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Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (1940)

Charlotte Herz is not a model human being. She has no patience for people she disagrees with and no qualms about telling them so. She has an affair with the husband of a kindly Englishwoman who hires her to care for her children. She chooses not to have an abortion when one is offered and then abandons the child on a train and flees.

And yet, through the almost 400 pages of Makeshift she is a riveting narrator. We meet her in a nursing home in New Zealand, recovering from … well, as we only learn many chapters later, the measles. She is anxious to leave. For one thing, she hasn’t much money. She suspects her genial doctor of padding her bill: “To Miss Charlotte Herz for Professional Services, 20 guineas: for Professional Smile, 10 guineas.”

She is bored and irritated with the bland pleasantness of New Zealanders, their country, and their ceilings. For weeks, she lay flat on her back, staring up:

This nursing home is far too efficient to have ceilings with any incident in them: there are no interesting cracks that could be imagined into men’s faces, no damp marks the mind could conjure into little cats. Simply a high remote acre or so of impeccable whitewash, faintly changing with the faintly changeful sky.

Improved, she can now sit outside in the sunshine, “eyes goggling downwards” at the perfect green lawn, “a happy picture of convalescence.” And so, she decides, she must write. She has a great deal of anger and hatred to get out of her system: “I cannot forever struggle with myself, forever gnaw serpent-like at my own tail, nor swallow my own venom.”

How she came to be in New Zealand and how she came to harbor such venomous thoughts and emotions is the story she tells. It starts in Berlin, just after the end of the First World War, “in that brief Indian summer after the war; that little time, between the occupation and the inflation, when we in Germany had hope.” A very little time.

Within months, Charlotte and her sister are huddled under their father’s old ulster coat in an unheated room they rent from a bitter anti-Semitic landlady. Having grown up in a prosperous bourgeois family, Charlotte and Mitzi are now near the bottom of Germany’s new postwar food chain: orphans, near-penniless, lacking any employable skills — and Jewish. Before the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, they would have considered themselves assimilated: secular, never setting foot in a synagogue, unfamiliar with Jewish rites and rituals aside from an occasional funeral.

But even before Hitler is a name seen in the Berlin papers, being Jewish is enough reason to be kicked a rung or two down the social ladder. “Whether we like it or not,” in this Germany, “we are nothing less than Jew.” The only way for the sisters to climb back up is simple: marry into wealth. Mitzi meets a dull but adoring American, son of an industrialist, marries, and is soon off to the safety of Pennsylvania.

Charlotte, however, is a creature of her own mind and heart. Her Tante Clara, one of the few relatives still with a little money, offers her a room. But it’s strictly a business proposition: “I was to marry something rich as soon as possible.”

Instead, she falls in love with her charming cousin, Kurt, and one hot afternoon in the tall grass of the Grunewald, gives herself to him. Unfortunately, where Charlotte is a romantic, Kurt is a realist. She heads to the Alps for a holiday, courtesy of American dollars from Mitzi; he marries an heiress.

One thing I found fascinating about Makeshift was how effectively Sarah Campion depicts a world in which women almost — but not quite — had an independent life within their grasp:

Even now, as I waddled swollen between the parting Grübl grasses, I was blazing a new brave trail for womanhood, for single women: establishing the right of even’ woman to motherhood without any of the boredoms of marriage. After all, why not? If men were sexual free-lances, why not women? It all seemed so simple, so gloriously obvious.

Once she gives birth, however, Charlotte makes a much grimmer estimate of her future. “Life in Germany for a battling spinster was even then hard enough: what should I do with a child?” Her only hope would be to find a man dumb or conniving enough to accept a single woman with an illegitimate child:

After that, a married life begun on shame, continued in boredom and stuffy closeness, made up of lustful unloving nights, nagging days, brats begotten in pure animal fury coming year after year to be suckled, clothed, washed, endured—all on a foundation of my shame and my rescuer’s brief nobility simmering down to a reminder of my shame. He would unendingly want gratitude. I hated gratitude then, I hate it still.

If she rejects this choice, she knows she will soon run out of what little money she has and have nothing: “Nothing is a ghastly word, even more devastating in German than in English.” So, she takes the one other choice open to her, the one terrible choice always open to desperate people. She runs away. She steps off the train taking her back to Berlin and leaves her baby daughter behind.

Makeshift is a remarkable account of the choices one Jewish woman makes to survive in a hostile world. After a favorite uncle is fatally injured by a group of SS thugs, she flees Germany for England. There, she is taken in by the Flowers, distant relatives living in a comically comfortable cocoon:

After four square meals, and any number of such unconsidered trifles as elevenses with cream cakes, cocktails before dinner and Horlicks at 11 p.m. to fend off the alleged horrors of night starvation, any Flower could go to its bed, bury its nose in the pillow as soft as a swan’s breast, and sleep like a log. In case by any dirty chance sleep were for a while denied, each Flower had by its bed a little table bearing reading-lamp, the latest worthless fiction, and a chintz-covered box brimming with digestive biscuits.

(Ah, to be a Flower!) But at heart, the Flowers are as mercantile in their thinking as Tante Clara. It’s lovely having Charlotte for a visit, but she needs to sort this business of getting a husband, and quickly.

Charlotte ultimately arrives in New Zealand via South Africa and Australia, but it’s a route we can recognize from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. At each stop, Charlotte tries out a new bed and then rejects it. Should she marry a stolid Cape Town farmer and resign herself to “a little folding of the hands to sleep, to the good, earthy sleep of the intellect women enjoy in that fruitful land?” Should she marry Harry, the congenial, adoring older man she meets on the boat to Sydney? Not after he has a near-fatal hemorrhage and becomes an invalid.

Having bounced from uncomfortable bed to uncomfortable bed, Charlotte comes to a conclusion both utterly selfish and utterly pragmatic: that she is a woman “who now was no longer in love with anything but her own comfort, her own assured future.” Years after she rejected the advice of Tante Clara and the Flowers, she recognizes the ugly, essential necessity of choosing survival over self-actualization.

Though the only scene of overt brutality against Jews is Onkel Hans’s beating by a few young SS men, still a year or two before Hitler comes to power, though the war is still a year or two from breaking out as Charlotte sits in the peaceful garden of her nursing home, Makeshift is a Holocaust novel. One of the more unusual Holocaust novels, perhaps, written before Auschwitz had been built, before scenes of Buchenwald had been displayed in newsreels around the world, but still a story about how one survives when homeless, unwanted — and fully conscious of the threat hovering just over the horizon:

While the spectators sit around in a sodden mass, no more than mildly uneasy, the bull is slaughtered in the ring, the blood flows, the torn flank gapes, the entrails drop sluggishly. In Wolfenbiittel the maddened Jew rushes upon barbed wire, away, away, anything to get away, and hangs there, a screaming bloody mass, till there is no more noise. In Berlin there is a pogrom to avenge the death of one man killed by a youth as mad as Hitler but more obscure. So once more, in Berlin, blood flows from the Jews. The smell of blood—oh, my God, the smell of blood!—once more fills the air.

“Comfy?” the man Charlotte has decided she will marry asks her immediately after this passage.

No, Charlotte knows she will never really be comfy.

Makeshift is a work that synthesizes experience and imagination. Born Mary Coulton, the daughter of Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, Sarah Campion (her pen name) attended a teacher training college, and after graduating with honors, spent years traveling around Europe until she landed in Berlin in 1933. There she taught English and came to know families like the Herzes. In fact, she left Germany 1937 when she was being pressured to identify her Jewish students to the Nazi authorities.

Like Charlotte, she spent time in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but in her case, she was vocal and overt in her political and social views, establishing a lifelong commitment to activism, and returned to England around the start of the war. She married New Zealand writer Antony Alpers and the couple eventually settled in Auckland. Though they divorced, she remained in New Zealand, where she continued to organize in support of liberal causes. Alpers/Campion must have been a woman with superpowers of empathy, a capacity for getting inside another human’s skin: the source, perhaps, of the imaginative energy that radiates throughout this book.

Incredibly, most of her fiction was written during the years in which she was traveling and working abroad. Makeshift was her sixth novel; she wrote six more between 1940 and 1951. Even more amazingly, she managed to write three novels set in rural Australia, including Mo Burdekin, her only book to have been reissued to date, despite spending less than a year in the country. In fact, she is still occasionally referred to as an Australian writer.

Much of Campion’s work has become extremely hard to find. Worldwide, there are just 19 copies of Makeshift available in libraries worldwide, according to WorldCat.org. Fortunately, the book is available electronically on Internet Archive. I highly recommend it. In Charlotte Herz, Sarah Campion creates a narrator whose intelligence, humor, and ruthless honesty — about herself more than anyone — makes for a thoroughly rewarding reading experience. Definitely my favorite book of the year so far.


Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (Mary Rose Coulton Alpers)
London: Peter Davies, 1940

The Fly, by Richard Chopping (1965)

Cover to the first edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

US paperback edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, and yet.

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

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

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

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


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

The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright (1959)

Cover of the first U.K. edition of The Day’s End.

My friend Robert Nedelkoff recommended this book to me after stumbling across a reference in a 1980 collection of Ronald Firbank’s prose titled Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques edited by Mervyn Horder. In Horder’s preface, he dismisses the notion of dramatic death scenes, writing, “We are assured by a competent technical observer of the subject that people tend to meet the moment of their death in the same manner as they live — the self effacing quietly in their sleep, the egocentric giving the maximum trouble to all concerned, the theatrical speechifying away con brio, the athletic with one foot out of bed, and so on.”

Horder’s competent technical observer, we learn from a footnote, was Pamela Bright, whose The Day’s End he describes as “a neglected book of 1956” — which of course caused Robert to reach for the Neglected Books phone. It sounded like the real deal, and I was delighted to find it awaiting patiently on the Internet Archive (link).

The Day’s End is a study in how we die. Set on the cancer ward of an unnamed women’s hospital on the western edge of London, the book takes us through two days on the ward as seen by its head nurse (Bright, though she never identifies herself in the book). There are old women and young, some there just for an exam or two, others doomed to spend their last days within its walls. Bright confirms Horder’s paraphrase above, but more from the perspective of a nurse:

The ways people die are as varied as the pictures on the wall ofa gallery, and each death remembered for a different reason: one for its setting; one for its atmosphere and whether there was summer in it or frost, or darkness and an oxygen cylinder; one for its human characters, for its peace, for its distress, and whether it was in the order of things or sudden in its unexpectedness.

At the time Bright wrote the book, she had been a practicing nurse for over 18 years. Earning her cap just after the outbreak of World War One, she served in military hospitals in Palestine and, after the D-Day invasion, trailing the British Army through northern Europe. The latter experience she described in her first book, Life in Our Hands (1955), and there are flashbacks to her time in Palestine throughout The Day’s End.

Also throughout the book are mentions of the stress of being responsible for a ward full of patients and a team of nurses and orderlies that almost seem like Bright’s reminders to herself: “it demanded constant wariness, the habit of keen observation, the noting of others’ moods and tempers, the habit of explaining, and the ability to learn the knack of not always depending on the advice or backing of others, but of believing in one’s own judgment and ability.” As she rides the bus home after her shift, her thoughts scroll through the patients — who’s improved, who’s failing, who may need to be shifted to one of the side rooms where a patient nearing death can have some hours of privacy and peace — and which nurses need to be encouraged or restrained the next day. She acknowledges, though, that she gains a form of comfort from that stress: “Although theoretically I abhor the business of being busy and in a hurry, yet I must confess that often it is in that condition I find myself happiest — it is a drug, and one can forget.”

Caring for a terminally ill patient proves among the most demanding of a nurse’s duties because it represents, in effect, a failure. So, on top of the inbred discretion of the English middle class there is a reluctance to draw attention to the obvious: “However acute a patient’s illness, we never admitted the signs of impending death.” Some of this reluctance stems from the difficulty of admitting how much about death remains unknown to medical professionals, but some also results from having seen the process repeated hundreds of times. “A dying man rarely looks death in the face,” Bright reports, “and who are we to tell him the truth? Why should he not go on building castles in the air when to some extent he has been doing it all his life?”

What makes The Day’s End memorable, however, are not such generalizations but Bright’s portraits of her patients. Mario, the dashingly handsome Italian soldier in her hospital in Palestine, who insisted on wearing a pink hairnet each night to keep his long, oiled black hair from getting mussed — until the night when he no longer called for it and Bright knew he would not last until morning. Or the lonely woman whose sad tale takes less than a sentence: “Miss Smart, for instance, who had had not a single friend and who couldn’t be forgotten when she died, for no one remembered her while she was alive….” And especially Mrs. Ferrett, possessed of a malevolent intensity worthy of a character in Balzac:

Her face seemed crudely sculptured, following the curves of a gargoyle on some cathedral front; and as one invariably gazes with delight upon such goblins and the workman’s freedom of expression, so one had to smile at Mrs. Ferrett. When she sat in bed she was coiled up in the smallest possible space, her chin almost resting on her knees, her hands close to her sides, like a child in embryo: when she was on her feet she moved softly and half inclined sideways like a crab: when her sharp eyes glistened, she pierced the ward from end to end and gleamed upon her neighbours, nurses, visitors, indeed everything. Mumbling, or munching peppermints; crabbed and cranky, she would gaze upwards at the plain corners and downwards at the dust, and in silent glee hug to herself some fearful secret.

She occupied the first place among the simplest. But she occupied it with such force, daring and calm that none of us would have thought of taking it away from her. This selfish, wicked woman bewitched even the people least susceptible to such influence: us nurses and the doctors.

Bright chronicled her career in a total of five books: Breakfast at Night (1956), about her training at an Edinburgh hospital; Life in Our Hands about her service in Europe during the war; The Day’s End, which found her in mid-career; A Poor Man’s Riches (1966), about her experiences caring for Palestinian refugees in the early 1960s; and Hospital at Night (1971), a fictionalized account based on her time as chief nurse of a busy metropolitan hospital. After retiring from service, she wrote a biography of her ancestor, Dr. Richard Bright, a pioneering surgeon who first described the ailment of the kidneys that now bears his name. She died in 2012 at the age of 98.


The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright
London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959

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

THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand (1877)

Cover of THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand

For a place deep in the heart of Central Asia, Khiva got a lot of traffic from English visitors in the 19th Century. In 1875, Captain Frederick Burnaby braved crossing the lines of a Russo-Turcoman to journey to the city, returning in triumph to tell the story in his best-seller, A Ride to Khiva. In 1899, Robert L. Jefferson, author of Roughing It in Siberia, repeated the feat (“as a sportsman”) and wrote about it in his imaginatively titled A New Ride to Khiva.

Between them, however, came the most daring traveler of all, F. C. Burnand (later Sir Francis), then editor of Punch. As he explained in his definitively titled THE Ride to Khiva, unlike Burnaby, he proposed to travel both to and from Khiva. And to travel not with Burnaby’s spartan 85-pound backpack but with saddlebags loaded with provisions and cooking utensils, a semi-grand piano fitted up with a comfortable bedroom, a store of American beef, and a cellaret full of beer and champagne (Pommery and Greno très sec). And finally, to stay in constant contact with his editors back in London, his own private wire (which at various times in the book is a telegraph, a means of escape, and former soldier named Wire).

Of course, all this kit costs a fortune. Luckily, Burnand manages to assemble a list of subscribers from those interested in his going — those interested in his not coming back.

The list of subscribers to Burnand's expedition to Khiva
The list of subscribers to Burnand’s expedition to Khiva.

“A. S. S.” on the list is, no doubt, Burnand’s poke at one of his perennial antagonists, the novelist Albert Smith, author of The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his friend Jack Johnson (1866), of whom the playright Douglas Jerrold once said, “When he signs his initials he only tells two-thirds of the truth.”

Scaring off the wolves with a portrait of Gladstone
Scaring off the wolves (in sheep’s clothing) with a portrait of Gladstone.

Traveling through the backlands of Russia brings its fair share of hazards. Burnand is chased by wolves, attacked by Tartars, thrown in jail more than once. He even spends a night in a pig stye — but comes away with a piglet who proves an invaluable ally. He teaches the Pig alphabet as well as to play numerous card games … perhaps too well:

This evening played two games of Double Dummy with the Pig. He won the last rubber. If he repeats this, I shall watch his play closely. The Sleigh-driver backed the Pig. I begin to suspect collusion.

Though the Pig goes on to rescue Burnand from several near-death experiences, the air of suspicion is never entirely lifted. “There is a twinkle in his eye that I don’t half like,” Burnand confides to his journal. Still, the Pig compares favorably to the mouse he befriends while on one of his stays in Russian jails: “An apt pupil, but possessing neither the solidity nor the gravity of the Pig.”

Despite bragging early on that he’d found a more direct route to Khiva than Burnaby followed, Burnand’s journal suggests otherwise. He reports crossing the river Oxus on page 26, but over the course of the following weeks, manages to cross it at least 20 times more. At least he thinks it’s the Oxus. “I suppose,” he confesses, “judging by the position of the stars, as I’ve lost my maps.” He accidentally wanders into Persia at one point, forcing him to backtrack for hundreds of miles.

Burnand's map of his ride to Khiva
Burnand’s map of his ride to Khiva.

As the map he provides in the book clearly shows, Burnand’s ride to Khiva ultimately involved more digress than progress. If, that is, he ever actually made the trip. The editors close the account with a suspicious note that Burnand reported that, “Khiva is a very charming place, and, from his description, not totally unlike Margate.” Burnand was a long-time resident of Ramsgate and perhaps Margate seemed journey enough for the busy editor.

THE Ride to Khiva originally appeared as a serial in Punch. There appear to be just three used copies available for sale, but fortunately you can find it in electronic formats for free on the Internet Archive.


The Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand
London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1877

Crotchets in the Air, or An (Un)Scientific Account of a Balloon Trip, by John Poole (1838)

Ticket to the Ascent of the Nassau, Charles Green's Balloon, from Vauxhall Gardens
Ticket to the Ascent of the Nassau, Charles Green’s Balloon, from Vauxhall Gardens

In September 1838, Mr. Charles Green, already considered England’s greatest balloonist (or aeronaut, as he preferred to say), entertained London crowds by making several ascents in his newest balloon, the Nassau, from Vauxhall Gardens. On one of these, he was accompanied by John Poole, then one of London’s leading playwrights (and soon to be author of the comic classic, Little Pedlington and the Pedlingtonians. Together they flew across London from west to east, enjoying a bottle of sherry and watching dusk settle over the city, until they came to ground somewhere along the road to Chelmsford.

Crotchets in the Air, Poole’s account of the trip, is as light as the gas filling Green’s balloon and unashamedly unscientific. “Why did you go?” Poole asks himself in hindsight. “To get out of the city,” is his reply, the balloon merely offering a novel and altogether more pleasant alternative to going by land:

One gets tired of being suffocated in coaches, choaked with coaldust in steam-boats, rattled and rumbled on railroads. But, up yonder, the ineffable stillness, the progressing movement without the slightest sensation of motion! whether up, down, forward, back, you seem to be suspended motionless in the air, whilst everything above, below, and around, is complaisantly taking the trouble of moving out of your way.

And unlike these forms of locomotion, travel by balloon is … quiet.

And then, the noiselessness, the perfect quiet, which I have before alluded to! It is the sublime of stillness. They who have not heard it — do not add this expression to your collection of bulls — they who have not heard it (for the ear is affected by it) can form no idea of it. In the tillest night, on the quietest spot on earth, some sound is occasionally heard, how soft or slight soever it be — the ripple of water, the buzzing of an insect, the fall of a leaf. But up there, you might fancy yourself living in an age antecedent to the creation of sound. There might you indulge to the uttermost in the luxury of thought, reflection, meditation there revel in all the delights of imagination, with not the ruffling of a utterfly’s wing to put your fancies to flight.

Indeed, the experience is so novel and so much more graceful than any of the land-bound options that even the departure comes in an unexpected manner. “I do not despise you for talking about a balloon going up, for it is an error which you share in common with some millions of our fellow-creatures,” Poole writes his friend. Instead, when Mr. Green casts off his anchor ropes, the balloon sits still and the land falls away.

[D]own it went with everything on it; and your poor, paltry, little Dutch toy of a town, (your Great Metropolis, as you insolently call it,) having been placed on casters for the occasion — I am satisfied of that — was gently rolled away from under us.

And the sights to be seen from several angels up (as RAF pilots used to put it) surpass those of travel on land (“Trees, rivers, and fields; fields, trees, and rivers! with here and there a hill some certain number of feet higher or lower than another!”). “Sights, oh! such sights! Gulliver not fabulous. Men and women six inches tall; and in proportion as we rose, they diminished — to five, four, three inches.”

Height eliminates all distinctions of class or rank: “The proud, the humble, the dignified, the lowly, yet, to us, the greatest amongst them was undistinguishable from the rest!” Poole admits, though, “I am glad I am down again, for I was imbibing a very contemptuous opinion of my species.”

Ascent of the Nassau
Ascent of the Nassau.

Poole traces their route in the landmarks below. Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, Blackfriars, St. Paul’s. Seeing St. Paul’s from above gives him the frisson of discovering a whole new sense of awe: “like possibilifying of an impossibility.” Seeing Newgate Prison, on the other hand, evokes feelings of outrage.

With what stomach for your breakfast would you get out of your bed at eight in the morning to be strangled at nine, in the open face of day, and in the presence of thousands of persons collected together to glut their eyes with the sight of a human being throttled with a rope — for such is the fashionable phrase — you call it the cant — for describing the execution of a murderer: how, I say, would you like that?

And as they drift away from the city and the sun sets, Poole sees London as any airline passenger would know it — but as none of its residents has seen it before: “And now conceive yourself looking down on an enormous map of London, with its suburbs to the east, north, and south, as far as the eye could reach, DRAWN IN LINES OF FIRE!”

Not everything about air travel is better, however.

There are no inns in the whole of that country so that when what we had “got in that bottle,” which was some sherry, was exhausted in drinking to the health of our dear little Queen, we could not get our bottle replenished for love or money.

Crotchets in the Air can be found on the Internet Archive and will take less time to read than it took Green and Poole to travel across London. It’s a sublime little gem and a perfect escape for anyone suffering from the lockdown blues.


Crotchets In the Air; or, an (Un) Scientific Account of a Balloon-Trip, by John Poole
London: Henry Colburn, 1838

John Timbs, Scissors-and-Paste Man

John Timbs, watercolor by Thomas John Gullick (1855), from the National Portrait Gallery
John Timbs, watercolor by Thomas John Gullick (1855), from the National Portrait Gallery

If I live to be 100, I vow to spend at least one of my remaining years compiling a “Best Of” compilation from the God-knows-how-many compilations assembled by John Timbs, perhaps the greatest of all compilers. We’ve all heard of Dickens and the many lesser ranks of Victorian writers who industriously cranked out three-volume novels at rates that competed with the fearsome cotton mills of the North, but poor John Timbs was forgotten not long after his body was placed in a pauper’s grave.

John Timbs was not really a writer. He was more of an assembler. He took things he found and assembled them into books with titles like Anecdote Lives Of Wits And Humourists, Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young, Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity: Illustrated from the Best and Latest Authorities, and Things Not Generally Known: Popular Errors Explained and Illustrated. These were all published cheaply, in low-priced editions with weak bindings and poor, thin paper, for the purpose of informing as many people as possible.

Timbs worked to improve people like himself. His father was a warehouseman who managed to pull together enough money to send his son to New Marlows, a school run by Rev. Joseph Hamilton and his brother Jeremiah Hamilton. There, he discovered his talent and put it to quick use, writing by hand a school newspaper that was passed among his classmates. He was then apprenticed to a chemist and printer in Dorking, where he met Sir Richard Phillips. Phillips had just published his little travel guide Morning’s Walk from London to Kew.

In the preface to that book, Phillips apologized for writing a guide to such a mundane journey, “which thousands can daily examine after him,” and for relying solely on the evidence of his own senses and deductions of reason.” Because of this, he wrote, “He therefore entertains very serious doubts whether his work will be acceptable to those LEARNED PROFESSORS in Universities” or “STATESMEN who consider the will of princes as standards of wisdom” or “ECONOMISTS who do not consider individual happiness to be the primary object of their calculations” or a dozen other types such as TOPOGRAPHERS, BIBLIOMANIACS, and LEARNED PHILOLOGISTS. Instead, he wrote for “AMATEURS of general Literature,” those “free and honest searchers after MORAL, POLITICAL, and NATURAL TRUTH.”

This was a man after Timbs’s heart and mind. Phillips encouraged the young man to contribute to his Monthly Magazine. Perhaps inspired by Phillips’ book, Timbs soon wrote his first book, A Picturesque Promenade round Dorking, in Surrey in 1823. Timbs then moved to London to work for Phillips and started reading voraciously. He quickly produced Laconics, the first of what would become a lifetime’s production of books in which he compiled, accumulated, integrated, and occasionally distilled what he’d read.

Front page of The Mirror from 1824
Front page of The Mirror from 1824

He moved on to become editor of The Mirror in 1827, then on to John Limbird’s The Mirror of Literature. There, he mastered his technique. Henry Vizetelly, who later worked with Timbs at the Illustrated London News, described it in his crotchety memoir, Glances Back Through Seventy Years:

Timbs spent the best part of a busy life, scissors in hand, making ‘snippets.’ Such of these as could not be used up in The Mirror were carefully stores, and when later on he became sub-editor of the Illustrated London News and editor of the Year-Book of Facts, he profited by his opportunities to add largely to his collection. By-and-bay he classified his materials, and discovered that, by aid of a paste brush and a few strokes of the pen, he could instruct a lazy public respecting Things not generally known, explain Popular Errors, and provide Something for Everybody, and that he had, moreover, amassed a perfect store of Curiosities of science, history, and other subjects of general interest, wherein people partial to snippets might positively revel.

There was no love lost between Vizetelly and Timbs, whom he called “quintessentially a scissors and paste man” — which was at least better than his assessment of Timbs’ predecessor, Thomas Byerley: “a crapulent hack.” Vizetelly wrote that “the tinted tip of Timbs’s nose suggested that The Mirror editor was not averse to what is called the cheerful glass, and yet he developed into a singularly sour and cantankerous individual” and accused him of being a vicious gossip who “seemed to take especial delight in repeating all the spiteful tales he could pick up” — to which the reader is tempted to mutter, “Et tu, Brute?”

One wonders where Timbs found the time to indulge in gossip. He never married, socialized little, and seems to have spent most of his hours bent over his desk with stacks of books at his elbows. In a study of early Victorian editors that F. David Roberts published in the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter in 1971, he wrote that these men were marked by certain common characteristics: “One obvious one was that they could write. Most not only could write but had a passion to publish.” Of the 165 men covered in Roberts’s study, they averaged 9 books each (“considerably about the going average for academics today). Yet for Roberts, these men “were pikers compared to Mr. John Timbs,” whom he credited with 150 volumes.

Advertisement for John Timbs's Knowledge for the People
Advertisement for John Timbs’s Knowledge for the People

His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry (originally written by future Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald) gives a flavor of the range of Timbs’s production:

They include, on subjects of domestic interest, Family Manual (1831), Domestic Life in England (1835), and Pleasant Half-Hours for the Family Circle (1872), and, on scientific subjects, Popular Zoology (1834), Stories of Inventors and Discoverers (1859), Curiosities of Science (1860), and Wonderful Inventions: from the Mariner’s Compass to the Electric Telegraph Cable (1867). He also wrote on artistic and cultural matters works such as Painting Popularly Explained (jointly with Thomas John Gulick) (1859) and Manual for Art Students and Visitors to the Exhibitions (1862). Through his connection with The Harlequin he has been identified as the likely compiler (under the pseudonym Horace Foote) of the Companion to the Theatre and Manual of British Drama (1829), which contains much valuable information on London theatres of the period. On contemporary city life his works included Curiosities of London (1855), Club Life of London with Anecdotes (1865), Romance of London: Strange Stories, Scenes, and Persons (1865), and London and Westminster, City and Suburb (1867). He also published on subjects of biographical and historical interest, including Schooldays of Eminent Men (1858), Columbus (1863), Curiosities of History (1859), Anecdote Biography (1859–60), Anecdote Lives of Wits and Humourists (1862), Ancestral Stories and Traditions of Great Families (1869), and Abbeys, Castles and Ancient Halls of England and Wales (1869). He also edited Manuals of Utility (1847), the Percy Anecdotes (1869–70), and Pepys’s Memoirs (1871).

Not surprisingly, with such an output, quality often suffered. “Mr. Timbs has an inexhaustible supply of quaint stories,” one reviewer wrote, “but his critical judgment is not quite as good as his industry is formidable.” John Bull’s reviewer was critical of Timbs’ multi-volume Anecdote Biography, observing that “Biography is something more than a collection of anecdotes.” Timbs’s portraits, he found were “lifeless; they are models, not men”: “He has dressed up a variety of figures which would make the fortune of Madame Tussaud in a week.” A Spectator reviewer, a little more charitably, acknowledged that “His books are of a kind to which it is easier for a reader than a reviewer to do justice.” Many of his books were reprinted in America, where reviewers focused on the positives. A North American Review assessment of School Days of Eminent Men is typical, saying the book could be “commended as a handy manual, containing a great deal of curious information, told in a playful, conversational style.”

Indiscriminate accumulations of anecdotes and trivia can often contain gems among all the junk, and the chief reason to remember the work of John Timbs today are the nuggets you can usually find within a dozen or so pages of any of his books. Long before anyone came up with the idea of bathroom books, a Spectator reviewer identified the peculiar merit of Timbs’s books: “His readers, if they do not gain instruction, will be amused, provided that they are satisfied with a few pages at a time. Such a collection of wit and humour can only be digested at intervals.” Here is a tiny sample of the things you can learn from a few minutes spent — wherever you happen to choose — with John Timbs:

The Fitzwalters had, however, a stranger privilege than even this: they had the privilege of drowning traitors in the Thames. The “patient” was made fast to a pillar at Wood Wharf, and left there for the tide to flow twice over, and ebb twice from him, while the crowd looked on, and enjoyed the barbarous spectacle.

From Abbeys, castles, and ancient halls of England and Wales

Peter the Great was a gourmand of the first magnitude. While in England, on his return from a visit to Portsmouth, the Czar and his party, twenty-one in number, stopped at Godalming, where they ate: at breakfast, half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, seven dozen of eggs, and salad in proportion, and drank three quarts of brandy, and six quarts of mulled wine; at dinner, live ribs of beef, weight three stone; one sheep, fifty-six pounds; three quarters of lamb, a shoulder and loin of veal boiled, eight pullets, eight rabbits, two dozen and a half of sack, and one dozen of claret. This bill of fare is preserved in Ballard’s Collection, in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford.

From Hints for the table: or, The economy of good living. With a few words on wines

The bone of the Lion’s fore-leg is of remarkable hardness, from its containing a greater quantity of phosphate of lime that is found in ordinary bones, so that it may resist the powerful contraction of the muscles. The texture of this bone is so compact that the substance will strike fire with steel. He has little sense of taste, his lingual or tongue-nerve not being larger than that of a middle-sized dog.

From Eccentricities of the animal creation

In the winter of 1835, Mr. W. H. White ascertained the temperature in the City to be 3 degrees higher than three miles south of London Bridge; and after the gas had been lighted in the City four or five hours the temperature increased full 3 degrees, thus making 6 degrees difference in the three miles.

From Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young

When the Archduke of Spain was obliged to land at Weymouth, he was brought to the Sheriff of Dorset, and lived at Woolverton House. The Sheriff, not being able to speak in any language but “Dorset,” found it difficult to converse with the Archduke, and bethought him of a young kinsman, named Russell, who had been a factor in Spain, and sent for him. The young man made himself so agreeable to the Archduke that ho brought him to London, where the King took a fancy to him, and in time he became Duke of Bedford, and was the founder of the House of Russell.

From Nooks and Corners of English Life, Past and Present

In 1865, there died in Paris the dwarf Richebourg, who was an historical personage. Richebourg, who was only 60 centimètres high, was in his sixteenth year placed in the household of the Duchess of Orleans (the mother of King Louis-Philippe). He was often made useful for the transmission of dispatches. He was dressed up as a baby, and important State papers placed in his clothes, and thus he was able to effect a communication between Paris and the émigrés, which could hardly have taken place by any other means. The most suspicious of sans culottes never took it into his head to stop a nurse with a baby in her arms.

From English Eccentrics and Eccentricities

Timbs was given a pension as one of the “Poor Brethren” of the Charterhouse in 1871, but for some reason he resigned his place and died in poverty at 28 Canonbury Place, London, on 4 March 1875. “He died in harness,” reported The Times, “almost with his pen in his hand, after a life of more than 70 years, and a literary career extended over more than half a century.” The Times faintly praised his special talent: “Though not gifted with any great original powers he was one of the most industrious of men, and there was scarcely a magazine of the last quarter of a centure to which he was not at least an occasional contributor.” In reviewing Timbs’s English Eccentrics not long after his death, the Spectator noted somewhat wistfully, “This is, we suppose, the last work of an indefatigable compiler, who had a talent for finding odd things hidden away in odd corners, and presenting them for the amusement of readers.”

Some Candidates for the #1920Club

Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1920Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration organized some five years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 13-19 April, read a book published in 1920 and write something about it.

You can see an example of the diverse titles and perspectives that come together under this umbrella from the very first such event, the #1924Club.

There were some truly canonical books published in 1920: The Age of Innocence; Main Street; This Side of Paradise; Women in Love; Chéri; R.U.R.; Three Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Unamuno.

But every time I go into the university library and wander down the aisles of English and American literature, I have to wonder: Does the world really need yet another bit of writing about Edith Wharton or D. H. Lawrence or F. Scott Fitzgerald? These writers are like those hotels with 10,000 reviews on Tripadvisor. Checking today, the current count on Goodreads for The Age of Innocence stands at 134,391 ratings and 6,378 reviews. Stop. Just stop. Will yet one more opinion make any difference?

I don’t pretend that every book I write about on this site is a masterpiece. I hope no one feels obligated to read anything I’ve featured here. But I do try to shine a little light on the things that few or none have read and written about for years, often decades. That, in its own humble way, seems to be adding something original to the world.

I want to encourage you to do the same. Go off-piste, as they say in skiing. Read and write about something from 1920 that no one else will. Maybe it’ll just be ho-hum, no life-changer, maybe too flawed to recommend to anyone else. Some books are neglected for good reasons, and you will do the reading public the service of warning them off. Maybe it’ll surprise you: who knew Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote straight fiction before she got into writing mysteries? Tell the English reading public about Polish novelist Zofja Nakowska’s first major novel, Kobiety (Women). Do you agree with Orlo Williams that Storm Jameson’s first novel, The Happy Highways, is just full of “Talk, talk, talk”? Is Stephen Hudson the English Marcel Proust? Chances are good that you’ll be the first, or at least one of the very few, to have traveled down that piste in many, many seasons. Every rediscovered masterpiece has to have its first rediscovery.

So here are a selection of long-forgotten titles from 1920 you might consider exploring as your contribution to the #1920Club. In most cases, you can find the book on the Internet Archive for free and easy downloading. I highly recommend downloading a PDF version rather than Text, EPUB or Kindle: these are usually unedited OCR’d versions with many, many errors. As I explained in this post from 2018, a PDF version, a good PDF viewer, and a nice-sized tablet computer are all you need to have a reading experience that’s the next best thing to holding the actual book in your hands.

Cover of Invincible Minnie by Elisabeth Sanxay Holdin

Invincible Minnie, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Her first novel, about a tenacious if unlikeable woman. “She is a short, plump, dowdy little woman … stupid, unsympathetic, unimaginative; but somehow she always had her own way…. If Invincible. Minnie had been written by a man instead of a woman he would probably have been lynched before this. … [But] there was no doubt after the second page that the book would prove utterly captivating, for there Mr. Peterson is described as having a ‘long yellow moustache, standing out fiercely like a cat’s;’ and reading on a matter of two or three pages, we encountered that ‘ridiculously coy old skeleton,’ the Defoe horse. It is inconceivable that a person capable of immortalizing horses and moustaches at a stroke could fail to do superlatively well with human beings.” — Constance Murray Greene, The Bookman “The book is firm and muscular, ripe and complete. No first novel of such intellectual or creative energy has appeared in this country for some time.” — William Curtis in Town and Country.

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

In the Mountains, by Elizabeth von Arnim

First published anonymously, which is why some von Arnim fans may not be familiar with it. The diary of a woman as she sits in an isolated chalet in the Swiss Alps. “The opening confession of a woman broken by some disappointment in love … lead one to expect a series of admirable, sometimes profound, reflections of the usual introspective order.” Instead, “a mind well stored with generous knowledge of human nature, both sore and soft with painful memories, and, above all, with a sweet and racy humour which lights up every page…. Poignant, rich in comedy, lit by that rare sense of humour which almost touches tears, while behidn the hearts and minds so vivivdly drawn stands the unintentional revelation of the writer’s personality, setting the little tale in an atmosphere which deserves the adjective already used — inspiring.” — TLS

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

Rockwell Kent and Son from Wilderness by Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent and Son. Illustration from Wilderness
Wilderness, Rockwell Kent

The story of the artist’s six-month stay, with just his nine-year-old son for company, on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, Alaska, profusely illustrated with drawings by Ken and his son. “It is not only a narrative of a simple and natural life in these days of a complex civilization, but it is a frank revelation of the ideas, thoughts, aspirations, and conceptions of an unusually artistic temperament.” — em>The Bookman

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

The People of the Ruins, by Edward Shanks

A time travel story. The hero is projected from the General Strike of 1924 into the future. The ability to use technology has been lost incomptence of later generations. Progress has been replaced by a surrender to decay and entropy. A former Army artilleryman, the hero enlisted by the Speaker, the Ruler of England, to aid in the civil war with the Chairman of Bradford and the President of Wales. ‘To appreciate the story the reader must follow it in the same gusto for adventure, and he will be repaid with a very pleasant entertainment.”–Orlo Williams in the TLS

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

Hagar’s Hoard, by George Kibbe Turner

Set in Memphis during the city’s battle with an epidemic of yellow fever in 1878, about a miser trying to protect his material wealth against an invisible killer:

And now, near and far away, across the town, the light of the Fever fires came out again, like evil flowers blossoming in the night. Not lighted in early all the cases now. As time went by, they gave that idea up. But now there were so many deaths everywhere, only an occasional fire, lighted here and there, made a great lot in the town.

“Before Hagar’s Hoard was twenty-one pages old I knew I was in the grip of a conqueror. Mr. George Kibbe Turner may be a new writer but he is already a master. Just that handful of pages, and my nerves were crawling with the secret and unconjectured fear that came to Memphis in ’78.” — W. Newton Douglas in The Sketch. Warning: in keeping with the fashion of the time, some characters make prolific use of the N-word.

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

Happy Highways, Storm Jameson

Orlo Williams’ review in the TLS really sells this one: “We cannot help feeling glad for the sake of Mr. [sic] Storm Jameson that he has got The Happy Highways off his chest. It must be a great relief to have discharged so much matter into the form of a novel…. Talk, talk, talk — this long book is a deluge of talk on every controversial subject in modern society, which makes the brain reel long before the end…. He seems to be writing down a flood of memories, lest he should forget them, for the satisfaction of his own soul…. When Joy, Mick and Margaret are just a little bit older, they will realize that there is a great deal of difference between being young and being extremely young. Extreme youth must rant and rage and tear the world to bits, without the world’s being harmed or benefited thereby. It all blows away like the spindrift cast up by the storm.”

In her autobiography, Journey from the North, Jameson wrote that the book only had two readers she knew of: an American convict and John Galsworthy. Galsworthy wrote her editor, Charles Evans: “This authoress has done what none of the other torrential novelists of the last ten years has achieved — given us a convincing (if not picture, at least) summary of the effervescence, discontent, revolt, and unrest of youth; the heartache and beating of wings. I should like to meet her. She must have seen and felt things…. To an old-fashioned brute like me, of course, the lack of form and line and the plethora of talk and philosophy pass a little stubbornly down the throat and stick a little in the gizzard, but the stuff is undeniable, and does not give me the hollow windy feeling I get from a German novel….”

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

Cover of recent edition of Kobiety

Kobiety (Women); a novel of Polish life, by Zofja Rygier Nakowska

“This very unusual book reveals the secret springs of all human life.” Well, that might be setting the bar a bit too high. “To read it after a long course of the mediocre, superficial writing through which a reviewer, in the course of his duty, must wade is like emerging from the subway and drawing pure air into the lungs.” Uncredited critic, New York Times The TLS was more measured in its assessment: “The book is indeed surprisingly uneven; subtle and extravagant, balanced and preposterous in turn, always stifling in its moral atmosphere, yet redeemed by a malicious sort of candour which endows the heroine herself with something akin to probity and extorts for her a certain respect.”

Available at the Internet Archive: Link

The Romantic Woman, by Mary Borden

The story of a failed marriage between the daughter of a Chicago millionaire and an English nobleman (in contrast to Borden’s own long and successful marriage to Sir Edward Spear). New York Times: “Where its author has been most successful is in the atmosphere of dull discontent, of poignant disillusion, which she evokes throughout. She gives a depressing picture of the utter cynicism of the English high society into which her heroine falls, against which she sets with telling effect the rawness and childishness of the ultra rich set of Chicago. There are neat characterizations, epigrammatic bits of phrasing and some passages written with unblushing frankness — in fact, for frankness concerning things usually veiled or ignored in conventional conversation the book stands high even in this age of audacity in thought and language.”

Available at the Internet Archive: Link.

Richard Kurt, by Stephen Hudson

Stephen Hudson’s novels, according to his own Wikipedia entry, “are now almost entirely forgotten.” Hudson was the pseudonym of Sydney Schiff, who was one of the first Englishmen to celebrate the work of Marcel Proust. Schiff took over translation duties from the ailing C. K. Scott Moncrief and was responsible for the translation of Time Regained that most English readers who made it that far through In Search of Lost Time will have read. He hosted a famous 1922 party at which Proust was introduced to James Joyce, an event celebrated in Richard Davenport-Hines’ 2006 book, A Night at the Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Party of 1922.

If the following, from The Nation, is accurate, Hudson/Schiff was clearly influenced by Proust in his own fiction: “Mr. Hudson is quite unconscious of the noisy and dazzling things that fill the day and die; he addresses himself with infinite quietude and patience to study and record the permanent foundations of human nature. Richard Kurt is very coolly and closely written, very exact and unemphatic, and quite long…. We are given indirectly, and wholly through Richard’s perceptions, presentations of his father and of his wife, that are astonishingly penetrating in vision and concrete in effect…. Rarely as a riper first novel appeared. It is solidly founded in its observation, built with a serene sureness of touch, careless of vain graces, disdainful of all appeal save that of its inner veracity.” (Note: published in the U.K. in 1919, in the U.S. in 1920)

Available at the Internet Archive: Link.

I’m keeping my own selection for #1920Club a secret — until next week. Happy reading.

The Well-Meaning Young Man, by Luise and Magdalen King-Hall (1930)

I decided to read The Well Meaning Young Man after stumbling across this passage:

Horatio Swann, the famous portrait painter, was at his wit’s end. Harry Ames, the well-known scene designer, was at his wit’s end. The Russian chauffeur, Boris, was lying upstairs under a neat check bedspread, in a bedroom of the inn, suffering from an overdose of cocaine. The only person who was enjoying himself was Gene Tunney the panther who, attached to the kitchen table by a stout chain, was guzzling his luncheon out of a wash-hand-basin. In the entrance hall of the inn, the Princess Vanda Fiorivanti stormed to and fro. Her tall, snake-like figure clad in a pair of seagreen pyjamas and a fur coat, quivered with rage. Her enormous, distraught yellow eyes, ringed with black lashes, appeared to swamp her emaciated white face. Her hair was like a crazy scarlet chrysanthemum and matched her scarlet mouth. Her general appearance at the moment closely resembled that of a vampire who had been carelessly buried without a stake in her heart, dug up again after some centuries, and was now giving vent to her feelings.

I am a sucker for over-the-top farces about the goings-on of silly rich people (viz. Five Days, The Ritz Carltons, Heart in a Hurricane, et al.), so this was enough to get me started.

The hero of The Well Meaning Young Man is not himself rich but he comes from a comfortable family. The younger son of Anglo-Irish gentry, Dan Cavanagh is already a failure. His father and mother (“a fine stand-up lump of a woman”) have shipped him off to join a family business in Sicily, thinking he had “a way with him” that “might be invaluable in charming intractable foreigners.” At the time he stumbles across the Princess and her entourage, however, he is trying to make his way there by foot, having squandered most of his travel budget with an old school chum in London. Dan is not the sharpest knife in the drawer: “He had not yet learnt to read except in the literal sense of the word,” and the authors esteem his handwriting “about one degree of culture superior to that of his valiant twelfth century ancestors, who came over to Ireland with Strongbow, and when occasion demanded, signed their names with an X.”

With her chauffeur incapacitated, the Princess hires Dan as a replacement, and he soon finds himself behind the wheel of a massive Pannonia-Svitza estate car, racing through the Black Forest towards Schloss Erlenburg, where American producer-tycoon Rex Guggenheim awaits the star of his new spectacle, “The Legend of St. Dorothea and the Heavenly Roses.” Unfortunately, by enlisting Dan, she also manages to hijack the narrative for the remainder of the book. What starts as a good-natured Bildungsroman with above-average comic writing swerves onto a side road and becomes mired in a seemingly endless opera buffa with all the fun and spontaneity as a Soviet rhythmic gymnastics demonstration. By the time poor Dan is spit out on the far side of the Alps, the comic spirit has been beaten out of us.

While The Well Meaning Young Man got waylaid with a narrative flat tire, I’m willing to give Magdalen King-Hall’s earlier solo attempt, with the intriguing title I Think I Remember, Being the Random Recollections of Sir Wickham Woolicomb, An Ordinary English Snob and Gentleman. I’m also a sucker for comic autobiographies of English snobs (viz. Lord Bellinger and the classic Augustus Carp, Esq.).

The Well Meaning Young Man is available on the Internet Archive (link).


The Well-Meaning Young Man, by Luise [Louise] and Magdalen King-Hall
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1930

Opium Fogs, by Rosemary Tonks (1963)

Cover of "Opium Fogs" by Rosemary TonksThough Rosemary Tonks’ Emir includes Opium Fogs in its “by the same author” list and not vice-versa, it’s a safe bet that Opium Fogs was written second. On all counts — particularly form, style, and characterization — it’s the more successful book. What’s more, throughout the book there are signs of material from Emir being reused, reworked, and improved.

Emir’s character Toby Garnett, for example, a bookstore clerk “too intelligent to be out of work and too intelligent to work” is resurrected in the form of Gerard Plowman (a librarian this time), the lovesick protagonist of Opium Fogs. Tonks shifts gender, telling most of the story from Gerard’s perspective and giving secondary focus to Gabriella, the object of his infatuation. She also steps up her geometry, incorporating two romantic triangles that intersect with Gabriella and the unlikely figure of Dr. Bodo Swingler, another character of ambiguously European origin.

Tonks is far more successful in the playing the parlour game of cleverness than she was in Emir. The text fairly crackles with apt lines: Gerard is a man “for whom everyday life is the equivalent of sewing mailbags in prison.” Another character is “celebrated as an international nobody.” A group of undertakers looks “as if they read nothing but obituary notices, and dined exclusively on bread and water and soapflakes.” A man’s conversation “was as stimulating as being told the plot of a play by someone who hasn’t seen it.” And it’s full of helpful advice: “If you are out to borrow money or ask a favour, nothing puts your victim on guard more rapidly than laughing at his jokes and generally making yourself agreeable.” “There is no better entertainment, when you’re stone cold and bored to death, than watching someone park a motor-car. The effect is therapeutic, wonderfully reviving.”

Opium Fogs is also fascinating to read if you know something of Tonks’ story. Like Tonks, Gabriella “married and left England a moody little beauty of twenty-two;” she also spent “eighteen months in India, ten of them paralysed.” In Tonks’ case, her bout with polio left her with limited use of her right hand. When Gabriella walks, “one saw that she went slowly as though one leg was very tired.” Though Gerard fervently seeks to rekindle their romance, Gabriella has moved on from his adolescent notions of love and happiness: “For women like Gabriella it is quite simply the
second-rateness of adultery that makes it so difficult to swallow.” Still in recovery from her illness, she wants simply “… to live with the minimum of difficulty. Don’t you understand? I need a roof overhead, three meals a day, the company of people who mean nothing to me, and permission to be tired and ugly for days on end.”

On the other hand, Gerard embodies the spirit of the flâneur that one finds throughout Tonks’ poetry. In her poem, “The Flâneur and the Apocalypse,” she wrote,

For his inebriated tread, the whole of Europe
With its great streets full of air and shade,
Its students and cocottes,
And traffic, roughly caked with blood,
Is not enough.
The whole of Europe put to sleep
By music, coal-fires, snow, and café life,
And suffocated by hot fogs and poppies,
And rocked by lovers, like a chest of breath,
Is not, for the flâneur, drug strong enough.

The emotion that shines brightest throughout Opium Fogs is Tonks/Gerard’s love-hate relationship with the city of London. The book is full of passages that aspire to the energy of the “Michaelmas term lately over” opening of Bleak House:

The Metropolis was clad in mildew, alive with glittering ooze and great fever clouds.

It was the funeral couch of a buried Pharaoh who has been wrapped up like a black-shirted vegetable in mouldy linens, crepes, plasters and aprons, steeped in the preserving vinegar of ancient curses. And loaded with the cookery of dark cosmetics, surrealist lavas, enamels, and armoury as fragile as the metal blisters on the sides of roasted fish.

People shook hands as though they had them buried up to the shoulder in earth.

The air was foul as in a gambling den, where everything is greasy to the touch.

One heard the railways shaking their chains.

But not so far away the sky opened for an instant over the Thames, to dry streets of shiny platters where the rank mane of Neptune lay overnight.

An interesting black day began.

The “opium fogs” of the title captures both the atmosphere and addictive nature of London life. “After this city which is so dirty, so impossibly difficult to live in,” Tonks writes, “you could never bring yourself to respect another which made living easy.” In fact, it’s a shame that Lauren Elkins missed the opportunity to include Rosemary Tonks and Opium Fogs in her recent book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Tonks’ authorial voice embodies “the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of society” that Wikipedia offers as the essence of the flâneur. And it would serve as a perfect dessert to follow an entrée of such heavy London seriousness as Doris Lessing’s novel from the year before, The Golden Notebook.

Opium Fogs is available in electronic formats on the Internet Archive (link).


Opium Fogs, by Rosemary Tonks
London: Putnam, 1963

Stunning Portraits from Hungary, by Adrian and Marianne Stokes (1909)

An Engaged Couple (Misko and Maruska at Menguszfalva), by Marianne Stokes
An Engaged Couple (Misko and Maruska at Menguszfalva), by Marianne Stokes

My wife and I had the chance to spend a few days in Budapest recently, our first visit to Hungary. One afternoon, we visited the M?csarnok Kunsthalle museum, which includes an exhibit of works related to the discovery of Hungarian folk art and lore by artists, musicians, and writers in the early part of the 20th century. Among the items on display was the above portrait, taken from Hungary, written by the English landscape artist Adrian Stokes and featuring paintings made by Stokes and his wife Marianne during a long visit to the country in 1908.

Fortunately, the book is available on the Internet Archive (link), because copies of the original 1909 edition sell for upwards of $75 — which isn’t a horrible price for a book that features 75 gorgeous color prints of Hungarian landscapes by Stokes and portraits by his wife. With the exception of the sunset view of the Margit Bridge and Hungarian Parliament building below, Stokes’ landscapes do not leap off the page.

The Houses of Parliament and Margit Bridge, by Adrian Stokes
The Houses of Parliament and Margit Bridge, by Adrian Stokes

But it’s the portraits by Marianne Stokes that make the book so memorable. They reach back to the Flemish masters (particularly “Prayer for the Dead”) and reach forward to the modernist realism of Andrew Wyeth (“Slovak Girl in Sunday Attire”).

The Garlic Seller, by Marianne Stokes
The Garlic Seller, by Marianne Stokes
Slovak Girl in Sunday Attire, by Marianne Stokes
Slovak Girl in Sunday Attire, by Marianne Stokes
The Bridal Veil, by Marianne Stokes
The Bridal Veil, by Marianne Stokes
Prayer for the Dead, by Marianne Stokes
Prayer for the Dead, by Marianne Stokes

The Stokes found many of the rural Hungarian people they encountered very reluctant to be painted. Adrian writes that men would head off the road and into the fields if they saw him setting up his easel. When Marianne offered payment for agreeing to pose, villagers would say they didn’t need the money as their relatives in America sent cash on a regular basis. One of the exceptions (though still reluctant) was Misko, a young boy they met in Vazsecz (now Važec, Slovakia):

Misko, by Marianne Stokes
Misko, by Marianne Stokes

Among my wife’s models was a boy named Misko — a dear little fellow nine or ten years old. Babyhood seemed still to linger about his eyes and mouth, but in spirit he was a labourer and a politician, as the red feather in his hat proclaimed him. Misko was amiable when not asked to sit. He underwent the martyrdom of posing twice, but nothing would induce him to come again. He willingly consented, however, to be our guide for four or five miles over the hills to the Black Vag, where we were going for a day’s fishing, and a gallant little cavalier he was! He spread branches and leaves in wet places for my wife to walk over, and offered his help at every difficulty on her path. At lunch, when we had given him a share of our cold chicken, he remained quietly at a little distance until he had unwrapped his own food, consisting of bread and a thick piece of bacon. He then cut the best part out of the middle of the bacon and came to offer it to us. My wife found it a joy to be with him, and I was able to proceed with my fishing without feeling that she was neglected.


Hungary, painted by Adrian & Marianne Stokes, described by Adrian Stokes
London: Adam and Charles Black, 1909

Jack the Giant Killer in all his Gory Glory

Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians (1820)
Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians (1820)

Back in the days when the average lifespan was about 40 years, children’s books could be pretty brutal. Take the story of Jack the giant killer, which now we almost exclusively see in its vegan variant, Jack and the Beanstalk. Here is a sample of some of the violence to be found in the pages of 19th century English and American versions of the story. The illustration above, which could easily date from the 17th century, comes from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians, by John Rush Golby, John Lee, and William Marshall Craig, published in 1820 (all links are to the titles in the Internet Archive.)

Jack and the giant, from The history of Jack the giant killer
Jack and the giant, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1830-1835?)

This somewhat medieval illustration comes from a book with a title almost as long as its text: The history of Jack the giant killer: relating how he overcame several huge giants, particularly one with two heads: his marriage with the Duke’s daughter: and other exploits. To which is added, The noble basket maker (there being a disappointing lack of gore in “The noble basket maker”).

Jack and the Giant, from History of Jack the giant killer; containing his birth and parentage (1850?)
Jack and the Giant, from History of Jack the giant killer; containing his birth and parentage (1850?)

Here in this illustration from the History of Jack the giant killer; containing his birth and parentage, the giant appears to date from Roman times — perhaps an indication that author Joseph Crawhall determined something of the giant’s genealogy in addition to Jack’s.

The murdering giant, from The History of Jack the Giant Killer (date unknown)
Jack fools the giant, from The History of Jack the Giant Killer (date unknown)

We know, of course, that the giant was a bad guy, but today’s accounts shy away from the details of his crimes. In The history of Jack the giant killer, published by Walker and Sons of Otley, we learn that the giant (of Welsh origin this time) was a less than adequate host. As we see above, the giant, having invited Jack to spend the night in his castle, sneaks into the bedroom in the middle of the night to hack Jack into tiny bits. Fortunately, cunning Jack has put a log in his place and watches the attack from behind a column.

Jack and the Two Giants, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1860)
Jack and the Two Giants, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1860)

In many of the 19th century accounts, there are more than one giant. Sometimes there are several. Above, from The history of Jack the Giant-Killer by W. S. Fortey, we see Jack subduing two giants at once.

The two-headed giant, from Jack the giant killer (1843?)
The two-headed giant, from Jack the giant killer (1843?)

Sometimes, the giants had two and even three heads. In this version. from Percival Leigh’s Jack the giant killer, the giant hails from Scotland.

Jack and the giant, from Jack the giant killer (between 1865 and 1889)
Jack and the giant, from Jack the giant killer (between 1865 and 1889)

In later versions of the story, the giant grows less gruesome and more human. In the illustration above, from Jack the giant killer, published by George Routledge and Sons, Jack looks a right little prig while the giant could well take his place in a Biblical setting by Michelangelo or Rembrandt.

Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer (1870?)
Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer (1870?)

The taste for blood remained well into the second half of the century, though, as in this illustration of Jack with his nine-pound pickaxe from the McLoughlin Brother’s gore-packed Jack the giant killer from around 1870.

Jack wails on the giant, from Favourite Fairy Tales (1861)
Jack wails on the giant, from Favourite Fairy Tales (1861)

Or this illustration, from John Corner’s Favourite Fairy Tales, of Jack wailing with Stakhanovite fervor on a particularly hideous giant’s head.

Grecian Jack and the Pre-Raphaelite Giant, from The Old Fairy Tales Retold (1870)
Grecian Jack and the Pre-Raphaelite Giant, from The Old Fairy Tales Retold (1870)

Still, the overwhelming trend was towards a kinder, gentler Jack and giant — as in the above illustration from James Mason’s revisionist The Old Fairy Tales Retold, where Jack is quite Grecian in his figure while the giant seems merely a troubled, if plus-sized, pre-Raphaelite soul.

By the time Andrew Lang and Kate Wiggins got their hands on them, is it any wonder the last bits of blood lust were wrung from this tale?

The Rat, by G. M. A. Hewett (1904)

An illustration from "the Rat," by G.M. A. Hewett
Mr. Samuel H. T.

It’s something of a guilty pleasure to come across a children’s book that doesn’t exactly seem to have been written with children in mind. Take The Rat, by G. M. A. (George Mottram Arthur) Hewett, the first in a series of “Animal Autobiographies” published by Adam and Charles Black in the early 1900s.

I give due credit to the Reverend Hewett, an Anglican priest who spent his life on the staff of Winchester College, Oxford–first as house master and finally as college chaplain–between 1878 and his death in 1927. Though his narrator, Samuel H. T. (the H. is for the one paw he lost, the T. to that half of tail he lost to a cat), speaks with the graceful and moderated tone of the gentry (“I cannot help feeling that I am a good fellow and a keen sportsman”), he does not pretend to be more than vermin in the eyes of his readers. And he’s willing to acknowledge that there are a few aspects in which rats lack something in refinement:

… fathers count for very little among us. Very few rats ever see their father, and a good thing too, for he is just as likely as not to eat one of his own children if food is scarce, and sometimes his wife helps him. Just fancy how you would feel if your dad strolled into the nursery or schoolroom one day, with his hands in his pockets, whistling a cheerful tune, and then, when you all ran up to him, hoping to be taken out for a nice safe walk, suddenly seized and devoured the tenderest and juiciest of you!

On the other hand, rats do treat the death of their own with a delicacy that can serve as instruction to Samuel H. T.’s young human readers:

We hardly ever use the word dead if we can possibly avoid it. It is too horrid, and so common and vulgar, too. You can always distinguish a really well-bred rat by the way in which he describes an accident. ‘Where’s Jimmy to-day?” asks somebody. “Feeding the hungry” is a nice answer when somebody has gobbled him up. “How’s your wife to-day?” he asks somebody else. “Dancing in the pig-sty” would mean “Caught by the leg in a trap.” “Singing in the larder” is a way of saying “Squeaking in a cage.” “Lying down with a bad pain in her back” can mean either “Killed by a stick” or “Nipped by a dog,” though we generally call the latter accident “Playing with the puppy.” You see, we are hardly ever ill, so that there is very little chance of people failing to understand. Perhaps you could now tell me how to say prettily and politely that your sister was dangling in the air with a noose round her neck, or that Billy was squashed quite flat under a large stone. Mind you make him quite flat. I could do that easily. I must tell you my answer: “Playing at being a pancake.” Now you make a better and politer answer if you can.

An illustration from "the Rat" by G. M. A. Hewett

Indeed, Hewett’s rat doesn’t just teach his readers about manners: he instructs them in an admirable school of philosophy built around the uncertainties inherent in the life of a rat:

What a lot of “perhapses”! I love perhapses: they are so much nicer than knowing for certain. That is partly the reason why it seems to me that a tramp ought to be a happier man than you. You know all about your breakfast to-morrow: porridge, bacon and eggs, muffins and strawberry jam, coffee or tea—you can hardly put “perhaps” in once. But very often the whole of a tramp’s breakfast is “perhaps”; and although I am very fond of perhapses, I should not care to have nothing else for breakfast, however nicely it was cooked, unless they put an awful lot of sauce and trimmings round the side. And a rat is better off still. He never says anything without beginning with “Perhaps.” His whole life is so very perhapsy, though he can generally find something to eat, if only he is alive to eat it. We are really very particular about our food, when we have the chance of being particular, but if it comes to the worst there is hardly anything that will not do, until something nicer turns up.

Five other “animal autobiographies” were published A & C Black after The Rat:

Each book features twelve beautiful color illustrations but appears to have had a different illustrator. The ones in The Rat appear to be signed by an “S. Bagnot De La Berg,” but I can’t find a record of an artist with this name. Hewett must have been quite the jolly old sport, as his other work available on the Internet Archive, The Pedagogue at Play, features a frontispiece photo of himself sitting up in the snow, skies cattywampus in front of him. “There may be many spills” while skiing downhill, he cautions his reader. “I have had as many as fifteen in twenty minutes; not trifling stoppages, but good honest rollings in the snow.”


Animal Autobiographies: The Rat, by G. M. A. Hewett
London: Alan and Charles Black, 1904

Free E-books of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage — and a technical note

dorothy_richardson_plaqueAlmost two years ago, I embarked upon my most ambitious and, it turned out, most rewarding reading task, working through the thirteen books of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. (Richardson referred to it as a single novel and each book as a chapter.) At the time I wrote:

… while a complete scholarly edition of Richardson’s work may become available ten years from now, today the situation is little better than it was fifty years ago, when Louise Bogan wrote, “Merely to get at Dorothy Richardson’s novels … has, of late, become so difficult that the waning of her reputation may be partly put down to the absence of her books themselves and data on their author.” The best complete edition, issued in four volumes by J. M. Dent in 1967, goes for $250 and more, if you can find it. For about $50, you can assemble the four paperback volumes issued as Virago Modern Classics in 1979, but they tend to be “well read” copies. There was also a cheap paperback set published by Popular Library in the U. S. in the 1970s, but it’s more of a wreck than a reference.

I also provided links to free electronic editions of the first seven books, courtesy of the Internet Archive. However, browsing through the archive recently, I discovered that twelve of the thirteen books are now available, thanks to the Digital Library of India, which scanned in the 1938 edition published by J. M. Dent:

If you want to undertake your own pilgrimage through Pilgrimage, you will still have to supplement these with Volume 4, either from the 1967 Dent hardback or from the Virago Modern Classics paperback editions, which includes the posthumously assembled thirteen novel, March Moonlight.

This is a good place, by the way, to mention that anyone who has benefited from the access to free electronic texts provided by the Internet Archive should take the opportunity to donate to its continued support.

Now for the technical note. On occasion, I get asked what e-reader I use, given the number of books I’ve covered from the Archive. I started out with a Nook not long after Barnes and Noble released the first one in 2009, primarily because it was the cheapest one, and then moved to a Kindle a year later because I was given one. Both had black and white displays, which were fine for books in EPUB/Kindle formats but lousy or useless for PDFs.

And this, for me, has always been the biggest drawback in using either to read material from the Internet Archive. Although virtually all texts on the Archive are available in formats compatible with e-readers, virtually all of these are also unedited outputs from optical character reader (OCR) scanners, which means they’re full of typos and page headers, footers, and other extraneous material. If the original text in the scanned book is clear and the person doing the scanning careful, these distractions are tolerable, but in too many cases, the output is just too difficult or tiresome to read in text format.

Because of this, I gave up on e-reading entirely for a while. But the thought that there were so many good books that I could access for free (and by now, the space that physical books take up is almost more of a concern than their cost) kept nagging me. When a friend showed me a PDF document on an iPad, I was tempted to go the Apple route, but cost and my concern for compatibility with my otherwise Windows-based household stopped me.

I finally found the happy solution after looking at a few Android tablets. I bought a used Lenovo 10″ tablet for about $110 and after trying out several different PDF readers settled on Xodo. I’ve been using this for over a year now and am completely content with it. The tablet is both big enough and small enough for comfortable reading, the display and size make most PDFs look much like the original printed page, and Xodo is very easy to use for annotation and highlighting. I’ve also moved my e-book files to Calibre which, when combined with a cloud-based storage service, gives me the ability to access my e-library from anywhere on the Internet. With the right plugin, Calibre also allows access to the locked PDF format used by the Open Library.

While I still prefer a real book to an e-book, the advantages of the 10″ tablet, a good PDF reader, and Calibre have definitely increased the proportion of e-books in my reading to a steady 25 to 30 percent, and I can highly recommend this solution to anyone who’s still on the fence about getting into e-reading.

Selected Modern Short Stories, edited by Alan Steele (1937)

Selected Modern Short Stories–the first of several collections that editor Alan Steele compiled for Penguin in the late 1930s–offers a good illustration of the random nature of literary fate. Let’s take at look at the authors listed on the cover:

John Hampson

Hampson’s first-published novel, Saturday Night at the Greyhound (1931) was a surprise best-seller for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and is back in print now, thanks to the ever-diligent Valancourt Books. It’s considerably harder to find his short stories, however. Only two were ever published i book form, and this in the very scarce Two Stories: The Mare’s Nest and The Long Shadow (1931), hand-printed in an edition of 250 by radical publisher Charles Lahr.

Helen Simpson

Simpson’s historical romances, such as Under Capricorn, were very popular during their time, but are now out of print outside her native Australia. You can, however, find her novel, Saraband for Dead Lovers (1935), available on the Internet Archive. She published just one collection, The Baseless Fabric (1925), well before this anthology. The one copy I could find for sale goes for $1000. When this was published, one reviewer wrote of it, “… eleven profoundly imagined creations here contained, each one, perfect in the exact balance and unfailing accuracy of its veiled suggestion, concerned with the potencies for good or evil latent in the invisible realm which separates the conscious senses from the surrounding world.”

H. E. Bates

Bates enjoyed a pretty consistent and happy balance of critical and popular esteem throughout his career and it has held on to this day. A good share of his novels and short story collections are in print, but you can also find his collection, The Enchantress (1961), for free on the Internet Archive.

Martin Armstrong

Armstrong’s work is long out of print, which is one reason why I wrote about his Selected Stories (1951) a few months ago. You can find a snippet of his work online in a throw-away compilation titled, What is Happiness? (1939), in which he and other English writers such as J. B. Priestley and Storm Jameson offered their answers to this question. I like Armstrong’s sly approach to avoiding an actual answer:

Before we can be truly happy we must gain control of our minds. How am I to do so?

The answer is simple: by obeying the Greek maxim, ‘Know thyself.’ Good! We are almost, it seems, at the end of our inquiry. Only one question remains: how am I to get to know myself? Ah! Now you’re asking. Saints and philosophers have been engaged on this simple question for some thousands of years but, unhappily, the answer is not yet to hand.

H. A. Manhood

H. A. Manhood was considered one of the best short story writers of the 1930s, but in the mid-1950s he gave up writing entirely and retired to an abandoned railway carriage in a field in West Sussex, where he spent the next decades brewing his own cider and attempting to get by as much as possible on a subsistence basis. Thanks to the Sundial Press, a collection of his stories, Life Be Still!, is now available, but you can also find his Selected Stories (1947)

T. O. Beachcroft

Reviewing Beachcroft’s second story collection, Graham Greene wrote that “Mr. Beachcroft is likely to become, after Mr. H. E. Bates, the most distinguished short-story writer in this country,” but unlike Bates, his work has disappeared without a trace. He didn’t even have a Wikipedia entry until I wrote one earlier today. Reviewing one of his later collections in The Spectator, Stevie Smith wrote:

Mr. Beachcroft’s talent is disarming. One thinks: thank heavens just a simple tale, with people one knows and bits of scenery and a bit of human feeling, not much more, but very agreeable. It is not difficult to put the reader in this pleasantly superior frame of mind, and having got the donkey where You want him, the creature is in your power…. Simplicity is the word for Mr. Beachcroft’s stories, but it is a poet’s simplicity, the most subtle in the world.

Thanks to the Internet Archive, you can enjoy The Collected Stories of T. O. Beachcroft (1946), which I will cover in more depth soon.

Liam O’Flaherty

Liam O’Flaherty will probably always have at least his classic novel, The Informer, in print, and his collection, The Wounded Cormorant was a feature of high school reading lists for decades. You can also find The Informer online at the Internet Archive, but for his stories, look for the exemplary collection, The Stories of Liam O’Flaherty (1956), at the Open Library.

L. A. G. Strong

Several of Strong’s novels are back in print thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing’s fine series of solid middlebrow novels and story collections from the 1930s-1960s. None of his numerous short story books are in print, but you can enjoy a healthy sample in his Travellers: Thirty-One Selected Stories (147), available from the Internet Archive.

Malachi Whitaker

As Malachi Whitaker, Yorkshire housewife Marjorie Whitaker became known as the “Bradford Chekhov” and was considered perhaps the finest woman writer of short stories between Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, but her work felt out of print for several decades until her collection, The Crystal Fountain, and autobiography, And So Did I, were released by Paladin Press in the 1990s. Unfortunately, they dropped from sight again after than. Just recently, however, Persephone Books added to their growing list of rediscovered by releasing Journey Home and Other Stories.

Frank O’Connor

O’Connor is safely ensconced as the leading Irish short story writer to follow Joyce–as demonstrated by the fact that the introduction to his Collected Stories (1981) was written by none other than famed Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann.

William Plomer

Plomer’s is one of those names that fans of neglected books will recognize, as one or other of his books–whether his South African novel Turbott Wolfe or his English novel Museum Pieces or his eccentric family memoir, Curious Relations–often shows up on lists such as those from Antaeus or Tin House. His short stories, however, vanished decades ago. Luckily, you can find a worthy sample on the Internet Archive in his collection Four Countries (1949), which includes stories set in Africa, Japan, Greece, and England. In his introduction, Plomer put himself solidly in the traditionalist camp when it came to short stories:

We rightly expect a story to have a point, and this generally means that we expect it to be dramatic. A short story must let us into the secrets of other people’s lives, and unless it lets us into their lives at a moment of crisis, it is unlikely to have much point or to be dramatic. The crisis may be a small one, but a crisis there must be. This crisis must engage the reader’s imagination, and it must illuminate some new or unfamiliar aspect of the human predicament, or some familiar aspect in a new way. As for the manner in which this is done, there are infinite possibilities, but it must be adroit.

Rhys Davies

Welsh writer Rhys Davies is still popular among his fellow countrymen thanks to the Library of Wales series, but mostly overlooked elsewhere. A large sample of his work can be found online, however, in The Collected Stories of Rhys Davies on the Internet Archive. Davies took a measured view of the lot of the short story writer:

Short stories are a luxury which only those writers who fall in love with them can afford to cultivate. To such a writer they yield the purest enjoyment; they become a privately elegant craft allowing, within very strict confines, a wealth of idiosyncrasies. Compared with the novel, that great public park so often complete with draughty spaces, noisy brass band and unsightly litter, the enclosed and quiet short story garden is of small importance, and never has been much more…. The short story gives the release of a day off, when something happened which one remembers with a smile or a start of interest, with a pang or a pause of fear.

My Literary Life, by Mrs. Elizabeth Lynn Linton (1899)

Eliza Lynn Linton, scanning the horizons for another victim
Eliza Lynn Linton, scanning the horizons for another victim
Between John Sutherland’s wonderful encyclopedia, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, and the Internet Archive, I can lose hours wandering through the three-volumed forest of English 19th century fiction, particularly in the last year that written by women. It can be soul-leeching, though. There is something relentlessly earnest and deliberate in so much English fiction after Amelia Opie. There aren’t many female counterparts to Thomas Love Peacock, Thackeray, Dickens or Wilde to lighten things up.

I thought I’d stumbled across a hidden gem when I started reading Amy Dillwyn’s 1884 novel, Jill, in which our heroine, making her own way through the world, is not above padding her travel claims or pocketing a precious object her employers clearly failed to appreciate adequately. And then I found that Jill was reissued by the Honno Press a few years ago as part of its Welsh Women’s Classics series.

And then I came across the following sentence in an essay about George Eliot: “She held her hands and arms kangaroo fashion; was badly dressed; had an unwashed, unbrushed, unkempt look altogether; and she assumed a tone of superiority over me which I was not then aware was warranted by her undoubted leadership.” It was attributed to Eliza Lynn Linton, a minor Victorian novelist and essayist, and a brief memoir that was published after her death in 1898. Such undisguised nastiness, so uncharacteristic of memoirists before Frank Harris and Beverly Nichols made it acceptable to add a hearty shake of bitters into the mix, deserved further investigation.

And the good old Internet Archive didn’t let me down. I quickly located an electronic copy of Mrs. Linton’s My Literary Life and proceeded to read the whole thing online (it’s a short book).

You know you’re in for some splenetic prose when the book opens with a warning — in this case from Mrs. Linton’s friend, another neglected late Victorian novelist, Beatrice Harraden (Ships that Pass in the Night — Anyone? Anyone?): “It is to be regretted also that she is not here herself to tone down some of her more pungent remarks and criticisms, hastily thrown off in bitter moments such as come to us all.” “Mrs. Linton’s pen was ever harsher than her speech,” Harraden offers in excuse, but My Literary Life rages on while Mrs. Linton’s dulcet tones have been silenced for more than a century. “It has been thought,” her publisher writes in introduction, that the incomplete sketches she was able to write before her death “possess an independent value which justifies republication.” Perhaps the same value upheld on a weekly basis by the National Enquirer.

Linton opens with a quick series of sketches of “My First London Friends,” who included the painter, Samuel Laurence, George Henry Lewes (not yet involved with Mary Ann Evans), and the poet Walter Savage Landor. Laurence, we learn, “by his experiments in glazes, grounds, and varnishes, some of his oil paintings were soon ruined by peeling off in broad patches, or by sinking into the canvas.” And was married to “a tall, fine, handsome woman, who overtopped him in height and I should say surpassed him in weight.” Lewes, she tells us, “would discourse on the most delicate matters of physiology with no more perception that he was transgressing the bounds of propriety than if he had been a learned savage.” And Landor, who is otherwise portrayed by Linton as a man of great kindness and learning, was a bit challenged in the haberdashery department:

He was dressed in brown, and his whole style was one of noticeable negligence. His clothes were unbrushed and shabby; his shirt-front was coarse and plain, like a nightshirt ; a frayed and not over-clean blue necktie, carelessly knotted, was awry; his shoes were full of bumps and bosses like an apple pie….

Linton goes on to discuss Thackeray and Dickens, contrasted the two men in both character and literary style for pages before adding the caveat, “I did not know either man intimately, but if not the rose itself, I knew those who stood near.” For their sakes, we can be grateful, since she quickly adds, with ominous tone, “Many secret confidences were passed on to me, which, of course, I have kept sacred; and both men would have been surprised had they known how much I knew of things uncatalogued and unpublished.”

She concludes with a chapter on “A First Meeting with George Eliot” in which she offers her timeliness comparison of the great author to a kangaroo. But not before polishing off a sampling of the women writers from the generation before hers — or, as Linton describes them, “remnants of a palaeozoic age.” These include Jane Porter, once celebrated for her historical tales such as The Scottish Chiefs, but in Linton’s eyes, “a kid of ghost from the tomb — a living monolith of pre-historic times.” Sadly, Linton confesses that “Charlotte Bronte I never saw; nor Harriet Martineau….” Lucky ladies. Linton only met Mrs. Norton only once, but that was enough to slip a quick knife in (it was “in later years, when her beauty was more a memory than a possession”).

Needless to say, the reader learns nothing of importance about George Eliot and far too much about Mrs. Linton’s squinted perspective on her contemporaries, and with her judgment that Eliot’s relationship with Lewes was nothing more than a house of cards, closes the cover on this short, brutish, and nasty book. Utterly forgettable and more than justly neglected, of course.

But after a long and heavy meal of Victorian seriousness, a palate cleanser nonetheless.


My Literary Life, by Mrs. Lynn Linton
London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1899

Gems from the Internet Archives: Women’s Autobiographies

Not having access to a major library, I often indulge my love of browsing in the Internet Archive. I’ll admit that it often requires much sifting through extraneous material to locate the occasional gem, but even after ten years I’m surprised at what I manage to find. Here, for example, is a selection of some exceptional autobiographical works by women, mostly published between the 1920 and 1960.

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Modeling My Life, by Janet Scudder (1926)

Born and raised in Terre Haute, Indiana, Janet Scudder was one of the first American women to make a name and career for herself as a sculptor. Passionate about art from childhood, she studied drawing and sculpture and then moved to Chicago, where she worked carving decorative features on furniture before being hired by Lorado Taft as one of his White Rabbits, a remarkable team of women sculptors who created dozens of statues and decorative friezes for buildings in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. She then traveled to Paris, where she studied under Frederick MacMonnies. She writes of the experience, “I’m sure, if I had known it when I was studying in MacMonnies’ Paris studio, the only woman among a number of men who were working from nude models, I should have seen the ghosts of the whole congregation of missionaries rising up in their wrath to denounce me.” She found Paris liberating, but hardly the sinpot it was considered in America: “Zulh Taft ([Lorado’s sister] and I were there quite alone, unchaperoned; she was studying painting in a studio, while I worked away at sculpture; we ate about in restaurants, we were thrown with all sorts of people who were responsible only to themselves, we had no one watching us and no one to whom we were accountable, we went to life classes in the evening and tramped home from school late at night and we felt as protected and safe from harm as though we had been living in the heart of a family in the Middle West.” She went on to Florence, where she began to create the classically-inspired fountains that became her specialty. Returning to the U. S., she struggled, but eventually managed to establish a reputation and a steady stream of clients. Modeling My Life ends with an account her return to France as part of a YWCA mission that helped care for and entertain troops with the American Expeditionary Force.

The Stone Wall: An Autobiography, by Mary Casals (1930)

The Stone Wall is something of a landmark in American LGBT history, perhaps the first autobiography in which the author openly acknowledges her attraction to another woman and their long and happy partnership. Born and raised on a New England farm to family with deep Puritan roots, Casal recalls having to defend herself from sexual assault from hired hands and other men while still a teen. She began to realize her feelings towards women early on, and had her first physical contact (kisses and hugs) with another woman while in college. She felt great pressure to conform to conventions, and even married a man, an entirely unsatisfying experience that ended in divorce after she gave birth to a stillborn child and, in her grief, fled to New York City. There, she came to peace with her feelings for the first time: “My city contact had caused me to look at myself less and less as a sexual monstrosity.” She writes candidly of the practical difficulties of finding ways to spend time with another woman in public, given the rigid social customs of the time, let alone taking the risk to express her feelings. It was not until she was in her thirties that she met her long-term lover, Juno, and they set up house together in an apartment in Greenwich Village. Today’s reader will probably cringe at a few aspects that date the book (she refers to homosexuals as “inverts”), but it’s a window into how one gay woman managed to make a life for herself in a time of considerable intolerance.

Louise Baker, playing tennis (press photo from 1955)
Louise Baker, playing tennis (press photo from 1955)
Out on a Limb, by Louise Baker (1946)

Reviewing Out on a Limb in the Saturday Review, Grace Frank quipped that Louise Baker could have easily called her book “The Leg and I,” in imitation of Betty Macdonald’s best-seller of the same period. The two books certainly share the same comic outlook, with every character an eccentric and every episode retold with tongue in cheek. While still a girl, Louise Baker was struck down by a passing automobile and had to have her right leg amputated. “When I regained consciousness ten days later in a white hospital bed, with the blankets propped over me like a canopy, I had one foot in the grave.” Such are the sort of puns with which Baker fills her book. Baker’s parents insisted that she make every effort to get along with her bi-pedal friends, and she soon developed a spirit of independence that led her, in the course of time, to learn to ski, skate, and play tennis (she was encouraged to write the book to provide inspiration to the many disabled veterans just returned from World War Two). She preferred using crutches to wearing an artificial leg, and accumulated a considerable “crutch wardrobe”: “Crutches don’t come in gay colors but any good enamel works the enhancing transformation. I am now just as likely to complain, ‘I haven’t got a crutch I’d wear to a dog fight,’ as I am to say, ‘I haven’t got a decent dress to my name.'” Baker also wrote a comic novel, Party Line, about the 43-year career of switchboard operator Elmira Johnson in the small town of Mayfield, California, and a humorous account of her time working in a boy’s boarding school in Arizona, Snips and Snails, which was made into a gawdawful movie, Her Twelve Men (1954).

Journey Down a Blind Alley, by Mary Borden (1946)

Published the same year as Out on a Limb, Borden’s book is its polar opposite in tone. The book recounts Borden’s experiences in organizing and leading the Hadfield-Spears Ambulance Unit throughout much of the Second World War, beginning in France in February 1940 and then, after evacuating to England and regrouping, in Syria and Egypt, and finally, in France again after D-Day. This was Borden’s second experience of battlefield nursing: she wrote of her time in field hospitals on the Western Front in The Forbidden Zone (1929). Borden, an American heiress and novelist (I featured her ambitious 1927 novel, Flamingo, here in 2009), was married to Brigadier General Edward Spears, who was Churchill’s military liaison with the French government up to its defeat and then with DeGaulle’s Free French forces. Much of Journey Down a Blind Alley is colored by a bitterness towards DeGaulle that stems in part from his at times petty treatment of Spears and in part from the many egos and attitudes among the French military with whom Borden had to deal, since the ambulance unit spent most of its time assigned to support Free French forces. She does admit that much of the difficulties had their roots in the complexity of interests among the French: “Looking back I realized now that the confusion and discord in the hospital reflected what was happening throughout France. Was not France herself in the winter of 1945 a medley of discordant elements with her F.F.I. and F.T.P., her heroic resistance and her bogus resistance, her Petainists and her milice and her armies from overseas who were straining their strength to the utmost limit of endurance so that France should not be said to have been liberated by strangers?” Journey Down a Blind Alley offers a sobering antidote to anyone still harboring an inclination to view the Second World War in simple good-and-bad terms.

lilliansmithjourney

The Journey, by Lillian Smith (1956)

“I went on this journey to find an image of the human being that I could feel proud of,” Lillian Smith writes at the start of The Journey. Smith, whose 1944 best-seller, Strange Fruit, was one of the first books to openly deal with segregation and racism in the South, finds herself reconsidering memories from her childhood and decides to travel along the coastal roads of South Carolina and George, “trying to recover the feel of the country where my family once
lived.” Along the way, she encounters people with varying views of life, race, and faith, including a motel owner whose ideas of progress, she realizes, come from a very different place than hers:

The manager of the motor court came to my door to offer a television set. He was of the swamp country, I saw now, as he stood there. He had the look that is left on a face when hookworm and malaria and malnutrition have done their destructive work early in life. And in his speech were the old accents which were natural to the wire grass and swamp people who found schooling as hard to come by in the old days as shelter and food. People who, in my childhood, were almost as remote from books and learning and science and art and comforts as are the peasants of China and India.

Now he operated a motor court, looked at television, drove a Buick, took a trip in a plane each fall (so he told me) to the World Series, and read a newspaper.

As I made use of the conveniences with which our scientific age has filled this motor court, set close to the swamp — old and mysterious and deep-rooted in time as our human past — I kept thinking of this man.

“Everything in the place is modrun,” he proudly told me, as he flung open the door to show me the mauve-colored lavatory and the mauve-colored toilet and mauve-colored toilet paper. And as I stared at the splendor I knew that his sanitary facilities as a child had been limited to a wash pan, a lean-to privy and the ancient corncob. No wonder he was proud of participating in these modern times.

As with many books, the best parts of The Journey are those that deal with the specific, the individual. As Orville Prescott wrote in his New York Times review, when Smith “writes about people she has known — quoting their conversation and telling their stories — she does so with sure skill and considerable emotional power.” However, “When she writes about abstract ideas she occasionally lapses into spasms of embarrassingly lush rhetoric and passages where her generous feeling is obvious, but where her precise meaning is lost….”

Dickey Chapell, 1959
Dickey Chapell, 1959
What’s a Woman Doing Here?, by Dickey Chapelle (1962)

Dickey Chapelle rarely followed a conventional path in her life. At age sixteen, she was studying aeronautical engineering on a scholarship to M. I. T.. Though she flunked out after two years, her love of airplanes and flying remained, and she earned her pilot’s license, paying for lessons with articles she sold to aviation magazines. When her husband was stationed to an Army unit in Panama after Pearl Harbor and she was told that wives could not accompany the men, she figured out that she could follow as an accredited journalist, and her career as a war correspondent began. Chapelle worked as both reporter and photographer. Her first combat assignment took her to Iwo Jima a week after the first landings. There she had a sudden wake-up call when encountering a wounded Marine whose “story probably is one of the reasons I’ve kept on being a chronicler of wars”:

After I took his picture, while the chaplain administered the last rites as the corpsman began transfusing him, he came back to consciousness for a moment. His eyes rested on me. He said, “Hey, who you spyin’ for?”

“The folks back home, Marine.”

“The folks-back home-huh? Well-fuck the folks back home,” he rasped. Then he closed his eyes. I didn’t see where his stretcher was carried.

After we had ceased loading for the day, his voice haunted me. What lay behind that raw reflex answer? What dear-John-I-know-you-understand letter? What other betrayal?

I remembered his wound. A piece of a giant mortar shell had sliced across his stomach. So I went down into the abdominal ward with my notebook in my hand. There were no names in it yet because I wasn’t willing to hold up moving stretchers while I spelled out names. But I had copied the dogtag numbers of each man as I made his picture. The nurses’ clipboard listed the serial numbers of the men being treated. The number I wanted wasn’t there. I thought perhaps I had been mistaken about the kind of wound he had, so I tried to find him in the other wards, the other decks, even those of the officers. I couldn’t find his number.

There was only one more set of papers aboard. This showed the dogtag numbers of the men who had died on deck. The number for which I was looking was near the top of the list.

So I think I was the last person to whom he was able to talk. And I had heard him die cursing what I thought he had died to defend.

It was my first and most terrible encounter with the barrier between men who fight, and those for whom the poets and the powers say they fight.

Chapelle went on to report on the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, on the U. S. Marine intervention in Lebanon, on Castro’s war against Batista in Cuba, and on the civil war in Algeria. She was captured by the Russians while accompanying a group of Hungarian resistance fighters along the border with Austria in 1956 and spent seven years in a Budapest jail. She had strong anti-Communist views and, with her husband Tony Chapelle, formed a relief organization, AVISO (American Voluntary Information Services Overseas), that provided food and information support on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the years following the Second World War. She was killed in Vietnam on November 4, 1965 while on patrol with a Marine platoon near Chu Lai. She was the first female American war correspondent killed in action. A selection of Chapelle’s photographs was published on the Washington Post website in December 2015 and over 500 of her pictures are available online at the Wisconsin Historical Society website.

The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell, by Storm Jameson (1945)

maryherveyrussell
I found this intriguing book on the Internet Archive (link), started reading it, and kept on and on, wondering where its meandering and, at times, mirage-like thread would lead. By the time I realized that it didn’t fully qualify as neglected (it’s been reissued, along with over a dozen other titles by Storm Jameson, as an e-book by Bloomsbury Publishing), it was too late.

Although Jameson presents it as the journal of the fictional Mary Hervey Russell, daughter of the domineering Sylvia (portrayed with both empathy and acidity in The Captain’s Wife) and her husband, captain of various small freighters, the intersections between the fictional Mary and the real-life Storm Jameson are too many to mistake this as anything but Jameson’s own journal, lightly disguised. It’s also not always a journal, as it includes a short play featuring Odysseus and a conversation about contemporary English poetry conducted by the corpses of several British soldiers killed during the German invasion of France in 1940.

Many of the entries are undated, but one can safely say that the journal covers the period between the Sudetenland crisis of 1938 and early 1943. Much of the first half of the book deals with the fears and trials of European intellectuals that Russell/Jameson encounters and assists in her role as president of the British branch of PEN, and the second half with her experiences during the first years of World War Two, including the Blitz and rationing. While I initially thought Jameson’s reflections on these contemporary events would be the most interesting parts of the book, there is often such a relentless seriousness that too much of it becomes tedious. (Or ridiculous: “Turning her back on us, France is bequeathing us a summer. Very kind. It would be kinder still if she sent us her Fleet.”)

Instead, perhaps the strongest connecting thread in the book is that of Russell/Jameson’s memories and emotions about her family. Her mother was imperious, selfish, unloving, and dismissive of her husband and children. Though seen from a distance of thirty years or more, her actions and words left wounds still raw. Jameson mourns the loss of her brother, a pilot killed in the First World War and then, just at the end, of her sister, killed in a German bombing raid. And she reflects upon the parallels between her family’s small dramas and the great changes she has witnessed in her lifetime:

Mine is the last generation brought up to know a great many hymns. And the last which remembers, as a thing felt, the Victorian certainties, hollow as these were, wormed inside, in 1900. Isolated, sarcastically indifferent to the rest of England, our Victorianism was almost of 1840. I rebelled against it, but it had formed and deformed me; even my revolt was filial. My deepest self, when I am conscious — you won’t expect me to answer for any sleeping or disinterested self — is patient, stubborn, a little cracked in its dislike of being told what to do. Anything which is repeated a great many times, a chair, a sentiment, words, repels it.

The lyricism of some of Russell/Jameson’s recollections are almost Proustian in their intensity, and I will have to excerpt one later to illustrate this.

While some parts of The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell are abstruce, dated, histrionic, or simply tedious, there are also some wonderful passages:

My landlady, a woman about forty, was in her room on the ground floor, the door open, while her hair was waved. Looking in the glass she could watch it as well as note who came in and out. In a monotonous voice she was telling the hairdresser that her husband had spent the night “with those women”, and was asleep in his room. “First thing when he wakes he’ll ask me to give him a clean shirt, and then what money I have in the drawer. What disillusion!”

The lines of her mouth formed a single word, of surprise and bitterness.

The streets here, behind their mask, unsmiling, of sunlight, are grey and hard with age. The life going on continuously, every inch occupied by it, in every room someone coughing, working, bartering, baking, or pressing offal into a cheap pate, ironing, giving birth, dying, was self-supported and self-devouring, completely cut off, by a hard membrane, from the soil.

This was the eighth book Jameson published during the war, and over the course of a sixty-year career, she published well over five dozen books. As with Ethel Mannin, Phyllis Bottome, and a number of her other contemporaries, Jameson’s work was a remarkable combination of the prolific, the popular, the psychological, and the political. It’s hard to imagine all of these qualities coexisting in a successful writer today.


The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell, by Storm Jameson
London: Macmillan, 1945

Nancy Shippen: Her Journal Book, edited by Ethel Armes (1935) – reviewed by Agnes Repplier

nancyshippen

[Editor’s note: Nancy Shippen: Her Journal Book, subtitled, “The International Romance of a Young Lady of Fashion of Colonial Philadelphia with Letters to Her and About Her,” compiled and edited by Ethel Armes, was published in 1935 and is available free on the Internet Archive: Link.

The following review, written by the remarkable Philadelphia essayist, Agnes Repplier, appeared in the March 1936 issue of The American Mercury and is available online at unz.org: Link.]

The Masculine Era

“Surrounded by lovers, I could at first see you without great danger,” wrote M. Louis Guillaume Otto, afterwards Compte de Mosloy, to Miss Nancy Shippen, aged sixteen; and, reading his words, we are irresistibly reminded of Lydia Bennet, aged fifteen, “tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once.” The close of the eighteenth century, whether it was closing in England or her colonies, saw little to fill a girl’s mind but costumes and lovers, followed in the course of time by marriage and domesticity. “I was formed for the world, and educated to live in it,” said Nancy a few years later, when her world was shrinking and darkening, and when the three hours consumed in dressing for a “bride’s visit” seemed no longer worth the while.

And what did it mean to be educated for the world in I779? Miss Shippen at fifteen could play a little on the harpsichord, sing a little “with timidity”, speak a little French, dance creditably, and embroider very well. While still at school she worked a set of ruffles for General Washington, no easy task as, in the absence of lace, the threads had to be drawn to give them a filmy look. She does not appear to have been very intelligent, but she was good tempered and docile, and she married the wealthy man who was her father’s choice rather than the agreeable young attaché to the French Legation who was her own.

Generally speaking this was a course to be commended. Fathers have longer sight and clearer vision than do girls under twenty. But in this particular case, prudence failed to justify itself. Colonel Henry Beekman Livingston had everything to recommend him save the kind of character and disposition which would have enabled a wife to live comfortably by his side. Nancy was not long suffering. After two years of profound discomfort, she took herself and her baby daughter back to her father’s home in Philadelphia, thus starting the endless complications which, in that staid and conventional era, beset the defiant wife. For Colonial America was a man-made world. Unmarried women had far more liberty, according to French visitors, than was good for them; but, once married, they fell into line, content to reign absolutely in their own domain, and to assume the responsibilities thus entailed:

To take the burden, and have the power,
And seem like the well-protected flower.

There was a great deal of chivalrous speech (it was the fashion of the time); and behind it a hard masculine sense that had nothing in common with the deep sentimentality of our day.

Nancy Shippen Livingston was to find this out to her cost. Her husband made no great effort to compel her return to him; but insisted firmly that the child should be placed under the care of his mother, Margaret Beekman Livingston, the only person in the confused narrative who commands our unfaltering respect. It is a relief to turn from unreason and emotionalism to Gilbert Stuart’s masterly portrait of this unpretentiously great lady; to the firm mouth, the amused eyes, the serene repose of a woman who understood life, and conquered it. Her generous support of her daughter-in-law is the best assurance that the unhappy young woman deserved more sympathy than she got.

To seek a divorce was so unusual a proceeding in 1789 that Nancy’s uncle, Mr. Arthur Lee, considered her desire for freedom as a joke; a joke in very bad taste, he admitted, but none the less absurd. That mysterious crime, mental cruelty, which has today been stretched to cover any action which an ordinarily human husband might perform in the course of twenty-four hours, was still a hundred years off. It would have provoked ribald laughter from a hard-headed eighteenth-century legislature. Henry Livingston was as safe then (he did not deserve safety) as he would be defenseless today. It is indicative of the decency of Colonial America that the word alimony was never mentioned by his supporters or by his wife’s.

The rest of the Journal Book, which is the raison d’etre of Miss Armes’ massive volume, is filled with pictures of social and domestic life in the days which charm us by their seeming serenity, but which must often have been empty and dull. Dull certainly for young Mrs. Livingston who loved frivolity and could not get enough of it; who hated the country which grew “more disagreeable” to her every day she lived in it; who tried hard to read Blair’s “excellent sermons”; and who wept copiously over The Sorrows of Young Werther. “There is luxury in some kinds of grief,” she remarks with unwonted sapience. Always in the offing is the good-looking Compte de Mosloy who would gladly have espoused his early love had she been free; but who filled up his time by marrying two other women, who made him reasonably happy.

We have no doubt that life today is too crowded, too noisy, too assertive, too pretentious in matters of the intellect, too combative about material things. Standards are lowered year by year to meet the demands of mediocrity. Yet out of this welter emerges clear and plain an effort to aid the uneasy human beings who know only that things go wrong. We are all pushing harder than is seemly, but perhaps we push to some purpose. The Sorrows of Young Werther echoed “the dim-rooted pain of thinking men” — hard to heal, but comparatively easy to forget.


Nancy Shippen: Her Journal Book, compiled and edited by Ethel Armes
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1935

Double Exposure, by Gloria Vanderbilt and Thelma Lady Furness (1958)

doubleexposureYou don’t read Double Exposure, the dual-narrated memoir of identical twins and society dames Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt and Thelma Morgan, Lady (later Viscountess) Furness as literature, but as a combination of specimen and spectacle. And as the latter, it offers more nooks and crevices than a Mandelbrot set.

For those into abnormal psychology, there is their half-Irish, half-Chilean and 100% drama-queen mother, Laura Delphine Kilpatrick Morgan. Nora Ephron once wrote that, “If you give your kids a choice, your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they’d choose suicide in the next room.” If you asked Gloria and Thelma, they’d go for the Hawaii option: anything to get away from that woman. Their daddy, on the other hand, the fine, dignified and long-suffering diplomat, Harry Hays Morgan (Senior), could do no wrong. Is it any wonder that both girls pretty much marry the first men who show any interest in them and who shared the outstanding attribute of being about the age of their father when they were born?

No matter, for each is quickly disposed with. Thelma’s first husband, Jimmy Vail Converse, grandson of AT&T co-founder Theodore Vail, turns out to be an abusive and bankrupt alcoholic. A quick trip to California produces a divorce, followed in about a year by marriage to Marmaduke Furness, British shipping magnate and member of the House of Lords … and also over twenty years her senior. His good manners and huge fortune could not hold a candle to the likes of Edward Prince of Wales, and Divorce Number Two followed within eight years of Divorce Number One. Sadly, Thelma lost out to another American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, and had to drown her sorrows in a quick fling with Prince Aly Khan (later husband to Rita Hayworth). She managed somehow to overlook the fact that, for once, she was the older one.

Meanwhile, Gloria fell for and married Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, heir to the fortune established by “Commodore” Vanderbilt. Gloria and Reggie got along famously (sorry), but sadly, Reggie had to go and ruin things by choking to death on his own blood due to a mysterious throat hemorrhage medical condition he had kept secret from her. A man whose chief accomplishment, according to his Wikipedia entry, was that, “He was the founder and president of many equestrian organizations,” Reggie left his widow and daughter (the Gloria Vanderbilt of fashion fame) comfortably off. Unfortunately, he and his lawyers left open a legal loophole through which his sister, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (yes, those Whitneys, swooped a few years later, making off with daughter Gloria and most of (mother) Gloria’s money. Nothing for it but a few more affairs. Oh, and a few years after that, daughter Gloria and lawyers swooped again, took mother Gloria’s annual allowance, and donated it to a charity for the blind. Had the expression been invented back then, one imagines (daughter) Gloria’s lawyers shouting, “BOO-YAH!”

But wait–there’s more! There are the rare and elusive Vanderbilt siblings–three of them. You have to keep a sharp eye out for them, though: no sooner than you spot one and it’s off into the mists for another decade or two. There are more transatlantic steamship trips than there are Washington-New York shuttle flights. There are their many close, intimate acquaintances–humble folk “such as Peggy Stout, who married dashing Lawrence Copley Thaw and later divorced him; Jimmy and Dorothy Fargo, whose name is associated with Pony Express fame; the two daughters of Mrs. Richard T. Wilson, Marion and Louise; Juan Trippe, now president of Pan-American Airways; the two Jimmys, Leary and O’Gorman; and Margaret Power, who had introduced us to Margaret Hennessy. They were both from Montana; their families at one time jointly owned the Anaconda copper mines.” And you: who do you watch polo with? Thought so.

Kirkus Reviews praised the twin authors for “sparing no detail no matter how unorthodox,” but half the fun of this book are the details they left out. Like, say, a moral and ethical framework. As Thelma is falling in love with Prince Edward, she and “Duke” Furness head off to Africa for a spot of safari and shooting. Lying in her tent one night, Thelma wails, “Why did I have to be the big white hunter?” A short ellipsis later, and she totes up her toll: “I shot an elephant, a lion, a rhino, and a water buffalo.” Even in those days, scruples were so passé. If you ever needed proof positive that the very rich are different from you and I, take a stroll through Double Exposure. For us proles, it’s available for free on the Internet Archive (Link).


from Double Exposure, by Gloria Vanderbilt and Thelma Lady Furness
New York: David McKay and Company, 1958