“For the want of a nail….” Or, in the case of Denis Mackail’s 1932 novel, David’s Day, for the want of a Mrs. Bowker. Mrs. Bowker is the day woman whose duties, among other things, is to fix breakfast for Mr. Albert Coffin of number 67 Pocklington Road, one of the tens of thousands of row houses thrown up in the suburbs of London just after the First World War.
There is nothing special about number 67, like its neighbors “built like blazes with everything that would more or less hold together”: “mass-produced metal casements and unseasoned joists and unimaginably flimsy doors’; “cheap, crumbling bricks with a kind of grey wash which, temporarily at any rate, hid most of the flaws.” Neither is there anything special about Mr. Coffin, a clerk at Hamhurst’s department store.
But he is a creature of habit, so when Mrs. Bowker fails to turn up one morning, Mr. Coffin’s day is set ever so slightly askew. He snaps at his wife, refuses to rush his breakfast, and arrives at the train station just a moment too late to catch his train. Never in five years had he missed his train. He hesitates, then decides to take the next one, even though it ran the other way round the London loop.
This decision puts him in the crowd rushing for buses and the Tube just in time to bump into a young woman hurrying in the same direction. Their fleeting encounter catches the eye of a smooth operator named Harry Jackson, who steps forward to introduce himself as a long-forgotten acquaintance. Harry charms Gladys — upset at running late for work — into a cab wherein she quickly discovers that Harry has a much different destination in mind.
Within less than an hour, Harry Jackson (real name Jack Harrison) is arrested for an outstanding theft warrant, Gladys quits her job, a City schemer is tipped into financial ruin, and one Lord Midhurst, “the stupidest of a dull lot” but a man of innate loyalty, assures himself of continued employment as a figurehead on various corporate boards.
With each chapter, Mackail sets character caroming off character, producing effects ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some fall in love, some fall in ruin, some take a step up the social ladder, some take a tumble down. An ardent suitor arrives to woo an actress just moments before the start of her West End show’s dress rehearsal, triggering an on-stage disaster that’s a two-page masterpiece of comic writing, the sort of thing that Michael Frayn later constructed his play “Noises Off” from: spontaneous concatenated catastrophes only work when assembled with the precision of Swiss clockworks.
Denis Mackail, 1939, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
From time to time, Mackail doubts his own ability to keep his clock ticking. “Would the chain break off here, just because a manager did or didn’t boast, or because he did or didn’t so something with his fingers?” And indeed, there are moments when the links grow tenuous, when the pace of this day of orchestrated chaos slows and the shadow of entropy creeps over the scene.
Fortunately, if Mackail’s stage direction is occasionally less than flawless, these flaws are offset by his wonderfully shrewd commentary. His is an omniscient narrator wise but not cynical about mankind’s fallibility. Throughout the book, as he moves his characters around at a usually frenzied speed, he still has time to insert his editorial asides: “The true Bright Young Person always practices with an eye, if not an eye and a half, on the crowd, and commits none of her ingenious or ingenuous excesses without making pretty certain that the Daily Dash or the Evening Branch shall here of it….”
He speculates on the nature of fame and success, asking questions we’re still grappling with today. “Is it more successful to have an immense reputation built on sand, or a minute reputation founded on rock?” Mackail makes no attempt to answer them, however. He understood that the joke is entirely about our eternally fruitless efforts to do so.
And as he continues to conduct his particles through their dance of chance encounters, he somehow manages to bring us back to Mr. Coffin, who makes it back to number 67 Pocklington Road at his usual time and by his usual train, contrite for his morning’s angry words to his wife and his angry thoughts about the missing Mrs. Bowker.
But where in all this is David, whose day this is? Well, let’s just say that Mackail has arranged things in such a way that the book ends on a note that is nothing less than sublime.
When David’s Day was first published, reviewers somehow missed the book’s essence. The Times called the book just “another of those amplified personal columns in which Mr. Denis Mackail specializes.” The New York Times judged it “a series of episodes rather than a novel.” They were both wrong: this is pure entertainment, nothing less. Don’t try to take it apart and figure out how the mechanism works: just enjoy how delightfully it marks the passing time.
David’s Day, by Denis Mackail London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932 Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932
Stella Gibbons’s first novel Cold Comfort Farm still resonates, if vaguely, in the popular mind. “Wasn’t there a movie?” Or, “didn’t I see that on TV?” In England, “something nasty in the woodshed,” the phrase invoked by the supposedly mad Aunt Ada Starkadder, proprietress of the farm, is still a cultural touchstone almost 90 years after the book was first published.
But as wonderful a satiric comic masterpiece as Cold Comfort is, the dozen or so of Stella Gibbons’s later novels that I have read are just as — if not more — rewarding because they allow a deeper experience of Gibbons’s greatest literary character: herself.
That is not to say that she wrote the same book again and again, as so often happens with writers who strike the jackpot with their first published work; rather, she creates in each book a different prism (and sometimes more than one) through which she reveals different aspects of herself. To read multiple Stella Gibbons novels is to get to know her better and better, and she is a very satisfactory companion.
She was born in 1902, the first of three children of a quiet and sweet mother who died suddenly when Stella was in her 20s and a volatile father of Irish extraction, a “bad man, but a good doctor” (as she described a character thought to be based on him). Her childhood home life was marked by her father’s rages fueled by his unsatisfied career ambitions. In his 1998 biography, Out of the Woodshed: the Life of Stella Gibbons (Bloomsbury), Stella’s nephew Reggie Oliver quotes a letter from Stella’s daughter Laura (his cousin):
Every few weeks it was ‘That name is not mentioned in this house,’ with an accompanying shudder and pursed lips, as one or other member of the family indulged in some escapade of which the other disapproved. Consequently, sides were taken….
Stella was old enough to be affected by the experience of two world wars and the accompanying changes in British culture and society, as well as by the concomitant destruction of the English countryside and the rise of highways and car culture, all of which bothered her greatly.
Well-educated herself, and a writer who honed her skills on more than 10 years of meeting newspaper deadlines, she lets slip literary references easily understood by any conventionally educated English school graduate; she asserts unapologetically the inherent differences between men and women, the value of marriage and the power of beauty–male and female; money is usually on people’s minds, and she shows she knows how to live on meager earnings. She values tidiness and order, well-turned fashions, and sensitivity to children.
That catalog of subjects and attitudes could lead one to expect a stuffy, garrulous, old-fashioned storyteller. Instead, she takes the dross of mundane lives and spins it into fairy tales that are also down to earth. She peoples her novels with men and women whose aspirations have run aground, but who inhabit a world of metaphysical rebalancings and animistic forces that permit them some escape.
——
Cover of 1935 edition of Bassett.
For the purposes of this essay, I am drawing on only two novels, Bassett (1933) and The Woods in Winter(1970). They come near the start and end of her writing career. And they offer the clearest example of characters that reflect herself.
Bassett was the “conventional” book she was contractually obligated to write in order to convince her publisher to take Cold Comfort. The Woods in Winterwas the last book she wrote for publication, though two other novels appeared posthumously.
Bassett opens with a typically succinct Gibbons observation:
There is a simplicity which comes from living too much in the world, as well as a simplicity which comes from living out of the world.
Hilda Baker belongs to the latter group. She is one of Gibbons’s shabby heroines of no great intellectual shakes or culture, but still worth knowing better. “Sensitive and intelligent people will refuse to believe that Miss Baker could be happy. However, Miss Baker was happy.”
She is also a beneficiary of one of those coincidences Stella regularly employs: Miss Baker (who has no living relatives) has suddenly inherited 200 pounds from a distant uncle. Added to her 180 pounds of savings from her paltry salary at a paper pattern office, she is faced with a dilemma of what to do with so much money. She fears it will “Dribble Away” (Gibbons’s caps) unless she makes a plan.
She responds to an advertisement soliciting “another lady, with some capital” to invest in converting a faded country estate to a boarding house. The response, from a Miss Eleanor Amy Padsoe, is postmarked “Bassett.”
And so we are off.
The letter from Miss Padsoe leaves Miss Baker “in some bewilderment,” and indeed, it is a masterpiece of flighty asides and unintelligible confidences. However, Hilda decides to visit. Once in the village, she accepts a ride from a handsome young man in a smart roadster, a silent girl at his side.
Miss Baker learns that the girl is Queenie Catton, another of Stella’s unlikely heroines and another partial stand-in for the author herself. Raised in a loud, activist socialist household, Queenie doesn’t fit in. She is, as her family admits, “our quiet one….So far she had effortlessly resisted all attempts to make her be anything…”
When Miss Padsoe and Miss Baker eventually meet, it does not start well. They are each horrified by the other, but of course do not say so. They eventually get along, and the flowering of their unlikely friendship is a pleasure to behold.
The young man who gives Miss Baker the ride is George Shelling, half of a cold-blooded aristocratic brother-sister duo who dream up sophisticated amusements while living in the country with their widowed mother. According to Reggie Oliver, Stella admitted she modeled the Shelling menage on the family of the man who ended their engagement; he, too, lived with his sister and mother and traveled in the “free love” set.
Queenie is the bridge between these two storylines as the hired helper to Mrs. Shelling and a loyal supporter of the two Misses.
In contrast to the louche brother and sister, Miss Padsoe and Baker pursue simple pleasures with beneficial results. “At eight-thirty precisely the two ladies, washed, dressed and trim … sat down to their eggs or sardines…. The afternoon was passed in more washing up and in cutting bread and butter for tea at half-past four, and then at half-past six it was time to begin preparing for supper at half-past seven. By ten … they ate cocoa and cake like schoolgirls, and fell into bed at eleven, drunk with unaccustomed work, and slept all night.”
In typical Gibbons fashion, Bassett climaxes in a whirlwind of loose ends being tidied up in a way that is satisfying but not always expected.
Cover of the first edition of The Woods in Winter.
The Woods in Winter, the last novel Gibbons wrote for publication, seems an intentional bookend to Bassett and an autobiographical coda. She sets it in roughly the same period as Bassett , the early 30s. The early action takes place in two settings familiar to her, the seamy precincts of the North London of her girlhood and Hampstead Heath, where she lived much of her adult life.
Its beginning is once-upon-a-time-ish: “Some forty years ago, there used to be in North London a place called St. Philip’s Square…. It was not a true square, but a rectangle, open at one end to a main road, along which trams and buses ran up to Hampstead Heath; a drab yet swarming place….”
As in Bassett , Gibbons creates two characters far apart in social standing and education but reflecting two aspects of herself: Helen Green, the young aspiring poet (Gibbons’s first book was a collection of poems, favorably viewed by important figures of the time), and Ivy Gover, the old fabulist.
Helen is well-educated and moves in high-brow Bohemian circles but is not quite a part of them; Ivy is a barely literate char who has gypsy-like powers and a proletarian sureness of where she stands (she always thinks of Helen as “Miss Green”). Ivy and Helen are connected by the fact that Helen employs Ivy to clean the small, dark cottage she is renting from a mother of a friend of hers; it’s located in the Vale of Health, the same stretch of Hampstead Heath that Gibbons lived in.
Again, as in Bassett , a bit of luck visits a penurious city-dwelling lower-class female of a certain age. Ivy’s great-uncle, whom she hasn’t seen since her girlhood, bequeaths his rundown cottage in the country near where Ivy was born and where she was sent to char for the gentry at age 11.
For Ivy, the Square is a hectic place: “The Square simmered in the early autumn plague of heat, sending up its shrieks and shouts and heavy footsteps to a pair of small ears that carried two beads of heavy gold, chased with a design that looked ancient, on delicate lobes.” In contrast, Helen looks out on “a prospect very different…. a quiet little street, made up of grey pavement and a long brown wood fence, above which looked the innocent head of a may tree whose berries were just beginning to redden, all lit faintly by the gold of the ascending moon. A bird was singing, far off in the dark woods of the Heath–perhaps even a nightingale–anyway, it was a heartbreaking sound, and Helen thought that she was exceedingly unhappy.”
Ivy, suspicious of the lawyer’s big words, goes to Helen to have her read the letter about the bequest. Helen reassures Ivy that the offer is valid and that she is lucky to have it.
By the time she wrote The Woods in Winter, Gibbons had perfected the technique of dueling interior and exterior dialogs, where each participant is saying what they don’t think and thinking what they don’t say, as in this exchange between Ivy and Miss Green:
“Just think, Ivy. It’s beautiful country there. I … know it well…”
Ivy was not interested in what Miss Green knew.
This being a Stella Gibbons novel, there are a number of pairings both theoretical and actual and various courtships, not all successful. Marriage is one of Stella’s interests. Though she shows sympathy for those who take a more transactional approach, she comes down on the side of marrying for love. In this novel, there are two such marriages by its end.
Of Helen and Ivy, Ivy is the more compelling character. Here she is in her first full night in the cottage, with her dog Neb. Ivy has just said farewell to a friend of her late husband who has delivered her mattress in his van and put it in the bedroom upstairs. Just before he takes his final leave, he suggests she air it out.
Ivy ran up. Up the stairs she raced, light as a leaf, with Neb after her, and in a minute down tumbled her mattress, almost into the fire … straightening it with determined kicks from her sturdy small boot. “Airin’! It don’t need no airin’, do it, beauty?…”
The story never leaves the country setting once Ivy is settled there. The characters Stella has created play out their dances under her masterful direction.
Her final chapter brings us to the present of 1970, as Stella is entering the winter of her life (she was 68 when it was published). Helen makes a final visit to the quaint village near the woods of the title. The High Street of Nethersham is now a tangle of automobile traffic, rooftop television antennas and suburban villas.
Helen escapes the traffic and noise to walk to the hilltop demesne of the old Lord (long dead). Helen encounters one of her friends from the old days and asks about the characters whose fates we do not know. Gibbons writes, “Helen had not quite yet come to that age when one hesitates to ask after a contemporary not seen for years. But she was one the edge of it.”
Helen takes one last look at the Lord’s hill and its beeches as she heads toward “the flat, beetle-like tops of the cars, jerking, stopping, jerking, stopping, behind the hedges whose lower branches were clotted with litter and grey with dust.
There they stood, high above her and far away, solemn and still in the waning fire of sunset; towers and castles of rustling green; benign father-gods of the woods; filled with their gently-stirring life in the blue air of summer or roaring slowly in winter’s gales….
The last passage is a word-for-word reprise of Helen’s private musings some 40 years earlier when she proffered her congratulations to Ivy on her good fortune in inheriting the cottage (which Ivy rejected silently). This constancy of Helen’s attitudes within the span of the 40-year narrative is matched by Gibbons’s constancy in her outlook over the nearly 40 years that separate these novels; this is what makes Gibbons’s appeal timeless, just like a fairy tale.
In her monumental reference work, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (Pantheon, New York.1976), Katharine Briggs notes that the term “fairy” is relatively recent and is derived from “the classical three Fates … supernatural ladies who directed the destiny of men ….” Stella and her fictional stand-ins were deeply concerned with getting other people’s lives properly sorted out and in conformance with Gibbons’s deeply felt morality. Following her efforts over the decades is a source of pleasure.
Jean Cocteau once called Victor Hugo’s Choses Vues (Things Seen), the posthumously published collection of notes the poet and novelist collected throughout his lifetime in Paris, “the only great classic of journalism.” Yet it’s never been fully translated into English.
When the book was first published in 1887, the English magazine Booklore informed its readers that it “contains some excellent reading”:
The poet’s observation was of the keenest and most comprehensive nature, and many details which to some might have seemed trivial, were to him indications of possible important events which might or might not lie beyond. Victor Hugo was ever on the look-out for “straws” wherewith to gauge the wind, and long habit in this practice had invested his organ of sight with microscopical powers.
George Routledge and Sons rushed out a two-volume uncredited translation of Choses Vues the same year, including the full contents of the French first edition.
Two volume 1887 Routledge edition of Things Seen.
The first story published in both editions was that of the decline and death of the diplomat Talleyrand, the architect of Napoleon’s undoing at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. By the time of his death, however, Talleyrand had become something of a forgotten oddity in Paris. Hugo reported on Talleyrand’s ignominious embalming:
This man, who possibly might have been a match for Machiavelli had he lived a century or two eailier, had the misfortune to die on the 17th of May, 1838. The doctors came and embalmed the body, and in order to do so Egyptian fashion, they drew the entrails from the side and the brains from the skull. This done, they nailed the mummy down in a coffin lined with white satin, and went away, leaving on the table the brains — those brains which had thought so many things, inspired so many men, built so many edifices, led two revolutions, deceived twenty kings, and kept the world within bound. When the doctors left, a footman entered and saw what they had forgotten. He suddenly remembered that there was a drain in the street outside; so off he went and threw the brains into it.
The centerpiece of Choses Vues is Hugo’s account of the revolution of 1848 as he witnessed it in the streets of Paris. This accounts for over half the length of the first edition and has often been cited as the most accurate first-hand report.
Four volume edition of Choses vues, edited by Hubert Juin.
It was, however, just a fraction of the full set of notes that Hugo left behind. It was not until nearly 100 years after the first edition of Choses Vues that a complete version, edited by the critic and novelist Hubert Juin, was published. Juin’s edition filled four volumes and represented over 1,000 pages — three times the length of the 1887 edition.
As Graham Robb admitted in his 1997 biography of Hugo, “This vast collection of personal and historical anecdotes is usually pillaged, as it is in this biography, for its illustrative gems.” But, Robb argued, it deserved to be considered as a composition in its own right — indeed, that it may represent his best work: “a fragmented view of what his work might have become without the all-consuming desire to be a financial success and the owner of a coherent philosophy.”
Another Hugo biographer, Andre Maurois, agreed. Hugo had two distinct styles, he wrote: “one of which Sainte-Beuve said he could never shed ‘his gaudiness, his pomposo‘; and the other, of Choses vues “remained that of the perfect reporter.” An early critic, Ernest William Henley, felt that Hugo the reporter was a relevation for those familiar with his pomposo:
When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to be no gaudier than his neighbours?
Robb suggests that Hugo’s obsession with fitting his creations into preconceived designs undermined the truth inherent in his less artful reportage. “Without the need to make all the data point in the same direction, Hugo could have gone on collecting information ad infinitum, spontaneously generating whole libraries of text like one of those super-efficient organisms he found so engrossing.”
And gather he could. Reading Choses vues in the 1950s, the Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton expressed his awe at Hugo’s ability to take in details: “Hugo has the capacity to record like a tape machine, a memory like that of the Polynesians or of Scotland Yard!” Aldous Huxley considered Hugo “that consumate journalist.”
Victor Hugo in 1848.
As far as I can determine, no one has tried to update or expand Routledge’s anonymous 1887 English translation. Which is a shame, for it’s clear that there are many things still to be revealed to English readers. Joanna Richardson, another Hugo biographer, notes that the full edition includes, for example, nine separate “erotic entries” for September 1871. The Routledge edition also skips almost everything Hugo wrote about the Franco-Prussian War.
Illustration of Leon Gambetta’s escape by balloon, Paris, 7 October 1870.
This account of the departure by balloon of the escape of Léon Gambetta during the siege of Paris in 1870, for example, which was quoted in Richard Holmes’ Falling Upwards:
There were whispers running through the crowd: “Gambetta’s going to leave! Gambetta’s going to leave!” And there, in a thick overcoat, under an otter-fur cap, near the yellow balloon in a huddle ofmen, I caught sight of Gambetta. He was sitting on the pavement and pulling on fur-lined boots.
He had a leather bag slung across his shoulders. He took it off, clambered into the balloon basket, and a young man, the aeronaut, tied the bag into the rigging above Gambetta’s head. It was 10.30, a fine day, a slight southerly wind, a gentle autumn sun. Suddenly the yellow balloon took off carrying three men, one of them Gambetta. Then the white balloon, also carrying three men, one of them waving a large tricolour flag. Under Gambetta’s balloon was a small tricolour pennant. There were cries of “Vive la Republique!”
Charles-Henri Sanson and the guillotine.
The Routledge edition does, however, include this early example of dark tourism, from a visit to the home of Charles-Henri Sanson, the chief executioner to both King Louis XVI and the first French republic (for which he guillotined his former employer):
One day an English family, consisting of a father, mother, and three lovely blonde daughters arrived. Their aim was to see the guillotine….
The blade was pulled up and released several times at the request of the young girls. One of them, the youngest and the prettiest was not satisfied, however. She asked the bourreau to give her a detailed description of the procedure known as la toilette des condamnes. She still wasn’t satisfied. Finally she turned to the bourreau [executioner].
“Monsieur Sanson?” she said timidly.
“Mademoiselle?” said the bourreau.
“What do you do when a man is on the scaffold? How do you tie him down?”
The bourreau explained this dreadful procedure, and said to her: “We call it enfourner. [Literally, to put in the oven.]
“Well, Monsieur Sanson,” said the young girl, “I want you to put me in the oven.”
The bourreau winced. He protested. The young girl insisted. “I want to be able to say that I was tied down on that thing,” she said.
Sanson looked at her parents. They replied: “If that is what she wants, do it.”
He had to give in. The bourreau made the young miss sit down, he bound her legs together with rope, he tied her arms behind her back, he laid her on the bascule and buckled the leather strap around her body. He wanted to stop there.
“No, no, you haven’t finished,” she protested.
Sanson leveled the bascule, put the young girl’s head in the lunette, and closed its two halves together. Only then was she content.
Later, in telling the story, Sanson said, “I was waiting for the moment when she would say ‘You still haven’t finished. Let the blade fall.'”
Helen Bevington, who read an expanded French edition of Choses vues in the late 1960s, wrote admiringly of the book in her own journal, Along Came the Witch:
An appealing kind of writing in France, in a sense notation, is (or was?) choses vues. It is, of course, the title of a book by Victor Hugo, from which the name may come: things seen, noted because there they are to look at. In America we haven’t much taste for such writing. In prose we require plots and conflicts. In poetry we have little talent for gazing at the view.
Victor Hugo was a passionate observer, partial to death scenes. He had an appetite for extinction, a man sure to be on hand at the sound of a death rattle or the passing of a funeral procession. The Choses Vues contains many a moment of mortality, pictured with gusto — the funeral of Napoleon, the death of the Duke of Orleans, the funeral of Mademoiselle Mars, the death of Madame Adelaide, the passing of Balzac. At the final curtain Hugo was unfailing, an absorbed witness and notetaker.
Perhaps someone will take on the job of translating the full Hubert Juin edition of Choses vues and give English readers a chance to experience this classic of journalism. Until then, you can make do with the two Routledge volumes, which are available on the Internet Archive: Volume One; Volume Two.
Choses vues, by Victor Hugo Available from Gallimard in a two-volume edition based the 1980 Hubert Juin edition
Little Victims is not a good novel, but it is a fascinating one. When it was published in 1932, it earned Richard Rumbold the censure of the Roman Catholic Church for its open discussion of homosexuality in public schools and Oxford, but for today’s reader its far more interesting aspects relate to its psychological aspects — often apparently subconscious — and its glimpses into the lives of the trailing edge of the Bright Young Things of Evelyn Waugh’s youth.
It’s not a good novel because it’s shoddily assembled and emotionally overwrought. Rumbold purports to tell the story of Christopher Harmsworth as seen by one of his schoolmates and friends, but he also tossed in personal letters, first-person passages, and liberal use of an omniscient narrator. The story centers around the unhappy triangle of Christopher, his tyrannical and brutish father, and his high-strung, overaffectionate, and often unstable mother. When in contact with each other, these three compounds hover on the edge of an explosive reaction.
It’s clear to Christopher that his parents should never have married. Aside from money and a peerage, his mother’s family had nothing going for them and many things going against them:
Old Lord W__ was in the last stages of debauchery brought on by habitual drunkenness and constant sexual intercourse with common prostitutes during his frequent visits to London. His wife was in a lunatic asylum, and his eldest son had committed suicide for no apparent reason.
Since they did, the next worst thing they could have done was to have children. Unfortunately, his mother became pregnant soon after the wedding, and produced little Christopher, “the unfortunate victim of the muddleheadedness and idiotic notions of his forebears.”
In the race for the lion’s share of the blame for victimizing the boy, Christopher’s mother is the clear winner. She was overly affectionate. “As thousands of men were being slaughtered in the mud of Flanders,”
She suckled his lips and gave him a thousand kisses, which were her husband’s due; she slept next his bed, and in the morning he was brought into hers, and she cuddled him between the sheets. She petted him, she took him everywhere, she spoilt him. She called him “dearest” and “darling” and “sweetest,” and held him up to everybody to be admired. It was not affection, it was passion.
No wonder, then, when Colonel Harmsworth decides to send Christopher off to boarding school at 14, one leg of the triangle is severed completely: “From that moment, Christopher took a violent dislike to his father, and continued to dislike him for the rest of his life.”
Sheltered and innocent, Christopher is ill-prepared for the realities of his public school: “Homosexuality was rife there, not only among the boys themselves, but between the masters and the boys.” To Rumbold’s somewhat self-righteous narrator, “unless you are a fool or a saint it is impossible to live in a community of perverts without becoming aware of and suspectible to its practices.” In his eyes, the young man left the school four years later accustomed to thinking of homosexuality as “the most prevalent and natural of sex manifestations.”
Going up to Oxford doesn’t improve the situation. Inspecting his tutor’s bookshelves, Christopher spots, hidden behind a set of Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic such titles as Sexual Physiology, Advice to Young Men and Sexual Life in Ancient Greece. Not long after settling into his digs, Christopher is visited by a fop in a blue silk shirt and carrying an ebony walking stick who invites him to a meeting of the Sitwell Society: “Yes — Edith and Osbert and Sache; they come down and speak every term.”
Christopher attempts to set himself on the upright path with a heartfelt address on socialism to the Oxford Union, only to see that “Already he was marked, stamped — as a pervert, and he would never be able to live it down.” He dons his mantle of victimhood with little resistance. After all, “the system’s to blame — that bloody system, which tries to educate you according to its absurd standards and perverts your sensibilities in the process.”
By his third year, the bright, healthy young man has a grey complection, skin roughened from “the unrelieved application of cheap cosmetics.” His bedroom as the appearance of “an untidy beauty parlor.” He spends most of his time in the company of the likes of Chum Price, a Brian Howard-like figure of extreme aestheticism who proclaims his hobby as “rescuing pretty boys.”
It’s at one of Chum’s parties that Christopher meets Henry Armitage, an older man from London who “seemed to know and to have known everybody worth knowing.” Henry takes the young man under his wing, inviting him to his London flat and for weekends at his country estate. Henry is married to Isabella Armitage, a writer and “one of London’s most renowned Lesbians.”
If the Armitages sound suspiciously like Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, there’s a reason. They are. Little Victims is a thinly-veiled roman-à-clef that takes Rumbold’s feelings toward his parents, friends, and lovers and winds them up to a fever pitch.
In real life, Rumbold became one of Harold’s protégés and lovers while at Oxford. While Christopher’s narrator portrays Henry Armitage as a sophisticated seducer, the reality is that Rumbold was a bit of an opportunist himself, particularly when it came to indulging in his fantasies. Nicolson would later write of Rumbold, “He had no control over his fantasies and day-dreams, over the alternating gusts of elation and melancholy that assailed him, over his almost incredible ignorance and therefore suspicion of the world around him.”
Rumbold published Little Victims while still at Oxford, and quickly faced the price of his youthful choices. When attending a service in the private chapel of the Old Palace in Oxford soon after its publication, Father Ronald Knox refused to offer him the Sacrament.
“When he reached me,” Rumbold later recalled, “He snatched the silver plate our of my hands and passed it one to the next person.” When Rumbold later wrote Knox demanding an explanation, Knox replied, “A few weeks ago I heard from the Archbishop of Birmingham that somebody had called attention to your novel, and asked if some public notice ought not to be taken of it.” The Archbishop told Knox that Rumbold ought not to be admitted to Communion. “The whole book is foul and offensive, and unless he withdraws it from circulation, and says he is sorry for having pbulished it, I do not see how we can allow him to receive Holy Communion.”
“I have written a very moral book,” Rumbold told reporters when news of the Archbishop’s decision became public. “I have attacked every kind of sexual licence, but my Archbishop, like most of the Catholic hierarcy, has no powers of discrimination. I wish I knew what he objects to in my novel.”
“I was at a Catholic school. People seem to believe that Catholic schools are immune from vice and different from Protestant schools. That is untrue. They are worse. How can I make Catholic schools pure unless I point out first of all how bad they are?” To some extent, he had a point. Its settings aside, Little Victims is as much a moralistic tract as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, including its melodramatic ending (Christopher finds himself incapable of heterosexual love, goes mad, and shoots himself).
Rumbold told reporters that he would appeal to the Pope. “I feel sure his Holiness will reinstatement, being a man of great sense and intelligence,” he assured them. He swore that he would travel to Rome for a private audience with the Pope, but there’s no evidence that ever took place.
Richard Rumbold and the Oxford English Club, from an item in The Tatler, March 1933.
Rumbold’s was a life of bold promises and disappointing results. If he’d hoped that Little Victims would launch him as a bright young talent, he was soon discouraged. As William Plomer later wrote in his introduction to A Message in Code: The Diary of Richard Rumbold 1932-1961, “It was the work of a confused young man who had been subjected to exceptional strains, was unsure of himself but ambitious, and was wildly and rashly trying to assert himself.”
Rumbold suffered from ill-health, depression, restlessness, and a near-constant sense of dissatisfaction with his own life and the state of the world around him. He trained as an RAF pilot during the war but lost his commission after flying an Anson under the Menai Bridge. He translated a collection of Flaubert’s letters and wrote a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but never managed to produce the great novel or poems he felt he should. In March 1961, while working with his friend and loyal companion Hilda Young in hotel room at Palermo, he stepped into the bedroom and, moments later, fell from the window and was killed instantly. The Italian coroner would not rule it a suicide.
The one subject that most interested Rumbold was himself. Little Victims was his first and least successful attempt to portray his life and his intense feelings toward his parents and others. He later revisited the story in his autobiography, My Father’s Son, first published pseudonymously as “Richard Lumford” in 1949. His third version can be seen in the diaries edited by Plomer. Plomer asked for its readers to think kindly of his late friend:
I myself knew Richard well for nearly a quarter of a century. I found him, in the face of his recurrent troubles, a courageous and exceptionally honest man, warmly affectionate and unembittered. Not one line in the papers he left and nothing I have heard about him, whether in his lifetime or after his death, has made me think otherwise. His courage and honesty light up the evidence of his lifelong battle to overcome his troubles and fulfil himself as a person and as a writer.
Little Victims, by Richard Rumbold London: Fortune Press, 1933
I love publishers who made a practice of listing their other releases on the flyleaf or dust jacket, because these can be the clues that lead me to a forgotten gem.
But sometimes, these lists are just a set of dusty tracks. Here, for example, is the list of titles that appears on the back of one of Peter Davies’ 1960 releases.
The first entry, Kathleen Sully’s Skrine, is quite familiar. I wrote about it in 2018 while I was on the trail of Sully’s remarkable oeuvre. At the time, I wrote of this bleak post-apocalyptic fable, “None of the four novels by Kathleen Sully I’ve read so far is anything quite like the others, but I feel safe in saying that Skrineis the most unlike the rest.” Having since read all 19 of Sully’s books, I can say that statement still holds true.
But I recognized none of the other titles in the list, which led me to start researching. Here are my findings, which should, if nothing else, convince you that like archaeologists and prospectors, searchers after neglected literary gems have to sift through their share of junk and dust along the way.
• The Angel in the Coffin, by Michael Ellis
Michael Ellis was the pseudonym of Stephen Llewellyn, an English reporter turned New Zealand soldier turned writer who died at the age of 47, not long after this second novel was published. The story follows a Dutch freighter taking European emigrants to New Zealand. One of the few reviews I’ve been able to locate said that Ellis/Llewellyn wrote “as if he had plums in his month” — whatever that means.
• All the Loyal People, by David Stone
Stone’s second novel. His first was a well-received spoof of the roman policier a la Simenon et al.. This one recounts a year in the life of a society reporter and failed novelist who bounces between a dingy flat and a series of parties, getting involved with a Gatsby-like operator and (of course) a mysterious beautiful young woman. The Observer’s reviewer called it “A most able satire on London’s scruffy hinterland,” but both The Evening Standard and New York Times wondered about the author’s real intent: “The narrator’s self-disgust keeps breaking in on the light comedy and suggests that the author was in two minds about the kind of book he was writing.” Several reviewers also found the marginal characters more interesting than the protagonist, which does seem to be a chronic problem among young-man-coming-of-age tales.
• The Crop Dusters, by Geoff Taylor
An adventure novel in the Nevil Shute vein, about a group of former RAAF pilots who gather to fly crop dusters in a battle against a plague of locusts in New South Wales. It’s full of details about flying the old prop planes, with the drama of the battle against the insects. “Written in unpretentious but sharply evocative prose,” wrote one Australian reviewer. “Sunny in mood, simple in plan, subtle in execution,” concluded the Birmingham Post.
• After the Storm, John Gilbert
This appears to be a pastiche on the Victorian tragedy of the good girl gone wrong. I say appears because the only review I could locate was brief and buried in the pages of Pacific Islands Monthly, an Australian magazine. After her fiance drowns himself and leaves her pregnant and penniless, Gilbert’s heroine puts her good looks to work and finds that the wages of sin can result in a decent living if you’re sharp about it.
• Stranger in Allanford, by E. C. Axford
A wartime evacuee returns to the village and home where she was hosted as a child. “A novel of compelling quality” is as much of a review as I can find. The author was an Oxford headmaster and this appears to have been his only venture into fiction.
• Mutiny in the Attic, by Betty Singleton
Hard to tell if this is sweet or saccharine. Four pensioners living in Eventide Home revolt against the home’s management and take off on an adventure. “A charming tale … the characterisation uncommonly good” said the Bristol Evening Post, one of the few papers to bother reviewing it. Despite the suggestion of malice in the cover illustration, I’m pretty sure that Lord of the Flies in an old age home this ain’t.
• The Self-Made Man, by Sylvia Cooper
Something of an odd choice of title for an English publisher. It’s about a Detroit trucking entrepreneur who looks back over his life at sixty, finding himself less satisfied with his personal successes than his business. The Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the few U.S. papers to give it a review and that one was negative: “The novel, an unfortunate waste of writing talent, falls flat from every viewpoint.”
• The Young Kings, by Laurence Moody
Two long short stories, one about an encounter in the Alps and the other set on a Greek island. Moody’s later novel The Ruthless Ones was later filmed as What Became of Jack and Jill?. Other than the fact that the first story involves mountaineering, I’ve been unable to track down any other details. Moody also wrote The Roxton Kibbutz, about an ill-conceived attempt to establish a commune in the early 1970s (those wacky hippies!). He may or may not be the same person as the later TV director (Taggart, et al.).
All these were listed on the back of The Initial Error, by Lydia Holland, which itself appears to have received no reviews. Which is surprising, given that she was the daughter of the prolific writer and reviewer Leonora Eyles and the one-time TLS editor D. L. Murray, ex-wife of the Italian critic Mario Praz, and well-regarded translator of Alberto Moravia and others.
So, all in all, a disappointing lot. However, if you happen to stumble across one of the above and find I’ve grossly underestimated its merits, please let us know.
An illustration from a French edition of the works of Paul de Kock.
“A__ has been trying to inoculate me with Paul de Kock, who, she assures me, is a moral writer, and with whose books our tables, chairs, sofas, and beds, are covered, as with the unclean plagues of Egypt,” the actress Fanny Kemble wrote her friend Harriet Martineau in 1842. “They are very clever, very funny, very dirty, abominably immoral, and I do not think I can read any more of them; for though I confess to having laughed till my sides ached over some parts of what I read, I was, upon reflection and upon the whole, disgusted and displeased.”
Kemble seems to have shared the opinion of many literate people of her time when it came to the man who was, for much of the 19th Century, France’s most popular novelist. Many were those who enjoyed his books. Fewer were those who would praise it. “The French writer whose works are best known in England is Monsieur Paul de Kock,” wrote William Thackeray in 1841. But, he cautioned, “Talk to a French educated gentleman about this author, and he shrugs his shoulders, and says it is pitoyable.” “Paul de Kock? he is very witty,” a woman once said to Jane Carlyle. “Yes, but also very indecent; and my uncle would not relish indecencies read aloud to him by his daughters.” Ralph Waldo Emerson admitted to having read one of de Kock’s stories, but hastened to add, “Its fun is so low that I will never lend it.”
Who was this controversial figure, whose books were considered as addictive and illicit as heroin? Well, he was a man whose entire life was consumed in his work. Starting with his first novel, L’Enfant de ma femme, published in 1811 when he was just 18, he proceeded to write, according to one biographer “de façon industrielle ensuite un roman en un mois chaque année” [in an industrial fashion followed one novel a month each year). Born in Paris, he claimed to have rarely left the city and spent most of his days at his desk in his house on the Boulevard St. Martin. The one luxury he allowed himself as the years passed was to purchase a house protected by high walls from the noise of the streets and curiosity of passers-by.
Paul de Kock’s study, looking out on the Boulevard St. Martin. Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby & Co. edition of The Memoirs of Paul de Kock.
At first, however, the streets of Paris served as one of his primary inspirations. His book of essays, Scenes of Parisian Life, closes with a piece titled “Paris from My Window,” in which he records the life he observes on the boulevard in front of his house. Around two P.M., he notices an elderly couple promenading along. It is M. Mollet and his wife:
M. Mollet is a short, full-bodied, red-faced, knock-kneed man who constantly wears an entire suit of flannel and above that two shirts, thin drawers, thick woollen trousers, two waistcoats, a coat, a frock coat and an overcoat. You can understand that this enormous mass moves only with difficulty. When M. Mollet wants to get his handkerchief out of his pocket, he begins by sighing, then he stops, lets go of his wife’s arm, gives her his cane to hold, and tries to make use of his hands; but he is never quite certain in which of his pockets he has put his handkerchief, and the examination is often so long that Madame Mollet ends by lending her handkerchief to her husband, who takes it with a grateful look and murmurs, “Thank you, dearest!”
By 1830, he had surpassed the likes of Balzac in terms of popularity. His books typically sold 2-3,000 copies, while Balzac, Georges Sand, and Eugene Sue were pleased to sell more than 1,000 of theirs. “There never was an author more popular in the real meaning of the word,” Théophile Gautier later wrote. “He was read by everybody, by the statesman as well as by the commercial traveller and the schoolboy, by the great ladies in society and by the grisettes.” De Kock’s knowledge of the everyday life of Parisians earned the admiration not just of his readers but of some of his colleagues. He “had the advantage of being absolutely like his readers,” argued Gautier. “He shared their ideas, their opinions, their prejudices, their feelings.” In fact, when the works of Charles Dickens first began to be published in France, his French publisher invoked the name of Paul de Kock in advertisements to gain the confidence of readers.
A caricature of Paul de Kock from 1842.
In her book Mastering the Marketplace: Book Subtitle: Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France, Anne O’Neil-Henry, one of the few academics in recent decades to take an interest in de Kock, calls him “the July Monarchy’s bourgeois writer par excellence,” but acknowledges that “by the 1830s his name carried a specific connotation: ‘Paul de Kock’ signified ‘bad’ literature, a sort of … marker of poor taste.” O’Neil-Henry argues that this is missing the point. “While critics around 1830 began to use his name synonymously with lowbrow literature, many of their reviews evinced an appreciation of some elements of his work and recognition of his successful command of the taste of modern readers.” “Simply put,” she writes, “’Paul de Kock’ did not always signify ‘Paul de Kock.”
In 1835, the English publisher Marston and Company advertised a collection of de Kock’s works that would be “carefully weeded from the indelicacy and impiety from which scarcely any French work is entirely exempt.” At the same time, however, they boasted that “A more thorough insight into French manners and customs may be acquired from one of de Kock’s novels than from fifty volumes of travels.”
His reputation throughout Europe was, in the mid-19th Century, that of an exceptional novelist. The young Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote his father in 1844, “Paul de Kock is unquestionably the most amusing and the most natural of the novelists. The interest of his works never flags for a moment, and even his pathetic scenes are perfectly true and unaffected.” Leo Tolstoy was a fan.“Don’t tell me any of that nonsense that Paul de Kock is immoral,” he was quoted as saying, “He is more or less what the French call leste and gaulois, free and rough, but he is never immoral.” When the French critic Ferdinand Brunetière visited Pope Leo XIII in the early 1880s, the Pope asked, “And how is the good Paolo de Koko?” In his book Sex Lives of the Popes, Nigel Cawthorne writes that Pope Gregory XVI shared his appreciation for the novelist. Benjamin Disraeli so admired de Kock that he worked an endorsement into his novel Henrietta Temple:
“Have you ever read Paul de Kock’s books?” “Never,” said Ferdinand. “What a fortunate man to be arrested ! Now you can read Paul de Kock! By Jove, you are the most lucky fellow I know!”
Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby edition of Adhémar.
De Kock could be counted on to provide entertainment value for money. To judge his merits, I tried That Rascal Gustave, one of the two dozen de Kock novels that were packaged in a mammoth edition published by Mathieson in London in the 1880s and available on the Internet Archive (link).
The book opens with young Gustave de Moranval being caught in a Paris love-nest with an 18-year-old girl from his home village by his uncle. The uncle dismisses the girl with a pay-off and dispatches Gustave to the home of M. de Berly in the Loire Valley with the aim of getting him married off to de Berly’s niece. The niece loves another, however, and Gustave’s roving eye gets him into some awkward situations. There are several incidents involving jumping from windows and having to put on women’s clothes.
In the scene that probably earned the book its scandalous reputation, Gustave finds himself hiding under the bed on the night that the niece and her new husband return to chez de Berly.
They fastened the door, and prepared to retire, so there were no means of escape for him, and he would be only too lucky if he were not discovered, as he could not even be taken for a thief since Aurelia knew him, and thus Julia [Gustave’s amoureux du moment] must be compromised; he made up his mind, therefore, to stay under the bed, happy if no one should turn him out of his hiding place. He lay on his back, hoping that Providence would not allow either monsieur or madame to look under the bed, as timorous souls so frequently do, waiting in perfect silence, without daring to move, and hardly to breathe, trusting that love or chance would enable him to escape.
As the couple prepares for bed, the bride is taken aback at her husband’s insistence on wearing a flannel vest and cotton night-cap, and reminds him of the Bible’s instructions: “When we are married, we must mutually meet each other’s desires, and even forestall them, and it allows us to enjoy the pleasures of marriage by begetting children in our own likeness.” What he then hears “opened his eyes as to the real character of the ‘prude’ he had first met at the residence of M. de Berly. Gustave finally manages to escape in the next chapter, entitled, “Julia Loses Her Beauty and Gustave Loses His Trousers.”
M. Berly falls down and finds himself on top of Gustave, an illustration by George B. Luks from the Quinby edition of That Rascal Gustave.
The next three years take Gustave on a grand tour of the salons and bedrooms of Spain, Italy, and England. He finds England’s tastes particularly mystifying:
Nobody can care for England who does not find his chief pleasure in horse-riding, cock-fighting, betting, punch, and plum-pudding, and it strikes a Frenchman as very strange to see all the ladies leave the room soon after the dessert is put on the table, whilst the gentlemen remain for such mirth as may be inspired by drinking burnt brandy.
In the end, he finds his way back to his home village, where the young woman he’d been caught with in Paris and born his child and won her way into the uncle’s affection – proving that “that virtue, gentleness, talent, and beauty can well replace birth and wealth.” And they all live happily ever after.
“It was Gustave especially which got me talked about,” de Kock later wrote in his memoirs:
Not in terms of praise by everybody. Oh, no. Many persons found the book rather too coarse, but I for my part declare, and I do so without a blush, that neither at that time nor later, did I feel the slightest remorse for my crime. To speak frankly, come, can you expect a novel called Gustave ou le Mauvais Sujet to have anything in common with Telemaque — unless it be where the son of Ulysses goes to chat, on the sly, in the caves, with the beautiful nymph Eucharis?…. At any rate many ladies were very gracious to me after reading Gustave. Ladies, evidently, who liked bad boys. There used to be ladies of that kind in those days.
To produce at the rate he did, de Kock understandably relied on certain formulas. French critic Jacques Migozzi has described it as, “Playing allegro presto with mistakes, surprises with a narrative or playful function, coincidences, misunderstandings or mystifications, and spicing up his story with burlesque episodes and bantering.” De Kock’s penchant for comedy made him the favorite of many readers. “When the vapours have smothered the sun, and when it rains, as it does always, instead of inhaling charcoal! or leaping from the Pont Neuf,” wrote John Sanderson in his 1838 book, The American in Paris, “I go into a cabinet de lecture, and read Paul de Kock. No author living can carry one so laughingly through a wet day.”
Illustration from an Italian edition of Soeur Anne.
There’s a good share of slapstick in That Rascal Gustave, enough to make one wonder why his novels haven’t been mined for more movie scripts. Here, for example, is how Gustave’s village love escapes from one awkward situation:
Susan, on hearing this, put both her legs out of the window, and this time she reached the ground, but she stumbled against Thomas, who knocked up against Mother Lucas, who fell over the greengrocer, who fell over the grocer, and so on. Pushing each other along, they got as far as the chateau, and then they did not push each other any more, and it was just as well, as they might otherwise have fallen into the moat which surrounds it.
At the same time, he could also be counted on to end on a moral note, reinforcing good bourgeois values.
By the time of his death in 1871, de Kock’s reputation had already begun to wane. Part of the problem, according to Gautier, was that he had unwittingly become a historical novelist:
His works contain the description of manners in a civilisation differing as greatly from our own as does that the traces of which are found in Pompeii; his novels, which people read formerly for amusement’s sake, will henceforth be consulted by erudites desirous of recreating life in that old Paris which I knew in my youth and of which the vestiges will soon have vanished…. Some of his novels have the same effect upon me as Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans; I seem to read in them the story of the last of the Parisians, invaded and submerged by American civilisation.
Ironically, it was just about the same time that de Kock’s novels gained traction, if not esteem, among readers outside France. Advertisements of his books began to be found in the pages of magazines from Manchester to Minnetonka, often tweaking his titles to play up their suggestiveness. Thus, Pantalon became Madame Pantaloons; Gustave, ou le mauvais sujet [the bad fellow] became That Rascal Gustave; Le démon de L’Alcove became The Vampire. Others needed no help, though: Cards, Women and Wine; The Courtesan; The Cuckold; Bride of the First Night; Wife, Husband, and Lover.
Article from the Pall Mall Gazette, 1871.
Not everyone thought this was a good thing. A bookseller in Liverpool was brought up on charges of trafficking in impure literature for carrying such titles as That Rascal Gustave. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was scandalized to find that a Cincinnati bookstore carried more copies of de Kock’s novels than of his sermons. One English traveler, reporting from Lima, Peru in 1881, lamented that “There was not a single decent edition of Don Quixote to be found in all the shops of the city,” but that there was “a brisk sale for indecent photographs and cheap editions of Paul de Kock novels.” A New England sea captain held the books responsible for the moral decay of many a young sailor: “Cheap novels, which record the imaginary exploits of highwaymen and pirates, constitute the chief entertainment” and “contribute their corrupting influences to poison the minds of hundreds of young and inexperienced sailors, and thus pave their way to those ‘houses of death,’ from which ‘none that go ever return again; neither take they hold of the paths of life.’”
A complete set of the 42-volume edition of the works of Paul de Kock published by Frederick J. Quinby Co., Boston.
Yet at almost the same time, several publishers outdid themselves in releasing ornate editions of de Kock’s works. Mathieson & Co. in London, George Barrie & Sons in Philadelphia, and the Jefferson Press and Frederick J. Quinby Company in Boston all published sets of twenty or more volumes. Quinby’s was the most elaborate, with red or teal blue leather bindings, Art nouveau flowers ornamentations, and illustrations by John Sloan, William Glackens, and others. In fact, it was a bit too elaborate, as Quinby only managed to publish 42 of a planned total of 50 volumes before going out of business in 1908.
Ad for a free copy of Gustave with a subscription to Pearson’s Magazine.
By the turn of the 20th Century, however, de Kock’s name had become synonymous for lowbrow in most English-speaking countries. He pops up several times in 1904 Dublin as depicted in Joyce’s Ulysses. “One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock, with a loud proud knocker, with a cock carracarracarra cock.” Molly Bloom recalls that her first lover “offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.” Yet he’d also become tame enough for Pearson’s Magazine to advertise an edition of That Rascal Gustave as a freebie with new subscriptions and the Boston Globe to serialize one of his novels, The Maid of Belleville, on the front page of its Sunday magazine in 1917.
Today, if we set aside over-priced print on demand reprints of his ancient editions, the works of Paul de Kock haven’t seen a new English edition (or translation) in at least a century. Even among bibliophiles, his work is now so devalued that a complete set of the Quinby edition in excellent condition was sold recently at auction for little more than $10 a volume. While he’s no candidate for elevation to the same shelf as Balzac or Flaubert, somewhere in his pile of hundreds of titles, there must be a few that merit rediscovery as, say, a 19th Century French counterpart to P.G. Wodehouse or some other prolific comic master. Anyone up for a deep-dive?
If Clarissa is a neglected read, it might have brought some of that neglect upon itself. It’s 1500 pages long for a start and over the month I read it, I developed aches and pains from lugging the thing about. It’s in epistolary form, a mode of storytelling that resolutely declines to come back in fashion, even in an online age. Its morals are not our own. It’s about a rape, which arrives about a thousand pages in. You can see why people give it a miss. Still, you should read it. You just have to acclimatise.
Clarissa is a product of the Wild West era of the novel, when the form hadn’t quite been fixed yet. A novel could be a lawless hotchpotch of philosophical dialogues, melodrama, borrowed stories and crude farce. Clarissa played a part in domesticating the form, in erecting the dry stone walls of realism, but it still very much belongs to the rougher age. It turns, in its later pages, into something like a Christian chapbook on a vast scale.
Another cause of the book’s neglect might be that its author, Samuel Richardson, lacks glamour. He was, in every sense, bourgeois. He didn’t have the frenzied entrepreneurialism of Defoe, the worldly conviviality of Fielding or Sterne’s strenuous peculiarity. He was smug about his achievements, obsequious to his social betters and prone to tedious moralising. He wanted novels to be respectable. He seemed unaware of the streak of lechery that runs through all his work. He’d be easy to dismiss, if Clarissa wasn’t so good. Greatness doesn’t always fall where it’s expected.
His debut novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) is the tale of a fifteen year old servant girl whose reward for resisting her employer’s sexual harassment is his hand in marriage and the riches and acclaim that go with it. Even at the time, there seemed something not right about this and the book’s denouement annoyed Henry Fielding so much he spent his first two novels taking the piss out of it, going so far as to name the first Shamela.
Richardsons’ follow up, Clarissa, came in 1748 and at first seems more of the same. Clarissa Harlowe is young, beautiful and a paragon of virtue, this virtue expressing itself in pious reflections, acts of charity and a strict system of daily organisation, which we are given in full (it’s that kind of novel). Robert Lovelace is also a looker, generous and charming, but abnormally dedicated to having it off and unscrupulous in furthering this cause. The book consists mostly of letters between Clarissa and her rather more likeable friend Anna, and Lovelace and Belford, a wavering fellow rake. Only, somehow, unlike Pamela, it slaps. The moralist in Richardson is restrained, at least for a while, and the artist in him takes over.
The eight volumes of an early German edition of Clarissa.
Dr Johnson is supposed to have said that anyone reading Clarissa for the plot would end up killing themselves, but there is a story of sorts. Clarissa’s family are keen on her marrying Solmes, an unappealing neighbour, and when she demurs, they take the very eighteenth-century step of holding her captive. Lovelace, meanwhile, has spotted her and has Designs. In a panic, Clarissa flees with him to London and is promptly held captive again. Perhaps Dr Johnson had a point. Yet I was completely gripped.
What matters isn’t the plot so much, but something else that happens as we go on. The mad abundance of letters to and fro, the characters all being compulsive jotters down of every thought, yanks us into the action. Richardson starts to use the letters like Shakespeare uses soliloquies. His characters argue with themselves, change their minds, waver in their intents, over a long series of erotic negotiations and, perhaps for the first time in the English novel, we feel we are seeing actual human beings and can look inside their thoughts. Clarissa and Lovelace might have been supposed to represent chastity and libertinage respectively, but there’s always the feeling of actual people behind these archaic beliefs, who won’t always live up to them.
So, Clarissa is exemplary, but also stubborn, priggish and far more attracted to Lovelace than she’d like to be. Lovelace, who could have been a moustache-twirling cardboard baddie, becomes something far more complex, split between his absurd and frightening commitment to the sexual chase and his growing regard for his victim. It’s an extraordinary act of ventriloquism, so that reading the Lovelace letters, it’s easy to forget we are reading Richardson at all. It’s as though the Puritan author poured all his buried flamboyance, libido and wit into the performance, along with a smidgeon of class resentment. Lovelace is fun to read. Richardson expressed some shock at how popular Lovelace proved, especially with female readers, but it’s easy to see why this was. He’s funny, he’s intelligent. He is also, we learn, a rapist and, even knowing it was coming, his drugging and rape of Clarissa still has the power to horrify.
The first time I read Clarissa, her ordeal struck me as implausible. My 20-year-old self didn’t believe we lived, anymore, in a world where wealthy individuals ferry teenage girls into brothels with the aid and assistance of their peers. Many years later, this disbelief has passed. Apparently likeable men do monstrous things unchallenged and Lovelace is an ancestor of every charming monster, from Humbert Humbert to James Franco. Clarissa’s preoccupation with bodily autonomy is put in religious terms, but, squinting past this, it’s impressive how much Richardson noticed the difficulties women face. And in Clarissa’s friendship with Anna Howe, who teases her and playfully toys with her own suitor, he created -to this male reader- a convincing friendship between two teenage girls. There’s something heartening in one of the founding English novels being about a young woman’s act of refusal.
An illustration from a 19th Century French edition of Clarissa.
After he rapes Clarissa, an alternately penitent and defiant Lovelace proposes marriage, a then standard way of saying sorry and restoring honour to all parties. Clarissa is having none of it. She forgives all who have wronged her, but is set upon leaving a world that has done its best to subject and degrade her. Here the book becomes much odder. Richardson seems to remember his business is offering life lessons and Clarissa embarks on a decline that is also an apotheosis, bidding farewell over a long 500 pages. At least half of this is great; long before they were considered diseases, Richardson seems to have understood PTSD and what looks like anorexia and the slow conversion to virtue of Lovelace’s friend Belford can still move, but some of it exasperates. My own tolerance was tested when, with a good few hundred pages left, our heroine buys a coffin. Having invented realism, Richardson swerves away into melodrama at whiplash speed and we are given a series of unlikely come-uppances and moments of repentance. Clarissa herself becomes a near saint rather than the sympathetic young woman of the opening stretch. She takes longer to die than Rasputin or Clive James. The moralising side of Richardson takes over and we are given many homilies on correct behaviour, including a demented passage where he tries to convince us that women of loose morals are ugly when not wearing make-up (this argument is not made, as you might expect, in praise of cosmetics).
Perhaps the problem comes from Richardson having no model of female excellence that wasn’t chiefly passive. All the characters line up to tell us, at dull length, how Clarissa is the most virtuous of women, but there isn’t any suggestion she could do more with her greatness than turn someone down and die. There’s a gulf between our way of looking at the world and his, and Clarissa’s death doesn’t quite cross it. You have to think yourself back into an England where refusing to marry your rapist could be an act of shocking radicalism. If you can do this, it sort of works.
If this proves too great a leap, if you can’t take Richardson’s forcing of characters who seemed to pulse with life into a sort of moral tableau, there’s still a hundred reasons to read this book. Read it for the weird moments of recognition, for the conversations we’re still sadly having, for Belford correcting Lovelace in his disbelief in female friendships, for Anna observing, after her friend is raped, that she now views seemingly good men as ones “who haven’t yet been found out.” Read it for the way erotic attraction and moral repulsion play against each other in Clarissa’s letters about Lovelace, read it for the stream of consciousness bricolage of the letters Clarissa writes when her mind is disordered, read it for the dash and swagger of Lovelace’s letters hiding an ethical abyss, read it for Anna and Clarissa’s friendship, for Richardson’s sudden moments of startling insight. You’ll roll your eyes at times but you might find yourself dabbing them as well.
Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (2018, Sandstone Press) and has written for The Guardian, The Fence and the Erotic Review and broadcast on the BBC. He is currently seeking agent representation for his second novel, The Crowd Pleaser. He tweets at @robpalkwriter.
Headline from the Victoria (BC) Colonist’s reprint of Peter Vansittart’s New York Times obituary.
Poor Peter Vansittart. When he died after a career spanning seven decades and producing over 40 books, some newspapers reached back to the very beginning and dredged up a damning line written about his first novel I Am the World: “I can without hesitation say that this is the worst book ever published.” Just which critic wrote that, I’ve been unable to determine. But it’s the sort of absolute declaration that lends itself to endless repetition.
Advertisement for I Am the World in The Spectator.
Was the judgment deserved? That’s very hard to tell because I Am the World has since become exceedingly rare. There are just three copies listed for sale, all well over $100, and six library copies listed in WorldCat.org. From the reviews I’ve been able to locate, I Am the World is, like several of Vansittart’s later novels, set in an abstract location — in this case, a country referred to simply as “The Land.” It tells of the ascent to the throne of absolute dictatorship of a charismatic peasant named Goran, aided by a Jewish banker named Finkenstein.
Vansittart’s descriptions of Finkenstein are difficult to read now. He’s a man “big-nosed in expensive glory” whose “slim tentacles swarmed everywhere.” Vansittart calls the Jews of The Land “mysterious people borm from the knowledge of Babylon darkly, living in the two worlds of race and nation, hiding disease and strength behind the glitter of their eyes.” Another Jew is “a short red figure with a snake’s tongue and a brain fertile and oozing like a grey sponge pressed by a hand seeking its own advantage.”
But the magnetic Goran is a bad piece of work, too. He beats up a blind old woman: “Goran smashed his fist savagely and with all his strength into her face, and she dropped recumbent and bleeding to the ground. With a single curse he stepped over her dragging the sack up from behind the wordless body.” When he ultimately rejects worldly power and seeks refuge in the sanctuary of a cathedral, he makes it clear that there is no place for the likes of Finkenstein there.
Though the “worst book” review may be apochryphal, the reviews I’ve managed to locate are hardly the kind to show off to Mom:
• Kate O’Brien in The Spectator:
“I am the World is a wordy first novel which might be ignored were it not that its sentiments leave a bad taste in the mouth, and one is forced to wonder why on earth it was published just now. It is a tale of a little country called The Land, which has some kind of “salvation” forced upon it by a thoroughly objectionable young peasan-dictator, who climbs to his curious power-vision on the back of a criminal Jew. The author is devoted to such words as lust and hatred, and is very free with his own loose conception of the deity. It is difficult to see where Mr. Vansittart is going in this over-lush study of a bad, crude megalomania.”
• R. D. Charques in the Times Literary Supplement:
“First novels are almost always the better for a certain modesty of intention, but there may be no great harm in striking an ambitious gesture. The abmition of I Am the World, however, is surely excessive even for a first novel by a young writer in these perplexing and difficult times…. But for the copiousness and polist of Mr. Vansittart’s language, it might have been kinder to ignore this first effort of his. He has, however, an unusual flow of words and a feeling for outward graces of style, and when he is not trying to be irresistibly eloquent he is at any rate engaged in expressing, however wordily, a point of view. But far too much of this lesser eloquence is merely bookish, while there are reams of empty sonorifics in the manner of “that chance of hope which could not now miscarry but must down upon the night’s frown.” As for the sentiment of the tale, one cannot but regret the evidences of a familiar and distasteful hysteria.”
• J. D. Beresford in The Guardian:
“… a first and very ambitious novel” but said Vansittart “as yet lacks something of the knowedgeableness necessary to make such a story as this convincing.”
• Frank Swinnerton in The Observer:
“Amid this verbiage are buried idealism and a serious idea, with an attempt to picture the rise of an ignorance man to power over a nation (imaginary) and his discovery that God moves in a mysterious way. But unfortunately Mr. Vansittart has not mastered the art of writing, which begins with a distinct knowledge of what one wants to say.”
• Anonymous review in The Sydney Morning Herald:
“Mr. Vansittart’s pseudo-allegorical style is baffling, but …it is possible to discern a trace of purpose behind the masses of turgid prose and ineffectual imagery….. This type of novel may appeal to a few readers in search of ‘something different.’ It is scarcely likely to be one of the year’s outstanding literary successes.”
V.S. Pritchett, Vansittart’s editor at Chatto & Windus, did suggest numerous changes, including toning down the language, all of which the author declined to make. This set a pattern that Vansittart repeated throughout his career. In a fascinating survey of Vansittart’s career packaged in a review of his 1986 novel, The Aspect in the London Review of Books, Martin Seymour-Smith wrote that, “The problem for Vansittart has always been that he is excessive: he wants to achieve too much within the bounds of a single volume. Nor will he give this ambition up – but by now his persistence has become courageous and impressive.”
Seymour-Smith identified this problem as far back as I Am the World. The book, he wrote, “is excessive (promisingly so): about the rise and fall of a dictator clearly based on Hitler, it seems to want to say everything that can be said about dictatorship. It is relentlessly and ambitiously unpleasant – the brutal and dark side of Vansittart has not, surprisingly, attracted the attention of reviewers – and is written in a curiously over-rhetorical, almost gushing style which sits very awkwardly with its sombre theme.”
Somehow, Vansittart managed to be a prolific producer of books despite his consistent habit of writing as he chose. Reviewing Vansittart’s novel Landlord in 1971, Auberon Waugh called him “one of those heroic people who just go on writing novels in English.” Francis King, reviewing Lancelot, Vansittart’s 1978 retelling of the Arthur legend, described the author as a noble eccentric: “Though he does not usually appear in histories of the modern English novel, though he has won no literary prizes and though his name is probably unfamiliar to the majority of the general reading public, he is a writer whose singularity is matched by his strength.” He continued to have advocates for his particular exceptionalism. In 1983, reviewing Vansittart’s Roman novel Three-Six-Seven: Memoirs of a Very Important Man, wondered, “When will this writer of extraordinary talent receive his due?”
Peter Vansittart receiving his honors from the Queen in 2008.
He did get formal due, courtesy of the Queen, just before his death in 2008, being awarded the Order of the British Empire. Although the New York Times obit said that Vansittart’s work was “like caviar to the critics and a stranger to the best-seller list,” he did crack the UK best-seller lists with his 1995 survey In the Fifties. And, as D. J. Taylor noted in Vansittart’s Independent obituary, the writer “belonged to a practically exclusive literary category: the defiantly highbrow novelist who, sustained by a private income and supportive publishers, writes more or less to please himself. Such qualifications are usually a guarantee of direst obscurity. Certainly none of Vansittart’s 40-odd books sold more than a few thousand copies or even went into paperback.” Although Taylor called Vansittart was a marginal figure in English literature, he credited him with “the virtual reinvention of the post-war historical novel.”
I Am the World, by Peter Vansittart London: Chatt & Windus, 1942
Konstantin Paustovsky titled the fourth volume of his autobiography The Story of a LifeYears of Hope, but it could just have easily been Years of Odessa. At the end of Volume 3, In That Dawn, he had escaped from Kiev and the battles for that city between the Reds, the Whites, the Ukrainians, and the Germans for the relative safety of the port city of Odessa. And here he would be stuck for most of the next two years.
Indeed, there is little hope to be found in these pages. The Whites retreated from the city in February 1920, leaving it with hundreds of ruins buildings and almost no food. Armies would continue to blow through the town like windstorms and the food supply was never a thing to be taken for granted.
Despite the grim situation, Paustovsky finds himself enlisted in a do-it-yourself newspaper operation, occupying offices by fiat, scrounging for paper and ink, and brow-beating officials into accepting the rag as a state-sanctioned news outlet. And among his fellow writers he made the acquaintance of Odessa’s most illustrious son, Isaac Babel.
Paustovsky’s first impression of Babel, however, was less than awe-inspiring:
Never had I seen anyone look less like an author. Stooping, almost neckless because of his hereditary asthma, with a duck’s bill of a nose, a creased forehead and an oily glint in his little eyes, he was anything but fascinating. At first sight you would have taken him for a commercial traveller or a stockbroker.
He soon learns, though, that Babel spoke with an assurance and focus that tended to leave his fellow writers speechless. He had no patience for colorful descriptions or romantic prose: “A story should be as accurate as a military report or a bank cheque,” he declared.
Yet he envied his colleagues for their ability to invent. “You can wrap things up in the dew of your imagination,” he told them, “while I — I have no imagination.” That’s why he had to focus on details, on specifics, on the precise touch, sight, and smell of things. “I have to know everything, down to the last wrinkle, or I can’t even begin to write.” Authenticity was his motto, he said — “And I’m stuck with it!”
Living in Odessa gave Paustovsky a priceless opportunity to learn to observe and record, and Babel’s lessons make Years of Hope, like all the volumes before it, shine with a vibrancy that often belies the grim conditions Paustovsky recalls. There’s barely a page without an incident, a conversation, or a description that seems as if it were happening now. Like this, about Odessa’s central market during one of the city’s periods of plenty:
How convey the noise of swearing, howling, whining, shouting, curses and hysterics, all merging into one continuous roar and suddenly cut off by the piercing sound of a policeman’s whistle ? Or the stampede of the black marketeers, festooned with their belongings, over the wooden pavements shaking to their tread ? Or the trail of yellowing bust-bodices, soldiers’ cotton underpants, and cracked, liver-coloured, rubber hot water bottles left in their wake?
Since rhetoric is out, I will have to do with every-day words.
Babel also taught him the art of the deal in the marketplace. The first rule was to feign indifference. One must never “show interest in any of the goods, and preferably to look bored as you elbowed your way through the crowd.”
Knowing how to bargain and barter was an essential survival skill. Cut off at times as waves of the Russian Civil War break over them, Odessans grow accustomed to living on almost nothing. “Only the cats, unsteady with hunger, wandered about looking for scraps. But scraps in Odessa were a thing of the past.” Food grew so scarce at one point that Paustovsky walks five miles out of town to an old mill where he’s been told the miller will take clothing in trade for flour. The only thing he has to offer the man is the shirt off his back, and he walks back bare-chested.
One of the few times Paustovsky does get away from Odessa, he nearly dies. Assigned to report on a transport of naval mines to Sebastopol, he discovers on the first night out that the ship he’s on is better suited for salvage than sailing. “Judging by all the signs,” a sailor tells him, “the Dimitry is heading for a watery grave.” Battered by a gale force 11 storm, the ship flounders and the captain barely manages to steer it into a safe anchorage.
On his return to Odessa (on a seaworthier ship), Paustovsky takes advantage of a short stop at Yalta to sneak ashore one night and climb up into the hills in search of Chekhov’s house. His last visit there had been in 1906, when his family was intact and the young Kostik had no notion of the turmoil his country would see in the next sixteen years. To even reach the house, he had to risk being stopped by patrols of Red guards. Yet this contact with his past — and Russia’s past — breaks through the danger and dreariness of the moment:
And suddenly I felt the nearness and certainty of happiness. Why, I don’t know. Perhaps because of that pure snow-whiteness which looked like the distant radiance of a beautiful country, or because of my sense of sonship — long unexpressed and driven to the back of my mind – towards Russia, towards Chekhov. He had loved his country in many ways, and he had loved her as the shy bride about whom he wrote his last story. He had firmly believed that she was going unwaveringly towards justice, beauty and happiness.
I, too, believed in that happiness — that it would come to my country, to starved and frozen Crimea, and also to me. I felt this as a swift and joyful impulse, like a passionate look of love. It warmed my heart and dried my tears of loneliness and fatigue.
Perhaps this is why Paustovsky chose to call this volume Years of Hope.
I first wrote about Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography, The Story of a Life, back in 2007. At the time, I’d read the U.S. edition from 1964, which nowhere indicated that it represented just the first three of a total of six volumes. Four years after that edition’s publication, Pantheon published The Years of Hope with the subtitle, Continuing The Story of a Life. When The Story of a Life was reissued as a Pantheon Moden Classic in 1982, again it was half the complete work.
Thanks to Paustovsky’s U.K. publisher Harvill, however, British readers were able to enjoy all six volumes, as translated from the Russian by Manya Harari, Michael Duncan, Andrew Thomson, and Kyril FitzLyon. For the record, these are:
Volume I: Childhood and Schooldays
Volume II: Slow Approach of Thunder
Volume III: In that Dawn
Volume IV: Years of Hope
Volume V: Southern Adventure
Volume VI: The Restless Years
In other words, the U.S. editions of The Story of a Life contain just Volumes I-III. To get the full Story, you’ll have to buy the last three Harvill books, which have never been reissued. They’re worth looking for, however, not only for the wonderful writing but also for their beautiful dust jacket designs.
The Story of a Life, Volume 4: The Years of Hope, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Manya Harari and Andrew Thomson London: Harvill, 1968
My feelings for The Steagle are a combination of awe and disappointment, sort of like what many felt about Evel Knievel’s attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in 1974. I admire Irvin Faust’s courage and audacity in trying to write about madness in a way that no one ever had — yet acknowledge that his results failed to hit the target. Somewhere short of the far side of sanity, The Steagle’s drag chute ejects and the book crashes in a messy jumble of words.
If some sharp publisher were to reissue The Steagle today, the book’s cover grab line could be, “A MAD MAN GOES MAD.” For both Faust and his hero, Harold “Hesh” Weissburg, are button-down, sport coat and tie wearing, salarymen of the early 1960s. Five days a week, Faust goes to work as a New York City public school guidance counselor and Weissburg teaches 17th Century English literature to bright-faced undergraduates. They have wives, mortgages, insurance policies, and daily commutes.
Like Don Draper of Mad Men, they’ve been drafted, uniformed, shot at. They’ve also been indoctrinated in American mid-century culture: comic strips and comic books, radio shows and movies, 78 RPM discs and sock hops, sports pages and the streets of Brooklyn. As Jack Ludwig put it in his New York Times review, “Everything is here, as current as Mad Magazine: Billboard America, brand-name America, America the blur seen from the window of a speeding train or car, the plotted-and-pieced America airplane passengers know best.” It’s the same combustible mixture that fueled all of Faust’s work, and all it takes is a spark to set it off.
For Hesh Weissburg, the spark is the news that Russian nuclear missiles have been spotted in Cuba. It triggers a psychotic break that leads him to interrupt his lecture on the mystique of the hero in Elizabethan literature and begin raving about Willie Mays and baseball, descending rapidly from rant to bizarre Brooklyn kid code:
(which condenses in the more comprehensible “YOU AND ME HAVE BEEN CONNED, BILKED, SCREWED BYE THE GREAT SPORTSMEN THAT TOOK OUR CLOSEST FRIENDS FROM US, AND THEN REACHED THE SINISTER FINALITY WITH THE KIDNAPPING OF THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL WHO OF COURSE IS WILLIE MAYS….”). Leaving his students gaping in bewilderment, he walks out of his class and heads to the airport, grabbing a flight to Chicago (“FLY NOW, PAY LATER!”) that starts a week-long dash about the country in search of….
Well, just what Weissburg is looking for is clear to neither himself nor us. It could be security in a moment of existential anxiety, but it could just as well be something as simple as the certainty of his 14-year-old comics/sports/radio/movie-obsessed self.
Chatting to his seatmate on board the flight to Chicago, Weissburg pretends to be Hal Winter, successful Broadway producer, and in this guise he checks into the Blackhawk Hotel, orders the best steak dinner and French wine in the place, and seduces a beautiful woman before heading off to his next stop. He visits Notre Dame to indulge a fantasy of being the Fifth Horseman in the football team’s legendary 1924 backfield lineup, Milwaukee to relive a romance from his G.I. days.
As he hops from place to place, Weissburg shifts from one fantasy character to another: Bob Hardy, brother to Andy of the movie family; Rocco Salvato, former high-school bully and present gangster; George Guynemer, son of the French flying ace of World War I; Cave Carson, son of doomed spelunker Floyd Collins; and, finally, Humphrey Bogart.
Weissburg heads for ever more artificial versions of the American dream in his manic race to stay one step ahead of the news of possible global annihilation. To Vegas:
Ocean’s Eleven. Sinatra. Judy. Thirty thousand a week. Sun. Desert. Red neon. One-armed bandits. Action. Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Nothing Monaco. Nothing Miami. Nothing Reno. Pools. Tanfastic. Bikinis. Action. Vegas.
Finally, when he reaches Hollywood, his mind jumbles together fragments from his cultural and personal memories into a climactic sequence in which he refights World War Two, single-handedly triumphing over all of America’s enemies. I can only convey the verbal cacophony that Faust creates by reproducing two sample pages below.
Like Weissburg’s “OBB” Latin, one can, with patience, decypher this linguistic jumble. Perhaps, in future, scholars will painstakingly extract and identify each of the shards of cultural reference scattered around this ruin. On the other hand, this may be a case where it’s better to take in the effect at a glance and move on.
For the trick in successfully portraying madness in fiction is that the novelist can never fully surrender control to the madmen. Otherwise, language risks becoming word soup. And there’s a lot of word soup in the last pages of The Steagle.
The book had its share of admirers back in the Sixties. Richard Kostelanetz called The Steagle “the most perceptive breakdown in all novelistic literature.” “Of the many new novels I have read in the past three years,” he wrote in TriQuarterly several years after the book’s first publication, it was “the only one that struck me as fusing the three virtues of originality, significance and realization at the highest levels of consistency.”
Jack Ludwig, the Times’s reviewer, felt that it was a mistake to characterize the book as comedy or satire: “It is funny and great in its take-offs. But it is at bottom compassionate, comic and sadly accepting. As long as reality is what it is, fantasy must serve man as refuge.” Time magazine, on the other hand, lost patience with Faust’s verbal fireworks: “This pop novel pops so violently that it cannot safely be perused without welding goggles.”
Lobby card for The Steagle (1971)
Faust’s failure didn’t dissuade Paul Sylbert from staging another attempt, however. Five years later, screenwriter and director Paul Sylbert adapted the book for AVCO Embassy Films. Richard Benjamin did his best to capture the mad panache and manic energy of Hesh Weissburg, but there was no way that Sylbert could have caged Faust’s beast into an 87-minute package. It didn’t help that the first-time director was working for legendary director-breaking producer Joseph E. Levine. Working at a time before director’s cuts were invented, Sylbert had to take his frustrations out on the printed page, publishing his account of the disaster, Final Cut: The Making and Breaking of a Film in 1974.
The Steagle, by the way, took its title from an amalgamation that echoes Faust’s zest for cultural integration. The Steagles were a short-lived creation that the National Football League devised during the manpower shortages of World War Two, combining the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers into a single team.
The Steagle, by Irvin Faust New York: Random House, 1966
In two volumes of nearly a thousand pages in total, The Melville Log may be the longest biography never written. Seventy years after its first publication, it’s still one of the most innovative takes on biography and a woefully under-recognized attempt to revitalize a form remarkably resistant to experimentation.
In the last ten years or so, there have been a number of celebrated alternative takes on biography. Alexander Master took us through a life in reverse in his Stuart: A Life Backwards, showing us how to see the dysfunctional adult Stuart Shorter through the lens of his childhood traumas. Craig Brown created a biography as kaleidoscope in Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Janet Malcolm revealed the inherent unreliability of all biographies in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes — which hasn’t stopped at least a half dozen more Plath biographies appearing since its first publication. And in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer wrote about D. H. Lawrence by writing about not writing about D. H. Lawrence.
Jay Leyda, 1951.
The Melville Log, however, remains — to my knowledge — the sole example of the DIY approach to biography. “In the making of this book,” Jay Leyda wrote in his introduction, “I have tried to hold to one main aim: to give each reader the opportunity to be his own biographer of Herman Melville, by providing him with the largest possible quantity of materials to build his own approach to this complex figure.” The only way he could do this, he continued,
… was to put together everything that could be known about this life, to bring the reader close to Melville’s progress through as many of his days as could be restored, so that the reader may watch him as he works, sees, reacts, worries — to make those seventy-two years, from 1819 to 1891, and a portion of the America they were lived in, in Henry James’s word, visitable. This approach forbade an emphasis on any part of his life to the exclusion of any other part, and forbade the neglect of material that seemed, in itself, of small importance. I trust the reader will find enjoyment in traveling alongside Melville — through good days and bad days, through great aims and trivial duties — as his body and mind grow and change — in a constant present, accumulating past experiences, but without knowing a future.
Without knowing a future. Leyda recognized the crucial flaw that limits the realism of any work of biography or history: unlike the subjects, the author suffers from knowing how things turned out. For us, Melville lived in the past. But as David McCullough has put it,
One might also say that history is not about the past. If you think about it, no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries didn’t walk about saying, “Isn’t this fascinating living in the past! Aren’t we picturesque in our funny clothes!” They lived in the present. The difference is it was their present, not ours. They were caught up in the living moment exactly as we are, and with no more certainty of how things would turn out than we have.
Though Herman Melville was born on 1 August 1819, Leyda opens his log two weeks later. Though Melville was certainly present at his birth, he wasn’t present in a conscious sense. But his infant subconscious likely sensed that he was coming into a family teetering on the edge of disaster. Thus, Leyda opens with an ominous letter to Melville’s father from one of his business partners: “I am under the painfull necessity of informing you that on the 9th instant I was obliged to Stop payment….” In the next, Herman’s grandmother Catherine Gansevoort is replenishing the family’s larder with an order including four gallons each of rum and Holland gin. When Herman is just five weeks old, his mother takes the children to her parents’ house in Albany to avoid the “epidemic fever” hitting New York City. Herman’s father writes his own father hopefully, “the alarm of Fever has suspended the little Business doing, but I hope with the blessing of GOD, confidence will soon return & Business revive again….”
Day by day, fragment by fragment, Leyda builds Melville’s world, spreading wider to take in political, economic, and social events, digging deeper into Melville’s own thoughts as shown in his journals and letters, and as reflected in those of his family and friends. Of course, his choice of fragments is not without a certain design or direction. As this excerpt shows, even as Moby Dick was being typeset and registered for copyright, a report was reaching New York of an incident proving that the fate of the Pequod was no wild invention.
Extract from The Melville Log from October 1851.
Leyda quotes, notes, extracts, reproduces, and interpolates. He invites us to look over his shoulder as he sits in the archive, reading Allen Melville’s calculation of his brother’s profits up to the publication of Moby Dick — and his dim prospects of significant profits from his newest title.
Allan Melville’s reckoning of his brother’s profits, from early September 1851.
This acccumulation of detail does not, however, guarantee that Leyda’s account is substantially more realistic than any conventional biography:
I found that while some aspects of Melville’s life grew more clear in the process, other aspects — usually the most important and creative ones — grew more complex and less clear. Even now that the casually undertaken project has grown into a book, and an enormous amount of material has been examined, I could not say that I know Melville any more than I can say I know why certain artists with whom I’ve had long friendships are artists.
Considering the lengths to which Leyda had pursued information about Melville, this is an unexpectedly frank admission. But one reason he chose to present a log of Melville’s life rather than a narrative in the usual biographical form is that he recognizes the difficult of the task facing every biographer:
[T]his job has, at least, given me an understanding and sympathy for all biographers eternally forced to simplify the tangle of real life and time into comprehensible patterns. Finding great areas of his art unused by biographer and critic, and excited by the discovery that Melville’s life was as dramatic as his art, I decided to take this documentary voyage outside the conventional realm of biography, and see where it would lead. I called what I was doing a Log of Melville’s life, for my purpose was to record the essentials of that life’s latitude and longitude, of its weather, course, whales captured or whales merely seen.
Leyda knew that even The Melville Log was itself only a fragment. Letters to and from Melville and other pertinent documents would, and did, emerge after its publication. In the mid 1960s, he took on the task of updating the Log to incorporate material revealed in the subsequent nearly twenty years, aided by Herschel Parker, and a new edition was published in 1969 by the Gordian Press with a supplemental chapter.
Already suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, however, Leyda had barely scratched the surface with his supplement and decided to begin again. He hired an assistant and began by cutting the earlier edition of the Log into pieces and trying to insert new material in a crude cut-and-paste manner. As Parker discovered when he and his assistant Mark Niemeyer visited Leyda’s home in 1987 in hopes of helping to get a new edition finished, the consequences of Leyda’s chosen method were disastrous:
You can imagine what happened: whenever you cut up a thousand pages into several thousand pieces so you can splice in hundreds of new pieces of papers, new items are going to get put in the wrong places, and new and old slivers of paper are going to get lost, half a page here, a page there. Every horror you can imagine did happen, and worse. One small oversight had disastrous consequences. No one had anticipated what would happen when, say, a Pittsfield item was spliced into a New York sequence, but hundreds of locations were thrown off, and given the technology being used these places were all but uncorrectable, since to splice in a new location would often mean recutting the rest of the heading and moving the last few words down a line (and in a heading running several lines would mean that all the lines would have to be recut).
Parker and Niemeyer gave up hope of making quick work of a new edition. Instead, as he told a meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1990, it was a task that could only be undertaken through a massive collaborative initiative, one he confessed himself too old and tired to lead. Though the effort was daunting, Parker still thought it worthwhile, “even in this age when literary history vaunts itself as being the product of stylistic verve, not archival research.” Though long retired from teaching, Parker still reflects on Melville and other subjects on his blog Fragments from a Writing Desk.
The Melville Log is not, perhaps, a book to be read through in the same manner one would a traditional biography. If you can afford the cost — and the shelf space — to keep a copy in your collection, it may be better appreciated by dipping at random into Leyda’s selections from the 26,356 days of Melville’s life. These dips will provide a constant reminder of the immediacy and inherent uncertainty present at every moment in any human life.
The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, by Jay Leda New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951 New York: The Gordian Press, 1969
Back in September 2020, I posted an interview with Kari Sund, a PhD student at Glasgow University, in which we discussed five neglected favorites she’d come across while working on her thesis about Hollywood novels. Reading the anonymous City Without a Heart recently, I was reminded of a baker’s dozen of other lesser-known Hollywood novels that I posted on Twitter around the same time and have collected here for safekeeping.
Cover of first US edition of Queer People
• Queer People, by Carroll and Garrett Graham (1930)
The brothers wrote this caustic satire out of frustration at not getting jobs with the studios. In it, a newspaper man gets drunk, wins studio contract, then spirals down through movieland’s denizens. Hollywood ate it up: the book went through 4 printings in three weeks. “As much like the average Hollywood yarn as a Wyoming cylone is akin to a school girl’s sigh” is how Variety’s reviewer put it. Earns a cameo appearance in City Without a Heart:
Together they entered Mr. Alexander’s outer office. A pretty girl, with eyes like sloes, looked up over a copy of ‘Queer People.’ ‘He’s busy right now,’ she said. ‘He’s in a con¬ ference right now.’ They retired.
Reissued in pulp paperback in 1950 with one of the all-time great titles: Fleshpots of Malibu, and reissued in the Lost American Fiction series in the 1970s.
Cover of Cinelandia, the Spanish version of Movieland by Ramon Gomez de la Serna.
• Movieland, by Ramon Gomez de la Serna (1930)
A somewhat legendary novel, extremely rare in English translation. Written by a Spanish author who’d never set foot in Hollywood, so he could make it whatever he wanted. “So distorted as to have little meaning for the average American,” NY Times wrote, but “as a baroque and flippant literary antic … the novel is thoroughly satisfactory.”
Much easier to find if you can read Spanish or French. In English, the one copy for sale goes for $399.
Cover of Good Old Jack by Eric Hatch.
• Good Old Jack, by Eric Hatch (1937)
A typical Eric Hatch wacky road show comedy. Director Jack splits Hollywood to avoid creditors and girls, lands in South American backwater, ends up producing a coup. Having acted like a dictator on the set in Hollywood, Jack finds himself well-prepared to be one — but is disappointed to find that much of the native scenery “less believable” than the fake sets he’d become accustomed to on the studio backlots.
Cover of If We Only Had Money by Lee Shippey.
• If We Only Had Money, by Lee Shippey (1939)
A writer of Westerns and his wife and kids are “poor but happy.” Then a studio contract comes and the money pours in. Still happy after that? This is a cautionary tale for the tiny number of writers who won big studio contracts, found themselves swimming in cash, then wondered why they weren’t happy. Shippey’s family wises up and opts to go back to “poor but happy.”
Sounds a bit lightweight, but lots of reviewers liked it: “a true American story written with the charm, sympathy and understanding of human nature.” I suspect Dorothy Parker’s Tonstant Weader might have fwowed up, though.
Cover of a Signet paperback edition of Dirty Eddie by Ludwig Bemelmans.
• Dirty Eddie, by Ludwig Bemelmans (1947)
A fable about a Hollywood star who’s a pig.
A real pig (Dirty Eddie–get it?)
Bemelmans pokes fun at a business where nobody seemed to know what he was doing … and got very well paid for it. “… one of the best pictures of the Hollywood rat race … indicates that the whole business is run by the people in it as if it were a scenario for a movie they constantly rewrite and recast every morning,” wrote Variety’s reviewer. “One sees the danger of magazine fragments made into a book,” warned another critic, “for there is little progression… Each page is a delight. The total of all pages makes almost no culminating effect.”
Cover of the Houghton Mifflin edition of Of Streets and Stars by Alan Marcus.
• Of Streets and Stars, by Alan Marcus (1961)
Dorothy Parker called it “A novel of dazzling originality, written with compassion, sometimes with a wild humor, always in the beauty of simplicity.” Truly forgotten. The foreword by Lion Feuchtwanger (“Who?”) didn’t help. First published by Manzanita Press in Yucca Valley; two years later, Houghton Mifflin took it mass market. “His style is spare, lean, staccato. Jagged cutting in and out of scenes, in the manner of a skillful director, gives the book a breathless momentum. It needs to be read carefully, but the effort will be handsomely repaid.” Alan Rich, New York Times.
Midge Decter, applying the belated but deadly thrust often typical of New York Review of Books, thought less of the book:
[It] participates in that almost-genre, the Hollywood novel, and in so doing touches down on just about every one of its almost-conventional themes. There is the Fan Mail Department of the great studio, into which harelips from Minnesota, lonely cowboys from Montana, crazy adolescent girls from Sweden and other far-off places pour their Dreams, dutifully answered with autographed photos of the stars deposited into the mails by lonely working-girls in Hollywood. There is the old executive, called by his initials (in this case, J.C.), who terrorizes, sentimentalizes, and worries for his ailing heart. There is the second-generation executive (clearly modeled on someone like Dore Schary) who works on the principle of hard efficiency and confronts in his sleep the empty anxiety at the center of his life. There is above all the young Eastern writer, a prize-winner, who comes to Hollywood to beat the movies and instead is thoroughly beaten by them. Through it all, behind it all, move the beautiful legendary creatures in costume dropping their masks just long enough to reveal themselves as mean tippers in the studio commissary or as having to go to the toilet in the middle of a take.
Cover of first US edition of Come On Out, Daddy by Bernard Wolfe.
• Come On Out, Daddy, by Bernard Wolfe (1963)
Bernard Wolfe’s sex/drugs/girls/jazz take on Hollywood, full of starlets, faded matinee idols, and producers on the rise and on the fall. Wolfe probably came closer to translating the spirit of a Lenny Bruce routine to fiction than any other novelist of his time. Overdue for reconsideration.
“… hilarious and grotesque, penetrating and compeling, and on occasion … thoroughly original. And there is something more–style. He writes as though the words were invented yesterday,” wrote Robert Kirsch in the Los Angeles Times. Over on the East Coast, however, Gerald Walker in the New York Times felt the book was “overwoven” and compared reading it to “wearing a 30-pould turtleneck sweater.”
Cover of ,em>The Symbol by Alvah Bessie.
• The Symbol, by Alvah Bessie (1966)
Wanda Emmaline Kelly, orphaned at two, foster homed, raped at nine, married at 16, pin-up queen by 18. Then Buck, the football player, lunky and loving and Calvin, the NY intellectual/painter.
Yeah … Marilyn.
Compared to Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls, wrote one reviewer, this is the Sistine Chapel.
Consider it a rough draft of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, a much better novel. However, I should say that Bessie earned the right to lambaste Hollywood after doing time as one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.
Cover of The Manner Music by Charles Reznikoff.
• The Manner Music, by Charles Reznikoff (1977)
“Unlike any other Hollywood novel ever done,” wrote Maurice Zolotow. “It is like T S Eliot writing a novel about banks, Wallace Stevens writing one about insurance companies.” A young composer goes to work as factotum to a movie producer named Paul Pasha. Wall St crashes, the studio folds, he heads back to NY, ends up burning his compositions in Central Park. In a just world, we’d recognize this as a minor American masterpiece.
I wrote about The Manner Music back in May 2020: Link
Cover of Night Tennis by Annabell Davis-Goff.
• Night Tennis, by Annabel Davis-Goff (1978)
Davis-Goff was Mrs. Mike Nichols #3.
“Reads almost like a handbook on film-making” wrote one reviewer. “A Hollywood novel that has an authentic contemporary feel (without ramming it down your throat),” Kirkus concluded.
I love this from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Edna Stumpf: “The bleakest book about fornicating and making movies I’ve ever read. It’s a real little sobersides of a fable about weighing the odds and taking the consequences and biting the bullet.” “Call me corrupt,” Edna continued, “but when I read a Hollywood novel I want to have fun, if only the fun of a cheap contempt for bratty stars and money-mad moguls and noontime sex with catered champagne in interior-decorated trailers”
Cover of Blue Pages by Eleanor Perry.
• Blue Pages, by Eleanor Perry (1979)
An autobiographical novel written after her divorce from Frank Perry: “I’ll be the first to say it’s a disguised version of my experiences, told from a middle-aged writer’s point of view.” “Novels by men which draw portraits of women as bitches or shrews seem to cause no particular comment. But let a woman write about men as master seducers, users, monsters and there are cries of ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,'” Perry remarked.
On the other hand, Perry reported that women saw “Blue Pages as a book about working women and above all, middle-aged women and their plight.” “The book makes a woman in her late 40s a viable, sexual being, not somebody ready for the ash heap.”
Cover of Hix Nix Stix Pix by David Llewellyn-Burdett.
• Hix Nix Stix Pix, by David Llewellyn Burdett (1984)
“Take Doctorow’s Ragtime and West’s Day of the Locust, chop them up, mix them together, and let the fragments fly,” was how NY Times’ reviewer summed up this debut novel. It’s a wild hodge-podge running from silents to talkies, with tons of cameos by Chaplin, Hitler, Salvador Dali, and many others. Most reviewers hated it, but the book has a small cult of die-hard fans.
Cover of Creative Differences by Buffy Shutt.
• Creative Differences, by Buffy Shutt (1990)
Hollywood seen through the eyes of a woman who rises through a series of scut jobs to become an executive VP for production, in charge of solving daily crises, mostly over male egos. This may resonate more than when it first came out. The narrator is nameless, for example, only because to all the male characters, she is either “Babe” or “Honey” or “Pet.” And, of course, the male egos are more fragile than the thinnest egg shell: “Several film-makers ask me where they’re sitting on the dais. By the way they ask, you’d think their entire self-worth is tied up in whether they are on the first tier or the second tier.”
Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author’s identity, but then the practical challenges settle in. Where does a bookseller shelve it: under the As? How does a would-be buyer refer to it? “It’s a book about Hollywood.” “Do you know the author’s name?” “No.”
Novels about Hollywood are a semi-popular topic for PhD dissertations, and I’ve found City Without a Heart mentioned in the bibliographies of several, but none of the doctoral candidates in question appears to have actually read the book. I only stumbled across it searching for something completely different on the Internet Archive. Having read it, I can allay your hopes (or fears): this is not the Great Lost Hollywood Novel.
But it is an interesting novel. Now, we all know that interesting is the “Get Out of Jail Free” card of adjectives. If you can’t say anything nice about someone, say they’re interesting. It’s what you tell your best friend after they drag you to a three-hour art house movie with a dozen lines of dialogue: “Yeah, that was interesting.”
In this case, interesting is not a cop-out but a way of saying that City Without a Heart is not a particularly well-written novel but it is a well-observed one, though distorted by the author’s prejudices. When the book was published, there was that initial rush of guesses about the authorship. Candidates included Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, Getrude Atherton, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis Bromfield, and even Greta Garbo. What’s clear is that the author was someone familiar with the workings of the studio system from the inside. Someone who’d penetrated to the inner sanctum of a studio chief’s office, for example:
Mr. Schloss’s office was protected from assault by three lines of defences. The first was held by an empty table and rather a formidable filing cabinet. The next boasted a standing guard of three young things with typewriters. The third and last was occupied by a young man with a mauve face, geranium-coloured hair, and the best set of dentures Mary had ever seen outside a showcase. He was supported by an individual with such a powerful resemblance to a gorilla that Mary was quite alarmed that there were no bars in front of him.
If the author was indeed a Hollywood insider, he was someone who’d grown to hate what he knew. “You know nothing about Hollywood,” says its first representative to encounter the photogenic Mary Fresnell and her aunt in their humble village in Cornwall. “It would be a crime to send a girl like Mary into that sort of atmosphere.” Anonymous drives home this point repeatedly and unsubtly, starting with his title. “Hollywood,” declares a screenwriter she meets there, “for all the ferocity of its labours and the wealth of its talent, is as empty a shell as ever existed in the history of the world.” Another denies the assertion that Tinsel Town is a godless place. There is a god, he argues: “the god of I.”
It’s not hard to pick up a few clues about the author’s identity beside his insider knowledge. The fact that he was a he and not a she, for example. Sprinkled throughout the book are a hints of a streak of misogyny, such as his dislike of chatty women:
Mrs. Knalder was Mary’s first experience of America’s endurance-test talking women. Later she discovered that they are numerous and are without mercy. Lack of subject-matter, the inattention or obvious boredom and infuriation of a listener has no influence upon the flow of their chatter. Like the brook it goes on forever.
His suggested cure for these women is brutal: “nothing short of amputation of the tongue is of any practical service whatsoever.”
Anonymous is also an anti-Semite. Hollywood’s studio heads all “rose from the tailor’s bench,” have waists that measure “anything up to sixty inches round” and faces that “bore the prominent characteristics of a toucan.” In Hollywood, the rightful order of classes has been turned on its head:
Hollywood is a Jewish stronghold. The entire picture industry is under their control. The power they possess is incalculable…. Enthroned they sit and jest of their humble origin to a Christian community which is never weary of trying to ex¬ hume, from totally non-existent sources, ancestors of most piquant aristocracy.
Ask a Jewish executive, in receipt of five hundred thousand dollars a year, whence he sprang, and you shall hear tales of a basement on the East Side of New York. Put the same question to a ten-dollar a day ‘extra’ and you shall be buffeted with half the names in the English peerage.
Contrast this with his descriptions of the people of Cadgwith, the little Cornish port from which Mary, the innocent pulled into Hollywood’s lair by the promise of filthy lucre. Its men “are simple folk who, when not riding the waves, sit upon an old stone wall and watch the sea from which their slender blessings flow. Its women “are busy at home, for where money is scarce work is plentiful.” You may recognize them as the future inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And Mary, of course, is the stoutest of these stout-hearted folk: “She could sail a boat, bait a line, shoot a net, and scale a cliff with any fisher lad in the village.”
She can also, we come to see, learn her lessons. Brought all the way from Cornwall to California based on her stunning beauty and vitality as caught, unaware, on a few minutes of film, she quickly falls from promising starlet to has-been (or rather, never-was) through the betrayal of a competitor unburdened by scruples, and heads home, the sadder but wiser girl.
Almost.
There is a twist right at the end that leads me to wonder if Anonymous’s chief gripe with Hollywood boiled down to something as simple as resentment that he wasn’t better paid.
I closed City Without a Heart grateful not to know Anonymous’s true identity. Three hundred pages in his company was quite enough. The book is a revealing if stilted portrait of Hollwood in one of its moments of transition, when talkies had overturned the hierarchy of silents and studios had succeeded in eliminating all but the last few independents, and for that it undoubtedly has some historical value. As a novel, however, its neglect is justified.
City Without a Heart, by Anonymous Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933
Stray cattle in a harsh landscape rarely fare well, let alone survive. The same could be said of stray novels in an unwelcoming market. So it’s not surprising that No More Giants, Joaquina Ballard Howles’ story about a young woman growing up on an isolated ranch in Nevada in the late 1940s attracted little attention and has been utterly forgotten.
It came out in 1966 as part of Hutchinson’s New Authors Series, an admirable series of first novels brought out by the U.K. publisher Hutchinson’s between 1958 and 1970. I’ve never seen a full listing of the New Authors Series, but from what I’ve been able to uncover, there were at least three dozen novels — and a handful of memoirs — issued under this imprint. Hutchinson formed the imprint to help “the new author, who has something of genuine importance to say” (in the opinion of Hutchinson’s unnamed judges). Hutchinson also declared that the series would only publish first books by writers who are members of the British Commonwealth. “No established writer, no author who has any other book to his credit (with such exceptions as a school text book, etc.) will be eligible for consideration.”
Times Literary Supplement article announcing Hutchinson’s New Authors scheme in October 1957.
Authors were paid a rather modest royalty of ten percent up to the first 5,000 copies sold (and there don’t appear to have been any that broke this mark), with an advance of £150. Relatively few of the authors whose first books benefited from this scheme saw a second book reach print. Exceptions include Maureen Duffy, whose That’s How It Was was published in 1962 and J. G. Farrell, whose debut The Man From Elsewhere came out in 1963.
Even among the diverse array of novice authors in Hutchinson’s series, Joaquina Howles was an outcast. An American, she qualified as a Commonwealth writer by marriage: her husband Geoffrey Howles was an Oxford graduate and banker specializing in oil investments whose work took the couple to Alberta, Canada, New York, and London. Like Jenny, the young woman in her novel, she had grown up on a ranch north of Reno. Unlike the girl, however, who gets pregnant by her first lover, a Basque ranch hand, and is sent to a home for unwed mothers, Howles attended Mills College, then the West Coast’s elite women’s school, and won several scholarships.
Photograph of Joaquina Ballard Howles from the dust jacket of No More Giants.
As No More Giants makes clear, though, her time at Mills and as an expat executive’s wife didn’t erase her memories of the good and bad aspects of life on a ranch. The hard work, surprisingly, is at the heart of the good. Long rides to herd grazing cattle allow her views of vast landscapes in shifting colors through the day. Chores provide a routine to distract her from her troubles: “The simple things, the milking, feeding, carrying, which we did with our hands, helped us both. Doing was the major part of living, and once as we both lifted the same bale of hay, I knew that we were healing ourselves.”
The biggest source of her troubles are her parents, an unhappy mix of personalities:
To my father, life ran in straight lines, and though they might run deep, they remained parallel, crossing only in the chaos of some unrecognised infinity…. My mother’s lines crossed, tangled, lost themselves in limbo, without colour, precision, or design.
“I wish I could have identified with Mama,” Jenny laments. If her father is the tall, laconic, gentle giant in her world, her mother is the fearsome one, “powerful as the sky can be in times of terror.” Lila, the spinster aunt who lives with the family, offers no consolation: “Aunt Lila lived in the world of terrible possibilities.” One of the few lessons she has to teach Jenny and her brother Brian is how to act if they find themselves kidnapped: “If we couldn’t phone when we were taken away we were to remember our names, ages, and address, so that sooner or later — perhaps even years later — we could escape and return home.”
The harsh landscape of the high desert is mirrored in the harsh emotional climate of Jenny’s home. Her mother hates her father for dragging her to the remote ranch and saddling her with unrelenting work and her father, in return, hates his wife’s failure to be a compliant helpmate. Their hatred is as much an environmental given as the desert’s dryness — “so familiar I had never thought of naming it.”
But even deserts are susceptible to sudden, unpredictable deluges:
Continuing hatred is a level thing, a line of monotony like telephone poles going across a valley, dwindling away out of thought. But sooner or later there is a break, a turn, a mountain where the line goes up or down or is broken, and then one sees it again and remembers the many poles in the valley.
Like the deluges that wash out bridges and brush fires that wipe out a season’s harvest, emotional crises rise up swiftly and with devastating force in No More Giants. It’s very much a novel of its place, a sparsely populated, unforgiving part of the American West unfamiliar to most British readers. If it could be said to resemble any other work of its time, it would be Joan Didion’s first novel Run River, another account of an unhappy ranch family in the West. Never published in the U.S., No More Giants gained a few brief and unexceptional reviews. The usually sharp-eyed Marigold Johnson of the TLS even got the author’s name wrong, referring to her as “Mrs. Knowles.”
Whether it was lukewarm reviews, disappointing sales, or some other reason, Joaquina Ballard Howles followed the path of many of Hutchinson’s new authors and gave up writing after publishing No More Giants. Or at least, so it was for over fifty years. In October 2020, however, a new novel titled Brighter Later appeared on Amazon. Apparently self-published, the book is described as a story of forgiveness about “a middle-class family living in one of London’s more affluent artistic communities, who encounter alcoholism and a horrifying secret along the way which rips their family apart.”
I’ve tried to track Mrs. Howles down, but my leads dry up variously in the U.K., Reno, and Palo Alto, California, so if anyone can tell us something about her current situation, please let me know. No More Giants is too good to leave out on the range as a stray.
No More Giants, by Joaquina Ballard Howles London: Hutchinson (New Authors), 1966
The truly awful cover of the US edition of The Halt During the Chase Rosemary Tonks wrote six novels, but in many ways they’re six versions of the same story. Married or not, her lead characters are women, young but not naïve, not sure of what they want but sure of what they don’t, sure that they want a man in their life but not sure which one or how. They’re poised like a driver at a red light in an unfamiliar neighborhood, knowing they’ve got to make a decision: Left? Right? Straight? The only thing that’s clear is that backing up is not an option.
In the case of Sophie in Tonks’s last novel, The Halt During the Chase, as the book opens, she’s left her job as an administrator at a language school in Kensington and is wondering whether she truly loves Philip, the rising star in Treasury. As the book opens, she’s also in the middle of a conversation about school knickers at her mother’s house in Hampstead.
In the book’s opening chapter, there in that Hampstead kitchen, Tonks perfectly captures the way the pendulum swings back and forth between affection and annoyance in an adult daughter’s conversation with her mother. The shared memories then painful, now comic: “The regulation dark blue knickers. And they were knickers too!” The mother’s desire to see the daughter settled, the daughter’s chafing at the spectre of entrapment. And the mother’s long-developed and now deadly skill in wielding the weapons of conversation. Such as that simple and deceptive question: “How’s it going?”
“How’s it going?” So childish, so shrewish, that I had to answer on the same level: “How’s what going?” She would then draw her face into an expression of nauseating complicity, just like a mime who only has one second to portray some human failing and so has to do it with decisive vulgarity. Heaven knows what underworld theatre she got the expression from, but it was invaluable.
Sophie’s mother is also a bottomless well of advice and life lessons, on everything from religion to noses:
A woman’s nose has to be small and neat. But a man is quite different. If a man hasn’t got a good nose, he should sit down and grow himself one, because he’s going to need it!
Backing up is most definitely not an option for Sophie.
The nearly as bad cover of the UK edition of The Halt During the Chase
In fact, after two hours in that kitchen, she feels suffocated. Desperate just to get out the front door and to the freedom that lies outside, even on the sidewalks of Hampstead.
More air! I couldn’t get enough of it — I wanted a cold, flowing river of it past my cheeks. Drink it down, white stuff, and get rid of all the vinegar inside you that makes you trembling and irresolute, afraid that you ‘re not rich enough for your lover, whom you love too much on one level and doubt on another.
Moving foward is the only choice, but how is still in doubt. The obvious answer seems to be marriage with Philip. Brilliant, fit, handsome, and obviously destined for a future KCB, Philip is also the safe choice: “the sort of man with whose life nothing could possibly go wrong; decisions were permanent, and ended at death.” Philip is a precursor of the Tony Blair Labourite: socialist, but not in a sweaty way. His socialism, Sophie thinks, is “so snobbish, so exclusive, so bogus.”
How snobbish, she suddenly realizes, when, lying together in a hotel bed after making love, Philip tells her, “I was going to ask you to come and live with me. But I can’t promise you there won’t be an emotional bust-up in five years’ time. And then you’ll be less well off financially than you are now.”
To Philip, this is both pragmatic and empathetic. What better demonstrates how much he cares for Sophie than his consideration for how hard it will be when he dumps her? To Sophie, this is soul crushing. Trapped beside Philip in that perfectly equipped, airtight hotel room, she feels herself being swallowed whole. Again, she finds herself suffocating. She claws through the heavy curtains, manages to crack up the window, and drinks in the air. “I have never tasted anything like it. Through that gap in the plating of the hotel, I began to carry on my life once again.”
In his perfect dispassionate way, Philip has pushed Sophie out into that intersection, forcing her to make a choice.
Here, however, we find the one thing that distinguishes Sophie from Tonks’s other heroines. She’s begun to realize she’s got a soul. She’s started attend lectures by Mr. Ruback, Hampstead’s resident mystic. She may not fully understand how she will develop her spiritual self, but she knows that it will not be Philip’s way — having all the right opinions, furnishing one’s life with all the right accessories. “Isn’t buying new lampshades a form of slow death?” she wonders.
The Halt During the Chase is not only Rosemary Tonks’ funniest book but it’s also her deepest. Or rather, it’s a book that hovers on the edge of depth. By the time the book was published, Tonks had entered a period of soul-searching that had been triggered by her mother’s death in 1968. As Neil Astley wrote in his Guardian obituary, “Rosemary turned her back on Christianity, and for the next eight years attended spiritualist meetings, consulted mediums and healers, and took instruction from Sufi ‘seekers’ before turning to a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. All these she repudiated in turn.”
One opens the book thinking the chase of the title is the hunt of one sex for another. Sophie does turn from Philip to take some interest in his half-brother Guy, but the real quest is a spiritual one. “They taught you that it was your job to develop yourself, as the primary purpose of life,” she says of Ruback’s lectures: “the chase is inward [Emphasis added].” It clear that this is Sophie’s most likely direction when she exits her intersection.
Though Tonks ultimately returned to Christianity years later, she dismissed her own writing as something as pointless as buying new lampshades. She burned an unpublished novel and if she’d had her way, would have seen to it that every copy of her published books saw the same fate.
If one knows nothing about Rosemary Tonks, The Halt During the Chase is a remarkable work, studded like a bejeweled belt with shrewd and funny observations and perceptive about the quandaries of women looking for ways to make a life not centered on a man and family. But once you know her story, it’s hard to read Halt without sensing the spiritual direction in which she was about to turn, without knowing that she would soon want to destroy the very words we are reading.
The Halt During the Chase, by Rosemary Tonks London: The Bodley Head, 1972
I’d never heard of Emlyn Williams before my sister gave me the paperback of his autobiography when I was about thirteen. The cover showed a sepia photograph of a boy of my own age with badly-cut hair and a tentative expression that was almost a smile.
After I read (and re-read) the book, I kept a lookout for his older incarnations: he still popped up in the odd pre-war film on Sunday afternoons, swarthily overacting; his creaky plays – once huge West End hits – were occasionally performed, largely in amateur theatre; his novel Headlong (which, bizarrely, was the basis of the John Goodman film, King Ralph) and a requisitely chilling book about the Moors Murderers, Beyond Belief, were both still in print.
But I’m sure that George, his early autobiography, will outlast the lot. From the opening it has precision, style and wit, as well as a dash and sparkle that is all its own, and it doesn’t matter if future readers know nothing about his relatively fleeting fame, because this book’s not about a famous person – it’s about someone who wants to be famous.
He writes with brilliance about his childhood egotism, of how, after seeing a schoolmate, Kate, lying in an open coffin, dead of pneumonia, he imagines – in heart-wringing detail – his own deathbed, funeral and eulogy: ‘Never another like him…’. The chapter ends: ‘Ten minutes later I was changed into ganssi and courduroys and in the field playing rounders as if I had not died at all. Or Kate either.’
Born in 1905, he grew up, Welsh-speaking, in Flintshire, the oldest son of an (intermittently) drunken publican and his long-suffering wife, but this is emphatically not a misery memoir – the parents’ marriage survived into loving old age, Williams senior pulled himself together and took a steady job in the steelworks, and both parents adored George, their gifted eldest son, who went from village junior school to the local grammar:
‘He has got to pass first’ said Mam, as he lit his pipe, ‘and there’s the trip, five miles, how would he get there every day if he did pass?’
‘In a tank’ said Dad, without a flicker. ‘I shall have one sent over from the works.’
From the grammar school, George won an Oxford scholarship and went on to a career in theatre and film. When (under his stage name Emlyn Williams) he starred in the smash-hit thriller, The Case of the Frightened Lady, the steelworks block-booked the cinema in Connah’s Quay, and Dic Williams had the prime seat at the centre of the balcony.
Penguin paperback editions of George and Emlyn by Emlyn Williams.
The narrative trajectory that takes his son to university is fabulous, but then a sort of drift and lassitude take over the story – the last quarter of the book is perhaps less satisfying, but it’s nevertheless intriguing. Williams falls for another undergraduate, loses the ability to study, drops out and follows the siren call of theatre to his first tiny role on stage. (Emlyn, his second autobiography – also enjoyable – takes up the story at exactly this point.)
But my favourite part of George has always been his days at the grammar-school, where he was nurtured by a superb language teacher, Sarah Cooke (later immortalised in his hit play The Corn is Green) and where he started to unleash his extravagant imagination in print. Asked to invent 3 sentences to include ‘inordinate’, ‘vehemence’ and ‘parsimonious’, George, who had just read an article on the Romanovs in The News of the World, went to town: ‘Rasputin, eerie werewolf of all the Russias, staggered up to the Czarina, his filthy locks inordinately matted as he flung a mere kopek to the subservient servant, for he was a parsimonious monster.’
This boy was never, ever going to settle for a job in the steelworks….
George: An Early Autobiography, by Emlyn Williams London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961
Lissa Evans is a former television producer and the author of V for Victory and other novels. You can learn more about her work at LissaEvans.com.
These include Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown, shelved in 1939 by Bennett Cerf at Random House for being too similar to The Grapes of Wrath — which wasn’t surprising, since Steinbeck had used Babb’s own Farm Security Administration notes as a source. Babb’s novel only saw the light of day in 2004 thanks to the University of Oklahoma Press. Another was Margaret Brown Kilik’s novel The Duchess of Angus, about the lives of women in San Antonio, Texas during World War Two. Discovered by Kilik’s step-grandmother, Columbia professor Jenny Davidson, in 2017, it only came to print in 2020 with the help of Trinity University Press.
Ad for Tough Little Trollop by Helen Adams.
Perhaps the most intriguing on the lot is Helen Adam’s 1935 novel Tough Little Trollop, which is about as obscure as a book can be without ceasing to exist. I didn’t bother linking the title to anything because there are no copies for sale and only two (!) library copies listed in WorldCat. Issued from the short-lived Hartney Press, which specialized in pulp Westerns, mysteries, and romances, the book was at least widely reviewed, though opinions were mixed. The Chattanooga News said it was “just tawdry.” The Minneapolis Star-Tribune called it “the best of its type” since Viña Delmar’s bestseller Bad Girl (which is supposed to be forthcoming from the British Library’s Women Writers series).
Variety’s reviewer thought it was “one of those over-sexed yarns concocted for library [meaning commercial lending libraries — decent public libraries didn’t shelve much pulp product in those days] readers,” but acknowledged, grudgingly, that “Trollop is more than that, though it is a story of sex rampant. Not classic literature, but decidedly a work of promise.” (Bear in mind that in the same issue of Variety, Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart was called “crude and amateurish” and both Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao were deemed “Not screen material,” though went on to be filmed in the 1960s.)
Ad for Hagar: A Story of To-Day from the New York Dispatch.
Phillips focuses on Alice Cary’s 1852 novel Hagar: A Story of To-Day. Published just two years after The Scarlet Letter, it offers a mirror to Hawthorne’s classic tale of adultery. Cary’s heroine, Elsie, is seduced by a clergyman and then abandoned. Elsie’s child dies at birth and she eventually takes on a new name, Hagar, and becomes a housemaid. She ultimately has the satisfaction of seeing the Reverend being carried off to the madhouse in a cage. The book was not well-received — one feminist paper, The Una, found the book “had no aim or purpose but to give utterance to sickly, morbid fancies” — and was largely forgotten until Nina Baym and other scholars began digging into the backlists of 19th century American women novelists.
In her 2000 book, Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History, Janet Gabler-Hover shows that there were at least thirteen Hagar novels –all by women — published between 1850 and 1913. In fact, the number of Hagar novels is enough that some scholars (including the usually meticulous Baym) became confused and credited Cary’s novel to Harriet Marion Stephens. Stephens’ novel, however, was titled Hagar the Martyr (1855). All drew upon the Biblical story of Hagar, the Egyptian (and therefore, Gabler-Hover argues, black) servant that Sarah tells to sleep with her husband Abraham and who bears the child Ishmael. These novelists, she writes, “probably selected Hagar because they wished to write novels exceeding the boundaries of the woman’s domestic novel in mid-century America.”
I’m intrigued by Stephens’ Hagar the Martyr. Its full title was Hagar, the Martyr; or, Passion and Reality, A Tale of the North and South. According to Gabler-Hover, Stephens, an actress of mediocre reputation, wrote the novel “pseudoauto-biographically, using the revenge aspect of the heroine to target theatre socialites who she imagined (probably rightly) had shunned her. The story starts in the antebellum South, where the girl Hagar is alleged to be the illegitimate child of a quadroon slave and her father, Alva Martin. Laird, a Southern gentleman of ungentlemanly ways, threatens to take her as a mistress and, after Hagar makes her way to the North and makes a name for herself in Boston society, re-emerges to assert his right to seize her as a slave.
Ad for Hagar the Martyr from the New York Times.
In words that seem a 19th Century version of Tough Little Trollop’s reviews, a proper journal such as The Living Age wrote indignantly of the novel,
The name of a woman on the title-page of a book is generally considered fair security for its freedom from gross faults of principle, if not of style. With this impression, we took up the story of Hagar, and — found ourselves mistaken. It were charity to suppose the author subject to occasional fits of mental aberration while guiding her pen. No reader of refined taste will proceed far in a book whose violations of probability and sins against good style are only exceeded by its recklessness of propriety.
Harper’s reviewer, more charitably, found Hagar the Martyr “a story belonging to the school of melodramatic intensity, written in a bold, dashing style, and seeking the materials for popular effect in scenes of strange and high-wrought passion.”
In 1955, not long after Dave Brubeck became the first postwar jazz musician to make the cover of TIME magazine, Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker’s veteran jazz critic, commented that novels about jazz had become “as indestructible as watercress sandwiches.” The irony of this, he noted, was that jazz, “with its overheated, bleary terminology and ghettoish aspects, is perhaps the hardest of all artforms to penetrate persuasively.”
It didn’t stop a couple generations of novelists from trying. After someone on Twitter asked for recommendations of novels about music and musicians recently, I began to jot down a list of just the ones about jazz and jazz musicians I could think of and was surprised how the list kept growing. Perhaps the best-known of these are one of the earliest, Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn (1938), which has been reissued as an NYRB Classic, and the best selling, Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). Algren’s book was more about drug addiction than jazz, and many of those who followed in his footsteps found it as hard not to mix up the two as did an unfortunate number of jazz musicians themselves.
Having played in an amateur big band for years, I’ve long taken an interest in books about jazz, but I won’t deny that the nonfictional ones — particularly coming from the pen of a master like Balliett, Gene Lees, Ted Gioia, or Stanley Crouch — tend, on average, to be far superior to their fictional counterparts. There’s just something about fiction and jazz than often comes out like mustard on chocolate: as great as the two may be on their own, put together they do neither a favor.
Approached as genre novels — which means, I guess, that you can set your critical brow down to middle or lower — however, they can have the same appeal as a whodunnit or western. Those same qualities of atmosphere, clichéd characters, and predictable plots that kill a book’s chance of critical praise can provide such the kind of reliable formula that makes for good escapism. Or, as another reviewer put it, one can become a willing “victim of a sort of déjà vu or déjà lu effect.” Here, then, are a dozen-plus jazz novels to enjoy.
I’d call this a half-way jazz novel. It’s about what happens when an amusement park piano player gets it into his head to start composing music. At first, everyone thinks it’s a joke, but when he meets a violinist with some training in orchestration, he ends up producing an opera titled The Giant Swing, which is set in … an amusement park. It’s halfway jazz because Burnett’s description of his hero’s music is clearly taken from George Gershwin’s “serious” compositions such as “Rhapsody in Blue” and Porgy and Bess — i.e., jazz-inspired but without the improvisational element. The story was later filmed as Dance Band (1941).
This, one of the earliest novels about a jazz musician, might just be the best when it comes to capturing both the business and the art of performing jazz. The story follows Frank and Pete Davis, brothers playing trombone and tenor sax (ala Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey), from the first time they pick up their horns in band class to their commercial and artistic success leading a swing band. The book is full of practical details about working as a musician that suggests that Steig spent a good deal of time listening to veterans of the road.
It’s also probably the first to address what made playing jazz so different from playing any other type of music before it. “Did you ever hear of Joe Venuti?” Frank asks a violinist interested in joining his band.
Well, he’s about the best of the jazz violinists. And by jazz violinist I mean something very different from the fiddlers who play in most dance orchestras. I mean a man who can play hot improvisations, a man who can play inventions extemporaneously in jazz idiom. There aren’t more than six or eight in the whole country who can do it well — probably the whole world. If I wanted a violinist I would try to find such a man. A Joe Venuti.
“But I don’t want a violin!” Frank continues. “The way I’ve worked things out there’s absolutely no place for it” — meaning that Steig also understood something that was beginning to be a major factor in the shift from hot jazz to swing: the importance of orchestration and arrangements.
Send Me Down is likely the most unjustly neglected novel on this list. Despite its — for the time — unusual subject, it was good enough to convince a hard-nosed reviewer like the novelist Kate O’Brien to declare, “There are not at this time of day many novels that can be called original, but Send Me Down is unmistakably one of them.”
The last book in the forgotten magnum opus of this genre, a trilogy called “Three Musicians’ loosely based on the careers of Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Eddie Duchin, and other white musicians who got their start in the 1920s’ hot jazz era. The first novel, Tangleweed (1943), followed a musician who got caught in the trap of booze and drugs. The second, The Wild Faun (1945), took the other direction and told about a talented soloist who sold out and became a big star playing non-threatening “sweet” music. Lou Carey, the protagonist of Little Boy Blues sticks with his passion, staying true to jazz, but also proves a first-class heel who cheats on the woman who loves him.
Willis, who was a musician himself, knew the lot of a touring player living out of a suitcase and riding the band bus from one town to another, and the kind of places where they performed:
You can walk tonight into the Union and find that nothing real has ever changed there. You can walk up to the bandstand with its tiny, scarred rail behind which the musicians sit secure, and after you have put your dime in the kitty, you can ask those boys to play a tune for you. They will understand. And one of them will stand up to the microphone while the pianist accompanies him, and in the dim light and the smoke the young man will ask if anyone in the house loves him, for you who had a dime but could not sing it, and everyone will understand. For a moment in the night, everyone will be silent, and each at his table, or in his booth, or with his instep hooked on the railing at the bar, will be asking, too, in his heart and in his own peculiar way, if anyone there loves him—the song said they did and somebody must.
He’s also the only writer on this list who would refer to “a Shangri-la, a never-never land, or more closely a kind of White House … the quarters of the fabulous Local 802 of the union to which they all belonged, the American Federation of Musicians.”
The only title on this list written by a woman. Ewing was a journalist who specialized in profiles of swing band leaders and innovative musicians such as Raymond Scott. This novel, similar to Willis’s followed the career of a trumpet player who gets tangled up in a messy marriage. From the book’s reviews, I regret that Ewing’s publishers didn’t encourage her to write a collection of profiles — ala Balliett and Lees — instead of a novel. This, from The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example:
When the author talks music, she talks first-hand, directly and without self-consciousness. Unhappily, she felt obliged to make a Book out of it, with a well-trammeled grade B plot containing a lady gangster and a lost week-end. The plot thickens but doesn’t jell; the dialogue is delivered on cue; and the music fades far, far away.
Dupree Blues is almost a novelization — except in this case, of a blues song rather than a movie:
Betty told Dupree She wanted a diamond ring And Dupree told Betty, “I’ll give you most anything.”
Now he didn’t want Betty To know he didn’t have a thing. He killed that jewelry man, Gave Betty that diamond ring.
Or as the Hartford Courant’s reviewer summed up this book, “When a man is addicted to liquor and hot music, he will not necessarily get into trouble. But add a beautiful blonde — and he is doomed.” Bonus points for featuring a trombone player, though.
Gilbert specialized in writing middle-brow, mid-best-seller-list novels that focused on particular settings: an architectural firm in Native Stone, Detroit automotives in American Chrome, a fancy Fifth Avenue apartment house in The Beautiful Life. The Hot and the Cool focused on a sextet of jazz musicians and their struggle to break through (perhaps hoping for something along the lines of the Brubeck Quartet’s splash). Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Balliett gave Gilbert credit for accuracy in his descriptions of the practical details of a musician’s life, but when it came to writing about music, he said Gilbert’s prose “reminded me of a man trying to carry on a rapid monologue underwater.”
Think of this as the Atlas Shrugged of jazz novels. Its hero, Virgil Jones, is sort of a cross between Art Tatum and Lennie Tristano — in other words, a piano god but, you know, intellectual? And at the core of his philosophy is … himself. He hands out cards reading “I AM THE LAST INDIVIDUAL IN THE WORLD” (though without an address, but I suppose the last individual in the world wouldn’t need one). This was Whitmore’s one and only novel. He soon found more profitable work as the lead writer for James Garner’s TV western Maverick.
When I wrote about this book back in 2009, I acknowledged that I’d have put it in the Justly Neglected if not for the fact that its lead character is a trombonist. As a wannabe sliphorn wrangler myself, I had to give it some bonus stars. Trombone players need love, too. However, the fact is that any book that takes almost 450 pages to cover two weeks in the life of a big band playing a gig at a Santa Monica amusement park had better justify that demand on its reader’s time by being awesome. And Sideman is not.
What I did appreciate — and what is rare among jazz novels — was Duke’s solid grasp of the difference between musical proficiency and the capacity to improvise. Duke’s hero Bennie Bell packs up his horn in the end because he comes to realize that he might be sharp enough to play the book and write innovative compositions, but he simply doesn’t have the chops to play a half-decent solo. And that — far more often than drugs — is what usually brings a would-be jazz musician’s career to an end.
Twenty-four years after The Great Swing, W. R. Burnett returned to take jazz head-on, though under a pseudonym for contractual reasons. In this case, he tells about the rise and break-up of a jazz trio — guitar, piano, and bass. He skirts around the challenge of trying to describe jazz by having a character intone, “Music is a hard thing to write about. Almost impossible, in fact: it’s just something you listen to — so I won’t bend your ears with too much talk about it.”
The trio’s bass player, Royal Mauch, sounds as if Burnett might have encountered the young Charle Mingus, then just making his name in L.A.:
This Royal — he broke everything up into pieces. The word ‘fracture’ was invented for him. I don’t know anything about Art — with a capital B, standing for Bushwa, to be polite about it, but if Royal had ever decided to paint, he would have painted those cockeyed looking things where the woman has two eyes on one side and looks like she was cut out of a marshmallow with a cleaver.
Baird was a former drummer who led a band called the Jesters of Rhythm that played around Pittsburgh in the 1930s and 1940s. After marrying and quickly fathering five children, however, he took a steadier job as a liquor store clerk and began writing pulp novels at night. This one is set in Pittsburgh and features the tragic romance between a white trumpet player and a Black singer. The result was not only unusual in its interracial theme but admirably concise. As Virginia Dale wrote in the New York Times, “You might think that jazz and love and double crossing, gambling and murder would be enough to crowd hundreds of pages, but here it’s all skimmed over in under 150.”
The only fictional outing of a one-time Broadway producer (the musical “Barnum”), this is easily the most obscure and hard-to-find title on this list. I couldn’t find a single review, aside from a brief synopsis in David Rife’s Jazz Fiction: A History and Comprehensive Reader’s Guide (2007). The New York Times’ only mention was in their “Books Published Today” item for 12 June 1956: “Novel about a musician.” So there you go.
An early offering by Ed McBain under his favorite pseudonym, Second Ending follows the example of The Man with the Golden Arm and focuses on the drugs more than the music. Though the main character is a trumpet man, the horn itself proves to be more important as something to hock than something to play. “A dossier on the disintegration phenomenon of addiction and the clawing torment of those who have been hooked,” according to Kirkus Reviews.
Most people familiar with the 1961 movie Paris Blues probably don’t realize it’s based on a book — or that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s characters were invented to appeal to white audiences. In the novel, it’s the Sidney Poitier character, sax man Eddie Cook, who’s the protagonist. A long-time expat, Cook finds his reluctance to return to the racism he remembers at home tested when he falls in love with a black American woman visiting France on her summer holiday. Flender himself was a New York-based writer who usually worked on comic material with the likes of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner before the sale of his novel to producer Sam Shaw allowed him to pursue more serious subjects, such as his 1963 account of the evacuation of Danish Jews, Rescue in Denmark.
This first novel won the Avery Hopwood Prize for major fiction in 1957. A clarinet player returns from the Korean War and trades his licorice stick for a bari sax and his adolescent fixation with Dixieland for a fascination with cool jazz. Lea captured the contrast between the jazzman’s passion for music and their passive acceptance of the limbo to which drugs and uncertain income condemns them.
This was screenwriter Kanin’s first novel, and it shows. Switching back and forth between present and flashbacks, it follows three musicians from their start as a Dixieland combo through changing styles and ensembles, to their ultimate fortunes and misfortunes. Although Kanin went on to write a number of bestsellers, the best parts of this book are those about the music itself, infused with Kanin’s thirty years of listening as an avid fan.
Russell made his mark in jazz history as the owner of Hollywood’s Tempo Music Shop, one of the best places to find jazz recordings in L.A. after the war and as the founder of Dial Records, for which Charlie Parker recorded a hugely influential set of tracks after being released from the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Red Travers, the trumpet player in The Sound, is largely based on Parker. Those familiar with Parker’s life can identify the real-life counterparts to most of the book’s characters and Ross later reused much of the material in his Parker biography Bird Lives!.
Simmons won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for his first novel, Corner Boy, in 1957, but he struggled to get his second book written and then published. Unlike most of the books on this list, it not only features a black protagonist but burns with the anger of a Black writer poised at the birth of the Civil Rights movement. For Simmons, jazz is more than just music: “Jazz is the story of the Black men being messed around so bad by the white man that if he could he’d lay down and die from the blues but his soul won’t let him do it.”
Man Walking on Eggshells and Corner Boy were forgotten for over thirty years until Norton brought them back in the late 1990s as part of a short-lived series of “Old School Books” by neglected Black writers. Although Amazon says it still has copies on stock, it’s probably time for Norton (or someone else) to consider another revival.
Asher, the house piano player at San Francisco’s famous Hungry i nightclub, based this comic novel about a New England Conservatory-trained pianist who moves to the Bay Area and takes a job playing at a strip club very loosely on his own experiences. Asher followed this up with The Electric Cotillion (1970), which took a similar character in a similar situation forward a few years, with the initial excitement and novelty of the San Francisco scene having been replaced with the drag of endless nights playing “Happy Birthday” and “Hava Nagila” at union minimum rates, until an 18-year-old high school dropout arrives to shake things up. Light on the jazz content, both novels are mainly of interest today as snapshots of SF’s swinging Sixties culture. Asher did, however, earn a permanent place in anyone’s jazz library b co-writing Hampton Hawes’ autobiography Raise Up Off of Me.
I wrote about this, Lees’ first novel, back in 2010. The book focuses on Jack Royal, a kid from Chicago who evolves from student of classical piano to jazz musician to jazz singer to pop star to star of baguette Westerns and adventure movies. My assessment: “Lees himself later told an interviewer that he hated the book. Perhaps the kindest thing one can says about it is that it provides convincing evidence that Lees made the right decision when he abandoned fiction and concentrated instead on writing about what he knew and loved best: jazz, pop, and the remarkable musicians who play it.”
Gig is about a gig. One night’s work for Roy Ambrose, a lounge pianist at the Seacliff, a fashionable joint in San Francisco known for its scenic views and society clientele. Of all the books on this list, it’s probably the most accurate in its depiction of the life of a working musician as seen through his own eyes. Roy has to deal with drunks, snobs, boors, groupies, clumsy waiters, and a rude owner, but takes it all with the perspective of someone who’ll deal with all of it all over again the next weekend:
I do not program people’s lives. I’m only a piano player. I long ago decided public arguments are silly, and I don’t participate. They solve nothing. No one’s opinions are changed. People argue because they’re good at it. I’ve learned I’m a flop at it. So I keep out of them and keep my distance from those who indulge in argument.
Roy is a true cool blue kind of cat:
Why continue this conspiracy of performers to keep the audience in its place? It’s the very thing that drives musicians to drink, to drugs, to insanity, this egomaniac reluctance to let someone else’s noises mix with their own. Why not let everybody into the act?
“As long,” he hastens to add, “as I continue to be in charge.”
I should mention that several fine novels in this genre from the 1960s have been reissued and are now available in print or eBook editions, including John Clellon Holmes’s The Horn, John Williams’s Night Song and Clifford’s Blues, and Mary Weik’s The Jazz Man, a children’s book.
It’s not hard to think of fiction set in Cambridge, from E.M. Forster’s Maurice (written in 1913-14, published posthumously in 1971) to Dusty Answer (1927) by Rosamund Lehmann and, more recently, Laura Barnett’s The Versions of Us (2015). But I’m convinced that well-written nonfiction can bring an authentic story to light in a way that no novel can. My research is on Cambridge’s first women students, university wives and college tutors (link) and there’s nothing like hearing their own voices, in the form of memoirs and biographies based on their letters and diaries. Here I focus more closely on two of these books.
Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember was published by Cambridge University Press, 1947. It’s a slim volume, only 50 pages long, with a jaunty introduction by the historian G.M. Trevelyan who writes:
If people who knew not the Victorians will absent themselves from the felicity of generalising about them for a while, and read this short book, they can then return to the game refreshed and instructed.
What I Remember begins, as many good stories do, with a happy childhood. Mary’s was spent in a rose-covered country rectory, where her father Reverend Thomas Paley encouraged his daughters’ education: ‘We had a father who took part in work and play and who was interested in electricity and photography’, she recalls. She moved to Cambridge in 1871 as one of the University’s earliest women students and one of the ‘first five’ at Newnham College; Girton College had begun two years previously. The idea that unmarried women could live apart from their parents and attend lectures was, as Paley Marshall said herself, ‘an outrageous proceeding’ at the time.
Soon after she arrived in Cambridge, she became fascinated by Political Economy because of Alfred Marshall’s lectures. He was ‘a great preacher,’ she observes, who spoke passionately about the need for women’s equality in education and quoted from George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. With his encouragement, Mary was one of the first two women to sit for the University’s final year exams in 1874 and she became Newnham’s first residential lecturer.
By the mid-1870s the Pre-Raphaelite era of colour in dress and house decoration had dawned all over England. As Florence Ada Keynes later wrote: ‘Newnham caught the fever. We trailed about in clinging robes of peacock blue, terra-cotta red, sage green or orange, feeling very brave and thoroughly enjoying the sensation it caused’ (By-ways of Cambridge History (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1956, first published 1947)). The college room that Mary studied and slept in was, like those of her students, papered in William Morris designs and hung with Burne-Jones prints. At the age of twenty-five she was that rare thing in Victorian times, an unmarried woman who lived independently from her parents and earned a good income doing a job she loved.
Then she and Alfred Marshall married and accepted posts at the newly founded University College, Bristol, where they taught and together published a textbook on The Economics of Industry (1879). Their working marriage seemed the ideal of an intellectual partnership that Mary had dreamed of, and What I Remember describes the happy years the Marshalls spent in Sicily and in Oxford before returning in 1885 to Cambridge. Alfred was made a Professor and published The Principles of Economics (1890) and Mary returned to her post at Newnham, where her inspiring teaching would have a great influence on one student: Winnie Seebohm.
‘This is the true story of a young woman who lived in the later part of Queen Victoria’s reign,’ Victoria Glendinning writes at the beginning of A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, her biography of Seebohm.
But do not be misled into thinking that because it is history it has nothing to do with you. 1885 is yesterday. It is probably tomorrow too. — From A Suppressed Cry
The prize-winning biographer of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell and Leonard Woolf, among others, Glendinning took as her first subject her Victorian great-aunt Winnie Seebohm, but the book is no less powerful for Seebohm’s obscurity. A Suppressed Cry was not much noticed when it was published in 1969 and it disappeared from view until it was reissued by Virago in 1995 with a new introduction by the author.
The issue at the heart of A Suppressed Cry is how a young woman from a close-knit Hertfordshire family rebelled against their loving claims on her and achieved her ambition to study at Cambridge. The Seebohms were linked to other Quaker clans in what Glendinning describes as ‘a tight genealogical spiral’ with banking and scholarly connections. Winnie’s father was the economic historian Frederic Seebohm, and she grew up with her siblings and invalid mother in an idyllic house called the Hermitage in rural Hitchin. Despite her obvious intelligence, Winnie was expected to be a ‘good daughter’, contented with flower-arranging and visiting her Quaker relations until a suitable husband was found for her. But she decided that ‘no woman (it is not my business to consider a man’s life) has any excuse for living a life that is not worth living’.
So, in 1885, at the age of 22, she took the gruelling Cambridge entrance exams and won a place at Newnham. A Suppressed Cry reproduces some of the touching letters and diary entries she wrote there. Winnie was thrilled with her college room, her new friends and the freedom to spend her days reading books and writing essays. She adored her tutors, particularly Mary Paley Marshall, who taught Political Economy ‘from a philanthropic woman’s point of view’. ‘She is a Princess Ida,’ Winnie told her sister, thinking of the heroine of Tennyson’s poem The Princess who founded a university for women.
She wears a flowing dark green cloth robe with dark brown fur round the bottom (not on the very edge) – she has dark brown hair which goes back in a great wave and is very loosely pinned up behind –very deep-set large eyes, a straight nose – a face that one likes to watch. Then she is enthusiastic and simple. She speaks fluently and earnestly with her head thrown back a little and her hands generally clasped or resting on her desk. She looks oftenest at the ceiling but every now and then straight at you.
Winnie wanted to become a teacher just like the marvellous Mrs Marshall, but her time as a student was heartbreakingly brief. After just six weeks at Cambridge, she fell ill and was brought back to the Hermitage to be nursed by her family. ‘How queer it looks to see everybody so leisurely here!’ Winnie wrote to her classmate Lina Bronner, confessing how she longed to return to Cambridge. ‘I imagine you lingering on dear Clare Bridge, and King’s spires will be looking grey and sharp against the sky.’
Her kindly tutor Mary Paley Marshall also wrote to her. She was the only woman Winnie knew who seemed to have it all, combining fulfilling academic work with her role as a wife. ‘If she is the woman of the future, I am sure the world will do very well,’ Winnie wrote in her diary. It was one of the last things she wrote. She died after a severe asthma attack – though she may also have had undiagnosed anorexia – just a few weeks later. Expected from childhood to suppress her ambitions and put others’ needs first, Seebohm was, in Glendinning’s memorable description, ‘left stranded on the shores of the nineteenth century’.
Mary Paley Marshall’s married life was far from the ideal that Winnie perceived. In the early 1880s Alfred turned against the idea of women at Cambridge: ‘it is not likely that men will go on marrying, if they are to have competitors as wives’ he told LSE founder Beatrice Webb. He insisted that The Economics of Industry, the book he and Mary wrote together, should be pulped and in 1897 he voted against women being awarded Cambridge degrees. But unlike Winnie, Mary was a survivor and she had the final word. After Alfred’s death in 1924 she co-founded Cambridge University’s Marshall Library of Economics. She worked there for nearly twenty years and her portrait now hangs above the library staircase opposite his.
What was left out of (or ‘forgotten’) in Mary Paley Marshall’s memoir What I Remember is at least as interesting as what was put in; and the cheering counterbalance to Winnie Seebohm’s sad story is the continuing success of Newnham, which celebrates 150 years as a women’s college this year.
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge. Her book reviews and essays have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Slightly Foxed and the Journal of Victorian Culture among others. You can follow her blog and other activities at AKennedySmith.com.
Isabel Bolton floats through the letters and memoirs of other writers like a ghost. “Isabel Bolton was there,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote May Sarton about a cocktail party in 1954: “A strange and rather pathetic figure, who is resigning herself to gradual blindness.” Edward Field recalls seeing her at the Yaddo writers’ colony around the same time, a tall elderly woman in a white dress and an outsized sun bonnet. At the time, Field was in his early thirties; she was in her seventies.
The other writers at Yaddo must have felt they had little in common with this aloof woman born in another century. Those who recognized her name knew it from the critical success of her three novels: Do I Wake or Sleep? (1946); The Christmas Tree (1949); and Many Mansions (1952), which had been nominated for the National Book Award. Far fewer knew that it was a pseudonym.
By the time she published her first novel as Isabel Bolton, Mary Britton Miller had become accustomed to being an outsider. But she’d started at the center of American society, born at the Madison Avenue mansion of her father Charles Miller, a prominent New York lawyer, and his wife Grace (née Rumrill). Charles, considered a rising star on Wall Street, was largely a self-made man, having overcome the scandal of his father’s suicide in 1847.
From the New York Daily Herald, 16 March 1847.
It was through Grace Rumrill that the Millers gained most of their status. Her father was a prosperous manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts and her brother James was a vice president of the Boston and Albany Railroad, having married the daughter of its founder, Chester Chapin. James and his father-in-law also founded and were on the board of the Chapin National Bank in Springfield. With a large summer house on the shore of Long Island Sound in New London, Connecticut and a mansion in Springfield, James Rumrill and his wife Anna Chapin Rumrill were among the wealthiest and most influential members of New England society.
Mary Miller and her identical twin sister Grace joined two older brothers and one sister in a bustling household full of servants that followed the common routine of autumns, winters, and springs in the city and long summers at the Rumrill-Chapin estates in New London. It was there, while playing tennis at his brother-in-law’s house that Charles Miller fell ill in August 1887, just two weeks after Mary and little Grace’s fourth birthday. Pneumonia quickly set in. Tending to her husband, Grace also became ill, and the two died within hours of each other a few days later.
From the Fall River Daily Evening News, 22 August 1887.
Their deaths not only left their children orphans but paupers. Having rushed back from vacation in France upon receiving the news, James Rumrill was appointed executor and soon discovered that Charles Miller’s practice was based largely on goodwill and promissory notes. He settled matters with his brother-in-law’s creditors and took the children to Springfield to live with his mother. Rebecca Rumrill tried her best, but she was in her late seventies and in poor health and died a little over two years after the five Millers’ arrival.
Writing as Isabel Bolton eighty years later in her memoir Under Gemini, Mary recreated the impression her death left on the twins:
Everything was at sixes and sevens. Grandma had gone. We could no longer find her in the library sitting beside the fire swinging her slipper on the end of her great toe. We could not find her in her room or in the dining room. There was a feeling among us all that we were not so safe and sheltered as before.
With Grandmother Rumrill gone, the children became the wards of James Rumrill and his wife Anna. James, who Mary remembered as “the most remarkable miniature gentleman anyone could imagine,” dapper and full of good humor, left the real decision making to Anna. She, in contrast, loomed over them like the judge in the supreme court of their lives. “Whatever charm and geniality she might have had,” Mary recalled, “was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed.”
Anna saw the Miller children as a problem to be solved. She had no desire to bring them into her fine house on the hill above Springfield, so Anna hired a former teacher to move in as their custodian. She was Desire Aurelia Rogers. As Mary later wrote,
Desire — who could have thought up a better name for her? What hopes, what dreams she must have had before she came to live with us. What lovely pictures must have floated and dissolved and built themselves again in that sad and hungry heart.
Unfortunately, Desire Rogers was outnumbered and outgunned. The five Miller children buzzed with more energy than she could match. The boys mocked her, the older sister Rebecca ignored her, and the twins alternated between tormenting and adoring her. She learned to trust their uncle’s characterization of them as “sprigs of Satan.” Life at the house on Maple Street became more and more anarchic. And Miss Rogers had no hope of support from Anna Rumrill, whose only interest was in keeping the orphans at arm’s length.
When Philip, the oldest of the orphans, was ready to go to college, Aunt Anna saw her opportunity to push the Millers even farther to the margins of her life. James arranged for Philip to attend his alma mater, Harvard (which continues to offer a James A. Rumrill scholarship) and Anna convinced her brother to take James, the younger Miller son, to Europe for a year’s study at a preparatory school in Geneva. Rebecca was to be sent to live and study with a music teacher in New York. The twins learned of these decisions when they returned home from school one day and found a sign reading, “THIS PROPERTY TO BE SOLD” planted on their front lawn.
They were to be packed off even further from Springfield than Geneva: Long Island. Mary and Grace, then just short of 14, were sent to live with a family in Quogue, on the south shore of Long Island. Though sad at being parted from Miss Rogers, they enjoyed their summer freedom, going off together around the countryside or swimming in the large lagoon.
Just ten days after their 14th birthday, while swimming at the mouth of the lagoon, they were caught in the current of the outgoing tide and were pulled away from their rowboat. They both struggled to swim back to the boat, but as Mary recalled in Under Gemini,
… this we saw was hopeless, a futile thing to do — to waste strength necessary to swim ashore. We were lost and terrified — Grace’s strength already spent. Was she clinging to me? No, she was not, she was still beside me in the water, swimming still. What was it she was saying? Clearly, I heard her voice; as though I myself were speaking the words, she said, “My darling Mary, how I love you….”
From the Brooklyn Standard Union, 14 August 1897.
News of Grace’s drowning made headlines in New York papers the next day. It left a permanent scar on Mary’s being. She had spent fourteen years with more than a constant companion. As she wrote in Under Gemini, as identical twins, Mary and Grace saw themselves as a single collective being:
Attuned to the same vibrations, with nerves that responded to the same dissonances and harmonies, we were one in body and in soul. What happened to one of us happened at the same instant to the other and both of us recognized exactly how each experience had registered in the other’s heart and mind. It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours.
The death of her parents and the death of her sister Grace were the tragedies that bookended Mary Miller’s childhood. Together they had an impact so profound that she wrote the story of these events and the years between twice.
Her first account, published as Mary Britton Miller, was In the Days of Thy Youth (1943). Reviewers lumped the book in with Life with Father and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, both much more nostalgic and comical accounts of life in the 1890s. The Chicago Tribune’s critic called the book “Charming, incredibly egotistical, beautifully remote,” but also “as antidiluvian as the dinosaur.” In a review titled “Gilt Gingerbread”, the New York Times recommended it mostly “For those who want to escape the headlines of today.”
Mary Britton Miller, around 1948, and the cover of Do I Wake or Sleep.
Unhappy that the book “made no ripples in the pond,” Bolton took a friend’s suggestion and adopted the pseudonym of Isabel Bolton for her next novel. It proved a lucky choice. Do I Wake or Sleep was praised as one of the best novels of its decade. Edmund Wilson reportedly fell for his fantasy of the young, pretty, and talented Isabel Bolton and was nonplussed when the stately older woman, walking with the aid of a cane, approached the bench where they’d arranged to meet in Central Park and introduced herself.
Her subsequent novels, The Christmas Tree and Many Mansions, were equally praised. Though some critics such as Stanley Edgar Hyman dismissed the acclaim for Bolton’s work as an aberration, most agreed with Diana Trilling that she was one of, if not the best, “woman writer of fiction in this country today.” Rose Field, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, ranked her alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Ann Porter, and Kay Boyle. “Miss Bolton’s talent is clear,” she wrote.
None of the people applauding the arrival of Isabel Bolton, from what I can determine, bothered to learn anything about Mary Miller. There was no mention of the several volumes of poetry, mainly sentimental in nature, she had published earlier nor did anyone give In the Days of Thy Youth a second look. They certainly didn’t know that the tragedies that framed that story came from her own life or that her sister’s drowning in 1897 did not mark the end of her woes.
Alone after Grace’s death, Mary attended a New England girls’ boarding school and then was shipped off to Europe to stay with her cousin Marguerite Chapin, who was studying music in Paris. It’s not clear if her aunt Anna Chapin Rumrill had any more intent than to get her out of the way. Mary may have returned to Europe a few years later, spending time in Italy where Marguerite, having married Price Roffrello Caetani, was now, officially, Princess of Bassiano and Duchess of Sermoneta.
Edward Field claims there were rumors that Mary had become pregnant while in Italy and given birth to an illegitimate child that she gave up for adoption. I’ve found nothing to substantiate this. Laurie Dennett barely mentions Mary in her 2016 book An American Princess, The Remarkable Life of Marguerite Chapin Caetani, even though the two cousins remained in touch through the decades and Marguerite was to publish one of Mary’s stories in an early volume of her literary journal Botteghe Oscure.
Somewhere in her mid-twenties, Mary decided to settle in New York City, taking an apartment in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood that would be her home for the rest of her life. She became active in social reform and led a study for the Consumer’s League of the conditions of children working in homes in New York slums. In her report, she wrote that “It is no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of young children in New York who ought to be in school who are hidden away in East Side tenements by their parents and often locked in so that they may be forced to do the awful home work outside factories, which the present laws do not forbid.” The situation, she argued, was effectively a sanctioned form of slavery.
From the Daily People, 30 December 1912.
After their grandmother’s house in Springfield was sold and the Miller children sent their separate ways, the siblings never found another home. Philip, the eldest, took a law degree and moved to Illinois, though he eventually returned to New York to join the prestigious Sullivan, Cromwell law firm. Rebecca married a Canadian doctor, Edward Farrell, and lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia for years.
From the Hartford, Connecticut Courant, 11 May 1916.
James, the younger of the two boys, had been taken under the Chapin wing and brought up through the ranks of the family bank in Springfield after graduating from Harvard. In 1915, he became president of the bank and was beginning to exert some influence in Massachusetts state politics. Within a year, however, he suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. He eventually recovered enough that he was allowed to go for walks on his own. Early on the afternoon of 11 May 1916, a gardener at the Swan Point Cemetery next door found his body with a revolver laying nearby. Like his grandfather Ezra Miller, he’d taken his life with a shot to the head.
Though the three remaining children were reunited in the early 1920s when Rebecca returned to New York City and her husband took a position on the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, tragedy continued to haunt their lives. Edward Farrell was struck by an attack of peritonitis and died before he could be operated on. Rebecca suffered from a crippling form of depression and died a few years later at the Home for Incurables in the Bronx.
When she was in her forties, Mary became writing poetry. Most of her poems were simple and transparent, written for children. Her first book, Menagerie (1928), was a collection about animals illustrated with woodcuts by Helen Sewell. Her poem “Cat” (“The black cat yawns/Opens her jaws,/Stretches her legs,/And shows her claws.”) has been reprinted numerous times in anthologies of cat poems. Even after her success as Isabel Bolton, she continued to publish collections of children’s poems, the last, Listen — the Birds appearing in 1961.
The remainder of her poetry was ethereal and religious, often invoking Jesus or the spirit. If there is a common theme through these poems, it is loss. In one of her “Stanzas to Spring” in Intrepid Bird (1934), for example, she cannot greet the season without some dread:
My eyes are worn with watching, and my heart is filled With unavailing knowledge. Underneath your bough Too much extortionate trust has been expelled For aught but apprehension to invade me now
Her reservations about looking back are clearest in “On Remembering One’s Childhood”:
If to these fonts and springs That joyed my soul When I was young I could return To be made whole again, I would discover Mint and fern And cresses green And flowers fresh and fair — But should I dip my hand Into the candid stream What flower or leaf or fern Would I recover there?
Reading this in light of her own experiences, one has to wonder if Mary Britton Miller ever fully recovered from the losses of her childhood.
She was forty when she took up poetry, sixty when she took up fiction. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she took up prose. For In the Days of Thy Youth is fact with the names changed and the occasional assistance of an omniscient narrator. Dedicated to “G. R. M.” (Grace Rumrill Miller, her drowned sister), the book opens with the death of their parents as perceived by the four-year-old twins. At first, there is only the commotion, the appearance of unknown relatives, the murmurs in the parlour. The adults try to explain the situation:
From their faces and the tones in which they spoke the twins got a sense that the world was coming to a sudden end, that a calamity so dire was about to overtake them that everything to which they were accustomed, light, air, food, shelter, the very business of living with these good things — was about to be whisked away from them. So when they finally realized that what they were being told was that their parents — their mother, their father were dead, “tot,” it did not seem so very terrible.
In the Days of Thy Youth is the story of the orphaned Millers (here called Marshalls) vs. the powerful Chapins (and their Rumrill followers), a contest doomed from the start. Although the little girls are relieved to be welcomed by their familiar grandmother, they can sense that the odds are against them. “Five orphan children, a bereaved old lady. You couldn’t set this outfit up against these Arnolds [the Chapins] who always managed to marry the right people and who felt in each other’s society such boundless assurance, energy and joviality.”
Their security grows more fragile with their grandmother dies. The twins find only a morbid pride to hold up in the face of their comfortable, better-off cousins:
“You have never had a funeral in your house.” No,” said Julia regretfully, she had not, and she continued to stare. “We’ve had three,” said the twins, lording it over Julia.
To the Chapins, on the other hand, the orphans are a cross they are only happy to bear when it allows them the leverage of superior self-righteousness over their neighbors. Otherwise, they are sure to make it “as obvious as a brass band” to the children “that they were a chronic source of trouble and responsibility.”
The fact that reviewers compared In the Days of Thy Youth to light-hearted memoirs of the “Gay Nineties” shows how little they understood it. Mary may have described wonderful summer days playing on the wide lawns of the Chapin/Rumrill estates on the shore of Long Island Sound, but she never forgot that the Millers were poor relations hosted with reluctance and some suspicion. The children might be invited to elaborate Christmas feasts at the Chapin mansion in Springfield, but then find themselves standing in the entrance hall afterward, abandoned. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” exclaims one relative. “Why didn’t you go home?” “We didn’t go home because nobody sent for us,” Philip replies.
Mary was able to see the potential for psychological devastation in the Chapins’ treatment of the Miller children and their concerns through their Aunt Anna’s effect on their guardian, Miss Rogers [the one name unchanged in this book]. When the twins are told that their grandmother’s house is being sold and their siblings farmed out to the care of others, they see in an instant the consequence for her:
They knew that from the moment she passed over the threshold of life with them at Maple Street Aunty Dee would cease to exist as a substantial human being. She would be Miss Nobody, Miss Nowhere, Miss Nothing-at-all. She’d be a ghost, calling on other ghosts to see, to hear, to speak to her. Nothing she said or did or even thought would be real, and nobody in any way connected with the bitter, defeated creature locked up inside this phantom lady could communicate with her. They might put out their hands to touch her, but to no avail. Miss Rogers would be ghost — wholly ghost.
By the time she was writing this, Mary was becoming something of a phantom in the eyes of others herself. Not long after In the Days of Thy Youth was published, Philip, her last remaining sibling, died of a heart attack while sitting at his desk on Wall Street. A year later, she would burst upon the literary world as Isabel Bolton, but she’d already lost most of her family and friends.
Those who looked closer, however, would see a woman still vitally connected to her world. Though her eyes were failing, she kept up with current literature by hiring readers. She fired one for balking when he came to the word “fuck” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. She published five books of children’s poetry between 1957 and 1961, each with a different theme and illustrator. Jungle Journey (1959) was illustrated by one of her closest friends, Tobias Schneebaum and drew, in part, on his experiences living with indigenous people in Peru and Mexico (later retold in Keep the River on Your Right (1969)).
Mary dedicated her next book as Isabel Bolton, Under Gemini, to Schneebaum. In it, she returned to the story told in In the Days of Thy Youth, but with a much tighter focus. This time, instead of hovering over her cast in the third person, she wrote in the first person, giving her world a fixed center: the being formed by her bond with her identical twin.
It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours. We were seldom referred to by those we lived among as Mary or as Grace but as the twins — I was Mary, she was Grace. This may be so.
“There is a legend,” she wrote, “that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed.” Their nurse grew flustered. She called for their mother, who declared that one was Mary, the other Grace. Thus, Mary’s words eighty years later: “This may be so.”
“Human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love,” Plato wrote in The Symposium. Grace Miller’s last words to her sister before drowning were, “My darling Mary, how I love you.” To Mary, so many years later, these words were a confirmation that they had found that whole in each other:
That business in which we are all perpetually engaged — the making of an individual soul — is an enterprise of memory. In our case it was a joint and not a single venture.
“I am an old woman now and full of many memories,” Mary wrote “but those which I have here evoked have for me still the strange and wonderful completeness of having lived another’s life that was at the same time my own.” If the people who saw Isabel Bolton sitting in a corner at a cocktail party or floating through the rooms at Yaddo saw her as something of a ghost, perhaps they could sense that she was walking through the world with the shadow of her sister at her side.
Mary Britton Miller was born in the horse and buggy era and wrote her memoir of her life as a twin in a time of ballistic missiles and Mutually Assured Destruction. But she had become familiar with destruction and loss early on in her life, and her awareness of life’s fragility pervades every page of her work as Isabel Bolton. As she wrote in Many Mansions,
… [T]here was something not to be passed over lightly in the startling fact that the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the soul, the long, long range of human memory, had been contemporaneous, all in the open world together, no shelter for us, no place to hide.
When David and Blanche, the two old friends in Mary’s last novel as Isabel Bolton, The Whirligig of Time, sit together, meeting in their eighties after a separation of decades, they feel themselves moving “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.” Perhaps Mary Miller wrote this because she knew just how close we always are to unimaginable catastrophe.
Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (2018, Sandstone Press) and has written for The Guardian, The Fence and the Erotic Review and broadcast on the BBC. He is currently seeking agent representation for his second novel, The Crowd Pleaser. He tweets at 
Lissa Evans is a former television producer and the author of 
Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge. Her book reviews and essays have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Slightly Foxed and the Journal of Victorian Culture among others. You can follow her blog and other activities at 
