Covers of the first U.S. editions of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters and Ring Lardner’s The Young Immigrunts.
“My parents are both married and ½ of them are very good looking.”
This is the story of two very different writers, one an American comic writer of genius, playwright and sportswriter, the other a young English girl with terrible spelling.
The American was Ring Lardner. Lardner began his career as a sports journalist with a particular interest in baseball, widened his remit to humorous columns, and became one of the best-known comic writers of his time. His novel You Know Me Al, written in the form of letters from a baseball player to a friend, is still extremely funny, while his theatrical parodies display a sardonic surrealism (a line from one of those short plays is still quoted in anthologies: “The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week”).
Lardner was the epitome of the hard-drinking, sports-loving American writer, admired by Hemingway, used as the basis for a character by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and immensely popular with the public; and he had a journalist’s scepticism. In 1919, the world was delighted by a very short novel apparently written by a nine-year-old girl called Daisy Ashford. The book – which had apparently been discovered by the British writer Frank Swinnerton, who passed it on to Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie – was called The Young Visiters. It recounted the story of Ethel, a young Victorian woman, and her social-climbing older friend, Mr Salteena, written in a breathless pastiche of the romances of the day. The Young Visiters was, and still is, unintentionally hilarious, and at the end of the First World War became an international best seller. Ashford, now in her early 20s, was a celebrity.
I shall put some red ruge on my face said Ethel because I am very pale owing to the drains in this house. Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters (1919)
Most of the world took Ashford at her word and The Young Visiters at face value, but there were those who were less convinced, and indeed, there is something about the book that suggests another hand was at work (lines like “he sat down and eat the egg which Ethel had so kindly laid for him” always seem a bit knowingly comic to me). One person who thought the book was a fraud was Winston Churchill; another was Ring Lardner. “I didn’t, and I don’t, believe Daisy Ashford in spite of Swinnerton’s testimony and that of other ‘witnesses.’” he once wrote.
But Lardner did more than express his doubts about The Young Visiters, he rewrote it. Or rather, he wrote a parody of it, called The Young Immigrunts.
“The Young Immigrunts” as originally published in The Saturday Evening Post.
First serialised in The Saturday Evening Post in 1920, The Young Immigrunts abandons the plot of Ashford’s book and its musings on social advancement and the aristocracy and replaces them with something completely American: the story of the Lardner family’s move from Goshen, Indiana, to their new home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The comedy is now about the awfulness of their road trip (and the father’s vile temper and reactions to said trip), but as the story is told by Lardner’s young son Bill, the book is able to retain the same youthful, naïve tone of its original.
We see the world through Bill’s eyes but, where Ashford’s prose is (apparently) unwittingly funny and unobservant, Lardner’s is very knowing, and directed at an adult readership. The Father and Mother are constantly sniping at one another, the journey is a nightmare, and the various cops, kids, and landladies that the family run into are a gallery of grotesques.
Will you call us at ½ past 5 my mother reqested to our lanlady as we entered our Hudson barracks.
I will if I am awake, she replid useing her handkerchief to some extent.
It’s clear from reading The Young Immigrunts that whatever his views on the original, Lardner must have enjoyed reading it. His use of language, the turns of phrase he adopts, the mixture of literary styles and pure illiteracy, take Ashford’s text as a template and a jumping-off point for Lardner’s own viewpoint. Sport, particularly baseball, features heavily (there’s even (possibly) a reference to the famous “Black Sox” baseball scandal.
Ring Lardner and his The Young Immigrunts alter ego.
The result is a book that’s a note-perfect parody of The Young Visiters – “We will half to change our close replid my mother steping into a mud peddle in front of the hotel with an informal look” – but also takes the text into a new, Lardnerian direction. It’s a masterpiece that works perfectly whether you’ve read the original or not.
And it contains what many people – or rather, all sane people – consider to be the funniest line in the history of literature (a line so memorable that at least two books about Lardner have been named after it).
I can’t really follow it so I’ll just say goodbye and leave you with the line. Here it is:
Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly. Shut up he explained.
David Quantick is a writer with seven novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Ricky’s Hand, was published in August 2022. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
The Young Immigrunts, by Ring Lardner Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1920
On the final page of Mightier than the Sword (1912), a novel about journalists and newspapers, the protagonist dies a lonely death in the middle of a maddened crowd. Humphrey Quain is a reporter for the new popular halfpenny paper The Day and is covering a riot of French wine makers protesting against government tax rises (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). In his short career as a ‘descriptive writer’ for his newspaper, Quain has undergone a strange transformation, subduing all human connection and emotion to become an obsessive news-gatherer and storyteller.
He dies because, in his desire to get to the heart of the story he is covering, he is trampled to death by ‘shaggy-haired’ French agriculturalists. His last thought is one of pleasure at his martyrdom, knowing he will make front page news for his paper. He is the ultimate journalist-hero, killed trying to get all the facts, and, in this, his final story, providing his paper with sensational ‘copy’.
There was a time when journalists were heroes, celebrated for exposing corruption in politics and big business, even bringing down a US president and ‘giving voice to the voiceless’, as they liked to say. During Courlander’s lifetime war correspondents became famous for risking all to cover conflict across the globe. Several, such as the Daily Mail’s beloved and respected ‘special’ G. W. Steevens, lost their lives covering the sordid reality of the Boer War in 1900. Many journalists still do try to make our world a better place but today a cynical and fragmented public is more likely to believe in journalists’ biases, that they are ‘enemies of the people’ or retainers in the pockets of wealthy proprietors or enemy powers. ‘Giving voice to the voiceless’ in the age of social media when everyone can find a platform for their voice seems also an outdated concept with connotations of ‘saviour complex’.
Producers still make films and series about the increasingly mythical hero-journalist along the lines of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men. A recent US television iteration, Alaska Daily (2022) starring Hilary Swank, portrays an almost unbelievably ethical group of print journalists battling to reveal the truth about the death and disappearance of indigenous women across the state.
It may still work on the screen, but written fiction abandoned the idea of the journalist hero decades ago. The journalist in novels, from the pen, typewriter or PC of Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, 1938), Graham Greene (The Quiet American, 1955) or Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada, 2003) is inevitably complex, compromised, and morally ambiguous: much more interesting that way.
Advertisement for Mightier than the Sword.
For he (it almost always is a he ), did once exist. Indeed, in Britain, in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of the First World War, there was a veritable slew of fictions depicting journalists as heroes, even in one, Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark (1904), saving civilisation from disaster (this novel, however, contains horrible anti-Semitic tropes and would never be revived today). Many of these novels were bestsellers, evidence of a public appetite for stories about journalists righting wrongs and seeking out facts. Even P. G. Wodehouse, with his swashbuckling Psmith Journalist (serialised in 1909 in The Captain magazine) had a go, sending his upper class and university-educated Psmith (the ‘P’ is silent), to New York to expose heartless tenement landlords.
Mightier than the Sword, which went into three editions in quick succession between May 1912 and October 1913, belongs to this fleeting golden age of newspaper novels. Courlander, a journalist himself, goes into great detail describing the work of the reporter, the sub-editor, ‘runner’, compositor, photographer, printer and the army of staff that went into bringing out a daily newspaper in the heyday of the new popular press. Here is his description of the composing room, a long-since vanished part of newspaper production:
Row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-board translating the written words of the copy before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould…
This kind of description may well be fascinating to the historian of newspaper production, but it is hard to see why, even in 1912, this level of detail would interest a reading public. But it may also be the key as to why, apparently, it was so popular. Courlander’s was a new and exciting, technology-driven world, when newspapers changed utterly from large, expensive, and highbrow to something that everyone could afford to buy and written in language those educated only to age 14 could confidently read. The Daily Mail, the first morning daily halfpenny in Britain, had been launched in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe). The stunning success of his paper, which reached a circulation of 1.2 million in just a few years, was followed rapidly by the Daily Express (1900) and the Daily Mirror (1903). These new popular papers used a combination of bolder typefaces, shorter sentences and shorter articles to attract a newly literate and newly enfranchised readership of the lower middle classes. The Daily Mail was disparaged as being written ‘by office boys for office boys’ by the then prime minister Lord Salisbury but it soon became a symbol of a new, better-connected and technologically advanced country.
In the novel, Quain’s paper, The Day, is a symbol of this modernity, its dazzling electric dome illuminating the night sky in a London still dimly lit by ‘copper-tinted’ gas. The new generation of printing presses that could produce thousands of newspapers an hour appeared miraculous, converting in seconds acres of blank white paper into ‘quire after quire’ of printed record of lives and events from across the globe. The telegraph and photography, like the digital world today, brought the far and exotic corners of the world into the hands of ordinary people. This is the wonder that Courlander was trying to evoke in his descriptions of the thundering presses, ‘like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.’ The newspaper is a giant, selling more than a million copies a day and the older journalists trained to write Dickens-style prose are either sacked or learn to write in crisp, short sentences.
Mightier than the Sword captures this moment of transition between the old world and the new at the very dawn of mass media.
The plot of the novel is simple: Humphrey Quain, a young writer from a quiet provincial cathedral city applies for a job on The Day. He is taken on, initially struggles but then does well and is promoted to be the paper’s Paris correspondent. In between his adventures, which involve solving tragic mysteries and reporting mining disasters, he falls in love with two women but breaks things off each time: his career is all-consuming.
Quain notices he is changing, from a sensitive young man to a news hound who doesn’t care about the people he reports on: “Everything in life now I see from the point of view of ‘copy’…even at the funeral [his aunt], as I stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that I could write a splendid column about it,” he confesses as he breaks off with yet another disappointed fiancée. Despite this metamorphosis he wouldn’t change his life for the whole world: from attending the lengthy committee of the Anti-Noise Society, or spending several minutes finding the right word to describe a street lamp in the dark: ‘This was the journalist’s sense – a sixth sense – which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about…his thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols.’
Although the novel made Courlander’s name (he had written four mediocre novels before Mightier than the Sword), it is unconvincing as a work of literature. Its importance lies in its ideas about popular journalism and the new industrial relations not just in newspapers, but everywhere. Quain notes that for the disposable reporters on the mass press, their words are simply another commodity, produced, ‘as a bricklayer lays bricks.’ In the final scene of the novel, Humprey Quain realises that the French rioters see him as a representative of the press, part of the political-corporate nexus that is ruining their way of life. This realisation shocks him, and only makes him want to seek harder for the truth.
An obituary notice for Alphonse Courlander.
Alphonse Courlander, like Guy Thorne, P. G. Wodehouse and other authors of Edwardian newspaper novels, was a journalist, who joined the Daily Express in the early years of the 20th century. As did his protagonist, he became famous as a ‘descriptive writer’ under the editorship of the Fleet Street legend Ralph Blumenfeld (Ferrol in the novel). In an art-meets-life moment, after the novel’s publication, Courlander was made Paris correspondent of the Daily Express but died shortly afterwards at the age of 33. In his obituary (23 October 1914), the Daily Mail asserted that Courlander died after a break-down, having ‘overtaxed his strength’ reporting on the War from Paris.
Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
Emma Goldman in a mug shot taken when she was wrongly implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. (Emma Goldman Papers)
This is a guest post by Joanna Pocock.
I can’t imagine many biographical novels about anarchists begin with the subject lying in bed as a child, hand between thighs, pleasuring herself. But Ethel Mannin’sRed Rose (1941), a fictionalised biography of the Russian Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940) does just that. Goldman’s childhood crush, a teenage boy called Petrushka, looked after the family’s ‘horses, and tended the sheep and cows in the field. Petrushka was tall and strong; quiet and gentle,’ Mannin writes. She then describes a game the young Emma played with him in which he,
lifted her up and suddenly flung her above his head, catching her as she fell and pressing her against him as she slid to the ground, so that she knew the body smell of his shirt and the animal smell of his coat, the warmth of his strong hard body, and the grip of his rough gentle hands. …there was no fear in this excitement, it was pure ecstasy.
Then Mannin paints this scene:
And it came again in the warm dark secrecy of the nights, so that childish hands pressed down between the remembering thighs in an attempt to recapture the sensation, and the darkness would be alive with Petrushka’s brown smiling face, the smell of horses, cattle, sweat, and the fields. Petrushka became her last thought on falling asleep and her first on waking.
Throughout her life, Goldman had an active sex life and many lovers. In her younger years she was in a ménage a trois with her soul mate, the anarchist and writer Alexander Berkman, and an artist who lived with the couple. They were not lovers for long, but their deep spiritual and political union lasted for the rest of their lives. As she aged, Goldman felt increasingly bitter about the uneven opportunities for men and women on what we would now call ‘the dating scene’. Berkman (the fictional Sasha in the book) had fallen in love with 20-year-old Emmy (Elsa in the book) whom he’d met in a café in Berlin when he was 52.
They were together until he died by suicide in June 1936. Mannin describes this as a thorn in Goldman’s side: ‘A man could age and lose his looks,’ she writes channelling the voice and mind of Goldman, ‘and still command the passionate love of the young and beautiful; it was not easy for a woman. Her business was not to desire but to be desired, and when her desirability was ended her desires were expected to die automatically—and the tragedy was that they didn’t. No one thought it wrong for a middle-aged man to desire a young girl, but everyone was horrified if a middle-aged woman showed other than a maternal interest in a young man.’
Mannin is sympathetic to Goldman’s desire not just for a fairer world but for a fairer playing field for women. A committed socialist and feminist herself, Mannin was also no stranger to love affairs. Like Goldman, she came from humble means; her father was a postal worker and her mother was a farmer’s daughter. Born in 1900, she supported the anarchist cause and fought for sexual liberation. In between her two failed marriages, she had affairs with W. B. Yeats and Bertrand Russell. Part of the pleasure of reading Red Rose, is the satisfaction of reading the life of a complex and politically driven woman as constructed and shaped by a female author who one senses has a strong kinship with her subject.
From the cover page of Red Rose.
The first two thirds of Red Rose feel more like a straightforward biography than a work of fiction because in these segments Mannin is basing her novel closely on Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life, which ends in 1928 – twelve years before Goldman’s death. The latter part of Red Rose had no memoir to rely on. Those final years of Goldman’s life needed to be ‘reconstructed from various sources—including imagination’, Mannin tells us in her short introduction. ‘And it is precisely that part of her life which I have had to reconstruct which has most interested me as a novelist, and which she urged I must “one day” write.’ This explains the tonal shift in the final third of the book which is imbued with a stronger imaginative power and a more novelistic sweep.
The two women met in the late 1930s when they were working on behalf of Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA) – the anti-fascist faction fighting against General Franco’s Spanish Nationalists. There is no historical documentation of their meeting, but there is one photo of them, from 1937, when Goldman came to Britain to speak at a London meeting in support of the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).
Ethel Mannin chairing a meeting in support of the Spanish anarchist CNT-FAI, with James McGovern, MP, (left) and Emma Goldman (right). Friends’ House, London, February 1937.
In the photo, we see Emma Goldman, aged 69, standing, shoulders back, delivering one of her fiery speeches. Ethel Mannin, hair pulled back severely would have been 38 in this photo – she looks off to the distance, wearing a serious expression. James McGovern, an MP, is furiously making notes. A year after this photo was taken, Emma Goldman would die from a stroke suffered in Toronto. Her body was allowed back into the US and she was buried in Chicago.
Goldman’s many affairs and two failed marriages feature prominently in Red Rose. Her second marriage was to the Welsh Miner James Colton (Jim Evans in Red Rose) is mentioned only three times in Goldman’s memoir, whereas Mannin brings in her novelist’s eye to this episode turning it onto a somewhat bittersweet affair. There was never any hint of a sexual relationship between the couple, and Mannin describes how after the registry office wedding, ‘When the marriage was affected,’ Emma ‘was impatient to get away. She realised that it meant disappointing Evans, and to “compensate” him she slipped him a ten shilling note on the station platform, urging him to “treat” himself and one or two of “the boys” to the pictures.’ There is a sense in Mannin’s description that the fictional James Colton, was in some ways humiliated or at the very least disappointed by Goldman’s perfunctory approach to their union. As an anarchist himself, he was committed to the cause and felt honoured to be able to do something for the famous Emma Goldman, but Mannin writes, ‘He stood there, troubled, confused, fingering the note she had forced upon him, overriding his bewildered objections.’ It’s in moments like these, when Mannin inhabits the interior world of her characters, that Red Rose fully comes alive.
Goldman’s life, according to Mannin, was one of passion and struggle. She was incarcerated for inciting a riot but only served several short prison sentences. Most of her struggles centred around money: she never had enough of it and was often hungry and homeless. In order to feed herself and to fund her travels and lectures to spread the anarchist message, Goldman took on whatever work she could. As a young woman, she worked making corsets and then in a glove factory. She trained and practiced as a nurse, set up a massage parlour and had two failed attempts at running an ice cream shop. She had a go at being a street prostitute on 14th Street in New York which ended in ignominy. The gentleman who took her for a drink noticed that she was not cut out for the job. He took pity on her, and after buying her a drink, gave her ten dollars for the trouble it took her to put on a fancy frock.
Much of Goldman’s energy is taken up with fund raising, which Mannin, as a self-made woman describes with a profound understanding. Reading Red Rose is a glimpse into the life of Goldman and into the mind of Mannin. The novel doesn’t completely work as a piece of fiction, and yet, it does re-imagine how a life can be documented and how pushing the boundaries of imagination are crucial to creating a successful work of fiction – even one that sticks so close to biography. In feminist politics there is always a sense of a trajectory, of history moving with the times, but what we see here is not history as a passive inevitability progressing from one idea to the next but a sense that history can be shaped and created by women with the aim of a fairer world. It is the fact that Ethel Mannin took on such a vital and important subject and had the courage to fill in the gaps of Goldman’s life with her own imaginings that makes Red Rose such an important work in the library of women’s – and the world’s – struggles.
Red Rose: A Novel Based on the Life of Emma Goldman (“Red Emma”), by Ethel Mannin London: Jarrolds, 1941
Joanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender: The Call of the American West, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and House of Anansi Press (US).
The novel won a prestigious international literary prize in 1936, beating George Orwell, Graham Greene, Stevie Smith and Sylvia Townsend Warner, amongst others; but you’ve probably never heard of it.
Book prizes, particularly if one has access to the judges’ deliberations, tell us much about taste and contemporary literary fashion; often they tell us little about what makes a novel great, or indeed long-lived. In 1936, Margaret Lane’s novel Faith, Hope, No Charity won the English Femina-Vie Heureuse prize previously won by Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay and E. M. Forster. You’ve probably never heard of the novel, and maybe not even the author (unless you’re a fan of Beatrix Potter: Lane wrote a well-received biography of the notoriously misanthropic artist, author and naturalist). Competing against Lane’s debut novel for the prize that year were Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and, arguably the most literary of the novels considered that year, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Other accomplished authors whose novels, shortlisted for the prize, fell by the wayside that year, were Rosamond Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and H. E. Bates.
The Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse of 1,000 francs (about £4,000 in today’s money), established by French publishers Hachette in 1904, added a competition for British authors in 1919 to encourage cordial cultural relations in the aftermath of the Great War. An English committee short-listed three novels each year, then forwarded these to the French judges who chose the winner. The English award lasted until 1939 and winners included Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall and Robert Graves, with the gender balance of winners roughly 50-50. The French Prix Femina continues to this day. The English committee’s criteria were that the winning novel should be a ‘strong and imaginative’ work, that the author should show promise for the future and that there should be something in the novel that should reveal the ‘true character and spirit’ of Englishness to French readers.
What was it about Faith, Hope, No Charity that felled so many literary giants but then itself sank without trace? At its heart the novel, set in the now-defunct London Docks at Wapping, is a critique of social, gender and economic relations of the mid-1930s. The main characters live in a dying and disorienting world, hovering between a Victorian past and an uncertain modernity hinted at by the dissatisfied poverty of the dock workers, clashes between the horse-based industries of the straw yards and the motor cars and growing numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the East End. It shows that as the spectre of a Second World War loomed larger, there was not one, but several versions of Britain, as strange to each other as if they were separated by vast oceans.
Sir William Rothenstein and Margaret Lane at the presentation of her Femina-Vie Heureuse Prize for Faith, Hope, No Charity in July 1937.
Margaret Lane had been a journalist, working first on the Daily Express and then Daily Mail, writing ‘descriptive’ pieces about events she had witnessed and people she had met (including the trial of Al Capone in Chicago and a chilling interview with Frau Goebbels in 1933). Lane’s reporter’s eye describes in great detail a divided world where half-starving, tubercular dock workers vie with each other for jobs unloading luxuries destined for the wealthy inhabitants of the West End:
Certainly there was always a crowd of men, breathing frostily and stamping on the muddy cobbles by half-past seven in the morning whenever a ship was known to be coming in. The casuals would be there too, wary and anxious on the fringe of the crowd, afraid to shove in with the registered men and afraid of missing a chance. They always dispersed quickly, walking off at high speed with their chins thrust down in their mufflers, hoping to get to another call-stand where there might still be need of a few more hands… The warehouses smelled strongly of tangerines, and were stacked full of thin-looking, beautifully stamped crates of fancy goods from Japan, tinsel and Christmas decorations from the Baltic ports, frozen turkeys from Poland.
It is an environment that eventually kills young Arthur Williams, married to Ada, one of the book’s female protagonists. Lane implies this is no accidental death but murder by an unequal social and economic system. Superimposed upon this background of economic hardship run the lives of several young women. Each represents a different class: Ada, an ostler’s daughter, the lower classes; Charlotte Lambert, a dancer, precarious bohemia and Margery Ackroyd, the landed bourgeoisie. All three are trapped, living lives mapped out for them by the vastly overpowering economic, gender and social strictures of the time. Where Ada, a widow at 19, is passive, patient and dutiful, Charlotte sets out to marry a besotted young man from the landed middle class in a doomed attempt to alter her destiny. Margery, the youngest and most actively rebellious of the three, boards a train to London to escape a future of subjugated tedium in a damp country house.
None of the women end up in a happy ever after. In the bleak final scene, on a freezing December evening, each woman contemplates her entrapment. But is the scene also suggests how the three may help each other defy society and their destiny through a collaborative effort:
The three sat together for a little while in silence, finding a quiet comfort in the still room and the fire, the hot tea and fiery brandy they sipped so cautiously, and in each other. The coals settled and blazed behind the bars of the grate; the gas in its white globe purred hoarsely.
They are in the old pierhead house in Wapping, rented by Charlotte, a symbol of the fast-disappearing world of the dockside trade. The image of the fireside provides the reader with a shard of hope that rather than struggling hopelessly and individually, together these women may lead fulfilling and free lives.
The house is a liminal urban space and a home for characters on the edge of society: unmarried women and homosexual male dancers, surrounded on three sides by water. While it is firmly located in London’s East End, it is also ‘otherland,’ an extraordinary island of Bohemia sandwiched between the working-class tenements and the industrial docks and as such represents escape of a kind. In the novel, each woman takes a different journey to reach the pierhead: Ada, the widow, on foot, Charlotte, the jilted fiancee in a car and Margery, the refusenik debutante a train. Its themes of rebellion, disappointment and its examination of the ‘new public woman’ gives Faith, Hope, No Charity a modernity that was recognised by the Prix Femina committee.
The chairmanship for the 1935-1936 committee was shared between the novelists Kate O’Brien and Margaret Kennedy. Other judges that year included the artist Laura Anning Bell, the novelists Sylvia Lynd, Amabel Strachey and Netta Syrett and the poet Ethel Clifford; their comments and deliberations reveal much about how a book wins a prize.
One of the most outspoken contributors was the 70-year-old late-Victorian popular author Netta Syrett, whom the other, younger women appear to have been afraid to contradict. She described Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, perhaps the most accomplished submission from a literary point of view as ‘a journal kept by a lunatic.’ Margaret Kennedy dismissed Greene’s A Gun for Sale as: ‘a bogus book. Intensely insincere.’ Sylvia Lynd was against Orwell, saying: ‘As with all his other books he displays a most unpleasant personality.’ And so it seems that Margaret Lane’s ‘promising’ novel was chosen by virtue of it not having anyone find anything egregious about it rather than it having any outstanding literary merit.
It was certainly a promising first novel, but not a great one. Some of the key characters are a little two-dimensional and not enough of their inner lives is revealed. The decisions Charlotte and Ada make are forced upon them and thus their ‘freedom’ lacks agency; their experiences are not transformative. The dropped ‘aitches’ of the working-class accents grate somewhat too. Although Lane wrote several other novels throughout her life, in the end, maybe it was the journalist in her that meant her greatest literary success was in biography and not fiction. There is an understanding and sensibility in her biographies of the writer Edgar Wallace and Beatrix Potter particularly, that is lacking in her treatment of her fictional characters.
Faith, Hope, No Charity, by Margaret Lane London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1935
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
Cover of the Solar Press edition of The Room Opposite and Other Tales by F. M. Mayor.
This is a guest post by the founder of Solar Press.
By rights, F.M. Mayor should be one of England’s most beloved novelists. The Rector’s Daughter was a bestseller upon its initial release and her other books were moderate successes. Virginia Woolf and John Masefield admired her work, Bertrand Russell was a friend, and her one and only short story collection for adults — released posthumously in 1935 — received a glowing endorsement from M.R. James, arguably the world’s greatest writer of ghost stories.
And yet, F.M. Mayor is not a household name. There have been no films made of her books, no BBC miniseries. Though everyone who reads her work seems instantly to become a fan and evangelist, she never seems to break through into the mainstream. Her relatively recent critical reappraisal, primarily within academic circles interested in early 20th century women writers, seems to be the closest Mayor has come to a mainstream breakthrough since the original publication of The Rector’s Daughter in 1924.
Despite many attempts over the years — from Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press to the Penguin Modern Classics series, Virago, and, most recently, the always wonderful Persephone Books — Mayor’s work seems destined for obscurity.
And none of Mayor’s work has proved more obscure than her final (posthumous) release: The Room Opposite & Other Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
There is little information available online about the collection, beyond a handful of blog posts and M.R. James’ endorsement of the work — notable as M.R. James, a noted reactionary and literary traditionalist, rarely praised (more often, he openly criticised) contemporary literature. Like many others, James’ endorsement of a work was enough to intrigue me; unlike most others, I became so fixated on the work that I wasn’t deterred by its unavailability and instead sought the work out at the British Library.
When I finally read the collection, James’ praise made complete sense. Not only are Mayor’s short stories a masterclass in the form, but, as has been noted by others, there is a definite conservative, almost reactionary, streak within Mayor’s work that James would certainly have appreciated.
Though Mayor associated socially with notable feminists, she herself does not seem to have identified as a feminist — much of her association with feminists seems to have stemmed from her status as a spinster. But, while many of her friends and associates were spinsters by choice, Mayor was a spinster through tragedy.
As is reflected in her work, Mayor was a romantic. She viewed love as something spiritual, sublime, superhuman, supernatural — variously with the power to revive or destroy those who fall under its spell. When her fiancé, Ernest Shepherd, far away in India, died suddenly in 1903, she was devastated — receiving word of his death by mail as she was closing down her life in England and preparing to join him.
Already sickly, for Mayor the loss was a blow from which she never recovered. After Shepherd’s death, she moved in with her sister and lived her remaining years quietly, splitting her time between writing and local charitable work. There is no record of her ever having another romantic relationship, and the residues of Ernest’s death are clearly visible in her writing — most notably in her story “The Unquiet Grave,” the story of a lover who loses his betrothed while trapped miles away, unable to visit her; and “Le Spectre de la Rose,” in which a woman is haunted by a man who is the image of perfection, immortal, distant, never ageing, and unattainable; her devotion to him gradually destroys her.
As noted, Mayor’s stories have a reactionary streak, often showing a clear distrust of “progress” in the political sense. In her stories, family and tradition are valued for their own sake; folk knowledge is respected and folk traditions are considered a logical extension of this knowledge. By contrast, social progressives, atheists, reformists, and rationalists are (at best) misguided utopians. There is never any contempt for these individuals — Mayor’s work is too inherently compassionate for that — but there is a fear that, in man’s rush to modernise himself and his society, his soul may be in danger. While this is most explicit in “Mother And Daughter” — the closest any of the short stories comes to open polemic — it’s a constant theme throughout.
Despite this, Mayor’s reactionary streak, much like M.R. James’, could hardly be labelled a one-note ‘of the time’ Christian conservatism. This same collection features stories where those fighting against tradition and society for a more spiritual kind of true love, those who murder righteously to protect or avenge, and those in the country still clinging to their ancient witchery and occult practices are presented at least compassionately, and frequently heroically.
Mayor’s morality is less obviously political than it’s often presented, more self-directed, spiritual, almost pagan—in contrast to her publicly expressed Anglican religious sensibilities. It’s hard to pin her down as having any worldview in particular, beyond being distrustful of the rapid, radical social change happening all around her, and an innate belief in the Chesterton’s Fence idea of tradition.
Despite its reputation and M.R. James’ endorsement, The Room Opposite is not, as it is frequently discussed, just another hard-to-find volume of Edwardian ghost stories. In fact, only around half of the sixteen stories are tales of ghosts or the macabre and the mysterious. The other eight are powerful, emotionally resonant dramatic pieces. Like many posthumous collections, The Room Opposite & Other Tales collects stories written across a period of Mayor’s life, covers various settings and genres, and often serves as a way to display the author’s own conflicted attitudes toward various elements of the world around her.
One of the more harrowing examples of this is “A Season At the Sceptre,” a highlight of the collection. It’s a story of sexual impropriety, harassment, and cruelty that takes place within an acting troupe. In it, a fast and loose modernity destroys innocence through the clash of world-weary city starlets and a naive aspiring actress from the country. The results are devastating. Reading letters Flora Mayor wrote while working as an actress herself, it becomes obvious that this particular tale was almost certainly inspired by her own experiences, first in Hastings (“Conversation in the dressing room is not inspiring … it really does seem to me rather immoral in places, and the tone is low throughout”) and later at the Lyric Theatre in London (“There is a great deal more pawing and squeezing from the managers than one is used to”).
Another dramatic highlight is “Christmas Night at Almira”, a beautifully written yet heartbreaking rumination on the cycles of life, from the freshness of youth, through to the decay of old age. It’s staggeringly honest about it all, and contains some truly haunting passages — not least during its climax, in which the story’s carefree icon of youth is brutally confronted with that ultimate endpoint of elderly decline: death.
As for the pulp macabre, while those tales tend to be rather more hit or miss, they do most clearly show Mayor’s development as a writer. This is most visible when looking at the stories which bookend the collection.
The title and opening story, “The Room Opposite,” while far from bad, is one of the collection’s weaker offerings. A relatively run of the mill, traditional mystery piece which does little to stand out. Though fun, it’s unremarkable. By contrast, the final story in the collection, “Le Spectre De La Rose,” is a masterpiece. Combining the “weird” and the Gothic with a more romantic, emotional, female-centric theming, rare for stories of this type — the result is something, which, while calling to mind no mythology in particular, feels distinctly mythological; it has an air of Wilde to it, without ever feeling like a riff or pastiche.
Other highlights of the macabre include the gloriously gothic “The Dead Lady,” and the almost cosmic horror “There Shall Be Light at Thy Death'” Both stories which I will highlight but not describe, to protect the impact of reading them.
And now, you can finally read them.
Inspired by what we’ve now come to believe is F.M. Mayor’s true masterpiece — and our desire to reprint other “lost”, scarce, and out of print books — we established our independent publisher, Solar Press, in early 2023.
We released this book, our first book, on April 5th of this year and we are extremely proud of the achievement.
This is the first reprint of the work since its original publication in 1935 — for the first time since 1935, you no longer have to pay for a rare collectable first edition (averaging £800 – £1500), or take a trek out to London to visit The British Library’s reading rooms.
Mayor is one of the unsung literary greats, and we’re thrilled to finally make such a wonderful collection accessible to a new generation of readers.
Solar Press is an independent publisher based in Bath, UK, focused on reprinting lost, out of print, and forgotten classics.
It started, of course, with his poetry, predictably, with his best-known work, “Adlestrop”, and inevitably, with the famous, final lines that spell-bind like few others:
And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
And this, in common with so many other people, is how I found Edward Thomas, revered as a poet but almost completely forgotten as a writer of fiction.
* * *
Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London in 1878 and studied history at Oxford. His first book, The Woodland Life, a collection of essays on the country, was published in 1896. Thomas subsequently embarked on a career as a prolific writer whose work ranged from biography to journalism, travel writing, fiction and literary criticism, although the strain of compromising his artistic ambitions to earn enough to support a family occasionally created periods of depression. His sense of being overwhelmed by a slurry of “hack work” was recognised by his friend the poet Robert Frost, who suggested in 1913 that Thomas devote himself to poetry, or as Frost himself put it, “I dragged him out from under the heap of his own work in prose he was buried alive under.” The poems he then wrote between 1914 and 1917 would secure his enduring reputation as one of Britain’s best-loved writers.
It was a love of Edward Thomas’ poems that set me off one day on an afternoon’s quest for more of his work. A meandering online search – the digital equivalent of beachcombing – took me to the Internet Archive, which brought up several books and led to a first twist of fate. For some reason, I was presented with a volume titled Cloud Castle and Other Papers, which turned out to contain not poetry but short stories. Two other books of short fiction were listed, Rest and Unrest and Light and Twilight. I had no idea Thomas had written books of short fiction, and from this brief list of little-known titles, Cloud Castle must have been the least-known of them all, having been published posthumously and containing an unfinished foreword by another neglected writer, W. H. Hudson, who himself died before its publication. Cloud Castle and Other Papers is not only overlooked but a death-shadowed work.
A second twist of fate: I often flick through a collection and pick a story at random. Had I done so this time and picked one of perhaps half a dozen other tales in that volume, I might well have given up on the book and never been the wiser. As it was, I started from the beginning and read the title story, “Cloud Castle.” By the end of the first sentence, I knew I had stumbled upon something special:
All the life of the summer day became silent after sundown; the earth was dark and very still as with a great thought; the sky was as a pale window through which men and angels looked at one another without a word.
In the story, a knight riding homewards with a friend describes a daydream in which he had been climbing a precipice towards a castle,
… when I began to climb again the moon was behind me and very low, and all the cliff was bathed in light and I seemed to hang like a carven imp on a sublime cathedral wall among the incense.
Eventually reaching an abandoned castle, he enters one particular chamber to find … well, the brief and strange encounter that occurs there is the heart of story and I’ll leave it for you to discover. What does or doesn’t, might yet, or could never have happened, remains oblique — hauntingly rather than frustratingly so.
I was startled. This wasn’t the Edward Thomas, the nature and the war poet, I had been expecting. In fact, the dream-logic of the story put me in mind of Jorge Luis Borges or something from the world of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Going through more of the stories, I was once again wrong-footed as I came across, “Mike,” a touching ode to a fondly-remembered dog, which brought me very much back to the realm of the everyday.
. . . his tail when he trotted along curled over his back and made children laugh aloud; but when he was thinking about the chase it hung in a horizontal bow; when stealing away or in full cry it was held slightly lower and no longer bent, and it flowed finely into the curves of his great speed.
Having read Cloud Castle and Other Papers, I set aside the poetry and began to explore Thomas’ other collections of short fiction. There I found the expected pen-portraits of nature as well as imagined folktales, magic realism and slivers of lightly concealed autobiography — exquisite miniatures nestled amongst some, admittedly, frustrating and overworked thickets that might have been cut back by the author’s later poetic rigour. The experience of reading Thomas’ fiction was revelatory.
Edward Thomas’ prose, when it has been remembered at all, is often thought of as something from which he escaped when he gave himself to poetry in the last years of his short life. Things are changing with his travel books (often describing his journeys on foot through the countryside of Southern England), which are being re-discovered by a new generation of nature-writers. His short fiction, on the other hand, remains uncelebrated even though Thomas himself felt warmly towards it.
One reason might be the incredible inconsistency of the work. Some stories feel like unfinished drafts; others contain a scattering of minor details that, cumulatively, jar. In “Mothers and Sons,” a man on a train, inexplicably wearing a fez, is described by a narrator whose identity remains irritatingly rather than enigmatically, unclear; in “Hawthornden,” a deftly-handled fatality is ruined with the clunk of a redundant “He was dead.” Other stories stop abruptly, unfinished rather than open-ended. Some stories are overwrought, some empty. And yet, despite this, if you look through Thomas’ books of short fiction, you will find treasures.
Having unearthed this collection of treasures, I decided to share it with others. I began by creating e-books of Rest and Unrest and Cloud Castle and Other Papers – designing covers and writing introductions. I wanted desperately to do what publishers such as Persephone and Boiler House Press were doing — curating, championing — and was just as eager not to fall into the category of the print on demand publishers specializing in literary grave-robbing, pillaging the Internet Archive and other sources and selling public domain titles at exorbitant prices with no added value. Having released the two titles, I realised I wanted to do something else: to distil what I felt to be the best of Thomas’ short fiction into a collection. This is how I came to produce Where Lay My Homeward Path.
* * *
Among the ten pieces in the collection, there are to be found, as might be expected from Thomas, darkly poetic evocations of the natural world. His images of flora and fauna, of gold agrimony, pilewort and brooklime, flow through these stories, like the ships in John Masefield’s “Cargoes.” Tales such as “A Man of the Woods” and, more humorously, “Seven Tramps: A Study in Brown” are calloused, with fists plunged into the soil of Thomas’ South Country or guiding us “through thickets of perpendicular and stiff and bristling stems, through brier and thorn and bramble in the double hedges.”
In “Mike,” a narrator’s reminiscences of his dog, are cruel, loving, clear-eyed and elegiac: “He forgave me so readily that it took some time for me to forgive myself.” “Milking” is brief, hard, unsparing:
He stood there a moment – a tall, crooked man, with ever-sparkling eyes in a nubbly and bony head, worn down by sun and toil and calamity to nothing but a stone, hollowed and grey, to which his short black hair clung like moss.
And as well as “Cloud Castle,” there are other moments of melancholic whimsy — “Snow and Sand,” a ghost story perhaps, reveals its dream-like essence wrapped in a filigree of detail: “The rushy margin is strewn with delicate bones and feathers among the snowflakes.”
I tried to take the internal rhythms and tones of each story and combine them to create a larger, interconnected work, almost as if composing music. The penultimate piece in the collection is also the longest, and the final story, the shortest. There is a crescendo and a brief finale. The book ends with “The Stile,” which contains a single sentence imbued with a pathos provided by hindsight: “I am something which no fortune can touch, whether I be soon to die or long years away” “The Stile” was first published in Light and Twilight in 1911. In 1915, Thomas enlisted in the Army and was posted to France in January 1917. On 9 April, he was killed at the battle of Arras.
* * *
It has to be said that these stories, so ripe for rediscovery, can all be found for free at sites like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg — you need only look for the books Rest and Unrest, Light and Twilight, and Cloud Castle and Other Papers. I press on with my own little book regardless, with a new cover design and a specially-written introduction, and we will see what happens. And if it should fail, it will be a heroic failure and maybe one day in the future, a site on neglected publishers will tell the story!
A word about W. H. Hudson. – another neglected writer
The original introduction to Cloud Castle and Other Papers was meant to have been by William Henry Hudson, an Englishman born in Argentina and a great friend of Thomas’. Hudson was himself an author and naturalist whose own writing helped foster the ‘back-to-nature’ movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. Although relatively little-known today, his influence persists. He wrote many books that ranged from natural history (British Birds) to dystopian science-fiction (A Crystal Age). His best-known novel, Green Mansions (1904), was often reprinted and made into a Hollywood film starring Audrey Hepburn in 1959. More recently, his novel A Shepherd’s Life (1910) was an inspiration for James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life (2015).
Hudson began work on the introduction to Cloud Castle and Other Papers just a few days before his death in August 1922. A fragment found subsequently among his papers was included in the Duckworth & Co. publication of Cloud Castle as a Foreword (and now also included in Where Lay My Homeward Path).
Irfan Shah is a writer and researcher. You can follow the fortunes of Where Lay My Homeward Path at www.openspacebooks.co.uk and on Twitter at @OpenSpaceBooks.
Some books are neglected in their old age, others — a majority — are neglected from birth. Alfred Grossman, the author of Marie Beginning (1964), was both neglected and known for it, a painful combination. Newspapers profiled his neglect in pieces that failed to avert it. Anthony Burgess, recognising another flinty show-off, gave his endorsement. It made no difference. Grossman released four novels that received good reviews and were ignored by the reading public. His efforts after the fourth were ignored by publishers too.
From the Chicago Tribune, 2 June 1968.
Marie begins in the world of The Apartment, the American office in its imperial phase. Two frazzled male office wiseacres drink their coffees and swap dialogue. Our heroine, a gamine young woman from Brooklyn, arrives to ask for a secretarial job. Her interviewer, Lydia, has very large breasts. (It was 1964. If a male writer thought up some breasts he was going to tell you about them.) So far, so Mad Men. Only something odd is afoot; the two guys in the office are discussing puritanism and the Conquistadores, and Marie bombards her interviewer with vaguely blackmailing questions about the aforementioned breasts and is rewarded for this with a job. (Yes, breasts, yes, I know. Again, it was 1964 and Lydia’s breasts are pretty much a character in this book.)
Then there’s the style. We are barely allowed inside the character’s heads; instead their inner lives spume out of them in florid ejaculations. They don’t so much converse as perform dialogue at one another, in a sort of gnomic screwball-ese of Grossman’s own invention. Scenes blur into each other in the space of a sentence. Marie herself might seem a familiar figure, the plucky street urchin who rises to the top through street smarts. Except there’s something chilling, something eldritch, about her, possessed, as she is, of both amoral cunning and a mysterious innocence. She is the teenage girl as avenging angel, or Martian, and her ambitions are set on more than just a job.
One senses that Grossman fell a bit in love with his creation, in a sweetly Platonic way. (“You don’t want to screw me and you know it. You and me,” she tells an office confidante, “I was a grown-up daughter — you could have fun with just walking on the edge of sex, playing with it, making jokes.” That sort of Platonic.) Aside from an early incident where she goads a blameless colleague into a botched suicide attempt for no reason except curiosity, her Machiavellianism is usually aimed at deserving targets. As Grossman gets fonder of her, or perhaps more annoyed at how America treated its children, Marie aims beyond humbling a few workplace chauvinists and takes on the country itself, embarking on an epic Kulturkampf against just about everything her creator must have loathed about his nation.
By a chain of implausiblebut enjoyable occurrences, Marie maneuvers her way into wedlock with her boss, Alexander Forbes. As well as being a minor plutocrat, Forbes is a predatory sadist and pervert and very American sort of fascist. We never fear for Marie in his clutches, which perhaps reduces the tension, but we do get to see our youthful protagonist turn her wits against the whole of the US right, in both its bow tied pseudo-aesthete patrician and gun-toting thick-as-pigshit forms. The creepy milieu of American reaction, its paranoid and prurient obsessions with racial and sexual hygiene, are expertly evoked. (Biographical detail: before turning to novels, Grossman edited one of the many CIA funded journals of the era, something he evidently had mixed feelings about.)
I will spoil things for no one by revealing Marie triumphs over her grim spouse and survives to fight further battles in a follow-up [The Do-Gooders (1968)] I’m now keen to read. This sequel, though, was to be Grossman’s last novel. He had no readership and it’s hard to say why. Perhaps he was that bit too clear-sighted, lacking the streak of post-Beat sentimentality of his black-comedy confreres Heller and Southern. The rest of his life was spent ignored except for occasional magazine pieces questioning why this talented author had had so little success. Twelve years after Marie Beginning was published, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He spent his last days alone, unable to physically write, but still recording novels onto a tape recorder that he knew would never be played.
Rob Palk is the author of Animal Lovers (Sandstone Press). He tweets at @robpalkwriter.
Marie Beginning, by Alfred Grossman New York: Doubleday, 1964
“I guess if you thought a little more about sex your circulation would be a whole lot better; there’s nothing like sex for keeping a girl warm.”
No, this is not Bridget Jones or one of her ilk but Virginia Odell, a young American at a Swiss finishing school which occupies much of P.Y. Betts’s novel French Polish, published by Victor Gollancz in 1933. To read it again is to be as startled as I was when first doing so, early in 1985, in the Round Reading Room, as it then was, at the British Library. I could not help but give whoops which startled sedulous thesis-writers either side of me.
Diligent curiosity had brought me to this seemingly frivolous perusal of a long-vanished novel — and would take me far from that sedentary perch in Great Russell Street. That winter I was at work compiling and introducing an anthology from the weekly magazine Night and Day, which lasted for only the second half of 1937 in a bid to be a London equivalent — with equally wonderful cartoons — of The New Yorker. Its demise is often attributed to a lawsuit brought against it by Twentieth-Century Fox after co-editor Graham Greene had written in no uncertain terms about the sexual stance displayed by nine-year-old Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie. In fact, funding had been low from the beginning, with modest fees paid to an array of authors who would, around the world, become better known down the years.
There were also some who faded from sight after appearing in such glittering company where they, too, made an equal showing. Among these was P. Y. Betts who wrote entertainingly about French life and food, as well as supplying “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”, which anticipated Nancy Mitford’s U and Non-U controversy by two decades. What could have become of such a talent? Try as I might, I could not discover anything much about her — and lamented this en passant in the long introduction to the volume which appeared later in the year.
Naturally, this anthology, with the first republication in five decades of Greene’s film review, brought interest from the hills around Los Angeles -– and, with the publication a few years later of Shirley Temple’s splendid memoir Child Star, her saying that Greene had in fact been accurate in his description of her sultry parading in that film and two others. That made a pleasing symmetry to the work on the anthology (if I say so myself, I am thanked in Child Star). Meanwhile, and perhaps all the more exciting, Michael Davie in an Observer column had picked up my reference to the seemingly fugitive P.Y. Betts. This led to the biographer of publisher Edward Garnett (the friend of Lawrence) getting in touch with an unpublished letter in which Garnett, as a reader for Jonathan Cape, had taken against Samuel Beckett’s early Dream of Fair-to-Middling Women (“I wouldn’t touch this with a barge-pole!”) but urged that the publisher take P. Y. Betts’s novel.
No sooner had I read about this unexpected literary confluence than Lady Eirene White got in touch from the House of Lords to say that she had been at St. Paul’s Girls’ School with Betts (as she was known) and that after growing up near Wandsworth Commons before the Great War, Betts had travelled around the world in the Thirties before joining the wartime Land Army which she quit around 1944 to live, alone, in a remote Welsh smallholding which she had never left.
And she was still there.
By this time, not only had electricity been installed there (in 1970), but also a telephone. Never had I thought that I should be talking upon it with somebody whom I had – dare I say it — thought might easily be dead.
Her conversation across those hundred of miles was as vivid as her writing.
Hearteningly, a little later, Veronica Wadley of the Daily Telegraph (and herself now in the Lords) readily agreed that I should travel there for an interview. This was quite a journey, without signposts through narrow lanes with high hedges in a motor-car at low gear (top gear was always a novelty for a window-flapping Citroen); when I did see anybody and asked directions, there was astonishment that I was going to visit P. Y. Betts (“we’ve heard of her but never seen her!”). Eventually I got there, at one end of a long track where I was greeted by a goat of an uncertain disposition and, after a struggle between tyres and mud, parked beside a low, thick-walled cottage from which, followed by a cat and dog, Betts emerged with pails in hand to feed others of the various animals which lived upon her tranche of hillside.
A far cry from the afternoon when Shirley Temple’s husband telephoned me about her imminent memoir (which she wrote herself). This was quite a place. We soon ate, while her talk roved across a Great War childhood near Wandsworth Gaol (an early memory was of watching people walk along the pavement to be in time to stand at its gates when a hanging was due) and looped around life in the Welsh hills, many tales of which reached her in that seclusion (the area was a redoubt of those who had returned from a flower-power trail along the road to Katmandu). As she went out again, the sky darkening, to feed the animals, I scribbled notes of all this, and her words echoed through my mind during the long journey back. There was something marvellously heartening about her conversation borne of long experience (and visits by the mobile library where she put in for so many new books); she was savvier about the world than those who are eternally, wirelessly connected. All of this I wrote up, and it appeared complete with a photograph of her beside one of those animals: a seemingly stray peacock.
And that was not that.
One morning I received a telephone call. A woman said, “Mr. Hecht would like to speak with you.” All right, I replied, puzzled, curious. This turned out to be the owner of independent publisher Souvenir Press, whose outwardly elegant office, chaotic within, was opposite the British Library on Great Russell Street. He had chanced to see the Telegraph piece – and wondered whether Betts would like to write a second book, one about the upbringing she had described to me.
This was an inspired notion, to which she readily agreed, and she wrote it – People Who Say Goodbye — through a Welsh winter. And, as chance also had it, this was published around the same time as Shirley Temple’s book. I asked Greene if he would give a quote for the cover, which he happily did, and, one way and another, the book got about: it was read in eight instalments on national radio, which, one Saturday, also sent an interviewer to her, while Dirk Bogarde (a man whose film career had begun a few years after she took up that life in the hills), who had found it in a Chelsea bookshop, made it one of his books of the year. It went into several paperback incarnations and is still in print.
She died in her nineties, after a stroke, which meant that — after living alone for so long — she had, ever pragmatic, to agree to a carer in that cottage where, as I found on another visit, there were now fewer animals but her spirit was still vivid — as it remains, so wise, so funny, and this sequence of events always makes me thankful that I had made the initial foray to the Reading Room.
P. Y. Betts’s inscription.
You never know what might happen. And so it is that I have now gone back to that novel French Polish which she wrote in her early twenties, and can again hear that voice from decades later. She gave me a copy of it and signed it – a novel now exceedingly hard to find (many have tried to do so after relishing People Who Say Goodbye).
For its first half or so, events take place in that Swiss finishing school before an excursion takes some of the girls with one of the mistresses to life in a pensione – and that amatory imbroglio which had been so much a source of discussion and speculation by the girls during days and evenings when they were meant to be pursuing regular studies. As Betts herself must have done, for the narrative finds room for quotations in several languages as well as extracts from one of the girl’s anthology-in-progress (“anything remotely lunar will do”) about references to the Moon, whose varying appearances in the night sky make it very much a character in a novel where due emphasis is also given to such matters as “those privy to the esoteric abracadabra of contraception” and a page of improvised stream of consciousness.
Time and again, one finds such descriptions as “when she laughed she opened her mouth so wide and displayed teeth so long and white and powerful that it was almost with a sense of incongruity that one glimpsed behind them a squat human tongue and not the darting scarlet tatter of a flop-eared puppy”. That very word “tatter” has one reaching for a dictionary of slang, and, to say the least, the novel is a repository of words and phrases which would make Anthony Burgess redouble his efforts to impress.
To pick out some, here are a “bourden of voices”, “dispharetic travelling”, and in a nightmare towards the end one of the teachers had seen a woman “apparelled in scarlet and monstrously mounted upon that heptacephalous progeny of hell”. And of course, in the opening pages, it is said of one of the girls that “a rufous challenge sparkled in her eyes, and her hair flamed like a November sun in the shadowy room”. There should be a revival of this expression for removing one’s dress: “she skinned it over her head”. And one could discuss until humans beings cease to exist the subsequent observation “have you ever noticed that people who are quite disintegratingly beautiful in the nude are often dreadfully pedestrian in clothes?”
And what can one say of Penelope “who had discovered that morning at prayers that j’ai sucri did not mean ‘I have sugared,’ but was French for Jesus Christ”? With all the precocity of youth, one is informed that ballet and ballade share a root. Amidst the current British crises, can it any longer be given credence that “they had such beautiful pink skins that Penelope thought they must be Etonians”? One such character, when asked if he is growing a moustache, replies, “at present it is only visible in certain lights, like the sheen on velvet”.
One reads on avidly, while pausing to ponder “coprolitic spirals” – and with passing time and “scrannel spirit”, one must marvel at the protracted metaphor made from the speed of life being akin to the long outer grooves of a 78-rpm disc shortening as the needle reaches the label: “on the record the last two inches really are covered in less time, though the tempo remains the same”. Once again, two pages in, here is that paragraph which, in the Round Reading Room, had me reading on. “Here, from a central parting of impeccable rectitude, uniform waves of iron-grey hair flowed towards the orderly roll at the back of the head with the beautiful inevitability of creation moving to one far-off divine event.”
Now, when Katherine Mansfield is rightly lauded, it is an interesting point of view that, a decade after her death, one of the precocious adolescents could say of her that she “bores me frightfully. She’s so conceited and vapourish, taking it for granted that everybody will be interested to read that on such-and-such a night she woke up and felt passionate. She was a beast to the Gaudier-Brczeskas, anyway.”
No apology for quoting so much from the novel. Otherwise how could readers gain a taste of something which led me to traverse all those miles, making it across the Severn Bridge, in a vehicle whose windows flapped open at the slightest breeze? The novel is sought after, and yet there are those who might cavil at its reappearance. The opening section lays some emphasis upon a Black woman’s arrival among the School’s pupils for a while. “On her ears were gold earrings of about the bigness of half-crowns and a coruscation of bracelets of strikingly extra-European workmanship gauntleted her bare forearm almost to the elbow.”
Some will decry this, and an element of debate would be that many others are regarded askance, such as a teacher who “had only once put her foot down, when a young man from Milwaukee had raped from her chalet a lavatory seat elegantly intagliated with edelweiss entwined with bells of gentian, with Alpenrose and the modest camomile. Since this incident, unique of its kind, Americans had not been encouraged”.
What place would such a lavatory seat find in “A Snob’s Guide to Good Form”?
Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).
French Polish, by P. Y. Betts London: Victor Gollancz, 1933
Dust jacket from the first US edition of The Case is Altered.
This is a guest post by Christopher Hawtree.
The Figures in the Boarding-House Carpet
Many a novel has sprung from a paragraph in a newspaper. Notable among them was that New York Times snippet about a houseful of murder victims in the Midwest which Truman Capote chanced to see — and so began the trail that led to In Cold Blood. Three decades earlier, William Plomer returned to London after a weekend away when his eye was caught at the railway station by something larger than a paragraph: posters announced SHOCKING BAYSWATER TRAGEDY.
The newspaper revealed to him — in late-November 1929 — that this tragedy had taken place in the very house where he lodged. It was a narrow escape, for it is likely that he would have joined his landlady in the mortuary had he not been out of town. She was the common-law wife of a man given to the obsession that she would succumb to any man who paid her court. Mania turned into murder as he set upon her with an open razor while their child looked on; with her dead, the man looked for Plomer, but the police were soon on the scene, samples taken — and, in due course, the returning novelist cleaned up the remaining mess.
Hardly surprisingly, that friendship with his landlady and the encounter with the blood which had spurted from her veins were to haunt him. Two years later, in the summer of 1932, he published his third novel The Case is Altered. After the South Africa of Turbott Wolfe and the Japan of Sado, this was a raw but deeply felt account of those clinging onto life by dint of a rented room in somebody else’s house.
Since his childhood, split between South Africa and terms at Rugby School, Plomer’s life had since been varied, and he knew such humble lodgings as well as Patrick Hamilton, who was to make a career from boarding houses, with such works as Hangover Square. Another boarding house novel, Marie Belloc-Lowndes’s The Lodger, inspired not only Plomer but also Norman Collins, whose London Belongs to Me has recently won new attention. One might also think of works by Muriel Spark, Emeric Pressburger, Tennessee Williams and Sarah Waters as examples of the continuing fascination of such settings, which provides dramatic unity while characters move in and out the shadows of rooms whose carpet is no longer as fresh as the time when it had been obtained on an instalment plan.
Cover of the Hogarth Press edition of The Case is Altered.
The Case is Altered proved to be Plomer’s most popular novel, one of the bestsellers of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, as had been Orlando, Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and Saturday Night at the Greyhound. The last, by Plomer’s friend John Hampson has something in common with The Case is Altered: set in a pub, its timescale is limited and to the fore is a cruel husband.
According to Plomer, the houses in his fictional Cambodia Crescent “have the self-righteous air of a selfish and uncultivated person who thinks that he is a good and wise, and the ornamentation around the doors, windows and chimneys forms a lasting insult to the beauties of natural stone and careful craftsmanship”. As this is in hailing distance of Kensington Gardens, one can be sure that Plomer’s house would now command cool millions.
Almost a century ago, it had simply been spotted by Mrs. Beryl Fernandez (with her impoverished and ailing common-law husband Paul), who thought that with care, it could become a profitable enterprise. She planned to run with the help of her friend Mrs. Gambits, “who belonged to that numerous and depressing class of women who are not exactly of the kind known as decayed gentlewomen, but whose chief aim in life is to be taken for decayed gentlewomen”. This was an era when even Mrs. Fernandez’s modest funds could stretch to the hiring of a manservant, Mr. Empringham “with grey hair and rather a puzzled expression on his face, as though he couldn’t quite make out why life had treated him quite the way it had, or what it was likely to do to him next”.
Among the lodgers are a couple, the Rudds, forever in hope of winning crossword competitions and siring a child. They are joined by Constantia Brixworth who is down on her luck after losing her money in an American railroad scheme. She is friendly with Frances Haymer, a former explorer, to whem she regularly entertains with tales of her fellow residents, whom the writer regards with all the curious avidity that she had showed in chronicling foreign tribes.
This is a finely-observed novel. Plomer describes Miss Haymer when she ventured out, as she “used a stick with a rubber end, and tottered along on heels that were rather too high, supporting, like some caryatid, a large, oldfashioned hat, decorated with a bird or two and some fruit, as in her heyday.” Of particular interest to both Miss Brixworth and Miss Haymer is young Eric Alston, who works in a greengrocer’s “and had a very fresh complexion, as if his cheeks were reflecting a rosy glow from the apples and peaches which it was his work to sell”. Eric is walking out with a girl who works in the kitchen of a clothes shop which, called Pélagie, proclaims itself as trading in “Robes and Modes”.
And so the scene is set for lives of aspiration running into frustration and worse — none blessed with “that assurance which the possession of money brings with it”. The novel’s title has a double meaning. A Miss Brixworth says to Alston (to whom she offers tea and omelettes), “When I had more money, I used to have an ordinary afternoon tea and late dinner, but now the case is rather altered…”. And nearby the house is a pub with that very name: a plaque relates that “it was originally called The Three Cranes but in the eighteenth century a famous highwayman was caught there unawares by a young lord whom he had robbed. ‘Now, sir,’ cried the peer as soon as he had made sure of his capture, ‘it seems the case is altered!”‘
William Plomer in 1932.
Briskly told in nineteen chapters across some three hundred pages, the novel has something of the “tea-tabling” manner for which Christopher Isherwood praised his and Plomer’s mentor, E.M. Forster. Despite a cinema fire, dramatic incident is rare; everything turns around the simmering of domestic matters, one small table-side event knocking into another much as a billiard ball sets up a chain reaction across the green baize. Worthy of Forster, or Proust, is the observation of Paul Fernandez who chain-smokes in the dead of night, the night-lamp’s shadows an emblem of his maniacal anxiety. “The idea of cruelty (which is only a diseased form of sympathy) was beginning to exercise a fascination over his thoughts. Not content with love, and love fully requited at that, he wanted power as well, he wanted to command more love, a stronger, more intense kind of intimacy than is humanly possible, and so he began to seek how he might obtain such power.”
And so begins a descent which will take down many with it against a background which forms an indelible view of the Thirties, whether in spiritualist gatherings, a mediation upon the nature of conscience, a suggestion of the homosexuality which had been to the fore in Sado, or advertisement hoardings “covered with huge posters. Each of them showed a gigantic human figure, and each figure seemed to live in a strange world of the imagination. A giantess in evening dress was in raptures at having discovered a new tooth paste to apply to a set of teeth that looked like the keys of a piano”. Whether observing people’s tendency to walk towards a window when contemplating the future or a man who “indulged in none of those humorous sallies which are so important a part of an auctioneer’s technique”, Plomer shows those powers of description which made people relish his letters’ arrival (would there were a collection of them).
Rather than dwell on the murder which was its inspiration, one relishes The Case is Altered for its life:
an immense murmur made up of the traffic of human beings going about their business and pleasure, a rich and subtle and continuous sound which it takes more than motor-cars to make, for it must contain as well the cries of infants, the ranting of demagogues, the tapping of the blind man’s stick, the happy laughter of young girls, the vomiting of drunkards, the stirring of squirrels in their sleep, the fall of leaves, the growth of trees, the threats of blackmailers, the solicitations of whores, the shuffling steps of lecherous old men, the banter of soldiers, the coy shrieks of housemaids, the shy kisses of young lovers, the worm in the bud, and the millionaire’s last words.
The novel put Plomer’s quiet life in good stead, although he was not to know such success again until its very end, in 1973, when his sequence The Butterfly Ball was illustrated by Alan Aidridge, who brought a similar style to his work in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. FThough his satirical and lyrical poems are a particular delightr, Plomer may now be best known as the publisher’s reader who, in the face of opposition, persuaded Cape to take on the first of Ian Fleming’s James Bonds novels, Casino Royale, and worked closely on the rest of them.
How has the equally if differently thrilling The Case is Altered fallen from print? It last appeared half a century ago in a hardback series called the Landmark Library. Perhaps some have balked at another aspect of the Thirties. As early as page twenty-six, one learns that “even if Miss Brixworth had not been able to see at once that Mrs. Fernandez was a Jewess, it would be soon have been able to tell that she was one, by the way she began over-emphasising her partiality to bacon for breakfast”. Two pages later, she “launched out into a sea of Jewish visions of luxury and comfort far beyond her means” and further in, there is “that Jewish impulse towards grandeur so noticeable in Mrs. Fernandez”.
Plomer was a humane man. These are the tropes of an era, similar to the first edition of Brighton Rock, which featured a Jewish Mr. Big in a seafront hotel (later editions turned him into an Italian, as if that made it all right). The narrator of The Case is Altered notes that “you can never make out whether the Jews want to be aristocrats or socialists. Half-way between East and West, they maybe somewhere near the truth, if the truth really lies in paradox. Jesus Christ was the greatest and most paradoxical of the Jews. He had the most aristocratic nature imaginable, and yet he lived with the lowest of the low. He was unique, and yet expressed himself in terms of what is ordinary and universal”.
For all that “Jews kiss and kill at the same time, just as a sportsman may feel a real affection for the game he slaughters”, The Case is Altered has a power which impressed its first publisher, Leonard Woolf, a Jew. As felicitous as it is raw, here is a novel which remains as provoking as when it appeared in 1932.
Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).
The Case is Altered, by William Plomer London: Hogarth Press, 1932 New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932
As a long-time student of early twentieth century novels, I must confess to at first being utterly confounded when I started reading Madam. I couldn’t make head or tale of the prose and the cast of characters that spun in dizzying speed before my eyes in the early sections was so bewildering that I had to draw a diagram of their relationships just to keep up.
Ethel Sidgwick makes great demands of her readers. Her meaning is like a will o’ the wisp, darting in the darkness of her elliptical prose. She is always several paces ahead of the reader, who feels as if they are dully plodding behind, in danger of losing their way completely. Even a contemporary Observer reviewer wrote that Sidgwick was “more elusive than Henry James” and that “she seems to overrate our powers of intellectual sympathy”, unaware that while she is racing ahead, her readers are stuck somewhere far behind her. But like a will o’ the wisp, one feels that if one might only grasp it, and bathe one’s mind in its light, it might illuminate a greater truth.
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Sidgwick was once regarded as a brilliant writer, “drawing the picture in firm, fine lines: never losing our attention, or ceasing to charm…it is supreme art,” wrote Reginald Brimley Johnson in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (1920). Madam is one of several novels Ethel Sidgwick produced between 1910 and 1926, earning praise for their literariness, wit and truths to be discovered under the sparkling wit of her prose. These novels, many with single-word titles such as Promise (1910), Succession (1913) and Restoration (1923) offered sharp and often humorous criticism of the manners of the British upper classes. Sidgwick enjoyed a few years of fame and popularity: regularly compared with Henry James, in 1919-20 she was offered that most glittering of accolades for an English author: a lecture tour of the United States, during which time she kept a journal that is now with her other papers held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Afterwards she dedicated the US edition of Madam, “To America. If she will accept so poor a thing in memory and in gratitude”. Her later novels, however, received less critical acclaim, being more popular and romantic. Despite having made considerable impact on both British and US reading publics, after long before her death in 1970, Sidgwick quickly had disappeared, virtually without trace. If she is remembered at all, it is only for her 1938 biography of her aunt who was an early principal of Newnham College Cambridge: Mrs Henry Sidgwick: a memoir by her Niece.
Published in Spring 1921, Madam follows the lives of a large cast of characters, from stable lads to landed gentry, in a narrative beginning just before the First World War, “the golden days, before the world lost its innocence”, and ending in the months following the Armistice. In the second half of the novel the traumatic effects of the War haunt the men who returned from the trenches, and those who were too young to fight. They are dogged not only by physical injuries but suffer an almost obsessive need to seek “fellowship with the dead”, their survivors’ guilt destroying any honest or meaningful relationship with the living. Like out-of-control pinballs, they careen wildly through London and county society, causing varying degrees of damage, from wrecking motor cars to breaking young girls’ hearts. A haunting study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) decades before the term was even coined, Madam is, as the contemporary Guardian reviewer urged, worth sticking with until the second half fully reveals itself.
The novel’s main characters are the jovial country squire Henry Wicken, who has lost a hand in the fighting and who gently subsides into what today would be called a nervous breakdown, and his former stable boy Mott Lane, who was too young to join up but who lost all five of his older brothers in the fighting. The effects of the war on Mott are more atrocious than on Henry: he suffers from a split personality, ruins everything he goes near: bicycles, motor cars, horses and young ladies. That is, until he meets Caroline, ‘Lina’ Astley, the ‘Madam’ of the title. She recognises Mott is damaged and through her patience and courage saves him from his demons and his desire only to be with the dead. Far from the dreary cliché of the angelic feminine, Lina helps Mott in a shockingly physical and criminal way. She confronts Mott’s at once cruel and pious mother (who used to interrupt her beating of him to read out verses from the Bible), slapping her hard on the face and stealing from her a memento of Mott’s beloved brother Christopher.
In meting out criminal and physical harm, fighting fire with fire, Caroline at once fractures the idealised image of herself as the gentle angel and smashes the tomb within which Mott has buried himself alongside his dead brothers. It is one of the few sharply defined moments of a novel swathed in obliquities and ellipses, a narrative style described by one contemporary reviewer as “typically feminine” and “liable to cause irritation”.
Such assertions call for evidence, so here we go:
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Because he simply longed to kill Mr Forrest with Miss Astley, last edition. The poor old surgeon really thought he knew her, that was the creamy part. She was probably sitting, every day, with her despatch-case, under his eye, just as usual; even though Lancaster had kissed her, and she had – No: it must be laid up in lavender for Forrest; for Miss Astley, final edition, was simply the sequel of all the other tales. Tell one, and you found yourself telling the others, inevitably wherever you were: it all followed on.
The novel is written entirely in this style and such questions as “what does ‘laid up in lavender’ mean?” and “what are earbobs?” and “why is the horse Titus starting to speak human language?” chase each other through the frantic reader’s mind. It is “a thing heavy with lightness”, as Sidgwick wrote of a character’s argument in the novel, but it could easily be applied to her own words, tricky to pin down “because there was nothing in it anywhere to grasp.” While pointing out her difficult style, contemporary reviewers nevertheless encouraged readers to persevere. “Through the greater part of his first perusal the reader has the sensation of being lost in a maze, or endeavouring (sic) to fit together the jumbled parts of a picture puzzle, or trying to work out the meaning of a code message without the key,” confessed a New York Times reviewer of Jamesie (1918). But those who stuck with the novel, even giving it a second reading, would be rewarded with its “fine literary quality” and “piquant character drawing”.
There is indeed something deeply resonant at the heart of this war novel. The male characters emerge from the smoke of Flanders so wounded and damaged that the question of how to make sure there is never again another war would be the contemporary reader’s chief conclusion. This was Sidgwick’s aim: born in 1877 into a progressive, literary and feminist family, she wrote for the pacifist Cambridge Magazine and was a lifelong supporter of the Save the Children fund founded by her friend Eglantyne Jebb. Sidgwick also lost her own brother, Arthur, killed in action at Ypres in 1917.
Because of its difficult style, Madam will not be brought triumphantly back into publication to enjoy a second literary life as have recently the works of her contemporaries Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth von Arnim. But if ever the curious reader were to chase its oblique meaning through the prose, they will be rewarded with moments of shuddering recognition of those early, shattered months after the Great War.
Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick London: , 1921
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
I have known of Norwegian author Sigrid Undset all my life. My parents got my name from Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, a monumental achievement for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1928. The novels were still popular in the 1950s, when my parents met, and their mutual love of the trilogy’s eponymous heroine forged an early bond. I confess I didn’t read Kristin Lavransdatter until well into adulthood, but like my parents before me, I found myself captivated by the story of Kristin, a complex, headstrong, passionate woman struggling to live a life of faith and truth in 14th-century Norway. Kristin Lavransdatter has fallen in and out of fashion over the years and garnered renewed interest recently thanks to Tiina Nunnally’s fresh translation. The rest of Undset’s prodigious literary output remains less well known, however, including a previous medieval saga, a biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, a memoir of World War II, and novels about women whose convictions and desires conflict with societal expectations. One such novel is Jenny, published in 1911, first translated into English in 1921.
Jenny’s opening pages display a hallmark of Undset’s style: vivid descriptions of the material world that establish the scene for the story that follows. “The music surged up the Via Condotti just as Helge Gram turned onto the street in the twilight,” the novel begins, as Helge, a Norwegian graduate student newly arrived in Rome, absorbs the dizzying array of sounds, smells, and sights that surround him:
It was The Merry Widow, played at a preposterously fast tempo, making it resound like a wild fanfare. And small, dark-haired soldiers stormed past him in the cold afternoon, as if they were no less than part of a Roman cohort which, at a furious double time, was about to fall upon the barbarian hosts rather than peacefully return home to the barracks for supper. Or perhaps that was exactly the reason they were in such a hurry, thought Helge with a smile; for as he stood there with his coat collar turned up against the cold, an oddly historical feeling came over him. But then he began humming along—‘No, a man will never understand women’—and continued down the street in the direction where he knew the Corso must be.
The line from The Merry Widow that Helge hums proves prophetic when he meets two other Norwegian expatriates in Rome, Francesca Jahrmann and Jenny Winge. Soon he becomes part of their coterie of artists amid the warmth, flora, food, and drink of an idyllic Roman spring. While Helge initially, and timidly, pursues Francesca (who has changed her given name, the old-fashioned Fransiska, to the Italian spelling), her hot-and-cold demeanor and interest in other men prompt him to turn his attentions toward Jenny, with whom he quickly falls in love. One sunny day, Jenny and Helge wander away from a picnic with the others and settle down in the grass, Helge’s head in Jenny’s lap. Against her better judgement, she gives in to his relentless begging for a kiss, and although she has qualms about their becoming involved, she gradually falls in love with him, and they plan a future together.
From this point on, the novel unfolds through Jenny’s perspective, and she proves to be one of the most intriguing fictional women I have ever encountered. The narrative describes her as tall, pale, thin, and graceful, with long blond curls and gray eyes. She wears white, gray, or black dresses and adorns herself with a simple necklace of pale pink beads—a cool exterior that belies her inner turmoil. We learn that she had a difficult childhood and harbors complex feelings toward her mother, “who had been widowed at the age of twenty and had nothing else in life but her young daughter.” Jenny has no memory of her father and lost a kind stepfather to an untimely death when she was a teenager. She was isolated and lonely at school, although she admits that her own arrogance stood in the way of making friends. “Superior and indifferent,” the narrative states, “she had smiled at the taunts and scorn of the whole class, feeling a silent and irreconcilable hatred that set in between her—who was not like the others—and all the rest of the children, who for her became a uniform mass, a many-headed monster.” As an adult, her yearning for a life of emotional and artistic integrity butts up against disheartening realities.
Back in Norway, Jenny and Helge must recalibrate their relationship amid complex family dynamics. Helge lives with his parents, and Jenny feels smothered in the toxic atmosphere of their profoundly dysfunctional marriage. “If only they could spend some time together again—just the two of them,” she muses, but they cannot, for, as she and Helge are engaged to be married, she is expected to spend an inordinate amount of time with her future in-laws. “She tried to think about their spring in the south, and she remembered the heat and the green campagna and the white flowers and the delicate silver mist on the mountains and her own joy. But she couldn’t seem to pull up an image of Helge from those days—the way he had looked to her adoring eyes.” Matters grow increasingly complicated when Helge’s father begins visiting Jenny in her studio and asks her to keep their meetings a secret from his wife. Frustrated and fed up, Jenny takes solace in her painting and in her friendship with a fellow artist, Gunnar Heggen, with whom she has long conversations about history, art, women, and men.
Sigrid Undset in 1911.
These conversations, along with a series of grim events, perhaps shed light on why Jenny is not more widely read. When Jenny asks Gunnar for an update on Francesca, for instance, problematic ideas emerge on all sides. A married woman now, Francesca only half-heartedly pursues her art and proves to be an inept, slovenly housewife, according to Gunnar. “If they have any children—and I’m certain they will,” he states, “you can be sure that Cesca will be done with painting. And it’s a damned shame. I have to admit, I think it’s sad.” “Oh, I don’t know,” Jenny replies. “For a woman, having a husband and children . . . At any rate, sooner or later we start yearning for that.” Women are “by nature” meant to be wives and mothers, she claims, and she admits she would give up everything, including her painting, for the right man—because “that’s the way we were created—all of us!” she exclaims.
For his part, Gunnar expresses what even in 1911 must have been considered sexist notions. “I won’t even talk about female morals, because they don’t have any,” he tells Jenny, and he laments that women are only career-minded until they achieve their goal of marriage. If no suitable man turns up, however, “Then you start neglecting your work and go around looking worn out and unhappy and dissatisfied,” he says. Jenny nods. He later states, “Women don’t have souls—that’s a fact.” Most of the men in Jenny’s life infantilize her, calling her “little Jenny,” although she is 28 years old and fiercely independent when the novel begins. They treat her like a simple child nevertheless available for their sexual pleasure. Much to her mortification, she sometimes enjoys such oppression.
Unpalatable ideas, to be sure, but the novel addresses urgent questions of the time vis-à-vis changing gender roles, sexual double-standards for women and men, and the opportunities or lack thereof available to ambitious women. Jenny lets Gunnar do most of the talking during the aforementioned scene not because she has nothing to say but because she thinks before she speaks and chooses her words carefully. Throughout the novel, we find her solemnly contemplating matters relevant in any time, such as the role of art, the nature of love, wherein happiness lies, and how to know and be true to oneself. Undset imbues her characters, especially Jenny, with complex interiority and a longing for meaningful connection with others, which, sadly, often proves elusive.
My copy of The Unknown Sigrid Undset, in which Jenny appears, belonged to my mother. My father inscribed it and gave it to her for Christmas in 2001. Sigrid Undset remained a touchstone for my parents throughout their long marriage, and I think of them, both recently deceased, while on my own journey through her works. Kristin Lavransdatter is magnificent, but before it, there was Jenny, remarkable in its own right and worth getting to know.
Kristin Czarnecki is the author of the memoir The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. Her creative nonfiction, literary criticism, book reviews, and poetry have been published in a variety of venues, and she has a chapbook forthcoming from dancing girl press. She holds a Ph.D. in English and is past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.
Jenny, by Sigrid Undset, in The Unknown Sigrid Undset: Jenny and Other Works. Edited and with an introduction by Tim Page, with new translations by Tiina Nunnally South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press, 2001
By March 1917 Britain had her back against the wall in a way she had never dreamed, nor expected even at the outbreak of War in August 1914. Then, people said it would all be over by Christmas, with the Germans bloodied and suing for peace. By the spring of 1917, for the first time since 1066 the “sceptred Isle” with its great Empire, unequalled industrial muscle and naval strength was facing an existential threat. Tens of thousands of young men had already been killed in France and Belgium, thousands more returned mutilated, shell-shocked and disfigured by new industrial and chemical warfare. On the Home Front, Zeppelin air raids across east and southeast England were showering death from the skies upon women and children. After the first attack, over Great Yarmouth on 19 January 1915, people living under the flight path of those vast, silent whales “flying high with fins of silky grey”, as the writer Katherine Mansfield described, felt exposed as never before. Street lamps were dimmed, blackout curtains were put up and people shrank as shadows passed overhead. While rationing would not be brought in until 1918, already sugar and meat supplies were under Government control to feed the Army first. People were foraging for gulls’ eggs, songbirds and fern bracken roots as alternative food sources. Restaurants stopped providing sugar shakers: a small thing but hugely symbolic of the new bewildering reality. Nearly three years in, and there seemed no way out.
Poets had at first welcomed the war, revelling in this opportunity for glorious self-sacrifice in England’s cause as in Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnets. Ironically, Brooke was one of the first to die, making a small corner of the Greek island of Skyros “forever England”. His fellow ‘War Poets’ quickly changed their tone seeing it as their role to tell people the truth about the horrors of the trenches, since the Press was not doing its job. Robert Graves’ ‘A Dead Boche’ (1916) showing the stinking, scowling, green-hued unburied German corpse in horrible close-up provided sobering correction to the Daily Mail’s upbeat accounts of biffing ‘The Hun’.
Novelists too tried to make sense of the new reality but paper shortages and the novelist’s need for reflection meant that few British ‘War’ novels were actually published before the Armistice in 1918. H. G. Wells’ Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916) portrays the confusion of the civilian population who on the one hand read in newspapers that the Germans “had been mown down in heaps” but that in the same papers, these same defeated Germans were advancing on Paris. Mr Britling and his doomed son Hugh spend a desperate Sunday afternoon examining maps of France trying, yet failing to work out the confusing and contradictory information. Similarly, the Home Front civilians in Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916) can barely tell the difference between truth and lies, sharing fake news about Russian soldiers landing in Scotland with snow on their boots, along with real news of babies being killed in Zeppelin raids. Readers would have to wait for Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1929), or Storm Jameson’s Company Parade (1934) for more fully worked out meditations on how we had got into this mess and what the War was doing to the national psyche. Yet there is one neglected novel, published in March 1917 at the War’s darkest hour, that is well worth reading for the light it sheds on English social and political life on the eve of War and during its first two years.
Stephen McKenna, from Authors of the Day by Grant Overton (1924).
At its heart, Stephen McKenna’s Sonia: Between Two Worlds is a devastating critique of a spoiled, complacent and too-wealthy ruling class that partied through “the years of carnival”, as he calls them, before August 1914. Too busy drinking champagne, making money and gossiping about the latest unfortunate debutante who had failed to catch a man in her first season, these representatives of the governing class pay heavily for their complacency. But so do hundreds of thousands of young men who had no say in political decision-making, with many working-class men, as well as all women, still unable to vote. About halfway through the novel George Oakleigh, Liberal MP and the novel’s narrator, looks back to those years of plenty (for the ruling classes at least): “I look back to find an infinite littleness in the artificial round we trod during my idle early days in London,” he writes. The world was “clattering into ruins” but just months before the cataclysm, he and his peers, even those with seats in the Lords or Commons, were too busy writing their names on pretty girls’ dance cards to notice.
The novel follows the lives of a group of young men from their schooldays at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign through to the mid-point of the First World War. They are products of Melton, a fictional public school, the finest in the land, that produces future MPs and prime ministers, generals, Whitehall mandarins and captains of industry. Melton is Westminster School, McKenna’s own alma mater, transported to somewhere in Wessex, that quasi-mythical old English Kingdom, once ruled by Alfred the Great. Centuries of English history and legend weigh heavily on the weathered old stone. At Melton the boys learn discipline, loyalty, Greek and Latin but also the cruel system that permits older boys to enslave and beat younger ones who step out of line. They learn that, as the apex of the English social class system, they are inheritors of the Earth. Into this centuries-old world of cloisters and courtyards, well-stocked libraries and finely clipped cricket pitches steps David O’Rane, a youth endowed with epic gifts of intellect, physical strength and rebelliousness. He can recite, perfectly, 30,000 lines of Greek poetry and take on 10 older boys in a fist fight. The Irish surname is no accident. He’s also gorgeous, with large dark eyes, chiselled cheek bones and dark flowing Byronic locks. The other boys would all fall a little bit in love with him, although would never admit to such weakness: the closest they get is to describe him as looking “like a girl”. Receiving regular beatings for refusing to support the school football team, O’Rane forces the other boys to reflect on whether their system is in fact, fit for purpose at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Daily Mail review of Sonia from 7 March 1917.
They don’t reflect for long however, so keen are they to get to Oxford and spend the next four years punting, drinking and deciding whether they’ll go to the Bar or not before they become MPs or take up their hereditary seats in the House of Lords. McKenna, who also attended Oxford and whose uncle was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, was well placed to observe the ruling elite in its process of formation. There is also a great love story that runs through the novel and the roller coaster passion between Sonia Dainton and David O’Rane caught the nation’s imagination so much that in the autumn of 1917, there was, according to the Manchester Guardian something known as “Sonia Fever”, a “pleasant malady” that made McKenna briefly famous. The book inspired the film director Denison Clift to make a silent movie version starring Evelyn Brent as Sonia in 1921 although it has since been lost.
Sonia is not great literature: the characters are two-dimensional and O’Rane is simply unbelievable in his all-round perfection. There is an affecting moment towards the end of the novel though, that captures the horror of the time. O’Rane, once invincible, returns from the trenches a broken man, his blindness a metaphor for his generation’s lack of foresight. A door slams shut by an unfelt gust of wind: there is no clear way out; incoherent rustlings and mutterings could be the ghosts of all those lost young. It is this rare literary focus on the war in the midst of the cataclysm that makes Sonia both unusual and powerful. The Manchester Guardian reviewer at the time made the point that Sonia was perhaps a “rather irritating reminder of mistakes and futility” when everyone was getting on with the job of survival. But this is precisely Sonia’s great strength: it is as a critique of contemporary British society a full decade before the great postwar novels like Parade’s End ventured to tackle the subject. As well as the feckless aristocracy, McKenna blames the new mass media for leading the public to believe false stories of German atrocities and for encouraging hatred, rather than understanding of, the enemy. Written with passion at the point of maximum danger, it thoroughly deserves another outing.
Sonia Between Two Worlds, by Stephen McKenna London: Methuen; New York: George H. Doran, 1917
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, popular German-language authors were experiencing a resurgence: Gunter Grass, Heinrich Boll, Hans Fallada, Wolfgang Koeppen, Ernst Junger — even the old stager Erich Maria Remarque — were all active and writing books which are still remembered and probably still read now.
But one author outsold them all during this time. Hans Helmut Kirst had his books regularly in the German best-seller lists, with sales of his forty-eight titles usually hitting around half a million copies each in the domestic market and with over twelve million copies in total worldwide. Yet today Kirst is largely forgotten.
Kirst’s output of fiction was prodigious but he was driven. He was also scriptwriter for eight films produced for the German market (six of which were from his own books); a documentary film-maker; and, on at least one occasion, an actor in a tv series. One of his books was made into a (not very good) big-budget film: The Night of the Generals starred Peter O’Toole, fresh from his success in Lawrence of Arabia. (The script had many notable contributors, including Gore Vidal, Paul Dehn and Joseph Kessel; O’Toole was apparently reluctant to take the part but felt an obligation to the producer Sam Spiegel, because of Lawrence).
Hans Helmut Kirst’s Gunner Asch novels in UK Fontana paperback editions.
Despite all this work, if he is remembered at all, Kirst‘s name is usually linked with his creation, Gunner Asch. In a series of four books, the adventures of the titular hero picked up on the literary exploration of the absurdity of military life that has accompanied conflict, from Alphonse de Vigny in the Bourbon restoration through good soldier Schweik’s adventures in the Great War to Hawkeye and Trapper in M*A*S*H.
His books (twenty-four of which were translated into English) fall into four broad categories. First, there are the humorously cynical army novels (like the 08/15 series about the misadventures of Gunner Asch), written from 1955 onwards. Then the historical thrillers, usually based in a military context (Night of the Generals, which appeared in 1963; Officer Factory, also 1963; The 20th of July, 1966; Night of the Long Knives, 1976) which are more serious explorations of the brutalising effects of military life. Then come the later novels, set in contemporary Germany and often crime-based in some way to reveal the seamy side of the post-war German ‘economic miracle’ (Undercover Man, 1970; A Time for Scandal, 1973; A Time for Truth, 1974; A Time for Payment, 1976). Finally, the outliers: the apocalyptic No One Will Escape, 1959 — like Shute’s On the Beach but grimmer; and The Fox of Maulen (published in the U.S. as The Wolves), 1968 – a bit like Fallada’s Alone in Berlin but a little less bleak.
This last title is undeservedly forgotten not least because it can stand as an archetype for Kirst’s “anti-war” books. It also has a timelessness as a fable of the corrupting effects of power.
The story revolves around what happens in the (fictitious) village of Maulen in the (real) region of Pomerania between 1932 and 1945. It follows the rise, fall and collapse of the local Nazi party seen through the eyes of one man, Alfons Materna, who is a shrewd, self-reliant and independent local farmer.
The plot is simple, although there are numerous characters. Written in four parts, the story follows the path of Materna’s political awakening. The first two parts deal with his transition from disinterested hostility to active opposition to the bumptious and malign leaders of the local Nazi party. Then through the third section, the period of the Nazi’s grip on the village, Materna has to wriggle ethically to survive. In the final section, the collapse of the village’s existence is traced as Russian tanks roll across the Pomeranian farmlands.
Materna is intrinsically hostile – but initially passively so – to the discipline that the local Nazis want to impose on the villagers and merely wants to get on with his life without interference – and (initially) without interfering in the lives of anyone else. Since the death of his wife, Materna has been used to being left alone to live his life, unmoved by the swirls of political argument, local or national.
His passivity disappears when his younger son is killed in a bungled weapons practice run by the local SA. Seeking some adventure as an alternative to their dull rural existence, both of Materna’s sons had joined the local party for the opportunities it offered for supposed comradeship, possible whoring, and certain excessive drinking. Then, when the effects of the Nazi’s racially-inspired policies begin to encroach upon the farm that Materna’s forefathers have owned for generations, his world is threatened and he feels forced to act.
Spurred by personal dislike of the strutting local Nazi leaders, Materna moves from passivity to individuals to outright opposition to the Nazi party in the village – brought about mostly by a mix of his grief, an innate contrariness to authority, and a streak of basic decency. His weapon (initially) is not sustained political argument (for he has no articulated opposition to what is going on) or even overt violence but barbed flattery, pricking the pomposity and incompetence of the local Nazi functionaries.
Later, as Materna’s contempt for the individual members of the local party grows, he increases the tempo of his campaign and progresses to using ridicule, blackmail and jealousy. Based on marital discord and prompted by unfounded rumour, he tries to wreck the relationships inside the structure of the SA. The story is told to show how Materna (always with his own interests at the forefront) brings down the ambitions of individuals with less guile, cunning or foresight. Materna is no saint. He is both greedy and generous, hard and sentimental, morally upright and debased at the same time.
At first, Materna’s low-key rebellion is purely a matter of self-interest. His farm workers – who often came from those parts of society that the Nazis wanted to eliminate – are crucially important to his business. But as they become demonised and persecuted, he begins to feel a sense of identification with the injustice, and organises a sort of underground railway foe the persecuted, which gradually comes to dominate his life. He reluctantly helps more and more people, often ones previously unknown to him, to escape to less dangerous places (in the mid-1930s even Poland seemed safer than turbulent Germany).
This underground railway becomes a business in itself and towards the middle of the book Materna has to realise that it is now longer possible to run it safely, together with the farm. And so he bargains with the local SA chief to authorize the travel of two “undesirables”: one of his trusted workers – a Jew – who will take charge of the other end of the railway; and a disabled woman he has come to love, whose life would be threatened were she to stay.
Although Materna could have left with the departing group, he chooses to stay to fulfil the economic terms of the bargain. He also explains that he wants to stay “to see what happens and have some fun,” a desire he explains is activated by both personal animosities and by a growing dislike of what is happening to his (specifically) local world.
Of course, as the book draws to a close Materna cannot escape his fate any more than can the other villagers of Maulen. Kirst’s ingenious ending is in keeping with the moral ambiguity of his characters.
But there is a deeper – and troubling — aspect to the book beyond the explication of the moral ambiguities and compromises in the story. The novel deals with moral choices, ethical dilemmas and personal deceits. A book about moral dilemmas cannot be judged without examining the moral record of the author himself. Here the evidence is not clear cut.
Kirst was born and grew up in the district of Masuren, a backwater of the then-German region of Pomerania. He joined the German Army in 1933, at the age of 19 and in the pit of the Great Depression. He became a member of the Nazi Party soon after. So, while it can be assumed that he bases the characters in his book on real-life acquaintances, it’s clear that Kirst was not describing his own experiences.
By the middle of the war, Kirst had risen from the ranks to the level of lieutenant in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. Although he never saw front-line action, he was appointed as the political instruction officer for his unit — entrusted with explaining, justifying and proselytising for Nazism and its policies.
After the war, Kirst claimed that he had confused the party of National Socialism with the country of Germany, and that he had been unaware that “one was in a club of murderers”. But can that really be so, given his record and position? Who can say from this distance whether Kirst repented and purged his guilt through writing or whether he just sublimated his experiences? Certainly, he went through a process of formal ‘de-Nazification’. Unlike others – Gunter Grass for instance — he never sought to conceal his past. But since Kirst never let a good idea have only one outing he employs the basic idea of subversion from The Fox of Maulen again in his later novel Party Games (1980), although this time with less poignancy and broader humour. The question then arises “Is the repetition evidence not of repentance but just commercial exploitation of experience?”
Kirst’s books were often criticised for subordinating the horror of events in Germany during the reign of the Nazis to a sequence of humorous incidents at a local level, which consequently glossed over the wider social and historical context. Some critics saw this as partly an act of self-exculpation. Kirst was writing — and his books were published — at a time when the problem of the recent past and the taint that had on the New Germany were matters of constant public discussion.
In one way or another, all of Kirst’s books deal with the effects on individuals as they shift from being members of a turbulent civil society prior to the rise of Hitler to followers of (or resisters against) doctrinaire Nazism and finally survivors or victims of the de-Nazification process .
Coincidentally — deliberately? ironically? – The Fox of Maulen was first published in Germany as Die Wolfe (the US edition carries the original title, The Wolves) in 1967, a year after Kurt Kiessinger became Chancellor of West Germany. Kiessinger was the first prominent former member of the Nazi party to achieve a high office in the West German government, having been a lawyer in the Kammergericht, the highest state court, for the city-state of Berlin, between 1935 and 1940, and having joined the Nazis in 1933).
Regardless of the motive, by reducing the focus to the local and personal, Kirst was able to show the impact of huge events on the individual lives of those who were “ordinary” – often resentful of the hand life had dealt them, not usually particularly active politically, not especially well-educated and not influential. He could take characters who, despite their handicaps of class or status or lack of wealth, saw opportunities to achieve their ambitions when their society developed in a different political direction. His stories thus became fables of lasting relevance, illuminating with mordant humour the havoc created by flawed characters placed by chance in positions to become agents of influence. His novels entertain and instruct (for those who are alert to the parallels). Change the names and the contexts and the basic stories in many of Kirst’s novels (and especially The Fox) can be applied to many other political events of the years of this century – never mind the events of 70 years ago. This, to me, is the mark of a novel of lasting value.
The Fox of Maulen is both the high water mark of Kirst’s writing and the high water mark of his examination of the morality of resisting or rejecting — making accommodations to survive in a world where moral choices cannot be resolved into simply black or white.
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.
The Fox of Maulen, by Hans Helmut Kirst London: William Collins, 1968
Option one: you publish nearly 100 novels and stories – many bestsellers – in your lifetime. You make a good living from your writing and have some impact, particularly within the burgeoning women’s equality movement, as many of your female protagonists are strong, independent and clever. Highbrow critics, suspicious of your copious output however, ignore you. A century after your death, not one of your novels is read, beyond the odd specialist scholar. The occasional mildewed cloth-bound first edition turns up in second hand bookshops and anyone who takes the chance to read your effortless prose is amazed they hadn’t heard of you. But you’re never going to be canonical, not even in this current revival period when forgotten women novelists are being exhumed more rapidly than the dead rise up in a zombie apocalypse. There are just too many of you.
Option two: you publish a handful of well-received literary novels, a couple of which, 100 years after your death are still in print, having made it onto university English studies reading lists. One, about turn-of-the-century English rural life, that critics considered your best (though you didn’t), is turned into a costume drama starring, I don’t know, Benedict Cumberbatch or Alicia Vikander. In your lifetime you’re never quite solvent and never quite satisfied, but you have a kind of immortality, even in a fleeting film credit.
Which would you choose? Or back then, being a writer on a vast production line with very little agency, could you choose at all? So many late-Victorian novels have sunk without trace, victims of what was recognised even at the time as “over-production”. But this is of course what this site is for, to find gems such as those that disappeared under what the Daily Mail described in 1903 as “the flood of fiction”. The Mail complained that of the 1600 novels published each year, barely any would survive the season and that “women are the worst offenders if over-production be an offence.” One estimate is that 99.5% of all nineteenth century novels printed, read and relished in their tens of thousands have vanished into what Franco Moretti called ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’.
Adeline Sergeant, from Notable Women Authors of the Day, by Helen C. Black (1893).
So, now we come to the case of Adeline Sergeant (1851-1904), named and shamed in the Daily Mail as one of the women culprits who wrote too many novels. She wrote 90 novels and stories in her lifetime, her output increasing with her years – publishing six a year 1901-1903 and eight in 1904. Even popular newspaper reviewers expressed fatigue at having to read yet another of her novels, one critic complaining: “Adeline Sergeant, like the poor, will always be with us.” She was so prolific that fourteen novels were published after she died, presumably of writing fatigue, in a boarding house on the south coast of England where so many English spinster novelists went to die. Her productivity meant that reviewers couldn’t keep up and only a fraction of her output received any critical notice. Many of her novels were sensational pot-boilers with romance or crime at their heart, often with a moral, heavily influenced by her religion – she moved from committed Methodist to committed Catholic through her life – and with titles like The Failure of Sibyl Fletcher and The Claim of Anthony Lockhart.
From the Daily Mail, 25 April 1901.
But even in cases like Sergeant’s, there is always the one that got away.
The Work of Oliver Byrd slipped out, unnoticed, in 1902, between The Master of Beechwood and Barbara’s Money. Very different from her other novels, it is remarkable for capturing the lives of early professional women living alone in London and negotiating social opprobrium for not accepting the chosen path laid for them of marriage and motherhood. While post-Second World War writers like Margaret Drabble and Muriel Spark are held to be the first to depict the lives of professional women, Sergeant and other forgotten women writers of the turn of the last century were doing this some fifty years earlier. The popular writer Dolf Wyllarde, for example, goes into great detail on lives in women-only boarding houses right down to the choice of wearing dark colours to disguise ink stains in her novel The Pathway of the Pioneer (1906).
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As Virginia Woolf acknowledged in Three Guineas, the only area of work where women were allowed to compete with men, because of its low pay and prospects, was the world of writing, the world Sergeant chose for herself. The Work of Oliver Byrd records the lives of professional women writers at the turn of the twentieth century and is to some extent, a feminist response to George Gissing’s famous critique of the writer’s life, New Grub Street (1891). Where the literary men of New Grub Street have to battle with populist taste, uncomprehending publishers and critics and lowbrow journalists, the women in Sergeant’s novel have to start by deconstructing their very selves. Women who want to be taken seriously as writers either have to marry a publisher against their better judgement or to conceal their feminity and write under a male pseudonym. The Work of Oliver Byrd follows two women who explore these routes to pursue their writing, the act of which is presented as a grand passion, a vocation that none who is called can resist, no matter the risk. And the risk, with a predatory, exploitative male editor, is great. While these women writers accept being under-paid, even plagiarised, , the worst risk is that of being found out to be a writer at all. For while women were indeed able to scratch out livings with their pen, the woman writer still attracted social opprobrium, hence the widespread use of male pseudonyms at this time. Oliver Byrd, it is no spoiler to reveal, is actually a woman called Avis Rignold, who goes to great lengths to disguise her indentity, using Post Office boxes, false addresses and avoiding in-person meetings.
There is a great detail of autobiography in the novel: while writing it Sergeant was living at the Chenies Street Ladies Chambers in Bloomsbury, a haven for single, intellectual women including the Quaker campaigner Emily Hobhouse, archaeologist Mary Brodrick and the historian Charlotte Fell-Smith. The most important room in the apartment of one of the professional women in the novel is described by Sergeant in loving detail:
It was lined on two sides with books – heavy, ponderous, learned-looking tomes, the bindings of which were darkly, yet richly coloured like leaves in autumn, lit with gleams of gold. A substantial writing-desk, with drawers and pigeon-holes innumerable, stood near the middle of the room, and before it stood a circular-backed, leather-seated armchair, which formed Eleanor’s usual seat when she had work to do.
Be still my beating heart. Perhaps, with the exception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh, I haven’t read an earlier depiction of the woman writer at her desk, striving to call words down from the heavens to translate onto paper:
What should she write about tonight? What had she to say? Her head throbbed, her eyes burned: she wanted to lie down quietly and go to sleep. But the wants of the public had to be satisfied and for this she must take up her pen and weave together laboriously the light fancies, the vague dreams of her better hours…she threw on a dressing-gown, turned up the gas and sat down to write.
There is a feminist message to the novel: the women writers are presented as either serious campaigners for justice or as uniquely able to capture “knowledge of the human heart”, while the dastardly male editor only seeks to repress them or pass their work off as his own. Written at a time when few women writers – including Sergeant herself- were taken seriously, it is a passionate plea to women to be proud of their work and continue fighting the fight. I wonder if Oliver Byrd, written towards the end of Sergeant’s life is some kind of letter of regret, that she didn’t allow her talent or novels to breathe, instead chasing one after the other after the other in a phenomenal sense of urgency that prioritised quantity over literary immortality. For she certainly could write – her prose is as easy and pleasant to consume as a jar of warm honey – and her novels are bursting with sparkling and contemporarily urgent ideas on social justice, women’s equality and the plight of the poor in wealthy imperial London. Maybe, like Avis Rignold, she didn’t quite have the courage to say: “This is who I am, and no one else.”
The Work of Oliver Byrd, by Adeline Sergeant London: James Nisbet and Co. Ltd., 1902
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
It’s not every day that you might turn on a television without referring to any guides and get to see a dramatised documentary based on a mystical, blind and deaf poet. That programme, ‘The Different Drummer’, in Easter 1980, was my introduction to Jack Clemo. I was spiritually and literary smitten by his unusual story. He saw himself as a poet, novelist, autobiographer, short story writer and Christian witness. The latter description as important as all that preceded it.
As Clemo highlighted in his first autobiography, Confession of a Rebel, he was, from a conventional point of view, unschooled. I myself was a partially schooled poet and wrote from an explicitly Christian point-of-view. As far as I knew, no evangelical-yet-literary poet, like Clemo, existed in Ireland.
I wanted to connect with him, so I wrote, enclosing a small chunk of bog turf as something illustrative of Ireland, just as the Cornish clay was an important symbol to him. Soon I got a reply about the dilemmas and challenges of being both convinced Christian and poet:
… Very few poets since Hopkins have felt this tension between Christianity & art, & I can see why my books & the TV film of my early struggle must have made special appeal to you. When one looks at the general cynicism & triviality of most modern poets, it’s clear that only a faith in redemption, personal guidance & victory in Christ can free a poet from illusion & disillusion…
In time I went to visit Clemo in his small stone cottage, at Goonamarris Slip, Cornwall, where he had been born and lived. The gloomy landscape was all concrete grey. Hills of clay tips surrounded his cottage. Clay dust discoloured everything. However, he turned that stark and ugly landscape into many meaningful metaphors in his prose and poetry.
Jack Clemo in the 1980s.
You may wonder how I communicated with this blind and deaf poet and author. His wife instructed me how to communicate, spelling out sentences letter-by-letter on his rough skinned palm , each sentence requiring a telegram like full stop, for clarity.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I did not expect such immediate and intimate contact! Clemo’s roughly-accented replies were difficult to decipher at first. After a few hours of my tactile tracing of words and his guttural verbal responses, I got exhausted. Then we continued many conversations on Christian faith, literary hopes and my upcoming marriage, using manual typewriters instead. We exchanged a hundred letters between 1980 and 1994. As far as I know, I became his sole protégé.
After a few false starts, Clemo’s unusual literary breakthrough came when his first novel, Wilding Graft, was published by Chatto and Windus in 1948. It sold an impressive 2,000 copies in the first week in UK. Not at all bad for a first publication.
The plot precis of Wilding Graft:
Set in the clay mining country of Cornwall during WW2, Wilding Graft turns on two characters, Garth Joslin and Griffiths. At the start of the book, Garth has just returned from his mother’s funeral. His relationship with his fiancée, a somewhat frigid and ill-matched girl named Edith, has been disintegrating as his mother’s mental illness has developed, and has finally ended – taking with it Garth’s good reputation in the area—after a flirtation with Irma Stribley, a London girl on a brief visit to relatives in Cornwall.
Garth’s mother, broken from nursing her husband through his final illness, had attempted suicide at the time of Edith’s marriage to another man, and had spent the last four years of her life in Bodmin mental asylum.
Garth, being (unconventionally) Christian concludes that there must be some divine plan working itself out through all that has happened, and determines to wait for it to become plain: to wait for Irma to be brought back to Cornwall.
As L. A. Thompson wrote in his thesis, Jack Clemo, 1916-55: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Clay Phoenix’:
Wilding Graft was written to show how God works and triumphs over atheism, paganism and worldliness… Clemo believed the novel was ‘given to [him] by God as a prophecy for [his] own life’ and as such it developed extra significance. He did not consider it to be a projection or fantasy, but his own future fictionalised: first healing and then marriage, with both just around the corner.
The original publisher’s blurb invited comparisons with Hardy and Powys, and very few reviewers failed to acknowledge the similarities. Expressions of Clemo’s Christian faith caused both praise from Professor of English Mary Ellen Chase and consternation from Maurice Lane Richardson.
Chase, writing in the New York Times, praises Clemo on a number of fronts, and has great sympathy for his Christian outlook. She stated that Wilding Graft an “should deserve attention both from those who like an excellent story and from those who are interested in the novel as a form of art…” She also goes on to say that: “the slow, exhaustive and yet tense treatment of tremendous human conflicts belong to the the 19th rather than 20th century novel….(giving) a certain stature seldom seen in distinctly modern fiction.”
However, writing in the Times Literary Supplement on 27 March 1948, Richardson praised Clemo for his depiction of the region and recognised his potential, but criticised him for including too much ‘mystical religiosity’ and not enough ‘humanism’. As Luke Thompson wrote in his thesis:
It was as though Clemo had been caught between the desires to write a popular potboiler, such as many of the working people used to enjoy, and a literary work of artistic value. As it is, the novel stands alone, a unique and powerful gesture, a page-turning romance with an undercurrent of divine interference and a surface of realism uncommon in writing about Cornwall….
I would be lying to say I enjoyed Wilding Graft’s regional and rather stilted plot. Rather, I read it as a unique accomplishment by a disadvantaged author who saw life through a Biblical lens of hope.
In 1981, at 65, Clemo received an honorary literary doctorate from the University of Exeter. Not bad for a blind and deaf autodidact author who went against the tide and who attended no college.
By the time of his death, in 1994, Clemo had published ten poetry collections of poems. He also had published a second novel, Shadowed Bed, as well as two autobiographies, Confession of a Rebel and Marriage of a Rebel. His third novel The Clay Kiln was published posthumously.
The University of Exeter, UK holds an archive of his manuscripts and papers.
Louis Hemmings worked for much of his life in various bookshops: second hand, religious and a mall bookshop. He also sold used theology books online from 1994 until 2014. His writing has principally been poetry but after a late entry into college, at the age of 62, discovered he could write credible fiction. His third and last novella, A Boarding School Boy’s Regrets will be self published September 2022. Louis collaborates with photographers and artists for his WordPress and Youtube channels. Louishemmings.com.
In 1962, after eight years as a Police Constable 258 of the Metropolitan Police between 1951 and 1959, he published The Little White God, an early example of what later came to be called a ‘police procedural’ novel.
Why then, if he only published one novel, is he of any interest?
First, because Brock went on to publish some very good poetry – quite a lot of it – and two of his poems are among the most anthologized of the twentieth century. So, the novel is an interesting waystation on the path of his development.
Second, because the novel is worth something in its own right. After a shaky few opening paragraphs, it develops strongly and gives an intriguing view of an unusual episode in an ordinary copper’s life in a suburban division of ‘the Met’ during the post-war years. It describes the perpetual battle between an efficient police force and a justice system striving for fairness; it lays bare, very vividly, the universal battle between the ‘doers’ and the paper-shufflers in any organisation; and it analyses, softly and subtly as it goes along, some deep moral issues about right and wrong.
Brock was born in 1927 to a working-class family in the middle-class suburb of Dulwich in South London. Books were apparently few in the Brock household and the atmosphere was occasionally ‘turbulent’. Brock won a scholarship to the local grammar school but left after completing his school certificate, the family lacking the funds or ambition to push his education any further.
Too young to be ‘called up’ in the war years, he completed his National Service in the Royal Navy and ended up in Hong Kong waiting to be “demobbed’ in 1947. Listless and bored, Brock began to read anything he could get his hands on at the NAAFI (the British servicemen’s welfare organisation) library and, finally, was reduced to borrowing a book of poetry.
This proved to be the opening of a door. After reading the paperback poems, Brock knew he wanted to write. As his fellow poet, obituarist and friend, Anthony Thwaite, would put it later, Brock thought that most activity is a means of defining oneself; and for Brock, poetry was the best means, of doing that.
After leaving the Royal Navy, Brock secured a job as a trade journalist and used the free time it afforded to write poetry, most unpublished, as a way of developing his proficiency and style. He gradually accumulated publication credits in small, literary poetry magazines of the time. He married in 1949 and, with a young family needing the regularity and the prospect of increasing income, two years later he joined the Met. He continued to write poetry.
His break came when the editor of the Times Literary Supplement published a few of his poems, accepted on their merits, without any knowledge of who or what the author was. The TLS is famously intellectual, so publication caused quite a stir in literary circles, when his identity as a working policeman with no more than a grammar school education became known.
This led to a brief flash of celebrity. when a journalist from the Daily Express interviewed him and the paper’s editor gave the resulting piece a full-page splash. Far from the reprimand expected for giving an unauthorised interview,– which appeared in the Daily Express as ‘PC258 CONFESSES I’M A POET –THE THINGS HE THINKS UP AS HE POUNDS THE BEAT’ – Brock’s revelation was received tolerantly.
In 1959, he left the police and joined the advertising firm of Mather and Crowther as a copywriter. It was here that he mined his experiences “pounding the beat”, as the Express had it, and produced The Little White God. The novel was published by the prestigious firm of Hutchinson (no, unfortunately not Constable). The Little White God was never published in the USA, despite the American readerships’ appetite for police novels (although British readers were happy to lap up American crime fiction in all its forms) possibly because of some of the unfamiliarity of the context and the commercial risk associated with a first novel.
The Little White God describes the downfall of Detective Constable Mike Weller, a (generally) good and conscientious policemen, who, like most of his colleagues, is tuned in to the rhythms of the streets he patrols. He is an alpha male without being macho; aware that only a thin line of fate separates him as a policeman from many of the criminals he brushes up against, coming as they did from the same background. They drink at the same pubs, live in the same areas, marry women from the same background– and accept the rules that police, crooks, the courts and prison dance to in the game of justice in post-war Britain. But the men who join the police become “Little White Gods” and their downfall, if it comes, is even harder.
‘Like most of his colleagues’ does not mean all of them, though. Weller has the misfortune to report to a superior officer who does not have the tolerance Brock himself experienced as a PC. Although happily married, Weller cannot resist having an affair with the wife of a small-time criminal he has arrested for ‘sus” — suspicion of attempting to break into a locked shop. The relative triviality of this offence and the three-month sentence it attracts is crucial to the timing of Mike and Rosie’s affair. It is a criticism later levelled at Weller that he could have “fitted him up” better by charging him with by going equipped for breaking and entering.
The affair develops into much more than Weller anticipates. The crook seeks revenge by putting stolen goods in the shed at the back of Weller’s house and then writing anonymously to the Station Sergeant at Weller’s police station. Through force of circumstances, the sergeant is forced to report the anonymous letter to the new senior officer in charge of the station who is out to make an impact. The officer, in turn, outwits his divisional chief in a trial of procedural strength and Weller is the victim of the struggle.
The Little White God is structured in two parts, the first being the development of the affair and the receipt of the letter, the second what happens afterwards. It is very definitely a book of two halves in terms of writing style, as well. While the second half is tight and falls very much into the category of a ‘police procedural’ the first half is, initially, slightly over-written:
Outside the Court, the sun was doing its best but making heavy weather of it. It would look out of the clouds for a minute or two and then the sky would shut up to give the wind a chance. Round the corner it blew as though it were coming straight from Siberia. It was the kind of wind that seemed to make your clothing feel transparent.
And later:
On top of the bus the wind came at them like a four-ale bar pug – all rush and no science – until they turned a corner and it retired out of breath.
“Transparent”? “Four-ale bar pug”? Apart from the confusing analogies, Brock is obviously in poet mode in starting the book.
But the narrative soon gathers its stride. The descriptions of South London suburbia and its residents becomes more fluent and less contrived, more based in the reality of Brock’s experience — and Mike Weller’s fate:
It was as if there were two police forces. One was the real one which caught criminals and the other was the one that existed in some high-up’s office at the Yard. The real force was there to catch criminals and you caught them the best way you could. You knew who they were and if you couldn’t get them down according to Judge’s Rules, you got them down in your own way. Mike could see nothing wrong with that. He was paid to catch thieves and he bloody-well caught them.
But it is this attitude that proves to be Mike’s undoing. His ambitious station commander has aspirations for a position at the Yard and has the mindset to go with it. In his eyes, Weller’s having an affair with a criminal’s wife is the greater crime and, thwarted at not being able to take Mike out ‘fairly’, he ensures that Weller pays for his indiscretion. Brock keeps the reader uncertain about Weller’s fate almost to the end of the book.
Weller is demoted from detective to beat policeman and subjected to all the petty and largely mindless administrative procedures that the lowest on the pecking order have to put up with. He loses his wife and his marriage, probably keeps the love of Rosie but certainly loses his livelihood in a grand gesture of resignation.
To the British reading public at the time, this unsentimental insider’s view of the police would have been a marked change from the prevailing conventions. At the time, the most famous fictitious British policemen was Dixon of Dock Green — an avuncular sergeant close to retirement age who had seen it all and who recounted police-station stories of the “it’s a fair cop, guv” type on television on Saturday evenings. The revolutionary and grittier Z Cars (which influenced many later British police series) was just about entering its stride but the cynical tone of Line of Duty and its Chief Inspector Hastings of AC12 (who would become a British cultural icon in his own right), with its unremitting focus on internal corruption, would have to wait a generation or more of profound social change.
Despite his upbringing and background, Brock is only hit-and-miss when it came to the novel’s dialogue. Conversations in the workplace and between policemen are clear, unstilted, direct but with the necessary amount of ellipsis of ordinary dialogue between people with shared conventions and background. Conversations between the male and female characters are less convincing. Aside from using the word “gel” (hard ‘g’) to stand for the South Londoner’s catch-all term for a woman, Brock offers few other stylistic clues to accent or educational background in the male-female exchanges. The 1950s lower classes in Peckham are suspiciously precise about grammar and syntax — especially Weller’s paramour Rosie.
But this is carping criticism. The novel is not dialogue-dependent for its momentum, being as much an examination of social ideas, cultural customs and a dissection of moral attitudes.
Cover of Invisibility is the Art of Survival.
What then of Brock after The Little White God? In his first collection published in the US, Invisibility is the Art of Survival, the jacket biographical sketch states:
Born in London in 1927, Brock says he has spent the subsequent years waiting for something to happen, occupying his time as a sailor, journalist, policeman, and adman, in that order. Yet none of this, he feels, has touched him, “except with a fine patina of invisibility.” Poetry, however, is for him an act of self-definition “which sometimes goes so deep that you become what you have defined. And this,” he adds, “is the nearest thing to an activity I have yet found.” Thus in addition to being poetry editor of Ambit, Brock has published several volumes of his own. His first, An Attempt at Exorcism, was brought out in 1959, and was followed over the next decade by A Family Affair, With Love from Judas, a large selection in Penguin Modern Poets 8, and A Cold Day at the Zoo. Confronted with his work, American readers will agree with the critic Alan Pryce-Jones that Brock has written “some of the most observant and compassionate poems of our time–poems, moreover, in which the poet keeps his feet on the ground as skilfully as his head in the air.”
(Alan Pryce-Jones was the editor of the TLS who first spotted Brock’s poetry.)
The reviews that the Little White God received may also have contributed to Brock not writing another novel. The Times reviewer praised the novel’s “blatantly unvarnished authenticity” but Simon Raven (another now-neglected novelist) in The Spectator damned it with faint praise by saying that the documentary account was “smartly done in its way”. An anonymous reviewer in the TLS said that “the documentary element is the most valuable … but does not go deep…” while having “… sufficient vitality to complement the other more important side of the novel”. But perhaps what might have sealed the fate of further novelistic adventures was Anthony Burgess’s (rather unkind) conclusion in The Observer that “Brock is capable of better than” a documentary.
Brock probably got something out of his system with The Little White God. It was written at the same time as James Barlow, Allan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, John Braine, John Osborne, and the loose grouping that became known as the ‘Angry Young Men’ were active. So it was in good radical company. But Brock maintained that it was poetry that helped him to define himself, so the success he began to have with that – he joined the editorial staff of the quarterly literary magazine Ambit in 1960 – probably meant he chose to concentrate on the strong suit of poetry rather than risk further half-hearted praise with novels.
Like most poets – and many prose authors – Brock could not make a living out of his writing alone, so for 30 years he stayed in advertising at Mather and Crowther, rising up the company, through its mergers, to end as a director and originating the famous “No FT. No comment.” slogan along the way. He edited the poetry section of Ambit for nearly four decades (1960-97), rubbing shoulders with the likes of J. G. Ballard, Eduardo Paolozzi and Carol Ann Duffy.
The Little White God was an early starter in the field of the British police procedural. The description of the investigation by the ‘rubber-heelers’ –Scotland Yard’s internal affairs men, who are the catalysts of Weller’s demise – is, as the publisher noted, documentary in style and as different from the aristocratic, amateur detective novels beloved of the Golden Age as chalk from cheese. Changing social attitudes from the war and then post-war austerity did away with that.
Those who only know Brock’s poetry will find it an interesting read since it fits well with his early poetical works and fills a gap, demonstrating the importance of experience in his writing. It is a deceptively angry book — angry at the frustration of advancement because of artificial barriers; impatient with rule-bound satraps who value mindless procedure above sensible outcome: hinting at the beginnings of rebellion.
Those who are fresh to Brock may well find that the novel is an enticing stepping stone to a poet of considerable talent in encapsulating the significance to the individual of common hurts. It was only as he got older that he got mellower. His initial works were partly autobiographical, coloured by the unhappiness of his first marriage. Later they became broader and less personal – more infused, paradoxically, like The Little White God –with the experience of ordinary people of the hurts inflicted by the world. Two of his poems– “Five Ways to Kill a Man” and “Song of the Battery Hen” — were particularly popular with compilers of anthologies.
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.
The Little White God, by Edwin Brock London: Hutchinson, 1962
Robert Harling? Steel Magnolias and The First Wives Club? American playwright, actor and film producer?
No – not that one.
This one: Robert Harling, British author of eighteen titles (fiction and non-fiction) and variously a bookseller, printer, Royal Navy Reserve officer, advertising executive, typographer, veteran magazine editor and cloak-and-dagger commando. And, just possibly, one of the many candidates whose qualities came together to form James Bond in the mind of Ian Fleming. (He certainly has a good claim to this, since he and Fleming were friends of long-standing.)
Harling’s name has fallen out of public recognition. He would have been — even at his peak — a mid-list author, although sufficiently strong-selling that one publisher stuck with him throughout his writing career (and he with them, of course): all of his novels were published originally by Chatto & Windus.
Among other things, Harling had been a writer and typographer and enthusiastic amateur sailor before joining the Royal Navy Reserve at the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, between 1951 and 1979, he wrote seven very good novels mostly dealing with journalism or having backgrounds based in the newspaper world. They were not quite thrillers, not quite literary fiction but certainly not pulp. Grahame Greene would probably have called them ‘entertainments”.
He also wrote eleven other non-fiction works, including two published before the war, on subjects as diverse as: the typography of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden (both books being regarded as authoritative still); typographic styles; London by-ways; and famous homes and gardens.
His ability to present information cogently, his friendship and not least his wartime exploits – first in charge of a whaler off the beaches of Dunkirk, then as navigating officer on corvettes assigned to convoy duties in the Western Approaches and the Mediterranean – culminated in him being recruited by Ian Fleming to join 30 Independent Assault Unit, which undertook all sorts of specialist tasks towards the end of the war, with minimal official sanction and maximum dash and daring. He and Fleming had met at a book launch party just before the war.
After the war, Harling became a design adviser to newspapers (including The Times where he held a long-standing consultancy) and then joined Homes and Garden magazine, where he stayed as editor for twenty–eight years, nurturing a band of young journalists into distinguished authorities on cooking, interior design and gardening.
He was also a fabulist.
It was only on his death in 2008 at the age of 98 that it became apparent that much of the story of his early life had been a fiction he’d invented.
Far from being an only child orphaned young and brought up by an aunt and uncle in Brighton (the story he had told even his children), he and his brother had been brought up in Islington. His father was a taxi driver and he had married (and divorced) early. Many of his family relationships he Harling concealed, for unknown, and unknowable, reasons.
It does appear that he ran a bookshop in Holborn briefly, but whether as proprietor or manager is unclear. He spent some time at the Daily Mail but then left to work as a printer in two specialist printing houses. By the beginning of the war, he had begun to develop a reputation as a minor authority on typefaces as editor of the journal Typography. He developed at least three new typefaces which have endured and on his death was described in the Times obituary as ‘the most innovative and distinguished typographer of the last century’. Some claim!
Aside from his typographical expertise, Harling is worth remembering for a number of his books. The Amateur Sailor and The Steep Atlantick Stream, the two he wrote about his time at sea, are the equal and possible superiors of The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, one of the most famous books about the Royal Navy in the Second World War. The Cruel Sea is not presented as anything but fiction and drew heavily on Monsarrat’s conversations with fellow officers in addition to his own experiences as an officer in corvettes and frigates in the Battle of the North Atlantic. One of the turning points in the novel, for example, comes when the ship Compass Rose is torpedoed. None of Monsarrat’s ships was torpedoed, and this stunning feat of plot and descriptive writing is all derived from second-hand information, possibly from someone involved in the sinking of HMS Firedrake in 1942.
The Cruel Sea, both the 1951 book and the 1953 film, was responsible for weaving into British boyhoods the myths and legends of the Second World War. It is without doubt, a great piece of writing that conveys the terror, stress and exhaustion of fighting a long, dogged war with the both the sea and human foes as the perpetual enemy. Harling’s books do the same, if perhaps less showily. They are less obviously fiction — although given his propensity to invent it cannot be held that they are entirely autobiographical. They are probably heavily embellished fact. They also avoid the serious flaw of Monsarrat’s book — a sub-plot of love interest in the second half of the book which grates oddly with the intensity of the main story and, far from acting as counter-point, distracts from the overall impact of the book.
The other candidates for burnishing his neglected memory are his novels based in Fleet Street – the ‘old’ Fleet street of hot metal printing and larger than life reporters and editors, particularly The Paper Palace and The Hollow Sunday.
The Paper Palace, written in 1951, was Harling’s first ‘civilian’ novel and his first venture into obvious fiction. The story concerns a columnist tasked by his editor, much against his objections, to uncover the reasons behind an obituary about a Communist written by a very capitalist newspaper proprietor – in fact their newspaper proprietor. This bare plot is the means of erecting a very satisfactory scaffolding about a power struggle between the editor and the proprietor, with the columnist being the instrument by which the duel is (partially) resolved. It is an exemplary ‘Fleet Street’ novel with the relationships between the two antagonists superbly described through the experiences of the columnist.
His second novel, The Dark Saviour (1952) continues the Fleet Street theme with a New York correspondent (who may or may not be the same man) being told by his London office to investigate an evangelistic, mystical revolutionary whose emotional appeal to the population is threatening the stability of a Caribbean island — run mostly for an elite. There are multiple betrayals between the characters and, like the correspondent, the reader is never quite sure whom to trust.
The Enormous Shadow (1955) is more obviously towards the thriller end of the spectrum; the denouement is much more ‘actionist’ than the previous two novels he had written to that date. The main protagonist is again a newspaper columnist (this time a recalled Washington correspondent) who is asked to pursue the story of the disappearance of a conscience-stricken atomic scientist. The scandal of the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 were still in the front of the public memory and the novel draws on a similar context. As with the previous novel, there is a love-interest element, well-handled, which is central to the story.
The background to The Endless Colonnade (1958) departs from the world of journalism, having as its protagonist a holidaying physician taking his first holiday after the death of his wife. Meeting an attractive Italian woman who flirts with him turns into an affair. She entrusts him with a secret that may endanger both of them; needless to say, the female character is a foundation for the entirety of the story. The format of the novel is also different from the previous three being much more like a journal written by the protagonist than a third person omniscient narrator. Without spoiling the story, the conclusion is melancholy and much like an ending of a Greene novel.
The Hollow Sunday (1967) returns very successfully to Fleet Street and is occasionally cited (by journalists) as being one of the best of the genre, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and Michael Frayn’s Toward the End of the Morning. The plot concerns the introduction of new technology into the printing of newspapers and how that will up-end the economics of the business. It is another ‘power-struggle’ story with politics and adultery thrown in for good measure. The characters are both well-drawn and likeable/dislikeable as required.
The Athenian Widow (1974) continues the investigative reporter theme — not a door-stepping tabloid man but a more genteel and refined exponent of the subtly pointed question and thorough, but discreet, research. It deals with issues of truth and journalistic responsibility. Somewhat flatter than the other Fleet Street books he wrote, it is slower in both development and outcome but no less gripping on its own terms.
Finally, in 1979, came The Summer Portrait, his last novel. Harling departed radically from previous themes and chose as the main character a painter on the verge of fame who paints the portraits of two very different people as summer commissions. Through them he has love affairs, all the while caught on the dilemma of whether to commit himself to one lover, or not. It is a very satisfying read, although much slower perhaps in some ways than anything else he wrote but, again, the conclusion is almost Greene-like.
In all his books, Harling’s writing is fluid, well-paced and engaging. He is a craftsman: he does not write bad sentences; the conversations and dialogue are well-enough handled — even at the distance of thirty, forty or fifty years — to be realistic and not stilted; though, admittedly, some of the words used to describe characters might now be regarded as unusable and the concepts about the dynamics of relationships (particularly between men and women) are very much of their time.
Harling was a psychological writer rather than one who relied on twists in the plot to drive books forward. What marks out his books is the psychological depth to the descriptions of his characters — going deeper into motivations and thoughts than simply skating along on plot and action. But the analysis is not so deep or introverted to be a drag on the plot and always relevant to the decisions that the characters take. . They are not flat cut-outs responding to the plot but rather the plot is pushed on by the psychological foibles, strengths and weaknesses – even the moral dilemmas — of the characters.
Harling was able to write convincingly about the effects of the demons which drove others to do things that they were often not proud of or had to defend against their own consciences and others’ criticisms. He probably conveyed much of himself through his novels in writing about the way his characters behaved.
Engagingly, Harling writes very well about women (at least from a male reader’s perspective). Although they conform to a certain type throughout his novels they are substantial and rounded characters. Their contributions to the plot are never peripheral and most often are central. This might be seen as unusual given the time in which he is writing. Harling’s female characters might not be as forceful as those of some modern authors but they are far more than the decorative ciphers of say, his great friend Fleming or any of the other fifties/sixties thriller writers like Maclean or even Innes..
None of his books were made into films (although The Paper Palace and The Enormous Shadow were both adapted into tv plays, one with Denholm Elliott in the lead role) – which may explain to some extent their lack of longevity in the public’s interest. Given the psychological complexity of Harling’s male central characters, it is an interesting parlour game to speculate who might have played them if the films had been made: Cary Grant is an obvious candidate for the suave, worldly columnist of, say, The Paper Palace. But generally he is a little too smooth for anything else. James Mason is sufficiently hard-edged for at least three of the stories perhaps but doesn’t have the crucial self-doubt that Harling’s central characters often display. Connery might have pulled it off more often than not – especially in The Enormous Shadow and The Athenian Widow. The tough one to cast would have been The Hollow Sunday. All of the male central characters are self-doubters to some extent, analytical of their own motives and very much the dissectors of the behaviour of others, which is why the books are such good reads.
Harling was not universally popular as a colleague. Not particularly gregarious, he shunned his own (secretly-prepared) retirement party from The Times with a rude remark about such affairs being nauseating. He admitted that some of the sparkle went out of his life when Fleming died. But he also found fierce devotees in the staff of House and Garden, some of whom – the cookery writer Elizabeth David for example – became famous in their own right after being taken on by the magazine.
Perhaps his attempts to conceal his background – successful until after his death – fostered his reluctance to talk much about himself, lest he betray his story. The last book he wrote – Ian Fleming: A Personal Memoir — was completed by his daughter and published posthumously. The title was probably chosen to capitalise on the cult of Bond, since it is mostly about Harling rather than Fleming (although it does reveal something of Fleming’s sexual proclivities in passing).
The book is something of an essay at autobiography, dealing extensively with Harling’s exploits in 30 Assault Unit. But even in this he could not bring himself to tell the complete truth about his past. Perhaps, having spun the story that long (he died at the age of 98), it had become more real than the truth – so “print the legend”.
Keeping people at arms length is one way of concealing one’s own history. And private people often listen well and become the most acute evaluators of others foibles, since they are testing themselves against what they see in others and vice versa. Writing then becomes a way of explaining personalities.
But few people who do those things can write as well as Harling did.
Robert Harling 27 March 1910 – 1 July 2008
As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.
This is a guest post by the novelist and childrens’ book author Eric Brown
‘The summer of nineteen-thirty-nine was a thoroughly rotten one.’ So opens Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, a chapter of autobiography by the Hungarian writer Adam Martin de Hegedus, published in 1944.
De Hegedus first came to England in 1927, staying five months to study reference books at the British Museum Library on International Law and to learn English in order to enter the Hungarian diplomatic service. At the end of that time, however, he decided to return to Hungary only to pass his final law examination: then, as he writes in Vanman, to abandon his plans to become a diplomat and ‘return to England and settle there for good and become an English writer.’ He continues: ‘It was England’s mental climate that had proved so all absorbing, so conquering, all powerful, compelling, that it made me feel at home at once…’
Throughout the Thirties he was based in London, working as the London correspondent for several Hungarian newspapers as well as placing articles with British periodicals as varied as Esquire, The Observer, Evening Standard and the London Mercury. 1937 saw the publication of his first book, Hungarian Background, and he completed his debut novel, Rehearsal Under the Moon, in 1940. Later that year, when Hungary allied itself with Germany, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with his homeland and de Hegedus was no longer able to send his daily cables to Budapest. He had lost his main source of income and decided ‘the best thing I could do was to volunteer for one of the Forces.’ In October 1941 he was sent to train as a gunner near Wakefield in West Yorkshire.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is his record of the following year, his training in Yorkshire and Nottingham and his posting to Kent to await assignment overseas. In the memoir, de Hegedus portrays himself as an outsider, forever looking in. There were the obvious facts that he was a Hungarian in Britain – despite having taken British nationality in the Thirties – and a writer, about which he commented: ‘I am to some extent inhuman and cold. Looking for copy all the time […] And the writer is lonely. The job has its gratifications, but it has dreadful drawbacks. The writer, you see, is not allowed to live.’ But what de Hegedus could not confess in his otherwise starkly honest account was that he was even more of an outsider because he was homosexual.
In hindsight, knowing what we do about de Hegedus, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and decode the sometimes buried messages in the text. In the chapter entitled ‘The Girl From Newcastle’, he describes his meeting and subsequent one night stand with a woman in the WAF: she ‘had a workmanlike handsomeness’ and ‘a nice deep voice’ and ‘there was something brave, almost heroic and masculine in [her] spirit’. He’s at home in the all-male environs of barrack life and describes the camaraderie (and the physical attributes) of his fellow soldiers.
On one occasion he is more overt in his sympathies and attraction. In Nottingham he meets Bombardier Brown, a troubled young man who says of himself: ‘I know that I am different. I have known it ever since I was a kid and I made up my mind that I would fight against it even if it’s impossible.’ In a moving passage, de Hegedus recounts an intimate meeting with Brown in which the young man unburdens himself. ‘… I am putting up a terrific fight. I may be beaten in the end, but I’m trying not to give in.’
De Hegedus questions Brown about his ambitions and learns that the Bombardier was turned down by the RAF because of his eyesight.
‘I wanted so much to become a pilot and I would have made a good pilot too.’
‘Yes. And it would have made you happier,’ de Hegedus assures him. ‘All that preoccupation with danger and adventure. You wouldn’t have found time to think of your personal problems…’
‘And it would have been so easy to end my life. Just shot down and finished […] Sometimes I really wish I was dead.’
Weeks later, de Hegedus is stunned to learn of Brown’s death in a motorcycle accident outside Nottingham. He was speeding, ran into a lorry, and died instantly – the inference being that the young man took his own life.
De Hegedus’s grief is followed by remorse. ‘Oh, how bloody cold-blooded I sounded […] when I asked him question after question. And what a thrill I had when he answered, full, honest, clean-breasted. Well, of course, he was confessing…’
It’s tempting to wonder to what degree his grief was responsible for his subsequent nervous breakdown, compounded by what happened next.
During his time as a gunner, de Hegedus applied for a commission and was refused; later he requested a transfer to the Army Education Corps as a lecturer, a role for which he was eminently suited. He was a Doctor of Law, could speak four languages, and had experience lecturing – quite apart from the fact that he was phenomenally well-read and had a wide knowledge of the arts. After an interview with the Selection Board, however, his application was rejected for reasons he was unable to fathom.
Following a bout of insomnia and depression, de Hegedus suffered a nervous breakdown and was referred to a military hospital in Leeds. After a period of recuperation, he was discharged from the Army in 1942. His later attempts to find work to aid the war effort were stonewalled for the same reason he was refused a commission and turned down as an Army lecturer: as his parents were enemy nationals, de Hegedus was considered a security risk.
The autobiography closes with de Hegedus working as a van driver, delivering film posters to cinemas in London and the suburbs. It was menial work for a man of his ability, but it did have the advantage of allowing him time to write.
At one point in Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting, while awaiting his posting overseas, de Hegedus contemplates the possibility of being killed in action: ‘It was, of course, unpleasant that from the literary point of view I had not had my season. I wanted to write at least five books, the kind of books I always wanted to write, messages in a bottle dropped into the sea, waiting for someone, like me, to pick up and read.’
Cover of an English edition of The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland (Adam de Hegedus).
Adam de Hegedus succeeded in his ambition to become ‘an English writer’. He wrote ten books: six works of non-fiction, two novels under his own name, and two1 under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland. The searingly honest and heartbreaking best-seller The Heart in Exile>2, 1953, as by Garland, was the very first work of fiction to tackle the theme of male homosexuality in 1950s Britain. De Hegedus died of poisoning, a suspected suicide, in October 1955.
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting is not only a wonderfully well written and compelling account of the times – his evocation of army life is on par with anything by Julian MacLaren-Ross – but an insight into the complex personality of the man himself and a neglected memoir that deserves a wider audience.
Notes 1 Three later novels attributed to ‘Rodney Garland’, published after Adam de Hegedus’s death in 1955, were the work of fellow Hungarian novelist Peter de Polnay: World Without Dreams (1961); Hell and High Water (1962); and The Sorcerer’s Broth (1966).
Eric Brown has published over seventy books. His latest is Murder Most Vile, and forthcoming is the SF novel Wormhole, written with Keith Brooke. He lives near Dunbar in Scotland, and his website is at: ericbrown.co.uk
Don’t Keep the Vanman Waiting by Adam de Hegedus London: Staples Press Ltd., 1946
“I got the idea from a detective novel. I read a lot of detective novels…”
The 1970s were full of the 1940s. In fashion, Halstead and Yves St Laurent brought out lines based on the 40s’ look. In music, Bette Midler and The Manhattan Transfer were reviving Glenn Miller and the Andrew Sisters, while in Britain, Roxy Music sang 2HB, an ode to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. But it was in cinema that the 1940s – and noir in particular – came back with a vengeance, like a spurned lover with a gun in her hand: Play it Again Sam (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), all updated noir tropes to suit the times. Perhaps it was all the old movies being rerun on US TV, maybe the scepticism of the archetypal 40s PI suited the post-idealism of the 1970s, or perhaps people just liked the clothes, but there it was: the 70s were full of the 40s.
Eddie Ginley’s ad.
Ahead of the game were two British movies: 1972’s hard-bitten classic Get Carter (based on Ted Lewis’ novel Jack’s Return Home) and the much more low-key Gumshoe, from 1971. Written by Neville Smith and directed by Stephen Frears, Gumshoe is a fantastic movie, set in contemporary Liverpool, starring Albert Finney as Eddie Ginley, a dreamer and would-be stand-up comedian who puts a joke ad in the paper on his birthday (see above) and gets more than he bargained for. With superb performances from Finney, Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finlay and a host of local actors, including the great Bill Dean, Gumshoe is a perfect marriage of old and new, understated Liverpool wit and noir attitudes (and there’s an astonishingly good pastiche soundtrack by Andrew Lloyd Webber).
But it’s the script that makes it. Neville Smith was to become a popular actor in the 1970s – best known for playing the lead in Alan Bennett’s Me, I’m Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (Trevor, a surrogate for Bennett himself), as well as his work with Ken Loach and others. Smith also wrote The Golden Vision, a Loach-directed television play about a group of Everton supporters and Long Distance Information, another TV play about a Elvis fan coming to terms with changes in his life on the night the King dies.
Smith’s central character Eddie is an Elvis fan too, his nostalgia for the past all mixed up, but what he mostly resembles, of course, is a Raymond Chandler hero. But Gumshoe is more than a pastiche of noir thrillers: it contains all the elements – a dame, a fat man, a murder, a betrayal, and plenty of mean streets – but adds to them a sense of the now. Eddie Ginley is not Philip Marlowe. He’s a socialist, a Labour voter. He signs on (“Down at the dole things move slowly. Down at the dole things always move slowly.”) He lives in a world not of night clubs, cabarets and torch singers, but working men’s clubs where the bingo takes precedence over the acts. (And there are odd little Beatles references throughout: Ginley lives in Gambier Terrace, as John Lennon once did, and has a friend called Mal Evans, the same name as the Beatles’ roadie).
Stephen Frears met Neville Smith in 1968 and, recognising his talent, asked him to write a thriller. As a writer, Frears said, Smith had “the grace of Jackie Milburn* and the wit of SJ Perelman**” – but he also saw that in Gumshoe, “within the framework of a pastiche of a film noir there lurked a human story.” Frears wrote in the introduction to the 1998 reissued paperback, “I had thought he was writing a thriller. In fact, he was constructing a self-portrait; a record of what it was like to have been a teenager in the English provinces in the Fifties.” Frears is right. Eddie Ginley is no hard man, no Spillane anti-hero packing heat. He’s a boy, with the sense of right and wrong of a boy. He wears the costume of a cynic – the trenchcoat, the whisky, even the gun – but he’s an innocent and, like all innocents (like all great movie private eyes), he’s going to get hurt.
Lobby card for the film Gumshoe.
The movie was made, released and went on to become, quite rightly, an acknowledged classic of British cinema. And before it came out, Neville Smith was asked to write a novelisation. Experienced screenwriter or not, he never written a book before. “I dithered and ended up with a week to the deadline,” he recalled later, and – borrowing a room at Frears’ house – dictated the book, as he had done the film, this time to a typist from a firm called Graduate Girls.
Perhaps it’s these unusual circumstances – dictating a novel in a few days from a script – that give Gumshoe the novel its voice. Laconic, but fast-moving. Drily funny, but also desperately melancholic. World-weary but also innocent. It’s a perfect noir and a perfect book. Is it better than the movie? Impossible to say: but without Finney and Frears, there’s more of Smith’s voice, and that’s not a bad thing.
Gumshoe the movie wasn’t a hit. Its stars continued their brilliant careers. Its soundtrack composer reused the movie’s main theme for another piece rooted in nostalgia, his musical version of Sunset Boulevard. Stephen Frears went on to well-deserved international success as a director, and Neville Smith continued to write and act (now in his 80s, he politely declines invitations to events where his work is shown).
It’s only the novel of Gumshoe that rests in the cold cases files. Issued by Fontana in paperback in 1971, it was reissued by Slow Dancer Press in 1998 with an introduction by Stephen Frears and a pithy afterword by Neville Smith: since then, nothing, which is a pity. Both versions can be acquired cheaply. Acquire them.
David Quantick is a writer with six novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Night Train, was published in September 2020. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Gumshoe, by Neville Smith London: Fontana Books, 1971 New York: Ballantine Books, 1972 London: Slow Dancer Press, 1998
Back in the 1990s, I was browsing my way through an independent bookstore in Saskatoon (now, sadly, defunct) and came across a title I hadn’t heard of, by an author whose name was unfamiliar to me.
I’ve always been drawn to war novels (I’m something of a history buff) and this one had, as its backdrop, the grim, bloody trenches of the First World War. I read a few paragraphs and decided to purchase The Poppy Factory, a leap of faith that paid big dividends as the book remains a favorite to this day.
It impressed me to such an extent that, some years afterward, when I was guest at a science fiction convention in Vancouver, I brought up The Poppy Factory during a panel of on “Neglected Books” that also included my Canadian colleague Spider Robinson.
No one in the audience recognized the book, so I stoutly defended its literary qualities, at one point cracking open The Poppy Factory, reading an excerpt from about thirty-five pages into the novel. The protagonist, Captain Adrian Garrard, is lying in “no man’s land” after an abortive attack. Wounded, semi-delirious, at first he can scarcely credit his senses:
I shall never find peace in the moonlight again, only fear, because it was then I saw the first of them.
It appeared over the lip of the crater, crouching on all fours, its black head twitching rapidly from side to side, sensing danger, scenting prey. It began to crawl through the mud toward me…
… I heard the sickening, sucking sound as its legs drove it closer and closer through the clinging mud and could not look. And then I heard laughter. Harsh, grating, wild, only just recognizable, but laughter.
I forced my eyes open.
The creature had risen onto its rear legs and, still bent forward, was clutching my revolver between its forepaws. Only they weren’t paws, they were earth-blackened hands, and the creature was not an animal but a man, his head shrouded in a cowl of filthy sacking, his clothes blackened rags…
…I lay still, feigning death. The claw-like hands ripped at my clothes. Perhaps this was death….
The reaction to that reading was most gratifying. I could see people writing the title down for future reference.
William Fairchild, with Simone Simon (L) and George Baker (R) on the set of The Extra Day in 1955.
My investigations over the years uncovered some biographical details about The Poppy Factory’s author, William Fairchild. He served in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, and subsequently enjoyed a fairly lengthy and successful tenure in the British film industry, scripting and directing a number of movies. His best-known efforts were Malta Story, featuring Jack Hawkins, and Star!, with Julie Andrews.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a strong cinematic feel to The Poppy Factory; visually it’s quite evocative and compelling. As part of his research, Fairchild personally toured the Ypres battlefield in Belgium, spurred by a rumor (I’ve never been able to confirm its veracity) that at one point in the conflict two hundred men from both armies lived underground between enemy lines.
William Fairchild died in 2000 at the ripe, old age of eighty-two.
Sadly, he never lived to see his novel translated to the big screen.
But it’s never too late to rectify that oversight….
Cliff Burns has been a professional author since 1985, with 15 books and scores of published short stories, essays, reviews and poems to his credit. He lives in western Canada with his wife, artist and educator Sherron Burns. He also writes the Beautiful Desolation blog.
The Poppy Factory, by William Fairchild London and Toronto: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1987 Also published as No Man’s Land in the U.S. by Bantam Books, 1988
David Quantick is a writer with seven novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Ricky’s Hand, was published in August 2022. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
Sarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.
Joanna Pocock is a British-Canadian writer currently living in London. Her work of creative non-fiction, Surrender: The Call of the American West, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize in 2018 and was published in 2019 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and House of Anansi Press (US).
Kristin Czarnecki is the author of the memoir The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. Her creative nonfiction, literary criticism, book reviews, and poetry have been published in a variety of venues, and she has a chapbook forthcoming from dancing girl press. She holds a Ph.D. in English and is past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.
