The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

on her uncanny ability as a white writer “for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.” Her very vulnerability contributed to her talent.

Rita, her sister, was not without her own vulnerabilities. She was a “plump woman with sad brown eyes,” who would go rushing up to Westchester County whenever “Sistuh” called, even as Sistuh had purportedly ruined her life. Rita was afraid of elevators, and instead climbed the stairs to Mademoiselle’s sixth-floor offices; nor would she travel on the subway without someone by her side. She left burning cigarettes everywhere she went, and aware of this problem, she feared it spelled the incendiary end of herself and any building in which she had been. It became the job of her assistant to meticulously go through the office at the end of each day in search of any remaining cinders.

Just a year after Rita was promoted to fiction editor, George Davis suddenly wrote an anguished letter to BTB, in which he staked his right to tell the truth on the “sacred duty” of any “serious writer.” His “truth” was that “naming Rita Smith as fiction editor is a shameful blot upon your record.” Rita was utterly incompetent, he argued, and she was lazy too. Contrary to her claims, she had not worked “months” with Truman Capote: George had. She was perpetually behind in her work, so much so that every few weeks work in his own department ground to a halt as everyone at the magazine was rallied to “read for Rita”—even her friends were called in to help read through the enormous pile of submissions that had accumulated over the weeks. And then there were “the vapors,” as George called her alcoholism: “Coffee trailing up ten times a day. Often the poor child was downright drunk and unable to cope. Her part of the office was a nasty shambles, both in appearance and dedication.”

Why, George asked rhetorically, was she not fired? He offered the answer himself: because of the fear of what she would do to herself. And then there were the tears—“often boozy and for hours, over the telephone in the middle of the night.” And then, of course, there were the family connections. Yet George laid the ultimate blame at the feet of his political nemesis, Cyrilly Abels: “Well, God damn it and to hell, I’m through with that bloody lie. Abels knows full well that Rita is editorially a mess.” As to Abels having done a song and dance about how well George had trained Rita: “My answer to that is: I vomit.” He finished his letter to BTB, “To repeat: I vomit.” That was the nail in the coffin. George Davis resigned from his remaining position of associate editor before he could be fired.

But Abels remained under his skin even after he had left Mademoiselle. He could not hold back and wrote to BTB again, explaining that he still needed to vent some more. He wanted to tell his story. He had first met Abels when they both worked at Harper’s Bazaar, and after he came over to Mademoiselle, she had stayed in touch with him, a “shy, warm, idealistic woman”—or so it seemed to him at the time. When BTB said she was having trouble finding a managing editor, he had suggested Cyrilly Abels. He had always known that politically she stood more to the left, but he hadn’t thought it mattered. Not until later did he realize that it mattered very much, in fact. At first, George had congratulated himself on how he had helped BTB make a wise choice, and then “Miss Abels began wistfully—and, oh God, how wistfully—to ask if she might occasionally suggest a writer or an idea.” The writers were all, George realized, Communist Party members or “fellow travelers,” liberals approved by the party. George thought he could keep it under control, but “as it turned out, I couldn’t.” A veritable cold war had erupted between her department and his, with Abels getting the girls in his department involved in “Commie front committees.” But he hadn’t said anything; he “dared not risk being called a renegade liberal.” He was caught in a trap, as he saw it.

George Davis claimed he was repulsed by Abels’s politics, but the nature of his complaints suggested another, unspoken, cause: her female ambition. He wrote: “Understand, I am sure Miss Abels does not belong to the Communist Party. I believe her now to be a woman of staggering ambition, who knows how to use the materials at hand.” She had, according to him, adopted all the Communist Party tactics of infiltration to fuel that ambition, including “sweetly and uncomplainingly taking over executive dirty work, of being the first to show up in the morning and the last to leave at night. That way, she makes you, me, everybody, feel guilty as hell.… Gradually the loyal drudge is rewarded. More and more power falls into her hands.” George explained that the previous year he had held back from saying anything because he did not want to add to the “squalid Red baiting.” But, finally, with no other recourse, he had “decided to run, to get out, to back down from the whole rotten business. Yes, yes, I would write, I would be free again,” he had convinced himself as he finally decided to quit.

But as soon as he had given his notice to BTB, George watched Abels “ruthlessly take over my department. I saw the mask of sweet timidity fall.” Still caught between a rock and a hard place, as George saw it, there was nothing Abels “would find more exploitable than to have me play the Whittaker Chambers to