www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered
Justly Neglected?
“Most neglected writers have been neglected for perfectly understandable reasons – usually because they are obscure, difficult or just plain boring.” Kate Saunders, The New Statesman, August 28, 1998
This is a note about a footnote. If John Biggs, Jr. is mentioned today, it’s inevitably as a supporting player in the life of his much more famous Princeton roommate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and if either of his novels enters the discussion, it’s probably in a footnote. This is not entirely unjust.
Biggs (Princeton ’18), Fitzgerald (’17), and Edmund Wilson (’16) became friends through their passion for writing and editing Princeton’s two literary magazines, The Tiger and The Nassau Literary Magazine. Biggs would serve as managing editor for both, though he quickly realized that Fitzgerald was the better (and more prolific) writer. He and Fitzgerald shared a room during FSF’s last term at Princeton before entering the Army in late 1917.
The 1917-1918 staff of the Princeton Tiger. John Biggs, Jr. center front and F. Scott Fitzgerald behind him.
Biggs later admitted that while he was “a literary snob, Fitz was a snob’s snob.” Despite the fact that Biggs came from a far wealthier family, Fitzgerald somehow managed to dress in the best clothing available from Brooks Brothers and Jacob Reed. When Fitzgerald needed someone to get him out of jail after a bender, though, it was Biggs who inevitably provided the bail.
Both men enlisted in the Army after American entered the First World War. Neither made it overseas. While Fitzgerald married and moved to New York after his discharge, Biggs returned to Princeton to graduate and went on to earn his law degree at Harvard. Biggs and his wife traveled to Paris for their honeymoon but then headed back to Delaware, where Biggs followed in his father’s footsteps and established a successful law practice.
Although he was not even a year older than Fitzgerald, Biggs became something of an older brother figure for the writer. Biggs arranged for a house in Delaware when Fitzgerald needed to dry out and he took an increasingly active role in handling Fitzgerald’s legal matters. In return, Fitzgerald introduced Biggs to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s.
Biggs wrote a long untitled novel while at Harvard that Fitzgerald shopped to Scribner’s, Putnam, and eventually, H. L. Mencken. “To my mind it has the most beautiful writing — and I don’t mean “fine” writing — that I’ve seen in a ‘coon’s age,” he told Mencken. “I don’t believe anyone in America can write like this — and the novel is also remarkable in the objectivity of its realism….” Mencken did not agree. Not only did the book never get published but Mencken, who crossed paths with Biggs socially from time to time, considered him dull and officious.
Scribner’s accepted Biggs’ next novel, Demi-Gods (1926), which reviewers found an awkward mix of American eccentric religious mysticism (there are two attempts to found a cult in the book) and Gilded Age tycoonism. Perkins accepted the book for Scribner’s but was measured in his feedback to Fitzgerald.
Perkins’ opinion of Biggs’ third novel, Seven Days Whipping, was much higher. Scribner’s publicized the book in all the major reviews. A shorter version was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine and prefaced with this potpourri-like teaser:
In describing the book, one is at a loss for comparatives. One thinks of James Joyce, of Edgar Allen Poe, even of that fantastic play, “Beggar on Horseback.” None of them fits, although all of them suggest something of the truth. Seven Days Whipping has certain qualities of Joycean introspection, the fascination of Poe’s stories, an atmosphere of fantastic mystery, a revelation of forces hidden deep in the primitive in all of us.
Fitzgerald was delighted at its apparent success. “I loved John’s book,” he wrote Perkins after receiving a copy. “It’s his best thing and the most likely to go. It’s really thought out — oddly enough its least effective moments are the traces of his old manner.” He did acknowledge, though, that “From the first draft, which was the one I saw, I thought he could have cut 2000 or 3000 words that was mere Conradian stalling around. Whether he did or not I don’t know.”
The book did not sell well, however, despite generally favorable reviews and Scribner’s support. And almost two years after his initial enthusiasm for the book, Fitzgerald — who was likely off on Biggs and all stable people in general, given his own troubles at the time — confided, “Seven Days Whipping was respectable but colorless. Demigods was simply oratorical twirp.”
I have to agree with Fitzgerald on Seven Days Whipping. That odd title, by the way, is the name of a Delaware tribesman whose sudden and dramatic appearance — with the aid of a tremendous hurricane-like storm — provides the climax of the book. In contrast, Bigg’s protagonist, Stawell — a Puritan throwback, perhaps (Stay Well)? — Ball La Place, is the opposite of dramatic. He is sober as a judge, which is fitting, since he is a judge (as Biggs himself would later become).
As dark clouds mass to the east, Judge La Place travels from his court in Wilmington to his family estate on the banks of the Red clay River. There, his wife awaits, expecting to deliver their first child at any moment. She is a late mother and La Place frets about her health and the birth. As they sit down for supper, the storm breaks with a violent fury. The telephone goes out and he decides to drive to fetch the doctor.
With sheets of rain and earth-shaking bursts of thunder battering him, La Place is startled to meet with a tall Indian, half-naked and carrying the body of a dead deer. What happens next is neither respectable nor colorless, but it is largely unbelievable unless you’re willing to accept that the mixture of an expectant wife and a melodramatic encounter in the rain would be enough to send a middle-aged judge into a murderous hysteria. A hysteria which evaporates as soon as the sun rises, the baby howls, and Seven Days Whipping manages to come back to life.
John Biggs, Jr. was not unfamiliar with hysteria and other forms of mental illness. He dealt with numerous cases involving commitment to mental asylums at a time when the power in such cases lay heavy against the individual and in the 1940s, he became the chair of the American Bar Association’s committee on the rights of the mentally ill.
He may not, however, have had the temperament to put himself fully into the mind of a man who goes mad, even if just briefly. Reading Seven Days Whipping, I was reminded of something James Baldwin once said in an interview: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” Whatever that something is, John Biggs, Jr. resisted it. If he wanted his readers to believe that Judge La Place becomes mad, he only succeeds in convincing us that he becomes histrionic.
Fortunately for Fitzgerald, Biggs was a far better lawyer and friend than he was a novelist. As Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and money problems grew worse, Biggs staunchly defended his interests and protected the writer against bankruptcy. Before his death, with Zelda in and out of institutions, Fitzgerald named Biggs executor and guardian of their daughter Scottie, and proximity to Biggs was one of the reasons that she settled in Washington, D.C. after leaving college.
I have to admit that I knew nothing about Seven Day’s Whipping when I started it. I was merely intrigued by the title and happy to give it a try when I spotted a cheap copy. In the end, it was more interesting as an entree to the story of John Biggs, Jr. — a good man, a good lawyer, a good judge, but a merely adequate novelist — than on its own merits. But such is the nature of reading forgotten old books: they’re not all masterpieces.
Seven Day’s Whipping, by John Biggs, Jr. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928
This was the most surprising book I’ve read in a long time. I was initially interested in The Woman’s Harvest because, having been published in 1916, it appeared to be the first English novel to deal with the situation of women on the home front in World War One. And at first, that’s what it proved to be.
Harvey Brunsdon is a floorwalker in a department store on Kensington High Street when the war breaks out in August 1914. Married and with an infant daughter at home, he decides it’s better not to volunteer for the Army out of purely practical concerns: how will his wife manage on 12 shillings a week when they’ve been living on £170 a year — or worse, on 9 shillings a week if he gets killed? After being shamed as a coward by a young woman presenting him with a white feather, though, he and his wife decide it’s better to do the patriotic thing.
Harvey enlists and his wife leaves the child in the care of her mother goes back to work. The independence and power of being an income earner seems to compensate for her loneliness — more than compensate for it, in fact: “If Elsie Brunsdon could have analyzed her tangled emotions during the autumn of 1914 she must have admitted that, contrary to all her expectations, she was enjoying every moment of her life.”
When Harvey is mustered out and returns, he finds it hard to return to the dressed-up interior work of the store and he seeks out the widow of his regimental commander, who has an estate in need of farm workers. Despite his lack of experience, he moves the family to the countryside. He takes to it like Oliver Wendell Douglas in Green Acres, while Elsie is less enthusiastic. In the course of a year, hard work and good old English pluck turn Harvey into a proven landsman.
Then, in Chapter IX, as Elsie is finally warming to rural life, Anna Floyd throws in this bombshell:
A disbanded regiment, nearly all young students and professional men, mustered in civilian clothes in Trafalgar Square, marched in silence down Whitehall, and hanged four members of the Cabinet on the lamp facing the entrance to Downing Street. The ringleaders, a major, two sergeants, and a private soldier, surrendered themselves and were arrested at once. They were sentenced to death, and on the evening of their trial four more prominent politicians dangled from the same lamp. The Prime Minister, arrested in his own official residence, was taken to see the bodies and informed that whilst the four men lay under sentence, four politicians would hang punctually every evening.
I did not see that coming.
Ad for The Woman’s Harvest by Anna Floyd.
Floyd goes on to tell us that England then experiences a renaissance of the land and within two years achieves near-total self-sufficiency in food production as thousands of veterans turn their swords into ploughshares, with commensurate benefits for Harvey Brunsdon as an early adopter, and we are back into his story, the most violent and tumultuous revolution since Oliver Cromwell having been introduced and passed over in the space of three pages.
But wait: there’s more.
At this point, we are precisely at the halfway point in the book and can be excused for wondering where this is all going.
And the answer is … polyamory.
Over the next 100-some pages, two of the local women disappear for months at a time — to France, to a clinic for “fatigue” — and return with infants of mysterious origin. A foundling. A dead cousin’s orphan. We learn that Harvey has been sowing his seeds in more than the land. In fact, there’s a third affair well underway. When Elsie finally figures this all out, Harvey chastises her. It was her own fault: “You’ve never offered me love of your own free will.” And it’s certainly not the fault of the other women: “They’re victims of the war. You ought to feel sorry for them. You are the fortunate one amongst your unfortunate sisters.” Elsie needs to understand that Harvey is merely doing his patriotic duty — and chill. Turn your head and think of England, in other words.
Though she was writing when the war had been raging for less than two full years, Anna Floyd seems to have been certain that it would result in the loss of a generation of English men and that her country’s future lay in a massive return to an agricultural economy and a massive embrace of sexual freedom … for men. And thus we discover what she meant by The Woman’s Harvest.
I was hoping this book would be a glimpse into how English women, recently emboldened by the Suffragette movement, responded to the early effects of the war. Silly me. The critic Gerald Gould called The Woman’s Harvest “unreadable.” I found it highly readable, blazing through in little more than a day. Highly readable — and highly ridiculous.
The Woman’s Harvest, by Anna Floyd London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1916
I love publishers who made a practice of listing their other releases on the flyleaf or dust jacket, because these can be the clues that lead me to a forgotten gem.
But sometimes, these lists are just a set of dusty tracks. Here, for example, is the list of titles that appears on the back of one of Peter Davies’ 1960 releases.
The first entry, Kathleen Sully’s Skrine, is quite familiar. I wrote about it in 2018 while I was on the trail of Sully’s remarkable oeuvre. At the time, I wrote of this bleak post-apocalyptic fable, “None of the four novels by Kathleen Sully I’ve read so far is anything quite like the others, but I feel safe in saying that Skrineis the most unlike the rest.” Having since read all 19 of Sully’s books, I can say that statement still holds true.
But I recognized none of the other titles in the list, which led me to start researching. Here are my findings, which should, if nothing else, convince you that like archaeologists and prospectors, searchers after neglected literary gems have to sift through their share of junk and dust along the way.
• The Angel in the Coffin, by Michael Ellis
Michael Ellis was the pseudonym of Stephen Llewellyn, an English reporter turned New Zealand soldier turned writer who died at the age of 47, not long after this second novel was published. The story follows a Dutch freighter taking European emigrants to New Zealand. One of the few reviews I’ve been able to locate said that Ellis/Llewellyn wrote “as if he had plums in his month” — whatever that means.
• All the Loyal People, by David Stone
Stone’s second novel. His first was a well-received spoof of the roman policier a la Simenon et al.. This one recounts a year in the life of a society reporter and failed novelist who bounces between a dingy flat and a series of parties, getting involved with a Gatsby-like operator and (of course) a mysterious beautiful young woman. The Observer’s reviewer called it “A most able satire on London’s scruffy hinterland,” but both The Evening Standard and New York Times wondered about the author’s real intent: “The narrator’s self-disgust keeps breaking in on the light comedy and suggests that the author was in two minds about the kind of book he was writing.” Several reviewers also found the marginal characters more interesting than the protagonist, which does seem to be a chronic problem among young-man-coming-of-age tales.
• The Crop Dusters, by Geoff Taylor
An adventure novel in the Nevil Shute vein, about a group of former RAAF pilots who gather to fly crop dusters in a battle against a plague of locusts in New South Wales. It’s full of details about flying the old prop planes, with the drama of the battle against the insects. “Written in unpretentious but sharply evocative prose,” wrote one Australian reviewer. “Sunny in mood, simple in plan, subtle in execution,” concluded the Birmingham Post.
• After the Storm, John Gilbert
This appears to be a pastiche on the Victorian tragedy of the good girl gone wrong. I say appears because the only review I could locate was brief and buried in the pages of Pacific Islands Monthly, an Australian magazine. After her fiance drowns himself and leaves her pregnant and penniless, Gilbert’s heroine puts her good looks to work and finds that the wages of sin can result in a decent living if you’re sharp about it.
• Stranger in Allanford, by E. C. Axford
A wartime evacuee returns to the village and home where she was hosted as a child. “A novel of compelling quality” is as much of a review as I can find. The author was an Oxford headmaster and this appears to have been his only venture into fiction.
• Mutiny in the Attic, by Betty Singleton
Hard to tell if this is sweet or saccharine. Four pensioners living in Eventide Home revolt against the home’s management and take off on an adventure. “A charming tale … the characterisation uncommonly good” said the Bristol Evening Post, one of the few papers to bother reviewing it. Despite the suggestion of malice in the cover illustration, I’m pretty sure that Lord of the Flies in an old age home this ain’t.
• The Self-Made Man, by Sylvia Cooper
Something of an odd choice of title for an English publisher. It’s about a Detroit trucking entrepreneur who looks back over his life at sixty, finding himself less satisfied with his personal successes than his business. The Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the few U.S. papers to give it a review and that one was negative: “The novel, an unfortunate waste of writing talent, falls flat from every viewpoint.”
• The Young Kings, by Laurence Moody
Two long short stories, one about an encounter in the Alps and the other set on a Greek island. Moody’s later novel The Ruthless Ones was later filmed as What Became of Jack and Jill?. Other than the fact that the first story involves mountaineering, I’ve been unable to track down any other details. Moody also wrote The Roxton Kibbutz, about an ill-conceived attempt to establish a commune in the early 1970s (those wacky hippies!). He may or may not be the same person as the later TV director (Taggart, et al.).
All these were listed on the back of The Initial Error, by Lydia Holland, which itself appears to have received no reviews. Which is surprising, given that she was the daughter of the prolific writer and reviewer Leonora Eyles and the one-time TLS editor D. L. Murray, ex-wife of the Italian critic Mario Praz, and well-regarded translator of Alberto Moravia and others.
So, all in all, a disappointing lot. However, if you happen to stumble across one of the above and find I’ve grossly underestimated its merits, please let us know.
Headline from the Victoria (BC) Colonist’s reprint of Peter Vansittart’s New York Times obituary.
Poor Peter Vansittart. When he died after a career spanning seven decades and producing over 40 books, some newspapers reached back to the very beginning and dredged up a damning line written about his first novel I Am the World: “I can without hesitation say that this is the worst book ever published.” Just which critic wrote that, I’ve been unable to determine. But it’s the sort of absolute declaration that lends itself to endless repetition.
Advertisement for I Am the World in The Spectator.
Was the judgment deserved? That’s very hard to tell because I Am the World has since become exceedingly rare. There are just three copies listed for sale, all well over $100, and six library copies listed in WorldCat.org. From the reviews I’ve been able to locate, I Am the World is, like several of Vansittart’s later novels, set in an abstract location — in this case, a country referred to simply as “The Land.” It tells of the ascent to the throne of absolute dictatorship of a charismatic peasant named Goran, aided by a Jewish banker named Finkenstein.
Vansittart’s descriptions of Finkenstein are difficult to read now. He’s a man “big-nosed in expensive glory” whose “slim tentacles swarmed everywhere.” Vansittart calls the Jews of The Land “mysterious people borm from the knowledge of Babylon darkly, living in the two worlds of race and nation, hiding disease and strength behind the glitter of their eyes.” Another Jew is “a short red figure with a snake’s tongue and a brain fertile and oozing like a grey sponge pressed by a hand seeking its own advantage.”
But the magnetic Goran is a bad piece of work, too. He beats up a blind old woman: “Goran smashed his fist savagely and with all his strength into her face, and she dropped recumbent and bleeding to the ground. With a single curse he stepped over her dragging the sack up from behind the wordless body.” When he ultimately rejects worldly power and seeks refuge in the sanctuary of a cathedral, he makes it clear that there is no place for the likes of Finkenstein there.
Though the “worst book” review may be apochryphal, the reviews I’ve managed to locate are hardly the kind to show off to Mom:
• Kate O’Brien in The Spectator:
“I am the World is a wordy first novel which might be ignored were it not that its sentiments leave a bad taste in the mouth, and one is forced to wonder why on earth it was published just now. It is a tale of a little country called The Land, which has some kind of “salvation” forced upon it by a thoroughly objectionable young peasan-dictator, who climbs to his curious power-vision on the back of a criminal Jew. The author is devoted to such words as lust and hatred, and is very free with his own loose conception of the deity. It is difficult to see where Mr. Vansittart is going in this over-lush study of a bad, crude megalomania.”
• R. D. Charques in the Times Literary Supplement:
“First novels are almost always the better for a certain modesty of intention, but there may be no great harm in striking an ambitious gesture. The abmition of I Am the World, however, is surely excessive even for a first novel by a young writer in these perplexing and difficult times…. But for the copiousness and polist of Mr. Vansittart’s language, it might have been kinder to ignore this first effort of his. He has, however, an unusual flow of words and a feeling for outward graces of style, and when he is not trying to be irresistibly eloquent he is at any rate engaged in expressing, however wordily, a point of view. But far too much of this lesser eloquence is merely bookish, while there are reams of empty sonorifics in the manner of “that chance of hope which could not now miscarry but must down upon the night’s frown.” As for the sentiment of the tale, one cannot but regret the evidences of a familiar and distasteful hysteria.”
• J. D. Beresford in The Guardian:
“… a first and very ambitious novel” but said Vansittart “as yet lacks something of the knowedgeableness necessary to make such a story as this convincing.”
• Frank Swinnerton in The Observer:
“Amid this verbiage are buried idealism and a serious idea, with an attempt to picture the rise of an ignorance man to power over a nation (imaginary) and his discovery that God moves in a mysterious way. But unfortunately Mr. Vansittart has not mastered the art of writing, which begins with a distinct knowledge of what one wants to say.”
• Anonymous review in The Sydney Morning Herald:
“Mr. Vansittart’s pseudo-allegorical style is baffling, but …it is possible to discern a trace of purpose behind the masses of turgid prose and ineffectual imagery….. This type of novel may appeal to a few readers in search of ‘something different.’ It is scarcely likely to be one of the year’s outstanding literary successes.”
V.S. Pritchett, Vansittart’s editor at Chatto & Windus, did suggest numerous changes, including toning down the language, all of which the author declined to make. This set a pattern that Vansittart repeated throughout his career. In a fascinating survey of Vansittart’s career packaged in a review of his 1986 novel, The Aspect in the London Review of Books, Martin Seymour-Smith wrote that, “The problem for Vansittart has always been that he is excessive: he wants to achieve too much within the bounds of a single volume. Nor will he give this ambition up – but by now his persistence has become courageous and impressive.”
Seymour-Smith identified this problem as far back as I Am the World. The book, he wrote, “is excessive (promisingly so): about the rise and fall of a dictator clearly based on Hitler, it seems to want to say everything that can be said about dictatorship. It is relentlessly and ambitiously unpleasant – the brutal and dark side of Vansittart has not, surprisingly, attracted the attention of reviewers – and is written in a curiously over-rhetorical, almost gushing style which sits very awkwardly with its sombre theme.”
Somehow, Vansittart managed to be a prolific producer of books despite his consistent habit of writing as he chose. Reviewing Vansittart’s novel Landlord in 1971, Auberon Waugh called him “one of those heroic people who just go on writing novels in English.” Francis King, reviewing Lancelot, Vansittart’s 1978 retelling of the Arthur legend, described the author as a noble eccentric: “Though he does not usually appear in histories of the modern English novel, though he has won no literary prizes and though his name is probably unfamiliar to the majority of the general reading public, he is a writer whose singularity is matched by his strength.” He continued to have advocates for his particular exceptionalism. In 1983, reviewing Vansittart’s Roman novel Three-Six-Seven: Memoirs of a Very Important Man, wondered, “When will this writer of extraordinary talent receive his due?”
Peter Vansittart receiving his honors from the Queen in 2008.
He did get formal due, courtesy of the Queen, just before his death in 2008, being awarded the Order of the British Empire. Although the New York Times obit said that Vansittart’s work was “like caviar to the critics and a stranger to the best-seller list,” he did crack the UK best-seller lists with his 1995 survey In the Fifties. And, as D. J. Taylor noted in Vansittart’s Independent obituary, the writer “belonged to a practically exclusive literary category: the defiantly highbrow novelist who, sustained by a private income and supportive publishers, writes more or less to please himself. Such qualifications are usually a guarantee of direst obscurity. Certainly none of Vansittart’s 40-odd books sold more than a few thousand copies or even went into paperback.” Although Taylor called Vansittart was a marginal figure in English literature, he credited him with “the virtual reinvention of the post-war historical novel.”
I Am the World, by Peter Vansittart London: Chatt & Windus, 1942
Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author’s identity, but then the practical challenges settle in. Where does a bookseller shelve it: under the As? How does a would-be buyer refer to it? “It’s a book about Hollywood.” “Do you know the author’s name?” “No.”
Novels about Hollywood are a semi-popular topic for PhD dissertations, and I’ve found City Without a Heart mentioned in the bibliographies of several, but none of the doctoral candidates in question appears to have actually read the book. I only stumbled across it searching for something completely different on the Internet Archive. Having read it, I can allay your hopes (or fears): this is not the Great Lost Hollywood Novel.
But it is an interesting novel. Now, we all know that interesting is the “Get Out of Jail Free” card of adjectives. If you can’t say anything nice about someone, say they’re interesting. It’s what you tell your best friend after they drag you to a three-hour art house movie with a dozen lines of dialogue: “Yeah, that was interesting.”
In this case, interesting is not a cop-out but a way of saying that City Without a Heart is not a particularly well-written novel but it is a well-observed one, though distorted by the author’s prejudices. When the book was published, there was that initial rush of guesses about the authorship. Candidates included Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, Getrude Atherton, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis Bromfield, and even Greta Garbo. What’s clear is that the author was someone familiar with the workings of the studio system from the inside. Someone who’d penetrated to the inner sanctum of a studio chief’s office, for example:
Mr. Schloss’s office was protected from assault by three lines of defences. The first was held by an empty table and rather a formidable filing cabinet. The next boasted a standing guard of three young things with typewriters. The third and last was occupied by a young man with a mauve face, geranium-coloured hair, and the best set of dentures Mary had ever seen outside a showcase. He was supported by an individual with such a powerful resemblance to a gorilla that Mary was quite alarmed that there were no bars in front of him.
If the author was indeed a Hollywood insider, he was someone who’d grown to hate what he knew. “You know nothing about Hollywood,” says its first representative to encounter the photogenic Mary Fresnell and her aunt in their humble village in Cornwall. “It would be a crime to send a girl like Mary into that sort of atmosphere.” Anonymous drives home this point repeatedly and unsubtly, starting with his title. “Hollywood,” declares a screenwriter she meets there, “for all the ferocity of its labours and the wealth of its talent, is as empty a shell as ever existed in the history of the world.” Another denies the assertion that Tinsel Town is a godless place. There is a god, he argues: “the god of I.”
It’s not hard to pick up a few clues about the author’s identity beside his insider knowledge. The fact that he was a he and not a she, for example. Sprinkled throughout the book are a hints of a streak of misogyny, such as his dislike of chatty women:
Mrs. Knalder was Mary’s first experience of America’s endurance-test talking women. Later she discovered that they are numerous and are without mercy. Lack of subject-matter, the inattention or obvious boredom and infuriation of a listener has no influence upon the flow of their chatter. Like the brook it goes on forever.
His suggested cure for these women is brutal: “nothing short of amputation of the tongue is of any practical service whatsoever.”
Anonymous is also an anti-Semite. Hollywood’s studio heads all “rose from the tailor’s bench,” have waists that measure “anything up to sixty inches round” and faces that “bore the prominent characteristics of a toucan.” In Hollywood, the rightful order of classes has been turned on its head:
Hollywood is a Jewish stronghold. The entire picture industry is under their control. The power they possess is incalculable…. Enthroned they sit and jest of their humble origin to a Christian community which is never weary of trying to ex¬ hume, from totally non-existent sources, ancestors of most piquant aristocracy.
Ask a Jewish executive, in receipt of five hundred thousand dollars a year, whence he sprang, and you shall hear tales of a basement on the East Side of New York. Put the same question to a ten-dollar a day ‘extra’ and you shall be buffeted with half the names in the English peerage.
Contrast this with his descriptions of the people of Cadgwith, the little Cornish port from which Mary, the innocent pulled into Hollywood’s lair by the promise of filthy lucre. Its men “are simple folk who, when not riding the waves, sit upon an old stone wall and watch the sea from which their slender blessings flow. Its women “are busy at home, for where money is scarce work is plentiful.” You may recognize them as the future inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And Mary, of course, is the stoutest of these stout-hearted folk: “She could sail a boat, bait a line, shoot a net, and scale a cliff with any fisher lad in the village.”
She can also, we come to see, learn her lessons. Brought all the way from Cornwall to California based on her stunning beauty and vitality as caught, unaware, on a few minutes of film, she quickly falls from promising starlet to has-been (or rather, never-was) through the betrayal of a competitor unburdened by scruples, and heads home, the sadder but wiser girl.
Almost.
There is a twist right at the end that leads me to wonder if Anonymous’s chief gripe with Hollywood boiled down to something as simple as resentment that he wasn’t better paid.
I closed City Without a Heart grateful not to know Anonymous’s true identity. Three hundred pages in his company was quite enough. The book is a revealing if stilted portrait of Hollwood in one of its moments of transition, when talkies had overturned the hierarchy of silents and studios had succeeded in eliminating all but the last few independents, and for that it undoubtedly has some historical value. As a novel, however, its neglect is justified.
City Without a Heart, by Anonymous Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933
I wonder how many people under the age of 40 understand the point of this question. If you’re under 40, by the time you learned to read, Rod McKuen had already begun to fade from the scene. He was no longer a regular on television variety shows — in part because television variety shows had themselves faded from the scene by the end of the Seventies. He was still performing live, but much of his audience were people who’d been going to his shows for years. After pumping out a steady stream of books of poetry and lyrics for over two decades, his output — having made him the biggest selling poet in the world for much of that time — fizzled out. After Intervals and Valentines in 1986, there would only be two more books, published in the early 2000s.
But there was a time — from 1967 to around the mid-1970s — when you couldn’t walk into a bookstore or record store or turn on a TV or radio without bumping into Rod McKuen. If he wasn’t as big as the Beatles, he was as big as Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass or Jacqueline Susann and certainly more prolific.
That was when, as a profile that appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 put it, “every enlightened suburban split-level home had its share of Rod McKuen.” “His mellow poetry was on the end table (Listen to the Warm), his lovestruck music and spoken-word recordings were on the hi-fi and his kindly face was on the set, on The Tonight Show and Dinah Shore’s variety hour.” (In our house, it was The Sea, one of his collaborations with Anita Kerr.) In Frank Sinatra’s long career, Rod McKuen was the only songwriter he ever devoted an entire album to. Guys bought his books to show their girlfriends how sensitive they were and women bought them for their boyfriends to show them what sensitive was. “The cult of Rod McKuen grows by leaps and bounds,” proclaimed a 1967 profile in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
The same year, The Chicago Tribune’s entertainment editor gushed, “Rod McKuen is great, great, absolutely great! His is a poet, and he sings and reads practically nothing but his own songs and poems. Doesn’t sound like a night club act? Well, he doesn’t just read and sing them — he lives them and makes you breathe and feel them. He drags you through the gamut of emotions, putting a lump in your throat one minute and making you chortle the next.”1
Bear in mind: this was a guy who wrote poetry and then read it in a quiet, gravelly voice (he used to joke that “It sounds like I gargle with Dutch Cleanser” and rock critic Greil Marcus once said it had “the force of a squirrel’s”) over a soft musical accompaniment. That was it. He didn’t dance and you couldn’t dance to him. He didn’t act, or at least hadn’t acted since his last B-movie in early 1960s. He didn’t tell jokes, or at least not many and not well enough. He wasn’t a sex symbol: although there were plenty of women (and undoubtedly some men) who fell in love with him, he made it clear he was a loner. And yet, he’s the only poet with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet, as late as 1974, he was being billed as “the greatest entertainer in the world!”2
Ad for Rod McKuen’s 1974 appearance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica
He did, however, infuriate many people who took poetry seriously. The English poet David Harsent described McKuen’s poetry variously as “scraps of maudlin meditation masquerading as emotion deeply felt,” “ersatz anguish, carefully sifted to pablum for easy consumption,” and “lumpish impressions of places and people, flashes of cheap surrealism and clumsy gropings at the numinous.” “No one has done more to degrade language and human sensibility,” D. Keith Mano wrote at the end of a full-page skewering in the National Review.
Josh Greenfeld, writing in Mademoiselle, lumped McKuen with Kahlil Gibran and the now-forgotten Walter Benton as “the Marshmallow Poets.” “The main thing I have against McKuen is his oversimplification of everything,” Greenfeld says. “I mean, if your pussy cat comes home, your life problems aren’t solved. And the words, the phrases McKuen uses! They all lack that precise particularization that is poetry.” Professor Robert W. Hill of Clemson University argued that McKuen “touched the anti-intellectual, the escapist, the superficial, the blindly sentimental capacities of the American public.” McKuen’s books, he wrote, belonged in “the lachrymose quagmire of the KMart poetry section.”
This was similar to the view expressed by Margot Hentoff in The New York Review of Books in its one and only review of his poetry: “McKuen is so devitalized a singer, so bad a poet, so without wit or tune—as well as so out of touch with the contemporary pop sensibility—that one can only consider his monumental nationwide popularity as a kind of counter-counter-cultural phenomenon.” Karl Shapiro said it was irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet. Shapiro conflated McKuen with Bob Dylan into a creation he called Dylan MacGoon. Asked about his creative regime, Shapiro wrote, “MacGoon tried to answer as best he could (language is not his strong point).” One reviewer refused to do anything more than include the title of McKuen’s latest in a round-up of recent poetry books. Reviewing McKuen, he complained, was “a bit like using a jack-hammer to clear cobwebs.”
This attitude was a dramatic contrast to the gushing admiration with which Margaret MacDonald, a reporter for the Oakland Times reviewed McKuen’s first book of poetry And Autumn Came in 1954. She praised the book’s “powerful impact of sincere emotions, expressed in clear language with original figures of speech and a sensitive approach.” “Like all true poetry,” she felt, it could “stand the test of re-reading” and was “one which all who really love poetry will keep in an easily accessible place for frequent perusal.”
There was a long gap between that review and the next. As Barry Alfonso writes in his fine biography of McKuen, A Voice of the Warm, McKuen self-published his next collection, Stanyan Street & Other Sorrow, and sold it at his concerts and other appearances while his long-time partner, Edward Habib, drove up and down California, placing it with bookstores. “I’d go through the telephone book and get addresses of bookstores,” Habib told Alfonso. “I’d go to the stores and say, ‘Can you handle five books? If they don’t sell by next week I’ll come and pick them up.’” In a matter of a year or so, this approach stacked up over sales of over 50,000 copies.
It was McKuen’s lyrics that sold the books — lyrics he wrote first for Glenn Yarbrough, one of the most successful of the school of well-scrubbed folksingers so popular in the early 1960s, and later for himself after signing with RCA. McKuen was a prolific lyricist, heavily influenced by Jacques Brel, whom he came to know during a spell in France and with whom he collaborated, performing some of Brel’s songs and writing others than Brel performed in translation. Indeed, the label chansonnier was perhaps more appropriate for McKuen than poet. And his performances drew inspiration from Brel, as McKuen usually sat on a stool on a bare stage, dressed in turtleneck sweater, jeans, and sneakers, and sang/spoke his songs.
In 1966, RCA released a Yarbrough album titled The Lonely Things: The Love Songs of Rod McKuen. The next year, having signed with RCA as well, McKuen recorded Listen to the Warm, which was also the title of his third book. Having heard about the grassroots success of Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows, Bennett Cerf of Random House had approached him to join its list and the two men agreed to an initial release of 30,000 copies of Listen to the Warm.
Gene Shalit broke the news in the Los Angeles Times, commenting, “Insiders versed [funny, Gene] in publishing history can’t remember another volume of poems by a national unknown which got such a send-off.” McKuen cagily negotiated a partnership arrangement that allowed him to continue publishing the books with his own Stanyan Press imprint, which gave him the advantage of Random House’s nationwide marketing while preserving the independence to put out other titles (which ultimately included God’s Greatest Hits, a collection of Bible quotes illustrated by the folk artist Sister Gertrude Morgan).
Listen to the Warm was as much a phenomenon of 1967 as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band. The book sold over one million copies in hardback within a year of its publication. Although the record’s success was less spectacular, it became the first of nine albums McKuen placed in Billboard’s Top 200 charts over the next four years.
Both the book and the record opened with a poem that became a favorite for many McKuen fans. “A Cat Named Sloopy” remembered a cat McKuen had owned when he was living in New York City in the early 1960s.
For a while the only earth that Sloopy knew was in her sandbox. Two rooms on Fifty-fifth Street were her domain.
In the poem, Sloopy wait while the poet goes off in search of love, or at least one-night stands, until one day when he runs away.
Looking back perhaps she’s been the only human thing that ever gave back love to me. prologue
Some of its fame could be attributed to association (or confusion) with a popular tune from two years before, “Hang On, Sloopy” by the McCoys. But it was a heartstring-tugger sure-fired to bring out the hankies. I suspect more than a few of his fans wanted to take Rod home like a stray kitten.
After years of hanging around the margins, McKuen quickly found himself in the warm embrace of the book, record, television, and stage business. He did hundreds of live shows each year, dozens of television appearances, and continued to release new books of poetry and new records at a steady rate. Ads for his books and LPs ran in mainstream magazines like the Saturday Review of Literature, Playboy, Life, and Time. In a 1980 book titled Shrinklits: Seventy of the World’s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size, Maurice Sagoff parodied Listen to the Warm:
Are you sentimental? Dote on plastic charm? Rod’s massage is gentle, Does no lasting harm:
No deep thoughts to rile you, Blandness to beguile you, Pare your toenails while you Listen to the smarm.
McKuen’s only record to break into Billboard’s Top 100, however, came years before Listen to the Warm. It was a novelty tune titled “Oliver Twist” that mocked the rage launched by Chubby Checker’s hit, “Let’s Do the Twist.” He later blamed his scratchy voice on too many nights of trying to sing the tune at bowling alley lounges.
An ad for a 1961 McKuen appearance performing his hit, “Oliver Twist”
“Oliver Twist” was only one of the many milestones along McKuen’s career path to bestselling poet (or chansonnier). After dropping out of high school, he started working as a disc jockey for an Oakland, California radio station. Within a year, he had attracted the attention of Bay Area entertainment columnist Dwight Newton, who included him among his “1952 Prospects”: “A young man with much promise. Writes interesting, colorful scripts for his disc jockey show. Good individual voice.” After a spell in the Army, he returned to the Bay Area, took an apartment on Stanyan Street in San Francisco, and began appearing as a singer in nightclubs such as the Purple Onion.
He also dipped his toe in the water of Hollywood, picking up a few parts but eventually earning lobby card billing, if only as a supporting player, on such movies as Rock, Pretty Baby. One of McKuen’s friends later joked that, “If Rod weren’t a poet, he’d make a tremendous marketing analyst,” and the proof can be found early on. In 1956, the United Press syndicate ran a feature titled, “Rod McKuen Has Too Many Talents.” “McKuen is a young man in a very pleasant quandary,” wrote the anonymous author — most likely a press agent paid by McKuen. “He does so many things well that he has trouble sometimes deciding which talent to emphasize.”
The article also reported that McKuen had “appeared in five Japanese films” while serving with the Army. This was just one of many accomplishments that McKuen would claim over the years. Others included singing with Lionel Hampton’s band, writing a column for the San Francisco Examiner, and performing for a state dinner at the Kennedy White House. He told one interviewer, “I write novels under other names. I wrote a medical book. I’ve had a couple of books of history that have done very well. I’m in the middle of doing a history now that will be about 12 or 13 volumes by the time it’s finished.” He also claimed that every day he ate one meal, read two books, wrote ten poems, and worked 16 hours straight.
Three and a half years of research has led me to believe that Rod told many white lies and some real whoppers about his life and career. A constant need to legitimize himself and prove his worth drove him to exaggerate his actual accomplishments, which were truly formidable. His deceptions were mostly benign; he probably came to believe many of them were true. In the end, they invoke more sympathy than outrage. No amount of recognition could still the nagging inner voice that he just wasn’t quite good enough.
Even after achieving commercial success as America’s chansonnier, culminating in his first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1969 (which was recorded and released as an album), McKuen continued to pad his resume. Perhaps his most dubious claim was of having taught himself musical composition. As early as the late 1950s, when he recorded several albums that would today be labeled “beatnik jazz,” he was taking credit for not only the lyrics but the music to his chansons. In 1960, he collaborated with veteran studio arranger Dick Jacobs on an instrumental album titled Written in the Stars, also known as The Zodiac Suite, with each track based on a different astrological sign. McKuen was listed as composer, but this needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
There was a lot of musical ghosting going on in the 1950s and 1960s. As is almost common knowledge today, most of the music heard on recordings by the Beach Boys, the Monkees, and other LA-based pop groups was actually played by a handful of ace session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. TV comedian Jackie Gleason claimed arranger credits on several dozen easy listening albums that were the work of trumpeter Bobby Hackett working at union scale.
McKuen acknowledged some of his collaborators, such as Stan Freeman, another veteran faceless studio musician, but in reality Freeman probably did most of the work. As Michael Feinstein told Barry Alfonso, Freeman recalled that McKuen would say something like, “I want to write a concerto for oboe and this and that instrument” and then hum a couple of melodies that Freeman would then work into a completed piece. And Freeman was certainly not McKuen’s only “collaborator”: others included John Scott Trotter, Vince Guaraldi, and Arthur Greenslade.
McKuen’s musical credits began to pile up quickly in the late 1960s. He was credited with a number of soundtracks, most notably for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Song in 1969 and which became a #1 pop hit for the English singer Oliver. His “classical” compositions began to compete with, and eventually overtake, his chanson albums. He took to listing them along with the titles of his books on the frontispiece.
Rod McKuen’s credits, from Intervals (1980)
As Alfonso writes, McKuen’s compositions “sound like an amalgam of Aaron Copland–like Western elements, stage musical melodies, and film soundtrack excerpts” — in other words, the sort of pleasant but somehow generic stuff often sold as library music. He gave Newsday reporter Leslie Hanscom a recording of his opera The Black Eagle when she interviewed him in 1979. “On later sampling,” she wrote, it turned out to be a work of truly masterful monotony with a plot and theme that might have made Jonathan Livingston Eagle a more appropriate title.” Hanscom found that McKuen “projects a sense of self that could dwarf Wagner.” That might have been an understatement: in 1983, he told Bill Thomas of the Baltimore Sun that he’d rewritten Wagner’s entire Ring cycle and reduced it down to 5½ minutes. Though McKuen often award-dropped the fact that one of his pieces was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music for 1974,3 for his composition The City: A Suite for Narrator & Orchestra, the other fact that composers such as Patric Standford openly admitted to ghostwriting for him tends to diminish just how impressive that accomplishment sounds.
The more one looks into the details of McKuen’s life and work, the more McKuen comes off as a Jack of all trades and master of none. His poetry and lyrics, in particular, were written at a furious rate. He published nearly 30 collections of poems, the vast majority new, in the space of 20 years. By the end of 1968, three of the alone had sold over one million copies. By 1972, it was 12 books and over 4 million copies; by 1974, 15 and 9 million; by 1979, 24 and 16 million. McKuen’s modesty about the success of his poetry tended to ring false. “I’ve sold five million books of poetry since 1967,” he told one interviewer, “but who’s counting?” Or, on another occasion, “I didn’t even know I was a millionaire until I read about it in the newspapers.”4
The enormous popularity of McKuen’s poetry could be one of the reasons so many critics attacked it. As critic Gary Morris has written, “There aren’t many art forms where commercial success is relentlessly equated with aesthetic worth.” The National Lampoon made an obvious joke of it in their McKuen parody: “The lone$ome choo choo of my mind/i$ warm like drippy treacle/on the wind$wept beach.” Even the New York Times felt free to publish their own parody: “I met your press kit first/Box of mimeographed attributes and achievements.”
A few tried to look beyond the sales figures. Robert Kirsch, the LA Times book editor, declared in late 1968, “I don’t believe that Rod McKuen can be ignored as a poet simply because he is the best-selling troubadour in America today.” But even Kirsch found it hard to be unqualified in his praise. Although he found that McKuen “more than occasionally … is capable of rendering awareness into perceptions of small but haunting truths,” he also acknowledged that “He is less effective on the printed page than on his records, where, assisted by music and the nuance of the spoken voice, he evokes recognition and fantasy.” Too many of McKuen’s poems — such as “Manhattan Beach,” from Lonesome Cities — read less like poetry and more like, well, notes:
I’ve taken a house at Manhattan Beach working the summer into a book.
Eddie came last weekend and brought two girls and some books. The girls were pretty but the books stayed longer and now they menace me stacked up on the floor staring back in unread smugness.
Otherwise I’ve had no visitors.
In a survey of American poetry of the 1960s written a few years later, Louis Simpson quoted from Listen to the Warm:
But yesterday you touched me and we drove to the toll beach and ran in the sand. Sorry no one could see how beautifully happy we were.
“Well, what’s wrong with it?” Simpson asked. “It’s simple, it makes lots of people happy. Only an effete intellectual snob would find fault with it…. The world is like a sand-pile with lots of nice gooey wet blobs to play with. It’s a soda pop, a weenie-roast, a sticky, marshmallow kiss.” McKuen’s world, he wrote, “is the province of Youth.” But Simpson warned that, “Youth sooner or later will want to have poetry. Not this slop.”
McKuen claimed he started writing poetry because he couldn’t find ones he liked. “I wanted to say something different or write about what everyone else was saying but say it in a different way.” But in truth, what tends to distinguish McKuen’s language from that of other poets is its lack of individuality. His poetry, like his music, is not so much different as generic.
“Forever is not far enough/to throw a smile/that never was” McKuen writes in one of his later collections, The Sound of Solitude. Which seems at first glance like a koan, something a guru or Yoda might say. Except … look closer, read it over a few times, and you realize it’s nothing. We know what each word means, but put together it’s nonsense. Everywhere is close enough/to lose a memory/you never had. Would you buy a book filled of 80 pages with that?
Saturday Night Live used to run a cartoon feature about two superheroes known as the Ambiguously Gay Duo. McKuen might be crowned the Ambiguously Poetic Poet. “I’m not a poet, I’m a stringer of words,” he sometimes demurred. Yet when the Los Angeles Times invited McKuen to submit a short reflection “On What Poets Are … and Aren’t,” he wrote with patent self-importance, “A poet is a keeper of the language.” The job of the poet was to “shed light on the darkness.” A poet “must repair but never rape the words that form his native tongue,” adding rather disingenuously, “nor should he be an advertisement for himself.” The LA Times piece sparked some sharp reactions. One reader wrote in to say that “Having McKuen comment on the nature of poetry is somewhat akin to having a kindergarten fingerpainter comment on the art of Picasso.”
McKuen often resorted to a rhetorical trick when asked to defend his poetry:
Actually, I really don’t think it’s fair to criticize poetry. A novel, sure. But not poetry. See a poet is his poem. He lives his poem. So if you just give a poem a quick reading and call it something like sappy, then you’re really calling the poet sappy. It just isn’t fair. Not really.
Attack my poems and you attack me, McKuen was saying — a cheap way of warding off any interviewer with good manners. “I lived that poem,” he liked to declare. “I defy you to catch me and say that I wrote about the experience badly. How do you know what the experience was? You didn’t live it!” Some who profiled McKuen pointed out, however, his penchant for assuming a martyr-like pose. Like the old joke, he seemed to say, “I’ve suffered for my art. Now, you can suffer, too!”
Rod McKuen signing books at a Phoenix mall, 1977.
Another tactic was to compare his fame to that of his critics. “Name one critic who’s downed me,” he challenged Bill Thomas, “and ask five total strangers if they know who he is. I bet none do. Then ask them if they’ve heard of me. They may have a good opinion or a bad opinion — but they sure as hell know who I am.”
On other occasions, McKuen would defend his poetry by trotting out its achievements. “I mean — if I wasn’t a damn good poet,” he told Rick Soll from The Chicago Tribune in 1975, “why would I be in the Oxford Book of Verse, why would I be in all the famous quotation books, why would my poems be used in hundreds of college courses?”
The trouble is: none of that was true. There is no Oxford Book of Verse. There are Oxford books of English Verse and American Verse and Comic Verse, and McKuen is in none of them. I also checked more than a dozen different quotation books published between 1968 and 1978, and the only one I found McKuen’s name in was What They Said in 1971: the Yearbook of Spoken Opinion. McKuen’s quote is worth repeating in the context of this discussion, however:
Critics attack my poetry because it’s understandable. I always think everything should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. A while ago it was announced that I would come out with a paperback of new poetry. I got bad reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Book World and a rave from Coronet, and I still have not written one word of the book.
Which, of course, was also untrue.
As for his poetry being used in hundreds of college courses, this was also improbable. A few, such as Brian Curtis in a 1972 article in The English Journal, the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English titled, “The Necessity of the ‘Rod McKuens'”, argued for McKuen as, if you will, a gateway drug for serious poetry. However, this argument tended to produce the response reported by Ross Talarico in his book Spreading the Word: Poetry and the Survival of Community in America: “As a matter of fact, I brought sneers to the faces of poets and critics when, during a couple of panel discussions over the past few years, I’ve made the observation that if poetry survives at all in America, perhaps more credit will go to Rod McKuen than to any of a few high-powered poetry critics.”
And both Curtis and Talarico were careful to point out that while McKuen’s poetry had utility, it lacked quality:
Do I say these things because I am a fan of Rod McKuen’s? No, not really. I’d be the first to say his poetry is filled with overused, often trite phrases, sentimentalism, predictability, and a naive, terribly romantic view of the world. [Talarico]
I do not suggest that “trash” compose the curriculum, although it fits the nation’s bias and fills drugstore shelves. We all leave our McKuens behind, and, if lucky, we suffer “growth.” [Curtis]
Part of the problem was McKuen’s own understanding of poetry. “The problem is that a lot of people who write poetry think the more obscure they can be, the more intelligent their poetry is,” he once told an interviewer. “To me, intelligence and obscurity never went together.” He sometimes compared his poetry to that of Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, but mostly in self-defense: “Their poetry was very uncomplicated, very straightforward.” “I write in the language of my day and try to make it effortless for the reader,” he said on another occasion, which only supports Dick Cavett’s quip that McKuen was “the most understood poet in America.”
Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with poems written in simple, uncomplicated language that reads effortlessly. Millions of American schoolchildren have had their first exposure to modernist poetry through Williams’s red wheelbarrow:
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
But I think it’s illuminating to compare McKuen’s simplicity with that of another poet known for creating poetry from simple, clear words: Mary Oliver. For the same of illustration, let’s look at how they each treat the subject of dogs. Here are two selections from McKuen:
From Caught in the Quiet (1970): My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too. Like me, he goes where the smiles go and I’d as soon lie down with sleeping bears as track the does by moonlight
Don’t trouble me with your conventions, mine would bore you too.
Straight lines are sometimes difficult to walk and good for little more than proving we’re sober on the highway.
I’ve never heard the singing of the loon but I’m told he sings as pretty as the nightingale.
My dog likes oranges but he’ll eat apples too.
And from Listen to the Warm: See the dog he doesn’t move—a voyeur. Never mind. What we’ve done is beautiful. For gods and animals to see, for us to stand aside in awe and look ourselves up and down.
And Mary Oliver:
From Devotions Now through the white orchard my little dog romps, breaking the new snow with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited, hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins until the white snow is written upon in large, exuberant letters, a long sentence, expressing the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better myself.
Neither poet tells us much about the dog they’re writing about. In both McKuen poems, however, the dog is merely an object. It, like the “gods and animals,” is there merely to be a silent witness. In Oliver’s poem, on the other hand, the dog’s the star. We’re sure that McKuen has seen dogs; but we know that Oliver has owned dogs and has watched them delight in hopping about in drifts of new snow. And while McKuen’s dogs are there to gaze upon his sensitive pensiveness in wonder, Oliver is the one observing and taking joy from her dog’s exuberance.
In his later years, McKuen was candid about his less-than-ideal childhood. He was born in a Salvation Army hospital, his father having vanished soon after sleeping with his mother, who was working as a taxi dancer. He was sexually abused by an aunt and uncle, physically abused by his stepfather, and probably both as a teenager at the Nevada School of Industry. He dropped out of school and went on the road at a young age and spent time as an in-house male prostitute at logging camps in the Pacific Northwest. A background of this sort of abuse is now known to be associated with an “impaired capacity to develop proper definitions of the self,” as the psychologists Bessel van der Kolk and Rita Fisler have written.
One suspects, therefore, that part of what was missing from McKuen’s poetry was himself. For all the supposed confessional honesty of his poetry, McKuen concealed and distorted much about himself, including his sexuality. Ambiguity was not a trick he used to avoid being pinned down: it was at the heart of his being. He was careful, for example, not to openly declare himself as gay. Though he lived with Edward Habib for decades, he always referred to Habib as “my brother.” After the success of Listen to the Warm, McKuen would refer to having a son and daughter he’d fathered during a stay in France in the early 1960s, but as Alfonso writes:
There is no information that confirms Rod McKuen ever had children. To the author’s knowledge, no one else has ever mentioned meeting or communicating with them. At least four of his closest friends either doubt or flat-out deny that Jean-Marc and Marie-France ever existed. After Rod’s death, no son or daughter came forward to claim anything from his estate.
Yet clues slip out here and there in his poetry, if only unconsciously. In “A Cat Named Sloopy,” for example, he writes:
I never told her but in my mind I was a midnight cowboy even then. Riding my imaginary horse down Forty-second Street, going off with strangers to live an hour-long cowboy’s life, but always coming home to Sloopy, who loved me best…
While “midnight cowboy” might have been an obscure reference when Listen to the Warm was published, it became impossible to miss after the release of the Oscar-winning film two years later. And some of the lines in the title poem are positively creepy: “Follow women after dark/they can only yell for help or whisper yes”; “I’m grateful then for your upbringing/it led you like an arrow here uncomplicated and mine.”
Though many of McKuen’s poems are about love, they are almost never a celebration of love or the loved. Instead, McKuen most often looks at love in the rearview mirror. Even when he’s in a relationship, he’s thinking about its end, as in the lyric of one of his most popular songs, “If you go away”: “If you go away/as I know you will….” One woman who posted about Listen to the Warm on Goodreads wrote tellingly, “My husband gave me [McKuen’s] three small poetry books, early in our marriage. I think I probably related some of his feelings in poems. Now I just see a man having affairs with various women, and then breaking up with them.” In fact, the one constant in McKuen’s views on love is himself: “If I’m still alone by now it’s by design/I only own myself, but all of me is mine.”
His political views were as ambiguous as his sexuality. Though hundreds of thousands of young people bought his books, he was never comfortable being associated with hippies, Flower Power, or other aspects of the youth movement. “Flower power is fine but what they really need is shower power,” he used to joke, and he had little patience for hippies: “I got my success on my own terms, worked for it, suffered for it. Hippies are fine, but I like to be clean myself,” he told the New York Times in 1969. In one of McKuen’s earliest profiles, Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times wrote that his careful choice of material and his own presentation made him “a hip square or a square hip, depending on which way you look at it.” Flower children may have bought his books, but they didn’t go to his concerts. One account of a McKuen performance described his audience as “white, female, middle class, scrubbed and respectable.” “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be. People don’t want to keep getting hit in the head with social commentary all the time.”
When the Saturday Review invited McKuen to review a collection of Mao Tse-tung’s poems, he made sure to stipulate that “Being neither far right, left, nor extreme middle (though having antagonized in my brief span each faction in turn), I am more concerned with poetry than with politics.” Even McKuen’s religious views were elusive. He told one interviewer that he’d been “a Roman Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Methodist, a Mormon, and a Quaker” and that he was planning to give Judaism and Greek Orthodoxy a try.
In some ways, it was as if McKuen was trying to be both the most famous poet in the world and invisible. When his book The Power Bright and Shining: Images of My Country was published in 1976 to coincide with the Bicentennial, he claimed that he had started out wanting to write “a kind of Studs Terkel book” featuring the words of working men and women.5 “Unfortunately — or fortunately, I suppose — it’s not easy for me to be invisible….”
It’s the ambiguity of McKuen’s identity that ultimately undermines his poetry. One reviewer on Goodreads wrote, “These poems are like the antithesis of Bukowski.” Well, exactly. Like him or not, Charles Bukowski was unapologetically himself. Rod McKuen, on the other hand, seems never to have been entirely satisfied with whatever self he devised.
And that lack of a strong sense of self may have been the secret to both his commercial success and his artistic failure. There was just enough content in McKuen’s poems to give his readers the sensation of reading poetry without any of the individuality or obscurity that make good poems both challenging and memorable. McKuen dedicated Come to Me in Silence by saying, “This book is for nobody/everybody.” “I think he should make up his mind,” quipped the Daily Mail’s book editor, Peter Lewis.
“If there’s a message in my work,” McKuen would often tell interviewers, “it’s about man’s inability to communicate.” Which cannot but remind one of Tom Lehrer’s joke: “If a person feels he can’t communicate, the least he can do is shut up about it.” Even McKuen occasionally allowed readers to see the emptiness at the center of his poetry. As he wrote in “October 3,” from In Someone’s Shadow:
If you had listened hard enough you might have heard what I meant to say. Nothing.
I was going to end this piece here, dagger neatly inserted into the poet’s corpse. But I realized this would leave an incomplete picture of McKuen’s work. One of my favorite adages is that if a pile of horseshit is big enough, there might be a pony in there. I went through more than a dozen of McKuen’s books across his career as part of my research. And yes, there are a LOT of poems about beaches and sunsets and loneliness, but there are also oddities.
Fans of pop music have long known that some of the most interesting tunes in an artist’s repertoire are the stray tracks thrown in to pad out one side of an LP, songs where the constraints of what should or shouldn’t go into a hit were tossed aside and caution shelved in favor of unfiltered creation. Sometimes, the result is awful; and sometimes the result is — well, if not genius, at least intriguing.
And the same is true of McKuen’s oeuvre. It may be that McKuen sheltered a big hole of hurt at the center of his being. And while a big hole of hurt may be a handicap as a poet, it can often be a source of great energy for a satirist. Listen to the Warm, for example, which is easy to dismiss entirely from its drippy dedication alone — “For E.: If you cry when we leave Paris/I’ll buy you a teddy bear all soft and gold” — includes a poem with the title “First and Last Visit to an Annex in Burbank.” “Time was you couldn’t see the Forest Lawn for the trees.” Forest Lawn, just to fill in possible gaps in cultural history, is a huge cemetery in Glendale, California where hundreds of celebrities from L. Frank Baum to Elizabeth Taylor are buried. It’s also one of the inspirations for Whispering Glades in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One And because it’s the cemetery that set the standard for the grandiose American style, it’s also largely swathes of headstone-dotted grass.
The fact that I had to explain McKuen’s joke drained what meager comic value it may retain, but it serves to illustrate the vein of ironic observation that runs quietly underneath much of the teddy bear dreck of his poetry. One of the best examples is his 1959 album Beatsville. It was marketed to tap into the Beatnik craze, the fascination with beret-wearing, goatee-bearded, finger-poppin’, jazz-loving coffee house-haunting poets and musicians who ranged from serious (Allen Ginsburg) to silly (Maynard G. Krebs). Its cover shows an angst-ridden McKuen brooding over a glass of cheap wine as he sits next to a wild abstract painting with a mysterious and beautiful woman and would lead the buyer to believe this is a sincere sample of Beat art.
Instead, it’s a pastiche. Though he’d spent plenty of nights strumming his guitar and singing folk songs and published his own book of poetry, McKuen wasn’t buying the shtick. On Beatsville, he mocked the beats as poseurs — such as “Raffia the poet, who is not only an angry young man but a dirty old man as well” — and riffed on their lingo (“I was mixed up with this Gemini cat who, well, she didn’t like to be liked, like”). As Alfonso puts it, McKuen “came across more as an observer (or infiltrator)” than a card-carrying Beat. He went on to demonstrate his disdain for the Beats even more obviously in the single “The Beat Generation” he released with Bob McFadden soon after: “Some people say I’m lazy/They say that I’m a wreck/But that stuff doesn’t faze me/I get unemployment checks.”
He went through years, or volumes, rather, without indulging his appetite for caustic commentary, but sometimes it came out despite himself. One of the tracks on his first album with Anita Kerr, The Sea, included a short number titled “Body Surfing with the Jet Set” that was full of parodies of surfer talk along the lines of Beatsville: “Madame Marie Ouspenskaya went through her whole life never learning to surf/But she sure had some bitchin’ garlic leis.” Years later, in his collection Beyond the Boardwalk, he reused that title for something whose humor is almost too black to bear:
My father’s uncle’s brother married his cousin. Twice he beat her up and twice the police came and twice they carried her away. Does that make her his cousin twice removed? Surf’s up.
I keep a loaded pistol just beneath my bed, it’s nice to have a gun that works in case I lose my head. Hang ten.
Edward Habib and Rod McKuen at McKuen’s Hollywood mansion.
In his later books, the sunshine fades and more often gives way to unvarnished sarcasm. The Beautiful Strangers (1980) includes a multi-part poem titled “A Field Guide to Cruising” that is nothing less than a summation of decades of cruising experience — by both McKuen and his “brother” Edward:
Do not dress up or down but as you would for an occasion. With some luck and some premeditation it will be one.
Avoid church socials or the Bake-off. Those who gather at such gatherings have paired off long ago. They are in the middle of what they perceive as the act of living life, who are we to interrupt them?
In its way, this is every bit as uncomfortable as anything in Bukowski. If nothing else, McKuen here ventures into territory few other American poets (well, perhaps aside from William Dickey in The Rainbow Grocery). In the same book, “Designer Genes” veers into Ogden Nash territory with its perhaps too-ephemeral satire on a 1980s fad:
With laissez-faire each derriere with nom or nom de plume is held in place with little space to wiggle or sha-boom.
In one of his last books, Intervals (1986), McKuen not only displays a more good-natured sort of humor but also includes his most extensive use of social observation in a long poem titled, “Is There Life After Tower Records?” The poem, dedicated to Tower Records founder Russ Solomon, will tug at the nostalgia strings of anyone who spent a long night browsing through the aisles of this legendary West Coast record store.6 (And for those under 40, I won’t try to explain what a record store was except to say that it was the social and cultural heart of many towns in America.)
See them move between the aisles, pathways so narrow that passing past another is bold adventure, thrilling drawing-in of breath and stomach. And in between the aisles, the islands back to back that hide the million dreams inside bright jackets, well-turned sleeves plastic fused so fast it must be cut apart to reach the shiny metal hopes, the deep dark vinyl of delight whose inner grooves can only be decoded by the diamond needle, narrow beam of laser light.
This is just the kind of ecstasy you would experience flipping through the shrink-wrapped albums that filled Tower Records’ trays.
Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in L.A.
Occasionally, just occasionally, McKuen shared moments too candid to be faked. Nothing like the trinkets about sun and sand and cats that cluttered many of his pages, with details that quickly burrow themselves uncomfortably into the reader’s mind:
One day coming home I saw a farmer pissing by the road. His balls hung down below his hand and looked so heavy that I began to run for no apparent reason. I didn’t stop until I reached the safety of my room.
Home again, I pulled the shade and got down from the bureau my Sunday School coloring book. Having chewed my brown Crayola just the day before, I had no choice but to color Jesus Christ’s hair yellow.
Ten pages before this in And to Each Season …, McKuen tells a ridiculous and unbelievable story about a friendship he made with a mountain lion he spotted in the woods behind his family’s house when they lived in rural Washington state. A few pages on, we’re back in the land of sun and lovers left behind.
Had McKuen held himself to the same standard of intimacy displayed in poems like this, he might truly have earned a place in one of the Oxford books of verse. And his poems might still be taught today.
But perhaps poet is not really the right label for Rod McKuen. Remember what he often said: “I’m an entertainer,” he would say, “and that’s what I want to be.” Perhaps we should heed Maya Angelou’s advice and believe him.
Reviewing that 1974 performance at the Troubadour in Santa Monica, Dennis Hunt of the L.A. Times wrote, “His performance was awash with flagrant melodrama. He used a lot of old, obvious tricks to put his songs across. On his closing number, ‘Seasons in the Sun,’ he was even gesticulating in the flamboyant manner of Al Jolson.”
There was a time when Al Jolson was considered the greatest entertainer in America. Today, it’s hard for anyone to see Jolson’s blackfaced rendition of “Mammy” in the original The Jazz Singer and cringe. As it might be hard for anyone to listen to one of Rod McKuen’s albums or read one of his books now and wonder how they managed to sell in astronomical numbers. Perhaps entertainment is not quite so timeless as poetry.
My thanks to Barry Alfonso for suggesting I take a look at Rod McKuen’s increasingly — if somewhat justly — neglected poetry.
1 The Tribune article also mentioned that the same bill featured a ventriloquist, Aaron Williams, “and his dusky friend, Freddy.”
2 The ad for McKuen’s appearance at the Troubadour credits the “greatest entertainer in the world” quote to The Times, London. I searched through the archives of The Times and failed to find any such statement. Indeed, the only time The Times saw fit to give McKuen more than advertising space, it was a brief entry in the “Times Diary” for 20 February 1969 about an appearance he made at the Odeon cinema on Leicester Square reading the lyrics to his title song for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Perhaps this, like many other things, was just something he made up.
3 One of McKuen’s favorite claims was that of having been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1974. This intrigued me so much that I contacted both the Pulitzer committee and the Pulitzer archives at Columbia to confirm it. What they both stated was that prior to 1980, when the Pulitzer Prize adopted its current nomenclature of winners, finalists, and entrants, the submission process for the Music prize was essentially open. All entrants were considered “nominees” and all nominees (there were 40 in 1974) received a certificate. It is quite possible that McKuen or someone working for him submitted the nomination. That didn’t keep him from frequently mentioning the nomination for years thereafter.
4 After reading dozens of McKuen’s newspaper interviews, I strongly suspect the piece he was referring to was … an interview with Rod McKuen.
5 McKuen said he’d spent months traveling around the country as research. “I took a lot of odd jobs” taxi driver, hot dog seller, ice cream seller, mine worker, garbage man. “I was found out in Florida and it got on the front page of the Miami Herald that I was a Miami garbage collector for a week.” In fact, no such story appeared. Instead, on December 18, 1974, a story appeared on page 2 of the Herald that reported that “Millionaire poet Rod McKuen worked in Miami as a garbageman sometime in the last three months as research for a new book.” He said it was the toughest job he’d ever done. “I was aching everywhere. I don’t know what they put in those cans. It must be cement bricks.” The story also added bartender and soda jerk to the list of his odd jobs. The source for the story? Rod McKuen.
6 I’m told that people shopped at Tower Records during daylight hours, but I have no personal experience of this and have to discount it as myth.
Few things give you as good a picture of life at a particular time and place as seeing what people considered satire. Satire with legs is tough to write. Barbs that seemed razor sharp at the time can strike today’s reader as dull — or worse, off-target or unsuccessful to an extent that can be excruciating to watch as a rerun. What was meant to poke the funnybone can seem like an unwelcome jab in the ribs. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea is an example of the dangers of consuming satire too long after its sell-by date.
By the Sea is set in the remote seaside town of Plankton. When I read the book, I was sure that Plankton was somewhere along the Central California coast, but many of its contemporary reviewers were convinced it was in New England. Albee offers no good geographic reference points to anchor it, so let’s say we’re both right.
Plankton’s original name — as not even the Indians found the place habitable before the crazy white men showed up — was Zion’s Golden Strand. A religious sect named the Semi-Submersion Redemptionists, whose men wore beards like Spanish moss and women dressed “like adders in calico,” settled there around 1900 to practice their faith in peace. Which they did for several decades, until their stricture against sex in any form began to whittle their number down to a handful. Then, during Prohibition, the rumrunners moved in, using it as a quiet and safe to land fast boats full of illegal hooch. After FDR eliminated the profit margin, the town was left for the strays and stragglers to occupy.
There is Bonesetter, a retired seaman who runs the town’s drug store and lives in a loose menage with his wife and her ex-stripper sister, Zarafa. There is Manuel Ortega, known to everyone as “Spic” (and here we begin to see the stretchmarks in the satire), who lost an arm bringing a load of whisky ashore and stayed to run the general store. There are the Tatum sisters, two retired librarians, and their mother, whose dementia takes the peculiar form of believing herself to be General George Custer. And there are a handful of artists, sculptors, and miscellaneous Bohemians.
The diverse collection of Planktonians is united on one point: that success as defined by the world outside is an anathema. “The human race, friends, cannot stand success,” Bonesetter tells his fellow townspeople. “Prosperity makes monsters of us all. Plankton has never known prosperity, and never will. Plankton is a serene place, a joyful place, an undiscovered place; what the literary critics call a happy valley. Let us keep it that way.”
Of all the misfits, none is quite so ill-fitted as Myrthis Lathrop. Having been sent to university to study law by his father, Myrthis rejected the notion that commerce was a game he needed to play. “The world is a mighty tough place, my fine young liberal,” he father told him, “as you’ll find out when you try to make a dollar.” To which Myrthis replied, “The world is a mighty tough place because it’s full of men trying to make a dollar.” He decided instead to move to Plankton, where he could live in one of the old abandoned Redemptionist houses for nothing, and be a bum, making a few bucks by selling samples of plants, sea creatures, and insects to his old university’s laboratories. When we first meet him, Myrthis is spending his day lying on the ground, taking notes on the second day of the Ant War.”22 blacks still on their feet, to 112 browns.”
Myrthis is himself a bit of a parasite. His fellow Planktonians feed him, fuel him, clothe him, fix his plumbing, and when necessary, save him from drowning. As little as they aspire to material success, Myrthis’s obstinate aimlessness irritates many and maddens Bonesetter in particular. He concocts a scheme to marry Myrthis off to Vitalia, a scroungy young woman recently arrived in town.
Hoping this will force Myrthis to settle down, Bonesetter is disappointed. Myrthis and Vitalia decide to establish a newspaper, despite the fact that they have no printing press and can’t write — or at least, spell. Undismayed, Myrthis types up the first issue with its front page story, “YOUR FRIEND AND MINE THE COKROACH.” Myrthis is not just pro-roach: he is a zealous roachist. “Those of us who are a bit too sure that we are the final and fairest flower of Creation will do well to reflect upon the fact that the cokroach has been here longer than we have and will be here when we are all through.” When the universe comes to its whimpering end, he assures his readers, “it will be the roach, not Man, who will stand on tip-toe on the last charred Reef of Earth and cry farewell my brothers farewell farewell.”
Somehow, Myrthis’s piece gets into the hands of a desperate syndication agent, and the next thing you know, all of America is calling for more. Myrthis and Vitalia are swept off to New York City to make the rounds of television game shows, news shows, and talk shows, all of which offer Albee opportunities to satirize What’s My Line, The Tonight Show, and other artefacts of the time that have now grown quaint or forgotten.
P. G. Wodehouse described By the Sea, By the Sea as “like a sort of innocent Peyton Place,” which may be more accurate now than when he said it. Peyton Place long ago lost its scandalous reputation, and so, by extension, has By the Sea. When the book was marketed, the favored hashtags were #lusty and #Rabelaisian, neither of which could manage to raise the lightest eyebrow today. Yet some of the reviewers were still able to wind themselves into a righteous tizzy about it. Writing in The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Martin Quigley practically issued an invitation for a book-burning: “This is a rather pleasant and funny little summer story that has been spoiled by self-conscious and witless dirty talk. The publisher and the author are trying to justify and exploit the dirty talk on the grounds that it is Rabelaisian.” Scoring points with the chauvinists in his audience, he added, “It is remindful of a sissy trying to pass himself off as a tough guy.”
Barely two hundred pages long, By the Sea, By the Sea could easily sit at one end of the bookshelf alongside Tobacco Road and Cannery Row — neither of which, IMHO, carry much more than trace amounts of the humor and raucousness that made them favorites of a generation or two of mostly male readers. It takes a lot more to stand out as a drop-out from society in today’s world.
Not that George Sumner Albee hadn’t earned his stripes as an outsider. He’d taken to the road early in life, traveling around the world in his twenties, stepping in to save Hemingway from getting pasted by a boxer in Key West in the thirties, taking a house in Cuba’s own Key West, Varadero, in the 1950s. He was a connoisseur of the laidback expat lifestyle, capable of writing a long and gushing letter in praise of Under the Volcano to Malcolm Lowry. Lowry, replying from an unhappy spell in England, was somewhat envious: “I have an impression that Cuba must be a marvellous place in which to live, and pursue the Better Life, the Better Thing, and indeed celebrate generally the Life Electric.” Finding the political climate in England not much more enlightened that that of Eisenhower’s US, he added, “… the only thing one could do is to put one’s school cap back on and read Wordsworth, or perhaps Henry Adams, until it all blows over. Meantime it is likely that no contribution will be made to human freedom.”
Albee had made his living as something of an acceptable rebel, a gentle satirist. His first novel, Young Robert, was a semi-autobiographical jab at his own young self, a story about a San Francisco youth full of the spirit of the Gold Rush and progress with a capital P. Although he published a couple of softer, more nostalgic novels in the 1950s, he earned his living as a writer of magazine fiction back in the days when that was still possible.
Albee’s magazine fiction was often satire a soft S. His 1948 story for Cosmopolitan, “The Next Voice You Hear,” played out a premise he came up with over lunch with a friend. “You know,” he said, “wouldn’t it be something if God would come on the radio and give people such a bad scare they’d wake up and behave themselves!” He repeated the story to his friend, Cosmopolitan’s fiction editor, Dale Eunson, and Eunson told Albee the magazine would buy the story if he wrote it.
George Sumner Albee’s story, “The Next Voice You Hear,” from Hearst International-Cosmopolitan, August 1948.
In the finished product, the voice of God goes out over every radio station on Earth one day: “A plan of creation ought by rights to go forward under its own rules, but you, dear children of the Sun’s third planet, are so near to destroying yourselves I must step in. I shall spend this week with you.” As you might expect, this news sends everyone but the most deeply devout into a panic, but God’s subsequent broadcasts are written in a wholly New Testament voice. When he takes leave on the following Saturday, his voice has “the gentleness, the fondness, the inifinite patience of the voice of an older brother teaching a beloved younger brother to skate, or make a kite, or whittle”: “A planet is a school. Live, dear children, and learn.”
Poster for the 1950 movie, The Next Voice You Hear
“The Next Voice You Hear” was made into a film with the same name in 1950, starring James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). Producer Dore Schary wrote an account of the making of the film, Case History of a Movie, soon after. James M. Cain, reviewing the book for the New York Times, wrote that “it gives a picture of movies that is almost definitive, with a singularly candid viewpoint.”
Illustration from The Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1957.
Albee was a flower child before the name existed. In his 1957 story, “The Mysterious Mr. Todd,” an updated version of Twain’s Mysterious Stranger pleas for a town council to turn a patch of land into a park instead of a prison:
There are people in this world who like prisons. They like them because prisons lock up souls, and they believe in locking up souls. They want to see all of us in uniform, marching along in lock-step, saying, “Yes, boss; yes, Fuhrer; yes, commissar.” A prison is the sorriest place in the world, sorrier than any cemetery, because in prison you bury souls. Now what does a park stand for? A park is a scale model of what we hope we’ll turn the whole danged world into someday. A park is a place where we can walk under trees, with flowers around us, and meet our neighbors and shake their hands and ask them how things are going and meet ourselves, too, maybe, on a quiet path, and find out who we are. A park is a freespace for free men. That’s why we’ve got to choose it every time — every time! Because the men in prison are the men who never had parks.
Illustration from “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” by George Sumner Albee, from The Saturday Evening Post, December 16, 1961.
But not all of Albee’s satire reads quite so benignly today. In a 1961 piece for The Saturday Evening Post, for example, his tongue was perhaps too deeply buried in his cheek for his self-mockery to come through. Titled, “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” he criticizes the U.S. for being the only country where women are not banished when men sit down to talk. He sorts women into seven categories such as “The Frustrated Actress” and “The Compulsive Talker.” He then lays out a program by which husbands can retrain their wives: “Take her to court trials. Take her to visit a chemical laboratory. Play Bach to her. Read her a bit of Kant, showing her how he extrudes one idea from another. From time to time, hit her.” With a little patience and persistence, he assures the reader, “in a year’s time you may find you have a chastened, thoughtful, well-mannered, reticent woman who can actually join in a conversation without destroying it.” And if she happens to slip into her old habits, “Check her promptly. ‘How would you like a rap on the mouth?’ is a query that startles the sturdiest woman.”
This is impossible to read without cringing. If you ever wondered what men like Mad Men’sDon Draper were reading, it was far more likely to be this than the poetry of Frank O’Hara, I’m afraid. George Sumner Albee may have been lucky that he died in 1965: I’m not sure how he would have fared when the Women’s Lib movement got going.
In 1974, by the way, Paramount Studios announced that producer Jerry Bruckheimer would be filming By the Sea with a script by Steve Tesich, but the project appears to have stalled soon afterward.
By the Sea, By the Sea was recommended to me by Kate Peacocke, who wrote from New Zealand, saying her father “loved its zany humour and its gentle wisdom, and so do I.” For me, the book lands halfway between unjustly and justly neglected. If you do read it, it’s best to look for the spirit of “Mr. Todd” and ignore the brief flashes of “Let’s Put Women in Their Place.”
Other Reviews
• Vernon Fane, The Sphere
… a happy, bawdy and very funny novel indeed; Mr. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea, which I propose to re-read often and certainly not to lend, unless it is to benighted travellers unable to get to a bookshop. Mr. P. G. Wodehouse has gone on record as finding it one of the funniest books he has read for ages and full of charm, too. He adds that it is like a sort of innocent Peyton Place, as contradictory a statement as the old master can ever have emitted. Be that as it may, he is certainly right about its being funny, and since that is a quality fairly thinkly parcelled out in contemporary fiction, I can recommend it to those readers who are free, broadminded and twenty-one.
• Dave Lipman, The Kansas City Star
If Aldous Huxley had stumbled across Plankton, he would not have had to search around bravely for new worlds. He could have loosened his tie and luxuriated in the company of somebody like Myrthis Lathrop…. There’s a theory, unproved, that a man who uses shingles from his own roof for firewood is a man worth meeting. It follows that a book in which such a man plays a leading role is a book worth reading.
• Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Guardian
the funniest book I have read in years: that is to say it is not “a riot of fun” but witty; satirical, not smart; adult, not “adult”; and like funny books from Candide to Lucky Jim, basically serious…. A young man’s book, presumably, which I wholly recommend.
• Lynn Hopper, The Indianopolis Star
Light, brassy, with serious undertones, and definitely on the wild side. A new book with more charm than most summer fiction is George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea.
By the Sea, By the Sea, by George Sumner Albee New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960 London: Victor Gollancz, 1960
CAUTION! Any person or persons who attempt to recognize their own sordid idiosyncracies in any character in this book are warned that anything they say will be used in evidence against them.
This disclaimer may be the best thing in this book. On the other hand, my knowledge of the who’s who (or who slept with who) of the glitterati of the 1920s (and 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s) may be too inadequate to have recognized — let alone understood — most of the inside jokes that are probably peppered throughout.
Daisy Fellowes was a portmanteau of connections. In her day, she may have been the best-connected person on the planet. If there are six degrees of separation between me and Kevin Bacon, there were probably no more than four between Daisy Fellowes and my grandfather. Just read the string of labels that opens her Wikipedia biography: “prominent French socialite, acclaimed beauty, minor novelist and poet, Paris Editor of American Harper’s Bazaar, fashion icon, and an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune.” Every one of those subordinate clauses by itself is more that most of us can claim. She packed six of them into her life. But then she did have plenty of hooks to hang them from, carrying around a name that would have taken up a sheet of paper by itself: Marguerite Severine Philippine de Broglie Ducasez Fellowes, Duchess de Gluecksbierg. Daisy Fellowes on her yacht c.1930
She was the kind of character who provides an irresistible rabbit-hole for even a well-intentioned writer. Thus, Ladislas Farago, when ostensibly writing about her daughter Jacqueline in his history of World War Two espionage, The Game of Foxes, veers off course for a quick swing around the isle of Daisy:
The Prince was killed in 1918, the year Jacqueline was born. His young widow, a ravishing and poignant figure in the deep mourning that was fashionable at that time, then married the Hon. Reginald Fellowes, a tall, dark, dashing British banker, younger son of the second Lord de Ramsey. From then on, she commuted between her palace in Neuilly-sur-Seine, her spacious Villa Zoriade on the Riviera, and Donnington Hall in Berkshire, once the residence of Beau Brummel, now decorated with Daisy’s magnificent collection of eighteenth-century furniture. She lived so sumptuously that even the walls of her boathouse on the Cote d’Azur were lined with drawings by Giovanni Tiepolo, the great painter of Venetian baroque whose frescoes adorn the Doge’s Palace. With apartments also in Belgravia and Tangier, she was always on the move, allegedly to dodge taxes on the vast Singer fortune.
Daisy Fellowes de Broglie Ducasez, acclaimed as the world’s best-dressed woman, was the outstanding hostess of her age, more devastatingly smart and witty than beautiful. She entertained prodigiously at her many homes and aboard her 250-foot yacht, the Sister Anne. Her circle of friends included not only such blue-blooded fixtures of high society as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Lady Castlerosse, Lady Diana Cooper, Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, and the Aga Khan, but also Somerset Maugham, the great ballet master Serge Lifar, Coco Chanel, Cecil Beaton, Yvonne Printemps, and Sacha Guitry.
Her name pops up in letters, memoirs, and biographies of everyone from Gertrude Stein and Colette to Erté and Chanel to the Duchess of Windsor and Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman (to name another portmanteau of the famous and rich). And there is always some juicy tidbit about her to be shared:
Daring Dos, Marie Trasko:
• “According to her hairdresser, she had her hair done as much as ten times in one day.”
The Power of Style, Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins:
• “Seeing a group of girls playing in a park, she asked the nurse watching them, ‘Whose lovely little children are those?’ To which the nurse replied, ‘Yours, Madame.’
Too brief a treat: the letters of Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke:
• “Daisy Fellowes (her face lifted for the fourth time — the Doctors say no more).”
October Blood, Francine du Plessix Gray (novel):
• “Daisy Fellowes, who always wore identical bracelets of diamones and rubies on each wrist (she ordered two of each because she loathed asymmetry).”
Second Son: An Autobiography, David Herbert:
• [Daisy on her daughters]: “The eldest, Emmeline, is like my first husband only a great deal more masculine; the second, Isabelle, is like me without guts; [and] the third, Jacqueline, was the result of a horrible man called Lischmann ….”
I confess that I bought Cats in the Isle of Man for its title alone, hoping for something quirky and unjustly forgotten. Instead, I found the book quippy and probably not worth what a used copy will cost you. It starts as the story of Claudia and John, twin children of an American Singer-like heiress and a handsome but feckless Polish prince. John is dropped off early in the journey, however, only to reappear briefly in the midst of World War One and then be killed in combat. Instead, the story becomes focused on Claudia and her consistently poor taste in men.
Claudia see her father and handsome and resolute, “a terribly just and severe judge.” Instead, he is feckless, a man who “dreaded being alone and would do anything to keep his friends about him, from the time he awoke in the morning to his last minute of consciousness.” Her first crush is on the debonair Felix, who quickly proves to be just another impoverished nobleman in search of an American fortune. She marries Count Robert for his “knack, which came from long practice, of asking questions about the futile things that women are interested in, and appearing to appreciate their answers, while all the time his gentle mind was wandering in other spheres.”
The Count takes her off to his castle in the countryside and makes her a near-prisoner in its bleak rooms, unchanged in their decor for the last eleven generations. Later on, with Robert conveniently dead and the fog of war putting her world in a comforting soft focus, Claudia meets and falls in love again with Felix. They pledge to spend the rest of their lives together. But once a shit, always a shit, Claudia learns in the end, and Daisy Fellowes draws the final curtain on her story.
Cover design from the Lincoln Mac Veagh edition of Cats in the Isle of Man (1929)
I got the strong impression Cats in the Isle of Man that Daisy Fellowes would have been terrific fun as a conversationalist. There are some amusing asides and observations tossed off in the course of the book. Count Robert worries that Claudia, “being half American, could not be entirely civilised.” The most sought-after prostitute in Paris is sought after by men not for her beauty or sexual prowess but simply because she “had a trick of looking at him with her brown eyes all the time he was speaking, and she never interrupted.” Sadly, these are bits of tinsel hung off an otherwise unremarkable frame. Claudia is a cipher and her story not worth telling. But the book did allow her to add “minor novelist” to her CV, so I guess it served its primary purpose.
File this “Justly Neglected” and run: You got a hair-dresser to get to!
Cats in the Ilse of Man, by Daisy Fellowes New York: The Dial Press/Lincoln Mac Veagh, 1929
The good cover of the otherwise bad Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock by Neil Bell
Let me admit at the start that I bought this book because of its cover. Let me also admit that I only finished it because of what I paid for it.
In a recent class, we discussed Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey, and I raised a question I’ve asked in every class where I’ve studied Homer: how come we never hear about the bad Homers? I count myself among those who say that Homer’s epics came down through a tradition of oral literature, evolving through years and generations of orators, eventually captured in the texts we have now. But it’s safe to assume that there were fringe versions of the epics and less-than-sterling orators who recited them. And maybe if your town wasn’t on the hot orator circuit, you had to listen to the bad Homers. The ones whose renditions had less, shall we way, artistry about them? “What’s he talking about now?” “Genealogy stuff.” “Oh, Zeus! Not again with the genealogy!” “He likes his genealogy.” “Enough already with the genealogy! Get back to the war scenes!”
I mean no disrespect to Neil Bell as a hard-working, hugely prolific writer who put food on his family’s table and kept a roof over their heads. But had he been living back in ancient Greece, I suspect he would have been considered a bad Homer. I’ve read a few of his books now, and I can see a definite pattern of stylistic bad habits emerging.
One is that Neil Bell apparently thought there was no such a thing as a bad story. Characters in his book are constantly popping up and, within a page or two of being introduced, launching into a story. “Shall I tell you how I came by this pipe?” the man asks, and we’re off for the next five pages on the saga of the man, his unhappy childhood (all Neil Bell childhoods are unhappy), his troubled youth, his encounter with some fascinator of uncertain origin, some nasty scrape, perhaps a romantic entanglement, and somewhere in the midst of it all the gaining of a pipe.
Now, once in a while, once in a book, this thing can be delightful. The first few times I encountered it in one of Neil Bell’s books, I was reminded of the scene in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie where the soldier comes up to the women in the restaurant and says, “Let me tell you about a dream I had….” In the movie, the sheer brazen non sequitur-ness of it is stunning.
But the sixth or tenth time it happens: Oy, vey!
Well, Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock is almost a babushka doll of these moments. We start with the story of how Frank Rawleigh got a job with Hamford’s [read Foyle’s] bookstore, rose through the ranks, married, and was living a comfortable life until one day he mysteriously disappeared.
Then we’re off on the story of how poor Mrs. Rawleigh copes with Frank being gone. A few months. A year. Years.
How she does it is with the aid of her live-in help and Jill-of-all-trades, Mrs. Paradock. When Frank’s money runs out, they have to find a way to make some more. They buy a chicken farm. Soon turns out they’ve been swindled (but not before getting a good long story about how the farm came to be up for sale).
So they try … well, I lost track along the way, but there was a massage parlor and a fortune-telling operation somewhere in there. Each involving oddball characters who wander in and sooner or later begin, “Let me tell you about a dream I had….”
Until one day, seven or eight years later, when Frank shows up at Mrs. Rawleigh’s door. Where has he been all this time?
“Let me tell you about that,” he begins. You need not hear the rest: it’s long, convoluted, and pointless. Nobody wants him around the place, anyway, and he’s out the door faster than leftover fish.
And the point of all this was …?
Oh, yes, and Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock both meet nice guys they decide to marry. Good for them.
But still, the point of all this was …? Besides a few hours killed in search of one?
And here we get to Neil Bell’s worst habit. Pointless stories are bad enough. Pointless commentary, though?
Now, there is nothing wrong with taking a detour or two along any narrative way to offer some interesting commentary. With some writers, the commentary is better than the story itself.
But what about when it’s not? What if it’s just a detour?
Let me offer just a small example of what I mean.
So Frank Rawleigh has returned. His wife sends him away to find a hotel for the night (this is not Odysseus and Penelope reunited at last). Now she waits with her new, good boyfriend (John, the doctor) for Frank to return and have “the big talk.”
“What time was it?” John asks (what time is Frank coming back):
“Nine sharp.”
“Ten minutes. Let’s drop it. Play me something.”
“What shall I play?”
“Something rollicking to clear the air. O by God no. He might hear you coming in. No, don’t play anything. Whatever it was it might be wrong. To him. We’ll read the evening papers. One can always escape into the news. I’ve often see men waiting to go into the theatre for a major operation poring over a newspaper. I suppose it’s the best way of escaping from one’s thought ever devised.”
The minutes dragged away. Neither knew what they were reading. Suddenly Ann said, “Here he is,” and a moment later the bell rang and presently Norma opened the door and Frank came in.
Now, no one ever keeps a stopwatch on a scene in a novel. There is no reason why Neil Bell couldn’t have cut right from Ann and John talking to Frank came in.
So why did he tell us that there were ten minutes to spare?
For no other reason than to mention this completely extraneous and irrelevant observation that reading a newspaper is a good way to kill time.
That’s it. There was utterly no other reason to put those words into this book. This was a thought that occurred to Neil Bell sometime in the writing of Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock, and by God he was going to work it in.
This sort of thing happens on stage when there’s an unexpected delay, when an actor is late walking on. If Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock were a play, the actors playing Ann and John might ad-lib a few lines to kill the time until the actor playing Frank walked on stage.
But this is a novel. Neil Bell is playwright, cast, and stage manager. He’s deliberately holding up Frank so John can say these pointless lines about reading a newspaper.
Nothing more. Not a colorful anecdote. Not a witty aside or pithy observation. He’s going to hold up the show just to tell us that reading a newspaper is a good way to kill time. And he’s going to actually make the reader kill time to do it.
“What’s he saying now?” “That reading a newspaper is a good way to take your mind off things.” “Enough with the newspapers! Get back to the freakin’ story!”
And this is why Neil Bell would have been one of the bad Homers.
Mrs. Rawleigh and Mrs. Paradock, by Neil Bell London: Alvin Redman, 1958
I’m not sure how I managed to consider myself an expert in neglected books and remain ignorant of Neil Bell and his massive oeuvre until recently, but it was only the sight of the striking cover of one of his posthumous story collections, The Ninth Earl of Whitby in a local bookstore that led me to him. By the time Bell (born Stephen Henry Critten) published his autobiography, My Writing Life (1955), he’d racked up 75 titles, variously credited to Stephen Southwold, Miles, Stephen Green, S. H. Lambert, Paul Martens, and, of course, Bell.
As I’ve probably written here before, I’m from the “There must be a pony in there” school. While I’m suspicious of the quality standards of any author who can manage to write 75 books in the space of about 35 years (and would produce enough more before taking his life in 1964 that his publisher, Alvin Redman, was still issuing Neil Bell titles for nearly ten years after his death), I wasn’t really to dismiss Bell as a hack without some further investigation. My initial searching quickly revealed a few facts. None of Bell’s books is currently in print. He wrote all over the map: historical novels, mysteries, romances, family dramas, science fiction, and many, many tales of the supernatural. He started writing children’s stories, wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, then stopped abruptly after getting married (more about this later).
In My Writing Life, Bell recounts that editor Douglas Jerrold told him that the first six chapters of Seathorpe “were the dullest he had ever read.” I didn’t share Jerrold’s opinion to that extreme, but there was a fair bit of wandering around in search of a plot. We start with Warren Passmore, upstanding member of the English gentry, and his story up to the point where he gets blown up on the Western Front and comes home an invalid, blinded and paraplegic, and decides himself unfit to continue as either husband or father.
Then we switch to Mark Passmore and his story up to the point where, having worked his way to to star reporter status on Fleet Street, heads to the sleepy Suffolk seaside town of Seathorpe to rest and try his hand at writing fiction. Seathorpe is an outpost of tradition resisting the tides of change, where “the indigenous plebians, from their most tender age, knew their places and kept to them.” Where no one had taken notice of things “since the Spanish Armada.” Wandering around the town, he spots a vision of loveliness and is overcome by “the conviction that he was going to marry the girl,” quits his newspaper job, buys a cottage, and settles down. So we appear safe to assume this is going to be a book about Mark Passmore and his romance with the vision.
We then get several chapters of Mark settling in and getting to know the various characters in town, learning the girl’s identity, arranging to spend time with her at the village fête. Then the vicar tosses a monkey wrench into the works with a little anecdote:
“But let me tell you. Cook discovered when she went to the pantry this morning a large pool of liquid on the floor. Quite a large pool. The pantry window was open. She did not think it was water. She said it did not feel like water. An odd remark, perhaps, but corroborated by the maid who presently wiped it up…. Quite an intriguing little mystery.”
So intriguing, in fact, that we soon see that Neil Bell intends to take us all down this narrative path for the rest of the book. The “life” that has come to Seathorpe is not the energetic and lovestruck young reporter but something far more sinister. More puddles are found — not like water. Marks are found in the sands — not like any known animal’s. A sheep is attacked and killed. The womenfolk grow concerned, the menfolk organize nightly watches. Sightings are reported: largish creatures, piglike by one account, crablike by another. Then an infant is found dead in his crib, which is soaked with the weird water-like substance.
Now, back when we were wandering around quaint old Seathorpe with young Mark Passmore, we listened as he had a visit with the town constable, who confided his great admiration for “rare books” — by which he meant books “their authors never before or afterwards did anything like … nor any other author.” The first of these he discovered was H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. One of Well’s early — meaning science fiction — novels, about a mad scientist who takes over a remote island to experiment in creating new forms of life, part human, part animal.
Well, Mr. Bell is giving us a hint of where we’re going, but it’s not surprising that it might get missed. For Neil Bell — if Life Comes to Seathorpe is any proof — never met a detour that wasn’t worth taking. Actually, you don’t have to take Seathorpe as proof, as Bell himself provides it in his very discussion of the book in My Writing Life. After mentioning Jerrold’s assessment of the book’s first chapters, he then launches into a meditation upon how infrequently (or too frequently) intercourse occurs in marriage. A page and a half later, he writes, “To return to Douglas Jerrold and Life Comes to Seathorpe.” Jerrold told Bell that “the rest of the book was as good as anything Wells had done in that kind.” Bell bristles at the comparison. “I like to think that as a writer I am unique, in a class by myself. And this is true, for no-one writers, or can write, or could ever have written, my books.” Nevertheless, there are, let us say, more than a few Wells-like aspects to this one of Bell’s books.
There is, however, one obvious way in which Life Comes to Seathorpe is nothing like one of Wells’ science fiction novels. Those books were written before Wells had fallen in love with his opinions and are pretty trim. They’re plot and nothing but plot for the most part. Walter Allen was blunt in his review of the book in The Spectator: “Shall we say it’s the germ of an early Wells story stretched out to the length of 120,000 words?”
“How does Mr. Bell manage to spin it out to such length?” Allen asked. “By giving us his views on a number of things.” So, for example, when Bell lifts the veil off the mystery of the puddles through the device of Seathorpe’s own mad scientist’s journal, we are moving along through the preliminaries of the man’s life up to the point he began attempting to create life (using some form of electrolysis, it turns out) when we take a left and wander down a five page detour about the evils of flogging: “All men who flog are brutes; they are frequently beasts; and often filthy beasts.”
As Paul McGrane writes in a fascinating article, “The Pseudonymous Mr. Bell,” in the Autumn 2014 issue of The Book Collector, Bell’s novels “explore suicide, murder, mental and physical catastrophe, and nightmarish visions of the end of humanity.” This leads McGrane to wonder “if there are pointers in his private life to his obsessions.” In the case of flogging, there certainly was. During Bell’s own time in school, he witnessed the flogging of a ten year-old classmate by a schoolmaster. “It seared my mind forever…. All my work for years had been devoted to pillorying such beastliness,” Bell later wrote in an unpublished memoir. Having survived a harsh childhood and four years as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front meant that Bell, as McGrane writes, “had no illusions about what human beings are capable of and, in his fiction, he set about describing it with a brutal honesty.”
On the other hand, Neil Bell could have benefited from applying the same brutal honesty to editing his own writing. That Life Comes to Seathorpe is a fascinating and “more-than-passingly strange” novel is undeniably. But so, unfortunately, is the fact that it’s not a particularly good one.
Life Comes to Seathorpe, by Neil Bell London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1946
A couple of months ago, I wrote about a TLS piece from 1961 (“Out of Print”) that discussed what led to one book being neglected and another discovered. What I didn’t realize at the time was the connection between this article and the subsequent reissue of a book that’s been mentioned on numerous occasions as an unjustly neglected minor classic: All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s (1933).
In his introduction to the 1963 reissue of the book, Ian Fleming wrote:
… the sequence of events leading up to the republication of this forgotten little book … would not have occurred had I not, as a matter of course, read a leading article which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of April i4th, 1961, titled “Out of Print.”
Several times since Jonathan Cape became my own publishers I have urged them to reprint my choice among “lost 5 books” this short novel by the shadowy, unsung Hugh Edwards, and now, fortified by The Times Literary Supplement, I returned to the attack. The reply was unexpected. Yes, they would do it if I would write an introduction.
When the book first appeared in 1933, James Agate, reviewing in the Daily Express, wrote, “The word ‘masterpiece’ is over-used, and one is wise to be shy of it. But I will maintain that here is probably a little masterpiece and certainly a tour de force. So far as my reading goes, it is the best long story or short novel since Conrad.” Despite this and over enthusiastic reviews, the book took years to sell out its initial run of 1500 copies and a 1937 republication of 3000 copies took a full seven years to sell out. There was a further Forces edition issued in 1943. And even with Fleming’s introduction and name on the cover, the 1963 Jonathan Cape edition did not lead to any further publications.
All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s is a bit like one night out of The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales. It’s the story of a group of people sitting around a fire one evening listening to another telling them a story. In this case, the group is Mr Cluny Stanyhurst, a ne’er-do-well younger son, his sixteen year-old mistress Lucy, and a French abbé exiled by the Revolution. The abbé introduces the tale:
There was a great ship, my daughter — a noble ship the boast of the merchants that once, on a wild coast, in wild weather, foundered. Some of the passengers and crew escaped, and came, destitute, ashore. Some many perished in the seas. That was a desolate, strange, wicked strand, forbidden, by reason of unusual currents and whirlpools, very powerful in their action, and weather, and cruel rocks, and continuous heavy surges, and breakers rolling and thundering, to ships. And here the vessel struck, and was broken, and went down. She was called the Blanchefleur.
He then brings in Thomas Pigeon, a young sailor, the sole survivor of the shipwreck, who proceeds to tell of the shipwreck somewhere along the coast of what is now Namibia, and how hunger, disease, and attacks by native people whittle the small band of survivors down to just two — Thomas and a young girl, also named Lucy. They encounter further hardships and, in the end, Thomas buries Lucy in the African sands.
Remember that Lucy is described as Stanyhurst’s sixteen year-old mistress. We learn that he first met Lucy at the age of fourteen, when she was the mistress of his uncle, Lord Cluny, and that he eventually steals the girl away from him. At the start of the evening, before the abbé and the sailor make their appearances, Mr Stanyhurst comes upon Lucy in her boudoir:
Taking a fondant between unblemished teeth, the girl went, crunching the frozen honey, to a couch upholstered in pale silk, on which she swung her pliant young body in a careless abandon, that, lifting the slippers upon the chair while she lounged, not only exposed slender silken legs, and buckled garters, but white glimpses of seducing bare skin beneath the sprawled skirt, Lucy with a writhing stretch of her body, arched the supple back, and deliberately pulled by this movement the little breasts out of the bodice.
To my eyes, this is just slightly more sophisticated than a letter in Penthouse. And the girl is sixteen. Perhaps to James Agate and Ian Fleming (who displayed a seriously misogynistic streak in the Bond books), this seemed delightful. To me, the father of a teenage daughter about the same age as Lucy when I first read the book, it’s creepy. No matter how elegantly the topic might be introduced into a book, looking past it and appreciating a good story on its own merits is a bit like trying to watch a movie while the fire alarm is going off in the theater.
When Marghanita Laski reviewed the 1963 reissue for the TLS, she wrote, “It has been said that women dream of the ideal husband, men of the ideal mistress; and if so this is a man’s dream.” To which I can only add, Touché! Sorry, James and Ian — I have to put All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s in the Justly Neglected pile.
All Night at Mr. Stanyhurst’s, by Hugh Edwards London: Jonathan Cape, 1933
“It was my father’s strange conceit to write me a letter, the writing of which extended over a period of more than thirty years, and which, ultimately, reached ten thousand pages in length, a total of over two and a half million words,” Page Smith writes in his introduction to this book, which should be considered as artifact more than work of literature. The letter’s length was only one of its unique features: “Much of it was devoted to an account of his sexual adventures, related in very explicit detail.”
Smith, a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, received the letter along with a handful of his father’s belongings, in several boxes and trunks delivered to his house in Santa Cruz, California after his father’s death in 1968. Although Smith’s father had mentioned the work to his son, he’d never hinted at its volume or its depth of erotic material. So when Smith first began reading through the stacks of papers, he was quickly put off.
Few children want to know anything about their parents’ sexual lives and the contrast between Smith and his father was particularly stark. Smith married the one and only woman he’d ever fallen in love with and stayed faithful to her until the day he died (she died two days later). Smith’s father had been married three times and, if the letter is an accurate account, had slept with hundreds, perhaps thousands of women. Smith acknowledged his own attitudes towards sex as conventional. His father had been fascinated by all variations of sex and experienced many of them repeatedly.
And so Smith’s first inclination was to leave the boxes in his barn and put the thing out of his mind. As a historian, he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of burning the lot. “There was some prospective historical-sociological-psychological significance to it,” he thought. Eventually, an editor at Little, Brown encouraged him to try shaping the material into a publishable format. An unabridged version would have run to 15-20 costly volumes and held appeal for only a handful of research libraries. In the end, the version published by William Morrow in 1976 represented about seven percent of the total.
“My father failed by virtually every standard that the average American regards as important,” Smith writes in his introduction. “He was an absent husband, a nothing father, an inadequate provider, a repeated business failure. In one area only was he an unqualified success — in bed, in sexual exploits.” If W. Ward Smith had any special talent, it seems to have been his appearance. He was a strikingly handsome man. “Women followed him with their eyes. Some looked discreetly, guardedly. Others stared openly.” Once, when Smith was dining with his father and their wives in a San Francisco restaurant, an attractive woman came up to their table, threw her arms around Ward Smith, and kissed him, whispering, “You’re beautiful” in his ear. She was a complete stranger.
He was also attractive to men, in the sense that he seemed to exude confidence, to be the type of man other men wanted to be around and imitate. It made him highly effective as a fund-raiser. Early in his business career, he got involved in various drives to raise funds for charitable causes in Philadelphia, and this brought him into contact with some of the wealthiest men in America, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr.. His reputation followed him to New York, where he became active in the Republican Party and organized fund-raisers in support of Allied war causes. In one drive, he placed a coffin with an effigy of the Kaiser in a rented hall and people paid a dollar each to drive a nail into it.
Coming from a middle-class family in upstate New York, Ward Smith got a leg up in society by marrying Ellen Page, daughter of a wealthy Baltimore businessman. The two were completely unsuitable. She came into the marriage a virgin, a classic example of the sheltered Southern belle. Ward, on the other hand, followed wherever his erection led him. He referred to Ellen as a “Vestal Virgin” and himself as “Prancing Pan.” They had two sons, quickly settled into separate routines, she in suburban New Jersey and he in a Manhattan apartment, free to carry on his affairs unencumbered. She divorced him after ten years.
Despite his appearances, Ward Smith was destined for failure as a businessman. His charm, intelligence, and capacity for hard work were undermined by his unquenchable appetite for sex. He would sleep with his colleagues’ wives and girlfriends, he would bring women into his office after hours for sex, he would step away from party and fund-raising dinners to have a quickie in any convenient corner. After working on Nathan Miller’s successful 1920 campaign for Governor of New York, he was fired when Miller began to distrust Smith’s handling of funds.
It was only the first in a string of rise-and-fall cycles for Ward Smith. According to Page Smith, detailed accounts of his father’s successful and unsuccessful business ventures come second only to descriptions of his couplings. One month he might be hosting dinner for dozens of friends in an expensive Manhattan restaurant, the next playing a trick on a telephone operator to get his nickel back after making a call. He ran an oil company, dealt in Florida real estate, manufactured twine, tried his hand at dairy farming, even made a killing one time buying and selling truckloads of beach sand. In the end, he became almost wholly reliant on the income made by his adoring third wife, a successful fashion designer.
And he had sex whenever and wherever he could. I confess that I skimmed much of this material as it is numbingly relentless at points, but the number and variety of locations involved alone are phenomenal: hotels, subways, parks, restaurants, nightclubs, trains, buses, cars, offices, staircases, closets, phone booths, women’s and men’s rooms, bordellos, ferry boats — there might even have been a church pew or two. The paperback edition of A Letter From My Father advertises the book as “A Classic of Erotic Literature.” In reality, it’s probably more effective than saltpeter in killing any erotic spirit. Reading the book reminded me of the time when I was eight and ate an entire bag of Red Whips: fifty years later, even the smell of Red Whips makes me nauseous.
On top of this, the reader has to confront the fact that Ward Smith was a pretty nasty piece of work when it came to his attitudes towards Jews, blacks, and Fascists. He always made it a point to comment if a woman he slept with was a Jewess, believing he had the power to release a craven eroticism stifled by their husbands. He despised FDR, referring to him as “Franklinstein,” and was an enthusiastic supporter of the isolationist America First movement. Writing in 1943, with a son serving in the U.S. Army in Europe, he describes “Herr Hitler” as “a true German patriot seeking only what he considers best for his people” and Mussolini “likewise a true Italian patriot.” After the war, he applauds the addition of air conditioning to the New York-Baltimore train, but complains that a quarter of the passengers are blacks.
Ward Smith’s account of his life ends in 1947. Or, as his son puts it, “The letter did not end; it stopped.” It’s hard to imagine any reader regretting this. Page Smith’s judgment on his father’s life is that it “seemed to me singularly futile and depressing,” and one can only agree. If there is any value to A Letter From My Father, it is only as a glimpse at the underbelly of American history. “Sex, power, money, and politics — all that is certainly thoroughly American and thoroughly human if not especially admirable,” Smith acknowledges. And for Page Smith himself, editing the letter allowed him to achieve some sense of reconciliation with his father. Which certainly gives the work value at a personal level. But outside the intimate circle of father and son, it can only be considered a curiosity.
A Letter From My Father: The Strange, Intimate Correspondence of W. Ward Smith to His Son, edited by Page Smith New York: Morrow, 1976
“This book is for Englishmen,” T. W. H. Crosland writes in his introduction to The Unspeakable Scotsman. “It is also in the nature of a broad hint for Scotchmen,” he adds, and the hint is a none-too-subtle invitation to back in their place, which Crosland defines as intrinsically inferior to that of any Englishman. He was, at least, honest about his position from the very start: “My qualification to bestow broad hints upon the politest and most intellectual of the peoples is that I possess a large fund of contempt for the Scottish character. Also I had the misfortune to be born on a day which is marked, sadly enough, in the calendars ‘BURNS DIED.'”
T. W. H. CroslandAlthough Thomas William Hodgson Crosland was at one point in his literary career rumored to be a candidate for Poet Laureate, he seems to have spent most of his time looking for saddles to become a bur under. He sided with Lord Alfred Douglas against Oscar Wilde, then against Wilde’s friend and defender Robbie Ross, and was one both sides of different libel cases in his time. At some point not long after Wilde’s death, Crosland took the notion to become what at best might be called an ironic racist. The Unspeakable Scotsman was his first venture into what, luckily, has remained his exclusive genre.
In chapter 9, “The Scot as Biographer,” for example, Crosland offers his view of Scots sentimentality with the bark on:
There are three Scotch books of biography, all published, I believe, within the last six years, which invariably raise my gorge. One of them is Margaret Ogilvy by Dr. J. M. Barrie [Crosland thought it funny to refer to all Scotsmen as “Doctor’], the second is J. M. Barrie and his Books by Dr. J. A. Hammerton, and the third is In Memory of W. V. by Dr. William Canton….
Margaret Ogilvy appears to have gone into no end of editions. It is an account of the character and sayings of Dr. J. M. Barrie’s mother, viewed in the light of Dr. Barrie’s own “literaryness.” I have no hesitation in pronouncing it to be one ofthe most snobbish books that has issued from the press any time this hundred years. It begins snobbishly, it goes on snobbishly, and it ends snobbishly. Offered to the reading public as a piece of fictional sentiment, it would still have been open to the charge of mawkishness. Offered unblushingly as a transcript from the life, and for the perusal of all who care to purchase, deplorable is the mildest epithet one can justly apply to it.
As to In Memory of W. V., Crosland writes, “I am constrained to confine myself to quotation. Comment would be altogether too painful.” One of his samples comes from Canton’s account of the funeral of his daughter W. V. (Winifred Vida):
We laid her to rest in Highgate Cemetery on the 18th…. At the funeral not only did the sun shine on the coffin, but in the grave itself there was light. All during the service, which was conducted by her friend, Dr. Robertson Nicoll, a robin, I am told, sat close to the grave; she would have liked that. When I went up next day the bees were busy among her flowers, and that too would have been to her liking.
Ironically, Crosland’s judgment of In Memory of W. V. echoes nothing more than Oscar Wilde’s remark on The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” I think most parents would find it hard to see the joke in this.
Finally, he returns to attack J. M. Barrie, this time through his assessment of J. A. Hammerton’s J. M. Barrie and his Books, perhaps the earliest survey of Barrie’s work, written by a self-professed devoted admirer and “brither Scot”: Even as Dr. Archer has discovered in Paradise Lost an inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry, so have I found in Dr. J. A. Hammerton’s J. M. Barrie and his Books an inexhaustible fund of the pure gold of Scotch opinion not only as to Dr. Barrie, but also as to other matters.”
Hammerton’s great sin, it appears, is in expressing an immoderate level of admiration for Barrie:
The main distinction of Nottingham journalism lies in the fact that it is associated with the name of Mr. J. M. Barrie…. To-day the so-called “Press House” is a tavern a few yards removed from the “Frying Pan,” and there penny-a-liners and half-fledged reporters drink beer and fancy themselves full-blown journalists, carrying down the traditions of Billy Kirker and that bright Bohemian band. But there are no Barries among them.
To which Crosland quips, “Nottingham, evidently, is in a parlous way.” Crosland, evidently, considered this quite witty.
The TLS took its own revenge upon Crosland by assigning its review to a gentleman with the fine Scots-Irish name of Gerald FitzGerald Campbell. Campbell found the book not a wee bit amusing:
We have all seen a child work itself into a fit of temper. We know how it screams and kicks, how it makes ugly faces and calls ugly names, how it beats its elders with puny, ineffective fist. The spectacle is not edifying; the feeling it excites is one of shame-faced pity — shame for poor human nature, pity for the individual child. The child itself knows that it is doing an unlovely thing. But it knows, too, that for the moment it has achieved notoriety and become the central figure of its little world. So it is with Mr. T. W. H. Crosland, the author of The Unspeakable Scotsman…. At first one hopes that the whole thing may be an elaborate joke, slightly ponderous and wholly personal, but still pardonable in a wearer of the cap and bells. But very shortly it appears that Mr. Crosland mistakes rudeness for wit, because he is furiously angry with anything that has the remotest connection with Scotland.
FitzGerald Campbell may simply have fueled Crosland’s fury, for he followed The Unspeakable Scotsman with the equally denigratory The Wild Irishman (1905), which contains such double-barrelled insults as, “I suppose that next to the Scotch, the Irish are out and out the dirtiest people on the earth.” Crosland was so comfortable in the role of racist that he also put out The Abounding American (1907) and The Fine Old Hebrew Gentleman (1922), in which he informed the reader that, “the most popular living ‘Ebrew gentleman is one Charlie Chaplin.”
When W. Sorley Brown wrote a hagiographic 490-page biography, The Life and Genius of T. W. H. Crosland (1928) following Crosland’s death in 1924, one reviewer wrote of Crosland, “Posterity may confirm the verdict that he was one of the great literary figures of his time, but, even on his eulogist’s admissions, few men have ever been so venomous and mean.”
Fortunately, posterity hasn’t.
The Unspeakable Scot, by T. H. W. Crosland London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1908
Reading Luxury Cruise is a bit like thumbing through issues of Holiday magazine, the glossy travel magazine of the 1950s. The look, the ads, the content — they all spell “M,000,000,000Ney.” The passengers aboard the Olympic have paid at least $14,000 each for their berths on this round-the-world cruise. That’s over $120,000 in today’s dollars, so this is a ship of very rich fools.
Some of them are spending new and plentiful Texas oil money. Some of them are more carefully doling out the remains of very old money. Others seem to be riding along on a supply of cash seemingly capable of endless replenishment. These are the boys “perpetually arrested at the sportcoat stage”: “They were genial, restless children, careful never to get too drunk, and their toys were sailing yachts and expensive motorcars and airplanes, and stocks and bonds and oil wells and gold mines, and whole ocean-going liners.”
Of the new money men, some are desperately trying to make their way into the old money circles the only way they know how: with cash. So the Seth Carsons of Dallas open up the pipelines and let the champagne and caviar flow. The Aldriches, Van Gouverneurs, and Ashcrofts drink and eat it all up and, as you can predict, leave tipsy, full, and disdainful of the Carson’s lack of subtlety.
Emlen Boyne and his wife — also of Dallas — are along for the ride simply because it seems like the sort of thing you do when you’re rich. So Em drinks a little too much on the first night out, talks a little too loud, enjoys himself more than he should. And earns the same sort of dismissal as Seth Carson — or so it seems. Coarse and boorish, the old money murmurs to each other. “They were generous, impulsive, simple people — peasants grown rich in the vast lottery of America, and they must be tolerated.” But behind the comments there is a lingering sense of having encountered something that had been bred out of them generations back: “a directness, a vigor, a cunning and yet an understanding and sincerity which was rare enough in their circles — Porcellian, for instance, at Harvard, or Brooks in New York.”
Joseph Bennett, the author, scion of the Pittsburgh steel Bennetts, Princeton ’43, Lieutenant (j.g.) (US Navy) in World War Two, partner of Wellington and Co., was familiar with both sides in this drama: the old money he grew up among and the new money he invested their remaining cash in. But he was also familiar with both sides of his own creation. He could undoubtedly have afforded a cabin on the Olympic, and he aspired to be the playwright, too. His senior thesis on Baudelaire was published by the Princeton University Press the year after his graduation and his seed money had helped establish the Hudson Review after the war.
Though Bennett knew his characters well, however, he apparently didn’t know what to do with them. There is much drinking, much talking, much commenting by some on the faults of others, many details noted that one can only assume are both accurate and precisely placed. There is a drunk stumbling by accident into a woman’s cabin and possibly committing a rape (but almost certainly not). There is the loss of a million-dollar necklace that could possibly be a theft (and most certainly is). There is an Italian count who plasters himself in make up and old Ike Shawley of Osage, Oklahoma, one of the original oil barons, spending his final days withering away on the sun deck. There are brassy broads who relish their booze and their boys and Main Line heiresses who would be happy if sex stayed next to sewing machine the way it does in the dictionary.
What there isn’t is, well, a point. Why bring these people together and why roll out their antics for us to observe? The plot lines of the probably-wasn’t rape and the definitely-was theft play themselves out three-fourths of the way through the book. What follows is a bit like watching the actors shuffle around on stage, still in character, for another twenty minutes after the play is over. Faultless scenery, costumes, and mannerisms can never compensate for the lack of any compelling drama or comedy. Bennett most certainly knew his material. He just didn’t know what to do with it.
Bennett died of leukemia at the age of 50 in 1973. From the records of his papers, held in the Princeton University Library, he appears to have written, or at least started, a half dozen other novels besides Luxury Cruise. With titles such as “Sons of Rich Men” and “Trevor and Townshend Fortunes,” they suggest Bennett might have produced something quite striking on the subject of American wealth if he’d lived longer.
Luxury Cruise is available in electronic format from the Open Library (link).
Luxury Cruise, by Joseph Bennett New York: George Braziller, 1962
“It is impossible to stop reading Kathleen Sully, who takes a vice-like Ancient Mariner’s grip on your nerves and feelings,” wrote one reviewer of Burden of the Seed. I completely agree: but having finished the book, I feel like this Ancient Mariner took me on a wild goose chase.
Once again, Sully offers a story completely unlike anything before it. The book falls into three sections. In the first, we are introduced to Stephanas, a orphan boy living in the care of two elderly aunts quite unfit for the job. One day, Stephanas sneaks out the back gate of their garden, wanders into a poor neighborhood, is accosted by some local bullies, then latches onto Marge, a girl who rescues him by threatening the boys with a brick. Stephanas slides right into Marge’s family, sitting down to bread and drippings for tea. Soon, he becomes a daily visitor, helping with the washing up and bringing items from the large collection of antique china his aunts have inherited as offerings.
In this section, Stephanas seems a rather resilient kid, growing increasingly independent from his aunts as they grow less and less capable of taking care of him, let alone themselves. Their petty interferences drive away their one servant, who leaves them with a piece of her mind: “… they were completely mad. They ought to be shut away where they could do harm to none except themselves. And as for them having the charge of a poor innocent child! Words failed her.” Aunt Rose’s hearing begins to fail; Aunt Clara grows blinder each day. Merely fixing two meals a day becomes an ordeal, and Stephanas steals change from their purses to buy enough food to keep himself from starving. When Rose finds Clara dead, it takes Rose four days to comprehend the fact. It takes Stephanas five days to notice Clara’s absence.
Leap forward some years. Stephanas returns from college to open the aunt’s house and get it ready for sale. He seduces Marge, decides he’s not interested in her, fantasizes about Marge’s mother, then heads off into the world. He proceeds almost at random through a few unsuitable relationships, then sets his mind on marrying Edna, a headstrong farm girl he encounters in Somerset. Yet after he sleeps with her, he claims to be married already and unable to obtain a divorce. They settle into a cottage together, Edna has his child, and spend some happy years. One day Stephanas informs Edna that he had lied about being married. She takes their son and returns to her father’s farm. There is some tedious back-and-forth squabbling and negotiation, and they reach a truce.
Then the war (the Second World War, never mentioned in specific) breaks out. If Stephanas seemed to have an approach to relationships as odd as his name, his attitude towards military service is even harder to fathom. He considers going into hiding. He enlists. Then he decides to escape to Ireland and desert. Running into Marge on the way, he drags her along. Then he changes his mind. Then he returns to his unit and is shipped overseas. After years, he comes back to Somerset and there is more back-and-forth with Edna. He thinks he wants her back. She thinks she wants to marry a farmer. Oh, by the way, we learn that their child had somehow been killed in the war. Stephanas goes off on a walkabout to lose himself. Then he changes his mind. By which point it’s momentum alone that will keep a reader from giving up.
And by which point it becomes clear that Kathleen Sully somehow lost her way in the course of writing Burden of the Seed. What started as an emotionally compelling story, sort of Great Expectations brought forward sixty years, became a meander in search of a protagonist. Young Stephanas has spunk. Adult Stephanas is emotionally damaged and incapable of knowing his own mind for much more than a day or two at a time. Edna is the one level-headed character in the book, but you have to wonder why she doesn’t show Stephanas the door, which would have brought the book to a close around page 100. There is some good writing her, but Kathleen Sully’s assembly is too jury-rigged to stand the test of time. I have to give Burden of the Seed a solid “Justly Neglected” rating, I’m afraid.
Burden of the Seed, Kathleen Sully London: Peter Davies, 1958
I have such hopes for The Intellectual Lover and other Stories, a collection of short stories written by David Freedman, a Romanian Jew who emigrated to the U.S. as a toddler, proved a prodigy at chess, and, after graduating from City College, became one of the most successful writers of jokes, sketches, and other material for comedians such as Eddie Cantor. Herman Wouk was one of many young Jewish writers in New York who spent time in Freedman’s laugh factory.
His family and friends considered that Freedman had frittered away his talent on the lucrative but not particularly respected business of churning out comic material, which the combined demands of radio and vaudeville were consuming in record quantities. And so, after Freedman died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of just 38, they collected a few of the short stories he’d written over the years and got them published by Harper and Row in 1940 with an introduction by Freedman’s friend, the writer and fellow Romanian emigre, Konrad Bercovici.
Bercovici’s introduction is by far the best part of the book. He describes the unique intimacy that existed between Freedman and his father, both lovers of chess, music, and literature, and shows how Freedman became something of a victim of his own success. Once he proved capable of coming up with apt material on demand, demand simply grew and grew until he worked himself into an early grave.
The stories, however, are another thing. They read like the work of someone who spent too many hours shut up in a library with one too many copies of Walter Pater, John Ruskin, or William Morris. In the title story, for example, the “Intellectual Lover” becomes incapable of not transforming the real women he sees into his Platonic ideal:
I began to notice for the first time, in women who I had known for years, certain features which I was confident belonged to that other girl. It became a habitual pastime with me to reconstruct her out of this one’s waist-line, that one’s eyes, the third one’s next, the fourth one’s arms, and the fifth one’s mouth.
She became a standard by which I analyzed, classified, and measured girls. I looked at women not to see them, but to see how they compared with her, with the standard. And as I observed new and more striking female traits in various women, I added them to this standard until it became an embodiment of all the attractive features and characteristics of all the women I knew.
It doesn’t take much of this to make me run to open a window and let some fresh air in. I will spare you the pain of an extract from the relentless Italian-American dialect of another story, “I Am He.” Let’s just-a say-a a beeg “Mamma Mia!” and leave it at that.
My apologies to those friends and family who still cherish Mr. Freedman’s memory, but I have to rate this the most justly neglected book I’ve come across in a long time. Sorry, but thats-a my opinion. If you’re desperate to prove me wrong, you can read the book in e-book formats for free at the Open Library (link).
The Intellectual Lover and Other Stories, by David Freedman New York: Harper and Row, 1940
A few months ago, Kate Macdonald, Visiting Fellow at the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, and I had a long dialogue on the subject of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which both of us had — coincidentally — just read and written about. That pleasant experience led to suggestions of other books to read and discuss, and we settled on Clemence Dane’s Broome Stages a 700-page saga that follows a family of English actors from the mid-18th century to the 1920s. I’d read very enthusiastic reviews several years ago and thought it might be a long, rich, and entertaining read.
Kate: When you suggested this novel I was keen because I enjoy reading novels about the theatre, and have long had Clemence Dane on my radar as an author I ought to know more about. I hadn’t realised that she wrote novels as well as plays (over 30 plays and 16 novels, and the Wikipedia entry suggests that she was also a painter and a sculptor). Now that I’ve read this novel (which is more like three or four), I’d rate her at the same level as J. B. Priestley: highly competent, excellent with character and dialogue, but not convincing as a literary stylist. She is a quintessential English middlebrow author, I think, but (in this novel) doesn’t give more than an absorbing family saga with lots of domestic drama. She’s vague about historical detail (especially shaky in the early, Regency part), but I think that’s because she’s writing as a playwright. All her characters are actors and her sets are stage sets. So much dialogue, and characters that draw the audience’s attention by being outrageous, or by saying arresting things. I found almost all them objectionable: selfish, obsessive, unkind, bullying and unreasonable, which is probably what makes them good dramatic subjects.
Brad: I’d have to concur with your assessment. Let’s face it, this novel is an order of magnitude lower than Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which we last discussed.
I was primarily interested in reading it because the reviews (both UK and US) when Broome Stages first came out were gushingly enthusiastic: “No lover of good fiction or of the theatre can afford to leave Broome Stages unread,” and that sort of thing. The Saturday Review (US) reprinted a long excerpt from it and the universal assessment seemed to be that it was a big, rich book studded with memorable characters large and small, and irresistibly readable. Personally, I found it all too resistable to read, at least in the first third or so.
In those early chapters, Dane uses a rather arch style that attempts, I guess, to mimic the tone of a Fielding but comes off (now, at least) stale and irritating. And I found it quite difficult to form a sustainable sense of many of the main characters. A sum of mannerisms and vices usually isn’t enough to turn a character from a name to a persona. The style, at least, grows a little more limpid as the story nears (Dane’s) present day, but the characters–well, I would certainly fail if you gave me a test of matching Broome names with their respective generations and actions now, a month-plus after reading it.
It did pick up momentum–a bit–but I felt that Dane didn’t some much end the story as stop it: as if she just ran out of ideas. There was one intriguing element toward the end. There is a fairly pointed hint at one point that youngest of the last Broome generation, John, is engaged in homosexual relationships at boarding school and then another, even more obvious, that he has a male partner–which his mother simple takes in stride, happy that her son is happy. Dane herself was gay and involved in a long-term relationship with a writer of children’s books, Olwen Bowen, so it might have been a way of asserting as normal and unexceptional something that was, at the time, considered acceptable only if covert.
Priestley is a good comparison. I thought of a huge best-seller in America around the same time–Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, which was a 1,000-plus page historical novel intended to invoke the spirit of Sir Walter Scott and maybe even Tolstoy, but which is now considered more as a curiosity than a work of any serious literary merit. Such doorstop wonders seem to pop up every generation.
Clemence Dane, 1934Kate: Looking at my notes I see that from the last generation of the Broomes it’s Richard who is gay, Henry dies in the war, Gerry is a lazy waster, and John is a mercurial playwright destined for greatness and to be the next Broome of the stage. But I need the notes to remember, you’re right about the personalitiesthemselves being forgettable. Hilaret, Lettice, Elinor, and Domina are the only named women characters I can recall. There was also Lionel’s illegitimate daughter who married into a Viennese Jewish family in the 1880s (very G. B. Stern, that), went to Brazil and brought forth another daughter who ended up in England to help Elinor elope scandalously with Lewis. Dane could absolutely create dramatic and entertaining storylines, but I agree, character definition was not her strong point.
Considering (now that you mention it) that Dane was herself gay, and presumably interested in women and their relationships, its odd that she create hordes of male characters, but only five women across three centuries of Broome breeding. They are all dominant, but stand out like illustrations of ‘the female condition in this century’ rather than working participants in the plot.
The staginess of the novel is quite attractive. I can visualise it working as a film or a TV series in the style of Dallas or Dynasty, endless sweepings on and off in big hats after huge rows and passionate arguments between men and women, and men who don’t behave as men are supposed to behave. The characters’ obsession with the continuance of the Broome legacy is typical of that genre. And, of course, after writing that I go to IMDB to check, and yes! It was made as a TV mini-series in 1966, starring many actors who don’t now have photographs by their names so they’re no longer working, or remembered. Only one series, though, and no pictures from it floating around on Google.
Brad: I think you hit the nail on the head: the staginess of this novel of the stage may weaken its merit as a work of literature but make it perfect material for adaptation to the screen. There have been plenty of great movies made from bad novels and bad movies made from great novels. And just think how a good screenwriter and a cast of expert scenery-chewing actors could turn the nastiness of many of the Broome characters into delicious viewing. Some of the best television of the last 10-15 years has been based on the ability to seduce viewers into sympathizing with some very bad people (Tony Soprano, Walter White, Francis Urquhart/Underwood). And 1966 is fifty years ago–more than enough time to justify a remake.
Shall we contact the BBC? Surely pitching a concept to some show-biz types is on one of our bucket lists.
Kate: The 1966 miniseries began with the Lewis Whybrow elopement and used up the remainder of the novel, which I think was wise. I can’t think of a TV series that crosses so many historical periods as this book does. The Pallisers, The Forsyte Saga, The Onedin Line, Poldark, all the British TV series of the 1970s that my mum was addicted to, and I took one look at, uncomprehending: they’re intense family sagas set in a discrete period, following the life of one individual and perhaps of their offspring as well. Perhaps that’s why Broome Stages is ultimately disappointing. Dane isn’t interested in people, she’s interested in creating a sweep of history, the rise and fall of a dynasty over centuries rather than generations. She loses the human focus, which is why her characters are unsatisfying. They have their moments of concentrated attention at crisis points, but years and decades go by in the turning of a page, which isn’t how one tells a story about people’s daily struggles.
Brad: True: any adaptation would have to focus on one period, at least in the case of Broome Stages. There have been a few examples of series that were able to successfully span several different time frames, but they required more narrative ingenuity than was demonstrated by Dane. As others have pointed out, she structured the generations and personalities of Broome Stages on the Plantagenets–which might be helpful for a reader familiar with that slice of English history but was utterly useless to a colonial such as I. In fact, one could hold up Broome Stages as a good illustration of why writing a novel around an arbitrary structure will rarely produce a work of the same merit as one building upon a strong story or interesting characters.
Which pretty much exhausts what I have to say about Broome Stages. I was hoping for better, but I’m afraid I will have to place it into my “Justly Neglected” file.
Kate: I never realised until I started reading up on the book afterwards that the Plantagnets were her framework. So that worked well, obviously ….. as you say, an arbitrary structure with more than a touch of staginess to it. So, goodbye Broome Stages. If I come across any other Clemence Dane novels I’ll read ’em, but I’m not expecting wonders.
Broome Stages, by Clemence Dane London: Heinemann, 1931
Eliza Lynn Linton, scanning the horizons for another victimBetween John Sutherland’s wonderful encyclopedia, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, and the Internet Archive, I can lose hours wandering through the three-volumed forest of English 19th century fiction, particularly in the last year that written by women. It can be soul-leeching, though. There is something relentlessly earnest and deliberate in so much English fiction after Amelia Opie. There aren’t many female counterparts to Thomas Love Peacock, Thackeray, Dickens or Wilde to lighten things up.
I thought I’d stumbled across a hidden gem when I started reading Amy Dillwyn’s 1884 novel, Jill, in which our heroine, making her own way through the world, is not above padding her travel claims or pocketing a precious object her employers clearly failed to appreciate adequately. And then I found that Jill was reissued by the Honno Press a few years ago as part of its Welsh Women’s Classics series.
And then I came across the following sentence in an essay about George Eliot: “She held her hands and arms kangaroo fashion; was badly dressed; had an unwashed, unbrushed, unkempt look altogether; and she assumed a tone of superiority over me which I was not then aware was warranted by her undoubted leadership.” It was attributed to Eliza Lynn Linton, a minor Victorian novelist and essayist, and a brief memoir that was published after her death in 1898. Such undisguised nastiness, so uncharacteristic of memoirists before Frank Harris and Beverly Nichols made it acceptable to add a hearty shake of bitters into the mix, deserved further investigation.
And the good old Internet Archive didn’t let me down. I quickly located an electronic copy of Mrs. Linton’s My Literary Life and proceeded to read the whole thing online (it’s a short book).
You know you’re in for some splenetic prose when the book opens with a warning — in this case from Mrs. Linton’s friend, another neglected late Victorian novelist, Beatrice Harraden (Ships that Pass in the Night — Anyone? Anyone?): “It is to be regretted also that she is not here herself to tone down some of her more pungent remarks and criticisms, hastily thrown off in bitter moments such as come to us all.” “Mrs. Linton’s pen was ever harsher than her speech,” Harraden offers in excuse, but My Literary Life rages on while Mrs. Linton’s dulcet tones have been silenced for more than a century. “It has been thought,” her publisher writes in introduction, that the incomplete sketches she was able to write before her death “possess an independent value which justifies republication.” Perhaps the same value upheld on a weekly basis by the National Enquirer.
Linton opens with a quick series of sketches of “My First London Friends,” who included the painter, Samuel Laurence, George Henry Lewes (not yet involved with Mary Ann Evans), and the poet Walter Savage Landor. Laurence, we learn, “by his experiments in glazes, grounds, and varnishes, some of his oil paintings were soon ruined by peeling off in broad patches, or by sinking into the canvas.” And was married to “a tall, fine, handsome woman, who overtopped him in height and I should say surpassed him in weight.” Lewes, she tells us, “would discourse on the most delicate matters of physiology with no more perception that he was transgressing the bounds of propriety than if he had been a learned savage.” And Landor, who is otherwise portrayed by Linton as a man of great kindness and learning, was a bit challenged in the haberdashery department:
He was dressed in brown, and his whole style was one of noticeable negligence. His clothes were unbrushed and shabby; his shirt-front was coarse and plain, like a nightshirt ; a frayed and not over-clean blue necktie, carelessly knotted, was awry; his shoes were full of bumps and bosses like an apple pie….
Linton goes on to discuss Thackeray and Dickens, contrasted the two men in both character and literary style for pages before adding the caveat, “I did not know either man intimately, but if not the rose itself, I knew those who stood near.” For their sakes, we can be grateful, since she quickly adds, with ominous tone, “Many secret confidences were passed on to me, which, of course, I have kept sacred; and both men would have been surprised had they known how much I knew of things uncatalogued and unpublished.”
She concludes with a chapter on “A First Meeting with George Eliot” in which she offers her timeliness comparison of the great author to a kangaroo. But not before polishing off a sampling of the women writers from the generation before hers — or, as Linton describes them, “remnants of a palaeozoic age.” These include Jane Porter, once celebrated for her historical tales such as The Scottish Chiefs, but in Linton’s eyes, “a kid of ghost from the tomb — a living monolith of pre-historic times.” Sadly, Linton confesses that “Charlotte Bronte I never saw; nor Harriet Martineau….” Lucky ladies. Linton only met Mrs. Norton only once, but that was enough to slip a quick knife in (it was “in later years, when her beauty was more a memory than a possession”).
Needless to say, the reader learns nothing of importance about George Eliot and far too much about Mrs. Linton’s squinted perspective on her contemporaries, and with her judgment that Eliot’s relationship with Lewes was nothing more than a house of cards, closes the cover on this short, brutish, and nasty book. Utterly forgettable and more than justly neglected, of course.
But after a long and heavy meal of Victorian seriousness, a palate cleanser nonetheless.
My Literary Life, by Mrs. Lynn Linton London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1899
Covers of first US and UK editions “Joyce Elbert had just turned thirty and divorced her second husband when she wrote this astonishing first novel … a daring story of a single woman’s frantic search for love in a loose living, free-wheeling world,” blares the cover of the Bantam paperback original of A Martini on the Other Table. I think I’ve seen about three hundred copies of this and other Elbert novels (Crazy Ladies, Drunk in Madrid) in used bookstores and thrift shops over the years and never paid the slightest attention to it, but when I spotted it in a discard box a few months ago, I thought, “Well, I’m focusing on women writers this year — why not?”
Looking for something quick, light, and a little newer after devoting a month to Dorothy Richardson’s weighty (in both length and substance) Pilgrimage, I fished A Martini on the Other Table out on the stack of cheap paperbacks perched precariously in front of a double row of other cheap paperbacks crammed into one of the bookcases in the basement.
I am something of an eternal optimist when it comes to cheap paperbacks. Experience has shown me that there is always a possibility that some remarkable and hitherto neglected gem lies behind a cover cleverly disguised to look like all the other junk that sat in a revolving wire book rack in front of the cigarette stand or the drugstore check-out. A slim possibility, but then you don’t maintain a site like this unless you’re willing to trust in outliers.
A Martini on the Other Table proved to be neither gem nor junk. A lost classic it ain’t, but it was something of a satisfying nostalgia trip for a kid who remembers spying on cocktail parties as I crouched in the hallway in my Dr. Dentons. Set in New York City, it’s narrated by Judy, just separated from her husband, a novelist enjoying his first wave of critical acclaim, and making her way writing superficial pieces for women’s magazines. No longer starry-eyed about love or fame, she makes the rounds of parties and gallery openings, having decided to post her picture next to the definition of blasé in the dictionary. She drinks too much and finds herself in bed with strange men on a regular basis. I half expected one of them to be Don Draper.
Most of the book is taken up with a intricately woven tangle of relationships, as a struggling artist and his socialite girlfriend befriend, and then bed (in turn) Judy, as a wealthy gallery owner watches her husband fall for a good-looking would-be actor, as Judy herself falls for a director of “industrial films” who turns out to be married (but not any more — or is he? — or isn’t he?). It’s all very complicated and utterly uninteresting, since none of these characters is anything but a name, hair color, facial expression, and personality quirk.
Joyce Elbert
How much of Judy’s story is based on Joyce Elbert’s is anyone’s guess. Elbert is quoted on the back cover as saying, “The greatest thing that happened to me was when I turned thirty and divorced my second husband…. Fitzgerald was all wet. Freshness and youth don’t stand a chance alongside anxiety and dissipation.”
If you squint hard enough, that line almost looks like something from Dorothy Parker. There are more than a few echoes of it in A Martini on the Other Table. When Judy and the film director take in a play, she says she’s “glad that Ed and I had not driven in from the suburbs after a rushed supper and anxiety over the new baby sitter…. If a man is going to cut out on his wife I would much rather be the girl friend than the wife, who usually gets him back in the long run. Uncertainty beats the A&P-on-Saturday syndrome any time.”
But Elbert’s rebel act rings a little hollow. A lot of people go to a lot of parties in this book, and none of them seems to have any fun. Judy spends far more time brooding about men and relationships than about independence and sexual freedom. “The only person I ever really cheated was myself,” she confesses just after the director proposes to her. It’s hard not to believe there’s an A&P lurking on a Saturday not too far in her future.
“When I say I’m a feminist, what do I mean?” Ann Oakley asks near the end of Taking It Like a Woman. “I mean that I believe that women are an oppressed social group, a group of people sharing a common exclusion from full participation in certain key social institutions (and being over-represented in others). The oppression, she argues, is that of being “subject to the awful soul-destroying tyranny of being told the meaning of their lives by others in terms which are not theirs.” In part, Taking It Like a Woman is an account of the various interpretations of the meaning of her own life that Oakley encountered in the first forty years of her life.
Oakley’s childhood and youth were heavily influenced by the success of her father, Richard Titmuss, who played a large role in the shaping of the British welfare state and the policies of the Labour Party in the 1950s and 1960s. Along with the example of her mother, a social worker, he defined for his daughter a life model involving competition, intellectual rigor, and dedication to society — in other words, one little open to anything that might smack of selfishness. To a young woman full of the natural doubts and uncertainties that any teenager might experience, it was, while never harsh or cruel, as relentless as the rigidity of sworn Fundamentalist parents.
Ironically, while Oakley found a very forward-looking husband, who was open to sharing household chores and comfortable with her playing the more dominant role as a bread-winner, and managed to find time and space to raise children as well (which she described in Becoming a Mother (1980)), she still struggled to find a fully satisfactory life model for herself. Indeed, I found it rather odd that she devoted such a significant portion of Taking It Like a Woman to what she refers to on her website as “fictionalised narratives about a love affair.” Nine of the book’s twenty-five chapters, in fact. In them, a woman (Oakley, I assumed, until I read the statement on her website) and a man, a sophisticated jet-setting academic from a far-off country (India? Indonesia? Japan? I couldn’t tell), meet in different hotels and resorts and share their souls — and amazing sex. After some years, he breaks it off, and she suffers a terrible crisis, only to decide that, “In the end, no one else was a reason for living: faith had to come from within, but within was no faith. So she finally took responsibility for her own life in a way that she always knew she would — being in the end just another woman.”Ann Oakley, 1984
It’s hard to accept that these passages are purely fictional, in light of a remark Oakley makes at the start of the book: “I have persevered in this task precisely because I know I am living and writing about something which is recognizable to others.” Really? Yes, growing up, marriage, children, making a career, running a household, dealing with the death of a parent, recovering from cancer — all of which Oakley describes — are things recognizable, even familiar to others. But an extended affair with a handsome, intelligent, exotic man in good hotels all over Europe? Maybe not so much.
Oakley ends with more questions than answers: “There is no certainty in anything,” she says to her daughter, as they walk along a seaside. Yet she does establish at least one fact that she has seen in her own life and the lives of the women she has studied and worked with: “The tension between the interests of the family and the interests of women as individuals has been rising for some two centuries. It is not possible for these interests to be reconciled.” She foresees more battles over this issue to be fought, and if she finds any hope, it is in the growing willingness of other women to “look at the circumstances of their lives.” For me, her own example was intellectually intriguing but not inspiring. I wasn’t convinced that Oakley provided any clues for how other women could overcome their “common exclusion from full participation in certain key social institutions.”
Taking It Like a Woman: A Personal History, by Ann Oakley New York: Random House, 1984
in a local bookstore that led me to him. By the time Bell (born Stephen Henry Critten) published his autobiography, 
As I’ve probably written here before, I’m from the “There must be a pony in there” school. While I’m suspicious of the quality standards of any author who can manage to write 75 books in the space of about 35 years (and would produce enough more before taking his life in 1964 that his publisher, Alvin Redman, was still issuing Neil Bell titles for nearly ten years after his death), I wasn’t really to dismiss Bell as a hack without some further investigation. My initial searching quickly revealed a few facts. None of Bell’s books is currently in print. He wrote all over the map: historical novels, mysteries, romances, family dramas, science fiction, and many, many tales of the supernatural. He started writing children’s stories, wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, then stopped abruptly after getting married (more about this later).
In 
I have such hopes for 
. “I mean that I believe that women are an oppressed social group, a group of people sharing a common exclusion from full participation in certain key social institutions (and being over-represented in others). The oppression, she argues, is that of being “subject to the awful soul-destroying tyranny of being told the meaning of their lives by others in terms which are not theirs.” In part, 
(1980)), she still struggled to find a fully satisfactory life model for herself. Indeed, I found it rather odd that she devoted such a significant portion of 