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Month: August 2007

On “The Last Puritan”, by George Santayana, from the Financial Times

Source: “A life worth living for”, by Harry Eyres, published August 17 2007 on the Financial Times website.

Harry Eyres, the Financial Times’ “Slow Lane” columnist, writes about “one of the slowest novels I’ve ever read”, the philosopher George Santayana’s The Last Puritan.

“Leisurely as it is,” writes Eyres, “it packs a surprisingly hard punch — at least at the end. A more sustained attack on the American puritan ideal has never been penned.” As Eyres describes the book,

Santayana’s attack on American puritanism is anything but crude. It is conducted through a long character study of the most noble and admir-able American puritan it would be possible to imagine. Oliver Alden is the wealthy scion of a leading Bostonian family – beautiful, intelligent, gifted and kind. He is thoroughly good, but, as becomes increasingly clear, incapable of happiness. A brilliant student and heroic footballer and oarsman, he has no idea how to live – or perhaps, too many ideas.

Despite its leisurely, meditative style and Santayana’s critism of mainstream American values, The Last Puritan was a best-seller and Book of the Month Club selection when it was first published in 1936. Back then, Time magazine’s reviewer offered an accurate assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Santayana’s sole novel:

It is characteristic of all Santayana’s writing that the weightiest subjects are handled with lightness and grace. The Last Puritan, no exception, contains amusing portraits of crabbed New Englanders, sophisticated New Yorkers, self-important Englishmen, sentimental Germans, to temper the gravity of the tale. It also contains extended digressions, discussions of German philosophy, of Shakespeare, Goethe, English education, yachting, sports, war, and rises in its record of Oliver’s last decision to some of the most eloquent prose that Santayana has written. Yet critics are likely to disagree for a long time to come over the question of whether The Last Puritan deserves to be reckoned with great U. S. fiction, whether it should even be considered a novel at all. Challenging comparison with The Scarlet Letter in its theme, it is obviously pale, frail, overintellectualized beside Hawthorne’s masterpiece. Evil for Hawthorne’s puritans was intense, powerful, a demon to be fought. For Santayana’s characters it is distant, abstract, a moral problem to be solved like geometry. Thus the characters in The Last Puritan are real as symbols of Santayana’s philosophy rather than as people.

Amazon shows The Last Puritan as out of print, but MIT Press still sells a pricey hardback edition from its series of Santayana reprints.

In the Mill, by John Masefield

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


Cover of first U.S. edition of 'In the Mill'
In a few days I mastered mistake-finding sufficiently to enjoy it very much and do it competently. I was at it all day long, working at speed; well, that was no hardship to me. From childhood, I had been trained to jump to the order; and speed has always seemed to me to be a vital part of efficiency. The continual movement put an end to my day-dreams about the Merchant Service college. I now was moving about all day long, going from floor to floor, stopping a loom, getting another under way, solving some odd error, or causing something to be set right, and having brief words with weavers now and then about the working of their machines. Most of my joy in the work came from its independence. I was the mistake-finder, running the job pretty much as I liked, trusted t do it well, and knowing that I was trusted. The flattery of this was a continual great delight to me; it was my first command, and full of the liveliest interest. No man can be unmoved by the great concerted energy of many men and women. The roaring thundering clang of the energy of the weaving-rooms was a big and exciting thing. Sometimes I felt that it was an enormous dragon and that my mind was going against it with one little purpose, to get at its secret springs and master it.

Editor’s Comments


In 1895, John Masefield, a young seaman apprentice on an English windjammer, became convinced he had some latent gift for writing and jumped ship in Manhattan. After a few hungry weeks, he walked into the office of a carpet factory in Yonkers and applied for a job. In the Mill is his memoir of the next two years, during which he worked as one of hundreds in a great Industrial Age factory full of looms, presses, pulley, conveyors, steam engines, and other complex machinery.

Masefield’s poetry has a strong lyrical streak, and it infuses In the Mill with a poetry that few would suspect of a world usually portrayed as grim, relentless, and inhumane. Partly this is because work in the mill was for Masefield, an improvement on his previous situations — working all hours in extreme weather on the ship, and before that, rising at four A.M. and carrying out back-breaking chores on a farm. Within a few weeks of being hired, Masefield realizes the regular hours — and days off — have their advantages:

When I returned from one of these excursions I felt that indeed my lot had fallen on a fair ground and that I had a goodly heritage; beauty all round me, leisure, such as I had not thought possible, books, so cheap that I could have a library of them, and a great, vivid romantic capital City only half an hour away.

As much of In the Mill is about Masefield’s time away from the factory as in it. Yonkers then sat on the far fringe of New York City; within fifteen minutes’ walk, he could find himself in the middle of a wild forest with no trace of man’s touch. And he could afford to buy books that he consumed with a ravenous hunger. Even though he saw writing as his calling, he had no real sense of what or how he would pursue it until he stumbles upon cheap red Buxton Forman editions of the works of Keats and Shelley:

I began with the Keats, wondering what a classic would be like, and a little fearful lest it should prove to be in couplets like Pope’s Odyssey. I read one short poem with amazement, then a second, which brought me under his spell for ever, then four lines of a third, and for that night I could read no more. I was in a new world where incredible beauty was daily bread and breath of life. Everything that I had read until then seemed like paving-stones on the path leading to this Paradise; now I seemed to be in the garden, and the ecstasy was so great that the joy seemed almost to burn…. I knew then that Medicine was not the law of my being, but the shadow of it; and that my law was to follow poetry, even if I died of it.

Masefield proves a diligent worker and obtains several promotions, moving up to the job described above, one we’d now call quality control. His supervisor holds out fine hopes for him — one day, he tells young “Macey”, you can have a factory floor of your own to run. To Masefield, however, this prospect rises up like a great life-consuming threat. He quits, collects his pay, sells off most of his books, and gets a berth on a merchant ship headed for England.

In hindsight, he thinks he may have seen the factory system in its best light, “in a land which held very strongly the concepts of equality and of dignity.” And he admits that his memories of the mill are not always glowing:

Often, I hated the mill; sometimes in a dream, I have thought that I had to be there again, or was there again, unable to leave, and have wakened glad to find it not so. When I revisited it a few winters ago, my heart sank at the sight of it, and I knew again my old winter horror.

In the Mill is written in a simple, self-effacing style that often belies its beauty and insights. One might argue that this style stems from a tendency in Masefield to avoid stepping above his place in the world, an innate acceptance of the Victorian class system that was fading fast or gone completely by the time he wrote this book. Certainly In the Mill seems subdued compared to what one might expect of a memoir of grunt work in a great dark factory. But it also seems something of a relief from the over-written and strident accounts more usually cataloged as proletarian literature. Indeed, subtlety and self-effacement are part of In the Mill’s great charm.

Other Comments

• The New Yorker, 23 August 1941

The British Poet Laureate recalls his experiences as a carpet-mill worker in Yonkers some forty-five years ago, at a time that marked the beginnings of his apprenticeship to literature. A simple and poignant autobiographical sketch.

• Time, 11 August 1941

By stiff literary standards, England’s Poet Laureate is an easy man to underestimate. But the very qualities that make his work minor (and made him Laureate) — simplicity, traditionalism and sentimentality — are also his great charm. Hardly less than Rudyard Kipling, he is a workingman’s poet. The same qualities make In the Mill, the story of the days when he was an intelligent young workingman, one of the most engaging of his books.

Locate a Copy

In the Mill, by John Masefield
London: Heinemann, 1941
New York: Macmillian, 1941

Save These Books!, from Salon.com

“Save These Books!”, from Salon.com, December 1997

Way back in its early days, Salon.com asked some of its contributors and other writers to share their thoughts about a favorite book that has fallen out of print. The feature included over twenty short essays on a hodge-podge of volumes ranging from The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (now back in print) to The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire, Joseph Wechberg’s contribution to a Time-Life cookbook series from the late 1960s. Of her selection, Diane Johnson writes,

People did not seem to like Nigel Dennis’s A House in Order as much as his earlier Cards of Identity, a novel much admired in the ’60s but now, perhaps, nearly as obscure as the strange little parable that followed, which I have loved since I read it when it came out, in 1966, but have lived without, unable until now to find a copy in libraries or second-hand bookshops. I had even begun to think I had invented this novel in the ensuing 30 years.

My remembered novel is a soothing allegory of order and serenity, concerning a man who isolates himself from the chaos and terror of the actual world when he is confined during a war to a greenhouse, and occupies himself with cleaning it up and growing a garden of flourishing plants. I understand now what attracted me then — it was the making of order out of chaos that, as the mother of young children, I envied. At the time, I saw no way out of personal household chaos, no way to achieve the single-minded and solitary pleasures of a grand project.

Luc Sante celebrates David Maurer’s The Big Con (also now back in print with an introduction by Sante), which he described as “a small masterpiece of the American language, veined with grifter lingo and populated by such characters as the High Ass Kid, the Seldom Seen Kid and the Narrow Gage Kid, whose ‘height was just the distance between the rails of a narrow gage railway.'”

Perhaps the most idiosyncratic suggestion comes from Jane and Michael Stern, who propose the Sears Catalog, a “vast syntagma of American stuff” in which you could find “a hunting rifle, a love seat, a diamond engagement ring or a tractor axle.” It might not qualify as literature, but can anyone who grew up with the Wish Book disagree that it’s a nonpareil sampler of middle American culture of the 20th century?

The Time of the Assassins, by Godfrey Blunden

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'The Time of the Assassins'I first read Godfrey Blunden’s The Time of the Assassins back in the late 1970s, after coming across a copy of the Bantam Modern Classics paperback reissue. The tag line on the cover read, “The nightmare novel of the terrorist war between the NKVD and the Nazi SS.” I was intrigued to find this unfamiliar author and title, and this subject, packaged as a “modern classic”, along with such established titles as All the King’s Men, Darkness at Noon, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Anthony West reviewed the book for the New Yorker when it was first published in 1952, and I will quote him at length to tell what the book’s about:

Godfrey Blunden is a newspaperman, and his novel about the Nazi occupation of the Russian city of Kharkov, The Time of the Assassins, is more a matter of reporting than of invention. But while it has no great aesthetic appeal and cannot be given much credit for literary grace, it makes its points in a blunt way and tells its horrid and fascinating story effectively. Mr. Blunden was in Russia during the war, and he was one of the correspondents who entered Kharkov soon after it was first retaken from the Germans. From the things he saw and heard among the ruins, and the things he learned later, he has constructed a convincing account of what happened in the town. In a sense it is stale news and of very little interest; Kharkov was lost to the Germans as they pressed eastward across the steppes toward Stalingrad, recovered after a year or so, lost again in a week, and finally retaken and held. A story of the events, and of the atrocities, during this swaying to and fro would be sad but boring because it is the story of too many towns and one already knows it too well. But Mr. Blunden is not reporting at that level; he is concerned with states of feeling and with what the time meant to people whose lives were altogether changed by the events that poured over them.

Kharkhov (Kharkhiv) under German occupation, 1942
… The Germans took Kharkov is a rush, so unexpectedly and so rapidly that all public records fell into their hands. Among them were lists of members of the Communist Party. While the city was still welcoming the Germans as liberators who had brought an end to the years of terror and purges that had begun in the early thirties, the Gestapo began hanging their way through the lists. Within a few days there was not a street, square, or public building in Kharkov that was not decorated with the supreme emblems of cruelty — hanged men and women….

The long-drawn-out process of disillusion began as the Ukrainian welcome to the foreign liberators was choked into stunned silence. At first the S.S. confined themselves to wiping out the Communists, and since the Party itself had ruled by terror, the German butchery seemed like the first step to setting up a rational state. But then came the massacres of prisoners of war, and then the massacres of the Jews, and then massacres of Slavs to make room for German colonists…. The unbelievable had happened; the liberators had brought with them a way of life worse than anything a sane man could imagine. The only hope was the return of the men who had made government an affair of secret denunciations, terror, and cold remoteness. It is human nature to reject despair. Mr. Blunden’s teacher and her friends believed that what they were going through might mean an end to government by terror — that it was impossible to live through it without learning how important kindness and gentleness and the humanitarian values were. When the Germans were driven out, something better would come.

But kindness and gentleness proved to be disloyalty to the only force that could drive the Germans out…. The Party came back, hardened, more tenacious, more uncompromising than ever, and among the first people it killed was the teacher.

The closing passage of The Time of the Assassins vividly depicts this grim denouement. After years of Soviet-managed famines and Stalinist purges, after battle, conquest, and a year of ruthless German occupation and exterminations, the few surviving innocents are smashed before they even have the chance to catch their breath:

In these cold battlefields and devastated cities there are no grotesqueries. The dead lie as in sleep, quietly no-sleeping, may lie there for as long as there is frost, the snow sweeping over them like a soft lace shroud, the flesh waxed and pink as with health. Nor does high explosive make that much difference or, as with this old woman, the rifle butt. Lying there on the floor her face broken, she is yet human, real, still clutching the old string bag with which, evidently, she attempted to fight her aggressors. And the children about her skirts! The children in the corners of the room! In the other rooms! Difficult even to see where they had been shot, lying there in sleeping attitudes, little bundles of ice-starched clothes, bullet-tinctured somewhere, frozen, perfect small angular faces, thin drumstick legs. There in the old schoolhouse, in the ruin of broken-in windows, torn-up floor, over-turned stove, in the confusion of rags and refuse, they are not in themselves horrifying; when the life-ending is less pathetic than the life-in-living, death may seem even pretty and peaceful. This is what Maryusa is thinking as she walks through the streets, a pace ahead of her captor: there are no lives any longer, therefore no responsibility; all that for which she has fought so stubbornly is now disposed of. She is not thinking of punishment; there being none to punish the doer, that is, none above the human authority by which this action was condoned. In her mind there if only peacefulness. It is not bad that the children are dead. The struggle was carried on, but now it is ended. Already in the basement room of the NKVD she awaits her own prompt demise with the same expectancy.

… Later (we remember) there were some in Moscow who thought the liquidation of the Kharkiv [Blunden uses the Ukrainian name for the city] schoolteachers precipitate. But the matter was soon forgotten, for not much over a week later (it seems so long ago now as to be hardly worth mentioning), the Germans were back in Kharkiv.

Cover of Bantam Modern Classics edition of 'The Time of the Assassins'If history is a broom, sweeping back and forth through time, then The Time of the Assassins is history told from the dust’s perspective. The truly nightmarish aspect of the experience of the survivors of Kharkov is that the purpose of the Soviets’ purge after retaking the city was rendered moot in the space of a week or so. There was no safe situation: side with either the Soviets or the Germans and you risked being killed as the other’s enemy. Attempt to remain neutral and focus on surviving, and you risked being wiped out by either side’s blind adherence to its ideology. It would not be too hard to see some parallels between the Kharkov of The Time of the Assassins and Baghdad and other Iraqi cities today, where there is danger in taking sides with the Shiites or Sunnis or Americans and danger in not taking sides. One wonders if retaining hope in such a situation isn’t just as insane as the monomanias of the various factions.

Lionel Trilling wrote the introduction to the Bantam Modern Classics edition, and I will let him provide the critical assessment of The Time of the Assassins:

I have no knowledge of what literary model Godfrey Blunden had in mind for his remarkable novel, The Time of the Assassins. But if I had to guess by whom he had regulated his tone and attitude, I should think it was not a novelist at all. My own reference as I read Mr. Blunden’s book was to certain historians, to Thucydides and to Tacitus, and, in a lesser degree, to Josephus. Like them, Mr. Blunden tells a story to which the only possible response might seem to be despair. Like them he maintains the power and fortitude of his mind, and of ours, before the terrors of actuality.

This is, I believe, a very considerable achievement, possibly a great one. It is first to be thought of as a literary achievement. Nothing could be more difficult than to present human extremity without, on the one hand, falsifying or mitigating the facts, or, on the other hand, assailing and subduing our minds with the details of horror. It is also a moral achievement, of the intelligence put at the service of the emotions.

… Yet if what Mr. Blunden tells us is more terrible than what we read of in the old historians, still Thucydides’ account of the Melian massacre, or of the plague at Athens, or of the death of the Athenian army in the Sicilian quarry, or, again, Tacitus’ record of the tyranny, torture, and treachery of the Roman civil wars, or Josephus’ narrative of the war against the Jews, are the ancient analogue of what the modern world has experienced in more extravagant form. And in the attitude of the historians, in their determination to maintain the power and integrity of the mind before the decay of the very fabric of society and the human soul, we have the tradition in which Mr. Blunden has put himself.

… The narrowness of the circumstances in which Mr. Blunden’s characters must exist, the limitation of their power of choice, is, as I have suggested, a disadvantage to the novelistic imagination. It is a measure of Mr. Blunden’s quality, of his literary power, his intelligence, and his moral commitment, that he overcomes this disadvantage. He overcomes it by realizing the power of the historical imagination. Like Thucydides, he derives his information in part from personal observation — he was for many years a correspondent in Russia and in that capacity was with the Red Army at Stalingrad and when it made its first reinvestment of Kharkov — and in part from careful inquiry. His commitment is to fact and to essential truth, which he serves no less by his imagination than by his experience and research. There is no page of his work that does not compel our admiring interest.

Locate a Copy

The Time of the Assassins, by Godfrey Blunden
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1952
London: Jonathan Cape, 1953

Caroline Slade

To an extent that puts better-known writers such as Steinbeck to shame, Caroline Slade wrote for the dispossessed, exploited, and impoverished Americans of the 1930s and 1940s. Educated at Skidmore College in the early 1900s, she spent three decades working and teaching in the field of social work before her first book was published in 1936, when she was fifty. She had begun to write years before that, though, winning an O.Henry prize in the late 1920s for one of her first short stories.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Sterile Sun'Her first novel, Sterile Sun, leaps straight into a subject few people were willing to discuss, let alone write about: prostitution. One by one, Slade takes the viewpoint of three prostitutes — Sue, a fourteen year-old runaway; Allie, a veteran of the streets who strenuously defends herself and her daughter; and Winkie, who filters everything through a romantic haze to avoid dealing with the reality of her situation. Of the three sections, the first, in Sue’s voice, is the most successful, very much a stream-of-consciousness monologue following the models set down by Joyce and others:

I wished I could get some more money then one day the old man met me down the road when I was coming from school he said Sue you go on up to the rocks and wait for me I want to tell you something I said hwo much will you give me he laughed he said well you little bitch but he said fifty cents so I said I would wait for him. He sat on a rock and made me stand between his legs he liked to feel me through my clothes he made such funny noises with his mouth I had to laugh I thought he was pretty silly but when he let me go he gave me a dollar bill I could hardly believe it he said will you meet me here again and I said I bet I would he just said you stand still Sue and then a whole dollar. I put it in my shoe I was so happy I could feel it with my foot in my shoe all that money I said it all for me and he said you bet it is then I was so scared my mother would find it.

Kicked out of school because she admits to having sex with older men, Sue hitch-hikes to a nameless city and soon turns to prostitution when her slim funds run out. She manages to avoid getting trapped into a white slavery racket, starts walking the streets, and then dies from a botched abortion. Allie and Winkie have managed to survive longer than Sue, but the novel ends with no indication that things will get any better.

At least one magazine criticized Slade for failing to suggest that society could solve the problems that led these women to their fates. But, as Paula Rabinowitz writes in her book, Black & White & Noir, “Faith in society was not going to solve these girls’ problems. Slade’s years as a social worker had taught her that already.”

Vanguard Press, which published Sterile Sun, took an odd marketing tact, advertising that it was issuing the book “in a special edition, the sale of which is limited to physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, educators, and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescence.” Vanguard also prefaced the novel with a sober introduction by one Reverend John Howard Melish urging readers not to look upon the book’s pornographic values (which are none, by today’s standards). They still managed to sell enough copies that the book is relatively easy to find, online at least, for five bucks or less.

In her subsequent books, Slade continues to hold to the view that things get better only through a tremendous effort of will — or as a fluke. While she never puts a social worker in a heroic light, she at least shows an understanding of, if not a sympathy for, the grim job they have. Still, she recognizes the symbiotic relationship between the poor and the bureaucrats trying to help them. In Lilly Crackell, Miss Stallings, the case worker who works on Lilly’s case for years, admits at one point, “The truth is, I live upon the lives of hungry, cold, poverty-stricken people; their misfortunes make possible for me my good job. My God, I never honestly looked at my job before. Why, my own income rests upon the backs of the poor!”

Cover of Signet paperback edition of 'Lilly Crackell'I read Lilly Crackell (1944) after seeing a post on the Women Writers message board that proclaimed, “This is a great American novel(very possibly ‘the’ Great American novel) that, to put it bluntly, wipes the floor with Steinbeck.” Lilly Crackell is the story of a welfare mother back before that term was invented. The Crackells are a white trash family living on Sand Hill, next to the dump, in a shack with a dirt floor. They get a weekly care package from the town that keeps them on the edge of starvation. Lilly is a stunningly attractive young girl who fools around with one of her school classmates, a young man from one of the “better” families in town, and winds up pregnant.

The book follows her through two decades and six children. She gets a job keeping house for an older farmer and ends up having three kids by him before he drops dead of a heart attack. His heirs kick her off the farm and she returns to the shack on Sand Hill. Meanwhile, we see, from Miss Stalling’s viewpoint, social services go from private charities to government programs and influx of money and attention with the New Deal. Yet, as the book closes, with Lilly feeling another pregnancy coming on, the Crackells are still dependents. Her oldest sons can’t pass the Army’s physical due to bad teeth and other effects of long-term malnutrition and Lilly and her mother are still stuck on Sand Hill.

I can’t agree with the poster’s high regard for Lilly Crackell as a work of art. Slade’s flat prose style lacks much of the energy of her monologues in Sterile Sun. I have no doubt that her account of the Crackells and the social agencies is utterly honest and firmly rooted in real cases Slade worked on. But few of her characters are developed in more than superficial detail and Lilly herself shows almost no change in her perspective and thoughts between 14 and 30-something. Still, I can agree with the New Yorker reviewer who wrote of the book, “Mrs. Slade has the talent, rare in these days, of combining warmth and compassion with intelligence, and she writes movingly, often humorously, and with sturdy common sense.”

Slade’s other novels are:

· The Triumph of Willie Pond (1940)

A story of a family on relief and the effects of the WPA and other New Deal programs. Social Work Today gave The Triumph of Willie Pond this strong endorsement: “to say every single social worker in the United States ought to read it is to do it injustice….” According to Time magazine, Slade’s mother wrote her after reading the book, “Caroline, wherever in the world did you hear such language?”

· Job’s House (1941)

In this novel, Job Mann and his wife, an elderly couple, find themselves slammed to the bottom of the social heap by the Great Crash and the Depression and struggle to cope with the “world of hate, whores, idiots, stinking tenements and the loathed ‘Welfares'”, as Time’s review put it.

· Margaret (1946)

Margaret was probably Slade’s best-known and -selling novel. It revisits the story of Sterile Sun, telling the story of a sixteen year-old girl who becomes a prostitute to help out her family and runs into problems with gangs and juvenile justice.

· Mrs. Party’s House (1948)

This book also deals with prostitution, but from the viewpoint of a madame. In Rabinowitz’s words, it “offers a history of government, legal, journalistic, welfare, and economic investments in prostitution.”

Slade’s husband, John Slade, was an attorney for Saratoga County and a professor of law at Skidmore College. The two were active supporters of the arts and she served as the first president of the foundation that built and ran the famous Yaddo writers’ colony. She died in Saratoga Springs in 1975.

Pull Devil, Pull Baker, by Stella Benson and Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine

Cover of first UK edition of Pull Devil, Pull Baker by Stella Benson

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Find Out More
· Locate a Copy

Excerpt


[The Count:] At Cracow I stop at the Hotel de France. There I soon make the acquentance of the jeunesse doré of the locality, and between19 them — (a very costly one) — of Count P______, son of governor general of a province, to hoom I made cleaver story; that on way I was robed of my french passeport, that make me stop at Cracow expecting to find a french consulate in town. On ground of this story, the young count introduce me to the austrian chief of police, who give me, without any difficultys, a certificate of identity, due signed and seeled by him, that had the same value as a regular passeport for all austrian empire. I reussite also to lent [borrow] two thousand florins by the proprietor of the hotel, to wich I payd largely all my bill and my way further — to Vienna. At Vienna I had the opportunity to make another loone of two thousand florins by a old friend of my. With this lendet money I left Vienna for the south — for Buda-Pesh, the beautiful Hungarian capital, where I spendet foolish near all my money with the charming, pretty, Hungarian gerls — that brogth me bec to misery. In this critic position I rich Trieste, where I stop in the best hotel, kept by a friend of my friend in Vienna. That make me all rigth; permit me to ewayt some new chances of making money for my tramping further.

19Among.

[Benson:] The count does not explain exactly why he was all right in the best hotel, or enlarge upon the nature of the “chances” that here favoured him, or mention whether the numerous creditors he left trailing behind him as he flashed upon his brilliant course, ever Came Back into His Life — (as your creditors and mine are so lamentably likely to do). I should very much like to discuss with him his financial methods; it seems to me that he must have much that is useful to teach us all on this point — but as he is now without a penny, enquiry would perhaps seem ill-timed or tactless. But at the period of his life which this story embraces, his skill in “making money” seems to me most enviable. His world seemed always full of strangers anxious to lend him thousands on no security at all. I can only say that mine is not. I once, with great difficulty, borrowed a shilling over a strange bank counter, on the security of my simple face — but this is my nearest approach to the Count’s splendid insouciance.

Editor’s Comments


This site has been idle for the last month while I enjoyed the longest vacation of my adult life — one whole month (long vacations being one of the benefits of working in Europe). I did not, however, stop searching for and reading neglected books, so I have a backlog of posts to work through. I’m starting on it in reverse order, taking a look at the last book I came across (in Missoula’s Bird’s Nest Books), which I read in the course of my flights back home: Stella Benson’s 1933 book, Pull Devil, Pull Baker.

Finding it in the Russian history section, I pulled Pull Devil, Pull Baker down for a look on the strength of Benson’s name, which I recognized from Tobit Transplanted which D. J. Enright mentioned on several lists on this site. Although the spine only lists Benson, the title page credits her and one Count Nicolas De Toulouse Lautrec De Savine, K. M. (Knight of Malta). A quick flip through the book suggested it was a combination of recollections by the count and commentaries by Benson. It also showed that the count’s sections featured a highly unusual prose, full of misspellings and words from a hodge-podge of languages. I still wasn’t quite sure what this was, but it looked novel enough to buy for a very reasonable $5.

Stella BensonThe book opens innocently. Benson vouches for the real existence of the count and offers a synopsis of his noble pedigree (quite unconnected with that of the famous painter) as a member of “one of the most distinguiched aristocratic famelys of Europe.” She describes meeting him while he was a patient in a charity hospital in Hong Kong. According to Marlene Baldwin Davis’ Notes to Benson’s diaries, Benson did, indeed, encounter:

an elderly expatriate Russian who was penniless and ill. This relationship, which began 13 April 1931, involved Stella’s listening to the man’s ‘loving stories,’ transcribing them into readable, but not literary English so as not to spoil the effect, and getting them published under the title, Pull Devil, Pull Baker.

Benson describes with some admiration the Count’s talent for wandering the world with hardly a cent to his name, playing on the sympathy and admiration of unsuspecting Samaritans. But she also saw that his taste for adventures was being outpaced by the wear of old age:

Wait a little while — and yet a little while again. There was, I thought, the sound of a creaking bolt in the words. At seventy-seven, when a man is sick and worn out, a little while is as high a prison wall as a big while.

The Count, we learn, comes from a family with blood ties to French, Spanish, German, and Russian nobility and social links to just about anyone else of “hyg class” in Europe. Born in Russian Alaska in 1856, he survives a turbulent childhood to become a guardsman, gambler, and gallant. He easily falls in love with women, who, by his account, usually fall just as easily in love with him. He runs up enormous debts, almost always with Jews whom he looks upon with splenetic contempt. The Count’s first chapter ends with his discharge from the Russian army after a fight with a Jewish tailor over money.

Benson titles the first chapter, “Pull Devil: Presenting the Baker from the Devil’s Point of View.” According to Brewer’s, “Pull Devil, Pull Baker” is “said in encouragement of a contest, usually over the possession of something.” Benson (the Devil) sets up the book as a series of opposing chapters: one chapter giving Benson’s view of the Count (the Baker) and his stories, followed by another presenting the Count’s story, mostly in his own words with slight commentaries and footnoting by Benson. She admits at the start that,

[t]he dislocation between author and editor is usually more discreetly glossed over than it is in our book. At any rate, in our book, the Count says what he means, and I say what I mean, and, although our meanings are often mutually contradictory, at least I do not interpret him, as some editors have been known to interpret authors who are no longer sufficiently alive to insist on interpreting themselves.

My editing consists largely in trying to outshout my author with ideas of my own — ideas always, I am sure, in his opinion, completely irrelevant and frivolous.

We pass by this statement as nothing more than editorial self-effacement, but about fifty pages into the book, Benson returns to the matter in a passage that, in my view, ranks among the most remarkable to be found in any piece of fiction from the first half of the twentieth century:

For this reason I am uncertain now whether the Count de Savine is editing me or I him. I am cleverer than he is — I think — but I am not sure whether I see more or understand more. Simply, I say more and I understand that I don’t understand. He writes austerely in terms of appearances. He feels that there are various sets of words applicable to various kinds of people. Cluck, to the goose, spells hen — grunt spells pig — what else can the goose know about hens and pigs. Blu eys, gold hairs and smole fiets spell women to the Count, champagne and guardee ostentation spell hyg class men, durtiness and igrerence spells loo class men; crookyness spells Jew. That Count writes A Crooky Jew and means all that is comprehensible to him about a Jew…. What more is there to say? What other eyes can one look through, if not through one’s own? I write “The Count de Toulouse Lautrec de Savine” and add after the name thousands of words. What do I mean? I mean an invented thing — the Count-plus-me. And yet I write his name again and again and add thousands and thousands of invented words to describe him-plus-me, simply because I have not the austerity to confine myself to what I know. His narrative shows me how little I know — yet here I am, commenting industriously upon in.

It seems to me that I could edit the Jew Taylor quite as easily as I can edit the Count. I could edit an armadillo now, if I had to. I have seen and talked to the Count; I have not seen or talked to the Jew Taylor or the armadillo, but to describe Count, Jew or armadillo I have no recourse but to invent. I know nothing about the Count de Savine, either, except what he looks like and what he says and what he writes.

So I shall make up some words about the Polish Jew — and I maintain that my Jew can be no more unlikely than the real one.

Benson then proceeds to repeat the story of the Count’s fight with the tailor — only this time from the tailor’s viewpoint. The Count knocks the tailor on the head and in the commotion, the lights are snuffed. The tailor thinks, for a moment, that he has died and gone into an afterlife of nothingness. He is frightened, then comforted by the realization that all his worldly cares and burdens are now gone. Coming to, he thinks, “For a minute I was free … now I am the slave of a slave.”

With this passage, Benson leaps from the simple dimensions of a collection of fanciful reminiscences with editorial commentary to the fictional equivalent of differential geometry. Pull Devil, Pull Baker is not just “an arrangement of short stories,” as critic R. Meredith Bedell describes it. I think it shares more in common with such works as Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and other early works of metafiction. Indeed, there are more than a few parallels between the book and Don Quixote itself: both play with the dimensions of the story as experienced and the story as told; both intersperse narration and commentary; and both deal with an elderly man from one era trying to deal with the realities of a very different one.

Perhaps without knowing it, Benson also manages to address a profound issue about the relationship between perception and reality that no less weighty a thinker than Ludwig Wittgenstein was grappling with at roughly the same time that she was writing Pull Devil, Pull Baker. “Cluck, to the goose, spells hen…. What other eyes can one look through, if not through one’s own?,” she writes. Is this not, essentially, what Wittgenstein was arguing with his aphorism, “If a lion could speak we wouldn’t understand him?”

That the Count is more likely descended from Baron Munchausen than Count Alexander IV de Toulouse Lautrec is obvious. Benson’s intrigue with the Count’s stories and viewpoint does not prevent her from exercising editorial discretion when it’s called for:

[The Count:] “Very please to meat you, Count,” tell he, “I was effrayed to molest you. You can not mean2 how inthusiast peopel are concern you, from the Blac See to the Baltic, and from there to the Pacific Costs of the Fahr East….” et., etc., etc..

2Know, imagine.

[Benson:] (Here follow nine pages of hero-worship.)

She does acknowledge that “I have grown to love the Count’s oddities of spelling,” but here again, her remarks play with our understanding of the relationship between Baker and Devil:

To make a loone suggests to me something more insouciant and dashing than the mere borrowing of money. I think the noty gerl must have possessed a piquancy that ordinary naughty girls lack. I like the ai and ay effects — so incongruously refained upon the bearded lip (bearded pen-nib?) of a world-roving adventurer; quait and quait I find much more convincing then a mere completely. And my favourite sentence in the whole of this work is —

[The Count:] The most ones of our officers had sweathearts, but I was to yang and to inconstant to bound me with a gerl; prefair to flay from one to a other, as a butterflay who flay from one flower to a other one.

“As an experiment,” Benson then “tries transposing” (an interesting choice of a mathematical term over the expected “translating”) one of the Count’s stories into grammatically and orthographically correct English: “The lawyer of the baroness appealed, on the ground that she was not in her normal mind at the time of the murder, but the appeal was dismissed by the high court.” Her point, although unstated, is clear: in these words, the story is not, in fact, one of the Count’s stories, but something different, not just if wording but in viewpoint. Yet the experiment also raises a question about the fundamental premise of the book: are these the stories as written by the Count (as claimed in the introduction) or as told by the Count and written by Benson? I have not had the opportunity to check Benson’s diaries, but if what Prof. Davis states is true (“This relationship, which began 13 April 1931, involved Stella’s listening to the man’s ‘loving stories,’ transcribing them into readable, but not literary English so as not to spoil the effect….”, then Benson’s experiment is itself a metafictional sleight of hand, showing the reader how dramatically a story can be changed just by altering the words and grammar in which it is told.

Pull Devil, Pull Baker is, I think, an unrecognized precursor to much of the post-modernist fiction that would be written after the Second World War. It belongs in the same canon as the works of Calvino, Borges, and Queneau. Take the following, which now recalls Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle but at the time displayed the same self-referential brio as Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (AKA Ceci n’est pas une pipe):

There is, perhaps, no thing called Truth in any book — or at any rate that can be arrived at by appraisal from a standpoint outside the book itself. Words in books are like citizens in cities; as long as they live in accord with their neighbours, they are beyond outside challenge…. My word truth, the Count’s word truth, the police-magistrate’s word truth, would all be strangers within one another’s gates.

For all the post-modernist and metafictional wizardry she displays in Pull Devil, Pull Baker, however, Benson does presume to be the Count’s superior. Instead, she reflects, with some sadness,

The words “quait unexpected,” which might almost be called the refrain of the Count’s story, no longer seem to us exciting — as they seem to him. We have grown wary of surprises, through living all our lives in such a quait and quait unexpected world. But the Count was born into an established world — a world scored with seemly grooves and bristling with instructive signposts….

The increasing complexity of the world, as compared with the much simpler, black-and-white world on which the Count de Savine first opened his eyes nearly eight decades ago, now imposes upon us a kind of colour-blindness. We forbid our hearts to leap forth on new adventures; spiritually as well as economically, we can’t afford adventures any more. We have learned to stay at home, because we know now that the world is round — that travel only takes us back to the same place in the end — that the path to adventure is a treadmill path round a spinning globe. There is no destination, either of dragon or princess…. And so I submit, as black-and-white refreshment to eyes dazzled with complex colour, these simple stories by a storyteller who never got tired of anything — least of all of himself….

At the time of its publication, Pull Devil, Pull Baker was seen a little more than a collection of quirky and entertaining reminiscences — “rodomontadinous reminiscences,” as Time’s reviewer put it. Scribner’s compared it to Trader Horn, while in the New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman called it “quaint without being at all nauseous.” One of the few to recognize that the book was something more than that was Benson’s friend and fellow writer, Winifred Holtby. In a letter to Benson, she wrote that the book “[S]how[s] how a writer works, how the artist’s mind differs from the non-artist’s — and how the purely self-regarding imagination which blinds, differs from the outward looking imagination which illuminates.” Perhaps the misunderstanding of the book worked in Benson’s financial favor, though: it was picked up by the Literary Guild and sold well in the U.S.. Unfortunately, she never had the chance to enjoy this success, as she died of pneumonia in December 1933 while living with her husband in northern Vietnam.

Find Out More

  • Wikipedia entry on Stella Benson
  • Prof. Marlene Baldwin Davis’ Notes to the Diaries of Stella Benson

Locate a Copy

Pull Devil, Pull Baker, by Stella Benson and Count Nicolas De Toulouse Lautrec de Savine, K. M.
London: Macmillan, 1933
New York: Harpers, 1933