The Unpossessed: A Novel of the Thirties (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Tess Slesinger (Author), Elizabeth Hardwick (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2002 | Series: New York Review Books Classics

Tess Slesinger's 1934 novel, The Unpossessed details the ins and outs and ups and downs of left-wing New York intellectual life and features a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic activists, and fur-clad patrons of protest and the arts. This cutting comedy about hard times, bad jobs, lousy marriages, little magazines, high principles, and the morning after bears comparison with the best work of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The farce or is it the tragedy? of New York leftist intellectuals done in by free love is gleefully taken up in The Unpossessed, the newly reissued 1934 comic novel by Tess Slesinger (1905-1945). Among the union organizers, academics, activists and slumming society folk who make up the cast are transplanted New Englander Miles ("his... conscience ticking neatly on his desk, beside the clock"); philanderer and mediocre novelist Jeffrey Blake, who gets it on with Comrade Fisher, a militant Trotskyite; and the droning Marxist professor Bruno Leonard. Several of these characters are, of course, planning to start a magazine. Slesinger, a New York native, moved in the same circles as Lionel Trilling, Clifton Fadiman and other famed liberal intellectuals, who seem to have provided her with rich material. Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Unlike so many other thirties novels, The Unpossessed treats the “topical” themes of its age as subsets of a much larger, more abiding theme in literature: the folly of all human (and particularly of pompous intellectual) endeavor that aims at imposing a rational direction on something as incorrigibly messy as history. Slesinger’s note—perfect depiction of this folly gives The Unpossessed its irresistible narrative energy." — The Atlantic Monthly

"It’s sophisticated…full of cutting observations and over—eager images; satiric, then ecstatic, alternating social criticism with displays of sexual and intellectual coquetry." — The Village Voice

"The farce—or is it the tragedy?—of New York leftist intellectuals done in by free love is gleefully taken up in The Unpossessed…" — Publishers Weekly

"Miss Slesinger’s radicalism had somewhat the flavor of Dorothy Parker’s; it was disabused, worldly, and tended to view social man as a collection of hollow, wordy grotesques. Thus the class war is transformed in her novel very largely into a war of the sexes." — Robert Adams, The New York Review of Books

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Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (August 31, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590170148
• ISBN-13: 978-1590170144
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #813,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Energetic and Refractory, January 18, 2004

By 

Buce (Palookaville) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unpossessed: A Novel of the Thirties (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Try this passage, not quite at random:

"`I'm the Bruno Leonard all-purpose one-man three-ring self-kidding self-perpetuating exhibitionistic circus divided like all Gaul into partes tres. One part sour grapes, one part wish-fulfillment, nine parts subconscious. And the greatest of these, according to the antediluvian Chinese, is the subconscious. This way, ladies and pessimistic gents, for the J. J. stream-line crooner, for old Doc Leonard the campaigning fool, watch hin frisk, watch him scamper, watch him catch his fleas in public. Don't feed him peanuts feed him opiates, buy your tablets at the gate from Miss Diamond who has given many years of service, who sacrificed her vacations, her virtue, that this firm might go on.' He subsided, to his own relief; collapsed into the chair that Nora drew up for him. `To sex and its many ramifications,' he said, and raised his glass."

Okay, it is out of context. But in context or out, I defy anyone to catch all the layers of meaning there, at least not on first reading. It's not precisely obscure (although I don't think I catch everything), not Joycean or Kafkaesque. It's more like a James Wood movie monologue: the narrator has no skin at all and she process on six channels at once, certainly the quickest-witted observer you could want to imagine. Or a "Simpsons" tape, where you know you will catch something new at second look, and some of the music gags will still go clean on past you.

Try it again for the rhythm. Can you get it? I cannot quite, but I am pretty sure it is there: all gnarly and snarky, all elbows and knees, a mind and a sensibility all its own. Just to get in the swing of things, I found I had to read it out loud, but no matter: it was better that way, and it lasted longer.

Tess Slesinger subtitles it "A Novel of the Thirties," and that it is: an attempt at clear-eyed observation of her cronies and adversaries among leftwing New York intellectuals at the bottom of the Depression. She dedicated it "to my contemporaries." Elizabeth Hardwick, in her introduction to the NYRB edition, calls it "a kindly act of intellectual friendship," and that it is not-indeed Hardwick's is one of the wildest misjudgments I can possibly imagine. It may be "friendship" in that she cares enough about these people that she wishes she could save them. But it is not in the least way kindly. Rather, this is an act of prophecy: a calling down of God's (if there is a God) wrath upon a wayward Greenwich Village by one who loved it a great deal but understood it - to her dismay - even better. It's rich, it's full of life and it is tainted with the acrid aroma of doom. What a talent. What a sensibility. What an experience, as energetic and refractory as any novel you will read for a long time. Tess Slesinger died in 1945 at the age of 39. She never wrote another.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stunning Portrait of the Time, June 1, 2007

By 

Skippy McGee (Providence, RI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unpossessed: A Novel of the Thirties (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

I knew within the first five pages of this book that I was going to love it. This is because Tess Slesinger's writing is beautiful and atmospheric. The narrator is third person omniscient, so we get a range of character's points of view in a flowing fashion. In this way it is similar to narrative like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

The basic premise is that there are these Greenwich Village leftists who want to start up a communist newsletter. This, however, is merely the basis for the larger group interactions. There are also deep dysfunctional relationships between the couples that make up the larger group and the shiftiing dynamic between man and woman. This novel looks hard at the mind of a woman of the time and what it is that she wants and whether or not she even knows what she wants anymore. It also looks at the men around them and how they percieve these "new" and "independant" women. It is a fascinating look at the relationship between the sexes.

I recommend getting not this verison, but the Feminist Press version because the Feminist Press edition has a very interesting forward.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More complex and intelligent that many other novels of the 1930s, March 27, 2007

By 

T. M. Teale (Colorado Springs, CO, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Unpossessed: A Novel of the Thirties (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

With her keen ability to delve into human psychology, Tess Slesinger is a worthy successor to Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Oops! I hope I haven't ruined this book for the general reader because--once you get beyond the first fifteen pages or so and catch on to what Slesinger is up to--you won't put the book down. In terms of literary Modernism and the writing craft, Slesinger builds on the accomplishments of Woolf and James, two of the acknowledged masters of interior psychological processes: Tess Slesinger adds wit, irony, and charm. And, she is thoroughly American in the pace and comedic timing of her work--the very *sound* of this novel is American.

To the general reader, I would say that The Unpossessed is not a consciously arty, literary novel. I'm convinced that there was no other way to write this work, no way to say what had to be said in any technique or structure other than the one in which Tess Slesinger wrote it. The author wanted to approximate reality, modern 1930's life (Depression Era, intellectual activism), and to exactly recreate each character's thoughts. To do that, Slesinger, like Woolf, had to master the use of parentheses and italics in order to show simultaneous thoughts, to show what characters are thinking when another character is speaking. Italics and parenthetical statements are necessary to give the reader the feeling of real life--as lived in the moment. And because every person is so mentally active, each has an interior consciousness which they bring to bear on the social predicament.

In Bruno Leonard, Slesinger has given us a university professor who is as idiosyncratic and witty as they come--the type of erudite, gentleman intellectual who has been largely killed off by mass delivery of education in the new diploma factories. And, in Elizabeth Leonard, Bruno's cousin, we have a young woman who is as engaging as she is sexy and mixed up. The "Black Sheep"--Emmett Middleton, and Cornelia and Firman--are as timeless as any intelligent, active college students frustrated with the times in which they live (with the poverty of the Depression Era, and the unequal sharing of wealth in the U.S.). They are genuinely hoping that the work of Karl Marx can show Americans a way toward a more just society. Emmett Middleton seems to be the stable, moral center of The Unpossessed.

In terms of language and style, The Unpossessed approaches poetry. In Slesinger's characteristically poignant and biting prose, she writes from inside Emmett's conflicted consciousness, "Emmett had hated the word 'business' since he was three years old; it came out of his father's mouth tobacco-stained and dry, slightly nasal; the combination of the zz sound with the n went the wrong way up his nostrils like burning sulphur off a kitchen match. 'He s-says I look too much like a girl scout for his racket anyway.' He thought with relief how since knowing Bruno he had relinquished the vain attempt to gain his father's approbation" (139).

Slesinger's willingness to let the English language carry her into poetic realms makes The Unpossessed soar above the polemical novel; her work has humor and grace in it. To be so young as Tess, so aware of the interior of the human soul, to write only one novel--and then to die so young!

And, dear reader, don't be led astray or fooled by Slesinger's at-times cool, emotionally distant prose. Underneath--and running throughout--is a plea from the heart: Intellectuals and activists must connect to life; while we are reading Engels and Marx and examining the direction of our nation, we must allow life to happen. Yes, be an intellectual with integrity, commit to a cause and be active with it--but go ahead, fall in love, get married, have a baby. These are not bourgeois concepts. They are life, too.

Finally, I don't know why this novel isn't on every undergraduate reading list along with Fitzgerald and Hemingway. This is truly a 20th-century masterpiece--and suitable for the times in which we live.