Making Do

By Christopher Porterfield

LAURA Z: A LIFE by Laura Z. Hobson

Arbor House; 410 pages; $17.95

Novelist Laura Z. Hobson (Gentleman's Agreement, Consenting Adult) suggests that the really basic human drives cannot be deterred. Murder, for instance, or war, or the neurotic love of a woman for a man who has hurt her. About the last, Hobson should know. Most of the men in her long life--she is now 83--seem to have turned out faithless or spineless, or both, and she has given them all ample opportunity to prove it.

During the 1920s, a spendthrift charmer named Tom Mount lived with (and on) Hobson for five years while remaining married to another woman. Hobson endured two abortions, one without anesthesia, before Mount went off to Tahiti to write. A six-year marriage to well-heeled Publisher Thayer Hobson proved more placid, until he stunned her one evening by announcing over the demitasse that he was leaving her for another woman. Looking back on that divorce, what makes her "boil with fury" is the thought that "any woman (most women?) should feel her life exploded into shreds and shards because a man leaves her." Her next great love was Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, founder of the shortlived (1940-48) New York newspaper PM. Before accepting his proposal, she wanted to be sure that they could have children; once she became pregnant, however, Ingersoll backed out. She later miscarried.

Yet for someone reduced to shreds and shards, Hobson certainly made do. She rose through jobs in newspapers and advertising to become a highly successful promotion writer; from 1934 to 1940, she was a promotion director for Time Inc. As befitted the daughter of prominent socialists (her father was Michael Zametkin, first editor of the Jewish Daily Forward), she flung herself into liberal causes. In a bold step for the 1930s, she adopted a son despite her single status. Bolder still, she went on to bear a son in secret without notifying the father; then, for the sake of appearances and the other child, she contrived to go through the motions of adopting the second one too.

Her friends were often famous, like Dorothy Thompson and Clare Boothe Luce. As she recalls life with the smart set, Hobson falls into a modish, woman's magazine tone in which even problems sound like boons. In 1942 her idea of dire indebtedness was owing rent to the Vincent Astor offices for her East Side apartment and a clothing tab to Bergdorf s. For all her social concern, political events are sometimes invoked as if they were backdrops for her personal dramas, as in a rendezvous with Ingersoll: "When he arrived, my rehearsed words went out the window ... For in the world at large ... all ordinary life seemed changed overnight: Germany was invading Russia."

Still, Hobson's book reflects formidable energy and grit, and it ends with an account of a genuine triumph: her stinging 1947 bestseller about antiSemitism, Gentleman's Agreement. Publishing it amounted to breaking a conspiracy of silence and shouting out one of middle-class America's nastiest little secrets. Hobson was undeterred as usual, even by resistance from an unexpected quarter. Among six or eight people whom she consulted before publication, she notes, the general advice was to "go ahead from Christians, and not go ahead from Jews." --By Christopher Porterfield This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.