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Short Reviews

Short Notices

Shorter reviews of neglected books.

Quarry, by Jane White (1967)

Cover of UK paperback of Quarry by Jane White

Brooks Peters, who had a wonderful website devoted to neglected gay writers before he lost it to Russian hackers, wrote me back in 2008 to recommend Jane White’s 1967 novel Quarry:

It’s a British novel from 1960s about three adolescent boys who kidnap a boy and keep him in a cave in a quarry. It’s been compared to Lord of the Flies. It got great reviews when it came out. I’ve just finished it and thought it was extremely well done. But a real enigma. I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society

Photo of Jane White, from the dust jacket of Quarry
Photo of Jane White, from the dust jacket of Quarry.

The post I wrote building on Brooks’ recommendation produced far more comments than usual. Some were about the book, but most were about White herself — including one from her son Martin Brady, a specialist in German literature and film at King’s College London. White was her maiden name and she was known in real life as Jane Brady, who taught at St. Catherine’s School in Surrey. She wrote seven novels between 1967 and 1979, as well as a memoir, Norfolk Child, published in 1973. She contracted multiple sclerosis in her forties, however, and was forced to stop teaching and writing. At a time when treatments for MS were few and ineffective, and, in her son’s words, “made what I believe was a brave decision to get out before things got (more) unbearable,” dying in 1985 at the age of 51.

I’ve long felt that Jane White greatly redeserved rediscovery, but must confess that while I collected all her books, I read none of them until last year, when I took Norfolk Child along when we spent a long and quiet Christmas break at a house located about ten miles from the isolated Norfolk farm where White grew up. I then tucked into Quarry, which is also set in the Norfolk countryside.

There is nothing bucolic about this novel, however. In fact, it simmers with sense of the danger that’s fostered by apathy. Early in the book, three teenagers — Todd, Randy, and Carter — persuade a younger boy to come with them to a cave in the side of an abandoned quarry near their town. The boy, who’s never given a name and who seems to lack any parent or guardian to notice his absence, is nothing but an abstract victim for them to toy with. “Who do you think he is?” Randy asks Todd.

The question never gets answered. Nor does the boy help. He seems, in fact, to be happy to leave his identity ambiguous. “But who are you,” Todd asks him after a few days. “You know who I am,” he replies. When asked for his name, he answers, “Fred. Or Bert. Or Jim. Anything will do — I really don’t mind.”

The friends aren’t even quite sure what they intend to do with the boy. All three are products of the 1960s, when parents let children — or at least boys — spend most summer and weekend days running around outside with little sense of how they spent the time. “Well? Where’ve you been?” Cater’s mother asks him. “Up at the quarry.” “Oh, the quarry again,” she concludes, moving on to another subject. And so, it’s easy for them to smuggle small amounts of food that they take to the boy.

Cover of first US edition of Quarry
Cover of first US edition of Quarry.

White deliberately leaves the boy’s situation abiguous. He’s not quite free to leave but neither is he restrained like a prisoner intent on escape. They soon decide, though, to build a cover for the cave that’s both shelter and jail. This being the 1960s, Carter is able to get the materials by simply sneaking into a nearby construction site one evening and taking what he needs. They see the building of the wall as a “Boy’s Own” project: “You’re making a good job of that, Randy,” says Carter. “I like doing it,” Randy tells him. “I like making things.”

The first casualty, however, isn’t the boy but a girl who wanders into the quarry and begins exploring. They chase her away, through a woods, and onto a road where she’s knocked down and killed by a passing motorcycle. Carter’s mother reads the news of the accident with as little interest as if looking at yesterday’s temperature.

The apathy of the adult world toward the teenage boys creates a vacuum which they are allowed to fill with their own fantasies, some sinister, some as childish as playing at being pirates. Randy and Todd, however, are near the end of secondary school, soon to be pushed out to join the adults. They look upon that prospect with complete uninterest. Far better to remain in the limbo of teenage life, able to take a parent’s car for joy-riding but never expected to pay for the fuel.

Cover of US paperback edition of Quarry.
Cover of US paperback edition of Quarry.

Their toying with the boy, however, must come to an end, and when it does, the result is brutal but almost anticlimactic. The boy’s death seems almost as unreal as has his weeks of uncomplaining imprisonment.

Brooks Peters wrote, “I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society.” I think he was half-right. I think that Quarry isn’t about the breakdown of society but about a society that has already broken down without realizing it. Most of the adults in the book seem to be sleepwalking through their lives. If there is a voice at the back of their heads to urge them to look a little more closely into what their children are up to, it’s tiny and faint, almost inaudible.

It was perhaps unsurprising that Quarry was compared to Lord of the Flies by numerous reviewers. Golding’s stranded schoolboys, though, had far richer imaginations than White’s teenagers. The violence of Randy, Todd, and Carter is not savage but mundane. Their captive boy is a welcome diversion from their otherwise tedious lives, but when he becomes an impediment, they have no choice but to make him go away, like disposing of the sheet of newspaper after finishing a packet of chips.

At the time it was published, Quarry seemed shocking to readers and reviewers, but after Columbine and countless other school shootings in America, after the murder of James Bulger in England, I suspect it will seem either prescient or all too numbingly familiar. What it will not seem like is the work of a private school English teacher in her offtime.

Quarry, by Jane White
London: Michael Joseph, 1967
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967

Simenon’s romans Américains

Georges Simenon was one of the world’s most prolific and best-selling authors when he was alive and he remains so today. Few of Simenon’s current readers, however, know that he not only lived in the United States for almost ten years but also set over a dozen novels here. But what’s even more surprising is these novels have appeared in English so haphazardly.

Simenon achieved his tremendous output through tremendous discipline. Despite the fact that he moved from place to place almost constantly, he kept to a strict routine of sitting down to his typewriter each morning, and once there, he wrote at a furious rate. A typical novel might take him two to three weeks. There was at least one Maigret a year, plus two to four of the psychological thrillers he called romans durs, plus countless stories. And if these weren’t enough, he also wrote further works under a variety of pseudonyms throughout the first half of his career.

Simenon claimed that living in the United States was a goal he had set himself as a young man, and soon after the war in Europe ended, he applied for visas for himself, his wife Tigy, and their son Marc. They landed in New York City in October 1945. Knowing almost no English, Simenon quickly hired an American agent and put out a request for a bilingual secretary to help him with his correspondence. He met the first application, a French Canadian woman named Denyse Ouimet, for an interview at a restaurant named Brussels near Central Park. As Denyse later told Simenon biographer Pierre Assouline, “I met him at the Brussels at 1:45. I saw him again at the Drake at 4:45. At 7:00 we were making love.”

Now a party of four, the Simenons headed for Quebec, where at least they avoided the language problem. There, he wrote his first two American novels, both set in New York City.

• Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946); first published in English as Three Beds in Manhattan (1964), translated by Lawrence G. Blochman.

Simenon transposed his first meeting and the early days of his affair with Denyse into this story, with his role played by François Combe, a French actor, and hers by Kay Miller, the estranged wife of a Hungarian count. In her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of the book, Joyce Carol Oates called it “the most existential of love stories,” and it represented something of turning point for Simenon in that it was his first novel in which sexual passion — which soon became one of his favorite narrative accelerants — was the driving motivation.

But it’s also about Simenon’s romance with Manhattan. The book is filled with scenes that show that even having spent just some weeks in the city, Simenon soaked in countless details. When not in bed with each other, François and Kay spend hours walking:

They were on the street again. No doubt about it, they felt most at home in the street. Their mood changed immediately. The magic, lighthearted comradeship they had found by accident returned the moment they were again caught up in the noise and confusion of traffic.
People were lining up in front of the move theaters. Gaudily uniformed doormen guarded the padded portals of night clubs. They passed them all by. They zigzagged aimlessly through the sidewalk crowds until she turned to him with a smile he recognized instantly. It was the smile that had started everything.

Later, while waiting for Kay to return after a separation, François walks endlessly, the city now devoid of the energy they experienced together:

… the little dark men swarming like ants under the lights, the stores, the movie houses with their garlands of light, the hot-dog stands, the bakeries with their displays of nauseating pastries; the coin machines that played music for you or allowed you to play at rolling balls into little holes that rang bells and lit lights; everything a great city could invent to deceive man’s loneliness…

Simenon may have written Three Beds in Manhattan having scarcely set foot in America, but he managed to produce not only his best romantic novel but also one of his best American ones.

The was filmed in France as Trois chambres à Manhattan in 1965, starring Maurice Ronet and Annie Girardot.

• Maigret à New-York (1946); first published in English as Maigret in New York (1980)

If you’ve read any of Simenon’s Maigret novels, you can guess that the Inspector was far less impressed with New York City than were the lovers of Three Beds in Manhattan. The beer is poor, the streets too noisy, he can’t smoke his pipe in a movie theater, and no one seems to understand why he wants his “little lunch” in the morning. The practice of numbering streets he finds particularly frustrating: “I’ve never had a memory for figures and you people are really tiresome with your numbered streets. Why couldn’t you say Victor Hugo Street, or Pigalle Street, or President-What’s-His-Name Street….?”

The story starts at convoluted and gets messier. There is a missing young man, perhaps the heir to a fortune or perhaps an imposter, a jukebox millionaire who started as a vaudeville musician, elements of the mob (some English editions are called Maigret and New York’s Underground), retired carnival performers and FBI men who aren’t always as helpful as they could be. Despite this, the book remains among the most popular of the many Maigret novels.

• La jument perdue (1947); not yet translated into English.

Simenon wrote this novel (the title could be translated as The Lost Mare Ranch) within weeks of arriving in Tucson, Arizona in September 1947, and he drew upon places and people he discovered there. Jane Eblen Keller, who wrote an extended study of Simenon’s time in Arizona and the books he wrote there for the Journal of the Southwest in 2002, describes it as “one of the few sunny books Simenon wrote,” a tale involving a pair of aging cowboys and a couple of elderly sisters in a town resembling Tucson — although Keller does add that the plot “deals in treachery and sorrow, skullduggery and betrayal, crooked business dealings and corrupt politics.”

• Le Fond de la bouteille (1948); first published in English as The Bottom of the Bottle (1954), translated by Cornelia Schaeffer.

This was the first of the romans Américains I read and I enjoyed it even more when rereading it recently. Simenon wrote the book while renting a house called the Stud Barn in the Santa Cruz Valley near Tumacacori, Arizona, about a fifty miles south of Tucson and just across the border from Nogales, Mexico. There, the eastern bank of the Santa Cruz River was broad and productive, and the area was mostly populated by a few dozen wealthy ranchers. The Simenons — Georges, his wife Tigy, mistress Denyse and son Marc, now joined by their French cook Boule (coincidentally another of Georges’ mistresses — quickly fit into the little community.

The ranchers and their wives enjoyed a relaxed and highly social lifestyle, often gathering at one or another’s large houses for parties that could go on for days — earning the area the nickname of Santa Booze Valley. At times when the river flooded, the eastern bank became completely inaccessible and the ranchers’ parties could then run on for weeks.

This is the situation into which Donald Ashbridge, a convicted murderer and escapee from a prison in Illinois, arrives. He wants money and help from his older brother P.M., a lawyer who’s married a woman with one of the largest ranches in the valley. Donald needs to get across the river and into Mexico, where his wife and children are waiting. But P.M., having built up a reputation of integrity, needs to distance himself from Donald and his own less than respectable upbringing. Meanwhile, the storm rages, the river rises, and the booze spins the party at ever-faster speeds.

The Bottom of the Bottle introduced a theme that appears in most of Simenon’s romans Américains — that of the supposedly upstanding citizen who’s ultimately undone by some fatal flaw rooted in a secret past or association. As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, that secret can remain hidden and inert. But when some catalyst upsets the formula — a brother on the run or a young woman found murdered or being black-balled from the country club — that stability quickly devolves into chaos.

In his Intimate Memoirs, Simenon recalled one concept that struck him while living in America: “In any American town, ‘you have to belong.’ To the community.” He himself admitted that when he was living in Connecticut, he had the illusion that he really belonged. But he also realized, as do his protagonists such as P.M. Ashbridge and Eddie Rico, that the flipside of belonging was ostracism and the ostracized person had not place in the American of the 1950s.

The novel was filmed — partly on location in the Santa Cruz Valley — as The Bottom of the Bottle, starring Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, and Ruth Roman, in 1956.

• Maigret chez le coroner (1949); first published in English as Maigret at the Coroner’s (1980), translated by Frances Keene.

In Maigret at the Coroner’s, Maigret is less inspector and more witness. He’s essentially dumped in a Tucson coroner’s inquest by an FBI agent he’s visiting on his way across the U.S., and most of the book is devoted to his following the courtroom proceedings, all the while trying both to figure out the case and decipher the odd habits of Americans. The case itself seems straightfoward: a young woman goes out partying on a Saturday night with five airmen from a nearby base and is found dead the next morning. Is it murder, accident, or suicide? We’ll never know, because Simenon ushers Maigret along to his next stop before the inquest closes.

It’s Maigret/Simenon’s observations about American manners and customs that are far more interesting than the crime (if there was one). Such as how they managed to avoid the hangovers that plagued him every time he indulged in American whiskey rather than his beloved beer:

From his first days in New York he had been amazed to see men whom he had left the night before in a state of advanced drunkenness all fresh-faced and, as they said, rarin’ to go the next morning. Then someone had told him their secret. After that, he noted in all the drugstores, in cafés, in bars, the special blue bottle mounted on a wall bracket, its spout down, out of which the proper dose of effervescent powder could be measured. Dropped into a glass to which the barman added water, the compound fizzed and tingled. This was served you as promptly as a morning coffee or a Coca- Cola, and a few minutes after ingesting it the fumes of the alcohol had been dispersed.

Yet why not? Machines for getting drunk, machines for getting over being drunk. They were logical people, after all.

Logical, yes, but this would not be Simenon if he didn’t also hint at the worm at the core. The clean-cut, Power of Positive Thinking-minded American men got that clean-cut look by taking their shirts to the dry cleaners instead of wearing them again and again like any sensible Frenchman. This emphasis on appearances is, to Maigret, just a façade. “He suspected that, at bottom, they suffered the same anxieties as the rest of humanity but that they assumed this happy-go-lucky appearance out of embarrassment.”

The book closes as Maigret’s plane is about to land in Los Angeles, the next stop on his tour. “Whatever would he see now?” he wonders as the book closes.

• Un nouveau dans la ville (1950); not yet translated into English.

Un nouveau dans la ville or A stranger in town is alone among les romans Américains in being set in a seaside town in Maine. As Jane Eblen Keller summarizes the book, the stranger acts a catalyst, unleashing the town’s many dysfunctions. He sets Charlie, the owner of the only bar in town, to wondering about the one foreigner in town, a quiet man called Yougo (he’s thought to be from Yugoslavia), and Charlie’s doubts infect the rest of the town. At the same time, the stranger suggests to Yougo that his situation is at risk, that the town’s latent xenophobia is about to make him its target. Simenon sets up a conflict that ends … well, for that we’ll have to wait for an English translation.

New York Daily News article on Simenon's second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.
New York Daily News article on Simenon’s second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.

• La Mort de Belle (1952); first published in English as Belle (1954), translated by Louise Varèse.

Belle is the first of three novels set in Connecticut, where Simenon settled after divorcing his first wife and marrying Denyse. At the time he wrote the books, Connecticut was within commuting distance of New York City by train but still full of small, quiet towns whose inhabitants could often point out generations of ancestors in the local cemetery. But in some ways, these books are more specific to a time than a place: specific, that is, to the time of blacklisting, McCarthyism, and whisper campaigns. And of course, these were all symptoms of that question Simenon saw Americans asking each other: “Do you belong?”

In the case of Spencer Ashby, the answer to that question is already a little unclear. A teacher at a local exclusive boarding school, he’s become a local artificially, by marrying the daughter of the school’s late headmaster. But when Belle, the daughter of one of his wife’s old friends, staying with the Ashbys temporarily, is found strangled in her bedroom, that artificial link becomes brittle. See, the problem is that Ashby was working in the basement, turning a piece of furniture on his lathe, at the time that Belle must have been murdered.

There’s no evidence of his being involved, no obvious motive. Yet it seems oddly suspicious to everyone. He’s questioned repeatedly by the police … and let go. Is it just a matter of time before they find the evidence? The doubt is enough to make the townspeople keep their distance: “The newspaper dealer was gaping at him as if he came from another planet; and two customers, who only came in for their papers and out again, cast a curious glance in his direction.”

And more than that — and this is really where Simenon excels in his dissections of his protagonists’ psyches — Ashby begins to doubt himself. “Why, not being guilty of anything, did he have a feeling of guilt?” The fragile props of his comfortable life begin to weaken, to give way. Whether Ashby has already committed some sin or only committed the sin of inaction, his self-doubt ultimately becomes a propelling force and drives him forever out of his comfortable inertia. Simenon plays out his drama quietly, subtly, simplying adding one straw after another until something catastrophic happens.

• Les Frères Rico (1952); first published in English as The Brothers Rico (1954), translated by Ernst Pawel.

The Brothers Rico demonstrates that Simenon had learned quite a bit about the workings of organized crime during his time in the U.S.. Eddie Rico is, to all appearances, a prosperous fruit and vegetable broker somewhere in central Florida. In reality, he’s a local boss, running the gambling and prostitution operations in his area while keeping the local sheriff on his payroll. It’s a nice, quiet affair, one that keeps him in good with the big bosses in New York without forcing him to get his hands dirty.

Eddie doesn’t really have the appetite for the rough side of the business: “He was never armed. The only gun he owned was in the drawer of his night table. As for fighting, he had too much of a horror of blows and of blood for that. He had fought but once in his his, when he was sixteen, and the blood running from his nose had made him sick.”

His brothers Gino and Tony, on the other hand, are suspected of being involved in a hit on a mob boss in Brooklyn. Which becomes a problem for Eddie when Gino shows up in Florida (note the parallel with The Bottom of the Bottle). He soon disappears again after realizing that Eddie is too afraid of his higher-ups to take a risk. Unfortunately, those higher-ups then enlist Eddie in tracking down his brothers.

Eddie knows that he’s playing the Judas goat. All he has to do is locate at least one of his brothers and then step out of the way and let the professionals do the rest: “It was routine. Long ago this kind of operation had been perfected like the rest, and by now they were performed according to an almost inalterable ritual. It was best to have executioners who, coming from elsewhere, were unknown in this area.” So, he does as he’s told, knowing he’ll be able to return to his quiet, comfortable life in Florida. Only without his soul: no one gets away with murder in a Simenon, even if by proxy.

The Brothers Rico was filmed in 1957, directed by Phil Karlson and starring Richard Conte as Eddie Rico.

• Feux rouges (1953); first published in English as The Hitchhiker (1957) and Red Lights (1967), translated by Norman Denny.

Red Lights is Simenon’s version of The Lost Weekend. Steve Hogan meets his wife for a couple of drinks before they hit the road one Friday evening, intending to pick up their kids from summer camp in New England. But it’s hot and rainy and the traffic is terrible and Steve just needs a drink or two more to get him through hours of sitting in traffic. And so he stops at a roadside bar.

The problem is, Steve is a blackout drunk. Or, as he puts it, “he goes into a tunnel”: “an expression of his own, for his private use, which he never used in talking to anyone else, least of all to his wife.” His wife refuses to go along and heads to take a Greyhound bus to the camp. Steve ignores her, walks into the bar, and the next morning, wakes up on the roadside in his car with a flat tire, his trunk rifled through, and a vague memory of having given a ride to an ex-con named Sid.

What’s worse, he has no idea where his wife is. And that’s where the nightmare really begins. Once again, Simenon looks behind the façade of the happy, normal American life:

For thirty-two years, nearly thirty-three, he had been an honest man; he had followed the tracks, as he had proclaimed last night with so much vehemence, being a good son, good student, employee, husband, father, and the owner of a house on Long Island; he had never broken any law, never been summoned before any court and every Sunday morning he had gone to church with his family. He was a happy man. He lacked nothing.

Then where did they come from, all those things he said when he’d had a drink too many and started by attacking Nancy before assailing society as a whole? They had to spring from somewhere. The same phenomenon occurred each time, and each time his rebellion followed exactly the same course.

For Simenon, a momentary lapse of judgment is never an isolated incident. There is always an underlying flaw, some fundamental character defect that just needs the right — or the wrong — set of circumstances to reveal its full capacity for destruction.

• Crime impuni (1954); first published in English as The Fugitive (1955), translated by Louise Varèse.

The Fugitive, which has also been published as Account Unsettled is only part romans Américains. The first half is set in Simenon’s native city of Liege in Belgium. Elie, a student rooming with Madame Lange and her daughter, becomes obsessed with revenge when a Romanian student named Michel Zograffi moves in and becomes the pampered pet of the household — and the daughter’s lover. Elie plots to murder the man and flees the city when he thinks he has. After years on the run, he makes his way to Bisbee, Arizona, where he runs the town’s best hotel as Mr. Craig. The plot hinges on the highly improbable coincidence that Michel (now Michael) Zograffi one day wanders in, bearing the scars of the murder attempt but now a wealthy investor come to bail out Bisbee.

The most plausible element of the story draws upon Simenon’s observations of the copper mining business in Bisbee, which then centered on the Copper Queen Mine. By the late 1940s, conventional tunnel mining was proving unproductive and open pit mining had not yet begun. Simenon postulated the collapse of the mine and the town:

It was as though the city were dying, the tip-trucks that at certain places ran along cables over the streets were now stationary near the pylons and the four tall oven chimneys at the far end of the valley no longer wore their crowns of greenish smoke.

It happened from one day to the next when the machines, which for twenty years had been boring into the red earth of the mountain, scooping out a gigantic crater, and uncovered a subterranean lake, the existence of which no one had suspected.

Bisbee was able to postpone its decline for a few decades by switching to open pit mining, but the city now relies more on tourism than industry to survive. As far as the book itself, however, I’d rate it the weakest of the lot, a story that might have fared better had Simenon left his characters on the other side of the Atlantic.

• L’Horloger d’Everton (1954); first published in English as The Watchmaker of Everton (1957) and The Clockmaker (1977), translated by Norman Denny.

In The Watchmaker of Everton, Simenon’s favored theme of guilt through inaction is played out in the form of a good father and a bad son. Dave Galloway, the quiet watch repairman of the title, a single father, learns that his son Ben and his girlfriend have stolen a car, and killed its driver, and run off into the night. When Ben is eventually caught and arrested several states away, he shows no remorse and no interest in talking to his father. Which, of course, leads the police — and Galloway’s neighbors — to wonder: how could a father not know he was raising a monster? “Do you know your son well, Mr. Galloway?” the police ask. Was he perhaps not quite the dutiful father everyone thought he was? And if so, what else might he be guilty of?

Galloway asks himself the same questions. Was this due, in part, to the fact that his own father had died when he was young, that he’d hated the stepfather his mother married? Did his flaws drive off Ben’s mother when the boy was just a toddler? The Watchmaker of Everton is an almost agonizing example of Simenon’s gift for pulling on one well-chosen loose thread.

Bertrand Tavernier filmed the novel as L’Horloger de Saint-Paul starring Philippe Noiret in 1974.

• La Boule noire (1955); first published in English as The Rules of the Game (1988), translated by Howard Curtis.

Walter Higgins, manager of the local supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds his application to the local country club has been rejected — for the second time. Higgins understands the real message behind this decision: “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community.” He begins to question everything around him, begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back.

And, of course, this being Simenon, there are reasons why Higgins might be insecure about his place in the community. Or rather, one reason: he was born poor. He grew up in a tenement, often having to fend for himself while his mother went out drinking. His real fear is that the country club men can smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.

Unlike P.M. Ashbridge or Eddie Rico, Walter Higgins doesn’t fall apart through this crisis. His resolution is more French than American: he falls into cynicism:

He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game — like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.

But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game.

• La main (1968); first published in English as The Man on the Bench in the Barn (1970), translated by Moura Budberg. Also published as The Hand (2016), translated by Linda Coverdale.

Written over a decade after Simenon left the U.S., The Man on the Bench in the Barn takes the theme of guilt by inertia of Belle and refines it down to a cold existential minimalism. Two couples get stuck in a blizzard near one of their houses. One of the men gets separated from the other three and doesn’t make it to the house. After some wait, the other husband — Donald Dodd (another lawyer (viz. P. M. Ashbridge), another artificial local (viz. Spencer Ashby)) — is sent to look for him. Already exhausted, he quickly gives up. But rather than simply return and admit his failure, he enters the barn near his house, where he sits for an hour or so, smoking.

“All the time I had been in the barn, on the red bench, I had chain-smoked, lighting one cigarette after another, dropping the butts
on the ground and stamping them out with my foot. I had smoked at least ten.” That’s it. That’s the sum of his crime. Except that when the storm abates and the authorities are notified, Dodd goes back to the barn and see that the cigarette butts are gone. Which can only mean one thing: his wife knows.

And that is all Simenon needs to let the unraveling begin. For Dodd has built around him the same façade that Maigret had detected in Arizona: “It made him think of too tidy a garment, too well washed and pressed.” In Dodd’s case — and he is only first-person narrator I’ve encountered in a Simenon — “The truth is that I wanted to have everything run smoothly and orderly around me.”

David Hare adapted The Man on the Bench in the Barn for the stage as The Red Barn in 2016.

The sum of Simenon’s Romans Américains, one could argue, is enough to earn him a place among the best American novelists of his generation. He could certainly claim to be — to steal something A. J. Liebling once said of himself — faster than anyone better and better than anyone faster. And we have to look back to Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter to find such bitter criticism of American mores and concepts of sin. It’s a shame that it’s a body of work still so incompletely represented in English.

Note: Simenon’s English language publishers have long been fond of bundling his books together. As a result, there are a number of compilations worth looking for if you’re interested in reading any of these novels:

  • Violent Ends, comprising Belle and The Brothers Rico. Hamish Hamilton, 1954.
  • Tidal Wave, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, and The Bottom of the Bottle. Doubleday, 1954.
  • Danger Ahead, comprising Red Lights and The Watchmaker of Everton. Hamish Hamilton, 1955.
  • An American Omnibus, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, The Hitchhiker, and The Watchmaker of Everton. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

The Story of a Life, Volume 5: Southern Adventure, by Konstantin Paustovsky (1969)

Cover of Harvill Press edition of Southern Adventure by Konstantin Paustovsky

“I lost touch with Russia for almost two years,” Konstantin Paustovsky writes in the introduction to this, the fifth volume of his autobiography. “But I do not regret it,” he continues, and neither will the reader. Southern Adventure is easily the most exotic, the most magical chapter in Paustovsky’s life.

After a trip along the Russian coast of the Black Sea aboard the freighter Pestel (which concludes the previous volume, Years of Hope, Paustovsky awakened one morning “feeling on my face the warm palms of somebody’s hands. They smelt of mimosa.” The Pestel is anchored off Sukhum (now Sukhumi), the main port in what was then the Abkhazian Soviet Republic. The scents from the lush tropical vegetation on shore carried out to the ship …

A postcard of a garden in Sukhum.
A postcard of a garden in Sukhum.

… until they formed a tight ball and the air was compressed into a thick syrup; then they would untwine again into distinct and separate fibres and I would detect the breath of azalias, bay-trees, eucalyptus trees, oleanders, wisterias and many other flowers wonderful in appearance and colour.

The sensation stirs a childhood fantasy based in stories of the Arabian nights and jungle explorers and Paustovsky resolves to go ashore — not just to go, but to stay. As he quickly learns — in an experience repeated throughout this book — the nascent bureaucracy of this young Soviet republic is ruthless and absolute: there is no official way for him to leave the ship except under close supervision and for a matter of just an hour or two. On the other hand, the harshness of Soviet rules are also softened by the indolence and lackadaisical attitude of most officials in the Caucasus: “The old and the new were jumbled up together in the way things get jumbled up in a basket after a sharp jolt.” Soon, he is walking along the boulevards of Sukhum.

In Sukhum, as with the other ports along the now-Georgian Black Sea coast that Paustovsky visits in the course of the book, “It was difficult to grasp what century we were living in.” While Soviet-organized collectives, workers councils, and goverment functions attempted to institute a new regime, blood feuds still broke out between families and tribes, disputes were more often settled by elders than by courts, and bamboo shoots still sprung up overnight in even the busiest streets in town.

Despite having no money and no job, Paustovsky lucks into a conversation with an official of the Cooperative Union of Abkhazia in Sukhum — the Absouyz — who hires him as a secretary. “I was hellishly lucky in Sukhum,” he writes, and indeed his luck throughout his two years in the Caucasus is one of the magical elements of this volume.

Lake Amtkheli inthe Abkhazia region of Georgia.
Lake Amtkheli in the Abkhazian region of Georgia.

But the most magical element by far is Paustovsky’s evocation of the other worldly beauty of the Caucasian landscape, where coastal strips of palm trees and tropical flowers suddenly transformed into steep Alpine mountains. Early in the book, he and an odd assortment of temporary residents of Sukhum make an expedition to Lake Amkeli, formed by an earthquake just a couple of decades before. The lake seems to Paustovsky something out of a fairy tale book:

The crystal clarity of reflections in the water was so perfect that it was impossible to distinguish the reflection of the shores and mountains from the real shores and mountains.

It was as if there were two Caucasuses around us. One of them rose up to the sky above, and the other went down into the shining abyss beneath our feet. Identical feathery clouds slowly moved in the sky and along the bottom of the abyss.

Every time I threw my line and sinker into the lake I shattered the ideal fusion of this world.

Soon, however, he grows restless and talks his way onto a ship heading further south, to the port of Batum. Here, to the fragrances of Sukhum are added the cacophony of a city closer in spirit to the Middle East than to Russia:

Postcard of the Turkish bazaar in Batum.
Postcard of the Turkish bazaar in Batum.

… in Batum, particularly in the Turkish bazaar, known as Nuri, you were deafened with a whole kaleidoscope of sounds — from the bleating of sheep to the desperate cries of maize sellers: ‘Hot maize!’; from the plaintive moans of a muezzin on the top of a near-by mosque to the squeaking of pipes out of the windows of dukhans and the tearful singing of their tipsy patrons.

As in Odessa, Paustovsky manages to convince the local seamen’s union to underwrite a newspaper and appoint him as its editor. The pay is low, but then so is the cost of living in Batum, particularly when he takes a room in the town’s “coastal shelter,” a refuge for sailors stranded in the port from getting drunk or spending a night in jail for fighting. The coastal shelter, he writes, was “a cross between a doss house, a pub, a police cell for drunks and a brothel.”

One of the men he encounters there is Batum’s lighthouse keeper, Stavraki. Something about the man sets Paustovsky’s senses on edge, and eventually he discovers that this is the notorious former Imperial Russian Naval officer responsible for shooting Lt. Pyotr Schmidt, the leader of the Black Sea fleet uprising of 1905 later made famous in Eisenstein’s movie Potemkin. Normally one to accept his fellow man with understanding, Paustovsky finds it impossible not to revile Stavraki:

That life of his was just a series ofacts of blackest treachery. And these acts of treachery developed out of petty bits of nonsense: out of a desire to wear just one more pip on his shoulder straps and cut a dash in women’s eyes, out of servile fear of all authority

A few months later, Stavraki was arrested by the Cheka, taken to Sevastopol, tried for his anti-revolutionary crimes, and sentenced to the same fate to which he’d sent Lt. Schmidt: death by firing squad.

Konstantin Paustovsky and his second wife, Valeria Navashina, in the late 1930s.
Konstantin Paustovsky and his second wife, Valeria Navashina, in the late 1930s.

After two years enjoying the warmth of the southern Black Sea coast, Paustovsky begins to long to see ice and snow again. He heads into the interior, to the Georgian capital of Tblisi. There, he meets again with Frayerman, a “martyr to the pen,” an inveterate journalist who’d managed to work his way around the rim of the Black Sea, writing for or, when necessary, founding newspapers. In Tbilisi, they start a paper for the railway workers, The Little Train Whistle, and enjoy riding the narrow lines that wind up into the mountains of Georgia.

It’s not a bad life for the time and place, but soon Paustovsky begins to brood about his mother and sister, abandoned long ago in Kiev. Why is he idling away his time in a foreign place when he could be helping them? “I wanted to groan at the painfully obvious, perfectly clear thought which had never before entered my head, groan at the realization of my absolute, unfeigned, genuine and, therefore, hideous loneliness, the realization that nobody needed me here.”

And with this, Paustovsky climbs aboard a train to start the long and tortuous journey back to his native Kiev, bringing his Southern Adventure to a close. Though his idyll in the Caucasus is, by his own admission, a hiatus in his life’s drama, one could not ask for a better way to stir one’s imagination and make one long for a similar time in some exotic locale. It’s a beautiful and memorable excusion.

Note: Vintage Classics recently announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith, due for publication in June 2022. This edition will not, however, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6.

The Story of a Life, Volume 5: Southern Adventure, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon
London: Harvill Press, 1969

The Red House, by Else Jerusalem (1932)

Ad for <em>The Red House</em> from <em>The New York Times</em>, 1932.
Ad for The Red House from The New York Times, 1932.

Catching up with my friend the Dutch translator and publisher (Van Maaskant Haun) Meta Gemert, I learned about a neglected Austrian best-seller from over 100 years ago that’s beginning to experience a comeback: Else Jerusalem’s 1909 novel Der heilige Skarabäus, which was published in English in 1932 as The Red House. The English version, published in the U. S. by The Macaulay Company and in the U.K. by T. Werner Laurie, sold poorly and quickly disappeared, which is why the only way to get your hands on a copy is via Inter-Library Loan.

Jerusalem, born Else Kotányi to Hungarian Jewish parents in Vienna in 1876, was a pioneer in her interest in the sociology and economics of the sex trade, and The Red House was the result of her study of the operations of Vienna’s brothels. The book centers on Milada, who comes to the Red House, an apartment house in Vienna’s red-light district, when her mother Katherine, comes to the city from a small town in Bohemia after being cast out as an undesirable. Though she has a chance to send Milada away to a convent school, Katherine sees no point in trying to better her daughter’s lot: “Why should she be any better than her mother?” she asks.

Katherine dies when Milada is still young, but the girl becomes a fixture as the house changes hands and becomes more of an upscale brothel in the hands of Else Goldscheider. Mrs. Goldscheider introduces Milada into the business in her teens, first serving wine in the house’s lounge and later turning her into a working girl at the age of sixteen. Unable to remember life before the Red House, Milada is naive in her acceptance of the familiar atmosphere of depravity. “Poliska,” she asks the brothel’s housemaid, “Tell me … what’s a decent girl?” “Girl … what idea you got,” responds the maid. “But I want to know,” continues Milada, “Have we any here? Or doesn’t any ‘decent girl’ … ever come to a bordel?”

One of the house’s regulars, Horner, takes a liking to Milada and tries to educate her in the realities of how prostitution operates as an integral element of “decent” society. “Did you ever see a dunghill beetle … eruditely Scarabæus coprophagus?” he asks Milada.

It’s a pretty little thing, gleaming in green and gold. But if you take it in your hand it discharges a dark brown fluid and your prying nose is rewarded for its curiosity by a most malevolent stench.

The world needs its dunghills, he argues. They allow society to pretend that everything else is clean and proper.

Milada acts as Jerusalem’s eyes and ears inside the world of prostitution in Vienna, noting the range of clients, from middle-class merchants to dashing young noblemen to self-righteous city fathers. She also learns how Mrs. Goldscheider stays on the right side of the police and the sanitary inspectors through a mixture of obeisance, flattery, bribery, and deceit.

After a few good years, during which the Red House rises to the reputation of one of the better houses in Vienna, Mrs. Goldscheider sells the business to Miss Miller, a former housekeeper for a country parson and a woman ill-suited to the task emotionally and practically. She tries to pitch pennies at every turn, driving away the better class of clientele and turning her girls into workhorses.

The house’s decline continues when Miss Miller is replaced by Nelly Spizzari. Jerusalem saw the sex trade not only as a feminist but also as one familiar with Marxism, and Nelly Spizzari — with “more energy and less conscience than all previous owners” — represents capitalism at its most brutally efficient and exploitative:

Under the Spizzari System The Red House speedily lost its unique position among establishments of its kind. Rapidly it sank to the lowest grade. Mrs. Spizzari had no understanding of, nor indeed any use for, the atmosphere of middle class respectability which had been the main attraction in The Red House. She had no use for girls who would have fitted in such surroundings, for she demanded of them services that the former Red House inmates, down to the most reckless of them, would have refused with shudders.

Spizzari takes advantage of the desperate poverty of some Viennese families to procure new girls cheaply and in their early teens:

One pet enterprise of the energetic Spizzari was to buy very young girls from inhuman parents who gloated over the purchase price, whether as straight cash or a monthly rent. With these innocent unfortunates in her power, Mrs. Spizzari would perform all sorts of manipulations, operating on them herself, cutting and stitching. She had a special technique of virgin-exploitation, which she managed to keep hidden from the medical inspector….

Into this toxic environment comes a young doctor, Gus Brenner, a well-intentioned crusader from a good family. Though he avoids the attempts of some of the girls to seduce him, he and Milada fall in love. In the hands of a typical romantic novelist of the time, Brenner might have become the knight in shining white armor who rescues Milada. In the hands of the scientifically-minded Jerusalem, however, such matches are only the stuff of fantasies. If Milada does manage to escape from the Red House, it is not without carrying her share of emotional and psychological scars.

Early edition of De heilige Skarabäus
Early German edition of De heilige Skarabäus.

Der heilige Skarabäus became a best-seller in continental Europe, being translated into Hungarian, Finnish, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian. It took over two decades, however, for the book to reach English readers, and then in an apparently abridged version. The Macaulay Company edition of The Red House runs to just over 300 pages, while catalogue records show that the original Austrian edition came to well over 600.

Ad for The Red House from Publisher's Weekly
Ad for The Red House from Publisher’s Weekly.

Though coming after the Jazz Age, the English version, titled The Red House, still seemed too controversial for Anglophones. “Readers who can stomach the subject of this novel will find it exceedingly well done,” wrote one brief review in The Spectator. “Those who cannot (the theme is prostitution) are advised to leave it alone.” The New York Times’ review acknowledged that, “The moral tone of the book is unquestionably sincere and lofty, its revelation of conditions convincing in every detail, and its aunguished protest driven home with terrible and arresting truth.” Still, the reviewer cautioned, “There seems small likelihood of a book so exclusively indigenous and alien to the American reader’s ken meeting with a kindred acclaim in its English version.”

Soon after, the book fell into disfavor in Austria and Germany, but for political rather than critical reasons. In questioning the moral integrity of good bürger society, Der heilige Skarabäus was quickly banned by the Nazis and Jerusalem’s work joined that of Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig on their bonfires.

By that time, however, she was no longer Else Jerusalem, having divorced her first husband and married an academic named Viktor Widakowich. She and Widakowich emigrated to Buenos Aires. Though she found Argentina largely lacking in cultural life, it soon become too difficult to consider returning to Europe and she died there in 1943.

Only recently has the book been resurrected for German-language readers. Austrian publisher Albert Eibl released a new edition, with an afterword by Professor Brigitte Spreitzer of the University of Graz, from his Das Vergessene Buch (the Forgotten Book) press. You may recall my mention of Eibl’s rescue of Maria Lazar’s novel Leben verboten!, which was published in English (also in an abridged version) in 1934 as No Right to Live.

Daniel Elkind published an article about The Red House in Lapham’s Quarterly earlier this year: House Warning: Revisiting Else Jerusalem’s critique of bourgeois hypocrisy and exploitation. As Elkind writes, “The double standard Jerusalem exposed in her novel persists: it is still more acceptable to hire a sex worker than it is to be one.” Blogger Edith LaGraziana (Edith of Graz, a pseudonym) also wrote about the book back in 2016: The Red House by Else Jerusalem

The Red House, by Else Jerusalem, translated by R. L. Marchant
New York: The Macaulay Company, 1932

Sigh for a Strange Land, by Monica Stirling (1958)

Cover of first US edition of Sigh for a Strange Land

“I always thought refugees were other people” are words none of us would ever want to say.

But no one ever chooses to become a refugee on a whim. Instead, as we witnessed just this week in Afghanistan, refugees usually have to grab what they can carry and leave in a rush. Their motivation is less to run towards than to run away, usually from violence, persecution, or simply chaos.

Resi, the teenage girl who narrates Monica Stirling’s 1958 novel Sigh for a Strange Land, awakes one morning to find a policeman at her apartment door. He informs her that her Aunt Natasha has been injured and is lying in the city hospital. Hurrying to see her aunt, Resi notices that the streets are oddly quiet. There are no queues outside the shops and the few people who pass look at her with shocked expressions.

Aunt Natasha’s only injury is a hangover from celebrating too hard the night before and she and Resi are soon headed back to their apartment. Now, however, the streets are full of noise, with groups of men running down sidewalks and the sounds of gunfire in the distance. Turning into their street, they see their apartment block going up in flames. The revolution has begun.

Seeking out the only friend they have, a horse trainer named Boris, Resi and Natasha soon find themselves on an overloaded truck headed for the frontier. After a long journey through the night, they climb out to face a table of Red Cross workers. Each of them is handed a piece of cardboard with a word on it: “REFUGEE.”

Some of their companions react in shock and disgust. “Refugees! My family’s an honorable one,” says one. “I’ll have you know, my grandfather founded our shop, built it up from nothing, and it’s been in the family ever since — wars, risings, strikes, upsets, nothing’s been able to dislodge us. And now . . . ”

If Resi, Natasha, and Boris are somewhat less surprised, it’s because their lives have been punctuated by displacements. Natasha and Boris grew up as members of the Russian imperial elite before the revolution of 1917. Natasha followed the White Russian diaspora to Paris and Italy. Boris joined a circus and found himself a citizen of an itinerant nation. Resi, left to Natasha’s care after the death of her parents, carries the blood of four nations in her veins: Russia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and France. And none of them has any papers, of course. “Could we ever prove I’m me if we wanted to?” Resi asks at one point.

Refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolution being processed at an Austrian reception center.
Refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolution being processed at an Austrian reception center.

Although Stirling never names the country from which the trio is fleeing — which adds to the sense of displacement that pervades the book — one cannot help but assume it’s Hungary, whose abortive revolution against a Soviet-backed regime in 1956 led to over 150,000 Hungarians seeking asylum in the West.

Resi, Natasha, and Boris sneak out of their temporary refugee center and enjoy a brief holiday taking in the opulence of what is clearly Vienna:

Halfway down the next street—which was full of traffic, I’d never before seen so many motor vehicles in one place — we were attracted by a prodigious delicatessen store. The vast window’s centerpiece was a glass-fronted silver machine in which a chicken roasted on a revolving spit. Either side stood massive hams, their outsides neatly breadcrumbed, their insides the color of dark pink roses. Spread around these in tiers were shallow white china dishes containing black and green olives, soft-fleshed tan mushrooms, smooth-skinned coppery sausages, the harlequin colors of vegetable salad, artichokes with gray-green mauve-topped leaves firm as if sculpted, beets with their darkly crimson juice turned cherry-color where it dissolved into a moat of sour cream, pies with richly glazed and crusted tops.

They pool their few coins and manage to buy coffees, cocoa, and pastries at a café. “Cafés are apt to outlast governments,” observes Boris.

Soon, though, they are back sleeping with hundreds of other refugees on a gymnasium floor, and Natasha, who is probably closer to 70 than the 50 she looks like, takes ill. The odd little family unit that has sheltered Resi through her childhood falls apart, and she is forced to decide for herself what place she will adopt as home.

Stirling quotes from a 1958 essay by V. S. Pritchett in which he wrote, “In the last hundred years half the world’s population has become uprooted, expatriated from class, race or nation. We live on frontiers.” Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, short story about people accustomed to that frontier existence. For this trio, nation and home have become concepts as slippery as a bubble of mercury.

Portrait of Monica Stirling by Stanley Parker, from <em>Tatler and Bystander</em> 1958.
Portrait of Monica Stirling by Stanley Parker, from Tatler and Bystander 1958.

And Stirling, who saw a great deal of displacement as a correspondent during World War Two and its aftermath in Europe, is fundamentally distrustful of these concepts. “I’ve never understood why anyone finds it difficult to believe chairs and tables are made of constantly moving atoms. Nothing is reliable in this moving world but love,” Resi comments early on. “All I’m interested in writing about is love,” Stirling once told her friend The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner — another veteran expatriate. “Private life,” Boris tells Resi, is “the greatest resistance movement of them all.”

Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, moving tale that manages to weave two disparate themes together: the unstable, transitory nature of home and nationality, and the strong, unwavering bonds of love. It’s a tale that resonates in this moment every bit as it did over fifty years ago. It’s available on the Internet Archive (link) and I’ve had it in my Calibre library for years, but it was only when Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow recently posted about Monica Stirling that I thought to take a serious look at it. I was hooked by the opening line: “The day the revolution started my Aunt Natasha was drunk,” and had to keep going.

The whole time I read the book, I kept thinking that it could quite plausibly have been written within the last ten years: it has that sort of timelessness, aided no doubt by Stirling’s choice to minimize her specific geographical and temporal references. I do have to agree with David Williams of the TLS, who wrote when the book was first published, “The first part is so god that one’s disappointment over the other two is keener perhaps than it ought to be”: there is a faint scent of sentimentality that lingers over the middle section and lasts until near the very end, when Resi has to confront her situation without the support of Natasha and Boris.

But overall, it’s a superb and taut novel. As John Davenport in The Observer, “Miss Stirling knows how to be exquisitely brief.” It’s a welcome skill in an age not lacking in loose baggy monsters.

Sigh for a Strange Land, by Monica Stirling
London: Victor Gollancz, 1958
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958

David’s Day, by Denis Mackail (1932)

Houghton Mifflin edition of <em>David's Day</em> (1932).
Houghton Mifflin edition of David’s Day (1932).

“For the want of a nail….” Or, in the case of Denis Mackail’s 1932 novel, David’s Day, for the want of a Mrs. Bowker. Mrs. Bowker is the day woman whose duties, among other things, is to fix breakfast for Mr. Albert Coffin of number 67 Pocklington Road, one of the tens of thousands of row houses thrown up in the suburbs of London just after the First World War.

There is nothing special about number 67, like its neighbors “built like blazes with everything that would more or less hold together”: “mass-produced metal casements and unseasoned joists and unimaginably flimsy doors’; “cheap, crumbling bricks with a kind of grey wash which, temporarily at any rate, hid most of the flaws.” Neither is there anything special about Mr. Coffin, a clerk at Hamhurst’s department store.

But he is a creature of habit, so when Mrs. Bowker fails to turn up one morning, Mr. Coffin’s day is set ever so slightly askew. He snaps at his wife, refuses to rush his breakfast, and arrives at the train station just a moment too late to catch his train. Never in five years had he missed his train. He hesitates, then decides to take the next one, even though it ran the other way round the London loop.

This decision puts him in the crowd rushing for buses and the Tube just in time to bump into a young woman hurrying in the same direction. Their fleeting encounter catches the eye of a smooth operator named Harry Jackson, who steps forward to introduce himself as a long-forgotten acquaintance. Harry charms Gladys — upset at running late for work — into a cab wherein she quickly discovers that Harry has a much different destination in mind.

Within less than an hour, Harry Jackson (real name Jack Harrison) is arrested for an outstanding theft warrant, Gladys quits her job, a City schemer is tipped into financial ruin, and one Lord Midhurst, “the stupidest of a dull lot” but a man of innate loyalty, assures himself of continued employment as a figurehead on various corporate boards.

With each chapter, Mackail sets character caroming off character, producing effects ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some fall in love, some fall in ruin, some take a step up the social ladder, some take a tumble down. An ardent suitor arrives to woo an actress just moments before the start of her West End show’s dress rehearsal, triggering an on-stage disaster that’s a two-page masterpiece of comic writing, the sort of thing that Michael Frayn later constructed his play “Noises Off” from: spontaneous concatenated catastrophes only work when assembled with the precision of Swiss clockworks.

Denis Mackail, 1939, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery
Denis Mackail, 1939, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

From time to time, Mackail doubts his own ability to keep his clock ticking. “Would the chain break off here, just because a manager did or didn’t boast, or because he did or didn’t so something with his fingers?” And indeed, there are moments when the links grow tenuous, when the pace of this day of orchestrated chaos slows and the shadow of entropy creeps over the scene.

Fortunately, if Mackail’s stage direction is occasionally less than flawless, these flaws are offset by his wonderfully shrewd commentary. His is an omniscient narrator wise but not cynical about mankind’s fallibility. Throughout the book, as he moves his characters around at a usually frenzied speed, he still has time to insert his editorial asides: “The true Bright Young Person always practices with an eye, if not an eye and a half, on the crowd, and commits none of her ingenious or ingenuous excesses without making pretty certain that the Daily Dash or the Evening Branch shall here of it….”

He speculates on the nature of fame and success, asking questions we’re still grappling with today. “Is it more successful to have an immense reputation built on sand, or a minute reputation founded on rock?” Mackail makes no attempt to answer them, however. He understood that the joke is entirely about our eternally fruitless efforts to do so.

And as he continues to conduct his particles through their dance of chance encounters, he somehow manages to bring us back to Mr. Coffin, who makes it back to number 67 Pocklington Road at his usual time and by his usual train, contrite for his morning’s angry words to his wife and his angry thoughts about the missing Mrs. Bowker.

But where in all this is David, whose day this is? Well, let’s just say that Mackail has arranged things in such a way that the book ends on a note that is nothing less than sublime.

When David’s Day was first published, reviewers somehow missed the book’s essence. The Times called the book just “another of those amplified personal columns in which Mr. Denis Mackail specializes.” The New York Times judged it “a series of episodes rather than a novel.” They were both wrong: this is pure entertainment, nothing less. Don’t try to take it apart and figure out how the mechanism works: just enjoy how delightfully it marks the passing time.

David’s Day, by Denis Mackail
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932

Choses Vues (Things Seen), by Victor Hugo

Two-volume Gallimard edition of Choses vues by Victor Hugo

Jean Cocteau once called Victor Hugo’s Choses Vues (Things Seen), the posthumously published collection of notes the poet and novelist collected throughout his lifetime in Paris, “the only great classic of journalism.” Yet it’s never been fully translated into English.

When the book was first published in 1887, the English magazine Booklore informed its readers that it “contains some excellent reading”:

The poet’s observation was of the keenest and most comprehensive nature, and many details which to some might have seemed trivial, were to him indications of possible important events which might or might not lie beyond. Victor Hugo was ever on the look-out for “straws” wherewith to gauge the wind, and long habit in this practice had invested his organ of sight with microscopical powers.

George Routledge and Sons rushed out a two-volume uncredited translation of Choses Vues the same year, including the full contents of the French first edition.

1887 edition of Things Seen by Victor Hugo
Two volume 1887 Routledge edition of Things Seen.

The first story published in both editions was that of the decline and death of the diplomat Talleyrand, the architect of Napoleon’s undoing at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. By the time of his death, however, Talleyrand had become something of a forgotten oddity in Paris. Hugo reported on Talleyrand’s ignominious embalming:

This man, who possibly might have been a match for Machiavelli had he lived a century or two eailier, had the misfortune to die on the 17th of May, 1838. The doctors came and embalmed the body, and in order to do so Egyptian fashion, they drew the entrails from the side and the brains from the skull. This done, they nailed the mummy down in a coffin lined with white satin, and went away, leaving on the table the brains — those brains which had thought so many things, inspired so many men, built so many edifices, led two revolutions, deceived twenty kings, and kept the world within bound. When the doctors left, a footman entered and saw what they had forgotten. He suddenly remembered that there was a drain in the street outside; so off he went and threw the brains into it.

The centerpiece of Choses Vues is Hugo’s account of the revolution of 1848 as he witnessed it in the streets of Paris. This accounts for over half the length of the first edition and has often been cited as the most accurate first-hand report.

Four volume edition of Choses vues, edited by Hubert Juin
Four volume edition of Choses vues, edited by Hubert Juin.

It was, however, just a fraction of the full set of notes that Hugo left behind. It was not until nearly 100 years after the first edition of Choses Vues that a complete version, edited by the critic and novelist Hubert Juin, was published. Juin’s edition filled four volumes and represented over 1,000 pages — three times the length of the 1887 edition.

As Graham Robb admitted in his 1997 biography of Hugo, “This vast collection of personal and historical anecdotes is usually pillaged, as it is in this biography, for its illustrative gems.” But, Robb argued, it deserved to be considered as a composition in its own right — indeed, that it may represent his best work: “a fragmented view of what his work might have become without the all-consuming desire to be a financial success and the owner of a coherent philosophy.”

Another Hugo biographer, Andre Maurois, agreed. Hugo had two distinct styles, he wrote: “one of which Sainte-Beuve said he could never shed ‘his gaudiness, his pomposo‘; and the other, of Choses vues “remained that of the perfect reporter.” An early critic, Ernest William Henley, felt that Hugo the reporter was a relevation for those familiar with his pomposo:

When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to be no gaudier than his neighbours?

Robb suggests that Hugo’s obsession with fitting his creations into preconceived designs undermined the truth inherent in his less artful reportage. “Without the need to make all the data point in the same direction, Hugo could have gone on collecting information ad infinitum, spontaneously generating whole libraries of text like one of those super-efficient organisms he found so engrossing.”

And gather he could. Reading Choses vues in the 1950s, the Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton expressed his awe at Hugo’s ability to take in details: “Hugo has the capacity to record like a tape machine, a memory like that of the Polynesians or of Scotland Yard!” Aldous Huxley considered Hugo “that consumate journalist.”

Victor Hugo, 1848.
Victor Hugo in 1848.

As far as I can determine, no one has tried to update or expand Routledge’s anonymous 1887 English translation. Which is a shame, for it’s clear that there are many things still to be revealed to English readers. Joanna Richardson, another Hugo biographer, notes that the full edition includes, for example, nine separate “erotic entries” for September 1871. The Routledge edition also skips almost everything Hugo wrote about the Franco-Prussian War.

Illustration of the escape of Leon Gambetta from Paris by balloon, October 1870
Illustration of Leon Gambetta’s escape by balloon, Paris, 7 October 1870.

This account of the departure by balloon of the escape of Léon Gambetta during the siege of Paris in 1870, for example, which was quoted in Richard Holmes’ Falling Upwards:

There were whispers running through the crowd: “Gambetta’s going to leave! Gambetta’s going to leave!” And there, in a thick overcoat, under an otter-fur cap, near the yellow balloon in a huddle ofmen, I caught sight of Gambetta. He was sitting on the pavement and pulling on fur-lined boots.

He had a leather bag slung across his shoulders. He took it off, clambered into the balloon basket, and a young man, the aeronaut, tied the bag into the rigging above Gambetta’s head. It was 10.30, a fine day, a slight southerly wind, a gentle autumn sun. Suddenly the yellow balloon took off carrying three men, one of them Gambetta. Then the white balloon, also carrying three men, one of them waving a large tricolour flag. Under Gambetta’s balloon was a small tricolour pennant. There were cries of “Vive la Republique!”

Charles-Henri Sanson and the guillotine
Charles-Henri Sanson and the guillotine.

The Routledge edition does, however, include this early example of dark tourism, from a visit to the home of Charles-Henri Sanson, the chief executioner to both King Louis XVI and the first French republic (for which he guillotined his former employer):

One day an English family, consisting of a father, mother, and three lovely blonde daughters arrived. Their aim was to see the guillotine….

The blade was pulled up and released several times at the request of the young girls. One of them, the youngest and the prettiest was not satisfied, however. She asked the bourreau to give her a detailed description of the procedure known as la toilette des condamnes. She still wasn’t satisfied. Finally she turned to the bourreau [executioner].

“Monsieur Sanson?” she said timidly.

“Mademoiselle?” said the bourreau.

“What do you do when a man is on the scaffold? How do you tie him down?”

The bourreau explained this dreadful procedure, and said to her: “We call it enfourner. [Literally, to put in the oven.]

“Well, Monsieur Sanson,” said the young girl, “I want you to put me in the oven.”

The bourreau winced. He protested. The young girl insisted. “I want to be able to say that I was tied down on that thing,” she said.

Sanson looked at her parents. They replied: “If that is what she wants, do it.”

He had to give in. The bourreau made the young miss sit down, he bound her legs together with rope, he tied her arms behind her back, he laid her on the bascule and buckled the leather strap around her body. He wanted to stop there.

“No, no, you haven’t finished,” she protested.

Sanson leveled the bascule, put the young girl’s head in the lunette, and closed its two halves together. Only then was she content.

Later, in telling the story, Sanson said, “I was waiting for the moment when she would say ‘You still haven’t finished. Let the blade fall.'”

Helen Bevington, who read an expanded French edition of Choses vues in the late 1960s, wrote admiringly of the book in her own journal, Along Came the Witch:

An appealing kind of writing in France, in a sense notation, is (or was?) choses vues. It is, of course, the title of a book by Victor Hugo, from which the name may come: things seen, noted because there they are to look at. In America we haven’t much taste for such writing. In prose we require plots and conflicts. In poetry we have little talent for gazing at the view.

Victor Hugo was a passionate observer, partial to death scenes. He had an appetite for extinction, a man sure to be on hand at the sound of a death rattle or the passing of a funeral procession. The Choses Vues contains many a moment of mortality, pictured with gusto — the funeral of Napoleon, the death of the Duke of Orleans, the funeral of Mademoiselle Mars, the death of Madame Adelaide, the passing of Balzac. At the final curtain Hugo was unfailing, an absorbed witness and notetaker.

Perhaps someone will take on the job of translating the full Hubert Juin edition of Choses vues and give English readers a chance to experience this classic of journalism. Until then, you can make do with the two Routledge volumes, which are available on the Internet Archive: Volume One; Volume Two.

Choses vues, by Victor Hugo
Available from Gallimard in a two-volume edition based the 1980 Hubert Juin edition

“The Worst Book Ever Published”

Headline from the Victoria (BC) Colonist’s reprint of Peter Vansittart’s New York Times obituary.

Poor Peter Vansittart. When he died after a career spanning seven decades and producing over 40 books, some newspapers reached back to the very beginning and dredged up a damning line written about his first novel I Am the World: “I can without hesitation say that this is the worst book ever published.” Just which critic wrote that, I’ve been unable to determine. But it’s the sort of absolute declaration that lends itself to endless repetition.

Advertisement for I Am the World in The Spectator.

Was the judgment deserved? That’s very hard to tell because I Am the World has since become exceedingly rare. There are just three copies listed for sale, all well over $100, and six library copies listed in WorldCat.org. From the reviews I’ve been able to locate, I Am the World is, like several of Vansittart’s later novels, set in an abstract location — in this case, a country referred to simply as “The Land.” It tells of the ascent to the throne of absolute dictatorship of a charismatic peasant named Goran, aided by a Jewish banker named Finkenstein.

Vansittart’s descriptions of Finkenstein are difficult to read now. He’s a man “big-nosed in expensive glory” whose “slim tentacles swarmed everywhere.” Vansittart calls the Jews of The Land “mysterious people borm from the knowledge of Babylon darkly, living in the two worlds of race and nation, hiding disease and strength behind the glitter of their eyes.” Another Jew is “a short red figure with a snake’s tongue and a brain fertile and oozing like a grey sponge pressed by a hand seeking its own advantage.”

But the magnetic Goran is a bad piece of work, too. He beats up a blind old woman: “Goran smashed his fist savagely and with all his strength into her face, and she dropped recumbent and bleeding to the ground. With a single curse he stepped over her dragging the sack up from behind the wordless body.” When he ultimately rejects worldly power and seeks refuge in the sanctuary of a cathedral, he makes it clear that there is no place for the likes of Finkenstein there.

Though the “worst book” review may be apochryphal, the reviews I’ve managed to locate are hardly the kind to show off to Mom:

• Kate O’Brien in The Spectator:

“I am the World is a wordy first novel which might be ignored were it not that its sentiments leave a bad taste in the mouth, and one is forced to wonder why on earth it was published just now. It is a tale of a little country called The Land, which has some kind of “salvation” forced upon it by a thoroughly objectionable young peasan-dictator, who climbs to his curious power-vision on the back of a criminal Jew. The author is devoted to such words as lust and hatred, and is very free with his own loose conception of the deity. It is difficult to see where Mr. Vansittart is going in this over-lush study of a bad, crude megalomania.”

• R. D. Charques in the Times Literary Supplement:

“First novels are almost always the better for a certain modesty of intention, but there may be no great harm in striking an ambitious gesture. The abmition of I Am the World, however, is surely excessive even for a first novel by a young writer in these perplexing and difficult times…. But for the copiousness and polist of Mr. Vansittart’s language, it might have been kinder to ignore this first effort of his. He has, however, an unusual flow of words and a feeling for outward graces of style, and when he is not trying to be irresistibly eloquent he is at any rate engaged in expressing, however wordily, a point of view. But far too much of this lesser eloquence is merely bookish, while there are reams of empty sonorifics in the manner of “that chance of hope which could not now miscarry but must down upon the night’s frown.” As for the sentiment of the tale, one cannot but regret the evidences of a familiar and distasteful hysteria.”

• J. D. Beresford in The Guardian:

“… a first and very ambitious novel” but said Vansittart “as yet lacks something of the knowedgeableness necessary to make such a story as this convincing.”

• Frank Swinnerton in The Observer:

“Amid this verbiage are buried idealism and a serious idea, with an attempt to picture the rise of an ignorance man to power over a nation (imaginary) and his discovery that God moves in a mysterious way. But unfortunately Mr. Vansittart has not mastered the art of writing, which begins with a distinct knowledge of what one wants to say.”

• Anonymous review in The Sydney Morning Herald:

“Mr. Vansittart’s pseudo-allegorical style is baffling, but …it is possible to discern a trace of purpose behind the masses of turgid prose and ineffectual imagery….. This type of novel may appeal to a few readers in search of ‘something different.’ It is scarcely likely to be one of the year’s outstanding literary successes.”

V.S. Pritchett, Vansittart’s editor at Chatto & Windus, did suggest numerous changes, including toning down the language, all of which the author declined to make. This set a pattern that Vansittart repeated throughout his career. In a fascinating survey of Vansittart’s career packaged in a review of his 1986 novel, The Aspect in the London Review of Books, Martin Seymour-Smith wrote that, “The problem for Vansittart has always been that he is excessive: he wants to achieve too much within the bounds of a single volume. Nor will he give this ambition up – but by now his persistence has become courageous and impressive.”

Seymour-Smith identified this problem as far back as I Am the World. The book, he wrote, “is excessive (promisingly so): about the rise and fall of a dictator clearly based on Hitler, it seems to want to say everything that can be said about dictatorship. It is relentlessly and ambitiously unpleasant – the brutal and dark side of Vansittart has not, surprisingly, attracted the attention of reviewers – and is written in a curiously over-rhetorical, almost gushing style which sits very awkwardly with its sombre theme.”

Somehow, Vansittart managed to be a prolific producer of books despite his consistent habit of writing as he chose. Reviewing Vansittart’s novel Landlord in 1971, Auberon Waugh called him “one of those heroic people who just go on writing novels in English.” Francis King, reviewing Lancelot, Vansittart’s 1978 retelling of the Arthur legend, described the author as a noble eccentric: “Though he does not usually appear in histories of the modern English novel, though he has won no literary prizes and though his name is probably unfamiliar to the majority of the general reading public, he is a writer whose singularity is matched by his strength.” He continued to have advocates for his particular exceptionalism. In 1983, reviewing Vansittart’s Roman novel Three-Six-Seven: Memoirs of a Very Important Man, wondered, “When will this writer of extraordinary talent receive his due?”

Peter Vansittart receiving his honors from the Queen, 2008.
Peter Vansittart receiving his honors from the Queen in 2008.

He did get formal due, courtesy of the Queen, just before his death in 2008, being awarded the Order of the British Empire. Although the New York Times obit said that Vansittart’s work was “like caviar to the critics and a stranger to the best-seller list,” he did crack the UK best-seller lists with his 1995 survey In the Fifties. And, as D. J. Taylor noted in Vansittart’s Independent obituary, the writer “belonged to a practically exclusive literary category: the defiantly highbrow novelist who, sustained by a private income and supportive publishers, writes more or less to please himself. Such qualifications are usually a guarantee of direst obscurity. Certainly none of Vansittart’s 40-odd books sold more than a few thousand copies or even went into paperback.” Although Taylor called Vansittart was a marginal figure in English literature, he credited him with “the virtual reinvention of the post-war historical novel.”

I Am the World, by Peter Vansittart
London: Chatt & Windus, 1942

The Story of a Life Volume 4: Years of Hope, by Konstantin Paustovsky (1968)

Cover of the UK edition of Years of Hope by Konstantin Paustovsky

Konstantin Paustovsky titled the fourth volume of his autobiography The Story of a Life Years of Hope, but it could just have easily been Years of Odessa. At the end of Volume 3, In That Dawn, he had escaped from Kiev and the battles for that city between the Reds, the Whites, the Ukrainians, and the Germans for the relative safety of the port city of Odessa. And here he would be stuck for most of the next two years.

Indeed, there is little hope to be found in these pages. The Whites retreated from the city in February 1920, leaving it with hundreds of ruins buildings and almost no food. Armies would continue to blow through the town like windstorms and the food supply was never a thing to be taken for granted.

Despite the grim situation, Paustovsky finds himself enlisted in a do-it-yourself newspaper operation, occupying offices by fiat, scrounging for paper and ink, and brow-beating officials into accepting the rag as a state-sanctioned news outlet. And among his fellow writers he made the acquaintance of Odessa’s most illustrious son, Isaac Babel.

Paustovsky’s first impression of Babel, however, was less than awe-inspiring:

Never had I seen anyone look less like an author. Stooping, almost neckless because of his hereditary asthma, with a duck’s bill of a nose, a creased forehead and an oily glint in his little eyes, he was anything but fascinating. At first sight you would have taken him for a commercial traveller or a stockbroker.

He soon learns, though, that Babel spoke with an assurance and focus that tended to leave his fellow writers speechless. He had no patience for colorful descriptions or romantic prose: “A story should be as accurate as a military report or a bank cheque,” he declared.

Yet he envied his colleagues for their ability to invent. “You can wrap things up in the dew of your imagination,” he told them, “while I — I have no imagination.” That’s why he had to focus on details, on specifics, on the precise touch, sight, and smell of things. “I have to know everything, down to the last wrinkle, or I can’t even begin to write.” Authenticity was his motto, he said — “And I’m stuck with it!”

Living in Odessa gave Paustovsky a priceless opportunity to learn to observe and record, and Babel’s lessons make Years of Hope, like all the volumes before it, shine with a vibrancy that often belies the grim conditions Paustovsky recalls. There’s barely a page without an incident, a conversation, or a description that seems as if it were happening now. Like this, about Odessa’s central market during one of the city’s periods of plenty:

How convey the noise of swearing, howling, whining, shouting, curses and hysterics, all merging into one continuous roar and suddenly cut off by the piercing sound of a policeman’s whistle ? Or the stampede of the black marketeers, festooned with their belongings, over the wooden pavements shaking to their tread ? Or the trail of yellowing bust-bodices, soldiers’ cotton underpants, and cracked, liver-coloured, rubber hot water bottles left in their wake?

Since rhetoric is out, I will have to do with every-day words.

Babel also taught him the art of the deal in the marketplace. The first rule was to feign indifference. One must never “show interest in any of the goods, and preferably to look bored as you elbowed your way through the crowd.”

Cover of the US edition of Years of Hope by Konstantin Paustovsky

Knowing how to bargain and barter was an essential survival skill. Cut off at times as waves of the Russian Civil War break over them, Odessans grow accustomed to living on almost nothing. “Only the cats, unsteady with hunger, wandered about looking for scraps. But scraps in Odessa were a thing of the past.” Food grew so scarce at one point that Paustovsky walks five miles out of town to an old mill where he’s been told the miller will take clothing in trade for flour. The only thing he has to offer the man is the shirt off his back, and he walks back bare-chested.

One of the few times Paustovsky does get away from Odessa, he nearly dies. Assigned to report on a transport of naval mines to Sebastopol, he discovers on the first night out that the ship he’s on is better suited for salvage than sailing. “Judging by all the signs,” a sailor tells him, “the Dimitry is heading for a watery grave.” Battered by a gale force 11 storm, the ship flounders and the captain barely manages to steer it into a safe anchorage.

On his return to Odessa (on a seaworthier ship), Paustovsky takes advantage of a short stop at Yalta to sneak ashore one night and climb up into the hills in search of Chekhov’s house. His last visit there had been in 1906, when his family was intact and the young Kostik had no notion of the turmoil his country would see in the next sixteen years. To even reach the house, he had to risk being stopped by patrols of Red guards. Yet this contact with his past — and Russia’s past — breaks through the danger and dreariness of the moment:

And suddenly I felt the nearness and certainty of happiness. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps because of that pure snow-whiteness which looked like the distant radiance of a beautiful country, or because of my sense of sonship — long unexpressed and driven to the back of my mind – towards Russia, towards Chekhov. He had loved his country in many ways, and he had loved her as the shy bride about whom he wrote his last story. He had firmly believed that she was going unwaveringly towards justice, beauty and happiness.

I, too, believed in that happiness — that it would come to my country, to starved and frozen Crimea, and also to me. I felt this as a swift and joyful impulse, like a passionate look of love. It warmed my heart and dried my tears of loneliness and fatigue.

Perhaps this is why Paustovsky chose to call this volume Years of Hope.

I first wrote about Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography, The Story of a Life, back in 2007. At the time, I’d read the U.S. edition from 1964, which nowhere indicated that it represented just the first three of a total of six volumes. Four years after that edition’s publication, Pantheon published The Years of Hope with the subtitle, Continuing The Story of a Life. When The Story of a Life was reissued as a Pantheon Moden Classic in 1982, again it was half the complete work.

Thanks to Paustovsky’s U.K. publisher Harvill, however, British readers were able to enjoy all six volumes, as translated from the Russian by Manya Harari, Michael Duncan, Andrew Thomson, and Kyril FitzLyon. For the record, these are:

  • Volume I: Childhood and Schooldays
  • Volume II: Slow Approach of Thunder
  • Volume III: In that Dawn
  • Volume IV: Years of Hope
  • Volume V: Southern Adventure
  • Volume VI: The Restless Years

In other words, the U.S. editions of The Story of a Life contain just Volumes I-III. To get the full Story, you’ll have to buy the last three Harvill books, which have never been reissued. They’re worth looking for, however, not only for the wonderful writing but also for their beautiful dust jacket designs.

The Story of a Life, Volume 4: The Years of Hope, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Manya Harari and Andrew Thomson
London: Harvill, 1968

The Melville Log, by Jay Leyda (1951)

1951 edition of The Melville Log, compiled by Jay Ledya
1951 edition of The Melville Log.

In two volumes of nearly a thousand pages in total, The Melville Log may be the longest biography never written. Seventy years after its first publication, it’s still one of the most innovative takes on biography and a woefully under-recognized attempt to revitalize a form remarkably resistant to experimentation.

In the last ten years or so, there have been a number of celebrated alternative takes on biography. Alexander Master took us through a life in reverse in his Stuart: A Life Backwards, showing us how to see the dysfunctional adult Stuart Shorter through the lens of his childhood traumas. Craig Brown created a biography as kaleidoscope in Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Janet Malcolm revealed the inherent unreliability of all biographies in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes — which hasn’t stopped at least a half dozen more Plath biographies appearing since its first publication. And in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer wrote about D. H. Lawrence by writing about not writing about D. H. Lawrence.

Jay Ledya, 1951
Jay Leyda, 1951.

The Melville Log, however, remains — to my knowledge — the sole example of the DIY approach to biography. “In the making of this book,” Jay Leyda wrote in his introduction, “I have tried to hold to one main aim: to give each reader the opportunity to be his own biographer of Herman Melville, by providing him with the largest possible quantity of materials to build his own approach to this complex figure.” The only way he could do this, he continued,

… was to put together everything that could be known about this life, to bring the reader close to Melville’s progress through as many of his days as could be restored, so that the reader may watch him as he works, sees, reacts, worries — to make those seventy-two years, from 1819 to 1891, and a portion of the America they were lived in, in Henry James’s word, visitable. This approach forbade an emphasis on any part of his life to the exclusion of any other part, and forbade the neglect of material that seemed, in itself, of small importance. I trust the reader will find enjoyment in traveling alongside Melville — through good days and bad days, through great aims and trivial duties — as his body and mind grow and change — in a constant present, accumulating past experiences, but without knowing a future.

Without knowing a future. Leyda recognized the crucial flaw that limits the realism of any work of biography or history: unlike the subjects, the author suffers from knowing how things turned out. For us, Melville lived in the past. But as David McCullough has put it,

One might also say that history is not about the past. If you think about it, no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries didn’t walk about saying, “Isn’t this fascinating living in the past! Aren’t we picturesque in our funny clothes!” They lived in the present. The difference is it was their present, not ours. They were caught up in the living moment exactly as we are, and with no more certainty of how things would turn out than we have.

Though Herman Melville was born on 1 August 1819, Leyda opens his log two weeks later. Though Melville was certainly present at his birth, he wasn’t present in a conscious sense. But his infant subconscious likely sensed that he was coming into a family teetering on the edge of disaster. Thus, Leyda opens with an ominous letter to Melville’s father from one of his business partners: “I am under the painfull necessity of informing you that on the 9th instant I was obliged to Stop payment….” In the next, Herman’s grandmother Catherine Gansevoort is replenishing the family’s larder with an order including four gallons each of rum and Holland gin. When Herman is just five weeks old, his mother takes the children to her parents’ house in Albany to avoid the “epidemic fever” hitting New York City. Herman’s father writes his own father hopefully, “the alarm of Fever has suspended the little Business doing, but I hope with the blessing of GOD, confidence will soon return & Business revive again….”

Day by day, fragment by fragment, Leyda builds Melville’s world, spreading wider to take in political, economic, and social events, digging deeper into Melville’s own thoughts as shown in his journals and letters, and as reflected in those of his family and friends. Of course, his choice of fragments is not without a certain design or direction. As this excerpt shows, even as Moby Dick was being typeset and registered for copyright, a report was reaching New York of an incident proving that the fate of the Pequod was no wild invention.

Extract from The Melville Log from October 1851
Extract from The Melville Log from October 1851.

Leyda quotes, notes, extracts, reproduces, and interpolates. He invites us to look over his shoulder as he sits in the archive, reading Allen Melville’s calculation of his brother’s profits up to the publication of Moby Dick — and his dim prospects of significant profits from his newest title.

Allan Melville's reckoning of his brother's profits.
Allan Melville’s reckoning of his brother’s profits, from early September 1851.

This acccumulation of detail does not, however, guarantee that Leyda’s account is substantially more realistic than any conventional biography:

I found that while some aspects of Melville’s life grew more clear in the process, other aspects — usually the most important and creative ones — grew more complex and less clear. Even now that the casually undertaken project has grown into a book, and an enormous amount of material has been examined, I could not say that I know Melville any more than I can say I know why certain artists with whom I’ve had long friendships are artists.

Considering the lengths to which Leyda had pursued information about Melville, this is an unexpectedly frank admission. But one reason he chose to present a log of Melville’s life rather than a narrative in the usual biographical form is that he recognizes the difficult of the task facing every biographer:

[T]his job has, at least, given me an understanding and sympathy for all biographers eternally forced to simplify the tangle of real life and time into comprehensible patterns. Finding great areas of his art unused by biographer and critic, and excited by the discovery that Melville’s life was as dramatic as his art, I decided to take this documentary voyage outside the conventional realm of biography, and see where it would lead. I called what I was doing a Log of Melville’s life, for my purpose was to record the essentials of that life’s latitude and longitude, of its weather, course, whales captured or whales merely seen.

Leyda knew that even The Melville Log was itself only a fragment. Letters to and from Melville and other pertinent documents would, and did, emerge after its publication. In the mid 1960s, he took on the task of updating the Log to incorporate material revealed in the subsequent nearly twenty years, aided by Herschel Parker, and a new edition was published in 1969 by the Gordian Press with a supplemental chapter.

Already suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, however, Leyda had barely scratched the surface with his supplement and decided to begin again. He hired an assistant and began by cutting the earlier edition of the Log into pieces and trying to insert new material in a crude cut-and-paste manner. As Parker discovered when he and his assistant Mark Niemeyer visited Leyda’s home in 1987 in hopes of helping to get a new edition finished, the consequences of Leyda’s chosen method were disastrous:

You can imagine what happened: whenever you cut up a thousand pages into several thousand pieces so you can splice in hundreds of new pieces of papers, new items are going to get put in the wrong places, and new and old slivers of paper are going to get lost, half a page here, a page there. Every horror you can imagine did happen, and worse. One small oversight had disastrous consequences. No one had anticipated what would happen when, say, a Pittsfield item was spliced into a New York sequence, but hundreds of locations were thrown off, and given the technology being used these places were all but uncorrectable, since to splice in a new location would often mean recutting the rest of the heading and moving the last few words down a line (and in a heading running several lines would mean that all the lines would have to be recut).

Parker and Niemeyer gave up hope of making quick work of a new edition. Instead, as he told a meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1990, it was a task that could only be undertaken through a massive collaborative initiative, one he confessed himself too old and tired to lead. Though the effort was daunting, Parker still thought it worthwhile, “even in this age when literary history vaunts itself as being the product of stylistic verve, not archival research.” Though long retired from teaching, Parker still reflects on Melville and other subjects on his blog Fragments from a Writing Desk.

The Melville Log is not, perhaps, a book to be read through in the same manner one would a traditional biography. If you can afford the cost — and the shelf space — to keep a copy in your collection, it may be better appreciated by dipping at random into Leyda’s selections from the 26,356 days of Melville’s life. These dips will provide a constant reminder of the immediacy and inherent uncertainty present at every moment in any human life.

The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, by Jay Leda
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951
New York: The Gordian Press, 1969

More Neglected Hollywood Novels

Movie stars reading

Back in September 2020, I posted an interview with Kari Sund, a PhD student at Glasgow University, in which we discussed five neglected favorites she’d come across while working on her thesis about Hollywood novels. Reading the anonymous City Without a Heart recently, I was reminded of a baker’s dozen of other lesser-known Hollywood novels that I posted on Twitter around the same time and have collected here for safekeeping.

Cover of first US edition of Queer People
Cover of first US edition of Queer People

• Queer People, by Carroll and Garrett Graham (1930)

The brothers wrote this caustic satire out of frustration at not getting jobs with the studios. In it, a newspaper man gets drunk, wins studio contract, then spirals down through movieland’s denizens. Hollywood ate it up: the book went through 4 printings in three weeks. “As much like the average Hollywood yarn as a Wyoming cylone is akin to a school girl’s sigh” is how Variety’s reviewer put it. Earns a cameo appearance in City Without a Heart:

Together they entered Mr. Alexander’s outer office.
A pretty girl, with eyes like sloes, looked up over a copy of ‘Queer People.’
‘He’s busy right now,’ she said. ‘He’s in a con¬ ference right now.’
They retired.

Reissued in pulp paperback in 1950 with one of the all-time great titles: Fleshpots of Malibu, and reissued in the Lost American Fiction series in the 1970s.

 

Cover of Cinelandia, the original Spanish version of Movieland by Ramon Gomez de la Serna
Cover of Cinelandia, the Spanish version of Movieland by Ramon Gomez de la Serna.
• Movieland, by Ramon Gomez de la Serna (1930)

A somewhat legendary novel, extremely rare in English translation. Written by a Spanish author who’d never set foot in Hollywood, so he could make it whatever he wanted. “So distorted as to have little meaning for the average American,” NY Times wrote, but “as a baroque and flippant literary antic … the novel is thoroughly satisfactory.”

Much easier to find if you can read Spanish or French. In English, the one copy for sale goes for $399.

 

Dust jacket of Gold Old Jack by Eric Hatch
Cover of Good Old Jack by Eric Hatch.
• Good Old Jack, by Eric Hatch (1937)

A typical Eric Hatch wacky road show comedy. Director Jack splits Hollywood to avoid creditors and girls, lands in South American backwater, ends up producing a coup. Having acted like a dictator on the set in Hollywood, Jack finds himself well-prepared to be one — but is disappointed to find that much of the native scenery “less believable” than the fake sets he’d become accustomed to on the studio backlots.

 

Cover of If We Only Had Money by Lee Shippey
Cover of If We Only Had Money by Lee Shippey.
• If We Only Had Money, by Lee Shippey (1939)

A writer of Westerns and his wife and kids are “poor but happy.” Then a studio contract comes and the money pours in. Still happy after that? This is a cautionary tale for the tiny number of writers who won big studio contracts, found themselves swimming in cash, then wondered why they weren’t happy. Shippey’s family wises up and opts to go back to “poor but happy.”

Sounds a bit lightweight, but lots of reviewers liked it: “a true American story written with the charm, sympathy and understanding of human nature.” I suspect Dorothy Parker’s Tonstant Weader might have fwowed up, though.

 

Cover of a Signet paperback edition of Dirty Eddie by Ludwig Bemelmans
Cover of a Signet paperback edition of Dirty Eddie by Ludwig Bemelmans.
• Dirty Eddie, by Ludwig Bemelmans (1947)

A fable about a Hollywood star who’s a pig.

A real pig (Dirty Eddie–get it?)

Bemelmans pokes fun at a business where nobody seemed to know what he was doing … and got very well paid for it. “… one of the best pictures of the Hollywood rat race … indicates that the whole business is run by the people in it as if it were a scenario for a movie they constantly rewrite and recast every morning,” wrote Variety’s reviewer. “One sees the danger of magazine fragments made into a book,” warned another critic, “for there is little progression… Each page is a delight. The total of all pages makes almost no culminating effect.”

 

Cover of the Houghton Mifflin edition of Of Streets and Stars by Alan Marcus
Cover of the Houghton Mifflin edition of Of Streets and Stars by Alan Marcus.
• Of Streets and Stars, by Alan Marcus (1961)

Dorothy Parker called it “A novel of dazzling originality, written with compassion, sometimes with a wild humor, always in the beauty of simplicity.” Truly forgotten. The foreword by Lion Feuchtwanger (“Who?”) didn’t help. First published by Manzanita Press in Yucca Valley; two years later, Houghton Mifflin took it mass market. “His style is spare, lean, staccato. Jagged cutting in and out of scenes, in the manner of a skillful director, gives the book a breathless momentum. It needs to be read carefully, but the effort will be handsomely repaid.” Alan Rich, New York Times.

Midge Decter, applying the belated but deadly thrust often typical of New York Review of Books, thought less of the book:

[It] participates in that almost-genre, the Hollywood novel, and in so doing touches down on just about every one of its almost-conventional themes. There is the Fan Mail Department of the great studio, into which harelips from Minnesota, lonely cowboys from Montana, crazy adolescent girls from Sweden and other far-off places pour their Dreams, dutifully answered with autographed photos of the stars deposited into the mails by lonely working-girls in Hollywood. There is the old executive, called by his initials (in this case, J.C.), who terrorizes, sentimentalizes, and worries for his ailing heart. There is the second-generation executive (clearly modeled on someone like Dore Schary) who works on the principle of hard efficiency and confronts in his sleep the empty anxiety at the center of his life. There is above all the young Eastern writer, a prize-winner, who comes to Hollywood to beat the movies and instead is thoroughly beaten by them. Through it all, behind it all, move the beautiful legendary creatures in costume dropping their masks just long enough to reveal themselves as mean tippers in the studio commissary or as having to go to the toilet in the middle of a take.

 

Cover of first US edition of Come On Out, Daddy by Bernard Wolfe
Cover of first US edition of Come On Out, Daddy by Bernard Wolfe.
• Come On Out, Daddy, by Bernard Wolfe (1963)

Bernard Wolfe’s sex/drugs/girls/jazz take on Hollywood, full of starlets, faded matinee idols, and producers on the rise and on the fall. Wolfe probably came closer to translating the spirit of a Lenny Bruce routine to fiction than any other novelist of his time. Overdue for reconsideration.

“… hilarious and grotesque, penetrating and compeling, and on occasion … thoroughly original. And there is something more–style. He writes as though the words were invented yesterday,” wrote Robert Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times. Over on the East Coast, however, Gerald Walker in the New York Times felt the book was “overwoven” and compared reading it to “wearing a 30-pould turtleneck sweater.”

 

Cover of The Symbol by Alvah Bessie
Cover of ,em>The Symbol by Alvah Bessie.
• The Symbol, by Alvah Bessie (1966)

Wanda Emmaline Kelly, orphaned at two, foster homed, raped at nine, married at 16, pin-up queen by 18. Then Buck, the football player, lunky and loving and Calvin, the NY intellectual/painter.

Yeah … Marilyn.

Compared to Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls, wrote one reviewer, this is the Sistine Chapel.

Consider it a rough draft of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, a much better novel. However, I should say that Bessie earned the right to lambaste Hollywood after doing time as one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.

 

Cover of The Manner Music by Charles Reznikoff
Cover of The Manner Music by Charles Reznikoff.
• The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff (1977)

“Unlike any other Hollywood novel ever done,” wrote Maurice Zolotow. “It is like T S Eliot writing a novel about banks, Wallace Stevens writing one about insurance companies.” A young composer goes to work as factotum to a movie producer named Paul Pasha. Wall St crashes, the studio folds, he heads back to NY, ends up burning his compositions in Central Park. In a just world, we’d recognize this as a minor American masterpiece.

I wrote about The Manner Music back in May 2020: Link

 

Cover of Night Tennis by Annabell Davis-Goff
Cover of Night Tennis by Annabell Davis-Goff.
• Night Tennis, by Annabel Davis-Goff (1978)

Davis-Goff was Mrs. Mike Nichols #3.

“Reads almost like a handbook on film-making” wrote one reviewer. “A Hollywood novel that has an authentic contemporary feel (without ramming it down your throat),” Kirkus concluded.

I love this from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Edna Stumpf: “The bleakest book about fornicating and making movies I’ve ever read. It’s a real little sobersides of a fable about weighing the odds and taking the consequences and biting the bullet.” “Call me corrupt,” Edna continued, “but when I read a Hollywood novel I want to have fun, if only the fun of a cheap contempt for bratty stars and money-mad moguls and noontime sex with catered champagne in interior-decorated trailers”

 

Cover of Blue Pages by Eleanor Perry
Cover of Blue Pages by Eleanor Perry.
• Blue Pages, by Eleanor Perry (1979)

An autobiographical novel written after her divorce from Frank Perry: “I’ll be the first to say it’s a disguised version of my experiences, told from a middle-aged writer’s point of view.” “Novels by men which draw portraits of women as bitches or shrews seem to cause no particular comment. But let a woman write about men as master seducers, users, monsters and there are cries of ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,'” Perry remarked.

On the other hand, Perry reported that women saw “Blue Pages as a book about working women and above all, middle-aged women and their plight.”
“The book makes a woman in her late 40s a viable, sexual being, not somebody ready for the ash heap.”

 

Cover of Hix Nix Stix Pix by David Llewellyn-Burdett
Cover of Hix Nix Stix Pix by David Llewellyn-Burdett.
• Hix Nix Stix Pix, by David Llewellyn Burdett (1984)

“Take Doctorow’s Ragtime and West’s Day of the Locust, chop them up, mix them together, and let the fragments fly,” was how NY Times’ reviewer summed up this debut novel. It’s a wild hodge-podge running from silents to talkies, with tons of cameos by Chaplin, Hitler, Salvador Dali, and many others. Most reviewers hated it, but the book has a small cult of die-hard fans.

 

Cover of Creative Differences by Buffy Shutt
Cover of Creative Differences by Buffy Shutt.
• Creative Differences, by Buffy Shutt (1990)

Hollywood seen through the eyes of a woman who rises through a series of scut jobs to become an executive VP for production, in charge of solving daily crises, mostly over male egos. This may resonate more than when it first came out. The narrator is nameless, for example, only because to all the male characters, she is either “Babe” or “Honey” or “Pet.” And, of course, the male egos are more fragile than the thinnest egg shell: “Several film-makers ask me where they’re sitting on the dais. By the way they ask, you’d think their entire self-worth is tied up in whether they are on the first tier or the second tier.”

City Without a Heart, by Anonymous (1933)

Cover of City Without a Heart

Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author’s identity, but then the practical challenges settle in. Where does a bookseller shelve it: under the As? How does a would-be buyer refer to it? “It’s a book about Hollywood.” “Do you know the author’s name?” “No.”

Novels about Hollywood are a semi-popular topic for PhD dissertations, and I’ve found City Without a Heart mentioned in the bibliographies of several, but none of the doctoral candidates in question appears to have actually read the book. I only stumbled across it searching for something completely different on the Internet Archive. Having read it, I can allay your hopes (or fears): this is not the Great Lost Hollywood Novel.

But it is an interesting novel. Now, we all know that interesting is the “Get Out of Jail Free” card of adjectives. If you can’t say anything nice about someone, say they’re interesting. It’s what you tell your best friend after they drag you to a three-hour art house movie with a dozen lines of dialogue: “Yeah, that was interesting.”

In this case, interesting is not a cop-out but a way of saying that City Without a Heart is not a particularly well-written novel but it is a well-observed one, though distorted by the author’s prejudices. When the book was published, there was that initial rush of guesses about the authorship. Candidates included Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, Getrude Atherton, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis Bromfield, and even Greta Garbo. What’s clear is that the author was someone familiar with the workings of the studio system from the inside. Someone who’d penetrated to the inner sanctum of a studio chief’s office, for example:

Mr. Schloss’s office was protected from assault by three lines of defences. The first was held by an empty table and rather a formidable filing cabinet. The next boasted a standing guard of three young things with typewriters. The third and last was occupied by a young man with a mauve face, geranium-coloured hair, and the best set of dentures Mary had ever seen outside a showcase. He was supported by an individual with such a powerful resemblance to a gorilla that Mary was quite alarmed that there were no bars in front of him.

If the author was indeed a Hollywood insider, he was someone who’d grown to hate what he knew. “You know nothing about Hollywood,” says its first representative to encounter the photogenic Mary Fresnell and her aunt in their humble village in Cornwall. “It would be a crime to send a girl like Mary into that sort of atmosphere.” Anonymous drives home this point repeatedly and unsubtly, starting with his title. “Hollywood,” declares a screenwriter she meets there, “for all the ferocity of its labours and the wealth of its talent, is as empty a shell as ever existed in the history of the world.” Another denies the assertion that Tinsel Town is a godless place. There is a god, he argues: “the god of I.”

It’s not hard to pick up a few clues about the author’s identity beside his insider knowledge. The fact that he was a he and not a she, for example. Sprinkled throughout the book are a hints of a streak of misogyny, such as his dislike of chatty women:

Mrs. Knalder was Mary’s first experience of America’s endurance-test talking women. Later she discovered that they are numerous and are without mercy. Lack of subject-matter, the inattention or obvious boredom and infuriation of a listener has no influence upon the flow of their chatter. Like the brook it goes on forever.

His suggested cure for these women is brutal: “nothing short of amputation of the tongue is of any practical service whatsoever.”

Anonymous is also an anti-Semite. Hollywood’s studio heads all “rose from the tailor’s bench,” have waists that measure “anything up to sixty inches round” and faces that “bore the prominent characteristics of a toucan.” In Hollywood, the rightful order of classes has been turned on its head:

Hollywood is a Jewish stronghold. The entire picture industry is under their control. The power they possess is incalculable…. Enthroned they sit and jest of their humble origin to a Christian community which is never weary of trying to ex¬ hume, from totally non-existent sources, ancestors of most piquant aristocracy.

Ask a Jewish executive, in receipt of five hundred thousand dollars a year, whence he sprang, and you shall hear tales of a basement on the East Side of New York. Put the same question to a ten-dollar a day ‘extra’ and you shall be buffeted with half the names in the English peerage.

Contrast this with his descriptions of the people of Cadgwith, the little Cornish port from which Mary, the innocent pulled into Hollywood’s lair by the promise of filthy lucre. Its men “are simple folk who, when not riding the waves, sit upon an old stone wall and watch the sea from which their slender blessings flow. Its women “are busy at home, for where money is scarce work is plentiful.” You may recognize them as the future inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And Mary, of course, is the stoutest of these stout-hearted folk: “She could sail a boat, bait a line, shoot a net, and scale a cliff with any fisher lad in the village.”

She can also, we come to see, learn her lessons. Brought all the way from Cornwall to California based on her stunning beauty and vitality as caught, unaware, on a few minutes of film, she quickly falls from promising starlet to has-been (or rather, never-was) through the betrayal of a competitor unburdened by scruples, and heads home, the sadder but wiser girl.

Almost.

There is a twist right at the end that leads me to wonder if Anonymous’s chief gripe with Hollywood boiled down to something as simple as resentment that he wasn’t better paid.

I closed City Without a Heart grateful not to know Anonymous’s true identity. Three hundred pages in his company was quite enough. The book is a revealing if stilted portrait of Hollwood in one of its moments of transition, when talkies had overturned the hierarchy of silents and studios had succeeded in eliminating all but the last few independents, and for that it undoubtedly has some historical value. As a novel, however, its neglect is justified.

City Without a Heart, by Anonymous
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933

No More Giants, by Joaquina Ballard Howles (1966)

Cover of No More Giants by Joaquina Ballard Howles

Stray cattle in a harsh landscape rarely fare well, let alone survive. The same could be said of stray novels in an unwelcoming market. So it’s not surprising that No More Giants, Joaquina Ballard Howles’ story about a young woman growing up on an isolated ranch in Nevada in the late 1940s attracted little attention and has been utterly forgotten.

It came out in 1966 as part of Hutchinson’s New Authors Series, an admirable series of first novels brought out by the U.K. publisher Hutchinson’s between 1958 and 1970. I’ve never seen a full listing of the New Authors Series, but from what I’ve been able to uncover, there were at least three dozen novels — and a handful of memoirs — issued under this imprint. Hutchinson formed the imprint to help “the new author, who has something of genuine importance to say” (in the opinion of Hutchinson’s unnamed judges). Hutchinson also declared that the series would only publish first books by writers who are members of the British Commonwealth. “No established writer, no author who has any other book to his credit (with such exceptions as a school text book, etc.) will be eligible for consideration.”

Times Literary Supplement article announcing Hutchinson's New Authors scheme in October 1957.
Times Literary Supplement article announcing Hutchinson’s New Authors scheme in October 1957.

Authors were paid a rather modest royalty of ten percent up to the first 5,000 copies sold (and there don’t appear to have been any that broke this mark), with an advance of £150. Relatively few of the authors whose first books benefited from this scheme saw a second book reach print. Exceptions include Maureen Duffy, whose That’s How It Was was published in 1962 and J. G. Farrell, whose debut The Man From Elsewhere came out in 1963.

Even among the diverse array of novice authors in Hutchinson’s series, Joaquina Howles was an outcast. An American, she qualified as a Commonwealth writer by marriage: her husband Geoffrey Howles was an Oxford graduate and banker specializing in oil investments whose work took the couple to Alberta, Canada, New York, and London. Like Jenny, the young woman in her novel, she had grown up on a ranch north of Reno. Unlike the girl, however, who gets pregnant by her first lover, a Basque ranch hand, and is sent to a home for unwed mothers, Howles attended Mills College, then the West Coast’s elite women’s school, and won several scholarships.

Photograph of Joaquina Ballard Howles from the dust jacket of No More Giants
Photograph of Joaquina Ballard Howles from the dust jacket of No More Giants.

As No More Giants makes clear, though, her time at Mills and as an expat executive’s wife didn’t erase her memories of the good and bad aspects of life on a ranch. The hard work, surprisingly, is at the heart of the good. Long rides to herd grazing cattle allow her views of vast landscapes in shifting colors through the day. Chores provide a routine to distract her from her troubles: “The simple things, the milking, feeding, carrying, which we did with our hands, helped us both. Doing was the major part of living, and once as we both lifted the same bale of hay, I knew that we were healing ourselves.”

The biggest source of her troubles are her parents, an unhappy mix of personalities:

To my father, life ran in straight lines, and though they might run deep, they remained parallel, crossing only in the chaos of some unrecognised infinity…. My mother’s lines crossed, tangled, lost themselves in limbo, without colour, precision, or design.

“I wish I could have identified with Mama,” Jenny laments. If her father is the tall, laconic, gentle giant in her world, her mother is the fearsome one, “powerful as the sky can be in times of terror.” Lila, the spinster aunt who lives with the family, offers no consolation: “Aunt Lila lived in the world of terrible possibilities.” One of the few lessons she has to teach Jenny and her brother Brian is how to act if they find themselves kidnapped: “If we couldn’t phone when we were taken away we were to remember our names, ages, and address, so that sooner or later — perhaps even years later — we could escape and return home.”

The harsh landscape of the high desert is mirrored in the harsh emotional climate of Jenny’s home. Her mother hates her father for dragging her to the remote ranch and saddling her with unrelenting work and her father, in return, hates his wife’s failure to be a compliant helpmate. Their hatred is as much an environmental given as the desert’s dryness — “so familiar I had never thought of naming it.”

But even deserts are susceptible to sudden, unpredictable deluges:

Continuing hatred is a level thing, a line of monotony like telephone poles going across a valley, dwindling away out of thought. But sooner or later there is a break, a turn, a mountain where the line goes up or down or is broken, and then one sees it again and remembers the many poles in the valley.

Like the deluges that wash out bridges and brush fires that wipe out a season’s harvest, emotional crises rise up swiftly and with devastating force in No More Giants. It’s very much a novel of its place, a sparsely populated, unforgiving part of the American West unfamiliar to most British readers. If it could be said to resemble any other work of its time, it would be Joan Didion’s first novel Run River, another account of an unhappy ranch family in the West. Never published in the U.S., No More Giants gained a few brief and unexceptional reviews. The usually sharp-eyed Marigold Johnson of the TLS even got the author’s name wrong, referring to her as “Mrs. Knowles.”

Whether it was lukewarm reviews, disappointing sales, or some other reason, Joaquina Ballard Howles followed the path of many of Hutchinson’s new authors and gave up writing after publishing No More Giants. Or at least, so it was for over fifty years. In October 2020, however, a new novel titled Brighter Later appeared on Amazon. Apparently self-published, the book is described as a story of forgiveness about “a middle-class family living in one of London’s more affluent artistic communities, who encounter alcoholism and a horrifying secret along the way which rips their family apart.”

I’ve tried to track Mrs. Howles down, but my leads dry up variously in the U.K., Reno, and Palo Alto, California, so if anyone can tell us something about her current situation, please let me know. No More Giants is too good to leave out on the range as a stray.

No More Giants, by Joaquina Ballard Howles
London: Hutchinson (New Authors), 1966

The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks (1972)

Cover of US edition of The Halt During the Chase
The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase

Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure of what they don’t, sure that they want a man in their life but not sure which one or how. They’re poised like a driver at a red light in an unfamiliar neighborhood, knowing they’ve got to make a decision: Left? Right? Straight? The only thing that’s clear is that backing up is not an option.

In the case of Sophie in Tonks’s last novel, The Halt During the Chase, as the book opens, she’s left her job as an administrator at a language school in Kensington and is wondering whether she truly loves Philip, the rising star in Treasury. As the book opens, she’s also in the middle of a conversation about school knickers at her mother’s house in Hampstead.

In the book’s opening chapter, there in that Hampstead kitchen, Tonks perfectly captures the way the pendulum swings back and forth between affection and annoyance in an adult daughter’s conversation with her mother. The shared memories then painful, now comic: “The regulation dark blue knickers. And they were knickers too!” The mother’s desire to see the daughter settled, the daughter’s chafing at the spectre of entrapment. And the mother’s long-developed and now deadly skill in wielding the weapons of conversation. Such as that simple and deceptive question: “How’s it going?”

“How’s it going?” So childish, so shrewish, that I had to answer on the same level: “How’s what going?” She would then draw her face into an expression of nauseating complicity, just like a mime who only has one second to portray some human failing and so has to do it with decisive vulgarity. Heaven knows what underworld theatre she got the expression from, but it was invaluable.

Sophie’s mother is also a bottomless well of advice and life lessons, on everything from religion to noses:

A woman’s nose has to be small and neat. But a man is quite different. If a man hasn’t got a good nose, he should sit down and grow himself one, because he’s going to need it!

Backing up is most definitely not an option for Sophie.

Cover of the UK edition of The Halt During the Chase
The nearly as bad cover of the UK edition of The Halt During the Chase

In fact, after two hours in that kitchen, she feels suffocated. Desperate just to get out the front door and to the freedom that lies outside, even on the sidewalks of Hampstead.

More air! I couldn’t get enough of it — I wanted a cold, flowing river of it past my cheeks. Drink it down, white stuff, and get rid of all the vinegar inside you that makes you trembling and irresolute, afraid that you ‘re not rich enough for your lover, whom you love too much on one level and doubt on another.

Moving foward is the only choice, but how is still in doubt. The obvious answer seems to be marriage with Philip. Brilliant, fit, handsome, and obviously destined for a future KCB, Philip is also the safe choice: “the sort of man with whose life nothing could possibly go wrong; decisions were permanent, and ended at death.” Philip is a precursor of the Tony Blair Labourite: socialist, but not in a sweaty way. His socialism, Sophie thinks, is “so snobbish, so exclusive, so bogus.”

How snobbish, she suddenly realizes, when, lying together in a hotel bed after making love, Philip tells her, “I was going to ask you to come and live with me. But I can’t promise you there won’t be an emotional bust-up in five years’ time. And then you’ll be less well off financially than you are now.”

To Philip, this is both pragmatic and empathetic. What better demonstrates how much he cares for Sophie than his consideration for how hard it will be when he dumps her? To Sophie, this is soul crushing. Trapped beside Philip in that perfectly equipped, airtight hotel room, she feels herself being swallowed whole. Again, she finds herself suffocating. She claws through the heavy curtains, manages to crack up the window, and drinks in the air. “I have never tasted anything like it. Through that gap in the plating of the hotel, I began to carry on my life once again.”

In his perfect dispassionate way, Philip has pushed Sophie out into that intersection, forcing her to make a choice.

Here, however, we find the one thing that distinguishes Sophie from Tonks’s other heroines. She’s begun to realize she’s got a soul. She’s started attend lectures by Mr. Ruback, Hampstead’s resident mystic. She may not fully understand how she will develop her spiritual self, but she knows that it will not be Philip’s way — having all the right opinions, furnishing one’s life with all the right accessories. “Isn’t buying new lampshades a form of slow death?” she wonders.

The Halt During the Chase is not only Rosemary Tonks’ funniest book but it’s also her deepest. Or rather, it’s a book that hovers on the edge of depth. By the time the book was published, Tonks had entered a period of soul-searching that had been triggered by her mother’s death in 1968. As Neil Astley wrote in his Guardian obituary, “Rosemary turned her back on Christianity, and for the next eight years attended spiritualist meetings, consulted mediums and healers, and took instruction from Sufi ‘seekers’ before turning to a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. All these she repudiated in turn.”

One opens the book thinking the chase of the title is the hunt of one sex for another. Sophie does turn from Philip to take some interest in his half-brother Guy, but the real quest is a spiritual one. “They taught you that it was your job to develop yourself, as the primary purpose of life,” she says of Ruback’s lectures: “the chase is inward [Emphasis added].” It clear that this is Sophie’s most likely direction when she exits her intersection.

Though Tonks ultimately returned to Christianity years later, she dismissed her own writing as something as pointless as buying new lampshades. She burned an unpublished novel and if she’d had her way, would have seen to it that every copy of her published books saw the same fate.

If one knows nothing about Rosemary Tonks, The Halt During the Chase is a remarkable work, studded like a bejeweled belt with shrewd and funny observations and perceptive about the quandaries of women looking for ways to make a life not centered on a man and family. But once you know her story, it’s hard to read Halt without sensing the spiritual direction in which she was about to turn, without knowing that she would soon want to destroy the very words we are reading.

The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks
London: The Bodley Head, 1972

Kind of Blue Books: Novels about Jazz Musicians

Dave Brubeck - TIME magazine 1954

In 1955, not long after Dave Brubeck became the first postwar jazz musician to make the cover of TIME magazine, Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker’s veteran jazz critic, commented that novels about jazz had become “as indestructible as watercress sandwiches.” The irony of this, he noted, was that jazz, “with its overheated, bleary terminology and ghettoish aspects, is perhaps the hardest of all artforms to penetrate persuasively.”

It didn’t stop a couple generations of novelists from trying. After someone on Twitter asked for recommendations of novels about music and musicians recently, I began to jot down a list of just the ones about jazz and jazz musicians I could think of and was surprised how the list kept growing. Perhaps the best-known of these are one of the earliest, Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn (1938), which has been reissued as an NYRB Classic, and the best selling, Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). Algren’s book was more about drug addiction than jazz, and many of those who followed in his footsteps found it as hard not to mix up the two as did an unfortunate number of jazz musicians themselves.

Having played in an amateur big band for years, I’ve long taken an interest in books about jazz, but I won’t deny that the nonfictional ones — particularly coming from the pen of a master like Balliett, Gene Lees, Ted Gioia, or Stanley Crouch — tend, on average, to be far superior to their fictional counterparts. There’s just something about fiction and jazz than often comes out like mustard on chocolate: as great as the two may be on their own, put together they do neither a favor.

Approached as genre novels — which means, I guess, that you can set your critical brow down to middle or lower — however, they can have the same appeal as a whodunnit or western. Those same qualities of atmosphere, clichéd characters, and predictable plots that kill a book’s chance of critical praise can provide such the kind of reliable formula that makes for good escapism. Or, as another reviewer put it, one can become a willing “victim of a sort of déjà vu or déjà lu effect.” Here, then, are a dozen-plus jazz novels to enjoy.

Cover of The Giant Swing by W. R. Burnett

• The Giant Swing, by W. R. Burnett (1932)

I’d call this a half-way jazz novel. It’s about what happens when an amusement park piano player gets it into his head to start composing music. At first, everyone thinks it’s a joke, but when he meets a violinist with some training in orchestration, he ends up producing an opera titled The Giant Swing, which is set in … an amusement park. It’s halfway jazz because Burnett’s description of his hero’s music is clearly taken from George Gershwin’s “serious” compositions such as “Rhapsody in Blue” and Porgy and Bess — i.e., jazz-inspired but without the improvisational element. The story was later filmed as Dance Band (1941).

 

Paperback cover of Send Me Down by Henry Steig

• Send Me Down, by Henry Steig (1941)

This, one of the earliest novels about a jazz musician, might just be the best when it comes to capturing both the business and the art of performing jazz. The story follows Frank and Pete Davis, brothers playing trombone and tenor sax (ala Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey), from the first time they pick up their horns in band class to their commercial and artistic success leading a swing band. The book is full of practical details about working as a musician that suggests that Steig spent a good deal of time listening to veterans of the road.

It’s also probably the first to address what made playing jazz so different from playing any other type of music before it. “Did you ever hear of Joe Venuti?” Frank asks a violinist interested in joining his band.

Well, he’s about the best of the jazz violinists. And by jazz violinist I mean something very different from the fiddlers who play in most dance orchestras. I mean a man who can play hot improvisations, a man who can play inventions extemporaneously in jazz idiom. There aren’t more than six or eight in the whole country who can do it well — probably the whole world. If I wanted a violinist I would try to find such a man. A Joe Venuti.

“But I don’t want a violin!” Frank continues. “The way I’ve worked things out there’s absolutely no place for it” — meaning that Steig also understood something that was beginning to be a major factor in the shift from hot jazz to swing: the importance of orchestration and arrangements.

Send Me Down is likely the most unjustly neglected novel on this list. Despite its — for the time — unusual subject, it was good enough to convince a hard-nosed reviewer like the novelist Kate O’Brien to declare, “There are not at this time of day many novels that can be called original, but Send Me Down is unmistakably one of them.”

 

Cover of Little Boy Blues by George Willis

• Little Boy Blues, by George Willis (1947)

The last book in the forgotten magnum opus of this genre, a trilogy called “Three Musicians’ loosely based on the careers of Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Eddie Duchin, and other white musicians who got their start in the 1920s’ hot jazz era. The first novel, Tangleweed (1943), followed a musician who got caught in the trap of booze and drugs. The second, The Wild Faun (1945), took the other direction and told about a talented soloist who sold out and became a big star playing non-threatening “sweet” music. Lou Carey, the protagonist of Little Boy Blues sticks with his passion, staying true to jazz, but also proves a first-class heel who cheats on the woman who loves him.

Willis, who was a musician himself, knew the lot of a touring player living out of a suitcase and riding the band bus from one town to another, and the kind of places where they performed:

You can walk tonight into the Union and find that nothing real has ever changed there. You can walk up to the bandstand with its tiny, scarred rail behind which the musicians sit secure, and after you have put your dime in the kitty, you can ask those boys to play a tune for you. They will understand. And one of them will stand up to the microphone while the pianist accompanies him, and in the dim light and the smoke the young man will ask if anyone in the house loves him, for you who had a dime but could not sing it, and everyone will understand. For a moment in the night, everyone will be silent, and each at his table, or in his booth, or with his instep hooked on the railing at the bar, will be asking, too, in his heart and in his own peculiar way, if anyone there loves him—the song said they did and somebody must.

He’s also the only writer on this list who would refer to “a Shangri-la, a never-never land, or more closely a kind of White House … the quarters of the fabulous Local 802 of the union to which they all belonged, the American Federation of Musicians.”

 

Cover of Little Gate by Annemarie Ewing

• Little Gate, by Annemarie Ewing (1947)

The only title on this list written by a woman. Ewing was a journalist who specialized in profiles of swing band leaders and innovative musicians such as Raymond Scott. This novel, similar to Willis’s followed the career of a trumpet player who gets tangled up in a messy marriage. From the book’s reviews, I regret that Ewing’s publishers didn’t encourage her to write a collection of profiles — ala Balliett and Lees — instead of a novel. This, from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example:

When the author talks music, she talks first-hand, directly and without self-consciousness. Unhappily, she felt obliged to make a Book out of it, with a well-trammeled grade B plot containing a lady gangster and a lost week-end. The plot thickens but doesn’t jell; the dialogue is delivered on cue; and the music fades far, far away.

 

Cover of paperback edition of Dupree's Blues by Dale Curran

• Dupree Blues, by Dale Curran (1948)

Dupree Blues is almost a novelization — except in this case, of a blues song rather than a movie:

Betty told Dupree
She wanted a diamond ring
And Dupree told Betty,
“I’ll give you most anything.”

Now he didn’t want Betty
To know he didn’t have a thing.
He killed that jewelry man,
Gave Betty that diamond ring.

Or as the Hartford Courant’s reviewer summed up this book, “When a man is addicted to liquor and hot music, he will not necessarily get into trouble. But add a beautiful blonde — and he is doomed.” Bonus points for featuring a trombone player, though.

 

Covers of various editions of The Hot and the Cool by Edwin Gilbert

• The Hot and the Cool, by Edwin Gilbert (1953)

Gilbert specialized in writing middle-brow, mid-best-seller-list novels that focused on particular settings: an architectural firm in Native Stone, Detroit automotives in American Chrome, a fancy Fifth Avenue apartment house in The Beautiful Life. The Hot and the Cool focused on a sextet of jazz musicians and their struggle to break through (perhaps hoping for something along the lines of the Brubeck Quartet’s splash). Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Balliett gave Gilbert credit for accuracy in his descriptions of the practical details of a musician’s life, but when it came to writing about music, he said Gilbert’s prose “reminded me of a man trying to carry on a rapid monologue underwater.”

 

Cover of Solo by Stanford Whitmore

• Solo, by Stanford Whitmore (1955)

Think of this as the Atlas Shrugged of jazz novels. Its hero, Virgil Jones, is sort of a cross between Art Tatum and Lennie Tristano — in other words, a piano god but, you know, intellectual? And at the core of his philosophy is … himself. He hands out cards reading “I AM THE LAST INDIVIDUAL IN THE WORLD” (though without an address, but I suppose the last individual in the world wouldn’t need one). This was Whitmore’s one and only novel. He soon found more profitable work as the lead writer for James Garner’s TV western Maverick.

 

Cover of Sideman by Osborn Duke

• Sideman, by Osborn Duke (1956)

When I wrote about this book back in 2009, I acknowledged that I’d have put it in the Justly Neglected if not for the fact that its lead character is a trombonist. As a wannabe sliphorn wrangler myself, I had to give it some bonus stars. Trombone players need love, too. However, the fact is that any book that takes almost 450 pages to cover two weeks in the life of a big band playing a gig at a Santa Monica amusement park had better justify that demand on its reader’s time by being awesome. And Sideman is not.

What I did appreciate — and what is rare among jazz novels — was Duke’s solid grasp of the difference between musical proficiency and the capacity to improvise. Duke’s hero Bennie Bell packs up his horn in the end because he comes to realize that he might be sharp enough to play the book and write innovative compositions, but he simply doesn’t have the chops to play a half-decent solo. And that — far more often than drugs — is what usually brings a would-be jazz musician’s career to an end.

 

Cover of It's Always Four O'Clock by James Updyke

• It’s Always Four O’Clock, by James Updyke (1956)

Twenty-four years after The Great Swing, W. R. Burnett returned to take jazz head-on, though under a pseudonym for contractual reasons. In this case, he tells about the rise and break-up of a jazz trio — guitar, piano, and bass. He skirts around the challenge of trying to describe jazz by having a character intone, “Music is a hard thing to write about. Almost impossible, in fact: it’s just something you listen to — so I won’t bend your ears with too much talk about it.”

The trio’s bass player, Royal Mauch, sounds as if Burnett might have encountered the young Charle Mingus, then just making his name in L.A.:

This Royal — he broke everything up into pieces. The word ‘fracture’ was invented for him. I don’t know anything about Art — with a capital B, standing for Bushwa, to be polite about it, but if Royal had ever decided to paint, he would have painted those cockeyed looking things where the woman has two eyes on one side and looks like she was cut out of a marshmallow with a cleaver.

 

Cover of Hot, Sweet and Blue by Jack Baird

• Hot, Sweet, and Blue, by Jack Baird (1956)

Baird was a former drummer who led a band called the Jesters of Rhythm that played around Pittsburgh in the 1930s and 1940s. After marrying and quickly fathering five children, however, he took a steadier job as a liquor store clerk and began writing pulp novels at night. This one is set in Pittsburgh and features the tragic romance between a white trumpet player and a Black singer. The result was not only unusual in its interracial theme but admirably concise. As Virginia Dale wrote in the New York Times, “You might think that jazz and love and double crossing, gambling and murder would be enough to crowd hundreds of pages, but here it’s all skimmed over in under 150.”

 

Cover of Jive Jungle by Ida Martucci

• Jive Jungle, by Ida Martucci (1956)

The only fictional outing of a one-time Broadway producer (the musical “Barnum”), this is easily the most obscure and hard-to-find title on this list. I couldn’t find a single review, aside from a brief synopsis in David Rife’s Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2007). The New York Times’ only mention was in their “Books Published Today” item for 12 June 1956: “Novel about a musician.” So there you go.

 

Cover of Second Ending by Evan Hunter

• Second Ending, by Evan Hunter (1956)

An early offering by Ed McBain under his favorite pseudonym, Second Ending follows the example of The Man with the Golden Arm and focuses on the drugs more than the music. Though the main character is a trumpet man, the horn itself proves to be more important as something to hock than something to play. “A dossier on the disintegration phenomenon of addiction and the clawing torment of those who have been hooked,” according to Kirkus Reviews.

 

Cover of Paris Blues by Harold Flender

• Paris Blues, Harold Flender (1957)

Most people familiar with the 1961 movie Paris Blues probably don’t realize it’s based on a book — or that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s characters were invented to appeal to white audiences. In the novel, it’s the Sidney Poitier character, sax man Eddie Cook, who’s the protagonist. A long-time expat, Cook finds his reluctance to return to the racism he remembers at home tested when he falls in love with a black American woman visiting France on her summer holiday. Flender himself was a New York-based writer who usually worked on comic material with the likes of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner before the sale of his novel to producer Sam Shaw allowed him to pursue more serious subjects, such as his 1963 account of the evacuation of Danish Jews, Rescue in Denmark.

 

Cover of Somewhere There's Music by George Lea

• Somewhere There’s Music, by George Lea (1958)

This first novel won the Avery Hopwood Prize for major fiction in 1957. A clarinet player returns from the Korean War and trades his licorice stick for a bari sax and his adolescent fixation with Dixieland for a fascination with cool jazz. Lea captured the contrast between the jazzman’s passion for music and their passive acceptance of the limbo to which drugs and uncertain income condemns them.

 

Cover of Blow Up a Storm by Garson Kanin

• Blow Up a Storm, by Garson Kanin (1959)

This was screenwriter Kanin’s first novel, and it shows. Switching back and forth between present and flashbacks, it follows three musicians from their start as a Dixieland combo through changing styles and ensembles, to their ultimate fortunes and misfortunes. Although Kanin went on to write a number of bestsellers, the best parts of this book are those about the music itself, infused with Kanin’s thirty years of listening as an avid fan.

 

Cover of The Sound by Ross Russell

• The Sound, by Ross Russell (1961)

Russell made his mark in jazz history as the owner of Hollywood’s Tempo Music Shop, one of the best places to find jazz recordings in L.A. after the war and as the founder of Dial Records, for which Charlie Parker recorded a hugely influential set of tracks after being released from the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Red Travers, the trumpet player in The Sound, is largely based on Parker. Those familiar with Parker’s life can identify the real-life counterparts to most of the book’s characters and Ross later reused much of the material in his Parker biography Bird Lives!.

 

Cover of Man Walking on Eggshells by Herbert Simmons

• Man Walking on Eggshells, by Herbert Simmons (1962)

Simmons won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for his first novel, Corner Boy, in 1957, but he struggled to get his second book written and then published. Unlike most of the books on this list, it not only features a black protagonist but burns with the anger of a Black writer poised at the birth of the Civil Rights movement. For Simmons, jazz is more than just music: “Jazz is the story of the Black men being messed around so bad by the white man that if he could he’d lay down and die from the blues but his soul won’t let him do it.”

Man Walking on Eggshells and Corner Boy were forgotten for over thirty years until Norton brought them back in the late 1990s as part of a short-lived series of “Old School Books” by neglected Black writers. Although Amazon says it still has copies on stock, it’s probably time for Norton (or someone else) to consider another revival.

 

Cover of The Piano Sport by Don Asher

• The Piano Sport, by Don Asher (1966)

Asher, the house piano player at San Francisco’s famous Hungry i nightclub, based this comic novel about a New England Conservatory-trained pianist who moves to the Bay Area and takes a job playing at a strip club very loosely on his own experiences. Asher followed this up with The Electric Cotillion (1970), which took a similar character in a similar situation forward a few years, with the initial excitement and novelty of the San Francisco scene having been replaced with the drag of endless nights playing “Happy Birthday” and “Hava Nagila” at union minimum rates, until an 18-year-old high school dropout arrives to shake things up. Light on the jazz content, both novels are mainly of interest today as snapshots of SF’s swinging Sixties culture. Asher did, however, earn a permanent place in anyone’s jazz library b co-writing Hampton Hawes’ autobiography Raise Up Off of Me.

 

Cover of And Sleep Until Noon by Gene Lees

• And Sleep Until Noon, by Gene Lees (1966)

I wrote about this, Lees’ first novel, back in 2010. The book focuses on Jack Royal, a kid from Chicago who evolves from student of classical piano to jazz musician to jazz singer to pop star to star of baguette Westerns and adventure movies. My assessment: “Lees himself later told an interviewer that he hated the book. Perhaps the kindest thing one can says about it is that it provides convincing evidence that Lees made the right decision when he abandoned fiction and concentrated instead on writing about what he knew and loved best: jazz, pop, and the remarkable musicians who play it.”

 

Cover of Gig by James Houston

• Gig, by James D. Houston (1969)

Gig is about a gig. One night’s work for Roy Ambrose, a lounge pianist at the Seacliff, a fashionable joint in San Francisco known for its scenic views and society clientele. Of all the books on this list, it’s probably the most accurate in its depiction of the life of a working musician as seen through his own eyes. Roy has to deal with drunks, snobs, boors, groupies, clumsy waiters, and a rude owner, but takes it all with the perspective of someone who’ll deal with all of it all over again the next weekend:

I do not program people’s lives. I’m only a piano player. I long ago decided public arguments are silly, and I don’t participate. They solve nothing. No one’s opinions are changed. People argue because they’re good at it. I’ve learned I’m a flop at it. So I keep out of them and keep my distance from those who indulge in argument.

Roy is a true cool blue kind of cat:

Why continue this conspiracy of performers to keep the audience in its place? It’s the very thing that drives musicians to drink, to drugs, to insanity, this egomaniac reluctance to let someone else’s noises mix with their own. Why not let everybody into the act?

“As long,” he hastens to add, “as I continue to be in charge.”

I should mention that several fine novels in this genre from the 1960s have been reissued and are now available in print or eBook editions, including John Clellon Holmes’s The Horn, John Williams’s Night Song and Clifford’s Blues, and Mary Weik’s The Jazz Man, a children’s book.

Loneliest Girl in the World, by Kenneth Fearing (1951)

Cover of first US edition of Loneliest Girl in the World

Loneliest Girl in the World was the first novel in history about losing something in your computer. Which was a neat trick given that personal computers wouldn’t even have a name, let alone be commonplace, for another thirty-some years.

The computer in this case isn’t really a computer. Rather, it’s a large audio recording, transcription, and storage device using stainless steel wire as its medium, combined with some kind of indexed reference system controlled by a dial. It’s intended to store everything from business meetings, musical performances, and radio shows to novelties called “audiobooks.” He envisions it as part of a continental network,

… offering instantaneous information to anyone, on any subject, but also a general repository for all the data a businessman might need in the daily conduct of his affairs. His correspondence, his estimates, inventories, invoices, receipts, bills paid and due, all memoranda, everything he now committed to paper and placed in his cumbersome and bulky individual files, not recoverable a good part of the time, could go on deposit with us, on tape or wire, quickly available at all times.

Its inventor, Adrian Vaughn, keeps his most advanced model in his Manhattan penthouse apartment, having recently devised a voice-activated mechanism and some kind of processor that allows recordings to be requested and played on demand. Known as “Mikki,” this system becomes the focus of intrigue after Vaughn and his son Oliver fall to their deaths through an accident involving keys and an open penthouse window.

“The Loneliest Girl in the World” is the name the tabloids give Vaughn’s daughter Ellen when she inherits the penthouse apartment. Despite her apparent wealth, her situation is closer to that of Prometheus, staked to a mountain peak so birds of prey can attack and eat his liver. When she returns after the funeral, in fact, she finds two men in Mikki’s room. “We think there’s a recording of an oral agreement your father made between Vaughn Electronics and another company about an exchange of rights for mass production and sale,” they tell her.

What they don’t say is that other things are hidden there, too, such as the disposition of most of Adrian Vaughn’s fortune. To avoid going bankrupt and being tossed onto the street, Ellen must find answers: “There is a secret here somewhere in this storehouse of living sound, this pool of memory.” The problem is that the system contains over 463,000 hours of recordings or enough to take 50 years to work through. And, as she quickly figures out, with her father, brother, and others using Mikki, the chances of something being misfiled increase dramatically: “Between the lot of us, everyone using the collection for a different purpose, anything not in the right place can be written off as lost forever.”

Anyone who shares a home computer is familiar with this.

Fearing was neither Luddite nor doomster when it came to technology. He’s not particularly interested in the implications of a system like Mikki. As he once admitted, movie scenes “depicting a hell of a lot of fantastic machinery as built and operated by the science of the future, laboratory thunderbolts leaping from a positive steel electrode to a negative Wassermann have always found me a ready sucker.” He’s impressed by Mikki’s inherent superiority to the fallible humans it serves:

I never forget. Unlike you, I have no limit of life, my memory is total and accurate, this thread of thought never wanders with the weakness of age, and I am always able to receive the new and strange, nor am I intrusive, stubborn. I do not evade issues, or lie. I do not know how to lie.

But if Loneliest Girl in the World isn’t science fiction, neither is it much in the way of suspense. In Fearing’s previous novel and the one for which he’s remembered, The Big Clock, the tension increases with each page as time and space run out for its hero, a man falsely accused of murder. Here, however, as Ralph Partridge aptly put it in his New Statesman review, Fearing “duly keeps the reader gasping for the first half of the book … and then — after halfway, the excitement fizzles out, the forceful characters go dim, the machine obligingly croaks out the most boring possible answers to the questions, and the book drops from listless fingers.” “A crushing disappointment,” Partridge concluded, adding, “You have been warned.”

The Sound of Murder: Mercury Mystery No. 173
The Sound of Murder, Mercury Mystery No. 173 (1953).

Even John Brooks, The New York Times’ reviewer, was pressed to have many good things to say about Loneliest Girl after warming up his enthusiasm for its predecessor. Brooks praised the book’s “readability, humor, sound characterization and firm but understated dramatic significance,” whatever that last phrase means. The book was reissued in magazine form as The Sound of Murder in the Mercury Mystery series two years later, but it’s been forgotten ever since. And, aside from its value as footnote material, it probably deserves this fate.

Loneliest Girl in the World, by Kenneth Fearing
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951

Loneliest Girl in the World

All Star Cast, by Naomi Royde-Smith (1936)

A program from the London Palladium, 1936.
A program from the London Palladium, 1936.

This is my contribution to Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’s (Stuck in a Book) #1936club celebration.

#1936Club

If you’re a theater lover like me, All Star Cast is the next best thing to the thrill of seeing a live performance. That’s because it’s about a live theater performance as experienced by both actors and audience.

Its premise is simple: a young theater critic, David Winters, arrives at the Empress Theatre in a taxi with a fellow critic, O’Hara. They’re there to attend the premier of a new play, The Ace of Wands, by the veteran playwright William Renishaw. And over the course of the next 270-some pages, Naomi Royde-Smith takes us through that experience.

We watch the audience dribble in, take their seats, converse with each other, anticipating the curtain’s rise. We follow the action on stage through three acts, hear the dialogue, watch the actors come and go, observe the sets and the use of props, feel the tension grow as it comes to seem as if the wrong person is going to be sent up for murder, sense the tragic relief as the right person arrives at the decision to admit guilt. And then, after the cast takes their bows, we join the slow stream climbing the stairs to the lobby, sharing reflections on the performance.

Fin.

When All Star Cast was first published, more than a few reviewers expressed surprise that no one had ever come up with the idea before. It’s not the same thing as reading a script. Royde-Smith includes all, or virtually all, the dialogue, but instead of stage instructions to the director and cast, she describes the action as seen by the audience — in particularly, by David Winters, who, though new to the job of critic, is an experienced and keen-eyed theater-goer.

An action, for example, as simple as a character picking up a small table lamp and placing it near another character is more than it seems:

“Queer bit of business with the lamp,” whispered the little man, as Rawlinson left the stage, “I wonder what it has been done for.”

“I wonder,” murmured David, not attempting to express his own recognition of the change in lighting effected by this simple and obvious gesture. The pillar of white light between the still unclosed doors in the centre of the background now showed faint and grey like the plinth of some vague funereal monument. The light from the shaded lamp on the ground made a round pool on the rug by the chesterfield, and threw a diffused circular glow upwards, changing the shadows of the room.

Is this something in the script or something the director has added? Something incidental or intentional?

Well of course, in a good performance, as this one seems to be, nothing is incidental, and a few pages later, we see that the lamp allows the murderer — and the audience — to see a crucial prop: a tarot card, the Ace of Wands. The Ace of Wands shows a hand holding a staff emerging from a cloud. Right-side up, it signals promise, a new opportunity; reversed, it warns of misfortune to come. Which way the card is read, and when and to whom the card appears, becomes instrumental to the plot twists that follow the murder in Act One.

We, like the audience, are surprised that the victim is the difficult Russian wife, played by Vera Paley, “famous for wearing to-day what every fashionable woman would be trying to wear next week.” It is she who enjoys the play’s star entrance:

Critics had been known to complain that, whether she played Rosalind or the Second Mrs. Tanqueray, she was never anyone but Vera Paley; but the salvo of applause with which she was greeted from the stalls as well as from the more discriminating parts of the house showed that she held a wide public under some kind of spell. She paused, holding the door open with her left hand, outstretched at full arm’s length behind her, so that the player with whom she was talking as she entered was hidden from the audience. Without bowing or losing her pose, she smiled as the applause increased in volume. She let the play cease while she, as Vera Paley, took her reception.

Within the next twenty minutes, she will be lying dead on stage, an antique Indian dagger through her heart.

“But darling,” David overhears a woman saying as the audience files toward the bar at the interval,

“Vera Paley can’t be killed in the first scene of Act I. She’s the leading lady.”

“Oh! So you think she’ll recover — or come back as a ghost and haunt them all?”

“Recover — ofcourse. Vera’d never do any highbrow spookery stuff. She’ll be ill in the most marvellous négligé — and then there’ll be a perfectly terrific love scene…”

Instead, as David learns from another critic at the next interval, Vera Paley is paying a favor to the producer and will be gone by the end of the first week to start rehearsals for a showpiece of her own.

This is just what makes All Star Cast so fun. You get to experience not just the play but all the trappings and all the threads that come together to weave a unique evening at the theater.

Ernest Milton and Naomi Royde-Smith.
Ernest Milton and Naomi Royde-Smith.

Naomi Royde-Smith knew her subject from all angles. She’d been a theater critic herself through much of the 1920s and had written several plays that were produced in London’s West End. Her husband, Ernest Milton, was an actor, a stalwart of the Old Vic’s company for over twenty years. And, as she conveys so effectively in her account of The Ace of Wands’s opening night, she understood just how complex were the sensations and interactions of a night at the theater:

It was difficult enough to form an opinion on a play, seen for the first time, that would not cry to be revised or restated when once you saw your own words in print. You could go back, re-read, check, verify when reviewing a book: but a play acted itself without repeating any passage, noteworthy or obscure, and while it told its tale, demanded attention on three counts. Its appeal was too complicated. You were bound to miss some point, while under the impression made by another, in a scene which you had to see, to watch and to hear in one and the same unrelenting minute. You had to pass judgment on playwright, players, scenic artist and producer at one sitting, while their combined work was set in movement before your eyes and made its continuous appeal to your ears as well.

“How flat and stale these journalistic phrases were in comparison with the state of mind in which the play had actually left him!” David Winters despairs. And it’s a tribute to Naomi Royde-Smith’s skill that All Star Cast succeeds so well in putting us into that state of mind — and longing for the chance to return to a theater ourselves.

All Star Cast is fairly rare, but luckily it’s available online from the Internet Archive: Link.

All Star Cast, by Naomi Royde-Smith
London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1936

The Whirlgig of Time, by Isabel Bolton (1971)

Cover of US edition of The Whirligig of Time

Never assign a young man to review an old woman’s book. If only the book editor of the New York Times had heeded this advice when he assigned James Childs to review Isabel Bolton’s novel The Whirligig of Time. At the time the book was published, Bolton was 87, Childs at least 50 years younger. He had little patience for Bolton’s subtle and deliberate approach: “[T]here is so much treacle running throughout these pages”; “[W]hat should be a novel of some realism is transmogrified into a fantasy of life without logic or meaning, and held together only by a Victorian prissiness”; Bolton “creates characters who possess much sap and little dimension” and “resolves the plot in such a fashion as to lead the reader to suspect that the author herself was beginning to tire of the whole project.”

Childs’s review torpedoed the good ship Whirligig. The book received few other reviews and quickly disappeared. When Bolton died a few years later at the age of 92, none of her books were in print. In the late 1990s, the Steerforth Press (and Virago in the UK) reissued her first three novels — Do I Wake or Sleep, The Christmas Tree, and Many Mansions (which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1952) — as New York Mosaic, with an introduction by Doris Grumbach (who was herself 80 at the time). Grumbach opened with an adage that could serve as this site’s motto: “It is one of the accepted truths of the publishing world that many good books appear, are critically praised but attract few readers, fall between the cracks of their time, and are never heard of again.” Grumbach quoted Tobias Schneebaum, a friend in Bolton’s later years: she was “imperious, sharp-tongued, demanding, witty, often a delightful conversationalist, and always difficult.”

Bolton’s style is often compared to Henry James. Her sentences are often long and complex, probing their subjects from multiple angles. Though she was 40 years James’s junior, their worlds were not so far apart. They both lived among the wealthy and worldly, where appearances mattered and yet could be so deceptive to the untrained eye. Manners and words were the basic tools of its defense, and in experienced hands could also be used for surgically precise and deadly offense.

The Whirligig of Time is an artefact from this world. Its two primary characters, Blanche Willoughby and David Hare, were raised in it and now, meeting again in their eighties after decades of separation, are its survivors, adrift in the Atomic age. They met as children in another century and another New York, a New York where their parents and grandparents lived in elegant brownstones and maintained private parks to keep out the riffraff and the Irish.

It was in one of these parks that the principal cast of The Whirligig of Time comes together for the first time. Blanche and her sister Lily, orphans, meet David as he plays under the watch of his mother Laura. “Willoughby, Willoughby,” Laura muses when the two girls are introduced. “I think you’re David’s second or third or fourth cousin, several times removed perhaps.”

They also meet Olivia Wildering, a girl of precocious self-confidence who, in the course of that afternoon, faces down a bull. The bull, left to graze in a corner of the park by one of its subscribers (again, it was a different New York), gets a notion to charge the children at play, only to be stopped by the force of Olivia’s outrage at his sheer presumption. The children, and David most of all, leave the scene in awe of Olivia’s willpower.

But the brief rush of Mr. Pickering’s bull is the only action in this book. Everything else happens indirectly and on the margins. In fact, most of the book takes place in flashbacks over the course of the two days before David and Blanche finally meet again. David arrives at Blanche’s doorstep on page 187; the book ends four pages later.

But these are two people with a rich past in common:

The past engulfed them — vibrations of the nerves connecting memory with memory, instantaneous transport from childhood to youth to maturity; they seemed to be moving together from place to place, from scene to scene, from year to year. Places, rooms wherein momentous conversations had been exchanged, faces of the dead reanimated by thoughts of them, moments, the appearance and disappearance of familiar presences, sounds, fragrances.

Blanche and David may be survivors, but neither is unscarred. Blanche fell under the spell of David’s beautiful mother Laura and came to act as sort of an emotional nursemaid after she realizes — as, apparently, no one else in their circle does — that Laura has refused the great love of her life. Laura meets a passionate and handsome Frenchman when married, a mother, and bound tight by conventions. She tells the man their love must remain unrequited. David, in turn, becomes bound to Olivia, drawn like a magnet by the force of her personality. The two marry in a “wedding of the season” and head off to begin their marital bliss.

At which point David quickly realizes “the sad fact that he had married an incorrigible bore.” To Olivia, David is merely an appendage. A necessary appendage in the eyes of their society, but one of little intrinsic value. He annoyingly insists on taking her around Europe to look at works of art he loves and which she finds, without exception, in bad taste. As their honeymoon continues, David finds himself having “to endure her conversation as one might listen to the ceaseless buzzing of a fly on a faultless summer afternoon.” She, in turn, longs to return to New York so she can organize the affairs that will keep her at the center of society’s attention.

Their marriage falls into a uncomfortable sort of limbo. And then David finds himself in a situation much like that his mother: madly in love with someone not his spouse. In his case, however, he does the disrespectable thing:

To remember his madness was in a measure now to recover it again. Helen Brooks — his need to see her, to talk with her, had devoured him. He had been quite ready to shatter his domestic life, to forfeit all responsibility for his child, to deal his mother the severest sorrow of her life, to ruin his position in society, to throw all chances for a reputable career to the winds on the dubious chance of winning her love.

Bolton shared Henry James’s view that there are no happy endings in this life. The shared memories that bring Blanche and David together after decades are not fond. The world they had known as children was “so safe and so parochial.” Their early adult lives, however, were marked by disappointments and failures, and as they grew older, they saw themselves “in an age that we had made and were unprepared to meet.” And looking ahead, the sense that they were moving, with the rest of the world, “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.”

Bolton does not view the world of her youth nostalgically: both Blanche and David recall its pains, slights, and injustices. But neither does she shy away from the flaws of the New York of glass, steel, and Civil Defense shelters. As Tess Lewis wrote in Hudson Review, “She wrote novels of manners when the manners she had known had already disintegrated. Her characters, adrift in an uncertain world, know better than to glorify the past, but cannot help longing for the lost security of their often unhappy childhoods.” The Whirligig of Time is an elegaic novel of quiet, delicate, and deeply moving power. But it’s not a young man’s novel.

Bolton herself was a Blanche Willoughby with no David to share her sadness. Bolton was a pseudonym that Mary Britton Miller chose after her first novel In the Days of Thy Youth (1943) failed to sell or gain critical attention. Born an identical twin into the family of a prosperous New York lawyer, she and her four siblings were orphaned when both her parents died of pneumonia when she was four. Ten years later, she watched her twin sister Grace drown as they swam together in Long Island Sound. Her elder brother committed suicide in 1916. By the time Bolton achieved some success as a novelist with Do I Wake or Sleep, she was the only surviving member of her family. Having never married, she had lost all her friends from youth by the time she undertook to write The Whirligig of Time. By then, she had learned things about disappointment and endurance that were still in her New York Times reviewer’s future.

The Whirlgig of Time, by Isabel Bolton (pseudonym of Mary Britton Miller)
New York: Crown Publishers, 1971

No Right to Live, by Esther Grenen (pseudonym of Maria Lazar) (1934)

Title page of No Right to Live and Esther Grenen (Maria Lazar)

Berlin, 1932. Ernst von Ufermann, a banker, is at Tempelhof Airport, about to board a plane to Frankfurt in a last-ditch attempt to bail out his failing firm. A man bumps into him, then disappears into the crowd. When von Ufermann reaches his gate, he finds his ticket, his passport, his wallet are gone.

At that point, most people would contact the police, try to arrange for replacements, contact the bank in Frankfurt. But von Ufermann surrenders to fate. “Oh, well! I don’t suppose old Hebenwerth would have given in anyway!” he shrugs, and hails a cab to take him back into the city. The theft has presented him with an opportunity to step away from the pressures of money, work, family, social status, the chaotic German economy. A hiatus, a moment of suspension:

Ufermann was almost ashamed of himself, but he could not help it. He was actually delighted at not having flown to Frankfurt. Slowly he paced a few steps. Now he had plenty of time at his disposal, the whole morning belonged to him and not to the business. No matter how many people rang him at the office, sorry he wasn’t there, he was away. No need to inquire about Irmgard’s health or dictate any letters, nor would he see the gloomy face of old Boss, who knew everything, who knew things that only a confidential clerk could know and could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. No need to consider when and where to tell Gierke to pick him up. He was simply going for a walk, just like anybody else. The sun shone, it was actually bright and warm.

And then the plane von Ufermann was supposed to be on crashes.

In No Right to Live, the novelist offers her protagonist a chance to escape from his life. A bit like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, Ernst von Ufermann gets a chance to see what the world looks like without him. For his widow and business partner, the cloud has a silver lining: a life insurance policy worth millions of marks, enough to bail out the firm and leave the grieving wife even wealthier than before.

With only the spare change in his pockets, however, von Ufermann soon finds himself grappling with the practical matter of survival. His mistress, a small-time actress, put him up for a night or two, then introduces him to a petty criminal who arranges for von Ufermann to travel to Vienna, complete with a borrowed passport and a new identity of Edgar von Schmitt, to deliver a mysterious packet to contacts there.

In Vienna, “Herr von Schmitt” finds he’s moved from relying on the goodwill of crooks to navigating the complex loyalties of a group of young National Socialist fanatics:

“Death to the Jews.” He was no Jew, he wasn’t even interested, he had never bothered about such things. Death! An ugly word. Death. Perhaps it really did mean something to him. In the street they were now singing Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles. Did that concern him? Death, death.

He also realizes that every day he continues to allow the lie of Ernst von Ufermann’s death to play out he implicates himself ever more deeply in a case of insurance fraud. What he’d imagined at first as a momentary break from the demands of his life proves to be a descent into an ever more powerful vortex of chaos. And when he does eventually manages to make his way back to Berlin, he learns that, unlike George Bailey, everyone seems quite a bit happier without him.

His only respite are the moments when he can become completely anonymous:

Who was the man in the leather jacket leaning against the dirty corridor-window with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth? Did no one know him? No, no one knew him. He gazed out at the black fields, the black woods flying past in the white and wintry air. The roofs of humble cottages stood out black and the pine-trees, stark and bare, were black too. The sound of voices came from the compartment. They scarcely noticed when he left the hot, stifling atmosphere in which they sat. They showed no surprise at his not taking off his shoes at night or propping himself up against his neighbour and snoring with half open mouth as they did. They never thought of saying “sorry” or “excuse me.” It was more by luck than anything else that they did not drop their greasy sandwich-paper on his lap. No, no one knew him.

No Right to Live illustrates the problem with the fantasy of escaping from a life you find unbearable. First, there’s no guarantee that the new life you devise is any better than the first one. And second, if you do then try to step back into the life you left behind, it’s like trying to eat off a plate that’s been shattered and pieced back together. These stories never end well.

Wishart ad for No Right to Live
Wishart advertisement for No Right to Live

When it was published by Wishart in England in 1934, No Right to Live was almost guaranteed to be forgotten. Wishart’s ad claimed the book had been banned by the Nazis, but in reality, the German and Austrian publishers knew well enough not to bother even trying to get it passed the Party censors. Even Wishart was concerned not to aggravate the German authorities and their sympathizers in England by pressing the book’s anti-Nazi content too far and chose not only to delete certain passages from Gwenda David’s translations but to insert a few things of their own.

Even without comparing No Right to Live with its original German text, it’s not hard to see that something was lost, if not in translation, then at least in publication. There are several points at which the narrative jerks forward somewhat unexpectedly, almost as if pages are missing. It’s not surprising, then, that there were almost no reviews of No Right to Live in the English press.

By the time No Right to Live appeared, its author had herself escaped from her old life and taken on an assumed name. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1895, Maria Lazar grew up among the elite of Austrian culture alongside Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig. Oskar Kokoschka painted her posed with a parrot in his 1916 Dame mit Papagei. Thomas Mann dismissed her first novel Die Vergiftung (The Poisoning) for its Penetranter Weibsgeruch (“penetrating woman smell”).

In 1923, Lazar married a Swedish journalist, Friedrich Strindberg, which gave her Swedish citizenship and the means to later flee her native country safely. The couple separated and in 1933, living in Berlin and uncomfortable with the prospect of living under Hitler’s regime, she accepted an invitation from the Danish novelist Karin Michaëlis to spend the summer at her home on the island of Thurø, where they were soon joined by Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel. Lazar never returned to Austria.

She adopted the pseudonym of Esther Grenen, which she thought sounded more Nordic, and Lazar and her daughter Judith later moved to Stockholm in 1939. She died there in 1948, having committed suicide after being diagnosed with a terminal case of cancer.

German and Dutch editions of No Right to Live: Leben Verboten and Leven Verboden
German and Dutch editions: Leben Verboten! from Das Vergessene Buch and Leven Verboden! from Van Maaskunt Haun

The original German text of the novel did not appear until 2020. A young Austrian and fan of neglected books, Albert C. Eibl, had published Lazar’s first and last novels, Die Vergiftung and Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut (The Natives of Maria Blood) through his one-man publishing house Das Vergessene Buch (The Forgotten Book). He was able to obtain Lazar’s typescript from the estate of Lazar’s daughter Judith and published the book, accompanied by a commentary by Prof. Johann Sonnleitner of the University of Vienna, in March 2020.

Leben Verboten! has been a commercial and critical success in Austria and Germany. Austrian TV channel Ö1 selected it as their book of the month for July 2020, writing that,

It is amazing with what clairvoyance and sharpness Maria Lazar describes the rise of National Socialism at the beginning of the thirties. The novel moves on rapidly, sometimes even has comical sides and is still oppressive in the description of the inhuman, ideologically cruel underpinned plans of National Socialism. One follows this — officially dead — Ernst von Ufermann through the days and weeks, as the political climate heats up threateningly. The book, which is a crime story, a psychological study and a political thriller at the same time, plays with the literary means of confusion, double life and more or less big rip-offs and impresses with quick scene changes and striking dialogues across all levels.

According to WorldCat.org, there are just nine copies of No Right to Live available in libraries worldwide. I obtained a PDF of the book courtesy of Meta Gemert, a Dutch writer, translator, and publisher, who will be releasing a Dutch edition, Leven Verboden! based on the original German manuscript from her Van Maaskant Haun Publishers in October 2021. Meta tells me that she’s trying to convince NYRB Classics to contract a new English translation of Leben Verboten!. If she does, it would follow the path of Gabrielle Tergit’s Effingers, which was a best-seller when it was reissued in Germany, in Dutch by Van Maaskant Haun as De Effingers in March 2020, and is rumored to be slated for publication by NYRB Classics in 2023. In the meantime, however, if you’re interested in reading No Right to Live in PDF, despite its shortcomings, drop me an email at [email protected].

No Right to Live, by Esther Grenen (pseudonym of Maria Lazar)
London: Wishart & Co., 1934

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, by Mary Lee Settle (1964)

Cover of US edition of Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday

This is a story about two novels. When Mary Lee Settle published Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday in 1964, she wasn’t happy with the reviews or how her publisher handled the book. Settle saw the book as part — the conclusion, in fact — of a larger series she’d begun with O Beulah Land (1956) and Know Nothing (1960), which ultimately became known as the “Beulah Land Quintet.”

Her plan was to trace the story of a family not unlike her own and those she grew up with: landed white people in West Virginia who could trace their lines from religious and political dissidents who left England for America in the 1600s, through the pioneers who drove their wagons into the hills of Appalachia and what would become West Virginia, who fought (on both sides) in the Civil War, who started the coal mines and fought in the battles between the miners and the owners (again, on both sides) in the early 20th century, and who saw the introduction of strip mining.

In 1964, an outside might have thought that this was a story that ended on a high note, at least for the owners and their descendents. Strip mining was pulling coal from the earth faster than any lot of troublesome miners could and the money that came in could be spent at exclusive country clubs, resorts like The Greenbrier, and shopping trips to New York and Europe.

Mary Lee Settle, circa 1960.
Mary Lee Settle, circa 1960.

But Mary Lee Settle was no outsider, and she must have had the sense that there was going to be a price to pay for raping this land. She picked up on clues that are sprinkled throughout Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday. And so, almost twenty years later, after writing the beginning of the story (Prisons (1973)) and the penultimate chapter (The Scapegoat (1980), about the violence between the miners and the owners around 1912), she returned to update her ending with The Killing Ground (1982).

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday appears relatively intact as the middle section (“Before the Revolution, 1960”) of The Killing Ground, which begins in 1978 and ends two years later. So, it can be read as a work in progress or a fragment. Personally, I think neither of those interpretations is correct. Fight Night and The Killing Ground tell fundamentally different stories. The Killing Ground is truly the culmination of the Beulah Land quintet, which is a larger story, a story about people and generations and their land. Fight Night, on the other hand, is a snapshot in time, a story about individuals, set over the course of little more than a weekend. And as a result, I think, a better and tighter book.

The book opens with a late night drunken phone call from Johnny McKarkle, the wealthy but aimless son of a family with coal money, to his sister Hannah in New York City. Johnny is in a phone booth in Canona, their home town in West Virginia. It’s Saturday night, “the night for a man to fight free to the surface of his life, not caring how he did it or how much hate he dragged up and let fly.” Johnny wants to confide in Hannah about his problems — marriage, meaningless job, unlistening parents — and to coax Hannah down to cut loose with him. The next call Hannah gets, a few hours later, brings the news that Johnny is dying, his head having been bashed in while he was sobering up in the town’s drunk tank.

Johnny is clearly painted as a tragic figure and Hannah isn’t much better off. But at least she’s had the sense to leave town, and when she gets off her flight from New York the next morning, her senses are alert for the signs of getting pulled back. Friends stop by her parents’ place — “set sentinel on the hill above Canona” — to express concern on their way home from church, but she knows they’re just looking for fuel for the gossip mill:

They would take whatever words I stammered out, piece an “inside” story together, their unkissed mouths breathing the smell of cigarettes and coffee into their telephones, making little secretive sounds to each other. I remembered how small termite mandibles were, and how, if you lean close and pinpoint attention, you can hear them, how their combined tenacity can crush a building. These women were moving close to trouble, chewing at it because they had, that week, none of their own to feed the others with.

These are the three best-written sentences I’ve come across in a long time. Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday is full of them. There are dry pages and a few ill-crafted passages in this book, but it’s worth reading just for sentences that cut to the bone like a switchblade in the hands of a killer with a swift and sure mastery of her weapon. Hannah on her father, a man who’s spent his adult life in the shadow of a domineering wife: “How could I ‘go easy’ with my father — a man whom I had never seen separately, as you see, in a split second of love or even horror, in all my life? Christ, I knew a two-day lover better than I knew my father.” On her mother, putting herself together after the shock of learning of Johnny’s death: “She began to take her own shape, hiding the woman again behind the lady.” Or Johnny’s relationship with Hannah: “Usually he loved me as you live in spite of.” Or the atmosphere of the Greenbrier (called Egeria Springs in the book): “Egeria’s smell, from the gate on into the rooms, a smell compounded of expensive secluded mountain air, hand-ironed linen, polish, huge, glossy, well-fed plants, and thick notepaper, I recognized later wherever I smelled it, and it brought me back to Egeria Springs. It was the clean, crisp new smell of protected American money.”

At times, Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday made me wonder if Balzac had been reincarnated as a woman from Charleston, West Virginia, for Settle deals with the relationship between families and money in a way few American writers — and even fewer of Settle’s generation — equalled. What she knew better than any of her characters was that families and money are always moving together in one of two directions, up or down. There is no stasis.

Johnny’s head is bashed in by one of his distant cousins, a hard scrabble farmer still trying to hold on to a poor patch of hill farm. Jake Catlett is from the unlucky line that got stuck with the rocky hillsides when the McKarkles got the rich bottom land along the river. A few decades of coal-mining wages wasn’t even to prevent the Catletts’ slow slide into deeper and deeper poverty.

But neither are the McKarkles secure in their grand house above Canona. Coal mining is starting its decline. Owners who failed to make the switch to strip-mining have already seen their fortunes evaporate:

Money disaster had a phrase: You ran through with every last thing. I could see people fleeing down River Street, running through it, shoveling money, until they threw the last thing, the last dollar, and having at last committed the unpardonable sin, they were stripped as if they had shed their clothes, left naked, turned away from, cut from the minds, except in moral stories or in late-night memories.

In the case of the McKarkles, this disaster is lurking somewhere in the future. Having lost his illusions during the war, Johnny — the heir to the McKarkle fortune, such as it is — has done nothing to avert this: “Without land to till or people to care for, Johnny had been caught in a parody where the land had shrunk to a genteel suburban house he wasn’t even needed to work for.” And with his death, that fate becomes certain.

The coming money disaster is paralleled by the disaster becoming evident in the toll that coal has taken on the landscape. That awareness is just setting in: “The river was too dirty with chemical and coal waste for many fish to survive in it. But they kept on trying.” As Settle sees it, however, in a perspective that at the time was just beginning to be expressed, the land was going to be the ultimate victim:

We had cut down its trees, and the water had poured down its naked gulleys and swept itself clean. We had stabbed too hard, and in those places it had shrunk back baring its rock teeth. Arrogance and lack of care toward its riches had grown into arrogance and lack of care for each other. The crash of the grabber at the coal face had exploited, grabbed, as we had grabbed. We had left a residue of carelessness, and the hatred that grew in it had made a fist.

Cover of The Killing Ground by Mary Lee Settle

When Settle returned to Canona and fit the small story of Johnny McKarkle into the fabric of the “Beulah Land” series when she incorporated Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday into The Killing Ground, the consequences of coal mining on both land and people had become clear. The two books, however, take very different views on their subject. In The Killing Ground, we see the decline of Canona and the McKarkles as if through a telescope, in the larger context of history. In Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, we see in small dimensions: one weekend, one family, one death. The larger context of history is only the background to Hannah McKarkle’s close observation. And when the writer is a cold-blooded and skilled knife fighter like Settle, used to feeling her victim’s breath as the blade goes in, the larger context of history doesn’t stand a chance.

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, by Mary Lee Settle
New York: The Viking Press, 1964