ROMANTIC ADVENTURE—Elinor Glyn—Dutton ($3.50).
A generation ago, Elinor Glyn was a name that caused many a ruction between the world and his wife. To the world, Author Glyn was hot stuff; to his wife, she was a Creature who wrote Vile Books. The post-War world can hardly remember what all the shouting was about, can just barely recollect that Elinor Glyn once wrote a notorious bestseller, Three Weeks, was credited with inventing “It,” an outmoded synonym for the equally outmoded expression “sex appeal.” Last week Elinor Glyn refreshed the U. S.’s memory about who and what she was. Her autobiography proudly admitted that she had been a successful revivalist of Romance, was just as careful to show that she had always been a Lady.
Being a Lady, Elinor Glyn has not told everything. Locked away in her diaries, the “unvarnished truth” is still imprisoned. But in Romantic Adventure she has let out some, after giving it a ladylike shellacking. Born on the Island of Jersey of Scotch-Canadian parents, Elinor Glyn (nee Sutherland) spent her early childhood in Canada in an atmosphere of “aristocratic exclusiveness” which she admits was “already nearly a century out of date” but which stood her in good stead in her lifelong pursuit of Romance. Elinor’s older sister (afterwards Lady Duff-Gordon) was considered the beauty of the family. Elinor herself had red hair and green eyes, and red hair was not the thing in the 1880s.
As a refuge from reality she took to books. Her heterodox hair and her heterogeneous reading made her “a rather embittered little philosopher” at 16. But Romance soon reared its tousled head again, in the person of an Eton boy on vacation, with whom Elinor ate candy and discussed the classics. On a visit to Paris, a little later, she was beset by a passionate Frenchman, who took her to the zoo, thrilled her to the marrow by whispering “Belle Tigresse!” (beautiful tigress) in her ear. From that adventure Elinor dates her hunger for tiger skins, of which she afterwards had seven. When her sister married into English society, Elinor visited her, became an immediate success. Her first two seasons brought her three admirers—a bibulous, spluttering peer, a Duke, a millionaire—but they were all unattractive.
Elinor was pleased to discover that there was something about her that men liked. It might have been her figure, with its 18-in. waist. “Whatever it was,” says she, “I became a sort of storm centre wherever I went.” After one countryhouse ball, four of her suitors after quarreling over her jumped in the lake in full evening dress, then returned to the house and took baths in their host’s best champagne. When news of this episode reached one Clayton Glyn, an eligible socialite old bachelor, he made up his mind that Elinor was the girl for him. She had not pictured Romance with silver hair (Glyn’s was prematurely grey), but she admired his worldy ways, his perfect teeth, his “quaintly arrogant point of view.” And she was 27. They married.
Part of their honeymoon was spent at Brighton, where, with a “princely gesture,” Bridegroom Clayton rented the public swimming baths for two days for their private use, so that he and his bride might swim there naked. The honeymoon over, they settled down to the life of travel, houseparties, “seasons” in London, the routine existence of their English set. After two years of marriage, Elinor found that Romance had flown. When she indignantly reported to Clayton that one of his friends had kissed her, he simply smiled. Elinor says she had plenty of opportunity to make him laugh on the wrong side of his face. Divorce in those days was social suicide, but discreet affairs were the rule. Elinor, though tempted, does not admit that she ever fell. Instead she took to writing, turned many a might-have-been into the wishfulfillment of words. “I drew, out of my vivid imagination, material to satisfy my own unfulfilled longing for romantic love.” Her first novel, The Visits of Elizabeth, came out as a newspaper serial, made such a hit that it was published as a book. A love-starved public called for more. By 1917 a popular edition of Elinor Glyn’s books sold a million copies. Her most famed tale. Three Weeks (1907), which she wrote in six, raised a storm in pulpit and press, was widely condemned as wicked. But most of its critics, says Elinor Glyn, never read the book, consequently did not realize its moral message. She gave one such critic, a Scottish professor of the History of Religions, a copy of Three Weeks to read, found him later in repentant tears.
It was lucky for Elinor Glyn that she had found a way of making money, for her husband’s involved affairs crashed six years before the War, and she had to sup port him and two daughters until his death in 1915. After the War, like many another English author, she went to Hollywood. There she found the pickings good, stayed nearly seven years. To her own labors there she credits such reforms in cinema sets as spittoonless ducal drawing rooms. She says she taught such stars as Valentino and Gloria Swanson how to make convincing love before a camera.
Now back in England, her nearly native land, Elinor Glyn is an old lady, with two grandsons at Eton, but her hair has not yet turned grey. Her London drawing room has tiger skins galore, not one spittoon. Ending her romantic memories on a mystic note of hope, she says she confidently expects the Millennium, has made a wonderful discovery, which she uncorks in her final sentence: “God’s in His Heaven—all’s right with the World!”
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