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novels

Eight Doorstoppers for #1937Club

Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1937Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration started some years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 15-19 April, read a book published in 1937 and write something about it.

I posted a list of ten short novels from 1937 on the Wafer-Thin Books site, but some of the most interesting books from the year are doorstoppers weighing in at 300 pages and up (and The Old Bunch crushing the scales at over 950 pages). I doubt anyone will have time to squeeze one of these in during the week, but they’re worth keeping in mind if you’re looking to sink your teeth into a big fat slice of 1930s prose fiction.

• Low Company by Daniel Fuchs

Low Company is the third novel in Fuchs’ trilogy set in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, an area where the first generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe are watching the second assimilate the ways and morals of the new country. In this case, however, the scene shifts slightly, to what Fuchs calls Neptune Beach (used as the title of the British edition) but is recognizable as Coney Island. As Jonathan Lethem wrote in his introduction to the 2006 David R. Godine reissue of the trilogy, “Fuchs’ Williamsburg is full of Communists and bookies, wanna-be Edisons hoping to make a fortune, young lovers trysting in McCarren Park on hot nights, Talmudic scholars, jewelers, and crooks — he wrote a world, now a lost world.” The story takes place over two days and centers on a soda parlor frequented by numerous characters high and low, including Shubunka, the operator of a string of cheap brothels, Moe Karty, a bookie running an off-track betting shop in the back, and Spitzbergen, a tenement landlord. There’s racketeering, robbery, murder, and enough desperation to fill two decent films noir. So it’s not surprising that Hollywood bought the film rights to the book and lured Fuchs out west to work as a screenwriter (among his credits is the Burt Lancaster-Yvonne de Carlo scorcher Criss Cross, one of the very best noirs, IMHO).

• The Chute by Albert Halper

The chute in Halper’s novel is the funnel through which tens of thousands of packages drop every day in the Chicago mail order house in which the story is set. It’s surprising that no one has reissued this novel recently, or at least commented on how accurately it presages Amazon’s massive warehouses and its brutal attempts to turn its workers into machinery. The Chute may have been written seventy years before one-click shopping, but Halper’s descriptions will seem sickeningly familiar to anyone who’s read an account of an Amazon warehouse:

The door had brought him upon the proscenium of a vast disorder, a jungle of belts. High and low belts stretched and criss-crossed, carrying merchandise in streams; and rollers, moving the belts swiftly, made a sound like angry surf. Into this world he went forward, threading his way. Suddenly he caught sight of the chute terminal and stood rooted, seeing a tremendous black mouth! Towering eighteen feet above the floor level, the opening was immense, the biggest mouth on the earth! Merchandise was pouring from it like lava, rushing into troughs. Mounted high on a wooden platform, and working desperately, a crew of ten separators were diverting the flowing mass with long wooden prongs. They stood there, long-armed, rangy young fellows, prodding the merchandise on. The troughs radiated cunningly, going to all corners of the vast floor. The packages, falling of their own weight from the chute-mouth, zoomed along the inclines at breakneck speed. It was uncanny seeing so many bundles, of their own volition careening with such dispatch. From the mouth, the merchandise, rushing out, zoomed forth with a roar. A landslide was falling, a landslide of goods.

Decades before workplace safety became regulated, the employees of the Golden Rule Company take terrible risks to keep up the expected pace of collection, packing, and shipping (that great black chute will be fed), knowing that the root of the problem is the company’s attempts to cut corners by reducing staff. One worker jokes to a visiting efficiency expert, “I could work twice as fast with four hands!” “I can’t say I like the spirit of your personnel this morning,” the expert remarks to the floor manager. The Chute could probably stand a bit of editing (558 pages), but it’s a Dreiserian feast of characters and commerce, both mostly seen at their worst.

• Pie in the Sky by Arthur Calder-Marshall

This is Calder-Marshall’s magnum opus, nearly 500 pages long, a mosaic cutting across 1930s England from high to low. His title comes from the I.W.W. song that mocks the attitudes of industrialists like the factory owner in this novel: “Work and play/Live on hay/You’ll get pie in the sky when you die!” Calder-Marshall captures England beginning to feel the force of organized labor, beginning to overturn the status quo of the Industrial Age:

In the old days, the atmosphere in the mill and the office had been at least superficially pleasant. Antagonisms were turned outwards, against other mills, producing, so the Yorke people maintained, inferior good at sometimes higher prices. But now the enemy was within: not the competitor or rival business, but the employer, the man at the top. Even Joynson, whose technical training had led him to identify his interests with Carder’s began to veer over to his subordinates. Like most educated subordinates, he became discontented as soon as he lost the illusion of not being a subordinate.

Calder-Marshall was no Orwell, however. Though he captures the mood and tone of everyone from the factory owner perplexed by his now-combative workers to the workers themselves, to idealistic Communists and camp followers merely in it for the thrill of rebellion, to the workers falling further and further behind as their wages fail to keep up with the cost of living, he has empathy for all his characters and none of the discontent of the I.W.W. song he quotes. Pie in the Sky is a rich but perhaps not fully satisfying meal.

• The Wild Goose Chase by Rex Warner

In his introduction to the 1990 Merlin Radical Fictions edition of The Wild Goose Chase, Andrew Cramp includes among Rex Warner’s influences in the book “Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Eisenstein, and Fritz Lang.” There is something for everyone in the nearly-700 pages of this book. Warner later translated numerous works of classical Greek and Latin and retold classical myths in modern English, and all of his novels share a certain timeless character. The book’s title, however, is literal: in the opening chapters, three brothers, Rudolph, David, and George set out on a hunt for a wild goose. Except it’s also a metaphor. As the book goes on, each leaves their home town on a search for something like the meaning or purpose of life. David’s is a spiritual quest; George’s is both political and sexual; and Rudolph…well, Rudolph is what we’d call an upperclass twit, the sort of airhead who sets out on his quest with a near-empty tank of gas. Warner dabbled in Communism, partly influenced by his friend, the poet C. Day Lewis, but his own vision was of a world beyond politics. When George rises up to speak to a crowd of demonstrators near the end of the book, his target is not something concrete like industrialists or totalitarianism but a hodgepodge of the major and minor:

What our old leaders most respected we chiefly despise a frantic assertion of an ego, do-nothings, the over-cleanly, deliberate love making, literary critics, moral philosophers, ballroom dancing, pictures of sunsets, money, the police; and to what they used to despise we attach great value — to comradeship, and to profane love, to hard work, honesty, the sight of the sun, reverence for those who have helped us, animals, flesh and blood.

I confess I have never managed to finish The Wild Goose Chase, not managing to find quite enough of the first three influences cited by Andrew Cramp.

• Spanish Prelude by Jenny Ballou

Mostly forgotten in the wake of the Spanish Civil War is the revolution of October 1934, which shifted the still-new Spanish republic sharply to the left following a series of violent strikes and fostered the reactionary movements that culminated in Franco’s revolt and the civil war three years later. Spanish Prelude is a large canvas on which the lead-up to the October 1934 revolution are portrayed. It won a Houghton-Mifflin Fellowship for Ballou, and although the book is not strictly autobiographical, it’s fiction based heavily on personal experience, the years Ballou spent in Spain in the first half of the 1930s. The timing of its publication, however, was unfortunate: by the time the book came out, Spain was at war and no one much cared to read about what happened beforehand. Especially when many of her characters were well-intentioned by ineffectual intellectuals neither willing to confront the status quo nor willing to side with it. If anything, Spanish Prelude may remind some of Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War trilogy with its cast of eccentrics very much swept up by the broom of history:

Julia’s husband was one of those critics who in a long journey in art had lost all their critical senses. The discoverer of the already discovered, his criticisms were learned, ecstatic, and mediocre. The only time I was able with any sincerity to congratulate him on the appearance of an article, Julia confessed to me she had given him the main idea. For she had none of that coarse loyalty that makes women pretend publicly to a slavish admiration of their husbands in order to further them in their careers. She aired all his faults, lovingly, and said she knew him as well as though she had given him birth. In her frank criticism, she admitted that it was she herself who was the most keen psychologist of our times and that her own intuition for art was infallible.

The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

• The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

This is the saga of the first and second generation of Jews in Chicago. Levin follows a group of twenty high school friends and classmates from their graduation in 1920 through the closing of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934. Two become doctors, one a lawyer. Others go into politics or journalism. Some of the women marry, happily or not, one ends up as a prostitute, another as a slum landlady. One becomes a union organizer, another a strike buster.

There was a model of an atom. Stemming out on wires from the dense nucleus were little corks representing electrons. And in life, all were in motion. Exactly like the planets — in the solar systems, Alvin reflected; the electrons moved in their excited orbits, turned and whirled on themselves. There was only one simple pattern, repeated in various dimensions, — in various thematic treatments, in the shapes and movements — of life. And if the electrons in a body-atom moved on the same general scheme as planets in a sky-system, why couldn’t you say that the human being, on his social plane, moved in the same kind of pattern? Why couldn’t you view society as a physical pattern, and people as these excited electrons, circling around their nuclei? And each bunch of electrons, forming a social atom, joined in motion with similar atoms, forming a class of society; and the classes of society, whirled into a planetary unit, were humanity, and where was humanity going?

Alvah Bessie, then a Communist and later a member of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, gave it a rave review in New Masses, calling it “long an infinitely satisfying. Another reviewer said it was “required reading for any understanding of Jewish life in America.” James T. Farrell, himself no slouch at writing large and complex Chicago novels, wrote that The Old Bunch was “one of the most serious and ambitious novels yet produced by the current generation of American novelists.” In a survey of novels of Jewish American life, Harold Strauss called it, “a landmark in the development of the realistic novel.” Several questionable paperback reissues (from presses with such inspiring names as Rancho Lazarus and Waking Lion) have been published in recent years, but you’re better off looking for a cheap version of the 1937 hardback or the hardback reissue put out in 1959 to coincide with Levin’s best-selling novel based on the Leopold & Loeb murder, Compulsion. The Old Bunch will keep you going for the better part of a month and it’ll be worth it.

• Victoria Four-Thirty by Cecil Roberts

The four-thirty train from Victoria on which Cecil Roberts’ passenger depart is headed for Austria and then on, in separate collections of cars to Rome, Athens, Budapest, and Istanbul, and his novel would have been a perfect companion for this trip. It’s a classic Ship of Fools or Grand Hotel formula: take a diverse set of characters, each with agendas hidden or overt, pack them into a (relatively) small space for a while, and watch what happens. And this is certainly a diverse set: a great Austrian conductor; a great lady from Belgravia; a war hero still suffering from combat stress; a conniving waiter; a pregnant stowaway; a mysterious Turkish millionaire; even the King of Slavonia (1937 was too late for Ruritania):

When the express was divided at Buda-Pest [bonus points for any novel that spell it Buda-Pest], one part going east towards Brasso for Bucharest, the other south for Belgrade and Nish, branching thence for Salonica and Athens, or Sofia and Constantinople, little Prince Sixpenny was fast asleep, for it was midnight. He had gone to bed almost immediately after dinner, served in their private compartment, and eaten in the presence of M’sieur Stanovich and Colonel Tetrovich. The meal finished, Miss Wiison had appeared and put him to bed. He was train-weary and had scarcely eaten all day. He had got the truth at last from M’sieur Stanovich. His father had been killed by a bomb thrown under his horse as he had ridden out from the Palace to attend some Army manceuvres. He had been killed instantly. So he was now the King of Slavonia.

There is nothing the least bit serious about Victoria Four-Thirty — nor should there be. Seriousness is quite out of place here. Arthur Hailey wrote this book thirty years later, only he called it Airport. There is a proper place in the world for novels that are chock full of characters, enormously entertaining, and will never change the world or your mind. This is one of them.

• Imperial City by Elmer Rice

… And here’s another, perhaps my favorite guilty pleasure read of all. Back in 2014, I wrote this about Imperial City:

It’s got something for nearly everyone: a murder in a crowded night-club; a race riot; a raid on a high-class whore house; adultery (both hetero- and homosexual); a solo flight across the Atlantic that ends tragically; a protest by undergraduates at Columbia; an unsuccessful hold-up and high-speed getaway; a black-out that cripples Manhattan just as a sickly child is undergoing an emergency surgery. Something’s happening on nearly every page, and with close to 600 pages, that’s a lot of action.

A good New York City novel ought to be bursting at the seams with energy, and that’s definitely the case with Imperial City. Here is just one paragraph out of thousands, as a foursome of wealthy socialites goes slumming on the boardwalk at Coney Island:

They strolled along in the laughing, voluble crowd. Everyone’s jaws were moving; those who were not munching ice cream cones and hot dogs or licking lollypops were industriously chewing gum. The air was thick with the smells of brine, pickles, sauerkraut, spiced sausage-meat, sizzling lard and human exhalations. People shoved and trod on each other’s toes to reach the booths where stentorian vendors extolled the merits of popcorn and pink spun sugar and Eskimo pies. Spectators stood five deep behind the players of skee-ball, Japanese ping-pong and coney races. There were long queues waiting to buy tickets for the Old Mill, the Love Ride, the jolting little electric auto-racers, the barrel in which a mortorcyclist risked death, the créche where prematurely born babies were displayed in incubators. In the swimming pools of the large bathing establishments the divers shouted and splashed. Elinor hated it all.

Imperial City is too long to squeeze in during the #1937Club, but I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a big, fat novel that lets you escape to 1930s Manhattan for a couple of weeks. It’s no worse than Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel and a lot more grown-up fun.

Margaret Boylen and her Odd Outcasts

Margaret Boylen
Margaret Boylen, from the dust jacket of The Marble Orchard.

Margaret Boylen was a writer ahead of her time. Her three novels were published in the age of Eisenhower and Father Knows Best, when men like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs could get away with writing about outsiders and fringe lifestyles but women had to conform to stricter stereotypes. Though a few critics appreciated what she tried to do, most found her choice of characters and plots too weird for literary fiction yet not weird enough to fit with a genre label like horror or science fiction.

The opening lines of Mary McGrory’s review of Crow Field, Boylen’s first novel, in the New York Times captures what might attract some readers and repel others: “Anyone who things that a Dali canvas should be wired for sound or that the Ancient Mariner would be the perfect dinner guest should be entirely charmed with Crow Field. Readers whose simpler tastes run to a desire to know what an author is talking about will probably leave off after a few pages, pleading seasickness.” She described Boylen’s prose as “a heaving sea of words” and “an epic verbal bender.” Martha Schlegel of the Philadelphia Inquirer thought that Boylen’s conception outstretched her talent: “This novel combines a mystery story with a stream of consciousness technique to present a symbolic struggle between good and evil, the whole meanwhile being used as a vehicle for comment on the state of humanity. The result … collapses under its own weight.”

Crow Field is set in a New England country town in the middle of summer stock season and takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. Ella Kinney comes to design sets for the resident theater company but is actually intent on figuring out the reason that the theater’s previous designer, Clem, disappeared. The actors and director think he just ran off out of artistic pique. Ella, aided by premonitory dreams, is certain he was murdered.

In none of her books does Margaret Boylen follow a straight line in her narrative or sentences, but Crow Field is by far her most circuitous work. If you’re looking for a story, you’ll probably not make it past the first chapter, which is a bit of a rapturous description of the town of Crow Field and its surroundings, sort of Thomas Wolfe channeled through Thomas de Quincey after a particularly good snack of opium.

But just as some travelers prefer wandering off the beaten path, some readers will relish Boylen’s meanderings. Here, for example, on her way back to her boarding house, Ella sees some children playing:

High on a heap of ashes, flapping her arms and crowing like a rooster, stood the little girl, the King of the Hill, empress and protector of all the children. She was their ideal; hers were the treasures of romance, imagination and daring. Aristocratic, greedy and generous, she bestowed favors of withheld them as she chose, for she knew everything in the world that could be done and could tell about it afterwards, saying that which was not, unchallenged, for in her mouth lies turned into fables. She stood on the ash pile crowing, and her followers brought her empty bottles, queerly shaped pieces of broken china, and the first violets of spring. She was a tidal wave that gathered to itself the whole ocean of childhood and strode inland like a mother, full-skirted and towering, to cast her watery brood on a friendly and unpeopled shore. There was nothing to hold or to bind her, it was the time of bliss and grace, she took the world by storm.

Though Doubleday tried to entice readers by promising “the excitement of literary discovery,” Crow Field was forgotten within weeks of publication. It took nine years for Boylen to return to print, this time with a new publisher (Random House), but yet another odd young woman as her heroine.

In The Marble Orchard, Lovey Claypoole, who was blinded by an explosion in her father’s workshop as he was tinkering with one of his many impractical inventions, regains the ability to see just before her grandmother’s burial in the cemetery — the marble orchard — atop the hill overlooking her Iowa town. There are echoes of Huckleberry Finn in the hideout Lovey makes for herself in the cemetery and later shares with the town’s renegade, Robber Jim, and a climactic flood to bring the town together at the end.

Boylen was a little more successful in attracting readers this time around. The New York Times book editor, Orville Prescott, confessed that he only read the book because it was pressed on him by his daughter. “I had to find out for myself about this strange novel which some people liked so much and some people disliked so heartily.”

It didn’t grab him at first: “The opening pages are enough to set one’s teeth on edge because they are so overwritten.” How overwritten? Well, here’s an early sentence:

When the supply of tombstones ran out and new upstart families had set up a rival cemetery on the other side of town, a cemetery whose polished and tinted marbles sparkled like wedding cakes in the sunshine, the First Families of New Hoosic (for such was the town’s inaccurate name), most of them, like mine, played-out, down-at-the-heel, the heel bruised by stones not left unturned in the bumsteered search for Grace, scurried around until they found, living in a tar-paper shack near Arbor Lodge at Nebraska City, an old-timer, a stone cutter who delighted in the prospect of scaring the daylights out of quick and dead alike.

Overwritten? Meandering, certainly, but no longer wrapping itself in the cloak of Thomas Wolfe.

Nevertheless, The Marble Orchard soon won Prescott’s heart. The book was, he cheered, “so original in matter and manner, so startling in its verbal acrobatics and so witty in a raffish and bizarre fashion unlike anything ever printed on paper before that it ought to make Mrs. Boylen famous.” On the other hand, he acknowledged, it might not: “Queerly brilliant books are all too often ignored.” Amen, brother!

The Times’s assigned reviewer, Victor Hass, saw the book as a quirky, corny country comedy: “Mrs. Boylen has recreated a time and a place and a people with wit, strength and an admirable economy of words [did he read the same book as Prescott?].” He then condemned the book to a New York reviewer’s Purgatory: “The result is an excellent regional novel.” These were the days when Willa Cather was still referred to as “a fine regional novelist.”

The best thing about The Marble Orchard is Lovey Claypoole’s voice, as distinctive in its perspective and diction as Mattie Ross’s in Charles Portis’s classic, True Grit. When Robber Jim — who is, in reality still a teenager himself and just a few years older than Lovey — tells her he plans to escape if sent to reformatory school, she despairs:

Misery. The good old-fashioned Number One Dilemma. Even setting aside the peculiar impossibility of it — or being but children, sexy, but children — the horned dilemma lowered at us. It often happens that two people who cannot be with each other cannot be without each other. But they have to, anyway, one thing or the other. And not pine away and die of it, either, nor lace it up in a suicide pact. Why not? Because it’s out of fashion, that’s why, and when a thing is out of fashion and has no style, you’ve lost the hang of it and don’t know how to do it anymore. But these are deep waters and God knows Lovey [Lovey often refers to herself in the third person] and her persnickety Robber were not in them. Just water-bugging over the surface, for the nonce.

The Marble Orchard sold slightly less poorly than Crow Field, but it did at least earn Boylen a Guggenheim Fellowship. Even with that, though, she struggled to progress on her third book. “I’m off to a party at the drop of a hat,” she told one interviewer. Still, she managed to return to print after five years — and with the same publisher — with A Moveable Feast. Although A Moveable Feast was a fresh title at the time, its use three years later for Ernest Hemingway’s bestselling posthumous memoir of Paris in the 1920s helped guarantee its disappearance.

A Moveable Feast (1961) is an Edward Gorey-esque take on Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers books. In the opening chapter, we are introduced to the five Mortrude children, who attain a gruesome bit of early fame when their parents are both killed in a tractor accident that has to be read to be believed. Orphaned and penniless, they are rescued and raised through the collective generosity of their hometown of Clorinda. Or at least, that’s what their guardian and the book’s narrator, Will Calhoun, would have everyone believe.

Uncle Will has hopes for the five Mortrudes as he attempts to raise them (Chapter Two, “How They Grew”) and then, years later, when four of them (Little Od having died trying to fly from the roof of their house) return to Clorinda (Chapter Three, “Why They Grew”). Located just down the road from the Claypoole’s New Hoosic, Clorinda aspires to be a version of Lake Wobegon, a town where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Instead, as the four big Mortrudes demonstrate, reality comes closer to William Carlos Williams’ vision than Garrison Keillor’s. These pure products of Clorinda go crazy, each in his or her own way. Like a remarkable number of Midwestern boys, Farnham heads straight for the coast and becomes a hard-drinking, far-traveling, tattooed sailor. Gidley rises high in academia but proves obsessed with minutiae. Jessica becomes a great beauty of Broadway who needs a third of a fifth to get through an evening.

And Eleanor becomes, perhaps, a proxy for Boylen herself. “Eleanor has still to learn that the shortest distance between a subject and a predicate is the simple declarative sentence,” Calhoun observes after reading an “unfairy tale” she sends him. In fact, as the Mortrude’s return to Clorinda approaches, he begins to see that his reality and theirs have been on separate planes for a long time: “Buffaloed. They had me buffaloed; from the very start, and my fear of the Reunion comes on apace.”

Several reviewers described A Moveable Feast as a Grand Guignol comedy set in a cornfield, but I think they missed what’s really going on in the book. It’s true that Boylen fills her pages with extravagant declarations and exuberant eccentrics. Like The Marble Orchard, it’s a book that would appeal to fans of Gorey, Charles Addams, and Lemony Snicket. But Boylen’s Midwest gothic has just as much in common with Flannery O’Connor’s Southern gothic: beneath its surface of the odd and the extreme runs a bedrock of moral granite. For Boylen, the real freaks are the ones struggling the most to maintain a facade of normality.

Margaret Boylen was just a year or two too early for the wave of black humor that became one of the high points in 1960s American fiction. And her chances of establishing a place alongside Bruce Jay Friedman, J. P. Donleavy, and Joseph Heller may also have been undermined by health problems. She died of a heart attack in 1967 at the age of 46. Her work has never been reissued.

A Check List of Good Books from 1931

“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
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.

Edith de Born and the Sense of Foreignness

Edith de Born, 1960

“Have you heard of the lady who writes under the name Edith de Born — an Austrian-Hungarian-Jewess I suspect – married to a French banker called Bisch?” Evelyn Waugh asked his friend Nancy Mitford in 1953, adding “She writes in English quite beautifully.” Waugh had spent several days as a guest of the Bisches in their elegant apartments opposite the Parc Royal in Brussels. Jacques Bisch was then a director of the Belgian office Société Générale, one of the leading French banks. Waugh confided that he had mistaken Jacques Bisch for a Belgian for most of the visit and had “dropped brick after brick” in his typically less-than-circumspect comments about the French.

Waugh’s suspicions about Mme. Bisch, however, were right on the mark. He probably had no idea, though, why she had chosen to write novels in English. It was a decision that came about, more than anything, through the disruptive effects of history.

Born on her family’s estate outside Vienna in 1901, Edith Ausch Kemengi was raised in the privilege of the most prominent members of the Austo-Hungarian court. Like the narrator of her semi-autobiographical novel Felding Castle, hers was “a world so different from that of my grandchildren that it might have been several hundred years ago.” Her father came from noble families in Hungary (Kemengi, more often spelled Kemenyi) and Austria (Ausch) and was a counselor and lawyer to the royal household of Emperor Franz Joseph. Sixty years after the fact, she remembered watching her father marching in one of the annual court parades from the window of their house in Vienna. Her mother was Jewish, but from a family of sufficient wealth and distance from the Orthodox faith to be considered acceptable in court society.

After the end of World War One and the collapse of the Hapsburg dynasty, however, Count Kemengi found himself land rich and cash poor and put most of his estate up for auction. Société Générale, like other French banks, saw the opportunity to swoop up some choice real estate for almost nothing and sent a young agent, Jacques Bisch, to bid on them. He took away with him not only the title to thousands of acres of Austrian land but also the Count’s daughter. By then, Edith had begun working as a writer, publishing theater reviews and short stories in Vienna and Berlin under the name of Edith Ausch.

She put her writing career on hold for the next twenty years, however, concentrating on assimilating into Parisian society and performing the role of wife and hostess in support of her husband’s career. Jacques Bisch rose quickly in the bank. The couple spent the early 1930s in London, where they were leading members of the colony of French expats. When King George V attended the memorial service for French president Raymond Poincaré at Westminster Cathedal in 1934, the Bisches were in attendance.

Their comfortable life in Paris was discrupted when the Germans invaded in 1940. Despite Edith’s Jewish ancestry, however, they remained. Edith put her language skills in service of the Resistance, having become fluent in French and English in addition to German. She translated communiques to and from the Special Operations Executive, an experience she later said gave her confidence in handling the nuances of English prose.

Her first novel, Gaëtan, or The Stock-Taking, was published in 1950 and demonstrated her ease in navigating the ways of European society. Most of the book consists of a conversation between Irina, the Russian-born widow of Gaëtan, a Frenchman of some high social standing, and Marie, his Swiss cousin. Marie has invited Irina to her villa above Lake Geneva out of courtesy, but really to probe Irina’s intent regarding what she considers an estate belonging to Gaëtan’s family as a whole. Soon, however, the topic shifts from property to love. Marie, it turns out, was in love with her cousin and crushed by his decision to marry a Frenchwoman (Irina is his second wife).

I thought Gaëtan quite a fine short novel when I wrote about it back in 2019, but it received only mildly positive reviews. Her next novel, The Bidou Inheritance (1951), her first published in the U.S. as well as England, made a bigger splash. The story of a small town French shopkeeper and the intrigues regarding his estate won glowing praise from Harper’s chief reviewer, Katherine Gauss:

Miss de Born, an Austrian married to a Frenchman, writes in almost flawless English with quiet distinction, and there is a classic sense of tragedy in the way in which she shows, through two generations, how the child against its own will apes what it most hates in the parent. She is a most perceptive and able new novelist

The Saturday Review put the book to a severe test by assigning it to Henri Peyre, then professor of French at Yale. Peyre noted that the subject of family members keeping a protective eye on a potential inheritance had been “a favorite of French fiction since the Revolution.” His assessment of de Born’s strengths and weakenesses may be the most succinct and accurate from all the reviews her subsequent sixteen novels received:

If she cannot be called a great writer, or at least not yet, she is undoubtedly a skilful one who, with great simplicity and artistic restraint, without any of the “modern” features of philosophy, any delving into the subconscious, morbid eroticism, fiashy juggling with time and logic, has composed a wellmade, a convincing, and an honest work of fiction.

While wellmade, convincing, and honest are admirable qualities, they tend not to be those that assure a writer’s place in literary history.

De Born’s skill in writing fiction in English was often, at least in the first decade of her career, considered the most notable feature of her work. The novelist Francis King, who became a close friend of de Born, recalled his own reaction to the book:

When the author presented me with a copy of the book (The Bidou Inheritance) some twenty years ago, my first astonished thought after devouring a single page was “How beautifully this woman writes!” Why astonished? The answer to that is that Born was an Austrian, who married a Frenchman (Jacques Bisch) and lived much of her life in Belgium, but like Conrad, Nabokov and Julian Green, she miraculously wrote better in her adopted language than most people in the language to which they were born. My second, much later thought was that she dealt with the cupidity of the French bourgeoisie with all the vividness of a Francois Mauriac or a Julian Green….

King later learned that Edith relied on help from a friend in England, the wife of a Norfolk vicar, to clean up and copy-edit her prose, so that unlike Conrad and Nabokov, her English was not a solo production. However, she shared with them what King called a sense of “foreignness”:

… though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreignness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.

Still, de Born’s prose was good enough to impress Waugh, whose own is considered some of the best of his time. Waugh reviewed her third novel, Daughter of the House (1953) — before staying as her guest — and found it her most mature novel so far:

Madame de Born has already attracted the admiration of the fastidious by her two previous works; brief, severly elegant, classical contes. In Daughter of the House she has spread her wings full span. It is a haunting, highly original story; an authentic work of art, classical in form and . Without once transgressing her self-imposed limits, the author produces an effect of breadth and intensity quite unusual in a modern novel, and worthy of comparison with the masters of her craft. It is a complete book, from which nothing could be taken and to which nothing could be added, without loss.

Over the next twenty-five years, Edith de Born published at a steady rate. Seven novels in the 1950s, seven in the 1960s, and four more in the 1970s. Two of her novels — Felding Castle (1959) and The House in Vienna (1959) — came closest to her own experience. In the first, a young girl named Milli has her first romances in the days just before the outbreak of World War One. The second takes Milli forward a decade, to a Vienna where noble families are now scraping by. Those who have some property left are selling it off, like de Born’s father did. Those still young enough to hope are leaving for Berlin or Paris or America. And many, desperate and bankrupt, are forced, like Fraulein Hertha von Branner, to write begging letters in hopes of finding work:

I have heard that you seek a gouvernesse for your children and so allow myself herewith to offer you my services. I write you in Englisch because it is a langwitsch which I have always spoken and written with great plaisure. My dear Father was two years at Eton, the famous Englisch school…. I mention him only as a guaranty for my standing, he was a Sektionschef in our Ministry for the Inside. Naturally I am ready to furnish you with every otherwise desired reference.

Although Felding Castle and The House in Vienna were advertised as the first two books of a trilogy, the next book she published, The Flat in Paris has no connection with their stories. Indeed, The Flat in Paris is one of her stodgiest books, perhaps because she forgot that she wrote at her best when the themes of love and property were intertwined. When she wrote of love alone, the result reads somewhat like the experience of driving a car with underinflated tires. One can reach the destination all the same, but it’s a tedious and inefficient journey.

Francis King once observed that like Edith Wharton, de Born “belongs to the world that she describes and yet has been distanced from it by an exceptional sensibility,” adding that,

Edith de Born’s books have almost invariably been concerned with civilised, if not intellectual, people, who have no difficulty in expressing themselves richly and succinctly. To write about such people — tended by devoted by dwindling bands of servants in large houses often full of objets d’art in the taste of a bygone age — is something that few novelists can now do with any conviction.

And the kind of adjectives reviewers used to describe de Born’s work lead one to think that she belongs in the school of followers/imitators of Henry James: “mature, authoritative, and genuinely sensitive”; “sensitive and delightful”; “lightly and subtly done”; “curiously tantalizing”; “elegant fable.” Peter Ackroyd wrote that one of her later novels, Mutual Observation, was “written with great intelligence and charm,” then closed, cuttingly, “and one can recommend it to one’s grandmother.” Anita Brookner, who often mentioned de Born as a writer she admired, also watered down her praise with such remarks as “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived” and that de Born “writes like a lady.”

But though de Born certainly knew exactly which fork to use in any dinner service, as well as which wine to serve with any dish, she was willing to delve into subjects that would not have been considered proper for conversations at her table. The Penalty of Exile (1964) is about a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — is found murdered in her dingy flat near Brussels’ Gare du Midi. State of Possession (note the reference to property and ownership in the title) is about a woman attempting to prove herself the mother of her illegitimate child.

In The Imperfect Marriage, Roger Warnier, heir of a wealthy family in the industrial north of France, returns from years as a prisoner of war in Germany and informs his wife that he is now in a relationship with one of his fellow prisoners and intends to remain so. Already unhappy with the grey life in their factory town, after growing up in the vineyards of the sunny south, she considers leaving but decides in the end to live in a form of coexistence that maintains a fine veneer of propriety — as well as her status in society. It was not surprising, Christopher Wordsworth once observed, that William Trevor sang praises for de Born’s work, “since both are considerable specialists on what survives and seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”

Cover of Scars by Edith de Born

De Born did return to her unfinished autobiographical trilogy, if indirectly, in her 1968 novel Scars. Although the lead character is now Mitzi, not Milli, the two women share similar histories. Mitzi is now an older woman, living in London, cut off by the First World War from the Austria she knew as a child, cut off from many of her Jewish relatives by the Second. As was de Born herself in Brussels, Mitzi’s may be a comfortable exile, but it is an exile nonetheless, an exile in both time and space.

In the book, a visit by an old Viennese friend forces Mitzi to reflect on the life she had left behind when she fled Austria following the Anschluss. But she also finds that she and Egon, the friend, share more than a past. They share the experience of being refugees:

They had crossed psychological as well as geographical frontiers and experienced the fact that national achievements could not be carried from one land to another. Famous men in German-speaking countries were asked elsewhere to spell their names; others, normally in a position to grant favors, were reduced to begging for the smallest privilege. People who had refused all forms of compromise were forced to accept the most uncongenial surroundings and humiliating conditions in order to subsist.

De Born understands, however, that losing one thing in life often means gaining something else. Having survived the tragedy of disrupted lives,

… they had become aware of new realities. Obliged to revise their standards of thought and value, both of them had developed from exiles into explorers of new moral fields. They had become pioneers of a world in which the nation was an anachronism. Gradually the frontiers they had crossed were replaced by unforeseen invisible boundaries, which could reveal wide chasms between people who still persisted in thinking in terms of the past and others who belonged to the future.

Although Edith de Born wrote and spoke English fluently, hosted the likes of Evelyn Waugh, and became a close friend of the historian Alethea Hayter, she never lost her sense of foreignness in the eyes of the English literary establishment. A critic as esteemed as V. S. Pritchett might say that her novel The Engagement was “An uncommonly good novel,” but the general assessment was that she was, at best, a minor novelist of manners. Someone to read between doing the shopping and mending socks, as a character in Jane Gillespie’s Envy does, and not, as in Anita Brookner’s dismissive judgment, someone whose novels need to be revived.

Indeed, it’s ironic to see Brookner making this judgment, given the significant role that the experience of exile plays in several of her novels. It’s hard to think that Brookner failed to see that it was precisely this experience, which was purely second-hand to her, that gave Edith de Born the power to see what “seethes under the surface of apparently extinct lives.”

Edith de Born published her last novel, The Negligent Daughter in 1978. She and her husband moved from rue Royale to a grand townhouse in the rue Marteau decorated with priceless paintings by Picasso, Miro, and Paul Delvaux and run by superior Flemish housekeeper. She died in 1987.

Robert Harling

Robert Harling
Robert Harling, around 1960.

This is a guest post by Stephen Bloomfield

Robert Harling? Steel Magnolias and The First Wives Club? American playwright, actor and film producer?

No – not that one.

This one: Robert Harling, British author of eighteen titles (fiction and non-fiction) and variously a bookseller, printer, Royal Navy Reserve officer, advertising executive, typographer, veteran magazine editor and cloak-and-dagger commando. And, just possibly, one of the many candidates whose qualities came together to form James Bond in the mind of Ian Fleming. (He certainly has a good claim to this, since he and Fleming were friends of long-standing.)

Harling’s name has fallen out of public recognition. He would have been — even at his peak — a mid-list author, although sufficiently strong-selling that one publisher stuck with him throughout his writing career (and he with them, of course): all of his novels were published originally by Chatto & Windus.

Among other things, Harling had been a writer and typographer and enthusiastic amateur sailor before joining the Royal Navy Reserve at the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, between 1951 and 1979, he wrote seven very good novels mostly dealing with journalism or having backgrounds based in the newspaper world. They were not quite thrillers, not quite literary fiction but certainly not pulp. Grahame Greene would probably have called them ‘entertainments”.

He also wrote eleven other non-fiction works, including two published before the war, on subjects as diverse as: the typography of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden (both books being regarded as authoritative still); typographic styles; London by-ways; and famous homes and gardens.

His ability to present information cogently, his friendship and not least his wartime exploits – first in charge of a whaler off the beaches of Dunkirk, then as navigating officer on corvettes assigned to convoy duties in the Western Approaches and the Mediterranean – culminated in him being recruited by Ian Fleming to join 30 Independent Assault Unit, which undertook all sorts of specialist tasks towards the end of the war, with minimal official sanction and maximum dash and daring. He and Fleming had met at a book launch party just before the war.

After the war, Harling became a design adviser to newspapers (including The Times where he held a long-standing consultancy) and then joined Homes and Garden magazine, where he stayed as editor for twenty–eight years, nurturing a band of young journalists into distinguished authorities on cooking, interior design and gardening.

He was also a fabulist.

It was only on his death in 2008 at the age of 98 that it became apparent that much of the story of his early life had been a fiction he’d invented.

Far from being an only child orphaned young and brought up by an aunt and uncle in Brighton (the story he had told even his children), he and his brother had been brought up in Islington. His father was a taxi driver and he had married (and divorced) early. Many of his family relationships he Harling concealed, for unknown, and unknowable, reasons.

It does appear that he ran a bookshop in Holborn briefly, but whether as proprietor or manager is unclear. He spent some time at the Daily Mail but then left to work as a printer in two specialist printing houses. By the beginning of the war, he had begun to develop a reputation as a minor authority on typefaces as editor of the journal Typography. He developed at least three new typefaces which have endured and on his death was described in the Times obituary as ‘the most innovative and distinguished typographer of the last century’. Some claim!

cover of the Amateur Sailor by Robert Harling

Aside from his typographical expertise, Harling is worth remembering for a number of his books. The Amateur Sailor and The Steep Atlantick Stream, the two he wrote about his time at sea, are the equal and possible superiors of The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, one of the most famous books about the Royal Navy in the Second World War. The Cruel Sea is not presented as anything but fiction and drew heavily on Monsarrat’s conversations with fellow officers in addition to his own experiences as an officer in corvettes and frigates in the Battle of the North Atlantic. One of the turning points in the novel, for example, comes when the ship Compass Rose is torpedoed. None of Monsarrat’s ships was torpedoed, and this stunning feat of plot and descriptive writing is all derived from second-hand information, possibly from someone involved in the sinking of HMS Firedrake in 1942.

Cover of The Steep Atlantick Stream by Robert Harling

The Cruel Sea, both the 1951 book and the 1953 film, was responsible for weaving into British boyhoods the myths and legends of the Second World War. It is without doubt, a great piece of writing that conveys the terror, stress and exhaustion of fighting a long, dogged war with the both the sea and human foes as the perpetual enemy. Harling’s books do the same, if perhaps less showily. They are less obviously fiction — although given his propensity to invent it cannot be held that they are entirely autobiographical. They are probably heavily embellished fact. They also avoid the serious flaw of Monsarrat’s book — a sub-plot of love interest in the second half of the book which grates oddly with the intensity of the main story and, far from acting as counter-point, distracts from the overall impact of the book.

The other candidates for burnishing his neglected memory are his novels based in Fleet Street – the ‘old’ Fleet street of hot metal printing and larger than life reporters and editors, particularly The Paper Palace and The Hollow Sunday.

Cover of The Paper Palace by Robert Harling

The Paper Palace, written in 1951, was Harling’s first ‘civilian’ novel and his first venture into obvious fiction. The story concerns a columnist tasked by his editor, much against his objections, to uncover the reasons behind an obituary about a Communist written by a very capitalist newspaper proprietor – in fact their newspaper proprietor. This bare plot is the means of erecting a very satisfactory scaffolding about a power struggle between the editor and the proprietor, with the columnist being the instrument by which the duel is (partially) resolved. It is an exemplary ‘Fleet Street’ novel with the relationships between the two antagonists superbly described through the experiences of the columnist.

Cover of The Dark Saviour by Robert Harling

His second novel, The Dark Saviour (1952) continues the Fleet Street theme with a New York correspondent (who may or may not be the same man) being told by his London office to investigate an evangelistic, mystical revolutionary whose emotional appeal to the population is threatening the stability of a Caribbean island — run mostly for an elite. There are multiple betrayals between the characters and, like the correspondent, the reader is never quite sure whom to trust.

Cover of The Enormous Shadow by Robert Harling

The Enormous Shadow (1955) is more obviously towards the thriller end of the spectrum; the denouement is much more ‘actionist’ than the previous two novels he had written to that date. The main protagonist is again a newspaper columnist (this time a recalled Washington correspondent) who is asked to pursue the story of the disappearance of a conscience-stricken atomic scientist. The scandal of the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 were still in the front of the public memory and the novel draws on a similar context. As with the previous novel, there is a love-interest element, well-handled, which is central to the story.

Cover of The Endless Colonnade by Robert Harling

The background to The Endless Colonnade (1958) departs from the world of journalism, having as its protagonist a holidaying physician taking his first holiday after the death of his wife. Meeting an attractive Italian woman who flirts with him turns into an affair. She entrusts him with a secret that may endanger both of them; needless to say, the female character is a foundation for the entirety of the story. The format of the novel is also different from the previous three being much more like a journal written by the protagonist than a third person omniscient narrator. Without spoiling the story, the conclusion is melancholy and much like an ending of a Greene novel.

Cover of The Hollow Sunday by by Robert Harling

The Hollow Sunday (1967) returns very successfully to Fleet Street and is occasionally cited (by journalists) as being one of the best of the genre, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and Michael Frayn’s Toward the End of the Morning. The plot concerns the introduction of new technology into the printing of newspapers and how that will up-end the economics of the business. It is another ‘power-struggle’ story with politics and adultery thrown in for good measure. The characters are both well-drawn and likeable/dislikeable as required.

Cover of The Athenian Widow by Robert Harling

The Athenian Widow (1974) continues the investigative reporter theme — not a door-stepping tabloid man but a more genteel and refined exponent of the subtly pointed question and thorough, but discreet, research. It deals with issues of truth and journalistic responsibility. Somewhat flatter than the other Fleet Street books he wrote, it is slower in both development and outcome but no less gripping on its own terms.

Cover of The Summer Portrait by Robert Harling

Finally, in 1979, came The Summer Portrait, his last novel. Harling departed radically from previous themes and chose as the main character a painter on the verge of fame who paints the portraits of two very different people as summer commissions. Through them he has love affairs, all the while caught on the dilemma of whether to commit himself to one lover, or not. It is a very satisfying read, although much slower perhaps in some ways than anything else he wrote but, again, the conclusion is almost Greene-like.

In all his books, Harling’s writing is fluid, well-paced and engaging. He is a craftsman: he does not write bad sentences; the conversations and dialogue are well-enough handled — even at the distance of thirty, forty or fifty years — to be realistic and not stilted; though, admittedly, some of the words used to describe characters might now be regarded as unusable and the concepts about the dynamics of relationships (particularly between men and women) are very much of their time.

Harling was a psychological writer rather than one who relied on twists in the plot to drive books forward. What marks out his books is the psychological depth to the descriptions of his characters — going deeper into motivations and thoughts than simply skating along on plot and action. But the analysis is not so deep or introverted to be a drag on the plot and always relevant to the decisions that the characters take. . They are not flat cut-outs responding to the plot but rather the plot is pushed on by the psychological foibles, strengths and weaknesses – even the moral dilemmas — of the characters.

Harling was able to write convincingly about the effects of the demons which drove others to do things that they were often not proud of or had to defend against their own consciences and others’ criticisms. He probably conveyed much of himself through his novels in writing about the way his characters behaved.

Engagingly, Harling writes very well about women (at least from a male reader’s perspective). Although they conform to a certain type throughout his novels they are substantial and rounded characters. Their contributions to the plot are never peripheral and most often are central. This might be seen as unusual given the time in which he is writing. Harling’s female characters might not be as forceful as those of some modern authors but they are far more than the decorative ciphers of say, his great friend Fleming or any of the other fifties/sixties thriller writers like Maclean or even Innes..

None of his books were made into films (although The Paper Palace and The Enormous Shadow were both adapted into tv plays, one with Denholm Elliott in the lead role) – which may explain to some extent their lack of longevity in the public’s interest. Given the psychological complexity of Harling’s male central characters, it is an interesting parlour game to speculate who might have played them if the films had been made: Cary Grant is an obvious candidate for the suave, worldly columnist of, say, The Paper Palace. But generally he is a little too smooth for anything else. James Mason is sufficiently hard-edged for at least three of the stories perhaps but doesn’t have the crucial self-doubt that Harling’s central characters often display. Connery might have pulled it off more often than not – especially in The Enormous Shadow and The Athenian Widow. The tough one to cast would have been The Hollow Sunday. All of the male central characters are self-doubters to some extent, analytical of their own motives and very much the dissectors of the behaviour of others, which is why the books are such good reads.

Harling was not universally popular as a colleague. Not particularly gregarious, he shunned his own (secretly-prepared) retirement party from The Times with a rude remark about such affairs being nauseating. He admitted that some of the sparkle went out of his life when Fleming died. But he also found fierce devotees in the staff of House and Garden, some of whom – the cookery writer Elizabeth David for example – became famous in their own right after being taken on by the magazine.

Perhaps his attempts to conceal his background – successful until after his death – fostered his reluctance to talk much about himself, lest he betray his story. The last book he wrote – Ian Fleming: A Personal Memoir — was completed by his daughter and published posthumously. The title was probably chosen to capitalise on the cult of Bond, since it is mostly about Harling rather than Fleming (although it does reveal something of Fleming’s sexual proclivities in passing).

The book is something of an essay at autobiography, dealing extensively with Harling’s exploits in 30 Assault Unit. But even in this he could not bring himself to tell the complete truth about his past. Perhaps, having spun the story that long (he died at the age of 98), it had become more real than the truth – so “print the legend”.

Keeping people at arms length is one way of concealing one’s own history. And private people often listen well and become the most acute evaluators of others foibles, since they are testing themselves against what they see in others and vice versa. Writing then becomes a way of explaining personalities.

But few people who do those things can write as well as Harling did.

Robert Harling
27 March 1910 – 1 July 2008

As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.

A conversation about G. E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia with the Lost Ladies of Lit

Kim Askew and Amy Helmes of the wonderful Lost Ladies of Lit podcast recently invited me to talk with them about G. E. Trevelyan’s remarkable first novel Appius and Virginia. Back in print now thanks to Eye Books and the Abandoned Bookshop Press, Appius and Virginia started me down my journey of discovering Trevelyan’s work a little over three years ago.

You can listen to the full conversation at the Lost Ladies of Lit episode 59: G. E. Trevelyan — Appius and Virginia.

Simenon’s romans Américains

Georges Simenon was one of the world’s most prolific and best-selling authors when he was alive and he remains so today. Few of Simenon’s current readers, however, know that he not only lived in the United States for almost ten years but also set over a dozen novels here. But what’s even more surprising is these novels have appeared in English so haphazardly.

Simenon achieved his tremendous output through tremendous discipline. Despite the fact that he moved from place to place almost constantly, he kept to a strict routine of sitting down to his typewriter each morning, and once there, he wrote at a furious rate. A typical novel might take him two to three weeks. There was at least one Maigret a year, plus two to four of the psychological thrillers he called romans durs, plus countless stories. And if these weren’t enough, he also wrote further works under a variety of pseudonyms throughout the first half of his career.

Simenon claimed that living in the United States was a goal he had set himself as a young man, and soon after the war in Europe ended, he applied for visas for himself, his wife Tigy, and their son Marc. They landed in New York City in October 1945. Knowing almost no English, Simenon quickly hired an American agent and put out a request for a bilingual secretary to help him with his correspondence. He met the first application, a French Canadian woman named Denyse Ouimet, for an interview at a restaurant named Brussels near Central Park. As Denyse later told Simenon biographer Pierre Assouline, “I met him at the Brussels at 1:45. I saw him again at the Drake at 4:45. At 7:00 we were making love.”

Now a party of four, the Simenons headed for Quebec, where at least they avoided the language problem. There, he wrote his first two American novels, both set in New York City.

• Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946); first published in English as Three Beds in Manhattan (1964), translated by Lawrence G. Blochman.

Simenon transposed his first meeting and the early days of his affair with Denyse into this story, with his role played by François Combe, a French actor, and hers by Kay Miller, the estranged wife of a Hungarian count. In her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of the book, Joyce Carol Oates called it “the most existential of love stories,” and it represented something of turning point for Simenon in that it was his first novel in which sexual passion — which soon became one of his favorite narrative accelerants — was the driving motivation.

But it’s also about Simenon’s romance with Manhattan. The book is filled with scenes that show that even having spent just some weeks in the city, Simenon soaked in countless details. When not in bed with each other, François and Kay spend hours walking:

They were on the street again. No doubt about it, they felt most at home in the street. Their mood changed immediately. The magic, lighthearted comradeship they had found by accident returned the moment they were again caught up in the noise and confusion of traffic.
People were lining up in front of the move theaters. Gaudily uniformed doormen guarded the padded portals of night clubs. They passed them all by. They zigzagged aimlessly through the sidewalk crowds until she turned to him with a smile he recognized instantly. It was the smile that had started everything.

Later, while waiting for Kay to return after a separation, François walks endlessly, the city now devoid of the energy they experienced together:

… the little dark men swarming like ants under the lights, the stores, the movie houses with their garlands of light, the hot-dog stands, the bakeries with their displays of nauseating pastries; the coin machines that played music for you or allowed you to play at rolling balls into little holes that rang bells and lit lights; everything a great city could invent to deceive man’s loneliness…

Simenon may have written Three Beds in Manhattan having scarcely set foot in America, but he managed to produce not only his best romantic novel but also one of his best American ones.

The was filmed in France as Trois chambres à Manhattan in 1965, starring Maurice Ronet and Annie Girardot.

• Maigret à New-York (1946); first published in English as Maigret in New York (1980)

If you’ve read any of Simenon’s Maigret novels, you can guess that the Inspector was far less impressed with New York City than were the lovers of Three Beds in Manhattan. The beer is poor, the streets too noisy, he can’t smoke his pipe in a movie theater, and no one seems to understand why he wants his “little lunch” in the morning. The practice of numbering streets he finds particularly frustrating: “I’ve never had a memory for figures and you people are really tiresome with your numbered streets. Why couldn’t you say Victor Hugo Street, or Pigalle Street, or President-What’s-His-Name Street….?”

The story starts at convoluted and gets messier. There is a missing young man, perhaps the heir to a fortune or perhaps an imposter, a jukebox millionaire who started as a vaudeville musician, elements of the mob (some English editions are called Maigret and New York’s Underground), retired carnival performers and FBI men who aren’t always as helpful as they could be. Despite this, the book remains among the most popular of the many Maigret novels.

• La jument perdue (1947); not yet translated into English.

Simenon wrote this novel (the title could be translated as The Lost Mare Ranch) within weeks of arriving in Tucson, Arizona in September 1947, and he drew upon places and people he discovered there. Jane Eblen Keller, who wrote an extended study of Simenon’s time in Arizona and the books he wrote there for the Journal of the Southwest in 2002, describes it as “one of the few sunny books Simenon wrote,” a tale involving a pair of aging cowboys and a couple of elderly sisters in a town resembling Tucson — although Keller does add that the plot “deals in treachery and sorrow, skullduggery and betrayal, crooked business dealings and corrupt politics.”

• Le Fond de la bouteille (1948); first published in English as The Bottom of the Bottle (1954), translated by Cornelia Schaeffer.

This was the first of the romans Américains I read and I enjoyed it even more when rereading it recently. Simenon wrote the book while renting a house called the Stud Barn in the Santa Cruz Valley near Tumacacori, Arizona, about a fifty miles south of Tucson and just across the border from Nogales, Mexico. There, the eastern bank of the Santa Cruz River was broad and productive, and the area was mostly populated by a few dozen wealthy ranchers. The Simenons — Georges, his wife Tigy, mistress Denyse and son Marc, now joined by their French cook Boule (coincidentally another of Georges’ mistresses — quickly fit into the little community.

The ranchers and their wives enjoyed a relaxed and highly social lifestyle, often gathering at one or another’s large houses for parties that could go on for days — earning the area the nickname of Santa Booze Valley. At times when the river flooded, the eastern bank became completely inaccessible and the ranchers’ parties could then run on for weeks.

This is the situation into which Donald Ashbridge, a convicted murderer and escapee from a prison in Illinois, arrives. He wants money and help from his older brother P.M., a lawyer who’s married a woman with one of the largest ranches in the valley. Donald needs to get across the river and into Mexico, where his wife and children are waiting. But P.M., having built up a reputation of integrity, needs to distance himself from Donald and his own less than respectable upbringing. Meanwhile, the storm rages, the river rises, and the booze spins the party at ever-faster speeds.

The Bottom of the Bottle introduced a theme that appears in most of Simenon’s romans Américains — that of the supposedly upstanding citizen who’s ultimately undone by some fatal flaw rooted in a secret past or association. As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, that secret can remain hidden and inert. But when some catalyst upsets the formula — a brother on the run or a young woman found murdered or being black-balled from the country club — that stability quickly devolves into chaos.

In his Intimate Memoirs, Simenon recalled one concept that struck him while living in America: “In any American town, ‘you have to belong.’ To the community.” He himself admitted that when he was living in Connecticut, he had the illusion that he really belonged. But he also realized, as do his protagonists such as P.M. Ashbridge and Eddie Rico, that the flipside of belonging was ostracism and the ostracized person had not place in the American of the 1950s.

The novel was filmed — partly on location in the Santa Cruz Valley — as The Bottom of the Bottle, starring Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, and Ruth Roman, in 1956.

• Maigret chez le coroner (1949); first published in English as Maigret at the Coroner’s (1980), translated by Frances Keene.

In Maigret at the Coroner’s, Maigret is less inspector and more witness. He’s essentially dumped in a Tucson coroner’s inquest by an FBI agent he’s visiting on his way across the U.S., and most of the book is devoted to his following the courtroom proceedings, all the while trying both to figure out the case and decipher the odd habits of Americans. The case itself seems straightfoward: a young woman goes out partying on a Saturday night with five airmen from a nearby base and is found dead the next morning. Is it murder, accident, or suicide? We’ll never know, because Simenon ushers Maigret along to his next stop before the inquest closes.

It’s Maigret/Simenon’s observations about American manners and customs that are far more interesting than the crime (if there was one). Such as how they managed to avoid the hangovers that plagued him every time he indulged in American whiskey rather than his beloved beer:

From his first days in New York he had been amazed to see men whom he had left the night before in a state of advanced drunkenness all fresh-faced and, as they said, rarin’ to go the next morning. Then someone had told him their secret. After that, he noted in all the drugstores, in cafés, in bars, the special blue bottle mounted on a wall bracket, its spout down, out of which the proper dose of effervescent powder could be measured. Dropped into a glass to which the barman added water, the compound fizzed and tingled. This was served you as promptly as a morning coffee or a Coca- Cola, and a few minutes after ingesting it the fumes of the alcohol had been dispersed.

Yet why not? Machines for getting drunk, machines for getting over being drunk. They were logical people, after all.

Logical, yes, but this would not be Simenon if he didn’t also hint at the worm at the core. The clean-cut, Power of Positive Thinking-minded American men got that clean-cut look by taking their shirts to the dry cleaners instead of wearing them again and again like any sensible Frenchman. This emphasis on appearances is, to Maigret, just a façade. “He suspected that, at bottom, they suffered the same anxieties as the rest of humanity but that they assumed this happy-go-lucky appearance out of embarrassment.”

The book closes as Maigret’s plane is about to land in Los Angeles, the next stop on his tour. “Whatever would he see now?” he wonders as the book closes.

• Un nouveau dans la ville (1950); not yet translated into English.

Un nouveau dans la ville or A stranger in town is alone among les romans Américains in being set in a seaside town in Maine. As Jane Eblen Keller summarizes the book, the stranger acts a catalyst, unleashing the town’s many dysfunctions. He sets Charlie, the owner of the only bar in town, to wondering about the one foreigner in town, a quiet man called Yougo (he’s thought to be from Yugoslavia), and Charlie’s doubts infect the rest of the town. At the same time, the stranger suggests to Yougo that his situation is at risk, that the town’s latent xenophobia is about to make him its target. Simenon sets up a conflict that ends … well, for that we’ll have to wait for an English translation.

New York Daily News article on Simenon's second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.
New York Daily News article on Simenon’s second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.

• La Mort de Belle (1952); first published in English as Belle (1954), translated by Louise Varèse.

Belle is the first of three novels set in Connecticut, where Simenon settled after divorcing his first wife and marrying Denyse. At the time he wrote the books, Connecticut was within commuting distance of New York City by train but still full of small, quiet towns whose inhabitants could often point out generations of ancestors in the local cemetery. But in some ways, these books are more specific to a time than a place: specific, that is, to the time of blacklisting, McCarthyism, and whisper campaigns. And of course, these were all symptoms of that question Simenon saw Americans asking each other: “Do you belong?”

In the case of Spencer Ashby, the answer to that question is already a little unclear. A teacher at a local exclusive boarding school, he’s become a local artificially, by marrying the daughter of the school’s late headmaster. But when Belle, the daughter of one of his wife’s old friends, staying with the Ashbys temporarily, is found strangled in her bedroom, that artificial link becomes brittle. See, the problem is that Ashby was working in the basement, turning a piece of furniture on his lathe, at the time that Belle must have been murdered.

There’s no evidence of his being involved, no obvious motive. Yet it seems oddly suspicious to everyone. He’s questioned repeatedly by the police … and let go. Is it just a matter of time before they find the evidence? The doubt is enough to make the townspeople keep their distance: “The newspaper dealer was gaping at him as if he came from another planet; and two customers, who only came in for their papers and out again, cast a curious glance in his direction.”

And more than that — and this is really where Simenon excels in his dissections of his protagonists’ psyches — Ashby begins to doubt himself. “Why, not being guilty of anything, did he have a feeling of guilt?” The fragile props of his comfortable life begin to weaken, to give way. Whether Ashby has already committed some sin or only committed the sin of inaction, his self-doubt ultimately becomes a propelling force and drives him forever out of his comfortable inertia. Simenon plays out his drama quietly, subtly, simplying adding one straw after another until something catastrophic happens.

• Les Frères Rico (1952); first published in English as The Brothers Rico (1954), translated by Ernst Pawel.

The Brothers Rico demonstrates that Simenon had learned quite a bit about the workings of organized crime during his time in the U.S.. Eddie Rico is, to all appearances, a prosperous fruit and vegetable broker somewhere in central Florida. In reality, he’s a local boss, running the gambling and prostitution operations in his area while keeping the local sheriff on his payroll. It’s a nice, quiet affair, one that keeps him in good with the big bosses in New York without forcing him to get his hands dirty.

Eddie doesn’t really have the appetite for the rough side of the business: “He was never armed. The only gun he owned was in the drawer of his night table. As for fighting, he had too much of a horror of blows and of blood for that. He had fought but once in his his, when he was sixteen, and the blood running from his nose had made him sick.”

His brothers Gino and Tony, on the other hand, are suspected of being involved in a hit on a mob boss in Brooklyn. Which becomes a problem for Eddie when Gino shows up in Florida (note the parallel with The Bottom of the Bottle). He soon disappears again after realizing that Eddie is too afraid of his higher-ups to take a risk. Unfortunately, those higher-ups then enlist Eddie in tracking down his brothers.

Eddie knows that he’s playing the Judas goat. All he has to do is locate at least one of his brothers and then step out of the way and let the professionals do the rest: “It was routine. Long ago this kind of operation had been perfected like the rest, and by now they were performed according to an almost inalterable ritual. It was best to have executioners who, coming from elsewhere, were unknown in this area.” So, he does as he’s told, knowing he’ll be able to return to his quiet, comfortable life in Florida. Only without his soul: no one gets away with murder in a Simenon, even if by proxy.

The Brothers Rico was filmed in 1957, directed by Phil Karlson and starring Richard Conte as Eddie Rico.

• Feux rouges (1953); first published in English as The Hitchhiker (1957) and Red Lights (1967), translated by Norman Denny.

Red Lights is Simenon’s version of The Lost Weekend. Steve Hogan meets his wife for a couple of drinks before they hit the road one Friday evening, intending to pick up their kids from summer camp in New England. But it’s hot and rainy and the traffic is terrible and Steve just needs a drink or two more to get him through hours of sitting in traffic. And so he stops at a roadside bar.

The problem is, Steve is a blackout drunk. Or, as he puts it, “he goes into a tunnel”: “an expression of his own, for his private use, which he never used in talking to anyone else, least of all to his wife.” His wife refuses to go along and heads to take a Greyhound bus to the camp. Steve ignores her, walks into the bar, and the next morning, wakes up on the roadside in his car with a flat tire, his trunk rifled through, and a vague memory of having given a ride to an ex-con named Sid.

What’s worse, he has no idea where his wife is. And that’s where the nightmare really begins. Once again, Simenon looks behind the façade of the happy, normal American life:

For thirty-two years, nearly thirty-three, he had been an honest man; he had followed the tracks, as he had proclaimed last night with so much vehemence, being a good son, good student, employee, husband, father, and the owner of a house on Long Island; he had never broken any law, never been summoned before any court and every Sunday morning he had gone to church with his family. He was a happy man. He lacked nothing.

Then where did they come from, all those things he said when he’d had a drink too many and started by attacking Nancy before assailing society as a whole? They had to spring from somewhere. The same phenomenon occurred each time, and each time his rebellion followed exactly the same course.

For Simenon, a momentary lapse of judgment is never an isolated incident. There is always an underlying flaw, some fundamental character defect that just needs the right — or the wrong — set of circumstances to reveal its full capacity for destruction.

• Crime impuni (1954); first published in English as The Fugitive (1955), translated by Louise Varèse.

The Fugitive, which has also been published as Account Unsettled is only part romans Américains. The first half is set in Simenon’s native city of Liege in Belgium. Elie, a student rooming with Madame Lange and her daughter, becomes obsessed with revenge when a Romanian student named Michel Zograffi moves in and becomes the pampered pet of the household — and the daughter’s lover. Elie plots to murder the man and flees the city when he thinks he has. After years on the run, he makes his way to Bisbee, Arizona, where he runs the town’s best hotel as Mr. Craig. The plot hinges on the highly improbable coincidence that Michel (now Michael) Zograffi one day wanders in, bearing the scars of the murder attempt but now a wealthy investor come to bail out Bisbee.

The most plausible element of the story draws upon Simenon’s observations of the copper mining business in Bisbee, which then centered on the Copper Queen Mine. By the late 1940s, conventional tunnel mining was proving unproductive and open pit mining had not yet begun. Simenon postulated the collapse of the mine and the town:

It was as though the city were dying, the tip-trucks that at certain places ran along cables over the streets were now stationary near the pylons and the four tall oven chimneys at the far end of the valley no longer wore their crowns of greenish smoke.

It happened from one day to the next when the machines, which for twenty years had been boring into the red earth of the mountain, scooping out a gigantic crater, and uncovered a subterranean lake, the existence of which no one had suspected.

Bisbee was able to postpone its decline for a few decades by switching to open pit mining, but the city now relies more on tourism than industry to survive. As far as the book itself, however, I’d rate it the weakest of the lot, a story that might have fared better had Simenon left his characters on the other side of the Atlantic.

• L’Horloger d’Everton (1954); first published in English as The Watchmaker of Everton (1957) and The Clockmaker (1977), translated by Norman Denny.

In The Watchmaker of Everton, Simenon’s favored theme of guilt through inaction is played out in the form of a good father and a bad son. Dave Galloway, the quiet watch repairman of the title, a single father, learns that his son Ben and his girlfriend have stolen a car, and killed its driver, and run off into the night. When Ben is eventually caught and arrested several states away, he shows no remorse and no interest in talking to his father. Which, of course, leads the police — and Galloway’s neighbors — to wonder: how could a father not know he was raising a monster? “Do you know your son well, Mr. Galloway?” the police ask. Was he perhaps not quite the dutiful father everyone thought he was? And if so, what else might he be guilty of?

Galloway asks himself the same questions. Was this due, in part, to the fact that his own father had died when he was young, that he’d hated the stepfather his mother married? Did his flaws drive off Ben’s mother when the boy was just a toddler? The Watchmaker of Everton is an almost agonizing example of Simenon’s gift for pulling on one well-chosen loose thread.

Bertrand Tavernier filmed the novel as L’Horloger de Saint-Paul starring Philippe Noiret in 1974.

• La Boule noire (1955); first published in English as The Rules of the Game (1988), translated by Howard Curtis.

Walter Higgins, manager of the local supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds his application to the local country club has been rejected — for the second time. Higgins understands the real message behind this decision: “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community.” He begins to question everything around him, begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back.

And, of course, this being Simenon, there are reasons why Higgins might be insecure about his place in the community. Or rather, one reason: he was born poor. He grew up in a tenement, often having to fend for himself while his mother went out drinking. His real fear is that the country club men can smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.

Unlike P.M. Ashbridge or Eddie Rico, Walter Higgins doesn’t fall apart through this crisis. His resolution is more French than American: he falls into cynicism:

He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game — like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.

But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game.

• La main (1968); first published in English as The Man on the Bench in the Barn (1970), translated by Moura Budberg. Also published as The Hand (2016), translated by Linda Coverdale.

Written over a decade after Simenon left the U.S., The Man on the Bench in the Barn takes the theme of guilt by inertia of Belle and refines it down to a cold existential minimalism. Two couples get stuck in a blizzard near one of their houses. One of the men gets separated from the other three and doesn’t make it to the house. After some wait, the other husband — Donald Dodd (another lawyer (viz. P. M. Ashbridge), another artificial local (viz. Spencer Ashby)) — is sent to look for him. Already exhausted, he quickly gives up. But rather than simply return and admit his failure, he enters the barn near his house, where he sits for an hour or so, smoking.

“All the time I had been in the barn, on the red bench, I had chain-smoked, lighting one cigarette after another, dropping the butts
on the ground and stamping them out with my foot. I had smoked at least ten.” That’s it. That’s the sum of his crime. Except that when the storm abates and the authorities are notified, Dodd goes back to the barn and see that the cigarette butts are gone. Which can only mean one thing: his wife knows.

And that is all Simenon needs to let the unraveling begin. For Dodd has built around him the same façade that Maigret had detected in Arizona: “It made him think of too tidy a garment, too well washed and pressed.” In Dodd’s case — and he is only first-person narrator I’ve encountered in a Simenon — “The truth is that I wanted to have everything run smoothly and orderly around me.”

David Hare adapted The Man on the Bench in the Barn for the stage as The Red Barn in 2016.

The sum of Simenon’s Romans Américains, one could argue, is enough to earn him a place among the best American novelists of his generation. He could certainly claim to be — to steal something A. J. Liebling once said of himself — faster than anyone better and better than anyone faster. And we have to look back to Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter to find such bitter criticism of American mores and concepts of sin. It’s a shame that it’s a body of work still so incompletely represented in English.

Note: Simenon’s English language publishers have long been fond of bundling his books together. As a result, there are a number of compilations worth looking for if you’re interested in reading any of these novels:

  • Violent Ends, comprising Belle and The Brothers Rico. Hamish Hamilton, 1954.
  • Tidal Wave, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, and The Bottom of the Bottle. Doubleday, 1954.
  • Danger Ahead, comprising Red Lights and The Watchmaker of Everton. Hamish Hamilton, 1955.
  • An American Omnibus, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, The Hitchhiker, and The Watchmaker of Everton. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.

Jonathan Walker on Charles Williams’ Supernatural Thrillers

This is a guest post by Jonathan Walker, whose latest novel, The Angels of L19, is published this month by Weatherglass Books

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Charles Williams, 1935.
Charles Williams, 1935.

Charles Williams was a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and, like them, a member of the legendary Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. Gervel Lindop’s recent biography of Williams therefore refers to him as the ‘Third Inking’, while Sørina Higgins’s blog, dedicated to his life and work, calls him ‘The Oddest Inkling’. Exactly how odd is something revealed in detail by Lindop’s biography, which I strongly recommend. Williams had a reputation for saintliness in his own lifetime, but much of his private life was more complicated than that reputation suggests, and modern fundamentalists attracted by his association with the Inklings might find his interest in magic and hermeticism disconcerting.

Unlike Lewis and Tolkien, Williams was not an academic, and attended the Inklings’ meetings for the most part only as a visitor to Oxford. His background was also quite different to theirs: he was from a lower middle-class family whose financial difficulties meant he had to drop out of the University of London after a year and take a menial job in the printing industry, though he managed to rise and become an editor at the London offices of the Oxford University Press. He was also a teacher – but he lectured in what would now be called FE: night-school classes for adult learners. (Only towards the end of his life, when the OUP had moved its offices back to Oxford during the war, did he give a series of lectures on Milton at the university, arranged by Lewis and Tolkien).

Williams wrote works of popular history for OUP, as well as poetry often inspired by Arthurian myth. But his novels, ‘supernatural thrillers’ published by T.S. Eliot at Faber, were his greatest success. The Eliot connection suggests the range of Williams’s interests: unlike Lewis and Tolkien, he was not hostile to literary modernism per se.

Though Williams is now relatively obscure – at least compared to his more famous friends – his novels pioneered a third model for fantasy writers to complement those of alternate, secondary worlds (Tolkien) or portal fantasies (Lewis). Lewis himself explains how this third model worked in a short talk he gave on Williams’s novels. These books, he said, mix:

what some people call the realistic, and the fantastic. I’d rather fall back on an older critical terminology and say that they mix the Probable and the Marvellous. We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs. On the other hand, we also meet the supernatural—ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts. … [T]his is not a mixture of two literary kinds. … Williams is really writing a third kind of book, … in which we begin by saying, ‘Let us suppose that this everyday world were … invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.’

In a portal fantasy like Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, characters from our world enter another through a magical gateway such as Professor Kirke’s wardrobe. In Williams’s stories, by contrast, representatives from other realities enters ours. In some respects his stories therefore resemble weird fiction, which is also preoccupied with the terrifying consequences of a ‘violation of frontier’. Except that for Williams these intrusions were not really violations at all. As Eliot wrote in his introduction to Williams’s final novel, All Hallows’ Eve, ‘For [him] there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. …. To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural’.

Cover of first UK edition of Descent Into Hell
Cover of first UK edition of Descent Into Hell (1937).

I confess that my interest in Williams is really only in his last two (and best) novels, Descent into Hell (1937), and the posthumously published All Hallows’ Eve (1945): I haven’t read any of the others, and the poetry does not appeal to me at all. But these two books are quite remarkable – not least for what they do with the idea of hell and the afterlife.

Williams is undoubtedly an odd stylist: his sentences are often crabbed and convoluted, not helped by his habit of inventing neologisms for religious or theological concepts in an attempt to avoid triggering preconceptions or taking sides in pre-existing doctrinal controversies. But he can also be a writer of great power, peculiarly alive to the far-reaching consequences of seemingly small moral choices.

In Descent into Hell, the titular journey is embarked upon by a historian, Lawrence Wentworth, who runs a discussion group for young people in his village. His downfall begins with his inability to accept that Adela, a woman from that group, has no romantic interest in him. Wentworth therefore welcomes the attentions of a succubus, a spirit form of Adela, who promises to submit to his every whim. For a fantasy writer, Williams here is peculiarly hostile to fantasy, at least when it takes the form of a denial of reality – worse, a denial of Kant’s moral imperative, the recognition that others have their own autonomy and desires independent of our own.

At the same time, Wentworth is also unable to admit to a professional error – the wound to his amour propre is too great for him to bear – and both these choices seal his fate. The hell that he enters, while still alive, is one where, having refused to accept his real relations to others and his obligations to the professional community to which he belongs, he is left alone. But not merely alone. Language is necessarily social: to speak implies an interlocutor. Without the willingness to fully imagine such an interlocutor, language itself collapses, and beyond that, even the possibility of associating things in meaningful patterns.

It is a hell of solipsism. The following passage comes from the extraordinary final paragraphs of the novel:

Then everything at which he was looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he also was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing together, because in this place they drew towards each other from the more awful repulsion of the void. But fast as they went they never reached one another, for out of the point that was not he there expanded an anarchy of unintelligible shapes and hid it, and he knew it had gone out, expiring in the emptiness before it reached him. The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels of black and white. He had forgotten the name of them, but somewhere at some time he had thought he knew similar forms and they had had names. … There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void.

Wentworth is a living character who enters hell prematurely. Descent into Hell also features a dead character – a ghost, in effect – a wretched suicide who lingers around the site of his death in a kind of grey limbo. Near but not in the living world, he is as alone as he felt in life. But not as alone as Wentworth, since he is still able to perceive – to receive – the attention of a sympathetic woman, herself close to death, who reaches out to him.

Cover of first UK edition of All Hallows Eve
Cover of first UK edition of All Hallows Eve (1945).

This kind of provisional limbo state also appears in All Hallows’ Eve, and it suggests Williams’s willingness to depart from Christian orthodoxy. In traditional Christian thought, death offers a kind of terminal end point beyond which moral choice is not possible. One’s eternal fate is fixed at the moment before death. (Even if one believes in purgatory, this does not change one’s ultimate fate: everyone in purgatory will ultimately attain heaven; no one in hell will).

In these two novels, by contrast, not only is hell a place to which you condemn yourself and can enter before you die, but – for those who retain some attachment to life even after their death – moral choice is still possible. Ghosts are, in effect, invited to reconsider the meaning of their life: now that it is over, with what in their earthy existence do they wish to identify themselves? And what do they wish to transcend? Do they wish to relive and reaffirm their most selfish impulses? Or do they want to search within their histories for flickers of generosity and love, however small and faltering these might be? And they can be very small indeed: the redemption of one of Williams’ ghostly characters begins with her remembering her husband getting up in the night to fetch her a glass of water.

Williams’s novels are full of more obvious and dramatic supernatural elements: the succubus, a doppelganger, a sinister cult leader bent on world domination, the Holy Grail, a magical Tarot deck – but for me the most powerful aspect of his fantasy is the way it magnifies the consequences of seemingly small and ordinary choices we make in our earthly lives and assigns to them a cosmic and eternal significance.

Jonathan Walker
Jonathan Walker grew up in Liverpool, but has lived in Glasgow, Cambridge, Swansea, Canterbury, Venice, Sydney and Melbourne. He is the author of a biography of a seventeenth-century Venetian spy, Pistols! Treason! Murder!, and a fantasy novel set in an alternate version of Venice, Five Wounds. His latest novel is a work of weird fiction set in 1980s Liverpool: The Angels of L19, published by Weatherglass Books. He has doctorates in history and creative writing.

That Rascal Paul de Kock

An illustration from a French edition of the works of Paul de Kock
An illustration from a French edition of the works of Paul de Kock.

“A__ has been trying to inoculate me with Paul de Kock, who, she assures me, is a moral writer, and with whose books our tables, chairs, sofas, and beds, are covered, as with the unclean plagues of Egypt,” the actress Fanny Kemble wrote her friend Harriet Martineau in 1842. “They are very clever, very funny, very dirty, abominably immoral, and I do not think I can read any more of them; for though I confess to having laughed till my sides ached over some parts of what I read, I was, upon reflection and upon the whole, disgusted and displeased.”

Kemble seems to have shared the opinion of many literate people of her time when it came to the man who was, for much of the 19th Century, France’s most popular novelist. Many were those who enjoyed his books. Fewer were those who would praise it. “The French writer whose works are best known in England is Monsieur Paul de Kock,” wrote William Thackeray in 1841. But, he cautioned, “Talk to a French educated gentleman about this author, and he shrugs his shoulders, and says it is pitoyable.” “Paul de Kock? he is very witty,” a woman once said to Jane Carlyle. “Yes, but also very indecent; and my uncle would not relish indecencies read aloud to him by his daughters.” Ralph Waldo Emerson admitted to having read one of de Kock’s stories, but hastened to add, “Its fun is so low that I will never lend it.”

Who was this controversial figure, whose books were considered as addictive and illicit as heroin? Well, he was a man whose entire life was consumed in his work. Starting with his first novel, L’Enfant de ma femme, published in 1811 when he was just 18, he proceeded to write, according to one biographer “de façon industrielle ensuite un roman en un mois chaque année” [in an industrial fashion followed one novel a month each year). Born in Paris, he claimed to have rarely left the city and spent most of his days at his desk in his house on the Boulevard St. Martin. The one luxury he allowed himself as the years passed was to purchase a house protected by high walls from the noise of the streets and curiosity of passers-by.

Paul de Kock's study, looking out on the Boulevard St. Martin. Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby & Co. edition of The Memoirs of Paul de Kock
Paul de Kock’s study, looking out on the Boulevard St. Martin. Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby & Co. edition of The Memoirs of Paul de Kock.

At first, however, the streets of Paris served as one of his primary inspirations. His book of essays, Scenes of Parisian Life, closes with a piece titled “Paris from My Window,” in which he records the life he observes on the boulevard in front of his house. Around two P.M., he notices an elderly couple promenading along. It is M. Mollet and his wife:

M. Mollet is a short, full-bodied, red-faced, knock-kneed man who constantly wears an entire suit of flannel and above that two shirts, thin drawers, thick woollen trousers, two waistcoats, a coat, a frock coat and an overcoat. You can understand that this enormous mass moves only with difficulty. When M. Mollet wants to get his handkerchief out of his pocket, he begins by sighing, then he stops, lets go of his wife’s arm, gives her his cane to hold, and tries to make use of his hands; but he is never quite certain in which of his pockets he has put his handkerchief, and the examination is often so long that Madame Mollet ends by lending her handkerchief to her husband, who takes it with a grateful look and murmurs, “Thank you, dearest!”

By 1830, he had surpassed the likes of Balzac in terms of popularity. His books typically sold 2-3,000 copies, while Balzac, Georges Sand, and Eugene Sue were pleased to sell more than 1,000 of theirs. “There never was an author more popular in the real meaning of the word,” Théophile Gautier later wrote. “He was read by everybody, by the statesman as well as by the commercial traveller and the schoolboy, by the great ladies in society and by the grisettes.” De Kock’s knowledge of the everyday life of Parisians earned the admiration not just of his readers but of some of his colleagues. He “had the advantage of being absolutely like his readers,” argued Gautier. “He shared their ideas, their opinions, their prejudices, their feelings.” In fact, when the works of Charles Dickens first began to be published in France, his French publisher invoked the name of Paul de Kock in advertisements to gain the confidence of readers.

A caricature of Paul de Kock from 1842.
A caricature of Paul de Kock from 1842.

In her book Mastering the Marketplace: Book Subtitle: Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France, Anne O’Neil-Henry, one of the few academics in recent decades to take an interest in de Kock, calls him “the July Monarchy’s bourgeois writer par excellence,” but acknowledges that “by the 1830s his name carried a specific connotation: ‘Paul de Kock’ signified ‘bad’ literature, a sort of … marker of poor taste.” O’Neil-Henry argues that this is missing the point. “While critics around 1830 began to use his name synonymously with lowbrow literature, many of their reviews evinced an appreciation of some elements of his work and recognition of his successful command of the taste of modern readers.” “Simply put,” she writes, “’Paul de Kock’ did not always signify ‘Paul de Kock.”

In 1835, the English publisher Marston and Company advertised a collection of de Kock’s works that would be “carefully weeded from the indelicacy and impiety from which scarcely any French work is entirely exempt.” At the same time, however, they boasted that “A more thorough insight into French manners and customs may be acquired from one of de Kock’s novels than from fifty volumes of travels.”

His reputation throughout Europe was, in the mid-19th Century, that of an exceptional novelist. The young Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote his father in 1844, “Paul de Kock is unquestionably the most amusing and the most natural of the novelists. The interest of his works never flags for a moment, and even his pathetic scenes are perfectly true and unaffected.” Leo Tolstoy was a fan.“Don’t tell me any of that nonsense that Paul de Kock is immoral,” he was quoted as saying, “He is more or less what the French call leste and gaulois, free and rough, but he is never immoral.” When the French critic Ferdinand Brunetière visited Pope Leo XIII in the early 1880s, the Pope asked, “And how is the good Paolo de Koko?” In his book Sex Lives of the Popes, Nigel Cawthorne writes that Pope Gregory XVI shared his appreciation for the novelist. Benjamin Disraeli so admired de Kock that he worked an endorsement into his novel Henrietta Temple:

“Have you ever read Paul de Kock’s books?”
“Never,” said Ferdinand.
“What a fortunate man to be arrested ! Now you can read Paul de Kock! By Jove, you are the most lucky fellow I know!”

Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby edition of Adhémar
Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby edition of Adhémar.

De Kock could be counted on to provide entertainment value for money. To judge his merits, I tried That Rascal Gustave, one of the two dozen de Kock novels that were packaged in a mammoth edition published by Mathieson in London in the 1880s and available on the Internet Archive (link).

The book opens with young Gustave de Moranval being caught in a Paris love-nest with an 18-year-old girl from his home village by his uncle. The uncle dismisses the girl with a pay-off and dispatches Gustave to the home of M. de Berly in the Loire Valley with the aim of getting him married off to de Berly’s niece. The niece loves another, however, and Gustave’s roving eye gets him into some awkward situations. There are several incidents involving jumping from windows and having to put on women’s clothes.

In the scene that probably earned the book its scandalous reputation, Gustave finds himself hiding under the bed on the night that the niece and her new husband return to chez de Berly.

They fastened the door, and prepared to retire, so there were no means of escape for him, and he would be only too lucky if he were not discovered, as he could not even be taken for a thief since Aurelia knew him, and thus Julia [Gustave’s amoureux du moment] must be compromised; he made up his mind, therefore, to stay under the bed, happy if no one should turn him out of his hiding place. He lay on his back, hoping that Providence would not allow either monsieur or madame to look under the bed, as timorous souls so frequently do, waiting in perfect silence, without daring to move, and hardly to breathe, trusting that love or chance would enable him to escape.

As the couple prepares for bed, the bride is taken aback at her husband’s insistence on wearing a flannel vest and cotton night-cap, and reminds him of the Bible’s instructions: “When we are married, we must mutually meet each other’s desires, and even forestall them, and it allows us to enjoy the pleasures of marriage by begetting children in our own likeness.” What he then hears “opened his eyes as to the real character of the ‘prude’ he had first met at the residence of M. de Berly. Gustave finally manages to escape in the next chapter, entitled, “Julia Loses Her Beauty and Gustave Loses His Trousers.”

M. Berly falls down and finds himself on top of Gustave, an illustration by George B. Luks from the Quinby edition of <em>That Rascal Gustave</em>.
M. Berly falls down and finds himself on top of Gustave, an illustration by George B. Luks from the Quinby edition of That Rascal Gustave.

The next three years take Gustave on a grand tour of the salons and bedrooms of Spain, Italy, and England. He finds England’s tastes particularly mystifying:

Nobody can care for England who does not find his chief pleasure in horse-riding, cock-fighting, betting, punch, and plum-pudding, and it strikes a Frenchman as very strange to see all the ladies leave the room soon after the dessert is put on the table, whilst the gentlemen remain for such mirth as may be inspired by drinking burnt brandy.

In the end, he finds his way back to his home village, where the young woman he’d been caught with in Paris and born his child and won her way into the uncle’s affection – proving that “that virtue, gentleness, talent, and beauty can well replace birth and wealth.” And they all live happily ever after.

“It was Gustave especially which got me talked about,” de Kock later wrote in his memoirs:

Not in terms of praise by everybody. Oh, no. Many persons found the book rather too coarse, but I for my part declare, and I do so without a blush, that neither at that time nor later, did I feel the slightest remorse for my crime. To speak frankly, come, can you expect a novel called Gustave ou le Mauvais Sujet to have anything in common with Telemaque — unless it be where the son of Ulysses goes to chat, on the sly, in the caves, with the beautiful nymph Eucharis?…. At any rate many ladies were very gracious to me after reading Gustave. Ladies, evidently, who liked bad boys. There used to be ladies of that kind in those days.

To produce at the rate he did, de Kock understandably relied on certain formulas. French critic Jacques Migozzi has described it as, “Playing allegro presto with mistakes, surprises with a narrative or playful function, coincidences, misunderstandings or mystifications, and spicing up his story with burlesque episodes and bantering.” De Kock’s penchant for comedy made him the favorite of many readers. “When the vapours have smothered the sun, and when it rains, as it does always, instead of inhaling charcoal! or leaping from the Pont Neuf,” wrote John Sanderson in his 1838 book, The American in Paris, “I go into a cabinet de lecture, and read Paul de Kock. No author living can carry one so laughingly through a wet day.”

Illustration from an Italian edition of Soeur Anne
Illustration from an Italian edition of Soeur Anne.

There’s a good share of slapstick in That Rascal Gustave, enough to make one wonder why his novels haven’t been mined for more movie scripts. Here, for example, is how Gustave’s village love escapes from one awkward situation:

Susan, on hearing this, put both her legs out of the window, and this time she reached the ground, but she stumbled against Thomas, who knocked up against Mother Lucas, who fell over the greengrocer, who fell over the grocer, and so on. Pushing each other along, they got as far as the chateau, and then they did not push each other any more, and it was just as well, as they might otherwise have fallen into the moat which surrounds it.

At the same time, he could also be counted on to end on a moral note, reinforcing good bourgeois values.

By the time of his death in 1871, de Kock’s reputation had already begun to wane. Part of the problem, according to Gautier, was that he had unwittingly become a historical novelist:

His works contain the description of manners in a civilisation differing as greatly from our own as does that the traces of which are found in Pompeii; his novels, which people read formerly for amusement’s sake, will henceforth be consulted by erudites desirous of recreating life in that old Paris which I knew in my youth and of which the vestiges will soon have vanished…. Some of his novels have the same effect upon me as Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans; I seem to read in them the story of the last of the Parisians, invaded and submerged by American civilisation.

Ironically, it was just about the same time that de Kock’s novels gained traction, if not esteem, among readers outside France. Advertisements of his books began to be found in the pages of magazines from Manchester to Minnetonka, often tweaking his titles to play up their suggestiveness. Thus, Pantalon became Madame Pantaloons; Gustave, ou le mauvais sujet [the bad fellow] became That Rascal Gustave; Le démon de L’Alcove became The Vampire. Others needed no help, though: Cards, Women and Wine; The Courtesan; The Cuckold; Bride of the First Night; Wife, Husband, and Lover.

Article from the Pall Mall Gazette, 1871.
Article from the Pall Mall Gazette, 1871.

Not everyone thought this was a good thing. A bookseller in Liverpool was brought up on charges of trafficking in impure literature for carrying such titles as That Rascal Gustave. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was scandalized to find that a Cincinnati bookstore carried more copies of de Kock’s novels than of his sermons. One English traveler, reporting from Lima, Peru in 1881, lamented that “There was not a single decent edition of Don Quixote to be found in all the shops of the city,” but that there was “a brisk sale for indecent photographs and cheap editions of Paul de Kock novels.” A New England sea captain held the books responsible for the moral decay of many a young sailor: “Cheap novels, which record the imaginary exploits of highwaymen and pirates, constitute the chief entertainment” and “contribute their corrupting influences to poison the minds of hundreds of young and inexperienced sailors, and thus pave their way to those ‘houses of death,’ from which ‘none that go ever return again; neither take they hold of the paths of life.’”

A complete set of the 42-volume edition of the works of Paul de Kock published by Frederick J. Quinby Co., Boston.
A complete set of the 42-volume edition of the works of Paul de Kock published by Frederick J. Quinby Co., Boston.

Yet at almost the same time, several publishers outdid themselves in releasing ornate editions of de Kock’s works. Mathieson & Co. in London, George Barrie & Sons in Philadelphia, and the Jefferson Press and Frederick J. Quinby Company in Boston all published sets of twenty or more volumes. Quinby’s was the most elaborate, with red or teal blue leather bindings, Art nouveau flowers ornamentations, and illustrations by John Sloan, William Glackens, and others. In fact, it was a bit too elaborate, as Quinby only managed to publish 42 of a planned total of 50 volumes before going out of business in 1908.

Ad for a free copy of <em>Gustave</em> with a subscription to Pearson's Magazine.
Ad for a free copy of Gustave with a subscription to Pearson’s Magazine.

By the turn of the 20th Century, however, de Kock’s name had become synonymous for lowbrow in most English-speaking countries. He pops up several times in 1904 Dublin as depicted in Joyce’s Ulysses. “One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock, with a loud proud knocker, with a cock carracarracarra cock.” Molly Bloom recalls that her first lover “offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.” Yet he’d also become tame enough for Pearson’s Magazine to advertise an edition of That Rascal Gustave as a freebie with new subscriptions and the Boston Globe to serialize one of his novels, The Maid of Belleville, on the front page of its Sunday magazine in 1917.

Today, if we set aside over-priced print on demand reprints of his ancient editions, the works of Paul de Kock haven’t seen a new English edition (or translation) in at least a century. Even among bibliophiles, his work is now so devalued that a complete set of the Quinby edition in excellent condition was sold recently at auction for little more than $10 a volume. While he’s no candidate for elevation to the same shelf as Balzac or Flaubert, somewhere in his pile of hundreds of titles, there must be a few that merit rediscovery as, say, a 19th Century French counterpart to P.G. Wodehouse or some other prolific comic master. Anyone up for a deep-dive?

The Tragedies of Isabel Bolton

Covers of In the Days of Thy Youth and Under Gemini, plus picture of Mary and Grace Miller in 1886.

Isabel Bolton floats through the letters and memoirs of other writers like a ghost. “Isabel Bolton was there,” the poet Louise Bogan wrote May Sarton about a cocktail party in 1954: “A strange and rather pathetic figure, who is resigning herself to gradual blindness.” Edward Field recalls seeing her at the Yaddo writers’ colony around the same time, a tall elderly woman in a white dress and an outsized sun bonnet. At the time, Field was in his early thirties; she was in her seventies.

The other writers at Yaddo must have felt they had little in common with this aloof woman born in another century. Those who recognized her name knew it from the critical success of her three novels: Do I Wake or Sleep? (1946); The Christmas Tree (1949); and Many Mansions (1952), which had been nominated for the National Book Award. Far fewer knew that it was a pseudonym.

By the time she published her first novel as Isabel Bolton, Mary Britton Miller had become accustomed to being an outsider. But she’d started at the center of American society, born at the Madison Avenue mansion of her father Charles Miller, a prominent New York lawyer, and his wife Grace (née Rumrill). Charles, considered a rising star on Wall Street, was largely a self-made man, having overcome the scandal of his father’s suicide in 1847.

From the <em>New York Daily Herald</em>, 16 March 1847.
From the New York Daily Herald, 16 March 1847.

It was through Grace Rumrill that the Millers gained most of their status. Her father was a prosperous manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts and her brother James was a vice president of the Boston and Albany Railroad, having married the daughter of its founder, Chester Chapin. James and his father-in-law also founded and were on the board of the Chapin National Bank in Springfield. With a large summer house on the shore of Long Island Sound in New London, Connecticut and a mansion in Springfield, James Rumrill and his wife Anna Chapin Rumrill were among the wealthiest and most influential members of New England society.

Mary Miller and her identical twin sister Grace joined two older brothers and one sister in a bustling household full of servants that followed the common routine of autumns, winters, and springs in the city and long summers at the Rumrill-Chapin estates in New London. It was there, while playing tennis at his brother-in-law’s house that Charles Miller fell ill in August 1887, just two weeks after Mary and little Grace’s fourth birthday. Pneumonia quickly set in. Tending to her husband, Grace also became ill, and the two died within hours of each other a few days later.

Article on the deaths of Charles and Grace Miller from the Fall River Daily Evening News, 22 August 1887.
From the Fall River Daily Evening News, 22 August 1887.

Their deaths not only left their children orphans but paupers. Having rushed back from vacation in France upon receiving the news, James Rumrill was appointed executor and soon discovered that Charles Miller’s practice was based largely on goodwill and promissory notes. He settled matters with his brother-in-law’s creditors and took the children to Springfield to live with his mother. Rebecca Rumrill tried her best, but she was in her late seventies and in poor health and died a little over two years after the five Millers’ arrival.

Writing as Isabel Bolton eighty years later in her memoir Under Gemini, Mary recreated the impression her death left on the twins:

Everything was at sixes and sevens. Grandma had gone. We could no longer find her in the library sitting beside the fire swinging her slipper on the end of her great toe. We could not find her in her room or in the dining room. There was a feeling among us all that we were not so safe and sheltered as before.

With Grandmother Rumrill gone, the children became the wards of James Rumrill and his wife Anna. James, who Mary remembered as “the most remarkable miniature gentleman anyone could imagine,” dapper and full of good humor, left the real decision making to Anna. She, in contrast, loomed over them like the judge in the supreme court of their lives. “Whatever charm and geniality she might have had,” Mary recalled, “was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed.”

Anna saw the Miller children as a problem to be solved. She had no desire to bring them into her fine house on the hill above Springfield, so Anna hired a former teacher to move in as their custodian. She was Desire Aurelia Rogers. As Mary later wrote,

Desire — who could have thought up a better name for her? What hopes, what dreams she must have had before she came to live with us. What lovely pictures must have floated and dissolved and built themselves again in that sad and hungry heart.

Unfortunately, Desire Rogers was outnumbered and outgunned. The five Miller children buzzed with more energy than she could match. The boys mocked her, the older sister Rebecca ignored her, and the twins alternated between tormenting and adoring her. She learned to trust their uncle’s characterization of them as “sprigs of Satan.” Life at the house on Maple Street became more and more anarchic. And Miss Rogers had no hope of support from Anna Rumrill, whose only interest was in keeping the orphans at arm’s length.

When Philip, the oldest of the orphans, was ready to go to college, Aunt Anna saw her opportunity to push the Millers even farther to the margins of her life. James arranged for Philip to attend his alma mater, Harvard (which continues to offer a James A. Rumrill scholarship) and Anna convinced her brother to take James, the younger Miller son, to Europe for a year’s study at a preparatory school in Geneva. Rebecca was to be sent to live and study with a music teacher in New York. The twins learned of these decisions when they returned home from school one day and found a sign reading, “THIS PROPERTY TO BE SOLD” planted on their front lawn.

They were to be packed off even further from Springfield than Geneva: Long Island. Mary and Grace, then just short of 14, were sent to live with a family in Quogue, on the south shore of Long Island. Though sad at being parted from Miss Rogers, they enjoyed their summer freedom, going off together around the countryside or swimming in the large lagoon.

Just ten days after their 14th birthday, while swimming at the mouth of the lagoon, they were caught in the current of the outgoing tide and were pulled away from their rowboat. They both struggled to swim back to the boat, but as Mary recalled in Under Gemini,

… this we saw was hopeless, a futile thing to do — to waste strength necessary to swim ashore. We were lost and terrified — Grace’s strength already spent. Was she clinging to me? No, she was not, she was still beside me in the water, swimming still. What was it she was saying? Clearly, I heard her voice; as though I myself were speaking the words, she said, “My darling Mary, how I love you….”

"Miss Grace Miller Drowned," from the Brooklyn Standard Union, 14 August 1897.
From the Brooklyn Standard Union, 14 August 1897.

News of Grace’s drowning made headlines in New York papers the next day. It left a permanent scar on Mary’s being. She had spent fourteen years with more than a constant companion. As she wrote in Under Gemini, as identical twins, Mary and Grace saw themselves as a single collective being:

Attuned to the same vibrations, with nerves that responded to the same dissonances and harmonies, we were one in body and in soul. What happened to one of us happened at the same instant to the other and both of us recognized exactly how each experience had registered in the other’s heart and mind. It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours.

The death of her parents and the death of her sister Grace were the tragedies that bookended Mary Miller’s childhood. Together they had an impact so profound that she wrote the story of these events and the years between twice.

Her first account, published as Mary Britton Miller, was In the Days of Thy Youth (1943). Reviewers lumped the book in with Life with Father and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, both much more nostalgic and comical accounts of life in the 1890s. The Chicago Tribune’s critic called the book “Charming, incredibly egotistical, beautifully remote,” but also “as antidiluvian as the dinosaur.” In a review titled “Gilt Gingerbread”, the New York Times recommended it mostly “For those who want to escape the headlines of today.”

Isabel Bolton and Do I Wake or Sleep
Mary Britton Miller, around 1948, and the cover of Do I Wake or Sleep.

Unhappy that the book “made no ripples in the pond,” Bolton took a friend’s suggestion and adopted the pseudonym of Isabel Bolton for her next novel. It proved a lucky choice. Do I Wake or Sleep was praised as one of the best novels of its decade. Edmund Wilson reportedly fell for his fantasy of the young, pretty, and talented Isabel Bolton and was nonplussed when the stately older woman, walking with the aid of a cane, approached the bench where they’d arranged to meet in Central Park and introduced herself.

Her subsequent novels, The Christmas Tree and Many Mansions, were equally praised. Though some critics such as Stanley Edgar Hyman dismissed the acclaim for Bolton’s work as an aberration, most agreed with Diana Trilling that she was one of, if not the best, “woman writer of fiction in this country today.” Rose Field, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, ranked her alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Ann Porter, and Kay Boyle. “Miss Bolton’s talent is clear,” she wrote.

None of the people applauding the arrival of Isabel Bolton, from what I can determine, bothered to learn anything about Mary Miller. There was no mention of the several volumes of poetry, mainly sentimental in nature, she had published earlier nor did anyone give In the Days of Thy Youth a second look. They certainly didn’t know that the tragedies that framed that story came from her own life or that her sister’s drowning in 1897 did not mark the end of her woes.

Alone after Grace’s death, Mary attended a New England girls’ boarding school and then was shipped off to Europe to stay with her cousin Marguerite Chapin, who was studying music in Paris. It’s not clear if her aunt Anna Chapin Rumrill had any more intent than to get her out of the way. Mary may have returned to Europe a few years later, spending time in Italy where Marguerite, having married Price Roffrello Caetani, was now, officially, Princess of Bassiano and Duchess of Sermoneta.

Edward Field claims there were rumors that Mary had become pregnant while in Italy and given birth to an illegitimate child that she gave up for adoption. I’ve found nothing to substantiate this. Laurie Dennett barely mentions Mary in her 2016 book An American Princess, The Remarkable Life of Marguerite Chapin Caetani, even though the two cousins remained in touch through the decades and Marguerite was to publish one of Mary’s stories in an early volume of her literary journal Botteghe Oscure.

Somewhere in her mid-twenties, Mary decided to settle in New York City, taking an apartment in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood that would be her home for the rest of her life. She became active in social reform and led a study for the Consumer’s League of the conditions of children working in homes in New York slums. In her report, she wrote that “It is no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of young children in New York who ought to be in school who are hidden away in East Side tenements by their parents and often locked in so that they may be forced to do the awful home work outside factories, which the present laws do not forbid.” The situation, she argued, was effectively a sanctioned form of slavery.

From the <em>Daily People</em>, 30 December 1912.
From the Daily People, 30 December 1912.

After their grandmother’s house in Springfield was sold and the Miller children sent their separate ways, the siblings never found another home. Philip, the eldest, took a law degree and moved to Illinois, though he eventually returned to New York to join the prestigious Sullivan, Cromwell law firm. Rebecca married a Canadian doctor, Edward Farrell, and lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia for years.

"Springfield Bank President a Suicide," from the Hartford, Connecticut Courant, 11 May 1916.
From the Hartford, Connecticut Courant, 11 May 1916.

James, the younger of the two boys, had been taken under the Chapin wing and brought up through the ranks of the family bank in Springfield after graduating from Harvard. In 1915, he became president of the bank and was beginning to exert some influence in Massachusetts state politics. Within a year, however, he suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized at Butler Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. He eventually recovered enough that he was allowed to go for walks on his own. Early on the afternoon of 11 May 1916, a gardener at the Swan Point Cemetery next door found his body with a revolver laying nearby. Like his grandfather Ezra Miller, he’d taken his life with a shot to the head.

Though the three remaining children were reunited in the early 1920s when Rebecca returned to New York City and her husband took a position on the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, tragedy continued to haunt their lives. Edward Farrell was struck by an attack of peritonitis and died before he could be operated on. Rebecca suffered from a crippling form of depression and died a few years later at the Home for Incurables in the Bronx.

Cover of Menagerie by Mary Britton Miller (1928)

When she was in her forties, Mary became writing poetry. Most of her poems were simple and transparent, written for children. Her first book, Menagerie (1928), was a collection about animals illustrated with woodcuts by Helen Sewell. Her poem “Cat” (“The black cat yawns/Opens her jaws,/Stretches her legs,/And shows her claws.”) has been reprinted numerous times in anthologies of cat poems. Even after her success as Isabel Bolton, she continued to publish collections of children’s poems, the last, Listen — the Birds appearing in 1961.

The remainder of her poetry was ethereal and religious, often invoking Jesus or the spirit. If there is a common theme through these poems, it is loss. In one of her “Stanzas to Spring” in Intrepid Bird (1934), for example, she cannot greet the season without some dread:

My eyes are worn with watching, and my heart is filled
With unavailing knowledge. Underneath your bough
Too much extortionate trust has been expelled
For aught but apprehension to invade me now

Her reservations about looking back are clearest in “On Remembering One’s Childhood”:

If to these fonts and springs
That joyed my soul
When I was young
I could return
To be made whole again,
I would discover
Mint and fern
And cresses green
And flowers fresh and fair —
But should I dip my hand
Into the candid stream
What flower or leaf or fern
Would I recover there?

Reading this in light of her own experiences, one has to wonder if Mary Britton Miller ever fully recovered from the losses of her childhood.

She was forty when she took up poetry, sixty when she took up fiction. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she took up prose. For In the Days of Thy Youth is fact with the names changed and the occasional assistance of an omniscient narrator. Dedicated to “G. R. M.” (Grace Rumrill Miller, her drowned sister), the book opens with the death of their parents as perceived by the four-year-old twins. At first, there is only the commotion, the appearance of unknown relatives, the murmurs in the parlour. The adults try to explain the situation:

From their faces and the tones in which they spoke the twins got a sense that the world was coming to a sudden end, that a calamity so dire was about to overtake them that everything to which they were accustomed, light, air, food, shelter, the very business of living with these good things — was about to be whisked away from them. So when they finally realized that what they were being told was that their parents — their mother, their father were dead, “tot,” it did not seem so very terrible.

In the Days of Thy Youth is the story of the orphaned Millers (here called Marshalls) vs. the powerful Chapins (and their Rumrill followers), a contest doomed from the start. Although the little girls are relieved to be welcomed by their familiar grandmother, they can sense that the odds are against them. “Five orphan children, a bereaved old lady. You couldn’t set this outfit up against these Arnolds [the Chapins] who always managed to marry the right people and who felt in each other’s society such boundless assurance, energy and joviality.”

Their security grows more fragile with their grandmother dies. The twins find only a morbid pride to hold up in the face of their comfortable, better-off cousins:

“You have never had a funeral in your house.”
No,” said Julia regretfully, she had not, and she continued to stare.
“We’ve had three,” said the twins, lording it over Julia.

To the Chapins, on the other hand, the orphans are a cross they are only happy to bear when it allows them the leverage of superior self-righteousness over their neighbors. Otherwise, they are sure to make it “as obvious as a brass band” to the children “that they were a chronic source of trouble and responsibility.”

The fact that reviewers compared In the Days of Thy Youth to light-hearted memoirs of the “Gay Nineties” shows how little they understood it. Mary may have described wonderful summer days playing on the wide lawns of the Chapin/Rumrill estates on the shore of Long Island Sound, but she never forgot that the Millers were poor relations hosted with reluctance and some suspicion. The children might be invited to elaborate Christmas feasts at the Chapin mansion in Springfield, but then find themselves standing in the entrance hall afterward, abandoned. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” exclaims one relative. “Why didn’t you go home?” “We didn’t go home because nobody sent for us,” Philip replies.

Mary was able to see the potential for psychological devastation in the Chapins’ treatment of the Miller children and their concerns through their Aunt Anna’s effect on their guardian, Miss Rogers [the one name unchanged in this book]. When the twins are told that their grandmother’s house is being sold and their siblings farmed out to the care of others, they see in an instant the consequence for her:

They knew that from the moment she passed over the threshold of life with them at Maple Street Aunty Dee would cease to exist as a substantial human being. She would be Miss Nobody, Miss Nowhere, Miss Nothing-at-all. She’d be a ghost, calling on other ghosts to see, to hear, to speak to her. Nothing she said or did or even thought would be real, and nobody in any way connected with the bitter, defeated creature locked up inside this phantom lady could communicate with her. They might put out their hands to touch her, but to no avail. Miss Rogers would be ghost — wholly ghost.

By the time she was writing this, Mary was becoming something of a phantom in the eyes of others herself. Not long after In the Days of Thy Youth was published, Philip, her last remaining sibling, died of a heart attack while sitting at his desk on Wall Street. A year later, she would burst upon the literary world as Isabel Bolton, but she’d already lost most of her family and friends.

Those who looked closer, however, would see a woman still vitally connected to her world. Though her eyes were failing, she kept up with current literature by hiring readers. She fired one for balking when he came to the word “fuck” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. She published five books of children’s poetry between 1957 and 1961, each with a different theme and illustrator. Jungle Journey (1959) was illustrated by one of her closest friends, Tobias Schneebaum and drew, in part, on his experiences living with indigenous people in Peru and Mexico (later retold in Keep the River on Your Right (1969)).

Mary dedicated her next book as Isabel Bolton, Under Gemini, to Schneebaum. In it, she returned to the story told in In the Days of Thy Youth, but with a much tighter focus. This time, instead of hovering over her cast in the third person, she wrote in the first person, giving her world a fixed center: the being formed by her bond with her identical twin.

It was never I but always we. It was never you or I but both of us. Never mine or yours but always ours. We were seldom referred to by those we lived among as Mary or as Grace but as the twins — I was Mary, she was Grace. This may be so.

“There is a legend,” she wrote, “that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed.” Their nurse grew flustered. She called for their mother, who declared that one was Mary, the other Grace. Thus, Mary’s words eighty years later: “This may be so.”

“Human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love,” Plato wrote in The Symposium. Grace Miller’s last words to her sister before drowning were, “My darling Mary, how I love you.” To Mary, so many years later, these words were a confirmation that they had found that whole in each other:

That business in which we are all perpetually engaged — the making of an individual soul — is an enterprise of memory. In our case it was a joint and not a single venture.

“I am an old woman now and full of many memories,” Mary wrote “but those which I have here evoked have for me still the strange and wonderful completeness of having lived another’s life that was at the same time my own.” If the people who saw Isabel Bolton sitting in a corner at a cocktail party or floating through the rooms at Yaddo saw her as something of a ghost, perhaps they could sense that she was walking through the world with the shadow of her sister at her side.

Mary Britton Miller was born in the horse and buggy era and wrote her memoir of her life as a twin in a time of ballistic missiles and Mutually Assured Destruction. But she had become familiar with destruction and loss early on in her life, and her awareness of life’s fragility pervades every page of her work as Isabel Bolton. As she wrote in Many Mansions,

… [T]here was something not to be passed over lightly in the startling fact that the splitting of the atom and the splitting of the soul, the long, long range of human memory, had been contemporaneous, all in the open world together, no shelter for us, no place to hide.

When David and Blanche, the two old friends in Mary’s last novel as Isabel Bolton, The Whirligig of Time, sit together, meeting in their eighties after a separation of decades, they feel themselves moving “toward some immense, annihilating, and unimaginable catastrophe.” Perhaps Mary Miller wrote this because she knew just how close we always are to unimaginable catastrophe.

Philip Roth and the “Writers from the Other Europe” Series

Covers from the Writers from the Other Europe series

In the spring of 1972, fascinated by the life and work of Franz Kafka, Philip Roth decided to visit Prague. He returned the following year to see how writers were managing to work under “conditions that were utterly alien to my own writing experience.” In preparation, he read as much as he could find of the work of contemporary Czech writers. He met and became friends with several writers, which led him to look for works in English translation by novelists working throughout Eastern Europe — still behind the Iron Curtain — since the end of World War Two.

from this, he was able to interest Penguin Books in starting a series of reprints called “Writers from the Other Europe,” for which he served as general editor. Between 1976 and 1983, the series published a total of 17 books, starting with Kundera’s Laughable Loves and Ludvík Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs. As Roth wrote,

The purpose of this paperback series is to bring together outstanding and influential works of fiction by Eastern European writers. In many instances they will be writers who, though recognized as powerful forces within their own cultures, are virtually unknown in America. It is hoped that by reprinting selected Eastern European writers in this format and with introductions that place each work in its literary and historical context, the literature that has evolved in “the other Europe” during the postwar decades will be made more accessible to an interested American readership.

Roth’s reputation and significant network of contacts enabled him to get an impressive range of authors to write introductions. Contributors included Carlos Fuentes, Irving Howe, Joseph Brodsky, Heinrich Boll, Angela Carter, Czesław Miłosz, Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Kott, John Updike, Josef Škvorecký.

Advertisement for the Writers from the Other Europe
Penguin ad announcing the “Writers from the Other Europe” series.

In most cases, the books had already been published in English translations, usually by academic presses. Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, for example, had been published in Michael Kandel’s translation by Walker and Company in 1963; Konwicki’s Dreambook was published by the MIT Press in 1969; neither attracting any real notice.

Among other things, the effort led to the discovery of the work of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz after the publication in 1977 of his two books, The Street of Crocodiles and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. When Roth learned that Isaac Bashevis Singer had been one of the few to review The Street of Crocodiles when it was originally published in 1963, he contacted Singer and the two men had a long conversation about Schulz that was later reprinted in the New York Times. Singer confessed to Roth,

The more I read Schulz — maybe I shouldn’t say it — but some of the stories, when I read him, I said he’s better than Kafka. There is greater strength in some of his stories. Also he’s very strong in the absurd — though not in a silly way, but in a clever way. I would say that between Schulz and Kafka there is something that Goethe calls Wahlverwandtschaft, an affinity of souls which you have chosen for yourself.

Cynthia Ozick, who went on to write a novel (The Messiah of Stockholm) based on the rumor that Schulz, who was killed in the Holocaust, had been survived by a son who himself became a writer. Ozick called Schulz one of “the most original imaginations in modern Europe’; John Updike, who wrote the introduction to The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, rated Schulz as “one of the great writers, one the great transmogrifiers of the world into words.” Jerzy Kosinski initiated an annual literary prize in Schulz’s name, to be awarded by a PEN American Center jury to a writer considered “insufficiently known.”

Covers from the Writers from the Other Europe series

Long after the series ended, its reputation lived on. In 1993, Herbert Mitgang called it “indispensable.” In their New York Times “By the Book” interviews, both William Vollmann and Nicole Krauss mentioned it. Vollmann singled out Konwicki’s A Dreambook for Our Time as an “underappreciated masterpiece,” “one of the many treasures from the late, lamented” series. Krauss said, “I’m a sucker for that entire ‘Writers from the Other Europe’ series that Penguin and Philip Roth published in the ’70s and ’80s.”

Even better, virtually all of the books are still in print nearly 40 years later — in a few cases, from Penguin itself.

The 17 titles in the “Writers from the Other Europe” series are:

  • The Guinea Pigs, by Ludvík Vaculík
  • Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz
  • The Joke, by Milan Kundera
  • The Farewell Party, by Milan Kundera
  • The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera
  • Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera
  • The City Builder, by George Konrád
  • The Case Worker, by George Konrád
  • The Polish Complex, by Tadeusz Konwicki
  • A Dreambook for Our Time, by Tadeusz Konwicki
  • A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kiš
  • Ashes and Diamonds, by Jerzy Andrzewjewski
  • Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal
  • This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski
  • Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, by Bruno Schulz
  • The Street of the Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz
  • Opium and Other Stories, by Géza Csáth

The 1970s: When Lit Went SF (and Vice Versa)

Cover of the paperback original of The Godwhale

A tweet about T. J. Bass’s wildly ambitious and imaginative Nebula Award-winning novel The Godwhale (1974) triggered a short discussion of favorite novels from the 1970s. I was struck by how many of them were — well, if not science fiction, then at least strongly influenced by SF. I started buying books — almost always cheap used pocket paperbacks — for myself around 1973, and as I began to recall those purchases, I realized that my own favorites were novels that sat on the border between SF and literary fiction.

Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick pioneered this territory in the 1960s, writing books we now recognize as key works of 20th Century literature without any suggestion that they’re somehow lessened through their origin as Ace, Daw, Dell, and Panther paperbacks deliberately packaged to turn off non-SF readers. When Collier released its paperback edition of Italo Calvino’s SF fables Cosmicomics in 1970, the publisher just as deliberately Doris Lessing gave it imprimatur of legitimacy with her dystopian novel The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), then returned to give it a gargantuan world-building embrace with her five-volume Canopus in Argos starting with Shikasta in 1979. (I’m pretty sure I have all five volumes of the Knopf hardbacks somewhere in storage: they quickly became fixtures of remainder tables. Literary appetites were not quite ready to follow Lessing to such lengths.)

Writers who ventured into this territory faced considerable obstacles. SF writers struggled to be taken seriously by critics and readers of mainstream fiction. Straight fiction writers risked being marked forever with the stigmata of the space opera. When one of the toughest of straight fiction writers, Harry Crews, opened William Hjortsberg’s second novel, Gray Matters in 1971 and read the first sentence, he later recalled, “My heart sank. I thought, ‘My God, he’s committed science fiction.'” Crews was willing, at least to state his objections:

Without going into too much detail, I think honor demands that I admit my prejudice against and contempt for most of what is called science fiction. Here is the formula — and therefore much of the reason for my contempt — for successful SciFi: it must have an anonymous ruling force; dehumanized people; totalitarian one?world drive to power; violence of mindnumbing dimensions ( people who have no stomach for the violence of their own everyday lives seem to read the violence of the future as morally instructive); and nuclear warfare.

“Every one of these elements of the SciFi formula are in Hjortsberg’s novel,” Crews acknowledged, the result, in his opinion, was simply “an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.”

Here is a survey of 25 novels from the 1970s that looked beyond the labels that booksellers and librarians crave and forced their readers to wonder if they’d stumbled in the wrong section. It’s not a comprehensive list by any means (omitting the significant arrival of feminism to SF that took place at the same time), but I hope it suggests that there are plenty of reasons not to write off the 1970s as just the decade of polyester shirts and leisure suits.

A Very Private Life (US paperback)

• A Very Private Life, by Michael Frayn (1968)

I’m stretching the envelope of “the 1970s” to include this gentle fable. Frayn makes his leap into the future with his usual elegance of phrase: “Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber,” the book begins. He depicts a world where almost everyone is controlled through drugs and isolation has become a prevailing mode of existence. Among other things, its spare prose and pared-back descriptions offer a marked contrast with the next four titles.

 

Barefootin the Head cover

• Barefoot in the Head, by Brian Aldiss (1969)

Perhaps the wildest, druggiest, and word-drunk-est of the orgy of SF novels written by Brits in the midst of the psychedelic era, in Barefoot in the Head Aldiss tosses LSD, James Joyce, fascism, and the Christ myth into the blender and comes up with a perfect cult classic concoction: unreadable to many, a nectar of the gods to a few. Reissued as a Faber Find.

 

The Big Win paperback cover

• The Big Win, by Jimmy Miller (1969)

Jimmy Miller was Jane Miller, known to everyone as Jimmy, and the widow of novelist Warren Miller. This first novel was published by Knopf, which was not known for its SF work at the time. Set in the future — i.e., 2004 — it depicts a world devastated by a combination of a Chinese virus (hmm …) and a nuclear war started by the French. New York City has become the refuge of the Richies, who play a human-hunting game with the Poories. The Big Win makes a Poory a Richy. The Big Lose, as you can imagine, is terminal. It’s a bit of a mess but a crazy sort of fun featuring, as Raymond Sokolov put it in his New York Times review, “plenty of unquotable and impressive lubricity.”

 

Bug Jack Barron cover

• Bug Jack Barron , by Norman Spinrad (1969)

Along with Aldiss, Moorcock, and other veterans of New Worlds, Spinrad, an American, helped bring SF into the age of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In this novel about a talk show host (Barron) stumbling into a massive conspiracy about the means of ensuring immortality, Spinrad also introduced techniques from experimental fiction, such as cut-up (viz. Burroughs, Gysin). Not everyone liked the results. Joanna Russ felt the author had taken on so much in terms of style and content that he ended up being smothered by it.

 

The Final Programme cover

• The Final Programme, by Michael Moorcock (1969)

The first in Moorcock’s four novels starring his anarchic, transmutating, polymorphically gendered superman, Jerry Cornelius. Word of mouth at the time I became aware of them in the mid-1970s was that Cornelius was sort of a drug-taking hipster James Bond, but I now suspect that everyone who said that was going off the covers, not the contents. Some of the books’ sexism has not aged well, but Moorcock’s embrace of body transformations and gender fluidity may resonate better with today’s readers than it did with his largely male audience when the novels first came out.

 

Inter Ice Age 4

• Inter Ice Age 4, by Kobo Abe (1970)

Abe was ahead of trend: he actually wrote this as a serial back in 1958-59. However, it was only published in English in 1970, which is why I’m including it. I turned to it somewhere in late high school after giving up on A Woman in the Dunes as just too abstract for my taste at the time. Inter Ice Age 4 should be a highly relevant book for our time, as it’s set in a world soon to be inundated by the melting of the polar ice caps. But there’s also a murder mystery, conspiracies, malevolent government and business entities, and heavy doses of biology (Abe trained as a physician). I got through it only vaguely understanding what I was reading, but I suspect now that it can hold its own alongside some of the early works of Stanislaw Lem (another writer who trained as a doctor but chose not to practice).

 

Armed Camps by Kit Reed

• Armed Camps, by Kit Reed (1970)

Another vision of a dystopic America, this time told by parallel narrators: Lt Col Danny March, a war-weary veteran (“I’ll tell you something about making dead guys…. You do it often enough and you’ll get used to it.”) and Anne, a woman on the run who finds her way to a pacifist commune called Calabria, isolated deep in a National Forest. Reed referred to it as her Why Are We in Vietnam?: “We were Americans, ergo we must be brash, insensitive, militaristic types. Never mind that Apollo 11 was heading for the Moon, Teddy Kennedy had just walked away from a fatal wreck in Chappaquiddick, leaving behind a drowned girl; less than a month later the Sharon Tate murders would confirm what many would not say but secretly suspected: that Americans were a crude, savage lot.” Though Reed had published some more conventional SF stories, Armed Camps cries out to be seen as serious fiction and not somehow diminished as a work of genre.

 

Going Nowhere paperback cover

• Going Nowhere, by Alvin Greenberg (1971)

There were plenty of novels written about young men running away — from the draft, from the farm, from the Establishment — in the early 1970s. But unlike most of them, Going Nowhere is far more timeless than of its time. Partly this is due to Greenberg’s approach to fiction, which always uses the most concrete details (one of his stories is about a man discovering just how far he can allow his foot to rot before it becomes inedible) to anchor the most abstract conceptions. In this case, it’s also due to the conception at the heart of the story: Unteleology, the philosophy of fundamental purposelessness that one of its characters develops. SF skeptic Harry Crews admitted in his New York Times review that Going Nowhere was the first novel with a spaceship in it he’d been able to finish since he was 10: “Any writer who will begin a novel of only 143 pages with a 400?word sentence, which sentence itself be gins with ‘Once upon a time,’ can’t be all bad. For one thing, you know he’s not playing it safe. He’s a man you can count on to take a chance.” “Alvin Greenberg,” Crews wrote, “is such a man.”

Greenberg, who died in 2015, is one of America’s most neglected metafictionists. One of his early short stories, published in Best SF 1970 (edited by Aldiss and Harry Harrison), was titled “‘Franz Kafka’ by Jorge Luís Borges by Alvin Greenberg.” He would go on to write stories such as “The Beast in the Jungle vs. A Sense of the Comic,” “Not a Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer,” and “The Mind of Emile Zola.” His work — four novels, short story collections, and poetry — is consistently theoretical yet worldly, extreme yet specific, tragic while remaining comic, and always accompanied by a genial narrative voice. You don’t always know where you’ll be going with Greenberg, but you’ll be in good company.

 

Gray Matters paperback

• Gray Matters, by William Hjortsberg (1971)

This is the novel that had Harry Crews reaching for his gun when he suspected Hjortsberg of fomenting SF. And of course, it is SF if we accept that fiction set in the future that involves some extrapolation of existing scientific, cultural, and/or political developments (or degradations) as SF. I think we can all accept that SF does not always equal space opera, and in this case, there is neither space nor opera. Gray Matters is the great brains-in-jars novel. Humans exist as the merest essential vessel to keep a brain functioning. Everything else is accomplished through thought: communication, commerce, and even sex. Gray Matters also has the merit of brevity: no reader of Hjortsberg even set down one of his books because it was too long.

 

Cover of Love in the Ruins US paperback

• Love in the Ruins, by Walker Percy (1971)

Subtitled The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, Love in the Ruins, envisions an America where all differences in race, religion, class, etc. have grown to their extremes (kind of like today). A lapsed Catholic scientist develops a machine to detect early signs of mental and spiritual degradation in hopes of bringing people to heal themselves. Instead, it becomes an object of great interest to the government, and soon the inventor finds himself on the run through the crumbling remnants of the United States, accompanied by Moira and her beloved pocket edition of the poems of Rod McKuen, “a minor poet of the old Auto Age.”

 

Cover of US paperback of 334

• 334, by Thomas M. Disch (1972)

Not really a novel but a collection of five novellas about the inhabitants of 334 East 11th Street, a housing project in Manhattan, during the second Roman Empire, which is just a few years after 1972. Samuel R. Delany was so impressed with one of the novella, “Angouleme,” that he wrote a book-length study of it titled The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction. In it, Delany argued, among other things, that 334 was SF not because of any explicit scientific content but by virtue of its imaginative breadth.

 

Cover of UK paperback of A Sweet Sweet Summer

• A Sweet Sweet Summer, by Jane Gaskell (1972)

Set in a Britain cut off from the rest of the world (Brexit foreshadowing, anyone?) and controlled by alien spaceships that hover in the sky, A Sweet Sweet Summer is East Enders dialed up to 11 and projected into the future. The aliens encourage all the fringe factions — fascists, Communists, racists, and even Scientologists — to incite violence and create chaos. “Shooting, pimping, knifing, beating to death, whether of strangers, life-long buddies, close relations, evan cannibalism, these are merely the pattern of life,” as the TLS reviewer summarized it. All narrated by Pelham, whom one Amazon reader described as “possibly the most repellent protagonist I have ever read.”

 

Saw by Steve Katz

• Saw, by Steve Katz (1972)

Saw was one of a short-lived series of largely experimental novels published by Knopf around this time. They were all printed in a rare — for Knopf, at least — glossy hardcovers without dust jackets, and on the rare occasions you stumble across them these days, they’re in surprisingly good shape, suggesting that Knopf shold have stuck with it. Steve Katz was the experimental fictionist of his time who most embraced the spirit of Pop Art. Although there isn’t a giant can of Campbell’s Soup in Saw, you wouldn’t be startled if one showed up. There are, however, a woman named Eileen who mates with an orbiting sphere in Central Park, a spaceship named Leroy, and a hidden hippopotamus. As with a number of the books on this list, Saw embraced (or stole) numerous elements from SF but it was never accepted as SF by SF die-hards (or later academics writing about SF in the 1970s).

 

Cover of first edition of Motorman

• Motorman, by David Ohle (1972)

Motorman was the first of a series of four novels that Ohle would write over the course of forty years featuring a character named Moldenke. Moldenke is as a “bloodworker” in a gauze factory in Texaco City outside L.A. (hence the title, perhaps, but there is no Motorman in the book) but also lives in a world with multiple moons, occasional double suns, and cosmic-scale timeshifts. One reader has compared it to a mix of Italo Calvino (in his Cosmicomics stage) and Cormac McCarthy (in his The Road stage). Out of print for decades, Motorman is now available from the Calamari Press (and you have even download a PDF version of it for free). In his introduction to this edition, Ben Marcus adds to the list of comparisons, calling Ohle “the dogsbody that resulted from a glandular mishap between Flann O’Brien, Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, Borges, and Raymond Roussel.”

 

Cover of Colonel Mint

• Colonel Mint, by Paul West (1972)

In his prolific career, Paul West wandered in and out of just about every genre you could think of, so it wasn’t surprising that his journey eventually led into SF. In Colonel Mint, he takes a top-ranked insider — the astronaut Colonel Mint — and turns into an outsider when he sees an angel through the window of his space capsule — and then makes the mistake of reporting it. Garth Lloyd Evans, writing in The Guardian, argued that West had simply “changed the conventional traditional context for his consciousness of being alive.” Changed it, that is, “from the parochial, the provincial, the national, the routine tick of the clock, into an awareness of eternity as our natural habitat.” Unlike much of the formulaic stuff that cluttered science fiction, however, Lloyd Evans felt that “this shift of vision does not involve a loss of heart or render one invulnerable to this world, now.”

 

Cover of Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer

• Quake, by Rudolph Wurlitzer (1974)

Quake is a dystopia novel after every Los Angeles hater’s heart. Wurlitzer operated in the realm of Pynchon, Vonnegut, and Brautigan, taking American quirks and twisting them into intricate origami. Here, we have Los Angeles after that massive earthquake we all know is coming some day. But instead of a predictable catastrophe novel, this is the story told by a writer who, if you will, inhaled. Like Hjortsberg, Wurlitzer wrote books you don’t have to set aside long weekends for.

 

Cover of The Last Western

• The Last Western, by Thomas S. Klise (1974)

Klise, whose day job was running an educational filmstrip company, wrote this, his only novel, as much as a moral exercise as a fictive one. He takes an innocent — Willie, a truly hybrid American, Irish-Indian-Black-Chinese with “red hair, red-gold-black-brown skin, and blue almond-shaped eyes spangled with brown,” and injects him into a dystopian world full of complex variations on the themes of power and evil. First Willie becomes the greatest pitcher in baseball with his trademark “upcurve” ball. Then he somehow manages to become Pope and the object of nefarious plots by Vatican, government, and media. The Last Western has never been reprinted and goes for a ridiculous amount of money if you can find a copy. But you can also download it for free from the Internet Archive.

 

Cover of paperback original of Dhalgren

• Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany (1975)

Depending on your perspective (or experience of reading it), Dhalgren is either a masterpiece, a gripping vision of America in its end state, or a convoluted and confusing mess. Launched with great noise as a Bantam paperback original when it came out, it may have suffered a fate similar to another thick book from around the same time, John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues. Both books struck many as too full of their own self-importance to get out of the way of their readers. Now, however, when those who read it come to Dhalgren rather than having it thrust upon them, it’s seen for what it is: a challenging, complex, and deeply considered work of modernism that also happens to be SF.

 

Comet by Jane White

• Comet, by Jane White (1975)

Jane White, whose work was first recommended to me by Brooks Peters back in 2008, wrote a number of odd, edgy psychological thrillers starting with Quarry in 1967. Her last book before her death in 1977, Comet was a dystopian novel with an extreme version of life on Earth after a great holocaust — a disaster so great and so long ago that no one knows quite what it was. Life is hardly above the level of the Stone Age now, with the added twist that procreation is essentially impossible. Into one of the tribes scattered over this world come a man and a pregnant woman. Does this all lead to a Second Coming? To be honest, I can’t say, having never read this myself. But it awaits on my shelves.

 

Cover of The Hospital Ship by Martin Bax

• The Hospital Ship, by Martin Bax (1976)

Dr. Martin Bax’s only novel, The Hospital Ship is the story of the Hopeful, an atomic-powered and largely self-contained hospital that sails around a world rapidly breaking down through a mix of disease, autism, and widespread psychosis. The hospital’s director decides that the solution is — you guessed it — breeding. Bax’s subject matter is heavily influenced by J. G. Ballard, so it’s not surprising that Ballard contributed a generous blurb: “the most exciting, stimulating and brilliantly conceived book I have read since Burroughs’ novels.” A number of readers have rated Bax’s technique better than his results, as he employs a variety of documentation, from letters to logs to patient records, to illuminate the story. Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review took the opposite view, however, and I recommend his review for anyone interest in learning more.

 

Cover of Plus by Joseph McElroy

• Plus, by Joseph McElroy (1976)

I wrote about Plus back in 2013, when I called it my most neglected book for the simple reason that it took me 36 years to get around to reading my copy. McElroy’s writing is notoriously challenging, but even by that standard, Plus is, at least in the estimation of one Amazon reviewer, not the place to start: “If you haven’t read McElroy, don’t jump into this unless you consider yourself the boldest and bravest of readers.”

Much of the reason stems from McElroy’s subject, which is a disembodied brain floating in orbit around the Earth as the control system of a satellite. Imp Plus — the brain — has limited understanding of language and even more limited grasp of vocabulary, so McElroy has to tell his story as if manipulating by remote control. As Imp Plus becomes more sentient, his language grows and we see that McElroy is leading us through the brain’s struggle to establish an identity independent of ground control — the other being known to Imp as the Acrid Voice. It’s a bold experiment that ultimately succeeds, but it’s a bit like scaling El Capitan with your bare hands. You will work hard, but if you make it to the top, you may find it one of your most intense reading experiences.

 

Cover of US paperback of Ratner's Star

• Ratner’s Star, by Don DeLillo (1976)

DeLillo wrote SF? He sure ’nuff did. In Ratner’s Star, Little Billy Twillig, a child prodigy, is enlisted by a mysterious military/scientific research institution to help them decode an enigmatic signal from space. “We feel certain it’s a mathematical code of some kind,” the director tells him:

Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

To which Billy replies, “Did you just fart?” Among DeLillo scholars, Ratner’s Star is considered a work from his formative stage, before the era of his prize-winning/bestselling books. Which means it’s both less effective as a coherent work and full of greater experimentation and risk-taking. DeLillo takes codes, the encapsulation of information in condensed packages, as an overarching metaphor for the obstacles facing all forms of communication, and so plays around with text and dives down rabbit holes like the significance of symbol-based languages like Chinese. But if you’re looking for another fat DeLillo novel to follow up Underworld, this is the natural choice.

 

Cover of Scimitar by Rick DeMarinis

• Scimitar, by Rick DeMarinis (1977)

In this broad satire of the American military-industrial complex, an aging billionaire named Skylor Blue, has himself reconstituted by attaching his head to a mechanical spider run by a computer. The narrator, a failed poet and lowly copywriter in one of Blue’s aerospace companies, travels into the bowels of the Byzantine security mechanisms set up to protect Blue’s new being and comes to face the reality of life as a Six Million Dollar Man:

And my body knew what it was looking at too:It recognized immediately what the head in the mechanical spider meant to it: The body, the mortal coil, the source of despair, the thing that gets sick, manufactures aneurysms, tumors, cataracts, piles, stones in the bladder, limestone in the arteries, the shakes, the drops, the shits, the tears; the thing that hurts you so terribly, the thing that finally betrays the clever, efficient brain by withering like a leaf, is superfluous. (“The body’s only purpose is to carry the brain,” said Edison, and he should have known.)

Perhaps not surprisingly for a book written by an American male in the 1970s, along with robotic life comes new extremes of sexual experience. Comparisons with J. P. Donleavy are not out of order.

 

Cover of Fork River Space Project

• The Fork River Space Project, by Wright Morris (1977)

Despite the title, I may be stretching things to say there’s a real SF element in this novel. Set in Fork River, a nearly-deserted Kansas town near the geographic center of the U.S., The Fork River Space Project is about a collection of oddballs who come together to work on what they hope will be a landing site for UFOs. Even if the guy who came up with the idea isn’t fully convinced that aliens even exist, he sees it as a way to “restore awe.” In the meantime, it’s where folks gather on Sunday, listen to music, and “go into orbit.” This is certainly one of Morris’s lesser books, but in a way it’s significant as perhaps the first mainstream novel to recognize that ever since the first Moon landing in 1969, we’ve been living on a small planet in a very big cosmos.

 

Cover of A Secret History of Time to Come

• A Secret History of Time to Come, by Robie Macauley (1979)

With this novel — which I can well remember buying in hardback for its beautiful cover and opening with anticipation — we see serious fiction approaching the obstacle of the leap into imaginative fiction … and balking. Set in a largely depopulated United States after some unspecified catastrophe, this novel proved that a story about an epic journey (in this case from East to West) is bound to fail without a destination. I recall there was a lot of wandering through the overgrown ruins of cities. Nothing else stuck with me. Thomas M. Disch justly savaged the book in his New York Times review and summed up the challenge of venturing into the No Man’s Land between straight fiction and SF:

A Secret History of Time to Come fails equally at the general task of fiction and at the specific task of science fiction. The special merit of the best SF is not its capacity to predict the future but to analyze and analogize the present. It offers writers an opportunity to make scale models of moral problems that cannot be dealt with — not, at least, with the same clarity and directness — using the conventional devices of the realistic novel. At this essential science fictional task, A Secret History of Time to Come has the moral and intellectual finesse of a World War I poster exposing Hun atrocities.

Have the boundaries between serious literary fiction and SF evaporated since the 1970s? A visit to most libraries and bookstores today would suggest not. But luckily, plenty of writers don’t let that dissuade them.

English as a Second Language: Following in Conrad’s Footsteps

First page of Burt's Polish-English Dictionary

Reviews of Selina Hasting’s new biography of Sybille Bedford, who was born Sybille Aleid Elsa von Schoenebeck in Charlottenburg, Germany and forced to live as an exile starting in the late 1930s due to her support of anti-Nazi causes reminded me of a number of other neglected writers who found themselves exiled not only from their own lands but also from their own languages.

The story of German intellectuals who sought refuge in the United States, particularly those who gathered in Santa Monica around the towering figure of Thomas Mann, is well known. But less remembered today are those who headed to England instead, a number of whom not only chose to settle for good outside their own countries but who adopted English as the language in which they wrote from then on. In an article in the Times Literary Supplement that appeared in 1962, Norman Shrapnel wrote of such writers: “Some have used the language as a honeymoon hotel, some as a gymnasium, some as a concert platform for virtuoso performances, some as an ideas factory. It has accommodated them nearly all, and their tendency has been to amplify, rather than alter, what might by now, if left to itself, have turned into something as stylized as a Pall Mall club or an Indian dance.”

Arthur Koestler, of course, is still recognized and his Darkness at Noon has a solid place in the canon. Here, however, are five others who chose to follow in Joseph Conrad’s footsteps.

Robert Neumann

• Robert Neumann

Robert Neumann was, like the better-known Stefan Zweig, a Viennese Jew who decided to leave Austria well ahead of the Anschluss. He settled in a village in Kent that he then took as the setting for his novel written in English, Scene in Passing (1942). The novelist J. D. Bereford considered it more successful as prose than fiction: “Dr. Neumann seems more at home with the English language than with the manner of life in an English village.” Neumann went on to write ten more books in English before he moved to Switzerland in 1958.

Cover of The Inquest by Robert Neumann

The Inquest (1944), an inquiry into the last years of a woman of the international set before the war, was his most commercially successful book. Though he never returned to live in Vienna, the city was close to his heart, and his first postwar novel, Children of Vienna (1946) decried the living conditions, particularly of the large number of orphan children, in the ruins left after the initial Soviet takeover of the city, “There are indignation, pity, savage humour, obscenity, irony on irony in this ferocious novel,” wrote one reviewer.

Neumann helped establish Hutchinson International Authors, an imprint of the major publisher, for which he contracted translations of numerous German and Austrian writers in exile, including Arnold Zweig (no relation to Stefan) and Heinrich Mann (Thomas’s older brother). His last work in English, The Plague House Papers (1959), was an unusual and light-hearted autobiography. “He has seemed to have decided to make the book worth his while as a novelist, and has arranged a nice patter of interacting themes,” Muriel Spark wrote in her review for the Spectator.

Neumann’s books are out of print in English, but Flood (1930), Children of Vienna (1946), and Insurrection in Poshansk (1952) are available on the Internet Archive.

Peter de Polnay with his dog Dodo

• Peter de Polnay

Born in Hungary, the son of a leader of the Jewish community in Budapest, de Polnay spent most of his life distancing himself from his home and his family. According to the version of the story he tells in The Crack of Dawn: A Childhood Fantasy (1958) and My Road: An Autobiography (1978), his mother was ill, his father an absent and abusive brute, and his primary caregivers were the servants who looked after him and his brother and sisters as they grew up in Switzerland, Italy, and England.

After spending time in Argentina and an unsuccessful attempt at establishing himself as a gambler on the Riviera, de Polnay found himself broke and in Paris and turned to writing to make cash. Though fluent in at least three languages, he opted for English based on its larger market share, and began pumping out novels at the rate of at least one a year beginning in the late 1930s.

Cover of The Germans Came to Paris by Peter de Polnay

In May 1940, however, the German invasion disrupted his comfortable life. Along with the government and many of the upper bourgeosie of Paris, he fled to Bordeaux, but soon returned. It was easier to survive on the cheap in Paris. He lasted for about a year, until he was able to make his way to England via Spain and Gibraltar.

He quickly took himself an English wife and enlisted in the Royal Pioneer Corps. After the war, he took a lease on Boulge Hall, the former home of poet and Rubaiyat translator Edward Fitzgerald. Though he aspired to the life of a country gentleman, he soon found the cost beyond his means, and after his wife died, he spent years as an itinerant, living in France, Spain, and Portugal while tapping out novel after novel that fell somewhere between Balzac’s Comedie Humaine and Simenon’s romans dur.

He remarried, this time to a Spanish woman, and converted to Catholicism. The couple lived for a number of years in seaside towns in Kent but decided they preferred the food and sun of France. By the time he died in 1984, he had written nearly 90 books in English.

Edith de Born

• Edith de Born

Edith de Born took perhaps the oddest route to writing in English. Born Edith Ausch, like de Polnay, she came from a Jewish family ennobled in the Austro-Hungarian court. When her father lost his title and most of his fortune after the end of World War One, she married Jacques Bisch, a French financier who’d come to Vienna to liquidate what remained of her family’s estate, and moved to Paris.

Having been taught French and English as a child, she quickly became fluent after stays in Paris and London before the war. Trapped in Paris by the German invasion, the couple became involved in the Resistance. She later said that the work of translating cables to and from London trained her to write in English with nuance and subtlety. When Jacques Bisch became president of the Société Générale Bank in Brussels, they took a palatial apartment on the rue Royale and hosted such English writers as Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford.

Cover of The Flat in Paris by Edith de Born

Though de Born wrote in English, English characters were exceptionally rare in her books. Instead, she wrote of people she knew: Belgians, Dutch, French, and, in her trilogy of Schloss Felding (1959), The House in Vienna (1959), and The Flat in Paris (1961), Austrians and Austrian expats like herself. Many reviewers praised her elegant, pseudo-Jamesian prose, but novelist Francis King wrote somewhat more precisely that it was “in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed”:

I use the word ‘composed’, rather than ‘written’, advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence. As with them too, one senses a ‘foreigness’, though it is impossible to point to any one passage and declare: ‘No one English could have written that.’ This foreigness is not a matter of vocabulary or syntax — each of these writers has a far more varied vocabulary and far firmer command of syntax than many a native-born novelist — but of rhythm. In the case of Edith de Born, this rhythm seems to be one, not of her native German, but of the French which (so I am told) she speaks with such precision and fluency.

King was dissembling in writing this. As he later disclosed in his autobiography, de Born sent all her manuscripts to the wife of an Anglican vicar in Norfolk, who returned them with meticulous line-by-line copy edits, before she submitted the corrected versions to her English publishers.

Jerzy Peterkiewicz

• Jerzy Peterkiewicz

When Jerzy Peterkiewicz arrived in England from France in 1940, he knew no English. Yet he enrolled in the University of St Andrews and went on to earn a doctorate in English literature at King’s College London. Soon after, he married Christine Brooke-Rose. Though they later divorced, both explored abstract and experimental themes and styles in their fiction. Peterkiewicz, however, grew somewhat more conventional in the course of his career, with one of his later books, The Third Adam, being a largely nonfictional account of the Mariavites, a Catholic cult based in the Polish town of P?ock whose leader considered himself to be the third Adam — the first two being the original man of Genesis and Jesus.

Cover of The Quick and the Dead by Jezry Peterkiewicz

His first few novels, written in the 1950s, were full of Joycean wordsplices and almost embarrassing onomatopeia. He liked writing, as he wrote of one of his characters, “at his cosmopolitan best, daring every vocabulary to twist his eloquent tongue.” The Quick and the Dead (1961) might better have been titled The Dead and the Slow as it’s the story of a man who only figures out he’s dead halfway through the book. Its subject and style left the Telegraph’s reviewer unsure of what he was dealing with:

If only one knew what Jerzy Peterkiewicz was up to. Or, alternatively, if only one could be sure that what he was up to was elaborately pretentious nonsense. But if it is hard to find the viewpoint that would enable one to read some meaning into his oblique and arbitrary fancies, it is equally hard to belieave that a writer, more a writer working in an adopted language (like another Polish novelist, Mr. Peterkiewicz knew no English until he was grown up), who clothes those fancies in such precise and fastidious words means nothing at all.”

Anthony Burgess, on the other hand, loved it: “Mr. Peterkiewcz is on of our most intelligent and original novelists. There are some excellent things in The Quick and the Dead. Whatever you’re going to call this uncategorisable book, it’s an altogether brilliant performance.”

Peterkiewicz’s life and work are now commemorated by the Jerzy Peterkiewicz Educational Foundation. The Third Adam (1975) and Green Flows the Bile (1968), Peterkiewicz’s last novel, are available on the Internet Archive.

Stefan and Franciszka Themerson

• Stefan Themerson

Stefan Themerson and his wife Franciszka — both artists and experimental film makers — were happy and productive members of the Left Bank avant garde, having settled in Paris after traveling there to meet the Hungarian artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy. “I just knew I had to be in Paris,” he later said. When the war broke out, he joined a regiment of Poles that fell apart soon after the Blitzkrieg began, and he ended up spending two years in a Red Cross hostel in Vichy France. There, he began writing his first novel Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, an elaborate pastiche of a scientific lecture on the subject of the superiority of insects to human beings. After being smuggled out of France and reunited with his wife in England, Themerson decided to rewrite the book in English.

Cover of first edition of Professor Mmaa's Lecture by Stefan Themerson

To say that Stefan Themerson wrote in English, however, is to accept that any one language could contain the energy of his imagination. Here, for example, is just an excerpt of the entry for Chapter Six in the Table of Contents of Professor Mmaa’s Lecture:

Wherein Professor Mmaa’s Lecture May Be Likened to a “Chariot Sailng over a Volcano ”

BATSMAN HITS A GOOSE & LADIES AND GENTLEMENT!
IMAGINING THE IMAGINATION
PROFESSOR MMAA’Ss ATTEMPT TO ADAPT A VERTICAL POSITION
HOW WILL MY OLD MAMMA COME TO BELIEVE IN THE SHALLOWEST BEING, & HOW WILL PROFESSOR SOUL COME TO BELIEVE IN CORPUSCLES?
LES MORTELS SONT EGAUX, AND THE TOLERANCE OF FANATICISM
LES MORTELS SONT DIFFERANTS, AND THE FANATICISM OF TOLERANCE
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN STOPS LAYING EGGS
NONOBODY ON SCIENCE, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICS
PANCAKERS & FARCEMEATERS

After the war, the Themersons became cornerstones of the English avant garde — which might be a bit of an non-sequitur, as they never looked for imitators or others to imitate. In 1948, they formed the Gaberbocchus Press, under whose imprint a fair share of their books were published over the course of the next 30 years. Franciszka worked steadily as an illustrator of children’s book, including such collaborations with Stefan as Peddy Bottom (1950), Mr. Rouse Builds His House (1951), and The Table that Ran Away Into the Woods (1963). Franciszka also provided the illustrations for Barbara Wright’s remarkable English translation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de Style

Queneau’s fiction is perhaps the closest equivalent to Themerson’s. Both men drafted genres and put them to work for slyly anarchic purposes. In one of Themerson’s last works, The Mystery of the Sardine (1986), he took the international conspiracy thriller a la The Da Vinci Code and turned it into a playful epistemological fantasy. Not everyone appreciated the results. Kirkus Reviews “a stringy mass” of heavy-handed social comedy and compared it to “sour-tasting fudge.” Neville Shack, reviewing it for the TLS, recognized that Themerson was more of a puppetmaster than a master of characterization:

Many of them, weird and wacky, seem to have a flair for bemusement in action and speech. They are figures in a constantly shifting scenario, neither nautralistic nor typical ofmuch beyond themselves. These people who come and go, often in search of clues, serve only the fickle ends of the narrative. They are mannequins, walking constructs in the mode of Peter Greenaway’s cinematic inventions; the tableaux are highly synthetic, despite real settings and occasionally believable situations.

There’s a certain satisfying irony in the fact that more of Themerson’s work is in print now in Polish than in English. Several of his books, including Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, are available on the Internet Archive.

Who was Tom Kromer? On the author of Waiting for Nothing

Dust jacket for 1935 edition of Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer
Dust jacket for 1935 edition of Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer.

A few days ago, the Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath released their first reissue title, bringing the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, back to print for the first time since 1986. Though it’s mostly been out of print since its first publication in 1935, Waiting for Nothing was been quietly influencing generations of writers from Hubert Selby to Breece D’J Pancake to James Kelman with its hard-nosed prose, impressionistic narrative, and grim, survivalist outlook.

But who was Tom Kromer? Facts about him are scarce to start with and he didn’t help much when he was asked to contribute an autobiographical note for the British edition of Waiting for Nothing:

I am twenty-eight years old, and was born and attended school in Huntington, W. Va. My people were working people. My father started to work in a coal-mine when he was eight years old. Later, he became a glass blower, and unable to afford medical treatment, died of cancer at the age of forty-four. There were five children and I was the oldest. My mother took my father’s place in the factory. My father’s father was crushed to death in a coal-mine. My father never hoped for anything better in this life than a job, and never worried about anything else but losing it. My mother never wanted anything else than that the kids get an education so that they wouldn’t have to worry about the factory closing down.

Owens Glass Factory #2, Huntington, West Virginia.
Owens Glass Factory #2, Huntington, West Virginia.

Kromer glosses over the specific. He was born in Huntington in October 1906, the son of Michael Albert Kromer, who’d emigrated from Russia in 1891 to join his father at a coal mine in Pennsylvania, and Grace Thornburg, a West Virginia native. Bert Kromer spent most of his working life in one of the big glass and bottle factories in northern West Virginia. The Kromers lived in several different towns while Tom was growing up, but settled in Huntington, where his father went to work at the Owens Glass Factory. In the 1920 census, Bert Kromer’s occupation was listed as glass-blower. Coming after years of working in coal mines as a boy, it was a job that likely contributed to his early death from lung cancer.

Kromer mentioned having three years of college but didn’t identify the school as Marshall University there in Huntington (later portrayed in the movie We Are Marshall). He wrote, “I taught for two years in mountain schools in West Virginia,” but didn’t say that he’d left when two of his favorite professors were fired after they protested the school’s banning of Mencken’s American Mercury magazine for its printing an article about a Missouri prostitute nicknamed “Hatrack.” Nor that he took the schoolteaching job to support his family after his father’s death in 1926.

Kromer returned to Marshall in the fall of 1928 and got his first taste of life “on the fritz,” as he put it, on an assignment for the Huntington Herald-Dispatch soon after. As an experiment, the paper sent him out, dressed in shabby clothes, onto the streets of Huntington to beg for change. “Pity the Poor Panhandler; $2 An Hour is All He Gets,” read the resulting article. It may have given Kromer a false sense of the ease with which one could live life on the bum: in hindsight, $2 an hour would seem a a fortune in the eyes of the narrator of Waiting for Nothing.

A month or so later, Kromer ran out of money to keep attending Marshall and decided to head to Kansas in search of farm work. He would spent most of the next five years on the road. As he wrote in his autobiographical note,

My intentions were to hitch-hike, and after hiking all day without a lift, a freight train pulled to a stop Beside the road. I crawled into a hox car. i never again voluntarily took up the responsibilities of hitch-hiking, but I always aligned my interests with the interests of the railroad companies. They generally got me where I wanted to go, which was never more definite than “east” or “west.”

The big Kansas farmers had already mechanized their operations, so there was no work to be had. “I got my first taste of men trying to buck a machine,” he later wrote. Kromer headed home after five months with little money and many hungry days. But things were just as bad in Huntington and he soon headed out again.

Waiting for Nothing is a lightly-fictionalized distillation of Kromer’s years as a hobo. He claimed that, “Parts of the book were scrawled on Bull Durham papers in box cars, margins of religious tracts in a hundred missions, jails, one prison, railroad sand-houses, flop-houses, and on a few memorable occasions actually pecked out with my two index fingers on an honest-to-God typewriter.” In fact, most of it was probably written in a notebook in the relative comfort of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps in California between mid-1933 and mid-1934.

The Oro Plata, Murphy’s Camp, California (1934), by Marcy Woods.
The Oro Plata, Murphy’s Camp, California (1934), by Marcy Woods.

At one of these camps near Murphy’s Camp in the Sierra Nevadas, he met the painter Marcy Woods. Kromer complained to Woods that he’d sent his manuscript, then titled “Three Hots and a Flop”, to several publishers with no luck. Woods’ wife Hazel was acquainted with the muckracking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who’d retired near the Woods’ home in Carmel, California, and offered to send the book to Steffens. Steffens returned the book after a few days with an enthusiastic note: “This story, this portrait of a ‘stiff’ is important. I sat up late nights reading it and I knew I was getting something I had never ‘got’ before: realism to the nth degree.” Encouraged by this response, Kromer sent the book to John Steinbeck’s first publisher, Covici-Friede. They rejected it.

Kromer wrote to Steffens again, asking for advice on hiring a literary agent. Steffens recommended Maxim Lieber, then the champion of many of the most promising radical writers in America: Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Anne Porter, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, Albert Halper, James T. Farrell, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes. Lieber submitted the book to Alfred A. Knopf, who’d begun to publish such writers in the hard-boiled style as Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. Knopf quickly bought the book and included it on their Spring 1935 list as “Title not announced.” Knopf did not care for “Three Hots and a Flop.”

By then, Kromer had left the CCC and taken a job at the Harvard Book Store in Stockton. One of the biggest risks of life on the road — along with getting beaten up by railroad bulls and falling off a train — was tuberculosis, and Kromer’s health could no longer stand up to the physical demands of the CCC work. The book store hosted a signing for Kromer when Waiting for Nothing came out in early 1935.

Harvard Book Store ad for Waiting for Nothing.
Harvard Book Store ad for Waiting for Nothing.

Waiting for Nothing came out at a busy time for the book reviewing business. It was competing with the likes of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Faulkner’s Pylon, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, and Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet. And it wasn’t the first novel about life “on the fritz.” Edward Newhouse’s You Can’t Sleep Here, which was based on Newhouse’s experience of unemployment and homelessness in New York City, came out the year before and a few months later, Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men was instantly compared with Waiting for Nothing.

Yet Waiting for Nothing still stood out from its competition. It’s easy to imagine Kromer’s fingers flying on a typewriter’s keys: his prose has the same striking staccato pace:

It is night. I am walking along this dark street, when my foot hits a stick. I reach down and pick it up. I finger it. It is a good stick, a heavy stick. One sock from it would lay a man out. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would lay him out. I plan. Hit him where the crease is in his hat, hard, I tell myself, but not too hard. I do not want his head to hit the concrete. It might kill him. I do not want to kill him. I will catch him as he falls. I can frisk him in a minute. I will pull him over in the shadows and walk off. I will not run. I will walk.

Many, including Kromer, spotted the influence of Hemingway, especially his first short story collection In Our Time. But it’s also very close to this sample from a young hobo’s diary, quoted in a 1934 book titled Boy and Girl Tramps of America, a factual account by Thomas Minehan published in 1934:

Sept. 11. Villa Grove. Rode with truck. Good town. Raining when I hit first house. Woman gave me three eggs, two big pieces of meat. Cream and corn flakes, cookies, jell and all the coffee I want. Ask lots of questions. Man in house, too. He gives me a dime when I go. Made thirty cents hitting stem. A junction. Took train. Friendly. Good for supper and that’s all.

Sept. 12. Shelbyville. Cop picked me up. Sent to jail, had to work two hours for dinner and supper. Stayed in jail all night. Six guys of us. N. G. Got out before breakfast. Walked with Shorty to Baxter. Small burg. N. G. Rode with farmer to Clarksburg. N. G. Got handout from farm girl, bacon and bread. Me and Shorty came back to ask for drink of water and she says, “Sic ’em,” to big gray dog. Dog jumped at Shorty, but Shorty socks it. I gets a club. Dog chases us a mile until we get to gravel and a lot of bricks. Boy did we give it to him then.

One critic later groused that “the ‘Tom Kromer’ of the book is a craftily simple version of the Tom Kromer who wrote it: the former doesn’t know where is next meal is coming from, but the latter knew to tell it like A Farewell to Arms.” And while it’s true that Kromer was better educated than the average hobo, his experience and hardened attitudes rang true to the life Minehan encountered when he accompanied one of his subjects through a week on the skids:

Large sewer rats scurry across the floor, rustling the newspapers, foraging in the filth. Drunks stagger in, miss the top step in the darkness, and stumble to the bottom. They call and curse at each other, fight, vomit, urinate in the darkness. Some groan. Many hiccup. One sings a ribald ballad, tuneless and wheezy. And by my side a sixteen-year-old boy coughs, continually, without waking. Deep and chesty is the cough. Between coughs, I can hear his labored breathing. A rattle comes from his throat. The rattle becomes deeper, more difficult. Breath wheezes, a pause. And cough, cough, cough, until the tubes are clear, and the boy can breathe again.

For Kromer, rats carried a special terror:

I listen to these rats that rustle across the floor. I pull this sack off my face and strain my eyes through the blackness. I am afraid of rats. Once in a jungle I awoke with two on my face. Since then I dream of rats that are as big as cats, who sit on my face and gnaw at my nose and eyes. I cannot see them. It is too dark. I cannot lie here and wait with my heart thumping against my ribs like this. I cannot lie here and listen to them patter across the floor, and me not able to see them.

It’s hard to believe that Orwell hadn’t taken some of his inspiration for Winston Smith’s fear of rats in 1984 from Waiting for Nothing.

A few months after the US publication, Constable published Waiting for Nothing in England. Theodore Dreiser was enlisted to write an introduction, which was enthusiastic, if in Dreiser’s uniquely ham-fisted and occasionally incoherent way. In the 1986 University of Georgia edition of Waiting for Nothing, which also includes most of Kromer’s other writings, Arthur D. Casciato wrote, “In the entire introduction, only Dreiser’s first two sentences really make sense: ‘This book needs no introduction or foreword,’ he writes. ‘It is its own introduction or foreword.’ Dreiser probably should have left it at that.”

The English edition was, however, missing an entire chapter. In Chapter 4 in the original, the narrator meets and goes home with a homosexual known as “Mrs. Carter” simply to get a warm meal. Once at Mrs. Carter’s, he faces the facts of his situation:

I will have to go to bed some time. This queer will stay awake until I do go to bed. What the hell? A guy has got to eat, and what is more, he has got to flop.

“Sure,” I say, “I am ready for the hay.”

You can always depend on a stiff having to pay for what he gets. I pull off my clothes and crawl into bed.

Given the laws in England at the time, however, Constable was in a quandary. “An experienced member of the book trade had sent us a warning,” they wrote in an insert that took the place of Chapter 4, “and we must decide whether, under existing conditions in this country, a true incident which could be publicly described in America was one which might not be publicly described in England.” It might not, Constable decided.

We have cut out Chapter IV entirely — cut it out with reluctance and with shame, merely consoling ourselves with the thought that fortunately the continuity of the book is in no way affected. Were we wrong to cut it out? No one can possibly say. Would we have been guilty of corrupting youth had we left it in? Once again, no one — in advance — has the smallest idea. That is how things are in England these days; and that is why Waiting for Nothing appears in England in an emasculated form.

On the strength of his five years on the road and the reviews of Waiting for Nothing, Kromer felt he’d earned the right to sit in judgment of those who would write about the hobo life. His contempt for Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men when he reviewed the book for The New Masses is unmuted:

You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes “Jesus Saves” on and of? in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men. When one of Mr. Anderson’s puppets gets a gnawing in the pit of his guts, he takes him up to a back door or a restaurant and feeds him. When his hero is mooning on the waterfront over a respectable two-bit whore that he is in love with, you will never guess what happens — the Communist in the book hands him fifty bucks and says here take this dough, I’ll not be needing it and make a home for the gal.

“Perhaps Mr. Anderson has never seen a bunch of desperately hungry men,” Kromer speculated.

Soon after Waiting for Nothing, however, Kromer found that even the book store work was too much for him. He headed again back to West Virginia, where one of his classmates from Marshall, Thomas Donnelly, convinced him to come to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Donnelly was taking a teaching post at the University of New Mexico starting that fall, working for their former Marshall professor Arthur S. White. His two Marshall acquaintances arranged a scholarship for Kromer to study journalism. In the report of literary conference in July 1936, Kromer was identified as “a health seeker and student living in Albuquerque.” Not long after he started classes, he began coughing up blood and was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital for treatment.

At St. Joseph’s Hospital, Kromer met Jeannette (Janet) Smith, a Vassar graduate who was being treated for rheumatic heart disease. Janet had been working in New Mexico for the Federal Writers Project and teaching at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school near Santa Fe. The two decided to get married, but postponed the wedding until Kromer was discharged from the Sunnyside Sanitorium where he’d been transferred. Janet got a job writing for the Albuquerque Tribune and Kromer sent off reviews for The New Masses and articles for The Pacific Weekly, a liberal magazine recently started by Steffens and his wife, Ella Winters. He applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship but was turned down. He also began work on a new novel titled Michael Kohler based on his grandfather’s life as a coal miner.

And that was essentially the end of Tom Kromer’s career as a writer. Janet and Tom Kromer married in December 1936. His last article, “A Glass Worker Dies,” based on his father’s death, appeared in The Pacific Weekly the same month. Tom never finished Michael Kohler.

The Kromer House, 1968. Photo by Harvey Hoshour.
The Kromer House, 1968. Photo by Harvey Hoshour.

In 1937, the Kromers bought a lot in Alameda, on the north side of Albuquerque, where they constructed an adobe house still known as “the Kromer House.” Janet became the editor of the Tribune’s Women’s Page and supported the couple until her death from lung cancer in 1960. According to at least one account, by the late 1940s, tuberculosis and alcohol abuse had turned Tom into a recluse. After the war, Janet established a chatty weekly advertising paper known as Janet Kromer’s Shopping Notes and there is a chance that Tom contributed some of its material. He was, in any case, the named party when an upset local Albuquerque TV personality sued Janet’s Shopping Notes for libel over a suggestion that she was pregnant and taking a beauty course when she was neither.

By the time the suit was dismissed by the New Mexico Supreme Court in 1964, Tom Kromer had left the state. He sold the Kromer House to Harvey Hoshour, an architect, who later reported that the place had fallen into serious disrepair. Hoshour and his wife restored the house and it’s now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Kromer moved back to Huntington and took a room in the same house on 4th Street he’d left in 1929. He lived there, cared for by his sisters Emogene and Katherine, until he died in 1969. He was buried in a family plot alongside his parents.

A Conversation with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, author of Ascent to Glory

Cover of Ascent to Glory by Álvaro Santana-Acuña

I learned about Álvaro Santana-Acuña’s new book, Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic, from Michael Orthofer’s review on his Complete Review site, and immediately purchased a copy. What attracted me was that Santana-Acuña doesn’t just describe the uncertain process by which García Márquez’s 1967 novel became a classic recognized around the world: he also explores why five other Latin American novels—powerful novels, novels of substantial literary merit—failed to achieve the same status. He refers to these examples as “literary counterfactuals”—the classics that might have been, if you will. His point is that looking at both the success (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and the “might have beens”, demonstrates that it’s often factors beyond the text’s quality, sometimes factors beyond the author’s control, that make or break a book’s longevity.

This resonated with what I’ve seen in my years of studying neglected books and writers and especially in this last year, when I’ve dug deep into the stories of forgotten writers as part of my graduate program at the University of East Anglia. So much, indeed, that I contacted Álvaro, who teaches sociology at Whitman College and asked if he’d be willing to participate in a discussion about what leads to one book becoming a classic and another little-known, little-read relic. I was delighted when he agreed, and what follows is a distillation of what was, as we both later agreed, the fastest 90 minutes we’ve spent since lockdown.

Brad: Congratulations on the book! For the sake of readers who are learning about it here, can you give a quick overview of what you cover?

Álvaro Santana-Acuña
Dr. Álvaro Santana-Acuña

Álvaro: Thank you. What I wanted to show in Ascent to Glory was that the road to the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude was actually very bumpy and that there were other books that for different reasons were expected to be more successful—or were already successful and then disappeared from view. And the same thing happens to authors. Critics and readers were expecting, for example, José Donoso, to be the real major Latin American Boom writer and his The Obscene Bird of Night the best Latin American Boom novel. What happened was that García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude took that place and instead, Donoso’s novel is now becoming a neglected literary work. No one could have predicted how things would turn out. Of course, the quality of the work matters, but as much or more that what happens afterwards. I wanted to show that the making of a classic is a social process, and that we need to look into the social, economic, and cultural context as well as the literary content, that is, the text, to understand why—and in the case of others like Donoso, why not.

Brad: Yes! I’ve seen that with so many writers I’ve looked at. The difference between the writer who continues to be read and the one who loses his or her readers in the space of a few years so often just seems to be a matter of dumb luck. I particularly see that now that I’m back in the university and I can see that the conventions of academic study tend to lead scholars to write about the writers that other people write about. It creates the effect that a few writers — Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, for example — get intensely studied. That every year, their library sections get bigger and bigger and bigger, while a few feet away you find some old copies of James Hanley’s books, say, that haven’t been read, let alone studied or written about. And the reactions of most academics when I approach them about someone like G. E. Trevelyan — an amazing writer whose books are almost impossible to find, who’s been completely forgotten in literary history—is complete disinterest. It’s like they can’t afford to become pigeonholed as a champion of the oddballs.

Covers of Los Sangurimas by Jose de la Cuadra

Álvaro: I must say that unfortunately, I had the same experience. One of the authors I study in Ascent to Glory, José de la Cuadra, was first mentioned to me by a colleague with a tremendous thirst for literature. He was always recommending books to me. I remember vividly the day he said, “Oh, you like One Hundred Years of Solitude? Read Los Sangurimas by de la Cuadra, and you tell me whether you think García Márquez actually found inspiration for his novel in that little book.” And the fact is that there are so many similarities between them that it’s very hard not to claim that García Márquez built on Los Sangurimas to write his own novel.

The truth is that One Hundred Years of Solitude was so successful because it built on themes that were already prevalent in other regional literatures of Latin America, as in Ecuador, where de la Cuadra wrote his works. That’s the reason why, when people had One Hundred Years of Solitude in their hands, they could immediately see connections with other books that they’d read. And that’s one of García Márquez’s merits: he was really interested in other peoples’ experiences, in other people’s works, in other literary traditions. That’s something that literary critics often don’t take into account. When they look at influences on famous writers, they tend to focus on other celebrated writers—to the point that nowadays, the prevailing narrative is that García Márquez wrote in the tradition of high modernism: especially, Woolf, Hemingway, Joyce, and Faulkner.

Covers of La Casa Grande by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio

But the reality is that García Márquez was omnivorous in his reading. He read those classic authors, but there were others like Curzio Malaparte from Italy. His style and themes had a big impact on García Márquez’s early writing. In Colombia, there were local writers such as Héctor Rojas Herazo, Eduardo Caballero Calderón, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, all of whom García Márquez knew personally. And if you read what these Colombians were writing at the time, you see that they were all on the same page. The case of Cepeda Samudio is even more interesting because, as I show in Ascent, García Márquez and other friends regarded him as an extraordinarily talented writer—and indeed, his masterpiece La casa grande is praised by scholars today even if it’s neglected by most readers. So, there are legitimately major classic writers like Faulkner and Woolf that influenced García Márquez, but there are also less well-known writers who arguably had as much or more of an impact on him.

Brad: A point that I found particularly interesting in your book was the distinction between a classic and a canonical book. What is that difference, and how can it help with looking at a text?

Álvaro: One of the reasons I wrote Ascent to Glory was to offer my colleagues in literary studies a different perspective on the question of what’s a classic. What struck me in looking at the examples of the counterfactuals I discuss is that a classic is a work that can survive on its own. Hamlet will survive whether or not the Royal Shakespeare Company continues to exist, for example. If anything, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s reputation can be damaged if there is popular and critical backlash against one of their productions of Hamlet.

Hamlet is also a canonical book: you have the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of the plays edited by Shakespeare scholars, you have the Folger Library, you have academics constantly working on new studies and interpretations. Similarly, Madame Bovary is a classic that thousands read every year in cheap paperback editions at the same time that you have the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition and annotated critical editions, plus dozens of film and TV adaptations.

There are other works that are canonical but not classics. They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments. I give a couple of examples in the book. One of them is Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, which depends on French publisher Gallimard to maintain its canonical status. And there are books that are classics but not canonical. Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, for example. People all over the world still buy it and read it, but the academy in general refuses to recognize it as a literary text worth studying and teaching. Of course, a canonical book can be become recognized as a classic.

Brad: Like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example? It was out of print for years, but once it was reissued and started to be written about, it got put onto course reading lists and started to take off through word of mouth until now we could say it’s able to survive in the wild.

Álvaro: Right, there are classics like The Prophet that can never become canonical unless some institution decides it’s going to stake its reputation on supporting it. The point is that when we talk about a text as canonical, we’re talking about a relationship based on dependencies. The canonical work that’s not a classic depends on the support of an institution—Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, for example, would probably not stay in print if there wasn’t an academic press to support it. But the press that publishes Epicoene also stakes something of its reputation when it chooses to publish that text.

This kind of dependency extends beyond literature. Let’s think about art museums. We know the Louvre, for example, has classics like the Mona Lisa but it also owns many other lesser known works displayed on its walls and stored in facilities underground.

Mona Lisa crowd at the Louvre

Brad: Yes! The vast majority of the works on display in the Louvre are not classics: there is only one Mona Lisa, there is only one Raft of the Medusa. And most art museums can’t aspire to only have classics because then most of them would be empty. That’s what I love about art museums, in fact: you can almost always count on seeing something you’re not familiar with. Here in Norwich, in the museum at the Castle, for example, there’s a wing devoted to the Norwich school of painters, who were around the time of J. M. W. Turner, who knew him, who inspired him and were inspired by him—but who weren’t Turner. So, it’s full of works that are amazing—but that aren’t the few classics people associate with Turner. Certainly, some of my favorite painters are artists I wouldn’t have known unless I’d seen their work hanging in a gallery or museum.

Covers of The Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso

Álvaro: That’s a good example, because it helps us understand why Turner became the pinnacle of this form of artistic expression: he was building upon a whole school, a whole aesthetic movement. Going back to One Hundred Years of Solitude, when we talk about the style known as magical realism, the perception is that García Márquez invented it. But the reality is that, when he wrote the novel, the term magical realism itself had been around for at least twenty years, and there were already people like Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, who were also writing in this style. So, when One Hundred Years of Solitude’s came out, it was building on that magical realist tradition.

But something happened: a dislocation of the tradition. When a book becomes an exceptional success, like One Hundred Years of Solitude’s, it tends to overshadow what came before. If you think about it, Shakespeare managed to kill his predecessors—and for decades after also managed to kill his successors. And that’s what classic books and classic authors do. García Márquez’s and One Hundred Years of Solitude’s success makes it seem like there’s nothing in Colombian literature before or after this writer and his novel.

Covers of The Fox Up Above and the Fox Down below by José María Arguedas

In reality, Latin American literature was far more diverse than just magical realism. I point to the example of the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, who had a different conception of what being Latin American meant. He was a supporter of indigenism. He wrote the superb but neglected novel The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below. Arguedas was proud to say, “I am a provincial writer!” And he wasn’t alone. But all these alternatives disappeared, and we only have that pinnacle—García Márquez and a few others—representing Latin American literature.

Now, if you do some digging, you find all these other writers and ideas that were active at the same time. Unfortunately, a lot of my academic colleagues say, “Yeah, but I’m not really interested in those minor writers,” while for me, it’s a passion. It really gives you a better and deeper understanding of what goes into making a Turner or a García Márquez.

Highway map

Brad: Absolutely. It’s all part of what makes literature. Literature is not just the classics. I like to use the analogy of a landscape. Today, the fastest route between two places usually involves driving on some freeway—which in the American West is often practically a straight line. But there’s so much to be seen if you get off the freeway, if you follow the two-lane roads that wind around a little more, that take you through the smaller towns, that show you features of the landscape that nobody taking the freeway ever knows about. The landscape is not just that strip you see as you rush along the freeway—in fact, most of the landscape is what you can’t see from the freeway.

And literature is like that. The works and the writers that people were reading at the same time that García Márquez was becoming known worldwide are part of Latin American literature even if now most people have forgotten them. One reason your distinction between a classic and a canonical book intrigued me is that it opens up ways to rebalance the situation, to bring the forgotten parts of literature into the discussion.

I have to confess that until I read Ascent to Glory, I always associated the idea of a canonical book with things like Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: that the canon was limited to 50 or 100 books—the pinnacles, as you put it—and that anything that wasn’t in the canon was, in effect, second class, not worth bothering about. Your interpretation, on the other hand, says that we can bring forgotten books back into the discussion—but they will need some support: a publisher willing to keep them in print, academics willing to study and write about them.

Covers of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Álvaro: You’re right. Ascent to Glory is an anti-reductionist book. That’s in part because I’m a social scientist, and one of the things I like about the social sciences is that they give you the tools to offer multi-layered understandings of how society works. Something as simple and concrete as a book requires the collaboration of so many people, not just the labor of the writer. Whether it’s a classic or a canonical book, that collaboration continues and can become highly complex. And this multi-layered perspective makes it impossible to take a reductionist view and claim that the fame of a classic rests only on the quality of the text.

Because this is not true. And I’m sure people reading our conversation now can remember reading a book written in absolutely amazing prose and asking themselves, “How is it possible that this book is not better known?” That’s what happened to me when I read Los Sangurimas. I said to myself, “This is a gem and nobody knows about it.”

That’s why I talk about it in Ascent to Glory: I wanted to make the story about One Hundred Years of Solitude a little more complex. I wanted to show all the obstacles that the book faced—in order to show that it wasn’t just magic. García Márquez took 15 years to write the book. At the same time, Latin American literature was emerging after decades of facing its own obstacles. And the book wasn’t expected to be a bestseller. In fact, as I show, the novel met all the conditions to be a complete failure. That’s why I quote publisher Alfred Knopf in the Introduction: “Many a novel is dead the day it is published.” Because that’s the truth.

Ascent to Glory aims to show that the road to any artwork’s attaining the status of a classic is not straight, that it depends on a lot of factors, and any one of them can easily go wrong. Actually, when an artwork becomes a classic, it’s more like an alignment of planets, where each planet is a different factor. The skills of the creator matter, of course, but also his or her professional connections of the creator, the support of peers, the quality of the artwork, the precise historical moment, the gatekeepers, the distribution channels, and the market—and when you put all these factors together, you understand how one book—One Hundred Years of Solitude—became a classic where another—say, José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso—didn’t.

This doesn’t mean that the planets can’t align in future for a neglected book. As a matter of fact, we often see rediscoveries in art, works that have been forgotten, come back to life, and even become classics.

Brad: Like Their Eyes Were Watching God…

Álvaro: Right. Another one is The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. Due to the political conditions in the Soviet Union when it was written, this novel couldn’t even be published during Bulgakov’s lifetime. But when it was published outside the Soviet Union in the 1960s, you had an audience ready to praise it as one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.

Mural in the Bulgakov Museum in Moscow

Brad: And, according to something I read recently, the most popular book in Russian prisons today.

Álvaro: It’s incredible. I didn’t know that. This would have been impossible fifty years ago. And that confirms the idea that there are factors that can be obstacles—the political environment in the Soviet Union, for example—but not forever. One factor I talk about in Ascent to Glory is gatekeepers like literary agents. Carmen Balcells was a Spanish agent who got to know Vargas Llosa and García Márquez when they were living in Barcelona and played a major role in their careers. Another of her clients, José Donoso, on the other hand, came to resent and even attack her, and she was not supportive in return. But gatekeepers like agents and agencies come and go, and when they do, things can suddenly become possible. It would have been hard to envision a TV or film adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude just a few years ago because of the influence of García Márquez’s agent. Netflix is now working on the first adaptation.

Let’s not forget that books are social objects. Their production follows social patterns. And what I’m trying to show in Ascent is that the transformation of the social object we call a book into the social institution that we call the classic needs a social explanation. We cannot limit the explanation to talking about the quality of the text. And there are social patterns we can see when we look at numerous classics—the Mona Lisa, War and Peace, Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn—that are like the freeways, to use your example.

Brad: Right. It’s not just that the freeway is the fastest, most direct route. It’s also that the freeway has rest stops, has places where you can refuel, get food, spend the night. In the same way that the classics have reproductions and adaptations and Cliff’s Notes and other things that make them more accessible.

Álvaro: Exactly. And I’m offering some ways in which we can understand these patterns. One is the imagination of the author—how the work is envisioned by its creator. Another is the production process—the way the work gets produced and marketed. And the third is the distribution process—how a book, for example, gets circulated, translated, reprinted, and adapted into other formats.

Even imagination is a social activity. García Márquez had colleagues he talked with as he was imagining the book, even before he started writing it. He had the works of other writers to inspire and guide him. And even as he was writing the novel, which after all took him over a decade in the end, he was talking about it, he was reading new things. Even though it was his hand putting the words on the page, in some ways it was more like a mural—the work of many hands.

In my book, I try to disassemble this collective process, which I call “networked creativity,” to identify the elements that fed into García Márquez’s imagining One Hundred Years of Solitude. And what I try to show in Chapter 7—“Indexing a Classic”—is that this social collaboration in the imagination stage continues in the circulation stage. Over the decades, as different people approach the book, at different times, languages, and social and political contexts, they find units of significance—indexicals, I call them—that become reinforced. Like the opening line of the novel…

Brad: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Álvaro: See! You know it by heart, too. You also run into people comparing their own experiences to that discovery of ice, people pointing to the impact of the words, different critics coming up with different interpretations—Freudian, semiotic, religious, etc.—of those words, until that line becomes something that even people who’ve never read the book can recognize and even memorize parts of it.

Covers of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Brad: I found your model of the process—imagination, production, circulation—striking for a number of reasons. One is that it seems as if only the first stage ever gets discussed in traditional literature courses. I mean, I took an undergraduate degree in English literature and we never talked about two thirds of this process. And yet now that I’ve been studying and writing about neglected books for years, I’ve come to appreciate how much of an impact things like the design of the cover or the prestige of the publisher or whether it was easy to translate and appealed to readers in other languages can have on whether a book succeeds or fails in the long run.

In Ascent to Glory you show, for example, how publishers in Spain dominated the development of Latin American literature for years because especially publishers in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina operated on a more limited local or national basis.

Álvaro: Yes. The control of the production and circulation of books on a wider basis throughout Latin America was in the hands of a small number of Spanish publishers. And because they had such control, they exercised a homogenizing, standardizing influence over the kind of books that Latin American readers—including writers—read.

Things have now changed. With the rise of the Internet, readers all over the world can learn about books, can buy and download books, and can start up their own discussions through everything from Goodreads to Twitter to blogs like yours. And that means that no single agent or critic or broker can have the impact that someone like Harold Bloom had just 20-30 years ago. The age of literary criticism as this sort of global religion is over.

Brad: I spoke with a number of publishers earlier this year and it was striking how many of them reported that attracting social media influencers were as or more important than getting reviews in major trade journals in how they marketed books. So, some publishers will routinely push free copies to Amazon “Top One Hundred” reviewers because those early five-star reviews can be as critical as a good review in the New York Times.

Álvaro: It doesn’t surprise me. Compare this to how readers would communicate about a book before the Internet. What would they do? They’d only know a handful of other readers and they’d have to write letters to them, or they’d write letters to newspapers or magazines. And the editors of those newspapers or magazines would choose what letters did or didn’t get published and then control the conversation about newly published books. Whereas now, with Goodreads and other social media platforms and even the comments section at the end of many online newspaper articles, we see a plurality of voices, even about neglected books. And those voices are reinforcing the idea that there are thousands of good books and thousands of good writers—and not just living writers and in-print books.

To go back to your landscape analogy, these social media discussion platforms are acting as avenues that open up the landscape, that encourage us to discover the diversity of writers and perspectives that exists beyond the narrow and straight lines of the “Western Canon.” For example, new platforms are helping to make more visible the literary works of female Latin American writers from the 1960s, some of which, such as Elena Garro’s Recollections of Things to Come, are said to have influenced the works of their more famous male peers, including García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. But there are still obstacles, and some are in academia.

Brad: Publish or perish.

Álvaro: Correct. There is a risk-averse atmosphere in academia and especially in some disciplines at present, which I think explains some of the responses you got when you approached academics about several neglected works and authors. This atmosphere makes it difficult to undertake long-term writing projects like Ascent to Glory. It took me eleven years to write this book. When I started it, I knew that it was a risky move from an early career standpoint, which demands from raising scholars shorter writing projects and a fast publishing turnaround. I’m happy to say that this is the book that I wanted to write. And it makes me even happier that Ascent is finding its way to readers with a passion for neglected authors and works, because, let’s not forget it, the prestige of classics stands not only on the shoulders of giants but also on the shoulders of neglected creators and neglected works of art.

The Five “Literary Counterfactuals of Ascent to Glory:

Five Neglected Hollywood Novels: An Interview with Kari Sund

Bette Davis reading from The Petrified Forest

Kari Sund is a PhD student at Glasgow University working on a thesis about the Hollywood novel. She’s following in noteworthy footsteps: the late novelist and memoirist Carolyn See published her own dissertation, The Hollywood Novels: An Historical and Critical Study way back in 1963. I contacted Kari recently to ask if she’d share some recommendations from her wide reading in this genre, and she generously agreed.

What got you interested in novels set in Hollywood? Were you a film buff who got interested in literature or a literature buff who got interested in film?

Definitely the latter. I first became interested in the Hollywood novel when I was doing my Postgrad in American Literature, though the course didn’t focus on the genre. One of the texts on the core course was John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, and when I had finished reading this my Kindle recommended that I read Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, which I had never heard of, but absolutely loved. As both the works were published in 1939 and both were set in California during the depression era, I wanted to write about their differing depictions of the Western Dream in American Literature, drawing from Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893).

Around about the same time, I was writing my dissertation on the portrayal of alcohol, waste and occupation in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this led to me reading his unfinished Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon (1941). That set the ball rolling: the more Hollywood novels I read, the more I wanted to read. What most surprised me was the fact that until reading Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, I hadn’t come across discussion of the Hollywood novel as a genre. I had taken undergraduate modules on twentieth-century American literature, and a postgrad in American literature, but the genre hadn’t been covered and it wasn’t even mentioned in any of the American lit anthologies on my shelves. That added a layer of intrigue to the topic for me, which I find always helps when you are going down a rabbit-hole.

Cover of Merton of the Movies

1. Merton of the Movies (1922) by Harry Leon Wilson.

This is perhaps the first Hollywood novel to become a best-seller. It’s interesting to compare what contemporary reviewers said to how the book’s remembered now. The New Republic’s reviewer, for example, said “for the thousands who will laugh with Mr. Wilson there are millions who might read his story and see nothing in it to laugh at at all.” Harry Leon Wilson has a reputation as a comic novelist (e.g., Ruggles of Red Gap): is this a comic novel or a tragi-comic novel?

For me Merton of the Movies is a tragi-comic novel, and it really surprises me how many scholars, critics and reviewers refer to Wilson’s work as simply comic. There is no doubt that it is laugh-out-loud funny at times. Merton is a small-town shop assistant who wants more from life and dreams of finding success as a serious actor. He moves to Hollywood, struggles at first, but eventually finds fame in slapstick Keystone Kops-style comedy westerns due to his remarkable likeness to an existing Western star.

The only problem is that Merton has a deep disdain for these comedies, seeing them as the lowest form of acting. But when a director recognises the humorous scenarios created by Merton’s tendency to take himself far too seriously, he exploits this, putting Merton in a comedy role without telling him. Merton thinks he has finally got the serious Western role of his dreams. This is hilarious, of course, but because all Merton’s colleagues and bosses on set are part of the ruse it’s also humiliating to witness. Merton finally reaches the level of fame and success he has long dreamed of, but by a means which he has always scorned – slapstick comedy – and so there’s a bittersweet element to this.

It’s definitely difficult to feel sympathy for Merton at times because he is pompous and judgemental, but Wilson’s novel speaks about the culture of the Hollywood film-factory utilising human beings for its own means, a culture which countless Hollywood novels would continue to explore into the 20s, 30s, and still do today. Merton can bring you tears of laughter and of pity, definitely a tragi-comic novel, and a wonderful read.

Some years ago in The New York Times, Nora Johnson called Merton of the Movies“>Merton of the Movies one of the Hollywood novels that had become “dated as old valentines in their innocence and their view of the movie capitol as exciting, amusing, certainly loony, but harmless on the whole.” Is this a fair accusation?

I don’t think this is entirely fair, no, mainly because I don’t feel that the novel depicts Hollywood as harmless. Wilson captures the excitement, or rather obsession, that people felt about potential fame and success in the field of acting, and that’s a dream that I don’t think has ever fully left Western culture. But with this obsession comes a resulting difficulty in distinguishing between reality and fantasy – another theme which Hollywood novels have continuously explored – and this is one of the main concerns of Merton of the Movies. Merton experiences delusions in his humdrum life back home, like getting into fights with mannequins at work as he envisions himself in a Western saloon scene, and becoming the laughing stock of the town when he tries to steal a local horse as his trusty steed.

After he has made the pilgrimage to Hollywood he ends up so destitute that he finds himself secretly living on film sets and nearly starving, and it is because his hold on reality is so loose that he is able to normalise this situation. He constantly filters the events of his own life as they might be depicted through a Hollywood memoir, or fan-magazine interview, with a famous star. Wilson’s narrative depicts these scenes in a comedic style, but Wilson himself was not a fan of Hollywood and there is an undeniably serious message in this novel about how harmful an extreme obsession with Hollywood, film, and the cult of celebrity can be.

The exploration of this theme has endured not only in fiction, but also in films about Hollywood and the West. Sunset Boulevard (1950), Mulholland Drive (2001), and more recently Ingrid Goes West (2017), all explore the distortion of reality through their character’s proximity to, or obsession with, Hollywood and celebrity. Ingrid Goes West links this to the use of social media in modern culture, exploring how we distort our own portrayals of reality via platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, and how these portrayals in turn impact our perceptions of our own lives. So, I don’t feel that Merton of the Movies“>Merton depicts Hollywood as harmless, nor do I think that the work is dated given that one of its main themes is still so relevant today. Johnson’s words do resonate in respect of one aspect of the novel though, and that is the fact that Merton still finds success in Hollywood, even if it isn’t his preferred role.

Scholars like John Parris Springer have observed that Wilson gives in to the fairy-tale perception that dreams really do come true, and I have to admit that I also find it disappointing that he somewhat endorses the idea that anyone could make it in Hollywood.1 This truly was a harmful message, one that was bringing thousands of starry-eyed young people to the film-capital in search of fame, only to be met with disappointment and sometimes destitution. Yet without this ending—Merton’s success—it would have been a completely different novel.

 

Cover of Minnie Flynn

2. Minnie Flynn (1925) by Frances Marion

Frances Marion was the highest-paid screenwriter (of either sex) in the 1920s. What does Minnie Flynn tell us about Marion’s view of the industry she was so successful in?

This picks up where I’ve just left off with Merton of the Movies. In Cari Beauchamp’s compelling work Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (1997), she writes that Marion wanted the novel to be “a warning to the thousands of women she saw pouring into Hollywood full of optimism and without the slightest idea of what lay ahead”.2 So Marion was open that this was a cautionary tale for young girls coming to Hollywood to try and make it as actresses.

At the time when Minnie Flynn was published, people were travelling to Hollywood in the thousands to find fame and success only to find that even extra roles were impossible to get because there was such a vast pool of hopefuls to select from. Hollywood had more budding actors than it needed. Marion’s message was that even for those young girls who did find work, it would not necessarily be the experience that they envisioned.

The novel follows a young girl, Minnie, who starts out as an extra in the East coast film industry. She is given an introduction by a minor actor she meets at a ball and who is interested in her romantically. Minnie doesn’t find massive stardom, but she does find moderate success and moves to Hollywood to continue her career.

Marion really emphasises the serious pitfalls, and one of the main ones is the loss of trust in friends and family members. Most of Minnie’s loved ones use her for what they can get when she is at the peak of her fame, and are nowhere to be found when she is down-and-out, it’s quite tragic. Then there is the added fact that, for most, fame rarely lasts.

Marion also makes it explicitly clear that women trying to make it as actresses were objectified sexually, often from a young age, as part-and-parcel of the casting process. This is one of the most significant aspects of the novel for me, as it reflects that a culture which still exists today – as we have seen in the last couple of years with the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement – has been deeply ingrained from the early years of silent film.

Marion confessed later that she spent four months writing the first four chapters and then finished the rest of the book in just six weeks. The “tough guy” novelist Jim Tully said she “was guilty of the artistic murder of a beautiful character.” Did you notice any significant shifts in style or quality in the course of the book?

I wasn’t aware of this when I was originally reading it, and I think it would lead to a different reading experience, so it makes me want to read the novel again! There are some aspects of the work which instantly come to mind. For example, Minnie moves from the East coast film industry to the West coast film industry, and her time in Hollywood is short in the grand scheme of the novel. I was surprised by just how much of the novel is set in the East and how little is set in the West, though this was also an aspect I enjoyed as I felt it highlighted the relevance of the East coast film industry to Hollywood, another topic which my thesis gives focus to.

As for Tully’s accusation, I guess the answer depends on how we consider Minnie as beautiful. From the start she’s described as physically beautiful but Marion also emphasises the many flaws of Minnie’s character: she is selfish, fickle, shallow, and pretty mean! If Tully means that the character was beautifully crafted, then I would agree, but I also felt the ending was effective, not rushed. Minnie ends up being used by partners, lovers, family members, and so-called friends. By the close of the book she is destitute, having lost her fame and her looks, and she’s punishing herself for her fate.

Cover of reissue of Minnie Flynn

Note: Kari got this beautiful copy of Minnie Flynn a few years ago from Ben Smith, who ran a Kickstarter to get the work back into publication (and who may have a spare copy or two for sale): Frances Marion’s Lost Novel Minnie Flynn – A New Edition

 

Cover of Twinkle Little Movie Star

3. Twinkle, Little Movie Star (1927) by Lorraine Maynard.

This is a children’s book — what might be considered YA (Young Adult) fiction today. What interests you about this book in the context of your research?

Hollywood-related fiction for children plays a huge role in my research. The first film-related novels to be published about Hollywood were in the form of series-works for children, so they really hold a formative position in the genre, yet these and all works for children are consistently dismissed from scholarship. Because of this, I assumed that they would be irrelevant to the larger genre, yet when I started reading these works I was struck by the similarities in the themes they explore, but also by the fresh perspectives that they bring to the genre, and so I felt they warranted more attention.

The most interesting aspect of Twinkle for me is the depiction of a child star – Vivi Corelli – and that stars experience of working in the film-industry of the 1920s. The story is almost wholly set in Hollywood, bar a few visits for location shooting, yet the universe we encounter in the novel really exists in a vacuum of film sets through the eyes of a child. Through this novel, Lorraine Maynard depicts and condemns the working conditions for child actors by detailing the dangers which Vivi is at the mercy of because of those conditions. It also touches on the use of animals in the industry, as Vivi’s co-star is a beloved dog, Scamp.

Illustration from Twinkle Little Movie Star
Illustration from Twinkle Little Movie Star
Would you consider Maynard’s child star, Vivi Corelli, a precursor to Shirley Temple?

Absolutely. Lorraine Maynard herself had worked as an actress for a short period of time when she was a teenager, so she would have had experience on film sets and in studios, and would have been familiar with the phenomenon of child stars in America. Variety also claimed that this work was allegedly based on “Baby Peggy” (Diana Serra Cary) who was one of the first child stars of the silent movie era, a real-life precursor to Shirley Temple.

 

Cover of Remember Valerie March

4. Remember Valerie March (1939) by Katherine Albert

Like Frances Marion, Katherine Albert wrote from insider knowledge of working in Hollywood. Yet The New York Times reviewer wrote, “It would be shocking to think that her people represent a cross-section of Hollywood, and this reviewer is left unconvinced by the jacket’s assurance that such is true.” Having read a fair share of Hollywood books by now, how realistic did the book seem to you?

For me, this is a good example of a Hollywood novel being unfairly dismissed based on its authorship and the subcategory to which it belongs. The work is female-penned, focuses almost entirely on the career of an actress and has elements of romance and sensation in it. Having dissected bibliographies on the genre and having now read a fair amount of scholarship on it, works with these characteristics have often been dismissed since—and they were not even given serious attention at the time of publication either. There is nothing in this work which strikes me as more or less realistic than the next Hollywood novel.

Remember Valerie March takes the form of a mock star exposé narrated by Conrad Powers, who’d directed most of March’s films. It focuses on Valerie’s personality, her rise to fame, her acting roles and methods, and the events of her personal life. The writing is sometimes deliberately sensationalised due to it being a mock-exposé, yet the story remains believable. The New York Times review wasn’t the only one to disparage the work: Hollywood novelist and scriptwriter Budd Schulberg dismissed Valerie March, along with Minnie Flynn and a number of other works about women’s experience in Hollywood as “Glamour Books, glorified fan magazine stuff”.3

This was the common view of these works in the 1950s and there hasn’t been much to contradict this stance in Hollywood scholarship since. This is one of the reasons I feel these works warrant further exploration. Given the prevalence within the genre of surrealist novels like The Day of the Locust (1939), satires like Carroll and Garrett Graham’s Queer People (1930), and tongue-in-cheek works like Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948), it does become difficult to distinguish this genre as “realistic”.

One thing that sets Remember Valerie March apart is the fact that Albert related the story through the voice and perspective of a male narrator–Conrad Powers, the director who discovered Valerie March. Why do you think Albert made this choice?

I’m not sure why, but it makes for a complex portrait of a Hollywood actress. In part, it’s a necessary measure to fit with the mock star-exposé form the narrative takes. At the time, the relationship between an actress and their director was something which film fan magazines and Hollywood gossip columns would often focus on as part of their preoccupation with revealing “insider” stories (and something we still read about in gossip magazines today!), so on more obvious level it would encourage an existing readership who were interested in Hollywood to buy the novel.

I don’t know if this was Albert’s conscious intention, but I also felt the narrative perspective highlighted the way in which women in Hollywood were—and often still are—filtered through male perspectives, and this is another reason why I selected this work for focus in my thesis. Conrad Powers has a close relationship with Valerie, and at times quite a strong ability to influence her decisions. I don’t think that Albert intended for the reader to always take Powers’ view of events at face value, but for them to question if there was a different perspective.

 

Cover of In a Lonely Place

5. In a Lonely Place (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes.

You’ve written that “For me, this is neglected in the sense that it’s not traditionally considered to be a Hollywood novel, but I think there’s a really strong argument for it being one!” How would you make that argument?

This ties in with a larger existing scholarly debate over how much of a link to Hollywood a Hollywood novel should have. Some critics think that a Hollywood novel should have a specific and significant geographical setting in Hollywood, while others feel that Hollywood doesn’t need to be a specific or central setting, but can be more of a “symbol rather than setting”, in the words of Jonas Spatz.4 To play devil’s advocate, I don’t really agree or disagree with either, or not yet anyway!

The genre has such an enormous and diverse collection of novels, all of which have varying degrees and forms of involvement with Hollywood as either a place or an industry. Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park (1951) isn’t even set in Hollywood, but with an overarching concern with the film industry and the people in that industry, no one can deny its status as a Hollywood novel. Then you have works like Remember Valerie March (1939), which are very distinctly set in Hollywood, painting a clear picture of living and working in Hollywood even down to what interior design is popular with the stars. Yet, as we have seen with the review you cited, it is still critically dismissed for being unrealistic or inaccurate.

In A Lonely Place (1949) hasn’t been discussed within the genre – to the best of my knowledge – and it isn’t recorded in any bibliographies of the genre, and I believe this is because of the book’s delicate involvement with Hollywood. Hughes goes to great lengths to utilise the geographical area, as the protagonist Dix Steele drives round specific streets at night, haunting hotspots where he *spoiler* looks for murder victims. The geographical element is very much there, but many would argue that there is no actual concern with Hollywood as none of the characters or plots are prominently involved in the film industry.

Much of Dix’s urge to kill, though, comes from a feeling of resentment which is clearly linked to class, money, and lifestyle. He pretends to be a novelist and tries to exude the casual superiority of a man of leisure. But, of course, this only betrays an inferiority. He is financially dependent on an uncle he hates, and the perpetual land of sunshine and beautiful film-people represents, for Dix, a fantasy which he has been shut out from after serving in the war.

His experience is such a truly stark contrast to the leisurely life which was consistently promoted in Hollywood through consumerism. This lifestyle was promoted through the films being produced, by the publicity machines of film studios, by the fan magazines, even in the shop windows you would pass as you walked down the street. The message was that this life of leisure was attainable if you only looked the part.

Dix is trying desperately to look the part but only feels an increasing sense of unbelonging that adds to his resentment. I would argue that there could be no better setting to fuel this type of resentment than Hollywood itself. So, though it might seem almost like an incidental setting – just the backdrop to a serial killer’s hunt – I think Hollywood is the essential setting for In A Lonely Place. I don’t think this novel could be set anywhere else and still have the same associations.

One last question: some people say that Hollywood and the movie business is an artificial environment, so fictions set there are inherently stilted or simplistic. Others say it’s an environment that distills, drawing out and intensifying aspects of the world at large. Where do you side?

From the Hollywood novels which I have read I think the genre tends to draw out and intensify aspects of the world at large. An idea which you come across frequently in scholarship on Hollywood and the Hollywood novel pre-1950s is that Hollywood was being perceived and portrayed in these novels as a “microcosm” of America. This idea doesn’t always resonate with me when I’m reading Hollywood novels, but I think in a great many of these works Hollywood is definitely being used to explore some of the larger social, cultural, and artistic concerns which people were experiencing at this time.

The early works I examine from the 1910s and 1920s reflect the changing perceptions of social class in America, women’s role in the workplace, concerns and excitement over industrialisation, invention, and technological advancements being made. I really haven’t read one Hollywood novel that I’ve found stilted or simplistic. Instead, even the least complex works still provide insight into significant aspects of the film industry and reflect larger concerns over cultural or societal issues, and if we are examining Hollywood and the film industry from a historical perspective these are extremely valuable insights.

Footnotes

1John Parris Springer. Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature. Norman. University of Oklahoma, 2000.

2Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. California, University of California Press, 1997.

3Budd Schulberg. “The Hollywood Novel.” American Film (Archive:1975-1992), vol. 1, no. 7, May 01, 1976, pp. 28-32.

4Jonas Spatz. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the American Myth. Mouton, The Hague, 1969.

Kari SundKari provided the following profile: I’m studying for my PhD in American Studies at Glasgow University, and my thesis is on the Hollywood novel genre pre-1950s. Other research interests include F. Scott Fitzgerald, and particularly the role played in his novels of alcohol, work, and waste. As a part-time student I also spend my time working in financial services, hospitality and teaching. My Twitter handle is @karichsund and my email address is [email protected], would love to hear from anyone with similar research interests, or fellow part-time PhD students as it’s always nice to connect with those who have a shared experience of this!

Candidates for the #1956Club

The 1956 Club logo
For about five years now, Karen Langley (Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambles) and Simon Thomas (of Stuck in a Book) have instigated a semi-annual event in which people around the world take a week to read and write about books published during a particular year. The next round, coming up the week of 5-11 October, will look at books from the year 1956.

1956 was a terrific year for what I might call good but not stuffily great books. Perhaps the best example is Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, which won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and which is much loved for the spirit embodied in its opening line: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” This was Macaulay’s last novel; also appearing in 1956 is Anthony Burgess’s first novel Time for a Tiger, the first book in his Malayan Trilogy.

To encourage folks to take advantage of the #1956Club while also discovering something beyond what’s readily available for instant download or overnight delivery, I’ve put together this list of 10 long-forgotten and out of print books from 1956.

Dust Jacket from Solo by Stanford Whitmore

• Solo, by Stanford Whitmore

A first and only novel about a jazz pianist working in Chicago. In the Sphere, Vernon Fane wrote, “Mr. Whitmore’s hero is an eccentric young man who describes himself as the last individual in the world, is a brilliant jazz pianist and, by his almost total independence, makes himself as many enemies as fans.” In the Guardian, Anna Bostock found Whitmore’s knowledge of Chicago and jazz “fascinating … with its own values, manners, and language, and the author’s sure command of these gives the novel something of the quality of a good travel book.” In the Observer’s year-end wrap-up, John Wain wrote that he’d under-praised Solo, “which has stayed in my mind very firmly since January, and show no sign of dissolving.”

 

Cover from For All We Know by G. B. Stern

• For All We Know, by G. B. Stern

A novel about the theater and all the personalities around it. In the New Statesman, Michael Crampton wrote that it “throbs with the passionate, false life of the stage. Everybody strikes poses, and there’s a good deal of sharp elbowing up right and down left in the crowd scences. But I find that green-room novels, like salted almonds, are insidiously to my taste.” Isabel Quigly praised Stern’s ability to manage a vast cast with sublime nonchalance. “For All We Know (a suitably airy title) is about one of those brilliant, fictional families with ramifications so complex that even with a family tree at the beginning you can hardly tell by the end exactly who is whose great-aunt or grandmother or second cousin. But it doesn’t really matter; what does is the frightful, fascinating buoyancy of plot, characters, conversations and, of course, plain narrative.”

 

Cover of The Brazen Head by John Cowper Powys

• The Brazen Head, by John Cowper Powys

One of Powys’s last books, described as a phantasmagoria and set in Wessex at the time of Roger Bacon. “A profusion of odd characters — barons, sorcerers, giants, enchantresses — appear and disappear, argue, tangle and disentangle, evacuate, copulate or die,” wrote Tom Hopkinson in the Observer. Hopkinson found the book a molten, formless mass — but didn’t think that mattered much. “The book’s chief quality,” he wrote, “lies in the author’s immense erudition and expansive kindliness of heart, which gleam, whenever they are allow to, through the boisterous confusion of action and the ceaseless babel of talk.” Both Stevie Smith and Angus Wilson named The Brazen Head one of their books of the year. “It is beautifully, deeply weird and also happy,” wrote Smith, while Wilson called Powys “still the most original living English writer.”

 

Cover from Remember the House by Santha Rama Rau

• Remember the House, by Santha Rama Rau

A novel about an English-educated Indian young woman in Bombay (Mumbai). Isabel Quigly found it seems—and maybe is—the first novel I remember reading which takes you right away from, right beyond, the confines of western thought. And so delicately that you barely notice, till afterwards, you have spent time in another world. The surface is perfectly familiar—a light, glittering, conversational style, dialogue that often recalls Mr. Waugh in his bright young days, action at just the right pace to keep you interested but not breathless, characters beautifully disposed and organised. ” “The worn old adjective ‘brilliant’ does really apply to this extraordinary eyocation of a way of life at once familiar and remote: and so deftly, so—in a brash, lighthearted way—femininely” Quigly concluded, “that you are half lulled into thinking it just another novel about social habits: which it is, but so very much more. And, I almost forgot to say, highly entertaining, at the idlest level of appreciation, as well.”

 

Cover of Image of a Society by Roy Fuller

• Image of a Society, by Roy Fuller

Mary Scrutton spoke for many potential readers when she wrote in the New Statesman, “I never met a more misleading title than Image of a Society. It sounds like yet another sociological survey. In fact it is rather like a good Arnold Bennett, only it is well written [posthumous apologies to Mr. Bennett]. It is about the people who work in a large Building Society in a provincial town, and more particularly about two of them—the ambitious, cocky, extrovert executive who is fancied as the next General Manager, and the sad, intellectual parent-ridden young solicitor who falls in love with that executive’s wife. Both men are most shrewdly studied, but not at the expense of the background; the whole movement of the office is tersely and wittily conveyed.” Scrutton had exceptional praise for Fuller’s skill: “It is a beautifully organised novel, all the more moving for being closely pruned. It gave me the feeling that I had when I first read Afternoon Men—namely, that most novelists never succeed in extracting the statue from the stone at all. No wonder it is often such hard work trying to enjoy them.”

 

Cover of A Single Pebble by John Hersey

• A Single Pebble, by John Hersey

This short novel drew upon Hersey’s years of living in China as the son of American missionaries. An American engineer travels by upon a junk up the Yangtze River in search of a location for a dam. But the story is more in the journey and the interactions between the young Westerner and the members of the crew, lead by a man known as Old Pebble. Howard Mumford Jones wrote that the book’s narrative “is merely the occasion of the novel, not the substance of Mr. Hersey’s art. He wonderfully succeeds in purveying the slow, dreamlike journey up this ancient river. We move with the junk as if under enchantment and are as helpless as the teller of the story to alter the drift of event or comprehend the Chinese enigma.” Santha Rama Rau found that Hersey “captured all the magic, the terror and the drama of that extraordinary stretch of water.” John Wain called it “the most distinguished book I read in the year — the one I would have least hope of ever being able to emulate.”

 

Cover of A Dance in the Sun by Dan Jacobson

• A Dance in the Sun, by Dan Jacobson

A short novel about the encounter between two drifters and a farm family they meet on a road in South Africa. John Wain gushed about the book in his Observer review: “A Dance in the Sun is a beautiful performance, a model of how to treat a vastly complicated subject without over-simplifying, and yet without ever becoming confused. As a novel of suspense, it could be enjoyed in the simplest way, but I doubt if anyone will be able to keep his reaction dewn to this level; the real subject of the book, race relations in South Africa, is so insistently present that it will touch and move the stupidest and most calious reader.” “Altogether,” Wain concluded, “one might, without absurdity, put this novel on the same shelf with A Passage to India — and that is a very small shelf.”

 

Cover of The Seven Islands by Jon Godden

• The Seven Islands, by Jon Godden

A short, simple, almost artless story about a holy guru living as a hermit on an island in the Ganges and the quite unholy measures he takes when he encounters competition in the form of Dr. Mishra, who wants to set up his own commune on a neighboring island. It’s a bit parable, a bit human comedy, and a bit distillation of Godden’s many years of observing Indian manners and thought. “This gravely mischievous fairy tale has a moral too good to give away,” wrote John Davenport. “A singularly charming book.”

 

Cover of Jamie is My Heart's Desire by Alfred Chester

• Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire, by Alfred Chester

Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire left many reviewers flummoxed but impressed. In the Listener, Sean O’Faolain wrote that it was “impossible to summarise … all a matter of mood, atmosphere, place, temperament: New York in a strangely, Parisian dress, more Baudelaire than Bonwit Teller.” The hero lives above a funeral parlor, hangs out with a deadbeat novelist, a one-eyed priest, and a warm-hearted social worker. The trappings and atmosphere of the mortuary seeps into everything in the book — “Only the vampires are missing,” O’Faolain joked. He was not entirely off the mark in writing that “Mr. Chester is a real writer; corrupted, somehow, astray somewhere, probably in French Lit., and exile — I hazard the guess.” “Would Mr. Alfred Chester, present whereabouts unknown, please return home immediately where his talent lies seriously ill?” O’Faolain pleaded.

 

Cover of The Marble Orchard by Margaret Boylen

• The Marble Orchard, by Margaret Boylen

The second of only three novels that Boylen wrote before dying at the age of 46, The Marble Orchard takes the Southern Gothic sensibilities of Flannery O’Connor and sets them down in the middle of Iowa, where Boylen grew up. Lovey Claypoole, a girl blinded as a result of one of her tinkerer-inventor father’s failed experiments, spends many hours roaming the graveyard — the marble orchard of the title — and talking with her town’s outcasts. Orville Prescott, the New York Times’s oracle of the time, only read the book because his daughter forced it on him. “I had to find’ out for myself about this strange novel which some people liked so much and some people disliked so heartily,” he later wrote. “Sometimes its crackling rainbow prose seems so artificial that all sense of reality is lost. But far more often Lovey’s extraordinary talent for the imaginatively right word, for the concrete detail that will bring a whole episode into life, for a fantastic but wonderful figure of speech, makes reading The Marble Orchard an exhilarating experience.

In the end, Prescott found the book “so original in matter and manner, so startling in its verbal acrobatics and so witty in a raffish and bizarre fashion unlike anything ever printed on paper before that it ought to make Mrs. Boylen famous.” It did not, of course. But as Prescott acknowledged, “Queerly brilliant books are all too often ignored.”

If you’re running out of time to locate one of these ten neglected titles, however, here are some others worth at look. These well- or somewhat well-known and in print titles from 1956 are almost enough to tempt me to divert from my path through the land of the neglected:

• My Dog Tulip, by J. R. Ackerley

Ackerley’s loving memoir of his Alsatian dog Queenie (whose name was changed to Tulip out of concerns over inferences about Ackerley’s homosexuality) was turned into an animated feature with Christopher Plummer in the lead in My Dog Tulip in 2009. Both the film and the book are well worth looking for.

• O Beulah Land, by May Lee Settle

Settle’s third novel and the second volume in what would ultimately become known as the Beulah Quintet, O Beulah Land is about the early settlement of the Ohio Territory. Like all of Settle’s books, it combines deep tenderness towards nature and emotion with absolutely unflinching depiction of the violence that runs through so much American history.

• The Lost Steps, by Alejo Carpentier

This was really the first novel that made English language readers sit up and realize that Latin American novelists were coming up with something new — the sizzle before the Latin American boom, if you will.

• Andersonville, by McKinlay Kantor

A huge book (~800 pages) and a huge bestseller, this account of the grim conditions in the notorious Confederate Andersonville prison camp — particularly coming after World War Two and the grim images of Nazi concentration camps — helped offset (somewhat) the nostalgia for the antebellum South embodied in that other doorstopping bestseller, Gone with the Wind.

• The Tree of Man, by Patrick White

Technically, this only qualifies for the #1956Club for readers in the UK, where it was published about nine months later than its appearance in the US and Australia. Like The Lost Steps, The Tree of Man was a book that made readers in the Northern Hemisphere sit up and realize that great fiction that wasn’t just English stories transplanted were being written in Australia.

• The Emigrants, by Vilhelm Moberg

Moberg published the first of his four volume Emigrants series in 1949, but it first reached English readers in 1956. In a fair world, we’d recognize it as one of the better candidates for the Great American Novel: taken together, the four books are the closest thing we have to an epic of the American Dream in all its complexities.

• Tunes of Glory, by James Kennaway

Kennaway’s first novel, later made into a terrific film starring Alec Guinness, Tunes of Glory is a favorite with many a soldier for its knowing depiction of the turnover of traditions and generations that’s inherent in the history any military unit that wants to remain effective.

• Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson

Angus Wilson was just nine years older than Kingsley Amis but he unjustly got labeled as an old man (in contrast to the Angry Young Men), despite the fact that his satirical blade cut far deeper and sharper than Amis’s. I’m not sure he had the best judgment in his choice of titles, either, which is a shame. I’d take Anglo-Saxon Attitudes over Lucky Jim any day of the week.

• A Charmed Life, by Mary McCarthy

Although I prefer McCarthy as a critic than as a novelist, I had to include this book — which Edward Albee had to have read before writing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — because it is so much better than the book she’s best known for (which need not be named).

• Pincher Martin, by William Golding

Another example where the novelist’s best known book pales in comparison to a somewhat lesser known work. I remember the impact when I realized, late in the book, was Golding was doing, what really was the fate of Pincher Martin. It was like that moment in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road when we learn that April Wheeler is dead: a punch in the chest that takes your breath away in shock.

• A Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh

So much life, so much suffering, so much death is packed into the under-200 pages of this novel about the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. An antidote for anyone who gave up without finishing Midnight’s Children

Andrew Graham, Teller of Club Secrets

Andrew Graham, from the dust jacket of Mostly Nasty

I came across Andrew Graham — Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Graham, to give him his proper title — through his story collection Mostly Nasty (1961). I bought the book purely for its intriguing cover and lovely design, the pages filled with ornate and startling illustrations by Leonard Huskinson. Mostly Nasty reads a bit like a collection of after dinner tales told over a brandy in the comfortable leather chairs of a fine old London club — if the club included men like Roald Dahl or John Collier among its members. For there are streaks of Dahl’s delight in the absurdity of death and Collier’s spirit of jolly misanthropy. There are many deaths in its pages and most are fraught with ridiculousness.

Cover of Mostly Nasty by Andrew Graham

On the other hand, Graham’s stories are told from the perspective of a man poised a rung or two above Dahl or Collier on the social ladder. He is not just familiar with fine country houses but able to spot the details that set a better one apart: “A particularly good set of busts of emperors looked down at us from the tops of the bookcases; firelight from a wood fire twinkled in the silver of the tea-tray; there was hot toast and farm butter and home-made black cherry jam; and a slight smell of vellum, Turkish tobacco and late roses.”

This is from “Dear George,” the story of a painfully well-mannered bachelor uncle who becomes the target of a thoroughly unpleasant nephew’s domestic terrorism. As George and the narrator settle down in the lounge for a bit of tea after their dusty journey, little Cedric launches his first raid: “He wore a Red Indian head-dress, he left the door open, he caught his foot in the wire of a standard lamp and brought it crashing to the ground, and, catching George (ever a slow-mover) unawares, seized hold of both ends of his moustache.” Too kind to heed the narrator’s advice “to give the child a sharp biff on the behind,” he suffers silently as Cedric attempts to extract every hair of George’s moustache by its root. “He must have suffered agony,” the narrator reflects. Little Cedric gets his comeuppance in the end, though, in a shocking if satisfyingly permanent way.

Cedric attacks George. Illustration by Leonard Huskinson from Mostly Nasty by Andrew Graham
Cedric attacks George. Illustration by Leonard Huskinson from Mostly Nasty by Andrew Graham

Graham’s elevated position has its disadvantages, though. His sense of fitness restrains him from taking quite the same evil relish in awful outcomes as a Dahl or Collier. This is not black humor but rather an elegantly muted shade of grey. Writing after two world wars — the latter in which Graham fought as a tank commander — where Britain took more than its fair share of losses, he is fully aware that social changes are afoot, but not yet decided whether he agrees with them:

Nowadays one is so accustomed to old ladies of eighty who do their own housework, bumble about the neighbourhood in Morris 10s, and spend the evening of life baby-sitting, that it was a rare pleasure, like sampling a wine of ancient vintage, to shake the be-ringed hand of this splendid old number, complete with curly fringe of false hair (weren’t they called “transformations”?), lace, altar-frontal held up round the neck by whalebone, locket on black watered-silk ribbon, and lace cuffs: complete, in fact, with all those trimmings which come in so handy if you happen to have a lady’s maid, but which only confuse the issue if you’re doing the washing-up

In structure, Graham’s stories betray a strong grounding in the kind of set-up/punchline structure first mastered by Edgar Allan Poe and then used for the next 100 years by writers like O. Henry and Frank Stockton. If you’re looking for that twist designed to provoke a burst of laughter or gasp of disbelief, read the first paragraph or two then skip to the last.

But what really matters here is the teller, not the tale. Graham is a man of the world, but not a man full of himself. Stick with him for the details, not the drama. If Graham’s mostly nasty tales seem to have had their cutting edges dulled a bit, it’s all in the interest of good taste. “Assuming one’s critical faculties were just a teeny-weeny bit numbed by a glass or two of really good wine,” one reviewer wrote, “these stories would be quite enjoyable.”

Graham would have been your man if really good wine was what you were looking for. He’d not only savored his fair share of the stuff in post-war military liaison posts, he spent much of the 1960s as the Times own wine correspondent — back in the days when the only wines considered worth drinking came from France bearing an appellation d’origine contrôlée. He got his start as a scribbler with a short memoir of his tour as the British Military Attaché in Saigon from 1952 to 1954 titled Interval in Indo-China (1956). The Telegraph’s reviewer praised Graham for his “light, conversational style that is often very amusing,” but I suspect his urbane and ironic account of his experiences now seems a bit ill-timed given what came after.

Cover of The Club by Andrew Graham

His skills as a raconteur, however, made him an exemplary clubman. I haven’t been able to track down a list of his memberships, but according to knowledgeable sources, it was the Conservative Club at 74 Saint James’s Street that inspired his next book, The Club (1957). Although written as a novel with a thin plot centered on the attempt of a nouveau riche manufacturer to gain access to the True Blue Club’s auspices ranks, The Club was closer to an anthropological study than a work of fiction. That is, if the anthropologist took a wicked delight in reporting the worst of his subject’s manners and customs.

Reviewers with some experience of club life took particular pleasure in reading the book. John Betjeman wrote that, “What makes this book so very well worth reading is its author’s accurate knowledge of elderly men and how much more maliciously they gossip about one another than women.” Alan Ross in the TLS found it “full of the most delicately observed character studies, of bores, complainers, retired soldiers, country gentlemen, business magnates, upstart peers, and the hereditary rich.”

One reviewer called it “a plum-cake of a book,” but praised Graham for his restraint: “Yet the joke is not overdone.” And indeed, some thought Graham’s instinct not too cut too deeply laudable. “There have been other books about the malice of men but few which so well describe their pathos,” Betjeman wrote, and Maurice Richardson considered that Graham had hit “the correct note of poignancy, so integral a part of club atmosphere which can turn the most divergent types of human frailty into desirable members of society.”

Cover of A Foreign Affair by Andrew Graham

Graham returned to Southeast Asia for his second novel, A Foreign Affair (1958). Set on a fictional island split between two states in uneasy and impermanent truce — the revolutionary Cheo Republic in the north and Westward-leaning but charmingly corrupt kingdom of Parasang in the south (reminder you of any place?) — A Foreign Affair is a comedy soaked in a genial sort of Foreign Office snobbery. Coups, crises, and conflicts may come and go, but the first priority of the British Ambassador is not to allow matters to upset the peace of a predictable daily routine.

When a crisis does arise, however, the Westerners are prepared to respond: “The Englishwomen of Alassar, with their unrivalled knowledge of auxiliary services in time of war, set about imparting their skills in First Aid, Fire Watching, Ambulance-driving and the making of hot sweet tea, to their Eastern sisters.” The wife of the French ambassador offers her own form of aid: instruction “in that essential weapon in the armoury of modern French healing, the hypodermic syringe.” For the most part, however, life in Parasang is one of late mornings, sleepy afternoons, and long evening cocktail hours. The primary duties of the Parasang Army are ceremonial:

For this they had left their humble homes in the ricefields; for this they had learnt to bear without blubbing the acute pain of wearing army boots and the relatively minor discomfort and airlessness of battledress; for this they had endured long hot afternoons on the barrack square, being screamed at by bull-chested sergeant majors, while their less patriotic brothers dozed till the evening shadows fell; for this they had sloped, ordered, presented, shouldered and trailed their arms, hitting the great unwieldy rifles till, if necessary, their hands bled. This, they felt — one glance of royal recognition — this was It.

And, considering that the Army was not normally called upon to do much else throughout the year, they were not far wrong in their belief.

Graham clearly drew upon his time as a military attaché in Vietnam for the material in A Foreign Affair, but he showed himself more than willing to make a joke at his own expense. Reporting the responses around the world to one of Parasang’s occasional coups, he notes that, “One enterprising London bookseller arranged a window display of an ill-informed and now out-of-date little book called Interval in Parasang, written some years before by a junior officer with literary ambitions who had served at Alassar under the Mandate.

Cover of Lover for a King by Andrew Graham

Graham’s next book, Love for a King (1959), is a lightweight bit of royalist nostalgia set in the early 20th century somewhere along the Adriatic in the kingdom of Quarankol. The love referred to in the title is not romantic but patriotic. Though the King of Quarankol is aging, ill, and somewhat fuzzy-minded, the people know he has only the best intentions. Unlike the Parasangians in A Foreign Affair, the people of Quarankol long for a peaceful transition of power, even if the choice of successors offers slim pickings. Graham tells a good-hearted but forgettable little fairy tale, and the most noteworthy aspect of the book may be the chapter heading illustrations by William McLaren.

Illustration by William McLaren, from Love for a King by Andrew Graham
Illustration by William McLaren, from Love for a King by Andrew Graham

Graham took a break from fiction in the early 1960s, probably due to elbow strain incurred through his work on the wine circuit for the Times. He knew he had a sweet deal, however, and seems not to have indulged in unnecessary flourishes of wine snobbery. Bevis Hillier, John Betjeman’s authorized biographer and an expert on English ceramics, for example, recalled sitting next to Graham at a fancy lunch and asking his opinion of the host’s choices in wines:

“You’re meant to know something about pottery and porcelain, aren’t you?” Graham replied. “How would you like it, if every lunch you went to, you were asked to turn the soup-plate upside down and pronounce on the quality of the ware? Well, that’s the sort of thing that happens to me with wine. So I’m having beer instead.”

Having poked fun at the ways of London clubs and the Foreign Office, it was only natural that Graham would turn in his next books to a subject he knew best: the Army. He made an exception, however, and took time to write a straightforward history of the regiment he served with through most of the War. Sharpshooters at War (1965) was an account of the wartime exploits of the 3rd, the 4th and the 3rd/4th County of London Yeomanry (the 3rd and the 4th were combined into the 3rd/4th after D-Day — who says the military can’t be efficient?).

Cover of The Regiment, by Andrew Graham

He then spun the table and in The Regiment (1967), Graham told the story of an earnest young historian’s struggle to extract a serious history from the records of a thoroughly dishonorable unit, Queen Adelaide’s Imperial Heavy Infantry. Vernon Scannell, who’d served as an enlisted man at El Alamein and spent much of his war years as a prisoner in military jails for desertion, didn’t think much of the book: “Most of the members of the regiment have comic names, long and difficult if they are officers, but Meagre and Lumber if they are Other Ranks. There are some jokes about bed-wetting, boils on the bottom, and homosexuality.” Simon Raven, on the other hand, who’d resigned his commission for “conduct unbecoming”, however, enjoyed the richness of Graham’s insider knowledge, offering as an illustration his translation of one particularly dusty dispatch:

The Original
Z Coy [Company], till recently out of luck, has made a successful foray on a hide-out in its area and captured several suspected terrorists. Well done, Z Coy; keep it up. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull soldier, so we are happy to say that they are showing their usual resource in finding off-duty recreations. A party from the Coy recently came down to the Battalion HQ on a short visit for administrative purposes, and impressed all by their cheeriness.

Translated into plain English
Z Coy, after months of incompetence, accidentally picked up two drunk natives in a ditch. Both were subsequently released, as being entirely harmless, by a contemptuous Inspector of Police. Meanwhile, native women were enticed into the Coy camp on numerous occasions and gave 37 soldiers clap. There were sent down to be treated by the MO at Battalion HQ and were delighted to get shot of their tedious duties.

Cover of The Queen's Malabars by Andrew Graham

Graham had such a good time with the book that he persuaded Leo Cooper, whose imprint published a long series of histories known as the Famous Regiments, to allow him to write a pastiche of the genre, The Queen’s Malabars (1970), subtitled “A Not-So-Famous Regiment.” The Queen’s Malabars were, if possible, even more disreputable than Queen Adelaide’s Heavy Infantry, having spent much of their time being shuttled off to places where they could be kept at a safe distance from anything remotely resembling armed conflict.

Graham’s books are all out of print now, but The Club, The Regiment, and The Queen’s Malabars get passed around among small circles of admiring readers. None of his books will go down in literary history, but he can always be relied upon for a good yarn and a good laugh — especially if accompanied by a good stiff drink within easy reach. And I have to admire the good nature of any author who would allow his illustrator to place his head on a plate as in this Leonard Huskinson illustration from Mostly Nasty.

Andrew Graham's head on a plate. Endispiece illustration by Leonard Huskinson, from Mostly Nasty
Andrew Graham’s head on a plate. Endispiece illustration by Leonard Huskinson, from Mostly Nasty.

Diana Trilling’s Neglected Favorites

Lionel and Diana Trilling
Lionel and Diana Trilling in the 1940s

Diana Trilling started writing weekly book reviews for The Nation magazine in early 1942 and kept at it for most of the next seven years. Collected in her 1978 book, Reviewing the Forties, her reviews offer a fascinating glimpse into the state of English-language fiction at mid-century.

She came to the job in part through the reputation of her husband Lionel Trilling, but she came well-prepared, having been Lionel’s copy writer for over a decade. As Paul Fussell wrote in his preface to this collection, “as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that “literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society.”

She also had strong opinions. Reviewing Natalie Robins’s 2017 biography The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling for The Nation, Vivian Gornick wrote:

Books, for Diana, were either decent or indecent, vulgar or civilized, responsible or irresponsible. Forget the hundreds of skewered writers who have gone down into oblivion; routinely, she also took apart the likes of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Evelyn Waugh, Arthur Koestler. Reviewing Truman Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948, she wrote: “I find myself deeply antipathetic to the whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote’s novel…. I would freely trade 80 percent of his technical virtuosity for 20 percent more value in the uses to which it is put.”

As Tobi Haslett wrote in The New Yorker, also reviewing Robins’ book, Diana Trilling’s “gimlet-eyed assurance that has not always aged well.” Trilling was already developing a reputation for being, as Marjorie Perloff put it, “a difficult, at times unpleasant woman — self-absorbed, arrogant, catty and competitive — who managed, sooner or later, to alienate just about everyone she knew.” Not that she couldn’t be entertaining when she had her knives out. I love this assessment of that domesticated English favorite, Angela Thirkell:

Advertised as a pleasant bundle of froth, Angela Thirkell is in fact quite a grim little person. For all her gentle voice, she is one of the great haters on the contemporary fictional scene. She hates sex, the movies, and the lower classes, except an occasional half-wit mechanic. The cousin of Rudyard Kipling, she hates “natives” and foreigners; she hates servants, except the governess who can frighten the grown son of a peer by asking him if his hands are clean.

Trilling’s standing as a critic has fallen considerably since her death. She is dismissed for having slammed the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jean Stafford, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Isherwood, while praising a few number of now-forgotten novelists.

It’s this point, however, that interested me in Reviewing the Forties. While many seem to think that Trilling’s criticism of books now considered classics such as 1984 imply that she was also dead wrong about the writers she liked, I’ve read enough to know that forgotten-ness is never a reliable indication of whether a book is worth reading. Here, then, is a sample of some of the now-neglected books that Trilling gave her thumbs-up to:

Cover of Weather of the Heart

• Daphne Athas’ s The Weather of the Heart

… written when Miss Athas was only twenty-two, her first published work, is strikingly talented. It is also an admirable attempt to put sensibility at the service of growth rather than of self-pitying retreat.

There is much fantasy in our literature of sensibility but it is predominantly narcissistic, unable to move beyond the range of the writer’s self-love. The fantasy in Miss Athas’s novel is almost frighteningly unhampered. On the one hand, Miss Athas can generate large dramatic conflict out of something as seemingly trivial as the murder of a pet canary. On the other hand, she can match Faulkner in the imagination of aberrant behavior. Her story is set in Maine and even her descriptions of landscape and weather are free and bold. It is only in her statement of the source of Eliza Wall’s sexual fears that Miss Athas works by rote, looking to the textbook.

• Caroline Slade’s Lilly Crackell

A social-work novel, despite the fact that it is unsparing in its criticism of that profession, Lilly Crackell is the most estimable novel I have read this week. A story of America’s lower depths, Lilly Crackell traces the career of a young girl raised in the squalor that is so apt to fringe American prosperity. When we first meet Lilly it is 1918; Lilly is a lovable child of fourteen, about to become the mother of an illegitimate baby. Twenty-four years later Lilly is the mother of six children and still the victim of almost unbelievable misery and privation.

Mrs. Slade … writes barely and factually with none of the “literary” overtones that make poverty good reading: it is unlikely that Lilly Crackell will have a fraction of the popular appeal of The Grapes of Wrath. But the book is no less courageous: it takes courage to make explicit the meaning of the war for people who have never had a chance to be anything but a drain on society.

• Edita Morris’s My Darling from the Lions

Mrs. Morris has published a volume of short stories but I am unacquainted with the earlier work. Her novel is set in Sweden where she was bom, and has two heroines, the sisters Anna and Jezza, who tell their firstperson stories in alternating chapters. Both girls are excruciatingly precious, and precious to themselves; self-love seems to be a concomitant of sensibility in women writers, and Mrs. Morris is one of those oh-the-aching-wonder-of-it-all literary women for whom a snowflake or a sausage is equally an occasion for ecstasy. Yet whatever my dislike of so much quiver, I have to admit Mrs. Morris’s talent. Cumulatively, her sensibility loses some of its exacerbation and even begins to take effect; after the first hundred pages I found myself acutely aware of the charm of her village in northern Sweden, almost as nostalgic for it as if I had myself known it. And it is certainly no denigration of Mrs. Morris’s gifts to say that she frequently invites comparison with better writers than herself: for example, her gallery of decayed gentlewomen — Anna and Jezza’s aunts — is suggestive of Chekhov, and the spiritual stature which she can give to the life of privacy suggests Isak Dinesen.

• Edward Newhouse’s The Hollow of the Wave

[It] wears no air of importance, is entirely understandable and even lively, it must be singled out from the run of current fiction: these are rare, if relative, virtues. It is some time since I have read a novel whose author comes through his book so attractively. Even where Mr. Newhouse’s manner is less than striking and his characters less dimensional than is their human privilege, we see the former fault as a defect of modesty, the latter as a defect of kindliness.

• Enrique Amorim’s The Horse and His Shadow

Like most good South American fiction, The Horse and His Shadow is a revolutionary novel but unlike the revolutionary fiction of our own country, it is subtle, fluid, deeply concerned with the drama of human relationships. The action moves between the estancia of Nico Azara, outside Montevideo, and the community of Polish refugees and poor natives who live on the fringes of Nico’s lands. On the estancia itself there is every shade of political opinion. In addition to the peons at the one extreme, and the arrogant Nico at the other, there is Adelita, Nico’s wife, an aristocrat of decent liberal opinions; there is Bica, her servant and illegitimate half-sister, who lives in lonely severity among the men ranchers; there is Marcelo, Nico’s brother, sought by the government for his part in smuggling refugees into Uruguay. Mr. Amorim doesn’t measure either the decency and courage or the weakness of these people by the famihar yardstick of their social-political views….

Even the poor people in Mr. Amorim’s novel, the gauchos and the struggling refugees, are shown naked of grandeur in an amazing scene in which two of their number steal the services of Don Juan for a broken-down mare. What Mr. Amorim is saying is what is too seldom said in fiction these days, that it is by both the new and the old, by the mixture of good and evil, by the progressive and the retarding, that society must advance, and he says it in the only way fruitful for the novelist, through drama and even melodrama.

• Ira Wolfert’s Tucker’s People

[T]he surprise literary package of the season, the most thoughtful and talented novel I have read this year. Mr. Wolfert is correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, a Pulitzer prize-winner in reporting, and author of The Battle of the Solomons but he turns out to be that rare creature, a newspaperman with a notable gift for creative writing. Tucker’s People is an outstanding novel, the simple statement of whose theme—the numbers racket in Harlem—gives no hint of its emotional and intellectual scope. Tucker’s People is a study in gangsterism; its characters are racketeers, politicians, hangers-on, police, and their families. But this is no Damon Runyonesque novel of the underworld; Mr. Wolfert talks out of his head, not out of the corner of his mouth. He views gangsterism as an aspect of our whole predatory economic structure and at least by implication his novel is as much a novel of legitimate American business as it is of racketeering.

In the sense that Mr. Wolfert is attacking the entire system of capitalism, he has of course written a “radical” novel, but it is in the sense that his method is the method neither of pamphleteering nor of rabble-rousing but the method of anatomizing society by anatomizing people that his novel is truly radical.

• Gontran de Poncins’s Home Is the Hunter

…although not so direct in its romantic appeal as Kabloona, the same writer’s account of his stay among the Esquimos, is still one of the notable books of recent years, shining out of the mist of most current writing with the full light of M. de Poncins’s remarkable personality. To read the books of M. de Poncins is to be unusually aware of their author: he seems at once very worldly and very internalized, monastically intense in spirit. One has the impression of an intelligence peculiarly of the French aristocratic tradition, and indeed Home Is the Hunter is a reconstruction — or a commemoration — of the almost feudal background against which, we can guess, M. de Poncins was himself bred. It is published as fiction but it is not strictly a novel. Rather, it is both elegiac poetry and penetrating sociological research into a culture which was already vanishing glory when the author was a small child before the first war.


The writer Trilling singled out for her greatest praise was a favorite of neglected book fans: Isabel Bolton. Of Bolton’s debut novel, Do I Wake or Sleep, she wrote:

Isabel Bolton’s Do I Wake or Sleep is quite the best novel that has come my way in the four years I have been reviewing new fiction for this magazine. Small, anonymous in the welter of current books, it might very well have escaped my notice had Edmund Wilson not called attention to it in the New Yorker: the possibility of such an oversight will now become my reviewer’s nightmare. Mr. Wilson’s high praise prepared me, however, only for a work of exceptional talent. It did not prepare me — nothing but reading the book could — for the extraordinary process of revelation that Miss Bolton’s novel turned out to be.

Opening as a minor work of poetic sensibility, the kind of writing which Miss Bolton herself goes on to describe as achieved with the nerves rather than with the deeper centers, Do I Wake or Sleep gradually deepens to become a work of compelling insight; then the story progresses a bit farther, and the intelligence that one has hitherto noted simply as a restraining force upon poetic excess slowly proclaims its dominion over the novel’s whole conception; finally one confronts the real shape and intellectual strength of the book, and recognizes the source of and response to a major fictional experience.

I have no idea who Miss Bolton is: the jacket of the novel is provocatively uninformative. Whoever she is, she is the most important new novelist in the English language to appear in years. Whatever her literary apprenticeship, her book—it is a long novelette, really, rather than a novel—is the achievement of a fully matured artist.


When Bolton’s second novel, The Christmas Tree, came out three years later, Trilling proclaimed that Bolton had established herself “as the best woman writer of fiction in this country today”:

Miss Bolton works like a mosaic-maker, piecing together bits of scenes and persons—but it is a full panorama and a full cast, though given us in such tiny fragments—until finally, in unbelievably small compass, the whole pattern and intention are laid out before us. By what miracle of selection and organization she catches in 212 pages all we need to know of four generations of her Danforths, a story which in the hands of any other writer would have been a giant tome, is a not-to-be-fathomed secret of her craft. She could not have done it, one is sure, had she used a different narrative manner. The reader may be too conscious of, even irritated by, her long Proustian sentences but they admirably connect past and present, and permit Miss Bolton to recollect, create, and comment upon, all at the same time and with greatest economy.

Having been reissued several times with Bolton’s third novel Many Mansions as New York Mosaic, Do I Wake or Sleep and The Christmas Tree have, sadly, been out of print so far this century.

The Wreck Out on the Highway: Novels and Auto Accidents

The wreckage of James Dean's Porsche, September 30, 1955
The wreckage of James Dean’s Porsche, near Cholame, California, September 30, 1955

It only takes a second. One moment, everything’s fine; the next, everything’s shattered. A friend of mine said her father once told her, handing over the keys to the family car, “When you get behind that wheel, you’ve put your finger on the trigger of a loaded gun.” For decades, “Road injury” has, according to the World Health Organization, been one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. As irrational as America’s obsession with gun ownership is, the fact remains that most of us don’t own one and gun violence affects far fewer of our lives than death and injury from automobile accidents.

It’s the dramatic potential — and here the meaning of potential in mechanics is also relevant — in an automobile accident that has tended more than a few novelists to use it as a catalyst or centerpiece. It’s probably no coincidental that most of these novels appeared between the late 1940s and mid-1960s: these were the years when American cars were big, fast, and almost completely lacking in any safety measures aside from the driver’s attention and skill. Freeways hadn’t yet overtaken two-lane blacktop highways as the primary conduit for travel of any distance, and any kid with memories from those days will be able to recall wincing as soon as their dad started to move out to pass some truck or car driving too slow for his taste.

Covers of The Descent by Fritz Peters

One of the first of these novels was Fritz Peter’s The Descent (1952). Peters spent his teenage years living in the loose community of followers around the mystic George Gurdjieff, arriving not long after Gurdjieff suffered a near-fatal car accident outside Paris and often wheeling him around the grounds in those first months — one of the memories recounted in his Boyhood with Gurdjieff (1964). It’s not surprising, then, that his experiences with Gurdjieff and the philosopher’s interest in man’s ability to control his destiny led him to use a multi-car accident on a mountain highway in New Mexico as an instrument for illustrating how its outcome might or might not be affected by the actions or thoughts of its victims. Peters captured the disruptive effects of an accident:

Reality, the fundamental, basic reality of life, had been imposed upon everyone involved in the accident for at least a short time. The dreams, illusions and enchantments, the superficial aims and purposed, desires and wishes, of the victims and the spectators were stripped away by the shock, leaving only the human essentials. The veneer of civilization that passes for human dignity had — for a time — ceased to exist.

Peters takes a Ship of Fools/Grand Hotel approach, leading up to the event through the eyes of a dozen or more of the people involved — victims as well as those who have to clean up the mess. For some, the accident quickly becomes a faint memory or statistic, but for those responsible and injured — physically or emotionally — their lives “continue to reverberate to the consequences.”

Covers of The Accomplices by Georges Simenon

Joseph Lambert, the rich businessman who kills a busload of school children when he’s focusing on the hand up his mistress’s skirt than the one of the wheel of his Citroen in Georges Simenon’s The Accomplices (1955), has his own sense of predestination in the first moments after the impact:

It was brutal, instantaneous. And yet he was neither surprised nor resentful, as if he had always been expecting it. He realized in a flash, as soon as the horn started screaming behind him, that the catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault.

As Simenon was often wont to do, he takes morbid pleasure in compounding the sins involved in his hero’s downfall. Not just a hit-and-run accident, but adultery, corruption, cover-up, collusion, and good old-fashioned hypocrisy. The sinister possibilities of the situation, in the hands of a master of human fallibility, make The Accomplices one of Simenon’s all-time best romans dur.

Covers of Juice by Stephen Becker

In Juice (1958), on the other hand, Stephen Becker’s focus is less on the psyche and more on the system. When Joe Harrison, heading home after three martinis and feeling no pain, runs down and kills a pedestrian on his way home, the system of business and justice in Southern California kicks in. The head of a chain of newspapers and television stations, Joe is in too prominent a position for those with a stake in his reputation to sit idle. The chairman of his board steps in, hires an expensive Hollywood lawyer, and mounts a campaign of public and private persuasion — the “juice” of the title — to swing a verdict of innocence. Becker caves in to his sense of justice in the end, which prevents Juice from being quite as juicy as it could have been.

Covers of Be Silent Love by Fan Nichols

Fan Nichols is an unjustly neglected woman “hard case” novelist who had a unique take on a hit-and-run story in Be Silent Love (1960) (also known by its unsubtle pulp paperback title The Girl in the Death Seat). Here, the focus is on the passenger, not the driver or the victim. Riding alongside her married boyfriend on the way to their weekend hideaway along the Hudson, Kay Hubbard begins to realize that adultery isn’t the worst thing he’s capable of after he clips a teenager and decides to drive away, hoping that no one has seen the accident. For a while, she plays along — it was her car, after all — but gradually understands the inevitable domino effect of compounded lies.

Ironically, though, Nichol’s most convincing character is the boyfriend, David Drake, a mass market paperback version of Richard Yates’ Frank Wheeler from Revolutionary Road. On the one hand, he’s full of his own superiority, smugly satisfied that he has managed both to wed a Congressman’s daughter and to bed a gorgeous redheaded girlfriend. On the other, no matter how high up the ladder he might rise, he can never stop looking down in fear:

Everybody was jealous of his success and he had to fight for what he wanted; he had always had to fight everybody, the ones trying to pull him down, step on him, knife him, crush him, all the bottom dogs of the world after him, snapping at his heels to stop him from climbing a ladder they could never, never climb.

Unfortunately, to resolve the predicament she’s created, Nichols has to turn Drake into a psychokilling machine and plausibility flies out the door by the third or fourth murder-to-cover-up-the previous-murder. Well, at least the pages fly by.

Covers of Accident by Elizabeth Janeway

In Elizabeth Janeway’s The Accident (1964), the young spoiled son of a wealthy importer runs into a tree at 97 miles per hour. He walks away with a few scratches; his college friend in the passenger seat is disabled for life. The accident sparks a previously faint sense of conscience in the young man. His family, on the other hand, responds in a variety of unhelpful ways: denial (his mother); corruption (his father); abandonment (his father again). Janeway introduces the wreck into their lives like a tiny drop of acid on a set of poorly-finished welds, and soon the connections are all coming apart: the center cannot hold when there’s nothing there in the first place. The New York Times gave the book to Frederick C. Crews, hot off his moralistic bestseller, The Pooh Perplex, and his verdict was predictably castigating. He called The Accident a “very adult soap opera” and found it typical of the genre of soft-hearted liberal literature whose “distinctive aspect … is its morbid sympathy for human weakness; any weakness will do.” Janeway, whose Powers of the Weak cries out to be rediscovered as a guide to help us rebalance the allocation of power and navigate out of the mess America’s in, was anything but soft-hearted, but Crews wasn’t the first or last man with an agenda to employ something a woman had written as a soapbox to hector from.

Covers of The Pursuit of Happiness by Thomas Rogers

Though published just four years after The Accident, Thomas Rogers’ The Pursuit of Happiness (1968) in some ways seems the more dated book. There are more than a few parallels between the two novels. In both, the driver at fault is a college student and son of a wealthy family. Janeway’s Steven Benedict destroys the life of his friend; Rogers’ William Popper kills a black woman on the streets of Chicago while’s chatting away with his girlfriend. Both men take responsibility, if not immediately — Popper going to jail for manslaughter, though he eventually decides to escape to Mexico. Both families respond in a variety of ways — protective, abetive, supportive.

But The Pursuit of Happiness is very much a novel of its particular time: 1968. William Popper’s classmates would be marching against Mayor Richard Daley’s police a few months later and the living rooms of his parents and aunts and uncles would be filled with images of dead soldiers in Vietnam and race riots in Watts and Detroit. Rogers took his epigraph from the Nichomachean Ethics: “There is a general assumption that the manner of a man’s life is a clue to what he on reflection regards as the good — in other words, happiness.”

This book came out around the time that you could buy a poster with Charles Schultz’s Peanuts character Linus and the slogan, “Happiness is a Warm Blanket.” And that, in the end, appears to have been William Popper’s own definition. The book is unquestionably well-written, well-constructed. It’s a classic of a certain spare, dispassionate style of fiction. Marian Engel found it “a novel remarkably free of cant,” wrote that the book “gains its stature from its honesty, its truth to patterns of speech and feeling, its accurate and free rendering of the conundrums of human relationships”: “There is no clumsy exposition; there are no purple passages; nothing is particularly quotable.”

And this, I’d argue, is what ultimately undermines the book. William Popper is the epitome of the well-bred, well-educated, well-fed white American who wishes everyone well as long as there isn’t too much discomfort involved for himself. His answer to the American dream is to escape America — which leads me to agree with The New Statesman’s reviewer, Vernon Scannell: “Well, that’s all very fine, I suppose, if you are living on unearned income with a smashing bird in sunny Mexico, but it doesn’t help those millions doing time in the big gaol of the USA.” If the USA is something of a car wreck itself right now, running away from the scene might be an easy answer, but it’s probably not the right one.