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Via Bodenbach, by Ferenc Körmendi (1935)

via Bodenbach by Ference Körmendi

If you ever want to experience what it was like to take a train in Europe in the mid-1930s, read Via Bodenbach. Ferenc Körmendi wrote it as an experiment in the use of interior monologue, taking the reader, through the thoughts of George Kovacs, a Hungarian engineer, moment by moment, as he travels from Budapest to Berlin. We walk along the platform to the compartment he’s tipped the porter to hold. It’s an early train, going via Prague and Bodenbach, allowing him to reach Berlin in time for a good night’s sleep at a hotel. He wants to be fresh for his visit to the factory where the electrical device he’s invented will be manufactured. With any luck, this device will make his fortune.

He’s early, so early he regrets tipping the porter. Few passengers have boarded, there are plenty of compartments. He decides to get a paper, a German film magazine — something to read. When he returns to the compartment, there is a woman just settling in. “A girl, no Hungarian, quite pretty.” She apologizes in German for shutting the window (it’s cold). Not German, either, probably Czech. A boy enters, followed by an older gentleman. There is the settling of bags and overcoats, apologies in Hungarian, then in German. Everyone understands German? Yes, then they’ll stick with German.

The train begins to pull out of the station. “It’s moving. Daddy, the train’s moving,” the boy says excitedly. So, they’re father and son. “Dear little boy,” the woman says, “How well he behaves.” Oh, he’s not little: almost thirteen. Father prods the son to introduce himself. There are introductions all around. The Szabos. The woman is Alice Morek: yes, definitely Czech. “May we ask where you are going to?” says the father. “Podmokly,” she replies. He’s puzzled. “Bodenbach, you probably know it by that name.”

Bodenbach, Czechosolvakia, before World War Two.

On the one hand, this is all mundane, just minutiae. The chit-chat continues, gracious but not overly friendly. How many more pages of this? you may wonder. But Kovacs is suspicious, petty, insecure. Not pathologically, just … well, human. And so a low-keyed, superficially polite battle of the stags begins. The elder Szabo is bound to lose, of course. He and his son are changing trains in Prague. Kovacs will still be in the compartment with Alice Morek after they leave.

In the course of the next few hours, Kovacs subtly edges out Mr. Szabo. Alice agrees to dine with him in the restaurant car. They head down the corridor, edging past the first diners. A couple of aristocratic men who pass “at their distance of five hundred years’ exclusivity, aloof and distant.” Cross from one coach to the next:

Second-class coach corridor empty a compartment door half open smoke tall blonde woman in red slippers lying not sleeping alone sleeping all the way to Berlin I might have come along here too lazy it doesn’t matter now I’m not so badly off where I am empty compartment here they’ve already gone to the restaurant car two suit-cases in the rack another empty compartment lots of luggage the door opposite’s open cold wind it’s going to rain these have gone as well or there wasn’t anybody here oh yes there was luggage and newspapers on the seat a half compartment one man alone eating sandwiches on the table in front of him no need of railway food for poisoning another coach if it crumpled up the end of the train’s empty another empty compartment one suit-case on the rack he was eating from a plate his wife must have packed it another. .. .

They lunch, have coffee. She is friendly now, but not yet warm. But Kovacs slowly grows obsessed. Each bit of information she offers he places like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, trying to construct her story. On the way back from lunch, he forces her into an empty compartment, forces a kiss on her. He begins to think: maybe I will get off in Bodenbach, take her to a hotel, seduce her, run off with her.

What he’s considering is mad, of course, reckless, but now it’s like each thought follows the next faster and faster, like we’re descending a spiral staircase, picking up speed, until we’re running, taking terrible risks. Will Kovacs abandon his carefully planned journey, go flying out of his neat and comfortable life in pursuit of Alice Morek? She has given him no encouragement, even protests that his conduct was abusive. When he tells her he’s going to get off in Bodenbach, too, that he intends to run off with her, she protests: he’s mad, she wants nothing to do with him. But will he persist? We cringe as Kovacs keeps stepping closer and closer to disaster.

Via Bodenbach is something of a tour de force. On the surface, it’s an extraordinarily detailed and precise account of one man’s journey by train through three countries, from early morning to after midnight. Underneath, though, it’s a walk along a tightrope strung between a complacent life in Budapest and the prospect of a successful partnership in Berlin suddenly complicated by the presence of this woman, a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman. Kovacs is not a sympathetic character, but that’s one of the reasons the narrative develops such compelling momentum: we know we wouldn’t be heartbroken if he goes tumbling off the rope and ends up a broken, bloody heap. A fascinating experiment — and a journey I’d be willing to take again.

(And yes, if you’re keeping score, this is the second Hungarian novel I’ve written about in which a man in a train meets a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman (see Farewell My Heart, by Ferenc Molnar. Coincidence? Plagiaristic inspiration? A common trait among Ferencs? Who knows?)


Via Bodenbach, by Ferenc Körmendi
London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1935

The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede (1948)

Publishing used to be a much different business, and no one could better attest to that than Donald Friede. After being kicked out of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, a job in the stockroom of Alfred A. Knopf convinced him that he wanted to be a publisher. The novelist Manuel Komroff (little read today) then hired him as his assistant in the production department of Boni & Liveright, t
one of the hot publishers of the early 1920s. Soon after, thanks to a small fortune from his father’s exclusive rights to sell Ford motorcars to Russia (until the Revolution, of course), he was able to walk into the office of Horace Liveright and buy his way into owning half the company. It entitled him, as he puts it, to “a ringside seat at a show that has never been equaled, and probably never will be: the literary explosion of the 1920s.”

And not just the literary. Still flush with his father’s cash, he bankrolled the avante-garde composer George Antheil, whom he’d met when the two of them were rushing to witness Charles Lindbergh’s landing at Le Bourget airfield after his successful solo crossing of the Atlantic (just a minor event in Friede’s frantic narrative). He brought Antheil and his wife back to New York, rented Carnegie Hall, and kept signing checks for the composer’s ever more grandiose notions (towering skyscraper backdrops, a real firehouse siren, a wind machine). The plan was for Antheil to debut for the American audience his Ballet Mechanique, debuted the previous season in Paris, along with his Jazz Symphony. Up to the last minute Antheil was coming up with new ideas and Friede was running around trying to materialize them.

The actual performance turned out to be one of the great disasters of musical history. With all the last-minute changes, the musicians were ill-rehearsed, the music too jarring for much of the audience, and then the wind machine ran amok and subjected the front rows to a minor hurricane. News of the fiasco devastated Antheil’s musical career for years. As Friede recalls,

He hated me so very much that a few years later, under a nom de plume, he wrote a detective story about me, in the opening pages of which he had the reader discover me dead in bed, a knife stuck in my back. In the balance of the book he managed to kill off my mother, my wife, and my brother, as well as a psychiatrist whom he had met through me. It was a very thorough job and had excellent cathartic results, as our present friendship proves.

Friede was able to turn his attention back to publishing. Boni & Liveright, along with other American publishers, were enjoying a moment almost never experienced since Gutenberg invented moveable type: “There were simply not enough books being printed to supply the demand.” Publishers were chasing after every writer worth his salt and more than a few who weren’t. Some of the worst books credited to Maxwell Bodenheim and Heywood Broun, for example, can be attributed to the desperation of publishers who would take anything of 40,000 words or more and slap it between a pair of boards.

Donald Friede, off in search of new manuscripts in the late 1920s.

But frenzied quest for manuscripts didn’t develop the best critical judgment. Fried turned down the rights to Charles Lindbergh’s memoir of his flight, We. “No thanks,” he said. “He’ll be forgotten in six months.” We went on to become one of the biggest bestsellers of the decade. He rushed to Paris to try to persuade James Joyce to give him the American rights to Ulysses. He felt he’d win over the author by presenting him with an exclusive American edition he’d had printed just for this meeting. Joyce opened the book, noted that the colophon page credited Friede as the copyright holder, and cooly dismissed him.

That was one of a string of missed opportunities that led Friede to wander out to Chicago to meet the bookseller Pascal (Pat) Covici, who was starting to create his own literary empire. The pair got to brainstorming and Friede returned to New York with plans to set up a new publishing house: Covici-Friede. Covici and his wife moved east, and soon a five-person company (Covici, Friede, their wives, and a stock clerk) was established on West Forty-Fifth Street. Unfortunately, what they lacked was a catalog. For 1928, they relied mostly on very expensive limited editions of tasteful erotica (sketches by Alexander King) and reissues of The Sweet Singer of Michigan by Mrs. Julia Moore, which Friede admits was “probably the worst volume of poetry ever written by anybody, anywhere.”

They courted Theodore Dreiser, passed on a thousand-page first novel called O Lost! that went to Scribner’s, fell into the masterful hands of Maxwell Perkins, and emerged two years later as Look Homeward, Angel. Slowly, they began to sign better books and better writers. Wyndham Lewis (when people still bought his books) and Joseph Moncure March’s boxing poem The Set-Up. Their breakthrough came when they bought the American rights to Radclyffe Hall’s then-revolutionary lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Condemned as obscene in England, the book had to pass the scrutiny of the New York Court of Special Sessions, but the court ruled it acceptable and its scandalous reputation made it an instant bestseller.

Flush with pride in their critical judgments, they then listened in rapture as Ben Hecht laid out his ideas for the book that would be his magnum opus, certainly the greatest of the Great American Novels, to be titled Deliaga. As Hecht’s chapters dribbled in, however, his creative desperation was only surpassed by their dread that they’d bought an unpublishable heap of yecch. Having already sold hundreds of copies as pre-orders, they grabbed a Hecht short story that was lying around and talked him into padding it out to become A Jew in Love.

With the Great Depression now well upon them, Covici-Friede entered what Friede calls their “deadly serious, if-it-isn’t-proletarian-it-can’t-be-good phase.” And they had a good prospect for making headways with this line thanks to John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men. Unfortunately, not good enough. Their creditors came knocking and Covici-Friede closed in 1938. Pat Covici moved over the Viking and signed Steinbeck’s next big novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Friede decided to try Hollywood.

At this point, a good editor would have told Donald Friede to wrap things up. The subtitle of The Mechanical Angel is, after all, “His adventures and enterprises in the glittering 1920s,” and here we are in the late 1930s, when glitter was still a scarce commodity outside the movies. Friede also entered a long period of wandering, short-lived enterprises, and marriages (including to the food writer M. F. K. Fisher in the late 1940s) — none of which he discusses here.

Instead, he pads out the book with a series of thematic chapters (I know you’re dying to read about his hobby of building radios) and what must bluntly be called old fart pontifications. The giddy fun of the crazy world of publishing, art, music, and drinking in the 1920s gets rehashed for its moral lessons and neither reader nor writer are the better for it. There are about 240 pages and 19 chapters in The Mechanical Angel. Stop at the end of Chapter 11 and you’ll thank me.


The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948

Farewell My Heart, by Ferenc Molnar (1945)

I found a copy of Ferenc Molnar’s little novel Farewell My Heart in Ravenswood Used Books while visiting Chicago recently. It was the sort of book that’s easy to miss on a shelf: no dust jacket, the spine broken and its lettering faded. For me, though, sitting between familiar titles by Vilhelm Moberg and Toni Morrison, it was an orphan crying out for a closer look. I recognized Molnar’s name but only knew him as a dramatist (Liliom, later made into the musical Carousel, among others). I soon found more than enough reasons to buy it: its size (8″x5″, just about the ideal for a book that’s pleasant to hold AND read; the nostalgic disclaimer “ABOUT THE APPEARANCE OF BOOKS IN WARTIME” on the colophon page; and a couple of opening lines that guaranteed I’d want to go on:

“Religion?” The Italian officer in the Fascist uniform asked, holding my passport in his hand.

The train had been standing at the border station between Switzerland and Italy for a long time.

Wherever this story was going to go, I was willing to follow.

And did. However, let me disclose up front that though I thoroughly enjoyed Farewell My Heart, it cannot be held up as anything more than an entertaining minor novel. In fact, it reminded me of those times when I’ve been in the mood to see a movie and taken whatever happened to be showing without being too discriminating — and been rewarded by something unexpected and memorable if not quite a masterpiece. Many years ago, I had to quickly shepherd some younger cousins out of my grandparents’ house to get them away from a family meltdown. I took them to the nearest multiplex and into the next available showing — Breaking Away. I don’t know what they thought of it, but for me it was not only far better than sitting through a screaming match but a movie I’ve been fond of ever since.

Farewell My Heart is about the unexpected, too. Its unnamed narrator is a fifty-something Hungarian journalist, a Jew who’s managed to shift some money to America without losing it in the Crash — enough to qualify for that rare and coveted object, an American visa. As he travels from Budapest, “At every border the poor, underpaid passport officials had started with that same strange expression at the American visa. As if it were some foreign coin which, though it had no value in their own country, they felt was very valuable.”

His train stops at Lausanne and a young red-haired woman boards and takes the seat next to him. She is also Hungarian, he learns, a twenty-year-old named Edith, and has a ticket on the same ship leaving Genoa for New York. She is pretty — but, he is quick to tell us, “let’s be absolutely frank, she was conventionally pretty — and let’s be even franker, there was something in her character, in her appearance, in her look, in her voice, that was reminiscent of the typical Budapest streetwalker.”

Edith soon abandons him for a Finnish diplomat — younger, more confident, better dressed than the narrator — until their itineraries diverge and she takes up again with the journalist. This pattern will be repeated on board the ship to America, in the cheap hotel they take rooms in upon arrival in New York, and over their first months in the new country.

The narrator is a cautious man, careful with his money and his health, having already been diagnosed as having a weak heart. He avoids leading Edith to think he has any interest in her other than as a companion, and when she decides to latch onto a young Hungarian dancer and go with him to try their luck in Hollywood, he offers her only a little money and encouragement. Not long after, he suffers a heart attack and while rehabilitating, meets and marries a gentle American woman closer to his age.

Married, eligible for citizenship, financially secure, he is in a perfect position to live out a life of quiet and moderation. And then Edith returns. And Molnar reminds us of one of the reasons we read fiction: to follow as people make terrible, foolhardy, self-destructive choices. Choices most of us wouldn’t be dumb or daring enough to take. And in this case, for no reason at all, for nothing more than the feeling the narrator had when Edith first sat beside him in that Swiss train compartment:

And still, when she sat down beside me and said softly, “It’s cold,” and pushed closer to me, and her shoulder and hip touched me, I felt unerringly that we two belonged to each other for all that remained of life. This was a fearful new element in my experience, this suddenly born thought which had taken possession of me with such overwhelming force, for no reason at all.

Farewell My Heart will take you just an evening or two to read. If you happen across it on a shelf someday, do pick it up. But if not, there are other good books a few inches further along.


Farewell My Heart, by Ference Molnar, translated by Elinor Rice
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945

The Midst of Life, by Mina Curtiss (1933)

Advertisement for The Midst of Life by Mina Curtiss.

The Midst of Life is subtitled “A Romance,” but knowing a bit about Mina Curtiss, I read it assuming it was a work of nonfiction. I was surprised, then, to discover than Houghton Mifflin marketed it as a novel, for aside from the change of a name or two, this is drawn directly from Curtiss’s life. Born into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family (her younger brother Lincoln rates a 700-page biography by Martin Duberman), she grew up in Boston and graduated from Smith College, where she taught French for over ten years. When she was 30, she married Henry Tomlinson Curtiss, an heir to the Spaulding sporting goods fortune, but Curtiss, who had suffered from lung problems all his life, died suddenly of pneumonia after less than two years of marriage.

“Why shouldn’t I write to you, dead as well as alive,” she asks on the first of June, 1932. The Midst of Life is a widow’s attempt to process her husband’s death. “Of course, I shall write to you — every day. I shall tell you everything, everything you would want to know.”

Mina Curtiss, 1933. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.

Though she says, “I shall write you to remind you in your other world of the simple happiness of this one, its casualness and its excitement,” we soon realize that the one being reminded in Curtiss herself. While she and Henry were married, they wrote each other every day when apart. The act of writing to a ghost is preferable, she admits, to her initial ways of coping with his loss. “At first, I fancied you were in the next room, that accidentally you had left it just before I entered. Then I used to expect to meet you in the street.” She once felt an almost irresistable impulse to stab a man in the street simply for his expression of utter indifference to her pain.

And so, she writes every day, or nearly every day. Not like a wife sharing her day with her husband — such conversations tend to be more about exchanging information than emotions. She shares her impressions and, inevitably, the memories they trigger. Henry was a great lover of gardens, so we hear about the day lilies and delphinium, about the tomatoes and squash in the large gardens around their country home in the Berkshires and her joy or disappointment in their growth. The two of them were avid riders, so we read of the moments when Mina is able to lose all sense of herself in a gallop and of her sadness at having to put down her aging stallion Sandy.

As the summer moves into August, Mina finds herself sifting through her memories of Henry’s last days. Struck down in a New York hotel, he lies struggling to breathe, too frail to be moved to a hospital, his doctors holding out little hope for recovery. For years, she has taken some comfort from believing that his last word to her was “Beautiful.” But as she examines her memories closer, she realizes that what he actually said just before losing consciousness was, “Go away. Leave me alone.” And Mina finds this not the devastating rejection she has feared. “Leave me alone,” was right, she decides. “Man is born into the world alone, he leaves it alone, and in a way he lives in it alone, too.”

In her last letter, on the 10th of October, as the frost comes and forces her to harvest the last fruits and vegetables from the garden, Mina recalls a conversation she had with Henry early in their relationship. He is driving her to the station so she can catch a train back to Smith when he notices her glancing nervously at her watch. “Why do you do that?” he asks. If she misses one train, she can catch another. “Aren’t you happy here and now?” And that, she concludes, is the only way in which she can hold onto something of the love they shared: by concentrating on the moments of happiness she still has the opportunity to experience, even without him.

If Mina Curtiss was able to publish these letters by calling The Midst of Life a novel, so be it. As readers we might do well to think of it as a novel, too. For there are things here that are almost too intimate to be shared with strangers. A fine and touching book.


The Midst of Life, by Mina Curtiss
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933

The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel (1961)

The Darkened Room by Hilde Spiel (1961)

“Europe is nothin’ on earth but a great big auction, that’s all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it’s just a big firesale, the whole rutten thing.” Hilde Spiel quotes this line from Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as an epigraph to her novel The Darkened Room (1961), about a group of Europeans who’ve washed up in Manhattan as jetsam from the firesale known as World War Two. Lele, the narrator, is a young Latvian woman whose parents were victims of the war: her father shot by the Soviets as a member of the intelligentsia (he ran Riga’s water system), her mother dead of starvation, one of the thousands abandoned by their Nazi captors in the final weeks before surrender. Seduced by an Italian in a displaced persons camp, she arrives in New York with a toddler son and an introduction to Mrs. Langendorf, an Austrian Jewess now working in New York as a psychiatrist.

Lele soon learns that Mrs. Langendorf may not have official credentials as a therapist, but she is a master of messing with people’s heads, and she moves on to work as housekeeper for Lisa, another expat Austrian Jewess. Lisa’s background is even murkier than Mrs. Langendorf’s. She spent the war in Rome as — even the relatively naive Lele figures this out — the mistress of a black marketeer. Her closets are full of designer Italian outfits, expensive paintings, priceless figurines and objets d’art. She escaped punishment when the Allies liberated the city by entrapping a well-meaning Army captain, Jeff, into marriage and is now installed in her apartment as the queen bee of a hive of fellow Central European refugees.

Lisa is neither beautiful nor friendly but somehow she manages to keep all around her in thrall, hosting parties paid for by selling off odds and ends of her Italian booty. She spends days huddled in her bedroom “like the oyster in its shell, surrounded by her scent bottles and her jewelled monocle and her books and her birds and her indecent Pompeian pictures, while she supped from her Louis Seize table and cowered on her gold-shot bedcover or lain in her pink sheets.”

Lisa seems to be, for Spiel, the embodiment of the decay and death of the culture of pre-war Europe, the world of cafes, liberal humanism, and carefree decadence. She draws in people with her intensity, but as Lele ultimately discovers, it’s an intensity fueled by heroin and an increasing fear that she is irrelevant in this new world. Lele comes across a note on which Lisa has scribbled, “Vivre? Nos valets le feront pour nous.” [Live? Our valets will do it for us.] As her physical and mental condition deteriorates, she still hosts her parties, but now she is less the maîtresse d’salon than a “somewhat deranged invalid who must be humoured and flattered, and whose odd behaviour must be glossed over with a lot of small talk.”

Hilde Spiel, around 1961.

The Darkened Room has a certain morbid fascination perhaps not dissimilar to that exercised by Lisa over her circle of followers. Hilde Spiel’s motivation for writing the book, however, are perplexing. Spiel, like Mrs. Langendorf an Austrian Jew with some experience in psychological research, won the Julius Reich Prize for outstanding Austrian literature with her first novel, Kati auf der Brücke, in 1933 but emigrated to England in 1936. There, she married Peter de Mendelssohn, a descendent of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, and became a naturalized British citizen.

After the war, she lived in England but spent increasing amounts of time in Austria, ultimately settling again in Vienna. She published a number of books in English as well as German. She never lived in the U.S., aside from a few visits. So why write this book that is such a condemnation of the European culture that she clearly embraced again? Looking around Lisa’s bedroom after her death, Lele thinks,

Europe, with its vice and its wisdom, its horror and its fascination, its cruelty and its refinement, was, like the evening sun, sinking down beneath the horizon. At last I was shaking free from the beautiful monster which had eaten my father and mother and pursued me across the ocean to lure me back, to ensnare me with the help of its rarest and most bewildering spectres.

Spiel appends a postscript in the voice of Paul Bothe, a popular German novelist who has become a permanent resident of the U.S. Bothe visits Lele and Jeff, now married and living happily and quietly in San Francisco. “By all outward appearances,” he writes, “they are two delightful people, typical of the artless, uncomplicated youth of the United States.” Wondering how the two could have been caught up in Lisa’s death spiral, he has to admit that, “As far as can be seen, there are no traces of it left.”

This is an odd conclusion to a very odd novel. In making the somewhat innocent Lele her narrator, Hilde Spiel draws us in as effectively as Lisa does her coterie, but then she buries the rotting old corpse of Europe and sends Lele, Jeff, and little Mario off to sunny California and a life that could come straight out of an ad in a 1949 issue of Saturday Evening Post. One wonders if she wrote The Darkened Room — in English, not German, by the way — in the old world comfort of the chalet in Saint Wolfgang im Salzkammergut that Wikipedia tells us she owned from 1955 on. It reads almost like an exorcism, yet after writing it, Spiel seems to have been content to reside in the lap of the evil spirits she had cast out.


The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel
London: Methuen, 1961

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank (1937)

Lost Heritage by Bruno Frank

A young man wanders along the streets of a Czech border town in the late evening looking for a place to stay. His clothes are dirty and torn from walking through the forest. When he finally locates a wretched little inn, the landlord treats his brusquely: just another one of those Jews sneaking away from the Nazis. He gives the man a tiny and dirty attic room.

When he opens the man’s passport to note down his details, however, he gasps. The man is Prince Ludwig Saxe-Camburg, a member of one of Germany’s oldest noble dynasties. This is not the sort of person to come wandering out of the woods from Germany.

In Lost Heritage (UK title Closed Frontiers), Bruno Frank illustrates the disruptive, destructive effects of Nazism in Germany by taking as his subject a man we would think exemplifies the solidity of the German establishment. Although the Kaiser has abdicated and the right of the German nobility to own and rule over their principalities and duchies has been ended, The Saxe-Camburgs are still the wealthiest and most respected family in their region and the trappings of the feudal culture are still respected by most of the family’s former subjects.

Ludwig is an aesthete. After flitting through subjects in university like a butterfly, he lands on art history through the influence of a revered professor and throws himself into cataloging the works of Goya. The growing influence of the Nazi Party is peripheral noise in his world. But then the professor is ejected from the university for suggesting that an etching by Dürer is not a symbolic forecast of the rise of Adolf Hitler. Prince Ludwig’s older brother is appointed to a high regional post in Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA). Hitler becomes Chancellor. The campus becomes an incubator for angry, zealous young men full of hatred for Jews and intellectuals.

Prince Ludwig moves to Berlin and makes contacts with a few anti-Nazi acquaintances: former professors, journalists, a few retired Army officers. They begin meeting secretly in his apartment to plan ways to resist, possibly overthrow Hitler. In a matter of weeks, however, the Gestapo surprise the men and take them prisoner.

Ludwig is tortured strictly through sleep deprivation, but from the prison’s hallways he can hear his fellow conspirators being beaten. When he is about to collapse from exhaustion, policemen enter his cell, hand him clothes to wear, take him out to a waiting car. Ludwig is certain he’s being taken out to be shot.

Bruno Frank takes Ludwig through three phases in his experience of Nazism in Germany: his late awakening and amateurish attempt at resistance; a desperate and mostly futile effort to sneak back into Germany and rescue his colleagues; and his flight and gradual transformation into that ubiquitous and miserable character of the 1930s, the German refugee. The story moves at a tremendous pace: events develop swiftly, Ludwig finds (or puts) himself into numerous cliffhanger-type situations.

I was greatly reminded of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns. Although the Oppermanns are Jews and the Saxe-Camburgs Aryans, they both start in positions of comfort and privilege and dismiss the warning signs, are slow to recognize the horror of Nazism until it’s overwhelmed them and made them its victims. Both books are gripping reads, the kind you drink in in hundred-page gulps.

But they’re also about Nazism in Germany in its early stages as a regime. The war and the Holocaust are still in the future. There are concentration camps and round-ups of troublesome elements, but the beatings of Jews and Communists, the smashing and looting of Jewish shops, and accumulating restrictions on academic, intellectual, commercial, and private life still seem random aberrations rather than parts of a deliberate plan. And for me at least, persecutions are not of anonymous millions but of the friends and associates of characters we have come to know and thus more intimate and frightening.

Though a man who does not see himself as a hero, Prince Ludwig reveals himself to be a man of character, loyalty, and when it counts most, physical courage. And he is, ultimately, a survivor, a man who finds a capacity to carry on even after losing everything that he had. I started Lost Heritage uncertain of where Bruno Frank was headed and finished it thoroughly satisfied. A pretty gripping movie could be made from this book.

The English edition of the book, Closed Frontiers, is available on the Internet Archive: link.


Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank, translated by Cyrus Brooks
New York: Viking, 1937
Closed Frontiers

London: Macmillan, 1937

The Colours of the Night, by Catherine Ross (1962)

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)

The colours of the night in Catherine Ross’s title aren’t romantic in the least. They’re the colors of the signal flares fired from the control tower of RAF Tormartin to confirm that the bombers coming back after a raid are friendly and not Luftwaffe attackers. This is just one of the many details that led numerous reviewers to call The Colours of the Night the most accurate and authentic account of life on an RAF bomber base during World War Two written from a woman’s point of view .

Virginia Bennett, the novel’s narrator, is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force stationed at an RAF Lancaster bomber base near Lincoln, assigned to the base motor pool. Lincolnshire, with its broad, fairly flat countryside and proximity to the North Sea coast, was, with East Anglia and North Yorkshire, dotted with RAF — and later, U.S. 8th Air Force — airfields from which the Allies launched the bombing raids on occupied Europe, Germany, and Italy that represented the longest single campaign of the Western front.

It was also the deadliest. To quote the Imperial War Museum, “During the whole war, 51% of aircrew were killed on operations, 12% were killed or wounded in non-operational accidents and 13% became prisoners of war or evaders. Only 24% survived the war unscathed.” An aircrew member was committed to fly thirty operational missions before he could be released to other less dangerous duties.

71 Squadron, the unit Bennett supports, flies twelve Lancasters, each manned with a crew of seven. Given a typical operational year (and the novel is set over the winter of 1942 to 1943, perhaps the most typical year for Bomber Command), she knows, most of the flying members of the current would be gone. “There’d be a 71 Squadron, of course, but of entirely new faces. It was a fact like the day of the week, or the month of the year. You accepted that fact.”

A fact that is only notional to Bennett until she finds herself falling in love with Flight Lieutenant Colin Craig. The two meet by accident — literally, as she is the first to arrive on the scene after Craig’s Lancaster goes skidding off the runway and into a muddy verge. He, of course, is handsome, cool, and instantly attractive. But she is cute, clever, and just stand-offish enough to attract his attention as well.

Their romance is considered fraternization between commissioned and other ranks and prohibited by regulations, so after a few bouts of flirting turns into something more serious, they have to resort to various subterfuges to spend time together — the most important being to ensure they’re never seen together. To further complicate matters, Virginia is an object of earnest interest by her motor pool section chief and Colin by the lieutenant in charge of the WAAFs at the base.

But the real complication is the fact of those statistics. As she senses that Colin is just as much in love with her as she with him, she asks the inevitable question:

“But what shall we do about us?”
“What about us?”
“Us,” I said slowly and painfully. “In the future.”
He stared at me surprised, almost blankly.

And suddenly it hits her: “I knew that in his own mind he had no future.”

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross - paperback edition

From this point, the tension is predictable: will Colin make it to thirty missions? On one hand, The Colours of the Night is no more than a well-crafted middlebrow romance. We know from the moment dashing Flight Lieutenant Craig emerges only slightly scathed from his crashed aircraft and borrows (and keeps) Virginia’s cigarette lighter that it’s just a matter of time before flirting becomes romance and romance leads to happy ending (or at least tentatively happy: Colin has made it clear he intends to return for another operational tour).

But offsetting this predictable formula is a wealth of details about the ins and outs of RAF and WAAF life. The regular medical inspections for the three scourges: lice, sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy. The itchiness and ugliness of the dark blue issue WAAF underpants and the various alternatives resorted to on all the days between medical inspections. The fact that no one knows what was happening on the base better than the radio and telephone switchboard operators.

Betty Beaty, AKA Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell
Betty Beaty, alias Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell.

Catherine Ross was familiar with all this from having been a Virginia Bennett herself during the war. In fact, as Betty Smith (her real name), she met her own husband, Group Captain David Beaty, himself a bomber pilot. They married after the war and David Beaty turned his hand to writing, becoming a successful writer of aviation-oriented novels (sort of the RAF equivalent to Douglas Reeman) and nonfiction books. Betty Beaty took up writing herself, first as Catherine Ross, then later as Karen Campbell and Betty Beaty. As Betty Beaty, she published nine Harlequin romance novels.

The Colours of the Night is no masterpiece, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable tale that’s rigorous in its accuracy and honesty. I would recommend it highly to anyone who likes novels set during World War Two.


The Colours of Night, by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)


This is a contribution to the #1962Club, this autumn’s edition of the semi-annual reading club coordinated by Simon Thomas and Karen Langley.

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke (1931)

starke - born into captivity

I wouldn’t recommend the parents of a teenage daughter showing signs of wanderlust leave a copy of Barbara Starke’s Born in Captivity lying around the house. At age sixteen, Starke’s aunt gave her a copy of David Grayson’s The Friendly Road, an account of a walking tour made by an adult man in 1912’s America. “It was the image of Grayson walking down a wilful road into unknown territory conscious of the delightful prospect of not turning back at night, which suddenly filled my mind with the luminous possibilities of such an act.”

Reading Grayson’s book suggests to Starke that “Perhaps, after all, it was not absolutely necessary” to come home every night –“even if he had no money or other devices to keep him from harm.” A pretty risky proposition, even for a man. For an attractive young woman of eighteen, the age at which Starke finally managed to sneak out of the house and start the journey described in Born in Captivity, it seems certain to end badly.

But Barbara Starke had some special angels looking out for her. She traveled from Massachusetts to California and back to New York City, rarely paying her way, almost always by just walking along the side of the road and hoping some kind stranger would stop and give her a ride. She never actually hitchhiked: she mades that emphatically clear. If offered a ride, she would accept unless she felt uneasy about the would-be good Samaritan. If not, she kept walking. Somehow, in the hundreds of rides she accepted, only once or twice did she have to fight her way out of the car.

More than that, the men who offered her rides — and it was always men, even though she wore mens’ clothes and was usually scruffy enough that many assumed she was a man until she climbed in — would buy her a meal or two, or pay for a separate hotel room, or even hand her five or ten bucks to help out. There were some, of course, who said they believed that “if a girl dared to tramp the road alone she must be prepared to ‘come across.'” She usually managed to change their minds. She felt, in fact, that hers was the superior power to intimidate: “I could look straight at them, could say unexpected things coldly, so that they wondered what weapons I concealed that I should be unafraid.”

On the other hand — and reading this must have made her mother’s hair stand up, if she ever did read her daughter’s book — if Starke liked a man’s company, she wasn’t above sleeping with him. On an early leg, she felt attracted to a handsome and soft-spoken engineer and shared his cabin on a night boat to Albany. And felt not the least regret: “If the captain of this ship should come in now, and there should be a nasty scene, they could not make me feel shame, I feel so proud and clean for having stayed with you.”

Like many young people throughout history, a good part of Starke’s motivation was to reject her parent’s choices. “The net had caught my father, and respectability, the tradition of owning a home and sending one’s children to college, had kept him there.” The only result she could see from their keeping a house and raising a family was to be “cheated of any joy,” to be “shackled by them.”

The freedom of the road allowed her not just to see the country but to sample from a smorgasbord of relationship possibilities. She liked and respected the engineer on the night boat, but she knew she didn’t want to marry him. A safecracker befriends her in Denver and she toys with joining him on a job, but decides a jail cell was the one thing worse than domestic misery. In Santa Barbara, a guy named Joe pulls alongside and serenades her. She joins him and they spend a week or so together. “I began to divine that one could get fond enough of another person to want him about a great deal.” Yet she walks on without regrets. “That priceless feeling of affection as we said good-bye on the Merced road in the early morning was not merely because we had given each other such joy, but because we were not even pretending to try to make it last longer.”

Born in Captivity was called Touch and Go in its English edition, but neither title does the book justice. The roads Starke traveled weren’t always friendly, but they were always free, not only in terms of economics but in terms of her own spirit. Yet just as she recognized in saying goodbye to Joe on the Merced road, she could not pretend to make her months of vagabondage run on indefinitely. Unlike with Joe, however, a regret remains. “How am I going to reach the ground and the sky again?” she wonders at the end as she sits in an office typing pool.

The novelist Henry Williamson raved about the book to his friend T. E. Lawrence. “Have you read Touch and Go by Barbara Starke? Cape did it. That girl can write; and seems the best of the new straight-ahead younger generation — passing the old hulks of 1914-18 and the concrete-ribbed waterlogs of the war-child generation.”

A. T. Simon III and Helen Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960
A. T. Simon III and Helen L. Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960.

Barbara Starke was the pseudonym of Helen L. Card. As Starke, Card published one novel, Second Sister, in England in 1933. The only remaining copies of this are in the U.K. registry libraries. Although she received a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writer’s conference in 1937, her work soon became confined to articles and catalogues of Western art, particularly by Frederic Remington. She ran the Latendorf Bookshop on Madison Avenue for years and never married.


Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931
London (as Touch and Go): Jonathan Cape, 1931

Star Turn, by René Clair (1926/1936)

Madeleine Rodrigue and Henri Rollan on the Eiffel Tower in Paris Qui Dort.

There are few lovelier works of French surrealism than René Clair’s short 1924 film, Paris Qui Dort, usually translated inelegantly into English as The Crazy Ray. In it, a planeload of people evade the rays of a secret weapon by which a mad scientist has put the inhabitants of Paris to sleep. The scenes of the deserted streets of 1920s Paris will tug at the heart of anyone who wishes they had a chance to time-travel back to the time of Hemingway, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the school of innovative artists, musicians, and writers to which Clair belonged.

Right around the time that René Clair was finishing work on his first film, he wrote his first novel, taking the world of film as its setting. And had he been as disciplined in his editing as he’d been with Paris Qui Dort, Star Turn could now be considered a little classic every bit as elegant and amusing.

Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn by René Clair
Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn.

The original French title, Adams, refers to Cecil Adams, the world’s greatest movie star. Adams is everything a studio and a worldful of moviegoers could ask for: handsome, dashing, funny, heroic, romantic, debonair and homespun. Whatever the part demands. He has just finished his latest film, Jack Spratt, about a thief with a heart of gold who’s, well, all the above adjectives, and awakes on the morn of its premiere. Given the universal popularity of this phenomenon, the atmosphere is, predictably, intense:

Adams opens the car door. A mouth bawls his name. This shout, repeated by the echo of the crowd, rumbles down the street like an earthquake. A group of women scramble madly round the car, lifting it and smashing it against a wall. Cecil flounders and sinks. He’ll be drowned in admiration…. A police-charge stems the tide. Cecil, who was just going down for the third time, staggers to his feet. He escapes along a lane that has been cleared through the crowd except for, here and there, a little human debris. Nine killed, thirty wounded.

As Adams watches the film from the safety of the projectionist’s booth, a transformation takes place that Clair may have borrowed from Buster Keaton’s 1924 film, Sherlock Jr.: “His three-dimensional body is absorbed by the screen and comes to life on its flat surface in the dancing shadow of Jack.”

This is the start of the dramatic predicament around which the plot of Star Turn revolves. Usually with celebrities, it’s the audience that has difficulty telling the difference between the performer and the character. In Adams’ case, he’s the one who finds it increasingly difficult to maintain an identity separate from those of his best-known roles.

There are seven of these alter-egos in all — from William the cowboy to Dorian the poet. (“My golden head troubles the beauty of the clouds,” Dorian declares. “One breath wafts me to heaven.” Dorian is a poet worthy of a place beside Percy Dovetonsils.) To make matters worse, each quickly suffers the same confusion as Adams and takes on an independent existence. Adams’ attempts to maintain some semblance of order are no match for their wills:

To avoid disconcerting experiences, he endeavoured to be William on Monday, Harold on Tuesday, and so on. On Monday he wore William’s outfit; on Tuesday Harold’s morning-coat. But the characters would have none of it. Eric appeared in William’s leather chaps. Jack turned up on the day set aside for Charles. They refused to fall into line.

He tries to escape them, traveling first to Japan, then China, then place by place around the globe back to New York. But one or all of the characters manage to keep up — indeed, are often already there when he arrives.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, Adams’ studio chief has come up with the perfect next part for the Greatest Actor on Earth: God. Perfect for the studio, disastrous for an actor in a losing battle with his multiple personalities. Yet the film gets made — and is then premiered to the entire planet simultaneously through a new invention that allows the atmosphere itself to be used as the screen.

What happens next, however, is determined by the most powerful of all deities: capitalism. With the power to speak to the whole world at once, the studio rebrands as Modern Religions, Inc. And instead of becoming the Almighty by playing God, Adams finds himself only a cog in an industrial entertainment machine.

René Clair on the set of an early sound film.

When Chatto & Windus decided to publish Adams in English in 1936 (the translator is uncredited), they asked René Clair to contribute a preface. With over a decade of film-making experience, Clair better recognized how the power of writer and director differed:

How fortunate is the literary artist, whose task of creation calls only for a pen and plenty of paper! The film director, on the other hand, is no more than a gear in the cinematographic machine. What complications are involved in bringing the slightest of his ideas to fruition!

Few things, he writes, are more misunderstood than the amount of control a director has over his own film. Asked what kind of movie he would make if he had absolute control, Clair responds, “You might as well ask a fish what it would do if it had legs and could stroll down Piccadilly.”

What matters in the real movie business? The same thing as in Clair’s fictional movie business: the bottom line.

If films acted exclusively by trained frogs induced a greater number of spectators to enter the portals of cinemas than do the pictures at present shown, producers would set about training frogs and would furiously outbid each other to acquire the brightest specimens of batrachian talent.

Clair wonders “how the genius of Shakespeare, of Wagner, or of Cezanne could have developed” if their work had depended on the collective judgment of the crowd. But it did, of course. Perhaps not with the efficiency of the studio system at its peak (around the time Clair was writing his preface?), but neither with the blithe independence he imagines.

The world of film he portrayed in Star Turn was, he writes, seen in “a flippant and fantastic light.” And yet, if we are to believe his own preface, the film world created by René Clair the novelist doesn’t really seem that far apart from the industrial enterprise described by René Clair the director. Aside from the one thing I mentioned at the start: René Clair the director would have had the assistance of an editor who would have excised the windy speeches that take what begins as a sublime little tale of comic surrealism and overwhelms it with more Serious Talk than its fine little frame can bear. Ah, if only it were acceptable to take the editing scissors to these bloated texts from the past. But perhaps that, too, is a bit too much like playing God.


Star Turn, by René Clair
London: Chatto & Windus, 1936

Knopf’s Borzoi Puppies – An Experiment in Experimental Fiction


The Seventies were weird. A lot of long-established conventions faltered or were kicked over, a lot of idealistic ventures were launched, often fueled more by hope than resources, and many institutions grabbed desperately at innovations they gambled would turn into lifelines. One such experiment was Alfred A. Knopf’s brief series of dust jacketless, shiny-covered hardbacks that championed the work of young American writers playing around with fictional forms and styles — a series referred to as “Borzoi puppies” after Knopf’s legendary Borzoi Books. Knopf launched the series by promising to break new ground between traditional hardbacks and cheap mass market paperbacks, offering “new novels at plausible prices.” The plausible price in 1971 was $3.50. (According to USInflationCalculator.com, this is equivalent to $26.37 today. By comparison, another Knopf title from the same year, Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, sold for $5.95 or $44.82 in 2023. Which goes to show that despite what some folks think, the price of new books today has not remotely kept pace with inflation.)

If you’re a veteran of American used book stores, you may have come across one or more of these. Fifty years later, they still standout on any shelf: such slick spines are more often confined to textbooks and high-end vanity publications. That look was the first thing to attract the interest of people covering the publishing industry. Reporting on the initiative in the New York Times, Joan Baum wrote, “At the risk of emphasizing the container at the expense of the contained, it should be noted at once that these slim volumes are bound in strikingly handsome overboards with back photos of the authors and cover designs that evoke the mood and subject matter within.”

Bill Katz (who later compiled Writer’s Choice, a cornucopia of neglected book recommendations, with his wife Linda Sternberg Katz), introduced the series to his fellow librarians in a piece in Library Journal:

With In the Animal Kingdom and Burnt Toast, Knopf initiates a program of publishing new fiction by young novelists at a reasonable price. The books are just slightly smaller than the ordinary novel, bound in paper over boards, and nicely produced, with attractive covers and good, wide margins. Each of the present works has as its hero a youth engaged in a version of the ancestor quest, familiar through anthropology, by which manhood is achieved. And, though the two books are very different in style and tone, each has a large component of ritual. These initial selections evidently were made with an eye to capturing two segments of the youth market: the English-major set, who may be impressed with Warren Fine’s impacted manipulations of time sequence and narrative voice; and the flower-child communards, to whom Peter Gould’s unremitting ingenuousness may appeal.

The series was short-lived: Knopf published four titles in 1971 and four more in 1972. By 1973, it was dead and forgotten. Dead probably because Knopf lost money on them — or at least (such is the logic of the market), didn’t make enough money. But unjustly forgotten, in my view. So, here is my attempt commemorate this experiment.

Cover of Burnt Toast by Peter Gould

Burnt Toast, by Peter Gould
Peter Gould’s amiable autobiographical novel about life on a Vermont farm with a sort-of commune of friends was a perfect introduction for the series. “We consulted the oracle when this book was first begun,” read Gould’s dedication. “This is what came up: ‘Innocence (The Unexpected)’.” The optimism of innocence, or maybe the innocence of optimism, was behind both Knopf’s investment and the creative spirit of these writers. Each of these books was an attempt to change the world, or at least evidence that the belief that fiction could change the world was still alive and kicking.
The farm in question had already been celebrated in Raymond Mungo’s nonfiction book of the year before, Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life. As often happens, Gould’s version was more earnest and less commercially successful. His hero, Silent, and a character named V.D.C. (for “Very Decent Citizen”) enter forthrightly and energetically into the task of farming and community building and take each setback with a mixture of wonder and resilience. Joan Baum wrote that rather than trying to turn his work into a book, Gould should have “tacked it up instead on the hardwoods in Vermont and read it aloud to the community for free.”
You can purchase Peter Gould’s more recent nonfictional account of his experiences at Total Loss Farm, Horse-Drawn Yogurt, on his website, PeterGouldVermont.com.

Covers of Their Family and In the Animal Kingdom by Warren Fine, illustrations by James Grashow

In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family, by Warren Fine
Warren Fine had more ambition that all his series-mates combined, and it shows in these two books, which have accumulated a tiny but loyal following over the years. In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family tell related stories that revolve around Orcus Berrigan and Gerhard Blau, who desert the revolutionary American army and head into the wilderness that is now the Midwest. They become trappers and Berrigan settles with an Indian woman known as Marie or Sawpootway. Their Family is Blau’s fantasy of what happens to Berrigan and Sawpootway in the years after the two men parted. Where In the Animal Kingdom is rhapsodical and profane, Their Family blends realism and visions, particularly as experienced by Sawpootway:

In the dream, her hands covered her ears; if she put her hands upon the sewing in her lap, she’d have to listen to words about Legget. She reached for the sewing, needing its confirmation: a voice spoke of her existence in an old life. The voice said nothing of Legget; her sewing disappeared beneath her fingers, and she didn’t miss it. Dutchess rose out of the water, lake water still and deep. The man, from her first dream, perhaps Legget, perhaps Thurlow, perhaps… The man from her first dream, a shape shifting, threw Dutchess into an oven, where, cooked, she became Sawpootway. In the oven, she bled forever from her womb, and no man would touch her. The man departed, betraying her as if he were one, now laughing at his joke, who’d already died, long before.

Something in Fine’s work set reviewers’ teeth on edge:

Warren Fine is a devotee of the “Faulknerian” school of writing: using endless, snake-like sentences and relying on purple prose to tell poetic rather than objective truth. If you believe that reality is mysteriously subjective and that a tale can never be told simply, then Their Family is your literary cup of commas, diluted with pitchers full of colons and sweetened by tablespoons full of semi-colons.

It’s hard to see what the fuss was about. “Faulknerian” is actually off the mark, in my view. The real tip-off to Fine’s creative inspiration is in his dedication in In the Animal Kingdom: “For John Hawkes.” Fine was probably the closest any writer came to following in “the school of Hawkes” (or is it “Hawkesian”?), with its mixture of mystical eroticism and precise, at times painful, concrete details.

And, it must be said, a clear invocation of the spirit of Walt Whitman in the opening to In the Animal Kingdom:

In America, I throw my single voice about like a ventriloquist; like an evangelist—ox, eagle, ass, or winged man, play my various tongues, both intimate and distant voices cast from my mouth, as if fishlines spread to flickering sheets, become so much like fish themselves, like blades and flames, to catch my experience in the animal kingdom, to come into my story, feeling as if with my tongue, to know again, and know mostly now, the process of my adventure in the flesh, as all tongues, like castaways returning through my mouth, reenter and descend into my present body.

Warren Fine never managed to publish another book after these two novels. He taught at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, often holding class in the Zoo Bar off campus, then moved to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he was found dead in his apartment in 1987 at the age of 44. His passing was marked by his favorite bartender in the Lincoln Star: “He drank, he gambled, he was lax about his health and his taxes. He hurt some wonderful women and they left him. They had no choice. He was desperately self-destructive… I know he believed the first rule of being a writer: write an awful lot.” Fine’s papers at the UNL archives include the manuscripts of dozens of stories and at least one unpublished novel.

The two striking cover illustrations are by James Grashow.

cover of Arkansas Adios by Earl Mac Rauch

Arkansas Adios, by Earl Mac Rauch
I’ve got to be honest about this one. There was a period, maybe from the early 1960s into the early 1980s, when Playboy magazine used to publish serious fiction in between the ads and nudes. Serious, often innovative, but also tending to fall into a certain rut that was even narrower and more identifiable than the supposed New Yorker school of spare short stories in which nothing happens (I’m citing the stereotype here). That rut was usually comic, often ribald, and pretty much always confined to male authors.,/dd>

I don’t know if Earl Mac Rauch ever published in Playboy, but if you wanted to get a good sense of what the Playboy school (or perhaps, playground) of fiction was like, give Arkansas Adios a read. It’s about a precocious eleven-year-old boy growing up in Red Mound, Arkansas and his picaresque adventures — at least, as picaresque as you can get on a fat-tired bicycle. One of his adventures involves playing a trick on the town’s prostitute. If that sounds like comic gold to you, you’ll probably love this book. Bearing in mind that Rauch published his first novel, Dirty Pictures from the Prom, while an undergraduate at Darmouth, I can be excused for describing the humor as sophmoric.
Reviewing the book for the Boston Globe, Richard Pearce wrote, “More than anything else, Rauch leads us from one episode to the next in anticipation of some mind-blowing joke that lies just beyond the novel’s reach.” Pearce rated the book “a minor by singular accomplishment like that of a Pogo or Snoopy cartoon,” which in my opinion is an insult to Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz.
Rauch does play around with fictional conventions, giving his characters dialogue balloons at one point, but I’m stretching to class this with the other books on the list as experimental fiction. His main claim to fame is his screenplay and novelization of the cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.

Cover of Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense by Kathy Black

Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense, by Kathy Black
Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense is about a Barnard graduate named Betty who’s trying to get a book called Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense published — that is, once she’s written in. In search of material, she interviews friends and old classmates and spends time in Paris with her boyfriend Arnold.
The book is filled with snippets. Snippets of the interviews, of Betty’s notebooks, of a play she wrote in elementary school, of letters to editors, of thoughts on such topics as “Modern Youth Searches for an Identity.” Even a snippet of an author’s apology to the reader:

“I started writing this book because I wanted to write something and because I needed something to write about so K said “Why not ask girls about their future plans” said K. In college you never think about the distant future said Arnold. So here it is, the distant future.

All this would quickly grow insufferable were it not for Kathy Black’s winning acknowledgement that since we’re following along with her wanderings, she owes the reader a chuckle or accurate insight every page or so. As the New York Times reviewer, Thomas Lask, wrote, Black manages to capture the spirit of a certain segment of American youth on the cusp of a new decade: “The goodwill of these young people, their desire to redress injustice, to make the world better, to do something about the deep stores of guilt that lie in their hearts all shine through their immaturity, their quixotic and sometimes dangerous behavior.”

As far as I can tell, this was Kathy Black’s only book.

Cover of Saw by Steve Katz

Saw, by Steve Katz
Of all the authors represented in the Borzoi puppies, Steve Katz was the most committed to experimental fiction as both cause and form. He founded the Fiction Collective (still going strong, yay!) with fellow experimentalists Walter Abish, Ronald Sukenick, et al., and never lost his love of play in every aspect of writing and publishing. His first novel, The Exagggerations of Peter Prince includes photos, illustrations, one-, two-, and four-column texts, and even a full-page set of exit doors in case the reader feels like quitting. His short story collection Creamy and Delicious (recently republished by Tough Poets Press) has been called the best embodiment of Pop Art in fictional form (and, I’m happy to note, is currently ranked as the 2506th greatest fiction book of all time according to TheGreatestBooks.org).
Saw could be seen as Steve Katz’s riff on J. G. Ballard, at least J. G. Ballard’s disaster novels of an Earth subject to relentless heat, rising sea levels, crystalization, and blistering winds. In this case, the disaster is garbage. It’s set in a New York City swimming in garbage: “Garbage heaps. Garbagy air, people wander around in the garbage, kicking it up underfoot, sucking it into their lungs, kissing it into each other’s mouth. The Garbage Age, not the Space Age or the Computer Age.” And when a couple manage begin enjoying a gourmet meal of asparus and veal Milanese, their apartment is invaded by “the fetid grimy rabble of the streets nobody loves. They drag with them some garbage cans full of steamy putrid stuff, and plastic bages full of sodden trash.”
So … how does this relate to the astronaut on the cover? Well, the Astronaut is Steve Katz, who is watching the garbage-piled world and us the reader and reserving his right to remain the impassive observer — or to descend and reorganize the world as a new Creator. If you have any familiarity with fragmentary fiction, you will be able to enjoy Saw. If not, you may feel like the New York Times reviewer, who claimed his ARC fell apart and left him with scattered pages and Chapter 7 following Chapter 17. Which I suspect Steve Katz would have told him was a darned good novel, too. Kirkus Reviews took a more tolerant view, saying it was “simply a charming book that amuses the reader as it gently deposits him from one place to another, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of pleasure if you’re so minded.”
Saw is in print, at least according to the website of the University of Alabama Press.

Cover of The Log of the S. S. Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford

Log of the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine, by Stanley Crawford
Stanley Crawford’s first novel, Gascoyne was a broad-brush satire of the American way of enterprise, something not too dissimilar from Stanley Elkin’s early novels or Max Apple’s wonderful collection The Oranging of America. His second — let’s call it The Log for short — represents the fabulist strain of 1970s American experimentalism. Mrs. Unguentine spends forty years as the partner and shipmate of Unguentine, the captain of barge full of plants, odd machines, and miscellaneous junk. They wander the sea aimlessly — literally: Unguentine “had been steering all those years with no idea of what he was steering towards.”
Eventually the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine becomes something of an ecosystem onto itself — a state both cozy and comforting and profoundly isolating. Until one day when Unguentine falls overboard. Though this comes to seem to Mrs. Unguentine as less an event then a condition, a state that may or may not persist: “[T]here seems to be no longer any precise moment when old Unguentine vanished from my life, it seems rather an almost gradual process that went on over many years and as part of a great rhythm, as if, through some gentle law of nature, his disappearance would be followed by his gradual reemergence, that he would come back, so on, so forth.”
The Log was the beloved secret book of a handful of readers for years, but now it’s back in print and available from the Dalkey Archive.

Cover of Motorman by David Ohle

Motorman, by David Ohle
People who wax about how weird and unsettling Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is need to read Motorman. The short novel has enough strangeness to fill a 400-page novel. The Motorman is Moldenke, who is kept alive by the transplanted hearts of several sheep and spends much of his days feeling guilt for having killed some jellyheads (who are people … maybe … sort of) and resisting the competing influence of Bunce, the “Bust’em or Burn’em Big Brother,” and Burnheart, the Organ Transplant King.
In his introduction to the Calamari Archives reissue of Motorman, Ben Marcus writes of the awe with which the few people he knew who were aware of the book — let alone had read it — spoke of it: “For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell.”
One of the striking aspects about Knopf’s backing this series is that they were able to get a book like Motorman reviewed in dozens of newspaper book sections around the country — even papers like the Fresno Bee. The downside, however, was that they couldn’t prevent reactions like this: “This particular book, a first novel, is a bummer. It is not good writing by any standard. There is no real creativity and certainly no redeeming social value. Is Ohle’s purpose to put a copy of Motorman into every spaced-out acid-head’s hands?” Well, Motorman did get into the hands of some spaced-out acid-heads as well as into the hands of a few lovers of envelope- and mind-expanding fiction who carried a torch for David Ohle’s odd book until, within the last decade or so, it’s begun to be recognized as a significant and complex work.

Having read half of them, I must say upfront that I don’t think any of them, with the possible exception of David Ohle’s Motorman, can be considered a classic. But neither are these complacent books. For literature to remain vital, it has to keep changing, and part of that change depends on writers who are willing to take risks and try things without the guarantee of success. While Knopf’s venture was probably a commercial failure, it would be a mistake to consider any of these books a critical failure. Not everything works. But there is something good in each of them and something for other writers to learn from. And for that alone, these puppies deserve to be remembered.

Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques (1955)

Cover of Love from a Convict by Veronica Henriques

Joan Reid would have sympathized with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate). “How shall I fill up my years?” she asks as she stands on the threshold of adulthood:

“Paint,” said my mother. “I will have you taught.”

“Medicine,” said an aunt.

“Secretary,” said a friend.

“Photography,” said someone else.

“Plastics,” I wanted to add.

“But surely I should feel something?” she replies. “Some purpose which I must fulfil?”

Because this is fiction, or the Fifties, or both, Joan manages to land a job as a reporter with a regional newspaper in a small city on the Channel coast based on little more than the ability to type and spell. She sets out for life with a capital L with an exchange that’s one of the best leavetakings in literature:

“Goodbye,” I said to my parents, as they handed me over to myself.

“Goodbye,” I said, taking possession.

Everyone at the paper is very nice and very helpful and there is not a whiff of sexism or misogyny, which suggests that either Joan is oblivious to it or Henriques never actually worked for a newspaper, for both were certainly as pervasive as the clouds of cigarette smoke in such places back then.

Indeed, these two paragraphs encapsulate the brightest and dimmest facets of Love from a Convict (its U.S. title was Love for a Convict, though why just the preposition was changed is anyone’s guess). At its best, Henrique’s narratorial voice is snappy, clever, unexpected, and funny. Joan, however, is often too dense or too earnest to merit Henrique’s brio.

How earnest? Earnest enough to fall in love in the space of five sentences and even fewer minutes. Stranded out on the moors by a bitter storm, she and a colleague seek shelter at the only structure that seems inhabited: a prison. A warder lets them into the visitors’ waiting room and fetches a convict, who comes into to light the stove. And the lightning strikes:

His nose was fairly straight; it had a slight twist as it neared his nostrils, which sloped back gently, sensitively. His mouth was straight, the upper lip very slightly overlapping the lower. His chin was square. He was a very attractive looking man I he sort of man I would want to love.

And that is pretty much all there is to it. By the time they make it back to the office, Joan is certain that she is in love with Richard, the inmate. Several visits in the following weeks only set her mind more firmly, though Richard seems an unpromising candidate. Soft-spoken, well-mannered, and attracted in kind to Joan, he is also prone to sudden bursts of rage. And on the day when his sentence is up, he attacks the guard bringing him the civilian clothes he’s about to be released in.

Joan’s parents are, understandably, concerned, despite her open optimism in sharing her news:

“I am in love,” I wrote my parents.

“Who? Do bring him home,” they wrote.

“I can’t,” I answered. “He’s still in prison.”

Her fellow reporters also try to dissuade her, but Joan is convinced. “If I didn’t love him, would I know so surely?” she challenges them. A cousin of Richard’s she meets tells her that he is a vicious man, “constantly exploding with belligerence.” Richard’s parents, who she visits in search of answers, have written him off: “We have our own lives to live, and we have accepted the fact that Richard is better in prison than out.”

None of them manages to change her mind. Even when the prison’s governor advises her that Richard is likely to keep adding years to his sentence through his outbursts, Joan remains steadfast. And here we leave the story, with Joan and Richard stuck in their respective limbos.

For me, this stuckness was what kept Love from a Convict from rising to the level of Veronica Henriques’ frequently-sparkling prose. Reading it was like listening a light and swinging jazz tune on a scratched record, where tune returns again and again and again to a particular two-bar passage. [Some youngsters make have to Google “record skipping” to understand that analogy.] Stuckness is a problematic state to end a novel in — indeed, Love from a Convict seems almost unfinished.

Ironically, the structural aspects were what Kingsley Amis thought most successful in the book. His problem was with Joan, whose willful naivete he could barely tolerate:

I had barely caught sight of Love from a Convict before starting to object to it, and certainly there can be few books more energetically not my cup of tea.

I can just about stomach the idea of a sensitive girl reporter on a provincial newspaper falling in love with a noble-savage convict, but her only identifiable motive for what she does about it turns out to be, not love, but a half-hidden desire to be though shocking by some people and ‘interesting’ by others, and at this point the last of my sympathy expired. It is with all the more emphasis, then, that I must praise the book, firstly for the unusual vigour with which it puts of its (to me antipathetic) state of feeling, and secondly for its grasp of technique, flair for exposition, adroitness in scene-shifting and the rest of the how=d’ye-do — whatever it is that makes the reader detect some kind of sense of vocation in a novelist. So when the next one from this stable appears I shall, reluctantly, have to get hold of it. (The Spectator, 18 February 1955)

Other reviewers were generally as positive as Amis, most of them singling out the freshness of Joan’s voice and perspective. “A little tour de force in the sense of honesty,” wrote Newsweek’s critic.

Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of <em>Love from a Convict</em>.
Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of Love from a Convict.

Veronica Henriques was 24 when Love from a Convict was published. The daughter of the novelist and founding member of the British Commandos, Robert Henriques, she went on to write four more novels in the next dozen years. By the 1970s, however, she had become more interested in painting and printmaking and began showing her work under her married name of Veronica Gosling. She continues to create and foster a space for art and community in her Studio 36 in Exeter.


Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques
London: Secker & Warburg, 1955

A Dozen Views of the Fall of France, June 1940

I recently spent the equivalent of two days listening to the audiobook version of The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 William L. Shirer’s massive follow-up to his classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At over 1,000 pages, the book will satisfy all but the most obsessive reader’s appetite for the workings of French politics between 1870 and 1940. And if there is one resounding criticism I’d make, it’s that Shirer’s is very much an old-school history. This is history from the top down, as seen (and then exhaustively recounted in memoirs) by the politicians and generals at the highest levels of the government and military. With few exceptions, we get little sense of how the events of May and June 1940 were experienced by ordinary people.

One reason I find this episode fascinating is that it represented, in a matter of weeks, at times even just days, the complete overturn of the status quo of millions. At every level from the individual to the national, things that were taken for granted were torn away or fell apart. For me at least, I cannot read an account from this time without wondering, What would I have done? How would I have reacted? Would I have acted selflessly or heroically? Or panicked and clogged the roads like thousands of other refugees? I hope I never have to learn that answers to these questions, but here is a selection of 12 different ways in which people responded.

Divided Loyalties: A Scotswoman in Occupied France, by Janet du Tessier Cros
Janet Griegson was a Scotswoman who married François Teissier du Cros, a physicist, in 1930. She found herself in the rural Cevennes region in southern France with her husband on military service in May 1940. In this memoir of her experiences during the war, she recalls first hearing the news of the invasion:

A little beyond Mandiargues some soldiers stopped the bus and came on board. They told us that their leave had been cancelled because at that very moment the Nazi troops were pouring into Holland. A buzz of dismay went through the bus. i sat frozen. Something in my mind was rushing desperately hither and thither, hunting for a way out. There was none. My sister Alice was married to a Dutchman and lived in The Hague. What would become of their children and of themselves? What about François? It was the end, the terrible end I had sensed from the beginning….

Death and Tomorrow (American title: The Germans Came to Paris)(1942), by Peter de Polnay
Peter de Polnay, a Hungarian-born novelist who wrote in English, was living in Paris and enjoying the best of la vie bohème when war broke out. He first felt himself outside the conflict, and even the start of the Blitzkrieg seemed, at first, of little import:

I went to play bridge in the house of an English friend, and at that bridge party only English and Americans were present. They all said that the French were running; I heard the word running the whole afternoon. Now that the Germans are inside France, I suggested, the running will stop. The answer was that the Stukas and the seventy-ton tanks were invincible. But there was Weygand [the marshal commanding the French army], I said. It was a pretty gloomy afternoon, though nobody quite believed that those tanks were really invincible, it was talking of the devil in the hope that the talk would exorcise him.

Death and Tomorrow is a vivid description of the first days of the German occupation of Paris, enriched by the fact that de Polnay seemed to cross paths — and be trusted — by everyone: Germans, French, collaborators, black marketeers, and Resistance members. Eventually, though, his freewheeling ways attracted the attention of the Gestapo and he was forced to flee, making his way to England, the story of which comprises the second half of his book.

The Train, by Georges Simenon
Twenty years after the fact, the prolific novelist Georges Simenon wrote one of his best novels — Brigid Brophy called it his masterpiece — about the choices people make when their lives are suddenly disrupted. The story opens as a Belgian couple are fleeing their home to escape the Germans. Familiar with the experience of occupation from the First World War, some of their fellow townspeople have decided to stay:

Other people, like us, were walking towards the station, burdened with suitcases and bundles. An old woman asked me if she might put hers on my cart, and she started pushing it along with me….

There was a rather wild look in most people’s eyes, but that was chiefly the result of impatience. Everybody wanted to be off. It was all a matter of arriving in time. Everybody was convinced that part of the huge crowd would be left behind and sacrificed.

Were those who were not leaving taking greater risks? Behind the window-panes, faces were watching the fugitives, and it seemed to me, looking at them, that they were stamped with a sort of icy calm.

The couple become separated in the evacuation and the husband meets a Czech woman who leads him to reconsider where he wants to go with his life. It’s a classic Simenon story, in which one unexpected accident, one step in the wrong direction, sets off a series of events that overturns everything an individual has taken for granted — rather as the fall of France did on a much larger scale.

Running to Paradise (1943) and Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1955), by John Lodwick
Finding himself in France at the outbreak of the war, John Lodwick joined the French Foreign Legion and was involved in numerous skirmishes as the French and British armies gave way before the Germans. He wrote about the experience twice: first as a novel with his fictional counterpart Adrian Dormant and again, 15 years later, in a memoir that encompassed his time as a prisoner of war, his escape to England, and his work as an agent for the Special Operations Executive in France and the Balkans.
Both books demonstrate that Lodwick, for all his superficial nonchalance, was a veteran of intense combats. In Running to Paradise, he describes the psychological effects of being attacked by Stuka dive bombers:

Both the precision of their aim and the destruction caused by it were intense. The effect of it was moral as well as material. A bomb takes a certain time to fall, and whistles as it drops. The blast and danger of its explosion are as nothing compared to the agonized suspense of these few moments. A man lying with his belly married to the soil or in the shallow shelter of some hole, feels himself annihilated in advance, a grubby penny lying on the counter of eternity. He cannot see. He dare not raise his head. He can only hear, and since the enemy realize this and know the control which his auditory system exercises on his nerves, they fit sirens to their aeroplane engines — sirens, whose mournful wail, like the last breath of a banshee, shall deafen him and curdle his quaking tripes.

F.S.P.: An N.C.O.’s Description of His and Others’ First Six Months of War, January 1st–June 1st, 1940, by Arthur Gwynn-Browne (1941)
Gwynn-Browne was an NCO assigned to a Field Security Post (a military police unit) with the British Expeditionary Force deployed to France after the German invasion of Poland. He witnessed, therefore, not only the truce-like “Phony War” but the panic and retreat when the German Panzers began driving through Belgium and France. Gwynn-Browne’s might be considered the first modernist account of World War Two, as his prose style shows the clear influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
In the early days, his unit is assigned to try to manage the masses of refugees filling every passable road leading away from the Germans:

There were hundreds of cars, thousands of refugees. They all looked much the same and one car looked much the same as the next one coming after. On the top there were always the mattresses laid flat on the roof and on them lay blankets pillows eiderdowns rug and these were securely corded and then usually a bicycle and a child’s scooter and sometimes a pram securely corded on top of them. It was hot and dry and it was all right, later on it was cold and wet and then it was not so all right. Inside the cars there was everything the family had and all the women inside all wore little round hats with little veils on them. The children usually there were two or three children they were asleep. There were never any pet animals and the windows were tight shut though it was hot but they were closed. Perhaps it is not kind to say they all looked very bourgeois but they did, they were plump scented and stuffy.

• Europe in the Spring, by Clare Boothe (1940)
Playwright and occasional reporter Clare Boothe (not yet adding husband and Time/Life owner Henry Luce’s name to hers) traveled to Europe in April 1940 expecting to travel around and witness the uneasy stalemate underway since the end of the German and Soviet takeover of Poland. Instead, she found herself caught up in the flight from the German attack, waking up on her first day in Brussels to the news that German troops were crossing into Belgium and German planes bombing its cities and forts. She makes her way to Paris, where she watches as the facade of Parisian sophistication crumbles as the government and army fall apart:

Paris got its information about what France had been doing all day, all night, the way a woman gets hers about what her husband has been up to. You know how a woman says, the split second her husband walks in the door with a carefully arranged smile on his face: “So things have been going badly at the office?” And he says: “My God, how did you know?” And she replies: “Because I know you so well, darling.” That is how Paris, the wife, knew what was happening to France, the husband. All the smiles or frowns on the politicians’ faces when they left their offices, the way military moustaches drooped or bristled at midnight, the inflections of well-known voices saying nothing or something or anything on the radio, on the telephone; the way important. people walked in the street; the way ministry doors were slammed; by the significant silences of a great race of talkers; by a thousand little downward percolating uncensorable gestures and indications, the contagious climate of a mood spread from the top of Paris to the bottom—from clerk to doorman, to domestic, to waiter, to policeman, to taxi-driver, to the people—so that the people of Paris knew from hour to hour how the fate of France fared.

Assignment to Catastrophe, by Major General Edward L. Spears (1955)
Spears, who grew up in France and had the dual advantages of a fluent mastery of the French language and culture and the trust of Winston Churchill, was appointed as Churchill’s personal representative to French prime minister Paul Reynaud soon after Churchill took over as British prime minister. Assignment to Catastrophe, Spears’ two-volume memoir of the lead-up to the war and of the fall of France, is a fascinating account of the personalities and politics at work in the last days of the Fourth Republic.
Knowing Marshal Pétain from his work as a liaison officer between the British and French forces during World War One, Spears paid a call soon after Pétain’s return from his post as ambassador to Franco’s Spain. He soon realized that the man who was being lauded as the savior of France was senile, ineffectual, and completely unsuited to the task:

Very sadly I said: “What France needs today, Monsieur le Marshal, is another Joan of Arc.” His reaction was startling. Once more he was all animation, his face lit up. “Joan of Arc! Joan of Arc!” he exclaimed, “Have you read my speech on Joan of Arc?” “No, Monsieur le Marechal “Now that is too bad, it should have been sent to you. I made it at Rouen; now when was it, in 1937, ’38? It was an extremely fine speech, I may say. I shall read it to you.”

To my amazement, not to say consternation, he went to some bookshelves between two windows, pulled out one or two bound volumes of typescript, did not find what he wanted, then bent right down to look at the lowest shelves. The effort was considerable, he straightened stiffly, and said: “I shall have it found, it is certainly here,” and, moving back to his desk, rang a bell. In a moment his Chief of Staff, General Bineau, appeared. He was almost as old as his chief (age was a major quality in the Marshal’s eyes) and, I think, very lame.

The problem was explained, and with courteous apologetic haste the General began to hunt for the speech.

It was presently found. “ Je vous remercie ,” said the Marshal, as, adjusting his pince-nez once more, he settled himself in a stiff arm¬ chair with his back to the window.

All I remember about that speech was that it was very, very long and that he read it in a monotone. I cannot recall a single sentence, or even its gist. What I do remember was the terrible sadness I felt as I watched him, a sadness now based on pity for a very old man for whom I had, till so recently, felt the deepest affection and regard. He was infinitely pathetic in his childish satisfaction as he read.

My First War: An Army Officer’s Journal for May 1940, through Belgium to Dunkirk, by Basil Bartlett (1942)
Like Gwynne-Browne, Basil Bartlett was assigned to an FSP with the B.E.F., but in his case as the commanding officer. My First War is a case study in the incoherence of an army and society in collapse. Macmillan tried to market the book as “British nonchalance and dry humor at its most enchanting,” but what comes across more strongly is a world view consistently failing to take in the magnitude and reality of the chaos it was experiencing.
As his unit approaches Dunkirk, Bartlett asks a Belgian for the name of a good hotel there, “as we’re all tired and feel we’d like a wash and a sleep.” The man looks at him in amazement. He soon discovers why:

Dunkirk was a nasty shock. I knew it had been bombed, but I hadn’t realised quite how seriously. As I entered the town there was a roar of engines overhead. I looked up and saw about thirty pale-green aeroplanes with a black cross on their underwings flying very low above me. There were no airraid shelters to be seen. So I dived down a side-street and hid myself under a stone seat. At that moment the bombs began to fall. Each aeroplane dropped a 500-pound screaming bomb. Then they all scattered hundreds of little delayed-action and incendiary bombs. By a miracle I escaped being hit.
I crawled out feeling rather shaken.

Strange Defeat, by Marc Bloch
Bloch, one of the leading historians of his time as well as a veteran of World War One, wrote a brief account that combined personal memoir with searching political and social criticism that was published after his execution by the Gestapo in 1944 for his work in the French resistance.
Serving as a fuels officer when his unit was cut off by the German assault in early May, Bloch evaded capture for ten days by disguising himself as … himself:

What, in fact, I did, after standing for a few moments deep in thought on the pavement of that hilly street, was to choose what seemed to me then the simplest, and, in the long run, the safest method of getting away. I went back to the house where I was billeted. There I took off my tunic. My rough serge trousers had nothing particularly military about them. From my landlord, who, with his son, showed, on this occasion, a high degree of courage, I got, without difficulty, the loan of a civilian jacket and tie. Then, after first making contact with an old friend who was a professor at Rennes, I booked a room in one of the hotels. Arguing that the best way to escape being noticed was to retain one’s identity, I put my real name and occupation on the form handed tome by the manager. My grey hairs were sufficient guarantee that no one would suspect the presence of an army officer beneath the outward semblance of so obviously academic a figure?

The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, by Lion Feuchtwanger (1941)
Novelist Feuchtwanger and his wife left Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power, knowing that their status as liberal intellectuals and Jews put them at risk of Nazi persecution. Within two weeks of the German invasion of France in May 1940, however, he was told to report to the internment camp at Les Mille. After several months, he managed to arrange his escape from internment, disguising himself as a woman and making it to Marseilles. There, with the help of American consul Varian Fry, the couple were given passage to New York, where Feuchtwanger wrote this account of his treatment by the Germans.
Feutchwanger wrote of the experience of captivity with thousands of other prisoners in Les Mille:

What I found most difficult about the camp was the fact that one could never be alone, that constantly, day and night, every act, every physical function, eating, sleeping, voiding, was performed in the presence of hundreds of men, men who were talking, shouting, moaning, weeping, laughing, feeding, smacking their lips, wiping their mouths, sweating, smelling, snoring. Yes, we did everything in the most public view, and no one seemed to feel the slightest embarrassment.

The Fall of Paris, by Ilya Ehrenburg
Ehrenburg spent the late thirties as a Soviet correspondent in Paris (and managed to avoid some of the personal and ethical risks of Stalin’s purges). In response to the fall of France, he quickly wrote a lengthy novel that, like Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy, traced the decay and breakdown of French society and the early impact of the Occupation. In it, he describes the despair of Parisians during the first days under Nazi rule:

All this time the Parisians had been staying indoors. They could not get used to the German soldiers in the streets. In the morning Agnés went shopping. The long queue was silent. The people tried not to think about anything. Searching for a pound of potatoes or a bottle of milk helped to distract their minds. If they talked at all it was about relations who had disappeared one had lost a husband, another a son.

Once an old man in a queue exclaimed: “What about France?”

Nobody answered, but everybody thought: “France is also lost.”

Troubled Sleep, by Jean-Paul Sartre
In the third volume of his unfinished tetralogy about French society from the Munich crisis of 1938 through the fall of France and the Occupation, The Roads to Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre follows a group of soldiers as they learn of the Armistice and are rounded up and shipped off to German prison camps. He describes a carload of prisoners watching as the French landscape rolls away from them:

Brunet saw a chateau that was not yet within their range of vision, a chateau in a park, white, and flanked by two pointed towers. A small girl in the park, holding a hoop, stared at them with solemn eyes; it was as though all France, an innocent and outmoded France, through those young eyes was watching them pass. Brunet looked at the little girl and thought of Pétain; the train swept across her gaze, across her own future of quiet games and healthy thoughts and trivial worries, on toward fields of potatoes and factories and armament works, on to the dark, real future of a world of men. The prisoners behind Brunet waved their hands; in all the cars Brunet saw hands waving handkerchiefs; but the child made no response, she only stood there clasping her hoop.

Central Stores, by Vicki Baum (1940)

“One must never place a loaded gun on the stage if it isn’t going to go off,” Anton Chekhov is said to have told aspiring playwrights. In Central Stores, Vicki Baum’s novel, not one but two pistols are introduced in early chapters. Any reader who’s ever heard about Chekhov’s gun will know to expect something explosive to come: a shooting, a robbery, a suicide, perhaps. By the time Der große Ausverkauf, the German original of Central Stores, was published in 1937, Baum had written 19 books in as many years, a production rate she kept up for another 20 years, amassing nearly 50 novels to her name.

Few writers can be this prolific without resorting to a few formulaic tricks, usually in the way of plots and characters. In Baum’s case, her plots tend to be variations on “Ship of Fools,” a warhorse from the Middle Ages that served many 20th bestselling authors (e.g., Arthur Hailey in Airport) well: put a batch of people with conflicting motives in a confined setting and let the inevitable chain reactions take place. This served her very well with her best-known and most successful novel, Grand Hotel (1929). So well, in fact, that these plots are usually referred to as “Grand Hotel” stories.

But by Central Stores, its limitations were becoming evident. Central Stores is a large Macys-like department store in midtown Manhattan, with twelve floors of everything from fish to furs. In fact, the first character in the book wafts into the china department with the smell of the fish on sale that day in the grocery department.

She was one of those customers who are always on the search for something cheaper. Shop-soiled blouses, leaky coffeepots, discoloured leather bags, clearance sales of imitation silk stockings — that is the sort of thing they go after. They are the wives of underpaid clerks, those worried and fretful women who never get anything which is worth the price they pay for it.

In Baum’s scheme, this woman is a secondary character. Though she will reappear to help frame the story, she is really just a device. Therefore, Baum has no need to tell us any more about her.

We can easily tell Baum’s primary characters. They all have names, ages, hair colors, physical assets or impediments, mannerisms. And like the pistols, if Baum mentions any of these, it’s a given they will serve some function in the course of the book. Mr. Philipp, the house detective, is in his sixties, balding, with a drinking problem and a pistol. Which means, we know, that he’s probably going to mess up and get fired and do something desperate. Lillian Smith, one of the models in the store’s haut couture department, is stunningly beautiful but perhaps a bit too slickly gorgeous and wears too much of a cheap perfume. These, too, will be used. Baum is a most utilitarian writer.

This is not to suggest that Central Stores is not an entertaining book. Although we can see her constructing a house of cards in the first two-thirds of the novel, just how it collapses and where the cards fall still comes as a surprise and the narrative’s momentum builds to the point where we keep turning the pages through the climactic chapters. I figured it would take me 4-5 days to read it; I finished it in two.

Several reviewers commented that Central Stores was perfect material for a film, and as I was reading it, I could picture Van Johnson as Eric, the tall window dresser married to Nina, the pretty young saleslady (Teresa Wright or Donna Reed). James Gleason, of course, has to be Mr. Philipp. Lillian Smith might be harder to cast: she needs a blonde, brassy femme fatale type, but not someone like Lana Turner who would become an A-lister. Lizabeth Scott, perhaps?

Central Stores is a bit of a puzzle in Baum’s oeuvre. When I first read about it, I just assumed that it, like most of Baum’s novels that were translated into English, would have been published and sold well in both the U.S. and England. But, in fact, Central Stores has never been published in America. Even its English publisher, Geoffrey Bles, appears not to have put much of a push behind the book, based on the few and small ads I’ve been able to locate. Was the perception of Baum as a German writer a factor? But she was, in fact, an Austrian Jew whose books were banned by the Nazis. It’s hard to tell now, but from what I can see, Central Stores was a natural for American readers and would have been a guaranteed bestseller. Unfortunately, this means that used copies are much scarcer in the U.S. now. Fortunately, the book is also available for reading on the Internet Archive (link).


This is a contribution to Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s #1940Club, the latest increment of their twice-yearly call for readers to write about books published in a particular year.


Central Stores, by Vicki Baum
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940

Mock Autobiographies for April Fools

Long before Clifford Irving concocted his fake autobiography of recluse millionaire Howard Hughes, mock autobiographies have been a popular vehicle for satire — usually of the sort of people who wrote these books, less frequently (viz. Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man), of the (real, not mock) author’s contemporaries. I’ve written about a number of these over the years, but I had no idea how broad this seemingly narrow sub-genre was until I started compiling this list, which is less comprehensive than I suspected a few days ago. And so, in no particular order, here is a baker’s dozen of autobiographies (and diaries) that are not — Surprise! — by the people they claim to be.

My Royal Past (1940, revised 1961)
By Baroness von Bülop, nee Princess Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-Waldstein. Actually by Cecil Beaton.
Perhaps the ultimate proof of the fact that Cecil Beaton felt his position as preferred photographer to the Court of St. James secure was the fact that not once, but twice, he mocked both his subjects and his own staid style of photographing them in this illustrated memoir of a remote offshoot of the tangle of Saxe-Coburg-Hesse-Hohenzollern-Hapsburg-etc. bloodlines that ruled Europe for too bloody long. Beaton himself dressed up as the Baroness, accompanied by such friends as the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, all dressed up in gowns and bemedalled uniforms.
The Baron and Baroness von Büllop on their honeymoon.
Beaton was so sure of himself, in fact, that he provided his own review blurbs before they were written: e.g., “Here, as Lord Beaconsfield said, is a book that no time should be wasted in reading.” Perhaps to capitalize on his renewed fame for his costume designs for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, My Royal Past was revised and reissued in 1961, including this time a list of errata, such as . And as one accustomed to paying attention to details, Beaton was sure to include a detailed index with such entries as:
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s entries in the index to My Royal Past.

Quail in Aspic (1962)
By Count Charles Korsetz. Actually by Cecil Beaton
Beaton had such fun with My Royal Past that he took another shot at the sub-genre the year after its reissue. Quail in Aspic was an “as told to” autobiography of a Hungarian count who had a knack for being on the side of European noble houses moments before their demise. He manages to remake himself as a proper English gentleman, however, complete with a fine country house and a matching set of prejudices.
Elsa Maxwell as Count Charles Korsetz.
This time around, Beaton recruited his long-time friend, the society hostess Elsa Maxwell, to portray the Count in the photographs (by Beaton, of course) that illustrate the book.

 

Cyril Pure’s Diary (1981)
By Cyril Pure. Actually by Michael Geare.
Cyril Pure is a man after every bookshop owner’s heart. Of malice, that is. Set up in Chipping Toad’s only bookshop, he dives headlong into the bookselling industry. Although it might be more accurate to say that the UK’s bookselling industry dives headlong upon him, rather like a pack of ravenous vultures. One publisher’s rep, having heard the shop has sold one of their books, leaves Cyril with 100 copies of a sure bestseller, Reminiscences of an Old Crocodile Shikari. The Chipping Toad Poetry Society names him its Vice President, in return for which he has the honor of hosting a reading by the famous Cement poet, Bert Stunge, and providing refreshments. Cyril puzzles over the inner meanings of Stunge’s work:

Tring, tring
Shoestring, heating
Bloating, fourteen
Umpteen, thumping…

Geare teamed up with Michael Corby the following year to write another mock diary, this time of the famed Transylvanian count, who, as it turns out, spent quite a lot of time in Victorian England, attending Balliol and Oxford, exchanging ripostes with Oscar Wilde, meeting Sherlock Holmes, and implicating Van Helsing in the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s earnest fun but more earnest than fun, unfortunately.

 

Lord Bellinger (1911)
By Lord Bellinger. Actually by Harry Graham.
Although just one generation away from trade, Lord Bellinger has easily adapted to the life of the idle nobility, priding himself on being “naturally disinclined to anything approaching effort.” An early attempt at portraying the type of privileged dimwit parodied in Monty Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition and now occupying numerous junior minister positions in the current Conservative government, Harry Graham ultimately missing his mark by favoring kindness over brutality in his approach.
I wrote about Lord Bellinger back in 2013.

 

Little Me: the intimate memoirs of that great star of stage, screen, and television, Belle Poitrine (1961)
By Belle Poitrine (see above for the rest). Actually by Patrick Dennis.
Dennis, rocketed to fame and fortune with his novel Auntie Mame and its Broadway and film adaptations, may have had most fun with this account of the successes, failures, and romantic entanglements of a grand dame actress a la Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, etc. Dedicated to her four husbands, including the fourth and shortest-lived (literally), Letch Feeley, the former Pomona gas station attendant who had the misfortune to step onto a yacht with his mistress just moments before it quite unexpectedly exploded. Illustrated with photographs by Cris Alexander.

Like Beaton, Dennis enjoyed this form so much that he followed a few years later with First Lady (1964), the memoirs of Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, whose husband, George Washington Butterfield, occupied the White House for 30 days in 1909 — most of that time drunk or cavorting with his mistress, Gladys Goldfoil, in one of the spare bedrooms.

 

I Think I Remember (1927)
By Sir Wickham Woolicomb (“ordinary English snob and gentleman”). Actually by Magdalen King Hall
A celebration of a life lived “when gentlemen were gentleman” and before “all this socialism, etc., made everything cheap and nasty.” As with Lord Bellinger, it’s easiest to simply poke fun at the pompous than to turn parody into an authentic comic creation. As The New York Times‘s reviewer put it, “In parodying the pompous tomes of reminiscences that great personages manage to foist on the publishers and public with little difficulty, Miss King-Hall has taken a step downstairs. It is as if James Joyce, after completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had gone ahead to fashion A Portrait of an Old Man with Senile Dementia.”

There must be something about these spoofs that inspires certain authors. Magdalen King-Hall wrote two others: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 (1926), which mocked the pretences and rituals of Georgian England and which she admitted she’d only written to escape the boredom of a summer at the English seaside; and Gay Crusaders (1934), the memoir of an English knight in the Third Crusade, an experience enlivened by liberal amounts of booty and made tiresome by the consistent habit of the French to arrival after all the fighting was done.

 

Water on the Brain (1933)
By Major Arthur Blenkinsop, formerly of the Boundary Commission in Mendacia. Actually by Compton Mackenzie
Mackenzie, who ran a British intelligence and special operations network in Greece during World War One and was involved in everything from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to an attempted assassination of Prince Phillip’s father, then King of Greece. Somewhat resentful at his lack of recognition from his higher ups, Mackenzie wrote this account of one particularly inept and dull-witted agent recruited into the service of His Majesty’s Director of Extraordinary Intelligence, MQ99(E).

 

The Way Up (1972)
By Anaxagoras, Duc de Gramont. Actually by Sanche de Gramont (who later changed his name to Ted Morgan).
The Way Up may have been an attempt to cash in on the success of the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, mock memoirs by Harry Flashman, the villain of Thomas Hughes’s earnest Victorian boy’s novel about Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days. In De Gramont’s case, his villainous hero is a fringe member of the court of King Louis XV, adventurer, soldier of fortune, slave trader, and courtier. Ironically, however, it was Scotsman Fraser who demonstrated a greater talent for panache than his French wannabe competitor. De Gramont/Morgan stuffs almost 500 pages full of plot but failed to come close to the joyous sense of bastardry that makes the Flashman novels so much fun.

 

The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace (1937)
By Ethel Firebrace. Actually by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker.
The Victorian novelist par excellence, Ethel Firebrace wears out four typewriters churning out over a hundred novels or over five million self-righteous words. By her own account, Ethel is not a prig. It simply happens to be the fact that everyone else is lazy, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy.
And non-garglers. Ethel attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. Writers who fail to gargle “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”
As I wrote back in 2019, The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace was a jeux d’esprit for lifelong friends Taylor and Whitaker, but on the whole probably more fun for them than us.

 

The Autobiography of Augustus Carp
By Augustus Carp, Esq. Actually by Henry H. Bashford.
Most of these books are amusing. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. The Autobiography of Augustus Carp is a comic masterpiece. Bashford, a Harley Street physician and amateur writer, grasped something that many of his fellow mock autobiographers failed to: namely, that one cannot spoof half-heartedly. There are moments, for example, when the reader sees the props in a book like The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, sees the scene being staged for a joke at Ethel’s expense. Bashford, on the other hand, understood that Augustus Carp is not only blissfully unaware of his ridiculousness but absolutely convinced of his constant and superior moral rectitude. And so, for example, if he happens to get hammered by imbibing excessively of a drink he’s told is “Portugalade,” he is not just a drunken boor but completely ignorant of the fact that he’s drunk. There’s a certain giddy delight in observing how often Bashford is able to coax Augustus into behaving like an idiot without his gaining the slightest clue to what’s going on.

 

My Hey-Day: The Crackup of the International Set (1940)
By Princess Tulip Murphy. Actually by Virginia Faulkner.
Taken from a series of articles Faulkner wrote for Town and Country in the 1930s, My Hey-Day is a world tour in the company of Tulip Murphy, former good-time girl and widow of “Brick-a-Minute” Murphy, who claimed to be related to ancient Irish royalty in some unspecified way. Unspecified is all right with Tulip, who’se never seen a set she couldn’t force her way into. Whether she’s visiting Scandanavian, the Soviet Union, France, Tibet, or Hollywood, Princess Tulip manages to mock power, wealth, class, culture, sexuality, and, most of all, fashion. No matter how limited her purse, she finds some old thing to throw on:

I was wearing an original Déclassé (salvaged from the wreck of my wardrobe), of spaghetti-colored cambric, handsomely trimmed in gum-drop green duvetyn with shoulder-knots of solid tinsel. My hat was a saucy beret no bigger than an aspirin tablet, which was held to my head by a specially trained family of matching chameleons. My only jewelry, square-cut cultured emerald cufflinks, matched the duvetyn, and I carried a fish-net parasol which also could be used for water-divining.

Princess Tulip noted, with regret, that the onset of World War Two was curtailing the activities of the International Set: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of a single hand.” However, Faulkner carried Tulip through at least a dozen more adventures after My Hey-Day was published, visiting New Orleans, Washington, Mexico, a Western dude ranch, and the wedding of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan in 1949 and setting at least the American land speed record for gate crashing.

The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler (1956)

Cover of the UK hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.

Ida Erickson, the central figure in Laura Beheler’s first novel, The Paper Dolls, is a well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed child. Despite the Depression, both her mother and father have good jobs and can treat her to new dresses, cokes, and store-bought cakes when many of her classmates wear hand-me-downs and go without lunch. Every day, Ida comes home and, the good little girl she is, goes to her room and plays. Which suits her parents, who are usually fighting behind their locked bedroom door. Without her parents, Ida is effectively alone:

Her grandmothers and granddaddies were all dead; they never even knew she got alive. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Damned old women sat around her kitchen table and slurped up her cokes. Ida rocked from side to side, tears wetting her arms, rolling down her chin, falling in small droplets onto the grass. Whispering blearily, she moaned. Was there ever anybody in the whole history of the whole world who didn’t have anybody?

Cover of the US hardback edition of The Paper Dolls.

With no real friends, Ida has provided herself with her own friends, the characters she keeps in her Universal Theme and Composition Book (No. S-1055). Sometimes they are just the head and shoulders taken from a Montgomery-Ward catalog; sometimes a full-length figure cut from a copy of The Delineator magazine. Beside each, she notes the name, vital statistics, key facts:

Sands Chutney — 14 years — 5 feet 1 inch tall — 109 pounds — English aristocrat — very rich.
Agnes Eaves — 15 years — 5 feet — 97 pounds — blond hair — very educated.
Dan Davis — 15 years — 5 feet 3 inches — 110 pounds — plays violin — is orphan.

Ida lives in a world so devoid of emotional or social interaction that her paper dolls are not only her source of entertainment and comfort but, as the years go by, more real than the real people in her life. When her father, apparently an inveterate philanderer, leaves to take a job in another city, abandoning Ida and her mother, Ida replaces him with a new doll (Fritz Robinson — 15 years — 5 feet, 2 inches — 120 pounds — shipwreck survivor). When her uncle Johnny, a musician, comes to stay for a while and shows more interest than any adult has before, Ida has a brief reprieve from the relentless dreariness of her non-imaginary like. But when Johnny moves on, Ida replaces him:

The first night he was gone, Ida found herself restless in a sea of aloneness. She got out the Universal notebook, laid out a few characters. For a long time she stared at the line-up, wondering what to do with it. Finally she decided Sands Chutney was named Sandy Chutney, and he played a clarinet.

Asked what she’d done on her summer vacation, Ida has only her paper dolls to fall back on:

“Well uh, I have this friend Sands Chutney who’s from New York. He came to see us, and he brought his girl friend with him. Her name’s Agnes Eaves. Well, he plays a real good clarinet, and she plays piano. And they taught me to play drums and guitar. Sands Chutney owns this httle night club back in Memphis, and that’s where he met Agnes Eaves. Well, they kept begging me to go back with them and play drums and guitar in the band. Two or three times I thought maybe I would, but I decided . . .”

Though Ida finishes school, gets a secretarial job, becomes an adult, the world of her paper dolls remains the focus of her life. Pearl Harbor is attacked and America enters the war. But to Ida, the war “was simply an incontestable fact, not a penetrating experience.”

Until she meets Allan, a Navy ROTC cadet, who quickly falls in love with her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he falls in love with his impression of Ida. At a superficial level, Ida understands what is expected of a young woman in the social rituals of romance and is capable of playing her part. But at some level, Allan is nothing more to her than a three-dimensional doll, and to him, she is much the same.

When Allan ships off with the Atlantic fleet, Ida moves to New York to wait for him. She dominoes through a series of jobs until she lands one as a day clerk in the Waverly Hotel. Like many of its residents, the Waverly is “a lost and seedy aristocrat.” A bitter 4F Jew named Wally Safferman — well, befriends is too strong a word, so let’s say he attaches himself to Ida. She’s willing to buy drinks and listen, even if she doesn’t really like him much.

The problem with Wally is that he does see Ida for who she is: “‘Ida, you are so …’ He paused, looking for words, then finished, ‘You are so unborn.'” Wally understands the difference between simple innocence and raw naïveté. Ida is still cocooned in the illusions she’s built up around her dolls. “Did you ever go through that stage where you watched with horror while your childhood dream world collapsed?” he asks her in astonishment.

Unfortunately, before Wally can burst Ida’s bubble, Allan writes to say that he’s returning. He has a job lined up in Topeka, Kansas and expects Ida to report for duty:

I’m the man in this outfit. Therefore, where my job is simply has to be the place we go. This whole thing has been crazy long enough, and I’m tired of it. So here it is straight and simple: will you come to Topeka and marry me?

Will she, readers? Well, let’s just say that it comes down to a choice between Allan in Topeka and Sands Chutney in a dark Manhattan bar.

Some reviewers found The Paper Dolls too close to a case study to be fully successful as a novel, but Laura Beheler offers a convincing case for fantasy as a survival mechanism that gets a person through a lot of bleak days. Few readers will reach the end, however, without seeing its long-term limitations. Which is why the other things reviewers called The Paper Dolls was a horror story. If it is a horror story, it is entirely because we cannot help but empathize with Ida, the lost little girl.

Laura Beheler, from the dust jacket of The Paper Dolls.

Laura Beheler was no Ida Erickson. Raised in Fort Worth, she served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in World War Two, worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and a copywriter for Neiman-Marcus, took up fencing and became a regional champion. In the late 1940s, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she became a junior high school teacher and wrote three published novels starting with The Paper Dolls. She never married, remained in Santa Fe until her death in 2008 at the age of 87, and presumably never kept a notebook full of paper dolls.


The Paper Dolls, by Laura Beheler
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956

Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman (1964)

Cover of first Us edition of Marie Beginning by Alfred Grossman

This is a guest post by the novelist Rob Palk.

Some books are neglected in their old age, others — a majority — are neglected from birth. Alfred Grossman, the author of Marie Beginning (1964), was both neglected and known for it, a painful combination. Newspapers profiled his neglect in pieces that failed to avert it. Anthony Burgess, recognising another flinty show-off, gave his endorsement. It made no difference. Grossman released four novels that received good reviews and were ignored by the reading public. His efforts after the fourth were ignored by publishers too.

From the Chicago Tribune, 2 June 1968.

Marie begins in the world of The Apartment, the American office in its imperial phase. Two frazzled male office wiseacres drink their coffees and swap dialogue. Our heroine, a gamine young woman from Brooklyn, arrives to ask for a secretarial job. Her interviewer, Lydia, has very large breasts. (It was 1964. If a male writer thought up some breasts he was going to tell you about them.) So far, so Mad Men. Only something odd is afoot; the two guys in the office are discussing puritanism and the Conquistadores, and Marie bombards her interviewer with vaguely blackmailing questions about the aforementioned breasts and is rewarded for this with a job. (Yes, breasts, yes, I know. Again, it was 1964 and Lydia’s breasts are pretty much a character in this book.)

Then there’s the style. We are barely allowed inside the character’s heads; instead their inner lives spume out of them in florid ejaculations. They don’t so much converse as perform dialogue at one another, in a sort of gnomic screwball-ese of Grossman’s own invention. Scenes blur into each other in the space of a sentence. Marie herself might seem a familiar figure, the plucky street urchin who rises to the top through street smarts. Except there’s something chilling, something eldritch, about her, possessed, as she is, of both amoral cunning and a mysterious innocence. She is the teenage girl as avenging angel, or Martian, and her ambitions are set on more than just a job.

One senses that Grossman fell a bit in love with his creation, in a sweetly Platonic way. (“You don’t want to screw me and you know it. You and me,” she tells an office confidante, “I was a grown-up daughter — you could have fun with just walking on the edge of sex, playing with it, making jokes.” That sort of Platonic.) Aside from an early incident where she goads a blameless colleague into a botched suicide attempt for no reason except curiosity, her Machiavellianism is usually aimed at deserving targets. As Grossman gets fonder of her, or perhaps more annoyed at how America treated its children, Marie aims beyond humbling a few workplace chauvinists and takes on the country itself, embarking on an epic Kulturkampf against just about everything her creator must have loathed about his nation.

By a chain of implausiblebut enjoyable occurrences, Marie maneuvers her way into wedlock with her boss, Alexander Forbes. As well as being a minor plutocrat, Forbes is a predatory sadist and pervert and very American sort of fascist. We never fear for Marie in his clutches, which perhaps reduces the tension, but we do get to see our youthful protagonist turn her wits against the whole of the US right, in both its bow tied pseudo-aesthete patrician and gun-toting thick-as-pigshit forms. The creepy milieu of American reaction, its paranoid and prurient obsessions with racial and sexual hygiene, are expertly evoked. (Biographical detail: before turning to novels, Grossman edited one of the many CIA funded journals of the era, something he evidently had mixed feelings about.)

I will spoil things for no one by revealing Marie triumphs over her grim spouse and survives to fight further battles in a follow-up [The Do-Gooders (1968)] I’m now keen to read. This sequel, though, was to be Grossman’s last novel. He had no readership and it’s hard to say why. Perhaps he was that bit too clear-sighted, lacking the streak of post-Beat sentimentality of his black-comedy confreres Heller and Southern. The rest of his life was spent ignored except for occasional magazine pieces questioning why this talented author had had so little success. Twelve years after Marie Beginning was published, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He spent his last days alone, unable to physically write, but still recording novels onto a tape recorder that he knew would never be played.


Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (Sandstone Press). He tweets at @robpalkwriter.


Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman
New York: Doubleday, 1964

The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing (1939)

Cover of the first US edition of The Hospital by Kenneth Fearing

Though it takes place within the space of just an hour or two, a lot happens in Kenneth Fearing’s first novel, The Hospital. A suicide, a disfigurement, an act of vandalism and a power outage, an old man’s death and a young woman’s reprieve from tuberculosis. But even more happens off-camera, so to speak.

Although Fearing’s Hudson General Hospital is an enormous Manhattan hospital with hundreds of patients and thousands of staff members, in his hands it’s just a microcosm in a world churning with events. A dramatic rescue at sea. A contest between rival gangs over who controls the dockworkers’ union. The collapse of a a giant company. An illicit affair. An attempt to unionize the hospital workers.

But these things are only mentioned in passing, a sentence or two, and with little in the way of context or explanation. Over the course of the book, for example, we learn that Steve Sullivan, a first mate, was responsible for a rescue at sea that was later resented by his ship’s owner, leaving him without a birth. We only get bits of this story — from Sullivan, from his mother, from his wife as she waits to be operated on for breast cancer, from the woman he’s in love with — and never all the details.

In part this is because Fearing is an impressionist, not realist. He works in quick strokes, not painstaking reproduction. But also because The Hospital is a mosaic composed of what dozens of characters think, feel, and see. This was the technique Fearing used in all his novels.

The table of contents of a Fearing novel is a list of names: each chapter a moment or two as seen by that character within the book’s overall short duration. Some are major characters, such as Doctor Cavanagh, the surgeon who removes the tumor from the breast of Freya, Steve Sullivan’s wife — a surgeon who’s racking up more than his share of operating room deaths. Some, like Tom Pharney, an electrician, walk on, utter a few lines, and exit, never to be seen again. In The Hospital, Fearing even includes a few faceless extras in his cast: the crew of a city tugboat, the attendant at a police switchboard:

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.

Every fire alarm in the city sounds up here, and it’s always going.

“Give me a description of the men. Yeah, describe them. Did they have a car? What kind of a car? Were they tall or short? Which way they went after they held you up?”

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong.

“Police Headquarters.”

Bong-bong, bong-bong-bong, bong-bong. On the box in front of me, Precinct 19 shows a green light Take it.

“Headquarters.”

“Narcotics Bureau.”

Put the call through. There is the yellow light of an outside wire. Take it.

“Police Headquarters.”

The approach is remarkably effective at conveying a sense of the swirling currents of activity that go on in a complex institution such as a major hospital. It’s an approach that many a film director has followed when trying to tell the story of a big event, such as the Normandy invasion in The Longest Day. It also reinforces the sense that the institution is large and the people small. At the scale of a whole novel, it’s a bit like looking down on a busy city street from a window on the 25th floor.

It also may have enabled Fearing to play to his strengths. No character’s chapter runs more than a few pages, some just a few paragraphs. This saves him the task of any real character development. His people are more cogs in his narrative machine than the actual engine of the narrative. Though Fearing gives us a salad full of bits of their stories, his story isn’t really about any of them. It’s about Hudson General Hospital as a artefact of modern society. Again, to use a film analogy, we could consider The Hospital for the Best Editing award, but none of its cast would get nominated for an acting award.

Of Fearing’s fiction, The Big Clock consistently gets the lion’s share of the attention and critical praise, but having read most of them now, I think there is much of a muchness about all of them. For what it is, it’s a very well done muchness, and I full expect to go on and read his remaining novels. They race with the manic energy of Fearing’s best known poem, “St. Agnes’ Eve,” with its shoot-out between the police and gunman Louie Glatz:

And rat-a-tat-tat
Rat-a-tat-tat
Muttered the gat
Of Louie the rat,
While the officers of the law went Blam! Blam!-blam!


The Hospital, by Kenneth Fearing
New York: Random House, 1939

Cloudy Trophies, by Anne Goodwin Winslow (1946)

Anne Goodwin Winslow was born during Reconstruction and died not long after the launch of the first ICBMs. She was 71 when her first novel, Cloudy Trophies, was published. To say, therefore, that this is a novel enriched by a lifetime’s worth of living is an understatement.

But then, if there is anything that characterizes Winslow’s work, it is understatement. She came of age when daughters of good families, particularly in the South, were raised in a manner not that different from that experienced by Jane Austen’s heroines. There was no formal schooling and social graces and embroidery were considered as or more important skills for young women to develop than literacy. From the shelter of her family’s estate, Anne Goodwin entered into marriage with a promising West Point graduate (first in his class), Lieutenant Eben Winslow, descendant of a Winslow who arrived in America on the Mayflower. With him she spent twenty-five years as an Army wife, mastering the art of surviving a series of posts almost airless in their social rigidity.

By the time she took up writing, however, first a little poetry and later a memoir (The Dwelling, and finally fiction, that world had largely been destroyed in two wars, revolutions, and a depression. More to the point, the intricate Victorian prose styles of Henry James and George Eliot had been given way to a variety of modernist styles, from the lean words of Hemingway to the visceral complexities of Joyce and Woolf.

What this meant for Winslow is that her sensibilities had not changed — but her sentences had. Where James might have used a paragraph or page to dissect the nuances of a character’s entrance into a room, Winslow chose to confine herself to a sentence or just a careful choice of adjective or verb. Or simply to leave it to the reader to discern the significance of a gesture or a statement from its context. She had, after all, spent decades in social circles where what was not said often spoke louder than conversations that had the substance of a butterfly’s flutter.

The events of Cloudy Trophies include a child’s death — possibly a murder — and a mother’s death — likely a suicide. Neither is taken head-on, though. On the other hand, they also aren’t tip-toed around. Instead, there is at most a stroke or two of the pen … and the assumed intelligence of the reader. Winslow writes like a classical Japanese painter paints, with light strokes instead of layers of colors. And for this reason, her fiction can given a reader the impression that nothing happens.

When Orville Prescott reviewed Cloudy Trophies for The New York Times, he wrote that Winslow “Promises much, but produces little. The beauty and the wisdom and the wit it offers would have been ever so much more effective if condensed into a short story or elaborated in an essay.” The charge is not entirely unfair: Cloudy Trophies is much more about what doesn’t happen than what does.

Richard Steele is a Senator from the South. Carolina? Georgia? Alabama? We don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s a wounded land, where “often they would pass a place where the house had burned down, only the tall brick chimneys left standing.” The Senator’s time at home at the manor of a former plantation is consumed by trying to sustain a fragile network of sharecropped farms and an estate falling into increasing disrepair.

His wife, Laura, is considered an elegant jewel of Washington society. This is Washington society at the height of its elaborateness. Is this the 1880s, the 1900s? We’re never told, but when she and the Senator are in town, in their house facing Lafayette Square and a short walk from the White House, her mind is consumed with “calling, or staying where they could be called on, when the proper days rolled round.” And with “the Cabinet and the Supreme Court and Congress and their own days — the Senate — and the Legations,” almost every day is a proper day.

Laura is stifled by the vacuity of Washington society, compared to what she sees as the authencity of life in the country. “She still found herself saying, ‘Isn’t it a pretty day?’ to people who had evidently not noticed whether it was or not.” By contrast, “In the country the weather was more important than almost anything else.” To Laura, “Not mentioning the weather seemed a loss somehow. It was like not noticing the moon.”

Laura and Richard have lost a child, their only child, a son, Rickie, drowned in a pond near the manor. She suspects it may have been an act of vengeance by a disgruntled sharecropper. Richard, however, dismisses this as unlikely, irrational, and most important, a failure to move on. Unlike Laura, he craves his time in Washington. The demands of his job and the superficiality of Washington society offer him ways to escape from his pain.

One could read Cloudy Trophies and see it as a quadrille, an elegant dance in which the characters come together and part, never touching more than fingertips, following precise and predetermined steps, and conclude, with Orville Prescott, that it’s a short story padded out to 230-some pages.

But that would be mistaking the brush strokes for the picture. This is a story about how the death of a child can destroy a mother and father, can leave them shattered, fragments of themselves, struggling to find ways to survive. But it’s not Anne Goodwin Winslow’s way to jab her finger at the heart of her story and shout, “This is what it’s about!” Despite her relatively unadorned prose, hers is still a Jamesian sensibility. She aspires to be a person on whom nothing is lost, and she expects the same of her readers.

Cloudy Trophies is the third of Winslow’s novels I’ve read, and while her inexperience with the form shows in some aspects of the book’s construction, I remain in deep admiration for the assurance of her artistry and her respect for the intelligence of her readers. Hers is the kind of quiet art that is perhaps the easiest of all to become overlooked and forgotten.


Cloudy Trophies, by Anne Goodwin Winslow
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946

The Fly, by Richard Chopping (1965)

Cover to the first edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

I often stumble across a particularly intriguing forgotten book while on the trail of a different one. Recently, I was looking for information about a novel by Henri-François Rey called The Mechanical Pianos when I came across this blurb from Arthur Calder-Marshall in a Secker & Warburg ad in the Guardian: “The most interesting failure I have read for years.”

From the Secker & Warburg ad in The Guardian, 29 January 1965.

For anyone who loves odd books, a phrase like “the most interesting failure” will set off alarms. I abandoned The Mechanical Pianos (pardon, Henri-François) and went in search of Mr. Chopping’s The Fly. The reviews I found made it clear that this was not just an interesting failure but a book with a uniquely off-putting power for many critics:

E. D. O’Brien, The Illustrated London News
“prurient, scatological, corrupt and sickening.”
B. S. Johnson, The Spectator
“much gratuitous nastiness conveyed by means of an overwritter, convoluted progression of cliches…. Quite revoltingly self-indulgent and pointless.”

Seymour Simckes, The New York Times
“progresses toward a total sullying of life, toward the harshest realities of grotesque death and grotesque madness.”
Adrian Mitchell, New Statesman
“This spleeny story of office life is dominated by snot, shit, semen, and pus. Why should anyone bother to write about the interesting, fairly virgin, subject of people who pick their noses and eat the pickings if all he can say about it is an implied ‘ugh’?”
Iain Hamilton, The Daily Telegraph
“His sardonic descriptions are informed by a disgust so acute that it might even be called exultant.”
Sunday Times
“Rarely have the filthy, petty particularities of loneliness — the Camembert among the hairbrushes, the menace of a tattered usherette — been give such a thorough going-over.”

“The Camembert among the hairbrushes”? Exultant disgust? This was clearly a book worth investigating.

The first few dozen pages of The Fly feature some of the most compelling writing I’ve come across in a long time. “The perpetual silent witness of the events in this unpleasant narrative,” Chopping informs us, is a fly. A common house fly. But a fly with “nacreous glistening body,” “vicious soft proboscis,” two “many faceted globes” to observe its world. And not a mere observer but a “servant of the Eumenides,” “the miniature personification of evil, neat, fast, deadly.”

US paperback edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

Mr. Chopping may not know his flies like an entomologist, but he clearly does exult in his descriptions. But this is just the first page. Turn it, and we and the fly are transported outside, to a gutter wet with drizzle, in which, “breaking the surface, lies a used condom.”

At least one reviewer pulled the red cord at this point.

He may not, therefore, have witnessed what happens on the third page. A young girl reaches into the gutter with a twig and produces the condom for her brother’s inspection: “‘Ere, Leslie, look at this!”

To call Jennifer –the girl — and Leslie street urchins would be to sully the fine name of street urchins. These are two of the dirtiest, nastiest, most malignant children in fiction. But they are paragons compared, in Chopping’s eyes, to what’s in the push-chair Jennifer is dragging along with her other hand:

Half lying, half sitting it gazes fixedly out at the world through still eyes, squinting and protuberant. It has been so battered into obedience by Jennifer that it knows better than to utter a sound. Its bloated appearance and its immobility are further accentuated by the lower half of its body being encased in faded blue woollen rompers, bulbously overstuffed with nappies. Its arms stick out straight in front of it as if they were articulated together on a wire through the upper part of its doll’s body. The hands are swollen, mottled blue and scarlet from bad circulation. Its head is concealed in, and its face framed by, a soiled white pixie cap. From this push-chair there arises a soursweet odour of stale urine and old milk. This object is called Brenda — Leslie and Jennifer’s baby sister.

“This object” — clearly Chopping is not a man with the milk of human kindness running through his veins. But he does not single out children with his animus: he is an equal opportunity misanthrope.

Jennifer, Leslie, and Brenda play in the street outside the Office. Although Chopping doesn’t identify where his novel is set, but it could be any overcrowded, squalid grey industrial English city of its time. The purpose of the Office is never mentioned, and it doesn’t matter. It’s a place full of desks and telephones, typewriters and file cabinets, ashtrays and pale-faced mediocre clerks, secretaries, and managers, all of them grey, miserable, and frustrated.

Mr. Gender most of all: “In adolescence, he was already a grey man in embryo.” Poor Mr. Gender does get his share of abuse from his creator. His encroaching baldness is examined under the fly’s microscope: “It saw damp thinning strands of hair, carefully trained across a putty-coloured skull; oiled fronds of seaweed across a dead fish’s belly.” His grossest behaviors are put on display for our revulsion: “going back to a childhood habit, he was feeding himself with the pickings from his nose with the eager rapacity of a hungry fanatic.”

Chopping has turned the tables on the reader, in other words. It is his fly who is the noble creature, the diligent agent taking note, acting on behalf of the gods. It is his people who are held up for our repulsion. There is not a line in these pages that does not make the reader want to take a shower and give himself a vigorous scrub down.

And yet, and yet.

Within a few dozen more pages, we discover the truth in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s words. For those willing to follow Richard Chopping into this cesspool he has created, The Fly is a journey filmed in Technicolor and Cinemascope. But as a novel, it ultimately fails in design and structure.

Balzac understood something that Chopping doesn’t: if you’re going to write about nasty people, it’s the nastiest ones who have to be the stars. By far the nastiest piece of work in the Office is the cleaning (there’s an irony!) lady, Mrs. Macklin. Her superpower is spotting everyone else’s vulnerabilities, which she then probes with her rustiest, filthiest instruments. And she’s not above shoving a corpse into the building furnace to avoid awkward questions. While Chopping may have prided himself on his choice of the fly as his witness, this book would have been much more effective seen through Mrs. Macklin’s hatefilled eyes.

Structurally, The Fly is several chapters too long. We follow everyone in the Office for an annual outing to the zoo. Chopping takes us home with several of the Office’s employees, as if test-driving them as protagonists, ultimately choosing to build his climax around Mr. O’Flattery, an anxious clerk whose only distinguishable feature is his being Irish, who works himself into a breakdown not so much by Mrs. Macklin’s machinations as by the anticipation of them — and even this process is drawn out too long. Chopping’s exultant disgust loses its joyous intensity, turning into tedium and, finally, weariness.

The Fly was Richard Chopping’s first novel. Trained as an artist, Chopping was best known for his trompe-l’œil covers for the original UK hardback editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Several years later, Chopping published a second novel, The Ring, about a gay man who finds himself consumed in London’s rough trade world. This was a world Chopping knew intimately, so I am interested to see if the subject tapped into his design aesthetic better than did the grey workers in The Fly‘s Office.


The Fly, by Richard Chopping
London: Secker & Warburg, 1965

Breathe Upon These Slain by Evelyn Scott (1934)

Cover of the first US edition of Breathe Upon These Slain.

I had the chance to speak recently with David Madden, whose anthology Rediscoveries was a primary inspiration that launched my quest to seek out neglected books and authors decades ago. We talked about the fact that I completed an MA program in biograpy and creative nonfiction at the University of East Anglia a few years ago, which led, inevitably, to mention of W. G. Sebald and, in particular, his masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. And this, in turn, led to his suggestion that I read Evelyn Scott’s Breathe Upon These Slain (1934).

In October 1932, the American novelist Evelyn Scott and her second husband, the English short story writer John Metcalfe, having grown sick of life in London, moved to Lowestoft on the coast of East Anglia and rented a cottage from a spinster named Miss Henderson. As they settled into the cottage for the winter, Scott began to wonder about the family whose pictures hung in every room. Some of the pictures were prints of such once-popular subjects as the death of Cock Robin or the ride of the Bengal Lancers.

But there were several family photographs — one in the east bedroom of four little girls, all dressed alike, from sometime in the previous century; one in the west bedroom of just three girls — older, in their teens. And her novelist’s imagination began to work.

I am not here to write stories, but to rest, and my knowledge of Suffolk is small — my knowledge of these people, nothing! — yet I feel queerly urged to give the four little girls their names.

“The four sisters shall be called: Cora, Ethel, Tilly and Margaret,” she decides. And with little more than observations of places and people around Lowestoft, a bit of history, and her powers of empathy, Scott created a story of their lives. The story of the Courtneys.

Not the story. Although she speculates that the Miss Henderson who collects the rent and occasionally checks in corresponds to one of the girls in the photographs, Scott wasn’t concerned with the facts. The term was decades from being coined, but what Scott decided to create was what we would now call a metafiction (or meta-nonfiction?). She never hides herself from the reader, nor does she ever pretend that the stories she tells about the family aren’t inventions.

Evelyn Scott, around the time of Breathe Upon These Slain. [Marks on the original.]

The absence of the youngest of the four girls from the photograph of the three older girls Scott explains through the story of Tilly. One drizzly autumn day when the coastal town is socked in with one of those grey mists that rise off the Broads and cut to the bone with a chill more penetrating than much colder winter frosts, Mrs. Courtney, a fastidious but impatient woman, sends Tilly outside to gain herself a bit of piece. Just seven or eight, Tilly obliges and heads out to the seaside strand, where she walks up and down for hours until soaked to the skin and near hypothermia. And promptly contracts pneumonia and dies.

This is just the first tragedy to befall the Courtneys. Ethel and Cora marry — Ethel to Patrick, a naval officer whose infatuation with her she never quite believes, Cora to a Harley Street surgeon. A brother, Bertram — another invention of Scott’s taken from a single photograph of a young man, a proud sahib someplace in India — is attached to the Indian Civil Service but finds he lacks the stiffness of upper lip it requires. Mrs. Courtney never sees how her fastidiousness in morals as much as manners drives her daughters off, Mr. Courtney — the owner of a fish packing company — never recognizes the unbridgeable gap that exists between himself and the shopkeepers and fishermen he lifts a pint with at the New Crown.

What blows the Courtneys to smithereens, though, is the First World War. Ethel’s husband’s ship is sunk by a German torpedo when cruising in waters that were considered submarine-free. Bertram, returned from India, is mowed down in one of the many pointless assaults during the Battle of the Somme. Devastated with grief over his son’s death and brutally isolated when he realizes that no one in the town can see beyond his status as “Courtney of Courtney’s Fish” to empathize with him, Philip Courtney takes his life. And Mrs. Courtney and Margaret — Meg, the spinster — are forced to sell their grand four-story house on the Strand and retreat to the cottage now occupied by Scott and Metcalfe. Yet even as try to build up a new world around this cottage, what comes back to haunt them is not Patrick or Bertram or Philip but little Tilly, who comes to seem a sacrifice offered up to the gods of Victorian conventions.

And Miss Henderson, who comes by bicycle to collect the monthly rent, is she Meg? No, Scott admits:

There has never been a Meg. And sometimes it seems as if there were, for each, only the idea lodged in a brain we term “actual” — the idea which can draw even modest men to murder and call themselves just!

While there is a certain daring in Scott’s willingness not just to acknowledge the artificiality of her invented lives but to insert her own presence in the Lowestoft cottage as a reminder that we should not fully suspend our disbelief, there is also a cost. Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike. Breathe Upon These Slain is a longish book — just a hair under 400 pages — and many of those pages are devoted to reflections on these character Scott has created as constructs rather than people.

Yes, all fictional characters are constructs. But the reason we love fiction and its characters is that in the hands of a good storyteller, we willingly take the leap of faith and believe in their existence, at least within the framework of the novel. As Time’s reviewer wrote, “Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike.”

Breathe Upon These Slain could easily be compared to Virginia Woolf’s The Years, which came out just a few years before and which follows another family, the Pargiters, through a similar span of time. But what separates The Years from Breathe Upon These Slain is that whatever ideas Woolf was attempting to demonstrate are always subordinate to her story and its characters, making her work a masterpiece where Scott’s is only an experiment. A remarkable experiment, and one that is often fascinating in its perspective and details. And while certainly one worth further study as a milestone in the development of metafiction and creative nonfiction, it too often lacks the breath of life it needs to rise to the level of a major work. Breathe Upon These Slain, Scott’s title commands. Yet, in the end, one has to conclude that it’s Scott who has slain the Courtneys.


Breathe Upon These Slain, by Evelyn Scott
New York: Smith & Haas, 1934
London: Lovat Dickson, 1934