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Covers

The Weepings and the Laughters

The Weeping and the Laughter by Viva King (1976)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Viva King (1976).

I bought Viva King’s autobiography, The Weeping and the Laughter, on the strength of a single review: “How pleasant to know Viva King even if it only be at second-hand through this candid and amusing book.” It also said that “There were few of that period [Bloomsbury, 1920s] whom Viva King did not come to know.” Ezra Pound greeted her naked once (he, not she). She corresponded with Augustus John, dined in Soho with Norman Douglas, had Ivy Compton-Burnett and her partner Margaret Jourdain to tea. Maurice Richardson quipped in the Observer, “If you fired a shotgun at one of Mrs. King’s parties you would risk peppering half the characters in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell.” Anthony Blond wrote that trying to keep track of the people who flash through King’s pages was like trying to read the names of stations on a fast-moving train.

But reviewers also noted her reputation for exceptional generosity; Richardson called her “a sort of British Higher Bohemian Mother Courage” and admired her honesty in writing of an affair she had with a sailor 40-plus years her junior when she was 70 — despite his tendency to make off with her jewelry. (She offers a fastidious way of saying that her lovers were uniformly bad at foreplay: “I needed revving up — and though the men may have had the right tools, they were bad mechanics.”)

When, as is my habit, I went in search of other reviews of Viva King’s book, I quickly discovered that “The Weeping and the Laughter” is a popular title. The phrase comes not from Shakespeare, as usual, but from an Ernest Dowson poem whose title, “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” is taken, in turn, from a poem by the Roman poet Horace (translation: “The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long”). Dowson’s poem is appropriate for an autobiography written in one’s eighties after a long and busy life:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

That hasn’t prevented other authors from using it for their own purposes. So, let’s take a look at some of the other books with this title.

The Weeping and the Laughter by Joachim Maass (1947)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Joachim Maass (1947).

The first, from what I can determine, to use the title was the English translation of this German novel about the murky details surrounding the murder of a Hamburg businessman. Married to a dancer whose career was cut short by an accident, Ernst Tylmann never understood the artistic temperaments of his wife or their three children, so the police suspect any of them might have killed him for his sheer obtuseness. Several reviewers compared the novel to Crime and Punishment — and then quickly added that Maass lacked Dostoevsky’s obsessive intensity. This may be one of those books whose cover outrates its contents.

The Weeping and the Laughter by Vera Caspary (1950)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Vera Caspary (1950).

Vera Caspary’s publisher boasted that The Weeping and the Laughter was her “debut in serious fiction” — which, of course, is a slight against Laura and previous novels that were marked as suspense or murder mysteries and consequently, not “serious.” The mystery here is Beverly Hills widow Emily Arkwright’s own psyche and motivations. Why did she attempt suicide when she was, on the surface, popular, happy, and successful? Dorothy B. Hughes — no slouch at writing “serious fiction” mislabelled as suspense herself — called it a fine portrait of “the self-sufficient modern woman who will break before she will bend.” This was reissued some years ago by the Murder Room Press, but for some reason, Amazon reports the Kindle edition is “out of stock” (is this even a thing?).

The Weeping and the Laughter by Julian Maclaren-Ross Caspary (1953)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Julian Maclaren-Ross Caspary (1953).

Julian Maclaren-Ross, who might have caught some buckshot had a shotgun been fired at one of Viva King’s parties (he was X. Trapnel in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time), took the phrase as the title for his first memoir. This volume covers his childhood up to the age of ten. Born in Ramsgate, he wrote that his first memory was of seeing an attack by German Zeppelins (an astonishing feat if it was the first raid on Ramsgate in late 1914). Arthur Marshall wrote in the New Statesman that some of Maclaren-Ross’s recollections were “probably tosh,” but overall the book gave a “charmed pleasure” and was “immensely engaging.”

When it was publised, The Weeping and the Laughter was intended to be the first of a total of four books of autobiography. They even had titles: Threnody on a Gramophone, The Sea Coast of Bohemia, and Khaki and Cockayne. Drink, poverty, and chaotic habits undermined his plans, and it was up to London Magazine editor Alan Ross to assemble posthumously his fragments into Memoirs of the Forties (1965), which achieved a success that eluded Maclaren-Ross during his lifetime. These were subsequently combined with The Weeping and the Laughter and other pieces into Collected Memoirs, which was published by Black Spring Press in 2005. I’m shocked to see that this edition been out of print for over a decade now. Unacceptable!

The Weeping and the Laughter by Judy Chard (1975)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Judy Chard (1975).

I include this only for the sake of completeness. This is the sort of book that no one bothers to review. The publisher’s own jacket blurb suffices to explain why:

Kate Fielding – a widow, but still comparatively young – seems to have everything a woman could wish for in life – except someone with whom to share it. Then she meets and falls passionately in love with a young artist — Larry Stafford. Can their love survive the difference of a decade in their ages, the criticism of friends and of Kate’s daughter, Roz, herself deeply involved with a married man? Can they overcome the terrifying illness which attacks Kate?

Folks, Lloyd Douglas wrote this story back in 1929. It’s called Magnificent Obsession. Save your time and watch the Douglas Sirk – Rock Hudson – Jane Wyman movie version, which put the O in overwrought (and we’re all the better for it).

The Weeping and the Laughter by Noel Barber (1988)
The Weeping and the Laughter by Noel Barber (1988).

This was Barber’s 32nd novel, published posthumously. A bestseller, probably because he’d amassed an army of fans with the previous 31. Twins of noble birth are separated in the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The lucky one makes it to Paris and finds success in love and business. The other is lost and written off as dead. But is he? And what about that teddy bear: is it just an object of childhood obsession like Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud? Or is there more to the story? I’m pretty sure I will never know. Or care.

Where are the The Weeping and the Laughters of this century? Has Ernest Dowson lost his capacity to inspire?

John Lodwick, a Forgotten Novelist: Covers and Reviews

John Lodwick (courtesy of Kim Davis and the New York Society Library).

A look this week at the many novels of John Lodwick, a prolific writer who died at 43 from injuries after an auto accident in 1959. Anthony Burgess once said he started writing with the ambition of being “the next John Lodwick,” given that Lodwick’s mastery of the English language, in Burgess’s estimation, “matches Evelyn Waugh’s.”

John St. John provides a good synopsis of Lodwick’s career in William Heinemann: a Century of Publishing, 1890-1990, his history of the writer’s principal publisher, :

For most of his life he lived violently. He began the war by enrolling in the French Foreign Legion and after being imprisoned on a charge of mutiny and fighting for the Legion in its retreat near Paris he was captured, escaped, and arrested again as a bicycle thief. Eventually he found his way back to England and became a special agent. In all he was imprisoned over a dozen times – all this and much more was recorded in his reminiscences Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1958). The war over, he became involved with smuggling rackets. He had several wives who gave him several children. Latterly he lived in Barcelona, was usually having to write too fast so as to keep his creditors at bay, and there were continual crises interspersed with drinking bouts. In 1959 he died violently in early middle age as the result of a car crash in Spain.

After a failed start as a cadet in the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, Lodwick bummed around Europe and was sleeping in a friend’s car on the Riviera when he decided to join the French Foreign Legion after the outbreak of World War Two. Captured by the Germans, he managed to escape and return to England via Spain, a country he later adopted as his second home.

Lodwick joined the Special Operations Executive, where he had a dramatic career, parachuting eight times into occupied France and twice into Crete, escaping (again) from a German prison camp, and serving as a liaison with resistance groups in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. His commander, however, later described Lodwick as “plausible, well-spoken but unscrupulous…only interested in his own skin and any woman he might admire.”

• Running to Paradise (1943)
Between returning to England and joining the S.O.E., Lodwick managed to write his first novel. It won Dodd, Mead’s award for best war novel, but could just as easily have been considered an autobiography, drawn heavily from Lodwick’s time in France after its fall in 1940. Its central figure, an Englishman by the name of Adrian Dormant, was a fictional alter ego who would appear again in a half-dozen or more of Lodwick’s later books. John Hampson described Dormant as “a consciously unheroic figure, with a prodigious fondness for liquor.”
L. P. Hartley admired Lodwick’s “Elizabethan relish for horrors; down to the last bloody detail he describes them with enormous zest and with a great wealth of literary allusion.” And the book was certainly a departure from the stiff upper lip-ishness of most British first-person accounts of the war published up to then: “We are supposedly democrats. A horse can shit upon the floor, a cow can contain itself, and a staff officer, tarvelling in a private carriage, has usually an equally private water-closet. But the poor bloody private, torn between modesty and necessity, must get out and do it on the sleepers at every halt.”
John Chamberlain’s New York Times review, however, foretold some of the problems that would dog Lodwick’s work: “a first-rate representation of chaos. But the essence of chaos can be reproduced as effectively in ten pages as in 381.”

• Myrmyda: A Novel of the Aegean (1946)
Elizabeth Bowen wrote of the book: “I was interested, from the first page on, not only by the story-telling, but by the spirit behind it — curiously disspasionate, disinfected, and pure, to the point of coldness, of sentiment. This is definitely a novel, not simply reportage.”

• Twenty East of Greenwich, or A Barnum Among the Robespierres
Another adaptation from Lodwick’s wartime experiences, this time about a British officer trapped with a band of Chetniks in Communist-dominated Yugoslavia at the end of the war. It seems to be an odd mix based on one review’s description: “Throat-cutting and torture are the commonplaces of this adventure, yet it is all very gay — cynical and casual, with sprightly back-chat and a constant run of surprises.”

• Peal of Ordnance (1947)
Long before the condition had a name and acronym, Lodwick wrote this satiric portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder. A Royal Engineers sergeant trained in the use of high explosives suffers from amnesia and finds himself applying those skills to manic purpose in peacetime, blowing up, among other things, the Albert Memoirial and a B.B.C. studio. “Mr. Lodwick has managed his fresh and lively story very well, and for all the fun his moral is not lost,” wrote Kate O’Brien in The Spectator.

• Brother Death (1948)
Walter Allen called this a “psychological thriller reduced to absurdity, compounded of equal parts Graham Greene and Hemingway, but concluded dismissively, “I do not know Mr. Lodwick’s earlier novels, but it is only charity to assume they are better than this.” Vernon Fane in The Observer, however, found it chilling: “Not to be recommended to insomniacs.” Michael Moorcock later called it Lodwick’s most original and ambitious thriller, a mix of Greene and Hitchcock.
Brother Death has been reissued by Valancourt.

• Something in the Heart (1948)
Olivia Manning called it an “ephemeral entertainment, but, as such, very entertaining indeed,” though she chastised Lodwick for referring to a husband and wife as “man and superior domestic servant.”

• First Steps Inside the Zoo (1950)
Antonia White may have thought she was finishing off the book with her review, but any lover of oddball novels couldn’t help but be intrigued by her assessment:

One of those rather tiresome books about crooks, perverts, nymphomaniacs and sadistic millionaires which set out to be desparately tough and cynical but frequently trip up into embarassing sentimentality. At any moment the author is apt to become almost spinsterishly coy as when, having taken a medically realistic line about all physical functions, he suddenly referes archly to a kitten’s penny-spending tray.’ Nevertheless Mr. Lodwick can be amusing, he can create an atmosphere, he can describe odd and louche characters and he can tell a story. If some shock treatment could deprive him of all memory of Hemingway, Norman Douglas and early Huxley, he might become something on his own.

• Stamp Me Mortal (1950)
Marghanita Laski felt that Lodwick undermined himself in this story about a failed romance between an English widower and a younger French woman: “As though to disguise his extremely serious intention, the author punctuates the narrative with his own form of humour; at its best this is bitter and stimulating, at its worst it is vulgar and facetious.”

• Love Bade Me Welcome (152)
L. A. G. Strong (himself now a forgotten novelist) was quite impressed, called it Lodwick’s best book to date: “It is more mature, more economical, surer in movement and purpose and, form the technical point of view, quite dazzling.” Strong felt that the only thing that kept Lodwick from becoming a great writer was “the compulsion of a major occasion” — something that would call “for that simplicity of response which could unify his great gifts.”

• Somewhere a Voice is Calling (1953)
Several considered this Lodwick’s best book. In her reader’s report for Heinemann, Rebecca West wrote:

This man is a distressing creature. He upset me when he came here, because he was so like one of my traitors: not that I suspect him of any treachery, it is the abstract treachery to candour, the mere doing of things furtively and against the common understanding of the world, which covers people with a Graham Greene mould. If you get rid of candour you disorient people, they go off to the wrong point of the compass with an air of infinite cunning and superiority to the people who are outside the frame, and it all means nothing…. The queer thing about this book is that it is spiritually homosexual…. He is the spinsterish female who wants a big he-man mate who rapes the other girls right and left and drinks everyone else under the table. She adores this mate, and hates the other girls who get raped, and goes and settles things with the people who are involved in his drunken scenes.

Yet she also summed up the book by writing, “How much more interesting than nearly all his contemporaries. How beautifully suppled his writing. He folds a sentence round a fact or a thought as the girl in the shop ties a scarf round your neck and you can’t do it at home in the same way, not ever.”

In a reverse of his previous judgment about Lodwick’s work, Walter Allen wrote that the book “has given me more immediate pleasure than any new English novel I have read for several months.” In particular, he enjoyed Lodwick’s extravagance of language: “His is not afraid of lyricism or even of the purple patch; and how pleasant this is when so many novelists handle their typewriters with the caution usually reserved for tommy-guns and dare nothing more than the short sharp burst. Mr. Lodwick uses words as though he loves them.”

• The Butterfly Net (1954)
Angus Wilson appreciated the book’s “deserved eulogy of Mr. Curtis Brown” but not Lodwick’s views on the Society of Authors. He clearly identified the book as “a sort of roman a clef that was sort of a cipher for the reader to crack. Kingsley Amis enjoyed the book more, though he felt it was “no more than a clothes-line on which are hung successions of incredible garrulities about literary fiddling and deviling, sins of various dimensions, Stendhal, the heating arrangements in hell, and kindred matters.” He did spot a key parallel between Lodwick and his protagonist (Adrian Dormant again): “Dormant never writes more than the one draft; Mr. Lodwick, one suspects, has pursued the same policy here.”
In the book, Lodwick describes an incident that he was involved in at Heinemann’s offices at 99 Great Russell Street:

On his last visit to his publisher, about eighteen months previously. Dormant had arrived carrying an unwrapped bottle ofwhisky. Bound, eventually, for a party, he had just purchased this bottle at a vintner’s, three doors away. So frigid, so comminatory had been the stares of the ladies in charge of the reception desk at that epoch, that Dormant had not dared to proceed upstairs with alcohol in his hands. He had concealed his bottle in the’interior of the grandfather clock. On leaving the building, he had forgotten to retrieve it, and when about three hours later, he had been smitten with a vague consciousness that something was missing, had not considered it wise to return and retrieve his property. Dormant now opened the grandfather clock, but only dust and the great pendant bollocks of the mechanism were to be seen.

Though Lodwick was vocal in his complaints about how Heinemann treated him, particularly about their reluctance to be overly generous with advances, the publisher showed remarkable loyalty despite his foibles. James Michie recalled that he and fellow editor Roland Gant:

Admired his writing, which we felt was something special, though also remarkably careless. He never became a really important writer, maybe because of so many Spanish wine stains on the manuscript. He possessed overwhelming charm and rascality of the good sort. He once told me that he liked the wicked gleam in my spectacles.

• The Starless Night (1955)
A sequel to Somewhere a Voice is Calling, Julian Symons called it his best book, though he also found “something unsatisfactory in Lodwick’s writing, a sense of chaos and incompleteness, a certain contempt for the medium.”
Walter Allen later wrote of the two novels:

[Lodwick’s] character Desmond Thornton, the hero of the two related novels, Somewhere a Voice Is Calling (1953) and The Starless Night (1955), which seem to me to show Lodwick at his best, says of himself, “I was a stupid little boy, and I had just two gears: the tough and sentimental.” Lodwick had the same two gears, but also an extraordinarily sensitive understanding of the tough, of men like Thornton, a minor consular official in Spain who is always in trouble because violent action is his only means of expression. Thornton is a former Commando, and he emerges as a striking representation of a type common to all classes and cultural levels, the self-imprisoned man who can resolve the problems that beset him only through violence, the man for whom war is the ideal condition because in war his normally anti-social behaviour receives social sanction.

He writes with great panache, afraid neither of lyricism nor of the purple passage. His use of metaphor is especially skilful, and he uses it particularly to describe and reveal his characters and their behaviour, thereby opening them up, enlarging them, giving them at times something like universality. The final effect of these novels of action, mannered, sophisti- cated, lyrical as they are, is elegiac.

John Davenport was exuberant in his praise of The Starless Night: “What a pleasure to have to ride on a dark horse! Mr. John Lodwick is one of the few true craftsmen writing in English. He is so very civilised, his dialogue and backgrounds are so very good, that he is always a joy to read…. All his sensibility goes into action, and who cannot find that a relief?”

• Contagion in This World (1956)
A timely story: plague and quarantine in Cadiz. Vernon Fane found it “His best novel for some time, and his best is very good indeed, the characterisation firm, the dialogue crisp, the sense of place meticulous.” But he also noted what was perhaps Lodwick’s fatal flaw as a writer: “There is a sort of Balzacian impatience about him, as though he were already itching to go on with the next novel.” One could comment that Balzac’s is a fine brand of impatience, but one has to acknowledge that it led the book to fall short of Camus’s account of a similar situation in The Plague. But Lodwick still had his supporters, including Mervyn Jones, who urged in the Blackpool Tribune, “Don’t put down that pen, Mr. Lodwick!”

• Equator (1957)
Set on an island in a lake in Central Africa held by a Spanish madman and fought over by the British, French and Belgians. Pamela Hansford Johnson’s review deserved a flashing “Spoiler Alert” sign: “This seems to me the warmest and most magnanimous novel Mr. Lodwick has written, but I could wish the tone of his satire were less uneasy. Just as he is successfully inducing us to laugh the other side of our faces, he wrecks the mood by having his hero eaten by a crocodile.”

• Bid the Soldiers Shoot (1958)
In his last book published before his death, Lodwick revisits his war experiences again without the pretense of fiction. V. S. Naipaul called it, “First-class entertainment, packed with incident and with a cast of hundreds.” H. D. Ziman, writing in the Daily Telegraph, noted that there had already been a fair number of books written about the exploits of the S. O. E. and various resistance movements, but that, “What is unusual about Mr. Lodwick’s account is the sheet zest, the frankness about misjudgments and blunders, the emphasis on the comice rather than the tragic element.” “Yet,” Ziman added, “again and again something occurs … which reveals … not merely a resourceful tough-neck, but a man of profound feeling.”

• The Asparagus Trench (1960)
Jeremy Brook, in his Observer review, wrote that “Had Lodwick lived to complete the book there can be little doubt that it would have been one of the most distinguished autobiographies to have been published in many years. But the fragment we have can stand alone: perfect in form, tantalisingly allusive, full of youth’s irrecoverable imaginative vitality, and as passionately concerned with what lies below the surface of life as it is witty about the surface itself.” Hugh Siriol-Jones was similarly enthusiastic: “There is no book better for a cold winter evening,” he wrote in The Tatler and Bystander. “This brief, gay and touching book is both bentle and sharp-edged and takes its athor through his childhood and early days at school (a strange and wholly separate world, full of weird projects and maquis activity, wonderfully conveyed).”

• The Moon Through a Dusty Window (1960)
This posthumous novel is narrated by a character one can imagine as one of Lodwick’s favorite drinking buddies:

My friend, I come from treaty ports, from enclaves, from halfa dozen small and accommodating states, including our delightful little neighbour, Andorra, which lies like a thin-shelled almond between the powerful nutcracker jaws of France and Spain. I come from every airfield where the police are slack, and from every quay where there is a small and unsupervised crane.

In the Guardian, Anne Duchene dismissed the book as “roccoco rigmarole about various English outcasts … incapable of anything but corrosive lucidity in conversation.”

With the exception of a breezy history of the S.O.E. and the Valancourt reissue of Brother Death, Lodwick’s books have been out of print for decades. As Geoffrey Elliott writes in his 2017 biography, A Forgotten Man: The Life and Death of John Lodwick, there has been little interest in revisiting Lodwick’s work:

Someone asked me, out of the blue, why I thought John Lodwick was ‘important.’ Taking the word as most people understand it he probably wasn’t.

The answer is simple: because he was such an interesting character, cut from a very different cloth.

When Elliott’s biography was published, D. J. Taylor wrote in The Spectator,

One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out of the London Library. Here, alas, John Lodwick scores particularly badly. If The Butterfly Net (“filled with a lot of booksy talk and worldly philosophising,” Angus Wilson pronounced in 1954) has run to all of five borrowers in the last five years, then The Starless Night (1955) seems not to have left the shelves since 1991. All this suggests that the title of Geoffrey Elliott’s valiant attempt to reconstruct Lodwick’s lost, vagrant and sometimes violent life is painfully accurate.

Based on the above survey of Lodwick’s work and the assessments of contemporary reviewers, however, I can’t help but feel that John Lodwick’s work deserves a second look.

A Cavalcade of Joan Butler Covers

From a letter to the Editor, Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1998

For over three decades, P. G. Wodehouse had stiff competition for the shillings of English readers looking for a good comic novel: Joan Butler. At the rate of roughly one a year, Stanley Paul published over thirty of Butler’s novels. Few of them were considered worthy of review by most of the major magazines and newspapers, but that didn’t stop readers from buying them in the thousands and sometimes tens of thousands. They are now — every last one of them — out of print.

Given the zeal with which the work of English women novelists from the interwar period has been rediscovered and celebrated in recent years, you might wonder how it is that the work of Joan Butler has been so utterly neglected. The answer is simple: she was a he. As the Daily Mail announced in early 1960, Joan Butler was the pseudonym of the writer Robert William Alexander, who was born near Dublin in 1905 and who died in British Columbia in 1979. Although Alexander published a handful of novels, some with science fiction themes, under his own name, he primarily worked as Joan Butler.

From Daily Mail, 31 October 1961, page 2

I’m still waiting for the cheap copy of one of Butler’s novels I bought recently to arrive, but in the meantime, I thought it worth splurging on a cavalcade of the covers from about two-thirds of Mr. Alexander’s total Butler production. So, over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach here it comes:

Heavy Husband, 1930
Unnatural Hazards, 1931
Mixed Pickle, 1934
Rapid Fire, 1945
Loving Cup, 1948
Heat Haze, 1949
Strictly Speaking, 1950
Soothing Syrup, 1951
Deep Freeze, 1952
Set Fair, 1952
Gilt Edge, 1953
Lucky Dip, 1953
Landed Gentry, 1954
All Change, 1955
Bridal Suite, 1956
Inside Work, 1956
Ready Cash, 1957
Home Run, 1958

Murder City, by O. M. Hall (Oakley Hall) (1949)

Cover of Pocket Books edition of 'Murder City'

Murder City was Oakley Hall’s first novel, published under the name of “O. M. Hall.” Although Hall came to be known as the dean of Western writers, particularly based on his 1958 novel, Warlock, he developed his chops with a number of thrillers full of guns, girls, and gangsters. The next four of these after Murder City were under the pseudonym of Jason Manor: Too Dead to Run (1953); The Red Jaguar (1954); The Pawns of Fear (1955); and The Tramplers (1956).

All of them shared urban California settings, usually a fictional version Hall’s native San Diego, as well as a cynical view of how power was abused in government, the police, business, and labor. Murder City is easily the most rough-and-tumble of the batch and displays the many shortcomings of a first novel. Every character can be labelled as either good or bad; plotting is haphazard and turns on too many awkward coincidences. The dialogue is packed with more wiseguy slang than a B movie, and when judgments are proclaimed, the evidence is piled on like corned beef in a Broadway deli:

You don’t realize what a dynasty you have. All those rented politicians and heisters and yeggs and torpedoes and tush-hogs. All your tea-pad boys, your gambling bosses, your labor racketeers. That’s your organization; you made it, but you can’t break it up. I don’t know why I feel sorry for you, Fats. All the killings that can be chalked up to your boys, the holdups, the beatings. The drunks and the hopheads you’ve made; the brothels you’ve set up and the girls you’ve buried in them.

The Pocket Books cover is the best thing about the book. KILL-CRAZY gangsters! A fight in what looks to be a pool hall. That title: MURDER CITY! This thing must have jumped off the newsstand shelves. On the other hand, there is the oddly feminist slant: the hero is on the ground, stroking the jaw that just took a punch, while his girlfriend covers him with a six-shooter. Who’s really in control, boys? And note that she also keeps a firm grip on her clutch purse. Why isn’t she the protagonist, and not her loser ex-Marine boyfriend?

Sketch portrait of Oakley Hall from inside cover of 'Murder city'

Murder City, by O. M. Hall (Oakley Hall)
New York City: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1949
New York City: Pocket Books, 1951

You Can’t Tell a Belmont Book by Looking at the Cover

Lurid covers full of sexual innuendos and implications of violence were the primary marketing tool for cheap paperback books back in the 1950s and 1960s, and few publishers were more lurid and cheaper in their tastes than Belmont Books. The staples of their line were science fiction (they published Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer, and others), Westerns (Fast Gun), thrillers (Hong Kong Kill), and sex (Jailbait Jungle). They sometimes combined genres, as in Rod Gray’s sex/spy series, The Lady from L.U.S.T..

As any fan of space age pop music knows, however, the inability of cheap record labels and paperback publishers to exercise discrimination in feeding their insatiable appetite for material sometimes led to gems slipping out under the cover of junk. Here are a half-dozen of Belmont’s neglected classics in disguise.

Cover of The Question by Henri Allrg

#1: The Question, by Henri Alleg

This is the English translation of La Question, French journalist Henri Alleg’s account of his imprisonment and torture at the hands of French paratroopers attempting to put down the Algerian revolt depicting in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers. The book’s suppression by French authorities only guaranteed that even more attention was focused on the methods used to deal with the anti-colonial movement–their increasing brutality and ineffectiveness, and became one of the turning points in the Algerian war for independence.

Belmont’s release of The Question was certainly not a high point in the book’s history. But the issue of the use of torture by military forces raised interest in the book again during the Vietnam War and, more recently, following the revelations regarding the treatment of inmates by U. S. Army personnel in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere. Bison Books reissued The Question in 2006, featuring the following quote from historian David Levering Lewis: “I read The Question in one quick sitting, riveted. It packs a tremendous punch today. It ought be required reading in all the military academies and issued to all DOD employees GS-11 and above.”

Cover of The Cheat by Charles Jackson

#2: The Cheat, by Charles Jackson

The Cheat is a repackaging of Earthly Creatures, the second collection of short stories published by Charles Jackson, best known as the author of The Lost Weekend. In his superb biography of Jackson, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, Blake Bailey discloses that Jackson went along with the book’s publication mostly in the interest of making some money and that he considered just two of its stories–“The Boy Who Ran Away” and “The Break”–as more than magazine fodder.

The New Yorker’s anonymous reviewer agreed: “The reader sees the point well ahead of time and is left tapping his foot, waiting for the moment of revelation.” Jackson’s acquaintance Budd Schulberg thought better of them, writing in The New York Times: “The stories of Charles Jackson are not the sort that powerful national weeklies order and ballyhoo in advance. They do not make us more pleased with ourselves, or our ways. One does not close this book with a sense of self-satisfaction, of sentimentalities coddled and preconceptions indulged.” And in The Saturday Review, William Peden, something of a short story specialist, saw elements in the stories that reveal parallels with Jackson’s own troubled history:

The central character of most of the short stories in Charles Jackson’s Earthly Creatures is his own worst enemy. He turns up in many forms: as an adolescent boy, as a young woman, as a middle-aged novelist, as an elderly mother. Something is either going wrong in his life, or has already gone wrong. Self-pitying and self-indulgent, he lashes out wildly at life. We watch him, in story after story, methodically going about the business of destroying himself. But he is seldom a fool, and herein lie the power and pathos of most of his stories.

Cover of The Education of a French Model

#3: The Education of a French Model, by Kiki (Alice Prin)

When this book was first published in the U.S. in 1930, playwright Robert E. Sherwood, reviewing it for Scribners, was not impressed:

Kiki was and is a queen of Montparnasse, a central figure in the weird, eye-filling, sense-curdling decoration of the Dome. She has been the subject and pal of most of the artists who, in the past decade, have been rejected by the Salon and ridiculed by the elder satirists only to awaken one morning to find themselves famous with Frank Crowninshield. Several of their portraits of her are reproduced in her book, but they are not nearly so good, as specimens of genuine modern art, as are her own scrawled sketches.

Ernest Hemingway has provided an introduction for the English version of “Kiki’s Memoirs.” He says that “it is written by a woman who, as far as I know, never had a Room of Her Own, but I think part of it will remind you, and some of it will bear comparison with, another book with a woman’s name written by Daniel Defoe.” He also says, “It is a crime to translate it,” and he is presumably right for, whatever the work may have been in its original form, in English it is thoroughly undistinguished, not particularly diverting, and hardly worth the wear and tear on the Customs officers imposed by those who attempt to smuggle it in.

Better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, Alice Ernestine Prin posed for just about every artist to wield a paintbrush or chisel in Paris in the 1920s (and slept with a number of them, too). She packed in enough experience to deem it worth writing a memoir at the young age of 28. Translated into English by Samuel Putnam, it was published with an introduction by Ernest Hemingway by the Black Manikin Press, a small press run by Edward Titus, cosmetics queen Helena Rubenstein’s husband, and promptly censored upon the arrival of the first shipment in the U.S..

But Kiki’s memoirs have had more lives than a cat. It was reissued, sans ban, by Boar’s Head Books in 1950, by Bridgehead Booksin 1955, as this Belmont paperback in 1962, by Tandem in London in 1964, and by both Ecco and Harper Collins in 1996. Kiki’s life was chronicled in Kiki’s Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900-1930, by Billy Kluver and Julie Martin in 1989 and more recently was the subject of Kiki de Montparnasse, a 2012 graphic novel by Catel Muller and Jose-Luis Bocquet.

Cover of There Was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings

#4: There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings, by Robert McAlmon

A title almost too long to fit on the spine of this slim Belmont edition, There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings is another souvenir from 1920s Paris. In this case, it’s a collection of three short stories originally published in 1925 as Distinguished Air by McAlmon’s own small press, Contact Editions. Contact is best known for issuing Hemingway’s first book, Three Stories & Ten Poems (1924) and Gertrude Stein’s Making of Americans (1925). McAlmon had founded the press after he married Winifred Ellerman, better known by her pen-name of Bryher. He was gay, she lesbian, and the marriage served only to deceive her father and keep her substantial inheritance intact.

Together and apart, they lived in all the right places to experience the artistic and sexual freedom of the time–Berlin, Paris, the Riviera. The stories in Distinguished Air are all set in Berlin and revolve around the world of sex, drugs, and cabaret:

When the cocaine dealer tired to get affectionate with me, and kissed me on the cheek, I pushed him away with feeble protest. The Polish boy took my arm, warningly, informing me, what I was ready to believe, that the German was schlecht (bad). He also became affectionate, as the men around Kepler were attempting to become with him, and Kepler’s protest was no more violent than mine had been. I felt vaguely resentful towards Flora, who, it seemed, could have paid more attention to me than she did, but it was easy to be seen that she was interested only in her own morbidity at the time.

As this excerpt should demonstrate, There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings is not in the same league as Christopher Isherwood’s better known Goodbye to Berlin. Malcolm Cowley considered 90% of McAlmon’s writing slapdash, betraying his lack of patience with rewriting and editing.

There was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings has resurfaced in recent years. The University of New Mexico Press issued it as Miss Knight and Others, edited by Edward Larusso with a foreword by Gore Vidal, and a Kindle version, under the original title of Distinguished Air is also available.

Cover of The Chute by Albert Halper

#5: The Chute, by Albert Halper

Halper was the premier American proletarian novelist of the 1930s, focusing on the lives in and around great workplaces such as printing plants, foundries (The Foundry (1934)), and, in the case of The Chute, the warehouse of a great mail-order company.

When it first came out, Saturday Review’s reviewer, N. L. Rothman praised the power of Halper’s prose:

To say that The Chute is even better than The Foundry would be an inconclusive half-truth; the more important half is that both, as well as Union Square, are sequential parts of an organic, growing body of work. Each of Halper’s novels has been a sure progression from, almost out of, the last, reflecting his steady development. He works with a prose that seems easy and artless, until you notice that other dimension he has given it, a pulsing, rhythmic quality which triples the meaning and the power of his severely simple vocabulary.

Ironically, given that he was writing in The New Masses, Granville Hicks focused not on the economic or political aspects of the novel but on its characters:

Halper’s obviously accurate account of the working of a mail-order house is impressive, but it would not accomplish his purpose if he were not able to set human beings before you. His characters are victims of a cruel type of exploitation, but they are remarkably resilient, full of hope, capable of joy. No one can accuse the author of a false optimism: most hopes are undeniably doomed to disappointment; the union that is organized conducts no victorious strike; the’ business itself has collapsed when the novel ends, and most of the characters, though they do not yet know it, are facing unemployment.

Halper was not, however, above depicting the men in charge as a bunch of soulless hard cases:

At the finish of the “tour,” Mr. McCracken said: “The floor is in good shape today.” He took a small book from his pocket, making the department 90 percent. At his last “tour,” the department had earned only 70 percent. He made these visits three or four times a year, unexpectedly, and the buyers were terrified when he came down. Their floors were marked on a “percentage” basis, and they never knew what was done with these reports. Mr. McCracken, though he stared at you pleasantly, had a certain amount of steel in his gray eyes. He reminded you somehow of an officer who, after shaking hands with his men as an equal, suddenly brings out” “All right, boys, over the top in a bayonet charge!”

If any these books is a candidate for reissue, it’s Albert Halper’s The Chute. Now that stories about grueling conditions in Amazon warehouses are becoming regular items in our news, the time seems right to bring this book back for a new audience.

Cover of Lonely Boy Blues by Alan Kapelner

#6: Lonely Boy Blues, by Alan Kapelner

Lonely Boy Blues was first recommended on this site by the intrepid Robert Nedelkoff in a list of recommendations he provided way back in 2007. Robert had written a long piece on Kapelner in his “Remainder Table” series for The Baffler ten years before that. Published by Scribner’s and edited by the legendary Max Perkins, the book is, as Robert has written, “by far the most experimental novel Perkins edited, clearly influenced by Dos Passos and Joyce–and this is remarkable because Perkins was known to usually discourage such experimentation by the writers he worked with.”

Kapelner had been kicked out of the American Communist Party and bummed around the U.S. before he sat down to write a story set in Brooklyn and buzzing with the manic energy of a big city:

Now let’s get this straight!

The flesh spins to the skull, and discharging in the skull lives the brain, jackpot brain, passport to a future, mardi-gras destiny drowning in confetti and wine. The future belongs to you, you are the future. Very elementary, my dear brain. Paste yourself to the bandwagon. Be the spoke in its wheel, you bitter American Dream brain, brain most likely not to succeed as a spoke, brain not knowing where it’s going, but it’s going. Oh, it’s a good brain as far as good brains go, but as far as good brains go it went. There’s one in every household.

No wonder that anyone who’s read the book instantly recognizes a precursor to the jazz-infused prose style of Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers. The publicity release for Lonely Boy Blues claimed that Kapelner wrote the book while listening non-stop to boogie-woogie records (including, no doubt, Jay McShann’s “Lonely Boy Blues”), and his wife, Edith Stephen, confirms that he used a manual typewriter exclusively because he loved the percussive sound of its keys.

But Lonely Boy Blues may also be the best novel for conveying the atmosphere of New York City in the midst of World War Two:

And then came the change in their voices, washed in mist. They walked like goons to a table, slumped in their chairs and the guy who said he’d get stewed was stewed, and he delivered a drooling lecture on topical themes:

The war and what’s gonna be?

How come housepainting wasn’t good enough for Hitler?

The brand of Churchill’s cigars.

Who told the Japs they can play baseball?

If the Russian women pilot boats and drive tanks who in the hell does the cooking?

Mahatma Gandhi’s laundry bills.

Why Mussolini should use Kreml.

The Turkish situation and the food in Chinatown.

The Man in the White House.

The meat situation in relation to the French situation.

V for Victory, da, da, da, DA!

The book was also undoubtedly too edgy for its time. Reviewing in The New York Times, Ruth Schorer (wife of critic Mark Schorer) gave it half a thumbs-up:

Lonely Boy Blues is the kind of book towards which it is almost impossible not to take a parental tone.

Every word of his novel, a publicity release has stated, was written to recorded boogie-woogie, and the expectation was that the jazz tempo and mood of metropolitan life would insinuate themselves into the prose. The result is an egregiously pretentious bit of fiction.

The view of metropolitan life which emerges from this book is the exact opposite of that which makes for the popular success of a novel like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And what one likes about Mr. Kapelner is exactly his determination to admit no compromise with the Good, the Beautiful and the True, when he can find none of these in experience itself.

…despite himself, Mr. Kapelner produces a mood. Something of the vast aimless chaos of city life, of the corrosive effect of mass poverty, of the shrillness and the stridency, of the drowned individual tragedy in the great mechanical mass, of the lonely condition of the ant-like human creature–something of this he expresses.

The book didn’t sell, but its loose connection with the Beats was enough to convince Belmont and several cheap paperback houses (Mayflower, Belmont, Lion) to reprint it. None of them made a dent in Kapelner’s career. For years after writing Lonely Boy Blues, he later told the writer Seymour Krim, “I didn’t know what to do with my time. I screwed around a lot, I wasted a lot of years….”

Stapled to the cover of my copy of Lonely Boy Blues was a 3×5 card written and signed by Kapelner:

Note from Alan Kapelner

My guess is that “Mr. Kasher” was Charles Kasher, who produced a few Broadway shows and movies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From the context of the note, I infer that Kapelner was writing around that time in hopes of interesting Kasher in an adaptation.

In 1960, he published a second novel, All the Naked Heroes, set in 1930s New York. The reviews were a little better, and it did earn the honor of being one of the 430 books found in Marilyn Monroe’s library after she died. It fell out of copyright after he died, so you can find it online at the Hathi Trust (link). Kapelner died in 1990 at the age of 77 without publishing another book.

Just last year, however, his wife Edith, who started a new career as a video artistin her 90s, released a short film, The Invisible Writer Becomes Visible, in tribute to Kapelner’s life and work. You can watch it now on YouTube:

It’s probably the first video you’ve ever seen that was produced by a 98 year old and a great way to bring this roundup of 50+ year old paperback covers to an end.

Chrstimas Eve, by Alistair Cooke (1952)

Cover of Christmas Eve by Alistair Cooke

Christmas Eve collects three of Alistair Cooke’s Christmas-time stories from his legendary BBC “Letters from America” broadcast. I listened to the audiobook version of the collection, Letters from America, 1946-1004, recently, and saddened at the thought that his sublimely calm, balanced voice is no longer with us. But this last year would surely have been tough even for him.

Though Christmas Eve is packaged like a children’s book, neither Cooke’s stories nor the wonderful illustrations by Marc Simont are children’s fare. The first story is about an ex-banker, wiped out by the Great Depression and living in a flophouse in the Bowery, who takes a department store Santa job and then celebrates by commandeering a yellow cab and careening around Manhattan. The second is about a Hollywood screenwriter’s “epic” journey to get to his sister’s home in Connecticut by midnight Christmas Eve. What might have seemed epic to Cooke and his listeners in the early fifties seems pretty much like what one out of three people trying to fly home at Christmas experience every year now.

The third is a little fable about an olde New Amsterdammer named Van Dam and his three daughters and his present-day (1952) counterpart, and hinges on whether you think there’s something inherently funny about a name like Van Dam. Well, those were more innocent days in some ways.

The real pleasure in Christmas Eve is not the stories but the voice of the author and the spirit of the illustrations. Treat yourself this weekend: go to the BBC’s archive of “Letters from America” broadcasts and experience this mad world viewed through sane and tolerant eyes.

Christmas Eve, by Alistair Cooke
New York City: Knopf, 1952

Selected Modern Short Stories, edited by Alan Steele (1937)

Selected Modern Short Stories–the first of several collections that editor Alan Steele compiled for Penguin in the late 1930s–offers a good illustration of the random nature of literary fate. Let’s take at look at the authors listed on the cover:

• John Hampson

Hampson’s first-published novel, Saturday Night at the Greyhound (1931) was a surprise best-seller for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and is back in print now, thanks to the ever-diligent Valancourt Books. It’s considerably harder to find his short stories, however. Only two were ever published i book form, and this in the very scarce Two Stories: The Mare’s Nest and The Long Shadow (1931), hand-printed in an edition of 250 by radical publisher Charles Lahr.

• Helen Simpson

Simpson’s historical romances, such as Under Capricorn, were very popular during their time, but are now out of print outside her native Australia. You can, however, find her novel, Saraband for Dead Lovers (1935), available on the Internet Archive. She published just one collection, The Baseless Fabric (1925), well before this anthology. The one copy I could find for sale goes for $1000. When this was published, one reviewer wrote of it, “… eleven profoundly imagined creations here contained, each one, perfect in the exact balance and unfailing accuracy of its veiled suggestion, concerned with the potencies for good or evil latent in the invisible realm which separates the conscious senses from the surrounding world.”

• H. E. Bates

Bates enjoyed a pretty consistent and happy balance of critical and popular esteem throughout his career and it has held on to this day. A good share of his novels and short story collections are in print, but you can also find his collection, The Enchantress (1961), for free on the Internet Archive.

• Martin Armstrong

Armstrong’s work is long out of print, which is one reason why I wrote about his Selected Stories (1951) a few months ago. You can find a snippet of his work online in a throw-away compilation titled, What is Happiness? (1939), in which he and other English writers such as J. B. Priestley and Storm Jameson offered their answers to this question. I like Armstrong’s sly approach to avoiding an actual answer:

Before we can be truly happy we must gain control of our minds. How am I to do so?

The answer is simple: by obeying the Greek maxim, ‘Know thyself.’ Good! We are almost, it seems, at the end of our inquiry. Only one question remains: how am I to get to know myself? Ah! Now you’re asking. Saints and philosophers have been engaged on this simple question for some thousands of years but, unhappily, the answer is not yet to hand.

• H. A. Manhood

H. A. Manhood was considered one of the best short story writers of the 1930s, but in the mid-1950s he gave up writing entirely and retired to an abandoned railway carriage in a field in West Sussex, where he spent the next decades brewing his own cider and attempting to get by as much as possible on a subsistence basis. Thanks to the Sundial Press, a collection of his stories, Life Be Still!, is now available, but you can also find his Selected Stories (1947)

• T. O. Beachcroft

Reviewing Beachcroft’s second story collection, Graham Greene wrote that “Mr. Beachcroft is likely to become, after Mr. H. E. Bates, the most distinguished short-story writer in this country,” but unlike Bates, his work has disappeared without a trace. He didn’t even have a Wikipedia entry until I wrote one earlier today. Reviewing one of his later collections in The Spectator, Stevie Smith wrote:

Mr. Beachcroft’s talent is disarming. One thinks: thank heavens just a simple tale, with people one knows and bits of scenery and a bit of human feeling, not much more, but very agreeable. It is not difficult to put the reader in this pleasantly superior frame of mind, and having got the donkey where You want him, the creature is in your power…. Simplicity is the word for Mr. Beachcroft’s stories, but it is a poet’s simplicity, the most subtle in the world.

Thanks to the Internet Archive, you can enjoy The Collected Stories of T. O. Beachcroft (1946), which I will cover in more depth soon.

• Liam O’Flaherty

Liam O’Flaherty will probably always have at least his classic novel, The Informer, in print, and his collection, The Wounded Cormorant was a feature of high school reading lists for decades. You can also find The Informer online at the Internet Archive, but for his stories, look for the exemplary collection, The Stories of Liam O’Flaherty (1956), at the Open Library.

• L. A. G. Strong

Several of Strong’s novels are back in print thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing’s fine series of solid middlebrow novels and story collections from the 1930s-1960s. None of his numerous short story books are in print, but you can enjoy a healthy sample in his Travellers: Thirty-One Selected Stories (147), available from the Internet Archive.

• Malachi Whitaker

As Malachi Whitaker, Yorkshire housewife Marjorie Whitaker became known as the “Bradford Chekhov” and was considered perhaps the finest woman writer of short stories between Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, but her work felt out of print for several decades until her collection, The Crystal Fountain, and autobiography, And So Did I, were released by Paladin Press in the 1990s. Unfortunately, they dropped from sight again after than. Just recently, however, Persephone Books added to their growing list of rediscovered by releasing Journey Home and Other Stories.

• Frank O’Connor

O’Connor is safely ensconced as the leading Irish short story writer to follow Joyce–as demonstrated by the fact that the introduction to his Collected Stories (1981) was written by none other than famed Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann.

• William Plomer

Plomer’s is one of those names that fans of neglected books will recognize, as one or other of his books–whether his South African novel Turbott Wolfe or his English novel Museum Pieces or his eccentric family memoir, Curious Relations–often shows up on lists such as those from Antaeus or Tin House. His short stories, however, vanished decades ago. Luckily, you can find a worthy sample on the Internet Archive in his collection Four Countries (1949), which includes stories set in Africa, Japan, Greece, and England. In his introduction, Plomer put himself solidly in the traditionalist camp when it came to short stories:

We rightly expect a story to have a point, and this generally means that we expect it to be dramatic. A short story must let us into the secrets of other people’s lives, and unless it lets us into their lives at a moment of crisis, it is unlikely to have much point or to be dramatic. The crisis may be a small one, but a crisis there must be. This crisis must engage the reader’s imagination, and it must illuminate some new or unfamiliar aspect of the human predicament, or some familiar aspect in a new way. As for the manner in which this is done, there are infinite possibilities, but it must be adroit.

• Rhys Davies

Welsh writer Rhys Davies is still popular among his fellow countrymen thanks to the Library of Wales series, but mostly overlooked elsewhere. A large sample of his work can be found online, however, in The Collected Stories of Rhys Davies on the Internet Archive. Davies took a measured view of the lot of the short story writer:

Short stories are a luxury which only those writers who fall in love with them can afford to cultivate. To such a writer they yield the purest enjoyment; they become a privately elegant craft allowing, within very strict confines, a wealth of idiosyncrasies. Compared with the novel, that great public park so often complete with draughty spaces, noisy brass band and unsightly litter, the enclosed and quiet short story garden is of small importance, and never has been much more…. The short story gives the release of a day off, when something happened which one remembers with a smile or a start of interest, with a pang or a pause of fear.

Croatian Tales of Long Ago, by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (1922)

From the cover of Croatian Tales of Long Ago


One day late, but in keeping with the spirit of Halloween, which reminds us each year of the didactic benefits of scaring the crap out of kids, I want to celebrate a fine example of fairy tales told with the gloves off. As Bruno Bettelheim (perhaps somewhat plagiaristically) reminded us, uniformly pleasant and positive stories have their place in children’s literature, but so do terror, violence, and horrible-looking monsters with sharp teeth: “‘Safe’ stories mention neither death nor aging, the limits to our existence, nor the wish for eternal life. The fairy tale, by contrast, confronts the child squarely with the basic human predicaments.” And while Bettelheim’s argument may have been weakened by the facts of his credentials and practices that have come to light since the publication of The Uses of Enchantment, there is an undeniable edge of terror in many folk tale traditions.

In an article in The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature, David Boudinot wrote, “Teaching fear through fairy tales is a proven method of helping children learn about safety, and it can help improve a child’s judgement and critical thinking skills.” By this standard, Ivana Brlić-Mažurani&cacute deserves a posthumous plaque from the folks at the National Safety Council for her collection, Croatian Tales of Long Ago available in its English translation by F. S. Copeland on the Internet Archive (link). Here are a few excerpts to demonstrate how these tales can help spice up the endless flow of Paddington pablum:

“Come along, brother, let’s get rid of grandfather. You have weapons. Wait for him by the well and kill him.”
…
There was the poor little fairy Curlylocks caught in the bowels of the earth! She was buried alive in that vast grave, and perhaps would never again see those golden fields for which she had set out, and all because she would not go straight on by the way they had intended, but would loiter and turn aside to the right and to the left to pry into God’s secrets!
…
Through fog and twilight ran Reygoch with the children in his arms and the terrified flocks at his heels in frantic flight—all running towards the dyke. And out to meet them flowed the Black Banewater, killing and drowning as it flowed. It is terribly strong, is that water. Stronger than Reygoch? Who knows? Will it sweep away Reygoch, too? Will it drown those poor herd boys and girls also, and must the dear little Fairy Curlylocks die—and she as lovely as a star?
…
Already the soldiers were battering at the entrance. Heavy clubs hammered on the doors and portals, banging and clanging till all the courts and passages of the soot-blacked house rang again, as though a host from the nethermost Pit were beating on the gates of Oleg the Warden.
…
Suddenly the Mountain rang with the most awful noise, so that the branches swayed and the leaves trembled on the trees, and the rocks and cliffs re-echoed down to the deepest cavern. It was Belleroo roaring.
…
So now the Sun thundered forth his anger. All the land fell silent with fear; axes and clubs were dropped in terror as the Sun thundered.

Illustration by Vladimir Kirin from “Croatian Tales of Long Ago”

The Copeland translation, published in 1922 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, is further spiced up with intricate paintings and black-and-white illustrations by Croatian artist Vladimir Kirin. The painting of the lion, bear, and wolf attacking the dragon—speaking of educating through fear and violence—from the book’s cover, however, is by the American illustrator, M. M. Williams (and depicts an event that doesn’t occur in any of the tales).

 

Croatian Tales of Long Ago, by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, translated by F. S. Copeland
New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1922

Paperbacks from the Montana Valley Bookstore

Exterior - Montana Valley Bookstore in Alberton, Montana

A visit to the Montana Valley Bookstore in Alberton, Montana, has been one of my rituals during our annual stay in Missoula, but this year events put books and many other things on hold. I did, however, snatch about 45 minutes in the store, just before closing, on my way back from a hospital in Spokane, and harvested about a dozen books from their basement paperback stash. Old paperbacks hold a special place in my heart, perhaps because they were the first books I bought when I started haunting used bookstores back in the mid-1970s. And one of the reasons I love the Montana Valley Bookstore is that it’s one of the ever-dwindling number of used bookstores that still has a substantial holding of paperbacks from the decades before trade paperbacks took over.

With only a short time to spare, I focused on looking for interesting titles by women writers. It’s harder and harder to surprise me — but not impossible, and easily the biggest surprise was the two thick Dell paperbacks by Arona McHugh.

Arona McHugh - Banner with a Strange Device and The Seacoast of Bohemia

If I’ve ever seen either of these books, I’ve forgotten. But from a material standpoint alone, I recognized a substantial piece of work when I saw it, and, of course, bought them both. Taken together, A Banner with a Strange Device and The Seacoast of Bohemia tell the stories of a collection of young men and women in post-World War Two Boston. Running over 1300 pages, the two books put Marguerite Young’s Miss Mackintosh, My Darling and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to shame in the Great American Doorstop Novel Race. Whether the same can be said about their literary merits is something I cannot yet say. The New Yorker’s brief review offered the faint praise that “Mrs. McHugh’s rough, able-bodied style carries her at full speed through almost six hundred pages, in which she describes the manners, looks, and varying sexual capacities and appetites of a group of young Boston people during the years immediately following the Second World War.” Writing in The New York Times, Haskel Frankel was a little less polite, saying that Banner should have been titled, “The Sun Also Rises on King Kong and Lady Chatterley.” Exactly one year later, Seacoast and Frankel again was the Times man on the scene. He surmised that the two books were, in fact, one novel roughly hewn in two by a publisher afraid to launch a single monolith into bookshops, and credited McHugh as “a natural-born storyteller, one of that rare type who can write about rocks and reduce the reader to a jelly.” On the other hand, he also concluded that “Enough is enough and 1,259 pages of painful youth in Boston is too much.” So perhaps I will not be assaulting Mount McHugh anytime soon.

Maude Hitchins - Honey on the Moon

The name Maude Hutchins struck a vaguely familiar note, which is why I picked up Honey on the Moon, but only after a quick search did I see it was because NYRB Classics reissued her novel of a girl’s coming of age, Victorine, with an introduction by Terry Castle. Hutchins spent 27 years in an unhappy marriage with Robert Maynard Hutchins, who played a large role in elevating the University of Chicago to a level equal with the Ivy League. But after their divorce, as Castle puts it, “the defection of the boy wonder that seems to have changed her, almost overnight, from dabbler in the avant-garde to serious writer.” Thumbing through the book, I gathered it’s the story of a young bride who begins to suspect that her older husband married her for her resemblance to — and value as a cover for his interest in — a younger man. Kirkus Reviews called it a “screaming spoof on the New Wave films, the anti-novel, and those drugstore bestsellers of purple passions.” Another reviewer wrote that Hutchins wrote for “the kind of reader who will assume her complexity from her carefully selected simplicities.” This one sounds worth placing in the to-read pile.

Elizabeth Jenkins - Brightness
I knew exactly who Elizabeth Jenkins was when I spotted this copy of her 1963 novel, Brightness. Jenkins, who may hold the longevity record for writers, having passed in 2010 at the age of 104, is best known for her novel of marital tension, The Tortoise and the Hare. When that book was reissued as a Virago Modern Classic, Hillary Mantel wrote that it was “as smooth and seductive as a bowl of cream,” and that Jenkins “seems to know a good deal about how women think and how their lives are arranged; what women collude in, what they fear.” Which is interesting, considering that Jenkins herself never married. Brightness is about the relationship between two very different mothers (and their no-so-different sons) in a small English village — the sort of situation that lead immediately to comparisons with Jane Austen. One reviewer called it “a fine novel — rather on the side of the angels, but without a smidgen of candied inspirational guff” and quoted the excellent line, “If you’ve only come across suffering that could be cured by psychiatry, you’ve done pretty well so far.”

Vera Randall - The Inner Room

The Inner Room purports to be a novel, but it’s probably more accurate to call it a linked set of short stories. It tells the individual stories of five women committed to an asylum for a variety of conditions ranging from post-partum depression to alcoholism. One of the stories was originally published in The New Yorker. Although Martha Cameron wrote, in an early NY Review of Books issue, that the book was “affecting and yet somehow fraudulent,” Randal appears to have based the work on first-hand observations, as she went on to publish a second novel (story collection?) on essentially the same topic, You Get Used to a Place.

Anne Bernays - The New York Ride
The New York Ride was the second of Anne Bernays’ ten novels, an account of the growing up and growing apart of two friends — first on a tour of Italy, swapping away ever-hovering Italian men, then in New York City as they navigate through the “floating crap game” artists, poets and poseurs in the Village, and finally in their married lives, when one’s apparent bi-polar disorder (two decades before it was routinely diagnosed) starts to rip things apart. One reviewer wrote that it was “fueled by a wit, intelligence and perception that make it a pleasure to read.”

Iris Dornfeld - Jeeney Ray

“Several cuts above Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird” declares a quote from a Sacramento Bee review. This was enough to pick Jeeney Ray as a subject for further research. What I did find out was that Iris Dornfeld was abetter known as Mrs. Carey McWilliams, whose husband was editor of The Nation magazine and journalist who first came to fame for his work exposing the brutal conditions of farm workers in California. Jeeney Ray earned respectable reviews from the few major national papers and magazines to review it. In The Saturday Review, Aileen Pippett wrote, “Every memorable novel has its distinctive tone. This one sings. Yet the characters are mostly brutal, ignorant, or depraved, their language is coarse and their actions are in keeping. Nature pleaseth, in Northern California, but man is frequently vile. Against a murky background Jeeney Ray herself shines like a star.” Jeeney Ray is considered mentally handicapped by most everyone in her town, but her grandmother has a greater trust in her senses. After many hardships and misunderstandings, Jeeney Ray is diagnosed as spastic — a term fortunately no longer in use, but one that unfortunately led to some pretty brutal “treatments,” such as forced sterilization. Dornfeld had grown up in the same area Jeeney Ray is set in, from what she called “a family of singers, storytellers, Bible-reciters, make-believers, and downright liars.”

Based on what 45 minutes produced, I look forward to having more time to browse when I return next year.

Popular Library’s “That’s So ’70s” Take on Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage

As I mentioned in my introductory post on Pilgrimage, there have been five editions in which the complete set of chapters/novels were published:

  • A four-volume set with 12 chapters/novels, from J. M. Dent and Cresset Press in 1938
  • A four-volume set with 12 chapters/novels, from Knopf in 1938
  • A four-volume set with 13 chapters/novels, from J. M. Dent in 1967
  • A four-volume set with 13 chapters/novels, from Popular Library in 1976
  • A four-volume set with 13 chapters/novels, from Virago in 1979

Of these, by far the oddest is the mass-market paperback set from Popular Library, one of which I am now the proud owner of.

I kind of remember seeing these when they first came out. As an English major, I was vaguely aware of Dorothy Richardson, probably having seen a reference to her in some survey piece I had to read as part of Prof. Malcolm Brown’s course on the 20th century British novel, but knew not much more than that she was lumped with Virginia Woolf, who I considered (at the time, and in the words of one of my classmates) “too adjective-y.” But when I saw these on the shelf, probably of the University Book Store , is it any wonder that I quickly labelled and filed them away under “soft porn”?

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If I bothered to open any of the four volumes — and I’m sure I didn’t — nothing in the inside cover would have dissuaded me from that opinion. To help would-be readers out, Popular Libary provided one-line synopses of the chapters:

• Pointed Roofs

“filled with the intrigues and hidden passions of a German girl’s school…”

• Backwater

“a school of life and love in London, where two different men each demand that Miriam be his…”

• Interim

“an escape from the bondage of the flesh into the ecstasies of the spirit…”

• Deadlock

“in which Miriam Henderson plunges into an affair with a man of an alien race…”

• The Trap

“a world of women who scorn men — an inverted world that welcomes Miriam with open arms…”

• Dawn’s Left Hand

“introducing Miriam to the joys and the agonies of a passionate love between two women…”

Even now, it makes me want to wash my hands.

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And then there are the cover photos. OK, they are true on one point: Miriam is a woman.

But the books are set between 1893 and 1915. And Miriam is short (5′ 4″, according to Richardson). And not considered particularly good looking by any of the men she encounters. And a brunette. Who was probably lucky to wash her hair more than once every few weeks, and who certainly never used a conditioner. And, though I haven’t done my research on this point, I’m pretty sure she never used lip gloss, either. Or had her portraits taken by Bob Guccione.

Contrary to the tag line above each volume title, Pilgrimage was not a “towering novel of the female revolution.” If it was, the females lost, unless “level of self-knowledge” had more political power back then than it does now.

In case we unwary buyers weren’t convinced by the covers, the backs of the books further promised that this could the kind of soft porn you could read in public — sort of like Proust meets Emmanuele:

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Now, anyone who bothered to read the finer print below it would actually get a fairly objective description of Pilgrimage:

The magnificent novels that comprise Pilgrimage constitute one of the most enthralling and revealing [as in illuminating, not as in she takes her clothes off … a lot] fiction experiences of our time. Each novel is designed as a separate drama, but all form beautifully wrought links of a chain of being and becoming that lead its remarkable heroine, Miriam, through the major conflicts and decisions that have affected humanity, and most particularly women, in our century of crisis and change.

In this extraordinary work of art, Dorothy Richardson creates a style and projects a vision that give twentieth women both a voice and an identity. For this is woman’s fiction in the finest sense of the term — fiction that explores the many facets of modern life, whether sex or politics, friendship or art, though the eyes of a woman bent on changing the world as she changes herself. Long considered by leading critics one of the key achievements of modern literature, Pilgrimage at least reaches the American public in this four-volume edition.

The trouble is, if soft porn is what you have in mind, you could read all of the above and think this was a female version of My Secret Life (which was also, by the way, a fairly regular item in a liberated fiction section in the late 1970s).

There is little chance that this Popular Library series will make a permanent mark in publishing or literary history. Quality was never a hallmark of the company. As you can see from the above, the four books are actually even the same size, quite. When I got this set in the mail recently, I opened up the first volume and the brittle cover proceeded to break off completely from the binding. Another decade or two, and these puppies will self-destruct. And another scarifying ’70s relic will, thankfully, be lost forever.

The Visitors, by Mary McMinnies (1958)

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The odd, alien green tint of the cover of the U.S. edition of Mary McMinnie’s second novel, The Visitors is somehow appropriate for this long out-of-print book, for it manages to be, at the same time, both highly realistic–indeed, drearily, tediously, relentlessly realistic at times, the kind of realism that’s so convincing that it can feel like the writer is holding your head under water and you want to struggle to break free–and utterly artificial.

The artificiality comes from the situation in which McMinnies places her main character, Milly Purdoe. A beautiful, lively but superficial woman, she find herself stuck in a grim provincial Polish city–a fictional equivalent of Krakow–in its bleakest, most repressive post-Stalinist days, the trailing spouse of a minor British Foreign Service officer. (The German title of the book was Seltsame Gäste–“Strange Guests.”) Quartered in a cold apartment in the town’s once-grand hotel, she has little to do but avoid tangles with her children’s stone-faced nanny, look for antiques in the pathetic stores and flea markets, and read Madame Bovary. Although the nanny is a novelty, a sign of her husband’s rise in the civil service, everything else is a little too familiar to Milly:

Already it was October. That was how time passed. Between departure from the last place, arrival at the next, and for a week or two either side, miraculously it stood still–if you could always be doing that, coming and going, going and coming. But no sooner had you arrived than you began, because it had to be and you were experienced at it, to settle in. No sooner were you settled in and starting to find your feet, yet still making discoveries like where to buy the best sausage and the bread and each day holding the promise of some novel experience before it close, than, before you knew where you were, the days would begin to assume a pattern, to merge into each other, yesterday like to-day, to-day like to-morrow; and in front of your eyes, little by little, the excitement would be fading, the novelty becoming stale, until in no time at all you knew you would be passing through the intermediate stage, the seemingly endless one you care for least, between coming and going. It would be like living in a dream; not uncomfortable, because only reality is that–your pulse-beat steady, you would be eating well, sleeping well; but certain times of day, the performing of certain actions, sherry at twelve, gin at six, brushing your teeth, pouring tea, seeming to come round with deadly regularity until you would feel something simply had to happen to joly you out of it, the dream routine; even if it were to be no more than a gale, like the gale with had raged the night before and had swept not only a great many leaves off the trees but a leaf off the calendar, too, and now it was October.

And so, like Flaubert’s romantic trapped in a dull French provincial town, Milly soon finds ways to keep busy that are undoubtedly amusing to her but also clearly dangerous and self-destructive when carried out under the eyes of a paranoid police state.

The Visitors is a big, ambitious book, rich is characterization and description, ruthless in its social satire, mesmerizing in its powerful narrative vortex. Some reviewers found that McMinnie’s ambitions outstretched her artistic reach, comparing her work with that of the period’s biggest over-the-topper, James Jones. It was picked up by the Book of the Month Club, which boosted its U.S. sales, and was twice released as a paperback, the second time in 1967 as a Penguin paperback. It’s been out of print ever since, though, and McMinnies appears to have published nothing since. A couple of readers remember it with enthusiasm on Goodreads and Amazon, but their reviews and this one are the book’s sole mentions on the Web.

The Visitors, by Mary McMinnies
New York City: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1958

The Drunk, the Damned and the Bedevilled, by Terence Ford

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The cover of The Drunk, the Damned, and the Bedevilled is chock full of all that is good in pulp fiction: sex, violence, alcohol and weirdness. The weirdness comes in part from the rather odd perspective of the picture (perhaps the artist had been punched by the guy in the tie and was looking up from the floor), in part from the Gregory Peck-like man in the middle, who seems outraged by the behavior of the guy in the tie but unable to get up from his chair, and in part from the title. Drunk, damned and bedevilled? We can easily imagine a classic pulp titled, The Drunk and the Damned. But Bedevilled? It comes across as hardly stronger than Befuddled.

The title is even odder when one considers that the novel’s original title was He Feeds the Birds, which comes from the Bible, Matthew 6:26: “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” One can see how this title wasn’t exactly fit for purpose if the aim was to grab the eye of a scanning would-be buyer of cheap fiction, but did Bedevilled slip in as an unconscious nod to the Christian basis of the original?

Finally, to top off things odd, when Berkeley Books decided to give Terence Ford’s book another try as a pulp in 1959, they steered in the opposite direction, going with the riveting title, Easy Living, and a cover that replaces a cocktail party fight with a starving writer listening to his wife’s pregnant belly.

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The Drunk, the Damned, and the Bedevilled, by Terence Ford
New York: Avon Books, 1952

Classic Covers from Claude Kendall Books

I recently picked up a first (and only) edition of Felix Riesenberg’s 1933 novel, Mother Sea, and was intrigued to see that it came from Claude Kendall, the same publisher that issued some of Tiffany Thayer’s most notorious over-the-top pot-boilers (including Thirteen Men and Thirteen Women).

Doing a bit of Googling, I quickly learned two things about Mr. Kendall: first, that he was murdered in a New York City hotel room in 1937, a murder that has never been solved (courtesy of The Passing Tramp); and second, that while the literary standards of his firm may not have been the highest, their book covers are among the most memorable of their period. Here is a little sample for your guilty pleasures:

Uncle Sham, by Kanhaya Lal Gauba (1929)

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This scathing satire of American life, subtitled “Being the Strange Tale of a Civilisation Run Amok,” which viewed the country from the perspective of the most virulent and self-righteous visitor, was a reaction to Katherine Mayo’s 1927 book, Mother India. The New Yorker’s reviewer called it “the best comic volume of the year.”

Lo!, by Charles Fort (1931)

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Depending on whose side you take, Charles Fort was either a “satirist hugely skeptical of human beings” or “a patron of cranks.” Either way, he was well-regarded by some people and still is today. He’s got his own society (the International Fortean Organization) and a magazine (Fortean Times) devoted to the phenomena he studied. Lo! comes with an introduction by Tiffany Thayer, illustrations by Alexander King (viz. my pan of his memoir, Mine Enemy Grows Older), and cover plugs by Theodore Dreiser, Booth Tarkington, and John Cowper Powys.

Smoking Altars, by Gladys St. John Loe (1936)

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Murder mysteries were a specialty for Claude Kendall, preferably set in exotic locations. This one takes place on a plantation in Kenya. Lionel Houser’s Lake of Fire was set in Burma, The Surrender of Helen in the South Seas, and Death Rides the Air Line on the then-novel mode of transportation. Murder in Bermuda, written by Kendall’s financial backer, Willoughby Sharp (who added his name on the books starting in 1934), is self-explanatory.

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Pasha the Persian, by Margaret Linden, with illustrations by Milt Gross (1936)

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Illustrated by the legendary cartoonist, Milt Gross, this might have been meant by Ms. Linden to be a children’s story, but Gross’ wild drawings put this solidly in the American tradition of tall tales, and might have been Gross’ attempt to out-do his compatriot George Herriman’s KrazyKat.

Twisted Clay, by Frank Walford (1934)

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Fetching a whopping $2,000 on Amazon, this novel of a demented teen-aged lesbian, in the words of James Doig, “has the distinction of being one of the more bizarre thrillers published in the 1930s, which is saying something given the excruciating excesses of R.R. Ryan, Harry Keeler, J.U. Nicolson amongst others.” It was banned for decades in Walford’s native Australia, although from the looks of it, Walford might have been plowing the same row as Kendall fave Tiffany Thayer. You can read more about the book on Wormwoodiana, the Tartarus Press blog. Kendall also published another early classic of lesbiana, G. Sheila Donisthorpe’s Loveliest of Friends.

Claude Kendall’s house was, in a way, the Grove Press of its time. Kendall did attempt to gain U. S. publication rights for Ulysses, although it might have been as much for its scandalous reputation as its literary merit. He did release the first U. S. edition of Octave Mirbeau’s S&M classic, Torture Garden.

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On the other hand, while Beth Brown’s two novels, For Men Only and Man and Wife, had historical settings (New Orleans of the 1890s), I suspect their attraction had more to do with their subjects (a madame and a prostitute, respectively). And the fact that the Kendall catalogue is rich with such obvious works of fine writing as Dark Dame, Six Lost Women, and Secret Ways tips the scales, I’m afraid, on the side of trash. On the bright side, one can honestly say that there is a larger audience of connoisseurs of fine trash now than there ever was, so I welcome them to dive into the vintage dumpsters of Claude Kendall (and Wiloughby Sharp) and see what treasures they can find.

There’s One in Every Town, by James Aswell

Cover of 1952 Signet paperback edition of 'There's One in Every Town'
Cover of 1952 Signet paperback edition of "There's One in Every Town"

“Completing engrossing on every page,” proclaims a plug by Erskine Caldwell on the cover of the Signet paperback edition of James Aswell’s short novel, There’s One in Every Town (1951). It appears beneath a James Avati cover featuring a wary brunette in a Carmen blouse (is there any other kind in a James Avati cover?). So we know we’re in Tobacco Road country, where beautiful white trash girls have a Viagra-like effect on all the men in town. Not surprisingly, as Aswell was an old college classmate of Caldwell.

In this particular instance, Jackie Vose (nee Cvasek) gets a reputation as a fast girl, but a few men believe her to be an angel at the core. One is her neighbor, who narrates the story, and the other the town’s doctor. The doctor eventually falls for her, to the town’s censure, and the two come to an end that reminded me of those Nancy Reagan fables that National Lampoon used to publish: where, no matter what sin the protagonists had committed, they always ended up run over by a runaway schoolbus.

Aswell, the son of a congressman, hailed from Baton Rouge, and published a number of novels about life down in the steamy South. Several of these also got picked up by Signet and graced with a dramatic Avati cover: The Young and the Hungry Hearted (Signet 116) and The Birds and the Bees (Signet 1121). The Midsummer Fires, however, only rated an Avon paperback release with a cartoonish cover–this despite the fact that a Natchitoches reviewer considered it to have beat out novels by Caldwell and James M. Cain as “the most nauseating book of 1948.”

Aswell died in 1955 of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 48.

There’s One in Every Town, by James Aswell
Indianapolis: Bobbs -Merrill, 1952

Breaking Up, by W. H. Manville

Cover of first U. S. edition of "Breaking Up," by W. H. Manville

I was tempted to tag this post Justly Neglected?, as Breaking Up, W. H. Manville’s 1962 bizarre novel of obsessively apathetic love is really quite bad. But out of respect for the fine work of graphic arts legend, Tony Palladino, who also designed the cover for Robert Bloch’s novel, Psycho, I’m listed this under “Covers.”

For Breaking Up, Palladino came up with a simple, striking image: an upside-down aerial shot of midtown Manhattan. It worked its magic with me, as it was the cover rather than the jacket blurb that led me to buy and read the book. Well, that and the setting: I’m always a sucker for books set in Manhattan, particularly when the protagonist works on Madison Avenue. And one could imagine Bill, the husband whose wife leaves him in the opening chapter, working alongside Don Draper–although it’s clear he lacks any real talent as an ad man, sculptor, or lover. His creative director sums up his character succinctly:

You want to be the American Rembrandt of the sculpture guys, you want to succeed in this business–you’ll wake up to the fact you want the dough as much as anyone one of these days–you want to have the greatest love story of all time with your wife, you want to be the guy who can beat the system, who can do all the other things, too. All without working at any of them. You want all that. Result: you get paralyzed.

Which reminds me of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s wonderful assessment of one of his acquaintances, Barry Pink: “Pink wants to sit on six stools at once, but he only has one arse.”

For a good two-thirds of the book, the reader has to follow Bill around as he wrestles with that timeless question: does he, or doesn’t he? His eyes are eventually opened to the anguish his wife has suffered trying to reconcile herself to the fact that her husband is an apathetic lump (he helps her pack when she moves out). He comes across her diary from the months before the break-up:

He is teaching me sculpture. It is hard for him to do and I pretend not to be too eager. He feels it is his own and as if he is giving part of himself away to me. And he is–at last.

Bill, I’ve been starving for you.

He finds in it a refuge. Sometimes I’m glad he has something in which he is not locked up and incoherent, but it frightens me in him. So remote.

Thus the angst of the remote Bill, seeking an outlet in his art, is channeled and magnified by his wife. My own feeling about Bill can be summed up by a quote from Tom Lehrer: “I feel that if a person has problems communicating, the very least he can do is to shut up.”

Somehow the revelations of the diary trigger a burst of action from the clod, and in the final chapters, in the course of one frenetic night, he tries to win her back, tries to destroy the tubercular male model she’s hooked up with, tries to orchestrate a con by which his agency’s key account can be saved, and tries to win a big account on which he and the above creative director can set up a new agency of their own. It’s not only completely unbelievable but technically inept: it’s not too entertaining when the juggler is running around the stage chasing after dropped balls.

It’s a good thing I read this on board a transatlantic flight: it forced me to withstand the temptation to toss the book out the window. Breaking Up is one book that deserves to sleep with the fishes.

Breaking Up, by W. H. Manville
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962

Keeper of the Flame, by I. A. R. Wylie

Cover of Popular Library paperback edition of "Keeper of the Flame"

This Popular Library edition of I. A. R. Wylie’s 1942 novel, Keeper of the Flame, dates from the early 1960s. There are some remarkable titles to be found among the best-sellers, bodice-rippers, and dreck that Popular Library released in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I wrote about a few of them about a year ago in the post, Digging into the Popular Libary at the Montana Valley Book Store.”

This is a particularly odd example. MGM purchased the film rights to Keeper of the Flame when the book was still unpublished. It was then published by Random House before the film was released, but subsequent runs featured a dust jacket with a still shot from the movie.

The film is best remembered today as Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s first, but it and the novel are nothing like their usual comedies. Steven O’Malley (Tracy), a celebrated foreign correspondent of the Quentin Reynolds-Vincent Sheean-John Gunter school, recently returned from Europe, takes an assignment to write the life story of Robert Forrest, a New England governor who’s inspired a nationwide populist movement. Forrest is considered a Lincoln-like figure, the great hope of the nation, but as O’Malley investigates, he finds there are some curious figures in Forrest’s household–including his wife.

I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just say that Forrest proves to have been a little more like Lincoln Rockwell than Abraham Lincoln.

Aside from the unusual story, Keeper of the Flame–both the novel and the film–are far more interesting seen in the context of their external connections and references. One watches the film looking for hints of the budding attraction between Hepburn and Tracy. One reads the novel in light of the figures such as Charles Lindburgh and Father Coughlin who inspired popular movements in America in the 1930s and 1940s–movements we now see as having a darker side.

Having written recently about Wylie’s memoir, My Life with George, I was impressed by two aspects of the book. First, it’s hard not to think that Wylie wrote it for the screen: there are at least a dozen scenes that play out exactly as filmed, and the whole sequence of the narrative matches that of the film so tightly it could have been a novelization after the fact. Second, despite the many superficial and clichéd characterizations, it’s obvious that Wylie was a very world-smart woman: if she played down her intelligence, it was because she’d had, by the 1940s, also thirty years’ experience of making a living with her writing.