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Long Reviews

The editor’s own in-depth reviews, excerpts, and background information on selected neglected books. This section is the centerpiece of this site.

The Little White God, by Edwin Brock (1962)

Cover of The Little White God by Edwin Brock

This is a guest post by Stephen Bloomfield

Edwin Brock only wrote one novel.

In 1962, after eight years as a Police Constable 258 of the Metropolitan Police between 1951 and 1959, he published The Little White God, an early example of what later came to be called a ‘police procedural’ novel.

Why then, if he only published one novel, is he of any interest?

First, because Brock went on to publish some very good poetry – quite a lot of it – and two of his poems are among the most anthologized of the twentieth century. So, the novel is an interesting waystation on the path of his development.

Second, because the novel is worth something in its own right. After a shaky few opening paragraphs, it develops strongly and gives an intriguing view of an unusual episode in an ordinary copper’s life in a suburban division of ‘the Met’ during the post-war years. It describes the perpetual battle between an efficient police force and a justice system striving for fairness; it lays bare, very vividly, the universal battle between the ‘doers’ and the paper-shufflers in any organisation; and it analyses, softly and subtly as it goes along, some deep moral issues about right and wrong.

Brock was born in 1927 to a working-class family in the middle-class suburb of Dulwich in South London. Books were apparently few in the Brock household and the atmosphere was occasionally ‘turbulent’. Brock won a scholarship to the local grammar school but left after completing his school certificate, the family lacking the funds or ambition to push his education any further.

Too young to be ‘called up’ in the war years, he completed his National Service in the Royal Navy and ended up in Hong Kong waiting to be “demobbed’ in 1947. Listless and bored, Brock began to read anything he could get his hands on at the NAAFI (the British servicemen’s welfare organisation) library and, finally, was reduced to borrowing a book of poetry.

This proved to be the opening of a door. After reading the paperback poems, Brock knew he wanted to write. As his fellow poet, obituarist and friend, Anthony Thwaite, would put it later, Brock thought that most activity is a means of defining oneself; and for Brock, poetry was the best means, of doing that.

After leaving the Royal Navy, Brock secured a job as a trade journalist and used the free time it afforded to write poetry, most unpublished, as a way of developing his proficiency and style. He gradually accumulated publication credits in small, literary poetry magazines of the time. He married in 1949 and, with a young family needing the regularity and the prospect of increasing income, two years later he joined the Met. He continued to write poetry.

His break came when the editor of the Times Literary Supplement published a few of his poems, accepted on their merits, without any knowledge of who or what the author was. The TLS is famously intellectual, so publication caused quite a stir in literary circles, when his identity as a working policeman with no more than a grammar school education became known.

This led to a brief flash of celebrity. when a journalist from the Daily Express interviewed him and the paper’s editor gave the resulting piece a full-page splash. Far from the reprimand expected for giving an unauthorised interview,– which appeared in the Daily Express as ‘PC258 CONFESSES I’M A POET –THE THINGS HE THINKS UP AS HE POUNDS THE BEAT’ – Brock’s revelation was received tolerantly.

In 1959, he left the police and joined the advertising firm of Mather and Crowther as a copywriter. It was here that he mined his experiences “pounding the beat”, as the Express had it, and produced The Little White God. The novel was published by the prestigious firm of Hutchinson (no, unfortunately not Constable). The Little White God was never published in the USA, despite the American readerships’ appetite for police novels (although British readers were happy to lap up American crime fiction in all its forms) possibly because of some of the unfamiliarity of the context and the commercial risk associated with a first novel.

The Little White God describes the downfall of Detective Constable Mike Weller, a (generally) good and conscientious policemen, who, like most of his colleagues, is tuned in to the rhythms of the streets he patrols. He is an alpha male without being macho; aware that only a thin line of fate separates him as a policeman from many of the criminals he brushes up against, coming as they did from the same background. They drink at the same pubs, live in the same areas, marry women from the same background– and accept the rules that police, crooks, the courts and prison dance to in the game of justice in post-war Britain. But the men who join the police become “Little White Gods” and their downfall, if it comes, is even harder.

‘Like most of his colleagues’ does not mean all of them, though. Weller has the misfortune to report to a superior officer who does not have the tolerance Brock himself experienced as a PC. Although happily married, Weller cannot resist having an affair with the wife of a small-time criminal he has arrested for ‘sus” — suspicion of attempting to break into a locked shop. The relative triviality of this offence and the three-month sentence it attracts is crucial to the timing of Mike and Rosie’s affair. It is a criticism later levelled at Weller that he could have “fitted him up” better by charging him with by going equipped for breaking and entering.

The affair develops into much more than Weller anticipates. The crook seeks revenge by putting stolen goods in the shed at the back of Weller’s house and then writing anonymously to the Station Sergeant at Weller’s police station. Through force of circumstances, the sergeant is forced to report the anonymous letter to the new senior officer in charge of the station who is out to make an impact. The officer, in turn, outwits his divisional chief in a trial of procedural strength and Weller is the victim of the struggle.

The Little White God is structured in two parts, the first being the development of the affair and the receipt of the letter, the second what happens afterwards. It is very definitely a book of two halves in terms of writing style, as well. While the second half is tight and falls very much into the category of a ‘police procedural’ the first half is, initially, slightly over-written:

Outside the Court, the sun was doing its best but making heavy weather of it. It would look out of the clouds for a minute or two and then the sky would shut up to give the wind a chance. Round the corner it blew as though it were coming straight from Siberia. It was the kind of wind that seemed to make your clothing feel transparent.

And later:

On top of the bus the wind came at them like a four-ale bar pug – all rush and no science – until they turned a corner and it retired out of breath.

“Transparent”? “Four-ale bar pug”? Apart from the confusing analogies, Brock is obviously in poet mode in starting the book.

But the narrative soon gathers its stride. The descriptions of South London suburbia and its residents becomes more fluent and less contrived, more based in the reality of Brock’s experience — and Mike Weller’s fate:

It was as if there were two police forces. One was the real one which caught criminals and the other was the one that existed in some high-up’s office at the Yard. The real force was there to catch criminals and you caught them the best way you could. You knew who they were and if you couldn’t get them down according to Judge’s Rules, you got them down in your own way. Mike could see nothing wrong with that. He was paid to catch thieves and he bloody-well caught them.

But it is this attitude that proves to be Mike’s undoing. His ambitious station commander has aspirations for a position at the Yard and has the mindset to go with it. In his eyes, Weller’s having an affair with a criminal’s wife is the greater crime and, thwarted at not being able to take Mike out ‘fairly’, he ensures that Weller pays for his indiscretion. Brock keeps the reader uncertain about Weller’s fate almost to the end of the book.

Weller is demoted from detective to beat policeman and subjected to all the petty and largely mindless administrative procedures that the lowest on the pecking order have to put up with. He loses his wife and his marriage, probably keeps the love of Rosie but certainly loses his livelihood in a grand gesture of resignation.

To the British reading public at the time, this unsentimental insider’s view of the police would have been a marked change from the prevailing conventions. At the time, the most famous fictitious British policemen was Dixon of Dock Green — an avuncular sergeant close to retirement age who had seen it all and who recounted police-station stories of the “it’s a fair cop, guv” type on television on Saturday evenings. The revolutionary and grittier Z Cars (which influenced many later British police series) was just about entering its stride but the cynical tone of Line of Duty and its Chief Inspector Hastings of AC12 (who would become a British cultural icon in his own right), with its unremitting focus on internal corruption, would have to wait a generation or more of profound social change.

Despite his upbringing and background, Brock is only hit-and-miss when it came to the novel’s dialogue. Conversations in the workplace and between policemen are clear, unstilted, direct but with the necessary amount of ellipsis of ordinary dialogue between people with shared conventions and background. Conversations between the male and female characters are less convincing. Aside from using the word “gel” (hard ‘g’) to stand for the South Londoner’s catch-all term for a woman, Brock offers few other stylistic clues to accent or educational background in the male-female exchanges. The 1950s lower classes in Peckham are suspiciously precise about grammar and syntax — especially Weller’s paramour Rosie.

But this is carping criticism. The novel is not dialogue-dependent for its momentum, being as much an examination of social ideas, cultural customs and a dissection of moral attitudes.

Cover of Invisibility is the Art of Survival
Cover of Invisibility is the Art of Survival.

What then of Brock after The Little White God? In his first collection published in the US, Invisibility is the Art of Survival, the jacket biographical sketch states:

Born in London in 1927, Brock says he has spent the subsequent years waiting for something to happen, occupying his time as a sailor, journalist, policeman, and adman, in that order. Yet none of this, he feels, has touched him, “except with a fine patina of invisibility.” Poetry, however, is for him an act of self-definition “which sometimes goes so deep that you become what you have defined. And this,” he adds, “is the nearest thing to an activity I have yet found.” Thus in addition to being poetry editor of Ambit, Brock has published several volumes of his own. His first, An Attempt at Exorcism, was brought out in 1959, and was followed over the next decade by A Family Affair, With Love from Judas, a large selection in Penguin Modern Poets 8, and A Cold Day at the Zoo. Confronted with his work, American readers will agree with the critic Alan Pryce-Jones that Brock has written “some of the most observant and compassionate poems of our time–poems, moreover, in which the poet keeps his feet on the ground as skilfully as his head in the air.”

(Alan Pryce-Jones was the editor of the TLS who first spotted Brock’s poetry.)

The reviews that the Little White God received may also have contributed to Brock not writing another novel. The Times reviewer praised the novel’s “blatantly unvarnished authenticity” but Simon Raven (another now-neglected novelist) in The Spectator damned it with faint praise by saying that the documentary account was “smartly done in its way”. An anonymous reviewer in the TLS said that “the documentary element is the most valuable … but does not go deep…” while having “… sufficient vitality to complement the other more important side of the novel”. But perhaps what might have sealed the fate of further novelistic adventures was Anthony Burgess’s (rather unkind) conclusion in The Observer that “Brock is capable of better than” a documentary.

Brock probably got something out of his system with The Little White God. It was written at the same time as James Barlow, Allan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, John Braine, John Osborne, and the loose grouping that became known as the ‘Angry Young Men’ were active. So it was in good radical company. But Brock maintained that it was poetry that helped him to define himself, so the success he began to have with that – he joined the editorial staff of the quarterly literary magazine Ambit in 1960 – probably meant he chose to concentrate on the strong suit of poetry rather than risk further half-hearted praise with novels.

Like most poets – and many prose authors – Brock could not make a living out of his writing alone, so for 30 years he stayed in advertising at Mather and Crowther, rising up the company, through its mergers, to end as a director and originating the famous “No FT. No comment.” slogan along the way. He edited the poetry section of Ambit for nearly four decades (1960-97), rubbing shoulders with the likes of J. G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi and Carol Ann Duffy.

The Little White God was an early starter in the field of the British police procedural. The description of the investigation by the ‘rubber-heelers’ –Scotland Yard’s internal affairs men, who are the catalysts of Weller’s demise – is, as the publisher noted, documentary in style and as different from the aristocratic, amateur detective novels beloved of the Golden Age as chalk from cheese. Changing social attitudes from the war and then post-war austerity did away with that.

Those who only know Brock’s poetry will find it an interesting read since it fits well with his early poetical works and fills a gap, demonstrating the importance of experience in his writing. It is a deceptively angry book — angry at the frustration of advancement because of artificial barriers; impatient with rule-bound satraps who value mindless procedure above sensible outcome: hinting at the beginnings of rebellion.

Those who are fresh to Brock may well find that the novel is an enticing stepping stone to a poet of considerable talent in encapsulating the significance to the individual of common hurts. It was only as he got older that he got mellower. His initial works were partly autobiographical, coloured by the unhappiness of his first marriage. Later they became broader and less personal – more infused, paradoxically, like The Little White God –with the experience of ordinary people of the hurts inflicted by the world. Two of his poems– “Five Ways to Kill a Man” and “Song of the Battery Hen” — were particularly popular with compilers of anthologies.

As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.

The Little White God, by Edwin Brock
London: Hutchinson, 1962

Life or Theater? An Autobiographical Play by Charlotte Salomon (1943/1981)

Charlotte Salomon’s “autobiographical play” Life or Theater? is often described as a work of Holocaust art. It’s true that Salomon created it while living as a Jewish German refugee in the south of France and that she was arrested, shipped to Auschwitz, and murdered there on 10 October 1943. And the repression of the Jews by the Nazis is a backdrop whose shadows grow longer as the story reaches its climax.

But Life or Theater? is first and foremost a story of private tragedies, tragedies whose full details have only gradually come to light over the course of decades.

Beween July 1940 and February 1943, Salomon, daughter of a wealthy Berlin surgeon, Dr. Albert Salomon, told a story in nearly 1,300 paintings on 10×13-inch sheets of paper with a narrative of 32,000 words of dialogue and description inscribed on their backs. From these, she selected 769, which she entrusted to her French doctor in Villefranche, with instructions for him to pass them on to Ottilie Moore, the German-American millionaire in whose villa Salomon and her grandparents were living. A few months later, she and her husband were arrested and deported to Auschwitz, where she was executed, probably on the day of their arrival.

Charlotte Salomon and her grandparents in France, 1939 or 1940.
Charlotte Salomon and her grandparents in France 1939 or 1940.

By the time of her arrest, Salomon’s grandfather was dead. She had killed him, preparing an omelette laced with the poison veronal. As Toni Bentley wrote in her 2017 New Yorker article, “Salomon’s crime that morning was not a mercy killing to save the old man from the Nazis; this was entirely personal.”

Life or Theater? itself is entirely personal, despite its historical context. Every character is someone from Salomon’s life. Its dramas are family dramas, its emotions individual and specific to her. And it is a work of self exploration, though the explorer admits her expedition is incomplete. As she wrote in a preface to what she described as “Ein Singespiel” — a libretto, if you will:

Since I myself needed a year to discover the significance of this strange work, many of the texts and tunes, particularly in the first paintings, elude my memory and must — like the creation as a whole, so it seems to me — remain shrouded in darkness.

The suicide of Charlotte Knare.

The story opens in darkness. The first painting shows a Berlin street at night, what appears to be a bridge, and a sequence of figures — a woman at first but growing less distinct — leading to the darkness at the lower lefthand corner. “One November day, Charlotte Knarre left her parents’ home and threw herself into the water,” the text tells us. Knarre is the name she gives her mother’s family, the Grünwalds; Charlotte Knarre is the aunt for whom she is named, the aunt whose suicide four years before Salomon’s birth proved only the first in a series of deaths that shaped her life.

In the next scene, Dr. Albert Kann, a young military doctor, courts and marries Franziska Knarre. Charlotte is born in 1917, but her mother suffers from depression and, within six panels afterwards, is shown taking an overdose of opium. Though she is found before it can take effect, she then jumps to her death while recouperating at her parents’ apartment. In reality, nine years passed between Charlotte’s birth and her mother’s suicide.

charlotte waits for her mother to come at night
Charlotte waits for her mother to come at night.

Charlotte struggles to understand her mother’s death. She leaves a letter on her mother’s gravestone: “Dear Mommy, please write to me.” She sits up nights expecting her mother to visit, like an angel.

Her life improves somewhat with the arrival of a governess, but then, in 1930, Dr. Kann meets and marries Paulinka (Paulina Lindberg in real life), an aspiring singer. For much of the next few years and several hundred pages, the focus shifts from Charlotte to Paulinka — her increasing popularity as a singer, the obsession of an older man, a theater director, for her and then Paulinka’s own obsession with a poet and mystic named Amadeus Daberlohn (“penniless Mozart”).

For Charlotte, Paulinka is a figure of fascination for her beauty, talent, and glamorous lifestyle — and a source of intense jealousy, first as a competitor for her father’s affection and then as Charlotte herself becomes obsessed with Daberlohn. At the same time, Charlotte learns from her grandmother that she has experienced even more tragedies that the suicide of their two daughters. Her brother and sister also took their lives; her husband has had affairs, stays with her only for the sake of appearances.

Der Sturmer announcement of boycott of Jews
Der Sturmer announcement of the boycott of Jews.

History begins to intrude upon this private story at the start of Act Two: “The swastika — a symbol of bright hope!” reads the text over a picture of brownshirts marching down a street, featuring the date “30.I.1933.” By the next panel, however, Der Sturmer announces the boycott of Jewish businesses. Dr. Kann is dismissed from his university post.

Two panels of Daberlohn's monologues.
Two panels of Daberlohn’s monologues.

But the greater shadow that descends over Charlotte’s world is that of Amadeus Daberlohn. Page after page after page appears with a series of his head and lines of dialogue –or rather, monologue. At one point, there are fifteen straight pages of his head and his talk; at another, nearly a dozen of Daberlohn shown reclining, the images and words growing more rushed and indistinct. One has to wonder whose madness is being depicted: Daberlohn’s or Charlotte’s?

Charlotte and Daberlohn in a park.
Charlotte and Daberlohn in a park.

Charlotte and Daberlohn meet away from the Kann’s home. He encourages her affection: “You are so beautiful. When you smile, your hands smile too.” The two are shown kissing. Embracing on a park bench. Arm-in-arm on the street.

And the focus shifts again, from Charlotte and Daberlohn to Daberlohn himself. To his attempt to create a masterpiece, an adaptation of the story of Adam and Eve into a contemporary setting. He superimposes this story onto his own relationship with Charlotte. Then he turns his back on her and his “masterpiece” becomes a version of the Resurrection blended with that of Orpheus and Eurydice. “My hopes, therefore, life with the future souls of young girls who are willing to tread the path of Christ, the Orpheus path,” he writes. Daberlohn’s “masterpiece” seems more than a little creepy as portrayed by Charlotte, still clearly infatuated with the man at a distance of some years.

Suddenly, it is 1938, and the public and private tragedies converge and accelerate. The assassination of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by the Jewish exile Herschel Grynszpan incites the destruction of Jewish shops and properties in Kristallnacht. Dr. Kann is sent to prison at Sachsenhausen. Paulinka manages to get him released and they leave Germany for the Netherlands.

After Grandmother Knarre's suicide attempt.
After Grandmother Knarre’s suicide attempt.

Charlotte joins her grandparents in France. There, her grandmother attempts to hang herself. In the aftermath, her grandfather reveals more dark family secrets. The grandmother makes another attempt, throwing herself out a window like her daughter had. And succeeding like her daughter had.

Charlotte talks with her grandfather
Charlotte talks with her grandfather.

Yet, somehow, Charlotte manages to find hope. She draws energy from the warmth and beauty of southern France. “You know, Grandpa,” she says, “I have a feeling the whole world has to be put together again.” To which he replies, “Oh, go ahead and kill yourself and put an end to all this babble!”

“She had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths,” Charlotte writes of her work over the year following her grandmother’s suicide. “And from that came: Life or Theater?”

This ending omits the poisoned omelette. And none of the words in Salomon’s text touch on the question that naturally arises when one learns of it: what was Salomon’s real motivation for killing her grandfather? It is hard not to look for answers in the pictures, however. Is there another untold story, a story about abuse, lurking in the many dark pages of Life or Theater?, written beneath the pages and pages of talking heads and feverish monologues, in the frenzied speed that seems to have driven Salomon’s brush throughout so much of this project?

The last panel of Life or Theater?
The last panel of Life or Theater?

The last image shows Charlotte in a bathing suit, kneeling on the beach, looking out over the blue Mediterranean as she paints or sketches. On her back are painted the words Leben Oder Theater. When I first read the book, I assumed the question was being posed as a choice between Life (as in real life) and Theater (as in Art). But now I wonder if Salomon intended it to be read differently: as a choice between Life (her own desire to draw inspiration from the beauty around her, to put the world together again) and Theater, as in the Greek tragedy, the family drama that the women in her family seemed to feel condemned to sacrifice themselves to.

Life or Theater? has appeared several times in English, each time with more material as new papers and paintings are discovered. The best and most comprehensive was the 2017 edition from the Overlook Press. Unfortunately, this edition is already out of print and hard to find. Taschen’s edition from the same year is still available, though it’s slightly abridged. Previous versions appeared in 1963, with a foreword by the theologian Paul Tillich, and in 1981 following the exhibition of 250 paintings at the Jewish History Museum in Amsterdam.

In all cases, the book is presented as an art book — large and very heavy with its hundreds of pages of full-color images. But I think this does the book as a book some disservice. For it can also be seen as a graphic novel. Indeed, many of its images will seem familiar to today’s readers, much more accustomed to the presentation of graphic novels.

Take this image from early in the book, showing Charlotte’s mother and father at the hotel when they spend their wedding night. Three wordless panels as they progress up the staircase, into the room, and into the bed.

The wedding night of Charlotte's parents.
The wedding night of Charlotte’s parents.

In 1943, this would have seemed novel, more like three shots from a film than any painting. But we can easily picture similar images from a book by Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown or Jimmy Corrigan. And I do hope that one day some editor will have the courage to package the book in this way. Not only because it seems truer to the spirit of the book, but also because its readership will remain limited as long as reading it means holding a great ten-pound lump in the lap for hours at a time.

Life or Theater? is one of the most intense and moving works of autofiction I’ve ever read, and I highly encourage others to discover it, even in ten-pound lump form.

Life or Theater? by Charlotte Salomon
New York: Overlook Press, 2017

The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes (1954)

The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes Vol !-III

Most Americans couldn’t explain what the Department of the Interior does, so one could ask why anyone would want to read over 2,000 pages of the diary of the man who ran the department over eighty years ago. I suspect it’s easily the least likely candidate for the #1954 Club, the latest in Simon Thomas and Karen Langley’s twice-yearly call for readers to write about books published in a particular year. Most of the books people offer during these events are novels, and most of these by British women. When I looked through various lists of notable books from 1954, though, I had to pause when I came to The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Volume III: the Lowering Clouds, 1939-1941. Back in another century when I was obsessed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, I’d read Volume I: The First Thousand Days, 1933-1936 and started Volume II: The Inside Struggle, 1936-1939 before running out of steam. This seemed a fit occasion to tackle it again.

FDR’s first Cabinet, March 1933. Harold Ickes is second from left, back row.

It’s not unusual to be worn out by Harold Ickes. A lot of people were. Indeed, one of the tributes to FDR’s strength of character was his ability to put up with having Ickes in his Cabinet for the entire length of his Presidency, a record of Secretarial tenure exceeded by only one other person in America history. Ickes was often referred to in the popular press as a curmudgeon and in private conversations as many other things best left unrepeated. Walter Lippmann once called him “the greatest living master of the art of quarrelling.” As one of his biographers, Graham White, has written, “Ickes seemed to lack insight into his own motives, to be sometimes obtuse in understanding others, to become obsessed with certain goals to a degree that approached the irrational.” One Washington commentator described him as “a man of bad temper and good will,” and anyone who reads his diary will agree that those descriptors are in the right order.

Ickes was a classic American liberal. He started as a progressive Republican, followed Teddy Roosevelt to the Bull Moose Party, then became a Democrat to support candidates he saw as advancing the causes he believed in most: breaking up big corporate trusts, obtaining safe and fair conditions for working people, expanding the availability of public schools and housing, fulfilling the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment. He headed the Chicago chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1920s, arranged for the black contralto Marian Anderson to perform at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing in their auditorium in Washington, D.C. in 1939, opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. As Secretary of the Interior, he played a crucial role in the New Deal by running the Public Works Administration and helped greatly expand the number and size of National and state parks with the help of the Civilian Conservation Corps. When he finally stepped down from the Cabinet, it was in protest against what he saw as President Truman’s sanctioning of corruption and cronyism in the Federal Government.

Harold Ickes in 1937.
Harold Ickes in 1937.

But he was also handicapped by the dangerous combination of a big ego and a thin skin. FDR brought Ickes into the Cabinet to keep the support of the left wing of the Democratic Party, but he deliberately put him in charge of a department recognized by everyone as being in the second rank of the Executive Branch. A generation after Ickes, the reporter Stewart Alsop would write that, “Interior only becomes clearly visible on the horizon of Political Washington when there is a row about the redwoods, or the Indiana dunes, or shale oil,” and though the topics may have been different in the 1930s, nothing had changed in terms of visibility or importance in the intervening years.

The two great issues that tend to consume the attention and energy of American presidents are the domestic economy and national security. This is starkly illustrated by FDR’s time in office, which can be divided neatly into the period when he was primarily concerned with bringing the Great Depression to an end and the years when he was consumed with America’s involvement in the Second World War. Nothing got under Harold Ickes’s skin as much as the fact that he could only play a supporting role in these dramas.

It was a critical role at times, particularly in the first years of FDR’s administration, when Ickes organized and ran the Public Works Administration, which employed millions of workers on infrastructure projects such as the Grand Coulee Dam, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the chain of bridges connecting Key West to the Florida mainland. But Ickes could not be satisfied with merely being a good public administrator, as much as he more than anyone else at the time believed in the value of such figures.

Importance in a political context correlates to power, and political power take two forms: formal authority and influence. Of the two, influence tends to be the more highly sought after. No power is so contested in Washington as that of being able to get the President to listen to what you have to say. Harold Ickes was tenacious in getting on FDR’s agenda at least once every week or so, preferably one-on-one or in small groups, and Ickes’s diary continues to be a primary source for historians studying Roosevelt. “I lunched with the President”, “I told the President”, and similar statements appear hundreds of times in these pages.

Ickes felt comfortable offering FDR advice on topics well outside his portfolio. One of the statements most often quoted from the diary comes from an entry in February 1938 at which Ickes argued that the U.S. should lift its embargo on selling arms to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. FDR told him that he’d discussed the matter with the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader in the Senate, and both felt that supporting the Republicans would lose Democrats the support of many Catholic voters. “This was the cat that was actually in the bag,” Ickes wrote afterwards in fury, “and it is the mangiest, scabbiest cat ever.” To Ickes, it proved that there was a conspiracy of conservative Catholics in the U.S. and Great Britain to make it easier for Franco to win.

Harold Ickes with FDR (L) and Henry Wallace (R)
Harold Ickes with FDR (L) and his arch-rival, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace (R).

Unfortunately for Ickes, he was working for the cagiest President ever to occupy the White House. FDR once tellingly said, “You know, I’m a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does.” He often gave members of his administration conflicting instructions simply to elicit which of them would prove more adept in coming out on top of the resulting squabbles. If FDR had on occasion to smooth Ickes’s ruffled feathers or flatter Ickes’s ego by appearing to take his advice, he would do it to serve his purposes. Ickes seems to have believed that, on the whole, FDR esteemed his advice highly. His diary, however, suggests otherwise. It’s clear that while FDR listened to Ickes selectively, Ickes pored over every communication with the President like a reader of tea leaves.

One reason FDR probably discounted Ickes’s counsel was that Ickes could never understand that influence tends to trumps formal authority. The only thing Ickes pursued more zealously than face time with the President was the preservation and expansion of the scope of his department. It’s very rare for substantive new functions to be established within any bureaucracy. Instead, battles over formal authority are almost always territorial disputes. For Ickes to increase the power of the Interior Department, it could only be by taking some away from another department. Throughout his time as Secretary, no territory so obsessed him as the U. S. Forest Service.

For reasons that few taxpayers could explain, the U. S. Forest Service was established under the Department of Agriculture, while the National Parks Service falls under the Department of the Interior. Ickes had a legitimate argument that the government could better ensure the conservation of forest land by transferring the Forest Service to Interior, but the cause was, in fact, driven as much by personal ambition as civic vision. When Ickes first brought up the idea with FDR in early 1934, the President was blithely supportive, telling Ickes that if he “could bring it about, it would be quite all right so far as he was concerned.”

That wording is classic FDR. He was, in effect, placing all the responsibility on Ickes’s shoulder. As Ickes himself recognized, although the Department of Agriculture had a smaller budget and staff than Interior, it also had, in a House and Senate still imbalanced in favor of rural voters, exceptionally strong support for maintaining its status quo. FDR was sending Ickes out to land Moby Dick with a rowboat and a butter knife. Seven years later, Ickes was still pressing FDR on the case for moving the Forest Service to Interior. And FDR was still nodding in mild encouragement. To this day, the Forest Service remains under Agriculture.

Ickes also protected his own territory like a junkyard dog. It helped that he had an ultra-sensitive conspiracy detector. Just two weeks after joining the Cabinet, Ickes told the President that, “in my judgment, a well-conceived conspiracy was in process of being carried out to make my position in the Cabinet untenable.” When, in 1939, FDR decided it would be necessary to adapt the Public Works Administration, moving it out from Interior and shifting its focus to war preparations, Ickes came close to resigning in anger. FDR invited him up to Hyde Park for a placating chat, but sent him home with a letter that was less gentle in tone: “My dear Harold, will you ever grow up? [FDR was eight years younger than Ickes.] Don’t you realize that I am thinking in terms of the Government of the United States not only during this Administration but during many Administrations to come?” FDR closed the letter, however, by assuring Ickes that, “For the hundredth time, I am not forgetting Forestry.”

One reviewer described Ickes the diarist as “Pepys with a chip on his shoulder.” In these pages, Walter Trohan of The Chicago Tribune wrote, “Ickes dies a thousand deaths in welters of self-pity, indignation, injured feelings, frustration, and tears.” Bankers, oil companies, Senators, Congressmen, White House staffers, journalists, lobbyists, and even life-long friends show up as hostile blips on Ickes’s ego-defense radar. In small doses, it’s amusing. At the length of these three volumes, it’s exhausting.

What’s also exhausting, but recounted in perhaps unparalleled detail, is the endless give-and-take involved in working in and around the highest levels of a national government. An enormous amount of Ickes’s time is consumed in meetings with members of Congress, staff from the White House, staff from his own department, to develop, test, refine, lobby for, defend, salvage, and, occasionally, resurrect proposals for new programs or changes in priorities and policies. Despite the considerable erosion of bi-partisan cooperation in Washington, this back-and-forth, give-and-take is the reality of how politics work at the Federal level. One needn’t read three volumes of Ickes’s diary to understand this, but it’s still a useful illustration of much the success of the good ideas that get through depends on the willingness of a few key people to push for them almost to the point of insanity.

Ickes’s diary also shows how politics is always enmeshed with personal issues, and none more than personal ambition. Almost every entry includes one or more conversations about what jobs are up for grabs, who are the likely candidates, who are backing them, what are their relative advantages and drawbacks. In Ickes’s day, there were many fewer so-called “Plum Jobs” (“Federal civil service leadership and support positions in the legislative and executive branches of the Federal Government that may be subject to noncompetitive appointment,” to quote GovInfo.gov), but the wheeling and dealing over appointments was a constant subject of discussion. Here, for example, is part of the entry for 24 January 1937:

Vice President Garner discussed the personnel of the joint committee that is to be appointed to consider the President’s reorganization plan. He brought up the name of Senator Byrd [Harry Flood Byrd, long-time senator from Virginia] in this connection, but the President objected to the inclusion of Byrd because he has been fighting his plan in favor of one of his own. I leaned over to Jim Farley and whispered to him that for my part I would rather take care of a man on the inside than on the outside and that I thought it would be good policy to appoint Byrd. Jim agreed and quoted what I had said but the President seemed to be set against Byrd. The Vice President also agreed with me, and finally the President said he would leave the matter to him. I rather suspect that the Vice President will appoint Byrd as a member of this committee and I hope that he will.

I quote this at length not to highlight Ickes’s prose style, which is unexceptional, but just to show how tiresome these discussions must have been. And this business with Byrd comes up two more times in the diary before a final decision is taken.

The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes is not particularly good literature. When it was first published, excerpts from the first two volumes were serialized in newspapers across the country. But back then, the memory of FDR and the personalities of his administration were still fresh in people’s minds. Today, the diary is illuminating not because we remember or care who Tommy Corcoran or David Lilienthal were but because it remains the most candid account of the grinding day-in, day-out work of governing.

As Graham White has put it, “It allows us to observe, from Ickes’ highly distinctive perspective, the messy processes of official decision-making; the rancorous controversies that disturbed the affairs of state; the personal charm and manipulative skills of a president who deftly kept his unruly team together; and, through all these things, the subtle and shifting relationship between idealism and ambition, principle and power.” Along with all the bargaining and sore feelings and backstairs deals that Ickes records, we also have a record of some of the boldest programs in American history, set down by a man who may have had a giant chip on his shoulder — but who also had the personal integrity not to hide this from the reader.

Ickes kept a diary the entire time he was in office. He was known for scribbling notes in most meetings, notes he would then use to dictate the first drafts of his diary entries. Considering the hectic schedule of a Cabinet secretary, even in the days before constant connectivity and social media, his commitment to keeping a record of his activities demonstrates — depending on your perspective — admirable discipline or a relentless compulsion.

#1954ClubThe complete work amounts to an estimated six million words. His widow, Jane, helped edit these volumes, which appeared after Ickes’s death in 1952, but the publication of the remaining period (Volume III ends with FDR’s speech on December 8 calling for a declaration of war on Japan) was stopped when her relationship with the publisher, Simon and Schuster, broke down. At this point, it’s unlikely that further volumes will ever appear.

The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Volume I-III
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953-1954

No Bedtime Story, by Mary Crawford (1958)

Cover of No BBedtime Story by Mary Crawford

Proximity is often what leads me to discover a neglected book. Whenever I look into reviews of something I’m planning to write about, I scan through the other titles discussed. This is most useful with reviews in British newspapers and magazines from the 1930s to the 1970s, when it was the habit of the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and other journals to have a reviewer — and sometimes, quite prominent writers such as L. P. Hartley, Angus Wilson, or Anita Brookner — to cover three to five new works of fiction in the space of an 800-word article.

In this case, it was Angela Milne’s review of Veronica Hull’s novel The Monkey Puzzle that led me to No Bedtime Story (1958), the last of a half-dozen novels that Mary Nicholson, née Crawford, published between 1932 and 1958. Milne described the book as “told by a small boy of a nameless oppressed country” in the days following a popular uprising against the ruling regime. In light of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and on the heels of reading a similar account of a revolution in a nameless European country and its refugees, Monica Stirling’s Sigh for a Strange Land, I was intrigued. While there were almost no used copies available, they were cheap, so I bought one.

Were No Bedtime Story to be published today, it would probably be categorized as a young adult novel. The story is narrated by a boy named Jacko, probably around nine or ten, living with his mother, father, and little sister Vicky in the capital of a country that might just as well be Hungary or any other landlocked European state. (All we know is that the sea lies somewhere across the border.) His father is an activist, a leader of the printer’s union, which seems to be organizing against some status quo, some combination of political and economic forces, and he often hosts meetings — sometimes attended by men with foreign accents — at their apartment.

But all we see and know is through Jacko’s eyes and thoughts. And for him, the story begins when the radio announcer says she is sorry: “Children’s Hour was cancelled. She said we weren’t to be cross about going to bed without our bedtime story.” The next morning, Jacko’s father leaves early. “It’s a day of great events,” he tell his family. His mother sends Jacko to school with Vicky, but the streets seem mostly deserted aside from a figure or two rushing along.

When Jacko and Vicky arrive at the school, there is talk of the “great events,” but no one quite knows what is going on. Everyone is sent home. From their apartment window, Jacko sees crowds rushing down the streets carrying flags and policemen chasing after them, knocking down and arresting a few. His mother puts on her green overcoat and leaves, telling Jacko that she’s going to do some shopping. She does not return.

The next morning, knowing no better, Jacko dresses and feeds Vicky and the two head to school again. Now, there is no one but Christina, a student teacher, and Banger, a neighborhood delinquent. Leaving Vicky in their care, he heads to the city’s main center to try and find his mother. He comes across some men loading bodies into a truck. A skirmish breaks out and he jumps into the truck with the men, who drive to the edge of town. There, he sees hundreds of bodies:

They were arranged tidily in rows, so I was able to walk down between them, when I had dodged out of sight of the lorry, looking for the green coat. I didn’t think it was any use looking at the faces, because some of them were not like faces. The clothes were torn, too, but not so much.

I found the green coat at last, and the face, which was not bloody at all. But it was white and glossy like a candle, and though it looked like my mother, it was also quite wrong. I might not have been certain it was her, except that she still had her string bag, helf-full of fading spinach, twisted round her wrist.

This passage captures what is best about No Bedtime Story, which is Crawford’s skill in capturing the mix of concrete details and incomplete comprehension with which a child might perceive a chaotic situation. We know that some kind of revolution is going on, that tanks are rolling down the streets, that people are either huddled together in their apartments or trying to escape to safety in another country. There are scenes we are all too familiar with: a tank knocking down the wall around a suburban garden, blowing a hole into a family’s home; people running away from gunfire; roads clogged with people fleeing and airplanes swooping down to spray them with bullets.

The disarray and confusion that occurs when a war crashes into a civilian population is amplified by Jacko’s youth and lack of a frame of reference. When he hears a great screaming noise, sees a great shadow pass over him, feels the blast of heat from an explosion, it takes him a moment to understand that a plane has been shot down. When he then comes across a man in a fly suit, a parachute strung out behind him, crawling feebly to drink from a pool of water, he doesn’t know if this whose side the airman is on: he simply acts on instincts and pushes the man into the water, drowning him.

I found the simple details and abstract setting of No Bedtime Story highly effective. It was hard not to project images from the war in the Ukraine onto some of its scenes. Several contemporary reviewers, however, had reservations about Crawford’s decision to use a child as her narrator. Anthony Cronin, writing in the TLS, acknowledged that “the story is told skillfully enough; there is no obvious insincerity.” “Yet,” he wrote with some suspicion, “we have the feeling that use is being made of a child’s eyes for an adult purpose.” He felt that Crawford was pushing an agenda, probably a liberal one: “We know of course that all political action leads to evil but there are ways and ways of telling us.”

Portrait of Mary Crawford by Elizabeth Henderson, from the flyleaf of No Bedtime Story
Portrait of Mary Crawford by Elizabeth Henderson, from the flyleaf of No Bedtime Story.

Angus Wilson, on the other hand, considered the novel a “tour de force that completely comes off,” but had reservations about the consequences of Crawford’s choice: “Nevertheless, even the greatest novel seen through a child’s eyes can never, I believe, be more than a tour de force.” “The vision is too limited,” he argued. “What the author gains by the brilliance of imposing this limitation accurately, he loses in the intellectual and imaginative scope of what can be told.”

To me, this is the objection of a writer who simply could never see himself making the same choice. Every narrator — even supposedly omniscient ones — is, in effect, a lens that focuses or disperses light in a particular way. In this case, I think Crawford has chosen a lens that accurately captures the experience of finding oneself in the midst of chaos. People say of such an experience that everything happens in a blur. But that isn’t true. Many things seem to be in a blur, while a few things stand out in perfect focus. And that was very much the feeling Mary Crawford conveys in No Bedtime Story.

No Bedtime Story by Mary Crawford
London: Putnam, 1958

Laugh a Defiance, by Mary Richardson (1953)

Photo of the cover of <em>Laugh a Defiance</em> courtesy of Sarra Manning.
Photo of the cover of Laugh a Defiance courtesy of Sarra Manning.

I recently engaged in a brief and pointless debate on Twitter with an impassioned adherent of the school of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” who argued that it was not only unnecessary to know anything about the person who wrote a book but limiting, the intellectual equivalent of showing up to compete in the Tour de France with a set of training wheels.

To read Laugh a Defiance, Mary Richardson’s memoir of her experiences in the Suffragette movement without some biographical context, however, would set you up to reach some seriously mistaken conclusions. On the surface, it’s terrific book — immediate yet self-reflective, moving but frequently quite funny. You would wonder why on Earth it’s been out of print since 1953.

Mary Richardson was a Canadian woman who settled in England and was working as a reporter for the Toronto Globe and other Canadian newspapers when, one day in early 1913, she encountered a young man distributing Suffragette pamphlets. This led to a meeting with Christabel Pankhurst, and she was soon set to work in the campaign aimed at raising public awareness through acts of property destruction. On her first mission, she threw rocks through windows of the Home Office before she was chased away by policemen. She was able to get away in part due to their being encumbered by heavy capes, which, she observed, “must surely have been designed before any idea of quick-footed, quick-firing felons like Suffragettes had disturbed the official mind.”

Richardson was an ideal foot soldier for the cause. “I was better able to undertake the more difficult tasks,” she wrote, “in that I had no family to worry about me and no one I needed to worry over. In the fullest sense I was free to do what was asked.” Soon after stoning Whitehall, she was sent to the Derby on the day that King Edward II and Queen Alexandra would be in attendance. There, as she stood holding a copy of The Suffragette in her hand, she watched in horror as one of her fellow militants, Emily Davison, calmly slipped under the rail, stepped into the racecourse in front of the oncoming horses and riders, and was knocked down and fatally injured. The hostility of the mob towards Davison, both at the track and at her funeral, only hardened Richardson’s resolve.

Richardson joined the Suffragettes when they had made a deliberate shift in tactics, one aimed at raising awareness of the movement through acts of disruption and, in particular, the destruction of property. This was considered an appropriate response to a prevailing order in which “values were stressed from the financial point of view and not the human.” She witnessed this attitude in its most glaring self-contradiction when she and several others tried to interrupt an Anglican church service to offer a prayer for Emmeline Pankhurst, then gravely ill in Holloway Prison. Their actions, she wrote, “had the effect of so changing the faces of Christians that they resembled gargoyles on their own medieval churches.”

Some of the incidents recalled in Laugh a Defiance make you want to cheer for their ingeuity. Marion Wallace-Dunlop, raised in a stern Scottish family and reluctant to become involved in violence, arranged for a male friend to sneak her into the House of Commons disguised as an older woman. Once there, she started marking up the walls of the lobby with an inked rubber stamp reading, “No taxation without representation.” When MPs finally noticed what she was doing, much of one wall was defaced and it took hours for cleaners to remove the graffiti. Wallace-Dunlop later introduced the hunger strike as a non-violent response to the abusive treatment the Suffragettes received in prison.

Few Suffragettes saw the inside of a prison as often as Mary Richardson. Between July 1913 and June 1914, she was arrested nine times, and she was one of the first to be subjected to forced feeding, the initial and barbaric response to the Suffragette’s hunger strikes. Heading off on one mission, she handed a bundle of her things to a housemate and told her, “If I’m not back for breakfast tomorrow morning, send this parcel to His Majesty’s prison at Holloway for me.” After the Cat and Mouse Act was passed, prisoners such as Richardson who staged hunger strikes were merely discharged when they fell ill and weak and then imprisoned again once they’d recovered, but that didn’t stop prisoner authorities from trying get the upper hand. On one visit to Holloway, the warders sent in a woman trained in ju jitsu to subdue her.

Article on Mary Richardson's slashing of the Rokeby Venus, from The Daily Mail.
Article on Mary Richardson’s slashing of the Rokeby Venus, from The Daily Mail.

Richardson’s best known act of destruction was her slashing of Velasquez’s painting The Toilet of Venus, better known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery in March 1914. For Richardson, the Venus and its prominent display — then one of the most expensive works of art in the gallery — symbolized much that she despised in the British establishment, including its public display of the nude female form. So, acting alone, she decided to damage or destroy the painting as an act of protest.

She bought what she refers to as an axe — but in photos looks more like a cleaver — at an ironmongers in Theobalds Road, then walked to the National Gallery. She slipped the cleaver up her sleeve and entered. The Venus painting was being guarded by two police detectives and, at first, there was enough of a crowd that it was impractical for her to approach the painting. So, she wandered for a while, then returned and started to sketch in a drawing pad. When one of the detectives left the room, the other took out a newspaper and she saw her opportunity:

I dashed up the the painting. My first blow with the axe merely broke the protective glass. But, of course, it did more than that, for the detective rose with his newspaper still in his hand and walked round the red plush seat, staring up at the skylight which was being repaired.

Though the detective and the nearest attendant were caught off guard, two visitors were not:

Two Baedeker guide books, truly aimed by German tourists, came cracking against the back of my neck. By this time, too, the detective, having decided that the breaking glass had no connectio with the skylight, sprang on me and dragged the axe from my hand. As if out of the very walls angry people seemed to appear round me. I was dragged this way and that; but as on other occasions, the fury of the crowd helped me. In the ensuing commotion we were all mied together in a tight bunch. No one knew who should or should not be attacked. More than one innocent woman must have received a blow meant for me.

Amazingly, this was not her last blow for the Suffragettes. Once in prison, she again went on a hunger strike and she again was released after falling ill. While out, however, she took on another job that was almost as spectacular, if not as public. She and another young woman, a new recruit, were sent to torch a large but abandoned country house on an estate outside London. Finding the grounds surrounded by a dense hedge, the recruit balked. Richardson simply wrapped her scarf around her head and went crashing through it.

She made her way to the house, dowsed the walls and floor with kerosene, and climbed outside to set light to the fuse. As soon as the flame caught, she ran back to where she’d broken through the hedge. Expecting the police to show up at any moment, she began crawling on hands and knees across the field when, “Suddenly, I felt a moist gust of warm air in my face and froze with horror.” In the darkness, she had smacked into the side of a cow.

Though she was quickly apprehended and charged, this would be her last mission. After war was declared in early August 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst called the Suffragette’s campaign to a halt and urged the women to support the war effort.

In popular accounts, the actions of the Suffragettes have taken on a certain rosiness of hue. No doubt their acts of protest were heroic and dramatic and their punishment by police and jailers disproportionate to their crimes. But some historians question the efficacy of their tactics. Brian Harrison and Martin Pugh have suggested that non-militancy, rather than militancy, and particularly violent militancy, ultimately played a bigger role in winning the vote for women.

In a detailed survey of Suffragette acts of destruction, C. J. Bearman raises the question: Did the WSPU’s campaign of distruption actually work? Based on his analysis, “The only returnable answer is that it did not. The main reasons for the militancy’s failure were that it did little economic damage and that it visibly lacked mass support….” The acts of arson, in particular, made not even a marginal difference in the number of arsons that occurred in an ordinary year — in fact, fire damage in the greater London area decreased in 1913, the year when WPSU arsonists were most active.

And ironically, Richardson herself recounts a most un-violent incident that may have had a greater impact that all her other missions. Once, she camped out on the doorstep of the Bishop of London to persuade him not to deliver a speech against suffrage he was scheduled to deliver in the House of Lords. After being put off all day, she was finally invited by the bishop’s secretary to return the following morning at 11. Once seated with the Bishop, though, her mind went blank.

I must earlier had rehearesed a dozen speeches. But I could remember nothing of these. It was as if I were compelled by something outside me to speak as I did. I could not remember afterwards what I did say. When I was at the end of my arguments, I remember, I paused and waited for the Bishop’s reaction.

“Before we discuss this any further, you must take refreshment,” he told her. He pushed a button and a servant came in with coffee and pink-iced cakes. The Bishop produced the text of his speech and said, calmly, “In view of what you have told me, I shall not make the speech I have written…. I think you have persuaded me.” And that was that.

And, indeed, based on Richardson’s account, the Suffragettes ultimately succeeded through a similarly peaceful conservation. After hearing that the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Enfranchisement Bill, which greatly expanded suffrage among men, made no mention of “Votes for Women,” Emmeline Pankhurst called upon Prime Minister Lloyd George. She warned him that her followers would resume militant action if women’s suffrage was not also addressed. Lloyd George, who supported the cause, expressed dismay, and afer consulting with his Cbinet, ensured that language was added to give the vote to women over the age of thirty.

As a historian, Brian Harrison has little patience for Richardson, who he describes as coming “as near as anyone to the ideal” of the self-sacrificing follower he claims that the Pankhursts sought to inspire. Likewise, Bearman dismisses Laugh a Defiance as “the unreliable memoirs of a self-dramatizing woman.” On this point, at least, their views don’t differ greatly from those express by the editors of the Evening Standard, who wrote after the slashing of the Rokeby Venus that “her lack of a sense of proportion pass the frontier between eccentricity and mental unsoundness.”

But we must bear in mind that historians, unlike some literary critics, do take context into consideration. And if we do the same, Laugh a Defiance no longer seems simply an entertaining piece of writing. Diane Atkinson, a historian overall favorable to the Suffragette cause, notes that after her time with the cause, Richardson “published several books during the war, … owned properties and was a somewhat unsuccessful landlady.” She also became one of a wave of women who sought public office after suffrage was approved.

Mary Richardson speaking for the British Union of Fascists in 1934.
Mary Richardson speaking for the British Union of Fascists in 1934.

Atkinson also notes, however, that in the early 1930s, Richardson joined the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and set up the Women’s Section for the party. Between 1932 and 1934, she spoke frequently in support of Fascist policies and candidates. Although she eventually grew disillusioned and rarely became involved in political causes after that, while she was as enthusiastic in her support of the Blackshirts as she had been of the Suffragettes. She illustrates a point made by Eric Hoffer in his classic study of extremist movements, The True Believer: “The danger of the fanatic … is that he cannot settle down…. The taste for strong feeling drives him on to search for mysteries yet to be revealed and secret doors yet to be opened. He keeps groping for extremes.”

I learned about Laugh a Defiance after Andy Miller mentioned it in a recent tweet. As Andy noted in speaking of the book on the Backlisted podcast, anyone thinking of reissuing it would need to ensure that appropriate historical and biographical context was provided. Without it, readers might fail to see the narrow but crucial line that divides Mary Richardson’s actions from ones with far more sinister conseqeuences.

The book is extremely rare — I was unable to find any copies available for sale — but there are over eighty copies available in libraries worldwide, so it wasn’t too hard to borrow one via Inter Library Loan. Here is the link to the WorldCat.org listing: Laugh a Defiance

Laugh a Defiance, by Mary Richardson
London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953

The Journey, by Rose Caylor (1933)

Advertisement for The Journey in Publisher’s Weekly.

Of all the muses you might expect a young woman novelist to be channeling in 1933, Henry Fielding is among the last. Yet the closest parallel one can find to Rose Caylor’s second novel, The Journey, is The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. In both books, a young innocent, a tabula rasa personality, travels to a great city where that blank slate is scribbled over by various forms of iniquity and sent home sadder and wiser.

But plot isn’t the primary point similarity between Tom Jones and The Journey. It’s the authorial voice. Tom Jones would be about a third as long and not one-tenth as enjoyable were its fairly thin story enriched by Fielding’s gentle, amused, and worldly-wise commentary. By the time Rose Caylor sat down to write The Journey, she’d been a newspaper reporter, PR agent for the American Medical Association, business report publisher, and actress in the Leo Dietrichstein’s traveling company, for which she had jumped into stage volcanoes, got shipwrecked on a desert island, and flounced around in crinoline and hoop skirts as “the Spirit of the Old South.” In his memoir Gaily, Gaily, Hecht compared Caylor to “a combination of Laurette Taylor, Sarah Bernhardt, and Geronimo.” Not quite the same as Fielding’s years as a magistrate and founder of the Bow Street Runners, but close in terms of street savvy, I suspect.

The actual story in The Journey could easily be squeezed onto about five pages without much abridgement. A Chicago reporter names Jimmy Dyrenforth sweet-talks Caryl Fancher, a typist in his father’s office and the two get married on a whim. Coming out of City Hall, Jimmy panics and rushes to a pay phone, where he talks the friendly editor of a New Orleans newspaper into giving him a job. Jimmy bolts for the first train to New Orleans, leaving the virginal Caryl to her own devices, hoping she will give up on the marriage before it’s even started.

Instead, she assembles a trousseau and heads off to New Orleans in pursuit. Though Jimmy meets her at the station, his welcome is mostly intended to persuade Caryl to leave as quickly as possible. Whether obstinate or just obtuse, she persists as he variously ignores and insults her, and eventually the two hop in bed and Caryl ends up pregnant. Though Caylor wrote her share of happy endings as a playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, there’s none to be found here. Caryl gives up eventually and heads to New York for an abortion after brow-beating Jimmy into borrowing $200 from his father.

So much for the narrative arc. What you can’t get from this synopsis, however, is any sense of why this book is 483 pages long. Perhaps an excerpt from Caylor’s introduction of the reader to Jimmy will help:

We take it that the reader will be glad at length to meet one of our characters who is not a fool. However, the reader may well turn and ask “What is her?” In attempting a valuation of our favourite masculine character, we must first state some of our concepts and premises, to which he must measure up. Thus:

To have convictions –! that is the true, the high, human importance. To feel that one’s beliefs matter, to attain them through moral force, to give them up with a struggle when one has become convinced they are false, that is living a worthy, possibly even noble, life. We truly believe that convictions, hard won and hard relinquished, are the only possessions that lend a passing importance to man, and dignity, etc., to his transitory estate. Our hero, however, hadn’t any hard-won convictions or any he wouldn’t give up at the drop of a hat. Opinions blew through his head like drafts. He no more bothered to knew where he got them than were he got a cold in the head, and he no more knew the reason why he gave them up than he could give the reason for a sneeze.

This is followed by nine pages of further reflection on Jimmy’s character, its development, and the nature of modern man, while Jimmy and Caryl wait side-by-side in a cab for the plot to move along. The Journey may take place in a time of trains, planes (well, a few), and automobiles, but its pace is solidly grounded in the 18th century. Thirty pages later, the couple is just sitting down to their first meal together. The consumation of their marriage is still at least three hundred pages off.

And this, in a nutshell, is the dilemma faced by a reader who decides to take Caylor’s journey. One reviewer called the book “irritating and entertaining,” and that’s precisely the mixed bag it offers. This is not a book you read for the story or even much for the characters, so if you don’t fall in love with Caylor as tour guide, I can’t imagine you’re likely to hang in past Chapter Two.

I think we have to accept that Caylor miscalculated how far she could stretch her story’s thin fabric over its complex scaffolding of commentary. I stuck with her to the very end because reading books like this is part of the price of my obsession. Given how rare this book is in the first place (perhaps a dozen copies in libraries worldwide and zero copies available for sale), I suspect few who even bother to read this far are likely to track down The Journey for themselves.

Yet, I must remind you that irritating was only one of the adjective used to describe this book. The other was entertaining. For, in the midst of many pages of reflections and discursions that often made me grumble, “Oh, just get on with it!”, there are also wonderful set-pieces. Like the literary discussion where a roomful of New Orleans belles dames debate whether Gulliver’s Travels is “fornographic” and gush over their latest reads, the titles and authors of which none of them can quite bring to mind. Or this description of the earnest authoress Rose Entwhistle and one of her attempts at research:

Today, Miss Entwhistle is very tired, and for a most perlexing reason. Having heard a salesgirl remark the other day, in answer to her own statement that a department store was very fascinating, that it was “a good place to learn human nature,” she had immediately (quite secretly of course and incognito) obtained a job in this same store and for that very purpose. Today, having worked a week there, having been rather disappointed in human nature, and having quit the day before, she suffered greatly in her feet, but especially there was a strange disquiet in her memory. Famous for her many stories dealing with department store life, she was beginning to wonder whether it was not she herself who was the author of that statement about department stores being “a good place to learn human nature,” and could it be that she had been taken in by a quotation from herself?

And, on occasion, Caylor can be refreshingly telegraphic in her approach. Take, for example, Chapter 32, which reads, in entirety, “We have no room in this book for the savageries of Caryl’s sister-in-law, Hazel.”

The Nation’s reviewer, Florence Codman, loved The Journey in all its digressive beauty, dismissing her own brief description of the book as “an offering of nickels where millions are to be enjoyed.” Well, perhaps not millions, but something in the mid-hundreds at least. Do these make The Journey worth the investment of a couple of weeks to read it? I guess that’s why I get paid the big bucks to help with these decisions.

The Journey, by Rose Caylor
New York: Covici, Friede (1933)

Harry Bleachbaker, by N. F. Simpson (1976)

Cover of Harry Bleachbaker by N. F. Simpson

This is a guest post by David Quantick.

Prayer: “Let us throw back our heads and laugh at reality.”
Response: “Which is an illusion caused by mescaline deficiency.”

N. F. Simpson wrote those words in his play A Resounding Tinkle, and they are as true today as they were then, which is to say as true as anything else. Simpson, born Norman Frederick but known to everyone as “Wally” – a play on the name of Edward VIII’s lover, of course – was a great writer, an influence on Cambridge comic writers like Peter Cook and John Cleese, and a popular and critically-acclaimed playwright from the 1950s onwards, admired both by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Wally wrote mostly for the stage, but also for television and cinema and, on one exceptional occasion, as a novelist. He was able to outdo Lewis Carroll by thinking of a million impossible things for breakfast but, unlike his contemporaries who could make their work only absurd, he could also be as funny as a writer he admired greatly, P. G. Wodehouse. More philosophical than absurdist, Simpson nevertheless created surreal worlds whose logic was as rigorous as that of Aristotle, only much more hilarious.

N. F. Simpson, around 1976.
N. F. Simpson, around 1976.

In his long career – his work was first performed at the Royal Court in London in 1957, and his last new work for the stage, If So Then Yes, debuted in 2009 – N. F. Simpson produced many extraordinary works, from A Resounding Tinkle and One Way Pendulum (the latter filmed by Peter Yates in 1964) to television work as diverse as episodes of the ITV serial Crown Court (which vehicle Simpson subverted to near-breaking point) and Elementary My Dear Watson, a 1973 TV play in which John Cleese played Sherlock Holmes.

An illustration from <em>Harry Bleachbaker</em>.
An illustration from Harry Bleachbaker.

Harry Bleachbaker, published 1976, is not his only prose work, but it is his only novel and, being an N. F. Simpson novel, is very little like anything else in fiction. Based, at times so closely as to be verbatim, on his 1972 play Was He Anyone, Harry Bleachbaker has very little in the way of plot and an enormous amount in the way of diversion, rumination and side-tracking. Its plot, which unfolds over a hundred or so pages with the speed of a Galapagos tortoise making its mind up, is extremely simple: a man named Albert Whitbrace has fallen into the Mediterranean and plans are put into motion for his rescue. Or rather, plans to make plans to rescue him are put into motion, or if not put into motion, then discussed. The whole thing reads – probably intentionally – at times like the minutes of a very tortuous civil service meeting. Practicalities are weighed up, pros and cons are debated, issues are raised, and all the time Albert Whitbrace remains floating in the Med. There are footnotes, there are illustrations, there are sections rendered in dialogue but the thrust of the story is never out of focus: Albert Whitbrace is in the sea and he must be got out. And eventually, a decision is made.

At times Harry Bleachbaker (the titular character remains obscure) reads like Flann O’Brien, at others like Samuel Beckett, and at still others like an extended Monty Python sketch, but always it is pure N. F. Simpson: a world gone mad which is nevertheless ordered by the strictest rules of logic. Simpson, who laughed at reality, nevertheless went to great pains to replicate it faithfully at the same time as he was mocking it. And from the very first page of Harry Bleachbaker, nothing is safe. The Author’s Note at the beginning warns the reader:

This is an uneven book, parts of it having been deliberately made more boring than was in itself strictly necessary in order to highlight those parts which are less so.

Even the blurb cautions, “This is not, it goes without saying, a book to be read through from cover to cover at one sitting, or even at several sittings. It is not, indeed, a book to be read from cover to cover at all….” Simpson’s own biography lacks the usual elements of self-promotion and enthusiasm: “He was born in 1919, though without having first gone into the thing properly to see what it was likely to entail. Had he done so he would not be here now.”

The whole thing sounds quite daunting, and the lack of a conventional storyline doesn’t help the casual reader. Simpson’s lack of interest in narrative, he explained in the radio documentary Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack of NF Simpson, was caused by stems from the death of his mother when he was a child: ever since then, he seemed to imply, nothing had made sense. But the book, whether dipped in from time to time or read from cover to cover in a manic burst of brain-frying, is fantastic. Simpson’s ear for dialogue is incredible. His ability to capture the details of human selfishness (for this is not a book about Good Samaritans) and the tangled mess of bureaucracy (this is also a satire on the modern age of red tape) creates a world where the reader, who should feel like ALBERT WHITBRACE that they are drowning in a sea of madness, is buoyed up by laughter and a sheer helplessness at the force of Simpson’s imagination.

As an introduction to Wally’s work, Harry Bleachbaker is accessibly hilarious as well as being fairly easy to find online. As a stand-alone novel, there is very little like it, however you choose to read it. Be careful, though: it will lure the reader into the world of N. F. Simpson, from which, thank God, there is no escape.

(The documentary Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack of NF Simpson is available at http://www.curtainsforradio.co.uk/downloads/reality-is-an-illusion-caused-by-lack-of-nf-simpson-2/)

David QuantickDavid Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
 
 
 

Harry Bleachbaker, by NF Simpson
London: Harrap, 1976

Everything is Quite All Right, by Wendell Wilcox (1945)

Everything Is Quite All Right

This is a guest Post by Andrew Guschausky.

The ways that we discover what we read are various. Sometimes we are led to a book by its reference in another book. Sometimes we hear mention of an unfamiliar author on the radio. I’ve heard that there are some brave souls who will pick up a book at a bookshop simply because the cover is too interesting to pass by.

In this case, I happened to be watching a book review on PaperBird’s YouTube channel. The always illuminating reviewer was discussing the works of James Purdy and then mentioned a young Chicago writer, Wendell Wilcox. Wilcox, he said, was “… just starting to find his way, but then in 1957 mysteriously just stopped publishing altogether, which is weird because around that same time is when James Purdy started appearing in print.” Something about the phrase, “mysteriously just stopped publishing,” piqued my interest. Perhaps it was only because, deep down, I love a good mystery. In any case, I decided to seek out Wilcox’s novel, Everything is Quite All Right, thinking that it might lead me down some rabbit hole but would end with me knowing why he stopped publishing.

Bernard Ackerman, Inc. published Everything is Quite All Right in 1945. On the back cover, there is a brief author bio: “Mr. Wilcox was graduated from the University of Chicago in 1929 and he has been married since 1931. He has lived in Chicago since he was five years old, and the scene of EVERYTHING IS QUITE ALL RIGHT is a great unnamed middle western city on the shores of Lake Michigan.”

In the 1930s, Wilcox became a friend of Gertrude Abercrombie, Chicago’s “Queen of the Bohemian Artists.” Abercrombie was an influential Surrealist painter and her vast network of friends and acquaintances included painters like Karl Priebe and Sylvia Fein, jazz musicians such as Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and writers Thornton Wilder and James Purdy. She regularly hosted parties, gatherings, and jam sessions at her house in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where artists from diverse backgrounds mingled. These gatherings acquired a reputation for attracting the most interesting talent in Chicago and beyond, as many traveling musicians and artists frequently stopped by. As for Abercrombie, she loved being the center of attention. Her gregariousness was legendary and the get-togethers continued even when she was too ill to get out of bed.

Abercrombie was not only a respected painter; she was also a talented jazz pianist. When jazz musicians improvised in her living room, it wasn’t uncommon for Abercrombie to join in on the piano. She had such strong friendships with so many musicians that she even inspired a couple of tunes: Richie Powell’s “Gertrude’s Bounce” and Roy Kral & Jackie Cain’s “Afrocrombie.” She made her home into an environment in which the music never stopped and its halcyon atmosphere was later recalled fondly by Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel. Abercrombie’s wide-ranging bohemian crowd was connected through her prevailing personae. In a way, these gatherings were comparable to the Paris literary salons hosted by another Gertrude.

Gertrude Stein surrounded herself with painters, poets, novelists, composers, and playwrights who visited her and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, at their Paris home on Saturday evenings. Stein also brought together artists who would influence each other and eventually have an effect on the broader culture. Although she is inextricably linked with Paris, Stein did feel the pull towards home. In 1934, she was invited to lecture at the University of Chicago and she returned in 1935. Thornton Wilder was teaching at the school’s English department at the time and he invited his friend Gertrude Abercrombie to attend Stein’s lecture, “Poetry and Grammar.” Abercrombie asked if she could bring along her friend, Wendell Wilcox. And, as Wilder put it, “…so began a romance of Wendell and Miss Stein.”

Wilcox had first read Stein’s work when he was an undergraduate and was quite taken with her poetry collection, Tender Buttons. After attending her lecture, the two writers began a correspondence that lasted until the end of Stein’s life. She was fond of his letters and the celebrated author encouraged the young Chicago writer to pursue his passion.

Wendell Wilcox, a portrait by Gertrude Abercrombie, circa 1930-1936. Oil on Masonite.
Wendell Wilcox, a portrait by Gertrude Abercrombie, circa 1930-1936. Oil on Masonite.

In her 1937 memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein mentions Wilcox, and writes that he “…has a feeling for meaning that is not beyond what the words are saying and of course that does make more brilliant writing and that is what he is doing.” This take on Wilcox reminded me of the English literary critic Cyril Connolly’s distinction between two styles of literature: vernacular (or, realist) and Mandarin. Of the Mandarin, Connolly says, “It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs….”

After publishing short stories in Harper’s Bazaar (his first story, “England Is in Flames,” appeared in 1941), Story, and The New Yorker, as well as having his stories included in anthologies like, Best American Short Stories and 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, Wilcox succeeded in having his debut novel accepted for publication.

Hoping to garner attention for the first-time novelist, Wilcox’s publisher asked permission to use the quotation from Everybody’s Autobiography and requested that Stein expand on what she meant by the comment. Ever the supportive friend and mentor, Stein sent a letter stating: “I am genuinely interested in his work. He has perfection, delicacy and persistence … all three good things.”

Everything is Quite All Right does not resemble the modernist writings of Stein. Wilcox’s writing is clear and straightforward and the plot itself is quite simple. As the back cover states, it concerns “…ordinary people living dull, uneventful lives.” We are introduced to the repugnant (and racist) Mrs. Korg as she has fired yet another “girl” that she and Mr. Korg have hired to clean their home, prepare their meals, and care for their baby. They have gone through eleven helpers in the past year.

We then meet the soon-to-be-twelfth, seventeen-year-old Elsie Singer. Elsie’s parents are struggling to provide for their five children on their Michigan farm. With the idea that she might be of some help, Elsie is sent to live with her recently widowed aunt in the city. Elsie is sweet and innocent by nature, but her mere presence grates on her Aunt Norah, who would prefer to remain in her ways. “For her the happy cheerful state was one of soft funereal gloom.” It was in the evenings just as the sun went down that Elsie’s presence was especially unwelcome. Every night, Norah would sit in the dark and, like clockwork, the presence of her late husband would arrive and together they would commune in the empty apartment.

Elsie is not an intellectual (characters refer to her as “slow” and “stupid”), but she is observant and instinctively kind. She cannot help but notice that her aunt does not really want her there. She is also aware that her presence back home was financially trying for her parents. Norah decides Elsie should find a job. So, with some prodding and some assistance from her aunt, Elsie finds work as a maid for Mr. and Mrs. Korg.

The scenes where Mrs. Korg makes impossible demands on her new maid are memorably uncomfortable. Mrs. Korg is perpetually frustrated with Elsie and she feels a sense of superiority which she frequently indulges. Meanwhile, Mr. Korg tries rather awkwardly to soften his wife’s harshness. For the most part, though, he goes about his work and stays out of the way. He is a meek fellow and he is ultimately convinced that life is merely “just doing ordinary things and having good or bad feelings about them.”

The Korgs’s marriage has some noticeable fissures and as the pressure continues to build, it seems that something will soon change:

Every war, they say, has its causes, those stated and those actual, and then there is always some event that precipitates the whole affair. Without this obvious event the war could never begun. The same is true of the main events in the lives of people.

After offering to give her a ride home, Mr. Korg takes Elsie on a drive to Lake Michigan. There, while the two sit on a rock overlooking the water, they share a kiss that inaugurates a love affair. We know, of course, that this cannot end well. And along the way, Elsie learns to follow her own heart. She leaves the Korgs, her aunt, and the city, and moves back to her family’s house in the country. But soon, Elsie finds herself getting to know the young man living just one farm over. At the end, the reader is left thinking things might actually be quite all right.

It seems clear why Stein championed Wilcox’s writing. His sentences move along quickly and, consequently, both humor and pathos are met so suddenly that their effects are just a little bit delayed. That delay often makes the laugh louder and the sigh longer. The novel is also full of irony. Characters are constantly doing things that they just admonished someone else for doing — such as when Mrs. Korg shouts at Mr. Korg that his outburst might wake the baby. Characters do self-serving things that they tell themselves are for the benefit of others: Elsie’s mother suggests that Aunt Norah take in Elsie not because the Singers need one less mouth to feed, but because her lonely, grieving sister needs some company. And the novel’s title, of course, is exactly what one says when everything is not quite all right. It really is no surprise that Wilcox’s writing drew comparisons to James Thurber’s domestic satires. And it is no surprise that his stories were featured in The New Yorker, as his writing has the clean, efficient, neat style that one associates with the magazine.

There’s little information about Wilcox’s life after his novel was published. He contributed a few more short stories to The New Yorker –the last piece I could locate (“No Larger Than Life”) was printed in the November 17, 1956 issue. After that, it appears that he dropped off of the proverbial literary map and that promise that Gertrude Stein saw in him was never fully realized.

The remembrances of Samuel Steward — poet, professor, pornographer, and tattoo artist — offered one clue as to why Wilcox drifted into anonymity. In The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward: Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life, Steward writes,

In 1945, my good friend Wendell Wilcox had a novel published, Everything is Quite All Right, and planned to write a new novel about his great passion, the Latin poet Catullus. But Wendell made the mistake of detailing his carefully researched plot to Thornton [Wilder], and sometime later, Thornton’s The Ides of March appeared. Therein, alas! Wendell found his plot. After that, Thornton discovered many of his friends in Chicago disappeared or grew cool as the story about Catullus gained wider circulation. I was one of those friends who vanished.

However, Penelope Niven, author of Thornton Wilder: A Life, discredits this claim. Wilder was well established by the time Everything is Quite All Right was released. With four novels and three Pulitzer Prizes to his name, Wilder had little need to resort to plagiarism. Niven adds, “Wilder’s correspondence confirms beyond question that he began conceiving and planning the novel as early as 1922, soon after his first trip to Rome.”

Wilcox visited Paris in 1949, seemingly with the desire to write. In a letter, Alice B. Toklas mentions his visit:

I’d only seen him once at one of the lectures Gertrude gave at the University of Chicago in ’35 and seeing him now has been a pleasure…Wendell wrote a short but not uninteresting novel a few years ago — he cant [sic] get to work easily though writing is as natural as living to him—he wants to stay a bit and get to work here.

Justin Spring, in his biography of Samuel Steward, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Poet, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, states that Steward and Wilcox reconnected in 1976. Through their correspondence, Wilcox painted a bleak picture. He was struggling with alcoholism, a recent colostomy, and liver cancer. His wife, Esther, was a librarian and the financial provider in their marriage. When she passed away, Wilcox had a tough time making ends meet and he admitted to Steward that he had long since given up writing.

In 1986, The Paris Review printed “Gertrude Stein: Letters to a Friend,” with commentary by Philip Galanes. Stein’s friend was Wendell Wilcox. The article gives us a glimpse into his later life: “… Wilcox settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he worked as an archivist at the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina. He died in 1981.”

James Purdy captured those old days of bohemian Chicago in some of his novels. He would occasionally use a friend’s likeness in his works throughout his career. In his 1959 novel, Malcolm, a Gertrude Abercrombie-like character plays a pivotal role and she does again in his 1967 novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, and in his 1996 novel, Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. On James Purdy’s Wikipedia page, his 1977 novel, Narrow Rooms, is referred to as “…a personal communication looking back some 25 years to Wendell Wilcox, a failed writer in the Abercrombie circle. Wilcox, who had once enjoyed a degree of success, stopped publishing at the very moment Purdy began commercial publication.”

When an author gives up writing, it puts their previous work in a peculiar light. One can’t help but see a trajectory of rise and fall. And in that light, we might see the previous work as presaging that failure — as if the works were stepping stones towards a destination that never existed. Should we consider Wilcox a failed author? I think the notion that he failed disregards his achievements. To have his work published in some of the most celebrated literary magazines, to have his novel published, to have the respect of his peers—maybe that was not enough, but all of that was not nothing. The reason for the decline of Wilcox’s writing career is still murky. Personal issues aside, the publishing world can be difficult and sometimes unfair. Most published writers have to live the life of Scheherazade. Sure, maybe your last story was good, but that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to finish telling your next one.

In his final published story, “No Larger Than Life,” recently widowed Mrs. Tanner discovers a letter addressed to her from a cousin that her late husband never delivered to her. The letter was meant to heal a wound in their relationship and the cousin is pleading to just forget about the conflict and make amends. Mrs. Tanner becomes so upset that she is nearly ill with the thought that her cousin waited for a reply and never received one—what if she is seen as stubborn or unforgiving? She can’t bear the thought of her cousin thinking less of her, so she decides to write a letter that will explain why she did not reply and say that she, too, would like to make amends. This decision eases her mind. But, months later, when asked if she sent the letter: “‘No. I put it off, and then I forgot, and then when I remembered again, I got to thinking how mad she’d made me,’ Mrs. Tanner said.”

That Wilcoxian style occurs in the way that a character finds fault in the actions of others yet they are incapable of seeing that same fault in themself. His characters are often blind to their own motivations and so their behaviors contradict their beliefs. The humor emerges when the contradiction is expressed, as it is by Mrs. Tanner.

There are clear connections between his final published story and his novel. Most of the action takes place in dining rooms and living rooms. What we learn of the characters arises from what they say and what others say to them. The domestic settings, the snappy dialogue, the cutting satire, the comedy born of a character’s folly, the spare, colloquial prose, they all formed the hallmark of Wilcox’s fiction.

Returning to Cyril Connolly’s distinction between the vernacular style of writing — simple, terse, and idiomatic — as opposed to the Mandarin. There is nothing in the vernacular, he argues, that we would not find in everyday speech. In other words, it is unadorned writing; as a principle, it avoids ornamentation. Connolly references Samuel Butler’s dictum: “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress—it should attract as little attention as possible.”

Everything is Quite All Right would undoubtedly fall into the vernacular camp. Wilcox had a knack for the realist style. He had an ear for everyday speech. He was talented enough to create work that has a distinctive charm. The interesting thing about the vernacular style is that it often encapsulates the work in its time. Wilcox’s novel is unquestionably of its time.

I was curious if Wilcox continued to write, despite not having anything published after 1956. Although he admits to eventually giving up writing, I wondered how long after publication he made that decision. I was curious if his style evolved. I was also curious if he made peace with writing for his own pleasure or if he only wrote for the purpose of publication. Some of these questions will likely remain unanswered. However, it appears that not all of his unpublished writings have been lost.

The Princeton University Library is home to the Wendell Wilcox Papers. There are decades of letters to and from his wife Esther, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Abercrombie, Thornton Wilder, and other writers and friends included in the collection. His published and unpublished short stories are collected, along with his manuscript of Everything is Quite All Right. And there are also manuscripts of three unpublished novels: The Color of Darkness, Rock Me to Sleep, and Helen.

For anyone interested in the American literary milieu of the 1940s, Everything is Quite All Right might be worth seeking out (although a recent glance at BookFinder.com only revealed four copies for sale). I found Wilcox himself to be more interesting than his novel. I’ve come to think of him as a kind of case study of a writer who once showed promise only to be forgotten in his own time. It was undoubtedly an interesting cultural place that he occupied: his connections with the art scene in Chicago and his bonds with Gertrude Abercrombie and Gertrude Stein. For me, the value of the novel was what it did and did not reveal about its author’s promise.

Andrew Guschausky lives in Boise, Idaho.

Everything is Quite All Right, by Wendell Wilcox
New York: Bernard Ackerman, 1945

Women in a Village, by Louisa Rayner (1957)

Three Serbian peasant women from the 1920s
Three Serbian village women, circa 1920.

It would be natural for Women in a Village to be compared with Rebecca West’s masterpiece about her travels in the former Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Both West and Louisa Rayner were Englishwomen writing about a land and people relatively unknown to most of their readers. But West was never anything but a visitor to Yugoslavia.

Rayner, on the other hand, was a resident. Fascinated by the country on her first visit in 1936, she returned the next year, when she met and married a Belgrade fuel dealer named Stojan Božic. She would no longer be able to see the country “as a picture; I should not be able to stand back and disparage or admire. I was going to become a Yugoslav woman; I was stepping into the picture.”

That step may have ensured her survival after the Germans invaded in 1941. By then, she had become fluent in Serbian and fully assimilated into the culture, serving slatko and coffee to her husband and his friends as they sat and talked in their living room, working in the kitchen in the early fall as they canned great quantities of tomato sauce.

In 1944, she and her husband decided to flee Belgrade with their six-year-old daughter, joining a great exodus of civilians leaving the city as it became a target for regular Allied bombing raids. He chose Rušanj, then an isolated village along a hillside roughly ten miles south of Belgrade. Life in the village was so rustic that there was no notion of rent: the villagers simply took them in and made them part of the household.

Having reconnoitered the situation beforehand, Stojan chose to approach Savka, a grandmother, who was already sharing a two-room hut with two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren. Savka’s hut had only an earthen floor and everyone slept together in a single bed. The hut had no chimney; there was simply an opening at the peak of the tiled roof through which the smoke escaped. Instead of a stove, Savka cooked on an iron dome suspended over the fire.

Rayner, who’d taken a degree in classics at Cambridge, recognized the central room of Savka’s hut as what the Greeks called a melathron — a black room. “… [M]ore than a kitchen, but hardly a living-room and not quite a hall in the medieval sense. The walls and beams of this room of Savka’s were black with soot, for the smoke from the hearth visited every cranny before drifting out through the room.” She later wrote of her comparison between Savka’s hut and those of Homer’s time in an article titled “Kitchen Problems in Ancient Greece,” published in The South African Archaeological Bulletin in December 1956.

“I did not stay with Savka in her melathron in order to study Homer,” Rayner wrote. But “in that precarious and primitive way of living I found Homer a most cheering companion. Homer had gone through all this. Homer knew. And in all this smoke and dirt and toil Homer had kept his poise and his refinement.”

Rayner’s classical sensibilities are evident throughout Women in a Village. The way of life in Rušanj was closer in many ways to that of ancient Greece. Even before the war, the village operated more on a barter basis, and as the war made currencies fleeting phenomena with fluctuating values this became all the more so. As a refugee with little more to offer than labor and occasional contributions of food or cloth, Rayner focused on doing all she could to assimilate.

Thus, unlike Rebecca West, who could afford to be subjective, picking and choosing among the various ethnic groups of Yugoslavia, Rayner is at all times an empathetic observer. Reference to Homer was one of the ways in which she could deal with the radical changes forced by her situation. So she doesn’t recoil at what occurred after each meal:

A sketch of Savka's house
A sketch of Savka’s house, from Louisa Rayner’s article in The South African Archaeological Bulletin.

… there was a black dog and his chocolate-covered mother. They served no purpose at all except to bark and lick the table clean after meals. The table (sofra) was about a metre in diameter and perhaps a foot in height. When the dogs had cleaned it, it was leant up against the wall out of the way. I suspect that the “table dogs” of the Odyssey also licked the tables and were not simply fed at table.

Rayner soon learns the merit of rustic ways, switching to wearing a wooden yoke after her first experience of hauling two bucketfuls of water from the well nearly a kilometer away from Savka’s hut. And when she finds the corpse of one of the neighbor’s chickens floating in a bucket, she simply extracts it and carries on. She comes to understand the importance of cattle in plowing even the smallest field and the tragedy of losing one of a matched pair. “She is a left-hand cow!” Savka chastises Rayner when she suggests borrowing one of another farmer’s spares. With many of the men having been conscripted into the Army or the partisans or forced labor in Germany, it is the women who do most of the work.

Rušanj is so far removed from its century that the villagers do not even observe St. Vitus’s Day, the day still held sacred by most Serbs, marking the death of the last Christian king in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. “It’s only a national holiday,” one of them remarks. The significance of that comment stunned Rayner:

Try to grasp the idea of the distance of stars. If you are not a scientist your mind faints in horror at the attempt. So in horror did my mind faint when I tried to comprehend the awful slowness of change. How long does it take for a new idea to be adopted — six hundred years? A thousand? Well, there is some hope. But how much more time is needed for that new idea to oust a new one? That is like the distance of stars. How long had it taken for the people of Rušanj, wherever they may have been living, to learn to worship oak trees — or the sun, or their ancestors? And how many millenia had they needed to forget whatever ideas they had before that? The mind faints.

Yet when it became clear that the Russians and Tito’s partisans were going to succeed in forcing out the Germans, the villagers adapted quickly to the emerging balance of powers — placing Rayner’s situation at risk. “It followed that a newly-converted partisan might be able to win the confidence of Russian and other Communists by denouncing someone who had spoken a word in favour of the British.” And even more so if the denounced were a British citizen.

Rayner and her husband returned to Belgrade soon after the Germans evacuated, but their stay would be short. By late 1945, they realized they would not be allowed to resume their former bourgeois ways and one or both could face imprisonment. Stojan arranged for visas through a friend in the French embassy and they left in January 1946, never to return.

Women in a Village was published in England in 1957. The book received enthusiastic reviews. V. S. Pritchett considered it “a most remarkable book…. Something quite new and original: war as it is seen by a distinguished, level-headed and sensitive woman. It is most interesting and well-written.” Most reviewers cited the author’s compassion and understanding. “Here is the drama of life and personality told with intelling perception in fascinating human detail and all on a level of taste and values calculated to excite the mind and heart at once,” wrote Monni Adams in the The Montreal Gazette.

Isabel Božic in 1986, photo by Dragoslav Simic, from http://www.audioifotoarhiv.com/engl/Louisa-Rayner.html
Isabel Božic in 1986, photo by Dragoslav Simic.

By then, Stojan and Rayner had parted ways, she settling back in Cambridge. The book soon fell out of print and was forgotten. In 1986, however, it was translated into Serbian and serialized in the Belgrade newspaper Politika. This led to a journalist, Dragoslav Simic, tracking down Rayner, who was by then retired in a small village near Diss in Norfolk. Born Isabel Foster, she had kept her married name and had been known as Isabel Božic in England. Simic traveled to Diss and interviewed Isabel Božic, who explained that she had taken her mother’s maiden name of Louisa Rayner as a pseudonym. Simic then visited Rušanj, where he found one of Savka’s surviving daughter-in-laws, Vuka. A translation of Simic’s story can be found online at http://www.audioifotoarhiv.com/engl/Louisa-Rayner.html. Isabel Mary Foster Božic died in 2004 at the age of 90.

Women in a Village, by Louisa Rayner (Isabel Mary Foster Božic)
London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1957

The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky (1974)

Cover of the Harvill Press edition of <em>The Restless Years</em>.
Cover of the Harvill Press edition of The Restless Years.

In the final pages of Southern Adventure, the previous volume in his memoir The Story of a Life, Konstantin Paustovsky boards a train from Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia to return to Russia having been struck by “the realization that nobody needed me here.” Anyone who’s read the first three volumes will know that Paustovsky must have been haunted by the memory of the two people who did need him: his mother and his sister Galya.

Paustovsky’s mother and sister were the last remnants of his family, a family blown to pieces by war, revolution, and misfortune. Volume One of The Story of a Life opens, in fact, as the author, then a young schoolboy, travels through a Ukranian winter to his father’s burial. The last sight we (and Paustovsky) have of them is in Volume 3, In That Dawn, when he’s forced to abandon them in Kiev as control of the city is wrestled for by the Reds, the Whites, the Germans, and the Ukranians. At the time, Galya had already begun to lose her sight, leaving the two women in a desperate state, with few friends and almost no resources to support themselves aside from the few funds that Paustovsky can send them from time to time.

By the time Paustovsky is reunited with them at the beginning of The Restless Years, Galya is blind and they are reduced to living in a single room in a tenement in Kiev: “two spindly iron bedsteads, an old cupboard, a kitchen table, three wobbly chairs and a mirror on the wall.” Everything in the room is grey — as if covered in dust, but in reality simply worn out of color through years of constant wiping and polishing.

Yet their faith in Paustovsky is undiminished by their years of waiting and need. All that matters to them is that, as a writer, he can change the world. “Tell me please, about the things you write,” his mother asks: “Can they help people, so that they will suffer less?”

It’s hard for any writer to change the world, especially when writing in a time of tremendous political, economic, and social upheaval. But as The Restless Years demonstrates, in Paustovsky’s case, it was not for lack of trying. He arrives back in Moscow in August 1923, almost five years after his last departure. The city is in the midst of one of the early experiments of the Soviet regime, the first cycle of the New Economic Policy and the closest the Communists came to embracing capitalism. Moscow is full of “NEPmen.” These supposed entreneurs were, for the most part, schemers, grifters, and swindlers with little to contribute to actual economic improvement. To Paustovsky, they are like characters in a cheap imitation of a Chekhov play, living “in shabby and spasmodic grandeur, with ramshackle motor-cars, faded beauties and restaurant-gypsy music.”

The city is also overrun by thousands of children orphaned through almost a decade of devastation. These bespriorniki wear bits of old army uniforms, beg for handouts or rummage for scraps in gutters and wastebins, carry their meager belonging in their pockets — “bits of broken combs, knives, cigarettes, crusts of bread, matches, greasy cards, and bits of dirty bandages.” As poor as he and his fellow writers may be, often going a day or two without a meal, Paustovsky finds some comfort in knowing that the bespriorniki are even worse off.

1923 was no more than thirteen or fourteen years later than the schoolboy days that open The Story of a Life, but to Paustovsky it seemed as if he had already lived “so enormously long that the thought of it filled me with terror.” At 30, he feels himself an old man among many of his fellow writers, even though most were no more than five years younger.

That feeling only intensifies when he learns of Lenin’s death. “Men were waiting to be saved from thousands of years of helpless sufferings,” he reflected, and now, “The man who knew what had to be done was gone.” He goes to the train station to travel to Red Square for the funeral but arrives too late. He then tries to walk along the tracks into town but soon collapses out of hunger and exhaustion.

Lenin’s death took from Paustovsky and millions of Russians the spark that fired their spiritual commitment to the revolution. In its place came a grey blanket of bureaucracy and mechanical repression overseen by Stalin. Paustovsky found himself increasingly consumed in self-protection — and most of all, in protecting his intimacy with the Russian language:

I tried to put up a resistance against everything capable of soiling the inner world I carried within me and tried to communicate to others. Most of all I was afraid of becoming contaminated by that exhausted and impotent language which at that time was spreading relentlessly and swiftly.

“The Russian language exists like a collection of great poetry, as unexpectedly rich and pure as the blaze of a starry sky over a forest waste,” he writes. Had it been otherwise, “I should have taken up bookkeeping or something of that sort.”

It was a struggle in which he was, by his own admission, largely unsuccessful in the next few years. “There is nothing worse than a nail driven into the wall and bending,” Paustovsky tells us. “One has no confidence in it.” His poor attempts at fiction in the mid-1920s “resembled in some inexplicable way a mass of nails more or less bent.”

What breaks this impasse is an assignment to travel deep into central Asia. Paustovsky’s imagination had been inspired by reading of an attempt by a Frenchman, Bernardin St. Pierre, to interest the Empress Catherine in his founding a utopian republic on the shore of a vast and desolate inlet off the Caspian Sea known as Kara Bugaz (now Garabogazköl). Catherine had better sense than the Soviets, who launched a grand venture to establish a salt production industry in the regime.

Cover of Kara Bugaz
Cover of Kara Bugaz (The Black Gulf).

If you want an unbiased version of the Kara Bugaz salt factories and Paustovsky’s role in propagandizing it, I highly recommend reading Frank Westerman’s excellent book Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia. For as much as Paustovsky earned a reputation as one of the few Soviet writers to maintain a relatively high level of personal integrity through decades of pressure to conform to the changing tides of editorial policies, his novel Kara Bugaz (1932) (translated as The Black Gulf) veers too close to socialist realism (i.e., propaganda) for comfort. Even in retrospect, his willful misreading of the reality of the situation is clear:

As I have already said, the work in Berezniki was carried out by deportees. But deportation is one thing and work another. Their condition as deportees in no way affected the selflessness of their work. They were the first, according to the chemical experts, to set up machines and installations which they had never seen before. In the past they had only dreamed about them or else read about them in foreign scientific and technical journals. Indeed, there was much to amaze the layman and strike him as being nothing less than a miracle.

The one good result from Paustovsky’s Kara Bugaz experience was that he quit the writers’ collective he’d joined after returning from Moscow and committed to making it on his own as an independent: not an easy task for any writer and particularly challenging through twenty years of Stalin’s rule.

But it also makes The Restless Years the most problematic book in The Story of a Life. It’s easy to read the first five books as the story of a series of violent storms as seen by a bit of flotsam caught up and tossed about by their winds and waves. Paustovsky was too close to the center of Soviet cultural life not to know the true nature of Stalin’s regime. And he cannot console himself, like his friend Mikahil Prishvin, by losing himself in the wonders of Russian nature and wildlife.

The fact that he kept himself aloof from much machinations of the Soviet system doesn’t mean that he remained pristine. Glimpses slip through now and again in The Restless Years. In describing an incident in which he collapsed from typhus while traveling on assignment in the Caucasus, he mentions in passing:

Famine had started in the Ukraine at the time and thousands of refugees rushed off to the south, to Transcaucasus, to the warm regions where there was enough to eat. They flooded out all the railway stations between Zugdidy and Samtredi. Typhus broke out among them.

There may have been a million or more corpses left in the wake of “Famine had started in the Ukraine.”

Sergei Budantsev
Sergei Budantsev

As with the two volumes before it, The Restless Years is full of wonderful sketches of the many writers Paustovsky encountered in the course of his long career. Perhaps the best are his recollections of Isaac Babel in volumes 4 (Years of Hope) and 5 (Southern Adventure). In one profile in this volume, however, he drops his artifice of blindness to Stalinist repression for a moment. He writes of Sergei Budantsev, who was loved as a conversationalist for his habit of sharing his thoughts for future books, “telling people willingly and in detail” their plan, subject, characters, and plots. “He would thus create a whole cycle of oral chapters and novels, worked out and completed to the last detail” — which then, all too often, he failed to translate onto the written page. Paustovsky ends his sketch with one chilling sentence: “Budantsev was one of the first to die in a Chukota concentration camp.”

The Russian edition of The Restless Years was published in 1964 — after the end of the Khruschev Thaw, but perhaps early enough in Brezhnev’s regime that such a blunt disclosure could still be tolerated. Nonetheless, when he wrote his memoir of Soviet literary politics, The Oak and the Calf, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was critical of what he saw as Paustovsky’s reluctance to call out Stalin’s repression directly, lumping him in with Ilya Ehrenburg, whose record of collaboration with the regime was certainly worse. The two men, he felt, were “writers who had seen the great dark epoch, and yet were forever trying to sidle round it, ignoring the things that mattered most, telling us nothing but trivialities, sealing out eyes with emollients till we no longer saw the truth.”

But Paustovsky may have had a different objective in writing his memoirs than of providing a historical record. He was an impressionist at heart, and if he can be criticized for not speaking out against the arrests, camps, exiles, and execution he knew were going on, he must also be credited for leaving behind one of the most vivid autobiographies ever written, a book of life every bit as much as War and Peace or Anna Karenina. And The Restless Years shows how Paustovsky came to understand how he needed to write.

Ironically, he claims that he came to this realization came to him on his journey to Kara Bugaz:

… I realized very soon that one must never make a special point of looking for material and behaving like an outside observer; instead, one must simply live while travelling or staying anywhere one happens to be, without trying to remember everything. Only then does one remain oneself and impressions are absorbed directly, freely, and without any previous “screening,” without the constant thought of what can and what cannot be utilized for a book, what is important and what is not.

“Memory,” he concludes, “will eventually make the necessary selection.” In saying this, Paustovsky is treating memory as inspiration rather than source. Throughout The Story of a Life, he recreates experiences, conversations, and sensations that no one could be expected to have remembered accurately or objectively. He doesn’t pretend to be authoritative on any point aside from his own memories, and even in recording those memories, he is saying, in effect, not “This is happened to me” but “This is what my life was like.” It may have made him a lesser witness in Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, but it certainly made The Story of a Life a book that seems at times as vivid and immediate as one’s own experiences.

Note: As I mentioned in my post on Volume 5, Southern Adventure, Vintage Classics has announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith in June 2022. As wonderful as I’m sure it will be, this edition will not, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6. All six volumes can be found on the Internet Archive.

The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon
London: Harvill Press, 1974

Give Me Your Answer Do, by Peter Marchant (1960)

Cover of first UK edition of Give Me Your Answer Do by Peter Marchant

“At the office Miss Finlay was something of a dark horse.” That opening line hooked me.

A while ago, someone on Twitter posted a picture of Give Me Your Answer Do in answer to a request for books that changed readers lives. I’m always intrigued when I come across a book that’s completely new to me, and this one was a blank slate. The poster provided no further information, but the sheer scarcity of the book (fewer than five copies for sale) was enough for me to take the plunge.

There’s something comfortably nonconformist about Give Me Your Answer Do. This might have been what made the book a life changer for its fan on Twitter.

Miss Finlay, Marchant’s heroine, is both dark horse and ugle duckling. She’s “tall and ungainly, with large feet and hands which made sudden, gawky movements. Her hair was flat, her upper teeth protruded, and she wore spectacles with plain, tortoise-shell rims.” Her fellow typists at Boothby, Gold & Co. think she looks “as if she scrubbed herself very regularly with carbolic soap.”

Miss Finlay engages with the other women at Boothby, Gold as little as possible without seeming rude, offers nothing about her private life. Which is probably wise. To them, her practical diversions when off work — mostly taking long bicycle rides into the countryside beyond London — would merely confirm she is as dull as they think. And her imaginative diversions would have been too wild and grand for their sedate little office.

For Miss Finlay — Margaret, not that anyone seems interested in her first name — has for many years carried on a passionate friendship with a large white horse named Ponikwer Peter Aylestone Bradshaw, or Bradshaw for short. Through dreary years at a bleak girls’ boarding school and further years of workday routine at Boothy, Gold followed by solitary nights in her little coldwater flat, Bradshaw has comforted and amused Margaret.

Margaret’s mother was happy to be rid of the girl. Beautiful and easily bored, she’d only had the child because an abortion was too hard to obtain and she’d only married Margaret’s father to put a wrapper of propriety around her pregnancy. Once Margaret could be put in the care of someone else, her mother could resume amusing herself with handsome and vapid men like her husband’s former commanding officer, Margaret’s real father. And to keep up with Margaret’s school fees and her mother’s expensive tastes in clothes and men, her father dutifully returns to labor at the coalface in India.

Socially awkward, physically inept, and deeply introverted, Margaret finds the experience of boarding school near unbearable. It’s only the odd moments when she can escape to the WC, lock herself into a stall that she has any privacy, and carry on a conversation with Bradshaw that can find any respite. He is the perfect companion: understanding, a good listener, always ready with a hug. She lulls herself to sleep each night imagining herself in the strong, protective arms (legs?) of Bradshaw.

When school comes to an end, Margaret’s mother deems her too ugly to be marriagable material and so packs her off to London to find secretarial work. Margaret soon manages to find herself a room of her own: a coldwater flat with a WC down the hall, perhaps, but a haven nonetheless. Within its four walls, she is free to paint the ceiling yellow, to fix the food she likes, and to carry on long conversations with Bradshaw.

Then, one day, Mr. Bacon, a divorced Yorkshireman as uncomfortable in his own skin as Margaret, invites her on a Saturday outing. One outing leads to another and soon companionship blends into friendship and begins to blend into … well, neither one of them feels quite comfortable putting a name on it. These are two extremely introverted people.

We know, of course, that a collision between Margaret’s fantasy world and her real world is inevitable, but the tension derives from our uncertainty over just how disastrous that crash will be. I’ll just say that Peter Marchant would have had Hollywood rom-com producers knocking on his door if he’d published this book in the 1990s instead of 1960. His ending is suspenseful, sappy, and satisfying in equal measure.

Marchant dedicated the book to Marguerite Young. Yes, the Miss Macintosh, My Darling Marguerite Young. Marchant had followed an unusual path to arrive at Young’s seminar at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the late 1950s. He’d taken an MA in the classics at Cambridge and taught a variety of subjects while serving in the British Army Training Service, then emigrated to Iowa, where he both taught in the School of Education and attended the Writer’s Workshop.

“I’ve heard you have a story about a girl with an imaginary pony,” Young said to Marchant soon after meeting him. Marchant told her it was a flop, having been rejected by magazines and even his agent. “T’d like to read it,” she insisted.

Marchant had few hopes for the story. If it was going to survive and get published, it would have to be cut back severely.

No, Young told him: “You must let it grow. It’s a treatment — it needs expansion.”

When he next brought her a draft, it had grown to over eighty pages. Young’s criticism was harsh but supportive: “With unerring ruthlessness,” she said, “you’ve crossed out the best parts of your writing…. You’ve massacred all your flowers, leaving only the bare branches. She pointed out a passage where Margaret is sitting alone on a hillside. Mr. Bacon, in a fit of passion, has tried to kiss her — an act that she receives like a full-fledged sexual assault.

“She saw the sun glittering on hothouse roofs and wondered why it didn’t crack from the heat,” Young read. “Why did you cut it?” she asked.

“It seemed to me nonsense. Hothouse roofs don’t crack from sunlight.”

“Her fear of sex has nothing to do with her fantasy about glass shattering? Come, now,” Young scolded him.

“Oh,” said Marchant. The lightbulbs were beginning to come on. Over the next weeks, Marchant wrote furiously, soon producing a 300-page manuscript he turned in as his MA thesis for the workshop. He sold the book to the British publisher Michael Joseph, which released the book in 1960. It garnered a few reviews, but its combination of an unconventional heroine and a theme of escape through fantasy was perhaps a little too far ahead of its time. The most frequently-used adjective in its review was “odd” — which probably turned folks off in that conformist day but ought to pique the interest of today’s readers. I think the book would do very well if reissued now.

Marchant put fiction behind him after publishing Give Me Your Answer Do. According to his obituary, he stayed in academia, becoming a specialist in the 19th century British novel and teaching for decades at Penn State and the State University of New York – Brockport. Instead, it was his wife, Mary Elsie Robertson, who focused on fiction, writing a half dozen novels starting with After Freud in 1981. A Quaker, holder of a black belt in judo, and a historian of the Holocaust, Marchant must have been a remarkable man, and Give Me Your Answer Do deserves a high place in any list of his accomplishments.

Give Me Your Answer Do, by Peter Marchant
London: Michael Joseph, 1960

Parachute, by Ramon Guthrie (1928)

Cover of UK edition of Parachute by Ramon Guthrie
Cover of UK edition of Parachute by Ramon Guthrie.

Ramon Guthrie’s 1928 novel Parachute is a story about PTSD. The term post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t been invented then, and the fact that the novel is full of pilots, airplanes, and people jumping out of them led its publishers to sell it as a story about aviation. Coming out a year after Charles Lindbergh’s record-breaking solo flight across the Atlantic, Parachute seemed guaranteed to hit a bullseye with the reading public.

The fact that its author was credited with downing four German aircraft (as an observer/gunner, mind, not a pilot) and awarded the Silver Star for his exploits didn’t hurt. But the actual fact was that Ramon Guthrie was by then, almost ten years after the war, anything but a stereotype of the heroic military aviator. He wrote the book, his second novel, while living in France, having returned in late 1921 to rejoin Marguerite Maurey, the woman with whom he’d fallen in love just before being repatriated to the United States as a casualty in early 1919. He’d taken a degree at the university in Tours and become interested in poetry, publishing several collections with expat publishers and writing a first novel, Marcabrun, about a 12th century troubadour.

The wounds for which Guthrie was brought home weren’t physical. He’d survived several crashes while serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps’s Aviation Section on the Western front. Worst that those, however, was the ill-conceived raid in which a flight of 10 DH-4 “Liberty” bombers took off on 18 September 1918 to attack Mars-la-Tour, a town just seven miles inside the German lines. Three planes dropped out due to mechanical problems. The Liberties were plagued with mechanical problems. A fourth turned back when the formation encountered clouds. The pilots, mostly inexperienced, had little experience flying and trying to navigating in clouds.

Ramon Guthrie and members of the 11th Aero Squadron.
Ramon Guthrie (arrow) and members of the 11th Aero Squadron.

About half an hour into their mission, the remaining six planes were attacked by German fighters. Three were quickly shot down, killing all six pilots and observers. Two others were damaged and force into crash landings. Only Guthrie and his pilot, Vincent Oatis, made it back safely, Guthrie managing to shoot down one of the German Fokkers. Guthrie later recalled the experience in the poem “Death with Pants On” in his last book Maximum Security War (1970):

I think of others
Chapin, Sayre, Comygies, Nick Carter
whom I last saw spinning down in flames
toward La Chaussee. Their first fight —
if you can call it that. Unmatched for unreality:
as we straggled out of clouds into a well
of open sky, the red-nosed hornets swooped.
Most of us
never found a chance to fire a shot.
There were others. I forget their names.

A few days after that raid, Guthrie’s helmet and goggles came off while they were flying at a relatively high altitude and he suffered burns to his face and eyes from the freezing air until Oatis got the plane down. Guthrie continued to fly, usually with Oatis, until less than a week before the Armistice.

Guthrie had been in France since the end of 1916, when he arrived in a contingent of the American Field Service ambulance corps, a now legendary unit that included such future writers as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E. E. Cummings. Guthrie’s section of the service operated with the French Army in both France and the Balkans. When American entered the war in 1917, Guthrie enlisted as an aviation observer, thinking it would take too long for him to qualify as a pilot.

Even before the war ended, however, Guthrie already began to suffer psychological effects from his combat experiences. He had bouts of amnesia and his behavior off duty began to concern his fellow flyers. As in World War Two, air combat in the First quickly gained a romantic mystique that covered up the ugly reality that war was even more of a meat grinder in the air than it was on the ground. Doughboys in the trenches had better chances of survival than the airmen they envied for their “luxurious” billets behind the lines. Life at a typical aerodrome was certainly more comfortable than it was in a front line trench, but you had to avoid being killed, wounded, or captured to enjoy it.

Newspaper article about establishment of a "Nervous" hospital for aviators in Cooperstown, NY.
Newspaper article about establishment of a “Nervous” hospital for aviators in Cooperstown, NY.

Even though psychiatry was still in its early days and looked on with some suspicion by other medical practitioners, the U.S. Army had begun to recognize that not all wounds were physical, and it sought to provide suitable rehabilitation for at least some of its returning veterans. For flyers like Guthrie, however, it was sheer luck that Stephen Carlton Clark, a wealthy philanthropist who later founded the Baseball Hall of Fame, had decided to offer the services of a brand-new hospital he was building on part of his estate in Cooperstown, New York. Clark had some snobbish stipulations, though. He preferred to limit the patients to aviators and even then only to those not requiring surgery or physical therapy. The hospital would specialize in “nervous shock” cases.

The hospital opened just in time to receive the first airmen arriving back in the U.S. in early 1919. In Parachute, the fictional town of Berkenmeer takes the place of Cooperstown and an only-partly-philanthropist named Alfred Banning takes the place of Clark. Among the hundred or so flyers assigned to the hospital are Tony Rickey, an ace and crack fighter pilot, and Harvey Sayles, who served entirely behind the lines as a ferry pilot.

Of the two, it’s Harvey who is the more damaged, however. He’s had three planes crack up on him, and after the third crash, he went AWOL for weeks before being caught by the military police. Unwilling to go through the trouble of organizing a court-martial, though, his commanding officer persuades the medical officer to diagnose Harvey with dementia praecox — or schizophrenia as it’s usually termed today.

Tony and Harvey find themselves outsiders at the hospital. From an Italian family in Peoria, Tony is considered lowbrow by the other pilots, most of them Ivy Leaguers from “better” families. Harvey, on the other hand, is seen as the only patient in the place truly in need of its care. “I’m plagued the by insanity label,” he complains. The rest of the men are just enjoying a few months of rest and recreation at the Army’s expense.

Tony isn’t bothered by the insanity label — or rather, it helps him accept Harvey’s idiosyncracies:

Tony didn’t mind listening to Sayles, because he knew that Sayles was crazy and couldn’t help talking that way; and occasionally as he listened he would become aware of a deep current of sense running through the babble. Once his ear had distinguished it, it was like singling out the notes of one instrument in an orchestra until it dominated everything else. Sometimes Tony would even wonder why more people didn’t talk that way, and if it wouldn’t be a good idea for more people to be insane.

Tony soon meets and begins an affair with Natalie, Alfred Banning’s beautiful young Russian wife. Managing to deceive the older man, he also persuades Banning to support a hare-brained scheme he concocts of establishing an airline based in Berkenmeer. Boston – Berkenmeer – Chicago, he fantasizes. Tony revs up the Chamber of Commerce and soon raises enough money to buy an old Curtiss Jenny and turn a local field into a runway.

His entrerpeneurial dreams get mixed up with his passion for Natalie, and soon the two have run off as Tony scrapes by with barnstorming jobs and joy-rides at county fairs. Meanwhile, Harvey decides it’s time to return to civilian life and travels to New York City in search of work. Instead, he encounters scenes more hellish than anything he’d seen during the war:

Miles of sidewalks and people flickering by, young men, old men, women, girls, and all with dead, distorted faces, horribly obscene, like gargoyles worn by the rain, the same faces that make the ghastly fresco of the Subway, blotchy, bloated, idiot faces with evil squints and apathetic leers. Subway Faces. Subway Faces crawling out into the air. He forced his pace to pass them more quickly and, as he met them, turned his eyes away with sickened dread.

While in New York, however, he witnesses a demonstration of parachuting and gets the idea to buy one and join Tony on his barnstorming travels. In addition to the stunts and rides, Harvey will do parachute jumps, giving most of the people on the ground their first sight of a falling from a plane in flight and surviving.

Guthrie understands that both Tony and Harvey are avoiding their inevitable return to the routines and small dramas of peacetime life. Flying, adultery, and skydiving are attempts to recreate the intensity of wartime experiences without recognizing their psychological costs. Harvey begins to worry that his trip to New York was proof that he was, indeed, insane — incapable of fitting back into normal life. As winter approaches, bringing an end to the barnstorming season, Harvey thinks that winter will also “terminate his life with Tony.” Harvey’s response is suicidal; Tony’s is merely rash and reckless. In the end, neither manages to put the war behind him.

Ramon Guthrie in 1928, a portrait by Stella Bowen.
Ramon Guthrie in 1928, a portrait by Stella Bowen (from the Hood Museum at Dartmouth).

Guthrie’s choice of title is ironic: neither Tony nor Harvey finds a way to break their fall from the heightened experience of war. Guthrie himself fared better, perhaps with the help of his wife, perhaps because of his return to France, or perhaps because of a simple resilience of spirit. He and Marguerite left France in 1929, driven out by the failing economy, and Guthrie landed a job at Dartmouth. He stayed there for over thirty years, writing little and concentrating on teaching and translation. He served briefly with the Office of Special Services, the forerunner of the CIA, to help coordinate between Allied forces and the French Resistance, earning the Legion d’Honneur, then returned to Dartmouth.

He was diagnosed with bladder cancer in the mid-1960s and had to curtail his teaching activities. His fight with the disease seemed to reinvigorate his creative energies, however, and he began writing poetry again. He was unwilling to condone further military operations, though, and he mailed his Silver Star to President Johnson in 1965 to protest the American involvement in Vietnam. He also began work on his best-known book Maximum Security Ward, which was published in 1970. By the time the book was published, however, the disease had seriously debilitated him and he spent his last years in pain, much of the time hospitalized. He managed to arrange his release in late November 1973 and took his life with an overdose of phenobarbital soon after returning home.

Parachute, by Ramon Guthrie
New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company
London: Gerald Howe

Apalache, by Paul Metcalf (1976)

Cover of Apalache by Paul Metcalf

I’m going against my principle of only writing about books that have been out of print for some time in offering this piece on Paul Metcalf’s Apalache as my contribution to the #1976Club. Although Apalache has been out of print as an individual volume since its publication in 1976, it’s available today as part of Volume I of the Collected Works of Paul Metcalf. On the other hand, that book and its two companion volumes — one of the worthiest products of American independent publishing — came out 25 years ago, so it’s at least no longer new.

I wanted to write about Apalache because, though his work may be in print, he’s perhaps the most neglected major American writer of the late 20th Century. And he’s certainly the first writer I started to follow devotedly. In looking through my collection of Metcalf’s works — books that have been in storage since 2001, when my wife and I thought we were moving to Europe for just three years — I came across a letter from 1981 in which Metcalf graciously thanked me for what was probably a gushing fan’s note.

My collection of books by Paul Metcalf
My collection of books by Paul Metcalf.

Looking at this stack, I also realize that it was assembled at some effort over the course of a decade or more. These books all predate Amazon and online bookshopping. I think I would open my local library’s latest copy of Books in Print, flip to the Ms, and scan to see if there was anything new from Metcalf. Although I found a receipt from Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue back in 1982 in Apalache, I’m pretty sure I bought the rest by writing to the publishers and enclosing checks to cover purchase and postage.

Most of Metcalf’s major works — Genoa (1965), Patagoni (1971), The Middle Passage Both (1982) — were published by the Jargon Society, the eclectic independent press run by his friend and Black Mountain College classmate, the poet Jonathan Williams. Williams was not a prolific publisher, but he was a master book designer and meticulous printer and all of the above are beautiful books in their own ways. Apalache was published by the Turtle Island Foundation in Berkeley (certainly why I was able to find it at Moe’s), and though a good-looking piece of work, not quite on the level of the Jargon Society books.

Metcalf put a book designer to the test. His style, at least from Genoa on — constantly draws upon the range of possibilities of then-current typesetting. Metcalf himself always wrote on a manual typewriting, but he never wanted to stay within conventions of font, paragraph, and line. He may have overtaxed the capabilities of Turtle Island’s designer, Clifford Burke. After receiving the manuscript, he called the writer and asked Metcalf to record a reading of the book so that he had a clearer idea of what the writer had in mind.

Apalache weaves together hundreds of excerpts from numerous sources ranging from Native American myths to the journals of early European explorers to scientific texts and newspaper articles. Metcalf’s first book Will West (1956) followed, for the most part, the pattern of a traditional prose narrative. By Genoa, however, his own words began to recede, changing from the substance of the text to the binding agent, the lead in a stained-glass window or the mortar in a mosaic. In his introduction to the 2015 edition of Genoa, novelist Rick Moody described Metcalf’s style as a “helixing of quotation and consciousness, with its multiple fonts and its open-ended grammatical structures, sentences that are sometimes picked up later and sometimes not.”

Metcalf later said that he decided to take a different direction in his writing as he began to work on Genoa in the early 1960s. He was responding, he said, to the sense “that the old-fashioned novel — pure fiction — had played itself out, that it must be refreshed, revivified, by the incontrovertible force of facts.” Those facts, for Metcalf, were the most precious ingredients. He spent months, sometimes years, mining them from countless volumes he found in libraries all over the Northeast. As his friend Guy Davenport once wrote, “Paul Metcalf is a great reader…. Metcalf’s reading is to find things which he puts together in patterns. Such was the working method of Plutarch, Montaigne, Burton, all of whose books are new contexts for other voices.”

An excerpt from "Shick Shock" published as a broadsheet
An excerpt from "Shick Shock" published as a broadsheet.

Metcalf then pieced these together, sometimes jamming texts into a seamless amalgam, sometimes leaving the original intact, occasionally linking pieces with his own words. From these sections he constructed the overall work based on a design — and an underlying message — that he saw on almost an architectural level. One critic has called Metcalf’s style architectonic, and the link to the geological term tectonic has particular significance in Metcalf’s case. His vision of history in Apalache reaches all the way back to the formation of the features of the North American landscape. The final passages in “Bash-Bish,” the first section of the book, invokes a litany of geologic terms: moraines, drumlins, podzols, eskers, monadnocks. He calls Appalachia the “resistant relic of metamorphosis” (his own words), that metamorphosis being the emergence of the continent from the time when “the earth an ocean. the earth ocean.”

Davenport argued that “Metcalf represents our most radical shift in the form of narrative.” Michael Davidson invented a new term, palimtextual, to describe the kind of work that Metcalf created, in which original source texts formed such an integral part of the overall work’s substance. George Butterick described it as “an eco-system of texts.” And yet there is a familiar literary pattern underlying Apalache: the tragedy.

Apalache is an epic tragedy of the loss of the Eden that North America represented when Europeans began to explore and colonize. In “Bash-Bish,” the first of the eight major sections that comprise Apalache, Metcalf starts with English explorers recounting the fact that they smelled the land before they even saw it. Then, as they land and explore, he moves along with them as they note the lushness and variety of trees, plants, features. And their first encounters with Native Americans and the odd names they give to places: “chaubuqueduck, messatsoosec … twada-alahala … machaquamagansett … the kenogamishish … connoharriegoharriee….”

Then, in “The Feare in Ye Buttocks,” we shift forward to explorations of the interior — the Saint Lawrence, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi — the hardships (starvation, disease, attacks by natives), and the first clashes. He takes the section’s title from the journals of Peter Esprit Radisson, recalling the desperation that set in on long excursions by canoe into what are now parts of Quebec and Ontario:

A strange thing when victualls are wanting, worke whole nights and dayes, lye down on the bare ground and not allwayes that hap, the breech in the water, the feare in ye buttocks, to have the belly empty, the weariness in the bones and drowsiness of ye body by the bad weather that you are to suffer, having nothing to keep you from such calamity.

The dramatic mid-point of the narrative comes in section three, “South →.” Metcalf assembles an abbreviated account of Roger Williams, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and forced to head south to what is now Rhode Island, where he founds the Providence Plantations. Williams encouraged a spirit of cooperation and co-habitation with the native Narragansett people that contrasts with the attitudes of the Massachusetts Puritans — and represented, for Metcalf, the one chance America had of a common stewardship of the land.

Unfortunately, as today’s American historians are demonstrating with increasing effectiveness (and controversy), much of this land’s history is colored by discrimination, hatred, exploitation, and violence. The next few sections offer depressing examples. In “Telemaque,” Metcalf runs parallel narratives — literally — of Denmark Vesey, a freed slave who attempted to organize an armed takeover of Charleston, South Carolina in 1822; and of Robert Williams, a North Carolina organizer who argued for the right of blacks to defend themselves against white violence with weapons, if necessary. Betrayed by one of his fellow conspirators, Vesey was hanged along with five other men. Railroaded in his hometown of Monroe, Williams eventually fled to Cuba, and later China, before returning to the US in 1970. The charges against him were dropped soon after he appeared at the Monroe courthouse.

The parallel texts in "Telemaque" from Apalache
The parallel texts of “Telemaque” in Apalache

The most damning passage, however, is in the section titled “Okefenokee.” Metcalf gives us a snatch of the genealogy of the Thrifts, a family that settled near the Georgia swamp, then howls across the following pages in large print, one word per page:

Hard Thrift logged the trembling earth.

Section six, “Shick Shock,” reconstructs America’s Genesis. “Where the sun sleeps, our fathers came thence.” Metcalf traces, using a combination of scientific/archaeological accounts, excerpts from Creek, Delaware, Iroquois, and other Native American myths, and passages from the Vinland Saga and the journal of Arthur Barlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh’s co-captain on the first Roanoke expedition, how the two peoples came into the land. How they came into contact he saves for the final two sections, “Cocoanut Indians” and “Beothuk.”

The last takes its name from the natives encountered by Sebastian Cabot and the first white settlers of Newfoundland. The Beothuk are probably responsible for the stereotype of the “red Indian,” as they had the habit of coloring their faces with red ochre pigment. Small in number, the Beothuk were considered “ghost people” by other tribes for their ability to disappear into the woods. This skill was not enough, however, to protect them from the white hunters and fishermen, who not only tended to shoot them on sight but then to brag of such acts as if of great accomplishments.

Despite the fact that consecutive colony governors banned such killings as “inhuman barbarity,” the practice continued. By 1770, Captain George Cartwright, whose report Metcalf quotes, wrote grimly,

It will be expected by the British reader that a work on Newfoundland should afford some insight into the destiny of the Beothuk Indian; but I am sorry to say, I cannot satisfy this expectation; none have been seen of late even by the trappers and hunters, by the Micmaics, or by the Esquimaux of Labrador; and, unless they are in the fastnesses of the centre of the island, the race has emigrated, or become extinct.

Metcalf closes with a phrase from one of the origin myths he used in “Shick Shock”: “… they feared a powerful monster, who was to appear from the sea.”

Paul Metcalf outside his writing cabin in the early 1970s.
Paul Metcalf outside his writing cabin in the early 1970s.

Metcalf never used a computer. Reading Apalache, I took generous advantage of the capabilities of search engines to track down passages in the book to their source texts. The text contents search feature of the Internet Archive was a particularly useful tool. One benefit of these searches was to see the quoted passages in context. In many cases, reading the longer text from which Metcalf took a few sentences, or even just a phrase, amplified the power of Metcalf’s mosaic. It gave me a chance to see the work, if you will, though Metcalf’s eyes, to understand what he chose to include and what to leave out. If ever Apalache gets the serious annotation it deserves, I think more readers will be able to see this book for the American classic I think it is.

In a eulogy he published in Rain Taxi, Allan Kornblum wrote that Paul Metcalf had “a scope of historical vision and a depth of compassion that I found breathtaking.” I find that last phrase key to appreciating Metcalf’s work. Yes, it is densely historical, and as he said himself, full of “the incontrovertible force of facts.”

But those who knew the man are uniform in their praise of his generosity, curiosity, and gentleness. Metcalf and his wife Nancy spent most of their lives in a secluded piece of land outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts, living in a rough wooden house with few conveniences. Day after day, when he wasn’t in a library, Metcalf retired to a small cabin on the property where he worked on his books. He was, in some ways, a more authentic Thoreau than Henry David himself, who relied on his mother to bring him supplies during his year of seclusion at Walden Pond.

With all my searching for the sources in Apalache, what I ultimately took away from the book was a deep sense of sadness. It is, in its unique way, the Great American Novel — if you accept that the Great American story is that of the destruction of Eden and its inhabitants and their replacement by a spirit of exploitation enforced through violence. I defy anyone to read “Beothuk” and not feel that you’re leaving part of your heart behind.

Metcalf once told Dalkey Archives founder John O’Brien that his daughter — who rarely read her father’s work — came to him after finishing Apalache and said, “I’ve learned something: you’re a closet romantic.” “Do you know what this book is?” she teased him. “No, what is it?” he replied. “It’s a love poem,” she answered. “You’re in love with North America.” Yet it’s love poem free of all illusions about the beloved. Metcalf looks upon the continent with wonder at its beauty and power — and horror at the crimes to be witnessed wherever one looks in its history.

Forty years ago, I was a noisy and enthusiastic young fan of Paul Metcalf’s work. Now, I am simply in quiet awe.

Apalache, by Paul Metcalf
Berkeley, California: The Turtle Island Foundation, 1976

Going Under, by Lydia Chukovskaya (1972)

Cover of the first edition of Going Under by Lydia Chukovskaya

Going Under is a story of physical comfort and emotional and psychological suffering. Nina Sergeyevna, a translator, arrives at Litvinovka, a writer’s retreat somewhere outside Leningrad, for a few weeks’ state-approved rest in the middle of winter. She’s provided with three meals a day, the freedom to walk through the neighboring countryside and forest, and, most importantly, time to think and write in her room. This last is most precious of all because, like many Soviet city dwellers, she has to share a communal apartment in which privacy is essential unknown.

Yet she will find nothing to shelter her from the pain of her memories. She’s decided to take advantage of this time to “go under.” Going under means to immerse herself in the past — specifically, into the time of Stalin’s purges and show trials of the late 1930s, when her husband Alyosha was arrested and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp.

Since Alyosha’s arrest, Nina has no contact with him. Like other women whose husbands and sons were sucked into the vortex of the Soviet penal system, she’s stood in line for months outside the prison where he’s supposed to have been taken, to ask of his whereabouts. The answers she was given were vague and always shifting. “There are no foundations for a review of the case.” “When he serves out his sentence, he will write to you himself.” “Maybe he’s alive, maybe dead. How would I know?” Finally, she’s told that he’s been sentenced to a special camp for “ten years without right of correspondence.”

It’s now been over twelve years. There’s been nothing. Many nights, Nina finds herself dreaming of Alyosha in prison, in a labor camp, being interrogated, sometimes even being executed. The uncertainty eats away at her psyche.

She wants to put down her thoughts to restore the sense of closeness with her husband that’s grown weak and thin over the years: “The book was me, the sinking of my heart, my memories, which nobody could see…. In creating it, Alyosha’s voice … would permeate” its reader’s soul. Nina is haunted in particular by the thought of his death. “What was his last moment like? How had they turned a living man into a dead man? … And where was his grave? What was the last thing he had seen as life abandoned him?”

Arriving at the retreat with Nina is Bilibin, a writer of comic stories who’s been rehabilitated as a member of the Writers’ Union after serving a term in the gulag. She is desperate to speak with him: “Until now I had never met anyone who had come from there — from a concentration camp.” Bilibin is flattered by Nina’s attention but wary of her questions. He suffers from angina; his heart is weak from the strain of his years in camp.

Finally, however, he reveals the truth:

He was never taken anywhere, he had never suffered from cattle-trucks or dogs. Everything was over long before that. According to Nikolai Aleksandrovich, “ten years without right of correspondence” simply meant execution by firing squad. To avoid repeating at the windows “executed”, “executed”, and so on that there should be no howling and crying in the queue.

Bilibin also confides that he is working on his own account, a book about the things he has seen in the camps. Nina is thrilled to have an ally, and solicitous of Bilibin’s fragile health, especially after he suffers a mild heart attack. As their time nears its end, Bilibin modestly offers his manuscript to Nina.

At first, she read with great excitement. “Yes, his writing was more powerful than his conversation.” Though Bilibin’s story is set in a mine, Nina recognizes some of the men from the camps he’s told her about. Perhaps it’s an allegory to avoid the censors. As she reads on, however, she realizes that Bilibin has written nothing more than a conventional piece of socialist realism: earnest workers, conscientious supervisors, a happy collective. “You’re a coward. No, you’re worse, you’re a false witness.” “Why did you not have the decency to remain silent,” she asks.

For Lydia Chukovskaya, there were only two legitimate choices for Soviet writers: tell the truth or remain silent. Her greatest scorn was for those who tried to follow a compliant middle way and appease the authorities. Going Under is really Chukovskaya’s own story, one she wrote in 1949 after learning of the fate of her own husband.

Matvei Bronstein, husband of Lydia Chukovskaya, in 1937.
Matvei Bronstein, husband of Lydia Chukovskaya, in 1937.

The daughter of Kornei Chukovsky, a children’s writer who was perhaps the best-known and most beloved literary figure inside the Soviet Union, Chukovskaya had married a Jewish physicist and mathematician, Matvei Bronstein, in the mid-1930s. Bronstein and Lev Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova’s son, were arrested. Gumilyov was set to a labor camp. Bronstein in all likelihood never made it out of basement of the NKVD’s building in Leningrad.

Chukovskaya and Akhmatova stood in the same lines described by Nina Sergeyevna in Going Under, the lines in the introduction to Akhmatova’s great poem “Requiem”:

In the black years of ezhovshchina I spent seventeen months in the prison lines. One day someone recognized me. Then, a woman with blue lips who stood behind me woke up from the trance into which we all fell and whispered in my ear: “And this, can you describe this?” And I said, “Yes, I can.” And then something like a smile glimmered on what once had been her face.

The two women became close friends and over the subsequent years Chukovskaya took notes of their almost daily conversations, note that were later published as The Akhmatova Journals, only one of whose three volumes has been translated into English.

In the decades after her husband’s arrest, Chukovskaya became one of the most vocal critics within the Soviet system. She supported Pasternak when he fell out of Stalin’s favor. She wrote in support of Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and Yuri Daniel when they were arrested and tried in the 1960s and in support of Joseph Brodsky and Andrei Sakharov when they were persecuted. She was a friend of Solzhenitsyn and let him hide in her flat for a time before he was finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. She was herself expelled from the Writers’ Union soon after.

Lydia Chokovskaya in the 1970s.
Lydia Chokovskaya in the 1970s.

She even had the courage to sue her publishers after they balked at publishing Sofia Petrovna, her short novel about a mother whose son is arrested during the purge. Although the book was accepted for publication in 1962, when it came time to be released in 1963 after Khruschev’s fall from power, the Soviet authorities banned it. Chukovskaya argued that her publishers were in breach of contract. Her publishers alleged that the book was not in the public interest, to which she responded,

Literature must illuminate what happened in 1937 in a profound way and from every angle. But this is beyond the powers of a single work. Only our literature as a whole can do that. And that is why we must not stop printing Solzhenitsyn. On the contrary, many more books about that time need to be printed, including my novel.

Amazingly, the court found in Chukovskaya’s favor and ruled the publisher had to pay her the outstanding share of the royalties. A samizdat copy of Sofia Petrovna was smuggled out and published in Paris as The Deserted House. It was not until 1988 that the book was published in the Soviet Union.

She once told an American reporter that she felt compelled to speak out against injustice in the Soviet system: “If I don’t do it, I can’t write about the things that matter. Until I pull this arrow out of my breast, I can think of nothing else!” Chukovskaya had great faith in the future. When she was expelled from the Writers’ Union, she responded in a public letter,

Always, when performing acts like this, you have forgotten — and you are now forgetting — that you control only the present and to some extent the past. There is still another court with jurisdiction over the past and the future: the history of literature.

What do they do — those you have expelled? Write books. After all, even prisoners have written books, and are writing them. And what will you do? Write resolutions.

Like Sofia Petrovna, Going Under was published in the West decades before it came out in Russia. The Chekhov Publishing Corporation released the book in Russian in the US in 1972 and an English translation by Peter M. Weston came out from Barrie &Jenkins the same year.

Reviewing the book for The New Statesman, Germaine Greer wrote, “Chukovskaya’s calm prose shakes the heart with grief and outrage for one of the greater man-made calamities of our time.” It was, she concluded, “a very important book indeed.” Valentin Terra argued that Going Under was “artistically neater, tighter, and more subtle” than Sofia Petrovna.

Anatole Broyard, the New York Times’ reviewer, however, savaged the book. He snarked that Solzhenitsyn’s enthusiastic blurb for the cover of the US edition “evades literary evaluation, either by accident or design.” Going Under, he wrote, was “dull, stodgy, amateurish and almost wholly bereft of ideas.” He was so sure of himself that he even ventured to say, “while I have not read The Deserted House I am convinced, in my heart, that it cannot have been a good book.”

Fortunately, the “history of literature” that Chukovskaya believed in has proved a better judge than Broyard. Although the book has never been reissued in English, it’s been translated into numerous languages. The book’s page on GoodReads includes positive reviews from readers in Germany, Spain, Finland, Latvia, and Armenia.

Lydia Chukovskaya died in February 1996. She was 89 and had lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union. Her body was buried in the cemetery at the writer’s colony of Peredelkino, not far from the grave of Boris Pasternak.

Going Under, by Lydia Chukovskaya, translated by Peter M. Weston
London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972

It’s a Great War! by Mary Lee (1929)

Cover for US edition of It's a Great War!

I’ve been collecting neglected books for decades and writing about them here for over 15 years and I still get surprised by books I’ve never heard of. I first came across a mention of It’s a Great War! in a 1935 newspaper article reporting on a talk about novels of World War One. The speaker, a professor at an Illinois university, singled it out as one of the “truest, most powerful” books written about the war and noteworthy for having been written by a woman: Mary Lee.

I quickly Googled it and was stunned to learn that Robert Lovett, one of the three judges for the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, considered it that year’s best book: “It is the biggest piece of fiction I have read, and comes nearest to satisfying the last conditions of which I was notified, i.e., ‘preferably a novel presenting the whole atmosphere of American life.’” Lovett ended up supporting the decision to award the prize to Oliver La Farge’s novel of Navaho life, Laughing Boy. It was not the only award Lee was short-changed on.

Mary Lee in her YMCA uniform.
Mary Lee in her YMCA uniform.

Daughter of an old Boston Brahmin family (she once informed a Boston College student that the Lees arrived in Boston two hundred years before the College), Lee was caught up in the fervor that accompanied America’s decision to enter the war in 1917. A recent graduate from Radcliffe College, she responded to an Army call for women to serve in administrative positions and sailed for France in the fall of that year as part of the staff of a field hospital. The hospital deployed near Bordeaux and Lee worked there for some months before being enticed to take a secretarial job with an Army Air Corps office in Paris. Then, growing uncomfortable with the relatively luxurious conditions in Paris, she joined the YMCA and took a post running a field canteen for an aviation unit near the front. She decided to stay on after the Armistice and set up and ran several canteens serving American Army units in occupied Germany, returning home to Massachusetts in late 1919.

Lee later said she wrote the book to tell women the truth about the war. “They think that war is a pure, wonderful crusade,” she told reporter Eleanor Early. “Fine young men and women, fighting for Justice…. If people really knew what it was like — if women knew –.” Following her own experiences with few fictional variations, her story took 200,00 words to tell. And when she finished it, she found no one interested in publishing it. So she put the manuscript on the shelf.

Then, in 1928, to mark the tenth anniversary of Armistice Day, Houghton Mifflin and the American Legion sponsored a contest offering $25,000 for the best novel about the war. Lee retyped the manuscript, leaving off her name as the rules required, and submitted it.

Most of the contest judges — all of the civilian judges, that is — considered Lee’s novel by far the best of the candidates. Retired Major General James Harbord, Pershing’s head of supply at the war’s end, however, thought the book “unseemly” in its content and inappropriate for an award sponsored by the Legion. Unwilling to go against the general, the other four judges agreed to a compromise and split the award between Lee and William T. Scanlon, who’d submitted a more conventional novel about combat during the battle of Belleau Wood, God Have Mercy on Us!. Scanlon and Lee each took home $12,500.

Rank and file Legionnaires objected to this compromise. Or rather, they objected to Lee’s selection. Ten years after the fact, veterans appeared, like General Harbord, to chafe at Lee’s mention of such unheroic aspects of the doughboys’ time overseas as prophylactic stations, drunkenness, and the abandonment of children they fathered with French women. Several Legionnaire posts, including one near her hometown of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts wrote letters demanding she forfeit the award, criticizing the book for its “frivolity”.

Ad for syndicated version of It's a Great War! from the San Francisco Examiner.
Ad for syndicated version of It’s a Great War! from the San Francisco Examiner.

Ironically, this was exactly the sort of thing Lee intended to document. “War is not a romance,” she protested. “As long as romances are fabricated about war, it will remain a noble, worthy, beautiful adventure for youth. As long as war is made romantic, it will go on.”

Nevertheless, there is a certain air of romance in the early chapters of It’s a Great War!. Anne Wentworth, Lee’s fictional counterpart, departs for France, she is full of idealism: “Wasn’t it a noble gesture…? They were starting out to make the world safe again…. This was a War to End War, –”

That idealism begins to fade as soon as her ship docks in Le Havre. There, all along the quai, lie stretchers with the British casualties being loaded onto a transport headed for England. “There was nowhere you couldn’t hear them…. See them…. Logs of wood, going slowly, one after another.”

And the reality of the women’s quarters at the hospital in Bordeaux are not the sort of thing mentioned in the recruitment literature: “Black fleas hopped…. Women taking clothes off. Hideous underwear. Fat legs and thin ones. Hairs…. How could anyone ever choose to look at women’s bare limbs…?” The expression “It’s a great war!” quickly turns from enthusiasm into sarcasm. It becomes a running joke. Anytime conditions are lousy, supplies are short, or Army bureaucracy infuriatingly pig-headed, someone will quip, “It’s a great war!”

Even more disheartening is Anne’s realization that she, a bright, intelligent young woman, is just as much a faceless number expected to keep quiet and follow orders as any soldier. “They thought you couldn’t be trusted, did they…. Sent you out here, fed you on horse meat, and then refused to trust you.” Though she enjoys a brief reunion with her brother, a lieutenant serving with an infantry unit, the hospital proves too dreary and too dull, being too far from the front. When Anne is offered a position with an Air Corps staff office in Paris, she jumps at the opportunity.

Paris seems a different world after the rural isolation of the field hospital. “Dresses, in shop windows, — soft and colored…. Through the glass, handkerchiefs, diaphanous, frail things with colored borders….” In the staff office, officers in smartly tailored uniforms and shining Sam Browne belts and boots rush in and out of meetings, trying to obtain airplanes from the French, supplies from America, and most importantly, attention from Pershing’s staff. Anne stays at the home of a French noblewoman, is invited out to restaurants and the Opéra Comique, goes for rides into the country in a general’s staff car.

There are occasional German air raids to dispel the illusion, of course. “Men, up there, in the darkness, trying to kill you…. Others trying to kill them….” Lee reminds us that air warfare was a grim novelty back then: “The sky, no longer an empty place you didn’t have to think of…. Human beings, skimming through the great dome….” She stoops to pick up a piece of shrapnel that falls at her feet. Her friend quickly ushers her under the arch of a bridge for safety.

Ad for It's a Great War! from the Guardian.
Ad for It’s a Great War! from the Guardian.

The samples I’ve offered so far demonstrate an aspect of Lee’s prose that many found hard to take. One British reviewer compared the experience of reading It’s a Great War! to “riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.” “A book about war cannot move smoothly, swiftly,” Lee later countered. “War moves in jerks.”

Now that we have seen many more writers work in such fragmented, impressionistic prose (Céline most obviously comes to mind), however, we should not be put off by Lee’s style. Instead, we should recognize the mastery with which she uses it to capture the fragmentary nature of intense experiences. This excerpt, describing Anne’s first flight in an airplane, seems a perfect example of what makes this book as palpable, as immediate, as some of the finest scenes in Tolstoy:

She held her breath, mouth open. The bumping earth, falling away below you…. Falling, falling…. Wind, filling your mouth, blowing furiously against you…. But you weren’t moving…. Moving means things that rush past…. Here there was nothing…. Nothing but that furious, high wind…. And the old earth, a purple map below there, sinking, sinking…. The great wing tipping, tipping…. You’d fall out. A great, swirling dip, — the earth going from one wing to the other, — God, you were upside down…. Breathless…. The world whirling…. Down, down….

As the fall of 1918 approaches, Anne grows concerned about her brother, whose unit fought in the battle of Château-Thierry. She scans casualty reports and asks anyone she meets who’s been to the front, but it is only a month later that she receives a letter from a nurse she knows: “The regiment was frightfully shot to pieces, but no one will be a greater loss than Geoffrey.”

Her brother’s death causes Anne to question the value of her work in comfortable Paris, and she decides to take a post with the YMCA where she can serve close to the front. The work seems trivial — every evening, she cooks up great batches of cocoa and bread and butter that she serves up to the soldiers and airmen who come into her canteen. It seems “like throwing things into a bottomless pit.” Yet she soon learns of its importance for morale — and health. Her little YMCA cafe provides the men with an alternative to getting drunk, sleeping with prostitutes, or simply lying in their bunk going mad with boredom.

And she gives the men an illusion of home. “Men will tell you that you remind them of their wife,” her first supervisor cautions her. In most cases, this is just a harmless flirtation. But Anne learns not to take her safety for granted. Lee recounts a scene in which Anne walks to her quarters late one night after closing the canteen. She spots a drunk American soldier staggering out of an estaminet. The man begins to follow her down the dark street. Though Lee doesn’t use the word, the possibility of being raped takes over Anne’s thoughts and she rushes in fear to the safety of her doorway.

Feature story by Eleanor Early on It's a Great War
Feature story by Eleanor Early on It’s a Great War!.

Among the many aspects of this book that impressed me was Lee’s candor in dealing with the realities of sex and violence in war. She not only mentions the presence of brothels near the front and the prophylactic stations run by the Army to deal with the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the number of children fathered by soldiers who seduced local women. “I’d like to see people start saying, ‘Johnny, this is a photography of the French girl your father had an affair with,'” she later told Evelyn Early.

She also writes of the threat of sexual assault that always hovered around any woman serving around large numbers of men. At one of her posts in occupied Germany, several junior officers conspire to ensure that Anne is never left alone with their unit commander, a colonel they recognize as a violent sexual predator. “This town’s no place for a decent woman,” one warns her, encouraging her to seek a different posting.

A book of over 600 pages can pack in a lot of detail, and I must pass over many for the sake of brevity, but the range of material Lee covers in this book is extraordinary. In some ways, the variety of her postings during and after the war exposed her to more than any typical soldier would have seen. It’s a Great War! may be the first novel to have captured one of the realities of 20th Century warfare: namely, that much of the activity in war has little to do with actual combat: “For every day at the front, three or four were spent at the rear,” she later remarked. “For every man at the front, seven or eight were at the rear.” She writes of the impact of the influenza pandemic, of seeing more soldiers buried from the flu than from wounds. And she devotes over a hundred pages to Anne’s time during the US occupation of the Rhineland following the Armistice, an operation few Americans today are aware of.

And she records the difficulties faced by those who return home after months or years away. When the train pulls into her hometown’s station, Anne is startled to realize that it was “entirely unchanged.” “Stations,” she thinks, recalling all those she saw in her journeys around wartime France (and post-war Germany), “were places with great holes blown in plaster, and roofs half fallen off.” Serving “Mr. Wilson’s cause” in the war, she also lost contact with the fundamental motivators of peacetime life: “Money. We forgot in France how life revolves round money.”

Her many months living in tents, working with make-shift cafes, walking miles from villages to encampments, made her wary of spending her days sitting in some office. “God, Life must have fresh air, and movement in it, — you mustn’t get tied to jobs that kept you indoors,” she thinks as she flees an interview at an insurance firm.

In her first months home, Anne struggles to adapt to these forces. Without the relentless pressure of her daily tasks serving the troops, she begins to suffer anxiety attacks — what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. She considers seeking medical advice — a Boston doctor she knew from the hospital in Bordeaux. But as she approaches his door, the grim prospect of what that age could offer in the way of psychological treatment chills her. “This thing might mean two years of sagging…. Limping…. Sanitariums…. Two years of being pitied…. Spilling your soul….” Anne turns around. “Soul, still her own, — thank God. Unspilled.”

The book ends with the election of Harding — and the mass rejection of those Wilsonian ideals she so believed in. If her future remains unclear, she has at least come to understand that there was no more chain of command to decide it for her.

Mary Lee in 1930.
Mary Lee in 1930.

Like Anne, Mary Lee rejected office work and the possibility of marriage to return to Radcliffe and take her master’s degree. She spent several years as a reporter for the New York Evening Post, one of the few women then on its staff, then went out at a freelancer for the New York Times and others, covering everything from society balls to sports events to a stint in Italy and Greece. Sometime during this period, she also wrote — and failed to interest publishers in — this novel.

By the time Lee won the American Legion contest and managed to get the book published, she appears to have settled back in her hometown of Chestnut Hill, living in her parents’ home. Though she did write another book, a history of Chestnut Hill, in the mid-1930s, she seems have devoted herself mostly to charitable causes, such as a fund to help Greek refugees during World War Two. Over forty years after It’s a Great War! was published, a reporter from the Boston College campus paper found her busy supervising a handyman working on her family home, which was now a rooming house for graduate students. She was reluctant to talk much about herself and refused to have her picture taken. “It seemed she had spent many of her productive years caring for her aging mother,” the reporter wrote. “Her life had grown quiet.” She died at the age of 90 in 1982, having left her home in Chestnut Hill only in her final months due to ill health.

Though Lee had to share the American Legion-Houghton Mifflin award, It’s a Great War! received considerable publicity. Most major US papers and all the national English papers mentioned and/or reviewed the book. As the sample below shows, most reviews were enthusiastic and a few agreed with the Illinois professor that it was one of the best, if not THE best, American novel about the war published until then. Of the reviewers who disliked the book, most were put off by the then-novelty of Lee’s prose style. After that, the most common criticism was that the book was too long and particularly that the final section, about Anne’s adjustments to peacetime life, were extraneous. Personally, I think the final section is one of the book’s best parts in that it’s one of the earliest examples of the kind of challenges we’re now accustomed to associate with the experiences of returning veterans.

It’s a Great War! sold well enough that both Houghton Mifflin and the English publisher George Allen & Unwin ran second impressions and the book was syndicated in abbreviated form in a number of US newspapers, including the San Francisco Examiner. The American Legion’s backlash against Lee only proved once again that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Legionnaires’ distaste for the book piqued book buyers’ interest and improved its sales.

The book’s hold on the attention of both readers and critics was brief, however. It’s never been reissued and is rarely mentioned in discussions of First World War literary. I suspect that Paul Fussell, whose The Great War and Modern Memory remains the best-known survey of literature from the war, wasn’t even aware of it. In the dozen-plus studies of literature and women’s role in the war published in the last twenty years that even mention the book, most give it no more than a sentence or two.

The one exception is Stephen Trout’s 2010 book On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941. Trout focuses on the American Legion’s attempts to dismiss It’s a Great War! and positions this response in a cultural context. “The novel’s avalanche of details and modernist fragmentation,” he argues “suggests disconcertingly that the war had no center of meaning — the last thing that an organization built around collective memory wished to hear.” His literary judgment, though, is qualified: “For a World War I scholar, her text offers a treasure trove of details that few other writers bothered to recovered. However, as a novel, it is rough going.”

Yet It’s a Great War! is no longer and no more detail-filled than Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth. (Brittain, coincidentally, was perhaps Lee’s most vocal defender against English critics.) And its style is certainly far more accessible to today’s readers, accustomed to sound-bite driven media. I was also reminded many times of another modernist, immersive masterpiece that was being published around the same time: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which I covered at length back in 2016.

While Pilgrimage has held its place in literary history, it’s suffered in terms of readership from its length and relative obscurity. Although I personally consider Pilgrimage far more interesting and accessible than Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one in a hundred people who know Proust’s work are even aware that Richardson’s exists. To compare Testament of Youth and It’s a Great War! in the same way is laughable: hundreds of thousands or millions have seen the recent film version of Brittain’s book; for Mary Lee’s book, there are … well, me, a few First World War specialists — and now you.

American literature has its share of one-book wonders. John Leggett’s fine book Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies deal with two post-World War Two examples, Ross Lockridge of Raintree County and Thomas Heggen of Mister Roberts. In many cases, these authors’ lives and careers flame out early and destructively. Mary Lee, on the other hand, seems to have this one book burning to be written and by the time it finally came out, had already decided — or been forced by family circumstances — to focus on other things. Whether those things represented a compromise or a cause, only she could have said. But It’s a Great War! deserves as much as Raintree County and Mister Roberts to be remembered as a work of substance and importance. It may, arguably, be the best American novel to come out of the First World War.

Contemporary Reviews

  • “… the book conveys the sense of war’s horrible waste, its aimless, blundering stupidity, as powerfully as any novel I can recall, with the single exception of Remarque’s great book [All Quiet on the Western Front]. As an indictment of everything that war means it stands in the front rank.”
    — Bruce Catton, syndicated reviewer

  • “Those who can accustom themselves to the staccato style of the authoress, with her herky phrases, will realise that the novel is a sincere attempt to present the uncensored truth. Necessarily this is not all, or mostly, attractice. It treats of the obscenities of billet life, the contrasts between gay life in Paris and the misery and despair in the fighting lines, the disillusionments leading to an embittering cynicism.”
    — The Age, Melbourne, Australia

  • “It would be unbecoming in us to defend American soldiers against the humble opinion which Miss Lee formed of much of their conduct. But when it comes about that she or her heroine pretends that the British Army lacked the services and the solace of genteel womanhood, that the young women of France sat with idle fingers, we dare to say that she talks through her hat. As Count Schuksen might put it, in the politest manner in the world, the damned impudence of such pretenses, based on so trivial an experience, takes our breath away.”
    — The Morning Post, London

  • “Staccato in style, these impressions make reading somewhat of a nervous strain. At the end, however, they piece into a kaleidoscopic design which service men and women will recognize at once as war in its infinite detail.”
    — Maxwell Benson, syndicated reviewer

  • “It seems to me one of the really good books that have come out of the war. It makes absorbing reading, and what a glorious lot of bunk-exploding goes on in its half a thousand pages.”
    — Herschel Brickell, New York Herald Tribune

  • “It gives a wider view of the work back of the front than any book so far written. The style is so unique that it literally carries the reader through a moving picture of the war behind the lines…. The reader is made to realize what the service man had to undergo. He is conscious of the reason why so many men do not and will not talk of their experiences ‘over there’.”
    — Barend Beek, Miami News

  • “Frankly speaking, It’s a Great War! proved a vast disappointment. After reading the first few chapters the story, as a whole, becomes dull and monotonous. It was recommended to us with great gusto, and perhaps that is why we didn’t like it.”
    — The Burlington (Vermont) Daily News

  • “We recommend this book to you as the greatest and frankest panoramic view of the war that has yet been published, not even excepting All Quiet on the Western Front. If you were in the war, you will sigh with relief at reading the truth. If you were not an active part of the army in France and at the front, you will probably be very much hurt at the picture Miss Lee paints — hurt and rebellious and incredulous, because you won’t believe what your read…. Get your courage up and procure the book from somewhere. You will be sorry all your life if you miss it.”
    — Eleanor Evans Wing, Appleton (Wisconsin) Post-Crescent

  • “It’s a Great War! is a long book — over 500 pages [the UK edition was 690] — but it is easy reading. Miss Lee has hit upon a style that perfectly fits her material — disjointed, staccato sentences for facts that presented themselves more of less disjointedly, in flashes…. It is a fine book that leaves one much enlightened and with much food for reflection.”
    — Philadelphia Inquirer

  • “In a staccato and rather confused style Miss Lee has managed to convey something of the gigantic bewilderment of those days in France, the seamy and sordid and disillusioning side of war, the bitterness and waste of life. She relies for her effect upon the diligent piling up of instantaneous and detached impressions.’ It is almost as if she had attempted a literal rendition of those vivid and disordered days. It’s a Great War is a powerful book, but it is too amorphous to be accounted a literary masterpiece.”
    — The Bookman (US)

  • “By far the majority of these six hundred and ninety pages are written in that manner, giving the reader the impression of riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.”
    — The Bookman (UK)

  • “[Lee] writes in the historic present participle … she, writing … a style, very irritating … using jerks and dots…. Mr. Wyndham Lewis says somewhere that this is done by feminine types who wish to appear virile.”
    — Nation and Athenaeum

  • “I may as well say at the outset that it is one of the most irritating books I have ever read through to a tedious end. The author is a journalist, but she appears to have the vaguest grasp of the ordinary rules of rhythm in words, as well as of punctuation. Four dots appear to be the quota for each ejaculation. There must be ten million dots in this book….
    Every step of this long narrative of events is recorded in a series of ejaculations. Most carefully of all are are set down the coarsest of details the heroine observes during her enforced contact with soldiers….
    The whole book is an impertinence. To call it a novel is an impertinence. It is no more a novel than the columns of a sensational newspaper, slapped together, could be called a novel. As for the war — a little WAAC, swabbing canteen floors at Dover during an air raid, is as qualified to write about it.”
    — “Tobias Trott,” The Graphic (UK)
    [This and similar comments led Vera Brittain to write the following to the editors of Time and Tide: “Mary Lee’s gigantic novel, It’s a Great War!, seems to me to have been more unfairly treated by reviewers than any important book for a long time… I suggest, therefore, that women are not … bored with war-books, but that their, real interest has not yet been aroused. And it will not be aroused until a war-book is published which removes the impression that one sex only played an active part in war, and one sex only experienced its deepest emotions.”]

  • “In my judgment she has accomplished a masterpiece.
    In the last analysis the least part of war is the actual fighting.
    The great part of it is the effect it produces on the souls of those engaged in it.
    The former can be ably written by any little war correspondent sitting on a safe hilltop. The latter can only be written by one who has lived it and nearly died of it — whether that death be physical or spiritual.
    It is this latter and more important aspect of war with which Miss Lee deals; and in all the literature of the war which I have read — English, French, German — no one has succeeded better in recreating the gradual descent into hell which is the inevitable fate of the man who goes to war…. Miss Lee has been to hell. Because of it, every page of her book is the truth — terrible, heart-breaking, discouraging, if you like, but, so help me God, the truth!”
    — Hamilton Gibbs, letter to the New York Times

It’s a Great War!, by Mary Lee
New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1929
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930

Music in the Listening Place, by Gloria Rawlinson (1938)

Dust Jacket of first edition of Music in the Listening Place by Gloria Rawlinson

I often go trawling through old book reviews in search of lost treasure. It’s usually not the reviews that feature words like “best”, “greatest”, “finest” that hint at something remarkable worth discovering. More often, there’s a certainly hesitancy in the reviewer’s tone, a suggestion that a book is, well, not bad exactly, but a little askew. A little hard to fit into a particular mold, a little awkwardness in the constraints of prevailing notions of what fiction or nonfiction should be. These are the clues I look for.

In the case of Music in the Listening Place, Gloria Rawlinson’s one and only novel, it was Majorie Grant Cook’s caution in her TLS review that “Readers who dislike the introduction of tiny supernatural beings among average-sized human creatures … will impatiently give up this novel and thereby lose a pleasure that is like biting into a strange new fruit.” Now, I’m not a big fan of fantasy novels, but Cook’s brief description of Rawlinson’s characters — a young woman who’d “lost her wits,” a beloved brother lost in an accident, an earnest young man named Edgar Pullsides — intrigued me and I hunted down one of the few used copies to be found for sale (all in Australia and New Zealand).

“I first heard of the strange little people called Turehu from my mother,” Rawlinson wrote in an introductory note. The Turehu were half-sized, pale human-like creatures — “little white faces with russet-coloured hair.” Although she was writing less than three hundred years after the first white settlement in New Zealand, even among the Maori, the Turehu had already become mythical, something that only the very old and very superstitious still believed in.

Although Rawlinson herself refers to the Turehu as fairies, as we learn in the course of the story, their powers are less magical than psychological. In ways that even they seem mystified by, they are, on occasion — but oh, how these occasions do matter — capable of grasping insights and memories that have eluded the people they help.

Rawlinson was just twenty when Music in the Listening Place was published, and even if the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder had been given that label at the time it’s unlikely she would have used it. And yet, she understood it well, for the real story in Music in the Listening Place is not about the wondrous powers of the Turehu but about how deeply wounded people begin to heal.

The Parks are a family in shock. Mr. Park, a solicitor, forgets his keys, sets out for town on foot instead of by car, has to check his collar before leaving home to make sure there’s a tie underneath it. Mrs. Park hides inside in fear of visitors, conscious that any old friend or neighbor who stops by will observe how large she’s become from years of overeating. And their daughter Aroha storms in and out of the house, sniping belligerently at meals and claiming domain over their back yard as a haven for weeds, bugs, and birds. Throughout the day, she peers at the window of her brother Rollo’s bedroom, anxious to be ready with something to please him: a slice of ripe watermelon, or a sandwich.

Only gradually do we learn that Rollo isn’t an elusive hermit. He’s never coming out of his bedroom because he’s been dead for years, killed in an accident after Aroha insisted he take her joyriding on a neighbor’s motorcycle. Aroha has blanked out all memory of the accident and Rollo’s death save a lingering sense of guilt. She’s stuck, still acting fourteen, still pretending that Rollo is alive, if unseen. And as long as Aroha is stuck, her parents are stuck, too. Even their neighbor, Edgar Pullsides, is himself something of a basket case. Although he makes a little money selling a patent cleanser of his own invention, he spends most of his time hiding in his workshop, building puppets and toys.

On one of his infrequent sales trips around the North Island, Edgar meets a group of Turehu led by the distinguished and nattily-dressed Academic Gentleman. Although the Turehu look upon the mundane interests of the white men with some distain, the Academic Gentleman insists that Edgar must take his wife Peg, a queer leathery-skinned Turehu, back to his home. “Now, Peg, my dear Peg, my lamb, you must try and remember,” he instructs her:

Surely you can remember! It comes to this that there will be no peace in the village if you do not remember. You were the one to catch the thoughts, and are, therefore the one on whom all the responsibility rests. I wash my hands of it all. Anakthe!”

Anakthe, we come to see, is Turehu for, variously, Strewth!, Inshallah!, and “I wash my hands of it all.”

Back home, Edgar hides Peg among the puppets in his workshop, but soon Aroha — his one confidant and fellow daydreamer — learns of Peg’s existence. For some pages, neither Rawlinson’s characters nor we quite know why she’s placed this unusual catalyst in the midst of her unstable cast, but her purpose eventually reveals itself.

Had Rawlinson been exposed to Freudian psychology, we would have good reason to say that Peg’s role is to trigger a cathartic memory, the trigger that Freud and Breuer thought had the effect of “reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed.” But it seems implausible that even a precocious New Zealand woman of twenty with a book of poetry already to her credit would have been familiar with their work.

Instead, we have to trust that Rawlinson knew that even the deepest hurts can only be borne so long. And when Peg does finally remember, reminding Aroha of Rollo’s last words as he sped toward his certain death, she releases the Parks (and Edgar) from the limbo in which they’ve been trapped for years.

Gloria Rawlinson, 1935
Gloria Rawlinson, 1935 (age 17).

As a young writer, Rawlinson shows a certain respect for the conventions of fiction that now seem to place unnecessary restraints on her imagination. But as a young white woman writing at a time when respect for the ways and wisdom of New Zealand’s indigenous people may have been at its lowest, she demonstrates striking empathy. The Maori characters in her book see much farther and more clearly than their colonizers. They know that the North Island is the remnant of a giant fish that surfaced in prehistoric time, that they owned and cared for the island before Captain Cook arrived, and that the Government still owes them the return of the lands stolen by law and gunpowder.

Perhaps Rawlinson understood the Maori’s perspective better than most New Zealanders of her time because she spent her first years living on the island of Tonga, where there was less of a divide between the handful of white settlers and the Tongans and she learned their language alongside her own English. Perhaps she also felt empathy because she was a victim herself, having contracted polio at the age of six, which left her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Music in the Listening Place came and went with no more than a few reviews, some perplexed, others appreciative, and has never been reissued. By the time the book was published, Rawlinson had fallen under the aura of the intense, talented but erratic Iris Wilkinson, who published under the name of Robin Hyde. After Hyde committed suicide in London in 1939, Rawlinson took on the role of curator of Hyde’s literary legacy, spending decades writing a biography that was finally published by Hyde’s son Derek Challis several years after Rawlinson died in 1995 at the age of 77.

I suspect that today’s readers, benefitting from the wealth and increased appreciation of fantastic fiction in the decades since the book’s first appearance, will find Music in the Listening Place, as I did, a powerful work that blends myth, psychology, and respect for indigenous cultures in ways that are quite remarkable given the time and age at which Gloria Rawlinson was writing. If it were published today, critics would not hesitate to call it a tour de force.

Music in the Listening Place, by Gloria Rawlinson
London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1938

Little Victims, by Richard Rumbold (1933)

Little Victims by Richard Rumbold

Little Victims is not a good novel, but it is a fascinating one. When it was published in 1932, it earned Richard Rumbold the censure of the Roman Catholic Church for its open discussion of homosexuality in public schools and Oxford, but for today’s reader its far more interesting aspects relate to its psychological aspects — often apparently subconscious — and its glimpses into the lives of the trailing edge of the Bright Young Things of Evelyn Waugh’s youth.

It’s not a good novel because it’s shoddily assembled and emotionally overwrought. Rumbold purports to tell the story of Christopher Harmsworth as seen by one of his schoolmates and friends, but he also tossed in personal letters, first-person passages, and liberal use of an omniscient narrator. The story centers around the unhappy triangle of Christopher, his tyrannical and brutish father, and his high-strung, overaffectionate, and often unstable mother. When in contact with each other, these three compounds hover on the edge of an explosive reaction.

It’s clear to Christopher that his parents should never have married. Aside from money and a peerage, his mother’s family had nothing going for them and many things going against them:

Old Lord W__ was in the last stages of debauchery brought on by habitual drunkenness and constant sexual intercourse with common prostitutes during his frequent visits to London. His wife was in a lunatic asylum, and his eldest son had committed suicide for no apparent reason.

Since they did, the next worst thing they could have done was to have children. Unfortunately, his mother became pregnant soon after the wedding, and produced little Christopher, “the unfortunate victim of the muddleheadedness and idiotic notions of his forebears.”

In the race for the lion’s share of the blame for victimizing the boy, Christopher’s mother is the clear winner. She was overly affectionate. “As thousands of men were being slaughtered in the mud of Flanders,”

She suckled his lips and gave him a thousand kisses, which were her husband’s due; she slept next his bed, and in the morning he was brought into hers, and she cuddled him between the sheets. She petted him, she took him everywhere, she spoilt him. She called him “dearest” and “darling” and “sweetest,” and held him up to everybody to be admired. It was not affection, it was passion.

No wonder, then, when Colonel Harmsworth decides to send Christopher off to boarding school at 14, one leg of the triangle is severed completely: “From that moment, Christopher took a violent dislike to his father, and continued to dislike him for the rest of his life.”

Sheltered and innocent, Christopher is ill-prepared for the realities of his public school: “Homosexuality was rife there, not only among the boys themselves, but between the masters and the boys.” To Rumbold’s somewhat self-righteous narrator, “unless you are a fool or a saint it is impossible to live in a community of perverts without becoming aware of and suspectible to its practices.” In his eyes, the young man left the school four years later accustomed to thinking of homosexuality as “the most prevalent and natural of sex manifestations.”

Going up to Oxford doesn’t improve the situation. Inspecting his tutor’s bookshelves, Christopher spots, hidden behind a set of Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic such titles as Sexual Physiology, Advice to Young Men and Sexual Life in Ancient Greece. Not long after settling into his digs, Christopher is visited by a fop in a blue silk shirt and carrying an ebony walking stick who invites him to a meeting of the Sitwell Society: “Yes — Edith and Osbert and Sache; they come down and speak every term.”

Christopher attempts to set himself on the upright path with a heartfelt address on socialism to the Oxford Union, only to see that “Already he was marked, stamped — as a pervert, and he would never be able to live it down.” He dons his mantle of victimhood with little resistance. After all, “the system’s to blame — that bloody system, which tries to educate you according to its absurd standards and perverts your sensibilities in the process.”

By his third year, the bright, healthy young man has a grey complection, skin roughened from “the unrelieved application of cheap cosmetics.” His bedroom as the appearance of “an untidy beauty parlor.” He spends most of his time in the company of the likes of Chum Price, a Brian Howard-like figure of extreme aestheticism who proclaims his hobby as “rescuing pretty boys.”

It’s at one of Chum’s parties that Christopher meets Henry Armitage, an older man from London who “seemed to know and to have known everybody worth knowing.” Henry takes the young man under his wing, inviting him to his London flat and for weekends at his country estate. Henry is married to Isabella Armitage, a writer and “one of London’s most renowned Lesbians.”

If the Armitages sound suspiciously like Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, there’s a reason. They are. Little Victims is a thinly-veiled roman-à-clef that takes Rumbold’s feelings toward his parents, friends, and lovers and winds them up to a fever pitch.

In real life, Rumbold became one of Harold’s protégés and lovers while at Oxford. While Christopher’s narrator portrays Henry Armitage as a sophisticated seducer, the reality is that Rumbold was a bit of an opportunist himself, particularly when it came to indulging in his fantasies. Nicolson would later write of Rumbold, “He had no control over his fantasies and day-dreams, over the alternating gusts of elation and melancholy that assailed him, over his almost incredible ignorance and therefore suspicion of the world around him.”

Rumbold published Little Victims while still at Oxford, and quickly faced the price of his youthful choices. When attending a service in the private chapel of the Old Palace in Oxford soon after its publication, Father Ronald Knox refused to offer him the Sacrament.

“When he reached me,” Rumbold later recalled, “He snatched the silver plate our of my hands and passed it one to the next person.” When Rumbold later wrote Knox demanding an explanation, Knox replied, “A few weeks ago I heard from the Archbishop of Birmingham that somebody had called attention to your novel, and asked if some public notice ought not to be taken of it.” The Archbishop told Knox that Rumbold ought not to be admitted to Communion. “The whole book is foul and offensive, and unless he withdraws it from circulation, and says he is sorry for having pbulished it, I do not see how we can allow him to receive Holy Communion.”

“I have written a very moral book,” Rumbold told reporters when news of the Archbishop’s decision became public. “I have attacked every kind of sexual licence, but my Archbishop, like most of the Catholic hierarcy, has no powers of discrimination. I wish I knew what he objects to in my novel.”

“I was at a Catholic school. People seem to believe that Catholic schools are immune from vice and different from Protestant schools. That is untrue. They are worse. How can I make Catholic schools pure unless I point out first of all how bad they are?” To some extent, he had a point. Its settings aside, Little Victims is as much a moralistic tract as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, including its melodramatic ending (Christopher finds himself incapable of heterosexual love, goes mad, and shoots himself).

Rumbold told reporters that he would appeal to the Pope. “I feel sure his Holiness will reinstatement, being a man of great sense and intelligence,” he assured them. He swore that he would travel to Rome for a private audience with the Pope, but there’s no evidence that ever took place.

Richard Rumbold and the Oxford English Club
Richard Rumbold and the Oxford English Club, from an item in The Tatler, March 1933.

Rumbold’s was a life of bold promises and disappointing results. If he’d hoped that Little Victims would launch him as a bright young talent, he was soon discouraged. As William Plomer later wrote in his introduction to A Message in Code: The Diary of Richard Rumbold 1932-1961, “It was the work of a confused young man who had been subjected to exceptional strains, was unsure of himself but ambitious, and was wildly and rashly trying to assert himself.”

Rumbold suffered from ill-health, depression, restlessness, and a near-constant sense of dissatisfaction with his own life and the state of the world around him. He trained as an RAF pilot during the war but lost his commission after flying an Anson under the Menai Bridge. He translated a collection of Flaubert’s letters and wrote a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but never managed to produce the great novel or poems he felt he should. In March 1961, while working with his friend and loyal companion Hilda Young in hotel room at Palermo, he stepped into the bedroom and, moments later, fell from the window and was killed instantly. The Italian coroner would not rule it a suicide.

The one subject that most interested Rumbold was himself. Little Victims was his first and least successful attempt to portray his life and his intense feelings toward his parents and others. He later revisited the story in his autobiography, My Father’s Son, first published pseudonymously as “Richard Lumford” in 1949. His third version can be seen in the diaries edited by Plomer. Plomer asked for its readers to think kindly of his late friend:

I myself knew Richard well for nearly a quarter of a century. I found him, in the face of his recurrent troubles, a courageous and exceptionally honest man, warmly affectionate and unembittered. Not one line in the papers he left and nothing I have heard about him, whether in his lifetime or after his death, has made me think otherwise. His courage and honesty light up the evidence of his lifelong battle to overcome his troubles and fulfil himself as a person and as a writer.

Little Victims, by Richard Rumbold
London: Fortune Press, 1933

The Steagle, by Irvin Faust (1966)

Cover of the first edition of The Steagle by Irvin Faust

My feelings for The Steagle are a combination of awe and disappointment, sort of like what many felt about Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in 1974. I admire Irvin Faust’s courage and audacity in trying to write about madness in a way that no one ever had — yet acknowledge that his results failed to hit the target. Somewhere short of the far side of sanity, The Steagle’s drag chute ejects and the book crashes in a messy jumble of words.

If some sharp publisher were to reissue The Steagle today, the book’s cover grab line could be, “A MAD MAN GOES MAD.” For both Faust and his hero, Harold “Hesh” Weissburg, are button-down, sport coat and tie wearing, salarymen of the early 1960s. Five days a week, Faust goes to work as a New York City public school guidance counselor and Weissburg teaches 17th Century English literature to bright-faced undergraduates. They have wives, mortgages, insurance policies, and daily commutes.

Like Don Draper of Mad Men, they’ve been drafted, uniformed, shot at. They’ve also been indoctrinated in American mid-century culture: comic strips and comic books, radio shows and movies, 78 RPM discs and sock hops, sports pages and the streets of Brooklyn. As Jack Ludwig put it in his New York Times review, “Everything is here, as current as Mad Magazine: Billboard America, brand-name America, America the blur seen from the window of a speeding train or car, the plotted-and-pieced America airplane passengers know best.” It’s the same combustible mixture that fueled all of Faust’s work, and all it takes is a spark to set it off.

For Hesh Weissburg, the spark is the news that Russian nuclear missiles have been spotted in Cuba. It triggers a psychotic break that leads him to interrupt his lecture on the mystique of the hero in Elizabethan literature and begin raving about Willie Mays and baseball, descending rapidly from rant to bizarre Brooklyn kid code:

“YOBBOU OBBAND MOBBEE HOBBAVE BOBBEEN COBBONNED, BOBBILKED, SCROBBEWED BOBBYE THOBBEE GROBBEAT SPOBBORTSMOBBEN THOBBAT TOBBOOK OBBOUR CLOBBOSEOBBEST FROBBIENDS FROBBOM OBBUS, OBBAND THOBBEN ROBBEACHED THOBBEE SOBBINOBBISTOBBER FOBBINOBBALOBBITOBBY WOBBITH THOBBEE KOBBIDNOBBAPPOBBING OBBOF THOBBEE GROBBEATOBBEST OBBOF THOBBEM OBBALL HOBBOO OBBOF COBBOURSE OBBIS WOBBILLOBBIE MOBBAYS….”

(which condenses in the more comprehensible “YOU AND ME HAVE BEEN CONNED, BILKED, SCREWED BYE THE GREAT SPORTSMEN THAT TOOK OUR CLOSEST FRIENDS FROM US, AND THEN REACHED THE SINISTER FINALITY WITH THE KIDNAPPING OF THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL WHO OF COURSE IS WILLIE MAYS….”). Leaving his students gaping in bewilderment, he walks out of his class and heads to the airport, grabbing a flight to Chicago (“FLY NOW, PAY LATER!”) that starts a week-long dash about the country in search of….

Well, just what Weissburg is looking for is clear to neither himself nor us. It could be security in a moment of existential anxiety, but it could just as well be something as simple as the certainty of his 14-year-old comics/sports/radio/movie-obsessed self.

Chatting to his seatmate on board the flight to Chicago, Weissburg pretends to be Hal Winter, successful Broadway producer, and in this guise he checks into the Blackhawk Hotel, orders the best steak dinner and French wine in the place, and seduces a beautiful woman before heading off to his next stop. He visits Notre Dame to indulge a fantasy of being the Fifth Horseman in the football team’s legendary 1924 backfield lineup, Milwaukee to relive a romance from his G.I. days.

As he hops from place to place, Weissburg shifts from one fantasy character to another: Bob Hardy, brother to Andy of the movie family; Rocco Salvato, former high-school bully and present gangster; George Guynemer, son of the French flying ace of World War I; Cave Carson, son of doomed spelunker Floyd Collins; and, finally, Humphrey Bogart.

Weissburg heads for ever more artificial versions of the American dream in his manic race to stay one step ahead of the news of possible global annihilation. To Vegas:

Ocean’s Eleven. Sinatra. Judy. Thirty thousand a week. Sun. Desert. Red neon. One-armed bandits. Action. Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Nothing Monaco. Nothing Miami. Nothing Reno. Pools. Tanfastic. Bikinis. Action. Vegas.

Finally, when he reaches Hollywood, his mind jumbles together fragments from his cultural and personal memories into a climactic sequence in which he refights World War Two, single-handedly triumphing over all of America’s enemies. I can only convey the verbal cacophony that Faust creates by reproducing two sample pages below.

Like Weissburg’s “OBB” Latin, one can, with patience, decypher this linguistic jumble. Perhaps, in future, scholars will painstakingly extract and identify each of the shards of cultural reference scattered around this ruin. On the other hand, this may be a case where it’s better to take in the effect at a glance and move on.

For the trick in successfully portraying madness in fiction is that the novelist can never fully surrender control to the madmen. Otherwise, language risks becoming word soup. And there’s a lot of word soup in the last pages of The Steagle.

The book had its share of admirers back in the Sixties. Richard Kostelanetz called The Steagle “the most perceptive breakdown in all novelistic literature.” “Of the many new novels I have read in the past three years,” he wrote in TriQuarterly several years after the book’s first publication, it was “the only one that struck me as fusing the three virtues of originality, significance and realization at the highest levels of consistency.”

Jack Ludwig, the Times’s reviewer, felt that it was a mistake to characterize the book as comedy or satire: “It is funny and great in its take-offs. But it is at bottom compassionate, comic and sadly accepting. As long as reality is what it is, fantasy must serve man as refuge.” Time magazine, on the other hand, lost patience with Faust’s verbal fireworks: “This pop novel pops so violently that it cannot safely be perused without welding goggles.”

Lobby card for <em>The Steagle,/em> (1971)
Lobby card for The Steagle (1971)

Faust’s failure didn’t dissuade Paul Sylbert from staging another attempt, however. Five years later, screenwriter and director Paul Sylbert adapted the book for AVCO Embassy Films. Richard Benjamin did his best to capture the mad panache and manic energy of Hesh Weissburg, but there was no way that Sylbert could have caged Faust’s beast into an 87-minute package. It didn’t help that the first-time director was working for legendary director-breaking producer Joseph E. Levine. Working at a time before director’s cuts were invented, Sylbert had to take his frustrations out on the printed page, publishing his account of the disaster, Final Cut: The Making and Breaking of a Film in 1974.

The Steagle, by the way, took its title from an amalgamation that echoes Faust’s zest for cultural integration. The Steagles were a short-lived creation that the National Football League devised during the manpower shortages of World War Two, combining the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers into a single team.

The Steagle, by Irvin Faust
New York: Random House, 1966

The Flutter of an Eyelid, by Myron Brinig (1933)

Covers of the 1933 edition of The Flutter of an Eyelid (L) and the Tough Poets Press reissue (R)
Covers of the 1933 edition of The Flutter of an Eyelid (L) and the Tough Poets Press reissue (R).

This is a guest post by Barry Alfonso

“God has always smiled on Southern California,” wrote Carey McWilliams in 1946. An abundance of blessings filled the landscape from the shoreline to the mountains – there was no excuse to feel empty or sad. Yet there has always been a brooding undercurrent to the region, with plenty of sinister shadow lurking amidst the sunshine. Huge clouds of guilt hang over the wide blue skies, brought westward by seekers hungry for self-reinvention who never quite escaped the sins and failures they left behind. There’s a sense of doom on the balmy breezes, as if the Lord might turn on His ungrateful children at any moment.

Southern California has long done strange things to writers. Poets, novelists and journalists have found fear and loathing among the drowsy Spanish Colonial bungalows and palm tree-shrouded grottos of the region. From the working-class ansgt of John Fante to the exalted consciousness of Aldous Huxley, writers have been unsettled, and sometimes driven mad by the sheer beguiling pleasantness of the place. Its promise of freedom has seemed like a curse to even adventuresome artists. Even a brief exposure to Southern California’s insinuating vibes can rewire the brain of the most workaday scribe.

From what I’ve read, Myron Brinig’s time in the region was relatively brief. Like so many others, the Minnesota-born, Montana-raised author headed West in the late 1920s seeking work in Hollywood. His first novel Singermann (1929) earned critical praise for its vivid depiction of the hardscrabble lives of Butte, Montana’s Jewish community. Brinig apparently wasn’t successful in getting on the screenwriting gravy train that rewarded Ben Hecht and other novelists of the era. He did find companionship for a time as part of a bohemian group centered around poet/bookseller Jacob Zeitlin in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood. This circle of creative types, athletes and assorted freethinkers spent time congregating at a beachside swimming club in nearby Palos Verdes. Brinig was made to feel welcome – he seemed to be another footloose dreamer looking for companionship and inspiration. The group thought Brinig was one of them – “he had a way of winning your confidence,” Zeitlin recalled in an interview many years later.

As it turned out, Brinig was repulsed by his new friends and the hedonistic lifestyle they embraced. Like a sponge soaking up toxic fluids, he absorbed as much sun-ripened decadence as he could stand, then squeezed it out through his spleen into a sprawling, surreal novel titled The Flutter of an Eyelid. Published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1933, the book had a difficult birth thanks to threatened litigation, received mixed reviews and quickly disappeared from view. Over time, it took on legendary status as a vividly vicious satire of L.A. eccentricity and excess. By the 2000s, rare copies sold in the $600-$700 range. L.A. historians like Mike Davis ranked the book with Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (published six years later) in its scathing depiction of pre-World War II L.A. The Flutter of an Eyelid became a lost touchstone from a vanished era of Angelino history.

Now back in print after nearly 90 years thanks to Tough Poets Press, Brinig’s book still has the power to surprise, confuse, irritate and fascinate. Readers looking for a taut, reporterly exposé of Golden State flakiness and corruption won’t find it here. Though not a personal confession in any normal sense, The Flutter of an Eyelid is a brazenly subjective take on what Brinig saw, heard and felt during his L.A. sojourn, a wildly uneven farrago of hallucinogenic vision, potboiler dialogue and droll caricature. At its best, its prose embodies the psychic breakdown that its convoluted storyline attempts to tell.

Two illustrations by Lynd Ward from The Flutter of an Eyelid
Two illustrations by Lynd Ward from The Flutter of an Eyelid.

Brinig sets the stage for the disorienting scenes to follow at the start of the book. Novelist Caslon Roanoke boards a ship headed for California in hopes of escaping the grey, tradition-encrusted confines of his native New England. As he sails into Los Angeles Harbor, he feels “possessed by the sun, as if climbing a steep ladder of golden rings to the sky’s zenith.” Very quickly, he gets to know an assortment of oddball pleasure-seekers who enjoy insinuating conversation, morbid home decoration ideas and crème-de-menthe baths. Everyone seems pretentiously unaffected. “The people are so natural they’re grotesque,” he says of the locals. “Here, all life is a series of breathless tangents shooting off from the center of the reasonable.” Hanging over everything is the power of the brilliant California sunshine, giving the novelist the sensation of its light running through his veins.

At this point, Brinig could have concentrated on sketching believable portraits of the quirky men and women who frequented the watering holes of late Jazz Age L.A. That’s not his goal here – whether through careful calculation or sheer self-indulgence, he draws the reader into the diffusive, sensually overloaded minds of his characters by blurring the distinctions between dream and reality. Nothing is fixed for the denizens of Alta Vista (the beachside town based upon Palos Verdes). The glittering, shifting waves of the ocean mirror the churning emotions and unhinged morals of Caslon’s new friends. The very idea of a “fact” is challenged early in the novel. A host of New Age self-empowerment philosophies and paranoic conspiracy beliefs that have become La-La Land cliches are anticipated in the unmoored fancies explored here.

Like a sideshow psychic shuffling through a tarot deck, Brinig contrasts and pairs up the novel’s supporting characters. Sensitive young “pagan” hunks Antonio and Dache revel in homoerotic fantasies that lead to delirium and death. Frustrated composer Jack – a “mannish” young woman portrayed with sympathy – longs for signs of affection from Sylvia, an artist’s muse who is also Caslon’s object of desire. A striking blonde who longs for her absent husband, Sylvia’s fluttering eyelids – symbolic of her veiled desires and fickle attentions – are frequently referenced throughout the novel. She is the topic of the book’s most memorable exchange:

“And you?” [Caslon] dared to address her at last. “What do you do?”
“I give and receive pain,” she said.
“Ah, that’s interesting,” said Caslon, already in pain.

There are more sinister figures as well. Mrs. Forgate is a creepy older woman who has spent time in Europe, where she poisoned several husbands. She savors rare liqueurs, wears black satin shoes that are “startlingly like miniature coffins” and speaks pleasantries that seem “to peer, green-eyed, from behind cerements and tombs.” Her presence allows Brinig to add decadent J.K. Huysmans/Aubrey Beardsley dark colors to his otherwise sunny landscape. Why the rest of the Alta Vista crowd tolerates Mrs. Forgate’s malevolent presence is not clear. She does provide Brinig with a fulcrum for deadly subplots, however.

Sister Amiee Semple McPherson
Sister Amiee Semple McPherson.

There’s at least one famous person depicted in exaggerated form here: Sister Angela Flower, a thinly-disguised caricature of Aimee Semple McPherson, L.A. superstar evangelist of the 1920s-‘30s. A flamboyant master of publicity who blended fundamentalist Christianity with a flair for show biz and raw sex appeal, McPherson had been controversial for some time before Brinig arrived in town. Her famed Angelus Temple church was in Echo Park; Brinig may well have seen her leading services. Whether the author saw Sister Aimee in action or not, he infused his portrait of Angela Flower with both loathing and a certain appalled respect for her innate charisma: she “lives, breathes, and shouts sex, without ever quite knowing it … (and) preached Christ with the eyes of a predatory animal and the lascivious mouth of Salome.”

Sister Angela informs a handsome, “brainless” young sailor named Milton that he is the reincarnation of Jesus and convinces him to attempt walking across the waves off Santa Monica Beach. This event occurs at the exact middle of the book and ties together (loosely) several of its occurring motifs. Milton/Jesus begins his stride upon the water, then falters when Sylvia flutters those pain-inducing eyelids of hers. He sinks out of sight, touching off a riot among Angela’s followers watching on the shore. In a scene that anticipates the mob violence at the climax of The Day of the Locust, the crowd reacts to Milton’s drowning by “stampeding like a herd of senseless wild animals…drowning along with the others who thought that they heard Jesus calling to them from the drear, dim depths of the melancholy ocean.”

By this point, it has been established that Caslon is creating these events by writing about them – the boundaries between the subjective and objective have been erased with the stroke of a key. Caslon is “unable to know when he was still at the typewriter or away from it. Was it a nightmare he was having, a hallucination more real than reality?” He attributes this omniscient psychosis to his environment: “Ever since I arrived in California, I seem to have become possessed of clairvoyant powers…sometimes, I write things before they happen.” His characters have independent thoughts and realize they are trapped in the world he is creating. “The thing to do was capture Roanoke and amputate both his hands so that he could no longer write a single word down on paper,” Antonio says. His friend Carlos adds, “We are prisoners of a page, and yet we continue to live like desperate flies whose legs are entangled in the glue of a poisonous sheet.”

Is Brinig anticipating postmodernism with this brain-teasing twist? There are echoes of Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author here, as well as anticipations of existentialism and the experimental fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet. The literary conceit Brinig indulges in captures the essential unreality of the Southern California mindset remarkably well. The egomaniacal dream of self-recreation that brought so many to the Golden State is taken to its logical (if insane) conclusion. While this works well as satire, it does little to make the reader care about Flutter’s characters. Caslon – the world-creating hero of the story as well as its victim – is not exactly a sympathetic figure. He pines for Sylvia and tries to save Jack from the mass destruction he knows is coming (he’s writing it, after all), but mostly he feels like “a visitor to Dante’s Hell” who is forced to endure the “germs of genius and the worms of wantonness” who populate the place. Such descriptions don’t encourage you to invest a lot in what happens to these sun-soaked wretches.

Brinig’s satiric edge slips from caustic into cruel in his portrayal of Sol Mosier, a feckless artist manque apparently based upon Jacob Zeitlin. Like the author’s real-life friend, Sol is a small-time Jewish businessman who longs for authentic experience and Walt Whitman-like poetic epiphanies. After failing spectacularly as a workman, he drags his wife into a quest for decadent pleasures that spirals out of control and finally takes her life. Along the way, Brinig comments about Jews in general, mocking them collectively for their self-obsession and clannishness. Being Jewish himself, Brinig seems to be working out some personal issues in writing about the hapless, doomed Sol. Whatever the motivation behind the character, Sol was close enough to Zeitlin in particulars to raise legal issues before Flutter was published. A threatened lawsuit caused Farrar & Rinehart to tone down Sol’s more objectionable aspects in print. Still, as California historian Kevin Starr noted, “Even by the most forgiving standards Brinig’s caricature of Zeitlin edges into anti-Semitism.” (Though unsuccessful as a poet, Zeitlin continued on as a bookseller and secured his status as a beloved figure in the L.A. literary community.)

Advertisement for The Flutter of an Eyelid
Advertisement for The Flutter of an Eyelid.

Gratuitous personal attacks are all part of the boiling bouillabaisse that is The Flutter of an Eyelid. The mechanics of the book are often creaky and turgid: a gothic subplot involving a decayed Spanish family and a murder-suicide bogs down the narrative towards the end. More could have been made of Angela Flower and her hold on the Midwestern retirees who comprise her besotted flock. In describing the petty obsessions of his characters, Brinig tries the patience of the reader with logorrheic laundry-lists of words and objects. He is at his best when he soars into psychedelic flights of language that skirt the ridiculous to achieve something nearly sublime. There’s an acid trip intensity to some of its passages, such as when Antonio and Dache share a cozy folie a deux before the latter drops dead from poisoning:

He knew the graceful, instantaneous leapings of deer as though shot forth from some great cosmic sling; the slow, curling indolences of snails, and the plodding, prowling intricacies of lobster and crab. He knew what it was to be a man and a woman, a wild deer and a cat prowling stealthily over leaves in search of a bird or a mouse. And he knew the tumbling cascades of moon-touched music that pour from the abandoned throats of nightingales… sometimes he was a snake, long and dazzling, and knew each separate, scintillant particle of earth.

The Flutter of an Eyelid ends with a gleeful depiction of California sliding into the ocean, sending the good, bad, and indifferent alike to a watery mass grave. (The powerful Long Beach earthquake struck Southern California around the time Brinig was completing or delivering the novel.) Listening to reports of the catastrophe over radio while safely back in New England, Caslon knows that he is responsible. He discovers that the manuscript of his book has been transformed into a damp piece of coral, leaving no trace of the fantasy he made reality.

In the real world, Brinig’s novel soon vanished as well. In an unsigned review published May 14, 1933, the New York Times pronounced Flutter a failure: “The fantastic elements are not sufficiently integrated with the realistic ones; the wit and satire are neither subtle or piercing…. The book is, in short, insufficiently amusing.” Brinig quickly returned to the more sober, realistic fiction he was known for, eventually scoring a notable success with The Sisters (1947), which was adapted into a film starring Errol Flynn and Bette Davis. Less popular novels continued to appear into the following decade. Long before his death in 1991, Brinig had slipped into obscurity.

For all its uneven prose, improbable plot convolutions and nasty caricatures, The Flutter of an Eyelid compels interest and even admiration. There’s nothing I’ve read that’s quite like this lush hothouse garden of a novel. Clearly, this was a story that Brinig needed to get out of his system: once he purged the noxious sunshine from his bloodstream, he never wrote in this vein again. Flutter may be an ephemeral expression preserved in literary amber, but its flipped-out bitterness in the face of seeming beauty still speaks to the Golden State experience. God could smile on Southern California, but Myron Brinig could only laugh, grimace and feel a little sick.

Barry AlfonsoBarry Alfonso is an author, journalist and songwriter. He is a founding member of the San Diego Comic Convention and a 2005 Grammy Award nominee. His most recent book is A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen (2019). More information can be found at barryalfonso.net.

 

The Flutter of an Eyelid, by Myron Brinig
New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933
Arlington, MA: Tough Poets Press, 2020

The Big Wheel, by Mark Benney (1940)

Cover of The Big Wheel by Mark Benney

I have been on a streak of novels that tug insistently at the reluctant Freudian in me. Dinah Brooke’s The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert was, by the author’s admission, an act of reparation for her own father’s failures as a husband, businessman, and father. I’m working my way through the small oeuvre of Richard Rumbold, who spent much of his life engaged in a civil war with his father and other proxy father figures.

Even without context, Mark Benney’s novel The Big Wheel (1940) is full of dangling psychological threads that cry out for a good tugging. At the core of the novel is the strange relationship between the narrator, a former burglar named Harry Carne, and an ambition and hyperactive young journalist named Eric Felton. The two men meet when, hoping to make a little money after his release from Holloway prison, Harry tries to sell a few articles to Eric’s newspaper. Eric becomes fascinated with Harry and soon invites him to take a spare room in his flat and start working as Eric’s assistant, a job that mostly involves churning out articles under Eric’s name.

Eric’s concept of journalism seems to have been developed from years of reading the stuff that filled the back pages of London papers:

Journalism was a constant exercise in selecting from a grim, mechanised world its trivial accidents and hazards, and refocussing them until all else was blotted out of the world picture. It kept him in a ferment of small surface excitements, and it was these, communicated into his writing, that made him a good journalist. If a film-star had chosen an Amerindian for her fourth husband, if a cow was born in Wilshire with reindeer horns, the fact would keep Eric in continuous bubbling enthusiasm for hours.

Like Harry, Eric has come up from the tenements, self-taught, full of rough edges, and prone to the allure of bright, shiny objects — and people. “Eric liked to view himself as a patron of genius,” Harry observes, but the geniuses Eric was attracted to tended to be eccentrics: “Anyone who dyed his hair green, or wore shorts in winter, or expounded cosmic themes in an unintelligible gibberish, stood a fair chance of being entertained by Eric.”

Just how Eric affords to be so generous is a bit of a mystery until Harry meets Phoebe, a woman with murky connections who, he gathers, is both Eric’s lover and patroness. Harry’s first sight of Phoebe is as she emerges from Eric’s bedroom one morning, and his description of her dressing is almost bilious in its hatred toward older women:

She seemed to have none of the normal woman’s feelings of pudicity, and no awareness even of her grotesque appearance. She made no attempt at concealment as she divested herself of coat and nightgown before stepping into her undergarments. She moulded herself into tight corsets with apparently no sense of the obscenity of the kneading motions whereby she subdued her flesh. Busily she drew on her stockings, and fastened her suspenders, chattering brightly all the while about her darling Eric and her pleasure that he had at last found a friend who was at once a wide boy and a nice boy. [A “wide boy,” in British slang, refers to a man who lives by wheeling and dealing, often criminal.]

Harry learns that it’s Phoebe who’s paying for Eric’s flat. When Harry asks just what he does for her in return, Eric is vague: “Oh, odd things. Just ideas like the wheel and that club you saw.”

“The wheel” is the big wheel of the title, a large Ferris wheel, part of a small amusement park set up on a vacant lot in East London. The Ferris wheel is equipped with enclosed cars just big enough for two people to sit in comfortably. Eric’s “idea” was to run the wheel very slowly, allowing couples just enough time and privacy to enjoy each other’s company in ways that London offered few clean and cheap alternatives for.

This is just one of Phoebe’s ventures. She is a rising star in the London underworld, an entrepreneur busy expanding her little empire into horseracing betting and penny casinos in Brighton. She has her hooks into the police, with a growing roster of bent cops, as Harry discovers when he gets on Phoebe’s wrong side. As affectionate as she seems toward Eric, he knows Phoebe wouldn’t hesitate to throw him under a bus.

He knows this because she’s already done it to her own son. Jim, an ex-boxer who works as the “Big Wheel’s” bouncer, has done a stint in prison himself, as he tells Harry:

“Wodger get done for?” he asked sympathetically.
“Screwing,” I said.
“The berks!” he said feelingly, and added: “I done a carpet at the Ville.”
“What for?” I asked.
“V’lent assault,” he said. “But somebody mixed it for me. I never done it, they mixed it for me. Found me fingerprint on a broken bottle what somebody’d been glassed wiv; en said I done it. But I never! Me, I don’t use glasses.”

What Jim doesn’t know is that his mother had arranged for his prints to be put on the bottle by one of her crooked cops. She was taking revenge for some wrong the generally harmless palooka had done.

This is just one reason why Harry hates Phoebe, though. Another is that she’s a little too much like his own mother, who, it’s clear, was both a prostitute and a minor operator. Harry sees his criminal record in patently Freudian terms: “Always the fundamental object of my burglaries had been to win my way back to acceptance by the Phoebes — to force their respect, to share their expansive, explosive life.”

The dynamics among the men in the book is equally rich in nuances, whether intended or not. “I’m not a pansy!” Eric protests at one point, but his actions suggest this is not a black-and-white situation. The language that Benney uses at points is difficult to read today as simply poetic:

With a rueful movement of his lips, he [Eric] reached across the table and touched my hand; it was the gesture of one willing to forgive, but unable to forget. “That’s all right,” he said sepulchrally. “You two [Harry and a woman] go ahead and enjoy yourselves.” Then he drank off a glass of beaujolais at a gulp and took up the bottle to re-fill.

When Harry contemplates taking up with Margaret, the woman in the above scene, his language is equally open to analysis: “Living with her, I should always be her dependent, a hungry mouth at her paps, a leech on her arteries.”

The characters in The Big Wheel are too unstable for anyone to expect a happy ending. It takes far too long, however, and Benney introduces too many unnecessary detours before this house of cards collapses. Like other novels from this period I’ve read, The Big Wheel seems to cry out for an editor with a sharp pair of scissors. I get the impression that for every Max Perkins and Edward Garnett, there were a hundred other editors who gave their authors’ manuscripts a quick glance for spelling errors and passed them along for typesetting.

But there are also wonderful bits of writing scattered throughout these pages. A cheap cafe in the early morning before the breakfast rush: “Charwomen wash the corpse of time killed, and downstairs, in the lavatories, one’s footsteps echo hollowly as in a marble mausoleum.’ [OK, perhaps hollowly needs to go back to the thesaurus it came from.] Convincing details of life in poverty: a neighbor asks for change for the gas meter; when Harry notices he has two ha’pennies in his hand, the man explains that he’s keeping them to put on his mother’s eyes when she dies. It’s also a rich source for your vocabulary, one cited numerous times in Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of the Underworld: berk (slattern); nark (rat); on the rory (down and out); straighten (to bribe).

Record of Henry Degras' third prison sentence.
Record of Henry Degras’ third prison sentence, 1932-1933.

Benney’s account of the London underworld in The Big Wheel seems almost sociological in its detail, it’s understandable, for formal sociological research would be his ultimate destination. Born Henry Charles in the East End in 1910, he grew up in the world of The Big Wheel. His mother was a prostitute. He was taken up by a small-time stage performer and adopted the man’s last name of Degras. It was as Henry Degras that he served three sentences in prison, the last, for fraud, at Wandsworth.

Cover of US paperback edition of Low Company
Cover of US paperback edition of Low Company.

After his release in mid-1933, he was befriended by the publisher Peter Davies, who encouraged him to take up writing. The result, an autobiography titled Low Company, was published in 1936. By then, he’d married for the first time, to a woman named Phyllis Benney. Given his real criminal record, Davies recommended Degras take up a pseudonym, and he chose the name of his wife’s late brother: Mark Benney.

Peter Davies advertisement for Low Company.
Peter Davies ad for Low Company.

Low Company was an immediate success. George Orwell, one of the toughest critics when it came to working class literature of the time, called it “one of the best lumpenproletarian books of our time.” The book was so well done, Newsweek informed its readers, that “the publishers feel impelled to swear it isn’t a literary hoax.” Every major paper and magazine gave it enthusiastic reviews, and Peter Davies encouraged his protégé to try his hand at fiction as well.

His first attempt, The Scapegoat Dances (1938), got mixed reviews. James Agate felt that Benney had “acquired a style of which any writer ought to be thoroughly ashamed.” But even the poorest reviews held out hopes for better. The next year, he put his writing skills at the service of one of his underworld acquaintances, producing What Rough Beast? A Biographical Fantasia on the Life of Professor J. R. Neave, Otherwise Known as Iron Foot Jack Neave. Neave was a “wide boy” well known around Soho, who, as Matt Houlbrook puts it in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (2005), operated at various times as “strongman, club manager, antique dealer, con artist, and street phrenologist.”

The Big Wheel (1940) was considered a big improvement over Benney’s first novel. Reviewing the book for the Tribune, Orwell wrote,

It is about the London sub-world, the dreadful civilization of pin-tables, cheap night clubs and furnished single rooms, where sport, crime, prostitution, mendicancy and journalism all overlap…. Its distinctive mark is its acceptance of the lumpenproletarian outlook, its assumption that the world of narks, pimps, eightpenny kips, punchdrunk boxers and rival race-gangs is as eternal as the pyramids.

V. S. Pritchett called Benney “the highbrow of the lower depths and the only novelist we have who really knows the Soho underworld” and estimated that the novel’s strongest points were “wit, a restless, over-excited mind, a bottomless pessimism, and a wonderful ear for the dialogue of his people.” Frank Swinnerton, who often found other novelists wanting in comparison to himself, offered begrudging praise: “Mr. Benney can be tiresome, but he is interestingly tiresome, and his people and their seamy streets are real.”

Swinnerton’s comment offers a clue to where Benney’s real interests lay. If the most successful elements of The Big Wheel are its details of London underworld life, it’s because Benney was, fundamentally, more interested in being a recorder than a creator. In 1939, he married Jane Tabrisky, a graduate of the London School of Economics who’d worked earlier for the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. When the war broke out, he attempted to enlist but was rejected for medical reasons. He then went to work at an airplane factory, an experience he turned into his third and last novel, Over to Bombers (1943).

After the war, he was able to get a civil service job as an Industrial Relations Officer with the Ministry of Fuel and Power. The Ministry sent him to report on conditions at coal mines around Durham in the northeast of England, which led to his 1946 book, Charity Main: A Coalfield Chronicle. Following this, he decided to undertake a study of conditions in British prisons and sought advice from Mark Abrams, who was pioneering techniques in polling and surveys. Gaol Delivery, published in 1948, led to further social science work and, ultimately, to an invitation to teach sociology in the undergraduate College at the University of Chicago.

Mark Benney at Shimer College, 1962.
Mark Benney at Shimer College, 1962.

Though he was the only member of the Chicago faculty with no college education whatsoever, Benney thrived in the university environment. As he later wrote, “I think that if I had known in 1950 that such a course as Social Science 2 was being offered anywhere in the world I would have strained all my resources to take it. It was ironical that I found myself now in 1951 both taking and teaching it.” Benney went on to work with David Riesman, whom he later referred to as his “champion.”

In 1959, Benney took a job on the faculty of Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Illinois. The small school, small town atmosphere of Shimer didn’t suit Benney, who was by then on his third marriage and still retained a few habits from his underworld upbringing. He left after a few unhappy years that he documented in his last book, a memoir of his “reformed” life after Low Company, titled Almost a Gentleman (1966). His last years were spent as a researcher for hire for government and academic institutions. He died in Clearwater, Florida in 1973.

The Big Wheel, by Mark Benney
London: Peter Davies, 1940