THE PEARL OF HER SEX,
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1947, pp. 182,$2.50.
Little did I think as I used to watch the author of this book playing the piano in the local moving picture parlors or sitting in English 26 (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday at 8 a. m.) through a bygone winter of the Big Snow, that he would ever find himself, in the unpredictable future, chopping up gumdrops for something horridly called a gumdrop cake. Yet it came to pass. This and other matters of personal history Mr. Cunningham reveals in his book entitled, very appropriately, The Pearl of Her Sex.
Actually the part played in the book by gumdrop cake, and such other alarming delicacies as sugared fish, is a relatively minor one. The greater number of the perplexities, dilemmas, and tribulations that beset the not-too-dominant male in this family chronicle are made out of more familiar materials, such as daughters, pets, maids, vacations, weekend visits, outdoor cooking, shopping expeditions, Christmas, la grippe. Yet do not misunderstand me. In Mr. Cunningham's telling none of these things is usual. Each incident, each tribulation becomes a unique experience, undergone and narrated by an unmistakable personality. Even given the ingredients, no other human being could possibly have written this book.
The book is funny, genuinely funny; at times very funny. But it is more than a funny book. It is constructed on a basis of bedrock family solidarity, and the author manages to convey something which any way you look at it is bound to be pretty serious—the span of a man's life, from its starting point (the starting point of the author's life is pretty clearly when he met the Pearl of Her Sex) through the years—and they were never dull ones—to the marriage of a daughter. The fixed point, the constant element, in all this history is, of course, the Pearl of Her Sex. Mr. Cunningham makes us like her. He makes us like her very much. He makes us like, a little breathlessly at times, the whole family.
Included in the book is Mr. Cunningham's fine and well-known wartime story about the boy next door. Included also is his account of his interview, years ago, with Mussolini, when the palace guards stopped him at the threshold to remove from his left hip pocket an extrasized bottle of milk of magnesia which he had scoured Rome to procure for the Pearl of Her Sex.
