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autobiography

Mock Autobiographies for April Fools

Long before Clifford Irving concocted his fake autobiography of recluse millionaire Howard Hughes, mock autobiographies have been a popular vehicle for satire — usually of the sort of people who wrote these books, less frequently (viz. Roy Lewis’s The Evolution Man), of the (real, not mock) author’s contemporaries. I’ve written about a number of these over the years, but I had no idea how broad this seemingly narrow sub-genre was until I started compiling this list, which is less comprehensive than I suspected a few days ago. And so, in no particular order, here is a baker’s dozen of autobiographies (and diaries) that are not — Surprise! — by the people they claim to be.

• My Royal Past (1940, revised 1961)
By Baroness von Bülop, nee Princess Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-Waldstein. Actually by Cecil Beaton.
Perhaps the ultimate proof of the fact that Cecil Beaton felt his position as preferred photographer to the Court of St. James secure was the fact that not once, but twice, he mocked both his subjects and his own staid style of photographing them in this illustrated memoir of a remote offshoot of the tangle of Saxe-Coburg-Hesse-Hohenzollern-Hapsburg-etc. bloodlines that ruled Europe for too bloody long. Beaton himself dressed up as the Baroness, accompanied by such friends as the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, all dressed up in gowns and bemedalled uniforms.
The Baron and Baroness von Büllop on their honeymoon.
Beaton was so sure of himself, in fact, that he provided his own review blurbs before they were written: e.g., “Here, as Lord Beaconsfield said, is a book that no time should be wasted in reading.” Perhaps to capitalize on his renewed fame for his costume designs for the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, My Royal Past was revised and reissued in 1961, including this time a list of errata, such as . And as one accustomed to paying attention to details, Beaton was sure to include a detailed index with such entries as:
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s entries in the index to My Royal Past.

• Quail in Aspic (1962)
By Count Charles Korsetz. Actually by Cecil Beaton
Beaton had such fun with My Royal Past that he took another shot at the sub-genre the year after its reissue. Quail in Aspic was an “as told to” autobiography of a Hungarian count who had a knack for being on the side of European noble houses moments before their demise. He manages to remake himself as a proper English gentleman, however, complete with a fine country house and a matching set of prejudices.
Elsa Maxwell as Count Charles Korsetz.
This time around, Beaton recruited his long-time friend, the society hostess Elsa Maxwell, to portray the Count in the photographs (by Beaton, of course) that illustrate the book.

 

• Cyril Pure’s Diary (1981)
By Cyril Pure. Actually by Michael Geare.
Cyril Pure is a man after every bookshop owner’s heart. Of malice, that is. Set up in Chipping Toad’s only bookshop, he dives headlong into the bookselling industry. Although it might be more accurate to say that the UK’s bookselling industry dives headlong upon him, rather like a pack of ravenous vultures. One publisher’s rep, having heard the shop has sold one of their books, leaves Cyril with 100 copies of a sure bestseller, Reminiscences of an Old Crocodile Shikari. The Chipping Toad Poetry Society names him its Vice President, in return for which he has the honor of hosting a reading by the famous Cement poet, Bert Stunge, and providing refreshments. Cyril puzzles over the inner meanings of Stunge’s work:

Tring, tring
Shoestring, heating
Bloating, fourteen
Umpteen, thumping…

Geare teamed up with Michael Corby the following year to write another mock diary, this time of the famed Transylvanian count, who, as it turns out, spent quite a lot of time in Victorian England, attending Balliol and Oxford, exchanging ripostes with Oscar Wilde, meeting Sherlock Holmes, and implicating Van Helsing in the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s earnest fun but more earnest than fun, unfortunately.

 

• Lord Bellinger (1911)
By Lord Bellinger. Actually by Harry Graham.
Although just one generation away from trade, Lord Bellinger has easily adapted to the life of the idle nobility, priding himself on being “naturally disinclined to anything approaching effort.” An early attempt at portraying the type of privileged dimwit parodied in Monty Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” competition and now occupying numerous junior minister positions in the current Conservative government, Harry Graham ultimately missing his mark by favoring kindness over brutality in his approach.
I wrote about Lord Bellinger back in 2013.

 

• Little Me: the intimate memoirs of that great star of stage, screen, and television, Belle Poitrine (1961)
By Belle Poitrine (see above for the rest). Actually by Patrick Dennis.
Dennis, rocketed to fame and fortune with his novel Auntie Mame and its Broadway and film adaptations, may have had most fun with this account of the successes, failures, and romantic entanglements of a grand dame actress a la Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, etc. Dedicated to her four husbands, including the fourth and shortest-lived (literally), Letch Feeley, the former Pomona gas station attendant who had the misfortune to step onto a yacht with his mistress just moments before it quite unexpectedly exploded. Illustrated with photographs by Cris Alexander.

Like Beaton, Dennis enjoyed this form so much that he followed a few years later with First Lady (1964), the memoirs of Martha Dinwiddie Butterfield, whose husband, George Washington Butterfield, occupied the White House for 30 days in 1909 — most of that time drunk or cavorting with his mistress, Gladys Goldfoil, in one of the spare bedrooms.

 

• I Think I Remember (1927)
By Sir Wickham Woolicomb (“ordinary English snob and gentleman”). Actually by Magdalen King Hall
A celebration of a life lived “when gentlemen were gentleman” and before “all this socialism, etc., made everything cheap and nasty.” As with Lord Bellinger, it’s easiest to simply poke fun at the pompous than to turn parody into an authentic comic creation. As The New York Times‘s reviewer put it, “In parodying the pompous tomes of reminiscences that great personages manage to foist on the publishers and public with little difficulty, Miss King-Hall has taken a step downstairs. It is as if James Joyce, after completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had gone ahead to fashion A Portrait of an Old Man with Senile Dementia.”

There must be something about these spoofs that inspires certain authors. Magdalen King-Hall wrote two others: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 (1926), which mocked the pretences and rituals of Georgian England and which she admitted she’d only written to escape the boredom of a summer at the English seaside; and Gay Crusaders (1934), the memoir of an English knight in the Third Crusade, an experience enlivened by liberal amounts of booty and made tiresome by the consistent habit of the French to arrival after all the fighting was done.

 

• Water on the Brain (1933)
By Major Arthur Blenkinsop, formerly of the Boundary Commission in Mendacia. Actually by Compton Mackenzie
Mackenzie, who ran a British intelligence and special operations network in Greece during World War One and was involved in everything from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to an attempted assassination of Prince Phillip’s father, then King of Greece. Somewhat resentful at his lack of recognition from his higher ups, Mackenzie wrote this account of one particularly inept and dull-witted agent recruited into the service of His Majesty’s Director of Extraordinary Intelligence, MQ99(E).

 

• The Way Up (1972)
By Anaxagoras, Duc de Gramont. Actually by Sanche de Gramont (who later changed his name to Ted Morgan).
The Way Up may have been an attempt to cash in on the success of the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, mock memoirs by Harry Flashman, the villain of Thomas Hughes’s earnest Victorian boy’s novel about Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days. In De Gramont’s case, his villainous hero is a fringe member of the court of King Louis XV, adventurer, soldier of fortune, slave trader, and courtier. Ironically, however, it was Scotsman Fraser who demonstrated a greater talent for panache than his French wannabe competitor. De Gramont/Morgan stuffs almost 500 pages full of plot but failed to come close to the joyous sense of bastardry that makes the Flashman novels so much fun.

 

• The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace (1937)
By Ethel Firebrace. Actually by Gay Taylor and Malachi Whitaker.
The Victorian novelist par excellence, Ethel Firebrace wears out four typewriters churning out over a hundred novels or over five million self-righteous words. By her own account, Ethel is not a prig. It simply happens to be the fact that everyone else is lazy, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy.
And non-garglers. Ethel attributes her success (“or very nearly all of it!”) to her habit of gargling after food. Writers who fail to gargle “spring up like toadstools, live as long, and disappear as ignominiously.” Needless to say, but “there are no garglers among modern poets.”
As I wrote back in 2019, The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace was a jeux d’esprit for lifelong friends Taylor and Whitaker, but on the whole probably more fun for them than us.

 

• The Autobiography of Augustus Carp
By Augustus Carp, Esq. Actually by Henry H. Bashford.
Most of these books are amusing. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. The Autobiography of Augustus Carp is a comic masterpiece. Bashford, a Harley Street physician and amateur writer, grasped something that many of his fellow mock autobiographers failed to: namely, that one cannot spoof half-heartedly. There are moments, for example, when the reader sees the props in a book like The Autobiography of Ethel Firebrace, sees the scene being staged for a joke at Ethel’s expense. Bashford, on the other hand, understood that Augustus Carp is not only blissfully unaware of his ridiculousness but absolutely convinced of his constant and superior moral rectitude. And so, for example, if he happens to get hammered by imbibing excessively of a drink he’s told is “Portugalade,” he is not just a drunken boor but completely ignorant of the fact that he’s drunk. There’s a certain giddy delight in observing how often Bashford is able to coax Augustus into behaving like an idiot without his gaining the slightest clue to what’s going on.

 

• My Hey-Day: The Crackup of the International Set (1940)
By Princess Tulip Murphy. Actually by Virginia Faulkner.
Taken from a series of articles Faulkner wrote for Town and Country in the 1930s, My Hey-Day is a world tour in the company of Tulip Murphy, former good-time girl and widow of “Brick-a-Minute” Murphy, who claimed to be related to ancient Irish royalty in some unspecified way. Unspecified is all right with Tulip, who’se never seen a set she couldn’t force her way into. Whether she’s visiting Scandanavian, the Soviet Union, France, Tibet, or Hollywood, Princess Tulip manages to mock power, wealth, class, culture, sexuality, and, most of all, fashion. No matter how limited her purse, she finds some old thing to throw on:

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

Princess Tulip noted, with regret, that the onset of World War Two was curtailing the activities of the International Set: “Many of my oldest friends can now count their yachts on the fingers of a single hand.” However, Faulkner carried Tulip through at least a dozen more adventures after My Hey-Day was published, visiting New Orleans, Washington, Mexico, a Western dude ranch, and the wedding of Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan in 1949 and setting at least the American land speed record for gate crashing.

The Story of a Life, Volume 5: Southern Adventure, by Konstantin Paustovsky (1969)

Cover of Harvill Press edition of Southern Adventure by Konstantin Paustovsky

“I lost touch with Russia for almost two years,” Konstantin Paustovsky writes in the introduction to this, the fifth volume of his autobiography. “But I do not regret it,” he continues, and neither will the reader. Southern Adventure is easily the most exotic, the most magical chapter in Paustovsky’s life.

After a trip along the Russian coast of the Black Sea aboard the freighter Pestel (which concludes the previous volume, Years of Hope, Paustovsky awakened one morning “feeling on my face the warm palms of somebody’s hands. They smelt of mimosa.” The Pestel is anchored off Sukhum (now Sukhumi), the main port in what was then the Abkhazian Soviet Republic. The scents from the lush tropical vegetation on shore carried out to the ship …

A postcard of a garden in Sukhum.
A postcard of a garden in Sukhum.

… until they formed a tight ball and the air was compressed into a thick syrup; then they would untwine again into distinct and separate fibres and I would detect the breath of azalias, bay-trees, eucalyptus trees, oleanders, wisterias and many other flowers wonderful in appearance and colour.

The sensation stirs a childhood fantasy based in stories of the Arabian nights and jungle explorers and Paustovsky resolves to go ashore — not just to go, but to stay. As he quickly learns — in an experience repeated throughout this book — the nascent bureaucracy of this young Soviet republic is ruthless and absolute: there is no official way for him to leave the ship except under close supervision and for a matter of just an hour or two. On the other hand, the harshness of Soviet rules are also softened by the indolence and lackadaisical attitude of most officials in the Caucasus: “The old and the new were jumbled up together in the way things get jumbled up in a basket after a sharp jolt.” Soon, he is walking along the boulevards of Sukhum.

In Sukhum, as with the other ports along the now-Georgian Black Sea coast that Paustovsky visits in the course of the book, “It was difficult to grasp what century we were living in.” While Soviet-organized collectives, workers councils, and goverment functions attempted to institute a new regime, blood feuds still broke out between families and tribes, disputes were more often settled by elders than by courts, and bamboo shoots still sprung up overnight in even the busiest streets in town.

Despite having no money and no job, Paustovsky lucks into a conversation with an official of the Cooperative Union of Abkhazia in Sukhum — the Absouyz — who hires him as a secretary. “I was hellishly lucky in Sukhum,” he writes, and indeed his luck throughout his two years in the Caucasus is one of the magical elements of this volume.

Lake Amtkheli inthe Abkhazia region of Georgia.
Lake Amtkheli in the Abkhazian region of Georgia.

But the most magical element by far is Paustovsky’s evocation of the other worldly beauty of the Caucasian landscape, where coastal strips of palm trees and tropical flowers suddenly transformed into steep Alpine mountains. Early in the book, he and an odd assortment of temporary residents of Sukhum make an expedition to Lake Amkeli, formed by an earthquake just a couple of decades before. The lake seems to Paustovsky something out of a fairy tale book:

The crystal clarity of reflections in the water was so perfect that it was impossible to distinguish the reflection of the shores and mountains from the real shores and mountains.

It was as if there were two Caucasuses around us. One of them rose up to the sky above, and the other went down into the shining abyss beneath our feet. Identical feathery clouds slowly moved in the sky and along the bottom of the abyss.

Every time I threw my line and sinker into the lake I shattered the ideal fusion of this world.

Soon, however, he grows restless and talks his way onto a ship heading further south, to the port of Batum. Here, to the fragrances of Sukhum are added the cacophony of a city closer in spirit to the Middle East than to Russia:

Postcard of the Turkish bazaar in Batum.
Postcard of the Turkish bazaar in Batum.

… in Batum, particularly in the Turkish bazaar, known as Nuri, you were deafened with a whole kaleidoscope of sounds — from the bleating of sheep to the desperate cries of maize sellers: ‘Hot maize!’; from the plaintive moans of a muezzin on the top of a near-by mosque to the squeaking of pipes out of the windows of dukhans and the tearful singing of their tipsy patrons.

As in Odessa, Paustovsky manages to convince the local seamen’s union to underwrite a newspaper and appoint him as its editor. The pay is low, but then so is the cost of living in Batum, particularly when he takes a room in the town’s “coastal shelter,” a refuge for sailors stranded in the port from getting drunk or spending a night in jail for fighting. The coastal shelter, he writes, was “a cross between a doss house, a pub, a police cell for drunks and a brothel.”

One of the men he encounters there is Batum’s lighthouse keeper, Stavraki. Something about the man sets Paustovsky’s senses on edge, and eventually he discovers that this is the notorious former Imperial Russian Naval officer responsible for shooting Lt. Pyotr Schmidt, the leader of the Black Sea fleet uprising of 1905 later made famous in Eisenstein’s movie Potemkin. Normally one to accept his fellow man with understanding, Paustovsky finds it impossible not to revile Stavraki:

That life of his was just a series ofacts of blackest treachery. And these acts of treachery developed out of petty bits of nonsense: out of a desire to wear just one more pip on his shoulder straps and cut a dash in women’s eyes, out of servile fear of all authority

A few months later, Stavraki was arrested by the Cheka, taken to Sevastopol, tried for his anti-revolutionary crimes, and sentenced to the same fate to which he’d sent Lt. Schmidt: death by firing squad.

Konstantin Paustovsky and his second wife, Valeria Navashina, in the late 1930s.
Konstantin Paustovsky and his second wife, Valeria Navashina, in the late 1930s.

After two years enjoying the warmth of the southern Black Sea coast, Paustovsky begins to long to see ice and snow again. He heads into the interior, to the Georgian capital of Tblisi. There, he meets again with Frayerman, a “martyr to the pen,” an inveterate journalist who’d managed to work his way around the rim of the Black Sea, writing for or, when necessary, founding newspapers. In Tbilisi, they start a paper for the railway workers, The Little Train Whistle, and enjoy riding the narrow lines that wind up into the mountains of Georgia.

It’s not a bad life for the time and place, but soon Paustovsky begins to brood about his mother and sister, abandoned long ago in Kiev. Why is he idling away his time in a foreign place when he could be helping them? “I wanted to groan at the painfully obvious, perfectly clear thought which had never before entered my head, groan at the realization of my absolute, unfeigned, genuine and, therefore, hideous loneliness, the realization that nobody needed me here.”

And with this, Paustovsky climbs aboard a train to start the long and tortuous journey back to his native Kiev, bringing his Southern Adventure to a close. Though his idyll in the Caucasus is, by his own admission, a hiatus in his life’s drama, one could not ask for a better way to stir one’s imagination and make one long for a similar time in some exotic locale. It’s a beautiful and memorable excusion.

Note: Vintage Classics recently announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith, due for publication in June 2022. This edition will not, however, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6.

The Story of a Life, Volume 5: Southern Adventure, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon
London: Harvill Press, 1969

Lissa Evans Recommends Emlyn Williams’ Autobiography George

Cover of first UK edition of George by Emlyn Williams

This is a guest post by the novelist Lissa Evans

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
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 EvansLissa 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.

Crime Pays Royalties: the Autobiographies of Thieves

The exploits of George Manolesco, "Prince of Thieves," from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905
The exploits of George Manolescu, “King of Thieves,” from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905

Ever since Daniel Defoe published his novel Colonel Jack (1722), readers have been fascinated by the lives of career criminals. Although, as Defoe spells out in his lengthy original title of the book, his hero “was made Colonel of a Regiment” and resolved “to dye a General,” the core of Jack’s story was the “Six and Twenty Years” he spent as a thief.

Thieves’ stories appeal to both the sinner and Puritan in us. Neglected Books fan Tony Baer describes a curious homegrown example from early 19th Century America titled Narrative of the Life of John Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (1837):

Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar. It’s surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837. Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison. Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden. According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid: “The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author’s own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen’s attempt to rob him.”

[For the long and strange history of binding books in human skin, see Megan Rosenbloom’s recent Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.]

The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade
An early edition of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade

The Autobiography of a Thief has been a perennially popular title, used, by my count, at least six times since Defoe. Charles Reade, who once competed with Dickens in terms of popularity with Victorian readers, took it for a short novel: The Autobiography of a Thief (1857). Reade, who was an advocate of social reform throughout his life, was careful to correct his narrator’s commentary. When the narrator writes that he “took with me three pounds ten shillings” from an Edinburgh baker after finding the work there too hard, Reade footnotes,

“Took with me.” No such thing. “Stole” is the word that represents the transactions. Always be precise. Never tamper with words; call a spade a spade and a picklock a picklock; that is the first step towards digging instead of thieving.

Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley
Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley.

A more authentic autobiography of a thief can be found in the opening chapter of Jottings from Jail; Notes and Papers on Prison Matters, by the Reverend J. W. Horsley (1887). Horsley, who served as chaplain at Clerkenwell Prison, collected oral histories and letters from inmates he came to know there. Horsley carefully annotated these accounts to help his readers decipher the criminal argot, such as in this inventory of the clients of a pub in Shoreditch popular with the East End’s underworld:

The following people used to go in there — toy-getters (watch-stealers), magsmen (confidence- trick men), men at the mace (sham loan offices), broads- men (card-sharpers), peter-claimers (box-stealers), busters and screwsmen (burglars), snide-pitchers (utterers of false coin), men at the duff (passing false jewellery), welshers (turf-swindlers), and skittle-sharps. Being with this nice mob (gang) you may be sure what I learned.

W. L. Hanchant later reprinted this autobiography in his 1928 book, The Newgate Garland; or, Flowers of Hemp, which collected poems, songs, and letters from London’s most notorious prison.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood

In 1903, journalist Hutchins Hapgood collected the oral history of a New York City pickpocket and petty thief in The Autobiography of a Thief. Many were sceptical of whether Hapgood’s thief was real or imaginary. He was probably a little of both. But the book was rich in details of how small-time crooks of the Bowery operated. Here, for example, is how “molly-buzzing” — stealing women’s pocket-books — worked:

We worked mainly on street cars at the Ferry, and the amount of “technique” required for robbing women was very slight. Two or three of us generally went together. One acted as the “dip,” or ” pick,” and the other two as “stalls.” The duty of the “stalls” was to distract the attention of the “sucker” or victim, or otherwise to hide the operations of the “dip”. One stall would get directly in front of the woman to be robbed, the other directly behind her. If she were in such a position in the crowd as to render it hard for the “dip,” or “wire “to make a “touch,” one of the stalls might bump against her, and beg her pardon, while the dip made away with her “leather,” or pocket-book.

Although it was never published in English, the autobiography of a thief who styled himself as royalty in the criminal world appeared in Berlin two years after Hapgood’s book. George Manolescu’s Ein Fürst der Diebe. After leaving his native Romania, Manolescu quickly developed a taste for high-end burglary and specialized in robbing jewellers and jewel owners, particularly from their suites in the finer hotels of the Riviera, Baden-Baden, and other stylish watering holes. Manolescu’s book is said to have inspired Thomas Mann’s unfinished masterpiece Confessions of Felix Krull.

Cover of I was a Bandit, the Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook
Cover of I was a Bandit, the 1930 Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook.

Two decades later, another international thief, Eddie Guerin, recounted his adventures in his 1928 book Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook. Tony Baer describes it as follows:

Amazingly well told autobiography of a career criminal who specialized in bank robberies.

Eddie grew up in Chicago in the 1860’s to the 1880’s. He published the book in 1928 at age 67, motivated in part by a desire to counteract his portrayal by his former flame in her book published slightly earlier: Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks.

There’s plenty of adventure, including blowing the safe of the American Express building in Paris, only to be double crossed, caught and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guyana to serve a life sentence. He later escaped and returned to the States, Canada and on to London where he continued a life of crime, narrowly escaping assassination by Chicago May and her new boyfriend.

What I dug most, however, was Guerin’s ‘underworld vernacular’ (his phrase—not mine—tho I suppose I’ll steal it now from this long dead thief).

The prose is precise, hardboiled, and terse. Just how I like it. He does not tell you. He shows you. With efficiency and enough flair to entertain without being at all showy or pretentious.

What I am now quite perplexed about now is whether the hardboiled school of writing was really drawn from Hammett and Hemingway, as we were always led to believe—or whether it was more some part of the zeitgeist. There appears to have been an underworld vernacular shared by cops and robbers and hoboes and day laborers alike. A dirty realism that people spoke around that time that finally made it pen to paper in the late 20’s.

Highly recommended. A real joy to read.

Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth
Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth

Around the same time, Alfred A. Knopf published two closely-related criminal memoirs. Grimhaven, by Robert Joyce Tasker (1928), is an account of a convicted burglar’s time at San Quentin Prison. Tasker took up writing while in prison and eventually sold a number of articles about his experiences to Mencken’s American Mercury. While at San Quentin, Tasker met another inmate, Ernest Booth, a veteran thief in for a failed bank robbery. Booth decided to try his hand at writing as well. As Tasker recounts in Grimhaven, the two men decided to avoid competing with each other:

In the end we drew up an oral compact that I would write only of prisons, and he would write only of criminals not yet in prison. We talked of the various things my experiences had taught me and decided that he should write the story of a bank-robbery, giving it every detail, with every emotion recorded.

Booth’s own book Stealing Through Life appeared less than a year after Tasker’s. With a record far longer than Tasker’s, Booth took a rather Nietzschean view of the criminal class:

There are those of us — thieves and poets — who are born intact. Complete. The stern realities of life are inverted and become only so many evidences of unreality. Within our selves we have a complete world of our imagination…. Within this realm of our own possession we retreat when confronted with things that do not fit into our preconceived scheme of things-as-they-should-be.

“We are the odd ones. The criminals, the geniuses, the builders of Utopias,” he boasted.

Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney
Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney

In 1936, three-time convicted burglar Henry DeGras published his account of growing up in the London underworld of prostitutes and “wide boys,” Low Company: The Evolution of a Burglar, under the pseudonym of Mark Benney. Released in the U.S. a year later under the odd title Angels in Undress, the book received wildly enthusiastic reviews, including from such notoriously tough critics as Rebecca West and George Orwell. Although his publisher Peter Davies touted Benney as “the man who committed a hundred burglaries,” Benney’s crimes had been mostly minor felonies. His last conviction was for skipping out on installment payments for a phonograph. Benney went on to write several novels about the world he’d grown up in, most notably The Big Wheel, discussed here recently.

Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson
Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson.

In 1965, R. Lincoln Keiser edited the memoir of a petty thief, Henry Williamson, Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief. A case worker for Cook County, Keiser got to know Williamson, a recent parolee from the Illinois State Penetentiary, and taped over a hundred hours on interviews which he condensed into this book. Although its cover appealed to a general audience, Keiser’s account was more sociological in nature and included commentary from Dr. Paul Bohannon, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.

Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder
Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder, by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long.

In 1970, Thomas E. Gaddis, best known for The Birdman of Alcatraz, his 1955 story of prisoner and amateur ornithologist Robert Stroud, collaborated with James O. Long and in compiling the recollections of a truly nasty piece of work, the serial killer Carl Panzram. Robberies were the least of his crimes, but there were plenty of them. As Tony Baer describes it,

Prior to his execution in 1930, Panzram and his death row guard became friends, and Panzram made a parting gift of a short autobiography, first published in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas Gaddis, who fills in gaps in the narrative with chapters written in the 3rd person.

The first-person confessions from Panzram to be the most compelling bits of writing. He is completely unapologetic, yet recognizes his own monstrosity. He is not trying to leverage the confession for profit, titillation nor commutation. He recognizes that publication will come after death, and thus seems pretty liberated to simply tell his tale in simple unadorned prose.

The writing is lean and uses common no frills language. He does terrible things out of misanthropy and greed. But basically just feels like he’s “paying it forward” on the ill treatment he’s received from others.

Panzram was a textbook example of recidivism: “What time I haven’t been in jail I have been either getting out or getting in again,” he wrote. His coldly amoral voice is chilling:

In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.

Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk
Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk.

The Thief: the Autobiography of Wayne Burk, Professional Thief (1971), an as-told-to book written by Los Angeles Times reporter Ted Thackrey, Jr., is perhaps the most insufferably self-satisfied of all these accounts. Burk claimed to have stolen over $15 million, though that number is hard to believe after I located a few stories of Burk’s exploits, such as his 1948 stick-up of the bar at the Hotel Il Trovatore in Bakersfield, California, where he made off with a whopping $185. Burk’s moral calculus is notable for its relativity:

Nobody in this world can ever say they starved because of anything I ever did. I don’t rob poor people; they ain’t got enough money to make it worth the trouble. I never screwed around with the stock market; there ain’t no one in this world can say I make their father jump out of a window because of something I pulled with a stock to make myself richer while everyone else in the country loses. I never made a motorcar that was so cheap and crappy that it got the people who drove it killed. I never put out a medicine that crippled people or gave them cancer, and I sure never shot some poor guy just because I didn’t happen to like his looks. If I put anybody out, I had a good reason — money!

Which sounds a little like the man who boasts that he’s screwed a lot of women but never messed around with anyone’s daughter.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Andrew Keith Munro
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Andrew Keith Munro

Alexander Keith Munro’s The Autobiography of a Thief (1972) proved to have been a work in progress. Less than three years after writing, “I had a tremendous amount of excitement out of being a burglar,” Munro apparently found the call of adventure irresistable and was sent up for stealing £23,000 in valuables from the country home of Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian and broadcaster.

Excitement seems to be a common theme in these autobiographies. In The Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journey (1972), Professor William J. Chambliss’s case study of a career burglar, Harry King shares the profound observation that, “It’s exciting and I really believe that it’s the excitement that makes it appealing.”

Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton and Edward Linn
Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton with Edward Linn

The most purely entertaining of all these memoirs is the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton’s Where the Money Was (1976), which he wrote with Edward Linn after his release from Attica State Prison in 1969. Like Munro and Harry King, Sutton found the thrill of planning and committing robberies more addictive than their rewards:

Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.

As imaginative as some thieves may be, they continue to stick to traditions when it comes to titles. When Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the 1972 Great Train Robbery came to tell his story, he called it — you guessed it — The Autobiography of a Thief (1985)

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum: What to Read After Waiting for Nothing

Hobos being moved out of Los Angeles, c. 1933

The Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath recently reissued the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, and the initial response of readers has been quite enthusiastic. I think a lot of today’s readers may not have been aware before now that there was a wealth of good writers beyond John Steinbeck who dealt with the impact of an economic and social catastrophe that reached as far back as the mid-1920s. So, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention some of the other remarkable books written in the 1920s and 1930s that focused specifically on life “on the bum”: the experience of the homeless, unemployed, and often desperate men and women who drifted about America in search of something to hope for.

The grandfather of all American hobo books is probably Ralph Keeler’s Vagabond Adventures (1870), which I wrote about in one of my earliest posts back in 2006. Keeler got around by steamboat instead of railroad, but his life of wandering and casual labor set the pattern that thousands would follow. Vagabond Adventures is so old that it predates the word hobo, which seems to have sprung up in the 1890s and which, according to etymologist Anatoly Liberman, has an uncertain origin. By the 1893 edition of the Funk & Wagnall dictionary, however, the establishment had already passed its judgment on the hobo: “An idle, shiftless wandering workman, ranking scarcely above the tramp.” Tramp, in fact, was the label preferred by poetic types, starting with W. H. Davies’s The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) and continuing through Harry Kemp’s Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative (1922). Kemp’s book, however, also marked the end of the romantic notions about life on the bum.

Cover of Beggars of Life by Jim Tully

• Beggars of Life: a Hobo Autobiography, by Jim Tully (1924)

Jim Tully was probably the first to celebrate the hobo-cum-hobo life, though by the time he published this autobiography, he’d been off the road for over a decade. Still, he worked hard to cultivate his image as a bruiser and built upon it through a series of novels about boxing, carnies and circus performers, thiefs, and prostitutes. A lot of the tough-guy literature of the 1930s drew its inspiration from Tully.

Kent State University Press has reissued a number of Tully’s books, including Beggars of Life, Circus Parade, Shanty Irish, and The Bruiser, as well as the biography Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler by Paul Bauer and Mark Dawidziak.

Cover of You Can't Win, by Jack Black

• You Can’t Win, by Jack Black (1926)

Jack Black spent most of his life on the wrong side of the law. The novelist and historian R. L. Duffus claims that Black was credited with over half the robberies that took place in the first year after San Francisco was hit by the 1906 earthquake. In between stick-up jobs and break-ins, however, Black preferred to travel like other hobos, at the railroad’s expense. Though he doesn’t actually use the word hobo in the book, there are plenty of stories about swinging into empty freight cars and run-ins with railroad bulls. It’s likely that Black decided to write his autobiography after seeing the success of Jim Tully’s, but Black has inspired his own followers, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, and Black is sometimes described as “the original beatnik” (a word that’s probably just as archaic as hobo by now).

There are several different reissues of You Can’t Win available now, including a Kindle edition and an audiobook.

Cover of Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg

• Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg (1929)

Bottom Dogs, Dahlberg’s first novel and largely autobiographical novel was written in Brussels but centers on the year or so that he spent bumming around the West after he was discharged from the Army. Dahlberg’s alter ego, Lorry, is what country songwriters call a ramblin’ man: “He didn’t care if he never saw any grub, he wanted his freedom, he wanted to knock about, hit the road whenever he felt like it, bum around the country.” And he arrives in a new town in typical hobo fashion:

… [H]e looked down; the train was rattling away at forty anyway; he wasn’t sure; but he knew he couldn’t jump. He’d have to wait till they got outside the yards of Ogden, Utah. He’d have to lay low, too, when he got in; he might get picked up in the streets. He wasn’t quite sure what he would do yet. Pulling into the yards outside of Ogden, Lorry jumped, hitting the coal cinders. He went down solid, bleeding at the hands and knees, and limped out of the railroad yards, stumbling toward the Lincoln Highway. He trudged along, half-heartedly hailing passing autos; he was too dirty; his shoes half off him; cinders in his ears; soot through his hair; no one would stop for him; they might think he was a stick-up.

Dahlberg was the first to test the appetite of critics and readers for a fictional equivalent of Tully and Black’s memoirs. Despite a foreword by D. H. Lwawrence, Bottom Dogs got a less than stellar reception. For Saturday Review, it seemed “to represent the vanishing point, the reductio ad absurdum of the naturalistic ‘low life’ novel,” that it amounted to ‘sub-animal reaction reported by sub-animal itself.’ “We doubt if the book helps one to understand any considerable or significant part of anything,” its reviewer sniffed.

Bottom Dogs is out of print now, but copies of the collection of Dahlberg’s first three novels that was published by Crowell back in 1976 can be picked up cheaply on Amazon and elsewhere.

Cover of A Hobo's Hornbook by George Milburn

• The Hobo’s Hornbook, by George Milburn (1930)

More cultural artifact than story, The Hobo’s Hornbook reprints dozens of hobo rhymes and songs, including classics such as “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” George Milburn, then a budding young folklorist, collected them from a variety of sources, including interviews with hobos in towns around the Midwest. “The idea that hoboes, as a class, were imbued with the spirit of the medieval troubadours first occurred to me in 1926 when I was living on the outskirts of Chicago’s hobohemia,” Milburn wrote in the introduction. “A short distance away was Washington Square, known to staid Southsiders and suburbanites as ‘Nut Square’ and to hoboes the nation over as ‘Bughouse Square.’ In that oasis speech is free and the hoboes make the most of it. There it was that I found my first hobo elocutionists….”

The text of The Hobo’s Hornbook is available online at https://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1930s/1930_the_hobos_hornbook__george_milburn_(HC)/index.htm.

Cover of You Can't Sleep Here by Edward Newhouse

• You Can’t Sleep Here, by Edward Newhouse (1934)

In You Can’t Sleep Here, Newhouse’s first novel, the hobo life is not a matter of personal choice but economic necessity. In the novel, a newspaper reporter loses his job and quickly drops through what little social support net existing in those early Depression days — getting evicted from his apartment, sleeping in flophouses and park benches, standing in soup kitchen lines, and finally sharing a crate in a Hooverville. The novel reflects the energetic radicalism with which Newhouse and many others responded to the economic devastation that followed the Stock Market crash. As one reviewer wrote, “Starvation has a remarkable effect on the intellect; the latter becomes susceptible to ideas to which, in the pride of its security, it had been stubbornly closed.”

You Can’t Sleep Here is extremely rare now, but you can find it online if your library has access to HathiTrust.org: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006498559.

Cover of Boy and Girl Tramps of America by Thomas Minehan

• Boy and Girl Tramps of America, by Thomas Minehan (1934)

Despite its somewhat childish title and a certain simple-worded prose style, this is a serious anthropo-/socio-logical study of the tens of thousands of young people made homeless, destitute, and itinerant by the Depression. Minehan spent several summers riding the rails and collecting observations and interviews in places like Chicago’s Bughouse Square. The New York Times’ reviewer was grateful for Minehan’s factual approach: “Congratulations are due to Thomas Minehan that he did not attempt to make literature out of the material he has put into this book. The stark, brutal, vivid, uncompromising realities of life he has set down in it are more important for his purposes, and for any use that could be made of them, than any literary product into which they could have been transformed.”

Boy and Girl Tramps of America is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/boygirltrampsofa0000unse

• Somebody in Boots, by Nelson Algren (1935)

Algren’s first novel, it drew upon his experiences in Texas, where he lived for a year or so after graduating from college. While there, he became so destitute that he stole a typewriter and landed in jail for a spell. The book sold poorly when first published and Algren preferred to draw attention to A Walk on the Wild Side, the 1956 novel into which he worked a number of elements from the earlier work. Of Someboy, Algren later wrote, “This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.

Still, it’s full of details that demonstrate that Algren was no dilettante when it came to his time on the bum. He records verses like those found in Milburn’s collection:

The roundhouse in Cheyenne is filled every night
With loafers and bummers of most every plight ;
On their backs is no clothes, in their pockets no bills.
Each day they keep comingfrom the dreary black hills.

He also recounts the tales that hobos tell each other about railroad bulls and sheriffs to avoid — like Seth Healey in Greenville, Mississippi:

He’ll be walking the tops and be dressed like a ’bo, so you’ll never know by his looks he’s a bull. But he’ll have a gun on his hip and a hoselength in his hand, and two deputies coming down both the sides ; your best bet then is to stay right still. You can’t get away and he’ll pot you if you try. So give him what you got and God help you if you’re broke. When he lifts up that hose-line just cover up your eyes and don’t try any backfightin’ when it comes down — sww-ish. God help you if you run and God help you if you fight; God help you if you’re broke and God help you if you’re black.

Somebody in Boots has been reissued a number of times, most recently in 2017 by IG Publishing, with an introduction by Colin Asher, author of Never a Lovely so Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren.

Cover of Hungry Men by Edward Anderson

• Hungry Men, by Edward Anderson (1935)

In this, Anderson’s first novel, an unemployed musician travels around America as a hobo until he stops in Chicago and forms a band with other homeless musicians. They get arrested after a fight breaks out when they refuse to play the Communist anthem, the “International.” Anderson was skeptical of the likelihood that the Depression would lead to revolution: “”Every idle man becomes economic-minded. He starts wanting to know why this man has a chauffeured Packard and he can’t get his three dollar shoes half-soled? But the American isn’t going to turn socialist or communist. At least not in this generation.”

This may accounted, in part, for Tom Kromer’s disdain when he reviewed Hungry Men for The New Masses. Kromer found it paled beside his own novel: “You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes ‘Jesus Saves’ on and off in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men.”

According to Anderson’s biography, Rough and Rowdy Ways: The Life and Hard Times of Edward Anderson (Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in the Humanities (Hardcover)) by Patrick Bennett (1988), however, Anderson spent two years “in the twilight world of vagabonds, riding the side-door Pullmans across the nation — San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston. Now and then he turned to riding his thumb along the highways, although he felt that hitchhiking was ‘like sticking your tail out and every time somebody passes they kick it.'”

The University of Oklahoma Press reissued Hungry Men in the early 1990s, but it’s out of print now. A Kindle version, however, is available from Amazon. Anderson’s second novel Thieves Like Us, which was filmed by Robert Altman in the 1970s, has been included in the Library of America’s volume Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s.

Cover of A Horse in Arizona, by Louis Paul

• Horse in Arizona, by Louis Paul (1936)

This is a picaresque novel by the long-forgotten novelist Louis Paul. Though the story centers on the travels of two ex-doughboys after World War One, Paul incorporated elements from the life of his better-known friend, John Steinbeck. It’s perhaps less of a hobo book than a book of many unsuccessful attempts to be hobos. The lead, one Resin Scaeterbun, accompanied by his Army buddy Copril Ootz, wind back and forth across the States in search of idleness.

As Paul told an interviewer, “They want to become bums, to give their whole souls to the art of bumming. But they find themselves circumvented and defeated on every hand.” But, he complained, “In a competitive economy, it is very hard to avoid work.” Instead, Resin finds himself at various times a bootlegger, fight promoter, poet, reporter, pornographer, and screenwriter, ending up in the thoroughly disgraced profession of bookseller. One reviewer wrote that Paul “writes as Rube Goldberg draws cartoons, with a delicious sense of the ridiculous.”

Horse in Arizona was published in England as Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. I’ve got to track this one down.

The Fire Escape, by Susan Kale (1960)

The paperback editions of The Fire Escape trumpet its message: “The tragic, unvarnished story of a prostitute.” Which is a bit like plastering the banner line, “The Story of a Cockroach” across the cover of The Metamorphosis: yes, well, I guess you could say it is, but that’s actually missing the point in a pretty big way.

Just what is The Fire Escape about, then, you ask? Boy, you’ve got me there.

It purports to be the autobiography of the youngest daughter of a curate, a woman never quite at ease in any situation for long, and positively antsy when it comes to any of the conventions of English middle class life shortly after the First World War. Shipped off to a boarding school, she befriends Norah, a day girl, and soon they are happily playing “Torture,” taking turns tying each other up. One day she does the job so successfully that Norah’s mother rushes in with a pair of scissors to cut the cord before the victim strangles.

Moved to a school for clergy daughters only, she quickly forms a secret society, “The Red Lamp,” with a new friend, Polly, and initiate a third member by locking her in a cupboard. Yet when she comes across a dog savaging a rabbit to death, she wonders, “Was I really so cowardly that I was going to maintain an acquiescent silence my whole life?”

Sent to a teacher’s college by her parents, she quits and signs up for an art school instead, then plays truant from that, finds a landlady willing to give her the use of an empty attic to live in, and takes up day work as a cleaning woman. When her father considers resigning his living out of shame, Susan up and takes off for Dublin with a boy from school, both mad over Yeats’s poetry. Running into the poet in the street, she recites the whole of “Sailing to Byzantium” and he invites them to watch a rehearsal of his play, The Cat and the Moon at the Abbey Theatre (which puts this incident, if true, in 1931).

Rescued and brought home from Dublin, she soon returns to the attic, accessible by the fire escape of the title. Putting the kettle on, she is startled when an old man enters from the floor below. He quietly sits on the sofa and watches her, occasionally speaking in a language she cannot understand. At some point, she learns his name: Alek Nauss.

Alek Nauss. Susan Kale. You see where the story goes from erratic to weird?

Over the next decade, Susan returns from time to time to the attic and has odd conversations with Alek. These she imbues with profound significance, though she manages to convey almost none of it to the reader. She falls in love with a puppeteer and wanders around southern England with him, often sleeping in the fields. He takes up with another woman and she gets a job scraping away excess lead from toy soldiers fresh from the molds. Ten hours a day for twenty seven shillings a week. Like the other women there, she merely endures it. “They endured the utter futility, the wretchedness of spending their days in scraping lead; the prostitution of their lives, in fact.”

She takes up with a poet, marries and has a son by him, then they divorce and she is forced to give the boy away to a relative. She goes through jobs and men and flats at a dizzying pace. She models for an artist, “a very ugly man.” Soon she and the artist are playing “torture” again, grown-up style. Except it’s all very British in its perversity:

One night, he suspended me by my ankles in a doorway. It was difficult because he didn’t want either to spoil the paintwork in his flat or to break my neck. It took more time than such things bearably can. We woke up to the insanity of our behavior simultaneously and didn’t meet again. He was sensitive.

Eighty-seven or so jobs later, she wanders out of a cafe and, while posting a letter, is approached by a man. “Are you doing anything tonight?” he asks. “What do you want?” “I wondered if you’d like to come to a show.” She repeats the question. “I’m game for anything,” he answers. Moments later, she agrees to sleep with him for two pounds, and suddenly she’s discovered her eighty-eighth job.

This being England in the late 1940s, setting oneself up as a prostitute involves a fair amount of subterfuge and thick swathes of middle class hypocrisy. She works mostly off ads posted in tobacconists: “Miss Domina Brand: Psychologist. Will Solve Your Problems Big or Small.” “Surely it’s wrong to put ‘Miss,’ isn’t it?” she asks. “Yes, but that’s what’ll convince them it’s not a real psychologist,” a helpful newsagent advises her.

Though a fair variety of fetishes are played out in her flats over the next decade, the one prevailing sense throughout this period is of dreariness. Susan Kale’s account of life in postwar London may capture its grey, tedious, tired attempts to keep up appearances better than any of the Kitchen Sink school plays and novels.

In the end, she gives up, worried she is running out of time. Or at least, so it appears. Because in the final pages, we return once again to the attic–now mostly a pile of rubble with a bit of the fire escape still clinging to its side. Alek Nauss is gone, dead years ago.

Is this meant as a metaphor for herself? What started as a secret place, a place where she could escape from her parents’ conventions, now just a ruin, “a broken-backed, disfigured space”? It’s difficult to tell but even more difficult to care, for by this point, the reader is likely exhausted from what has been nearly two hundred pages of “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” narrative that rarely offers more than a paragraph or two respite from Susan Kale’s relentless restlessness.

It is perhaps most interesting as a dramatic contrast to just about any other Englishwoman’s account of the same period. Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark undoubtedly knew of women like Susan Kale in their time, but they made sure to steer clear of their acquaintance. If there is any comparison one might draw, it is with the equally-forgotten Kathleen Sully’s early novels, particularly Canal in the Moonlight, with their odd mixes of grim poverty, black humor, and cruel fate. If any man picked up a paperback copy of The Fire Escape looking for a thrill, he would certainly have been disappointed, if not eagerly looking for the nearest bottle or narcotic instead.

The First Escape, by Susan Kale

London: Putnam, 1960

Journey Through a Lighted Room, by Margaret Parton (1973)

Cover of 'Journey Through a Lighted Room'

I knew I was going to like Margaret Parton’s memoir, Journey Through a Lighted Room, on page two, when she writes of reflecting upon a Quaker meeting while “wandering aimlessly about the garden with a vodka and tonic in hand.”

This is the story of a woman who wasn’t ashamed by the fact that she liked a good drink, a good book, a good meal, a good piece of music, a good conversation, and a good fuck. She made her way in the working world, had an abortion she never regretted, married twice and divorced once, fell and stayed in love with a married man through two decades, raised a son and watched him die of leukemia, cared for a mother suffering from dementia, struggled with her weight, and generally held her own through lows and highs that I suspect any contemporary woman could relate to. Indeed, it’s a little surprising that Journey Through a Lighted Room isn’t better known and still in print, because the book is as fresh and frank as if Parton were telling it to us here and now.

Parton grew up in exceptional circumstances. Her mother, Mary Field Parton, was a successful writer and social activist who worked with Clarence Darrow and edited Mother Jones’ autobiography. Her father, Lemuel Parton, was a reported whose column, “Who’s News Today,” was syndicated in hundreds of newpapers across the US in the 1930s and 1940s. Her aunt, Sara Bard Field, campaigned for women’s suffrage and married Charles Erskine Scott Wood, whose resume included everything from graduating from West Point and fighting Indians in the West to defending Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman in court to painting and writing for socialist magazines. There was never a time when she wasn’t in the midst of talented, opinionated, and famous people. At the age of 14, she wrote in her journal,

Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson, a historian named Mr. Woodward [C. Vann Woodward] and his wfie, the reformed burglar Jack Black, and Mr. and Mrs. E. B. White were here. A very amusing evening, during which Sinclair Lewis rose from the table and carried his plate of roast beef over to the desk where I was eating alone because there wasn’t enough room for me at the big table; he sat down on the floor beside me and fed his roast beef to Tiggy and talked about cats.

Of the same evening, Margaret’s mother wrote in her diary, “Dinner party ruined by lovable but drunk Red Lewis.”

Mary and Lemuel Parton married when they both had established themselves in their careers, and though they were devoted to Margaret, their only child, they were utterly absorbed with each other. “It’s almost as hard for a child to grow up in the presence of an extremely happy marriage as it is to grow up in an unhappy home,” someone who knew her parents later observed to Margaret.

It was also hard from Margaret to establish her own identity when she was surrounded by such accomplished people. After graduating from Swarthmore, she bounced through a series of low-level jobs — writing news items for radio and spending a year as a fact-checker at The New Yorker. Feeling somewhat suffocated working in her parents’ world in New York City, she moved to San Francisco, where for two years she got to experience life as an independent adult. Though she wrote a humorous account of the time in Laughter on the Hill (1945), she admits in Journey that she left some of the more painful aspects out — particularly being abandoned by a man who got her pregnant and having, with almost no money to spare, to locate a doctor willing to give her an abortion.

When her father died in 1943, she returned to New York and worked as a newspaper reporter. Her time in San Francisco earned her an assignment to return there in 1945 to cover the conference leading to the formation of the United Nations. This, in turn, led to an assignment to Japan, the start of nearly seven years spent as a reporter in the Far East and India, where she covered events like the partition and the assassination of Gandhi. She also married Eric Britter, a British correspondent, and gave birth to their son, whom she named Lemuel, after her father.

The marriage was shaky from the start, however, and in September 1952, she took her son and returned to the U.S., moving in with her mother in Palisades, north of New York City. There, she “quickly discovered the facts of life for the single woman in the suburbs: almost total exclusion from the social life of the community.” Slowly, she won some writing jobs, and in 1954, was assigned to cover the first trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard for the murder of his wife. Parton’s coverage stood out and was soon being used by papers throughout the U.S..

This raised her visibility significantly and eventually led to an offer to work as an editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, at the time perhaps the most popular woman’s magazine in America. Having worked for years in the male-dominated field of newspaper reporting, she struggled to conform to the conservative, traditional conventions of the Journal:

From the Goulds came a constant pressure for IDEAS. From Beatrice: “I do hope your suggestions will be COMPELLING!” From Bruce: “We are always in need of good Big Ideas, such as ‘The Ten Richest Women,’ ‘The World’s Most Famous Jewels,’ and ‘The Ten Best-Dressed Women.'” That memo really amused me. Those were Big Ideas?

Though she was able to slip in occasional pieces of serious fiction and reporting, these were rare and hardly what the Journal’s readers wanted. “… [I]n the same issue we ran a superior story by Rebecca West and in the homemaking department an offer of a Bible quilt pattern; there were 3,200 requests for the pattern and one letter commenting on the Rebecca West story.”

In the late 1950s, she ran into an old acquaintance from Japan, former Navy Commander Alfred Hussey, a lawyer who’d served on General MacArthur’s staff and was one of the principal authors of the Japanese constitution, and they married in 1963 after his divorce from his first wife. His health began to fail soon afterward, however, and he died in 1964.

Around the same time, her mother began suffering from dementia, and though Margaret tried for months to care for her at home, she eventually had to put her into the first of a series of nursing homes. She then spent her days sorting through over fifty years of her parent’s papers and belongings, getting their house ready for sale, and visiting her mother: “the hours with her were agonizing and my heart broke with pity each time I saw her, particularly at the contrast with the self-assured, dynamic woman who emerged each day from the diary pages I was reading.” She also cared for her neighbor, Muriel Snow, widow of the writer Edgar Snow, in the terminal stage of cancer, holding Muriel’s hand as she screamed, “Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Die Help Me Die!”

The one bright spot in this time was her son, Lemuel, who emerged from a long period of adolescent isolation and depression and was building a circle of friends and a reputation as a tennis instructor. She was particularly vulnerable, therefore, when Lem suddenly fell ill. After he was hospitalized, a doctor came to tell her that Lem was suffering from an aggressive form of leukemia. “‘How long?’ I managed to ask. ‘Around four weeks,’ he said.”

Left alone after Lem’s death, she often considered suicide. “Some nights, alone and swept by storms of grief, I would stare at Lem’s .22, and twice I loaded it and held the muzzle in my mouth. Several times I poured sleeping pills into my hand and waited to find out what I would decide.” In the end, she simply carried on and found some sense of peace: “I no longer worry about being hopelessly out of step with current intellectual and literary movements, and simply accept myself as someone who is absorbed in unfashionable thoughts about love, truth, and the continuity of time.”

Margaret Parton continued to work after publishing Journey Through a Lighted Room, writing for Woman’s Day and other magazines, preparing a biography of her mother, and organizing the collection of papers now held by the University of Oregon Library. She helped establish the historical committee for her community of Palisades. She died in 1981.

Journey Through a Lighted Room is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.

Journey Through a Lighted Room, by Margaret Parton
New York City: The Viking Press, 1973

Suicides, from Living Again: An Autobiography, by Felix Riesenberg

Always there is death. In those early St Mary’s days death was close, for Bellevue had the morgue, and out of morbidness some of us went there to see rows of white-sheeted stillness on the slabs–the lost and forgotten corpses of a city that holds so much of life and happiness and hope. The wharves by the East River attract those drifting near the edge. Always we had the dinghy, a black-painted, four-oared boat, swung out in its davits at the port fore rigging. The call to launch was answered with alacrity. It would splash into the slip and stroke away toward the floundering of the desperate. Many would-be suicides were snatched from the cold river by the boys on the schoolship. I took part in a few of these rescues, the saved sometimes cursing us until hot coffee and a slab of corned beef brought them to their senses. Jumping from piers seems to be one of the reactions of the city. As buildings grew higher, jumping from windows and splattering on the hard cement became a ghastly fact. Not long ago, in the storm center of the depression, I had a man drop close to me on Forty-fifth Street. He landed with a thud and lay still. There was no human boat capable of saving him once he had started down; screams, terrorizing cries clattered about and echoed between the high walls of adjoining office buildings, but these came from women, spectators in opposite cubicles. The falling man was silent. A policeman pulled a tarpaulin from a truck and threw it over the inert body. Two young women who had been closer than I were carried into a near-by drugstore; they had fainted.