Covers of the first U.S. editions of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters and Ring Lardner’s The Young Immigrunts.
“My parents are both married and ½ of them are very good looking.”
This is the story of two very different writers, one an American comic writer of genius, playwright and sportswriter, the other a young English girl with terrible spelling.
The American was Ring Lardner. Lardner began his career as a sports journalist with a particular interest in baseball, widened his remit to humorous columns, and became one of the best-known comic writers of his time. His novel You Know Me Al, written in the form of letters from a baseball player to a friend, is still extremely funny, while his theatrical parodies display a sardonic surrealism (a line from one of those short plays is still quoted in anthologies: “The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week”).
Lardner was the epitome of the hard-drinking, sports-loving American writer, admired by Hemingway, used as the basis for a character by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and immensely popular with the public; and he had a journalist’s scepticism. In 1919, the world was delighted by a very short novel apparently written by a nine-year-old girl called Daisy Ashford. The book – which had apparently been discovered by the British writer Frank Swinnerton, who passed it on to Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie – was called The Young Visiters. It recounted the story of Ethel, a young Victorian woman, and her social-climbing older friend, Mr Salteena, written in a breathless pastiche of the romances of the day. The Young Visiters was, and still is, unintentionally hilarious, and at the end of the First World War became an international best seller. Ashford, now in her early 20s, was a celebrity.
I shall put some red ruge on my face said Ethel because I am very pale owing to the drains in this house. Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters (1919)
Most of the world took Ashford at her word and The Young Visiters at face value, but there were those who were less convinced, and indeed, there is something about the book that suggests another hand was at work (lines like “he sat down and eat the egg which Ethel had so kindly laid for him” always seem a bit knowingly comic to me). One person who thought the book was a fraud was Winston Churchill; another was Ring Lardner. “I didn’t, and I don’t, believe Daisy Ashford in spite of Swinnerton’s testimony and that of other ‘witnesses.’” he once wrote.
But Lardner did more than express his doubts about The Young Visiters, he rewrote it. Or rather, he wrote a parody of it, called The Young Immigrunts.
“The Young Immigrunts” as originally published in The Saturday Evening Post.
First serialised in The Saturday Evening Post in 1920, The Young Immigrunts abandons the plot of Ashford’s book and its musings on social advancement and the aristocracy and replaces them with something completely American: the story of the Lardner family’s move from Goshen, Indiana, to their new home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The comedy is now about the awfulness of their road trip (and the father’s vile temper and reactions to said trip), but as the story is told by Lardner’s young son Bill, the book is able to retain the same youthful, naïve tone of its original.
We see the world through Bill’s eyes but, where Ashford’s prose is (apparently) unwittingly funny and unobservant, Lardner’s is very knowing, and directed at an adult readership. The Father and Mother are constantly sniping at one another, the journey is a nightmare, and the various cops, kids, and landladies that the family run into are a gallery of grotesques.
Will you call us at ½ past 5 my mother reqested to our lanlady as we entered our Hudson barracks.
I will if I am awake, she replid useing her handkerchief to some extent.
It’s clear from reading The Young Immigrunts that whatever his views on the original, Lardner must have enjoyed reading it. His use of language, the turns of phrase he adopts, the mixture of literary styles and pure illiteracy, take Ashford’s text as a template and a jumping-off point for Lardner’s own viewpoint. Sport, particularly baseball, features heavily (there’s even (possibly) a reference to the famous “Black Sox” baseball scandal.
Ring Lardner and his The Young Immigrunts alter ego.
The result is a book that’s a note-perfect parody of The Young Visiters – “We will half to change our close replid my mother steping into a mud peddle in front of the hotel with an informal look” – but also takes the text into a new, Lardnerian direction. It’s a masterpiece that works perfectly whether you’ve read the original or not.
And it contains what many people – or rather, all sane people – consider to be the funniest line in the history of literature (a line so memorable that at least two books about Lardner have been named after it).
I can’t really follow it so I’ll just say goodbye and leave you with the line. Here it is:
Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly. Shut up he explained.
David Quantick is a writer with seven novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Ricky’s Hand, was published in August 2022. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
The Young Immigrunts, by Ring Lardner Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1920
History is written by the winners, George Orwell said, and this goes for family history, too. After finishing Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, you sigh in relief that the adage is true in this case. If Kataryn Loughlin and her little sister Esther survived to adulthood, it was despite the best efforts of their Aunt Abby.
“Aunt Abby” sounds far too familiar for this forbidding woman. She was, Loughlin writes, the “final synthesis of eight generations of Puritan ancestors, the last member of an intermarrying tribe who had persistently adhered to a family code of Pedigree, Prudence, Pride, and Purse.” Intermarrying is putting it lightly: not only did the Fitches and Martins and Fitch-Martins have a tradition of marriage between first and second cousins, but they also recycled first names, particularly Abby and Pliny, making Loughlin’s first chapter, “Family History,” a bewildering read.
But you can skip that, for soon the cast is pared down to the essential few. Kataryn and Esther are the survivors of the four daughters of Katherine Fitch-Martin, Abby’s half-sister, and the Marine of French-Canadian origin she married. When Katherine dies in a fire, the girls are left to their closest relatives: their grandfather, his daughter Abby, and his son James (from his second marriage and therefore, despised by Abby). When the girls arrive at the family home in Whitesboro, New York, Abby makes their situation clear: “You are the unwanted, unfortunate products of my half-sister’s ill-advised marriage and are only here temporarily, to humor my father.”
She then shuttles the girls to an empty, unheated bedroom and locks the door behind her. Kataryn is five. Esther is four. This is just the first of many nights they will spend cold and hunger in a household with more than ample means to provide for them generously. But Miss Abby Fitch-Martin is a pathologically mean and cold woman who proceeds to spend nearly twenty years denying them any form of material or emotional comfort.
Hers was a Puritanism distilled to its extreme. Meat was eaten once a week, and then it was a one-pound piece of steak divided into five portions with Abby always reserving the largest for herself. Kataryn and Esther were given one set of clothes, one pair of boots, one cotton coat for the bitter upstate New York winters. If their clothes were torn or became threadbare, Miss Abby gave needle and thread and instructed the girls to mend the garment themselves. If a classmate invited them in for a snack after school, Miss Abby forbade the girls from entering anyone else’s house and sent them to bed without supper. If a sympathetic parent gave them some trinket — a marble, a playing card — she confiscated and destroyed it, calling the girls thieves.
One summer when Kataryn was just eight years old, she so angered Miss Abby with some trivial infraction that her aunt threw her first belongings in a bag, took her to the train station, and put her aboard a train to Montreal, where the girl’s long-missing father was known to have some family. Miss Abby gave Kataryn a nickel and instructed her to “Find a relative in the phonebook and call them.” Miraculously, Kataryn made it to Montreal, given food along the way by fellow passengers, and with help from a kindly station agent, was able to locate a great-uncle with whom she was able to stay for a few months. But even that meager reprieve ended and the girl was returned to the “care” of Miss Abby.
Even a small school prize — a five-dollar gold piece — would be confiscated and disappear into what James called, “Aunt Abby’s insatiable maw.” She kept accounts meticulously and made a point to charge everything possible against Kataryn and Esther’s eventual inheritance: “A good quarter of her long life was spent at her desk, estimating and recording the minutiae of daily life.” In 1914, for example, she noted the fares for six hundred tram rides to Utica and back, all of them debits against the girls, as were the wages for the cook, half the food expenses, and all of the coal, water, and electricity used in the house.
If there was any relief from Miss Abby’s relentless neglect, it was thanks to their uncle James. A brilliant if eccentric man (he worked on a number of Esperanto dictionaries) and alcoholic, he convinced Abby on several occasions to allow Kataryn to “chaperone” him on a trip to a sanitarium in Colorado for “the cure.” On one of these trips, Kataryn grew so bored that she talked a couple from Arizona into taking her along when they returned home and she spent two months in the warm, relaxed atmosphere Flagstaff. Among other things, this book is testament to Kataryn’s incredible ability to avoid disaster.
Even when Kataryn managed an escape, earning a scholarship to college and covering her living expenses through a variety of jobs, Miss Abby’s thirst for retribution could not be satisfied. Just before the girl’s first year of study ended, Miss Abby traveled to campus and presented herself to the school’s dean, informing him that the only way Kataryn could have made her money was by “thieving and whoring.”
Kataryn and Esther married and freed themselves of Miss Abby’s control, but she then directed her still-generous supply of venom at poor Uncle James. After falling and breaking a hip at age 81, she insisted on being treated as an invalid, with James her only full-time carer, despite reports from neighbors that she could occasionally be glimpsed moving around the house on her own feet. When he finally collapsed and died of a combination of exhaustion and hunger, Miss Abby left alone — and triumphant:
She had regained her pinnacle. That her whole life had slipped by in the waiting was utterly unimportant. At long last, it was all hers again: the money, the property, and most of all, the sacred name. She, who had valued it the most, was the last ever to possess it.
Kataryn Loughlin, from the dust jacket of Miss Abby Fitch-Martin.
One might ask, “Why would anyone read a book about such a nasty, petty person?” Well, for me, the answer is two-fold. For one, Miss Abby’s meanness is of such a magnitude and intensity that it fascinates in the depth of its blackness. She could easily take a place besides the worst of Dickens’s villains and leave them quaking. And for the other, Kataryn Loughlin is a fine writer who keeps her resentment simmering without ever letting it boil over. A good Christian woman, she married a sexton and the two of them cared for the Methodist church and cemetery in Vernon, New York, for over thirty years. Though she wrote hundreds of articles on local history during that time, Miss Abby Fitch-Martin was the only book she published. Kataryn Loughlin died in 1965 at the age of 57.
Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, by Kataryn Loughlin New York: Coward-McCann, 1952
Suggested ad layouts from the pressbook for Five Star Final.
For the last couple of years, I’ve closed most nights by watching one of the hundreds (thousands?) of early sound movies made in the period commonly referred to as Pre-Code, from the introduction of sound in the late 1920s to the adoption of the Motion Picture Production Code (often called the Hays Code) in 1934. Technical limitations aside — and these have as much to do with the quality of film stock and the blasé attitudes of studios towards preservation as with the shortcomings of the recording equipment of the period — these films manage to squeeze a lot of story into 60- to 75-minute packages.
But recently, I’ve begun to explore the literary roots of Pre-Code, gathering some of the stories, novels, and plays that provided the source material for many of these movies. Although studios did use original stories devised by member of their writing staffs, the majority of Hollywood A-list movies (and a healthy share of the B-movies) were adapted from existing literary properties. Often, the adaptations wandered far afield from the original works. A notorious example is the 1934 film based on Willa Cather’s novel A Lost Lady, which transplanted Marian and Captain Forrester from 1890s Nebraska to 1930s Chicago, jettisoning almost everything except character names and a skeleton of the plot along the way. Cather was so disgusted with the result that she forbade further use of her work by Hollywood for the rest of her lifetime.
Louis Weitzenkorn’s play Five Star Final, which debuted in New York in December 1930 and was transformed into a film starring Edward G. Robinson that was released by Warner Brothers nine months later, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Cather’s A Lost Lady. Both play and movie are scathing attacks upon “yellow journalism” — the unscrupulous practices of tabloid newspapers that, sadly, continue to be seen today. A veteran of New York City newspapers, Weitzenkorn came up through the ranks until he became editor of one of yellow journalism’s worst offenders, the New York Evening Graphic, which was known by its critics as the “Porno-Graphic.” He only lasted a few months in the job, though, finding it too hard to stomach the necessary ethical compromises. One of his colleagues on the Graphic, Frank Mallen, later wrote that, “He never liked anything about it. As a matter of fact, he didn’t know why in hell he ever got tangled up in it.” After tendering his resignation, Weitzenkorn boarded a ship for France and decided to work out his feelings about the Evening Graphic and its ilk in dramatic form.
Five Star Final debuted in December 1930 and was a critical and popular success. Over a year after the Wall Street crash, theater-goers in New York still had an appetite for social criticism, and Five Star Final delivered it fast and unfiltered. As John W. Perry wrote in Editor and Publisher, the play is “a venomous, sullen, and bitter castigation of that sensational fringe of American newspaper making which has only one god — circulation — and which, for the sake of this god, will sacrifice honor, decency, and self-respect without the quiver of an eyelash.” Arthur Pollock, a widely-syndicated critic, said the play “froths at the mouth considerably” and would have been more effective with a little toning-down. The Daily Worker’s reviewer took a strict Marxist view: “Since it is bourgeois criticism and not workers’ criticism, it mixed in a lot of snobbish disgust at the workers,” characterizing the Gazaette’s readers as “soda jerkers and fat chambermaids.”
In Five Star Final, Weitzenkorn portrays the transgression and redemption of Randall, his fictional counterpart, editor of the Evening Gazette. Prodded by a circulation-hungry owner, he agrees to run a serial about a scandal from 20 years past, in which a distraught young woman named Nancy Voorhees murdered the employer who had seduced and impregnated her and then refused to take responsibility for his act. Found innocent by a sympathetic jury, she slipped from the public spotlight and seemingly disappeared. Randall soon manages to track her down though, and his publicity tears down the facade of a normal life Nancy and her husband have created. The relentless sensationalism of the Gazette’s coverage ultimately leads the couple to commit suicide.
Ad for the original New York production of Five Star Final.
Five Star Final ran for 175 performances on Broadway and several touring companies took the play around the country in the following months. Warner Brothers bought the film rights for $25,000 and began lining it up as a feature for Edward G. Robinson, the studio’s hottest star from the success of his protrayal of the Al Capone-like Rico in Little Caesar. Warners’ most productive director, Mervyn Le Roy (six feature films in 1931 alone), was assigned to direct. There was a slight delay in the film’s release, however, because Weitzenkorn’s contract prohibited Warner Brothers from going out to theaters until the last touring run of the play ended.
As scripted by Byron Morgan and Robert Lord, the film may represent the closest thing to a faithful adaptation short of an actual filmed stage production. After reading the play — one of the relatively rare examples of a Pre-Code source play that was published — I watched the film again, following along from the book, and was struck by how extensively Morgan and Lord reused Weitzenkorn’s text. Indeed, more than just dialogue, whole pages of which are essentially reproduced word-for-word, but also the act/scene structure and even staging directions.
Use of split screen in Five Star Final.
Although Weitzenkorn had no film experience when writing the play, his staging made the film easy to translate into a shooting script. While there are just seven locations used in the play’s 19 scenes and Weitzenkorn called for the use of a revolving stage floor that would allow several scenes to be performed in two or three locations simultaneously. This was innovative for theaters but Le Roy could easily reproduce the effect using the split-screen technique perfected early in the sound era. Le Roy also eliminated several brief scenes from the play that had less to do with advancing the plot than with creating the atmosphere of the Gazette’s typical readers.
Dropping one in particular — set in “Trixie’s flat” — avoided running afoul of state censors with its unsubtle suggestion that Trixie and her flatmate are prostitutes. Another, in “the apartment of a colored couple,” makes the film a bit less offensive to current sensibilities than the play. Its omission, on the other hand, probably leaves today’s viewers wondering what the references to “Clearing House numbers” was all about. (See this item from the Harvard University Press blog for an explanation of how numbers rackets in Harlem used the daily transaction totals from the New York Clearing House as the basis for the daily betting.)
Edward G. Robinson’s character washes his hands in Five Star Final.
One aspect of the film that draws the attention of viewers now, on the other hand, is absent from the play. Several times in the film, Robinson is shown diligently washing his hands. Robinson and Le Roy came up with the idea, and it works well on several levels. Although the term obsessive compulsive disorder hadn’t come into widespread use at the time, the behavior not only shows the stress Robinson’s character feels in continually being forced to engage in duplicitous and exploitive practices but symbolizes his desperate attempts to cleanse his guilty conscience. Its last instance also provides the set-up for one of film’s best lines when Aline MacMahon, playing Robinson’s secretary, castigates him, saying that “You can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.
Five Star Final (the play) has not shared its film version’s longevity. One watches the film now for its brisk direction (despite running nearly 90 minutes), sharp dialogue (much from the play), and ensemble acting. Frances Starr and H. B. Warner, Warner’s stock players are particularly effective as Nancy Voorhees and her husband, one of more believable examples of marital love onscreen from the time. Tabloid journalism is every bit as awful now as then, but at least we’re saved from the onslaught of papers attempting to produce three, four, five, or more editions in a single day. And so while the film still works as entertainment, Weitzenkorn’s play is only of interest as a historical artifact today.
Five Star Final the film was even more successful than the play, making a profit of $500,000 over its costs and earning a nomination for Best Picture at the 5th Academy Awards (it lost to Grand Hotel). Warners recycled the story in 1936 in Two Against the World, with Humphrey Bogart in the lead and the setting changed somewhat awkwardly (the age of 24-hour news broadcasting was still almost 40 years away) to a radio station. Louis Weitzenkorn moved to Hollywood for a few years, contributing to screen plays for 24 Hours (1931) and Men of Chance (1932), before returning to New York and the newspaper business. In the early 1940s, he moved back to his home town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and tried writing another play, but he died in 1943 when his clothes caught fire as he was fixing a pot of coffee in his apartment.
Five Star Final: A Melodrama in Three Acts, by Louis Weitzenkorn New York: Samuel French, 1931
“Where is the House of Childhood?” A stranger stops the narrator of Marie Luise Kaschnitz’s short novel in the street to ask this question. “What is it? A museum? A school?” The stranger isn’t sure. The narrator herself has never heard of it. Yet, as she walks on, puzzling over the encounter, there she sees it.
It’s not a particularly distinctive building: big, gray, “without any special adornment except for a kind of Jugendstil embellishment placed above the portal and below which the name was written in golden letters.” She moves on. She’s not particularly interested. “The mere word childhood makes me kind of nervous. It’s amazing how little I remember from my childhood and how much I dislike being reminded of that time by others.”
But then it turns out that the House of Childhood is actually located quite close to her apartment. But she finds the entrance, a tiny foyer leading to a security window, probably under constant surveillance by a security camera, off-putting: “Things of that sort remind me of the Gestapo.” Anyway, the past is dead: “The only thing that’s important is the present.”
Still, it nags at her. Might as well have a quick look, she thinks. She walks in. Now the entrance leads to a courtyard, sort of a garden, scattered with exhibits: “Disorderly, even chaotic, but not at all sinister.” Intrigued, she returns again and again. The rooms seem to be under constant reorganization. Displays appear, disappear. Exhibits target specific senses: smells, tastes, sounds. Some are quite disturbing:
Yesterday, for example, I heard in a dark room one single scream that went right through me, and today I blindly ran into a veil of iron, hurting my lips, while smelling powder and the fragrance of violets…. The urgency of impressions like that is almost painful, maybe even more so because you don’t just pass from one to the next but are forced to experience, I might almost say practice, each one several times. Five or six times in succession, the scream without any additional sounds reverberating in the air, just as many times the quiet scratching of the veil on my lips; behind that, dead cold, as from fog-shrouded skin.
With repeated visits, some things in the House of Childhood begin to seem familiar to this woman who’s so intently put the past behind her. “Again and again I hear my mother singing.” Not songs, but little phrases: “Have you not seen your father?” — even though her father is in Russia.
As she grows more obsessed with the House, parts of her current life seem to slip away. Things in her apartment are moved. She takes a seat in a cafe and the waiters all ignore her. She rushes to the House and finds it closed — not just closed but giving the impression of having been shuttered permanently.
Marie Luise Kaschnitz in the late 1950s.
Kaschnitz wrote The House of Childhood while she and her husband were living in Rome in the mid-1950s and some German critics have suggested the book was a symbolic attempt to explore the childhoods that were lost to younger Germans during the Third Reich. (Renate Rasp would take a much darker satiric look at the same subject years later in her novel A Family Failure, reviewed here in 2019.) In a monograph on Kaschnitz, Elsbeth Pulver speculated that the novel is a metaphor for the process of undergoing psychoanalysis, and the random-yet-progressive nature of the narrator’s experiences in the House, the movement from general to specific and intimate memories (or, perhaps more correctly, sensations) certainly resembles what numerous patients who’ve gone through extended psychoanalytic treatments report.
Kafka’s The Trial is an obvious influence, but I think Kaschnitz moves well beyond imitation. Kaschnitz is best known among English-language readers for her short story, “The Fat Girl,” and a fascination with the pathologies of childhood is a theme in several of her other stories. Like Kafka, Kaschnitz knows that the absurd only works when the bizarre illogical of any situation is anchored in the specific and realistic, and throughout The House of Childhood one finds images and sensations that trigger one’s own memories. I think it’s a brilliant work that much deserves more attention and study.
Das Haus der Kindheit, by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1956), translated into English as The House of Childhood by Anni Whissen Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990
Catherine Klein stands in Berlin’s Tiergarten station saying farewell to her husband, who’s leaving on a train to Amsterdam, a visa to England in hand. Both Jews, after years of attempts, he has managed to secure safe passage out of Germany by virtue of being a doctor, one of the few skills considered worthy of emigrant status by the British. She will have to wait until he can arrange for her to join him. It’s the first of August, 1939.
Klein’s memoir of her experience of living as a Jew under the Nazi regime and her near-miraculous escape in 1942 is easily the most gripping book I’ve read in many months. Even before the war starts just a month after her husband’s departure, she details the succession of measures that progressively restrict the rights of German Jews — sometimes moving at glacial speed, then, as after Kristallnacht in 1938, in a sudden brutal sweep. At first, they comply, turn inwards, try to cope.
Then coping is not enough: “Whisky, sedatives’ and bridge cards become necessary commodities.” Her husband’s practice is taken away, then their apartment, then their belongings inventoried. They are harassed on the streets, friends are beaten up, arrested. When he leaves for England, she writes every day, expecting their separation is temporary. Then Germany invades Poland, Britain and France declare war in response, and they are trapped on different sides. “Every bomber setting out from here may bring death to you every bomber you watch taking off may mean death to me,” she writes in a letter she knows cannot reach him. “I am not defeatist, you know that better than anyone, but I now believe that we will not see each other again.”
Alone now, she has fewer resources, fewer defenses as the war provides the rationale for stepping up the pace of persecution. She has to find a room in a “non-Aryan” house. Along with other healthy Jewish women, she is pressed into work at a factory supplying equipment for the Army. The rationing and restrictions on movement experienced by all Germans are imposed even more strictly on the Jews, and in 1941, she is forced to wear the yellow Star of David so that conductors can keep her from using busses and trams, shop owners refuse her entrance, Aryan doctors refuse to treat her. When her father suffers a severe heart attack one evening, she spends hours trying to find a doctor who will come to his bedside. By the time she succeeds, she returns to find him dead.
Jewish couple in Berlin wearing yellow stars, 1941.
An American reporter befriends her, invites her to parties at the embassy, passes her goods — peanuts, coffee — now considered contraband. He begins to concoct various escape plans, but the war manages to foil them all. A visa to Switzerland with the possibility of a ship from Genoa? Italy’s declaration of war against France and Britain in June 1940 rules that out. Passage across Russia to Vladivostok and a ship to America? Hitler’s invasion of Russia a year later cuts off that route. Then, Germany’s declaration of war against the United State in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 lands the reporter and other Americans in internment as enemy aliens.
Early in 1942, she is awakened by screams and cries of pain from somewhere nearby. “A pogrom!” she thinks, fearing that the Nazis had decided to abandon all pretense and simply exterminate the remaining Jews in their beds. She discovers, however, that the sounds come from a former schoolhouse just down her street. Puzzled, she asks a neighbor about the sounds.
“Do be quiet, for God’s sake,” she whispers fiercely. “You will lose your head if you go on talking like that! You know just as well as we do what it is.”
“But I don’t, Frau Schultze. Honestly I don’t.”
“You must have noticed that the school has been turned a temporary hospital, haven’t you? That is where our soldiers are sent when they come back from Russia with legs, hands, noses and ears frozen off. Even morphia is no use for pains like theirs. But I’ll give you a bit of advice: you haven’t seen anything, you haven’t heard anything and as for me I certainly haven’t told you anything.”
Despite the relentless propaganda of Joseph Goebbel’s machine, ordinary people still manage to retain some skepticism about the endless reports of victories. “Good news,” an Aryan supervisor at her factory remarks one day. “There were 20 British bombers in last night’s air raid, and the Luftwaffe managed to shoot down all 25.”
With every day, however, she sees her factory workroom growing emptier. More Jews are being picked up and put on trains bound for the rumored camps in Poland. She realizes that she must find a way out. “In my present situation all I can expect from life is certain death. Why not gamble for it?” she reasons. Recalling one of the more fantastic schemes mentioned by the American reporter, she contacts a man in the Italian embassy said to be amenable to selling passports and visas. He proposes to sell her the real passport on an Italian woman living in Berlin and arrange for a transit visa for Switzerland. To pay for it, she has to give him — and the woman — most of the few personal items left to her.
Käthe Cohn, 1942.
Even this proves extraordinarily difficult in her circumstances. How to obtain a passport photo, let alone twelve copies? Where to find a suitcase — and how to explain why it’s needed? She begins to fear that the train she will board will be one bound for a camp in the east, not Basel.
It’s unnecessary to go into the series of last-minute crises and lucky breaks that enable Klein to make it to Switzerland. The fact that this book exists already tells us that her escape attempt ultimately succeeds. But there are a few important facts that Klein had to omit in the interest of protecting people still in Germany at the time her account was published in 1944. First, her name. In a paper presented to the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1997, Charles Rubens, a relative by marriage, disclosed that Catherine Klein was Käthe Cohn, born in 1907 and married to Doctor Ernst Cohn in 1928. Even her translator, Eva Meyerhof, author of A Tale of Internment, reviewed here recently, had taken the pseudonym of Livia Laurent for the same reason.
Ida Gassenheimer, 1946.
More extraordinary, however, is the story Klein/Cohn omits completely from this book. While she describes her father’s last days and death, there is no mention of her mother. As Richard N. Lutjens, Jr. writes in his book, Submerged on the Surface: The Not-So Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941-1945, the last great round-up of Jews in Berlin was held in March, 1943. On March 2, 1943, Klein/Cohn’s mother, Ida Gassenheimer, went to her bank to take out a little of the money she was still allowed to keep on deposit. “Frau Gassenheimer! You’re still here?!” exclaimed the clerk. “I have information that by March 5 there won’t be any Jews left in Berlin!”
According to “My Underground Life in Berlin,” a memoir she wrote with the help of her daughter, Ida Gassenheimer was advised by a sympathetic Aryan doctor to take the name of an Aryan German woman he knew was within days of death. Taking temporary refuge with friends, she wrote to registrar in the woman’s hometown and was able to obtain a copy of her birth certificate, pleading that she’d been bombed out of her home. With this, she was able to obtain an identification card and ration book and then to obtain a room — really more of a coal storage closet — in the apartment of an invalid Aryan woman. Here, she managed to survive until the Russian troops arrived in May 1945, and better, to find herself in the American sector when the Allies divided up the administration of Berlin. With the help of the occupying military government, she was able to emigrate to England in 1947 and join her daughter in 1947.
She remained there until her death in 1963. Doctor Ernst Cohn became a well-respected GP and his patients included the novelist Colin Macinnes and several members of the Rolling Stones. He died in 1979 and Käthe Cohn died in 1981. Escape from Berlin has never been reissued.
Escape from Berlin, by Catherine Klein London: Victor Gollancz, 1944.
“The tribunal has decided that this young lady is to be interned until further order.” So read the notice delivered to Livia Laurent in July 1940. It was, she writes, “a queer thing” that came on top of years of queer things: finding herself an outcast in her own country (Jewish in Nazi Germany); having to uproot herself and navigate the bureaucratic and financial challenges of leaving Germany; making her way to a new country (England) and absorbing its language and ways. And now, despite the seemingly self-evident fact that a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany was unlikely to pose a security threat to England, finding herself labelled an enemy alien and ordered to report to Holloway Prison for confinement.
A Tale of Internment is a wafer-thin story of Laurent’s year behind bars and barbed wire for the crime of being foreign. Like Paul Cohen-Portheim, whose Time Stood Still was featured here in 2014 and has since been reissued in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, Livia Laurent’s entrance into internment was marked by the goodwill and bad advice of her jailers. Her warder said she would be sent (like Cohen-Portheim, at first) to the Isle of Man — “A beautiful place, I went there on my honeymoon” — and advised to pack a bathing suit (“Essential. Sunglasses, no”).
Unlike men like Cohen-Portheim the war before, the women internees of 1940 were housed in hotels or boarded with residents. They were free to roam the streets and fields of the town, but barbed wire barricades and guard posts marked the perimeter within which their movements were restricted. The Babel of voices Laurent encountered on a typical walk represented the extent of Hitler’s conquests: “French, Italian, German in all dialects, including Austrian, Czech, Polish, Dutch.”
But even though the women were treated civilly, allowed to receive parcels and correspond with people outisde the camp, even given a small weekly allowance for cigarettes, cosmetics, or sewing items, they never forgot that their only crime was holding the wrong king of passport:
That fact alone was sufficient to overshadow any other consideration for their personal value, their own integrity. And they accepted it. The terrible thing was their own acceptance of it, making it possible for a technical matter to influence their character, their courage, touch their very souls. To watch them in the offices, waiting patiently hour after hour, where there should have been no waiting necessary at all. To see a woman of sixty being servile towards a girl of twenty, who in the ordinary course of events might have been her employee, being servile because the girl belonged to the staff and could give or withhold a permission. And watching the girl being conscious of her power, enjoying it, using it.
After a long grey, monotonous winter, the administrative machinery begins to turn, and one by one, the women’s cases are reviewed for possible release. Some hear in a few weeks. Others wait months. It’s pointless to inquire, of course. And to further complicate the situation, a decision is taken to bring in known Nazi sympathizers and confine them in the same town-camps. No one expected the Nazis to be released, but now arose the danger of becoming the victim of a whispering campaign. The mere suggestion of a favorable attitude towards the genuine enemies is enough to have an application for release rejected.
In the end, though, Laurent’s request is approved. Yet, when she reads her release certificate, she realizes her freedom remains conditional: “Exempted from internment until further order.” She was interned “until further order”; now, another “further order” hangs over her head.
A Tale of Internment, like Time Stood Still, shines with humanity, good humor, and a recognition of the inherent absurdity of most blunt-force administrative actions. Even its publication required a request by the Jewish Refugee Committee and approval by the Secretary of State, and even then its author chose to use a pseudonym (her real name was Eva Meyerhof) to protect remaining internees and relatives still in Germany.
A Tale of Internment, by Livia Laurent (pseudonym of Eva Meyerhof) London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942
Cover of the program from “An Evening for Verity Bargate” at the Soho Theatre, 1981.
Verity Bargate wrote three short, savage novels — No Mama No (1978), Children Crossing (1979), and Tit for Tat (1981) — before dying too, too young at the age of 41 just as reviews for her third novel were coming out. I found three cheap, battered Fontana paperbacks of Bargate’s books in a London bookshop years ago, but something about the cover of No Mama No gave me the impression that it was about child abuse and so for years I was put off reading it.
I deeply regret my reluctance now. Not only was my impression quite mistaken, but once I started No Mama No a few months ago, I soon discovered why Lynda Lee-Potter once wrote in the Daily Mail, “I can only read Verity Bargate at one sitting without stopping for secondary considerations like food or sleep.” I read No Mama No at a sitting and did the same with Children Crossing and Tit for Tat the next two days. It helped that all three books are under 160 pages each, but with this year being dedicated to wafer-thin books, I have an office full of such books, most of which I manage to ignore as the months pass.
But there is something so gripping and unique about Verity Bargate’s fiction that I fell into her world for three days and came out wondering how these little sticks of dynamite have managed to be so forgotten. I don’t use the word dynamite lightly (or originally). This is what Isabel Colegate wrote of her approach: “Verity Bargate has her machine gun on her hip and is spraying bullets before she even dynamites open the door.”
Cover of Fontana paperback edition of No Mama No (1979).
I generally dislike the queasiness of some readers and reviewers at anything that hints of being a plot spoiler, but this is one time I must take care not to disclose the gut-punches that await anyone who picks up one of Bargate’s novels. For not only are they all unexpected and powerful, but each embodies the special quality that makes these books seem decades ahead of their time. In her TLS review of No Mama No, Anne Duchene aptly described what Bargate does in each story: she “opens, very calmly and very skillfully, like a blade going through flesh, a door from enraged normality into raging perversity.”
Jodie, for example, the narrator of No Mama No, having given birth to a second son, finds herself not just feeling no love for the child but actively repelled by him: “that rather old aubergine they had thrust at me in the name of motherhood.” With one son still a needy toddler and the other an unwelcome addition, with an unsupportive and uninterested husband (of course, she became pregnant so quickly because he finds birth control in any form an assault on his manhood), with the weight of post-partum depression crushing down upon her, Jodie is on the brink of what I dreaded when first inspecting the book: neglect, if not violence against the children.
Then an old beloved schoolmate reconnects after years and invites Jodie to come down to Brighton for a day. On the train to the seaside, Jodie takes her boys into the toilet, changes their outfits, and begins to feel suffused with happiness. When she meets her friend Joy at the station, they embrace warmly and Jodie says, “Oh Joy, I forgot to tell you. This is Willow and this is Rainbow. My daughters.” It isn’t entirely a conscious decision: “It wasn’t I who had changed their clothes, it was someone else, and that someone else had effectively blocked off my escape route.” That sense of detachment in the act of taking a bizarre, irreversible step, is shared by all three of Bargate’s heroines.
But this is not the spoiler. Over the next weeks, the visits to Brighton become a regular respite from the domestic tedium of life in London with two unloved boys and a mostly-absent husband. Is Jodie’s lie about her boys being girls pathological? As Bargate tells it — through Jodie’s perspective — it seems palliative, the one way she can find to get through this difficult time.
No, the spoiler is how David, Jodie’s husband, reacts when he learns of Jodie’s deception. His reaction is not that different from that of some reviewers. Selina Hastings found the improbabilities of Bargate’s plots “monstrous.” Stephen Glover felt that Children Crossing suffered from “a vein of unlikelihood and angst which would make the deepest sceptic blanch.” In his review of Tit for Tat, John Braine showed himself an Angry Young Man become a Fussy Old Critic. The book, he wrote, “breaks the prime rule of the novel, which is that we must be able to sympathize with the central figure.”
Cover of Fontana paperback edition of Children Crossing (1980).
Reading Bargate’s reviews now, I saw that her critics fell into two starkly divided camps: those who found her heroines and their actions horrifying and incomprehensible; and those who “got it.” The “it” that Bargate’s enthusiasts got was the possibility — no, the probability — that women could have less than gracious and compliant responses to betrayal. Jodie in No Mama No feels betrayed by a husband who sees a family as something his wife is obligated to produce with the predictability — and the lack of effort on his part — of a worknight dinner. Rosie in Children Crossing feels betrayed by her pianist husband, who finds her the drudge who makes life away from the excitement of concert tours an unpleasant burden. And Sadie in Tit for Tat feels betrayed by Tim, the boyfriend who pressures her into getting a dangerous abortion and then escapes into an affair with another woman with whom he’s decided he wants to form a family.
Perhaps part of response of critics who found Bargate’s books disturbed and disturbing was a reaction to what they saw around them as the assault on conventions of sexuality and marriage by second-wave feminism. The world, especially the male one, was still tightly bound to those conventions. In Children’s Crossing, for example, Rosie says of her husband, “He thinks, by leaving me, he will regain his freedom. What he doesn’t realize is that he never lost it. I dread him discovering that.” But for Bargate, those conventions have become almost farcically hollow. When Sadie tell her boyfriend Tim that she’s pregnant, he tells her flatly, “You are not going to have this baby. I will marry you, but no baby now. Okay? Deal?” At which she thinks, “I half expected him to pust a contrat towards me. But my silence is not my signature.” That could almost serve as a slogan of passive resistance: “My silence is not my signature.”
From a distance of forty-plus years, the behavior of Bargate’s heroines seems far less bizarre and more understandable. Anyone who’s seen Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman, for example, will likely recognize the need of a victim to seek revenge for violation — even if the need, as in the case of Cassie in Promising Young Woman or of Sadie in Tit for Tat goes beyond the bounds of sanity (or the law).
The toxic waste of lies is the central theme in Bargate’s fiction, as she readily admitted herself:
The kind of lies I use in my books are ones which I don’t approve of. But I try to show the motives. I’ve been the recipient of a lot of lies and a lot of half-truths. In a way it’s may me almost honest: that sounds really wanky, doesn’t it? But I think I know how hurtful they can be — more than a theft or physical abuse. There’s a conspiracy of lies. Liars recognize each other. They don’t like to each other but they lie in front of each other. I don’t know what you call it. A leprosy of lie.
This attitude was an outgrowth of her own experiences. Bargate’s parents divorced soon after her birth and she grew up in what she once called “a middle class version of a child in care”: placed in a boarding school run by nuns before she turned six and shuttled off to holiday camps and homes to minimize the time her mother or father had to spend around their daughter. Her father was a high-ranking who “was always telling me that I was ugly, that my hands were huge.” Her mother considered her homely and slow. Her mother died when Bargate was a young nursing student; she cut off all contact with her father after their last meeting at the funeral.
In her mid-twenties, having left nursing, burned out from too many contacts with death and suffering, she married Frederick Proud, and with him founded Soho Poly, a ground-breaking theater devoted to one-act plays by rising young writers. After having two sons, she and Proud divorced and she took over running the theater on her own. Though a critical success, the work took a toll and in her late thirties, Bargate developed cancer. Bob Hoskins, who performed and wrote for Soho Poly, remarked to a reporter at the time, “A bird is running a theatre, the top one-act play theatre in the country, probably the world, she writes three novels, she’s running a home, bringing up two kids, and dying of cancer — she’s got my toast, anyway.”
One of the playwrights spotlighted by Soho Poly was Barrie Keefe. He and Bargate fell in love and began living together. She credited him with encouraging her as a writer. “I wrote the book because I was in love with Barrie and he wanted me to. It’s like winning the fruit machine.” Even so, she worried that readers would think that No Mama No was autobiographical, that Jodie’s attitude toward her sons reflected her own feelings toward her own sons Tom and Sam.
Cover from the Fontana paperback edition of Tit for Tat (1982).
At the same time, the parallels between Bargate’s protagonists and her own life are unmistakable. In No Mama No, Jodie is a child of boarding schools whose only positive relationship is with her old classmate, Joy. Sadie in Tit for Tat has also grown up in the care of others, ignored by her mother and loathed by her father. As Andrew Sinclair, who knew Bargate, wrote of her books, “they spring from a deep well of early pain and dread that goes beyond the immediate circumstances and suggests the operation of some malignant force from which there is no escape.”
The pain that Bargate may have harbored from her own childhood, perhaps exacerbated by the experience of divorce and struggle with the theater, enabled her to distill in her fiction a tremendous intensity of emotion that clearly scared off some in the first generation of her critics. But a few, like Hermione Lee, recognized what makes her fiction exceptional: “What Bargate can do like no one else, is to tackle head-on, with controlled dramatic force, the relationship in her women’s lives between physical and emotional pain and deprivation. And it hurts.”
Sinclair suggested just what was lost with Bargate’s death in 1981: “The author might achieve almost anything if she were to leave the scrutiny of the anatomy of melancholy for the surgery of society.” And it’s heartbreaking to think of the novels that Verity Bargate might have produced if that passion, that intensity, and that courage to follow a story into very dark places had survived to take on larger subjects. Nevertheless, even with the three slim sticks of dynamite she left sizzling on the shelf, I think today’s readers, today’s women in particular, will find that Verity Bargate is a writer of unforgettable and unique power.
I will add that I was so impressed by Bargate’s work that I contacted the agency handling her literary estate about reissuing No Mama No as part of the Recovered Books series that I edit for Boiler House Press. Unfortunately, we were not able to offer terms sufficiently lucrative to reach an agreement. I do hope that some press with deeper coffers takes an interest in bringing these remarkable novels back to print.
No Mama No London: Jonathan Cape, 1978. Children Crossing London: Jonathan Cape, 1979 Tit for Tat London: Jonathan Cape, 1981
There have been plenty of novels about some cataclysmic disaster overwhelming England, but aside from J. G. Ballard’s first three novels about the disaster taking the form of wind (The Wind from Nowhere), water (The Drowned World), and drought (The Burning World), most are well over the wafer-thin limit. So, if you’re in the mood for taking your dystopia in pocket-sized form (and not getting enough from the daily news), here are five mostly-neglected ways you can ruin an evening or two.
After the Rain by John Bowen (Ballantine Books, 1959, 158 pages) An attempt to break a drought in Texas becomes a global disaster. Slowly. The narrator, an advertising copywriter, like many London commuters, learns to don wellies and slosh his way into the office, where the management exhorts its staff to “Get flood-conscious copywise.” But soon the rising waters flood the Underground, streets turn into rivers, and our chap and his mate get their hands on a dinghy and row their way out of London. Within weeks, England becomes unrecognizable and largely uninhabited:
So we went on through that flooded countryside. The water covered the fields, and the flat bottom of the dinghy sometimes scraped the tops of hedges. We had left the Thames valley, and we were lost more frequently as we worked our way westwards along the troughs of water that lay between the hills, until every now and again hills would come together, so that we had either to back or slosh through the mud and rain, dragging the dinghy to the next stretch of water.
During those days we saw neither animals nor people. Those animals which had not been drowned would long ago, we supposed, have been eaten, and the people the villages would either be dead or have been evacuated to areas more easily supplied with food. Only once, the grey of evening grew deeper before nightfall, we came across a little hillock surrounded by water, from which a single gaunt beast—a child’s pony, by its size—stared at us. We drew nearer, and it lifted its head, and neighed. As we paddled on into the twilight, the sound pursued us for long after the pony itself had vanished from our sight.
Eventually, they encounter other survivors and together they assemble a raft that becomes their new home, their new land—with all the old problems of people attempting to get along in a too-small space. A solid story with some amusing satirical moments. Bowen, who was also a screenwriter and playwright, turned After the Rain into a play several years later.
One by One by Penelope Gilliatt (Atheneum, 1965, 187 pages) A mysterious plague overtakes England. In scenes eerily reminiscent of the first months of the COVID pandemic, half-measures and confusion lead the crisis to spin out of hand and an ineffective government quickly puts its own survival over that of its citizens: “For many days, far too many, no one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Overwhelmed, people resort to denial: “Not many of us believed in our own death.”
People have many instinctive motives for protecting themselves from a knowledge of catastrophe. Some of them are evasive; others have to do with a man’s conception of his duty, or his very genuine and deep-bitten feeling that if ill-fortune is already having a whack at his world he had better not incite it to worse by noticing it. The distemper struck England as if sent by some blast of the stars, and for a long time most of us tried to ignore it. We disbelieved it, blamed it on official carelessness, diverted our buried panic into vicious reprisals upon the West Indians or the Jews and felt sure that there must be a pill for it, though probably not on the NationalHealth.
A shortage of medical staff results in the narrator’s husband, a veterinarian, being enlisted, first as a nurse and soon as a doctor. Returning to London by train one evening, she sees an orange glow in the distance and realizes it’s the light from a bonfire of burning corpses.
A common problem that faces any writer who chooses to create a great catastrophe is how to end it. Do you let it run amok and wipe everyone or almost everyone out? Does it somehow resolve itself? Do you simply exit, leaving the characters to sort themselves out? As anyone who’s read Stephen King’s massive apocalyptic novel The Stand knows, the collapse is the fun part; putting things back together is anticlimactic and had spelled the death of many a promising narrative arc. And, sadly, One by One is another victim: a terrific start; a disappointing finish. However, it may still rate as England’s best COVID novel until someone writes a better one.
Leftovers by Polly Toynbee (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966, 189 pages) The French film director René Clair made a silent called Paris Qui Dort (English title, The Crazy Ray) in which a group of people aboard an airplane manage to be the only people to avoid being frozen in sleep by a mad scientist’s rays and then spend days cavorting around Paris, picnicking on the Eiffel Tower and stealing valuables, until a few decide to try to bring the city back to life. Polly Toynbee’s novel Leftovers had a similar premise: when London falls victim to a powdery gas that kills everyone who inhales or touches it, a handful of young people manage who happen to be in an odd corner of the Underground survive. When they emerge, like the passengers in Paris Qui Dort, they proceed to have themselves a jolly good time, ransacking Buckingham Palace and having sex in the most luxurious settings. When all that frolicking leads to pregnancies, however, they find themselves reverting to the values of the establishment they’ve just spent months flaunting. Toynbee published this at the age of 19, before she’d even attended university, and rather like Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, it is better appreciated as work of fun than as a work of fiction.
The Time of the Crack (republished as The Crack) by Emma Tennant (Jonathan Cape, 1973, 142 pages) One lovely summer evening, London is shocked by an enormous noise and a great trembling of the ground as a crack appears in the middle of the Thames and the northern suburbs rise up above the city behind a gigantic cliff. In the subsequent hours and days, people panic, flee, take refuge in luxury hotels, or generally run amok. Society quickly breaks down. A group of mentally-ill children escape their therapist guardians and take over an abandoned hospital:
The five-year-olds, led by Neddy and Mary, a brother and sister who were regressing together (and who before their rescue by Thirsk had been respectively at Wormword Scrubs and Holloway) were playing doctors in the emergency wards. Neddy, brandishing his scalpel, was striding impatiently from bed to bed as Mary prepared the patients for their operations. He had decided to amputate the leg of a man with a serious heart condition, who was attached to various complicated-looking machines….
The crack continues to grow wider and wider and the bands of survivors in the ruins between the highlands of the North and the river fragment into various cliques: hundreds of women follow a wild-haired seer called Medea Smith; a few wealthy developers assemble an army of enforcers that gathers and herds others into concentration camps as laborers for their grand project to construct a bridge across the crack. And everyone watches the people and cars that pass back and forth in the distance on the Other Side and fantasizes about what awaits there. One man, a die-hard leftist, builds a balloon to transport his family there:
Jeremy Waters worked hard, his fingers trembling with impatience. It was clear to him now that if he and his family reached the other side, they would at last find the life which he had hoped to find in Hampstead. At last, a society in which ecology and socialism went hand in hand. A society of brothers, fighting together to preserve the strange and beautiful structures thrown up by the Crack, and treating each other with decency and respect. Communism without a dictatorship! And the worst of it was that Waters might be too late. Everyone else had got there first.
But Nature tolerates neither vacuums nor the Crack, and a greater disaster looms just a few pages further. Having witnessed her first novel, The Colour of Rain, published pseudonymously, be trashed by the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia as the embodiment of the decline of English fiction, she set aside her pen for nine years until she was inspired by the work of Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard and decided to try again. Ironically, though the two writers were leading a revolution in science fiction, they offered her mundanely pragmatic advice: structure the book in four parts of 40 pages each; sequence events up to a climax; introduce and develop a core set of characters. She later described The Time of the Crack as “very carefull plotted,” and it certainly avoids the problem of the post-catastrophic letdown.
They by Kay Dick (Penguin, 1977, 94 pages) They appeared as a Penguin original in 1977. With a simple black-and-white cover, a literally wafer-thin spine (under half a centimeter) barely able to hold text, and printed in perhaps 1,000 copies or less, it quickly disappeared, despite winning the South-East Arts Literature Prize. I found my copy in a bookstore in Antwerp only when it showed itself squashed to the back behind several thicker volumes by Joan Didion. I suspect most of the originals that survive have likewise slipped to the back of bookshop shelves and been forgotten.
My copy of the Penguin edition of They, barely thick enough to squeeze the ISBN on.
Luckily for Kay Dick’s legatees, two keen “archives moles,” Lucy Scholes, who was still writing her Re-Covered column for the Paris Review, and Becky Brown, Curtis Brown’s head of heritage copyrights, both stumbled across it in early 2020 and a five-way bidding contest for the publication rights ensued, with Faber and Faber (UK), McNally (US), and Knopf (Canada) emerging as winners. The rediscovery was splashed across just about every major English-language journal with a book section and many thousands more copies that Penguin ever printed have been sold. So They is certainly not neglected anymore.
Kay Dick was a woman notorious for cultivating quarrels like a winemaker perfecting a vintage and even with the rediscovery of They, Dick is finding both champions and critics among its readers. It is a deeply ambiguous novel (indeed its ambiguity is reminiscent of Olga Ravn’s recent novel, The Employees (at 125 pages, also wafer-thin). Related in nine episodes by its narrator, it tells of the encroachment upon and isolation of the artists and poets of England by increasing numbers of sinister figures apparently associated with the state and intent upon, well, dumbing down the country. Their methods grow more ruthless and brutal. They gut the National Gallery. They take a woman who continues to paint from her home and blind her. They hound the dwindling survivors into ever-more-threatened pockets. It’s not surprising that many see in They an allegory for the gutting of some of England’s most vital public services, from the NHS to the water system, or for the ham-fisted censorship and assault on reproductive rights and queer lives in states like Texas and Florida. But it can also be read as a dismissal of the masses as brutes too ignorant to deserve their right for a voice in a democracy. Either way, if you like to be unsettled by a book, you won’t go wrong with They.
Iain Crichton Smith is best remembered now as a poet, but he published a dozen novels over the space of 25 years, starting with Consider the Lillies (1968), a now-classic tale of the Clearances of the Scottish Highlands in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like his poems, Smith’s novels are mostly short, spare in their use of words, poetic in their choice of the few telling details that reveal far more than many writers working on much larger canvases.
An Honourable Death is a superb example. It’s a fictional portrait of Hector MacDonald, a lad born in a Ross-shire croft who rose through the ranks of the British Army from private to Major General before being destroyed by insinuations that he was a homosexual who was grooming teenage boys and taking his life in a Paris hotel in 1903. It’s just 135 pages long but manages to span three decades, a half-dozen wars, and three continents.
Convinced the Army is his destiny, he walks out of the tartan shop where he’s working and into a recruiter’s office, thence to be dispatched to a training garrison without a word to his employer or parents. He finds himself in his natural element, drawn to the precision of the parade ground and its regimen:
Hector loved drill and was good at it, as he was at all the tasks he had .to do, including shooting and PT. But it was drill that attracted him most and most moved him. There was about it a mystique, a definiteness, an accuracy that enchanted him. The barked commands evoked exact responses from him. He could see as he looked around him shapelessness becoming form, a pure, severe order emerging.
Sent with his regiment to India, he soon distinguishes himself in battle and earns a commission. Though he understands how to play the Army as a winning game, he is an outsider in the officer class. “They had the casual code, the casual radiance of the privileged. They could sniff each other out. They knew instinctively who was one of them.” Hector is not. He survives by cultivating an air of taciturnity, retreating in a “fortress of silence in which he would make no errors.”
Major-General Sir Hector MacDonald in 1901.
He fights in most of the Empire’s little wars of the late 1800s: Afghanistan, South Africa, the Sudan. He understands war. He is fearless and quick-thinking under fire. His instincts serve him well. It is peacetime that unsettles him. At loose ends in a posting to a garrison in Edinburgh, he is attracted to a lively young woman and is persuaded by her parents to marry her. It is a secret marriage, as the Army forbids officers to marry until they reach the rank of captain. And though his wife bears him a son, it is largely a celibate and distant marriage: ten years can pass without seeing each other.
Meanwhile, the Army sends him on rounds of its standard posts. To India, to South Africa in the final days of the Boer War. His exploits earn him a knighthood and general officership, but he is too much the outsider to be brought into a central leadership role. Instead, he’s sent abroad, to India again, to an official tour of Australia, and finally to Ceylon as the senior officer in the colony. He is bored with training the reserves, irritated by the narrow society of the planters and merchants. He befriends the sons of a Portuguese merchant, takes them on outings, showers them with expensive gifts. There are suggestions, as the Governor General advises him, of “something improper going on.” He is recalled to England, then ordered back to Ceylon to be court-martialed–though the unspoken order is that he “do the honourable thing.”
An Honourable Death follows the historical record faithfully but not slavishly. Years are skimmed in a paragraph. Scenes that other writers would devote a chapter to are dispatched in a page or less. Days of a treacherous sea voyage are summed up in a perfect phrase: “The water was like an infinitude of roofs collapsing.” Millennia of warfare in Afghanistan leaves a land awash with “an ancient, careless, brutal mortality.” It’s a brilliantly written portrait of a man with a limited vocabulary of self-awareness and a world simple and inflexible in its strictures, a thoroughly satisfying creation. I look forward to reading more of Iain Crichton Smith’s work.
An Honourable Death, by Iain Crichton Smith London: Macmillan, 1992
Wright Morris is, in my opinion, the least-appreciated great American writer of the 20th century. How under-appreciated? Well, the last book-length critical study of his work was published in 1985 and his only biography, Haunted: The Strange and Profound Art of Wright Morris by Jackson Benson, was self-published. Fire Sermon and A Life are among his finest works, a pair of novellas that tell the story of the last weeks in the life of 82-year-old Floyd Warner. We first see him through the eyes of Kermit Oelsligle, the eleven-year-old boy who’s come to live with him after his parents were killed in an accident:
It is a long city block to the grade school exit where the old man gleams in the sun like a stop sign, and that is how he looks. He wears a yellow plastic helmet and an orange jacket with the word STOP stenciled on the back of it. The flaming color makes the word shimmer and hard to read. He might even be a dummy—the word GO is stenciled on the front of the helmet—but anyone who knows anything at all knows it’s the boy’s great-uncle Floyd. He’s actually pretty much alive but those who don’t know it cry out shrilly, “Are you a dummy, Mr. Warner?”
Floyd Warner is a man of set habits and few words and he and Kermit had achieved a truce of sorts, living in the oldest trailer in a trailer court full of old people in a seaside California town. But then Floyd’s sister Viola (“who had faith enough to save half the people in hell”) dies and the two have to travel to Nebraska to deal with the estate. They hitch up the trailer to Floyd’s 1928 Maxwell and creep their way east.
They manage a few hundred miles a day, mostly traveling after the sun goes down, but Floyd finds himself relying more and more on Kermit, who ends up doing most of the driving. After passing a couple of hippies a dozen times or more along the way, Kermit stops to pick them up, which infuriates Floyd, but he hasn’t the energy to kick them out. And so the four of them make it to the mostly-deserted town, surrounded by prairie, where the farmhouse where Floyd grew up and Viola died stands, full of abandoned furniture. One of the hippies knocks over a lit kerosene lamp and the place burns to the ground.
Disgusted with everything, Floyd unhitches the trailer and drives off in the Maxwell. At this point, Fire Sermon ends and A Life begins. Now Floyd travels south and west, to the New Mexico ranch he bought as soon as he could be rid of Nebraska and where he and his wife lived until she died of cancer nearly forty years earlier. With his old, slow car, he has to drive the back roads, but that suits his temperament:
It was a comfort to Warner to be off the freeway and back on a road where the turns were at right angles. One reason he had put the car up on blocks in California was that the winding roads were confusing. In the space of ten miles the sun in his eyes would be around at his back. The lack of any right angles made it difficult for him to find his bearings. With the angles gone, what did a man have left but up and down? It now occurred to him that up or down pretty well covered his available options, up to heaven with Viola, or straight to hell with everybody else.
As he passes through Kansas, he picks up George Blackbird, a native American just discharged after serving with the Army in Vietnam. Neither he nor Blackbird are talkers, but Blackbird’s company starts to open Floyd up to the richness of the life he mostly let pass by:
Gazing in the direction from which he had come, he seemed to see his life mapped out before him, its beginning and its end, its ups and its downs, its reassuring but somewhat monotonous pattern like that of wallpaper he had lived with, soiled with his habits, but never really looked at.
A Life transforms as we read from a terse, sparse comedy to a mythic journey. Floyd Warner, the old man unsatisfied and unimpressed with the people and places he’s spent his years with, finds a resting place in an ending that is both bleak and beautiful. Like his fellow Nebraskan, Willa Cather, Wright Morris writes things that are so simple on the surface and so deep and complex underneath (though unlike Cather, Morris can be laugh-out-loud funny). This was the third time I’ve read Fire Sermon and A Life and they only grow richer with each reading.
Cover of the Macmillan (UK) hardback edition of The Roundabout.
This year, I have been running the Wafer-Thin Books reading group with James Morrison (Caustic Cover Critic) and promised myself that I would take this as an opportunity to be more succinct in my posts. But I quickly discovered that, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, it’s often harder to write something short than something long. Nevertheless, I will attempt to keep this and subsequent posts about some of the neglected wafer-thin books (under 150 pages long) that I’ve been reading this year.
Cover of U.S. paperback edition of Neighbors.
I’ll start with one I just finished, a tattered and price-stickered paperback published by Modern Promotions (“A Division of UniSystems”) in 1969 under the title of Neighbors. Neighbors is the American title of The Roundabout, originally published in the UK by Macmillan in 1968. I doubt I would have picked it up were it not for the following blurb from Brigid Brophy:
I greatly admire Neighbors [I’m sure she wrote The Roundabout], which takes up the universal nightmare feeling, “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong” and spins it into a very elegant, economical and scarifying little trap for the imagination.
Brigid Brophy, in my opinion, was a writer whose critical judgments you can take to the bank, so I was happy to spend a buck on the book and add it to my growing pile of wafer-thinners in anticipation of this year.
This morning, I picked it up to get a dozen or so pages tucked in and ended up reading it straight through. This is a riveting little book that manages to squeeze three different narrators and at least four different perspectives into 138 pages. There aren’t a lot of books on the theme of “Suppose I’ve got it all wrong,” but boy, do they tend to be good ones: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier; Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. And you can add this one to the list.
Cover of U.K. paperback edition of The Roundabout.
Mathew, a naive and odd young man, takes a room at Mrs. Haines’ house. Within his first day there, he notices, through the curtains in the window of the house next door, just fifteen feet away, that someone is watching him. He learns that this is Mrs. Shawburn, a heavy-set middle-aged woman whose husband is blind and almost deaf. He speaks to her over the backyard hedge, has tea with her and Mr. Shawburn, who’s obsessed with horse-racing, and believes she tries to kiss him impulsively as she shows him out the door. He becomes convinced that Mrs. Shawburn has designs on him and then, when he notices that the couple isn’t taking their usual walk on Wednesday evenings, that she’s murdered her husband.
Some of this is true. Or partly true. Some of it is utterly, totally mistaken. The root problem is fundamental in our make-up as humans: what you see and what I see can differ dramatically. And as dramatic as the relevations are by the halfway point in The Roundabout, there are even bigger ones waiting in the second half. This is a delicious wafer-thin slice of nastiness, a superb evening’s read.
Michael Allwright, 1968.
Michael Allwright was a South African journalist who said that he came up with the idea for The Roundabout from playing a game of “What If?” with a friend. Though his dustjacket bio says he was working on a second novel, I can’t find any evidence that one was ever published.
The Roundabout is available on the Internet Archive: Link.
The Roundabout by Michael Allwright London: Macmillan, 1968 London: Panther, 1969
Published in the U.S. as Neighbors New York: Walker and Company, 1968 New York: Modern Promotions, 1969
David Quantick is a writer with seven novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Ricky’s Hand, was published in August 2022. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.
