The Outward Room (New York Review Books Classics)
Millen Brand
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1590173597
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Outward Room is a book about a young woman’s journey from madness to self-discovery. It created a sensation when it was first published in 1937, and has lost none of its immediacy or its power to move the reader.
Having suffered a nervous breakdown after her brother’s death in a car accident, Harriet Demuth is committed to a mental hospital, but her doctor’s Freudian nostrums do little to make her well. Convinced that she and she alone can refashion her life, Harriet makes a daring escape from the hospital—hopping a train by night and riding the rails into the vastness of New York City in the light of the rising sun. It is the middle of the Great Depression, and at first Harriet is lost among the city’s anonymous multitudes. She pawns her jewelry and lives an increasingly hand-to-mouth existence until she meets John, a machine-shop worker. Slowly Harriet begins to recover her sense of self; slowly she and John begin to fall in love. The story of that emerging love, told with the lyricism of Virginia Woolf and the realism of Theodore Dreiser, is the heart of Millen Brand’s remarkable book.
only her own death but the death of the years in the hospital. She pressed her face into her hands, Forget, take away death. She pushed back her hair and looked downward at the man. He was motionless, his eyes closed, breathing evenly. Eyelids. Once in the hospital she had been awakened at night and feeling restless had gone into Miss Cummings’ room. Miss Cummings was lying still; all at once she had thought that she was dead. Her eyelids in particular had the blank look, the fixity of death. As
“Do you think I’ll have a baby?” He smiled. “You might, but it doesn’t happen so easily, usually. We’ll have to be more careful, though.” “How do you mean?” He explained. “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know that.” Repulsion, again the world as something unknown; the man singing in the evening behind the rooming house: threat. Accept, take it as it is. And looking again at John, at his face and particularly his shadowed eyes, she regained suddenly the knowledge of his understanding, of his identity
geometric tiers, were other parapeted roofs which held not so much moonlight as the city’s light reflected downward from the sky. The sky had no night; pale in the center, it rayed to a nervous horizon which threshed with electric signs. Continually loud, El trains passed throwing flares of blue sparks. Harriet looked for the Cathedral; it appeared to the north, its latticed scaffolding thin in the distance. Turning, she looked for Mr. Tannik. Mr. Tannik, by himself, stood at the edge of the
for the first time: a persistent gray and even sound that was the spring itself. Revealing again the surface of the courtyard, giving it its wetness. As she sat thinking of it, the gate clanged. Driven by an impulse, the same that had made her go out into the sun in the afternoon, she ran from the room and down the stairs. At the lower house door she saw him coming; he was framed against the outside light, the air of spring. Machines, Victory. She ran and threw herself against him, held him.
he had been alive, they had always had a party. Friends, relatives had come, but in her memory she saw only him, his tall straight figure, his face across the candles on the cake. “Blow them out,” he always said to her and she seemed to smell the smoke of the extinguished candles and feel her breath going to him. Brother— Too late. “Be not children in understanding” Steps sounded in the building and Rocco’s dog barked. Her thought was broken; she heard the sound of the city, faint cries, the