Word: scotts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...STORY OF MRS. MURPHY (445 pp.)-Natalie Anderson Scott-Dutton...
...picture strikes one very queer note: its infatuation with breadwinning as the real measure of stability and wholesome family life. When Scott gets good & sore at his wife, he just can't give a hoot for moneymaking, and that neglect is represented as close to the ultimate catastrophe. But he recovers. Within a few hours after she has killed a man in her parlor, and is still suffering from shock, he leaves her, with her entire approval, for more important matters at The Office...
Jimmy Murphy, 25, had just knocked Napoleon across the kitchen with a baseball bat. Jimmy, a single-minded lush, had a frightful temper. Sometimes, according to Author Natalie Anderson Scott, he was capable of "smiling humorously," but more often anger "twisted his handsome face" and corrupted his "sweet, childish mouth." He swindled, stole, played fast & loose with girls-among them an artist named Kay, and Dolores, who wore sables and "went around adjusting herself" (Dolores could "adjust herself in a thrice"). Jimmy peddled dope, knifed his sister, beat up his mother, hocked the family goods. But his mother loved...
Apparently Author Scott thinks so too, for she has lavished 175,000 warning words on the clinical details of Jimmy's decline & fall. The publishers urge readers not to assume that The Story of Mrs. Murphy is simply "another" novel about a drunk. They are quite right. Distinguished by nothing except low-grade prose and high-grade intentions, it is probably the worst novel of its kind since the days of T. S. (Ten Nights in a Barroom) Arthur...
Pattern. In London, early in the war, Flight Lieut. Ray Amherst Scott was granted a divorce. Grounds: his wife had committed adultery with one Arthur Williams. Scott remarried her in 1943, was just granted another divorce. Grounds: adultery again with the same Arthur Williams...