The Long Loneliness

Day enters into a common law marriage with a man whom she has fallen in love with. Forster is a biologist who, though he hails from England, has grown up in North Carolina. He has spent World War One sick with influenza and does not recover until the war is over. When she meets him, he is still working on gaining back the 75 pounds his illness has taken. He is a decentralist, anti-industrialist, southern agrarian. Both have a diverse friend group.

Day enjoys reading by the beach on Staten Island while Forster fishes. This is a joyous period of her life and she begins to pray often. She also befriends her neighbors, many of them foreigners, but some from Manhattan. Day compares them to the characters of certain writers:

Sasha and Freda, their relatives and children, were a Gerhardi story which I read from day to day with a great deal of interest; Malcolm and Peggy were Huxley or Waugh, smart and rather consciously sophisticated. Pierre, the bootlegger, and his wife were of Knut Hamsun (117).

Forster himself is a quiet man who only becomes verbose when he is angry. His irritation is often caused by Day’s “absorption in the supernatural rather than the natural, the unseen rather than the seen” (120).