The firm, whose Hesperus Classics series specializes in reissues of short, lesser-known works by well-known authors (e.g., Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Tragedy of the Korosko or Goethe’s The Man of Fifty)–or lesser-known works by obscure authors (e.g., Two Princesses by Pushkin’s contemporary, Vladimir Odoevsky), asks readers to “Select one out-of-print book you think worthy and explain in no more than 500 words why you love it and why it deserves to be brought back into print.”

“Your 500 word introduction must be well written and eloquent, and clearly list the title of the book, author name and when the book was last in print (as far as you are aware).”

Based on the usual fare of Hesperus Classics, I would add that books that are under 200 pages, in the public domain, and have been out of print for at least 25-30 years will stand a better chance of being selected.

Email or post your written entry to info@hesperuspress.com by the 1st of June 2012.

The detailed rules can be found at http://www.hesperuspress.com/Web/pages/competition.aspx.

Born and raised in a house just up the street from the Liverpool waterfront, Frank Laskier ran away to sea when just fifteen. Shifting from ship to ship–many of them tramp steamers whose conditions resembled those of B. Traven’s The Death Ship–he spent most of the next dozen years as a merchant seamen. Aside from a short stint when he tried life ashore and ended up in jail for burglary, he spent much of the time filthy and miserable at sea or drunk and violent in port.

Then, sometime in late 1940, his ship, Eurylochus, was attacked and sunk by an merchant raider, the Komoran, off the coast of West Africa. Laskier’s foot was blown off by a shell, and he and the other thirteen survivors spent three days adrift in a life raft before being rescued by a Spanish trawler. He was eventually repatriated to the UK, where he idled away his days in a pub until a young BBC radio producer overheard him regaling some friends with a story. The producer thought him a natural radio personality and convinced Laskier to record an account of the attack and his rescue.

The piece proved immensely popular with wartime listeners and Laskier went on to write and broadcast more talks over the next year. These were collected as My Name is Frank. Of the book, a reviewer in the Spectator wrote:

Frank Laskier’s broadcasts had the stuff of greatness; put into print they lose nothing in the reading. By a natural genius this seaman has found an expression and a rhythm which the poets and artists of the modern world have been striving after for generations.

Although a genuine article, Laskier did allow himself to be used for maximum propaganda effect. In The Merchant Seamen’s War, Tony Lane refers to him as a Stakhanov–the Russian coal miner made a worker’s hero by Soviet propagandists. Laskier appeared in several films, encouraging others to join the Merchant Marine. You can see a preview of one at the British Pathé website.

A year or so later, Laskier published Log Book. The book is clearly an autobiography, as the story follows his own exactly. But, for some unexplained reason, Laskier chose to call himself Jack in the book, and to treat the story as fiction, avoiding most references to specific times and places.

The book suffers not at all by this choice–indeed, it may gain in power, as it thereby allows the writing to stand on its own.

And what writing it is. Reviewing the book in the New York Herald Tribune. Lincoln Colcord called it, “a work of art so simple and acute, that one often pauses to wonder. Here, for example, is Laskier’s description of the return from liberty of a hand who had watched his own brother fall and smash his skull on the deck a few days before:

Outside, beyond the pool of light over the gangway, the stand-by man and Jack could hear a man stumlbing along. He seemed to be having an hysterical argument with somebody. It was the donkey-man–still in his engine-room clothes–as he had gone down the gangway for a quick one. His face, as he came under the light, looked blotched, and red and swollen. He stopped at the quayside and looked up at the ship; a big, grimy figure, gazing up the gangway to the faces of the man and boy–then passing to the outlines of the ship. “You dirty, hungry, lousy bastard! You stinking, bloody old death trap.” His voice rose to a scream: “You … you death ship! Hey, boy, call the bosun–and tell him to come ashore and meet the bloody Madam.” He stood there swaying, and they could see the sweat slowly trickle down his face. Or was it tears–dead bosun was his brother. The stand-by man stood at the tope of the ladder. “Come aboard,” he said, “come up now mate and get some kip.” The donkey-man looked up at him, then he slowly started to crawl up the ladder. Up and up, dragging one foot after the other. his gnarled hands gripping the rail. Up and up, away from the land, away from the whores, and away from himself. He was all the Jims, all the sailors. Leaving all the sordidness and filth of the land–leaving that land–crossing that silent, inviting strip of water–stepping into a new world. One board, the ghost of his brother waited to lead him gently to his bunk. His footsteps rang hollowly as he slumped along the darkness of the deck and vanished into the fo’castle.

There are dozens of such passages throughout the book. I counted over twenty pages I’d dog-eared while reading it.

Laskier was thirty years old when he wrote Log Book, but his voice and perspective are those of a man of long and hard experience. After years of whoring, drinking and fighting, a year in Borstal and another in Nottingham prison, he finally experiences an epiphany one night when he takes a break to go on deck as his ship steams through the Bay of Biscay:

His old friends the porpoises came out and did their set of lancers in front of the bows. He could hear the rustle and swish of their bodies as they surfaced. And the gentle plop as they submerged. The sea, the sky, the moon and the stars–in unison–told him of the glorious heritage of beauty that belongs to the sailor. They would forgive him all, so long as he was worthy of them and could feel their beauty.

His personal peace is short-lived, those, as the Second World War breaks out shortly after he reaches port. He signs on with another ship and is soon convoying a load of Britsh children to Canada. On the return voyage, the old freighter’s engines fail to keep speed and the ship is forced to fall out and make its way back to Liverpool alone–a nervous week of scanning the surrounding waters for signs of U-boats.

The ship’s end comes, however, not in the bitter, rough North Atlantic but on a calm evening, as “Phosphorus gleamed in the wake of the ship, pale green; long, beautiful streaks of cold fire.” The attack comes abruptly, with great noise, fire, explosions, and is over in just two pages, as Jack throws himself into the water, not realizing his foot is gone. He and the few survivors endure three days, exposed, with no water and sharks constantly circling and scraping against their raft.

They have the good fortune to be rescued by a passing trawler and, later, by a Royal Navy ship, and Laskier and his shipmates are evacuated to a hospital ship anchored in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The book ends with Jack back in the UK, and, like Laskier, discovered by the BBC and speaking for the first time on the radio.

Despite the enthusiastic critical reception of Log Book and My Name is Frank, Laskier was quickly forgotten when his propaganda value had faded. He moved to the US and tried to get the movie studios interested in his stories. His first genuine novel, Unseen Harbor, was published in 1947, but received little notice. He died less than a year later, the victim of an automobile accident.

Log Book, by Frank Laskier
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942
New York City: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943

This is the first tip-off that Eugene Löhrke’s 1935 novel, The First Bus Out, is not about the usual bus trip.

All the travellers climb up the rear entrance when the bus finally pulls in, and pile into seats in the back. Surrounded by fog and drizzle, with nothing but an occasional street light or the vague outline of buildings or hills, the bus seems to be lost in a world unto itself. “Thick shadows, gray and black, muffled the painted steel-arch of the ceiling like a dense upholstery. Rapt eyes gazed straight ahead at the blank, dull windshield or out of the leaden windows, seizing casually on each recognizable fragment of landmark, dropping it into the deep soothing vacuum of inertia and speed.”

It doesn’t take long, of course, to figure out what’s going on. The only way all these people could travel on a bus that would need to hit all points on the compass is if they’re really headed for the same destination. Löhrke was not the first to come up with this premise. Sutton Vane’s 1923 play, “Outward Bound,”, brought seven people together in the lounge of an ocean liner, and discover eventually that they’re in the waiting room for Heaven and Hell. It’s also a situation that allowed the writers of “Lost” to work their way out of the convoluted web of concidences they’d spent six seasons weaving.

To Löhrke’s credit, the gimmicks stop as soon as his cast is on board the bus. For the next two hundred pages, we wander through their thoughts, learning a little–but not too much–about them. Mrs. William Godfrey Horton, an imperious dowager who treats the meek Mrs. Harold Strong sitting beside her with contempt, turns out to have only transformed her drunken, abusive and unfaithful husband into the pillar of virtue she wanted when he did her the favor of dying. Myron Baxter, a liberal writer, comes to realize he has nothing to offer the masses he’s spent his time trying to lead into revolt. The only passenger who seems to have no regrets or misgivings is Schiavoni, a Mafia hitman with a gun nestled inside his jacket.

Every once in a while, one of them notices the white, terrified face of a young girl who rises up from behind the driver to scream, but the sound never penetrates his stream of thoughts.

And that’s all that happens, essentially. At the very end, we do follow the thoughts of Mr. Mole, a sad and lonely physics professor, in the last moments as he commits suicide and finds himself back at the beginning, waiting in the bus station. Oddly, however, the lack of action does nothing to detract from book’s enjoyment. Löhrke creates a mosaic from bits of memories from each character, but his touch is usually light and subtle and no one comes to any dramatic realization. The truth is always a little hard to bring into focus, much like the landscape seen through the bus’s window.

Taking a note from Graham Greene, I would class The First Bus Out as an entertainment rather than a novel. For me, it offered a couple evenings’ worth of interesting reading and belongs in a class with Herbert Clyde Lewis’ elegant and grimly comic Gentleman Overboard.

Löhrke was a veteran of World War One who’d worked as a newspaper reporter and translator when he took up fiction in the early 1930s. He wrote a total of four novels, but when he and his wife moved to England in the late 1930s, he focused on nonfiction, writing several books that dealt with events just before and after the outbreak of World War Two. It appears that his health was damaged during duty with the U.S. Army during the war, as he published little afterwards and died at the age of 56 in 1953.

The First Bus Out, by Eugene Löhrke
New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1935

George Thompson’s name won’t be found in too many histories of American literature. That’s because his claim to fame was as perhaps our country’s first great writers of trash. Thompson wrote dozens, maybe hundreds of works with such titles as Venus in Boston, The Gay Girls of New-York, The Mysteries of Bond Street, Adventures of a Sofa, and The Amorous Adventures of Lola Montes, which were as popular and pandering in their day as, say, “Jersey Shore” or “Date My Ex” are today. As David S. Reynolds puts it in an entry on “Sensational Fiction”, “Among the kinds of sexual activity Thompson depicts are adultery, miscegenation, group sex, incest, child sex, and gay sex.” These books were sold by publishers advertising “Rich, Rare and Racy Reading,” and sold for 25 or 50 cents–equivalent to $50 to $100 today, if Internet inflation calculators are reliable.

No surprise, then, that he lays the melodrama on thick when it comes to telling his own life’s story. He runs away from home after knocking his uncle down a staircase and quickly meets up with one Jack Slack, a thief and swell barely older than him, who proceeds to introduce Thompson to beer and champagne. Before the night is over, they’ve met up with a prostitute and fallen into a card game. “What wonder is it that I became a reckless, dissipated individual, careless of myself, my interests, my fame and fortune?,” Thompson reflects.

Methinks he doth protest too much.

He gets a job working as a printer’s apprentice, but the work is, of course, merely the pretext for introducing us into the tangled affairs of the printer and his wife, both of whom are cheating on the other. This soon leads to one of the book’s many dramatic climaxes, as the enraged husband offers the wife one final choice:

With these words, Romaine cocked his pistol and approached his wife, saying, in a low, savage tone that evinced the desperate purpose of his heart—

“Take your choice, madam; do you prefer to die by lead or by steel?”

The miserable woman threw herself upon her knees, exclaiming—

“Mercy, husband—mercy! Do not kill me, for I am not prepared to die!”

“You call me husband now—you, who have so long refused to receive me as a husband. Come—I am impatient to shed your blood, and that of your paramour. Breathe a short prayer to Heaven, for mercy and forgiveness, and then resign your body to death and your soul to eternity!”

So saying the desperate and half-crazy man raised on high the glittering knife. Poor Mrs. Romaine uttered a shriek, and, before she could repeat it, the knife descended with the swiftness of lightning, and penetrated her heart. Her blood spouted all over her white dress, and she sank down at the murderer’s feet, a lifeless corpse!

Now that experience would have been enough for a lifetime for most folks, but it’s just the beginning in Thompson’s case.

Eventually, after a detour into acting, a jail break, a few dozen romantic entanglements and enough other scandals that one soon gives up keeping track, Thompson decides to head to the peace and civility of Brahmin Boston. Oddly, however, for a man who made his fortune on telling other people’s secrets, Thompson took great offense at the prying nature of Bostonians:

A stranger goes among them, and forthwith inquisitive whispers concerning him begin to float about like feathers in the air. “Who is he? What is he? Where did he come from? What’s his business? Has he got any money? (Great emphasis is laid on this question.) Is he married, or single? What are his habits? Is he a temperance man? Does he smoke—does he drink—does he chew? Does he go to meeting on Sundays? What religious denomination does he belong to? What are his politics? Does he use profane language? What time does he go to bed—and what time does he get up? Wonder what he had for dinner to-day?” &c., &c., &c.

Thompson spends just one year in Boston before heading back to the fleshpots of New York, which is where the book comes to an end. Not, however, before he has a chance to swear that “not one single word of fiction or exaggeration has been introduced into these pages.”

And I am Marie of Roumania.

My Life; or The Adventures of George Thompson, Being the Autobiography of an Author
Boston: Federhen, 1854

I sat down to read a few pages to get a sense of the book. An hour later, I was on page 50 and committed to finish it.

Invasion (originally titled Invasion 14 in French) would not, at first glance, seem the sort of book that can pull you in and make you want to stay. Set in Roubaix, a French industrial town just a few miles from the border with Belgium, Invasion is the record of over four years’ occupation by the German army as experienced by dozens of the local inhabitants. Even on a good day, Roubaix is a pretty grim place: a town of mills and mines, full of streets of grey shuttered houses, much of the year under a grey a dreary sky. Trapped behind German lines, the people of the town had no choice but to remain, but today’s reader is free to leave their story gathering dust on the shelf.

However, Van der Meersch’s style (in translation, at least) is simple and immediately accessible, like Tolstoy’s, and like the great master, he has a viewpoint that seems able to get inside the head and heart of any character. In the course of the novel, Van der Meersch follows dozens of the town’s residents, from wealthy mill owners to shopkeepers and farmers to petty criminals and little children. As with a Russian novel, there are times when one gets lost in the flurry of names (I kept confusing the Fontcroix with the Laubigiers).

Yet despite the bleakness of the novel’s setting and subject and the constant shifting from character to character, Van der Meersch maintains a remarkable level of narrative tension. Put any group of people in an extreme situation and their responses will vary widely. This has been a basic formula of story-tellers for millenia. But in this case, the strain seems to increase relentlessly. No one–not even the Germans–expects the occupation to wear on for months and then years. The faint, muffled sound of shelling–the front is never more than twenty miles away–goes on and on, and the sense of hopelessness grinds away at even the strongest.

The Laubigiers, an ordinary working class family, for example, offer shelter to three French soldiers separated from their unit in the first retreat. It’s a simple gesture of charity in response to a request from the local priest. Civilian clothes and forged papers are arranged to aid their escape. But then the time wears on:

For the first few weeks an atmosphere of mutual toleration prevailed, but then a certain amount of friction began to develop. The men were bound to the Laubigiers by no real ties, and became irritable under pressure of forced seclusion. Their minds turned to their own people, and the necessity of learning new trades in order to keep themselves occupied and to earn enough to pay for their keep, of becoming cobblers, harness-makers, and chair-menders, began to get on their nerves. Quarrels started. Disputes arose over the sharing of coal and food. The carelessness and messiness of her three lodgers did violence to Félicie’s naturally tidy nature.

“Seen in its stark reality,” van der Meersch concludes, “the situation was one in which a group of people remained bound together by necessity, while all the time they grew daily to hate one another more and more violently.”

One reason I was interested in Invasion is that I wanted to explore the effects of a prolonged occupation on a people. Twice in the course of thirty years, the people of Belgium, where I live now, and parts of France, lived for years under the rule of an occupying power. This is an experience unknown in American history, and I have a theory that this is one reason why people in this part of Europe view good and evil as lying along a spectrum of infinitely subtle gradations and no clear-cut distinctions.

In the first months of the occupation, a few in the town display true heroism. A priest and a local schoolteacher manage to produce a newsheet telling about local incidents of German brutality and calling for resistance. A mill owner rallies his workers to refuse to make cloth for German uniforms. But they are all soon rounded up and shot, imprisoned or sent off to forced labor. Even the rich find their possessions confiscated and their savings eaten away by black market prices.

Some collaborate quickly and with little sense of guilt. Others give in only when their means or willpower have been exhausted. Some develop genuine friendships, as the Laubigiers do for a German cook billeted with them, that inevitably come with complications that verge or veer into collaboration.

By the time the severe winter of 1917-18 comes around, the hardships have worn away almost all sense of hope and dignity. The extent to which the experience leads inevitably to self-destruction is symbolized by peoples’ pillaging of their own homes:

Gradually, and rather fearfully, folk began to remove the banisters from staircases, trap-doors from lofts, everything that was of no immediate, or only of secondary, use. Boards were taken from the backs of cupboards, shelves for keeping food fresh in the cellars, doors and woodwork from lavatories, the seats themselves, the roofs. A futher step involved the shutters of windows, rabbit hutches, tool-sheds, coal boxes. After a further week or two the doors of the rooms had to go, attic floors, gutters, and drain pips. Finally, life came to be lived in the strangest apologies for houses, bare walls open to the air, with a mattress of the ground and a fire in one corner.

The occupation does end, however. Two hours after the last German leaves, the English arrive, and the retribution begins almost as soon as the celebrations. “Realizing that life in France would be impossible for them,” women who have taken German lovers “made up their minds to see whether they could not start afresh in Germany.” When they catch up with retreating troops, though, they are sent back to be branded and beaten.

The men, on the other hand, soon reach “a sort of tacit agreement to cease fire…. It was very much better to form a mutual admiration society than to rake up uncomfortable truths and start hitting blindly at the expense of all and sundry.” “Those who stumbled on the truth,” writes van der Meersch, “took fright and avoided it like poison.”

A native of Roubaix, van der Meersch was just seven years old when the German occupation began, but his novel is informed by a rich network of friends, relatives and neighbors and years of hearing their recollections. Trained as a lawyer, his advice was often sought out even though he never actually practiced. The historian Richard Cobb, who met van der Meersch when he was evacuated to Roubaix as an internee during the German occupation of 1940-44, described the novelist as “the magician who had pulled the front off so many corons [villages], to introduce me, de plein pied, into the kitchen and the smell of coffee and boiling potatoes.”

In an essay in his book, Paris and Elsewhere–reissued as a New York Review Classic–Cobb calls van der Meersch “a regionalist who had written almost exclusively about Roubaix and who had brought honour to the town by winning the Prix Goncourt. He was, in fact, a clumsy stylist, a Christian-Socialist Zola, who wrote off an accumulated stock of fiches [files].” Invasion does, at times, give the sense of being an accumulation of fiches–primarily because no single character dominates the narrative.

Van der Meersch wrote around a dozen novels, all of them set in and around Roubaix, in the space of about as many years. He was 27 when Invasion was published, and two years later he won the Prix Goncourt for L’Empreinte du dieu, translated into English as Hath Not the Potter. By the time Cobb met him, “He was tubercular and had fallen under the influence of a medical eccentric who preached under-nourishment as a cure for tuberculosis; his most recent novel [Corps et âmes, translated as Bodies and Souls] was an attack on orthodox medicine.” He died of the disease in 1951 at the age of 43. Although several of his novels are still in print in France, as well as Spain and Germany (not Invasion, understandably), his work has largely been forgotten by English readers.

Invasion, by Maxence van der Meersch, translated by Gerard Hopkins
New York: Viking Press, 1937

Some twenty years after the end of the war with Japan a freighter arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue. The owner of the collection, a huge, smiling fat man named Geraty, presented a passport to customs that showed he was a native-born American about as old as the century, an exile who had left the United States nearly four decades before. The collection contained all the pornographic works written in Japan during the last three hundred and fifty years, or since the time when Japan first closed itself to the West.

I took the book straight home and proceeded to read it in the space of about two days. It was wild, complicated and constantly over the top in its details: Geraty’s penchant for stuffing gobs of wasabi up his nose; Baron Kikuchi, the Japanese aristocrat and spymaster who could sleep with his glass eye open, making others believe he had superhuman powers of concentration; Father Lamereaux, the pederast priest; the horrifying account of the Japanese army’s atrocities in its rape of Nanking. Whittemore made Vonnegut seem tame in comparison. The book remained in my memory as one of my most intense reading experiences and that paperback has traveled with me through a dozen moves since then.

So it was on my books to devote a long post to when I started working on this site. I felt certain I would be offering up a wonderful box of treasures in bringing it to light again.

I was wrong–others had already written posts about it, even before I started the site: Jeff Van Der Meer on the SF Site in 2002; the late Bob Sabella on his Visions of Paradise blog in 2005. Others followed thereafter: Dan Schmidt on his Dfan blog in 2009, Chad Hull on his Fiction is Overrated blog in 2010. And it turned out that a small press, Old Earth Books, had reissued Circus, along with the four books in Whittemore’s subsequent Jerusalem Dreaming quartet, with an introduction by novelist John Nichols, in 2002.

Still, with such a vivid memory of the book, I knew I had to give it a second reading.

Ah, there are some experiences best left in memory.

Quin’s Shanghai Circus is, without a doubt, an impressive work of story-telling. Although the novel is set mostly in Japan and China, Whittemore’s approach more resembles the intricacies of the most ornate Islamic scripts, in which one wonders how anyone could manage to unravel a text from the twists and coils and overlapping strokes. It’s not surprising that he shifted his setting to the Middle East after this book.

According to his biographies, Whittemore spent some years working in the Far East for the CIA. Doing just what is never revealed. Personally, I find the fact that he let this be mentioned revealing. From my experience, people who consider themselves espionage professionals are exceptionally tight-lipped and discreet. There’s a joke in the DC area that you can always tell that someone works for the CIA when they respond, “I work for the government,” to questions about what they do for a living.

On the other hand, I’ve run into ex-GIs who weave elaborate accounts of their “black ops” days, who describe suitcases full of cash and unbelievably precise surveillance technology, who seem to have inhabited a world where everyone was on the take and nothing was as it seemed. Personally, I have become a great skeptic of conspiracies and secrecy. If conspiracies were managed as well as they’re usually claimed to have been, then it seems to me that the easiest way to solve the world’s problem would be to make everything a conspiracy. Do we really save our most extraordinary ingenuity and very best organizational skills for conspiracies, making do with second-best for everything else in life?

Which leads me to suspect that Whittemore was only a very accomplished version of those ex-GIs whose bullshitting verged on the rococo. Reading Quin’s Shanghai Circus as a middle-aged father and mortgage-payer was a considerably different experience than it was when I was a virgin teenager. Today, the book seems to belong with what I call the Playboy Magazine school of fiction.

Back in the days when men would claim that they read Playboy for the writing, there was a certain type of brittle sophistication to the stories it would publish. Brittle like the magazine itself, for poke through the ads for Scotch and cigarettes and English sportscars, and you would find each month’s installment of Little Annie Fanny.

Probably a big reason I thought better of Quin’s Shanghai Circus in recollection was Whittemore’s graphic description of the horrors of the assault on Nanking (you can find a long excerpt in Jason Lundberg’s post on the book). It is so brutal, it has the effect of giving the rest of the novel a solid base of seriousness. But reading it for second time, I found the passage more offensive in its use than in its contents. To be honest, it seemed to have been included more for its shock value than for its function in developing the story, and I questioned Whittemore’s right to appropriate the event for what would otherwise be just an entertainment (here I’m appropriating Greene’s use of the term).

I’m sure that not everyone would have the same reaction to the novel or Whittemore’s other works. At least one thesis (“Opening the Window to Edward Whittemore: Systems that Govern Human Experience”, by Joseph Winland, Jr.) has been published, and more will probably follow. Anne Sydenham has created a website, Jerusalem Dreaming, devoted to his work. There you will find numerous expressions of praise, including this quote from Tom Robbins: “One of the best-kept secrets in American literature, the novels of the mysterious Edward Whittemore are like bowls of hashish pudding: rich, dark, tasty, amusing, intoxicating, revelatory, a little bit outlandish and a little bit unsafe.”

All I can say is: if a bowl hashish pudding sounds good to you, go right ahead and dig in. Don’t let me stop you.

Quin’s Shanghai Circus, by Edward Whittemore
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974

The young woman of the title is Leonore Wahl, the daughter of a successful Jewish banker in Berlin, university student and eager follower of the intellectual radicals of her time. She meets and has an affair with Werner Bertin, a rising young writer of a more modest family. I hesitate to say that she falls in love with Bertin, because although the two develop a relationship that continues when Bertin is enlisted into the German Army Services Corps and shipped off to a series of postings, Zweig makes it clear that neither is quite ready to put head over heart.

Until Leonore finds that she is pregnant, that is–or at least, until she deals with this fact. If Young Woman of 1914 is remembered at all today, it is as one of the earliest and frankest accounts of abortion. Given her youth, her situation as a single woman, and her awareness of the weaknesses as well as the strengths of her feelings for Bertin, she decides to have an abortion. Although illegal at the time, safe but surreptitious abortions could be found if one had sufficient funds and guile. With the help of her brother, Leonore locates a doctor who performs the procedure:

Leonore, outstretched on the examination chair, uttered no more than a sharp gasping moan as she clutched its metal edges. On each side of her a Sister held down her arms and shoulders with dragoon-like fists. The violence of the onslaught almost deprived her of consciousness. Her heart seemed to change into an organ sensitive to pain, and she felt as though it were splitting within her breast; an engulfing surge of torment swept over her forehead and temples.

“Poor creatures, they always had to pay the bill,” the doctor muses.

This excerpt gives a sense of the ham-fistedness of Zweig’s style–or at least of Eric Sutton’s translation–that turns the experience of reading his novels into something akin to hiking through thick underbrush. It’s unfortunate, as the basic story here is actually quite modern. When Bertin meets Leonore again, he does feel and express some remorse, but mostly to be seen to care. In truth, what she’s gone through is alien and a little distasteful to him.

Having seen a little of combat and a great deal of the drudgery and boredom of army life, though, Bertin has a much greater appreciation for the comfort of a loving relationship, and Leonore herself seems prepared at last to find refuge in the tenderness they feel for each other. They decide to marry, if only to postpone Bertin’s quick return to the front. And as she sees him off at the train station, she thinks, “It was none other than love that had come upon her–love that suffers, schemes, creates: just love.”

I have mixed feelings about this book. It’s full of fine moments, such as a walk Bertin takes through the streets of a Bosnian town while serving on the Balkan front, where Zweig captures the flow of life that goes on despite the big-H history happening all around it. And in the relationship of Leonore and Bertin, he does a good job of conveying the awkwardness of lovers who need to establish an intellectual equality before confronting their real feelings for each other. On the other hand, what would have been a little masterpiece if pared down a to around 150 pages takes Zweig over 380 pages to tell. And this is one of Arnold Zweig’s shortest books! It’s no surprise to discover that he went on to become a key literary figure in East Germany. There is a certain Marx-like windbagishness in his writing. Stefan Zweig–no relation–would have dealt with this in a novella.

Young Woman of 1914, by Arnold Zweig, translated by Eric Sutton
London: Martin Secker, 1932

That hardly makes this sound like a book you’d want to crawl in bed with, I admit, and it might seem crazy to suggest that The Bachelors could hold its own beside some of the best novels of the 19th century. It’s so rich in its characterizations, so full of wonderful details and mannerisms.

But imagine Dickens without the tiniest hint of sentimentality. Imagine David Copperfield dying cold, sick and hungry along the road to Dover instead of making it to the warmth of his aunt’s house, and you get a sense of how ruthless Montherlant can be toward his characters. “The tragic thing about anxious people is that they always have cause for anxiety,” he observes at one point, which illustrates the kind of cold, scientific objectivity with which he relates these sad, tragic stories.

What really distinguishes The Bachelors in my mind is that Montherlant manages to be pitiless without becoming cruel, to be grim but not bitter. This is not a satire. Montherlant doesn’t try to skew the story to make a point about the inadequacy of an older generation. This is just an unblinking look at failure. Which also makes it absolutely riveting. The experience of reading The Bachelors is a bit like the old saying about watching a car wreck: “It hurts to look, but you just can’t turn away.”

The Bachelors was originally translated into English by Thomas McGeevy and published as Lament for the Death of an Upper Class by John Miles in 1935. Terence Kilmartin, who translated several other works by Montherlant, released a second English translation, using a literal translation of the French title, in 1960. I picked up McGeevy’s translation and started it, thinking I’d found a long-forgotten work by Montherlant, until I realized it was actually The Bachelors. I thought McGeevy’s version was pretty good, but Kilmartin’s is far easier to locate, having been reissued several times, by Penguin and Quartet.

The Bachelors, by Henri de Montherlant, translated by Terence Kilmartin
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960

This site is run by Kate Macdonald, an English lecturer at Ghent University and “a lifelong browser in second-hand bookshops.” “Each week,” she writes, “I post a new podcast on a forgotten book that I think deserves new readers. The podcasts last for about 10 minutes, and appear in the feed first thing on a Friday.” The podcasts so far have covered such books as Vern Sneider’s Tea House of the August Moon and an obscure 1941 novella by Colette, Julie de Carneilhan.

The French title of this 1978 novel by Raymond Cousse is Stratégie pour deux jambons–or, in English, Strategy for Two Hams. Admittedly, that’s still not the most appealing title one could imagine, but it’s certainly more cerebral than visceral, which is more in keeping with the book’s style.

The full English title–Death Sty: A Pig’s Tale–is, however, a case of truth in advertising, though that’s a bit like saying that KFC should be renamed “Hot Dead Chicken to Go.” This slim book, just 96 pages long, is the interior monologue of a male pig, living in one of the hundreds or thousands of pens in a finishing plant, waiting to be slaughtered.

But this is not a story of poor beasts being brutalized. The nameless narrator of Death Sty takes a very French approach to his situation. Rather than bemoan his fate, he uses his last hours to work out his raison d’être:

I am alone now, and all indications are that I will be until the end. Which will not, I can sense, be long in coming. However, I can’t complain. Indeed, do I have any reason to complain? Uneviable as I may find it, is my fate not being shared? I am forced to acknowledge that such comparisons have always somewhat escaped me. And I know some–even humans–who would readily trade places with me.

The area where I have been installed is sufficient to my needs and answers to my wants. I am unable to tell whether the premises are longer than they are wide, or vice versa. However, I like to think they are at least as wide as they are long. For some reason, the notion of being able to move freely within a square is a comfort to me.

This is a Stoic pig: “I will be slaughtered following accepted process, and consummatum est.” He does not intend to resist his fate. Instead, he spend much of his time constructing an elaborate mental image of the slaughterhouse, its systems, and the whole process by which his being will be transformed into food and then back again into waste:

The cycle of alimentation does not proceed only in one direction. If those in high places enjoy our products, can it be denied that we in turn profit from their castoffs, in the form of slops regularly sent down to the base. Any insinuation that these slops fall down of their own accord reveals a low mind. For that matter, there can be no argument about the efforts the authorities are always making to speed up production.

“One day, I tell myself, your slice of me will be wafted to the 82nd floor, up to the presidency itself,” he thinks, although he cautions himself: “Perhaps that’s bragging a bit too much.”

Cousse, whose few other works–none of them yet translated into English–reveal a sly satirical bent, manages to be both subversive and cynical in Death Sty. On the one hand, the book takes its place in a long line of works dating back to Swift, Kafka and Orwell, mocking the aspirations of people in an ever-expanding structure of systems and processes. Cousse’ narrator is a happy cog on a great big wheel of commerce. “I am a law-abiding hog,” the pig proclaims proudly. “So long as I control my merchandise, not one iota will be diverted from the legal market.”

In fact, he dreams of a future when the process will achieve its ultimate level of efficiency: “The time is not far distant when the hog will be able to forgo their assistance and take his factor into his own hands”: “A trajectory without any hitches, completely planned from womb to package.”

At the same time, Cousse translates Stoicism from the classical past to the technological present. It was Seneca, after all, who wrote that “Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he is born.” Cousse’s pig understands and accepts his purpose and derives a sense of peace from it. Indeed, Cousse draws a parallel between the pig and Christ at the Last Supper: “And joining action to words, I add: take, eat, this is my ham; and behold my tripes that are offered for you, and drink my blood before it coagulates, but only grant that we may lay aside our quarrels so that we can offer to the world the image of a body united in its purpose.”

So, despite its atrocious title, Death Sty turns out to be a work that’s far more likely to be a cause for reflection than revulsion. Those who can get past the cover will discover that rare thing, a mesmerizing philosophical piece.

I have to thank my colleague, Eric Lièvre, for recommending this book. In France, by the way, Stratégie pour deux jambons has been transformed into a monologue for the stage. You can find a clip from one production at Dailymotion.com.

Death Sty: A Pig’s Tale, by Raymond Cousse, translated by Richard Miller
New York City: Grove Press, 1980