Home Port by Olive Higgins Prouty ~ 1947. This edition: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. Hardcover. 284 pages.
Time for a quick post this morning before I’m off into the snowy world to further the progress of the performing arts in our community: the vocal and choral portion of our regional version of what in other parts of the world could be called an Eisteddfod begins tomorrow, and today I collect the vocal adjudicator from his flight in and then brief him on the finer points of what his duties shall be. It will be a peaceful and pleasant meeting, but it puts a gaping hole in my otherwise home-focussed Sunday. Ah, well, it’s all for a good cause. Encouraging musicians is always a good thing, and I get to sit and listen in as my reward!
So. Olive Higgins Prouty. A name I had heard bandied about in the past, though I had not until now bumped into one of her books.
She’s the author of the widely known Stella Dallas, 1923, and her 1941 book Now, Voyager was made into the 1942 film starring Bette Davis which has attained film classic status. Olive Higgins Prouty also famously mentored a young Sylvia Plath, which seems to be a whole other complex story which I shan’t get into here.
Olive Higgins Prouty was deeply interested in psychology and psychotherapy, and her books are reportedly very much about the emotional lives of her characters, and their rehabilitation from various states of mental imbalance through various therapeutic experiences, not necessarily involving “professional” intervention, but rather organically through positive life experiences and such. Or that is my understanding, in particular from my reading of Home Port, which is all about the emotional trauma and healing of its key character, Murray Vale.
Murray is a young man in his early twenties; he is in the process of studying for his law degree, though it’s not his dream job by a far stretch; he’d rather be out rambling in the woods and studying flora and fauna. Luckily he has a summer job as a camp counsellor at his old camp, so he gets to indulge in woodsmanship and mentoring all the younger boys in his personal passion.
But disaster is about to strike.
Murray is asked to take another counsellor along on a short canoe trip to scout out a camping location; he’s specifically asked to keep an eye on his partner and not allow him to over-exert himself; seems the chap has a ticky heart. All is well until a sudden storm blows up; the men end up in the water, and despite heroic attempts on Murray’s part, the other counsellor slips away and is lost.
Murray makes it to shore, passes out, and regains consciousness to a horrifying realization: he has let everybody down! (Murray has serious self-esteem issues, being the younger, more bookish, less athletic brother to super-athlete and all-around good guy Windy, who even after being crippled by a bout with polio is active in the local sport and social scene – everybody loves Windy!)
What to do, what to do? Murray considers suicide, but can’t quite figure out the “how”; after much inner anguish he decides instead to disappear from his old life and go to ground under an assumed name, which he pulls off with a little luck, becoming a successful camp guide for a small Maine fishing outfit. (I’m condensing madly here.)
Murray also has sex issues, in that he thinks he is impotent, because all of his previous relations with women have been so stressful that he can’t fulfill their requirements, as it were, but luckily there is this one young woman client of his who is utterly non-threatening and sweet and interested in all the same things…
Long story short, Murray is rehabilitated in both his own eyes and those of the world, as he finds true love and then goes off to be a brave soldier in World War II, vindicating his moment of physical weakness out there on that long-ago lake.
All’s well that ends well; Murray has found his “home port”.
Not a bad effort as far as these sorts of sentimental stories go; I was happy to go along for the ride, though I often felt like giving wishy-washy Murray a good hard shake. Which was the whole point, I suppose.
Home Port is the fourth installment in a series of five novels regarding the fictional Vale family; it was interesting enough that I may indeed by seeking out the other four novels at some point. (The sequence is: The White Fawn (1931), Lisa Vale (1938), Now, Voyager (1941), Home Port (1947), and Fabia (1951).
I’m really curious now about getting my hands on the even earlier Stella Dallas; Olive Higgins Prouty intrigues me; I want to read a bit more of her work.
It appears from a cursory visit to ABE that none of Prouty’s books are terribly rare; she was a bestseller in her time, and Stella Dallas for one has been in print fairly continuously since its publication in 1923, due to its (apparently unauthorized) adaptation as a long-running radio soap opera and its subsequent high public profile.
So there we go. Another new-to-me vintage author discovered, another sequence of books to chase down at my leisure.
On that note – must run! Happy Sunday, fellow readers.
Oh – that obligatory rating: 6.5/10, let’s say. It got a bit soggy towards the end – very über-heartwarming and neatly tied up – but getting there was reasonably diverting.
Leaves & Pages 
What most intrigued me in this post was not the book review but the tantalising references to your “eistedfodd”. I myself sing in a choir. I do hope you will write some more about this in future posts.
What what? What is this choir endeavor? I need to hear more about this!
Ah! Our “Eistedfodd”, our Festival, is a wonderful thing. All across Canada there are regional performing arts festivals, generally administered by teams of volunteers with mainly community (non-governmental) support which are targetted for youth performers in particular but generally open to all ages.
The purpose of our festivals is threefold: celebratory, educational, and competitive. We strive to provide a public venue and “stage time” to our participants; they perform their pieces in concert/recital format, in front of an audience, and under the eye of adjudicators – generally well-established professionals in the particular discipline of the performers – for written analysis and constructive feedback on each piece performed. There are often donated cash prizes and scholarships to be awarded – a nice bonus. Often we provide workshops as well, to allow for more detailed instruction. There is also a marking/grading aspect: top performers in each age/skill group of each discipline are recommended to go on to the Provincial Festival, and winners at Provincials go on to perform/compete at our Canadian National Festival.
Our regional festival is celebrating its 35th season this year; I have been personally involved for over a third of that time, moving up the ranks (as it were!) from flunky volunteer (I believe my first job was as a door monitor) to various positions on the board of directors. Sounds fancy, but we’re all just regular people with an interest in making this thing happen for our community performing artists. It’s a rewarding sort of enterprise, in all the best ways.
Our own festival takes place in four stages from February to April, and hosts the disciplines of classical voice, musical theatre, choir, speech arts (prose, drama, poetry), dance (modern, ballet, stage/jazz/tap), and piano. Other festivals in the province host all of the above as well as strings and guitar, and woodwinds and brass disciplines.
So there it is! Festival time is upon us, a year’s worth of planning and background work culminating with seeing our performers up there on the stage! Most of them will retain some connection with their arts in their lives to come; some will go on to make their careers in those fields. It’s a great pleasure to be a small part of making that happen for them; we like to think that our society at large is a better place because of our efforts in this area. 🙂
Well. I have a nice old copy of Home Port, and I read it a year or so ago, and I liked it a lot. I especially liked how Murray continued to go his own way and a plant and bug and nature guy, instead of being coerced into following in Windy’s footsteps. The odd thing about it, I found, was how he vanishes from the final scenes.
So, I then read Fabia (which I bought at the same book sale as Home Port, and frankly, my dear, I class that one as dreck. Really. I actually wrote a full blown review of it (which I virtually never do) over at my blog, for the 1951 book club (https://dalyght.wordpress.com/2017/04/10/1951-club-fabia-by-olive-higgins-prouty/), with a side look at Home Port. Another Home Port review can be found here: http://anotherlookbook.com/home-port-olive-higgins-prouty/
Yes, Now Voyager is a pretty good read too.
Well. My goodness. How interesting. You have made me most curious about continuing my acquaintance with the Vales. Do you know, Home Port flirts a bit with dreck-status – that convenient love affair at the end, the coincidence factors, the awkward pyscho-babble which apoparently was Prouty’s “thing” – there were moments when I found things just a little distancing – the author assumes that her reasders are utterly like-minded, perhaps? Therefore willing to put up with anything offered from the plot menu? Hmmm… But great parts of the book were truly engaging. Interesting. Will have to see where I go with this writer.
Well, much as readers like us enjoy the same books sometimes, it’s quite possible to have different opinions too. (The Foolish Gentlewoman?)
But while we’re on the subject of recomended books, I finally managed to track down Mexico Unknown, through ILL, and was very happy to do so. A strange and event-filled book, though many times I found myself saying, “Are you nuts? Take your daughter back to the sanity and safety of BC and let your peripatetic husband fend for himself.” Obviously, however, they survived their adventures, so I guess it’s all okay.