The Maimie Papers (review)

REVIEWS 365 Maimie Pinzer, The Maimie Papers, ed. Ruth Rosen and Sue Davidson . New York: The Feminist Press, 1977. 439 pp.$6.95 in paperback . Imagine receiving letters from a very articulate woman with a driving obsession to lay bare her life to you as she is living it, and who, as she writes, is overtaken by a remarkable recall of incidents from her early life, so that you receive her past and present in a narrative that is almost novelistic. Imagine, too, that you yourself are a writer, and that you live in an era when letter writing is still construed to be an art through which we learn something of the meaning of our mutual experience . As a novelist, you might want to offer a fraternal response to this gifted writer, for all literary people know how much a word of encouragement may mean, given at the right time. But it was a difficult case for Fanny Quincy Howe, who had published a first novel, The Pearl. It was difficult because she knew her own advantaged life among the "gentle Americans," the humanitarians of Boston, had little in common with her correspondent's life, that a career as a writer was a luxury available largely to the leisure class, and that her correspondent , Maimie Pinzer alias Jones, was, alas, a reformed whore. We must be grateful that Fanny Howe did appreciate the value of these letters; that her daughter Helen Howe also did; that they were preserved by the Howes and then by the Schlesinger Library at Harvard , where the historian Ruth Rosen came upon them; and that subsequently , together with Sue Davidson, she edited the letters for the Feminist Press. Ruth Rosen has written an introduction that offers compassionate insight into the status of women during the period. The result is a book of value not only to those concerned with the psychology , history and sociology of women but also to those who care, as I do, about the craft of narrative and the elusive connection between autobiography and art. The correspondence, which covered a period from 1910-22, began at the suggestion of Herbert Welch, a Philadelphia social worker, who "rescued" Maimie from the gutter and fostered her conversion to Christianity (she was born a Jew). Probably he hoped the correspondence would subdue a flamboyance in his protegee that somewhat repelled the pious Mr. Welch, for a remarkable sensuality clung about Maimie even in her reform, although she had lost an eye as a result of her evil ways and wore a patch where there once had been a saucy gleam. It is true that Fanny had a profound effect upon Maimie, but fortunately not a subduing one. Rather, under the lady's benign en- 366 biography Vol. 2, No. 4 couragement Maimie discovered her capacity to open her heart and mind with words, and poured forth to her idealized friend-sistermother a remarkable report as she tried to live the straight and narrow life of the working girl. Maimie had many traits of an artist working with words—a painful appreciation of the moral disorderliness of society, a caution about making judgments of others, a surprising dedication , and an eye and ear for telling details. And she had as well an innate grasp of craft that many writers work years to master—an amazing sense of suspense, the bald techniques of "planting" and "foreshadowing ," and above all a desire to create, if only for her audience of one, a coherent, plausible world out of the chaotic, onrushing events of life itself. In that sense the letters differ greatly from a diary, where introspections and musings predominate over form, for Maimie was primarily interested in communication with a being other than herself and one whom she could admire. She depicts with immediacy and sharp detail how it was for both respectable and shady women of her time. In one letter, as she writes Mrs. Howe of how she and another woman in Montreal are setting up a steno service, she is reminded of her first imprisonment at the age of thirteen, when her life of prostitution began, and she includes an account ofthat ordeal with unsparing...