Skyscraper (36 page)

Appeal and Reception

As an astute modern critic of the immensely successful British Harlequin romances has noted, feminine popular art can enable women to smooth over very real problems and tensions. The Harlequins even, she posits, enabled women “to live in oppressive circumstances [while] investing their situations with some degree of dignity.”
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The Harlequins relied on the fantasy of the girl from modest circumstances marrying the rich man who recognizes her unique worth.
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In typical romance form, Lynn Harding has the choice of a prosperous older lawyer and a budding young engineer. What is new is that, whatever the choice, she will have the relationship very much on her own terms.

“Miss Baldwin is an observant reporter and well versed in the surface plausibilities of contemporary life,” wrote a reviewer for the August
New York Herald Tribune
.
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If one deconstructs that comment, one realizes that Baldwin had an instant appeal to young women whose jobs were necessary for the family wage but whose marriage choices were severely constricted by the Depression. Serialized in
Cosmopolitan
and published in book form in 1931 by Dell, the novel was immediately reprinted in British as well as American editions. The Dell cover was suitably lurid. A tall, svelte woman with pointy breasts, a slim red-belted waist, a mane of light brown hair, and too much makeup posed provocatively with a skyscraper in the background. True to its lurid traditions, the Dell Romance cover places Lynn's body at a forty-five-degree angle to the leaning skyscraper, which seems to either extend from or penetrate her pelvis.

If the cover bore no relation to Baldwin's Lynn—petite,
black-haired, dressed conservatively, and with very little makeup—the movie version rightly chose Maureen O'Sullivan as the female lead. She was pert, pretty, and very much the lady (even in the jungle with Tarzan, the love object in a previous O'Sullivan role).

Still, whether or not the novel's Lynn or Hollywood's Lynn were behaving themselves, Baldwin's version fed Depression-era hunger for an ordinary girl swept up into the high life that she flirts with but rejects for the dependable, and also average, young man. Baldwin treated the story wittily, making it an unlikely cross between a fan magazine tell-all biography and a novel of manners. Many are the descriptions of Lynn's activities after hours; her clothes; makeup kit; nightclub dinners; and tennis dates. But equally plentiful are the mornings after: the pinched weekly budgets; the negotiations for advancement at work; the conversations among male and female office staff; and the awed respect for the male executives up high in the office tower.

Baldwin also takes some chances with women's desire. Lynn becomes aroused (a word the novel prudently omits) by the ardent kisses or even the proximity of her two beaux, the down-to-earth, struggling Tom Shepard and the duplicitous man of wealth (at least on paper) David Dwight. She fears being alone in a man's bedroom, for she knows she may not be prim there. And she frequently has to calm her passions after a kiss at the door so that she can sleep—or not. It may not be Anaïs Nin, but it is not Louisa May Alcott either.

Baldwin was often (and continues to be) compared to Fannie Hurst, and there is a relation of difference between the two. Hurst's readership expected weepers and suffering; Baldwin's Lynn triumphs by keeping her head. Hurst has some deft chapters that display psychological insight about feminine masochism, her own fears writ large about giving up control over work and love to a man. Baldwin takes the fear of complete submission and defuses it. Hurst's focus remains the backstreet woman, controlled by her abysmal self-image. Baldwin's Lynn takes hold of herself and rejects the cad figure, the lawyer David
Dwight, before he can harm her. Behind her lightness of tone is an incisive, if non-Freudian, analysis:

Compared to classic novels of seduction from Samuel Richardson's British-virtue-imperiled epistolary novel
Clarissa
onward, it may seem that Baldwin lets Dwight off easily. Richardson's Lovelace is amoral and sadistic, and eventually drugs the pure Clarissa and rapes her because her virtue is otherwise proof against him. Dwight, though no villain in the grand style, serves a purpose of his own. His bad past acts with a multitude of women, as is often the case with the type, are there to be researched. And Lynn is fully able to research him—with some help from her rueful, heartsore supervisor Sarah Dennet, who years ago was Dwight's mistress.

The importance of Lynn's discovery for the 1930s popular readership, however, is that Baldwin's heroines are no dime-store Madame Butterflys. When the chips are down, they still have their self-respect, their belief in an orderly world, and their good breeding. This must have been a welcome, if optimistic, message to generations of anxious American parents fearful of city temptation.

Baldwin's “pulp” label is based on the way her novels titillate rather than scrutinize or complicate. She is content to interpose temptations between her good-hearted heroine and the marital rewards that ultimately come her way. But a closer look at the structure of
Skyscraper
reveals subtleties of narrative construction. For one thing, the three young women at its core—Lynn, Mara, and Jennie—each love a man who cannot support them in style. Each, too, is wooed by an older man with
a past who represents luxuries and excitement. Such material is familiar enough. But Baldwin balances her interlacing subplots to make a trio of statements about the girls who work in the vast office building. The hapless Jennie, in what she wrongly sees as movement upward, becomes the unhappy mistress of the out-of-town buyer Jake Meyer. Mara gives up her job to placate her charmless husband. Only Lynn pursues love's truths without handing in her notice to the Seacoast Bank.

This reliance on traditional denouements does not necessarily date the book. Middle-classness has the immense appeal of solidity, and Lynn's goals were, and are, little different than those of millions of American women. Too, Baldwin's fantasy is well mixed with social satire. David Dwight's Fifth Avenue penthouse where visits “Babe Leonard, who wrote stark tales of the submerged millions and who lived on Park Avenue from the proceeds.”

Baldwin and Modernity

There is no record that Baldwin, who enjoyed her life at home, writing, raising her children, and socializing among the Westport elite, was an admirer of the otherwise divergent group of American artist-photographers like Charles Sheeler, and painters Elsie Driggs and Ralston Crawford. Dubbed “Precisionists” for their hard-edged approach to skyscrapers, they were dedicated to the geometric clarity of line, the mechanized, spotless soul of the machine. Not surprisingly, many of them accepted commissions from business magazines to photograph the industrial sublimity of the newest corporate headquarters and factories. In their hands, the skyscraper is a silver and black icon of the machine age. A more socially committed artist was Lewis W. Hine.
Men at Work
(1932) was his remarkable photography series of the construction of the Empire State Building, then the ultimate skyscraper and an inspiration for Baldwin's novel. (The opening ceremonies for the Empire State Building occurred six months before Baldwin's quickly written novel
appeared.)

Baldwin was as alert to the metaphor of skyscrapers as any modernist photographer or painter. She was also aware of the masculine energies that went into its construction. From the first page, her descriptions are based on male/female dyads. Notice the sexuality of the opening passages. Men violate Mother Earth, impregnate her, and bring forth a mechanical “child” of their own invention. The construction workers are men, the money is men's, and so, too, is the driving energy to build and people the Seacoast Bank:

This is the skyscraper as prosperity and style, daring and force. Unlike most romance writers but like many “serious” artists, Baldwin is caught up in the particularity of the building and its populace. Going beyond the excitement and beauty of the building, she engages in an ethnography. She lists the architectural features from door handles to towers, the varied businesses, including the lowly luncheonette and the high-toned offices of investment banking. Above all, she delights in the myriad of workers who inhabit the building from Monday to Friday, dwelling seriocomically on their transit from Grand Central Station to the skyscraper elevators. Like any accomplished wordsmith, she details the business girls' clothing, cosmetics, facial expressions, and body language. Commuters in a
heterosexual world, they experience the “marriage of strange knees, [the] . . . welding of limbs . . . [the] brief encounter of arms, breasts, and shoulders.”

Baldwin's enduring concern is the fate of feminine ambition. The novel's most perceptive figure, the womanizing lawyer David Dwight, compares a skyscraper to an insular town. When this veteran philanderer pretends to worry about the rootlessness of working girls, he is really pointing out that for many single women the job functions as a daytime home unless a “real” one can be found. Until then, they are fair game for him and his ilk.

In rebuttal, Baldwin's narrative approvingly contains many characters, male and female (the soon-to-be-divorced Dwight included), who live alone. This is not a novel of urban dislocation. Baldwin humanizes the mega-buildings where so many earn their bread. Indeed, from beginning to end, the skyscraper is no more alienating or dangerous than the honest ambition that infuses the men and women to enter it day after day and year after year.

Because there is so much emphasis on Lynn's enthusiasm for promising but entry-level work in a male-executive food chain,
Skyscraper
is inevitably a meditation on class and gender roles. File cabinets and cafeteria lunches are the lot of Lynn and her clerical coworkers. The men of power dine, leisurely, at expensive French restaurants. No reader could escape the overriding question of the novel: In the exhilarating masculine corridors of power, what room is there for women?

“A Novel of Marriage vs. a Career.”

In the original Dell paperback edition, Baldwin's novel was subtitled “A Novel of Marriage vs. a Career.” By reissuing this novel so long out of print, the Feminist Press has enabled a revisionary view of this limiting duality, for
Skyscraper
is one of those best-selling romances that demonstrate how women's
pulp texts “embody conflicts they do not overtly represent.”
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There is much in the novel that sustains a feminist reading, particularly its closing chapters. Superficially, Baldwin uses the lovers' misunderstanding to separate Lynn and Tom and throw her into the beginnings of a relationship with the wolfish David Dwight. In one of his few truthful statements, the smitten millionaire even offers to divorce his wife and marry Lynn—the prize that a romance readership wishing to forget the Depression could long for. Then Tom, predictably enough, shows up, and the young couple is reconciled. Through a series of stratagems, Sarah Dennet rightly unmasks Dwight as an insider trader and an emotional monster. Lynn and Tom's marriage provides some customary closure.

Before Baldwin wrapped up this narrative package, she also included sermons to the office pool. The “fallen woman” Jennie's prospects become increasingly bleak. Even though Lynn wishes to retain the friendship, the shamed Jennie warns Lynn that kept women have no friends. Jennie, looking increasingly haggard and headed for the backstreet, soon follows Jake Meyer around the country as his mistress. The unhappily wed Mara's plight is little better. No longer in love and as far from a marital reconciliation as ever, Mara returns to her embittered but now job-holding husband. She leaves both office and friends behind. Expediency, too, has now become her god.

In the end, the novel provides a vote for the necessity of women's friendships: Lynn's decision to give up Dwight is in part thanks to Sarah Dennet, who discovers his stock manipulations. Baldwin asks us to believe that Sarah's friendship with Lynn now transcends her jealousy of the younger woman. Similarly, when Lynn finds out that Sarah had an affair, long ago, with Dwight, she is only angry that he misused the older woman. In a presciently feminist way, Lynn avers that Sarah has become more important to her than David Dwight. Both
women repudiate Dwight, thus demoting him from a desirable man-about-town to the liar and cheat that he is.

Baldwin creates a pair of subversions to conclude
Skyscraper
: unmasking the Fantasy Man, so contrary to the typical working girls' romance, also means warning Mr. Right to be egalitarian. The skyscraper where Tom and Lynn report to work must now be home to their mutual respect. He has learned not to trifle with a woman's world. Whether inscribed in a pulp romance or proposed as a foundation of the Equal Rights Amendment, this is a message that remains all too controversial to this day.