Book Review: The Life of Doris Summerday

Readers of A Weird Occasional, Number One who enjoyed the strange adventures of Findlay Sackett may be interested in an additional review of his obscure melodrama, The Life of Doris Summerday. 

- Christopher Tompkins 

Thanks to David Tibet for pointing out this forgotten review of a forgotten book.

A FEMALE MEGALOMANIAC; DORIS SUMMERDAY By Findlay Sackett. 290 pp. New York: E.R. Starr Company.

Front Cover (Collection of the Author)

The story of Doris Summerday is the story of a female megalomaniac. By putting it in the first person Mr. Sackett steals a march on critics of this romantic melodrama. The naive utterances of Doris can be explained as in character, and her rather simple addiction to explaining everything she does or thinks as “womanly,” and therefore to be expected from her, is also quite in keeping. You wouldn't want a heartless, shallow, unsophisticated child of the Kentucky mountains to speak with the tongue of a wise angel, would you?

Nothing seems to affect Doris Summerday. Her lover from the outside world, Gaspard Louville, means little to her save as a symbol of escape from the rural regions. When she is the cause of the death of her mountain sweetheart, Jasper Hoadley, it seems not to make a mark on her conscience. She is forever explaining herself in slick, facile terms. On Page 33 she speaks of her "womanly integrity"; on Page 35 she refers to her “woman's perception”; on Page 37 she mentions a “woman's faith in clairvoyance"; and on Page 38 she varies the formula a bit by talking of a “man's conceit.” On Page 88 occurs the sentence: “I was a woman with a woman's longing for physical comfort, but withal a woman's respect that urged me to reject it at the price at which it was offered to me." She thinks of herself as the woman, and though she never compares herself to Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, Manon Lescaut and other women for all time, it is perfectly patent that if she had ever heard of the great women of the world she would consider herself the twentieth century sister of this group.

The story of Doris Summerday is episodic. She begins as a mountain girl, although she is born with lowland heritage. She has a mountain sweetheart, but deserts him with a virtual snap of her fingers when the well-dressed stranger from New Orleans comes along. When Jasper, her mountain boy, gets killed by the supposed “revenoo” men, she leaves the mountains and her mother, bound for her father's people. She wanders into a house of ill repute, quite innocently, and there she meets her cousin, Harold Summerday, who undertakes to bring her to her father's people. Harold turns out to be a grasping cad, quite willing to sacrifice Doris for money. In the end he persuades her to go South with him and pose as a boy. She does this, rides a horse for him in a race, is thrown and the hoax is discovered. Harold runs off, leaving her to Fate. And then she is brought to trial for the murder of Jasper Hoadley back in Kentucky, but she is saved from conviction by her New Orleans lover, Gaspard, who makes a timely appearance. The whole tale, while it might be credible if told with more attention to the mortar between the solid bricks of the “big scenes,” seems, as Doris tells it, quite hollow and fictitious.

New York Times, July 3, 1927, Page 12