Proximity is often what leads me to discover a neglected book. Whenever I look into reviews of something I’m planning to write about, I scan through the other titles discussed. This is most useful with reviews in British newspapers and magazines from the 1930s to the 1970s, when it was the habit of the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and other journals to have a reviewer — and sometimes, quite prominent writers such as L. P. Hartley, Angus Wilson, or Anita Brookner — to cover three to five new works of fiction in the space of an 800-word article.
In this case, it was Angela Milne’s review of Veronica Hull’s novel The Monkey Puzzle that led me to No Bedtime Story (1958), the last of a half-dozen novels that Mary Nicholson, née Crawford, published between 1932 and 1958. Milne described the book as “told by a small boy of a nameless oppressed country” in the days following a popular uprising against the ruling regime. In light of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and on the heels of reading a similar account of a revolution in a nameless European country and its refugees, Monica Stirling’s Sigh for a Strange Land, I was intrigued. While there were almost no used copies available, they were cheap, so I bought one.
Were No Bedtime Story to be published today, it would probably be categorized as a young adult novel. The story is narrated by a boy named Jacko, probably around nine or ten, living with his mother, father, and little sister Vicky in the capital of a country that might just as well be Hungary or any other landlocked European state. (All we know is that the sea lies somewhere across the border.) His father is an activist, a leader of the printer’s union, which seems to be organizing against some status quo, some combination of political and economic forces, and he often hosts meetings — sometimes attended by men with foreign accents — at their apartment.
But all we see and know is through Jacko’s eyes and thoughts. And for him, the story begins when the radio announcer says she is sorry: “Children’s Hour was cancelled. She said we weren’t to be cross about going to bed without our bedtime story.” The next morning, Jacko’s father leaves early. “It’s a day of great events,” he tell his family. His mother sends Jacko to school with Vicky, but the streets seem mostly deserted aside from a figure or two rushing along.
When Jacko and Vicky arrive at the school, there is talk of the “great events,” but no one quite knows what is going on. Everyone is sent home. From their apartment window, Jacko sees crowds rushing down the streets carrying flags and policemen chasing after them, knocking down and arresting a few. His mother puts on her green overcoat and leaves, telling Jacko that she’s going to do some shopping. She does not return.
The next morning, knowing no better, Jacko dresses and feeds Vicky and the two head to school again. Now, there is no one but Christina, a student teacher, and Banger, a neighborhood delinquent. Leaving Vicky in their care, he heads to the city’s main center to try and find his mother. He comes across some men loading bodies into a truck. A skirmish breaks out and he jumps into the truck with the men, who drive to the edge of town. There, he sees hundreds of bodies:
They were arranged tidily in rows, so I was able to walk down between them, when I had dodged out of sight of the lorry, looking for the green coat. I didn’t think it was any use looking at the faces, because some of them were not like faces. The clothes were torn, too, but not so much.
I found the green coat at last, and the face, which was not bloody at all. But it was white and glossy like a candle, and though it looked like my mother, it was also quite wrong. I might not have been certain it was her, except that she still had her string bag, helf-full of fading spinach, twisted round her wrist.
This passage captures what is best about No Bedtime Story, which is Crawford’s skill in capturing the mix of concrete details and incomplete comprehension with which a child might perceive a chaotic situation. We know that some kind of revolution is going on, that tanks are rolling down the streets, that people are either huddled together in their apartments or trying to escape to safety in another country. There are scenes we are all too familiar with: a tank knocking down the wall around a suburban garden, blowing a hole into a family’s home; people running away from gunfire; roads clogged with people fleeing and airplanes swooping down to spray them with bullets.
The disarray and confusion that occurs when a war crashes into a civilian population is amplified by Jacko’s youth and lack of a frame of reference. When he hears a great screaming noise, sees a great shadow pass over him, feels the blast of heat from an explosion, it takes him a moment to understand that a plane has been shot down. When he then comes across a man in a fly suit, a parachute strung out behind him, crawling feebly to drink from a pool of water, he doesn’t know if this whose side the airman is on: he simply acts on instincts and pushes the man into the water, drowning him.
I found the simple details and abstract setting of No Bedtime Story highly effective. It was hard not to project images from the war in the Ukraine onto some of its scenes. Several contemporary reviewers, however, had reservations about Crawford’s decision to use a child as her narrator. Anthony Cronin, writing in the TLS, acknowledged that “the story is told skillfully enough; there is no obvious insincerity.” “Yet,” he wrote with some suspicion, “we have the feeling that use is being made of a child’s eyes for an adult purpose.” He felt that Crawford was pushing an agenda, probably a liberal one: “We know of course that all political action leads to evil but there are ways and ways of telling us.”
Angus Wilson, on the other hand, considered the novel a “tour de force that completely comes off,” but had reservations about the consequences of Crawford’s choice: “Nevertheless, even the greatest novel seen through a child’s eyes can never, I believe, be more than a tour de force.” “The vision is too limited,” he argued. “What the author gains by the brilliance of imposing this limitation accurately, he loses in the intellectual and imaginative scope of what can be told.”
To me, this is the objection of a writer who simply could never see himself making the same choice. Every narrator — even supposedly omniscient ones — is, in effect, a lens that focuses or disperses light in a particular way. In this case, I think Crawford has chosen a lens that accurately captures the experience of finding oneself in the midst of chaos. People say of such an experience that everything happens in a blur. But that isn’t true. Many things seem to be in a blur, while a few things stand out in perfect focus. And that was very much the feeling Mary Crawford conveys in No Bedtime Story.
No Bedtime Story by Mary Crawford London: Putnam, 1958
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I recently engaged in a brief and pointless debate on Twitter with an impassioned adherent of the school of Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” who argued that it was not only unnecessary to know anything about the person who wrote a book but limiting, the intellectual equivalent of showing up to compete in the Tour de France with a set of training wheels.
To read Laugh a Defiance, Mary Richardson’s memoir of her experiences in the Suffragette movement without some biographical context, however, would set you up to reach some seriously mistaken conclusions. On the surface, it’s terrific book — immediate yet self-reflective, moving but frequently quite funny. You would wonder why on Earth it’s been out of print since 1953.
Mary Richardson was a Canadian woman who settled in England and was working as a reporter for the Toronto Globe and other Canadian newspapers when, one day in early 1913, she encountered a young man distributing Suffragette pamphlets. This led to a meeting with Christabel Pankhurst, and she was soon set to work in the campaign aimed at raising public awareness through acts of property destruction. On her first mission, she threw rocks through windows of the Home Office before she was chased away by policemen. She was able to get away in part due to their being encumbered by heavy capes, which, she observed, “must surely have been designed before any idea of quick-footed, quick-firing felons like Suffragettes had disturbed the official mind.”
Richardson was an ideal foot soldier for the cause. “I was better able to undertake the more difficult tasks,” she wrote, “in that I had no family to worry about me and no one I needed to worry over. In the fullest sense I was free to do what was asked.” Soon after stoning Whitehall, she was sent to the Derby on the day that King Edward II and Queen Alexandra would be in attendance. There, as she stood holding a copy of The Suffragette in her hand, she watched in horror as one of her fellow militants, Emily Davison, calmly slipped under the rail, stepped into the racecourse in front of the oncoming horses and riders, and was knocked down and fatally injured. The hostility of the mob towards Davison, both at the track and at her funeral, only hardened Richardson’s resolve.
Richardson joined the Suffragettes when they had made a deliberate shift in tactics, one aimed at raising awareness of the movement through acts of disruption and, in particular, the destruction of property. This was considered an appropriate response to a prevailing order in which “values were stressed from the financial point of view and not the human.” She witnessed this attitude in its most glaring self-contradiction when she and several others tried to interrupt an Anglican church service to offer a prayer for Emmeline Pankhurst, then gravely ill in Holloway Prison. Their actions, she wrote, “had the effect of so changing the faces of Christians that they resembled gargoyles on their own medieval churches.”
Some of the incidents recalled in Laugh a Defiance make you want to cheer for their ingeuity. Marion Wallace-Dunlop, raised in a stern Scottish family and reluctant to become involved in violence, arranged for a male friend to sneak her into the House of Commons disguised as an older woman. Once there, she started marking up the walls of the lobby with an inked rubber stamp reading, “No taxation without representation.” When MPs finally noticed what she was doing, much of one wall was defaced and it took hours for cleaners to remove the graffiti. Wallace-Dunlop later introduced the hunger strike as a non-violent response to the abusive treatment the Suffragettes received in prison.
Few Suffragettes saw the inside of a prison as often as Mary Richardson. Between July 1913 and June 1914, she was arrested nine times, and she was one of the first to be subjected to forced feeding, the initial and barbaric response to the Suffragette’s hunger strikes. Heading off on one mission, she handed a bundle of her things to a housemate and told her, “If I’m not back for breakfast tomorrow morning, send this parcel to His Majesty’s prison at Holloway for me.” After the Cat and Mouse Act was passed, prisoners such as Richardson who staged hunger strikes were merely discharged when they fell ill and weak and then imprisoned again once they’d recovered, but that didn’t stop prisoner authorities from trying get the upper hand. On one visit to Holloway, the warders sent in a woman trained in ju jitsu to subdue her.
Richardson’s best known act of destruction was her slashing of Velasquez’s painting The Toilet of Venus, better known as the Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery in March 1914. For Richardson, the Venus and its prominent display — then one of the most expensive works of art in the gallery — symbolized much that she despised in the British establishment, including its public display of the nude female form. So, acting alone, she decided to damage or destroy the painting as an act of protest.
She bought what she refers to as an axe — but in photos looks more like a cleaver — at an ironmongers in Theobalds Road, then walked to the National Gallery. She slipped the cleaver up her sleeve and entered. The Venus painting was being guarded by two police detectives and, at first, there was enough of a crowd that it was impractical for her to approach the painting. So, she wandered for a while, then returned and started to sketch in a drawing pad. When one of the detectives left the room, the other took out a newspaper and she saw her opportunity:
I dashed up the the painting. My first blow with the axe merely broke the protective glass. But, of course, it did more than that, for the detective rose with his newspaper still in his hand and walked round the red plush seat, staring up at the skylight which was being repaired.
Though the detective and the nearest attendant were caught off guard, two visitors were not:
Two Baedeker guide books, truly aimed by German tourists, came cracking against the back of my neck. By this time, too, the detective, having decided that the breaking glass had no connectio with the skylight, sprang on me and dragged the axe from my hand. As if out of the very walls angry people seemed to appear round me. I was dragged this way and that; but as on other occasions, the fury of the crowd helped me. In the ensuing commotion we were all mied together in a tight bunch. No one knew who should or should not be attacked. More than one innocent woman must have received a blow meant for me.
Amazingly, this was not her last blow for the Suffragettes. Once in prison, she again went on a hunger strike and she again was released after falling ill. While out, however, she took on another job that was almost as spectacular, if not as public. She and another young woman, a new recruit, were sent to torch a large but abandoned country house on an estate outside London. Finding the grounds surrounded by a dense hedge, the recruit balked. Richardson simply wrapped her scarf around her head and went crashing through it.
She made her way to the house, dowsed the walls and floor with kerosene, and climbed outside to set light to the fuse. As soon as the flame caught, she ran back to where she’d broken through the hedge. Expecting the police to show up at any moment, she began crawling on hands and knees across the field when, “Suddenly, I felt a moist gust of warm air in my face and froze with horror.” In the darkness, she had smacked into the side of a cow.
Though she was quickly apprehended and charged, this would be her last mission. After war was declared in early August 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst called the Suffragette’s campaign to a halt and urged the women to support the war effort.
In popular accounts, the actions of the Suffragettes have taken on a certain rosiness of hue. No doubt their acts of protest were heroic and dramatic and their punishment by police and jailers disproportionate to their crimes. But some historians question the efficacy of their tactics. Brian Harrison and Martin Pugh have suggested that non-militancy, rather than militancy, and particularly violent militancy, ultimately played a bigger role in winning the vote for women.
In a detailed survey of Suffragette acts of destruction, C. J. Bearman raises the question: Did the WSPU’s campaign of distruption actually work? Based on his analysis, “The only returnable answer is that it did not. The main reasons for the militancy’s failure were that it did little economic damage and that it visibly lacked mass support….” The acts of arson, in particular, made not even a marginal difference in the number of arsons that occurred in an ordinary year — in fact, fire damage in the greater London area decreased in 1913, the year when WPSU arsonists were most active.
And ironically, Richardson herself recounts a most un-violent incident that may have had a greater impact that all her other missions. Once, she camped out on the doorstep of the Bishop of London to persuade him not to deliver a speech against suffrage he was scheduled to deliver in the House of Lords. After being put off all day, she was finally invited by the bishop’s secretary to return the following morning at 11. Once seated with the Bishop, though, her mind went blank.
I must earlier had rehearesed a dozen speeches. But I could remember nothing of these. It was as if I were compelled by something outside me to speak as I did. I could not remember afterwards what I did say. When I was at the end of my arguments, I remember, I paused and waited for the Bishop’s reaction.
“Before we discuss this any further, you must take refreshment,” he told her. He pushed a button and a servant came in with coffee and pink-iced cakes. The Bishop produced the text of his speech and said, calmly, “In view of what you have told me, I shall not make the speech I have written…. I think you have persuaded me.” And that was that.
And, indeed, based on Richardson’s account, the Suffragettes ultimately succeeded through a similarly peaceful conservation. After hearing that the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Enfranchisement Bill, which greatly expanded suffrage among men, made no mention of “Votes for Women,” Emmeline Pankhurst called upon Prime Minister Lloyd George. She warned him that her followers would resume militant action if women’s suffrage was not also addressed. Lloyd George, who supported the cause, expressed dismay, and afer consulting with his Cbinet, ensured that language was added to give the vote to women over the age of thirty.
As a historian, Brian Harrison has little patience for Richardson, who he describes as coming “as near as anyone to the ideal” of the self-sacrificing follower he claims that the Pankhursts sought to inspire. Likewise, Bearman dismisses Laugh a Defiance as “the unreliable memoirs of a self-dramatizing woman.” On this point, at least, their views don’t differ greatly from those express by the editors of the Evening Standard, who wrote after the slashing of the Rokeby Venus that “her lack of a sense of proportion pass the frontier between eccentricity and mental unsoundness.”
But we must bear in mind that historians, unlike some literary critics, do take context into consideration. And if we do the same, Laugh a Defiance no longer seems simply an entertaining piece of writing. Diane Atkinson, a historian overall favorable to the Suffragette cause, notes that after her time with the cause, Richardson “published several books during the war, … owned properties and was a somewhat unsuccessful landlady.” She also became one of a wave of women who sought public office after suffrage was approved.
Atkinson also notes, however, that in the early 1930s, Richardson joined the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and set up the Women’s Section for the party. Between 1932 and 1934, she spoke frequently in support of Fascist policies and candidates. Although she eventually grew disillusioned and rarely became involved in political causes after that, while she was as enthusiastic in her support of the Blackshirts as she had been of the Suffragettes. She illustrates a point made by Eric Hoffer in his classic study of extremist movements, The True Believer: “The danger of the fanatic … is that he cannot settle down…. The taste for strong feeling drives him on to search for mysteries yet to be revealed and secret doors yet to be opened. He keeps groping for extremes.”
I learned about Laugh a Defiance after Andy Miller mentioned it in a recent tweet. As Andy noted in speaking of the book on the Backlisted podcast, anyone thinking of reissuing it would need to ensure that appropriate historical and biographical context was provided. Without it, readers might fail to see the narrow but crucial line that divides Mary Richardson’s actions from ones with far more sinister conseqeuences.
The book is extremely rare — I was unable to find any copies available for sale — but there are over eighty copies available in libraries worldwide, so it wasn’t too hard to borrow one via Inter Library Loan. Here is the link to the WorldCat.org listing: Laugh a Defiance
Laugh a Defiance, by Mary Richardson London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953
“One of the most ardent pursuits of man is finding excuses to persecute other people.” This chilling observation by Laurie Lee forms the epigraph to A Significant Experience, Gwyn Griffin’s story of the persecution and torture of a naïve young man — really a boy — by the officers of a British Army training base in Egypt during World War Two. It was a setting Gwyn Griffin was familiar with, having been born and raised in Egypt as the son of a Colonial Service officer and having served during the war and after in a variety of Army and police units in the Middle East and Africa.
is an illustration of what happens when an inflexible system encounters a foreign and incompatible body. Van der Haar, the son of a Dutch merchant long settled in Syria and fluent in English, French, and Arabic, is befriended by a British military intelligence officer who wants to use him as an agent and interrogator. To bring him into the Army, however, requires the boy, not yet 18, to complete the short officer training course run at the base.
That Van der Haar is out of his element is obvious:
As individuals, most of the staff would have wised to be kind to Van der Haar, but in their professional capacities they could not be so. He had to be shouted at on the parade ground as much as any other cadet; he had to be officially chased on the square, officially bullied by the N.C.O. instructors, officially harried by the authorities…. To the other cadets — ex-sergeant-majors, sergeants, and corporals, combat soldiers who had often been years in the army — this treatment meant nothing; they knew it for the bluff it was.
to Van der Haar, fresh out of a French-run lycee where he learned the fundamentals of rationalist thinking, the idea that abuse of cadets by the staff was simply a scheme to inculcate a predictable level of regimentation and obedience seems absurd: “when he was shouted at he thought the shouter was really angry, really hating him.”
Van der Haar can’t march straight, can’t handle his rifle properly, can’t respond as required to the stimuli of daily drill. While this perplexes most of the staff (was it really possible that someone “could know absolutely nothing at all about the British Army”?), it maddens Captain Lutwyche, who prides himself on running the best company in the school. Maddens him because Van der Haar’s innocence and beauty stirs the homosexual desires he prefers to satisfy outside the camp, with Arab boys, in alleyways with the safety of the night.
Grumbling about Van der Haar in the officers’ bar, Lutwyche is informed that, because he’s considered a “boy soldier” under Army regulations, he can be punished for his minor infractions by caning. Lutwyche wins the approval of the camp commandant for this course of action and arranges to have this “significant experience” delivered to Van der Haar that evening. He leaves it to Battalion Sergeant Major Ulick to explain the decision and the punishment to Van der Haar:
He paused, frowning, trying with all his might to do something he had never done before: to evaluate and analyze a social concept and to put the result into words. He knew the facts. He knew that the English upper-class, whom he thought of always in terms of “officers,” put a peculiar and irrational value upon corporal punishment; it was almost an obsession with them, and practically every officer he had ever known “believed in it.”
To Ulick, caning is just one of the mysterious tribal rituals of the officer class, and “as such must be jealously retained, guarded, and worshipped.” He neither agrees with nor condemns its application: beating is simply another absurd element in the whole charade of military discipline.
For Major Seligman, an officer with a wartime commission rather than a Sandhurst-trained Regular, however, decision to cane Van der Haar is the action of an institution only capable of existing within its own artificial reality. The Regulars who run the training camp (and the Army itself) were part of “the machine of organized English upper class brutality,” which aims to eliminate “all those feelings and emotions which made the whole difference between man and beasts and which the system so deplored….” His thoughts speak for the millions who took the first opportunity of the General Election in 1945 to put Clement Atlee in place of Winston Churchill.
And likely for Griffin himself. Though he attended a boarding school in England and served the Empire in several of its colonies, he considered it morally and intellectually corrupt. Where Graham Greene saw in colonial stations the signs of moral exhaustion, Griffin saw active and malevolent forces. He and his wife — the daughter of a colonial governor — tried living in various places in Africa and Australia, but it was only when they settled in rural Italy that they were able to distance themselves from these forces.
It’s unfortunate that within a few years of making a home there that he died suddenly, of a blood infection in 1967 at the age of 45. His last novel, An Operational Necessity, a fictional account of the shooting of the survivors of a torpedoed merchant ship, the S. S. Peleus by a German U-boat, had only just hit the bestseller lists and in the U.S. and U.K.. All set in real or fictional British colonies or at sea, his novels might be compared with those of Alistair Maclean or Hammond Innes were it not for the streak of indignation that simmers in all of them.
This book is slight, just under 100 pages, and the comparisons with Billy Budd are obvious, if incidental. I found it hard not to read A Significant Experience and not see parallels with the callous actions and hostility toward “foreigners” of the current government in the U.K.. It makes one wonder whether the “machine of organized English upper class brutality” was in any way seriously affected by the end of the Empire.
A Significant Experience, by Gwyn Griffin New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963
Sense and Sensuality is a novel caught somewhere between Queen Victoria and Dr. Kinsey. Richard and Laura, a young upper-middle class couple living in London in the late 1920s consider themselves sophisticates in taste and morality. Richard, a publisher, recognizes the growing appeal of modernism and Laura knows this means one should appreciate the work of Gertrude Stein, though she can’t find the patience to read it.
Had they existed in real life, Richard and Laura would undoubtedly have been a part of the Bright Young Things, and they will remind some readers a good deal of Tony and Brenda Last of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, though that novel came five years later. They are out almost every night at parties or clubs while a servant takes care of the tiresome details of raising their child. Laura in particular adores the company of the ever-changing cast of handsome young men. “When she was jolly and happy, she enjoyed kissing strange young men. And it never occurred to her to have a bad conscience about it.”
Laura enjoys playing the coquette, though at times she has a hard time knowing “how much was pretence and how much was true.” Richard, on the other hand, is a bit suspicious of many new ideas like psychoanalysis (“It’s too easy, somehow”). Yet they both feel themselves almost obliged by modern mores to experiment. One of Richard’s friends tells him that “One ought to have three women. One for a companion. One to feel romantic about. And one to make love to.” “It sounded silly,” he thinks, “but as a matter of fact it also contained a good deal of truth.”
In reality, what appeals to him is less a modern notion of an open marriage than the good old-fashioned double standard of chauvinism. So, when he begins an affair with April, a pretty younger woman a bit in awe of his worldliness, he considers it “a bit off” when Laura objects. And so she, in response, begins an affair with the shallow but funny Julian.
But neither is prepared to accept infidelity as just another part of modern life, like air travel or jazz. Julian is a better dancer, a better lover, than Richard, but somehow Laura longs for her husband’s solidity. Richard enjoys playing with April but would never for a moment think of ending his marriage to be with her. Laura struggles to make sense of the situation: “The Victorians thought they ought not to commit adultery, and did! We think we ought not to be jealous and are!” “Am I just being a suburban wife?” she wonders.
To the give-and-take drama between Richard and Laura, Salt adds an updated version of the Greek chorus in the form of letters from Daisy, their maid, to her friend Nellie:
The drawing-room here has got pictures of naked women. I suppose it all depends on what one likes. I was never one to like that sort of thing. It’s not that I’m what you’d call narrow-minded, but I’ve got my feelings like anyone else and I never did like dirt. I believe Mrs. L. would run about the house without a stitch on. She’s not sensitive like I am.
Nellie isn’t terribly upset at Laura’s carrying on an affair (“with some women, one man is never enough”), but she doesn’t think much of her choice in lovers (“He’s got something sly in his face”).
How to resolve this situation? Around the time that Sense and Sensuality was published, Evelyn Waugh and his first wife dealt with it the “modern” way: they divorced. Salt, however, reached back to a tried-and-true denouement from the Victorian era: tuberculosis and tragic death. And for all its cleverness, Sense and Sensuality is ultimately undermined by Salt’s apparent preference for the mores of the previous century. The first time Laura coughs, you know where this story is headed.
Sarah Salt was the pseudonym that Coralie Von Werner Hobson adopted in the late 1920s for some reason. She’d already published several somewhat well-received novels under her own name, beginning with The Revolt of Youth in 1919. She’d previously used it as a stage name when she’d spent a season as part of a touring theatrical company — an experience she twice put to fictional use: once with Revolt and the second time with Joy is My Name (1929) (published as Sarah Salt). She published several more books as Salt, ending with Murder for Love in 1937. She died in 1946 at the age of 55.
Sense and Sensuality, by Sarah Salt (pseudonym of Coralie Hobson) London: Victor Gollancz, 1929 New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929
“In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow.” Wright Morris’s The Works of Love opens “West of the 98th Meridian,” in the part of western Nebraska that was sparsely populated in the late 1800s and that remains so today. In the land “where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn’t….”
As I’ve written before, Wright Morris is one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, but he tends to get labeled and limited as a regionalist. And it’s due in part to sentences like those above. I have to admit, though I have loved and admired The Works of Love since I read it forty years ago, I mentally tagged it as a Midwestern novel myself. I recalled it as a story set mostly in lonely places, in railroad stations where the express trains from Omaha to Denver don’t stop, in towns where a single hotel serves as the one place where travelers can sleep, eat, and drink.
And it’s true that this is where Will Brady is born and where The Works of Love, which traces the path of his life, starts out. Will’s father dies when he’s still a boy, likely a suicide worn down by failure and the emptiness of the land. You can’t really say that Will is raised here. His mother leaves him and Will makes his way on his own, starting out as a railroad station agent. He gradually works his way east, until he finds himself the owner of a large egg-producing operation outside Omaha.
He also finds himself a father and a husband, in that order. After falling into a sort-of relationship with one of the whores in his town’s brothel, he receives a basket a year or so later containing “a sausage-colored baby” and a note saying, “My name is Willy Brady.” He then weds the widow of the owner of the town’s hotel, not so much out of love as out of a sense that a wife is one of the things with which a man’s meant to furnish his life.
On their first night together after the wedding, Will finds his wife laying in bed, “wrapped from head to foot, as mummies are wrapped.”
It occurred to him that something like that takes a good deal of practice, just as it took practice to lie, wrapped up like a mummy, all night. It took practice, and it also took something else. It took fear. This woman he had married was scared to death.
The wife wrapped up and protected from her husband is an image that stays with anyone who reads The Works of Love. It symbolizes how Will Brady is cut off, shut out, isolated from the people he loves. Which is part of what makes the book one of the most powerfully sad stories in American literature.
But what I didn’t recognize when I first read this book as a young man was that The Works of Love is, fundamentally, a work of absurdist fiction. In an analysis of The Works of Love published in a 1968 issue of Western American Literature, Joseph Wydeven wrote that critics such as Granville Hicks dismissed the character of Will Brady as a cipher, “a person moved paradoxically by an absence of motivation.” They argued that he “seems to exist at times as little more than a receptor of sensual stimuli, unable to convert perception into perception.”
But so is Gregor Samsa of Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. To Will Brady, much of life is a baffling mystery. He knows how to perform the tasks that his work puts before him and he does them well, attaining a level of wealth and comfort that others envy and are attracted to. After his first wife leaves him, he manages to persuade a good-looking younger woman to marry him, but she leaves him for “a Hawayan” vaudeville performer while they are still honeymooning in California. He provides for his son’s care but lives apart, often thinking of writing him a letter but rarely managing to send one.
He sees himself as “a traveler, something of an explorer” — except that the foreign land through which he travels is the land of other people:
It was one thing to go to the moon, like this foreigner, a writer of books, but did this man know the man or woman across the street? Had he ever traveled into the neighbor’s house? Did he know the woman who was there by the lamp, or the man sitting there in the shadow, a hat on his head as if at any moment he might go out? Could he explain why there were grass stains on the man’s pants? That might be stranger, that might be harder to see, than the dark side of the moon.
Morris based his story somewhat on his own relationship with his father. A man who struggled with depression and went through a string of unsuccessful marriages and lonely railroad station jobs, he, too, left his son in the care of strangers and seemed to forget about him for years. Morris told of saving up to buy an old pocket watch from a pawn shop, a watch he then proceeded to wrap up and leave under the Christmas tree in the Omaha house where he was staying, so that he could open it on Christmas Day and pretend that it was from his father.
For Morris, bottled-up men like his father and Will Brady were representative men. As he once told the critic Wayne Booth:
When I say, What is there to say about a man with so much of his life left out? I mean the reader to understand there will be plenty, however strange…. Without knowing, and in a sense without really having adequate reason to feel so, I was absolutely confident … that in Brady’s emotionally muted relationships and his failure to relate to others there was the drama, however submerged, of much American life.
Will Brady ends up playing the part of the most benevolent and friendly father figure known to American children. He takes a job as Santa Claus at the Montgomery Ward store in downtown Chicago, and buys a sun lamp to give himself the appropriate rosy complexion. But the harder he chases after the image he thinks the children want, the more his actions become self-destructive, the further he distances himself from others. He no more succeeds in making a connection with other people than Gregor Samsa succeeds in breaking out of his cockroach shell.
Morris worked in concrete, specific images and sensations. His prose is taut, his scenes immediate. He didn’t indulge in flights of fantasy. And so, it’s easy to think of him as a realist.
But rereading The Works of Love, I saw that I had fallen into a trap of thinking of the book as a realistic novel. We don’t make this mistake with Kafka. Though he gives the reader convincing details that help us feel the plight of Gregor Samsa as he lies helpless, unable to shift his cockroach body, unable to make speechlike sounds, we understand throughout that we’re reading something fantastic. But the realism of Morris’s writing is meant to achieve the same effect: to make us believe there is a man as cut off and bottled-up as Will Brady. So, it would be easy to diagnose him, using today’s terminology, as operating somewhere along the autism spectrum.
Seen symbolically, however, seen in the context of Kafka rather than Theodore Dreiser, Will Brady doesn’t have to be diagnosed. Morris wasn’t really telling the story of a man we’re expected to believe in as a fictional counterpart to any real person — not even his father — any more than Kafka meant us to think of people we knew who’d become cockroaches overnight. Will Brady’s story is a lens through which Morris means to show us something about “the drama, however submerged, of much American life.” When Brady buys a sunlamp, he’s no different from the guy who buys a new truck or bigger TV: they’re both trying to buy some form of happiness. And where it leads him is where all such behavior leads: still standing apart, still wondering why he’s no happier.
The University of Nebraska Press began reissuing Wright Morris’s work in the early 1970s and has shown exceptional support by keeping these books in print for decades as part of their Bison Books paperback series. But though the Press made it possible for generations of readers to discover and come to love Morris’s writing, it also helped reinforce the perception of Morris as a regionalist. The Works of Love was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf. Had Knopf or a similar major New York City publisher reissued The Works of Love, I strongly suspect that we would now recognize it a novel that deserves to stand on the same shelf with Invisible Man, Herzog, and Something Happened.
This is a guest post by the novelist and childrens’ book author Eric Brown
‘The summer of nineteen-thirty-nine was a thoroughly rotten one.’ So opens Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, a chapter of autobiography by the Hungarian writer Adam Martin de Hegedus, published in 1944.
De Hegedus first came to England in 1927, staying five months to study reference books at the British Museum Library on International Law and to learn English in order to enter the Hungarian diplomatic service. At the end of that time, however, he decided to return to Hungary only to pass his final law examination: then, as he writes in Vanman, to abandon his plans to become a diplomat and ‘return to England and settle there for good and become an English writer.’ He continues: ‘It was England’s mental climate that had proved so all absorbing, so conquering, all powerful, compelling, that it made me feel at home at once…’
Throughout the Thirties he was based in London, working as the London correspondent for several Hungarian newspapers as well as placing articles with British periodicals as varied as Esquire, The Observer, Evening Standard and the London Mercury. 1937 saw the publication of his first book, Hungarian Background, and he completed his debut novel, Rehearsal Under the Moon, in 1940. Later that year, when Hungary allied itself with Germany, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with his homeland and de Hegedus was no longer able to send his daily cables to Budapest. He had lost his main source of income and decided ‘the best thing I could do was to volunteer for one of the Forces.’ In October 1941 he was sent to train as a gunner near Wakefield in West Yorkshire.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is his record of the following year, his training in Yorkshire and Nottingham and his posting to Kent to await assignment overseas. In the memoir, de Hegedus portrays himself as an outsider, forever looking in. There were the obvious facts that he was a Hungarian in Britain – despite having taken British nationality in the Thirties – and a writer, about which he commented: ‘I am to some extent inhuman and cold. Looking for copy all the time […] And the writer is lonely. The job has its gratifications, but it has dreadful drawbacks. The writer, you see, is not allowed to live.’ But what de Hegedus could not confess in his otherwise starkly honest account was that he was even more of an outsider because he was homosexual.
In hindsight, knowing what we do about de Hegedus, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and decode the sometimes buried messages in the text. In the chapter entitled ‘The Girl From Newcastle’, he describes his meeting and subsequent one night stand with a woman in the WAF: she ‘had a workmanlike handsomeness’ and ‘a nice deep voice’ and ‘there was something brave, almost heroic and masculine in [her] spirit’. He’s at home in the all-male environs of barrack life and describes the camaraderie (and the physical attributes) of his fellow soldiers.
On one occasion he is more overt in his sympathies and attraction. In Nottingham he meets Bombardier Brown, a troubled young man who says of himself: ‘I know that I am different. I have known it ever since I was a kid and I made up my mind that I would fight against it even if it’s impossible.’ In a moving passage, de Hegedus recounts an intimate meeting with Brown in which the young man unburdens himself. ‘… I am putting up a terrific fight. I may be beaten in the end, but I’m trying not to give in.’
De Hegedus questions Brown about his ambitions and learns that the Bombardier was turned down by the RAF because of his eyesight.
‘I wanted so much to become a pilot and I would have made a good pilot too.’
‘Yes. And it would have made you happier,’ de Hegedus assures him. ‘All that preoccupation with danger and adventure. You wouldn’t have found time to think of your personal problems…’
‘And it would have been so easy to end my life. Just shot down and finished […] Sometimes I really wish I was dead.’
Weeks later, de Hegedus is stunned to learn of Brown’s death in a motorcycle accident outside Nottingham. He was speeding, ran into a lorry, and died instantly – the inference being that the young man took his own life.
De Hegedus’s grief is followed by remorse. ‘Oh, how bloody cold-blooded I sounded […] when I asked him question after question. And what a thrill I had when he answered, full, honest, clean-breasted. Well, of course, he was confessing…’
It’s tempting to wonder to what degree his grief was responsible for his subsequent nervous breakdown, compounded by what happened next.
During his time as a gunner, de Hegedus applied for a commission and was refused; later he requested a transfer to the Army Education Corps as a lecturer, a role for which he was eminently suited. He was a Doctor of Law, could speak four languages, and had experience lecturing – quite apart from the fact that he was phenomenally well-read and had a wide knowledge of the arts. After an interview with the Selection Board, however, his application was rejected for reasons he was unable to fathom.
Following a bout of insomnia and depression, de Hegedus suffered a nervous breakdown and was referred to a military hospital in Leeds. After a period of recuperation, he was discharged from the Army in 1942. His later attempts to find work to aid the war effort were stonewalled for the same reason he was refused a commission and turned down as an Army lecturer: as his parents were enemy nationals, de Hegedus was considered a security risk.
The autobiography closes with de Hegedus working as a van driver, delivering film posters to cinemas in London and the suburbs. It was menial work for a man of his ability, but it did have the advantage of allowing him time to write.
At one point in Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, while awaiting his posting overseas, de Hegedus contemplates the possibility of being killed in action: ‘It was, of course, unpleasant that from the literary point of view I had not had my season. I wanted to write at least five books, the kind of books I always wanted to write, messages in a bottle dropped into the sea, waiting for someone, like me, to pick up and read.’
Adam de Hegedus succeeded in his ambition to become ‘an English writer’. He wrote ten books: six works of non-fiction, two novels under his own name, and two1 under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland. The searingly honest and heartbreaking best-seller The Heart in Exile>2, 1953, as by Garland, was the very first work of fiction to tackle the theme of male homosexuality in 1950s Britain. De Hegedus died of poisoning, a suspected suicide, in October 1955.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is not only a wonderfully well written and compelling account of the times – his evocation of army life is on par with anything by Julian MacLaren-Ross – but an insight into the complex personality of the man himself and a neglected memoir that deserves a wider audience.
Notes 1 Three later novels attributed to ‘Rodney Garland’, published after Adam de Hegedus’s death in 1955, were the work of fellow Hungarian novelist Peter de Polnay: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and The Sorcerer’s Broth (1966).
Eric Brown has published over seventy books. His latest is Murder Most Vile, and forthcoming is the SF novel Wormhole, written with Keith Brooke. He lives near Dunbar in Scotland, and his website is at: ericbrown.co.uk
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting by Adam de Hegedus London: Staples Press Ltd., 1946
“I got the idea from a detective novel. I read a lot of detective novels…”
The 1970s were full of the 1940s. In fashion, Halstead and Yves St Laurent brought out lines based on the 40s’ look. In music, Bette Midler and The Manhattan Transfer were reviving Glenn Miller and the Andrew Sisters, while in Britain, Roxy Music sang 2HB, an ode to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. But it was in cinema that the 1940s – and noir in particular – came back with a vengeance, like a spurned lover with a gun in her hand: Play it Again Sam (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), all updated noir tropes to suit the times. Perhaps it was all the old movies being rerun on US TV, maybe the scepticism of the archetypal 40s PI suited the post-idealism of the 1970s, or perhaps people just liked the clothes, but there it was: the 70s were full of the 40s.
Ahead of the game were two British movies: 1972’s hard-bitten classic Get Carter (based on Ted Lewis’ novel Jack’s Return Home) and the much more low-key Gumshoe, from 1971. Written by Neville Smith and directed by Stephen Frears, Gumshoe is a fantastic movie, set in contemporary Liverpool, starring Albert Finney as Eddie Ginley, a dreamer and would-be stand-up comedian who puts a joke ad in the paper on his birthday (see above) and gets more than he bargained for. With superb performances from Finney, Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finlay and a host of local actors, including the great Bill Dean, Gumshoe is a perfect marriage of old and new, understated Liverpool wit and noir attitudes (and there’s an astonishingly good pastiche soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd Webber).
But it’s the script that makes it. Neville Smith was to become a popular actor in the 1970s – best known for playing the lead in Alan Bennett’s Me, I’m Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (Trevor, a surrogate for Bennett himself), as well as his work with Ken Loach and others. Smith also wrote The Golden Vision, a Loach-directed television play about a group of Everton supporters and Long Distance Information, another TV play about a Elvis fan coming to terms with changes in his life on the night the King dies.
Smith’s central character Eddie is an Elvis fan too, his nostalgia for the past all mixed up, but what he mostly resembles, of course, is a Raymond Chandler hero. But Gumshoe is more than a pastiche of noir thrillers: it contains all the elements – a dame, a fat man, a murder, a betrayal, and plenty of mean streets – but adds to them a sense of the now. Eddie Ginley is not Philip Marlowe. He’s a socialist, a Labour voter. He signs on (“Down at the dole things move slowly. Down at the dole things always move slowly.”) He lives in a world not of night clubs, cabarets and torch singers, but working men’s clubs where the bingo takes precedence over the acts. (And there are odd little Beatles references throughout: Ginley lives in Gambier Terrace, as John Lennon once did, and has a friend called Mal Evans, the same name as the Beatles’ roadie).
Stephen Frears met Neville Smith in 1968 and, recognising his talent, asked him to write a thriller. As a writer, Frears said, Smith had “the grace of Jackie Milburn* and the wit of SJ Perelman**” – but he also saw that in Gumshoe, “within the framework of a pastiche of a film noir there lurked a human story.” Frears wrote in the introduction to the 1998 reissued paperback, “I had thought he was writing a thriller. In fact, he was constructing a self-portrait; a record of what it was like to have been a teenager in the English provinces in the Fifties.” Frears is right. Eddie Ginley is no hard man, no Spillane anti-hero packing heat. He’s a boy, with the sense of right and wrong of a boy. He wears the costume of a cynic – the trenchcoat, the whisky, even the gun – but he’s an innocent and, like all innocents (like all great movie private eyes), he’s going to get hurt.
The movie was made, released and went on to become, quite rightly, an acknowledged classic of British cinema. And before it came out, Neville Smith was asked to write a novelisation. Experienced screenwriter or not, he never written a book before. “I dithered and ended up with a week to the deadline,” he recalled later, and – borrowing a room at Frears’ house – dictated the book, as he had done the film, this time to a typist from a firm called Graduate Girls.
Perhaps it’s these unusual circumstances – dictating a novel in a few days from a script – that give Gumshoe the novel its voice. Laconic, but fast-moving. Drily funny, but also desperately melancholic. World-weary but also innocent. It’s a perfect noir and a perfect book. Is it better than the movie? Impossible to say: but without Finney and Frears, there’s more of Smith’s voice, and that’s not a bad thing.
Gumshoe the movie wasn’t a hit. Its stars continued their brilliant careers. Its soundtrack composer reused the movie’s main theme for another piece rooted in nostalgia, his musical version of Sunset Boulevard. Stephen Frears went on to well-deserved international success as a director, and Neville Smith continued to write and act (now in his 80s, he politely declines invitations to events where his work is shown).
It’s only the novel of Gumshoe that rests in the cold cases files. Issued by Fontana in paperback in 1971, it was reissued by Slow Dancer Press in 1998 with an introduction by Stephen Frears and a pithy afterword by Neville Smith: since then, nothing, which is a pity. Both versions can be acquired cheaply. Acquire them.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Gumshoe, by Neville Smith London: Fontana Books, 1971 New York: Ballantine Books, 1972 London: Slow Dancer Press, 1998
‘NOVELIST LECTURER VANISHES’ announced a headline in The Sheffield Telegraph on Wednesday, June 26, 1963. ‘What has happened to Kathleen Sully, the writer who should have arrived in Sheffield yesterday to lecture at the Sheffield Arts Festival?’ the reporter asked. Sully, then at the height of her career, had been invited to lecture on ‘The Modern Novel’ as a highlight of the festival held at the University of Sheffield.
She was looking forward to it. ‘They think a lot of me up there,’ she had written her friend, the director Lindsay Anderson, a few days earlier. ‘Know the Heads of Languages and they set my work for 3rd year students.’ Instead, she failed to show up. No explanation was ever given. Two members of the faculty appeared in her place and discussed Sully’s writing. It may have been the last time anyone discussed her work in a public form. For although she continued to publish for another seven years and lived nearly forty more, as far as English literary history is concerned, Kathleen Sully has vanished completely.
Her name means nothing to you. I can say this with confidence because it meant nothing to me and I have been studying English novels and novelists great and obscure for over forty years. I first saw Kathleen Sully’s name in a list of 100 or so English woman novelists of the 20th century, a list running from Margaret Atwood to Virginia Woolf. It was the only name I didn’t recognize and given my hobby of tracking down forgotten books and writers, that fact immediately set me searching for more information. I quickly determined that she had written over a dozen books, that none of them were in print and few used copies were still available for sale. I located an electronic copy of her 1958 novel Merrily to the Grave on the Internet Archive and began reading.
Merrily to the Grave opens as Harold and Melanie Thydes, an elderly couple with ‘three small suitcases full of odds and ends, and each other,’ are wandering along the promenade in Brighton, cold, tired and desperately looking for a cheap place to stay. A policeman befriends them and takes them to Hesta Blazey’s. Hesta’s rooming house is not a desirable address: ‘It smelt of kippers, dust, onions, hair-oil, soap, turpentine, bath cubes, floor polish (though nothing looked polished), human sweat and cat.’
But it is a refuge of sorts. Whether pensioner, two-bit performer, shop girl, prostitute or thief, one thing unites the residents: failure. Rejected long ago by a fiancée returning from the Great War, Hesta expresses her love through acceptance. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ she maintains. Though her tenants have reached rock bottom in the eyes of society, some of them learn there are even lower depths to which a person can sink: ‘other kinds of poverty, other kinds of nakedness, other kinds of crime’—the depths where the quality of compassion is lost.
Kathleen Sully’s writing is almost addictively readable. Her prose is spare, unstudied, brisk. She relies heavily on dialogue—but not on deep conversations. Scenes move quickly. Emotions run close to the surface. Merrily to the Grave was fuelled by a raw energy, a brutal honesty I’d only seen in Orwell or Patrick Hamilton. I was eager to go further. I located cheap copies of more novels, gulped them down, posted my initial reactions and became obsessed with learning more.
These were not like anything I’d read before. There were hints of Joyce’s rawness, of Lawrence’s bluntness and, in Sully’s use of dialogue, of Ivy Compton-Burnett, but only hints. Her first novel, Canal in Moonlight, opens: ‘Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whet appetites for yet more.’
Canal centres on the Hoppes, a family with sixteen children living in a filthy house with a broken toilet and a pregnant goat in the kitchen. Horace Hoppe is soft-headed and idle, his wife Belle a fat sloppy former prostitute. Their children run wild. They steal. A little boy comes home with a ball smeared with the blood of a murdered young woman. Even the Dyppes, the ‘proper’ family next door, is dysfunctional: Mrs. Dyppe torments her spinster daughter about maintaining an upright reputation, all the while concealing the fact that Mr. Dyppe had committed suicide after learning he’d caught a venereal disease from his wife. This was beyond kitchen sink realism: this was toilet bowl realism.
Kathleen Sully’s 1960 novel, Skrine, set in the aftermath of some unspecified global apocalypse, opens with a woman murdered for a pack of cigarettes. A Man Talking to Seagulls opens—and closes—with a body lying dead on a beach. In Through the Wall, little Celia Wick shivers outside while her parents fight, throwing plates and punches. ‘The Wicks were the scum of Mastowe: drunkards, loafers, petty thieves, and worse,’ Sully writes. And yet through this grim world flows a current of magic and spirituality. At night, Celia rises up from her miserable bedroom and flies above her street, up into the moon, ‘a million years away to where tigers ate apricots, and birds, honey-coloured and smelling of wall-flowers, flew in and out of her heart.’
The nameless madwoman in ‘The Weeping and the Laughter,’ one of the short novels in Canaille, tells how she used to ‘flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like an owl.’ In A Man on the Roof, a dead husband comes back to his wife as a ghost and the two carry on as if nothing had happened. One of Sully’s later novels, A Breeze on a Lonely Road, is about a solicitor searching for the people and places he dreams about each night. As a man stands over a dead body at the end of A Man Talking to Seagulls, he suddenly realizes ‘that he beheld a husk—that the man was elsewhere—no matter where—but somewhere—and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished—ever.’ The only equivalent I knew to this combination of realism and the fantastic was the magical realism of Latin American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez—but Sully began publishing a decade before these works were known in England.
Seeing how little had been written about Kathleen Sully’s work, I decided to carry through to the finish. I tracked down the rest of her books, locating the rarest—Not Tonight (1966)—at the British Library, one of just a dozen libraries worldwide still holding a copy. It was clear that Sully followed in no one’s footsteps. This uniqueness unsettled reviewers when her books first came out; now, it was what intrigued me. Even relative to my own extensive knowledge of neglected writers, the extent to which Sully’s work had vanished seemed astonishing.
So, I began looking into Kathleen Sully’s life and critical reputation, trying to understand why she had gone from being such a prolific and original writer to being utterly forgotten. Aside from contemporary reviews when her books were first published, critical assessments of her work are virtually non-existent. Walter Allen, part of the bedrock of the English literary establishment of his time, considered her work worth mention alongside that Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and future Nobel Prize winners William Golding and Doris Lessing in his 1960 survey, The Novel To-day. Ironically, Allen’s short paragraph on Sully is still the only critical consideration of her work to appear in print in the last nearly-sixty years. Her name appears in no encyclopaedia, in no dictionary of biography, in no other survey of the English novel.
One reason for her critical neglect is that she didn’t fit in—a reflection of the institutional prejudices of the English literary world. She was a woman writing when writing was a man’s game—not just a man’s game, but a public school/university-educated man’s game. She was the wrong age: too young for the generation of Greene, Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen, too old for the likes of Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch and the Angry Young Men. Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, then rising stars in a new wave of gritty, ‘kitchen sink realism’ theatre, were so impressed with her early novels they chose her first play to initiate a bold new series of Sunday night ‘productions without décor’ at the Royal Court Theatre in London—but remembered her years later as a ‘middle-aged woman standing in the wings.’
She didn’t write the sort of domestic dramas and comedies that were considered standard middlebrow fare. There is not a lot of tea being served in china cups and saucers in her books. Sully’s characters ate bread and drippings huddled around the kitchen table. They didn’t fit the mould of other fiction of her time. ‘Her people constantly say the untoward thing, move strangely against conventional furniture,’ as one reviewer put it. But they weren’t rebels, either. Sully’s novels are utterly a-political and virtually a-historical: while they’re mostly set in mid-20th century Britain, they provide few references to events that might allow one to pin the story to a specific time.
And her work itself didn’t fit in. ‘Every now and then a novel comes along which appears to possess outstanding merit, and yet to fit into no known category,’ read the fly-leaf blurb, and for once the publisher’s statement wasn’t hyperbole. ‘Bizarre? A nightmare prose-poem, a lyric nightmare? How shall one describe Canal in Moonlight?’ asked Elizabeth Bowen in The Tatler. ‘I have never read anything like it,’ John Betjeman wrote in the Daily Telegraph. John Davenport, in The Observer, was equally baffled: ‘I don’t, quite honestly, know what to make of it.’
As further books followed, reviewers seemed to reach consensus on two points. First, that Sully was a powerful storyteller: ‘It is impossible to stop reading Miss Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,’ wrote Siriol Hugh-Jones of her fifth novel, Burden of the Seed. And second, that no one knew how to take her. ‘Kathleen Sully beats me,’ Karl Miller confessed in reviewing Shades of Eden for The Observer. Even after she’d published nine books, they remained stumped. ‘Kathleen Sully is another mystery, which on the evidence of her new novel [The Undesired, 1961] I can’t solve,’ confessed Ronald Bryden.
In his survey, Walter Allen precisely assessed the cost of her uniqueness: ‘Kathleen Sully is a novelist very much on her own, which may account for her comparative lack of critical recognition.’ By her eleventh novel, The Fractured Smile, The Times Literary Supplement—‘that British bastion of highbrow book culture,’ as Publisher’s Weekly once called it—seemed to have found a way to deal with her: ‘Miss Sully has established a reputation as something of an eccentric among novelists.’ By her 14th novel, the TLS simply stopped reviewing her work entirely.
Sully did little to ensure her own legacy. She donated no papers or manuscripts to any archive for eventual research. If she had any friendships with other writers of her time, none of them considered her worth mentioning in their own letters or memoirs. I looked through biographies of the literary figures of her time, from Kingsley Amis to Angus Wilson, and found not one mention of her. And from the story about the Sheffield Arts Festival we know that she didn’t show up on the one occasion when her work was publicly recognized by academics. Whether she was flouting the school, taken ill, caught up in some personal crisis or simply the victim of an automobile breakdown doesn’t matter now—she never got another opportunity.
Kathleen Sully lived for over thirty years after her last novel, Look at the Tadpoles, was published in 1970, and yet at that point, as far as the literary world was concerned, she vanished forever. Even her own literary agency lost track of her. In 1986, the Curtis Brown agency published a notice in the Times trying to locate her in connection with the renewal of American publication rights.
None of the journals that reviewed her novels noted her death at the age of 91 in September 2001. When I began to investigate Kathleen Sully’s life for a biographical entry on Wikipedia, I soon found that the fifteen years she spent as published novelist were an anomaly: aside from her books and their reviews, there seemed to be nothing. If I wanted to find any record of her life beyond the books, I would have to look in other places: genealogical databases, census records, civil registers and telephone directories. I would also have to locate surviving members of her family, if there were any.
By picking through public records, one can sketch the bare facts of Kathleen Sully’s first thirty-two years. The second of seven children, she was born Kathleen Maude Coussell in a poor neighbourhood on the south side of London in 1910. Her father Albert was a skilled mechanic, credited in a 1910 issue of The Engineer with the design of an automotive device, but that didn’t appear to have improved his family’s economic status. Between 1911 and the 1929, the family moved at least six times—mostly back and forth between poorer parts of London (Peckham, Lambeth, Camberwell) and market towns in Cambridgeshire (Wisbech) and Norfolk (Downham Market).
If Sully’s fiction contains any traces of her childhood, it suggests the Coussell household was poor, overcrowded, and chaotic. Canal in Moonlight centres on a family with sixteen children living in squalor with dogs, cats, rats, goats and even a broken-down horse. Overcrowding and families with odd assortments of generations and relations are constant themes in her early books. These were, in fact, among the first aspects of her work to draw the attention of reviewers. ‘[T]he house in it stinks of goats, blood seeps under the garage door for a child to bounce his ball in, and the warehouse rats are as big as cats,’ Isabel Quigley wrote in her Spectator review of Canal in Moonlight.
Children in her books are often left to fend for themselves. In Through the Wall, Celia Wick sleeps on a filthy sack of straw, has one pair of dirty, ripped underpants, and is handed over to another woman to raise when her mother remarries. Stephanas in Burden of the Seed steals from a pair of senile aunts to buy food for himself. Sully may have taken liberties in her fiction, but families living in poverty on the fringe of society are such a constant in her work it seems reasonable to assume that she experienced something of the same in her own childhood.
At twelve, Sully was sent to the Barrett Street Trade School, where she studied dressmaking. She left the school at fifteen and worked in a garment factory in East London. She was still living at home when she married Charles Sully, a skilled mechanic like her father, in 1932. Within a year, she gave birth to a daughter, Victoria, and a second daughter, Shirley, followed in 1934. Charles and Kathleen carried on with the itinerant lifestyle she’d grow up with. Victoria (Vicki) was born in Paddington, Shirley in Billericay in Essex. In the 1939 register, they are listed in Weston-Super-Mare on coast of Somerset. Then a civil register records the birth in 1942 of a son, Fraser, listing Charles as the father, in Southend-on-Sea—back in Essex.
From here, the facts are hard to find and harder to verify. Many of the official records that could provide dates and addresses to trace her life over the next sixty years have not yet been released. Much of the rest of the available information came from Sully herself. In a short ‘About the Author’ sketch printed on the dust jacket of Canal in Moonlight she reported that ‘At 38 years of age’—around 1948—she attended Art College for two years and then ‘went on to a Teacher’s Training College to take a teaching post (Art and English).’ A biographical sketch taken from Sully’s response to a questionnaire included in Contemporary Authors (1966) further specified ‘Art College’ as Taunton Art College and St. Alban’s Art College and ‘Teacher’s Training College’ as Gaddesden. This last fact helps narrow the timeline somewhat, given that Gaddesden Training College operated just from 1946 to 1951.
This list of dates and places would not have been particularly illuminating had it not been supplemented by an email I received from Paul Hunt, Vicki’s son, in March 2019. He had seen my posts about his grandmother’s novels and confirmed that the information in her Wikipedia entry was correct to his knowledge. ‘I think I can help in explaining why she faded,’ he wrote. According to Paul, Kathleen and Charles Sully’s marriage was ‘rancorous’ and marked by separations. Sometime before the start of World War Two, Kathleen took the girls to a cottage in Paignton, Devon, where she tried to run a dress shop. She then reunited with Charles and they lived in Weston-Super-Mare as recorded in the 1939 register.
Not long after, the couple had ‘a furious row’ and Kathleen took the girls to Denbigh in Wales. Charles pressed to be allowed to visit his daughters and Kathleen relented. She would regret this decision. As Paul wrote:
My mother remembers the event clearly. They were living in a small cottage in a village close to Denbigh. Her father came to visit and when her mother left for work, he threw the children’s clothes into a suitcase and then rushed them to the station. She believes they left by train. He had nowhere to live and so his mother came and cared for the children. They all lived for some time in a room in a house in Hereford.
‘Much as I loved my grandfather, I knew him as an uncompromising person and I could imagine him doing this,’ Paul added. This account also seems credible considering a few other facts: Vicki married in Newbury, Berkshire in 1957; Charles died there in 1997; and Shirley died there in 2008. So, Charles stayed in Newbury for decades, while Kathleen moved from place to place, almost always near the sea, always miles from Newbury. In Kathleen Sully’s entry in Contemporary Authors, it states, ‘children: three.’ There is no mention of her marriage.
If the story of Charles abducting the girls is true, it does raise questions about Fraser Sully. If Charles was father, as stated in the birth register, why didn’t he take Fraser as well? Or did the incident take place before Fraser was born? Was Fraser illegitimate, as Paul speculates, conceived in an affair that took place afterward? Regardless of the boy’s paternity, however, picturing Kathleen Sully as a single mother raising a son—possibly without any financial support—provides a context that helps make sense of the few available facts about her life after 1942. Financial considerations and the need to care for her son, for example, would likely have been her foremost concerns after 1942.
With no family money, no university degree, and a young son to look after, Kathleen Sully would have few options. ‘Almost every mother of fatherless children has to find work to help in their support,’ Leonora Eyles wrote in her1947 book Unmarried but Happy. ‘On the whole, it is better if a single woman with children can earn money in the home,’ she continued, recommending child-minding, typing, keeping a small shop, dressmaking, graphic arts and writing as possible ways to earn money working in the home.
In her ‘About the Author’ sketch, Sully devoted the most space to listing the many jobs in her ‘varied career’: ‘domestic, lift attendant, dress model, dress cutter, dress designer, dress-shop owner, professional swimmer and diver, canvasser, bus conductress, cinema usherette, free-lance artist and writer, tracer in the Admiralty, dressmaker.’ She later repeated this list in her Contemporary Authors questionnaire, adding ‘owner of antique shop and now full-time novelist’—which correlates with a remark in her June 1963 letter to Lindsay Anderson: ‘I have finished with shops and all else other than setting down the human agony and joy.’
Looking at this list alongside Eyles’ Unmarried but Happy, I wondered if Sully had her own copy of the book. My suspicions only increased after reading the following: ‘There is only one art that is blithely taken up without training, without discipline and without the appreciation of difficulty with which one approaches even the learning of knitting, and that is the art of writing.’ We know that writing was one of Sully’s first ventures as a working single mother because her first book wasn’t published in 1955 but in 1946, when Edmund Ward, a children’s book publisher, released Small Creatures and Stony Stream, listing Kathleen M. Sully as the author. Small Creatures contains two stories, about a dormouse and a dragonfly; Stony Stream is about fish. Neither the stories nor the style is noteworthy, but the books did get reprinted at least four times each. They appear to be her only attempts at juvenile fiction.
How did Sully get from ‘It was a warm day in Spring, and the East Wind blew gently through the grasses growing in the meadow’—the opening line of Stony Stream—to the fierce and tenacious rats that greet the reader of Canal in Moonlight? Perhaps she found, in her arguments with Charles, in their separations, in having her daughters stolen from her and in her effort to support herself and Fraser, that she had to be fierce and tenacious herself. In her June 1963 letter to Anderson, she reassures him, ‘You will find me much changed: not so arrogant and childish,’ and closes by saying, ‘it is so good to hear from one who was my first friend.’ Did she really spend those years before the success of her first novels friendless? Or did she attack would-be friends like one of Bikka’s rats?
A clue to Kathleen Sully’s temperament—and stunning evidence of the anger and pain wrapped up in her separation from Charles—can be found in a poem that Vicki shared with me. Written in the late 1980s after she attempted to visit her mother, who was by then living in Camborne in Cornwall, it was part of Vicki’s extraordinary effort to restart her life after her traumatic childhood and an unhappy early marriage. I reprint the poem here in full (and with Vicki’s permission) because it reveals so much that lies beneath the sparse facts.
Lost Person
The first time I lost her I was six in a whitewashed cottage in Wales my father came to visit he said but he threw my sister’s and my things into a suitcase and rushed us to the station
the second time came after twenty years I found her on the back of a book a middle-aged woman and the name was right I wrote her letter said why see me now I am successful and not before
the third time my son tracked her down and she said I could meet her too with her dark eyes and beauty she resembled my sister not me my mentally ill sister both with long white hands not like my gardening ones
she told me of her struggles, her travels in Spain and her achievements she didn’t ask about mine she said my hair and clothes were wrong she gave advice on diet and lifestyle I must put castor oil on my eyes to prevent cataract I was drowning in words when my letters went unanswered I knew I had lost her again years later I found her new address and phoned she said I could visit rain was forecast and the air was heavy with sour scent of cow parsley as I drove the pre-motorway tangle of roads to her terraced house in Camborne weeds straggled over her doorstep when I knocked, a ragged curtain jerked at the grimy window the front door inched open
hunched over a frame her eyes glittered up at me and with a voice reverting to the cockney of her youth she said I have two things ter say ter yer one is Go Away and the other is Piss Orf the door slammed shut cold rain began to fall and I left
In this poem, ‘the first time’ is clearly Charles’ abduction of Vicki and Shirley; ‘when I was six’ fixes the time as late 1939 or early 1940. The ‘second time’ would have been around 1959 or 1960, after seeing Kathleen’s photograph on the back cover of Merrily to the Grave—the only book on which it appeared. If Sully did write ‘why see me now I am successful,’ one can hardly imagine a more ‘arrogant and childish’ response by a mother to her long-separated daughter.
Paul Hunt incorporated the ‘third time’ into Mahogany Rose, the novel loosely based on his family that he published as ‘Paul Sully.’ I say loosely because Paul merges the stories of his grandmother and mother into his character Suzy. Much of Suzy’s story—living in Ghana at the time it attained independence, working in a defence laboratory, participating in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – comes from Vicki. But there is also the visit to Kathleen at the house in Cornwall and elements of the bitter relationship between Kathleen and Charles.
Vicki’s poem offers some further clues into Kathleen Sully’s life and the family’s emotional traumas. Vicki refers to ‘my mentally ill sister’—Shirley. Looking for more information on Shirley Sully, I located a letter she wrote in 1986 to an imaginary lover named Frederique, which the artist Lisa Marie Gibbs posted on her blog in 2016 in tribute to ‘My mentor, my friend, my inspiration.’ Gibbs confirmed that Shirley lived with her father and struggled with mental illness as an adult. Shirley’s letter quotes Stevie Smith’s poem ‘The Frog Prince’—‘I have been a frog now/for a hundred years’—and adds, ‘As I have not had a family to look after, I have tried to make as many things as possible–my clothes, sculptures, paintings.’
Vicki shared with me a set of poems that she wrote after Shirley died. Through these, we can trace not only Shirley’s troubles but the parallels between her and Kathleen. In her ‘prologue’ Vicki writes,
we sisters shared a map shared the haemorrhage of streaks and runs and patched-up places
After taking the girls from Kathleen in Wales, Charles – who was working as a contractor for the Royal Air Force and moving from airfield to airfield – left the girls in the care of a Mrs. Crane, ‘the lonely woman/who cared for us/a bit/when she was sober.’ Vicki married, mostly as a means of escape, she says, and Shirley was left to deal with Charles, who was, according to Vicki, an angry, controlling, and violent man. She displayed a talent for art and was able to get work in London, where she soon fell in with a group of friends as full of vices as they were of promises.
She also began suffering from a combination of alcoholism and mental illness and was forced, on more than one occasion, to beg Charles to return to live with him. During these years when Shirley’s life was punctuated by various crises, she made contact with Kathleen and even went to stay with her in Cornwall briefly. This must have been in the late 1960s, for the sole dedication in all of Kathleen’s 17 novels appears in 1969’s A Breeze on a Lonely Road. It reads ‘For Shirley—My Daughter.’
It’s not clear if Kathleen Sully ever shared the loss of her daughters with people who knew her as a writer. There is no hint in her few letters in Lindsay Anderson’s archives that she had any children but Fraser. In her June 1963 letter, she writes that Fraser is finishing his first year at the University of Manchester, which meant ‘I am free to go where I like and do what I like.’ Fraser’s attendance at university might also explain why she could be ‘finished with shops and all else,’ and why there was a break of nearly four years between the publication of The Undesired in 1961 and The Fractured Smile in 1965.
Did the furious rate at which she first published—ten books in the space of less than six years—have something to do with Fraser’s situation? Was Sully paying for school fees? In my copy of Canal in Moonlight, I found a short letter she wrote from Brighton in early 1957 and was able to confirm that the address had been a rooming house at the time—possibly the inspiration for Merrily to the Grave—suggesting she might have been living alone while Fraser was at boarding school. Her June 1963 letter to Anderson, on the other hand, was sent from a house in The Lizard, a hamlet at the southernmost tip of Cornwall, which she had recently purchased as ‘a permanent home (retreat).’
This period between books may also have been when she took ‘her travels in Spain’ mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Two of her subsequent books—Horizontal Image and Island in Moonlight—largely take place in Mediterranean settings. Within a year or so of failing to show up for the Sheffield Festival, however, Sully resumed writing at an even more fevered pace, publishing another seven novels in just five years.
There is a noticeable difference in these books from her first ten—a difference in tone and in intensity. The Fractured Smile is an infidelity farce, Dear Wolf a limp comedy about a small-town Lothario. Not Tonight was described as a ‘whimsy, flimsy piece of sugary shockingness’ by one reviewer. Christopher Wordsworth, in The Guardian, found that The Fractured Smile ‘meanders artlessly’ and Dear Wolf displayed ‘a rather simpleton humour.’ Mary Holland was scathing in her assessment of Not Tonight: ‘At best it is the novel one might expect from an aunt who had been told once too often: “You write such droll letters, you should put it all down in a book.”’ By 1968, when Horizontal Image was published, The New Statesman’s reviewer complained, ‘She is prolific and seems to have created a standard expectation in her readers—the deadliest way of paralysing critical faculty.’ Both Sully and her critics were, it seems, becoming exhausted. Where her early books were reviewed in major periodicals by top-flight reviewers, her last few barely received notice.
Why does the list of books end in 1970? Did she lose her readership? Did her publisher lose interest? She didn’t stop writing. On New Year’s Day in 1992, she informed Anderson ‘Am still writing—but you know how things are in the publishing business—and my work has become more controversial.’ In the same letter, she mentions that Fraser ‘is very well—works full time and held on as a member of staff’ and implies he is living with her. This letter is addressed from Camborne, very likely the same terraced house mentioned in Vicki’s poem. Paul Hunt believes that the reason Kathleen stopped publishing was that her energies became consumed in dealing with Fraser’s schizophrenia. Mahogany Rose includes a conversation in which Matt (Charles Sully) tells Paul’s fictional counterpart that Fraser (whose name, interestingly, is not changed) hung himself in his bedroom in the Camborne house. Paul did later acknowledge to me that ‘I never met him [Fraser] so I could not be sure of this fact.’
Paul’s disclaimer raised my suspicions because, at the time, I’d been unable to find any record of Fraser Sully’s death. When I ordered a copy of Kathleen’s death certificate from the General Register Office, I decided to search for Fraser’s as well, and soon obtained information that both disproved and proved what Paul had written. Fraser Sully did not commit suicide. He died of heart failure at the age of 76 in May 2019, just two months after Paul’s email. However, according to his death certificate Fraser died at Woodtown House at Bideford in Devon, a care home that, according to its website, ‘provides nursing care and rehabilitative support for 28 adults experiencing complex mental health needs.’ Although the staff at Woodtown House could not discuss Fraser’s condition, they did acknowledge that he’d been living in the home for nearly twenty years—probably from the time that Kathleen entered the care home in Camborne where she died. It’s safe to assume that Fraser’s care would have consumed much of his mother’s time and energies in the years before she had to seek full-time care for herself.
So perhaps Paul was right, after all. Perhaps the reason Kathleen Sully vanished from the literary world had less to do with institutional prejudices and more to do with the simple fact of a mother struggling, with few resources and little support, to cope with her son’s mental illness. ‘Not all of us can withstand the inequalities of life: its buffeting, its knocks,’ Hesta Blazey says in Merrily to the Grave. Kathleen Sully had been isolated from her family for decades. She had few connections to the literary world to start with. Her few letters to Lindsay Anderson may, indeed, represent the only ones to have survived the buffeting and knocks that would have been the daily life of an aging woman caring for an adult son with schizophrenia. Orwell said that history is written by the winners. It’s easier to win when you’re not isolated, out on the margins, old and out of print. Perhaps, in the end, there is no mystery why Kathleen Sully vanished.
I thank Vicki Sully and Paul Hunt for their generous cooperation in my research on this article.
Of all the muses you might expect a young woman novelist to be channeling in 1933, Henry Fielding is among the last. Yet the closest parallel one can find to Rose Caylor’s second novel, The Journey, is The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. In both books, a young innocent, a tabula rasa personality, travels to a great city where that blank slate is scribbled over by various forms of iniquity and sent home sadder and wiser.
But plot isn’t the primary point similarity between Tom Jones and The Journey. It’s the authorial voice. Tom Jones would be about a third as long and not one-tenth as enjoyable were its fairly thin story enriched by Fielding’s gentle, amused, and worldly-wise commentary. By the time Rose Caylor sat down to write The Journey, she’d been a newspaper reporter, PR agent for the American Medical Association, business report publisher, and actress in the Leo Dietrichstein’s traveling company, for which she had jumped into stage volcanoes, got shipwrecked on a desert island, and flounced around in crinoline and hoop skirts as “the Spirit of the Old South.” In his memoir Gaily, Gaily, Hecht compared Caylor to “a combination of Laurette Taylor, Sarah Bernhardt, and Geronimo.” Not quite the same as Fielding’s years as a magistrate and founder of the Bow Street Runners, but close in terms of street savvy, I suspect.
The actual story in The Journey could easily be squeezed onto about five pages without much abridgement. A Chicago reporter names Jimmy Dyrenforth sweet-talks Caryl Fancher, a typist in his father’s office and the two get married on a whim. Coming out of City Hall, Jimmy panics and rushes to a pay phone, where he talks the friendly editor of a New Orleans newspaper into giving him a job. Jimmy bolts for the first train to New Orleans, leaving the virginal Caryl to her own devices, hoping she will give up on the marriage before it’s even started.
Instead, she assembles a trousseau and heads off to New Orleans in pursuit. Though Jimmy meets her at the station, his welcome is mostly intended to persuade Caryl to leave as quickly as possible. Whether obstinate or just obtuse, she persists as he variously ignores and insults her, and eventually the two hop in bed and Caryl ends up pregnant. Though Caylor wrote her share of happy endings as a playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, there’s none to be found here. Caryl gives up eventually and heads to New York for an abortion after brow-beating Jimmy into borrowing $200 from his father.
So much for the narrative arc. What you can’t get from this synopsis, however, is any sense of why this book is 483 pages long. Perhaps an excerpt from Caylor’s introduction of the reader to Jimmy will help:
We take it that the reader will be glad at length to meet one of our characters who is not a fool. However, the reader may well turn and ask “What is her?” In attempting a valuation of our favourite masculine character, we must first state some of our concepts and premises, to which he must measure up. Thus:
To have convictions –! that is the true, the high, human importance. To feel that one’s beliefs matter, to attain them through moral force, to give them up with a struggle when one has become convinced they are false, that is living a worthy, possibly even noble, life. We truly believe that convictions, hard won and hard relinquished, are the only possessions that lend a passing importance to man, and dignity, etc., to his transitory estate. Our hero, however, hadn’t any hard-won convictions or any he wouldn’t give up at the drop of a hat. Opinions blew through his head like drafts. He no more bothered to knew where he got them than were he got a cold in the head, and he no more knew the reason why he gave them up than he could give the reason for a sneeze.
This is followed by nine pages of further reflection on Jimmy’s character, its development, and the nature of modern man, while Jimmy and Caryl wait side-by-side in a cab for the plot to move along. The Journey may take place in a time of trains, planes (well, a few), and automobiles, but its pace is solidly grounded in the 18th century. Thirty pages later, the couple is just sitting down to their first meal together. The consumation of their marriage is still at least three hundred pages off.
And this, in a nutshell, is the dilemma faced by a reader who decides to take Caylor’s journey. One reviewer called the book “irritating and entertaining,” and that’s precisely the mixed bag it offers. This is not a book you read for the story or even much for the characters, so if you don’t fall in love with Caylor as tour guide, I can’t imagine you’re likely to hang in past Chapter Two.
I think we have to accept that Caylor miscalculated how far she could stretch her story’s thin fabric over its complex scaffolding of commentary. I stuck with her to the very end because reading books like this is part of the price of my obsession. Given how rare this book is in the first place (perhaps a dozen copies in libraries worldwide and zero copies available for sale), I suspect few who even bother to read this far are likely to track down The Journey for themselves.
Yet, I must remind you that irritating was only one of the adjective used to describe this book. The other was entertaining. For, in the midst of many pages of reflections and discursions that often made me grumble, “Oh, just get on with it!”, there are also wonderful set-pieces. Like the literary discussion where a roomful of New Orleans belles dames debate whether Gulliver’s Travels is “fornographic” and gush over their latest reads, the titles and authors of which none of them can quite bring to mind. Or this description of the earnest authoress Rose Entwhistle and one of her attempts at research:
Today, Miss Entwhistle is very tired, and for a most perlexing reason. Having heard a salesgirl remark the other day, in answer to her own statement that a department store was very fascinating, that it was “a good place to learn human nature,” she had immediately (quite secretly of course and incognito) obtained a job in this same store and for that very purpose. Today, having worked a week there, having been rather disappointed in human nature, and having quit the day before, she suffered greatly in her feet, but especially there was a strange disquiet in her memory. Famous for her many stories dealing with department store life, she was beginning to wonder whether it was not she herself who was the author of that statement about department stores being “a good place to learn human nature,” and could it be that she had been taken in by a quotation from herself?
And, on occasion, Caylor can be refreshingly telegraphic in her approach. Take, for example, Chapter 32, which reads, in entirety, “We have no room in this book for the savageries of Caryl’s sister-in-law, Hazel.”
The Nation’s reviewer, Florence Codman, loved The Journey in all its digressive beauty, dismissing her own brief description of the book as “an offering of nickels where millions are to be enjoyed.” Well, perhaps not millions, but something in the mid-hundreds at least. Do these make The Journey worth the investment of a couple of weeks to read it? I guess that’s why I get paid the big bucks to help with these decisions.
The Journey, by Rose Caylor New York: Covici, Friede (1933)
Back in the 1990s, I was browsing my way through an independent bookstore in Saskatoon (now, sadly, defunct) and came across a title I hadn’t heard of, by an author whose name was unfamiliar to me.
I’ve always been drawn to war novels (I’m something of a history buff) and this one had, as its backdrop, the grim, bloody trenches of the First World War. I read a few paragraphs and decided to purchase The Poppy Factory, a leap of faith that paid big dividends as the book remains a favorite to this day.
It impressed me to such an extent that, some years afterward, when I was guest at a science fiction convention in Vancouver, I brought up The Poppy Factory during a panel of on “Neglected Books” that also included my Canadian colleague Spider Robinson.
No one in the audience recognized the book, so I stoutly defended its literary qualities, at one point cracking open The Poppy Factory, reading an excerpt from about thirty-five pages into the novel. The protagonist, Captain Adrian Garrard, is lying in “no man’s land” after an abortive attack. Wounded, semi-delirious, at first he can scarcely credit his senses:
I shall never find peace in the moonlight again, only fear, because it was then I saw the first of them.
It appeared over the lip of the crater, crouching on all fours, its black head twitching rapidly from side to side, sensing danger, scenting prey. It began to crawl through the mud toward me…
… I heard the sickening, sucking sound as its legs drove it closer and closer through the clinging mud and could not look. And then I heard laughter. Harsh, grating, wild, only just recognizable, but laughter.
I forced my eyes open.
The creature had risen onto its rear legs and, still bent forward, was clutching my revolver between its forepaws. Only they weren’t paws, they were earth-blackened hands, and the creature was not an animal but a man, his head shrouded in a cowl of filthy sacking, his clothes blackened rags…
…I lay still, feigning death. The claw-like hands ripped at my clothes. Perhaps this was death….
The reaction to that reading was most gratifying. I could see people writing the title down for future reference.
My investigations over the years uncovered some biographical details about The Poppy Factory’s author, William Fairchild. He served in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, and subsequently enjoyed a fairly lengthy and successful tenure in the British film industry, scripting and directing a number of movies. His best-known efforts were Malta Story, featuring Jack Hawkins, and Star!, with Julie Andrews.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a strong cinematic feel to The Poppy Factory; visually it’s quite evocative and compelling. As part of his research, Fairchild personally toured the Ypres battlefield in Belgium, spurred by a rumor (I’ve never been able to confirm its veracity) that at one point in the conflict two hundred men from both armies lived underground between enemy lines.
William Fairchild died in 2000 at the ripe, old age of eighty-two.
Sadly, he never lived to see his novel translated to the big screen.
But it’s never too late to rectify that oversight….
Cliff Burns has been a professional author since 1985, with 15 books and scores of published short stories, essays, reviews and poems to his credit. He lives in western Canada with his wife, artist and educator Sherron Burns. He also writes the Beautiful Desolation blog.
The Poppy Factory, by William Fairchild London and Toronto: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1987 Also published as No Man’s Land in the U.S. by Bantam Books, 1988
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled “The Mystery of Jessamy Morrison” that surveyed four of the six novels published between 1963 and 1972 by a writer of that name. Aside from the fact that the British Library’s catalogue listed “Jessamy Morrison” as a pseudonym, I hadn’t been able to determine anything more about Morrison’s true identity. Indeed, although the pioneering lesbian critic and publisher Barbara Grier considered two of Morrison’s early books, The No Road (1963) and The Girl from Paris (1965) among the best books on gay themes in their respective years, certain aspects of the books made me wonder whether Jessamy was, in fact, male.
Soon after I posted the piece, the British novelist and editor Eric Brown emailed me. “Now this is a long shot,” he wrote, “and I suspect it might come to nothing — but I wonder if there is a possibility that Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym used by Peter de Polnay?” Eric felt the descriptions of Morrison’s novels seemed “like synopses of works by Peter de Polnay: upper middle-class characters, continental settings, unpleasant female characters, and sex.”
I’ve been fascinated by Peter de Polnay for some time and wrote de Polnay’s Wikipedia biography several years ago. Born into a Jewish-Hungarian noble family, he and his sisters were raised mostly by governesses and caretakers in Switzerland and England. After a series of misadventures in Austria, Argentina, and the French Riviera, de Polnay settled in Paris and began writing novels in English. His first book, Angry Man’s Tale (1939), was described by one critic as “a curious and effective blend of James M. Cain and Noel Coward.” De Polnay tried to blend into the woodwork when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 but eventually chose to flee, making his way south through Spain to Gibraltar, from where he was evacuated to England — an experience he recounted in his 1941 book Death and Tomorrow.
De Polnay tried to assume the life of an English country gentleman, renting Boulge Hall, formerly the home of the poet and translator Edward FitzGerald (responsible for the hugely popular English translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam). He soon found this lifestyle unaffordable and after his first wife died in 1950, he spent most of the rest of his life circulating through Spain, France, and southern England. And all the while, he wrote like a demon, amassing something like 80 books under his own name before his death in 1984.
I’ve written about several of de Polnay’s books. All that I’ve read are short, spare, speedy, and utterly cynical, leading me to refer to him as “a poor man’s Georges Simenon.” Poor because de Polnay is not quite the master that Simenon can be at his best. As a novelist, de Polnay lacks something of Simenon’s ruthless efficiency. None of the de Polnays I’ve read so far is without an extraneous character or two, or a narrative detour down what proves to be a dead end. And unlike Simenon, de Polnay was not working in his native language (which he’d probably say was French rather than Hungarian, in any case). Now, that alone is not necessarily a handicap (viz. Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov to name just two who put many native English writers to shame), but combined with the speed with which de Polnay wrote (averaging 3-4 books a year), it led so some stylistic tendencies that Eric Brown felt might offer further hints to Jessamy Morrison’s identity.
The moment I read Eric’s first email, I knew he had to be correct. “It seems obvious now that I think about it. Many similarities. Many,” I replied. However, I was also checking with other sources to see what I could find. The Humanities staff of the British Library diligently looked through their records but found no further clue to why their catalogue listed Jessamy Morrison as a pseudonym. The Society of Authors drew a blank as well, and so did several agencies I contacted.
I sent Eric a selection of chapters from Morrison’s novels to aid in his comparison with Peter de Polnay’s prose. “I’m convinced it’s Peter de Polnay,” he wrote back a few days later:
Even if we were to disregard the many stylistic similarities, it ‘feels’ like de Polnay: the narrative is leisurely and slapdash, interspersed with often irrelevant asides concerning the narrator’s relatives or acquaintances (a typical de Polnay trait.) The milieu is pure PdP. At the start of The No-Road he mentions shooting (he was a keen shooter) and the specialist phrase ‘walk up partridges’ – which has echoes with a character in his 1970 novel Spring Snow and Algy. He’s casually disparaging about stout women, and garrulous swearing women, who often crop up in his books.
Eric’s comparison of de Polnay’s prose with Morrison’s added to his conviction:
The stylistic similarities are telling. The prose is littered with ugly sentence splices; there’s an under-use of commas; minor characters are described coming and going to no real effect; he employs ‘whereby I mean’ and ‘As a matter of fact’ and ‘In short’ which crop up again and again in DpD’s novels; he combines in the same paragraph dialogue attributed to different characters which other novelists would lay out on separate lines; there are one or two instances of the absence of a comma between verb and gerund, a DpD trait; in dialogue, characters are oddly off-hand with each other.
Like de Polnay, Morrison had a predilection for splicing sentences:
We had a couple of hours to kill, Clarissa went off with the children, I called in on my club, and then we all met at the air terminus.
Like de Polnay, Morrison composes with a slapdash brush, introducing, as Eric put it, “willy-nilly, background detail into a section of dialogue, thus wrong-footing the reader when returning to the dialogue”:
My father had been a shipbroker in Leadenhall Street and my brother John and I inherited the business. In furtherance of our business I went abroad from time to time to places like Antwerp and Rotterdam and Hamburg. “That doesn’t come into it,” I added. Clarissa remembered she had something or other to do, so left the room, and if I come to think of it she never thanked me properly for agreeing to the holiday in Majorca.
And, like de Polnay, Morrison’s stage directions can be haphazard:
I said I intended to settle in the town. Before he could make some appropriate remark an ill-dressed old woman, in a not too clean apron, waddled in and asked for ten Woodbines. Meanwhile the man in the green hat had left. The landlord served the woman, the door closed on her and we were alone.
“He likes having minor characters wander off set for no reason!” Eric observed.
By this point, I was convinced as well. So, I wrote to Peter de Polnay’s son Greg, a retired actor now living in France. I’d interviewed Greg for the Wikipedia article on his father. “Yes, indeed Jessamy Morrison was a pseudonym of my father’s,” he replied. “But I had no idea he had written so many novels.” Greg de Polnay’s relationship with his father had been difficult at the best of times — as evidenced by the fact that Peter de Polnay never mentioned his son in any of his autobiographies.
Chances are that Peter de Polnay adopted the pseudonym of Jessamy Morrison for two reasons. First, to avoid saturating the market. But more importantly, to avoid incurring the wrath of the Catholic Church, which still maintained its index of forbidden books. De Polnay had converted after marrying his third wife, Maria del Carmen Rubio y Caparo, daughter of a Spanish theater director and a devout Catholic.
And, by 1963, he had become accustomed to using a pseudonym. As Greg confirmed, his father published a number of novels for W. H. Allen under the name of Rodney Garland. Rodney Garland was itself a pseudonym, adopted by a fellow Hungarian emigre named Adam Martin de Hegedus. De Hegedus was a journalist and commentator who’d published several works of nonfiction between the late 1930s and early 1950s. He took the pseudonym when W. H. Allen published his 1953 novel The Heart in Exile (recently reissued by Valancourt Books). Now considered a landmark book for its candid and positive portrayal of the relationship between two gay men, The Heart in Exile risked condemnation, if not censorship, given the fact that homosexuality was still illegal under English laws.
De Hegedus died in October 1955, though the circumstances of his death are still in doubt. Soon after his death, W. H. Allen published a second Rodney Garland novel, The Troubled Midnight, which was undoubtedly by de Hegedus. Over the course of the next ten years, however, W. H. Allen published three more novels by “Rodney Garland”: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and Sorcerer’s Broth (1966). Greg de Polnay has confirmed that the last two were written by his father. I’m waiting on a copy of World Without Dreams to see if it passes the subject/style test.
So, there we have it: Jessamy Morrison was Peter de Polnay. I shall have to amend his Wikipedia page now.
Prayer: “Let us throw back our heads and laugh at reality.” Response: “Which is an illusion caused by mescaline deficiency.”
N. F. Simpson wrote those words in his play A Resounding Tinkle, and they are as true today as they were then, which is to say as true as anything else. Simpson, born Norman Frederick but known to everyone as “Wally” – a play on the name of Edward VIII’s lover, of course – was a great writer, an influence on Cambridge comic writers like Peter Cook and John Cleese, and a popular and critically-acclaimed playwright from the 1950s onwards, admired both by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Wally wrote mostly for the stage, but also for television and cinema and, on one exceptional occasion, as a novelist. He was able to outdo Lewis Carroll by thinking of a million impossible things for breakfast but, unlike his contemporaries who could make their work only absurd, he could also be as funny as a writer he admired greatly, P. G. Wodehouse. More philosophical than absurdist, Simpson nevertheless created surreal worlds whose logic was as rigorous as that of Aristotle, only much more hilarious.
In his long career – his work was first performed at the Royal Court in London in 1957, and his last new work for the stage, If So Then Yes, debuted in 2009 – N. F. Simpson produced many extraordinary works, from A Resounding Tinkle and One Way Pendulum (the latter filmed by Peter Yates in 1964) to television work as diverse as episodes of the ITV serial Crown Court (which vehicle Simpson subverted to near-breaking point) and Elementary My Dear Watson, a 1973 TV play in which John Cleese played Sherlock Holmes.
Harry Bleachbaker, published 1976, is not his only prose work, but it is his only novel and, being an N. F. Simpson novel, is very little like anything else in fiction. Based, at times so closely as to be verbatim, on his 1972 play Was He Anyone, Harry Bleachbaker has very little in the way of plot and an enormous amount in the way of diversion, rumination and side-tracking. Its plot, which unfolds over a hundred or so pages with the speed of a Galapagos tortoise making its mind up, is extremely simple: a man named Albert Whitbrace has fallen into the Mediterranean and plans are put into motion for his rescue. Or rather, plans to make plans to rescue him are put into motion, or if not put into motion, then discussed. The whole thing reads – probably intentionally – at times like the minutes of a very tortuous civil service meeting. Practicalities are weighed up, pros and cons are debated, issues are raised, and all the time Albert Whitbrace remains floating in the Med. There are footnotes, there are illustrations, there are sections rendered in dialogue but the thrust of the story is never out of focus: Albert Whitbrace is in the sea and he must be got out. And eventually, a decision is made.
At times Harry Bleachbaker (the titular character remains obscure) reads like Flann O’Brien, at others like Samuel Beckett, and at still others like an extended Monty Python sketch, but always it is pure N. F. Simpson: a world gone mad which is nevertheless ordered by the strictest rules of logic. Simpson, who laughed at reality, nevertheless went to great pains to replicate it faithfully at the same time as he was mocking it. And from the very first page of Harry Bleachbaker, nothing is safe. The Author’s Note at the beginning warns the reader:
This is an uneven book, parts of it having been deliberately made more boring than was in itself strictly necessary in order to highlight those parts which are less so.
Even the blurb cautions, “This is not, it goes without saying, a book to be read through from cover to cover at one sitting, or even at several sittings. It is not, indeed, a book to be read from cover to cover at all….” Simpson’s own biography lacks the usual elements of self-promotion and enthusiasm: “He was born in 1919, though without having first gone into the thing properly to see what it was likely to entail. Had he done so he would not be here now.”
The whole thing sounds quite daunting, and the lack of a conventional storyline doesn’t help the casual reader. Simpson’s lack of interest in narrative, he explained in the radio documentary Reality Is An Illusion Caused By Lack of NF Simpson, was caused by stems from the death of his mother when he was a child: ever since then, he seemed to imply, nothing had made sense. But the book, whether dipped in from time to time or read from cover to cover in a manic burst of brain-frying, is fantastic. Simpson’s ear for dialogue is incredible. His ability to capture the details of human selfishness (for this is not a book about Good Samaritans) and the tangled mess of bureaucracy (this is also a satire on the modern age of red tape) creates a world where the reader, who should feel like ALBERT WHITBRACE that they are drowning in a sea of madness, is buoyed up by laughter and a sheer helplessness at the force of Simpson’s imagination.
As an introduction to Wally’s work, Harry Bleachbaker is accessibly hilarious as well as being fairly easy to find online. As a stand-alone novel, there is very little like it, however you choose to read it. Be careful, though: it will lure the reader into the world of N. F. Simpson, from which, thank God, there is no escape.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Harry Bleachbaker, by NF Simpson London: Harrap, 1976
Back in August 2021, when I interviewed Michael Walmer about his independent press MichaelWalmer.com, which has reissued dozens of fine neglected books, he asked if I knew anything about the 1960s British author Jessamy Morrison: “I’m wondering whether or not you’ve looked into her,” he wrote — “Who she actually was — if indeed it was only one person. My searching so far has revealed nothing.”
The name was completely new to me, and that in itself is an increasingly uncommon thing.
Well, having since tracked down, purchased, and read four of Jessamy Morrison’s novels and awaiting a fifth to make its way from South Africa, I can answer Michael’s inquiry. I’ve looked into her, who she actually was.
And my searching so far has revealed nothing.
According to the British Library’s catalogue, Jessamy Morrison is a pseudonym. Having checked with the Society of Authors, Penguin Random House (which now owns the backlist of Morrison’s original publisher, W. H. Allen), and several major literary agencies, I’ve been unable to find any record outside library catalogues and a handful of bookseller listings.
What’s worse, I’m no longer even sure that Jessamy Morrison was, in reality, a she or a he. Or both.
Three of Morrison’s books have male narrators, which in itself offers no clue. Plenty of women have written novels with male leads and male narrators.
Of the very, very little that was written about Morrison’s books even when they first came out, the one thing consistently mentioned in reviews was the “unusual” nature of their subjects. Given that these books came out when England was just learning how to swing, that was undoubtedly code for homosexuality. W. H. Allen dropped a big, unsubtle hint on the cover of Morrison’s first novel The No-Road (1963) by announcing it as “A brilliant new novel in the tradition of The Well of Loneliness” — Radclyffe Hall’s one-scandalous novel of lesbian love. And that’s confirmed through the rave reviews that Barbara Grier, a pioneering lesbian writer and publisher, wrote for The Ladder, a 1960s lesbian journal, in her identity as Gene Damon.
Grier delighted in the ways in which Morrison puts the reader into the minds of men who consider themselves urbane and intelligent and then demonstrating beyond all doubt that they’re as thick as bricks when it comes to understanding women.
Gerald Milton, for example, acknowledges at the very start of The No-Road that he failed to see what was going on with his wife Clarissa: “One needs detachment in order to know. Detachment is easy when one isn’t involved.” He admits that he was “involved up to the neck,” yet still prides himself in thinking that “I retained my detachment to the last.”
Gerald and Clarissa are a fairly conventional upper-middle-class English couple. He is a shipbroker whose business to various European ports and Clarissa’s primary passion is for horses. They enjoyed a very British sex life, “neither of us attaching too much or too little importance to sex.” Gerald does share with the reader that he takes the occasional opportunities that arise on business trips through “a drink too many but never by planning or premeditation.”
On a holiday to Majorca, the Miltons encounter a boisterous group at a restaurant that Clarissa suggests are probably gay men and women but that Gerald dismisses as simply loud and unpleasant. One of the group, a self-confident woman named Diana Upton, however, befriends Clarissa on the beach and soon the two are inseparably. After their time on the island, though, the Miltons return to London on schedule.
Within a few weeks, however, Diana Upton arrives in London and begins making frequent calls on the Milton house. The two women go out riding together. Gradually, even Gerald starts to realize they’re having an affair. Though he puts all the blame of Diana as the devious seductress, he condemns Clarissa as a deviant:
I know, I said to myself, there are women homosexuals the same way as male homosexuals, but I know too that society has to defend itself against them. In my own nest was an enemy of society and to my misfortune the enemy happened to be my wife. And what she had down was in my eyes, and according to my sense and rules or morals, almost as illegal as murder. There are no extenuating circumstances for sexual depravity.
Clarissa agrees to end the affair and Gerald agrees to bring in Jill, a rather plain and dumpy woman in her thirties, to help with the children and household matters in consideration. And all is forgotten, bygones easily becoming bygones.
And so, this particular story might end, were it not for Gerald’s indominable obtuseness. For him, Clarissa’s affair was a disgraceful but forgivable dalliance. For her, it was a transformative experience. As John Lee Hooker’s mother observes in “Boogie Chillen,” once the boogie-woogie’s in someone, “it’s got to come out.” Or, to put it another way, three into two won’t go. And it’s not Gerald the Upright who fails to live happily ever after.
Herbert Brownlow, the narrator of Morrison’s next book, The Wind Has Two Edges (1964), is equally obtuse but perhaps a bit less hypocritical in his propriety. Herbert has retired from civil service to a flat in a Channel-side town neither too touristy for comfortable nor too dull to be deadly, where he intends to write the definitive history of administration.
His sole acquaintance is Stephen, a fellow civil servant who seems, upon their meeting again, to have become somewhat too louche and fond of drink for Herbert’s taste. Stephen has also made friends with two young, noisy, and brutish brothers named Alan and Michael. They spill drinks, jostle tables, make lewd comments about girls, and generally unsettle Herbert when he tries to have a quiet drink in the pub with his old friend.
Herbert becomes particularly offended by the brothers when they begin toying with the affections of Beryl, the beautiful and apparently strait-laced granddaughter of his landlady. In hopes of putting affairs back into good order, Herbert ends up thoroughly entangled in lives his entire worldview makes him ill-prepared to deal with. He attempts to play matchmaker, then peacemaker, and finally, the knight in shining armor to resolve matters in what, to him, seems a straightforward and rational manner.
Unlike Gerald Milton, however, when the facts of the situation — which include the efforts of several gay men and women to love as they choose without running afoul of the law or their community — are make clear to him, it is Herbert who adapts his values and put friendship ahead of such labels as “deviant” or “enemy of society”: “If you want to give it a label, Beryl had said on that unfortunate morning, then call me a lesbian. I could not. For I remembered only two nice and happy girls who in their harmonious way had given me a delightful meal.”
His error in trying to make sense of affairs deliberately convoluted to disguise the actual sexual orientation of its participants, as he admits in the end, was failing to consider “the human element.” The Wind Has Two Edges reminded me very much of Kathleen Sully’s novel Merrily to the Grave, similarly set in a house in a Channel-side town and similarly about how a collection of society’s outcasts and misfits can find community and acceptance together.
If The Wind Has Two Edges ends in a sort of sadder-and-wiser sunset glow, Morrison’s third novel The Girl from Paris (1965) opens with a scene certain to offend conventional British proprieties of its time. Duncan Diplock (which sounds like a name out of Catch-22) is trolling the streets of Montparnasse after midnight in search of a prostitute. Not just any prostitute, however, and not, as you might expect, for sex. Duncan is on a recruiting trip. He’s looking for a suitably attractive and refined prostitute to bring back to London and install in his mate Martin’s call-girl service. Duncan and his wife will host her as, ostensibly, an au pair to fool the immigration authorities, while she earns a small fortune for Martin by bringing in a better class of client.
Duncan selects Josette, a stunningly beautiful widow on the stroll to pay for her daughter’s care in a safe and respectable country home. After her initial surprise when Duncan starts talking business instead of hopping into bed, the wheels in her head begin turning and she negotiates a tough bargain: she will take the job for just one year and at a higher than planned rate.
Once settled London, though, Josette proves an agent of chaos — sexually, emotionally, financially, and practically. Martin the pimp falls in love with her, Duncan’s wife Wendy is seduced by her, a wealthy and shallow young lord contemplates marrying her, and Duncan simply struggles to keep it all from attracting the attention of the police. Josette, as he slowly realizes, is calculating and acting at a level of self-interest that makes the rest of the cast look like hapless amateurs. While their lives fall to pieces, Josette is able to return to Paris with a tidy sum to open a dressmaking business with — her intent all along.
The Girl from Paris is not a particularly profound book, but Morrison is quite effective in making Josette’s highly unconventional position seem more balanced than that of any of the lovestruck or simply bewildered English men and women around her. And as with all of the Morrison novels I’ve read so far, it flies like the wind. You keep turning the pages in each out of fascination, wondering just where this is all going.
I haven’t located a copy of Morrison’s rarest novel, Rusty (1967), which seems to be about the affair between a wild ingenue and a prominent author, and I’m still waiting to get my copy of The Office Party (1967), which was the only one to be widely reviewed. But the sixth and last novel, The Widow (1972), offers a few hints that clarify, if not solve, the mystery of Jessamy Morrison.
The Widow has, again, a male narrator. Nigel Hood is a successful art dealer dealing with an exclusive network of artists and clients. While in Durban to arrange a sale, he runs into an old Oxford friend, a South African poet named Roy Banting. After great initial fame and critical success, Banting has become something of a has-been, spending much of his time building an elaborate garden on a country estate and looked after by his adoring wife Charlotte Ann.
When Roy dies suddenly of a heart attack, Nigel finds himself enlisted into the roles of executor, counselor, and problem solver. The root of the problem is that Roy and Charlotte Ann’s marriage was a fake. He’d married a sexy but troubled undergraduate while teaching in the U.S. and never managed to secure a proper divorce. And now Charlotte Ann is pregnant with Roy’s child. So, will the child be a bastard or will Roy be revealed as a bigamist? This leads Nigel to devise an elaborate charade with all the complexities of a Feydeau farce and none of the humor.
Morrison spins out the tale with the usual flair for convolutions, but this time around it’s a little like listening to a very long-winded explanation of a situation you weren’t much interested in to start with. “Yes, yes,” I found myself saying, “get on with it.” If the real author behind Jessamy Morrison gave up publishing after The Widow, it may simply have been that he or she ran out of ideas.
I say he or she because I found it difficult to convince myself that The Widow was written by anyone but a man. Not only is there not the slightest hint of anything but good old-fashioned heterosexuality going on, but the book is riddled with one of the most notorious tells of male writers: a fixation about breast size. Nigel makes sure the reader knows that Charlotte Ann is well-endowed while Nancy, his long-time girlfriend, is not. He even makes sure we are forced to witness a scene in which Charlotte Ann lactates for his edification.
Perhaps this alone is not enough to prove that Jessamy Morrison was, in fact, a male author, but it certainly raises questions. Why would a man take a woman’s name and then publish novels written from a man’s perspective? The Wind Has Two Edges aside, is the lesbian element in two of the other three novels a serious attempt to stimulate a conversation about the complexities of gender and sexual preferences, or is it simply a literate version of the very old story of a guy trying to talk his wife or girlfriend into a threesome with one of her friends?
I still hope to unravel the mystery of Jessamy Morrison, but at this point it’s more out of curiosity than any interest in trying to bring a lost-lost talent back to light. Three of the four novels discussed here may have some value as artifacts of a time when sexual mores in England were beginning to change, but only The Wind Has Two Edges has more than average merit.
I welcome any assistance any reader of this piece might be able to lend in solving this mystery. It would still be nice to know what was going on with these books. If nothing else, they are certainly atypical for their time.
The No-Road, The Wind Has Two Edges, The Girl from Paris, and The Widow were all published by W. H. Allen in London.
The ways that we discover what we read are various. Sometimes we are led to a book by its reference in another book. Sometimes we hear mention of an unfamiliar author on the radio. I’ve heard that there are some brave souls who will pick up a book at a bookshop simply because the cover is too interesting to pass by.
In this case, I happened to be watching a book review on PaperBird’s YouTube channel. The always illuminating reviewer was discussing the works of James Purdy and then mentioned a young Chicago writer, Wendell Wilcox. Wilcox, he said, was “… just starting to find his way, but then in 1957 mysteriously just stopped publishing altogether, which is weird because around that same time is when James Purdy started appearing in print.” Something about the phrase, “mysteriously just stopped publishing,” piqued my interest. Perhaps it was only because, deep down, I love a good mystery. In any case, I decided to seek out Wilcox’s novel, Everything is Quite All Right, thinking that it might lead me down some rabbit hole but would end with me knowing why he stopped publishing.
Bernard Ackerman, Inc. published Everything is Quite All Right in 1945. On the back cover, there is a brief author bio: “Mr. Wilcox was graduated from the University of Chicago in 1929 and he has been married since 1931. He has lived in Chicago since he was five years old, and the scene of EVERYTHING IS QUITE ALL RIGHT is a great unnamed middle western city on the shores of Lake Michigan.”
In the 1930s, Wilcox became a friend of Gertrude Abercrombie, Chicago’s “Queen of the Bohemian Artists.” Abercrombie was an influential Surrealist painter and her vast network of friends and acquaintances included painters like Karl Priebe and Sylvia Fein, jazz musicians such as Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and writers Thornton Wilder and James Purdy. She regularly hosted parties, gatherings, and jam sessions at her house in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where artists from diverse backgrounds mingled. These gatherings acquired a reputation for attracting the most interesting talent in Chicago and beyond, as many traveling musicians and artists frequently stopped by. As for Abercrombie, she loved being the center of attention. Her gregariousness was legendary and the get-togethers continued even when she was too ill to get out of bed.
Abercrombie was not only a respected painter; she was also a talented jazz pianist. When jazz musicians improvised in her living room, it wasn’t uncommon for Abercrombie to join in on the piano. She had such strong friendships with so many musicians that she even inspired a couple of tunes: Richie Powell’s “Gertrude’s Bounce” and Roy Kral & Jackie Cain’s “Afrocrombie.” She made her home into an environment in which the music never stopped and its halcyon atmosphere was later recalled fondly by Saul Bellow and Studs Terkel. Abercrombie’s wide-ranging bohemian crowd was connected through her prevailing personae. In a way, these gatherings were comparable to the Paris literary salons hosted by another Gertrude.
Gertrude Stein surrounded herself with painters, poets, novelists, composers, and playwrights who visited her and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, at their Paris home on Saturday evenings. Stein also brought together artists who would influence each other and eventually have an effect on the broader culture. Although she is inextricably linked with Paris, Stein did feel the pull towards home. In 1934, she was invited to lecture at the University of Chicago and she returned in 1935. Thornton Wilder was teaching at the school’s English department at the time and he invited his friend Gertrude Abercrombie to attend Stein’s lecture, “Poetry and Grammar.” Abercrombie asked if she could bring along her friend, Wendell Wilcox. And, as Wilder put it, “…so began a romance of Wendell and Miss Stein.”
Wilcox had first read Stein’s work when he was an undergraduate and was quite taken with her poetry collection, Tender Buttons. After attending her lecture, the two writers began a correspondence that lasted until the end of Stein’s life. She was fond of his letters and the celebrated author encouraged the young Chicago writer to pursue his passion.
In her 1937 memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein mentions Wilcox, and writes that he “…has a feeling for meaning that is not beyond what the words are saying and of course that does make more brilliant writing and that is what he is doing.” This take on Wilcox reminded me of the English literary critic Cyril Connolly’s distinction between two styles of literature: vernacular (or, realist) and Mandarin. Of the Mandarin, Connolly says, “It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs….”
After publishing short stories in Harper’s Bazaar (his first story, “England Is in Flames,” appeared in 1941), Story, and The New Yorker, as well as having his stories included in anthologies like, Best American Short Stories and 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, Wilcox succeeded in having his debut novel accepted for publication.
Hoping to garner attention for the first-time novelist, Wilcox’s publisher asked permission to use the quotation from Everybody’s Autobiography and requested that Stein expand on what she meant by the comment. Ever the supportive friend and mentor, Stein sent a letter stating: “I am genuinely interested in his work. He has perfection, delicacy and persistence … all three good things.”
Everything is Quite All Right does not resemble the modernist writings of Stein. Wilcox’s writing is clear and straightforward and the plot itself is quite simple. As the back cover states, it concerns “…ordinary people living dull, uneventful lives.” We are introduced to the repugnant (and racist) Mrs. Korg as she has fired yet another “girl” that she and Mr. Korg have hired to clean their home, prepare their meals, and care for their baby. They have gone through eleven helpers in the past year.
We then meet the soon-to-be-twelfth, seventeen-year-old Elsie Singer. Elsie’s parents are struggling to provide for their five children on their Michigan farm. With the idea that she might be of some help, Elsie is sent to live with her recently widowed aunt in the city. Elsie is sweet and innocent by nature, but her mere presence grates on her Aunt Norah, who would prefer to remain in her ways. “For her the happy cheerful state was one of soft funereal gloom.” It was in the evenings just as the sun went down that Elsie’s presence was especially unwelcome. Every night, Norah would sit in the dark and, like clockwork, the presence of her late husband would arrive and together they would commune in the empty apartment.
Elsie is not an intellectual (characters refer to her as “slow” and “stupid”), but she is observant and instinctively kind. She cannot help but notice that her aunt does not really want her there. She is also aware that her presence back home was financially trying for her parents. Norah decides Elsie should find a job. So, with some prodding and some assistance from her aunt, Elsie finds work as a maid for Mr. and Mrs. Korg.
The scenes where Mrs. Korg makes impossible demands on her new maid are memorably uncomfortable. Mrs. Korg is perpetually frustrated with Elsie and she feels a sense of superiority which she frequently indulges. Meanwhile, Mr. Korg tries rather awkwardly to soften his wife’s harshness. For the most part, though, he goes about his work and stays out of the way. He is a meek fellow and he is ultimately convinced that life is merely “just doing ordinary things and having good or bad feelings about them.”
The Korgs’s marriage has some noticeable fissures and as the pressure continues to build, it seems that something will soon change:
Every war, they say, has its causes, those stated and those actual, and then there is always some event that precipitates the whole affair. Without this obvious event the war could never begun. The same is true of the main events in the lives of people.
After offering to give her a ride home, Mr. Korg takes Elsie on a drive to Lake Michigan. There, while the two sit on a rock overlooking the water, they share a kiss that inaugurates a love affair. We know, of course, that this cannot end well. And along the way, Elsie learns to follow her own heart. She leaves the Korgs, her aunt, and the city, and moves back to her family’s house in the country. But soon, Elsie finds herself getting to know the young man living just one farm over. At the end, the reader is left thinking things might actually be quite all right.
It seems clear why Stein championed Wilcox’s writing. His sentences move along quickly and, consequently, both humor and pathos are met so suddenly that their effects are just a little bit delayed. That delay often makes the laugh louder and the sigh longer. The novel is also full of irony. Characters are constantly doing things that they just admonished someone else for doing — such as when Mrs. Korg shouts at Mr. Korg that his outburst might wake the baby. Characters do self-serving things that they tell themselves are for the benefit of others: Elsie’s mother suggests that Aunt Norah take in Elsie not because the Singers need one less mouth to feed, but because her lonely, grieving sister needs some company. And the novel’s title, of course, is exactly what one says when everything is not quite all right. It really is no surprise that Wilcox’s writing drew comparisons to James Thurber’s domestic satires. And it is no surprise that his stories were featured in The New Yorker, as his writing has the clean, efficient, neat style that one associates with the magazine.
There’s little information about Wilcox’s life after his novel was published. He contributed a few more short stories to The New Yorker –the last piece I could locate (“No Larger Than Life”) was printed in the November 17, 1956 issue. After that, it appears that he dropped off of the proverbial literary map and that promise that Gertrude Stein saw in him was never fully realized.
The remembrances of Samuel Steward — poet, professor, pornographer, and tattoo artist — offered one clue as to why Wilcox drifted into anonymity. In The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward: Recollections of an Extraordinary Twentieth-Century Gay Life, Steward writes,
In 1945, my good friend Wendell Wilcox had a novel published, Everything is Quite All Right, and planned to write a new novel about his great passion, the Latin poet Catullus. But Wendell made the mistake of detailing his carefully researched plot to Thornton [Wilder], and sometime later, Thornton’s The Ides of March appeared. Therein, alas! Wendell found his plot. After that, Thornton discovered many of his friends in Chicago disappeared or grew cool as the story about Catullus gained wider circulation. I was one of those friends who vanished.
However, Penelope Niven, author of Thornton Wilder: A Life, discredits this claim. Wilder was well established by the time Everything is Quite All Right was released. With four novels and three Pulitzer Prizes to his name, Wilder had little need to resort to plagiarism. Niven adds, “Wilder’s correspondence confirms beyond question that he began conceiving and planning the novel as early as 1922, soon after his first trip to Rome.”
Wilcox visited Paris in 1949, seemingly with the desire to write. In a letter, Alice B. Toklas mentions his visit:
I’d only seen him once at one of the lectures Gertrude gave at the University of Chicago in ’35 and seeing him now has been a pleasure…Wendell wrote a short but not uninteresting novel a few years ago — he cant [sic] get to work easily though writing is as natural as living to him—he wants to stay a bit and get to work here.
Justin Spring, in his biography of Samuel Steward, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Poet, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade, states that Steward and Wilcox reconnected in 1976. Through their correspondence, Wilcox painted a bleak picture. He was struggling with alcoholism, a recent colostomy, and liver cancer. His wife, Esther, was a librarian and the financial provider in their marriage. When she passed away, Wilcox had a tough time making ends meet and he admitted to Steward that he had long since given up writing.
In 1986, The Paris Review printed “Gertrude Stein: Letters to a Friend,” with commentary by Philip Galanes. Stein’s friend was Wendell Wilcox. The article gives us a glimpse into his later life: “… Wilcox settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he worked as an archivist at the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina. He died in 1981.”
James Purdy captured those old days of bohemian Chicago in some of his novels. He would occasionally use a friend’s likeness in his works throughout his career. In his 1959 novel, Malcolm, a Gertrude Abercrombie-like character plays a pivotal role and she does again in his 1967 novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, and in his 1996 novel, Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. On James Purdy’s Wikipedia page, his 1977 novel, Narrow Rooms, is referred to as “…a personal communication looking back some 25 years to Wendell Wilcox, a failed writer in the Abercrombie circle. Wilcox, who had once enjoyed a degree of success, stopped publishing at the very moment Purdy began commercial publication.”
When an author gives up writing, it puts their previous work in a peculiar light. One can’t help but see a trajectory of rise and fall. And in that light, we might see the previous work as presaging that failure — as if the works were stepping stones towards a destination that never existed. Should we consider Wilcox a failed author? I think the notion that he failed disregards his achievements. To have his work published in some of the most celebrated literary magazines, to have his novel published, to have the respect of his peers—maybe that was not enough, but all of that was not nothing. The reason for the decline of Wilcox’s writing career is still murky. Personal issues aside, the publishing world can be difficult and sometimes unfair. Most published writers have to live the life of Scheherazade. Sure, maybe your last story was good, but that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to finish telling your next one.
In his final published story, “No Larger Than Life,” recently widowed Mrs. Tanner discovers a letter addressed to her from a cousin that her late husband never delivered to her. The letter was meant to heal a wound in their relationship and the cousin is pleading to just forget about the conflict and make amends. Mrs. Tanner becomes so upset that she is nearly ill with the thought that her cousin waited for a reply and never received one—what if she is seen as stubborn or unforgiving? She can’t bear the thought of her cousin thinking less of her, so she decides to write a letter that will explain why she did not reply and say that she, too, would like to make amends. This decision eases her mind. But, months later, when asked if she sent the letter: “‘No. I put it off, and then I forgot, and then when I remembered again, I got to thinking how mad she’d made me,’ Mrs. Tanner said.”
That Wilcoxian style occurs in the way that a character finds fault in the actions of others yet they are incapable of seeing that same fault in themself. His characters are often blind to their own motivations and so their behaviors contradict their beliefs. The humor emerges when the contradiction is expressed, as it is by Mrs. Tanner.
There are clear connections between his final published story and his novel. Most of the action takes place in dining rooms and living rooms. What we learn of the characters arises from what they say and what others say to them. The domestic settings, the snappy dialogue, the cutting satire, the comedy born of a character’s folly, the spare, colloquial prose, they all formed the hallmark of Wilcox’s fiction.
Returning to Cyril Connolly’s distinction between the vernacular style of writing — simple, terse, and idiomatic — as opposed to the Mandarin. There is nothing in the vernacular, he argues, that we would not find in everyday speech. In other words, it is unadorned writing; as a principle, it avoids ornamentation. Connolly references Samuel Butler’s dictum: “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress—it should attract as little attention as possible.”
Everything is Quite All Right would undoubtedly fall into the vernacular camp. Wilcox had a knack for the realist style. He had an ear for everyday speech. He was talented enough to create work that has a distinctive charm. The interesting thing about the vernacular style is that it often encapsulates the work in its time. Wilcox’s novel is unquestionably of its time.
I was curious if Wilcox continued to write, despite not having anything published after 1956. Although he admits to eventually giving up writing, I wondered how long after publication he made that decision. I was curious if his style evolved. I was also curious if he made peace with writing for his own pleasure or if he only wrote for the purpose of publication. Some of these questions will likely remain unanswered. However, it appears that not all of his unpublished writings have been lost.
The Princeton University Library is home to the Wendell Wilcox Papers. There are decades of letters to and from his wife Esther, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Abercrombie, Thornton Wilder, and other writers and friends included in the collection. His published and unpublished short stories are collected, along with his manuscript of Everything is Quite All Right. And there are also manuscripts of three unpublished novels: The Color of Darkness, Rock Me to Sleep, and Helen.
For anyone interested in the American literary milieu of the 1940s, Everything is Quite All Right might be worth seeking out (although a recent glance at BookFinder.com only revealed four copies for sale). I found Wilcox himself to be more interesting than his novel. I’ve come to think of him as a kind of case study of a writer who once showed promise only to be forgotten in his own time. It was undoubtedly an interesting cultural place that he occupied: his connections with the art scene in Chicago and his bonds with Gertrude Abercrombie and Gertrude Stein. For me, the value of the novel was what it did and did not reveal about its author’s promise.
Andrew Guschausky lives in Boise, Idaho.
Everything is Quite All Right, by Wendell Wilcox New York: Bernard Ackerman, 1945
It would be natural for Women in a Village to be compared with Rebecca West’s masterpiece about her travels in the former Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Both West and Louisa Rayner were Englishwomen writing about a land and people relatively unknown to most of their readers. But West was never anything but a visitor to Yugoslavia.
Rayner, on the other hand, was a resident. Fascinated by the country on her first visit in 1936, she returned the next year, when she met and married a Belgrade fuel dealer named Stojan Božic. She would no longer be able to see the country “as a picture; I should not be able to stand back and disparage or admire. I was going to become a Yugoslav woman; I was stepping into the picture.”
That step may have ensured her survival after the Germans invaded in 1941. By then, she had become fluent in Serbian and fully assimilated into the culture, serving slatko and coffee to her husband and his friends as they sat and talked in their living room, working in the kitchen in the early fall as they canned great quantities of tomato sauce.
In 1944, she and her husband decided to flee Belgrade with their six-year-old daughter, joining a great exodus of civilians leaving the city as it became a target for regular Allied bombing raids. He chose Rušanj, then an isolated village along a hillside roughly ten miles south of Belgrade. Life in the village was so rustic that there was no notion of rent: the villagers simply took them in and made them part of the household.
Having reconnoitered the situation beforehand, Stojan chose to approach Savka, a grandmother, who was already sharing a two-room hut with two daughters-in-law and four grandchildren. Savka’s hut had only an earthen floor and everyone slept together in a single bed. The hut had no chimney; there was simply an opening at the peak of the tiled roof through which the smoke escaped. Instead of a stove, Savka cooked on an iron dome suspended over the fire.
Rayner, who’d taken a degree in classics at Cambridge, recognized the central room of Savka’s hut as what the Greeks called a melathron — a black room. “… [M]ore than a kitchen, but hardly a living-room and not quite a hall in the medieval sense. The walls and beams of this room of Savka’s were black with soot, for the smoke from the hearth visited every cranny before drifting out through the room.” She later wrote of her comparison between Savka’s hut and those of Homer’s time in an article titled “Kitchen Problems in Ancient Greece,” published in The South African Archaeological Bulletin in December 1956.
“I did not stay with Savka in her melathron in order to study Homer,” Rayner wrote. But “in that precarious and primitive way of living I found Homer a most cheering companion. Homer had gone through all this. Homer knew. And in all this smoke and dirt and toil Homer had kept his poise and his refinement.”
Rayner’s classical sensibilities are evident throughout Women in a Village. The way of life in Rušanj was closer in many ways to that of ancient Greece. Even before the war, the village operated more on a barter basis, and as the war made currencies fleeting phenomena with fluctuating values this became all the more so. As a refugee with little more to offer than labor and occasional contributions of food or cloth, Rayner focused on doing all she could to assimilate.
Thus, unlike Rebecca West, who could afford to be subjective, picking and choosing among the various ethnic groups of Yugoslavia, Rayner is at all times an empathetic observer. Reference to Homer was one of the ways in which she could deal with the radical changes forced by her situation. So she doesn’t recoil at what occurred after each meal:
… there was a black dog and his chocolate-covered mother. They served no purpose at all except to bark and lick the table clean after meals. The table (sofra) was about a metre in diameter and perhaps a foot in height. When the dogs had cleaned it, it was leant up against the wall out of the way. I suspect that the “table dogs” of the Odyssey also licked the tables and were not simply fed at table.
Rayner soon learns the merit of rustic ways, switching to wearing a wooden yoke after her first experience of hauling two bucketfuls of water from the well nearly a kilometer away from Savka’s hut. And when she finds the corpse of one of the neighbor’s chickens floating in a bucket, she simply extracts it and carries on. She comes to understand the importance of cattle in plowing even the smallest field and the tragedy of losing one of a matched pair. “She is a left-hand cow!” Savka chastises Rayner when she suggests borrowing one of another farmer’s spares. With many of the men having been conscripted into the Army or the partisans or forced labor in Germany, it is the women who do most of the work.
Rušanj is so far removed from its century that the villagers do not even observe St. Vitus’s Day, the day still held sacred by most Serbs, marking the death of the last Christian king in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. “It’s only a national holiday,” one of them remarks. The significance of that comment stunned Rayner:
Try to grasp the idea of the distance of stars. If you are not a scientist your mind faints in horror at the attempt. So in horror did my mind faint when I tried to comprehend the awful slowness of change. How long does it take for a new idea to be adopted — six hundred years? A thousand? Well, there is some hope. But how much more time is needed for that new idea to oust a new one? That is like the distance of stars. How long had it taken for the people of Rušanj, wherever they may have been living, to learn to worship oak trees — or the sun, or their ancestors? And how many millenia had they needed to forget whatever ideas they had before that? The mind faints.
Yet when it became clear that the Russians and Tito’s partisans were going to succeed in forcing out the Germans, the villagers adapted quickly to the emerging balance of powers — placing Rayner’s situation at risk. “It followed that a newly-converted partisan might be able to win the confidence of Russian and other Communists by denouncing someone who had spoken a word in favour of the British.” And even more so if the denounced were a British citizen.
Rayner and her husband returned to Belgrade soon after the Germans evacuated, but their stay would be short. By late 1945, they realized they would not be allowed to resume their former bourgeois ways and one or both could face imprisonment. Stojan arranged for visas through a friend in the French embassy and they left in January 1946, never to return.
Women in a Village was published in England in 1957. The book received enthusiastic reviews. V. S. Pritchett considered it “a most remarkable book…. Something quite new and original: war as it is seen by a distinguished, level-headed and sensitive woman. It is most interesting and well-written.” Most reviewers cited the author’s compassion and understanding. “Here is the drama of life and personality told with intelling perception in fascinating human detail and all on a level of taste and values calculated to excite the mind and heart at once,” wrote Monni Adams in the The Montreal Gazette.
By then, Stojan and Rayner had parted ways, she settling back in Cambridge. The book soon fell out of print and was forgotten. In 1986, however, it was translated into Serbian and serialized in the Belgrade newspaper Politika. This led to a journalist, Dragoslav Simic, tracking down Rayner, who was by then retired in a small village near Diss in Norfolk. Born Isabel Foster, she had kept her married name and had been known as Isabel Božic in England. Simic traveled to Diss and interviewed Isabel Božic, who explained that she had taken her mother’s maiden name of Louisa Rayner as a pseudonym. Simic then visited Rušanj, where he found one of Savka’s surviving daughter-in-laws, Vuka. A translation of Simic’s story can be found online at http://www.audioifotoarhiv.com/engl/Louisa-Rayner.html. Isabel Mary Foster Božic died in 2004 at the age of 90.
Women in a Village, by Louisa Rayner (Isabel Mary Foster Božic) London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1957
In the final pages of Southern Adventure, the previous volume in his memoir The Story of a Life, Konstantin Paustovsky boards a train from Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia to return to Russia having been struck by “the realization that nobody needed me here.” Anyone who’s read the first three volumes will know that Paustovsky must have been haunted by the memory of the two people who did need him: his mother and his sister Galya.
Paustovsky’s mother and sister were the last remnants of his family, a family blown to pieces by war, revolution, and misfortune. Volume One of The Story of a Life opens, in fact, as the author, then a young schoolboy, travels through a Ukranian winter to his father’s burial. The last sight we (and Paustovsky) have of them is in Volume 3, In That Dawn, when he’s forced to abandon them in Kiev as control of the city is wrestled for by the Reds, the Whites, the Germans, and the Ukranians. At the time, Galya had already begun to lose her sight, leaving the two women in a desperate state, with few friends and almost no resources to support themselves aside from the few funds that Paustovsky can send them from time to time.
By the time Paustovsky is reunited with them at the beginning of The Restless Years, Galya is blind and they are reduced to living in a single room in a tenement in Kiev: “two spindly iron bedsteads, an old cupboard, a kitchen table, three wobbly chairs and a mirror on the wall.” Everything in the room is grey — as if covered in dust, but in reality simply worn out of color through years of constant wiping and polishing.
Yet their faith in Paustovsky is undiminished by their years of waiting and need. All that matters to them is that, as a writer, he can change the world. “Tell me please, about the things you write,” his mother asks: “Can they help people, so that they will suffer less?”
It’s hard for any writer to change the world, especially when writing in a time of tremendous political, economic, and social upheaval. But as The Restless Years demonstrates, in Paustovsky’s case, it was not for lack of trying. He arrives back in Moscow in August 1923, almost five years after his last departure. The city is in the midst of one of the early experiments of the Soviet regime, the first cycle of the New Economic Policy and the closest the Communists came to embracing capitalism. Moscow is full of “NEPmen.” These supposed entreneurs were, for the most part, schemers, grifters, and swindlers with little to contribute to actual economic improvement. To Paustovsky, they are like characters in a cheap imitation of a Chekhov play, living “in shabby and spasmodic grandeur, with ramshackle motor-cars, faded beauties and restaurant-gypsy music.”
The city is also overrun by thousands of children orphaned through almost a decade of devastation. These bespriorniki wear bits of old army uniforms, beg for handouts or rummage for scraps in gutters and wastebins, carry their meager belonging in their pockets — “bits of broken combs, knives, cigarettes, crusts of bread, matches, greasy cards, and bits of dirty bandages.” As poor as he and his fellow writers may be, often going a day or two without a meal, Paustovsky finds some comfort in knowing that the bespriorniki are even worse off.
1923 was no more than thirteen or fourteen years later than the schoolboy days that open The Story of a Life, but to Paustovsky it seemed as if he had already lived “so enormously long that the thought of it filled me with terror.” At 30, he feels himself an old man among many of his fellow writers, even though most were no more than five years younger.
That feeling only intensifies when he learns of Lenin’s death. “Men were waiting to be saved from thousands of years of helpless sufferings,” he reflected, and now, “The man who knew what had to be done was gone.” He goes to the train station to travel to Red Square for the funeral but arrives too late. He then tries to walk along the tracks into town but soon collapses out of hunger and exhaustion.
Lenin’s death took from Paustovsky and millions of Russians the spark that fired their spiritual commitment to the revolution. In its place came a grey blanket of bureaucracy and mechanical repression overseen by Stalin. Paustovsky found himself increasingly consumed in self-protection — and most of all, in protecting his intimacy with the Russian language:
I tried to put up a resistance against everything capable of soiling the inner world I carried within me and tried to communicate to others. Most of all I was afraid of becoming contaminated by that exhausted and impotent language which at that time was spreading relentlessly and swiftly.
“The Russian language exists like a collection of great poetry, as unexpectedly rich and pure as the blaze of a starry sky over a forest waste,” he writes. Had it been otherwise, “I should have taken up bookkeeping or something of that sort.”
It was a struggle in which he was, by his own admission, largely unsuccessful in the next few years. “There is nothing worse than a nail driven into the wall and bending,” Paustovsky tells us. “One has no confidence in it.” His poor attempts at fiction in the mid-1920s “resembled in some inexplicable way a mass of nails more or less bent.”
What breaks this impasse is an assignment to travel deep into central Asia. Paustovsky’s imagination had been inspired by reading of an attempt by a Frenchman, Bernardin St. Pierre, to interest the Empress Catherine in his founding a utopian republic on the shore of a vast and desolate inlet off the Caspian Sea known as Kara Bugaz (now Garabogazköl). Catherine had better sense than the Soviets, who launched a grand venture to establish a salt production industry in the regime.
If you want an unbiased version of the Kara Bugaz salt factories and Paustovsky’s role in propagandizing it, I highly recommend reading Frank Westerman’s excellent book Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia. For as much as Paustovsky earned a reputation as one of the few Soviet writers to maintain a relatively high level of personal integrity through decades of pressure to conform to the changing tides of editorial policies, his novel Kara Bugaz (1932) (translated as The Black Gulf) veers too close to socialist realism (i.e., propaganda) for comfort. Even in retrospect, his willful misreading of the reality of the situation is clear:
As I have already said, the work in Berezniki was carried out by deportees. But deportation is one thing and work another. Their condition as deportees in no way affected the selflessness of their work. They were the first, according to the chemical experts, to set up machines and installations which they had never seen before. In the past they had only dreamed about them or else read about them in foreign scientific and technical journals. Indeed, there was much to amaze the layman and strike him as being nothing less than a miracle.
The one good result from Paustovsky’s Kara Bugaz experience was that he quit the writers’ collective he’d joined after returning from Moscow and committed to making it on his own as an independent: not an easy task for any writer and particularly challenging through twenty years of Stalin’s rule.
But it also makes The Restless Years the most problematic book in The Story of a Life. It’s easy to read the first five books as the story of a series of violent storms as seen by a bit of flotsam caught up and tossed about by their winds and waves. Paustovsky was too close to the center of Soviet cultural life not to know the true nature of Stalin’s regime. And he cannot console himself, like his friend Mikahil Prishvin, by losing himself in the wonders of Russian nature and wildlife.
The fact that he kept himself aloof from much machinations of the Soviet system doesn’t mean that he remained pristine. Glimpses slip through now and again in The Restless Years. In describing an incident in which he collapsed from typhus while traveling on assignment in the Caucasus, he mentions in passing:
Famine had started in the Ukraine at the time and thousands of refugees rushed off to the south, to Transcaucasus, to the warm regions where there was enough to eat. They flooded out all the railway stations between Zugdidy and Samtredi. Typhus broke out among them.
There may have been a million or more corpses left in the wake of “Famine had started in the Ukraine.”
As with the two volumes before it, The Restless Years is full of wonderful sketches of the many writers Paustovsky encountered in the course of his long career. Perhaps the best are his recollections of Isaac Babel in volumes 4 (Years of Hope) and 5 (Southern Adventure). In one profile in this volume, however, he drops his artifice of blindness to Stalinist repression for a moment. He writes of Sergei Budantsev, who was loved as a conversationalist for his habit of sharing his thoughts for future books, “telling people willingly and in detail” their plan, subject, characters, and plots. “He would thus create a whole cycle of oral chapters and novels, worked out and completed to the last detail” — which then, all too often, he failed to translate onto the written page. Paustovsky ends his sketch with one chilling sentence: “Budantsev was one of the first to die in a Chukota concentration camp.”
The Russian edition of The Restless Years was published in 1964 — after the end of the Khruschev Thaw, but perhaps early enough in Brezhnev’s regime that such a blunt disclosure could still be tolerated. Nonetheless, when he wrote his memoir of Soviet literary politics, The Oak and the Calf, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was critical of what he saw as Paustovsky’s reluctance to call out Stalin’s repression directly, lumping him in with Ilya Ehrenburg, whose record of collaboration with the regime was certainly worse. The two men, he felt, were “writers who had seen the great dark epoch, and yet were forever trying to sidle round it, ignoring the things that mattered most, telling us nothing but trivialities, sealing out eyes with emollients till we no longer saw the truth.”
But Paustovsky may have had a different objective in writing his memoirs than of providing a historical record. He was an impressionist at heart, and if he can be criticized for not speaking out against the arrests, camps, exiles, and execution he knew were going on, he must also be credited for leaving behind one of the most vivid autobiographies ever written, a book of life every bit as much as War and Peace or Anna Karenina. And The Restless Years shows how Paustovsky came to understand how he needed to write.
Ironically, he claims that he came to this realization came to him on his journey to Kara Bugaz:
… I realized very soon that one must never make a special point of looking for material and behaving like an outside observer; instead, one must simply live while travelling or staying anywhere one happens to be, without trying to remember everything. Only then does one remain oneself and impressions are absorbed directly, freely, and without any previous “screening,” without the constant thought of what can and what cannot be utilized for a book, what is important and what is not.
“Memory,” he concludes, “will eventually make the necessary selection.” In saying this, Paustovsky is treating memory as inspiration rather than source. Throughout The Story of a Life, he recreates experiences, conversations, and sensations that no one could be expected to have remembered accurately or objectively. He doesn’t pretend to be authoritative on any point aside from his own memories, and even in recording those memories, he is saying, in effect, not “This is happened to me” but “This is what my life was like.” It may have made him a lesser witness in Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, but it certainly made The Story of a Life a book that seems at times as vivid and immediate as one’s own experiences.
Note: As I mentioned in my post on Volume 5, Southern Adventure, Vintage Classics has announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith in June 2022. As wonderful as I’m sure it will be, this edition will not, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6. All six volumes can be found on the Internet Archive.
The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon London: Harvill Press, 1974
Brooks Peters, who had a wonderful website devoted to neglected gay writers before he lost it to Russian hackers, wrote me back in 2008 to recommend Jane White’s 1967 novel Quarry:
It’s a British novel from 1960s about three adolescent boys who kidnap a boy and keep him in a cave in a quarry. It’s been compared to Lord of the Flies. It got great reviews when it came out. I’ve just finished it and thought it was extremely well done. But a real enigma. I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society
The post I wrote building on Brooks’ recommendation produced far more comments than usual. Some were about the book, but most were about White herself — including one from her son Martin Brady, a specialist in German literature and film at King’s College London. White was her maiden name and she was known in real life as Jane Brady, who taught at St. Catherine’s School in Surrey. She wrote seven novels between 1967 and 1979, as well as a memoir, Norfolk Child, published in 1973. She contracted multiple sclerosis in her forties, however, and was forced to stop teaching and writing. At a time when treatments for MS were few and ineffective, and, in her son’s words, “made what I believe was a brave decision to get out before things got (more) unbearable,” dying in 1985 at the age of 51.
I’ve long felt that Jane White greatly redeserved rediscovery, but must confess that while I collected all her books, I read none of them until last year, when I took Norfolk Child along when we spent a long and quiet Christmas break at a house located about ten miles from the isolated Norfolk farm where White grew up. I then tucked into Quarry, which is also set in the Norfolk countryside.
There is nothing bucolic about this novel, however. In fact, it simmers with sense of the danger that’s fostered by apathy. Early in the book, three teenagers — Todd, Randy, and Carter — persuade a younger boy to come with them to a cave in the side of an abandoned quarry near their town. The boy, who’s never given a name and who seems to lack any parent or guardian to notice his absence, is nothing but an abstract victim for them to toy with. “Who do you think he is?” Randy asks Todd.
The question never gets answered. Nor does the boy help. He seems, in fact, to be happy to leave his identity ambiguous. “But who are you,” Todd asks him after a few days. “You know who I am,” he replies. When asked for his name, he answers, “Fred. Or Bert. Or Jim. Anything will do — I really don’t mind.”
The friends aren’t even quite sure what they intend to do with the boy. All three are products of the 1960s, when parents let children — or at least boys — spend most summer and weekend days running around outside with little sense of how they spent the time. “Well? Where’ve you been?” Cater’s mother asks him. “Up at the quarry.” “Oh, the quarry again,” she concludes, moving on to another subject. And so, it’s easy for them to smuggle small amounts of food that they take to the boy.
White deliberately leaves the boy’s situation abiguous. He’s not quite free to leave but neither is he restrained like a prisoner intent on escape. They soon decide, though, to build a cover for the cave that’s both shelter and jail. This being the 1960s, Carter is able to get the materials by simply sneaking into a nearby construction site one evening and taking what he needs. They see the building of the wall as a “Boy’s Own” project: “You’re making a good job of that, Randy,” says Carter. “I like doing it,” Randy tells him. “I like making things.”
The first casualty, however, isn’t the boy but a girl who wanders into the quarry and begins exploring. They chase her away, through a woods, and onto a road where she’s knocked down and killed by a passing motorcycle. Carter’s mother reads the news of the accident with as little interest as if looking at yesterday’s temperature.
The apathy of the adult world toward the teenage boys creates a vacuum which they are allowed to fill with their own fantasies, some sinister, some as childish as playing at being pirates. Randy and Todd, however, are near the end of secondary school, soon to be pushed out to join the adults. They look upon that prospect with complete uninterest. Far better to remain in the limbo of teenage life, able to take a parent’s car for joy-riding but never expected to pay for the fuel.
Their toying with the boy, however, must come to an end, and when it does, the result is brutal but almost anticlimactic. The boy’s death seems almost as unreal as has his weeks of uncomplaining imprisonment.
Brooks Peters wrote, “I can’t figure out what it is really about except perhaps the breakdown of society.” I think he was half-right. I think that Quarry isn’t about the breakdown of society but about a society that has already broken down without realizing it. Most of the adults in the book seem to be sleepwalking through their lives. If there is a voice at the back of their heads to urge them to look a little more closely into what their children are up to, it’s tiny and faint, almost inaudible.
It was perhaps unsurprising that Quarry was compared to Lord of the Flies by numerous reviewers. Golding’s stranded schoolboys, though, had far richer imaginations than White’s teenagers. The violence of Randy, Todd, and Carter is not savage but mundane. Their captive boy is a welcome diversion from their otherwise tedious lives, but when he becomes an impediment, they have no choice but to make him go away, like disposing of the sheet of newspaper after finishing a packet of chips.
At the time it was published, Quarry seemed shocking to readers and reviewers, but after Columbine and countless other school shootings in America, after the murder of James Bulger in England, I suspect it will seem either prescient or all too numbingly familiar. What it will not seem like is the work of a private school English teacher in her offtime.
Quarry, by Jane White London: Michael Joseph, 1967 New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967
I’m not a great reader of mystery novels. I have nothing against the genre, but even its most loyal fans will have to admit that it has a healthy share of workmanlike prose, two-dimensional characters, and predictable plots. And let me be clear from the start that Stanton Forbes (one of several pennames used by Deloris Stanton in the course of her 40-year career) wrote plenty of the first two. Having read a half-dozen of her novels and sampled a dozen more, however, I can say with some authority that her books almost never come out the way you’d expect.
What overcame my usual resistance to reading mysteries when it came to Stanton Forbes, though, was the one aspect in which I’d argue she has no equal in the field: her titles. Here is a sample of just a few:
If the contents of these books doesn’t always live up to the quirky charm of their titles, they’re usually not half bad. Forbes published over 20 novels as Forbes in the space of about 25 years while also producing nearly as many under the pseudonym of Tobias Wells in the same period, so it would be a bit much to expect brilliance and originality throughout. But I got the sense that Forbes never took what she was doing too seriously.
Forbes usually starts with one of the most frequently-used situations in all fiction: collect a half-dozen or more mismatched characters in some artificial situation (yes, a grand country house is a favorite setting), toss in a corpse or two, shake vigorously, and let human nature do the rest. She also draws upon some of the signature motifs of Alexandre Dumas père: switched infants, the high-born in low places, and the low-born in high places. But she never seems to have gotten too hung up about plausibility.
In Welcome, My Dear, to the Belfry House (1973), for example, there is no good reason why the grand actress Deirdre Dunn would be holed up in a grand Gothic mansion on an isolated, windswept beach with a house full of former vaudevillians and circus performers. She is, after all, THE Deirdre Dunn:
Deirdre Dunn as Catherine the Great, Deirdre Dunn as Mary, Queen of Scots, Deirdre Dunn in plays by O’Neill, Ibsen, Shake¬ speare, Moliere, in adaptations of novels by Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Hara. “Deirdre Dunn dances . . . Deirdre Dunn sings . . . Deirdre Dunn laughs.” Deirdre Dunn as Sarah Bernhardt, Deirdre Dunn in a new Hitchcock thriller, Deirdre Dunn in everything!
Nor are we really expected to believe that a handsome young chiropterologist would just happen to arrive at the house at the same time as the sweet young orphan who has just learned that Deirdre Dunn is her grandmother. Or that he would be coming to study a rare species of bats that nest in the … you guessed it … belfry.
In All for One and One for Death, the cast is a set of female quintuplets and five matching male celebrities: a baseball player, an artist, a movie actor, a pop singer, and a nuclear scientist. Forbes has the girls tell their side of the story, followed by the boys, with her small town sheriff taking center stage in Act III to solve the puzzle.
The whole point, after all, is see how Forbes can pull off another feat of legerdemain. Will the rightful heir be the chauffeur or will the plain, self-effacing housekeeper turn out to be a vicious she-wolf from Hell? In fact, after the first few of her books, I learned to keep an eye out for her MacGuffins. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Forbes was fond of throwing her readers off the scent.
She often sets her reader up to be tricked by starting out with a suspicious death or two already having occurred. “Did one Alvaro Rojas, gardener by profession, and one Cecilia Jenks, housemaid, die by accidental drowning off Belfry House within eighteen months of each other?” she asks early in Welcome, My Dear, to the Belfry House. Did the millionaire Harrington Hartford Lake really die of a heart attack, causing all his potential heirs to gather at the start of Bury Me in Gold Lamé? Or was he poisoned by his twenty-something fourth wife and former stripper — sorry, artistic dancer — Kohinoor Diamond Lake? Or is he even dead in the first place?
In Go to Thy Death Bed, which takes place among the members of a vaudeville troupe in 1890s Philadelphia, the preceding murders are the unsolved hatchetings of Marguerite’s mother and grandmother — naturally begging the question, is she our fictional Lizzie Borden? If she is, and I can’t honestly say, having only skimmed this one, it certainly won’t be for any of the reasons we’ll have been led to believe for at least the first 150 pages.
When Forbes executes her trick well, she manages to squeeze more than one turn of the table into her last twenty-some pages. Some Poisoned by Their Wives appears for most of the book to be a hunt for an elusive black widow who’s bumped off several innocent G.I.s stationed around El Paso, Texas during World War Two to gain access to their death benefits. Except that whole plot turns out to have itself been a grand MacGuffin orchestrated to kill off a character barely even visible on the radar. And then, just because she can, Forbes flips the table again and tosses in a final Verbal Klnt/Keyzer Söze twist to make us wonder just what was going on all along.
Sometimes, however, Forbes has to resort to the same sort of drawn-out mechanical explanations of the crime that make the last chapters of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels so tiresome. It defeats the point of a superb feat of magic to have someone come on stage afterward and explain in detail how it was done.
And there are times when the ridiculousness of the situation overwhelms Forbes’s ability to pull of the trick. As much as I love the title of If Laurel Shot Hardy the World Would End, it’s not a particularly good murder mystery. We are expected to believe that once a year, the drama students at a local college all dress up and run around town playing pranks. OK, that’s not so bad. But this year in particular, there are thirteen pairs dressed up as Laurel and Hardy running about, and one of them managed to race into the office of the CEO of the town’s biggest company and murder him. Or are there more than thirteen pairs? Or was that just a coincidence? Or was it someone completely different, someone wanting to steal his company or his prototype computer (BABY)? I finished the thing and can tell you the correct answer is none of the above. But save yourself the trouble and skip the book in the first place.
Not all of Forbes’s novels involve such far-fetched premises. In fact, her first book as Stanton Forbes, Grieve for the Past (1963) is closely rooted to her own upbringing and probably her best book overall. Born in Kansas City in 1923, Forbes was raised in Wichita, Kansas during the Great Depression, and this is the book’s setting. In it, Ramona Shaw, a bookish fifteen-year-old girl likely not that different in interests and personality from Forbes herself, begins to question why a devout elderly couple in her neighborhood were murdered. Her parents, neighbors, and the police are all convinced it’s the work of one of the many jobless, homeless drifters who pass through the town.
You can tell that Forbes was at home not just in her setting but in Ramona’s voice. She has yet to experience much beyond her own neighborhood, let alone town: “Next to the Farmers was the Bragdon house and then the Webster grocery store. That was my world — except from school, of course. That was my world — in that time.” She already understands the subtleties of Midwest values: “Caroline was prettier. Not pretty. Just prettier.” She fantasizes that some wealthy benefactor will learn of her detective work and decide, “Now there is a girl I should send to college.” But she also knows that her aspirations are seen as futile:
This was the way everybody treated me. As if they were saying inside, Isn’t that nice? The child has ambition. She’ll learn, of course. She’ll find out. She’ll find out that wanting is not getting.
Ramona turns out to be shrewd but not ingenious. She does figure out the likely murderer, but she’s unable to do anything about it in the end. Which she finds maddening. “I mean — crime doesn’t pay. You can’t let someone kill and get away with it,” she complains to her grandfather, a former lawman. “That’s a fine theory,” he replies, “only it doesn’t always work out. I wish it did. I wish we could mark a neat little SP after every crime, S for solved, P for punished.” “There’s many a murderer loose in this world, Ramona,” he cautions her. “And that’s the truth.”
A similar sense of groundedness pervades other novels set in small towns. Although She Was Only the Sheriff’s Daughter takes place in Texas, Forbes’s Yarrowville is as believable a small Texas town as the Thalia of The Last Picture Show. Anthony Boucher, the New York Times’s long-standing crime fiction critic, distinguished between Forbes’s naturalistic novels and those he called “tailored-to-order.” The characters in the latter, he argued, never came close to the credibility of the ones in the realistic novels, and Grieve for the Past certainly supports his case. But I wonder whether she ever intended for the two to be compared.
Perhaps the answer can be found in the novels she published as Tobias Wells. These all feature Knute Seversen, first as a Boston homicide detective and later as chief of the Wellesley, Massachusetts police. While not quite so unflappable as Inspector Maigret, Seversen can usually be relied upon to keep his head when all around are losing theirs. And he seemed to allow Forbes/Wells to work in a middle ground between grounded realism and near-farcical flights of fantasy. So, the victims, the circumstances of their deaths, and the cast of suspects tended to be unusual, they still had to retain some amount of plausibility. No quintuplet/celebrity matchups allowed anywhere near Plymouth Rock.
Counting her first four novels, which she co-wrote with Helen Rydell as Forbes Rydell, Stanton Forbes published over 45 mysteries by the time she died at the age of ninety in 2013. And if the unpublished manuscripts listed in the finding aid for her papers at Boston University are any clue, she came nowhere near running out of terrific titles: Mother Goose Was Stuffed, Mother Goose Was Cooked; The Hippie-Yippie Murder; Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed; When the Hearse Goes By, Jack and Jill Hill Kill, Fall of the House of Snodgrass, Mary a Pickle Makes a Mickle….
“At the office Miss Finlay was something of a dark horse.” That opening line hooked me.
A while ago, someone on Twitter posted a picture of Give Me Your Answer Do in answer to a request for books that changed readers lives. I’m always intrigued when I come across a book that’s completely new to me, and this one was a blank slate. The poster provided no further information, but the sheer scarcity of the book (fewer than five copies for sale) was enough for me to take the plunge.
There’s something comfortably nonconformist about Give Me Your Answer Do. This might have been what made the book a life changer for its fan on Twitter.
Miss Finlay, Marchant’s heroine, is both dark horse and ugle duckling. She’s “tall and ungainly, with large feet and hands which made sudden, gawky movements. Her hair was flat, her upper teeth protruded, and she wore spectacles with plain, tortoise-shell rims.” Her fellow typists at Boothby, Gold & Co. think she looks “as if she scrubbed herself very regularly with carbolic soap.”
Miss Finlay engages with the other women at Boothby, Gold as little as possible without seeming rude, offers nothing about her private life. Which is probably wise. To them, her practical diversions when off work — mostly taking long bicycle rides into the countryside beyond London — would merely confirm she is as dull as they think. And her imaginative diversions would have been too wild and grand for their sedate little office.
For Miss Finlay — Margaret, not that anyone seems interested in her first name — has for many years carried on a passionate friendship with a large white horse named Ponikwer Peter Aylestone Bradshaw, or Bradshaw for short. Through dreary years at a bleak girls’ boarding school and further years of workday routine at Boothy, Gold followed by solitary nights in her little coldwater flat, Bradshaw has comforted and amused Margaret.
Margaret’s mother was happy to be rid of the girl. Beautiful and easily bored, she’d only had the child because an abortion was too hard to obtain and she’d only married Margaret’s father to put a wrapper of propriety around her pregnancy. Once Margaret could be put in the care of someone else, her mother could resume amusing herself with handsome and vapid men like her husband’s former commanding officer, Margaret’s real father. And to keep up with Margaret’s school fees and her mother’s expensive tastes in clothes and men, her father dutifully returns to labor at the coalface in India.
Socially awkward, physically inept, and deeply introverted, Margaret finds the experience of boarding school near unbearable. It’s only the odd moments when she can escape to the WC, lock herself into a stall that she has any privacy, and carry on a conversation with Bradshaw that can find any respite. He is the perfect companion: understanding, a good listener, always ready with a hug. She lulls herself to sleep each night imagining herself in the strong, protective arms (legs?) of Bradshaw.
When school comes to an end, Margaret’s mother deems her too ugly to be marriagable material and so packs her off to London to find secretarial work. Margaret soon manages to find herself a room of her own: a coldwater flat with a WC down the hall, perhaps, but a haven nonetheless. Within its four walls, she is free to paint the ceiling yellow, to fix the food she likes, and to carry on long conversations with Bradshaw.
Then, one day, Mr. Bacon, a divorced Yorkshireman as uncomfortable in his own skin as Margaret, invites her on a Saturday outing. One outing leads to another and soon companionship blends into friendship and begins to blend into … well, neither one of them feels quite comfortable putting a name on it. These are two extremely introverted people.
We know, of course, that a collision between Margaret’s fantasy world and her real world is inevitable, but the tension derives from our uncertainty over just how disastrous that crash will be. I’ll just say that Peter Marchant would have had Hollywood rom-com producers knocking on his door if he’d published this book in the 1990s instead of 1960. His ending is suspenseful, sappy, and satisfying in equal measure.
Marchant dedicated the book to Marguerite Young. Yes, the Miss Macintosh, My Darling Marguerite Young. Marchant had followed an unusual path to arrive at Young’s seminar at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the late 1950s. He’d taken an MA in the classics at Cambridge and taught a variety of subjects while serving in the British Army Training Service, then emigrated to Iowa, where he both taught in the School of Education and attended the Writer’s Workshop.
“I’ve heard you have a story about a girl with an imaginary pony,” Young said to Marchant soon after meeting him. Marchant told her it was a flop, having been rejected by magazines and even his agent. “T’d like to read it,” she insisted.
Marchant had few hopes for the story. If it was going to survive and get published, it would have to be cut back severely.
No, Young told him: “You must let it grow. It’s a treatment — it needs expansion.”
When he next brought her a draft, it had grown to over eighty pages. Young’s criticism was harsh but supportive: “With unerring ruthlessness,” she said, “you’ve crossed out the best parts of your writing…. You’ve massacred all your flowers, leaving only the bare branches. She pointed out a passage where Margaret is sitting alone on a hillside. Mr. Bacon, in a fit of passion, has tried to kiss her — an act that she receives like a full-fledged sexual assault.
“She saw the sun glittering on hothouse roofs and wondered why it didn’t crack from the heat,” Young read. “Why did you cut it?” she asked.
“It seemed to me nonsense. Hothouse roofs don’t crack from sunlight.”
“Her fear of sex has nothing to do with her fantasy about glass shattering? Come, now,” Young scolded him.
“Oh,” said Marchant. The lightbulbs were beginning to come on. Over the next weeks, Marchant wrote furiously, soon producing a 300-page manuscript he turned in as his MA thesis for the workshop. He sold the book to the British publisher Michael Joseph, which released the book in 1960. It garnered a few reviews, but its combination of an unconventional heroine and a theme of escape through fantasy was perhaps a little too far ahead of its time. The most frequently-used adjective in its review was “odd” — which probably turned folks off in that conformist day but ought to pique the interest of today’s readers. I think the book would do very well if reissued now.
Marchant put fiction behind him after publishing Give Me Your Answer Do. According to his obituary, he stayed in academia, becoming a specialist in the 19th century British novel and teaching for decades at Penn State and the State University of New York – Brockport. Instead, it was his wife, Mary Elsie Robertson, who focused on fiction, writing a half dozen novels starting with After Freud in 1981. A Quaker, holder of a black belt in judo, and a historian of the Holocaust, Marchant must have been a remarkable man, and Give Me Your Answer Do deserves a high place in any list of his accomplishments.
Give Me Your Answer Do, by Peter Marchant London: Michael Joseph, 1960