Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (1940)

13 March 20231 March 2023

Charlotte Herz is not a model human being. She has no patience for people she disagrees with and no qualms about telling them so. She has an affair with the husband of a kindly Englishwoman who hires her to care for her children. She chooses not to have an abortion when one is offered and then abandons the child on a train and flees.

And yet, through the almost 400 pages of Makeshift she is a riveting narrator. We meet her in a nursing home in New Zealand, recovering from … well, as we only learn many chapters later, the measles. She is anxious to leave. For one thing, she hasn’t much money. She suspects her genial doctor of padding her bill: “To Miss Charlotte Herz for Professional Services, 20 guineas: for Professional Smile, 10 guineas.”

She is bored and irritated with the bland pleasantness of New Zealanders, their country, and their ceilings. For weeks, she lay flat on her back, staring up:

This nursing home is far too efficient to have ceilings with any incident in them: there are no interesting cracks that could be imagined into men’s faces, no damp marks the mind could conjure into little cats. Simply a high remote acre or so of impeccable whitewash, faintly changing with the faintly changeful sky.

Improved, she can now sit outside in the sunshine, “eyes goggling downwards” at the perfect green lawn, “a happy picture of convalescence.” And so, she decides, she must write. She has a great deal of anger and hatred to get out of her system: “I cannot forever struggle with myself, forever gnaw serpent-like at my own tail, nor swallow my own venom.”

How she came to be in New Zealand and how she came to harbor such venomous thoughts and emotions is the story she tells. It starts in Berlin, just after the end of the First World War, “in that brief Indian summer after the war; that little time, between the occupation and the inflation, when we in Germany had hope.” A very little time.

Within months, Charlotte and her sister are huddled under their father’s old ulster coat in an unheated room they rent from a bitter anti-Semitic landlady. Having grown up in a prosperous bourgeois family, Charlotte and Mitzi are now near the bottom of Germany’s new postwar food chain: orphans, near-penniless, lacking any employable skills — and Jewish. Before the Kaiser’s empire collapsed, they would have considered themselves assimilated: secular, never setting foot in a synagogue, unfamiliar with Jewish rites and rituals aside from an occasional funeral.

But even before Hitler is a name seen in the Berlin papers, being Jewish is enough reason to be kicked a rung or two down the social ladder. “Whether we like it or not,” in this Germany, “we are nothing less than Jew.” The only way for the sisters to climb back up is simple: marry into wealth. Mitzi meets a dull but adoring American, son of an industrialist, marries, and is soon off to the safety of Pennsylvania.

Charlotte, however, is a creature of her own mind and heart. Her Tante Clara, one of the few relatives still with a little money, offers her a room. But it’s strictly a business proposition: “I was to marry something rich as soon as possible.”

Instead, she falls in love with her charming cousin, Kurt, and one hot afternoon in the tall grass of the Grunewald, gives herself to him. Unfortunately, where Charlotte is a romantic, Kurt is a realist. She heads to the Alps for a holiday, courtesy of American dollars from Mitzi; he marries an heiress.

One thing I found fascinating about Makeshift was how effectively Sarah Campion depicts a world in which women almost — but not quite — had an independent life within their grasp:

Even now, as I waddled swollen between the parting Grübl grasses, I was blazing a new brave trail for womanhood, for single women: establishing the right of even’ woman to motherhood without any of the boredoms of marriage. After all, why not? If men were sexual free-lances, why not women? It all seemed so simple, so gloriously obvious.

Once she gives birth, however, Charlotte makes a much grimmer estimate of her future. “Life in Germany for a battling spinster was even then hard enough: what should I do with a child?” Her only hope would be to find a man dumb or conniving enough to accept a single woman with an illegitimate child:

After that, a married life begun on shame, continued in boredom and stuffy closeness, made up of lustful unloving nights, nagging days, brats begotten in pure animal fury coming year after year to be suckled, clothed, washed, endured—all on a foundation of my shame and my rescuer’s brief nobility simmering down to a reminder of my shame. He would unendingly want gratitude. I hated gratitude then, I hate it still.

If she rejects this choice, she knows she will soon run out of what little money she has and have nothing: “Nothing is a ghastly word, even more devastating in German than in English.” So, she takes the one other choice open to her, the one terrible choice always open to desperate people. She runs away. She steps off the train taking her back to Berlin and leaves her baby daughter behind.

Makeshift is a remarkable account of the choices one Jewish woman makes to survive in a hostile world. After a favorite uncle is fatally injured by a group of SS thugs, she flees Germany for England. There, she is taken in by the Flowers, distant relatives living in a comically comfortable cocoon:

After four square meals, and any number of such unconsidered trifles as elevenses with cream cakes, cocktails before dinner and Horlicks at 11 p.m. to fend off the alleged horrors of night starvation, any Flower could go to its bed, bury its nose in the pillow as soft as a swan’s breast, and sleep like a log. In case by any dirty chance sleep were for a while denied, each Flower had by its bed a little table bearing reading-lamp, the latest worthless fiction, and a chintz-covered box brimming with digestive biscuits.

(Ah, to be a Flower!) But at heart, the Flowers are as mercantile in their thinking as Tante Clara. It’s lovely having Charlotte for a visit, but she needs to sort this business of getting a husband, and quickly.

Charlotte ultimately arrives in New Zealand via South Africa and Australia, but it’s a route we can recognize from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. At each stop, Charlotte tries out a new bed and then rejects it. Should she marry a stolid Cape Town farmer and resign herself to “a little folding of the hands to sleep, to the good, earthy sleep of the intellect women enjoy in that fruitful land?” Should she marry Harry, the congenial, adoring older man she meets on the boat to Sydney? Not after he has a near-fatal hemorrhage and becomes an invalid.

Having bounced from uncomfortable bed to uncomfortable bed, Charlotte comes to a conclusion both utterly selfish and utterly pragmatic: that she is a woman “who now was no longer in love with anything but her own comfort, her own assured future.” Years after she rejected the advice of Tante Clara and the Flowers, she recognizes the ugly, essential necessity of choosing survival over self-actualization.

Though the only scene of overt brutality against Jews is Onkel Hans’s beating by a few young SS men, still a year or two before Hitler comes to power, though the war is still a year or two from breaking out as Charlotte sits in the peaceful garden of her nursing home, Makeshift is a Holocaust novel. One of the more unusual Holocaust novels, perhaps, written before Auschwitz had been built, before scenes of Buchenwald had been displayed in newsreels around the world, but still a story about how one survives when homeless, unwanted — and fully conscious of the threat hovering just over the horizon:

While the spectators sit around in a sodden mass, no more than mildly uneasy, the bull is slaughtered in the ring, the blood flows, the torn flank gapes, the entrails drop sluggishly. In Wolfenbiittel the maddened Jew rushes upon barbed wire, away, away, anything to get away, and hangs there, a screaming bloody mass, till there is no more noise. In Berlin there is a pogrom to avenge the death of one man killed by a youth as mad as Hitler but more obscure. So once more, in Berlin, blood flows from the Jews. The smell of blood—oh, my God, the smell of blood!—once more fills the air.

“Comfy?” the man Charlotte has decided she will marry asks her immediately after this passage.

No, Charlotte knows she will never really be comfy.

Makeshift is a work that synthesizes experience and imagination. Born Mary Coulton, the daughter of Cambridge historian G. G. Coulton, Sarah Campion (her pen name) attended a teacher training college, and after graduating with honors, spent years traveling around Europe until she landed in Berlin in 1933. There she taught English and came to know families like the Herzes. In fact, she left Germany 1937 when she was being pressured to identify her Jewish students to the Nazi authorities.

Like Charlotte, she spent time in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but in her case, she was vocal and overt in her political and social views, establishing a lifelong commitment to activism, and returned to England around the start of the war. She married New Zealand writer Antony Alpers and the couple eventually settled in Auckland. Though they divorced, she remained in New Zealand, where she continued to organize in support of liberal causes. Alpers/Campion must have been a woman with superpowers of empathy, a capacity for getting inside another human’s skin: the source, perhaps, of the imaginative energy that radiates throughout this book.

Incredibly, most of her fiction was written during the years in which she was traveling and working abroad. Makeshift was her sixth novel; she wrote six more between 1940 and 1951. Even more amazingly, she managed to write three novels set in rural Australia, including Mo Burdekin, her only book to have been reissued to date, despite spending less than a year in the country. In fact, she is still occasionally referred to as an Australian writer.

Much of Campion’s work has become extremely hard to find. Worldwide, there are just 19 copies of Makeshift available in libraries worldwide, according to WorldCat.org. Fortunately, the book is available electronically on Internet Archive. I highly recommend it. In Charlotte Herz, Sarah Campion creates a narrator whose intelligence, humor, and ruthless honesty — about herself more than anyone — makes for a thoroughly rewarding reading experience. Definitely my favorite book of the year so far.

Makeshift, by Sarah Campion (Mary Rose Coulton Alpers)
London: Peter Davies, 1940

The Fly, by Richard Chopping (1965)

19 September 20233 February 2023

Cover to the first edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

I often stumble across a particularly intriguing forgotten book while on the trail of a different one. Recently, I was looking for information about a novel by Henri-François Rey called The Mechanical Pianos when I came across this blurb from Arthur Calder-Marshall in a Secker & Warburg ad in the Guardian: “The most interesting failure I have read for years.”

From the Secker & Warburg ad in *The Guardian*, 29 January 1965.

For anyone who loves odd books, a phrase like “the most interesting failure” will set off alarms. I abandoned The Mechanical Pianos (pardon, Henri-François) and went in search of Mr. Chopping’s The Fly. The reviews I found made it clear that this was not just an interesting failure but a book with a uniquely off-putting power for many critics:

E. D. O’Brien, The Illustrated London News: “prurient, scatological, corrupt and sickening.”
B. S. Johnson, The Spectator: “much gratuitous nastiness conveyed by means of an overwritter, convoluted progression of cliches…. Quite revoltingly self-indulgent and pointless.”
Seymour Simckes, The New York Times: “progresses toward a total sullying of life, toward the harshest realities of grotesque death and grotesque madness.”
Adrian Mitchell, New Statesman: “This spleeny story of office life is dominated by snot, shit, semen, and pus. Why should anyone bother to write about the interesting, fairly virgin, subject of people who pick their noses and eat the pickings if all he can say about it is an implied ‘ugh’?”
Iain Hamilton, The Daily Telegraph: “His sardonic descriptions are informed by a disgust so acute that it might even be called exultant.”
Sunday Times: “Rarely have the filthy, petty particularities of loneliness — the Camembert among the hairbrushes, the menace of a tattered usherette — been give such a thorough going-over.”

“The Camembert among the hairbrushes”? Exultant disgust? This was clearly a book worth investigating.

The first few dozen pages of The Fly feature some of the most compelling writing I’ve come across in a long time. “The perpetual silent witness of the events in this unpleasant narrative,” Chopping informs us, is a fly. A common house fly. But a fly with “nacreous glistening body,” “vicious soft proboscis,” two “many faceted globes” to observe its world. And not a mere observer but a “servant of the Eumenides,” “the miniature personification of evil, neat, fast, deadly.”

US paperback edition of The Fly by Richard Chopping

Mr. Chopping may not know his flies like an entomologist, but he clearly does exult in his descriptions. But this is just the first page. Turn it, and we and the fly are transported outside, to a gutter wet with drizzle, in which, “breaking the surface, lies a used condom.”

At least one reviewer pulled the red cord at this point.

He may not, therefore, have witnessed what happens on the third page. A young girl reaches into the gutter with a twig and produces the condom for her brother’s inspection: “‘Ere, Leslie, look at this!”

To call Jennifer –the girl — and Leslie street urchins would be to sully the fine name of street urchins. These are two of the dirtiest, nastiest, most malignant children in fiction. But they are paragons compared, in Chopping’s eyes, to what’s in the push-chair Jennifer is dragging along with her other hand:

Half lying, half sitting it gazes fixedly out at the world through still eyes, squinting and protuberant. It has been so battered into obedience by Jennifer that it knows better than to utter a sound. Its bloated appearance and its immobility are further accentuated by the lower half of its body being encased in faded blue woollen rompers, bulbously overstuffed with nappies. Its arms stick out straight in front of it as if they were articulated together on a wire through the upper part of its doll’s body. The hands are swollen, mottled blue and scarlet from bad circulation. Its head is concealed in, and its face framed by, a soiled white pixie cap. From this push-chair there arises a soursweet odour of stale urine and old milk. This object is called Brenda — Leslie and Jennifer’s baby sister.

“This object” — clearly Chopping is not a man with the milk of human kindness running through his veins. But he does not single out children with his animus: he is an equal opportunity misanthrope.

Jennifer, Leslie, and Brenda play in the street outside the Office. Although Chopping doesn’t identify where his novel is set, but it could be any overcrowded, squalid grey industrial English city of its time. The purpose of the Office is never mentioned, and it doesn’t matter. It’s a place full of desks and telephones, typewriters and file cabinets, ashtrays and pale-faced mediocre clerks, secretaries, and managers, all of them grey, miserable, and frustrated.

Mr. Gender most of all: “In adolescence, he was already a grey man in embryo.” Poor Mr. Gender does get his share of abuse from his creator. His encroaching baldness is examined under the fly’s microscope: “It saw damp thinning strands of hair, carefully trained across a putty-coloured skull; oiled fronds of seaweed across a dead fish’s belly.” His grossest behaviors are put on display for our revulsion: “going back to a childhood habit, he was feeding himself with the pickings from his nose with the eager rapacity of a hungry fanatic.”

Chopping has turned the tables on the reader, in other words. It is his fly who is the noble creature, the diligent agent taking note, acting on behalf of the gods. It is his people who are held up for our repulsion. There is not a line in these pages that does not make the reader want to take a shower and give himself a vigorous scrub down.

And yet, and yet.

Within a few dozen more pages, we discover the truth in Arthur Calder-Marshall’s words. For those willing to follow Richard Chopping into this cesspool he has created, The Fly is a journey filmed in Technicolor and Cinemascope. But as a novel, it ultimately fails in design and structure.

Balzac understood something that Chopping doesn’t: if you’re going to write about nasty people, it’s the nastiest ones who have to be the stars. By far the nastiest piece of work in the Office is the cleaning (there’s an irony!) lady, Mrs. Macklin. Her superpower is spotting everyone else’s vulnerabilities, which she then probes with her rustiest, filthiest instruments. And she’s not above shoving a corpse into the building furnace to avoid awkward questions. While Chopping may have prided himself on his choice of the fly as his witness, this book would have been much more effective seen through Mrs. Macklin’s hatefilled eyes.

Structurally, The Fly is several chapters too long. We follow everyone in the Office for an annual outing to the zoo. Chopping takes us home with several of the Office’s employees, as if test-driving them as protagonists, ultimately choosing to build his climax around Mr. O’Flattery, an anxious clerk whose only distinguishable feature is his being Irish, who works himself into a breakdown not so much by Mrs. Macklin’s machinations as by the anticipation of them — and even this process is drawn out too long. Chopping’s exultant disgust loses its joyous intensity, turning into tedium and, finally, weariness.

The Fly was Richard Chopping’s first novel. Trained as an artist, Chopping was best known for his trompe-l’œil covers for the original UK hardback editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Several years later, Chopping published a second novel, The Ring, about a gay man who finds himself consumed in London’s rough trade world. This was a world Chopping knew intimately, so I am interested to see if the subject tapped into his design aesthetic better than did the grey workers in The Fly‘s Office.

The Fly, by Richard Chopping
London: Secker & Warburg, 1965

The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright (1959)

13 March 202323 November 2022

Cover of the first U.K. edition of *The Day’s End*.

My friend Robert Nedelkoff recommended this book to me after stumbling across a reference in a 1980 collection of Ronald Firbank’s prose titled Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques edited by Mervyn Horder. In Horder’s preface, he dismisses the notion of dramatic death scenes, writing, “We are assured by a competent technical observer of the subject that people tend to meet the moment of their death in the same manner as they live — the self effacing quietly in their sleep, the egocentric giving the maximum trouble to all concerned, the theatrical speechifying away con brio, the athletic with one foot out of bed, and so on.”

Horder’s competent technical observer, we learn from a footnote, was Pamela Bright, whose The Day’s End he describes as “a neglected book of 1956” — which of course caused Robert to reach for the Neglected Books phone. It sounded like the real deal, and I was delighted to find it awaiting patiently on the Internet Archive (link).

The Day’s End is a study in how we die. Set on the cancer ward of an unnamed women’s hospital on the western edge of London, the book takes us through two days on the ward as seen by its head nurse (Bright, though she never identifies herself in the book). There are old women and young, some there just for an exam or two, others doomed to spend their last days within its walls. Bright confirms Horder’s paraphrase above, but more from the perspective of a nurse:

The ways people die are as varied as the pictures on the wall ofa gallery, and each death remembered for a different reason: one for its setting; one for its atmosphere and whether there was summer in it or frost, or darkness and an oxygen cylinder; one for its human characters, for its peace, for its distress, and whether it was in the order of things or sudden in its unexpectedness.

At the time Bright wrote the book, she had been a practicing nurse for over 18 years. Earning her cap just after the outbreak of World War One, she served in military hospitals in Palestine and, after the D-Day invasion, trailing the British Army through northern Europe. The latter experience she described in her first book, Life in Our Hands (1955), and there are flashbacks to her time in Palestine throughout The Day’s End.

Also throughout the book are mentions of the stress of being responsible for a ward full of patients and a team of nurses and orderlies that almost seem like Bright’s reminders to herself: “it demanded constant wariness, the habit of keen observation, the noting of others’ moods and tempers, the habit of explaining, and the ability to learn the knack of not always depending on the advice or backing of others, but of believing in one’s own judgment and ability.” As she rides the bus home after her shift, her thoughts scroll through the patients — who’s improved, who’s failing, who may need to be shifted to one of the side rooms where a patient nearing death can have some hours of privacy and peace — and which nurses need to be encouraged or restrained the next day. She acknowledges, though, that she gains a form of comfort from that stress: “Although theoretically I abhor the business of being busy and in a hurry, yet I must confess that often it is in that condition I find myself happiest — it is a drug, and one can forget.”

Caring for a terminally ill patient proves among the most demanding of a nurse’s duties because it represents, in effect, a failure. So, on top of the inbred discretion of the English middle class there is a reluctance to draw attention to the obvious: “However acute a patient’s illness, we never admitted the signs of impending death.” Some of this reluctance stems from the difficulty of admitting how much about death remains unknown to medical professionals, but some also results from having seen the process repeated hundreds of times. “A dying man rarely looks death in the face,” Bright reports, “and who are we to tell him the truth? Why should he not go on building castles in the air when to some extent he has been doing it all his life?”

What makes The Day’s End memorable, however, are not such generalizations but Bright’s portraits of her patients. Mario, the dashingly handsome Italian soldier in her hospital in Palestine, who insisted on wearing a pink hairnet each night to keep his long, oiled black hair from getting mussed — until the night when he no longer called for it and Bright knew he would not last until morning. Or the lonely woman whose sad tale takes less than a sentence: “Miss Smart, for instance, who had had not a single friend and who couldn’t be forgotten when she died, for no one remembered her while she was alive….” And especially Mrs. Ferrett, possessed of a malevolent intensity worthy of a character in Balzac:

Her face seemed crudely sculptured, following the curves of a gargoyle on some cathedral front; and as one invariably gazes with delight upon such goblins and the workman’s freedom of expression, so one had to smile at Mrs. Ferrett. When she sat in bed she was coiled up in the smallest possible space, her chin almost resting on her knees, her hands close to her sides, like a child in embryo: when she was on her feet she moved softly and half inclined sideways like a crab: when her sharp eyes glistened, she pierced the ward from end to end and gleamed upon her neighbours, nurses, visitors, indeed everything. Mumbling, or munching peppermints; crabbed and cranky, she would gaze upwards at the plain corners and downwards at the dust, and in silent glee hug to herself some fearful secret.
She occupied the first place among the simplest. But she occupied it with such force, daring and calm that none of us would have thought of taking it away from her. This selfish, wicked woman bewitched even the people least susceptible to such influence: us nurses and the doctors.

Bright chronicled her career in a total of five books: Breakfast at Night (1956), about her training at an Edinburgh hospital; Life in Our Hands about her service in Europe during the war; The Day’s End, which found her in mid-career; A Poor Man’s Riches (1966), about her experiences caring for Palestinian refugees in the early 1960s; and Hospital at Night (1971), a fictionalized account based on her time as chief nurse of a busy metropolitan hospital. After retiring from service, she wrote a biography of her ancestor, Dr. Richard Bright, a pioneering surgeon who first described the ailment of the kidneys that now bears his name. She died in 2012 at the age of 98.

The Day’s End, by Pamela Bright
London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959

City Without a Heart, by Anonymous (1933)

10 June 20218 June 2021

Cover of City Without a Heart

Publishing a book anonymously is a risky bet. For every Primary Colors, which took a long-term lease on the bestseller lists and won a film adaptation, there are a hundred books like City Without a Heart. At best, there is an initial flurry of speculation about the author’s identity, but then the practical challenges settle in. Where does a bookseller shelve it: under the As? How does a would-be buyer refer to it? “It’s a book about Hollywood.” “Do you know the author’s name?” “No.”

Novels about Hollywood are a semi-popular topic for PhD dissertations, and I’ve found City Without a Heart mentioned in the bibliographies of several, but none of the doctoral candidates in question appears to have actually read the book. I only stumbled across it searching for something completely different on the Internet Archive. Having read it, I can allay your hopes (or fears): this is not the Great Lost Hollywood Novel.

But it is an interesting novel. Now, we all know that interesting is the “Get Out of Jail Free” card of adjectives. If you can’t say anything nice about someone, say they’re interesting. It’s what you tell your best friend after they drag you to a three-hour art house movie with a dozen lines of dialogue: “Yeah, that was interesting.”

In this case, interesting is not a cop-out but a way of saying that City Without a Heart is not a particularly well-written novel but it is a well-observed one, though distorted by the author’s prejudices. When the book was published, there was that initial rush of guesses about the authorship. Candidates included Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, Getrude Atherton, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis Bromfield, and even Greta Garbo. What’s clear is that the author was someone familiar with the workings of the studio system from the inside. Someone who’d penetrated to the inner sanctum of a studio chief’s office, for example:

Mr. Schloss’s office was protected from assault by three lines of defences. The first was held by an empty table and rather a formidable filing cabinet. The next boasted a standing guard of three young things with typewriters. The third and last was occupied by a young man with a mauve face, geranium-coloured hair, and the best set of dentures Mary had ever seen outside a showcase. He was supported by an individual with such a powerful resemblance to a gorilla that Mary was quite alarmed that there were no bars in front of him.

If the author was indeed a Hollywood insider, he was someone who’d grown to hate what he knew. “You know nothing about Hollywood,” says its first representative to encounter the photogenic Mary Fresnell and her aunt in their humble village in Cornwall. “It would be a crime to send a girl like Mary into that sort of atmosphere.” Anonymous drives home this point repeatedly and unsubtly, starting with his title. “Hollywood,” declares a screenwriter she meets there, “for all the ferocity of its labours and the wealth of its talent, is as empty a shell as ever existed in the history of the world.” Another denies the assertion that Tinsel Town is a godless place. There is a god, he argues: “the god of I.”

It’s not hard to pick up a few clues about the author’s identity beside his insider knowledge. The fact that he was a he and not a she, for example. Sprinkled throughout the book are a hints of a streak of misogyny, such as his dislike of chatty women:

Mrs. Knalder was Mary’s first experience of America’s endurance-test talking women. Later she discovered that they are numerous and are without mercy. Lack of subject-matter, the inattention or obvious boredom and infuriation of a listener has no influence upon the flow of their chatter. Like the brook it goes on forever.

His suggested cure for these women is brutal: “nothing short of amputation of the tongue is of any practical service whatsoever.”

Anonymous is also an anti-Semite. Hollywood’s studio heads all “rose from the tailor’s bench,” have waists that measure “anything up to sixty inches round” and faces that “bore the prominent characteristics of a toucan.” In Hollywood, the rightful order of classes has been turned on its head:

Hollywood is a Jewish stronghold. The entire picture industry is under their control. The power they possess is incalculable…. Enthroned they sit and jest of their humble origin to a Christian community which is never weary of trying to ex¬ hume, from totally non-existent sources, ancestors of most piquant aristocracy.
Ask a Jewish executive, in receipt of five hundred thousand dollars a year, whence he sprang, and you shall hear tales of a basement on the East Side of New York. Put the same question to a ten-dollar a day ‘extra’ and you shall be buffeted with half the names in the English peerage.

Contrast this with his descriptions of the people of Cadgwith, the little Cornish port from which Mary, the innocent pulled into Hollywood’s lair by the promise of filthy lucre. Its men “are simple folk who, when not riding the waves, sit upon an old stone wall and watch the sea from which their slender blessings flow. Its women “are busy at home, for where money is scarce work is plentiful.” You may recognize them as the future inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” And Mary, of course, is the stoutest of these stout-hearted folk: “She could sail a boat, bait a line, shoot a net, and scale a cliff with any fisher lad in the village.”

She can also, we come to see, learn her lessons. Brought all the way from Cornwall to California based on her stunning beauty and vitality as caught, unaware, on a few minutes of film, she quickly falls from promising starlet to has-been (or rather, never-was) through the betrayal of a competitor unburdened by scruples, and heads home, the sadder but wiser girl.

Almost.

There is a twist right at the end that leads me to wonder if Anonymous’s chief gripe with Hollywood boiled down to something as simple as resentment that he wasn’t better paid.

I closed City Without a Heart grateful not to know Anonymous’s true identity. Three hundred pages in his company was quite enough. The book is a revealing if stilted portrait of Hollwood in one of its moments of transition, when talkies had overturned the hierarchy of silents and studios had succeeded in eliminating all but the last few independents, and for that it undoubtedly has some historical value. As a novel, however, its neglect is justified.

City Without a Heart, by Anonymous
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933

THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand (1877)

23 January 2021

Cover of THE Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand

For a place deep in the heart of Central Asia, Khiva got a lot of traffic from English visitors in the 19th Century. In 1875, Captain Frederick Burnaby braved crossing the lines of a Russo-Turcoman to journey to the city, returning in triumph to tell the story in his best-seller, A Ride to Khiva. In 1899, Robert L. Jefferson, author of Roughing It in Siberia, repeated the feat (“as a sportsman”) and wrote about it in his imaginatively titled A New Ride to Khiva.

Between them, however, came the most daring traveler of all, F. C. Burnand (later Sir Francis), then editor of Punch. As he explained in his definitively titled THE Ride to Khiva, unlike Burnaby, he proposed to travel both to and from Khiva. And to travel not with Burnaby’s spartan 85-pound backpack but with saddlebags loaded with provisions and cooking utensils, a semi-grand piano fitted up with a comfortable bedroom, a store of American beef, and a cellaret full of beer and champagne (Pommery and Greno très sec). And finally, to stay in constant contact with his editors back in London, his own private wire (which at various times in the book is a telegraph, a means of escape, and former soldier named Wire).

Of course, all this kit costs a fortune. Luckily, Burnand manages to assemble a list of subscribers from those interested in his going — those interested in his not coming back.

The list of subscribers to Burnand's expedition to Khiva — The list of subscribers to Burnand’s expedition to Khiva.

“A. S. S.” on the list is, no doubt, Burnand’s poke at one of his perennial antagonists, the novelist Albert Smith, author of The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury and his friend Jack Johnson (1866), of whom the playright Douglas Jerrold once said, “When he signs his initials he only tells two-thirds of the truth.”

Scaring off the wolves with a portrait of Gladstone — Scaring off the wolves (in sheep’s clothing) with a portrait of Gladstone.

Traveling through the backlands of Russia brings its fair share of hazards. Burnand is chased by wolves, attacked by Tartars, thrown in jail more than once. He even spends a night in a pig stye — but comes away with a piglet who proves an invaluable ally. He teaches the Pig alphabet as well as to play numerous card games … perhaps too well:

This evening played two games of Double Dummy with the Pig. He won the last rubber. If he repeats this, I shall watch his play closely. The Sleigh-driver backed the Pig. I begin to suspect collusion.

Though the Pig goes on to rescue Burnand from several near-death experiences, the air of suspicion is never entirely lifted. “There is a twinkle in his eye that I don’t half like,” Burnand confides to his journal. Still, the Pig compares favorably to the mouse he befriends while on one of his stays in Russian jails: “An apt pupil, but possessing neither the solidity nor the gravity of the Pig.”

Despite bragging early on that he’d found a more direct route to Khiva than Burnaby followed, Burnand’s journal suggests otherwise. He reports crossing the river Oxus on page 26, but over the course of the following weeks, manages to cross it at least 20 times more. At least he thinks it’s the Oxus. “I suppose,” he confesses, “judging by the position of the stars, as I’ve lost my maps.” He accidentally wanders into Persia at one point, forcing him to backtrack for hundreds of miles.

Burnand's map of his ride to Khiva — Burnand’s map of his ride to Khiva.

As the map he provides in the book clearly shows, Burnand’s ride to Khiva ultimately involved more digress than progress. If, that is, he ever actually made the trip. The editors close the account with a suspicious note that Burnand reported that, “Khiva is a very charming place, and, from his description, not totally unlike Margate.” Burnand was a long-time resident of Ramsgate and perhaps Margate seemed journey enough for the busy editor.

THE Ride to Khiva originally appeared as a serial in Punch. There appear to be just three used copies available for sale, but fortunately you can find it in electronic formats for free on the Internet Archive.

The Ride to Khiva, by F. C. Burnand
London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1877

Crotchets in the Air, or An (Un)Scientific Account of a Balloon Trip, by John Poole (1838)

20 January 2021

Ticket to the Ascent of the Nassau, Charles Green's Balloon, from Vauxhall Gardens — Ticket to the Ascent of the Nassau, Charles Green’s Balloon, from Vauxhall Gardens

In September 1838, Mr. Charles Green, already considered England’s greatest balloonist (or aeronaut, as he preferred to say), entertained London crowds by making several ascents in his newest balloon, the Nassau, from Vauxhall Gardens. On one of these, he was accompanied by John Poole, then one of London’s leading playwrights (and soon to be author of the comic classic, Little Pedlington and the Pedlingtonians. Together they flew across London from west to east, enjoying a bottle of sherry and watching dusk settle over the city, until they came to ground somewhere along the road to Chelmsford.

Crotchets in the Air, Poole’s account of the trip, is as light as the gas filling Green’s balloon and unashamedly unscientific. “Why did you go?” Poole asks himself in hindsight. “To get out of the city,” is his reply, the balloon merely offering a novel and altogether more pleasant alternative to going by land:

One gets tired of being suffocated in coaches, choaked with coaldust in steam-boats, rattled and rumbled on railroads. But, up yonder, the ineffable stillness, the progressing movement without the slightest sensation of motion! whether up, down, forward, back, you seem to be suspended motionless in the air, whilst everything above, below, and around, is complaisantly taking the trouble of moving out of your way.

And unlike these forms of locomotion, travel by balloon is … quiet.

And then, the noiselessness, the perfect quiet, which I have before alluded to! It is the sublime of stillness. They who have not heard it — do not add this expression to your collection of bulls — they who have not heard it (for the ear is affected by it) can form no idea of it. In the tillest night, on the quietest spot on earth, some sound is occasionally heard, how soft or slight soever it be — the ripple of water, the buzzing of an insect, the fall of a leaf. But up there, you might fancy yourself living in an age antecedent to the creation of sound. There might you indulge to the uttermost in the luxury of thought, reflection, meditation there revel in all the delights of imagination, with not the ruffling of a utterfly’s wing to put your fancies to flight.

Indeed, the experience is so novel and so much more graceful than any of the land-bound options that even the departure comes in an unexpected manner. “I do not despise you for talking about a balloon going up, for it is an error which you share in common with some millions of our fellow-creatures,” Poole writes his friend. Instead, when Mr. Green casts off his anchor ropes, the balloon sits still and the land falls away.

[D]own it went with everything on it; and your poor, paltry, little Dutch toy of a town, (your Great Metropolis, as you insolently call it,) having been placed on casters for the occasion — I am satisfied of that — was gently rolled away from under us.

And the sights to be seen from several angels up (as RAF pilots used to put it) surpass those of travel on land (“Trees, rivers, and fields; fields, trees, and rivers! with here and there a hill some certain number of feet higher or lower than another!”). “Sights, oh! such sights! Gulliver not fabulous. Men and women six inches tall; and in proportion as we rose, they diminished — to five, four, three inches.”

Height eliminates all distinctions of class or rank: “The proud, the humble, the dignified, the lowly, yet, to us, the greatest amongst them was undistinguishable from the rest!” Poole admits, though, “I am glad I am down again, for I was imbibing a very contemptuous opinion of my species.”

Poole traces their route in the landmarks below. Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, Blackfriars, St. Paul’s. Seeing St. Paul’s from above gives him the frisson of discovering a whole new sense of awe: “like possibilifying of an impossibility.” Seeing Newgate Prison, on the other hand, evokes feelings of outrage.

With what stomach for your breakfast would you get out of your bed at eight in the morning to be strangled at nine, in the open face of day, and in the presence of thousands of persons collected together to glut their eyes with the sight of a human being throttled with a rope — for such is the fashionable phrase — you call it the cant — for describing the execution of a murderer: how, I say, would you like that?

And as they drift away from the city and the sun sets, Poole sees London as any airline passenger would know it — but as none of its residents has seen it before: “And now conceive yourself looking down on an enormous map of London, with its suburbs to the east, north, and south, as far as the eye could reach, DRAWN IN LINES OF FIRE!”

Not everything about air travel is better, however.

There are no inns in the whole of that country so that when what we had “got in that bottle,” which was some sherry, was exhausted in drinking to the health of our dear little Queen, we could not get our bottle replenished for love or money.

Crotchets in the Air can be found on the Internet Archive and will take less time to read than it took Green and Poole to travel across London. It’s a sublime little gem and a perfect escape for anyone suffering from the lockdown blues.

Crotchets In the Air; or, an (Un) Scientific Account of a Balloon-Trip, by John Poole
London: Henry Colburn, 1838

John Timbs, Scissors-and-Paste Man

27 July 2020

John Timbs, watercolor by Thomas John Gullick (1855), from the National Portrait Gallery

If I live to be 100, I vow to spend at least one of my remaining years compiling a “Best Of” compilation from the God-knows-how-many compilations assembled by John Timbs, perhaps the greatest of all compilers. We’ve all heard of Dickens and the many lesser ranks of Victorian writers who industriously cranked out three-volume novels at rates that competed with the fearsome cotton mills of the North, but poor John Timbs was forgotten not long after his body was placed in a pauper’s grave.

John Timbs was not really a writer. He was more of an assembler. He took things he found and assembled them into books with titles like Anecdote Lives Of Wits And Humourists, Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young, Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity: Illustrated from the Best and Latest Authorities, and Things Not Generally Known: Popular Errors Explained and Illustrated. These were all published cheaply, in low-priced editions with weak bindings and poor, thin paper, for the purpose of informing as many people as possible.

Timbs worked to improve people like himself. His father was a warehouseman who managed to pull together enough money to send his son to New Marlows, a school run by Rev. Joseph Hamilton and his brother Jeremiah Hamilton. There, he discovered his talent and put it to quick use, writing by hand a school newspaper that was passed among his classmates. He was then apprenticed to a chemist and printer in Dorking, where he met Sir Richard Phillips. Phillips had just published his little travel guide Morning’s Walk from London to Kew.

In the preface to that book, Phillips apologized for writing a guide to such a mundane journey, “which thousands can daily examine after him,” and for relying solely on the evidence of his own senses and deductions of reason.” Because of this, he wrote, “He therefore entertains very serious doubts whether his work will be acceptable to those LEARNED PROFESSORS in Universities” or “STATESMEN who consider the will of princes as standards of wisdom” or “ECONOMISTS who do not consider individual happiness to be the primary object of their calculations” or a dozen other types such as TOPOGRAPHERS, BIBLIOMANIACS, and LEARNED PHILOLOGISTS. Instead, he wrote for “AMATEURS of general Literature,” those “free and honest searchers after MORAL, POLITICAL, and NATURAL TRUTH.”

This was a man after Timbs’s heart and mind. Phillips encouraged the young man to contribute to his Monthly Magazine. Perhaps inspired by Phillips’ book, Timbs soon wrote his first book, A Picturesque Promenade round Dorking, in Surrey in 1823. Timbs then moved to London to work for Phillips and started reading voraciously. He quickly produced Laconics, the first of what would become a lifetime’s production of books in which he compiled, accumulated, integrated, and occasionally distilled what he’d read.

Front page of The Mirror from 1824 — Front page of *The Mirror* from 1824

He moved on to become editor of The Mirror in 1827, then on to John Limbird’s The Mirror of Literature. There, he mastered his technique. Henry Vizetelly, who later worked with Timbs at the Illustrated London News, described it in his crotchety memoir, Glances Back Through Seventy Years:

Timbs spent the best part of a busy life, scissors in hand, making ‘snippets.’ Such of these as could not be used up in The Mirror were carefully stores, and when later on he became sub-editor of the Illustrated London News and editor of the Year-Book of Facts, he profited by his opportunities to add largely to his collection. By-and-bay he classified his materials, and discovered that, by aid of a paste brush and a few strokes of the pen, he could instruct a lazy public respecting Things not generally known, explain Popular Errors, and provide Something for Everybody, and that he had, moreover, amassed a perfect store of Curiosities of science, history, and other subjects of general interest, wherein people partial to snippets might positively revel.

There was no love lost between Vizetelly and Timbs, whom he called “quintessentially a scissors and paste man” — which was at least better than his assessment of Timbs’ predecessor, Thomas Byerley: “a crapulent hack.” Vizetelly wrote that “the tinted tip of Timbs’s nose suggested that The Mirror editor was not averse to what is called the cheerful glass, and yet he developed into a singularly sour and cantankerous individual” and accused him of being a vicious gossip who “seemed to take especial delight in repeating all the spiteful tales he could pick up” — to which the reader is tempted to mutter, “Et tu, Brute?”

One wonders where Timbs found the time to indulge in gossip. He never married, socialized little, and seems to have spent most of his hours bent over his desk with stacks of books at his elbows. In a study of early Victorian editors that F. David Roberts published in the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter in 1971, he wrote that these men were marked by certain common characteristics: “One obvious one was that they could write. Most not only could write but had a passion to publish.” Of the 165 men covered in Roberts’s study, they averaged 9 books each (“considerably about the going average for academics today). Yet for Roberts, these men “were pikers compared to Mr. John Timbs,” whom he credited with 150 volumes.

Advertisement for John Timbs's Knowledge for the People — Advertisement for John Timbs’s *Knowledge for the People*

His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry (originally written by future Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald) gives a flavor of the range of Timbs’s production:

They include, on subjects of domestic interest, Family Manual (1831), Domestic Life in England (1835), and Pleasant Half-Hours for the Family Circle (1872), and, on scientific subjects, Popular Zoology (1834), Stories of Inventors and Discoverers (1859), Curiosities of Science (1860), and Wonderful Inventions: from the Mariner’s Compass to the Electric Telegraph Cable (1867). He also wrote on artistic and cultural matters works such as Painting Popularly Explained (jointly with Thomas John Gulick) (1859) and Manual for Art Students and Visitors to the Exhibitions (1862). Through his connection with The Harlequin he has been identified as the likely compiler (under the pseudonym Horace Foote) of the Companion to the Theatre and Manual of British Drama (1829), which contains much valuable information on London theatres of the period. On contemporary city life his works included Curiosities of London (1855), Club Life of London with Anecdotes (1865), Romance of London: Strange Stories, Scenes, and Persons (1865), and London and Westminster, City and Suburb (1867). He also published on subjects of biographical and historical interest, including Schooldays of Eminent Men (1858), Columbus (1863), Curiosities of History (1859), Anecdote Biography (1859–60), Anecdote Lives of Wits and Humourists (1862), Ancestral Stories and Traditions of Great Families (1869), and Abbeys, Castles and Ancient Halls of England and Wales (1869). He also edited Manuals of Utility (1847), the Percy Anecdotes (1869–70), and Pepys’s Memoirs (1871).

Not surprisingly, with such an output, quality often suffered. “Mr. Timbs has an inexhaustible supply of quaint stories,” one reviewer wrote, “but his critical judgment is not quite as good as his industry is formidable.” John Bull’s reviewer was critical of Timbs’ multi-volume Anecdote Biography, observing that “Biography is something more than a collection of anecdotes.” Timbs’s portraits, he found were “lifeless; they are models, not men”: “He has dressed up a variety of figures which would make the fortune of Madame Tussaud in a week.” A Spectator reviewer, a little more charitably, acknowledged that “His books are of a kind to which it is easier for a reader than a reviewer to do justice.” Many of his books were reprinted in America, where reviewers focused on the positives. A North American Review assessment of School Days of Eminent Men is typical, saying the book could be “commended as a handy manual, containing a great deal of curious information, told in a playful, conversational style.”

Indiscriminate accumulations of anecdotes and trivia can often contain gems among all the junk, and the chief reason to remember the work of John Timbs today are the nuggets you can usually find within a dozen or so pages of any of his books. Long before anyone came up with the idea of bathroom books, a Spectator reviewer identified the peculiar merit of Timbs’s books: “His readers, if they do not gain instruction, will be amused, provided that they are satisfied with a few pages at a time. Such a collection of wit and humour can only be digested at intervals.” Here is a tiny sample of the things you can learn from a few minutes spent — wherever you happen to choose — with John Timbs:

The Fitzwalters had, however, a stranger privilege than even this: they had the privilege of drowning traitors in the Thames. The “patient” was made fast to a pillar at Wood Wharf, and left there for the tide to flow twice over, and ebb twice from him, while the crowd looked on, and enjoyed the barbarous spectacle.
From Abbeys, castles, and ancient halls of England and Wales: Peter the Great was a gourmand of the first magnitude. While in England, on his return from a visit to Portsmouth, the Czar and his party, twenty-one in number, stopped at Godalming, where they ate: at breakfast, half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, seven dozen of eggs, and salad in proportion, and drank three quarts of brandy, and six quarts of mulled wine; at dinner, live ribs of beef, weight three stone; one sheep, fifty-six pounds; three quarters of lamb, a shoulder and loin of veal boiled, eight pullets, eight rabbits, two dozen and a half of sack, and one dozen of claret. This bill of fare is preserved in Ballard’s Collection, in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford.
From Hints for the table: or, The economy of good living. With a few words on wines: The bone of the Lion’s fore-leg is of remarkable hardness, from its containing a greater quantity of phosphate of lime that is found in ordinary bones, so that it may resist the powerful contraction of the muscles. The texture of this bone is so compact that the substance will strike fire with steel. He has little sense of taste, his lingual or tongue-nerve not being larger than that of a middle-sized dog.
From Eccentricities of the animal creation: In the winter of 1835, Mr. W. H. White ascertained the temperature in the City to be 3 degrees higher than three miles south of London Bridge; and after the gas had been lighted in the City four or five hours the temperature increased full 3 degrees, thus making 6 degrees difference in the three miles.
From Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young: When the Archduke of Spain was obliged to land at Weymouth, he was brought to the Sheriff of Dorset, and lived at Woolverton House. The Sheriff, not being able to speak in any language but “Dorset,” found it difficult to converse with the Archduke, and bethought him of a young kinsman, named Russell, who had been a factor in Spain, and sent for him. The young man made himself so agreeable to the Archduke that ho brought him to London, where the King took a fancy to him, and in time he became Duke of Bedford, and was the founder of the House of Russell.
From Nooks and Corners of English Life, Past and Present: In 1865, there died in Paris the dwarf Richebourg, who was an historical personage. Richebourg, who was only 60 centimètres high, was in his sixteenth year placed in the household of the Duchess of Orleans (the mother of King Louis-Philippe). He was often made useful for the transmission of dispatches. He was dressed up as a baby, and important State papers placed in his clothes, and thus he was able to effect a communication between Paris and the émigrés, which could hardly have taken place by any other means. The most suspicious of sans culottes never took it into his head to stop a nurse with a baby in her arms.
From English Eccentrics and Eccentricities

Timbs was given a pension as one of the “Poor Brethren” of the Charterhouse in 1871, but for some reason he resigned his place and died in poverty at 28 Canonbury Place, London, on 4 March 1875. “He died in harness,” reported The Times, “almost with his pen in his hand, after a life of more than 70 years, and a literary career extended over more than half a century.” The Times faintly praised his special talent: “Though not gifted with any great original powers he was one of the most industrious of men, and there was scarcely a magazine of the last quarter of a centure to which he was not at least an occasional contributor.” In reviewing Timbs’s English Eccentrics not long after his death, the Spectator noted somewhat wistfully, “This is, we suppose, the last work of an indefatigable compiler, who had a talent for finding odd things hidden away in odd corners, and presenting them for the amusement of readers.”

Some Candidates for the #1920Club

7 April 2020

Next week, folks around the world will be taking part in a unique collective reading event: #1920Club, the next installment of a semi-annual celebration organized some five years ago by Karen (Kaggsy) and Simon Thomas. The rules are simple: sometime during the week of 13-19 April, read a book published in 1920 and write something about it.

You can see an example of the diverse titles and perspectives that come together under this umbrella from the very first such event, the #1924Club.

There were some truly canonical books published in 1920: The Age of Innocence; Main Street; This Side of Paradise; Women in Love; Chéri; R.U.R.; Three Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Unamuno.

But every time I go into the university library and wander down the aisles of English and American literature, I have to wonder: Does the world really need yet another bit of writing about Edith Wharton or D. H. Lawrence or F. Scott Fitzgerald? These writers are like those hotels with 10,000 reviews on Tripadvisor. Checking today, the current count on Goodreads for The Age of Innocence stands at 134,391 ratings and 6,378 reviews. Stop. Just stop. Will yet one more opinion make any difference?

I don’t pretend that every book I write about on this site is a masterpiece. I hope no one feels obligated to read anything I’ve featured here. But I do try to shine a little light on the things that few or none have read and written about for years, often decades. That, in its own humble way, seems to be adding something original to the world.

I want to encourage you to do the same. Go off-piste, as they say in skiing. Read and write about something from 1920 that no one else will. Maybe it’ll just be ho-hum, no life-changer, maybe too flawed to recommend to anyone else. Some books are neglected for good reasons, and you will do the reading public the service of warning them off. Maybe it’ll surprise you: who knew Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote straight fiction before she got into writing mysteries? Tell the English reading public about Polish novelist Zofja Nakowska’s first major novel, Kobiety (Women). Do you agree with Orlo Williams that Storm Jameson’s first novel, The Happy Highways, is just full of “Talk, talk, talk”? Is Stephen Hudson the English Marcel Proust? Chances are good that you’ll be the first, or at least one of the very few, to have traveled down that piste in many, many seasons. Every rediscovered masterpiece has to have its first rediscovery.

So here are a selection of long-forgotten titles from 1920 you might consider exploring as your contribution to the #1920Club. In most cases, you can find the book on the Internet Archive for free and easy downloading. I highly recommend downloading a PDF version rather than Text, EPUB or Kindle: these are usually unedited OCR’d versions with many, many errors. As I explained in this post from 2018, a PDF version, a good PDF viewer, and a nice-sized tablet computer are all you need to have a reading experience that’s the next best thing to holding the actual book in your hands.

Cover of Invincible Minnie by Elisabeth Sanxay Holdin

• Invincible Minnie, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Her first novel, about a tenacious if unlikeable woman. “She is a short, plump, dowdy little woman … stupid, unsympathetic, unimaginative; but somehow she always had her own way…. If Invincible. Minnie had been written by a man instead of a woman he would probably have been lynched before this. … [But] there was no doubt after the second page that the book would prove utterly captivating, for there Mr. Peterson is described as having a ‘long yellow moustache, standing out fiercely like a cat’s;’ and reading on a matter of two or three pages, we encountered that ‘ridiculously coy old skeleton,’ the Defoe horse. It is inconceivable that a person capable of immortalizing horses and moustaches at a stroke could fail to do superlatively well with human beings.” — Constance Murray Greene, The Bookman “The book is firm and muscular, ripe and complete. No first novel of such intellectual or creative energy has appeared in this country for some time.” — William Curtis in Town and Country.