“Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light colored girl. Must be neat and obliging.”
“Well, Lydia,” said the woman seated at the desk, “what’s happened? Didn’t that job do?”
The young coloured girl stood before her, quietly dressed, straight and tall, her colour light as a Spanish beauty’s.
‘Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I didn’t take that job. I just didn’t take it. That’s all.”
The woman rapped the desk with the end of her pencil.
“You know you can’t pick and choose in times like these,” she slid sharply. She picked up a card from the box-index, and read it out with bitter emphasis: “Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light coloured girl. Must be neat and obliging. Now what,” she said impatiently, “did you find to object to?”
“Nothing,” said the tall girl. “I didn’t do no objecting at all. He wanted a girl to sleep there at night. I likes to go home. That’s all.”
“Well,” snapped the woman at the desk, “if you want work, Lvdia, you’ll have to make some concessions.”
“I makes concessions every day I lives,” said Lydia, “but I do like to sleep the night alone. This doctor, he don’t want to sleep alone. That’s what the neat and obliging means.”
The woman’s face flushed dark with anger.
“You people have no sense of truth!” she said. “Don’t come here talking about an eminent man like that! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, making such an excuse!”
This sketch, from the the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, is one of the most powerful in the entire book. Pregnant with her third child, Boyle found herself with the burden of filling the many gaps in the collection left by contributions that were never submitted and contributions fundamentally out of keeping with the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day. And so, perhaps in desperation as pieces failed to arrive in response to requests, she began reaching out to everyone she knew — friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and in this case, her mother, Katherine.
It makes me long for the book Katherine Boyle never wrote. “I makes concessions every day I lives” is such a stunning statement. Matter-of-fact, resigned to the situation yet never failing to bear witness to its fundamental injustice. It’s a perfect example of the kind of breathtaking writing that jumps out of the pages of this remarkable collection.
365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936
Unemployed Crowd Benches of New York Parks as New Year Begins
Charlie huddled in the doorway, protected somewhat from the tugging wind; but when he saw the old lady approaching with her dog, he squared his shoulders and walked towards her with something of his old carelessness. He whispered: “It’ll be easier, the first time, to ask an old dame. It won’t be so shameful.” The old woman stopped and peered over her nose glasses at Charlie, surveying his wrecked shoes, his dirty reddened hands, his unshaven face. The terrier bitch stepped forward, dancing in the cold, and sniffed his trousers, making a whining sound.
All at once Charlie’s jauntiness vanished. The set speech which he had rehearsed in the doorway went out of his mind. He spoke rapidly in his terror: This was the first time he had ever begged. She must believe that, for God’s sake. He wasn’t a bum. He’d had a good job until just a few months ago. This was the first time, and he hadn’t eaten for almost two days. He was a man with self-respect and she must believe that. It was important. She must believe that, for God’s sake.
The old woman opened her bag. She dropped a dime into his palm.
Charlie sat on a bench in Washington Square, clutching the coin tightly, crushing with his heels clods of soiled and brittle snow. In a little while he would get up and buy something hot for his gnawing belly; but first he must sit here a little longer and adjust himself to shame. He rested his face against the iciness of the iron bench, hoping that nobody could guess his degradation by looking at him. He thought: “I sold out pretty cheap, didn’t I?”
William March only contributed two sketches to the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, but they are among the very best in the book. This one in particular is like a haiku of the Great Depression: brief, deft, perfect. It’s exactly reflective of the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day.
365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936
Editor’s Note: This entry for June 30, 1934, written by the Swedish novelist Gustav Sandgren, offers a timely reminder of the precarious nature of freedom.
Headline: “Wanderers on the Face of the Earth” [Sweden]
The train moved out from the small station. He sat on the bench opposite me, his little dark-clothed body nervously twitching, his long white hands moving like disturbed birds. His eyes blinked behind silver-bowed eyeglasses. And I listened to him, while the landscape glided by as in a dream, silent and contourless.
“I tell you I am afraid,” he said. “You know I am an emigrant, and that I have saved my life by running away from Germany. Still it is not those facts that upset me. I am not afraid of anything happening to my body, it is not death I talk of. It is something other. Something dreadful beyond words. Something that happens not only to me, but to the whole world. You understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Pardon me I — I mean I have seen and felt ten millions of respectable citizens, of kind, labouring folks suddenly turn bandits, bloodhungry animals, craving for men to put to death by kicks and blows. I say to you, I have felt it, seen it, seen my best friend and neighbour, a peaceful clerk with ink-spots on his fingertops turn wild, heard him hammer at my door with an axe to get in and kill me. Yet it is not the facts I shrink from — it is the thing behind it, the evil power, the nothingness of all that we called human thoughts and feelings. We have been cheated, we are cheated, the whole of mankind. We have lived on illusions and now they are withdrawn from under our feet… ”
“But in this country you are safe,” I tried to soothe him.
“Nobody is safe, I am afraid. I say I am afraid. It is nameless ugly things that begin to darken over us, that are to come. I seek to calm myself, but I can’t, I can’t….”
His poor little figure hooked in the corner, his clammy hands fastening to the window strap. The train moved very fast, it was as if we were thrown forward through a mist of green, through a green dead dream.
And I felt his fear.
This piece appears in 365 Days, an anthology of what we would today call flash fictions, inspired by a newspaper headline and story for each day in 1934, that was edited by the American writer Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail, along with their Irish friend Nina Conarain.
365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936 London: Jonathan Cape, 1936
Damocles is drunk. He has imbibed a stock of whisky, a warehouse of gin and a dockyard of champagne. Before slumping over the steering-wheel, he declares that the negro hostess of the joint he is leaving is his true and only mother; the other one, the blood relative, no longer counts at all.
Damocles drives on, now jerking upright, now falling asleep. The car lurches perilously: decidedly, it would be wiser to stop. Damocles abandons his car in the heart of the Bois and sets off on foot. He talks. His voice and his words are suspended in his delirium. He walks. He talks. The trees, the planets, the earth, the sky, all seem simple to him. He fears nothing, neither the bludgeon of the police nor the assassin’s knife.
Damocles returns to the civilized parts of town. His former wrath revives. He would like to knock down a house with his fist. “All — all are heartless. They sleep. They make babies. They do not know the horror of it all.” Further on, before a butcher shop, he emits atrocious yells. In a public park, he sees a drunk asleep on a bench. Damocles thinks himself an angel or in a dream.
At dawn, Damocles rings the bell of the apartment house where he lives with his mother. In a corner of the vestibule, weeping, his mother stands in her nightgown. The concierge, attired in her petticoat, is repeating: “Your son was killed tonight in a motor accident. They have just telephoned.”
Damocles feels himself all over and discovers that he has lost his arms and legs. Now he understands why it seemed to him that night for the first time, that he had come face to face with himself.
— Michel Leiris
365 Days is an anthology of flash fiction published decades before the form had a name. American novelist Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail were in Austria at the start of 1934 — a year, as they wrote in the preface, “that was to be characterized by almost universal unrest, by civil war, revolution, by strikes and unemployment figures reaching monstrous proportions.” They decided to “compile a record in fiction form not only of that year’s nationally or internationally important events but as well of the ordinary individual’s life.”
They collected American, English, French, German, Austrian, and Italian newspapers, along with some from as far away as Australia and Singapore. From these they selected stories they thought representative of the year’s events, movements, and attitudes. With the help of their friend Nina Conarain, an Englishwoman who later published dozens of Mills & Boon romances as Elizabeth Hoy, they wrote or contacted fellow writers and asked they to write 300-word pieces, usually imaginative, based on these stories.
Some ignored these requests. Some just wrote one or two. William Saroyan sent in an entire year’s worth of material. Boyle, Vail, and Conarain knew they would have to fill in any gaps with their own pieces, but by the time submissions stopped flowing in, it was obvious that there were well over 100 days’ worth of material still to be written. Vail contributed some, including some of the most imaginative ones, but he began to lose interest in the project as his interest in his new lover, the heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, began to heat up. In the end, it was Boyle, pregnant with her third child, who wrote over a quarter of the book’s contents, demonstrating exceptional versatility in her choice of subjects and styles.
Halfway through the year, much of the edited material for the book was destroyed when a pro-Nazi group set fire to the offices of an Austrian anti-Nazi newspaper, Tyrolia, and a burning package was tossed into the beer garden of Boyle and Vail’s hotel room and exploded. Less than two weeks later, Boyle gave birth to their daughter Katherine.
When the book was finally published in 1936, reviewers seemed to delight in dismissing the project as a novelty and to note how few of the stories met their critical standards. Now, however, it is a fascinating document featuring an impressive range of contributors. Raymond Queneau’s two days are his first work to be translated into English. James T. Farrell and Henry Miller provided pieces, as did now less well-known writers as Bessie Breuer, Grace Flandrau, Arthur Calder-Marshall, William March, Evelyn Scott, and Malachi Whitaker. The overall tone is empathetic, anti-fascist, activist, and angry, yet it rarely descends into propaganda. Indeed, one wishes that a collection of contemporary writers would take on a similar project for one of our own tumultuous years.
I have been reading my way through 365 Days a day at a time and will be posting other pieces from it through the rest of this year.
365 Years, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936 London: Jonathan Cape, 1936
“Do you mean to say I didn’t give you anything to eat yet?” one character asks another several hours into their wanderings around Paris in Monday Night. At this point, the pair has visited three or four bars and had at least a few drinks in each one of them. And the night is just beginning.
If you’re not one for drinking on an empty stomach, Monday Night may remind you of that time when you made the mistake of going out on the town with someone who considers bar nuts an entree. Bernie Lord, a medical student, arrives in Paris fresh off the train from Le Havre and meets up with a slight acquaintance from Chicago named Wilt Tobin who’s been living in France since before the First World War. His mission is to meet a man named Jean Sylvestre who has become world famous as a forensic toxicologist (though this was before the job had a name). Bernie is in awe of Sylvestre’s technical wizardry and hopes to learn a bit of the master’s craft.
Wilt is the only person Bernie knows in Paris. Literally anyone else would have been a better choice. Wilt is a writer, but somewhere along the way the pleasure of enjoying an aperitif at a sidewalk table outside a charming café has become a compulsion. Writing is now only a means to get money to drink with — that and cadging a glass or five off anyone who will listen to him. Stepping off the train in a crisp new blue serge suit, Bernie is shocked at his first sight of Wilt: “The cracked brown shoes, the grey trousers with no shape left in back or front, the paunch buttoned into the waistcoat, the shirt, the twisted tie, the soft, bristled jowls, the dark small almost fervently set eyes….” Wilt not only has “no sign of youth to recommend him, but no look left in eye or teeth to recall that he ever had been young.”
Still, Wilt feels some obligation to his friend. Luckily for him, though, their first stop, the pharmacy where Sylvestre got his start, is close to the Gare St. Lazare. When they fail to produce any further information about the man than the fact that Monsieur Sylvestre never comes there anymore, Wilt steers Bernie into the nearest bar to discuss next steps. This sets the pattern for much of the plot of Monday Night. The only difference between Bernie and Wilt and Vladimir and Estragon of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is that they’re looking instead of waiting. Oh, and drinking. In fact, each stage of looking tends to be preceded by around a half dozen drinks.
By around ten P.M., Wilt advises Bernie that it’s now either too late or too early to eat:
“The time we should have started in eating, if we were going to eat at all, was right after the first drinks, the first two or three drinks, right after the gin fizzes we had at the brasserie.” The darkness stretched before him as he walked, facsimile of that obliteration unpunctuated by mood or time that life itself and action had become…. “So now we’ll just have to hold off awhile until the red wine is out of the system,” he said. “I don’t want you to get sick the first night we’re out together. I want to take care of you, Bernie.”
Wilt not only seems to run solely on the promise of another drink but as the night wears on, he begins to take over Bernie’s quest as well. Early on, Bernie explodes at Wilt’s complete ignorance of the feats of Monsieur Sylvestre and the murderers condemned through his testimony. “My God, Wilt, don’t you know? Don’t you know about it? I thought everybody — anybody who read the papers, anyway — I thought there wasn’t anybody who–” But Wilt becomes convinced that Sylvestre is hiding a dark secret, that he is motivated less by objective truth than by revenge.
The two men head for Malmaison, on the outskirts of Paris, where Sylvestre now resides in a villa surrounded by large estate. Wilt begins to construct a psychological portrait of the chemist, examining his motivations, wondering at what it must be like to know your words will send a man to the guillotine. When they reach the villa, they learn that Sylvestre is in Lyons on a case, but his servants invite them into the kitchen, where a game of Monopoly is underway. More drinks are had as Bernie finds his will to live fading and Wilt cagily pries out information about Sylvestre.
Wilt and Bernie’s journey takes them out and back into Paris and through Monday night to early Tuesday morning. As with a bad hangover, the world they return to seems both fuzzy and jarring. Bernie no longer knows why he wanted to meet Sylvestre in the first place, and Wilt finds the solution to Sylvestre’s mystery in a newspaper headline spotted as they wait in the Gare St. Lazare for Bernie’s train back to Le Havre.
Monday Night has been described as an unusual detective story. If you accept this, then Boyle’s ending will seem abrupt and ill-prepared. But that’s the wrong way to look at the book. Boyle tells us what Monday Night is really about in its dedication, which comes from one of her unpublished stories called “The Man Without a Nation.” In that story, she writes of the “secret code” of the expats she had come to know in the course of — by that time — fifteen years in Europe:
Those who speak it follow no political leader and take no part in any persecution or conquest; nor have they to do either with a vocabulary of the rich or the poor or any country or race; it being simply one way of communication between the lost and the lost.
Wilt is one of these lost souls, one who has realized that he has stayed too long to be considered a tourist and can never stay long enough to become French. “It didn’t take me very long to find out I was in the wrong country,” he jokes to Bernie. “Only about eighteen years.” Boyle signals this awareness of being a displaced person (before that became an official term at the end of the next world war) in the book’s very first line: “You might have recognized it as a drugstore except for its situation in what might generally be called the wrong country.”
Kay Boyle based the character of Wilt on Harold Stearns, a man she and her second husband, Laurence Vail, came to know in Paris. Legend has it that after reviewing the proofs of a collection of essays by American intellectuals and artists that he edited titled Civilization in the United States, Stearns immediately booked passage to England, convinced that the United States had no civilization. In reality, it’s likely that a favorable exchange rate and the advent of Prohibition played a larger role in his decision.
As it was, he was only able to make it to Paris on the strength of a loan from Sinclair Lewis, who was in awe of Stearn’s potential. It was a loan that Stearns never repaid. Lewis later got something back, however, by referring to Stearns (indirectly, mind) as “an important habitue of the Cafe de Dome in Paris living these many years as a grafter on borrowed money.” Asked to respond by an American reporter, Stearns said he’d like to come back to the U.S. for the privilege of punching Lewis in the face.
A “Peter Pickem” story from the Chicago Tribune, 1923.
For a while after arriving in Paris, Stearns was able to get by working as “Peter Pickem,” the Paris track correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. But then his drinking got so bad that he started to go blind and he lost that job and survived on a combination of betting on the horses and the generosity of his drinking partners. As he later wrote in his memoir, The Street I Know (1935), Stearns learned that few friends will buy you a meal, but plenty will buy you a few rounds at the bar. In his book Americans in Paris (1977), Tony Allan wrote that Stearns’s “shabby, unshaven figure was pointed out to newcomers as a warning of the dangers of the Latin Quarter.”
Hemingway was the first to commemorate Harold Stearns in fiction. In The Sun Only Rise, Jake Barnes encounters a friend named Harvey Stone in Stearns’s favorite café:
I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Sélect. There were a few people inside at the bar, and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.
“Sit down,” said Harvey. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just looking for you.”
“Been out to the races?”
“No. Not since Sunday.”
“What do you hear from the States?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I’m through with them. I’m absolutely through with them.”
He leaned forward and looked me in the eye.
“Do you want to know something, Jake?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t had anything to eat for five days.”
Stearns wrote in his memoir, “I would stay up at the Sélect until dawn crept through the windows, drinking champagne and watching the boys and girls do their vaudeville stunts.”
Stearns himself described the Sélect as “a seething mad-house of drunks, semi-drunks, quarter drunks, and sober maniacs (most of whom were on the wagon only temporarily, of course, because of unkind medical favors of the fickle goddess, Venus).” It was, he wrote with bittersweet reflection, “a useless, silly life — and I have missed it every day since.”
But by 1932 — not Wilt’s 18 years, but a little more than ten — Stearns, like Wilt, knew he had stayed too long. “I was just an uprooted, aimless wanderer on the face of the earth. And a lonely one, too. I didn’t like that; I hated it. And, since there was nothing else to do, I would go into the bar and take another drink and try to forget.” With the arrival of the Depression and exodus of easy American money, however, even drinking to forget was becoming harder and harder. “With no teeth, few friends, no job, and no money,” Stearns wrote, “I naturally decided that all I could do was return to my own country — and to try to start all over. Everything about Paris had suddenly become distasteful to me; I suppose because I felt so alien and alone.”
If you’re a fan of 1930s detective fiction, you will certainly find Monday Night unsatisfactory. Sylvestre’s is not that much of a mystery. It’s really just the excuse for Boyle to send her lost soul, Wilt, and his naive companion Bernie, on their hallucinatory odyssey through the Paris night, an odyssey that will ultimately lead them both, like Stearns, back to America.
Monday Night represented both a structural and stylistic departure for Boyle. Although the plot takes place in the space of less than 24 hours, her night will seem endless to many readers. Though she sketches the people they meet in quick, precise strokes, it is Wilt and Bernie — and really just Wilt — who remains on camera, in focus, throughout the book. And in describing their wandering, Boyle switches back and forth between Wilt’s streetwise newspaperman’s chatter and rich, impressionistic descriptions of the Paris streets, scenes, and shadows. Reviewing the book in The Nation, Louis Kronenberger felt the latter “achieves strong and even beautiful effects, but shows too little restraint and has some of Faulkner’s and Wolfe’s tendency to overwrite.”
Most critics noted admirable qualities in Monday Night but felt it too much of an oddity to take as seriously as her previous novels. Otis Ferguson of The New Republic called Wilt “a sort of lost-generation Don Quixote.” Time’s reviewer found Boyle’s cast “a bunch of puzzling neurotics” and Alfred Kazin dismissed them as “manikins who walk through the book as on hot beds of coal.” Kronenberger, on the other hand, felt that part of the problem for reviewers was that their easy labels were ill-suited for Boyle:
Call her decadent and you will find an imagery that is vital and under almost perfect control. Call her lush and you’ll find prose with the delicacy, discipline, smoothness to the touch and good hard grain of carving in ivory. Call her a necromancer and then see by what homely undeniable things she sets up her rhythms and the overtone of their effect.
Monday Night has always had a small but loyal set of fans. Dylan Thomas called it “the best novel of the year” in a review for the New English Weekly and wrote Boyle a gushing fan letter that was reprinted on the cover of a 1970 reissue of the book. Doris Grumbach and James Laughlin of New Directions Press both named it one of their candidates for rediscovery in their submissions to Bill and Linda Katz’s 1983 guide to neglected books, Writer’s Choice. The editor Virginia Faulkner confided to Boyle that “Monday Night remains for me a landmark” in a letter written 25 years after the book first came out. And in the late 1940s, the actor Franchot Tone attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise money for a film version of the book, saying that its “way of story-telling makes me tingle.”
Boyle herself felt the book represented something of a breakthrough and said that she “liked it the best of my novels.” Perhaps this is, in part, because it is so overwhelmingly a book about men, about their actions and thoughts and desires. Her next few novels — Primer for Combat (1942), Avalanche (1944), and A Frenchman Must Die (1946) — would also take the world men as their focus — in combat, in mountain climbing, in wartime espionage and resistance. But most critics would agree that these attempts to create, if you will, lyrical action stories, are substantially weaker books when compared with Monday Night. Not much happens in Monday Night — if you set aside the drinking and walking — but within its small frame a moving and unsettling portrait of a lost soul can be seen.
Monday Night, by Kay Boyle New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938
“A Check List of Good Books” from Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931
I’ve long wondered about one of the longest modernist novels ever written, Evelyn Scott’s A Calendar of Sin (1931), an epic of the Reconstruction and after that took two volumes to encompass its over 1300 pages. When I stumbled across a copy with the original dust jackets at a reasonable price recently, I grabbed it. But I have yet to read it, so this is not about A Calendar of Sin.
On the back of the book, however, as was often the practice of publishers in those days, there appears “A Check List of Good Books,” which lists thirty titles then available from Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith. Cape & Smith was a brief and unsuccessful joint venture between the veteran British publisher Herbert Jonathan Cape and the American Harrison Smith. Established in 1928, the partnership lasted just three years. Smith left to form his own house and Robert Ballou, the former literary editor of the Chicago Daily News, who’d been the treasurer, took over and the firm reformed as Jonathan Cape and Robert Ballou. This incarnation was even briefer, closing its books in 1933.
The Cape & Smith check list, however, is an interesting mix of classics and the now-forgotten. The books by William Faulkner, Sigmund Freud, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, and Evelyn Waugh have remained in print and are well-established as 20th century classics. Several others (Maurice Hindus’s two books, Louis Fischer’s study of Soviet foreign policy, Charles Yale Harrison’s biography of Clarence Darrow) are too contemporary not to have been superseded by other studies. But let’s take a quick look at a few of the less well-known titles. A number of these have been reissued from time to time — Plagued by the Nightingale, for example, was a Virago Modern Classic. But these are the sort of almost-classics that never quite manage to stay in print without the support a champion or two.
• A World Can End, by Irina Skariatina
A candid, if at times disingenuous, account of the Russian revolution as seen by a member of the aristocracy. In his review for The Spectator, Graham Greene wrote:
“Here is death as we might ourselves experience it, not death in the desert or the jungle, but death in the drawing-room, the bullet that smashes the familiar picture…. The sufferings of her family, of her deaf old father, the General, who could not be stopped from criticizing the Revolution at the top of his voice until at last he was struck down in a street brawl, of the old Princess, her mother, married to an Estonian gardener that she might be allowed a passport to leave Russia, then dying when she crossed the frontier, are described with a freedom from prejudice, even with some sympathy for the Revolution, which makes her story the more terrible. If this is the best that can be said, one wonders at the worst.
Skariatina was able to leave the Soviet Union and come to New York, where she married an American, Victor Blakeslee, an experience she wrote about in a sequel, A World Begins. Shortly afterward, she and Blakeslee visited Russia and she published an account of their trip with the somewhat boasting title of First to Go Back.
Skariatina’s memoir was based on her diary, which gives the book an immediacy — but also a certain amount of undiguised naïveté, as in this entry from early 1917:
On my way home this afternoon, just as I left the hospital, I saw a wretched little dog perishing of cold and hunger. Its bones were sticking out in the most ghastly way and as for its eyes — the anguish in them cannot be described! Right next to where the little thing lay was a grocery store — so I dashed into it, bought an enormous sausage and was just about to feed the beastie, when all of a sudden passers-by, of the kind one sees in the hospital district, began to stop and stare and grumble out loud: “Look at her feeding a dog, when Christians are hungry nowadays. Ugh, those idle rich!” … Nothing like it ever happened to me before. It proves that there is a feeling of hostility among the poor that is ready to crop up at the slightest pretext.
• Juan in America, by Eric Linklater
Juan in America tells the story of Scotsman Juan — the name is meant to evoke Byron’s Don Juan, though it’s a loose connection at best — and his adventures in 1920s America. As the summarized it, Juan encounters “gangsters bootleggers, wenches, bean-wagon proprietors, Carolina negroes and Hollywood deities. He runs rum from Windsor to Detroit, rides a mule for twenty-four hours down a flood-swollen river, invades a beer baron’s Everglade retreat and seduces his daughter, and accompanies these adventures with a running fire of commend and ribald laughter.”
Linklater wrote the book after spending two years in America, so it’s filled with dry British satire of American customs and manners. The book is often cited as an example of a modern picaresque novel, and it stands (or falls) on the strength of its episodes rather than its narrative arc. Juan in America has been a perennial favorite of reissuers, coming out several times as a Penguin Modern Classic and within the last twenty years as a Capuchin Classic. At the moment, it’s available as an eBook from Bloomsbury in the U.S., but not in England.
Illustration from Mad Man’s Drum by Lynd Ward.
• Mad Man’s Drum and Gods’ Man, by Lynd Ward
Two wordless novels, in which the story is told through a series of full-page woodcuts. The form was pioneered by the Belgian artist Frans Masereel, and these, Ward’s first two attempts, are far more interesting as art than literature. Both suffer from excessive abstraction, with every character treated as symbol rather than individual. Susan Sontag considered God’s Man so awkward that she listed in her Camp canon in her milestone essay, “Notes on Camp.”
By far Ward’s best graphic novel was his last, Vertigo (1937). In his introduction to the two-volume Library of America edition collecting all seven of Ward’s novels, Art Spiegelman writes of it,
“Genuinely novelistic in scope, it is a difficult work that grapples with perilously difficult times. As emblematic as Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, as ambitiously experimental as Dos Passos’s U. S. A/ trilogy, as apocalyptic as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, it is a key work of Depression-era literature, and useful in understanding what is being down to us right now.”
If you are interested in sampling Ward’s novels but reluctant to go for the magnum opus, budget versions of God’s Man, Mad Man’s Drum, and Vertigo are available from Dover Books.
• The Wave, by Evelyn Scott
When The Wave was published in 1929, Carl Van Doren called it “the greatest novel on the American Civil War.” At the time, with five novels to her credit, Scott was considered one of the premier American modernists. In fact, publishers Cape & Smith touted a novel by another of their Southern-born writers by saying, “The Sound and the Fury should put William Faulkner in the company of Evelyn Scott.”
In his 1950 study The American Historical Novel, Ernest Leisy wrote that The Wave “marked a new advance in the technique of historical fiction, and in an article from 1964, Robert Welker asserted that the book should be seen as “the standard measure against which novels dealing with the war were tested, and perhaps more than any one book, it is responsible for opening up the materials of the Civil War to fiction. It is unique in American fiction.”
Peggy Bach, whose advocacy of the novel, along with that of her frequent collaborator David Madden, wrote of The Wave in a 1985 article in Southern Literary Journal,
Scott’s style is elaborate; her sentence structure is complex and often convoluted. Her characters, even when they are the great men about whom much Civil War fiction is written, exhibit particular human behavior in a particular situation. Upon the firm foundation of her intellect, her interests in various groups of people — Negroes, Jews, poor whites, politicians, military leaders — her strong compassion for the plight of women in the South, and her knowledge of history, Scott formed a novel unusual in content, character, tone, and structure.
Bach and Madden were responsible for the Louisiana State University Press reissuing the book in 1996 as part of the “Voices of the South” series. Since then, however, the book has, like much of Evelyn Scott’s work, fallen out of print again.
• Gallows’ Orchard, by Claire Spencer
Claire Spencer, the author of Gallows’ Orchard was, conveniently, Harrison Smith’s wife. Still, that doesn’t account entirely for the hyperbolic reception her debut novel received. As Harvard Crimson’s reviewer gushed, it “has everything and is everything necessary to make it an extraordinary good novel.” Amy Loveman, the Saturday Review’scritic, tried to chalk it up to that old stereotype, the natural born writer:
Every now and again there appears an author who is a novelist not by power of will, but as naturally as the bird is master of flight. Miss Spencer is of that happy company who write with so direct a vision as to seem to be improvising as they proceed. Her book has that appearance f unpremeditation which is the triumph of art. It has an urgency and immediacy of emotion that are the very accent of life, a sequence of happening as seemingly inevitable as the inescapable encounters of actual existence. Her narrative is electric with feel-ings -— quick with a passionate responsiveness to the beauty of nature, the pathos of dumb beasts, the calamities and complexities of the human heart.
Gallows’ Orchard tells the story of a Scottish girl who becomes pregnant by one man and marries another to save her name. When the truth finally comes out, her village takes its revenge in a manner, well, befitting Thomas Hardy … or Shirley Jackson.
Spencer later divorced Smith and married Mabel Dodge Luhan’s son John Evans. The poet Robinson Jeffers, with whom they stayed after Spencer obtained her divorce in Reno, wrote a friend, “You never saw a pair of such handsome creatures — in a strange unusual way & so different.” they lived in Luhan’s compound in Taos until they sold it in the late 1960s and moved to Maine. Claire Spencer Evans died in 1987 at the age of 91.
Gallows’ Orchard is available on HathiTrust (to those who have access).
• Brother and Sister, by Leonhard Frank
Leonhard Frank gained international acclaim for his first novel Carl and Anna, and American reviewers seemed inclined on the strength of that to give this account of a brother and sister who accidentally fall in love and marry (the old trick of long separation and a broken family). The New York Times thought that “so great is Frank’s art in portraying the love that is theirs [Constantine and Lydia, the two sibling/spouses], that one understand and sympathizes. One can no more censure them for what has happened than one can upbraid a mountain torrent for going out of its course and inundating ground that had hitherto slumbered in peaceful repose.”
But British critics were less enthusiastic. The historian E. H. Carr wrote in The Spectator, “If his intention was to write a modern realistic novel on these themes, he has stopped half-way in the attempt. He ostentatiously flouts realism by a Shakespearean use of the long arm of coincidence; and he adopts, both for narrative and for dialogue, a purely poetical style which sometimes achieves beauty and occasionally, at any rate in translation, descends from the sublime to the ridiculous…. The result is a powerful and striking book which will be widely read and discussed; but Herr Frank has not solved, has not even really faced, the problems which he raises.
• Bystander and The Magnet, by Maxim Gorki [Gorky]
I must confess that these two titles were unfamiliar to me. But they’re also just the tip of the iceberg, or, more accurately, the first half of The Life of Klim Samgin, a tetralogy that Wikipedia describes as “Gorky’s most ambitious work, intended to depict ‘all the classes, all the trends, all the tendencies, all the hell-like commotion of the last century, and all the storms of the 20th century.'” Bystander and The Magnet were followed, in English translations, by Other Fires in 1933 and Specter in 1938. The first two volumes in English were published by Cape & Smith; the second two by Appleton-Century. None of them has ever been reissued in English.
Among English-language readers, Maxim Gorki’s reputation has fallen dramatically since these books were published. Once considered the moral pillar of Russian literature after Tolstoy, Gorki had a problematic relationship with Lenin and even more so with Stalin, and his collaboration in the white-washing of the disastrous Belomor Canal, a pointless project to which thousands of Gulag prisoners were sacrificed has tended to outweigh his literary accomplishments since his death.
This is a work of massive scale. The four books add up to over 2,700 pages. If you really wanted to read them, you’d have to be prepared to shell out over $500. While there are plenty of copies of Bystander available for under $20, there is just one copy of Other Fires currently listed for sale, and it goes for over $400.
Whether it would be worth the effort in terms of reading satisfaction is another question. There was no difference of opinion among reviewers on one point: these are wordy novels. Gerald Gould, who reviewed Bystander for the Observer, was not a fan:
At first sight, one might merely wonder why this enormous book is not more enormous. Since the conversations seem endless, why not make them literally endless, especially as they all agree in finding nothing to agree about? But an artist of Gorki’s stature is entitled to his method, even when it involves tedium: and his book must be read for the impression of muddle it conveys. This, after all, is but the first volume of a trilogy: between the dissolution of this, and the Revolution that is coming, there may be an intention of violent contrast. Certainly the theory, so far, appears to be: “Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.” The subject is the Russian Intelligentsia as it lived and talked — O how it talked! — between the assassination of Alexander II and the coronation of Nicholas II. The intelligentsia is unintelligent. Vagueness, vanity, morbidity, self-consciousness, lack of Ideals, a soft snow-drift of purposeless arguments and feckless delays, a sniffing at revolution — such is the picture: the few people who do anything quickly pass out of it: the hero goes on wondering about himself.
E. H. Carr put it more succinctly in reviewing The Magnet for the Spectator: “Gorki wields an amazingly fluent pen, but ‘the art to blot’ is one which he forgot at an early age.”
On the other hand, those who loved 19th Century Russian novels found much to love in this one. In the Saturday Review, Alexander Kaun wrote that Bystander was not a historical novel but an immediate novel:
…we watch the bewildering Russian panorama, not in its cosy remoteness, but as a disconcerting immediacy. We miss the comfort of a historical novel, in which everything has been made clear and definite by the obliging author. Rather do we share the discomfort of contemporary Russians who lived in the chaos of an unduly protracted period of storm and stress. We speed headlong from the spectacular ‘Seventies, reverberating with terroristic explosions and culminating in the assassination of Alexander II, through the arid ‘Eighties, drabbish with pseudo-Tolstoyan passivitv and Chekhovian whimpering, and into the mad ‘Nineties, when a hothouse industrialization was foisted upon a rustic, famished country in which erstwhile peasants, stolid and pious, turned overight into militant proletarians, when the intelligentsia tried to digest a chop-suey of Marx-Nietzsche-Ibsen-Wilde-Verlaine-PIekhanov-Lenin-Mikhailovsky-Chernov.
Kaun was willing to excuse much in consideration of the energy in Gorki’s narrative: “A tremendous canvas of Russian life unfolds before our eyes, dizzying in its colorfulness and multiplicitv of action and movement…. Perhaps he uses his faculty a bit extravagantly; the abundance of faces and objects may tax our receptivity. But then, we recall the dimensions of the canvas, its Homeric proportions.”
One wonders whether anyone will want to take on a new English translation (no one had good things to say about the first one). Is the work worth it? Or is The Life of Klim Samgin as justly forgotten now as the thick historical novels of Gorki’s contemporary Dmitry Merezhkovsky (who?).
• Plagued by the Nightingale, by Kay Boyle
This was Boyle’s first novel, written in part in anguish at her treatment by the Breton parents of her first husband, Richard Brault. Though mostly written between 1923 and 1927, it was not published until 1931, at which point she confessed to a friend, “I wrote [it] so many years ago that I feel it has nothing to do with me now.” In her review of the book, along with Wedding Day, Boyle’s first collection of stories, Katherine Anne Porter wrote,
The whole manner of the telling is superb: there are long passages of prose which crackle and snap with electric energy, episodes in which inner drama and outward events occur against scenes bright with the vividness of things seen by the immediate eye: the bathing party on the beach, the fire in the village, the delicious all-day excursion to Castle Island, the scene in the market when Bridget and Nicholas quarrel, the death of Charlotte, the funeral. Nothing is misplaced or exaggerated, and the masterful use of symbol and allegory clarify and motivate the mam great theme beneath the apparent one: the losing battle of youth and strength against the resistless army of age and death. This concept is implicit in the story itself, and it runs like music between the lines. The book is a magnificent performance; and as the short stories left the impression of reservoirs of power hardly tapped, so this novel, complete as it is, seems only a beginning.
After being out of print for decades, it was reissued in 1966 to launch the Crosscurrents/Modern Fiction series of neglected books from the Southern Illinois Press. In his introduction to that edition, Harry T. Moore wrote,
The novel that emerged is a variant on the Henry James theme of the clash between Americans and Europeans— and it may be asked, Who since James has handled this theme more skilfully? Indeed it can safely be said that Kay Boyle in her first novel portrayed a French provincial family far more convincingly than any other American writer, in her story of the American girl Bridget who has married a Breton and at- tempts to live with his fiercely clannisH family that dominates a village.
In 1948, the American writer Kay Boyle left France, where she had spent most of the previous 25 years to live in Germany. Germany was then an occupied country, split between the Soviets, French, British, and Americans into four zones of military administration. Whether she was making amends for sitting out France’s own time of occupation in the safety of America, or spurred by the call of The New Yorker editor Harold Ross for “fiction from Germany,” or just interested in a unique place in time, Boyle was to find in the experience the inspiration to write the dozen stories and articles collected in The Smoking Mountain.
Boyle took her title from a passage by the German novelist and anti-Nazi journalist, Theodor Plievier: “…the people ceased to exist as a people and became nothing but fuel for the monstrous, smoking mountain, the individual became nothing but wood, peat, fuel oil, and finally a black flake spewed up out of the flames.” The Germany she witnessed was barely beginning to recover. Most city centers were still fields of rubble. Gaunt men, women, and children still tramped along the roads, either fleeing from the Soviet zone or trying to return to homes and families they left during the war. As William Shirer wrote in his foreword to the 1963 edition of The Smoking Mountain, the Germany of 1948 “is not a pretty place for human beings, either the conquered or the conquerors. The cities are largely a mass of ruins, the rubble piled high wherever you look. The Germans, who have lost another great war they expected to win, are understandably still in a daze.”
Frankfurt, 1947
Many of the men, former soldiers often returning from POW camps outside Germany seemed more like ghosts than living beings. One of Boyle’s Americans describes an itinerant ex-POW digging up potatoes for a few pfennig as “a figure so eloquent in its suffering, so dramatically conceived, that it might have been a portrait done in sombre oils, the dark, despairing eyes, not of a living man but of an El Greco head, following him now from where the canvas was placed upon a museum’s shadowy wall.” Another finds it difficult to enjoy the folk dances being performed for a party of American occupation VIPs when he notices how close they are to starvation:
It seemed to him that the threads of their necks must snap in two, unable to bear the weight of the fleshless skulls they carried, and that their bones would pierce the carnival lace and tinsel of their disguise, and expose them for the skeletons they were. He could hear the girl’s hand striking the tambourine with which she danced, and he could not bring himself to turn his head and see again the bony stalks of her white arms lifted, like the arms of those who have already perished reaching from the grave. And the young man, in his matador’s suit and his cracked, black, patent-leather pumps, danced his desperate, intricate steps before her, his legs as brittle and thin as sticks of kindling in his cotton stockings, the brass coins jingling with avarice on his tricorner hat. And no one else looked at them, it seemed to Rod Murray; no one else dared watch them as they danced away across the parquet floor.
Frankfurt American Post Exchange, mid-1950s
In glaring contrast is the wealth and health of the Americans and their Post Exchanges, clubs, cocktail parties, and commissaries:
But once you stepped from the German city street, and into the Commissary, here, for better or worse, was the look of home. Metal push-wagons waited in a double row in the overheated entranceway, as they waited in the chain stores of any Stateside city you might name. Mrs. Furley showed her identification to the German girl seated at the desk, and picked up a meat number, and then she moved on with the others, as she had day after day of the year that had just elapsed—moved on with the young women in their saddleback shoes and bobby socks, pushing her wagon as they pushed theirs before them, moved into the thick of it with the matrons, the teen-age girls, the displaced grandmothers, some of them newly come from the States, who clung to the handles of their vehicles as if to the last remaining vestiges of a civilization they had always known….
On the shelves which lined and bisected the vast low hall were stacked the familiar cans and bottles—the names of Campbell, and Heinz, and Van Camp, and Fould, and Kellogg, to reassure the exiled, and beans and pancakes illustrated in color so that the fears of the lost and the bewildered might be allayed.
For some Americans, however, life on post in Germany was better than life back home. In “Home,” a black G.I. befriends a skinny Germany boy he spots shivering in the rain, takes him into the Post Exchange, and buys him a new set of clothes, including a warm coat and sturdy shoes. When the German clerk checking him out chastises the G.I. for spoiling the boy, he replies, “Well, at home … at home, ma’am, I never had much occasion to do for other people, so I was glad to have had this opportunity offered me,”
The best piece, however, is the introduction—at over seventy pages by far the longest in the book. In large part, it reprints Boyle’s account for The New Yorker of the trial of Heinrich Baab, a thuggish low-ranking member of the S.S. known as “The Terror of the Frankfurt Jews.” Unlike the Nuremberg Trials and other tribunals conducted by the Occupation forces, Baab’s trial took place in a German court, with German judge, jury, prosecutor, and defense attorney. And unlike most of the victims of the high-ranking Nazis tried in Nuremberg, many of Baab’s victims sat in court and watched their former persecutor as he sat in the dock. “If they were not actually the murdered,” Boyle writes, “they were those whose annihilation had been attempted, or they were of the flesh and blood of those who had died.”
As Boyle describes him, Baab seems more intent on snacking than on the proceedings:
He had a pallid, bloated face, this forty-one year-old Frankfurt citizen, and he wore a khaki shirt, the collar of which seemed tight around his fleshy neck. His broad rayon tie, which had apparently been striped in yellow and brown in its time, was now faded, and his heavy head, with the front half of the skull naked of hair, hung sideways. For, despite the fact that he was on trial for the murder of fifty-six other Frankfurt citizens, he was concerned with some kind of tidbit, some kind of nut, which his fingers kept shelling out of sight below the panels of the dock. With his head inclined at this angle, the polished area of his broad, flat skull was mercilessly exposed, and his blunt-fingered heavy hand could be seen only at those moments when he contrived to slip a nut into his mouth. As he prepared the next morsel of food for consumption, his sagging jowls went surreptitiously into motion, and his glance moved carefully around the courtroom as he chewed.
In Baab’s trial, Boyle saw “the pattern for a revolution which has not taken place, the outline for action which might spring not from an outraged national honor, but from the outrage of a deeper, wider honor.” At the time when The Smoking Mountain was first published by McGraw-Hill in 1951, her assessment was that Germany was still holding back from this revolution, not yet ready to “be brought to accept a national responsibility?” By the time the book was republished by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963, Shirer considered that Boyle’s Germany “is a Germany which no longer exists. The rubble has long since been cleared, the cities and factories rebuilt, the Germans become prosperous and independent and confident…” In reality, though, the wounds of war do not heal just from having the rubble cleared and shiny new buildings erected in its place. One thing I’ve come to appreciate from living in Europe for many years is that the experience of war, defeat, and occupation makes it much harder to look at the world in black and white terms like “good” and “bad”: survival usually involves more subtle nuances of grey. For anyone who’s forgotten that, Kay Boyle’s The Smoking Mountain offers an effective reminder.
The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Germany During the Occupation, by Kay Boyle New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963
