Dear, Dead Hollywood

No Mother to Guide Her, by Anita Loos. McGraw-Hill, $3.95 With what high hopes does one open Anita Loos’ new novel, No Mother to Guide Her. Here, by the creator of those brilliant comedies of bad manners—Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1927), might be the ultimate Hollywood novel, if Miss Loos had but dipped her pen once more in the same corrosive ink in which she sketched the portrait of Lorelei Lee and the world which made her possible. But although Miss Loos rises occasionally to the satiric heights consistently achieved in the chronicles of Lorelei and Dorothy, this “memoir” of the erstwhile Movie Queen, Viola Lake, as recorded by that Prince of Positive Thinkers, Elmer Pastor field Bliss, is for the most part considerably inferior stuff.

I think the principal fault may lie in the lenses through which the narrative is refracted—Elmer’s. In drawing this columnist-uplifter, Miss Loos might have done well to bear in mind a point E. M. Forster has made about Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma: we know she is a bore, but she doesn’t bore us. Unfortunately, in choosing Elmer Bliss to chronicle the life and times of Viola Lake, Miss Loos has not allowed Elmer’s “positive” philosophical view and prose style to become sufficiently qualified by ironic self-revelation.

RD

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Robert Drake

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No Mother to Guide Her, by Anita Loos. McGraw-Hill, $3.95 With what high hopes does one open Anita Loos’ new novel, No Mother to Guide Her. Here, by the creator of those brilliant comedies of bad manners—Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1927), might be the ultimate Hollywood novel, if Miss Loos had but dipped her pen once more in the same corrosive ink in which she sketched the portrait of Lorelei Lee and the world which made her possible. But although Miss Loos rises occasionally to the satiric heights consistently achieved in the chronicles of Lorelei and Dorothy, this “memoir” of the erstwhile Movie Queen, Viola Lake, as recorded by that Prince of Positive Thinkers, Elmer Pastor field Bliss, is for the most part considerably inferior stuff.

I think the principal fault may lie in the lenses through which the narrative is refracted—Elmer’s. In drawing this columnist-uplifter, Miss Loos might have done well to bear in mind a point E. M. Forster has made about Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma: we know she is a bore, but she doesn’t bore us. Unfortunately, in choosing Elmer Bliss to chronicle the life and times of Viola Lake, Miss Loos has not allowed Elmer’s “positive” philosophical view and prose style to become sufficiently qualified by ironic self-revelation.