Resistant Wife

Enough to alarm the woman-wary is the contemporary trend to novels and memoirs by writers' wives and mistresses. Few years ago Arnold Bennett's mistress, Dorothy Cheston-Bennett, and his wife, Marguerite, published their intimate memoirs. About the same time appeared the memoirs of D. H. Lawrence's wife, Frieda. While these memoirs spilled plenty of beans, at least they were withheld until their subjects were dead. Not so Half A Loaf, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel by Sinclair Lewis' exwife, Grace Hegger.

Latest such old wife's tale is Madeleine Boyd's novel, Life Makes Advances (Little, Brown, $2.75), by the separated wife (now a Manhattan literary agent) of an elegant Manhattan ex-critic. While husband's and wife's names are fictitious, Author Boyd confesses the characters are real.

Nicole was an egoistic, adventurous, impressionable, plain-looking, book-loving French girl. Her motto, borrowed from a religious martyr, was Resist. "Resisting" many a Frenchman, Nicole at 18 went to Dublin to teach French in a language school. When she met Michael Brandon, handsome journalist, and budding diplomat, her resistance collapsed--against the universal warning of her friends, who called him arrogant, priggish, sadistic and a lot besides.

Married to Michael shortly before he sailed in 1913 to become British vice consul at Baltimore, she suddenly gave her motto a new focus. From then on she resisted her Protestant upbringing and Michael. It is this part of the story which is enough to scare male readers about literate wives and mistresses--a recital of love affairs, bedroom lyricism, plate throwing, tongue lashings, a self-righteous exposure of everything from Michael's lack of ambition to his dirty hairbrushes.

Properly, such human documents should be reviewed by a psychiatrist. No one else could satisfy the reader's main curiosity, namely, what motives of exhibitionism, just grievance or resentment against a male-dominated world prompt the writings of such a book. Madeleine Boyd does a thorough job in messing up the portrait of the elegant husband. But she herself does not come through looking as though she were dressed for church.

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