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Love Story. By Ruth McKenney. (Hart-Davis. z 2s. 6d.)
Miss Rum MCRENNEY'S autobiography has the charm of foreign- ness. The customs of Greenwich Village sound every bit as foreign as those of Istanbul. Take the menu for a nourishing Sunday break- fast-in-bed—melon sprinkled with brandy, smoked salmon, eggs Benedict (with Polish ham), chicken a la King, popovers, pinednPle muffins and currant-jelly omelette. No wonder that Miss McKenney gained 3 stone in a few months, and then had to live on lettuce for a year. Other domestic details are equally surprising. Before her marriage, for reasons of economy, she lived in a seventeen-room btxroclap-board castle on a mountain in Connecticut with her sister (" My Sister Eileen " of the book and the play which brought Miss McKenney fame) and the sister's baby and a nurse. Miss McKenney's stories in the New Yorker had to maintain them all, plus a costly item called diaper service for the baby. They were chronically hard-up. The nurse used to boil the baby's undershirts. ;If these were his vests, could she not have boiled the diapers instead, thus effecting an elementary economy in two directions ? After Miss McKenney became Mrs. Lyman her sister used to call herself Mrs. Lyman, too, when opening credit accounts in Fifth Avenue shops. Neither of them saw an objection to this simple method of getting credit, regarding the whole thing as a sporting contest between themselves and their creditors. Miss cKenney was astonished by her husband's reactions when he und out. He was already supporting the sister, baby, nurse, etc., and drew the line, with passion, at ball-dresses on tick as well. It was then, realising that her great work on the history and organisa- tion of the United Rubber Workers of America would never be a best-seller, that she decided to write a funny book. Let us be 'thankful for this, because she can do it very well. Literary parties, litical meetings, tremendous conjugal rows over Keats and credit cicounts and crumbs in the bed, reconciliations, Hollywood, journalism, childbirth, nursery schools-she laughs uproariously at ll of them, and at herself most of all. The laughter is infectious, ecause it is supremely unaffected and good humoured. ssays in Zen Buddhism: Second Series. By D. T. Suzuki. (Rider gs.)
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