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Short Reviews

Short Notices

Shorter reviews of neglected books.

Island in Moonlight, by Kathleen Sully (1970)

Cover of With this, I reach the end of this year’s longest exploration, that into the oeuvre of the utterly forgotten novelist, Kathleen Sully. There is one more of her 17 novels I haven’t read, but the one copy of Not Tonight that was available five months ago has since been snatched up. You have to check WorldCat.org to find a library copy. Mind you, that goes for Island in Moonlight, too.

Island in Moonlight takes Sully further afield than any of her other books. In this case, to a nameless island one presumes is in Greece but which bears only slight resemblance to any actual location. The island was once visited in his youth by Alex Mundle, a successful British businessman. Recently blinded by some unspecified accident (yes, there is no shortage of backstory ellipsis), Mundle has decided to return to the island, which he remembers as some sort of idyllic oasis, and retire from life.

Pell, his chauffeur, who accompanies Mundle to the island, sees it differently:

The place did not look prosperous. It rather reminded me of a middle-west ghost town, and as wind-blown. The faces which peered at us out of the darkness were ghostlike, too — white, dark-eyed and swathed with black shawls.

Arriving in the off-season, they find the only place still serving food is a fly-blown cafe by the harbor front known as Hot Dog Joe’s (a name I’m sure never occurred to any Greek restaurateur). Blind and unable to speak the local language (also unspecified), Mundle still manages to locate a caretaker, a penniless British writer, rents a cold, bare house in the village, and settles down. He spends most of his time teaching himself to play the accordion, but his money quickly earns him some kind of status as the local big man.

His money soon attracts the same kind of attention as a fresh piece of meat on a hot day, and Mundle’s idyll turns pear-shaped. A trio of sharks by the names of Dickie, Mame, and Beth swoops in and performs an efficient scavenging job, leaving Mundle near-broke and homeless. In the end, he is the town joke, earning a few coins playing at Hot Dog Joe’s each night.

I could go into more details. Sully tosses in characters and narrative threads until the book begins to resemble a pile of pick-up sticks. It would take more effort to pull the important ones than is worth the bother. I wish I could say that this, Sully’s penultimate novel, shows her nearing the end of her writing career on an upswing, but I honestly found it something of an aimless mess.

While the story in Dear Wolf, reviewed recently, was frivolous, it at least had some aspirations to form. One reviewer compared Sully to a Sunday painter, and on this particular Sunday, she seems to have been in quite a rush, dabbing her colors onto her canvas without much consideration of proportion or design. I’m not sure what the moral is here: pride goeth before the fall? But I will say that her ability to propel a narrative forward was demonstrated once again. I wasn’t sure where the story was going, but it sure hurtled forward at a mean clip.

I am still intrigued to know more of Sully’s story. What got her started writing — and what led her to stop? What were her influences, or was she entirely self-taught? Where did her polymorphous perspectives on sexuality, the world of the spirit, and social structures come from? What did she think of her early critical success and her slow fade from notice, even as she continued to publish? If anyone can offer a clue to any of this, please contact me.

Island in Moonlight, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1970

Dear Wolf, by Kathleen Sully (1967)

Cover of
Nob Caldar, the wolf in Kathleen Sully’s Dear Wolf, could be the hero of a 1950s R&B song — the Dominoes’s “Sixty Minute Man” or anything by Bo Diddley (“A young girl’s wish and an old woman’s dream”). He’s the local lovin’ man, who manages to bed at least a dozen different women in the course of the novel’s 2-3 week span.

It ain’t because of his good looks. He’s hairy, pot-bellied, hovering around forty, rarely wearing clean clothes, and never with more than a pound or two to his name. He lives out beyond the town in a caravan so filthy that even his most ardent lover wouldn’t come near it. He’s not the slightest bit interested in settling down (“Women, they’re all the same: they want to own you lock, stock and barrel”). And he has to send off postal orders each week to support the three children he’s had by different women.

Nob — yep, it’s that obvious — is the satyr as comic relief. Half the time he gets a woman in bed, he ends up scurrying out the window and scrambling to find his pants in the dark. He gets chased by dog, man, and angry mob. He’s sent running out of the village, half-naked and wearing a chastity belt the blacksmith has constructed to keep his amorous inclinations in check. Yet somehow he keeps finding a soft spot in the next woman’s heart.

Dear Wolf is by far the least substantial of Kathleen Sully’s novels, a bit of farce that takes about an hour and a half to read and sticks with you about as long after. Not one worth looking for.

Dear Wolf, by Kathleen Sully

London: Peter Davies, 1967

Heart in a Hurricane, by Charles G. Shaw (1927)

Cover of Heart in a Hurricane
Charles G. Shaw’s 1927 novel Heart in a Hurricane has a great deal in common with Fillmore Hyde’s The Ritz Carltons from the same year. They’re both grounded in comic stereotypes of the idle rich — specifically, the idle rich of Manhattan in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. Almost every character wears a top hat, white tie, and tails, or plus-fours, or an evening gown. If anyone appears in tweed, you can bet they’re not quite our type, no matter what their other qualities might be. The Ritz Carltons features illustrations by Rea Irvin, inventor of the New Yorker’s signature character, Eustace Tilley; Heart in a Hurricane features illustrations by Ralph Barton, whose work graced New Yorker covers nearly as often as Irvin’s and Peter Arno’s in the Twenties.

Rupert and DorisAnd both books are less novels than strings of episodes that don’t so much conclude as stop. In the case of Heart in a Hurricane, the episodes revolve around the unsuccessful romantic encounters of an idle rich young man named Rupert Twombley. We first spot Rupert alone in his box at the Opera, munching away at a bag of peanuts while listening to Siegfried and watching the crowd:

To Rupert’s immediate left sat the Q. Maynard-Lents, an over-ripe couple who had with them Creighton Bloat, 3rd. and his very latest bride, Juliette Goslyn — looking like nothing so much as an advertisement for listerine, one of the Archer boys, and Ulysses W. Schmonk — lord of linoleum; while just beyond, in the Paisley’s box, borrowed by the Leslie Dennings, were, in addition to the latter, little Estelle Tennis and four odd bachelors who at once recalled the Elm City Quartet. Further along was Mrs. de Haven Shattuck, commonly known as “Duckie,” having as guests the Rill twins (who had not merely fallen asleep but were snoring sonorously), as well as a cousin from Bernardsville who had been stone deaf for the last seven years…. Also present were the Beverley Something Joneses, just back from Jekyll Island, the Tackwit girls and two adolescent bond salesmen, the Willie Clayducks with H. I. H. Prince Nuga (who understood not a word of English), old Mrs. Bass, still wondering whether she would every marry off her unfortunate duaghter — Fern, Aggie Larchmont, as gorgeous as an Arabian night and twice as unreal, the Julian Gorlocks, Otto Kahn bowing in every direction, Cyril Hatch, the de Rinkleys, and Fuzzy Dilworth, who was said to possess the most beautiful toes on Long Island.

If you get a chuckle from this sort of thing, rest assured — it’s a feature of every chapter.

It’s no wonder that Shaw’s good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald offered some gentle criticism of the book:

My reason for the long delay is the unusual one. That, owing to a review I’d read, I didn’t approach “Heart in a Hurricane” with high expectations. I’m happy to say that I was absolutely wrong. It is a damn good piece of humorous writing from end to end — much better than anything of its sort I’ve read in years. The character is quite clear — clearest, if I may say so, when his tastes are least exhaustively cataloged…. I wish you’d try something with a plot, or an interrelation between two or more characters, running through the whole book. Episodes held together an “idea,” in its fragilest sense, don’t give the opportunity for workmanship or for really effective effects. I take the liberty of saying this because there is so much talent and humor and discernment in the book as a whole. [The full letter is available on Slate.]

Heart in a Hurricane was Charles G. Shaw’s first and last novel. After it, Shaw returned to his first profession, art, where he achieved success as an abstract painter, designer, and sculptor. One of his rare attempts as authorship after Heart in a Hurricane was the innovative children’s book, It Looked Like Spilt Milk (1947). His 1937 painting, Wrigley, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows that Andy Warhol was not the first to see the artistic possibilities in commercial packaging. Shaw died in 1974.

Wrigleys, by Charles G. Shaw, 1937
Wrigleys, by Charles G. Shaw (1937)

The Ritz Carltons, by Fillmore Hyde (1927)

Cover of The Ritz CarltonsRemember when it was still possible to make fun of rich people? Like Thurston Howell III and his wife, Lovey, on Gilligan’s Island? Or the silly, spoiled heiresses in High Society and My Man Godfrey? Well, if you’re nostalgic for a time when the idle rich were valid objects of ridicule instead of reality TV stars, The Ritz Carltons was written for you.

For Fillmore Hyde, the more money a family has, the more it must struggle with the slightest of problems. Which limousine to take? Will the first chauffeur be available to drive us to Long Island (because really the second one wouldn’t do)? Or what to do on your summer vacation:

The problem of where to go for the summer is a grave one to people of wealth and social prominence. The majority of mankind may take it lightly, but the rich cannot; from somewhere they must find strength to solve the perplexing question; and they do — noblesse oblige.

The Ritz Carltons, of course, faced it squarely.

Labelled as a novel, The Ritz Carltons is nothing more than a series of sketches. Actually, it could have worked well as the basis of a sitcom, especially back in the early days of TV when they had fifteen-minute shows — because there isn’t more than fifteen minutes of material in any of the chapters. And its humor has just that reliable formulaic ring you could count on from sitcoms.

In this case, the formula depends on a catalyst and predictable reagent. The reagent is Mrs. Ritz Carlton, whose response to the slightest hint of stress is complete physical collapse. As in the episode in which their daughter, Ritza announces her engagement to Parker House, just graduating from Harvard. The happy parents rush to Cambridge to witness their son-in-law-to-be’s commencement.

“Why isn’t he dressed like the rest?” asked Ritz, noticing that the ornament of Parker’s gown was of a different color from that of the others.

Ritza didn’t know.

The Fates were soon to make it plain. A speech was made, and the new graduates were asked to come forward to receive their diplomas. Parker House was the first in line — and the fateful words, Summa cum Laude, came down the wind from the dais.

“Good God!” exclaimed Ritz as the truth swept over him. “The fellow’s a grind!”

On his left, Mrs. Carlton collapsed silently into the arms of the secretary.

And each episode ends with the doctor rushing in from stage left to aid the prostrate woman.

The Prostrate Mrs. Carlton
The Prostrate Mrs. Carlton

Come to think of it, The Ritz Carltons has a pretty strong misogynistic streak in it, too.

Well, you don’t look to a formulaic sitcom for subtlety — just a few cheap laughs. To help forget the fact that the rich today are not sources of comic relief but soulless blood-sucking vampires.

The Ritz Carltons, by Fillmore Hyde with illustrations by Rea Irvin
New York: Macy-Masius, 1927

Shade of Eden, by Kathleen Sully (1960)

Cover of Shade of Eden by Kathleen Sully

I wrote in my post on Kathleen Sully’s Canaille that she was an unstudied novelist — sometimes clumsy in her prose and style but also free of many of the conventions of more mainstream writers. In Shade of Eden, she amply demonstrates that one set of conventions she felt free to ignore was that of sexuality. Without using any of the terms, she introduces homosexuality, lesbianism, even polyamory into her story — and shows no concern with any of it. If any moral principle applies for Sully, it is simply that love is better expressed than frustrated.

To demonstrate, she plays out a set of variations on this theme. There are Bette and Eddie, married some years and with a young son, Sandy, who have reached the stage where each realizes the other is not the perfect match. There are the Patchetts, married longer and irrevocably entrenched in mutual contempt. There is Cliff, brought into the situation by Eddie in hopes of putting Bette’s fidelity to the test. There is Patsy, an old friend of Jean Patchett’s who proves to be carrying a torch for her. And there is Miss Hinks, one of Patsy’s co-workers at the local department store, for whom any opportunities for love have passed by.

These characters she weaves in and out as if performing a series of chemical experiments: how will she react with him (or her)? Some reactions are almost lethal. Others fizzle without effect. And some produce surprising results. Bette, Eddie, Cliff, and Sandy prove a better combination than any other set of twos or threes:

They existed in unity. Their blood — each felt its pulsing — seemed to flow round their circle, into and out of each, one stream through four hearts; their thoughts were all the same colour and texture; their spirit was one. Four souls had found a rent in the fabric around Eden and had crept in past the bearer of the flaming sword.

“Or had the bearer looked the other way?” This is the real world, after all, and specifically England in the 1950s. This delicate construction must collapse, of course, and not all the pieces will get picked up. Finding and expressing love does not guarantee lasting results. It’s just as likely to turn out like that stuff you squirt into a flat tire to get to the nearest gas station.

Shade of Eden proves once again that if Kathleen Sully has been forgotten by English literary history, it may well have been because she was something that English literature hadn’t seen for centuries: a naïf. Wikipedia states that “naïve art does not necessarily evince a distinct cultural context or tradition. Naïve art is recognized, and often imitated, for its childlike simplicity and frankness.” Although this was written about visual art, it may offer the best way of understanding Kathleen Sully’s remarkable oeuvre.

Shade of Eden, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1960

Appius and Virginia, by G. E. Trevelyan (1933)

Cover of Appius and VirginiaI’ll admit that I bought G. E. Trevelyan’s novel, Appius and Virginia, on the briefest of descriptions: “A story of a spinster who raises an ape in isolation in hopes of turning him into a man.” It seemed to promise another His Monkey Wife, John Collier’s sublime account of … well, as the title says. And, indeed, one of the consistent criticisms made of Appius and Virginia is that it’s not another His Monkey Wife.

Once I began reading, however, several things became clear. First, this is a riveting story. Taking in a few pages before turning over for the night, I ended up staying up for fifty pages and finished the book the next day. As Leonora Eyles wrote when she reviewed the book for the TLS on its first publication, “There are times when it is painful to go on reading, but impossible to shirk it….” Second, if there is anything comedic about Appius and Virginia, it’s only in the sense that Balzac used the term “comedy.”

There is nothing farcical here. Instead, this is the tragedy of two souls utterly incapable of understanding each other. Virginia Hutton, a single woman deep into spinsterhood, decides to undertake an experiment. She purchases an infant orangutan she christens Appius and raises him in complete isolation, treating him in every way as if he was a human child: “If it succeeded she would indeed have achieved something. She would have created a human being out of purely animal material, have forced evolution to cover in a few years stages which unaided it would have taken aeons to pass….”

The price of failure, however, is absolute: “… if this experiment failed her existence would no longer be justified in her own sight.” The alternative to throwing herself completely into the experiment is continuing to living in her single woman’s club in Earl’s Court, “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus”: “an existence subdued and rounded and worn smooth by the little comforts and habits of her warm nonentity.”

And so as the book opens, we find Virginia sitting in the nursery of the cottage to which she has taken Appius, watching him sleep in the crib. Each time he attempts to burrow into his blanket, she commands, “Head out!” Night after night, through relentless repetition, she will teach Appius to sleep like a human. This is the sum of her technique. Caring for Appius, keeping the house, tending to the yard and garden, avoiding in every way possible not only any contact between Appius and any other ape but also any disclosure of the experiment to any other human being.

Gradually — very gradually — her efforts produce some effects. She gets Appius to say her name: “Ma-ma.” She manages to train him to feed himself with a spoon. Through years of daily training, she teaches him to read.

Or so she assumes. In fact, Appius merely learns to recognize the pictures in the lesson book and to produce the sounds he has come to know that “Ma-ma” will make as Virginia reads and repeats the text to him. Nearly none it reflects the cognition she thinks is going on. Instead, Trevelyan shows how very different is Appius’s understanding of his world compared to Virginia’s. One night, he watches a thunderstorm from his nursery window:

Blackness. Big moving things. Big still things. Big black things. Stillness, whiteness, dazzle.

White lights shooting: bright blades cleaving the black branches. Big silent things swaying and shiverying. Big moving things rotating: bending, sinking, swaying, crouching under the light.

Dazzle, giddiness. Blackness, brightness. Round and round, down and down.

In the first few years, Virginia seems impervious to the effects of her constant physical and mental toil: “The constant excitement, the unrelaxed tension, the unwavering hope, intermittently fed by minute signs, that before long he would communicate with and understand her, these not only sustained her through each day; she flourished upon them.” Appius, on the other hand, does not understand the pictures, does not understand the meaning of the sounds he has learned to make, does not understand the sounds that “Ma-ma” makes. “What was she saying now? He’d better repeat it, or she’d shake him, and then he’d be jerked right up into the nursery so suddenly that he wouldn’t be able to get back again for a long time.”

Appius’ progress slows, of course, and the years of constant work wear Virginia down. The kitchen grows black with filth, dust accumulates everywhere, the garden goes to weed. Virginia spends hours reading to Appius and the ape is happy to sit, comfortable and half asleep, in her arms, one hand on hers. “They had discovered the perfect relationship,” Virginia thinks. “Darling child, you can’t know how lonely mama was before she had you.” But of course, Appius truly can’t know how lonely mama was. Neither can Virginia understand that Appius has learned nothing more than to reproduce desired actions and sounds.

One could read Appius and Virginia as an allegory for marriage or the relationships between men and women in general. Indeed, one could argue that Trevelyan demonstrates that understanding may be secondary or even completely dispensable in a relationship. In reality, the only thing Appius and Virginia share is coexistence. In Virginia’s case, though, this is preferable to the invisible nonexistence of an aging single woman in the city. Which is why Appius and Virginia may be one of the most powerful stories about loneliness ever written.

Appius and Virginia, by G. E. Trevelyan
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933

Passage from the Red Sea, by Zofia Romanowicz (1962)

Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962, from the Archiwum Emigracji, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Toru?, Poland
Zofia and Kazimierz Romanowicz in front of the Galerie Lambert in 1962

This post belongs in an as-yet uncreated category called “Scarcer than Hens’ Teeth.”

According to AddAll.com, there are exactly two copies of Passage Through the Red Sea available for sale, the cheapest starting at over $700. If you can read French, you can find more copies, including one autographed by the author, for $15-25. For those with access to a university library, WorldCat.org reports several dozen copies available in the U.S. and elsewhere, including one at the high school library in Chinook, Montana, in case you’re passing through there.

So I will not claim to have read this book, but I think it’s worthwhile on occasion to bring a little attention to truly, madly, deeply neglected books while there’s still a chance.

Zofia Romanowiczowa, to use her proper Polish surname, the author of Passage Through the Red Sea, was seventeen when the Germans invaded her country. Arrested by the Gestapo in early 1941 for aiding the resistance movement, she spent most of the rest of the war in a series of prisons and concentration camps, ending in the Flossenbürg subcamp of Neu-Rohlau in Bohemia. She and a friend escaped during an evacuation march and she was eventually able to make contact with the Red Cross and be taken into the American Zone.

She settled in Paris, where she met and married Kazimierz Romanowicz, owner of a bookstore and publishing company, Libella, serving the expatriate audience. The two became leaders in the Polish cultural community, founding the Galerie Lambert, an exhibition and performance space. She continued to write, eventually publishing a dozen novels, of which Passage Through the Red Sea is the only one to have been translated into English.

The English translation, by Virgilia Peterson (whose bilious memoir, A Matter of Life and Death, I discussed here back in 2007), was published as a Kurt and Helen Wolff book by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1962. It recently relatively few reviews (the New York Times passed it up) and soon disappeared. But here are a couple of the reviews that did appear:

• Kirkus Reviews:

It would be quite just to call this odd, repellent little book a strangely powerful novel. The narrator (we are not told her name or anything else which is not absolutely necessary) spent her adolescence in a concentration camp. While there she was kept alive, and also permanently crippled emotionally, by her love for and dependence upon an older girl named Lucile, who was married to Paul, who died in another camp. The narrator loved and still loves Paul, too, in much the same tortured, adolescent way. After their liberation, after Lucile has abandoned her, the narrator takes a rather crass (her opinion of him) lover named Philippe. When the book opens, years later, Lucile is coming halfway around the world in answer to the narrator’s desperate letters. Lucile, the narrator’s “”salvation””, is quickly attracted by Philippe, her “”doom””. When the narrator murders them both it is “”so that she (Lucile) would cease not being Lucile.”” It is a very sick and often moving portrait of a warped soul whose only reality lies in the dead dreams of a childhood ruined by war. The main fault to find is technical: the book is all self-analysis and private symbolism, repetitious to the point of fetishism: the tense drama of the actual events is present by implication only. But after all, that is precisely the narrator’s tragic condition.

• The New Yorker:

A strange, sorrowing short novel that deals with the reunion of two women — the nameless narrator and Lucile, who is somewhat older — some years after their release from a Nazi concentration camp. The narrator discovers that Lucile, whose help she needs and has always needed, has become an empty, posturing copy of her former self, and for a horrifying reason: in prison, the narrator, through her own dependence and frailty, has permanently drained Lucile, leaving only a husk. This nightmarish plot is accentuated by an oblique, dreamlike narrative (there is almost no dialogue), written in a chanting, doubling-back-on-itself prose, which may or may not be the author’s style but which is nevertheless just right.

• Elizabeth Cade in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

This beautifully written memoir of a Polish girl’s imprisonment in a Nazi slave labor camp, her intense bond with another woman, and their respective adjustments to freedom takes a unique place in contemporary writing. It touches, in a new and two-sided approach, the questions which have concerned the existentialist school of thought: personal integrity and the usage of freedom.

The narrator is still a young and idealistic girl when she is deported. In the camp she meets an old school pal, Lucile, who becomes her friend, protector, and above all, the guardian of her self-respect. “Let go” is Lucile’s motto, whenever her younger friend is about to give up wht last vestige of human dignity and sink to an animal level in the despair brought on by hunder and physical suffering. It is Lucile’s belief that survival must not be bought at any cost.

Freedom seemed to justify such moral strength. They “cherished the image of freedom as a higher and more just form of existence … a paradise of perfection where the lion and the lamb would lie down together, where everything would be given back to everyone.” When confronted with the realities of the world, in which compromise seems to be the accepted modus vivendi, both women take different paths in utilizing their hardwon survival.

The novel switches with flashbacks to the camp days to its locale in post-war Paris, winding up in a dramatic climax. Brilliantly translated by Virgilia Peterson, this is a fascinating exploration of human relationships and values.

• Polly Saunders in The Newport News Daily News:

For those of us who never spent time in a concentration camp this intense novel might seem to be an exaggerated account of morbid emotions. If we sharpen our imaginations, however, we can appreciate it as a small masterpiece written by a survivor of just such an inferno.

… Lucile was the elder of the two. She had been the younger girl’s only reason for being. “Lucile had known more about me than I knew about myself and sometimes, thanks to her, there came to life in me whole worlds the existence of which, until now, I had not suspected.”

This attachment is so powerful that it carries over into her present life in Paris. She still needs Lucile’s support and nostalgically recalls their camp days (despite their horrors) when she basked in her warm protection and love. The anticipated reunion finally takes place and there is utterly crushing disillusionment when she finds a changed Lucile. Lucile’s strength now lies in her ability to forget the past. She is interested only in wrenching from her present life whatever pleasures present themselves. References to their former life are taboo. Meantime, her worshipper practically dissolves in her disappointment.

The writing is intense. Sentences are long and repetitious and, for this reason, often monotonous. The story is depressing, but it is powerful in its turbulent outpouring from a young girl’s heart.

The best source on Zofia Romanowicz is a 2016 article by Alice-Catherine Carls from World Literature Today blog titled “The Renaissance of Zofia Romanowicz,” which includes a link to four poems newly translated into English.

A Distant Summer: Three Narratives, by Renzo Rosso (1962)

Cover of US edition of A Distant Summer by Renzo Rosso

A Distant Summer collects three long stories: “A Distant Summer,” “The Bait,” and “A Brief Trip Into the Heart of Germany.” Saturday Review’s reviewer tried to sum them up cleverly as “a scene erotic, a scene exotic, a scene psychotic,” but like most pat descriptions of a book, left a largely inaccurate summation of its true qualities.

Each story offers a snapshot of Italian life during and just after the Second World War. In “A Distant Summer,” set in the late summer of 1943, a seventeen year-old boy awakens to the complexity of adult life. Staying with his mother in a fine resort hotel at the foot of the Alps, he, like the other residents, is trapped in a sort of limbo. Mussolini has been removed from power by King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Badoglio named Prime Minister, but there are rumors that German divisions are preparing to come through the passes and take over control. Uncertain and fearful, they cling to the hotel as a refuge, sitting

… from morn to dusk on benches in the same square or around a clump of pines in the park or at tables in the bar. And these places might have been borders of the world or confines of a leper settlement, for no one crossed them, preferring extenuating boredom at the hotel to excursions and even simple walks in the lovely surroundings, lest these interrupted the reassuring sense of closeness to other besieged ones.

In his idleness, the boy becomes fixated on the only lone woman staying at the hotel, Signora Borghi, waiting with a young son while her husband, an Air Force pilot, is stuck with his unit. His adolescent reverie is broken when a tall, dark, well-dressed man, Signor Rangoni, arrives. He is an unashamed slacker: “I suffer from a rare and costly disease,” he says, “It costs me a fortune to have this disease till the end of the war.” But he and Signora Borghi are quickly attracted. In the course of an evening or two, the boy spies them walking off together into the evening shadows after dinner, and when he follows, see Rangoni pressing her up against a wall, her legs wrapped around him.

The boy’s anger, jealousy, and confusion are further compounded when the husband arrives. The boy is infatuated with the image of the dashing and heroic pilot, and emotionally sides with him until he overhears him say to his wife, “I hope one day someone will write me an anonymous letter and tell me. I’ll kill you and you know why now, I’ll beat you black and blue.” Exposed to aspects of the relations between men and women he had never encountered, the boy is left feeling something of a stranger in his own world.

Although it doesn’t quite match the quality of “A Distant Summer,” “The Bait,” which tells about how a charismatic young figure in the local Communist movement manipulates an admiring boy into becoming his accomplice, is certainly the better of the two remaining stories. “A Brief Trip Into the Heart of Germany,” about an encounter between a war crimes investigator and a former concentration camp guard, comes off less convincing.

“A Distant Summer” seems a perfect candidate for filming, rather an Italian counterpart to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Beween: a story in which a boy is given a glimpse into the existence of sex as a force quite separate from any notions he might have of love or romance. The scenes are well-shaped, focused, precisely and efficiently sequenced, the prose — translated by Archibald Colquhoun — clean, exact, and specific. As the TLS reviewer wrote, “Signor Rosso can draw the pith of a man or a situation in a few words; he seems to have no tricks and an apparently transparent style, and all he says, with such brevity and such lack of elaboration, strikes one as piercingly accurate.”

A Distant Summer is available in electronic format on the Open Library (Link).

A Distant Summer: Three Narratives, by Renzo Rosso, translated by Archibald Colquhoun
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1962

Published in the U.K. as:

The Bait and Other Stories
London: Secker & Warburg, 1962

The Undesired, by Kathleen Sully (1961)

Cover of The Undesired by Kathleen Sully

Having now read a full dozen of Kathleen Sully’s 17 books, I’m beginning to see the outlines of her moral universe. Though it’s rich in comic circumstances and peopled more by the good than the evil, there is never more than a razor’s edge separating life from death, never more than a chance accident separating life’s winners from its losers. The Undesired is an object lesson in how to survive in her world — and how not to.

Stanley Chubb is one of the losers. A meek little man, he is so little noticed when retiring after thirty years in the same government office that a co-worker mumbles “See you Monday, Chub” as he leaves. He is as alone in the world as one can be: “… he was an old man without close friends or relatives — a lone man at the end of his life and usefulness, traveling in a train to a small flat in a nondescript street. He had done nothing worth recounting; he had see nothing worth remembering. He was nothing — a speck in the universe, less than a speck — merely a point in space.” Faced with a future in which he will simply “moulder away as if he had never been born,” he decides he must “blast this world wide open.”

He heads into the West Country and picks a little resort village on the coast to settle in, taking a decrepit cottage without electricity or running water and pledging to engage with the people there instead of receding into the background as he’s done all his life. Soon after, another retiree, the erect and tweedy Agnes Strathers — universally called “Horse” behind her back — shows up and demands to know if the cottage is for sale. She, too, is one of the undesired: “unlucky enough to feel alone in the world, unwanted, unlovely, unloved.”

Sully weaves Stanley, Agnes, and the growing circle of people they become involved with through an intricate choreography of encounters, misunderstandings, and accidents, but the real story here is far simpler than that. The Undesired is about nothing more than learning to survive by reaching out to the people around us — for help and to help.

But Sully will not let her readers be lulled by the soft glow of a happy ending. Just as the book closes, she draws our attention to another solitary visitor, a plain, grey nameless woman like Agnes, and leaves us with a grim reminder that we are never more than a step or two from death’s grasp. I recommend reading The Undesired in a warm place: a cold and bitter draft runs through this book.

The Undesired, by Kathleen Sully

London: Peter Davies, 1961

Horizontal Image, by Kathleen Sully (1968)

Cover of Horizontal Image by Kathleen Sully

Kathleen Sully was 58 when Horizontal Image was published. Liddy Creemer, her protagonist, is perhaps ten years younger. Her husband Tim is a good man: faithful, a good provider. Her daughter Olive is married to the also faithful Jeff. Together, they are visiting the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey when Liddy looks into a mirror set horizontal to the ground and sees “a visage of eighty years old.” It shocks her so much she reels, thinking, “My life has gone: I’m old — nearly dead.”

I’m not sure the phrase “mid-life crisis” was being used in 1968, but I’m pretty confident it wasn’t being applied to women. Reading Horizontal Image, I was often struck by how Kathleen Sully’s perspectives on the situation of women was far ahead of its time. Here, for example, is a short discussion between Liddy and her daughter:

“It’s my opinion that a woman can’t be a good mother and a career girl at the same time.”

“That’s right, Olive: you are beginning to see the problem. Husbands ought to share in the beginning and –”

“If any father ever took his responsibilities seriously, it’s Tim. He still does.”

“He takes the pleasure of his children — I’m talking about dirty diapers, feeding, cooking, cleaning, nursing and minding in those first years. A father should share the work and so allow the mother to continue to earn so that she may always be independent financially. And so that she can enjoy the children, too.”

“He takes the pleasure of his children” — that’s a fine (meaning, well-put) distinction. As a stereotypical housewife of her time, Liddy recognizes the steep economic uphill climb she faces if she wants to be independent: no skills worthy of easy employment; housekeeping and cooking skills sufficient to please a husband but not to work in either capacity professionally; no access to money without her husband’s permission. When she does decide to leave home and trying living on her own, Liddy has no other option but to pawn her jewelry, none of which is of any great worth.

Once on her own, when Liddy decides to explore the possibility of relationships with men other than Tim, she soon realizes that they all come with drawbacks of some type. One seeks sex but really wants a housekeeper; another is a fine companion in the day but an utter loss at night. Considering that Horizontal Image hinges on a woman’s negative self-image, it’s men who are seen in the worst light. Sully often offers up corrective asides to set the reader straight: John Downe was boyish in the manner meant when grown men are called boyish. Real boys are not at all like boyish men: they tend to be mischievous with a cruel streak, their energy is directed nowhere or anywhere, their innocence is a surface quality masking a furtive probing towards adult feelings.”

Liddy ends up in Sicily, where she manages to scrape out a way of surviving, but not before putting out a call for cash to avoid being put out on the street. She sends it in parallel to the three men — including her husband Tim — she thinks may still be prepared to help. The response is surprising and leads to a hectic and comic ending. But the reality of being female in a world run by men is never far, as an encounter on the steps of a Sicilian church reminds her:

She sat there, grey and old, dressed in dusty black — black cotton dress, black shoes and stockings, black shawl — all as old as herself and as worn. Her grey hair was drawn harshly back from her wrinkled brow and her nobbled, veined hands hung loosely over her skinny knees.

Liddy had been preparing to enter the church. The woman’s eyes caught hers and held them: not so much because they begged but by the surprise, amazement and envy in them. Liddy wore a simple pale cream dress, sleeveless, with a cream cardigan slung loosely over her shoulders.

The woman summed it all up in one simple gesture: with her left hand she indicated her own wretched attire — her own self — then moved the hand towards Liddy’s immaculate outfit and well-fed person. They looked into each other’s eyes — Liddy’s cool English ones and her near-black anguished ones. They were sisters: it was neither fair nor equal.

Horizontal Image is no Golden Notebook, but it certainly is proof that feminism was, by the late 1960s, penetrating deeply into the sensibility of English women — including that of a 58 year-old housewife and mother of three well into her second decade as a novelist.

Horizontal Image, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1968

Horizontal Image

Small Talk at Wreyland, by Cecil Torr (1918, 1921, 1923)

Wreyland Manor in 1910
Wreyland Manor in 1910

One day in December 1916, Cecil Torr, a lifelong bachelor and amateur scholar, an expert in Roman and Greek history and author of books on Hannibal and ancient ships, began keeping notes on items of interest about the people and land around his family home, Wreyland Manor, on the edge of the village of Lustleigh in Dartmoor. “Down here, when any of the older natives die, I hear people lamenting that so much local knowledge has died with them, and saying that they should have written things down.”

The scope of his note-keeping quickly got out of hand. “I meant to keep to local matters,” he apologized, “but have gone much further than I meant.” And thank God for that. As the book’s original reviewer in the TLS wrote, “An analysis of the first few pages reveals: the value of local memory; … his parents, grandparents and kinsfolk; heaven; faith and works; infectious disease; weather-lore; singing birds; rooks; weather lore again; homely remedies for illness; open windows; the may-dew on the young barley.”

And thus what might have been a minor and justly forgotten bit of Dartmoor folklore became Small Talk at Wreyland, one of the great bedside companions of English literature. After getting the first volume together for printing in a private edition he planned to share with a few of his friends, Torr was contacted by S. C. Roberts, one of the editors at the Cambridge University Press, who’d been show the book by J. B. Peace, the firm’s chief printer, and asked if he was interested in having the book published. Torr agreed and when the book came out in the summer of 1918, it was soon being celebrated as offering a welcome relief from the constant drone of war news. “We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and are sitting with him over the fire,” wrote one reviewer.

Torr, his father, and his grandfather had all been university-educated, well-traveled, and omnivorous in their appetites for knowledge of all types. Torr often draws upon what seems to have been a substantial library as well as a great supply of family letters and diaries, so that his “small talk” embraces large as well as small topics. A few pages into the book, we learn about the ritual of scrubbing the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica on Maundy Thursday:

The dignitaries of the church come down in procession, each one carrying a candle and a mop; and they throw oil and wine upon the altar, and then begin to scrub. I was close by, and noticed how differently they all did it. Some evidently thought it symbolical, and merely waved their mops across the altar, hardly touching it. And others would scrub hard, and then put their heads down and look carefully through their spectacles to see what they had done, and then go on scrubbing again till they were satisfied that they had done their bit.

A page later, he shares a remark one of his “thoroughgoing Protestant” neighbors made upon being told of Cecil’s visit to Rome and seeing the Pope: “Well now, maister, what be he like? I reckon he be a proper tiger to fight,” considering the Pope the Devil’s agent on earth.

Further on, he shares his mother’s recollection of one of the last duels held in the area: “It was a quarrel of two retired officers over facts which they could easily have verified. They had both got the facts wrong, and each was right in disbelieving what the other said; but neither of them would allow his veracity to be impugned, and they settled the matter in this fashion at five o’clock next morning.” The two men settled the argument with brutal finality: they both died.

“Cecil Torr on Scilly,” an uncredited photo from the Dartmoor Archive
He was particularly fond of the work of one of his great uncles, the Reverend William Davy, who spent most of his adult life writing an enormous twenty-six volume System of Divinity, then went on at the age of eighty to produce a three-volume set of “improved” extracts (you can find one volume online in the Internet Archive (link)). In a work of such length, one might expect an occasional detour to be found, such as the following diatribe on the evils of drinking tea: “the immeasurable use of that too fashionable and pernicious plant, which weakens the stomach, unbraces the nerves, and drains the very vitals of our national wealth; to which nevertheless our children are as early and as carefully enured, from the very breast, as if the daily use of it were an indispensable duty which they owed to God and their country.” No wonder England never managed to establish an empire.

And there is no end of the talk of the people of Lustleigh and the surrounding countryside, which Torr considered the most beautiful in England. Looking at her garden one summer afternoon, one neighbor remarked, “I were just a-wonderin’ if Heaven be so very much better ‘an this: ’cause, aless it were, I don’t know as I’d care for the change.” Another assures him about the best way to forecast the weather: “If the signboard of the Punch Bowl creaked upon its hinges, and the smoke blew down at Treleaven’s corner, rain was sure to follow, let the quicksilver be high or low.”

Small Talk at Wreyland was not a best-seller by any means, but its reputation as a book of great variety, charm, and humor spread, and Torr was soon invited to put together another. Small Talk at Wreyland Second Series was published in 1921 and the Third Series volume in 1923. The later volumes are just as good as the first. In Series Three, for example, Torr offers a short disquisition on the subject of haloes:

Saints and angels had round haloes, but other people had to be content with square or oblong haloes while they were alive. I do not know why this was so, or what a halo really was whether it was a thing like a rainbow which always faces you, or whether it was a flat and rigid thing which you saw obliquely when the wearer turned aside: the Old Masters have depicted it both ways. For want of higher authority I draw my own conclusions from such things as Toto Maidalchini says: namely, that saint Cassian, being puzzled, scratched his head, and thereby put his halo all awry; or that saints Pancras and Sebastian went bathing in one of the rivers of Paradise, and then sat upon the river bank while their haloes were drying in the sun.

If there is a book heaven, I have a feeling Cecil Torr is sporting his own halo there.

A selection from the three books was published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 1979, but aside from the usual print-on-demand suspects, you’ll have to make do with the electronic versions (Internet Library Series One (link), Series Two (link) and Series Three (link)) or one of the many used copies you can find for as little as one buck online (AddAll.com).

There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden (1944)

Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943
Women workers training at a Royal Ordnance Factory, 1943

I keep lists of books to find, to buy, to read, and three titles that have been on all of them for years are Inez Holden’s wartime memoirs/novels: Night Shift (1941); There’s No Story There (1944); and It Was Different At The Time (1945). When my friend Kate Macdonald recently announced that her Handheld Press would be issuing Night Shift and It Was Different At The Time in a single volume, Blitz Writing, edited by Kristin Bluemel in 2019, I was thrilled. Seeing my reaction, Kate very generously offered to send me a PDF copy of There’s No Story There that Kristin has been using for courses for years.

In her own post on There’s No Story There, Kate writes that this is “both a story and not a story” because it is essentially nothing more than a slice of time in the life of a secret munitions factory in Yorkshire and the lives of its workers, without a definitely beginning or end, which is certainly true. But anyone who’s worked in a high security situation knows, one of the easiest ways to spot one is by its deliberate efforts to maintain a low profile. “There’s no story there … move along” is the kind of thing a security guard might say as he quietly suggests you’d best move along. “Security is the foundation of the whole thing,” the chief of security tells the plant manager.

There’s No Story There is set in what was undoubtedly a Royal Ordnance Factory or its private equivalent run by ICI Nobel, one of the massive facilities, usually located well away from population centers and favored bombing targets, at which artillery shells and aerial bombs were manufactured. These facilities were literally powder kegs, where extraordinary precautions were taken to prevent sparks or anything else that might trigger an explosion that would very likely set off others and result in the whole facility being blown out of existence. No wonder such an accident is never far from workers’ minds: “Now supposing there was a ‘blow’ here … Another part of my consciousness would be taken clean away from me…. Maybe I wouldn’t even remember leaving the hostel this morning…. There would be a parting in my memory as if a zip fastener had been ripped back and then got stuck suddenly….”

Holden may have taken some inspiration from Henry Green’s superb factory novel, Living (1929), because she uses a similar approach, scanning through the minds of a variety of the men and women working at the munitions plant. Julian, the Dunkirk survivor who transports shells from one shed to another; Mrs. Karslake, the hyper-officious functionary whose chief task is arranging for film showings to keep workers’ minds from the fact that they are never more than a second from obliteration; Ysabette Jones, the schizophrenic who boasts of her Group Captain boyfriend who “knows German, Italian, Spanish and all those already.” Holden’s proxy is probably the observer, Geoffrey Dutton, who lurks on the edge of the scene, obsessively recording conversations in his notebook. Only Geoffrey notices that the male and female workers “shared the same table, the same food, and the same fatigue — yet the conversation of the women and the men was completely isolated, on from the other.”

It would explain both the exceptional accuracy of the book and its essential shapelessness. The plant, its workers hostel, its operations and the interactions of the people are all artificial, temporary, full of privileges unknown elsewhere in England (Ham! Fruit!), and always on edge, one ear cocked for the possibility of an explosion. “There’s no story there, one can’t know it all. How can one? — with thirty thousand workers, some brave, some sad, some stupid, some clever, and others just kind of comical,” one young woman writes home. Although her letter would most certainly have been censored by someone in the Security office. These places would, after all, have run much more smoothly if they didn’t have to use people. And that tension between the desire to dehumanize the process and the unsuppressible insistence of people to be human provides the energy that makes There’s No Story There such a fascinating read.

Kate is considering issuing There’s No Story There if the reprint of Blitz Writing does well. So keep an eye peeled for when Blitz Writing comes out next summer!

There’s No Story There, by Inez Holden
London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1944

Through the Wall, by Kathleen Sully (1957)

Cover of Mastowe is a miserable industrial town on the English coast. Life there, writes Kathleen Sully, “seemed to know no moderation”: in the summer, “everything became dehydrated”; “in the winter everything was wet and cold”; and even when frozen “Mastowe managed to be uncomfortably wet — wet walls, wet bedrooms, wet cellars, wet feet, wet overcoats, and spirits, damp perhaps elsewhere, were sogged and water-logged at Mastowe.”

And the most miserable being in Mastowe is little Celia Wick. With lice in her hair, a rip in her bloomers, locked out of her house for hours on a cold and rainy day, going to bed hungry because her mother is too busy arguing with her father for coming home drunk, trying to fall sleep on a filthy straw mattress. She escapes by flying out her bedroom window, floating down the streets, transporting herself to the sea to watch a magical show: “the shells gave out tiny musics and the pebbles captured the light of distant starts, and the waves, separate and personal for an instant, each broke upon the living sands, then merged into the mother sea again with contented sighs.”

Through the Wall is Kathleen Sully’s grimmest story. Celia’s father dies of tuberculosis; when her mother remarries, the new husband refuses to accept the child and she is given to a friend. Any happiness that might come her way is soon replaced by a new tragedy. At fifteen she hitch-hikes to London. We last see her being taken into a lay-by by a trucker.

Suddenly, the story jumps forward twenty years. The step-father who disowned her is tormented with guilt. He convinces himself that a woman in London who’s been sentenced to hang for murder is Celia and sends his nephew off to find her and seek her forgiveness. Reluctant at first, eventually the nephew leaves on a long and largely fruitless search that leads him through a series of London neighborhoods as hard and poor as Mastowe.

Through the Wall contains some of Sully’s strongest writing. As her first book, Canal in Moonlight suggests, she had more than a brushing acquaintance with the smells, the sounds, the sensations, and the desperation of poverty. The row houses with broken windows, a jake in the back, and underfed and dirty children playing in the street. The crowded pub full of people looking for an escape:

… the mixture of other sounds, the warmth of alcohol within, and the close-pressing bodies without, all added to the feeling of unreality and confusion.

A pair of feet tapped out the rhythm of the piano’s tune; two or three voices sang the words; glasses clinked; a man shouted, “Two beers”; a woman laughed with a full, unrestrained voice.

… A woman caught his eye, but her stare was vacant, unseeing; she raised a glass of gin to her mouth, drank, continued to stare, but her thoughts seemed far away.

A man rolled up his shirt-sleeve, and carefully explained something about a scar to a disinterested group of people who drew seriously on their cigarettes.

An old woman, black-hatted, stockinged, coated-and-scarfed, nodded her shriveled head as if counting the throng, and smiled secretly into a glass of stout every time she took a sip.

The power of Sully’s spare but evocative prose cannot disguise the awkward seam that joins the two parts of her story. Gradually, however, the real link between Celia and Rodney, the nephew searching for her, becomes apparent, and it has little to do with their practical circumstances. Through the Wall is ultimately a book about the possibility of spiritual survival in a relentlessly harsh world. I’m not sure I say that Sully fully realized what she attempted, but once again, she demonstrates a voice and vision that was unlike anyone else’s. My respect for her achievement grows with each book.

Through the Wall, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1957

A Breeze on a Lonely Road, by Kathleen Sully (1969)

Cover of A Breeze on a Lonely Road by Kathleen Sully

A Breeze on a Lonely Road may be the most level-headed account of madness every written. Not that Trevor Greyson, Sully’s lonely bachelor solicitor is raving and frothing at the mouth mad. Trev has a very moderate, very English form of madness: for over thirty years, he steps into an alternate reality out on the moor: “On the moor he had many friends — all who came there. On the moor, he was not a greying and balding man of fifty: he was a supple youth whose voice rang with enthusiasm.”

On the moor, exciting things happened. On the moor, people were friendly: genuinely interested in him, genuinely please with his company. Unfortunately, “He had been escaping to the moor for many years and now it had become a greater reality than his waking live. It was his reality — so much that his work and daytime activities had become less and less important.”

The matter comes to a head during one of his mental trips to the moor when he comes across a group of badgers who have been killed. Dozens of their bodies lie scattered about. Trev finds this deeply perplexing: if this is his fantasy, as he understands it to be, then why would such a violent, evil act have taken place?

The experience leads him to reflect deeply on what it means for the moor to be part of his reality. He neglects his work to prepare a detailed map of the moor as he has experienced it. He compares it with real moors around England and finds no match, not even close. One night, as he is out with his friends on the moor, he asks them for their names, addresses, other details about their lives.

These are pointless questions, one of them, Edward, responds:

Telling you would mean nothing, and there is no name — no name that one could name though, if there were, how to get there? No map or chart could show the way but there is no map and, if there were, you would not be able to travel in that direction. Dear boy, do be content.

When Trev wakes, however, he writes down everything he can recall. He shuts his office and heads off to follow these clues.

None of them leads to anything definitive. It’s the wrong address, or no one by that name has ever lived there, or other details are off. Not just a bit off — wholly wrong in most cases. But still there are … resonances. He neither finds clear answers nor convincing disproof.

Concerned, his few acquaintances arrange for two psychiatrists to speak with Trev. And in a remarkably moderated depiction of psychiatrists at work, they bring Trev’s attention to possible connections between his moor experiences and his real life and leave it at that. No locking him away, no drugs, and no miracle cures.

In fact, they confirm what Edward had told him on the moor: “What you find out, prove or disprove will alter nothing except your attitude.” In Trev’s case, the most significant change is indeed one of attitude: from quietly and covertly sneaking away from his own day-to-day reality to a fantasy that makes him happy to deliberately making happiness part of his day-to-day reality. In the end, he’s still fifty, balding, and single and still responsible for what makes him happy: it’s a moderate sort of transformation, and all the more convincing as a result. In its own calm, softly comic way, A Breeze on a Lonely Road is one of the healthiest books I’ve read in a long time.

A Breeze on a Lonely Road, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1969

The Fractured Smile, by Kathleen Sully (1965)

Cover of The Fractured Smile by Kathleen Sully

The Fractured Smile is a Feydeau comedy of infidelity, coincidences and missed connections transported to sixties England and a universe where Brownian motion has replaced Newtonian mechanics. Jess wakes to a phone call saying that her husband, George, has been spotting boarding a train to the seaside with his very attractive secretary. Jess throws on a dress, digs George’s revolver out of the attic, and dashes out of the house still wearing her bright red fuzzy slippers, with son David in tow, to give chase.

From this point on, the chain reactions take off, carried along by their own momentum. Except that Sully’s chain reactions have a unique characteristic. While each propels the story along, it also causes her characters — and the reader — to adapt to a shift in perspective. Piling into the first train compartment with any space, full of adrenaline and jealous rage, Jess gradually realizes that her compartment mates are not aloof and anonymous but a group of little people, elderly, alert, and considerate: “She looked around at their faces — they were pocket-sized angels in moth-balled reach-me-downs.”

Once at the coast, Jess quickly discovers how difficult it is to track down an unfaithful husband in a resort town full of hotels when his name really is Mr. Smith. Jess becomes separated from David and the gun. David meets up with a fearless local seven year-old named Rodge and the two of them meet up with a tenacious little dog they name Stray. Both Jess and George’s parents learn of her homicidally-minded flight to the coast and decide to team up and head off in pursuit.

Characters rush in and out of places with the manic energy of a farce on fast-forward. The two sets of in-laws, at distant ends of the financial and cultural spectrum, find they have far more in common than suspected. George eventually shifts from skulking husband to ally in the hunt for the lost boys. But in Sully’s physics, nothing that’s been upended can’t be upended again. Another accident, an angry word, and soon the in-laws are at battle again: “She could hear their querulous voices, her mother’s dominating all, as they quarrelled, heavily and bitterly, bringing up old wounds from the past, personal slights, imagined insults, broken promises — anything, anything at all so long as it could be hurled spitefully at the other.”

And as seems to be a rule in Sully’s universe, death is never too far off stage. Emotions tumble one after another like the balls in a bingo spinner, so love and loyalty and giddy delight can be followed a page or two later by fear, bitterness, and dread. As one might expect in a universe ruled by a healthy dose of randomness, some reactions shoot characters off into quite unexpected directions and some simply ricochet them right back where they came from. One thing’s for sure, though: when you start The Fractured Smile, you won’t be able to predict how things will turn out.

The Fractured Smile, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1965

A Man on the Roof, by Kathleen Sully (1961)

Cover of "A Man on the Roof" by Kathleen Sully

I don’t think it qualifies as a spoiler to say that the man on the roof in A Man on the Roof is a ghost. Specifically, he’s Wilfred Clough, late husband of Peony. Obsessed with stamp collecting while living, he returns to haunt — or rather, berate — his wife after she sells his collection.

Left with little after Wilfred’s death, Peony has moved in with Ada Frisby, a spinster and oldest friend. Though the two women find happiness in each other’s company, people make fun of their situation — their relationship, their age, their poverty. Even their landlady whispers behind their backs: “Ada-Boy” and “fat as a pig.”

Kathleen Sully's inscription in my copy of "A Man on the Roof"
Kathleen Sully’s inscription in my copy of “A Man on the Roof”
But these old girls still have some spunk. Indeed, they constantly manage to bolster each other’s confidence. When Wilfred suddenly appears in their flat demanding that Peony retrieve his stamps: “I shall not go until you fetch them back.” “You must do as you please,” she replies. “It won’t affect us in the least.” And though Wilfred is further infuriated when he learns his coveted collection has gone for little more than three hundred pounds, Peony and Ada consider it more than enough to start a new chapter in their lives.

A Man on the Roof could have been made into a great little Ealing comedy had it been published a few years earlier. The ladies buy a junky old van, have it fitted with a couple of beds and a gas ring, and set out for a life on the road. Though hoping to leave Wilfred behind in the flat, he manages to latch onto them like a limpet. They have their share of misadventures, all accompanied with Wilfred’s grumpy commentary, and have a gay time.

And their dogged independence and bedrock optimism alters how they’re perceived. Instead of mocked for being too old, too fat, too poor, too ineffectual, people begin to see their better qualities:

But he did not see the wrinkles around her bird-like eyes, nor did he notice the grey amongst the soft brown hair which was cut in a modern cap of loose waves and curls. His did not see the strings showing her neck; he admired her hands because of the signs of toil.

He saw a small woman — remarkably fit and spry, sun-burnt and clean — no messy make-up or varnish, a gently smiling mouth — as sweet and modest as a young girl’s, slim, pretty legs –decidely pretty legs. And pretty knees — decidedly pretty knees. He saw a fine woman — a charming woman — and a woman who couldn’t be bribed or intimidated.

Even Wilfred starts to look at Peony differently. Her refusal to listen to his criticism or let his constant presence (he’s visible but immaterial, if that makes any sense) eventually wins his respect:

“I’m beginning to think that I wasted my life living all those years in that hole of a town. Why didn’t we come to live in the country?”

“I always wanted to live in the country,” said Peony.

“You should have forced my hand.”

“Easier said than done.”

“And to think of all the time and money I wasted on those stamps and what good did they do me or you?”

Farcical comedies are bit like wind-up toys: no matter how fast they run along at first, at a certain point it’s hard for them to keep going. The trick is wrap things up while there’s still some energy left. It should be easier to do with a ghost story: after all, ghosts can live happily ever after. In the case of A Man on the Roof, however, Kathleen Sully resorts to some cumbersome narrative machinery that takes most of the glow from what should be a sunny ending. (Tip to writers: if you find yourself introducing new characters in the last chapter — don’t.) Otherwise, A Man on the Roof is a bit of fun with no more substance than a champagne bubble.

A Man on the Roof, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1961

McCabe, by Edmund Naughton (1959)

Covers of various editions of McCabe by Edmund Naughton

Edmund Naughton’s 1959 western, McCabe, is mainly mentioned as a footnote to Robert Altman’s first masterpiece, his 1971 film McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Reissued as a tie-in to the film when it came out, it’s been out of print for over three decades now and fetches some fairly steep prices. (My tip: the cheapest copies seem to be of the 1961 Oldham Press edition — the “Man’s Books” version, which bundles McCabe with two other macho titles in what appears to have been attempt to create a testosterone-rich alternative to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.)

This is a real shame because it diminishes how much of Altman’s “revisionism” in his approach to the western movie derives from Naughton’s work. Superficially, McCabe follows a classic western formula: stranger comes town, a reputation as a gunslinger trailing behind him; he settles in and the town settles to him; then he is forced to decide whether to run and save his skin or stand his ground and take his chances. There’s a showdown scene as dangerous and gripping as the climax of High Noon.

Yet, writing just seven years after High Noon, Naughton is far less looking back at the traditions of the western than anticipating much of what came in the next 10-15 years, in films and, to a lesser extent, in novels. Naughton’s protagonist, John McCabe, is closer to an anti-hero like Catch-22’s Yossarian than Marshal Will Kane. Though a dead-eye shot who’s adapted his Colt to fire without a trigger, he has only killed one man and him mostly by accident. He lives mostly as a traveling gambler but reminds himself that he was chased off a riverboat as a greenhorn amateur. He tries to be fair to the Chinese and Indians in the little mining town of Presbyterian Church where he decides to set up a saloon and, later, a whorehouse.

And he is far ahead of his time in his attitude towards women — or at least towards Mrs. Miller, who arrives and takes over the job of running McCabe’s whorehouse. Though the two are partners in business and, fairly regularly, in bed, McCabe understands that he cannot take their relationship for granted:

McCabe was sensitive about being noticed in her room. He took care, thought, to be discreet, to attend to business, and there were nights when he didn’t want to go over there.

Those were the nights when he knew she would like there smoking naked on the bed with the wicks down in the kerosene lamps; and, if he came, she would look at him with eyes like violet stones in cold water — as if he were to blame for the man she had sold herself to that evening.

McCabe also exhibits a degree of emotion intelligence that’s still pretty rare in most male characters. He struggles with Mrs. Miller’s dispassionate approach to their nights together. Though frustrated that she quickly sees that he is close to illiterate and far less trustworthy with figures, he wishes they could share more than just a physical intimacy: “All my like I been walking around with a block of ice inside me, Constance, and I don’t hardly get the sawdust brushed off before you got me back in the icehouse.”

Covers of German, French and Italian translations of McCabe

Naughton’s view of good and evil is a far cry from High Noon, too. McCabe is a gambler, a schemer, a coward and, when pressed, a killer. Rev. Elliott, who has erected the church that gives Presbyterian Church its name, is bitter, bigoted, and anti-social: he would prefer that the rest of the town disappeared. When gunmen arrive to face off with McCabe, they are there as stooges of a distant corporation, carrying out a business transaction:

Snake River Mining Company can’t afford you: can’t afford a man it can’t buy out. Know that? Never tolerate that. Can afford Sheehan, damned fop they sent to you last week: margin of corruption it allows for in its budget. Company calculated the cost of Presbyterian Church; who collects doesn’t matter. More corrupt people are, easier they can be controlled; company can always send them to jail when they get to be a nuisance.

… At any rate, McCabe, they can’t afford you around. Bad example. Pile all these mountains on you, if they have to; so people thereabouts will believe it, if they deny you ever existed.

Naughton may have been the only writer of westerns to have learned more from George Orwell than Zane Grey — although one English reviewer cited a different influence, dismissing the book as the “Latest example of the neo-Freudian intellectual death-wishful Westerns.” Suffice it to say that McCabe merits more than just footnote status in reference to a much better known movie. It’s original, innovative, and as gripping as any thriller. And, as one reviewer put it, “You don’t have to like westerns to like this one.”

McCabe, by Edmund Naughton
New York: Macmillan, 1959

A Man Talking to Seagulls, by Kathleen Sully (1959)

Cover of 'A Man Talking to Seagulls'

Kathleen Sully uses death as punctuation in A Man Talking to Seagulls, a tale of one day in the life of Dundeston, a resort somewhere on the east coast of England. She opens the day with the body of a young woman washed up on the beach. Scratcher, a vagrant living in a shack on the beach, “a man of little account to anybody — even himself,” is the first to find her and, it seems, the only one to take any note of her death. “Where is she?” he asks the seagulls as he feeds them.

She must be somewhere; she can’t be nowhere. A person is a person the same as a gull’s a gull. And a soul’s a soul: indestructible, quite — quite indestructible, everlasting, for ever and ever. The good Lord said it was so — is so. The body holds the soul — holds us.

The police come quickly and take the body away and Dundeston carries on with its day. The man who rents the beach chairs begins setting them up. The man with the donkeys brings them out to await a new batch of riders. The cockle seller lights up his stove and raises the awning on his stand. The day-trippers start flowing in from the bus stand and train station. The people staying in holiday bungalows awake and breakfast.

In one of the bungalows, two young people away for a secret weekend begin arguing. He loses his temper and throws a vase at her head. She collapses. He tries to rouse her. Finding no sign of life, he decides he must dispose of the body. “Val won’t be missed — yet,” he thinks. “When she was missed — and who would miss her apart from her landlady and a few casual friends — would she be traced?” He stashes the body in a shed and heads into town for breakfast.

This disregard for the value of a life threads throughout A Man Talking to Seagulls like a motif in a minor chord: never too long, never too loud, but persistent and unsettling. To the young and healthy, it’s an irrelevance. To the middle aged trying to get through another day, it’s an annoyance. And to an old woman quietly nipping from the bottle of gin in the family picnic basket, it’s a disturbing inevitability:

Her youth was long past, yet she found it difficult to accept the fact that she was old — really old. But her weak and trembly legs insisted upon it; her gnarled and blue-roped hands proclaimed it; only the oldest of human flesh was as crepe-like and yellowed as her own.

And a little while after having these thoughts, as she sleeps in her beach chair, death makes its second appearance of the day. “What can we do with her out here — how will we get her home?” is her daughter’s first reaction. She is still at the annoyance stage.

Sully manages to squeeze a cast of dozens into the space of barely 160 pages. They weave in and out, crossing paths or missing each other entirely. Val, the girl with the cracked skull, comes to, finds herself wrapped up in a canvas cloth in the shed, susses the situation, manages to slip out, and heads for the first train out of town. Her would-be murderer wanders the town trying to decide between finding a shovel and a discreet bush to bury her behind and attempting to toss her body into the sea that night. He meets a creepy old man in a isolated mansion at the edge of the town and is left with the distinct impression that the old man may have buried a body or two himself.

But he never meets with any sense of regret until death makes its last visit of the day. Wandering along the beach, he comes across another body:

For an instant he knew that he beheld a husk — that the man was elsewhere — and that life was life and could not be denied or extinguished — ever. The body was merely a shack.

The instant passed and all knowledge of it: all he knew afterwards was that he had felt something to stupendous to comprehend.

After reading six of Kathleen Sully’s seventeen novels, I think I can see two themes emerging in her work: life is chaotic and rarely comprehensible; and death is inevitable and never more than a breath away. A Man Talking to Seagulls is an apt example of how she managed to weave both themes into a single composition almost Simenon-ian in its grim efficiency.

A Man Talking to Seagulls, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1959

The Club, by A. D. Wintle (1961)

Cover of "The Club" by A. D. Wintle

Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle MC, or A. D. Wintle for short, was one of the great characters of the 20th century, a genuine war hero, egoist, eccentric, and defender of all things gentlemanly. He died before finishing his autobiography, but when his friend Alastair Revie condensed the million-some words of manuscript that Wintle left behind him into under 300 pages, he was sure to keep Wintle’s chosen title: The Last Englishman (1968). I’m sure Wintle would have held that there was nothing the least bit presumptuous about it.

This is the book I wanted to write about, but unfortunately, copies fetch anywhere from $300 to $2,000 — too rich for my peasant blood. So I had to make do with what I could find and afford: Wintle’s 1961 novel, The Club, which can be had (at the moment) for as little as 64 cents. Although calling it a novel vastly exaggerates the book’s substance. It’s more of a will-o’the-wisp in hardback form.

The Club of The Club is THE Club:

It is not one of the leading clubs. It is The Leading Club itself. It is the standard club on which all other clubs leading or following would wish it to be supposed that they themselves are modelled.

It is “The Club,” and as such it is known, not only to taxi-drivers and other persons in equally specialized professions, but also to all members of all clubs or would-be clubs.

The Club claims to be a history of The Club assembled by a group of distinguished editors, but it is in fact merely a collection of old warhorses of anecdotes told by Sir Milner Gibbard, Baronet, of Blandwich Place in the County of Wessex, the member of over fifty years’ standing proposed as their expert source — although Sir Milner’s first reaction is to dismiss the idea outright: “‘No!’ he snapped. ‘Absolutely out of the question,’ he added, no doubt with the intention of making his intention crystal-clear.”

“The trouble is … the great trouble is, that I don’t know anything about it.”

The editors are confused.

“You talk as if I had been here for five thousand years instead of fifty,” he explains.

After a fair amount of fruitless negotiations, one of the editors suddenly realizes the problem. “He paused, then raised his voice and spoke very slowly and very clearly: ‘We were asking … I mean to say, that I was asking you to write us a History of The Club.”

“The Club!” he exclaims. “Good God, I thought you said The Flood.”

This gives you an idea of the tone (and content) of the rest of the book. Just imagine Spike Milligan in the role of Sir Milner and you’ll find you’re reading a collection of never-performed skits from The Goon Show.

And just what exactly is wrong with that? I hear you ask. My point precisely, sir!

The Club, by A. D. Wintle
London: Cassell, 1961

Skrine, by Kathleen Sully (1960)

Cover of Skrine by Kathleen Sully

None of the four novels by Kathleen Sully I’ve read so far is anything quite like the others, but I feel safe in saying that Skrine is the most unlike the rest. In fact, in his TLS review, Arthur-Calder Marshall observed that Sully’s critical reputation (back when she had one) would have been higher if she’d had the stamina to rewrite the same novel over and over, like Ivy Compton-Burnett. Instead, he wrote,

Each of her novels, like those of Miss Muriel Spark, is original in the sense of being not merely unlike those of other authors but also unlike her other novels. Each demands from the reader an approach without preconceptions; each erects the standards by which the author wishes this particular book to be judged. There is no Sullyland, but there is a Sully world, as yet as ill-defined in her eight novels as the maps of the early cosmographers. It is being filled in piece by non-continguous piece.

From what I have been able to learn, Sully’s novels were set in southern England in a time somewhere between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. Skrine, however, while set in the same area, takes place in a time after most of the population and signs of civilization in England — and the rest of the world, we must assume — has been wiped out by some worldwide holocaust. Nuclear war? Plague? One cannot tell. “Surface earthquakes” is the most we are told. Survivors band together in scattered farms or the startings of small walled towns. Others roam the landscape, living by their wits and ability to overpower those like them.

As Skrine opens, the title character, has just killed a woman for a pack of cigarettes. He finds just one cigarette — desiccated or ersatz — left in the pack. No matches on her. And his lighter long out of fluid. He moves on.

A lone wanderer, Skrine is a stranger, looked at with suspicion and fear by anyone he encounters. And his memory is haunted by people — an old woman, a man, a child. Are they people he killed? “These people don’t exist — except in my brain. I must rid myself of them.” “I’ll be the boss,” he tells himself. “I’ll banish these apparitions for once and all time.”

But after he swims across a wide river — the Thames? — and collapses on the far shore, his imagination kicks in again. He sees a boy watching him. He cannot recall killing a child. Had he stolen food from him? “Children had been abandoned or deliberately lost and there had been rumours of cannabalism and the rumour hadn’t surprised Skrine or troubled him in those days — at least, not much.”

After stumbling on in a delirium of hunger, he comes across a group outside a walled town burying four bodies — three adults and a child. He edges up, watches, then cries out, “This child is alive.” Taken into the town, he is hailed as a healer. Some sort of illness is taking its toll, and the inhabitants flock to him to be cured. The mayor holds a council and it is decided to let Skrine stay.

At this point, the narrative shifts. Within a few days, Skrine discerns that the arrangements of power are more complex than he first thought. The real power is held by Jervis, a short, nasty, and brutish man who took over the town with the help of a small band of men armed with guns. Do the guns really work? No one has the appetite to find out. A few of the original inhabitants murmur about taking control back. Jervis recognizes the value of an ambiguous opposition and gives them just enough rope to keep muttering behind his back. He cultivates Skrine as an ally — also recognizing that Skrine sees himself as a loner and idealist, and hence probably not capable of organizing any viable resistance.

Skrinecould be read as a parable for the use of power in the age of Twitter. Jervis warns the people of the threat of attacks from other towns to the south. In reality, he wants to take their remnants of running machinery and supplies. In response to his threats, Skrine and others mutter their objections — but no one makes any over gesture of opposition. And Jervis has his trolls among the small population, raising charges against Skrine: Theft! Rape! Murder!

If a parable, then Skrine offers little hope for us today. Fear may be a negative force, but in the right hands it can be extremely effective, especially when it gathers an influential minority to its cause. A reviewer in the Catholic Herald called Skrine “an absolutely remorseless, post-Apocalypse novel, uncompromisingly bleak.” It is all those things — and also impossible to put down. One wonders how Kathleen Sully — then a mother of three teenagers — found a way to such dark emotions and then translated them so powerfully to the page. And one also has to wonder: how is it that Lord of the Flies has sold in the millions and is taught in classrooms around the world, while Skrine has vanished so successfully that not even a single copy appears to be available for sale?

Skrine, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1960