If we were to trust Virginia Faulkner, the “Lost Generation” had no desire to be found. In The Barbarians (1935), her account of the Bohemian life of expats and war veterans set in Paris and on the Riviera in 1922, to be “disoriented, wandering, directionless” was more fun than having to be tied down to any particular plan. The Barbarians — a loose cluster of creative types — painters, a sculptor, a writer, a pianist, and a gigolo — value independence over all:
Because their work was concerned with the forms of things, they had little time to bother with problems of behavior when in the presence of substance. They possessed great singleness of purpose, and because they found simplicity in all that they most admired they tried to regulate their lives as simply as possible. What they disliked they avoided or ignored, or pretended was non-existent. Life all students of reality, they were experts at make-believe. Like all people who must live intensively, they were sometimes cruel and impatient. Like all specialists, they had a good many blind spots.
This sounds remarkably insightful coming from a writer who was all of 22 when The Barbarians, but bear in mind that Faulkner was nine years old in 1922 and had spent less than a year in Europe, mostly attending a tony girls’ finishing school in Rome. So, there’s far more in this book one has to attribute to precocious powers — of either observation or imagination or probably both. “Tauchnitz had taken the place of experience,” Faulkner writes of one particularly naïve young woman, but it might have truer for the author herself than she might like to admit.
Faulkner later wrote scripts for Fred Allen’s radio show and dialogue for Hollywood comedies, and her talent for rapid-fire conversation in an absurdist vein takes center stage in much of The Barbarians.
“There are so many things to think about. For instance, did it ever occur to you that there are an equal number of hands and feet in the world — at least to start with?”
“And the thumb is the strongest of the fingers?” said Phip helpfully.
“And monkeys have knuckles,” contributed Beppo. “At least, I think they do. Funny how you never associate a monkey with a knuckle.”
“And if we didn’t have fingernails, what would we scratch with?” said Marie.
“Do you suppose if we weren’t subject to itching we’d have fingernails?” inquired Andreas.
“Pulling off the fingernails was a medieval form of torture,” said Sarkesso.
“The Chinese take great pride in long fingernails,” said Lise valiantly.
“And short feet.”
“And many a foot is not twelve inches long.”
“And there is a kind of worm called the inch-worm.”
“And it is very hard to tell one end of worm from the other.”
“Can worms back up?”
This provoked quite a long discussion which ended by Lise and Beppo going out to get some worms….
Faulkner also tries her hand at romantic farce involving mistaken identities and hiding under beds à la Feydeau and proves herself a quick study. The Barbarians collectively foil Baroness Von Schanzburg’s attempt to arrange a marriage between her daughter and a passing American millionaire (“An income for herself from the son-in-law was not essential but would be acceptable,” she muses) and spirit her off to their Left Bank suite of garrets.
With no apparent talent aside from looking beautiful, she’s soon convinced by a ne’er-do-well to join him selling fake native artworks to tourists in the middle of the Sahara. Faulkner may have taken a page from Evelyn Waugh’s just-published A Handful of Dust in that the girl finds herself held prisoner by an especially sadistic local trader. Unlike Waugh’s Tony Last, however, several Barbarians come to the rescue, and the comic crew rides laughing into the sunset.
When it came time for The Barbarians to be published, however, it was Faulkner herself who was the butt of jokes. As the story came out in May 1935 when the New York Supreme Court granted her an annulment, one night two months before Faulkner had been entertaining friends, including Tallulah Bankhead, at her hotel. As more drinks were poured, the party flowed out of the hotel and into one or more nightclubs, until at 3 A.M. the next morning, she was standing up in front of the Justice of the Peace of Harrison, New York pledging to love, honor, and obey one Everett Weil, whom reports identified as a “cotton converter,” whatever that is/was. Hours later, Faulkner awoke, finally sober, to find Weil bringing her breakfast in bed. Faulkner, who was likely gay and in any case in no mood to get hitched, fled the scene and began a frantic search for the fastest route to an annulment. A few papers picked up the story in March, but when the court ruling came out on 15 May 1935, The New York Daily News gleefully put its best headliner writer to work:
Headline from The New York Daily News story on Virginia Faulkner’s short-lived marriage
“Fifteen Scotch highballs preceding a dawn elopement mystified Virginia Faulkner so thoroughly that she didn’t know what was happening until the blissfully happy bridegroom, Everett V. Weil, revived her with a platter of scrambled eggs of his own making in his apartment at 42 W. 74th St. Then she fled,” the article opened. You can hear the copy writer chuckling as he went to town on this story. “He Scrambles, She Scrams,” quipped a subheading. It ended with testimony from her application: “All she remembers of the honeymoon’s final chapter, she deposed, was that the bridgegroom gave her his card and phone number as she was leaving his apartment, and said: ‘Call me up some time.'” Not even Faulkner ever managed to come up with a story quite as wild as that.
The Barbarians, by Virginia Faulkner New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935
When I spotted the yellow1 spine with the title Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! and the name of Eileen Winncroft below it while browsing through the shelves here at UEA, I knew I had spotted a live one: rare, audacious, and somehow overlooked in the sometimes cultish fervor for novels by British women from the 1930s. That title alone is a bundle of potential psycho-sexual-social interpretations, and I knew I would have to read the book to see just which direction Eileen Winncroft took it.
Now, some readers might stop at the second sentence: “‘Breakfast, poops,’ he murmured in a homosexual Oxford accent.” We’re obviously in comic territory, but not everyone would find the joke funny today. Winncroft might have considered herself a sophisticate — and her narrator Forest is quite open-minded when it comes to heterosexual love — but when it comes to gay men and women, her humour sinks to the level of Benny Hill:
“Do stop stroking each other; you look like a couple of pansies.”
But she only made them worse and they picked dog daisies and stuck them behind each other’s ears and smacked each other’s bottom and called each other darling and behaved in a manner in which young men do in that pretty pub so near the Green Park.
Sean is a poet and would-be writer, while Forest is a mother and bread-winning writer. It’s Forest who worries about being able to buy her daughter new Wellies while Sean spends hours sunning himself in a deck chair, épuisé et fatigué. Be a Gent is, at least at the start, a comedy of role reversals. “Never in her wildest dreams did she think of Sean as a husband… She felt too much of a gent to need a husband then.” The problem at the root of their marriage, in fact, is that Forest sees Sean as an object: “… much as he despised his long, slender body it had at least got him a wife, whereas his inspired brain had not even got him enough to eat.”
That doesn’t stop Forest from turning out newspapers articles for pregenant women on “how much your husband could help in these last few tiring months.” For Forest is in her last few tiring months as the novel opens. And when the household is increased with a healthy baby boy (Robin), the population is quickly rebalanced by a sickly adult man as Sean — at his mother’s expense — is sent away to a sanitorium in Switzerland. Leaving Forest alone to manage affairs.
I use the word affairs with tongue firmly in cheek. Not only does Forest have to pop up to London and make the rounds of Fleet Street in search of freelance writing gigs, she also has to sort out childcare, lodging, food, finances, and transportation. To this extent, Be a Gent is utterly up-to-date. It may, in fact, be the best account of life as a freelancer written before the phrase “gig economy” lit up some sadistic capitalist’s brain. More than a few writers will recognize the editors Forest has to deal with:
“I adore the article you had in the so-and-so yesterday. Now, that is exactly the kind of thing I want. Why don’t you give me that kind of thing instead of this kind of thing.” Picking up her last article for them and curling up their lips at it.
Outside the practical realm, Be a Gent is about a game of musical chairs, with Forest the player and a series of men the chairs — once she’s got rid of Sean through a divorce pulled off like a rabbit from a hat. There is Charles, the unfailingly charming and reliably caddish man about town. Martin, the magnificent doctor who proves to have a different girl for … well, several days of the week. An enormously wealthy Frenchman smitten with Forest — but she with him? Not so much. It all ends like these games do: the music stops and the player plops down on the chair that happens to be within reach. It doesn’t really matter which man Forest ends up with.
Winncroft admits that none of her characters, including Forest, are particularly admirable. “The next story I write will be about quite different people. Really nice normal people.” But since she only knows one at the moment, she invites her readers to send “names and addresses of any others you know so that I can have a few minutes’ talk with them and get a complete picture of them for the story.”
Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent! is a little needle of a tale about surviving as an independent woman wrapped up in so many layers of fluff I suspect almost no one felt the barb when it came out. Neither Forest nor Winncroft took herself seriously enough to brood over anything. And the prose speeds the reader along in endless strings of conjunctions:
And then Susan got affected…. And that, of course, opened the heavens…. And while all this fun was going on…. And, of course, Forest accepted…. And the pretty girl he loved…. And Forest returned home…. And every week she tried not to see Martin….
It’s not all like this, but I counted strings of sentences starting with “And …” running on for as much as two pages. Winncroft set a high standard for breathlessness in her prose.
To her credit, she was writing something of an ironic self-portrait. Eileen Winncroft was, in fact, a pseudonym of a pseudonym. To the millions of readers of the Daily Express, she was Martha Blount, one of a trio of women’s page columnists — along with Anne Edwards and Eve Perrick — masterminded by Lord Beaverbrook and all taking their names from friends of the poet Alexander Pope. A few years before Be a Gent came out, Martha Blount provided regular updates during and after her pregnancy. In real life, Martha Blount was Mrs. Neil Macloughlin (her second husband) and their son — known to the Daily Express as Simon Blount — Shaun Macloughlin went on to become a writer of radio dramas for the BBC and, more recently, to found the English Through Drama program. And Mrs. Macloughlin was the former Mrs. Franckeiss and, in the beginning, Henrietta Pryke from Sussex. It took a good hour digging through genealogical databases to unravel that thread.
As Eileen Winncroft, she went on to write a second novel, Angels in Ealing (1939), with a very different tone entirely — a story involving a real angel and a real divine power. Then, over a decade later, she collaborated with a German woman, Else Wendel, in writing Hausfrau at War (1957), a memoir of life in Germany during the Second World War.
Hutchinson catalogue listing for I Am Going to Have a Baby
As Martha Blount, she appears to have had a deal with Hutchinson in 1937 to write a book based on her Daily Express columns to be titled “I am Going to Have a Baby.” The book was announced in Hutchinson’s catalogue with the promise that it would contain “advice on matters which, if overlooked, may be disastrous.” Unfortunately, the book appears never to have been published: not even the British Library has it. Now we know the reason for World War Two. Much later, in the 1960s, Martha Blount finally offered her advice to mothers in a little paperback titled, A Time for Joy (1968). Tandem Paperbacks gave it far less hoopla than “I am Going to Have a Baby,” despite the fact that the former appears to have been largely based on the latter.
1The UEA Library has the second printing, which had a simpler, all-yellow binding. For those of you keeping track.
Be a Gent, Little Woman, Be a Gent, by Eileen Winncroft (pseudonym of Henrietta Macloughlin) London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1938
Financial Times has the best two opening sentences I’ve read in a long time:
William Longfellow Wollacombe, the Royal Academician, an upright figure with whiskers and the face of a statesman, a man of great truth and purpose you would have said, endowed this world somewhat bountifully with children. Indeed, he was a shade careless about it, not sufficiently distinguishing between his own field and his neighbour’s with the result that the stern visage which has now gone out of fashion stamped itself rather freely on the new age, though with diminishing incisiveness.
The wonderfully vague sense that adultery and bastardry are rather like atmospheric phenomena that take place beyond one’s control conveyed here sets the tone perfectly for the comic clash at this book’s core. If the painter Wollacombe floats through his world blithely unaware of his impact on it, he is positively razor-sharp compared to his poetess wife, Ella, sometimes referred to as “Love-in-the-Mist.” On her brief and infrequent passes through the family’s home in Kensington, she is apt to stumble into one of the many children rambling unsupervised around the place, say “I seem to know you,” and then call out indefinitely, “Give him a penny!” before passing out again.
There are, in fact, thirteen Wollacombe children, bearing artistic names such as Leonardo, Perugino, Rubens, Ingres, Veronese, Gentile, and Lippi and even more artistic manners: “They wrote, painted, made sculpture or played instruments from birth.” They gather like birds when they need to eat, descend upon unwitting grocers, taking away whatever foods strike their fancy, and signing off on hugely marked-up bills against their father’s account. Fortunately, Wollacombe is among the great artistic successes of the Victorian age: “He painted Cows. No gallery in England was complete without a number of Wollacombe Cows; no private house without one or two reproductions.”
One Wollacombe, however, is the odd number in this baker’s dozen: Titian. When his mother asks, “And what are you going to be when you grow up? Painter? Poet? Sculptor? Musician?” he snaps back, “None of that nonsense for me. I’m going into business!” Financial Times, in other words, is a fable about an ant in a world filled with grasshoppers. Unlike his siblings, Titian’s soul aches for order, and he insists on being sent away to boarding school. Fraser passes over this period with an observation some might find applicable to the current Conservative government:
We do not want to follow Titian through his schooldays: nothing could be duller. He used, later, to say that his schooldays were the happiest of his life. Men do say that. It shows they ceased to develop a short time after they left.
Titian takes all the pennies given by his mother and deposits them fastidiously in a Post Office account. And when, after leaving school, he rises quickly through the ranks of a commercial firm (his specialty is collecting outstanding debts), and is recruited by Kettering, the era’s grand financier, his father bids him a bitter farewell: “I can’t say I’m sorry you’re going. I never thought any one of mine would have sunk so low.”
Financial Times perfectly illustrates the principle that tragedy is the flipside of comedy (and vice versa). We laugh at the continual discord between upright Titian and the rest of the Wollacombe tribe. They accept him with a breadth of mind, a tolerance for all types, even a sort of affection — “rather like the affection of a scientist for some example of Neanderthal Man.” To him, though, their tolerance merely proved them utterly lacking in principle. To Leonardo et al., Titian is sad but comic figure. To the author, however, he is ultimately a tragic figure — for it’s clear from the start whose side Fraser’s on.
Despite the fact that Fraser was an accomplished and knighted administrator and civil servant, his greatest passion was for spiritual matters, especially the possibility of transcendence, of passing from this world to another realm of immortality and beauty. He saw art as one of the means by which we can build bridges between the two worlds, and so he has no choice but to take Titian through to a final judgment in the court of immortality. In Fraser’s hands, of course, it’s a kangaroo court, and it’s painful thing to witness. Painful and sadly, from an artistic standpoint, unsuccessful. Good comedy is its own reward. In Financial Times Fraser manages to earn a fortune and fritter it away trying to make a philosophical point. “There is little left to record,” he writes on page 200 — which is where he should have stopped writing. And if you take up Financial Times — which I highly recommend — I would advise you to make the editorial choice Fraser failed to. You won’t miss what you miss.
Other Reviews
• Viola Garvin, The Evening Standard
It sparkles with laughter and mischief; heaves hugely with a deeper mirth at the eternal comedy; gravely considers the temporal world and its mad affairs; pities both the sad and sick, both sinful and sorry, though with an aloof, measured tenderness in proportion to the larger issues. Above all, being afraid neither of beauty nor ugliness, but taking experience for the enriching thing it is, not afraid either of life or death.
• Kate O’Brien, The Spectator
Because Mr. Fraser writes at speed, keeps up his design of excess, overstatement and satire, sustains in all directions, pro and con his hero, a sense of non-reality, and presents a crowd of amusingly mythical figures, formal, grotesque, decorative and theatrically-lighted—his inverted theme, which might have been merely a statement, untenable, as an effect of fireworks, develops into a sustained amusement, imperfect and uneven, but well worth reading, and containing much that is colourful and out of the common. Hit or miss anyway, it is non-pedestrian, and aims at being an entertainment.
Financial Times, by Ronald Fraser London: Jonathan Cape, 1942
This is not a book: it’s an open wound. In a prefatory note, Ewart Milne calls Time Stopped “the story of the narrator’s life as seen in retrospect after the death of this wife.” The problem is Milne’s life stopped when his wife Thelma died of breast cancer in 1964.
Milne, an Irishman who began writing after a decade working as a merchant seaman, took up residence in England in 1942. He came from Ireland through the help of John Betjeman, whom Milne contacted after being told he had been targeted for assassination by the Nazis for his vocal support of the English cause. He was assigned as a land manager at Assington Hall in Suffolk, where a school for refugee children. There he met and became involved with Thelma Dobson, a married woman whose husband was serving in the Royal Air Force. He writes in the book’s first poem:
That summer of forty-five The war in Europe all over and done And the airmen soldiers from the war returning You going to meet your first husband Then we three speaking together
“And I begged him not to be hurt/We had not deceived him,” Milne continues. To a man who seems to have worn his principles on his chest — couriering medical supplies to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, speaking out against the Nazis in Ireland, encouraging the work of other writers — this proves to be a significant factor in what follows.
Denis Dobson agreed to let Thelma separate, after which — at least as recounted here — she began her affair with Milne. Denis then went along with her application for divorce and Thelma and Milne married in 1947. She came from a family of moderate wealth and supported Milne’s writing, which brought in little money. Never part of any particular school, considered something of an outcast in Ireland and an outsider in England, he never managed to connect himself with either literary establishment: “The English see I am not English/To the Irish I am Anglo” he writes in Time Stopped.
In the early 1950s, Milne got acquainted with the young Irish writer and balladeer Patrick Galvin and encouraged his work. They collaborated on several pieces for literary magazines and spent a great deal of time together. And, as Milne later learned, Galvin spent a great deal of time with Milne’s wife Thelma. In 1962, thinking perhaps that he would be warmly welcomed back by his native country, Milne returned to live in Dublin. Resentment is a long-burning fuel, and Milne’s rejection of Ireland during the war lingered in the minds of some of his old colleagues. Few doors were opened to him.
To make matters worse, Thelma was diagnosed with breast cancer. Milne was slow at first to react to the news: “You reproach me dead that I did not see/The gravity of your illness.” He tries to defend himself posthumously: “Love I laid my palm on your breast twenty years ago/Saying truly I suspected some evil inside there.’
Already devastated by Thelma’s death, Milne was knocked down again with news that he seems to have taken just as hard. He learns that Thelma had been supporting Patrick Galvin financially, even buying half the printing of his 1960 collection, Christ in London, from its publisher, Linden Press. He learns that the two had been carrying on an affair, practically under his nose, for years.
The revelation sent Milne into a fugue from which he emerged, over 18 months later, with Time Stopped. Every poem in the book is untitled, every poem is dated: 28 Nov 1964; 11 March 1965; 15 Jan 1966. This is, in effect, Milne’s journal, but he rearranged the entries, interspersed with short prose “Intermissions,” to show “my growth of understanding.” The result is powerful, painful, and at times almost unreadable. “This is my life since you left me alone/This rack this torture.” It can seem, at times, as if we’re on that rack with Milne. And as with any torture, one only wants it to stop.
This is one of several problems with Time Stopped. Coming from a minor poet and an even smaller press, Time Stopped received few reviews, but those all spotted its core shortcoming. “The subject matter is painful,” wrote C. B. Cox in The Spectator, “and, I think, beyond Milne’s ability to control in language.” Fellow Irishman P. J. Kavanagh gave him partial credit: “The attempt seems to me admirable — it is one of the things verse is for — but, alas, I cannot say it is successful. The pain stays with Mr. Milne and refuses to change into poetry.” I don’t know if Milne did any editing on his poems beyond their sequencing, but this often reads like 160-plus pages of raw material crying out to be rewritten down to a dozen or so good poems. You know what some of the themes are going to be. How do I live without you? I hate you for abandoning me. How do you like your blue-eyed girl Mr Death? Be prepared to see them repeated over and over and over.
But the more subtle problems stem from Milne’s blind spots. In its obituary for Milne, The Times described Time Stopped as a “harrowing elegy … written in the agonized recognition of her infidelity to him, revealed only after her death.” The following week, the paper printed a letter from Douglas Cleverdon, a former BBC producer, who wrote that the comment “deserves a footnote”:
His own lechery was notorious. To my wife’s astonishment, he made a pass at her within 10 minutes of their first meeting; and I vividly recall his indignation and sense of ill-usage when he complained to me that, in his sixties, nubile young women actually rejected his amorous approaches. He attributed this to the selfishness of the younger generation.
The hostility of Cleverdon’s letter and The Times’ decision to print it, stirred up a kerfuffle that was noted by papers on both sides of the Atlantic. T. E. Utley, the obituaries editor, justified printing the letter: “In the obituary we revealed a fact about his wife, which was very damaging; people wrote to say that he was totally awful, and justice seemed to be required.” When Cleverdon was asked to comment, he did clarify that he hadn’t seen Milne in over 20 years, but “I never liked him very much: He was conceited and absolutely shaken that girls wouldn’t lie down in front of him. But then you know what these elderly Irish poets are like.”
Perhaps the relationship between Milne and Thelma Dobson was chaste until they asked for Denis Dobson’s consent, but if it was true what other people said of Milne (and here I am assuming that T. E. Utley didn’t use “people say” in the way Trump does), then his reaction to his wife’s affair with Galvin is melodramatic and unjust to say the least:
Oh women women women Charismatic the womaniser approaches Pretended feminist matey-like says ‘Be emancipated love come to bed What of it what of that husband of yours You are free woman come to bed’ And you fall for it every time bang flat on your backs
So Thelma was just a sucker for a smooth operator — just like all women? Knowing Milne’s history, one has to wonder who was the womanizer he had in mind: Galvin or himself? Milne undermines his own righteous indignation in revealing at times, perhaps thoughtlessly, his own inclinations:
Do you remember • together sawing the fallen branches I joked and said I’d like to make love to your daughter When she grew older We weren’t married then Your daughter was a small child And you answered gaily that we would all go wild When once the war was over And everyone be free to love And no one be hurt at all As you were not by what I said
I confess that I almost stopped reading at this point. Time Stopped has been described as confessional poetry, but usually confessional poets are actually conscious of the things they’re confessing to. I may be guilty of 2020 vision in looking at these lines from 1965, but one cannot deny that there’s a certain hypocrisy at work here — one that becomes even more apparent from the extent to which Milne turns Galvin into his bête noire:
Spawn of monstrous mouth Thief of the world Treachery is his name
Flatters friendlike • takes his friend’s wife Flatters his friend’s wife • takes her purse Take her body from her husband’s bed to his own
“May he burn for his fooling you/May he burn and double burn.” The Times was not alone in describing Time Stopped as Milne’s reaction to his wife’s infidelity, but if one actually reads the book, it’s hard not to see it just as much as his reaction to Galvin’s betrayal of his friendship with Milne. Thelma comes across as a dupe, not a willful adulteress. Galvin, on the other hand, is a snake with two apples: offering love to Thelma, friendship and trust to Milne.
Galvin’s acceptance of Thelma’s financial support is nearly as infuriating to Milne as his seduction:
And for his pseudo-aiding me He got payment of handouts from you Over and over he got paid Till your handouts became a habit to you Became his way of life.
Which begs the question, of course: hadn’t they become a habit to Milne, too? Milne was a strenuous writer of letters to the editor, to numerous editors and on all sorts of topics, and in the years after Thelma’s death, their frequency and pitch both increased. In the same year that the book was published, Milne wrote a letter to The Times dismissing the protest of several young poets who burned a stack of poetry books outside the Arts Council’s offices in St. James Square. “Some of us elder poets,” he intoned, saw the Council’s embrace “as the kiss of death.” He concluded haughtily that “Poetry is its own reward. If it isn’t I suggest they try another trade….” It is, of course, so much easier for poetry to offer its own rewards when aided by a wife’s independent wealth — most of which, by the way, Thelma passed along to Milne.
I came across Time Stopped when engaged in one of my favorite games: browsing in the stacks of a well-stocked library and taking out and flipping through any odd volume that catches my eye. I didn’t know Ewart Milne or his work when I opened the book, but you can’t read more than a poem or two from it without recognizing its extraordinary character. Milne obviously intended Time Stopped to be published and read, but it has much more of the feel of a diary never meant to be shared: it is raw, awkwardly shaped, and both honest and self-deceiving in the way we all are when we try to be candid. It may not be literature — but unforgettable it most certainly is.
[As a footnote, I should say that Milne introduced the • character in these poems as a way of indicating a slight pause, rather like a rest character in written music. In some ways, this might represent the poet’s most useful contribution to literature: it’s a device I would welcome to further use.]
Time Stopped, by Ewart Milne London: Plow Poems, 1967
I started a habit of posting covers and short notes about neglected books on Twitter and Instagram last year. One of the books I featured recently was Marian Spitzer’s tribute to a legendary vaudeville theatre, The Palace (1969). I read in one of the reviews of the book that Spitzer had been a publicist for the Palace in its heyday, which piqued my curiosity and led me to do a little more research. From her Wikipedia entry, I learned that she had written several books before The Palace as well as a number of short stories, and this led me to go looking for her fiction. It wasn’t a long search: her 1924 novel, Who Would be Free, which is available on the Internet Archive.
Marian Spitzer, from the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, 7 September 1923
Spitzer was just 25 when the book was published, but she was already a veteran writer. She’d started as a publicist for the King-Bee Hive vaudeville agency when she was just 18, then switched to become a reporter for The New York Globe. By age 21, she was being invited to speak before journalism groups. One of the apparent benefits of her time as a publicity agent was developing a not-inconsiderable knack for self-promotion. She claimed she wrote the book only because publisher Horace Liveright asked her to. It was a promise she did her best to avoid. She later explained her approach to writing:
My method is this: When evening comes I may or may not have a date. Say, for sake of argument, I haven’t. I call up all the theaters where I think I make be able to graft a free ticket. Say, then, that I get turned down everywhere. Then I telephone all my friends and ask what they’re doing. They;re all doing something that they don’t want interrupted, say. Then I look around the place for a book that I haven’t read. If it’s just my luck that there isn’t, I take a last try at the theaters.
By then, if I fail again, I’ve exhausted all my resources for getting out of working. So I write.
Who Would be Free has, I suspect, substantially autobiographical elements. Like Spitzer herself, her heroine Eleanor Hoffman was born into a family of upper-middle-class German Jews living on the Upper West Side, the “Our Crowd” that Stephen Birmingham wrote about in his 1977 book. In the books’s opening chapter, she and her sister Muriel are being confirmed in a ceremony in a wealthy synagogue, alongside young men headed for Princeton and Yale. Comfortable in their place, her parents look down on Gentiles and recently-immigrated Jews from Eastern Europe. Eleanor’s mother, in particular, worries endlessly about protecting her family’s status by finding proper husbands for her daughters. Only when pushed to exasperation does she allow a word like meschugah slip into her conversation.
Who Would be Free stays true to its title: this is the story of an escape. After a classmate slips her a copy of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Eleanor loses faith not only in her religion but in her parents’ ability to consider her best interests. “In Jewish families, especially among the kind I come from,” she tells a Gentile friend, “you’re a prisoner to your parents, not only until you marry, but forever after, and the only satisfaction you can get is to have children of your own, and make prisoners of them.” She rejects marriage as an escape route: “That was marriage. She would belong to him. Then she wouldn’t belong to herself any more.”
After a blow-up with her mother, Eleanor storms out of the family apartment and moves in with a friend. Although she initially feels the pull of home, a few uncomfortable family dinners (“Frantic pleas, agonized wailings, extravagant promises. Threats of suicide, too.”) are enough to steel her resolve. It helps that she gets a lucky break and lands a job as a graphic designer with a theatrical producer. She quickly falls in love — with her work:
She was utterly happy. The life in and around the theater was exactly what she wanted, her idea of a dream come true. Just to be there, to listen to the plans for the new season, to chatter idly with the people who dawdled in and out of the Kalbfleisch office, to read the script of a new play and hear a discussion of who would be the best person to get for the star part, to be consulted occasionally by the art director on a point of scenic technicality or a matter of lights, that was heaven. She loved her job, she loved the strange, half-made people who were connected with her job, she loved her mode of living.
And then she falls in love with a man — a writer, a cynic … and a Gentile. The attraction is mutual. She admires his mind, he adores her spirit of independence. Best of all, they share the same tastes: “‘It’s pretty good to like the same things,’ he said blithely. ‘but when you find someone who hates the same things you do, it’s incomparable.'” But Eleanor has already learned one lesson in love: it can be survived. “[S]he had lost him, and she had wanted to die. But after a while she had recovered. She would always recover.” Having lived through the death of her fiancée, killed in combat in France, she decides (to steal a title from Marjorie Hillis), to live alone and like it: “She had to be footloose, spiritually as well as actually,” even if that comes at the price of loneliness.
I went to see Greta Gerwig’s film of Little Women just after finishing Who Would be Free and it was tempting to draw parallels between the two stories, even to try to sell Spitzer’s book as “Little Women in Manhattan”: sisters, a war, marriage as an economic proposition, the difficulty of a woman finding a place for herself outside of marriage. Unlike Jo March, however, Eleanor Hoffman sees both marriage and her family as prisons. Much as she feels a strong bond with her sister Muriel, just a year younger and alongside throughout school and synagogue, Eleanor sees her as victim, a prisoner happy to be locked in by husband and children for the rest of her life.
In an interview after the book was published, Spitzer said, “There are seven or eight reasons why I’m not married,” the first being “that no man has ever asked me to marry him.” In reality, she was already involved with another writer, Harlan Thompson. The two would marry less than a year later, have two sons, work together in New York and Hollywood, and from all accounts spend four happy decades together until Thompson’s death in 1966. Spitzer continued to write and publish fiction for another ten years — a novel (now extremely rare) called A Hungry Young Lady (1930) and short stories such as “Out Where the Blues Begin” (from The Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1933). In the late 1940s, she contracted tuberculosis and was bedridden for over a year, an experience she recounted in I Took It Lying Down (1951). Her final book, drawing heavily on her time as a publicity agent, was The Palace (1969). She died in 1983.
Who Would be Free, by Marian Spitzer New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924
I’m not sure what the point of this post is. There are seven copies of this book worldwide listed in WorldCat.org. There are none available for sale. If you want to read it, your best bet is to get a copy of amateurish scan I made of the British Library’s copy. There are few enough people who even read these posts in the first place. Given those odds, Lord knows whether anyone else will ever read Trance by Appointment.
Portrait of G. E. Trevelyan by Bassano (1937), courtesy of the National Portrait GalleryI have begun research on the life and works of Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan for the MA program in Biography at the University of East Anglia (Go … um, I don’t actually know what the sports teams refer to themselves as … Anglers?). From what I have been able to discover so far, sometime in 1932 she rented a flat or a room in a flat on Lansdowne Road in Kensington that she shared with 3-4 other people and where she remained, steadily writing away, producing a total of eight novels, until a German bomb hit the place and she died of injuries a few months later. She appears to have had exactly what Virginia Woolf proposed as the prerequisites for an independent woman writer in “A Room of One’s Own”: a room of her own and five hundred a year. She didn’t write reviews. She didn’t go to country house weekends. She didn’t go to parties or join them. She sat and wrote what she wanted to write.
Publishers seemed interested in publishing what she wrote. Martin Secker published her first four books; Victor Gollancz her next three; George Harrap this last one. She got consistently favorable reviews, but perhaps it was more the cachet of the Trevelyan name (G. M., G. O., R. C., Sir Charles, et al.) that attracted them. In any case, none of them ever went to a second printing, let alone a reissue. I still have to get to the archives to track down the contractual correspondence, but the dearth of copies of any of her books today certainly suggests that no one was queuing up to reserve the latest G. E. Trevelyan novel at their local Boots Book Lover’s Library.
And so, Gertrude went out of her flat on Lansdowne Road on a stretcher in early October 1940 and disappeared. The Times and a few other papers published a few lines when she died of her injuries in early 1941 and that was it. She was buried in the cemetery up the road from her parents’ home in Bath, and from what I’ve seen in terms of coverage in English literary history and criticism, they might as well have buried all of her books with her. There is nothing. I’ve gone through all the surveys of the 20th century British novel they have here in the UEA library: nothing. I went through the biographies of her contemporaries (Bowen, Greene, Orwell, Waugh, Woolf, etc.) looking for mentions of her name: nothing. The one trace is in Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye: a single entry, dated 4 September 1933. “Reading Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel Hot-House. I desperately want to write an Oxford novel – but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well.” I’ve been checking with a number of academics specializing in British women novelists of the mid-20th century — which is something close to a minor industry — and get the email equivalent of blank stares. Not only is her work lost, but no one else appears to be looking for it.
This is not entirely true. Just last year, the academic publisher Routledge reissued the very novel Barbara Pym got all excited over: Hot-House. Not that you’d know by anything that Routledge’s website will tell you. What you have to look for is this gripping title: Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II. This is one of a series of novels and other narratives of university life — meaning Oxford and Cambridge — edited by Dr. Anna Bogen. The series includes Neapolitan Ice (1928) by Renée Haynes (a classmate of Gertrude’s at Lady Margaret Hall), Rosy-Fingered Dawn (1934) by Rose Marie Hodgson, and other hard-to-find titles — companion texts to Bogen’s 2015 study, Women’s University Fiction, 1880–1945 (which doesn’t actually mention Trevelyan, by the way). The way in which Routledge has packaged and marketed these books is execrable — and I’m being as polite as I can. There are only two things in Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II: Hot-House and a 10-page introduction by Bogen. And this is what the title page says:
Title page of the 2018 Routledge reissue of G. E. Trevelyan’s Hot-House
To be fair, if you click on the “Contents” tab of the Routledge page for Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II, you will see the following: “Table of Contents: Volume 2. Hot-House (1933), Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan.” So, it’s not like Routledge is denying they’re reissued Hot-House: they just not particularly interested in telling anyone. If you’re dying to read it, by the way, be aware that the hardback edition will cost you £110.00, which may be why UEA doesn’t own a copy.
All of which is a tediously long preface to a discussion of Gertrude Trevelyan’s last and easiest rarest novel, Trance by Appointment. Trance tells a simple and sad story. Jean, the middle daughter of a working-class London family, is a psychic. As she grows, her family comes to recognize this talent and introduce her to Madame Eva, who runs a fortune-telling business from a basement flat in Bayswater. Eva, who encourages Jean to develop her skills, then introduces her to “the Professor,” Norman Mitch, an astrologer, who sees the commercial possibilities of a “trance by appointment” business run in a better part of town. In some ways, from this point forward the story will be familiar to anyone who’s read Tolstoy’s Kholstomer, usually translated as “Strider: The Story of a Horse” — or, if you’ve read Marx, the story of labor in the hands of capitalism. The resource is used up in a relentless quest for profit, then tossed aside in contempt.
In this case, the means of production are a little unusual. Trevelyan tells much of the story through Jean’s perspective, which means that though she has visions as early as when she’s strapped in a stroller and being wheeled along the street by her sister Joyce, it takes her a while to understand what’s happening.
“Where does it come from, Mum?” “What, lovey?” “The trees and things that come when it’s dark. When you lie and look hard, but you have to keep still as still or it goes. And the bubbles that’s all different colours and jumps about, where does it come from, Mum?” “Stuff and nonsense. Is my water boiling yet?”
Gradually, the family comes to recognize that Jean has “the Sight,” but her mother caution, “It’s a precious gift to them that can keep their tongue still, but no good ever come to them that didn’t. You keep it quiet, my dearie, to yourself.” Jean tries at first to fit into the normal workday world, taking a job selling cigarettes from a little stand in the nearby Underground station. But the energy that bombards her from the thousands of souls that pass her every hour overwhelms her and she collapses. Mum takes Jean to Madame Eva, who’s happy to have “a nice, quiet, refined sort of girl to ‘elp her in the house and learn the business.”
And “Jean did love it, being at Madame Eva’s”: Eva takes the girl under her wing, shows her how to recognize the signs in a client’s expression, clothing, manners, and language that Eva relies on to produce the appearance of clairvoyance. “Remember this, though,” she advises, “everyone wants money, it doesn’t matter how much they’ve got. That’s always a safe one.” Fascinated by Eva’s use of the crystal ball, Jean reveals her ability to fall into a trance and see visions, and Eva begins to organize seances: rare occasions for which a much higher fee can be demanded.
This in turn attracts the attention of Eva’s friend, the astrologer. Trevelyan is a little too eager to let us know he’s not to be trusted: “Mr. Mitch was a bit fat, with a white face, and his hair was curly except that he oiled it down, and was starting to go bald on top, he brushed it across.” His manners are well-oiled, too — taking Jean’s hand, stroking it, murmuring, “My dear lady.” Soon, he’s talked Jean into marriage and sets her up in a West End studio — to “Get you further with the clee-an-tale.” He gives up reading the stars “to manage for Jean” and sets her on a schedule of frequent seances. He convinces Jean that the visions are communications from the dead — specifically his dear departed little sister, Daisy — and soon Jean imagines Daisy calling to her: “Jee-een, I want to talk to you, Jee-een.” Unfortunately for Norman’s plans, he also sleeps with his new wife, and with the predictable results. Two of them, in fact. And when Jean resists strapping on the seance harness again after the second child, Norman takes his anger out on her. “You can thank your Mum for that,” he snaps at his son after slapping Jean around. Although Jean continues to give readings — reluctantly, with ever greater hesitation, ever less appetite to fight or even care about her fee — Norman all but abandons her to strike out on his own again.
Most reviews of Trance by Appointment offered moderate praise. Edwin Muir, writing in The Listener, called the book “a sordid, pitiable little story, told with that cruel attention to detail which characterises Miss Trevelyan’s art.” Leonora Eyles, her most consistent advocate among critics, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, “Once again Miss Trevelyan gives us an insight into human minds that is quite uncanny, and her Jean, though such an unusual character, is completely convincing.” The New Statesman’s John Mair, on the other hand, thought Trevelyan had wasted her time — and his: “Apart from her mediumistic talents Jean is a complete nonentity, and no writer could present her otherwise. A good novelist would never have made the attempt.”
I truly did not enjoy Trance by Appointment. It is a grim story, a story of a soul being ground down by an abusive husband and the relentless pressure to pay the rent and put food on the table. I found myself, like Jean, taking pleasure from the littlest things — yellow flower petals floating in a blue bowl or the solid, if at times ineffectual, goodness of Madame Eva.
But my respect for Gertrude Trevelyan’s talent and courage as a writer grew as it has with every one of her books I’ve read. This was a woman who grew up in a family with a prestigious name and a modest but comfortable fortune. She went to university when a tiny fraction of women did. She didn’t go out of her way to establish herself with her contemporaries or to seek celebrity. And in Trance by Appointment, as she did in her two previous books, William’s Wife and Theme with Variations, she collected material by listening, by taking in talk and attitudes and expressions while walking through the city, while riding on the bus or Underground, while standing in queues or waiting in shops, and then returned to her room in Kensington and put herself deeply, intently into a mind, a situation, a life completely different from hers.
Trevelyan’s Jean is not a specimen pinned to a piece of cardboard for disinterested examination by an omniscient narrator. She tells Jean’s story as if Jean’s sister, or Madame Eva, or Jean’s neighbor were trying to tell it, aided occasionally by Jean’s own awkward, imprecise attempts to explain what she sees. Maybe John Mair was partly right, that Jean’s is “an aimless and random mind.” Evidence of Jean’s exercise of free will are rare (but not wholly absent). But managing to tell this woman’s story and keep it utterly convincing, utterly coherent for over 260 pages is no small accomplishment as a writer. Name one other contemporary of Trevelyan — male or female — who took this kind of risk, who undertook this level of experimentation.
Gertrude Trevelyan (center) with the other contributors to Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford, from The Bystander, 1 March 1933
This is a picture of Trevelyan taken in 1933 to celebrate the publication of Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford, a collection to which she contributed an essay attacking the complacency of “Garden Cities,” the new suburbs around London. Who would guess that the smallest person in the group, the one woman in the photo, would be capable of leaps of imagination that would put all the men around her to shame?
Trance by Appointment, by G. E. Trevelyan London: George G. Harrap & Company, Ltd., 1939
In 1964, Sir John Gielgud convinced Richard Burton to star in a Broadway production of Hamlet. Still smoking hot from his big-screen romance with Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, Burton was looking to solidify his street cred as a serious actor after a few Hollywood duds. Gielgud’s motivation is a little less clear, as gradually becomes clear to the rest of the cast and crew.
In any case, they shook hands and with Alex Cohen as producer, Gielgud began assembling a stellar cast: Hume Cronyn as Polonius, Alfred Drake as Claudius, a young John Cullum as Laertes, and an impressive list of veteran character actors such as Barnard Hughes, George Voskovec, Eileen Herlie, Kit Culkin (father of Macaulay et al.), and Linda Marsh. As Guildenstern, he picked William Redfield. Though just 37 at the time, Redfield already had thirty years’ experience in radio, TV, film, and theatre.
Gielgud took the cast up to Toronto in late January 1964 to begin rehearsals. Redfield began providing a running account of the process through a series of letters to his friend, Bob Mills, back in New York, and these are the letters collected in Letters from an Actor. It was nearly a month into rehearsals before Redfield hit his stride, moving from notes scratched on cocktail napkins to what eventually became at-times epic narratives of the daily/nightly goings-on on and off stage.
From the very beginning, there was a certain tension — mostly artistic — that pervaded the production. Gielgud was the epitome of the subtle and refined school of acting, perhaps the great master of underplay. And by this point, he had decades of Hamlet under this belt. As Redfield notes, “He remembers, bone-wisely, all the forty-plus years of playing Shakespearean roles; of directing his fellow actors in those roles; of observing Ralph Richardson rehearsing and playing this part, Laurence Olivier that one … and on through every degree of accomplishment and competence.”
Burton, on the other hand, was part of the postwar, naturalistic school of British actors and possessed of a sometimes volcanic temperament. Burton was direct. “As a tank is direct. Throw what mortar you will, a tank keeps coming until it is annihilated. I can imagine him fighting with a severe head wound,” writes Redfield. “I can picture him with an arm chopped off fighting fiercely with what remains.”
The two men almost never exchanged angry words over the production. Gielgud was far too ephemeral for that. On top of his feather touch as a director, he also chose to take set and costume to an understated extreme. The set was nothing but a barest collection of furniture and towering abstract planes painted black. Instead of period costume, the actors appeared in street clothes. “Since he is dealing with a great play and an electric star,” Redfield surmises, “he gambles that the rest of us can be efficient enough to meet our challenges without the help of fur and flugelhorns; that we can be kings without crowns, soldiers without epaulets.” In Redfield’s case, Guildenstern looks as if he could have strolled in from an insurance office down the street.
If there was anything Gielgud stressed, it was verbal delivery. He knew the play backwards and forwards and would hone in on the smallest things in an actor’s lines. “Not ‘the’ — ‘the‘” he stresses to Redfield at one point. This drives Redfield nuts, for all his admiration for Gielgud, because at the same time he continues to ignore the actor’s plea that Burton is completely mangling the speech following the the line. After one performance during the play’s preview run in Boston, he tells Phil Coolidge, who plays the Captain, “Coolidge, it’s a charming performance, but get yourself a hat. I couldn’t tell you why, but you’re nothing without a hat.” When the play finally opened on Broadway, Peggy Cass (raise your hand if you know her name from To Tell the Truth) offered Redfield a summary of the situation: “No direction for this show. Everyone was left to strike out on his own. Hume Cronyn got a triple.”
William Redfield was perhaps the ideal reporter for this beat. He had a big enough part to be in the midst of much of the action on stage and a small enough one to have plenty of time to observe. Indeed he’d realized early in his career that he’d never be a star. When he was 17, a friend told him, “You do not have a star’s temperament. You are not a killer. A star must be a killer. You will be one of the best actors in the country but you will never be a star no matter how many times you are billed above the title.”
He also had a healthy respect for just how tough the business of acting is:
The theatre is more ruthless than a factory, more expensive than a newspaper, and more closely watched than a shoe-shine boy. The theatre’s product is fearfully expensive; the theatre’s guarantee of employment is nil; the theatre’s competition is savage; the theatre’s employer’s are gamblers with the odds a good eight to one against them. Do you think the actors don’t know this? In fact, you will not meet a more tough-gutted and realistic group of people professionally speaking during your lifetime than actors. Why? Because when a play fails, Armaggedon is upon us. It even costs money to cart the scenery away.
Show me a working actor and I will show you a man with a cement stomach.
One reason the production has gone down in history is that it was perhaps the earliest example of the kind of stage-to-screen bridges one now sees in things like streamed performances from the Met. A group of television producers approached Alex Cohen and convinced him to allow a live performance to be filmed in a new process called “Electronovision.” The resulting “Theatrofilm” was shown in thousands of movie theaters around the U.S. and grossed a healthy $4,000,000. You can see it yourself on YouTube. But none of the profits benefited the actors. Redfield writes bitterly, “The financial details of this venture involved a mass screwing of the acting company so excruciatingly delicious that only a separate letter could do the tale justice.”
Sadly, Letters from an Actor was William Redfield’s only venture into print, aside from a collaboration with his friend, Wally Cox, on Mr. Peepers: A Sort of Novel (1955), a spin-off from Cox’s television series of the same name. He carried on with a busy career as a character actor until dying of leukemia at the age of 49 in 1976. You can get a small but superb example of his work in this clip from Elaine May’s 1971 film, A New Leaf, in which he tries to tell Walter Matthau’s character he’s broke:
Church, prayer, going to Sunday services and weekday evening meetings remains the center of life for some families and communities. One hundred years ago, they were the frameworks of the rituals and values of many English people, particularly those of the class of shopkeepers and lesser professions. Each denomination and sect identified itself through its practices and principles.
As Peter Fletcher shows in his memoir, The Long Sunday, the Wesleyan Chapel in their East Coast seaside town was the center of his family’s lives, the measure by which they judged themselves and their neighbors. His parents’ commitment to faithful attendance, service in countless supporting chores, and application of the church’s strictures to control their children and condemn their neighbors was the one point on which they could agree. They were united in their ability to place their brethren in precise order of damnation or salvation. They knew “who was making eyes at whom, who was being married, who was expected to die, who was prosperous, who was running for bankruptcy, who was suspected of secret drinking, card-playing and other vices.”
This was even easier when it came to other Christian churches. “I could have prepared a seating-plan of Heaven — this is where my concentric circles first come in — showing exactly where the members of the several denominations, from Salvationists to Roman Catholics, would find themselves in relation to the Great White Throne.” “Without the slightest hesitation I could have decided to whom to distribute harps and haloes, and who would be fortunate to secure ‘standing room only’ on the edge of the outer darkness.”
In all other matters, Peter realized as he grew, their primary function was to serve the other as “a catalyst precipitating resentment.” His father was to blame for all his mother’s disappointments, and vice-versa. “The one thing they had in common was their religion.” They projected their expectations onto their children, and in his zealous quest to please them by achieving all possible prizes for service, rote learning, and generally pious demeanor, Peter acknowledges that “By the time I had reached the age of fourteen I was an unsufferably self-righteous little prig.”
At that point, however, his attitude began to change, and it was primarily due to his own quiet, careful observation of the adults in the congregation. He began to notice the discrepancies between what people did and said in church and what they did after. “For reasons best known to themselves the adults were by common consent playing, and thoroughly enjoying, a highly dramatic game of ‘let’s pretend.'”
That didn’t prevent him, though, from throwing himself headlong into throng when an Evangelistic Campaign pitched its tent in town. “I was one of those into whose hands this great enterprise had been committed. I was on the inside, looking out.” He goes to all the meetings, and vies with the best of them when it came to profess his sins and ask for redemption: “the longer one person went on the longer would the others be likely to go on when their turn came. So once a prayer meeting got under way there was no telling when it would stop.”
Growing up in an environment go strenuously concerned with following the straight and narrow path did mean that certain aspects of Peter’s upbringing were neglected. Here, for example, is the sum of his father’s attempt to explain the facts of life:
“That’s a tom-cat, but it has been cut.” “I didn’t notice anything wrong with it.” “Of course you didn’t. I said it’s been cut.” His tone of voice indicated that the word, ‘cut,” had some special significance, but I hadn’t the remotest idea what it was; so after a pause, I said, Oh, has it?” My father asked: “You know what I mean, don’t you?” I answered, “No.” “Well, if you don’t know what I mean, I can’t tell you!” My father replied, and relapsed into morose silence. And that was the beginning and the end of all the parental instruction I ever received into the mysteries of procreation.
It is only when Peter enlists in the Royal Ordinance Corps several months after the start of the war in 1914 that he is able to step free of the pressure to “play along” with the rituals of his family and the church. Being treated as an anonymous and presumably incompetent recruit comes as something of a relief. And when a big, coarse, hard-drinking Welshman in his unit shows some kindness to him after Peter passes out on the parade ground, he realizes that the man is treating him in a more truly Christian manner than anything he had experienced in nearly twenty years’ daily life in the Wesleyan Church: “I have given up the religious which is nothing but the exception, extraction, exaltation, ecstasy, or it has given me up. I possess nothing but the everyday.”
The Long Sunday is a remarkable effort to understand a time, a place, and a way of making sense of the world that Fletcher himself has moved on from without ever giving the sense that he is trying to reject it or undermine it by revealing its flaws. Whatever flaws he can now recognize in his parents, their rituals and beliefs, and their efforts to pass them along to him, he is less interested in passing judgment than in achieving some perspective and balance in his understanding. And in that regard, The Long Sunday is a model of a clear-eyed but deeply sympathetic approach to revisiting one’s past.
The paperback editions of The Fire Escape trumpet its message: “The tragic, unvarnished story of a prostitute.” Which is a bit like plastering the banner line, “The Story of a Cockroach” across the cover of The Metamorphosis: yes, well, I guess you could say it is, but that’s actually missing the point in a pretty big way.
Just what is The Fire Escape about, then, you ask? Boy, you’ve got me there.
It purports to be the autobiography of the youngest daughter of a curate, a woman never quite at ease in any situation for long, and positively antsy when it comes to any of the conventions of English middle class life shortly after the First World War. Shipped off to a boarding school, she befriends Norah, a day girl, and soon they are happily playing “Torture,” taking turns tying each other up. One day she does the job so successfully that Norah’s mother rushes in with a pair of scissors to cut the cord before the victim strangles.
Moved to a school for clergy daughters only, she quickly forms a secret society, “The Red Lamp,” with a new friend, Polly, and initiate a third member by locking her in a cupboard. Yet when she comes across a dog savaging a rabbit to death, she wonders, “Was I really so cowardly that I was going to maintain an acquiescent silence my whole life?”
Sent to a teacher’s college by her parents, she quits and signs up for an art school instead, then plays truant from that, finds a landlady willing to give her the use of an empty attic to live in, and takes up day work as a cleaning woman. When her father considers resigning his living out of shame, Susan up and takes off for Dublin with a boy from school, both mad over Yeats’s poetry. Running into the poet in the street, she recites the whole of “Sailing to Byzantium” and he invites them to watch a rehearsal of his play, The Cat and the Moon at the Abbey Theatre (which puts this incident, if true, in 1931).
Rescued and brought home from Dublin, she soon returns to the attic, accessible by the fire escape of the title. Putting the kettle on, she is startled when an old man enters from the floor below. He quietly sits on the sofa and watches her, occasionally speaking in a language she cannot understand. At some point, she learns his name: Alek Nauss. Alek Nauss. Susan Kale. You see where the story goes from erratic to weird?
Over the next decade, Susan returns from time to time to the attic and has odd conversations with Alek. These she imbues with profound significance, though she manages to convey almost none of it to the reader. She falls in love with a puppeteer and wanders around southern England with him, often sleeping in the fields. He takes up with another woman and she gets a job scraping away excess lead from toy soldiers fresh from the molds. Ten hours a day for twenty seven shillings a week. Like the other women there, she merely endures it. “They endured the utter futility, the wretchedness of spending their days in scraping lead; the prostitution of their lives, in fact.”
She takes up with a poet, marries and has a son by him, then they divorce and she is forced to give the boy away to a relative. She goes through jobs and men and flats at a dizzying pace. She models for an artist, “a very ugly man.” Soon she and the artist are playing “torture” again, grown-up style. Except it’s all very British in its perversity:
One night, he suspended me by my ankles in a doorway. It was difficult because he didn’t want either to spoil the paintwork in his flat or to break my neck. It took more time than such things bearably can. We woke up to the insanity of our behavior simultaneously and didn’t meet again. He was sensitive.
Eighty-seven or so jobs later, she wanders out of a cafe and, while posting a letter, is approached by a man. “Are you doing anything tonight?” he asks. “What do you want?” “I wondered if you’d like to come to a show.” She repeats the question. “I’m game for anything,” he answers. Moments later, she agrees to sleep with him for two pounds, and suddenly she’s discovered her eighty-eighth job.
This being England in the late 1940s, setting oneself up as a prostitute involves a fair amount of subterfuge and thick swathes of middle class hypocrisy. She works mostly off ads posted in tobacconists: “Miss Domina Brand: Psychologist. Will Solve Your Problems Big or Small.” “Surely it’s wrong to put ‘Miss,’ isn’t it?” she asks. “Yes, but that’s what’ll convince them it’s not a real psychologist,” a helpful newsagent advises her.
Though a fair variety of fetishes are played out in her flats over the next decade, the one prevailing sense throughout this period is of dreariness. Susan Kale’s account of life in postwar London may capture its grey, tedious, tired attempts to keep up appearances better than any of the Kitchen Sink school plays and novels.
In the end, she gives up, worried she is running out of time. Or at least, so it appears. Because in the final pages, we return once again to the attic–now mostly a pile of rubble with a bit of the fire escape still clinging to its side. Alek Nauss is gone, dead years ago.
Is this meant as a metaphor for herself? What started as a secret place, a place where she could escape from her parents’ conventions, now just a ruin, “a broken-backed, disfigured space”? It’s difficult to tell but even more difficult to care, for by this point, the reader is likely exhausted from what has been nearly two hundred pages of “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” narrative that rarely offers more than a paragraph or two respite from Susan Kale’s relentless restlessness.
It is perhaps most interesting as a dramatic contrast to just about any other Englishwoman’s account of the same period. Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark undoubtedly knew of women like Susan Kale in their time, but they made sure to steer clear of their acquaintance. If there is any comparison one might draw, it is with the equally-forgotten Kathleen Sully’s early novels, particularly Canal in the Moonlight, with their odd mixes of grim poverty, black humor, and cruel fate. If any man picked up a paperback copy of The Fire Escape looking for a thrill, he would certainly have been disappointed, if not eagerly looking for the nearest bottle or narcotic instead.
The First Escape, by Susan Kale London: Putnam, 1960
I knew I was going to like Margaret Parton’s memoir, Journey Through a Lighted Room, on page two, when she writes of reflecting upon a Quaker meeting while “wandering aimlessly about the garden with a vodka and tonic in hand.”
This is the story of a woman who wasn’t ashamed by the fact that she liked a good drink, a good book, a good meal, a good piece of music, a good conversation, and a good fuck. She made her way in the working world, had an abortion she never regretted, married twice and divorced once, fell and stayed in love with a married man through two decades, raised a son and watched him die of leukemia, cared for a mother suffering from dementia, struggled with her weight, and generally held her own through lows and highs that I suspect any contemporary woman could relate to. Indeed, it’s a little surprising that Journey Through a Lighted Room isn’t better known and still in print, because the book is as fresh and frank as if Parton were telling it to us here and now.
Parton grew up in exceptional circumstances. Her mother, Mary Field Parton, was a successful writer and social activist who worked with Clarence Darrow and edited Mother Jones’ autobiography. Her father, Lemuel Parton, was a reported whose column, “Who’s News Today,” was syndicated in hundreds of newpapers across the US in the 1930s and 1940s. Her aunt, Sara Bard Field, campaigned for women’s suffrage and married Charles Erskine Scott Wood, whose resume included everything from graduating from West Point and fighting Indians in the West to defending Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman in court to painting and writing for socialist magazines. There was never a time when she wasn’t in the midst of talented, opinionated, and famous people. At the age of 14, she wrote in her journal,
Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson, a historian named Mr. Woodward [C. Vann Woodward] and his wfie, the reformed burglar Jack Black, and Mr. and Mrs. E. B. White were here. A very amusing evening, during which Sinclair Lewis rose from the table and carried his plate of roast beef over to the desk where I was eating alone because there wasn’t enough room for me at the big table; he sat down on the floor beside me and fed his roast beef to Tiggy and talked about cats.
Of the same evening, Margaret’s mother wrote in her diary, “Dinner party ruined by lovable but drunk Red Lewis.”
Mary and Lemuel Parton married when they both had established themselves in their careers, and though they were devoted to Margaret, their only child, they were utterly absorbed with each other. “It’s almost as hard for a child to grow up in the presence of an extremely happy marriage as it is to grow up in an unhappy home,” someone who knew her parents later observed to Margaret.
It was also hard from Margaret to establish her own identity when she was surrounded by such accomplished people. After graduating from Swarthmore, she bounced through a series of low-level jobs — writing news items for radio and spending a year as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. Feeling somewhat suffocated working in her parents’ world in New York City, she moved to San Francisco, where for two years she got to experience life as an independent adult. Though she wrote a humorous account of the time in Laughter on the Hill (1945), she admits in Journey that she left some of the more painful aspects out — particularly being abandoned by a man who got her pregnant and having, with almost no money to spare, to locate a doctor willing to give her an abortion.
When her father died in 1943, she returned to New York and worked as a newspaper reporter. Her time in San Francisco earned her an assignment to return there in 1945 to cover the conference leading to the formation of the United Nations. This, in turn, led to an assignment to Japan, the start of nearly seven years spent as a reporter in the Far East and India, where she covered events like the partition and the assassination of Gandhi. She also married Eric Britter, a British correspondent, and gave birth to their son, whom she named Lemuel, after her father.
The marriage was shaky from the start, however, and in September 1952, she took her son and returned to the U.S., moving in with her mother in Palisades, north of New York City. There, she “quickly discovered the facts of life for the single woman in the suburbs: almost total exclusion from the social life of the community.” Slowly, she won some writing jobs, and in 1954, was assigned to cover the first trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard for the murder of his wife. Parton’s coverage stood out and was soon being used by papers throughout the U.S..
This raised her visibility significantly and eventually led to an offer to work as an editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, at the time perhaps the most popular woman’s magazine in America. Having worked for years in the male-dominated field of newspaper reporting, she struggled to conform to the conservative, traditional conventions of the Journal:
From the Goulds came a constant pressure for IDEAS. From Beatrice: “I do hope your suggestions will be COMPELLING!” From Bruce: “We are always in need of good Big Ideas, such as ‘The Ten Richest Women,’ ‘The World’s Most Famous Jewels,’ and ‘The Ten Best-Dressed Women.'” That memo really amused me. Those were Big Ideas?
Though she was able to slip in occasional pieces of serious fiction and reporting, these were rare and hardly what the Journal’s readers wanted. “… [I]n the same issue we ran a superior story by Rebecca West and in the homemaking department an offer of a Bible quilt pattern; there were 3,200 requests for the pattern and one letter commenting on the Rebecca West story.”
In the late 1950s, she ran into an old acquaintance from Japan, former Navy Commander Alfred Hussey, a lawyer who’d served on General MacArthur’s staff and was one of the principal authors of the Japanese constitution, and they married in 1963 after his divorce from his first wife. His health began to fail soon afterward, however, and he died in 1964.
Around the same time, her mother began suffering from dementia, and though Margaret tried for months to care for her at home, she eventually had to put her into the first of a series of nursing homes. She then spent her days sorting through over fifty years of her parent’s papers and belongings, getting their house ready for sale, and visiting her mother: “the hours with her were agonizing and my heart broke with pity each time I saw her, particularly at the contrast with the self-assured, dynamic woman who emerged each day from the diary pages I was reading.” She also cared for her neighbor, Muriel Snow, widow of the writer Edgar Snow, in the terminal stage of cancer, holding Muriel’s hand as she screamed, “Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Help Me Die!”
The one bright spot in this time was her son, Lemuel, who emerged from a long period of adolescent isolation and depression and was building a circle of friends and a reputation as a tennis instructor. She was particularly vulnerable, therefore, when Lem suddenly fell ill. After he was hospitalized, a doctor came to tell her that Lem was suffering from an aggressive form of leukemia. “‘How long?’ I managed to ask. ‘Around four weeks,’ he said.”
Left alone after Lem’s death, she often considered suicide. “Some nights, alone and swept by storms of grief, I would stare at Lem’s .22, and twice I loaded it and held the muzzle in my mouth. Several times I poured sleeping pills into my hand and waited to find out what I would decide.” In the end, she simply carried on and found some sense of peace: “I no longer worry about being hopelessly out of step with current intellectual and literary movements, and simply accept myself as someone who is absorbed in unfashionable thoughts about love, truth, and the continuity of time.”
Margaret Parton continued to work after publishing Journey Through a Lighted Room, writing for Woman’s Day and other magazines, preparing a biography of her mother, and organizing the collection of papers now held by the University of Oregon Library. She helped establish the historical committee for her community of Palisades. She died in 1981.
Had The Mere Living not been largely forgotten by now, it would undoubtedly be saddled with an unshakeable and unfavorable comparison to Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. For both are circadian novels (taking place within the space of a single day) set in London and both really heavily on the use of a stream of consciousness narrative told through multiple characters. The Mere Living was the first novel by B. (for Betty) Bergson Spiro, who would publish the rest of her books under her married name, Betty Miller.
Two of Miller’s later novels are now in print: Farewell, Leicester Square (1941) has been reissued by Persephone Books and On the Side of the Angels (1945) by Capuchin Classics. The Mere Living, on the other hand, disappeared soon after publication and there are currently just two copies available for purchase.
One clue to the nature of The Mere Living can be found in the author’s maiden name, for she was a close relative of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was best known at the time for his theory of time. Bergson argued that there were essentially two different times: clock time, the regular, rhythmic, linearly progressing dimension measured by the clock; and time as experienced by individuals, which in our perceptions can speed up or slow down based on factors that may have nothing to do with the ticking of the clock.
The Mere Living is, in one way, an illustration of Bergson’s theory, as the author takes through one day in four progressive stages — Breakfast Time; Lunch Time; Tea Time; and Dinner Time — but at widely different paces as experienced by the four members of the Sullivan family: Henry, the husband and father; Mary, the wife and mother; Nancy, the daughter (19); and Paul, the son (17). So, as an example, as Henry, Paul, and Nancy rush out and into the whirl of the morning rush hour at the end of the Breakfast Time section, Mary feels “an air of release, of pleasure in her solitude,” and quietly tends to the bulbs in her window pots.
Spiro was, without a doubt, aware of and perhaps somewhat inspired by Mrs. Dalloway, but it would be both unfair and not particularly illuminating to compare the two books. For Spiro’s title reveals her major theme, which I’d argue is not only the experience of time framed in the space of a day but also time framed in the space of a life(time). All four Sullivans wake up and go to sleep in the same house and the same beds. One can safely assume that much of their next day will be very much like this one — full of rituals, tasks, chores, and obligations.
On the other hand, in each of their days is a sign of a profound change to come, all of them changes that will put their lives on a different course. Paul becomes aware of his infatuation with a fellow student, Richard, the first sense that this is where his need for physical and emotional connection will take him. Nancy meets Oliver, the married man she has been seeing, in his apartment, his wife being out of town, and realizes she is ready to sleep with him. Henry, having gone into an import/export business with a somewhat mysterious man with Continental connections, begins to understand that he is probably being swindled. And most omninously, Mary’s physician connects her sharp, intermittent attacks of pain and anxiety to a lump in her breast.
By sending her characters out into a busy London day, Spiro is provided with numerous opportunities to show the varieties of time that can be experienced in modern life, such as the hurry-up-and-wait world of the subway:
Along the passage. Hurry, hurry. Quick pattering of many feet. But the train had already gone. Too late. It had gone. Low vacant tunnel. Too late. Aimlessly, they walk up and down, their steps sounding in the shallow silence. In the self-conscious silence. Up and down. Or stare at the advertisements on the in-curling walls. Seen ’em before, anyway. Up and down. Damn the train, was it never coming?
Or the new time-refuges of the cafe, the pub, and the cinema: “But here, for three hours, is a new time, self-sufficient, unrelated: the march of actual time artificially broken, and synthetically replaced, dream-potent.”
Miller took her title from a line from Browning’s “Saul”: “How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ/All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!” And The Mere Living vibrates with energy generated from a world filled with other people. For Miller, the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James called the infant’s impression of the world is part and parcel of modern life for old as well as young. Not that this energy is all positive and productive. On the dust jacket of the U.S. edition of The Mere Living, Miller described her own challenges in writing the book:
Virginia Woolf has said that it is impossible to write without “a room of one’s own.” The Mere Living was written, for the most part, in a corner of the sitting room, with the wireless giving forth its eloquence, and my father, mother, sister and two brothers all tirelessly discussing their particular interests in life at the moment.
Considering that Bergson Spiro was just 22 when she published The Mere Living, she displays, in her treatment of Mary’s examination by her physician, remarkable insight to the perspectives of much more mature women and men. She also demonstrates a clear understanding of the common practice of doctors benignly deceiving their patients:
“Well, Mrs. Sullivan, it’s more or less as I thought. There’s nothing serious to worry about.” Deliberately, he spoke the words: and waited for the change of expression that he knew, the upward, dawning smile, eager, humble, grateful, released. It was one of his hardest moments. The penalty he had to bear, the physician’s, the priest’s, for assuming the responsibility created by that necessity for mother-trust which persists in all grown-up children who fear the dark … his duty being, as he had come to see it, to keep the frightened and ignorant man-child or woman-child from that elemental fear, his duty being to reassure, to inspire comfort and confidence as well as physical relief, for as long a period as possible in these children who came to him with awed confidence in his silent knowledge, in the shining toys, the knives, the lancets, the colored drugs, the mysterious paraphernalia …
When Mary is reunited with her family in the last section, Dinner Time, she draws some comfort from the knowledge that, whatever happens, her children will carry on a part of her: “They glance at me with the living flame of their eyes. To me they owe that flame.” Though family can seem a straitjacket to the two young people eager to break away and discover their own lives, it is also one of their time refuges, like the cafe or cinema: “At nightfall, they returned, acquiescent, to the household of common existence, mutually dependent, interrelated; resigning, in the common purpose that held them about this table, the divergent demands of each separate-striving personality.”
And after the evening time with the family, each person heads to the last essential refuge of sleep. For Mr. Sullivan, it frees him from the deepening fear that he is about to be ruined:
Gradually, sleep-warmth lapped, vague and mollifying and blind. It deprived him increasingly of knowledge of his own body.
Dying away into an easeful warmth of non-being…. He no longer felt his hands. Soft drunken pillow.
Body was darkening and darkening, all knowledge of himself was going, he was escaping at last….
One reviewer attributed the success of The Mere Living to “the extraordinary keenness of its author’s sense-perceptions and her impulsive (but often effective) tyranny over words.” The passage above, with the repetition of warmth, of knowledge, the repetition of short drumming phrases, the synesthesia of “drunken pillow,” all work to achieve a convincing sense of falling asleep. The book is full of such deft descriptions. If there are occasional moments of awkward characterization, these are quickly left behind in the tremendous current of time that runs throughout The Mere Living. When I finished Robert Hillyer’s perfect novel, My Heart for Hostage, I was a bit afraid that it would be hard to find something to maintain its high standard. In its own unique way, The Mere Living certainly does.
The Mere Living, by B. Bergson Spiro (Betty Miller) London: Victor Gollancz, 1933 New York: Frederick Stokes, 1933
I feel a little trepidation in writing about My Heart for Hostage. It may be the closest thing to a perfect book that I’ve come across in nearly 13 years of working on this site. It’s so good that early in reading it, I felt a frisson of fear that Robert Hillyer would not be able to sustain its quality, that the style, the story, or the narrative voice would give way and leave me frustrated and disappointed. Instead, I feel it’s I who will end up letting this book down.
My Heart for Hostage is the story of a romance doomed from the start — but not for the reason you might think at first. Edward Reynolds, freshly discharged from the U.S. Army after time in combat on the Western Front and afterward as a courier for the U.S. delegation at the Peace Conference, meets Germaine, a beautiful 19 year-old girl from Nantes enjoying her first freedom in Paris. Strongly attracted to each other from the start, they are soon sleeping together in what both take at first as nothing but a fling. Edward, son of a fine New England family, talks of marriage but Germaine brushes him off.
They encounter a variety of early American expats, including a dowager still carrying a torch for Edward’s father and a flamboyant painter proud of his notoriety as a décadent. They escape to Brittany, where they spent an idyllic few late summer weeks swimming and sailing off a small fishing village, and Germaine finally admits she could marry Edward. When the first storm of autumn arrives, they return to Paris to plan for their marriage and the trip back to Edward’s home in the U.S..
In Paris, however, single incident sparks Edward’s simmering sense of jealousy, and it all blows up. Edward is hospitalized, and when he recovers, he travels to Nantes to locate Germaine. He finds her about to wed an older man to whom she had been promised by her parents years before, and he quickly flees, taking the first passage to the U.S. he can book. There, on board, he meets a fellow ex-officer who reveals a few facts that transform his entire understanding of Germaine — indeed, that reveal to Edward how little he understands people at all.
My Heart for Hostage could be written off as just another American in Paris story, but everything about this book takes it to a level that puts everything else in this genre in the shade (with perhaps the exception of Henry James’ The Ambassadors, a peak I haven’t attempted myself). From his social status, upbringing, education, and experience, Hillyer was already encountering France with considerable sophistication, but what’s refreshing here is his insistence on bringing things back to an immediate and personal level:
The trouble was, he said, that people in America who pose generally had some goal in view; they wanted to impress some advantageous person to get on in the world. Whereas in France, people just posed for the fun of it.
No, she decided, people in France who posed also had some goal in view; but the goal was just to show off. You see, the French wanted to puff themselves up in their own eyes by making other people notice them, even if they had to behave very queerly like the silly artists on the Boulevard St. Michel. Americans wanted to overreach other people. If a Frenchman were posing, he’d look seriously in a mirror to see if he were acting the part properly; an American would wink at his reflection to show he was not fooling himself at any rate. Sometimes Americans seemed to her much more mature than the French. But in love they are very banal. “Take, for example, yourself, Edouard. You never believe at the right time and you always doubt at the wrong time. Isn’t that true?”
Edward had been thinking that she knew altogether too much about Americans in love. “I don’t know,” he said, and suddenly buried his face in his hands.
“But you do know,” she persisted, “because you never really trust me. You will never believe if we live together in joy until our death. That doubt will poison whatever you think of me — oh, even at our best times together — and it will bite, drop by drop, like acid into you, into your deep nature, until all you will have to say to me will be Bonjour, cherie, and Cherie, dors bien.”
Robert Hillyer 1942Just how much of My Heart for Hostage is autobiographical is hard to tell. Like Edward Reynolds, Robert Hillyer served in the U.S. Army during World War One and remained on active duty after the war, working like Edward as a courier for the Peace Conference. Like his more famous Harvard classmates e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, and Malcolm Cowley, he came to France first as a volunteer ambulance driver, and became, like Edward, fluent in French. And like Edward, he returned to the U.S. in late 1919. Edward’s story ends on board the freighter taking him home; Hillyer became a professor of English at Harvard. Best known as a poet, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1934 for his Collected Verse.
Hillyer wrote My Heart for Hostage, the second of his two novels, at a distance of over twenty years from his time in Paris and in the midst of another World War. From its dust jacket illustration, one can imagine that My Heart for Hostage was being aimed by Random House for a sentimental, mainly female audience, but in reality, this is a book that would have appealed to G.I.s if they’d made it past the title page. Hillyer’s soldiers carry some scars with them they little understand and can’t control. They find relief in sex and drink, and feel a distance between themselves and the folks back home they can’t quite express. And they have a sense that the only true relationships have to be founded on trust — which, unfortunately, their experiences have shown to be something not given lightly. But I suspect that few G.I.s ever got their hands on My Heart for Hostage, and so it soon slipped into obscurity: too late for the veterans of WWI, too early for the veterans of WWII. I hope it will not take another war for it to be rediscovered.
I’ve covered plenty of books well-deserving of rediscovery on this site. But if it’s not going too far out onto a limb, I have to say that My Heart for Hostage is perhaps the closest thing to a neglected masterpiece I’ve come across. I cannot recommend it too highly. There are less than a dozen copies available for sale at the moment: Grab a copy now!
My Heart for Hostage, by Robert Hillyer New York: Random House, 1942
Ethel Firebrace In The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, Malachi Whitaker and Gay Taylor offered the world a feminine match for H. H. Bashford’s really good man, Augustus Carp, Esq. Lost now to literary history, Ethel Firebrace was prolific novelist of the early 20th century, churning out dozens and dozens of works such as Clothed in White Samite, Ecstacy’s Debit, His for an Hour, and the thrilling wartime romance, An Airman for Averil. Firebrace followed in the footsteps of such industrious Victorian women writers as Margaret Oliphant and Eliza Lynn Linton. In fact, I half suspect that Whitaker and Taylor, who probably met at one of Charles Lahr’s literary evenings in London in the late 1920s, had skimmed Linton’s My Literary Life, which is one of the snippiest memoirs ever published.
I must caution, however, that unlike Augustus Carp, whose righteousness in all things stems from his utter blindness to the world around him, Ethel Firebrace maintains her moral superiority from her firm understanding that she is simply better than everyone else. It is not selfishness that prevents her from helping others but simply “a nature too finely tuned.” Unfortunately, though her family early recognized that little Ethel was too busy “thinking of higher things,” they failed to spare her “the sight of their toil-worn hands, dust-laden hair, and brows which bore the wrinkled imprint of perpetual household budgeting.” Consequently, “being a very sensitive child, this left a deeper mark upon me than they realised.”
Indeed, for Ethel, the world is divided between the sensitive and the insensitive — there being far too few of the former and far, far too many of the latter. When she marries and gives birth, she vows “at whatever cost, never to let this event repeat itself during my married life” and finds it difficult to forgive her daughter “the eternity of torture she had caused me.” How was it that women before her were able to bear so many children? “Cast-iron insensitiveness,” of course.
Fortunately for the reading public, however, Ethel found the inner strength to steel herself against her baby’s cries of hunger and other ill-considered attempts to distract her and focus on her great gift: writing. Starting with Jessica’s Secret, she works diligently at the coalface, wearing out four typewriters along the way, generating, by her own count, over five million words. By the time she begins her autobiography, she can state with confidence that “I do not think there can be many, well versed in book-lore, who are unacquainted with at least one of the works of Ethel Firebrace.” I feel some shame in admitting that until I read this book, I was one of the unenlightened minority.
For her many gifts to literature, she has received countless in return from her admirers, including “a leopard-skin rug, a transparent nightdress, twenty pounds of quince jelly, what turned out to be a very sick monkey, a fountain-pen, and a set of alleged performing fleas.” Beside the talents that God bestowed upon her, she attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. She suggests that the literary world can be divided infallibly between the garglers and the non-garglers. The non-garglers such as Mr. Aldous Huxley are destined to “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”
Cresset Press advertisement for The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace
The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace is easily one of the rarest books I’ve featured on this site. There are just two copies available for sale — one for $600+ and one for almost $900. I was able to read it thanks to my British Library and a quick stop through London last month. It was hard to keep quiet at some points while reading it: while not quite as fine-tuned as Augustus Carp, Esq., The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace absolutely deserves rediscovery as a perfect little comic gem. In a fictional heaven somewhere, Ethel Firebrace and Augustus Carp, Esq. live together in sympathy, both confident in their superiority of character and intellect if slightly disappointed that the rest of existence will never fully appreciate their brilliance. Such is the cross the truly great must bear.
The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, written anonymously by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker London: The Cresset Press, 1937
Cover of ‘Emir’ with photo of Rosemary Tonks by June Johnston
Rosemary Tonks’ first two novels, Emir and Opium Fogs were published within weeks of each other and TLS and other papers reviewed them together, so it’s hard to be sure which one was written first. But my bet is on Emir. If Opium Fogs is never less than eccentric, it is at least a finished work. Emir is just eccentric.
Having now had my hands on all of the six novels that Tonks published between 1963 and 1972, I can say that the ploy of Emir is, in rough terms, the plot of every one of Tonks’ novels: a young woman of definite opinions but indefinite sense of self is pursued by varied men of varied ages, is intrigued by one or more of them, and ends up with none. As Neil Astley makes clear in his introduction to his superb 2014 reissue of Tonks’ poems, Bedouin of the London Evening, Tonks’ heroines mirror many aspects of their creator’s own life and character.
Her father died of blackwater fever in Africa before she was born; she and her mother moved 14 times during the war; she spent years semi-abandoned in boarding schools; she married and moved to India and then Pakistan with him, suffering typhoid fever in in the first and polio in the second; lived briefly in Paris; and returned to live as something of a reluctant member of the arts-and-literature scene in London. Her poetry and then her novels attracted some attention in the 1960s, but she seems never to have been fully comfortable with her work or life during this period. Her mother’s death led to a spiritual crisis, and she went through a series of conversions before ending up, increasingly ill and reclusive, by the seaside in Bournemouth. Rediscovered in a 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary [Can anyone provide a recording of it?], she died in 2014 just months before Astley’s Bloodaxe Books published her work for the first time in over 40 years.
In Emir, Tonks’ young woman, Houda Lawrence, is already suffering from the romantic equivalent of Groucho Marx’s quip that “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”: “Even supposing she had been able to find someone of her own age who was attractive to her, she would at once have begun to watch him for the first mistake.” Though an aspiring poet who walks the streets of London, green notebook in hand, she finds herself “deaf to the joys of professional Bohemia: which is certain death.” And she is still struggling to get out from underneath the influence of a mother who wants her to surrender to her proper role as wife and helpmeet.
Her taste in men leads her to dance around the edges of an affair with Eugene, a man of “rioutous European pedigree” and impeccable taste in clothes. “An older woman encountering his glance — it was like being stared at by a violet — might have summed him up: ‘Untrustworthy to a degree. But worth it.'” Of his parentage, Tonks writes only that “there was a suggestion of a child being carried in and out of opera boxes.” Tonks is by far at her best in artful character assassination: “However long he waited, Eugene always managed to appear to be dismissing a waiter when she arrived.”
Her dialogue, however, makes one long for the gritty realism of Les Liaisons dangereuses:
“A poet must be one of civilization’s failures. You forget; it’s the mongrel who gets kicked.”
“I cannot harm you; because you are completely vulnerable. But if the way up a publisher’s staircarpet led over my heart, you would not hesitate to tread it.”
“My God. What a low estimate you have of my ambitions. The staircarpet of a great poet is the only walk I could take after the arrogance of the pavement.”
I haven’t made a definitive study of the subject, but I’ll go out on a limb here and postulate that no one not looking at a staircarpet ever used the word “staircarpet” in a conversation. Twice.
I confess to having spent more for a copy of Emir than for any book I’ve ever owned. It was the only copy I’ve seen come up for sale in the last couple of years. And I will offer as a service to other readers the assurance that this is a book you need not covet, particularly when the superior Opium Fogs is available free on the Internet Archive (link). As Charles puts it in his Sonofabook review, Tonks spends far too much time in the book “trying to score points in the parlour game of cleverness.”
I’ve been interested in reading No Goodness in the Worm ever since I read A Prison, A Paradise, the memoir in which Gay Taylor, writing under the pseudonym of Loran Hurnscot (compiled from what she saw as her two worst sins, sloth and rancour), recalled her obsession and affair with A. E. Coppard and the decades-long process of moving beyond it. Unfortunately, the book very rare and priced accordingly (the cheaper of the two copies currently available goes for $400). However, I stumbled across a copy for the relatively low price of about $100 last month and sprung for it.
I think it helps to read No Goodness in the Worm having A Prison, A Paradise in mind, because it reveals the extent to which Taylor was able to achieve a perspective on her experience through fiction that took her a much longer time to gain for herself in real life.
The story at the heart of both books starts with the marriage of Harold (Hal) Midgley Taylor and Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall in 1920. “Both of us got a bad bargain,” Gay Taylor later wrote in A Prison, A Paradise. She hated housework, cooking, and most of the conventional “wifely duties.” He suffered from tuberculosis and a penchant for business ventures he had no ability to run. Their wedding night was a disaster. “Hell, the first night, is what a woman never forgives,” she later wrote. He went off to his mother’s house. She returned to the flat she shared with her friends Bee Blackburn and Pran Pyper.
Yet a few months later, all four decided to move to a village in Berkshire and founded, using Hal Taylor’s remaining savings, the Golden Cockerel Press with the questionable business model of publishing books of poetry and short stories “that could not expect to command great popularity or wide sales.” Combined with Hal Taylor’s ill health and the utter lack of experience on the part of all four, the press quickly headed for failure.
At the same time, the marriage was headed for failure as well. Taylor later summed up her husband’s attitude as, “Since happiness is not for me, it’s unbearable to me that anyone should have it.” Fortunately for the press but not the marriage, in stepped A. E. Coppard, a man of considerable charm and practical skills. He managed the press well enough to keep it alive until qualified hands came to the rescue. And he seduced Taylor.
For Taylor, it was a head-over-heels passion, one that consumed her body and soul and overruled any concerns about propriety. She and Coppard escaped to live in a little love nest some miles from the press. While caring for her husband as an ailing and frustrated man, she had no patience for his self-pity and half-hearted attempts to control her. She described his appeal as: “For heaven’s sake go back to being unhappy, and that will give me peace.” Unfortunately, Coppard proved a mixed blessing himself. “He goes itching after almost every woman he sees — he’s a miniature Frank Harris,” an acquaintance later told her.
In real life, Hal Taylor found escape from his misery by dying in March 1925. Taylor went on and off with Coppard for longer, until finally abandoning him after several years and several short-lived reconciliations. When she wrote No Goodness in the Worm, therefore, she had just a few years’ distance from the experience, and it’s easy for anyone who knows something of the story to find the parallels between the fiction and its source. Valentine in the novel is Gay; Humphrey, the husband, is Hal; Coppard is Francis Merryweather, although his skill is furniture making rather than writing; and Sikey and Jane are Taylor’s friends Bee and Pran. (Taylor came up with different names for all of them in A Prison, A Paradise as well.) Taylor changed a number of the practical aspects of the story: Humphrey’s only illness is emotional; the foursome and Francis/Coppard aren’t engaged in any business together, thriving or not.
Husband and wife are still miserable, though. “It’s an odd thing to find out that you’re married to your worst enemy,” Valentine tells her Sikey early in the book. The marriage “had never been a properly adult relation, a mature interchange between man and woman;” instead, she describes it as “a mutual propping association.” And when the impish and charming Francis comes into her life, “a golden haze” comes over Valentine’s “mental landscape,” and “some dimly prophetic part of her mind recognized that it would not life, nor Francis Merryweather be perceived as other human beings perceived him, until the whole drama of their relationship was nearing its close.” Humphrey’s response is only slightly less dysfunctional than Hal Taylor’s: “You’re free to have your little affairs; I’m not a slave-owner. But I won’t be let down in front of everybody and I won’t allow you to let me down.”
The outcome of this affair is, of course, predictable, foretold by the old verse apochryphally credited to William James:
Hogamus Higamus Men are Polygamous Higamus Hogamus Women Monogamous
Valentine wants Francis, Francis only, Francis wholly, and Francis wants … oh, what’s this? This looks fun. “To anyone with a spark of sense, life is simply the opportunity for exquisite sensation,” he tells Valentine. Such is not the foundation of a stable or lost-lasting relationship. In the end, Valentine suffers intensely, suffers to the point of attempting suicide. Though she survives, she sees her future as one of long, slow, difficult recovery. And Francis gets married, has more affairs, sells lots of custom-made furniture, and disappears off into a golden haze.
Ironically, the most interesting relationships in the book are not between men and women but between Valentine and her friends. As the TLS reviewer put it, “The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing.” Sikey is an independent-minded social scientist who treats going to bed with men as one step above laboratory experiments. Jane is more grounded, yet she also rejects convention, marrying a dying man to give his young daughter a step-mother and home.
Valentine’s real tragedy, it seems to me, is that she allows herself to forget how much she has going for herself compared to men. Indeed, it’s hard not to find some pretty powerful parallels to the state of women and men today:
It was a commonplace between them that since the war men had become almost unendurable; they were spoilt, bored, irresponsible; virtue had gone out of them…. [T]he twentieth century or war (they were never sure which) had given them a world of half-men to grow up among, half-men who mechanically aped emotions, or who, unable to bring contentment to one woman, would appease their own impotence or vanity by sniffing around among half a dozen or more, or who clung to breasts and skirts in the prolonged infantility of grown men unable to face the world that they had made.
It’s not surprising that some contemporary reviewers (see Frances Lamont Robbins below) took exception to this viewpoint. Despite the emergence of a whole generation of remarkable women writers and artists after the First World War, not everyone was prepared to see the sexual tables turn so completely. What is surprising is how many reviewers accepted and welcomed this perspective. Gay Taylor clearly revealed a need to reconsider the balance of power between men and women, and it’s sad that so little has changed in the 80 years since No Goodness in the Worm was written.
Other Reviews
Frances Lamont Robbins, in The Outlook, January 21, 1931
Things must be looking black for the men in England. There feminism is an anti-male movement. (Here it is only indirectly so.) If English feminism has a literature, this novel must represent its lowest point; for it is one of the rankest pieces of nonsense that this patient reviewer ever read. Such incredible, such dreadful men; indeed there is no goodness in these worms! And, by natural sequence, such incredible, dreadful women, too…. The writer of this novel has considerable feeling for rich words, and some narrative skill. But we do not think she meant her novel to be funny–unless she is a man.
Bernadine J. Scherman, in The Saturday Review of Literature, February 21, 1931
It is a great satisfaction–after reading the dozens of contrived and artificial novels that are dumped on the public every month—to come across at last a novel that reveals a soul. The author of No Goodness in the Worm may have had no such lofty purpose, but unconsciously or otherwise, she has achieved it…. Though the author never states a thesis, and writes her novel only as a personal story, still the impression remains that this is indeed the state of mind of most thinking English women of thirty or so.
After all the proportion of women to men in England before the war was about three t« one, and since then of course far greater. Women have had to become economically independent, and to this end, better educated and far more emancipated from families and tradition than before; while the flower of their own generation of men has been killed off. It is an abnormal state of affairs apparently affecting many of the younger English writers, and certainly admirably reflected in this first novel of Miss Taylor.
Guy Holt, in The Bookman, February 1931
… [I]n far too many years of haphazard reading I have not previously encountered just the point of view which Miss Taylor so ably expresses. I have read books written in bitterness against man; I have read books which were the product of defiance, or contempt, or pathological frigidity, but this springs from none of these. It is simply the work of one who, through her. characters, views man dispassionately and finds him, on the whole, dispensable. And that, I take it, is score one for the novel of 1931.
Marjorie Grant Cook, in The Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1930
A sensitive and comely piece of work. No Goodness in the Worm is a first novel of exciting quality: one of those uncommon books whose first page is a good through which the reader enters a little world of other people’s lives and is lost for the time to his own….
When it comes to love scenes this writer thinks sometimes, unconsciously, in the phrases of Lawrence. For the rest she very definitely writes her own book, and the justice and wit of her expressions are constantly stimulating…. The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing. A book that grows in strength as it nears its end makes a second novel by the same hand something to look forward to.
No Goodness in the Worm, by Gay Taylor London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930 New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930
The anonymous TLS reviewer described G. E. Trevelyan’s third novel, As It Was in the Beginning (1934) as “almost unreadable in its intensity.” Thumbing through the book after getting it in the mail last month, I could see that was an apt assessment, and somewhat dreaded the level of attention I would have to devote to it.
Thank God for airplanes. I have by now developed a reliable regime in which I strap myself into the seat and strap myself into a book and fairly successfully tune out the rest of the world for however long the flight takes. And so I took As It Was in the Beginning with me on a short work trip to Turkey this week. It proved a wise decision, particularly when we sat on the tarmac in Istanbul for several hours waiting for some mechanical work.
As It Was in the Beginning takes place entirely in the mind of Millicent — Lady Chesborough, widow of Lord Harold — as she lies in a nursing home bed in the last days before her death from the effects of a stroke. Childless, her only visitor is one of her late husband’s nieces. Nurses come in and go out, always adjusting her sheets, lifting her numb left arm as they do. Her thoughts dwell on Phil, the young man she took as a lover, who left her not long before.
This is a tour-de-force of stream of consciousness writing and construction. As Millicent lies in bed flowing in and out of consciousness, she revisits repeatedly certain moments from her life, rerunning these memories as one sometimes does in the same way as a bit of song gets caught in the head. The servant coming to her in the garden of the house at Chesborough, which she had turned into a rehabilitation hospital for wounded soldiers, with a small orange envelope bearing the message that Harold had been killed on the Western Front. Her sense of dread at that sight, combined with her fear that the young man she was tending to would sense her distress. Phil’s approaching her in the lounge of the hotel in Brighton where they met: if there hadn’t been that shelf under the table that forced her to turn herself sideways, facing the entrance, would they not have met?
At the same time, though, Trevelyan gradually and almost imperceptibly steps Millicent back through her life. She traces her affair with Phil from his leaving in anger over her refusal to purchase a new automobile to their road trips in his first one, their nights out in London as she scanned the faces in clubs and restaurants, wondering who took her for an old fool, to their first meeting there in Brighton. And though her longing for Phil and her self-recriminations — both for losing him and giving in to his dubious romancing — remain constants in her thoughts, we see her in the first years as a widow, in the claustrophobic world of Chesborough, where “I always felt I was something very small cowering inside a figure labelled The Squire’s Wife.” She leaves for London, where she can enjoy the freedom of anonymity:
It was like a tonic, sometimes, to stroll along the High Street in the sunshine and hardly be glanced at. And in a ‘bus one person is very much like another. I remember being grateful, even, to a ‘bus conductor, when he punched a ticket and pushed it at me, looking the other way. Just the right amount of notice. One must have a ticket: one exists. But not expected to be anything.
This view of life as older woman in London contrasts with that of the spinster in her first novel, Appius and Virginia: “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the ‘bus … and the half compassionate, half contemptuous had of the conductor, grimy and none too gentle, as she clambers down the swaying steps on to the sliding pavement.”
But unlike Virginia Hutton, who sought ferociously to imprint her will upon another being, Millicent struggles throughout her life for a sense of identity. Much of the time, she feels herself “there, but not in the body: watching it from the outside and feeling responsible for it, without having it firmly in hand. Having to creep back in to pull the strings.” Looking at herself in a mirror as a newlywed, she thinks, “I’m much too small for this huge room…. Harold ought to have married somebody imposing.”
The one place she feels most at peace is in a London cinema, where she can be lose all sense of herself:
People aren’t people, they haven’t any faces. And all quite quiet, looking at the screen. They’ve left their anxieties outside in the street, in that big, glaring porch with the big posters. They’ve chained them up. Anxieties, waiting and hissing outside.
So many people. That’s why they come here you know. In here they needn’t be people. It’s dark in here, it’s dark in my room, I like my room. And I’m not separate. I don’t think I am, I’m part of the darkness, and the people who aren’t people. All part of the darkness.
I’m like anyone else. All alike and nothing, staring at the screen.
Some reasons why Millicent has such a fragile sense of self become clear as we go back into her youth and childhood. The only child of a country doctor, her main playmates are Dick and Hilda, children of the local Lord, who make it clear her invitations are at their bidding. Her first brush at romance ends before it even begins, with the young man barely aware of her presence. Her parents have little time to spend with her. Her tutor, Miss Cresset, has little patience for her needs: “Tell me a story.” “You’re old enough to tell them to yourself.” Only her Nanny, open and affectionate, notices the strange absence in Millicent’s life:
“It’s nice when there’s nobody here.”
“Why, there never is anybody here, is there? You’re a funny little thing. Don’t you want to have other little girls and boys to play with?”
“There’s only Dick and Hilda.”
“Well, don’t you want to have them?”
“No.”
And even earlier: “Nanny, why am I inside this?” “Inside what?” “Arms and legs and things. Why am I inside it? It’s nasty.” And on to her earliest sensations: “And want and full and nothing, and want and warm and nothing. And want and want and want and want. Alone and alone and alone.” Her only sense of security comes at the very beginning: “Back, back: sheltering darkness and safe, yielding warmth…. Strong, perpetual beat of the dark.”
I found Trevelyan’s handling of the final rush back through infancy, through birth, back to the womb surprisingly moving. She manages to convey quite effectively how enormous and intimidating the world can seem to a little thing, particularly without a strong maternal presence, without any base from which to look out at the world. As Millicent nears her birth, she also nears her death and her thoughts reach out in desperation for her lost lover, Phil. You know exactly where this story is going, yet Trevelyan makes it intense and unfamiliar.
One could see As It Was in the Beginning as something of a set piece, the kind of assignment a writer might give herself to test and hone her skills. But this is far more than that. Trevelyan builds a powerful sense of a woman whose life was a constant struggle to reassure herself of her own identity — a struggle she often lost. Considering that she did it within the narrow confines of a single room in a nursing home and in the span of perhaps a week or less, it’s a bravura performance. Having read five of Trevelyan’s novel now, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that she was the only English woman writer of her generation to pick up Virginia Woolf’s baton and run with it. And sadly, due to injuries suffered in a Blitz raid on London, she died barely a month before Woolf at the early age of 37 and was quickly and utterly forgotten. The time for her rightful recognition is long overdue.
Reviews
• Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 1934
Once again Miss Trevelyan has used her gifts of psychological insight and imagination to produce, in As It Was in the Beginning, a work of striking talent. And once again, as in Appius and Virginia and Hot House, she has written a book which is almost unreadable in its intensity, but which compels one to go on reading in spite of almost physical discomfort, by the admiration one feels for the author’s ingenuity and her uncanny insight into human beings….
Miss Trevelyan has here chosen a more everyday type of character than she did in the other two, but even so she has not yet produced anything universal: the agonies, the twists, the cravings of futile and hapless people still obsess her; she has a genius for suffering and such power in describing it that the reader feels worn out after a few chapters. Should Miss Trevelyan ever write of beauty and kindliness, using for purposes of stimulation the powers which she now employs to sear and suffocate her readers, it is hard to set limits to what she might achieve.
• Vernon Fane, “The Book World,” The Sphere, 2 June 1934
“Technically interesting” is the description of Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s As It Was in the Beginning (Seeker. 7s. 6d.). Life is laid bare by comments and reveries and the sustained delusions which precede death.” There is a dearth of verbs an abundance of full stops a fumbling at word patterns. Technical fiddlesticks Miss Trevelyan is suffering from an overdose of Gertrude Stein.
• Sheffield Independent, 21 May 1934
As her previous novels (Appius and Virginia and Hot House) showed, Miss G. E. Trevelyan cannot be classed as a conventional novelist, but the strange technique she has used in her latest book, As It Was in the Beginning, though extremely interesting, proves rather irritating. The book is a mass of comments by a woman of fifty who is dying in a nursing home. These comments, reveries and delusions cover her whole life, gradually working back to her birth.
• Aberdeen Press and Journal, 30 May 1934
To translate into unemotional print the disjointed memories of a nursing home patient re-living the past before “death’s kiss” is a technical feat of daring, for another’s experiences presented in this form can be so easily boring. The fact that Miss Trevelyan succeeds. remarkably well in sustaining interest is at once a tribute to her skill and the pathos of her tale, the tale of a woman grown too old for love, her passion for a, man younger than herself, desperate, vain resistance of the attacks of old age, and the shock of his ultimate desertion. Here is all the tragedy of ari ageing woman unwilling to give up what she never had in youth. Memories, memories, an unhappy marriage, a boy and girl fruitless friendship, childhood (particular effective word-building) birth, and birth and death unite — “light and blinding space, blank and boundless and without shadow: stark unending light.”
• The Tatler, 13 June 1934
… if you are fond of pointing out to people in distress that we all must like of the beds of our own making, then Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s new novel, As It Was in the Beginning, is not for you. You will find in her a ruthless destroyer of that optimism which, in reality, is either a desire to be left emotionally undisturbed, or a pretty shelving of all life’s ugliness and pain on God’s understanding of what is best for us after all…. Not a pleasant story, nor a happy one.
• Northern Whig and Belfast Post, 21 July 1934
The cleverness of it is indisputable, it is also effective in passages, yet one cannot agree that this method has perceptible advantages over that adhered to by most of the writers of fiction.
As It Was in the Beginning, by G. E. Trevelyan London: Martin Secker, 1934
William’s Wife is the natural history of a bag lady. Starting from the day of Jane Atkins’s wedding to grocer William Chirp, a widower in his late fifties, G. E. Trevelyan takes us step by step through her metamorphosis from an ordinary young woman in service (a good position, more of a lady’s companion) to a queer figure haunting the streets of London, bag in arm, scavenging for food and firewood.
In Jane’s case, the process is triggered by William’s tight-lipped parsimonious complacency and intolerance, but eventually becomes self-propelled. It all starts with a broken window cord: “‘The window cord’s gone, upstairs,’ she told William, watching him chip warily at the gaping mutton leg. ‘Eh? Ah?'” A week later, she raises the subject again:
“How about that window cord,” she said in a low, Sunday voice, straight forward into her collar. “Did you tell someone about it?”
“Cord? Eh?” He shut the gate behind them and they went on around the drive, still talking in low voices in case one of the neighbours should hear, or someone in the road.
“Yes,” she said. “What I told you. It’s gone in the lower sash.”
“Don’t want to open the lower sash.” He fitted his key in the door. “That don’t matter.”
Then there is the matter of her clothes. Two years after the wedding, Jane gingerly suggests that the few dresses that made up her trousseau are growing shabby:
And he wasn’t even looking round. Pointing with his pipe. “Waste not, want not.”
“I know, William, but it’s the best part of two years and….”
“Save something for a rainy day.”
He drew at his pipe for some minutes, then he looked round at her. “My poor wife….” He cleared his throat. “My first wife didn’t go spending on new gowns, not once in ten, no, fifteen years.” He put the pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire.
Jane does have some small sum of her own, some twenty pounds saved from her wages. But this money now belongs to William, of course. Makes no difference to him: it’s all wastage.
And so Jane begins a slow, quiet campaign of guerrilla warfare, saving a few pennies from her weekly grocery allowance. It must be a small amount, for William carefully totals the bills. And then what she does accumulate must be spent with even greater care, as he would notice anything new. She resorts to having near-copies made of her old dresses.
Then William announces one day that he’s sold the shop and retiring. Now it is not just the money given for groceries that Jane has to safeguard, but her time as well. Each Tuesday, William stands at the door as she returns, questioning any deviation from her normal forty-five minutes. And once a day at four, if it’s not too wet, he goes out for a walk: “If she slipped upstairs at once she had half an hour for certain, if it didn’t come to rain, to do any little thing she wanted: to sew a bit of new frilling on a collar without him asking what she was doing, or turn out a drawer, or just stand, drumming on the window, and look out at the road….
It was the only bit of pleasure she got.
Even the outbreak of the Great War doesn’t alter William’s steadfast routine or his selfishness. Jane takes up knitting for the soldiers, which gives her the gift of an extra hour out of the house each week, but finds it hard to convince William to send a parcel to his son-in-law serving at the front:
“Socks, eh?” And then he began to chuckle. “He doesn’t want any socks. What does he want with socks? Socks? He’d smoke them!” He burst into a loud chuckle, knocking his pipe on the bar of the grate.
Smoke-them. Hu. Hu. Smoke-them.
Then one day, William catches a cold and within weeks is gone. And now we notice how much of him has infiltrated Jane’s thinking:
She saw Mrs. Peat out and shut the door after her and put up the chain. And that was the last, she hoped. Didn’t want any more coming round to help, poking their noses in, for that was all it meant. Minnie Hallett would have come there to sleep fast enough for the asking, and she wasn’t the only one either. Sooner be without: doing nothing but make work and there was enough to do as it was. Some might like it, but she didn’t. At a time like that you wanted to be quiet to yourself. Whoever would have thought.
Left with an annuity of two hundred pounds, Jane is free to buy new furniture for the house, to have someone in for repairs, to buy some new clothes. Instead, she decides the best way to be quiet to herself is to sell the house and move to something smaller and newer in a different town, closer to London. And to rent: “It made you shudder to think your money might be tied up in property like that, and no way to get at it.”
But she finds it harder to get rid of William’s old Victorian furniture. It seems such a shame: “good solid furniture that had years of wear in it yet, and twice the quality of what you could buy new: nasty rubbishy stuff, a lot of it, painted up to sell, and no wear or value in it.” And her new neighbors too forward, the new town less attractive than it seemed at first. She moves. And moves again. And again.
Each move takes her to a smaller space, but Jane just stacks up her furniture. Finally, she is living in a dank basement on a busy street, a place of too little account for anyone to notice. Which is fine with her: fewer eyes spying in and coveting her things. But even this is not enough, so she buys a large black shopping bag and begins to fill it with her best gloves and newest pair of stockings. Plus her umbrella and good scarf. And the spoons and forks. And the sack with her important papers. Can’t afford to have someone breaking in and taking them.
And she sets out each day to spot the very cheapest produce and meat. Shocked when she first comes across a stall selling odd bits of meat as cat food, she finds herself wandering in. “Not that that didn’t look good enough very often, as if anyone could have eaten it.” When a potato rolls off a greengrocer’s cart and lands at her feet, she picks up. “Waste not, want not, as my poor husband used to say.”
We experience the entirety of William’s Wife through Jane’s eyes, so we are slow to recognize her metamorphosis into a suspicious, miserly, and tight-lipped old woman until the process is irreversible. The ability of Oxford-educated Trevelyan to slip inside the mind, culture, and language of a woman of a different age and class is remarkable and utterly convincing. As with Theme with Variations, I found it as riveting as watching a car crash — or, in this case, a human crash. When I set the book down, I felt as if all the air has been sucked from my lungs. William’s Wife is a chapter of the human comedy that would have made Balzac proud.
William’s Wife, by G. E. Trevelyan London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1938
I’ve been saving Mikhail Osorgin’s novel, Quiet Street, for a quiet break. There is something about a good, thick Russian book — things like Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, or Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography — that demand you set aside distractions and carve out hours to let it take over your life, and I could tell that Quiet Street was one of these. Full of characters, full of emotions, full of life, abuzz with bullets as well as bees.
Quiet Street is the story of the Russian Revolution as told through the flotsam that was swept up in its currents. No one in this book is in charge. Even the opportunistic ex-soldier who works his way up to a position of influence with the Bolsheviks ultimately finds himself merely a tool, valued only for his skill and efficiency in shooting the victims sent to him in the basement of the Lubyanka by those signing the letters.
We all know this story. Anyone who is good, innocent, or just plain unlucky will end up dead, broken, scarred, in prison, or exiled. Such knowledge is enough to put some readers off even reading a Russian book. Titles like Life and Fate appear to promise great, grey monoliths of suffering, appealing only to masochists. I confess to feeling some dread at picking up Quiet Street, but only because I knew it would involve getting to know and care about characters and then watch them suffer and be abused.
Like Stolnikov, the handsome young university student who rushes to enlist in the first patriotic frenzy after the outbreak of war in 1914. A good officer, considerate of his men, he steps out of a dugout and is blasted by a stray artillery shell that strikes his trench. His arms and limbs are amputated at a field station, he is evacuated to a Moscow hospital where he soon becomes universally referred to as “The Trunk.” The staff trains him to carry out a few trivial tasks with the aid of a stick held in his mouth. “The doctors said: ‘A miracle. Just look at him. There’s nature for you!'”
For Osorgin, though, nature is a force more powerful and elusive than any man-made constructs encountered in this book. The comings and goings of the swallows, the nightly journeys of the mice living under the floorboards of the house on Sivtsev Vrazhek in Moscow that provides the epicenter of Quiet Street are just as important as those of any of its human inhabitants. “It’s possible that the world of humans, with all its happenings and all its personal joys and sorrows, is overestimated, and that it all leads to very little in reality,” Stolnikov cautions a young woman who visits him.
Man’s small place in the world is a central theme in Quiet Street. As the Bolsheviks spar with the White Russians and others, Osorgin recognizes the real victor: “In the summer of 1919 Moscow was conquered by rats.” The rats harbor lice, and the lice introduces typhus, and soon characters are being comandeered into burial brigades at mass graves outside Moscow. The owner of the house in Sivtsev Vrazhek, an ornithologist, gives the swallows and other small birds he studies a greater place in his scheme of things:
“It is all the same to the swallows what people are quarreling about, who is fighting against whom and who comes out on top. One to-day, another to-morrow, and so all over again…. Now the swallows have laws of their own,a nd their laws are eternal. And these laws are of much greater importance than any of our making. We still know very little about them; so much yet remains to be discovered.”
Of all nature’s forces, none is greater than death. Osorgin’s death is not blind but subtle in its logic, capable of patience and restraint when required. As the ornithologist’s wife lays in her deathbed,
Death stood at the bedside and listened to the old lady’s moan, then withdrew to a corner. It had been keeping watch for over a month at the bedside of Tanyusha’s grandmother, shielding her from all the attractions of life and preparing her for admission into the void. When the night nurse fell asleep Death would hand the old lady her drink, cover her up with the blanket and wink at her fondly. And, not recognizing Death, the old lady would say to it in her weak little voice, “Thank you, dear one; thank you so much!”
And when the old lady went to sleep Death would yield to an impulse to play impish tricks: fling off the blanket, pinch the old lady in her side and stop up her mouth with the palm of its bony hand to impeded her breathing. And it would laugh quietly, chuckling and displaying its black teeth.
Death is everywhere in the book, in the form of old age, war, revolution, famine, disease, and the arbitrary exercise of power. Yet some of Osorgin’s characters manage to maintain a remarkable obliviousness to its presence:
It needed the deeply ingrained mentality of the civilian and the profound ignorance of the research student to enable Vassya to go on standing there quite calmly, without even noticing the bullets whizzing past. Nobody stopped him; and it did not enter his head that he was being shot at from the whole length of the street.
The one fate Osorgin spared his characters was exile. That he saved for himself. The gist of his story can be found in Lesley Chamberlain’s book, Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia. Cosmopolitan (he worked as a correspondent in Italy for years), progressive (he converted to Judaism when he married his second wife, Rachel, daughter of the Zionist Ahad Ha’am, more interested in art and nature than politics, Osorgin was just the sort of minor member of the intelligentsia Lenin found most irritating.
Ignored in the chaos following the October Revolution, Osorgin then found refuge in running a cooperative used bookstore with Nikolai Berdyaev and like-minded intellectuals. The bookstore provided both practical and moral support to its community, offering much-needed cash for their books and a refuge of rationality in the midst of the madness swirling outside. The ornithologist takes advantages of such a bookstore to get money for food and wood in the winter of 1920. Soon, however, Lenin found time to return to his favorite irritants. Osorgin was arrested and found himself in the same Lubyanka basement his characters refer to as “The Ship of Death.” He was exiled rather than shot, ending up in Kazan before being returned to Moscow for medical reasons. Within weeks of his return, his name appeared on a list of 160-some intellectuals that was presented for Lenin’s approval, and loaded on a steamer headed for Germany and permanent exile. He and his wife eventually settled outside Paris, publishing two novels that were translated into English, Quiet Street and My Sister’s Story (1931), before his death in 1942.
Chamberlain writes that Quiet Street is undermined by Osorgin’s nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia, but I think this is a misreading. I doubt that Osorgin considered any particular regime superior to another. For him, all man’s constructions were like the house on Sivtsev Vrashek, more vulnerable to destruction by rust, worms, mold, and weather than by war or conspiracy. Osorgin was greatly influenced by the writings of the Stoics, particularly the Meditations , and it’s hard to believe that in writing Quiet Street he didn’t keep in mind Marcus Aurelius’s injunction: “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.”
Quiet Street, by Michael Ossorgin [Mikhail Osorgin] New York: The Dial Press, 1930
Since the Fifties, there have been plenty of junk or ‘Pulp’ novels depicting the Second World War from American and, to a lesser degree, British & Australian authors. (Yes, even Australia had pulp war novelists. Owen Gibson was one writer who, during the Fifties, churned out about 25 slim novels about Aussies in WW2. Totally forgotten now, his books are so rare that even the National Library doesn’t have copies of all of them).
Written purely for entertainment value with no literary pretensions whatsoever, these novels were easily digestible, usually churned out by hacks and often adhered to a routine recipe. That meant loads of action, rendered in a blunt, easily digestible manner along with a compulsory lurid sex scene or two. For the American types, the characters usually comprised the stock GI squad encountered in many a novel or Hollywood film- the wise-cracking New Yorker, the rich kid from Boston with a chip on his shoulder, the tall Texan farm-boy, the loud-talking Italian, the brooding Native American who grew up on a reservation etc.
The majority did not survive past their first print-run. Amidst the mediocrity, an occasional better example would emerge, usually when a writer tried just that little bit harder or dared to stray from the standard rules of the genre. One which stayed in my memory when I read it when I was at high school in the early 80s was The Glory Jumpers (1961) by Delano Stagg which stood out from fellow Pulp novels by the author’s attempt to realistically depict combat rather than the blood-and-guts battle-porn that lesser writers indulged in. I recently tracked down a copy and re-read it. Despite my advanced age, I was still impressed with it. It is certainly no great work of literature but it has the flavour of realism and after doing a little research on the net, I discovered that Delano Stagg was a pseudonym of two authors who actually served in WW2. The book features a similar scenario to Spielberg’s movie “Saving Private Ryan”: an outnumbered group of Americans has to defend a Norman village from an overwhelming force of Germans. Yet, despite the blood-and-thunder of the film, I found Stagg’s novel more convincing and more believable in its portrayal of battle. In the latter, not every G..I is an expert marksman, there is no hand-to-hand fighting (in modern warfare, enemy soldiers seldom get that close) and most casualties are caused by artillery.
Inspired by my re-discovery of Stagg’s little novel, I dug out another forgotten war novel from my youth: Ragged Regiment (1981) by George Marion. I first read this when I was 17, only six years after this novel was published. My original copy was lost so when I say “dug out,” I meant hunting down another paperback copy on eBay. I wish I could explain my fascination with obscure war fiction and why it has grown in the past ten years. Perhaps I like the idea that at least some-one is reading the labours of some long-forgotten author. Or maybe its resentment that some real gems of the genre have been allowed to lie neglected in dusty obscurity while a few famous (and in my opinion, over-rated) examples like All Quiet on the Western Front have never been out of print.
George Marion Cole (1927-2008) was an engineer and lawyer who lived most of his life in Seattle. Drafted into the US army in 1945, he arrived in Europe after VE Day and he spent a period in post-war Germany as a soldier in the Allied forces of occupation. During this time, he learnt to speak fluent German and developed an enthusiasm for the art and literature of that nation. Marion was also a keen writer and he wrote five manuscripts but only one — Ragged Regiment — was published.
Let’s get one thing clear. Ragged Regiment is not a great novel. In a literary sense, the writing is competent but routine. But to be fair to the author, I doubt Marion intended it to be. There is nothing pretentious or even ambitious about this novel. The only literary reference is the title: the phrase “Ragged Regiment” appears in Shakespeare via the character Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1. Having been published in 1981, Marion’s novel appeared long after the classic Pulp era of the 40s and 50s. Indeed, the late author might have been offended by my suggestion that his book has any link to that genre at all. But in my opinion, it bears similarities through its straightforward, unpretentious style and the ease of its consumption by the reader. However, Marion’s novel retains an interest for me because of its down-to-earth naturalism. That is the point at which this novel parts company with most Pulp war novels, through its focus on the everyday mundane life of a frontline soldier.
When one thinks about most of the popular portrayals of WW2, be it HBO’s Band of Brothers or screen games like Call of Duty, the focus has been on the men at the sharpest tip of the sharp end. Any and every battle is furious, relentless, bloody and vital. Everybody fights hard and many do not survive.
What makes Ragged Regiment stand out from this crowd is that it takes the opposite approach. The characters in the novel are rear echelon US army engineers who have spent the latter half of 1944 pulling non-combat duty in France, repairing roads and building bridges behind the lines. The central character, PFC Stan Nilson, has had a soft existence, running a PX store at a rear-line base. At the beginning of the Ardennes Offensive (the so-called “Battle of the Bulge“) in the freezing cold of December 1944, the regiment’s sheltered life comes to an abrupt end when they are sent into the lines to serve as riflemen.
Had this been a standard war novel of the Pulp era, or if it was the scenario of a more recent war movie, the regiment would end up fighting some epic, costly battle, having to defend a vital position such as a bridge or crossroads, which would escalate into a bloody finale. Alas, any reader expecting such from this novel is going to be disappointed. The engineers are assigned a sector to hold but it is on the fringes of the main battle. There is no grand attack by the enemy, no massed armour, no hordes of German infantry. This is a quieter sector that appears frozen by stalemate. The Germans do not launch major assaults; instead they probe the US lines, sending out patrols or occasional raiding parties. Deaths do occur — quite frequently but in a random fashion: a mortar round or sniper shot, a case of frost-bite, an accident, a friendly-fire incident. The engineers have no idea of what is happening in other sectors and simply have to do their best to survive and to hold the line.
What I like about this novel is its unstated quality which greatly enhances its’ realism. Instead of epic battles, we get to see the mundane concerns of the frontline soldier, where the cold, damp and lack of sleep are as dangerous enemies as the Germans. The novel devotes a lot of space to the simple problems a soldier encounters everyday- how to stay warm, how to keep your feet dry, how to rig up adequate communications, how to rotate shifts in the lines so everyone gets an equal chance at sleep. The novel shows vividly how fatigue can wear down a soldier’s reserves of strength as much as actual combat. One exhausted soldier, ordered to pull a second shift in the lines before he has had any rest, draws his rifle at his hated platoon sergeant and is barely restrained in time by some of his buddies.
Close encounters with the enemy are rare. Stan Nilson only has one such meeting and he kills his opponent in a very un-heroic, un-Hollywood fashion, shooting the German in the back. Even that is a Pyrrhic victory as the German has already killed two of Nilson’s friends beforehand. After that incident:
For the next three nights Stan went about his duties in a state of mental and physical numbness. He thought about Andy and the young German whose body he had riddled with half a drum of slugs. The images in his mind were at times clear and vivid, at other moments distant and misty. But always they were there. He shunned conversation and avoided company. It irritated him to see a hint of laughter or pleasure in the other men. Somehow it reminded him of what he was not and never again could be.
The severe stress of existing in a war zone is portrayed well but the novel also highlights the vital relief a soldier can derive from even a simple pleasure, like finally getting some hot water to shave in:
Stan knelt down beside the helmet, grabbed what was left of his bar of soap and began lathering his face. His concentration on the excruciating sense of pleasure flowing into his skin from the hot water was total and absolute. If he ever saw a bathtub again, he would soak in it forever.
Despite its lack of any artistic merit, the low-key restraint of this war novel marks it out as unusual, making a refreshing alternative to the more bombastic depictions of warfare that we normally receive.
This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill ([email protected]).
Ragged Regiment, by George Marion New York: Tower Books London: Star Books
For an obscure novelist, Michael Whitney Straight (1916- 2004) had an extraordinary life and career. A member of a distinguished family, his maternal grandfather was William C. Whitney, Secretary of the US Navy in the late 1800s, his mother was Dorothy Whitney, the famous philanthropist and his father William (who died of Spanish Flu in 1918 when Michael was only two) was a noted investment banker. Michael’s brother Whitney was a Grand Prix driver and one of the few American pilots to fly in the Battle of Britain and his sister Beatrice was an Oscar-winning actress.
Michael studied at Cambridge University, England during the mid-1930s and while there, he joined the Communist Party, became an associate of the “Cambridge Five” ring of British spies, was recruited into the KGB as an agent. Straight, despite his surname, was a bisexual and while at Cambridge, he had a brief love affair with English undergraduate Anthony Blunt who spied for the Soviets for many years and who later became custodian of the Royal Family’s art collection.
In 1937, Straight returned to the US and got a job in the Department of the Interior and even served as President Roosevelt’s speech-writer. During this period, he secretly had regular meetings with a Soviet agent. In the Second World War, Straight served as a B-17 pilot and after the war, he took over as publisher of New Republic magazine. In 1963, while applying for a public service job in Washington DC, Straight confessed about his Communist past and his Cambridge connections- revelations that would indirectly lead to the exposure of Blunt (although that man wasn’t publicly unveiled as a spy until 1979). Straight was married three times and fathered eight children. Even in his choice of wives, he seemed able to make connections- his second wife Nina was the half-sister of Gore Vidal and stepsister of Jackie Onassis.
Somehow during all this, Straight found time to embark on a career as a novelist after he left his job at the New Republic in the late Fifties. This proved to be perhaps less fruitful than Straight hoped as his output was limited to only three novels, a small handful of non-fiction works and a two-volume memoir (one part of which was published posthumously). Regarding his novels, his third one, Happy and Hopeless (1979) was a romance set in the White House during the Kennedy Presidency, a book that Straight had to self-publish. The other two were, perhaps surprisingly, both historical novels, both set in the Old West during the Plains Wars between the US Army and the Native Americans, Carrington (1960) and A Very Small Remnant (1963).
Carrington is set in Wyoming in the winter of 1866 during the early years of the Plains Wars. The title character is a true-life person, Lt Colonel Henry B. Carrington who commanded Fort Phil Kearny during the war against Red Cloud of the Sioux Nation. Growing tensions and a series of clashes led to the infamous Fetterman Massacre on December 21, 1866 in which over eighty US soldiers were lured, four miles from the Fort, into an ambush by over 1,500 Sioux and the entire force, including its commander, Captain William J. Fetterman, was wiped out. Carrington was blamed for the disaster, largely due to his unpopularity with many of his men and the perceived timidity and reluctance that he displayed during his leadership at the Fort. A later court of inquiry cleared him but his reputation and his army career was in ruins.
The most striking thing about this novel is that, considering the time it was written (1960) and the colourful life of its author, its style is curiously old-fashioned. Straight remains highly respectful of the historical realities of the era in which the book is set. Many historical novels and films often reflect more about the times in which they were written or made than how much they reveal about the times in which they attempt to portray. Film Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Little Big Man (1970) arguably tell us more about the cultural and political upheavals of the Sixties than they do about the actual West. And Michael Blake’s 1988 novel Dances With Wolves is more a reflection on late 20th century New Age’s embrace of Native American mysticism than a convincing portrayal of the Frontier Wars.
The novel portrays Carrington in a sympathetic light but not idealised nor in total favourable terms. The officer that emerges here is initially a quietly confident man but soon revealed to be strickened with in-securities and a high-strung sensitivity to criticism. It reminded me of the central character in James Salter’s 1956 novel The Hunters, now recognised as a minor classic and possibly the only novel of any literary merit to emerge from the Korean War. In Salter’s book, the leading character is a pilot who arrives at his Air-Force unit in Korea determined to make his mark. But his own inner vulnerabilities, combined with poor luck and his own in-ability to assert his place among others, prevent him from achieving the success he desires. As well as his own private demons, he has to contend with a living one, in the form of an arrogant, brash younger pilot who rapidly gains the popularity, tally of MiGs and favour with senior officers that the eludes the former.
In Straight’s novel, Colonel Carrington is an idealist, favourably disposed to the Indians. The novel illustrates his thoughts as he lies awake just before dawn:
The Indians, passing under the window. That broken-down chieftain, slumped like a sack of meal over his broken-down pony. A beggar in the land of his fathers. And we in the army are substantially to blame. What a succession of men we sent to meet with them, to make peace! Grattan, that Irish bully out of West Point, who touched off the raids by his brutality. Chivington, who butchered Black Kettle’s band, men, women, and children, in the name of the Almighty. And last year those two incompetents Connor and Cole, marching up the Powder River without a moment of study or preparation, and crawling back, defeated and half dead.
Carrington is confident he can bring about a successful and enduring peace treaty with the Sioux. Again the reader hears his inner thoughts, ‘I shall meet all the Chiefs at Laramie; meet them in a spirit of charity and godd-will; understanding in place of arrogance, resolution in place of bluster; they will respond. No more the wrathful shock of iron arms.’
Within the first handful of pages, the reader learns that not only is the Colonel a staunch idealist with a firm self-belief, he is also insufferably vain. ‘The West is no place for glory hunters. Magnanimity is needed there; and tact; skill in engineering; administrative ability; a knowledge of resources; yes, and a sense of history in representing the President before the Indian nations. All qualities that I bring to the command; there isn’t an officer in the regular Army as well qualified as I am to carry the flag into Indian country.’
The flowery workings of Carrington’s inner musings are soon brought down a peg or two once he arrives at Fort Kearny. The novel depicts the subsequent chain of events from a number of other character’s perspectives, including junior officers, NCOs, privates and officer’s wives (the latter also living at the Fort). Carrington’s confident demeanour slowly but steadily peels away as the novel progresses. His self-belief is fragile and is whittled away by the grumblings of his subordinates who prefer to hate the Indians and who long to fight them. Carrington wants to succeed, he wants to make a lasting peace with the Sioux. But he cannot cope with the unexpected, cannot adapt to unforeseen obstacles.
The succession of meetings with Chiefs of the Sioux, and later their rivals, the Cheyenne, produce no worthwhile gains. Discipline and morale at the Fort goes on the decline, while the rank-and-file’s hatred of the Indians steadily grows, threatening to explode. In one scene, an meagre Thanksgiving dinner is interrupted by the mental collapse of the Carrington family’s African-American servant Dennis:
In the kitchen, the banging grew louder and louder until it sounded as though the stove would break apart. ‘Not so loud, Dennis!’ they called, and when he kept on they peered through the kitchen door. The old man was kneeling by the stove and battering it with his head.
Carrington has the desire to control the events unfolding around him, but not the strength. The Colonel wants to control the river but is instead carried along by its currents. Like the pilot in The Hunters, Carrington ultimately has to face up to a more dynamic rival, in the form of newly arrived Captain Fetterman. The latter is younger, stronger, more determined, more flamboyant, a man who dominates whichever room he enters, an Alpha male that easily undermines Carrington’s unsteady authority. Fetterman soon gains the men’s respect and popularity while Carrington looks more isolated and out of his depth with each passing day. And Fetterman is spoiling for a fight:
Fetterman looked across the valley. He asked: ‘What lies beyond that ridge?’
‘Indians! Two thousand warriors, waiting for you!’
‘Please God,’ Fetterman said, ‘they won’t have to wait long!’
As I already mentioned, this novel’s style borrows from Westerns of the 1920s and 30s, with traits of ‘Hard-Boiled’ crime fiction thrown in. The dialogue between characters tends to be sparse and blunt in a modern-style. Yet in other parts of the novel, the windy inner-musings of some of the characters read like literature of the 19th century.
The fore-mentioned Fetterman Massacre is not depicted in the novel, the reader is instead shown its aftermath when Carrington leads a party to cautiously investigate what happened to Fetterman’s command.
An outcropping of grey boulders marked the northern end of the slope. Ten Indian ponies were sprawled around it; the snow was stained with the blood of scores of braves. There, Carrington judged, the infantry had paused- only to retreat again as the cavalry swept past. But four old soldiers who knew the folly of retreat and the two frontiersmen had settled among the boulders and fought on.
Against such fighters the Sioux had taken no chances upon any encounter in the world to come. The first of the frontiersmen lay over a rock, his eyes beside him, the second was pierced by a hundred arrows. Griffin’s tendons were sliced. Cullinane had no hands or feet. O’Gara’s chest had been ripped open and his heart taken; he stared past the Colonel with a wry smile.
Carrington was unable to stop Fetterman’s foolhardy rush into the ambush. Positioned at the edge of the battle, Carrington is frozen with in-decision. He could muse on his future remembrance in the annals of history, but Carrington could not think nor act on his feet in the harsh, fast-moving present.
The Native Americans, when they fight, fight back hard and without mercy. Yet the author, like the central character, is respectful to them. Sadly, the depiction of the Sioux and Cheyenne Chiefs at the various peace-talks is the least convincing aspect of the novel. Straight’s attempts at the Native’s dialogue reads like the standard mode of Indian Chief speech from any Western of the 40s or 50s. ‘White man speaks with forked tongue’ was about the only stock phrase missing.
Straight’s skills as a novelist were limited. In technical terms, there is nothing innovative about this novel. Indeed, for a novel written at the beginning of the Sixties, it is curiously derivative of the forms and recipes set by Westerns of prior decades. However it is an interesting portrait of a man clearly out of his depth, a self-glorifying idealist who planned for greatness but his own ego prevented his feet from being on the ground long enough to understand and adapt to the realities of what lay in front of him.
This is a guest post generously contributed by Peter Hill ([email protected]).
Carrington, by Michael Straight New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966
