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Year: 2008

New from NYRB Classics: First English translation of Stefan Zweig novel

NYRB Classics continues to set the standard for publishing long-lost treasures. Its latest release is of particular note: The Post-Office Girl is the first English translation (by Joel Rotenberg) of Rausch der Verwandlung (trans: “The Ecstasy of Transformation”). This novel was found among Zweig’s papers after he and his wife committed suicide in Brazil during World War Two and only published in the original German in 1982.

The novel tells the story of Christine Hoflehner, a postal clerk in a small Austrian town: 25, but already on her way to become a career fonctionnaire:

Her hand with its pale fingers will raise and lower the same rattly wicket thousands upon thousands of times more, will toss hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of letters onto the cancelling desk with the same swiveling motion, will slam the blackened brass canceller onto hundreds of thousands or millions of stamps with the same brief thump.

Then, out of the blue, she gets an invitation to join a wealthy aunt in Switzerland. She’s exposed to money, glamor, fashion, society … and then sent back home. As an old tune from World War One put it, “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree?” Well, as Zweig shows with his typically bitterly realistic touch, you can’t … but neither can Christine just leap over the walls of income, expenses, class boundaries, social mores. You’ll have to buy a copy of the book yourself to find out how it ends. And you probably don’t even need the publisher’s cheap-shot description of the novel as “Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde” to entice you, if you’re a fellow lover of fine neglected books.

The Village Voice polls writers on favorite obscure books

Source: “Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books”, the Village Voice, 13 May 2008

In an attempt to get folks thinking about something other than best-sellers for their summer reading lists, the Village Voice polled sixteen writers to name their favorite obscure book. At least one suggestion is utterly cryptic: of Jim Dodge’s Fup, which has been in print forever and had its steady stream of fans, Colum McCann writes, “The less said about it, the better.”

On the other hand, Jennifer Egan got me interested in Harold Q. Masur’s detective novels from the 1940s and 1950s with these opening lines from You Can’t Live Forever:

It started with a summons, a brunette, and a Turk.

The summons was in my pocket, the brunette was in trouble, and the Turk was dead.

Egan writes, “In his savvy, stylish novels of the ’40s and ’50s, Masur manages to wink continuously at the detective genre even as he revels in it.”

Novelist Donna Tartt offers Blood in the Parlor, by Dorothy Dunbar, commenting that, “Each of the 12 stories is an account of a 19th-century murder told with a light, macabre sense of humor. I’d love to see it back in print with illustrations by Edward Gorey.” Ed Park names an early novel by Harry Stephen Keeler, whose goofily bizarre mysteries have been rediscovered lately and who now has his own society of fans. Jonathan Ames nominates The Lunatic at Large, one of several of the prolific Scots comic writer J. Storer Clouston you can read or download online from Project Gutenberg. Between this article and this site, we may be able to put a dent in the sales from Oprah’s book club.

“Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” brings Neglected Writer Winifred Watson to Screen

Released by Focus Films in March 2008, “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” brings to the big screen the novel of the same name by Winifred Watson, one of a generation of British women writers sometimes referred to as “the middlebrows”.

The film probably owes its existence to the fine work of Persephone Books, which reissued the book in 2000 and has devoted itself to rediscovering writers such as Watson, E. M. Delafield, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and others. And thanks to the film, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has sold over 23,000 copies, by far the press’ best seller to date.

Watson lacks a Wikipedia entry so far, but you can read her Independent obituary online at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/winifred-watson-640426.html.

Faber Finds: a Major Neglected Books Series Launches

Debuting June 2008: Faber Finds, the biggest venture into republication of neglected books since the start of NYRB Classics. In the words of the publisher, the aim of the series “is to restore to print for future generations a wealth of lost classics.”

With an initial list of 100 titles, Faber Finds will already be well on its way to keeping pace with NYRB Classics. The first set includes a few books that appear on a number of lists on this site–Keith Douglas’ Alamein to Zem Zem, which Faber reissued back in 1992 and Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, for example–but some other previously unmentioned ones, such as A Sword for Mr. Fitton, the first of a series of novels along the lines of the Patrick O’Brien’s popular Jack Aubrey stories, and Miss Willmott of Warley Place, a biography of one of the first woman landscape gardeners that currently fetches over $100 in first edition.

Faber promises that the list “will grow and embrace fiction, thrillers, sci-fi, memoirs, biographies, history, poetry, travel books, popular science and books for younger readers.” The publisher also invites readers “to let us know what you’d like to see back in print” by emailing suggestions to [email protected]. You can even enter a prize drawing for a free copy of P. H. Newby’s Something to Answer For, which won the very first Booker Prize back in 1969.

A most welcome addition to the bookshelves.

Sincerely, Willis Wayde, by John P. Marquand

· Excerpt
· Editor’s Comments
· Other Comments
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Excerpt


Cover of first edition of 'Sincerely, Willis Wayde'
When he had come under Mr. Henry Harcourt’s personal supervision, Willis could not help see that he was regarded in a new light by everyone in the plant. The workmen he had always known were as friendly to him as ever. Labor, he was to learn later, seldom could be made to take an interest in management; but is was different in the office, where people he had known through many summers now gave him appraising, suspicious looks. Willis could sympathize, because he had been pushed forward above the heads of many who had been working there for years. He knew that Mr. Briggs in the sales department disapproved of his promotion. Mr. Briggs had told him that he had worked at Harcourt for fifteen years before he had been pulled off the road to be assistant sales manager. You worked your way up from the bottom in those days, and the way to learn business was doing business, instead of studying at some school. Mr.Hewett had a more generous attitude, perhaps because he knew that his days at the mill were almost over. Mr. Hewett often told Willis to watch this or that, because Willis might be in his shoes some day. He spoke only half seriously, and Willis was under no illusions, since it would obviously be years before he could ever manage Harcourt’s.

His father’s attitude was what disturbed Willis most.

“Son,” his father said on evening, “I had a friend once, out in San Francisco. We’d been working together building dams for Pacific Gas and Electric, and then he joined up with Standard Oil. I remember when he took the boat to China. We had quite a lot of drinks the night before, telling each other what we were going to do, because we were pretty young then, and kids all want to be American heroes. Now I suppose you want to be one, too, but I don’t any more. It’s hard enough to try to be what you are. Well, anyway, I stood on the pier seeing Bill off, and I had quite a head that morning. I was there quite a while watching the ship pull out, seeing it get smaller, and I knew Bill was going somewhere I wasn’t ever. Well, it’s the same with you. Only just remember this one thing. Every now and then take a look at yourself, and try to be sure where the hell you’re going. I can’t tell you because I wouldn’t know.

Editor’s Comments


For a while in the middle of the last century, John P. Marquand was the most successful novelist in America–successful in consistently hitting the top of the best seller lists as well as in earning critical recognition, including the Pulitzer Prize for his 1937 novel, The Late George Apley. By the time he published Sincerely, Willis Wayde, however, both his sales and literary reputation were on a decline–one that’s continued till today. Aside from his early magazine fiction and his Mr. Moto series of detective novels, Marquand’s books had been subtle satires of East Coast–and particularly Boston–society. His approach and subject matter probably seemed a bit soft and a bit stale compared to that of Grace Metalious or Norman Mailer.

Ironically, as Millicent Bell writes in her authoritative biography, John P. Marquand: An American Life:

Marquand first thought of Sincerely, Willis Wayde as a novel that would firmly put behind him the lost world of early twentieth century America. He planned to depict a hero “swatting it out with life, strictly in the urban world of today–somebody on the down-wind side of the point of no return.”

C. Hugh Holman called Sincerely, Willis Wayde Marquand’s “least typical book,” and several prominent features do separate this novel from his other serious works. Many of Marquand’s narratives rely heavily on the use of flashbacks to tell the story; here, he looks relentlessly forward as we follow Willis Wayde’s rise from being the son of a factory engineer to the CEO of a major industrial conglomerate. Unlike other Marquand protagonists, Willis never puts up seriously struggle with his own doubts. He takes quick note of them and then moves on. And Sincerely, Willis Wayde is more a novel of business than society.

In this case, the business is that of industrial belting. Marquand shrewdly chose a product that had no consumers but other businesses–manufacturers, supply companies, supermarket chains. This allows his character to stay immersed in a world where rational choices based on bottom lines, rather than that of individual purchases influenced by unpredictable psychological factors. Which is fortunate for Willis, for whom psychology is never his best subject: “It was a relief to meet someone like Mrs. Jacoby, who did not have the Harcourt’s sentiments, because anyone with common sense knew that sentiment had no place in industrial transactions.”

Starting out as a protégée of Mr. Henry Harcourt, the aging head of Harcourt Mill, a family business rooted in Marquand’s favorite fictional town of Clyde, Massachusetts, Willis might have stayed with the firm, slowing working his way up the ladder like Mr. Briggs or Mr. Hewett. But he has also grown up in an ambiguous relationship with Harcourt’s son and grandchildren, sort of an unofficial foster child or poor cousin. Bess Harcourt, the , flirts with Willis at times as they become adults, but sticks with convention in the end, marrying a dull but wealthy heir.

A different man–a traditional Marquand hero, perhaps–would have shrugged and soldiered on, sadder but wiser. Willis’ father, a better judge of human nature, counsels him to be realistic:

“You’re trying to be something you aren’t,” he said. “You watch it, Willis. You keep on trying to be something you aren’t, and you’ll end up a son of a bitch. You can’t help it, if you live off other people.”

“I don’t get your point. I honestly don’t,” Willis said.

And he truly doesn’t. Instead, he lands a job with a high-priced New York consulting firm. And from that point on, Willis never looks back. He comes across a struggling belting factory and insinuates his way into a position with the firm. Through hard work and dedicated boosterism, he not only saves the company but takes it to a position from which he orchestrates a merger with Harcourt Mills.

Willis strives to be the very model of a modern major businessman of the late Industrial Age. He rises early every morning, does twenty push-ups, and reads fifteen minutes from Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf. He joins the Rotary, fancies himself a fine speaker, and moves through a series of bigger and better houses and cars. And he comes to hold model opinions of where American culture was going:

They did not like their country in spite of all the fine things America had done for them, such as the education it had given them and the chance to sell their books and motion-picture rights for enormous prices. They did not like America in spite of the opportunity America gave them to acquire lovely homes and have their pictures in Life and Time. These people were constantly sneering at solid institutions, snapping at the very hand that fed them. When they wrote about business, they looked upon people who earned an honest dollar by selling products, running banks or production lines as crass materialists, devoid of ideals and social conscience. Businessmen in all these novels were ruthless and very dumb. Willis often wished that he might have a talk with some of these writers. He wished that he could show them that men who ran factories and sold the products and dickered with bankers, tax examiners and labor union organizers were not as dumb as a lot of novelists who always seemed to be at Palm Beach with some blonde.

Eventually, Willis’ earnest pursuit of profit and efficiency lead him to sacrifice Harcourt Mill itself. Its aging plant and workforce can’t compete with newer, larger factories, despite his promise to the Harcourts–and himself–that “He certainly would do everything he could–within reason–to keep it open.”
Time magazine cover portrait of John P. Marquand

That “within reason” is a wonderful and telling touch by Marquand. One reason his reputation with critics and readers has suffered in the last half century is that, despite a sometimes wooden prose style, he is often too subtle and wise for his own good. Time’s reviewer compared Willis to George Babbitt, but Marquand was never one for stereotypes. No one really goes through life without self-reflection. Even with his strong drive for success, Marquand shows Willis constantly checking himself–checking if he’s wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, making the right choices.

The problem is that these are all glances. Genuine doubts penetrate to one’s core, and these would just slow Willis down. So when he stops to search his soul, it’s more in the way you pat your pockets to reassure yourself that the car keys are still there. Marquand deftly conveys this conscientious moral blindness in the following passage as Willis prepares to tell the Harcourts that he’s going to close their family business:

The art of persuasion, Willis believed, was the very keystone of American business and the basis of American industrial prestige, and he was never more convinced of its importance than during his talk with Bill and Bess. Without exaggeration, never in his life had he so keenly wanted two people to understand and sympathize with his point of view and to agree with his conclusions. It would have been unthinkable to have quarreled after so many years. It was a time for a sincere interchange of reaction, a time when every question must be answered.

The strength of his approach, as he talked to Bill and Bess, lay in his sincere sympathy.

Capitalism, as Marquand portrays it, is not evil. Rather, it is more like a parallel universe, one with laws that are simply incompatible with the world of emotions, art, and traditions. When Willis finds himself in the latter world, as in the novel’s final scenes, where he struggles to enjoy (as a model successful tourist) a long-awaited vacation in Paris with his wife, Marquand shows what a sad and dull refugee he is. Away from the office and boardroom, Willis is like an actor without a part. He just moves around the stage getting in everyone’s way. You could say that the novelist of society ultimately wins out over the novelist of business in Sincerely, Willis Wayde. No one gets to stay in the office forever.

I consider Marquand one of the very few 20th century American novelists who writes like a grown-up, and I don’t want to close this review without noting that Sincerely, Willis Wayde also features one of the better portraits of a marriage since that other classic novel of business colliding with society, William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham. Willis’ wife, Sylvia, sees him more clearly and realistically than he ever does himself. Yet she also understands that she wants the comforts and luxuries that his ambition brings to their marriage and respects his talents too much to skewer him. In that way, she exemplifies maturity in Marquand’s eyes. “Mature people,” he once said, “are happier. At least they can rationalize the world in such a way that they are not going to beat their heads against a wall.”

The critic Maxwell Geismar wrote that, “Mr. Marquand knows all the little answers. He avoids the larger questions.” I think this insults Marquand’s intelligence–and Marquand’s respect for ours. Large questions about how one can reconcile business demands with human needs can be seen throughout Sincerely, Willis Wayde. It’s to Marquand’s credit that he knows most readers are smart enough to know there no simple answers.

Other Comments

· Harlan Ellison, who wrote on his website:

That Marquand continues to be overlooked is nothing less than criminal. He’s one of the few authors I’ve read that’s skewered institutions without mocking the troubled plights of his protagonists. Truly the harder road to travel. His characters are all too human in the foolish decisions they make. His married couples are astutely observed, steeped in the worst of compromises. Remarkably, Marquand was criticized for chronicling flatline heroes, but I can’t think of another author that’s dared to display the harsh undertow of comfy middle class life quite like him. Too many people trundle through life without even the inkling of an inner revelation. And the delicate decision of whether to watch haplessly as someone destroys herself or to intervene and scare them straight becomes a tricky ethical tightrope.

· Terry Teachout, on his About Last Night blog:

Babbitt with a backstory. This undeservedly forgotten 1955 blockbuster follows a New England businessman along the twisty road that leads from youthful idealism to mature vengefulness. Less subtle than Point of No Return, Marquand’s masterpiece, it offers a harsher, explicitly satirical view of life among the capitalists, and though Marquand’s Lewis-like portrayal of his anti-hero’s philistinism is a bit heavy-handed, I can’t think of a more convincing fictional description of the high price of getting what you think you want.

· John Kenneth Galbraith, in the New York Times, from 1984:

Neglected also is the modern corporate executive, the university-trained managerial type, wherever he lives. Thirty years ago – in 1955 – John Marquand made a brilliant beginning on this task with Sincerely, Willis Wayde, a novel that did not receive the attention it deserved from being, I think, too fully abreast of its time. Willis is a highly competent, soundly schooled, relentlessly ambitious, deeply offensive graduate of the Harvard Business School; he brings the best in modern management techniques to bear on the Harcourt Mill in Clyde, Mass., an old and distinguished manufacturer of industrial belting. He also brings off a greatly advantageous merger, moves the headquarters to the Middle West and, eventually, as part of a very intelligent strategy – strategic planning even then – abandons the original New England operation.

· Time, 28 February 1955

…. Marquand manages a highly skillful double-switch with the reader’s emotions. Early in the book, he smoothly turns the nice youngster into a glossy horror; later on he turns the horror into a rather sad character who compels sympathy. Novelist Marquand’s plot may sag at points, but the caricature of his hero is fascinating, down to the last page, when wise and forbearing Sylvia tucks in her husband with a kiss and a Nembutal. Perhaps the most pathetic thing about Willis Wayde is that, in his own peculiar way, he believes in what he is doing, is sincere even in the dreadful, calculating little social-business notes he always signs: Sincerely, Willis Wayde.

· F. H. Guidry, Christian Science Monitor, 24 February 1955

Mr Marquand’s masterful ability to delineate mood-creating detail in both setting and character is widely acknowledged. One can “walk in imagination” with his people, not only with a pleasing sense of compassion but with an agreeable awareness of irony as well.

Find Out More

Locate a Copy

Sincerely, Willis Wayde, by John P. Marquand
Boston: Little, Brown, 1955

Small World, by Carol Deschere

The fact that Carol Deschere Berendt, mother of John Berendt, author of the best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The City of Falling Angels, once published a novel, Small World, under her maiden name, would not in itself qualify the book for mention here.

But, as Syracure Post-Standard writer Laura T. Ryan noted two years ago in her blog, Karen DeCrow, a pioneering feminist and one-time president of the National Organization for Women, was passed along a copy back in the late 1970s. DeCrow was so moved by the book that, “… she typed up a 5-page letter and sent it to everyone she knew in the publishing world, hoping to get it re-released.” Ryan quotes from the letter:

Twelve years before publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963), Carol Deschere wrote a novel which could have spurred the feminist revolution, had enough women read it. In Small World, a simply written and simply plotted novel, Deschere tells us the story of a bright, educated, and cultured woman who leads the life of a middle-class housewife. Her husband is kind and generous, her children are intelligent and obedient, her home is stylish and comfortable.

Her world, however, is so small that it revolves totally around food, clothing, furniture, and an occasional outreach of interest to music, art, and literature. The novel takes place during one of the critical periods in American history: World War II had just ended, the alliances of nations in the world were dramatically shifting, capitalism as an economic system was being seriously questioned for the first time in a century, and the seeds of the Cold War period were being developed in the United States. Yet Kay Hiller, the hero of the novel, does not deal with these issues, despite the fact that she is both bright and intellectual….

… For women who dream of art, music, literature, and affairs of state there are few alternatives — lovers, suicide, or worst of all, resignation. With the broadening of the small world for women, hopefully novels about Emma (Bovary), about Kay, will become historical documents.

As Berendt himself describes the book in an interview on Barnes & Noble’s website,

The story concerns a family of four living in upstate New York. It’s charming and beautifully written. Carol Deschere, the author, happens to be my mother, and the family depicted in her novel closely resembles our own. The book sold about 2,000 copies and, although my mother never wrote another book, Small World was a life-changing experience for me, because in addition to making me enormously proud of her, it showed me for the first time how real life could be transformed into words and stories and published in a book for all to read. It also planted the first seed in my mind that I might become a writer one day.

Deschere died last year at the age of 92. Small World remains out of print–in fact, a quick search of AddAll.com located a grand total of three copies, at $48, $200, and almost $1,000, respectively. Two reviewers on Amazon remembered it fondly enough to post 5-star reviews of the book, so Karen DeCrow is not alone in hoping that this book may someday find its way to republication.

The Invisible Flag, by Peter Bamm

· Excerpt
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Excerpt


A man–a human being–is wounded. In the split second in which he is hit he is hurled out of the fighting machine and has become, in an instant, utterly helpless. Up to that moment all his energy was directed forward, against an enemy army stretching across the landscape like an imaginary line, its exact position unknown. So engrossed was he in what went on round him that he was left with no conscious thought about himself. but now he is thrown back on himself: the sight of his own blood restores him to full self-awareness. At one moment he was helping to change the course of history: at the next he cannot do anything for himself.

Hours afterwards night falls. Gray fear envelopes him. Will he bleed to death? Will he be found? Is he going to be hit again? Are the Germans retreating? Will he be captured by the Russians?

An eternity passes before a couple of soldiers drag him a short way back. There, in a shell crater or some primitive dugout, the first outpost of medicine, sits the regimental medical officer. The wounded man is given a bandage, a splint, a tourniquet, an injection to ease his pain. Then he is left to lie around somewhere, wondering again if he will ever be moved. At last he is carried further and eventually put into an ambulance. He finishes up among a multitude of other wounded men, lying in semi-darkness and a fearful silence broken only by the groans of those around him. At long last his stretcher is lifted again. From the moment he comes into the bright circle of light under the theater lamp he ceases to be a mere lump of animate matter and becomes a patient, a man who is suffering. When he leaves the operating theater, the pitiful, dirty, bloodstained creature is once again a human being, cared and provided for.

This small miracle is accomplished with a piece of thin steel which weighs less than a couple of ounces–a scalpel. At its tip converge years of skill and training; a technique developed through centuries of experiment; the immense and complicated organization of a modern army’s medical service. And above it, as it cuts deep to heal, above that little tent in the wood by the Dniester, there flutters beneath the wide Ukrainian sky a small dauntless flag: an invisible flag: the flag of humanity.

Editor’s Comments


Cover of first U.S. paperback edition of 'The Invisible Flag'Peter Bamm’s The Invisible Flag is an extraordinarily well-written semi-fictional memoir of his experiences as a field surgeon with the German Army on the Eastern Front in World War Two. When it was first published in 1956, the Times Literary Supplement called it “a masterpiece,” and the book is studded with passages of stunning prose equal to and even better than that quoted above. Bamm fell in love with the Russian landscape even as he saw it torn up in brutal fighting. One imagines him in company with Konstantin Paustovsky, sharing a drink outside a dacha while they took in the beauty of a summer twilight in the Ukraine.

In the course of the book, Bamm’s duties take him rolling forward across the steppes in the blazing summer of 1941; enduring bitter winters that threaten lives even more immediately than combat; into the hills of the Crimea and the mountains of northern Georgia; and then, with the long retreat beginning with Stalingrad, back through the Ukraine and into Poland and Eastern Prussia. In each place, Bamm notes how nature carries on oblivious of man’s activities around her. He makes us feel the sweat blinding him as he operates under a blazing sun and the bitter winds biting his skin as he trudges through deep snow to reach a rear command post.

He also brings a gallery of characters alive: rugged and ingenious NCOs who regularly manage to locate food, supplies, horses, or wagons for Bamm’s unit, a Wermacht equivalent to the U.S. Army portable surgical hospital; a Russian POW who staggers into the unit’s camp one morning and remains as a helper for the next four years; civilians who display exceptional compassion and generosity even when they’ve lost everything and others who begrudge the slightest favor to their own; and veteran officers who struggle on despite the hopeless of inevitable defeat and the insanity of the Nazi regime.

In real life, Bamm was one Curt Emmrich, a surgeon who had served with the German Army in World War One–a highly educated and cultured man who had traveled the world, spoke French, and quoted Homer and Virgil. His deep pride in his own professionalism as a doctor and soldier is evident throughout the book. He allies himself with other experienced officers and medical men and contrasts his views and actions with those of the S.S. and other Nazi party members. In fact, he refers to Nazis in general as “the others” throughout the book. Bamm and his fellow officers and men appear to hold themselves to a higher moral standard: “The orgy of revenge in which the Dictator was indulging was complemented by an orgy of servility among his creatures. To the soldiers all this was repugnant.”

He does not deny in anyway the atrocities that were going on around him throughout the campaign on the Eastern Front. He recalls Jews being led away to the outskirts of a village, forced to dig a trench, then shot and bulldozed into it. He cites the case of one officer who was imprisoned for taking photos of such an event. He knows that Jews were taken into vans and gassed. He knows that Communists were hunted down and executed. His justification for remaining silent in the face of these actions is merely that it would have been futile to protest. Instead, his focus is on doing his duty as a surgeon, trying to save the lives that pass through his tent–regardless of whether they are German or Russian, Christian or atheist. One presumes no Jew ever made it to his operating table.

Bamm made a conscious moral compromise that weighed his ability to save lives and spare suffering over his ability to interfere with the gross outrages going on around his. One must accept this fact to read The Invisible Flag. Some may not be able to. Within the boundaries of Bamm’s choice, the book is rich in superb descriptive writing:

The whole crawling mass has meandered twenty yards onto the open field to by-pass a dud bomb that lies unexploded in the middle of the road. To left and right the fields are strewn with a weird assortment of stoves, milking stools, bedsteads, radio sets, munition boxes, lamps. It is like the aftermath of a flood. Every few hundred yards is a broken-down vehicle; or a dead horse with a swollen belly; or a corpse. Crows rise with a heavy flapping of wings. Tattered gray clouds chase without pause high above the living and the dead; high above beast and man.

The Invisible Flag received enthusiastic reviews and sold well, both in Germany and in numerous translations, but has been out of print in English since the late 1950s. If another powerful semi-fictional memoir of war on the Eastern Front, Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier, deserves reprinting and notice despite continuing controversies over its veracity, then there is no excuse for Peter Bamm’s remarkable book being left in the shadows.

Locate a Copy

The Invisible Flag, by Peter Bamm (pseudonym of Curt Emmrich)
London: Faber, 1956
New York: John Day, 1956; Signet (paperback), 1958

Six Lives and a Book, by Claude Houghton

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Editor’s Comments


Even though I found his I am Jonathan Scrivener only a partial success, Claude Houghton’s approach the question of identity was so unusual that I wanted to explore his work further. A few weeks ago, I received a copy of his 1943 novel, Six Lives and a Book, which I had quite honestly ordered for no reason but that I thought the title promised something interesting.

Six Lives and a Book is much more more experimental in its structure than I am Jonathan Scrivener. The first sixty-some pages of the novel are actually excerpts from a fictional work titled The House Not Made With Hands by an author named Oldfield. This novel is set in a residential hotel in London. The narrator, a man named Mavers, encounters the different inhabitants of the house, who range from a good-time, perhaps gold-digging girl to an aging miser. As in I am Jonathan Scrivener, these encounters are usually long conversations in which the two characters seem to probe each other to detect his or her true character, beliefs, or values. But it is on a London bus one evening that Mavers suddenly sees through another man’s public image–literally:

Opposite was an old man leaning forward on a short thick walking stick, who was gazing at me with eyes which might have been concerned with any one of a number of far-away things, but which certainly were not concerned with me. He was a heavy, shabby, lugubrious figure with wisps of dirty white hair escaping under a scarecrow hat. His attitude implied immense fatigue, the face was a record of disasters rather than a human countenance, but, nevertheless, there were hints of stunted grandeur about him–hints which compelled you speculate about this derelict man who leaned on his stick, staring at nothing.

Then–suddenly–I saw this man as he would have been if all his possibilities had been realised. It was as if another man were sitting by his side–the men he would have been if all his stunted qualities had attained maximum growth. And, which was terrifying, there was no doubt whatever that the wreck of a man in the scarecrow hat and the transcendent being by his side were one and the same.

From this moment on, Mavers finds these visions of a person’s potential coming to him again, until he sees the other of six other people in the house he shares. “Every one,” he concludes,

… lives in a strange and haunted house, for our essential lives are concerned with principalities and powers, and our human relationships are a reflection of our combat with those powers and principalities.

And with that, Houghton abruptly switches to the Public Library at Marleham, a small port in Devonshire, where Olga Purvis, during the time of the Blitz. Olga Purvis, a London woman made homeless by the bombing, is staying in Marleham and decides to check out The House Not Made With Hands.

Although a newcomer to Marleham, she has already come to know a number of other temporary residents: a rugged veteran merchant sailor waiting for a new ship after having his last torpedoed; an heiress grieving her lover, an RAF ace recently killed in combat; a radical; a charity organizer also displaced by the Blitz–six in all, just as in the novel.

And just as in the novel, these characters meet, talk, clash and find common bonds. The borrowed copy of The House Not Made With Hands circulates among them. Each has some revelation about his or her true desires or concerns while killing time in this sort-of limbo. In the end, each leaves Marleham for a new destination or undertaking–with a truer understanding of himself.

Or at least I assume so. Frankly, as in Jonathan Scrivener, I found that Houghton is either too subtle in his dialogue for a clod like me to pick up his nuances or just plain obtuse. At the end of Six Lives and a Book, the most interesting character, a nameless, brutish man (not one of the six) who haunts Olga, playing an erotic cat-and-mouse game with her,is about to return the The House Not Made With Hands to the library when he thumbs through the book and comes across the two passages above. He recalls Olga reading them to him. “But then,” Houghton adds, “there had been another entry [in her diary] which she had not read. She had exclaimed: “No, It’s not that! I know that’s nonsense!”

When I read this, I began to wonder if Six Lives and a Book wasn’t just some great shaggy dog tale. I have to admit that I had been hooked early on and kept reading, expecting to come to a climax in which connections among the characters or some event lead to a dramatic revelation … only to wind up with “I know that’s nonsense!” Even now, as I run through the book again for this piece, I half-believe the joke was on me. I find it a little hard to believe, when as reliable a source as the critic and lexicographer Eric Partridge considered it one of Houghton’s best.

But then … having compared Jonathan Scrivener to the works of Paul Auster, particularly his New York Trilogy, it occurs to me that some people think those novels are shaggy dog tales, too. It takes a good storyteller to carry off an effective shaggy dog tale, because the key is to draw the reader or listener along to the point that the narrative pull overrides one’s better judgments.

So is Six Lives and a Book a glimpse into men’s true souls? Or just a bait-and-switch?

Read it and draw your own conclusion.

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Six Lives and a Book, by Claude Houghton
London: Collins Publishers, 1943

The Shadow Riders, by Isabel Paterson

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Editor’s Comments


Cover of first edition of 'The Shadow Riders'
When H. L. Mencken reviewed Isabel Paterson’s first novel, The Shadow Riders, he concluded that despite “a certain readableness”, it would soon be “dead and forgotten.” And so it has remained, along with all the rest of Paterson’s novels, even with her rediscovery as a Libertarian icon. Frankly, in comparison to her masterpiece, Never Ask the End or even The Golden Vanity, The Shadow Riders is easy for anyone but a completist to neglect.

Yet despite its limitations–wooden characters and sometimes even stiffer prose–The Shadow Riders has a few rewards for the reader who pulls it off the shelf every decade or so.

Paterson’s wit, for one. The book’s epigraph deserves a place alongside any of Dorothy Parker’s best quips:

There is an old proverb which says that one can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. It is doubtless a true saying; I only wonder what one does with the flies after having caught them.

Lesley Johns, who wins the prize of protagonist after a neck-and-neck race with several characters through much of the book, is clearly Paterson’s avatar. Raised on farm by a long-suffering mother and ne’er-do-well father, Lesley works her way up from clerk to journalist at one of the local papers in the fictional version of Calgary, Alberta, where the novel takes place. Like Paterson, Lesley is clear-eyed about social hypocrites and always keeps a pin handy for bursting bubbles:

“Mrs. McConach this afternoon was almost in tears of ecstasy because the Duke of Inverarie is buying an estate somewhere hereabouts. Her grandfather was a crofter, turned out to make more room for deer on the Duke’s grandfather’s Scotch estate…. [B]ut then the Duke’s great-grandfather’s grandfather was simply the most successful cattle thief on the border.”

“Society,” Paterson writes, “is run on the Berkeleian theory that everything exists only in the imagination. What could be more comfortable?”

“Everything,” she adds, “in this sense includes everything but money. There is something so grossly material about money as to resist the strongest doses of philosophy.” Paterson’s hard-nosed view of money and its importance in a capitalist world comes from her many years of living from payday to payday, earning every step of her own way. This economic realism makes it hard not to notice how artificial Paterson’s attempts to at romanticism are. For over 350 pages, she leads her audience along through the on-again, off-again relationship between Lesley and Chan Herrick, the millionaire’s nephew who gradually evolves from lounge lizard to stalwart entrepreneur. They wind up, of course, in each other’s arms. We don’t buy it and I doubt Paterson did, either. “I want freedom, not power,” Lesley remarks at one point. Why, then, would this woman saddle herself with this future Rotary Club officer?

After all, early on in the book, she reads Chan’s true nature:

“I shouldn’t have guessed,” she said, “that you are a shadow rider.”

“A what?” he asked. When she fell into her own vernacular he was always interested. “What is a shadow rider? Sounds rather poetic.”

“It isn’t,” she retorted cruelly. “You watched your own shadow for a long time back there. If you did that on the rodeo, and the range-boss saw you–you’d be looking for a new job. It’s the lazy ones, the indifferent ones, do that.”

When Chan and Lesley unite at the book’s end, she is about to head to Chicago, for a job with a big newspaper there–which is pretty close to what Paterson did in real life herself. It’s a shame she didn’t let the best character in The Shadow Riders escape, too.

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The Shadow Riders, by Isabel Paterson
Toronto: S. B. Gundy, 1916
New York: John Lane Company,1916

Fortune is a Woman, by Hermes Nye

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Excerpt


Cover of first edition of 'Fortune is a Woman'
I had been sitting all afternoon in the office alone, with my feet on the desk, reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Building up a law practice in a depression is a slow way to get rich, but it’s a fine chance to improve the mind, learn card tricks or take up the five-string banjo. Well, here I was with my mind on red hair and high heels, and I went down the elevator in the Santa Fe Building and came out into Commerce Street. I was passing the Waldorf Hotel Bar. This bar was usually full of whores, horse players, and the vendors of razor blades and rubber goods who made the offices in those days. I saw Gail Lindquist at one of the tables just inside the door; she had a tall brew in front of her and was looking out into the street with the enraptured stare seen commonly on the faces of seasoned beer drinkers and Botticelli madonnas. Gail was not the redhead. In fact, I had thought very little of Gail Lindquist up to that time; and if I had just walked off into the Commerce Street traffic and broken a leg or two, or gone upstairs and picked up a dose–anyhow, I looked in and there was Gail.

Gail Lindquist, college graduate, only not of Texas University, but of some place in Southern California, some hick school you never heard of, one of those places where the head of the English department coaches girls’ basketball, heads up dramatics (As You Like It and Charley’s Aunt), and spends his summer vacations on his father-in-law’s farm. A rangy, limed-oak blonde, negligently dressed, sometimes with a delicate white pimple or two on her face (when she had had a fighting letter from her mother as I was later to find out), a small pointed chin, not much jaw to speak of, but with (as I was also to find out) knots of formidable Calvinist muscles along the jaw line, a small wart on one cheek, the loveliest gray eyes you have ever seen, and a fine mind. All this, together with a light, soaring, I’ve-saved-the-last-dance-for-you voice, if you can still say that sort of thing without having people compare you to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Editor’s Comments


Hermes NyeHermes Nye was born in Chicago, but became a legendary East Texas character: a lawyer, folksinger, folklorist, novelist, humorist, and local liberal activist. Nye clearly never took anything, including himself, too seriously. When, in the midst of the 1960s folk boom, he published a guide to folk songs, he gave it a triply-redundant title that included its own punchline: How to be a folksinger; How to sing and present folksongs; or, The folksinger’s guide; or, Eggs I have laid.

Fortune is a Woman is a genuinely neglected book. First published as a paperback original in 1958, it passed unreviewed out of print and most copies have long since disappeared. The half-dozen or so copies to be found for sale on the Internet run as high as $50 a copy. About its only notice in the last 50 years was its inclusion in James Ward Lee’s 1987 survey, Classics of Texas Fiction.

The novel is narrated by Paul Cotton, a young lawyer getting his start under the wing of a wise and patient veteran of Dallas courts, Harry Alderson, known as “the Chief.” He’s living on an allowance from his father, sharing a room at the YMCA, lusting after a cute waitress at his usual diner, and hoping to hang out his own shingle in a year or two. And he’s depressed: too educated not to have ambitions and too lazy to hold out much hope of realizing them. For him to make a fortune, it will have to land in his lap.

Which is what happens, in a very roundabout and unexpected way–rather as Nye approaches the story himself. Paul and Gail agree to pair up with his roommate on a double date, only to find out the fourth party is the coveted waitress. Paul finds consolation of a sort in Gail’s company and over the next week or so, becomes convinced he’s deeply in love with her.

Gail, unfortunately, is not. She seems to have a complicated relationship or two going in addition to her bemused flirtation with Paul. She also has a taste for exotic forms of rot-gut:
“At the apartment, she had some Mexican liqueur made up out of one part brimstone, eight parts of alcohol and two parts crankcase drippings from Monterrey taxi cabs.” A former lover shows up, as do Gail’s parents, and eventually she’s found, smoking gun in hand, over a man’s body.

In the meantime, Paul has a real case or two, and before he knows it, this boy has more complications going on than his poor little soul can handle. Heart-broken, afraid his short-lived legal career is about to go down in flames, he finds himself leaning out the window of his 11th story office, contemplating a quick way out.

Fortunately for Paul and the reader, Nye is far too amused by life’s comedy to let things get too far out of hand. Most of the loose threads get wound in and haphazardly fastened, leaving Paul with his suddenly-deceased boss’ practice, a win or two under his belt, and enough perspective not to head for the window again.

Frankly, though, the story is the least of this book. What makes this novel a delight to read is Nye’s wry, knowing, and unpretentious voice:

We had a settlement pending in a will case with his firm, Bamberg and Callahan. It was a bastard of a case, the legatees as contentious and stiff-necked as a group of Lutheran schismatics, and money as thick as flies around a boarding-house syrup pitcher. I went up to the sixteenth floor, and into the door with all the names on it; it was a big firm, they had enough lawyers around to make up two football teams including the line coaches and waterboys. The receptionists here had sculptured hair and big breasts and sat at electric typewriters that double-spaced whenever you cleared your throat. Some senior member on his Grand Tour had paid too much money for a lot of seventeenth century Neapolitan oils and these were on every wall, softly lighted; and with the wine-colored carpets and deep leather divans, the place looked like a fifty-dollar whorehouse. Except for the library. The library had everything but the original Magna Carta and the stone tablets of Hammurabi. “Looking up the law at Bam and Call” was a favorite expression among the young lawyers, since it saved you a trip to the courthouse; and there were always those typewriters to look at….

You can tell that Nye must have been a hell of a guy to while away a night in a Dallas bar in. He knows all the town’s streets, offices, taverns, and all its characters–the old money, the new money, the just-getting-by, and the down-and-out. And as the novel takes place in the midst of the Depression, not much separates any of them:

An air swept over me, sour with the smell of home dry-cleaning; the worst air in the world, the air of failure. And not just spiritual or moral failure; but financial failure. There was a secondhand reek to it, blowing off used-car lots and across seas of dependency. You may recognize this failure, amigo, it has its own signature: the eyes of the brave little woman who has to “make do”; the seven o’clock bus; the whiff of rubber cement as you stick the dime shoe-soles onto your Thom McAns, the ping of twelve-year-old Chevrolet doors; the voice that will let you know when there is an opening, or that the truck will be around at three for the bedroom suite.

Another writer gifted with Nye’s narrative voice might have invented a wise-cracking detective like Gregory Macdonald’s Fletch. But I suspect that would have required more design than Nye cared to put into this book. Instead, he manages to pull off two worthy feats. First, he writes a gently comic ballad celebrating his beloved city without glossing over any of her flaws or vices. And second, he manages to take on the Bildungsroman–a form that has been the ruin of many a more ambitious writer–without leaving the reader ready to wring the writer’s or protagonist’s neck–or both–by the book’s end. In its own way, Fortune is a Woman has a lot in common with that now-canonized 20th century masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March. I have a feeling, though, that if he’d ever found himself sharing a drink with Hermes Nye, Bellow would be the one doing the listening.

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Fortune is a Woman, by Hermes Nye
New York: Signet Books, December 1958

Catching Up: The Dogs by Ivan Nazhivin; Mary’s Country, by Harold Mead; My Hey-Day, by Virginia Faulkner

Life does get in the way of one’s hobbies at times. NeglectedBooks.com has had to suffer the fate of its subjects since mid-December, and even now I fear this post will have to be more telegraphic than usual–if I can manage that. I have to side with Pascal in believing that it takes longer to write less.

Here, at least, is a recap of recent rediscoveries:

Cover of first U.K. edition of 'Mary's Country'

Mary’s Country, by Harold Mead
London: Michael Joseph, 1957

I learned of Mary’s Country when browsing through the archive of Ken Slater’s “Something to Read” columns from Nebula Science Fiction. Slater gave the novel a big thumbs-up, writing, “All in all, whilst this may not be the happiest book of the moment, it is by far the most interesting and the most powerful. Highly recommended for a one-sitting reading. Don’t start it until you have the time to finish it . . . it is dangerous!”

Had 1984 and Lord of the Flies not been published within the decade prior to Mary’s Country, Slater might have been justified by adding that it was the most original novel of the moment. Unfortunately, anyone familiar with them would find it hard not to view Mead’s work as a mash-up of the two books. The novel opens in a state not unlike that in 1984, in which a ruling class keeps a prole-like population in check through drink, prostitution, and cheap entertainment while waging war against the hated “Dems”. As part of its master plan, the state is practicing a form of eugenics, separating out the finest physical specimens at birth and raising them to be future rulers.

Mary’s Country follows a group of such children as they watch the state collapse around them through the effects of biological warfare. After all their masters and many of their classmates have died, they band together and trek to an unknown paradise that Mary, one of the older children, has described to them. Unfortunately, as disease and chaos has destroyed their civilization, they are forced to arm themselves and fight off other bands of survivors. As they trek into the countryside, their means and moraes grow more primitive, and they adopt a totem they dub “the Watchman”. Here shades of Lord of the Flies can be seen as a new, more violent, tribal culture emerges.

Mary’s Country is certainly a powerfully-written book, and I found myself drawn by its strong narrative. But I would be hard-pressed to recommend the book for republication when ignorance of Golding and Orwell would have to be a pre-requisite for any reader hoping to experience its full effect.

The Dogs, by Ivan Nazhivin
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1931

Nazhivin’s novel is a panorama of Russia from before World War One to the height of the Russian revolution as seen through the eyes and minds of dogs. The dogs mirror society, ranging from a pair of noble Borzois and the pampered lapdog of the Grand Duke Nicholas’ mistress to Siedoi, a mutt. Despite his questionable pedigree, Siedoi is the novel’s protagonist, and manages to travel from Moscow to the country estate of a family of Russian gentry to the trenches on the Eastern Front and a prisoner-of-war camp in Austria and then back again to the estate as the human society around him progressively collapses.

Time magazine’s review of The Dogs called it, “one of the most articulate books of Russia, of human and other natures, yet written in the Tolstoi vein,” and like Tolstoi, Nazhivin displays a remarkable ability to portray his characters–both dog and human–in all their faults without passing judgment. With one exception: Peter, whom we first see as a lax and cruel kennel keeper, then as a thief, liar, coward, cheat, rapist, and, finally, Bolshevik rabble-rouser. Though Nazhivin doesn’t gloss over the problems and corruptions of Tsarist Russia, it’s clear that Peter symbolizes all the evils brought by the Communists, and the only thing lacking in the caricature are horns and a tail.

Still, The Dogs is moving account of the destruction experienced at all levels of Russian society enhanced by the novelty and humor of being told from animal perspectives. And in the much-travelled Siedoi, a flea-ridden survivor with a romantic soul, Nazhivin creates one of most memorable characters I’ve come across recently.

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'My Hey-Day'

My Hey-Day, or The Crack-up of the International Set, by Princess Tulip Murphy, as told to Virginia Faulkner
New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940

This book is pure froth–but it’s premium-quality froth. These are the purported memoirs of Princess Tulip Murphy, whose nobility is not the only thing about her of questionable provenance. After leaving her husband, “Brick-a-minute” Murphy, she manages through a combination of theft, seduction, and blackmail–though none of these offenses is so crudely named by their culprit–to elbow her way into “the International Set.” She then circulates among this amorphous band of royalty, heirs, heiresses, and hangers-on from Bajden-Baden to Cucamonga.

Each chapter recounts her adventures in a new place–Stockholm, where she meets Xerxes IX, Crown Prince of Jugo-ourway and his mother, Queen Carmen-Veranda; England, where she spents a dreary week at Sneers, the Spiltshire seat of the Earls of Quinsy; Pompei, where she takes her turn watching the famous painter, Pablo Paolo Pali at work on his prize-winning composition, “There Are More Ways of Choking a Cat than by Swallowing It With Butter, Horatio”; Mazatlan, where her friends Peter Frenzy Fripp and Olga Ostrogoth are tossed in jail for photographing an execution (“Nobody we knew,” the Princess hastens to add). Each spot offers her a chance to air yet more of her remarkable wardrobe:

I was wearing an original DeClassé of spaghetti-colored cambric, handsomely trimmed in gum-drop green duvetyn with shoulder-knots of solid tinsel. My hat was a saucy beret no bigger than an aspirin tablet, which was held to my head by a specially trained family of matching chameleons. My only jewelry, square-cut cultured emerald cuff-links, matched the duvetyn, and I carried a fish-net parasol which could also be used for water-divining.

As the world edges closer to the outbreak of World War Two, her trek eventually leads her to a yurt in forbidden Tibet, where despite the company of Lulu Alabaster, Lady Crystal Scum, and Count Udo von und zu Vonundzu, and heated political debates (“You know as well as I that Germany is dictated–but not red,” observes the Count), she finds herself bored: “But to the teeth!” Even though “there are so many armies wandering around that trains and ships are said to be unpleasantly crowded,” she resolves to head off in search of the “European belligerents”: after all, she notes, “Everyone’s going.”

As Time magazine wrote of Faulkner’s first novel, Friends and Romans, My Hey-Day “… breaks nobody’s bones or butterflies, lets no threatening skeletons loose on a frightened world, hurls no manifesto, literary or political.” What it does is offer a steady stream of wise-cracks, puns, and other comic material that holds up remarkably well considering the many decades passed since it last saw the light of day.