Tired Lady

THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW -Marguerite Harrison -Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

Men of action usually recount their ad-ventures with a headstrong determination to get the story told, never wasting a thought on self-analysis or moral probing. But the reminiscences of such women of action as Marguerite Harrison or Baroness Ishimoto (TIME, Sept. 2) are about equally divided between spirited accounts of intense activity and Hamlet-like reflections on whether the activity, once concluded, was politically useful, morally commendable, or even any fun. Mrs. Harrison's 664-page autobiography suggests a straight, old-fashioned adventure story, packed with plots and narrow escapes, but pictured with a slow-motion camera and annotated by a psychoanalyst.

Marguerite Harrison's background was that of a Baltimore debutante, wealthy shipowner's daughter, entirely contented with the hunts, the Monday "germans," the church parades and Junior Cotillions that characterized pre-War Baltimore society. Her husband died after twelve years of happy married life, leaving her with a son to educate, a high standard of living to maintain and debts of $70,000. She ran a boarding house, interior decorating shop and tearoom, became assistant society editor and music critic of the Baltimore Sim, volunteered to do espionage in Germany during the War. The signing of the Armistice made her task less hazardous than she had thought it would be, but she saw the street-fighting during the Spartacist uprising, collected a mass of political and economic information on Germany, witnessed the birth of intense nationalism after the Versailles Treaty was signed.

A routine task assigned to her in this period afterwards dominated her life. A U. S. war correspondent named Robert Minor, afterwards Communist candidate for Mayor of New York, then widely known as a radical illustrator and the son of a prominent Texas judge, was arrested for distributing seditious literature. He was released, but Marguerite Harrison was detailed to gather information on the case. Her activity was written up in The Army and Navy Journal, although she did not know it. Returning from Germany, she was sent to Moscow in 1920, soon arrested by members of the Cheka who had read the article, released on condition that she would inform on the activities of foreigners in Russia. Attempting to give only harmless or misleading information, she was soon locked up again, threatened but not mistreated, released after ten months as a result of influence exerted by the American Relief Administration. She visited the Far East, avoiding Soviet territory, was investigating the turbulent, short-lived Far Eastern Republic when that strange land, the refuge of prisoners, fugitives, monarchists and shell-shocked madmen, was incorporated into the Soviet Union. This again placed her on Soviet territory. She was arrested, returned to Moscow to a cell in the same prison she had been in before. This time her plight was more serious. She had little hope of a quick release, became ill and despondent, permanently lost interest in international politics.

Even after her release and the success of Grass, Mrs. Harrison experienced a strange sense of being an alien in U. S. society. She traveled in the Balkans and the Near East, in 1926 married Arthur Blake, a disillusioned Englishman with whom she has since lived quietly in New York and Hollywood.

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