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The Kathleen Norris of today is a strikingly handsome woman who looks like a duchess and, fortunately, isn't one. "The greatest fun in life," she told me, "is being forty." One of the most highly paid and the most popular of American women writers, she has pleased the critics as well as the public with at least two of her books, Mother and the recent Certain People of Importance. This tall, aquiline-featured, dominant woman is of literary family. Her husband, a brother of Frank Norris, is Charles Norris, whose Salt and Brass are both American novels of worth, and she is aunt to the children of William Rose Benet, the poet. Her life has been a varied one, and it shows in her keen understanding of women's hearts and minds, and in her unfailing observation of detail. About to be a debutante in San Francisco, the death of her father and mother, and a reversal of family fortune, made her seek independence. She tried various occupations—with a hardware house, as a librarian, as a reporter. At twentythree, however, she had made her first successful effort as a writer. She sold a story. From then on in the field of journalism and of fiction she has been progressing steadily. For most of the year the Norrises live on a ranch in California. What an amazing pair they must be to be able to exist in the same house! One writer in a family is difficult enough, I hear; but not so with the Norrises. They not only work well in the same house, but they help each other. Apparently their methods of procedure are quite different. Mr. Norris is hard-pressed during the period of creation. He fights for the right word. Mrs. Norris, on the other hand, says that the enjoys every moment of putting pencil to paper. At her best Kathleen Norris can present a fine, moving, startlingly real picture of life. At her worst she becomes caught in describing the minutiae of daily routine. A blue pencil would greatly have improved Certain People of Importance. Possibly Mrs. Norris knows this now. She is working, in addition to her usually generous output of short novels and short stories, on a new long novel. It will be all about the Irish, not the Irish question, and by the time it is finished she will perhaps have learned not to tell us every piece of meat and every slice of vegetable that goes to make up the daily Irish stew! J. F.
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