Cover of the Macmillan (UK) hardback edition of The Roundabout.
This year, I have been running the Wafer-Thin Books reading group with James Morrison (Caustic Cover Critic) and promised myself that I would take this as an opportunity to be more succinct in my posts. But I quickly discovered that, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, it’s often harder to write something short than something long. Nevertheless, I will attempt to keep this and subsequent posts about some of the neglected wafer-thin books (under 150 pages long) that I’ve been reading this year.
Cover of U.S. paperback edition of Neighbors.
I’ll start with one I just finished, a tattered and price-stickered paperback published by Modern Promotions (“A Division of UniSystems”) in 1969 under the title of Neighbors. Neighbors is the American title of The Roundabout, originally published in the UK by Macmillan in 1968. I doubt I would have picked it up were it not for the following blurb from Brigid Brophy:
I greatly admire Neighbors [I’m sure she wrote The Roundabout], which takes up the universal nightmare feeling, “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong” and spins it into a very elegant, economical and scarifying little trap for the imagination.
Brigid Brophy, in my opinion, was a writer whose critical judgments you can take to the bank, so I was happy to spend a buck on the book and add it to my growing pile of wafer-thinners in anticipation of this year.
This morning, I picked it up to get a dozen or so pages tucked in and ended up reading it straight through. This is a riveting little book that manages to squeeze three different narrators and at least four different perspectives into 138 pages. There aren’t a lot of books on the theme of “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong,” but boy, do they tend to be good ones: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier; Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. And you can add this one to the list.
Cover of U.K. paperback edition of The Roundabout.
Mathew, a naive and odd young man, takes a room at Mrs. Haines’ house. Within his first day there, he notices, through the curtains in the window of the house next door, just fifteen feet away, that someone is watching him. He learns that this is Mrs. Shawburn, a heavy-set middle-aged woman whose husband is blind and almost deaf. He speaks to her over the backyard hedge, has tea with her and Mr. Shawburn, who’s obsessed with horse-racing, and believes she tries to kiss him impulsively as she shows him out the door. He becomes convinced that Mrs. Shawburn has designs on him and then, when he notices that the couple isn’t taking their usual walk on Wednesday evenings, that she’s murdered her husband.
Some of this is true. Or partly true. Some of it is utterly, totally mistaken. The root problem is fundamental in our make-up as humans: what you see and what I see can differ dramatically. And as dramatic as the relevations are by the halfway point in The Roundabout, there are even bigger ones waiting in the second half. This is a delicious wafer-thin slice of nastiness, a superb evening’s read.
Michael Allwright, 1968.
Michael Allwright was a South African journalist who said that he came up with the idea for The Roundabout from playing a game of “What If?” with a friend. Though his dustjacket bio says he was working on a second novel, I can’t find any evidence that one was ever published.
The Roundabout is available on the Internet Archive: Link.
The Roundabout by Michael Allwright London: Macmillan, 1968 London: Panther, 1969
Published in the U.S. as Neighbors New York: Walker and Company, 1968 New York: Modern Promotions, 1969
Portrait of Betty Swanwick by Clive Gardiner (c.1948).
If Betty Swanwick is remembered today, it’s usually for her painting The Dream, which was used on the cover of the Genesis album Selling England by the Pound. And it’s as a painter she would probably prefer to be remembered, since she resigned from her long professorship at Goldsmith’s College School of Art in 1970 to pursue her unique style, a blend of traditional realism and somewhat exaggerated modernism.
Cover of Selling England by the Pound by Genesis, cover painting by Betty Swanwick.
But it would be an injustice not to celebrate her brief but distinctive career as a novelist. Whether she decided to write novels as a vehicle for her illustrations or as an outlet for her literary inclinations, between 1945 and 1958, Betty Swanwick wrote and illustrated three slim novels that gleefully subvert many of the tropes and conventions of the 19th century novels and more than deserve recognition themselves.
Born in 1915, the daughter of a professional draughtsman, Swanwick entered Goldsmith’s College at the young age of 15 and studied under two masters, Edward Bawden and Clive Gardiner. She fell into a long-term relationship with Gardiner, who helped get her a teaching position with Goldsmith’s after her graduation. It was a job she held for over thirty years, though she ultimately saw it as an obstacle to her own creative development.
Cover of The Cross Purposes (1945).
She supplemented her teaching income by taking on occasional illustration jobs for clients ranging from London Transport to Strand magazine and, less frequently, illustrating children’s books such as Marjorie Seymour’s Camille Cat, “the story of a cat who liked green figs far too well.” Perhaps she felt she could do just as good a job with the words as the illustrations, for in 1945, she published her first novel — or, more properly, novelette, as specified in its subtitle, since it’s just 64 pages long.
Esmeralda and the Reverend Randall.
The Cross Purposes opens in the manner of any good Victorian novel, with the Reverend Robert Randall and his sister Esmeralda traveling to take a vacant curacy in the prosperous town of Frogs Copping. The beautiful and eligible Esmeralda catches the eye of Frederick, son of Sir Edward Chalmers, the town’s most prominent nobleman, and everyone assumes that the Reverend Robert will pair up with Chalmers’ ward, the lovely Hermione Beauchampers.
Nothing in a Swanwick novel ever turns out quite as planned, though. Hermione is beautiful, cruel, and conniving and more than happy to lure the Reverend into matrimony, but she is no match for her governess, Miss Whistle:
Miss Whistle, mark you, was a woman of shrewd perception and quick ideas, and, being of an uneasy age, seized the possibility of being a respectable married woman with both hands. What more could a plain, intelligent woman require than a plain, egotistical husband with settled means? It was a very good and manageable catch, thought Miss Whistle to herself whilst saying her prayers at night.
Soon, two engagements are announced, and Hermione departs to the Continent in search of wealthier fish. Sir Edward plans a betrothal ball that sets his “noseholes quivering with lively anticipation.” Swanwick knows how to draw her story to an end according to the formula: “There now only remains the winding up of this story to universal satisfaction and cosmic gratification.” This doesn’t, however, mean that everyone lives happily ever after.
The double wedding.
Swanwick is too much a realist to risk going into details about what happens after the dual wedding. She sides with Sir Edward, who would be just as happy to see the vision of the two couples at the altar in the lavishly decorated church prolonged indefinitely, “until the whole of them, the bridal party and all, were slowly consumed by death, standing up in a breathless trance in the Floral Chapel.”
Paddy Rossmore’s catalogue raisonné, Betty Swanwick: Artist and Visionary, lists few works between The Cross Purposes and her next novel, Hoodwinked (1957). Rossmore notes that this is more likely due to the fact that she concentrated on teaching and commercial work and the latter, held by the Society of Illustrators and Artists, was discarded in the course of moves and reorganizations. In any case, when she turned to fiction again, it was to revisit the theme of matrimonial mismatches — but this time brought up to current day and with even more subversive twists.
Cover of Hoodwinked (1957).
Cora Fox and Madeleine Mudie are old friends with a common problem: uncooperative children. Cora’s older daughters, Laurel, Flora, and Philippa are mad about jazz and are only interested in improvising and jitterbugging. Her youngest, Gemma, is the loveliest and most conventional in her attitudes … aside from her penchant for lying and cheating. Madeleine’s son, Castor, is handsome, of age, and an ideal candidate to be matched and married off … aside from his disinterest in everything except designing womens’ wear. The solution in obvious to both women.
Mr. Fox’s suicide.
And its urgency increases when Gemma arrives home, having been expelled from her boarding school for egregious cheating. The shadow it casts upon the family name leads Mr. Fox to take his life in front of Gemma (Swanwick illustrates the scene in case we have trouble picturing it). Gemma sighs with relief at the sight of her dead father. “Phew! Well, that is that,” she says, “very coolly fanning the smoke fumes from her eyes.” Castor and Gem are hastily brought together in hopes of kindling sparks.
Madeleine, Cora, Castor, and Gemma.
Unfortunately, Castor prefers older women. Cora, to be specific. While he goes through the motions to please his mother, he insinuates himself into Cora’s companionship, and finds her love-starved and not entirely unwilling. At the same time, an enormously wealthy and utterly socially inappropriate Indian Rajah buys the estate next door to the Foxes. Gemma may have cheated on a fair number of her subjects, but arithmetic was not one of them. You can see where Swanwick is going. All it takes is the sudden death of the distraught Madeleine to remove the remaining obstacle.
Cover of Beauty and the Burglar (1958).
A year later, Arthur Barker Ltd. published her third novel, Beauty and the Burglar, while kicked the Victorian matrimonial formula to the curb for good. Once again, an eligible pair — this time, the ward Palma Purre and the earnest reformer Bernard Follow — are brought together through the machinations of guardians and parents with the aim of achieving a quick and socially profitable match. Palma is not entirely unwilling, but Bernard’s feet are so rooted in the 19th century that it’s hard for her not to get a bit exasperated. “It is to be hoped that we shall see a good deal of each other in the future,” he tells her.
I would find it satisfying to develop you in other ways also: of course, it goes without saying that we refer to the higher ways. There will be much gratification from these services that I am more than willing to render you. Whenever I am free from tours and lectures, I shall endeavour to see you and train you for the proper purpose in life.
Luckily for Palma, one night a cat burglar named Rowland Swagger sneaks into her bedroom to steal her jewelry. Instead, he falls instantly for Palma — and she for him — and the two abscond to his hideout, which happens to be a school where he is teaching a new generation to carry on his dishonorable profession. Rowland proudly shows Palma around his Royal Academy of Crime, allowing her to observe classes ranging from safecracking to the art of proper coshing.
Coshing class.
Rather than taking exception to Rowland’s criminal enterprise, Palma is inspired by its educational potential and proposes to deliver a lecture to the students on the “Art of the Golden Section,” aided by an attractive and scantily clad model. The lecture gets a tremendous response and before we know it, the R.A.C. begins transforming into the G.C.C. — the Golden College of Culture. All ends happily at the altar again, or rather the bridge, as Rowland and Palma and Bernard and the thoroughly inappropriate Melba find themselves before an old sea dog named Captain Blott.
Betty Swanwick, around 1958.
John Betjeman found Swanwick’s novels “Strange, startling, funny, and with a weird beauty.” Other reviewers struggled to categorize her books, drawing on everyone from Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins to David Garnett and Damon Runyon in hopes of finding a familiar point of reference. Angela Milne probably described them best by writing that they were “small and funny in the way [Daisy Ashford’s juvenile comic novel] The Young Visiters was funny” — but “not unintentionally so.” In fact, she argued, everything Swanwick did “points roundly to its adulthood.” And it would be wrong to dismiss these three little novels as pastiches. If anything, I’d say they looked forward, not back, towards 1960s satires of long-standing British traditions such as Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! and Lindsay Anderson’s If…. Swanwick was not just saying that those Victorian tropes were dead but standing in front of their grave and saying a derisive, “Good riddance.”
Betty Swanwick died in 1989 from complications due to cancer. None of her novels has ever been reissued, but several can be had for under $50 if you’re interested. They’re lovely little packages of subversive fun.
Three novels by Betty Swanwick: The Cross Purposes (1945) Published by Editions Poetry London
Hoodwinked (1957) and Beauty and the Burglar (1958) Published by Arthur Barker Ltd.
Advertisement for Fortune Grass from the Daily Telegraph.
“Darling, are you sure it will not be too much for you?” Mabel Lethbridge’s first husband asks when she is pregnant and he learns his father has cut him off without a penny.
“Nothing is too much for me,” she replies. Which could well serve as this remarkable woman’s motto. Her portrait ought to be printed next to the word resilience in every English dictionary. Fortune Grass covers a little over ten years in her life, but what a lot she packed into those years!
Born in 1900, she lived an itinerant life as she, her sister, two brothers, and their mother trailed around the British Empire following her father, a soldier of fortune. When Mabel grew sickly (mirroring her parents’ marriage), her mother took the children to Ireland, where Mabel thrived in the quiet rural setting. Her mother then dispatched her to an archetypal horrible boarding school — a stay that was short-lived.
With the start of World War One, the family moved to Ealing and her sister and older brother headed off, one to be a nurse, the other into the Army. Though just 16, Mabel felt frustrated at having to wait two years to join the war effort. So, she lied. Mabel was nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic and would, as we come to see, cheerfully wield a lie in service to what she considered a good cause.
Dismissed from nursing when the truth about her age comes out, she lies again — to both the recruiters and her mother, who thinks she is sewing uniforms — and volunteers for the dangerous work of assembling shells in a government munitions factory. No matter how many crude safety measures the Ministry of Defence tried to put in place, the women working there were never more than a stray spark away from death. “That’s the last shell, by the time you’ve done that the milk will be here,” one of her fellow workers says one afternoon when Mabel has been there for just over six weeks. “The last shell! The last shell!” she thinks. And then:
… a dull flash, a sharp deafening roaf and I felt myself being ’hurled through the air, falling down, down, down, into darkness. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. . . . Mother! . . . Mother! Leghe! Reggie! [Her brothers.] Wouldn’t someone come? Wouldn’t someone speak to me? I lay quietly on my side. Now a blinding flash and I felt my body being torn asunder. Darkness, that terrifying darkness, and the agonised cries of the workers pierced my consciousness.
When she comes to, Mabel reaches down and discovers her left leg below the knee has been blown off. Her whole body has been peppered with shrapnel and she is blind and almost deaf. Most of the other women in her hut are dead.
Evacuated from the scene, she wakens again in the hospital. A familiar voice, Tattie, one of her friends from the plant, is by her side. But Mabel’s greatest fear is for her mother: “Oh, Tattie, Tattie,” I sobbed, “I have lost my leg and I am blind, but you won’t tell Mother, will you?”
From the Daily Mirror, 18 May 1918.
For her sacrifice, Mabel is awarded the Order of the British Empire — at the time, the youngest person ever to win it. Because of her injury, the Viscount officiating, rather than she, had to get down on his knees to present it. The medal is not enough, however, to change how her family viewed her condition. “Don’t you realise you are a cripple?” her mother asks when Mabel declares her intent to go out and find work again. Other relatives give her the cheapest of hand-me-downs — a skirt with a large burn in the back: “That’ll do for Mabel, she never goes anywhere.”
But Mabel refuses to be a victim. She teaches herself to walk, first with crutches, then a cane. She stuffs some clothes into her purse, climbs aboard a bus, heads to Whitehall, and gets a job filling out for a ministry. After she finds a room she can afford in a miserable women’s hotel, she writes to inform her mother, begging her to stay away.
The squalor of the hotel and its older inhabitants — widows and spinsters who “exuded an air of tragedy” — combined with the tedium of her work and her still-weak condition and soon Mabel has to obtain a medical waiver and stop working. Stop working for ministry, that is, because what now commences is a whirlwind two years of jobs, relationships, and living arrangements.
Mabel washes dishes in a restaurant, sells matches at Tube stations, cleans stoops in Westminster and Knightsbridge, minds stalls in Borough Market, hawks newspapers, poses for art students, operates a crank organ, and works at least a half dozen other jobs. She sleeps in the bushes along the Embankment and works as a live-in companion. She co-habits with “Daddy,” the demobbed Army officer with whom she’d started a correspondence during the war — despite the fact that he’d married another woman in a mad moment — then falls in love with his cousin Noel, who moves in with them.
“Peggy the chair girl,” from the Sunday Pictorial, December 3, 1922.
In her own mad moment, she decides she and Noel must get married. And in nearly the same moment, she devises the scheme by which she makes her first fortune: renting folding chairs to people waiting in queues outside West End theaters. From offering a handful of chairs outside the Ambassador Theater, near the apartment she shares with Noel, “Peggy the Chair-Girl” expands her business in the space of a year to one involving thousands of chairs and several franchisees. She even finds herself in the midst of a turf way when a group of thugs attempts to take over her concession outside the wildly popular revival of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals in 1922.
Article about Noel Kalenberg’s failed suicide attempt, 1922.
Her marriage to Noel, however, proves a complete failure. Claiming to be studying for the bar, he is nothing but the polar opposite of Mabel: lazy, snobbish, and a drunkard. Mabel decides within the first month that she must leave and says so to Noel. She then marches out to manage the chair rentals at the Ambassador. Standing on the sidewalk outside the theater, she and the patrons hear two shots from the direction of her apartment. She rushes upstairs to find Noel has attempted suicide. There is a great hubbub and Mabel is briefly suspected of murder.
Like everything else he puts his hand to, suicide is yet another failure for Noel. He recovers and Mabel takes him back in. Mabel is carrying his child, but that doesn’t prevent him from knocking her around and drinking up her earnings. The situation only gets worse when he stops studying for the bar and his father cuts off his allowance.
Ad for Mabel Lethbridge, Estate Agent (1934).
Yet none of this gets Mabel down. Her water breaks as she’s vending chairs. She delivers the child and promptly goes back to work, carrying the baby in one arm and passing out chairs with the other. And she soon manages to dispatch Noel off to his family in Ceylon. As we leave our heroine at the end of Fortune Grass, she has just established herself as the first woman estate agent in England. And she’s just 28!
Mabel Lethbridge went on to write two more autobiographies and rack up another marriage and many more accomplishments, making herself a wealthy and widely popular woman in the process. By the time she died, she’d been the subject of a “This is Your Life” television show and included in the historic BBC “Great War Interviews” series.
Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, who knew her as “Granny Mabel” in the 1960s, just before her death, mentions Mabel in her book The Slow Train to Milan:
I was always frightened of cupboards, ever since the day in Cornwall at Granny Mabel’s when a leg sprang out and hit me, and it was her leg, with her thick stocking and built-up shoe, and I screamed and dropped it, and Granny Mabel laughed. I had been seven at the time, and I had never realised that Granny Mabel had only one leg. Mabel Lethbridge O.B.E., who didn’t like you to miss out the letters after her name, and who had worked in a munitions factory during the First World War when she was sixteen. The factory had been bombed, and a whole wing of the nearest hospital had been cleared for survivors, but Mabel alone had survived with one leg blown away, and the other ruined. She had received her O.B.E. in hospital from the King. Granny Mabel, who had been everywhere, and married a millionaire and who could swear more than any sailor on the quay at St Ives.
So, the next time you feel, as they say in Texas, like climbing aboard your pity pot, think what Mabel Lethbridge would do in your shoes — one of which had an artificial leg stuck in it!
Fortune Grass, by Mabel Lethbridge London: Geoffrey Bles, 1934
Constance Tomkinson in Germany in 1937, while touring with the Basil Beauties.
“My goal was to become the Toast of Broadway,” Constance Tomkinson writes in her 1962 memoir, What a Performance. So is that of a thousand other bright-eyed young women and men who come to New York each year. While she failed to make a name for herself on Broadway, or in the nightclubs of Europe, or in the theatres of London, Tomkinson succeeded in writing some of the most entertaining books of her time.
Indeed, she may still hold the record for most money earned per word by an author. MGM bought the film rights to her first book, Les Girls (1956) for £20,000 even before the book hit the stores, but after much script doctoring and studio diktats, the resulting musical bore almost no resemblance to Tomkinson’s story — which led some wits to quip that she was paid £10,000 each for “Les” and “Girls.”
Tomkinson was born in Canso, Nova Scotia in 1915. Her father was a Non-conformist Protestant minister; her mother, Grace Tomkinson, was a writer who published a number of well-regarded novels of Canadian life. Her parents must have had tremendous faith in their daughter, for they allowed her to board a boat in Halifax bound for the sinful city of New York when she was just 18.
Cover of What a Performance! by Constance Tomkinson.
She’d been accepted into the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where she studied drama, speech, and dance under such teachers as Tamara Borzoi and Martha Graham. During her first summer break, she auditioned for a summer stock company that producer Izzy Gordon was organizing. Having spent a year studying the dramatic arts with a capital Ah, Tomkinson wasn’t prepared for the hard-nosed practicality of a working theater company:
“How many plays are we doing ?” I put both elbows on the table and gazed at him earnestly. “Ten. We open with Tobacco Road. You’ll be playing the daughter with the hare-lip.” “A play well worth doing.” I nodded. “It has the feeling of truth.” “It has everything. One set. Small cast. No costumes, much. About costumes, you provide your own.”
After graduating, she soon learned that the lot of a working actress was less passion and high ideals than cold-water flats and meals at the Automat. She rushed to auditions, slunk home dejected time after time. Quickly, she began to expand her definition of “theater,” which allowed her to land a well-paid, steady, but perhaps less than prestigious gig:
It was with pride I announced that I was to play the female lead in the Mario and Maria dance team and that we were to open at Atlantic City’s most exclusive night club, from where we hoped to go on to the Plaza…. I told my family I was to dance in a club, without disclosing its name, which was not reassuring, or its location. I hoped my father would think it was a country club with the more wholesome overtones of golf. My mother and sister would guess the truth and classify their suspicions as Top Secret.
Next, she went from suggestive tangos to solemn pageants. She and a friend decided to set up, under the auspices of a company that franchised Biblical dramas to small troupes that toured churches around the U.S. The work might have been more respectable but it came with many logistical headaches, many of them involving the great trunks of heavy costumes. It only took a few months before Tomkinson’s friend bowed out: “You may go on with the Biblical Boys from success to success but I’m retiring,” she said. “I’ve had enough of pulling curtains with one hand and playing God with the other.”
So, Tomkinson decided to try her luck in England. Despite its legendary theatre scene, London proved even tougher than New York when it came to making it past a first audition. Growing hungry and desperate, she answered an add for chorus girls, part of a touring revue known at the Millerettes, that was scheduled to depart on a tour of nightclubs in Scandanavia. Blonde, pretty, and roughly capable of dancing in synchronization with the other 15 Millerettes, she got the job, the start of a string of chorus line jobs she chronicles in Les Girls.
Dust jacket of the Michael Joseph first edition of Les Girls.
This experience emboldened her to apply for the most famous chorus line in the world at that time: Les Girls at the Folies Bergère in Paris. She got this job, too, and was soon up on stage with the great Josephine Baker. The show, she found, was not the precision machine she’d anticipated:
The first night I was in the show I was led to believe, by the babble of voices, the running feet and the feeling of excitement and urgency, that there must be some crisis; but I learned that every night there seemed to be a crisis at the Folies. There were great dash and elan backstage, but little apparent co-ordination. Many orders were given, but few taken. I expected the organization to fall apart at any moment, but miraculously it held together. I decided it must be the French way.
One of Tomkinson’s goals in joining the Folies girls was to “do” Paris. Feeling after six months that “I was now scraping the bottom of the Baedeker barrel,” she started looking for other opportunities. History and luck laid one in her lap soon after. The Basil Beauties, managed by Reginald Basil, considered the glamour girls of the chorus line business, came to the Folies for a short run before heading to a long turn of Germany. Concerned that the Nazis might make trouble for a Jewish woman in the group, Basil was looking for a replacement. Though not as drop-dead gorgeous as the rest of the Beauties, Tomkinson figured that “in Paris, where the supply of English girls was limited,” she might do.
Basil was stand-offish at first. His was no ordinary ensemble. “They’re not a troupe,” he warned her. “None of that one, two, three, kick, kick, heads, heads sort of thing.” But Tomkinson conspired with a friend to change his mind. The friend brought her name up, then assured Basil there was little chance she would deign to joint them. This bit of reverse psychology did the trick and she soon bundled aboard the train to Berlin with the rest of the Beauties.
It was something of a bizarre tour. While nightclubs and parties were still lively places, there was an ominous spectre hovering over even the most sophisticated venues. Even the relatively naive Tomkinson began to notice it:
Once my eyes were sharpened, I registered things that at first had gone unobserved: laughter in the streets or in a Bierkeller suddenly being checked when the shadow of a uniformed, truncheon-swinging thug passed by; the notice in small lettering outside restaurants and hotels — “Juden unerwünscht” [Jews not wanted].
By the time the Beauties made it to Rome, it was clear that Fascism was making it too hard to carry on as if nothing had changed from the Roaring Twenties. “We knew that the Basil Beauties were deteriorating,” Tomkinson writes. “The stick make-up was worn down to little stumps and there was not an unbroken eyebrow liner.”
Les Girls follows the Beauties on to Amsterdam, where “Tommie” toyed with a Dutch diamond merchant, then back to Italy as part of a touring Carnevale, then finally back to London for a run at the veddy upper crust Dorchester Hotel. It’s at the Dorchester where she parts ways, but for reasons she only explains in her second book, African Follies (1959).
One night at the Dorchester, she was introduced to an older gentleman she refers to only as Mr. Doe who kept ordering lemon squashes instead of champagne cocktails. He explained that he had made a fortune in toffees and thought alcoholic beverages interfered with the taste of sweets.
Cover of African Follies by Constance Tomkinson.
He was preparing to leave for Africa, he told Tomkinson, and was in the market for a secretary to accompany him. She heard Africa and ignored the rest. He ignored her utter lack of secretarial skills and offered her the job. “Availability was my chief qualification for the post,” she writes. She did, however, take the precaution of going to see Mrs. Doe just to make sure everything was above board.
His plan was to trek from Timbuktu to Khartoum by truck, a journey he estimated would take ten days. It ended up taking two months. He intended to travel as a proper English gentleman should. “Essential bring cummerbund,” Mr. Doe telegraphed her in setting out requirements for provisions.
The pair ended up being complementary companions. Though Mr. Doe insisted that the pot be heated up when making tea, even in the middle of the sweltering desert, he also proved handy when it came to coaxing a malfunctioning truck back to life. And though Tomkinson struggled to keep up with the long memos Mr. Doe would dictate (even when there was no way to send them to anyone), she proved better suited than he when it came to coaxing French border guards to let their group past.
The Africa they saw was that of empires beginning to fray at the edges. As Michael Hogg put it in his Daily Telegraph review of African Follies, “It was not the Dark Continent that they saw but the seedy hinterland, with its decayed expats and hotels magnificent in name only; not adventure that they got but discomfort, as they trekked dustily from barely-existing towns to uninhabitable resthouses living on sardines and brandy.”
Hogg also noted the particular gift Tomkinson has for telling her stories. “Even at her funniest she rings true — or very nearly so.” Was it true that one of the more remote outposts they stopped at in British Sudan, with a white population of three had a country club with just two members? “No matter; it undoubtedly ought to be so.” In her review of Les Girls for The Tatler, Elizabeth Bowen echoed this sentiment: “The story is simple first because it is true, also because it bubble and trills from the writer’s pen.” “Only nasty readers will be disappointed,” she promised.
The disappointment is that no matter how publishers try to suggest otherwise, there is little or nothing risque in Tomkinson’s memoirs. “Miss Tomkinson is a lady,” Bowen wrote. “I don’t mean she stresses it, but it shows.” Most of her fellow dancers in the various groups were too smart to give in to their stage door Johnnies. “A girl’s best friend is her virtue” was Tomkinson’s motto. As Helen Beal Woodward wrote in Saturday Review, though she “masqueraded as a champagne cocktail, at heart she was as wholesome as a bottle of Seven-Up.”
Partly this was because by the time Constance Tomkinson started writing her memoirs, she was, as she told one interviewer, “anchored to a well-ordered life as the wife of a one-time economic planner.” She took up writing after finding that her only daughter, Jane, was a good nap-taker and gave her time each afternoon to get a few hundred words in.
This was around 1952, after marrying her second husband, Sir Hugh Weeks, one of the leading economic advisors to the Conservative Party, and becoming Lady Weeks. But “Tommie” Tomkinson still had plenty of adventures in her when she got back from Africa with Mr. Doe.
In the summer of 1939, she returned to New York with her mother, planning to get Broadway a try again. But there they met Albert Batchelor, a cousin of Grace Tomkinson’s, who had set himself on taking a trip around the world by the most modern transportation means available. He invited Constance to come along and she happily accepted.
They headed west across the U.S. by train, then flew to Hawaii and on to Hong Kong by clipper plane, then by British Airways to Singapore. They arrived on the day the Second World War broke out. Albert was unfazed, though. An experienced pilot, he knew how to talk his way around an airfield and through a combination of persuasion, good fellowship, and (probably) bribery, he managed to get hops all the way to Egypt. Though the British and Italians were observing their own version of the Phony War in North Africa at the time, direct access across the Mediterranean was cut off and they had to hop their way inland through British and French colonies.
It was early November by the time Albert and Constance, along with a band of American expats fleeing Europe, managed to return to New York by way of Lisbon. They hadn’t managed to beat Phileas Fogg’s 80 days, but undaunted, Albert booked a clipper ship to the Caribbean and continued on his journey.
Constance remained in New York and went to work for the British mission coordinating the purchase and delivery of supplies and weapons from America. While there, she met and married Lt Peter Twiss, a Royal Navy fighter pilot (and later world air speed record holder) who was touring American building support for the Allied cause.
Cover of Dancing Attendance by Constance Tomkinson.
She traveled to England to rejoin Twiss after the war ended, but their marriage fell apart and Constance was once again on her own. She turned again to entertainment, but this time in a supporting role. She spent two years working for the Sadler’s Wells ballet company, where she dealt with prima personalities like Margot Fonteyn and Ninette de Valois. Then, after divorcing Peter Twiss and marrying Sir Hugh, she moved over to the theatre, working as secretary to Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic until she quit in 1952 to have her daughter. She wrote about this time in Dancing Attendance (1965).
Though motherhood gave her time to write, it didn’t give her inspiration. When she finished Dancing Attendance, she capped her pen and devoted her energies to the duties of Lady Weeks.
All of Constance Tomkinson’s book had an effortless charm that wins over even the hardest-boiled reader. But though she had no training in writing, she took great care to achieve that effortlessness. She once told an interviewer, “I feel I must polish a book within an inch of its life, because if you haven’t anything important to say, as is the case with comedy, you must say it well.” A quote that belongs on the wall of anyone who aspires to write comedy.
Constance Tomkinson Twiss, Lady Weeks, died in Sussex in 1995 at the age of 80. Her memoirs are all, sadly, long out of print.
Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press ad for A Jingle-Jangle Song by Mariana Villa-Gilbert.
Mariana Villa-Gilbert, who died recently at the age of 86, spent most of her life as a largely forgotten writer. Her last novel, Manuela: A Modern Myth, came out in 1973 and, like the previous five and her one short story collection, The Sun in Horus (1986), quickly went out of print and have never been reissued.
Such is the fate of a writer whose work earns the half-hearted verdict of “interesting.” Her first novel, Mrs. Galbraith’s Air (1963), about — well, not so much an affair as an attraction — between bright schoolboy and an older, sophisticated married woman was nuanced and complex but perhaps at a level a bit beyond its author’s reach. When I read it last year with some anticipation, I found that what was meant as subtle too often came out as muddle. I gave up several chapters into Manuela when the comic satire seemed to lose all connection to reality, though I still plan to take it up again in hopes that the problem was less with the book than with my tired brain.
Villa-Gilbert probably took her title of A Jingle-Jangle Song from Bob Dylan’s early hit “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for it takes place in a brief moment, probably around late 1964, when there seemed a chance that the American folk revival from which Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, and other singers might wash ashore in England with similar success. Sarah Kumar, Villa-Gilbert’s heroine, is undoubtedly modeled on Joan Baez, with similar long black hair, olive skin, piercing dark eyes, and otherworldly voice.
Arrived in London on a brief stop en route to appearances in France, Sarah is taken by a British DJ to an opening at a Pall Mall art gallery and subsequent after party. Jet-lagged and uncomfortable, she drinks far too much and finds herself hanging over the sink in the ladies’ room. Which is where Jane, an older woman and wife to the exhibiting sculptor, comes to her aid. Jane cleans Sarah up and escorts her to a quiet couch to sleep it off.
The next day, Jane and Sarah meet again in a Soho cafe. Jane is waiting to meet her husband for lunch; Sarah is trying to re-enter the world with the help of caffeine. They talk and agree to meet later. Jane is already aware of a vague attraction. Discussing Sarah with her husband after the party, she had found herself being wary of how she spoke of her:
“Twenty-two.” Carefully. And putting aside the earring now, placing it exactly — so. Afraid he might wonder at her interest, that she’d bothered to discover her age. (Oh but it was ridiculous, the way one hummed and hahed over these things. Why on earth should she be ashamed of her interest in a member of her own sex?)
Within 48 hours of their first meeting, the two are making love, both apparently for the first time with another woman. Jane’s background is one of mostly unfulfilled matrimony punctuated by a very occasional affair (her husband’s far more frequently). Sarah, however, is scarred. After losing her virginity to a professor for whom she was just one in a long string of undergraduate conquests, she fell into a five-year relationship with a messianic figure who abused her physically and emotionally. This ended when she was swept up as a rising star by her agent, who is only interested in Sarah as a property — abuse of another form.
Now caught in a torrent of recording sessions, television appearances, concerts, and revolving hotel rooms, Sarah arrives in London not just jetlagged but shell-shocked. Her attraction to Jane, is less physical than for the emotional safety she offers. For her part, Jane is drawn both by Sarah’s beauty and the intensity of her passion for living, chaotically as she currently expresses it.
A Jingle-Jangle Song falls into that narrow sub-genre of the layover romance, where some of the magic resides in the relentless approach of the departure. We all know these things can only end in one of two ways: with a wistful farewell and a heart-breaking return to normal life; or with the last-minute scene in which the two lovers decide to rescue their love at the cost of all the resulting disruption to their normal lives. Either romance or normalcy has to win. This is the logic of this particular cliche.
In the case of A Jingle-Jangle Song, however, we are left one step short of the fork in the denouement. Either Villa-Gilbert was reluctant to choose her ending or intentionally manipulating her readers’ expectations.
Mariana Villa-Gilbert, from the late 1950s.
In his Guardian obituary of Mariana Villa-Gilbert, Christopher Adams wrote of the novel, “Attacked by reviewers for its lesbian content, it nevertheless gained a following in the lesbian press and stands as an important contribution to the genre.” Attacked is too harsh a word. Pigeon-holed might be more accurate. Mary Kenny, in the Evening Standard, dismissed A Jingle-Jangle Song as “yet another [unsuccessful] stab at the definitive lesbian novel, not without talent — but not wholly with conviction either” and exhorted the author: “Come, come, Miss Villa-Gilbert: we did better in the dorm at convent school.” Vernon Scannell, quite the proper Englishman in the New Statesman, admitted that “For non-lesbians like myself, the love scenes have a certain didactic interest,” unconsciously revealing just how limited was his understanding of the physical act of sex between two women took place. (And the sex in the novel is barely past the “brush of a fingertip” level.) The worst take by far was that of David Irvine in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, who concluded that the root of the problem was that Sarah Kumar “can never quite reconcile herself to the fact that she is a half-caste.”
The most insightful and enthusiastic review was that written by Gene Damon, editor and critic of the pioneering American lesbian magazine, The Ladder. Damon, whose job often involved reading the sleasiest and worst-written porn, wrote that, “For me, the reward for searching through endless hundreds of books each year is the occasional title tha tmakes all the boredom and all of the irritation engendered by many of them, worth it.” A Jingle-Jangle Song, she announced, “is one of the special books.” Damon felt that “the nature of love is discussed and examined without clinical detractions” and the sex was described in realistic yet tender terms.
A Jingle-Jangle Song was, Damon wrote, “the closest thing to a romantic novel one could expect in this time.” Still, she did note that Villa-Gilbert’s decision to switch back and forth between character’s perspectives was undermined by her use of aa third-person narrative, “which is awkward and unsatisfactory” — as indeed it is. In a book where so much of the time is spent in scenes with just the two women, it can at times prove challenging to keep track of which she is which.
Now that I read neglected books not just to write about them here but with an eye to whether they might be worth including in Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, I can see that there is a middle ground between “justly neglected” and “reissue worthy.” It links to something I discussed back in 2020 with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, the author of Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. “There are other works that are canonical but not classics,” he argued. “They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments.” When we select a book for Recovered Books, a primary consideration is whether it’s likely to be of enough interest to current readers to make a profit, however modest. This is not, as Santana-Acuña puts it, a curatorial project.
Does A Jingle-Jangle Song deserve reissue? I agree with Christopher Adams that it has some place in the history of lesbian relationships in the English novel, and for that alone it merit inclusion in a series devoted to neglected fiction on this theme. At the same time, I think there are enough essential flaws in its execution that it is hard to argue it can stand on its own without that pigeon-holing label. As a straight white male, I am uncomfortable in making that statement. It may well be that A Jingle-Jangle Song changed some lives. It may be that its structural flaws are of secondary importance to its place in the development of lesbian themes in literature.
What should be clear, regardless of one’s view of where it best fits in our understanding of literature, however, is that it doesn’t deserve to be so obscure and inaccessible that there are no copies for sale and just around three dozen copies sitting in (mostly) university libraries around the world. This is one of the reasons why I hope the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust, and similar initiative continue to scan and make such books available online. What we understand as literature only grows when we can find places for books like A Jingle-Jangle Song and the other works of Mariana Villa-Gilbert and many, many other writers like her.
A Jingle-Jangle Song, by Mariana Villa-Gilbert London: Chatto & Windus/The Hogarth Press, 1968
Joan Reid would have sympathized with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate). “How shall I fill up my years?” she asks as she stands on the threshold of adulthood:
“Paint,” said my mother. “I will have you taught.”
“Medicine,” said an aunt.
“Secretary,” said a friend.
“Photography,” said someone else.
“Plastics,” I wanted to add.
“But surely I should feel something?” she replies. “Some purpose which I must fulfil?”
Because this is fiction, or the Fifties, or both, Joan manages to land a job as a reporter with a regional newspaper in a small city on the Channel coast based on little more than the ability to type and spell. She sets out for life with a capital L with an exchange that’s one of the best leavetakings in literature:
“Goodbye,” I said to my parents, as they handed me over to myself.
“Goodbye,” I said, taking possession.
Everyone at the paper is very nice and very helpful and there is not a whiff of sexism or misogyny, which suggests that either Joan is oblivious to it or Henriques never actually worked for a newspaper, for both were certainly as pervasive as the clouds of cigarette smoke in such places back then.
Indeed, these two paragraphs encapsulate the brightest and dimmest facets of Love from a Convict (its U.S. title was Love for a Convict, though why just the preposition was changed is anyone’s guess). At its best, Henrique’s narratorial voice is snappy, clever, unexpected, and funny. Joan, however, is often too dense or too earnest to merit Henrique’s brio.
How earnest? Earnest enough to fall in love in the space of five sentences and even fewer minutes. Stranded out on the moors by a bitter storm, she and a colleague seek shelter at the only structure that seems inhabited: a prison. A warder lets them into the visitors’ waiting room and fetches a convict, who comes into to light the stove. And the lightning strikes:
His nose was fairly straight; it had a slight twist as it neared his nostrils, which sloped back gently, sensitively. His mouth was straight, the upper lip very slightly overlapping the lower. His chin was square. He was a very attractive looking man I he sort of man I would want to love.
And that is pretty much all there is to it. By the time they make it back to the office, Joan is certain that she is in love with Richard, the inmate. Several visits in the following weeks only set her mind more firmly, though Richard seems an unpromising candidate. Soft-spoken, well-mannered, and attracted in kind to Joan, he is also prone to sudden bursts of rage. And on the day when his sentence is up, he attacks the guard bringing him the civilian clothes he’s about to be released in.
Joan’s parents are, understandably, concerned, despite her open optimism in sharing her news:
“I am in love,” I wrote my parents.
“Who? Do bring him home,” they wrote.
“I can’t,” I answered. “He’s still in prison.”
Her fellow reporters also try to dissuade her, but Joan is convinced. “If I didn’t love him, would I know so surely?” she challenges them. A cousin of Richard’s she meets tells her that he is a vicious man, “constantly exploding with belligerence.” Richard’s parents, who she visits in search of answers, have written him off: “We have our own lives to live, and we have accepted the fact that Richard is better in prison than out.”
None of them manages to change her mind. Even when the prison’s governor advises her that Richard is likely to keep adding years to his sentence through his outbursts, Joan remains steadfast. And here we leave the story, with Joan and Richard stuck in their respective limbos.
For me, this stuckness was what kept Love from a Convict from rising to the level of Veronica Henriques’ frequently-sparkling prose. Reading it was like listening a light and swinging jazz tune on a scratched record, where tune returns again and again and again to a particular two-bar passage. [Some youngsters make have to Google “record skipping” to understand that analogy.] Stuckness is a problematic state to end a novel in — indeed, Love from a Convict seems almost unfinished.
Ironically, the structural aspects were what Kingsley Amis thought most successful in the book. His problem was with Joan, whose willful naivete he could barely tolerate:
I had barely caught sight of Love from a Convict before starting to object to it, and certainly there can be few books more energetically not my cup of tea.
I can just about stomach the idea of a sensitive girl reporter on a provincial newspaper falling in love with a noble-savage convict, but her only identifiable motive for what she does about it turns out to be, not love, but a half-hidden desire to be though shocking by some people and ‘interesting’ by others, and at this point the last of my sympathy expired. It is with all the more emphasis, then, that I must praise the book, firstly for the unusual vigour with which it puts of its (to me antipathetic) state of feeling, and secondly for its grasp of technique, flair for exposition, adroitness in scene-shifting and the rest of the how=d’ye-do — whatever it is that makes the reader detect some kind of sense of vocation in a novelist. So when the next one from this stable appears I shall, reluctantly, have to get hold of it. (The Spectator, 18 February 1955)
Other reviewers were generally as positive as Amis, most of them singling out the freshness of Joan’s voice and perspective. “A little tour de force in the sense of honesty,” wrote Newsweek’s critic.
Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of Love from a Convict.
Veronica Henriques was 24 when Love from a Convict was published. The daughter of the novelist and founding member of the British Commandos, Robert Henriques, she went on to write four more novels in the next dozen years. By the 1970s, however, she had become more interested in painting and printmaking and began showing her work under her married name of Veronica Gosling. She continues to create and foster a space for art and community in her Studio 36 in Exeter.
Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques London: Secker & Warburg, 1955
“A frank novel of today’s most controversial subject.” The tag line on the cover of the New English Library edition of George Moor’s novel The Pole and Whistle is accompanied by a photo of two men having a chat in the pub over a pint and a fag. It may have been the publisher’s way of achieving some plausible deniability, given that the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults, had yet to be passed. The subject could just as well be alcoholism, perhaps.
The contrast between the tentative tone of the book’s cover and the candor of George Moor’s writing, however, is striking. In fact, Moor’s ability to create a situation which is simultaneously utterly mundane and life-destroyingly risky is part of what makes The Pole and Whistle a fascinating work for its time.
John Anselm, in his mid-twenties, is working for his uncle in a chick hatchery in a large city in Lancashire (Moor was raised in Liverpool). His work is hard, tedious, and full of long days. One evening, dreading the long walk back to his apartment, he stops at the Pole and Whistle, a run-down pub just off the main square. There, as he quietly sips a pint, and then another and another, standing in the narrow “parlour,” he notices the young men in tight blue jeans going in and out through the door marked, “Singing Room.” The carefree spirit of the teenagers, the blare of the jukebox, and another pint or two releases John’s inhibitions. “Like a chameleon I changed my emotional colour with each succeeding song. I yearned for ‘Johnny’ and I flamed for ‘Norman.'”
Then, after a visit to the gents’, he encounters a sharp-dressed man in his late twenties who offers him a pint. “You were on ‘D’ landing in Stafford, weren’t you?” he asks. Frank Jeffers, just out of prison, is full of cock and confidence and not the least bit reserved about his interest in John. The two wander out and into a park, where Frank pushes John up against a tree and kisses him. “I’ll do you tomorrow night,” he tells John. “I’ll wait for you in the Pole and Whistle.”
“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve,” John tells us. He has accustomed himself to loneliness as a way of avoiding the reality of his sexual orientation. “I could never be liberated from an inner watchfulness. To myself I disclosed only a slumbering awareness of what I was.” To be honest about his desire would ruin everything in his life: his job, the love of his parents, the acceptance of his community, the right to live freely outside prison.
But Frank wipes that all away with the openness of his physical and emotional attraction to John. Soon their nights all start in the Pole and Whistle and end in John’s bed, although this still requires some subterfuge to avoid the patroling bobby and suspicions of John’s landlady. Frank is even so comfortable with their relationship that he takes John home to meet his mum, almost to show off that he can make friends with someone of a better class.
For as genuine as Frank and John’s love for each other is, the fact that they are nightly committing an illegal act is not their only problem. Frank is a criminal, a petty burglar. He can never hold onto an honest job for more than a week or two and he is constantly trying to devise another easy theft. One night, Frank goes missing and stays missing for weeks. When he finally shows up at John’s flat, he confesses that he’d tried to pull a job in a nearby town, been caught, and spent some time in jail. Before long, he attempts another robbery, which also fails, and lands him in prison with a five year sentence.
If John is hoping for a discreet and (relatively) safe long-term relationship, Frank is the last man he should be involved with. Well, next to last, perhaps, after Beggy, one of Frank’s thuggish friends, who takes advantage of the absence of John’s protector to organize a session where John is gang-raped and tortured.
Feeling his world near collapse, John retains enough of a self-preservation instinct to grab a thin, implausible thread and save himself by taking a job in Japan. In a rare moment alone with his mother, he comes out to her. “I knew,” she tells him. “Only, you had so much control I thought it would be for ever.” “It is better to be dead than live without love,” he responds, adding, “The love of a man” to be clear. Their conversation ends in the most British way imaginable: “‘I accept you as you are,’ said my mother. ‘I’ll make some tea'” John replies.
Although The Pole and Whistle was a potentially controversial book when it was published (the New English Library lacked the visibility or marketing clout to attract any serious attention), it’s actually a quite ordinary and calmly-told story about inappropriate loves and learning to accept them. John loves Frank and knows they can never be together. John’s sister is involved with a married man and she and her parents accept this as a long-term relationship. John’s mother may regret the consequences of her son’s sexuality but accepts it as a fact. No one gets everything he wants and still life goes on.
The Pole and Whistle was only ever published as a paperback original and copies are extremely scarce today. But it is recognized as one of the few and one of the best English novels to deal openly with homosexual love published before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. Dewey Wayne Gunn included it in his Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881-1981.
It’s likely that the book had some autobiographical elements. After attending Cambridge, where he won several awards for his poetry, George Moor returned north, teaching in Lancashire and Wales before he moved to Japan in the early 1960s. There, he worked as an English teacher and translator. He later taught in Papua New Guinea and Iran, returning to England after the fall of the Shah. He won an award for his novella Fox Gold not long after that. This was collected with his stories “Nightingale Island” and “Bowl of Roses” and published by John Calder in 1978. He also had two novellas published in New Writing and Writers in the 1970s. Moor was a frequent entrant in New Statesman parody and satire competitions in the 1980s. He died in Burnley in 1992.
The Pole and Whistle, by George Moor London: The New English Library, 1966
It started, of course, with his poetry, predictably, with his best-known work, “Adlestrop”, and inevitably, with the famous, final lines that spell-bind like few others:
And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
And this, in common with so many other people, is how I found Edward Thomas, revered as a poet but almost completely forgotten as a writer of fiction.
* * *
Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London in 1878 and studied history at Oxford. His first book, The Woodland Life, a collection of essays on the country, was published in 1896. Thomas subsequently embarked on a career as a prolific writer whose work ranged from biography to journalism, travel writing, fiction and literary criticism, although the strain of compromising his artistic ambitions to earn enough to support a family occasionally created periods of depression. His sense of being overwhelmed by a slurry of “hack work” was recognised by his friend the poet Robert Frost, who suggested in 1913 that Thomas devote himself to poetry, or as Frost himself put it, “I dragged him out from under the heap of his own work in prose he was buried alive under.” The poems he then wrote between 1914 and 1917 would secure his enduring reputation as one of Britain’s best-loved writers.
It was a love of Edward Thomas’ poems that set me off one day on an afternoon’s quest for more of his work. A meandering online search – the digital equivalent of beachcombing – took me to the Internet Archive, which brought up several books and led to a first twist of fate. For some reason, I was presented with a volume titled Cloud Castle and Other Papers, which turned out to contain not poetry but short stories. Two other books of short fiction were listed, Rest and Unrest and Light and Twilight. I had no idea Thomas had written books of short fiction, and from this brief list of little-known titles, Cloud Castle must have been the least-known of them all, having been published posthumously and containing an unfinished foreword by another neglected writer, W. H. Hudson, who himself died before its publication. Cloud Castle and Other Papers is not only overlooked but a death-shadowed work.
A second twist of fate: I often flick through a collection and pick a story at random. Had I done so this time and picked one of perhaps half a dozen other tales in that volume, I might well have given up on the book and never been the wiser. As it was, I started from the beginning and read the title story, “Cloud Castle.” By the end of the first sentence, I knew I had stumbled upon something special:
All the life of the summer day became silent after sundown; the earth was dark and very still as with a great thought; the sky was as a pale window through which men and angels looked at one another without a word.
In the story, a knight riding homewards with a friend describes a daydream in which he had been climbing a precipice towards a castle,
… when I began to climb again the moon was behind me and very low, and all the cliff was bathed in light and I seemed to hang like a carven imp on a sublime cathedral wall among the incense.
Eventually reaching an abandoned castle, he enters one particular chamber to find … well, the brief and strange encounter that occurs there is the heart of story and I’ll leave it for you to discover. What does or doesn’t, might yet, or could never have happened, remains oblique — hauntingly rather than frustratingly so.
I was startled. This wasn’t the Edward Thomas, the nature and the war poet, I had been expecting. In fact, the dream-logic of the story put me in mind of Jorge Luis Borges or something from the world of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Going through more of the stories, I was once again wrong-footed as I came across, “Mike,” a touching ode to a fondly-remembered dog, which brought me very much back to the realm of the everyday.
. . . his tail when he trotted along curled over his back and made children laugh aloud; but when he was thinking about the chase it hung in a horizontal bow; when stealing away or in full cry it was held slightly lower and no longer bent, and it flowed finely into the curves of his great speed.
Having read Cloud Castle and Other Papers, I set aside the poetry and began to explore Thomas’ other collections of short fiction. There I found the expected pen-portraits of nature as well as imagined folktales, magic realism and slivers of lightly concealed autobiography — exquisite miniatures nestled amongst some, admittedly, frustrating and overworked thickets that might have been cut back by the author’s later poetic rigour. The experience of reading Thomas’ fiction was revelatory.
Edward Thomas’ prose, when it has been remembered at all, is often thought of as something from which he escaped when he gave himself to poetry in the last years of his short life. Things are changing with his travel books (often describing his journeys on foot through the countryside of Southern England), which are being re-discovered by a new generation of nature-writers. His short fiction, on the other hand, remains uncelebrated even though Thomas himself felt warmly towards it.
One reason might be the incredible inconsistency of the work. Some stories feel like unfinished drafts; others contain a scattering of minor details that, cumulatively, jar. In “Mothers and Sons,” a man on a train, inexplicably wearing a fez, is described by a narrator whose identity remains irritatingly rather than enigmatically, unclear; in “Hawthornden,” a deftly-handled fatality is ruined with the clunk of a redundant “He was dead.” Other stories stop abruptly, unfinished rather than open-ended. Some stories are overwrought, some empty. And yet, despite this, if you look through Thomas’ books of short fiction, you will find treasures.
Having unearthed this collection of treasures, I decided to share it with others. I began by creating e-books of Rest and Unrest and Cloud Castle and Other Papers – designing covers and writing introductions. I wanted desperately to do what publishers such as Persephone and Boiler House Press were doing — curating, championing — and was just as eager not to fall into the category of the print on demand publishers specializing in literary grave-robbing, pillaging the Internet Archive and other sources and selling public domain titles at exorbitant prices with no added value. Having released the two titles, I realised I wanted to do something else: to distil what I felt to be the best of Thomas’ short fiction into a collection. This is how I came to produce Where Lay My Homeward Path.
* * *
Among the ten pieces in the collection, there are to be found, as might be expected from Thomas, darkly poetic evocations of the natural world. His images of flora and fauna, of gold agrimony, pilewort and brooklime, flow through these stories, like the ships in John Masefield’s “Cargoes.” Tales such as “A Man of the Woods” and, more humorously, “Seven Tramps: A Study in Brown” are calloused, with fists plunged into the soil of Thomas’ South Country or guiding us “through thickets of perpendicular and stiff and bristling stems, through brier and thorn and bramble in the double hedges.”
In “Mike,” a narrator’s reminiscences of his dog, are cruel, loving, clear-eyed and elegiac: “He forgave me so readily that it took some time for me to forgive myself.” “Milking” is brief, hard, unsparing:
He stood there a moment – a tall, crooked man, with ever-sparkling eyes in a nubbly and bony head, worn down by sun and toil and calamity to nothing but a stone, hollowed and grey, to which his short black hair clung like moss.
And as well as “Cloud Castle,” there are other moments of melancholic whimsy — “Snow and Sand,” a ghost story perhaps, reveals its dream-like essence wrapped in a filigree of detail: “The rushy margin is strewn with delicate bones and feathers among the snowflakes.”
I tried to take the internal rhythms and tones of each story and combine them to create a larger, interconnected work, almost as if composing music. The penultimate piece in the collection is also the longest, and the final story, the shortest. There is a crescendo and a brief finale. The book ends with “The Stile,” which contains a single sentence imbued with a pathos provided by hindsight: “I am something which no fortune can touch, whether I be soon to die or long years away” “The Stile” was first published in Light and Twilight in 1911. In 1915, Thomas enlisted in the Army and was posted to France in January 1917. On 9 April, he was killed at the battle of Arras.
* * *
It has to be said that these stories, so ripe for rediscovery, can all be found for free at sites like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg — you need only look for the books Rest and Unrest, Light and Twilight, and Cloud Castle and Other Papers. I press on with my own little book regardless, with a new cover design and a specially-written introduction, and we will see what happens. And if it should fail, it will be a heroic failure and maybe one day in the future, a site on neglected publishers will tell the story!
A word about W. H. Hudson. – another neglected writer
The original introduction to Cloud Castle and Other Papers was meant to have been by William Henry Hudson, an Englishman born in Argentina and a great friend of Thomas’. Hudson was himself an author and naturalist whose own writing helped foster the ‘back-to-nature’ movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. Although relatively little-known today, his influence persists. He wrote many books that ranged from natural history (British Birds) to dystopian science-fiction (A Crystal Age). His best-known novel, Green Mansions (1904), was often reprinted and made into a Hollywood film starring Audrey Hepburn in 1959. More recently, his novel A Shepherd’s Life (1910) was an inspiration for James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life (2015).
Hudson began work on the introduction to Cloud Castle and Other Papers just a few days before his death in August 1922. A fragment found subsequently among his papers was included in the Duckworth & Co. publication of Cloud Castle as a Foreword (and now also included in Where Lay My Homeward Path).
Irfan Shah is a writer and researcher. You can follow the fortunes of Where Lay My Homeward Path at www.openspacebooks.co.uk and on Twitter at @OpenSpaceBooks.
A year or so ago, I picked up this cute Ballantine paperback copy of No Wonderland from 1967, one of a half-dozen or so contemporary British novels published to exploit America’s fascination with the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and everything gear fab. “A young girl alone in London’s swinging night world,” with a picture of a mophead and his bird sipping from what appears to be a glass of water, and from all appearances very much in love. So one might expect this to be something of a mod rom-com.
Alice is just under 18, secretly loves Elvis (considered very old school by then), and is in London to experience life. She is intrigued by, then attracted to, then fully under the sway of Matthew, just over 19 and quite full of his own worldly-wiseness. Alice moves into his flat. Only it’s not entirely his flat. There is also David, a student, and Al, a somewhat older Jamaican man.
Matthew and Alice is a match made in Soho. Which means that Matthew sometimes has to work the streets as a rent boy while Alice sips endless espressos while wedging herself into crowded tablefuls of loud artists and drama students and people of ambiguous employment. This relationship swirls around with the current for chapter after chapter, with the only episode of real interest being when Al gets beaten up by a group of white fascists protesting against immigrants. At the end, Alice declares to Matthew, “I don’t want to marry anyone but you,” to which Matthew replies, “Don’t let’s get bored, Alice.”
While No Wonderland is not particularly interesting or successful as a novel, it’s scattered with moments of genuine observations. Like how awkward it is for a young man to pretend to enjoy dancing with a stranger while her boyfriend has disappeared, obstensibly in search of a drink, or how exhausting to sit and pretend to be interested in the conversation of people strenuously trying to win an ennui competition. In fact, what struck me most about No Wonderland was how most of this life that Alice seems so eager to experience is tedious and uninspiring.
And yet, there was something that made me want to give Lindsay another try. No John, No (1966), her third novel (No Wonderland was first published in England in 1962), is about another woman, just a bit older than Alice, and her search for love. “This is a novel about what it is like to be poor, rootless, intense, and lesbian, trapped in a desperate bohemian life on the wrong side of Notting Hill,” the book’s dust flap tells us. Well, at least we know not to expect a rom-com.
“At the moment,” Kate tells us, “I’m living with Terry who is a girl like me and I rather love Terry in a way.” Although Terry is in her 30s, Kate is pleased that she’s “not like most lesbians who get broad in the hips when they pass the age of twenty-nine.”
This is from the second paragraph on page one. Two paragraphs later, we read that “Kate as usual is doing nothing, she bites her fingernails and is waiting for me to do everything for her.” So, now this is Terry speaking. A page later, the author tells us that “Kate and Terry shared a flat near the Portobello Road market.” Then we’re back with Kate, then over to Terry, then back to the author, and so on for roughly half the book, until Kate meets Anne and now we get four perspectives.
Telling a story through multiple narrators is nothing new, of course. Changing them from paragraph to paragraph is somewhat more challenging, but it tends to be less so when what the author is trying to do is help the reader see the complexity of the story. Unfortunately, the story in No John, No is actually quite simple: Kate wants to be in love and, if possible, be loved in return, though that is of secondary importance. The switches of narrators is more distracting than revealing, particularly when the characters themselves seem preoccupied with figuring out their own identities.
The one person in the book who seems to see things clearly is Kate’s married friend, Helen. Helen finds Kate’s good-natured muddle-headedness infuriating, not endearing. “Do you want me to be like you, then? Are you worried that I’m different?” Kate asks her. “No, I don’t want you to be like me,” Helen replies, “but I don’t want you to do things without understanding why, and there is a reason, something to do with your past, a psychological reason Kate.”
Cressida Lindsay and her son Simon, 1963.
Helen may have been addressing her author as much as Kate. For Lindsay’s life was a journey full of abrupt changes of direction. Her granddaughter, Tanya Perdikou, reflected on its erratic course in a 2021 article for the Wellcome Collection:
She received little love from either of her parents and reacted by spurning obligation to others, spending many years erratically pursuing her own desires. Her rejection of the traditional role of ‘mother’ was extreme: she moved from home to home, lover to lover, descended into alcoholism, neglected her five children and ended up founding The Old Rectory, a commune in rural Norfolk.
At the time No John, No was published, Lindsay’s fourth child had just been born. Its father was Anthony Blond, who published Lindsay’s second novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces. Blond was quite deliberately pulled by Lindsay into a complicated triangle with her and her lover, Mark Hyatt. Recalling the bohemianism of her grandfather Norman Lindsay, Blond writes that:
She was equally bohemian in outlook and had three children by three different men. When she met me she decided I was to serve as papa no.4. She stalked me with delicacy. Her current lover, papa no. 3, was a gypsy and a poet called Mark Hyatt. He was beautiful…. A sensuous poetic face, tender lips, eyes you could swim in and a faultless nose…. Of course I fell for him.
After sleeping with both Lindsay and Hyatt, Blond bought her the country house she longed for — The Old Rectory — and was dumped by Hyatt for a tall younger man named Atom. Some time later, when Blond was visiting Lindsay and the chidren there, Atom arrived to say that Hyatt had committed suicide after learning that he was about to be left for a woman.
The dramatically different covers of the UK and US editions of Lovers and Fathers.
She married Peter Hammerton in 1968 and had her fifth and last child by him. Her next novel, Lovers and Fathers (1970), is something of a fictional account of how she ended up with five children and at least as many lovers. Lindsay, the American publisher’s blurb tells us, “has always been completely open to love in whatever variety it presented itself, whether casual, Freudian, heterosexual, lesbian, forced, seductive, or literary.” Whether we’re quite sure of what all of those adjectives refer to, we certainly get a healthy sample of the frenetic and eclectic nature of Lindsay’s love life:
For six months I had lived with the children and a few lovers. For a week I had fallen in love with a journalist because his eyebrows hung over his eyes like a moustache, and his mouth was red and he had life so well organised…. Then for weeks I liked sleeping with me…. one evening I fell in love with a tall man who had green eyes….
And then there was Bill, off to Canada the next day, he talked of the forests and pines and he drank beer very quickly…. Also Robin. Sometimes he stayed and he was good to hold, and also to be held by. One day, he said, “I’m glad your Jason affair has burned itself out.”
Then we’re on to Thomas and Gloria and Robin and it becomes like trying to remember faces on the sidewalk from a seat in a fast-moving bus. Around the time of Lovers and Fathers , John Swinfield visited Lindsay at The Old Rectory and filmed a short piece for Anglia Television that is available for viewing (if you’re in the UK) on the BFI Player. It shows a vibrant if chaotic community of writers, artists, and musicians centered around the rough country house, with children wandering on and off camera and talk and music and laughter filling the air.
If Lindsay’s like was full of children and lovers and friends at the time, it was also full of alcohol. What she couldn’t silence with the noise and energy of the people around her she could try to numb with drink. Perhaps a clue to the demons she was struggling with can be found in her second and best novel, Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces (1963).
At least one reviewer joked that the book’s title tells us all we need to know about its plot. But plot is of secondary importance here. “This book makes shocking reading,” the paperback edition’s blurb tells us. Shocking is the wrong adjective, though. Shocks are sudden. They have lingering effects, but they are usually brief, like a bolt of lightning. Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces is like fifteen rounds of being bludgeoned by an exhausted but relentless prizefighter.
When the book opens, ten-year-old Rachel has found a purse with some cash on the street. She takes it home but know better than to tell her mother Lucy about it, for Lucy will just take the money down to the pub to get drunk and probably come home late that night with a man she’d picked up. Much of the world may still be a mystery to Rachel, but she knows that money buys food, which she never gets much of.
Rachel’s father has gone to war. We gather from a few things Lucy says that he was probably taken prisoner in the British Army’s retreat from the German blitzkrieg of May-June 1940, but it’s clear that Lucy has given up hope and Rachel is trapped in a limbo of deprivation and neglect. She has a few other children to play with and together they built a little shelter that becomes a refuge for Rachel, but it’s a rough sort of refuge. Stan, a thuggish boy just turning teen taunts Rachel as a “Lying Jew puss” and attempts to force himself on her.
Lucy’s drinking progesses to the point she staggers home one night in a fit of DTs and her ravings become so loud and violent that the police are called and take her away. Rachel is then sent to what she’s told is a girl’s school but is obviously a reformatory. The attendants, known as rats, feel free to insult, mock, and slap the inmates. “This is not a rest home for young ladies, you know,” one of the rats tells her.
Her situation improves a bit when she is moved to a Catholic convent, though the sisters inflict a form of religious abuse by hounding her with the need to memorize the catechism and prepare herself for conversion. Rachel spends almost four years here, but they pass in a few pages. Then one day, a balding man in a thick overcoat and a grubby shirt shows up to take her away. “Are you Daddy?” she asks. “I never expected such a grown-up daughter. And quite pretty,” he tells her. What follows are the worst three pages in the book.
Though Cressida Lindsay may not have experienced quite the level of abuse and poverty that her character Rachel does, she did have a childhood marked by extreme highs and lows. Her father, the novelist Philip Lindsay, was friends with many celebrities and a lively figure in London creative society, but he had trouble holding onto money and Cressida spent more time with the sisters at her convent school than with her parents. The title Father’s Gone to War and Mother’s Gone to Pieces may give some indication of the abandonment she may have experienced and explain why she so fervently sought the company of others, seeking a level of contact and commitment that not all of them were willing to give.
After over decade at The Old Rectory, Lindsay and her husband Philip moved into the city of Norwich. She became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and cared for Philip when he began to suffer from dementia. After her death in 2010, her son Dylan Hyatt discovered the manuscript of a fifth novel, written around the time of her move to Norfolk, and arranged to have it published as an e-book. The Mole and the Mountain is available from Amazon.
Charlotte Herz is not a model human being. She has no patience for people she disagrees with and no qualms about telling them so. She has an affair with the husband of a kindly Englishwoman who hires her to care for her children. She chooses not to have an abortion when one is offered and then abandons the child on a train and flees.
And yet, through the almost 400 pages of Makeshift she is a riveting narrator. We meet her in a nursing home in New Zealand, recovering from … well, as we only learn many chapters later, the measles. She is anxious to leave. For one thing, she hasn’t much money. She suspects her genial doctor of padding her bill: “To Miss Charlotte Herz for Professional Services, 20 guineas: for Professional Smile, 10 guineas.”
She is bored and irritated with the bland pleasantness of New Zealanders, their country, and their ceilings. For weeks, she lay flat on her back, staring up:
This nursing home is far too efficient to have ceilings with any incident in them: there are no interesting cracks that could be imagined into men’s faces, no damp marks the mind could conjure into little cats. Simply a high remote acre or so of impeccable whitewash, faintly changing with the faintly changeful sky.
Improved, she can now sit outside in the sunshine, “eyes goggling downwards” at the perfect green lawn, “a happy picture of convalescence.” And so, she decides, she must write. She has a great deal of anger and hatred to get out of her system: “I cannot forever struggle with myself, forever gnaw serpent-like at my own tail, nor swallow my own venom.”
How she came to be in New Zealand and how she came to harbor such venomous thoughts and emotions is the story she tells. It starts in Berlin, just after the end of the First World War, “in that brief Indian summer after the war; that little time, between the occupation and the inflation, when we in Germany had hope.” A very little time.
Within months, Charlotte and her sister are huddled under their father’s old ulster coat in an unheated room they rent from a bitter anti-Semitic landlady. Having grown up in a prosperous bourgeois family, Charlotte and Mitzi are now near the bottom of Germany’s new postwar food chain: orphans, near-penniless, lacking any employable skills — and Jewish. Before the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, they would have considered themselves assimilated: secular, never setting foot in a synagogue, unfamiliar with Jewish rites and rituals aside from an occasional funeral.
But even before Hitler is a name seen in the Berlin papers, being Jewish is enough reason to be kicked a rung or two down the social ladder. “Whether we like it or not,” in this Germany, “we are nothing less than Jew.” The only way for the sisters to climb back up is simple: marry into wealth. Mitzi meets a dull but adoring American, son of an industrialist, marries, and is soon off to the safety of Pennsylvania.
Charlotte, however, is a creature of her own mind and heart. Her Tante Clara, one of the few relatives still with a little money, offers her a room. But it’s strictly a business proposition: “I was to marry something rich as soon as possible.”
Instead, she falls in love with her charming cousin, Kurt, and one hot afternoon in the tall grass of the Grunewald, gives herself to him. Unfortunately, where Charlotte is a romantic, Kurt is a realist. She heads to the Alps for a holiday, courtesy of American dollars from Mitzi; he marries an heiress.
One thing I found fascinating about Makeshift was how effectively Sarah Campion depicts a world in which women almost — but not quite — had an independent life within their grasp:
Even now, as I waddled swollen between the parting Grübl grasses, I was blazing a new brave trail for womanhood, for single women: establishing the right of even’ woman to motherhood without any of the boredoms of marriage. After all, why not? If men were sexual free-lances, why not women? It all seemed so simple, so gloriously obvious.
Once she gives birth, however, Charlotte makes a much grimmer estimate of her future. “Life in Germany for a battling spinster was even then hard enough: what should I do with a child?” Her only hope would be to find a man dumb or conniving enough to accept a single woman with an illegitimate child:
After that, a married life begun on shame, continued in boredom and stuffy closeness, made up of lustful unloving nights, nagging days, brats begotten in pure animal fury coming year after year to be suckled, clothed, washed, endured—all on a foundation of my shame and my rescuer’s brief nobility simmering down to a reminder of my shame. He would unendingly want gratitude. I hated gratitude then, I hate it still.
If she rejects this choice, she knows she will soon run out of what little money she has and have nothing: “Nothing is a ghastly word, even more devastating in German than in English.” So, she takes the one other choice open to her, the one terrible choice always open to desperate people. She runs away. She steps off the train taking her back to Berlin and leaves her baby daughter behind.
Makeshift is a remarkable account of the choices one Jewish woman makes to survive in a hostile world. After a favorite uncle is fatally injured by a group of SS thugs, she flees Germany for England. There, she is taken in by the Flowers, distant relatives living in a comically comfortable cocoon:
After four square meals, and any number of such unconsidered trifles as elevenses with cream cakes, cocktails before dinner and Horlicks at 11 p.m. to fend off the alleged horrors of night starvation, any Flower could go to its bed, bury its nose in the pillow as soft as a swan’s breast, and sleep like a log. In case by any dirty chance sleep were for a while denied, each Flower had by its bed a little table bearing reading-lamp, the latest worthless fiction, and a chintz-covered box brimming with digestive biscuits.
(Ah, to be a Flower!) But at heart, the Flowers are as mercantile in their thinking as Tante Clara. It’s lovely having Charlotte for a visit, but she needs to sort this business of getting a husband, and quickly.
Charlotte ultimately arrives in New Zealand via South Africa and Australia, but it’s a route we can recognize from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. At each stop, Charlotte tries out a new bed and then rejects it. Should she marry a stolid Cape Town farmer and resign herself to “a little folding of the hands to sleep, to the good, earthy sleep of the intellect women enjoy in that fruitful land?” Should she marry Harry, the congenial, adoring older man she meets on the boat to Sydney? Not after he has a near-fatal hemorrhage and becomes an invalid.
Having bounced from uncomfortable bed to uncomfortable bed, Charlotte comes to a conclusion both utterly selfish and utterly pragmatic: that she is a woman “who now was no longer in love with anything but her own comfort, her own assured future.” Years after she rejected the advice of Tante Clara and the Flowers, she recognizes the ugly, essential necessity of choosing survival over self-actualization.
Though the only scene of overt brutality against Jews is Onkel Hans’s beating by a few young SS men, still a year or two before Hitler comes to power, though the war is still a year or two from breaking out as Charlotte sits in the peaceful garden of her nursing home, Makeshift is a Holocaust novel. One of the more unusual Holocaust novels, perhaps, written before Auschwitz had been built, before scenes of Buchenwald had been displayed in newsreels around the world, but still a story about how one survives when homeless, unwanted — and fully conscious of the threat hovering just over the horizon:
While the spectators sit around in a sodden mass, no more than mildly uneasy, the bull is slaughtered in the ring, the blood flows, the torn flank gapes, the entrails drop sluggishly. In Wolfenbiittel the maddened Jew rushes upon barbed wire, away, away, anything to get away, and hangs there, a screaming bloody mass, till there is no more noise. In Berlin there is a pogrom to avenge the death of one man killed by a youth as mad as Hitler but more obscure. So once more, in Berlin, blood flows from the Jews. The smell of blood—oh, my God, the smell of blood!—once more fills the air.
“Comfy?” the man Charlotte has decided she will marry asks her immediately after this passage.
No, Charlotte knows she will never really be comfy.
Makeshift is a work that synthesizes experience and imagination. Born Mary Coulton, the daughter of Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, Sarah Campion (her pen name) attended a teacher training college, and after graduating with honors, spent years traveling around Europe until she landed in Berlin in 1933. There she taught English and came to know families like the Herzes. In fact, she left Germany 1937 when she was being pressured to identify her Jewish students to the Nazi authorities.
Like Charlotte, she spent time in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but in her case, she was vocal and overt in her political and social views, establishing a lifelong commitment to activism, and returned to England around the start of the war. She married New Zealand writer Antony Alpers and the couple eventually settled in Auckland. Though they divorced, she remained in New Zealand, where she continued to organize in support of liberal causes. Alpers/Campion must have been a woman with superpowers of empathy, a capacity for getting inside another human’s skin: the source, perhaps, of the imaginative energy that radiates throughout this book.
Incredibly, most of her fiction was written during the years in which she was traveling and working abroad. Makeshift was her sixth novel; she wrote six more between 1940 and 1951. Even more amazingly, she managed to write three novels set in rural Australia, including Mo Burdekin, her only book to have been reissued to date, despite spending less than a year in the country. In fact, she is still occasionally referred to as an Australian writer.
Much of Campion’s work has become extremely hard to find. Worldwide, there are just 19 copies of Makeshift available in libraries worldwide, according to WorldCat.org. Fortunately, the book is available electronically on Internet Archive. I highly recommend it. In Charlotte Herz, Sarah Campion creates a narrator whose intelligence, humor, and ruthless honesty — about herself more than anyone — makes for a thoroughly rewarding reading experience. Definitely my favorite book of the year so far.
Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (Mary Rose Coulton Alpers) London: Peter Davies, 1940
As much I base most of my choices for this site on research, my heart belongs to my first neglected book love, the browsing of library and bookstore shelves in search of unfamiliar titles. As physical used bookstores become ever rarer in the U.S., I have to resort to online equivalents. A favorite technique is to select a publisher and date range and simply scroll through the listings that come up on one book site or another.
Which is how I came across Perplexities, a book I suspect I would never have found through research or physical browsing. It came up, quite simply, as the cheapest copy of a Faber & Faber title from the early 1930s I could find on AbeBooks.com. So I ordered it. I was pleased when it arrived with its dust jacket relatively intact, since this usually drives up the price.
Now, frankly, given my inveterate book buying, I tend to place my new arrivals in one of the teetering stacks scattered around my office and only return to them months or years later. But the writing in Perplexities is so spare, so lacking in artifice — so naked, if you will — that I began reading immediately:
I must write. It may be a way of fixing my mind on a logical sequence of ideas. It is ridiculous to allow one’s thought’s to run round within a desire like a squirrel in a cage.
I am the slave of an emotion, whereas I believed, not so long ago, that I had won freedom.
Perplexities’ unnamed narrator is, we learn, a French-born woman living in London and in love with a man from the North named Peter. In love — but not head over heels. No, she has seen too much for that. And so she tries to examine this new love, this new relationship, this possible future, in the context of the loves and relationships of her past.
The first of these, of course, is with her mother. A vain, beautiful Parisian, a widow holding herself to a higher standing than her husband’s legacy can support. And aspiring to a higher romantic standard as well. Protective of her prospective suitors, her feelings to her daughter are early on complicated by jealousy and a ferocious defense of her primacy as the object of desire in the house. “Whoever loved my mother ceased to know freedom for as long as they loved her.” For longer, in fact: “After she had lost the power to confer joy she retained the power of inflicting pain.”
Her mother is, in today’s vocabulary, an expert emotional abuser. “Her strength was in her tongue. She could hurt amazingly with her tongue.” Yet she also positioned her daughter to maintain and, indeed, improve her social and economic status: a good Catholic education in convent schools, proficiency in English with time spent with an English family, the Giffords.
Observing the Giffords adds to her understanding of the minefield of emotions lurking at even apparently placid family dinner tables. “Mrs. Gifford was a hard-working, devoted, conscientious wife and mother,” the narrator acknowledges. “I often wondered why her family did not leave the house in a body.” For Mrs. Gifford’s husband and children live in abject fear of her ability to inflict guilt in retribution for the smallest perceived slight:
I believe that more pain and suffering have been inflicted in the name of love than under the frank panoply of hate. Hate, at least, does not paralyse its victims by calling on their chivalry at the same time as it strikes. An enemy does not use as a shield the loud warning that he himself will be hurt if we are not careful.
This is, I think, an observation of striking insight — and striking currency. This is precisely why the damage done by parents who abuse through martyrdom is fundamentally different from that inflicted by direct abuse.
The narrator of Perplexities is in her early 40s. Her husband, an Englishman she married for love, was killed in the war over a decade earlier. Her two children, to whom she admits she was at best only adequate as a mother (“The passion of motherhood is a closed book to me”), are grown, living their own lives, and not looking to her for emotional or financial support. Nor does she expect it: “To expect gratitude seems a commercial appreciation for returns which has nothing to do with love.”
She has a job — and likes it:
I thoroughly enjoy work myself. I can enjoy almost any kind of work, provided it aallows me to put into it the whole, no more (not for long at least), but no less.
Her male colleagues, she thinks, fail to understand this balance. Some try to fill their time away from work with hobbies, seeking fulfillment they lack at work. Others are what we would now call workaholics:
I think one of my colleagues, Smith cannot fail to return after his death, day after day, to his desk, to watch his successor going on with his work. Smith loves the office, he loves coming to it in the morning, he is the last to leave it at night, he does not know what to do with unexpected holidays, he is always ready to postpone the expected ones.
It is the independence she has won through work, widowhood, and given her own children their freedom that ultimately allows her to recognize the trap that a relationship with Peter, her Northerner, would be. He is not an equal opportunity lover: “Mutual pleasure in sex does not enter Peter’s calculations.” Even worse, he’s a thirty-something man walking around with an umbilical cord. Proposing a seaside holiday, he adds that his mother, of course, will be joining them.
Perplexities is, effect, one woman’s inventory of her experiences of love and life in an attempt to decide what to do with the rest of it. And her choice is a courageous one: “Above all, I must try to conquer fear before I die.” This, she believes, is “a crusade on which all the remaining forces of a solitary woman with a love for freedom might well embark.”
Perplexities was marketed as a novel, but even Faber & Faber struggled to classify the book. “Whether one regards it as fiction or a transcript from real life, Perplexities is a very unusual book” declares its dust jacket. Too unusual for some reviewers: “There is some championing of the cause of prostitutes and perverts, a great deal of muddled thinking, rather tediously recorded, and a complete absence of a sense of humour,” observed B. E. Tood in The Spectator.
The Bookman’s critic was one of the few to acknowledge that the narrator’s perspective was more common than some might think: “Many women will share the author’s perplexities, and will enjoy a sense of fellowship in reading this book. A sensitive, critical mind is brought to bear upon the peculiar problems of modern life, especially women’s problems, which are discussed with such sincerity and common sense as should help to clear fresh paths through the tangles of convention.”
In some ways, Perplexities anticipates by almost fifty years Alice Koller’s An Unknown Woman, another book written in an attempt to take stock of a life and decide whhere to go with it. Koller had foresaken romantic love after an early failed relationship while in graduate school and was already intellectually prepared to embrace a solitary life (though with a German shepherd as companion), and it was a path she stuck to until her death almost forty years later. But as much as I admire Koller’s book, I have to say that I suspect more readers today would respond to the simple, succinct prose and the fearless candor of Perplexities.
E. R. Leigh, according to copyright records, was the pseudonym of Jeanne Berthe Julie Rigaud, a French woman born in Paris in 1881, who married Harry Footner, a civil engineer, in 1902. Like her narrator, Jeanne Footner had two children, both of whom were in their twenties when she wrote her book. And like her narrator, she lost her husband in the war — on August 1, 1916, one month to the day after the start of the Battle of the Somme. She took her pseudonym from her husband’s middle name, Erlegh. Perplexities was her only book. Perhaps, also like her narrator, its writing helped her reach some decision. She never remarried and she died in Portsmouth at the age of 70 in 1952.
Perplexities, by E. R. Leigh (pseudonym of Jeanne Rigaud Footner) London: Faber & Faber, 1932
I often stumble across a particularly intriguing forgotten book while on the trail of a different one. Recently, I was looking for information about a novel by Henri-François Rey called The Mechanical Pianos when I came across this blurb from Arthur Calder-Marshall in a Secker & Warburg ad in the Guardian: “The most interesting failure I have read for years.”
From the Secker & Warburg ad in The Guardian, 29 January 1965.
For anyone who loves odd books, a phrase like “the most interesting failure” will set off alarms. I abandoned The Mechanical Pianos (pardon, Henri-François) and went in search of Mr. Chopping’s The Fly. The reviews I found made it clear that this was not just an interesting failure but a book with a uniquely off-putting power for many critics:
E. D. O’Brien, The Illustrated London News
“prurient, scatological, corrupt and sickening.”
B. S. Johnson, The Spectator
“much gratuitous nastiness conveyed by means of an overwritter, convoluted progression of cliches…. Quite revoltingly self-indulgent and pointless.”
Seymour Simckes, The New York Times
“progresses toward a total sullying of life, toward the harshest realities of grotesque death and grotesque madness.”
Adrian Mitchell, New Statesman
“This spleeny story of office life is dominated by snot, shit, semen, and pus. Why should anyone bother to write about the interesting, fairly virgin, subject of people who pick their noses and eat the pickings if all he can say about it is an implied ‘ugh’?”
Iain Hamilton, The Daily Telegraph
“His sardonic descriptions are informed by a disgust so acute that it might even be called exultant.”
Sunday Times
“Rarely have the filthy, petty particularities of loneliness — the Camembert among the hairbrushes, the menace of a tattered usherette — been give such a thorough going-over.”
“The Camembert among the hairbrushes”? Exultant disgust? This was clearly a book worth investigating.
The first few dozen pages of The Fly feature some of the most compelling writing I’ve come across in a long time. “The perpetual silent witness of the events in this unpleasant narrative,” Chopping informs us, is a fly. A common house fly. But a fly with “nacreous glistening body,” “vicious soft proboscis,” two “many faceted globes” to observe its world. And not a mere observer but a “servant of the Eumenides,” “the miniature personification of evil, neat, fast, deadly.”
Mr. Chopping may not know his flies like an entomologist, but he clearly does exult in his descriptions. But this is just the first page. Turn it, and we and the fly are transported outside, to a gutter wet with drizzle, in which, “breaking the surface, lies a used condom.”
At least one reviewer pulled the red cord at this point.
He may not, therefore, have witnessed what happens on the third page. A young girl reaches into the gutter with a twig and produces the condom for her brother’s inspection: “‘Ere, Leslie, look at this!”
To call Jennifer –the girl — and Leslie street urchins would be to sully the fine name of street urchins. These are two of the dirtiest, nastiest, most malignant children in fiction. But they are paragons compared, in Chopping’s eyes, to what’s in the push-chair Jennifer is dragging along with her other hand:
Half lying, half sitting it gazes fixedly out at the world through still eyes, squinting and protuberant. It has been so battered into obedience by Jennifer that it knows better than to utter a sound. Its bloated appearance and its immobility are further accentuated by the lower half of its body being encased in faded blue woollen rompers, bulbously overstuffed with nappies. Its arms stick out straight in front of it as if they were articulated together on a wire through the upper part of its doll’s body. The hands are swollen, mottled blue and scarlet from bad circulation. Its head is concealed in, and its face framed by, a soiled white pixie cap. From this push-chair there arises a soursweet odour of stale urine and old milk. This object is called Brenda — Leslie and Jennifer’s baby sister.
“This object” — clearly Chopping is not a man with the milk of human kindness running through his veins. But he does not single out children with his animus: he is an equal opportunity misanthrope.
Jennifer, Leslie, and Brenda play in the street outside the Office. Although Chopping doesn’t identify where his novel is set, but it could be any overcrowded, squalid grey industrial English city of its time. The purpose of the Office is never mentioned, and it doesn’t matter. It’s a place full of desks and telephones, typewriters and file cabinets, ashtrays and pale-faced mediocre clerks, secretaries, and managers, all of them grey, miserable, and frustrated.
Mr. Gender most of all: “In adolescence, he was already a grey man in embryo.” Poor Mr. Gender does get his share of abuse from his creator. His encroaching baldness is examined under the fly’s microscope: “It saw damp thinning strands of hair, carefully trained across a putty-coloured skull; oiled fronds of seaweed across a dead fish’s belly.” His grossest behaviors are put on display for our revulsion: “going back to a childhood habit, he was feeding himself with the pickings from his nose with the eager rapacity of a hungry fanatic.”
Chopping has turned the tables on the reader, in other words. It is his fly who is the noble creature, the diligent agent taking note, acting on behalf of the gods. It is his people who are held up for our repulsion. There is not a line in these pages that does not make the reader want to take a shower and give himself a vigorous scrub down.
And yet, and yet.
Within a few dozen more pages, we discover the truth in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s words. For those willing to follow Richard Chopping into this cesspool he has created, The Fly is a journey filmed in Technicolor and Cinemascope. But as a novel, it ultimately fails in design and structure.
Balzac understood something that Chopping doesn’t: if you’re going to write about nasty people, it’s the nastiest ones who have to be the stars. By far the nastiest piece of work in the Office is the cleaning (there’s an irony!) lady, Mrs. Macklin. Her superpower is spotting everyone else’s vulnerabilities, which she then probes with her rustiest, filthiest instruments. And she’s not above shoving a corpse into the building furnace to avoid awkward questions. While Chopping may have prided himself on his choice of the fly as his witness, this book would have been much more effective seen through Mrs. Macklin’s hatefilled eyes.
Structurally, The Fly is several chapters too long. We follow everyone in the Office for an annual outing to the zoo. Chopping takes us home with several of the Office’s employees, as if test-driving them as protagonists, ultimately choosing to build his climax around Mr. O’Flattery, an anxious clerk whose only distinguishable feature is his being Irish, who works himself into a breakdown not so much by Mrs. Macklin’s machinations as by the anticipation of them — and even this process is drawn out too long. Chopping’s exultant disgust loses its joyous intensity, turning into tedium and, finally, weariness.
The Fly was Richard Chopping’s first novel. Trained as an artist, Chopping was best known for his trompe-l’œil covers for the original UK hardback editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Several years later, Chopping published a second novel, The Ring, about a gay man who finds himself consumed in London’s rough trade world. This was a world Chopping knew intimately, so I am interested to see if the subject tapped into his design aesthetic better than did the grey workers in The Fly‘s Office.
The Fly, by Richard Chopping London: Secker & Warburg, 1965
This was the most surprising book I’ve read in a long time. I was initially interested in The Woman’s Harvest because, having been published in 1916, it appeared to be the first English novel to deal with the situation of women on the home front in World War One. And at first, that’s what it proved to be.
Harvey Brunsdon is a floorwalker in a department store on Kensington High Street when the war breaks out in August 1914. Married and with an infant daughter at home, he decides it’s better not to volunteer for the Army out of purely practical concerns: how will his wife manage on 12 shillings a week when they’ve been living on £170 a year — or worse, on 9 shillings a week if he gets killed? After being shamed as a coward by a young woman presenting him with a white feather, though, he and his wife decide it’s better to do the patriotic thing.
Harvey enlists and his wife leaves the child in the care of her mother goes back to work. The independence and power of being an income earner seems to compensate for her loneliness — more than compensate for it, in fact: “If Elsie Brunsdon could have analyzed her tangled emotions during the autumn of 1914 she must have admitted that, contrary to all her expectations, she was enjoying every moment of her life.”
When Harvey is mustered out and returns, he finds it hard to return to the dressed-up interior work of the store and he seeks out the widow of his regimental commander, who has an estate in need of farm workers. Despite his lack of experience, he moves the family to the countryside. He takes to it like Oliver Wendell Douglas in Green Acres, while Elsie is less enthusiastic. In the course of a year, hard work and good old English pluck turn Harvey into a proven landsman.
Then, in Chapter IX, as Elsie is finally warming to rural life, Anna Floyd throws in this bombshell:
A disbanded regiment, nearly all young students and professional men, mustered in civilian clothes in Trafalgar Square, marched in silence down Whitehall, and hanged four members of the Cabinet on the lamp facing the entrance to Downing Street. The ringleaders, a major, two sergeants, and a private soldier, surrendered themselves and were arrested at once. They were sentenced to death, and on the evening of their trial four more prominent politicians dangled from the same lamp. The Prime Minister, arrested in his own official residence, was taken to see the bodies and informed that whilst the four men lay under sentence, four politicians would hang punctually every evening.
I did not see that coming.
Ad for The Woman’s Harvest by Anna Floyd.
Floyd goes on to tell us that England then experiences a renaissance of the land and within two years achieves near-total self-sufficiency in food production as thousands of veterans turn their swords into ploughshares, with commensurate benefits for Harvey Brunsdon as an early adopter, and we are back into his story, the most violent and tumultuous revolution since Oliver Cromwell having been introduced and passed over in the space of three pages.
But wait: there’s more.
At this point, we are precisely at the halfway point in the book and can be excused for wondering where this is all going.
And the answer is … polyamory.
Over the next 100-some pages, two of the local women disappear for months at a time — to France, to a clinic for “fatigue” — and return with infants of mysterious origin. A foundling. A dead cousin’s orphan. We learn that Harvey has been sowing his seeds in more than the land. In fact, there’s a third affair well underway. When Elsie finally figures this all out, Harvey chastises her. It was her own fault: “You’ve never offered me love of your own free will.” And it’s certainly not the fault of the other women: “They’re victims of the war. You ought to feel sorry for them. You are the fortunate one amongst your unfortunate sisters.” Elsie needs to understand that Harvey is merely doing his patriotic duty — and chill. Turn your head and think of England, in other words.
Though she was writing when the war had been raging for less than two full years, Anna Floyd seems to have been certain that it would result in the loss of a generation of English men and that her country’s future lay in a massive return to an agricultural economy and a massive embrace of sexual freedom … for men. And thus we discover what she meant by The Woman’s Harvest.
I was hoping this book would be a glimpse into how English women, recently emboldened by the Suffragette movement, responded to the early effects of the war. Silly me. The critic Gerald Gould called The Woman’s Harvest “unreadable.” I found it highly readable, blazing through in little more than a day. Highly readable — and highly ridiculous.
The Woman’s Harvest, by Anna Floyd London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1916
“I guess if you thought a little more about sex your circulation would be a whole lot better; there’s nothing like sex for keeping a girl warm.”
No, this is not Bridget Jones or one of her ilk but Virginia Odell, a young American at a Swiss finishing school which occupies much of P.Y. Betts’s novel French Polish, published by Victor Gollancz in 1933. To read it again is to be as startled as I was when first doing so, early in 1985, in the Round Reading Room, as it then was, at the British Library. I could not help but give whoops which startled sedulous thesis-writers either side of me.
Diligent curiosity had brought me to this seemingly frivolous perusal of a long-vanished novel — and would take me far from that sedentary perch in Great Russell Street. That winter I was at work compiling and introducing an anthology from the weekly magazine Night and Day, which lasted for only the second half of 1937 in a bid to be a London equivalent — with equally wonderful cartoons — of The New Yorker. Its demise is often attributed to a lawsuit brought against it by Twentieth-Century Fox after co-editor Graham Greene had written in no uncertain terms about the sexual stance displayed by nine-year-old Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie. In fact, funding had been low from the beginning, with modest fees paid to an array of authors who would, around the world, become better known down the years.
There were also some who faded from sight after appearing in such glittering company where they, too, made an equal showing. Among these was P. Y. Betts who wrote entertainingly about French life and food, as well as supplying “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”, which anticipated Nancy Mitford’s U and Non-U controversy by two decades. What could have become of such a talent? Try as I might, I could not discover anything much about her — and lamented this en passant in the long introduction to the volume which appeared later in the year.
Naturally, this anthology, with the first republication in five decades of Greene’s film review, brought interest from the hills around Los Angeles -– and, with the publication a few years later of Shirley Temple’s splendid memoir Child Star, her saying that Greene had in fact been accurate in his description of her sultry parading in that film and two others. That made a pleasing symmetry to the work on the anthology (if I say so myself, I am thanked in Child Star). Meanwhile, and perhaps all the more exciting, Michael Davie in an Observer column had picked up my reference to the seemingly fugitive P.Y. Betts. This led to the biographer of publisher Edward Garnett (the friend of Lawrence) getting in touch with an unpublished letter in which Garnett, as a reader for Jonathan Cape, had taken against Samuel Beckett’s early Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women (“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole!”) but urged that the publisher take P. Y. Betts’s novel.
No sooner had I read about this unexpected literary confluence than Lady Eirene White got in touch from the House of Lords to say that she had been at St. Paul’s Girls’ School with Betts (as she was known) and that after growing up near Wandsworth Commons before the Great War, Betts had travelled around the world in the Thirties before joining the wartime Land Army which she quit around 1944 to live, alone, in a remote Welsh smallholding which she had never left.
And she was still there.
By this time, not only had electricity been installed there (in 1970), but also a telephone. Never had I thought that I should be talking upon it with somebody whom I had – dare I say it — thought might easily be dead.
Her conversation across those hundred of miles was as vivid as her writing.
Hearteningly, a little later, Veronica Wadley of the Daily Telegraph (and herself now in the Lords) readily agreed that I should travel there for an interview. This was quite a journey, without signposts through narrow lanes with high hedges in a motor-car at low gear (top gear was always a novelty for a window-flapping Citroen); when I did see anybody and asked directions, there was astonishment that I was going to visit P. Y. Betts (“we’ve heard of her but never seen her!”). Eventually I got there, at one end of a long track where I was greeted by a goat of an uncertain disposition and, after a struggle between tyres and mud, parked beside a low, thick-walled cottage from which, followed by a cat and dog, Betts emerged with pails in hand to feed others of the various animals which lived upon her tranche of hillside.
A far cry from the afternoon when Shirley Temple’s husband telephoned me about her imminent memoir (which she wrote herself). This was quite a place. We soon ate, while her talk roved across a Great War childhood near Wandsworth Gaol (an early memory was of watching people walk along the pavement to be in time to stand at its gates when a hanging was due) and looped around life in the Welsh hills, many tales of which reached her in that seclusion (the area was a redoubt of those who had returned from a flower-power trail along the road to Katmandu). As she went out again, the sky darkening, to feed the animals, I scribbled notes of all this, and her words echoed through my mind during the long journey back. There was something marvellously heartening about her conversation borne of long experience (and visits by the mobile library where she put in for so many new books); she was savvier about the world than those who are eternally, wirelessly connected. All of this I wrote up, and it appeared complete with a photograph of her beside one of those animals: a seemingly stray peacock.
And that was not that.
One morning I received a telephone call. A woman said, “Mr. Hecht would like to speak with you.” All right, I replied, puzzled, curious. This turned out to be the owner of independent publisher Souvenir Press, whose outwardly elegant office, chaotic within, was opposite the British Library on Great Russell Street. He had chanced to see the Telegraph piece – and wondered whether Betts would like to write a second book, one about the upbringing she had described to me.
This was an inspired notion, to which she readily agreed, and she wrote it – People Who Say Goodbye — through a Welsh winter. And, as chance also had it, this was published around the same time as Shirley Temple’s book. I asked Greene if he would give a quote for the cover, which he happily did, and, one way and another, the book got about: it was read in eight instalments on national radio, which, one Saturday, also sent an interviewer to her, while Dirk Bogarde (a man whose film career had begun a few years after she took up that life in the hills), who had found it in a Chelsea bookshop, made it one of his books of the year. It went into several paperback incarnations and is still in print.
She died in her nineties, after a stroke, which meant that — after living alone for so long — she had, ever pragmatic, to agree to a carer in that cottage where, as I found on another visit, there were now fewer animals but her spirit was still vivid — as it remains, so wise, so funny, and this sequence of events always makes me thankful that I had made the initial foray to the Reading Room.
P. Y. Betts’s inscription.
You never know what might happen. And so it is that I have now gone back to that novel French Polish which she wrote in her early twenties, and can again hear that voice from decades later. She gave me a copy of it and signed it – a novel now exceedingly hard to find (many have tried to do so after relishing People Who Say Goodbye).
For its first half or so, events take place in that Swiss finishing school before an excursion takes some of the girls with one of the mistresses to life in a pensione – and that amatory imbroglio which had been so much a source of discussion and speculation by the girls during days and evenings when they were meant to be pursuing regular studies. As Betts herself must have done, for the narrative finds room for quotations in several languages as well as extracts from one of the girl’s anthology-in-progress (“anything remotely lunar will do”) about references to the Moon, whose varying appearances in the night sky make it very much a character in a novel where due emphasis is also given to such matters as “those privy to the esoteric abracadabra of contraception” and a page of improvised stream of consciousness.
Time and again, one finds such descriptions as “when she laughed she opened her mouth so wide and displayed teeth so long and white and powerful that it was almost with a sense of incongruity that one glimpsed behind them a squat human tongue and not the darting scarlet tatter of a flop-eared puppy”. That very word “tatter” has one reaching for a dictionary of slang, and, to say the least, the novel is a repository of words and phrases which would make Anthony Burgess redouble his efforts to impress.
To pick out some, here are a “bourden of voices”, “dispharetic travelling”, and in a nightmare towards the end one of the teachers had seen a woman “apparelled in scarlet and monstrously mounted upon that heptacephalous progeny of hell”. And of course, in the opening pages, it is said of one of the girls that “a rufous challenge sparkled in her eyes, and her hair flamed like a November sun in the shadowy room”. There should be a revival of this expression for removing one’s dress: “she skinned it over her head”. And one could discuss until humans beings cease to exist the subsequent observation “have you ever noticed that people who are quite disintegratingly beautiful in the nude are often dreadfully pedestrian in clothes?”
And what can one say of Penelope “who had discovered that morning at prayers that j’ai sucri did not mean ‘I have sugared,’ but was French for Jesus Christ”? With all the precocity of youth, one is informed that ballet and ballade share a root. Amidst the current British crises, can it any longer be given credence that “they had such beautiful pink skins that Penelope thought they must be Etonians”? One such character, when asked if he is growing a moustache, replies, “at present it is only visible in certain lights, like the sheen on velvet”.
One reads on avidly, while pausing to ponder “coprolitic spirals” – and with passing time and “scrannel spirit”, one must marvel at the protracted metaphor made from the speed of life being akin to the long outer grooves of a 78-rpm disc shortening as the needle reaches the label: “on the record the last two inches really are covered in less time, though the tempo remains the same”. Once again, two pages in, here is that paragraph which, in the Round Reading Room, had me reading on. “Here, from a central parting of impeccable rectitude, uniform waves of iron-grey hair flowed towards the orderly roll at the back of the head with the beautiful inevitability of creation moving to one far-off divine event.”
Now, when Katherine Mansfield is rightly lauded, it is an interesting point of view that, a decade after her death, one of the precocious adolescents could say of her that she “bores me frightfully. She’s so conceited and vapourish, taking it for granted that everybody will be interested to read that on such-and-such a night she woke up and felt passionate. She was a beast to the Gaudier-Brczeskas, anyway.”
No apology for quoting so much from the novel. Otherwise how could readers gain a taste of something which led me to traverse all those miles, making it across the Severn Bridge, in a vehicle whose windows flapped open at the slightest breeze? The novel is sought after, and yet there are those who might cavil at its reappearance. The opening section lays some emphasis upon a Black woman’s arrival among the School’s pupils for a while. “On her ears were gold earrings of about the bigness of half-crowns and a coruscation of bracelets of strikingly extra-European workmanship gauntleted her bare forearm almost to the elbow.”
Some will decry this, and an element of debate would be that many others are regarded askance, such as a teacher who “had only once put her foot down, when a young man from Milwaukee had raped from her chalet a lavatory seat elegantly intagliated with edelweiss entwined with bells of gentian, with Alpenrose and the modest camomile. Since this incident, unique of its kind, Americans had not been encouraged”.
What place would such a lavatory seat find in “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”?
Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).
French Polish, by P. Y. Betts London: Victor Gollancz, 1933
Cover of the first US edition of Breathe Upon These Slain.
I had the chance to speak recently with David Madden, whose anthology Rediscoveries was a primary inspiration that launched my quest to seek out neglected books and authors decades ago. We talked about the fact that I completed an MA program in biograpy and creative nonfiction at the University of East Anglia a few years ago, which led, inevitably, to mention of W. G. Sebald and, in particular, his masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. And this, in turn, led to his suggestion that I read Evelyn Scott’s Breathe Upon These Slain (1934).
In October 1932, the American novelist Evelyn Scott and her second husband, the English short story writer John Metcalfe, having grown sick of life in London, moved to Lowestoft on the coast of East Anglia and rented a cottage from a spinster named Miss Henderson. As they settled into the cottage for the winter, Scott began to wonder about the family whose pictures hung in every room. Some of the pictures were prints of such once-popular subjects as the death of Cock Robin or the ride of the Bengal Lancers.
But there were several family photographs — one in the east bedroom of four little girls, all dressed alike, from sometime in the previous century; one in the west bedroom of just three girls — older, in their teens. And her novelist’s imagination began to work.
I am not here to write stories, but to rest, and my knowledge of Suffolk is small — my knowledge of these people, nothing! — yet I feel queerly urged to give the four little girls their names.
“The four sisters shall be called: Cora, Ethel, Tilly and Margaret,” she decides. And with little more than observations of places and people around Lowestoft, a bit of history, and her powers of empathy, Scott created a story of their lives. The story of the Courtneys.
Not the story. Although she speculates that the Miss Henderson who collects the rent and occasionally checks in corresponds to one of the girls in the photographs, Scott wasn’t concerned with the facts. The term was decades from being coined, but what Scott decided to create was what we would now call a metafiction (or meta-nonfiction?). She never hides herself from the reader, nor does she ever pretend that the stories she tells about the family aren’t inventions.
Evelyn Scott, around the time of Breathe Upon These Slain. [Marks on the original.]
The absence of the youngest of the four girls from the photograph of the three older girls Scott explains through the story of Tilly. One drizzly autumn day when the coastal town is socked in with one of those grey mists that rise off the Broads and cut to the bone with a chill more penetrating than much colder winter frosts, Mrs. Courtney, a fastidious but impatient woman, sends Tilly outside to gain herself a bit of piece. Just seven or eight, Tilly obliges and heads out to the seaside strand, where she walks up and down for hours until soaked to the skin and near hypothermia. And promptly contracts pneumonia and dies.
This is just the first tragedy to befall the Courtneys. Ethel and Cora marry — Ethel to Patrick, a naval officer whose infatuation with her she never quite believes, Cora to a Harley Street surgeon. A brother, Bertram — another invention of Scott’s taken from a single photograph of a young man, a proud sahib someplace in India — is attached to the Indian Civil Service but finds he lacks the stiffness of upper lip it requires. Mrs. Courtney never sees how her fastidiousness in morals as much as manners drives her daughters off, Mr. Courtney — the owner of a fish packing company — never recognizes the unbridgeable gap that exists between himself and the shopkeepers and fishermen he lifts a pint with at the New Crown.
What blows the Courtneys to smithereens, though, is the First World War. Ethel’s husband’s ship is sunk by a German torpedo when cruising in waters that were considered submarine-free. Bertram, returned from India, is mowed down in one of the many pointless assaults during the Battle of the Somme. Devastated with grief over his son’s death and brutally isolated when he realizes that no one in the town can see beyond his status as “Courtney of Courtney’s Fish” to empathize with him, Philip Courtney takes his life. And Mrs. Courtney and Margaret — Meg, the spinster — are forced to sell their grand four-story house on the Strand and retreat to the cottage now occupied by Scott and Metcalfe. Yet even as try to build up a new world around this cottage, what comes back to haunt them is not Patrick or Bertram or Philip but little Tilly, who comes to seem a sacrifice offered up to the gods of Victorian conventions.
And Miss Henderson, who comes by bicycle to collect the monthly rent, is she Meg? No, Scott admits:
There has never been a Meg. And sometimes it seems as if there were, for each, only the idea lodged in a brain we term “actual” — the idea which can draw even modest men to murder and call themselves just!
While there is a certain daring in Scott’s willingness not just to acknowledge the artificiality of her invented lives but to insert her own presence in the Lowestoft cottage as a reminder that we should not fully suspend our disbelief, there is also a cost. Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike. Breathe Upon These Slain is a longish book — just a hair under 400 pages — and many of those pages are devoted to reflections on these character Scott has created as constructs rather than people.
Yes, all fictional characters are constructs. But the reason we love fiction and its characters is that in the hands of a good storyteller, we willingly take the leap of faith and believe in their existence, at least within the framework of the novel. As Time’s reviewer wrote, “Readers will admire Author Scott’s ingenuity in projecting her photographs into life-sized semblances, but they will not agree that she has made these foreigners completely lifelike.”
Breathe Upon These Slain could easily be compared to Virginia Woolf’s The Years, which came out just a few years before and which follows another family, the Pargiters, through a similar span of time. But what separates The Years from Breathe Upon These Slain is that whatever ideas Woolf was attempting to demonstrate are always subordinate to her story and its characters, making her work a masterpiece where Scott’s is only an experiment. A remarkable experiment, and one that is often fascinating in its perspective and details. And while certainly one worth further study as a milestone in the development of metafiction and creative nonfiction, it too often lacks the breath of life it needs to rise to the level of a major work. Breathe Upon These Slain, Scott’s title commands. Yet, in the end, one has to conclude that it’s Scott who has slain the Courtneys.
Breathe Upon These Slain, by Evelyn Scott New York: Smith & Haas, 1934 London: Lovat Dickson, 1934
Cover of U.S. edition of Close of Play, the second book in the Biff and Netta trilogy.
I wish I had more time to write this piece, for this trilogy not only amounts to nearly 900 pages but represents one of the most unusual stories I’ve ever come across. When Striplings (1934), the first volume, appeared in America, it was acclaimed as a comic masterpiece. “A rare combination of Wodehouse and Rabelais!” declared the president of the American Booksellers Association. Reviews were so enthusiastic the book went into five printings in less than a month.
I can’t imagine anyone comparing the trilogy to Wodehouse, Rabelais, or anything remotely funny if they knew how its story ends. Though I am not usually one to take care to avoid spoilers, in this case I won’t go into details, except to say that the final pages of Own Wilderness (1938) are the most heart-breaking I’ve read in many years.
In her foreword to Close of Play, the second volume, Nina Warner Hooke wrote that she felt compelled to continue the story of Biff and Netta after being asked to so many times by readers of Striplings. “I do not yet know what is going to happen to my striplings…. Perhaps there will be more to come. Perhaps not,” she concluded. Yet to me, the narrative arc — hell, the narrative momentum — seems inevitable and irresistable, as certain as the fact that two leaves that fall into stream will be pulled downstream by its current.
So, who are Biff and Netta? Biff, eleven, is the son of Hugh Tamlin and his wife Georgina. Hugh, who “used to have something to do with the Rubber World,” now spends his days cloistered in a workshop in his estate — The Place — in Sussex, supposedly working on inventions but in reality simply hiding from the truth that his world is crumbling around him. The fine house in London he has inherited is now rented to a family of Greek Jews whose monthly checks are almost the only income he has left. He can no longer afford repairs on the buildings or grounds of the once-grand Place, is in arrears with his property tax, and has had to reduce the staff to almost nothing.
His marriage is in even worse shape. His wife Georgina has taken a lover, Henry Arthur Pybus-Glanville, known as Uncle Pi, who lives at the estate on weekends and is the only functional adult in this highly dysfunctional family. And even his affair with Georgina is largely a thing of the past, as her only interest is in riding around the country on Warrior, her prize horse, likely the only asset of real value remaining. The only part of the affair not left in the past is Netta.
Netta, eight, is the spit and image of Uncle Pi. “She had his blunt features. His nondescript hair. His throaty laugh. So there is was.” Rounding out the cast is John Johns, the sour chauffeur/gardener/handyman, and Miss Mudford, the governess. Muddy had once been a good governess, but now she is prisoner of her demons: bad teeth, “muddy skin, muddy voice, and muddy mind,” and “given to secret masturbation an pornographic literature.”
In their decay, the Tamlins have become isolated from much of the world around them. Hugh continues to receive copies of trade magazines but no longer bothers to read them. “Not many people ‘knew’ the Tamlins these days. Things were said about them. None too savoury things. The servants were a queer lot. And then there was Uncle Pi.”
The only vitality left at The Place resides in Biff and Netta, who spent their days foraging around its two hundred acres. They swim in its ponds, climb its trees, trap its rabbits and ferrets — they are almost feral in their freedom. Biff spends the summer in a single pair of shorts, literally unable to wash them unless he spends a day naked in bed. They are “extravagant children.” “They did everything with an extravagant largeness and a total disregard for consequences. They were extravagantly fond of one another.”
Too fond. Their mutual attraction is both a thing born of genuine innocence and love and one of the worms at the core of this apple, an apple destined to rot and disintegrate in a manner that is both horrifying and gripping to witness over the course of the trilogy.
If Biff and Netta are Warner Hooke’s Adam and Eve, their problem is not that they haven’t tasted the fruit of knowledge. It’s that Netta, at least, doesn’t care:
“You know I shan’t ever marry anyone but you!” “We can’t be married, you fathead!” “Why can’t we?” “Because we’re related. We’re not allowed to. There’s a law about it.” “Not allowed to? Why ever not?” “Because we should have queer sorts of things for children.” “Oh, Biff, what sort of things?” “Well, things with two heads. Or six toes, or something. It’s called inbreeding. It happened to the chickens last year.”
Netta is not deterred. “We might have something with eyes all over its stomach. We might make a lot of money out of it. We could show it at Church Fêtes and charge tuppence to have a look.”
As Biff and Netta near puberty, the adults at the Place rally one last time. Uncle Pi agrees to pay for Biff and Netta to be sent off to boarding schools. Their experiences are very different. Biff grows leaner, harder, stronger — but is an outcast, treated as an oddity by his schoolmates, nursing his hatred of them, and longing to be reunited with Netta. Netta, on the other hand, no longer malnourished, puts on weight, fits in, makes friends, develops schoolgirl crushes.
When they meet again during the first school holiday, civilization in the form of conventions and moraes have intruded. Netta confides that her breasts are being to grow. “Let me feel,” Biff demands. “He thought he had never felt anything so soft.” Yet when he reaches out again, Netta draws back: “‘Don’t,’ she said.” “For the first time in their lives, they felt that a veil had descended between them.” The extravagance of their affection may have diminished, but the strength of their attraction never does. Biff abandons school, gets work as a farmhand, then runs away when he learns that Netta plans to spend her summer holiday with a classmate.
This is where Striplings ends. It’s hard for me to take Warner Hooke’s claim that she didn’t plan to carry on with the story seriously. In one of the rooms of The Place, there is a mural of a scene from a Greek myth slowly falling apart. Early in the book, Netta and Biff take guesses as to when the next piece will tumble to the ground. There are too many pieces in Warner Hooke’s narrative left dangling, about to fall, to treat it as a completed work. Or perhaps it would be better to say that she closes the book on the crash before we’ve had the chance to count the victims.
The pieces begin to fall in Close of Play:
Fifteen months later, early in the summer holidays, the horse Warrior put his foot in a rabbit hole and fell heavily, breaking his neck and Georgina’s back. Careless of Warrior. One would not have expected him to do a thing like that.
The dispassion in those lines hints at one of the peculiar qualities of Warner Hooke’s writing. She has a knack for eliciting our sympathies for Biff and Netta in all their rough tenderness — and yet can, a few sentences later, poke at her characters with the disinterest of a scientist examining a specimen under a microscope. Most of Warner Hooke’s later work were stories about animals written for children, and her instincts seem to be those of a naturalist rather than a novelist.
Nina Warner Hooke, from the New York Times, 1934.
One of Stripling’s American reviewwers, Herschel Brickell, wrote that “Very few of the considerable number of contemporary novels that have attempted to explore the strange world of the young of the human species have been so honest, so forthright and so understanding….” And the American edition of Close of Play included a letter from birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger to its publisher in which she called it “one of the most real books I have ever read and the truest study of children and adolescence I’ve had the pleasure of reading in fiction form.”
The realism of Warner Hooke’s treatment of Biff and Netta’s story is all the more striking for the utterly bizarre reality of their situation. Working as a navvy on a construction site in Brighton, Biff hears of Georgina’s death and returns to The Place. Now taller, stronger, and callous of hands and manners, he is bound to act as an accelerant in what is already a highly combustible situation. Though Netta is in the midst of a teenage romance with a neighbor, Rodney Fletcher, she finds herself drawn again to Biff. And though Biff has been living in the roughest of workman’s lodgings, he can see that The Place is on the brink of collapse. Much of its forest has had to be sold off for lumber, and Hugh, referred to the children as D.M. (Deaf Mute, for his near-total lack of interaction with anyone), is almost catatonic in his isolation.
A child-man, Biff exudes a certain confidence and power that attracts followers, and both Rodney and Netta go with him when he decides to leave The Place again. He returns to his room in Brighton and the three settle in together. They have almost nothing, yet he ensures their basic needs are met through intimidation:
Biff they feared. He subdued them from the outset. They surrendered to him because they had no alternative. If he required an extra blanket or another cup, there was little use in stating that it was not available. He went downstairs to fetch it. And if the excuse proved to have been founded on fact, he went out and bought what he wanted and charged it to Ma [the landlady].
Of course, three into two won’t go, as they say, and after a few months of pretending to be a simple working man and attempting to understand the complexities of Netta’s relationship with him and Biff, Rodney returns to his familiar middle-class life. Rodney is hands-down the most normal character we will come across. No wonder he’s destined to be among the wounded.
At this point, Close of Play ends. The last book, Own Wilderness, opens in London, where Biff and Netta are boarding with a greengrocer and his family. Netta helps out in the shop, while Biff cycles through a variety of jobs, not all of them legal, until he settles in as a delivery truck driver. Warner Hooke’s cast grows to take in the whole family and the power of the narrative is weakened somewhat as she loses the tight focus on Biff and Netta.
That is, until Hugh dies and leaves The Place to them. Saddled with debts, its buildings now so decrepit as to be barely habitable, it still has the attraction of Eden to Warner Hooke’s strange Adam and Eve. Foraging, once their pasttime, now becomes their means of existence. And now that they are both of age, Biff and Netta begin to become aware of what their neighbors are saying about their relationship.
It’s enough at this point to say that we’ve left Wodehouse and Rabelais behind long ago. We are now deep in Thomas Hardy’s territory. How we got here isn’t entirely clear, and I’m not sure it was to Warner Hooke, either. She probably didn’t work according to a plan, probably didn’t know from one chapter to the next when Biff and Netta were going to lead her. But we should be grateful that she stuck with them.
In some ways, taken together, Striplings, Close of Play, and Own Wilderness resemble a 19th Century English novel more than a modernist one. Biff and Netta’s path meanders from time to time and Warner Hooke occasionally suffers from the naturalist’s tendency to note all phenomena, even the unimportant, when some details ought to be omitted. But taken together — and as hard as these books are to locate, I cannot overstress how important it is to read the three as a single work — this trilogy is a work of stunning power, and I just regret that I am giving it less than its due with such a relatively brief assessment. Absolutely unjustly neglected; absolutely worth tapping into your local Inter Library Loan service to get your hands on. (Note: Own Wilderness is avaiable through HathiTrust.org, if you have access.)
The Biff and Netta Trilogy, by Nina Warner Hooke (credited as N. Warner Hooke) Striplings London: Faber and Faber, 1934 New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1934 Close of Play London: Putnam, 1936 New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1936 Own Wilderness London: Putnam, 1938 New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938
Venetia Murray’s novel The Twelve Days of Christmas (1968) has a reputation for being a cult novel, though I suspect that’s largely due to a certain passage that’s been quoted several times in potpourri books by Jilly Cooper and others. It comes from a scene in which two lovers are laying in bed in a discreet Paris hotel after making love. “I need some new pants,” the woman tells the man, which leads him to do a quick bit of the kind of mental calculus that’s one price of carrying on an affair:
After all, having committed himself to all this expenditure, he might as well get the best of it. And pants cost less than some things. But he was not looking forward to the moment when they would walk together down the Faubourg St Honoré. A happy thought occurred to him. Tomorrow was Sunday and the shops in the Rue St Honoré would be closed both on Sunday and Monday. This Sarah had forgotten. He realized this meant that he would have to keep her in bed for most of today.
Sarah is Sarah Yeates, in line to become Lady Yeates whenever her grandfather the Earl dies. The man is Simon Burford, a married publisher who’s told him wife that he’s attending a French publishing conference in Lyons. Which is just the sort of thing that French publishers organize … five days before Christmas.
But amorous complexities and moral quandries are the warps and woofs of Venetia Murray’s fictional fabric in The Twelve Days of Christmas. Sarah is divorced from her third husband and has had so many affairs that during her Paris getaway she has to stay two steps ahead of herself to avoid leading her current lover into someplace she’s been with one of the others. For Paris and London are small towns when it comes to people of their class and amatory habits:
There had been a memorable occasion in some restaurant in the King’s Road, where too many people who had crossed currents in their lives too often, had all run into each other having dinner at separate tables. Henry’s ex-wife had been there; she had been with a man with whom Suzy had once had an affair. Catharine had been there with someone she should not have been there with, since she was supposed to be a respectable married woman even if her husband was once again away. Some irrelevant Italian girl was there.
With so many matchings and mismatchings going on, some irrelevant man or woman is bound to find themselves the leftover in such scenes. When Simon flies off to Paris — sorry, Lyons — Catharine, his wife (second marriage for each) heads off to a psychedelic party at the Ritz and winds up falling for Mark, a novelist and leftover man. The party is being thrown by Catharine’s ambiguously trans(Atlantic) friend Elizabeth, who’s wealthy enough to persuade the management of the Ritz to look past the stoned half-naked bodies that litter the floor of her suite at the end of the party.
The Twelve Days of Christmas is certainly an artifact of the Swinging Sixties, but the irony is that the lion’s share of the licentiousness is in the hands of the monied/salaried/mortgaged thirty-somethings. Perhaps this is because the book is very much a roman à clef. According to Murray’s obituary in the Guardian, it was “a thinly disguised and pungent portrait of young, spoilt marrieds playing around in London in the early 1960s.”
Venetia Murray in the mid-1960s.
At the time Murray wrote the book, she was between her second and third marriages and was part of a social set whose interconnections — marital, sexual, familial, and professional — were easily as intricate as any in the novel. The granddaughter of the renowned classicist and humanist Gilbert Murray and daughter of the journalist and politician Basil Murray (rumored to be the model of Evelyn Waugh’s character Basil Seal), Venetia Murray had been among the more privileged child evacuees of Blitz, spending most of the war living with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and his wife in Washington, D.C. and attending the exclusive Potomac School for girls.
When she was 18, she stayed with the novelist Nancy Mitford in Paris so she could attend a gala ball. Mitford wrote of Venetia to Waugh:
I’ve got a Beauty of 18 coming tomorrow which is a lovely treat, she came with her mother to buy a ball dress, which she has duly done, & I’ve persuaded the mother to leave her with me for a few days. She is called Venetia Murray, daughter of my dear old drunken cousin the late Basil M & she is an old fashioned Beauty, that is to say rather large & in a perpetual state of puppy like ecstasy which I find very attractive — like a puppy which wags itself rather than its tail.
Murray attributes to her character Sarah an incident that took place during her stay with Mitford:
Once upon a time when Sarah had been very young and in Paris she had been allowed, though only sixteen, to go to a ball with some young people. But she had been told to be back by twelve. She had been staying with her god-mother, a witty and well-known novelist but not a connoisseur of the behaviour of young girls. Sarah arriving back from the ball at five — in face she had only been having fun, not doing anything that in those days people like her god-mother would have called “wrong” — had run across the large courtyard in her ball gown, aware of how late she was. Her god-mother had been waiting up, worried that Sarah, in her charge, might have done something “wrong.” Her god-mother had said, “What is the use of running the last hundred yards when you are five hours late?”
I suspect that anyone familiar with the goings-on of London literati in the 1950s and 1960s could find many other examples of Murray’s appropriation of real-life characters and situations. Simon and Catherine rent a bedroom in their North London house to Suzy, an arrangement that sounds similar to the one Murray and Sally Newton, daughter of the actor Robert Newton, had in the house owned by poet and cricket writer Alan Ross. An annotated edition of The Twelve Days of Christmas would, in fact, likely be a valuable piece of social and literary history. As a work of fiction, however, it’s amusing but superficial — in its way as dated as a Regency romance (Murray later became a historian of the Regency) — and not a 1960s counterpart to Waugh’s early novels about the Bright Young Things of 1920s London.
The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Venetia Murray London: Collins, 1968
Dust jacket from the first US edition of The Case is Altered.
This is a guest post by Christopher Hawtree.
The Figures in the Boarding-House Carpet
Many a novel has sprung from a paragraph in a newspaper. Notable among them was that New York Times snippet about a houseful of murder victims in the Midwest which Truman Capote chanced to see — and so began the trail that led to In Cold Blood. Three decades earlier, William Plomer returned to London after a weekend away when his eye was caught at the railway station by something larger than a paragraph: posters announced SHOCKING BAYSWATER TRAGEDY.
The newspaper revealed to him — in late-November 1929 — that this tragedy had taken place in the very house where he lodged. It was a narrow escape, for it is likely that he would have joined his landlady in the mortuary had he not been out of town. She was the common-law wife of a man given to the obsession that she would succumb to any man who paid her court. Mania turned into murder as he set upon her with an open razor while their child looked on; with her dead, the man looked for Plomer, but the police were soon on the scene, samples taken — and, in due course, the returning novelist cleaned up the remaining mess.
Hardly surprisingly, that friendship with his landlady and the encounter with the blood which had spurted from her veins were to haunt him. Two years later, in the summer of 1932, he published his third novel The Case is Altered. After the South Africa of Turbott Wolfe and the Japan of Sado, this was a raw but deeply felt account of those clinging onto life by dint of a rented room in somebody else’s house.
Since his childhood, split between South Africa and terms at Rugby School, Plomer’s life had since been varied, and he knew such humble lodgings as well as Patrick Hamilton, who was to make a career from boarding houses, with such works as Hangover Square. Another boarding house novel, Marie Belloc-Lowndes’s The Lodger, inspired not only Plomer but also Norman Collins, whose London Belongs to Me has recently won new attention. One might also think of works by Muriel Spark, Emeric Pressburger, Tennessee Williams and Sarah Waters as examples of the continuing fascination of such settings, which provides dramatic unity while characters move in and out the shadows of rooms whose carpet is no longer as fresh as the time when it had been obtained on an instalment plan.
Cover of the Hogarth Press edition of The Case is Altered.
The Case is Altered proved to be Plomer’s most popular novel, one of the bestsellers of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, as had been Orlando, Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and Saturday Night at the Greyhound. The last, by Plomer’s friend John Hampson has something in common with The Case is Altered: set in a pub, its timescale is limited and to the fore is a cruel husband.
According to Plomer, the houses in his fictional Cambodia Crescent “have the self-righteous air of a selfish and uncultivated person who thinks that he is a good and wise, and the ornamentation around the doors, windows and chimneys forms a lasting insult to the beauties of natural stone and careful craftsmanship”. As this is in hailing distance of Kensington Gardens, one can be sure that Plomer’s house would now command cool millions.
Almost a century ago, it had simply been spotted by Mrs. Beryl Fernandez (with her impoverished and ailing common-law husband Paul), who thought that with care, it could become a profitable enterprise. She planned to run with the help of her friend Mrs. Gambits, “who belonged to that numerous and depressing class of women who are not exactly of the kind known as decayed gentlewomen, but whose chief aim in life is to be taken for decayed gentlewomen”. This was an era when even Mrs. Fernandez’s modest funds could stretch to the hiring of a manservant, Mr. Empringham “with grey hair and rather a puzzled expression on his face, as though he couldn’t quite make out why life had treated him quite the way it had, or what it was likely to do to him next”.
Among the lodgers are a couple, the Rudds, forever in hope of winning crossword competitions and siring a child. They are joined by Constantia Brixworth who is down on her luck after losing her money in an American railroad scheme. She is friendly with Frances Haymer, a former explorer, to whem she regularly entertains with tales of her fellow residents, whom the writer regards with all the curious avidity that she had showed in chronicling foreign tribes.
This is a finely-observed novel. Plomer describes Miss Haymer when she ventured out, as she “used a stick with a rubber end, and tottered along on heels that were rather too high, supporting, like some caryatid, a large, oldfashioned hat, decorated with a bird or two and some fruit, as in her heyday.” Of particular interest to both Miss Brixworth and Miss Haymer is young Eric Alston, who works in a greengrocer’s “and had a very fresh complexion, as if his cheeks were reflecting a rosy glow from the apples and peaches which it was his work to sell”. Eric is walking out with a girl who works in the kitchen of a clothes shop which, called Pélagie, proclaims itself as trading in “Robes and Modes”.
And so the scene is set for lives of aspiration running into frustration and worse — none blessed with “that assurance which the possession of money brings with it”. The novel’s title has a double meaning. A Miss Brixworth says to Alston (to whom she offers tea and omelettes), “When I had more money, I used to have an ordinary afternoon tea and late dinner, but now the case is rather altered…”. And nearby the house is a pub with that very name: a plaque relates that “it was originally called The Three Cranes but in the eighteenth century a famous highwayman was caught there unawares by a young lord whom he had robbed. ‘Now, sir,’ cried the peer as soon as he had made sure of his capture, ‘it seems the case is altered!”‘
William Plomer in 1932.
Briskly told in nineteen chapters across some three hundred pages, the novel has something of the “tea-tabling” manner for which Christopher Isherwood praised his and Plomer’s mentor, E.M. Forster. Despite a cinema fire, dramatic incident is rare; everything turns around the simmering of domestic matters, one small table-side event knocking into another much as a billiard ball sets up a chain reaction across the green baize. Worthy of Forster, or Proust, is the observation of Paul Fernandez who chain-smokes in the dead of night, the night-lamp’s shadows an emblem of his maniacal anxiety. “The idea of cruelty (which is only a diseased form of sympathy) was beginning to exercise a fascination over his thoughts. Not content with love, and love fully requited at that, he wanted power as well, he wanted to command more love, a stronger, more intense kind of intimacy than is humanly possible, and so he began to seek how he might obtain such power.”
And so begins a descent which will take down many with it against a background which forms an indelible view of the Thirties, whether in spiritualist gatherings, a mediation upon the nature of conscience, a suggestion of the homosexuality which had been to the fore in Sado, or advertisement hoardings “covered with huge posters. Each of them showed a gigantic human figure, and each figure seemed to live in a strange world of the imagination. A giantess in evening dress was in raptures at having discovered a new tooth paste to apply to a set of teeth that looked like the keys of a piano”. Whether observing people’s tendency to walk towards a window when contemplating the future or a man who “indulged in none of those humorous sallies which are so important a part of an auctioneer’s technique”, Plomer shows those powers of description which made people relish his letters’ arrival (would there were a collection of them).
Rather than dwell on the murder which was its inspiration, one relishes The Case is Altered for its life:
an immense murmur made up of the traffic of human beings going about their business and pleasure, a rich and subtle and continuous sound which it takes more than motor-cars to make, for it must contain as well the cries of infants, the ranting of demagogues, the tapping of the blind man’s stick, the happy laughter of young girls, the vomiting of drunkards, the stirring of squirrels in their sleep, the fall of leaves, the growth of trees, the threats of blackmailers, the solicitations of whores, the shuffling steps of lecherous old men, the banter of soldiers, the coy shrieks of housemaids, the shy kisses of young lovers, the worm in the bud, and the millionaire’s last words.
The novel put Plomer’s quiet life in good stead, although he was not to know such success again until its very end, in 1973, when his sequence The Butterfly Ball was illustrated by Alan Aidridge, who brought a similar style to his work in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. FThough his satirical and lyrical poems are a particular delightr, Plomer may now be best known as the publisher’s reader who, in the face of opposition, persuaded Cape to take on the first of Ian Fleming’s James Bonds novels, Casino Royale, and worked closely on the rest of them.
How has the equally if differently thrilling The Case is Altered fallen from print? It last appeared half a century ago in a hardback series called the Landmark Library. Perhaps some have balked at another aspect of the Thirties. As early as page twenty-six, one learns that “even if Miss Brixworth had not been able to see at once that Mrs. Fernandez was a Jewess, it would be soon have been able to tell that she was one, by the way she began over-emphasising her partiality to bacon for breakfast”. Two pages later, she “launched out into a sea of Jewish visions of luxury and comfort far beyond her means” and further in, there is “that Jewish impulse towards grandeur so noticeable in Mrs. Fernandez”.
Plomer was a humane man. These are the tropes of an era, similar to the first edition of Brighton Rock, which featured a Jewish Mr. Big in a seafront hotel (later editions turned him into an Italian, as if that made it all right). The narrator of The Case is Altered notes that “you can never make out whether the Jews want to be aristocrats or socialists. Half-way between East and West, they maybe somewhere near the truth, if the truth really lies in paradox. Jesus Christ was the greatest and most paradoxical of the Jews. He had the most aristocratic nature imaginable, and yet he lived with the lowest of the low. He was unique, and yet expressed himself in terms of what is ordinary and universal”.
For all that “Jews kiss and kill at the same time, just as a sportsman may feel a real affection for the game he slaughters”, The Case is Altered has a power which impressed its first publisher, Leonard Woolf, a Jew. As felicitous as it is raw, here is a novel which remains as provoking as when it appeared in 1932.
Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).
The Case is Altered, by William Plomer London: Hogarth Press, 1932 New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932
My friend Robert Nedelkoff recommended this book to me after stumbling across a reference in a 1980 collection of Ronald Firbank’s prose titled Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques edited by Mervyn Horder. In Horder’s preface, he dismisses the notion of dramatic death scenes, writing, “We are assured by a competent technical observer of the subject that people tend to meet the moment of their death in the same manner as they live — the self effacing quietly in their sleep, the egocentric giving the maximum trouble to all concerned, the theatrical speechifying away con brio, the athletic with one foot out of bed, and so on.”
Horder’s competent technical observer, we learn from a footnote, was Pamela Bright, whose The Day’s End he describes as “a neglected book of 1956” — which of course caused Robert to reach for the Neglected Books phone. It sounded like the real deal, and I was delighted to find it awaiting patiently on the Internet Archive (link).
The Day’s End is a study in how we die. Set on the cancer ward of an unnamed women’s hospital on the western edge of London, the book takes us through two days on the ward as seen by its head nurse (Bright, though she never identifies herself in the book). There are old women and young, some there just for an exam or two, others doomed to spend their last days within its walls. Bright confirms Horder’s paraphrase above, but more from the perspective of a nurse:
The ways people die are as varied as the pictures on the wall ofa gallery, and each death remembered for a different reason: one for its setting; one for its atmosphere and whether there was summer in it or frost, or darkness and an oxygen cylinder; one for its human characters, for its peace, for its distress, and whether it was in the order of things or sudden in its unexpectedness.
At the time Bright wrote the book, she had been a practicing nurse for over 18 years. Earning her cap just after the outbreak of World War One, she served in military hospitals in Palestine and, after the D-Day invasion, trailing the British Army through northern Europe. The latter experience she described in her first book, Life in Our Hands (1955), and there are flashbacks to her time in Palestine throughout The Day’s End.
Also throughout the book are mentions of the stress of being responsible for a ward full of patients and a team of nurses and orderlies that almost seem like Bright’s reminders to herself: “it demanded constant wariness, the habit of keen observation, the noting of others’ moods and tempers, the habit of explaining, and the ability to learn the knack of not always depending on the advice or backing of others, but of believing in one’s own judgment and ability.” As she rides the bus home after her shift, her thoughts scroll through the patients — who’s improved, who’s failing, who may need to be shifted to one of the side rooms where a patient nearing death can have some hours of privacy and peace — and which nurses need to be encouraged or restrained the next day. She acknowledges, though, that she gains a form of comfort from that stress: “Although theoretically I abhor the business of being busy and in a hurry, yet I must confess that often it is in that condition I find myself happiest — it is a drug, and one can forget.”
Caring for a terminally ill patient proves among the most demanding of a nurse’s duties because it represents, in effect, a failure. So, on top of the inbred discretion of the English middle class there is a reluctance to draw attention to the obvious: “However acute a patient’s illness, we never admitted the signs of impending death.” Some of this reluctance stems from the difficulty of admitting how much about death remains unknown to medical professionals, but some also results from having seen the process repeated hundreds of times. “A dying man rarely looks death in the face,” Bright reports, “and who are we to tell him the truth? Why should he not go on building castles in the air when to some extent he has been doing it all his life?”
What makes The Day’s End memorable, however, are not such generalizations but Bright’s portraits of her patients. Mario, the dashingly handsome Italian soldier in her hospital in Palestine, who insisted on wearing a pink hairnet each night to keep his long, oiled black hair from getting mussed — until the night when he no longer called for it and Bright knew he would not last until morning. Or the lonely woman whose sad tale takes less than a sentence: “Miss Smart, for instance, who had had not a single friend and who couldn’t be forgotten when she died, for no one remembered her while she was alive….” And especially Mrs. Ferrett, possessed of a malevolent intensity worthy of a character in Balzac:
Her face seemed crudely sculptured, following the curves of a gargoyle on some cathedral front; and as one invariably gazes with delight upon such goblins and the workman’s freedom of expression, so one had to smile at Mrs. Ferrett. When she sat in bed she was coiled up in the smallest possible space, her chin almost resting on her knees, her hands close to her sides, like a child in embryo: when she was on her feet she moved softly and half inclined sideways like a crab: when her sharp eyes glistened, she pierced the ward from end to end and gleamed upon her neighbours, nurses, visitors, indeed everything. Mumbling, or munching peppermints; crabbed and cranky, she would gaze upwards at the plain corners and downwards at the dust, and in silent glee hug to herself some fearful secret.
She occupied the first place among the simplest. But she occupied it with such force, daring and calm that none of us would have thought of taking it away from her. This selfish, wicked woman bewitched even the people least susceptible to such influence: us nurses and the doctors.
Bright chronicled her career in a total of five books: Breakfast at Night (1956), about her training at an Edinburgh hospital; Life in Our Hands about her service in Europe during the war; The Day’s End, which found her in mid-career; A Poor Man’s Riches (1966), about her experiences caring for Palestinian refugees in the early 1960s; and Hospital at Night (1971), a fictionalized account based on her time as chief nurse of a busy metropolitan hospital. After retiring from service, she wrote a biography of her ancestor, Dr. Richard Bright, a pioneering surgeon who first described the ailment of the kidneys that now bears his name. She died in 2012 at the age of 98.
The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959
When Studs Terkel titled his 1984 oral history of the American experience in World War Two The Good War, he meant it ironically. Terkel’s book is full of accounts of G. I.s and civilians who could still, decades afterward, think of themselves as casualties. Thanks, however, to Tom Brokaw’s hagiographic 1998 bestseller The Greatest Generation, however, the honeyed glow that Terkel refused to give his portrait of the war is now once again well-established and part of the current dementia among some Americans for a history that’s all nice, clean, and guilt-free.
If you count yourself among these folks, Mary Lee Settle’s 1966 memoir of her time in the Royal Air Force, All the Brave Promises, is not for you. Indeed, Settle opens the book with a salvo designed to eradicate any inclination a reader might have of looking on that time nostalgically:
We are accused of being nostalgic. We have been. What we have remembered are events. The Second World War was, for most of us, a state, a state of war, not an event. It was a permeation, a deadening, a waiting, hard to recall. What we have told about is the terrifying relief of battle or the sweet, false relief of leave.
These were not the causes of a psychic shock from which a generation of people are only now beginning to emerge. For every ‘historic’ event, there were thousands of unknown, plodding people, caught up in a deadening authority, learning to survive by keeping quiet, by ‘getting by,’ by existing in secret, underground; conscripted, shunted, numbered. It took so many of them, so many of their gray days and their uprooted lives. It taught them evasive ways to survive. These ways, dangerous to the community and to the spirit, have been a part of the peace.
“It taught them evasive ways to survive” is not how Tom Brokaw wanted us to look on the experience of American veterans of World War Two. But it’s the sort of bracingly brutal respect for honesty that makes Mary Lee Settle’s writing seem at times like a slap across the face. Not an insulting slap — a “Wake Up!” slap.
Settle came to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the women’s arm and second-class component of the Royal Air Force by a circuitous route. After marrying an Englishman named Rodney Weathersbee in 1939, she followed him to Canada when he joined the RAF and was sent there for training and delivered their son Christopher while still there as a military wife. The marriage soon fell apart, though, and she headed back to West Virginia, where her parents took over the care of Christopher while Settle headed to Washington, D.C. to get involved in war work.
During that period before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t easy for an American woman to get into the British forces. She started by applying at the British Embassy in Washington, where she was aided by the young Roald Dahl and the playright and World War One veteran flyer Ben Travers. Then it was a matter of getting to England, which she finally did in October 1942, along with a boatfull of Roayl Navy and RAF trainees.
Through Weatherbee and her embassy friends, a posh welcome was arranged and Settle spent a week enjoying the finest comforts wartime London could offer. But then she reported for duty and the fun part came to an end.
Her first day as a WAAF was a foretaste of what much of the next 13 months would be like. With her foreign accent, refined looks, and High Street clothes, Settle was quickly labelled an outsider by her fellow enlistees, most of whom came from poor families in the East End. They stuck together like a chorus, commenting savagely on the faults of their superiors and anyone else who wasn’t “their type.” For Settle, “It was the first glimpse of the stratification, almost Chinese in its complication and formality, which covered everything from a hairdo to a state of health to sugar in tea and by which each Englishman holds himself apart, himself his castle, from his fellows.” Although she did manage to establish a few weak friendships during her time, Settle son grew accustomed to her permanent position in the eyes of the other WAAFs as an undesirable and untrusted alien.
The year or so Settle spent in the WAAFs included some of the grimmest days of the war. This was the long, slow, unthrilling buildup to D-Day and beyond. Settle was assigned to RAF Hullavington, the Empire Central Flying School, where much of the RAF’s basic flight training took place, There, she was assigned as a radio operator, spending hours each day in the darkened control room and trying to communicate with pilots over weak and heavily jammed signals. It was like staring into a solid fog hoping to make out the faintest shapes, and it eventually led to aural hallucinations that nearly drove her mad.
The food was bad, the showers cold, the barracks largely unheated, and the days full of damp, grey, chilly English weather. The WAAFs were at the bottom of the station’s pecking order, lower even than the kitchen staff, some of who were prisoners of war. To make matters worse, any possibility for camraderie was undermined by the fact that WAAFs were assigned to positions individually, rather than as a formation. As Settle puts it,
It showed even in the language — one was ‘attached’ to a station, each new place approached without knowing a soul, so that to be posted off your station was a thing to be feared and in it was a vague sense of punishment. Such isolation among the vast majority of the ground crews bred an unseen poisoned miasma, secret beneath the structure as sex was secret to authority.
Her work and the living conditions proved exhausting, relentless, and utterly thankless. Any sense of contributing to a greater cause was life. On the other hand, as she realized one afternoon off as she cycled through some nearby villages, being treated like a cog in the war machine brought a novel, if odd, sense of freedom:
[For] the first time I sensed an irresponsibility, an ease of letting go. My uniform was issue, my bicycle was issue. I was utterly without worry about where my food was coming from. So long as I did what I was told, kept silence and remained acquiescent, I had freedom from decision, freedom from want, freedom from anxiety for survival. That, too, seemed out of my hands—the deci- sion of an abstract, an order from “above.” For a few minutes the rose hedges swept past me; I felt an almost mystic contentment. Then, even in the sun, cold fright caught me and I pedaled faster, as if I could ride away from the space of that feeling. I had experienced the final negative freedom, that of the slave.
There’s another one of those Settle slaps: “the negative freedom … of the slave.”
After a particularly long and demanding shift, Settle collapsed and was diagnosed as severely underweight and malnourished. She was sent to London to recouperate and quickly realized that her talents and temperament were better suited for work with the U.S. Office of War Information. The OWI arranged for her separation from the WAAF and her induction — as a major, though without uniform — into the U.S. Army.
The framing facts of Settle’s story — her marriage, her son, her escape into the OWI — are missing from All the Brave Promises. It took her much longer to provide these facts, in her unfinished memoir Learning to Fly, which was published shortly after her death in 2005. All the Brave Promises is not, however, a book that depends on external context to succeed. Her aim, as she later wrote, was simply to document how thousands of young English women were used by their country and to counter what she called “the official peacetime bravery … the self-congratulation of it, its terrible mistakes.” “It was such a tiny arrow thrown,” she acknowledged, “But it was all I could do.”
With an aim as keen as Mary Lee Settle’s however, even tiny arrows can be deadly. If you should ever find yourself giving into notions of the romance of war, I recommend All the Brave Promises as an antidote.
All the Brave Promises: Memories of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391, by Mary Lee Settle New YorK: Delacorte Press, 1966 London: Heinemann, 1966
