ROUGHLY SPEAKING — Louise Randall Pierson—Simon and Schuster ($2.50).
The house where Louise Randall lived as a child stood above the bridge in Quincy, Mass. H. H. Richardson, great American architect, built it. In the warm haze of New England's Indian summer, life there was magical.
When Louise looked out of her bedroom window, she could see the Adamses walking around their box-bordered garden next door. Early each morning Father Randall, with his brilliantined beard and his hearty manner, took Louise to the stables to feed sugar to the horses while they were being curried. He brought her boxes of Page & Shaw chocolates, got front seats for the Admiral Dewey Parade, took her to see Joe Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle. He told her that all their magnificent house needed was a moat and a drawbridge, and he was going to put them in.
The house also needed him. The life that had been compounded of good things for little girls while he was alive crashed to its tearless ruin with his death. Louise, who was twelve when he died, could remember the diamonds in the eyes of his bulldog stickpin, and how she hid her dolls under the covers and made Father sit on a chair, so he would not sit on the dolls when he came to say goodnight. He took everything to the grave with him—money (he had signed too many notes), friends, family standing, a way of life and a certain knowledge of how to meet it.
Forty Years' Record. Louise Randall Pierson's autobiography covers the years from 1902, when Father died, to the present. Roughly Speaking is as uneven as the years it spans. The 332 pages of neat, small print, marred by an affected breeziness and by curiously false conversational passages, nevertheless make up a lively, candid, sometimes exasperatingly interesting book. Its record is bitter, if the facts of the family's struggle alone are considered. But Mrs. Pierson is so persistently cheerful in keeping the record that she seems optimistic by will power alone. Sometimes, like sunlight filtering through the shutters of a darkened room, paragraphs of emotion cut through the desperate happiness and warm the pages with a gentle, subjective glow.
Louise graduated from Simmons College in Boston, a tidy, short, shirtwaisted feminist bundle of aggressive restlessness. She did research on constructive juvenile activities for a neurasthenic Yale professor until the professor's wife, objecting, among other things, to the openwork yoke of Louise's shirtwaist, fired her. New Haven's lights "were bright and made a glow in the sky. The engines in its factories throbbed and hummed. ... It was breath-catching. Home was a million miles away. This was the maelstrom of life."
In 1911 Louise was a stenographer in the socially unacceptable Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. (The episode is so elusively treated that a naive reader might conclude that she had been in naval intelligence ever since.) Then she moved to New York, married—a Yale man of good family working in a bank—lived in uptown Manhattan in a weird apartment, began to write magazine articles, and found a brief breathing space in life.