The Inside Story of an Outsider, by Franz Schoenberner

12 June 20184 August 2012

Although Franz Schoenberner was a man of letters for his entire adult life, aside from a short time of service in the German Army at the end of World War One, he was over fifity before he wrote his first book. Throughout the 1920s and up to Hitler’s taking power as Chancellor of Germany in early 1933, Schoenberner was a journalist and editor–most notably of the satirical (and anti-Nazi) weekly, Simplicissimus. As such, he was an archetypal European intellectual of the golden days of transnational humanism–the world of Stefan Zweig, Jules Romains, and André Gide. Not surprisingly, then, when he did come to write his first book–a clear-eyed and self-deprecating account of that period–he titled it, Confessions of a European Intellectual.

When the Nazis began cracking down on all forms of political opposition following the Reichstag fire in February 1927, however, Schoenberner quickly realized that the only options available to him were exile or imprisonment. Taking a few belongings and a little money in a backpack, he crossed into Switzerland in March 1933 and began life as a refugee. The Inside Story of an Outsider, his second book, published in 1949, is his account of eight years of living as an outsider.

From the time they set foot in Switzerland until their acceptance as long-term residents of the United States in 1941, Schoenberner and his wife, the novelist Ellie Nerac, existed in a political and economic limbo. For most of this time, their passports were in the hands of the local police. They could not leave without visas and sufficient funds to gain entry to another country, and they could not return to Germany without risking certain imprisonment or death in a concentration camp. Their status did not allow them to hold down regular jobs, and no one in Switzerland or France needed an editor of a liberal German-language magazine. Nazi laws had made it almost impossible to get any of their funds out of their German bank accounts or to sell their remaining property, and what small royalties they could get out of selling an occasional article in a Swiss or French magazine often took months to make it through a complex chain of bank transfers.

Even so, Schoenberner and Nerac were able to get by, living in cheap apartments in the south of France and devising countless ways to economize. These he recalls in a charming chapter titled, “How to Live Without Money.” “Having lived so many years almost exclusively by miracles, I feel obliged to relate for the personal benefit and encouragement of my readers some of these experiences and even some of the practical techniques which, as I have found, are likely to create the practical and psychological preconditions for such miracles to happen.”

Schoenberner is the first to admit that what he and his wife experienced–even the months of internment with thousands of refugees in filthy camps run with gross incompetence by the Vichy French–hardly compared with the fate of millions of other victims of the Second World War. Even among his fellow internees, some found their situation too much to bear. Schoenberner recounts the fate of his friend, the poet Walter Hasenclever, in the Camps des Milles, outside Aix-en-Provence:

Only when, getting up at dawn, I suddenly heard that Hasenclever could not be awakened, I knew that his good night had been a last good-by. He was still breathing when two stretcher bearers brought him to the infirmary. But a last look at his face–so deadly pale and deadly quiet–made me feel sure that any attempt to save him would be in vain. An empty tube of veronal had been found in the straw of his sleeping place. He probably had taken all the twenty tablets shortly after going to bed, and I knew enough of medicine to be certain that after eight hours the stomach pump could not remove the poison from his body. … If he reused to take this chance, it was because his will to live, as well as to create, was exhausted, and the new struggle seemed no longer worth while to him. If all he wanted was peace, life should not be forced upon him. In our times more than ever, life would always mean the opposite of peace, and everyone had to make his choice, Since he had decided for peace, it should not be disturbed.

Schoenberner had the advantage of a tremendous internal resilience–and of just enough recognition outside Germany–based largely on the reputation of Simplicissimus–to win an occasional favor with a French official–such as a release from a internment camp outside Bayonne just a day or so ahead of its being taken over by German forces.

He and Nerac also benefitted from the support of their friend, the German novelist Hermann Kesten, who was active on the Emergency Rescue Committee in the U.S.. Eventually, with the help of Varian Fry, the committee’s representative in Marseilles, who was responsible for the release of thousands of refugees from Vichy France, they were able to pull together the necessary paperwork and enough funds to gain passage to New York via Lisbon.

Having made it to the safety of the United States did not, however, mean that all their worries were over. They still faced the challenge of adapting to a new language and culture and finding a way to make a living. Fortunately, standing alone and stranded with their few suitcases in a customs shed on Staten Island, they sought out the help of woman wearing a Red Cross uniform.

This woman turned out to be a member of the local Unitarian Church, and her generosity in taking them in, offering room and board for weeks, helping them find a place to stay in Manhattan, setting them up with connections for work, and simply offering much-needed compassion and support to two very tired and uncertain people, makes you wish that all refugees coming to this country could experience the same kind of welcome.

As do many writers trying to tell a story with a happy ending, Schoenberner struggles a bit in the final chapters of The Inside Story of an Outsider. He throws in a tribute to the work of Thomas Wolfe that has little to do with the rest of the book–particularly given that Schoenberner never met or knew Wolfe personally. Although he is able to gain a position with the Office of War
Information and is persuaded to write Confessions of a European Intellectual, which wins very favorable reviews, he does not believe that the peace achieved at the end of the war represents anything but an ugly compromise. Schoenberner is unwilling to attribute any special meaning to his experiences or his choice to record them aside from the imperative for a writer to be “an incorruptible witness.”

I hope I’m not being too rude when I say, however, that, for a German intellectual, Schoenberner’s style and outlook are surprisingly light and optimistic. One might say he possesses an almost Gallic charm. And it is the pleasure of spending some hours in the company of a remarkable narrator–intelligent, compassionate, humorous and self-effacing–that makes The Inside Story of an Outsider a book worth seeking out. Over the last few days, I’ve always enjoyed picking it up, even if just for a few minutes, and regretted setting it down. Considering the book’s subject, that’s quite a recommendation.

The Inside Story of an Outsider, by Franz Schoenberner
New York City: The Macmillan Company, 1949

Breaking Up, by W. H. Manville

12 June 201830 July 2012

I was tempted to tag this post Justly Neglected?, as Breaking Up, W. H. Manville’s 1962 bizarre novel of obsessively apathetic love is really quite bad. But out of respect for the fine work of graphic arts legend, Tony Palladino, who also designed the cover for Robert Bloch’s novel, Psycho, I’m listed this under “Covers.”

For Breaking Up, Palladino came up with a simple, striking image: an upside-down aerial shot of midtown Manhattan. It worked its magic with me, as it was the cover rather than the jacket blurb that led me to buy and read the book. Well, that and the setting: I’m always a sucker for books set in Manhattan, particularly when the protagonist works on Madison Avenue. And one could imagine Bill, the husband whose wife leaves him in the opening chapter, working alongside Don Draper–although it’s clear he lacks any real talent as an ad man, sculptor, or lover. His creative director sums up his character succinctly:

You want to be the American Rembrandt of the sculpture guys, you want to succeed in this business–you’ll wake up to the fact you want the dough as much as anyone one of these days–you want to have the greatest love story of all time with your wife, you want to be the guy who can beat the system, who can do all the other things, too. All without working at any of them. You want all that. Result: you get paralyzed.

Which reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s wonderful assessment of one of his acquaintances, Barry Pink: “Pink wants to sit on six stools at once, but he only has one arse.”

For a good two-thirds of the book, the reader has to follow Bill around as he wrestles with that timeless question: does he, or doesn’t he? His eyes are eventually opened to the anguish his wife has suffered trying to reconcile herself to the fact that her husband is an apathetic lump (he helps her pack when she moves out). He comes across her diary from the months before the break-up:

He is teaching me sculpture. It is hard for him to do and I pretend not to be too eager. He feels it is his own and as if he is giving part of himself away to me. And he is–at last.
Bill, I’ve been starving for you.
He finds in it a refuge. Sometimes I’m glad he has something in which he is not locked up and incoherent, but it frightens me in him. So remote.

Thus the angst of the remote Bill, seeking an outlet in his art, is channeled and magnified by his wife. My own feeling about Bill can be summed up by a quote from Tom Lehrer: “I feel that if a person has problems communicating, the very least he can do is to shut up.”

Somehow the revelations of the diary trigger a burst of action from the clod, and in the final chapters, in the course of one frenetic night, he tries to win her back, tries to destroy the tubercular male model she’s hooked up with, tries to orchestrate a con by which his agency’s key account can be saved, and tries to win a big account on which he and the above creative director can set up a new agency of their own. It’s not only completely unbelievable but technically inept: it’s not too entertaining when the juggler is running around the stage chasing after dropped balls.

It’s a good thing I read this on board a transatlantic flight: it forced me to withstand the temptation to toss the book out the window. Breaking Up is one book that deserves to sleep with the fishes.

Breaking Up, by W. H. Manville
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962

The Patriot, by Harold Bienvenu

12 June 201824 July 2012

Cover of Avon paperback edition of "The Patriot" by Harold Bienvenu When I picked up an old paperback edition of Harold Bienvenu’s 1964 novel, The Patriot, I was hoping it might turn out to be a forgotten gem. From the cover blurbs, it was clearly a scathing view of right-wing Southern California politics from the heyday of Barry Goldwater. A young public relations man sets up shop in a fictional version of San Bernardino or Riverside, and stumbles into a connection with right wing minister. Together they decide to form the American Patriots, a group blending the tenets of the John Birch Society, the NRA, and Senator Joe MacCarthy.

“I am an American Patriot. I believe in a Supreme Being. I believe in the American Republic. I believe in the American Constitution. I believe in the American Enterprise System. I am an American Patriot.” So goes the group’s oath. At first it’s little but a flag-waving version of the Rotary, but with the help of a local millionaire (modelled on Walter Knott of Knott’s Berry Farm) and the PR man’s hard work, it soon becomes a force in local politics and business. Stores are pressured into sponsoring the group and displaying American Patriot cards. A not-too-subtle boycott is organized: “No member who is an American Patriot would trade with any professional man, or any businessman, who is ashamed to proclaim himself a patriot.”

At this point, The Patriot could have developed into something promising. But having created the situation, novice novelist Bienvenu (a professor of economics by trade) quickly loses all control, and the story spirals off into lurid silliness. In the course of a few chapters, the PR man dumps his lounge singer girlfriend, agrees to become a bagman for a Howard Hughes-like billionaire in return for a shot at the local Congressional seat, and rapes and then marries the Knott-like millionaire’s lesbian daughter. Bienvenu might have started out with the aim of writing a serious book, but he caught the Harold Robbins mojo and ended up with a gawdawful mess.

Hands down the worst book I’ve read this century.

Ads from the Saturday Review of Literature

23 July 2012

I had the chance to pick up an assorted lot of bound issues of the Saturday Review of Literature from the 1920s to the 1950s and have been going through them in search of well-regarded but since forgotten books.

However, just as interesting as the reviews have been the ads–particularly the personal ads, which became a regular feature of the magazine somewhere in the early 1930s. These are touchingly open and naive, amusingly pompous, cryptic, or–often–downright bizarre. Here are a few examples:

Correspondence invited concerning social patterns, individual reactions, one more script, the country, pox, or your favorites. By mature man. Box 520-D.
AMIABLE MALE wishes employment based not solely upon his 23 years. Some education (art), much erudition; deep love of music. Long fingers, but firm palms. Though no derring-doer, worn or untrod paths considered. Box P-973.
HEY GALS! Let’s swap hats! If your friends are tired of seeing you in that hat send it to us with $3.00 and we will send you a new-to-you sterilized hat. What can you lose? No junk, please. Hat-to-you, 816 Broad St., Chattanooga, Tenn.
TO JUNKETS—alone and palely loitering. Yes.—you were saying… .? SANS MERCI.

So, to share some of these wonderful snippets of past lives, I put together a Tumblr site that will offer up other samples once or twice a day:

saturdayreviewofliteratureads.tumblr.com

There’s enough of a supply to keep this going for a year or so. Check it out.

Keeper of the Flame, by I. A. R. Wylie

12 June 201823 July 2012

This Popular Library edition of I. A. R. Wylie’s 1942 novel, Keeper of the Flame, dates from the early 1960s. There are some remarkable titles to be found among the best-sellers, bodice-rippers, and dreck that Popular Library released in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I wrote about a few of them about a year ago in the post, Digging into the Popular Libary at the Montana Valley Book Store.”

This is a particularly odd example. MGM purchased the film rights to Keeper of the Flame when the book was still unpublished. It was then published by Random House before the film was released, but subsequent runs featured a dust jacket with a still shot from the movie.

The film is best remembered today as Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s first, but it and the novel are nothing like their usual comedies. Steven O’Malley (Tracy), a celebrated foreign correspondent of the Quentin Reynolds-Vincent Sheean-John Gunter school, recently returned from Europe, takes an assignment to write the life story of Robert Forrest, a New England governor who’s inspired a nationwide populist movement. Forrest is considered a Lincoln-like figure, the great hope of the nation, but as O’Malley investigates, he finds there are some curious figures in Forrest’s household–including his wife.

I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that Forrest proves to have been a little more like Lincoln Rockwell than Abraham Lincoln.

Aside from the unusual story, Keeper of the Flame–both the novel and the film–are far more interesting seen in the context of their external connections and references. One watches the film looking for hints of the budding attraction between Hepburn and Tracy. One reads the novel in light of the figures such as Charles Lindburgh and Father Coughlin who inspired popular movements in America in the 1930s and 1940s–movements we now see as having a darker side.

Having written recently about Wylie’s memoir, My Life with George, I was impressed by two aspects of the book. First, it’s hard not to think that Wylie wrote it for the screen: there are at least a dozen scenes that play out exactly as filmed, and the whole sequence of the narrative matches that of the film so tightly it could have been a novelization after the fact. Second, despite the many superficial and clichéd characterizations, it’s obvious that Wylie was a very world-smart woman: if she played down her intelligence, it was because she’d had, by the 1940s, also thirty years’ experience of making a living with her writing.

Crack of Doom, by Hugh Edwards

12 June 201813 July 2012

Cover of US first edition of Crack of Doom, the third and, apparently, last novel by Hugh Edwards. Edwards’ first book, All Night at Mr Stanyhurst’s, was called “the finest short novel since Conrad,” and reissued in 1963 with a foreword by Ian Fleming.

Walter Mehring

12 June 201812 July 2012

At the moment, Walter Mehring’s poems, essays and novels are out of print in both German and English. Mehring’s The Lost Library:The Autobiography of a Culture is, like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a paean to the humanist culture of Central Europe before the rise of Hitler.

Walter Mehring

You can read a short bio at Wikipedia and an obituary from the New York Times.

A number of Mehring’s poems were set to music. You can listen to several on YouTube: “Charité”, performed by Wacholder, and “American Riesenspielzeug”, sung by Joseline Gassen.

Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Gentleman Overboard Reissued–in Spanish

12 June 20188 July 2012

Several years ago, Diego D’Onofrio, one of the partners in La Bestia Equilátera, a small press located in Buenos Aires, contacted me asking for suggestions of neglected books that might be of interested to his readers. La Bestia Equilátera, which translates literally to “The Equilateral Beast,” had already published the works of a number of English-language authors that qualify as neglected–or at least until-recently-neglected: Julian McLaren-Ross; Alfred Hayes; David Markson; Ivy Compton-Burnett; and Lord Berners.

After a quick check of La Bestia’s catalog, I knew just what to recommend: Herbert Clyde Lewis’ Gentleman Overboard, which I’d just featured on this site. Gentleman Overboard is a small masterpiece, a marvel of precise writing and imagination. One reader on Goodreads describes it as “Wodehouse meets Sartre”–which is an excellent précis. It starts out as a restrained comedy and evolves into a profoundly moving meditation on existence.

I didn’t hear from Diego again until a couple of months ago, when he contacted me looking for some more recommendations. To my surprise and great pleasure, he informed me that La Bestia Equilátera had, in 2010, published El Caballero que Cayó al Mar: a translation in Spanish by Laura Wittner of Gentleman Overboard. Diego reported that the book had sold well and earned some good reviews from critics and bloggers. They had even put together a fun little website dedicated to the book: elcaballeroquecayo.com.ar, where you can read the first chapter.

Diego was kind enough to send me a copy of the book, along with two others from La Bestia that deal, at least in part, with lesser-known books. Siluetas, by Argentinian writer Luis Chitarroni, an editor at La Bestia, is a collection of essays and reviews of a wide range of authors and their works. Many are fairly well-known, even best-sellers such as P. D. James. However, there are also a few that will appeal to any fan of neglected books–including William Gerhardie, Flann O’Brien, Logan Pearsall Smith, and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Informes de lectura/Cartas a Montale is a collection of letters written by Roberto Bazlen, a lifelong resident of Trieste, to friends, writers, and publishers about books. Bazlen was a voracious reader, fluent in a number of languages, and he was constantly championing the works of writers from far and wide. Bazlen was, in particular, a friend of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale, and the second half of the book is a selection of letters Bazlen wrote to Montale between 1925 and 1930.

I won’t mention the books I recommended when Diego contacted me again in May, for fear of jinxing them, but one of them was one of Isabel Paterson’s three amazing novels from the 1930s. I notice that all three are available now from Amazon in Kindle format, but when the heck will someone reissue one or all of them in paper?

Americans in Glasshouses, by Leslie James

12 April 20212 July 2012

Cover of Americans in Glasshouses by Leslie James

“What’s so funny ’bout Peace, Love and Understanding?,” Nick Lowe once asked in a song. But there’s nothing funny about them, of course, which is why there are times in each of our lives when Hatred and Intolerance bust through our better selves like the Tasmanian Devil. Which is usually a mistake.

But there are rare times when giving in to our lower devils is as satisfying as picking at a scab and watching it come off clean. I suspect Leslie James felt that way throughout the entire process of writing this book.

Americans in Glasshouses is a straight-faced dissertation, written in the voice of a dispassionate scholar, on the subject of what is wrong with Americans and why. The situation, as James saw it back in 1950, when the book was first published, was, at the root, very simple:

A highly competitive culture in which no one can feel himself to be permanently successful.
A compulsive need to consume.
An unhealthy and woman-dominated family-structure.
No culture.
A political system which no mature people would tolerate.
No souls.
Much more than their just share of the world’s goods.

Ah, to have the confidence of such unadulterated prejudices.

Of course, sixty years later, this is still both stereotype and uncomfortably close to the truth.

James’ aim is “to standardize the diverse impressions about America in European minds.” There is such nonsense written and said about America in Europe, argues this serious-minded academic, and it leaves too many merely confused. If only Europeans could gain a real understanding of America, then they would be able to teach Americans to conduct themselves properly. And what is proper conduct? Why, “in the manner English gentlemen thought other Englishmen should conduct themselves, when England was the leading Power in the world,” of course.

James writes with the power of authority, authority gained from close study and painstaking analysis. He is familiar with all the latest research and an experienced traveler who has seen every corner of the country. This is why he can assure, as he does in one of the many scholarly asides footnoted on almost every page, that, “All people who do not read The New Yorker are forced to live in the suburban equivalent of city slums, referred to as ‘the wrong side of the tracks.’ Those who do not read the Reader’s Digest either, are forced to live on the tracks. Neither group is permitted to own a station-wagon or join a country club.”

This is, of course, utter nonsense, and if you’ve made it to this point in the book, you’ve already figured out that this is a book-length counterfeit, as fake as a three dollar bill. And as deft and successful as a hat trick.

It’s clear within a few pages that this is all tongue-in-cheek and artfully pompous. And if that’s all it were, this would have been better done as a three-page piece in Punch. What makes Americans in Glasshouses worth reading after sixty years is that it’s still a good old-fashioned hoot. James’ stereotypes are occasionally a bit long in the tooth (though I guess that cocktail parties are sort of coming back), but always so overblown that it’s hard not to smile:

As is well-known outside America, Americans lack souls. This makes them even simpler to understand. It makes them both simple and simple-minded. (Souls are notoriously correlated with complexity, and therefore with higher mental development.) It is therefore unnecessary to go below the surface to learn about Americans, because most of them only live on the surface.

And it’s impossible for James’ windbag scholar not to let more than a few equally amusing stereotypes about the English slip in:

Everyone in Europe knows that American children are badly brought up. This is because their parents bring them up themselves instead of using nannies and boarding schools.

Thus, reading Americans in Glasshouses comes to seem like a guilt-free vacation from tolerance and understanding.

Copies of Americans in Glasshouses are available on Amazon for as little as $1.98, but you can get electronic versions free at the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/americansinglass000094mbp.

Americans in Glasshouses, by Leslie James
New York City: Henry Schuman, Inc., 1950

“The Pearls of Publishing,” from the Saturday Review

2 October 201921 June 2012

Back in November 1949, a three-part series called, “The Pearls of Publishing” appeared in the Saturday Review. “In the hope of increasing and prolonging the public’s interest in deserving books,” the magazine’s editors asked American publishers “to think back over the books issued during the past year and select two titles–one issued by their own house, one by another firm–which, in their opinion, failed to get the response they deserved.” This did not have to mean the book was a flop: simply that it “failed to achieve the full impact” it should have.

Despite good sales and critical acclaim that eventually led to its selection as the 1949 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, several publishers still named James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor, which was featured in the early days of this site. Elizabeth Charlotte Webster’s Ceremony of Innocence, a Candide-esque satire on religion and conventional mores that I stumbled across in the great Montana Valley Book Store last year, was nominated twice.

While a fair number of the books were too topical (Strategic Air Power for Dynamic Security) to expect anyone to remember them today, a fair number of intriguing titles pop up in the course of the three articles. Here is a sample:

• Olivia, by Olivia

Kurt Wolff, a legendary figure in publishing and then working at Pantheon, nominated Olivia, an anonymous novel published by William Sloane Associates: “A very beautiful and subtly written account of adolescent experience, which has lost nothing of its intensity by maturing in the cellar of memory…. It combines fine writing with moving content, and is a thoroughly civilized book. The anonymous author was later identified as Dorothy Bussy, nee Strachey–one of Lytton Strachey’s sisters. The book was about a young schoolgirl’s crush on the headmistress of her boarding school and was based on her experiences at the school run by Marie Souvestre before she founded Allenwood, where Souvestre had a profound influence on the young Eleanor Roosevelt.

• Mr. Preen’s Salon, by Robert Tallant

Theodore Purdy of Appleton-Century-Croft called this Doubleday novel, “A witty and delightful picture of New Orleans life … a good antidote to the innumerable lush and overheated books on that city which have been published in recent years.” Tallant was something of a scribe of New Orleans, with other titles such as Voodoo in New Orleans and The Pirate Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans to his credit.

• The Golden Warrior, Hope Muntz

With four mentions, this historical novel about the Norman Conquest was the favorite among those polled. LeBaron Barker of Doubleday wrote of the book, “Miss Muntz’s success with the chronicle form, to my way of thinking, is going to have a decided effect on the whole historical-novel categoy,” and Edward Shenton of Macrae-Smith called it “a stark, somber story, written with great restraint but with a depth of feeling and power that set it apart from most books of its kind.”

• The Willow Cabin, by Pamela Frankau

“One of the finest novels I have read in a long time. The writing itself should stand as an example for young novelists, and the characters come alive in a fashion that very few novelists have been able to achieve. There is little or no sensationalism, no extreme exaggeration or histrionics; yet the story and the people have stayed with me very clearly since I read it.”–W. E. Larned, Whittlesey House

• The Witness, by Jean Bloch-Michel

Kurt Wolff recommended this French novel, which Pantheon published in translation, as did George Pellegrini. “Its central theme–the destructiveness of moral solitude–is of timely and universal interest. Though hailed by a majority of critics as an outstanding piece of sober, fine and compelling writing, sales have nor corresponded to our expectations.” Pellegrini called it, “The kind of book that people talk about once they’ve read it.”

• Trials of a Translator, by Ronald Knox

Marigold Hunt, an editor of Sheed & Ward, a publisher specializing in Catholic books run by novelist Wilfrid Sheed’s father, recommended this account of Knox’ struggles in translating the Bible: “Msgr. Knox’s own explanations of the kind of translation he was aiming at, and his replies to his foremost critics would have had a much wider appeal than has so far been the case. It isn’t as if he was the stuffy kind of scholar, or as if, at this date, anyone was likely to suppose him to be: Trials of a Translator is not only instructive, but exceptionally good fun.”

• Napoleon: For and Against, by Pieter Geyl

Conceived while a prisoner at Buchenwald, Napoleon: For and Against was one of the first works of meta-history–an assessment of how Napoleon was viewed by a series of French historian, and a fine illustration of Geyl’s view of history as an “argument without end.” Nominated both by its own house, the Yale University Press, and an editor from the rival Princeton University Press, who wrote, “The message–for all of us, not just for historians–is that we should search our souls pretty thoroughly before claiming that we have discovered objective truth.”

• Last of the Conquerors, by William Gardner Smith

Robert Haas of Random House recommended this novel from Farrar, Straus: “A fine novel … about a Negro in our Army of Occupation in Germany … a disturbing commentary on the way democracy sometimes fails to work. Extremely well written and with something really important to say.”

• Late Have I Loved Thee, by Ethel Mannin

Frank Bruce of Bruce Publishing compared this to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain: “Conveying a message of deep significance for all, in the vein of ‘What profiteth a man if he gaineth the whole world, etc.’–a philosophy which many have completely ignored–Ethel Mannin’s book is a masterful work which could do an immense amount of good in its revelation of today’s basic problem.”

• The Man Who Carved Woman from Wood, by Max White

John Fischer from Harper & Brothers picked this as his firm’s best under appreciated title: “Admittedly not a book for every reading taste but those of us here who like it for its odd and spirited blend of fancy and humor are convinced that there are fifteen or twenty thousand readers in the country who would enjoy it.”

• The Saracen’s Head, or, The Reluctant Crusader, by Osbert Lancaster

“A ‘children’s book’ which should really be read for pleasure by ‘children from eight to eighty,'” wrote John Fischer of Harper & Brothers. This account of a knightly equivalent of Ferdinand the bull was the first of three, which chronicled the history of the the Littlehamptons of Drayneflete from prehistory to 1940. They were ultimately collected as The Littlehampton Saga. The other titles were Drayneflete Revealed and The Littlehampton Bequest. Lancaster, who illustrated Nancy Mitford’s novels and created cartoons for Punch filled his drawings for these books with Easter eggs for those familiar with odd bits of English history and architecture.

• My Place to Stand, by Bentz Plagemann

John Farrar of Farrar, Straus nominated this from his own catalog: “One of the finest accounts of the overcoming of a physical handicap ever written. It has tenderness, honesty, and spiritual overtones, and a personal narrative. It has taste. It has made more friends and will make more, but it is difficult to understand why they have not been quicker to discover one of the books of the year that has wisdom and hope in it.”

• Cream Hill

This account of life on a Connecticut farm, written by editor and weekend countryman Lewis Gannett, led a usually-sober Kirkus Review to gush, “This opened a new door & me — a peek into the past of our countryside, a realization that it is not only in manmade things that we are the melting pot of the world. For here–along our roadsides–are flowers and grasses, shrubs and trees, immigrants from all parts of the world… It is a potpourri of Connecticut’s countryside natural history, the flowers and trees and shrubs, the vegetables, the wild plants he grew–and the ones he couldn’t grow. There’s nature lore, too,–the tomato has a wholly new personality for me. The thrill of his fern garden is contagious. And the seasonal round of week-end country living was alluring for its likes and its unlikes to our own, not very many miles away.”

James Agate on Emil Ludwig’s Beethoven: The Life of a Conqueror

12 June 20183 June 2012

January 4, Thursday (1945)

Dipping into Emil Ludwig’s Beethoven: the Life of a Conqueror, I find this on the G major Piano Concerto:

At the beginning the piano emerges gently from dreams; this is truly Beethoven improvising. Two romantic themes, renunciation and hope, are gradually developed. When, after an orchestral interlude, the piano is heard again solo, it is as if a butterfly rose ecstatically from its cocoon. There are no fortissimos here, and when the call to new adventures sounds, the butterfly sinks back, dreaming. The whole thing is wrapped in dark-red velvet. . . .

And about the C minor Concerto, that it begins with

stormy scale passages three octaves long, like a roaring lion appearing suddenly with threatening mien in the midst of the orchestra.

I have nothing with all this stuff about cocoons, red velvet, and roaring lions. Presently I read, “Beethoven dedicated his adagios to women.” And I say that the man who can read sex into the slow movements of the Hammerklavier Sonata and the Ninth Symphony would believe that Wagner’s Venusberg music is a Hymn to Chastity! Next I read that in the F major Rasoumowsky Quartet, “the cello continues to exude platonic wisdom.” Feeling that this amateur has exuded enough nonsense, I open the window and neatly drop his book on to a passing lorry’s tarpaulin’d top.

From The Later Ego, by James Agate

A Dream of Treason, by Maurice Edelman

25 May 20232 June 2012

Elected at the age of 34 as the member for Coventry in the Labour wave that swept Churchill out of as Prime Minister after VE Day, Maurice Edelman served in Parliament until his death 30 years later. And while he may not have enjoyed the historical fame of Disraeli or the sales of Jeffery Archer, he may be the supreme representative of that exclusive class, the British MP-slash-novelist. Between 1951 and 1974, he published over a dozen novels, along with a handful of non-fiction works.

While I wouldn’t call him a great writer, Edelman was certainly adept at producing novels that managed to be both entertaining and intelligent. His paperback publishers tended to slap racy covers on his books in blatant attempts to convince unsuspecting browsers into thinking them essentially indistinguishable from other shelf fodder. One can picture copies of A Dream of Treason or Shark Island or Disraeli in Love next to the finest works of Erle Stanley Gardner, Mac Bolan or Barbara Cartland. Had he been more of a publicity hound, he might even have been able to boost his numbers into Jeffery Archer’s range.

If you were to judge by their covers–and if they weren’t pandering, they were just boring–you’d think Edelman’s books fully deserve their fate today: utterly forgotten and disregarded. But good things sometimes hide behind terrible packaging. Flip past the title page of any of his novels, and you will find material far more subtle, sophisticated and intelligent that you’d have reason to suspect.

A Dream of Treason, his third novel (1955), is a perfect example. Its protagonist, Martin Lambert, is a mid-level civil servant in the Foreign Office who appears to be doomed to spend the rest of his career in mediocrity. Lambert is married to an alcoholic who’s spent her recent years hopping into Lambert’s colleague’s beds, spending months in institutions, or making scenes at embassy affairs–in other words, a frightful liaibility for an aspiring diplomat. Too unstable a property to risk putting her husband in more prominent positions.

Until he’s approached by Brangwyn, the brash and ambitious new Foreign Secretary, with a proposal to pass some controversial state papers to a radical French journalist. It is a patently treasonous act, and Brangwyn has marked Lambert as someone just desperate enough to do it, in return for a posting that will give his career a second wind. The deal is made, and Lambert makes the drop in a quiet room of the National Gallery, looking forward to a move to Tokyo.

And then Brangwyn dies in a plane crash, leaving Lambert with no posting, no protector, and no alibi. The leaked material makes the expected splash in the French press, and the Foreign Office security officers begin hunting for its source. Lambert is quickly suspected but the investigation is pursued with typical bureaucratic deliberation–which means he is allowed to spend days wondering about his fate and his options. Edelman is quite effective in portraying the plight of a man who is about to be caught and has no good way out.

But he is at his best in capturing the intricate interplay between politics and bureaucracy that defines the workings of British government. The permanence of the Civil Service and the transcience of part-led governments creates an environment where the leaders can often find themselves subordinated to the people who are meant to follow them. Lambert’s biggest mistake, the Permanent Undersecretary–the senior civil servant in the Foreign Office–points out to him, was to put his faith in a politician rather than in his own kind:

“I’ll tell you this, Martin. The politician’s never been born who in the long run can stand up to a determined Civil Servant. Oh, I know that some tough Minister can come along and throw his weight about. He’ll stir up the Department study the functional diagram say he wants this and that. And then he’ll have to go off to a dinner or a conference or to a Cabinet meeting. And in the meantime, the Civil Servant will be co-operating with his great ally inertia. Inertia: it’s eminent among the graces.”

Edelman is at his worst, however, when he wanders from office and club into the realm of sex. There is a romance, between Lambert and a girl of nineteen. It is veddy British and veddy icky: “He put his arm around her waist and from there, under her left armpit, and they walked together slowly and with out speaking towards the light of the postern-gate, while beneath his fingers, he felt her breast, firm and pendant in the rhythm of their motion.” This is low, not love.

If you can overlook the ham-fisted attempts at romance, A Dream of Treason is remarkably successful as a thinking person’s entertainment, the sort of thing you read as a nice break between weightier books. I’ve ordered a couple more of Edelman’s novels for just such occasions.

You can find electronic copies of A Dream of Treason online at the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/dreamoftreason001478mbp.

A Dream of Treason, by Maurice Edelman
New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1955

The Red Monarch, by Yuri Krotkov

6 December 202229 May 2012

krotkov - red monarch pb

In his 2002 book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Martin Amis wrote, “it has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany.” When Penguin released the paperback edition of Yuri Krotkov’s 1979 novel, The Red Monarch: Scenes from the Life of Stalin, the cover featured a pencil sketch of Stalin topped by a big red clown’s nose, clearly demonstrating that the Soviet dictator had already reached the point where he could be treated with ridicule.

Krotkov’s purpose in writing The Red Monarch was not comic, though the book is full of moments of gallows humor, schadenfreude and even a few authentic jokes. Born within days of the October Revolution, Krotkov grew up surrounded by the image and impact of Stalin. “I never met Stalin and I never talked to him,” he writes in his introduction, “But for thirty-five years I lived with this man, day and night, voluntarily and involuntarily, thinking about him and knowing that my destiny depended on him and his personal reasoning.”

In The Red Monarch, combines historical fact and personal imagination to create a series of set pieces, each depicting an incident involving someone confronting Stalin at the height of his powers. The first date from the middle of the Second World War; the last deal with his death and its aftermath.

The famines, the first waves of the Great Terror, the show trials and the worst days of the German invasion are all behind him at this stage. Everyone who deals with Stalin–including men like Beria and Vlasek, who control much of the terror system and know the worst that it has carried out–come into his presence a bit like a lowly feeder into the cage of a great lion with violent instincts and hair-trigger reactions.

Krotkov does a marvelous job of conveying the ambient sense of terror that could turn a conversation about something as mundane as a pair of slippers into a veiled threat of being sent off to a firing squad or the gulag:

“And what is that on your feet, Comrade Shaposhnikov?”
“Night shoes … my wife brought them from Leningrad … as a gift.”
“Ah, that’s what they are … slippers.”
“No, Josif Vissarionovich, they are not slippers,” Shaposhnikov corrected Stalin, “they are night shoes. Slippers usually have no backs, but these …”
“No, Comrade Shaposhnikov, they are slippers, slippers.” Stalin repeated stubbornly, “and do not argue with me.”
“So they are slippers …”
“If I say they are slippers, Comrade Shaposhnikov, that means they are slippers. Right?”

But it is not enough to prove that night shoes can only be slippers. Stalin must draw out the most insidious intent from them:

“When she gave me these night shoes …”
“Slippers, slippers!”
“… she said, ‘Wear these in good health, so you will be comfortable when you are on guard, and so there will be no unnecessary noise when you walk up to Comrade Stalin at night to cover him or fix his pillow.”
“Thank your wife, Comrade Shaposhnikov, for her double consideration, for you and for me. How was it that Seraphima put it: ‘So that there will be no unnecessary noise when you walk up to him at night….’ Interesting. What had your wife in mind, Comrade Shaposhnikov?”
“Felt absorbs noise. That is, in these … slippers, it is possible to come up to a person and he will not hear you.”
“Will not?”
Stalin’s mustache twitched slightly and his right eye suddenly squinted. But Shaposhnikov did not notice this.
“You said, Comrade Shaposhnikov, that it is possible to come up to a person so that he will not even suspect it. Is that not so?”
“That is so,” Shaposhnikov answered.
“In other words, in these slippers it’s possible, in your view, to come up to a person from behind and kill him during his sleep. And, in your view, it’s quite easy to do. Right?”

Krotkov’s Stalin is almost feline in his pleasure in toying with his victims as they lay before him, paralyzed with terror. In a number of the episodes, he lets the victim go, confident that he can repeat the torture at a moment’s notice.

Krotkov, a writer with KGB links who defected to the West while in the UK on a tour in 1963, grew up in Georgia and had many Georgian friends, including the actor Mikhail Gelovani, who played Stalin in numerous films such as The Fall of Berlin. This gave him an advantage in depicting Stalin, and the book includes several pieces focusing on Stalin’s relationships with Georgian colleagues and friends–which were even more complicated than those with Russians. Even Gelovani features in a chapter titled, “The Two Stalins,” in which Stalin repeatedly teases the actor: should he be praised for the accuracy of his portrayal? Or attacked for caricaturing Stalin?

I’ve read a fair number of books about Stalin and the Soviet era, such as Orlando Figes’ Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, but The Red Monarch impresses me as the most succinct summation of the bizarre web of intrigue and fear that Stalin was able to create around him. It’s sharp as a razor, and like a razor, not to be picked up without due care and respect. I recommend it, as well as The Nobel Prize, Krotkov’s similar mediation of the experiences of Boris Pasternak following the international acclaim of Doctor Zhivago.

The Red Monarch: Scenes from the Life of Stalin, by Yuri Krotkov
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979

My Life with George: An Unconventional Autobiography, by I. A. R. Wylie

12 June 201827 May 2012

I. A. R. Wylie subtitled her book, My Life with George, “An Unconventional Autobiography,” and the adjective was appropriate in more than one way. George, she tells us in an opening paragraph, is that “factotum … known to the general public as our subconscious.” Given the Gay Old Nineties illustration on the book’s dust jacket and the sly reference to Clarence Day’s then-recent best-seller, Life With Father, it appears that Wylie and/or her publisher were playing a little joke on buyers, who probably assumed George was some character from the author’s past.

But Wylie’s title is also appropriate because her life itself was unconventional, particularly by the standards of the America and England of 1940. Aside from a few years in a boarding school in Brussels, she was largely self-educated, and she was certainly largely independent from an early age. She pedalled her way back to London from a family holiday at the seaside when she was just ten years old, spending a night along the way.

This trip was, in fact, her father’s suggestion, and he was the first reason her life was so unusual. Alec Wylie was, if his daughter’s account is accurate, a volatile and manic personality, who managed to flout Victorian conventions by a combination of charm, luck, and the kindness of strangers:

From the day of his birth to the hour of his death he never had a penny that he could legitimately call his own. If by some strange chance he had earned it, he already owed it several times over, and it was only an additional reason for borrowing more. Quite often he didn’t have a penny of any sort, and there were days in our large absurd house in London when there was no food for anyone except the bailiff occupying our one completely furnished room. But in the nick of time Father would run into some fine fellow who understood his situation perfectly, and we would be in funds again. The bailiff would be wined and dined and sent on his way rejoicing and proud to know us, and the furniture vans would begin to arrive with expensive, unpaid-for furniture–quite awful stuff because Alec’s taste was Victorian in its last most ponderous convulsions.

Ida–named quite literally after her parents, Ida Ross and Alec Wylie–was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1885, the first child of Wylie’s second marriage. Having married, and fathered two children, he divorced his wife and fled England with creditors at his heels, pausing only to propose to his ex-wife’s sister Christine on the way to the docks. He sweet-talked his way into a marriage with Ida Ross, the sad and plain daughter of a wealthy businessman, but quickly grew bored in Australia. On the pretext of pursuing a law case in England involving his father-in-law’s firm, he cashed in the return tickets for luxury-class one-way fares and took his wife and newborn daughter back to London.

Alec resumed his erratic affairs in London and his wife soon wasted away and died, knowing she would never see Australia again. Fortunately for young Ida, though, not before striking up a deep friendship with Christine, the woman Alec had once tried to marry. In an extraordinary example of loyalty, Christine took on the primary responsibility for making sure that Ida was clothed, fed and cared for, despite the vagaries of Alec’s fortunes, until the girl was in her late teens. Christine was just the first of a line of women who proved far stronger and more reliable than any man in Ida’s life.

This life was also unconventional for its time because Wylie’s precocious independence didn’t stop with solo bicycle rides. Having spent many hours playing by herself and filling the time by making up her own stories, she took easily to writing fiction, and, at the age of 19, sold the first short story she sent off to a magazine editor. From that point on, she was able to support herself–and eventually, Christine as well–as a writer.

She did it, in part, because she was always driven by a pragmatism that may have been a reaction to her father’s fantastic behavior. Rooming with another young English woman who had been raised in colonial India, she wrote and sold several stories based her roommate’s recollections: “At the end of my first year Esme rejoined her parents in India but she left behind her enough sahibs, memsahibs, Bo-trees, ayahs and compounds to furnish me with all the necessary ingredients for an Anglo-Indian novel which I wrote when I was twenty-one.” She went on to write at least five books based in India–The Native Born, or, The Rajah’s People (1910); The Daughter of Brahma (1913); Tristram Sahib (1915); The Temple of Dawn (1915); and The Hermit Doctor of Gaya (1916).

Along with her tales of faux India, Wylie also had considerable success with a series of books based on her experiences of living in Germany in her early twenties: My German Year (1910); Rambles in the Black Forest (1911); and The Germans (1911). Although she returned to England in 1911, she kept in touch with German friends and tried to offer a more balanced view of the German people against the jingoism of British propaganda during World War One. Her novel, Towards Morning (1918), was perhaps the first in English to suggest that not all Germans were evil imperialists (one character is shot for cowardice after refusing to take part in a particularly vicious attack).

In England, Wylie continued to go against the tides of convention by joining the Suffragette movement and providing a safe house where women who had been released from prison to recover from their hunger strikes were smuggled away from police surveillance. As she tells in the book, one of her allies in this effort was another young Englishwoman named Rachel.

After the war, Wylie and Rachel travel to the U.S., where Wylie’s books and stories have enjoyed commercial success. Despite having no driving experience, they buy a car and spend over a year travelling all over the country, from New York City to San Francisco and southern California. Wylie has her first encounter with Hollywood, which had already begun to mine her catalog for stories. Unfortunately, she was hired as a color consultant for “Stronger Than Death”, based on her Anglo-Indian novel, The Hermit Doctor of Gaya, and had to confess that she’d never actually been to India.

That didn’t keep the studios from continuing to hire Wylie. Over thirty movies made between 1915 and 1953 were based on her works, including “Torch Song” and “Phone Call from a Stranger”, which feature great scenery-chewing performances by Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, respectively. Her story, “Grandmother Bernle Learns Her Letters,” published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1926, was filmed twice–by John Ford in 1928 and by Archie Mayo in 1940, both times for Fox. Ford called “Grandma Bernie,” which portrays the four sonds of a German family divided between sides in the First World War, “first really good story” he ever filmed. The best-known film made from her work is probably “Keeper of the Flame” (1942), which is usually remembered as the one non-comedy that Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn made together.

Anyone reading My Life with George today will have no trouble identifying one unconventional aspect of Wylie’s life: her sexuality. She mentions a number of women with whom she spends time and shares homes, although she never even remotely suggests any physical aspect of these relationships. She does, however, admit,

I have always liked women better than men. I am more at ease with them and more amused by them. I too am rather bored by a conventional relationship which seems to involve either my playing up to someone or playing down to someone. Here and there and especially in my latter years when there should be no further danger of my trying to ensnare one of them I have established some real friendships with men in which we meet and like each other on equal terms as human beings. But fortunately, I have never wanted to marry any of them, nor with the exception of that one misguided German Grenadier, have any of them wanted to marry me.

She also acknowledges that many of her women friends refer to her as “Uncle,” and her choice of being credited as “I. A. R. Wylie” instead of Ida Wylie was certainly an attempt to downplay her gender in publications.

Somewhere in late twenties, Wylie became friends with Josephine Baker, a pioneer in the field of public health. The first director of New York’s Bureau of Child Hygiene, Baker had helped locate “Typhoid Mary” and introduced the first programs of publically-funded pre- and post-natal care in the country. Neither Baker nor Wylie ever declared themselves openly as lesbians, but according to Dr. Bert Hansen’s article, “Public Careers and Private Sexuality: Some Gay and Lesbian Lives in the History of Medicine and Public Health”, the two women were partners.

When Baker retired in the mid-1930s, she, Wylie, and another pioneering female physician, Dr. Louise Pearce, bought Trevenna Farm, outside Skillman, New Jersey, and lived there together. Baker died in 1945; Pearce and Wylie in 1959. The farm, coincidentally, went up for sale again recently.

The literary merit of My Life with George diminishes as the book goes on, though. With all the events of her young life and her own ironic commentary, the first two thirds is terrific. It’s fast, funny and vibrant demonstration of how resilient some children can be in the face of staggering adult neglect.

After her first circuit of the U.S. with Rachel, however, Wylie loses focus. Editorial opinions are poor substitutes for first-hand observations even when fresh–and they don’t stay fresh long: “I would wise with all my heart that in the coming struggle between Good and Evil–for me it amounts to that–America would stand full-armed, shoulder to shoulder with nations who for all their shortcomings are the defenders of civilization against barbarism.” The last book staggers through its last 50-60 pages loaded down with such baggage.

Aside from direct-to-print copies of her works now in public domain and a couple of library reissues, Wylie has not had a book in print since the early 1960s. Her last novel, Claire Serrat, was published in 1959, as was praised by one reviewer as “the book of the month.” Interestingly, Ben Brady used a scenario based on Claire Serrat as the centerpiece for his 1994 book, Principles of Adaptation for Film and Television.

Locate a copy:

Find it at Amazon.com: My Life with George
Find it at Amazon.co.uk: My Life with George
Find it at AddAll.com: My Life with George

My Life with George: An Unconventional Autobiography, by I. A. R. Wylie
New York City: Random House, 1940

Uncover a Classic in Hesperus Press’ Competition

13 May 2012

The Hesperus Press, a London-based small press, is celebrating its 10th year in business with a contest in which readers can nominate their candidates for the unknown classic most deserving of reissue.

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 [email protected] by the 1st of June 2012.

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

Log Book, by Frank Laskier

30 September 202318 March 2012

This slim book–just 119 pages–contains some of the simplest and most powerful writing I’ve come across in a long time. And at the same time, it’s something of a mystery.

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 stumbing 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

The First Bus Out, by Eugene Löhrke

12 June 20184 March 2012

One by one, an assortment of characters enter a bus station from the darkness of an early morning, and purchase tickets for their destinations: Bronxville, Greenwich, Siracusa, Salzburg, Washington, D.C. and the Newark airport. “The first bus out,” the ticket agent tells them.

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

My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson by George Thompson

12 June 20181 March 2012

If you’re in the mood for some cheap–heck, free–lowbrow reading, I can recommend George Thompson’s brief autobiography, My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson, which you can find at Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Thompson offers up a double murder plus suicide, blackmail, robbery, gambling, teenage drunkenness, prostitution, child abuse, and adultery–and that’s just in the first three chapters.

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

Invasion, by Maxence van der Meersch

12 June 201826 February 2012

I ordered a copy of Maxence van der Meersch’s 700-page novel, Invasion, after reading Tom Leonard’s review of the book on Amazon, but having recently devoted a considerable amount of time to another very long–but very great–novel (Fortunata and Jacinta), I intended to stow it away in the nightstand for later.

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

Quin’s Shanghai Circus, by Edward Whittemore

12 June 201819 February 2012

I first read Quin’s Shanghai Circus around my freshman year in college, when I was hot off devouring the whole series of Vonnegut’s novels in their Dell paperback editions. I found a used copy of the Popular Library paperback edition of Circus and was convinced to buy it from the first three sentences alone:

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.

The Inside Story of an Outsider, by Franz Schoenberner New York City: The Macmillan Company, 1949

Breaking Up, by W. H. Manville New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962

Americans in Glasshouses, by Leslie James New York City: Henry Schuman, Inc., 1950

A Dream of Treason, by Maurice Edelman New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1955

The Red Monarch: Scenes from the Life of Stalin, by Yuri Krotkov New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979

Locate a copy:

My Life with George: An Unconventional Autobiography, by I. A. R. Wylie New York City: Random House, 1940

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

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

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

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

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