Cover of UK edition of Parachute by Ramon Guthrie.
Ramon Guthrie’s 1928 novel Parachute is a story about PTSD. The term post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t been invented then, and the fact that the novel is full of pilots, airplanes, and people jumping out of them led its publishers to sell it as a story about aviation. Coming out a year after Charles Lindbergh’s record-breaking solo flight across the Atlantic, Parachute seemed guaranteed to hit a bullseye with the reading public.
The fact that its author was credited with downing four German aircraft (as an observer/gunner, mind, not a pilot) and awarded the Silver Star for his exploits didn’t hurt. But the actual fact was that Ramon Guthrie was by then, almost ten years after the war, anything but a stereotype of the heroic military aviator. He wrote the book, his second novel, while living in France, having returned in late 1921 to rejoin Marguerite Maurey, the woman with whom he’d fallen in love just before being repatriated to the United States as a casualty in early 1919. He’d taken a degree at the university in Tours and become interested in poetry, publishing several collections with expat publishers and writing a first novel, Marcabrun, about a 12th century troubadour.
The wounds for which Guthrie was brought home weren’t physical. He’d survived several crashes while serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps’s Aviation Section on the Western front. Worst that those, however, was the ill-conceived raid in which a flight of 10 DH-4 “Liberty” bombers took off on 18 September 1918 to attack Mars-la-Tour, a town just seven miles inside the German lines. Three planes dropped out due to mechanical problems. The Liberties were plagued with mechanical problems. A fourth turned back when the formation encountered clouds. The pilots, mostly inexperienced, had little experience flying and trying to navigating in clouds.
Ramon Guthrie (arrow) and members of the 11th Aero Squadron.
About half an hour into their mission, the remaining six planes were attacked by German fighters. Three were quickly shot down, killing all six pilots and observers. Two others were damaged and force into crash landings. Only Guthrie and his pilot, Vincent Oatis, made it back safely, Guthrie managing to shoot down one of the German Fokkers. Guthrie later recalled the experience in the poem “Death with Pants On” in his last book Maximum Security War (1970):
I think of others Chapin, Sayre, Comygies, Nick Carter whom I last saw spinning down in flames toward La Chaussee. Their first fight — if you can call it that. Unmatched for unreality: as we straggled out of clouds into a well of open sky, the red-nosed hornets swooped. Most of us never found a chance to fire a shot. There were others. I forget their names.
A few days after that raid, Guthrie’s helmet and goggles came off while they were flying at a relatively high altitude and he suffered burns to his face and eyes from the freezing air until Oatis got the plane down. Guthrie continued to fly, usually with Oatis, until less than a week before the Armistice.
Guthrie had been in France since the end of 1916, when he arrived in a contingent of the American Field Service ambulance corps, a now legendary unit that included such future writers as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E. E. Cummings. Guthrie’s section of the service operated with the French Army in both France and the Balkans. When American entered the war in 1917, Guthrie enlisted as an aviation observer, thinking it would take too long for him to qualify as a pilot.
Even before the war ended, however, Guthrie already began to suffer psychological effects from his combat experiences. He had bouts of amnesia and his behavior off duty began to concern his fellow flyers. As in World War Two, air combat in the First quickly gained a romantic mystique that covered up the ugly reality that war was even more of a meat grinder in the air than it was on the ground. Doughboys in the trenches had better chances of survival than the airmen they envied for their “luxurious” billets behind the lines. Life at a typical aerodrome was certainly more comfortable than it was in a front line trench, but you had to avoid being killed, wounded, or captured to enjoy it.
Newspaper article about establishment of a “Nervous” hospital for aviators in Cooperstown, NY.
Even though psychiatry was still in its early days and looked on with some suspicion by other medical practitioners, the U.S. Army had begun to recognize that not all wounds were physical, and it sought to provide suitable rehabilitation for at least some of its returning veterans. For flyers like Guthrie, however, it was sheer luck that Stephen Carlton Clark, a wealthy philanthropist who later founded the Baseball Hall of Fame, had decided to offer the services of a brand-new hospital he was building on part of his estate in Cooperstown, New York. Clark had some snobbish stipulations, though. He preferred to limit the patients to aviators and even then only to those not requiring surgery or physical therapy. The hospital would specialize in “nervous shock” cases.
The hospital opened just in time to receive the first airmen arriving back in the U.S. in early 1919. In Parachute, the fictional town of Berkenmeer takes the place of Cooperstown and an only-partly-philanthropist named Alfred Banning takes the place of Clark. Among the hundred or so flyers assigned to the hospital are Tony Rickey, an ace and crack fighter pilot, and Harvey Sayles, who served entirely behind the lines as a ferry pilot.
Of the two, it’s Harvey who is the more damaged, however. He’s had three planes crack up on him, and after the third crash, he went AWOL for weeks before being caught by the military police. Unwilling to go through the trouble of organizing a court-martial, though, his commanding officer persuades the medical officer to diagnose Harvey with dementia praecox — or schizophrenia as it’s usually termed today.
Tony and Harvey find themselves outsiders at the hospital. From an Italian family in Peoria, Tony is considered lowbrow by the other pilots, most of them Ivy Leaguers from “better” families. Harvey, on the other hand, is seen as the only patient in the place truly in need of its care. “I’m plagued the by insanity label,” he complains. The rest of the men are just enjoying a few months of rest and recreation at the Army’s expense.
Tony isn’t bothered by the insanity label — or rather, it helps him accept Harvey’s idiosyncracies:
Tony didn’t mind listening to Sayles, because he knew that Sayles was crazy and couldn’t help talking that way; and occasionally as he listened he would become aware of a deep current of sense running through the babble. Once his ear had distinguished it, it was like singling out the notes of one instrument in an orchestra until it dominated everything else. Sometimes Tony would even wonder why more people didn’t talk that way, and if it wouldn’t be a good idea for more people to be insane.
Tony soon meets and begins an affair with Natalie, Alfred Banning’s beautiful young Russian wife. Managing to deceive the older man, he also persuades Banning to support a hare-brained scheme he concocts of establishing an airline based in Berkenmeer. Boston – Berkenmeer – Chicago, he fantasizes. Tony revs up the Chamber of Commerce and soon raises enough money to buy an old Curtiss Jenny and turn a local field into a runway.
His entrerpeneurial dreams get mixed up with his passion for Natalie, and soon the two have run off as Tony scrapes by with barnstorming jobs and joy-rides at county fairs. Meanwhile, Harvey decides it’s time to return to civilian life and travels to New York City in search of work. Instead, he encounters scenes more hellish than anything he’d seen during the war:
Miles of sidewalks and people flickering by, young men, old men, women, girls, and all with dead, distorted faces, horribly obscene, like gargoyles worn by the rain, the same faces that make the ghastly fresco of the Subway, blotchy, bloated, idiot faces with evil squints and apathetic leers. Subway Faces. Subway Faces crawling out into the air. He forced his pace to pass them more quickly and, as he met them, turned his eyes away with sickened dread.
While in New York, however, he witnesses a demonstration of parachuting and gets the idea to buy one and join Tony on his barnstorming travels. In addition to the stunts and rides, Harvey will do parachute jumps, giving most of the people on the ground their first sight of a falling from a plane in flight and surviving.
Guthrie understands that both Tony and Harvey are avoiding their inevitable return to the routines and small dramas of peacetime life. Flying, adultery, and skydiving are attempts to recreate the intensity of wartime experiences without recognizing their psychological costs. Harvey begins to worry that his trip to New York was proof that he was, indeed, insane — incapable of fitting back into normal life. As winter approaches, bringing an end to the barnstorming season, Harvey thinks that winter will also “terminate his life with Tony.” Harvey’s response is suicidal; Tony’s is merely rash and reckless. In the end, neither manages to put the war behind him.
Ramon Guthrie in 1928, a portrait by Stella Bowen (from the Hood Museum at Dartmouth).
Guthrie’s choice of title is ironic: neither Tony nor Harvey finds a way to break their fall from the heightened experience of war. Guthrie himself fared better, perhaps with the help of his wife, perhaps because of his return to France, or perhaps because of a simple resilience of spirit. He and Marguerite left France in 1929, driven out by the failing economy, and Guthrie landed a job at Dartmouth. He stayed there for over thirty years, writing little and concentrating on teaching and translation. He served briefly with the Office of Special Services, the forerunner of the CIA, to help coordinate between Allied forces and the French Resistance, earning the Legion d’Honneur, then returned to Dartmouth.
He was diagnosed with bladder cancer in the mid-1960s and had to curtail his teaching activities. His fight with the disease seemed to reinvigorate his creative energies, however, and he began writing poetry again. He was unwilling to condone further military operations, though, and he mailed his Silver Star to President Johnson in 1965 to protest the American involvement in Vietnam. He also began work on his best-known book Maximum Security Ward, which was published in 1970. By the time the book was published, however, the disease had seriously debilitated him and he spent his last years in pain, much of the time hospitalized. He managed to arrange his release in late November 1973 and took his life with an overdose of phenobarbital soon after returning home.
Parachute, by Ramon Guthrie New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company London: Gerald Howe
Georges Simenon was one of the world’s most prolific and best-selling authors when he was alive and he remains so today. Few of Simenon’s current readers, however, know that he not only lived in the United States for almost ten years but also set over a dozen novels here. But what’s even more surprising is these novels have appeared in English so haphazardly.
Simenon achieved his tremendous output through tremendous discipline. Despite the fact that he moved from place to place almost constantly, he kept to a strict routine of sitting down to his typewriter each morning, and once there, he wrote at a furious rate. A typical novel might take him two to three weeks. There was at least one Maigret a year, plus two to four of the psychological thrillers he called romans durs, plus countless stories. And if these weren’t enough, he also wrote further works under a variety of pseudonyms throughout the first half of his career.
Simenon claimed that living in the United States was a goal he had set himself as a young man, and soon after the war in Europe ended, he applied for visas for himself, his wife Tigy, and their son Marc. They landed in New York City in October 1945. Knowing almost no English, Simenon quickly hired an American agent and put out a request for a bilingual secretary to help him with his correspondence. He met the first application, a French Canadian woman named Denyse Ouimet, for an interview at a restaurant named Brussels near Central Park. As Denyse later told Simenon biographer Pierre Assouline, “I met him at the Brussels at 1:45. I saw him again at the Drake at 4:45. At 7:00 we were making love.”
Now a party of four, the Simenons headed for Quebec, where at least they avoided the language problem. There, he wrote his first two American novels, both set in New York City.
• Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946); first published in English as Three Beds in Manhattan (1964), translated by Lawrence G. Blochman.
Simenon transposed his first meeting and the early days of his affair with Denyse into this story, with his role played by François Combe, a French actor, and hers by Kay Miller, the estranged wife of a Hungarian count. In her introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of the book, Joyce Carol Oates called it “the most existential of love stories,” and it represented something of turning point for Simenon in that it was his first novel in which sexual passion — which soon became one of his favorite narrative accelerants — was the driving motivation.
But it’s also about Simenon’s romance with Manhattan. The book is filled with scenes that show that even having spent just some weeks in the city, Simenon soaked in countless details. When not in bed with each other, François and Kay spend hours walking:
They were on the street again. No doubt about it, they felt most at home in the street. Their mood changed immediately. The magic, lighthearted comradeship they had found by accident returned the moment they were again caught up in the noise and confusion of traffic. People were lining up in front of the move theaters. Gaudily uniformed doormen guarded the padded portals of night clubs. They passed them all by. They zigzagged aimlessly through the sidewalk crowds until she turned to him with a smile he recognized instantly. It was the smile that had started everything.
Later, while waiting for Kay to return after a separation, François walks endlessly, the city now devoid of the energy they experienced together:
… the little dark men swarming like ants under the lights, the stores, the movie houses with their garlands of light, the hot-dog stands, the bakeries with their displays of nauseating pastries; the coin machines that played music for you or allowed you to play at rolling balls into little holes that rang bells and lit lights; everything a great city could invent to deceive man’s loneliness…
Simenon may have written Three Beds in Manhattan having scarcely set foot in America, but he managed to produce not only his best romantic novel but also one of his best American ones.
The was filmed in France as Trois chambres à Manhattan in 1965, starring Maurice Ronet and Annie Girardot.
• Maigret à New-York (1946); first published in English as Maigret in New York (1980)
If you’ve read any of Simenon’s Maigret novels, you can guess that the Inspector was far less impressed with New York City than were the lovers of Three Beds in Manhattan. The beer is poor, the streets too noisy, he can’t smoke his pipe in a movie theater, and no one seems to understand why he wants his “little lunch” in the morning. The practice of numbering streets he finds particularly frustrating: “I’ve never had a memory for figures and you people are really tiresome with your numbered streets. Why couldn’t you say Victor Hugo Street, or Pigalle Street, or President-What’s-His-Name Street….?”
The story starts at convoluted and gets messier. There is a missing young man, perhaps the heir to a fortune or perhaps an imposter, a jukebox millionaire who started as a vaudeville musician, elements of the mob (some English editions are called Maigret and New York’s Underground), retired carnival performers and FBI men who aren’t always as helpful as they could be. Despite this, the book remains among the most popular of the many Maigret novels.
• La jument perdue (1947); not yet translated into English.
Simenon wrote this novel (the title could be translated as The Lost Mare Ranch) within weeks of arriving in Tucson, Arizona in September 1947, and he drew upon places and people he discovered there. Jane Eblen Keller, who wrote an extended study of Simenon’s time in Arizona and the books he wrote there for the Journal of the Southwest in 2002, describes it as “one of the few sunny books Simenon wrote,” a tale involving a pair of aging cowboys and a couple of elderly sisters in a town resembling Tucson — although Keller does add that the plot “deals in treachery and sorrow, skullduggery and betrayal, crooked business dealings and corrupt politics.”
• Le Fond de la bouteille (1948); first published in English as The Bottom of the Bottle (1954), translated by Cornelia Schaeffer.
This was the first of the romans Américains I read and I enjoyed it even more when rereading it recently. Simenon wrote the book while renting a house called the Stud Barn in the Santa Cruz Valley near Tumacacori, Arizona, about a fifty miles south of Tucson and just across the border from Nogales, Mexico. There, the eastern bank of the Santa Cruz River was broad and productive, and the area was mostly populated by a few dozen wealthy ranchers. The Simenons — Georges, his wife Tigy, mistress Denyse and son Marc, now joined by their French cook Boule (coincidentally another of Georges’ mistresses — quickly fit into the little community.
The ranchers and their wives enjoyed a relaxed and highly social lifestyle, often gathering at one or another’s large houses for parties that could go on for days — earning the area the nickname of Santa Booze Valley. At times when the river flooded, the eastern bank became completely inaccessible and the ranchers’ parties could then run on for weeks.
This is the situation into which Donald Ashbridge, a convicted murderer and escapee from a prison in Illinois, arrives. He wants money and help from his older brother P.M., a lawyer who’s married a woman with one of the largest ranches in the valley. Donald needs to get across the river and into Mexico, where his wife and children are waiting. But P.M., having built up a reputation of integrity, needs to distance himself from Donald and his own less than respectable upbringing. Meanwhile, the storm rages, the river rises, and the booze spins the party at ever-faster speeds.
The Bottom of the Bottle introduced a theme that appears in most of Simenon’s romans Américains — that of the supposedly upstanding citizen who’s ultimately undone by some fatal flaw rooted in a secret past or association. As long as nothing disturbs the status quo, that secret can remain hidden and inert. But when some catalyst upsets the formula — a brother on the run or a young woman found murdered or being black-balled from the country club — that stability quickly devolves into chaos.
In his Intimate Memoirs, Simenon recalled one concept that struck him while living in America: “In any American town, ‘you have to belong.’ To the community.” He himself admitted that when he was living in Connecticut, he had the illusion that he really belonged. But he also realized, as do his protagonists such as P.M. Ashbridge and Eddie Rico, that the flipside of belonging was ostracism and the ostracized person had not place in the American of the 1950s.
The novel was filmed — partly on location in the Santa Cruz Valley — as The Bottom of the Bottle, starring Joseph Cotten, Van Johnson, and Ruth Roman, in 1956.
• Maigret chez le coroner (1949); first published in English as Maigret at the Coroner’s (1980), translated by Frances Keene.
In Maigret at the Coroner’s, Maigret is less inspector and more witness. He’s essentially dumped in a Tucson coroner’s inquest by an FBI agent he’s visiting on his way across the U.S., and most of the book is devoted to his following the courtroom proceedings, all the while trying both to figure out the case and decipher the odd habits of Americans. The case itself seems straightfoward: a young woman goes out partying on a Saturday night with five airmen from a nearby base and is found dead the next morning. Is it murder, accident, or suicide? We’ll never know, because Simenon ushers Maigret along to his next stop before the inquest closes.
It’s Maigret/Simenon’s observations about American manners and customs that are far more interesting than the crime (if there was one). Such as how they managed to avoid the hangovers that plagued him every time he indulged in American whiskey rather than his beloved beer:
From his first days in New York he had been amazed to see men whom he had left the night before in a state of advanced drunkenness all fresh-faced and, as they said, rarin’ to go the next morning. Then someone had told him their secret. After that, he noted in all the drugstores, in cafés, in bars, the special blue bottle mounted on a wall bracket, its spout down, out of which the proper dose of effervescent powder could be measured. Dropped into a glass to which the barman added water, the compound fizzed and tingled. This was served you as promptly as a morning coffee or a Coca- Cola, and a few minutes after ingesting it the fumes of the alcohol had been dispersed.
Yet why not? Machines for getting drunk, machines for getting over being drunk. They were logical people, after all.
Logical, yes, but this would not be Simenon if he didn’t also hint at the worm at the core. The clean-cut, Power of Positive Thinking-minded American men got that clean-cut look by taking their shirts to the dry cleaners instead of wearing them again and again like any sensible Frenchman. This emphasis on appearances is, to Maigret, just a façade. “He suspected that, at bottom, they suffered the same anxieties as the rest of humanity but that they assumed this happy-go-lucky appearance out of embarrassment.”
The book closes as Maigret’s plane is about to land in Los Angeles, the next stop on his tour. “Whatever would he see now?” he wonders as the book closes.
• Un nouveau dans la ville (1950); not yet translated into English.
Un nouveau dans la ville or A stranger in town is alone among les romans Américains in being set in a seaside town in Maine. As Jane Eblen Keller summarizes the book, the stranger acts a catalyst, unleashing the town’s many dysfunctions. He sets Charlie, the owner of the only bar in town, to wondering about the one foreigner in town, a quiet man called Yougo (he’s thought to be from Yugoslavia), and Charlie’s doubts infect the rest of the town. At the same time, the stranger suggests to Yougo that his situation is at risk, that the town’s latent xenophobia is about to make him its target. Simenon sets up a conflict that ends … well, for that we’ll have to wait for an English translation.New York Daily News article on Simenon’s second marriage, to Denyse Ouimet, in 1950.
• La Mort de Belle (1952); first published in English as Belle (1954), translated by Louise Varèse.
Belle is the first of three novels set in Connecticut, where Simenon settled after divorcing his first wife and marrying Denyse. At the time he wrote the books, Connecticut was within commuting distance of New York City by train but still full of small, quiet towns whose inhabitants could often point out generations of ancestors in the local cemetery. But in some ways, these books are more specific to a time than a place: specific, that is, to the time of blacklisting, McCarthyism, and whisper campaigns. And of course, these were all symptoms of that question Simenon saw Americans asking each other: “Do you belong?”
In the case of Spencer Ashby, the answer to that question is already a little unclear. A teacher at a local exclusive boarding school, he’s become a local artificially, by marrying the daughter of the school’s late headmaster. But when Belle, the daughter of one of his wife’s old friends, staying with the Ashbys temporarily, is found strangled in her bedroom, that artificial link becomes brittle. See, the problem is that Ashby was working in the basement, turning a piece of furniture on his lathe, at the time that Belle must have been murdered.
There’s no evidence of his being involved, no obvious motive. Yet it seems oddly suspicious to everyone. He’s questioned repeatedly by the police … and let go. Is it just a matter of time before they find the evidence? The doubt is enough to make the townspeople keep their distance: “The newspaper dealer was gaping at him as if he came from another planet; and two customers, who only came in for their papers and out again, cast a curious glance in his direction.”
And more than that — and this is really where Simenon excels in his dissections of his protagonists’ psyches — Ashby begins to doubt himself. “Why, not being guilty of anything, did he have a feeling of guilt?” The fragile props of his comfortable life begin to weaken, to give way. Whether Ashby has already committed some sin or only committed the sin of inaction, his self-doubt ultimately becomes a propelling force and drives him forever out of his comfortable inertia. Simenon plays out his drama quietly, subtly, simplying adding one straw after another until something catastrophic happens.
• Les Frères Rico (1952); first published in English as The Brothers Rico (1954), translated by Ernst Pawel.
The Brothers Rico demonstrates that Simenon had learned quite a bit about the workings of organized crime during his time in the U.S.. Eddie Rico is, to all appearances, a prosperous fruit and vegetable broker somewhere in central Florida. In reality, he’s a local boss, running the gambling and prostitution operations in his area while keeping the local sheriff on his payroll. It’s a nice, quiet affair, one that keeps him in good with the big bosses in New York without forcing him to get his hands dirty.
Eddie doesn’t really have the appetite for the rough side of the business: “He was never armed. The only gun he owned was in the drawer of his night table. As for fighting, he had too much of a horror of blows and of blood for that. He had fought but once in his his, when he was sixteen, and the blood running from his nose had made him sick.”
His brothers Gino and Tony, on the other hand, are suspected of being involved in a hit on a mob boss in Brooklyn. Which becomes a problem for Eddie when Gino shows up in Florida (note the parallel with The Bottom of the Bottle). He soon disappears again after realizing that Eddie is too afraid of his higher-ups to take a risk. Unfortunately, those higher-ups then enlist Eddie in tracking down his brothers.
Eddie knows that he’s playing the Judas goat. All he has to do is locate at least one of his brothers and then step out of the way and let the professionals do the rest: “It was routine. Long ago this kind of operation had been perfected like the rest, and by now they were performed according to an almost inalterable ritual. It was best to have executioners who, coming from elsewhere, were unknown in this area.” So, he does as he’s told, knowing he’ll be able to return to his quiet, comfortable life in Florida. Only without his soul: no one gets away with murder in a Simenon, even if by proxy.
The Brothers Rico was filmed in 1957, directed by Phil Karlson and starring Richard Conte as Eddie Rico.
• Feux rouges (1953); first published in English as The Hitchhiker (1957) and Red Lights (1967), translated by Norman Denny.
Red Lights is Simenon’s version of The Lost Weekend. Steve Hogan meets his wife for a couple of drinks before they hit the road one Friday evening, intending to pick up their kids from summer camp in New England. But it’s hot and rainy and the traffic is terrible and Steve just needs a drink or two more to get him through hours of sitting in traffic. And so he stops at a roadside bar.
The problem is, Steve is a blackout drunk. Or, as he puts it, “he goes into a tunnel”: “an expression of his own, for his private use, which he never used in talking to anyone else, least of all to his wife.” His wife refuses to go along and heads to take a Greyhound bus to the camp. Steve ignores her, walks into the bar, and the next morning, wakes up on the roadside in his car with a flat tire, his trunk rifled through, and a vague memory of having given a ride to an ex-con named Sid.
What’s worse, he has no idea where his wife is. And that’s where the nightmare really begins. Once again, Simenon looks behind the façade of the happy, normal American life:
For thirty-two years, nearly thirty-three, he had been an honest man; he had followed the tracks, as he had proclaimed last night with so much vehemence, being a good son, good student, employee, husband, father, and the owner of a house on Long Island; he had never broken any law, never been summoned before any court and every Sunday morning he had gone to church with his family. He was a happy man. He lacked nothing.
Then where did they come from, all those things he said when he’d had a drink too many and started by attacking Nancy before assailing society as a whole? They had to spring from somewhere. The same phenomenon occurred each time, and each time his rebellion followed exactly the same course.
For Simenon, a momentary lapse of judgment is never an isolated incident. There is always an underlying flaw, some fundamental character defect that just needs the right — or the wrong — set of circumstances to reveal its full capacity for destruction.
• Crime impuni (1954); first published in English as The Fugitive (1955), translated by Louise Varèse.
The Fugitive, which has also been published as Account Unsettled is only part romans Américains. The first half is set in Simenon’s native city of Liege in Belgium. Elie, a student rooming with Madame Lange and her daughter, becomes obsessed with revenge when a Romanian student named Michel Zograffi moves in and becomes the pampered pet of the household — and the daughter’s lover. Elie plots to murder the man and flees the city when he thinks he has. After years on the run, he makes his way to Bisbee, Arizona, where he runs the town’s best hotel as Mr. Craig. The plot hinges on the highly improbable coincidence that Michel (now Michael) Zograffi one day wanders in, bearing the scars of the murder attempt but now a wealthy investor come to bail out Bisbee.
The most plausible element of the story draws upon Simenon’s observations of the copper mining business in Bisbee, which then centered on the Copper Queen Mine. By the late 1940s, conventional tunnel mining was proving unproductive and open pit mining had not yet begun. Simenon postulated the collapse of the mine and the town:
It was as though the city were dying, the tip-trucks that at certain places ran along cables over the streets were now stationary near the pylons and the four tall oven chimneys at the far end of the valley no longer wore their crowns of greenish smoke.
It happened from one day to the next when the machines, which for twenty years had been boring into the red earth of the mountain, scooping out a gigantic crater, and uncovered a subterranean lake, the existence of which no one had suspected.
Bisbee was able to postpone its decline for a few decades by switching to open pit mining, but the city now relies more on tourism than industry to survive. As far as the book itself, however, I’d rate it the weakest of the lot, a story that might have fared better had Simenon left his characters on the other side of the Atlantic.
In The Watchmaker of Everton, Simenon’s favored theme of guilt through inaction is played out in the form of a good father and a bad son. Dave Galloway, the quiet watch repairman of the title, a single father, learns that his son Ben and his girlfriend have stolen a car, and killed its driver, and run off into the night. When Ben is eventually caught and arrested several states away, he shows no remorse and no interest in talking to his father. Which, of course, leads the police — and Galloway’s neighbors — to wonder: how could a father not know he was raising a monster? “Do you know your son well, Mr. Galloway?” the police ask. Was he perhaps not quite the dutiful father everyone thought he was? And if so, what else might he be guilty of?
Galloway asks himself the same questions. Was this due, in part, to the fact that his own father had died when he was young, that he’d hated the stepfather his mother married? Did his flaws drive off Ben’s mother when the boy was just a toddler? The Watchmaker of Everton is an almost agonizing example of Simenon’s gift for pulling on one well-chosen loose thread.
Bertrand Tavernier filmed the novel as L’Horloger de Saint-Paul starring Philippe Noiret in 1974.
• La Boule noire (1955); first published in English as The Rules of the Game (1988), translated by Howard Curtis.
Walter Higgins, manager of the local supermarket in Williamson, Connecticut, father of four (with another on the way), school board treasurer and assistant secretary of the Rotary Club, finds his application to the local country club has been rejected — for the second time. Higgins understands the real message behind this decision: “They were telling him he wasn’t worthy of belonging to the community.” He begins to question everything around him, begins to speculate on silent conspiracies against him, on hushed conversations held behind his back.
And, of course, this being Simenon, there are reasons why Higgins might be insecure about his place in the community. Or rather, one reason: he was born poor. He grew up in a tenement, often having to fend for himself while his mother went out drinking. His real fear is that the country club men can smell the poverty he’d managed to escape.
Unlike P.M. Ashbridge or Eddie Rico, Walter Higgins doesn’t fall apart through this crisis. His resolution is more French than American: he falls into cynicism:
He didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but he was sure he was on the right track. The reason people thought he didn’t count was because he didn’t know the rules of the game. Yes, it was a game — like the games of his childhood. He hadn’t known that, maybe because he’d had to start too young, or too low, he, the son, as his mother said sarcastically, of Louisa and that scum Higgins.
But that wasn’t the main thing. What was important was to conform to the rules, certainly, but most of all, to know it was all a game.
• La main (1968); first published in English as The Man on the Bench in the Barn (1970), translated by Moura Budberg. Also published as The Hand (2016), translated by Linda Coverdale.
Written over a decade after Simenon left the U.S., The Man on the Bench in the Barn takes the theme of guilt by inertia of Belle and refines it down to a cold existential minimalism. Two couples get stuck in a blizzard near one of their houses. One of the men gets separated from the other three and doesn’t make it to the house. After some wait, the other husband — Donald Dodd (another lawyer (viz. P. M. Ashbridge), another artificial local (viz. Spencer Ashby)) — is sent to look for him. Already exhausted, he quickly gives up. But rather than simply return and admit his failure, he enters the barn near his house, where he sits for an hour or so, smoking.
“All the time I had been in the barn, on the red bench, I had chain-smoked, lighting one cigarette after another, dropping the butts on the ground and stamping them out with my foot. I had smoked at least ten.” That’s it. That’s the sum of his crime. Except that when the storm abates and the authorities are notified, Dodd goes back to the barn and see that the cigarette butts are gone. Which can only mean one thing: his wife knows.
And that is all Simenon needs to let the unraveling begin. For Dodd has built around him the same façade that Maigret had detected in Arizona: “It made him think of too tidy a garment, too well washed and pressed.” In Dodd’s case — and he is only first-person narrator I’ve encountered in a Simenon — “The truth is that I wanted to have everything run smoothly and orderly around me.”
David Hare adapted The Man on the Bench in the Barn for the stage as The Red Barn in 2016.
The sum of Simenon’s Romans Américains, one could argue, is enough to earn him a place among the best American novelists of his generation. He could certainly claim to be — to steal something A. J. Liebling once said of himself — faster than anyone better and better than anyone faster. And we have to look back to Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter to find such bitter criticism of American mores and concepts of sin. It’s a shame that it’s a body of work still so incompletely represented in English.
Note: Simenon’s English language publishers have long been fond of bundling his books together. As a result, there are a number of compilations worth looking for if you’re interested in reading any of these novels:
Violent Ends, comprising Belle and The Brothers Rico. Hamish Hamilton, 1954.
Tidal Wave, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, and The Bottom of the Bottle. Doubleday, 1954.
Danger Ahead, comprising Red Lights and The Watchmaker of Everton. Hamish Hamilton, 1955.
An American Omnibus, comprising Belle, The Brothers Rico, The Hitchhiker, and The Watchmaker of Everton. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
I’m going against my principle of only writing about books that have been out of print for some time in offering this piece on Paul Metcalf’s Apalache as my contribution to the #1976Club. Although Apalache has been out of print as an individual volume since its publication in 1976, it’s available today as part of Volume I of the Collected Works of Paul Metcalf. On the other hand, that book and its two companion volumes — one of the worthiest products of American independent publishing — came out 25 years ago, so it’s at least no longer new.
I wanted to write about Apalache because, though his work may be in print, he’s perhaps the most neglected major American writer of the late 20th Century. And he’s certainly the first writer I started to follow devotedly. In looking through my collection of Metcalf’s works — books that have been in storage since 2001, when my wife and I thought we were moving to Europe for just three years — I came across a letter from 1981 in which Metcalf graciously thanked me for what was probably a gushing fan’s note.
My collection of books by Paul Metcalf.
Looking at this stack, I also realize that it was assembled at some effort over the course of a decade or more. These books all predate Amazon and online bookshopping. I think I would open my local library’s latest copy of Books in Print, flip to the Ms, and scan to see if there was anything new from Metcalf. Although I found a receipt from Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue back in 1982 in Apalache, I’m pretty sure I bought the rest by writing to the publishers and enclosing checks to cover purchase and postage.
Most of Metcalf’s major works — Genoa (1965), Patagoni (1971), The Middle PassageBoth (1982) — were published by the Jargon Society, the eclectic independent press run by his friend and Black Mountain College classmate, the poet Jonathan Williams. Williams was not a prolific publisher, but he was a master book designer and meticulous printer and all of the above are beautiful books in their own ways. Apalache was published by the Turtle Island Foundation in Berkeley (certainly why I was able to find it at Moe’s), and though a good-looking piece of work, not quite on the level of the Jargon Society books.
Metcalf put a book designer to the test. His style, at least from Genoa on — constantly draws upon the range of possibilities of then-current typesetting. Metcalf himself always wrote on a manual typewriting, but he never wanted to stay within conventions of font, paragraph, and line. He may have overtaxed the capabilities of Turtle Island’s designer, Clifford Burke. After receiving the manuscript, he called the writer and asked Metcalf to record a reading of the book so that he had a clearer idea of what the writer had in mind.
Apalache weaves together hundreds of excerpts from numerous sources ranging from Native American myths to the journals of early European explorers to scientific texts and newspaper articles. Metcalf’s first book Will West (1956) followed, for the most part, the pattern of a traditional prose narrative. By Genoa, however, his own words began to recede, changing from the substance of the text to the binding agent, the lead in a stained-glass window or the mortar in a mosaic. In his introduction to the 2015 edition of Genoa, novelist Rick Moody described Metcalf’s style as a “helixing of quotation and consciousness, with its multiple fonts and its open-ended grammatical structures, sentences that are sometimes picked up later and sometimes not.”
Metcalf later said that he decided to take a different direction in his writing as he began to work on Genoa in the early 1960s. He was responding, he said, to the sense “that the old-fashioned novel — pure fiction — had played itself out, that it must be refreshed, revivified, by the incontrovertible force of facts.” Those facts, for Metcalf, were the most precious ingredients. He spent months, sometimes years, mining them from countless volumes he found in libraries all over the Northeast. As his friend Guy Davenport once wrote, “Paul Metcalf is a great reader…. Metcalf’s reading is to find things which he puts together in patterns. Such was the working method of Plutarch, Montaigne, Burton, all of whose books are new contexts for other voices.”
An excerpt from "Shick Shock" published as a broadsheet.
Metcalf then pieced these together, sometimes jamming texts into a seamless amalgam, sometimes leaving the original intact, occasionally linking pieces with his own words. From these sections he constructed the overall work based on a design — and an underlying message — that he saw on almost an architectural level. One critic has called Metcalf’s style architectonic, and the link to the geological term tectonic has particular significance in Metcalf’s case. His vision of history in Apalache reaches all the way back to the formation of the features of the North American landscape. The final passages in “Bash-Bish,” the first section of the book, invokes a litany of geologic terms: moraines, drumlins, podzols, eskers, monadnocks. He calls Appalachia the “resistant relic of metamorphosis” (his own words), that metamorphosis being the emergence of the continent from the time when “the earth an ocean. the earth ocean.”
Davenport argued that “Metcalf represents our most radical shift in the form of narrative.” Michael Davidson invented a new term, palimtextual, to describe the kind of work that Metcalf created, in which original source texts formed such an integral part of the overall work’s substance. George Butterick described it as “an eco-system of texts.” And yet there is a familiar literary pattern underlying Apalache: the tragedy.
Apalache is an epic tragedy of the loss of the Eden that North America represented when Europeans began to explore and colonize. In “Bash-Bish,” the first of the eight major sections that comprise Apalache, Metcalf starts with English explorers recounting the fact that they smelled the land before they even saw it. Then, as they land and explore, he moves along with them as they note the lushness and variety of trees, plants, features. And their first encounters with Native Americans and the odd names they give to places: “chaubuqueduck, messatsoosec … twada-alahala … machaquamagansett … the kenogamishish … connoharriegoharriee….”
Then, in “The Feare in Ye Buttocks,” we shift forward to explorations of the interior — the Saint Lawrence, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi — the hardships (starvation, disease, attacks by natives), and the first clashes. He takes the section’s title from the journals of Peter Esprit Radisson, recalling the desperation that set in on long excursions by canoe into what are now parts of Quebec and Ontario:
A strange thing when victualls are wanting, worke whole nights and dayes, lye down on the bare ground and not allwayes that hap, the breech in the water, the feare in ye buttocks, to have the belly empty, the weariness in the bones and drowsiness of ye body by the bad weather that you are to suffer, having nothing to keep you from such calamity.
The dramatic mid-point of the narrative comes in section three, “South →.” Metcalf assembles an abbreviated account of Roger Williams, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and forced to head south to what is now Rhode Island, where he founds the Providence Plantations. Williams encouraged a spirit of cooperation and co-habitation with the native Narragansett people that contrasts with the attitudes of the Massachusetts Puritans — and represented, for Metcalf, the one chance America had of a common stewardship of the land.
Unfortunately, as today’s American historians are demonstrating with increasing effectiveness (and controversy), much of this land’s history is colored by discrimination, hatred, exploitation, and violence. The next few sections offer depressing examples. In “Telemaque,” Metcalf runs parallel narratives — literally — of Denmark Vesey, a freed slave who attempted to organize an armed takeover of Charleston, South Carolina in 1822; and of Robert Williams, a North Carolina organizer who argued for the right of blacks to defend themselves against white violence with weapons, if necessary. Betrayed by one of his fellow conspirators, Vesey was hanged along with five other men. Railroaded in his hometown of Monroe, Williams eventually fled to Cuba, and later China, before returning to the US in 1970. The charges against him were dropped soon after he appeared at the Monroe courthouse.
The parallel texts of “Telemaque” in Apalache
The most damning passage, however, is in the section titled “Okefenokee.” Metcalf gives us a snatch of the genealogy of the Thrifts, a family that settled near the Georgia swamp, then howls across the following pages in large print, one word per page:
Hard Thrift logged the trembling earth.
Section six, “Shick Shock,” reconstructs America’s Genesis. “Where the sun sleeps, our fathers came thence.” Metcalf traces, using a combination of scientific/archaeological accounts, excerpts from Creek, Delaware, Iroquois, and other Native American myths, and passages from the Vinland Saga and the journal of Arthur Barlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh’s co-captain on the first Roanoke expedition, how the two peoples came into the land. How they came into contact he saves for the final two sections, “Cocoanut Indians” and “Beothuk.”
The last takes its name from the natives encountered by Sebastian Cabot and the first white settlers of Newfoundland. The Beothuk are probably responsible for the stereotype of the “red Indian,” as they had the habit of coloring their faces with red ochre pigment. Small in number, the Beothuk were considered “ghost people” by other tribes for their ability to disappear into the woods. This skill was not enough, however, to protect them from the white hunters and fishermen, who not only tended to shoot them on sight but then to brag of such acts as if of great accomplishments.
Despite the fact that consecutive colony governors banned such killings as “inhuman barbarity,” the practice continued. By 1770, Captain George Cartwright, whose report Metcalf quotes, wrote grimly,
It will be expected by the British reader that a work on Newfoundland should afford some insight into the destiny of the Beothuk Indian; but I am sorry to say, I cannot satisfy this expectation; none have been seen of late even by the trappers and hunters, by the Micmaics, or by the Esquimaux of Labrador; and, unless they are in the fastnesses of the centre of the island, the race has emigrated, or become extinct.
Metcalf closes with a phrase from one of the origin myths he used in “Shick Shock”: “… they feared a powerful monster, who was to appear from the sea.”
Paul Metcalf outside his writing cabin in the early 1970s.
Metcalf never used a computer. Reading Apalache, I took generous advantage of the capabilities of search engines to track down passages in the book to their source texts. The text contents search feature of the Internet Archive was a particularly useful tool. One benefit of these searches was to see the quoted passages in context. In many cases, reading the longer text from which Metcalf took a few sentences, or even just a phrase, amplified the power of Metcalf’s mosaic. It gave me a chance to see the work, if you will, though Metcalf’s eyes, to understand what he chose to include and what to leave out. If ever Apalache gets the serious annotation it deserves, I think more readers will be able to see this book for the American classic I think it is.
In a eulogy he published in Rain Taxi, Allan Kornblum wrote that Paul Metcalf had “a scope of historical vision and a depth of compassion that I found breathtaking.” I find that last phrase key to appreciating Metcalf’s work. Yes, it is densely historical, and as he said himself, full of “the incontrovertible force of facts.”
But those who knew the man are uniform in their praise of his generosity, curiosity, and gentleness. Metcalf and his wife Nancy spent most of their lives in a secluded piece of land outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts, living in a rough wooden house with few conveniences. Day after day, when he wasn’t in a library, Metcalf retired to a small cabin on the property where he worked on his books. He was, in some ways, a more authentic Thoreau than Henry David himself, who relied on his mother to bring him supplies during his year of seclusion at Walden Pond.
With all my searching for the sources in Apalache, what I ultimately took away from the book was a deep sense of sadness. It is, in its unique way, the Great American Novel — if you accept that the Great American story is that of the destruction of Eden and its inhabitants and their replacement by a spirit of exploitation enforced through violence. I defy anyone to read “Beothuk” and not feel that you’re leaving part of your heart behind.
Metcalf once told Dalkey Archives founder John O’Brien that his daughter — who rarely read her father’s work — came to him after finishing Apalache and said, “I’ve learned something: you’re a closet romantic.” “Do you know what this book is?” she teased him. “No, what is it?” he replied. “It’s a love poem,” she answered. “You’re in love with North America.” Yet it’s love poem free of all illusions about the beloved. Metcalf looks upon the continent with wonder at its beauty and power — and horror at the crimes to be witnessed wherever one looks in its history.
Forty years ago, I was a noisy and enthusiastic young fan of Paul Metcalf’s work. Now, I am simply in quiet awe.
Apalache, by Paul Metcalf Berkeley, California: The Turtle Island Foundation, 1976
Going Under is a story of physical comfort and emotional and psychological suffering. Nina Sergeyevna, a translator, arrives at Litvinovka, a writer’s retreat somewhere outside Leningrad, for a few weeks’ state-approved rest in the middle of winter. She’s provided with three meals a day, the freedom to walk through the neighboring countryside and forest, and, most importantly, time to think and write in her room. This last is most precious of all because, like many Soviet city dwellers, she has to share a communal apartment in which privacy is essential unknown.
Yet she will find nothing to shelter her from the pain of her memories. She’s decided to take advantage of this time to “go under.” Going under means to immerse herself in the past — specifically, into the time of Stalin’s purges and show trials of the late 1930s, when her husband Alyosha was arrested and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp.
Since Alyosha’s arrest, Nina has no contact with him. Like other women whose husbands and sons were sucked into the vortex of the Soviet penal system, she’s stood in line for months outside the prison where he’s supposed to have been taken, to ask of his whereabouts. The answers she was given were vague and always shifting. “There are no foundations for a review of the case.” “When he serves out his sentence, he will write to you himself.” “Maybe he’s alive, maybe dead. How would I know?” Finally, she’s told that he’s been sentenced to a special camp for “ten years without right of correspondence.”
It’s now been over twelve years. There’s been nothing. Many nights, Nina finds herself dreaming of Alyosha in prison, in a labor camp, being interrogated, sometimes even being executed. The uncertainty eats away at her psyche.
She wants to put down her thoughts to restore the sense of closeness with her husband that’s grown weak and thin over the years: “The book was me, the sinking of my heart, my memories, which nobody could see…. In creating it, Alyosha’s voice … would permeate” its reader’s soul. Nina is haunted in particular by the thought of his death. “What was his last moment like? How had they turned a living man into a dead man? … And where was his grave? What was the last thing he had seen as life abandoned him?”
Arriving at the retreat with Nina is Bilibin, a writer of comic stories who’s been rehabilitated as a member of the Writers’ Union after serving a term in the gulag. She is desperate to speak with him: “Until now I had never met anyone who had come from there — from a concentration camp.” Bilibin is flattered by Nina’s attention but wary of her questions. He suffers from angina; his heart is weak from the strain of his years in camp.
Finally, however, he reveals the truth:
He was never taken anywhere, he had never suffered from cattle-trucks or dogs. Everything was over long before that. According to Nikolai Aleksandrovich, “ten years without right of correspondence” simply meant execution by firing squad. To avoid repeating at the windows “executed”, “executed”, and so on that there should be no howling and crying in the queue.
Bilibin also confides that he is working on his own account, a book about the things he has seen in the camps. Nina is thrilled to have an ally, and solicitous of Bilibin’s fragile health, especially after he suffers a mild heart attack. As their time nears its end, Bilibin modestly offers his manuscript to Nina.
At first, she read with great excitement. “Yes, his writing was more powerful than his conversation.” Though Bilibin’s story is set in a mine, Nina recognizes some of the men from the camps he’s told her about. Perhaps it’s an allegory to avoid the censors. As she reads on, however, she realizes that Bilibin has written nothing more than a conventional piece of socialist realism: earnest workers, conscientious supervisors, a happy collective. “You’re a coward. No, you’re worse, you’re a false witness.” “Why did you not have the decency to remain silent,” she asks.
For Lydia Chukovskaya, there were only two legitimate choices for Soviet writers: tell the truth or remain silent. Her greatest scorn was for those who tried to follow a compliant middle way and appease the authorities. Going Under is really Chukovskaya’s own story, one she wrote in 1949 after learning of the fate of her own husband.
Matvei Bronstein, husband of Lydia Chukovskaya, in 1937.
The daughter of Kornei Chukovsky, a children’s writer who was perhaps the best-known and most beloved literary figure inside the Soviet Union, Chukovskaya had married a Jewish physicist and mathematician, Matvei Bronstein, in the mid-1930s. Bronstein and Lev Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova’s son, were arrested. Gumilyov was set to a labor camp. Bronstein in all likelihood never made it out of basement of the NKVD’s building in Leningrad.
Chukovskaya and Akhmatova stood in the same lines described by Nina Sergeyevna in Going Under, the lines in the introduction to Akhmatova’s great poem “Requiem”:
In the black years of ezhovshchina I spent seventeen months in the prison lines. One day someone recognized me. Then, a woman with blue lips who stood behind me woke up from the trance into which we all fell and whispered in my ear: “And this, can you describe this?” And I said, “Yes, I can.” And then something like a smile glimmered on what once had been her face.
The two women became close friends and over the subsequent years Chukovskaya took notes of their almost daily conversations, note that were later published as The Akhmatova Journals, only one of whose three volumes has been translated into English.
In the decades after her husband’s arrest, Chukovskaya became one of the most vocal critics within the Soviet system. She supported Pasternak when he fell out of Stalin’s favor. She wrote in support of Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and Yuri Daniel when they were arrested and tried in the 1960s and in support of Joseph Brodsky and Andrei Sakharov when they were persecuted. She was a friend of Solzhenitsyn and let him hide in her flat for a time before he was finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. She was herself expelled from the Writers’ Union soon after.
Lydia Chokovskaya in the 1970s.
She even had the courage to sue her publishers after they balked at publishing Sofia Petrovna, her short novel about a mother whose son is arrested during the purge. Although the book was accepted for publication in 1962, when it came time to be released in 1963 after Khruschev’s fall from power, the Soviet authorities banned it. Chukovskaya argued that her publishers were in breach of contract. Her publishers alleged that the book was not in the public interest, to which she responded,
Literature must illuminate what happened in 1937 in a profound way and from every angle. But this is beyond the powers of a single work. Only our literature as a whole can do that. And that is why we must not stop printing Solzhenitsyn. On the contrary, many more books about that time need to be printed, including my novel.
Amazingly, the court found in Chukovskaya’s favor and ruled the publisher had to pay her the outstanding share of the royalties. A samizdat copy of Sofia Petrovna was smuggled out and published in Paris as The Deserted House. It was not until 1988 that the book was published in the Soviet Union.
She once told an American reporter that she felt compelled to speak out against injustice in the Soviet system: “If I don’t do it, I can’t write about the things that matter. Until I pull this arrow out of my breast, I can think of nothing else!” Chukovskaya had great faith in the future. When she was expelled from the Writers’ Union, she responded in a public letter,
Always, when performing acts like this, you have forgotten — and you are now forgetting — that you control only the present and to some extent the past. There is still another court with jurisdiction over the past and the future: the history of literature.
What do they do — those you have expelled? Write books. After all, even prisoners have written books, and are writing them. And what will you do? Write resolutions.
Like Sofia Petrovna, Going Under was published in the West decades before it came out in Russia. The Chekhov Publishing Corporation released the book in Russian in the US in 1972 and an English translation by Peter M. Weston came out from Barrie &Jenkins the same year.
Reviewing the book for The New Statesman, Germaine Greer wrote, “Chukovskaya’s calm prose shakes the heart with grief and outrage for one of the greater man-made calamities of our time.” It was, she concluded, “a very important book indeed.” Valentin Terra argued that Going Under was “artistically neater, tighter, and more subtle” than Sofia Petrovna.
Anatole Broyard, the New York Times’ reviewer, however, savaged the book. He snarked that Solzhenitsyn’s enthusiastic blurb for the cover of the US edition “evades literary evaluation, either by accident or design.” Going Under, he wrote, was “dull, stodgy, amateurish and almost wholly bereft of ideas.” He was so sure of himself that he even ventured to say, “while I have not read The Deserted House I am convinced, in my heart, that it cannot have been a good book.”
Fortunately, the “history of literature” that Chukovskaya believed in has proved a better judge than Broyard. Although the book has never been reissued in English, it’s been translated into numerous languages. The book’s page on GoodReads includes positive reviews from readers in Germany, Spain, Finland, Latvia, and Armenia.
Lydia Chukovskaya died in February 1996. She was 89 and had lived to see the fall of the Soviet Union. Her body was buried in the cemetery at the writer’s colony of Peredelkino, not far from the grave of Boris Pasternak.
Going Under, by Lydia Chukovskaya, translated by Peter M. Weston London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972
I’ve been collecting neglected books for decades and writing about them here for over 15 years and I still get surprised by books I’ve never heard of. I first came across a mention of It’s a Great War! in a 1935 newspaper article reporting on a talk about novels of World War One. The speaker, a professor at an Illinois university, singled it out as one of the “truest, most powerful” books written about the war and noteworthy for having been written by a woman: Mary Lee.
I quickly Googled it and was stunned to learn that Robert Lovett, one of the three judges for the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, considered it that year’s best book: “It is the biggest piece of fiction I have read, and comes nearest to satisfying the last conditions of which I was notified, i.e., ‘preferably a novel presenting the whole atmosphere of American life.’” Lovett ended up supporting the decision to award the prize to Oliver La Farge’s novel of Navaho life, Laughing Boy. It was not the only award Lee was short-changed on.
Mary Lee in her YMCA uniform.
Daughter of an old Boston Brahmin family (she once informed a Boston College student that the Lees arrived in Boston two hundred years before the College), Lee was caught up in the fervor that accompanied America’s decision to enter the war in 1917. A recent graduate from Radcliffe College, she responded to an Army call for women to serve in administrative positions and sailed for France in the fall of that year as part of the staff of a field hospital. The hospital deployed near Bordeaux and Lee worked there for some months before being enticed to take a secretarial job with an Army Air Corps office in Paris. Then, growing uncomfortable with the relatively luxurious conditions in Paris, she joined the YMCA and took a post running a field canteen for an aviation unit near the front. She decided to stay on after the Armistice and set up and ran several canteens serving American Army units in occupied Germany, returning home to Massachusetts in late 1919.
Lee later said she wrote the book to tell women the truth about the war. “They think that war is a pure, wonderful crusade,” she told reporter Eleanor Early. “Fine young men and women, fighting for Justice…. If people really knew what it was like — if women knew –.” Following her own experiences with few fictional variations, her story took 200,00 words to tell. And when she finished it, she found no one interested in publishing it. So she put the manuscript on the shelf.
Then, in 1928, to mark the tenth anniversary of Armistice Day, Houghton Mifflin and the American Legion sponsored a contest offering $25,000 for the best novel about the war. Lee retyped the manuscript, leaving off her name as the rules required, and submitted it.
Most of the contest judges — all of the civilian judges, that is — considered Lee’s novel by far the best of the candidates. Retired Major General James Harbord, Pershing’s head of supply at the war’s end, however, thought the book “unseemly” in its content and inappropriate for an award sponsored by the Legion. Unwilling to go against the general, the other four judges agreed to a compromise and split the award between Lee and William T. Scanlon, who’d submitted a more conventional novel about combat during the battle of Belleau Wood, God Have Mercy on Us!. Scanlon and Lee each took home $12,500.
Rank and file Legionnaires objected to this compromise. Or rather, they objected to Lee’s selection. Ten years after the fact, veterans appeared, like General Harbord, to chafe at Lee’s mention of such unheroic aspects of the doughboys’ time overseas as prophylactic stations, drunkenness, and the abandonment of children they fathered with French women. Several Legionnaire posts, including one near her hometown of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts wrote letters demanding she forfeit the award, criticizing the book for its “frivolity”.
Ad for syndicated version of It’s a Great War! from the San Francisco Examiner.
Ironically, this was exactly the sort of thing Lee intended to document. “War is not a romance,” she protested. “As long as romances are fabricated about war, it will remain a noble, worthy, beautiful adventure for youth. As long as war is made romantic, it will go on.”
Nevertheless, there is a certain air of romance in the early chapters of It’s a Great War!. Anne Wentworth, Lee’s fictional counterpart, departs for France, she is full of idealism: “Wasn’t it a noble gesture…? They were starting out to make the world safe again…. This was a War to End War, –”
That idealism begins to fade as soon as her ship docks in Le Havre. There, all along the quai, lie stretchers with the British casualties being loaded onto a transport headed for England. “There was nowhere you couldn’t hear them…. See them…. Logs of wood, going slowly, one after another.”
And the reality of the women’s quarters at the hospital in Bordeaux are not the sort of thing mentioned in the recruitment literature: “Black fleas hopped…. Women taking clothes off. Hideous underwear. Fat legs and thin ones. Hairs…. How could anyone ever choose to look at women’s bare limbs…?” The expression “It’s a great war!” quickly turns from enthusiasm into sarcasm. It becomes a running joke. Anytime conditions are lousy, supplies are short, or Army bureaucracy infuriatingly pig-headed, someone will quip, “It’s a great war!”
Even more disheartening is Anne’s realization that she, a bright, intelligent young woman, is just as much a faceless number expected to keep quiet and follow orders as any soldier. “They thought you couldn’t be trusted, did they…. Sent you out here, fed you on horse meat, and then refused to trust you.” Though she enjoys a brief reunion with her brother, a lieutenant serving with an infantry unit, the hospital proves too dreary and too dull, being too far from the front. When Anne is offered a position with an Air Corps staff office in Paris, she jumps at the opportunity.
Paris seems a different world after the rural isolation of the field hospital. “Dresses, in shop windows, — soft and colored…. Through the glass, handkerchiefs, diaphanous, frail things with colored borders….” In the staff office, officers in smartly tailored uniforms and shining Sam Browne belts and boots rush in and out of meetings, trying to obtain airplanes from the French, supplies from America, and most importantly, attention from Pershing’s staff. Anne stays at the home of a French noblewoman, is invited out to restaurants and the Opéra Comique, goes for rides into the country in a general’s staff car.
There are occasional German air raids to dispel the illusion, of course. “Men, up there, in the darkness, trying to kill you…. Others trying to kill them….” Lee reminds us that air warfare was a grim novelty back then: “The sky, no longer an empty place you didn’t have to think of…. Human beings, skimming through the great dome….” She stoops to pick up a piece of shrapnel that falls at her feet. Her friend quickly ushers her under the arch of a bridge for safety.
Ad for It’s a Great War! from the Guardian.
The samples I’ve offered so far demonstrate an aspect of Lee’s prose that many found hard to take. One British reviewer compared the experience of reading It’s a Great War! to “riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.” “A book about war cannot move smoothly, swiftly,” Lee later countered. “War moves in jerks.”
Now that we have seen many more writers work in such fragmented, impressionistic prose (Céline most obviously comes to mind), however, we should not be put off by Lee’s style. Instead, we should recognize the mastery with which she uses it to capture the fragmentary nature of intense experiences. This excerpt, describing Anne’s first flight in an airplane, seems a perfect example of what makes this book as palpable, as immediate, as some of the finest scenes in Tolstoy:
She held her breath, mouth open. The bumping earth, falling away below you…. Falling, falling…. Wind, filling your mouth, blowing furiously against you…. But you weren’t moving…. Moving means things that rush past…. Here there was nothing…. Nothing but that furious, high wind…. And the old earth, a purple map below there, sinking, sinking…. The great wing tipping, tipping…. You’d fall out. A great, swirling dip, — the earth going from one wing to the other, — God, you were upside down…. Breathless…. The world whirling…. Down, down….
As the fall of 1918 approaches, Anne grows concerned about her brother, whose unit fought in the battle of Château-Thierry. She scans casualty reports and asks anyone she meets who’s been to the front, but it is only a month later that she receives a letter from a nurse she knows: “The regiment was frightfully shot to pieces, but no one will be a greater loss than Geoffrey.”
Her brother’s death causes Anne to question the value of her work in comfortable Paris, and she decides to take a post with the YMCA where she can serve close to the front. The work seems trivial — every evening, she cooks up great batches of cocoa and bread and butter that she serves up to the soldiers and airmen who come into her canteen. It seems “like throwing things into a bottomless pit.” Yet she soon learns of its importance for morale — and health. Her little YMCA cafe provides the men with an alternative to getting drunk, sleeping with prostitutes, or simply lying in their bunk going mad with boredom.
And she gives the men an illusion of home. “Men will tell you that you remind them of their wife,” her first supervisor cautions her. In most cases, this is just a harmless flirtation. But Anne learns not to take her safety for granted. Lee recounts a scene in which Anne walks to her quarters late one night after closing the canteen. She spots a drunk American soldier staggering out of an estaminet. The man begins to follow her down the dark street. Though Lee doesn’t use the word, the possibility of being raped takes over Anne’s thoughts and she rushes in fear to the safety of her doorway.
Feature story by Eleanor Early on It’s a Great War!.
Among the many aspects of this book that impressed me was Lee’s candor in dealing with the realities of sex and violence in war. She not only mentions the presence of brothels near the front and the prophylactic stations run by the Army to deal with the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the number of children fathered by soldiers who seduced local women. “I’d like to see people start saying, ‘Johnny, this is a photography of the French girl your father had an affair with,'” she later told Evelyn Early.
She also writes of the threat of sexual assault that always hovered around any woman serving around large numbers of men. At one of her posts in occupied Germany, several junior officers conspire to ensure that Anne is never left alone with their unit commander, a colonel they recognize as a violent sexual predator. “This town’s no place for a decent woman,” one warns her, encouraging her to seek a different posting.
A book of over 600 pages can pack in a lot of detail, and I must pass over many for the sake of brevity, but the range of material Lee covers in this book is extraordinary. In some ways, the variety of her postings during and after the war exposed her to more than any typical soldier would have seen. It’s a Great War! may be the first novel to have captured one of the realities of 20th Century warfare: namely, that much of the activity in war has little to do with actual combat: “For every day at the front, three or four were spent at the rear,” she later remarked. “For every man at the front, seven or eight were at the rear.” She writes of the impact of the influenza pandemic, of seeing more soldiers buried from the flu than from wounds. And she devotes over a hundred pages to Anne’s time during the US occupation of the Rhineland following the Armistice, an operation few Americans today are aware of.
And she records the difficulties faced by those who return home after months or years away. When the train pulls into her hometown’s station, Anne is startled to realize that it was “entirely unchanged.” “Stations,” she thinks, recalling all those she saw in her journeys around wartime France (and post-war Germany), “were places with great holes blown in plaster, and roofs half fallen off.” Serving “Mr. Wilson’s cause” in the war, she also lost contact with the fundamental motivators of peacetime life: “Money. We forgot in France how life revolves round money.”
Her many months living in tents, working with make-shift cafes, walking miles from villages to encampments, made her wary of spending her days sitting in some office. “God, Life must have fresh air, and movement in it, — you mustn’t get tied to jobs that kept you indoors,” she thinks as she flees an interview at an insurance firm.
In her first months home, Anne struggles to adapt to these forces. Without the relentless pressure of her daily tasks serving the troops, she begins to suffer anxiety attacks — what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. She considers seeking medical advice — a Boston doctor she knew from the hospital in Bordeaux. But as she approaches his door, the grim prospect of what that age could offer in the way of psychological treatment chills her. “This thing might mean two years of sagging…. Limping…. Sanitariums…. Two years of being pitied…. Spilling your soul….” Anne turns around. “Soul, still her own, — thank God. Unspilled.”
The book ends with the election of Harding — and the mass rejection of those Wilsonian ideals she so believed in. If her future remains unclear, she has at least come to understand that there was no more chain of command to decide it for her.
Mary Lee in 1930.
Like Anne, Mary Lee rejected office work and the possibility of marriage to return to Radcliffe and take her master’s degree. She spent several years as a reporter for the New York Evening Post, one of the few women then on its staff, then went out at a freelancer for the New York Times and others, covering everything from society balls to sports events to a stint in Italy and Greece. Sometime during this period, she also wrote — and failed to interest publishers in — this novel.
By the time Lee won the American Legion contest and managed to get the book published, she appears to have settled back in her hometown of Chestnut Hill, living in her parents’ home. Though she did write another book, a history of Chestnut Hill, in the mid-1930s, she seems have devoted herself mostly to charitable causes, such as a fund to help Greek refugees during World War Two. Over forty years after It’s a Great War! was published, a reporter from the Boston College campus paper found her busy supervising a handyman working on her family home, which was now a rooming house for graduate students. She was reluctant to talk much about herself and refused to have her picture taken. “It seemed she had spent many of her productive years caring for her aging mother,” the reporter wrote. “Her life had grown quiet.” She died at the age of 90 in 1982, having left her home in Chestnut Hill only in her final months due to ill health.
Though Lee had to share the American Legion-Houghton Mifflin award, It’s a Great War! received considerable publicity. Most major US papers and all the national English papers mentioned and/or reviewed the book. As the sample below shows, most reviews were enthusiastic and a few agreed with the Illinois professor that it was one of the best, if not THE best, American novel about the war published until then. Of the reviewers who disliked the book, most were put off by the then-novelty of Lee’s prose style. After that, the most common criticism was that the book was too long and particularly that the final section, about Anne’s adjustments to peacetime life, were extraneous. Personally, I think the final section is one of the book’s best parts in that it’s one of the earliest examples of the kind of challenges we’re now accustomed to associate with the experiences of returning veterans.
It’s a Great War! sold well enough that both Houghton Mifflin and the English publisher George Allen & Unwin ran second impressions and the book was syndicated in abbreviated form in a number of US newspapers, including the San Francisco Examiner. The American Legion’s backlash against Lee only proved once again that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Legionnaires’ distaste for the book piqued book buyers’ interest and improved its sales.
The book’s hold on the attention of both readers and critics was brief, however. It’s never been reissued and is rarely mentioned in discussions of First World War literary. I suspect that Paul Fussell, whose The Great War and Modern Memory remains the best-known survey of literature from the war, wasn’t even aware of it. In the dozen-plus studies of literature and women’s role in the war published in the last twenty years that even mention the book, most give it no more than a sentence or two.
The one exception is Stephen Trout’s 2010 book On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941. Trout focuses on the American Legion’s attempts to dismiss It’s a Great War! and positions this response in a cultural context. “The novel’s avalanche of details and modernist fragmentation,” he argues “suggests disconcertingly that the war had no center of meaning — the last thing that an organization built around collective memory wished to hear.” His literary judgment, though, is qualified: “For a World War I scholar, her text offers a treasure trove of details that few other writers bothered to recovered. However, as a novel, it is rough going.”
Yet It’s a Great War! is no longer and no more detail-filled than Vera Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth. (Brittain, coincidentally, was perhaps Lee’s most vocal defender against English critics.) And its style is certainly far more accessible to today’s readers, accustomed to sound-bite driven media. I was also reminded many times of another modernist, immersive masterpiece that was being published around the same time: Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which I covered at length back in 2016.
While Pilgrimage has held its place in literary history, it’s suffered in terms of readership from its length and relative obscurity. Although I personally consider Pilgrimage far more interesting and accessible than Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one in a hundred people who know Proust’s work are even aware that Richardson’s exists. To compare Testament of Youth and It’s a Great War! in the same way is laughable: hundreds of thousands or millions have seen the recent film version of Brittain’s book; for Mary Lee’s book, there are … well, me, a few First World War specialists — and now you.
American literature has its share of one-book wonders. John Leggett’s fine book Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies deal with two post-World War Two examples, Ross Lockridge of Raintree County and Thomas Heggen of Mister Roberts. In many cases, these authors’ lives and careers flame out early and destructively. Mary Lee, on the other hand, seems to have this one book burning to be written and by the time it finally came out, had already decided — or been forced by family circumstances — to focus on other things. Whether those things represented a compromise or a cause, only she could have said. But It’s a Great War! deserves as much as Raintree County and Mister Roberts to be remembered as a work of substance and importance. It may, arguably, be the best American novel to come out of the First World War.
Contemporary Reviews
“… the book conveys the sense of war’s horrible waste, its aimless, blundering stupidity, as powerfully as any novel I can recall, with the single exception of Remarque’s great book [All Quiet on the Western Front]. As an indictment of everything that war means it stands in the front rank.” — Bruce Catton, syndicated reviewer
“Those who can accustom themselves to the staccato style of the authoress, with her herky phrases, will realise that the novel is a sincere attempt to present the uncensored truth. Necessarily this is not all, or mostly, attractice. It treats of the obscenities of billet life, the contrasts between gay life in Paris and the misery and despair in the fighting lines, the disillusionments leading to an embittering cynicism.” — The Age, Melbourne, Australia
“It would be unbecoming in us to defend American soldiers against the humble opinion which Miss Lee formed of much of their conduct. But when it comes about that she or her heroine pretends that the British Army lacked the services and the solace of genteel womanhood, that the young women of France sat with idle fingers, we dare to say that she talks through her hat. As Count Schuksen might put it, in the politest manner in the world, the damned impudence of such pretenses, based on so trivial an experience, takes our breath away.” — The Morning Post, London
“Staccato in style, these impressions make reading somewhat of a nervous strain. At the end, however, they piece into a kaleidoscopic design which service men and women will recognize at once as war in its infinite detail.” — Maxwell Benson, syndicated reviewer
“It seems to me one of the really good books that have come out of the war. It makes absorbing reading, and what a glorious lot of bunk-exploding goes on in its half a thousand pages.” — Herschel Brickell, New York Herald Tribune
“It gives a wider view of the work back of the front than any book so far written. The style is so unique that it literally carries the reader through a moving picture of the war behind the lines…. The reader is made to realize what the service man had to undergo. He is conscious of the reason why so many men do not and will not talk of their experiences ‘over there’.” — Barend Beek, Miami News
“Frankly speaking, It’s a Great War! proved a vast disappointment. After reading the first few chapters the story, as a whole, becomes dull and monotonous. It was recommended to us with great gusto, and perhaps that is why we didn’t like it.” — The Burlington (Vermont) Daily News
“We recommend this book to you as the greatest and frankest panoramic view of the war that has yet been published, not even excepting All Quiet on the Western Front. If you were in the war, you will sigh with relief at reading the truth. If you were not an active part of the army in France and at the front, you will probably be very much hurt at the picture Miss Lee paints — hurt and rebellious and incredulous, because you won’t believe what your read…. Get your courage up and procure the book from somewhere. You will be sorry all your life if you miss it.” — Eleanor Evans Wing, Appleton (Wisconsin) Post-Crescent
“It’s a Great War! is a long book — over 500 pages [the UK edition was 690] — but it is easy reading. Miss Lee has hit upon a style that perfectly fits her material — disjointed, staccato sentences for facts that presented themselves more of less disjointedly, in flashes…. It is a fine book that leaves one much enlightened and with much food for reflection.” — Philadelphia Inquirer
“In a staccato and rather confused style Miss Lee has managed to convey something of the gigantic bewilderment of those days in France, the seamy and sordid and disillusioning side of war, the bitterness and waste of life. She relies for her effect upon the diligent piling up of instantaneous and detached impressions.’ It is almost as if she had attempted a literal rendition of those vivid and disordered days. It’s a Great War is a powerful book, but it is too amorphous to be accounted a literary masterpiece.” — The Bookman (US)
“By far the majority of these six hundred and ninety pages are written in that manner, giving the reader the impression of riding in an obsolete bus with solid tires, bumping eternally over tramway lines or other excrescences.” — The Bookman (UK)
“[Lee] writes in the historic present participle … she, writing … a style, very irritating … using jerks and dots…. Mr. Wyndham Lewis says somewhere that this is done by feminine types who wish to appear virile.” — Nation and Athenaeum
“I may as well say at the outset that it is one of the most irritating books I have ever read through to a tedious end. The author is a journalist, but she appears to have the vaguest grasp of the ordinary rules of rhythm in words, as well as of punctuation. Four dots appear to be the quota for each ejaculation. There must be ten million dots in this book…. Every step of this long narrative of events is recorded in a series of ejaculations. Most carefully of all are are set down the coarsest of details the heroine observes during her enforced contact with soldiers…. The whole book is an impertinence. To call it a novel is an impertinence. It is no more a novel than the columns of a sensational newspaper, slapped together, could be called a novel. As for the war — a little WAAC, swabbing canteen floors at Dover during an air raid, is as qualified to write about it.” — “Tobias Trott,” The Graphic (UK) [This and similar comments led Vera Brittain to write the following to the editors of Time and Tide: “Mary Lee’s gigantic novel, It’s a Great War!, seems to me to have been more unfairly treated by reviewers than any important book for a long time… I suggest, therefore, that women are not … bored with war-books, but that their, real interest has not yet been aroused. And it will not be aroused until a war-book is published which removes the impression that one sex only played an active part in war, and one sex only experienced its deepest emotions.”]
“In my judgment she has accomplished a masterpiece. In the last analysis the least part of war is the actual fighting. The great part of it is the effect it produces on the souls of those engaged in it. The former can be ably written by any little war correspondent sitting on a safe hilltop. The latter can only be written by one who has lived it and nearly died of it — whether that death be physical or spiritual. It is this latter and more important aspect of war with which Miss Lee deals; and in all the literature of the war which I have read — English, French, German — no one has succeeded better in recreating the gradual descent into hell which is the inevitable fate of the man who goes to war…. Miss Lee has been to hell. Because of it, every page of her book is the truth — terrible, heart-breaking, discouraging, if you like, but, so help me God, the truth!” — Hamilton Gibbs, letter to the New York Times
It’s a Great War!, by Mary Lee New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1929 London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930
“I lost touch with Russia for almost two years,” Konstantin Paustovsky writes in the introduction to this, the fifth volume of his autobiography. “But I do not regret it,” he continues, and neither will the reader. Southern Adventure is easily the most exotic, the most magical chapter in Paustovsky’s life.
After a trip along the Russian coast of the Black Sea aboard the freighter Pestel (which concludes the previous volume, Years of Hope, Paustovsky awakened one morning “feeling on my face the warm palms of somebody’s hands. They smelt of mimosa.” The Pestel is anchored off Sukhum (now Sukhumi), the main port in what was then the Abkhazian Soviet Republic. The scents from the lush tropical vegetation on shore carried out to the ship …
A postcard of a garden in Sukhum.
… until they formed a tight ball and the air was compressed into a thick syrup; then they would untwine again into distinct and separate fibres and I would detect the breath of azalias, bay-trees, eucalyptus trees, oleanders, wisterias and many other flowers wonderful in appearance and colour.
The sensation stirs a childhood fantasy based in stories of the Arabian nights and jungle explorers and Paustovsky resolves to go ashore — not just to go, but to stay. As he quickly learns — in an experience repeated throughout this book — the nascent bureaucracy of this young Soviet republic is ruthless and absolute: there is no official way for him to leave the ship except under close supervision and for a matter of just an hour or two. On the other hand, the harshness of Soviet rules are also softened by the indolence and lackadaisical attitude of most officials in the Caucasus: “The old and the new were jumbled up together in the way things get jumbled up in a basket after a sharp jolt.” Soon, he is walking along the boulevards of Sukhum.
In Sukhum, as with the other ports along the now-Georgian Black Sea coast that Paustovsky visits in the course of the book, “It was difficult to grasp what century we were living in.” While Soviet-organized collectives, workers councils, and goverment functions attempted to institute a new regime, blood feuds still broke out between families and tribes, disputes were more often settled by elders than by courts, and bamboo shoots still sprung up overnight in even the busiest streets in town.
Despite having no money and no job, Paustovsky lucks into a conversation with an official of the Cooperative Union of Abkhazia in Sukhum — the Absouyz — who hires him as a secretary. “I was hellishly lucky in Sukhum,” he writes, and indeed his luck throughout his two years in the Caucasus is one of the magical elements of this volume.
Lake Amtkheli in the Abkhazian region of Georgia.
But the most magical element by far is Paustovsky’s evocation of the other worldly beauty of the Caucasian landscape, where coastal strips of palm trees and tropical flowers suddenly transformed into steep Alpine mountains. Early in the book, he and an odd assortment of temporary residents of Sukhum make an expedition to Lake Amkeli, formed by an earthquake just a couple of decades before. The lake seems to Paustovsky something out of a fairy tale book:
The crystal clarity of reflections in the water was so perfect that it was impossible to distinguish the reflection of the shores and mountains from the real shores and mountains.
It was as if there were two Caucasuses around us. One of them rose up to the sky above, and the other went down into the shining abyss beneath our feet. Identical feathery clouds slowly moved in the sky and along the bottom of the abyss.
Every time I threw my line and sinker into the lake I shattered the ideal fusion of this world.
Soon, however, he grows restless and talks his way onto a ship heading further south, to the port of Batum. Here, to the fragrances of Sukhum are added the cacophony of a city closer in spirit to the Middle East than to Russia:
Postcard of the Turkish bazaar in Batum.
… in Batum, particularly in the Turkish bazaar, known as Nuri, you were deafened with a whole kaleidoscope of sounds — from the bleating of sheep to the desperate cries of maize sellers: ‘Hot maize!’; from the plaintive moans of a muezzin on the top of a near-by mosque to the squeaking of pipes out of the windows of dukhans and the tearful singing of their tipsy patrons.
As in Odessa, Paustovsky manages to convince the local seamen’s union to underwrite a newspaper and appoint him as its editor. The pay is low, but then so is the cost of living in Batum, particularly when he takes a room in the town’s “coastal shelter,” a refuge for sailors stranded in the port from getting drunk or spending a night in jail for fighting. The coastal shelter, he writes, was “a cross between a doss house, a pub, a police cell for drunks and a brothel.”
One of the men he encounters there is Batum’s lighthouse keeper, Stavraki. Something about the man sets Paustovsky’s senses on edge, and eventually he discovers that this is the notorious former Imperial Russian Naval officer responsible for shooting Lt. Pyotr Schmidt, the leader of the Black Sea fleet uprising of 1905 later made famous in Eisenstein’s movie Potemkin. Normally one to accept his fellow man with understanding, Paustovsky finds it impossible not to revile Stavraki:
That life of his was just a series ofacts of blackest treachery. And these acts of treachery developed out of petty bits of nonsense: out of a desire to wear just one more pip on his shoulder straps and cut a dash in women’s eyes, out of servile fear of all authority
A few months later, Stavraki was arrested by the Cheka, taken to Sevastopol, tried for his anti-revolutionary crimes, and sentenced to the same fate to which he’d sent Lt. Schmidt: death by firing squad.
Konstantin Paustovsky and his second wife, Valeria Navashina, in the late 1930s.
After two years enjoying the warmth of the southern Black Sea coast, Paustovsky begins to long to see ice and snow again. He heads into the interior, to the Georgian capital of Tblisi. There, he meets again with Frayerman, a “martyr to the pen,” an inveterate journalist who’d managed to work his way around the rim of the Black Sea, writing for or, when necessary, founding newspapers. In Tbilisi, they start a paper for the railway workers, The Little Train Whistle, and enjoy riding the narrow lines that wind up into the mountains of Georgia.
It’s not a bad life for the time and place, but soon Paustovsky begins to brood about his mother and sister, abandoned long ago in Kiev. Why is he idling away his time in a foreign place when he could be helping them? “I wanted to groan at the painfully obvious, perfectly clear thought which had never before entered my head, groan at the realization of my absolute, unfeigned, genuine and, therefore, hideous loneliness, the realization that nobody needed me here.”
And with this, Paustovsky climbs aboard a train to start the long and tortuous journey back to his native Kiev, bringing his Southern Adventure to a close. Though his idyll in the Caucasus is, by his own admission, a hiatus in his life’s drama, one could not ask for a better way to stir one’s imagination and make one long for a similar time in some exotic locale. It’s a beautiful and memorable excusion.
Note: Vintage Classics recently announced the release of a new translation of The Story of a Life by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith, due for publication in June 2022. This edition will not, however, include the last three books, so if you’d like to read the full story, you’ll still need to hunt down the Harvill Press translations of Volumes 4, 5, and 6.
The Story of a Life, Volume 5: Southern Adventure, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon London: Harvill Press, 1969
Ad for The Red House from The New York Times, 1932.
Catching up with my friend the Dutch translator and publisher (Van Maaskant Haun) Meta Gemert, I learned about a neglected Austrian best-seller from over 100 years ago that’s beginning to experience a comeback: Else Jerusalem’s 1909 novel Der heilige Skarabäus, which was published in English in 1932 as The Red House. The English version, published in the U. S. by The Macaulay Company and in the U.K. by T. Werner Laurie, sold poorly and quickly disappeared, which is why the only way to get your hands on a copy is via Inter-Library Loan.
Jerusalem, born Else Kotányi to Hungarian Jewish parents in Vienna in 1876, was a pioneer in her interest in the sociology and economics of the sex trade, and The Red House was the result of her study of the operations of Vienna’s brothels. The book centers on Milada, who comes to the Red House, an apartment house in Vienna’s red-light district, when her mother Katherine, comes to the city from a small town in Bohemia after being cast out as an undesirable. Though she has a chance to send Milada away to a convent school, Katherine sees no point in trying to better her daughter’s lot: “Why should she be any better than her mother?” she asks.
Katherine dies when Milada is still young, but the girl becomes a fixture as the house changes hands and becomes more of an upscale brothel in the hands of Else Goldscheider. Mrs. Goldscheider introduces Milada into the business in her teens, first serving wine in the house’s lounge and later turning her into a working girl at the age of sixteen. Unable to remember life before the Red House, Milada is naive in her acceptance of the familiar atmosphere of depravity. “Poliska,” she asks the brothel’s housemaid, “Tell me … what’s a decent girl?” “Girl … what idea you got,” responds the maid. “But I want to know,” continues Milada, “Have we any here? Or doesn’t any ‘decent girl’ … ever come to a bordel?”
One of the house’s regulars, Horner, takes a liking to Milada and tries to educate her in the realities of how prostitution operates as an integral element of “decent” society. “Did you ever see a dunghill beetle … eruditely Scarabæus coprophagus?” he asks Milada.
It’s a pretty little thing, gleaming in green and gold. But if you take it in your hand it discharges a dark brown fluid and your prying nose is rewarded for its curiosity by a most malevolent stench.
The world needs its dunghills, he argues. They allow society to pretend that everything else is clean and proper.
Milada acts as Jerusalem’s eyes and ears inside the world of prostitution in Vienna, noting the range of clients, from middle-class merchants to dashing young noblemen to self-righteous city fathers. She also learns how Mrs. Goldscheider stays on the right side of the police and the sanitary inspectors through a mixture of obeisance, flattery, bribery, and deceit.
After a few good years, during which the Red House rises to the reputation of one of the better houses in Vienna, Mrs. Goldscheider sells the business to Miss Miller, a former housekeeper for a country parson and a woman ill-suited to the task emotionally and practically. She tries to pitch pennies at every turn, driving away the better class of clientele and turning her girls into workhorses.
The house’s decline continues when Miss Miller is replaced by Nelly Spizzari. Jerusalem saw the sex trade not only as a feminist but also as one familiar with Marxism, and Nelly Spizzari — with “more energy and less conscience than all previous owners” — represents capitalism at its most brutally efficient and exploitative:
Under the Spizzari System The Red House speedily lost its unique position among establishments of its kind. Rapidly it sank to the lowest grade. Mrs. Spizzari had no understanding of, nor indeed any use for, the atmosphere of middle class respectability which had been the main attraction in The Red House. She had no use for girls who would have fitted in such surroundings, for she demanded of them services that the former Red House inmates, down to the most reckless of them, would have refused with shudders.
Spizzari takes advantage of the desperate poverty of some Viennese families to procure new girls cheaply and in their early teens:
One pet enterprise of the energetic Spizzari was to buy very young girls from inhuman parents who gloated over the purchase price, whether as straight cash or a monthly rent. With these innocent unfortunates in her power, Mrs. Spizzari would perform all sorts of manipulations, operating on them herself, cutting and stitching. She had a special technique of virgin-exploitation, which she managed to keep hidden from the medical inspector….
Into this toxic environment comes a young doctor, Gus Brenner, a well-intentioned crusader from a good family. Though he avoids the attempts of some of the girls to seduce him, he and Milada fall in love. In the hands of a typical romantic novelist of the time, Brenner might have become the knight in shining white armor who rescues Milada. In the hands of the scientifically-minded Jerusalem, however, such matches are only the stuff of fantasies. If Milada does manage to escape from the Red House, it is not without carrying her share of emotional and psychological scars.
Early German edition of De heilige Skarabäus.
Der heilige Skarabäus became a best-seller in continental Europe, being translated into Hungarian, Finnish, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian. It took over two decades, however, for the book to reach English readers, and then in an apparently abridged version. The Macaulay Company edition of The Red House runs to just over 300 pages, while catalogue records show that the original Austrian edition came to well over 600.
Ad for The Red House from Publisher’s Weekly.
Though coming after the Jazz Age, the English version, titled The Red House, still seemed too controversial for Anglophones. “Readers who can stomach the subject of this novel will find it exceedingly well done,” wrote one brief review in The Spectator. “Those who cannot (the theme is prostitution) are advised to leave it alone.” The New York Times’ review acknowledged that, “The moral tone of the book is unquestionably sincere and lofty, its revelation of conditions convincing in every detail, and its aunguished protest driven home with terrible and arresting truth.” Still, the reviewer cautioned, “There seems small likelihood of a book so exclusively indigenous and alien to the American reader’s ken meeting with a kindred acclaim in its English version.”
Soon after, the book fell into disfavor in Austria and Germany, but for political rather than critical reasons. In questioning the moral integrity of good bürger society, Der heilige Skarabäus was quickly banned by the Nazis and Jerusalem’s work joined that of Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig on their bonfires.
By that time, however, she was no longer Else Jerusalem, having divorced her first husband and married an academic named Viktor Widakowich. She and Widakowich emigrated to Buenos Aires. Though she found Argentina largely lacking in cultural life, it soon become too difficult to consider returning to Europe and she died there in 1943.
Only recently has the book been resurrected for German-language readers. Austrian publisher Albert Eibl released a new edition, with an afterword by Professor Brigitte Spreitzer of the University of Graz, from his Das Vergessene Buch (the Forgotten Book) press. You may recall my mention of Eibl’s rescue of Maria Lazar’s novel Leben verboten!, which was published in English (also in an abridged version) in 1934 as No Right to Live.
For the last few years, I’ve tried to offer some lesser-known suggestions for those interested in taking part in one of the ‘net’s best and biggest collective reading events, Kaggsy and Simon Thomas’s (stuckinabook) semi-annual clubs. This coming October 11-17, they’re inviting you to read and write about books published in 1976.
Looking back, the one book published in 1976 most likely to hold a permanent place in literary history is William Gaddis’s massive wordfest and satire on American capitalism, JR*. However, coming in at nearly 800 pages, it may be a bit more than most readers will want to take on in a week. Even if you choose to listen to Nick Sullivan’s landmark audiobook version, you’re still looking at clocking in over 37 hours or roughly many people’s entire work week.
For 1976 Club suggestions, I decided to look at a couple of the “Books of the Year” features that used to be an annual fixture in newspaper book sections. In these, well-known writers and occasional celebrities were asked to name their favorite books of the year. Although those who participated often showed the professional courtesy of honoring good works by their peers (JR and E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime earned the most mentions), there are always a few unexpected or obscure titles that get mentioned. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, offered his own uncompleted novel The Original of Laura, which didn’t get published until long after his death the next year. John Cheever told The New York Times that he ended the year with George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, though he confessed that he couldn’t read it in the laundromat.
So, here, without further ado, are recommendations from year-end round-ups in The Observer and The New York Times from 1976. (Note that the Agate and Bardin are 1976 reissues of earlier books, but I’ve kept them because they’re both darned good books.):
“Books of the Year” from The Observer, 12 December 1976:
“A short, very fresh, mischievous novel about the adventures of an ingenuous French-Canadian writer in French literary circles. The poor lad, who came to conquer, is picked dry. A Balzacian story that custom hasn’t staled: compressed here and ‘pris sur le vif,’ it has the charm of a classic cautionary tale.” — Mary McCarthy
“In fiction, I most enjoyed meeting a new novelist in David Batchelor, whose Brogan and Sons shows a skilled had, a sense of social comedy, and the gift of being serious without portentousness.”
“I didn’t read much new fiction this year, but although as a rule I don’t much like short stories, I particularly enjoyed Francis King’s new collection, Hard Feelings and Other Stories. His combination of wit and unforgiving observation is always a pleasure.”
“Consoles me somewhat for not possessing the nine-volume original, that unique Ptolemaic universe of theatre, ponies, literature, golf, music and wisecracks, autobiography and social history combined (“Today for the first time in history I put on yesterday’s shirt”). — Philip Larkin
“The unputdownable thriller, the one for your last night in the condemned cell … about a sociologist in the clutches of a fiendish whiz-kid conducting a death-grapple between multinationals.” — Maurice Richardson
“A crime weirdissimo, three novels dashed off in the Forties by a man who had been a bouncer in a roller-skating rink, is much the best 95p’s worth on the market.” — Russell Davies
“Two excellent novels about life’s losers: Emma Tennant’s Hotel de Dream experiments with the stange Hitlerian fringe of menaces that hangs around the dreams of those who have failed; Henrie Mayne’s An Unreasonable Man is a more traditional but moving and funny account of the disorder that a typical English eccentric creates in the lives of others.” — Angus Wilson
“… has not received the notice it deserves. The author, from a distinguished Polish musical family, was an officer of the reserve captured when the Russians took the Poles in the rear after Hitler’s frontal assault. He should have finished up among the 4,000 of his fellow officers shot by the NKVD in Katyn forest. But he survived. His story of life in Soviet captivity is the more moving for its unassumingness.” — Edward Crankshaw
“Authors’s Authors” from The New York Times, 5 December 1976:
“The best contemporary novel I’ve read this year…. It deals with a half-crazed survivor of the Holocaust who is periodically incarcerated in a rehabilitation center in the Negev desert. The book is laced with surreal black humor and frilliant digressions on the destiny of the Jews. It’s the Israeli counterpart of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” — Francine de Plessix Gray
“A hard, brilliantly visual novel which is equal in quality to early Hawkes. Few American writers have such a sensuous yet masterfully controlled style.” — William Gass
“A stunning book about a bright, sad, witty woman in a state of emotional disarray. Must be read carefully in order to appreciate its nuances, and even then you’ll never be sure you’ve caught them all.” — Richard Yates
“I always thought refugees were other people” are words none of us would ever want to say.
But no one ever chooses to become a refugee on a whim. Instead, as we witnessed just this week in Afghanistan, refugees usually have to grab what they can carry and leave in a rush. Their motivation is less to run towards than to run away, usually from violence, persecution, or simply chaos.
Resi, the teenage girl who narrates Monica Stirling’s 1958 novel Sigh for a Strange Land, awakes one morning to find a policeman at her apartment door. He informs her that her Aunt Natasha has been injured and is lying in the city hospital. Hurrying to see her aunt, Resi notices that the streets are oddly quiet. There are no queues outside the shops and the few people who pass look at her with shocked expressions.
Aunt Natasha’s only injury is a hangover from celebrating too hard the night before and she and Resi are soon headed back to their apartment. Now, however, the streets are full of noise, with groups of men running down sidewalks and the sounds of gunfire in the distance. Turning into their street, they see their apartment block going up in flames. The revolution has begun.
Seeking out the only friend they have, a horse trainer named Boris, Resi and Natasha soon find themselves on an overloaded truck headed for the frontier. After a long journey through the night, they climb out to face a table of Red Cross workers. Each of them is handed a piece of cardboard with a word on it: “REFUGEE.”
Some of their companions react in shock and disgust. “Refugees! My family’s an honorable one,” says one. “I’ll have you know, my grandfather founded our shop, built it up from nothing, and it’s been in the family ever since — wars, risings, strikes, upsets, nothing’s been able to dislodge us. And now . . . ”
If Resi, Natasha, and Boris are somewhat less surprised, it’s because their lives have been punctuated by displacements. Natasha and Boris grew up as members of the Russian imperial elite before the revolution of 1917. Natasha followed the White Russian diaspora to Paris and Italy. Boris joined a circus and found himself a citizen of an itinerant nation. Resi, left to Natasha’s care after the death of her parents, carries the blood of four nations in her veins: Russia, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and France. And none of them has any papers, of course. “Could we ever prove I’m me if we wanted to?” Resi asks at one point.
Refugees from the 1956 Hungarian revolution being processed at an Austrian reception center.
Although Stirling never names the country from which the trio is fleeing — which adds to the sense of displacement that pervades the book — one cannot help but assume it’s Hungary, whose abortive revolution against a Soviet-backed regime in 1956 led to over 150,000 Hungarians seeking asylum in the West.
Resi, Natasha, and Boris sneak out of their temporary refugee center and enjoy a brief holiday taking in the opulence of what is clearly Vienna:
Halfway down the next street—which was full of traffic, I’d never before seen so many motor vehicles in one place — we were attracted by a prodigious delicatessen store. The vast window’s centerpiece was a glass-fronted silver machine in which a chicken roasted on a revolving spit. Either side stood massive hams, their outsides neatly breadcrumbed, their insides the color of dark pink roses. Spread around these in tiers were shallow white china dishes containing black and green olives, soft-fleshed tan mushrooms, smooth-skinned coppery sausages, the harlequin colors of vegetable salad, artichokes with gray-green mauve-topped leaves firm as if sculpted, beets with their darkly crimson juice turned cherry-color where it dissolved into a moat of sour cream, pies with richly glazed and crusted tops.
They pool their few coins and manage to buy coffees, cocoa, and pastries at a café. “Cafés are apt to outlast governments,” observes Boris.
Soon, though, they are back sleeping with hundreds of other refugees on a gymnasium floor, and Natasha, who is probably closer to 70 than the 50 she looks like, takes ill. The odd little family unit that has sheltered Resi through her childhood falls apart, and she is forced to decide for herself what place she will adopt as home.
Stirling quotes from a 1958 essay by V. S. Pritchett in which he wrote, “In the last hundred years half the world’s population has become uprooted, expatriated from class, race or nation. We live on frontiers.” Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, short story about people accustomed to that frontier existence. For this trio, nation and home have become concepts as slippery as a bubble of mercury.
Portrait of Monica Stirling by Stanley Parker, from Tatler and Bystander 1958.
And Stirling, who saw a great deal of displacement as a correspondent during World War Two and its aftermath in Europe, is fundamentally distrustful of these concepts. “I’ve never understood why anyone finds it difficult to believe chairs and tables are made of constantly moving atoms. Nothing is reliable in this moving world but love,” Resi comments early on. “All I’m interested in writing about is love,” Stirling once told her friend The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner — another veteran expatriate. “Private life,” Boris tells Resi, is “the greatest resistance movement of them all.”
Sigh for a Strange Land is a simple, moving tale that manages to weave two disparate themes together: the unstable, transitory nature of home and nationality, and the strong, unwavering bonds of love. It’s a tale that resonates in this moment every bit as it did over fifty years ago. It’s available on the Internet Archive (link) and I’ve had it in my Calibre library for years, but it was only when Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow recently posted about Monica Stirling that I thought to take a serious look at it. I was hooked by the opening line: “The day the revolution started my Aunt Natasha was drunk,” and had to keep going.
The whole time I read the book, I kept thinking that it could quite plausibly have been written within the last ten years: it has that sort of timelessness, aided no doubt by Stirling’s choice to minimize her specific geographical and temporal references. I do have to agree with David Williams of the TLS, who wrote when the book was first published, “The first part is so god that one’s disappointment over the other two is keener perhaps than it ought to be”: there is a faint scent of sentimentality that lingers over the middle section and lasts until near the very end, when Resi has to confront her situation without the support of Natasha and Boris.
But overall, it’s a superb and taut novel. As John Davenport in The Observer, “Miss Stirling knows how to be exquisitely brief.” It’s a welcome skill in an age not lacking in loose baggy monsters.
Sigh for a Strange Land, by Monica Stirling London: Victor Gollancz, 1958 Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958
Lady Eleanor Smith with circus folk, from The Sphere (1933).
This is a guest post by theatre critic and researcher Julia Rank. In this article, the term ‘gypsy’ is only used when quoting directly from Lady Eleanor Smith’s work.
‘I was born dead’ is the ominous first sentence of Lady Eleanor Smith’s 1939 memoir Life’s a Circus. The doctors at the scene of her birth pronounced her dead without checking for any signs of life and threw themselves into attempting to save her mother. The midwife, with nothing to lose, had the bright idea of massaging the newborn with gin and slapping her repeatedly until she elicited a wail. Mother and daughter both survived and Lady Eleanor grew up to become a Bright Young Thing, journalist, publicist and novelist, with a particular devotion to the circus and scenes from Romani life.
Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945) was the daughter of Conservative MP Frederick Edward Smith, ennobled as Earl of Birkenhead when appointed Lord Chancellor in 1919, and Margaret Eleanor Furneux (a granddaughter of Joseph Severn, painter and friend of John Keats). The young Eleanor enjoyed a privileged upbringing with ponies, dancing classes and Christmases spent at Blenheim Palace (her father was one of Winston Churchill’s closest friends). Despite growing up in the heart of the establishment, she was drawn to Romani culture from an early age, teaching herself the language and making the serendipitous discovery that her paternal great-grandmother was a Romani woman named Bathsheba (apparently the Lord Chancellor was proud of his ‘romantic’ origins rather than trying to conceal them, while at the same time exaggerating the humbleness of his middle-class Birkenhead upbringing).
Like her contemporary Nancy Mitford, Smith’s formal education was centred around learning to speak French. A happy experience at Queen’s Gate School, South Kensington, alongside lifelong friends and fellow Bright Young Things Allanah Harper and Zita Jungmann, was not to last. She was sent to boarding school but ran away, after which she completed her education with an extended stay with an aristocratic Belgian family who lived at the Museum of the Congo outside Brussels. On her return to England, she refused to ‘come out’ as a debutante as was expected for a young lady of her background and decided instead to pursue a career in journalism.
Through her social connections, Smith landed a role writing a twice-weekly ‘Women’s Gossip’ column for an evening paper but disliked “publicising a loathsome clique of nitwits”. She then worked as cinema critic, which she found more convivial. Highlights included introducing Katharine Hepburn and Elisabeth Bergner to British audiences(and being introduced to Hitler’s policies by the Austrian-Jewish Bergner).
Cover of first US edition of Red Wagon.
A stint travelling with a circus as a publicist provided ample research opportunities for Smith’s first novel Red Wagon (1930). Red Wagon is far from culturally sensitive. Nevertheless, it stands up as a gripping yarn even today.
Inspired by Victorian showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger, “one of the finest types of English circus man”, the novel tells the life story of self-made and (mostly) benevolent circus dictator Joe Prince in flashback form. In the novel’s present day, the circus is no longer the national institution it was in previous decades nor is Joe Prince quite the “roistering king of the road, a plutocrat among nomads” he once was. One of his daughters has settled in suburbia and the other, to her father’s disapproval, wants to showcase her equestrian skills for cinema.
The action then flashes back to the 1860s when Joe is five years old and his acrobat mother is killed in a fire during an American tour. After a period of fostering by a Thénardier-esque clown, he’s sent to a Dickensian orphanage. He escapes in his teens, joins a circus, works his way up through the ranks and eventually sets up his own circus, always living by the mantra ‘Circus first’.
Ad for the US edition of Red Wagon.
According to the Scotsman, ‘The book stands as a challenge to all those who doubt woman’s ability to write a ‘straight’ tale unmarked with the stamp of ‘feminine’ psychology’”. The novel features a male protagonist who isn’t prone to self-reflection and who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. Joe Prince is defined by his relationship with the circus and its nomadic life rather than by his romantic relationships. The novel is ‘romantic’ in terms of its setting rather than its love story.
A life-changing romance does occur, but it’s near the end and is one-sided. It’s hard not to be creeped out the way in which Joe, in middle age, marries the much younger Romani princess Sheba (surely named for Smith’s ancestor Bathsheba), the daughter of Starlina, his first crush. Sheba, who is “bought from her people for the sum of fifteen pounds”, can’t settle into the role of circus chatelaine and eventually abandons her husband and daughters to return to her community.
The depiction of Romani characters is the most troubling aspect of the novel. ‘Gajo’ (non-Romani) circus folk and Romanis are not allies. “Joe, in common with most circus children,” Smith writes, “had been brought up to despise and hate this dark race […] sometimes they attached themselves to circuses and brought disgrace to any show”. Despite Smith’s personal identification with Romani people and Joe’s coming to admire them, her Romani characters are strongly ‘othered.’ Sheba and the other Romani in the book are described as ‘wild’, witch-like,’ ‘savage’, ‘brazen’, ‘tawny’ etc. The circus itself is also described in disruptive terms, as something that allows ‘the English to take their pleasure not sadly, but almost savagely, with a boisterous brutality that would endure long into the night.” Smith feared that “It will be a dreadful day when the circus decides to become social” (but noted that she had never personally seen a mistreated circus animal).
Vita Sackville-West, writing for Common Cause, hailed Red Wagon as “a brilliantly successful first novel” and Oliver Wray of The Graphic commented, ”‘I have not read so satisfying a novel since Mr Priestley’s The Good Companions.” The Yorkshire Post found Joe Prince “a most human and likable creature… a real relief after the fantastic figures of most novelists who have touched his kind.” Of course, Smith’s title and her father’s fame may have had some influence on the praise it received. Lord Birkenhead was appalled to learn that his daughter was writing a novel and assumed it would only be published because of who he was – but he eventually changed his tune and gave her a ruby and diamond brooch representing the red wagon shortly before his death later the same year.
Article on banning of Red Wagon, from the Oakland Tribune, 8 July 1930.
Alongside the positive literary reviews, Red Wagon was the subject of a minor cause celebre. The book was banned by Glasgow public libraries when an elderly councillor proclaimed that the 28-year-old Smith “knows too much for her age” and should have “shown more reticence” in her handling of the “love incidents”. I would hazard a guess that this complaint refers to the scene in a seedy Montmatre hotel room in which Joe loses his virginity to Rose, a worldly American equestrienne: ‘He wanted her and would apparently take her without wasting any time on preliminary dalliance. He pulled her on to his knee, burying his face in the daffodil shower of her hair, kissing her wildly, roughly, madly, holding her so tight that he hurt her and she cried for mercy’. Publisher Victor Gollancz responded, “I have had many funny experiences during seven years of publishing, but this is much the funniest.” He quipped that the real reason for controversy was the title, with ‘Red’ suggesting political sympathies at odds with those of Glasgow council. Which seems unlikely: Gollancz was himself a socialist but Smith was her father’s daughter politically. The novel went into its fourth printing despite the Glaswegian objections.
Poster for the film version of Red Wagon.
Joe Prince may have disliked the cinema, but the epic scope and flamboyant setting of Red Wagon made it ideal for filmic treatment. In 1933, it was adapted by Elstree’s British International Studios, directed by the Austrian-born Paul L. Stein and starring the American actor Charles Bickford (who went on to be a three-time Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor) as Joe. It was an ambitious production by British standards of the time, running 50% longer than average — 107 minutes long as opposed to the usual70 minutes.
As the author of the source material, Smith felt that she was regarded ‘the lowest form of animal life” on the film set. But she also acknowledged that novelists were not suited to adapting their own work for screen and that specialist scenario writers were required. Feeding an appetite for melodrama with exotic settings, several of her subsequent novels were turned into film, including Ballerina (The Men in Her Life), Tzigane (Gypsy) and Caravan, starring actors such as Loretta Young, Chili Bouchier and Stewart Granger.
Lady Eleanor Smith, from The Sketch (1932).
Smith cultivated a fey, uncanny image of herself in the press and in her memoir. Life’s a Circus related childhood encounters with a ghost dog called Gyp and grisly tales told by a nanny who attended the last public hanging in Britain. In the 1930s, she lived in a flat off the King’s Road with a black cat named Satan (despite the fact she was a Roman Catholic – probably a reference to her 1932 short story collection Satan’s Circus). She conjures up images of an aristocratic, urban version of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s heroine Lolly Willowes. She died at the age of 42 after a long illness and her most enduring work is probably her Regency-era novel The Man in Grey, albeit mostly by virtue of the Gainsborough Studios’ film adaptation starring James Mason and Margaret Lockwood.
Julia Rank is a London-based theatre critic, historical researcher and academic proofreader. Her favourite things include theatrical fiction, interwar chorus girls, and the American baritone and film star Gordon MacRae. For more information, visit her website, julia-writes.com.
Michael Walmer is both one of the most modest and one of the most ambitious of the growing number of small independent publishers specializing in reissuing the work of forgotten and under-appreciated authors. A one-man firm operating from a cottage in the Shetland Islands, Michael Walmer has not only built up an impressive catalog over the course of the last nine years but is branching out with a new series, Northus Shetland Classics, later this year.
He took some time recently to answer a few questions about his imprint and where it’s headed.
• What inspired you to start up your own publishing firm?
My inspirations are twofold: first, obviously, an enduring love of writing and of writers – the capacity of some individual humans to craft language in such a way that illumination and beauty comes. And also the fact that many writers have not been celebrated with the same relish that the acknowledged classic writer might garner, despite their having equal or greater skill, to my mind – that’s the ‘neglected’ part. My second inspiration was the feeling that I could do it in a practical sense. I had served my time in publishing with a well-known literary publisher and, because of the small size of that house, had learnt much of the trade at first hand, from contracts to editing to design to sales. Also, the advent of print-on-demand technology meant that I didn’t have to be wealthy to publish.
• Where did your initial list of titles come from? Were these favorites you’ve wanted to see back in print?
The initial list established the idea of the republication of oeuvres, rather than solo titles. The tone of the list came from the desire to underline what brilliance there was in comic writing – six of the first ten were wits: Max Beerbohm, Ada Leverson, Ronald Firbank, Kylie Tennant, Stella Benson and Saki. And comedy was a tonic in a world that I found depressing – there was added value on that score. Anger at the state of the world and the release from that which comedy (specifically satire) gives, is the personal background.
Then there were four others who were ‘serious’ but interesting for a variety of reasons: George Sand because she was remembered now more as a romanticized celebrity than a writer; Mary Webb because she is consistently misunderstood; W. Clark Russell because sometimes a straightforward novel of events can be a huge pleasure; and the tenth ‘spot’ was given over to single works which I think deserve more attention – the first was M.R. James’ only novel, the weird The Five Jars.
These are ‘favourites’, but not the only ones – the list of potential inclusions is lengthy!
Now this remit has expanded into several additional series: a belles-lettres series of non-fiction, a poetry series, a series of classic translated fiction, a series of pre-Victorian classics, a series of great short works, and a series of modern classics. Most recently, I’ve teamed up with Robert Alan Jamieson on Northus Shetland Classics to reissue a series of key works from the literature of my new home, Shetland. The series is divided into four ‘streams’ using identifiers from the Shetland dialect: Yarns (fiction), Poyims (poetry), Myndins (memoir) and Alting (a forum for general non-fiction)
• What readers are you hoping to interest in your books? What’s been their responses so far?
Anyone with a hunger for the less traversed regions of literature, like myself, and yourself. That feeling that you will do best if you play to your passions enlivens that. It’s the same reasoning that keeps me from publishing something that I don’t respect just for the money.
Lots of great individual responses, in terms of readers and bloggers getting on board, taking up review copies and spreading the word. But I’m just about to start a new phase where I look to the trade more – the current experiment is going from being firm sale to being ‘sale or return’, so as to be an attractive proposition for more prospective buying by bookshops, and then developing a mailing list to let them know of new titles as they come. We’ll see how that goes – early days!
• What unexpected challenges have you run into?
All sorts of challenges, all the time. Challenges from within, where I don’t feel I’ve nailed it with a particular design or blurb. Also from without, where I thought I’d get good takeup on a particular effort and didn’t. And, of course, those things that always happen in the background of publishing, that I can’t comment on specifically – difficult estates, or irritating agents, or whatever! But then again, those times are always balanced by their opposites – brilliant responses, designs that really sing, and such.
• What books would you love to reissue but, for whatever reason, have been unable to?
Two thus far, and for the reasons above. I’d better not say too much more!
• What lessons have you learned in the process of getting your initial titles out?
That responses can always surprise, which is wonderful. Also, for some strange reason that I don’t quite understand, that the picture in my mind’s eye of any book I do always looks a lot worse than the real thing – somehow I imagine it less svelte, less balanced, less OK than it really is. Hmmmm, that seems like a problem for a psychoanalyst! Not to rely on / assume too much – just keep flexible and patient.
• Why do you think there’s an increased appetite now for rediscovering little-known books from the past?
Culturally, I think that’s been born of the digital revolution. Prior, access to these titles was extraordinarily restricted – literally visiting libraries of preservation like the British Library, the Bodleian or the Library of Congress was the only way of seeing them, copies were so rare. Or finding them through old ‘analogue’ second-hand book-search methods, like those little slips of paper from dealers with offers, sent all around the world in response to requests in trade journals! Now digitisation has meant that these titles which are out of copyright can be made available (admittedly often pretty poor quality photo-reproductions) to anyone who has online capacity. The further reaches of literature then become open to examination, rather than an effectively closed territory.
This has been the baseplate for interest to grow into other realms: material which is still in copyright is not usually available this way, but interest is peaking, exemplified by your blog, among some notable others, like Furrowed Middlebrow, Bear Alley and the like. Then it takes dedicated people to start making them available in pleasant editions to give them a happier new life – there are a growing group of us doing that, which I think is splendid. When I started, in 2012, there were only House of Stratus and Valancourt really, in the ‘curated’ (non-generic) print-on-demand field, anyway. Now there are loads of us.
You can browse the complete Michael Walmer catalogue and order online at www.michaelwalmer.com.
I often go trawling through old book reviews in search of lost treasure. It’s usually not the reviews that feature words like “best”, “greatest”, “finest” that hint at something remarkable worth discovering. More often, there’s a certainly hesitancy in the reviewer’s tone, a suggestion that a book is, well, not bad exactly, but a little askew. A little hard to fit into a particular mold, a little awkwardness in the constraints of prevailing notions of what fiction or nonfiction should be. These are the clues I look for.
In the case of Music in the Listening Place, Gloria Rawlinson’s one and only novel, it was Majorie Grant Cook’s caution in her TLS review that “Readers who dislike the introduction of tiny supernatural beings among average-sized human creatures … will impatiently give up this novel and thereby lose a pleasure that is like biting into a strange new fruit.” Now, I’m not a big fan of fantasy novels, but Cook’s brief description of Rawlinson’s characters — a young woman who’d “lost her wits,” a beloved brother lost in an accident, an earnest young man named Edgar Pullsides — intrigued me and I hunted down one of the few used copies to be found for sale (all in Australia and New Zealand).
“I first heard of the strange little people called Turehu from my mother,” Rawlinson wrote in an introductory note. The Turehu were half-sized, pale human-like creatures — “little white faces with russet-coloured hair.” Although she was writing less than three hundred years after the first white settlement in New Zealand, even among the Maori, the Turehu had already become mythical, something that only the very old and very superstitious still believed in.
Although Rawlinson herself refers to the Turehu as fairies, as we learn in the course of the story, their powers are less magical than psychological. In ways that even they seem mystified by, they are, on occasion — but oh, how these occasions do matter — capable of grasping insights and memories that have eluded the people they help.
Rawlinson was just twenty when Music in the Listening Place was published, and even if the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder had been given that label at the time it’s unlikely she would have used it. And yet, she understood it well, for the real story in Music in the Listening Place is not about the wondrous powers of the Turehu but about how deeply wounded people begin to heal.
The Parks are a family in shock. Mr. Park, a solicitor, forgets his keys, sets out for town on foot instead of by car, has to check his collar before leaving home to make sure there’s a tie underneath it. Mrs. Park hides inside in fear of visitors, conscious that any old friend or neighbor who stops by will observe how large she’s become from years of overeating. And their daughter Aroha storms in and out of the house, sniping belligerently at meals and claiming domain over their back yard as a haven for weeds, bugs, and birds. Throughout the day, she peers at the window of her brother Rollo’s bedroom, anxious to be ready with something to please him: a slice of ripe watermelon, or a sandwich.
Only gradually do we learn that Rollo isn’t an elusive hermit. He’s never coming out of his bedroom because he’s been dead for years, killed in an accident after Aroha insisted he take her joyriding on a neighbor’s motorcycle. Aroha has blanked out all memory of the accident and Rollo’s death save a lingering sense of guilt. She’s stuck, still acting fourteen, still pretending that Rollo is alive, if unseen. And as long as Aroha is stuck, her parents are stuck, too. Even their neighbor, Edgar Pullsides, is himself something of a basket case. Although he makes a little money selling a patent cleanser of his own invention, he spends most of his time hiding in his workshop, building puppets and toys.
On one of his infrequent sales trips around the North Island, Edgar meets a group of Turehu led by the distinguished and nattily-dressed Academic Gentleman. Although the Turehu look upon the mundane interests of the white men with some distain, the Academic Gentleman insists that Edgar must take his wife Peg, a queer leathery-skinned Turehu, back to his home. “Now, Peg, my dear Peg, my lamb, you must try and remember,” he instructs her:
Surely you can remember! It comes to this that there will be no peace in the village if you do not remember. You were the one to catch the thoughts, and are, therefore the one on whom all the responsibility rests. I wash my hands of it all. Anakthe!”
Anakthe, we come to see, is Turehu for, variously, Strewth!, Inshallah!, and “I wash my hands of it all.”
Back home, Edgar hides Peg among the puppets in his workshop, but soon Aroha — his one confidant and fellow daydreamer — learns of Peg’s existence. For some pages, neither Rawlinson’s characters nor we quite know why she’s placed this unusual catalyst in the midst of her unstable cast, but her purpose eventually reveals itself.
Had Rawlinson been exposed to Freudian psychology, we would have good reason to say that Peg’s role is to trigger a cathartic memory, the trigger that Freud and Breuer thought had the effect of “reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed.” But it seems implausible that even a precocious New Zealand woman of twenty with a book of poetry already to her credit would have been familiar with their work.
Instead, we have to trust that Rawlinson knew that even the deepest hurts can only be borne so long. And when Peg does finally remember, reminding Aroha of Rollo’s last words as he sped toward his certain death, she releases the Parks (and Edgar) from the limbo in which they’ve been trapped for years.
Gloria Rawlinson, 1935 (age 17).
As a young writer, Rawlinson shows a certain respect for the conventions of fiction that now seem to place unnecessary restraints on her imagination. But as a young white woman writing at a time when respect for the ways and wisdom of New Zealand’s indigenous people may have been at its lowest, she demonstrates striking empathy. The Maori characters in her book see much farther and more clearly than their colonizers. They know that the North Island is the remnant of a giant fish that surfaced in prehistoric time, that they owned and cared for the island before Captain Cook arrived, and that the Government still owes them the return of the lands stolen by law and gunpowder.
Perhaps Rawlinson understood the Maori’s perspective better than most New Zealanders of her time because she spent her first years living on the island of Tonga, where there was less of a divide between the handful of white settlers and the Tongans and she learned their language alongside her own English. Perhaps she also felt empathy because she was a victim herself, having contracted polio at the age of six, which left her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Music in the Listening Place came and went with no more than a few reviews, some perplexed, others appreciative, and has never been reissued. By the time the book was published, Rawlinson had fallen under the aura of the intense, talented but erratic Iris Wilkinson, who published under the name of Robin Hyde. After Hyde committed suicide in London in 1939, Rawlinson took on the role of curator of Hyde’s literary legacy, spending decades writing a biography that was finally published by Hyde’s son Derek Challis several years after Rawlinson died in 1995 at the age of 77.
I suspect that today’s readers, benefitting from the wealth and increased appreciation of fantastic fiction in the decades since the book’s first appearance, will find Music in the Listening Place, as I did, a powerful work that blends myth, psychology, and respect for indigenous cultures in ways that are quite remarkable given the time and age at which Gloria Rawlinson was writing. If it were published today, critics would not hesitate to call it a tour de force.
Music in the Listening Place, by Gloria Rawlinson London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1938
Charles Williams was a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and, like them, a member of the legendary Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. Gervel Lindop’s recent biography of Williams therefore refers to him as the ‘Third Inking’, while Sørina Higgins’s blog, dedicated to his life and work, calls him ‘The Oddest Inkling’. Exactly how odd is something revealed in detail by Lindop’s biography, which I strongly recommend. Williams had a reputation for saintliness in his own lifetime, but much of his private life was more complicated than that reputation suggests, and modern fundamentalists attracted by his association with the Inklings might find his interest in magic and hermeticism disconcerting.
Unlike Lewis and Tolkien, Williams was not an academic, and attended the Inklings’ meetings for the most part only as a visitor to Oxford. His background was also quite different to theirs: he was from a lower middle-class family whose financial difficulties meant he had to drop out of the University of London after a year and take a menial job in the printing industry, though he managed to rise and become an editor at the London offices of the Oxford University Press. He was also a teacher – but he lectured in what would now be called FE: night-school classes for adult learners. (Only towards the end of his life, when the OUP had moved its offices back to Oxford during the war, did he give a series of lectures on Milton at the university, arranged by Lewis and Tolkien).
Williams wrote works of popular history for OUP, as well as poetry often inspired by Arthurian myth. But his novels, ‘supernatural thrillers’ published by T.S. Eliot at Faber, were his greatest success. The Eliot connection suggests the range of Williams’s interests: unlike Lewis and Tolkien, he was not hostile to literary modernism per se.
Though Williams is now relatively obscure – at least compared to his more famous friends – his novels pioneered a third model for fantasy writers to complement those of alternate, secondary worlds (Tolkien) or portal fantasies (Lewis). Lewis himself explains how this third model worked in a short talk he gave on Williams’s novels. These books, he said, mix:
what some people call the realistic, and the fantastic. I’d rather fall back on an older critical terminology and say that they mix the Probable and the Marvellous. We meet in them, on the one hand, very ordinary modern people who talk the slang of our own day, and live in the suburbs. On the other hand, we also meet the supernatural—ghosts, magicians, and archetypal beasts. … [T]his is not a mixture of two literary kinds. … Williams is really writing a third kind of book, … in which we begin by saying, ‘Let us suppose that this everyday world were … invaded by the marvellous. Let us, in fact, suppose a violation of frontier.’
In a portal fantasy like Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, characters from our world enter another through a magical gateway such as Professor Kirke’s wardrobe. In Williams’s stories, by contrast, representatives from other realities enters ours. In some respects his stories therefore resemble weird fiction, which is also preoccupied with the terrifying consequences of a ‘violation of frontier’. Except that for Williams these intrusions were not really violations at all. As Eliot wrote in his introduction to Williams’s final novel, All Hallows’ Eve, ‘For [him] there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. …. To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural’.
Cover of first UK edition of Descent Into Hell (1937).
I confess that my interest in Williams is really only in his last two (and best) novels, Descent into Hell (1937), and the posthumously published All Hallows’ Eve (1945): I haven’t read any of the others, and the poetry does not appeal to me at all. But these two books are quite remarkable – not least for what they do with the idea of hell and the afterlife.
Williams is undoubtedly an odd stylist: his sentences are often crabbed and convoluted, not helped by his habit of inventing neologisms for religious or theological concepts in an attempt to avoid triggering preconceptions or taking sides in pre-existing doctrinal controversies. But he can also be a writer of great power, peculiarly alive to the far-reaching consequences of seemingly small moral choices.
In Descent into Hell, the titular journey is embarked upon by a historian, Lawrence Wentworth, who runs a discussion group for young people in his village. His downfall begins with his inability to accept that Adela, a woman from that group, has no romantic interest in him. Wentworth therefore welcomes the attentions of a succubus, a spirit form of Adela, who promises to submit to his every whim. For a fantasy writer, Williams here is peculiarly hostile to fantasy, at least when it takes the form of a denial of reality – worse, a denial of Kant’s moral imperative, the recognition that others have their own autonomy and desires independent of our own.
At the same time, Wentworth is also unable to admit to a professional error – the wound to his amour propre is too great for him to bear – and both these choices seal his fate. The hell that he enters, while still alive, is one where, having refused to accept his real relations to others and his obligations to the professional community to which he belongs, he is left alone. But not merely alone. Language is necessarily social: to speak implies an interlocutor. Without the willingness to fully imagine such an interlocutor, language itself collapses, and beyond that, even the possibility of associating things in meaningful patterns.
It is a hell of solipsism. The following passage comes from the extraordinary final paragraphs of the novel:
Then everything at which he was looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he also was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing together, because in this place they drew towards each other from the more awful repulsion of the void. But fast as they went they never reached one another, for out of the point that was not he there expanded an anarchy of unintelligible shapes and hid it, and he knew it had gone out, expiring in the emptiness before it reached him. The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels of black and white. He had forgotten the name of them, but somewhere at some time he had thought he knew similar forms and they had had names. … There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void.
Wentworth is a living character who enters hell prematurely. Descent into Hell also features a dead character – a ghost, in effect – a wretched suicide who lingers around the site of his death in a kind of grey limbo. Near but not in the living world, he is as alone as he felt in life. But not as alone as Wentworth, since he is still able to perceive – to receive – the attention of a sympathetic woman, herself close to death, who reaches out to him.
Cover of first UK edition of All Hallows Eve (1945).
This kind of provisional limbo state also appears in All Hallows’ Eve, and it suggests Williams’s willingness to depart from Christian orthodoxy. In traditional Christian thought, death offers a kind of terminal end point beyond which moral choice is not possible. One’s eternal fate is fixed at the moment before death. (Even if one believes in purgatory, this does not change one’s ultimate fate: everyone in purgatory will ultimately attain heaven; no one in hell will).
In these two novels, by contrast, not only is hell a place to which you condemn yourself and can enter before you die, but – for those who retain some attachment to life even after their death – moral choice is still possible. Ghosts are, in effect, invited to reconsider the meaning of their life: now that it is over, with what in their earthy existence do they wish to identify themselves? And what do they wish to transcend? Do they wish to relive and reaffirm their most selfish impulses? Or do they want to search within their histories for flickers of generosity and love, however small and faltering these might be? And they can be very small indeed: the redemption of one of Williams’ ghostly characters begins with her remembering her husband getting up in the night to fetch her a glass of water.
Williams’s novels are full of more obvious and dramatic supernatural elements: the succubus, a doppelganger, a sinister cult leader bent on world domination, the Holy Grail, a magical Tarot deck – but for me the most powerful aspect of his fantasy is the way it magnifies the consequences of seemingly small and ordinary choices we make in our earthly lives and assigns to them a cosmic and eternal significance.
Jonathan Walker grew up in Liverpool, but has lived in Glasgow, Cambridge, Swansea, Canterbury, Venice, Sydney and Melbourne. He is the author of a biography of a seventeenth-century Venetian spy, Pistols! Treason! Murder!, and a fantasy novel set in an alternate version of Venice, Five Wounds. His latest novel is a work of weird fiction set in 1980s Liverpool: The Angels of L19, published by Weatherglass Books. He has doctorates in history and creative writing.
“For the want of a nail….” Or, in the case of Denis Mackail’s 1932 novel, David’s Day, for the want of a Mrs. Bowker. Mrs. Bowker is the day woman whose duties, among other things, is to fix breakfast for Mr. Albert Coffin of number 67 Pocklington Road, one of the tens of thousands of row houses thrown up in the suburbs of London just after the First World War.
There is nothing special about number 67, like its neighbors “built like blazes with everything that would more or less hold together”: “mass-produced metal casements and unseasoned joists and unimaginably flimsy doors’; “cheap, crumbling bricks with a kind of grey wash which, temporarily at any rate, hid most of the flaws.” Neither is there anything special about Mr. Coffin, a clerk at Hamhurst’s department store.
But he is a creature of habit, so when Mrs. Bowker fails to turn up one morning, Mr. Coffin’s day is set ever so slightly askew. He snaps at his wife, refuses to rush his breakfast, and arrives at the train station just a moment too late to catch his train. Never in five years had he missed his train. He hesitates, then decides to take the next one, even though it ran the other way round the London loop.
This decision puts him in the crowd rushing for buses and the Tube just in time to bump into a young woman hurrying in the same direction. Their fleeting encounter catches the eye of a smooth operator named Harry Jackson, who steps forward to introduce himself as a long-forgotten acquaintance. Harry charms Gladys — upset at running late for work — into a cab wherein she quickly discovers that Harry has a much different destination in mind.
Within less than an hour, Harry Jackson (real name Jack Harrison) is arrested for an outstanding theft warrant, Gladys quits her job, a City schemer is tipped into financial ruin, and one Lord Midhurst, “the stupidest of a dull lot” but a man of innate loyalty, assures himself of continued employment as a figurehead on various corporate boards.
With each chapter, Mackail sets character caroming off character, producing effects ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some fall in love, some fall in ruin, some take a step up the social ladder, some take a tumble down. An ardent suitor arrives to woo an actress just moments before the start of her West End show’s dress rehearsal, triggering an on-stage disaster that’s a two-page masterpiece of comic writing, the sort of thing that Michael Frayn later constructed his play “Noises Off” from: spontaneous concatenated catastrophes only work when assembled with the precision of Swiss clockworks.
Denis Mackail, 1939, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
From time to time, Mackail doubts his own ability to keep his clock ticking. “Would the chain break off here, just because a manager did or didn’t boast, or because he did or didn’t so something with his fingers?” And indeed, there are moments when the links grow tenuous, when the pace of this day of orchestrated chaos slows and the shadow of entropy creeps over the scene.
Fortunately, if Mackail’s stage direction is occasionally less than flawless, these flaws are offset by his wonderfully shrewd commentary. His is an omniscient narrator wise but not cynical about mankind’s fallibility. Throughout the book, as he moves his characters around at a usually frenzied speed, he still has time to insert his editorial asides: “The true Bright Young Person always practices with an eye, if not an eye and a half, on the crowd, and commits none of her ingenious or ingenuous excesses without making pretty certain that the Daily Dash or the Evening Branch shall here of it….”
He speculates on the nature of fame and success, asking questions we’re still grappling with today. “Is it more successful to have an immense reputation built on sand, or a minute reputation founded on rock?” Mackail makes no attempt to answer them, however. He understood that the joke is entirely about our eternally fruitless efforts to do so.
And as he continues to conduct his particles through their dance of chance encounters, he somehow manages to bring us back to Mr. Coffin, who makes it back to number 67 Pocklington Road at his usual time and by his usual train, contrite for his morning’s angry words to his wife and his angry thoughts about the missing Mrs. Bowker.
But where in all this is David, whose day this is? Well, let’s just say that Mackail has arranged things in such a way that the book ends on a note that is nothing less than sublime.
When David’s Day was first published, reviewers somehow missed the book’s essence. The Times called the book just “another of those amplified personal columns in which Mr. Denis Mackail specializes.” The New York Times judged it “a series of episodes rather than a novel.” They were both wrong: this is pure entertainment, nothing less. Don’t try to take it apart and figure out how the mechanism works: just enjoy how delightfully it marks the passing time.
David’s Day, by Denis Mackail London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932 Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932
Stella Gibbons’s first novel Cold Comfort Farm still resonates, if vaguely, in the popular mind. “Wasn’t there a movie?” Or, “didn’t I see that on TV?” In England, “something nasty in the woodshed,” the phrase invoked by the supposedly mad Aunt Ada Starkadder, proprietress of the farm, is still a cultural touchstone almost 90 years after the book was first published.
But as wonderful a satiric comic masterpiece as Cold Comfort is, the dozen or so of Stella Gibbons’s later novels that I have read are just as — if not more — rewarding because they allow a deeper experience of Gibbons’s greatest literary character: herself.
That is not to say that she wrote the same book again and again, as so often happens with writers who strike the jackpot with their first published work; rather, she creates in each book a different prism (and sometimes more than one) through which she reveals different aspects of herself. To read multiple Stella Gibbons novels is to get to know her better and better, and she is a very satisfactory companion.
She was born in 1902, the first of three children of a quiet and sweet mother who died suddenly when Stella was in her 20s and a volatile father of Irish extraction, a “bad man, but a good doctor” (as she described a character thought to be based on him). Her childhood home life was marked by her father’s rages fueled by his unsatisfied career ambitions. In his 1998 biography, Out of the Woodshed: the Life of Stella Gibbons (Bloomsbury), Stella’s nephew Reggie Oliver quotes a letter from Stella’s daughter Laura (his cousin):
Every few weeks it was ‘That name is not mentioned in this house,’ with an accompanying shudder and pursed lips, as one or other member of the family indulged in some escapade of which the other disapproved. Consequently, sides were taken….
Stella was old enough to be affected by the experience of two world wars and the accompanying changes in British culture and society, as well as by the concomitant destruction of the English countryside and the rise of highways and car culture, all of which bothered her greatly.
Well-educated herself, and a writer who honed her skills on more than 10 years of meeting newspaper deadlines, she lets slip literary references easily understood by any conventionally educated English school graduate; she asserts unapologetically the inherent differences between men and women, the value of marriage and the power of beauty–male and female; money is usually on people’s minds, and she shows she knows how to live on meager earnings. She values tidiness and order, well-turned fashions, and sensitivity to children.
That catalog of subjects and attitudes could lead one to expect a stuffy, garrulous, old-fashioned storyteller. Instead, she takes the dross of mundane lives and spins it into fairy tales that are also down to earth. She peoples her novels with men and women whose aspirations have run aground, but who inhabit a world of metaphysical rebalancings and animistic forces that permit them some escape.
——
Cover of 1935 edition of Bassett.
For the purposes of this essay, I am drawing on only two novels, Bassett (1933) and The Woods in Winter(1970). They come near the start and end of her writing career. And they offer the clearest example of characters that reflect herself.
Bassett was the “conventional” book she was contractually obligated to write in order to convince her publisher to take Cold Comfort. The Woods in Winterwas the last book she wrote for publication, though two other novels appeared posthumously.
Bassett opens with a typically succinct Gibbons observation:
There is a simplicity which comes from living too much in the world, as well as a simplicity which comes from living out of the world.
Hilda Baker belongs to the latter group. She is one of Gibbons’s shabby heroines of no great intellectual shakes or culture, but still worth knowing better. “Sensitive and intelligent people will refuse to believe that Miss Baker could be happy. However, Miss Baker was happy.”
She is also a beneficiary of one of those coincidences Stella regularly employs: Miss Baker (who has no living relatives) has suddenly inherited 200 pounds from a distant uncle. Added to her 180 pounds of savings from her paltry salary at a paper pattern office, she is faced with a dilemma of what to do with so much money. She fears it will “Dribble Away” (Gibbons’s caps) unless she makes a plan.
She responds to an advertisement soliciting “another lady, with some capital” to invest in converting a faded country estate to a boarding house. The response, from a Miss Eleanor Amy Padsoe, is postmarked “Bassett.”
And so we are off.
The letter from Miss Padsoe leaves Miss Baker “in some bewilderment,” and indeed, it is a masterpiece of flighty asides and unintelligible confidences. However, Hilda decides to visit. Once in the village, she accepts a ride from a handsome young man in a smart roadster, a silent girl at his side.
Miss Baker learns that the girl is Queenie Catton, another of Stella’s unlikely heroines and another partial stand-in for the author herself. Raised in a loud, activist socialist household, Queenie doesn’t fit in. She is, as her family admits, “our quiet one….So far she had effortlessly resisted all attempts to make her be anything…”
When Miss Padsoe and Miss Baker eventually meet, it does not start well. They are each horrified by the other, but of course do not say so. They eventually get along, and the flowering of their unlikely friendship is a pleasure to behold.
The young man who gives Miss Baker the ride is George Shelling, half of a cold-blooded aristocratic brother-sister duo who dream up sophisticated amusements while living in the country with their widowed mother. According to Reggie Oliver, Stella admitted she modeled the Shelling menage on the family of the man who ended their engagement; he, too, lived with his sister and mother and traveled in the “free love” set.
Queenie is the bridge between these two storylines as the hired helper to Mrs. Shelling and a loyal supporter of the two Misses.
In contrast to the louche brother and sister, Miss Padsoe and Baker pursue simple pleasures with beneficial results. “At eight-thirty precisely the two ladies, washed, dressed and trim … sat down to their eggs or sardines…. The afternoon was passed in more washing up and in cutting bread and butter for tea at half-past four, and then at half-past six it was time to begin preparing for supper at half-past seven. By ten … they ate cocoa and cake like schoolgirls, and fell into bed at eleven, drunk with unaccustomed work, and slept all night.”
In typical Gibbons fashion, Bassett climaxes in a whirlwind of loose ends being tidied up in a way that is satisfying but not always expected.
Cover of the first edition of The Woods in Winter.
The Woods in Winter, the last novel Gibbons wrote for publication, seems an intentional bookend to Bassett and an autobiographical coda. She sets it in roughly the same period as Bassett , the early 30s. The early action takes place in two settings familiar to her, the seamy precincts of the North London of her girlhood and Hampstead Heath, where she lived much of her adult life.
Its beginning is once-upon-a-time-ish: “Some forty years ago, there used to be in North London a place called St. Philip’s Square…. It was not a true square, but a rectangle, open at one end to a main road, along which trams and buses ran up to Hampstead Heath; a drab yet swarming place….”
As in Bassett , Gibbons creates two characters far apart in social standing and education but reflecting two aspects of herself: Helen Green, the young aspiring poet (Gibbons’s first book was a collection of poems, favorably viewed by important figures of the time), and Ivy Gover, the old fabulist.
Helen is well-educated and moves in high-brow Bohemian circles but is not quite a part of them; Ivy is a barely literate char who has gypsy-like powers and a proletarian sureness of where she stands (she always thinks of Helen as “Miss Green”). Ivy and Helen are connected by the fact that Helen employs Ivy to clean the small, dark cottage she is renting from a mother of a friend of hers; it’s located in the Vale of Health, the same stretch of Hampstead Heath that Gibbons lived in.
Again, as in Bassett , a bit of luck visits a penurious city-dwelling lower-class female of a certain age. Ivy’s great-uncle, whom she hasn’t seen since her girlhood, bequeaths his rundown cottage in the country near where Ivy was born and where she was sent to char for the gentry at age 11.
For Ivy, the Square is a hectic place: “The Square simmered in the early autumn plague of heat, sending up its shrieks and shouts and heavy footsteps to a pair of small ears that carried two beads of heavy gold, chased with a design that looked ancient, on delicate lobes.” In contrast, Helen looks out on “a prospect very different…. a quiet little street, made up of grey pavement and a long brown wood fence, above which looked the innocent head of a may tree whose berries were just beginning to redden, all lit faintly by the gold of the ascending moon. A bird was singing, far off in the dark woods of the Heath–perhaps even a nightingale–anyway, it was a heartbreaking sound, and Helen thought that she was exceedingly unhappy.”
Ivy, suspicious of the lawyer’s big words, goes to Helen to have her read the letter about the bequest. Helen reassures Ivy that the offer is valid and that she is lucky to have it.
By the time she wrote The Woods in Winter, Gibbons had perfected the technique of dueling interior and exterior dialogs, where each participant is saying what they don’t think and thinking what they don’t say, as in this exchange between Ivy and Miss Green:
“Just think, Ivy. It’s beautiful country there. I … know it well…”
Ivy was not interested in what Miss Green knew.
This being a Stella Gibbons novel, there are a number of pairings both theoretical and actual and various courtships, not all successful. Marriage is one of Stella’s interests. Though she shows sympathy for those who take a more transactional approach, she comes down on the side of marrying for love. In this novel, there are two such marriages by its end.
Of Helen and Ivy, Ivy is the more compelling character. Here she is in her first full night in the cottage, with her dog Neb. Ivy has just said farewell to a friend of her late husband who has delivered her mattress in his van and put it in the bedroom upstairs. Just before he takes his final leave, he suggests she air it out.
Ivy ran up. Up the stairs she raced, light as a leaf, with Neb after her, and in a minute down tumbled her mattress, almost into the fire … straightening it with determined kicks from her sturdy small boot. “Airin’! It don’t need no airin’, do it, beauty?…”
The story never leaves the country setting once Ivy is settled there. The characters Stella has created play out their dances under her masterful direction.
Her final chapter brings us to the present of 1970, as Stella is entering the winter of her life (she was 68 when it was published). Helen makes a final visit to the quaint village near the woods of the title. The High Street of Nethersham is now a tangle of automobile traffic, rooftop television antennas and suburban villas.
Helen escapes the traffic and noise to walk to the hilltop demesne of the old Lord (long dead). Helen encounters one of her friends from the old days and asks about the characters whose fates we do not know. Gibbons writes, “Helen had not quite yet come to that age when one hesitates to ask after a contemporary not seen for years. But she was one the edge of it.”
Helen takes one last look at the Lord’s hill and its beeches as she heads toward “the flat, beetle-like tops of the cars, jerking, stopping, jerking, stopping, behind the hedges whose lower branches were clotted with litter and grey with dust.
There they stood, high above her and far away, solemn and still in the waning fire of sunset; towers and castles of rustling green; benign father-gods of the woods; filled with their gently-stirring life in the blue air of summer or roaring slowly in winter’s gales….
The last passage is a word-for-word reprise of Helen’s private musings some 40 years earlier when she proffered her congratulations to Ivy on her good fortune in inheriting the cottage (which Ivy rejected silently). This constancy of Helen’s attitudes within the span of the 40-year narrative is matched by Gibbons’s constancy in her outlook over the nearly 40 years that separate these novels; this is what makes Gibbons’s appeal timeless, just like a fairy tale.
In her monumental reference work, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (Pantheon, New York.1976), Katharine Briggs notes that the term “fairy” is relatively recent and is derived from “the classical three Fates … supernatural ladies who directed the destiny of men ….” Stella and her fictional stand-ins were deeply concerned with getting other people’s lives properly sorted out and in conformance with Gibbons’s deeply felt morality. Following her efforts over the decades is a source of pleasure.
Jean Cocteau once called Victor Hugo’s Choses Vues (Things Seen), the posthumously published collection of notes the poet and novelist collected throughout his lifetime in Paris, “the only great classic of journalism.” Yet it’s never been fully translated into English.
When the book was first published in 1887, the English magazine Booklore informed its readers that it “contains some excellent reading”:
The poet’s observation was of the keenest and most comprehensive nature, and many details which to some might have seemed trivial, were to him indications of possible important events which might or might not lie beyond. Victor Hugo was ever on the look-out for “straws” wherewith to gauge the wind, and long habit in this practice had invested his organ of sight with microscopical powers.
George Routledge and Sons rushed out a two-volume uncredited translation of Choses Vues the same year, including the full contents of the French first edition.
Two volume 1887 Routledge edition of Things Seen.
The first story published in both editions was that of the decline and death of the diplomat Talleyrand, the architect of Napoleon’s undoing at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. By the time of his death, however, Talleyrand had become something of a forgotten oddity in Paris. Hugo reported on Talleyrand’s ignominious embalming:
This man, who possibly might have been a match for Machiavelli had he lived a century or two eailier, had the misfortune to die on the 17th of May, 1838. The doctors came and embalmed the body, and in order to do so Egyptian fashion, they drew the entrails from the side and the brains from the skull. This done, they nailed the mummy down in a coffin lined with white satin, and went away, leaving on the table the brains — those brains which had thought so many things, inspired so many men, built so many edifices, led two revolutions, deceived twenty kings, and kept the world within bound. When the doctors left, a footman entered and saw what they had forgotten. He suddenly remembered that there was a drain in the street outside; so off he went and threw the brains into it.
The centerpiece of Choses Vues is Hugo’s account of the revolution of 1848 as he witnessed it in the streets of Paris. This accounts for over half the length of the first edition and has often been cited as the most accurate first-hand report.
Four volume edition of Choses vues, edited by Hubert Juin.
It was, however, just a fraction of the full set of notes that Hugo left behind. It was not until nearly 100 years after the first edition of Choses Vues that a complete version, edited by the critic and novelist Hubert Juin, was published. Juin’s edition filled four volumes and represented over 1,000 pages — three times the length of the 1887 edition.
As Graham Robb admitted in his 1997 biography of Hugo, “This vast collection of personal and historical anecdotes is usually pillaged, as it is in this biography, for its illustrative gems.” But, Robb argued, it deserved to be considered as a composition in its own right — indeed, that it may represent his best work: “a fragmented view of what his work might have become without the all-consuming desire to be a financial success and the owner of a coherent philosophy.”
Another Hugo biographer, Andre Maurois, agreed. Hugo had two distinct styles, he wrote: “one of which Sainte-Beuve said he could never shed ‘his gaudiness, his pomposo‘; and the other, of Choses vues “remained that of the perfect reporter.” An early critic, Ernest William Henley, felt that Hugo the reporter was a relevation for those familiar with his pomposo:
When Hugo wrote for himself he wrote almost as simply and straightforwardly as Dumas. The effect is disconcerting. You rub your eyes in amazement. It is evidently Hugo. But Hugo plain, sober, direct? Hugo without rhetoric? Hugo declining antithesis and content to be no gaudier than his neighbours?
Robb suggests that Hugo’s obsession with fitting his creations into preconceived designs undermined the truth inherent in his less artful reportage. “Without the need to make all the data point in the same direction, Hugo could have gone on collecting information ad infinitum, spontaneously generating whole libraries of text like one of those super-efficient organisms he found so engrossing.”
And gather he could. Reading Choses vues in the 1950s, the Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton expressed his awe at Hugo’s ability to take in details: “Hugo has the capacity to record like a tape machine, a memory like that of the Polynesians or of Scotland Yard!” Aldous Huxley considered Hugo “that consumate journalist.”
Victor Hugo in 1848.
As far as I can determine, no one has tried to update or expand Routledge’s anonymous 1887 English translation. Which is a shame, for it’s clear that there are many things still to be revealed to English readers. Joanna Richardson, another Hugo biographer, notes that the full edition includes, for example, nine separate “erotic entries” for September 1871. The Routledge edition also skips almost everything Hugo wrote about the Franco-Prussian War.
Illustration of Leon Gambetta’s escape by balloon, Paris, 7 October 1870.
This account of the departure by balloon of the escape of Léon Gambetta during the siege of Paris in 1870, for example, which was quoted in Richard Holmes’ Falling Upwards:
There were whispers running through the crowd: “Gambetta’s going to leave! Gambetta’s going to leave!” And there, in a thick overcoat, under an otter-fur cap, near the yellow balloon in a huddle ofmen, I caught sight of Gambetta. He was sitting on the pavement and pulling on fur-lined boots.
He had a leather bag slung across his shoulders. He took it off, clambered into the balloon basket, and a young man, the aeronaut, tied the bag into the rigging above Gambetta’s head. It was 10.30, a fine day, a slight southerly wind, a gentle autumn sun. Suddenly the yellow balloon took off carrying three men, one of them Gambetta. Then the white balloon, also carrying three men, one of them waving a large tricolour flag. Under Gambetta’s balloon was a small tricolour pennant. There were cries of “Vive la Republique!”
Charles-Henri Sanson and the guillotine.
The Routledge edition does, however, include this early example of dark tourism, from a visit to the home of Charles-Henri Sanson, the chief executioner to both King Louis XVI and the first French republic (for which he guillotined his former employer):
One day an English family, consisting of a father, mother, and three lovely blonde daughters arrived. Their aim was to see the guillotine….
The blade was pulled up and released several times at the request of the young girls. One of them, the youngest and the prettiest was not satisfied, however. She asked the bourreau to give her a detailed description of the procedure known as la toilette des condamnes. She still wasn’t satisfied. Finally she turned to the bourreau [executioner].
“Monsieur Sanson?” she said timidly.
“Mademoiselle?” said the bourreau.
“What do you do when a man is on the scaffold? How do you tie him down?”
The bourreau explained this dreadful procedure, and said to her: “We call it enfourner. [Literally, to put in the oven.]
“Well, Monsieur Sanson,” said the young girl, “I want you to put me in the oven.”
The bourreau winced. He protested. The young girl insisted. “I want to be able to say that I was tied down on that thing,” she said.
Sanson looked at her parents. They replied: “If that is what she wants, do it.”
He had to give in. The bourreau made the young miss sit down, he bound her legs together with rope, he tied her arms behind her back, he laid her on the bascule and buckled the leather strap around her body. He wanted to stop there.
“No, no, you haven’t finished,” she protested.
Sanson leveled the bascule, put the young girl’s head in the lunette, and closed its two halves together. Only then was she content.
Later, in telling the story, Sanson said, “I was waiting for the moment when she would say ‘You still haven’t finished. Let the blade fall.'”
Helen Bevington, who read an expanded French edition of Choses vues in the late 1960s, wrote admiringly of the book in her own journal, Along Came the Witch:
An appealing kind of writing in France, in a sense notation, is (or was?) choses vues. It is, of course, the title of a book by Victor Hugo, from which the name may come: things seen, noted because there they are to look at. In America we haven’t much taste for such writing. In prose we require plots and conflicts. In poetry we have little talent for gazing at the view.
Victor Hugo was a passionate observer, partial to death scenes. He had an appetite for extinction, a man sure to be on hand at the sound of a death rattle or the passing of a funeral procession. The Choses Vues contains many a moment of mortality, pictured with gusto — the funeral of Napoleon, the death of the Duke of Orleans, the funeral of Mademoiselle Mars, the death of Madame Adelaide, the passing of Balzac. At the final curtain Hugo was unfailing, an absorbed witness and notetaker.
Perhaps someone will take on the job of translating the full Hubert Juin edition of Choses vues and give English readers a chance to experience this classic of journalism. Until then, you can make do with the two Routledge volumes, which are available on the Internet Archive: Volume One; Volume Two.
Choses vues, by Victor Hugo Available from Gallimard in a two-volume edition based the 1980 Hubert Juin edition
Little Victims is not a good novel, but it is a fascinating one. When it was published in 1932, it earned Richard Rumbold the censure of the Roman Catholic Church for its open discussion of homosexuality in public schools and Oxford, but for today’s reader its far more interesting aspects relate to its psychological aspects — often apparently subconscious — and its glimpses into the lives of the trailing edge of the Bright Young Things of Evelyn Waugh’s youth.
It’s not a good novel because it’s shoddily assembled and emotionally overwrought. Rumbold purports to tell the story of Christopher Harmsworth as seen by one of his schoolmates and friends, but he also tossed in personal letters, first-person passages, and liberal use of an omniscient narrator. The story centers around the unhappy triangle of Christopher, his tyrannical and brutish father, and his high-strung, overaffectionate, and often unstable mother. When in contact with each other, these three compounds hover on the edge of an explosive reaction.
It’s clear to Christopher that his parents should never have married. Aside from money and a peerage, his mother’s family had nothing going for them and many things going against them:
Old Lord W__ was in the last stages of debauchery brought on by habitual drunkenness and constant sexual intercourse with common prostitutes during his frequent visits to London. His wife was in a lunatic asylum, and his eldest son had committed suicide for no apparent reason.
Since they did, the next worst thing they could have done was to have children. Unfortunately, his mother became pregnant soon after the wedding, and produced little Christopher, “the unfortunate victim of the muddleheadedness and idiotic notions of his forebears.”
In the race for the lion’s share of the blame for victimizing the boy, Christopher’s mother is the clear winner. She was overly affectionate. “As thousands of men were being slaughtered in the mud of Flanders,”
She suckled his lips and gave him a thousand kisses, which were her husband’s due; she slept next his bed, and in the morning he was brought into hers, and she cuddled him between the sheets. She petted him, she took him everywhere, she spoilt him. She called him “dearest” and “darling” and “sweetest,” and held him up to everybody to be admired. It was not affection, it was passion.
No wonder, then, when Colonel Harmsworth decides to send Christopher off to boarding school at 14, one leg of the triangle is severed completely: “From that moment, Christopher took a violent dislike to his father, and continued to dislike him for the rest of his life.”
Sheltered and innocent, Christopher is ill-prepared for the realities of his public school: “Homosexuality was rife there, not only among the boys themselves, but between the masters and the boys.” To Rumbold’s somewhat self-righteous narrator, “unless you are a fool or a saint it is impossible to live in a community of perverts without becoming aware of and suspectible to its practices.” In his eyes, the young man left the school four years later accustomed to thinking of homosexuality as “the most prevalent and natural of sex manifestations.”
Going up to Oxford doesn’t improve the situation. Inspecting his tutor’s bookshelves, Christopher spots, hidden behind a set of Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic such titles as Sexual Physiology, Advice to Young Men and Sexual Life in Ancient Greece. Not long after settling into his digs, Christopher is visited by a fop in a blue silk shirt and carrying an ebony walking stick who invites him to a meeting of the Sitwell Society: “Yes — Edith and Osbert and Sache; they come down and speak every term.”
Christopher attempts to set himself on the upright path with a heartfelt address on socialism to the Oxford Union, only to see that “Already he was marked, stamped — as a pervert, and he would never be able to live it down.” He dons his mantle of victimhood with little resistance. After all, “the system’s to blame — that bloody system, which tries to educate you according to its absurd standards and perverts your sensibilities in the process.”
By his third year, the bright, healthy young man has a grey complection, skin roughened from “the unrelieved application of cheap cosmetics.” His bedroom as the appearance of “an untidy beauty parlor.” He spends most of his time in the company of the likes of Chum Price, a Brian Howard-like figure of extreme aestheticism who proclaims his hobby as “rescuing pretty boys.”
It’s at one of Chum’s parties that Christopher meets Henry Armitage, an older man from London who “seemed to know and to have known everybody worth knowing.” Henry takes the young man under his wing, inviting him to his London flat and for weekends at his country estate. Henry is married to Isabella Armitage, a writer and “one of London’s most renowned Lesbians.”
If the Armitages sound suspiciously like Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, there’s a reason. They are. Little Victims is a thinly-veiled roman-à-clef that takes Rumbold’s feelings toward his parents, friends, and lovers and winds them up to a fever pitch.
In real life, Rumbold became one of Harold’s protégés and lovers while at Oxford. While Christopher’s narrator portrays Henry Armitage as a sophisticated seducer, the reality is that Rumbold was a bit of an opportunist himself, particularly when it came to indulging in his fantasies. Nicolson would later write of Rumbold, “He had no control over his fantasies and day-dreams, over the alternating gusts of elation and melancholy that assailed him, over his almost incredible ignorance and therefore suspicion of the world around him.”
Rumbold published Little Victims while still at Oxford, and quickly faced the price of his youthful choices. When attending a service in the private chapel of the Old Palace in Oxford soon after its publication, Father Ronald Knox refused to offer him the Sacrament.
“When he reached me,” Rumbold later recalled, “He snatched the silver plate our of my hands and passed it one to the next person.” When Rumbold later wrote Knox demanding an explanation, Knox replied, “A few weeks ago I heard from the Archbishop of Birmingham that somebody had called attention to your novel, and asked if some public notice ought not to be taken of it.” The Archbishop told Knox that Rumbold ought not to be admitted to Communion. “The whole book is foul and offensive, and unless he withdraws it from circulation, and says he is sorry for having pbulished it, I do not see how we can allow him to receive Holy Communion.”
“I have written a very moral book,” Rumbold told reporters when news of the Archbishop’s decision became public. “I have attacked every kind of sexual licence, but my Archbishop, like most of the Catholic hierarcy, has no powers of discrimination. I wish I knew what he objects to in my novel.”
“I was at a Catholic school. People seem to believe that Catholic schools are immune from vice and different from Protestant schools. That is untrue. They are worse. How can I make Catholic schools pure unless I point out first of all how bad they are?” To some extent, he had a point. Its settings aside, Little Victims is as much a moralistic tract as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, including its melodramatic ending (Christopher finds himself incapable of heterosexual love, goes mad, and shoots himself).
Rumbold told reporters that he would appeal to the Pope. “I feel sure his Holiness will reinstatement, being a man of great sense and intelligence,” he assured them. He swore that he would travel to Rome for a private audience with the Pope, but there’s no evidence that ever took place.
Richard Rumbold and the Oxford English Club, from an item in The Tatler, March 1933.
Rumbold’s was a life of bold promises and disappointing results. If he’d hoped that Little Victims would launch him as a bright young talent, he was soon discouraged. As William Plomer later wrote in his introduction to A Message in Code: The Diary of Richard Rumbold 1932-1961, “It was the work of a confused young man who had been subjected to exceptional strains, was unsure of himself but ambitious, and was wildly and rashly trying to assert himself.”
Rumbold suffered from ill-health, depression, restlessness, and a near-constant sense of dissatisfaction with his own life and the state of the world around him. He trained as an RAF pilot during the war but lost his commission after flying an Anson under the Menai Bridge. He translated a collection of Flaubert’s letters and wrote a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but never managed to produce the great novel or poems he felt he should. In March 1961, while working with his friend and loyal companion Hilda Young in hotel room at Palermo, he stepped into the bedroom and, moments later, fell from the window and was killed instantly. The Italian coroner would not rule it a suicide.
The one subject that most interested Rumbold was himself. Little Victims was his first and least successful attempt to portray his life and his intense feelings toward his parents and others. He later revisited the story in his autobiography, My Father’s Son, first published pseudonymously as “Richard Lumford” in 1949. His third version can be seen in the diaries edited by Plomer. Plomer asked for its readers to think kindly of his late friend:
I myself knew Richard well for nearly a quarter of a century. I found him, in the face of his recurrent troubles, a courageous and exceptionally honest man, warmly affectionate and unembittered. Not one line in the papers he left and nothing I have heard about him, whether in his lifetime or after his death, has made me think otherwise. His courage and honesty light up the evidence of his lifelong battle to overcome his troubles and fulfil himself as a person and as a writer.
Little Victims, by Richard Rumbold London: Fortune Press, 1933
I love publishers who made a practice of listing their other releases on the flyleaf or dust jacket, because these can be the clues that lead me to a forgotten gem.
But sometimes, these lists are just a set of dusty tracks. Here, for example, is the list of titles that appears on the back of one of Peter Davies’ 1960 releases.
The first entry, Kathleen Sully’s Skrine, is quite familiar. I wrote about it in 2018 while I was on the trail of Sully’s remarkable oeuvre. At the time, I wrote of this bleak post-apocalyptic fable, “None of the four novels by Kathleen Sully I’ve read so far is anything quite like the others, but I feel safe in saying that Skrineis the most unlike the rest.” Having since read all 19 of Sully’s books, I can say that statement still holds true.
But I recognized none of the other titles in the list, which led me to start researching. Here are my findings, which should, if nothing else, convince you that like archaeologists and prospectors, searchers after neglected literary gems have to sift through their share of junk and dust along the way.
• The Angel in the Coffin, by Michael Ellis
Michael Ellis was the pseudonym of Stephen Llewellyn, an English reporter turned New Zealand soldier turned writer who died at the age of 47, not long after this second novel was published. The story follows a Dutch freighter taking European emigrants to New Zealand. One of the few reviews I’ve been able to locate said that Ellis/Llewellyn wrote “as if he had plums in his month” — whatever that means.
• All the Loyal People, by David Stone
Stone’s second novel. His first was a well-received spoof of the roman policier a la Simenon et al.. This one recounts a year in the life of a society reporter and failed novelist who bounces between a dingy flat and a series of parties, getting involved with a Gatsby-like operator and (of course) a mysterious beautiful young woman. The Observer’s reviewer called it “A most able satire on London’s scruffy hinterland,” but both The Evening Standard and New York Times wondered about the author’s real intent: “The narrator’s self-disgust keeps breaking in on the light comedy and suggests that the author was in two minds about the kind of book he was writing.” Several reviewers also found the marginal characters more interesting than the protagonist, which does seem to be a chronic problem among young-man-coming-of-age tales.
• The Crop Dusters, by Geoff Taylor
An adventure novel in the Nevil Shute vein, about a group of former RAAF pilots who gather to fly crop dusters in a battle against a plague of locusts in New South Wales. It’s full of details about flying the old prop planes, with the drama of the battle against the insects. “Written in unpretentious but sharply evocative prose,” wrote one Australian reviewer. “Sunny in mood, simple in plan, subtle in execution,” concluded the Birmingham Post.
• After the Storm, John Gilbert
This appears to be a pastiche on the Victorian tragedy of the good girl gone wrong. I say appears because the only review I could locate was brief and buried in the pages of Pacific Islands Monthly, an Australian magazine. After her fiance drowns himself and leaves her pregnant and penniless, Gilbert’s heroine puts her good looks to work and finds that the wages of sin can result in a decent living if you’re sharp about it.
• Stranger in Allanford, by E. C. Axford
A wartime evacuee returns to the village and home where she was hosted as a child. “A novel of compelling quality” is as much of a review as I can find. The author was an Oxford headmaster and this appears to have been his only venture into fiction.
• Mutiny in the Attic, by Betty Singleton
Hard to tell if this is sweet or saccharine. Four pensioners living in Eventide Home revolt against the home’s management and take off on an adventure. “A charming tale … the characterisation uncommonly good” said the Bristol Evening Post, one of the few papers to bother reviewing it. Despite the suggestion of malice in the cover illustration, I’m pretty sure that Lord of the Flies in an old age home this ain’t.
• The Self-Made Man, by Sylvia Cooper
Something of an odd choice of title for an English publisher. It’s about a Detroit trucking entrepreneur who looks back over his life at sixty, finding himself less satisfied with his personal successes than his business. The Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the few U.S. papers to give it a review and that one was negative: “The novel, an unfortunate waste of writing talent, falls flat from every viewpoint.”
• The Young Kings, by Laurence Moody
Two long short stories, one about an encounter in the Alps and the other set on a Greek island. Moody’s later novel The Ruthless Ones was later filmed as What Became of Jack and Jill?. Other than the fact that the first story involves mountaineering, I’ve been unable to track down any other details. Moody also wrote The Roxton Kibbutz, about an ill-conceived attempt to establish a commune in the early 1970s (those wacky hippies!). He may or may not be the same person as the later TV director (Taggart, et al.).
All these were listed on the back of The Initial Error, by Lydia Holland, which itself appears to have received no reviews. Which is surprising, given that she was the daughter of the prolific writer and reviewer Leonora Eyles and the one-time TLS editor D. L. Murray, ex-wife of the Italian critic Mario Praz, and well-regarded translator of Alberto Moravia and others.
So, all in all, a disappointing lot. However, if you happen to stumble across one of the above and find I’ve grossly underestimated its merits, please let us know.
An illustration from a French edition of the works of Paul de Kock.
“A__ has been trying to inoculate me with Paul de Kock, who, she assures me, is a moral writer, and with whose books our tables, chairs, sofas, and beds, are covered, as with the unclean plagues of Egypt,” the actress Fanny Kemble wrote her friend Harriet Martineau in 1842. “They are very clever, very funny, very dirty, abominably immoral, and I do not think I can read any more of them; for though I confess to having laughed till my sides ached over some parts of what I read, I was, upon reflection and upon the whole, disgusted and displeased.”
Kemble seems to have shared the opinion of many literate people of her time when it came to the man who was, for much of the 19th Century, France’s most popular novelist. Many were those who enjoyed his books. Fewer were those who would praise it. “The French writer whose works are best known in England is Monsieur Paul de Kock,” wrote William Thackeray in 1841. But, he cautioned, “Talk to a French educated gentleman about this author, and he shrugs his shoulders, and says it is pitoyable.” “Paul de Kock? he is very witty,” a woman once said to Jane Carlyle. “Yes, but also very indecent; and my uncle would not relish indecencies read aloud to him by his daughters.” Ralph Waldo Emerson admitted to having read one of de Kock’s stories, but hastened to add, “Its fun is so low that I will never lend it.”
Who was this controversial figure, whose books were considered as addictive and illicit as heroin? Well, he was a man whose entire life was consumed in his work. Starting with his first novel, L’Enfant de ma femme, published in 1811 when he was just 18, he proceeded to write, according to one biographer “de façon industrielle ensuite un roman en un mois chaque année” [in an industrial fashion followed one novel a month each year). Born in Paris, he claimed to have rarely left the city and spent most of his days at his desk in his house on the Boulevard St. Martin. The one luxury he allowed himself as the years passed was to purchase a house protected by high walls from the noise of the streets and curiosity of passers-by.
Paul de Kock’s study, looking out on the Boulevard St. Martin. Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby & Co. edition of The Memoirs of Paul de Kock.
At first, however, the streets of Paris served as one of his primary inspirations. His book of essays, Scenes of Parisian Life, closes with a piece titled “Paris from My Window,” in which he records the life he observes on the boulevard in front of his house. Around two P.M., he notices an elderly couple promenading along. It is M. Mollet and his wife:
M. Mollet is a short, full-bodied, red-faced, knock-kneed man who constantly wears an entire suit of flannel and above that two shirts, thin drawers, thick woollen trousers, two waistcoats, a coat, a frock coat and an overcoat. You can understand that this enormous mass moves only with difficulty. When M. Mollet wants to get his handkerchief out of his pocket, he begins by sighing, then he stops, lets go of his wife’s arm, gives her his cane to hold, and tries to make use of his hands; but he is never quite certain in which of his pockets he has put his handkerchief, and the examination is often so long that Madame Mollet ends by lending her handkerchief to her husband, who takes it with a grateful look and murmurs, “Thank you, dearest!”
By 1830, he had surpassed the likes of Balzac in terms of popularity. His books typically sold 2-3,000 copies, while Balzac, Georges Sand, and Eugene Sue were pleased to sell more than 1,000 of theirs. “There never was an author more popular in the real meaning of the word,” Théophile Gautier later wrote. “He was read by everybody, by the statesman as well as by the commercial traveller and the schoolboy, by the great ladies in society and by the grisettes.” De Kock’s knowledge of the everyday life of Parisians earned the admiration not just of his readers but of some of his colleagues. He “had the advantage of being absolutely like his readers,” argued Gautier. “He shared their ideas, their opinions, their prejudices, their feelings.” In fact, when the works of Charles Dickens first began to be published in France, his French publisher invoked the name of Paul de Kock in advertisements to gain the confidence of readers.
A caricature of Paul de Kock from 1842.
In her book Mastering the Marketplace: Book Subtitle: Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France, Anne O’Neil-Henry, one of the few academics in recent decades to take an interest in de Kock, calls him “the July Monarchy’s bourgeois writer par excellence,” but acknowledges that “by the 1830s his name carried a specific connotation: ‘Paul de Kock’ signified ‘bad’ literature, a sort of … marker of poor taste.” O’Neil-Henry argues that this is missing the point. “While critics around 1830 began to use his name synonymously with lowbrow literature, many of their reviews evinced an appreciation of some elements of his work and recognition of his successful command of the taste of modern readers.” “Simply put,” she writes, “’Paul de Kock’ did not always signify ‘Paul de Kock.”
In 1835, the English publisher Marston and Company advertised a collection of de Kock’s works that would be “carefully weeded from the indelicacy and impiety from which scarcely any French work is entirely exempt.” At the same time, however, they boasted that “A more thorough insight into French manners and customs may be acquired from one of de Kock’s novels than from fifty volumes of travels.”
His reputation throughout Europe was, in the mid-19th Century, that of an exceptional novelist. The young Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote his father in 1844, “Paul de Kock is unquestionably the most amusing and the most natural of the novelists. The interest of his works never flags for a moment, and even his pathetic scenes are perfectly true and unaffected.” Leo Tolstoy was a fan.“Don’t tell me any of that nonsense that Paul de Kock is immoral,” he was quoted as saying, “He is more or less what the French call leste and gaulois, free and rough, but he is never immoral.” When the French critic Ferdinand Brunetière visited Pope Leo XIII in the early 1880s, the Pope asked, “And how is the good Paolo de Koko?” In his book Sex Lives of the Popes, Nigel Cawthorne writes that Pope Gregory XVI shared his appreciation for the novelist. Benjamin Disraeli so admired de Kock that he worked an endorsement into his novel Henrietta Temple:
“Have you ever read Paul de Kock’s books?” “Never,” said Ferdinand. “What a fortunate man to be arrested ! Now you can read Paul de Kock! By Jove, you are the most lucky fellow I know!”
Illustration by John Sloan from the Quinby edition of Adhémar.
De Kock could be counted on to provide entertainment value for money. To judge his merits, I tried That Rascal Gustave, one of the two dozen de Kock novels that were packaged in a mammoth edition published by Mathieson in London in the 1880s and available on the Internet Archive (link).
The book opens with young Gustave de Moranval being caught in a Paris love-nest with an 18-year-old girl from his home village by his uncle. The uncle dismisses the girl with a pay-off and dispatches Gustave to the home of M. de Berly in the Loire Valley with the aim of getting him married off to de Berly’s niece. The niece loves another, however, and Gustave’s roving eye gets him into some awkward situations. There are several incidents involving jumping from windows and having to put on women’s clothes.
In the scene that probably earned the book its scandalous reputation, Gustave finds himself hiding under the bed on the night that the niece and her new husband return to chez de Berly.
They fastened the door, and prepared to retire, so there were no means of escape for him, and he would be only too lucky if he were not discovered, as he could not even be taken for a thief since Aurelia knew him, and thus Julia [Gustave’s amoureux du moment] must be compromised; he made up his mind, therefore, to stay under the bed, happy if no one should turn him out of his hiding place. He lay on his back, hoping that Providence would not allow either monsieur or madame to look under the bed, as timorous souls so frequently do, waiting in perfect silence, without daring to move, and hardly to breathe, trusting that love or chance would enable him to escape.
As the couple prepares for bed, the bride is taken aback at her husband’s insistence on wearing a flannel vest and cotton night-cap, and reminds him of the Bible’s instructions: “When we are married, we must mutually meet each other’s desires, and even forestall them, and it allows us to enjoy the pleasures of marriage by begetting children in our own likeness.” What he then hears “opened his eyes as to the real character of the ‘prude’ he had first met at the residence of M. de Berly. Gustave finally manages to escape in the next chapter, entitled, “Julia Loses Her Beauty and Gustave Loses His Trousers.”
M. Berly falls down and finds himself on top of Gustave, an illustration by George B. Luks from the Quinby edition of That Rascal Gustave.
The next three years take Gustave on a grand tour of the salons and bedrooms of Spain, Italy, and England. He finds England’s tastes particularly mystifying:
Nobody can care for England who does not find his chief pleasure in horse-riding, cock-fighting, betting, punch, and plum-pudding, and it strikes a Frenchman as very strange to see all the ladies leave the room soon after the dessert is put on the table, whilst the gentlemen remain for such mirth as may be inspired by drinking burnt brandy.
In the end, he finds his way back to his home village, where the young woman he’d been caught with in Paris and born his child and won her way into the uncle’s affection – proving that “that virtue, gentleness, talent, and beauty can well replace birth and wealth.” And they all live happily ever after.
“It was Gustave especially which got me talked about,” de Kock later wrote in his memoirs:
Not in terms of praise by everybody. Oh, no. Many persons found the book rather too coarse, but I for my part declare, and I do so without a blush, that neither at that time nor later, did I feel the slightest remorse for my crime. To speak frankly, come, can you expect a novel called Gustave ou le Mauvais Sujet to have anything in common with Telemaque — unless it be where the son of Ulysses goes to chat, on the sly, in the caves, with the beautiful nymph Eucharis?…. At any rate many ladies were very gracious to me after reading Gustave. Ladies, evidently, who liked bad boys. There used to be ladies of that kind in those days.
To produce at the rate he did, de Kock understandably relied on certain formulas. French critic Jacques Migozzi has described it as, “Playing allegro presto with mistakes, surprises with a narrative or playful function, coincidences, misunderstandings or mystifications, and spicing up his story with burlesque episodes and bantering.” De Kock’s penchant for comedy made him the favorite of many readers. “When the vapours have smothered the sun, and when it rains, as it does always, instead of inhaling charcoal! or leaping from the Pont Neuf,” wrote John Sanderson in his 1838 book, The American in Paris, “I go into a cabinet de lecture, and read Paul de Kock. No author living can carry one so laughingly through a wet day.”
Illustration from an Italian edition of Soeur Anne.
There’s a good share of slapstick in That Rascal Gustave, enough to make one wonder why his novels haven’t been mined for more movie scripts. Here, for example, is how Gustave’s village love escapes from one awkward situation:
Susan, on hearing this, put both her legs out of the window, and this time she reached the ground, but she stumbled against Thomas, who knocked up against Mother Lucas, who fell over the greengrocer, who fell over the grocer, and so on. Pushing each other along, they got as far as the chateau, and then they did not push each other any more, and it was just as well, as they might otherwise have fallen into the moat which surrounds it.
At the same time, he could also be counted on to end on a moral note, reinforcing good bourgeois values.
By the time of his death in 1871, de Kock’s reputation had already begun to wane. Part of the problem, according to Gautier, was that he had unwittingly become a historical novelist:
His works contain the description of manners in a civilisation differing as greatly from our own as does that the traces of which are found in Pompeii; his novels, which people read formerly for amusement’s sake, will henceforth be consulted by erudites desirous of recreating life in that old Paris which I knew in my youth and of which the vestiges will soon have vanished…. Some of his novels have the same effect upon me as Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans; I seem to read in them the story of the last of the Parisians, invaded and submerged by American civilisation.
Ironically, it was just about the same time that de Kock’s novels gained traction, if not esteem, among readers outside France. Advertisements of his books began to be found in the pages of magazines from Manchester to Minnetonka, often tweaking his titles to play up their suggestiveness. Thus, Pantalon became Madame Pantaloons; Gustave, ou le mauvais sujet [the bad fellow] became That Rascal Gustave; Le démon de L’Alcove became The Vampire. Others needed no help, though: Cards, Women and Wine; The Courtesan; The Cuckold; Bride of the First Night; Wife, Husband, and Lover.
Article from the Pall Mall Gazette, 1871.
Not everyone thought this was a good thing. A bookseller in Liverpool was brought up on charges of trafficking in impure literature for carrying such titles as That Rascal Gustave. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was scandalized to find that a Cincinnati bookstore carried more copies of de Kock’s novels than of his sermons. One English traveler, reporting from Lima, Peru in 1881, lamented that “There was not a single decent edition of Don Quixote to be found in all the shops of the city,” but that there was “a brisk sale for indecent photographs and cheap editions of Paul de Kock novels.” A New England sea captain held the books responsible for the moral decay of many a young sailor: “Cheap novels, which record the imaginary exploits of highwaymen and pirates, constitute the chief entertainment” and “contribute their corrupting influences to poison the minds of hundreds of young and inexperienced sailors, and thus pave their way to those ‘houses of death,’ from which ‘none that go ever return again; neither take they hold of the paths of life.’”
A complete set of the 42-volume edition of the works of Paul de Kock published by Frederick J. Quinby Co., Boston.
Yet at almost the same time, several publishers outdid themselves in releasing ornate editions of de Kock’s works. Mathieson & Co. in London, George Barrie & Sons in Philadelphia, and the Jefferson Press and Frederick J. Quinby Company in Boston all published sets of twenty or more volumes. Quinby’s was the most elaborate, with red or teal blue leather bindings, Art nouveau flowers ornamentations, and illustrations by John Sloan, William Glackens, and others. In fact, it was a bit too elaborate, as Quinby only managed to publish 42 of a planned total of 50 volumes before going out of business in 1908.
Ad for a free copy of Gustave with a subscription to Pearson’s Magazine.
By the turn of the 20th Century, however, de Kock’s name had become synonymous for lowbrow in most English-speaking countries. He pops up several times in 1904 Dublin as depicted in Joyce’s Ulysses. “One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock, with a loud proud knocker, with a cock carracarracarra cock.” Molly Bloom recalls that her first lover “offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.” Yet he’d also become tame enough for Pearson’s Magazine to advertise an edition of That Rascal Gustave as a freebie with new subscriptions and the Boston Globe to serialize one of his novels, The Maid of Belleville, on the front page of its Sunday magazine in 1917.
Today, if we set aside over-priced print on demand reprints of his ancient editions, the works of Paul de Kock haven’t seen a new English edition (or translation) in at least a century. Even among bibliophiles, his work is now so devalued that a complete set of the Quinby edition in excellent condition was sold recently at auction for little more than $10 a volume. While he’s no candidate for elevation to the same shelf as Balzac or Flaubert, somewhere in his pile of hundreds of titles, there must be a few that merit rediscovery as, say, a 19th Century French counterpart to P.G. Wodehouse or some other prolific comic master. Anyone up for a deep-dive?
Julia Rank is a London-based theatre critic, historical researcher and academic proofreader. Her favourite things include theatrical fiction, interwar chorus girls, and the American baritone and film star Gordon MacRae. For more information, visit her website, 
You can browse the complete Michael Walmer catalogue and order online at 
