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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 Big Firm, by Amabel Williams-Ellis (1938)

Cover of The Big Firm by Amabel Williams-Ellis

Written by Jayne Sharratt.

“Hot off the oven of our own time” was the verdict on new novel The Big Firm, according to The New York Times of 20th February 1938, in a review which also found it “unusually significant” and “distinguished as a work of literary art”. The novelist was the forty-three-year-old British writer and left-wing activist Amabel Williams-Ellis, who, although fulfilling the description of “neglected” today, in her lifetime was used to commanding press attention.

I began investigating Amabel’s story after visiting Plas Brondanw, the Snowdonia ancestral home of her husband Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of the fantasy village Portmeirion, and seeing her name on a plaque commemorating their marriage in 1915. Though Amabel was described only as a daughter, sister, wife and mother in the guidebooks, I followed my hunch there might be more to her than that and began digging. I found that in a career spanning seven decades of the twentieth century Amabel had published over seventy books. Six of these were novels, mainly written between 1925 and 1939.

One sign of her present-day obscurity is the difficulty I have had in buying copies of these novels, and what follows relies on my memory and notes of reading the book in the British Library in pre-pandemic times, as well as my own research into her life.

Born in 1894, Amabel was the daughter of the influential editor-proprietor of The Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, and grew up in a family where celebrity was normal. Dinner with a prime minister, story time with Rudyard Kipling, chess with the governor of Egypt and tea with the explorer Mary Kingsley were normal experiences for a girl whose relatives included the biographer Lytton Strachey and the painter Simon Bussey.

From the French magazine <em>Excelsior</em>spread on the wedding of Amabel and Clough Williams-Ellis in 1915.
From the French magazine Excelsior spread on the wedding of Amabel and Clough Williams-Ellis in 1915.

When journalists and photographers turned up at her wartime wedding in a rural chapel in Surrey at an hour of the morning intentionally chosen to evade them, chasing the bride and groom down the hill to their getaway car, they came for her not Clough. She was both a Jazz Age socialite and an activist with serious politics and a steely work ethic. Despite the war being over and Clough being offered alternative employment as an architect, the Army refused to discharge her husband at the end of the war until he had written a history of the Tank Corps, so Amabel sat down and wrote it for him, finishing it just in time for the birth of their second child, Charlotte, in 1919.

The Big Firm(1938) was Amabel’s fourth novel. It was written in an atmosphere of increasing international tensions and crisis – Hitler’s annexation of Austria took place within weeks of its publication. Completion of the novel had been complicated by the concussion Amabel suffered when she was struck by a car while visiting her mother and her friend and author Margaret Storm Jameson helped proofread the draft for publication. The Big Firm tells the story of Owen Wynne, a scientist who works in microbiology research and his love affairs with two women, Caro and Nicola. The big firm of the title is Consolidated Scientific Products, which employs Owen and prevents him from publishing his research. Owen’s political leanings are left-wing; the plot concerns his attempts to prevent arms and scientific products being sold to the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. The action moves remorselessly and thrillingly to the climax in which Owen and Nicola race to intercept a shipment intended for a mysterious cargo ship moored off the coast of North wales.

Characters who wrestle with strong political principles when others seek to corrupt them are a feature of The Big Firm. When Nicola, the wife of a Labour MP and committed member of the Labour Party herself, hears her husband preparing to compromise to gain a government post, her respect is lost. “This isn’t the moment when responsible leaders ought to stress our fundamental socialist policy,” he tells her. “We’ve got to soft pedal, otherwise the Labour Movement will be destroyed.” Nicola decides she must leave him. To her, his pragmatism is “false and horrible.” Her decision to end the marriage over this difference of political views might seem extreme to us, but in the context of the 1930s politics compromise could mean appeasing dangerous forces.

Amabel recognised the threat posed by Hitler to world peace when he came to power and advocated action to prevent full scale war. To this end, in July 1934, she travelled to New York to give evidence to the American Inquiry Commission, which was collecting information about conditions in Germany in the hope of getting the US government to take notice. Amabel described her missions to Berlin that year, the death threats she had received, and the treatment of Jews and Communists. “There is not only no right or justice in Germany, there is no truth,” she told the commissioners.

For the rest of the 1930s, Amabel campaigned against Fascism. She was put under surveillance by the British secret service as a result. Her son Christopher was killed in 1944 in Italy at the age of twenty-one, and she often wondered whether she had done enough to prevent the war. Amabel always suffused her writing with the issues which most concerned her, and in this light The Big Firm is part of the history of the anti-Fascist movement in the 1930s.

To the New York Times’ reviewer Jane Spence Southson, it was the scientific background of The Big Firm that stood out. A wife of one of the directors of Consolidated Scientific Products declares in a speech that although many people think of themselves as contemporary, they don’t have the first clue what is going on in the world of science. Southson notes that this will not be true for readers of the novel, which she considers more masculine in tone than any she has ever read by a woman because it is so detailed and knowledgeable on its subject. Reviewing Amabel’s memoir in 1983, Michael Holroyd noted that her working method was always to write a book in order to learn about its subject, and she would have been very much following her inclinations in the case of The Big Firm.

The masculine tone Southson referred to may have been a reference to its descriptions of the inner workings of Owen’s employer, CSP, an environment rarely written about by women at that time. Amabel had a track record of writing about technical “male” subjects established when her first published book detailed the development of the tank as a weapon of war. When she wrote a careers guide aimed at boys and girls in 1933 called What Shall I Be? she visited work places personally and interviewed the people who worked there to gain insight into what their work actually entailed. At a chemical plant, she observed astringently, “for some unexplained reason women are hardly ever employed…. Probably this is just a custom of the trade, for their seems to be no other objection.”

Amabel Williams-Ellis
Amabel Williams-Ellis in the 1930s. Photo by Howard Coster, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Amabel always said that if she had been a boy, she would have chosen to be a scientist. Given no formal education or encouragement to go to university by her parents, she became a writer instead, but ensured that her daughter Charlotte became a scientist after studying at Cambridge University. Charlotte’s daughter, Dr. Rachel Garden, also a scientist, told me that her grandmother had a well-hidden insecurity about her lack of formal education which she rectified by asking questions of experts. It is probable that this kind of research lay behind her convincing portrait of a research scientist facing moral dilemmas at work in commercial industry.

In her testimony before the American Inquiry Commission in 1934, Amabel made a point of saying that the Nazi regime was suppressing women’s rights, that Nazis held that women were to be wives and mothers in the home only, with the primary task being to raise “fine warriors.” In Britain at that time, opportunities for women were slowly improving but the belief that women had to choose between family and career was still dominant. As a writer, Amabel was always concerned with women’s feelings about their lives.

Both Caro and Nicola, the women in The Big Firm, are struggling with complicated emotions towards traditional female roles. When the novel opens, Owen is having an affair with Caro, a woman of whom her family say, “all girls want to elope with their schoolteacher or with the butcher, or eat hasheesh, or run away to sea. They all want to – but Caro does.” Caro is lost. She realises that clinging to Owen will not give her the purpose she craves. Married women confuse her: “Could she, did she even desire to become like them, so peaceful…so blank…annihilated?”

But what, she wonders, is her alternative?

“You remember I tried to be a Doctor once? It was too difficult . . . oh, well! Anyhow, I believe a lot of women don’t stick things because they find it hard to believe enough in themselves…to think the work that they do, is all that necessary.”

In the 1950s, Amabel would write bitterly about the way in which society’s “uncreating unbelief” in a girl’s “power to do anything worthwhile” held young women back from reaching their true potential. Perhaps this is what she was implying with the deeply unhappy Caro.

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Meanwhile, Owen and Nicola have been working together as part of the Industrial League Against War. They acknowledge their love for each other on the journey to Wales to intercept the suspicious cargo ship. Nicola has realised she is pregnant with her husband’s child and looks at Owen with “the desperate eyes of a creature in a trap.” In the end, Nicola and Owen decide to be together and love the child nonetheless. It is not going to be an easy romance, but the reader feels it might be a successful one.

Both Caro and Nicola are wrestling with their roles in a society which is not built for their benefit. This was a theme Amabel would return to, most notably in her 1951 work of nascent feminism The Art of Being a Woman.

In the late 1930s, Amabel was a modern woman writing about issues which still resonate today. Why then, is she so unknown? One answer to this question could be the variety of genres Amabel wrote in. Her dozens of books include biography, politics, memoir, feminism, parenting, anthologies of fairy tales and science fiction, and non-fiction books for schools. By the time of her death in 1984 the novels, none of which were written later than 1951, were forgotten and (if her work was mentioned at all) she was considered “a writer for children.”

Another answer lies in the fact that she was a woman. A male reviewer of her autobiography (who complained that she failed to say enough about all the famous men she had known and talked too much about herself) decreed her a writer “fated to be known by her menfolk”. This was an unjust self-fulfilling prophecy, but the growing fame post World War Two of her architect husband Clough Williams-Ellis and Portmeirion overshadowed Amabel’s own achievements. Portmeirion is such a flamboyant and colourful vision it is hard for Amabel’s narrative to have space within it, and the Williams-Ellis name today is synonymous with both the village and the pottery begun by Amabel and Clough’s daughter Susan.

Amabel herself recognised that her legacy might have fared better if she had written with her birth name when she called her memoir All Stracheys are Cousins. In the majority of Amabel’s books I borrowed from The British Library, the same pencilled hand had struck out Williams-Ellis on the title page and annotated “Strachey”. In the eyes of The British Library she was a Strachey.

A recurring note in Amabel’s writing is her hope for the next generation of young women. In The Big Firm, a schoolgirl called Lou tells Nicola that she wants her own life to be different:

“I should want to be able to say I was a something – you know, a doctor or a writer or a vet or something. I’m certain that if I was doing politics like you, I should want to be a member of parliament or in the cabin … not just a person who makes speeches.”

Amabel Williams-Ellis cared deeply about her family, but she was also very resoundingly “something” in her own right and The Big Firm is convincing evidence of this.

This is a guest post by Jayne Sharratt. Jayne is working on a biography of the writer and activist Amabel Williams-Ellis.
Follow her on Twitter: @jayne_sharratt.		Jayne Sharratt

The Big Firm, by Amabel Williams-Ellis
London: Collins, 1938

Rene’s Flesh, by Virgilio Piñera (1952)

Covers of the Eridanos Press and Marsilio Publishers editions of René's Flesh by Virgilio Piñera
Covers of the Eridanos Press and Marsilio Publishers editions of René’s Flesh by Virgilio Piñera.

“Whereas English distinguishes between ‘flesh’ and ‘meat,'” translator Mark Schafer writes in an introductory note to René’s Flesh, “Spanish fuses the two concepts in the single word carne, which is used in phrases like ‘flesh of my flesh’ and ‘flesh and blood’ as readily as in ‘meat pie.'” The two concepts of meat and flesh fuse in the Spanish title — La carne de René — as they fuse in its story. This book is a powerful reminder that the human body is a package of meat you will ever read.

I was introduced to the work of Virgilio Piñera when I read Cold Tales, his collection of absurdist, surrealist, yet viscerally realistic short stories. No one’s stories are quite like Piñera’s. If I tossed out names like Borges, Ionescu, or Kafka, you might get some sense of his work — and it’s certainly of the same caliber, worthy of being considered as among the great writers of the 20th century — but you would likely make the mistake of thinking you knew it because you’d read theirs, and Piñera absolutely deserves to be read on his own.

I’m not sure I’d recommend René’s Flesh as the book to start with, though. There’s always a certain disorienting effect to Piñera’s work. As one Goodreads reader put it, his stories take place “in noplace in notime.” Locations are unnamed and the era could be anywhere from the 1920s to today. There are enough details — clothing, furniture, shops, trappings of government and church — to make the settings seem familiar, but at the same time, nothing specific enough to say we’re in Cuba or Argentina, where Piñera lived at different times, or Spain or the United States.

And then there are his subjects, things like the train as big as the world or the climbers whose bodies are broken into smaller and smaller pieces as they tumble from a mountaintop. Piñera takes things we know and stretches them to the point where they seem grotesque or ridiculous or both.

René’s Flesh is a novel that takes one thing we know — that we humans are creatures of the flesh, which means in Spanish, at least, that we are also creatures of meat — and stretches it to lengths that are not just uncomfortable but deeply disturbing. The novel opens as René, a young man just turned twenty, joins a queue outside a butcher shop. The shop is overflowing with meat and the hungry people are clamoring to buy as much as they can.

René, however, is there for a different purpose. His father Ramón wants to teach his son to love flesh. “My dear child, tomorrow, the day you turn twenty, I will put you in possession of the secret of the flesh.” (Bear in mind Schafer’s use of the word “meat” in his translation when talking about the human body and “flesh” when dealing with food, which I’ve tried to follow in this piece. However, as Schafer also warns, “to, as it were, help flesh out Piñera’s vision … wherever the word ‘flesh’ appears, it may be understood as ‘meat,’ and vice versa.”)

Ramón is not a flesh lover: he’s a flesh worshipper. His taste for the flesh is “a preference so passionate as to constitute a veritable priesthood and even a dynasty, something that is passed on from father to son, that is jealously bequeathed to keep the enthusiasm alive.” Ramón is a mysterious figure who’s uprooted his family in midnight moves throughout René’s childhood: “Some people asserted he was a traveling businessman, others, an engineer, some, a smuggler, and there were even people who declared him an assassin.”

Covers of Italian, French, and Portuguest translations of René's Flesh
Covers of Italian, French, and Portuguese translations of René's Flesh

Unlike Ramón, René abhors the flesh. His father’s passion for flesh, his murky role in some international conspiracy related to its worship, is the reason his family has been on the run for as long as he can remember. The sight of great slabs of beef, severed pig’s heads, steaks, roasts, and sausages in the butcher shop sicken him. Worse yet, in Ramón’s eyes, his son has yet to accept that being a creature of meat comes hand in hand with the reality of having to endure pain.

Pain — from cuts and wounds and torture — is a given when René joins his father in the Cause. Ramón, like his father before him, is a leader in the Cause, a worldwide revolutionary movement: “I am chief of those who are pursued, who pursue those who pursue us.” That sentence embodies marvelously the isolation, the circular logic, that binds so many extremist groups. For those in the Cause, “The pursuit never ends, it is infinite; not even death would bring it to a close.” When Ramón dies, René will carry on, and so on and so on. There is no suggestion that the Cause will ultimately prevail.

And what is the Cause fighting for?

“Over a piece of chocolate.” Many years before, the ruling powers forbade the people to eat chocolate. Protests led to riots, which led to underground movements that converged into the Cause.

But, René objects, “I’m never seen you drink chocolate.”

“You think we’re so foolish as to be seen with a cup of chocolate in our hand?” Ramón replies, “What we’re defending is the cause of chocolate.”

San Sebastiano, by Maestro dagli Occhi Spalancati
San Sebastiano, by Maestro dagli Occhi Spalancati (c. 1470).

At this stage in the Cause’s history, what it’s defending has, in fact, become irrelevant. All that matters is that the Cause is a struggle for which its believers must be willing to experience pain as well as to inflict it. In fact, given the circular logic of its belief, the two acts can be fused into one. shows a painting of St. Sebastian, the early Christian martyr. But unlike traditional depictions of St. Sebastian, this martyr is his own punisher:

This St. Sebastian was drawing arrows from a quiver and sticking them into his body. The painter had shown him in the moment of sticking the last one into his forehead. His arm was still raised, his fingers now removed from the end of the arrow and seeming to fear that this arrow hadn’t sunk definitively into his flesh.

For this reason, René is sent off for training. His school has a specific purpose: “Knowledge must be beaten into a person,” its director informs him. The only textbook at the school is the human body — “everything a man needs to forge his way into the flesh of another man.” If the Cause is going to produce men prepared to torture their pursuers, it must also teach them to experience pain: “a body deprived of pain isn’t a body but a rock; that the greater the capacity for pain, the greater the vitality.”

As one of fifty freshmen, René is muzzled, strapped into a chair, and subjected to increasingly powerful electrical charges. Their skins burn and sweat drips off their noses and fingers. Then, the rest of the students are instructed to creep up, to sniff around their bodies, trying to detect the subtle differences in the amount of pain they are suffering.

When René fails to show an acceptable level of pain, he is singled out for special treatment. He is forced to listen to a record endlessly repeating the same insistent lecture:

Attention, René! René! Attention, René! René! René! … Why do you not want? Do you not want because wanting, you do not want or do you want because you want not to want? Do you want wanting or do you want not wanting? How do you want?

When this brainwashing treatment fails, Swyne, the school’s chief torturer, decides that René is too impervious to pain. He must be softened up through the most direct method. And so he sets to licking René from head to toe. Soon, squads of students are stripped to the skin and put to the task. The licking goes on for hours. Days. It’s essential they succeed, for it’s René’s destiny to be a leader. “Cannon fodder comes in two categories,” Swyne tells him: “leader meat and mass meat.” Leaders are those “who aren’t just tortured, but who torture themselves and in turn torture others, inventing new models of torture.”

René’s Flesh follows the conventional formula of a Bildungsroman, covering the formative years and education of (usually) a young man. But writing 200 years after Voltaire, Piñera’s Candide is hypercharged with the forces of mass production and totalitarianism. There is no garden at the end of René’s journey.

There is so much to unpack in this book I can only scratch the surface. I haven’t even touched on the use of doubles (René meets a man who’s paid to have himself surgically altered to look exactly like his father Ramón), or the collusion between church and state, or deformity (the millionaire known as Ball of Flesh) or dual significance of arrows (Cupid’s arrows vs. St. Sebastian’s arrows). This is not a book one likes, but it is a book one admires — although, as Raymond Souza put it, “Pinera’s writings inspire the kind of admiration that a surgeon’s scalpel produces.”

Photos of Virgilio Piñera by Ida Kar (1964)
Photos of Virgilio Piñera by Ida Kar (1964). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Piñera was a gay man who lived under the dual repression of the Catholic church and reactionary leaders like Juan Perón and Fulgencio Batista. What he would have experienced as the pleasures of the flesh were considered deadly sins and criminal acts. It’s not surprising that the Cause takes St. Sebastian as its ideal. As Richard A. Kaye has written, “gay men have seen in Sebastian at once a stunning advertisement for homosexual desire (indeed, a homoerotic ideal), and a prototypical portrait of tortured closet case.”

René’s Flesh is often grouped or compared with José Lezama Lima’s novel Paradiso. Both writers were Cuban and homosexual, both novels dealt with young men growing up as outsiders in their worlds. However, René’s Flesh is, in my opinion at least, a much more relevant and accessible book. Despite the strong role of Catholic symbolism, Piñera’s use abstraction and exaggeration make this a story that can be appreciated by just about any reader on the planet. I called Cold Tales the best discovery I made in 2017, a year I devoted exclusively to short story collections. Barely one month into this year, I’m not afraid to call René’s Flesh my discovery of 2021. If Rhinoceros and The Trial can be considered 20th century masterpieces, then so can René’s Flesh.

[Although René’s Flesh was published in Mark Schafer’s excellent translation as part of outstanding Eridanos Press Library series in 1990 and two years later by Marsilio, it’s been out of print for decades and the few used copies available go for prices starting at $140. Fortunately, the book is available in electronic format on the Internet Archive (Link), which is how I read it.]

René’s Flesh, by Virgilio Piñera, translated by Mark Schafer
Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, 1990

The Miserable Child and her Father in the Desert, by Dinah Brooke (1974)

Cover of The Miserable Child and her Father in the Desert by Dinah Brooke

Sometimes the story around a book is even better than the book itself. This is definitely the case with Dinah Brooke’s 1974 novel The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert.

The Miserable Child is a six-year-old English girl abandoned in a dismal boarding school in the south of England. Her mother is in a sanatorium, her father, as the title suggests, is in the desert — in this case, serving with Montgomery in Egypt. It’s the autumn of 1942. At the school, they have whalemeat stew for lunch: “There is a war on, you know.”

The little girl knows she’s been abandoned: “Daddy Daddy Daddy, you don’t think of me at all,” she complains. “You imagine that I am secure, but there is no security for me if you are about to die.” In the desert, Monty has a Plan. A great offensive against the Germans is in preparation. The girl, of course, knows nothing about this — at the time.

In telling the story of The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert, Dinah Brooke adopts both the perspective of a frightened and lonely little girl in 1942 and of her adult self, aware of history with a big H (the battle of El Alamein) and a little one (her father’s being evacuated with a case of jaundice before the attack). At school, “The Miserable Child is alone and panic-stricken.” At the same time, however, she also wanders around the front in Egypt, observing the progress of the battle: “The Miserable Child wanders up to Kidney Ridge, where the enemy are launching heavy armoured counterattacks…. She prowls around the battlefield like a jackal, a hyena, sniffing at bodies as the sun rises high and the heat and the flies and the stench rise with it….”

Brooke switches perspectives instantly, without offering us signal or clue. It makes reading a disconcerting experience but also adds to the impact of the narrative. Though things follow a roughly chronological order, we are never quite sure of where the narrator stands. Are we seeing things through the eyes of the Miserable Child in the moment or through the eyes of the woman whose memories of her miserable childhood and knowledge of other facts provide context not available to the girl?

We are one-third of our way into the book before it becomes clear that this is really the story of the father, not the child. The son of a steel-makng family in the North, Bob is a promising young man, ready to work his way up the ladder at the works, eager to push for improvements. His judgment is not always sound, however. He has a bit too much of a taste for drink and he marries a fragile, artistic woman suffering from TB. When the war comes, he is happy for the opportunity to escape into the Army, placing his daughter into a convenient school and enjoying a spree in London with his best friend’s wife before shipping out.

Though Bob proves unfit for service and returns to a post with the steel works, his promise has already faded. He knows neither how to accommodate the growing role of the trades unions nor how to keep the trust of the financiers or government ministers. So, he heads to Kenya to launch himself again, divorcing his first wife and picking up another along the way. The Miserable Child, of course, is left to make her way at the same miserable school.

The construction firm he joins in Kenya goes bust, and Bob takes to drink while his new wife’s popularity among the clubmen leads to mocking comments behind his back. He gives up Kenya and the wife and heads back to England. Within weeks, he’s lying in a locked ward for alcoholics, admitted through the collusion of his brother and the presiding physician.

From here, Bob’s story is one of steady decline, with most of his time spent in jail or asylums. Everyone agrees he’s a fine fellow. On the few occasions when he’s able to visit his daughter, in school or in London or on the maternity ward after the birth of his first grandchild, everyone comments on his manners and charm. It’s just that he can’t take care of himself, let alone anyone else. And so he leaves the Miserable Child there in the hospital facing the prospect of raising her child without the help of her own parents.

With only what we’re told in the book, we’re left wondering what Dinah Brooke was trying to do in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert. We feel sympathy for both father and daughter, but what is the point of this account of their miseries?

Fortunately, Brooke gave us her answer in “An Obsession Revisited,” an essay she wrote for Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, a collection edited by Ursula Owen and published in 1983 by Virago. “I was obsessed with my Dad for twenty years,” she writes.

You could almost say I made a career out of him – or out of the lack of him. Do people whose fathers are more present in their lives become so obsessed? I never lived with him after I was three, hardly saw him between the ages of seven and twenty-five, yet the amount of energy I focused on him was phenomenal.

“It would be hard not to describe his life as a failure,” she acknowledges. Like Bob in the book, his father ran a steel factory — Lysachts Steel Works in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. He married a painter with lung problems, hit a plateau in his rise in the firm, and shrugged off the fetters of that life by joining the Army and warehousing his daughter in a boarding school. After the war, he divorced, remarried, went to Kenya and failed to make a new start. And from there, as Brooke puts it, “He became an alcoholic, went mad, and spent most of the rest of his life in asylums of varying degrees of Dickensian horror.”

Joseph Brooke and his daughter Dinah in 1938.
Joseph Brooke and his daughter Dinah in 1938. From Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.

In hindsight, she sees the novel as an act of reparation — a posthumous attempt to establish kind of relationship she never had — and of restoration (of her father’s reputation):

I mean look, a book, printed pages, hard covers, shiny pictures. Just look at you, see what a mess you made of your life? You’re much better like this. Neat, full of good things, fixed, appreciated. You really fucked it up didn’t you, you silly old man, but don’t worry, I’ll make it OK. I’ll rewrite your life for you, not improving things much — playing around with the facts a bit, yes; putting you into the army instead of the air force so I can have some nice games with Monty at El Alamein, but not papering over the cracks; not trying to make you appear better, more successful, a better father.

Joe, while I’m writing about you I feel as if I’m pushing something uphill. Making a tremendous effort, as if I have to act both parts at once, the parent and the child. I did so want you to be a father to me. I did so want someone to be a father to me. You did the best you could. It wasn’t a lot. The desire was there, but the execution was feeble.

It wasn’t enough, though. “I was really hooked on fathers,” Brooke admits. She wrote another novel (Death Games (1976)), in which “a suicidal daughter pursues her father through the horrors of war-torn Vietnam, and finally, in the heat of the afternoon, she makes love to him, and as he comes he has a heart attack and dies.” In an early fictional instance of self-harming, the daughter holds lit cigarettes to her skin just to feel something.

“Thank goodness I’ve finished with that little lot,” she concludes.

There’s another twist in the story, however. In “An Obsession Revisited,” Brooke mentions spending six years at the ashram of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. After becoming interested in the Bhagwan’s teachings in London, she travelled to India and made several short stays, during the last of which the Bhagwan annointed her with a new name, Ma Prem Pankaja.

Brooke decided to bring her children along and to settle in India for the long term. As she later wrote,

So we went, and settled into a run-down ex-British Raj house next to the ashram, surrounded by mangoes and palm trees. The only trouble was the kids didn’t like it much. The schools were dreadful, and there weren’t any kids their own age, turning ten, around the ashram. My daughter was having quite a good time, but my son desperately wanted to go home, and I more and more wanted to stay.

So, Brooke took her children back to England, left them in the care of their father, the actor Francis Dux, and returned to India. Brooke’s close friend, the writer Sally Belfrage, joined her and remained at the ashram for the better part of a year. Belfrage later published an account of the experience, Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram (1981), that offers an independent, if not entirely objective, view of Brooke’s time as a sannyasin (convert).

Belfrage was outraged by Brooke’s decision to leave her children behind. She also wasn’t convinced by Brooke’s embrace of her new faith. “They make her wear only orange,” Belfrage wrote, but in Brooke’s case, “It’s not by any means the shaven-headed-saffron-Buddhists-of-Oxford-Street sort of thing — Dior or Chloe will do as long as it’s orange,” and she looked “as Vogue-y as ever.” To Belfrage, the Rajneeshis were nothing more than a cult: “If Bhagwan were Billy Graham, they’d be out crusading; if he were Charles Manson they’d be out killing….”

Brooke returned to England, having decided against following the Bhagwan to his new enclave in Oregon, around the time that Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram was published. Feeling attacked by her friend, Brooke wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Responsible Mother” that appeared in The Guardian in May 1982. “I’d like to say something about motherhood from the point of view of this character, which was me,” it began.

Headline from Dinah Brooke's article in The Guardian, 31 May 1982.
Headline from Dinah Brooke’s article in The Guardian, 31 May 1982.

“Leaving my children certainly did not happen easily or casually. Being an averagely neurotic, guilt-ridden middle-class Englishwoman I manage to make it as difficult as possible for myself and everyone else by endless agonies of indecision,” she admitted. In her response to those who criticized her decision, Brooke also pointed to experiences recounted in The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert:

Among the myths to which I have subscribed is the one which decrees that children can only be happy rolling around like puppies in large groups wearing the minimum of clothes and not being forced to learn anything — because of course I was an only child and went to boarding school and had to wear a uniform.

And her feelings during this separation were perhaps not that different from those of her father over those years in the boarding school. “Most of the time I didn’t miss them at all,” she confessed. “My mother wrote regularly, sending photos and telling me how they were.”

After two years at the ashram, Brooke returned to England to spend Christmas of 1977 with them. When she returned to India, however, “I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for six weeks, almost all day, every day.” “Somehow,” she recognized, “all the sorrow of my own childhood were condensed into this endless crying.”

Discussing her situation, the Bhagwan suggested that Brooke was making the mistake of trying to take responsibility for her children’s feelings. She came to accept this view. “My parents are not responsible for the way in which I experience my life,” she informed The Guardian’s readers, “and neither I nor their father are responsible for the way in which our children experience theirs.” She felt justified in her choice: “I spent six years with an Enlightened Master, and not gift that life has to offer can be greater than that.”

As one can imagine, not everyone agreed with Brooke’s conclusion. The Guardian printed a number of angry responses to what most seemed to consider a “self indulgent” article. “I’m sorry that Dinah Brooke got so little out of being a mother,” wrote one. “My stomach churned on reading about Dinah Brooke’s six-year stay in India sans children,” wrote another, who couldn’t imagine spending even six days away from her own.

Dinah Brooke effectively disappeared from the printed page after “An Obsession Revisited” was published. In the short biographical remarks that preceded the essay, she wrote, “Returned to London. Ran a market stall, met Derek, now Mahabodh. Work as temp. sec. and freelance journalist. Tomorrow?” From what I’ve been able to determine, although Brooke had worked for The Observer and others prior to taking up fiction, her work after the ashram wasn’t for any major papers or magazines. [2023 update: Perhaps more will be revealed with the republication of her novel Lord Jim at Home by Daunt/McNally Editions.]

The Miserable Child and her Father in the Desert, by Dinah Brooke
London: New Fiction Society, 1974

The Grandmothers, by Glenway Wescott (1927)

This is a guest post by Barry Alfonso, author of A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen

To someone who grew up in California, a place like Wisconsin seems both drab and exotic, the sort of bland nowhere you would never want to visit deliberately. This may be the prevailing view, but that’s not how I thought of the Badger State when I lived in San Diego. I remember discovering Michael Lesy’s classic book Wisconsin Death Trip in the early ‘70s. Its grim prose and even grimmer photos from the 1890s captured a world as darkly fascinating as H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham for me. The Wisconsin countryside seemed like a vast empty plain where human affairs — quiet tragedies punctuated with loud explosions of insanity — could play out. Living in a supposed paradise at the far end of the continent, Californians tend to think of the Midwest as irredeemably dull, filled with the sort of stunted people who don’t have the gumption to move West. To me, though, books like Lesy’s made the case that places like Wisconsin were filled with mystery, shadowy secrets, old houses harboring old people possessed by twisted dreams.

A lingering association of the Badger State with things stark and spooky led me to pick up a paperback copy of Good-Bye Wisconsin (Signet edition, 1964) at a San Diego used books store in the 1990s. The author of this short story collection was Glenway Wescott, a writer completely unknown to me. Reading it, I was struck by his lyrical prose and the empathetic treatment he gave to his damaged and morally confused characters. Years later, I ran across Wescott’s novel The Grandmothers at a library sale in the Pittsburgh area. This 1927 novel — apparently a best-seller that went through at least 24 printings — was a much deeper dive into the moody Midwestern landscapes and tormented characters that Good-Bye Wisconsin dealt with. I recently re-read it and found it an even richer experience the second time around.

Gelnway Wescott, 1933
Glenway Wescott, 1933.

On the surface, The Grandmothers treads the same ground covered by Sherwood Anderson: commonplace scenes rendered with a poetic touch, filled with repressed, thwarted men and women who turn into grotesque exaggerations of themselves when their hurts and grievances remain buried too long. Anderson generally dealt with Midwestern small town life rather than more isolated rural folk, but the same sense of rigid Protestant proprieties draped over chronic regret and moldering obligation is present in Wescott’s novel as well. Both Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Grandmothers feature an adolescent boy with artistic inclinations who strongly resembles the author at a similar age. That said, Wescott seems to accept and embrace the failings and cruelties of the society he grew up in with a greater sense of forgiveness than Anderson does. And while Westcott is more literal and less parable-like in his accounts of his characters’ lives, his poetic language is even more mystically evocative than Anderson’s. The Grandmothers doesn’t mythologize its gruff, semi-articulate men and wounded yet indominable women so much as surround them with a visionary glow. Its prose heightens the normal world and makes you see it with renewed color and vibrancy:

“They went down the Mississippi on a river boat. There were whisperings of the water and a sound of kisses around the prow as it advanced through regular ripples that were like a wedding veil…”

“The east was covered with tiny clouds like the torn bits of paper which a newcomer finds in a dismantled house; the sun entered the sky like such a newcomer.”

“As a flying seed will debauch a whole meadow with flowers, one kiss, one caress not even wished for, had spoiled her peace of mind, even her good health.”

The arc of The Grandmothers is simple and reminiscent of similar narratives. A group of families move to frontier Wisconsin before the Civil War and intermarry, establishing lines of descendants who prosper or succumb to ill fortune (mostly the latter) as the world enters the 20th Century. Wescott treats nearly everyone with respect and at least a modicum of sympathy — there are no real villains in the book. He doesn’t shy away from bringing out the more unpleasant and downright bizarre qualities of his characters, though. One of the grandmothers of Alwyn (the stand-in for a young Glenway Wescott) suffers from excessive prudery and takes to hiding small household objects to torment her husband. The couple’s poisoned but enduring marriage is summed up in a bitter vision: “During their last years it was as if they lay on one deathbed — the dying hands interlaced by habit, by hatred of each other and love of God, the dying mouths murmuring truths without pity and complaining still.” (I read this and thought of certain photographs in Wisconsin Death Trip and shuddered a little.)

At times, the slow-seeping toxicity within these family relationships gets a tad claustrophobic. Those who wander away from the ancestral homesteads generally come to no good, though their travels do add some excitement. Black sheep Evan Tower runs off to fight in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, deserts the army and hops a freighter for London, marries an Italian woman and ends up living with his wife and children under an assumed name in New Mexico. These adventures provide contrast to the severe monotony of rural Wisconsin life, throwing its grinding routines and unyielding moral codes into starker relief.

Wescott parses the subtle shadings within old-fashioned Protestantism without displaying disdain or boredom. (Unlike Sherwood Anderson, he doesn’t flaunt his pagan instincts.) The lives of the most publicly religious are portrayed in the least flattering terms — the “stringless harp wrapped up like a mummy in the music room” found in a minister’s home suggests his overall stuffiness. It is the women in the book — most of them thwarted or broken by love — who seem to possess the most life-affirming faith. Believe in a forgiving God and the promise of heaven makes the sorrows of the everyday world easier to accept. Yet that isn’t the whole story – as the book nears its conclusion, Wescott makes clear that hard-shell Methodism, habitual labor and flattened expectations still allow for nobility and satisfaction if not joy. The “dignity of citizenship” and “the perfect and tender monotony of an uneventful married life” deserve celebration, something Anderson (let alone fellow Midwestern chronicler Sinclair Lewis) might not concede.

The final chapters of the novel lay the older generation to rest as Alwyn’s growing awareness of his family heritage comes into focus. Wescott notes that Alwyn spied upon his family, “studied to convict them,” even as he watched his grandmothers slowly die. He compares his desire to write to the art of taxidermy, an attempt to simulate life out of selected pieces of the dead past. As she wastes away, his maternal grandmother mistakes Alwyn for her son and tells him, “You know, you are my only sweetheart.” Whether this parting benediction is given to the wrong person is irrelevant. Wescott finds an all-embracing love in the resolute endurance and collective heartbreak of his ancestors.

In its sometimes bleak, sometimes tender depiction of a vanished world, The Grandmothers anticipates Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels. There’s a quietly compelling drama to the stories that both writers tell about the Midwest, as well as an attempt to describe ordinary men and women with as much perceptiveness and nuance as possible. They share a deep empathy for the overlooked and undervalued. I haven’t seen Wescott’s name invoked in reviews of Robinson’s fiction. Those who admire her work would find The Grandmothers worthy of discovery.

I have visited Wisconsin many times over the past two decades. I’ve seen the sorts of places Wescott described in The Grandmothers and maybe even met the descendants of the people he wrote about. The mysteries of the Badger State still haven’t been dispelled for me. I hope they never are. If I need to revisit them, I will return to The Grandmothers one more time.

The Grandmothers, by Glenway Wescott
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927

Beowulf, by Bryher (1956)

Cover of first US edition of Beowulf by Bryher

When Pantheon published Bryher’s Beowulf in 1956, one of its reviewers, R. T. Horchler, wrote, “Those who know Bryher’s historical romances will be surprised that Beowulf is a contemporary war novel, about the bombing of London in World War II.”

I have to confess that over the decades I’ve known about Bryher and her work, I always assumed that Beowulf was a historical novel — something from English history along the lines of The Player’s Boy (Shakespeare) or This January Tale (the Norman Conquest). It was only when I was browsing through a bibliography of World War Two fiction recently that I discovered my mistake — and quickly located a copy.

What’s more surprising, however, is that Beowulf has never been published in England. Bryher had, in fact, written the book in late 1943 and early 1944 while living in London as a refugee with her partner, the American poet H. D.. As Bryher later wrote in her war memoir, The Days of Mars, “The English refused to publish Beowulf. They do not want to remember. It was a documentary, not a novel, but an almost literal description of what I saw and heard during my first six months in London.”

Instead, after she returned to France following Liberation, Bryher was encouraged by her friends Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier to translate the book into French. Tt was published by Mercure de France as Beowulf: roman d’une maison de thé dans Londres bombardé in 1948. Bryher later repaid the favor by dedicating the American edition of the book to Beach and the memory of Monnier.

Monnier in particular loved the book, declaring in a French review, “As for myself, I should like better to have written it than most of the books that are spoken about.” Beach, who met Bryher in the 1920 when her then-husband Robert McAlmon brought the writer into Shakespeare & Co., saw a connection between Bryher’s behavior on that first visit and her approach to her subject in Beowulf:

Bryher, as far as I can remember, never said a word. She was practically soundless, a not uncommon thing in England; no small talk whatsoever — the French call it ‘letting the others pay the expenses of the conversation.’ …. She was quietly observing everything in her Bryhery way, just as she observed everything when she visited ‘The Warming Pan’ teashop in the London blitz days — and, as Beowulf proves, nothing escaped her.

Beowulf takes place over a few weeks in the course of the Blitz. It centers on a modest tea shop, the Warming Pan, run by Misses Selina Tippett and Angelina Hawkins. Bought with a legacy left Selina from her years in service, the tea shop runs on a mixture of hospitality and the altruism of its owners, who are willing to look past rationing restrictions to slip an extra cake to a hungry young soldier or to allow a lonely old man to spend hours nursing a cup in the corner.

There is no plot per se. Bryher simply introduces us to the Warming Pan, its owners, help, and a selection of its customers. She begins with Horatio Rashleigh. Old, lonely after the death of his wife, and no longer producing paintings that anyone wants, he survives on a tiny allowance given begrudgingly by a cousin. As if old age and widowerhood weren’t bad enough for him, war has left him thoroughly bewildered: “Why, this war was raging because people wanted to make haste, were shoddy, indifferent to detail, selfishly avid of some temporary laurel, unlike the anonymous craftsmen who had spent a lifetime on some obscure corner of a cathedral wall.” Horatio would have been happier living before the Industrial Age. “The artist abhors engines,” he observes to one of the few people who will still listen to him.

To the Warming Pan come an array of noncombatants. Colonel Ferguson, an expat returned after years in Switzerland, in hope of offering some service to some part of the government — with no clear notion of what, where, or how. Adelaide Spenser, a suburban wife in for a day of shopping, to whom the war is inevitable if undesirable: “If people make guns, it is human nature to want to use them.” Ruby, the waitress, worried each night that her family’s East End tenement will be destroyed by one of the German’s “century” (incendiary) bombs. The only soldier to appear in the whole book is Joe, a childhood friend of Eve, one of Selina and Angelina’s lodgers. Joe is also the only person who appears to thrive on the war — leading Eve to think, “It was a comment on civilization that it had taken a war to settle him into his right place.”

The Warming Pan is the culmination of a dream Selina has fostered through the decades she spent caring for an invalid, Mrs. Humphries. “Tearooms had had a special meaning for Selina. She associated them with freedom.” Freedom might seem an odd thing to associated with a tearoom, but in Selina’s mind, “Only those people who lived obedience for six and a half days of the week knew what liberty was.” The Warming Pan fulfils a need — serving as something like “a cross between a village shop and the family doctor.”

Selina has cultivated the art of the standard. “With the shortage of eggs and currants, all experiments had gone.” “Nowhere in all the district,” she reflects with pride, “had good standard things”: good farmhouse tea, nice crumpets and gingerbread, rock cakes and buns” — “the sort of food people wanted after a hard day or some hours of freedom too precious to waste on lunch.” Adrienne Monnier understood the value of these staples in wartime: “It is surely as a distributor of manna that Selina Tippett considers herself and fulfills her task. Complete manna, since tea with her is accompanied by perfect toast and excellent pastry,” Monnier wrote in an essay collected in Les Dernières Gazettes.

In offering these bedrocks of the English diet and a warm, hospitality place in which to enjoy them, she is not just running a business but improving morale. “For if clients came in to lunch and went off cheerfully afterwards, they, in turn, would affect their relatives and their maids.” “It was inspiring really,’ she thinks, “how much one solitary woman could do in defence of her native land.”

Her partner, Angelina Hawkins, is one of those tweed-cloaked Englishwomen whose energy could power a thousand homes. While Selina minds the shop and caters to its customers — never chatting too long or allowing too much familiarity, mind — Angelina is off doing battle with the war’s many attempts to interfere with and disrupt normality. “It added such richness to life, making so many contacts,” she thinks “hearing and learning so many things even if occasionally something went wrong.” It’s no surprise to learn, for example, that Angelina had roped Selina into taking classes in Esperanto before the war, or that Bryher characterizes her as “what the French called ‘an amateur of meetings.'”

A woman drinking tea atop rubble from the Blitz
A woman drinking tea atop rubble from the Blitz.

War’s inevitable disruption of norms and the earnest attempts by the English to defend them is the overarching theme of Beowulf. To Adelaide Spenser, war is “a queue and a yellow form with blank lines that had to be filled up with the stub of a broken pencil.” To Selina, it’s “an endless succession of rainy days in a small country place on a brief summer holiday.” There is something satisfying in how many characters find solace in the thought that they can always write a sharply worded letter to the Times.

And no one is as ardent a defender as Mr. Burlap, the veteran civil servant Colonel Ferguson visits in the vain hope of finding a position. Arriving at his office one morning to find his secretary’s desk has been requisitioned, Burlap’s reaction is a gem of stiff-upper-lip-ness: “I am worried, I have been worried, but am I to understand that … unauthorized persons have entered this room where I am engaged, oh, in a very humble and insignificant manner, in guiding the destinies of a war-racked country and have removed the tool with which you aid me in such labours?”

The Beowulf of the book’s title refers not to the monster of the Old English saga but a plaster bulldog that Angelina Hawkins brings in one day to serve as the Warming Pan’s mascot:

“In a salvage sale, opposite the Food Office. I can’t keep a dog, I know, in the raids, but it’s so cheerless without one. I was afraid at first that you might be tempted to call him Winnie, but then I thought, no, here is an emblem of the whole of us, so gentle, so determined….”

“And so stubborn,” Adelaide Spenser interjects. And despite the fact that Selina, Horatio, and almost everyone else in the shop finds Beowulf the bulldog ugly and in bad taste, he does, in the end, serve his symbolic purpose, perched atop a bomb crater outside the shop, a Union Jack tied around his neck.

If Beowulf has a documentary quality, it’s no coincidence. As Bryher wrote in The Days of Mars, it had a real-life equivalent:

Hilda had discovered the Warming Pan some years earlier and usually went there for lunch. Up to 1941, its owners, Selina and Angelina, supplied their clients with soup, meat, two veg and dessert for two shillings and ninepence. They were country people, they bought all the ingredients they could directly from farms and the cooking was plain but excellent. Such places are now extinct. I liked it because, as I said, I could go there without fear.

And it was the sight of a plaster bulldog that inspired Bryher to write the novel:

I saw a huge crater at the end of Basil Street. Somebody had fetched a large plaster bulldog, I assume from Harrods because they were then on sale there, and stuck it on guard beside the biggest pile of rubble. At that moment Beowulf, my war novel, was conceived.

Even the sad old painter Rashleigh came from her experience: “We had corresponded for years,” she wrote, “and as he earned his living painting miniatures on ivory of the Victory, what else could I call him but Horatio?”

At just 201 pages in the American edition with generous margins, widely-spaced lines and each chapter set out by separately-numbered pages, Beowulf is more novella than novel, but Bryher packs a lot into her carefully chosen words. Monnier considered it a “little classic” and one American reviewer called it a novel “in which all the excess baggage has been thrown out.” Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Orville Prescott wrote that Bryher “has succeeded so well in her modest project that Beowulf could serve as a loving memorial to the millions of Londoners who carried on, as one of Bryher’s characters said, ‘after all the nervous people must have left.'”

Cover of Schaffner Press edition of Beowulf by Bryher
Cover of Schaffner Press edition of Beowulf

Marianne Moore, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, compared Bryher’s tribute to the spirit of “Keep Calm and Carry On” to Colonel Ferguson’s small but honest attempt to come to the aid of his country:

Like the Colonel’s return, Bryher’s work is always an offer of services. Beowulf is not only a close-up of war but a documentary of insights, of national temperament, of primness and patriotism, sarcasm and compassion, of hospitality and heroism, a miniaturama of all the folk who stood firm.

It’s wonderful, therefore, that British readers will finally have a chance to enjoy Beowulf for themselves. In October 2020, Schaffner Press, a small U.S. independent publisher based in Arizona, will be releasing it for the first time to in the U.K.. It can be pre-ordered now from Hive, Blackwell’s, Foyle’s, and Waterstones, among other outlets, and U.S. readers can find links to a variety of sources on the Beowulf page on Schaffner’s website.

Beowulf, by Bryher
New York: Pantheon Books, 1956
Tucson, Arizona: Schaffner Press, 2020

O Western Wind (1943) and You’ve Gone Astray (1944), by Honor Croome

First editions of O Western Wind and You've Gone Astray by Honor Croome

Most writers will be forgotten. While there are plenty of examples where a writer’s work has been neglected through deliberate acts of suppression, there are far more where the neglect is due to the lack of any deliberate act of remembrance. Fortunately, when it comes to the work of British women writers of the 1920s to 1950s, there have never been so many people committing deliberate acts of remembrance on a daily basis. Beginning with the ground-breaking Virago Modern Classics series, publishers such as Persephone Books, Dean Street Press, Handheld Books, Turnpike Books, NYRB Classics, and the recently-launched British Library Women Writers are busy bringing the work of dozens of writers back to print. Dozens of book bloggers are helping promote and celebrate these reissues. Academics are collaborating through such initiatives as the Middlebrow Network and Transatlantic Literary Women. And through his Furrowed Middlebrow blog, Scott Thompson continues to reveal just how rich and vast the ranks of these women writers were.

Yet even with all these hands to the task, some remain overlooked. Take Honor Croome for example. She published five novels between 1943 and 1957, all of them received with enthusiastic reviews that praised her precise prose style and her sensitivity to the qualities of even her most unlikeable characters. Two — the ones discussed here — deal with the relatively popular subject of the experience of women during the Second World War. And yet not only have her books all fallen out of print but her name doesn’t even appear in what is likely the most comprehensive catalog of the writers, Scott Thompson’s Master List on Furrowed Middlebrow. It’s not through lack of trying. But when being lost and forgotten is the default end state for writers, there can never be enough deliberate acts of remembrance.

And so I want to take a few minutes to recognize Honor Croome’s work by looking at her first two novels: O Western Wind (1943) and You’ve Gone Astray (1944). O Western Wind focuses on the lives of four women and their children while You’ve Gone Astray deals with just two — yet it’s the latter which ultimately has a broader scope.

O Western Wind opens on a crowded passenger ship crossing the rough waters of the Irish Sea, on its way to take hundreds of British women and their children to safety in Canada. Most of them are in the Third class compartments: “One can get away from the smell of ship in the first class lounges and even, occasionaly, in Tourist; never in Third. There is oil in it, and brass, and sea salt, and, particularly in Third, disinfectant, and bad sailors find it conducive to seasickness.” Sitting in the Third class bar are two cousins, Margaret and Cora, happy to have their children settled for the night.

Margaret is older, longer married; Cora is younger, wed to an RAF bomber pilot, and stunningly attractive. “I wish I could feel like Cora looks, at the end of a day like this,” Margaret muses. In the lounge, they meet Mary Hallam, a nervous mother, with a two-year-old daughter and just months from delivering a second child. To these three women, Croome adds Daphne Torrance — divorced with two teenage sons and an eye for available men — and then takes us through their first year of life as evacuees.

The women are settled outside Boston with the help of a local refugee committee. The contrast with wartime England strikes them as soon as they leave the train station: “No sand-bags or strong-points anywhere. No road-blocks, no sentries. Not a man in uniform to be seen. Not a plane in the sky. No one carrying gas-masks. No steel helmets on the policemen. A carefree, lovely land. And tonight there would be lights again.”

Margaret and Cora and their children end up in a remote country house. The peace and quiet of their surroundings seem unworldly after life in crowded, busy, noisy London:

Margaret and Cora, like dwellers on another planet, went marketing and swept and scrubbed and cooked, tended their children, drank their tea, and sat by the fire, evening after lonely evening. They had the children; they had housework. There — as mothers and drudges — they stopped short. It was a great deal, but a great deal was missing. Friendship meant an envelope with a printed slip “Opened by Examiner 3697” gummed over one end.

“Whole tracts of faculties lay idle,” Croome writes, and in both novels she examines the uneven and often unbalanced mix of domestic, economic, and intellectual demands that women who take on the responsibilities of child-rearing have to meet. Margaret thinks, only half-jokingly, “We should have been Victorian wives…. Then we should have found this a lovely, lovely rest.” Except, as she quickly adds, that probably would have meant she would have had eight children to care for and Cora four.

Eventually, the Greater Boston Hospitality Committee brings the four women and their kids together to live at Southwood, a large mansion left empty after the death of its dowager owner. In some ways, it comes to seem even more artificial than the isolation of their farmhouse in the country. Everything around them speaks of wealth, luxury, comfort — but it’s all given by the grace of the Hospitality Committee. “It seemed as though several new layers of unreality had interposed themselves between them and the great tragedy from which they had cut themselves off; and in their varying ways they fretted against their physical good fortune.”

I was often remind of Paul Cohen-Portheim’s Time Stood Still, his account of four years spent as an internee in a British camp during the First World War. Like him, these women are not abused in any physical way; and yet, the very artificiality and limitations of their situation become, in the end, a sort of torture. And like Cohen-Portheim, Croome’s women find that “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence.” Margaret thinks at one point:

For the duration, Clive Torrance would infest the dinner table. For the duration, they would have to check their conversation to keep it within Mary Hallis’s scope. For the duration, they would chit-chat with Mrs. Torrance about nothing in particular. Margaret found herself wanting, frantically, to hear the sound of a masculine voice, preferably several of them. I’m not turning into a man-hunter, I’m resigned to celibacy, but I am tired of being a full-time hen….

It is only after several crises that Margaret, whose voice seems to speak Croome’s own thoughts most often, finds a way to look beyond the walls of their comfortable but indefinite existence. “There would be moments of black depression,” she thinks, but she can at least “distinguish between the superficial and the real, now.”

O Western Wind draws in part on Honor Croome’s own experiences. She left Liverpool bound for Canada in July 1940 with two children (and, like Mary Hallam, within weeks of delivering another). Although the family would eventually settle in Ottawa after John Croome was appointed head of the British Food Mission to Canada, Honor and the children spent over a year living as refugees in Westwood, Massachusetts outside Boston. While there, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe taking exception to another British refugee’s suggestion that Americans were not showing sufficient gratitude for Britain’s sacrifices: “You owe us much, we owe you much,” she wrote. “Among other things each owes the other for their share in our joint victory over Hohenzollern Germany. Of what those shares were, let our dead as well as our dollars speak.”

When the Croomes returned to England in 1946, they needed a much bigger cabin. They were now a family of seven, bringing along three sons born in Canada. In other words, Honor Croome managed to produce two novels and three children during her own indefinite existence in the US and Canada. Her capacity for work seems astonishing. Both before and after the war she was a frequent reviewer for The Economist, and one of her editors, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, once said of her speed in reading, “A thousand pages in her sight are but an evening gone.” The same may have been true for her speed in writing. She must have been one of those rare writers who can work in short snatches, for she dedicated her second novel to “John, Ursula, Gilbert and David, because they occasionally kept quiet.”

Yet in neither book does Croome suggest that the solution to a woman’s challenges in juggling both family and a career is simply to work harder. You’ve Gone Astray (1944), in fact, is a demonstration that this is a recipe for failure. In some ways, the book is a prequel to O Western Wind: taking place between the early 1930s and the first year or so of the war, it follows two women — Linda and Kitty — from a short spell of sharing a flat in London through marriage, children, and successes and failures at work.

You’ve Gone Astray is far more about Linda than Kitty. Kitty — slight, beautiful, flirtatious and starting out as a writer of romance novels — is more of a leitmotif than major character. Though we enter the story through Kitty’s eyes, it’s Linda — tall, Amazon-like, with a fearsome intellect (if less formidable practical knowledge) — with whom we spend most of our time.

The daughter and niece of vigorous Edwardian activists, Linda feels somewhat guilty for taking a job with a reform-minded organization called the Housing Plan rather than heading off to India to run a hospital as her aunt did or crusading for women’s right as her mother did. Her work brings her in contact with Hugh, a journalist with a strong interest in social reform, and soon the two are married — and Linda is pregnant.

As she tries to raise her daughter while continuing to work for the Housing Plan, she realizes she’s missing out. On burning the midnight oil with colleagues, on a pint after work, on the Budapest Conference. She struggles with the cognitive dissonance of being both mother and manager: “She had to turn dislocating psychological somersaults, morning and evening, Saturday and Monday, switching from the role of expert and organizer to that of suburban housewife and back again.” And the simply physical toll: “She was almost always tired.”

Kitty encounters the same issues when she becomes pregnant several years later than Linda. She expresses a feeling my wife often recounted during her pregnancies: “It’s so inevitable. As though something had you by the scruff of the neck and were whispering in your ear, ‘You can’t get out of this. You can’t get away. You can’t talk your way out, no one can help you out, it’ll happen, I’m not sorry for you, my name is Nature.'” Unlike Linda, however, Kitty can afford to park her son with a kindly couple in the country while she types and socializes away and her husband — present in the book for little more than the essential biological moment — is off on archaeological expeditions.

Croome captures the blur of considerations and commitments that must swirl through the head of any working mother:

… waking with an eye on that clock, working, still with an eye on that clock, frantically, among perversely uncooperative kitchen utensils and crockery, listening desperately for Mrs. Pratt’s click at the gate, picturing the London train remorselessly pulling out of the station a mile away; crawling home in a rush-hour train, supper menus and unfinished business dancing an unholy saraband in her brain; listening to Mrs. Pratt’s chronicle of leaking taps, spoiled potatoes, mistakes in the grocery bill, and misdeeds by Diana (more a problem child than ever these days); flinging off her town clothes, flinging on an apron, plunging through the preparation for supper, with scarcely time to give Diana a good-night kiss; spending her evenings on endless letters to agencies and to the malevolent half-wits or mere phantoms whom those agencies recommended.

In a sentiment many women might share, she adds, “Linda yearned for a good servant as a prisoner for freedom, as a miser for money, as a sick man for health.”

The strain of it all takes its toll in numerous ways, leading to arguments, separation, even death. There are some grim chapters in this book. And though Linda and Hugh find some happiness on the other side — and Kitty finds an escape from her worries — Croome doesn’t offer us happy endings, just sustainable compromises. She was nothing if not a realist.

Croome’s own background bore some resemblance with Linda’s. Her mother, Mildred Minturn, was an American socialite who graduated from Bryn Mawr, where she became a close friend of Frances Fincke, later wife of the famed judge Learned Hand. In fact, Fincke turned down Hand’s first proposal to marry because she and Mildred had planned to live together and pursue careers as scholars and social reformers. Bertrand Russell met Mildred while she was at Bryn Mawr and the two maintained a flirtatious relationship even after she married Arthur Hugh Scott, an Englishman, in 1906.

Mildred took graduate classes at Barnard and traveled widely after leaving Bryn Mawr, visiting Japan and Europe and taking a desert caravan in Egypt with a fellow classmate. She was outspoken in her views, writing frequent letters to magazines in England and the U.S., and translated French Socialist Jean Jaures’s Studies in Socialism shortly before her wedding to Scott. She struggled, however, with health problems and died in 1922, when Honor was just a teenager.

Honor had a most cosmopolitan upbringing. She spent her early years in France, where her father taught at l’École de l’ Île-de-France, a French boarding school run on the model of an English public school. She attended a girl’s school in Switzerland (an experience she used as the basis for her 1955 novel, The Mountain and the Molehill), the Hayes Court School in Kent, Bryn Mawr College in the US (for a year — “I did not flunk out,” she was careful to note), then the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally the London School of Economics.

After the LSE, she wrote her first book, The Approach to Economics, then landed a job at the New Fabian Research Bureau, a left-leaning organization involved in statistics and planning — most probably the inspiration for the Housing Plan in You’ve Gone Astray. Soon after, she married John Lewis Croome, who’d been a year ahead of her at the LSE.

Honor Croome, 1944
Honor Croome, from a 1944 newspaper article

In 1935, as she informed the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, she took a job as political secretary to Lady Astor. She wrote that “It’s tremendous fun” but also tiring: “I am rapidly going grey and can hear imaginary typewriters and telephones in my dreams.” A year later, she wrote that she left the post “owing to (a) nervous exhaustion and (b) incompetence” and “returned to the fleshpots and to society of son [John] and heir aged 2½.” “Very nice, too,” she added. She gave birth to a daughter, Ursula, in 1936 and wrote her classmates that she was busy with a family “to cook for, a job to hold down, and book to see through the press.” The book she referred to was her weightiest economic text, The Economy of Britain: A History, published in 1938, which she co-wrote with R. J. Hammond.

After nearly six years in the US and Canada, Croomes returned to their home in Claygate outside London in 1946 and Honor resumed her work as an economist and journalist while continuing to write and raise her children. She published her third novel, The Faithless Mirror in 1946 and began publishing articles for the general public in magazines such as Home & Garden. Included in Who’s Who’s starting in 1950, she answered the book’s pro-forma questionnaire by listing her primary form of recreation as “domesticity.” She published two more novels in the 1950s: The Mountain and the Molehill and The Forgotten Place (1957). She also published a further economics text, Introduction to Money in 1956.

When she died in 1960, The Economist made an exception of its practice of being “anonymous by conviction as well as by tradition” and printed a black-boxed notice of her passing. “To those who knew her,” the editors wrote, “every piece she wrote could only be hers; to those who did not, her reviews were no less identifiable, running like a strong shining thread through these pages. The style was the woman.”

They paid tribute to the high quality of her prose: “The cutting-edge and quality of what she wrote was that she knew, respected and was mistress of the English language. It was almost impossible to alter or cut her contributions.” As a reviewer, she was “lively and learned in the right sense of both words; sensitive but never soft; humane and good-humoured but never sentimental or trivial; critical, sometimes in a biting and indignant fashion, but never censorious; a civilised human being with a zest for life and people as well as understanding of great ideas and arguments.”

“It is hard to believe that there can ever be another like her,” The Economist piece concluded. “This is understatement,” responded Sir Geoffrey Crowther in the next issue. “Such beauty, such wite, such capacity to understand other people’s minds, sometimes even better than they do themselves, such capacity to move with grace in so many different fields from housewifery and writing about it to the most abstruse theoretical economics — all these in combination made her unique.”

Perhaps this post will now motivate other readers to discover Honor Croome’s unique qualities as a novelist.

O Western Wind
London: Christophers, 1943

You’ve Gone Astray
London: Christophers, 1944

Both by Honor Croome

The Beautiful Life, by Edwin Gilbert (1966)

Cover of The Beautiful Life by Edwin Gilbert

The sweet spot for my individual strain of nostalgia is right around 1965. That was about the time I began to get an allowance and to be free to wander around on my own — which, taken together, meant I could go to Saturday matinees, buy comic books, baseball card, and model airplanes, and eat at the snack bar. In other words, begin to exist as a semi-autonomous consumer of then-contemporary culture. I knew, of course, that I was on the outside of the real world — the adult world — but at least now I could press my face up against the glass.

There were many things about the adult world I didn’t understand, but there were a few things that I knew for sure belonged to adulthood. Driving and cars, of course. Smoking and drinking. Hairdos for women and suits and ties for men. Cocktail parties and dancing. These were all things I saw my parents doing, wearing, going to, talking about — but the guides to the adult world I trusted most were magazines like Life, Time, and (when I could sneak a peak at it) my dad’s Playboys.

Debutante at the Embers
From LIFE magazine, 1965: Debutante Anne Morris on a date at The Embers in Manhattan.

The adult world I saw in the ads and photo spreads in these magazines is the world of Edwin Gilbert’s The Beautiful Life (1966). Everything that constituted “the beautiful life” — the life led by the best people, the in-est of all the In Crowds — as represented in the magazines can be found here. Slim, straight-line, minimalist dresses; Twiggy-style short hairdos; glamorous women in evening gowns on the arms of rich, handsome men in tuxedos; discotheques and designer living rooms; pop art and dinners at the Four Seasons.

As a work of fiction, it’s moderately above average. Gilbert made his living writing well-constructed but somewhat superficial novels that offered readers glimpses into worlds they probably didn’t have access to: the late-stage 400 (Silver Spoon, 1957); silver salver diplomacy (The New Ambassadors, 1961); Detroit auto executives (American Chrome, 1965); old money (Newport, 1971). He was a craftsman whose sales and reputation depended more on consistency than genius.

This shows most in Gilbert’s choice of protagonists. Bayard Burton “Grove” Grovenour is a 30-something heir with old money and new ideals. He and his daisy-fresh wife Rosemary return from the Siberia of suburban Connecticut to dive into the deep end of Manhattan life, taking a penthouse apartment at 1027 Fifth Avenue as their modest pied-a-terre. Grove wants to save New York from godless modernistic architecture and city planning. Rosemary just wants to belong. Grove fails spectacularly; Rosemary manages to reach the epicenter of In-ism, becoming the icon everyone wants at their party or on their magazine spreads. But none of that much matters: they are merely the jetsam Gilbert tosses in to lure the sharks, remoras, and other prey and parasites of High Society.

It’s not the story that matters here, anyway. The best way to enjoy The Beautiful Life is as a time-capsule. It’s like a trip back to the poshest parts of Manhattan when to be rich, young, and white in Manhattan was to be at the apex of the food chain.

But that’s not what makes the book interesting. Grove, Rosemary, and all their rich friends are, after all, pretty dull stuff. It’s the ecosystem that serves, entertains, dresses, drives, houses, feeds, doctors, and otherwise supports them Gilbert meticulously documents that raises The Beautiful Life above its mid-60s airplane reading peers.

Gilbert structures his book as a series of set-pieces, each taking place at a specific address, each hosted by a particular enabler, starting with Andrew, the doorman of 1027 Fifth Avenue. Andrew “knows his air of solicitude is both pleasing and proper to their rank (or what they might wish their rank to be)” and maintains careful control of the hierarchy of the building’s tenants through the nuances of his service. Mrs. Alfreda Peysen, 44-year resident and minked-and-bejeweled heiress, gets “his warmest (seniority) greeting.” Young Mr. Grovenour, newly-arrived and prone to poking around at the base of the trees along the sidewalk, on the other hand, gets just enough politeness to cover up Andrew’s contempt.

Next, we meet Katherine Reeves, the stiff-coifed, tight-lipped real estate agent who shows the Grovenours their prospective apartment. Their judgment of the place, of course, is far less important than her approval of them. She finds “simple satisfaction from passing judgment on the lowly and on the highly who come within the precinct of her verdicts.” As a result, Gilbert tells us, she is “one of the happiest of human beings.”

Smirnoff ad from Life magazine
Smirnoff ad from LIFE magazine, 1965, with Killer Joe Piro and Skitch Henderson.

Gilbert’s tour of High Society’s courtiers and household staff continues with a visit to Big D’s, the Park Avenue discotheque where DJ Ray Noonan (a surrogate, perhaps, for Killer Joe Piro) takes control over a crowd of the idle and powerful each night:

Watch him now: a record is playing on the first turntable; a second record is already silently spinning on the second turntable; a third is in place. As the first disc nears its rockrolling end, Roy deftly drops the arm onto the second platter so that one overlaps the other and he reaches to the control panel and juices up the volume so that the changeover is made with kinetic brilliance; and then he dials it down again and prepares the record to go next on turntable number three.

But this is not the artistry for which he is paid. Roy’s gift lies in his ability to pace the dancers, and to anticipate their moods:
Is the Frug blasting too long?
Is the age group changing?
Is fatigue or boredom seeping in?
Has he caught the signal from the bar that business needs to be escalated?

Roy, an ex-GI from Oklahoma who quietly seeds his fat tips into a house for his family in Queens, has classified all the fauna that congregate on his dance floor: “the old Crust and the young Crust, the Cafe Mafia, the Jets, the Pop people, and a few, a very few Just Plain Money.”

Gilbert’s tour continues with a lunch visit to Le Trianon, overseen by Claude Troube, who enforces the restaurant’s code with a velvet-gloved iron hand:

His attention is also sensitive to the welfare of the diners, particularly to those who are new to his tables, those who might violate any of a number of decrees: pipes and cigars are interdit; cigarettes are permitted but not between courses. It is also to be understood that since too many martinis before dining anesthetizes the senses, the waiter will not serve more than one, possibly two, cocktails; but not a soupçon more. As for the so-called health diets of some Americans who fuss about the use of butter, cream or salt — such idiocies will not be tolerated here.

In the course of the book, we meet Chet Darnell, the fresh-faced juvenile of 46 who tickles the ivories for the private parties of the most exclusive clientele; Lorio, maître d’ “haute coiffure who turns each customer “from a flat-heeled, over-scrubbed, dull-suited, tight-curled nonentity into a chicly shod, clad and coiffed creature of infinite allurement’; Martine, who dresses them at her by-name only boutique, and Dolores the masseuse, catering to the oft-divorced and accustomed to “working on the same body while the name keeps changing.”

Arthur's discotheque from LIFE magazine 1966
From LIFE magazine 1966: “At Arthur, in New York, the country’s most famous discotheque, the patrons lend a bizarre air to the club, arrayed before a Mondianesque background in their Op art mad rags. In foreground is director, Sybil Burton Christopher.”

We hang out in the chauffeur’s room in the garage of 1027 Fifth Avenue and in the apartment of Hank Hartley, art dealer to the elite, who helps them cover their walls “with paintings of monumental cheeseburgers, colossal Coke bottles, cans of baked beans, soaring syringes, F.B.I, posters, ceiling-high photos of Clara Bow’s face and Elizabeth Taylor’s mouth, and many other fine artworks of this genre.” We visit the atelier of Waldo Stryker — Andy Warhol stand-in — who produces these paintings to fund the art films he forces his patrons to endure:

There followed a shadowy view of an amorphous room which contained a bed on which lay a long-haired, pock-faced girl in white leotards; she was reading a book and she would wriggle around sporadically, and then putting the book aside would stare languidly to her left. The camera would hold on her for what seemed an interminable time as she stretched her body and began undulating in a clumsy and prolonged exhibition of sexual frustration or, if you chose, desperate longing for human recognition and affection. Alternating with these views, the camera would swing leftward to show nearby a brutish young man of outsized shoulders and biceps, attired in the glossy black deep-sea diving gear of a frogman, as he kept checking his twin-tubed oxygen tanks and his elongated spear gun, working away with total masculine preoccupation.

In silence the film’s monochromatic images continued their alternating rhythms with absolutely no variety and with no regard for time until the final shot, which was sustained for nine minutes as the camera held on the girl’s blemished face, the only relief coming when a fly, which touched down on her cheek, caused her to twitch the insect away.

As we swirl along through the haunts of the hoi-polloi, we watch as earnest Grove is discreetly shuffled off to the fringe as an idealistic nut-case and Rosemary becomes a star entrant in the popularity contest, “in full combustion as she hastened her pace, projecting her personality, driving fiercely to hold onto her rating in the popularity poll, the trophy that confirmed her position as one of the prize tigers running in the annual New York In-ism Sweepstakes.” The lesson, I suppose, is that success is hollow, but Gilbert makes Grove’s righteous failure look pretty hollow, too. The only characters who truly seem happen in this book are all the extras who open the doors, spin the records, tinkle the ivories, drive the cars, and otherwise make sure that the Good Life, if not really all that good, is at least comfortable. They seem to have the wisdom to stay on the sidelines of the Rat Race and carefully manage the bits of cheese they collect.

You can have your Jane Austens, or go back to the Regency days courtesy of Georgette Heyer, or the tea-cosy days courtesy of E. M Delafield. When I’m suffering from a serious spell of nostalgia, keep that land spreadin’ out so far and wide — just give me Manhattan in ’65.

The Beautiful Life, by Edwin Gilbert
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966

The Laughing Cavalier, by Allan Turpin (1969)

Cover of first UK edition of The Laughing Cavalier by Allan Turpin

How does a book or writer get forgotten? There are a few instances where it’s a matter of deliberate suppression: who in Nazi Germany read the work of Stefan Zweig or Thomas Mann after their books were burned? There are cases where it’s a matter of institutional prejudice, such as the tendency of university English departments to ignore the work of women writers and people of color. Cultural disinclination is a big factor: until magic realism burst upon the scene with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Latin American literature was considered as obscure specialty subject in the U.S. “Canadian novelist” is a label still dismissed by many American and U.K. readers; and “French Canadian novelist” is almost the kiss of death, as the example of Marie-Claire Blais illustrates. Product distribution channels disable as much as they enable access to writers’ work: where U.K. books routinely leap over to U.S. bookshelves, one in ten of the same number of Australian titles make the trip across the Pacific.

But the most common and by far most effective way things get forgotten is inertia. Forgetting is the human condition. Dementia is only noticeable because it’s such an aggressive form of forgetting. Remembering takes effort, and if no one makes the effort, the inevitable result is that people and what they accomplished in their lives are forgotten.

Take Allan Turpin as an example. He published ten novels in his lifetime, most of them in the space of a little more than dozen years between 1964 and 1977. All received favorable but not glowing reviews: praise for his light, sophisticated comedy, mild caution over his old-fashioned style. None of them were ever reissued. When he died in 1979, there was no notice in any of the major papers. He died without heirs and left his entire estate to the Royal Literary Fund.

If Turpin is remembered at all today, it has nothing to do with his writing. In 1925, he and a young woman named Molly Ackland convinced themselves they were in love and decided to get married. He was 22, she was 19. He had little experience of romantic love and neither had experience of heterosexual love. The marriage was misguided from the start and was ultimately annulled. Molly Turpin began wearing male clothing, transformed herself into Valentine Ackland, became a poet and met and became the lifelong companion of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. Richard Turpin — born Allan Richard Turpin, he was known to his friends as Richard — exited stage left and disappears from Ackland’s story.

Part of the problem with the marriage, as Ackland later wrote in her memoir For Sylvia, was Turpin’s confusion over his own sexuality: “Richard was without any experience of women, and he was suffering from remorse and fear because of certain homosexual relationships he had enjoyed recently. ‘Enjoyed’ is the important word. He was now horrified to remember that he had been happy.” Her suspicions may have been well-founded. After the annulment, Turpin remained single for the rest of his life and census electoral records show him sharing an address with another man or a married couple.

Turpin shared some of Ackland’s desire to write, though it manifested in a very different way. Where she wrote confessional poetry, he converted his own experiences into a diffident sort of comic fiction. His first novel Doggett’s Tours, published as Richard Turpin in 1932, drew from the several years he spent as a tour guide on the Continent. His first love was for the theatre, but he had little success there. A comedy titled “The Fare Includes Romance” was produced in 1933 and closed after a week. His adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw was forgotten just as quickly in 1946.

James remained, however, a dominant influence on his writing. On the strength of The Laughing Cavalier, I would describe Turpin’s work as Evelyn Waugh channelled through Henry James: his pages are peopled by ridiculous people, his paragraphs riddled with sentences of near-Jamesian convolution:

No particle of her was excited by George, fair-haired, as pink-cheeked as a girl, naïve, awkward, diffident; with the wrong ties, slovenly speed, and an unappetizing background; given, once his diffidence had worn off, to a great deal of rather foolish laughter and talk about nothing; generous, but feckless, and apparently without ambition ever to be anything more than a clerk on 30/- a week; a young man who, although the least knowable of young men since he never knew himself, seemed on first acquaintance rather boringly knowable and predictable; an absurd young man who, nevertheless, like all men, took his feelings seriously and could be alarmingly melodramatic and sentimental — than which nothing is less attractive when you don’t want it.

If Turpin’s style owed something to James, his attitude could be attributed to Waugh (or perhaps, going back a generation, as Turpin often seemed wont to do, Wilde). “I think that animals are fortunate in that their relationship with their parents is healthily short,” Turpin’s narrator announces at the start of The Laughing Cavalier. “Rather than see children exposed to the enormous risk of being brought up by their own parents,” he argues, “I would prefer state rearing. A visit to hospital must convince anyone of the extraordinary amount of disinterested humanity that exists where there is a need for it.”

The Laughing Cavalier was one of what Turpin at some point intended to be an eight-novel sequence called Memoirs of a Naïve Young Man. The naïve young man, Geoffrey Gillard, clearly becomes a fictional stand-in for Turpin himself once one discovers the coincidences between Gillard and Turpin’s life.

Allan Richard Turpin was born in 1903 to Frank Turpin and Clara Turpin (née Gillard). At the time, Frank Turpin’s profession was listed as “stamp dealer” — the same profession as George Gillard, the narrator’s father and the subject of the book. An earlier volume in the Memoirs series, Innocent Employments, describes the rise of this stamp business. As in the book, Richard Turpin joined his father in the business after a few unsatisfactory years as a tour guide. A passenger list from a trip he made to the U.S. in 1927 identifies Turpin as a “philatelist.” In 1930, Turpin and his older brother took over F. B. Turpin when their father retired.

Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals
Laughing Cavalier, a portrait by Frans Hals (1624)

Turpin/Gillard takes his title from Frans Hals’ famous 1624 portrait Laughing Cavalier. Remembering his father as seen through his son’s fourteen-year-old eyes, Turpin describes “a man who, although his thick auburn hair and pointed imperial were quite impressive, was, beneath them, unexpectedly short and rather self-indulgently plump; a man who, because of this beard, his rich red complexion, and light blue, constantly smiling, not very penetrating eyes, rather resembled, everyone said, Hals’s Laughing Cavalier, of which we had a colour print in the hall; a man than whom, in fact, no one could be more amiable and less terrifying.”

George Gillard disappoints his son by his obstinate insistence on being himself. It’s not the obstinacy that irritates: it’s his father’s blithe disregard for how relentlessly mundane his taste, talk, habits, thoughts, opinions — even his gestures are. Though a tremendous success in his stamp business, he is utterly lacking in ambition. Though he can afford to go to the theatre regularly, he enjoys the most formulaic romance every bit as much as something by Shaw. And yet, to his son’s annoyance, he is also “the most universally liked man I have ever met.”

If you pick up The Laughing Cavalier hoping for a Waugh-like dissection of the older generation, however, you’ll be disappointed. Writing reflectively at 66, Turpin finds it harder to maintain the uncompromising standards of a twenty-something. “If I did not admire my father, I, as I have already suggested, loved him much more than I knew,” he writes about halfway through the book.

George Gillard’s greatest failure in his son’s eyes is his failure to adequately mourn the death of his wife. Although her son acknowledges that his mother, who was often ill through his childhood, often left his father in the position of having to attend social engagements solo, he is shocked when — just six months after her death — he begins to court another woman. “If he had not murdered my mother, he had, in my youthful eyes, committed a crime that was almost the equivalent of murder”: “he had not regretted her death.”

Choosing to close up and sell off the house his sons had grown up in, George falls from an exotic-looking younger woman he meets when viewing a prospective new flat with his son. Turpin’s description of their accidental encounter contains one of the many gems of observation that are studded throughout the dense weave of his prose: “We moved across the sitting-room and, at the door, confronted the ladies, who were just about to wander in. There was the usual exchange of ‘sorries’ by which the English cover their acute embarrassment when proximity forces them to recognize the existence of strangers.”

Fifty-seven to the woman’s thirty-five, ready to retire from a successful but not wealthy business, George fails to see the limitations of his attraction, much to his son’s further exasperation. To everyone’s great relief, when the woman does let him down, she does so with enough grace as to merely deflate, rather than shatter, his ego, and a much more suitable mate is soon found. Turpin lacks the cold-bloodedness to leave any of his characters in shreds.

And this may offer a clue to why Allan Turpin’s work has become forgotten. It was just this quality that appealed to Turpin’s original reviewers. Claire Tomalin wrote that, “With fewer ponderous generalisations and more laughter this would have been an even better book: as it is, it deserves a place in the rich chronicles of the English petty bourgeoisie of our century.” Robert Baldick, in The Daily Telegraph, observed that “If Mr. Turpin cultivates a small plot of literary earth, he tends it with exquisite skill, and the results are never disappointing…. Few authors have written so perceptively about the father-son relationship: it is high time Mr. Turpin’s quiet talent was more widely recognized.” Instead, Turpin’s quiet talent was forgotten soon after his last book was published. This is good but unshowy work. The lack of cold-bloodedness is considered a virtue in a female middlebrow novelist: gentle-hearted satire has long legs in this era of Persephone Books and the Dorothy Whipple revival. In a male middlebrow novelist, however, gentle satire is reason enough to let his work slowly moulder into earth.

I’ll admit that when I first started reading The Laughing Cavalier, I was put off by the Jamesian-ness of Allan Turpin’s prose. But at a certain point, probably no more than a chapter in, I found myself relaxing, giving in to the leisurely pace, appreciating the subtlety of observation and the lightness of the comic touches. And once you adapt to Turpin’s Edwardian speed, the journey becomes much easier to enjoy.

The Laughing Cavalier, by Allan Turpin
London: Michael Joseph, 1969

We Can’t Breathe and Many Thousand Gone, by Ronald Fair (1972, 1965)

Cover of We Can't Breathe, by Ronald Fair

It’s a little surprising, given how George Floyd’s dying words “I can’t breathe” have been heard around the world and ignited such widespread protests against institutional racism and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, that no one has noted their echo in the title of Ronald Fair’s novel We Can’t Breathe. A largely autobiographical novel of growing up as a black child in Chicago during the Second World War and after, Fair called it “the work of my lifetime, the book I’ve been trying to write for 10 years.”

Its central theme is that of finding a way to achieve some success as a black man in a white man’s world while maintaining some remnant of self-respect. All the ingredients of ghetto life are here: poverty, prejudice, drugs, numbers runners, petty crimes, gospel churches and corner gangs, rotten landlords and decent hard-working people being ground down by the daily friction of life. Fair’s fictional self, Ernie, narrates the story retrospectively, speaking as one who has managed to escape the worst effects of this childhood.

Ernie and four of his friends form a band after they are tormented and mocked by a group of older boys. “The five of us were brothers now, and we had to fight the others for fear that they would rob us of what little manhood we had. We had to fight the others, otherwise we would have lived in such fear of them that we would not have been able to breathe.” As they grow, they confront the threats of their world: gangs and dope dealers; the ferocious, relentless rats that infest their basements and alleys; and the prejudice of most of the white people they come in contact with. At times, they find themselves in situations where the only options are fight or flight, others where it’s a choice between surrendering — or bullshitting one’s way out.

One of the boys, Willie, takes the latter approach when caught shoplifting in a white store. “Catch the nigger before he gets away!” one of the clerks screams. he coolly walks up to her, sticks a finger in her face, and asks, “Bitch, just who the hell you think you callin a nigger?” When the manager responds by slamming him against a counter shouting, “But you were stealing, boy, and you know that’s wrong,” Willie shifts gears and adopts the stereotype of the chasten, contrite Uncle Tom:

I sho do, suh, but I had to do it to get some money for my baby sister,” he lied. “We ain’t got no food at home. Honest. We ain’t even got no bread. You know what it’s like, mister, you know, to be hungry — I mean to be real hungry? My mama left home las week and ain’t nobody there to take care of the baby cep me and I had to do somethin cause we so hungry. I didn’t know what to do, mister, I swear I didn’t. I thought if I stole somethin I could maybe, you know, sell it and get some money for food. Know what I mean? Ain’t gonna call no police, are you? Please don’t, mister, please. Please. I’m sorry.

Willie proceeds to lay out a woeful tale designed to induce maximum sympathy and swears to come work sweeping out the store’s basement — knowing full well that the white manager wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into the store the very next day.

Ernie is a little luckier than his friends. Though he’s exposed to the same environmental and institutional obstacles, his mother and father stay together, they eat together each night, and no matter how dismal their apartment, he has his own bed to sleep in each night. His father encounters humiliating discrimination in trying to work in a defense plant and becomes for a time an angry and abusive drunk, but he finds a way out and Ernie has more of a sense of home and family than Willie and the others.

He also has the luck to encounter a friendly, and for the time, exceptionally enlightened English teacher in junior high school. She sees some promise in his awkward attempts at writing and gives him a book to take home and read. “I thought reading was a drag,” he recalls.

I had spent years reading about white children on farms, white men at their work, white mothers at their household chores, white animals with black spots, white families going on picnics, white grandparents coming from the country to visit their children and grandchildren, white soldiers, white generals, white sailors, white naval captains, white admirals, white explorers, white heroes, white traitors, white pilots—white-white-white-white-white everybodies with white everything they did being about as interesting to me as all of the white teachers I had had who really did not give a damn if I ever learned to read or spell or write or think.

The book Mrs. Taylor gives Ernie is a biography of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the black general who led the Haitian revolution against the Spanish and the French. After resisting it for weeks, Ernie picks it up while staying home sick and is thunderstruck. “A Negro general,” he tells his mother. “Wow, Mom, I never knew there was a Negro general did anything anywhere. A Negro! Wow, Mom, I gotta read this whole book.”

With Mrs. Taylor’s encouragement, Ernie begins to write stories set in the world he’s grown up in. When she returns his first piece, however, he is surprised at her corrections. “I was shocked to see how many times she had drawn a line through the word ‘mothafucka.'” Thinking back on the experience, he reflects,

I realize that it was a story about a mothafuckin bunch of fuckin drunks in a rotten fuckin mothafuckin town with a mess of mothafuckin other mothafuckas, fuckin around and fuckin up their lives and every other mothafuckin person in the mothafuckin neighborhood who was unfortunate enough to live in the mothafuckin city with all the fucked-up mothafuckin white people fuckin over the black mothafuckas all the fuckin time. The story ended with the only way to get out of the mothafuckin trouble in the mothafuckin world was to end up as a mothafuckin dead man, six mothafuckin feet under the mothafuckin ground.

“Is this really the way they talk?” she asks him. When he replies, “Yes, ma’am,” she responds — and here I suspect we are dealing with fiction rather than autobiography — “If that’s the way some of the people you know really talk, then I suppose I had no right to change their language.”

Ronald Fair, 1975
Ronald Fair on the cover of his 1975 chapbook, Excerpts

Perhaps this did occur. Perhaps Fair did have such an open-minded, sympathetic teacher at some point. But this anecdote illustrates why We Can’t Breathe, although undoubtedly a highly accurate picture of black life in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, fails to satisfy as a work of fiction. Ernie emerges as a young man largely unscathed. He is the survivor, but his survival seems to owe much to — well, either luck or predestination. “I had been granted immunity by the gods or by God or by the natural order of things,” he writes, “because I had been given a vision of survival without dehumanization. I would survive in spite of what happened to everyone around me.” It is hard to empathize with a character who comes off as a bit of a Teflon man. And to be honest, throughout the book, Fair’s anger is often muted by a certain amount of nostalgia for his good old days, no matter how unlikely he’d really want to turn back the clock.

George Davis, reviewing We Can’t Breathe in the New York Times, saw it as weaker overall than Fair’s first novel, Many Thousand Gone, which had been published seven years earlier and which Davis called “One of the most beautifully written books of the last decade.” Readers who turn to Many Thousand Gone for beautiful writing, however, are in for a shock. Fair subtitled the book A American Fable, but it bears little resemblance to anything Aesop ever wrote — unless there’s a version of “The Tortoise and the Hare” floating around somewhere that ends with the tortoise eating the hare.

The premise of Many Thousand Gone is simple and gut-wrenching: in a little quadrant in the middle of Mississippi called Jacobs County, wholly owned and run by the Jacobs family, slavery has never ended. Tiny, unimportant, in the midst of a state resentful of its status after the war, and surrounded by sympathetic counties, Jacobs County has managed to keep history from moving past 1864. Few outsiders — and definitely no black ones — are allowed in. The only way out for the slaves is escape. Letters in and out are censored. Black men who show any sign of resistance are beaten to death and buried. All black women are considered fair game for any white man to take in the bushes and rape.

Although Samuel Jacobs, the founder of Jacobs County, had originally strived to keep his slaves of pure black blood, over the decades the policy of his descendants towards rape has meant that there are fewer and fewer pure black babies. When the last of these is born, Granny Jacobs — like most of the black residents, she carries the name of the county’s founder — dubs him “the Black Prince” and vows to arrange his escape. When he is still a teenager, she carries out an elaborate plan by which she smuggles him to a friendly black family in a nearby county while convincing the sheriff of Jacobs County that the young man has died. The family takes him to Chicago, where he becomes a writer. The episode cannot help but bring to mind the story of King Herod and the infant Jesus.

The catalyst that sets off the chain reaction that destroys the century-long status quo in Jacobs County is when the Black Prince publishes a book about the town. He sends his grandmother a copy of Ebony with an article about it. The censor in the Jacobsville post office passes it to the sheriff, who recognizes immediately the danger in allowing the slaves in his county — all but one, the preacher, kept illiterate — see photos of black people living better than most of the whites they knew. “I can tell you one thing,” he says. “You ain’t gonna see none of them pictures as long as I’m alive.”

But word gets out and soon the slaves are curious. “They wanted to know more about the magazine, about the bright cars and fine clothes, the beautiful black women and the big houses, and especially about the schools, where colored boys and girls and young men and women learned about things the Jacobs County Negroes didn’t understand, but knew must be worth learning if the colored folks up north bothered about them.” The young black men in the county begin to talk of organizing against the whites and to placate them, the preacher writes a letter to the President of the United States:

I is writin to tell you about us because if you dont come down here or send that army down to do something to free my people they is going to kill every white man and every white woman and every white child in Jacobs County. We slaves down here Mr. President. We been slaves ever since I can remember and I been here sixty years and Granny Jacobs been here more than eighty years and she still a slave. The sheriff and Mr. Jacobs and the sheriffs deputies make us work in the fields and in the house and in the warehouse and on folks farms and in the post office and in the stores and in the jails and everywhere and aint never paid us no money cep when we ask for food or for some clothes or things like that and they dont let us leave Jacobs County. Ifen one of us tries to leave we gets kilt just as quick as swattin a fly we gets kilt. We just found out that colored folks aint slaves nowheres else cep here and we want you to free us.

The letter is smuggled out of the county. There is no reply. But months later, a carful of Federal men arrive in Jacobsville and start asking questions. The sheriff is cagey enough to keep them from discovering too much and concocts a reason to lock the agents up. Unfortunately for him and the rest of the white population of Jacobs County, however, any combustible mixture held too long and under too much pressure is bound to explode. The ending is swift, violent, and ruthless.

Many Thousand Gone is not the black equivalent of The Turner Diaries, however. This is a less a fable than a parable, a story to be told and read not literally but for its lesson. When Lillian Smith reviewed the book for St. Louis Post-Dispatch shortly before her death, she wrote, “It would be a wonderful thing if we had on our streets … storytellers telling long tales to the people. What a story this is to tell! What a soft mercy might creep into dry, hating hearts if only they could feel the poetry of this little book.” Many Thousand Gone is brief — barely more than a hundred pages — crisp, powerful as a gut-punch but told in a cool, matter-of-fact tone. There may be no actual Jacobs County, but in creating it, Ronald Fair illustrated with the precision of a haiku the damage that any inequality too long sustained can wreak upon both the oppressed and their oppressors. It’s not a book whose time has come, sadly. It’s a book whose time has never left.

We Can’t Breathe, by Ronald L. Fair
New York: Harper & Row, 1972

Many Thousand Gone, by Ronald L. Fair
New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965

A War Without a Hero, by G. E. Trevelyan (1935)

Front page of A War Without a Hero by G. E. Trevelyan

I write this piece with a mixture of sadness and disappointment. Sadness because this is the last novel by the remarkable G. E. Trevelyan I have to write about. And disappointment because A War Without a Hero is not a book I would recommend to anyone not interested in becoming a G. E. Trevelyan completist.

Over the last year and a half, I have tracked down, either purchased (usually at greater expense that I’m used to) or copied (thanks to the British Library), read, and written about all eight novels that Trevelyan wrote between 1932 and 1939. And I’ve become convinced that her utter absence from any history or study of the English novel between the two wars has nothing to do with her merit or significance as a writer and everything to do with the tendency of literary academics to stick to well-travelled paths. I’ve contacted several dozen researchers specializing in this period over the last year and in every case had the same responses: ignorance (“Who? Never heard of her.”) and uninterest (“Good luck with your research. Goodbye.”).

G. E. Trevelyan, perhaps more than any writer of the generation that came after Virginia Woolf, followed Woolf’s advice in “A Room of One’s Own.” An only child whose father’s occupation on census forms is always listed as “independent means,” she came down from Oxford, found herself a flat in Kensington and went to work writing novels. Though she once said that she went through three drafts of every novel, she managed to produce eight in the space of as many years and in each case, to produce something that was not in any way like the others. It may have been health problems that kept her from developing a wider circle of connections to the literary world: though she died from injuries sustained when a German bomb hit her building, her death certificate also mentions that she suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. She didn’t review other people’s books, didn’t get her photo taken at other people’s parties, didn’t travel much, didn’t lose herself to drink, sex, or politics. She sat in her room and wrote.

And took enormous creative risks. If she took anything from the example of Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, it was to commit fully to her artistic vision and hold nothing back in trying to realize it. In some cases — Appius and Virginia (1932); As It Was in the Beginning (1934); Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937); and William’s Wife — she succeeded. In others — Hot-House (1933); Theme with Variations; and Trance by Appointment — her experimentation had mixed results. And in the case of A War Without a Hero, she failed.

If she failed, it was not due to half-heartedness. In A War Without a Hero, Trevelyan built upon the experience of writing As It Was in the Beginning, which takes place entirely in the mind of a woman in her dying days and uses the stream of consciousness approach developed by Woolf, Richardson, May Sinclair and others of the generation before hers. Where As It Was involves one character’s thoughts and perceptions, A War interweaves the streams from multiple sources.

Unfortunately, none of these sources is fully convincing — and the story itself implausible if not unbelievable. The book opens as Ann Cavan, a London woman with some money and artistic interests, approaches the tiny Channel Island where she’s decided to lay low while waiting for her divorce decree. In her late twenties or early thirties, attractive, well-dressed and used to good food and fine accommodations, she has for no obvious reason set upon taking a room in a rough cottage on a tiny island accessible from a slightly larger and more populated one only at low tide.

Four people live in the house: Mrs. Hymes, a widow, her sons Matthew and Joshua, fishermen, and Davey, who is blind. They live off the fishing and a few cows and pigs that roam freely around the island. The cottage has no electricity and no running water. The island is enveloped in fog much of the time, rough and rocky all of it. This is not B&B territory.

Once settled in her upstairs room at the cottage, Ann quickly realizes there is nothing to do. She’s not a reader, not a sketcher or painter or whatever her vague artistic inclination might actually manifest itself as. And the Hymes are not much for conversation. Matthew and Joshua spend most of their time out fishing and when on land communicate in grunts and monosyllables. Mrs. Hymes is bitter, tired, and contemptuous of the silly useless woman renting her room. Davey spends his days doing little besides sitting in a chair outside the cottage.

“This is utterly hopeless and sickening and impossible,” Ann thinks early on in the book and it’s this sense that Trevelyan is most effective in expressing. Things like listening for hours to water drip from the gutters:

Water ran into the butt almost continuously. Foghorns boomed without an interval through the darkness. Revolution, earthquake, half London wiped out: lot of difference it would make, she thought bitterly. The drips were joining up, drip drip drip drip and then the pause of a heart-beat. And drip again, and pause, and drip, and drip drip dri-i-p, and a thin, trickling stream.

This is not fertile ground from which any vibrant drama is likely to spring … and it doesn’t. Ann convinces herself that Davey is a prisoner of his family’s ignorance and arranges to take him to London to see if a Harley Street specialist can restore his sight. Once Davey can see, Ann then decides the two of them will marry and break free of Mrs. Hymes’ tyranny.

But then they return to the island and make themselves at home in that upper bedroom. Able to see, Davey is transformed. Once a bore, he’s now a brute. Mrs. Hymes takes revenge by carrying out her own transformation, turning Ann from a woman of the world and into a slave:

Mrs. Hymes slapped their food on the table; she pinched her mouth. And him that’s been brought up so nice. Never let to get into no rough ways. She saw Annie standing, looking at him. “What you standing there for?” Gaping at him that you’ve done your best to drag him down and down. Done your best you have, and aren’t fit to black his boots. “Get out and shut up the chickens.”

And so it goes. Life on the island is nasty, brutish, and endless. Everything is painted in shades of grey. There is a lot of staring and hopelessness. A War Without a Hero is like the written equivalent of a bad art film. Fin.

Reviews in the Thirties tended to run under 300 words and offer little insight into a book, but in the case of A War Without a Hero, the reviewers took its measure with deadly accuracy:

• A. G. Macdonell, The Bystander:

It is very seldom that a true-blue, hard-boiled reviewer, born and bred in the trade — a tough baby, in fact — reads a book that makes him want to go and shoot himself. But if ever a book was liable to induce insanity, melancholia, tendencies towards suicide, inflammation of the eyes, and general Dostoievsky-complex, it is A War Without a Hero by Miss G. E. Trevelyan. Consider the plot for yourselves. Just run your eye over it and let me know by post-card, duly stamped, whether you think it is a reasonably likely one. An artistically-minded lady wants to be divorced from her husband. During the six-months time-lag she decides to go to a remote Channel Island, and there she lodges with a fearful family of illiterate yokels. One of them, David, a lad of twenty, is blind, and the artistic lady decides to marry him. This she does. Her life is then devoted to looking after this fiendishly dull, semi-witted youth and to washing up dishes and scrubbing floors in mid-Channel. I ask you. The real trouble about the book is that the moment the arty lady decides to marry the blind youth, all interest vanishes. You simply cannot believe that such a thing is possible, and the moment you find yourself doubting the possibility of a plot you find yourself either bored to tears, as with Miss Trevelyan, or excited beyond works, as with the late Mr. Edgar Wallace.

• Peter Quennell, The New Statesman:

A War Without a Hero is an intelligent book, but not very readable. Miss Trevelyan certainly knows how to write; but I wish that she did not mistake abruptness for vividness, and that her characters’ thoughts were not perpetually cropping up in broken bits and pieces of interior monologue scattered broadcast all over the printed text. Her story would be twice as impressive if it were half as long. Incidentally, the complete aimlessness of the central character — a young woman of means who marries the blind boy she discovers on an imaginary Channel Island — lends a sort of reflected aimlessness to the whole narrative…. After almost four hundred gloomy, capable and unsparing pages, the reader’s spirits have declined to their lowest ebb.

• The Observer:

If Dostoievsky had laid a wager that he could write an even gloomier book than The Brothers Karamazov, and if, while trying to win the wager, he had been attacked by biliousness, gout, arthritis, and neuralgia, and if he had lost all his money, and if he had been sent back to Sideria, he might well have written A War Without a Hero. And if he had, he would undoubtedly have won his bet hands down.

• Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement:

In each of her previous books Miss G. E. Trevelyan used her talent to delve into morbidity to such a degrees that they fascinated while repelling the reader. In her latest novel, A War Without a Hero, the same talent for atmosphere is there, but we get very little of the compassion and humanity that lightened the others. And the story is so incredible — even more incredible than that of the woman and the ape [Appius and Virginia] — that it sometimes tasks the reader to go on with it…. In this book, as in the others, the reader gets a sense of unendurable spiritual claustrophobia, a sense of life lived in unutterable degradation of mind and body from which there is no escape. The style is very difficult; sometimes it becomes so allusive as to be hardly comprehensible. Once again Miss Trevelyan has given us an insight into things that seem to find their real place in a psychiatrists’s notebook.

• Francis Iles, The Daily Telegraph:

In A War Without a Hero, Miss G. E. Trevelyan set herself a difficult task: to depict a marriage between a lady and an oaf, and the slow deterioration of the lady to the oaf’s level. The task was too difficult; for never for an instant does the book carry conviction…. None of this will do. Ann, as she is first shown to us, would (a) never have married the young oaf, (b) if she had done so, would never have stayed with him, to be buffeted and bullied. There is a D. H. Lawrence vague fog over it all, in which ideas become personified and actions stultified because real human character is disregarded.

As an experiment in fictional technique, A War Without a Hero is a failure. As a book … well, it’s waiting there in the British Library and a few others around the world for the next time a Trevelyan completist comes along.

A War Without a Hero, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1935

Strange Journey, by Maud Cairnes (pseudonym of Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick) (1935)

Cover of first UK edition of Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

Body swapping, where two characters end up in each other’s bodies is such a staple of comic and fantastic theater, fiction, and film that it’s got its own Wikipedia page, which links in turn to a list of over 100 examples of body swapping in media. Many of the modern interpretations can be traced back to F. Anstey’s 1882 novel, Vice Versa. Usually the exchange occurs between sharply contrasting individuals: a father and his son (Vice Versa); a mother and daughter (Freaky Friday); a boy and a girl (The Swap). In the case of Strange Journey, the opposites in question are a middle-class suburban English housewife (Polly) and a landed/titled member of the ruling class (Lady Elizabeth).

Polly and Tom live in one of the new garden cities ringing London that began popping up after the First World War. As much as she loves Tom and her two children, she does tire of the endless demands that other people make on her time and energy. One day, as she stands at her front gate watching a queue of traffic idling behind a bit of road work, she sees an elegant woman sitting inside a Rolls Royce and looking out idly:

Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.

The traffic moves, the Rolls passes, and Polly goes back into the house. A week or so later, a picture of a similar Rolls in a magazine brings back that daydream. But suddenly, Polly feels a moment of dizziness, after which her head clears and she looks down at her hands.

They are not hers. They are hands “of the sort that I should have loved to possess, white and slim, with long fingers and shining almond-shaped nails.” She finds herself in exactly the sort of place she’d dreamt of: fireplace roaring, walls lined with portraits, battle scenes, and books, and a butler bringing in the afternoon tea. She manages to mask her complete disorientation, but quickly finds herself unable to come up with the appropriate responses to the older woman sitting with her. Worse, two large dogs that wander in bristle and growl at her. “Good Lord, one would think they were seeing ghosts,” the woman remarks. After a few more moments of panic, Polly finds herself back home again.

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Over the following months, she finds herself transported to the grand country house again and again, and she begins to suss out a little about the woman whose skin she’s in. Her name is Lady Elizabeth. She is married to Major Forrester — Gerald — who appears to enjoy flaunting his interest in several different beautiful and flirtatious women. She is an avid shooter and rides to the hounds, skills which Polly utterly lacks, leading to embarrassing and awkward moments with Lady Elizabeth’s acquaintances. The shooting in particular proves particularly disturbing:

All those people who seemed quite pleasant and ordinary had taken the massacre as a matter of course. Only I had never seen things killed, except on the films, when naturally one knows that it does not hurt…. Of course I had known that such things took place; that the meat people eat gets knocked on the head, and chickens have their necks wrung, but I had never visualised what slaughter was actually like. I simply had never thought about it.

Polly struggles to navigate her passages through Lady Elizabeth’s life — just which of the dozens of bedrooms in the house is hers, for example? She also realizes how little she actually knows about the simplest protocols and assumptions of the gentry. £1,000 a year, for example, seems a fortune to her; it is, however, considered one step from the poorhouse for any young man hoping to marry into a good family. On the other hand, she’s a whiz at bridge, which astonishes everyone who thought Lady Elizabeth looked on all forms of card play with distain.

She also soon realizes that her exchanges are mutual. When she’s transported into Lady Elizabeth’s skin, the Lady finds herself in Polly’s. She’s dismayed to learn that her children love the stories of castles and knights their mother has been telling them, stumped to come up with a good explanation of how she can suddenly play the piano with ease. Worse, while she feels certain the Lady Elizabeth views her own husband Gerald with a mixture of dislike and disinterest, she begins to suspect the Lady of having designs on Tom.

Eventually, Polly and Lady Elizabeth — as themselves — make contact and attempt to come to an understanding of how the mechanism linking them operates. Much of it seems to depend on a sort of synchronized wishful thinking, just the kind of idle daydreaming that led to their first experience. Simply arranging to meet, however, brings Polly to an understanding of just how constrained her lot is compared to Lady Elizabeth’s. “Gerald would never ask what she had been doing, and she could go to a picture gallery or a concert and nobody would think it at all queer.” Polly, on the other hand, sees that “I really had no private life at all”: “If I should feel inclined to do something quite ordinary like that, by myself, everybody in my neighbourhood would wonder why.”

The most interesting the twist in Strange Journey is not the details of how the two women are able to exchange lives — and they do, at least for a while, manage to use it at will — but the author’s attempt to pull off her own swap.

Maud Cairnes - Lady Kathleen Hastings Curzon-Herrick
From The Bystander, 3 April 1935.

Maud Cairnes — as The Tatler and several other society-radar magazines revealed soon after the publication of Strange Journey — was a pseudonym. She was not a literarily-inclined middle class woman but the Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick, eldest daughter of the 14th Earl of Huntingdon and wife of Mr. William Montagu Curzon-Herrick, whose own grand house, Beaumanor Hall, and its surrounding estate had been in his family for over 300 years. When William and Lady Kathleen were married in 1916, their wedding was called “The Event of the Week” and featured in a full-page spread in The Illustrated London News. Going by the story in The Times, I counted fourteen lords and ladies, at least eight counts and countesses, three viscountesses, one earl (Huntingdon, of course), and one each baroness, duchess, and marchioness.

A Hunting Party at Beaumanor Park
A Shoot at Beaumanor Park, from The Illustrated London News, 1925. Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick is third from left.

Lady Elizabeth’s world was Lady Kathleen’s. Her father the Earl, and later she and Mr. Curzon-Herrick, regularly hosted great shooting slaughters at their estates. Lady Kathleen was as much at home in the saddle, if perhaps not cutting quite the same slim, elegant figure in her riding gear. She frequented the ballet, theater, and concert hall, saw her name in Court Circulars, set an example for housewives like Polly with her reputation for wit, grace … and heavy smoking.

Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick in riding gear, from The Illustrated London News, 1930
Lady Kathleen Curzon-Herrick in riding gear, from The Illustrated London News 1928.

She was also long an amateur at the writing game. Her sister Grace recalled Kathleen writing plays the three Hastings girls would perform while still being taught at home, and in the mid-1920s, the Lyceum’s Stage Club put on a production of Kathleen’s play, “It is Expedient.” Strange Journey was her first novel, but its reviews in both England and the U.S. would have pleased most seasoned writers. In The New Statesman, Cyril Connolly — after savaging the more established Kay Boyle’s novel The Next Bride (“a very annoying book”) — praised it as “an original and charming story; a very good idea is neatly worked out, and there is something fresh and delightful about this first novel.” The Illustrated London News repaid Lady Kathleen for her many appearances on its pages by calling her book “fresh and odd, and an unusually good first novel.”

The Spectator’s anonymous reviewer, after saying that Strange Journey was “a remarkable little book: a good novel on a theme that is pure housemaid’s delight,” identified its greatest strength:

It does verge on the romantic; but it is saved, and made, by being told in the practical words of Polly Wilkinson herself. Her gaffes on her various translations into the body of Lady Elizabeth, her suburbanisms, her anguish when she finds herself suddenly on horseback in the middle of the hunting field, are all related with extreme common sense. One likes Polly Wilkinson.

Considering that the voice of Polly Wilkinson is the voice of a Lady Elizabeth translating herself into the mind of someone she could only have experienced or imagined at some remove, Lady Kathleen’s success in her first attempt at fiction is even more remarkable. And the down-to-earth tone of Polly Wilkinson’s voice is what prevents Strange Journey from sinking into cringe-worthy farce and keeps it at the level of simple human comedy:

She then opened a big jewel case in which there were several tiers. I thought it looked like a real treasure chest, when I saw brooches and necklaces, bracelets, ear-rings and rings, all in velvet compartments. I just stared. Late for dinner or not I had no intention of hurrying over my choice. I took a sort of collar of emeralds and diamonds, and put it round my neck; it looked wonderful. Then I found some emerald and diamond ear-rings, long ones, and some bangles; I put two or three of these and a big diamond brooch like a spray, that cheered up the dress a lot.

Then I saw the pearls — three long ropes of them — and one shorter one. I put the ropes on and looked happily at my reflection in the mirror.

“I think I want something on my head now,” said I, wondering if it was a grand enough party for a tiara.

Foley, who had been looking rather stunned, smiled respectfully as though I had made a joke. I gathered that it was not a tiara occasion.

Lady Kathleen made just one other excursion into novel-writing. She followed up a few years later with The Disappearing Duchess (1939), which required less of an imaginative stretch. It told of how the Duchess of Darenth went missing from a French villa while on a visit in the summer of 1913 and how an ex-Secret Serviceman found her. Sold and reviewed as a conventional mystery, it earned brief, respectful reviews: “A neat and pleasantly readable story” (TLS); “cunningly compiled to sound plausible to our expectant ears” (The Daily Telegraph).

From this point forward, Lady Kathleen faded slowly from sight. Her husband died suddenly in 1945 and much of the land around Beaumanor Hall had to be sold off to pay his death duties. When the Curzon-Herrick name appeared in the press, it was more likely to be about her daughter. She died in Hove in February 1965 at the age of 71, earning no more than a one-line notice in The Times.

Strange Journey, by Maud Cairnes (pseudonym of Lady Kathleen Hastings Curzon-Herrick)
London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1935
New York: Norton, 1935

By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee (1960)

Cover of first UK edition of By the Sea, By the Sea by George Sumner Albee

Few things give you as good a picture of life at a particular time and place as seeing what people considered satire. Satire with legs is tough to write. Barbs that seemed razor sharp at the time can strike today’s reader as dull — or worse, off-target or unsuccessful to an extent that can be excruciating to watch as a rerun. What was meant to poke the funnybone can seem like an unwelcome jab in the ribs. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea is an example of the dangers of consuming satire too long after its sell-by date.

By the Sea is set in the remote seaside town of Plankton. When I read the book, I was sure that Plankton was somewhere along the Central California coast, but many of its contemporary reviewers were convinced it was in New England. Albee offers no good geographic reference points to anchor it, so let’s say we’re both right.

Plankton’s original name — as not even the Indians found the place habitable before the crazy white men showed up — was Zion’s Golden Strand. A religious sect named the Semi-Submersion Redemptionists, whose men wore beards like Spanish moss and women dressed “like adders in calico,” settled there around 1900 to practice their faith in peace. Which they did for several decades, until their stricture against sex in any form began to whittle their number down to a handful. Then, during Prohibition, the rumrunners moved in, using it as a quiet and safe to land fast boats full of illegal hooch. After FDR eliminated the profit margin, the town was left for the strays and stragglers to occupy.

There is Bonesetter, a retired seaman who runs the town’s drug store and lives in a loose menage with his wife and her ex-stripper sister, Zarafa. There is Manuel Ortega, known to everyone as “Spic” (and here we begin to see the stretchmarks in the satire), who lost an arm bringing a load of whisky ashore and stayed to run the general store. There are the Tatum sisters, two retired librarians, and their mother, whose dementia takes the peculiar form of believing herself to be General George Custer. And there are a handful of artists, sculptors, and miscellaneous Bohemians.

The diverse collection of Planktonians is united on one point: that success as defined by the world outside is an anathema. “The human race, friends, cannot stand success,” Bonesetter tells his fellow townspeople. “Prosperity makes monsters of us all. Plankton has never known prosperity, and never will. Plankton is a serene place, a joyful place, an undiscovered place; what the literary critics call a happy valley. Let us keep it that way.”

Cover of first US paperbackedition of By the Sea, By the Sea by George Sumner Albee

Of all the misfits, none is quite so ill-fitted as Myrthis Lathrop. Having been sent to university to study law by his father, Myrthis rejected the notion that commerce was a game he needed to play. “The world is a mighty tough place, my fine young liberal,” he father told him, “as you’ll find out when you try to make a dollar.” To which Myrthis replied, “The world is a mighty tough place because it’s full of men trying to make a dollar.” He decided instead to move to Plankton, where he could live in one of the old abandoned Redemptionist houses for nothing, and be a bum, making a few bucks by selling samples of plants, sea creatures, and insects to his old university’s laboratories. When we first meet him, Myrthis is spending his day lying on the ground, taking notes on the second day of the Ant War.”22 blacks still on their feet, to 112 browns.”

Myrthis is himself a bit of a parasite. His fellow Planktonians feed him, fuel him, clothe him, fix his plumbing, and when necessary, save him from drowning. As little as they aspire to material success, Myrthis’s obstinate aimlessness irritates many and maddens Bonesetter in particular. He concocts a scheme to marry Myrthis off to Vitalia, a scroungy young woman recently arrived in town.

Hoping this will force Myrthis to settle down, Bonesetter is disappointed. Myrthis and Vitalia decide to establish a newspaper, despite the fact that they have no printing press and can’t write — or at least, spell. Undismayed, Myrthis types up the first issue with its front page story, “YOUR FRIEND AND MINE THE COKROACH.” Myrthis is not just pro-roach: he is a zealous roachist. “Those of us who are a bit too sure that we are the final and fairest flower of Creation will do well to reflect upon the fact that the cokroach has been here longer than we have and will be here when we are all through.” When the universe comes to its whimpering end, he assures his readers, “it will be the roach, not Man, who will stand on tip-toe on the last charred Reef of Earth and cry farewell my brothers farewell farewell.”

Somehow, Myrthis’s piece gets into the hands of a desperate syndication agent, and the next thing you know, all of America is calling for more. Myrthis and Vitalia are swept off to New York City to make the rounds of television game shows, news shows, and talk shows, all of which offer Albee opportunities to satirize What’s My Line, The Tonight Show, and other artefacts of the time that have now grown quaint or forgotten.

Cover of first UK paperbackedition of By the Sea, By the Sea by George Sumner Albee

P. G. Wodehouse described By the Sea, By the Sea as “like a sort of innocent Peyton Place,” which may be more accurate now than when he said it. Peyton Place long ago lost its scandalous reputation, and so, by extension, has By the Sea. When the book was marketed, the favored hashtags were #lusty and #Rabelaisian, neither of which could manage to raise the lightest eyebrow today. Yet some of the reviewers were still able to wind themselves into a righteous tizzy about it. Writing in The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Martin Quigley practically issued an invitation for a book-burning: “This is a rather pleasant and funny little summer story that has been spoiled by self-conscious and witless dirty talk. The publisher and the author are trying to justify and exploit the dirty talk on the grounds that it is Rabelaisian.” Scoring points with the chauvinists in his audience, he added, “It is remindful of a sissy trying to pass himself off as a tough guy.”

Barely two hundred pages long, By the Sea, By the Sea could easily sit at one end of the bookshelf alongside Tobacco Road and Cannery Row — neither of which, IMHO, carry much more than trace amounts of the humor and raucousness that made them favorites of a generation or two of mostly male readers. It takes a lot more to stand out as a drop-out from society in today’s world.

Not that George Sumner Albee hadn’t earned his stripes as an outsider. He’d taken to the road early in life, traveling around the world in his twenties, stepping in to save Hemingway from getting pasted by a boxer in Key West in the thirties, taking a house in Cuba’s own Key West, Varadero, in the 1950s. He was a connoisseur of the laidback expat lifestyle, capable of writing a long and gushing letter in praise of Under the Volcano to Malcolm Lowry. Lowry, replying from an unhappy spell in England, was somewhat envious: “I have an impression that Cuba must be a marvellous place in which to live, and pursue the Better Life, the Better Thing, and indeed celebrate generally the Life Electric.” Finding the political climate in England not much more enlightened that that of Eisenhower’s US, he added, “… the only thing one could do is to put one’s school cap back on and read Wordsworth, or perhaps Henry Adams, until it all blows over. Meantime it is likely that no contribution will be made to human freedom.”

Albee had made his living as something of an acceptable rebel, a gentle satirist. His first novel, Young Robert, was a semi-autobiographical jab at his own young self, a story about a San Francisco youth full of the spirit of the Gold Rush and progress with a capital P. Although he published a couple of softer, more nostalgic novels in the 1950s, he earned his living as a writer of magazine fiction back in the days when that was still possible.

Albee’s magazine fiction was often satire a soft S. His 1948 story for Cosmopolitan, “The Next Voice You Hear,” played out a premise he came up with over lunch with a friend. “You know,” he said, “wouldn’t it be something if God would come on the radio and give people such a bad scare they’d wake up and behave themselves!” He repeated the story to his friend, Cosmopolitan’s fiction editor, Dale Eunson, and Eunson told Albee the magazine would buy the story if he wrote it.

George Sumner Albee's story, "The Next Voice You Hear," from Hearst International - Cosmopolitan, August 1948.
George Sumner Albee’s story, “The Next Voice You Hear,” from Hearst International-Cosmopolitan, August 1948.

In the finished product, the voice of God goes out over every radio station on Earth one day: “A plan of creation ought by rights to go forward under its own rules, but you, dear children of the Sun’s third planet, are so near to destroying yourselves I must step in. I shall spend this week with you.” As you might expect, this news sends everyone but the most deeply devout into a panic, but God’s subsequent broadcasts are written in a wholly New Testament voice. When he takes leave on the following Saturday, his voice has “the gentleness, the fondness, the inifinite patience of the voice of an older brother teaching a beloved younger brother to skate, or make a kite, or whittle”: “A planet is a school. Live, dear children, and learn.”

Poster for the 1950 movie, The Next Voice You Hear
Poster for the 1950 movie, The Next Voice You Hear

“The Next Voice You Hear” was made into a film with the same name in 1950, starring James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). Producer Dore Schary wrote an account of the making of the film, Case History of a Movie, soon after. James M. Cain, reviewing the book for the New York Times, wrote that “it gives a picture of movies that is almost definitive, with a singularly candid viewpoint.”

First page of The Mysterious Mr. Todd, from The Saturday Evening Post Feb 9 1957
Illustration from The Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1957.

Albee was a flower child before the name existed. In his 1957 story, “The Mysterious Mr. Todd,” an updated version of Twain’s Mysterious Stranger pleas for a town council to turn a patch of land into a park instead of a prison:

There are people in this world who like prisons. They like them because prisons lock up souls, and they believe in locking up souls. They want to see all of us in uniform, marching along in lock-step, saying, “Yes, boss; yes, Fuhrer; yes, commissar.” A prison is the sorriest place in the world, sorrier than any cemetery, because in prison you bury souls. Now what does a park stand for? A park is a scale model of what we hope we’ll turn the whole danged world into someday. A park is a place where we can walk under trees, with flowers around us, and meet our neighbors and shake their hands and ask them how things are going and meet ourselves, too, maybe, on a quiet path, and find out who we are. A park is a freespace for free men. That’s why we’ve got to choose it every time — every time! Because the men in prison are the men who never had parks.

Illustration from "Let's Put Women in Their Place," by George Sumner Albee, from The Saturday Evening Post, December 16, 1961
Illustration from “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” by George Sumner Albee, from The Saturday Evening Post, December 16, 1961.

But not all of Albee’s satire reads quite so benignly today. In a 1961 piece for The Saturday Evening Post, for example, his tongue was perhaps too deeply buried in his cheek for his self-mockery to come through. Titled, “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” he criticizes the U.S. for being the only country where women are not banished when men sit down to talk. He sorts women into seven categories such as “The Frustrated Actress” and “The Compulsive Talker.” He then lays out a program by which husbands can retrain their wives: “Take her to court trials. Take her to visit a chemical laboratory. Play Bach to her. Read her a bit of Kant, showing her how he extrudes one idea from another. From time to time, hit her.” With a little patience and persistence, he assures the reader, “in a year’s time you may find you have a chastened, thoughtful, well-mannered, reticent woman who can actually join in a conversation without destroying it.” And if she happens to slip into her old habits, “Check her promptly. ‘How would you like a rap on the mouth?’ is a query that startles the sturdiest woman.”

This is impossible to read without cringing. If you ever wondered what men like Mad Men’sDon Draper were reading, it was far more likely to be this than the poetry of Frank O’Hara, I’m afraid. George Sumner Albee may have been lucky that he died in 1965: I’m not sure how he would have fared when the Women’s Lib movement got going.

In 1974, by the way, Paramount Studios announced that producer Jerry Bruckheimer would be filming By the Sea with a script by Steve Tesich, but the project appears to have stalled soon afterward.

By the Sea, By the Sea was recommended to me by Kate Peacocke, who wrote from New Zealand, saying her father “loved its zany humour and its gentle wisdom, and so do I.” For me, the book lands halfway between unjustly and justly neglected. If you do read it, it’s best to look for the spirit of “Mr. Todd” and ignore the brief flashes of “Let’s Put Women in Their Place.”

Other Reviews

• Vernon Fane, The Sphere

… a happy, bawdy and very funny novel indeed; Mr. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea, which I propose to re-read often and certainly not to lend, unless it is to benighted travellers unable to get to a bookshop. Mr. P. G. Wodehouse has gone on record as finding it one of the funniest books he has read for ages and full of charm, too. He adds that it is like a sort of innocent Peyton Place, as contradictory a statement as the old master can ever have emitted. Be that as it may, he is certainly right about its being funny, and since that is a quality fairly thinkly parcelled out in contemporary fiction, I can recommend it to those readers who are free, broadminded and twenty-one.

• Dave Lipman, The Kansas City Star

If Aldous Huxley had stumbled across Plankton, he would not have had to search around bravely for new worlds. He could have loosened his tie and luxuriated in the company of somebody like Myrthis Lathrop…. There’s a theory, unproved, that a man who uses shingles from his own roof for firewood is a man worth meeting. It follows that a book in which such a man plays a leading role is a book worth reading.

• Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Guardian

the funniest book I have read in years: that is to say it is not “a riot of fun” but witty; satirical, not smart; adult, not “adult”; and like funny books from Candide to Lucky Jim, basically serious…. A young man’s book, presumably, which I wholly recommend.

• Lynn Hopper, The Indianopolis Star

Light, brassy, with serious undertones, and definitely on the wild side. A new book with more charm than most summer fiction is George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea.

By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960
London: Victor Gollancz, 1960

The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff (1977)

Cover of first US edition of The Manner Music by Charles Reznikoff

When poet Charles Reznikoff died in 1976, his wife, Myrie Syrkin, gave his papers to publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, which had begun collecting and issuing his poetry and other writings. A while later, Martin called Syrkin to say he’d found the manuscript of a completed novel titled The Manner Music. She knew nothing of it — and Reznikoff had usually discussed anything he was working on with her. What’s more, Martin added, it’s a Hollywood novel. For a couple of years in the late 1930s, Reznikoff had worked in Hollywood as a researcher and assistant to Albert Lewin, an acquaintance from his Brooklyn youth who’d been a protege of Irving Thalberg and worked his way up to producer. Maurice Zolotow later compared the discovery to finding a T. S. Eliot novel about banks or one by Wallace Stevens about insurance.

The Hollywood label has stuck with The Manner Music ever since. In reality, saying The Manner Music is a Hollwood novel is like saying Moby Dick is a Nantucket novel: not untrue but generally missing the point. Milton Hindus, a friend of Reznikoff and a stalwart supporter, came closer to the mark in noting the parallels between the book and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Both stories involve two men: one a prosperous pragmatist, the other an ascetic idealist. In both stories, the narrator is nameless; in both, he is at a loss to understand the other man’s obsession. Both are case studies demonstrating the observation of Reznikoff’s friend William Carlos Williams that “The pure products of America go crazy.”

Reznikoff’s Bartleby is a composer named Jude Dalsimer. Like Reznikoff, Dalsimer works and lives alone in Hollywood while working for a studio producer, known as Paul Pasha in the book, so that his wife could stay in New York and keep her job as a teacher. He doesn’t mingle with the other writers, avoids most parties. He rents a room in a little hotel in Santa Monica, far out the tramline from the studios. Like Reznikoff, he prefers to walk, usually for miles along the beach, down the coast as far as Redondo and Hermosa Beach.

In his introduction, Robert Creeley observes that the two characters in The Manner Music resemble two aspects of Reznikoff himself. As Reznikoff did for a time after leaving college, the narrator is a traveling salesman in dry goods, and his work allows him to meet his friend Jude in both New York and Hollywood. Like Reznikoff, who held down a steady job as a social workder for years, the narrator accepts the monotony and occasional humiliations of the work in return for its security: “Like all salesmen, I suppose, I am very patient. We soon learn to wait for hours in anterooms and to send our cards again and again and still to be pleasant and to smile.” The narrator accepts listening to Jude performing his music on the cheap piano in his apartment in the same manner. “I listened patiently then for an hour or more — most likely less — and again heard nothing that moved me.” Jude’s music isn’t to his taste — not like band music or “an old fellow singing old songs for pennies in the backyards.”

Charles Reznikoff in the late 1960s
Charles Reznikoff in the late 1960s

Jude Dalsimer, on the other hand, represents Reznikoff’s artistic self. Though he wrote and published his poetry throughout much of his working life, Reznikoff never gained much recognitition for it until very late and he tended not to discuss it with many of his acquaintances. As a fellow Brooklyn poet, Harvey Shapiro once wrote, “Reznikoff devoted his entire life to verse, and whatever he did is characterized by meticulously fine and painstaking craftsmanship.” None of his poems, Hindus observed, “were made merely in order to ‘sell and sell quickly.’ They are without exception patient labors of love, pure skill and artistic integrity, and they seem bound, in time, to find fit readers (however few or many) to respond to their muted appeal.”

Jude is not particularly concerned with the success of his music: “As to whether it will be sold or not, sung or played, that is really not my business. I am not going to bother about that too much: my job is to write it. That no one else can do.” If anything, he is deeply suspicious of the American culture of consumerism. He tells of a dinner party at which a German refugee, a former concentration camp prisoner, was asked to speak. Instead of talking about his experiences in Germany, however, he told the story of a friend who’d committed suicide soon after arriving in America. “Why? Why did he do it?” the man asked. “I will tell you why. Because of the indifference here!” Late in the book, when destitute, homeless, and hopeless, he burns all his compositions in a trashcan in Central Park.

Both Dalsimer and Reznikoff were also great walkers and listeners. Reznikoff’s letters to Syrkin are full of things seen on his walks:

A study in tempo of conversation: a pretty big boy and a little boy are walking together. The little boy is really tagging after the other one- eager to be a fellow. The older fellow is wearing a peculiar hat and the younger fellow asks, “What kind of hat is that?” No answer. “What kind of hat is that, Stanley?” emphasizing the name. Stanley answers cheerfully, “A monkey hat.” “What kind of hat is that?” the little fellow asks again, not what kind of hat is that (namely a “monkey hat”) but what kind of a hat is that (namely, the hat you have on). And again Stanley says curtly and cheerfully, pleased with his own wit, “A monkey hat.” But, after a pause he adds, “A small round sailor hat.” Specific enough, to be sure, but the little fellow now says aloud to himself, “A monkey hat,” wondering, perhaps, if it is really a kind of hat and if so what an attractive name for a hat and could he get one …

Dalsimer’s music is also drawn from what he sees on his walks. The narrator compares one piece to the sound of the wind “blowing down a street on an April evening, rattling windows and making the swinging signs of the stores squeak.” When Jude tries to recount recent incidents, the narrator says, “‘Better yet,’ and here I lied as all salesmen lie and flatter, ‘play them.'” “Well,” Jude replies, “I was taking a walk,” and he proceeds to play.

Some of the walks in The Manner Music show us a country deep in the grips of the Depression:

As I walked along the drive again, I saw a man coming towards me; a poor man by his clothes: he had no overcoat and his trousers were of a cheap goods without the tailor’s crease. We were alone, for the day was cold and the drive was windy. I saw that he had stopped and was watching me furtively; a man of forty or fifty with an honest face, I thought, lined by cared. When I had passed, I could see that he stooped to pick up something — probably a cigar butt or cigarette that someone about to step on a bus had thrown away. Perhaps he had been ashamed to stoop for it in front of me.

The narrator has his last encounter with Jude in an automat in Manhattan. “I noticed that a seam in the collar had parted and another in the shoulder and that the thread that edged the buttonhole in the lapel was unraveling.” Asked where he’s staying Jude replies, “I have the airiest room in New York.” Only later does the narrator understand what this means.

A number of Reznikoff’s poems make their way into The Manner Music — or perhaps vice-versa. In the novel, for example, the narrator recalls,

When I left the theatre it was raining. I went to my hotel through the wholesale district, the streets of which were empty at night, rain or no rain, although busy enough by day when offices and lofts were full of people. I passed an old woman selling newspapers from the shelter of a doorway. As I bought one, I glanced down at her feet.

“You were looking at my feet, weren’t you?” she asked. “Aren’t they terrible—so big in these rubbers. But it is better to have your feet look big than to get them wet,’ she added, still dubious. “A man lent them to me. They are rubbers for a man and I had to tie them with a string. But better than to be sick, eh?”

I took shelter in the doorway, too, to get out of the rain for a moment. “But how big my feet look in them,” she went on. I wondered as I listened, Does this old woman selling newspapers in the rain on this lonely corner still think it matters how her feet look—big or small? I looked at her again: whatever she had been only life was left — and vanity.

This shows up again in a passage from Inscriptions: 1944-1956:

It was raining and the street
empty. I passed an old woman selling newspapers.
As I bought one
I glanced at her feet.
“So big
in these rubbers.
But it’s better than to get them wet,” she added,
dubious, “and to be sick.
A man lent them. They are rubbers for a man, not me,
and I have to time them on with a string.
But how big my feet look!” I looked at her again:
only this was left — vanity.

Sirkin thought her husband might have kept the book a secret because of its portrait of Jude Dalsimer’s wife: “A petulant, pretty, notably unsympathetic female, a Zionist, a high school teacher who tactlessly keeps complaining about her fatigue and lets her talented, unappreciated husband end his poverty-striken quest in Bellevue. A roman-à-clef with a vengeance!” Reading Reznikoff’s Selected Letters, however, one sees that much of it was drawn from his letters to her. In September 1939, for example, as he saw his job with Albert Lewin about to come to an end, he wrote:

At lunch, and we go to lunch together every day, I am silent for long stretches and obviously comfortably so; now he makes conversation, tells stories I have heard before, and which he feels, somewhat uncomfortably that I have heard him tell; they are not particularly good stories, for example, how he dined with a certain friend and this friend engaged in a quarrel with somebody at another table, who was then insignificant but is now the head of a studio—a great man; I listen politely and think with some satisfaction that now I can make a suitable reply.

In The Manner Music, this becomes a lunch between Jude Dalsimer and Paul Pasha:

Paul and he went to the studio each day, but did nothing, waiting for the next move by the heads of the studio. They went out to lunch together, daily, for Paul no longer had any appointments. There was a change between them — slight but perceptible to both. Now that the relation of master and man was about to end — most likely in a week or two — they became equals again. At lunch Jude was generally silent. Comfortably so. It was Paul who tried to make conversation, who told stories which Jude had heard and which Paul felt, uncomfortably, that Jude had heard him tell.

Myrie Sirkin suspected that he wrote The Manner Music after William Carlos Williams suggested that the exercise might help him overcome a writer’s block he was experiencing in the late 1940s. “Perhaps it was the writing of this novel which enabled Reznikoff to overcome what appears to have been a psychic or spiritual blockage (whatever the causes were) to rediscover his ancient springs, to return to poetry,” Anthony Rudolf later speculated. This should not, however, diminish the value of The Manner Music. It is, in the words of Milton Hindus, “a small, multi-faceted gem” that deserves its place on the shelf of great American short novels alongside Bartleby.

The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff
Santa Barara: The Black Sparrow Press, 1977

Daylight in a Dream, by E. M. Butler (1951)

Cover of Daylight in a Dream by E. M. Butler

When Eliza Marian Butler, who published as E. M. Butler, died in November 1959, her Times obituary noted, among her many accomplishments, that “She also published two not very good novels.” Daylight in a Dream was the first, and I hope here to demonstrate that the Times writer was not only tactless but wrong.

The story in Daylight in a Dream reminded me a bit of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solder and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. In all three books, a character is confronted by the uncomfortable fact that they’ve fundamentally misunderstood some key aspect of their past — the kind of realization that shakes a person to the roots. In this case, however, the fiction is also an attempt by its author to look back on her experiences — in particular Butler’s experiences during World War One — through the eyes of an alter ego.

Butler’s fictional self, Miss Rawlinson, is known and feared among the other faculty at Arcady Teaching College as “Old Raw.” “Her behaviour, her silences, her very pronunciation and choice of words implied a tacit criticism of their standards of conduct.” When they all relapse “one and all into mental undress” at the end of a hard day, she holds herself erect and aloof. She refuses to engage in gossip or impugn the good character and motives of the Principal, Miss Cardigan. “You ought to be governess to the Vere de Veres, that’s what you should be,” one of them snips sarcastically. [The Vere de Veres refers to a family of stratospheric nobility invented in a Tennyson poem, the source of the line “Kind hearts are more than coronets/and simple faith than Norman blood.”]

The very qualities that alienate “Old Raw” from her common room peers were what endeared her to the women’s nursing unit she served with on the Eastern Front in Russia in 1916-17. They were “fascinated by her phraseology, by her excessive personal modesty, by her manners, by her morals, by everything that was hers.” Soon after her arrival, someone refers to her as “Heart of Oak” and this quickly becomes her universal pet-name, “Oakey Darling.” Her Red Cross commander recommends her to Dr. Everet, the head of the unit, as “a capable mechanic, as steady as a rock, hasn’t a nerve in her body or one flighty thought in her head.”

Dr. Elsie Inglis in the uniform of the Scottish Woman’s Hospital

Dr. Everet is Butler’s fictional substitute for Dr. Elsie Inglis, the Scottish surgeon and suffragette who established the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service at the start of World War One. The SWFHS organized and deployed field hospitals manned by women volunteers near the front lines in France, Romania, Russia, Macedonia, and Serbia. Inglis led the mission to Russia, which E. M. Butler joined as a translator and driver in 1916.

Already fluent in German and French and working as an assistant lecturer at Newnham College, Butler added a third language to make herself useful in the war effort. As she later wrote in her autobiography Paper Boats (1959) (available on the Open Library), “I set about learning Russian as a first step to getting out to Russia with the Red Cross or in any other way.” The Red Cross took her word that she could speak Russian and assigned her to escort four nurses down to the SWH unit already in place in Bessarabia (now part of Moldova), traveling via Norway, Sweden, Finland and down through much of White Russia and the Ukraine.

Along the way, she had an unsettling encounter with a seer while waiting to change trains in St. Petersburg. “Kakoe narod? (What people?),” the woman asked Butler. “Angliski,” she replied. “Ah,” the woman exclaimed, “Haroshi narod! (A fine people).” The woman told her to listen, then recited this list of names: “Kathleen Theresa Blake, Maude Juhemie, Rose Georgina, Theobald Blake, Fitzwalter, Francis James.” Despite the mispronunciation, Butler recognized the names of her six brothers and sisters. Butler, who later wrote an influential book on Ritual and Magic (1949), was always open to supernatural phenomena and accepted the woman’s instruction to “Go where you are waited for,” despite the warnings of the nurses accompanying her. Butler later claimed that the ghost of her first biographical subject Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau came to her while she was studying his papers and promised to make his handwriting decipherable.

Butler described her time at the front as “the happiest in my life.” In Paper Boats, she recalled odd mix of the grim and the sublime she experienced there:

At least twice every night it was my duty to collect all the bed-pans in the hospital and all the blood-stained dressings, empty them into so-called sanitary pails and stagger with them for about a quarter of a mile across the steppe to the so-called sanitary trench. It was noisome work, and frightening too, for I was nearly always accompanied by a savage pack of pariah dogs snapping and snarling at my heels. On the way back, I used to pause, drink in great gulps of air and look up at the stars. I would then become conscious of a sound never heard in the daytime. It was as if the steppe were sighing, softly, hopelessly, uncomplainingly. It was in fact the subdued chorus of the wounded men, hundreds of them, moaning in the night. They were heroically silent under suffering by day; but nature spoke at nightfall.

The dynamo powering the SWH unit in Russia was the organization’s founder, Dr. Inglis. Butler pays eloquent tribute to Inglis in Daylight in a Dream:

There was a driving-power in her fragile body which would have put a Rolls-Royce to shame, a genius for getting miracles to happen, and administrative gifts hardly distinguishable from statesmanship; for she refused to recognise impossibilities, and the hearts of her subordinates often sank like lead when she issued orders which must be obeyed and yet seemed impossible to fulfil.

A description that makes one long for such leadership today’s pandemic. In her book, British Women of the Eastern Front: War, Writing and Experience in Serbia and Russia, 1914-20, Angela K. Smith calls the SWH units “one of the most successful women’s organisations of the war”: “Of primary importance, they enabled women doctors to get to the heart of the action and save lives.” Inglis continued to work with the unit even after it became clear she was dying from cancer.

In October 1917, recognizing the increasing instability of the situation in Russia as the war was being overtaken by revolution, Dr. Inglis was ordered to evacuate her unit and take it by train to Archangel, from where it would sail home to England to be reorganized and sent to support the Serbian army fighting in Macedonia. Butler vividly recalls the long and difficult journey all the way from Odessa to the port in the Arctic north.

At one point, the driver takes the train through Moscow at high speed to avoid being stopped and attacked by rioting mobs. “Outside was the unknown and the unknowable,” she writes. “Inside, crowded together in fourth-class compartments, eating what little bully-beef there was out of battered tins, sharing knives, forks, and spoons and their inmost thoughts a handful of girls and women were living with an intensity which perhaps comes to few in a lifetime; and one of them with equal intensity was dying.”

This train journey is at the heart of the crucial revelation that comes to Miss Rawlinson. She encounters another former member of the unit, Miss Pearson, and they dine together, sharing memories. Pearson makes a passing comment to the unit’s almost losing all its supplies just before sailing from Archangel. Rawlinson is mystified and Pearson recounts a long and complicated tale of how Brook, the woman charged with getting the equipment on board, battled with recalcitrant rail officials and customs officers and managed, despite speaking almost no Russian and the imminent start of a nationwide strike, to prevent its being abandoned miles outside Archangel on a lonely siding.

This forces Rawlinson to remember the task given her at the start of the trip from Odessa: “You will place yourself unreservedly at Brook’s disposal on the journey whenever she needs help with the equipment.” When Brook had been asked who she wanted as an assistant, she had specifically picked “Oakey Darling.” Though Oakey Darling had accompanied Brook in checking on the cars holding the unit’s supplies at every stop along the way, when they arrived at Archangel she thoughtlessly boarded the freighter with the rest of the group, leaving Brook in the lurch. This, Rawlinson suddenly realizes, was why she had been ostracized — suddenly and without explanation, on the voyage back to England and thereafter. “There must be a blind spot in her somewhere,” she thinks. “That blind spot was her heart.”

E. M. Butler in her library at Cambridge

In reality, it was Butler who saved the equipment. After pleading fruitlessly with the Archangel station master to shift the cars so the equipment could be loaded, she sought Dr. Inglis in her cabin on the Porto Lisboa. “She opened eyes which looked enormous in her small, white, freckled face, and whispered: ‘You must either get the equipment on board before we sail, or stay behind to guard it. Your duty is to the equipment.” Butler returned to the rail yard, where she spotted a last lone engine being returned to its depot in preparation for the strike. “In much more fluent Russian than I have ever commanded,” she recalled, “I told him what lay in store for me if those vans weren’t shifted immediately; and to my horror and dismay I found myself pulling out the vox humana stop. That did it. Without a word said on his side, the engine was driven up to the vans, coupled to them and driven up to the quay.”

Rawlinson leaves the unit when it arrives back in England. As with the real Elsie Inglis, Dr. Everet survives long enough to salute the Serbian troops accompanying the unit as they debark in Newcastle, only to retire to a nearby hotel and die in her sleep. Butler herself stayed with the SWH through its time in Serbia, returning to England in December 1918, whereupon she was hospitalized for nearly a year with malaria.

She went back to lecturing at Newnham in 1921 and remained until 1935, when she took a full professorship at the University of Manchester. She then returned to Cambridge in glory in 1945 as the Schroeder Professor, the pre-eminent faculty post in German language and literature. Her partner, Isaline Blew Horner, was a leading scholar of Pali literature, the canon of religious writings at the core of Theravada Buddhism. In keeping with the discretion of Butler’s time, Horner names appears just once, and in an innocuous context, in Butler’s autobiography. When he reviewed Paper Boats for the Telegraph, Anthony Powell wrote, “There is nowhere else in the world except these islands where women of Miss Butler’s kind are produced, scholarly and daring lades, never wholly out of touch with a kind of Jane Austen primness even at their most rebellious and outspoken, and in the midst of unlikely adventures.”

Daylight in a Dream is a slight novel, more of a novella at a mere 125 pages. But the Times did it and Butler a disservice by calling it “not very good.” In reality, it’s the kind of book that can only be written late in life, when the blacks and whites of youth and idealism have shaded and grown subtle with age and perspective. A book of the quality of A River Runs Through It or H. L. Davis’s The Winds of Morning — books in which, as I once wrote, the author’s voice is “spare, ironic, experienced but never claiming to be wise, with a soft-spoken good humor.” It’s also a book where you get the sense that by waiting so long to tell the story, the author was able to make it as short as possible.

Daylight in a Dream, by E. M. Butler
London: The Hogarth Press, 1951

A Pin’s Fee, by Peter de Polnay (1947)

Cover of <em>A Pin's Fee</em>. Design by Margaret de Polnay, 1947.
Cover of A Pin’s Fee. Design by Margaret de Polnay, 1947.

I’ve probably seen Peter de Polnay’s name on the spine of books as long as I’ve been going to used bookstores, but it was only two years ago that I actually read one of his books — a relatively late novel, Blood and Water (1975). In my post, I compared de Polnay to Simenon’s “straight” novels, the ones without Inspector Maigret, which are often about the most mundane individuals finding themselves in extreme situations — on the run, committing murder, being blackmailed. Having read several more de Polnays, I’d moderate that comparison slightly. While de Polnay’s characters are every bit as unexceptional as Simenon’s, their situations tend to be more awkward than extreme, more uncomfortable than unendurable. Kind of like our situations now, if you’re lucky enough to only have to tolerate being locked down during this pandemic.

Peter de Polnay wrote nearly 100 books in the space of 40-some years and it’s pretty much a given that anyone who writes 100 books will produce a fair amount of justly neglected ones. The odds on there being a masterpiece or three among the 100 are long; but it’s a lead-pipe cinch that some of them are dreck. If anyone ever bothered to read through the entire de Polnay oeuvre, he or she didn’t bother to make their notes available, so there is no easy way to know in advance where any title you might pick up might fall on the masterpiece-to-dreck spectrum. Martin Black grabbed de Polnay’s 33rd novel, The Run of the Night, for example, and found it “not a good book…. The prose is wooden and clunky, the characters are uninspired and uninteresting.” When B.S. Johnson reviewed the novel back in 1963, he was equally blunt: “On almost every page of The Run of Night there are faults of sentence construction, punctuation, or grammar, this is the kind of novel which reads as though it was never revised (let alone proof-read)….”

I confess I chose to read A Pin’s Fee for no other reason than its cover. That bold color-blocked design — by de Polnay’s first wife Margaret — must have radiated when it sat on display tables back in 1947. It’s far more vibrant than anything else that would have sat in the fiction section, like something by Esphyr Slobodkina or Matisse in his papercut period.

The cover is by far the liveliest thing in this novel, which largely takes place in a grey, battered London still recovering from the war. Intact houses often look out on the rubble of bombed ones; when a character hears thunder from a sudden storm, he instinctly waits for the sound of sirens and collapsing buildings to follow. A few scenes take place in settings of great elegance — a cocktail party in a suite at Claridge’s — but more are in squalid flats, dingy pubs and sordid private clubs.

De Polnay moved easily in high society and low. He’d been raised in luxury, waited on by servants and governnesses, and he’d slept in flea-ridden flophouses. He’d been a hobo, tram-driver and store clerk in Argentina, maneuvered through the black marketing networks in occupied Paris, and seen the birth of his son announced in the “Court Circular” column in The Times. He’d gambled in the Casino at Monte Carlo, winning and losing a fortune, and by the time he was writing this book, just hitting his stride as a prolific middlebrow author, with sales and reviews respectable enough to assure an income high enough for summers on the Riviera and occasional lunches at the Savoy.

Cover of A Pin's Fee by Peter de Polnay
The cover of this cheap Harold Hill & Son reissue of A Pin’s Fee has nothing to do with the actual story.

I found reading A Pin’s Fee a bit like watching a good B-movie from the Forties or Fifties. I went along as much for the period details, the interiors and exteriors, the lighting and costumes, as for the writing and story. I half suspect that De Polnay himself wasn’t sure where he was headed when he started. The story could have been about a father with a scandalous past or intrigue with a nearby country neighbor, but it ended up being about entanglement with a woman with a mysterious history, thrice-divorced … perhaps a high-priced prostitute? He was a good 40 pages into a 200-page book before he grabbed a narrative line and ran with it.

De Polnay takes his title from a line in Hamlet (Act I, Scene 4). Hamlet scoffs at the notion he should fear approaching the ghost of his father: “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee/And for my soul/what can it do to that/Being a thing immortal as itself?” Pins being one of the first mass-produced articles of Shakespeare’s day, “a pin’s fee” was another way of saying “not worth much.” Despite the fact that de Polnay’s leading character Nigel has enough of a stock portfolio to keep him in a country house and write an occasional book review or exhibition catalogue piece, he walks through his life as if it’s worth little more than a pin’s fee. While it makes him a less than compelling protagonist, it serves him well as an observer of the swank and the skids.

Cover of 1970 reissue of A Pin's Fee
This 1970 Howard Baker reissue cover is slightly more accurate. The lead character does frequent the British Museum Reading Room.

De Polnay is at his best depicting the desperation of people trying to hold onto their comfortable lives, as in this Kensington hotel filled with what he calls “evacuees from Menton” — Menton being the French Riviera resort that catered to people of a certain age and income, accustomed to good but not showy food and discreet help and able to afford a room in a respectable full-board hotel:

Not one young face, and while he waited for his food he looked first at this face, then at that, and since the food was slow in arriving he had examined every face by the time a waitress, with a melancholy squint, brought his soup. All those faces were the faces of usurers. They hung on to life, counting every second, hating every second, but none the less each new second was a second to add to the hoard.

“All those faces were the faces of usurers.” Such intermittent flashes of brutal cynicism shine like gems in the ashpile. On the other hand, it’s also some of the better passages that also betray the sloppiness of de Polnay’s prose:

He got in and found an empty compartment, but as he settled down in a corner seat he noticed that a small elderly woman was with him, nevertheless. She was huddled up in the corner, her hair was grey and she was full of angry misery. She looked at him and began to hate him. She hated him openly and conspicuously, and he couldn’t get on with The Time but had to glance at her at regular intervals: as though to be on the alert in order to duck swiftly when the hatred attacked him. She had a pale, saintly face with was swollen with hatred. Her bag, resting on her knees, was shiny black, and because her eyes were black, too, he had the irresponsible fancy that today she was wearing black eyes to match her bag.

There are several things right and wrong here. The last sentence, cut down by at least five words, should come right after “her hair was grey,” etc.. Her “face swollen with hatred” should follow. The paragraph should end with Nigel’s discomfort. The image of the old woman in the corner beaming hatred at Nigel is great, but the clunkiness of the prose diffuses its intensity.

I spent a good amount of my most recent lockdown Sunday reading A Pin’s Fee, and it was one of the more relaxing things I’ve done since this mess started. De Polnay could tell a good story even when it wasn’t clear to me — or, I think, to him — where it was going. While he was no master of prose style, he had a sure hand when it came to flawed people and their haunts. If anything, I closed the book with a renewed enthusiasm to venture further in the vast expanse of Peter de Polnay’s oeuvre.

A Pin’s Fee, by Peter de Polnay
London: Hutchinson & Co., 1947
London: Harold Hill & Son, 1948
London: Howard Baker, 1970

Development, by Bryher (1920)

Cover of first US edition of Development

This is my contribution to the #1920Club, a unique collective reading event organized by Kaggsy and Simon Thomas. I offered some less-than-well-known candidates last week, but I deliberately saved this one for myself.

Development was the first novel published by Bryher, pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman. It was the first of three loosely-fictionalized autobiographical novels, followed by Two Selves (1923), which was first published by Contact Editions, the Paris-based press established by Robert McAlmon and West (1925). All three of the books are virtually unattainable in first edition, but the University of Wisconsin Press did reissue the first two books as Two Novels: Development and Two Selves, edited by Joanne Winning, back in 2000.

Development takes Nancy — Bryher’s fictional self — from her earliest conscious memories at the age of three or so to her first visit to the Scilly Isles around the age of 17. The Scillies were deeply important to Bryher, to the point that she took the name of one of the isles as her pseudonym, and the remote wildness of the Scillies seems to have motivated her to reject many of the customs and values of the conventional world she’d been raised in.

Bryher was one of Dorothy Richardson’s closest and most loyal friends, and Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which was itself (to some extent) a fictional autobiography, was clearly an inspiration. As in Pilgrimage, the story is told through the stream of the lead character’s consciousness, but in Bryher’s case, there’s a certain stiffness to the stream, if that makes any sense. Pilgrimage radiates such a vibrant sense of living in the world; in Development, on the other hand, the world is seen through a very literary/rational sensibility. And, frankly, one perhaps a little too satisfied with its own opinions — something it was refreshing to see is not unique to young men.

Perhaps this is because Bryher felt she had been born the wrong gender. As she once wrote her long-time lover, the American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), “I am quite justified in pleading I ought to be a boy—I am just a girl by accident.” At a very young age, Nancy finds herself thinking, “Her one regret was that she was a girl.” When many little girls wish for dolls, Nancy dreams of owning a pocket-knife. She longs to be a sailor, imagines stowing away on a ship when she turns fourteen: “Why was she born with a boy’s heart when she might not go to sea?”

Little of Nancy’s knowledge of boys comes from first-hand experience. The only child of an enormously wealthy father — Sir John Ellerman, Bryher’s father, owned shipping lines and newspapers and was likely one of the richest men in Edwardian England — Nancy rarely have the opportunity to play with others. “Henceforth, her games should be shared with her elephant, a safer and quieter companion” than a girl she encounters one day in front of her house in Cornwall. She also learns about the world through books written for boys, especially the historical novels of G. A. Henty. Although Bryher never mentions the novelist, it’s clear that her first inspiration is Henty’s 1887 novel, The Young Carthaginian, A Story of the Time of Hannibal. Nancy begins to write her first novel: “Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign” — taking her hero’s name from one of Henty’s leading characters. The allure of Carthage fades, however, when she sees the actual remains of the city “a darkness of mud, a greyishness that held no violet about it, set with a few bleak stones.”

Cover of the U. of Wisconsin edition of Two Novel: Development and Two Selves, by Bryher

If Bryher/Nancy is sure she was meant to be a boy, she’s equally sure she was meant to be a writer. Even more frequent than her dreams of the sea are those of writing a book. One reason that language has such importance for Nancy is that she is a synesthetic. As she grows, her associations between words and colors grows more intense — “until her whole vocabulary became a palette of colours, luminous gold, a flushed rose, tones neither sapphire nor violet, but the shade of southern water.” This sensation extends even to letters: “Seven letters were white, C, G, Q, S, T, O, and U; three of the others were black, D, E, and I. W was crimson; H, M, and Y were various shades of gold and primrose.” Because of Nancy’s fascination with language, Development is as much as anything a bibliomemoir — long before anyone was tossing that word around. We follow along as she falls in love with Shakespeare, partly for his poetry, mostly for his history, dislikes Keats, gorges herself in the lush exoticism of Salammbô. The third and final section of Development, “Transition,” is a catalogue of the reading of her late teens, each book leading her towards the one she is preparing to write. Fortunately, when she does put pen to paper, she sticks to original material: “The intervals of her reading Nancy filled with her own manuscript, wrought neither of imagination nor remembered stories but of the one experience she knew from end to end — herself.”

Before this last burst of the intellectual development in her late teens, however, Nancy has to endure her middle passage: boarding school, or as Bryher un-subtly titles this section, “Bondage.” Like Bryher, Nancy is sent relatively late to a girl’s school, joining the Fourth Year and quickly being progressed to the Fifth. Her two years, though, seem an eternity. A decade before Antonia White’s Frost in May, fifty years ahead of Deschooling Society, Bryher was scathing in her criticism of mass education. Downwood — the fictional equivalent of Queenswood, the school Bryher attended — is a typically grim English boarding school, “one of the coldest, bleakest places she had seen, with open windows, worn-out carpets, and a mass of white paint inside, and outside a long weedy lawn and a few flower-pots.” While slightly more comfortable than Dicken’s Dotheboys Hall, Downwood is hardly better in its approach to instruction. Rote learning, repetition, memorization, and progress in locked step are the hallmarks of its regime, compounded by ruthless conformity. Nancy learns never to mention she has travelled widely. Having never really known other children, she finds them more like cattle. “For the first time the spirit of the crowd — an oppressed thing in turn oppressing, judge of outward aspect only, blind to the finer shades, with the strength of the sloth,
the ferocity of a brute — weighed her and weighed her distrustfully.” The effect of being in class is deadening: “Not a girl was idle, joyfully idle; not a mind was interested; not a thought was alert.”

Cover of first UK edition of Development by Bryher

As much as we sympathize with Nancy, there is a certain superiority in her views towards her classmates that’s hard to like. She pities them “the poverty of their monotonous restricted thought.” Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Development, I found it undermined by a deep-seated solipsism. For great stretches of the book, it really does seem as if no one else exists. At one point as she recounts Nancy’s experiences around the Mediterranean, for example, Bryher writes, “Unshaken from her Italian allegiance, Nancy left, one January morning, for Algiers.” Nancy is at this stage around the age of 10 or 11. Nancy didn’t leave for Algiers — she most certainly went along as one of a party led by her mother or father or both. Ditto for the visits to Egypt, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, etc.. Did Nancy have a governness? A tutor? Apparently not. In reference to her own parents, the words “mother” and “father” appear just three times each. Looking back, I see I had much the same impression about Bryher’s much-later non-fictional memoir: “The Heart to Artemis is remarkably depersonalized. If Bryher were to take a Myers-Briggs test, I’m pretty sure she would prove to be an NT. We learn a great deal about her thoughts and very little about her feelings. For a life so full of experiences, it’s almost creepily dispassionate.”

Development was in some ways Bryher’s most successful novel. Published in both England and the U.S., it went into second printings. One reason was the controversy stirred up by her account of Downwood. After publishing an article titled “Cramped School Girls” that summarized Bryher’s descriptions of the school, The Daily Mail solicited “the opinions of our readers, particularly those who have attended such schools as are the subject of Miss Bryher’s outspoken criticism.” Over the next few days, numerous women wrote in. One girl said “To pass examinations was the main object at my school. The rules were particularly stupid.” A former teacher said she had led “the cramped life of a nun,” though she felt the experience of the war meant that many were coming back “with a far more human outlook.” A Miss Cowdroy, principal of Crouch End School, however, thought that schools like Downwood had become “as extinct as the dodo. Every modern school aims at complete self-development and self-expression.” One father supported Bryher, writing that “Parents need to insist upon the reform of the mid-Victorian system,” while Avery H. Forbes, a teacher with 38 years’ experience argued somewhat ironically that “girls are far better taught than are boys of the same age.”

Bryher responded with a letter to the editor, rejecting Miss Cowdroy’s argument and suggesting that schools like Downwood weren’t becoming extinct fast enough. She spread the fault widely if evenly: “I blame the parents. It is their duty to insist that a suitable and healthy education should be given to their children…. I blame the teachers. They should insist on freedom of life and thought…. I blame the children themselves. They should fight for an education that will fit them for their future life….” The Mail, however, gave the last word to Miss Angela Brazil from Coventry, who said she’d received letters from hundreds of schoolgirls, most of whom wrote of the “gorgeous fun” they had at school. Despite Miss Brazil’s optimism, though, sadly too many of Bryher’s criticisms of Downwood remain valid for our schools a hundred years later.

Development, by Bryher
London: Constable, 1920
New York: Macmillan, 1920

Hot-House, by G. E. Trevelyan (1933)

Title page from G. E. Trevelyan's Hot-House

In a biographical sketch, G. E. (Gertrude Eileen) Trevelyan wrote of her time at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford: “Did not: play hockey, act, row, take part in debates, political or literary, contribute to the Isis or attend cocoa parties, herein failing to conform to the social standards commonly required of women students.” If we go by Hot-House, her fictional account of one young woman’s three years at Oxford, it’s clear she didn’t think much of those standards. Trevelyan said her chief accomplishments at Oxford were developing “smoker’s throat and a taste for misanthrophic reflection.”

Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan from the Oxford Chronicle, June 17, 1927
Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan from the Oxford Chronicle, June 17, 1927

She didn’t omit mention of her winning the 1927 Newdigate Prize for English verse — the first ever by a woman. The novelty of the award led to the story being picked up by wire services and reprinted in newspapers worldwide — in everything from The Daily Mail to The St. Louis Daily Livestock Reporter to The Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser. Trevelyan was presented the prize at the Encaenia ceremony, following the award of degrees honoris causa to Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander during the First World War, Field Marshal Viscount Edmund Allenby, who freed the Middle East from the Ottoman Turks, and Etienne Gilson, a French philosopher. The day before, there had been a total eclipse of the sun, the first visible in England since 1724, and most of the male students at Oxford had taken the event as an excuse to leave early. “This,” The Oxford Times asserted, “doubtless explained the presence in the gallery of many undergraduettes in their quaint hats.” Trevelyan herself chocked up the publicity surrounding her award to astonishment at “evident revolutionary tendencies at work in the University.” The fact that the University Council had decided, just two weeks prior, to limit the number of women students to 620 suggests it wasn’t much of a revolution.

Trevelyan made her analogy for Oxford’s women’s colleges clear on her title page, including a definition from Chamber’s Dictionary: “Hot-house: a house kept hot for the rearing of tender plants.” Anyone who’s ever been in a hot-house knows that in addition to providing an benign environments for growing plants, their warm, humid atmospheres can also be suffocating. This certainly seems to have been Trevelyan’s view of her own school. From reading Hot-House, one gets the impression that what Queen Anne’s College — Trevelyan’s fictional stand-in for Lady Margaret Hall — fostered was not learning or personal growth but gossip and relentless surveillance. Everyone seems to keep track of everyone else. When Mina, the impressionable young woman at the center of Trevelyan’s story, runs down the hall in her pajamas and collapses in a hysterical fit outside the door of a fellow student, it’s all anyone talks about the next day.

In the servant’s hall: “Lyin’ on the floor, she was, all rolled in an eiderdown. Cryin’ somethin’ cruel.”

In the kitchen: “Did you hear that? How one of the maids saw a stewdent rolling on the floor in New Building corridor and screamin’ fit to bring the house down?”

In the Common Room: “Yes, in the New Building corridor. On Sunday night.”

In the Senior Common Room: “What’s this story about Cook wandering round the passages at night?”

One thing I admire about Trevelyan’s work is that in every one of her books, she dives into the deep end and really submerges herself in her subject. In the case of Hot-House, this means she brings the reader into the walls of Queen Anne College and keeps us trapped inside its claustrophic atmosphere without a break for almost 400 pages. The book opens as Wilheminia Delacroix Cook — Mina — a new first-year student, rides along Parks Road, returning to her room after having tea with Alec, a friend of her brother. We follow like a camera as she weaves through the streets, past Keble, across the Broad, by the Bodleian Library and into the gates of Queen Anne. The college presents a predatory image: “Crouched, throwing out wings, like tentacles, along side the road and away, at hidden angles, towards the river.” It grabs Mina into these tentacles and this is the last time we get a breath of fresh air for the next three years.

Trevelyan could be accused of over-egging her cake. Mina is immature even by undergraduate standards, impressionable, obsessive, and given to exaggeration and excessive rumination. Her emotional amp goes all the way to 11. The grim old heads in the Senior Common Room take her measure early on: “Rather unbalanced, you know. Nerves and so on. Not quite the right thing for the college, perhaps.” Mina is quickly swept up in the first weeks’ welcoming activities:

What a rush. Lectures, and all the things you had to get for your room, and so many Third Years and Second Years asking you to cocoa. (And why did they call it cocoa? It never was cocoa. And they always made some joke about its being something else. Was that why? And people always popping in and out. So exhausting.

Mina’s college career careens through a series of crises, most of her invention and fueled by her desire to impress everyone by the intensity of her responses. At first, this seems to be the persona she’s chosen to take with her fellow First Termers — the family, as she calls them. When her mother falls ill early in the term, she announces, “Dears, Mina may have to desert her family soon”: “I must. It’s absolutely indicated. I must go and stroke the lamb’s head.” Anyone who’s been in a high school drama club will recognize the type immediately.

Postcard view of Lady Margaret Hall

The problem, though, is that Mina buys her own act. She quickly latches onto her tutor, Mlle. Claude Morlaix, a no-nonsense woman with little time or sympathy for her student’s desperate need for approval and, worse, affection. By the middle of the second term, classmates are murmuring behind her back: “Mina seems frightfully keen on her, doesn’t she?” To them, she refers to Morlaix as “the lamb,” tenderly but also slightly dismissively. Unfortunately, she uses the same language in her own thoughts, becomes convinced that it is Morlaix, not she, who’s the dependent. To make matters even worse, Mina has a competitor — Erica, a recent graduate. Morlaix and Erica share a flat outside of college and similar attitudes towards its environment: “It’s rather awful living in. So many people and none of them real.” When Morlaix suffers an eye infection and is out of action for weeks, Mina assumes the role of savior. “One must, simply must, rescue the lamb somehow. One couldn’t … absolutely and definitely could not … simply abandon the unfortunate infant to that … that woman.” Morlaix, of course, has no interest in being saved, especially not by some high-strung undergraduate.

After much angst and many scenes in which the various college choruses — the family, the faculty, the kitchen help — comment on her histrionics, Mina moves on to another obsession: Professor Ferrand, a quiet English tutor recently widowed and perhaps a bit careless of his appearance. She becomes convinced she is destined to be his helpmate, an illusion he unknowingly fosters through simply being polite. When even he finds it necessary to disabuse her of any interest in having another wife, a classmate asks what she plans to do: “Do, my lamb? But … but as if that … as if that made just any difference. As if it did. In any case … absolutely in any case … there’s … there’s the edge. And one just has to jump.” Unfortunately, by this point, near the end of the Third Year, no one has much time for Mina’s melodrama. “Oh, yes, of course. Yes, I see,” the classmate replied, puzzled.

Although things are less claustrophobic in universities now — Lady Margaret Hall has been coed for decades — the artificial and self-contained nature of college life still presents adaptation challenges after graduation, particularly for anyone who stays in a dorm or fraternity/sorority house the whole time. We can recognize the despair Mina feels at the prospect of going down. “But it’s got … just got … to go on. All this. The college. It can’t just stop.” “We’re all going down, aren’t we?” a classmate replies. “It can’t make very much difference.” But to Mina, leaving school is not moving forward. For her, it’s “complete, utter, dissolution….”

By this point in the book, we feel as if we’ve spent the full three years locked in a cramped and overheated college room. The final section of Hot-House — “Bedding Out” — takes us a year or so later. Mina’s classmates are out in the world: teaching, working in a store, worried about the practical tasks of daily life. But also writing to and about Mina. Though out of school, her way of dealing with things hasn’t changed. She tracks down Alec in South Africa and pursues him, convinced the “lamb” needs her care. Rejected, she selects another object and follows him to South America. And so on. I needn’t say how the story ends.

After 380-plus pages inside Queen Anne’s College, however, “Bedding Out” seems, as Coleridge said in his famous comparison of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, like stepping from “a stuffy, hot sick-room, and Fielding to an open lawn on a breezy day.” Had the whole book been like this, I would consider Hot-House one of the better English novels of its time. But the truth is that pages 1 through 384 are in dire need of an editor.

Trevelyan’s greatest strength is her willingness to go into her fictional experiments completely. When she commits to a setting, a viewpoint, a cast of characters, she gives it her all. Sometimes, as in the case of William’s Wife and Appius and Virginia, this risk-taking pays off in stunning returns. In the case of Hot-House, I suspect some readers would feel short-changed. It’s true, as Anna Bogen has written, that Trevelyan’s treatment of Mina “wrests from the reader an uncanny mix of irony and empathy.” We can feel for her while also thinking her ridiculous.

But Trevelyan also makes some unwise choices. At the macroscopic level, the book needs to be cut ruthlessly. There is no need to dissect, re-dissect, and re-re-dissect every little crisis in Mina’s hyper-crisis-filled three years at college. The narrative falls into a predictable pattern one wearies of. At a microscopic level, there are things like Mina’s italics-laden thoughts and dialogue: a little of this goes a long way, n’est-ce pas? Worse that this — unforgivable, really — is Trevelyan’s attempt to capture the accent of Irma Lupo, a Brazilian woman loosely attached to the faculty of Queen Anne’s. One comes to dread the character’s appearance — partly because she’s used as a caustic, eating away at the fabric of just about every relationship in the school, but mostly because of sentences like this: “Eet ees a week since I meet ‘er…. I wondaired eef you know eef she ees eel?” It’s as bad as anything out of Uncle Remus Tales or any other execrable dialogue fiction from the turn of the 20th Century.

The novelist Barbara Pym read Hot-House when the book first came out, while still a student at St. Hilda’s College in Oxford. “Reading Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel Hot-House,” she wrote in her diary. “I desperately want to write an Oxford novel – but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well.” A bit of simmering down would have helped Hot-House: inside this book is are 250 pages of a terrific novel. Would that Trevelyan’s editors at Martin Secker had handed back her manuscript with a single instruction: “Distill.”

Good luck on finding a copy of the first edition of Hot-House. I didn’t even bother to link to AddAll.com because there’s nothing there. The title links to WorldCat.org, but there are just eleven library copies listed. You can, however, purchase it from the academic publisher Routledge. What you have to look for is this gripping title: Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II, edited by Dr. Anna Bogen. Act now and you can get it for the low, low sale price of $148, or as the folks at Routledge should call it, “our direct-to-shredder rate,” since fewer and fewer institutions have the appetite for such prices and no individual readers have the stomach for this nonsense.

Other Reviews

• Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement

Miss G. E. Trevelyan, as she showed in her first novel, Appius and Virginia, is undeniably a writer with an unusual gift of psychological penetration. This is displayed to the full in Hot-House, yet we doubt if any but specialists will persevere to the end of it. A psychoanalyst may read it as he would a case book, and the principals and staff of girls’ school and women’s colleges should read it as a matter of duty. But it is doubtful if many of the readers will be able to stand this “listening-in” to a neurotic girl’s thoughts and babblings, or bear the stifling monotony of the style — cleverly enough designed as it is to show the suffocating atmosphere of Miss Trevelyan’s college….

Only a deep concern about modern youth and its tendencies could drive a reader through the book from cover to cover, for it is not so much a novel as a social document and may well be laid aside with a sense of disquiet. Can Youth — sheltered Youth — really become so unbalanced, so morbid, so stifled as this. Is Oxford such a forcing-ground for pettiness and neurosis?

• Britannia and Eve

A clever book and also very difficult to read. The prose here, instead of being hurdy-gurdy, is a series of gasps and wriggles…. The principal character, a girl called Mina, has no discoverable purpose or power of reasoning, and is hard to distinguish from a lunatic.

• E. J. Scovell, Time and Tide

Hot-House has merit as art, but it is bad, because it is unbalanced, social criticism. It is a very well disciplined book. The deterioration of Mina Cook through her nine terms at Oxford is carefully and subtly observed, and for all the monotony of the narrative, which gives one a mistaken sense of repetition, there is no waste in the recording of it; indeed, the author has preserved so devotedly the unities of place and of subject that the novel is a little like a scientific monograph on some subject studied in deliberate isolation….

Miss Trevelyan could reply to this that Hot-House is not sociology at all. It is satire, and no one (except the victim) asks to be fair; it is art, which has to select and simplify and exaggerate…. But it is all rather dull. The stifling evenness of temperature makes it heavy reading, and that evenness is through all the book; for even the characters that escape from the hothouse seem to exist chiefly in their reaction to it. Any story is likely to become wearing too, when almost all its events and emotions are moonshine, existing only in the character’s imagination: and this is true of Hot-House.

• The Guardian

Where this novel falls into the hands of an Oxford man his first instinct will be to say, “I told you so.” … The book itself is written with quite remarkable skill. The heroine is one of those girls whom one calls “vague.” She thinks and speaks with the utmost incoherence. She is extraordinarily suggestible; and in the course of three years of uneventful college life she succeeds in erecting out of nothing, and brooding over and living through, a full half-dozen of emotional crises. It is an uncomfortable novel, as all really successful studies of hysteria are likely to be.

• The Sydney Sunday Sun and Guardian

G. E. Trevelyan has been so determined to give us a minutely detailed picture of life in an Oxford women’s college that the result is rather like looking at a collection of insects through a microscope. This would be endurable if the microscope were properly in focus, or the insects were at all interesting, but the author adjusts it at such a distorted angle that the mind of the normal person revolts from it. There are, moreover, running through the book sly, faint suggestions of a type of perversion not usually discussed much except by the ultra modern, and irritatingly enough, the suggestions are never sufficiently definite for us to know whether the author really intends them or whether it is our own nasty minds at work.

Hot-House, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1933

Witches’ Sabbath, by Maurice Sachs

Cover of Spurl Editions reissue of Witches' Sabbath by Maurice Sachs

Maurice Sachs was a charmer. Jean Cocteau once warned their mutual friend, the poet Max Jacob, “Don’t trust Maurice. He’s a charmer. He would try to charm God Himself!” In writing his memoirs with utterly self-effacing candor, he managed to make his charm live on after him. Sachs wrote in the tradition of Rousseau, Stendhal, and André Gide, convinced that the greatest sin of all was hypocrisy. In the pages of his posthumously-published memoir, Witches’ Sabbath — being reissued this week from Spurl Editions — and its sequel The Hunt, Sachs admits to breaking most of the Commandments.

Though he rarely managed to complete the novels he started and few of his plays made it to the stage, Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few. Though a homosexual, he wasn’t averse to going to bed with a woman if it served a purpose. He also wasn’t averse to sleeping with the enemy. He seduced several German officers while living in occupied Paris and numerous members of the LVF (Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme, a Nazi-friendly French military group) and Gestapo after moving to Hamburg in 1943. “My life has been nothing but one long complicity with the guilty,” he wrote. “I have always been on the side of the pariahs.”

Sachs’ grandmother had scandalized French society by leaving her husband to marry Jacques Bizet, the talented but erratic and spendthrift son of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen. Sachs idolized Jacques, but by the time they became close, Bizet was already bent on self-destruction. Maurice remembers Bizet playing around with a revolver one day. He “fired one bullet out the window to show me it was really loaded, and put the barrel in my mouth, right up against my palate. Then he put my forefinger on the trigger and said: ‘When you’ve had enough of life, that’s the way to kill yourself. It’s clean, and you don’t feel a thing.’” Not long after that, Bizet used the gun in exactly that way to take his life. Maurice was just sixteen.

Sachs’ grandfather was a wealthy diamond merchant, but Sachs’ parents managed to squander his legacy. When he was seventeen, Maurice had to arrange for his mother’s quick escape to England after she wrote her creditors a large check guaranteed to bounce. He disliked his family so much he fantasized in his memoir about the family he wished for: “My father comes in all muddy from foxhunting, my mother gets up from the piano where she has been singing a simple ballad.” He claimed the only things he inherited from his parents were his father’s laziness and his mother’s “lack of balance.”

His parents rid themselves of the responsibility to raise Maurice by sending him off to a boarding school. By his account, French boarding schools were just as much hotbeds of sadomasochism and homosexual as English ones. Maurice skirted the approaches of masters and upperclassmen but fell in love with a fellow student and appears to have accepted his sexual preference with remarkably little angst.

After leaving school, he set himself up in Paris with what he’d saved from his grandfather’s estate and dove headfirst into the city’s social and cultural life. “How good it felt to be twenty, in those days. This was the reign of gaiety and license,” he recalled. He met the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and fell under the spell of his piety. Sponsored by Maritain and his wife, Sachs converted to Catholicism in 1925 and soon after entered a seminary to become a priest.

It was to be a short stay. Sachs put on his soutaine in January 1926; by the end of September, he had been ejected from the order. While enjoying a short vacation on the Riviera, he made the acquaintance of the American writer Glenway Westcott, who in turn introduced him to a handsome (and wealthy) teenager named Tom Pinkerton. Sachs fell madly in love with Pinkerton. Though Sachs maintained the relationship remained platonic, Pinkerton’s mother complained to the Bishop of Nice.

Covers of French editions of Le Sabbat by Maurice Sachs

Sachs acknowledged that “I mistook an ephemeral enthusiasm for an eternal vocation.” He also confessed that he felt “a mixed delight” in the trappings of the church “that was not entirely pious.” He loved his soutaine, for example: “The black was becoming, and made me look slender.” He is also reported to have had his lined with pink silk crêpe du Chine.

He went from one institution to another. Leaving the seminary made him eligible for military service, and he was soon stationed with the French army of occupation along the Rhine in Germany. While his first job was monitoring latrines, he was soon put in charge of the officer’s library after a colonel found him reading Montesquieu at his post. About the only thing he took away from his time in the army was his lifelong friendship with the poet Max Jacob.

Back in Paris again, he indulged himself in the two vices he’d become acquainted with in the military: sex and drink. Though he claimed not to have known of their existence, he began frequenting Paris’s male brothels, including the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, notorious as the scene of Marcel Proust’s more extreme sexual experiences. He also became a profligate drinker: “it was difficult, if not impossible, for me to sit down to a meal without having drunk about ten cocktails.”

Sachs rarely held back his passions. If Cocteau learned to be wary of Maurice’s charms, Sachs gave into his enchantment with the poet and artist completely: it was, he wrote, “total, immediate, and delicious.” “When we left this magician,” Sachs recalled, “I knew beyond all doubt that I was going to live only for him.” Cocteau’s response to Sachs was friendly but cautious.

He did, however, recommend the young man to Coco Chanel, who hired him to assemble a private library. Then “on the point of no longer counting her fortune,” Chanel gave him a monthly budget of 60,000 Francs and carte blanche in his commission. “I had no problem making a good living out of this sum,” Sachs wrote in something of an understatement. It’s unlikely that much of Chanel’s investment made it to her shelves. He took full advantage of her largesse:

I had an apartment, paintings, a car, a secretary, two servants, a masseur, expensive love affairs; I spent my nights in cabarets, my afternoons at the tailor’s, I bought books and bibelots, and this was perhaps the moment of my life when I enjoyed the highest degree of physical comfort. What young man would not have been intoxicated by so many absurd grandeurs which he believed to be the result of his personal genius?

By the time he’d exhausted Chanel’s good humor, however, he’d managed to convince other investors of his genius as well. Lucien Demotte hired Sachs to help assemble collections of French paintings that were shown in Paris and London. The pair then headed, artworks in hand, to New York, where Demotte owned a gallery on East 57th Street. Unfortunately, they landed in New York with perhaps a million dollars’ worth of merchandise which had little prospect of being sold. Sachs was able to hang onto Demotte’s coattails for a while, standing in as a groomsman when Demotte married the daughter of the Franco-American tycoon Felix Wildenstein in early 1931, but he soon had to fend for himself.

Louis Marcoussis, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurice Sachs and Moise Kisling at the Claridge Galleries, London, June 1929
Louis Marcoussis, Giorgio de Chirico, Maurice Sachs and Moise Kisling at the Claridge Galleries, London, June 1929

He came up with a solution with the help of Harold Peat, director of a lecture tour agency. Impressed with Sachs’ good looks and suave manners, he agreed to take Sachs on as a lecturer. The only problem was: on what?

“What will you talk about?”
“About art.”
“There can’t be more than three hundred people who are interested in that. We need three thousand. Why not talk about politics?”
“Because I don’t know anything about politics.”
“Just read the morning papers, and that evening tell what you read in your own words.”

Two weeks later, Peat was selling his new client as “Maurice Sachs: Famous French Economist,” whose talks promised to “Train a Spotlight on the Secrets of Europe.” Sachs also found support for his new career in an admiring member of his early lectures. Gwladys Matthews, whose father was pastor of the largest Presbyterian congregation in Seattle, was an aspiring writer who wanted to get free of her family.

Sachs claimed he told her of his preference for men but said he was interested in gaining a wife for the sake of a future political career. He charmed Reverend Matthews with the sincerity of his passion: “I love your daughter,” he told Matthews. “If you do not give your consent to our marriage, I shall marry her all the same.” Regardless of who was fooling whom, Maurice and Gwladys were married in Seattle in June 1932, her father officiating.

In Witches’ Sabbath, Sachs referred to Seattle as “Morpheus,” which gives a clue to the prospects for the marriage. The couple honeymooned in the Adirondacks then returned to the West Coast, taking an apartment in San Francisco. It was there, in April 1934, that Gwladys filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion. “Brilliant Romance to End” read the Associated Press headline for the news. In fact, what would prove Maurice’s longest romantic involvement had begun – according to the divorce papers – in February 1933 he ran off with a young Californian he refers to in the book as Henry. As usual, Sachs was honest about his dishonesty: “I had married her like a madman; I left her like a coward,” he wrote.

Gwladys, by the way, later moved to Hollywood, worked as a screenwriter and married the pioneering photographer Ned Scott in 1936. Before his desertion, she also did Sachs the favor of translating his memoir, The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, which Knopf published just weeks after Maurice took off with Henry.

Cover of The Decade of Illusiion by Maurice Sachs

The book, now long out of print, received good reviews. “A charming and delightfully kaleidoscopic parade,” wrote C. Norris Millington in The American Magazine of Art. “staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France.” Millington credited Sachs for his “dramatis personae”: “practically every well-known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, bookseller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” Others thought he took his personal Who’s Who too far, noting that his index listed 770 names, or roughly three names for every page.

Maurice and Henry took the advance for Decade of Illusion and bought berths on a cattle boat returning to Le Havre. Sachs returned to a family devasted by the Depression. “Nous n’avons rien” he wrote: “We have nothing left.” Sachs’ mother had suffered a heart attack; his Uncle Richard had committed suicide. Though Sachs’ most tolerant, if skeptical, supporter, André Gide, helped him get a job editing a new series for La Nouvelle Revue Française, the money wasn’t enough to support the two lovers and Maurice had to fill in as a desk clerk at the cheap hotel where they stayed. Sachs’ description of the hotel (which he calls the Hotel Saint-Joachim but was actually l’hôtel Saint-Yves) and its residents are some of the best passages in Witches Sabbath.

A man who stays in a hotel, far from his habitual milieu, inwardly liberated, rarely constrains himself. The employee sees him naked. In two years of the hotel business, I learned a great deal about human behavior. I have seen maniacs, debauchees, paragons of virtue, monsters of anger, the timorous, the greedy, and the generous; I have observed vanity and folly, dreadful aberrations, charming virtues, conduct full of inner distinction, and incredible abasement I have watched, and a horrible spectacle it was, thousands of individuals eat, whom it was my duty to watch as they did so (spaghetti dinners were always the worst). The toilet that doesn’t work, the bath that overflows, the bed in which, in spite of everything, a lady believes she has found a mischievous flea, oblige a curious participation in the intimacy of people whom you know too much about and whom you don’t know. The intimacy that no sympathy motivates is as painful as a promiscuity of the flesh.

Even with this income, Sachs wrote, “There was almost no day when I knew exactly how we were going to eat that evening.” He admits to hanging around the bookstalls across the river from the Louvre for the purpose of stealing books. Cocteau later wrote that during this time, Sachs would stuff his pockets with toilet paper, rustling it so others thought his pockets were full of 1,000-Franc notes. “It gives me confidence,” Sachs told Cocteau.

Copies of Spanish, Italian and German editions of Witches Sabbath

Sachs’ way of coping with poverty disgusted some of his acquaintances. Marcel Jouhandeau, who later collaborated with the Nazis, claimed that it was his encounters with Sachs that led him to write a notorious article, “How I Became an Anti-Semite,” for the journal of the far-right party, Action Française.

Sachs was saved by the actor Pierre Fresnay, best known among English-speaking audiences for his role as the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu in Jean Renoir’s 1937 film, La Grande Illusion. Fresnay encouraged him to write for the stage. Though most of Sachs’ attempts never reached completion, let alone the stage, his translation of the Terence Rattigan play, French Without Tears was a success. Fresnay enlisted Sachs to work as stage manager when he organized a run of plays performed on alternating nights in London’s West End in 1938. Sachs returned to Paris exhausted. It is here that Witches’ Sabbath ends. “I am leaving. I don’t know where I am going, where I shall go. To the East, if I have any luck.”

The Hunt ( La chasse à courre), Sachs’ last and incomplete memoir, picks up a two years later in May 1940, as the German Blitzkrieg was approaching Paris. Sachs had managed to attach himself to the staff of the government radio network and fled with it to the Third Republic’s final capital in Bordeaux. There, he first encountered the deceit, greed, and hypocrisy that would characterize much of French life under the Occupation. After a few weeks of sharing an over-priced bed in an overcrowded hotel, he returned to Paris.

There, he found the black market was already booming. “What was I going to do if not the black market?” he asked. Once again, Sachs relied on his charm and connections to work his way in. He became a specialist in moving jewelry and precious goods, often working on consignment. He lied and was lied to on a daily basis. “I was up to my neck in the very finest garbage,” he wrote.

And exceptional garbage it was. While rationing and deprivation was the rule for ordinary Parisians, with the right connections and enough money, the life of luxury rolled on: “the Chataigné … turned out a delectable lobster au beurre blanc, Philippe served the foie gras at the height of rationing, chocolate mousse, and meat without coupons, the Vieux Pont-Neuf, where they had cakes made with real cream, Gaffner served beefsteaks, Lola Tosch offered leg of lamb, et cetera….” It took a furious amount of wheeling and dealing to keep up this lifestyle, however, and Sachs’ accounts of his many transactions are both dizzying and mind-numbing.

After a point, however, the reader loses interest in knowing how much he took from the Duchesse d’Y or sold to the Comte de T.. Sachs came to feel the same way. “The fatigue, the boredom, yes, above all the boredom of these incessant transactions, the unreality, the roguery, the disgust I felt for myself and for others suddenly seized me by the throat,” he wrote. He teamed up with the ex-wife of one of his friends and retreated to the quiet of a village in Normandy.

Covers of US and UK editions of The Hunt by Maurice Sachs

In The Hunt, he refers to the woman as Pomme. In reality, she was Violette Le Duc, who later became famous for her memoir, La Bâtarde. Though they spent months together – continuing to keep up a steady black-marketing operation, only now in produce, meats and cheeses – it would be hard to tell from comparing their respective accounts. In The Hunt, Pomme is a pleasant companion with an absurd crush on him. In La Bâtarde, he is the brilliant, handsome, and talented Maurice Sachs – Le Duc refers to him by his full name at least 50% of the time. Sachs ultimately found her suffocating. Le Duc credits him with inspiring her to write:

Maurice said to me next day: “Your unhappy childhood is beginning to bore me to distraction. This afternoon you will take your basket, a pen, and an exercise book, and you will go and sit under an apple tree. Then you will write down all the things you tell me.”

That afternoon, Le Duc began to write what would become her first book, L’Asphyxie. If you are interested in a third version of this story, you can watch director Martin Provost’s 2013 film, Violette.

Maurice and Pomme were accompanied to Normandy with Karl-Heinz, a German Jewish orphan that Sachs took a notion to adopt. The Rothschild family had taken in a group of Jewish orphans ejected from Germany a few months before the outbreak of war in hopes of finding homes with good French families. One doubts two black marketeers hiding out in the country were quite what they had in mind. And Sachs’ treatment of Karl-Heinz demonstrated the dangers of boutique parenting.

Sachs was attracted by the twelve-year-old’s good looks, but as soon as the boy opened his mouth, he left his foster father with a longing to flee. Karl-Heinz was not interested in books or art or music. His ambition was to be a waiter. Sachs was glad to learn of an American Quaker organization that was arranging for orphans to be sent to families in the U.S. and soon Karl-Heinz was standing at the nearest train station, ticket in hand. “My burning love for Karl-Heinz had already been extinguished in the tepid waters,” Sachs confessed, happy to be rid of the boy’s “appealing mediocrity.”

Sachs returned to Paris and the 24×7 life of deal-making, but his luck in coming out on the profitable end of these increasingly complicated three-, four- and five-way transactions was on the wane. By the beginning of autumn 1942, he was looking for another way out.

In October 1942, Sachs finally headed East. To Hamburg. His rationale is unclear from The Hunt and none of the several biographies written since the 1960s have come up with a definitive answer, but the most likely reasons relate to lust and greed. Sachs was infatuated with the strong, self-confident blond Aryans he encountered in smart uniforms in Paris and saw a chance to carouse with more of them in the Fatherland. He also thought the Nazis would pay well for information supplied by a willing Frenchman operating inside the forced labor organization supplying thousands of workers for German factories.

Sachs managed to slip out of occupied France in November 1942, sleeping with his guide along the way. The final section of The Hunt is drawn from letters he sent back to Paris. At first, he found the experience of going to work with hundreds of other French workers tedious: several pages of The Hunt are devoted to cataloguing the character flaws and bad habits of Bretons, Gascons, and others. And “Need I add that they had never heard the word ‘conversation’ in their lives?” He was proud, however, of what he referred to as his “little Ministry of Internal Affairs.”

Sachs was in Hamburg when some of the cities’ most devastating bombing raids took place. “The city is really nothing more than a heap of charred rubble in which I still have a room without water, without electricity, almost without anything,” he wrote after one raid. Still he felt more at home than he had in occupied France. “No doubt about it, I adore this country: the only one where I find it easy to be happy, where I’m instinctively happy, as it were.” And there was no shortage of sexual partners: “There’s love for all through the town,” he reported almost giddily.

In June 1943, he wrote with excitement – and suspicious ambiguity – of getting a new job. “I am well paid, newly clothed, and well thought of,” he crowed. The job undoubtedly involved collaboration with the Gestapo, but it also provided him with opportunities to seduce young Frenchmen of the LVF and the occasional willing Nazi. He may not have known that at the age of 36, he was already being referred to as Maurice la tante — Maurice the aunt.

The Nazis were less susceptible to Sachs’ charm, however. In November 1943, he was arrested for his homosexual activities and sent to the Fuhlsbüttel prison. What happened to Sachs after this was for some years a mystery. When La chasse à courre was first published in Paris in 1947, it ended with a postscript added by the publisher stating Sachs’ whereabouts were unknown. Later, it was reported he had been lynched by inmates. Finally, a German reporter was able to confirm that in April 1945, Sachs and the other prisoners in Fuhlsbüttel were evacuated to avoid the approaching British Army and forced to march to another facility in Kiel. Walking through the snow without food, water, or proper clothing, many of the inmates died along the way. When Sachs and another prisoner failed to join the formation on the morning of April 14, 1945, they were shot in the head by a Belgian SS guard.

Le Sabbat (subtitled souvenirs d’une jeunesse orageuse — Memoirs of a Stormy Youth) caused “a considerable furor in literary and salon circles,” as Janet Flanner reported in a 1946 “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker. One French reviewer described it as “The chronicle of a vicious drunk and pervert, whose struggles to refashion his life and regenerate his soul are blocked by a voluptuous pleasure in guilt and loathsomeness.” Even untranslated, the assessment of another reads like a seminarian’s list of venal and deadly sins: “Mal élevé, vicieux, orgueilleux, vaniteux, adonné aux pires excès, aux perversions les plus scandaleuses, homosexuel, renégat, mufle, il représente le point extrême de la jeunesse débauchée et cynique.” An American academic reviewer put it more bluntly: “Young Jew writes je as easily as Jean-Jacques.”

Cover of Day of Wrath by Maurice Sachs

The book was first translated into English by Robin King in 1953 as Days of Wrath: Confessions of a Turbulent Youth. It’s a rendition best left forgotten. The TLS reviewer called the translation “slapdash” and “disfigured by an exasperating carelessness in the proof-reading.” And despite his claim that the book was of greater literary than documentary value, King also chose to bowdlerize the text. As Benedict Nicolson put it in his New Statesman review, “There can be no excuse” for King’s editorial decisions: “… reproducing parts of chapters, omitting a phrase here, a paragraph there, in so arbitrary a fashion that one is continuously driven back to the French text to discover what the author intended.”

Covers of US, UK and paperback editions of Witches Sabbath by Maurice Sachs

Spurl Editions has wisely chosen to reissue the 1964 Richard Howard translation, titled Witches’ Sabbath, instead. At the time of its original publication, Anthony Powell called it “a near-classic of its kind.” Powell had an elegant way of describing Sachs’ elusive manner of dealing with facts. “Although one suspects there is little here that is not, within its context, true, the skill of the narrative makes truth almost beside the point.” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick Modiano was so inspired by Sachs’ handling of the truth that he brought Sachs back to life as an aging and unrepentant collaborator in the first novel of his “Occupation trilogy,” La Place de l’Etoile (1968).

A year after Witches’ Sabbath, its sequel The Hunt, Richard Howard’s translation of La chasse à courre was also published by Stein and Day in the U.S. and Calder & Boyars in the U.K.. Although a much shorter and obviously incomplete book, Sachs’ charm was still on display. “There’s a racy, flaunted untrustworthiness about Sachs which keeps you on your guard just as surely as it keeps you reading,” David Williams wrote in The Daily Telegraph. The New Yorker, on the other hand, had the opposite of Robin King’s assessment, saying the book had far more documentary interest than literary merit.

Spurl Editions has done readers a great favor with its reissue of Witches’ Sabbath. At a time when people are looking for a good book to hunker down and enjoy, this is an excellent way to spend a few days while you’re barricaded behind your walls of toilet paper. You can order the book now from Spurl or from Amazon as of April 3.

One by One, by Penelope Gilliatt (1965)

Cover of Pnather paperback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt

When I picked up an old Panther paperback copy of Penelope Gilliatt’s novel One by One at Bookcase, a veritable treasure trove of old books near the cathedral in Carlisle just a few weeks ago, its cover blurb was already a bit too real: “London is once again an isolated, panic-stricken city … in the grip of a fearsome plague that has killed 10,000 by the third week of August.” Now, like Polly Talbot, Gilliatt’s protagonist, I am holed up in my home, advised to avoid venturing out in the interest of containing a new and dangerous virus — which made reading this book a particularly unsettling experience.

It’s impossible not to look for parallels between Gilliatt’s fictional epidemic and today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Polly’s husband Joe is a veterinarian, but he becomes involved early in the response to the mysterious illness that begins taking lives as Europe swelters in a July heatwave — first helping out in a laboratory, then as a lowly orderly in a make-shift morgue and finally seconded as a doctor in a London hospital as the numbers rise. Aware of its contagion potential, he insists that Polly — seven months pregnant — remain at home weeks before the government responds and takes steps to quarantine London from the rest of the UK.

Cover of Atheneum US hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt
Cover of Atheneum US hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt

As in today’s crisis, the government is slow to act: “People were asked, but not ordered, to avoid travelling in and out of London.” Swimming pools are shut; the infected are isolated in their homes, food and supplies being brought to them by civil defense workers in protective gear. “For many days, far too many, no one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Before long, however, most of the city is shut down. Racketeers posing as undertakers take away corpses and set them alight with petrol in empty lots. As in time of the Black Death, survivors find themselves confronted by the overwhelming presence of death, but few are equipped with a faith to cope with it: “The difficulty of living without any system for thinking about dying was unacknowledged, and for that reason very acute.”

And as we are seeing now, some respond by grasping at war as an analogy. “In the emergency the right thing to do was to stir other people to a sense of outrage, to make a stink about it and hope it could be turned into the Armada or Dunkirk or anything but a biological affliction.” At the same time, those at a distance from the worst affected find it hard to break out of their everyday concerns. Over a few days before London is fully quarantined, Polly is able to visit her mother and her friends in the countryside. There, the discussion is not about the virus but about the scandalous public school careers of various MPs: “Our friend was always a great beater…. I should say he has beaten at least half the Cabinet.” The topic shifts then to speculation about closeted gays and unfaithful wives. The old boys express some sympathy for the PM’s wife and her series of ever-richer and fatter lovers: “I always think of Daphne like that, pressed out like a wafer by the great weight of men traveling over her, bumpetty bum, bumpetty bum.” When one finally turns to acknowledge Polly, he asks about the parties she must be missing.

“‘I shouldn’t think there are many,’ she said. ‘Too many of the guests are dead.'”

“It’s not on to mope,” the peer cautions her. As she approaches London on her return, she sees an orange glow in the distance. Burning corpses.

Cover of Secker and Warburg UK hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt
Cover of Secker & Warburg UK hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt

In the novel’s final chapters, the focus shifts from the epidemic writ large to the individual stories of Polly and Joe and situations having little to do with the illness. Polly manages to get out of London to the safety of her mother-in-law’s house by the sea, but finds the potential for harm there — emotional from Joe’s mother and medical from her degenerative GP — far worse than anything in London. Meanwhile, the Press (Gilliatt uses the capital P to hammer home her point), having first made Joe into hero for his selfless hospital work, turn him into a pariah by digging up evidence of a teenage experiment with homosexuality.

It is in these pages that Gilliatt’s aim becomes clear: to skewer the Establishment (using the capital E with which it was hammered in the 1960s) for its complacency. She sees in how upper- and upper-middle class parents cared for their children — including their gay children — indicators of how these children (now the adults in charge) deal with the epidemic:

You never gave him a chance to get near you. You shoved him into a grey flannel suit and sent him to some prissy dame’s-school when he was six, you gave him a meringue or something when he had a good report and you saw that he had his castor oil and you took him to those god-awful mournful churches without even believing a word of it yourself; and that was it. Then you packed him off to boarding school for more of the same when he was eight. Eight. And it went on for ten more years.

In other words: pack them up and get them out of sight. Unfortunately, as is often the case with fiction, messages can get in the way of stories, and One by One ends with what The New York Times’ reviewer, Martin Levin, called a “climactic no sequitur.”

One can identify, in hindsight, which reviewers considered themselves part of the Establishment by their verdicts of the book. Writing for The Listener, Hilary Corke regretted that Gilliatt had chosen to mix good old fashioned science fiction with “social satire and commentary.” Marigold Johnson, the TLS reviewer and never one to blunt her arrows, found the book “Too much of a rag-bag of protest, comic observation, emotional analysis, fantasy and cleverness.” Anthony Burgess, whose own novels were often similar rag-bags, loved it: “If it had a fault, it was the best fault imaginable: more action and characters and ideas than the small space could carry.” Johnson did, however, credit Gilliatt for displaying a “passion and intelligence … far too rare and ambitious for one to wish that it had been written in any other way or to forget the impression it leaves.”

Penelope Gilliatt obituary
One of Penelope Gilliatt’s obituaries

One by One was Penelope Gilliatt’s first novel and though it’s also her shortest, its mix of sharp and strong set pieces of description and dialogue and hazy passages of internal monologues suggest that her fictional talents were better suited for the short story form. Although Gilliatt is primarily remembered now as a film critic, she left behind a considerable body of fiction, most of which can be found online at the Open Library (Link), including One by One. When Gilliatt died of alcoholism in 1993 at the age of 61, her friend lyricist and playwright Betty Comden, wrote, “What a glowing further career she might have had, and what beautiful, inventive, never-to-be-written pages this cleverest of all sausages [a bit of British slang Gilliatt often used] might have produced we will never know.” Were she alive today, however, she would also be among those at most risk in the face of our real-world epidemic.

One by One, by Penelope Gilliatt
London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1965
New York: Atheneum, 1965

As Love is Deep, by Betsey Barton (1957)

Cover of first US edition of As Love is Deep by Betsey Barton

This is a sad book: a daughter’s memoir of her mother’s prolonged and painful death from cancer over the span of four years. It’s an even sadder book when you know what came after it.

Betsey Barton was born in comfort and grew up in luxury. Her father, pioneering advertising man Bruce Barton, didn’t invent the concept of boosterism, but he certainly refined it. His 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, gave aspiring American capitalists a “Get Out of Purgatory” card by assuring them that Jesus — “the world’s greatest business executive” — wanted them to get rich. As a founder of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO), still one of the world’s leading ad agencies, he came up with brand names and slogans that are woven into our vernacular: General Motors; General Electric; and Betty Crocker, to mention a few. Barton went on to become a prominent Republican congressman representing Manhattan and advocating the Isolationist cause at the start of World War Two. During the run for his third term as President, FDR loved to mock Barton and fellow Isolationists Joe Martin and Hamilton Fish III with his phrase “Martin, Barton, and Fish” (to the rhythm of “Winken, Blinken, and Nod”), but his mockery had little effect on Barton’s wealth or social standing.

Betsey Barton (left), from Town and Country magazine, 15 July 1934
Betsey Barton (left), from Town and Country magazine, 15 July 1934

Barton’s only daughter Betsey was in the spotlight from the time she had her coming-out ball. Her picture appeared regularly in newspaper society sections and the pages of slick upscale magazines. In 1934, not long after being photographed for Town & Country, Betsey was severely injured in an automobile accident. Her back was broken and she was left paralyzed from the waist down. Three years later, while spending a winter holiday with her family outside Phoenix, the ambulance carrying her to a hospital for routine physical therapy went off the road, compounding her existing injuries and leaving her with severe nerve damage.

Newspaper article on Betsey Barton's 1937 accident
Photo of Betsey Barton from 26 February 1937 Pittsburgh Post Gazette

At first, Betsey and her parents hoped she would recovery her ability to walk, but after years of expensive and unsuccessful treatments, they came to accept that her condition was irreversible. As she experienced just how many challenges everyday life put in the path of a disabled person — even one with all the advantages of money and position — Betsey became an advocate with a cause. And when the first American servicemen began to return from combat with similar injuries, she became a writer as well. Her first book, And Now to Live Again (1944), was a call for these men not to lose hope.

Cover of first US edition of And Now to Live Again by Betsey Barton

Though she described herself as a nonprofessional, Betsey Barton wrote with the credibility of someone who’d been through the same experience. Her message was simple: in losing one life — a life free of injuries — these men had won a new one, a life “that in many delicate and tender ways is a far better one.” She recognized her readers would be skeptical. “Had I read this years ago when first I lost the use of my legs I would have thrown down the book in disgust,” she admitted. She offered herself as an example of both the potential for rehabilitation and its many opportunities for setbacks. “I have done all the wrong things and made all the mistakes it is possible to make and still survive.” But she also addressed the practical considerations of the handicapped: “Going into restaurants, going into subways, going out to dinner … become monstrous affairs demanding will power and planning and concentration.”

After the war, she continued to take an active role in the cause of the disabled and made frequent visits to military hospitals to talk with and support G.I.s undergoing rehabilitation. She turned these experiences into fictional form with her 1948 novel, The Long Walk. Set in an Army hospital, the story focuses on the “difficult” patients — the men who resist rehabilitation, sunk in their hopelessness and self-pity. Barton placed herself in the story in the person of Janet, a wheelchair-bound young woman whose presence is intended — but with mixed results — to boost the mens’ morale. While most reviews were complimentary, one British critic noted a weakness that runs through much of her writing: “The country which Miss Barton explores with so much sympathy and understanding is entirely that of the mind, and its physical setting is negligible.”

Around the time The Long Walk was published, Betsey’s mother was diagnosed with colon cancer. Having relied heavily on her mother’s support through years of therapy, the news hit Betsey with exceptional force. As Love is Deep is the diary of Esther Barton’s long and ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer and her daughter’s even longer struggle to come to terms with her mother’s death.

When she returned to New York City to be with her mother, Betsey wrote, “I was met by a stranger. A nervous, thin woman with what appeared to be suddenly whitened hair greeted me in the library.” The woman she had left “well and strong and full of life” was now shaking and hesitant. And worst of all for her daughter, she wanted to be left alone. “Mothers don’t ask to be left alone very often. They are the available members of the human race,” Betsey noted, frustrated at being unable to reciprocate the support she’d been given. Even when the two women sit together, Betsey finds herself “filled with a sense of desolation” at her mother’s silence.

This separation becomes a major theme in their relationship and a primary source of the feelings Betsey struggles with after her mother’s death: “So I stood outside her, as I was to do so often in months to come, filled with admiration at her ability to continue on with life as it had always been, terrified at the lack of communication.” Ironically, another accident ensured that Betsey could not be with her mother at the end. When Esther Barton died in November 1951, Betsey herself was laying in a hospital room, having slipped in her bathroom and fractured her left thigh. She was unable to attend the funeral.

The Arizona desert had by then become the Barton’s second home and the setting becomes Betsey’s spiritual refuge over the following years. It also became a practical refuge when the family’s home in Foxboro, Massachussetts — the home she grew up in, a small Colonial cottage expanded through numerous additions — was condemned and had to be demolished. Esther Barton had lavished years of collecting on the house’s furnishings and Betsey now watched “all the lovely things within it” being dispersed to scattered family and friends. “The house could be looked upon as a symbol of a time of life and through tears I could come finally to accept that what I missed was the fact that the time of life was over, must be over, for all of us.” In the desert, she found “a different kind of thinking” as she looks out on the long vistas towards the mountains: “Relationships, too, perhaps, are different because they exist within these lovely dimensions.”

As her mother was dying, Betsey channeled some of her energies into a second novel, The Shadow of the Bridge (1950), set in an exclusive New England girls’ boarding school. There is no mention of this in As Love is Deep, but it’s perhaps significant that one of the two main characters in the novel, Alida, is haunted by the memory of her mother, who died when the girl was still a child. While novelist Sterling North thought the book was “a beautifully organized, exquisitely told story, enriched by a real mastery of abnormal psychology,” most critics were much harsher. “This story of adolescent anguish is clearly written, with earnest intensity, but it casts little light upon ancient trials and the intensity itself is of such an unrelievedly banal order that it is something of an embarrassment,” Gertrude Buckman wrote in The New York Times. “There is freshness neither in the writing nor in the conception or drawing of characters or situation.”

Even though As Love is Deep is just 144 pages long, it took Betsey Barton seven years to write. Though she claims to reach some sense of what we casually refer to as “closure” — “the present was returned to me at last” — there is an underlying and unresolved conflict evident throughout. Early in the book, she writes,

I have given up the idea of working on myself, lost faith in it, since I have learned that will power, no matter how faithfuly applied, cannot restore my ability to walk. At one time I had thought that, despite all medical dictums, my force of will could cure me. Now I know differently. My interest in esoteric knowledge has not waned. It is only that I have suffered the disillusionment of not being able to bring about a miraculous healing of myself.

Both And Now to Live Again and As Love is Deep are filled with calls to find peace and perspective in love, beauty, and spiritual matters. “If we look at it right,” she argues, “even when we are doing what seems like nothing but the drudgery of physical exercise, we are working with divine tools, sacred tools, following the holy laws that will lead us out of disease into ease.” Yet one senses that Betsey Barton was herself never fully convinced. Her own physical challenges rarely allowed themselves to be ignored for long.

Headline from The Los Angeles Times, 13 Decmeber 1962: Betsey Barton, Crippled Author, Drowns in Pool

On the morning of Thursday, 13 December 1962, readers of The Los Angeles Times were greeted with a headline announcing Betsey Barton’s death. The morning before, Betsey’s live-in nurse found her floating face up in the pool outside her house in the hills above Bel-Air. Her wheelchair lay at the bottom of the dead end. Tracks in the lawn and deck indicated Betsey had wheeled herself up to and into the pool. The watch on her wrist read 4:40 AM. The police reported that acquaintances said that Betsey had been despondent over her increasing health problems. Though no note was found, the death was ruled a suicide. Her father funded a fellowship in his daughter’s name, administered by the World Rehabilitation Fund, to support the work of rehabilitation therapists and clinics in Third World countries and provide hope even though Betsey Barton ultimately lost hers.

As Love is Deep, by Betsey Barton
New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1957