Now, Voyager (Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp) [ペーパーバック]

Olive Higgins Prouty would not have appreciated her books being regarded as pulp! But she would have been happy, I think, knowing that people were reading them again and enjoying them.

She is one of those cases where a novelist could be extremely popular in her own lifetime and then, almost forgotten. Meanwhile the movies made from her books (including STELLA DALLAS and NOW VOYAGER) show how original and striking her plots were, how unique she was. Sylvia Plath, who wrote her many flattering, almost gushing letters so long as Prouty was giving her money, was vicious about her in private (and in the pages of THE BELL JAR, in which Prouty appears as a menacing, elderly Lesbian, almost like She-Lob at spider). It's funny how the encounter between Plath and Prouty has taken on mythic proportions, and how indeed Prouty's best work approaches thast of Plath in terms of its insight into the human condition, especially of suffering, illness, pain and madness. Anyone who reads NOW VOYAGER, or its "prequel," LISA VALE will see that Prouty was intimately familiar with neurosis. Plath might have been taken aback had she realized that Prouty herself had been hospitalized for mental illness when she was a teenager, way back at the turn of the century. In many ways, Prouty's whole life foreshadowed Plath's. We note in NOW VOYAGER the way that Charlotte's stifled New England ways explode when she encounters the debonair, sexy European man who turns her on to Lawrentian sexuality and rebellion--Sylvia and Ted much?

Now if only someone would reprint (among others) WHITE FAWN, HOME PORT, GOOD SPORTS and PENCIL SHAVINGS! Olive Higgins Prouty could write and it's time the world realized it.

"Now, Voyager" is a remarkable publishing event. Here is a timeless tale of love and transformation that first appeared 64 years ago, instantly became a best-seller, went through God only knows how many reprintings before sliding slowly into near-obscurity, along with its author, Olive Higgins Prouty, today all but forgotten. Neither the author nor her book deserved this sorry end, and The Feminist Press is to be congratulated for re-publishing "Now, Voyager." The publisher pigeonholes this novel as "pulp" writing, a sometimes derogatory term implying fiction that is popular but not very well written, and certainly not enduring literature. This novel is in fact anything but "pulp" fiction: "Now, Voyager" is a story brilliantly conceived, and the reader who takes a chance on this novel will be repaid with sheer exhilaration as the text soars on every page with rare lyricism and hauntingly beautiful passages.

Here's a typical sampler of Prouty's art:
"The pointed pinnacles of the cathedral loomed up above the heterogeneous mass of buildings surrounding it like the pointed tops of spruce above deciduous trees of various varieties. The buildings crowded down to a string of small boats at the water's edge. The blue bay was full of rippling reflections-sails, roofs, pinnacles, and mountain-tops. The air was full of sunshine, breezes, gulls and gulls' calls. The tenders were already plying between the liner and the shore. Other little boats were chugging here and there, plying through the reflections, trailing long wakes of watered silk."

The new edition is a faithful rendition of the original novel. The only changes have been the addition of a foreword and afterword and chapter titles. Misprints in the reprinted edition, not present in the original text, are irritating but fortunately rare. There have been small changes in typography that are indeed helpful in bringing the typography up to a more easily readable modern standard. The republished paperback and hardcover versions are identical, but the paperback has added a thumbnail biography of Prouty and its cover displays a publicity still from the well-known film with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid.

While overpriced, the hardcover edition has a binding and cover that are much more robust than those of the original 1941 edition; fittingly, this new hardcover "Now, Voyager" will last for generations. (A pristine first edition of "Now, Voyager", if you can find one, sells for over $1000.)

This is one of the rare cases where the film is better than the book, I think. However, the film follows the book very faithfully and it is a pretty good story. Charlotte Vale is a dowdy Bostonian who is bullied by her family into what was charmingly then called a nervous breakdown. After a long respite at a "sanatorium" run by a helpful psychiatrist (plus a good diet, haircut, makeup, wardrobe, and eyebrow shaping) she takes a cruise to Europe. On ship she meets a rather sad-sack married man who finds her blunt awkwardness endearing, and they have a drawn-out unconsummated love affair. The unconsummation somehow works in the context of these two lost souls (the man also had a nervous breakdown) who are good, honest people at heart. Back then (1941) men who left their wives and children paid a serious social cost. So in the end, the two find a rather odd way of being together without compromising either their reputations or their integrity. Olive Higgins Prouty may not have been the greatest writer in the world, but she shows a sensitivity to mental illness and feelings of alienation due to her own struggles with them. Which makes the treatment she got from her far more famous student protege, Sylvia Plath, all the more cruel. Prouty supported Plath financially and emotionally even after her suicide attempt but was viciously lampooned (along with nearly everyone else Plath knew) in "The Bell Jar." Even more ironically, there is this passage in Now, Voyager: "Everyone who takes his or her own life increases the fear in all his progeny of committing the same act during a period of depression. In fact, every blood relation he possesses gets a drop of the same poison. Nice parting gift. Mighty bad example to set for one's friends and associates, too."