All Brides Are Beautiful

Peter Cummings and Susan Allis, portrayed by Mark Stevens and Joan Fontaine in 1946 movie adaptation From This Day Forward

At the beginning of this year I expressed my reluctance to post personal things related to my ‘spiritual journey’, on account of the fact that my life has been so heavily fragmented. It took me only half a year to overcome this reluctance and thus ‘out’ myself as a total hypocrite, but I would like to hope that my original essay on fragmentation still has some value. I lived in Pittsburgh as a grad student for two years, but being an Episcopalian at the time, I didn’t start making connexions with the working-class Orthodox history of the city until well after I left. And it was only after I came back to the United States from China that I happened to pick up All Brides Are Beautiful, a novel by first-generation Rusin-American and Braddock, PA native Adalbert Thomas Belejcak – better known by his nom de plume, Thomas Bell. This novel turned out to be a guiding star in more ways than one. I can literally say that it kept me sane in a difficult time of my life.

Set in New York City, All Brides Are Beautiful is a slice-of-life story about a down-on-his-luck machinist, Peter Cummings, and his girlfriend – later wife – Susan Allis, who works as a clerk in an ‘independent’ bookshop. I call it a ‘realist romance’: it follows their courtship and marriage, and contrasts their life with those of their neighbours, the Beasleys, and landlady. It doesn’t shy away from the homely and even ugly details of working-class life in New York City at the tail end of the Great Depression, particularly in its description of their apartment building or the various difficult financial and social circumstances they have to deal with. The realities of debt, rent hikes, quarrels with managers, quarrels with bosses, and most of all unemployment: the challenges facing Peter were in many cases all too real for me – particularly since I was reading this novel when I myself was unemployed. In this passage in particular, Bell spoke both to and for me, with a humble eloquence:

[Peter] learned that to give is not only better than to receive but infinitely easier; and that is bitter knowledge, hardly learned. Against circumstances which made it impossible for him to find work, feel himself a whole man, mere rage was futile; nevertheless he raged. Hunger, even injustice, one could endure, but this piecemeal disintegration of one’s pride, one’s self-assurance, was a slow death. There were times when he found it hard to meet Susan’s eyes.

This book reveals a feminist attitude towards work – somewhat autobiographically (Bell relied on his wife’s work and money and stayed at home while he was unemployed and while he wrote), Peter relies on Susan’s work as a clerk just to (never quite) make ends meet, at least until he lands a job working as a machinist outside the city. The relationship between Peter and Susan itself is playful and teasing and occasionally raunchy, even when the two of them are stressed or angry – but one sees very quickly that a factor that separates Peter from his immediate Beasley neighbours is that he respects Susan. Much of the backdrop which serves to highlight Peter and Susan’s kinda-sorta-functional relationship pertains to the ways in which the Beasleys’ relationships are for the most part falling apart. On the other hand, one of the major plot points involves Susan’s friend Victoria, whose first husband left her alone and pregnant, and who faces a similar situation with her current boyfriend Dan. All the time the reader is led to assume this relationship too will end up badly for Victoria, particularly when she ends up pregnant and seemingly abandoned again, but Bell manages to subvert our expectations with Dan by giving him something of a tragicomic moment toward the end of the book.

Unions and organising are foregrounded as well, and one of the plot points involves Susan’s brother-in-law Hank – who has long been unemployed himself – being offered work crossing picket lines as a scab. Bell portrays Hank’s plight with sympathy, but makes it clear what he believes is the right thing to do: he has Hank come down at last on the side of the striking workers, even though it means staying unemployed and continuing hardships for himself, his wife and his children. Peter (also probably semi-autobiographically on Bell’s part) is also a member of the CPUSA and a subscriber to the Workers’ Daily. American involvement in World War II is looming, which is one of the reasons Peter is able at last to find work. But as he returns from work, he gives internal voice to the following reflections:

To work, to breed, to die; to have in the work little pride, in the breeding little reason for joy, and to die at last like an animal broken with hardship—that was his future, and Susan’s and Martha’s and Hank’s and Victoria’s and Dan’s, the future of the men in this shop and the ordinary men and women of the world. That was their future, for all their dreams. And if they got no worse than a lifetime of labour and insecurity they would be the luckier ones of their kind, for others would starve to death, see their children bloated with malnutrition, made aged dwarfs in mills and factories; work and poverty would rot them with disease, they would be mangled in machines or clubbed and shot on picket-lines; and many would be blown to bits on capitalist battle-fields while safely behind the lines their wives and children had their eyes burned out, their lungs chewed bloody, by the most modern and efficient of poison gasses. For money, for profit and power.

That was their future.

That was what they could expect unless they themselves, the workers, the ordinary men and women of America, ordered it otherwise. Would they realise their own terrible danger, learn to recognise their enemies and their friends, before it was too late? Would they listen, would they believe?

The politics only form a part of this novel’s world, though, which is intensely local. It is a story that seemingly could only take place in New York; the forms of alienation, the openness about sex, the backgrounded racial tensions and portrayals of the wealth gap (the Wall Street set appear briefly and are immediately contrasted with everyone else) would seem wrong set anywhere else. Having been written in the 1940’s, the vernacular feels dated as well as heavily-localised, but it is not inaccessible. Apart from the broader working-class themes and a couple of brief intimations that Peter hails from a recent immigrant family in Appalachia, Bell’s Rusin roots make no appearance at all in this book – those are apparently featured more prominently in his more famous novel (which I haven’t read yet), Out of This Furnace. I still consider this Rusin literature, however, both on account of the fact that it pays such great attention to locality and on account of its stress on class.

Speaking for myself, though, it turned out to be something of an accident that I found work as a machinist (following the family tradition, so to speak) just as I was finishing this book. But somehow I keep finding that these accidents – like my brief career in Pittsburgh and then becoming Orthodox several years later – are never really so accidental as they first appear. Along with the miraculously-sympathetic and -supportive folks at Saint Herman’s, Thomas Bell’s book did help me through a hard time in my career, and for that – even though it is by no means highbrow fiction – it will always have an honoured place on my bookshelf.