Lady – Thomas Tryon, 1974 ★★★

Soft-Lit Nostalgia Bath Packs Punch

It’s not a Thomas Tryon novel unless someone is looking back with a mixture of sadness and nostalgia upon life-changing mistakes.

Lady is the ultimate backwards glance from an author whose oeuvre suggests chronic neck pains from same. Tryon’s intentions are so noble here, and his attention to detail so exact, you want him to pull off a masterpiece. At least I did, considering that he made my home state the setting; there’s not enough prize fiction celebrating the Nutmeg State.

Growing up in the sheltered coastal enclave of Pequot Landing, Connecticut in the 1930s, young “Woody” Woodhouse finds himself both enraptured and intrigued by the title character, a woman of means whose stately hilltop manor overlooks both his house and a town green presided over by majestic elm trees, this being before Dutch Elm disease would take them all away.

The more time Woody spends with Lady, the more covetous he becomes of her attentions, and the more perplexed he is regarding various mysteries of her life. This latter aspect becomes more pronounced as Woody observes a strange character calling on her and apparently leaving her deeply upset.

Woody wonders if she is in trouble. Then, after the visits cease, he wonders what happened to the man, and about other Lady-connected matters, too. Why did the proprietor of an inn she once stayed at make her leave? Why is the forty-something Lady so determined to waste her Indian-summer beauty in a state of stubborn widowhood? As Woody’s seemingly idyllic childhood stretches like molasses, he finds himself wishing to pull off the veil that encircles her life.

“During most of my boyhood, I strove to know the heart of Adelaide Harleigh, to unravel the enigma that lingered in the corners of her mouth as her smile faded,” Tryon writes at the start of the book. “For if she was everything to everybody, if she most often seemed joyful and content, her joy appeared to me as something of a disguise.”

Taking in a period of some 15 years, from the early days of the Great Depression to the end of World War II, Lady presents a deep-dish look at the same fictional locale where Tryon set his debut novel The Other, published three years before. Here, as there, you get a contrast between a rosily-recollected childhood and a dark-underbelly sort of situation. Pequot Landing as it appears in Lady comes off like Peyton Place, a viper's nest of scandal and hypocrisy, yet we view it through a prism of soft candlelight with Lady at its center.

Despite those and other commonalities with The Other, and with Harvest Home, Tryon’s second novel, the author’s then-growing reader base would likely have been thrown by Lady. Before it, he had given them blood-curdling horror novels packed with gory revelations and psychological suspense. Lady by contrast presents a kind of tea-cosy Victorian melodrama that's rather light on the drama. There is a mystery at the heart of Lady, and one of Tryon’s trademark surprises indeed awaits you, a very impressive one which caught me flatfooted. But this novel as a whole is more placid in its design, and more sentimental in its depictions.

Frankly, this got to be a problem for me after a while. For over 150 pages, the narrator itemizes his daily experiences around Lady, and the jealous joy she brings to his life, in a way that veers too often into precious and twee territory. Woody lays out the particulars of her house, lovingly describes her wardrobe down to her fancy gloves and mink coat, the cooking smells wafting in from the kitchen, and the special manner of speaking he developed with Lady referencing “Krazy Kat,” a comic strip they both enjoy. She calls him "Ignatz," after a mouse character featured in the strip.

Woody’s raptures in the company of Lady seem at times too pressed to be the genuine reflections of a pre-teen boy recalling time spent in the company of a woman old enough to be his mother: “She kissed me, and oh, the fragrance of her perfume, the tiny surge of blue through a vein in her throat, and those beautiful brown eyes smiling down. Oh, how I loved her, and oh, how I hated her to leave. But tomorrow, she promised as she tiptoed out, tomorrow, what larks.”

"Trees are God's most perfect race" declares Adelaide Harleigh, also known as "Lady," in Thomas Tryon's book of the same name. Here one sees Pine Street in Cornwall, Connecticut, circa 1910, a Dutch-elm-lined road common at the time to the state before the Dutch elms were largely wiped out by disease. [Image from http://www.cornwallhistoricalsociety.org/exhibits/forests/dutchelm.htm.]

It was, at times, a hard read. But sticking with Lady proved worthwhile. For one thing, there is that surprise, which proves to be quite affecting and relates to a core message of the novel, regarding the critical importance of love in a world full of harsh realities and even harsher judgments.

Tryon’s account of life at Pequot Landing also breathes with the vitality of honest reflection and layered reality that draws you in. No doubt the author was using his own Connecticut upbringing to inform his book, as he did with The Other and would do again later in The Night Of The Moonbow, another childhood novel set in the state in the 1930s. The time and place seemed to work for him well; they are three of his most accomplished books.

Tryon made his name as a popular screen actor and explained his career change as a way of escaping imperious directors. But it's clear when you read Lady how much of a natural he really was at writing. More than other novels of his, Lady showcases Tryon's gift for literate and descriptive prose. It’s a balancing act at times, both in terms of preciousness as well as how long he can describe episodes involving very slight amounts of action without losing the thread of an interesting idea. Often he did lose me, sometimes for extended periods, but there was always just enough story in Lady to help me find my way back.

As strained as I found the central relationship, there’s something about the way Tryon channels the setting around Lady and Woody to fit the situation. Weather is a key concern here; Tryon is always shifting his narrative from one season to another, taking full advantage of Mark Twain’s maxim about the consistent inconsistency of New England weather to sometimes Gothic effect. Tryon paints in words the enervating heat of a summer's evening as Woody stands watchfully at his sleeping porch, or a winter's scene out of Currier & Ives where Lady and her faithful chauffeur Jesse speed across the neighborhood in a horse-driven sleigh. Even when Tryon overdoes it, like when he employs a famous storm that ravaged New England, the Hurricane of 1938, as Wagnerian backdrop for a reconciliation scene late in the book, the result is one that leaves you feeling you didn't just read the experience, but lived it.

It’s not a book that pulls you by the nose and keeps you reading. Tryon’s ability to do that in other novels seems to have been deliberately given a rest here. To be honest, I missed it a lot, especially in the last third, which is more mopey and elegiac than warranted. I think Lady's lack of story is a serious flaw. But I admired the craft of Lady, Tryon's way of presenting the various social circles of Pequot Landing, and even the naked sentiment expressed, however cloying. There’s a message in the book I think people can relate to, about how society can exact a price from the truest hearts, and why it’s important regardless to maintain a foothold in that society, however steep that price may be.

“You will learn, my Ignatz, that there is a vast difference between loneliness and solitude,” Lady tells Woody midway through the book. “Solitude is a kind of food, we eat it and it sustains us, but loneliness is a starvation diet – no one ever got healthy being lonely.”