“The Secret”: Come for the fake relationship trope, stay for the discussion of broader cultural shifts and how those shifts have historically been reflected in the romance genre.

“Look here,” he said at last, “it seems to me that in the circumstances, there is only one possible thing to do.  One cannot risk making your grandfather seriously ill—perhaps even being responsible for his death.”  As she gave a little cry, he went on:  “I’m sorry to speak so plainly, but the only thing to do is to face facts.  You cannot run such a risk, and so the only thing to do is to go on with this farce—”

“What do you mean?” June asked swiftly.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Obviously, Mr. Macbride will have to go on believing that I am your husband.  That means that for the present I shall be obliged to remain here.  Later we can say that we have quarreled again, and I’ve gone off—to South America or wherever I am supposed to have been.”

One of these days I will get back to Cornell Woolrich, I promise (I’ve actually picked up a couple rare Woolrich stories since my last review), but alas(?), today I’m getting another pulp romance story out of the way:  “The Secret,” by Muriel Page, published in the October 11th, 1930 issue of Love Story Magazine.  I picked the issue up a few months ago, partly because the price was right and partly because it included a Hagar Wilde short story (she of Bringing Up Baby screenplay fame, who coincidentally also wrote the formal companion piece to Cornell Woolrich’s 1928 article “Girls, I Know Your Line,” as discussed and linked to in this review).  The Wilde story was a total bust, I’m sorry to say—it was inane and irritating enough that I’m torn between wanting to formally review it just so I can properly air my grievances, and also not wanting to review it purely because I don’t think it’s worth the time or the effort.  There was, however, Muriel Page’s “The Secret” in the issue as well, and while the one Page story I’d read before didn’t impress (more on this later), this one seemed to promise the fake relationship trope, and I am a sucker for a good fake relationship, and so, I gave it a shot.  (And while it is far from the best story out there, it’s still fun and pleasant enough.  At the very least, it’s better than the aforementioned Wilde story.)

Our heroine is June, a young woman who was recently contacted by her estranged maternal grandfather, Donald Macbride.  Grandpa, we learn, had disowned his daughter (June’s mother) when she ran off to marry a man he disapproved of, and by the time he 1.) managed to pull his head out of his ass, and 2.) track his daughter back down, she and her husband had since died, leaving behind the now-adult June, who is earning her living (such as it is) as a legal secretary.  Gramps still wants to connect with her in an attempt to at least try to make things right, but he also doesn’t want to risk a repeat of the past, so he stipulates that he’ll only see June if she’s already married.

In an ideal world, June would tell her grandfather to fuck off for the way he treated her mom, but the truth is she could really use the financial security he could provide (secretarial work doesn’t exactly pay well, and it’s also implied her boss is sexually harassing her), so practicality wins out over pride, and the unmarried June does what so many of us would do in her place:  She simply invents a husband.  She buys a ring to wear for show, settles on the name “Royal Barrington” (figuring it’s unusual enough to be safe), and makes up a story about how he’s currently working in Canada South America and how they’re also quarreling badly enough that she’s refusing to accept any of his money (thus explaining why she was working an office job instead of playing homemaker, natch).  The ruse works, but—while she initially didn’t mind lying—Gramps turns out to be very sweet and very sorry for his past actions, and June ends up feeling genuinely guilty for the deception.  Worse yet, he’s in delicate health, so suddenly coming clean to him now might shock him into a heart attack.  June is angsting over her moral predicament when her grandfather calls her into his study one day, only to present her with a young man, named…Royal Barrington???

Grandpa is beside himself, all, “Oh, isn’t this wonderful, now you two can kiss and make up!  So go ahead, kiss, kiss!” and if he had two dolls of them, he would no doubt be mashing their faces together in front of him, like I used to do with my Barbies.  Royal Barrington (for that is, in fact, the stranger’s honest-to-goodness name) misinterprets June’s stunned, pleading expression, and obliges:

At that moment Royal Barrington was quite certain that Donald Macbride was mad, and that the imploring look in June’s eyes meant nothing but that he must humor him.  He was also aware that the girl who the old man was insisting was his wife was the prettiest thing he had ever set eyes on; and before June knew what was happening, she was caught in a pair of strong arms, and a charming masculine voice with an underlying note of amusement in it exclaimed:

“I guess I’m not going to wait for a second bidding.”  Then before she could utter any protest, he had kissed her on the lips.

Grandpa, practically cackling with glee, is like, “Well, I’ll leave you two alone to work out the details!” at which point Royal is finally like, “So…mind telling me WTF that was all about?”  (As far as he was concerned, he was merely paying a visit to settle a mortgage payment on some property he just inherited, and then the next thing he knows, he apparently has a wife and furthermore needs to make amends with her.)  June is all, “Omg, this is a disaster!” and explains the situation, albeit leaving out the whole “I was desperate to leave my job because my boss was a creep” detail.  Royal, feeling sorry for Mr. Macbride (and truth be told, a little sorry for June, too, even though he acknowledges that she was the one who effectively got herself into this mess), is like, “Welp, I guess the only thing to do is to stick around and pretend to be your husband.  After a little while we can stage another fight and I can ‘disappear’ back to South America.”  June—clearly not knowing how to take a win when it drops in her lap—objects to this plan, but Royal basically says, “Too bad, I’m doing it anyway!”  (Royal, for the record, seems to have lived a sort of asexual existence up until this point, far more interested in work than women, and is currently experiencing what can only be called a romantic awakening, which is throwing him for an emotional loop.)

Left without much of a choice, June finally agrees, but things are tense between the supposed husband and wife, as June fears Royal sees her as nothing more than a mercenarial gold-digger, and also resents the power he now has over her, what with the way he knows the truth.  Complicating things further is the memory of his kiss and the knowledge that—under different circumstances—she would find him very attractive.  Meanwhile, if Royal is coming off as cold and disapproving of her, it’s only because he’s trying ever-so-hard to keep his newly-realized feelings in check:  “[A]gain and again,” we’re told, “he had to crush down the impulse to repeat the offense [of kissing her]!”  (Oh, these crazy kids and their exclamation marks!)  Still, their outward presentation of a couple is going well enough—that is, until Grandpa’s neighbor Mrs. Devereux comes to visit, bringing along her husband and their friend, Ralph Carew, AKA: June’s old boss, AKA: the only other person who knows she’s lying about her marital status, and who might very well leverage that information for his own nefarious purposes…

 

“The Secret” is a fun story.  It won’t knock your socks off, but it does the fake relationship trope well, and Royal is—overall—a sweet and likeable hero.  June is a little weepy and wishy-washy for my tastes, but she’s still better than the heroine of “Girl Alone,” so I can’t complain too much.  Really, what interests me about “The Secret” is not so much the story itself (which is cute and competent, but that’s about it, to be honest), but more what it represents on the whole.  As discussed in my last vintage fiction article, “The Love-Pulp Heroine Steps Out,” there does seem to be a shift in the romance pulps, right around the early 1930s.  While I can’t yet claim to be particularly well-versed in stories from the 1920s, those I have read tend to be more old-fashioned—the language, plots, and characters (female characters especially) all lean a bit more Victorian in their overall vibes.  But right around 1930 or so, you see this “new” school of romance writing start to take off in the pulps (and eventually take over), one that’s more relaxed in style and more relatably modern in sensibilities.  (“Discard your bustle, darling!” the gas-station-owning heroine of Dorothy Ainsworth’s “Wanted—A Man!” quips to her sister.  “This is 1931, you know!”)  You can even see this reflected in the cover art of the time, with covers of the 1920s often showing women in these very feeble, passive poses—but come the ’30s, the body language (on average) becomes noticeably more confident:

Compare: the April 23rd, 1927 issue of Love Story Magazine vs. the August 26th, 1933 issue.

Now arguably, at least as far as Love Story is concerned, this is Daisy Bacon’s influence at work, as she took over editing duties in 1928 and made the conscious effort to drag the magazine into the 20th century, so to speak—but it may very well point to a larger cultural shift.  And the romance genre has seen similar sorts of sea changes at other points in its history:  In 1972, with The Flame and the Flower and the inception of sex on page; in the early- to mid-’90s, when the genre really starts to move out of the bodice-ripper era and into something less rapey; in 2011, with Fifty Shades of Grey suddenly making erotic romance a viable mainstream thing, as opposed to a subgenre that needs to be confined to independent presses; and I think we saw another, smaller one piggyback in 2018 as a result of the #MeToo movement, where suddenly explicit, enthusiastic consent has become very important.  And so, considering how these more modern shifts correlate with the various waves of feminism (or otherwise coincide with feministic movements), it makes perfect sense to me that romance would have seen a corresponding shift, way back with feminism’s first wave.  (After all, were the 1970s—for example—not similar to the 1930s in a lot of respects?  Both being periods of massive social upheaval and economic depression?)

So what gets me about “The Secret” is that it’s an almost perfect representation of that “old school” style.  The language is distinctly more stilted and formal—not just in word choices, but in sheer structure; the dialogue is downright stiff with a lack of contractions.  June may be more proactive than “Zaida” of the previously-mentioned “Girl Alone,” but that’s damning with faint praise if there ever was such a thing; she’s still a fairly weak, unassertive character at the end of the day.  And then there’s miscommunication between June and Royal, owing to traditional gender politics and gender expectations (though this is admittedly a lot worse in the previous Page story I read, 1931’s “The Way of Her Heart”).  Suffice it to say, it makes me very curious about Muriel Page’s age and background, and how that might have influenced her writing.  (I have tried to look her up, and I have a couple decent leads, but unfortunately “Page” is a common last name, as was the first name “Muriel” back in the day, so…it might take a while, pfft.)  It also makes me curious about those authors who managed to bridge the 1920s and ’30s (and beyond, in some cases)—did their own personal styles change with the times, or did those “old school” qualities keep clinging?

Aside from all that, on a kind-of-related note, one other thing that continues to interest me about pulp romance stories (even the “new school” ones) is how very historical they feel—by which I mean, the tropes they employ and the beats they hit are ones we would now primarily associate with historical romances.  And while they certainly read as historical romances now, due to the passage of time, they were written as contemporaries.  It makes for an odd combination, looking back on them today.  Georgette Heyer is usually credited with inventing the modern historical as we know it (and specifically the Regency romance, as she effectively wrote Jane Austen pastiches), but was there something else in the water of Ye Olde Romancelandia, that we have since forgotten about?  It just gets me thinking, is all.  (And reminds me that I really should get around to reading a Heyer romance one of these days, if only for the cultural literacy; for better or for worse, there’s no denying she had a major impact on the genre.)

But back to “The Secret.”  Would I recommend it?  Sure!  Like I said, it’s cute and competent, though yes, do be aware going in that it has a distinctly antique-ish (as opposed to just the usual vintage) vibe.

 

Random end thoughts:

• My favorite part of the story (and probably the sexiest, overall) comes after June and Royal have been pressed into visiting the Devereuxs for a weekend.  The two have adjoining bedrooms (sorry, folks, you have to wait a few more decades before you get the Only One Bed trope), and at one point Royal comes into June’s room, looking for a needle and thread, as he needs to fix a shirt for that evening’s dinner.  Instead, he finds June napping in a chair, wearing little more than a silk dressing gown.  She wakes up from what passes as a sexy dream about him and does him the favor of mending the shirt, herself, while Royal hangs out in the connecting doorway and sexual tension hovers between them.  (“This is quite a domestic little scene, isn’t it?” he remarks.  “It almost makes one feel that we really are married.”)  We never learn what Royal, himself, is wearing, but I’m choosing to believe he’s similarly underdressed, in either a dressing gown of his own or an undershirt.  ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
• Toward the beginning of the story, in reference to June and Royal’s supposed quarrel, her grandfather says, “In my young days marriage was for better or worse, and it was not for a wife to dictate to her husband whether she should obey him or not.  But times have changed for the worse, I’m thinking.”  Oh, fuck off, Grandpa.  June won’t say it, but I will.
• To bring it back to “The Way of Her Heart,” what put me off of that story even more than the miscommunication is the fact that—if there isn’t outright marital rape—there’s at the very least extremely dubious consent between the hero and heroine.  The whole thing put a bad enough taste in my mouth that I never even wanted to revisit it enough to write a basic summary for my Pulp Romance Guide.  However, that was toward the beginning of my pulp adventures, before I really had a good sense of context, so I probably should revisit it; to date, it’s the only pulp romance story I’ve read that actually features sex (fade-to-black, but still), and furthermore the sex gets discussed (albeit obliquely) after the fact, so that alone probably makes it worth a closer inspection.  Anyway, if you happen to want to check it out for yourself in the meantime, you can find it in the April 25th, 1931 issue of Love Story.
• Muriel Page (to bring it back to her, specifically) doesn’t seem to have been terribly prolific, publishing only seven stories according to The FictionMags Index, all in Love Story, and all between 1930 and 1932.  Hard to say if I’ll be able to hunt any more of them down, but maybe I’ll keep my eye out.
• I linked directly to “Wanted—A Man!” by Dorothy Ainsworth up above, but let it be known that—while I never wrote a formal review for the story—it is listed in the aforementioned Pulp Romance Guide.  (Yanno, in case you want an actual summary.)

 

And now I’ll end with this neat little illustration from the story.  Based on the style and the shape of the “M,” the artist might be P.J. Monahan?  But don’t quote me on that.

Why aren’t they smooching?  Presumably it’s depicting the first time they meet, so they should be smooching!

Tagged: 1930s, daisy bacon, love story magazine, muriel page, pulp, romance, short stories, the secret