Book Review: Love and Laughter

I'm pre-scheduling some book reviews. If I get online within 24 hours of the time they go live, each will be presented by an adorable adoptable animal who has an especially appealing picture posted at its Petfinder page. So here is Scarlett, a five-year-old untrained hound, looking for someone who wants to teach her basic house-pet skills: 

I can't say much for the nannyish approach this organization takes to rescuing dogs who are at risk of being euthanized, or used in gruesome medical experiments by somebody like Anthony Fauci...but if you want to rescue this dog from a group that sound as if they're getting a lot of dogs killed in the name of "rescuing" them, paste https://www.petfinder.com/dog/scarlett-54096655/dc/washington/rural-dog-rescue-md384/ into your browser.

Title: Love and Laughter

Author: Marjorie Holmes

Date: 1967, 1972

Publisher: Doubleday (1967), Bantam (1972)

ISBN: none

Length: 239 pages

Quote: “It doesn’t take money to achieve an atmosphere of charm and quiet. It merely takes time, efficient management, and the little artistic touches...”

And also, as Holmes goes on to show on pages 9 and 10, a family who want the same kind of charm and quiet for which Mother envies her single friends, which is probably a family where all the children are over age twelve. When Grandma wanted an “atmosphere” at dinner, she had the children fed somewhere else. Which probably involved paying someone money.

The writer known as Marjorie Holmes (a pen name) wrote a successful book called I’ve Got to Talk to Somebody, God. Seeing that the book had sold well, the old Washington Star newspaper started printing regular short columns by Holmes. These columns were secular, and dealt with the brand-new, made-for-TV “traditional” family lifestyle in which all husbands were full-time breadwinners, all wives were full-time homemakers, all sons went into the Army, all daughters moved away to wherever their husbands had come from or gone, and everybody was happy-happy-happy because they had the latest expensive toys.

Although a full-scale industry grew out of publishing the complaints of people for whom this lifestyle pattern didn’t work, it was working pretty well for Holmes. Here and there we find a gentle murmur of dissatisfaction...but Holmes did seem to have a nice life, with the income from a big-city newspaper to help support her “cabin” at a posh lakeside community in suburban Virginia. She wrote short pieces about her children’s love of water, about holding a child’s hand, about letting neighbors’ children visit her home, about squirrels, about catalogue paper dolls, about the joys of helping her husband with some of their home improvement projects and watching all the neighbors pitch in to help with others. Being a Total Woman, Full-Time Wife and Mother and Part-Time Writer was a truly plushy job for those who could get it; what all those other women (and men) were complaining about was that they couldn’t get it, that simply finding a husband (if female) or a full-time job (if male) wouldn’t put you straight into a family life like Holmes’s, even in 1967.

Holmes was grateful. Her way of showing gratitude was to write these pieces, with occasional touches of humor, but more often with heartfelt sentimental bliss. This is a volume of Blessings being Counted: baby carriages, suitcases, even a ticket for fishing without a license (it was legal to fish from the pier, but not from their own boat, at the lake)—and even the children. Not everyone had them, Holmes knew. She herself might not have them forever. Best to write down what she loved about them, in case she needed to remember it someday.

The result was what 1970s pre-feminist literary circles dismissed as calendar art. Some pundits even claimed that in a good story somebody had to die, and of course there were, at the time, the Radical Red Writers clamoring for revolutionary work that would make people fighting mad, like Richard Wright or Allen Ginsberg, or at least thoroughly dissatisfied, like all those depressing Europeans you had to read for college credit. Meanwhile, ordinary unpretentious people were buying more copies of books like Holmes’ than of books like Wright’s. When one wasn’t trying to impress other artsy types with one’s tolerance for the ugly, depressing, or positively psychotic avant-garde, whether or not one had a house by the lake or even had children, it was nice to remember the good things about being a mother. Or a father. If a book like Love and Laughter didn’t make you glad to be a parent, it might at least make you glad to have one.

Anybody who can construct sentences on paper could write a book similar to Love and Laughter, and these days dozens, if not hundreds, of bloggers are doing it. If you enjoy the filtered reality, as distinct from fiction, found by reading blogs, you’ll enjoy having one of the best collections of this kind of writing bound in a nice little feel-good book.