The Southampton Story

LAND I HAVE CHOSEN--Ellin Berlin--Doubleday Doran ($2.50).

By any standard, Land I Have Chosen is a remarkable first novel. It is remarkable for: 1) its plot, a rigorous, old-fashioned narrative with beginning, middle and end; 2) its portrait of Anne Brooke, a well-meaning, attractive girl who begins as a Long Island debutante, ends as a Nazi sympathizer. But the book's chief interest is that it is the work of Mrs. Irving Berlin.

The Story. In 1928, at Southampton, L.I., Anne was in her element. She wore a short white dress, drove a blue car with red wheels, went to all the parties, sang, danced, shivered at the thought of growing old, and struggled with the great problem of her life: should she marry Paul Craven?

Nephew and heir of a fabulously wealthy speculator, Paul was handsome, broad-shouldered, faithful, devoted to Anne. At ler first girlhood dances he had been a protector among the strange, stony-faced little boys in their first dinner jackets. Anne intended to marry Paul, but would not set a date, and when he left for Chicago on business--warning her not to have a last fling in his absence--she was half relieved to see him go.

She should have listened to him. Under the surface of Southampton talk about Al Smith, the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, life was more like the life of Tsarist Russia than any debutante could understand. In Paul's absence, Anne fell in love with Marco Ghiberti, a mysterious Italian visitor (Southampton had just recovered from the visits of Lindbergh and the Prince of Wales) who was rumored to be nobility. It was a joke. Marco was a Harvard law student whose father had run a restaurant in Italy. Nothing spoiled the joke except that Anne had promised to marry Marco.

When the story got around, the girls passing Anne and Marco hummed I Can't Give You Anything but Love, Baby. Scraps of conversation from adjoining tables reached them: "I haven't laughed so much since that Russian prince turned out to be a soda clerk. . . ." Anne broke down, sent Marco away, married Paul.

The remainder of Land I Have Chosen is the story of Anne's disintegration. With a hidden satisfaction she found herself watching the great fortunes crash in the Depression, was ashamed of herself for not feeling sorry. Presently she was no longer ashamed of herself. Running parallel with the story of Anne is the life of Lisa Blessing, a German actress who accepts the U.S. as Anne, in the end, accepts Nazi Germany.

Less well done, Lisa's story complicates the book, blurs its outlines, is tiresome reading compared with the vivid scenes of life & death on the Southampton beachhead. Readers are likely to forget the long talks about politics. They will remember Anne's shock at seeing Marco at her best friend's wedding, the families crowding together in poverty after the suicides and heart failures of the crash. When rich Uncle Bruce Craven went broke, and was charged with having stolen $6,500,000, Marco was the lawyer on the other side. When Uncle Bruce asked his friends how his trial was going, somebody handed him a package. It contained a revolver and a note: "This is the gun that Albert used."

Significance. Land I Have Chosen has been sold to Warner Bros, for $150,000. What it says is that popular U.S. fiction has come full circle, that the kind of situations and characterizations that ten years ago were the province of left-wing intellectuals have become the substance of skillful popular writing. In Land I Have Chosen the anti-Nazi propaganda is the basis of popular appeal; the story Southampton is highbrow, subtle, and in effect smuggled into the book.

The strength of Mrs. Berlin's writing is in its honesty, in the maturity of her vision of character, her ability to be unsparing without being malicious. Its weakness is that situations, intense and often moving, are not exhausted of their drama before other complications crowd them out. The book has its lyric passages, but they are more often merely an attempt to achieve lyricism, and the subject is in itself harsh.

The author. Twenty years ago, when Ellin Mackay was a contributor to the struggling New Yorker (she wrote an article, then thought to be sensational on the dull life, of debutantes), she met Irving Berlin at Jimmy Kelly's Greenwich Village nightclub. Berlin had then written the four Music Box Revues, adding Say It with Music and A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody to his long list of hits. He had amassed a fortune of $5,000,000, enjoyed an income of $500,000 a year. Ellin Mackay, second daughter of wealthy Clarence (Postal Telegraph) Mackay and his blue-stocking wife (author of Stone of Destiny) had grown up at Harbor Hill, the $6,000,000 country estate at Roslyn, L.I. that tough old miner John (Comstock Lode) Mackay gave Clarence Mackay for a wedding present.

Clarence Mackay would not give his consent to Ellin's marrying Berlin. On New Year's Eve, 1925, Berlin admitted defeat and, after pouring his passion into All Alone, prepared to sail for Europe. Then Ellin agreed to marry him despite her art-collecting, opera-patronizing, horse-racing parent. She ran away with the most popular U.S. songwriter since Stephen Foster. Clarence Mackay disinherited her from the fortune that had once been counted in the tens of millions, did not forgive the Irving Berlins until his own marriage (his second) to Opera Singer Anna Case.

Unlike many first novels, Land I Have Chosen is not autobiographical. The mother of three daughters, and a highly articulate anti-Nazi, Novelist Berlin is not like her novel's heroine.

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