Book Review: The Big Family

Title: The Big Family

Author: Viña Delmar

Date: 1961

Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company

ISBN: none

Length: 375 pages

Quote: “Historically, only one incident rests on a shaky foundation. There is nothing to substantiate that John, upon learning that he would be defeated in his first attempt to win a seat in Congress, then cleverly devoted himself to Andrew Jackson’s cause. However, it is true that after the election Jackson rewarded him with the position of United States district attorney at New Orleans.”

If you look up "Vina Delmar" online, with or without the tilde or old-style double N, the first thing you'll find is that it's the name of a city in Chile. The author really was married to a man whose stage name was "Gene Delmar," although his father's name was Zimmerman, and her parents really had named her Alvina. She is not remembered as a scholarly writer. Though first and best known for smutty novels and dramas (her first book was actually called Bad Girl), later on in life she wrote several family-friendly, relatively clean historical novels, only mildly Hollywooded-up. The Big Family is one of those.

I’ve written some harsh reviews of “family saga” novels about fictional families of unpleasant people; The Big Family is my kind of “family saga” novel. It’s about a real family, the descendants of Jane Mackenzie and John Slidell of New York, several of whom really did achieve distinction. John Slidell, Junior, advanced from being a district attorney at New Orleans to being a U.S. Senator for Louisiana. Jane Slidell was married to Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened diplomatic relations between the United States and Japan. Alexander Mackenzie, John’s and Jane’s brother who chose to use the name of his mother’s (much richer) family, also commanded a ship, though not quite so successfully as Perry.

History has spared the Slidells from any documentation of some of the less impressive events in the family saga. These events Delmar has filled in, not always with the most felicitous results.

John Slidell, Senior, was a soap-boiler’s son with nothing to recommend him to the wealthy Mackenzies. He didn’t know who his grandparents had been, or, when the question arose, whether they had been ethnically Jewish or nominally Christian--they were not, in any case, religious. How did he ever marry into that family? A scenario that was not uncommon, in the nineteenth century, was the rich girl who had been deliberately kept so “innocent” of the facts of life that she didn’t realize that one of the stupid, childish gross-out games a boy friend proposed could lead to pregnancy; sometimes, by way of punishment, she was ordered to marry the boy. Another possibility, suggested by old portraits, was that Jane Mackenzie was considered so unattractive that she thought she had to marry “down” or not at all. Another possibility, suggested by the corresponding point in this reviewer’s family history, is that some rich American parents were taking democracy very seriously and thought it was fantastic for an heiress to marry a self-made man. All of those things really happened but Delmar ignores these possibilities and spins a 1950s movie romance for the couple, where a hormone surge leads straight to a happy-ever-after marriage. There was no need for that. The story is really about the next generation, and could just as well have started with the known facts of Jane Slidell’s marriage to her brother’s superior officer.

Delmar also admits having filled in some of the details of Senator Slidell’s early life in what seems to have been the most sympathetic way, and used an unverified legend about his daughter’s old age to wrap up the story. John Slidell was always, to put it mildly, a controversial politician. His alliance with Andrew Jackson may well have been based on similarities of character, and Jackson’s readiness to balance the budget by cutting it, as well as his loyalty to an unpopular wife, were admired (and still are). Slidell probably wasn’t all bad. He was not, however, the fiscally conservative egalitarian Jackson had been. About a politician remembered for his associations with James Buchanan, with slavery, and with the doomed Confederate Cause, it’s hard to find good things to say. Delmar tries.

I don’t know why she doesn’t turn to the Congressional Record for pro-Slidell material; whether she thought that would be too wonky for a novel, or whether the Congressional Record does not in fact record anything Delmar thought would work as pro-Slidell material. I suspect the latter.

The adventures of the naval officers in the family, however, were abundantly documented and are good stories. Those stories are told in a way that addresses adults not children, but won’t embarrass the adults if the children happen to try reading this book, and may actually appeal to the children. Perry succeeds by studying a situation and thinking creatively about the constraints of the problem set before him; Mackenzie doesn’t succeed so much as he survives by being fair and decent enough that one of the men who’ve plotted to rob and kill him feels obliged to warn him.

If you like family stories with ambitious, glamorous, human but not vile characters who owe at least some of their success to talent and effort as well as family connections, The Big Family is for you. It's available (for now) at the standard price of $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address at the very bottom of the screen; one more book of this size, and perhaps one or two smaller ones, would fit into one $5 package.