By Arlene J. Fitzgerald, ©1966
Cover illustration by Mort Engel
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“A pagan wouldn’t have
bothered with formalities. He would simply have dragged you off to his lair by
those corn silk tresses and had his way with you. Perhaps I should try that.”
“Dedicate yourself to the cause you were made for—that of making a man happy.”
“When you’re tired of mopping sweat and grime from rugged brows, come back to me, darling. Maybe by then you’ll be ready to shed that noble white garment, and settle down to being my lovely and obedient bride.”
“She always liked to start a new case feeling as fresh and crisp as the pert, white cap perched on top of her shining head which looked like a spread winged dove ready to take flight.”
REVIEW:
Arlene Fitzgerald is one of
those writers whose work sometimes tiptoes the fine line between clever and
stupid. Is it bad writing or hilarious camp when the nurse and her heartthrob
doctor make out over the still-warm body of a patient who has just died, or
when a bum for some unfathomable reason decides to eat the powder he discovers
in the stomach of a dead fish he’s found on the beach and overdoses on cocaine?
It’s a rhetorical question not easily answered, but in the case of Log Camp Nurse it’s essentially moot,
because no such hilariously bizarre scenes unfold. Rather here Arlene has given
us a clearly dull book without much interest or camp in this falsely advertised
log camp, though we are subject to a
few of her more annoying quirks (the nurse’s penchant for “ligating” or “clamping”
or “tying off” or “severing” a thought or feeling frequently occurring behind
her sternum with “the cold, firm scalpel of nurse’s discipline”), plus a few of
the usual VNRN hackneyed plot devices that make no sense whatsoever.
Here we find Tove Jansen (because Arlene loves the unusual name—witness Key and Glee and Stag) visiting her father in a logging camp similar to the ones she grew up in because her dad is a timber man, when a flood doesn’t actually trap her there. But when she’s driving out of the mountains she encounters a truck that has crashed, killing the passenger and severely injuring the driver. The next car that comes along just happens to contain the handsomely homely camp doctor, Russ Bryden, who kisses her in the road before rescuing the injured man, so she decides to quit her job in Cosmo Beach in a hospital for wealthy hypochondriacs who all appear to be female. But she can’t quite bring herself to also abandon her not-quite-fiancĂ© Paul Sleeter, who she swears she loves but actually does not like very much (on pretty much every other page we are told how “handsome, suave, sophisticated, ambitious,” “polished” and “immaculate” he is, while being assured that “she had tried to convince herself she did love Paul” even as “the glamour of being married to a man like Paul had worn thin” and as she pants for Dr. Russ, who “made her heart act up” and “did things to her that Paul had never been able to do, even in their most tender moments”).
Most of the book involves Tove and Russ being hauled from one emergency to another, Tove somehow being the only healthcare professional available any time a woman goes into labor (for a camp with a population of several hundred, babies are born on a startlingly frequent basis), which means appalling preparations of shaving and enemas and sterile “technic” for a completely unsterile vaginal birth and shoving the husband out the door (one of whom is suspected of heading straight into the arms of the camp prostitute because his wife’s pregnant body is so unattractive, causing the woman to decide that she will not be having any more children). Paul makes the obligatory appearance in the humble logging camp to assist in a splenectomy for a patient who had been shot, an astonishingly dry surgery for a patient who we are told is bleeding out. During his little visit he affectionately assures his would-be bride that “if I thought that homely, red- headed doctor had done anything to smirch your conscience—or that you had allowed him to—I’d kill you both, darling.” And so he continues to win Tove’s admiration as well as ours.
You know where this book is
headed from the first chapter, and Arlene gives us none of her fantastic
flights of reality to enliven the story in this frankly dull book. Even the end—the
ubiquitous mine cave-in in which Tove is the only person small enough to
squeeze through the tiny opening in the rocks to administer the live-giving
treatment of tucking a wool blanket around the man with a crushed chest, and the
too-soon appearance of Dr. Russ, who manages to get through with two additional
men and a stretcher about ten minutes later—is boring. We know Arlene is
capable of delivering a lot more laughs—again, whether intentional or not,
whether out of delight or derision, involves a much longer discussion—but the
end result is that in Log Camp Nurse
she does not give us anything worth reading, for better or for worse.
