But it’s also the only case I know (admittedly, there may be others I don’t) of a novel that’s been rewritten and published by its author with a different title. In a brief note at the start of the book, Riesenberg wrote:

The basis of the present story is my novel P.A.L issued by Robert M. McBride & Company in 1925. I have rewritten my earlier novel and the job has given me considerable amusement. I offer the result without apology or prayer.

P.A.L, which I wrote about back in August 2012, is an acerbic account of the career of an over-the-top entrepeneur and huckster, P. A. L. Tangerman, who shills everything from baldness cures and health tonics to chocolate, cigars and self-improvement books and, finally, to a scheme to produce gold from desert sand. Riesenberg was 44 when he published the book. He came late to writing, having worked as a merchant marine officer, Arctic explorer, civil engineer, and building inspector.

Riesenberg’s view of American capitalism in P.A.L is bitterly satiric, full of an angry that Riesenberg later gave full vent to in his Depression novel, Passing Strangers. He relates the story of Tangerman’s rise and fall through the eyes of Marakoff, a Russian merchant seaman, shipwrecked off the coast of Washington State and tossed into the feverish boosterism of Tangerman’s Seattle. Rather like Gulliver in the land of the Brobdingnag, Riesenberg’s narrator finds a sort of monstrous energy at play:

Power! light! heat! These were everywhere in evidence. As I walked up from the wharf, the sensation of coming again into a highly charged community caused my finger tips to tingle…. Lean, earnest-faced men shouted revolution, others spoke rapidly of religion, and still others, great, full-mouthed orators, extolled the virtues of special medicines. A band of uniformed musicians chanted loud praises of the Lord. Over all was the constant blink of great electric signs.

Later, when the scene shifts to Chicago, the narrator’s sense of a diseased society becomes literal:

Such thoughts came to me of an evening, looking out on the avenue and marveling at the curious folk who walked by. What was going on about me so far exceeded even these fancies that I judged the world throughicurious eyes. At times I felt we were in a great hospital full of patients, all sick, some seriously, some slightly, but getting worse. I even pictured this great hospital managed by a peculiar staff of somber, public doctors. It seemed to me the great hospital of humanity was for a time in charge of the world’s undertakers, men prospering mightily through the general debility.

The intensity of Riesenberg’s reaction to the fervor of the 1920s is muted only slightly in his rewrite of the book three years later. Although I haven’t done a line-by-line comparison of texts between P.A.L and Red Horses, I think I can safely say that Riesenberg’s major change was to pare away whatever he considerable inessential.

P.A.L was structured in four parts, preceded by a prologue describing the voyage and shipwreck of Marakoff’s ship. In Red Horses, Riesenberg dispenses with the prologue completely. He also dispenses with a considerable amount of editorial commentary. The prologue to P.A.L begins,

Of course there is an explanation for everything. Even a state of mind may be explored, and some have attempted to explain the favor of a woman. Chance and time play upon us constantly. Love and murder may be answers to the same demand; Who can see everything and know all, in a universe growing more complex with time?

In Red Horses, Riesenberg wisely dropped this exordium and jumped straight into the story:

I was a sailor, ashore and out of work. I had no money, no friends, no business or profession upon which I might rely.

The cut of the prologue is the largest single change in the text, and there is no equivalent change in the story itself. Marakoff, whose name is taken down as Markham by his rescuers, is given an introduction to P. A. L. Tangerman, who is launching the Cudahy Dome, a contraption intended to cure baldness by applying a vacuum to the scalp, as his first great venture. Tangerman spins off dozens of other enterprises and eventually moves to Chicago with Markham in tow. He continues to surf from one deal to another, relying in most cases more on momentum and hype than real capital, until one of his many paramours shoots him dead. Markham returns to Washington State and settles down happily ever after with Madeleine, Tangerman’s first wife, whom Markham has loved from afar for years.

In fact, it would probably be more accurate to describe Red Horses as an edit of P.A.L than a rewrite. Riesenberg did make other structural alterations beside dropping the prologue, but these consist only of changes in how the text is broken up. What are called “Parts” in P.A.L become “Books” in Red Horses, and instead of “Chapters,” Riesenberg divides these into numbered sections, using nearly twice as many in Books Two and Three–the Chicago books.

Aside from these changes, which make little difference in the reading experience, what is most noticeable between P.A.L and Red Horses is what is missing. As the following excerpts demonstrate, the primary skill Riesenberg developed between the two versions is the use of his blue pencil.

In the end, Riesenberg very likely got more amusement than critical or financial reward out of rewriting P.A.L as Red Horses. P.A.L garnered a handful of reviews; Red Horses even fewer. Neither was ever reprinted. Perhaps thanks to my earlier piece, there appear to be exactly as many copies of P.A.L for sale as Red Horses: two. Aside from a couple of surveys of fiction set in Chicago, neither has been remembered in print anywhere outside this site since Riesenberg’s death. I suspect Riesenberg’s work might have fared between if he’d lived in Nebraska or Georgia or Texas, where he might at least have earned some recognition as a regional novelist. Although I wouldn’t claim masterpiece status for either version of Tangerman’s tale, I do think it deserves an honorable mention in the history of American literature and I suspect some industrious graduate student could provide an interesting textual analysis of the two books. Until then, however, we’ll keep a candle burning here in Riesenberg’s memory.

Red Horses, by Felix Riesenberg
New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1928

Kemal, a prolific and popular writer specializing in novels about the lower classes, was a contemporary of Hikmet and served time with him in the same jail–an experience he recounted in his 1947 book, In Jail with Nazim Hikmet“>In Jail with Nazim Hikmet. His most famous book, The Idle Years, now available from Peter Owen Ltd. with a preface by Pahmuk, is a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman. Like Hikmet, he died in exile–in Bulgaria, in his case–and his works have since become recognized and accepted as some of the best Turkish literature of the 20th century. A substantial site, including an English language section, is available at www.orhankemal.org, and Everest Publications, a Turkish press, has brought many of his books, including a few English translations, back to print.

The Prisoners tells a classic tale of human hopes and tragedy. Ahmet, known a “Captain” by his fellow inmates from his time as a merchant seaman, receives a little money from his mother while serving a sentence for the murder of two men who’d killed his father. Against his instincts, he’s talked into gambling it in the running crap grame controlled by another prisoner, Solezli. He wins some, and treats the other inmates of Ward 72, a filthy hole to which the lowest tier of prison society is resigned, to a little food, some beans and meat.

The taste of warm, filling food soon leads Captain to return to the crap game. He wins again, and soon is off on a winning streak. Ward 72 is transformed with his takings. He becomes a force in the prison. He begins to have hopes of a life after his sentence is up decades in the future.

Nothing good lasts forever, of course, and it all comes to a grim end. You know this from the moment Captain comes back to Ward 72 with cash in hand, but Kemal succeeds in making the story fresh and gripping. Despite the bleak and ruthless prison setting, The Prisoners is as simple and powerful as a classic short novel such as The Red Badge of Courage.

One copy of The Prisoners is available on Amazon for the ridiculous price of $231, but you can order it for much less at Amazon.de or from the Turkish bookstore chain, D&R.

The Prisoners, by Orhan Kemal, translated by Cengiz Lugal
Istanbul: Everest Publications, 2012

Phillip Routh, whose blog, How Jack London Changed My Life, chronicles his prolific and eclectic reading, contacted me recently with a couple of recommendations–Gontran de Poncin’s memoir, Father Sets the Pace (“a withering biography of a supremely selfish man”), and Valery Larbaud’s short 1911 novel, Fermina Márquez. Knowing the breadth of his taste, I invited him to provide a longer list of recommendations to be included among the Sources on this site.

A few days later, he posted a list of ten titles with his comments, along with additional recommendations for most of the writers. “I had difficulty in selecting ten books, because so many were jostling for inclusion,” he wrote. I’ve just uploaded it to the site: you can read it now: Recommendations from Phillip Routh.

Thanks for your contributions, Phillip!

Greave earned a place in the home while hiding away in a room in a decrepit boarding house in Calcutta, an experience he describes in The Seventh Gate. An unexpected windfall from his father allowed him to book a passage to England on a merchant freighter. For Greave, leaving India and gaining a hope of proper treatment was his first miracle. The second, he hoped, would be for him to walk out of the clinic cured, a healthy man.

The book opens with his long ride in the back of a cab from a Liverpool dockside to the home. His nerves worn raw from eight years of painful and lonely existence in India, he finds himself contemplating suicide even as the cab nears his destination:

I was in a state not far removed from insanity; it would not have been correct to describe me as a youngish [he was 38 when he arrived at the hospital in 1947] man who was sick. I was sick, but I was more than that; I was a perambulating mass of fear. Because of my fate I felt that I had lost the status of human being, that I stood outside the bounds of human pity; and the fear of something unimaginably horrible happening to me, once my condition was known, had become part of my mental make-up. And yet in a way this fear was my own choice; I had deliberately accepted it as the price of freedom. For eight years I had clung to the outskirts of life; crouching in my corner I had feasted my eyes on its radiance and gaiety; and though it had meant hiding like a criminal I had managed to retain my identity.

I dreaded beyond words the possibility of being shut away, of becoming a number in a hospital ward, of forfeiting even the nominal rights of a human being. To be shut up was a death sentence, and yet it was worse than that; it was a sentence of life without any of the ingredients that make life bearable.

It takes Greave some weeks to adapt to his new circumstances and begin to feel safe. The physical comforts–a room of his own, a comfortable chair to sit in, a soft bed to sleep in, windows from which to look out to the surrounding fields, three warm, nourishing meals a day–break down his resistance first. Then the genuine concern of the sisters and physicians for his care, and the companionship of his fellow patients helped him lose his sense of isolation. And after suffering years of painful and pointless injections into his scars, his disease began to respond to treatments with the new drug, dapsone.

The most difficult part of his recovery, though, is spiritual. In the time that he hid away from the world in his room in Calcutta, Greave had come to see his disease as a mark of “the guilt of a thousand generations of twisted minds, and of bodies thirsting for decay.” At the home, among other sufferers, he felt a release–”one of the the main ingredients in that shining peace I had prized so much.” With the successful treatment of his leprosy, “… all this was to be taken from me. I was to be flung back into the world of ordinary men, my body healed but bearing the taint of my guilt-haunted mind.” “I stood like a diver on a high springboard,” he writes, “looking down into the dark, greedy waters into which I soon must plunge, and knew that I was terrified.”

In the end, it is the Sisters who guide him to the cure for his soul as well as his disease. In a moving closing scene, in which he watches three of the novices he’s come to know take their voes and prepare themselves to leave on their missions to Africa, he finds a way to let go of his fears and entrust his fate to God.

The dust jacket copy sets up The Second Miracle as a story of Christian redemption, but there are few direct religious references or scenes in the book. What there are, instead, are many passages of beautifully written, closely observed, and sympathetic prose. This is some of the best writing I’ve come across, and I will be excerpting a least a couple of passages in succeeding posts. Here is a short one, recalling the last days of one of the elderly patients:

But although the gap left by that massive, bent figure with the wheezing chuckle and shoulders draped in a faded green shawl was a real one, it was surprising how quickly he seemed to slip out of the general mind. For a day or two there were comments on his absence and inquiries as to his progress, and then he appeared to be lost sight of in the space of gossip and small personal spites and ambitions. It struck me as extraordinary that a man could so rapidly drop out of the circle and be forgotten by the rest, vanish and be as though he had never existed; but it struck me that perhaps this apparent callousness was due not so much to heartlessness as to an unconscious instinct for self-preservation. It was necessary for us to forget, to put out of our minds and utterly discard, anything that could remind us of the tenuous uncertainty of our hold on life. We all knew, though probably we scarcely admitted the thought even to ourselves, that we were little more than a hair’s breadth away from a similar defeat, and consequently we focused all our powers upon the struggle for survival, without a backward glance for those who were unable to keep their foothold upon the uneasy tightrope of existence.

While staying at the home, Greave began to write and publish for the first time, and for this we all owe the sisters a debt of gratitude. After leaving the home, he married and was able to make a living as a writer. He published articles in various magazines, wrote The Second Miracle and several novels–all out of print–and a further memoir, The Seventh Gate, in 1976. He died in 1977 at the age of 68.

The Second Miracle, by Peter Greave
New York: Henry Holt, 1955

from Aston Kings, by Humphrey Pakington

The book–Brooks’ first novel–takes place in seven snapshots between mid-1938 and Labor Day 1940. In the midst of a relaxing summer break at their Connecticut country home, the Randolfs’ banker arrives to break the news to the mother, Elaine, that what little capital her late husband had left the family has evaporated in the stock market. She has to sell off their heavily mortgaged country home and Manhattan apartment and move into a cheaper apartment with her two daughters and son-in-law, soon to be joined by her son Joel and his new wife, Harriet.

We watch the story unfold through Harriet’s eyes. The only daughter of an introverted and widowed professor, she is dazzled by the Randolf’s effortless grace. She confides to her brother-in-law, “We think they live life more completely, they feel things physically, because they act by instinct. We think they’re complete naturals. That charms us; they have more fun, we think, than the thoughtful people.” Harriet feels sorry about their plight only because “it wasn’t fair that people like the Randolfs should have to worry and think about money.”

At first, they take it in as a momentary inconvenience. Living on the remnants of their fortune is a comic bit of “roughing it,” the cramped apartment “a sort of camping place.” As time wears on and the money continues to evaporate, however, their charm wears as thin as the elbows in Joel’s old jackets. He gets a job with an advertising firm but his good looks and ingratiating manner fail to compensate for his utter incompetence. He loses the job and starts drinking earlier and earlier in the day. One daughter, Kit, gets a job in a fine department store and soon learns to get ahead through pure ruthlessness masked by a thin veneer of style. Pris, the youngest, is incapable of doing anything but attracting clueless men with her beauty.

And Elaine, utterly useless, does little but pine for her comfortable past. “The trouble with Elaine was that she was really stupid,” Harriet comes to realize. Her only assets were “a lovely, sensitive face, and excellent taste in dressing herself and arranging her home.”

Of all the family, it is Harriet who proves the most resourceful. She not only does all the cooking and housekeeping for the lot, but she teaches herself typing and gets a job when Joel gives up any pretence of looking for work. And the Randolfs appreciate it–in the way that a wealthy family might appreciate the work of a particularly good maid or butler. “You’re good at this sort of thing, aren’t you, Harriet?,” remarks Pris.

“This sort of thing” is a phrase that recurs throughout the book. It always refers to accommodation to the practical necessities of life–something the Randolfs seem to regard as either onerous or unthinkable. As Joel and Elaine grow more helpless and dependent, Harriet discovers her own strength and independence.

In the end, however, the Randolfs, like the Beers in Cheever’s story, manage to survive through a series of decisions that defy Harriet’s conventional reason:

The resilience of this family was almost immoral, she thought. In the books, weakness and irresponsibility fall when the props are taken away just as the Randolfs had fallen. But in the books weakness never picks itself up again, and here were the Randolfs bright as day and just as charming as ever. All because Pris has kidnaped a rich man into marrying her, Kit has booted out a poor husband and relentlessly cut a few throats, and Elaine is sponging off her son-in-law.

Although Kingdom On Earth was written when Brooks was just twenty-five, it displays a remarkably mature and well-rounded perspective. While showing the Randolfs with all their flaws, she is sympathetic rather than caustic, understanding rather than mocking.

Anne Brooks published a second novel, Hang My Heart, a year after Kingdom On Earth. The story of an ambitious woman starting her career in the magazine business, it received even better reviews, and Brooks was described as one of the more promising young American novelists. From that point on, however, she seems to have disappeared, at least from the world of publishing. I would be interested in finding out the rest of her story.

Although several direct-to-print publishers offer copies of Kingdom On Earth, you can download it for free from the Internet Archive at http://archive.org/details/kingdomonearth001098mbp.

A video feature about five remarkable memoirs featured on this site:

• You Still Have Your Head, by Franz Schoenberner
• The Story of a Life, by Konstantin Paustovsky
• Charley Smith’s Girl, by Helen Bevington
• Under Gemini, by Isabel Bolton
• The Seventh Gate by Peter Greave

I am not yet able to write in the literal sense of the word. Writing always meant to me writing in longhand with a pencil which gave the wonderful chance to erase and to change every third word, or even, if you felt like it, to begin again the same sentence on a fresh page without much difficulty. It was almost a year after the accident that I started–not to write, but to dictate–this new story not of my life, but of something which was near death: a rather long voyage pretty near to the border of the unknown country from which nobody returns. It was indeed a very strange and instructive voyage; otherwise, I wouldn’t date to recount it, because nothing is more boring than telling about your illness. I shall try to speak as little as possible of illness–and as much as possible of health: the special sort of health which can exist even when your whole body, with the sole exception of your head, is lifeless and scarcely belongs to you.

But as long as your head, your mind, is still working and is not too much preoccupied with the strange state of your body you can make new discoveries in this foreign country of illness, discoveries which may be worth sharing with others–not only those who have gone or are going through a similar ordeal, but almost anybody who in one way or another suddenly faces the necessity of overcoming some suffering, some handicap, for which he was not prepared. … as everybody knows who has a longer and deeper experience of life, even the most tragic situation often includes a strange element of humor–tragic humor, perhaps, or sardonic humor, and even sometimes simple human humor. As long as you are able to see these elements you are not entirely lost in tragedy–not lost in your suffering. You are already a little bit above and beyond the factual situation when you are able to view it with the detachment of an objective observer. There is a certain sense of the grotesque, and sometimes cruel irony which seems to be an inescapable part and parcel of the process of living.

You Still Have Your Head: Excursions From Immobility is an account of Schoenberner’s experiences and–mostly–his thoughts during his recovery from being attacked and left paralyzed from the neck down. Schoenberner had gone to complain about loud music from a neighboring apartment. One of the young men in the apartment flew into a rage and savagely struck out at Schoenberner, breaking his neck. A German intellectual who had fled Nazi Germany two steps ahead of the Gestapo–a situation he recounted in The Inside Story of an Outsider–Schoenberner responded to his situation the only way he knew how: by considering it in light of history, literature, philosophy and, occasionally, human behavior. Possessed of a remarkable resilience of spirit and sense of humor, if he ever experienced a moment of self-pity, you won’t find it here. Instead, you’ll find one man’s attempt to put a horrific twist of fate into perspective, an example of understanding reached through the disciplined exercise of a lifetime’s worth of learning.

You Still Have Your Head: Excursions From Immobility, by Franz Schoenberner
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957

Most of his books are set in the mid-to-lower strata of English nobility, where there are family estates, clergymen with livings, second or third sons in the Royal Navy, eccentric aunts or grandmothers how ask awkward questions, and charming young people holding tennis racquets and bumbling about with love and marriage. It all takes place somewhere between about 1888 and 1938, during which there are births and deaths, occasional bothers, and no great tragedies. If there are revolutions or strikes going on, they are too far away and too alien to be admitted, let alone acknowledged.

Instead, it’s a world where certainties are cherished and cultivated. “They prided themselves on moving with the times, while doing all in their power to make time stand still for themselves,” Pakington writes of the group of English ladies in Aunt Auda’s Choir (U.S. title, Our Aunt Auda). Of Canon Wargrave, the father in Aston Kings, Pakington observes that “he conformed to the general principle that the accumulation of wealth in an honest and straight-forward manner was one of the first duties of a Christian and a gentleman.” Wrote Roger Pippett, “It is a world few of us know from experience, but we are familiar with it every time the curtain in a theatre goes up on a chintzy English drawing room.” It’s a world from which Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster must look rather wild and daring.

Ironically, this sane and stable world seemed to have a great appeal to American readers and reviewers during the tumultuous years of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Every one of Pakington’s novels published between 1931 and 1951 were enthusiastically welcomed in Saturday Review and the New York Times. “This is a major book. Major in every way,” wrote Jane Spence Southron, reviewing Family Album for the Times.

Pakington’s lack of message was, in fact, considered something of a virtue: “So few authors turn their hands to good-humored humor, non-ax-grinding, non-crow-picking entertainment, that there is especial cause for thanksgiving when one who has a way with him takes pen in hand for a reader’s holiday,” wrote Saturday Review’s anonymous reviewer of Four in Family. Virgilia Peterson applauded his always-tolerant attitude towards his characters: “He contents himself with mirroring their habits, their pastimes, their platitudes, and their idiosyncracies.”

Writing of George Dangerfield, who had recently published a post-mortem of Pakington’s world in The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), celebrated, in fact, his artlessness:

He is a haphazard writer. His novels proceed, more or less, until he is tired of writing them, at which point somebody is married off to somebody else, and that’s that….

His irrelevance, after all, is what binds us to Mr. Pakington, if we like him at all, and I for one like him very much. Why do I read him? Not to discover what is to happen next to Johnnie Bartlett, the hero of Family Album. Johnnie is an agreeable child, an agreeable youth, and an agreeable middle-aged man. He marries the girl he loves and when she dies he marries, after a suitable interval, the girl who has always loved him. No, the reason why one reads Mr. Pakington is because one always hopes to find on turning the next page some minor character who will delay the story for a while with amiable nonsense, and then not infrequently just disappear. Sir Gerald Frogg, the medico “who was only called in when it was quite certain the patient could not live,” is such a character.

Another is Auda Biddulph, who is no-one’s actual aunt, and who found music “a useful means of controlling, cajoling and bullying her acquaintances,” or Aunt Serena in Aston Kings, who was “always ready to welcome the worst,” or Aunt Lucy in Young William Washbourne, who invades Malta more successfully than did the Knights of St. John. There is usually at least one eccentric aunt in every book.

By the mid-1950s, however, Pakington’s formula was losing its appeal. Of one of his later novels, one reviewer wrote dismissively, “It makes few demands on a reader and offers the small rewards of a sincere and well-mannered narrative about some uncomplicated people.” A younger generation of reviewers and readers found his artlessness more tiresome than charming. While the Times welcomed The Vynes Of Vyne Court like a new crop of apples, Al Hines, writing in Saturday Review, diagnosed it as dead on arrival: “it is a combination which has been thoroughly drained of all the humor and interest with which Mr. Wodehouse and Mrs. Thirkell manage to impart quality to their long series of books in the same genre.” If not dead, it was certainly going stale. One of the few positive things said of John Brandon was that it was “pleasantly notable for the authentic glow of gaslight that pervades its early chapters.

No one could accuse Humphrey Pakington of not writing what he knew. Born the third son of the fourth Baron Hampton in 1888, he went to public school, entered the Royal Navy in 1903, and served with honor during the First World War. Several of Pakington’s protagonists, including young William Washbourne and John Brandon, also serve in the Royal Navy. After the war, he trained as an architect (one of his first books, for children, was How the World Builds). Novel-writing seems to have been principally a creative outlet, as he was already quite comfortably off through the combination of inheritances and architectural work. In 1962, he succeeded his oldest brother to become the 5th Baron Hampton. He had few reasons to complain about his lot in life. Not surprisingly, then, that one reviewer wrote of his autobiography, Bid Time Return (1958), “Happy lives seldom account for masterpieces, but when they are well spent, gracious, and successful, they can be good reading.”

None of Humphrey Pakington’s novels have been in print in almost fifty years. Only his 1945 guidebook, English Villages And Hamlets–which is, itself, an something of an artifact of a lost world–is currently available. While I wouldn’t try to propose any of his books as neglected masterpieces, there can be found in a few of them, such as Aston Kings and Family Album a sense of the comic that is both dry and loving.