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The Dwelling Place of Light

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Through the first half of this novel it looks as if American novelist Winston Churchill might be plowing new ground: a naturalistic approach to major public and private issues, including the rights of workers, the role of unions, female victimhood at the hands of powerful men, pre-marital sex, even abortion. But halfway through he seems to lose his nerve and reverts back to older, genteel, idealistic solutions to the problems he raises.

The main plot thread is concerned with Janet Bumpus, who takes a job as secretary to Claude Ditmar, an agent for the Chippering Mills. Ditmar falls in love with her and seduces her at a hotel in Boston. Right afterward it's as if she sees him for what he is for the first time, and disagrees with his business practices, siding with the downtrodden workers when they go on strike. Dumping Ditmar, Janet next becomes interested in a radical intellectual, Leonard Rolfe. But when she learns that free love is part of his radical beliefs, she quickly takes her leave of him. She then meets Brooks Insall, an idealistic writer who sympathizes with the proletarian cause but sees himself as too far above it to get involved personally, except through his writings done in his safe ivory tower (these types are still too much with us today, unfortunately).

Here is where Churchill's book really begins to crumble to dust and ashes. Just before meeting Insall, Janet realizes she's pregnant with Ditmar's child. Insall loves her and wants to marry her anyway, but she comes to the conclusion he's only being generous and she refuses him. She also now believes that Ditmar really loved her (and she him), but when she seeks him out, she learns he is dead. She decides to go away to northern Maine to have the child and leave it to Insall (and his mother) to raise - all very convenient because she "knows" she's going to die anyway, and she does. "Modern" issues (at least this personal dilemma faced by Janet; the problem with the unions and the workers is pretty much dropped altogether) are therefore dealt with the only way Churchill knew how - in the 19th-century "proper" and idealistic way you might expect from such lesser "romantic-realistic" writers as Marion Crawford, Margaret Deland, or F. Constance Woolson (and never from someone like Dreiser, whom he seemed to be imitating at the beginning).

A second plot thread involves Janet's sister Lise, who falls faster and harder than Janet, ending up in prostitution, though her purpose seems to be more a mirror that Janet can hold up to measure her own life against, which allows her to make the decisions she does near the end. The scenes dealing with Lise is Churchill at his most naturalistic - and modern. But it's as if Churchill knew he hadn't it within him to continue in this vein, thus the regression to "safer" ground at the end. This was his last novel; one wonders if he felt he was loosing touch with mainstream trends in America and thus quit trying to depict it in fiction. It was probably a wise decision: it's hard to imagine how poorly a new novel of his might've been received in the age of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Lewis.