89. Tess Slesinger — The Unpossessed with Paula Rabinowitz and Peter Davis

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KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to championing forgotten classics by women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes. 

AMY HELMES: Hey everybody. Today we're back with another lost classic that deserves a spot on your nightstand. Tess Slesinger's 1934 novel, The Unpossessed, is a satirical portrait of Depression era left-wing New Yorkers. Extremely popular for a brief period, it was printed four times within a month of publication, making Slesinger a minor celebrity almost overnight. 

KIM: And we are lucky enough to have two incredible guests with us today. The author's son, Peter Davis, and cultural critic and professor Paula Rabinowitz. As you know, Amy, when I read this book a few years ago it immediately became a personal favorite. I'm kind of obsessed with the 1930s, both in books and in film. We've done a few episodes on books from that era, and we've learned a lot. 

AMY: Yeah, and we highly recommend you also go back and listen to our episode on Margery Latimer's book, We Are Incredible. Our guests on that show, Joy Castro, gave us a really great primer on Modernism while discussing that.

KIM: But back to The Unpossessed, I have the New York Review Books edition and it is now heavily annotated and highlighted. And I know yours is as well, Amy, right? 

AMY: Yeah. And in fact my daughter actually said, "Mom, your book has a beard," because it had that many Post-it notes sticking out of it. Almost every line of this novel stood out to me and made me think.

KIM: It's true. There are just so many great lines and passages in The Unpossessed. We have a lot to discuss, so let's read the stacks and get started.

[intro music]

AMY: So as Kim said, we have two guests today. Dr. Paula Rabinowitz is an author and professor emerita of English at the University of Minnesota. Her area of specialty is American materialist, feminist cultural studies. And she's the recipient of numerous awards, including a Mellon Fellowship, a Rockefeller residency at Bellagio, Italy, and a Fulbright professorship in Rome, and then Shanghai. She also wrote the afterword to a new collection of Tess Slesinger's stories out this month from Boiler House Press's Recovered Book Series. That collection is titled Time: The Present. 

KIM: And our second guest, Peter Davis, is a filmmaker, author, novelist, and journalist. His film, Hearts and Minds, about American military action in Vietnam, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1975. Peter, I believe you're our first Academy Award winner on the podcast, so we're very excited. As a reporter, he covered the US war in Iraq for The Nation. He's also written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, New York Woman, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Times. His most recent novel, 2015's Girl of My Dreams, follows a young screenwriter in the 1930s when Hollywood, the Depression, and the Communist Party intersected powerfully in the American psyche.

AMY: You're actually the first relative of a "lost lady" that we've been able to have on, so very exciting. How does it feel to see the world taking such a renewed interest in your mom's work in recent years? 

PETER DAVIS: How it feels is thrilling. I'm delighted to see her rediscovered for a new generation. The work speaks to this generation, to the generation that is of not only my own children, but my own grandchildren.

AMY: Absolutely. 

KIM: We'd love to start the show off by giving our listeners some background on her, because I think it will lead nicely into our discussion of the book. Tess Slesinger was born into a Jewish family in New York city in 1905. Her mother was a welfare worker who later became a prominent psychoanalyst, which is kind of fascinating in its own right. We were even thinking about maybe doing a future mini episode on her. She sounds great. Slesinger's father was a dress manufacturer, and Tess was the youngest of four children. She had three older brothers. Incidentally, Amy, I found out while researching this episode, that one of her brothers created Red Rider, the comic book character that most of us probably know from the movie A Christmas Story.

AMY: "You'll shoot your eye out kid," right? Clearly we've got a creative family here. Peter, is there anything else that you happen to know that can round that out a little bit? 

PETER: Well, her father actually was kind of a ne'er-do-well, and one of the interesting things about that marriage is that my mother went east to be at their 50th anniversary in 1942. And the morning after that, my grandmother Augusta Slesinger, kicked him out of the apartment and said, "I never want to see you again "

AMY: After their 50th anniversary party? 

PETER: Yeah. The morning after the celebration. 

KIM: Oh, wow. 

PAULA RABINOWITZ: Well, Tess foresaw that all in many of her stories about the morning after the party. 

KIM: Yep. 

AMY: That is incredible. So Paula, what else can you tell us about Tess's early years? 

PAULA: Well, um, she was born into a milieu that was part of the Upper West Side, upper middle-class and even very upper-class immigrant Jews who came mostly from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire. So this was a fairly established community. Uh, mostly they were quite secular, and she was educated at Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and then went to Swarthmore, and then went to Columbia. At Columbia, you know, she became part of a much larger group of left-wing Jewish intellectuals that I think we'll get into a little later. Much of her work draws on her autobiography. I mean, at some point she does say she's an inveterate liar. That's why she writes. 

PETER: My mother told me -- we had some pretty serious discussions, even though she died just after my eighth birthday -- but one of our discussions, I asked her, "Why are you a writer?" And she said, "Well, when I was late coming home for dinner, I would come in and tell tremendous whoppers. And they said to me, 'Okay, stop, stop. You don't need to lie. What you do is you make those stories, just write them and then there'll be stories.'" And so she said to me, "That's how I became a writer." 

KIM: That's wonderful. That's great. Um, at Columbia, Tess met and eventually married a classmate named Herbert Solow, and marrying Solow really opened up a whole new world for her. Can you tell us any more about that? 

PAULA: Well, um, the people who she hooked up with there were in the process of founding a magazine called The Menorah Journal, which is central to the novel The Unpossessed. And they were part of what are now known as the New York intellectuals. They're all aligned with the Left. These were people who were not, you know, necessarily part of the Communist Party milieu; they were maybe satellites of it. And some were students, some were faculty members at Columbia, or became faculty members, Lionel Trilling, and so forth. They were part of a anti-Stalinist side of the Left. And I think part of the reason that Slesinger's work is interesting, again, it's part of a resurgence that's going on. Unfortunately, we're living in a moment where, you know, we could be on the verge of World War III. People's livelihoods are very precarious. They don't have job security. I mean, we're not in a Depression, but I think there are reasons that there's a resurgent interest in the 1930s. 

AMY: Yeah. Kim and I have been doing several other novels from the 1930s for this podcast. I feel like I'm reading the morning newspaper and then I'm reading these novels and they're lining up in a scary way. And so we should also mention that Tess's marriage to Solow disintegrated. 

PAULA: I think that's the whole central, you know, point of The Unpossessed in a way. Um, I mean, it's almost written in real time as her marriage is coming apart at the seams.

KIM: Did you want to say something about that Peter too? 

PETER: Well, yes, because there was a political split between my mother and Solow too. My mother really did become a Communist. She would never, and my father, who also was a Communist, they would never call themselves Stalinists, but they were Communists. Solow was a Trotskyite, and that was a curse word among Communists. They used to say, "He's nothing but a Trot." Well, um, Solow, like a number of Trotskyites, took a fairly hard right turn, which was incredible. And Solow worked for Fortune magazine. Henry Luce, who was quite a right-winger, he hired a number of Trotskyites to work on his magazine.

PAULA: That's right. I mean, the Time Life Corporation, you know, Luce's corporation, Fortune, people were subverting things, you know, on the inside and they have many, many, you know, articles. about the Moscow subway station, as it was being built.

KIM: I had no idea. That's so interesting. Yeah. I had no idea.

PAULA: Everything is always more complicated than we think.

KIM: Sure, sure. 

AMY: Yeah. So needless to say. Having gone through this divorce, you know, all these complicated political things happening, she decides to write this novel, The Unpossessed. She's 29 years old. It's 1934. She basically uses her experiences among this radicalized Left and draws on all that for the book. And let's just say she doesn't pull any punches. So Paula, could you please give our listeners a little spoiler free summary of what The Unpossessed is all about? 

PAULA: Well, what's great about it is it really doesn't have much of a plot. It's really episodic, but it follows a kind of dual track of the Establishment and this dream of this left wing magazine that was going to be a home for these intellectuals who could critique Capitalism and so forth. And that's sort of the story of The Menorah Journal, which started in the late Twenties. And I should say my father-in-law published a poem in there. 

AMY: Wow!

KIM: I love that connection. 

PAULA: Furthermore, he and Tess shared the same literary agent, Max Lieber, who was probably a Soviet agent, but anyway, that's another story. Um, and then the other track is following the sort of disintegration or the problematic relationships of these three couples, two of whom are married, one is cousins of each other who have a kind of incestuous sort of desire for each other, and then sort of an orbit of people around them. And it's written almost like a rondo. It's very indebted to Stefan Zweig, so that each chapter will feed into another chapter. Even though they're on very different subjects, she will use a verb or she will use some gesture like in Hollywood of a door opening to introduce the next character or the next scene and so forth. So it's beautifully structured, which I have to say, I wrote my dissertation in part on this novel and I just in reading it now picked up on all these things that she had done, it's so sophisticated, that I didn't pick up on, you know, 35 or 40 years, whenever that was, uh, too long ago. Um, it's kind of like Edith Wharton, cause it's about New York, meets James Joyce, meets Stefan Zweig and many, many things, like Preston Sturges's movies, pick up on many of the things that she's pulling off there.

AMY: I love that analogy. 

KIM: Yeah, me too.

AMY: And what you said about having found something new that you discovered about it, I absolutely feel that you could read it every year for the rest of your life and not find everything that she was intending. And to be able to have a professor here with us, this is what I need! I need you to walk me through some of it. It's so layered. 

KIM: Um, and in the introduction to the New York Review Books edition, the late great Elizabeth Hardwick actually compares The Unpossessed's fractured eloquence and polyphonic pages, that's what she calls it, to the serene and controlled works of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. 

PAULA: I should say that she's basically stealing that from Lionel Trilling's introduction from the 1964 papers.

KIM: Okay. So Lionel Trilling said it first. Okay. 

PAULA: She's in a way quoting him.

KIM: Perfect. Okay. So yeah, so we're adding Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield to our comparisons. I can see all of that. 

PAULA: I'm going to read a little section from early in the novel. You really get a sense of what Tess does so well. So she's always referring to actual things and objects and places and situations. So taxi cabs or going into the grocery store, the butcher or whatever. And then of course, those all have symbolic meaning. Then there's always the interior, you know, monologue of the characters. And then those are all being contained. In some larger social circumstance. There is hardly a paragraph that doesn't somehow refer to what's going on at the moment. It's set in 1932, so it's the Scottsboro Boys trials and the hunger march. Okay, so she, Margaret, she's one of the main characters, is in the kitchen with Jeffrey, one of the other main characters. They're not married to each other:

the reviews Jeffrey, tell me what they did to you. The reviews.

He said, obediently taking the sugar returned with characteristic absorption in his test. Idiotic as usual, his hands move, competently, opening bottles, all that economic drivel, you know, well miles subscribes to it and bring know too about my dot, dealing with social distinctions. When I'm concerned with life transcending class lines, where you hand me the lemons now, Maggie.

And anyway, thanks. I'm something of a mystic. He poured with an expert narrowing of the eye from a brown bottle into the cocktail shaker. They did speak of me though. Two of them, he numbered modestly and just studiously pushed the lemon peels back off the cocktail off. As America's DH Lawrence, more ice cubes tumbled in I'm terribly fed up with Grenadier and aren't you to hell with it.

And of course they missed my most symbolic meetings. I thought you were a Colombian earnest. She murmured and thought about how miles would add this week. She wished that miles, his ghost would stay outside with miles, arguing marks with Nora. Of course I'm a Marxist intellectual, I should say. He stirred and tasted, edit another spoon of sugar.

She wondered if his revolution existed just as cocktails did as something for Jeffrey to enjoy. And as a matter of fact, I have it on good authority that certain members of the left wing, you know, I'm pretty close to them. He paused and thought it's fine. Brow wrinkled. Oh, yes, I'm ready for the bitters. Maggie. 

AMY: Well you've read that beautifully. The action-packed pacing of everything she does. 

KIM: Yeah. And it encapsulates everything that we're talking about, like, what are these people doing? You know. It's very performative. 

AMY: She goes on a little bit after that to describe Jeffrey as synthetic cheese. 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: He can be spread thin everywhere, like a synthetic cheese. And I'm like, oh, that is totally Jeffrey! 

KIM: Paula, did you want to talk a little bit more? Maybe you already said what you wanted to say, but you were going to talk about the structure of the novel and its sentences. 

PAULA: Yeah, no, I can, I can go on forever about this. So these two couples, Jeffrey and Nora, um, and Maggie and Miles are having drinks together at Nora and Jeffrey's house. And Jeffrey is a serial philanderer, and he's been after Maggie for a while, but she keeps pushing him off. But she and Miles have just had a fight, so she's kind of succumbing to him a little bit. Anyway, they have a kiss in the kitchen and, um, just at the point that everything seems to be, I don't know, they don't know what to do with it, they mentioned Bruno, the third of the three men. And then the next chapter happens. There's a knock on the door and Bruno enters. And that is how the whole novel moves from the beginning to the end. It starts with wilted celery. Margaret has gone to Mr. Pappelmeyer's grocery store and is complaining because the celery is kind of wilted and, you know, she can't really bring this lousy celery home to her husband. She says, he's from New England after all, he's not gonna take lousy, soft celery. And the motif of vegetables and fruits kind of runs through the whole thing. So here we have them mixing the cocktails with the lemon. Later on in this big party celebration scene, there's people sort of literally stepping on top of the table that's laid out with pineapples and so forth. And at the very end there's this giant mishegoss that goes on over this fruit basket. This vegetable fruit metaphor that runs through the whole thing is indicative of things. And, you know, there are moments when someone is lying in bed and then the next chapter, somebody else is lying in bed, and it's just brilliant. 

AMY: I mean, the way you're describing that feels very cinematic too. Like I can see the filmmaker making those kinds of decisions. 

PAULA: I'm surprised it hasn't been made into a film yet. 

KIM: Oh, it would be a beautiful film. So The Unpossessed shines a light on society, but it's also a story about a marriage that's imploding. And actually the marriage plot, which revolves around whether or not a couple, the Flinders, will keep a pregnancy. It seems like she's trying to explore whether or not it's possible to be a radical and also have a happy home. Paula and or Peter, do you have any thoughts on this? 

PETER: Well, this desire to have a child that Margaret Flinders has conflicts with her husband's desire not only not to have a child, but to remain political, political, political. And so that last chapter that Paula referred to where fruit comes into it again after she's had a D&C, an abortion, that was also very true to life. That's exactly what happened. Uh, my father told me about this. As a political act, he refused to have a child 

AMY: This is Solow then? 

PETER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. No, no, no way. My father also told me some interesting things about the Unpossessed. There were two reviews in the Communist paper and the first one in The Daily Worker praised it. "This is a novel of the Left. It's terrific!" About a week later they realized it was a satire. And the second one condemned it. Well, long after that, I interviewed for something that I was doing, Earl Browder, who had been the head of the American communist party. I asked him, "Did you ever remember a novel called The Unpossessed that was written by my mother?" He said, "Oh, yeah. I'll tell you what that did. The Unpossessed was like a breath of fresh air, which we needed to have. It's always a good idea to be able to laugh at yourselves, but we didn't know that then." Anyway, that was Earl Browder.

AMY: I think that's exactly what she's doing, is nobody gets a break, you know? She's got a criticism for every group in this novel, um, you know, the bourgeoisie, but also the magazine people, themselves, the students. Nobody gets a free pass. 

KIM: No one comes off looking great. Yeah. 

PETER: Yeah. Nobody gets a free pass, but she also has sympathy.

KIM: Yes. 

PETER: My mother's prose, which was anything, but prosaic, really shows itself in this chapter called Elizabeth, which was the greatest breakup chapter. Elizabeth, also one of the alter egos of my mother, had been living in Paris with this guy. And I just want to read it because what's not said in this chapter is so important: why it's snow?

She did not exclaim with joy as she flew to the window for a first fresh breath of morning. Why it's my first Paris snow. She did not cry out as she threw back the curtains and let showers of snow reflected sun spatter, Denny, and the bid in glory. Oh, it's snowing. And maybe this is love and I don't want to leave you.

She could not help. Not saying again, not, not once, but not numberless times as she ran about the room, looking for stockings without holes. Oh, but I like it here with you, Elizabeth. He did not reply. Although he heard plainly every word she had not spelled. 

AMY: I'm so glad you read that. When I read the chapter, Elizabeth, I just put the book down for a second. I texted Kim and said, "That's the greatest breakup scene in all of literature," like you just said, Peter. Everybody can understand that concept of a couple breaking up and all the things that they are thinking, but they're not saying that could even, almost maybe salvage the whole thing, you know what I mean? I don't throw the word genius around too often, but yes, I mean, that was incredible. 

KIM: It gives me chills hearing it again. 

PETER: And then two chapters later, um, The Fast Express, which I'll just mention briefly, she's on her way home now and their copy of Ulysses is left on the floor crying. 

AMY: Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's weeping on the floor, which gets us back to James Joyce, right? 

KIM: Yeah, exactly. 

AMY: I was going to read a little bit from fast express just because, I mean, that whole chapter is exhilarating. So it's after the breakup with Dennis, um, she's basically on a ship home, back to America. She's going to go back to her cousin, Bruno, who has cabled her. Her thoughts are basically echoing this idea that she's on a metaphorical train. You can kind of feel the locomotive in her thoughts, you know? So I'm just going to read a little section. Oh. And I should mention that she sees a man kind of noticing her as she's having these signs: Love don't touch me. Love. Keep your hands off this proud modern daughter. Happiness girl, no brooding there. It's a matter of friction, of scientific friction. If you go sentimental, you have only yourself to blame. Don't be obsessed by inhibitions. Don't be possessed by old traditions. Ah, stranger. I see you at yon corner table. You know me. You know me as if I were naked. Haywire play, girl drink-sodden gay girl. Sel-fpity is the lowest form of wit, wit is the purest form of self-pity. I was tired of artists, artists. I'm tired of unloved lovers. Bruno, what is the object of my game? Hell-bent for what is my fast express, my jingling jangling cocktail express. Lust without love and joy without joy, we pound down the tracks on our sex express, no stopping, no loving, no time to take breaths. So I'll stop there, but I mean, you can kind of get the chug, chug chugging along that she's feeling, like I'm just going from one lover to another, like, what's the point? What's it all about? Yeah. Love it.

KIM: So that's Elizabeth, then we've talked about Margaret. There's also Nora. She's the wife of Jeffrey. He's a charming and rakish philanderer, but she's really complacent and maternal in the face of all of his obvious affairs. Paula, what do you think Slesinger is trying to show with these three different women?

PAULA: Well, I mean, interestingly, you say she's maternal, but she does not want to have a child. When Margaret says to her I'm pregnant, why don't we have kids? Nora looks at her and says "What are you, nuts?" Like, "No, I already got one in the form of my husband". But it's fairly clear that these three positions of the woman who takes care of her man and that's her job, the woman who wants to be a mother, but keep some kind of identity, and the woman who is, you know, the ex-flapper; the new woman. I mean, 1932 is only 12 years after women got suffrage in the United States. And while the discourse has always been that the second wave of feminism didn't really start until the Sixties, that is not true. As Bruno says, at some point in the novel, the most important revolution is the revolution between the sexes. So I think what she's looking at are these various dimensions of what it means to be female and the fact that there really is no way in a sense to reconcile them, given the constraints of the social world in which they live and the economic constraints. And so forth. 

AMY: And yeah, moving over to the men in this book, the fact that they're trying to do something important with this magazine, it's basically farcical, but then she also does have some empathy and affection for the men because they're each having their own existential crisis. Is there anything else Paula, you could add on that? 

PAULA: Well, the novel is mostly interested in terms of the interior qualities in the women, but I don't think she's just mocking these guys. I mean, I think she's trying to understand what is going on amongst a generation of men who don't want to participate in this kind of bourgeois world of business. They have this problem of where they say, "We're sterile. We don't know what to do." Because they're intellectuals. They spend their time thinking. They're more interested in the idea of the thing than the act. That's what Bruno keeps saying, you know, "Is there a magazine?" He doesn't really want there to be a magazine, because he'd rather think about the magazine than actually do the boring work of proofreading it. So I think she's trying to come to terms with a new kind of masculinity. She's sympathetically trying to figure out these guys. There's a kind of undercurrent of pathos there, but there's also a lot of mocking of everybody.

PETER: One of the things that Elizabeth Hardwick said in her introduction, which I think is very true, she referred to the characters in The Unpossessed as "conversational communists." So they not only weren't going to really start a magazine, they also weren't really going to foment revolution. They were conversational communists.

KIM: Like "Let's start a literary 'zine!" 

AMY: Yeah, exactly. 

KIM: I did that once. Anyway. 

AMY: Um, so the novel reaches its climax at this fundraising party thrown by the magazine's rich benefactress. All the characters in the novel come together. It's really brilliantly written and we have this character of Bruno who gave us a showstopping speech. Peter, do you want to talk about that? 

PETER: Yeah, Bruno, when he harangues the crowd, he goes on and on: "Listen, fellow bastards," roared Bruno unheard at the punchbowl. "Drink, drink with me. Up with your glasses, down with your hopes. To the Revolution!" I have to just say that in my own novel, which took place in 1934, all the characters are fictional except for one. And that's Bruno Leonard. Bruno Leonard, he walked out of my mother's novel, and I apologize in the notes at the end. I said, I think it's okay to steal from your mother. 

AMY: I love that Bruno lives again, 

KIM: Yes. Me too. 

PETER: Yeah, he does.

PAULA: In a way, he's probably the one who never died. I mean, he has these great lines: "We believe in nothing but aspirin and sex. The full bladder is our only goal. We sponsor sublimation, constipation, procrastination, masturbation, prevarication, adumbration equivocation." And he goes on and on and on. 

AMY: It's a great speech. Yeah. 

PAULA: But you would think the novel would end at this disastrous end of the party, but then there's this Part Four called Mrs. Flinders. And that's the scene of her leaving the maternity hospital after her abortion, which as she says to Miles when he is putting her into the taxi cab, "What's a D&C between friends?" Kind of a devastating line, because, she doesn't want to have this abortion, but after this party where it seems clear that there's no hope for communism or capitalism, it's all just falling apart, they say, well, how can we bring this child into this world? And the taxi driver is carefully driving because she's coming out of this hospital with this gigantic basket of fruit that Miles has brought her because he doesn't know what else to do. 

AMY: I love that you brought up the limp celery at the very beginning with the basket of fruit at the very end. I hadn't really thought of the limp celery as a euphemism until now. And I know what that stands for now. It makes a lot more sense 

PAULA: Because all through the novel, the word sterile or the word empty, or the word barren is running through it. 

AMY: Also like a hostility from the men towards the women because of their ability to create. We intrinsically create something with our bodies, whereas these men failed to create something intellectual.

KIM: They can't even get their magazine going. 

PAULA: Well, I mean, this novel is also coming in just 12 years after "The Wasteland." I mean, we're in the great year of the hundredth anniversary of "The Wasteland" and of Ulysses, of the two seminal works of Modernist literature in English. And you know, "The Wasteland" is all about those empty kind of cardboard boxes, our intellectual men. And so, you know, she's talking to a lot of different strains of literary and social and political discourses simultaneously, and you know, there's a real pathos to it because there doesn't seem to be a way to get out of it. The magazine's a wreck. All the relationships are wrecks. They don't have the baby. So it's like, "Well, what is there?" She, Tess, goes on to write this great novel about it. 

AMY: Yes. Yeah. And then also she has even further success in her career. So let's circle back to Tess's life, Peter, you know, her second act. Do you want to kind of share what she went on to do after writing The Unpossessed?

PETER: Well, she went to California, kind of summoned by Irving Thalberg, to write the script for Pearl Buck's novel The Good Earth. And there is someone in The Good Earth, a wife, as a matter of fact, who says, "Forgive me for dying." Well, one of the people who wrote her dissertation about my mother's work and she, at one time had wanted to write a biography, she called it, forgive me for dying, which is also a sadness about my mother. Anyway, she met my father, Frank Davis, in California while she was writing that screenplay. And he was a young producer at MGM. He hated producing, and so they then wrote screenplays together, the last of which was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

AMY: They were nominated for an Academy Award for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? 

PETER: They were nominated, and my mother had died by the time of the Oscars and they didn't win. 

PAULA: But can I just mention one of her other films that they worked on together, which was 1940's "Dance, Girl, Dance," which is a feminist classic of different women who are in different circumstances, but who are all connected somehow. In this case, through a dance troupe and then a burlesque show. And the remarkable scene towards the end of the film when Maureen O'Sullivan breaks the fourth wall and just speaks to the audience. This is at a burlesque show, these men are laughing at these women and coming to look at their bodies, but these women are professional dancers and they're just doing their jobs. And so it's a remarkable moment. It's about voyeurism, about exploitation, about patriarchy and so forth and, and about class and how, you know, women bond together as performers. 

KIM: I loved reading about that in your afterward to the new collection. I want to watch that movie. Is that available to watch? 

PAULA: Oh yeah.

KIM: Okay, great. I'm going to look for that. So, Peter, as you said, your mom sadly died from cancer at a very young age, 39. Such a young woman. She'd accomplished so much in such a short time. We're so sorry for your loss, and so honored to be able to get the word out about her incredible life and work. Although you were quite young when she died, do you have any other childhood memories of her that you'd be willing to share?

PETER: I can remember so many things. Both she and my father moved away from Los Angeles to a place about 60 miles east to what we called a ranch. Tiny. Seven acres, but we had animals, chickens, and pheasants and stuff, and grew a lot of things. And they did that because they both wanted to see what it was like to get away from the city, away from Hollywood and away from the Communist party. Now they didn't stop being Communists, but they got sick of the humorlessness of the party, and the fact that, as my father did tell me, that there was this hierarchy and within the hierarchy of the party, there was also snobbery. So it was just the same thing that you had in the capitalist world. But so, yeah, and I can remember, um, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my mother very patriotically would become a lookout. You had to go to a particular place where you could see the sky very well. It was like a hill. And on this hilltop, they would be from midnight until 6:00 AM. They would take the midnight to 6:00 AM and my mother did that, and on other nights, my father did. Also, she was a beautiful swimmer for whatever that matters. And when she would dive into our pool, it was as though there was no wake at all. My father would dive and create waves all over, but when my mother dove, it was just a very clean dive. And they also would sometimes go in the pool without suits.

AMY: She was a new woman! 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: But you said your mom didn't make a splash when she dove into the pool, but she is making a splash now, in fact. This month we get to celebrate the release of a collection of her short stories called Time: The Present. Paula, can you tell us anything about this? 

PAULA: Well, the story about your mother being a great swimmer ties into the story in the collection that I find the most compelling, which is "Kleine Frau." It's about this young couple who are on their honeymoon in Austria. She's bought a dirndl and she's walking around in her native peasant costuming. And they come down from their hotel to the lake and there's all these local people staring at the water and it's because one of the children of one of the families has drowned. And it's all told from the point of view of the woman. Her husband has gone up to the shore and she's like "Really?" You know, she's this sort of petty annoyed, young woman, you know, privileged young woman, like "Why are these people doing this? I'm cold and where's this husband and what's going on?" And finally, when it's clearly determined that they're never going to get this boy who's drowned, the husband admits to her and says, "You know, I was a champion swimmer. I should have gone in the water and saved this boy." And she looks at him in sort of this incomprehending, what are you talking about? Because she's been angry at him in her head for not paying attention to her. And it's clear, at this moment at the end, that this marriage is already over. And I didn't realize that your mother was a great swimmer, but that sort of ties into this. And if you think about it, I mean, you know, people got married barely knowing each other. And many of the stories in this book are about the sort of tension in these young women who have gotten married and they're like 20, 21, 22, and they're still really tied to their mothers. And they've sort of left their mothers in order to marry these guys whom they barely know. I mean, they sort of met them and went out with them and got married to them and it's like, "Well, you know..."

KIM: "Now what do we do?"

PAULA: Exactly? 

PETER: One of the stories I really like a lot, and Paula mentioned this too in her afterward, is "The Times So Unsettled Are." It doesn't take too much of a reach for you to say that about today. 

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. We don't even have to state all the ways that there's the relevance between what we've been talking about and what's going on.

PAULA: Yeah. And again, it's really about the dissolution of a marriage, but it's also in the context of the politics of Austria and the destruction of the socialist government there as it's sort of eventually will become a welcoming zone for Nazis. 

PETER: The other story I want to briefly comment on is "On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover."

PAULA: The greatest title ever. 

KIM: It is! 

PETER: As my father pointed out, he was her second husband, and she didn't even know him when she wrote that! She wrote it while she lived in New York. She didn't have a second husband in New York! But once again, it's about infidelity in marriage, and she talks about in her first marriage, which was more kind of an open marriage, they were both unfaithful, but in this marriage only he gets to be unfaithful. So yeah, that is the patriarchy writ large. 

AMY: And listeners, I don't think we can stress enough how exciting it is that there's this new collection of stories out. And we have Boiler House Press to thank for that. It was released just this month.

KIM: Yeah. This collection is actually a really important companion to The Unpossessed book. I highly recommend readers who love reading The Unpossessed or are at all interested in Slesinger pick up this book as well. 

AMY: We also wanted to give a special shout-out to the man who was instrumental in the release of Time: The Present -- Brad Bigelow of Neglected Books. He was our guest from episode 59 on G.E. Trevelyan, you might remember, and he was actually kind enough to introduce us to our guests today. So thank you, Brad, for that. We appreciate you so much! And of course, Peter and Paula, it goes without saying that this has been truly a thrill and an honor. Thank you so much, both of you, for bringing your perspectives to the show.

PETER: Thank you. The thrill is mine. 

PAULA: I mean, I have to say Peter Davis has been one of my heroes since the Seventies, when his film came out. In fact, my other life is as a documentary film critic, and in part it's because of Hearts and Minds. So the fact that I get to not only talk about his mother, who was instrumental in one part of my life, but her son, who was instrumental in another part... I would never have contacted him personally. It's... I don't do that. 

AMY: I love it. I want you guys to be good friends now! 

PAULA: We intend to be! 

PETER: Well, yeah, so thank you, Amy and Kim. And Paula, lots of thanks to you, and it's a great pleasure to see you.. 

PAULA: Now this is what I feel. Thank you. 

KIM: Bye-bye 

AMY: So we'll sign off now, but don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter, where we'll occasionally be giving out sneak peek info on which books we'll be featuring in future episodes. You can get a jump on your reading if you're inclined to read along with us. Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.