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Short Reviews

Short Notices

Shorter reviews of neglected books.

The Young Immigrunts, by Ring Lardner (1920)

This is a guest post by David Quantick.

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 QuantickDavid 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

Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, by Kataryn Loughlin (1952)

Cover of Miss Abby Fitch-Martin by Kataryn Loughlin

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, author of Miss Abby Fitch-Martin
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

The House of Childhood, by Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1956/1990)

Cover of the U. of Nebraska Press edition of Marie Luise Kaschnitz's The House of Childhood

“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.
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

A Tale of Internment, by Livia Laurent (1942)

Title page of A Tale of Internment by Livia Laurent, 1942

“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

Neglected Circadian Novels

I had the opportunity to give a short talk on neglected circadian novels to the British Association for Modernists’s Ephemeral Modernisms conference recently and I thought it was worth offering here a rundown of the various books I mentioned.

A circadian novel takes place within a 24-hour period or a portion thereof. The first scholar to catalogue the circadian novel, David Leon Higdon, preferred this term to that of “one-day novel” for the simple reason that there are many examples of books where the narrative takes place over more than one calendar day: Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a self-evident example.

Not being well-versed in critical theory, I won’t attempt to philosophize about the significance of circadian novels in the context of modernism or of critical writing on the ephemeral and the experience of everyday life, of which Bryony Randall’s 2016 article, “A Day’s Time: The One-Day Novel and the Temporality of the Everyday,” from New Literary History, is a good place to start. Randall quotes Michael Shearingham, who observes that “the figure of the day can provide access to the totality which is the everyday,” and several novelists have commented on the practical utility of a single day or a 24-hour period from a dramatic standpoint. Reflecting on his novel, A Kestrel for a Knave (1968), Barry Hines observed, “It seemed like a natural way to do it. I compressed a number of incidents which had taken place at random over a number of years into one day to strengthen and speed up the narrative.”

Higdon proposes three “focal points”–what might more accurately be called structures–that comprise the majority of circadian novels:

• A Typical Day
Two of the greatest modernist novels, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses are examples of these.

• The Last Day
The last of the protagonist (e.g., Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil) or of someone close to the protagonist (e.g., Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day)–although, ironically, in most cases, it’s only the author who knows in advance that the character is going to die that day (damned writers playing God again).

• An Eventful or Event-filled Day
The distinction here is between a novel set on a historically important day (e.g., Christa Wolf’s Accident, which takes place on the day of the Chernobyl nuclear accident) and one set on a day full of personal events (think of Carson McCuller’s The Member of the Wedding).

The value of these categories are limited, though, as there are plenty of cases where a circadian novel fits into more than one. Is Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa Dalloway’s typical day or Septimus Smith’s last day–and does it matter?

In any case, here are some of the lesser-known circadian novels I mentioned:

Cover of Pay Day by Nathan Asch

• Pay Day by Nathan Asch (1930)
Asch could easily have called this, his second novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Jim, a clerk, picks up his pay and heads home to change for a night on the town, hoping for some adventure that will reward his daily drudgery:

Something wonderful was going to happen in a little while. Maybe in the subway, maybe home, or later in the evening. Coming out of the office, through with work for the day, the time absolutely his own until the next day at nine ‘clock, he felt happy, he was excited.

This Saturday happens to coincide with the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, but Jim has no interest in larger events. He wants to get drunk, hold a woman close, have a few laughs. Throughout the night, though, the execution intrudes into his consciousness, regularly triggering the thought: is there something I could be doing? In the end, he surrenders to the assumption that he is too small to make a difference: “It was too damned bad these two were killed if they were innocent, but some people said they did it, and it didn’t make much difference anyway. Tomorrow he’d have to go to the office just the same….” Pay Day is a fascinating snapshot of life in New York City in late Prohibition as well as a portrait of a man choosing to turn away from a chance to look beyond his immediate needs.

Asch’s 1925 novel, The Office is also a circadian novel, one I wrote about here back in 2006.

• Twenty-Four Hours by Louis Bromfield (1930)
Twenty-Four Hours opens as a dinner party at the home of Hector Champion — “seventy-one and soft” — is breaking up. Everyone is bored, most unhappy, a few drunk. The guests slowly drift out the door and into the night, but none of them to bed. Jim Towner will wander the speakeasies in hopes of staying drunk and numb, eventually ending up in the apartment of his mistress, the nightclub singer Rosie Dugan. By the time he wakes up the next morning, she will be dead.
Historian Henry Seidel Canby wrote that Bromfield was “an observer and a summer-up of current custom, current type, and current ideas and his series of novels is likely to be often excerpted from by those writers who in the next age will try to describe the America that was in the eaily nineteen hundreds.” Well, no one much remembers Bromfield for these novels now, but I’d argue that Twenty-Four Hours is still worth a look. Jim Towner could easily have been one of Tom Buchanan’s drinking buddies, his wife Fanny someone with whom Daisy comiserated over cocktails. It’s a powerful portrait of emptiness.

• Doctor Serocold by Helen Ashton (1930)
Doctor Serocold is a GP in an English country town. His day starts with an early morning call to the deathbed of his former partner and continues through a dozen or more house calls and his usual surgery hours, until it comes to an end late that night with the delivery of a baby. Ashton uses this construct to create a portrait both of the doctor, an able if not exceptional professional, and the community he serves. Across all this, the doctor is anticipating with dread the receipt of results of his own medical test, certain that he has stomach cancer. As Amy Loveman wrote in the Saturday Review, it’s “Not in any way a dazzling book…but distinguished in its clarity of conception and smoothness of execution.” Doctor Serocold was Ashton’s most successful novel, particularly in the U.S., where it was picked up as a Book of the Month Club featured title.
Ashton liked to build her novels around structures — literally, in the case of her 1932 novel, Belinda Grove, which told the story of a fictional Regency house north of London and the generations of its inhabitants — including a ghost.

• The Mere Living by B. Bergson Spiro (Betty Miller) (1933)
As I wrote here back in 2019, “One clue to the nature of The Mere Living can be found in the author’s maiden name, for she was a close relative of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who was best known at the time for his theory of time. Bergson argued that there were essentially two different times: clock time, the regular, rhythmic, linearly progressing dimension measured by the clock; and time as experienced by individuals, which in our perceptions can speed up or slow down based on factors that may have nothing to do with the ticking of the clock.
The Mere Living is, in one way, an illustration of Bergson’s theory, as the author takes through one day in four progressive stages — Breakfast Time; Lunch Time; Tea Time; and Dinner Time — but at widely different paces as experienced by the four members of the Sullivan family: Henry, the husband and father; Mary, the wife and mother; Nancy, the daughter (19); and Paul, the son (17).

Miller took her title from a line from Browning’s “Saul”: “How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ/All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!” And The Mere Living vibrates with energy generated from a world filled with other people. For Miller, the “blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James called the infant’s impression of the world is part and parcel of modern life for old as well as young.

• Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (1937)
With editions now available in nine different languages, Gentleman Overboard is somewhat less neglected than when I first wrote about it here in 2009. Yes it’s worth mentioning as an example of the Last Day circadian novel, since all the action takes place within the hours between Henry Preston Standish’s stroll on the deck of the Arabella and his slip and fall into the Pacific and the last time his slips beneath its surface, never to come up again. From a structural standpoint, Lewis follows the parallel narrative lines of Standish’s thoughts through what proves to be his final day on Earth and the reactions of the passengers and crew of the Arabella as they gradually become away of his disappearance — and begin constructing explanations and motivations for the event.
Lewis’s 1940 novel, Spring Offensive, is also a “last day” circadian novel that I wrote about here in 2009.

• David’s Day by Denis Mackail (1932)
David’s Day could compete with Ulysses in the complexity of its structure. As I wrote here in 2021, “With each chapter, Mackail sets character caroming off character, producing effects ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some fall in love, some fall in ruin, some take a step up the social ladder, some take a tumble down…. From time to time, Mackail doubts his own ability to keep his clock ticking. ‘Would the chain break off here, just because a manager did or didn’t boast, or because he did or didn’t so something with his fingers?’ And indeed, there are moments when the links grow tenuous, when the pace of this day of orchestrated chaos slows….” Nonetheless, Mackail is a wise and amiable choreographer and David’s Day is a thoroughly entertaining book, with an ending that arrives like a cherry atop a splendid dessert.
Like Helen Ashton, Denis Mackail was fond of simple structural frameworks. He also used the eventful day model in his novels The Flower Show (1927) and The Wedding (1935)–and like Ashton, he also wrote a house-centric novel (Huddlestone House (1945)).

• The Sixth of October (1932) and The Seventh of October (1946) by Jules Romains
These two novels bookend the twenty-seven volume series of Jules Romains’ massive work known in English as Men of Good Will in both a physical and literal sense. The first takes place on Tuesday, October 6, 1908, the second twenty-five years later on Friday, October 7, 1933. But beyond this frame, Romains reproduces in large part the chapter-by-chapter structure of the first book in the last. People watch sign-painters at work in 1908, watch an actress in her bath in a silent film in the first; in the last, they gather around an avertisement for false teeth and watch another actress, now in a sound film. Perhaps a bit too obvious and artificial, the approach at least provided Romains with clear starting and ending points for the intricate movements of his hundreds of characters over the course of the thousands of pages of Men of Good Will.

• The Chase by Horton Foote (1956)
The Chase began as a play (1952) that Foote expanded into a novel — and which Lillian Hellman later adapted into a 1966 film directed by Arthur Penn and starring Marlon Brando and Robert Redford. It works well as a novel, with each chapter focusing on a particular character as Foote leads us through the reaction of a Texas town to the news of the escape of Bubber Reeves, a convicted murderer and one of the town’s former bad seeds. Of the three different versions of the story, the novel best serves Foote in bringing out the character of the town and its web of self-righteousness, self-service, and pervasive prejudice. A fast-moving and gripping read.

• The Last Hours of Sandra Lee by William Sansom (1961)
I confess that I haven’t read this novel, which takes place on the day of the Christmas party at Allasol, a London company involved in miscellaneous chemicals. But Peter Green’s description from his Saturday Review piece on the novel makes it sound like great fun:

Liquor available includes South African sherry, peppermint cordial, brown ale, sparkling cider, ginger wine, Spanish Chablis, Australian Burgundy, Cherry Heering, British port, Irish whiskey, Advocaat, and a brew unknown to me called Pineapple Fortified. On this phenomenal alcoholic basis the whole staff lakes off like a squadron of superjets. From jollity they pass to lechery, from lechery to bitchiness. Some are sick, others caught with their pants down, others again utter unforgettable and unforgivable home truths.

It also sounds like a bit of 20th century mythology, rather like the boisterous conventions full of exuberant drunk sales reps from the Midwest that appear in Hollywood movies from the 1930s through the 1960s. Let’s bear in mind, however, that we’re in the hands of William Sansom, one of the English masters of the short story form and not a writer given to pointless ornamentation.

The Last Hours of Sandra Lee was the basis of the 1965 film, The Wild Affair starring Nancy Kwan as Marjorie (not Sandra) Lee.

• The Horrors of Love by Jean Dutourd (1963)
In the 600-some pages of this novel, two men carry on a conversation about the case of Roberti, a politician convicted for murdering his mistress’s brother. They wander around Paris, lunch, take a coffee at a café, an evening drink at a bar, come to no great conclusions, but cover a great deal of intellectual territory, from the idea of France to the place of fiction in the modern world:

HE: Fiction has always exerted an influence on manners, you know, especially love stories.

I: Yes, but in the old days fewer people knew how to read, there were fewer novels and they weren’t reinforced by the movies. It is interesting to note how in this age of technics, industry, trips to the stars, atomic fission, population explosions, rabid nationalism, the cold war between socialism and capitalism and all the other horrors which I shall refrain from naming, the rights of the little human heart are proclaimed with just as much persistence and diversity.

HE: I have my own ideas about that.

I: Tell me:

HE: I believe heart-throb magazines and sentimental movies are patent medicines.

Yet when asked to recommend a book worth reading, novelist Diane Johnson wrote, “My first choice would be Jean Dutourd’s The Horrors of Love, which is translated into English and was published in the sixties. It is an incredible tour de force — a dialogue running to more than 600 pages, between two men who are walking through Paris, talking about the fate of a politician friend of theirs who was brought down by an erotic entanglement. Urbaine, wise, humane, funny, even suspenseful — this is a worthy successor, as someone said, to Proust.” Historian John Lukacs seconded this recommendation, writing, “It is a delicious and profound work of art, from beginning to end. Andre Maurois likened it to Proust; but in some ways it is better than Proust, sprightlier and more imaginative. The language itself is superb.”

• One Day by Wright Morris (1965)
One Day takes place on Friday, November 23, 1963. The news of President Kennedy’s death hits the town of Escondido, California — likely based on Mill Valley, where Morris lived — but at its own small level, other dramatic events reverberate as well: a baby abandoned at the animal shelter; a doctor has a traffic accident that forces him to remember the one twenty years before when he struck at killed two hitchhikers; a local mortuary’s first television ad debuts with unfortunate timing; an elderly woman is found dead in a car when it rolls into an ice machine. Some of what happens is absurd, some tragic, some touching: throughout the novel, we are constantly reminded that throughout his career Morris could never quite decide whether humanity was something to laugh at in its insanity or weep at in its folly.

An Honourable Death, by Iain Crichton Smith (1992)

An Honourable Death by Iain Crichton Smith

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

The Last Days of Floyd Warner: Fire Sermon and A Life, by Wright Morris (1971, 1973)

Fire Sermon and A Life by Wright Morris

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.

Eight Doorstoppers for #1937Club

Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1937Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration started some years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 15-19 April, read a book published in 1937 and write something about it.

I posted a list of ten short novels from 1937 on the Wafer-Thin Books site, but some of the most interesting books from the year are doorstoppers weighing in at 300 pages and up (and The Old Bunch crushing the scales at over 950 pages). I doubt anyone will have time to squeeze one of these in during the week, but they’re worth keeping in mind if you’re looking to sink your teeth into a big fat slice of 1930s prose fiction.

• Low Company by Daniel Fuchs

Low Company is the third novel in Fuchs’ trilogy set in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, an area where the first generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe are watching the second assimilate the ways and morals of the new country. In this case, however, the scene shifts slightly, to what Fuchs calls Neptune Beach (used as the title of the British edition) but is recognizable as Coney Island. As Jonathan Lethem wrote in his introduction to the 2006 David R. Godine reissue of the trilogy, “Fuchs’ Williamsburg is full of Communists and bookies, wanna-be Edisons hoping to make a fortune, young lovers trysting in McCarren Park on hot nights, Talmudic scholars, jewelers, and crooks — he wrote a world, now a lost world.” The story takes place over two days and centers on a soda parlor frequented by numerous characters high and low, including Shubunka, the operator of a string of cheap brothels, Moe Karty, a bookie running an off-track betting shop in the back, and Spitzbergen, a tenement landlord. There’s racketeering, robbery, murder, and enough desperation to fill two decent films noir. So it’s not surprising that Hollywood bought the film rights to the book and lured Fuchs out west to work as a screenwriter (among his credits is the Burt Lancaster-Yvonne de Carlo scorcher Criss Cross, one of the very best noirs, IMHO).

• The Chute by Albert Halper

The chute in Halper’s novel is the funnel through which tens of thousands of packages drop every day in the Chicago mail order house in which the story is set. It’s surprising that no one has reissued this novel recently, or at least commented on how accurately it presages Amazon’s massive warehouses and its brutal attempts to turn its workers into machinery. The Chute may have been written seventy years before one-click shopping, but Halper’s descriptions will seem sickeningly familiar to anyone who’s read an account of an Amazon warehouse:

The door had brought him upon the proscenium of a vast disorder, a jungle of belts. High and low belts stretched and criss-crossed, carrying merchandise in streams; and rollers, moving the belts swiftly, made a sound like angry surf. Into this world he went forward, threading his way. Suddenly he caught sight of the chute terminal and stood rooted, seeing a tremendous black mouth! Towering eighteen feet above the floor level, the opening was immense, the biggest mouth on the earth! Merchandise was pouring from it like lava, rushing into troughs. Mounted high on a wooden platform, and working desperately, a crew of ten separators were diverting the flowing mass with long wooden prongs. They stood there, long-armed, rangy young fellows, prodding the merchandise on. The troughs radiated cunningly, going to all corners of the vast floor. The packages, falling of their own weight from the chute-mouth, zoomed along the inclines at breakneck speed. It was uncanny seeing so many bundles, of their own volition careening with such dispatch. From the mouth, the merchandise, rushing out, zoomed forth with a roar. A landslide was falling, a landslide of goods.

Decades before workplace safety became regulated, the employees of the Golden Rule Company take terrible risks to keep up the expected pace of collection, packing, and shipping (that great black chute will be fed), knowing that the root of the problem is the company’s attempts to cut corners by reducing staff. One worker jokes to a visiting efficiency expert, “I could work twice as fast with four hands!” “I can’t say I like the spirit of your personnel this morning,” the expert remarks to the floor manager. The Chute could probably stand a bit of editing (558 pages), but it’s a Dreiserian feast of characters and commerce, both mostly seen at their worst.

• Pie in the Sky by Arthur Calder-Marshall

This is Calder-Marshall’s magnum opus, nearly 500 pages long, a mosaic cutting across 1930s England from high to low. His title comes from the I.W.W. song that mocks the attitudes of industrialists like the factory owner in this novel: “Work and play/Live on hay/You’ll get pie in the sky when you die!” Calder-Marshall captures England beginning to feel the force of organized labor, beginning to overturn the status quo of the Industrial Age:

In the old days, the atmosphere in the mill and the office had been at least superficially pleasant. Antagonisms were turned outwards, against other mills, producing, so the Yorke people maintained, inferior good at sometimes higher prices. But now the enemy was within: not the competitor or rival business, but the employer, the man at the top. Even Joynson, whose technical training had led him to identify his interests with Carder’s began to veer over to his subordinates. Like most educated subordinates, he became discontented as soon as he lost the illusion of not being a subordinate.

Calder-Marshall was no Orwell, however. Though he captures the mood and tone of everyone from the factory owner perplexed by his now-combative workers to the workers themselves, to idealistic Communists and camp followers merely in it for the thrill of rebellion, to the workers falling further and further behind as their wages fail to keep up with the cost of living, he has empathy for all his characters and none of the discontent of the I.W.W. song he quotes. Pie in the Sky is a rich but perhaps not fully satisfying meal.

• The Wild Goose Chase by Rex Warner

In his introduction to the 1990 Merlin Radical Fictions edition of The Wild Goose Chase, Andrew Cramp includes among Rex Warner’s influences in the book “Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Eisenstein, and Fritz Lang.” There is something for everyone in the nearly-700 pages of this book. Warner later translated numerous works of classical Greek and Latin and retold classical myths in modern English, and all of his novels share a certain timeless character. The book’s title, however, is literal: in the opening chapters, three brothers, Rudolph, David, and George set out on a hunt for a wild goose. Except it’s also a metaphor. As the book goes on, each leaves their home town on a search for something like the meaning or purpose of life. David’s is a spiritual quest; George’s is both political and sexual; and Rudolph…well, Rudolph is what we’d call an upperclass twit, the sort of airhead who sets out on his quest with a near-empty tank of gas. Warner dabbled in Communism, partly influenced by his friend, the poet C. Day Lewis, but his own vision was of a world beyond politics. When George rises up to speak to a crowd of demonstrators near the end of the book, his target is not something concrete like industrialists or totalitarianism but a hodgepodge of the major and minor:

What our old leaders most respected we chiefly despise a frantic assertion of an ego, do-nothings, the over-cleanly, deliberate love making, literary critics, moral philosophers, ballroom dancing, pictures of sunsets, money, the police; and to what they used to despise we attach great value — to comradeship, and to profane love, to hard work, honesty, the sight of the sun, reverence for those who have helped us, animals, flesh and blood.

I confess I have never managed to finish The Wild Goose Chase, not managing to find quite enough of the first three influences cited by Andrew Cramp.

• Spanish Prelude by Jenny Ballou

Mostly forgotten in the wake of the Spanish Civil War is the revolution of October 1934, which shifted the still-new Spanish republic sharply to the left following a series of violent strikes and fostered the reactionary movements that culminated in Franco’s revolt and the civil war three years later. Spanish Prelude is a large canvas on which the lead-up to the October 1934 revolution are portrayed. It won a Houghton-Mifflin Fellowship for Ballou, and although the book is not strictly autobiographical, it’s fiction based heavily on personal experience, the years Ballou spent in Spain in the first half of the 1930s. The timing of its publication, however, was unfortunate: by the time the book came out, Spain was at war and no one much cared to read about what happened beforehand. Especially when many of her characters were well-intentioned by ineffectual intellectuals neither willing to confront the status quo nor willing to side with it. If anything, Spanish Prelude may remind some of Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War trilogy with its cast of eccentrics very much swept up by the broom of history:

Julia’s husband was one of those critics who in a long journey in art had lost all their critical senses. The discoverer of the already discovered, his criticisms were learned, ecstatic, and mediocre. The only time I was able with any sincerity to congratulate him on the appearance of an article, Julia confessed to me she had given him the main idea. For she had none of that coarse loyalty that makes women pretend publicly to a slavish admiration of their husbands in order to further them in their careers. She aired all his faults, lovingly, and said she knew him as well as though she had given him birth. In her frank criticism, she admitted that it was she herself who was the most keen psychologist of our times and that her own intuition for art was infallible.

The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

• The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin

This is the saga of the first and second generation of Jews in Chicago. Levin follows a group of twenty high school friends and classmates from their graduation in 1920 through the closing of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934. Two become doctors, one a lawyer. Others go into politics or journalism. Some of the women marry, happily or not, one ends up as a prostitute, another as a slum landlady. One becomes a union organizer, another a strike buster.

There was a model of an atom. Stemming out on wires from the dense nucleus were little corks representing electrons. And in life, all were in motion. Exactly like the planets — in the solar systems, Alvin reflected; the electrons moved in their excited orbits, turned and whirled on themselves. There was only one simple pattern, repeated in various dimensions, — in various thematic treatments, in the shapes and movements — of life. And if the electrons in a body-atom moved on the same general scheme as planets in a sky-system, why couldn’t you say that the human being, on his social plane, moved in the same kind of pattern? Why couldn’t you view society as a physical pattern, and people as these excited electrons, circling around their nuclei? And each bunch of electrons, forming a social atom, joined in motion with similar atoms, forming a class of society; and the classes of society, whirled into a planetary unit, were humanity, and where was humanity going?

Alvah Bessie, then a Communist and later a member of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, gave it a rave review in New Masses, calling it “long an infinitely satisfying. Another reviewer said it was “required reading for any understanding of Jewish life in America.” James T. Farrell, himself no slouch at writing large and complex Chicago novels, wrote that The Old Bunch was “one of the most serious and ambitious novels yet produced by the current generation of American novelists.” In a survey of novels of Jewish American life, Harold Strauss called it, “a landmark in the development of the realistic novel.” Several questionable paperback reissues (from presses with such inspiring names as Rancho Lazarus and Waking Lion) have been published in recent years, but you’re better off looking for a cheap version of the 1937 hardback or the hardback reissue put out in 1959 to coincide with Levin’s best-selling novel based on the Leopold & Loeb murder, Compulsion. The Old Bunch will keep you going for the better part of a month and it’ll be worth it.

• Victoria Four-Thirty by Cecil Roberts

The four-thirty train from Victoria on which Cecil Roberts’ passenger depart is headed for Austria and then on, in separate collections of cars to Rome, Athens, Budapest, and Istanbul, and his novel would have been a perfect companion for this trip. It’s a classic Ship of Fools or Grand Hotel formula: take a diverse set of characters, each with agendas hidden or overt, pack them into a (relatively) small space for a while, and watch what happens. And this is certainly a diverse set: a great Austrian conductor; a great lady from Belgravia; a war hero still suffering from combat stress; a conniving waiter; a pregnant stowaway; a mysterious Turkish millionaire; even the King of Slavonia (1937 was too late for Ruritania):

When the express was divided at Buda-Pest [bonus points for any novel that spell it Buda-Pest], one part going east towards Brasso for Bucharest, the other south for Belgrade and Nish, branching thence for Salonica and Athens, or Sofia and Constantinople, little Prince Sixpenny was fast asleep, for it was midnight. He had gone to bed almost immediately after dinner, served in their private compartment, and eaten in the presence of M’sieur Stanovich and Colonel Tetrovich. The meal finished, Miss Wiison had appeared and put him to bed. He was train-weary and had scarcely eaten all day. He had got the truth at last from M’sieur Stanovich. His father had been killed by a bomb thrown under his horse as he had ridden out from the Palace to attend some Army manceuvres. He had been killed instantly. So he was now the King of Slavonia.

There is nothing the least bit serious about Victoria Four-Thirty — nor should there be. Seriousness is quite out of place here. Arthur Hailey wrote this book thirty years later, only he called it Airport. There is a proper place in the world for novels that are chock full of characters, enormously entertaining, and will never change the world or your mind. This is one of them.

• Imperial City by Elmer Rice

… And here’s another, perhaps my favorite guilty pleasure read of all. Back in 2014, I wrote this about Imperial City:

It’s got something for nearly everyone: a murder in a crowded night-club; a race riot; a raid on a high-class whore house; adultery (both hetero- and homosexual); a solo flight across the Atlantic that ends tragically; a protest by undergraduates at Columbia; an unsuccessful hold-up and high-speed getaway; a black-out that cripples Manhattan just as a sickly child is undergoing an emergency surgery. Something’s happening on nearly every page, and with close to 600 pages, that’s a lot of action.

A good New York City novel ought to be bursting at the seams with energy, and that’s definitely the case with Imperial City. Here is just one paragraph out of thousands, as a foursome of wealthy socialites goes slumming on the boardwalk at Coney Island:

They strolled along in the laughing, voluble crowd. Everyone’s jaws were moving; those who were not munching ice cream cones and hot dogs or licking lollypops were industriously chewing gum. The air was thick with the smells of brine, pickles, sauerkraut, spiced sausage-meat, sizzling lard and human exhalations. People shoved and trod on each other’s toes to reach the booths where stentorian vendors extolled the merits of popcorn and pink spun sugar and Eskimo pies. Spectators stood five deep behind the players of skee-ball, Japanese ping-pong and coney races. There were long queues waiting to buy tickets for the Old Mill, the Love Ride, the jolting little electric auto-racers, the barrel in which a mortorcyclist risked death, the créche where prematurely born babies were displayed in incubators. In the swimming pools of the large bathing establishments the divers shouted and splashed. Elinor hated it all.

Imperial City is too long to squeeze in during the #1937Club, but I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a big, fat novel that lets you escape to 1930s Manhattan for a couple of weeks. It’s no worse than Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel and a lot more grown-up fun.

Via Bodenbach, by Ferenc Körmendi (1935)

via Bodenbach by Ference Körmendi

If you ever want to experience what it was like to take a train in Europe in the mid-1930s, read Via Bodenbach. Ferenc Körmendi wrote it as an experiment in the use of interior monologue, taking the reader, through the thoughts of George Kovacs, a Hungarian engineer, moment by moment, as he travels from Budapest to Berlin. We walk along the platform to the compartment he’s tipped the porter to hold. It’s an early train, going via Prague and Bodenbach, allowing him to reach Berlin in time for a good night’s sleep at a hotel. He wants to be fresh for his visit to the factory where the electrical device he’s invented will be manufactured. With any luck, this device will make his fortune.

He’s early, so early he regrets tipping the porter. Few passengers have boarded, there are plenty of compartments. He decides to get a paper, a German film magazine — something to read. When he returns to the compartment, there is a woman just settling in. “A girl, no Hungarian, quite pretty.” She apologizes in German for shutting the window (it’s cold). Not German, either, probably Czech. A boy enters, followed by an older gentleman. There is the settling of bags and overcoats, apologies in Hungarian, then in German. Everyone understands German? Yes, then they’ll stick with German.

The train begins to pull out of the station. “It’s moving. Daddy, the train’s moving,” the boy says excitedly. So, they’re father and son. “Dear little boy,” the woman says, “How well he behaves.” Oh, he’s not little: almost thirteen. Father prods the son to introduce himself. There are introductions all around. The Szabos. The woman is Alice Morek: yes, definitely Czech. “May we ask where you are going to?” says the father. “Podmokly,” she replies. He’s puzzled. “Bodenbach, you probably know it by that name.”

Bodenbach, Czechosolvakia, before World War Two.

On the one hand, this is all mundane, just minutiae. The chit-chat continues, gracious but not overly friendly. How many more pages of this? you may wonder. But Kovacs is suspicious, petty, insecure. Not pathologically, just … well, human. And so a low-keyed, superficially polite battle of the stags begins. The elder Szabo is bound to lose, of course. He and his son are changing trains in Prague. Kovacs will still be in the compartment with Alice Morek after they leave.

In the course of the next few hours, Kovacs subtly edges out Mr. Szabo. Alice agrees to dine with him in the restaurant car. They head down the corridor, edging past the first diners. A couple of aristocratic men who pass “at their distance of five hundred years’ exclusivity, aloof and distant.” Cross from one coach to the next:

Second-class coach corridor empty a compartment door half open smoke tall blonde woman in red slippers lying not sleeping alone sleeping all the way to Berlin I might have come along here too lazy it doesn’t matter now I’m not so badly off where I am empty compartment here they’ve already gone to the restaurant car two suit-cases in the rack another empty compartment lots of luggage the door opposite’s open cold wind it’s going to rain these have gone as well or there wasn’t anybody here oh yes there was luggage and newspapers on the seat a half compartment one man alone eating sandwiches on the table in front of him no need of railway food for poisoning another coach if it crumpled up the end of the train’s empty another empty compartment one suit-case on the rack he was eating from a plate his wife must have packed it another. .. .

They lunch, have coffee. She is friendly now, but not yet warm. But Kovacs slowly grows obsessed. Each bit of information she offers he places like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, trying to construct her story. On the way back from lunch, he forces her into an empty compartment, forces a kiss on her. He begins to think: maybe I will get off in Bodenbach, take her to a hotel, seduce her, run off with her.

What he’s considering is mad, of course, reckless, but now it’s like each thought follows the next faster and faster, like we’re descending a spiral staircase, picking up speed, until we’re running, taking terrible risks. Will Kovacs abandon his carefully planned journey, go flying out of his neat and comfortable life in pursuit of Alice Morek? She has given him no encouragement, even protests that his conduct was abusive. When he tells her he’s going to get off in Bodenbach, too, that he intends to run off with her, she protests: he’s mad, she wants nothing to do with him. But will he persist? We cringe as Kovacs keeps stepping closer and closer to disaster.

Via Bodenbach is something of a tour de force. On the surface, it’s an extraordinarily detailed and precise account of one man’s journey by train through three countries, from early morning to after midnight. Underneath, though, it’s a walk along a tightrope strung between a complacent life in Budapest and the prospect of a successful partnership in Berlin suddenly complicated by the presence of this woman, a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman. Kovacs is not a sympathetic character, but that’s one of the reasons the narrative develops such compelling momentum: we know we wouldn’t be heartbroken if he goes tumbling off the rope and ends up a broken, bloody heap. A fascinating experiment — and a journey I’d be willing to take again.

(And yes, if you’re keeping score, this is the second Hungarian novel I’ve written about in which a man in a train meets a beautiful, mysterious, and almost certainly inappropriate woman (see Farewell My Heart, by Ferenc Molnar. Coincidence? Plagiaristic inspiration? A common trait among Ferencs? Who knows?)

Via Bodenbach, by Ferenc Körmendi
London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1935

The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede (1948)

Publishing used to be a much different business, and no one could better attest to that than Donald Friede. After being kicked out of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, a job in the stockroom of Alfred A. Knopf convinced him that he wanted to be a publisher. The novelist Manuel Komroff (little read today) then hired him as his assistant in the production department of Boni & Liveright, t
one of the hot publishers of the early 1920s. Soon after, thanks to a small fortune from his father’s exclusive rights to sell Ford motorcars to Russia (until the Revolution, of course), he was able to walk into the office of Horace Liveright and buy his way into owning half the company. It entitled him, as he puts it, to “a ringside seat at a show that has never been equaled, and probably never will be: the literary explosion of the 1920s.”

And not just the literary. Still flush with his father’s cash, he bankrolled the avante-garde composer George Antheil, whom he’d met when the two of them were rushing to witness Charles Lindbergh’s landing at Le Bourget airfield after his successful solo crossing of the Atlantic (just a minor event in Friede’s frantic narrative). He brought Antheil and his wife back to New York, rented Carnegie Hall, and kept signing checks for the composer’s ever more grandiose notions (towering skyscraper backdrops, a real firehouse siren, a wind machine). The plan was for Antheil to debut for the American audience his Ballet Mechanique, debuted the previous season in Paris, along with his Jazz Symphony. Up to the last minute Antheil was coming up with new ideas and Friede was running around trying to materialize them.

The actual performance turned out to be one of the great disasters of musical history. With all the last-minute changes, the musicians were ill-rehearsed, the music too jarring for much of the audience, and then the wind machine ran amok and subjected the front rows to a minor hurricane. News of the fiasco devastated Antheil’s musical career for years. As Friede recalls,

He hated me so very much that a few years later, under a nom de plume, he wrote a detective story about me, in the opening pages of which he had the reader discover me dead in bed, a knife stuck in my back. In the balance of the book he managed to kill off my mother, my wife, and my brother, as well as a psychiatrist whom he had met through me. It was a very thorough job and had excellent cathartic results, as our present friendship proves.

Friede was able to turn his attention back to publishing. Boni & Liveright, along with other American publishers, were enjoying a moment almost never experienced since Gutenberg invented moveable type: “There were simply not enough books being printed to supply the demand.” Publishers were chasing after every writer worth his salt and more than a few who weren’t. Some of the worst books credited to Maxwell Bodenheim and Heywood Broun, for example, can be attributed to the desperation of publishers who would take anything of 40,000 words or more and slap it between a pair of boards.

Donald Friede, off in search of new manuscripts in the late 1920s.

But frenzied quest for manuscripts didn’t develop the best critical judgment. Fried turned down the rights to Charles Lindbergh’s memoir of his flight, We. “No thanks,” he said. “He’ll be forgotten in six months.” We went on to become one of the biggest bestsellers of the decade. He rushed to Paris to try to persuade James Joyce to give him the American rights to Ulysses. He felt he’d win over the author by presenting him with an exclusive American edition he’d had printed just for this meeting. Joyce opened the book, noted that the colophon page credited Friede as the copyright holder, and cooly dismissed him.

That was one of a string of missed opportunities that led Friede to wander out to Chicago to meet the bookseller Pascal (Pat) Covici, who was starting to create his own literary empire. The pair got to brainstorming and Friede returned to New York with plans to set up a new publishing house: Covici-Friede. Covici and his wife moved east, and soon a five-person company (Covici, Friede, their wives, and a stock clerk) was established on West Forty-Fifth Street. Unfortunately, what they lacked was a catalog. For 1928, they relied mostly on very expensive limited editions of tasteful erotica (sketches by Alexander King) and reissues of The Sweet Singer of Michigan by Mrs. Julia Moore, which Friede admits was “probably the worst volume of poetry ever written by anybody, anywhere.”

They courted Theodore Dreiser, passed on a thousand-page first novel called O Lost! that went to Scribner’s, fell into the masterful hands of Maxwell Perkins, and emerged two years later as Look Homeward, Angel. Slowly, they began to sign better books and better writers. Wyndham Lewis (when people still bought his books) and Joseph Moncure March’s boxing poem The Set-Up. Their breakthrough came when they bought the American rights to Radclyffe Hall’s then-revolutionary lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Condemned as obscene in England, the book had to pass the scrutiny of the New York Court of Special Sessions, but the court ruled it acceptable and its scandalous reputation made it an instant bestseller.

Flush with pride in their critical judgments, they then listened in rapture as Ben Hecht laid out his ideas for the book that would be his magnum opus, certainly the greatest of the Great American Novels, to be titled Deliaga. As Hecht’s chapters dribbled in, however, his creative desperation was only surpassed by their dread that they’d bought an unpublishable heap of yecch. Having already sold hundreds of copies as pre-orders, they grabbed a Hecht short story that was lying around and talked him into padding it out to become A Jew in Love.

With the Great Depression now well upon them, Covici-Friede entered what Friede calls their “deadly serious, if-it-isn’t-proletarian-it-can’t-be-good phase.” And they had a good prospect for making headways with this line thanks to John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men. Unfortunately, not good enough. Their creditors came knocking and Covici-Friede closed in 1938. Pat Covici moved over the Viking and signed Steinbeck’s next big novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Friede decided to try Hollywood.

At this point, a good editor would have told Donald Friede to wrap things up. The subtitle of The Mechanical Angel is, after all, “His adventures and enterprises in the glittering 1920s,” and here we are in the late 1930s, when glitter was still a scarce commodity outside the movies. Friede also entered a long period of wandering, short-lived enterprises, and marriages (including to the food writer M. F. K. Fisher in the late 1940s) — none of which he discusses here.

Instead, he pads out the book with a series of thematic chapters (I know you’re dying to read about his hobby of building radios) and what must bluntly be called old fart pontifications. The giddy fun of the crazy world of publishing, art, music, and drinking in the 1920s gets rehashed for its moral lessons and neither reader nor writer are the better for it. There are about 240 pages and 19 chapters in The Mechanical Angel. Stop at the end of Chapter 11 and you’ll thank me.

The Mechanical Angel, by Donald Friede
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948

Farewell My Heart, by Ferenc Molnar (1945)

I found a copy of Ferenc Molnar’s little novel Farewell My Heart in Ravenswood Used Books while visiting Chicago recently. It was the sort of book that’s easy to miss on a shelf: no dust jacket, the spine broken and its lettering faded. For me, though, sitting between familiar titles by Vilhelm Moberg and Toni Morrison, it was an orphan crying out for a closer look. I recognized Molnar’s name but only knew him as a dramatist (Liliom, later made into the musical Carousel, among others). I soon found more than enough reasons to buy it: its size (8″x5″, just about the ideal for a book that’s pleasant to hold AND read; the nostalgic disclaimer “ABOUT THE APPEARANCE OF BOOKS IN WARTIME” on the colophon page; and a couple of opening lines that guaranteed I’d want to go on:

“Religion?” The Italian officer in the Fascist uniform asked, holding my passport in his hand.

The train had been standing at the border station between Switzerland and Italy for a long time.

Wherever this story was going to go, I was willing to follow.

And did. However, let me disclose up front that though I thoroughly enjoyed Farewell My Heart, it cannot be held up as anything more than an entertaining minor novel. In fact, it reminded me of those times when I’ve been in the mood to see a movie and taken whatever happened to be showing without being too discriminating — and been rewarded by something unexpected and memorable if not quite a masterpiece. Many years ago, I had to quickly shepherd some younger cousins out of my grandparents’ house to get them away from a family meltdown. I took them to the nearest multiplex and into the next available showing — Breaking Away. I don’t know what they thought of it, but for me it was not only far better than sitting through a screaming match but a movie I’ve been fond of ever since.

Farewell My Heart is about the unexpected, too. Its unnamed narrator is a fifty-something Hungarian journalist, a Jew who’s managed to shift some money to America without losing it in the Crash — enough to qualify for that rare and coveted object, an American visa. As he travels from Budapest, “At every border the poor, underpaid passport officials had started with that same strange expression at the American visa. As if it were some foreign coin which, though it had no value in their own country, they felt was very valuable.”

His train stops at Lausanne and a young red-haired woman boards and takes the seat next to him. She is also Hungarian, he learns, a twenty-year-old named Edith, and has a ticket on the same ship leaving Genoa for New York. She is pretty — but, he is quick to tell us, “let’s be absolutely frank, she was conventionally pretty — and let’s be even franker, there was something in her character, in her appearance, in her look, in her voice, that was reminiscent of the typical Budapest streetwalker.”

Edith soon abandons him for a Finnish diplomat — younger, more confident, better dressed than the narrator — until their itineraries diverge and she takes up again with the journalist. This pattern will be repeated on board the ship to America, in the cheap hotel they take rooms in upon arrival in New York, and over their first months in the new country.

The narrator is a cautious man, careful with his money and his health, having already been diagnosed as having a weak heart. He avoids leading Edith to think he has any interest in her other than as a companion, and when she decides to latch onto a young Hungarian dancer and go with him to try their luck in Hollywood, he offers her only a little money and encouragement. Not long after, he suffers a heart attack and while rehabilitating, meets and marries a gentle American woman closer to his age.

Married, eligible for citizenship, financially secure, he is in a perfect position to live out a life of quiet and moderation. And then Edith returns. And Molnar reminds us of one of the reasons we read fiction: to follow as people make terrible, foolhardy, self-destructive choices. Choices most of us wouldn’t be dumb or daring enough to take. And in this case, for no reason at all, for nothing more than the feeling the narrator had when Edith first sat beside him in that Swiss train compartment:

And still, when she sat down beside me and said softly, “It’s cold,” and pushed closer to me, and her shoulder and hip touched me, I felt unerringly that we two belonged to each other for all that remained of life. This was a fearful new element in my experience, this suddenly born thought which had taken possession of me with such overwhelming force, for no reason at all.

Farewell My Heart will take you just an evening or two to read. If you happen across it on a shelf someday, do pick it up. But if not, there are other good books a few inches further along.

Farewell My Heart, by Ference Molnar, translated by Elinor Rice
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945

The Midst of Life, by Mina Curtiss (1933)

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The Midst of Life is subtitled “A Romance,” but knowing a bit about Mina Curtiss, I read it assuming it was a work of nonfiction. I was surprised, then, to discover than Houghton Mifflin marketed it as a novel, for aside from the change of a name or two, this is drawn directly from Curtiss’s life. Born into a wealthy and cultured Jewish family (her younger brother Lincoln rates a 700-page biography by Martin Duberman), she grew up in Boston and graduated from Smith College, where she taught French for over ten years. When she was 30, she married Henry Tomlinson Curtiss, an heir to the Spaulding sporting goods fortune, but Curtiss, who had suffered from lung problems all his life, died suddenly of pneumonia after less than two years of marriage.

“Why shouldn’t I write to you, dead as well as alive,” she asks on the first of June, 1932. The Midst of Life is a widow’s attempt to process her husband’s death. “Of course, I shall write to you — every day. I shall tell you everything, everything you would want to know.”

Mina Curtiss, 1933. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.

Though she says, “I shall write you to remind you in your other world of the simple happiness of this one, its casualness and its excitement,” we soon realize that the one being reminded in Curtiss herself. While she and Henry were married, they wrote each other every day when apart. The act of writing to a ghost is preferable, she admits, to her initial ways of coping with his loss. “At first, I fancied you were in the next room, that accidentally you had left it just before I entered. Then I used to expect to meet you in the street.” She once felt an almost irresistable impulse to stab a man in the street simply for his expression of utter indifference to her pain.

And so, she writes every day, or nearly every day. Not like a wife sharing her day with her husband — such conversations tend to be more about exchanging information than emotions. She shares her impressions and, inevitably, the memories they trigger. Henry was a great lover of gardens, so we hear about the day lilies and delphinium, about the tomatoes and squash in the large gardens around their country home in the Berkshires and her joy or disappointment in their growth. The two of them were avid riders, so we read of the moments when Mina is able to lose all sense of herself in a gallop and of her sadness at having to put down her aging stallion Sandy.

As the summer moves into August, Mina finds herself sifting through her memories of Henry’s last days. Struck down in a New York hotel, he lies struggling to breathe, too frail to be moved to a hospital, his doctors holding out little hope for recovery. For years, she has taken some comfort from believing that his last word to her was “Beautiful.” But as she examines her memories closer, she realizes that what he actually said just before losing consciousness was, “Go away. Leave me alone.” And Mina finds this not the devastating rejection she has feared. “Leave me alone,” was right, she decides. “Man is born into the world alone, he leaves it alone, and in a way he lives in it alone, too.”

In her last letter, on the 10th of October, as the frost comes and forces her to harvest the last fruits and vegetables from the garden, Mina recalls a conversation she had with Henry early in their relationship. He is driving her to the station so she can catch a train back to Smith when he notices her glancing nervously at her watch. “Why do you do that?” he asks. If she misses one train, she can catch another. “Aren’t you happy here and now?” And that, she concludes, is the only way in which she can hold onto something of the love they shared: by concentrating on the moments of happiness she still has the opportunity to experience, even without him.

If Mina Curtiss was able to publish these letters by calling The Midst of Life a novel, so be it. As readers we might do well to think of it as a novel, too. For there are things here that are almost too intimate to be shared with strangers. A fine and touching book.

The Midst of Life, by Mina Curtiss
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933

The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel (1961)

The Darkened Room by Hilde Spiel (1961)

“Europe is nothin’ on earth but a great big auction, that’s all it is, that bunch of old worn-out places, it’s just a big firesale, the whole rutten thing.” Hilde Spiel quotes this line from Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as an epigraph to her novel The Darkened Room (1961), about a group of Europeans who’ve washed up in Manhattan as jetsam from the firesale known as World War Two. Lele, the narrator, is a young Latvian woman whose parents were victims of the war: her father shot by the Soviets as a member of the intelligentsia (he ran Riga’s water system), her mother dead of starvation, one of the thousands abandoned by their Nazi captors in the final weeks before surrender. Seduced by an Italian in a displaced persons camp, she arrives in New York with a toddler son and an introduction to Mrs. Langendorf, an Austrian Jewess now working in New York as a psychiatrist.

Lele soon learns that Mrs. Langendorf may not have official credentials as a therapist, but she is a master of messing with people’s heads, and she moves on to work as housekeeper for Lisa, another expat Austrian Jewess. Lisa’s background is even murkier than Mrs. Langendorf’s. She spent the war in Rome as — even the relatively naive Lele figures this out — the mistress of a black marketeer. Her closets are full of designer Italian outfits, expensive paintings, priceless figurines and objets d’art. She escaped punishment when the Allies liberated the city by entrapping a well-meaning Army captain, Jeff, into marriage and is now installed in her apartment as the queen bee of a hive of fellow Central European refugees.

Lisa is neither beautiful nor friendly but somehow she manages to keep all around her in thrall, hosting parties paid for by selling off odds and ends of her Italian booty. She spends days huddled in her bedroom “like the oyster in its shell, surrounded by her scent bottles and her jewelled monocle and her books and her birds and her indecent Pompeian pictures, while she supped from her Louis Seize table and cowered on her gold-shot bedcover or lain in her pink sheets.”

Lisa seems to be, for Spiel, the embodiment of the decay and death of the culture of pre-war Europe, the world of cafes, liberal humanism, and carefree decadence. She draws in people with her intensity, but as Lele ultimately discovers, it’s an intensity fueled by heroin and an increasing fear that she is irrelevant in this new world. Lele comes across a note on which Lisa has scribbled, “Vivre? Nos valets le feront pour nous.” [Live? Our valets will do it for us.] As her physical and mental condition deteriorates, she still hosts her parties, but now she is less the maîtresse d’salon than a “somewhat deranged invalid who must be humoured and flattered, and whose odd behaviour must be glossed over with a lot of small talk.”

Hilde Spiel, around 1961.

The Darkened Room has a certain morbid fascination perhaps not dissimilar to that exercised by Lisa over her circle of followers. Hilde Spiel’s motivation for writing the book, however, are perplexing. Spiel, like Mrs. Langendorf an Austrian Jew with some experience in psychological research, won the Julius Reich Prize for outstanding Austrian literature with her first novel, Kati auf der Brücke, in 1933 but emigrated to England in 1936. There, she married Peter de Mendelssohn, a descendent of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, and became a naturalized British citizen.

After the war, she lived in England but spent increasing amounts of time in Austria, ultimately settling again in Vienna. She published a number of books in English as well as German. She never lived in the U.S., aside from a few visits. So why write this book that is such a condemnation of the European culture that she clearly embraced again? Looking around Lisa’s bedroom after her death, Lele thinks,

Europe, with its vice and its wisdom, its horror and its fascination, its cruelty and its refinement, was, like the evening sun, sinking down beneath the horizon. At last I was shaking free from the beautiful monster which had eaten my father and mother and pursued me across the ocean to lure me back, to ensnare me with the help of its rarest and most bewildering spectres.

Spiel appends a postscript in the voice of Paul Bothe, a popular German novelist who has become a permanent resident of the U.S. Bothe visits Lele and Jeff, now married and living happily and quietly in San Francisco. “By all outward appearances,” he writes, “they are two delightful people, typical of the artless, uncomplicated youth of the United States.” Wondering how the two could have been caught up in Lisa’s death spiral, he has to admit that, “As far as can be seen, there are no traces of it left.”

This is an odd conclusion to a very odd novel. In making the somewhat innocent Lele her narrator, Hilde Spiel draws us in as effectively as Lisa does her coterie, but then she buries the rotting old corpse of Europe and sends Lele, Jeff, and little Mario off to sunny California and a life that could come straight out of an ad in a 1949 issue of Saturday Evening Post. One wonders if she wrote The Darkened Room — in English, not German, by the way — in the old world comfort of the chalet in Saint Wolfgang im Salzkammergut that Wikipedia tells us she owned from 1955 on. It reads almost like an exorcism, yet after writing it, Spiel seems to have been content to reside in the lap of the evil spirits she had cast out.

The Darkened Room, by Hilde Spiel
London: Methuen, 1961

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank (1937)

Lost Heritage by Bruno Frank

A young man wanders along the streets of a Czech border town in the late evening looking for a place to stay. His clothes are dirty and torn from walking through the forest. When he finally locates a wretched little inn, the landlord treats his brusquely: just another one of those Jews sneaking away from the Nazis. He gives the man a tiny and dirty attic room.

When he opens the man’s passport to note down his details, however, he gasps. The man is Prince Ludwig Saxe-Camburg, a member of one of Germany’s oldest noble dynasties. This is not the sort of person to come wandering out of the woods from Germany.

In Lost Heritage (UK title Closed Frontiers), Bruno Frank illustrates the disruptive, destructive effects of Nazism in Germany by taking as his subject a man we would think exemplifies the solidity of the German establishment. Although the Kaiser has abdicated and the right of the German nobility to own and rule over their principalities and duchies has been ended, The Saxe-Camburgs are still the wealthiest and most respected family in their region and the trappings of the feudal culture are still respected by most of the family’s former subjects.

Ludwig is an aesthete. After flitting through subjects in university like a butterfly, he lands on art history through the influence of a revered professor and throws himself into cataloging the works of Goya. The growing influence of the Nazi Party is peripheral noise in his world. But then the professor is ejected from the university for suggesting that an etching by Dürer is not a symbolic forecast of the rise of Adolf Hitler. Prince Ludwig’s older brother is appointed to a high regional post in Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung (SA). Hitler becomes Chancellor. The campus becomes an incubator for angry, zealous young men full of hatred for Jews and intellectuals.

Prince Ludwig moves to Berlin and makes contacts with a few anti-Nazi acquaintances: former professors, journalists, a few retired Army officers. They begin meeting secretly in his apartment to plan ways to resist, possibly overthrow Hitler. In a matter of weeks, however, the Gestapo surprise the men and take them prisoner.

Ludwig is tortured strictly through sleep deprivation, but from the prison’s hallways he can hear his fellow conspirators being beaten. When he is about to collapse from exhaustion, policemen enter his cell, hand him clothes to wear, take him out to a waiting car. Ludwig is certain he’s being taken out to be shot.

Bruno Frank takes Ludwig through three phases in his experience of Nazism in Germany: his late awakening and amateurish attempt at resistance; a desperate and mostly futile effort to sneak back into Germany and rescue his colleagues; and his flight and gradual transformation into that ubiquitous and miserable character of the 1930s, the German refugee. The story moves at a tremendous pace: events develop swiftly, Ludwig finds (or puts) himself into numerous cliffhanger-type situations.

I was greatly reminded of Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns. Although the Oppermanns are Jews and the Saxe-Camburgs Aryans, they both start in positions of comfort and privilege and dismiss the warning signs, are slow to recognize the horror of Nazism until it’s overwhelmed them and made them its victims. Both books are gripping reads, the kind you drink in in hundred-page gulps.

But they’re also about Nazism in Germany in its early stages as a regime. The war and the Holocaust are still in the future. There are concentration camps and round-ups of troublesome elements, but the beatings of Jews and Communists, the smashing and looting of Jewish shops, and accumulating restrictions on academic, intellectual, commercial, and private life still seem random aberrations rather than parts of a deliberate plan. And for me at least, persecutions are not of anonymous millions but of the friends and associates of characters we have come to know and thus more intimate and frightening.

Though a man who does not see himself as a hero, Prince Ludwig reveals himself to be a man of character, loyalty, and when it counts most, physical courage. And he is, ultimately, a survivor, a man who finds a capacity to carry on even after losing everything that he had. I started Lost Heritage uncertain of where Bruno Frank was headed and finished it thoroughly satisfied. A pretty gripping movie could be made from this book.

The English edition of the book, Closed Frontiers, is available on the Internet Archive: link.

Lost Heritage, by Bruno Frank, translated by Cyrus Brooks
New York: Viking, 1937
Closed Frontiers

London: Macmillan, 1937

The Colours of the Night, by Catherine Ross (1962)

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)

The colours of the night in Catherine Ross’s title aren’t romantic in the least. They’re the colors of the signal flares fired from the control tower of RAF Tormartin to confirm that the bombers coming back after a raid are friendly and not Luftwaffe attackers. This is just one of the many details that led numerous reviewers to call The Colours of the Night the most accurate and authentic account of life on an RAF bomber base during World War Two written from a woman’s point of view .

Virginia Bennett, the novel’s narrator, is a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force stationed at an RAF Lancaster bomber base near Lincoln, assigned to the base motor pool. Lincolnshire, with its broad, fairly flat countryside and proximity to the North Sea coast, was, with East Anglia and North Yorkshire, dotted with RAF — and later, U.S. 8th Air Force — airfields from which the Allies launched the bombing raids on occupied Europe, Germany, and Italy that represented the longest single campaign of the Western front.

It was also the deadliest. To quote the Imperial War Museum, “During the whole war, 51% of aircrew were killed on operations, 12% were killed or wounded in non-operational accidents and 13% became prisoners of war or evaders. Only 24% survived the war unscathed.” An aircrew member was committed to fly thirty operational missions before he could be released to other less dangerous duties.

71 Squadron, the unit Bennett supports, flies twelve Lancasters, each manned with a crew of seven. Given a typical operational year (and the novel is set over the winter of 1942 to 1943, perhaps the most typical year for Bomber Command), she knows, most of the flying members of the current would be gone. “There’d be a 71 Squadron, of course, but of entirely new faces. It was a fact like the day of the week, or the month of the year. You accepted that fact.”

A fact that is only notional to Bennett until she finds herself falling in love with Flight Lieutenant Colin Craig. The two meet by accident — literally, as she is the first to arrive on the scene after Craig’s Lancaster goes skidding off the runway and into a muddy verge. He, of course, is handsome, cool, and instantly attractive. But she is cute, clever, and just stand-offish enough to attract his attention as well.

Their romance is considered fraternization between commissioned and other ranks and prohibited by regulations, so after a few bouts of flirting turns into something more serious, they have to resort to various subterfuges to spend time together — the most important being to ensure they’re never seen together. To further complicate matters, Virginia is an object of earnest interest by her motor pool section chief and Colin by the lieutenant in charge of the WAAFs at the base.

But the real complication is the fact of those statistics. As she senses that Colin is just as much in love with her as she with him, she asks the inevitable question:

“But what shall we do about us?”
“What about us?”
“Us,” I said slowly and painfully. “In the future.”
He stared at me surprised, almost blankly.

And suddenly it hits her: “I knew that in his own mind he had no future.”

The Colours of the Night by Catherine Ross - paperback edition

From this point, the tension is predictable: will Colin make it to thirty missions? On one hand, The Colours of the Night is no more than a well-crafted middlebrow romance. We know from the moment dashing Flight Lieutenant Craig emerges only slightly scathed from his crashed aircraft and borrows (and keeps) Virginia’s cigarette lighter that it’s just a matter of time before flirting becomes romance and romance leads to happy ending (or at least tentatively happy: Colin has made it clear he intends to return for another operational tour).

But offsetting this predictable formula is a wealth of details about the ins and outs of RAF and WAAF life. The regular medical inspections for the three scourges: lice, sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy. The itchiness and ugliness of the dark blue issue WAAF underpants and the various alternatives resorted to on all the days between medical inspections. The fact that no one knows what was happening on the base better than the radio and telephone switchboard operators.

Betty Beaty, AKA Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell
Betty Beaty, alias Catherine Ross and Karen Campbell.

Catherine Ross was familiar with all this from having been a Virginia Bennett herself during the war. In fact, as Betty Smith (her real name), she met her own husband, Group Captain David Beaty, himself a bomber pilot. They married after the war and David Beaty turned his hand to writing, becoming a successful writer of aviation-oriented novels (sort of the RAF equivalent to Douglas Reeman) and nonfiction books. Betty Beaty took up writing herself, first as Catherine Ross, then later as Karen Campbell and Betty Beaty. As Betty Beaty, she published nine Harlequin romance novels.

The Colours of the Night is no masterpiece, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable tale that’s rigorous in its accuracy and honesty. I would recommend it highly to anyone who likes novels set during World War Two.

The Colours of Night, by Catherine Ross (Betty Beaty)

This is a contribution to the #1962Club, this autumn’s edition of the semi-annual reading club coordinated by Simon Thomas and Karen Langley.

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke (1931)

starke - born into captivity

I wouldn’t recommend the parents of a teenage daughter showing signs of wanderlust leave a copy of Barbara Starke’s Born in Captivity lying around the house. At age sixteen, Starke’s aunt gave her a copy of David Grayson’s The Friendly Road, an account of a walking tour made by an adult man in 1912’s America. “It was the image of Grayson walking down a wilful road into unknown territory conscious of the delightful prospect of not turning back at night, which suddenly filled my mind with the luminous possibilities of such an act.”

Reading Grayson’s book suggests to Starke that “Perhaps, after all, it was not absolutely necessary” to come home every night –“even if he had no money or other devices to keep him from harm.” A pretty risky proposition, even for a man. For an attractive young woman of eighteen, the age at which Starke finally managed to sneak out of the house and start the journey described in Born in Captivity, it seems certain to end badly.

But Barbara Starke had some special angels looking out for her. She traveled from Massachusetts to California and back to New York City, rarely paying her way, almost always by just walking along the side of the road and hoping some kind stranger would stop and give her a ride. She never actually hitchhiked: she mades that emphatically clear. If offered a ride, she would accept unless she felt uneasy about the would-be good Samaritan. If not, she kept walking. Somehow, in the hundreds of rides she accepted, only once or twice did she have to fight her way out of the car.

More than that, the men who offered her rides — and it was always men, even though she wore mens’ clothes and was usually scruffy enough that many assumed she was a man until she climbed in — would buy her a meal or two, or pay for a separate hotel room, or even hand her five or ten bucks to help out. There were some, of course, who said they believed that “if a girl dared to tramp the road alone she must be prepared to ‘come across.'” She usually managed to change their minds. She felt, in fact, that hers was the superior power to intimidate: “I could look straight at them, could say unexpected things coldly, so that they wondered what weapons I concealed that I should be unafraid.”

On the other hand — and reading this must have made her mother’s hair stand up, if she ever did read her daughter’s book — if Starke liked a man’s company, she wasn’t above sleeping with him. On an early leg, she felt attracted to a handsome and soft-spoken engineer and shared his cabin on a night boat to Albany. And felt not the least regret: “If the captain of this ship should come in now, and there should be a nasty scene, they could not make me feel shame, I feel so proud and clean for having stayed with you.”

Like many young people throughout history, a good part of Starke’s motivation was to reject her parent’s choices. “The net had caught my father, and respectability, the tradition of owning a home and sending one’s children to college, had kept him there.” The only result she could see from their keeping a house and raising a family was to be “cheated of any joy,” to be “shackled by them.”

The freedom of the road allowed her not just to see the country but to sample from a smorgasbord of relationship possibilities. She liked and respected the engineer on the night boat, but she knew she didn’t want to marry him. A safecracker befriends her in Denver and she toys with joining him on a job, but decides a jail cell was the one thing worse than domestic misery. In Santa Barbara, a guy named Joe pulls alongside and serenades her. She joins him and they spend a week or so together. “I began to divine that one could get fond enough of another person to want him about a great deal.” Yet she walks on without regrets. “That priceless feeling of affection as we said good-bye on the Merced road in the early morning was not merely because we had given each other such joy, but because we were not even pretending to try to make it last longer.”

Born in Captivity was called Touch and Go in its English edition, but neither title does the book justice. The roads Starke traveled weren’t always friendly, but they were always free, not only in terms of economics but in terms of her own spirit. Yet just as she recognized in saying goodbye to Joe on the Merced road, she could not pretend to make her months of vagabondage run on indefinitely. Unlike with Joe, however, a regret remains. “How am I going to reach the ground and the sky again?” she wonders at the end as she sits in an office typing pool.

The novelist Henry Williamson raved about the book to his friend T. E. Lawrence. “Have you read Touch and Go by Barbara Starke? Cape did it. That girl can write; and seems the best of the new straight-ahead younger generation — passing the old hulks of 1914-18 and the concrete-ribbed waterlogs of the war-child generation.”

A. T. Simon III and Helen Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960
A. T. Simon III and Helen L. Card, with Frederic Remington painting, around 1960.

Barbara Starke was the pseudonym of Helen L. Card. As Starke, Card published one novel, Second Sister, in England in 1933. The only remaining copies of this are in the U.K. registry libraries. Although she received a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writer’s conference in 1937, her work soon became confined to articles and catalogues of Western art, particularly by Frederic Remington. She ran the Latendorf Bookshop on Madison Avenue for years and never married.

Born in Captivity: The Story of a Girl’s Escape, by Barbara Starke
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931
London (as Touch and Go): Jonathan Cape, 1931

Star Turn, by René Clair (1926/1936)

Madeleine Rodrigue and Henri Rollan on the Eiffel Tower in Paris Qui Dort.

There are few lovelier works of French surrealism than René Clair’s short 1924 film, Paris Qui Dort, usually translated inelegantly into English as The Crazy Ray. In it, a planeload of people evade the rays of a secret weapon by which a mad scientist has put the inhabitants of Paris to sleep. The scenes of the deserted streets of 1920s Paris will tug at the heart of anyone who wishes they had a chance to time-travel back to the time of Hemingway, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the school of innovative artists, musicians, and writers to which Clair belonged.

Right around the time that René Clair was finishing work on his first film, he wrote his first novel, taking the world of film as its setting. And had he been as disciplined in his editing as he’d been with Paris Qui Dort, Star Turn could now be considered a little classic every bit as elegant and amusing.

Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn by René Clair
Dust jacket for Chatto & Windus edition of Star Turn.

The original French title, Adams, refers to Cecil Adams, the world’s greatest movie star. Adams is everything a studio and a worldful of moviegoers could ask for: handsome, dashing, funny, heroic, romantic, debonair and homespun. Whatever the part demands. He has just finished his latest film, Jack Spratt, about a thief with a heart of gold who’s, well, all the above adjectives, and awakes on the morn of its premiere. Given the universal popularity of this phenomenon, the atmosphere is, predictably, intense:

Adams opens the car door. A mouth bawls his name. This shout, repeated by the echo of the crowd, rumbles down the street like an earthquake. A group of women scramble madly round the car, lifting it and smashing it against a wall. Cecil flounders and sinks. He’ll be drowned in admiration…. A police-charge stems the tide. Cecil, who was just going down for the third time, staggers to his feet. He escapes along a lane that has been cleared through the crowd except for, here and there, a little human debris. Nine killed, thirty wounded.

As Adams watches the film from the safety of the projectionist’s booth, a transformation takes place that Clair may have borrowed from Buster Keaton’s 1924 film, Sherlock Jr.: “His three-dimensional body is absorbed by the screen and comes to life on its flat surface in the dancing shadow of Jack.”

This is the start of the dramatic predicament around which the plot of Star Turn revolves. Usually with celebrities, it’s the audience that has difficulty telling the difference between the performer and the character. In Adams’ case, he’s the one who finds it increasingly difficult to maintain an identity separate from those of his best-known roles.

There are seven of these alter-egos in all — from William the cowboy to Dorian the poet. (“My golden head troubles the beauty of the clouds,” Dorian declares. “One breath wafts me to heaven.” Dorian is a poet worthy of a place beside Percy Dovetonsils.) To make matters worse, each quickly suffers the same confusion as Adams and takes on an independent existence. Adams’ attempts to maintain some semblance of order are no match for their wills:

To avoid disconcerting experiences, he endeavoured to be William on Monday, Harold on Tuesday, and so on. On Monday he wore William’s outfit; on Tuesday Harold’s morning-coat. But the characters would have none of it. Eric appeared in William’s leather chaps. Jack turned up on the day set aside for Charles. They refused to fall into line.

He tries to escape them, traveling first to Japan, then China, then place by place around the globe back to New York. But one or all of the characters manage to keep up — indeed, are often already there when he arrives.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, Adams’ studio chief has come up with the perfect next part for the Greatest Actor on Earth: God. Perfect for the studio, disastrous for an actor in a losing battle with his multiple personalities. Yet the film gets made — and is then premiered to the entire planet simultaneously through a new invention that allows the atmosphere itself to be used as the screen.

What happens next, however, is determined by the most powerful of all deities: capitalism. With the power to speak to the whole world at once, the studio rebrands as Modern Religions, Inc. And instead of becoming the Almighty by playing God, Adams finds himself only a cog in an industrial entertainment machine.

René Clair on the set of an early sound film.

When Chatto & Windus decided to publish Adams in English in 1936 (the translator is uncredited), they asked René Clair to contribute a preface. With over a decade of film-making experience, Clair better recognized how the power of writer and director differed:

How fortunate is the literary artist, whose task of creation calls only for a pen and plenty of paper! The film director, on the other hand, is no more than a gear in the cinematographic machine. What complications are involved in bringing the slightest of his ideas to fruition!

Few things, he writes, are more misunderstood than the amount of control a director has over his own film. Asked what kind of movie he would make if he had absolute control, Clair responds, “You might as well ask a fish what it would do if it had legs and could stroll down Piccadilly.”

What matters in the real movie business? The same thing as in Clair’s fictional movie business: the bottom line.

If films acted exclusively by trained frogs induced a greater number of spectators to enter the portals of cinemas than do the pictures at present shown, producers would set about training frogs and would furiously outbid each other to acquire the brightest specimens of batrachian talent.

Clair wonders “how the genius of Shakespeare, of Wagner, or of Cezanne could have developed” if their work had depended on the collective judgment of the crowd. But it did, of course. Perhaps not with the efficiency of the studio system at its peak (around the time Clair was writing his preface?), but neither with the blithe independence he imagines.

The world of film he portrayed in Star Turn was, he writes, seen in “a flippant and fantastic light.” And yet, if we are to believe his own preface, the film world created by René Clair the novelist doesn’t really seem that far apart from the industrial enterprise described by René Clair the director. Aside from the one thing I mentioned at the start: René Clair the director would have had the assistance of an editor who would have excised the windy speeches that take what begins as a sublime little tale of comic surrealism and overwhelms it with more Serious Talk than its fine little frame can bear. Ah, if only it were acceptable to take the editing scissors to these bloated texts from the past. But perhaps that, too, is a bit too much like playing God.

Star Turn, by René Clair
London: Chatto & Windus, 1936

Knopf’s Borzoi Puppies – An Experiment in Experimental Fiction


The Seventies were weird. A lot of long-established conventions faltered or were kicked over, a lot of idealistic ventures were launched, often fueled more by hope than resources, and many institutions grabbed desperately at innovations they gambled would turn into lifelines. One such experiment was Alfred A. Knopf’s brief series of dust jacketless, shiny-covered hardbacks that championed the work of young American writers playing around with fictional forms and styles — a series referred to as “Borzoi puppies” after Knopf’s legendary Borzoi Books. Knopf launched the series by promising to break new ground between traditional hardbacks and cheap mass market paperbacks, offering “new novels at plausible prices.” The plausible price in 1971 was $3.50. (According to USInflationCalculator.com, this is equivalent to $26.37 today. By comparison, another Knopf title from the same year, Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, sold for $5.95 or $44.82 in 2023. Which goes to show that despite what some folks think, the price of new books today has not remotely kept pace with inflation.)

If you’re a veteran of American used book stores, you may have come across one or more of these. Fifty years later, they still standout on any shelf: such slick spines are more often confined to textbooks and high-end vanity publications. That look was the first thing to attract the interest of people covering the publishing industry. Reporting on the initiative in the New York Times, Joan Baum wrote, “At the risk of emphasizing the container at the expense of the contained, it should be noted at once that these slim volumes are bound in strikingly handsome overboards with back photos of the authors and cover designs that evoke the mood and subject matter within.”

Bill Katz (who later compiled Writer’s Choice, a cornucopia of neglected book recommendations, with his wife Linda Sternberg Katz), introduced the series to his fellow librarians in a piece in Library Journal:

With In the Animal Kingdom and Burnt Toast, Knopf initiates a program of publishing new fiction by young novelists at a reasonable price. The books are just slightly smaller than the ordinary novel, bound in paper over boards, and nicely produced, with attractive covers and good, wide margins. Each of the present works has as its hero a youth engaged in a version of the ancestor quest, familiar through anthropology, by which manhood is achieved. And, though the two books are very different in style and tone, each has a large component of ritual. These initial selections evidently were made with an eye to capturing two segments of the youth market: the English-major set, who may be impressed with Warren Fine’s impacted manipulations of time sequence and narrative voice; and the flower-child communards, to whom Peter Gould’s unremitting ingenuousness may appeal.

The series was short-lived: Knopf published four titles in 1971 and four more in 1972. By 1973, it was dead and forgotten. Dead probably because Knopf lost money on them — or at least (such is the logic of the market), didn’t make enough money. But unjustly forgotten, in my view. So, here is my attempt commemorate this experiment.

Cover of Burnt Toast by Peter Gould

• Burnt Toast, by Peter Gould
Peter Gould’s amiable autobiographical novel about life on a Vermont farm with a sort-of commune of friends was a perfect introduction for the series. “We consulted the oracle when this book was first begun,” read Gould’s dedication. “This is what came up: ‘Innocence (The Unexpected)’.” The optimism of innocence, or maybe the innocence of optimism, was behind both Knopf’s investment and the creative spirit of these writers. Each of these books was an attempt to change the world, or at least evidence that the belief that fiction could change the world was still alive and kicking.
The farm in question had already been celebrated in Raymond Mungo’s nonfiction book of the year before, Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life. As often happens, Gould’s version was more earnest and less commercially successful. His hero, Silent, and a character named V.D.C. (for “Very Decent Citizen”) enter forthrightly and energetically into the task of farming and community building and take each setback with a mixture of wonder and resilience. Joan Baum wrote that rather than trying to turn his work into a book, Gould should have “tacked it up instead on the hardwoods in Vermont and read it aloud to the community for free.”
You can purchase Peter Gould’s more recent nonfictional account of his experiences at Total Loss Farm, Horse-Drawn Yogurt, on his website, PeterGouldVermont.com.

Covers of Their Family and In the Animal Kingdom by Warren Fine, illustrations by James Grashow

• In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family, by Warren Fine
Warren Fine had more ambition that all his series-mates combined, and it shows in these two books, which have accumulated a tiny but loyal following over the years. In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family tell related stories that revolve around Orcus Berrigan and Gerhard Blau, who desert the revolutionary American army and head into the wilderness that is now the Midwest. They become trappers and Berrigan settles with an Indian woman known as Marie or Sawpootway. Their Family is Blau’s fantasy of what happens to Berrigan and Sawpootway in the years after the two men parted. Where In the Animal Kingdom is rhapsodical and profane, Their Family blends realism and visions, particularly as experienced by Sawpootway:

In the dream, her hands covered her ears; if she put her hands upon the sewing in her lap, she’d have to listen to words about Legget. She reached for the sewing, needing its confirmation: a voice spoke of her existence in an old life. The voice said nothing of Legget; her sewing disappeared beneath her fingers, and she didn’t miss it. Dutchess rose out of the water, lake water still and deep. The man, from her first dream, perhaps Legget, perhaps Thurlow, perhaps… The man from her first dream, a shape shifting, threw Dutchess into an oven, where, cooked, she became Sawpootway. In the oven, she bled forever from her womb, and no man would touch her. The man departed, betraying her as if he were one, now laughing at his joke, who’d already died, long before.

Something in Fine’s work set reviewers’ teeth on edge:

Warren Fine is a devotee of the “Faulknerian” school of writing: using endless, snake-like sentences and relying on purple prose to tell poetic rather than objective truth. If you believe that reality is mysteriously subjective and that a tale can never be told simply, then Their Family is your literary cup of commas, diluted with pitchers full of colons and sweetened by tablespoons full of semi-colons.

It’s hard to see what the fuss was about. “Faulknerian” is actually off the mark, in my view. The real tip-off to Fine’s creative inspiration is in his dedication in In the Animal Kingdom: “For John Hawkes.” Fine was probably the closest any writer came to following in “the school of Hawkes” (or is it “Hawkesian”?), with its mixture of mystical eroticism and precise, at times painful, concrete details.

And, it must be said, a clear invocation of the spirit of Walt Whitman in the opening to In the Animal Kingdom:

In America, I throw my single voice about like a ventriloquist; like an evangelist—ox, eagle, ass, or winged man, play my various tongues, both intimate and distant voices cast from my mouth, as if fishlines spread to flickering sheets, become so much like fish themselves, like blades and flames, to catch my experience in the animal kingdom, to come into my story, feeling as if with my tongue, to know again, and know mostly now, the process of my adventure in the flesh, as all tongues, like castaways returning through my mouth, reenter and descend into my present body.

Warren Fine never managed to publish another book after these two novels. He taught at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, often holding class in the Zoo Bar off campus, then moved to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he was found dead in his apartment in 1987 at the age of 44. His passing was marked by his favorite bartender in the Lincoln Star: “He drank, he gambled, he was lax about his health and his taxes. He hurt some wonderful women and they left him. They had no choice. He was desperately self-destructive… I know he believed the first rule of being a writer: write an awful lot.” Fine’s papers at the UNL archives include the manuscripts of dozens of stories and at least one unpublished novel.

The two striking cover illustrations are by James Grashow.

cover of Arkansas Adios by Earl Mac Rauch

• Arkansas Adios, by Earl Mac Rauch
I’ve got to be honest about this one. There was a period, maybe from the early 1960s into the early 1980s, when Playboy magazine used to publish serious fiction in between the ads and nudes. Serious, often innovative, but also tending to fall into a certain rut that was even narrower and more identifiable than the supposed New Yorker school of spare short stories in which nothing happens (I’m citing the stereotype here). That rut was usually comic, often ribald, and pretty much always confined to male authors.,/dd>

I don’t know if Earl Mac Rauch ever published in Playboy, but if you wanted to get a good sense of what the Playboy school (or perhaps, playground) of fiction was like, give Arkansas Adios a read. It’s about a precocious eleven-year-old boy growing up in Red Mound, Arkansas and his picaresque adventures — at least, as picaresque as you can get on a fat-tired bicycle. One of his adventures involves playing a trick on the town’s prostitute. If that sounds like comic gold to you, you’ll probably love this book. Bearing in mind that Rauch published his first novel, Dirty Pictures from the Prom, while an undergraduate at Darmouth, I can be excused for describing the humor as sophmoric.
Reviewing the book for the Boston Globe, Richard Pearce wrote, “More than anything else, Rauch leads us from one episode to the next in anticipation of some mind-blowing joke that lies just beyond the novel’s reach.” Pearce rated the book “a minor by singular accomplishment like that of a Pogo or Snoopy cartoon,” which in my opinion is an insult to Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz.
Rauch does play around with fictional conventions, giving his characters dialogue balloons at one point, but I’m stretching to class this with the other books on the list as experimental fiction. His main claim to fame is his screenplay and novelization of the cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.

Cover of Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense by Kathy Black

• Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense, by Kathy Black
Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense is about a Barnard graduate named Betty who’s trying to get a book called Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense published — that is, once she’s written in. In search of material, she interviews friends and old classmates and spends time in Paris with her boyfriend Arnold.
The book is filled with snippets. Snippets of the interviews, of Betty’s notebooks, of a play she wrote in elementary school, of letters to editors, of thoughts on such topics as “Modern Youth Searches for an Identity.” Even a snippet of an author’s apology to the reader:

“I started writing this book because I wanted to write something and because I needed something to write about so K said “Why not ask girls about their future plans” said K. In college you never think about the distant future said Arnold. So here it is, the distant future.

All this would quickly grow insufferable were it not for Kathy Black’s winning acknowledgement that since we’re following along with her wanderings, she owes the reader a chuckle or accurate insight every page or so. As the New York Times reviewer, Thomas Lask, wrote, Black manages to capture the spirit of a certain segment of American youth on the cusp of a new decade: “The goodwill of these young people, their desire to redress injustice, to make the world better, to do something about the deep stores of guilt that lie in their hearts all shine through their immaturity, their quixotic and sometimes dangerous behavior.”

As far as I can tell, this was Kathy Black’s only book.

Cover of Saw by Steve Katz

• Saw, by Steve Katz
Of all the authors represented in the Borzoi puppies, Steve Katz was the most committed to experimental fiction as both cause and form. He founded the Fiction Collective (still going strong, yay!) with fellow experimentalists Walter Abish, Ronald Sukenick, et al., and never lost his love of play in every aspect of writing and publishing. His first novel, The Exagggerations of Peter Prince includes photos, illustrations, one-, two-, and four-column texts, and even a full-page set of exit doors in case the reader feels like quitting. His short story collection Creamy and Delicious (recently republished by Tough Poets Press) has been called the best embodiment of Pop Art in fictional form (and, I’m happy to note, is currently ranked as the 2506th greatest fiction book of all time according to TheGreatestBooks.org).
Saw could be seen as Steve Katz’s riff on J. G. Ballard, at least J. G. Ballard’s disaster novels of an Earth subject to relentless heat, rising sea levels, crystalization, and blistering winds. In this case, the disaster is garbage. It’s set in a New York City swimming in garbage: “Garbage heaps. Garbagy air, people wander around in the garbage, kicking it up underfoot, sucking it into their lungs, kissing it into each other’s mouth. The Garbage Age, not the Space Age or the Computer Age.” And when a couple manage begin enjoying a gourmet meal of asparus and veal Milanese, their apartment is invaded by “the fetid grimy rabble of the streets nobody loves. They drag with them some garbage cans full of steamy putrid stuff, and plastic bages full of sodden trash.”
So … how does this relate to the astronaut on the cover? Well, the Astronaut is Steve Katz, who is watching the garbage-piled world and us the reader and reserving his right to remain the impassive observer — or to descend and reorganize the world as a new Creator. If you have any familiarity with fragmentary fiction, you will be able to enjoy Saw. If not, you may feel like the New York Times reviewer, who claimed his ARC fell apart and left him with scattered pages and Chapter 7 following Chapter 17. Which I suspect Steve Katz would have told him was a darned good novel, too. Kirkus Reviews took a more tolerant view, saying it was “simply a charming book that amuses the reader as it gently deposits him from one place to another, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of pleasure if you’re so minded.”
Saw is in print, at least according to the website of the University of Alabama Press.

Cover of The Log of the S. S. Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford

• Log of the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine, by Stanley Crawford
Stanley Crawford’s first novel, Gascoyne was a broad-brush satire of the American way of enterprise, something not too dissimilar from Stanley Elkin’s early novels or Max Apple’s wonderful collection The Oranging of America. His second — let’s call it The Log for short — represents the fabulist strain of 1970s American experimentalism. Mrs. Unguentine spends forty years as the partner and shipmate of Unguentine, the captain of barge full of plants, odd machines, and miscellaneous junk. They wander the sea aimlessly — literally: Unguentine “had been steering all those years with no idea of what he was steering towards.”
Eventually the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine becomes something of an ecosystem onto itself — a state both cozy and comforting and profoundly isolating. Until one day when Unguentine falls overboard. Though this comes to seem to Mrs. Unguentine as less an event then a condition, a state that may or may not persist: “[T]here seems to be no longer any precise moment when old Unguentine vanished from my life, it seems rather an almost gradual process that went on over many years and as part of a great rhythm, as if, through some gentle law of nature, his disappearance would be followed by his gradual reemergence, that he would come back, so on, so forth.”
The Log was the beloved secret book of a handful of readers for years, but now it’s back in print and available from the Dalkey Archive.

Cover of Motorman by David Ohle

• Motorman, by David Ohle
People who wax about how weird and unsettling Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is need to read Motorman. The short novel has enough strangeness to fill a 400-page novel. The Motorman is Moldenke, who is kept alive by the transplanted hearts of several sheep and spends much of his days feeling guilt for having killed some jellyheads (who are people … maybe … sort of) and resisting the competing influence of Bunce, the “Bust’em or Burn’em Big Brother,” and Burnheart, the Organ Transplant King.
In his introduction to the Calamari Archives reissue of Motorman, Ben Marcus writes of the awe with which the few people he knew who were aware of the book — let alone had read it — spoke of it: “For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell.”
One of the striking aspects about Knopf’s backing this series is that they were able to get a book like Motorman reviewed in dozens of newspaper book sections around the country — even papers like the Fresno Bee. The downside, however, was that they couldn’t prevent reactions like this: “This particular book, a first novel, is a bummer. It is not good writing by any standard. There is no real creativity and certainly no redeeming social value. Is Ohle’s purpose to put a copy of Motorman into every spaced-out acid-head’s hands?” Well, Motorman did get into the hands of some spaced-out acid-heads as well as into the hands of a few lovers of envelope- and mind-expanding fiction who carried a torch for David Ohle’s odd book until, within the last decade or so, it’s begun to be recognized as a significant and complex work.

Having read half of them, I must say upfront that I don’t think any of them, with the possible exception of David Ohle’s Motorman, can be considered a classic. But neither are these complacent books. For literature to remain vital, it has to keep changing, and part of that change depends on writers who are willing to take risks and try things without the guarantee of success. While Knopf’s venture was probably a commercial failure, it would be a mistake to consider any of these books a critical failure. Not everything works. But there is something good in each of them and something for other writers to learn from. And for that alone, these puppies deserve to be remembered.

Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques (1955)

Cover of Love from a Convict by Veronica Henriques

Joan Reid would have sympathized with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate). “How shall I fill up my years?” she asks as she stands on the threshold of adulthood:

“Paint,” said my mother. “I will have you taught.”

“Medicine,” said an aunt.

“Secretary,” said a friend.

“Photography,” said someone else.

“Plastics,” I wanted to add.

“But surely I should feel something?” she replies. “Some purpose which I must fulfil?”

Because this is fiction, or the Fifties, or both, Joan manages to land a job as a reporter with a regional newspaper in a small city on the Channel coast based on little more than the ability to type and spell. She sets out for life with a capital L with an exchange that’s one of the best leavetakings in literature:

“Goodbye,” I said to my parents, as they handed me over to myself.

“Goodbye,” I said, taking possession.

Everyone at the paper is very nice and very helpful and there is not a whiff of sexism or misogyny, which suggests that either Joan is oblivious to it or Henriques never actually worked for a newspaper, for both were certainly as pervasive as the clouds of cigarette smoke in such places back then.

Indeed, these two paragraphs encapsulate the brightest and dimmest facets of Love from a Convict (its U.S. title was Love for a Convict, though why just the preposition was changed is anyone’s guess). At its best, Henrique’s narratorial voice is snappy, clever, unexpected, and funny. Joan, however, is often too dense or too earnest to merit Henrique’s brio.

How earnest? Earnest enough to fall in love in the space of five sentences and even fewer minutes. Stranded out on the moors by a bitter storm, she and a colleague seek shelter at the only structure that seems inhabited: a prison. A warder lets them into the visitors’ waiting room and fetches a convict, who comes into to light the stove. And the lightning strikes:

His nose was fairly straight; it had a slight twist as it neared his nostrils, which sloped back gently, sensitively. His mouth was straight, the upper lip very slightly overlapping the lower. His chin was square. He was a very attractive looking man I he sort of man I would want to love.

And that is pretty much all there is to it. By the time they make it back to the office, Joan is certain that she is in love with Richard, the inmate. Several visits in the following weeks only set her mind more firmly, though Richard seems an unpromising candidate. Soft-spoken, well-mannered, and attracted in kind to Joan, he is also prone to sudden bursts of rage. And on the day when his sentence is up, he attacks the guard bringing him the civilian clothes he’s about to be released in.

Joan’s parents are, understandably, concerned, despite her open optimism in sharing her news:

“I am in love,” I wrote my parents.

“Who? Do bring him home,” they wrote.

“I can’t,” I answered. “He’s still in prison.”

Her fellow reporters also try to dissuade her, but Joan is convinced. “If I didn’t love him, would I know so surely?” she challenges them. A cousin of Richard’s she meets tells her that he is a vicious man, “constantly exploding with belligerence.” Richard’s parents, who she visits in search of answers, have written him off: “We have our own lives to live, and we have accepted the fact that Richard is better in prison than out.”

None of them manages to change her mind. Even when the prison’s governor advises her that Richard is likely to keep adding years to his sentence through his outbursts, Joan remains steadfast. And here we leave the story, with Joan and Richard stuck in their respective limbos.

For me, this stuckness was what kept Love from a Convict from rising to the level of Veronica Henriques’ frequently-sparkling prose. Reading it was like listening a light and swinging jazz tune on a scratched record, where tune returns again and again and again to a particular two-bar passage. [Some youngsters make have to Google “record skipping” to understand that analogy.] Stuckness is a problematic state to end a novel in — indeed, Love from a Convict seems almost unfinished.

Ironically, the structural aspects were what Kingsley Amis thought most successful in the book. His problem was with Joan, whose willful naivete he could barely tolerate:

I had barely caught sight of Love from a Convict before starting to object to it, and certainly there can be few books more energetically not my cup of tea.

I can just about stomach the idea of a sensitive girl reporter on a provincial newspaper falling in love with a noble-savage convict, but her only identifiable motive for what she does about it turns out to be, not love, but a half-hidden desire to be though shocking by some people and ‘interesting’ by others, and at this point the last of my sympathy expired. It is with all the more emphasis, then, that I must praise the book, firstly for the unusual vigour with which it puts of its (to me antipathetic) state of feeling, and secondly for its grasp of technique, flair for exposition, adroitness in scene-shifting and the rest of the how=d’ye-do — whatever it is that makes the reader detect some kind of sense of vocation in a novelist. So when the next one from this stable appears I shall, reluctantly, have to get hold of it. (The Spectator, 18 February 1955)

Other reviewers were generally as positive as Amis, most of them singling out the freshness of Joan’s voice and perspective. “A little tour de force in the sense of honesty,” wrote Newsweek’s critic.

Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of <em>Love from a Convict</em>.
Veronica Henriques, from the dust jacket of Love from a Convict.

Veronica Henriques was 24 when Love from a Convict was published. The daughter of the novelist and founding member of the British Commandos, Robert Henriques, she went on to write four more novels in the next dozen years. By the 1970s, however, she had become more interested in painting and printmaking and began showing her work under her married name of Veronica Gosling. She continues to create and foster a space for art and community in her Studio 36 in Exeter.

Love from a Convict, by Veronica Henriques
London: Secker & Warburg, 1955

A Dozen Views of the Fall of France, June 1940

I recently spent the equivalent of two days listening to the audiobook version of The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 William L. Shirer’s massive follow-up to his classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At over 1,000 pages, the book will satisfy all but the most obsessive reader’s appetite for the workings of French politics between 1870 and 1940. And if there is one resounding criticism I’d make, it’s that Shirer’s is very much an old-school history. This is history from the top down, as seen (and then exhaustively recounted in memoirs) by the politicians and generals at the highest levels of the government and military. With few exceptions, we get little sense of how the events of May and June 1940 were experienced by ordinary people.

One reason I find this episode fascinating is that it represented, in a matter of weeks, at times even just days, the complete overturn of the status quo of millions. At every level from the individual to the national, things that were taken for granted were torn away or fell apart. For me at least, I cannot read an account from this time without wondering, What would I have done? How would I have reacted? Would I have acted selflessly or heroically? Or panicked and clogged the roads like thousands of other refugees? I hope I never have to learn that answers to these questions, but here is a selection of 12 different ways in which people responded.

• Divided Loyalties: A Scotswoman in Occupied France, by Janet du Tessier Cros
Janet Griegson was a Scotswoman who married François Teissier du Cros, a physicist, in 1930. She found herself in the rural Cevennes region in southern France with her husband on military service in May 1940. In this memoir of her experiences during the war, she recalls first hearing the news of the invasion:

A little beyond Mandiargues some soldiers stopped the bus and came on board. They told us that their leave had been cancelled because at that very moment the Nazi troops were pouring into Holland. A buzz of dismay went through the bus. i sat frozen. Something in my mind was rushing desperately hither and thither, hunting for a way out. There was none. My sister Alice was married to a Dutchman and lived in The Hague. What would become of their children and of themselves? What about François? It was the end, the terrible end I had sensed from the beginning….

• Death and Tomorrow (American title: The Germans Came to Paris)(1942), by Peter de Polnay
Peter de Polnay, a Hungarian-born novelist who wrote in English, was living in Paris and enjoying the best of la vie bohème when war broke out. He first felt himself outside the conflict, and even the start of the Blitzkrieg seemed, at first, of little import:

I went to play bridge in the house of an English friend, and at that bridge party only English and Americans were present. They all said that the French were running; I heard the word running the whole afternoon. Now that the Germans are inside France, I suggested, the running will stop. The answer was that the Stukas and the seventy-ton tanks were invincible. But there was Weygand [the marshal commanding the French army], I said. It was a pretty gloomy afternoon, though nobody quite believed that those tanks were really invincible, it was talking of the devil in the hope that the talk would exorcise him.

Death and Tomorrow is a vivid description of the first days of the German occupation of Paris, enriched by the fact that de Polnay seemed to cross paths — and be trusted — by everyone: Germans, French, collaborators, black marketeers, and Resistance members. Eventually, though, his freewheeling ways attracted the attention of the Gestapo and he was forced to flee, making his way to England, the story of which comprises the second half of his book.

• The Train, by Georges Simenon
Twenty years after the fact, the prolific novelist Georges Simenon wrote one of his best novels — Brigid Brophy called it his masterpiece — about the choices people make when their lives are suddenly disrupted. The story opens as a Belgian couple are fleeing their home to escape the Germans. Familiar with the experience of occupation from the First World War, some of their fellow townspeople have decided to stay:

Other people, like us, were walking towards the station, burdened with suitcases and bundles. An old woman asked me if she might put hers on my cart, and she started pushing it along with me….

There was a rather wild look in most people’s eyes, but that was chiefly the result of impatience. Everybody wanted to be off. It was all a matter of arriving in time. Everybody was convinced that part of the huge crowd would be left behind and sacrificed.

Were those who were not leaving taking greater risks? Behind the window-panes, faces were watching the fugitives, and it seemed to me, looking at them, that they were stamped with a sort of icy calm.

The couple become separated in the evacuation and the husband meets a Czech woman who leads him to reconsider where he wants to go with his life. It’s a classic Simenon story, in which one unexpected accident, one step in the wrong direction, sets off a series of events that overturns everything an individual has taken for granted — rather as the fall of France did on a much larger scale.

• Running to Paradise (1943) and Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1955), by John Lodwick
Finding himself in France at the outbreak of the war, John Lodwick joined the French Foreign Legion and was involved in numerous skirmishes as the French and British armies gave way before the Germans. He wrote about the experience twice: first as a novel with his fictional counterpart Adrian Dormant and again, 15 years later, in a memoir that encompassed his time as a prisoner of war, his escape to England, and his work as an agent for the Special Operations Executive in France and the Balkans.
Both books demonstrate that Lodwick, for all his superficial nonchalance, was a veteran of intense combats. In Running to Paradise, he describes the psychological effects of being attacked by Stuka dive bombers:

Both the precision of their aim and the destruction caused by it were intense. The effect of it was moral as well as material. A bomb takes a certain time to fall, and whistles as it drops. The blast and danger of its explosion are as nothing compared to the agonized suspense of these few moments. A man lying with his belly married to the soil or in the shallow shelter of some hole, feels himself annihilated in advance, a grubby penny lying on the counter of eternity. He cannot see. He dare not raise his head. He can only hear, and since the enemy realize this and know the control which his auditory system exercises on his nerves, they fit sirens to their aeroplane engines — sirens, whose mournful wail, like the last breath of a banshee, shall deafen him and curdle his quaking tripes.

• F.S.P.: An N.C.O.’s Description of His and Others’ First Six Months of War, January 1st–June 1st, 1940, by Arthur Gwynn-Browne (1941)
Gwynn-Browne was an NCO assigned to a Field Security Post (a military police unit) with the British Expeditionary Force deployed to France after the German invasion of Poland. He witnessed, therefore, not only the truce-like “Phony War” but the panic and retreat when the German Panzers began driving through Belgium and France. Gwynn-Browne’s might be considered the first modernist account of World War Two, as his prose style shows the clear influence of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
In the early days, his unit is assigned to try to manage the masses of refugees filling every passable road leading away from the Germans:

There were hundreds of cars, thousands of refugees. They all looked much the same and one car looked much the same as the next one coming after. On the top there were always the mattresses laid flat on the roof and on them lay blankets pillows eiderdowns rug and these were securely corded and then usually a bicycle and a child’s scooter and sometimes a pram securely corded on top of them. It was hot and dry and it was all right, later on it was cold and wet and then it was not so all right. Inside the cars there was everything the family had and all the women inside all wore little round hats with little veils on them. The children usually there were two or three children they were asleep. There were never any pet animals and the windows were tight shut though it was hot but they were closed. Perhaps it is not kind to say they all looked very bourgeois but they did, they were plump scented and stuffy.

• Europe in the Spring, by Clare Boothe (1940)
Playwright and occasional reporter Clare Boothe (not yet adding husband and Time/Life owner Henry Luce’s name to hers) traveled to Europe in April 1940 expecting to travel around and witness the uneasy stalemate underway since the end of the German and Soviet takeover of Poland. Instead, she found herself caught up in the flight from the German attack, waking up on her first day in Brussels to the news that German troops were crossing into Belgium and German planes bombing its cities and forts. She makes her way to Paris, where she watches as the facade of Parisian sophistication crumbles as the government and army fall apart:

Paris got its information about what France had been doing all day, all night, the way a woman gets hers about what her husband has been up to. You know how a woman says, the split second her husband walks in the door with a carefully arranged smile on his face: “So things have been going badly at the office?” And he says: “My God, how did you know?” And she replies: “Because I know you so well, darling.” That is how Paris, the wife, knew what was happening to France, the husband. All the smiles or frowns on the politicians’ faces when they left their offices, the way military moustaches drooped or bristled at midnight, the inflections of well-known voices saying nothing or something or anything on the radio, on the telephone; the way important. people walked in the street; the way ministry doors were slammed; by the significant silences of a great race of talkers; by a thousand little downward percolating uncensorable gestures and indications, the contagious climate of a mood spread from the top of Paris to the bottom—from clerk to doorman, to domestic, to waiter, to policeman, to taxi-driver, to the people—so that the people of Paris knew from hour to hour how the fate of France fared.

• Assignment to Catastrophe, by Major General Edward L. Spears (1955)
Spears, who grew up in France and had the dual advantages of a fluent mastery of the French language and culture and the trust of Winston Churchill, was appointed as Churchill’s personal representative to French prime minister Paul Reynaud soon after Churchill took over as British prime minister. Assignment to Catastrophe, Spears’ two-volume memoir of the lead-up to the war and of the fall of France, is a fascinating account of the personalities and politics at work in the last days of the Fourth Republic.
Knowing Marshal Pétain from his work as a liaison officer between the British and French forces during World War One, Spears paid a call soon after Pétain’s return from his post as ambassador to Franco’s Spain. He soon realized that the man who was being lauded as the savior of France was senile, ineffectual, and completely unsuited to the task:

Very sadly I said: “What France needs today, Monsieur le Marshal, is another Joan of Arc.” His reaction was startling. Once more he was all animation, his face lit up. “Joan of Arc! Joan of Arc!” he exclaimed, “Have you read my speech on Joan of Arc?” “No, Monsieur le Marechal “Now that is too bad, it should have been sent to you. I made it at Rouen; now when was it, in 1937, ’38? It was an extremely fine speech, I may say. I shall read it to you.”

To my amazement, not to say consternation, he went to some bookshelves between two windows, pulled out one or two bound volumes of typescript, did not find what he wanted, then bent right down to look at the lowest shelves. The effort was considerable, he straightened stiffly, and said: “I shall have it found, it is certainly here,” and, moving back to his desk, rang a bell. In a moment his Chief of Staff, General Bineau, appeared. He was almost as old as his chief (age was a major quality in the Marshal’s eyes) and, I think, very lame.

The problem was explained, and with courteous apologetic haste the General began to hunt for the speech.

It was presently found. “ Je vous remercie ,” said the Marshal, as, adjusting his pince-nez once more, he settled himself in a stiff arm¬ chair with his back to the window.

All I remember about that speech was that it was very, very long and that he read it in a monotone. I cannot recall a single sentence, or even its gist. What I do remember was the terrible sadness I felt as I watched him, a sadness now based on pity for a very old man for whom I had, till so recently, felt the deepest affection and regard. He was infinitely pathetic in his childish satisfaction as he read.

• My First War: An Army Officer’s Journal for May 1940, through Belgium to Dunkirk, by Basil Bartlett (1942)
Like Gwynne-Browne, Basil Bartlett was assigned to an FSP with the B.E.F., but in his case as the commanding officer. My First War is a case study in the incoherence of an army and society in collapse. Macmillan tried to market the book as “British nonchalance and dry humor at its most enchanting,” but what comes across more strongly is a world view consistently failing to take in the magnitude and reality of the chaos it was experiencing.
As his unit approaches Dunkirk, Bartlett asks a Belgian for the name of a good hotel there, “as we’re all tired and feel we’d like a wash and a sleep.” The man looks at him in amazement. He soon discovers why:

Dunkirk was a nasty shock. I knew it had been bombed, but I hadn’t realised quite how seriously. As I entered the town there was a roar of engines overhead. I looked up and saw about thirty pale-green aeroplanes with a black cross on their underwings flying very low above me. There were no airraid shelters to be seen. So I dived down a side-street and hid myself under a stone seat. At that moment the bombs began to fall. Each aeroplane dropped a 500-pound screaming bomb. Then they all scattered hundreds of little delayed-action and incendiary bombs. By a miracle I escaped being hit.
I crawled out feeling rather shaken.

• Strange Defeat, by Marc Bloch
Bloch, one of the leading historians of his time as well as a veteran of World War One, wrote a brief account that combined personal memoir with searching political and social criticism that was published after his execution by the Gestapo in 1944 for his work in the French resistance.
Serving as a fuels officer when his unit was cut off by the German assault in early May, Bloch evaded capture for ten days by disguising himself as … himself:

What, in fact, I did, after standing for a few moments deep in thought on the pavement of that hilly street, was to choose what seemed to me then the simplest, and, in the long run, the safest method of getting away. I went back to the house where I was billeted. There I took off my tunic. My rough serge trousers had nothing particularly military about them. From my landlord, who, with his son, showed, on this occasion, a high degree of courage, I got, without difficulty, the loan of a civilian jacket and tie. Then, after first making contact with an old friend who was a professor at Rennes, I booked a room in one of the hotels. Arguing that the best way to escape being noticed was to retain one’s identity, I put my real name and occupation on the form handed tome by the manager. My grey hairs were sufficient guarantee that no one would suspect the presence of an army officer beneath the outward semblance of so obviously academic a figure?

• The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940, by Lion Feuchtwanger (1941)
Novelist Feuchtwanger and his wife left Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power, knowing that their status as liberal intellectuals and Jews put them at risk of Nazi persecution. Within two weeks of the German invasion of France in May 1940, however, he was told to report to the internment camp at Les Mille. After several months, he managed to arrange his escape from internment, disguising himself as a woman and making it to Marseilles. There, with the help of American consul Varian Fry, the couple were given passage to New York, where Feuchtwanger wrote this account of his treatment by the Germans.
Feutchwanger wrote of the experience of captivity with thousands of other prisoners in Les Mille:

What I found most difficult about the camp was the fact that one could never be alone, that constantly, day and night, every act, every physical function, eating, sleeping, voiding, was performed in the presence of hundreds of men, men who were talking, shouting, moaning, weeping, laughing, feeding, smacking their lips, wiping their mouths, sweating, smelling, snoring. Yes, we did everything in the most public view, and no one seemed to feel the slightest embarrassment.

• The Fall of Paris, by Ilya Ehrenburg
Ehrenburg spent the late thirties as a Soviet correspondent in Paris (and managed to avoid some of the personal and ethical risks of Stalin’s purges). In response to the fall of France, he quickly wrote a lengthy novel that, like Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy, traced the decay and breakdown of French society and the early impact of the Occupation. In it, he describes the despair of Parisians during the first days under Nazi rule:

All this time the Parisians had been staying indoors. They could not get used to the German soldiers in the streets. In the morning Agnés went shopping. The long queue was silent. The people tried not to think about anything. Searching for a pound of potatoes or a bottle of milk helped to distract their minds. If they talked at all it was about relations who had disappeared one had lost a husband, another a son.

Once an old man in a queue exclaimed: “What about France?”

Nobody answered, but everybody thought: “France is also lost.”

• Troubled Sleep, by Jean-Paul Sartre
In the third volume of his unfinished tetralogy about French society from the Munich crisis of 1938 through the fall of France and the Occupation, The Roads to Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre follows a group of soldiers as they learn of the Armistice and are rounded up and shipped off to German prison camps. He describes a carload of prisoners watching as the French landscape rolls away from them:

Brunet saw a chateau that was not yet within their range of vision, a chateau in a park, white, and flanked by two pointed towers. A small girl in the park, holding a hoop, stared at them with solemn eyes; it was as though all France, an innocent and outmoded France, through those young eyes was watching them pass. Brunet looked at the little girl and thought of Pétain; the train swept across her gaze, across her own future of quiet games and healthy thoughts and trivial worries, on toward fields of potatoes and factories and armament works, on to the dark, real future of a world of men. The prisoners behind Brunet waved their hands; in all the cars Brunet saw hands waving handkerchiefs; but the child made no response, she only stood there clasping her hoop.