BOOK REVIEW: A Diary of Love by Maude Hutchins

I’m continuing to read the works of Maude Hutchins, an early twentieth century artist and novelist. Her writings fit in the category of the “nouveau roman,” not my favorite genre, but hers are fascinating and odd. (She was supposedly admired by Anais Nin.)

A Diary of Love, published in 1950, is her second novel. It was almost banned for obscenity, but rescued by the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s tame compared to what we’re used to today, but it does focus on sex and skirts uncomfortable sexual taboos.

The fictional diary is kept by an adolescent girl named Noel. She is an orphan living with an aloof, sad grandfather and an unmarried aunt. The household is also regularly visited by two hypersexualized neighbors and their son, Dominick, who is roughly Noel’s age. A few other characters flit in and out: their strange maid, Frieda, who so desperately wants a child that she has a false pregnancy and then mothers a doll; a randy very young music student; and an omnipresent doctor.

Noel is coming of age, very interested in the mystery of sex, and left to puzzle it out by what she overhears and the glimpses she catches of what goes on around her. Her diary entries are dreamy and confused, and often end with her recording her temperature. In the second part of the book, she has been sent (for three years) to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Arizona. Her life takes on a different pattern as she makes a new family there, one that is immersed in sickness and in sexual desire. In part three, she is discharged home, cured of TB, three years older, and slightly less confused about both sex and love.

This novel, and Hutchins’ others, contain autobiographical tidbits, but it’s a challenge to decipher what they are.