runs for mayor of their small town. His particular issue is the clean-up of the local slum; his rival is the evil developer who owns the slum. This subplot, threaded through Ladies' Aid meetings, town gossip and schoolyard fights, perks along in the background, while Casey studies for exams, goes to basketball games, enters a speech contest, votes on where to hold the school dance, dates, breaks up, listens to her friends' problems, buys Christmas presents and quotes poetry.

Concerning Casey, is, in fact, less a teen novel and more like Irene Hunt's Up a Road Slowly or the Anne of Green Gables/Betsy-Tacy books. Like these books, it focuses less on a specific plot and more on overall coming of age, and like these books there is a vivid background of small town characters and the bustle of family life. (Eve Bennett based this book on her own adolescence in Yankton, South Dakota.) Casey's family is lively and passionate, fond of debating politics at the dinner table; there's a wise town doctor, a sharp-tongued aunt and a run-down general store where everyone buys Christmas presents.
And yet...nostalgia can only take you so far. Up a Road Slowly looks at alcoholism, mental instability and death. Anne of Green Gables also has a major character die, and even the Betsy/Tacy books glance in that direction. The great theme is that difficult as these experiences are, the heroines gain something from them which is essential to their growth and their art. Concerning Casey, on the other hand, brushes by anything too serious. Tom Town, the local slum, is given only scant mention, as is the reason for her brother Rick's sudden marriage.

And then there's quote above, late in the book, pegging Casey as unlikeable, which is something of a surprise. After all, Casey's envious little sister describes her as "the most popular girl in town." She has two ever-faithful swains named Bob and Butch. She comes in second place in the state speech contest and is asked out by the first place winner. All in all, there's only the vaguest hint she thinks of life beyond high school. Bennett seems to want to have it both ways: to create a independent, thoughtful, lone-wolf heroine and at the same time make her a popular girl, blithe and feminine.
In the end, the independent girl wins, but it's a strange victory. Watching her younger brother battle meningitis, Casey decides she wants to go to medical school. The town doctor agrees to pay her way, in the name of the son he never had. She also agrees to marry Bob (who's going to medical school, too) even though she's not really in love with him. There's no pretense, in these last pages, that Casey's necessarily going to be happy, only that she's going out to experience life. If all of Concerning Casey were as daring as the final chapter, it might be better known today.

Stay Away from Boys Who Like Wagner

Title: I, Judy
Author: Eve Bennett
Publisher: Julian Messner, 1957
Setting: Outdoorsy Denver
Fun: Aspen before the celebrities ruined it; singing folk songs; dressing up as the Unsinkable Molly Brown
Quote:
"Ever since she had been a bit of a girl and had dreamed up stories and believed in fairies, and had read every moment she was allowed, Judy had meant to be a writer."

A lot of teen novels don't deal very directly with romance. Sure, there's a steady boy somewhere in a background subplot, but he's the kind of boy only a matronly novelist would designate as the hero -- handsome but not arrogant about it, even-tempered, full of common sense and possessed of a one-syllable name like Bill, Joe or Walt. Of course there's a very good reason for keeping boys out of books that are mainly designed to help girls sort out growing up. Boys are a distraction. They lead to bad decision-making. Therefore the easiest hero to have is an understanding one who stays entirely in the background except for the moment he asks the heroine to the Spring Formal.

Give some credit, then, to I, Judy, for focusing a plot on what to do when you have a bad boyfriend. Judy is an unusual heroine -- skinny and neurotic. She's a latchkey kid (her father's dead and her mother supports the family) who in the first chapter is elected to the school newspaper and receives a poison pen letter insulting her sloppy appearance. On a trip to Aspen as a reporter she meets Riley, a passive-aggressive rich kid. Danger appears when Riley invites her to his house when his parents aren't home and plays his favorite classical records, all of which, Judy notes, seem to have the word "death" in the title. Riley tells her listening to them makes him feel:

"As if I'm standing apart, 'way above everything. As though I can see clearly all the little things, the little people. I'm above them and they don't matter. I'm sorry for them and their little crawling insignificant lives -- but they don't really matter. There are the stars and the sun and the moon and storms all about me -- the lightning and the thunder and all the elements -- I love it! I feel like God!"

At which point Judy suddenly remembers she has some homework she's forgotten to do.

Judy finds her voice writing for the school paper, makes some more friends and begins to see her mother as a human being, but through it all Riley hangs around, throwing tantrums, not calling and playing the neglected-rich-kid card at every opportunity. Judy doesn't quite get rid of him because she recognizes that she shares some of his emotional peculiarities. However, because this is a teen novel, I, Judy does not end with a double suicide to the strains of Die Walkure. Instead a deus ex machina sends Riley to military school. (Love of Wagner plus military school. Great combination.) With him goes the last touch of realism in the novel, for in the final chapter Judy is awarded a college scholarship, gets a part-time job writing for an actual newspaper and has at least two potential new boyfriends, one of whom says "It's OK if you can't cook, because I can."
I suppose it's unfair to quibble about the happy ending. Judy sort of deserves it, after Riley. And I, Judy does a good job of walking that line between benign entertainment and something a little deeper.