Judging from what I’ve learned of her life, Kathryn Hulme (1900-1981) had the makings of several other autobiographical novels besides We Lived as Children. Hulme was born and raised in San Francisco. She studied at Berkeley before heading to New York to begin a journalistic career. She married in 1925 and divorced three years later. Her first book appeared in 1928 and her first novel in 1932. Hulme spent much of the 1930s in Paris, where she joined a group of gay and bisexual women who studied with the Armenian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff. She returned to the United States during the war, at one point becoming a welder at the Kaiser shipyard, then went back to Europe to supervise refugee camps. Hulme left that work in 1951, moved to Phoenix, converted to Catholicism and wrote The Wild Place, an award-winning account of the refugee problem. Her next novel, based on the life of a former co-worker, Marie Louise Habets, was A Nun’s Story (1956). The book became a best seller and was later adapted for a hit movie starring Audrey Hepburn. Hulme moved again, this time to Hawaii. There she set up housekeeping with Habets and wrote several other books, the last of which appeared in 1974. Whew!
We Lived as Children by Kathryn Hulme. Knopf (1938), 325 pp.
The story opens in San Francisco just before the 1906 earthquake. Kay, aged five or six at the time, is trying to figure out her relationship with her father, Frank, the owner of a woolen mill. He doesn’t live with the rest of the family -- mother Laura, sister Jen and brother Buzz -- or see his children often. But when he does show up, he treats them to a wonderful day. Kay’s mother is always excited to see him, but the two don’t ever spend more than a few minutes together. Then the word gets out: Frank is going marry again. He’s going to be more distant from his children than ever but not so far that they lose hope that he’ll return to the family one day.
The blurb on its dust jacket calls this book “delightful.” And that may be true in so far as it describes Kay’s adventures, told in a reminiscent first person, as she grows up in the first decades of the last century. Even her reactions to the earthquake and fire are recalled with childlike charm. Hulme aims to do more than delight, however. Later she wrote that she wanted to demonstrate the evils of divorce. What she actually does is quietly and indirectly show that Kay’s father is a perfect bastard. Cold, callous and self-involved, he’s hardly the sort of man who could have lived up to the fantasies of his children if he had stayed in his first marriage. Whatever meaning readers assign to the novel, they are likely to be drawn into the lives of its characters. The book deserves a large audience.
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