Hutchins, Maude (Phelps) McVeigh

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HUTCHINS, Maude (Phelps) McVeigh

Born 4 February 1902 (?), New York, New York

Daughter of Warren R. and Maude Phelps McVeigh; married Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1921 (divorced 1948)

Maude McVeigh Hutchins was educated at St. Margaret's School in Waterbury, Connecticut, and received a B.F.A. degree from Yale University in 1926. Divorced in 1948, Hutchins settled in Connecticut with her children. Talented not only in writing but also in the plastic arts, Hutchins published poems and short stories in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, Accent, Mademoiselle, Nation, Epoch, Poetry, and the Quarterly Review of Literature; and her sculpture was exhibited in one-woman shows in St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York.

A Diary of Love (1950), originally banned by British customs as well as by the police censor board in Chicago, is a three-part recollection of a young girl's initiation into adulthood. The diary's exordium explains that the entries are ex post facto, written years after the events took place. The gap in time allows Noel's sophisticated and knowledgeable perspective to enhance and deepen her adolescent experiences. The first part presents the earliest stimuli and those persons who provide negative lessons in sensitivity. The second part takes place in a sanitarium in the desert, where Noel convalesces for a number of years from tuberculosis. Here, too, the propriety and routine do not preclude erotic undercurrents, and the more imminent death appears to the patients, the more important sensuality and eroticism become. After Noel returns home, in the final part, she falls in love with Dominick and they share an intimate awareness of sensual experimentation. Their near-perfect relationship continues until the honeymoon night, when Dominick's unconscious desires are revealed. As he cries out, in his sleep, his mother's mythical name, Leda, Noel immediately understands his incestuous feelings. Neither she nor Dominick can alter the spontaneous direction of eroticism, and she silently acknowledges the permanence of her rival.

Noel's remark, "I imagined love as a pie, a slice for each," provides the title for Hutchins' collection of short stories, sketches, plays, and monologues. Love Is a Pie (1952) is somewhat uneven in quality. A more sustained work is the novel Victorine (1959), which, like A Diary of Love, presents a young woman's journey from innocence to experience. Various persons emerge from a multitude of impressions to guide Victorine through successive passages to maturity.

Honey on the Moon (1964), like A Diary of Love, is written from the first person, Hutchins' most successful point of view. Sigourney, a twenty-year-old girl from Connecticut, marries Derek, a forty-year-old suave bachelor from New York City. Lonely for the simplicity of her single life, Sigourney discovers on her honeymoon that Derek's graciousness and élan are tempered by his aloofness from her and his fascination with haute fashion, homosexuals, and transvestites. Once she realizes that he has married her for her astonishing resemblance to a former lover, Sigourney's sanity deteriorates. Aiming a pistol at her husband, Sigourney fires too late, and when a second shot is fired, the reader cannot be sure if Sigourney has killed herself or merely hallucinated.

Most of Hutchins' novels trace the emerging sensuality of a young and acutely sensitive female protagonist. A Diary of Love opens as Noel delicately and deliberately crushes ripe raspberries against her tongue, relishing their "sweet disintegration." Similarly, the protagonist of Honey on the Moon feels the physical vibrations down through her limbs from repeating the word "husband." As the sensibilities of these women develop, random objects are supplanted by specific individuals, both male and female, who stimulate and refine new experiences and sensations. In Victorine, for example, the young girl is guided by her half-witted friend, "Fool Fred," to share his vision of a magnificent white stallion, a vision poised ambiguously between their fantasies and reality. In Hutchins' work, such epiphanies are crucial, but only intermittent, during the maturation process.

Hutchins balances her heroines' perceptions between fantasy and the real, but sometimes they are too weak to maintain that balance; they are nevertheless consistently sensitive and appealing. It is through their ingenuous perceptions that Hutchins manages to combine a frank eroticism with succinct and elegant language. She was praised highly by Anaïs Nin (in The Novel of the Future) for her vivid and cinematic love scenes and for her attention to the senses and the emotions. Hutchins is at her best when suggesting evanescent moments of sensual apprehension that mark the transition from childhood to womanhood. For her honesty, subtlety, and graceful style, Hutchins deserves greater study from readers and critics.